Disclaimer: Death Note and all related characters all the property of Tsugumi Ohba, Takeshi Obata, Shueisha, and Viz. This story is for entertainment, non-profit purposes only. Please don't sue me, I'm just a poor college student practicing her writing.
Tagline: Some said the hardest thing to gain in the world was blind faith. For a certain young man, it was the act of trying to lose that trust in the invisible that was impossible. Entire series spoilers. Near centric fic.
Note: Set after Chapter 98 and 99, but before the conclusion of the series. For the longest time I didn't want to post this story. I felt it was too emotional, and too raw for it to be accessible by other fans. It was written in response to the events of Chapter 99. "Tears of Heaven" was actually written after this fic, but was directly influenced by the ideas played around with here. I don't consider this story part of my fanfiction canon for Death Note any longer, but I still hope that some people may enjoy it. Yes, Near has feelings too. He just doesn't like other people to know they exist.

This fic is also based upon the assumption that Near has very poor eyesight due to his albinism. If you want to find out more, look me up on Deviant Art, where I have a journal written in regards to the effects of albinism and how they may reflect Near's behaviour in the manga.

Thank you to Ariel-D for beta reading this, and all the rest of my Death Note fanfiction! I couldn't do this without you.

RUNNING BLIND

The sky, particularly dull and overcast, seemed to reflect the growing melancholy of the day. Grey clouds billowed at the horizon, suggesting at an approaching thunderstorm. Even now, flashes of lightning lit the skyline, brightening momentarily the brush-stroke wisps of condensed water and the towering skyscrapers of a city grown too fast, too large. It was if a dragon were loose in the heavens, crying out with bolts of electricity and roaring thunder.

If I didn't know better, I would say that he is weeping for us.

Pale, strangely transparent, blue eyes gazed absently at a computer monitor, watching as the storm brewed. Somewhere nearby, a small window let in certain shades of light, but it was closed and shaded, and he wouldn't have been able to see anyway if he'd taken the time out to look. Even the monitor was fuzzy, as if a painter had left an impressionist's image of reality for him to watch.

A thin, bony finger reached up and twirled a piece of hair, white, curly, the same as the drifting cirrus clouds that preceded the gale. The boy, older than he looked, younger than he felt, marvelled at the absolute absurdity of it all. How it was there, so big, a cloud right over his head, and yet he couldn't really see it with his own eyes. How it could just be an illusion of the computer monitor, an unreality, as false as the world he couldn't quite see.

Nothing ever felt real to him. Nothing past a foot from his face, where the shadowy mists of the world would begin to slowly resolve into something tangible, existed past his mind. And so he took the world of unrealities as it was, facts, figures, data, and made it what he wished. Nothing was impossible to a boy who didn't know what actually was out there.

On the monitor, a digitized stream of lightning laced out from the cloud tops and struck the tip of Tokyo tower. The boy imagined, somewhere, that television stations wavered momentarily as their signals were interrupted by the sudden electro magnetic barrage. Static would flare in the existence of dramas and soap operas, bringing horror to the thousands that watched them with baited breath.

Priorities, priorities.

Nothing was impossible.

The boy paused, his finger laced amidst curls. Then he reached, slowly, towards the table in front of him, and picked up three small objects. They were rough, hand carved, and he could feel splinters working at his skin, trying to find entrances into his flesh where they could work deep and never be removed. Where they could sit and fester, a pain that would never go away.

Carefully, so as not to drop them, he brought them close to his face. The tiny finger puppets stared up at him, painted eyes frozen in their respective positions, faces caught, candidly, in expressions so very familiar. Expressions, reflections from his memories, of days spent in a warm dormitory with a roaring fireplace, books opened on a bed, card games at midnight, and the hushed voices of three brothers from three countries talking in whispers . . .

In the distance, through walls of steel and plaster, thunder boomed. It was closer now. More tangible, yet he still couldn't see it. It was beyond his touch.

He closed his eyes, wishing the images on the screen away. Without his sight, he pushed the one puppet away, far away, so that it rolled along the table and fell to the floor with a quiet rattle. He had let that one go long ago, and seeing it, in these closed, personal surroundings, brought feelings into his chest that he didn't want.

Do you weep for us, Ryuzaki?

An empty spot existed in his chest which could fill too easily with pain, a spot left by the man who had once been his brother. But there wasn't a place in the world for that pain, or that hole. Not in the roll that he had been left to fill. He was the replacement – no one was left to replace him. Not anymore.

