(AN: This is the first actual piece of prose I have written about Zaiden, beyond the ridiculously massive (eleven thousand words) character interview/character study I did, which was for personal reference and will not be posted. He turned out a lot more insane than he is in the interview, and in subsequent stories. I think the "mature" rating is actually deserved. I have also discovered that the physics involved are pretty much completely wrong, and I might eventually give this story a massive overhaul. It's messy, simple as that. Try and suspend disbelief, please? Also, Zaiden is a character who was designed for a small group RP, and this story is pretty much in the same "canon" as the RP. Dedicated to my fellow RPers, all of you.)

DOWN THE DRAIN

--by: lira-chan--

He peered down the drain to see what was clogging it and saw... He wasn't sure what he saw. Zaiden was actually in his bathroom, staring into murky water to try and ascertain what the hell had gotten stuck in the drain. It was the bathroom that actually had a bathtub. Zaiden rarely used it for one of its intended purposes; he couldn't remember the last time he'd had an actual bath. Which was what had sparked this brilliant idea. The thought of soaking in steaming water made him feel pleasantly nostalgic, so he had done it. After a relaxing soak, he'd let the water drain – supposedly – and had left the room to do some coursework while he waited. And had come back to this.

At first Zaiden just assumed it was his own hair. Enough hair could probably clog a drain to the point where water would not go down the drain, but he didn't have that much hair and tended to check the drain rather regularly. He didn't think the water had gone down at all, and was slightly surprised that he had not noticed this happening – or not happening, as the case might be – when he first left the bathroom. He started to reach into the water to check, but noticed a reddish tinge spreading from the drain. What... The hell... Was that?

It was probably a bad idea, but Zaiden reached into the murky and now possibly bloody water anyway. He shoved two fingers into the drain – they were all that really fit – and wriggled them around a bit. He did feel something that felt rather like a wad of hair, and also something firmer, but soft as well. It had a familiar texture, and was obviously small enough to fit down a drain. Puzzled and not thinking much of it, he pulled the offending object from the drain.

It was a finger. A human finger.

Zaiden studied the finger in horror. It seemed to have been sawed off just past the second knuckle. He assumed sawed from looking at the state of the edge of a small finger bone, although it wasn't as if he would actually know. It was worrisome enough to find a finger in his tub, but what worried him more was the volume of blood that had issued forth from the drain, slow as the leak might have been. One little finger would not have produced that much blood. Something was very, very wrong.

On the one hand, Zaiden was worried. He had been studying. He had been being quiet. He didn't think this had just backed up in the plumbing. Someone had put it there, somehow. Which meant it had probably been there before his bath – he had bathed with a human finger in the tub, and god only knew what else – and probably since before he'd come home from class that evening. On the other hand, he was genuinely and morbidly curious what had happened, and not just for the obvious security reasons.

There was one obvious thing he could do. Reach back down the drain and see if there were any other clues. He was a smart man; he knew it. It was like a puzzle to solve, albeit a frightening one, and it gave him a strange little thrill. So he did just that. He stuck his hand back in the bloody, rather chill water and fished around in the drain. There was more of what felt like hair, so he pulled that out by great hanks. It took him four grabs to get what seemed like all of it out, and it was a surprising amount of hair. He was a little bit surprised by what could be fit down a drain, but a drain was also attached to a long pipe, so he supposed it made sense.

The water started to go down. Zaiden wasn't sure if he should be relieved or not. He continued on his self-assigned mission. It seemed the hair had dredged something else up, something that had been jammed down the drain and had slipped farther into the pipe itself previously. It was another finger. A slightly different size from the first, but coloration made him think that they both came from the same person. He thoughtfully compared them to his own, and noticed they were smaller. A woman's, maybe? Or a teenagers? They didn't seem quite small enough for a child. Had someone been killed? He didn't think a whole body could be disposed of down a bathtub drain, but he supposed you never knew until you tried. It would take some time, of course. Did this have something to do with his business dealings?

Half of the water was down the drain now, but Zaiden still didn't know where the blood had come from. Two fingers was still not nearly enough to have produced that amount. He idly wondered if a body had been disposed somehow. Maybe it had been drained of blood, and the blood poured down the drain? If the person was shoving other small bodily pieces and hair down there, perhaps it was enough to back up the system to the point where blood would remain undrained. Perhaps somehow the standing water in the tub had leeched it back to the surface. Zaiden didn't know; this was not his forte.

