Things never went as planned, as L had come to learn. He wanted to get back because K was in trouble, but the jet was not waiting at the airport like it was supposed to. Why? Because Matt and Mello decided to ignore his request to call the jet from Wammy's to Singapore, and instead they sent it to New Hampshire. When he got back there would be hell to pay, the situation was dire and he needed to get K to safety.
"L," Watari said quietly. "They didn't mean to send it to the wrong place. They were, erm, occupied when you made the request. They're only human after all."
"They're not supposed to be!" L snapped. "They're supposed to function fully and never make mistakes because one mistake can cost a life. You and I know that very well. Please go call in some favors to get a jet or something to get us back home so that we can figure out what to do with K."
"Of course," Watari replied calmly. He took out his cell phone and called in a favor from the consulate while L paced back and forth trying to figure out a way to get home faster. "L," he said after a moment. "There's a jet waiting for us at the airport now, put your shoes and jacket on and let's go." L muttered something about not being a child, but put his jacket and shoes on anyways.
L got into the back of the car that Watari had set up for them and watched Watari load the bags into the car slowly before walking to the front seat and drove away, being mindful of the speed limit and any pedestrians. L growled in frustration and Watari sighed, he was trying to be careful. They got to the airport and L practically ran to the plane.
One of the jet's attendants helped Watari load all of the equipment into the jet and they took off within the hour. L grabbed his laptop and typed an e-mail to K to warn her about the danger she was in and then proceeded to tell her to prepare all of the children for evacuation to the Wammy House in South Africa. A couple minutes later he got a reply confirming that such protocol had been followed and that she would be waiting for his return to plan from there.
A couple of hours later, L was running through Wammy's House and all of the buses to the airport were departing from the house full of children and their most important belongings. The staff of Wammy's was sent out on different scouting missions to try and find B's exact location. The South African government agreed to let L's people guard the children, fully armed and continue lessons as planned.
When L had gotten to K's room she was packing all of her paperwork into a leather briefcase, her laptop going into the same briefcase. She had to think hard about this whole situation. Her life was crumbling all around her, and she was helplessly watching her friend try and put it together with nothing more than chewing gum and glue sticks. She wanted to scream and tell him to just let her go, and to let all of the pieces be obliterated completely because there was no point. She was going to be murdered anyways, so why delay the inevitable? It would just make it all the more painful for all of her friends if they failed.
She threw her bag on her bed and swore in every language she knew, which was quite a few, but she wasn't really counting. She cursed every god, every object, and every person while she put emphasis by punching the wall. It wasn't helping, she was just proving her insanity more and more. The worst part was that she knew it, but she couldn't find herself caring. She felt somewhat detached from her body, and that was never a good sign.
"L," she whimpered, starting to shake in her seat. "They're going to get me. Just let me go to them. They don't want you, they just want me dead. Please!" She started begging, but he shook his head and started pacing around her room, his thumb on his lips.
"No," he muttered. "I'm not going to let them do anything to you. You're far too important to me for me to just sit back and watch you die! I need you, you're my best friend and I doubt that there will ever be anyone that understands me as well as you do; and what about Matt? He needs you too! He may not admit it, but he needs your company when he and Mello fight, and when he's reminded of what has happened during his childhood. You're his only connection to his past that isn't trying to kill him!"
"You'll all survive without me," she muttered, looking down at her bloody knuckles, blood dripping onto the floor, from punching the wall. L stopped pacing and turned to her, looking at her knuckles blankly.
"We may live without you," L said bitterly, "but it won't be surviving! You don't understand the difference because you're not surviving! You let your fears take over when times get tough, and you can't afford to do that. You need to be a detective first and a human being second. I understand that it's difficult, especially for you because of what you've gone through and what you're still going through, but it's necessary for you to be able to enjoy life!"
"Does it really matter?" K asked angrily. "They're going to kill me anyways, even if you try and protect me! They're working with B! He'll stop at nothing to take you down, and I don't want anything to happen to you, stupid! You're my best friend, and I can't see you get hurt."
"Don't you realize that your death or even injury would hurt me?" L asked angrily. "Every time something bad happens to you, it hurts. You need to let me keep you safe!"
"Yes," she said. "But not as much as if you tried and failed to protect me. I know how much that would hurt. And I don't want you to be in that kind of pain. So just let them get me and move on. You can find another best friend. You can't save me this time and you should know that by now."
