a/n: Unrelated storyline. Just so there's no confusion.
Answers
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Tochigi Women's Prison is a blessing in disguise. In the beginning the prisoners would rather have that gorgeous, gleaming silver needle neatly imbedded into their arm, but as time goes on, they realize that it gives them a chance to just sit down and ponder, really ponder their lives. What went right, what went wrong, and every single little thing in between. By the time death calls, they remember every single little detail about their life spans; completely dug out from their unconsciouses out of the boredom of incarceration.
38 year old Nanase Takeuchi was sure that there was nothing left to dig up.
She could picture her daughter's face; that perfect face of beauty that she could see even when the girl was in her womb. Each contour was something a great deity could only dream of.
Emiko. Sweet Emiko.
So blissful, the very definition of innocence.
And something deep inside of Nanase knew that Satan resided under that innocent skin. Underneath her smooth flawless skin that her flesh basket of pregnancy helped form.
Although Emiko was half of her, she was also half of her father.
And if Nanase's husband wasn't the devil incarnate, then she didn't know what was.
Funny that today she would think of him. She had been in the prison for eight years, and rarely thought about her husband, yet she thought about her daughter every single second of every single day. It comforted her. It soothed her aching mentality.
And it also drove her insane.
She was one of the most well behaved prisoners in the entire sect. Yet little did the guards, her inmates themselves even, know that she was truly crazy.
Crazier than anyone they kept down in the level three lockdowns. Crazier than the child molesters or those who always mumbled to themselves or those who didn't say a word whatsoever.
She was drunk with love for her daughter. And it was something that could be kept very well hidden in a place like this.
Everyone rested in the rec-room after a hard day's work. The television with its bad reception scratched and wailed messages from the world through the speakers, every once in a while having to endure a large pound from a fist or futile adjustment of its rabbit ears to make the picture better. Nanase sat in her corner, the ninety degree angled walls surprisingly not indented from her occupation in the spot. She had been sitting in that corner every break, every day, for the last eight years. It was her spot. Everyone else seemed to understand this, and she was grateful.
The news was on. The reporters with their fancy hairdos and shiny lip gloss delivered the news with smiles on their faces, no matter what they were talking about. They could have been reporting a dead decapitated child found in a ditch and they would still smile. Such phoniness, but such strength. Nanase's working part of her brain vaguely wished that she could have such a skill of pretend. So many years since she had smiled, so many years since she used those facial muscles. Her skin felt like stone. It never budged, even when she worked hard with her inmates out in the blazing sun.
The name 'Kira' predictably came out of the speakers.
Just last week everyone from the west wing of Tochigi dropped dead. Well, not really dropped. Some hung themselves with their bed sheets, some smashed their skulls against the cell walls or the porcelain sinks, some forced larger parts of their bodies through the barred windows and ended up crushing themselves.
It was like a slow moving wave lurking its way through the prison. Every month or so, a group of people would die in their cells, or even fall into their food at breakfast, dead as can be. Nanase would see this, hear this, and it barely registered with her emotional catalog. Something would flicker inside of her mind, but she did not know what it was, nor cared to know. She was past hoping for parole, past living life day by day. Everything had melted together in one hard inescapable glass mold, and she felt no pain as she drowned. When Kimiko grasped her heart in the weight room, or when Hikaru cut her stomach up with her plastic butter knife, Nanase did nothing. They were dead. And alive, they had the same value.
A toxic monotony, and she did nothing to break it.
Except…when she thought about Emiko.
She actually felt things when she thought about Emiko. She wanted to hug her knees in claustrophobia, in fear. In sadness that the girl was being raised by other people and not her own mother.
She wanted to talk to her daughter. To see how she was. If she had a boyfriend. If she was going to college. When she got her first period. What she wanted to do as a profession.
To run her fingers through the girl's hair that was probably thick and jet black like hers.
Nanase didn't feel a thing when she relived the memory of stabbing a long butcher knife into the heart of her husband, but all she had to do was envision her child's face, and her feelings were a pliable sickening butter. She had been convicted of murder, with no chance of being released. Last she heard, they were still trying to decide whether she was to receive the death penalty or not.
