savetheearth | Entry #A-12: "Annihilation" [Text Open Network/Action closed to Tony, Dirk and Richard]

Time passed slowly when pain and fear governed every moment. Sleeping and waking mingled blearily due to the limited artificial light, which left the other senses to sharpen insidiously. Occasionally, the effect was unreliable; shadows moved in ways that were physically impossible, and disjointed conversations took place in the exclusive company of the gagged and the dead. And when that company was joined by thugs with thumbscrews, it was no longer unpredictable, just a weary dance of playing tired chicken with information that could hurt many other Numbered individuals. Starving and sleep-deprived after nearly a full week of torture, both L and Tony were in rough shape, but their ordeal was uneven; Tony had suffered the brunt of the physical anguish, and the comparatively brittle L had been saddled with the burden of watching, with the power to stop it all for the modest price of betraying everything he'd worked to protect.

Slumped in his chair, L rocked back on the leg he imagined to be slightly less sturdy than the others, with the same odd satisfaction a child might get from wiggling a loose tooth. He wasn't sure why he continued to persist as though there was any chance of escape; maybe it was purely the way Tony looked, beaten bloody with grey-tinged skin that said he couldn't take much more, but L couldn't just give up on the promise he had made to get Tony out of this. He had not been able to save Moises, and to lose Tony as well would be to lose his ability to live with himself, regardless of whether or not Albero's people killed him.

The door slid open again, much sooner than L had expected it to, and he braced himself for another session. If Tony succumbed today, it was true that L wouldn't be able to live with himself, but if the detective spoke, he wouldn't be able die peacefully, either.

In the last day or so Tony had grown largely unresponsive, even to the torture. Occasionally he vomited blood, or made a pathetic pained sound, but for the most part he simply drooped limply in his chair, unable to even lift his head. Fortunately as things progressed to this point he barely felt the pain anymore, honestly he barely felt anything. A little numb maybe, uncomfortably cold, but not much beyond that. What happened around him was a distant blur, and his mind processed things at the rate of cold molasses flowing.

He knew, distantly, that he was dying. There really wasn't any arguing about it anymore. L couldn't keep his promise, even if Anthony had known from the beginning there wasn't a chance. It was nice to have hope for a little while.

There wasn't even a twitch as the door slid open, either he was unconscious again or just so far gone that he couldn't even react to outside stimulus. On the bright side he didn't even scream anymore?

"Tsk. Look at this."

The lisping voice heralded the arrival of the now-familiar sight of a pale, solemn-looking woman with a small briefcase in the doorway. There were essentially two types of torture session that took place within these walls - indiscriminate artless beatings administered by thugs, and more specialist work done by this woman.

She was hardly an expert - that was why they'd brought L in, after all. Still, she'd shown an appallingly enthusiastic willingness to learn so far. Horribly appropriate, since she had some sort of serpentine modifications done to her at some point: she was literally a cold-blooded torturer.

"Such a mess."

Her lip curled distastefully, forked tongue flicking out to taste the air momentarily before retreating. She turned away and started to fuss with her case, ready to select today's implements of torture.

"Any requests for today? I don't suppose you'd like to just give up and talk. It would save us all a lot of effort."

L narrowed his eyes, lowering his head in an instinctive and primal stance of open aggression. Not that it did him any good strapped into a chair and gagged, but even when the rag came out of his mouth, the last time he'd chewed through it he'd promised himself and Tony that he wouldn't speak again. His silence was intended to be complete; if he convinced himself that he couldn't talk, it was the most effective way to ensure that he wouldn't. So his glare was the only answer their torturer would receive from him, regardless of the cruel method she settled on to loosen his tongue.

It was always harder once she started, though, and with Tony spitting up blood on the regular and drooping, no longer able to hold his head up, every ounce of empathy L possessed would be working against them.

As if any request I gave you would matter in the least. You always choose what hurts the most, what pushes him closer to death and me closer to breaking...

Edited (Phone tags) 2014-08-16 20:45 (UTC)

Still nothing from the slumped and broken form of Anthony. Only ragged, strained breathing to even give away that life still valiantly clung to him. Honestly even gagging was only a formality at this point. He had nothing to say, no sounds to make, could barely work his jaw as it was.

Much of the damage was due to those thugs, who were careless and thoughtless in their beatings. Damaged bones and organs, ruptured deep tissue that would bring death so much faster than the skilled hands of an experienced torturer. They knew how to make people suffer while keeping them from merciful death.

That was, after all, why they were more cruel. But honestly, is it even worth the time torturing a dying person?

