Disclaimer: I don't own the characters or the source material.


Torn Out Pages


Picture book perfection. Thin, clumsy fingers draw or recreate with toys the house with garden, her parents and her sister, and the dog she'd begged for and that got run over by a car a year later.

A pretty smile and sweet cheerful helplessness can get you anywhere, so she has these, always. She leaves behind her dolls and neglects her pencils very soon, to play dress up and painting on herself. She smiles without effort, hopeful and happy, in the face of adversity, before and after.

The trial drags out, and she can tell and doesn't want to believe where it will end. There's an uproar of outrage from the spectators, who can tell as well, at her tears and her cry of rage (waterproof mascara and light pink lipstick keep her face strangely undisturbed and theatrical in her grief) before her parent's murderer, uproar of sympathy. The media, in the little coverage she gets – a newspaper and a magazine that prints her picture beside the story, and several websites that copy each other – mocks the lack of evidence and the "alleged" they have to put before "murderer", if they even bother, condemns the law for its inefficacity.

She feels weak and enraged, because a pretty smile and cheerful helplessness can't get you anywhere: they don't prevent the kind, compassionate, condescending, hungry looks that fuse at her from dismissing her, pretty, sweet, erotic, childlike, human doll. They will acquit him.

Story book life, where she is saved by a mysterious hero, who comes and avenges her in secret, from the shadows, unaware of her. She knows then that she will find him and offer her very being to him, since, in this story, she is his price.


In the evening after she's seen him, she lays on her bed, hair dishevelled, pen turning between perfectly manicured fingers, while Rem watches over her with apprehension. Kira. He's young and good-looking, respected, intelligent, talented, all she's dreamt of and more.

She represses a happy laughter, and has images of him flash up before her interior eyes, the few glimpses she's had of him and the photo she found, and imagined pictures, undresses him, redresses him, rearranges his hair, reads their future in the lines of his hand. Teenage-romance perfection that she plays out in her mind, ready to recreate it in reality, mercilessly.

Kira, Yagami Light, Light, Light, my light, she whispers to herself, delighted, tastes his name on her lips. She will kneel at his feet and adore him and serve him, give up all she loves, sacrifice her life – but he will kiss her and compliment her and give her presents and take her out to restaurants and walks in the park and to movies, like her boyfriend should.

Rem observes suspiciously as she draws patterns into the air in the darkness, the plan of the house they will have (with a fenced garden for a dog to roam free), later, after their marriage – she's too young now, of course – where she will wait for him and greet him, doors wide open all day when everyone is safe in his new world.