this story slingshots wildly between sort-of angst (it's not hardcore angst) and blithe sarcasm. just a warning, folks.

For Herosexual

- The Night Before The Morning After -

Matt was stuck in the early morning haze of not-quite-awake, blinking slowly into the light which slanted through the blinds. It was late evening in Japan, the hum of rush hour traffic had already died into a soft susurration of bicycle tyres and street cleaners, and Matt felt acutely that there was something in the apartment which belonged ... elsewhere. Like on another planet, maybe.

Perhaps Near was visiting.

Matt snuffed into his pillow amusedly, one hand groping aimlessly around the floor and sifting through the throwaway leather and chinese take-away cartons. That was one thing which never changed, at least. There would always be chinese take-away and Mello in leather, and Matt almost derived more comfort from this than from the gun which he had finally found cowering underneath Mello's stripper outfit - sorry, underneath Mello's pants. Matt snapped his goggles over his eyes and rolled over, kicking the sheets onto the floor and cocking the hammer of the revolver in a single smooth movement, which looked at you over its James Bond-esque sunglasses and smirked, Been there, done that. Matt paused as he passed Mello's bed - though really it was just a stolen mattress with linen of dubious colour heaped woefully upon it - and noticed that Mello's latest leather fashion conquest was still crumpled near the pillow.

Matt's hand tightened on the butt of the gun as he looked around cautiously - everything else seemed to be in place. Rosary tangled around the lamp they had rescued from an Ikea dumpster, gun garishly decorated with a crucified Christ sitting next to a crumpled heap of aluminium Wonka wrappers, half-empty vodka bottle serving as a vase for some wilted roses. But the leather was glaring at him; in an otherwise inconspicuous room, it may as well have been glowing with radioactive menace. The leather was there. But Mello wasn't in it. The leather was here, and Mello was not. It was like seeing light, but no shadows; everything familiar looked brain-dizzyingly wrong, like an optical illusion which slipped past your understanding and then proceeded to make rude gestures at your sanity. Mello was not in his leather. Ye Gods, it was the apocalypse. Bring on the horsemen and rivers of flaming demonic wrath.

Either Mello had been fiendishly abducted by a crack team of ninjas hired by Kira (who also happened to have X-Men superpowers which let them stop time and walk through walls and shit) or Mello was walking buck naked around the apartment.

Not just naked naked. Mello could never be anything but buck naked.

Matt fumbled in his pocket for a cigarette, remembered that he wasn't wearing any pants, swore softly with delightful vehemence and crudity, grabbed desperately for the vodka bottle, swilled it without bothering to remove the flowers, swore loudly with delightful vehemence and crudity when a thorn stabbed him spitefully in the face and then put the cherry on the proverbial cake by choking on the vodka like a vaudeville mime artist.

The bedroom door slammed open, and to do the moment justice you really have to imagine it in slow-motion.

Mello was very much un-abducted, and very, very much here.

The first thing Matt did was drop the vodka bottle. It tumbled gracelessly through the air, and smashed against the floorboards with a sound like a car crash; loud and destructive, overlaid by the pattering tintinnabulation of breaking glass, and if sound had a personality this one would be an arsonist, or a personal trainer, with the grim glow of madness flaring in its soulless eyes. The alcohol spread in a noxious puddle across the floor, and Matt wasn't entirely sure if it was the fumes making him dizzy. Because, well, fuck -

The second thing he did was say, "Mello?" In a voice which was ridiculously high-pitched and much less manly than someone who possessed as much gun-savvy suavity as Matt rightfully deserved. But of course it was Mello - if there was another bitchingly sexy blonde with scars across half their face and torso, the skin mottled and twisted with ridges like swollen spines, and ice-eyes as hard and jagged as a curse, and a smile which said on your knees, bitch, then Matt would like to shoot them.

"Matt," Mello said, and his eyes didn't light up like they used to, but they became sharper and wilder. He looked at Matt like a fey thing from underneath the ragged ends of his bangs, but Matt's eyes were considerably lower than Mello's face and he missed the amusement which curled through the pale irises. "Matt," he repeated, and one hand flicked open a lighter; with a hiss, the small flame flickered into being. A cigarette slid out of his other palm, smooth as a lie.

"What?" Matt said, narrowing his eyes as thin whorls of poison spun gently from the ashy tip of the cigarette; he let the craving flood through his blood and the taste soak into his mouth, because there was nothing else which came quite so close to the bittersweet taste of vodka and chocolate.

Mello gestured elegantly to himself, grinning like the devil's own Chesire Cat. "My outfit," he declared grandly, tilting his head back to reveal an indecent amount of pale, swanlike neck.

