DN -- Caveat Emptor II: The Skeleton Parade
Title: Caveat Emptor
Chapter: 2. The Skeleton Parade
Fandom: Death Note
Pairing: L/Light
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 3,223
Prompt: "dark"
Warnings: don't even get me started! XD
Summary: In which there are shopping trips, sarcasm, backhanded compliments, dark rooms, big guns, bubble baths, trauma of every sort, and detailed fantasies involving cake - lots of those. Let the buyer beware indeed.
Author's Note: eltea is my beta goddess. ♥
ii. the skeleton parade
There was a damp, cold, somewhat grimy handkerchief over his nose and mouth, and he thrashed to the best of his meager ability, but before he could complain about unsanitary conditions and general indignity, there was a dizziness, and then there was dark.
-
When Light awoke, it was to an impenetrable, inexplicable blackness.
He blinked in abject horror, three times, four, thinking he was blind.
Then, rolling over on the floor-cold, gritty, altogether unpalatable-he saw a thin line of sunlight searing through a wide crack at the bottom of the wall, a strip of white that set his pulsing head to throbbing with gusto.
Which begged the question-what the hell was this place?
His wrists ached and stung at turns, which the cool steel and faint clink of handcuffs quite succinctly explained.
He’d had just about enough of goddamn handcuffs for one lifetime, thanks.
Indistinct voices consulted, and then the unmistakable roar of a nearby engine answered his question: this place was the back of a semi. He could almost make out corrugated steel for walls, but it was hard to tell how much was vision and how much was detailed imagination.
As the engine settled to a low rumble, idling in the… wherever it was, Light heard a quiet groan.
“Ryuzaki?” he prompted tentatively.
“Light-kun,” a familiar voice returned, sounding as though its owner was wincing heavily. “May I ask a favor of you?”
It was a strange question for one waking up in the back of an eighteen-wheeler, having been knocked unconscious and dragged to an undisclosed location, presumably about to be dragged to another, more distant one.
Then again, this was L.
“Sure,” Light permitted over the grinding of tires on pavement as the truck began to move.
“Please pardon my language,” L requested.
Light paused.
“What?” he asked.
“Fuck,” L said, emphatically.
Oh. Well, then.
There was a sigh.
“All right,” L decided, sounding steadier. “First of all, are you hurt?”
Light attempted to process the input from his nervous system. “I don’t think so,” he concluded, “though I do have a bitch of a headache.”
“I am sorry to hear that,” L told him. “Very likely that is a residual result of the anesthetic inhalant. If it doesn’t fade with time, please tell me.”
Light wasn’t sure what L planned to do about it, but he doubted that inquiring further would help matters.
He struggled up to a sitting position, trying to wriggle his fingers enough to coax the blood back into them. “So,” he said. “Brief me on what exactly just happened here.”
L sighed again. “Ah… well-”
“No,” Light interjected, musing automatically now as his brain summoned some reserves of wit, “let me think. It’s clear that they wanted you, and I was an afterthought. They probably just took me by association, and then because they realized I’d be able to explain what had happened if I got away. But that means that they were looking for you specifically, and had tracked you down. They had to have had a motive, which means they know who you are. But to be able to find you out in the middle of Japan, they must know what you look like, and they must have either been following you for a long time, or have gotten extremely and implausibly lucky.” He paused, knitting his fingers together and clenching them behind him, resenting the grit under his hands, which jittered and bounced as the truck shuddered over the road. “Which means… that they must have seen your face, and must either be rogue collaborators-which I find doubtful; that’s spy-novel stuff-or people with a reason to want revenge, presumably somebody you’d put away who held a grudge until he got out again.”
“Light-kun assumes our captor is male,” L remarked idly.
“Purely for the sake of pronoun simplicity,” Light replied glibly. “Where was… All right. Let’s see. For someone to know your face, he-or she-must have encountered you before you were quite so cautious, which would have very likely been necessary when you were just starting out at this whole world’s-greatest-detective thing and didn’t have any agents on your side, at which point you probably couldn’t employ anyone to do your dirty work-ah, field work.” It was hard to resist the urge to wink, even though it wouldn’t have made a difference. “Hmm… how old were you when you started out?”
