Notes: This story was written for week #49 - Linda at the LJ community dn_contest. ...I was really surprised when it ended up winning Mod's Choice, too! People seemed to like it, so I posted it here, for you guys to maybe enjoy it, too. I'd be happy if you left some feedback on your way out. :)
She only knew that there had been a car accident, and that her glasses had snapped in half, a neat split right at the middle of the frame, when her head had collided with the door.
Afterwards, no one had bothered to tell her much about it. She was only seven, still a child, and she had lost her family in a matter of minutes—she had been able to pick up as much from the policemen's muffled conversations and their shocked, pitying tone. Sitting on the steps of an ambulance with a blanket put around her shoulders, she had heard them say that a truck had run a red light, that the driver had fallen asleep at the wheel, and that she, Rebecca Miller, had been damned lucky to survive with only a few bruised ribs.
She also knew that she was the top of her class at school, that the nonchalant ease with which she brought home straight A's had at first unnerved and then delighted her parents, and that most of her teachers said, in muffled voices and with meaningful glances, that she was a very intelligent little girl.
The accident and her good grades seemed to be the main reasons why she was sitting in a dimly-lit office in an orphanage called Wammy House, and as the old man on the other side of the desk filled out what looked like a lot of paper work, she tried desperately to focus on these two things. The man had told her, in a very kind, understanding voice, that she was about to start a new life—a life that they would spend training and sharpening her intellect, like a weapon, until she might or might not be able to be the successor to a world-famous detective.
She had had to pick a new name for herself—only one name, a first name—and she had decided almost immediately. Linda, like the cat she had gotten for her fifth birthday.
She waited for the man to say something, stared down at her hands and tried very hard to believe that everything she had lost, her family, her home, even her cat, had belonged to someone else. She was Linda now, a new person, and she didn't need to feel sad about what Rebecca had gone through anymore. Rebecca was gone, vanished into nothingness when the man had written down her new name with a smooth, swift motion.
For the first time since the accident, she smelled nothing but clear air when she inhaled, while every breath before had tasted of smoke, gasoline, and the otherworldly, coppery scent of blood on metal. She felt clean, a brand-new, smooth sheet of blank paper, waiting to be filled with new memories, like the thick hand-made paper she had loved to paint on.
She didn't allow herself to think about all the things she'd need to forget for this new life—like how her father had used to push her on the swing, gently, as if he'd been constantly afraid that she'd fall; how her older brother had sometimes taken her out to ice cream when he'd been home for the semester break; or how her mother's hand had felt on her cheek when she'd woken her up for school, warm and soft, and like home.
"You need to sign your new name here," the kind old man said, mercifully interrupting her thoughts, and she breathed deeply through her nose, willing her chin to stop quivering. He slid a single sheet of paper across the desk, along with a pen, and she reluctantly raised her head.
She noticed vaguely how the paper stood out against the dark, faintly shimmering wood of the table top, and how the edges seemed to blur. She leaned forward as far as she dared, and narrowed her eyes, but all she could see was a big, grey blotch against the whiteness, like a drop of rain on a window looking out on a cloudy sky.
The old man didn't say anything, and she couldn't see his expression, but his silence seemed puzzled. She swallowed down the sudden, fierce wave of helpless anger that seized her—Rebecca's bad eyesight had stuck with her through her transition to Linda, like a leech, and she felt strangely betrayed.
"My eyes—," she began, and broke off again, humiliation burning high in her cheeks. "I used to wear glasses," she said, after a short pause when she willed her voice not to shake, but it still felt like admitting to a failure, the first in this new life.
The man simply nodded, never uttering the words of disappointment that she had expected, but she didn't want to see his understanding smile, either. Vigorously, she leaned in again, this time closely enough that the grey cloud became words and numbers and, at the bottom of the page, a single black line.
She quickly took the pen and wrote her new name there, with neat, quick strokes, and felt satisfied and a little redeemed when her hand didn't shake. She carefully capped the pen, and tried to welcome the heady feeling of a new life stretching out in front of her.
On the next morning, after a night of fitful sleep in a small bedroom that she shared with another girl called Samantha, the old man took her to a strict-looking nurse, and Linda got a new pair of glasses.
