Chapter Text
September 17 1998
Mello pushes the door to Rue’s old room open with bated breath and his heart in his throat.
“It’s dusty as fuck,” Matt grumbles behind him, his face buried in his handheld.
“Shut up, it’s cool. This is where Rue used to stay.” Still, Matt is hardly impressed. Mello is more than content ignoring him and pacing around the room a few times before heading to the wardrobe. It’s not so much the room, but the maps that he’s interested in. He tries to imagine Rue and Lev years younger, playing in the yard outside, or talking on the floors of their rooms with books and games between them.
“Mello, come on,” Matt groans. “Hurry it up, man.”
“Cool it, Jeevas, I just gotta—found it!”
On the floor, they spread out papers that have Mello’s eyes wide, and Matt’s attention finally away from his game. The maps smell of age, and Mello traces his fingers over everything with a delicacy that he rarely has anymore.
“We should go in the woods,” Matt says with a crooked smile, and his goggles pushed up onto his head. Mello laughs too loud, taken aback by the idea of Matt even wanting to go outside in the first place. But hell, he isn’t about to complain. Grasped between his thumbs and index fingers, Mello picks the map up, and they scurry their way out.
It’s Matt, in the forest, that speaks up first. They stand in the middle of a mess of sticks, some longer than others, and some stacked in an attempt at a pattern. Maybe, a fort. Or maybe, nothing at all. “What’re we gonna do with it?”
Mello tries to think, but he can hardly picture what this mess would have looked like. “It’s a wreck, either way,” Matt adds, and Mello shrugs.
“We could fix it.”
“Just like theirs?”
“Yeah.”
Matt shakes his head. “That’s boring as shit.” His fingers are itching to do something, tapping against his jeans and then snaking up to grasp at the hem of his shirt. “We’ll just make a better one.”
Mello learns quickly that Matt doesn’t care much for the past, and has no intention of letting it take up his time. Mello can’t bring himself to be so blissfully forgetful.
Still, his lips stretch into a smile when Matt kicks over what could be the remnant of a wall.