The woman seems to have been asking herself a similar question. She plucked something from the case and stood behind L's chair, forcibly turning his head to ensure that he faced Tony.

"Just look what you've done. He's dying. You know it, I know it. Even the most astonishingly stupid of people can see it."

Anyone would think she was deliberately choosing as many words with s-sounds in them as possible in order to accentuate the lisp. In other circumstances, the effect might be comical.

She produced the item she'd taken from the case, reaching around L's face and delicately holding it before his eyes. A syringe.

"It's morphine. See how he's suffering? You could end it. Give him some form of relief. All you have to do is cooperate."

It was a cruel and dirty card to play, because L knew it well. He more than remembered the first time he'd tried morphine; he thought about it frequently, and was intimately familiar with the unique ability narcotics had to dull the senses, clouding what hurt and enhancing what felt like heaven. A lethal overdose of morphine was actually, all things weighed and considered, a tremendously humane and blissful way to die. To give it to a friend whose other option was to suffer to his last breath would be the last and greatest kindness L could bestow upon him.

It would also break their promise, unfortunately.

Eyes on Tony's face and the story of suffering it told, L shook his head back and forth twice.

Even though it was really hard to process and understand exactly what was going on or being said, Anthony was aware enough that talking was happening. The torturer was there, bothering L about something, and holding something in her hand. What was that, anyway?

With monumental effort he managed to shift himself, tilting his head enough to crack open one weary eye to peer at them from under his matted bangs. A syringe, it took a lot longer than it should have to realize what it was, but the word 'morphine' might as well be foreign to him right now. Anthony was still having a lot of trouble understanding things, one thing he did know is that for some reason instead of completely spent and exhausted that strange fury that he'd not had enough energy to feel in days had started to boil again.

Only this time it was different, he couldn't completely place how, but somehow it felt... dangerous. Like if whatever was going on didn't stop soon, things would get really bad. Not that he could articulate that at the moment, just work his jaw kind of uselessly, puff a frustrated exhausted noise, and go back to slumping because it took too much effort to try to watch.

Do what you want he didn't care anymore.

"Such cruelty. To do this to someone so young."

With a slight shrug and shake of the head, she returned to her case. Replacing the syringe, she instead selected a small, clear bottle of fluid which she held up for L's benefit.

"Sulphuric acid." She smiled - almost apologetically, though the effect was ruined somewhat by her snakelike unblinking gaze. "I'm going to pour this directly onto his eyes."

She stepped towards Tony's chair, sweeping the hair out of his face with her free hand. "I'm going to blind you now, Fido. So at least you won't have to look at the man who sentenced you to die as slowly and painfully as possible."

L's dark eyes widened even before she finished speaking the name of the second substance; he didn't need to be told what it would do when it came in contact with fragile corneas.

L shook his head more rapidly as she approached, then touched Tony, brushing his hair aside in a way that could almost be considered tender in a different situation. If Tony died, he wouldn't need his eyes... but if Tony died, then L had nothing left to lose. Clearly, she was trying to capitalize on Tony's final moments and the amount of comfort he had access to. It wouldn't be like Moises' swift and abrupt end, it would be drawn-out and terrible and haunting.

You can't...

Except she could, and would. Tony's eyes burning out of their sockets wouldn't kill him yet, and until he breathed his last, he'd be maimed before the perfect eyes of someone who could have stopped it.

His mouth opened, but only to draw in a sharp breath his chest didn't want to let go of. To exhale would be to scream, perhaps, or would be if L would permit himself a single vocalization. To plead would be fruitless, anyway; her cold eyes said as much, succinctly and with chilling finality.

Oh, that didn't sound good. Pretty sure that sounded very unpleasant, he liked his eyes after all. Well, he had liked his eyes, he'd started to dislike them after he'd watched Moises' rather violent end, and everything else he'd been witness to recently. Acid wouldn't remove the memories, however, so it really wasn't going to help him any.

Hah, with that name you'd think he was a beloved pet, or maybe he was just getting delirious. Safe bet on the latter, really. Anthony just looked up at her, expression vaguely pleading, mostly confused, as if asking 'what did I do to deserve this?'

But something was off, something deeply unsettling and somehow more worrying than even his impending blinding. He struggled a little, hissing through his gag as if trying to speak. This was really the most fight he'd put up in quite a while, of course she'd probably misinterpret it as him being afraid of losing his eyes.

Not so much, he was trying to warn her.

As one would expect, she took the muffled vocalisations as pleas to stop. Inclining her head as if in sympathy, she unstoppered the bottle of acid.

