Chapter Nine:

Erin collapsed onto her cot, mentally exhausted by the mental rodeo she had just been put through. L did not take his interrogations lightly. She felt like she'd be put through the ringer. A million times, at least. And then a couple hundred more just for good measure.

She was hoping to drift off, but as per usual sleep evaded her when she really wanted it. No doubt the nap earlier was what was throwing her off, even if it hadn't been the most restful thing. She also had no idea what time it was. For all she knew it still could have been the middle of the day, or maybe it was four in the morning. With the lack of windows or time pieces, there was no way to tell. Just because she had been speaking to L didn't mean anything either.

If there was anyone with a more messed up sleep schedule than her, it was most certainly him.

Which begged to question how it was he was even capable of thinking straight, let alone how he managed to outwit everyone else. As an insomniac herself, she knew just how bad a lack of sleep could mess a person up. Apparently circadian rhythms were not to be messed with. Just because a person didn't sleep well at night, didn't mean that a nap was going to fix it. REM sleep was important. She'd gone days with only broken sleep, and not only had it royally messed with her ability to concentrate, and reason, but it also sent her emotions running haywire, made her muscles cramp like nobody's business, and just overall made her incompetent and miserable. Either the readers had exaggerated how bad L's sleep habits were, or he was some kind of alien.

Still, poor sleep would certainly explain his proclivity for snacks. If he was anything like her in that regard, a lack of restful sleep probably turned him into a food vacuum. Although she had to wonder if he was getting all his essential nutrients. Outside of that one banana that one time, he had never been shown to eat anything healthy. Not that she could remember, anyway. Well, the were the occasional decorative strawberries on his cakes. Still. As healthy as fruits were, they still had a crazy high sugar content. Where was he getting his protein? What about amino acids? She was no nutritionist, but that kind of stuff was important right?

Honestly, how was L not hospitalized? For a guy who took note of the way different seating positions affected his thinking capacity, he should have been keeping an eye on the normal, important stuff. Unless he was just totally full of bull shit, which… Was equally unsurprising as it was marginally hilarious.

All she could picture was ever so proper Light, all disgruntled by L's blasé disregard for acceptable social conduct, and L straight up spouting a pile of rubbish just to be a stubborn troll.

Which brought to mind another important question that she had. Why had L seen fit to reveal himself to Light in the first place? Against a killer like Kira, L's secret identity was his absolute trump card. To play it on a gamble seemed extremely reckless. She could not remember what justification they gave in the series, but she felt like maybe it had something to do with giving Light a good jolt and watching how he responded. That couldn't have been all though. Maybe against such a brilliant opponent L had felt his own personal analysis was required? Maybe they had hoped that putting that kind of extreme pressure on Kira would force him into acting rashly, making a mistake? There had been some nonsense about Light not being able to kill L once he revealed himself, without thus alerting the task force, but still. Still. It just didn't seem worth it.

Then again, who was she to try and analyze L? Especially based on imperfect information from a faulty memory. Heck, from where she sat, having just spent several long minutes speculating over all his unhealthy habits, Erin felt suddenly compelled to question whether L didn't have a self-destructive personality.

Just like that, the young woman bolted straight up, and snapped her head in the direction L's voice had been emanating from earlier. She stared and stared, even though really, she was just burning a hole in a completely nondescript wall.

There came a crackle of static after a few moments of this. "Ms. Harker. You appear to be alarmed about something."

Yeah. Yeah, she was alarmed. She had just asked herself whether L might not be suicidal. Or, if not quite that, at the very least currently in the process of… seeking his own place of death. That sounded more poetic than it probably was but given the way he had trudged about in the show, given the way he had recklessly chased after Kira, she could not shake the sudden notion. Of course, that was alarming to her. It was fine for her to be waiting to die, technically she already had. L, though, was supposed to be different. At once childish and an unstoppable force of will in pursuit of his justice, he was supposed to be…

A hero.

Although, that had never been something which he proclaimed to be. Actually, she still remembered that clip where he had identified himself as a monster. Which, maybe, was telling in its own way.

"Ms. Harker?"

"Yes. Sorry. I was just…" overthinking things. Definitely. Maybe projecting her own fatalistic attitude on him. Really, what did she actually know? About anything, let alone his emotional state. "Thinking. About the time I started to scream in that detective's face. It's mortifying. I feel so bad about it, looking back."

