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"Do you think she'd accept flowers??"
A hopeless sigh. The sun as bright as ever as his friend kept staring at the blonde girl across the football field of the campus.
No, I don't have enough balls to do that... maybe I could leave a letter on her desk in classroom instead."
"You're such a kid." Matthias chuckled, patting Gabriel's shoulder.
"Don't stress it out. You have the whole year ahead."
________
That was the first time Matthias learned that time is precious.
Eyes on his computer screen, darknet in front of his face. Scrolling pages and pages of data scrapped by his reaper friends, about all kind of scandals.
"What a pile of shit", he thinks to himself, as he quickly reads about yet another politician being a pedophile. Dozens and dozens of informations that make him feel a wrench in his guts; he thought he'd get used to it, having been so close to that world of political lies in the past, but no. His goodness is too big, his heart is too open, he complains to himself, and he can't look away without caring like most of his old friends keep doing nowadays.
His phone pings.
"Found anything?" He reads, and quickly taps the words "not yet" on the keyboard as response to his boss, Juan Lebedev.
"Time is precious", the NSF leader types back, and the hacker sighs.
"I know."
____________
They had organized a party in the fraternity, and Matthias didn't go. He didn't quite like those things; being the popular guy in the college was a (heavy) cover his big brother had taught him. He felt like an actor putting on a costume and gaslighting himself into playing a role he didn't like. Not that he didn't like the attention - he did, and the biggest reward was being able to catch the eye of all the girls he fancied. But the quiet of his room in the dormitory once he was alone, away from his loud, chaotic friends, was warmer than his mother's embrace.
For this reason, when they invited him to the big party, Matthias refused categorically. He wasn't interested in trying new drugs, he secretly disliked the nauseating feeling of being drunk. He faked having a rendezvous with a girl, laughed at their sexual jokes about "how he was gonna drill her" and "have more fun than them", and closed the door of the room as they left with a relief.
"I sure am", he had thought, before sitting in front of his PC and start coding a mod for his favorite video-game.
And he did, until some frenetic knocks at his door disturbed his quiet, until his drunk, wasted, and crying friend Tommy carried him to the party by force, grabbing his arm way too tightly.
Until he saw Gabriel's lifeless body on the floor.
______________
The name McLean finally appears in front of his eyes.
He opens the crypted files, smirking to himself at the knowledge that no one else could open them even after all these years. Such scandal would've make the front pages - even with all the efforts the White House would've put into digging the story into oblivion as per usual.
He starts the download on external drive, before informing his boss that he has what he wanted. He's going to gain a place among the most trusted people of the CEO of Lebedev Global with a proof of an US scandal that feels like sitting on a time bomb.
________
"I want to be as cool as you, you know." Gabriel once said. Matthias laughed at the affirmation. "I'm not, though.", he retorted, without taking away his eyes from his phone. "I'm nothing but a nerd wearing a mask."
"A hot mask, that is." his friend had pointed out. "And for losers like me who also ain't hot, the road to popularity is made of grinding."
Matthias had no response for that, so he just looked up to meet his best friend's eyes with a questioning look, inviting him to go on with his discourse.
"Losers like me need to mold themselves in the mass of the cooler losers."
"The ones who get shitfaced thrice a week? You consider those idiot cool? Be serious, Gabriel."
A frustrated expression printed on his face, he didn't bother keeping the conversation going.
The "cool kids" had started early to try all kinds of drugs - and now it suddenly made sense why Gabriel had come back to the dorm stoned a few times. He was trying so hard to fit in, he was sacrificing his own ideals. Matthias instead, had never been interested in drugs, and yet was accepted immediately in the boys gangs of every school he joined. His sparkling personality and his green eyes were girls magnets, and it was enough to be treated like an oracle. He never once had to consider how privileged he was in social situations, starting from being the son of a famous, popular politician on the rise.
"What a fucking idiot I am", he was now thinking to himself, as the paramedics closed the bag and declared his best friend dead.
