Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

You hadn’t always been this way.

That is, confined in a mad genius’s flat with no choice in the matter. 

And you surely wouldn’t have expected yourself to be calmly cooking yourself dinner as your captor sat on the couch, rewatching the same 240p granular CCTV footage in a loop. The black-haired detective beckoned for you to be seated by him, and you complied. 

A measly few weeks ago, you would’ve scoffed and turned heel at his command. But now, you begrudgingly follow his whim. The sight of the front door, locked only from the inside, taunts you. How easy it would be to march out the door, and how infuriating it was that he had you so under his thumb that you willingly decided not to.

Your captor was thin, lanky, and peculiar in many ways. Despite his constant consumption of sweets, he never seemed to put on a single kilogram. He tended towards the same uniform of blue pants and a white shirt, day in, day out. He was obviously not a man keen on self-care, given the constant disarray of his hair and the dark, tired bags under his eyes. Yet you knew better than to judge him by his messy appearance and shabby sweatpants. 

Beneath your kidnapper’s unremarkable appearance, he was smart—extremely so—and meticulous in his every action. The first week of your imprisonment, you combed through every cranny of the flat when he left the house. What you were looking for, you didn’t know, and it didn’t really matter anyway. Just…anything you could find about the man who stole you away from your life. Hell, even a letter from his mom would be something, but all you had was nothing.

He was always one step ahead of you. Everything you knew about him was information he chose to let you know. It was always clear who always had the upper hand between the two of you. 

“Do you want one?” The low, monotone voice interrupted, breaking the ice treat in half, “You’ve been staring. Normally I wouldn’t share these ones as they’re my favourite, but you’re the exception.” 

How you wish you weren’t the exception.

Absentmindedly, you take the ice treat from his hand, tasting the sugar as it melts in your mouth while his voice drones on. How funny, your captor, L, was regarded as so intelligent as to be sought out by Interpol, and yet he had the habits of a petulant child. He couldn’t survive without an alarming dose of sugar every day, and became sullen and jealous if you admired any person’s intelligence other than his own. His quirks would have even been cute, were he anyone else. 

Surely someone else would’ve been interested in him for his eccentricities. So why did he have to go out of his way for someone who wanted none of his attention?

L’s voice once again breaks your reverie, “…and I can tell you’ve not been listening given by how you’ve been making the same noise to everything I’ve said. What are you thinking about?”

You blink. It wasn’t like you to be so spacey, but today, everything in the now familiar house flooded your memory of one month prior.

You glance over to the miniature calendar propped on the coffee table. Some couples celebrated the anniversary of their relationship. You counted the weeks, now month, of your kidnap. 

“Why?” You ask, drunk on the wistful nostalgia of this particular date, “Why choose me? Why go this far for just one person?” 

L returns his gaze to the monitor with a thoughtful expression.

“Truthfully, I do not know why.” The popsicle in his hand had, by now, evaporated under his ravenous cravings to the bare stick.

“I like seeing how you think, and I value your presence…enough to want to keep you from ever leaving, from ever being someone else’s.”

L was never downright sappy or cloying with his words, yet you knew firsthand the depth of his affection. 

His first recourse upon returning, every day, was to hold you in a deceptively crushing embrace. To any outsider, it might’ve seemed like a sweet gesture between a loving couple. To you, his lanky arms entrapped you with a strength that betrayed their appearance. His fingers gripped the fabric of your clothing with a tightness that revealed the true extent of his possessiveness beneath his apathetic demeanour, deeply inhaling against the skin of your neck. The more you resisted, the less reciprocative of his embrace that you were, the longer and tighter his hold was. You learned, through time, that it was better to ease your unwilling muscles into the embrace. If you could stomach it that day, you would even wrap your arms around him in a weak act of reciprocation. L was more willing to hear out your requests the more compliant you were with his delusion of mutual love. 

In the end, he always got what he wanted from you, and you were powerless to do anything about it. 

If you rebelled and attempted to flee, he would find you and send people to bring you back. No matter how clever you were to avoid him, he still managed to track you down, and drag you back. He delighted in listing how you improved from your last attempt, analysing your performance as one might an episode of their favourite television show. When you acquiesced and gave up on attempted escape, that just meant he succeeded in conditioning you into his fantasy of you as his partner. Either by complying or resisting his kidnap, he had you right where he wanted you. More and more, you learned to fit more into the role of his partner: grudgingly obliging in returning his forced affection.

But no matter how reciprocal you forced yourself to be, you had yet to figure out relinquish his hold on you at night. 

Every night, without fail, L would wrap his arms around your midsection and bury his face into your back, like a personal teddy bear. When you tried to pry yourself free, his arms would tighten uncomfortably until there was not one centimetre of room between the two of you. You had tried to stay up late, hoping he would fall asleep first and give you some breathing room (or time to flee), but he never seemed to need the rest as much as you did. No matter how long you forced your weary eyelids open, he ran on constant energy, seemingly without exhaustion. 

He liked listening to your heartbeat, he had confessed once. He said it calmed him and eased his mind. In some small way, it gave you a twisted feeling of power to know that you, a regular citizen, could have such an effect on one of the greatest minds in the world. 

