Written for the 10yearsofdn blog on Tumblr. I will probably come back and edit some more later, but for now my deadline hastily approaches. This is one of my most favorite underrated characters and pairings, mostly because you can interpret them any way you want.
She works rapidly, hands darting from canvas to brush to water jar to the knot of gold hair on the back of her head, from which three thick brushes protrude. A green splatter lands on her cheek, and as she searches for a damp rag she doesn't hear the door open.
When Linda raises her head, she stops, the brushes in her hair still dripping acrylic blues.
"Hello, Linda," he says as her breath hitches.
"Near," she breathes.
He turns to look out of the window, looking vaguely uncomfortable in that way he has since childhood. "I know it's been quite a while," he says blandly.
"Four years," she says, "And you didn't even bother to knock on the door, either." She attempts weakly to smile, but the muscles of her face won't hold.
Some of the baby roundness has fallen away from his face, but still his cheeks bear traces of childlike softness, belying his eighteen years. His eyes are narrowed with a constant aloofness, so pronounced as to be almost nastiness. He is not the small boy with whom she shared her applesauce on Saturdays.
"Where did you go?" she asks.
"New York," he says. "Tokyo. Wherever I had to be."
"Did you…see them? Before they died?" The words emerge forced and awkward, but she says them firmly nonetheless because there is no way around the word 'die.'
"Did I speak to them recently, you mean?"
"Yes, I guess that's what I mean."
"Only to Mello," he says with his peculiar flattened cadences. "I had something of his that he needed back. I haven't spoken to Matt in four years."
Her face falls, and Linda places the paintbrush down on the easel trough. "He didn't ever call me again," she says. "He didn't tell me anything about what they were going to do."
"I have reason to believe he didn't expect to die. He was very confident in his predictions about the behavior of the Japanese police force. And in his driving, of course."
Bunching her knees into her chair, Linda leans her head back to investigate the faint beginnings of a water stain creeping along the ceiling. "I guess I kind of knew he wasn't coming back," she says before running out of words.
../../..
When she was seven she frequently wandered through the halls.
The rooms weren't uniform, so whenever she did have time to wander the many rooms there was always some new corner or crevice yet unexplored. One day she passed an open door to find an honest-to-god wardrobe, complete with double doors and claw feet.
Linda, like most students of The Wammy House, was profoundly precocious, and precociousness had led her to read enough of the work of C.S. Lewis to be aware that a wardrobe could hold the promise of another world. Snow and a lamppost and kindly fauns would be nice, but what she really preferred was a doorway back to her kitchen in Massachusetts. Maybe her dad would walk out of the wardrobe smelling of aftershave and starch. He would call her Colleen.
Almost involuntarily, she opened the door. There was no Tumnus, no Turkish delight. Only a couple of rugby shirts, jeans, and a pair of sneakers, smelling of wood, fabric softener, mothballs. Nonetheless, she sat in the corner, breathing the familiar smell of the laundry detergent, deciding that wardrobes were nice even if there was no world at the back of them. She fell asleep in a little curl of chubby limbs.
When she woke, she was being watched. "There's a girl in my closet," called a boy with blond hair, maybe two years older than Linda, crouching before the double doors.
"I didn't mean to," she said, feeling her face scrunch up as if to prepare for a good long cry.
The boy stared for a long moment, brows furrowed. "Well, don't go crying about it," he said. "I don't really care if you sleep in there anyway. You're just a little kid. I let Matt sleep in my closet sometimes. Matt, come see!" He called, looking back out the doorway.
A boy with red hair and a dusting of freckles emerged from the hall, breathing a little heavily, slightly flushed. "What is it?"
The other boy pointed at Linda, who was quite sure she would weep.
"Hi," said the one called Matt, extending a hand for a vigorous shake. "I'm Matt and I'm eight. That's my corner, but you can have it for a while if you want. I'm not that sleepy anyway."
"Thank you," she whispered.
"But can I maybe come in and take the other corner?" He whispered conspiratorially. "Roger's chasing me. He says I have to take a bath."
../../..
