Fifteen minutes later, Shinjuku
As he walked the path from the park to his apartment, he heard a voice behind his back.
“Hey.”
Izaya turned around at the familiar voice and saw a six-foot-plus giant with skin dark enough to melt into the night.
“Simon?” he asked. Simon gave his usual cheery grin.
What’s Simon doing here?
For once in his life, Izaya’s mind was occupied with doubt. He was normally the one causing others to feel doubt and grow confused, but now he was in their position.
It only lasted for an instant, but an instant was all Simon needed.
The moment that Izaya started to speak, the giant’s scarred fist plunged into his face.
Thirty minutes later, apartment building, Shinjuku
“That took you long enough. Did you get the… What happened? You look dreadful,” Namie exclaimed, taken aback by Izaya’s brilliantly blue and puffy eye.
His eyelid was swollen like a boxer’s after a bout with a particularly hard puncher, and the bruise around it was vivid and dark.
“…I took a pretty good punch, though it didn’t knock me out. As I was working my way up to being able to stand again, I got a lecture in Russian. ‘I don’t want to lecture you,’ indeed… It was one for the ages.”
“What? Russian? What do you mean…? I thought you’d never taken a bruise like that, even when fighting with that Shizuo guy.”
Izaya grimaced at the mention of his archenemy’s name. He analyzed the punch he’d just taken, comparing it to that of the loathsome one.
“Shizu’s stronger, of course…but this was the punch of someone who does some kind of hand-to-hand combat training. I was able to react, but not to dodge… Heh. Guess those rumors about him being a Russian mobster or mercenary have something to them.”
“Are you all right? You don’t have a hemorrhage, do you?”
It was rare for Namie to show him any kind of concern, but Izaya wasn’t listening.
“Damn… Just when I’d gotten the best of Saika and thought I was something special, this happens to me.”
But through the first taste of direct physical pain in ages, Izaya couldn’t help but enjoy himself.
He looked at his pupils in the mirror and ran through the basic brain hemorrhage tests, grinning all the while. He turned to Namie.
“Hey…can I ask you something?”
“What?”
“Were you the one who leaked Mikado’s information to Horada?”
“I wonder. And if I did, you would have seen it coming, wouldn’t you?” she replied without batting an eye. Izaya grimaced and looked up excitedly at the ceiling.
“Heh! Honestly, some people I can read like a book, such as you…and others completely defy my predictions, like Simon and Shizu. This is why I just can’t stop loving humanity… That’s right. That must be why I can keep doing this shitty, shitty job… It’s so much fun, it makes me sick.”
Somewhere there, in the midst of his words, was the tiniest bit of truth.
But Namie listened to his confession, straight-faced, and cut him down in her usual cold manner.
“I’ve said this over and over, but…I think humanity hates you in return.”
Thirty minutes earlier in the street
Izaya felt his body float into the air as pain exploded on his face.
The floating sensation ended abruptly when his back slammed hard against the wall of an apartment building several yards away. The shock jolted his back, waist, and limbs, the blood vessels in his extremities nearly bursting with pain and numbness.
His mind was woozy, but the internal pain and nausea from the shock forced his brain into action. The voice of the black man squatting over him reached his ears.
“Hey. You mind listening to something you don’t want to hear?”
These friendly words were the start of a much, much longer monologue.
“You know, it’s laughable what a cowardly creep you are. Ha-ha…ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha.”
The Russian mockery washed over Izaya. He glared up at the big man and slowly replied, “Actually…I have to agree.”
His reply was in Russian as well—creating the rather surreal sight of an Asian and a black man speaking Russian on the asphalt.
“The thing is, Simon, I happen to like that side of my personality,” he said, leaning back against the wall, his face still brimming with confidence. “I know you care about this neighborhood…but why are you showing up now? What does any of this have to do with you?”
“Oh, that? It’s quite simple.”
It was a rare, honest question from Izaya, and Simon returned it with simple honesty of his own.
“You remember Masaomi’s girlfriend?”
“…Yeah.”
“She told my restaurant partner a lot of things. About you and what’s going on now.”
The face of Saki Mikajima came to Izaya’s mind. He had told her part of his current plan—he’d been using her as a tool to manipulate Masaomi Kida and bring him back when needed.
Oh, now I see. Saki really was in love with him.
Saki had betrayed him. This fact did not particularly surprise him.
In that case, I can give them my blessing.
It was, in fact, within his range of expectations—but there was one thing he didn’t understand.
“Why would she contact you guys rather than tell Kida himself?”
“Hah! Kida wouldn’t have stopped, even if she’d told him. Plus…she probably didn’t have anyone else to call on the phone. I doubt she knew the phone numbers of anyone in Kadota’s little group.”
“Again, why you?” Izaya started to ask, then figured it out.
Why Simon? Saki wasn’t particularly close with him. It was a common sushi destination, but certainly not the kind of place where one would trade numbers with the employees.
Huh? Numbers…?
That was where he understood. Yes, Saki didn’t know any number that she could reach out to for help. Which was exactly why—in the absence of anyone else she could ask—she got the contact information of Simon or the white sushi chef he worked with.
Meaning…
“Our sushi shop gets a lot of business.”
The conclusion he arrived at was so silly, he didn’t comment.
Simon laughed and said it anyway. “Whether it’s a hospital or wherever…we can deliver to anyone with a phone book.”
A phone book.
Such a simple and basic answer.
