Yin is far and away my favorite character in DTB, partly because of the subtle intensity of her character development and partly because there's so much we don't understand about her and the other Dolls. The latter, of course, leads me to this twisted thing of run-ons and haziness and general lack of clarity and far, far too many "and"s, because in my mind, that's how Yin thinks.
As a side note, the word "nakama," which was translated as "comrade," can also refer to a friend who is as close as family, which is the meaning I'm going with here.
Not having written fanfic in a number of years, concrit is more than welcome.
If she had been anything other than a Doll, she would have found it ironic that all she wanted was to be seen when she herself could see nothing.
Her specter had "sight," yes, but it was a hazy, relative thing, with lines and colors and motion that she couldn't touch and couldn't feel and was really too far away to matter. She didn't really understand why Mao had asked her, on their first meeting, if she needed help getting back to the stand without her eyes.
She might – if she had been able to follow the mind-paths back then - have asked why that was important, but then Huang had barked an order and her mind had obediently blanked and she had walked away. Mao hadn't asked again. In the end, it didn't really matter. It was others who so valued that imprecise, distant "sight," and the thinking held little logic to her, but it pushing through the fog in her brain took too much energy, so she didn't bother wondering.
Instead, she spent her days sitting in the little cigarette stand and walking the corridors of her thoughts, chasing them as far as she could before the trail vanished into the mist before her and after her and she became a simple Doll once more. Then, time would pass and she would come back to herself, once again picking up the trail until a customer came to the stand and her programming wiped away all her efforts and again left her lost and mindless in the mist.
It was Hei who had broken the cycle. Hei, who came to the stand not to trigger her programming, but to run against its grain, to move so far from its depth that for a single moment, it was her and him and the chill of the shade on her skin and the crinkling candy wrapper in her hand and no fog anywhere and for the first time she could see, really and truly. But then he was gone and the haziness was there and she was blind again. But if she tried, she could squeeze the little gift in her hand and the soft crackle gave her thoughts a focus so she didn't get quite so lost, and that was where it really started.
So by the time he confronted her in that run-down mansion in the rain, the mist no longer clung as tightly to her ankles and she could walk further and see better than she ever could before. And so, when she heard him call her "nakama," she understood what it meant – that she was precious to him like he was precious to her, even if she didn't fully comprehend how one was precious to the other. And when he held out a hand and offered her a choice that blew the haze away, she could see like Kirsi had seen, and knew he saw her like no one had in a very long time.
So if all she had to do to grasp that hand was brush aside a lonely, desperate man, then that sin was a very small price to pay.