Having resolved to throw off childish stereotype within the first year of his stay at Wammy's, nothing grated more than seeing Near persevere with a teddy bear in his arms. In the competitive pressure-cooker of L's lofty expectations, Mello had to keep his chin up against an ocean's swell of insecurities. He suspected – feared - that genius was coincidental. The day would come when an adult would crouch before him and say that he was just like everybody else, actually. In defense against this potentiality, to fend off condescension, he isolated and differentiated himself and never played.

He had been an only child. A privileged normal life had once promised to churn him soft. Good Catholic values, barely understood but well memorised, gave him a puritanical base on which he might have built a foundation of gentleness. He could still call on two or three clear early memories and some vague impressions of happy feelings: memories of church baking, of some kids he knew, of his parents' endless, unfathomable, perfect love. Their kindness and attention had bloated his self-confidence. But that was all he remembered, unfortunately, so these rosy recollections served to make all the more bitter the comparison of his upbringing against his tragic new circumstance: orphaned and set loose in an Institution unconcerned with the individual except to test and school him.

Fuck Near for bringing his childhood with him to the Orphanage. Fuck Near for holding onto it against the onslaught of work, of demands. Fuck Near for being younger and better anyway. Fuck Near for being respected as an intellectual all while making Optimus Prime fly around his fucking head.

Mello wanted adulthood to just fucking bash him. In the liminal space of intelligent kinderheit he was a stranger to everyone, but it would be better when he was 18, surely.

In Wammy's, everything he did was surveilled, but rarely acknowledged except as an increase or decrease in rank. He learnt showmanship for the attention – locking a kid in a cupboard, starting frivolous fights, backing up his creative threats with violent follow-through. It was hard on him not to be especially seen. Actually, he couldn't bare it. Better to be hated than unnoticed.

But he was good at the exercises the counsellor put him through when he was sent to her room downstairs of "does he look like he's having fun at the party? Is this child a boy or a girl, do you think? Are they getting along?" because lack of socialisation or conditioning had nothing to do with his furious outbursts. "Is she sad?" accompanied by the face of a frowning woman, bangs pushed off her face like a passport photo. Probably, based on her expression, but she's an actor, isn't she? Maybe she's over the fucking moon.

He was so lonely, Near his only worthy contemporary, until the December just after his 12th birthday when Matt came to the house. Matt shook it all up with his bad attitude, and that was a surprise to the entire faculty since they'd assumed the worst possible un-child was Mello. Usually Wammy's only took little kids - Near had come when he was 6 and Mello had been there since he was almost but not quite 8. That was so they could be brought up into the system, into the morals of L. But Matt was a scrappy looking, mean little 11 year old who spoke English like he'd learnt it from the articles in Playboy and liberally used his middle finger to answer any and all attempts by other children to interact with him. Quilish Wammy himself had personally led Matt into the building by the hand, and stuck around for a day and a half to fold him, kicking and spitting, into the routine. An unusual care was taken to settle him in.

Though Mello would come to consider himself Matt's relative superior and best friend, he started by admiring and hating him. Hatred was always the first emotion he hunkered down in when he met someone new. It was like, fuck Matt for having an entourage, fuck him for being somehow more aloof and daring and anarchistic in his rejection of good social behaviour than Mello had ever imagined being, fuck his unique style of bastardly contrariety.

As soon as Wammy peeled away in his black Mercedes, Mello intended to storm up to Matt and ask him what the fuck was his deal, but couldn't find him. Everyday, Matt had to be dragged out of hiding into class, where he spent the whole time fidgeting and acting weird at his desk before sneaking into the busy hallway and sliding sideways out of existence again. The rare times Mello was able to observe him, he seemed uncomfortable and unhappy.

Mello didn't get him alone until the weekend, when he accidented upon Matt smoking in the boy's bathroom. Matt had clambered up onto the windowsill at the end of the line of stalls and rounded his shoulders into the square hole in the wall, looking out. Mello had never seen a kid smoke.

'What the fuck is up with you?' Mello asked, blocking the door and crossing his arms.

Matt shrugged.

'You never go to the dining hall.' Mello accused. 'You're fucking weird.'

'Yeah.' Matt agreed. He squished the cigarette on the toe of his shoe. 'It's weird here.'

'I guess it is.' Mello conceded. 'You don't fit in.'

'You fit in?'

'No.'

'Ok.' Matt said.

'Why do you smoke?'

'Because. Why are you so nosy?'