And an indecent amount of everything else, too, of course.

Mello's cheeks hollowed as he blew smoke through pursed lips, cancer stick clutched with debonair style between two thin fingers. And that was one of the differences between them - when Mello smoked, he was like the Duke of Hell; a fallen angel, charming to a fault, impeccably dressed and able to kill you with a smile, if he thought that the gun hidden in his pocket was too blase. Matt smoked like a nicotine whore that was going to get his junkie ass done in for cancer, and didn't really give a fuck either.

Matt considered. "Well ... It's different," he began hesitantly, relishing the opportunity to have a legitimate reason to rake his eyes covetously over Mello's body. Then he raised an eyebrow, the expression made particularly peculiar with his eyes hidden by goggles. "But, really, Mello ... suspenders?"

On any other person the expression would have been a pout. But that ridiculous, Matt told himself, because Mello. Does. Not. Pout. Nevertheless, the blonde seemed distinctly put-out at Matt's lack of enthusiasm for his outfit. He was bare-chested, and Matt felt almost voyeuristic looking at the scars wrapped around the muscle of his shoulder; it was something that Mello kept private, ever hidden beneath a second skin of tight-fitting leather. Blue suspenders rolled down his torso, clipping to a pair of black jeans that were faded, and torn at the knees with age; Matt suspected that after so many years of leather which needed to be greased before it could be worn, the Russian was physically incapable of wearing pants that weren't unfeasibly tight around the crotch. This particular pair had a zipper like the gnashing jaw of some horrible beast, huge metal slashes that demanded a blood sacrifice before they would yield. Mello must have attacked them with pliers and a deathwish.

"I thought you liked suspenders," Mello scowled, a cloud of nicotine smog colouring his words. Matt reached over and plucked the cigarette from his hand, sucking in the smoke greedily. He rolled it around in his mouth, closing his eyes to savour the harsh sting which accompanied it, and then threw back his head and exhaled slowly. Smoke furled from his nostrils and barely parted lips, like a sleeping dragon.

"I like suspenders," Matt admitted, "You just surprised me."

Mello turned and stalked away, leaving Matt to amble slowly after him with the cigarette drooping between his lips. The suspenders met in a 'Y' shape on Mello's back, the singular strap running parallel to the valley of his spine and framed by the wings of his prominent shoulder blades. His feet were bare, and the pink soles flashed from underneath the overlong cuffs of the jeans as Mello stormed silently into the kitchen. Matt slouched onto a stool, watching the other boy bemusedly. "What did you expect me to do?" He asked, trying to coax Mello out of his bad mood, "Throw you onto to bed and ravish you?"

"The floor would have been fine."

Their apartment, Matt noticed with timely detached interest, was far too small. Mello was scowling, leaning on the kitchen counter and sucking on a bar of chocolate, glaring at the redhead over his cocoa-covered lips. Thin muscled arms crossed angrily over his chest, feathered hair curved around his scowl, suspenders looking unashamedly dashing as they loped down into his belt, Mello looked like ... something that Matt would like the ravish on the bed, he had to admit. Or the floor. Matt inhaled some cancer (because he knew that if Mello heard the tremble in his voice he would, quite literally, be fucked) and said,

"There is such a thing as taking nonsensical flirting too far."

It hadn't been what he wanted to say. What had been floating around in his mind, which was still cowering in a corner and pinching itself in case this was all a strange fantasy, was something like You get the chocolate sauce, I'll get the handcuffs or even Come hither. In fact, a very large and insistent part of Matt was boycotting cheesy pick-up lines altogether and was determined to hurtle over the counter and tear off those goddamn suspenders with his teeth, but Mello was one scary motherfucker and it really Did Not Do to rape mafia bosses, especially before breakfast.

Matt had to settle for eye-fuckery; orange-tinted as Mello was behind the reflective gleam of Matt's goggles, the blonde of his hair was still inconceivably bright against the soot-blackened grime of the wall. The dying sunlight made a zebra out of the floor and cut swathes of greyshades over Mello's skin; light and dark, smooth and scarred. Matt lit another cigarette as Mello licked on his chocolate. Bitter and sweet.

The smoke curled upwards in tempestuous whorls, and Mello followed them dispassionately with his angry eyes. The silence was determined to be excruciatingly awkward, but Mello was certain that it was one of those comfortable silences - and when it was between Mello and Forces of Nature, the laws of physics tended to shy away from the gun and the leather and hide under the pillow of another reality for a while. Mello was king of the fucking world, and he always got what he wanted. The thought flickered across his mind that perhaps Matt didn't understand this. "I always get what I want," Mello declared, eyes flashing as his exquisite lips curved with arrogance, teeth flashing white against the sharp edges of another chocolate bar.

