Work Text:
“Mello.”
You’re dreaming about fire again. A match, a lighter, a broken church. You watch yourself burn and feel nothing: something has locked your emotion away. Mello died a long time ago. Mihael is at peace.
“Mello.”
The dream flickers like candle flame. You shudder in the heat, readjust — you are the only cold thing here and the warmth seethes against your skin, bores through your shell, swallows you, burns higher—
“Mello!”
You jolt awake, gasping a little. “What?”
“It’s Amane,” says Matt, letting go of your shoulder. You blink hard to orient yourself as he leans in to lay the back of his hand over your forehead. “You alright? You’re burning up.”
No I’m not, you don’t say, it’s freezing in here. The light from his array of computer screens dances across his goggles. You think of dog eyes, glowing green in the dark.
“Fine,” you answer too late. Sit up. Let his touch fall away. “I’m fine. What about Amane?”
“She’s talking in her sleep,” Matt says. “It sounds pretty much nonsense to me, but you might get something out of it.”
“Show me then.”
You take advantage of the few seconds he turns away to settle into a looser position and scrub a hand over your face. The digital clock on the floor says it’s three in the morning. You’d closed your eyes on his couch after waking Matt up for his shift less than an hour ago, and your brain has decided to thank you for your generosity by gifting you a killer headache. What joy. God, it really is cold.
“Here,” Matt says, propping the laptop onto your knees before hauling himself up on the couch next to you. He leans in to hold down the volume key. “Sound up.”
He stays there even after his finger slides off the keyboard, forearm flush against yours. He’s warm. You allow it.
Bugging Amane’s place was tricky. You only managed two cameras at first, but now that she and Mogi are visiting NHN regularly, you’ve had the opportunity to sneak in more. You don’t often look at the bedroom feed, though; it leaves a bad taste in your mouth and Amane doesn’t do anything of importance there anyway, or at least hasn’t until now.
She’s shivering now, violently, on the edge of thrashing. Curled into herself. She has one arm flung out.
“Don’t,” she slurs through the tinny laptop speakers. “Don’t.”
“Poor girl,” Matt mumbles.
Bog-standard nightmare, probably. Although if what Halle told you is accurate…
“Don’t, Rem! Please!”
“Aha,” says Matt, pointing at the screen.
“What?”
“That word, re-mu. She keeps saying it.”
“It’s a name,” you say. “Look it up.”
“Gotcha.” He slides down the sofa like an overcooked noodle, leaving you with a shoulder colder than it was from the start, to sit on the floor and start typing on his tablet. You could run a hand through his hair from here. You don’t; you lean forward and tilt your head to the side some more (it’s helping with the headache, you think) to stare into the monitor.
“No, no, no,” Amane is saying. Her face is all contorted, nothing like the Misa Amane who drags cops with her to window-shop, nothing like the Misa Amane spinning airy garbage to an audience who knows more than her. Her voice wavers. A child’s. The beep-boop of Matt’s typing slices through a sob. “Don’t write it, Rem, don’t write it, don’t write it, you’ll—!”
You narrow your eyes. Writing…
“Please,” she begs again, “please, I hate you, I don’t need it, I don’t—”
Silence, then, but she keeps shivering.
“Damn,” Matt sighs after another minute, flopping back on the couch cushions to look up at you. The goggles wink under the light. “I can’t find anybody with that name in Japan. Got a couple dozen hits from the family registry, but none of them overlap with this area.”
“It could be a nickname,” you suggest absently.
“Tried that,” Matt says, “still nothing good.”
Don’t write it, you’ll — what?
Misa Amane. The second Kira.
Why would writing someone else’s name in the Death Note hurt Rem, whoever that is? The notebook doesn’t allow collateral damage. Unless this Rem was being threatened, or — you remember Sidoh and his wobbling stack of documents — it went against one of the rules of the Death Note.
Sidoh. Rem. I don’t need it.
A notion creeps in your head. It’s almost certainly a normal nightmare. But the tremor in your fingers says otherwise, and when it comes down to it, that’s always been what you listen to: your hands, your rosary, the sky.
“Penny for your thoughts?” asks Matt, still flopped backwards.
Shit, you never got around to telling him about the Shinigami, did you?
“You’re still an atheist?” you check.