'I'm curious.' Mello snapped.

'Why are you curious?'

It was because Matt was effortlessly special. He did whatever he wanted like he'd never felt shame. Mello thought he could intuit something from Matt, some uncanny depth, some Minor chord, a little dissonance. He was jealous of the laissez-faire attitude that let Matt unflinchingly break rules in the communal rooms, but suspicious of it, too; intuitive and empathetic enough to see the pattern of unfortunate oversight it must have taken for Matt not to get away with bad behaviour, but to develop into it without reproach, to be simultaneously shy and lawless. Because Matt had first tried smoking on the front steps, and had only learnt to hide because Roger told him with kindness not suiting the severity of the crime that it was not allowed. Mello had seen the shell-shocked expression Matt wore from class to class every time he was admonished - the look of worry and uncertainty that lasted hours - and started to think that no one had ever told Matt no or yes or much of anything. So Mello had lost a childhood, Near had dragged it undead with him into his new life, and Matt had never had one.

'Everyone else here sucks.' Mello said. 'That's why.'

'Maybe I suck.' Matt kept his head facing away, looking outside. 'You don't know.'

'Fuck off with that.' Mello rolled his eyes. 'I don't like downers.'

'Uppers?' Matt sniggered.

'What? Get off the window.'

Matt slid down and landed with a squeak on the yellow tile. He was good at doing what he was told, Mello would find, which contradicted the first impression. He was still a whole head shorter than Mello, skinny like a decomposed cat. He quirked a smile and shook the carton of smokes at Mello to see if he'd bite.

Mello shook his head, aware that smoking for the first time could embarrass him. Never try anything new in public, he believed. He was aware of the importance of reputation, of the tenuous nature of it, of the need to cultivate and groom it.

They did not then become friendly. Mello promised not to be a snitch or a rat about the smoking; Matt knew the words but didn't seem to appreciate the sentiment behind them much. Mello assumed, going forward, that Matt was totally socially inept. He started to interpret everything he saw Matt doing as the blind navigation of a foreigner in an alien world. It might have made him sympathetic if Matt hadn't instantly jumped up the rankings to 3rd, toppled Near for one week in January to sit in 1st, spent the first week of February in 2nd.

'I don't care.' Matt said, when Mello accused him of being coddled because he was still honing English while everyone else studied Hemingway. 'Anyway, doesn't that logic suck ass?'

'The only one sucking ass is you.' Mello growled, putting a fingertip on Matt's sternum. 'I'm going to be the next L if I have to push you out a window.'

'Do it.' Matt said without passion. 'I'd like to see you do that.'

'I fucking could.'

'Near first.' Matt suggested. 'It makes more sense.'

Mello swallowed the implication ("if you could you would've") and wanted to punch Matt until he was dead. Embarrassment hit him in a gutless woosh. 'Just stay out of my way.'

'You talk to me.' Matt lifted one shoulder to his ear. He was looking off somewhere.

'Because you make me.'

'Not really.' He started to brush past Mello, reaching into his pocket. 'I'm going for a walk.'

Mello turned to watch him. Matt looked over his shoulder for a moment and met his eye.

Somehow, Matt was getting out of Wammy's. He disappeared from the grounds all the time and came back with stuff. Mello could see him walking in the street from the window of his bedroom if he looked out around 4pm most days. A little mess of red hair and raincoat romped across the street into the beyond. That was when he got cigarettes, and once Matt let Mello observe him pouring vodka on the flowerbeds behind the soccer field, so who knew what else he was nicking from the shops.

'Isn't Roger making you cut that out?' Mello asked, invading one of Matt's private smoke breaks in the unoccupied bathroom that summer. Matt always disappeared when the other kids were busy at something, soccer or eating or painting in a group.

'I guess.' Matt said. 'Maybe.'

Like a slimy fish, Matt was slipping himself through the cracks of Wammy's. Now he steadfastly maintained 3rd. Sometimes he skipped class. Mello hadn't thought such a brilliantly organised, well-run, perfectly funded organisation had cracks to slip through. And yet.

Mello leant against the wall, watching Matt tap ash onto a piece of toilet paper. 'How long have you been doing that, anyway? What the fuck kinda parents let you?'

'A bit. Just happened.'

'My parents were religious.' Mello said like a chastisement.

'Are you?' Matt asked. He'd turned on the sill so his dangling shoelaces were level with Mello's stomach and he almost faced him. 'Does God love you?'