“When I began officially,” L said quietly, “fourteen.”
Light hesitated momentarily to consider. “Damn,” was the verdict.
“Yes,” L agreed, which didn’t make a great deal of sense, though Light wasn’t in much of a mood to argue. “When we decided upon it, it took Watari and myself two weeks to erase all evidence of my previous existence.” Light imagined he blinked placidly. “We had to hack into a great deal of websites and databases; it was quite challenging. And highly illegal.”
Light took a few deep breaths. On the bright side, they were alive so far, which was unequivocally good news. “Well?” he prompted. “What comes next?”
“I have hypothetically addressed this contingency on more than one occasion,” L answered.
Light paused.
“You’ve thought about it before?” he paraphrased.
There was a hint of a smile in L’s voice. “Yes, Light-kun.”
“And?”
Probably a shrug there. “My cellular phone contains an extremely precise tracking device,” he explained, “to which only Watari has access. He would have been about to arrive when we left headquarters, and he will indubitably begin attempting to reach me, at which point he will certainly discover that something is amiss.”
“Presuming,” Light muttered, “that your phone is on.”
“Well, the tracker is deliberately designed to function unless the phone is entirely disassem-”
“Presuming,” Light cut in, “that they brought it with them.”
L was silent a moment to consider. “I should think they would,” he responded, “for ransoming purposes. They should realize that the first thing Watari is going to do is to call that phone, which would, from their perspective, be the beginning of negotiations.”
Light drew his knees up to his chest, feeling distantly L-ish, and rested his head on them. “If they know you’re L,” he noted, “they might expect you to try a trick like that.”
He didn’t mention the possibility that ransom wasn’t on their captors’ minds.
“I have other precautions in place as well,” L murmured. It sounded a little hollow.
It sounded like a lie.
“Happy Mother’s Day, mom,” Light mumbled into his knee. “Your son got himself kidnapped and took Ryuzaki with him.”
“It’s hardly your fault, Light-kun,” L reassured him quietly.
“Would you have been traipsing around Tokyo today if it hadn’t been for me?” he countered.
L shifted. “Please try to stay optimistic, Light-kun,” he said softly. “That’s just about all we have left at this juncture.”
“Real encouraging,” Light muttered.
L sighed. “Are you even listening, Light-kun?”
-
Light dozed against his knees-the position was surprisingly sustainable and not too uncomfortable; L was really onto something-and slipped into a dream where the rumbling belonged to the earth-movers of a construction site. He was frowning about it, because it was very distracting; and he was cold, because he didn’t have anything more than his underwear on; and his shoulders ached, and his wrists stung, because he was handcuffed to the bed-frame. He was just starting to wonder why in the blazing hell he’d be cuffed to the headboard, feeling the muscles between his shoulder-blades start to cramp in protest, when he heard L calling gently, “Light-kun, Light-kun,” which seemed to be his way of apologizing for the fact that he couldn’t find a fork for the cake that was sitting on the nightstand. There was a whole pile of cake, a mountain of cake, an Everest of cake balanced on the bedside table, cake that came in a variety of different colors, and it was all capped with bright strawberries like a bunch of pudgy flags. That was a lot of cake, and Light would hate to see it wasted, so he tried to wait patiently while L rattled through the silverware drawer, trying to find a fork-he could’ve sworn they had at least one…
A flashlight streamed into his eyes, rousing sharp, instinctive tears, and he winced and ducked away, still wreathed in the last shreds of the dream, still taunted by the deep, gentle contentment that had flown beneath the minor irritations plaguing his fantasy.
“Fucking…” he muttered under his breath, and his voice cracked.
The flashlight-wielding fiend snickered a little, grabbed his arm, and yanked him down from the truck bed. Blindly he stumbled, Picasso patches of white still blaring on the backs of his eyelids, uncaring hands steadying him as his numb feet and his overbearing pride rebelled in inconvenient unison. Somehow, he was manhandled out of the truck and onto the pavement, where he fought for his balance and fortunately won. Squinting, he made out an L-looking object beside him, its wild hair silhouetted by the harsh eyes of the fluorescent lamps looming over what appeared to be an empty lot.
