In Our Bedroom After the War @helena-lyndon - Tumblr Blog

Intro

Helena Lyndon (she/her)

Half-jaded quant in her gap year writing about Death Note Mello, Near, Halle Lidner and everything Wammy's. M/N/H are my writing muses ❤️, and I primarily ship Meronia & Mello/Halle.

This blog is half DN and half literary. I am very much in love with the craft of writing itself. Excerpts from books I'm reading live here too.

LANG: EN, CN, Kindergarten-Deutsch

AO3

Found this little get-to-know-you questionnaire from @mellomeowow's blog and I feel like doing this atm.

last song: The Cure - Disintegration

currently watching: Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1979)

current obsession: Mello, Near, Women of DN project, and writing good parataxis sentences

currently reading: Damage by Josephine Hart. The conventional wiriting wisdom says "show don't tell" but Ms Hart told very well.

currently working on: Too many projects. I need to retrain for my 10K too. First half of 2026 was rough 🤒

currently wearing: White pajamas a la Nate River

last google search: Do not remember....

favorite flower: Tuberose and rose ❤️

I myself am also quite new to DN fandom on Tumblr so am always happy to talk to folks here. 🐼

@mellophiliac @neallo @dolce-farn1ente

*polite panda bow*

Picking a poem each for Mello and Near

This is Mello's life in a capsule:

The Heart asks Pleasure—first— And then—Excuse from Pain— And then—those little Anodynes That deaden suffering— And then—to go to sleep— And then—if it should be The will of its Inquisitor The privilege to die—

This is Near, who survives but has lost everyone:

Water, is taught by thirst. Land—by the Oceans passed. Transport—by throe— Peace—by its battles told— Love, by Memorial Mold— Birds, by the Snow.

Both poems are by Emily Dickinson.

#death note #death note mello #death note near #emily dickinson

epifaniacintilante

This isn't a rehearsal, there won't be a second chance

LUST, CAUTION (2007)

helena-lyndon

I love, love, love this film. It's so rare to watch a movie that trusts a woman with this much interiority — not just as an object of desire or a plot device, but as a mind we're allowed inside.

What does it cost, psychologically, to be the bait? What happens when the seduction stops being a performance and the fear underneath it stops being fear, and becomes something you can't name?

It's riveting to watch as a stand-alone piece. It becomes something else entirely once you know the history it's standing on...

The film was adapted from a short story by Eileen Chang, one of the best Chinese writers in the 20th century. The film director Ang Lee wrote in the afterword of its English translation:

To me, no writer has ever used the Chinese language as cruelly as Zhang Ailing (Eileen Chang, 张爱玲), and no story of hers is as beautiful or as cruel as “Lust, Caution.” She revised the story for years and years— for decades— returning to it as a criminal might return to the scene of a crime, or as a victim might reenact a trauma, reaching for pleasure only by varying and reimagining the pain. Making our film, we didn't really “adapt” Zhang's work, we simply kept returning to her theater of cruelty and love until we had enough to make a movie of it.

Was just chatting with the lovely @kiyomitakada about old Mando-pop, and this made me think of Mello always.

I miss him 😭😭😭. Have been crushing on him since middle school.

下雨天了怎么办我好想你...

#mandopop #death note mello #I am getting all sentimental now #buries my face into the pillow

Let's goooo!

The Halle fic is already complete and published — you might have already read it from my old AO3 account. The Takada one is WIP.

All cover art comes from the great Tamara de Lempicka.

#death note #kiyomi takada #writing projects #halle lidner

Halle, Mello, the institutional politics of SPK, and a bit of Near

One of the best films I have watched this year is The Man Standing Next, a South Korean political thriller. It tells the story of how a loyalist became a regicide: the minister of KCIA (South Korea's CIA), driven by a tangle of motives, came to assassinate his master and the president of the nation. Strangely, this South Korean tale later inspired my understanding of why Halle sided with Mello.

