The Alias

Eighteen

I'm so sorry for this super late update, school has been a complete ASS.

Matsu decided it'd be best for him to distance himself from the task force, or perhaps more specifically, Ryuzaki. The only person who valued his opinions was Soichiro, but he confined himself along with Light, and Matsu felt that if Soichiro wasn't there, then he wasn't needed. It was 7:59 pm, one minute before I had planned to leave for the library, and Matsu and I were spooning on the couch. He was passed out behind me with his mouth slightly agape.

I gently unlatched Matsu's arms from around me and slowly pushed myself off the couch in hopes that I would not wake him. I grabbed my phone and the house key from the counter and tip-toed out the door. Once outside the building, the crisp night air hit me like a slap in the face and I hugged my arms against my body. The sky was mostly dark, except for the faint glow from the city's light pollution and the waning crescent moon, so it was difficult to see where I was going.

Before I walked up to the back doors of the library, I pulled my hood as far as it would go over my head to block any surveillance cameras from spotting my face. It's not much, but it'll do. I pulled two brown bobby pins out of my pocket and fashioned one into a lock pick by straightening it out, and the other into a tension wrench by bending it into an 'L' shape. After sticking the tension wrench into the bottom of the keyhole, I turned it left and right, making sure the lock would at least turn. Satisfied, I tensioned the lock and began to pick it, pushing on the driver pins with my handmade pick until one of them bound up, then repeating the process until the door unlocked. I learned how to lock pick only a few weeks ago when Light started locking and booby-trapping his room. I must say, I've gotten quite good at breaking and entering.

I stepped quietly into the pitch-black library, feeling my way around the shelving and over to where I thought the computers were. After a solid minute of fumbling around, my fingertips grazed a cool, smooth surface: a computer screen. I felt around for the chair, sat down, and turned the computer on. The blue light folded around me, bounced off of the freshly cleaned desk, and scattered light around the room.

"You've got to be shitting me," I mumbled to myself. This computer was ancient. Let's see... yep, no microphone. Now what? I hovered over the widgets on the desktop. Microsoft Word... Yahoo!... the trash can, and... a red dot? I furrowed my eyebrows and hovered the mouse over it. A small tag appeared next to my mouse reading, 'Screen recorder'.

"Huh." I leaned back in my chair thinking for a moment before my eyes widened in realization. Bingo. I'll screen record the computer reading my speech and email it as an mp3 file to Ryuzaki from a fake email. I lined my fingers onto the mechanical keyboard and began typing. My fingers were much too small for the large keys, making it incredibly difficult for me to type fast. On top of that, my mind thought of words much faster than my hands could go, as I had deemed it best to think of my speech on the fly rather than prepare a script. I wanted to avoid leaving a physical paper trail.

After tweaking the speech for the hundredth time, I decided it was as good as it could get, so I hit the screen record and activated the text-to-speech.

The computer's robotic voice rang out, "Hello, Kira Investigation Team. I am Mika Lune, and I know who Kira is..."

***

I finished after about an hour and reluctantly attached the audio file to an otherwise blank email. Once I hit send there was no taking it back. I hesitated for a moment, took a deep breath, and hit send. I signed out of my fake email as fast as possible, closed the browser, and shut down the computer. Shit, I forgot to check the time.

Getting up from my chair, I once again fumbled around the dark library and out the back door, making sure I heard it lock behind me. I moseyed to the front of the building and looked at the large clock above the front doors; it was only 9:20. I need to find something to do for at least four more hours. Matsu thinks I'm working a graveyard shift at the gas station. I looked around at the near-empty streets and decided to walk around the city for a while.

I shoved my hands into my pockets and began walking west, in the opposite direction of the condo building. I followed the reflection of the moon in the windows of the buildings passing by and thought back to the first time Light turned against me. It was exactly two months ago, a waning crescent moon adorned the sky, just like tonight, and I was laying on his bed staring up at the ceiling. I was waiting for him to come home, since he had been out with friends all afternoon, from the time school got out until well into the evening hours. So there I laid, unmoving, watching the sunbeams recede from the ceiling and get replaced by the bluish hue of the moon. So clearly did I remember that color, its blue-grey glow resembled the sweater of the man I wanted to tell Light about. This man was tall, so very tall, and his eyes were dark brown, almost black. I could still picture his slender fingers, pale from the cold, pointing straight at me as he yelled for my attention. He tried speaking to me but I wouldn't listen, I just continued walking, and he became desperate. He reached out his hand and grasped my backpack, pulling me backward, and I hit the ground hard. He spoke quickly, his eyes twitched wildly, and I could see powder on and under his nose. He said he knew me when I was younger when I was a baby, and that he needed me to relay a message to my father. I froze in shock, not knowing what to do, and let him ramble. I never did relay Soichiro his message because, in truth, I didn't hear it. I was too busy staring at the medallion around his neck; it was the Yamabishi logo, which meant he was a member of the Yamaguchi-gumi, or, more broadly, the Yakuza. Looking back, I realized this man hadn't been looking to speak with Soichiro, he was looking for my birth father, his dealer. What happened next would haunt me until my death. I tore my eyes away from his medallion to find that he pulled out a knife and was pointing it in my direction.

"You're very pretty," he said, "just like your mother." He lunged forward, took me by the hair, and dragged me into the alleyway he had previously been standing in. "You weren't listening to me, were you, beautiful?" He tore my backpack from my shoulders, "no matter, I'll just have to make you listen." His fingers clamped around my neck and before I could react, I was lifted from the ground and pinned up against the wall. I was now at eye level with him, beads of sweat fell from his hair down the side of his face and onto his sweater. He smelled of alcohol and cigarette smoke, a smell which burned in my nostrils hours after I had escaped him. If it weren't for a passing good samaritan, I wasn't sure what he would have done to me. They yelled to get his attention, and he loosened his grip just enough to let me fall back to the ground. As soon as my feet hit the pavement, I swiped my backpack up and ran. I ran the entire way home and collapsed onto our front stoop, exhausted and in pain.

When Light finally got home, he opened the door, flicked on the light, and immediately told me to get out of his room. I tried to get him to listen to me, but he refused, even after I stressed how important it was. My eyes welled with tears of frustration, but that didn't seem to matter to him. He just held the door open and pointed for me to leave. Before I left, I blurted out that I was attacked by a Yakuza member, and after a few seconds, he looked me dead in the eye and said, "he could have you for all I care."

I quickly snapped out of my daydream by a sudden convulsion of my torso. When did I start crying? I stopped walking and tried to calm my sobs, sitting down on a nearby bench and holding my head in my hands. I sat there for quite a while and thought about all that has gone wrong in my life, these last two months were like a single grain of sand buried in the beach of my life. I thought about all the pain I'd endured alone, turning over the small corked jar of apple seeds in my pocket, and came across a devastating realization: the only thing keeping me busy, my sole purpose for staying alive so long, was working on the Kira case. Now that it was over, I was left to wait for a response to my recording, if one ever came. I ripped the jar from my pocket and stared at it. About 160 ingested seeds would kill a 120-pound person, and I was only 5'0 and 92 pounds, so ingesting 160 seeds would mean my death was guaranteed. How many are even in here?