Sanctuary Devoured

Chapter 1:

With lithe fingers he fixed his sunglasses, the wide lenses fully covering his eyes. In front of him lay a cup of freshly brewed coffee and a small stack of magazines. He leaned his head on his propped up arm.

"Val, this idea of yours...you can't be serious." Roger spoke from behind him, the older man's eyes staring down at the raven-haired seventeen year old. Around them the stillness, the utter deprivation of living sounds was suffocating. "Leave things to Mello and Near..."

Val's lips twitched at Roger's protest, though he simply picked up the top magazine and started to leaf through its pages. He barely heard Roger sigh as the man realized Val was ignoring him. Or at least feigning it. Val listened as the man turned around and headed towards the door, the sound of the man's footsteps deafening to Val's sensitive ears.

"..." Val closed his eyes and listened to his heartbeat. If the older man could have seen his eyes, there would be no hiding his fear. What he needed to do – what he'd decided to do wasn't comforting. It wasn't peaceful.

He exhaled the breath he'd been holding and opened his eyes. The sunglasses tickled his nose, tempting him to remove them. But after spending so many years practically blind until his surgery, he was sensitive to light. Five years since, yet it still hurt when any but the faintest of glimmers touched his eyes.

Sometimes he wondered if he should've bothered with the surgery.

"Heh." Val smirked, closing his eyes briefly before focusing on the magazine article laid before him. The photos, the names...he remembered shifting through the rumors online and trying to reconstruct that detective's thought processes. It had become an obsession.

After L had died and the orphanage closed, the first thing Val did was move to Japan. Roger had followed. Eventually they had found this empty building and commandeered it for themselves. A newly constructed building that had suddenly been abandoned.

Roger had had no inkling of its importance. And Val had had only a slight suspicion.

Val chuckled to himself, wondering how well his plan would work.

0

Some time later:

Matsuda sighed as stepped out of the train station and headed towards his apartment. He had just blown another date with his stupidity and klutziness.

'I'm probably gonna die a bachelor, and if the Kira investigation doesn't start making headway I'll never get promoted...'

He sighed again, walking along in a slouch and wondering if he should go somewhere for a drink.

"Matsuda-san." An ambiguous figure slouching against a storefront window called out to him as he passed. The dim, evening lighting made the person's clothing and face difficult to make out, but Matsuda paled. The softness of the voice unnerved him, and its intonation of the greeting following his name made his heart thump. "Good evening."

That politeness. That pose. Matsuda gulped or tried to, his throat sucked dry by shock. Fear. His head pounded. 'Impossible. Im-pos-si-ble.'

The next moment he heard footsteps shuffling off down into the shadowed side-street, and the figure or apparition or whatever was gone.

"Impossible. Impossible." Matsuda continued to mutter, staring blankly down the darkened street.

0

"Impossible, Matsuda. Are you sure you weren't drunk?" Aizawa asked as the younger officer recounted what he'd seen.

"I wasn't! Not this time and not the other times either!" Matsuda exclaimed, his voice becoming shrill from terror and frustration at not being believed. "Three times! I've seen him three times since that first night! L..."

"Matsuda, maybe you've been working too hard. How about you take some time off..." Souichiro began, only to be cut off by the irrational younger officer.

"NO! I wasn't hallucinating and I don't need time off. It was his ghost, I know it..."

"Matsuda, there are no such things as ghosts." Light calmly spoke, cutting off the older yet more naive man. "It's probably just someone who resembles Ryuzaki...or maybe a relative or some such." Light watched as his words had their effect. Since they didn't simply dismiss Matsuda's encounters as hallucinations, the excited man listened to them. After all, it could be a relative of the detective's.

"Maybe..." Matsuda mumbled while the rest of the officers concurred. Their conversation played in the background of Light's awareness.

'Someone resembling Ryuzaki has been pestering Matsuda...I doubt it's a relative otherwise they'd have come forward to claim his body when he died.' Light pondered, turning toward the computer screen. The first time Matsuda came and told the task-force about the apparition, he had questioned Ryuk about the possibility of a ghost – after all, if shinigami existed then it's possible that other otherworldly things did. Ryuk though denied that being possible, since the dead stood dead. 'Maybe a doppelganger? Someone L hired to show up just in case he was killed? Or...'

Light closed his eyes in thought, but quickly dismissed that idea. Ryuzaki had been too intelligent to have been a fake, so this unknown person had to be the fake or a replacement.

He felt his lips twitch, holding back a smirk. Things had been so boring lately, so non-challenging, that he thought his brain would rot away. But if this person was a replacement L had set up in case he died, Light would be able to once again exercise his brain. Of course it'd probably be nothing more than a small diversion.

'Heh. L, I'll triumph over any safeguard you set up. And I'll prove I'm the greater of us two.'

0

Swinging her handbag as she sauntered back to the apartment she shared with Light, Misa smiled. Filming for her current movie had just entered its final stages, and she couldn't wait until she could spend some quality time with Light.

The smile remained on her face when the shuffling sound of footsteps rushed towards her, and a sharp pain tore into her abdomen. It warped into shock as the knife sunk deeper into her flesh. She managed to look up at her attacker's face before unconsciousness hit – her eyes widened in horror as she viewed the person's face. The suffocating shadow of unconsciousness engulfed her before she managed to look at the person's name with her Shinigami eyes.