The first thing he realized when he came to was that he wasn't dead. Well, he didn't think he was dead. After all, he was in the same room as before he passed out. Damnit. His glasses had fallen off. Probably because his chin had fallen against his chest in a show of pure exhaustion. That blurry shape on the floor beneath his feet was probably them. He shivered. It sure was cold here. Wherever he was. Edgar Vargas thought back to what had transpired before he succumbed to the intricate seduction of all consuming fatigue, but truth be told he didn't remember much of it. Something akin to a philosophical debate with a mad man, but he couldn't be sure. Of course, it was meant to result in his imminent death. But clearly that had not occurred for he did feel very much alive. His torso ached abominably and he appeared to still be well off the ground.

He also really had to pee. How long had it been? Part of the pain in his abdomen was his stomach gnawing on itself, grumbling an incessant demand for food. He hoped the mad man would come back and let him down, because he did need to use the toilet. He also thought about maybe going to the grocery market and getting something to fill the barren cabinets in his apartment's kitchen. Well, perhaps it wasn't necessarily a kitchen as a bunch of drawers, a tiny portable fridge and a camping set Bunsen burner. He was big on using paper bowls over his Bunsen burner to heat up his ramen packets. Nothing caught fire, quite an interesting explanation for it. But he had more demanding thoughts on his mind than Bunsen burners and ramen. Well, maybe the ramen was a demanding thought. The sound of his stomach growling was drowned out by the door to the room slamming open. Loud footsteps, and then suddenly there were nimble fingers pulling the belts undone from around his stomach. Quickly the handcuffs were also removed and he fell to the floor…onto his glasses. He heard them snap. He sighed. The fall had hurt a good deal worse than being up there. But he also now had the problem of not being able to see.

"There, you 'can go now'." A familiar voice sneered.

Edgar paused. He did want to go, but he wasn't sure it would a successful mission since he couldn't see and he'd just broken his glasses.

"What? Don't want to leave now? You seemed so intent on it before you took a nap."

"I do want to leave, I just broke my glasses."

There was no response from the voice, so Edgar supplied, "I can't see without them."

"Oh, how unfortunate for you." The voice paused, "So, you cannot leave unless you have glasses?"

"Well, not necessarily."

"So leave then."

Edgar sighed. He picked up the broken glasses and rose shakily to his feet. Then he stumbled blearily towards what he thought was the door. He was wrong. It was a wall. He grunted and began feeling along the wall as he shuffled very slowly. There was an impatient noise behind him so he assumed the mad man was becoming exasperated with him. Not very far away from him were footsteps and the sound of a door closing. Well at least now he knew roughly where the exit was. He started shuffling in that direction. Edgar managed to make it out of the room and up a seemingly endless number of stairs. It was frustrating mostly due to the fact that occasionally he would reach a platform and think he'd reached the top. Then he'd go forward expecting to run into a door. Instead his feet would catch on the foot of even more stairs. After quite a while he found a door instead of stairs. He opened it and entered another room.

The details were nonexistent to him. Everything was a fuzzy blob. Edgar avoided the larger blobs. He held his hands out in front of him. But this didn't do him much good when he bumped into a blob he hadn't noticed before and fell over. His already sore stomach crashed into the arm of a chair. Groaning, Edgar steadied himself and collapsed into it. Not the most comfortable chair in the world, but it was much better than blindly walking up countless flights of stairs.

"You're in my seat." The mad man observed.

Edgar jumped, startled. The mad man settled down on the blob on the floor in front of Edgar. It was probably a coffee table. Suddenly there was a pair of glasses on his face. But they only slightly dulled the pain.

"Can you see now?" He asked.

"No, where'd you get these?"

"I stole them from an eye doctor."

"Ah."

For a while they tried several different glasses. The mad man would ask him if he could see or not, and Edgar would reply with a no. Eventually they found the right pair. Suddenly everything swam into focus. He could see the man in front of him, and at that moment everything came back to him. Nny, that was his name. He was sitting on a wooden crate with glasses scattered all around him and a large bag in his lap. Apparently he'd grabbed every pair in the store. For a moment Nny took the ones off Edgar's face. There was pause.

"You're blind." Nny announced.

"Thank you." Edgar replied.

The glasses were put back on his face. Nny stood up and tossed the bag into a corner. He then disappeared through the door Edgar presumed led down to the bottomless basement. After a few minutes Edgar was at a loss. Nny had gone out of his way to steal all the glasses from the eye doctor's so that Edgar could see. This was after he'd quite generously not killed him. So, it should be obvious that Edgar should now leave. However, Edgar couldn't decide whether he still wanted to leave or not.