"It wouldn't be the same," L said. "I don't want another best friend, I just want you! YOU are my best friend, and I don't want anyone else to try and fill that spot because it's taken and that wouldn't change if you were dead. You'd still be my best friend."
"The fact that you wouldn't try and make a new best friend just makes you seem like you depend on me," she observed calmly, "which is not healthy and needs to be fixed. It's even worse that you're dependent on someone like me. I'm unhealthy enough on my own, I don't want to make you believe that I'm ok how I am because we both know that it's total bullshit."
"Don't swear," he muttered. "And that's irrelevant because I think that you're perfectly fine exactly how you are." He looked into her eyes and saw that she was almost crying. "Please don't cry," he said gently, moving to the side of her bed and kneeling. He grabbed one of her hands carefully and looked at it while he tried to find a way to convince her to come with him to New York City.
"I'm not coming with you," she said firmly, looking at him. Her eyes were completely focused for once. "I'm just going to let them take me and you can't do anything to stop me." L sighed and dropped her hand.
"I was afraid you'd say that," he said while standing up. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a tiny syringe. "I don't want to do this, but you're leaving me no choice." He pushed the needle into her arm and watched as her eyes started to droop.
"Asshole," she slurred before closing her eyes completely. L sighed and picked her up, and walked out the door. Watari sighed when he saw L carrying K to the jet.
"She is not going to be happy," Watari said wearily. "Be prepared for when she wakes up."
"All right," L said quietly, setting her down in one of the seats and fastening the seatbelt. He sat down and fastened his own and pulled out his laptop from the bag under his seat.
He couldn't stop staring at her sleeping form, she looked so peaceful and innocent. It was so unlike her when she was awake, and yet so similar because it was still her. Work wouldn't be done while she was lying there, dreaming about whatever her imagination came up with.
In her dream, she could hear agonized moans of people and smell the rotting of corpses. The room she was in was foggy, so she couldn't see anywhere around her. There was also a weird distortion of light, which she realized was blood smeared on whatever light source was in the room. This was not going to be a very pleasant dream, she thought. Though when are they ever?
"K," a ghostly whisper echoed around her, its presence was menacing and she shivered involuntarily. "K," it echoed again.
"Who's there?" She whimpered pitifully. She scanned the room quickly, though she knew it was no use, the visibility was about an inch in every direction.
"K," the voice echoed again, joined by two other voices that were just as menacing as the first. She whimpered and cold laughter followed.
"Go away," she muttered. She put her hands over her ears to try to block off the sound, but the laughter still bounced around the room. That was when K realized that the voices were coming from her head, not the room. "Get out of my head! You're not real, you can't be."
"We're very real," the voices said coldly. "You can't block us out. We're part of you."
"No," she whimpered. "This can't be true, I'm not crazy. This is just a dream, right?"
"Maybe, maybe not," the voices sneered. "Maybe this is just a warning of what to come, girl. You're going to die, and we'll be the ones to kill you."
"Who are you?" she yelled, scrunching her eyes closed and pulling at her hair.
"You know exactly who we are," one of the voices said, B, her unconscious mind just figured out. "And I can't wait to kill you. Poor Lawli will be so distraught to see what I leave behind for him."
"B," she said grimly. "I never thought that you would share the kill with people like my parents. They only want my money, that's all they've ever wanted from me was the money that I've accumulated through the years to live off of."
"Well that's because you're a useless bitch otherwise," her father growled. "What point is having a child if they suck the life out of you?"
"If you felt that way, why didn't you just abort?" K sneered. "It would have been so much cheaper."
"Perhaps," her mother said. "But we figured that we would make you useful somehow. Be grateful that you were somewhat intelligent or we would have sold you to someone. Your life could have been worse."
The dream changed. She was chained to a hard surface, blood running from a gaping wound in her abdomen, her knees bent at weird angles, and her left shoulder had a gaping hole that was the same size as the one in her abdomen. She could also feel her back sticking to the surface, but she didn't know what was causing that. Somehow she wasn't in immense amounts of pain, but realization struck, she was sleeping.
She heard laughter on both sides of her, all of it terrifying. She wanted to wake up, but she couldn't. Damn L and his sedative, she was stuck in this nightmare until it wore off. She took a deep breath and steeled her nerves.