“Just stay calm, Light-kun,” he recommended.
“Easy for you to say,” Light shot back, slightly startled by the snide tone to his own voice. “You don’t have feelings.”
He shouldn’t have said it. He never should have said anything like that. Not to L. Not to the only friend who had ever felt like one.
L looked at him for a long moment, though his eyes were visible only as a faint gleam in the dark.
“I will do my best to talk us out of this situation,” he said quietly at last. “I hope that you will trust me.”
Of course he did. Of course he trusted…
It was the dream. It was waking up from it. It was blinking his way awake to the unnerving epiphany that his subconscious mind had jammed the two of them into a dingy apartment by a construction site, cake overflowing from the nightstand and crumbling messily to the floor, him tied to the fucking bedpost, asking quite politely to be compromised, and he’d been happy about it.
If that wasn’t enough to justify snapping at L, he didn’t know what was.
…God, he hoped it was enough.
Somebody prodded his lower back with an unsympathetic hand, and he moved obediently forward, trying to resist the urge to watch L for any sign he could extrapolate.
They were shepherded into an unrepentantly industrial building, a warehouse wonderland of steel and cement, bars on the windows and sawdust on the floors. This, like the layer of grime on the floor of the truck bed, offended Light’s deepest-held sanitary sentiments. He suspected a conspiracy.
Ill-lit hallways spread out in the glare of the flashlights’ beams, shades of gray hemming them blandly in on every side. Light’s eyes were mutinously objecting to the abuse, and, weak and bleary from the insubstantial nap, pins and needles stabbing in his mistreated hands, he had little consolation to offer them.
The yellow-white probes outlined a padlocked steel door no different from any of the others, and one of the bulky dark shapes moved forward to undo the lock. The door swung open, hinges piping up with an ear-splitting squeal, and broad hands planted themselves on Light’s back and shoved.
Barely balanced to begin with, he supposed it wasn’t much of a surprise that he tumbled to the floor, scraping his chin, his head smacking against the impassive cement hard enough to rouse his headache from the gentle muttering to which it had subsided to a full-fledged roar.
Rolling over onto his back only to grit his teeth at the pressure on his hapless hands, Light tasted blood in his mouth and decided, once and for all, that today was not a good day.
And it got a whole lot worse when they took L away with them.
He’d been counting on having his longtime companion with him here as well. He’d been banking on L’s low voice and imperturbable calm, on the unwavering gaze, on the wry amusement even in the direst straits. He’d been literally linked to the man for so long that he’d come to rely on L’s presence.
He didn’t like being alone.
Cold everywhere except where more blood drizzled halfheartedly from the raw place on his jaw, he curled up on his side, trying to ignore the numbness building in his arm and the throbbing taking up residence in his shoulder. He didn’t have the heart for pain, or the patience. He was alone, and they’d probably tossed L’s cell phone into the first Dumpster they could find.
-
His limbs were leaden when he awoke, with blurred and grainy eyes, to the mournful wail of hinges and the cadence of a calm, disinterested voice that spoke in English.
He rolled partway over, clenching his jaw against the flaring anger of his agonized muscles, and squinted up into the face of the newcomer, whose words he could narrowly puzzle out through the triple impediments of the haze of sleep, the limits of his English vocabulary, and the impassive figure’s unfurling drawl.
“Then his father will be among the first to hear the news,” the man remarked. Flashlights’ pale eyes darted wildly as their owners moved, and Light glimpsed a face-a thin face, a gaunt face, a face with cheekbones like snow-capped ridges and eyes like sunken coals primed for consumption by the ambient ash. The body matched, skinny, but not like L’s-L was slender, and this man was sticklike. Sharp and narrow, like an insect. A scarecrow with glowing eyes.
He must have imagined it. His mind was playing tricks, conniving with the flashlights’ fakery.
“We can make the call now,” someone volunteered, another face flickering into and out of being, a real one, a human one this time.
“No,” the creature demurred idly. Glints in the depths of the black sockets met Light’s questioning eyes. Either they assumed he couldn’t piece together a bit of English, or they didn’t care. “Give them a little time to miss him first. What’s the phrase? You don’t know what you have until you’ve let it go?”
The face fragmented into a smile.