Matt bobbed his head agreeably. "I know," he said softly, and the harsh edges between shadows and sunlight blurred as dusk tumbled softly over the day. "And if you wanted me you would already have me."

Mello growled. "You're a cocksucking wanker, Mail Jeevas."

Matt snorted, and plumes of smoke curled from his nostrils. "You only wish."

The crack echoed around the room, with marvellous panache; it was exactly what Hitchcock would have used to make his audience flinch and palpitate in terror, as the camera settled like a startled butterfly onto a trembling hand which still clutched the smoking gun ... but there was no cinematic glamour to the moment. There was a gun, but it was huddled underneath Matt's loosely curled palm, cold and starkly grey against the linoleum green which all seventies apartments seemed to inescapably possess. In fact, forget about Hitchcock - there was only Mello, whose chocolate had shattered against the startled clench of his jaw, and sent ripples of reality through a moment that had been so close to almost.

There was always only Mello.

The blonde was luminescent in the gloom, even without his leather. His pale skin, a Russian legacy that Matt - freckled and sunbrowned - had always found amusing, was flushed along the knife-sharp edges of his cheekbones, and his thin lips had pinched together. Mello only ever pinched his lips when he was trying not to shoot someone; many a minion had staggered away to faint with relief when the boss pinched his lips at them and fingered his gun in a narrow-eyed way. But only Matt and L had ever been able to make Mello blush, and the detective (no good cake-eating not-sleeping hunch-backed baggy-trouser-wearing long-toed germophobic bastardly fucker, Matt thought snidely as he remembered his competition) had graciously died and allowed Matt to swoop in, like Spiderman, and sweep Mello off his feet. Except that he hadn't gotten to that part yet; at the moment he was slightly obsessed with British sci-fi, which was what had led to this entire mess with the suspenders, and Spiderman fetishes were resting politely in the back of his mind.

Mello tried not to choke on stray shards of Guylian (the though like fucking shrapnel, this shit floated across his mind, and he tried to forget the bloodied taste of twisted metal puncturing his throat as a building tumbled down around him). Matt's cigarette had died on his lips, leaving a calloused burn that Mello ached to run his tongue across soothingly, because he was much too manly and much too mafia and much, much too Mello to simply ask 'are you alright?'

Suddenly, Matt bolted upright and twisted his wrist until the watch face glared sullenly back at him; his own face brightened with childish glee and he turned his goggles to Mello. Even the orange seemed to have perked up, and the colour in all its reflective magnificence was clashing wildly, in a way that made Mello think of fireworks and fruit salads, with the tangled red strands of Matt's hair.

"Torchwood'll be on in a moment." Matt grinned, attempting to lighten the situation and failing laughably.

Mello would have said, 'colour me surprised' if he had been raised by the unsettlingly cheerful couple from Stuart Little instead of orphaned and left to die before running away at fourteen to overthrow the mafia and undertake a systematic revenge that consumed his life ... but he hadn't.

And so, because Mello was Mello and he wasn't going to share his Mattie with some British turd-fucker who dared to think that his tight ass was sexy enough for Matt to goggle at, he walked over to the television, seized the X-Box that Matt dragged everywhere, and smashed it through the blank screen with a delight that was decidedly vicious.

He ignored Matt's shout of alarm as he came skidding into the room like the cop from a bad action movie, but his ignore-dickhead-until-he-appreciates-me-and-my-suspenders air was ruined when the sight of Matt running his hands mournfully over the snapped plastic and twisted wires, some of which were still sparking with pathetic valiance, made Mello's stomach twist like he hadn't gotten his morning chocolate fix. Somebody had once told him that if you were jealous of inanimate objects, you were better off shooting the bastard in the heart before they screwed you up even more. Ah, yes - it had been Matt. How charming, Mello thought angrily, hooking his thumbs underneath his suspenders and snapping them against his collarbone.

Matt glanced up at him with what was possibly meant to be vengeful fury, but instead came across more as adorable befuddlement. The word fuckable tapdanced through Mello's mind, wearing tophat and scarlet lace garters and a wicked glint in its sultry eyes. The fact that the lace matched the precise shade of Matt's hair was irrelevant.

"Pay attention to me," Mello growled, seizing angry handfuls of the gamer's shirt and pulling the protesting redhead to his feet until their chests smacked together. Matt's top was warm and rough against his skin, and for a second - barely a second, hardly even a moment - Mello let himself lean into the comforting thrum of Matt's heart and let its reassuring beat vibrate through his bones.

