1.

Matt started smoking because of television.

He refuses to acknowledge that his background had any influence. Ash was the first scent and the first color he ever knew, but he won't credit his no-called parents with anything, not even his flaws.

He might have been clean all his life out of sheer contrariness, if not for that show. If he concentrates, he can still visualize the hero's cigarette grin, the hero's liquid gait. Shabby yet imperious, so goddamn cool. And Matt has never been cool; he's apathetic, which is almost.

Saturday mornings, the television room at Wammy's was a certified battleground, with Mello the loudest and hardest of the jousters, but Matt didn't complain. He just stole a TV small enough to tuck in his closet.

The act of smoking hurt more than he expected. He anticipated the terms of addiction and cancer and death, but not the scorching dryness fisting his twelve-year-old lungs. In five minutes, he gulped down two bottles of water, with Mello laughing the entire time.

(Although Matt teased Mello about L, he never begrudged the blond's bruised adulation. At least L is real. Was real.)

His memory's starting to crumple and burn, ashes-to-ashes, but Matt still remembers how much the ending hurt him. Heroes died frequently, foolishly, in real life, but not in movies, not in shows. His hero collapsed, the credits scrolled, and Matt felt cheated — all that casual badassery dissolved, for some blonde bitch in rain-wet leather. Matt dimly recalls ripping the mini-television from his desk and dropping it from the window, the inside of his goggles blurring before the machine hit the damp ground.

2.

After that, he switched entirely to video games. Games had no plot, no character connections. Easy come, easy go. His PSP and cigarettes stayed with him, long after everyone else had left.

Then one Saturday morning, cigarette in hand, he answered the phone and it was Mello, with that familiar dirty pride. Come, Mello said, and Matt's shudder was all the answer needed. Twenty-five hours later, the hacker was on a plane, heading to his dame and damnation, like he always knew he would.

"We could die"Mello said forty hours later, in bed.

"We will die,"Matt said and twisted his fingers in Mello's hair, remembering, memorizing.

3.

At the barricade, the bullets hurt more than he expected.

When he dies, Matt forgets to say, "Bang."