» ooc post: history
The kid everyone knows as Matt, or “that insane American brat” was actually born in Perth, Australia. His parents got officially married when he was five years old. Matt still remembers how beautiful his mom looked in that white dress and how much she had smiled that day… mostly because that was probably the only time he had seen her smile.
His parents’ marriage turned out to be a disaster. Matt remembered them getting along better before their wedding than after. No fights, no curses, no daddy knocking at Matt’s window in the middle of the night and asking him to give him the cigarettes he forgot to take when mom kicked him out of the house for the umpteenth time that day... For three long years, that was what Matt had to suffer, day after day. The fact that he was still on good terms with his dad despite his mother’s desperate attempts to separate the two (Matt didn’t have to become a jerk and a loser like his father; he deserved better and she tried her hardest to make the boy understand that his father was a bad influence, but Matt was too enraptured by the flashy little gadgets that his father brought home from God-knows-where to care about more important matters) certainly didn’t help things and after three long years, his mother decided they were both hopeless and that she simply couldn’t stand them anymore. So she left, packed her bags (a suitcase, nothing more) and ran off with her lover, one of Matt’s father’s friends.
Matt doesn’t remember missing his mom. He probably didn’t have the time to miss her, because his father quickly filled in her absence by making sure that Matt had everything an eight-year-old boy could possibly want. A new “babysitter” every day (all female and none older than twenty-five), video games, junk food, comic books and near-limitless supplies of household appliances that Matt could dismember as he saw fit.
This paradisiacal life lasted for exactly a year, at the end of which Matt’s father was arrested and sentenced to fifteen years in prison for theft and trafficking. With his father in prison and his mother missing, Matt was taken in by the Social Services and sent to an orphanage in Sydney. It was there that he learned how to smoke and pick locks and pockets. At the age of ten, Matt was already a fully-fledged criminal who had a brilliant mind and an incredibly vivid imagination to his aid. He would’ve taken down the same road that his father did if it wasn’t for that IQ test that he took out of boredom one day. The next thing Matt knew, he was on a plane on his way to Winchester, England, having been transferred to an orphanage for children like him -- young prodigies. He didn’t take the whole “gifted children” thing too seriously; it sounded too much like a cheesy X-Men rip-off to him, but he did like the thought of going to England.
Wammy’s House, the infamous orphanage for genius kids turned out to be a bit more than what Matt had expected. Lessons and lessons and studying and tests and some more studying for good measure -- definitely the exact opposite of his idea of a good life. Matt skipped classes, got caught and sent to detention, skipped classes again just to spite the teachers, neglected his studies and generally acted like the black sheep of the orphanage... until he met Mello, brilliant chocoholic teenage psycho with an ego the size of the American continent and a fuse shorter than a hooker’s skirt. The two didn’t click together -- they clashed. With fireworks and scary music playing in the background and all the assorted drama junk. Mello seemed intent on crushing all newcomers so they would know their place, while Matt simply wanted to be left to his own devices. His blatant disrespect for anything even remotely resembling a form of authority didn’t sit well with Mello, hence their near-apocalyptic daily disputes which ended more often than not with both of them bruised and scratched and in detention.
It was Matt who made the first step towards reconciliation when he realized that, while Mello demanded to be obeyed much like anyone with a higher status than Matt did, his rule wasn’t exactly as strict as everyone else’s. Mello was, first of all, a creature of fun and that was something Matt could understand only too well. It took a great deal of patience from his part to make Mello trust him and ultimately consider him his friend, but the rewards were worth it. In less than a year, the two became nigh inseparable.
Which was why when Mello was transferred to White Ridge a few years later, Matt followed him. Wammy’s just wasn’t fun anymore, not without Mello around.