Work Text:
Mello knocks and enters before L can slide an edgeways word around the doorframe to reach him.
But that's Mello in summary and spades—he's not seeking permission; he's offering fair warning.
This presuming that Mello is ever fair—ever just, L should say; fair is a distantly foregone conclusion, the due of strawspun hair and ivory flesh and the eyes' paradoxical cold burn.
L wishes it wasn't so easy to sink into the wet cotton of clichés. He wishes Mello wasn't so remarkable that only a stuttering flood of platitudes seems to encircle him. He wishes that Mello wasn't whore and harpy and angel and saint all bundled together with ragged flashes showing, wishes that Mello was only one thing inside, wishes that he had an excuse for understanding this transcendent subject of melded parts.
He does understand, somehow. He has somehow internalized it, all of it, all of Mello, and absorbed it into himself.
It's all nonsense.
He can't breathe without it.
Mello saunters unconcernedly up behind him, unthinking, all-feeing, and the room and everything in it is his to toy with.
The white hands rise; L sees them backwards in the gleaming screen, the light dancing in the spaces between the letters and numbers and half-truths that plague him.
Perhaps that's why—another why, shunted in amongst the obvious reasons. Mello, uncensored, unrepentant, unguarded, unkind, is entirely true.
The white fingers rake through his hair, and the black-lacquered nails graze his scalp, favoring his ears.
He wishes he didn't understand.
A finger curls, and then another, knotted, inextricable. With the peculiar gentleness he wishes he didn't recognize, they draw his head back, angling him for a warm kiss, strangely chaste, that swims with chocolate.
He finds himself watching Mello's eyelids rise, and the swooping dark lashes look so heavy it's a wonder the boy can lift them.
Wonder, perhaps, is the root of this.
Mello's eyes are bright and unrelenting, and he wishes he couldn't read the offer that is a plea.
Mello doubts the sincerity of fortune. "Windfall" does ring ominous.
L tucks his palm against Mello's neck, silken hair sliding past his knuckles, and understands the things that aren't said, that never will be, that every movement speaks.
I have let it destroy me.
I know what it means to be broken.
You have no obligation—
Of course not. And I don't want one. But I get you. I'm like you. I can fix you. I might be the only person who can.