Which was true. She really did feel deeply embarrassed by that. Even if, maybe, no one could blame her for her reaction given everything that had been going at the time. It just seemed so terribly dramatic. She knew she could be dramatic, but as she pictured that scene, and how it might have looked from an outsider's perspective it seemed over-the-top. Poor Aizawa, although she liked to think her next meeting with him had not been nearly so bad, she had still been pretty out of it. What with the meds and realizing she was in the wrong reality. To make matters worse, the next time they met it was because he'd been sent to fetch her back from the lamest attempt at running away ever. If she ever saw him again, she was pretty sure there was no way that she would be able to look him in the eye.

It was not an honest answer to L's question however, and she was confident that he probably knew that. Still, she was certainly not going to go right ahead and ask him whether he was trying to get himself killed. For one thing, technically she still wasn't supposed to know who he was. For another, even if she had, a lot of her conjectures were based on his personal lifestyle that she also was not supposed to know of, and things which he had not even done yet. Plus also, awkward.

She could not do that kind of deeply emotional conversation, not with him. Besides, she doubted that was something he would want to discuss with her whether it was true or not. That was what he had Watari for.

"You have met with two detectives." He noted, once again not bothering to phrase it as a question. Nor did he draw attention to what he might have thought regarding her assuredly blatant fibbing. Really, he was very good at prying for information without actually giving away what it was he was trying to discern at any given moment. He just threw seemingly random bait out there, and observing what type of fish it lured in was as important as actually catching one.

"Yeah," she answered. "The first guy showed up a couple times. I think the other one was, like, his boss or something? A superior or whatever? I only met him once." She had hoped that the interrogation was over, having desperately scrambled through his minefield of questions for what felt like hours not long before. Unfortunately he either had a moment of spare time on his hands, or he was employing that evil tactic of persistently and randomly intruding upon her so that she got worn down by being constantly on guard. That was a thing right? Erin was pretty sure that she had read about it in a novel.

"Hmm."

She squinted in the direction of the voice, wondering for the millionth time what he'd been expecting from her. "They… seemed nice? I guess?" That was a relatively polite thing to say, right? "The first guy came and got me after I, um, panicked."

They had already addressed her short-lived flight from the hospital in his earlier questions. She had been asked in a bunch of different ways where she had been going, and if she had been planning to meet up with anybody. He seemed so inclined to believe that it had been some sort of well thought out plan on her part, that it had been decidedly awkward admitted that she'd just had a panic attack after a nightmare. Outside of the fact that the nightmare had been a little more than just a typical bad dream, it'd been the truth too, which somehow made it worse.

Of course, that had lead to several very carefully worded enquires about the contents of her nightmare. Reluctantly she had admitted that it revolved around her believing that she had died and was stuck in some sort of terrible limbo. Most disconcertingly was when L had started to press her on whether she had been alone in her dream, or if there had been anything else there. Not in so many words course, but the direction his interrogation had started to take had set off the mental alarms, and she firmly skirted any sort of mention about Ilmort.

"Do you recall their names?"

Well she sure wasn't going to admit to it now. "Uh… this is probably going to sound pretty shitty of me, but, um, because they were foreign names… Um… was it Ozawa? Er, um Iwa…za? And, the other guy was Yakatori? No. Wait, isn't that an actual thing? Or was that… Yakitori! That's what I'm talking about! That wasn't his name though. Sorry. I think one of them started with an S? Maybe? And the last name definitely started with a 'Ya' sound. Probably?" When all else failed, Erin figured a long string of inane rambling was probably a pretty good fall-back plan. "Can I blame the meds? For not remembering? I mean, there was a lot going on at the time."

There was another fizz of static, but no actual reply. She had a sneaking suspicion that L had just ditched her without so much as a by-your-leave. Not that it was going to keep her up at night. At least the game of twenty (billion) questions that they had going on was on hold for a little while longer. Besides, she had plenty of other reasons why she was going to be kept up at night, all infinitely less mundane than L's lousy manners.

She flopped back on her bed, and resolved to try and ignore all of it in favour of going to sleep, no matter how futile such an attempt might be. As she did, the exceedingly unsatisfactory pillow she had been provided with did remarkably little to absorb the impact as her head thunked down.

With a low groan, Erin thought of her bed at home, and missed it dearly. Even if she had horribly neglected it back then, suddenly she had come to realize what a treasure it was that she had taken for granted. She missed the heap of blankets, and her flannels sheets. She missed her insane collection of pillows. She was never going to have a chance to truly appreciate what at blessing it had been ever again, and that she regretted a fair bit. Distance makes the heart grow fonder, and all that.

Sure, she would have died that day anyway, so no matter what she never would have had a chance to enjoy it one last time, but since she was feeling grouchy, she decided it was just another mark against Ilmort and Kira. Actually, by that standard, it was also a mark against Ryuk. When she had watched the show, she had found him an enjoyable and fun addition. Now, she was once again reminded of the fact that it was because of him that any of the following events had even kicked off. By that standard, to a certain degree, she could understand why Ilmort and his boss were so peevish about his unruly shenanigans.

