clockwork maiden
by Time Signature
Disclaimer: I do not own Death Note.
Warning: fem! Near. A lot of head-canon with Near's mother. A hint of Mello x Near at the end.
When Near recalled the days she spent with her mother, it was never in vivid colors. She only saw white, gray, silver, burnt gold…it could not be helped, the girl supposed. Her mother, a world-renowned inventor, was of the mind that what she made should remain colorless.
"See these robots? They move very fluidly, don't they? They seem almost human," the woman in a white lab coat murmured to a young Nate. "And that's why I don't paint them or use more colorful metals to create them – these robots are not meant to be human. I keep them as dull as they are now to make sure that they aren't alive. Do you understand, my little clockwork child?"
Ah, Near thought. This was the time when she had asked her mother why everything she saw was so monotone. Even though she had always been a genius, she had not understood why her mother would never color her creations, further increasing their perfection.
"And besides," her mother continued in her memory, "all the color I ever wanted…left one day, and I could never find myself wanting another. Clockwork child, please don't wish for color. It only brings you pain inside."
Her father had disappeared before Nate could memorize his face, but the prodigy could assume that he must have been full of life. Life that both her mother and herself lacked. After all, Nate had done her best to be her mother's "clockwork child."
Virtually emotionless, and working solely on logic and calculations. Guaranteed never to fail, just like her mother's inventions. Predictable, beautifully so.
Monotone. From her naturally albino hair to her skin, unblemished from never going outside, to her pure white nightgown (she had five of these, and no other clothes).
She had barely met any other people, either – almost no one visited them, as it was quite well-known that her mother disliked contact. Her "friends" were the still figures in the workroom, which she suspected saw more humans than she herself. She needed no color, except what her mother gave.
The first color in Nate's memories was a foreign, shockingly bright red. The red which spilled from her mother's wounds from beneath the deathly pale skin (which she could never have imagined to hide such sharp color). She could not remember anything else, though. She had not directly seen the murderer, as her knights - her robots had destroyed him before he could advance to their princess. All she could see was the first color flooding into her. And she hated color, just like her mother had said she would. It was painful.
Robots did not act well toward things that were not in mind when first created. And she did not take well to this abnormality, this…change in her routine. Her clockwork was failing, and she could not accept that. She could not be human. She needed to be perfect, infallible, like all the princesses of yore. No true person could be as "kind, gentle, and the fairest in all the land" like the stories said. She needed to be like that.
Nate needed to rid herself of this color. She pressed the switch on one of the cleaning robots, and all the red soon went away, except for the droplets at the tips of her hair pooling at her feet – try as she might, it never truly washed away. She cut her hair to her chin, the hair that she had never cut before.
Amidst all her knights, the girl knelt on the ground, strands of her long white hair still clutched in both hands.
And then the door opened, bringing noise that she had never heard before, and change. There in the doorway stood an elderly man with a kind-looking smile (she had seen him once before – Quillish Whammy, one of her mother's colleagues) and a younger man, as colorless as she, with bottomless eyes.
She stared blankly. She could not decide whether to focus on the younger, the elder, or the outside that was behind them. She compromised by lowering her gaze to the red-stained tips of her newly cut hair. Behind her, the barber-robot still brandished its scissors.
She could hear them approaching. She saw the expensive…brown, this color was, shoes of the inventor. She felt a strange warmth of human fingers on her shoulders, and she looked up into the black, comforting eyes of the young man who had crouched to her eye level.
"Hello, Nate," he said simply.
"Hello," she replied, absolutely expressionless. After all, they were strangers that had visited her house right after she had erased all traces of a murder.
The black-and-white, panda-resembling (pandas were one of the only animals she knew, because they were colorless, and her mother allowed her to see only colorless things) man turned to his companion. "She would indeed be a good candidate."
Whammy nodded, and bent down. "Nate…would you like a new home?"
The clockwork child did her best impression of a robot. "What makes you think I would need one?"
Panda-man informed her, "We know that your mother has been killed, and that you have disposed of both bodies."
Why? How could they know?
"We have…connections," the inventor said. "Now, I will ask you again – would you like a new home?"
Nate blinked. "I believe it is not my choice, though. I cannot stay in a home without a parent or guardian."
The edges of his lips curved into a wrinkled smile. "That is true. I will rephrase that…would you like to live in my orphanage?"
What were the benefits of doing so? It would probably be better endowed than other, public institutions, but she could tell that they were expecting something of her to bother coming to a crime scene. She turned to the panda-man, who told the inventor, "She's as smart as I expected. Of course, the possibility of me making a mistake is excruciatingly small."
The elderly man nodded once more, and said to Nate, "My orphanage is for the exceptionally gifted. You are a very bright child, and we would welcome you."
But that was still not enough reason for the clockwork princess. That would mean that she would have to leave the safety of her nonliving maids and knights and go to live among other people. It meant color and noise and unexpected changes.
"What will I gain?" she asked.
"Good facilities and special education that will increase your best talents. A fair amount of physical training as well," the panda-man replied. She might learn to like panda-man; he seemed much like her.
"I suppose that is one of the most advantageous homes I could live in. Very well, I will live in your orphanage."
Panda-man opened her small, pale hands that she had never realized were still grabbing her cut hair. He slipped his large, bony ones into them and said, "Nate, we will give you a new name, just as we give everyone else. You will be Near from now on. Not Nate River, or anything else your mother has called you. And you may call me L."