“There,” L pauses the security footage, jolting you out of your reminiscence, “he’s reaching out like he’s seen Kira,” he comments, “perhaps Kira was on the train with him.”

How he could come to such conclusions with such scant information, you would never know. 

Before you can reply, Watari’s entrance punctures your question, accompanied by a tray of sweet refreshments for the shaggy haired man.

After a moment, you try again, “Why do you think he does this? Kira, that is.”

Taking a bite of the green tea ice cream, L looks up thoughtfully.

“Kira and I are very much alike. Despite his ideals of justice, he is childish and hates losing. I am the same. I believe his motives for killing are a mixture of both his personality and his ideals. Every death is a challenge to justice, to me. Yet his choice of victims, shows that he believes he is making the world better. He wishes to force his own ideals upon the world, and I am here to stop him. It is as simple as that.”

A game…that was exactly how your relationship with L was. But for you, the stakes were your life and freedom. You were a prize that L won, and he would ensure at any chance that he would never lose you, even if it meant cheating. None of this kidnapping was about morality or misconstrued perception of righteousness. Even though L may have one of the most brilliant minds in the world, he has the emotional maturity of a spoiled child. What he covets, he ensures that he gets. Rejection or refusal is not an option. 

You supposed you should’ve realised much sooner with how immature he could be.

L always needed to prove that his intellectual prowess was stronger than anyone else’s. Anytime you admired anyone, be they fictional or non-fictional, he seemingly found all their flaws right after. It was clear he did not take any sort of rivals well. His jealousy of “rivals” was almost even cute.

Well, save for the fact that he kidnapped you. 

“Sometimes I wish I could open your head and see inside,” L interrupts your thoughts, the large, unblinking eyes peer through you, “especially when you’re so deep in thought like today.”

You look away from his fish-like eyes, crossing your arms. Even after becoming accustomed to living with him, his long, fixed stare never got any less unnerving. 

“Has it ever occurred to you,” you query, “how ironic this is from an outside perspective? You represent justice; you’re supposed to bring Kira down. And yet, you kidnapped me—took me from my old life to be your companion against my will.” 

The question doesn’t seem to phase him at all. “Each person will have their own perspective on morality, and this is mine. You should know that I won’t change my mind on this matter, even though you don’t agree with my actions.”

L turns the screen off, retiring from the collage of granular security footage. He turns to you, wrapping his arms around you and touching his nose to your neck. Your body, on instinct twitches to pull away, but you stiffen your muscles to halt the reaction.

You usually try not to think about the past, as it only makes you misty-eyed when you can do nothing to free yourself from your current predicament. But today, you can’t seem to help the bitter nostalgia from overflowing. How you miss the time where you could just follow the battle between L and Kira from a television. You missed how impersonal it was, as a law-abiding citizen, when you didn’t have to worry about L or Kira taking interest in you. Now you would never know that freedom until the finale of the two opposing forces. 

“How fortunate I am to have found you before anything could have happened to you.”

How fortunate for him indeed.  

Chapter Text

The first thing you notice as you wake up is that your head kills. 

The second is the heaviness in your head, limbs, everything. 

You must have been tired to feel so sluggish even after such a deep, dreamless sleep. Did you have a lot to drink the night before? Everything’s so dizzy. Your head falls back into the pillow as you struggle to anchor it back on your shoulders. 

You’re in your room. 

You wouldn’t expect to be anywhere else, but there’s something off-putting that bothers you. Maybe it’s the haze lingering over you, but your room doesn’t feel…right. And maybe if your senses and judgement could slip out of their stupor a bit faster, you could tell what exactly was wrong. 

But at the moment, a muddled sense of wrongness is all you have. 

As your sense sharpen, that cloudy dis-ease morphs into a growing sense of alarm. This is not your room, but one so similarly furbished that you could be excused for not knowing. 

You lived alone. 

Which meant that someone had violated your privacy, illicitly accessed your apartment, made the deliberate effort to recreate it, and brought you here. The more you thought about it, the more you realised how terrible wrong the whole situation was.

You felt so…out of it. Everything felt so wrong. Did you get drugged? How did you get here? Why can’t you remember anything from the night before? 

You move to stumble out of bed, but a tension cuts your movement short. 

There are cuffs and chains attached to your wrists. 

It makes a strained clattering sound as it rattle against the bed. The metal is cool to the touch, and uncomfortably snug. But whoever put you in these decided to use padded ones, as to why, you couldn’t even imagine. 

At that moment, the door opens to admit a black-haired man you have never seen in your life. You press your back against the wall. The man, slouched even in his walk, continues approaching you.

“Drink this,” he holds a glass of water to your lips, “It’s not drugged or poisoned; I can assure you.

The water is cool and smooth against your throat. A contrast to the discomforting, unblinking gaze that drinks in your vulnerability. 

“If you behave well, I might be convinced to remove the handcuffs. If you are violent or resistant in any way, I have a variety of restraints that I am prepare to use until you can manage yourself properly. I can give you a demonstration if you’d like.”