Zaiden decided to give the drain one last check. He reached around quite thoroughly, and all he came up with was what looked suspiciously like most of a person's ear. More pieces could have been shoved down the drain and merely made it far enough that his reaching fingers could not grab them, but certainly not a whole person. There were bends in the piping, after all; that much mass, even in small pieces, would not fit. Which meant there was a body out there, somewhere. Zaiden was sure of it.

He was still uncertain if this had something to do with his business dealings. They were more than just a little shady, and for a man of his age, he had a lot of strange contacts. Why else would someone have chosen his apartment, out of all the apartments in the building? He sincerely doubted it was random. Someone had to have known this was where he lived, and had done this on purpose. Maybe it was a message. Well, message received. Now to do something about it.

Zaiden had a contact with clearance to access the national fingerprint database. He wasn't even positive what the man's actual job title was, or even what he actually did. Zaiden merely knew that such clearance had come in handy in the past. And even water-logged and cut off from their body, fingers still had fingerprints. He would send them along to his contact and figure out who the person had been. He could go from there.

After passing along the fingers, Zaiden had calmly returned to his college coursework. It wouldn't do to get behind in his studies just because of one murder. He'd probably been indirectly responsible for other deaths in the past, both through the choices he made and his own inaction. However, this was the most personal death had ever been for him. Shouldn't this be more traumatizing? Shouldn't fishing cut off fingers out of your bathwater have more of an effect on your mental state? Apparently not. This damn paper for class was far more engaging than such thoughts, and distracting to boot.

Class and life proceeded as usual for about a day. Zaiden knew his contact had clearance, but surely he still had other work he had to do. He couldn't immediately obtain prints and run them through the system. These things took time. Fortunately, "time" expired by the next evening. Zaiden received a phone call, and then police information on the woman the fingers had belonged to was faxed over to the young man.

Zaiden read over the information. He wasn't sure what to do with it. It was a woman he knew, he was sure of it, just after reading the file and seeing her picture. It obviously wasn't someone he'd known well. One of his contacts, that was who it was. He tried to remember what she had done for him last. He believed she had given him some insider information regarding gambling. He knew that was technically illegal, but if you weren't caught... He'd actually turned a tidy profit, but had... Inconvenienced... Some local criminal elements. Well, that probably explained who had done it.

The world was more corrupt than many people knew. So many did hear about the supposed underworlds, but knew not what that really meant. Zaiden had a bit of personal experience with such things – something that would be surprising to so many of his school friends, considering his breeding and upbringing. The gambling incident hadn't been entirely legal to start with. That was where the criminal elements came in. Zaiden knew he wanted to change the world somehow, or at least make a mark on it that he did not consider "evil." He wanted his name to live on long past his own ending. This might not be enough to immortalize his name, but interfering with criminals probably wasn't the worst place to start – if it didn't get you killed.

Zaiden had a lot of information on the criminal organization. It was not big-time by any stretch of the imagination, but they had a lot of influence in one of the counties of California. Apparently they did have means enough to detect Zaiden's involvement in their recent problems, which was more than Zaiden could say of most of the people he trifled with. It was actually slightly less impressive that they had tracked him to his home. That really wasn't dreadfully hard. He was a very public figure, once you knew his name. But he could not allow them to get away with this. For one, the woman's family would worry, and murder was a serious crime. He had thought the group was more interested in gambling and drugs. This was a worrisome escalation.

For another, Zaiden could not allow them to get away with this, for his own safety. He liked the thought of causing trouble for people who would not be making the world a better place, in any way, shape, or form. He rather liked causing mischief in general – he'd done a bit of it in school, his most daring feat being the rigging of the student council elections one year – but knew that wouldn't fly in the real world. At least, it wouldn't, depending on who he picked on. If he was to be a politician as well, it would do best to make as few enemies as possible. All politicians had enemies. And enemies interfered with his good work. So he could not allow himself to be killed before he made his mark, preserved his name. He could not allow these people to send along the message that he was weak, or would crumble, or could be trifled with. He would make an example of them, preserving his safety in more ways than one.