"I'm not here on a social visit," says Near. "I brought you something that I suppose is yours." He pulls a small cardboard package from a jean pocket and places it before her on the table. "it's his personal effects," he explains dryly, and Linda notices for the first time the slant of light on something coiled in his hand. "A rosary," he says, spreading his slender fingers. "Mello's. I'm not entirely sure, but he may have had it with him just before he died. It's possible it had a significance beyond his particular sartorial tendencies."
"How uncharacteristically sentimental of you," Linda says.
He turns to leave before she has a chance to ask how long he's staying.
She turns to the box Near left. Her fingers are ginger as she slips them under the cardboard lid. Reaching timidly in, she pulls out and places on the table a box of cigarettes – mostly empty – a Zippo lighter, and the damned goggles he tended to hide behind. Upon further examination, the strap is stiffened with something dry and brown. Upon the realization that it might be blood, Linda is struck with the urge to vomit. She dry heaves several times over the sink before finding the composure to go back to her investigation. There's nothing else there but a thin pink gaming console stylus and a pair of backup glasses.
The collection is haphazard and generally mundane, but the thought of his hands on these things – the thought that his cells are still lingering where the warmth of his fingers used to be – drives her to lay them out in a little shrine on the bedside table.
../../..
On the day Mello left, Linda found Matt huddling in a corner.
She'd never spoken deeply with Mello beyond a sort of courtesy, but he made his absence felt even to those who lacked a personal connection.
At the edge of thirteen, she was already guided by the eyes of a painter, trained to recognize light and shadow, the hills and valleys of a face, and the ebbs and flows in a voice. Mello had tight wires behind his limbs. He was dynamic and burned too fast, like a dying candle wick. He left ruin behind him.
"I didn't think he'd just leave me," muttered Matt. "I thought we'd leave together when we got too old to stay."
Linda said nothing, only slipped her hand into his warm, dry one. "I'm sorry."
He gripped her hand in return. "If he won't," he said, "you'll do it, right?"
"What?"
"Leave with me when we're grown up. I don't want to be all by myself."
Resting her eyes on his flyaway hair, and then on his glasses perched crookedly on his nose, and then on his white-knuckled hand curled around hers, she decided that he was the most beautiful thing she'd ever seen. "Yes," she said. "But we'll go to Paris at least once, right?"
"More than once," he said. "We'll go wherever we feel like."
He sensed, she intuited. Matt was a technician, not an artist, and he noted changes from then to now. His mind operated in figures and bytes of information, storing away quantitative bits for later, pulling out theories and postulations to understand his surroundings. Linda preferred to get her hands dirty, feeling her way little by little into the spaces in him, searching with her fingers for purchase in a crack she could climb into and grow like a weed. They settled into a long pattern of filling in each other's cracks.
../../..
There's a chapel and a small cemetery behind the House. The grounds are centuries-used. Early patches of grass poke through the dirty slush left from January snow. There's a dense quiet here, as Linda lifts her feet over the bones of the long dead. Two muddy wet wounds are dug from the earth, uniform, accompanying one more headstone laid in the 1990s. She stops to observe the length and depth of the empty graves, and considers what it might be like to jump into one of them.
A church bell rings.
Stepping into the chapel, she is washed in warmth and winter sunlight filtering through stained glass. When she lays eyes on the caskets, laid free of ornamentation at the altar, a deafening wave passes over her body – like the feeling of being punched in the nose, only spreading through her limbs. Her ears buzz.
And suddenly the nightmare takes shape. Because hearing of a body burned beyond recognition and another riddled with policemen's bullets is one thing, and staring at two boxes and realizing they contain the hands and feet and hearts of two people who will not move – realizing those hands will never skate down your arms or brush hair behind your ears again – is quite another thing.
../../..
For two days, he didn't say anything about it. He just wandered about with dark circles under his eyes, distant and eating even less than usual. She wondered briefly if he was sick.
Late that night, a shadow loomed in her doorway. Crossing from the boys dorm to the girls' after eight was a violation of the rules, particularly after age twelve, but neither said anything when he stumbled to collapse on her pillow. "I have to tell you something," he yawned, draping an arm over her waist, "and I hope you aren't going to want to kill me."
