DISCLAIMER: I am not Lord Vasquez.

AUTHORS NOTES: This fanfic is a sort of... pet project of mine. I've already got it planned from beginning to end, and don't feel any particular need to stop writing it. That is, with the entire plot figured out, It is entirely likely that this story will most definitely be finished.

I know that this is short - when I write on paper, my stories always are. Every chapter will, unfortunately, hover around this length, but the story itself will be about 22 chapters long, if all goes to plan.

RELATION

Though Johnny had vowed to try and get his emotions under check, he still found himself, on occasion, dragging some sorry shit of a human being down to his basement under the triple-digit heaven house, strapping them into one of his innumerable torture devices and keeping them there until the person in question could recite exactly what it was that they'd done wrong, word for word - without him having revealed such information to them in the first place.
Of course by that point, he'd usually have the person reduced to tears and praying to every deity that they could think of -some of which were not even the pray-to-me sort- to let them go. Which, sometimes, Johnny did, as an experiment. Not pray to gods, no, but release them. Since his entirely disappointing encounter with God, and a distinctly less-than-pleasant trip through Hell, Johnny had decided that it was highly unlikely that any god cared about him even in the slightest. The whole encounter with the 'other side' as it were, had been very disillusioning.

Regardless of his belief that Deities were thusly undeserving of worship at all, Johnny would sometimes listen to the prayers of his captured victims, usually out of boredom and a lack of anything better to do, from some nearby, unseen area - and some rare captives would be lucky enough to be released, though not before he promised them a just-as-painful second go round if he ever caught them acting like the goblins deeper in the city ever again. He had yet to se any of his released captives disobey him. It was very pleasing.
There had been one man, he recalled, -named Dixon, if memory served, which to be honest, it usually didn't- that he had released and then proceeded to meet up with again several months later. Not on purpose, of course - it had been purely accidental.
Johnny had, at the time, only the vaguest of memories of the man, recognizing him but not sure where from. So, he had been fairly surprised when the man had begun pleading for his life in the middle of the street, begging Johnny to let him live, telling him everything he'd done since his release from the maniacs basement. He had, as Johnny recalled, broken down to tears when Johnny grinned, finally remembering where he had seem the man before, and assuring him that he had no immediate reason to, nor any interest in, recapturing him. Johnny had continued on his way and left the man bawling on the street, in too much of a good mood to be overly bothered by the noise.

Right now though, Johnny had another man in his basement, screaming that the maniac was going to 'get it'. After a while, the man had stopped, but still stared at Johnny with such an arrogant confidence that the maniac couldn't help but rant and yell and screech at the man before him that his death would be painful, and drawn out, that he was going to assure his death took as long as was physically possible.

"You don't understand..." The man finally had said one day, after enduring a particularly long, and less lucid rant from Johnny about cheese and peanut butter. Johnny paused, gazing at the man with a suspicious look in his hazel eyes.

"And that would be what, exactly?" He started. "Why I choose to keep you alive? Because if that's the case, then then you're right - I really don't understand. I should kill you - keeping you alive enough to be coherent is getting tedious." Johnny turned towards the table behind him; it was covered in blades of varying designs that needed to be cleaned before they rusted over. He lost too many knives that way. A knife was snatched up, and a cloth, too.

"No - that's not it." The man muttered, weak from lack of food but no less confidant, for some reason or another. "We've been tracking you for years." Johnny paused in his careful cleaning of the numerous blood-stained blades before him, turning to his captive with a wide, toothy grin upon his gaunt face.

"Oh have you? Obviously not very well, then, otherwise I'd be in a padded cell right now, wouldn't I?" The captive shook his head, chuckling. For a few moments, Johnny entertained the idea of tossing the dagger he was currently cleaning at the captive before him, into his skull - the only reason he didn't was because he was trying to deaden that part of him, the part that cared enough about shits like this to react to them. So, he let the man continue, even if only begrudgingly.

"Not if we only wanted to watch you - and believe you me, it was the most difficult of tasks for the longest time. You kept vanishing like smoke on the goddamned wind." Despite the man trailing off into silence, Johnny knew he wasn't done.

