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

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.

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

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