Chapter Text
"And that is how our glorious Leader, the most benevolent and wonderful Light Yagami, came to apprehend the tyrant L and bring peace again. I shudder to think what our world would be like if our fearless Leader had not been victorious."
Matt has heard this story before. He's heard it more than once. He's heard it since he was a teenager, and he suppresses a yawn and lets his eyes wander to the window, past the bars to the barbed wire fence and the surrounding forest. He'd only been in this place for a little under a month but the lesson plans were more or less the same as in the public facilities.
Only this place isn't public. It operates under the guise of a reformatory for particularly troubled youth but everyone knows the truth about it.
It's a prison.
It's worse than a prison. People went in and never came back out. Or, if they happened to be lucky enough to either escape or survive their sentence, they came back changed. They came back with ugly scars on their temples, drooling, terrified. Subdued. The fear is another vital aspect of it, fear of the government, fear of the police and rebuttal and punishment. It's what has kept Light Yagami in power for the past five years.
Matt remembers living in America, the way the economy collapsed in on itself, the rioting, the police choke-hold; the way it seemed to spread, like a virus, from Canada and into Europe and how only Japan seemed to survive it. How their Prime Minister Soichiro Yagami kept everything in check and under control. There was no panic in Japan. No crisis. Life continued on as per usual.
Until he died, suddenly and unexpectedly.
Then Light Yagami took over and things spiralled downward even faster. The invasion of North Korea gave him firepower and when China sided with him it got worse. The riots escalated—everything broke down. Everything just caved in on itself, and it was Light Yagami who built it all back up. And how could any government argue, when he was backed by sixteen storehouses packed with nuclear missiles? It wasn’t even that nobody tried to stop him. Plenty of people did. But Light is nothing but charming and deceptive and underhanded, and people who opposed him started disappearing and turning up dead. Happy accidents, car crashes and suicides and random muggings. The only one who ever came close had been L, and that had ended like all the others.
Matt leans back in his chair and is thankful it doesn't squeak. He's been okay so far. He's stayed under the radar of everyone, took the pills handed to him and smiled and said “yes sir” whenever something was asked of him. It makes his skin crawl. It makes him sick. He wonders if his mother is ashamed.
"Am I boring you, Eighty-Two?"
Matt dimly registers his number being called. In here he is not a human being, he's just a number, another digit on a long list. He is not Matt Jeevas, son of a former French actress and a district attorney. He's just Eighty-Two, the numbers dark ink against his inner wrist.
"What? No."
"You've been looking out that window for fifteen minutes."
Matt thinks that's an exaggeration. He shakes his head, "I haven't. I've been listening."
He doesn't know why he says that. The instructor's eyes narrow at his defiance, and an uncomfortable, heady silence settles in the room. His other classmates are still—even the ones with healing scars that fidget and rock to comfort themselves don't dare move or breathe.
"Are you arguing with me? Raising your voice?"
Matt makes a face without meaning to do it, "I'm not raising my voice."
Shut up, his brain says. Shut up, shut up, shut up.
The instructor's jaw tightens. Then she turns and walks to the other side of the room, her heels clicking against the stark white linoleum, and she punches a few buttons on an intercom.
A voice crackles through the other end, "Yes?"
"I'm having some trouble with a student," she says, and Matt feels like he should run, like he should make a break for it while he still has the mental capacity to know he should run, "Could you send someone to collect him?"
"Of course," the voice responds, "They will be there shortly."
The teacher turns to him, and Matt swears she looks smug. Fear, white hot and familiar, uncoils in the pit of his stomach and threatens to suffocate him. It curls around his throat like a python and squeezes and he feels cold all over, like he's been dumped in an ice bath.
It's not even five minutes. The door creaks open, and then men in suits are hauling him to his feet, and Matt doesn't fight; he lets them drag him up and they shove him out of the room and down a hallway. The next door needs to be opened with a keypad—on the other side the floors and walls aren't pristine and white. They're streaked with dried blood, and it reeks to high heaven of something that might be rotting flesh. The hairs on his neck stand up as they haul him to an empty room, spare a table and two chairs, and deposit him in it.
It feels like hours that he's stuck in there, pacing, until a man in a white-coat finally comes in. He's carrying a tray with several small cups on it. He smiles in a way that reminds Matt of a snake, and he tries to resist the urge to take a step backwards.
"Hello, Eighty-Two. Sit, please."
He does. He does it out of fear, and the man smiles, pacified by his obedience.
"I hear you were being argumentative in class," he says, picking each little cup off the tray to set on the table. Matt can see now they're full of pills, "You know that's not appropriate."
"I know."
The man slides a cup toward him, and he takes it and immediately downs the contents. The man smiles wider.
"But I know you're a good boy, Eighty-Two. You love our Leader."
Another cup is slid his way, and Matt takes it and only hesitates a little before he swallows the pills. He'd been pissing blood and waking up vomiting since he came here, but saying no to these people resulted in chunks of your brain missing, and what's a little puke and bloody piss when compared to losing your frontal lobe?
