An Unintentional Truce?
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The moment B opened the door, presumably the next morning, Light raised his head as much as he could. This was beyond humiliating, except for throwing up the other day, but if he didn't ask, he was going to be in trouble.
"B, I need to use the bathroom," he tried to keep the desperation out of his voice, but B merely shrugged. He sauntered over in a manner similar to L's, his back hunched and his walk languid, and started to unbuckle the restraints. He undid the one holding down Light's wrist before backing up and pulling out, of all things, a handgun. Light froze, still extremely uneasy around them due to the incident with his father after his imprisonment.
"You can undo the rest of the restraints yourself." B was far enough away that he couldn't reach him without jumping off the table, and he held the gun like he knew what to do with it.
Swallowing hard, Light turned and tried not to look too closely at his hand as he started to pull out the pins holding his skin down. The morphine's effects were still fairly strong, but it made him queasy to feel them there. There was a fluttering in his stomach as he continued to remove the blood-caked slivers of metal. In some places, the skin started to curl back up as the tension was released, and the sensation made his legs start to tremble. He could feel the blood draining out of his face as he worked, and a cold sweat ran down his neck.
Finally, they were all gone, and Light tried to move his arm. A sense of utter wrongness mingled with a kiss of dull pain which only worsened as he dragged his hand slowly down the table. Actually lifting his arm was impossible; it felt like his muscles were trying to pull his tenuously connected phalanges apart. He hissed from between clenched teeth as he stopped trying to move it and instead managed to undo the restraints around his ankles with one hand. His legs were lead weights as he swung them over the edge of the table, which was an inch or two too high for his feet to reach the ground, and tried to slide off. His legs were too weak from lack of proper circulation, though, and they gave out immediately upon reaching the ground. As he started to fall to his side, unthinkingly he threw out his arm to break his fall.
When his tortured hand touched the floor, stars went supernova in front of his vision, and oblivion slammed into him with the force of a runaway train.
He came to shortly thereafter, the throbbing pain barely cutting through the morphine and not allowing him to remain unconscious for long. B was dragging him by his collar and very nearly choking him, pulling him toward a door in the room other than the exit. Light's hand had been placed palm-side up in his lap, and the sight made him dizzy as the blood rushed out of his head with stunning speed. He had broken a bone or two; he could see the shattered bone shards poking out of his mangled flesh, but he looked away before he could see how many. There was more blood smeared in a messy arc where he had fallen, and his shirt was soaking it up from his hand. His stomach pumped violently at the sight, and his mouth tasted bitter with saliva.
"I'm awake, B, I'm awake. I can walk," he grimaced as he said the words. He thought he could walk, for it had to be better than being dragged like this. B released him and backed off again, waiting as Light slowly stood up. It took an eon. He had to hold his left hand to his chest to keep from bumping it; he couldn't move the fingers at all except to open them slightly. After that, it was like a dance of incredibly complex proportions: put weight on one hand, fold up one leg, test it for stability, shift weight, fold up other leg, flex quadriceps, wobble dangerously, push off with hand and squat upwards... Light was sweating at the end of it, though he wondered how he had the fluids to do so, considering he hadn't drank anything in some time. It was probably the IV; B was incredibly thorough for a psychopath. Goodness knows where he was getting all of his supplies; maybe he was a doctor or a pharmacist.
"Take your time," B interrupted his musings, folding his arms across his chest, the gun still pointed at Light. "There is no hurry; all we're both waiting for is L."
"What do you mean?" B smiled that strange grin of his, tilting his head back so Light saw the scar again under his hair.
"L didn't want to meet me when I called, so I hung up on him to give him a few more days to ponder it."
"You... already spoke to him?" L had left him here with this madman? Light knew that L would be cautious, but since when would he allow an innocent, at least as far as he believed, be held hostage? "Does he know about...?" he looked lamely at his hand, feeling even sicker than he had when pulling the pins out of his own skin.
"I spoke to him after you and I talked. He responded immediately that he would not come. He doesn't know the specifics," B glanced down at Light's hand, "but he knows how I am. Some friend you have." His voice had dropped into a sibilant hiss on the last sentence, and Light felt his heart sinking. It was impossible that L didn't care enough to save him, but why wouldn't he...? His face hardened. L was not his savior; he was as self-centered as Light himself, and this proved that only Light was going to get himself out of this. He didn't have time to ask any more as B pushed lightly against his shoulder, and Light obediently stepped backward, his pride having taken too many blows already to protest.
"There's a shower in there too." He closed the door in Light's face without waiting for a response and eyeballed him through the small window in the door just to show him that he could still watch him. Light shivered at the man's words before turning to finally use the facilities. How long had he been restrained? Two or three days? He honestly couldn't tell, what with fading in and out of consciousness so much.