“Eh, agnostic,” he corrects. “Who gives a fuck what’s up there.”
This stings, which annoys you — Matt of all people shouldn’t be able to affect your emotional state.
“I’m going to hell for that, huh,” he adds into the silence, knocking his knuckles against yours.
“Gods of death are real.”
You can see even through the goggles that he’s squinting at you.
“What.”
“Shinigami,” you repeat. “Are real. They appear when you touch the Death Note.”
Matt’s very still for a moment that drags on long enough for you to start wondering if you’ve broken him, then huffs a surprised laugh. “What else haven’t you told me yet?”
“Nothing as important as that,” you shrug.
He groans. “Come on, Mello, I won’t be able to help you if I don’t know this stuff!”
“Don’t sulk.” You flick him on the head. “I’ll catch you up.”
It was, you recognize, pure self-interest that kept you from updating him in the first place. Other than that you haven’t had to explain yourself in ages, you don’t want Matt to be here. You would’ve picked some other Wammy product in a heartbeat, if not for the fact that none of them are both still competent in the skills you need and willing to listen to you. Matt’s — he’s — well he’s not clean, none of you are, but he’s never been swept into the black hole of you and Near and L before; he’s not meant to be here. He’s not part of the story. He’s some two-bit extra with five minutes of screentime and a whole sprawling life you abandoned halfway through and he’s nothing to you, by which you mean he’s everything. You would like to believe there is a world outside all this. You would like to believe he makes it back there.
For now, though, he’s yours — partner, tool, responsibility, friend — and you’ll just have to deal.
“Can I smoke here?” Matt asks, then sticks out his tongue sheepishly when you turn a bewildered glare on him. “Hey, I just got my worldview upended, I’m allowed a cigarette.”
You don’t look all that upended to me. “Fine,” you say, and watch the way he fumbles with his lighter before coaxing out the flame, casting more wobbling shadows across the room.
“Go on,” he says, once he’s taken a breath. “Did you talk to… him?” A guess. You nod. “Feed him chocolate?”
“Yep.”
“Wh—” The smoke makes him sputter, and you laugh, can’t help it. “I was joking!”
So you tell the story: Sidoh and the Eyes and the realm of dust only a hair’s breadth from yours. You weave through the reams upon reams of Shinigami regulations. You inform him that at least one Shinigami likes chocolate and so your tastes are objectively correct (“uh-huh,” Matt says, “sure”).
Amane stirs again halfway through your account of the Shinigami world as a monarchy; you cut off with a click of teeth and jerk the laptop closer to you on instinct.
“Rem,” she mumbles again, softer.
“You think it’s a Shinigami name,” Matt realizes, having clambered back onto the sofa to peer over your shoulder.
You don’t reply — Matt doesn’t need your confirmation — and zoom in on her face, ignoring the way your throat sours. (Pointing a gun feels as natural as breathing; this will too, someday. If there is a someday.) Amane has her eyes squeezed tightly closed. You watch as a tear collects in one corner.
Rem wrote a name for Amane, and then died. Who was it? Who was the threat?
Amane doesn’t seem to have her memories in daytime. You’ve been formulating new routes of action for days now; you’ve wondered whether she was ever even Kira at all. But if you could get something out of her at night —
“The Shinigami died for her,” Matt murmurs, “and saved her life. That’s what you think.”
You exhale hard.
“She doesn’t seem very happy about it,” Matt adds.
“Could have been a friend,” you shrug. Amane has gone still again.
“Maybe for her.”
There’s a strange note in his voice. You turn. “What?”
“Maybe for Amane,” Matt clarifies. “But not this Shinigami. I mean, it died for her.”
“People die for their friends all the time,” you point out.
Which you would know if you had any, chimes your twelve-year-old self who you tell to shut up — most people liked Matt back then and most people do now, probably. How would you know.
“I guess,” says Matt. “I just mean, if it was me…”
He trails off.
“What,” you prompt.
“Nothing.” He’s finished his cigarette by now, tossed it into a packed ashtray. You keep itching to clean it for him. “I guess — I don’t know — yeah, I don’t know. It’s too early to think, alright?”
He’s always been a shit liar.
“Go back to sleep then,” you say. “I’ll keep watch.”