“A charming adage.” He paused, and then, in accented Japanese, finished, “Good evening, Light. Please make yourself at home.”
The hinges howled, and the door shut.
Light looked at the black expanses of the ceiling, at the black expanses of the wall, at the black expanses of this world. It was a nightmare. It was in his mind. He’d wake up in a warm apartment, the air thick with the smell of newly-made baked goods salvaged from the womb of the oven, and he’d drowse lazily on the bed that filled the space, because they didn’t have room for a couch and didn’t care, and L’s hair would whisper against his neck as its owner licked the last smudges of frosting from his fingertips, and he’d set his head on Light’s shoulder, and they’d sleep…
-
It was the sound of the door opening that roused him again, and he lifted a skull still shrouded in wispy dreams.
Somebody really needed to do something about those hinges.
A slight form received a firm push and crumpled not far away, distinctly silhouetted against the dim silver light from the hall. The wedge of illumination in question was reduced to a sliver as the door began to shut, and then it was gone.
“L?” he whispered into the dark. One syllable and his throat felt raw. He would have sold his soul for a glass of water.
“Yes, Light-kun,” L’s disembodied voice confirmed from the immensity of the blackness about them. The voice in question was lower even than usual-raspier, but gentler than he’d ever heard it. “Are you hurt?”
“No,” Light decided, his arms and fingers tingling vindictively as if to betray him. “Are you?”
There was a terrible pause.
“Nothing that won’t heal, Light-kun,” L told him softly.
Light closed his eyes, but there wasn’t any relief in it, because it made no difference. “What did they do to you?” he demanded. “Who are these people?”
It did not escape his notice that L only answered the second question.
“His name is Thomas Wergild,” he explained, familiar cotton rustling as he moved. “And I put him in prison for a very long time, though it appears he’s bribed his way out or managed it with ‘good behavior.’ In any case, he sold drugs to half of greater Los Angeles and a staggering portion of South America. The game, as it were, that we played set a world record for the amount of money at stake in a single case.”
Light smiled automatically. “That’s my Ryuzaki.”
Jesus, he was tired. Why had he said that? Too much trauma. He needed to touch base and screw his head back on; the circuit wasn’t closed, and the light-bulb wasn’t working.
Appropriately enough.
He detected a faint smile in L’s voice as the beleaguered detective replied.
“I was sixteen,” he noted, “and remarkably naïve. I let him learn to recognize me, quite like you said. I had hoped it wouldn’t come back and cause me to regret it, but my choices were rather more limited then. I was sloppier-I had to testify at his trial, and we destroyed all indications of my person, but he had ample time to become acquainted with my appearance.”
Light gathered his strength and maneuvered into a sitting position, ignoring the angry sewing kit of nerve signals that recommenced its assault on his helpless limbs. The joints in his knees creaked unhappily as he folded his legs up against his chest and laid his head on them.
“So,” he said. “What now?”
It was like last time. It was like the dim cell in the heart of the complex, like the hopeless captivity he’d known before, like the bars in front of him and the wall behind, his hands bound, his head thick, fevered thoughts coagulating as he started staring contests with the cold eye of the camera, knowing he couldn’t win. That he could never win.
L shifted. “Now,” he replied mildly, “we wait.”
“What for?” Light prompted wearily.
“I don’t know,” L admitted. “We’ll find out. There’s a possibility of rescue, as we established earlier, but I’d estimate the chances of that proceeding as intended to be around twenty percent.”
One in five, then.
Somehow, that wasn’t very reassuring.
Especially since this hadn’t already happened four times with no results.
“You’re supposed to know everything,” Light heard himself mumble nonsensically. Or perhaps it was meant to be funny. Why couldn’t he shut himself up? “You’re L.”
“No one knows everything,” L responded, a touch of dark amusement to the statement. “Certainly not me.” He drew in a deep breath. “We’ll be all right, Light-kun.”
“Is that a promise?” Light inquired.
“I try not to make promises,” L explained, “for fear of inadvertently breaking them. Consider it… a hope.”
“God,” Light managed weakly.
“He may yet be on our side,” L noted.
Not if he’s in my head, Light thought morosely. Not if he knows what kind of madness is keeping me sane.