They put a kettle on in the small kitchenette placed on the floor for those who need soup or a drink of water. "Mello contacted me," he said. "He did it through one of those forums I set up, and in code."
Linda, putting spoonfuls of honey into her mug, chewed on his words, examining them to find the shape and weight. "Do you think it's real?" She asked.
"As near as I can tell," he said.
"If he admits to needing help," she muttered, "he probably does."
"He hasn't spoken to me in four years and now he needs my help," Matt bit, burying his head in his arms, folded on the table.
"You have to do what you think is the right thing," she said, staring at a fixed point on the wall, blinking tears away. "But if you leave, you won't come back."
He rose from the table and trudged in his long pajama pants to the counter where she leaned, winding his arms around her in a way that felt too much like a goodbye. She stopped trying to blink the tears back.
../../..
When the last of the small handful of spectators files out of the chapel, someone probably notices Linda is gone. She doesn't care. She's pressed with her back to the wall next to the kitchen's back door, twenty feet from the dumpster.
Smoothing her floral skirt with her hands, she finds the oblong shape of the box in her pocket, and remembers the two cigarettes. She still has the Zippo, so she strikes flame to the tip of one an dplaces it experimentally between her lips. It's vile.
Smoking beside a dumpster is an ugly way to mourn, she thinks, but Matt and Mello's deaths were ugly, and the way they're being buried is ugly because no one would care so much for their dignity, were they alive.
Near finds her holding the cigarette.
"Linda."
"Mm?"
In the moonlight he looks somewhat ghostly, although his customary sheet-like pajamas are exchanged for a pair of starched khakis and a blue button down. "I wasn't aware that you smoked," he says, and she laughs. It's a bark more than a laugh. It contrasts with the delicacy of the wispy hair falling on her cheek, and with her floating skirt.
She laughs shakily. "I don't."
"So why are you holding a lit cigarette?"
She takes another drag, trying not to cough. Her stomach turns slightly. When she meets his eyes, they are that same cool blue-gray. They betray nothing, and yet she searches for something in them that she can latch onto and hold. Something feeling.
She can't find it with the naked eye.
Disappointed, she puffs again and says, "Don't you ever keep on doing something you don't actually want to do, for no particular reason? Just because you can't think of anything else you'd rather be doing?"
"Maybe," he says. "Most of the time, I don't know whether I'm enjoying what I do."
"It's like black coffee," she says. "Bad coffee. It's bitter and it tastes like chemicals, and it doesn't even give you enough of a buzz to keep you awake. But you keep drinking it anyway, maybe because it's easier than deciding to throw it away or get a better drink. Maybe I'm smoking this cigarette because I don't know what else to do with it. Save it? No, that would be stupid. Throw it away? That would feel irreverent."
"Inertia," says Near. "The tendency of an object to resist a change in direction."
"Exactly," Linda says, snapping her fingers and taking another puff. "I guess humans resist change the same way."
Maybe, she thinks, that's why she and Matt settled so deeply into a groove and stayed there for so long. Maybe Mello was a deeper pattern, ingrained in a way four years couldn't remedy. Maybe it's why she suddenly feels as though she's adrift at sea.
The corner of Near's mouth quirks lightly. "It was Matt's, wasn't it?"
"Yes," she says. "I've got one more. Want a light?"
He unbuttons his top button and untucks his shirt. "Not really," he says, sighing and leaning against the brick.
"Well, I sure as hell don't want to smoke it," she says, taking another labored puff on the lit one. It's more than halfway to the filter. In the end, she lights it and hands it to him and he holds it like he's going to smoke it but never puts his mouth on it once.
"Don't you want some dinner?" Linda asks, after they've stood for several minutes holding cigarettes neither particularly wants.
"I'm not particularly hungry," he says.
"But I'm going to die now if I don't eat something," she says, feeling the tightness of her cheeks that comes after crying hard, "and I need some company. So you should go with me, and we're going to go eat something fried."
"Fair enough," he says, stubbing out the last of the un-smoked cigarette.