'Dunno.' Mello told him. 'I struggle with it.'

'Is it good being loved?' Matt asked, with his eyes on his fingers holding the burning butt.

'As far as I know.'

'Cool.'

'Yeah.'

Between classes, Mello's rage continued to directionlessly swell. Violins in his belly choked him with sharp, drowning music. He went back to the counsellor's room to point at pictures ("she's angry", a frowning woman) and noticed that it wasn't the cavernous dark mystery he'd built it up to be when he was younger, but an office in which his lengthening legs fit. Now, there were anger management strategies. There were options, tools, helplines. There was the yawning knowledge that his psychology would never be simple again, that there may be nothing anyone could do to put him in control.

He ran into Matt in the hallway during an Easter egg hunt put on by Linda, who was the House's stand-in for tender loving care, after the counsellor had been teaching him how to count to 10. Seething privately over the embarrassment of aimless aggression, he asked Matt what the fuck when they bumped shoulders.

Matt had had a minor transformation that year and become handsome. He was still the puniest, worst smelling, most foul-mouthed 13 year old Mello had ever met, but now he was interesting with a trim jawline and a deeper voice and a lazy magneticism. The vague obsession with him Mello had batted away like a gnat the year previous became a swarming crush, and Mello couldn't resist seeking him out to ask him what the fuck at every opportunity, fascinated every time by the answer.

'I'm going for a walk.' Matt muttered, not looking up from his Gameboy screen. He'd taken to wearing goggles, some sort of attempt at individualising his expression. 'You can come, if you want.'

Mello nodded and they went out together. On the lawn, kids were laughing. Matt put his game in his pocket and just walked out the front gate like it hadn't occurred to him that it might not be allowed. There had never been a secret, never a furtive escape. Just Matt unpenned by the boundaries of Wammy's.

They were told they could sign out on weekends, go on trips with teachers on some weekdays. Lots of outings to the local pool. Some soccer field visits, some baseball, some other supervised garbage. Mello never went. Near never went. Matt never went.

The sidewalk sloped down into a thicket of brick buildings. Matt meandered and smoked. Purposefully, he led them over a basketball court and into a tight space in the stairwell of a public school. Highschoolers drifted away on the field to their left, rambunctious and carefree. Mello leant on the railing and crossed his ankles while Matt hunched on a step.

'I just go wherever.' Matt said when Mello asked why they were there. Matt was only showing him the routine, not anything in particular. Just the mundane reality of his excursions.

'What a waste of time.' Mello snorted.

Matt shrugged. 'Fills the days.'

'Life isn't about filling days. Don't you have any ambition? Hobbies? What are you gonna do when you leave?'

'Whatever, I guess.' Matt stretched his legs out and looked up at Mello through his yellow lenses. 'What will you do?'

'Be L, obviously.'

'Or?'

'There isn't anything else.' Mello snapped.

'Huh.'

The sound of teenagers laughing, posturing, and jostling dimmed while Matt finished another smoke, and by the time they got up off the concrete and made for the shops, they were alone under the waning sun. Mello wanted to see how Matt got his stuff, but between the aisles of a corner store, he didn't see a thing.

'They don't beep.' Matt explained after, taking a chocolate bar from the pocket of his hoodie and passing it to Mello.

'When did you take it?'

Matt grinned a little proudly and waved his hand in a slow half circle like whatever whenever however. He took another out; handed that to Mello, too.

'What did you get?' Mello asked. He peeled the foil back on one of the bars and put the other in his back pocket for later.

'Just stuff for you.' Matt answered. 'You're cool.'

'You're cool, too.' Mello said, dumbly.

'Don't get me arrested when you're a detective.'

'Obviously.' They were letting themselves brush each other while they walked, an intentional accident. 'This isn't the sort of thing L gives a fuck about, anyway.'

'You actually care about catching criminals?' Matt asked. They were skirting a park, and then going though the gate and making for the swing set. 'Or are you just happy doing what L does, because it's L?'

Mello put his foot into the seat of one of the swings and hoisted himself up. He could look down on the top of Matt's head, where Matt had pushed the goggles up into his hair. The plastic suction had left dents around his nose, an angry red tattoo. 'As long as I'm the best.' Mello decided. 'Whatever I do, I won't be beat at it. I happen to be at Wammy's, but it's my choice to win.'

'I'm not challenging you.' Matt squinted up at him. The sun was behind Mello, a dying glare.

