Me & Her

Me

"Wait," I say to the barrel of the gun.

This isn't something I'm supposed to do. Not someone like me. I'm a mousy brunette with a tremor in my lungs. In Sherlock Holmes, I would have been the first victim on every case. But I don't think I can be that person anymore. I think, in the back of my mind – our mind – I've come to realise that I may not know who I was, but who I am is melting into being in a river of steel. Still, I blink a few times as the guns give pause. Fingers on triggers, steady as statues.

"I remember now. I remember everything." Light doesn't move forward. Emma remains poised, while Noah bites his lip so hard a well of blood spurts onto his chin.

"You had my Mother shot. You killed innocent people – people who worked for you – to trick me into thinking Alyssa, my Alyssa, my alter, was a monster. But we are not monsters. She is as human as I am. Perhaps we are more human than you." Karen Hill is smiling, nonchalant through my words. She is merely waiting, in a holding pattern. For me to fall into silence. But she is willing to wait. Willing to wait. She is a fool.

"I have enough evidence against you. I am the evidence. And I promise that you can try to silence me, but I will never stop. I promise that you can shoot me, you can lock me up, but you can't stop me. I will find a way – whatever it takes – to tell the world about you. To tell them everything. To tell the world that we are human and what we feel is real and we are not wrong. We are not wrong! Who are you to decide who we are? Who Alyssa is, who I am. No. No, you don't get to decide that". Karen Hill scoffs.

"You don't understand what we have to do in this world. You don't understand the price of progress," she says. As if I'm a little girl, clinging onto her leg, begging her to tell me the secrets of the universe. But I am not. I am a person with a heart, with tears, and a mind of my own. Two minds of my own. Standing before the guns and the bullets which could shred my spine, I say,

"I am that price". And if this is progress, then I can't be a part of it. Not this. Never this. No one should be a part of something like this. Something so gnarled and twisted and wrong that it made me think I was inhuman. Made us think that we didn't deserve to exist.

"You made me think Alyssa was a monster," I continue, aware of Light shaking his head in my direction. "But you were wrong. You were all wrong. She saved my life. So, I will do everything in my power to keep her safe. To keep everyone safe. I will never stop trying to tell the world the truth and my voice is one you cannot silence."

The room seems to shake, as if the carpet is rising up in waves of cream. The walls rattle, passing my words around in Reverse Chinese whispers. Getting louder, louder, louder until they reach a crescendo before Karen Hill's ears. Karen Hill, who, with absence in her tone, smiles and points her gun.

"We can try, my brave girl". They are the last words I hear before she pulls the trigger. Although, I can't be sure. Everything seems to blend together, and yet each action, each reaction, is so stark it reminds me of ink floundering on Egyptian cotton.

Karen Hill, pulling the trigger, unblinking. Offering me the prize of a mortal wound rather than a fatal wound. Dr. Light, standing, staring. Watching. Doing nothing. I'm not sure what I expected. Especially not from him. Noah, screaming, his saucepan eyes balloons against the unadorned walls. Until—

"No!" They say it's not like the movies. Nothing moves in slow motion. Nothing morphs into a freeze-frame. They're wrong. Yet they're right. Nothing slows, but nothing speeds up either. Nothing freezes, yet nothing moves. There are only snapshots, moving with the fluidity of water in a Dam. Only mercurial oil paintings shifting to life before my eyes.

Emma, with her dark eyes, pushing me. Pushing me behind her. Or pulling herself in front of me. And she is silent while I shout and scream and cry and bray and fumble and struggle and she is silent, she is silent.

And she is smiling.

And I am not.

And a gunshot cleaves the air.