Disclaimer: same as Prologue.

A/N: Sorry it took so long to get this up. We had some wind and thunderstorms that ended up knocking our power out for a couple of days and that does not a quickly written chapter make :)
Thank you to all the lovely people who reviewed! Your words are much appreciated!

Chapter 1- The Search

Pounded walls make bloody fists

You search through every fissure

It's running, ghostlike, out of reach

Not for you to discover.

A year later

"Mello, you should pick up the wrappers. Watari will be home at any moment."

The blonde stared up at me, smirking for a moment before rolling his eyes and gathering the empty chocolate bar wrappers. Shuffling into the sitting room, I passed Near. As usual, he was crouched down on the floor in front of one of his puzzles. I hopped into the chair in front of one of the windows and stared at the youngest of our strange household. Once the puzzle, completely black, was finished, he turned it off the board, brushed a hand through the pieces and went to putting it back together again. Sometimes I wished I could get my mind to stop racing long enough to enjoy putting the same blank black puzzle together over and over again.

"L," Mello stated from across the room. I looked up and once again wanted to pull the teen's midriff top down as far as it would go to cover the exposed skin but resisted… somehow.

"Yes?" I asked.

"I'm going out with Matt." That's when I noticed he had his leather jacket in his hand.

"You should really wait until Watari arrives, Mello," Near spoke in his high voice from the floor.

Mello rolled his eyes. "He won't mind not seeing me for a while," he said irritably, shrugging the coat on. "After all, we all know that L is his favorite."

It always aggravated me when Mello used this argument as an excuse to go out and do God-knows-what with his friends. "He'll want to see you, I'm sure," I argued, but Mello already had the door open. I turned to Near, who was messing up the pieces to the puzzle again, and felt the corner of my lip turn up. "You'd think that he was the youngest of us."

Near froze over the pieces and turned to look up at me. "The only reason you like me better than him is because of his volatile nature. If he was a bit calmer and less inclined to violence, you wouldn't have a thought for me." He went back to his game. "But then again, you wouldn't ever say, one way or the other…"

With that, I knew that Near was through talking to me. I couldn't ignore the fact that Watari did tend to pay a special kind of attention to me, though he never ignored Mello or Near. I certainly did not ask for the extra acknowledgement, either. We shared a love of glass sculpturing and we often spent time admiring the sometimes simple and sometimes intricate beauty in them. Some appeared to be so breakable and some looked like a bomb could not tear them apart.

Once Near had finished the puzzle again he picked up the entire board and disappeared up the stairs, apparently finished with my company.

Laying my hand on the desk, I spun my chair around so I could gaze out over the city to the tree-covered hills in the distance. Those hills were the one thing that could calm me, though most people said that the hills were haunted by a creature. Something had happened there at any rate. A year ago, all of the animals that lived in the trees had vacated. Within a week, you could walk through them and not find a single animal or hear a single noise. All that was left was an overwhelming sense of danger. The elders said that it was the evil waking up after being dormant for so long but I did not believe that. The logical part of my brain would not let me accept it as fact. It was much more likely that the area had been contaminated. This would explain the absence of animals, and if the chemical, or whatever it was, had a smell, it would explain the uneasy feeling.

I, of course, had no way to talk to anyone outside of this apartment about it. Sure, I had no problem going outside, but others tended to see me as…different. I always walk with a deep slouch and sit with my knees pulled up to my chest. I suppose I could walk upright but it's a chore to do it for just a few feet. As for the way I sit, it's much easier to think. The way I look doesn't seem to help either. Pale skin and jet black hair that can't be tamed. My unusually wide, gray eyes are always marked by dark circles. I could chose to wear different clothes, I guess but my jeans and white shirt suit me fine and shoes just bug me.

I hopped out of the chair and shuffled into the kitchen. Flipping the dial on the stove, I began to heat the water that was already in the kettle. I walked to the cupboards and pulled out a saucer and cup with just the tips of my fingers, then turned and retrieved from a different cabinet: a container of tea leaves, a box of sugar cubes and a carton of doughnuts. I dumped some of the leaves into the teapot beside the stove in a manner that even I had to describe as 'haphazardly'. While the water heated I reached for two skewers that were sitting beside the sink and began to stab the doughnuts with them, arranging the pastries as I wanted them. As soon as the water was hot, I sloshed enough into the teapot to fill it and quickly wiped the rest up with a towel. I don't think I got it all. Gathering everything onto a serving tray I shuffled back into the sitting room, deposited the tray on the desk and maneuvered back into my chair.

I bet it is toxic waste, I thought as I dispensed the tea into the cup and then methodically placed ten cubes of sugar into the black liquid. I couldn't blame anyone who believed that the forest was haunted though. It certainly would have looked creepy enough. If I thought like a normal person, I would probably be afraid of it, too.

I put my thumb to my lip and as I continued to ponder the mystery of the mountains, the sky darkened and a heavy rain began to beat on the window. Many times I had thought about going into the forest myself and searching through its peculiarities. There did seem to be a strange pull to go there… maybe more like curiosity.

I broke out of my thoughts as I realized that the rain had increased so much that I could no longer see through it. I almost smiled to myself as I hoped that Watari remembered his umbrella. Picking up the skewer, I released the first of the doughnuts and popped it into my mouth.

*~*~*~*~*~*~*

"Chief, I'm sorry, but the woman was a dead end."

Chief Soichiro Yagami of the Japanese Task Force sighed. "Well, it was worth a try. That will be all for today Aizawa."

"Good night, sir." Shuichi Aizawa started to turn. "Not that it's really any of my business, but perhaps you should head home also, Chief. Your wife and daughter still need you."

