Hi there! I won't bother you too much with my rambling I promise. Just a quick warning though, English is not my native language so you might find a few odd things in there. I tried to proofread everything but still, I thought I'd give you a fair warning.
I hope you'll enjoy reading this as much as I had fun writing it! It's been a long time since I last posted anything on this website, so I have no idea how this story will be received. Let's just hope for the best, right?
I met B when I was eight.
I don't really know how old I am, mind you, but the approximation serves the purpose of our story.
I was born in misery. My mother was a common whore, and not a very remarkable one at that. From what I understand she wasn't pretty, nor was she particularly clever. Whatever few redeeming qualities she had – if she had any – couldn't make up for her lack of wits. I've been told she ended up on the wrong side of the wrong people, got raped, got pregnant and promptly died in childbirth.
The little thing that clawed its way out of her belly didn't even reward her sacrifice with a wail. The babe came into the world, coughed a few times, but otherwise stayed silent. Its red face all scrunched up like a prune, its tiny hands balled up in angry fists, the little beast kicked like hell but refused to acknowledge its mother. All it did was latch onto her dying breast and suck greedily.
No one really saw what had happened until they heard a babe yelling somewhere deep in the brothel. When they got to her cell they found her covered in blood and gore among the dirty linens. Naked down to her waist, tits out, and here I was, sucking on a dried out nipple and very displeased about it.
I wasn't born a fighter. I was turned into one.
The whores kept me for a time. I guess I was some sort of pet to be groomed and fed occasionally. I grew up in a long dirty hallway leading to doors only seedy men would pass, fly open and pants falling off their flabby butts.
Many times would I hear moans and dirty talk through those doors, and even more frequently would they try to take me there too. But I was a nasty thing to behold, all greasy-haired with a snarly face, crouched down on my haunches and too fast for them to catch.
I took to stealing whatever shiny things I could find in their pockets. The whores kept them occupied well enough for me to sneak in and out of the rooms, steal their pocket watches and bank notes, some engagement rings too, and vanish with none of them being the wiser. I got a pretty penny out of my antics, enough to buy some food and decent clothing for a while.
But then I grew up. I got tall enough to suck a cock. Tall enough for them to fantasize about tiny lil' me on all four, butt in the air, crying out for Daddy.
I gauged my first eye at six.
Some dirty old fart who ran a bank, or some CEO who thought being on top of the world out there would give him supreme rights over anyone and anything down under. He was in for quite the surprise. I don't remember much, only that he somehow managed to back me into a corner and tore my shirt off. Next thing I knew, I had launched myself at him with all the fury a wild little beast like me could muster. I clawed at his face, spit at him, snarled and tore at his flesh until I felt his grip on me slacken. He screamed – oh boy did he scream – and wailed like a baby, holding his hands to his face. A trickle of blood ran through his fingers and stained mines.
The man never came back. Neither did I.
I was beaten to an inch of my life that day. They left me half dead on the floor. No whore would heal me as I had lost them one of their best clients. The pimps sold me to the rings soon after. Here I was told one very simple rule. One that even the dimmest of the dim could understand.
Fight for your life.
So I fought. I fought on those rings. I fought kids my age and old men, grown adults and lanky teenagers. I fought meat and left steak behind. The world had never been so simple for anyone out there.
Fight or die.
It was a simple life, really.
It quickly became apparent to me that whatever brains my mother had lacked, I certainly did not have inherited the same faulty disposition. I was wholly uneducated, but I was clever. Clever enough to spot a weakness on my opponent's left kneecap, or to see a pattern in their movements and move accordingly. I had never been taught how to read, but I learned to recognize the inscriptions on the doors. "Toilets", "Private", or "Kennels".
B came in unannounced, as great men always do.
To this day, I'm still unsure of his reasons for seeking me out. I believe he was just there, and saw something he couldn't quite decipher. Maybe I was just that flavor of odd he had never tasted. He told me I had something he sought, but B had always had a private agenda. Some sort of secret motive that even I could never quite understand.
He had been sheltered, you see, and he wanted to have a taste of what he called a cocktail of pure instinct, brute strength and ferocity. He wanted a taste of me, as if he could just crack my skull open and suck the animal right out of me with a metal straw. I have no doubt that he would have done so had it been a sure way to reach his purpose.