Mello felt retorts on his tongue: "You couldn't, Third" or "Well, you're no threat". He looked at Matt's flickering eyelashes, freckled gentle skin, pink sardonic smile. 'No,' he said, with a traumatising voice crack, 'I know you aren't.'

It was incomprehensible news, impossible. Mello spent his every waking moment horny or desperate to improve his grades. He was all-consumed by dreams of the future. If he failed, he had nothing. Back-up plans were for quitters. There was only L. There was only success. How could Matt be so casual about the title Mello had striven for and worked towards ever since he'd been tragically wrenched out of the number one spot in his parents' hearts and shoved into the rat race of unwanted, unimportant children? How would Matt ever self-actualise without a goal?

Matt was the poor, aimless sod that had hitherto existed, as far as Mello had assumed, only outside the gates of the Institution. The lame, wasted, underachieving average. Mello had suspected that genius was earnt, so he had won it. He had thrown aside what he perceived to be childish distractions, built himself up with the stereotypical characteristics of the proverbial "wiz kid" as a guide. He had lived in fear of this thing that Matt was embracing - mediocrity. Horrified, he saw that they were equally capable, equally educated, and that they were nothing special anyway, because Matt didn't care to use his innate gift and Mello spent every waking moment replicating it and coming up short. They were just one studious boy who wanted to be the greatest detective in the world and a gifted bastard who didn't want anything in particular.

And L was taking his sweet goddamn time deciding if Mello was going to get what he wanted. Weeks galloped by without a decision, L being too busy with Kira, overwhelmed by the threat. At 18, Wammy's would settle Mello somewhere nice to do what he wanted with a severance package (called inheritance), and that would likely be that. So fuck Kira. Fuck him for delaying Mello's satisfaction, the security of his future. Fuck him for getting all the fucking attention. Fuck him for wasting everyone's bloody time. The sooner Mello was chosen, the sooner he could relax. The sooner his fogging anger, his depressive overcast, would clear.

On his 14th birthday, instead of collecting his cursory slice of cake downstairs in the dining hall, Mello went to Matt's room to chill. 4 years until he could be his own creature. 4 years until he would be L or he wouldn't. He'd spent some of the year previous in 1st feeling vindicated but all winter he'd been 2nd week after miserable week. Stubbornly, he still refused to think about what else he might be other than L, but couldn't resist the tantalising thought of what sort of person he would be unconstrained by the restrictions of Wammy's. He was nursing resentment towards the system that had moulded him so untactfully into a neurotic reinforcement for a man who hadn't even called to wish him a happy birthday this year. When he was chosen, the title of L would take on whatever flavour he assigned to it – it would be Mello calling the shots, painting the image. L could be daring, could be sexy, would be human.

'Here.' Matt said, digging in the drawer of his bedside table and pulling out two containers of frosting and a handful of chocolate bars. 'Got you this.'

'Thanks.'

Going to Matt's room had become something of a respite for Mello. Matt had coated the good wood dresser, carbon copies of which were in every room in the House, in stickers. The walls were plastered in stolen street signs and license plates and a poster – inexplicably, since Matt didn't listen to pop music - of Usher. It was an ugly, curated, and personal space. It was so removed from the aesthetic of the rest of the House, it was possible to imagine you were anywhere else. And it stank like Matt. Dirty laundry, hot plastic cords, cigarettes, and a thin, sweet veneer of half-assed cologne to mask the unsavory. Mello often revolted himself with a nagging temptation to steal away with one of Matt's shirts, bring some of the magic of Matt's hideous hideaway back into the real world with him. To smell him when he was sleeping four doors away in the caustic cleanliness of his own bed. To keep him closer for longer.

'Come be my partner when this is done.' Mello said, faux casual.

'Sure, yeah.' Matt answered. He was tinkering with a switchboard on the floor, legs crossed. He put his cheek on his fist and looked up at Mello for a blink through the dumb goggles and then back down. Mello made himself hopeful pretending that Matt's bashful mannerisms were the shy evidence of requited affection. Sometimes when he took Matt's arm, Matt seemed to glow and want him to hold on. When their legs pressed close on the couch in the TV room, Mello choked on his breathing and stayed stalk-still to see what would happen next, soaring on the feeling of Matt just as still beside him, the passive acceptance of his unusual proximity.

'We'll need a way to find each other.' Mello said. He popped the lid off one of the frosting containers. Matt knew him. Matt knew what he liked. Chocolate and funfetti. 'L isn't very accessible.'