He chose to ponder this decision while he searched for a toilet. Edgar found one and it seemed relatively sanitary. He pointedly avoided looking at the tub filled with bloody appendages. After that he twisted the taps of the sink and ran some surprisingly clean water over his hands. He shook them vigorously and dried them as best he could with his shirt. So then…why was this so hard to figure out? He could go home to his serial killer free apartment and eat ramen. Or, he could stay here with a crazy person who almost killed him. Almost. He still might. Gee, what a hard choice to make. Edgar was rattled with indecision and frustration. Besides, what would happen if he told Nny that he didn't want to leave? What would he do then? Edgar still had his job to go to. What time was it? He groaned.

Edgar reentered what he guessed was the living room and glanced around for a clock. Finding none, he glanced at his wrist by force of habit. His watch remained there and it told him that it was nearing two in the afternoon, on a Thursday. He was supposed to have been at work at nine this morning. He could always call in sick a little late. If he got a hold of Becky, the slutty office intern, she wouldn't care enough about him calling in late to tell anyone about it. That was a good plan. He strode across the room quickly and stood in front of the door. This was the last door, it lead outside, he was sure of it. If he went through it he was free. He could go back to his normal life. Right? Why was it so hard to open this door? He threw a cautious look over his shoulder and found Nny standing in the hall, about to enter the bathroom. In one hand he had a bucket full of more bloody limbs. In the other were a just as bloody saw, and a wash cloth. Nny gazed at him in confusion, before snickering in amusement. He then left Edgar alone again, having gone into the bathroom and shut the door. Edgar realized at that moment he was really pushing it. Nny probably wanted him to have been gone an hour ago. Why was he still there anyways?

He padded over to the bathroom and lifted a hand to knock. But before he could a foot slipped through the crack in the door and pushed it open. Nny was sitting on the counter, one foot in the sink and the other dangling over the side. He was scrubbing the blood off his saw with the washcloth he'd brought with him. He didn't spare a glance for Edgar who was merely standing there. The air between them was quite complacent. The tension that Edgar imagined would be there wasn't. He leant against the door jam and Nny finally looked up at him.

"You're still here."

"Yes."

"Do you want me to kill you?" Edgar was surprised with himself when the question didn't really bother him. The tone with which it was uttered held no real frustration, only genuine curiosity.

"Not really."

Nny scowled, though Edgar figured it wasn't aimed at him but more at a stain on the saw that wasn't coming off. He scrubbed more furiously and ended up giving it up as a lost cause. He dropped the saw onto the dirty floor and hopped off the counter. Blithely, as though he had important things he needed to be doing, Nny weaved by him. Edgar turned with the movement and watched Nny head for the stairs again. Instead of passing through the doorway and down into the basement he paused. Turning around he opened his mouth and then closed it. At long last he said, 'Don't sit in my chair'. After that he disappeared. Edgar nodded though the person it was aimed at was already out of sight. Now what to do?

Sponges…sponges…aisle 15. Edgar swerved onto aisle 15. He grabbed a few packs of sponges and tossed them into the cart. Edgar found that his thoughts were rather incoherent, since his waking up in the basement room where he'd almost been killed. First he had wanted glasses, so that he could leave. He'd escaped the basement, been given glasses and he didn't leave. He didn't leave then because he needed to use the bathroom. After that he didn't really have a reason for not leaving, but he'd stumbled upon Nny scrubbing away at his saw. But the stains wouldn't come out, not with a washcloth. So now he was at the grocery market getting sponges, and brasso. The latter because it worked on stainless steel, and sink faucets; maybe it worked on saws? He'd find out when he went back to Nny's house. The fact of the matter was he was out. He was a good several miles away in fact. He could just keep walking and get to his apartment and go back to normal. But the stain was starting to bug him. That and he was also feeling strongly compelled to clean Nny's bathroom. Gloves…gloves…jumbo pack. Into the cart. He also grabbed a bottle of tilex. And a mop. He could get cleaning supplies from his apartment. Hmm, he probably needed a broom.

Edgar stood in the checkout line waiting behind a morbidly obese couple that was rather loud and obnoxious. Nny might kill them. He thought absently. Hmm, the sponges were on sale. By the time they were done arguing and had purchased their things, Edgar noted that the chipper blonde cashier was rather fatigued. She smiled brightly at him nonetheless and Edgar returned the gesture in his automatically polite manner. She looked through him in that way that most people did. It was amazing how his amiable demeanor could make him so invisible. The one time in his life where he'd raised his voice at someone they'd glanced over at him as if he were something shiny they were momentarily distracted by. Then, then they'd turned to something else rather quickly. Was his voice just instantaneously muted by other people's ears when he spoke? Maybe he wasn't actually speaking and it was an illusion constructed by his brain to keep his entire psyche from collapsing? Who knew?