Her grandmother had always said that an idle mind was the devil's playground. In that regard, Ryuk and Light really were two peas in a pod, although at least Ryuk had always been honest about his self-centred search for entertainment. Light had to go around pretending that it was some quest for an ideal, crime-free world of peace. Really, neither of them were good fellows, but Light was a walking, talking case of narcissism.

If high school English had been more open minded about modern forms of literature, Erin probably would have had a lot of fun writing comparison and contrast essays about Light, Ryuk, and probably L. In fact, even Misa Amane and Rem would have been fun characters to dissect. They had both acted out of some twisted form of love after all. Heck, if someone had put some time into it, chances were a study on their perverse devotions would have held up just fine against any classic Shakespearean tragedy. Macbeth, probably, because of the murder and ambition themes. Unfortunately dying and getting zapped to the actual world of the story did a pretty good job of ruining any and all literary enthusiasm Erin might have had for the entire thing. Go figure, right? Again; distance makes the heart grow fonder.

Although, in the spirit of honesty, she had never been all that enthusiastic in high school either, shockingly enough. In fact, it was probably the boredom which was responsible for sending her mind cartwheeling down such a useless route. Frankly, it was obnoxious, and she very much wished that it would cease and desist. Unfortunately, that was not how insomnia worked, and while she had stubbornly forced herself to shut down earlier, apparently she was now too keyed up for such methods to work.

Joy of all joys.

As such, she came to terms with the fact that she had a long period of staring at the ceiling, wishing for a sedative or maybe a tranquilizer dart to put her out of her misery, ahead of her. It was that, or she was going to start thinking up prose on Mello's death, and contemplating who else might have been suffering from self-destructive tendencies. Heck, she was bound to start wishing for Ilmort to make an appearance just to stave of any sort of poetic tendencies. That way lead to true madness.

Worse. She was beginning to feel the first inklings that she might have to make use of the toilet faculties. This was deeply bothersome given that L had not actually acknowledged whether or not she had earned her well deserved privacy. Perhaps it was a miracle that it had taken as long as it had, although, to be fair, the last meal she remembered had been breakfast forever ago in the hospital. A breakfast that she did not actually recall finishing, and which she was internally convinced had been laced with something. As far as she could tell, that seemed the most likely explanation for how they had transported her to the containment facility without her awareness.

She rolled her head to the side and stared forlornly at where she imagined there might be a camera. Should she ask about that current status of their negotiations? Was that being too persistent? Did she care? Would he even answer? Man. Out of context, she felt like such a clingy girlfriend, or something. In context, she just sounded demented, and had to wonder if maybe she should start worrying about Stockholm Syndrome or something. Which was even more immensely demented, given how it hadn't even been a full day. Besides, she wouldn't have to worry about Stockholm Syndrome when she was dead.

Exasperated, Erin bolted up in bed again, sighing loudly and with deep aggravation. This time she dropped down onto the floor and began doing a sad series of sit-ups. After-all, she could not take being stuck in her thoughts anymore. If sleep would not come to her, then she would drag herself to it via non-stop physical exercise. If that failed, she would drop her head on her rock of a pillow some more and hope that she'd fall unconscious at some point. Either she would end up seriously built whenever Ilmort got off his ass and let her die, or she would end up heavily concussed. The perks of having a short life expectancy was that neither really mattered all that much.

Still. She really hoped L made up his mind about the whole bathroom thing soon. Without her having to bring it up. Again.

As if summoned by her thoughts, Erin heard a sound which, while familiar in spirit, was unfamiliar in the sense that besides whatever sounds she or L made over the intercom, it had been totally silent in the containment facility. It took her a moment to even discern what they were, and when she did she completely halted her lame attempts at exercise, and stood up, close to the bars where she had a better view of the hallway beyond.

Footsteps. Still distant, so she did not know who they belonged to, but they were there all the same.

Then there was that crackle as the microphone came to life once again. "Ms. Harker. That would be your meal. Stand back from the bars. Furthermore, video surveillance will be halted while there is another person present. You will be relocated tomorrow."

What.

What was he talking about? Relocated to where? Also, what? Video surveillance was going to be halted?

She peered suspiciously at the same point where she had been eying up previously, the place she had settled on assuming held the camera. Was he being serious? Totally honest? Sure it wasn't exactly ideal, but if she hazarded a guess that the other person who was going to be present was Watari, then she imagined he would be as courteous and respectful of her a strictly possible. And if it was Watari… she felt reasonably confident in L's confidence in him. Enough that maybe, just maybe she could trust L's word.