'I can do that.' Matt offered. 'I'll set up something online.'

'Is that safe?'

'Sure. Gimme that.' Matt scuttled forward a few inches and gestured at the frosting, which Mello had already started eating with one finger. Matt swiped just a little off the top. 'You trust me, I guess.'

'Yes.'

Nodding, Matt leant back on his elbows and looked up. He'd let Mello write his name on the ceiling, encouraged him to write something cool or memorable so he would see it when he was staring sleeplessly skyward in the long, lonely nights. Matt had insomnia and then crashed, burnt out. Now he sighed.

Sometimes, it was awkward and too warm in Matt's room, and so exciting it was frightening. Matt had found ways to bypass the parental controls throttling their Internet access and had gotten scarily good at sifting through forbidden treasures like high definition pornography and videos of beheadings, striking comedy or horror gold, curating playlists to share with Mello when they were alone. They sought sex and violence, becoming numb and comfortable with viscera and skin, elbows knocking and throats swallowing nervous spit.

Then sometimes it was like this. Matt had opened the window a crack so the wind came in and brushed them cold, and he was relaxed on the floor, looking pleased with himself.

'I might get some dogs.' Mello mused, snapping the comfortable silence. 'Attack dogs.' He was playing with fantasies of himself needing them, of using the wildness he was barely suppressing to his benefit instead of counting to 10 for the counsellor like a fucking child.

'Don't really like dogs.' Matt said.

'I'll just carry a gun.'

'Yeah.' Matt smiled slow and languid. 'Yeah. That's cool as Hell. Anycunt can have dogs.'

Right. And Mello wouldn't be just anycunt. No matter what, never that. 'Have more.' he prompted, leaning over his knees to shake the frostingcontainer at Matt. He'd been gouging deep handfuls out of it. God, Matt really really knew him.

'It's ok, I got it for you.' Matt's stuck smile tilted closer. Almost close enough. 'Is there anything else you want for your birthday?'

'No.'

'Good, because I didn't get you anything else and I want to play Street Fighter.'

Mello rearranged his legs to make room for Matt on the bed, playfully pushed at him so he bobbled like a grinning matryoshka, and sat back so his head rested on the wall. He was happy enough, for now.

The slim remainder of that year fell away peacefully, Mello overtaking Near in the rankings for the first time since September and staying there through January. Matt convinced Mello to celebrate the New Year with him in a bush under the window of the Science Lab with a bottle of Jameson, a vanilla cigar, and a plaid dog blanket to keep them warm. Linda threw a crying fit in the TV room.

Mello had never thought much about the other children in the Orphanage. Except the absence of family and a lot of specialised schooling, he felt that he had nothing of import in common with them. Linda was the only other child of an exact age with him and Matt, but he found her boring and non-threatening and mostly ignored her. All of her time, it seemed to him, was spent in useless artistic contemplation. She read poetry. She painted fifty identical skies with watercolours. At some point, Matt had copied her art style to draw graffiti in the washrooms for a laugh. Mello couldn't remember having bullied her in particular, and especially not badly enough to warrant a shout-out in both her public freak out and, obviously, since Mello was pulled to Roger's office over it and chewed out, the emotionally fraught over-exaggeration of his attitude towards her which she inevitably relayed to the counsellor afterwards.

Apparently Linda was an antiestablishmentarian. She was angry not only at Wammy's for pitting her against her fellow man and giving her anxious dreams and persistent feelings of inadequacy or something, but at Mello and Near for doing what Wammy wanted, for being what he wanted, or for wanting what he wanted them to want. And because it was she Mello had pushed in the cupboard a couple years prior. And because he never called her by her name, only called her 'Five'.

She set the precedent. After delivering what may have been a rousing speech had it been decipherable through the worst of her sobs, after counting to 10 in the same room where Mello counted to 10 every Friday afternoon, she walked out the gates of Wammy's and never returned. No one went after her. Her name was crossed off the list with a black sharpie that very day.

"We aren't forcing you to be here" the ease of Linda's departure seemed to say. It also said "We don't care about you.".

'Sure.' Matt said when Mello scraped up a chair and sat next to him in Calculus the next morning to ask if he'd heard any of Linda's complaining, since he spent so much time in front of the television. 'It was awkward.'

'What did she say about me? What did I ever do her?'

'It's shitty when people cry.' Matt mumbled. He was making a deep, shining grey line on the surface of the desk with his pencil. 'She just started going ballistic. I don't think it was really about you.'