When he went to turn on the shower, a sense of hopelessness washed over him. What was the point? So he could be clean before B gutted him like a fish and mailed his entrails to L? He had as much as said he was going to kill him by saying that things would happen if he lived through this. His mind couldn't grasp that. He couldn't possibly function if he believed that B was going to kill him no matter what. There had to be a way out, somehow, and he would find it. L was a genius as well; the man had to think of something.
He chuckled darkly as his thoughts returned to L without his consent. Did he subconsciously want the detective to be his knight in shining armor? The same man who had chained him to himself and deprived him of sleep for months and accused him constantly of being a mass murderer when he was theoretically innocent? The same man who said he wanted true justice for Kira with one breath and professed that Light was his friend with the next?
He inadvertently derailed his own thoughts by bumping the shower door with his hand, eliciting a tiny cry from him that he bit off even though B probably couldn't hear him in here. The pain was starting to creep in behind the morphine, reaching shadowy fingers and tickling at his awareness. Light was afraid of the agony coming back. He shucked off his shirt as carefully as he could, pulling it meticulously over his hand one inch at a time. He couldn't fathom how he was going to get it back on. The rest of his clothes were shrugged off in a pile outside the shower, which had orange-scented shampoo and body wash in it. He was almost surprised that it wasn't strawberry, like L preferred. Maybe B hadn't gotten close enough to find out L's obsession with the fruit in all its forms, which was probably the case since he said he had never met him. Light had to give him a modicum of credit for doing such a good job copycatting him without ever meeting him.
Then he got into the hot water and all rational thought abandoned him. It felt so good that he wondered if he could just lie down and drown in it. The simple comfort almost brought tears to his eyes before he realized what an emotional wreck he was becoming, though he could hardly fault himself for the slip. He leaned against the wall, pressing his cheek against the cool tile, and held his left arm out of the spray, for he doubted that washing his exposed muscles and bones was a good idea. His eyes closed as the water coursed down his face, tracing the contours of his cheeks and drawing a path down his chest, eventually trailing down his legs and off his toes. The tension followed the same path, bleeding out of him and leaving him drained.
His own helplessness disgusted him. With the agony in his hand, he couldn't function or even think straight when it was throbbing through his arm. Pain of this magnitude was such a new sensation to him; obviously he had hurt himself in the past, but nothing compared to this sensation that his hand was still being ripped apart, a source of misery that didn't fade with time; it merely became background noise. It bothered him that he didn't even physically resist B, but he had always relied on his mind to get him out of trouble. Especially during the Kira case, his mind had kept him well away from suspicion and danger even though he had killed record numbers of people. His physical abilities had only been tested in tennis and in fights with the unusually resilient L; they were not up to disarming someone with a gun who seemed to be in very good health compared to him.
He shook off his thoughts before they could become self-pitying, shutting off the water and stepping out of the warmth. After drying off, he got mostly dressed without too much trouble, but he didn't relish the thought of putting a blood-soaked shirt back on. He took what had been one of his favorite shirts to the sink and started to wash it. Everything took so long to do with only one hand, but he couldn't even get his left hand wet without seeing stars. He settled for eventually putting his damp shirt back on with only his right arm in it. Try as he might, the nausea that slammed through him as he tried to put the other hand back through the sleeve made it impossible to put back on.
He felt much better despite his uncomfortable dress as he opened the door again. B was sitting atop the table that had the restraints in L's crouch, the barrel of the gun still pointed toward Light even as it lay on the table with B's hand loosely atop it. B nodded toward something on a smaller table where he had gotten the syringes earlier.
"It's not much, but it's food. I don't have the supplies to feed you intravenously as well." Light glanced at the offerings and saw that, thankfully, there were no cakes or pies. There was packaged sushi and a seaweed salad with the labels ripped off; evidently B didn't want him to know where he had gotten them from. There were two bottles of water as well, and Light picked up one of them first. B didn't move from his place, so Light sat in the chair that B had used earlier, noting that it was still far enough away from B that the other could shoot him before Light reached him if he stupidly decided to attack him.
It felt good to sit up; it only increased his feelings of helplessness when he couldn't even look his captor in the eye. He held the water between his knees and twisted the top off, eagerly finishing off the entire bottle when he got it open. His mouth was cottony-dry whenever he wasn't sick, and it bothered him.
"Why are you doing this?" he asked as he lifted the top off the mixed sushi. "I can see keeping me alive until you get L, but you don't have to let me out of the restraints too."
