Author's Note / Content Warning
This story contains mature and potentially disturbing themes, including violence, abuse, bullying, murder, strong language, and morally grey behaviour. Reader discretion is advised.
***
It's on every screen.
Televisions murmuring in living rooms. Radios crackling on kitchen counters. The big displays bolted above train platforms and propped in shop windows, playing to no one and everyone at once. Different cities. Different languages. The same story looping across all of them.
Today, the notorious serial killer stands trial.
Everyone's on it, everyone has an opinion.
＊
The courtroom is bigger than a courtroom should be — or maybe it only feels that way, the ceiling too high, the air too heavy, settling over the rows of people who came to see a monster.
In the middle of all that space stands a small, frail figure.
Three judges face her: one at the centre, one to either side.
"You stand accused, of twenty-nine counts, of murder — each killing, deliberate, and premeditated." A pause. "How does the defendant plead?"
A woman. Small. Frail. Almost disappointingly ordinary for someone the world has spent months calling a monster.
Her eyes are empty. She looks less like a defendant than like someone who wandered into the wrong room and hasn't yet realised it.
From the side, she isn't frightening at all. No sharp edges. No menace. Just an ordinary woman — the kind you'd pass on the street and forget before the next corner.
Then she turns her head.
Not to the judges.
Not to the gallery.
To you.
Slowly. Almost lazily, as though she'd known you were there the entire time.
Those vacant eyes finally settle on something.
You.
Her mouth curves. Just slightly. A little smirk, the first living thing her face has done since she entered the courtroom.
"Let me tell you what actually happened."