She, the genius, was rendered speechless for a moment. She had been ordered to no longer be a clockwork child, what she had strived so hard to be for all her life. By a panda-man, no less.
Nate – no, Near – hated to admit this. "But…I don't know how."
There was possibly no way that the man could tell that she was talking about being a clockwork child. She could very well be talking about being Near. And yet, his eyes somehow told her that he knew.
"It's alright."
Then he deemed the conversation done and gestured to Whammy to leave. "Prepare the car, Watari, while she finalizes her departure."
"Watari," she murmured, while she overwrote the Quillish Whammy she knew. Panda-man, L, tilted his head to one side. She quickly shook her head and then left him to go into her room.
It was exactly as she had left it – pure white, with a toy city covering virtually the entire ground. In the middle stood a proud robot, tiny compared to her mother's life-sized ones; the first one Nate had ever made by herself. She took the robot and then went to her closet, taking out two identical nightgowns and a few sets of underclothes. She carried them in her arms to the living room, as she had no bag (her mother had clearly never intended for her to go outside).
Bringing out a bag, L put the items inside. "Is this truly all you need?"
She looked at the unmoving barber robot. She looked at the cleaning robot. She looked at all of the other ones she had grown up with, and then she turned back and nodded.
"Yes."
She shuffled forward in her white slippers that she never took off. Then, realizing that she had no idea where the car was, she slowly extended her hand to L's.
He looked down, and enveloped her hand in his. She trembled a bit at the door, which she would exit for the first time, and he gripped her hand again.
She raised her head again (it was so much lighter without her hair), taking in all the new sounds and smells and colors. She felt like the clockwork creating her was slowly disintegrating, and she clutched herself with her other, empty hand to stop herself from falling apart.
She walked like that all the way to the sleek, black, car. With three fingers she cautiously touched the handle. She stepped in, as daintily as a fairy-tale princess (then again, princesses wouldn't have opened cars themselves) and reveled in the monotonies of the car. She sank into the soft seats and then fell asleep.
Nate was being shaken. She was never shaken. Was this a new robot of her mother's?
…And then everything came back to her, and she blinked rapidly, turning to the person who had shaken her – L.
"We are reaching Wammy's House in a couple minutes, and there are some things I would like to go over before that."
Near's blank eyes stared, waiting for him to speak.
"Firstly, this is an orphanage for the talented. If you do not keep up, we will have you transferred."
She nodded.
"Next, we have a variety of facilities, from an art studio to a junk workshop. You are allowed to use any of them after you have been guided through."
She nodded again.
"Finally, we do not particularly encourage contact with others. However, it may be beneficial to have a few allies."
She nodded one last time and turned to face the front, but before she could do so, L handed her a colorful Rubik's cube, altered to have twenty-five squares on each face instead of nine.
"I give every child one present when they go in. This is for you."
She stared at the seemingly unfamiliar, vivid cube in her pallid hands with wonder. She twisted the top, red layer. The red remained on the top, while the sides changed. She drank in the red, now not as poisonous as it had seemed before, and murmured a small "thank you."
That reminded her that she did not have her robot right now. She pulled it out and, replacing it with the Rubik's cube, hung the bag with her few worldly possessions over her shoulder.
The car stopped. Watari opened the door on L's side, much like a servant would do for a princess. She had compared both a panda and a princess to L, and that made her almost smile. Almost, though.
She still was clinging onto the remnants of her previous life, her clockwork princess. And that was why she slipped out the door while Watari was prepared to close it, because she wished for someone to hold it open for her.
The elderly man reprimanded her a little, but she paid no attention. Near, she now was. From the moment she stepped inside her new home, she would no longer be a clockwork princess with nonliving servants and untouched, flowing hair.
She would only be a clockwork maiden. And soon, she felt, she would lose all her clockwork.
Glancing around at the spacious green lawn, void of anyone right now, she sighed. Then she caught up to L, who was already at the door of the orphanage, and shuffled into the large entrance. She almost immediately bumped into a whirl of color.
"Mello," L said to the whirl (a boy, she noticed. A very colorful boy.), who was looking sheepish. "What are you doing out of class? And Matt, too."
Mello was his name. And the boy coming out of the door's shadow was Matt. She filed that information like she did everything else.
"Uh. Well, we heard that there would be a new kid coming…and we…" the golden-haired boy trailed off.
L sighed through his nose. "This is to not happen again," he said, but the boy ignored him.
"What's your name?" he asked, bright smile on his face. It was almost too much color for her, and she blinked many times to accommodate this new, colorful person.
"…Near," she murmured.
He became silent for a moment, while the other boy – Matt – came up to them and greeted her.
Then Mello asked, "Why are you so…white?"
Matt instantly slapped him on the arm, whispering, "That's not a nice thing to ask," but she did not hear them.
Why are you so colorful?
Near, the colorless clockwork princess, stared at the boy. The first boy her own age she had ever seen. The first person with so much color and life. She imagined her father to be much like this.
And then, slowly but surely, she felt her clockwork crumbling.
end.
A/N: Thank you for reading! This was my first DN story. Mello x fem! Near is one of my favorite ships, and I couldn't resist that last bit. Hope you enjoyed! Reviews are welcome.
Time Signature