I can never write something that isn't depressingly morbid and horrifyingly distressing with these two. I blame Raito. He's the mass murderer in the relationship. Warning in this story for references to child abuse, kidnapping, rape, and psychological torture. This is the recovery.
The wall was blank, except it really wasn't.
True, there were no pictures. It was bereft of paint. But there was blood.
Glazed amber eyes blinked tiredly at the stains on the walls surrounding him. Some stains were older than others, a dark brown compared to a bright, unfriendly crimson.
He used to associate that color with the sunset or rise.
The door opened, and he couldn't ever summon the energy to feel fear. Dead, empty eyes turned to the man in the doorway, and from his corner, he began to shake reflexively when the man stepped inside and pulled out the now-familiar knife.
…
The walls were blank. This time, they really were.
On some level, he knew that. He had seen them in a moment of clarity. But the bloody stains lingered still.
Unchanged amber eyes were drawn the door where the woman stepped in. She smiled at him, but he gave no reaction. Her smiled lessened a little, and she made a note on one of those clipboards they all carried around.
He blinked lazily in her direction, and he vaguely heard some sort of buzzing noise. He ignored it. She reached for his arm, which was wrapped neatly in several white bandages stained red. He screamed. She took out a needle, and he screamed louder, struggling against the bond that held him down. She pressed the needle into his arm, and he saw only black.
…
The walls weren't blank this time. The variety was confusingly comforting.
He recognized the room as the one he used to sleep in, years and years ago. He had been nine; last he had seen this place.
He had had his seventeenth birthday two weeks ago.
Still dead amber eyes flicked over the furniture. A queen sized bed, a bookshelf, a desk, a lamp, a bedside table- they were all different. He imagined, vaguely, that they had updated the room as the years went on. Kind, but entirely unnecessary.
He turned to the people he had been reintroduced to two days ago as his parents and thanked them with a smile and a nod of his head. He shut himself in the room and relished in the feeling of a locked door.
He knew they were on the other side. He didn't much care. The bloodstains were covering his baseboards.
…
The walls still weren't blank, but certainly less decorated than before.
He preferred the silence brought by empty walls. His family fretted over that development, but he thought it was reasonable.
The books were interesting. He has learned a lot when he was away- he was loathe to call it anything other than that- including everything he would need to survive on the streets and in the government, if need be. They were cruel, but they had planned on using them, all of them, to break down the world's base little by little.
He was their favorite, as the smartest of the bunch.
It was no different in his senior year of high school. For the first time, he found himself able to gaze out a window. Not become entirely uncaring of the teacher's instruction, without fear of being beaten afterward.
He had quite forgotten what it felt like to be around people who didn't really care.
He placed the book aside and heard his mother call him for dinner. His amber eyes- still dead, still vacant, still haunted- snapped to the door with an urgency that would scare most people. His family was somewhat more adjusted to it over the course of three months. He stood, and felt the metal braces in his ankles shift and realign to allow him to walk. They had been installed in the hospital.
With unsteady steps, he made it to the door and inwardly despaired at the blood-soaked stairs that greeted him.
…
The walls around this new place were blank in an unnerving way. It was disturbingly familiar, and he hated them.
The man who was currently employing his father was staring at him, and he fought the urge to shift and curl into himself. The stare reminded him of those other men, right before he got punished. Blank like the walls, yet as sharp as his eyes used to be, before he went away.
His father was shouting at the man, but, as always, he didn't really hear what was being said. He got the gist of it, but he ignored it, terrified at what it implied. The man snapped back, but only once, and it was enough to silence his father.
He wondered what kind of man the onyx eyed creature was, to have such power over a man twice his size and nearly triple his age. He also wondered why his father- oh, how he hated those words, mother, father, sister, because he had no family, not really, they didn't know him, didn't understand- would be silenced so quickly when he had been screaming in his defense a moment before.
The man with the dark eyes didn't move a muscle, except to say one word. And that one words smeared blood over the walls and the people and the furniture and his world.
…
The walls were blank, in their own way. Of course, there was the one made of bars, with a lock, and it made him ache at how much time in his life he would have to spend in captivity. Although his father had tried, he had given no fight, nor protest to his treatment. Even though he had no idea there was even a serial killer on the loose. Even though he didn't know anything about the case, nothing even, that was public knowledge.