[chapter i] [chapter iii]
Chapter: 2. The Skeleton Parade
Fandom: Death Note
Pairing: L/Light
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 3,223
Prompt: "dark"
Warnings: don't even get me started! XD
Summary: In which there are shopping trips, sarcasm, backhanded compliments, dark rooms, big guns, bubble baths, trauma of every sort, and detailed fantasies involving cake - lots of those. Let the buyer beware indeed.
Author's Note: eltea is my beta goddess. ♥
ii. the skeleton parade
There was a damp, cold, somewhat grimy handkerchief over his nose and mouth, and he thrashed to the best of his meager ability, but before he could complain about unsanitary conditions and general indignity, there was a dizziness, and then there was dark.
-
When Light awoke, it was to an impenetrable, inexplicable blackness.
He blinked in abject horror, three times, four, thinking he was blind.
Then, rolling over on the floor-cold, gritty, altogether unpalatable-he saw a thin line of sunlight searing through a wide crack at the bottom of the wall, a strip of white that set his pulsing head to throbbing with gusto.
Which begged the question-what the hell was this place?
His wrists ached and stung at turns, which the cool steel and faint clink of handcuffs quite succinctly explained.
He’d had just about enough of goddamn handcuffs for one lifetime, thanks.
Indistinct voices consulted, and then the unmistakable roar of a nearby engine answered his question: this place was the back of a semi. He could almost make out corrugated steel for walls, but it was hard to tell how much was vision and how much was detailed imagination.
As the engine settled to a low rumble, idling in the… wherever it was, Light heard a quiet groan.
“Ryuzaki?” he prompted tentatively.
“Light-kun,” a familiar voice returned, sounding as though its owner was wincing heavily. “May I ask a favor of you?”
It was a strange question for one waking up in the back of an eighteen-wheeler, having been knocked unconscious and dragged to an undisclosed location, presumably about to be dragged to another, more distant one.
Then again, this was L.
“Sure,” Light permitted over the grinding of tires on pavement as the truck began to move.
“Please pardon my language,” L requested.
Light paused.
“What?” he asked.
“Fuck,” L said, emphatically.
Oh. Well, then.
There was a sigh.
“All right,” L decided, sounding steadier. “First of all, are you hurt?”
Light attempted to process the input from his nervous system. “I don’t think so,” he concluded, “though I do have a bitch of a headache.”
“I am sorry to hear that,” L told him. “Very likely that is a residual result of the anesthetic inhalant. If it doesn’t fade with time, please tell me.”
Light wasn’t sure what L planned to do about it, but he doubted that inquiring further would help matters.
He struggled up to a sitting position, trying to wriggle his fingers enough to coax the blood back into them. “So,” he said. “Brief me on what exactly just happened here.”
L sighed again. “Ah… well-”
“No,” Light interjected, musing automatically now as his brain summoned some reserves of wit, “let me think. It’s clear that they wanted you, and I was an afterthought. They probably just took me by association, and then because they realized I’d be able to explain what had happened if I got away. But that means that they were looking for you specifically, and had tracked you down. They had to have had a motive, which means they know who you are. But to be able to find you out in the middle of Japan, they must know what you look like, and they must have either been following you for a long time, or have gotten extremely and implausibly lucky.” He paused, knitting his fingers together and clenching them behind him, resenting the grit under his hands, which jittered and bounced as the truck shuddered over the road. “Which means… that they must have seen your face, and must either be rogue collaborators-which I find doubtful; that’s spy-novel stuff-or people with a reason to want revenge, presumably somebody you’d put away who held a grudge until he got out again.”
“Light-kun assumes our captor is male,” L remarked idly.
“Purely for the sake of pronoun simplicity,” Light replied glibly. “Where was… All right. Let’s see. For someone to know your face, he-or she-must have encountered you before you were quite so cautious, which would have very likely been necessary when you were just starting out at this whole world’s-greatest-detective thing and didn’t have any agents on your side, at which point you probably couldn’t employ anyone to do your dirty work-ah, field work.” It was hard to resist the urge to wink, even though it wouldn’t have made a difference. “Hmm… how old were you when you started out?”