She used to get so angry when she thought about her husband. How he smoked in the house, even though she told him how bad it was for Emiko's lungs. How he would sleep around with other women. How his eyes would become glassy and lecherous whenever he would come home to find Emiko spread out on the living room floor doing her homework, still in her school uniform.
How his fist connected with her cheek bone.
Before she changed, she thought about domestic abuse and shook her head in disbelief. A husband always wants a pretty wife. How could he keep one if he ruined her face?
There was no care in his beatings. She could have gone on so much longer if he had just hit her below her neck. Bruises on her stomach, bruises on her breasts, legs, back…
None of that even mattered. She would have been content if he had left her face alone.
And then, with Kirin beer on his breath, he would come home, asking her to take off her apron and lift up her skirt, and in a drunken frenzy would screw her right on the kitchen table. Fighting this demand in particular would mean certain death. She only rejected him once; the first time that he came home and slid a hand up her inner thigh and told her to spread them, he beat her so badly she didn't know if she would live to see the next day. She stayed there on the kitchen floor as he went and passed out in their bedroom, and would rise the next morning with a face covered in dried blood and her underwear around her ankles. After that, she obeyed; did everything he asked for, not even allowing her urge to vomit to become real.
Perhaps the insanity didn't start in the prison, she used to think. Perhaps it was that one night that she crept into their bedroom. He was passed out on the bed once again, and she just stared at his sleeping figure. Had he opened his eyes, he would have seen his wife standing over him with a Noh mask expression, her body silhouetted in the doorway by the dim hallway light. Or maybe it was the next night that she did the same thing after kissing her daughter goodnight.
Or the next night.
And the night after that.
All she knew was by the time she went to the kitchen and took the knife out of the drawer, habitually wiping it on her apron like she would before cooking dinner, there was no way she was in her right mind. When the knife came down on her husband's chest cavity, the blood splattered her face and stained her tongue red. Her poor mind was so far gone that not even the relief of having done away with the one demon in her life came to rescue her.
Policemen.
Cherry red and sky blue flashing lights.
Handcuffs.
A joke of a trial.
Jail.
And then finally, prison.
Still in the corner, Nanase snuck a look at the television. Prisoners crowded around the box with a fuzzy picture, quiet as a tomb. It was an interview with a policeman who had been one of many to back out of the Kira investigation for fear of losing their lives in the process.
"Kira operates by killing criminals without having direct contact with any victim-"
Killing criminals…nothing new.
"He is a menace to society-"
Since when were criminals valued members of society?
"And those who stayed within the investigation will stop at nothing to bring him down."
From what she had heard about this Kira, he seemed like he had a God complex. Like he was the ultimate stage of judgment, the very last step to see if a human was good or bad, to see if they deserved to live or not. A swift and merciless hammer of justice, or something resembling it.
And his presence at Tochigi had been very prominent lately. Prisoners were dropping like flies.
Nanase bowed her head so that it touched the top of her knees. It was rare that she questioned whether she had done the right thing or not, because so many times she thought it had been done on instinct. Strip away every fiber of a person's well-being, and it's the same as cornering a lion. Or so the saying goes; and it was quite true with her.
Such an obedient wife, she was. A good mother, she was. Kept a good vault of secrets, yes she did.
Did Kira know her story?
Would Kira take into consideration what she had to go through before she made her decision?
Did he just assume that all criminals were bad? Or did he have the power to see? To truly see?
Nanase Takeuchi hugged her knees tight, and pursed her lips tighter. Her time was coming soon. She could feel it in her empty bones which she filled with a dulled vacant loathing for everything that happened to her. Kira was coming for her, coming for her life, getting closer and closer to getting her name.
Well that was just fine.
If she had done the right thing, then she would be spared. And free to live out the rest of her days in Tochigi.
If she had done the wrong thing, then she would die soon. Of a heart attack or other means. Part of her hoped it would be creative, then maybe her muted nerves would feel something.
Come on, Kira. You have the gavel. Do you truly know how to use it?
