(1)

Kira is not God. Aaron was innocent.

They framed him, and they put the frame-up on TV, and Kira saw it and killed him, even though we showed them at his trial that it wasn't him, even though the jury was almost to the point where they believed us because the cops found one fingerprint from those guys and those guys said they were never there…Kira didn't care.

Kira killed him. Before my eyes, as he left the witness stand after testifying on his own behalf, Kira ripped his life out of his chest like a hungry demon and he fell down and down the steps and landed with his neck twisted under him and his arms and legs all tossed about like a monstrous puppet's. And all the cops there never tried to investigate or anything. They just cleared his body away and gave it back to us later. Aaron! To have seen the person you love die in such a way, before a crowd of people, and have the death not matter to anyone.

After that, no one said Aaron was innocent anymore. Not even our staunchest supporters would say that where anyone else could hear them. Jury members said as they left that it was too bad that he'd been guilty after all.

A God would have known. A God would have cared.

We gather now, the ones Kira has left with nothing, we innocents who have watched our innocents be snuffed out without recourse, we gather in darkness, in secret, that no one may hear us, as though we were the wickedest of plotters, and we mourn them, we curse him, curse that name, curse him for being only a name, for if we knew who he was we would die cursing him to his face, if no more. For you, Aaron, for the meaningless death he gave you, I would consider such a death to mean the world. If they ever catch him, we will go to the prison where they put him and we will stay there, hating him and making him feel the hatred we have had to hide all this time, our loathing and our scorn, until they take him to be executed, or until some other angry victim sets bombs and blows to the furthest reaches of hell the prison, and us, and him.

That devil.

(2)

Kira is God.

So he purifies us and makes us clean in the blood of the lamb. One day soon all will be pure, and we will begin a new age of godliness, and he who is now known to the world as Kira will step forward into the light and we will know him for our Lord.

Until then I provide him with the faces of the sinful. The newspapers and the heretics who run them accepted the demon L's request to abandon their ordained task of revealing the guilty, but it does not matter because Kira has us, his faithful, and we will never hesitate. He stays his holy hand until mankind itself denounces the sinner or the sinner speaks against God himself, testing our spirit of submission. We will never hesitate. We will never rest. We are everywhere. We see all. We will offer up the polluted ones until mankind is cleansed and the time of Kira is at hand.

(3)

Being in the public eye is dangerous in a way it never was before. You have to walk a narrow line, if you're anything like me, between things you can't say and stay alive, and things you just can't say. Without choking on bile. Most media personalities are understanding, given we're all in the same trap even more hours per day than other public figures, and don't ask questions that could put one another on the spot. It's the new etiquette. Everyone remembers Koki Tanabata.

We respect her. She's a hero. But she's also dead.

Some people break the new rules, though, just for a big moment, especially the Kira supporters who have nothing to fear, and then you have to get through the moment without dooming yourself or betraying your convictions. I come closer to the second one every time.

After all, there's nowhere you can go to escape Kira. Not really. Sooner or later I expect I'll give in and say that he is good.

Kira's position on the world stage during the time skip has to have been more complicated than we were shown, only partly because Light had effectively muzzled dissent with the threat of death. We got the loud collaborators, but presumably there were plenty of silent dissenters, and a spectrum of understanding on the issue. This will be a series of drabble-ish public opinion pieces on the theme of 'Kira is God.' All reviews enthusiastically accepted.