“When I began officially,” L said quietly, “fourteen.”
Light hesitated momentarily to consider. “Damn,” was the verdict.
“Yes,” L agreed, which didn’t make a great deal of sense, though Light wasn’t in much of a mood to argue. “When we decided upon it, it took Watari and myself two weeks to erase all evidence of my previous existence.” Light imagined he blinked placidly. “We had to hack into a great deal of websites and databases; it was quite challenging. And highly illegal.”
Light took a few deep breaths. On the bright side, they were alive so far, which was unequivocally good news. “Well?” he prompted. “What comes next?”
“I have hypothetically addressed this contingency on more than one occasion,” L answered.
Light paused.
“You’ve thought about it before?” he paraphrased.
There was a hint of a smile in L’s voice. “Yes, Light-kun.”
“And?”
Probably a shrug there. “My cellular phone contains an extremely precise tracking device,” he explained, “to which only Watari has access. He would have been about to arrive when we left headquarters, and he will indubitably begin attempting to reach me, at which point he will certainly discover that something is amiss.”
“Presuming,” Light muttered, “that your phone is on.”
“Well, the tracker is deliberately designed to function unless the phone is entirely disassem-”
“Presuming,” Light cut in, “that they brought it with them.”
L was silent a moment to consider. “I should think they would,” he responded, “for ransoming purposes. They should realize that the first thing Watari is going to do is to call that phone, which would, from their perspective, be the beginning of negotiations.”
Light drew his knees up to his chest, feeling distantly L-ish, and rested his head on them. “If they know you’re L,” he noted, “they might expect you to try a trick like that.”
He didn’t mention the possibility that ransom wasn’t on their captors’ minds.
“I have other precautions in place as well,” L murmured. It sounded a little hollow.
It sounded like a lie.
“Happy Mother’s Day, mom,” Light mumbled into his knee. “Your son got himself kidnapped and took Ryuzaki with him.”
“It’s hardly your fault, Light-kun,” L reassured him quietly.
“Would you have been traipsing around Tokyo today if it hadn’t been for me?” he countered.
L shifted. “Please try to stay optimistic, Light-kun,” he said softly. “That’s just about all we have left at this juncture.”
“Real encouraging,” Light muttered.
L sighed. “Are you even listening, Light-kun?”
-
Light dozed against his knees-the position was surprisingly sustainable and not too uncomfortable; L was really onto something-and slipped into a dream where the rumbling belonged to the earth-movers of a construction site. He was frowning about it, because it was very distracting; and he was cold, because he didn’t have anything more than his underwear on; and his shoulders ached, and his wrists stung, because he was handcuffed to the bed-frame. He was just starting to wonder why in the blazing hell he’d be cuffed to the headboard, feeling the muscles between his shoulder-blades start to cramp in protest, when he heard L calling gently, “Light-kun, Light-kun,” which seemed to be his way of apologizing for the fact that he couldn’t find a fork for the cake that was sitting on the nightstand. There was a whole pile of cake, a mountain of cake, an Everest of cake balanced on the bedside table, cake that came in a variety of different colors, and it was all capped with bright strawberries like a bunch of pudgy flags. That was a lot of cake, and Light would hate to see it wasted, so he tried to wait patiently while L rattled through the silverware drawer, trying to find a fork-he could’ve sworn they had at least one…
A flashlight streamed into his eyes, rousing sharp, instinctive tears, and he winced and ducked away, still wreathed in the last shreds of the dream, still taunted by the deep, gentle contentment that had flown beneath the minor irritations plaguing his fantasy.
“Fucking…” he muttered under his breath, and his voice cracked.
The flashlight-wielding fiend snickered a little, grabbed his arm, and yanked him down from the truck bed. Blindly he stumbled, Picasso patches of white still blaring on the backs of his eyelids, uncaring hands steadying him as his numb feet and his overbearing pride rebelled in inconvenient unison. Somehow, he was manhandled out of the truck and onto the pavement, where he fought for his balance and fortunately won. Squinting, he made out an L-looking object beside him, its wild hair silhouetted by the harsh eyes of the fluorescent lamps looming over what appeared to be an empty lot.
“Just stay calm, Light-kun,” he recommended.