Most political betrayals are isomorphic — they follow a similar, often predictable structure. As long as an institution has favorites, it has expendables; a hairline fracture, untreated, widens over time. Throw a dash of bitterness into the mixture of human follies, and there you go: the gun is loaded. The Ides of March is coming!

In canon, Halle came to be Near's bait for Mello. She — or any woman with a sense of dignity in a male-dominated space — would, upon understanding the full picture, carry a splinter inside her. The very hairline fracture. Canon never lets that fracture open fully, but in the real world of institutional politics, such fractures are dangerous things. Also, canon Near is not the most charismatic or personable leader. Where he excels in strategy and logic, he utterly lacks in warmth.

Some fanfictions attribute Halle's partiality toward Mello to desire. I am not entirely persuaded: a mature woman who has survived the CIA is more likely than most to possess formidable self-control. It would take a lot more to push her over the edge.

My own reading is this: Halle harbors a quiet, accumulated resentment toward Near — like a hemorrhage trapped beneath the skin — and Mello represents everything Near is not. Mello would know, intimately, how suffocating it is to exist in Near's proximity, and the sensation of being understood in that way is far harder to resist than physical desire. That, I believe, is how Mello destabilized Halle — not through a gun or coercion, but through recognition.

Considered in this light, Halle's unauthorized pivot to Mello was not a lapse but an inevitability. Governing one's mind is ten thousand times harder than governing one's body, especially if you have felt unseen and unheard for so long.

And none of this is Near hate. I love him the way I love an emotionally constipated chess grandmaster, and he is beautiful the way a Bach composition is beautiful: the emotion is rarely declared, rarely confessed. It lives in the architecture, in the intervals between voices, in what the structure withholds rather than releases. You don't listen to Bach passively; you follow the counterpoint and arrive somewhere you didn't expect. Near is the same. He doesn't meet you halfway. He simply exists, precisely constructed, minimally leaking, and if you have the patience to read past the surface, something gets through.

Concluding with a Bach piece here, animated. I figure this captures N's essence in some way.

#death note #death note mello #halle lidner #death note near #ok I need to go back to my books #A lot of INTJs are like this

tennisthemedhatesex

I keep mixing up the spelling of Mello's first name (Mihael) with my favorite chess player's first name (Mikhail).

Anyways, this is prompting thoughts that if Mello played chess, his style would be very similar Tal's. Unpredictable, messing up his opponents' strategy by crazy sacrifices and forcing them into odd positions.

Since you can train chess engines to have specific styles, in theory, one could train a machine learning model on the style of Mikhail Tal, as well as perhaps Bobby Fischer, and possibly Alexander McDonnell, and get a decent Mello chess-bot to play against.

helena-lyndon

Yes!

Mello -> Mikhail Tal, or the entire Latvian school, where they just set fire to the chessboard. Other candidates: Shirov, Nezh, Viktor Korchnoi ⬇️ I mean I can totally see M playing chess like this badass.

Near -> Anatoly Karpov. The imperturbable "boa constrictor" who slowly suffocated his opponents to death. Karpov was also a favorite of the Soviet establishment — another parallel to Near.

The photo above is also Korchnoi (the black sheep of Soviet chess) playing against Karpov the Golden Child. Young Karpov def had Near energy.

Unlike M&N, Tal and Karpov got along quite well IRL. Mello would have loved to see his Chess alter ego slaying Near/Karpov in this blitzkrieg.

#death note mello #death note near #chess #death note #mikhail tal #anatoly karpov #World Chess Championship 2026 is in Nov and I am so ready #i need to commission art of M&N playing chess #viktor korchnoi

This is my all-time favorite Near fan art. The artist is Lyre, a Chinese creator who was active almost two decades ago. Sadly, they've gone completely unreachable when censorship took down their blog hosting site.