The nurse had even let her pick the color scheme—blue, like her eyes—so Linda did like the new glasses, at least when they lay folded neatly on her desk.
Before she had come to the orphanage, in that last episode of her former life as Rebecca, she hadn't missed her old glasses at all. She had grown used to seeing the world as if through a fogged window, and she had liked the feeling of days dissolving and blurring together just like the colors around her.
She had started going to class two days after her arrival, and she did wear the new glasses in the classrooms, simply because she needed to. But after class she took them off, satisfied with seeing only who came close enough—she didn't have many friends, although the other children all seemed to like her, and those who did come close enough for Linda to make out the shapes of eyes, noses and mouths, didn't mind that her glasses stayed hidden in a drawer in the afternoons.
"It would be good if you wore your glasses as much as possible," the nurse told her, not unkindly, but with a hint of exasperation that Linda couldn't help cringing at. "You see, your eyes won't get better if you don't train them."
Linda said nothing, just stared at the moving, skin-colored blob that she knew was the nurse's face. She didn't know how to explain why she didn't like the new glasses—it was just too strange to put into words, especially when you were almost eight years old, far too grown-up to be bothered by something this silly, and, most of all, supposed to be extraordinarily intelligent.
Even if she could have found words that described it, she wouldn't have wanted to talk about her aversion to her glasses to anyone—not even her best friend and roommate, Samantha, who hadn't even laughed when Linda had admitted, after one and a half weeks of nightmares, that she still needed to sleep with a night light.
Sure, the glasses allowed her to see clearly, and for that, Linda was grateful when her Maths teacher wrote line after line of numbers on the blackboard in his tiny scrawl. But they also somehow sharpened the outlines of everything, to a point that it almost gave her headaches.
The world was just too close, too clear, too loud, too everything when Linda tried to go out on the playground with the glasses firmly perched on her nose. The brightness of the colors seemed to scorch her retinas. Everything appeared... fierce somehow, aggressive, and almost ferocious with colorful intensity. It reminded Linda of a particular nightmare she had often had when she'd been little—a dream of walking through a forest where the trees loomed so high overhead that she couldn't see the sky, and where the leaves soundlessly transformed into sharp, snapping teeth the moment she turned away.
It felt, Linda thought, like listening to music that gradually grew louder and louder, until you just wanted to clap your hands over your ears. Taking her glasses off was the only way Linda knew how to escape—maybe she'd need to search for something else instead, a control of sorts, to turn the volume down.
Maybe if she took to looking at things with a pencil and paint brushes again, like she had done as Rebecca, she could take the sharp, threatening edge out of them, and, over time, grow less afraid.
Although she immediately berated herself for thinking about her former life, the thought of her former favorite pastime stuck with her. Even when Samantha asked her what she was thinking about, Linda couldn't take her mind off of carefully-sharpened crayons and wet brushes gliding gracefully across white sheets of paper.
After dinner, she went to one of the adults and asked for supplies. She hated the tremor in her voice, but when the woman smiled at her and told her to pick out the things she wanted from a catalogue, she couldn't stop the grin that spread over her face in return, born from relief and a sudden familiar, sweet rush of excitement.
At first, Mello scared her just a little—but then again, he probably had that effect on every new kid who came to Wammy House. It was kind of funny, Linda thought later, that he was the first thing she'd seen through her new glasses. She had obediently put them on in the nurse's office, looked out the window, and Mello had run past it in a streak of gold over black, in pursuit of a football.
She was slightly intimidated, but most of all, she felt strangely drawn to Mello, like a moth to the flame. He was different from all the other kids she had gotten to know; wherever he went, he was the center of attention, people flocking around him as if lured by an unseen force. He seemed to have endless energy—he was either doing his homework with a fierce concentration that bordered on obsession, or out on the playgrounds, romping around with his friends or plotting some sort of prank with a wicked gleam in his dark eyes.