"It isn't me you need to appeal to. It's him." She nodded towards L and then reached out to loosen Tony's gag, the bottle held precariously over his face. There was no point in muffling his screams, after all, when they would only help encourage L to talk. "Brace yourself. This is going to be unpleasant."

She began tilting her hand with agonising slowness, keeping her gaze cooly fixed on L. The message was clear: you can still stop this. Talk.

L wished to be a stone. Unsurprisingly, like all of his wishes since their captivity had begun, it didn't come true, and he was left to watch the bottle tip closer to Tony's eyes while his pounding heart battled his breaking mind.

He could stop it. He needed to save the many at the cost of the few, but he could stop it, what monster wouldn't with that power? The back legs of his chair raised then hit the floor hard as he strained forward in a fruitless attempt to physically stop her; he was suddenly desperate to get her attention and try to make a deal, something that might make them both happy, something that could spare Tony the kind of agony she was about to inflict on him.

He nodded earnestly, but when he opened his mouth to start negotiations, not a sound came out. It seemed, ironically, that one of L's wishes had indeed been granted: now that he wanted to talk, he actually couldn't.

Of course she misunderstood, of course she misread his intent and plea. That terrible roiling something that chewed at his gut and clawed at his mind grew louder and more furious by the moment. Waiting, biding its time but for what? Anthony didn't understand, he couldn't comprehend what it was that was going on in him. Was his body just betraying him, was this what dying actually felt like? Not slow and cold and agonizing but furious and thrashing?

With the gag out of his mouth he was finally able to try to make out the words he so desperately wanted to say. However, with his jaw not cooperating and his tongue feeling like a chunk of tree bark he still only managed a few broken, raspy words. "Sh-shn't," Some slurred sounds too garbled to make out and. "Cn't s-stp." Vowels were the bane of his existence with a poorly working jaw, let him tell you.

L's struggling caught his attention, and though he craned a bit to see what was going on Tony knew better than to struggle too much with acid dangling precariously over his face. No, L, if you talk now this all would have been for nothing.

Unpleasant was putting it mildly. The pain from that first drop of acid was like nothing he'd felt to date, the agony was enough to drag a pitiful pained cry from his wrecked and battered form. However, it was what else was dragged out that was infinitely more interesting.

All at once his eyes went black, both eyes, irises taking on an unearthly red glow. Around and from him shadows seemed to coalesce as if they'd come alive, his form shifting and billowing, growing to a towering, menacing height. The sound of bindings ripping, the chair splintering as it was crushed beneath what had been Tony just moments before. It took less than a few seconds for the transformation to take place, the broken pieces of chair batted aside like a mild irritation as the creature loomed over the snake woman.

To call it 'black' would be a gross understatement, it was more like trying to look into the absence of light, a strange writhing darkness that was difficult to pinpoint. The creature didn't wait long for a reaction, it lunged without so much as the preamble of a growl, teeth aiming to dig into her throat while claws sought whatever flesh they could rend.

Despite her modifications, the woman wasn't built for fighting. She could hold her own with a handgun, sure, but she absolutely was not engineered for fighting off...

...well. Whatever the hell that was.

The blank look she'd been wearing as she'd dangled the acid before Tony's face vanished, her eyes widening and her jaw dropping open slackly. Her fast reflexes didn't allow her to escape the creature's claws, but they did allow her to throw the remainder of the acid at him while letting out a loud, unearthly shriek.

"GUARDS!"

Something was wrong, something more than all the things that had been obviously wrong for a week and counting. At first, his thought was that Tony couldn't stop from spilling the information they'd agreed to take with them to the unmarked graves that were in their very near futures, and a pang of dread flared in his chest. Then he thought that maybe Tony was telling him that he couldn't stop, that he needed to stay strong and bite through his tongue before he let a single name slip past it. He shuddered and winced as the acid came in contact with the soft tissue of Tony's eye, resisting the temptation to close his own. He was currently being spared a lot of physical anguish, but it felt enormously disrespectful to turn away from the torture that Tony was being subjected to. L always watched, no matter how much it made his insides slither and revolt, because to ignore it would be to ignore the sacrifices that were being made, if unwillingly, to spare his own brittle body from being beaten and broken.

Watching the effects of the acid, however, was disturbing in a different way than the other inflictions and injuries had been. Black and red... was that possible, for eyes to react so suddenly and hideously?

I did this.

It didn't matter that Tony had taken so many beatings for him. L was fragile, and L was breaking.

I'm sorry.

