Chapter Text
“I have to admit,” Kira said. “I was surprised by you.” He was leaning with one hand on his desk, looking unsteady.
Haruko nodded. “I’m sure you weren’t expecting either of us.” She nodded at Aoi’s dead body.
“That’s true.” He paused. “But I was actually surprised by you.”
“Why?” Haruko asked. Did he know who she was? He must have.
Kira was looking directly at them now. He smiled. Then, he walked over to the bookshelves. Haruko could see now that there was a break in them with a corkboard. “Come here,” he said.
Haruko took a reluctant step forward. She still couldn’t see the corkboard. Haruko took another step.
Once she could, a chill ran down Haruko’s spine. It was covered with pictures of her.
“It’s been fun,” Kira said. “Tracking your movements. Watching you get involved with the resistance.” He looked over at Aoi. “And that’s not the only thing you got involved with. But the show’s over, now.” He smiled again. Kira walked back to his desk, saying, “I’m going to kill you. But, first, I want to know …”
He was like a villain in one of those old spy movies that Oba-chan liked, Haruko decided. Always wanting to go on a monolog.
Kira said, smiling that same smile. He looked over at Haruko. “I want to know about you. Why you’re here, and how you got here.”
Why was he so interested in her? It didn’t make sense, unless he knew about her name. And no one knew about her name. Her mother had made sure of that.
“I’m here because you’re a terrible person,” Haruko said. It was the truth and would likely give her a chance to see him flinch.
He didn’t. “And how’s that,” he said.
Haruko smiled back. “You’re a killer. I walked home from work every day and see corpses lying on the street.” She paused. “Crime stopped a long time ago. You can’t tell me anyone deserves that.”
Kira smiled again. Haruko was starting to suspect that he was hiding behind all of these smiles. “I am a savior,” he said.
“From what?” Haruko asked. “People live in fear of you.”
“You’re twenty-five. Too young to know what the world was without me,” Kira said. “I would kill you, too, except …”
“You don’t know my name,” Haruko said. It was not a taunt; it was a fact. No one knew Haruko’s name, except for herself, Michika, Oba-chan and her mother. And they all were dead.
He smiled again. His smiles were starting to fall apart, getting more jagged and teeth-filled. “You’re a clever girl,” he said.
And then, for the first time since Oba-chan had died, Haruko felt anger coursing through her veins, touching every part of her body, making her fists clench and her skin overheat. She took a step forward. “You don’t know me,” she said.
“But I do, Haruko. I’ve watched you for years, now. It’s been the most fun I’ve had since …” his eyes left her, dulling and losing focus. His concentration left the room and the present, instead focusing on some faraway time or place. Kira shook away the thought. “In a long time.”
Haruko walked up to him. It would be much easier to kill him from a close distance. Not a good thing to leave Aoi’s body, but Haruko knew she was dead, and there was nothing she could do about that. Nothing except what they came here to do.
This was the first time Haruko got a good look at everything that was on his desk. Papers were stacked up like abandoned skyscrapers, and then spread out everywhere like broken glass after an earthquake. A few pens were scattered about the mess—mostly fountain pens that had to cost several thousand yen a piece.
There were also two photographs on his desk, but Haruko couldn’t see either one because the frames were facing the other way. Haruko wrinkled her nose. Who was important enough to Kira for him to keep a photo of them on his desk?
She ran through what she knew of Kira’s personal life—three husbands, four wives, about fifteen kids spread between them.
“Now,” Kira said. He flicked the guards away with a motion of his hand. “I want to talk to you.”
Haruko wanted to ask why—he seemed like too paranoid of a man to leave her alone with him. But that wasn’t the case, obviously. So, she swallowed her doubt, and it sank to the bottom of her stomach like a large stone. “About what?”
Kira smiled. It must have been something he’d learned at some point—smile when you seem nervous, or scared, or you’re not sure what to do. Not that different from what Oba-chan had told Haruko. “You.” He said. “I bet I know more about you than you know about me.”
For a moment there, that was probably true. But then, Haruko leaned forward far enough to make out the photographs Kira kept on his desk.
One of them was a Victorian-style family portrait. It showed a man, a woman and their daughter. He was dressed in a suit, and the two girls were dressed in frilly white dresses. Only the woman was making an attempt to smile, and it was obviously fake. The man, Haruko realized, was Kira.