“Who are you? What do you want from me?” You ask in a voice hoarse with disuse.

“You may know me as L. This, of course, is not my real name. For both yours and my safety, you will know me only by this alias.”

He removes the empty water glass, placing it on the nightstand. He sits at the end of your bed, hugging his knees to his chest and resting his thumb on his lip. His eyes fix on you, unblinking.

“I have no intentions of harming you—quite the opposite. I’ve come to value your presence, habits, and opinions. I estimate that I’ve lost approximately 30% of my productivity without your presence. As you can imagine, this poses a serious detriment to my work. It is more efficient to keep you close. And this way I can take care for you.”

“But you don’t know anything about me. We’ve never even met before.”

The corners of his mouth turn up, “Actually, I know you quite well, and anything I don’t know can be remedied with time. You were on the right track with those cameras in your apartment, but it would be very difficult to notice them with only the naked eye.”

Your blood runs cold.

“You’ve been watching me,” it’s a statement, but he answers it nonetheless. 

“Yes, although…” he leans forward, dead eyes scrutinising every detail of your face, “I hadn’t accounted for you being 20% more attractive up close like this.”

In another situation you might have blushed, but as it is, you’re chained to the bed with no way of creating any space between you and his fish eyes. 

“I want to go home,” you beg, “Please, I don’t want to be here.”

“This will be your home for now, although I acknowledge that it will take time for you to adjust to your new surroundings…know that any attempts at resistance or leaving will not yield any results for you. Though you are welcome to try. It would be fascinating to see what progress you can make.”

You had never thought that someone could make trying to escape so creepy and unnerving.

“If you’re really L, as you say, then doesn’t doing this—“ you glance around at the diorama of your room, attempting to avoid his stare, “—isn’t all this the opposite of justice? Doesn’t kidnapping me stand against everything you work for?”

He looks up, contemplating. 

“Every person has their own idea of justice. I would argue that bringing you here is an act of justice as I can better concentrate on catching Kira with you here. Furthermore, letting you free in a world filled with so many dangers, would be more of a moral wrongdoing. However, it’s understandable that you may view this situation unfavourably for now. With time, you’ll become accustomed to living here with me. I recreated your room so that you might become more comfortable with adjusting your environment. If you wish to change the layout, I’m amenable to changing it.”

A wave of disgust roils through your stomach

“Both of us stand to gain from this arrangement. I can better improve my focus and have your company. Being here, I can better provide for your safety and wellbeing. Being associated with me brings many dangers. I will ensure none of them will harm you, and that Kira will never know your identity. You are welcome to argue your case more with me, but know I will not be swayed on my position.”

And who’s fault do you think it is that I am now associated with you? 

“I can care for myself,” you respond, unable to control the bitterness in your voice, “I’m an adult, not a child.”

“Is that so,” he peers at you as if peeling back your flesh to poke around inside, “from my observations, your sleep schedule is woefully inadequate, the average adult needs anywhere from 7 to 9 hours of sleep, a mark which your current sleep schedule drastically fails in meeting,”

It was clear he had been stalking you, he had quite plainly confirmed it for himself, but to hear him list such details drove the stake closer to home.

“Furthermore, you struggle to meet rent each month. Your relationship with your landlord is strained, and if you miss another payment—“ 

“That’s enough!” You interrupt, face burning. 

“Well,” he starts, and you can see the self-satisfied grin that forms on his face, “I believe I’ve sufficiently proved my point. Your previous situation was less than ideal. But under my care, your living needs will be up to a far higher standard to which you had subjected yourself.” 

You turn your face away to avoid seeing his smug expression. The most maddening part of everything was that he was right. By all accounts, your life was not exactly peachy. But hearing it from a creep who admitted to stalking you for God knows how long was not exactly the intervention you needed nor cared for. 

It would be best to play along for now, you decide. L, or whoever he really is, seems meticulous, and thoughtful. If you wanted a real chance at getting out of here, you would need to think through a plan. At the very least, this man didn’t pose any overt threat to you. You could take time to get on his good side. And once you had to opportunity, you wouldn’t let it slip away.

“You must be hungry.” 

You are. But to admit it would be so humiliating that silence and starvation, seems, at the moment, preferable. Thankfully, your kidnapper spares you the embarrassment.

“I have Watari preparing something for you.”

You shuffle your handcuffs, “how am I supposed to eat anything with these on?” Perhaps approaching the topic like this could be subtly persuade him to remove the restraints. 

But he leaves your question hanging in the air. For at that moment, an elderly man enters the room, carrying a bowl of soup. L, or whoever he really is, takes the bowl within his hands, scooping the broth. He tilts his head to the side smiling in a way that might’ve even been charming in a cute sort of way.

He brings the spoonful to your lips. 

No, you know better. That’s the smile of someone who utterly delights in having you chained up, incapable of anything other than being utterly helpless to his will. That’s the smile of a crazed man who would bug your room just to satisfy his own sick fantasies. That’s the smile of a man who wouldn’t hesitate to kidnap you just because he has a crush. 

“Open wide.”