It's late, I'm stressed, dysphoric, and the 'L' key on my keyboard is being temperamental...let's write a fic.

It's fascinating, in an uncomfortable sort of way, watching his hair fall into the bathroom sink. The scissors snip along, they have been for the past ten minutes, and he pulls his hair taut as a guitar string. It goes limp is in his hand, cut away from his head. He stands there, staring into the mirror, holding a too long lock of bright red hair. He drops it into the sink and listens for the wispy thud as it hits the porcelain.

Once down to his lower back, his hair now rests in choppy sections just past his ears.

He sets the scissors down and stares at all the twisting hair in the sink. Knowing that he'll clog the sink if he washes it all down the drain, he scoops up the clumps and drops them in the trashcan, tying up the bag when he's done.

When his mother comes home, she screams.

When his sister sees, she smiles.

It's a long rest of the day, he finds himself confined to his room for the rest of the day. His sister sneaks in through his window, a pair of actual barber scissors in her hand, and she smiles. They use an old dress, lay it out on the floor so they won't have to worry about hair getting into the carpet. He grins as the scissors snip. His sister is studying cosmetology, he's watched her practice on wigs before, but this is the real deal.

It's not even, but it looks better, and he hugs her as tight as he can.

Thinking is a bad habit of his. He tags along with his sister while she shops, mostly so he can get out of the house, and he worries. Will he grow up and look like his sister? He doesn't want wide hips, doesn't want a protruding chest.

Of course, he keeps these concerns to himself until they boil over and he's crying in front of her. She shushes him, pulling him into a hug and she tells him that they'll figure it out.

They don't really figure it out.

His sister is busy during the day, he's stuck with their mother when he's not at school. They run errands, his mother talks to friends, and he hears them whispering. He blocks it out now. He'll let them say what they want, it won't matter in the long run, not really.

He gets into fights, marveling at the way the bruises bloom across his skin. His sister helps him bandage the cuts, and presses kisses over the bruises on his face and arms. She reads him books at night, because their mother won't anymore, says he's too old for bedtime stories. But his sister disagrees, she brings his favorites. She sits with him on his bed, his head in her lap while she reads, her voice quiet so their mother won't hear.

He sits on the bathroom counter, his sister in front of him. Her face is pinched in concentration as she deals with a particularly large blacktop burn across his lower back. She tells him that maybe, just maybe, he should stop fighting with the kids at school so much.

It's a sound idea. But he doesn't listen.

The fights don't matter anyway. He starts most of them, those are fine. The ones he doesn't start are fine too. Those will stop when he gets older.

It'll all be fine, so why should he be mad?

Computers are incredibly fascinating. A nice teacher at school teaches him after classes are done for the day. She says he has a knack for it. He does what he can at the school building, then races home to work on the family computer. The teacher always gives him candy, and he helps her grade papers in return.

It only takes a few words typed into a search engine, and he stumbles upon a treasure trove of information he'd never be able to find anywhere else.

He waits until his mother and sister are out for the day to dig what remains of his birthday money from beneath his mattress. Jogging to the pharmacy only takes twenty minutes, and locating the first aid section takes a fraction of that time.

He's not old enough to need the bandages, but one day, he's going to.

It's a car crash, on the way home from school.

Of course it's a car crash.

He walks out of the hospital with a scar across his stomach. But his mother was dead on impact and his sister's head caved in when the car door got crushed.

And he's alone.

He ends up cramming what he can into a single rolling suitcase. In the depths of his underwear draw are two boxes, they're wrapped inside a plastic pharmacy bag. He puts it in the suitcase, between an old shirt and a pair of frayed jeans. With his sister's stuffed bear squished into the inside pocket, he's ready to follow the old man in the suit.

Wammy's House is full of too smart children, with too much time. He declines his new alias and stubbornly stares down the old man behind the desk. After a ten minute standstill, the man asks him what he'd liked to be called then.

His name is Matt now, and it feels so nice to have a name that people will use.

So Matt fights tooth and nail, screams and cries and blocks doorways until the old man agrees to let him room with another boy. He's blond, with a short fuse and big blue eyes, and his name is Mello.

Matt's prepared to fight Mello when they first meet. Mello's gaze is calculating, young though they may be, Matt hates that look. It's the look his mother had, some of the teacher's at the schools, the kids in his neighborhood. He's prepared to slap it off of Mello's face when the other boy declares 'you're all right,' and claps Matt's shoulder.

They work out a system. Matt pretends he doesn't notice Mello's red eyes in the morning, and Mello never says anything about Matt's strict rules of privacy.

They're at a solid place of one and two for about a year until another little boy makes his debut at Wammy's. He beats Mello by a solid handful of points in their academic scores, but Mello snakes additional points in with completed case simulators.

Placements aren't officially announced, it's word of mouth more than anything.

The first night they hear rumors that Near might be a better option than Mello as a successor, Matt ignores their system.

Mello's upset, tears streaming freely down his cheeks while he struggles to breathe right.

Matt's noticed.

Mello strives for perfection, it's ingrained in him, carved in his bones and burned in his brain. And Near's thrown him off course. There's always hope though, successors are useless if L is alive, and when he dies, Matt thinks Roger or Wammy will make all three of them work together.