His so-called family shielded him, treated him as freshly spun glass. Sometimes it was appreciated. Most of the time, it was a nuisance. He was being accused of murder, even though he hadn't had any real contact with people since his release from the hospital eight months ago.
He closed his eyes and wished, not for the first time, for death.
It would be easier, kinder, than allowing to live in the blood tainted world he lived in.
That's why he didn't protest. The executioner's block was easier than suicide.
…
The walls were blank. Normal, to others' eyes, he supposed.
They had released him eventually. He had received numerous apologies and a hefty compensation fund. He cared little for money, and had no use at all for empty words.
It pacified his father, however, so he didn't tell them to take it back, didn't tell them to just shut up.
He blinked slowly at the people outside the window, and his mother touched his arm in concern, asking what was wrong. He waved off her concern, and wondered how she could be so stupid.
The blood splatters broke the serene picture outside.
…
The walls were blank and average, nothing at all out of the ordinary.
He didn't expect to run into the man with the onyx eyes there.
It was a small, quaint café not far from his collage, a place where he baked small pastries for the purpose of having pocket money.
The current batch wouldn't come out of the oven for another hour, so he had taken over the register for a while so that the young woman who usually ran it could owe him money and a favor.
But the man came waltzing in, speaking rapidly into a phone in a language he didn't understand before the man hung up with a huff. He cussed out the phone briefly as he looked over the menu behind the counter.
While the man was preoccupied, he stood behind the counter and wished once more to die. He didn't even care how.
When the man finally noticed him, he gave his order in short clipped tones, and he rang it up with shaking hands. The man apologized again, but he waved him off.
His hands were as red as the crimson sunrise.
…
The walls were never blank again. They were always covered in blood.
He and the man met several times over the next two years.
He still avoided his family as much as possible. They still treated him gently, but he was nearly twenty, and didn't appreciate it. He found himself seeking solace in the man that once imprisoned him, and found himself an equal.
Though the man could never understand, never know what his childhood and teen years had consisted of, he was content to go back to the man's hotel as often as he was invited.
And gradually, he learned. Even though the blood soaked everything he touched, everything he saw, he learned so much. And he was so grateful. Maybe he was even almost happy.
…
The walls were blank again when he learned that the man had been the one to save him, two years ago.
He had been working on the case for a month, and it was the kidnapping of a young, seven-year-old girl that had lead him to the building where several hundred missing children and teens resided.
The man had not known that he had been one of them.
And he had not known that there were well over six hundred others in his previous position. He had not known that at least twenty children and young pre-teens were reported missing every week for ten years.
It had made him sick to know that he was amongst the earliest of the children taken. The he was one of the unlucky ones.
That night, for the first time, he agreed to stay with the man overnight. They slept together.
He ignored the blood in his hair the next morning.
…
"You could help me, you know," L said one night.
Raito glanced over to where L was sitting in the armchair across the room. "With what?" he asked, look down at his book again and turning the page.
"You know what," L retorted, and Raito grinned inwardly and didn't respond. "Cases," L finally conceded.
This time, Raito set aside the book and stared hard at the man with the onyx eyes. "Why?" he challenged the genius detective.
L rolled his eyes. "I have to leave Japan some time, but I don't exactly fancy losing my lover in the process," he replied.
"So your reasons are purely selfish ones."
"Precisely."
"Shameless."
"You think I care?"
"No, probably not."
"Exactly, so why are we discussing this?"
"I have a family here, you know. Why should I leave my home for you?" Ratio countered instead of answering.
"We both know that you resent your family more than you could ever love them, and that you haven't ever felt any real attachment to Japan."
"Damn you."
"You're only furthering my point. You know I'm right."
"I really hate you sometimes," Ratio huffed, throwing himself into the pillows on the bed.
"Not the first time I've heard that," L told him seriously, and Raito glanced up to L much closer than before.
Ratio smirked at him. "Trust me, I know. You're obnoxious," he said, but allowed L to kiss him anyway.
He ignored the fear coursing through his veins. He ignored the man with the knife and a fetish for chains and pretty children. He ignored it all. He blocked the memories and instead pulled L closer, thinking only of how soft the detective's lips were and how right they felt against his own.
The walls didn't close in on him anymore. It didn't matter if they were blank or not.
And eventually, the blood was cleared away.