By the time that Edgar had returned to Nny's house it was getting darker out, though the sun had yet to set. He didn't knock on the door, merely walking in as if he lived there. Setting down all of his cleaning supplies outside the bathroom on the floor Edgar began rummaging around for his gloves. The first task he was going to tackle was removing all the limbs from the bathtub and burying them in the front yard. He thought he saw a sign out front that said something akin to "Stay off the loose soil, it's impolite to walk on the dead." All he really needed was a shovel. But as he was thinking on whether or not it would be worth it to go find Johnny and ask where the shovel was, he was becoming more and more disgusted by the limbs in the tub. It finally came to the point where he couldn't look at them. So maybe the incoherency was wearing off.

He'd just spent nearly $50 on cleaning supplies so that he could clean the bathroom of the crazy man who'd almost killed him. In fact, Edgar couldn't even remember why Nny hadn't killed him. His memory went a little fuzzy after Nny had raised the gun. He probably had passed out from the panic of having a gun pointed at his head. But it seemed like something else had happened, something that had somehow distracted Nny. He'd left, and then after that decided that he should just let Edgar go. After all, Edgar was Nny's bestest friend ever. Edgar closed the door to the bathroom and leant against it, sliding down to sit on the floor. What was it he'd told Nny? He wasn't afraid of death? "Fuck fear!" What a confident statement. It must have been the adrenaline. Because now, now he felt very, very afraid. He'd passed countless torture machines down in the basement, well; they'd appeared to him blobs then. So he couldn't really be sure they were torture machines, but it was an educated guess that could probably be trusted.

"Where did the bags come from?"

Edgar glanced up at Nny briefly before turning to gaze back at the floor. Nny had another bucket of limbs, and the stench of blood, old and new, was making him nauseous. Why hadn't he noticed the smell before? It seemed to be consuming him now. It was making his eyes water and his nostrils burn. When he opened his mouth to speak he swore he could taste it on the air.

"The grocery market."

Nny set down his bucket and his saw and knelt down beside Edgar. He perused through the bags offhandedly grabbing one of the sponge packs. For a few minutes he inspected the brasso. Edgar found himself explaining that he'd gone to the market to get things with which to clean the bathroom. He'd bought the sponges and the brasso so that Nny could get the stains off of his saw.

"Yes, well," Nny was staring at him, "That was quite kind of you. I don't really understand why you're still here, but if you want to clean my bathroom I won't stop you."

"You're welcome."

"My only request," Nny continued, as if Edgar hadn't spoken, "Is that you leave the filthy appendages in the bathtub. That is where I like to put them."

"Alright."

"Unless," Again, it was almost like Edgar wasn't there, "you clean out all the parts. I bury them in the front yard when I've accumulated enough. I think my dirt is quite fertile by now. I wonder if flowers would grow well there."

Edgar didn't try to speak this time; it wasn't as if Nny would hear him. He looked up at the serial killer next to him. Johnny looked as if he really was mulling over the possibility of planting flowers in his yard. In fact, for the next several minutes Johnny was consulting him on whether or not he should start growing a garden to cover up the ugly dirt. Edgar nodded and 'hmm'd in the right places while silently praying that Nny didn't decide to kill him. But as the minutes ticked away he started to realize that at this particular moment in time, Johnny didn't feel compelled to do him harm. But there was still a nagging question on his mind.

"Why didn't you kill me?"

"Are you still stuck on that? Really?"

Edgar stared at Nny, whom was currently wearing an exasperated expression, "Well, it is kind of an important issue for someone."

"Not being killed? It really bothers you so much?"

"Well, it's not the 'not being killed', it's more the why. You seemed so set on it."

"Oh, I was distracted by little squee's father. It seems he found the tunnel from his bathroom to one of the basement levels of my house."

"Squee?" Edgar asked, just to make sure he heard right.

"My neighbor." Nny explained, then adding, "He has terrible parents."

Edgar shook his head. He really should go home. Johnny was terribly deranged. He decided not to kill him solely on the fact that he got distracted. How lovely. But, Edgar was starting to discover with a strange sense of apathy growing in his stomach, that he didn't really want to go home. He had no will to leave. He'd probably still have his job, if he felt like going. No one would notice him being gone. No family or friends to check in on his absence from his regular life. He could stay here and clean Nny's bathroom, pass out in the living room and no one would really notice.

A hand waved in front of his face. Edgar turned to face Johnny who was standing up. "I'm going to use these sponges you got for me to try and get the stains off my saw. If you want to clean you'll have to do so around me."

With that, Nny disappeared into the bathroom and left Edgar in the hallway. After a few minutes there was an excited exclamation behind him:

"It works!"

Maybe he would stay. Possible death seemed much better than being ignored. For the moment that was his decision. He'd probably change his mind in a few hours. But a few hours later, when the bathroom was clean, he was hungry, and Johnny was hungry. So they went to the gas mart. He still didn't want to leave.

TBC…