"Near?"
The word is meaningless, an empty syllable that falls flat on his deaf ears.
"Near, please. Come inside."
He ignores the voice, just as he ignores the cold. It is meaningless. Everything beyond his walls is less relevant than ever. The only things are himself—the snow—the stone.
The stone.
It is smooth and unbroken, except for the sharp inscription of a single word.
Mello.
"Near, you'll freeze."
All that remains is the stone. There is no corpse lying in decay under the ground, no ashes resting on a shelf. That would be wasteful. No trace remains but for the stone.
"Near, I'm going inside now. Come in when you're ready."
Resignation.
Near's toes curl, digging into the snow. It's a habit that's hard to break. It is one habit that he has retained, even if others have been shattered.
The blood is coursing sluggishly through his head, pumping, pounding. His fingers reach up to grip a stray piece of hair, then falter, and instead reach out to brush against the inscribed name. His index finger slips across the jagged lines of the M and twirls the tail of the e, followed by the parallels of the twin l's. Last comes another o, and his finger spins slowly around its outline like a lost traveler. Near is lost.
The cold is seeping into his veins, and that's good. It quiets the rush of the blood; it silences the mental processes that rip through reality like a bullet train. Near has always prided himself on his mental acuity.
He had never believed he would come to regret it.
Even before, before Wammy and new names and the days of endless puzzles and games, even then, he had never regretted his abilities. They were simply a fact of his life, unchanging, like his need for oxygen and sustenance. Even before, when he learned the meaning of words like cruelty and jealous from the brutal lessons of other children, he hadn't regretted it. He wasn't capable of regret; it was unnecessary, stupid, and Near wasn't stupid.
Now, though, now, he felt it, pounding through his veins, and he wished his brain was incapable of the emotion. Regret. His strongest emotions had always been irritation or satisfaction; like a hawk, he knew what it meant to accomplish a hunt, but little else. Now he felt them, rising like a tide at the edge of his unconscious, and Near learned what fear was. The flood of new emotions was terrifying in its illogical complexity, in its immediacy and extremity. Near was drowning. Fear, regret, anger, guilt—all new emotions, drowning him in incomprehensible babble.
They weren't the worst of it.
Everything was trumped by grief.
Near's fingers reached out to trace the cool engraving again: Mello. The wires of his mind were stretched too far, too tightly, and Near was no longer Near. His alias was gone, stripped away, and for once, he was nothing more than a child.
He does not appreciate the loss of control.
Nate River withdraws his finger from the tombstone and waits. In due course, the cold will seep in, and his soul will freeze sufficiently for him to return inside. The walls will return, mended, though the breach will be remembered.
Ice is perfection.
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"...for destruction, ice is also great, and would suffice..."
It's amazing how damaging walls can be, but sometimes, destruction is a twisted form of salvation.
Wednesday, January 16th, 11:11 PM.
Cairn