AN: well, this is my first Death Note fic. And even though there isn't much around about Linda, I was still inspired to write about her.
Disclaimer: If I owned Death Note, you would know. Trust me.
Linda always thought visuals showed things that could not be seen. That was why she loved art so much; at least, that was a simplified reason why.
There were so many things she couldn't see with her eyes when she drew or painted or sculpted. She could see anything she could feel, and her hands could make it all happen. Well, maybe it wasn't necessarily her hands. It was her mind that set them into drive, to show what her subconscious knew, but usually it seemed like it wasn't even her mind, maybe her instincts, but the only explanation she could come up with was that some force inside her was taking over her. Maybe this was why she was such a good artist.
Sometimes, she didn't know the things she put on paper or canvas were even inside of her.
Linda knew her past must have been inside of her somewhere. She knew that there were people all over who had memories stored inside them, memories that had been there for years, and didn't remember them until one thing triggered their mind and everything came back.
But that never happened to Linda.
She had lived in some house before she came to the Wammy house. She had a photograph of it- of the house, half of its small garden, and some of the road nearby, before the paper ended. But that was all, in all senses of the phrase. Not only was that all the photograph showed of Linda's previous-former? (sometimes it seemed like she had come from a former life, and had been reincarnated)- life, but it was the only piece of evidence Linda had that she had a life before the Wammy house. It showed no real distinguishing details about the house's location, she noted.
When she had first arrived at the orphanage, she was told (but she barely remembered it) that she was an exceptional child because she saw things that nobody else could see, that she could make them real. Linda was a very young child then, and because of that, only had a very simple understanding of what that meant.
Now that she was older (in fact, she was one of the oldest girls) she understood completely.
If it was inside of her, she could make it real. And she did. She painted on the wall over her bed, drew on her hands during classes, made one thousand multicolored paper cranes. She sketched anything she could think of. Even the most basic of her works had depth and meaning, like they came from something real- something true, something that existed somewhere, no matter what way.
She could make pictures of anything, really- happiness and sadness and anger and (and this was the one she was told she conveyed best) forgetting.
She thought she was thirteen, but since nobody had ever found her birth certificate or any other of her paperwork, for that matter, she didn't know exactly. They weren't even sure of what her real name was- when she came to the Wammy House, and she had to choose a name, she was told she had said "Linda". She thought she vaguely remembered being called "Linda" once, or hearing the name somewhere, but if she did, she didn't remember.
In watercolors, she painted a house, wet with rain that covered the roof and trees and road and half of a garden nearby. There was a girl, like a faerie or a spirit, floating in the garden, fading into the sky and into the paper.
If the photograph didn't have "My House" written on the back, she wouldn't have known it was hers.
Linda often wondered where she had come from, what was her life before she could remember? She knew that memories that lasted came from when you were at least five years old, but that didn't help her much. She was the kind who couldn't just let anything be, whether she could succeed or not, but even though she thought there were some things she couldn't succeed in, she didn't want to know.
Did she always exist? Of course, that was a silly question. Where, who, what was she before? She couldn't have just faded out, then faded back in from nowhere. That made no sense at all. There was no such thing as some separate yet same girl, only in stories and drawings and dreams.
But when she drew herself, in a stranger girl's forgotten half-hidden garden, floating away, fading, off into the house and sky and nowhere, some parallel universe on paper, until the colors got lighter and lighter until they were no more, just another slightly wet from watercolor spot on paper, she forgot. Or, at least, she doubted it. Either way, she knew something was missing. It wasn't in her paintbrush, or mind, or hands, or watercolors.
She knew it wasn't inside of her, she didn't like it but she had painted what she had seen.
So she settled for thinking that it, whatever it was, was missing, and she, on the paper, was with it, colors reaching into nowhere or somewhere or someone, until they could go no further and faded into nothing.