Summary: Near's eyesight has never been perfect, but ever since the explosion destroyed Mello's hideout with the fool still inside, he's been inexplicably going blind.
Disclaimer: If I owned Death Note, this wouldn't be called fanfiction, now would it?
A/N: This story has been sitting unfinished for almost a decade: it had an ending planned but not written, and a lot of stuff in the middle that needed reworking. It's a concept and a story that's stuck in my mind, though, and I knew one day I'd have to finish it. Thankfully it's nearly (ha!) done now, so there won't be too much waiting between chapters.
You can infer slashiness here if you like, but if you like angst and introspection and Near being uncomfortable, oooooh boy, are you ever in the right place. Enjoy!
Hands of the Beholder
Rupture
It's six a.m., and again he finds himself looking at the picture.
He could spend his mornings watching the sun slowly rise over the New York skyline, but he's content enough to see just that bright smile and perfect sunshine hair. Here are his guilty pleasures, all sweetly summarized in a simple Polaroid, and dwelling upon them for these few scant moments each day is the only indulgence he allows himself.
But there's no secret joy in this ritual anymore, no tingling in the pit of his stomach, no private smile upon his pale lips. He looks into those blue eyes – so much softer in this photo than he'd ever seen in person – and there is a tense pulling deep inside his chest.
This snapshot from the past might be all that's left of Mello.
He wishes he could look back on that long ago autumn in England and say that he was happy then, that either of them had been happy in those days, but he frowns and halts that thought. As useful as lying may be when dealing with others, he will not stoop so low as to lie to himself. He knows that Mello only smiled that day because there had been a camera pointed at him.
His eyes twitch, and the line of Mello's mouth disappears, his hair blurring into the golden foliage behind him. When the boy begins to shake back and forth, Near squeezes his racing eyes shut and returns the photograph to its hiding place within his white pajama top. Sprawling his short legs out on the floor, he madly rubs at his eyes, but when he blinks them open the room is still fuzzy and the monitors all run together on the walls. His hands cover his face, and he tries to hold his quivering eyelids still for a few moments.
He peeks between his fingers, trying to focus on the tower of dice beside him. He can see the outline of the black and white Empire State Building he constructed yesterday, but he can't tell one die from another.
He shuts his eyes and grits his teeth and sends a socked foot crashing into the tower.
Hundreds of dice tumble and clack on the hard floor, but even in this rare display of anger he holds back and kicks it just hard enough to rupture its foundation, letting it fall in a pile. To have all those dice scattered across the room would inconvenience himself and his team, and cleaning them up would be an unnecessary waste of time.
He draws his leg back, hugging his knee to his chest. To think so far ahead is nothing out of the ordinary for him, nor is keeping his head together in the wake of emotions; these talents usually work to his advantage, but right now he finds them despicable. An angry Mello would have sprayed dice debris over the whole room, and when not a one was left stacked he would have stomped on the tiny cubes in some vain attempt to break them, to destroy them. Ridiculous, yes, but he imagines such rage would be intensely liberating.
His black eyes emerge again, and though their shaking has stopped, the effects linger. He can see his hands and the buttons of his shirt clearly enough, but the outlines of the furniture and fixtures in the sterile room are lost to him. His eyesight has always been somewhat weak, but with every passing day since the explosion – since that insane last-ditch maneuver destroyed Mello's hideout with the fool still inside – his vision has been rapidly and irrefutably deteriorating.
He has an inkling that his condition is a psychological one, triggered by that very event. A preposterous idea, yes, but nevertheless one he cannot rule out.
That little spark of hope lying in the back of his mind, however – the thought that, if Mello somehow turns up alive, his vision will return to normal – is absurd at best.
"If my life were any emptier, I'd cease to exist, at least according to my mother," a woman's voice echoes from the hall outside. "Career be damned, I suppose. I can't possibly be happy if I'm not popping out grandchildren for her."
"Ha, my mom's the same way," a man laughs just outside the door. "She won't stop bugging me to find a nice girl and settle down!"
Near picks up a cold die from the floor, cursing himself for being so distracted as to let their approaching footsteps go unnoticed. He holds the little gambling piece up to his face and lets his eyes focus on it until the edges become clear.
The black dots still refuse to sharpen, no matter how often he blinks or how much he squints.
"You know, if we worked together we could easily shut both our mothers up..."
"Don't push your luck, Gevanni."
He scowls and places the die on the floor in front of him, working solely by the feel of the recessed dots to make sure that the evenly-spaced four faces him and the neat rows of the six lay on top. As the heavy door opens behind him, he begins a founding row of twenty dice, a perfectly straight line with fours all forward and sixes high. He listens to the slick Oxfords and clicking heels coming nearer, and idly wonders if either of them are astute enough to notice how slowly his dice move from the pile on his right to the neat row before him, or how long each spends between his fingers before he gently sets it in place.
He rather doubts it.
"Good morning, Near," Lidner greets him first, heels stopping at his left. "Starting another tower, I see."
Near is silent, and does not even look up at the patronizing woman to acknowledge her presence. Thankfully, she is reasonably quick to take hints and leaves his side then, moving on to check the computers across the room as he begins his second row.