Chief Yagami made no reply, but continued to stare at the few files on his desk as Aizawa left the room followed by Kanzo Mogi. Chief Yagami had been prevented from carrying out a full scale investigative search for his son after the first few months. He was allowed, however, to use his own time to carry on the hunt. Most of his time was now spent looking through every nook and cranny for any possible sighting. Picking up the file nearest to him, he looked at the face of his son in the picture pinned to the top paper.

The son he had not seen in a year.

When Light had gone missing, Chief Yagami started an immediate search for him. There was no reason for the boy to have run away and certainly they would have gotten a note from him saying that he had.

There was no note.

There was no body.

There was no evidence that his son had not simply vanished off the face of the earth.

There were only numerous statements of where so many people had last seen him. As far as Chief Yagami could tell, the last person to see his son was a young girl named Yuri that he had been on a date with. After dropping her off at her house, he seemed to fall off the face of the planet.

Desperate, Chief Yagami had had his team interview everyone at his son's school and few knew anything about the illusive Light Yagami. One thing that stayed in many peoples stories was a fight. An argument that had taken place in the university courtyard. Nearly half of the school had seen the fight between the two men and were almost too shy to tell the task force what it had been about. They soon found out that one of the men involved had revealed a bit too much about the other man's sexuality. Light had been the one to go too far. Most people they interviewed didn't know who the other man was, just that he had looked furious when he was away from Light. Some said he looked angry enough to have done something about it.

No one was able to name the other man, however. No one, that is, until the fourth member of their team, Touta Matsuda, arrived. After that, the students were able to simply point to who it was.

Chief Yagami let the file fall back onto the desk and exited the room. He walked down the too familiar hallway and took a right at the end, and made his way through the lobby to leave the building.

He was going to talk to Matsuda again.

*~*~*~*~*~*~*

"Aweeeee, come on Light!"

"Leave me alone."

"Fine. I'll just go get some more apples myself."

Finally. As much as I was grateful to not be alone in this castle, sometimes life with Ryuk was a little too much to bear.

I walked down the stone hallway. Everywhere in the castle was kept barely lit as I wanted it. There were no mirrors, either. I did not want to see myself. I knew what I had become and I knew the only way to go back to being who I was before.

Fall in love, and be loved in return.

Misa Amane should have thought about how impossible that would be when she turned me into this… thing. Not to mention, in order to keep from causing a panic, I have to stay in this castle. It was certainly big enough, and expensively decorated but hopelessly absent of people to 'fall in love' with.

Not that I understood the point of love. Chemicals reacting in a certain way to make you a fool. Pointless. At least she gave me Ryuk and Rem and the others. Not that I have any clue what they are, but they are strange enough to amuse me and Ryuk is just wicked enough to keep me interested in life.

Flinging my hand… claw out in front of me, I shove open the door and stride into the Gray Room. Dropping into my favorite chair in front of the fire, I think about my visitor earlier. There wasn't any real reason to scare him, but I had been kind to him, there was no reason for him to steal from me.

Standing abruptly from my chair I left through the opposite door and entered my personal chambers. The Black Room. A fire was burning here, also. On top of the mantle lay the rose that the girl had given me a year ago. Still full and beautiful, it made me sick to look at it. Turning away, I walked toward the large window to see the storm.

In a flash of lightning, I caught my reflection. Thick golden fur with streaks of jet black and alabaster. Large black eyes set in a face that almost looks human. Eight feet of nothing that could pass for what I used to look like. Not the claws or shape of the joints. I sighed and turned away from the window, repulsed with myself. Then again, at least I didn't have horns or a tail.

Dejectedly, I walked to the fire and gently picked up the rose. Holding it in my too big hand, all I wanted to do was crush it. Fold my hand over it and make it look anything but perfect.

In another year, I would be stuck in this form… forever.

Replacing the rose, I walked back out into the hall. Perhaps it would be wise to turn the recent incident into as good a thing as it could be. Even if the old man came back alone, he would be more company than I had had in a while. Perhaps if I could convince the witch that I had made an attempt, she would lengthen my sentence until I found a better way of escaping it. If one of the boys came, I might be able to fool them into loving me. How I could do that as I looked now… was almost impossible to think about. Surely Amane wouldn't have given me two years if it were impossible…

"Rem," I spoke into the darkness. I had only to wait a few moments before the bizarre creature appeared before me.

"Yes, Light?" She asked. Of all the strange creatures in the castle, Rem was the kindest. For that reason, I always treated her with more respect than the others.

"We have a guest coming soon… we should prepare a room."

"May I suggest the closed room in the east wing?"

It was enough to almost make me laugh. "I suppose that one would be perfect."

"I'll get Gelus, Sidoh and Deridovely." She turned to go, but just before, she placed a bony hand on my shoulder. "It's not as useless as you think."

*~*~*~*~*~*~*

The apartment door slamming open woke me from where I was sleeping, crouched in my chair.

"L."

Turning, I saw Watari framed in the doorway. The old man was soaked through and looked frantic.

"Watari, what happened? Are you all right?" I jumped up from the chair and shuffled quickly over to him. He pushed my hands away and tried to regain some of his decorum.

"L," he nearly whispered. "I don't know how to start."

I turned away and led him into the room. "Start by sitting down. I'll get you a towel."

Before I could get too far, he grabbed my arm so that I would turn to him. He held out a small glass rose. It's intricate design was perfect in every way and no imperfections marred it in any way.

"The monster in the mountains is real, L."

That stopped me in my tracks and almost made me stand up straight. I looked into Watari's eyes and my blood started to run cold.

"He's real," he repeated, placing the glass rose in my hand. "And at the end of the week, I'm going back to him and he is going to kill me."

A/N: Pretty please R&R! Many, many thanks to my awesomesauce beta Amy who beat me with a whip till this chapter was finished :D