"I should've prevented this."
________________
"You don't heal from grief. You just learn to live with it." That's what he kept saying to himself as days went by. As the lessons stopped, the students went through the usual initial shock, and the policemen kept the case open for months.
Gabriel's decease was caused by an overdose, but no one seemed to have the answer as to who brought the meth in the dorm, and how did he happen to use such an high dose.
Few students among Matthias's group were interrogated, a couple had been kept overnight at the police station, and Matthias had to answer a few stupid, inconclusive questions that only made him wonder if the police really wanted to find where the issue began.
Maybe the police didn't care about Gabriel, just another college student that played with fire and burned himself; but he did care.
And for this simple reason, he started to dedicate his free time for justice. Cause he wasn't going to forget his friend, and he'd never allow anyone to do so either.
___________
He's not surprised by what the McLean folder is hiding, what he has found back then during his private investigation. It's not like he can forget those moments; the first time he cloned a phone sim, the first time he intercepted a call, the first time he'd register someone without their consent. He would question everything and everyone, and every night log into the darknet under the nickname of "4rchang3L" to hide everything in form of crypted data, behind a few firewalls only he could breach with the right coding. No physical proof had to exist; not after big names started appearing.
Names of people whom would eat his mother's food every Sunday when his parent organized brunch with friends; politicians, from all parties, secretly being close to powerful drug dealers. Suspicious bank movements that were disguised as "governamental duty", that definitely didn't involve passing a new law at the assembly.
The pattern was clear quick enough: students buy drugs from small drug dealers, who get it from big ones, who use homeless or needing people to deliver it, which are the ones generally arrested and taking the blame. Drug manufacturer buy societies you'd never suspect, that are always, always, owned or partially owned by US politicians. The police, being funded by these same names, simply... closes an eye. And then casualties happen and justice isn't due.
Of course, Matthias's research was incomplete at the time, and lots of the dots needed wew missing. And who knew police didn't like accusations without proof.
________
As soon as his foot stepped into the cell, he knew he had fucked up big time. Shouting in front of the whole college that the police department of Boston was corrupted and rotten, that they were the main cause as of why Gabriel had lost his life, them and their incompetence; the small riot he had organized in memory of his best friend had ended up on the local news and before he could realize it, his handcuffed wrists were on TV. What a national shame for his parents, for his way too hypocritical catholic mother and his freshly elected senator father.
Those parents who've always seemed to be loving him and all of his success, would they have loved him for his honesty?
A big stack of money slid under his father's fingers into the hand of the police department's Chief. The cell was open after only 5 minutes, and the ride home felt to Matthias like he had to grasp for air every 10 seconds. Only a "don't say anything." escaped his mother's lips briefly, cutting the heavy silence in the car, and he thought it couldn't get worse until he saw the baggage at the front door.
A terrified look appeared on his face as he turned to his parents, their eyes empty.
"You put a shame on our name." His father said, coldly. "It's not something I can forgive."
__________
Ever since, he had despised that name. "McLean". Even when his bigger brother had come to visit him in Washington DC months after, in his long, inconclusive process of appeasing the situation between family members, and he had told him "no matter what dad says, you will always be a McLean", Matthias's stomach was already turning around in disgust.
He didn't want to be associated with it anymore; not when all it gave him was fake smiles, fake personality, and fake dignity.
It wasn't a simple decision to change last name - he loved his parents, he really did, and had been grateful all his life for the opportunities they had given him. The easy life they had paved for him was still there despite their connections being broken. He knew big names, he was friends with kids of celebrities, he wouldn't have struggled to rebuild his life as long as he'd put hard work into it.
But they had him questioning if they really loved him as their son, or if all they'd given him was nothing but the consequences of their own fame. Of their *name*.
A name stained by lies and appearances, and no substance. No, he didn't want to be associated with it.
He wasn't stained. He was clean.
"McClean". What a cheeky choice.
_______________