"However..." The maniac started for him, too impatient to let him begin on his own.

"However, recently you stared popping up all over the place. Whatever you used to do, you don't anymore." The man was grinning widely, his eyes flashing with all of the arrogance that Johnny hated so much. "We never tried to capture you because you were too slippery to dig into, too elusive to get any real, tangible evidence on. It was hard enough just to keep track of where you were, let alone what you did day to day." Now, the man looked rather high-and-mighty, and it was threatening Johnny's self-control. He looked as though he, despite being chained up, tortured, held captive and dying of both starvation and thirst, was somehow in a better position that Johnny.

"Why so chatty all of a sudden, hm?" Johnny asked, snatching up yet another of the dirty blades. He wondered if the man expected to have one thrown at him. The man certainly didn't act like it. Dagger still in hand, he moved, walking casually up to his captive. Perhaps this man needed some incentive so as to not talk like that to the man that controlled whether or not he remained alive. "Should I do something about it?" The man didn't respond - he only continued to grin, making Johnny narrow his eyes and wonder just what, exactly, could be done to finally sap this mans infallible confidence.
"How about I strap you into Edgar's Machine?" Johnny asked, not really looking for an answer. He'd either continue to grin, or agree with it. No help at all. The man was like to go along with anything Johnny suggested, and Edgar's Machine was as good as any other torture device in this expansive basement of his.

Originally, the machine hadn't really had much of a name. It had been another in a long line of nameless torture devices that littered the rooms of his basement, one of the ones that inevitably wound up with it's occupant dying. Edgar had been the first one to be put into that particular device, and because Johnny had had nothing to call the thing, he'd started calling it 'Edgar's Machine', even after he'd used it to kill dozens of others.
Besides, he was certain that Edgar wouldn't have minded - the man was one of severe few that Johnny had ever felt the need to remember, if not the only one.

"Sure." The man said, breaking the maniac out of his thoughts. "Too bad you won't get the chance." Again, Johnny narrowed his eyes, angered a fair bit by this captives ability to shrug off the seriousness of his situation and practically joke around with the man that was about to kill him.

"And why is that?" Johnny asked sharply. "Because you said so? I'm afraid that's not quite how it works down here." Johnny felt his voice turn sibilant with anger, and fought to control it as he continued to speak. This one man was ruining all of the progress Johnny had made on complete domination over his emotions! "You see, regardless of what you may think; down here I am untouchable. I have dragged thousands of shits and jock-holes just like you down here, and among those only two have escaped with their lives intact."

"Y'know, Dixon was a good man." Johnny twitched, narrowing an eye in confusion at the sudden change in topic.

"Dixon...?" Johnny muttered. "This wouldn't happen to be the very same Dixon I released a few months back...?" The man nodded.

"The same. He was one of our best, you know. Now we can hardly talk to him without him him taking off, yelling about something or other. We weren't prepared for his being captured, and hadn't the resources to try and take him back. His was a very unfortunate loss." Johnny fingered the bloody dagger still in the grip of his bony hands. He was sorely tempted to just kill this man and be done with it. It would certainly save him a lot of trouble.

"And what does that mean for me? If I could catch another one of you people, whoever you people are, with so few problems... You people aren't doing too well, you know." The captive only grinned again as he spoke.

"I was supposed to get caught. Now you've become a threat to us, we have to take you out. My friends will be here soon." Johnny laughed, dropping the dagger back down with the others, and headed upstairs. He was hungry - he could go for some skettios.

"Good luck." He muttered. "If I can kill in broad daylight with no consequences, I doubt I have anything to fear from you."

I apologize for the short chapter - when I write on paper, my stories are always always ALWAYS short. Well, not 'Another Time, Another Tale' (Unposted Kingdom Hearts fic I've been working on for nigh on three years now), but that's because I don't separate chapters in that until I realize that I'm more than twenty pages in.

Either way, forgive me for the shortness - but at the same time, for those of you honestly bothered by such: Get over it. I don't write for you. This is my story not yours. :p