Linda had never known someone to be so real, for lack of a better word—especially in the orphanage, where most children tended to behave like little adults, spurred into growing up by the ever-present possibility of succeeding to L. Sure, Mello was one of the hardest-working kids, relentlessly pursuing his goal of surpassing Near with unashamed fierceness. But he was also bold and reckless where the others tended to be a bit overcautious for their age; his emotions seemed too close to the surface, always on the verge of boiling over and getting him into trouble. He had one of the quickest tempers Linda had ever seen, and when he was angry, his eyes, usually as dark as his beloved chocolate, seemed to brighten into amber.
Linda hoped wholeheartedly that she'd never be on the receiving end of one of those glares, and she kept a safe distance—but she watched Mello, all the same, because her fascination with him far outweighed the fear.
As the air gradually warmed, as if tuning up for the sizzling heat of the summer months, Linda took to sitting outside, her new sketchbook on her lap. She reluctantly put on her glasses for these drawing sessions, at least until she had drafted a basic outline of her subject. Samantha often sat beside her, prattling away about the newest gossip, unperturbed by Linda's apparent lack of attention.
At first, Linda only drew trees and flowers, sometimes with shaking hands. She scolded herself for it, but she was terrified of having unwillingly left her talent for art behind when she had abandoned Rebecca; more than anything, she wanted her art to live up to her own expectations, if only to prove to herself that while she had lost everything else, this essential part of her was still there.
The fear gradually left, when she found that the intangible magic that transferred an image from her head on the paper still responded to her call, and she grew bolder. The trees and flowers made room for the balanced lines of the orphanage's sunlit rooms and facades—and, finally, pictures of the other children.
Portraits were what Rebecca had been best at, what she had enjoyed most; Linda had carefully kept herself in check, not daring to hope for more than a shadow of what she'd once been capable of. And so she was unable to feel more than a dazed sort of surprise when she took one last look at Samantha, who was patiently sitting on her bed with her hands folded in her lap and an expectant gleam in her eyes, and saw that the black-and-white girl in her sketchbook looked just like her.
The slow wave of profound, peaceful satisfaction that swept through her was unlike anything she had ever felt before—like she had accomplished more than just a simple charcoal portrait of her best friend. She flipped the sketchbook over for Samantha to see, and watched the delighted surprise on the other girl's face, feeling almost like a piece of her that she hadn't even realized she'd been missing was falling back into place.
Linda started experimenting with her different boxes of art supplies. Crayons, she quickly found out, were great for blending, and easy to handle; it only took her half an hour to find out which colors she needed to mirror the exact hue of Samantha's blond hair. The smell of oil paint gave her headaches, but Linda still used it, relishing in the canvas' unexpected roughness under her brushes.
She never touched the smallest box—it had been a present from her new friends, who had pooled their money in order to buy her some of the most expensive felt-tip pens she had ever seen—Japanese copic markers. She—or rather, Rebecca—had also had a few of them, back in her other life, and Linda remembered that handling them had taken a lot of practice. The results had been more than worth it, but she didn't want to use up all the ink while trying to get used to them; she wanted to save the box for something special. It was one of the first presents Linda had gotten, and she wasn't going to waste it.
Her favorites were the watercolors. The sheer range of tinges fascinated her to no end—one dab of her brush could color Near's Lego bricks a deep ultramarine, and she only needed to dip the brush into her glass of water once, before carefully shading his white pyjamas in pale gray blue. When she used rough or grained paper, the colors flowed into a pattern on their own, resembling the bark of a tree.
She never dared to draw Mello, though. Not because she didn't want to, but out of a weird, paranoid fear that he'd find out and get angry—or worse, laugh at her because she'd done it wrong.
Everyone who was allowed even a short glance at her sketchbook told her that she was very talented, but with Mello, Linda wouldn't even have known where to start, if she had chosen to draw him. She didn't know how to put all of him on paper—the dangerous, impatient vehemence in everything he did, the way his hands balled into white-knuckled fists when Near got better grades; his wide, impish grin when he huddled together with his best friend Matt, the two bowed heads gleaming golden and copper in the sunlight.
Mello talked to her once, on a sunny afternoon that Linda knew she would remember for all her life.
She was sitting outside, on one of the benches by the common rooms, moving a soft pencil across the paper in sure, swift strokes that, little by little, turned into Samantha's familiar features.