“Easy for you to say,” Light shot back, slightly startled by the snide tone to his own voice. “You don’t have feelings.”
He shouldn’t have said it. He never should have said anything like that. Not to L. Not to the only friend who had ever felt like one.
L looked at him for a long moment, though his eyes were visible only as a faint gleam in the dark.
“I will do my best to talk us out of this situation,” he said quietly at last. “I hope that you will trust me.”
Of course he did. Of course he trusted…
It was the dream. It was waking up from it. It was blinking his way awake to the unnerving epiphany that his subconscious mind had jammed the two of them into a dingy apartment by a construction site, cake overflowing from the nightstand and crumbling messily to the floor, him tied to the fucking bedpost, asking quite politely to be compromised, and he’d been happy about it.
If that wasn’t enough to justify snapping at L, he didn’t know what was.
…God, he hoped it was enough.
Somebody prodded his lower back with an unsympathetic hand, and he moved obediently forward, trying to resist the urge to watch L for any sign he could extrapolate.
They were shepherded into an unrepentantly industrial building, a warehouse wonderland of steel and cement, bars on the windows and sawdust on the floors. This, like the layer of grime on the floor of the truck bed, offended Light’s deepest-held sanitary sentiments. He suspected a conspiracy.
Ill-lit hallways spread out in the glare of the flashlights’ beams, shades of gray hemming them blandly in on every side. Light’s eyes were mutinously objecting to the abuse, and, weak and bleary from the insubstantial nap, pins and needles stabbing in his mistreated hands, he had little consolation to offer them.
The yellow-white probes outlined a padlocked steel door no different from any of the others, and one of the bulky dark shapes moved forward to undo the lock. The door swung open, hinges piping up with an ear-splitting squeal, and broad hands planted themselves on Light’s back and shoved.
Barely balanced to begin with, he supposed it wasn’t much of a surprise that he tumbled to the floor, scraping his chin, his head smacking against the impassive cement hard enough to rouse his headache from the gentle muttering to which it had subsided to a full-fledged roar.
Rolling over onto his back only to grit his teeth at the pressure on his hapless hands, Light tasted blood in his mouth and decided, once and for all, that today was not a good day.
And it got a whole lot worse when they took L away with them.
He’d been counting on having his longtime companion with him here as well. He’d been banking on L’s low voice and imperturbable calm, on the unwavering gaze, on the wry amusement even in the direst straits. He’d been literally linked to the man for so long that he’d come to rely on L’s presence.
He didn’t like being alone.
Cold everywhere except where more blood drizzled halfheartedly from the raw place on his jaw, he curled up on his side, trying to ignore the numbness building in his arm and the throbbing taking up residence in his shoulder. He didn’t have the heart for pain, or the patience. He was alone, and they’d probably tossed L’s cell phone into the first Dumpster they could find.
-
His limbs were leaden when he awoke, with blurred and grainy eyes, to the mournful wail of hinges and the cadence of a calm, disinterested voice that spoke in English.
He rolled partway over, clenching his jaw against the flaring anger of his agonized muscles, and squinted up into the face of the newcomer, whose words he could narrowly puzzle out through the triple impediments of the haze of sleep, the limits of his English vocabulary, and the impassive figure’s unfurling drawl.
“Then his father will be among the first to hear the news,” the man remarked. Flashlights’ pale eyes darted wildly as their owners moved, and Light glimpsed a face-a thin face, a gaunt face, a face with cheekbones like snow-capped ridges and eyes like sunken coals primed for consumption by the ambient ash. The body matched, skinny, but not like L’s-L was slender, and this man was sticklike. Sharp and narrow, like an insect. A scarecrow with glowing eyes.
He must have imagined it. His mind was playing tricks, conniving with the flashlights’ fakery.
“We can make the call now,” someone volunteered, another face flickering into and out of being, a real one, a human one this time.
“No,” the creature demurred idly. Glints in the depths of the black sockets met Light’s questioning eyes. Either they assumed he couldn’t piece together a bit of English, or they didn’t care. “Give them a little time to miss him first. What’s the phrase? You don’t know what you have until you’ve let it go?”
The face fragmented into a smile.
