So. Uh. HI. BEEN A WHILE, HASN'T IT. Even a year later, I still ship this like burning, so here we are yet again. /nervous laugh

Hope you all still enjoy le Mello/Sayu. 3

I own nothing, as usual. Lyrics are "Creation Lake" by Silversun Pickups.

3. repaire des loups

/

the way things have fallen

can't be afraid anymore

first we were water

in creation lake

there are twenty-four parts in a day

that divides me from you

/

They haven't known morning in one hundred years. Here, in the dark womb of a motel room, in a city full of nameless faces and equally faceless names, the curtains are bound together with safety pins to shut out any straying glow of copper and yellow outside. Out there, it's a balmy world of October that they've forgotten without so much as a wave goodbye.

But it's not morning. The clock can blink on 7:42 all it wants, and tiny teeth of sunlight can bite through the gaps in the curtains, but it's not morning. Not when Mello's here.

Sayu's lying naked on her stomach, the skinny thread of her body stretched out atop his own, and her hands are lost in the blonde crash of his hair. There are hot palms on her skin, one on her shoulderblade and the other on the humble hill of her bottom, and lips on her forehead that have tasted evils that only come to her in the most lucid of dreams.

Mello, she thinks, is something very much like a nightmare. She sees him. She watches that spark of fear flit across the blue of his eyes when he's almost there, almost complete, watches his face crack and contort in the final panting seconds of delirium - but most of all, she watches him right now, when he's down for the count and so eerily silent that it makes Sayu's ears ring like church bells.

This religion in her head is mounting into a crusade. Sometimes she dreams of crosses, thousands of them tucked into a vast expanse of black sand, endless, frosted over with ice, every single one of them sporting Mello's name. Every time, she tries to tear those hideous gray letters off, tries to scramble them into another name and throw them into the sea, but they always stick to her fingers and tattoo themselves into her skin, staining her, marking her -

Mello lifts his head and presses his mouth to the white wing of Sayu's throat, and she stops thinking. He's murmuring into her skin, "Don't you have a home to go to?"

Sayu would go cold at that, if she knew anything but heat-heat-pressing-heat right now. Nevertheless, she tilts her head back, exposing more of her neck to him, and says, "Maybe."

"'Maybe'," Mello repeats through an almost-laugh. It burns wild and bright against Sayu's skin, a dizzying stamp of breath. "Not so sure about that, huh?"

Sayu stays quiet. His breath speaks for her.

"I used to be like that, too," Mello purrs into her throat. "So eager to never have a home, to make out like some black wolf on the hunt, relying on nothing more than myself to survive."

This isn't like him. Sayu prides herself on not knowing too much about this fire-and-brimstone man, getting by on just enough of his fuel to keep her here (and it never takes too much; a winded breath here and there, a mournful crack in his voice, a glint of ice-blue in the midst of steam and flame), but this, she knows, isn't like him. Mello isn't a used-to sort of man, whether it's what he used to be like or the hideous things he used to do. Whereas Sayu tends to live in a white-silk dream most of the time (or black-lace nightmares; those come in waves, too), Mello is right now and right here and let's tear down this vision right now and right here.

She envies him for that, she thinks. Just a little.

"I bet you've always wanted something like that, too." Mello tucks a strand of her hair behind her ear, the gesture quiet and curious and almost out of place. His eyes are fixed on her neck instead of her eyes; she can look at him freely now, can absorb his brightness without sacrificing any of their shared darkness. She watches his mouth, notes every shape it makes as he says, "You strike me as the type to want to destroy something every now and then."

Sayu furrows her brow at that, but not enough to suggest concern. It's a tiny note of recognition, the dot of a question mark that completes the symbol but doesn't commit to the question itself. Destroy something, he says. Every now and then, he says.

There might be some truth in that, actually. Maybe just a breath of it, just a little stitch of it. There have been times when, yes, maybe she touched the lace curtain of her window with the very tips of her fingers, feeling its softness, its girlish charm that hasn't been amended since grade school, only to be overcome with the sudden and insatiable urge to hook her fingernail into the tiny eyelet and drag until the entire curtain splits like a busted lip. Maybe, every now and then, she thinks about slinging blank paint onto her bathroom mirror, or pressing the left side of her face to the stove burner until her skin bubbles and tears and – and scars –

And on some untamed impulse, she asks, "What's it like?"

Mello's eyes lift, linking onto hers so intensely that Sayu swears she hears the sound of an engine revving in the back of her skull, or the fatal burst-fire of a pistol as it reminds its victim of their laughable mortality.

"What's it like," Mello murmurs, "to destroy something?"

Sayu nods, breathless.

For a long while, Mello stares at her with an expression that she doesn't think she's ever seen before. It's not anger, but it's not calm; it's not sadness, but it's not happiness; it's nothing that she can title, nothing that she can pin letters onto and call familiar, and that sends a molten ripple of fear to skitter through her stomach like a hot little coal flung out onto an icy ravine.

After a few beats, though, the look softens (or perhaps hardens, she can't really tell), and she thinks she spots a note of sadness somewhere on his face now instead of that unreadable, indefinable expression still burning in her gut. Mello's eyes drift off to the left, while Sayu's drift down to his mouth. It barely opens at all when he says, quietly, "You should go home tonight."

Sayu's silent.

"You should go home," Mello goes on, "and be with your mother. Take a bath. Put on something clean. Go to sleep and dream about…" He exhales, long-suffering, and mutters, "Dream about anything but destruction."

Sayu isn't sure exactly what causes her face to flush at his words, or what might explain the pathogens of embarrassment to ambush her bloodstream; whatever it is, it's potent enough to inspire a stunned blink of her dark, heavy eyes before she drops her forehead onto Mello's chest and simply breathes him in while she has him, here, in this dark tomb of a motel room that has likely known ten thousand souls before it swallowed theirs.

"Just…another moment." Sayu's voice is every hoarse and raw thing cutting out onto the shadowy silence as her fingers curl against Mello's lean sides. "Just one more moment, please…"

Mello's only response is a winded sigh and the lost, wayward tangle of his hands into Sayu's hair. Their bodies interlock one link away from perfectly when he rolls them both over and covers her with every scarred, ravaged inch of his body, impossibly warm, impossibly wanting.

Outside, everything is bright.