He saw me fight and he liked it. He liked the beast I was, the mad dog that anyone out there would have put down without a second thought. He came from the outside, you see, and stood out like a sore thumb in the crowd. I didn't see him – but I know he did. He was well-mannered and moved like a cat, used big words and strung them together in sentences that were too beautifully crafted for us not to notice how odd, how beautiful he was among us.
And yet he belonged.
There was something about him, some quiet power than laid dormant deep inside him, some kind of vibration thrumming under his skin. A disease running rampant in his flesh, crawling up his veins and festering in his brain. He was as mad as the rest of us, just as damned and just as wretched. He was that refined monster that got me hooked. I had that edge he craved.
All my life I had been living on the razor's edge. I knew nothing about living, only surviving. He, one the other hand, had been pampered in a nice manor somewhere deep in England's countryside. He had been pampered, waited on and taken charge of from a very tender age. He may have been an orphan, but he never had been a wanting one.
He was taught to read and write. He was taught to think and to deduce; he had learned how to see the reasoning behind apparent madness, how to understand even the darkest minds. He was taught to fight – some pretty moves for sure, all proper and clever, carefully timed and oh so useless down bellow. He was taught a glorified version of the dirtiest mess there ever was on earth. He fought without bloodshed, without anything at stake.
He fought like I read. Like a bloody dumb cow.
He approached me at the end of the fight. Some tried to stop him but to no avail. He didn't even grant them a look as he bypassed them all. He went straight to the point. He was never one to waste his words.
He could use me. He had something I wanted. If I just said the word, he would take me away. Give me everything I never even knew I had longed for. Yet hearing him talk, I got a taste. A thrilling experience it was, to hear that many words come together in intricate patterns; such power, such knowledge hidden away behind his dark eyes. All those things I didn't know, all I had yet to discover and didn't even know was there, right at my fingertips. All I had to do was say yes.
And say yes I did.
There was no hesitation, no second-guessing anything. I traded instincts for knowledge. Brutality for civilization.
He took me away.
He grasped my hand and didn't let go. His long fingers curled up around my wrist, pressing uncaringly on my bruises as he rose up from his crouch and simply walked away. Minutes later, policemen stormed the gates of the building and shots were heard left and right.
B never said anything. He simply smiled that creepy smile of his, turned off his phone and crushed the SIM card between two fingers before disposing of it in the nearest trashcan.
The fighting rings were dismantled that night. The prisoners were sent to rehabilitation centers and no one ever heard of them again. Most of the leaders escaped. Their henchmen weren't so lucky. Some were killed in the mayhem, other were caught and incarcerated after a very short trial.
And that was it.
B taught me.
I taught him.
As I gobbled up information like a starving pig he delved into my psyche, trying to understand what made me tick, what made me the beast he wanted to emulate.
I taught him about fighting dirty. I broke his idea of honor and laughed at the mere idea of rules. Survival didn't abide rules. I fought him and won, time and again, but he never stopped trying. He was taller, stronger, but I was faster and definitely meaner. His pretty moves weren't worth crap against me. I sent him flat on his back, again and again. I broke his wrist and his arms, smashed his legs and blackened his eyes, and every time I did he had that look about him. I knew an animal when I saw one. B had forgotten how to be one, and he wanted me to remind him.
So remind him I did.
I soon leaned about L.
B never was interested in my conversation until much later, but even at the beginning of our association he talked about him. L. His brother I guessed, though that notion became blurred as time went on.
I never quite understood their relationship. I never was interested to begin with. But L had something B wanted.
L was first.
He was first and B was not, though I never quite knew what "first" meant. I never cared to ask. B was Backup, second rate, good but not quite enough. He was disposable, he said, but he wanted more. He wanted to be the real deal. He wanted to be better than the best, he often said, and he wanted L to know it. He wanted to be acknowledged and deemed worthy, you see, but revenge had too sweet a taste for him to pass up on his way to greatness.
He wanted L to suffer.
Wanted him to know what being second best was, what not good enough felt like. He wanted him to know he lost to none other than the one person who had never measured up. He wanted to have something L never had.
And that something was precisely what he needed me for.