“A charming adage.” He paused, and then, in accented Japanese, finished, “Good evening, Light. Please make yourself at home.”
The hinges howled, and the door shut.
Light looked at the black expanses of the ceiling, at the black expanses of the wall, at the black expanses of this world. It was a nightmare. It was in his mind. He’d wake up in a warm apartment, the air thick with the smell of newly-made baked goods salvaged from the womb of the oven, and he’d drowse lazily on the bed that filled the space, because they didn’t have room for a couch and didn’t care, and L’s hair would whisper against his neck as its owner licked the last smudges of frosting from his fingertips, and he’d set his head on Light’s shoulder, and they’d sleep…
-
It was the sound of the door opening that roused him again, and he lifted a skull still shrouded in wispy dreams.
Somebody really needed to do something about those hinges.
A slight form received a firm push and crumpled not far away, distinctly silhouetted against the dim silver light from the hall. The wedge of illumination in question was reduced to a sliver as the door began to shut, and then it was gone.
“L?” he whispered into the dark. One syllable and his throat felt raw. He would have sold his soul for a glass of water.
“Yes, Light-kun,” L’s disembodied voice confirmed from the immensity of the blackness about them. The voice in question was lower even than usual-raspier, but gentler than he’d ever heard it. “Are you hurt?”
“No,” Light decided, his arms and fingers tingling vindictively as if to betray him. “Are you?”
There was a terrible pause.
“Nothing that won’t heal, Light-kun,” L told him softly.
Light closed his eyes, but there wasn’t any relief in it, because it made no difference. “What did they do to you?” he demanded. “Who are these people?”
It did not escape his notice that L only answered the second question.
“His name is Thomas Wergild,” he explained, familiar cotton rustling as he moved. “And I put him in prison for a very long time, though it appears he’s bribed his way out or managed it with ‘good behavior.’ In any case, he sold drugs to half of greater Los Angeles and a staggering portion of South America. The game, as it were, that we played set a world record for the amount of money at stake in a single case.”
Light smiled automatically. “That’s my Ryuzaki.”
Jesus, he was tired. Why had he said that? Too much trauma. He needed to touch base and screw his head back on; the circuit wasn’t closed, and the light-bulb wasn’t working.
Appropriately enough.
He detected a faint smile in L’s voice as the beleaguered detective replied.
“I was sixteen,” he noted, “and remarkably naïve. I let him learn to recognize me, quite like you said. I had hoped it wouldn’t come back and cause me to regret it, but my choices were rather more limited then. I was sloppier-I had to testify at his trial, and we destroyed all indications of my person, but he had ample time to become acquainted with my appearance.”
Light gathered his strength and maneuvered into a sitting position, ignoring the angry sewing kit of nerve signals that recommenced its assault on his helpless limbs. The joints in his knees creaked unhappily as he folded his legs up against his chest and laid his head on them.
“So,” he said. “What now?”
It was like last time. It was like the dim cell in the heart of the complex, like the hopeless captivity he’d known before, like the bars in front of him and the wall behind, his hands bound, his head thick, fevered thoughts coagulating as he started staring contests with the cold eye of the camera, knowing he couldn’t win. That he could never win.
L shifted. “Now,” he replied mildly, “we wait.”
“What for?” Light prompted wearily.
“I don’t know,” L admitted. “We’ll find out. There’s a possibility of rescue, as we established earlier, but I’d estimate the chances of that proceeding as intended to be around twenty percent.”
One in five, then.
Somehow, that wasn’t very reassuring.
Especially since this hadn’t already happened four times with no results.
“You’re supposed to know everything,” Light heard himself mumble nonsensically. Or perhaps it was meant to be funny. Why couldn’t he shut himself up? “You’re L.”
“No one knows everything,” L responded, a touch of dark amusement to the statement. “Certainly not me.” He drew in a deep breath. “We’ll be all right, Light-kun.”
“Is that a promise?” Light inquired.
“I try not to make promises,” L explained, “for fear of inadvertently breaking them. Consider it… a hope.”
“God,” Light managed weakly.
“He may yet be on our side,” L noted.
Not if he’s in my head, Light thought morosely. Not if he knows what kind of madness is keeping me sane.
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