"Not like your whore mother," the man says, and Matt struggles to swallow, "She was selfish. She didn't love you. She wouldn't have left you alone if she did. Our Leader loves you, Eighty-Two. He does. He wants you to be happy and healthy."
Matt remembers his mother too clearly. Matt remembers the French ghetto they were both herded in to. He remembers watching his mother be beat for questioning, the fear and the confusion of simple everyday tasks. He remembers the day she died, not long after L's death was splashed over newspapers and every remaining social media site as a warning. How she died rebelling, rioting in the ghetto—shot dead and then strung up as an example. Matt had been only fifteen at the time, and he'd managed to hide for years under his neighbour's floorboards, living off the meager scraps of food that could be slipped down to him.
Until they found him.
The neighbour died of two gunshot wounds to the head. Harbouring the spawn of a rebel was treason.
That's how—
Nausea rises in the back of his throat, and he nods despite how it makes his head spin, "I know."
"Good boy."
He eases another cup of pills toward him, and Matt's about to grab them when there's a banging from outside in the hallway. Then there's shouting, lots of it, and Matt isn't sure what's going on, but the man tells him to stay still and don't even breathe and gets up.
The door opens for only a second before something solid connects with the guard's head and sends him sprawling. A boy, probably his age, ducks inside. He's got shaggy blond hair on one side of his head while the other is shaved, an ugly scar marring the skin just above his ear, and his eyes are wild, bright blue and frantic. They pin Matt where he sits, and then the boy spits out a mouthful of pills into his palm.
"Get up," he hisses, "Now."
Matt's legs aren't responding right, but he manages to do as he's told. The room swims, and the blond boy stalks over, snatching the cup of pills off the table. He inspects what's inside and makes a face before looking up at him again.
"Did you swallow?"
Matt's head wobbles in a nod. The boy huffs out a breath in what's clearly frustration.
"Don't take this personally. Or do, I don't care. But remember I'm saving our lives."
Matt can't even get out a protest before the kid has his arm in a vice grip and is slamming a fist into his gut. Matt's head spins, and the unbearable wave of nausea gets worse, enough that he has to jerk himself backward to avoid puking on the kid's feet.
A hand rubs over his spine, and when Matt looks back he's surprised to see the boy beside him. There's still banging on the door behind them, and he smiles, a little, at him.
"You're going to be fine," he says, "I'm Mello."
“Matt,” He glances toward the door before he turns back to Mello, "What the hell are you doing?"
"Not letting them win," Mello replies, like it ought to be obvious, "See that vent? We're going to climb out through there."
Matt follows his eyes to the air duct in the top corner of the room. They would fit, barely, but he shakes his head.
"They're going to kill us."
"We're better alive," Mello says, going back to the table to start to push it over, "Good propaganda says 'yes sir'. We're useless dead. Not even good for experimenting on."
"Experimenting on?"
"What do you think the pills are for, dummy?" Mello snaps, shoving the table flush to the wall before he grabs the one chair, "Are you going to help or not?"
The banging gets worse. Matt looks between the door and Mello. Mello sighs.
"Look, like it or not, we're partners now. They'll never believe you're not in on it. So you might as well help me."
"You're crazy."
"No, I'm not," Mello says, "Now come on."
Matt tries to remember how to breathe and he thinks distantly of his mother, standing tall at the front of that line of people in the ghetto, chanting “Death to Light Yagami” in French before the army open fired on them all. Mello is still watching him, and he swallows past the knot in his throat and grabs the other chair, dragging it over to the table. Mello wastes no time in climbing up, and he pulls at the grate over the vent as Matt tries not to panic as the thumping at the door gets louder.
It takes him way too long but Mello gets the grate off and climbs in and Matt follows. It's dark and dusty. He bites on his lip and starts to crawl blindly forward.
"Just be quiet," Mello says, and his voice echoes around them, tinny and metallic, "It's not far. This vent should go outside."
The statement doesn't inspire confidence, and Matt wonders if he should turn around but he keeps going, he keeps crawling forward until his palms brush Mello's bare feet. He can see the outline of his silhouette, illuminated by light, and Mello thumps his shoulder against the grate until it pops off. The amount of noise makes Matt uncomfortable, and Mello climbs down first before he follows.
They're not outside.
They're far from outside. They're in a room surrounded by bodies, none of them older than eighteen, in various states of decay, some missing limbs and parts of their skulls, some stitched together. Matt feels sick. Mello curses under his breath, and he looks frantically around the room before back to Matt.
"This should be outside."
"Yeah, well—"
The door at the opposite end of the room bangs open, and several guards come in. Mello makes run for the vent, but it's too tall, and the guards grab him before he can get up. Matt doesn't know what to do, and two men grab him and club him upside the head, and the last thing he sees is Mello, flailing and screaming, before everything goes black.