He needed to acquire something L wouldn't understand. Something he wouldn't be able to anticipate, something that would give him the winning edge.
He needed to leave the land of rationality – that land L had already conquered – and dive into madness. He sought to shed his humanity, what tethered him to the shore of predictability to drift away in raging waters. He needed the beast to impart some of her savagery to him. L wouldn't know how to think like an animal. He was too well educated, too rational, too logical to understand. He wouldn't expect it, B used to say, and that might win him the fight.
I didn't care at the time.
I had never learned to care about anyone but myself.
I learned to care about B though. In time. He gave me letters and ink, pencils and books, so many keys that opened up the way to knowledge. How dim, how clueless I had been! He threw books at me and told me to be quick. Ordered me to be quiet. He often needed to think.
We spent about two years together. Two years and I looked more and more human. B, however, sank deeper into madness. That same madness that saw me come into the world. That particular brand of crazy flowing through my veins had infected him and now, as I learned how to tame the beast, his got wilder. Angrier. Meaner.
He spent our last days together obsessing over what he called "the impossible case". He would spend hours muttering in the dark, sometimes shouting random exclamations or hitting something when the scenario running through his head didn't go as planned. Our fights got more intense. It never worried me. I knew he would never kill me – he still needed me after all – but fighting for the sake of it had lost its shine. I had moved on from being a beast. I wanted to be more than a mere animal, though books weren't quite cutting it anymore. I knew about society but somehow couldn't quite figure out how to be part of it.
But then one day, he won.
He sent me flat on my back. He was on me in a flash, some kind of blade pressing against my throat. I didn't see where he got it from. Time stopped. He stared at me wide-eyed, stunned by his own victory. And as I stared back, I knew that our time together had come to an end.
B left the very same night. I didn't try to stop him.
I wandered for a time, not quite sure what to do with myself yet. I knew I wanted to try my hand at being human. I just needed a chance.
The opportunity presented itself in a most unusual way.
A police raid of all things.
I had fallen back on what I knew best. The underworld. Yet I had learned things that none other knew. I was different. Changed. Knowledgeable. One look around and I saw things that had escaped my notice before. I guessed people's interests, unveiled their plots and uncovered their darkest secrets after a single glance. I saw their relationships and decoded them as easily as basic equations. I discovered that I could influence the power balance there. The scales were easily tipped. One push here, one suggestion there, the whisper of a rumor in the right ear and I could overthrow kings and crown new ones. I was the master that could tame them all, control whatever pathetic lives they led. I was clever enough to do that. To come out on top and become the leader of the underworld, the greatest criminal there had ever been.
Yet I knew not what purpose it could serve.
Why would I sell drugs to a bunch of lost souls? Why would I send children down in the fighting pits, or sell unfortunate young girls to greasy old pigs? Money? What would I even do with it? Nothing had caught my interest. Nothing but the world above, the world I had read so much about. I still thirsted for knowledge and excitement. I longed to shed my fur and step into a suit of human skin.
So I did.
I sold a fighting ring to the police.
First I infiltrated the rings, went back to fighting for a while. I stayed long enough to plant a few clues here and there, to pull the right levers. And when the time was right, I pushed the right button and sent dozens of policemen storming through our gates.
Just like B years ago, I disposed of the stolen mobile phone I had used to text my final clue to the police.
Then I played my part.
The police found me, as well as the others, down in the cages. We were locked up like animals, just as I remembered. I made sure to pick the worst of the rings when I devised my plan. As we saw policeman after policeman run along our cage, I paid close attention to my surroundings. I didn't want to be sent to a rehabilitation center, after all. I needed to catch their attention, but I didn't want to appear too broken. They needed to think there was still hope for me yet.
Mr Yagami spotted me the very moment he came into the room.
I was only thirteen – few of us were as young as I was. Children usually didn't survive. Yet I had, and I knew he was hooked. I knew it as soon as I saw those eyes fall on me and his expression morph into one of shock and profound displeasure. I came to realize that he had children of his own, and I quickly identified his empathy as my greatest opportunity. I met his gaze head on. Here, crouched in that dirty cage, I knew that my entire future hung in the balance.
