Sleepwalking

A/N: Linda's time to shine! I haven't actually read any fics with Linda as a main character except oursolemnhour49's Aftertaste of Death, so I haven't much to compare this one to. Maybe you'll like it.

I do not own Death Note.

"He wrote in a notebook," Near said. "That was his method of killing: writing the person's name while thinking of their face."

I stared at the child before me, the boy who'd had to grow up faster than all of us, yet didn't really. His bottomless eyes verified the ludicrous truth.

"There were two real notebooks and a fake I had one of my agents produce," he pronounced. "They have all been burned."

"What did they look like?"

"They were black, and one had markings on the cover-"

"Not the notebooks; the people who wrote in them. Kira and his tool."

"Ah." For a moment, I wondered if he would reply. There were probably a lot of things he wanted to forget.

"Well, X-Kira, the one who was carrying out the killings for the first Kira, was your average Japanese man, with long, narrow glasses, shoulder length hair. He was a prosecutor, outfitted like an undertaker when there's really no difference between the two professions. Kira was… more attractive to the average eye, one might say."

"Near, coming from someone as asexual as you, that's a little creepy."

He frowned disapprovingly at my flippant tone. "I said to the average eye, not to mine. Anyways, you're the artist here, not I. You've come to the wrong person if you want loving aesthetic details. That's all I have to say."

XXX

Two weeks after that terse meeting with Near, an envelope slid under my door. On the outside, in Near-print (almost indistinguishable from Tempus Sans ITC on a computer), it read:

Perhaps your artist's eyes can see what mine cannot. Take care that this does not meet the same fate as Mello and mine.

Mello and mine… what? I slit the envelope open hastily to reveal a sketch.

Near couldn't have done it… maybe one of his agents, or someone who was close to him, because here he was, in eternal sepia and fine lines… Kira.

Well, Near was right. He couldn't have described Kira.

Straight nose, thin lips, sharp eyebrows indented in righteous indignation, narrow chin that could probably drill holes in someone's shoulder if he rested it just right. Somehow he looked like justice, cool, clean, professional, and blind… that is, blinded by his own warped vision of the world.

His twisted eyes simmered, oblique, bronze, and so very far away. He saw nothing in front of him; he saw only some distant empire that existed in his dreams.

I'd stopped looking at the picture; I could already see the man in my mind. His eyes were clouded over, misty as with a cataract, because that's what he had, wasn't it? A mental cataract, an obsession with chasing clouds, and it led him to bring lightning down on thousands. The eyelids drooped, shut a quarter of the way, as if he were about to nod off into a dreamland where he was God?

Someone said, perhaps we are all dreams in the mind of God? And if God should wake?

The pale fingers reached up to drive Morpheus away, and the planes of his hands echoed in my mind, hands that had killed so easily.

Perhaps he had dreamed of fountain pens, black notebooks, white pages, and red blood. I could see him hunched over his desk (it would be the same color as his hair, eyes, and suit), frantically scribbling names, as if his life depended on it.

And I realized… it did. His eyes told me: Kira was only justice if he killed those condemned by justice. He could only live by killing by taking another's breath, by destroying.

Perhaps that's the main difference between me and Kira.

I mentally slapped myself; what was I thinking, comparing myself to Kira?

But didn't it ring true? There was just something about placing a pen to paper that spoke to both of us. One voice said kill, one said create.

And for a fleeting moment, Kira and I hovered together somewhere in the confines of my mind, both artists, both dreamers.

But from the sound of it, this God-artist had woken up to a bullet through his dreams.

Some other poet-philosopher said: "Between living and dreaming, there is a third thing. Guess it."

That would be sleepwalking, Señor Machado.

A/N: Right, neither do I own the two quotes used in the end because I could not have come up with such brilliance myself. The second one is from Spanish poet Antonio Machado, and idk where the first one is from, although I learned it in Spanish two years ago.

Read and review, plox! :)