"Are you complaining?" Light felt like a child as he shook his head, feeling his damp bangs brushing across his forehead. "I've never taken a hostage before, so I can't say as I have an established procedure for hostage negotiations. It's not the most interesting thing in the world, so I decided to try to make you relatively comfortable while we wait. I have no ill will toward you personally, so I feel no need to make you suffer."
That made Light pause as he picked up a piece of tuna sushi with the hand left intact. No ill will, when he'd carved into his hand like a piece of meat and left it exposed to the open air?
B snickered as he followed Light's gaze.
"That was not punishment. I was bored, that was all." Light glanced at him, disgusted by the smile on B's face. Despite his rage at the man for causing him this kind of suffering, however, he thought he could understand. After all, he had started killing and judging humanity out of boredom even though his goals were much more noble.
"You have a strange way of dealing with boredom." Light couldn't shake the feeling that this was the pot calling the kettle black.
"Perhaps, but can you say that I have forced you to suffer unduly? You've got morphine and I have plenty more where that came from. My goal is to keep you alive, not kill you inadvertently."
It struck Light then that B was almost completely different than the sadist he had first spoken to. At first, B had talked to him as though he was going to mutilate and send pieces of him back to L within days; he had even said as much. Who was this only slightly deranged benefactor that he now spoke with? Was this what speaking to someone indubitably insane was like, this total incongruity between their words and their actions from one day to the next?
"What do you plan to do with L?" Light found himself trying to keep the conversation going despite his misgivings. It kept him from thinking too much about his current predicament. He wasn't thinking overmuch about plans to kill B or escape him just yet; he needed to know more.
"That is the million dollar question, isn't it?" B chuckled softly, the sound little more than air escaping his mouth. "I'm not sure myself. Perhaps I just need to see him, get some sort of closure."
"Did L do something to you?" Light was surprised that B was telling him more than he had earlier. He had gotten the impression that B was simply obsessed with the man, maybe physically, maybe intellectually, but certainly an unreasoning sort of devotion. Now perhaps there was a deeper meaning that B had been unwilling to divulge earlier.
B looked at him, his face angling down until he looked even more like L as he glanced up at him though his hair. His eyes were weighing his response to Light's question, which was another way that he and L were different. L could be unreadable if he wanted, as inscrutable as a blank wall and completely indecipherable even to someone with Light's social skills. B was far more open in comparison.
"L did nothing to me personally, you could say, but he has never acknowledged my skills as an investigator... or a criminal." B shifted, resting more weight on one leg as he put one knee on the table, his hand still idly resting on the gun. "I was in training to be like him, but I was dismissed before reaching his level. The killings in Los Angeles were my attempt to outdo him, to give him a case he couldn't solve." Light waited before asking the inevitable question.
"It didn't work?" B only gave a slightly sheepish twist to his lips.
"I've gotten over the humiliation, but yes, you are correct. I set myself on fire to make myself the last in the chain of murder victims, forever leaving him in the dark as to my whereabouts, but I was discovered." He scowled slightly. "An FBI agent found me and saved me from burning to death, leaving me with these and my own shame." He pulled up one sleeve of his white shirt to reveal skin red and pink with savage burn scars that started about mid-forearm.
"The FBI agent was working as L's eyes and ears, one Naomi Misora. I think I underestimated her." Light stiffened at that, despite his best efforts. B's sharp eyes caught it and looked at him questioningly. "Is that name familiar to you?"
"Yes, actually. I saw her at the NPA volunteering to help with the Kira investigation when I went to see my father. I think her fiance was one of the agents killed by Kira."
"So she is here as well, in Japan?" B's eyes took on a feral glint.
"I don't know," Light lied smoothly, despite the smallest inkling to tell him some of the truth, that he 'suspected' she had been killed by Kira. "I only saw her that one time. Maybe L wasn't interested in using her again."
"Perhaps," B tapped a finger on the gun, making Light nervous since it was still pointed at him. "I would have liked to see her again, I think. Clever woman even if she couldn't stand sugar."
"Did you cultivate L's sugar addiction as well?" Light tried to direct the conversation away from Misora, reluctant to be pressed to answer more questions about his knowledge of her. As easily as lying came to him, he was uneasy about testing his skills with so many factors working against him. He figured this question was safe since it was obvious that B was imitating L even without explaining his reasons.
"Easily enough. It does help my energy levels after a few days without enough sleep, and then you have to keep eating it to keep from crashing. Either that or subsist on coffee, which leaves a dirty taste in my mouth after a while."
"Hmm," Light hummed as he finished off the sushi and started on the salad without any utensils. He wasn't concerned about quite a few things that might have bothered him in the past, quite content to eat with his hands if it got him food.