Mr Yagami took me home that night. He introduced me to his wife, then to his children. Mrs Yagami was a kind soul, such as I had never seen before. She cuddled me, fed me and showered me with affection as soon as her husband told her of my story. It took some getting used to, I'll admit.
As time passed, I grew to like this family. Mrs Yagami's food and tender hugs, Mr Yagami's kind reprimands, little Sayu's antics and Light's quiet conversation.
I kept learning. I learned about affection, family and friendship. I learned about loyalty, I learned about kindness and selflessness. I learned how to smile and how to laugh, how to joke and how to comfort.
I learned about justice.
Such a concept had always been preposterous to me. Justice couldn't reach the depths of the underground. Never once had it touched me, nor had I ever wanted it to. Mr Yagami decided otherwise. He was a solemn man: his honesty was uncompromising. So was his sense of justice. More than once did I break his rules. I took something I wanted – be it a toy or a piece of cake – when it wasn't mine to take, or stole something I thought I needed. Equality sounded like a fairytale in my ears. Want. Take. Brute force was my currency. He would have none of that.
I often think that B gave me freedom.
I also know that Mr Yagami gave me humanity.
He gave me the final ingredient to my transformation. The moral compass I never knew I lacked – a sense of justice. Here it was, the difference between men and beasts. A sense of right and wrong, some sort of moral code, a wish for harmony and equal opportunity. A set of guidelines that could benefit everyone, high and low, clever and dim, if properly enforced.
And so I found my purpose.
I left them when I reached sweet sixteen.
As much as I had come to love that family, the underground called. I was born there. I belonged there. My purpose laid there, or so I had finally understood. So I whispered my goodbyes and slept away into the night.
I spent the next two years tracking down monsters.
I broke down empires, dismantled so many human trafficking rings that my name became the bane of the underground. I was the monster that scared monsters, the one beast they had failed to break and that had come back to bite them in the ass. I was relentless. I collected evidence and left clues for the police to find. I manipulated giants and tricked them into ruin. I left them threadbare, on the verge of a mental breakdown. And when the final straw was so close that they could feel breathing down their neck, when they had nothing left to their name but a gun and one last bullet, I would call them and give them a choice. Give themselves up or eat a bullet. None of them ever chose death. None of them were brave enough to face the end of their own existence. They all collapsed into tears, shaking and snorting, begging for mercy to the one person who would never listen.
The police knew there was someone cleaning up the underworld. No one ever mentioned it though. I was effective, so why bother?
It all came to a screeching stop when B came back into my life.
Of course he would appear when I least expected him.
I discovered that the lanky teenager I had met all those years ago had turned into a tall, wiry man. He sat crouching and regularly stuck his fingers in a jar of strawberry jam. He clutched everything with the tip of his fingers and had lost so much sleep that his eyes were now underlined with deep, dark circles. His hair was tousled, his clothes too large for him. His eyes though, those hadn't changed. Dark, bottomless pits that could swallow me whole if I let them.
They had molded him into something I didn't recognize.
And as I sat staring at him, I saw someone else staring back for a second.
B had turned himself into someone he wasn't. Someone he wanted to crush into the ground. He had stolen every bit of him he could see and emulated the man with frightening accuracy. I had never met L. Yet here, in that room, I suddenly felt like I had.
B had adopted a mannerism he didn't even know I was quite familiar with. Whoever L was, he sat like someone who was always ready to leap to his feet and make a run for it. He acted like he despised human contact, much like I had seen children fear it after too many beatings. He crouched like someone who was used to protect vital parts of his body at all times.
L had never seemed so familiar. I wasn't sure that B understood what those mannerisms meant. What it said about the man he tried so hard to impersonate. Maybe he did. Maybe he didn't. But as I watched him move around the room, I couldn't help but feel anger clawing up my throat. Those traits weren't something to joke about. They were scars, gaping wounds that had scabbed over and healed overtime. They were the last remnants of a struggle that one could never forget, no matter how many years had gone by. They were too hardly acquired for anyone to just harbor them without the terrible story that came with them. They weren't supposed to be mocked and disrespected.
Yet B wasn't laughing.
They wanted a replacement, so here it was. A distorted vision of a man I'd never met. B had become a bastardized version of someone I wasn't sure I understood, a mockery of the man he was supposed to become.
Did they know how much damage they had done?
