A/N: OKAY! Yes, this is Matt/Mello/Linda, but I think you'll all agree, if you read it, that the focus is actually Matt/Mello. I'm just putting that out there, because I know a lot of people see Linda's name and run a mile in the other direction, lol. To be honest there are actually a whole variation of possible relationships in this fic, depending on what you choose to read into/out of it, ahah. Finally, it's also very much AU. So they're still at Wammy's but have recently finished their schooling.

Warnings: nakedness, angst, reference to sex, implied (very much past) child abuse.

Relationships: Matt/Mello/Linda; Matt/Mello; etc...

They Say

What you don't know can't hurt you. That's what they say. Linda has never subscribed to the theory herself. She isn't even sure if she would want to. Maybe. Maybe ignorance would be bliss but― she doesn't know. All she does know is that she doesn't have that luxury anyway. Linda's no more a fool than anyone else she's grown up with.

She slips from the sheets, careful not to wake Mello as she slides over and past him. She pads across the room, bare feet cool on the timber floor, and she puts her hands on the heavy weight of the drapery. They're on the second storey here, and it's early, the world quiet; it's not as though anyone is going to be looking in. She pulls at the curtains slowly, to keep the rattling rings hushed as they jingle and whisper against each other. Linda likes the morning sunlight on her legs and on the soft downwards swell of her breasts where her unbuttoned shirt hangs open. She arches into the light, hands rising up the drapery to better stretch the slight stiffness in her shoulders. Her eyes trace the lines of the grounds, lawns wandering through trees and gardens to reach the tall walls that the define their universe. Linda loves it here. She was already old enough, when she arrived ‒ small hand cradled fearfully in the enveloping warmth of Mr. Wammy's steady fingers ‒ to fully appreciate her salvation. She doesn't even mind the way the coldness of the long halls, when winter settles over Winchester year after year, makes the scars on her body itch. They gleam strangely in the sunlight, too, snaking pearly pink amongst the fine silver of stretch lines on her heavy breasts, running low along her slender torso to where her hips taper with boyish contrast, and pale skin meets sandy curls.

She lets go of the curtains, pulls her hair away from her neck, and puts it in place with a pencil from the tin on the desk. The desk itself is a papered tangle of last year's lesson plans, hard-covered books on international law making love with texts on oil painting, and the debris of childhood sharing breathing space with a foil sheet of birth control pills. She slides a sketchbook out from amongst it all, and pads back to the bed. She perches on the edge there, legs crossed beneath her, sunshine still just reaching her neck, but the air cooler on her skin. She turns to a clean page, and begins to draw.

Linda doesn't believe in love. She was already old enough, too, when she arrived, to have had that concept purged neatly from her mind. She does believe in need and affection, though, and the touch of warm hands on warm hands. She sees it, in the boys ‒ the young men ‒ on the bed before her.

Mello is still fast asleep, his hair a messy halo on the pillow, one of his hands clutching a fistful of sheets, the other spread calmly against the mattress. Matt is waking slowly, shifting restlessly. He yawns, and gazes up at her from beneath heavy lashes, his green eyes bleary. He mouths, g'mornin', in her direction. She smiles as an answer, her eyes following the shift of the muscles in his back as he moves across the empty space she that had vacated; moves to press himself in against Mello. He puts his face at Mello's shoulder blade and nuzzles at Mello's pale skin, soft gold in the morning light. Linda mightn't be able to say much about ignorance, but there's no doubt in her bones that knowledge is painful. In the beginning―

In the beginning she had had a purpose here. They'd needed her. She'd enabled them. She'd let them pretend. Let Mello pretend he hadn't already backed himself into some kind of monogamous corner. Let Matt pretend he were somehow straight. The two of them, they'd needed her between them, like a protective glove, like a shield from the truth that she'd always known, of course, from even before the very first touch ‒ they only need each other.

Ironic, really.

But she'd known. She'd known when she was sixteen and Mello had kissed her just to make Matt jealous, and she'd known when Matt had furled red frustration and had kissed her too. She'd known later, as well, the first afternoon they'd tumbled into an awkward, eager mess, and maybe they'd all drunk too much of the scotch Mello had smuggled out of Roger's office, but it wasn't just that, at least, not for her. She can remember it as if it were yesterday; remember the feeling of being with them that first time. Remember the heart-pulse of their derailed need pushing through her just to get to each other―

Long enough ago. Now their time at Wammy's is almost over. They all know it. Classes are long finished; they work on small cases instead, together or alone. And Matt and Mello lie in her bed without her, their bodies close together in the space where her own body warmth has no doubt already faded. Linda smudges at her sketch with the edge of her thumb, then makes the sweet line of Mello's back more defined. She caresses pencil softly as Matt's face takes shape on paper.

She hates the fact that she cares, seeing as she's always known. She wishes she could be stronger. Like Near. Near knows. Near knows, because Near watches everything, but most of all he watches Matt and Mello. He'd cornered her in the dining room once ‒ taller than her, now, when he chooses to stand ‒ and his face had told her that he felt sorry for her. She'd been so angry. She'd pushed him away, her hands flat and furious against his chest with its childish cotton and buttons. He'd just looked at her as she'd stormed out, and she'd tried to turn her heel on his pity. But Near knows.

Probably everyone knows. Wammy's is a small cosmos. Nothing is ever said but somehow the information spreads sideways regardless.

Still. Near knows on a different level. Because Linda knows too. After all, she's watched him watching.

Linda details the cotton sheets and the shadows they make, sloping waves of white that slide from boy hip to boy shoulder. Matt and Mello shift closer, limbs tangling, breath meeting, ruining her composition. It doesn't matter. She can draw them from memory. She'll always be able to draw them from memory, and she knows it, etched, as they are in her mind; every inch of skin, every birthmark, every twist of hair. Always.

Always, and Near is leaving today. He told her. A job. A case. From L. The first of them to be sent overseas. Mello will be angry. Linda holds the sketchpad at arm's length and looks at it. She can never do them justice. They're too beautiful. They're too beautiful, and she can't draw the invisible threads that bind them together, can't draw what she can't fathom, as Mello's hand slides down the length of Matt's back. She finds a fine grey felt-tip, writes in the corner, with curling script,

dear Matt, dear Mello

She pauses, pen at her mouth. She turns it thoughtfully, feels the cold of the ink leave a grey mark on her jaw. Nothing she could write would say what she meant. Nothing she could write would say... anything at all.

She leaves the sketchpad on the desk, beside Matt's goggles and curling strips of silver chocolate paper.

"Where you going?" Matt asks with a yawn, as she fetches clean underwear from a drawer near the bed.

"Go back to sleep," she hushes gently. She pulls the knickers on, then Mello's discarded jeans, and Matt's shirt, because she can, and because the jeans are Mello's favourites, and he's not the only one who can be vindictive.

She kisses them, though, before she leaves.

Mello is watching her, blue eyes piercing, as she laces her boots. She loathes the tears biting at the back of her vision.

She doesn't say, I loved both, you know.

She doesn't say, I'd have stayed forever, if you'd just left space for me.

She does say, see you.

Mello just looks for a moment, then nods slowly, and presses his face back against Matt's neck. He's asleep again by the time she's pulled her knapsack from the back of the closet.

*

When she knocks on Near's door, his mouth says, you're running late and I was about to leave.

His eyes say, please.