Nothing, now that the game was almost over, really mattered. Over and won, and burning churches and trucks and who knew what else had carved a second hole in his heart. It was all gone, far gone, and he couldn't see it, and he didn't want to. Scarcely little time had gone by since it had happened, short hours made long, driven by necessity and work – yet he could still remember it even as he tried to forget and focus on the end game, the final boss, which they were so close to defeating.

His co-workers had come quietly to his side when they had found out, passing him the papers and the photographs taken by the police team which had discovered the burning structure. Disaster, they said, disaster, disaster, and what were they supposed to do now that their lead woman, one of their suspects and keys to the masterminded plot, was dead? They had needed her for evidence, to prove a connection to the murderer beyond a doubt.

In his mind, Takada was expendable. He saw what they didn't, bound by the tangible fabric of reality. He saw the pieces falling into place, the strings pulling everything tighter and tighter until they were all, inexplicably, wound and tied together. Even without her confession, without an interrogation under burning white lights, he saw where she fit into the world.

But he couldn't bring himself to see what they had shown him, last, finally, in the remaining photo. The body had been burned away beyond recognition, along with the only proof of the identity of the victim. No proof had remained at all, and his mind had refused to see what his eyes really couldn't anyway. No proof, no proof at all. Never mind the bike found on the scene, or the general planning of it all, which carried the ever-predictable, tell-tale signs of a person driven to act without thinking things through, with their mind ever on the present instead of the future . . .

She was expendable, but he was not. He was never expendable, no matter what he said, no matter what they both claimed.

Nothing was impossible, right?

The building shuddered with a sudden boom of thunder, and the boy shuddered in response, opening his eyes wide to see if the room was still there around him. The dark, confined space, the monitors, dulled so as not to hurt his vision, seemed so very cold at that moment. So very, very inhuman, just as he liked them. Machines didn't hurt him.

I wonder if you can see how much I'm kidding myself right now. You always could. You knew me too well.

And the finger puppets stared up at him, as if silently chiding, "You know. You know. You know. You know the truth."

In the distance, a door opened and closed. Voices echoed down a long hallway, laughing, talking, as if nothing was wrong. As if they couldn't hear the symphony in the sky, crying out to the world in a voice that was wrought with anger.

Clutching the figurines tightly, the boy stumbled from his chair, from the seat and the monitor which were his window to the real world. White socks, white pants which were too long and too big, slipped on the shiny surface of the floor. He slipped, fell, crawled along the ground, ignoring the blossoming pain in his knee caps, until he could feel the edge of the sealed doorway with his fingers.

Numb, mind stuck in a loop that he couldn't seem to break, he wretched the door open, a large cloth blind catching him in the face as a sudden gust of wind caught it and blew it inward. He threw it aside, and staggered outside onto wet tiling and the blinding light of the outside world.

He couldn't see much. Everything was white, endless white with grey patches where buildings rose up in the distance. In front of him, a thin, metal railing separated the balcony of the building from the sky beyond. It was this that he fell onto, the iron bars cold and biting against his hands.

Rain began to fall, and the railing grew slick so that he slid from it back onto the hard cement blocks of the walkway. The droplets pelted his clothes, his skin, his face, until he felt as though it had swallowed him, and that somewhere, somewhere, he was washing away in a river of souls.

In a quickly growing pool of rain water, the boy stared blindly out at the world and tried to see, desperately, the approaching figure of a thin man dressed all in black, matted hay blond hair waving in the wind. All he found, in the end, was a small wooden finger puppet, clutched tightly in his fingers and growing soggy from the moisture, water-based paint running so that the expression seemed to turn from one of sadistic pleasure to sadness. Sitting beside it, face nearly washed clean of any expression, was the other puppet, dressed all in white so that it nearly blended into the hazy glow of the outside world.

The figurines tried to slide from his fingers, to bounce off the terrace onto the road below, but he caught them in his palms and hugged them close to his chest. Then he clumsily tucked them into his shirt pocket, trying to shield them from the rain. They would be safe there, together, even from the salt water running down his cheeks onto his clothes.

Somewhere in the sky, lightning flashed, thunder boomed again, and Nate River knew, with a dull and throbbing sorrow, that two voices now called out to him from a place he could not touch.

FIN