"B, you bloody bastard," she said, her English accent especially thick. "You'll never get away with this. Even if I die, L will catch you and kill you so fast you won't know what's coming. And as for you, mum and dad, you'll be sent to a mental institution in an undisclosed location where your 'treatment' will be agonizing. Good luck with your plans when you're too afraid to leave your little cot."
All of them laughed, not believing what she said. "You really think Lawli will be able to function without you?" B asked. "He's gone soft since he met you. He doesn't stand a chance."
"He has successors that can take over if necessary," K ground out. "They'll kill you without a second thought."
"If they can catch us," her mother sneered. "Your cousin, Mail, will never be able to get over the trauma of losing his parents and then you. And after you're gone we'll take care of his precious Mihael and Nate. He'll be useless without them."
The dream dimmed suddenly, and she realized she was waking up. What a nightmare she was having. Luckily it was coming to an end, for now.
K stirred, causing L to look up at the sudden movement. She was muttering in some strange mix of English, French, and German, so L was having a hard time following what she was saying. What he caught wasn't good, though.
"K," L said quietly, causing her to stir and mutter something about Matt, Mello, and Near. "K," he said louder, causing her to groan.
"What did you give me?" she murmured groggily. "Whatever it was, I don't appreciate it."
"Sorry," he said unapologetically. "It was the only way I would be able to get you onto the plane and into New York City. Did you sleep well?"
"No," she muttered. "I had the usual nightmares. The only difference is that I was stuck in them and had no control over them. I couldn't wake up."
"Now I am sorry," he said. She waved him off and sat up in her plane seat.
"I would have had them anyways," she said dismissively. "There's nothing you could have done about them. It's not your fault, L."
"I know," he said. "I still feel guilty. I should have just given you one of your sleeping pills and anti anxiety."
"I wouldn't have swallowed them," she said quietly. "But you still shouldn't have forced me onto a plane. I don't want to go to New York, he's probably hiding out here with my parents and we'd never know because of the ridiculous amount of people that reside in the city and their ability to blend into a crowd, especially B."
"If I remember correctly you are quite talented at blending into the crowd," L said blandly. "Do I have to bring up the case in Paris that you went undercover as a rich boarding school student? Or the one in Germany? Or any of the others?"
"Ugh, no," she muttered, blushing at the compliment. "But those had less intelligent criminals. B is as smart as us, and with my parents it's a real risk. They know us well enough to predict some of our movements. B will know that we'll choose a big city, my parents know how to lure me into their traps, and when they do, I'll be as good as dead."
"They won't catch us," L growled fiercely, surprising K. "You and I will catch them and we will come home safely. I promise to protect you, Watari will as well."
"Don't make a promise you can't keep," K muttered. L glared at her. "What? You might not be able to keep this one. B is ruthless and has a way of getting ahead of you for a very short amount of time. And that short amount of time costs lives and you know it. I'm sorry L, but it's true and you know it."
"I won't let him get ahead of me," L said, determined. "I know how he thinks, and I know he won't try anything in the open because he can't get a good getaway in this kind of city."
"I need a cigarette," K muttered, her hand shaking. "I can't deal with this shit. This is too much. You should have let me stay behind so they could just kill me. My parents would do it quickly if I gave them my bank codes."
L took a pack out of his pocket reluctantly and handed it to her with a slightly disappointed look on his face. "I wish you hadn't picked up this habit from Matt."
"Would you rather I pick up someone else's cocaine habit, or a heroin addiction?" she asked, lighting the cigarette expertly and taking a long drag. She exhaled slowly and sighed in what could only be described as contentment, though that was not what she was feeling.
"No," L muttered. "I just wish you would have chosen something that didn't smell as repulsive."
"It's not like I smoke as much as Matt," she said, taking another drag. "It's only when I'm having trouble forming coherent sentences and I start shaking. Otherwise I just pop pills and drink caffeine to stay awake."
"Maybe you shouldn't drink so much coffee," L suggested. She shrugged him off and smoked quietly for a few minutes before putting out the cigarette and putting it in the ashtray L provided.
"Well I'd drink some liquor but that interferes with my medications in a bad way," she said. "Trust me, I've tried it and I hallucinated and threw up a lot. Poor Matt had to take care of me."