A few seconds later, Haruko recognized the woman. Blond hair, in pig tails, smiles that never reached her eyes—those eyes, they changed color frequently, but never lost that same look in them. It was a face that lurked at the edge of her consciousness, never seen but always felt; pressing up against her mind for an instant before disappearing. It was a face that only appeared fully in her dreams. Her mother.
And, didn’t that make sense? She dreamed of endless wide hallways, and courtyards behind every door. Servants dying, right in front of her. Oba-chan was wrong. Her parents didn’t work in Kira’s house; they lived there.
That meant that the little girl in the picture, the one standing in between her parents, on a chair, like that would make them the same height, was her. And didn’t that make sense? She had the same hair color—a dirty blond. And couldn’t she remember that day, if she thought hard enough about it? The cameraman’s flash had been the brightest thing she’d ever seen. Her father was there, and he seemed like the strangest man to her—someone she’d heard discussed far more times than she’d ever met.
Compared to that, the second picture was mundane. It showed a row of men, all dressed in dark suits. One of them was a younger Kira, but Haruko didn’t know any of the others. They probably weren’t important.
Haruko took a step back. If Kira was her father, that meant she knew his name.
So, Haruko had found the chink in Kira’s armor. She had his name, and she just had to write it down on the paper, the same way he had written down Aoi’s name. That had killed her, so maybe it would kill him as well.
That was the point in time when Haruko’s mind returned to the present, and she realized Kira was looking at her, waiting for a response. “Like what,” she said. “What do you know about me?”
Kira paused for a moment, thinking. Probably trying to figure out what would freak her out the most. “You reported the manager of the hotel you used to work at. Michika Harada was dispatched to the case. He saw your name and recruited you to the resistance. And you fell in with her,” he nodded again at Aoi’s dead body.
“I was born here,” Haruko said. “Raised here. By your first wife. Who helped me escape. And you’ve been tracking me ever since.”
Kira walked back over the corkboard. Haruko’s heart was racing in her ears. She knew his name—this could be her opening.
“Not that whole time,” he said, looking over the security footage still he had of her.
Most of them showed her in brightly colored clothes, outlined against the propaganda. The propaganda she’d orientated herself by, the ones that were stamped on her mind, on the inside of her eyelids.
“I thought I’d lost you, for a while.” He took another step. “But then you showed up, in England, with my sister, who I’d also thought had disappeared.” He smiled and shook his head. “Poor Sayu. She never was the same, after she was kidnapped as a teenager. Never quite in touch with reality. Always a bit dreamy.”
That didn’t line up with the serious, stone-faced Oba-chan that Haruko knew.
“I was sorry that I had to kill her, but I had no choice,” Kira said. He turned around and faced Haruko. “You, on the other hand, I do have a choice with.”
“And what choice is that?” Haruko asked.
“My children—I hate all of them,” Kira said. “They grew up here, in these walls, with no concept of the world. They sit around all day, lazy, spoiled, with sex and drugs and all other sorts of things. None of them can be my heir.”
The response seemed to hang in the air, unspoken. Haruko decided to say it anyway. “And I can be.”
Kira nodded. “You’ve suffered—you’ve lived out there. You’re motivated.” He smiled again, so wide it showed his tongue. “You’d have to be, or you wouldn’t be here.”
Haruko nodded. Part of her, she knew, would have loved this. To be this close to Kira—this close to the raw power that emulated from this room, from the desk … She looked at Aoi’s body.
“You’re right,” she said. “I am motivated.”
And, with that, she grabbed on the pens on the desk, one that was already uncapped, and put it to the open notebook that was lying there, right underneath where Aoi’s name was printed in neat, broad strokes. Haruko remembered her birth certificate, the typed, wide kanji that told her what she needed to know. Light Yagami, she spelled out, and then dropped the pen.
Kira was standing a lot closer to her now. He furrowed his brow, looked back and forth to the notebook and her. He took one step forward and glanced at the photographs on his desk. Then, unceremoniously, he collapsed.
No alarms sounded. No guards came rushing in. No evidence of what had happened escaped the room. Outside, it remained a peaceful, steady autumn night.
Haruko stared at the notebook for a long, long time.