Gevanni comes next, but he only stops for a moment, bows, and gives a short, "Good morning, sir," before following her. He, at least, seems to know better than to play friendly to an unwelcoming audience.
Lester arrives two minutes and two more rows of dice later, but he does not pause for mere greetings. The plastic tray he carries clacks as he sets it upon a table a few feet from Near's station on the floor. A shuffling of paper follows it. He boldly steps between the new tower's foundation and the old's pile of rubble, slapping one shoe against the other as he takes his usual military stance. Near stops now and looks up at the man, though he can see only as far as his elbows and the manila folder in his hands very clearly.
"Yes?" he questions flatly, abandoning the dice to twist a curl of white hair between his fingers.
"Your breakfast is on the table, Near, sir," Lester states, his confident speech suspiciously quiet. He is a man who never speaks without good reason, and Near is in no mood to wait needlessly for it.
"The point, Commander Lester."
"We have... received some new information from the Los Angeles police department." Lester extends his arm and offers Near the folder, but the colorless boy turns away with a deep frown and picks up another die. He can barely make out the large print on the outside of the folder, and will not give himself away by trying to read whatever papers it holds. He has thus far refused to admit his optical shortcomings to the team, and would rather they remain in the dark until absolutely necessary. His pride demands that much.
"Give me the important points," he commands, finding the four-dotted side of the die with his thumb. "I have little time to pick through poorly written police reports."
"Of course, sir." Lester clears his throat nervously. "It seems that, in cleaning up the debris of the mafia hideout, another corpse was discovered in the room that Mello and the Japanese Vice-Director were in at the time of detonation. The body was wedged beneath a support beam and hidden by a fallen portion of the roof, which explains why the initial sweep failed to find it."
The die is squeezed tight between his fingers, the four in front and the six on top, but Near's hand stops midair above the half-finished row.
"Has this body been identified?" he deadpans, rubbing his index finger over the two dots on the left side of the die.
"No. The police are still awaiting the DNA results, and are attempting to match dental records," the older man says uneasily. "The body was burned beyond recognition, but is male, with a very slim build, and... from the skeletal structure, they estimate him to have been between the ages of 18 and 22."
Near at last puts the die in its place, and stares blankly down at the white square forming on the floor as his eyes start to shake again.
"Cause of death?" He blinks and rubs at his eyes in the most casual manner possible, hoping the movement will go unnoticed. It does him little good, and his field of vision continues to shimmy back and forth.
"The initial explosion shook the beam loose, and it fell on him. Since he seemed to have no internal injuries, they believe that the beam did not kill him, but only pinned him down. He burned to death."
Near's left eye twitches uncontrollably now, independent of the right, and he slaps a hand over it with the least amount of thought he has given to any physical action in recent memory. He is prepared to accept that Mello might have died that day, but this... This could not be right, they must have made some mistake in their conclusions, some oversight – surely the burnt flesh hid a fatal bullet wound, or the beam had snapped his neck, or the shock of the explosives had knocked the life out of him.
Surely Mello had not died so shamefully as she died.
As hazy as his present vision is, so finely does his mind's eye see the past, so loudly do the screams of long ago ring in his ears, so warm are the torches of superstitious villagers as they surround a single hut, laughing and gloating in assumed victory even as their target hides silent and alone in the tropical brush. He squeezes his eyes shut; he is not even angry. In his heart he is laughing with them, mocking the pointless death of that foolish woman in that flimsy shack of a home. But he is laughing at the perpetrators too, the idiots that have set their neighbor's house aflame to kill a demon child but have killed its mother instead. His coal-black eyes open and glare at them from behind the leaves, and he wishes the villagers would die as well – not to avenge his mother, or even to save his own life, but because people so utterly worthless do not deserve to live.
He wonders if these thoughts are evil, if he truly is the abomination they fear, if he deserves their righteous wrath after all...
"Near..?"
He rubs his eyes once more and finds his vision clearing. He can see the dice before him now, the individual cubes that make up each row and column, and can nearly decipher each little dot in the lines that stripe the top of his construction.
He sees that his first perfect row was crooked all along, and scowls.
"If it is Mello," Near declares coldly, picking up a die from the pile and rolling it across his fingers, "the police will have no records to compare. If no identification is made after all methods have been exhausted, then we may assume it is him."
"Understood."
"Is that all, Commander?"
"Yes, Near, that's all."
"Let me know when they make the ID, then." He realizes his mistake as soon as it escapes his mouth. His eyes shy off to the left, as far from Lester as he can point them.
"Of course, sir," Lester replies with a curt nod, perhaps not noticing.
Near stands slowly, and his hand autonomously rises to fidget with the curly hair that hangs by his ear, despite the little cube still nestled in its palm. He cannot stay in this room, with these people, with his mind so clouded as to let some stupidly hopeful 'when' slip out in place of a safely neutral 'if.'
"I am going to wash up before I take my breakfast," he quickly excuses himself, pointing his white-socked toes toward the heavy steel door before the other can reply.