Nope. No excuses. I've had this lying around for at least three weeks and never posted it...

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Chapter 8

The raven-haired eccentricity lay almost completely still on his back as he stared at the single, dull light that lit the prison-like room.

Actually, it was a prison room... an old, broken down prison that had long been abandoned by everyone except the rats and the snakes and other unseemly creatures of the night. He liked the quiet it afforded, and the thick walls all around that would insulate any screams of his victims. He had worked on sprucing up a single wing, deep in the facility even beyond the reach of idiotic teenage punks, and the section now sported clean bathrooms, a sanitary rec-room-turned-lab, an incinerator in an off room that might have been a morgue (...God knows why the prison had an incinerator and its own morgue, but he certainly wouldn't be complaining) that he had fixed, and a kitchen. The few people who had meandered this deep into the bowels of the prison and managed to avoid the traps he had laid in the main halls had all had their death dates a few minutes after they walked into his line of sight... as such, he was allowed to indulge his twisted bloodlust for a night...

Yes, my bloodlust is twisted, mused the red-eyed killer as his eyes roved to the bunk above him, where his sleeping, chained victim was thrashing fitfully every once in a while, causing the chains to rattle unpleasantly; a scream would issue from his mouth occasionally, whimpers more often, fully contrived words less often... fully contrived words that were not names like "Beyond" and "Kira" even less often than that.

Bloodlust as defined by the masses is a want for merely that... blood... B's train of thought trailed off somewhere into the winding corridors of his mind as he lifted his hand and stared at it. It was so pale it seemed to almost be glowing in the half-dark dimness of the stuffy by clean room. Only a single blood stain tainted the otherwise immaculately cleaned concrete, and it was L's blood, so that was quite all right... the man had bit his tongue in his sleep. B had replaced the tongue with his own finger while he had worked to get the tongue guard out of his pocket, and now he lifted that hand so he could stare at the wound. It had stopped oozing quite a while ago, but there was still an ominous red tint to the wound and the surrounding skin.

I was never in this just for the thrill of murder... nay, to experience the thrill of murder you would have to have some kind of belief that life is indeed precious and sacred so you get that high when you take it away... I was never under such delusions, it's just experiments to me, yet I am classified as a "blood luster" under humanity's standards... a mere serial killer, not the master of a great chess game, a tactician...

Once again his thoughts trailed off when he subconsciously realized it was time. The killer had always had an impeccable internal clock, so much so that he never glanced at a clock intentionally to affirm his accuracy, not even when he was a boy... it was a feeling, an instinct that came along with the rest of his instincts; whether he had been born with such feelings or they had been pounded into him through deeper subterfuge from the torture house called "Wammy's"... he would never know, nor did he particularly care.

Chuckling softly, stopping, revising the chuckle, standing, and then revising it yet again as he noiselessly exited the room where his tormented Lawli lay, he hypothesized about the outcome of this particular experiment out of a whole line of experiments meant to decipher this one fact... whether or not fate succumbed to probability... and if not, explaining many of the impossible coincidences in the world of medicine and death...

The hallway wasn't lit at all, and the only light were a few moonbeams which had managed to find their way in through cracks in the ceiling or the barred windows of the prison rooms, but this was no problem for the jam lover. He had long ago learned to embrace the dark to quash the fear he had had of it when he had been a boy.

Even as he stepped into the room where his experiment lay, he didn't turn on the light immediately, instead letting his other senses give him a more detailed perception of the room first. Faint, clean scent of fresh blood and chemicals mixed, an undertone of mildew, which pervaded the entire facility, and an even more "under" undertone of salt from sweat and tears. The taste on his tongue was similar; barely metallic and chemically, slightly salty.

Currently, there was no actual sound except the soft whine of wind from outside the prison and the always present whisper of air circulating through the rooms, but otherwise, there was nothing except the doppelganger's own breathing, not even the slightest swish of a rustle from the sedated patient who he knew was in the middle of the room.

Now the man moved toward the switch. Even though it was on the other side of the room and not exactly a comforting walk in the dark with that hint of death, the raven trekked it without anxiety or problem, for he knew the room almost as well as he knew his the contours and attitude of his favorite knife. Unlike most of the rooms, this one was bone dry without a hint of humidity, although the damp smell of the mildew belied that fact. A modified air conditioner that was made specifically to suck the moisture out of the room so he could commence his experiments as accurately as possible... it was off now, as the raven had calculated the exact time each day and night the device would have to be running to keep the room at its optimum dryness... having it run 24/7 was not only annoying, but it also increased the chance of his discovery; although it was difficult to hear over the usual noise of the city, if anyone unwittingly strayed into his abode they would no doubt hear at least a faint reflection of the noise.

With a click, the room was flooded with a white, medicinal light, and the room in its entirety was revealed. The serial killer glided over the concrete towards the silent, tormented soul who was lying, back up, on a gurney, strapped down with restraints eerily similar to those the killer himself had been restrained with when they had taken him to asylum. His rounded face was red as a beet, the paunch he had originally sported had seemingly melted off, leaving an almost emaciated individual lying there, his head of messy, dark brown, wild hair had fallen out (the jam lover had gathered every last strand a few days ago when he had come back to his prison), and his body was marred with rashes and boils. A stainless steel table stood stoic, just out of the restrained man's reach, with several vials and syringes arrayed like small but deadly vanguards.

B cracked his neck audibly with a subtle smirk as his eyes trailed to the words and numbers that hovered unsteadily above the man's head... it wouldn't be too long now, only a few minutes... he took a seat on the concrete floor, leaned back and stared up through a crack in the ceiling with a content sigh.

The point of this particular chain of experiments was to see exactly how bound fate was to the practical, the expected, the scientific. B had injected his previous, oh, thirty or so victims with two various poisons that had two very, very different effects but would have no effect on each other as they ravaged the body, and B could easily factor in the inevitable effects the bodily detriments would have on each other, which would be minimal...; one was quite a bit more potent than the other. The serial killer wanted to see how many times out of ten the more potent poison would kill the victim than the lesser dangerous one. Seeing as how death dates were always set, he would be able to hypothesize a few various things according to the results, in conjunction with the volumes of information he had acquired from his years of experiments... mainly exactly how alterable death dates are, and how cemented to science fate is... for if it is Fate's whim the victim die from the less potent poison, who is B to try and misdirect the course of the imp's pleasures?

Once again Beyond's internal clock went off, and he stood up carefully from the floor, turning to stare at the corpse next to him. With a graceful turn, he stepped over to the table, carefully selected one of the battery-powered electric knives, perfect for cutting through bone and flesh cleanly, stopping to feel the coolness of it beneath his hand... with another quarter-turn, he faced the corpse again, removed the sheet, and turned the knife on. The high whine of it was soon punctuated by the slithering, wet sound and a higher whirring that sounded like wood being cut, but was really bone..

And somehow, at that moment... the exact moment the knife first cut through the skin above the sternum for the classic Y-cut of autopsies, B was unaware of everything but the canvas spread before him.

And that was when a low, keening, human whine rose above the sound of the saw.

It was L.