After their latest prank that had involved a bucket of water, a doorframe, and a few unsuspecting victims, Mello, along with his large circle of friends, had been placed under house arrest for the rest of the week. Being grounded wasn't bothering them much, from the sound of it—they were playing football in the common room, their excited shouting easily drowning out the adults' yells to stop making such noise.
Linda ignored the racket, lifted her sketchbook a little more, and started shading Samantha's curly hair. Another shout from inside, along with a bang, and then the ball ricocheted off the wall in the room behind her, followed by the sound of hasty footsteps.
Suddenly, she smelled chocolate, and the faintest trace of cigarette smoke, because Mello always hung around Matt these days. She froze, her pencil suspended in mid-air, and didn't dare to breathe.
"Wow," Mello said, and leaned over her shoulder to take a closer look at the sketch. He was balanced precariously on the windowsill, and Linda could hear the other kids shouting for him to fetch the damn ball already and come back, but he didn't move.
She wasn't wearing her glasses, but when she looked to the left, she could see Mello craning his neck and staring at her sketch intently, head tilted just so, like it was one of the most interesting things he'd ever seen.
"Wow," he repeated, his mouth stretching into what Linda had labeled his special smile, the one that was neither sneering nor wickedly delighted at some mischief he had made. It was rare, she thought, for Mello, who was always so frustrated at being second best, to unabashedly appreciate someone else's work, but she could see that he was doing just that when their eyes met. "I bet you'll make great artist's renderings one day."
Her mouth was still half-open with an unspoken reply when Mello had long rejoined his friends in their game, although she didn't know what she would have said, even if he had stayed to listen. The sun had turned his head into a flow of molten gold, streaking past his ears in red highlights, and she could still see the soft strands on his temples, bleached into platinum blonde by many hours spent outdoors, as if the color had been brilliant enough to leave an afterimage.
On the same day, she started looking through her art supplies, in search for the exact color of Mello's hair.
She found it in the last place she looked, after having rifled through watercolor palettes, her large collection of crayons, and a box with almost depleted pastels. The felt-tip pens from Japan were in the bottom drawer, and when Linda placed them on top of her desk, she couldn't help but smile a little at how oddly fitting it was. It was just like Mello, she thought, that even when she just wanted to finally try her hand at a portrait of him, the best, most expensive pens she had were barely good enough.
She tested the various shades of yellow on the special paper her friends had bought—it was coated in some sort of chemicals to prevent the markers from bleeding out their expensive ink. The copic markers had two tips—a broad one for coloring larger areas, and a thinner, flexible one that fascinated her to no end. It bent when she hesitantly pressed it to the paper, and returned to its original shape when she let go, just like a brush. She could make tiny dots with it when she just barely touched the tip to the paper, but it could also color broad arcs, depending on the angle she used.
The marker she finally settled on was a vibrant, golden yellow, with just the faintest orange hue that would bring out the reddish streaks that this afternoon's sun had put in Mello's hair. Linda picked out a few brighter yellows for the highlights, and placed them all next to a fresh sheet of the special paper.
Taking a deep breath, she picked up her pencil, willed her hand to stop shaking, and started to sketch. If she couldn't capture all of Mello at once, maybe she could start with the look on his face when he had seen her sketchbook—that intent, serene concentration, mingled with a captivated sort of amazement, as if he had searched and found a secret message in between her pencil's strokes.
Linda wasn't wearing her glasses when she ran into Mello in an empty hallway on the night he left, but she didn't need perfect vision to guess what mood he was in. A black bag was slung over his shoulder, and his expression was somewhere between defiant and outright murderous, so Linda stepped back quickly after she'd almost collided with him.
He had had a considerable growth spurt over the last few months, so he could actually glower down at her, which made Linda feel like a deer caught in the headlights of a truck roaring towards her at full speed. Sure, technically she was two months older than Mello, and her fifteenth birthday was less than a week away—but apparently, that didn't mean he couldn't still intimidate her.