"Is the food all right?" B asked, as though he was a waiter inquiring as to Light's enjoyment of the meal. This complete turnaround from B's earlier treatment unnerved him, but he doubted he could inquire about it even indirectly without making B suspicious. It was better to just accept it for now and hope that B wouldn't fly off the handle in a sudden rage and cut him up some more.
"It's fine," Light replied as he daintily licked a bit of vinegar from his finger, which was the truth. Often enough, he had eaten the same thing at Headquarters when chained to L and unable to leave for lunch. He had been forced to ask for certain items and hope the rest of the team remembered what to get him during lunch if he didn't feel like cooking in the kitchen. Sometimes L, the pompous ass, took the decision out of his hands after the team left when he would refuse to stop working long enough to let him go to the kitchen at all. On those days, Light was condescendingly offered sweets to pacify him, which he invariably refused unless it was some sort of fruit, while he devised ways to make the detective pay later in explicit detail. He would also make every attempt to finish off the coffee pot when Watari was not there to make more for L, who seemed to hate doing anything for himself.
Sometimes it amazed Light how it was even possible to feel two such extremes for one person, especially since their 'friendship' was marked by vicious fights with physical repercussions that lasted for days rather than heartfelt conversation. Some said that best friends always fought, but no one would ever call a relationship characterized by distrust and suspicion that of 'best friends'.
His left arm jerked as a muscle spasmed in it, and he almost dropped his food when the spike of pain went through him. He gritted his teeth and held on to the salad, reluctant to let anything resembling nutrition fall to the floor because he was clumsy. The morphine must be starting to wear off as a dull ache seemed to lend his arm unusual weight.
"Does it hurt?" Light winced, wondering why he was asking. Wasn't it obvious? Hadn't he done this in the first place? Was he an utter moron? No, he was crazy, that was all. He was insane and unpredictable because of it.
"It's starting to," he finally replied as his thoughts ran in familiar circles. B stepped backwards off the table, uncannily graceful despite his contorted posture. He crossed the room to the door and turned back to Light to tell him that he would be right back, locking the door after he left.
Light was left alone to finish his meal, feeling more puzzled than ever. If he didn't know better, he'd say that this B and the one he had initially woken up to were two completely different people. Maybe B had dissociative personality disorder. After everything else, it really wouldn't surprise him.
The door clicked open, and he glanced up to see the gun, again, as well as a syringe in B's hand. Apparently, he had taken them out of the room while Light had been in the bathroom, perhaps so Light didn't try to use them on his own. Maybe B was going to let him remain unrestrained in the future. Light squelched that thought; better not to hope so he wasn't disappointed later.
"Can I trust you not to do anything incredibly stupid?" That got Light to look up. His tormentor was asking if he could trust him? B continued without waiting for an answer. "You have two options when I approach you: you can sit still and hold out your right arm so I can give you your next dose, or you can get shot if you move. This is loaded and I can squeeze the trigger long before you can take it from me." Light couldn't stop the frustrated little laugh that bubbled up out of him. Hopeless. This situation was hopeless.
He set down his now empty lunch container and propped his arm on the back of the chair so it was fully extended and pointed toward B. He turned his head away for good measure. Of course he wanted the morphine, and he probably wouldn't have fought him anyway. He knew better than to tangle with an armed man one-handed, but having B tell him what to do like that bit savagely into his already wounded pride, like a lion chewing on its prey without killing it just to make it suffer.
He felt the needle slide expertly into his arm and tried to relax so B wouldn't think he was getting ready to jump him despite his warning. The cool feeling snaked through him again, wiping away the memory of the pain in his tortured limb. It felt so good already, even though he knew it hadn't been long enough to actually deaden the pain. His mind was telling him that everything would be alright now, and that worried him.
"Feeling it already?" Light nodded, his eyes closing of their own accord as he breathed out slowly. B withdrew the needle before backing away to what sounded like his usual distance. "It always hits hard at first. You'll get used to it."
"Will I?" Light asked, not liking the 'lost child' sound that he could hear in his voice. It made him think that he was growing a little too comfortable with this arrangement already, asking B for answers and maybe even reassurance.
This fiend had hurt him, badly. He was not Light's friend, despite their rather civil conversation today; he was a madman who had kidnapped and tortured him in order to get to someone else. He was completely despicable.
He had to remember that, even as his eyes started to close as he nodded off.
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A/N - Sorry for the long break between chapters. I think I was a little overzealous in my updating at first. I can't keep up that pace this month with school, but I now have a laptop with Wi-Fi (my old one was EIGHT years old!) so I won't be going without the whole month, and neither will you! Yay! It feels so good to be writing again!
Hope you enjoyed, and thanks always for reading!