So it's not a big deal to him.

But it is to Mello.

Matt sits on Mello's bed, where the blond has collapsed, and settles a hand in his hair.

"You're fine," he says simply, dragging his blunt nails along Mello's scalp.

He's not sure if it helps really, but Mello's eyes aren't as red as he expects them to be. The blond disappears to wash his face. When he returns, he's wearing a different shirt, a tank top in his hands, and he's breathing better.

Matt refuses to get out of bed, the air is hot and stifling but he's not moving. Mello's been trying, to no avail, to pull the blanket off, but Matt's got an iron grip on it. It's twisted about his legs, between his arms, over his head. He might suffocate, but he doesn't want to come out.

"Matt!"

Mello gives one last hard tug before dropping the blanket. They have an important lesson today, Mello doesn't want to miss it. Matt doesn't really care.

The door swings shut and Matt waits until he can't really breathe to throw the blanket off of him. He spends a solid minute heaving in air before laying down on his stomach.

Maybe he'll just stay in bed forever.

Rolled between a pair of old pajama pants are two boxes, still wrapped in a plastic pharmacy bag.

He spends fifteen minutes twisting about in front of the mirror, pulling on the bandages and biting his lips until he manages to clip the edge in place. It's not perfect, but with a loose shirt, it doesn't look so bad.

Somewhat appeased, Matt pulls on a pair of socks and joins Mello in the library.

The blond has his head buried in some sort of encyclopedia, and Matt sits next to him.

"Feeling better?" Mello asks without looking up from his pages.

"Yeah."

No.

Matt feels faint, feels dizzy and his chest hurts. He can't breathe because breathing hurts, and everything is starting to hurt. He doesn't want it to hurt. But, and god help him, he prefers the hurt to seeing himself in the mirror.

To make matters worse, Mello is staring.

Staring like he knows exactly why Matt's breath is rattling around his ribcage.

Staring like he knows why Matt keeps pulling his shirt away from his chest.

Staring like he knows everything there is to know about Matt.

And Matt doesn't like that.

So he snaps.

He snaps because it's been too long since he's felt something, damn it. He's had no opinions, felt nothing, nothing at all since his sister died in the car crash. No, even before that. His emotional state was nothing but a blob of grey overlaying anger.

The whispers, the small mindedness, the constant reminders he gave, every fist that connected with his body, it all made him angry. But he'd filed it away, because 'hey whatever, it won't last forever so it doesn't matter'.

But it does matter and Mello's still staring.

Matt doesn't realize he's stopped yelling and started crying until Mello's thumb brushes against his cheek, catching a tear and wiping it away.

"Breathe," Mello says gently.

Matt chokes out a negative and Mello only nods.

"Take off your shirt then."

"What- no, what the hell?"

"They're constricting your chest, affecting your ability to breathe, unwrap them, and throw them away."

Mello's voice is steely, no room for argument, but Matt doesn't want to admit to anything.

"I don't know what you're talking about," Matt sniffles.

"You'll warp your ribcage. Don't be stupid. I'll turn around, just take them off, I don't care."

Mello stands up and turns around, his back to Matt, and he crosses his arms in front of his chest, waiting impatiently.

The idea of serious injury isn't appealing in the slightest.

Matt reaches under his shirt and unclasps the bandage edge. Almost immediately, it's easier to breathe. Mello turns back around once Matt's pulled the bandage from beneath his shirt. Without an explanation, Mello takes the bandage. He moves to his nightstand and pulls out a pair of scissors, cutting the worn and ragged fabric in halves, then quarters.

Matt only stares.

"You're number three, Matt, you're not stupid." Mello throws what remains of the bandage into the trash then rejoins Matt on his bed.

"You didn't have to do that."

"Yes I did, otherwise you'd bind yourself up tomorrow too. Have you ever had a panic attack in bandages? It's not fun." Mello fixes his gaze on the far wall. "I don't know what it is you do on that computer of yours, but I thought you'd have found all the warnings. And the alternatives."

Mello helps Matt order a binder and they have it shipped to a temporary P.O. box in town. They sneak out to pick it up and Mello helps him into it. It doesn't look all that impressive in its packaging, but Mello turns around and waits for him to change.

Once he does, he puts on his shirt and takes a deep breath.

"Better, isn't it?" Mello asks, happy gleam in his eyes.

"Shut up." Matt elbows Mello in his side, noting the seam of his own binder through his sweatshirt.

They cut each other's hair, old t-shirts on the ground to keep hair from getting in the carpet.

Matt tells Mello about his sister, about what she was like and she did for him. Mello tells Matt about one of his cousins, how they moved away from home after legally changing their name and getting in a fist fight with their father.

They trade stories of when they were younger, when stress wasn't such a big factor in their lives. Mello swear up and down that he didn't always have dark circles under his eyes, and Matt tells him how his hair used to roll down his back like a waterfall of fire.

They laugh, and things are fine.

Listen up, do not bind with bandages under any circumstances. I don't give a damn if it's the most dysphoric day in your life. I've been there, don't do it. You can use compression tank tops, i'd recommend the kind used for dancers, and loose t-shirts. Just please, for the love of all, DO NOT BIND WITH BANDAGES