"Are the medications working at all?" L asked sadly. She shrugged.
"Kind of," she said. "But not as much as they should, I imagine. But any stronger of a dose would make it hard to work, and that's all I really have. I can't sit around in a daze, so I'm not on the recommended dosage."
"Well you should go on the recommended dosage, even if it puts you in a fog," L said. "You're too stressed out to do work anyways."
"You don't understand," she said quietly. "I don't feel like myself on the normal dose. I feel like I live in a dream. It's kind of like floating in a half-conscious state all the time, just floating through the world like pollen on the wind. I can't do that, it's not a good thing to go through every day. Believe me, for a while I was on the normal dose and I didn't function. Matt said I was like zombie, and he was so scared that something was wrong, or that I was overdosing. But the doctor said that the medication was supposed to make me like that."
L frowned. "Why didn't you tell me?" he asked her quietly, his eyes looking directly into hers. She shrugged and rolled her shoulders, trying to get rid of some of the grogginess.
"Because I figured it wasn't that big of a deal," she said, staring right back at him with a blank stare. "I don't want to live like this, but I can't call what I was like before living at all."
"So what are you saying?" he asked her, his brows furrowed slightly in agitation. "Do you want to die?"
"Yes," she said honestly, completely calm. "The only reason I'm staying alive right now is for you and Matt. If you weren't in my life, I'd probably be dead now because this is a miserable existence for me. But you make it almost worth living, if that makes you feel any better."
"It really doesn't," he said sadly. "If I had known you felt this way I would have stayed around more often. Does Matt know how you feel?"
"Of course he does," she replied sharply. "This is Matt we're talking about. He reads people like a book. Though he has a harder time reading you and I."
"You let your guard down, didn't you?" L asked. K sighed and rand a hand through her hair.
"Yeah," she said tiredly. "But it was completely accidental. I was working on a case that turned out to have been a setup by B, and I had a major panic attack. It was so bad that I was placed in the medical wing of the school and Matt stayed with me the whole time, catching everything I said awake and asleep. I can't control my subconscious. He also was observing me because you had him report major changes in behavior and such."
"I remember that," L said vaguely. "But from what he told me he didn't completely understand what you were feeling or saying. He said that you were being cryptic and you kept switching languages at awkward parts of sentences without knowing. One of the things he said you were doing was you were having a conversation with him in German, but you switched to English, and then to Spanish without so much as a warning. And then you went to French. He asked you about it later and you didn't know what he was talking about."
"I don't remember any of this," K muttered. "I think I was still out of it, and the medications they had me on complicated things."
"I see," L muttered. "You shouldn't be doing cases then. If you can't keep your composure enough to keep your secrets, then I will not allow you to work on any more cases."
"I'd like to see you try," she said angrily. "I'll do what I want, when I want. You're not the boss of me and you know perfectly well what I am capable of when I am determined to do something."
"I have more resources than you will ever hope to," L said. "I can keep you from doing anything if I wanted to. Don't test me, K, you'll lose." K glared at him before turning on her laptop and working on minor cases to take up some time.
Watari sighed from the cockpit; they always had to bicker like small children because one always had to be right. Good thing they were landing in New York, or else he would slap them both, though it wouldn't really do any good because K would probably just start crying and L would glare at Watari and try to kick him, and likely he would succeed. Watari did not want to be kicked by L, or anyone with that much martial arts training.
When the plane landed they immediately put everything into the car Watari had set up. K and L loaded their laptops into the back seat of the car so they could work as much as possible before having to load everything into the apartment.
"This is where I leave you," Watari said. "I have to monitor the school for a while. Your living arrangements have been set up according to both of your preferences. I will check in with you by phone and e-mail multiple times a day and through surveillance cameras placed throughout the house. I will come and check in at a random time every week."
"Understood," K and L said in unison, giving Watari mock salutes to try and ease the building tension that they were all feeling. Watari gave a weak smile in return before walking back to the jet.
"Take care of each other," he called behind him before the stairs went up and the door closed.
K stood next to L and held his hand, her own shaking and cold. He gave her hand a comforting squeeze before leading her to the car. They drove off to their new hideout, both silently praying for a safe return home. But of course God doesn't answer to the nonbelievers, as they had both come to learn.