Something lunged, the woman screamed, and L broke.

Take me, too.

Not much was, honestly, the strength and speed of this particular kind of creature is only written about in the darkest supernatural stories. And she now had one baring down on her furious and hungry.

The shout didn't concern him, nor did the acid which seemed about as annoying as slightly too hot water for all the good it did. A little twitch, nothing more, but with her in his claws he twisted and wrenched, aiming to simply rend her apart. Much like everything else about the strange horrifying creature his strength was beyond human, flesh and bone might as well be a rag doll in its grasp.

Hopefully those guards get here soon because he would absolutely love to introduce himself properly.

Dazed and petrified, there were several long moments where L could only stare in shock at the carnage spread out before him. The fact that he was covered in warm, far-flung gore was actually the least of his worries; while the germaphobe ordinarily panicked over the smallest bits of perceived contamination, he had just seen Tony transform into something enormous and terrifying. A monster, or demon, or unnamed grotesque horror, whatever it was had erupted when Tony was near death and L was near cracking, tearing the interrogator in half and painting their grim cell a hideous shade of deep crimson. It had lasted for just a few moments but L remembered every detail, and every detail made him tremble as the other Mafiosos made a hasty and panicked retreat. Though his own legs wanted to run, they were currently tied to a chair, as they had been for the last week, and his adrenaline had no such easy outlet.

That loose leg was at the forefront of his thoughts, though. Kicking against the floor, he threw himself down with as much force as he could, feeling it in his shoulder but mostly in the gloriously cracking wood. He tugged his hands away from the twisted amalgam of splintered wood and knotted rope, pulling himself toward the dismembered Mafioso's belt. A knife and a gun were both present, and he used the former to saw apart the ropes binding his legs and stuffed the latter into his suit pocket. Since he was covered in burst human, anyway, he took advantage of the ability to finally contact the network by scrawling his number, a location, and an appropriately urgent message in the cooling blood and entrails.

He wasn't finished yet, though. There was still the matter of Tony's unconscious form. At least, L hoped he was merely unconscious, pulling his limp arm over his shoulder and maneuvering clumsily to drape and lift his slight but dead weight. With his difficult hands, it was more about balancing the body than holding it, and there were a few false starts before he had any success at all. He staggered to his feet, which slipped slightly on the slick floor. Starting off at a tottering, lurching run, he found the outside hall, along with the path to the warehouse's nearest exit, bizarrely clear. His run became an adrenaline-fueled sprint as he barreled through the door and out into the fading but natural sunlight of evening, a scrawny, blood-soaked young man who carried the same on his back. He had last approached this building at night, and he was currently on the other side of it, but he knew where he was, and his ruined dress shoes pounded the pavement back toward the more populated and friendly parts of Locke City until his legs finally gave out. He collapsed in a heap alongside Tony, breathing hard, shaking as he removed his jacket and collared shirt and pressed them against anything that looked like it was bleeding. Tony was covered in blood, his own and another's, and it was almost impossible to tell the difference at this point.

In L's current state of mind, it was also nearly impossible to tell the difference between friend and foe. Anyone attempting to approach the refugees would be advised to do so with extreme caution.

Holy SHIT. Police...er wait...is police going to be any use here?

Everything is under control for the moment. L has been checked into the hospital to be tended.

Edited 2014-08-18 02:06 (UTC)

Thanks for the update. Anyone else was hurt?

Tony has been hospitalized for injury as well. As far as I know, neither of them are in immediate danger at this point.

Tony too? Damn. What the hell was going on?

What is your current status--should I bring a doctor?

[Not that he knows where he can find a doctor, but he'll just kidnap one and fly in there or something, this is how this parrot rolls.]

Edited (whoops I misread stuff there) 2014-08-17 23:56 (UTC)

L has been admitted to the hospital. He's all right for now.

Thank you for letting me know. Can he have visitors? I would like to come see him if he is able and if the hospital will let me inside without too much fuss.

[ Well, that's.

That's.

Horrifying as all hell. She'd been worried, given the messages earlier in the week noting him missing. Even if he was okay... This was a hell of a thing to wake up to. ]

Entry #A-12: "Annihilation" [Text Open Network/Action closed to Tony, Dirk and Richard]

Before [Closed to Tony, L, NPCs]

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

After [Closed to Tony, L, Richard, and Dirk]

Text

Text ; A couple of hours later

Text ;

Text ;

Text ;

[Text]

Text ; A couple of hours later

Text ;

[not here, only seen after the fact and the notices of hospitalization, just a reaction tag~]