She swallowed, quickly taking in his attire—it was long past bedtime, but he was wearing a jacket and combat boots—and she knew, as clearly as if he'd told her, that he was leaving. She had heard some of the oldest orphans talking in hushed, shocked voices that had reminded her of the night of the car accident. It was rumored that L had died, that Kira had killed him, and that no one knew for sure who his successor would be.
Her gaze came to rest on Mello's bag, and she thought that it probably wasn't going to be him.
Mello looked startled for a moment, and then glared at her. Linda thought vaguely that even though his features looked a little blurred to her, she could still feel the heat of his stare, as if he wanted to scorch a hole into her head. "What are you doing out of bed?" he snapped, and in the same breath, "Get out of my way!"
She didn't move, not even when he took a distinctly threatening step forward, well invading her personal space. Instead, she said the first thing that came to her mind, in a halting voice, although she already knew what his reply was going to be. "Are you— leaving?"
"Yes," Mello said, some of the anger melting out of his tone and giving way to surprise—maybe he just wasn't used to people not running for the hills when he looked at them like they were about to die by his hands. "Near is going to be L's successor," he added, almost as an afterthought, and scowled again, although Linda could tell his anger wasn't directed at her, this time. "There's nothing left for me here."
He sounded like he was trying, unsuccessfully, to keep the familiar, bitter resentment out of his voice, and Linda didn't know what to say. Sometimes, when she couldn't sleep during a thunderstorm, she wondered if there were any words in the world that could appease the hopeless, angry malevolence that seemed to make him think that being second best—something that Linda would have admired, if she hadn't known that Mello wouldn't appreciate it—was nothing more than a humiliating failure.
There probably weren't any words that Mello would listen to, though. He was private about his supposed defeats like that—absolutely no one could so much as try to talk to him about them, at least not without getting yelled at or, if Mello was in a particularly destructive mood, punched in the face without warning. Even Matt had to duck sometimes to avoid being hit by a thrown book when he, probably against his own better judgement, tried to convince Mello that getting a slightly lower score than Near on an essay wasn't the end of the world. Mello always dodged attempts to cheer him up, and stalked around the orphanage with clenched fists for hours—almost, Linda thought, as if he wanted to draw out his own disappointment for as long as possible, like some sort of self-inflicted punishment.
Linda had heard it said that hindsight was always 20/20, but even when she woke up the next morning, she couldn't think of anything she could—or should—have said, to hold him back. She could only stand there, her gaze flickering back and forth between the bag and Mello's uncompromising expression, with her breath caught in her throat and blood rushing to her cheeks.
Finally, she settled for the last thing she wanted to say, but she simply didn't know what else to do. "Goodbye, then," Linda said quietly, and forced herself not to drop her gaze to her shoes when she, without thinking, stuck out her hand.
Mello's eyebrows first shot towards his hairline and then drew together in a confused frown as he stared at her hand as if she had slapped him. He seemed to have steeled himself for a barrage of arguments as to why he should stay, and that she was letting him go without yelling for Roger apparently took the wind out of his sails. For a moment, he looked like he wanted to break the sudden silence—but then, as if he had suddenly read Linda's mind and heard her silently pleading with him not to say anything derisive for once, he closed his mouth again, and took her hand.
His fingers were warm around hers. Linda remembered with sudden embarrassment that her hands were stained with drying oil paint, but Mello didn't seem to mind; he squeezed her hand once before drawing back, and said, "'Bye, Linda," in a nonchalant tone that sounded a bit forced.
He wasn't smiling, but not scowling either. Linda thought he looked strange—older, somehow—with that almost blank look on his face, and almost instinctively, she took a deep, steadying breath, knowing that this was her last chance to get him to stay. But before she could think of what to say, he pushed past her with surprising gentleness, and had already disappeared around the corner when she turned around.
It took every ounce of willpower she had, but Linda didn't run after him. She stood there for what seemed like hours, her face burning and her hand tingling, and wondered whether the blurring of her vision only came from her myopia. Her body felt heavy and tired when she finally forced herself to move towards the stairs that led to the bedrooms, and yet she was wide awake, her mind still reeling with things she could and should have said.
Only later, when she was listening to Samantha's deep breathing and tried to fall asleep, she wondered how Mello had known her name.