Then Matt was pushing him away, and Mello's skin burned in the spaces over his ribs where Matt's palms had rested. The gamer was stalking through the room like a caged cat, head tossing angrily from side to side as a slither of curses hissed through the twist of his lips. "No, Mello. This, we. We can't."

Mello was still against the wall, and if you weren't Matt you would have missed the nervous twitch in his jaw as he sneered his way through the rejection and neatly sidestepped his heart as it threw itself off the metaphorical skyscraper of Matt's half-broken words. We can't.

"We fucking can, Mattie." Mello sounded harsh, and like the whiny bitch Matt was always telling him he is, and if they weren't standing on opposite sides of a room with fists clenched in pockets, around suspenders, eyes sparking like they're high and in the Neon City then Mello knew that Matt would have been pinching his arm and saying such a fucking girl, you little pansy. And Mello would have cocked an eyebrow and slung the gun over his shoulder like an honest-to-God cowboy, Matt would have laughed in that wheezing, toothy way which made Mello's breath hitch and then offered to buy him tampons until Mello offered to total his car. The scenario played itself nicely out in Mello's mind - glowing like the commercials on the shopping channel which screamed out that the next ten callers would receive a free cassette tape, stomach cruncher, divine redemption. It all sounded so good.

Matt angled a look at Mello from underneath the crumpled heap of his bangs, the rim of his goggles a comforting blinker around the edges of the world, holding things together. Mello was slouched on the wall with his hands in his pockets and his eyes dark and glimmering with something that Matt's only ever seen when people are looking into the barrel of his gun and their lives have telescoped down, down to this one moment. Because, Jesus. To get shot or not to get shot was pretty much the fucking question, and none of that philosophical religious shit Mello was always rambling about was ever going to convince Matt otherwise.

The rosary dangled in the hollow trench of Mello's sternum and Matt was drawn out of half-formed fantasies involving Mello, and churches and baptised wine (he doesn't know if there is such a thing, but it sounds right in his mind, fitting into place with Mihael and his memories of his mother and all the other things he's almost sure he made up). He notices that the silence has finally become awkward, and it has sidled into the room like an elephant. Which knows how to become invisible. And is like super stealthy.

Matt realised, with a kind of belated woe-is-me sigh, that his metaphors suck.

Literary anti-genius aside, Matt can't help but notice (and, God, he's trying not to) the half-lidded look that Mello's giving him, the way his mouth is soft and wet and slightly open, the way his fingers are spread across his ribs like soldiers on the front line, straight and trembling. Matt was already half-hard - suspenders will do that to a guy - but when Mello exhales softly, like someone has compressed the air out of his lungs, and his eyelids flicker underneath the tangle of his bangs the bulge in Matt's pants become painful and starts to demand a visceral attention that Matt so depserately wants to provide. The terrifying bit was that Mello didn't seem to mind providing that attention either.

Note suspenders.

Mello sighed again, and Matt followed the soft fall of his chest.

"Then I guess I'm going to have to do it," he murmured, and Matt took a precautionary step backwards as Mello's gaze flew upwards and landed on him, predatory. The door was rough against his back, and Matt wriggled desperately into it as Mello stalked forwards - because, of course, Mello would just have to stalk, with his mouth curved wildly and his eyes all dark and sharp underneath the shadow of his bangs.

"This is not a good idea," Matt said, closing his eyes as Mello stepped in front of him. Their toes were touching, and Mello's feet were cold and curled against Matt's. "Really," he gasped, his skin honest-to-God tingling as Mello curved around him, arms on either side of Matt's face and Mello's body radiating a burning heat. Matt felt his head swim dizzily, and thought that if he opened his eyes the world would be shimmering with heat, made all a-tremble by the carbon smell of Mello.

Matt felt Mello canting away from him, stopping their chests from touching; he could see perfectly the clean arch of Mello's spine, the bent angle of his fingers as they snapped the goggles off Matt's face and dropped them unheedingly to the floor. Bastard, Matt thought, the momentary irritation nice and normal and distracting from the way Mello's hair was ticklish on his cheeks.

"Matt," Mello said, his voice high and clear. Matt pursed his lips into a seam, shuttered his face. "Don't you want this?"

Of course I fucking want it, Matt thought. His eyelids blazed bloody, sunlight breaking over the capillaries as Mello shifted. The wall, old and water-logged, sighed where the blonde leaned against it and Matt breathed deep in the sudden space. But there's a reason Hollywood makes so many movies about The Morning After.

"Story of my fucking life, Mello," Matt said, and opened his eyelids a crack, turning his head to view Mello's languid silhouette, broken by the bars of his eyelashes. "Waking up to find you gone."