With a slow nod, she hesitantly back away from the bars, and in fact perched lightly on the edge of her cot.

From the shadows emerged the heavily obscured figure of one Watari. Maybe. It could have been anyone, perhaps. But the trench coat, fedora, and the black cloth mask matched the image he had presented when he had acted as the intermediary between L and the law. She could not think of who else it might have possibly been, given that she was of the belief that the more official circles of the investigation were uninvolved with her incarceration. Unless Watari had a stand in, it had to have been him.

Once again, the sheer implausibility of everything was brought home. The entire time she was shovelling some sort of creamy pasta into her mouth with a plastic spoon, Erin could not stop herself from staring. She tried not to, sure, especially given how she was blind to whatever sort of expression lay beyond the mask, and therefor blind to whatever it was he might have been thinking. She tried to innocuously keep her focus on her food, but it was to no avail. She even considered briefly whether or not to say anything, but her throat closed up at the thought of it.

Even if she had been totally fine talking to L through the intercom.

In fact, she stayed quiet long after Watari had gone. Even her thoughts were still for a time, although that did not last. After all, she had her supposed relocation to consider. Her first thought, of course, was concerned with where she was going to be relocated. Back to the hospital? Was she being sent somewhere worse? Was she going to be tested like they had done with Kira? She had no way of knowing, which lead her to her second concern. Whywas she being relocated? Had she done something wrong? Or, less likely, had she done something right?

Not a chance. L had to know that she was throwing out lies left, right, and centre. Maybe he had allowed her the moment of privacy that she had requested, but maybe that was because he recognized that sprinkled in with the multitude of half-truths, and complete untruths, there was the occasional truth. Or maybe this was some sort of carrot and the stick tactic. Look, see, you cooperated, and you were rewarded. Were they just trying to encourage her into being helpful? And if that was the case, where was the stick? No way had L been completely fooled by her. Maybe her attempts at playing the game had been so pathetic that they were taking pity on her. Maybe she was so obvious about her lying that they were humouring her, because they knew no matter how desperately she tried to be duplicitous they would still get whatever they wanted out of her in the end.

That still did nothing to explain the whole relocation thing. Maybe that was going to be the stick. Maybe they were were going to truss her up like they had Misa. It seemed a little weird that they would give her any privacy at all if that was their intent though.

Another paranoid glare settled on the spot on the wall.

She would have to be on guard for some sort of weird scenario where they made it seem like she had the opportunity to escape or hurt someone. If they planned on testing her like Kira, she had no intentions of falling for their traps. Heck, maybe the whole relocation things was the trap. Maybe they were just going to take her for a drive around the loop, see what she did, and then dump her back in her cell. If she didn't do anything to immediately incriminate herself… Anything worse than she apparently already had, that was.

Erin stewed over the whole thing for a while, waffling back and forth between one paranoid possibility and the next. She forgot all about her pursuit of sleep, although she did try to act as cool, unconcerned and normal as possible. In the extremely likely event that L was evaluating her current behaviour, then she was determinedly not going to give away how easily he had sent her mind spiralling down a drain of uneasiness. Although, retrospectively she figured that a certain amount of unease would have been the perfectly average response to her entire day. In fact, unease probably would have been the mild response.

Perhaps she should have played up the unhinged hysteric a little bit more. The groundwork had definitely already been laid for it, and, despite whatever she might have thought before, spending her last few days in a mental hospital was probably preferable to getting dragged around, and detained in whatever way L fancied at any given moment. Also, they might have at least given her lame pudding with her meals like the hospital had. Even that weak attempt at dessert had been noticeably missing from her most recent meal.

It was too late for that though. It was too late for a lot of things.

Erin grimaced, and wished again for her window to stare out of. She wished again for sleep, for the comforts and distraction of home. She wished again, since all of the above were apparently impossible, that she had been allowed to Rest In Peace, at the very least. "Why me," she whispered, somewhat against her will, her voice a little too strained and forlorn to make her feel entirely comfortable.

There was, of course, no answer. There never was, not when it really mattered.

AN: Greetings from the abyss, I guess. I hope that you all are as well as can be expected. I'd apologize for the lateness of this update, but I imagine that it's getting pretty old. Thank you, sincerely, to all of you who have stuck by this, and to all the newbies willing to give this meandering shenanigan a chance. Bless all you who have reviewed and shown your support. As always, I apologize because I know my editing is a hot mess and there are bound to be typos and errors all over the place. Feel free to give me a heads up if there is anything glaringly wrong.