But how to do it? Zaiden would not sully his own hands with things as messy as killing. Not directly, at least. No blood would stain these thin white fingers with direct contact. He did have a few contacts who would not be above such things, but... There had to be a creative way of doing this. Getting the criminals caught would not send a big enough message, nor be satisfying enough for Zaiden himself. Maybe he'd get them killed after all. He would just have to be artistic about it. And find the rest of the woman's body. Not for any noble reasons, but because Zaiden was morbidly curious what had become of it.

He would need time to think, time to plan. And a little time to research. He would have to look through his notes – carefully disguised as no such thing – and work out exactly who would need to be factored in to this equation. Ah, puzzles were delightful things. They could be damning and frustrating, but when you finally solved them, the feeling was so brilliant.

Two weeks later, there was an article in one of the local papers. It was one of the most bizarre things most people had read in recent history, and many were surprised that the paper had been allowed to print it in the first place. The story was also briefly on the news, but no footage of the scene was aired.

The story detailed what had been discovered in the penthouse suite of the largest and most well-known local hotel. The suite had been paid for for a month two weeks prior, and when the name of the buyer was traced, it was discovered that the man had actually been dead for three years. No one knew where the money had come from.

In the bedroom area, the corpse of a local crime boss had been found. Coroners estimated time of death as being roughly eleven to thirteen days prior. The story was not clear on the details of how the journalist knew, but explained in lurid detail how the crime boss had been forced to consume a large quantity of flesh belonging to a woman unnamed in the article. The rooms were filled with other corpses, found to be all of the members of the crime boss' organization. The walls were literally painted with the blood of the dead men. In one room, a lengthy confession had been written, detailing the crimes of the organization. Perhaps all of them, in exact detail. This account included an explanation of how it had been written by the offenders with their own blood as they slowly died.

How all the members had been killed was a mystery. Most were believed to have bled to death. But rough times of death proved that some had been gutted after the deaths of the others, all at the same time. The article seemed to be somewhat confused on this count. It cited that entrails had been spread around the suite, done extravagantly and in a way that could not have been achieved by the men themselves. They all would have been too incapacitated by that time for such action. "Evidence" indicated that there was an outside presence involved, but there was no physical evidence of any sort that could prove that anyone other than the criminals had been in those rooms during the timeframe. No DNA, no fingerprints. Nothing. The doors were all locked from the inside. It was billed a horrible, mysterious travesty.

Zaiden sat in his apartment, at the small dining nook in the kitchen, reading the newspaper. It was a local paper, technically, but from the next county over. He was reading quite the interesting story, and smiled to himself thoughtfully. Ah, the artistry involved. It was detestable, what that man could do, but even Zaiden had to admit that he possessed some sick sort of talent. There was no way this event could be tied back to Zaiden. He had been several times removed from anyone directly involved, and had taken all the necessary precautions. At least, no one could prove his involvement in any way that was concerning.

However, this sent quite the message. Any crime groups wishing to threaten or off Zaiden would think twice, he was sure. After all, they might worry that they would be gutted, would watch as a stranger in black spread their internal organs over nearby surfaces with relish, would grow weaker as their blood was slowly siphoned from them, that which had not already been spilled. The last thing they would see, quite possibly, was walls painted red with their own blood. Even if Zaiden was dead and gone, this fate might await them – or a fate worse. There were fates worse than death, but death was such a potent motivator. People would do many things, to avoid their own death.

Yes, Zaiden could go back about his life now. The threat to it had been eliminated, and surely the police had been left with enough in that suite to identify the murdered woman as well as the criminals. Her family would be notified. And surely this news was not so much worse than that of hearing that she had been murdered by a criminal gang. Zaiden laughed mirthlessly. Perhaps cannibalization by a criminal gang was worse, but it added an extra layer to the depravity – even if that part had been purely Zaiden's invention and no intention of anyone else prior to his involvement. And the family would cope, somehow. The woman was dead, either way, and at least this way it was fascinating.

Zaiden liked interesting stories. There were many in politics, and he enjoyed reading about them. He had just created one that would not die soon. Murders like this were always preserved in history somehow. And while the news coverage had been minimal, there were other ways the details could leak out to the masses. Ah, well, there was coursework to be done. And maybe Zaiden would take a nice, hot bath.