Backup could never just play backup. He needed his own spot to shine. He was denied, so he decided to just take L's. He was supposed to replace him, right? And he was almost there too, or so he said. B's impossible case had almost come to fruition. He failed to become the new L – even he saw how twisted he had become – so he would die carving his own place. He would be backup no longer. He planned to push L from his pedestal, smash his brains into the ground and destroy everything he stood for. He wanted to burn L's first place and build his own castle there.
He would present him with a case he would never crack.
He didn't ask anything of me.
Weirdly enough, he came to say goodbye. I caught glimpses of him under the L persona, but those glimpses were brief and often blurry. B was almost manic in his obsession.
He didn't stay long after that. I knew what I had taught him would be used in an act of rebellion against whoever L was, and whatever had been done to B in that orphanage of his. I knew he wasn't sound of mind anymore. I knew he was dangerous. I let him go all the same.
B was the first of many things for me. My first friend, my first mentor, my first savior. He gave me my first pen, taught me my first letters, made me laugh for the first time.
He was also my first betrayal.
I left a clue. Just one. One that would tip the scales and leave him broken.
B planned to murder innocent people and I couldn't stop him. I owed him that much. I did, however, send that first clue that send L on his tracks much sooner that he should have been.
L unknowingly taught me another great lesson that day.
Justice often comes at a great price.
I watched from afar as B was defeated. I lost my first friend forever that day, and Justice turned out to be an ungrateful mistress. B had chosen his path; nothing I could have said would have changed his mind. Yet I lamented his fate. L had ensured Justice had been served for B's victims. But what about B himself?
B had never been a gentle soul. He was harsh, arrogant, and quite insufferable at times. He told the truth without varnish and never bothered with pleasantness. He was also brilliant, driven and funny in that wicked, roguish way of his. He was hurt, insecure and crushed by the pressure they put him under.
He deserved justice too.
Yet I knew that he would never get it. So I left.
I stopped seeking Justice and took a trip around the world.
I met great people and terrible people; I saw beautiful things and horrors no one could behold without a flinch. I kept learning and I never forgot, no for one second, the feel of B's hand pulling me out of the pit. I thirsted for everything the world had to offer. B had given me the freedom to enjoy it, and I intended to honor him that way.
Until Kira appeared, and everything changed.
I don't pretend that I don't understand Kira's reasoning. I understand it all too well. But I've been taught differently and I have sacrificed my most precious friend to a Justice that Kira now threatens to annihilate.
B's fate would be meaningless if L's justice didn't prevail.
My own sacrifice would lose its significance.
As I grew from beast to human, L, I came to realize that I am a very prideful person. I don't like anything I do going to waste. I don't want B to die either. So Kira must fall.
Understand, L, that I didn't pick your side out of conviction.
You are merely a way to an end.
Now you will be pleased to learn that the one thing I left out of my story is precisely what will convince you to let me take part to the investigation you're currently leading. I wouldn't have reached out otherwise.
My mother died in childbirth and I was given away to the fighting pits before anyone could really come to care for me. By the time B found me I had been nicknamed Beast, for I was the most ferocious little thing that ever lived. B never cared for that name, so he called me Ren. I kept that name when I introduced myself to the Yagami, out of commodity more than anything else.
But you see L, what you have and I don't, what makes me the wildest and the most invaluable pawn on your chessboard, is as simple as that.
A name.
I was never given one. I am no one, and we both know that Kira can't kill ghosts.
I will be waiting, L, for any partnership you might suggest on that case. I believe curiosity will draw you to me, if nothing else. After all, wouldn't you be curious to see what kind of wild card B released into the world?
xXx
L carefully folded the letter and passed it back to Watari.
Minutes passed by in utter silence. One could only hear the whirring of the four computers running in the background.
After a while, Watari took it upon himself to read the strange letter that had caused such a contemplative mood in his young protégé. The first sentence left him reeling. What followed floored him. By the time he finished reading, L had turned around and was watching him closely, seeking guidance in one silent look. Watari couldn't quite come up with anything yet.
L understood – of course he understood – and came up with a decision of his own. After all, she was right. He was curious, if nothing else.
One look from him, that's all it took. Watari knew what he had to do.
"Call her."