Mello was suddenly in front of him again, eyes glittering and fathomless, and something wrenched cruelly in Matt's stomach.

"Glass always half-fucking-full, ain't it, Mattie?" Mello hissed, narrowing his eyes and pretending to be angry, but there was something dazed in the angle of his eyebrows, something wild in the set of his mouth. "Well, you gotta know something -"

And then he kissed Matt. Mello's mouth was soft but his teeth were sharp, biting into Matt's lower lip and wrenching open his mouth like it was the millionth time that Mello had pressed Matt against the nearest vertical surface and ground their hips together like this. Matt moaned, the sound rising out of him, dirty and graceless as he twisted his hands through Mello's hair and their mouths slicked clumsily together. He curved one palm under the hook of Mello's shoulder blade, moved the other to the base of Mello's spine and notched his thumb into the indents, feeling Mello shudder underneath him.

"What are you going to do?" Matt asked, ragged and bewildered. Mello was biting the underside of his jaw, and each hot swirl of blood under his skin was soothed by the cool swipe of Mello's tongue, a conflict of sensations that made Matt's higher-level thinking mostly shut down.

"Anything. Everything," Mello whispered against Matt's neck, feeling the triphammer of Matt's pulse underneath his lips, each throb like being electrocuted. "You're wearing too many clothes."

Mello's hands fell on Matt's hips like a benediction, rings clinking against the buckle as Mello wrenched down the zipper, palmed the bulge in Matt's boxers and folded to his knees like a prayer. Matt gasped, hands running spasmodically over Mello's neck before fisting once more in his hair, which was long enough for two good handfuls. Matt was going to tease Mello about that later, but right now Mello was peeling away his boxers and blowing slyly on the tip of his cock and later was the last thing on Matt's mind.

"Cock-tease!" Matt half-shouted in frustration, throwing his head back against the wall as Mello ran a fist over his hardened length, fingernails scraping along the sensitive flesh, making Matt whine and buck into his hand. "Motherfucking, won't you just - " He bit his tongue, but Mello was glancing up at him wickedly with devil-light in his eyes, licking his lips and then lowering his head and sliding his mouth onto Matt, and nothing had ever turned Matt on more than having Mello on his knees, Mello making Matt shiver and keen with every hollow suck of his cheeks, Mello with one hand down his own jeans like a teenager and the other biting into Matt's hip. Matt was slicked with sweat, rolling his hips gently with his fingers carving imprints across Mello's scalp and gasping roughly, "Fuck, fuck - don't you ever stop, you bitch. Okay. Fuck."

Matt finished in Mello's mouth, feeling the blonde shudder beneath him as he came in his jeans, his mouth pulling away from Matt's cock with an obscene sucking sound that was absolutely the most unbelievably arousing thing he had ever heard.

"Oh sweet fuck," Mello said, his eyes wide and bright, blue like the far-flung expanses of the ocean and his mouth bruised. Matt laughed, breathless.

"Yeah," he agreed, giving Mello a slow look and helping him to his feet. Mello's other hand was sticky, and Matt brought it to his mouth, shivering when Mello's pupils suddenly blew wide with shock, making his eyes liquid and alien. Matt mouthed across the tendons of his wrist, biting the fleshy part of Mello's palm underneath his thumb, sucking each finger separately into his mouth and licking it clean.

Mello's eyes were slitted and his hips canted against Matt's, bones grinding together. Mello slid his hand along the length of Matt's torso, watching his fingers slip in and out of Matt's mouth, eyes rolling back in his head as Matt bit along the knuckle, and it was like there was no tomorrow, no way the world could possibly survive this. Mello tugged his hand out of Matt's mouth and slicked it down Matt's neck, fitting his mouth against Matt's scalding lips, his hands scaling the ladder of Matt's spine. Yards and yards of hot, smooth skin and Matt always writhing against him, wild and willing. Mello grinned as Matt slipped the suspenders off his shoulders and fit his mouth against Mello's collarbone.

"I won't be gone tomorrow, Mattie," Mello swore, chest hitching as Matt opened his mouth, warm and wet, against his shoulder. Drew the redhead into him, pressed a thigh between Matt's legs and shifted backwards to accommodate Matt's weight. "You know why?" Mello pulled Matt's face away from his navel, and Matt had never seen Mello look so angry or so used, his mouth swollen, dark marks pressed into his pale skin. He shook his head, aching to get his mouth back on Mello's skin.

"Cause tomorrow," Mello whispered, "We're gonna be doing all this again on the bed."

thanks for reading! and reviews are pretty, so don't be shy!

~ Eicklehart