'Who knew she was a fucking lunatic?' Mello wondered. 'Why did she mention me if it wasn't about me?'

Matt shrugged. 'Why does anyone do anything, I guess.'

'It's so frustrating talking to you, Matt.' Mello said, meaning that it was difficult to make Matt talk about other people with any depth, since he tended to take everything at face value. 'Just tell me what she said, I'll interpret it for myself.'

'Women are shrill.' Matt offered, apropos of nothing. 'I tuned her out.'

'Helpful.'

'Well, she was fucked about something about how you punish her for a perceived inferiority with no base in reality, and all this orphanage is is just a bullshit sociopathic pig farm.'

'Pig farm?'

'Yeah, well, that was the basic idea. My words.' Matt shrugged again. 'Oink. Marxism.'

'Are you saying she thinks L is a tool of the ruling class?'

'It's my metaphor.'

'Yeah, congratulations, you mastered equivocation. What, exactly - not in your own bloody words - did she say about me?'

'It wasn't about you, per say.' Matt repeated. 'She was having some sort a mental breakdown. The stress got to her; she thinks you're implicit, that's my understanding.'

Mello had known B, he'd known A. 'Not everyone is cut out for the task of becoming L.' he said.

'I liked Linda.'

'When did you ever like Linda?'

'From afar.'

Mello's gut caught on fire. 'You can't be serious. You're supposed to be on my side!' he snapped before he could stop himself.

'Sure, whatever.'

'Fuck Linda. She was never going to rise in the rankings. L doesn't need 5 successors.'

'Sure.'

That was Near's opinion, not Mello's original thought. It wasn't even something he felt – hearing it had pissed him off, actually, and he'd told Near to shut up and have a little compassion. Near had said it with such clipped, easy detachment when Roger had called them to his office to talk – along with a reassurance that he wasn't disenfranchised whatsoever and would continue in his studies without distraction, punctuated by the tipping of a solitary domino, poignantly separate from a long line of them he'd set-up safely off to the side. It was callous. Logical, but not right. Matt hadn't liked Linda any more than he liked the chairs in the library, he was just a nice boy, raw under a scabbed heart, reacting to an event that had shaken him. Mello had seen how strong emotion challenged Matt's fortitude, made him shut down and get weird. Mello liked that Matt, who was rude to everyone by being too immediately honest, could honour the memory of a dumb girl who'd yelled at him by standing up to Mello's jealous, selfish interrogation, could put in a good word for some chick he'd never looked twice at. 'She'll be better off.' Mello decided. Class was starting, the room was being shushed. 'If she was so unhappy, maybe it's for the better.'

'Yup.' Matt said.

They were all sheltered. Never wanting for anything but an acknowledgement of their intellectual efforts. Well, Matt wanted to find a way to get his hands on some weed, but Matt was an outlier. Materialistically speaking, every child in Wammy's was a spoilt brat.

Near took up destroying his own toys that summer. He'd been building legos and tearing them down. He spent days on a city of cards and toppled it. Dolls were knocked around. Either he wasn't forming attachments to his toys because he'd been raised in excess and didn't appreciate them, or becoming a teenager, while failing to force him to give up his childish playthings, had succeeded in turning him into a nihilist.

Mello was in second from March to November. The list was static, in fact. Mello felt like he was banging on a closed door. His fuse was especially short as autumn set in. The clock was ticking. He didn't want to be 15 and unsure; 14 and unsure was torment enough.

He slept over in Matt's room on Friday, November 5th, ignorant, of course, of L's dying. Matt rested his head on Mello's shoulder and told him that at midnight on Febuary 1st, 2008, there would be a channel where they could talk for 24 hours before it self-destructed. It was the most dramatic, romantic thing Mello had ever heard. It was perfect. It was so unlike pragmatic, binary thinking Matt. Matt had done it for him because he knew him better than anyone, had paid absolute attention to him, intuited his flair for the theatric, had been the only person since the hazy memory of his parents who had made any effort to understand him, to give him what he actually wanted: to be special.

'Whatever happens, I'm in.' Matt said into the black cotton collar of Mello's shirt. 'We become partners in policing, or partners in crime. Whatever.'

'Why crime?' Mello asked, almost laughing.

'Because if L picks Near, you'll murder him.' Matt explained. 'I'm seriously just waiting for the day you snap and say fuck it. Fuck everyone.'