I wanted to reach out to them so badly to ask for repost permission, but there’s really no way to find them anymore. It breaks my heart, but it is what it is...

#death note #death note near #nate river

everythingdeathnote-blog

helena-lyndon

I am deceased. 1950s Hitchcock film energy here. Icy blonde and anti-hero.

#Death note Mello #halle lidner #mello x halle #spicyyyy #holy smokes #my fav rarepair

The fault, dear Halle

Explicit | 13,137 words | Mello x Halle

Tags: Shakespearean Tragedy, Power Dynamics, Slow Burn, Angst, Character Study, Unreliable Loyalty, Slow-Burn Betrayal, Shakespearean Intertext, Ang Lee Lust Caution Intertext, Psychological Drama

"It was easier to be caught than to admit she had wanted to drive deeper. And she did want to. Not him—or not only him—but the opening. A man's desire was a door, and she had spent three years in rooms where every door was locked, calling it professionalism, calling it teamwork, calling herself a unique asset. But Mello wanted her, and wanting made him porous. If he pulled her to that sagging mattress, he would be inviting her into the one place he could not defend. She would get inside him. She would become a pin bone at his throat, a probe into his entrails, poking and mapping and stroking that old wound awaiting her. It bore the same name as hers. " (Chapter 2)

AO3

Been sitting on this story for ages and then spent the last month writing it like a woman possessed. It was originally called The Regicide. Glad it's done. No matter what, I can sleep now.

#melloxhalle #mello death note #halle lidner #death note fanfiction

ayayapap

niamero activities are taking place on my nsfw twt <3

#death note #death note mello #death note near

Class Struggle

(Mellodramattic mini fic, 320 words)

Summary: A brief exercise in Marxist political economy, in Mello's bed.

-----

Mello had him pinned. The slick, heavy leather of his jacket pressed cold against Matt’s striped shirt. The mattress groaned under them. Mello held him by the chin, forcing the redhead to look straight into his eyes.

“Look at me, “ Mello growled, his voice thick with dark, territorial hunger. He dipped lower, his lips brushing at Matt’s throat. Then he bit into it. A mark was already blooming in the harsh, cold fluorescent light. He slammed his knee between Matt’s thighs, forcing his legs apart with ruthless efficiency. Matt gasped.

“You are completely trapped,” Mello hissed. His breath was hot against Matt’s ears, demanding complete, unreserved submission.

“Say it. Who do you belong to?”

Matt blinked slowly behind his fogged-up goggles. His pupils dilated slightly, and his posture entirely slack. For a moment he made a mental audit of everything he had ever owned: two changes of clothing, a Nintendo Game Boy, a laptop that barely functioned, and some random necessities. Nothing that could not be packed into a little carry-on.

He took a deep breath, adjusted his neck against the pillow, and looked straight into Mello’s piercing green eyes.

"The proletariat," Matt replied, flatly.

Silence fell across the room. Mello’s hand froze against Matt’s hip.

"What?" He asked.

"The proletariat," Matt repeated patiently. "I own no means of production. I sell my labor power to survive. Belonging to a private individual would imply a feudal or slave-owning economic structure, which was superseded by bourgeois capitalism."

Mello stared at him for three full seconds.

Slowly, the blond sat back on his heels. He unbuckled his glove, the buttons clicking in the quiet room. He reached into his coat pocket, pulled out a box of cigarettes, and lit one without offering Matt a drag.

"Fuck off," Mello muttered, exhaling a thin cloud of smoke toward the ceiling. "Get out of my bed."

(Fin)

-----

Inspiration: It's nothing by @morphinejunkie (sorry I cannot help it 😂)

AO3 link

#death note mello #death note matt #mellodramattic #No Smut Just Socialism #Coitus Interruptus #没有低俗内容，只有社会主义 #helena lyndon writes

Death Note music pairings

Mello: Industrial (a la Skinny Puppy, Nine Inch Nails but NOT Closer, good heavens no)