When the chef picked up the phone and said, “Russia Sushi, how can I help you?” did she take him literally?
Izaya couldn’t stop the smile from touching his lips. Simon looked down on Izaya’s mirth with a cold grin of his own. “I didn’t make it in time earlier today, but here I am now to put a nail in you.”
“…”
“You shouldn’t be stirrin’ up the town like this, Izaya.”
“Y’know, Simon,” Izaya muttered in Japanese, staring at the man through his rapidly swelling eye.
“You come across completely different speaking Russian than when you speak Japanese…”
“You know…it’s really quite stunning what an underhanded creep you are,” Shingen said flatly as he put his shoes on. “I’ve looked into your past… You were pulling the strings all along in that turf war two years ago, weren’t you?”
“Whatever do you mean?”
“Those two groups of youngsters… They were Japanese versions of street gangs, right? You manipulated both teams, kept your hands clean, and made off with the juiciest morsels of information to sell.”
“…”
Shingen turned back to look at the confidently grinning Izaya and smirked inside of his gas mask.
“You sent that girl who worships you to those boys. From what I heard, it was her injury that ended up resolving the entire matter…”
He paused, then offered a conjecture dripping with irony. “I suspect that even that
was on your orders. Perhaps you gave her all of the instructions, up to the point of her kidnapping…though I don’t know if there are actually any girls willing to follow orders up to the point of serious bodily harm.”
A moment’s silence.
Izaya did not answer the question directly. He wore a wry grin as he said, “Saki and those other girls…were so unfortunate. That’s what made them so adorable.”
“Puppets of an unfortunate man like you. I understand you’ve been doing this sort of thing since high school. Shinra used to tell me that you ‘didn’t understand a thing about love.’”
“That’s rich, coming from a pervert with a fetish for decapitated women… But at any rate… All of those girls, including Saki, were being terribly abused by their families and lovers, worse than you can possibly imagine…”
As he spoke, Izaya’s face took on a complex mixture of pity and ecstasy. “But unable to hate their abusers, they were trapped where they were. That’s the kind of people they were, and that’s exactly what made them so easy to manipulate. They were possessed by more than just the love of their partner, but a kind of worship. And I shifted that worship onto me instead—that’s all. If I did wish for death, they would hesitate, but still join me in the end…”
“Hmph. You treat this so lightly. It almost makes me think it would be very easy to switch one’s doctrine on a dime,” Shingen noted with equal parts admiration and exasperation. He recognized that the young man standing there was truly a monster. How many lives had the mind behind that smile destroyed?
Izaya suddenly changed the topic. “Does the term leanan sídhe mean anything to you?”
Shingen’s eyes widened in surprise.
“…”
“?”
“Er, nothing. It’s a type of fairy in Irish and Scottish folklore, isn’t it? The kind that kills the man she falls in love with.”
“Yes. She seduces a man, and if he accepts her love, she gives him talent in exchange for his life. If he resists her love, she becomes a willing slave to him until he gives in… That’s what Saki’s kind are.”
Shingen saw Izaya’s point. Falling in love with the kind of girls Izaya described would—if not provide magical powers—certainly seem more likely to end in tragedy.
“But now…Saki’s fallen to being Kida’s slave. Which means that, like the poet in the legend, Kida’s life will be drained away. As it was, so it shall be,” Izaya said in mourning for the teenager.
Shingen considered this, then thought about his own son and his pairing with a monster…and decided to argue back.
“But…can you truly say that the poet’s shortened life is a tragedy?”
Izaya smiled in a way that suggested he didn’t care in the least. He sighed, “Well, if he truly loves the fairy, then maybe he’s happy anyway.”
“If he knows full well that he’ll be misfortunate, and he loves her anyway…doesn’t that make him happy in the end?”
Hospital room, Raira General Hospital
Masaomi stared up at the ceiling from his hospital bed.
Though he’d taken the painkillers, a dull throbbing still raced through his body. It wasn’t unbearable, but it was worse than the kind of pain one could ignore to get some sleep.
Visiting hours were over, and his injuries weren’t life threatening, so Anri and Mikado were sent home already. They shoved Masaomi into an empty room, and he lay there, bored, examining the patterns on the ceiling and thinking about his past experiences in this hospital.
Two years ago.
When he walked into Saki’s room to suggest that they break up, she smiled at him.
“Thanks… You came for me.”
Her smile was the exact same as it had been before the hospital, the expression of someone truly delighted to see him. And it was that very smile that cut deeper into his heart than any knife.
I can’t. I can’t bear it.
I have to tell her.
Say it. Just say it, Masaomi.
“I know.”
“…Huh?”
Saki was offering him a way out as he stood there, sweating nervously.
“I know, Masaomi… You didn’t really come, did you?”
“…!”
“Yeah… I heard from Izaya… You were calling him, weren’t you? Over and over and over… He showed me the call history and laughed about it.”
That…sick bastard!
He felt a surge of anger at Izaya, but it was immediately suppressed into a different emotion. No matter who he aimed his anger at, it always ended up turned on himself. The undeniable fact that he had run away was heavier and more real than any emotion, and it had an ironclad grip on his heart.
“But don’t let it bother you. It wouldn’t have changed much for me if you’d come after that or you hadn’t.”
“…Stop it.”
“I mean, as long as you didn’t get hurt…that was the most important part…”
It was at that very moment that the words finally spilled out of Masaomi’s mouth.
“Let’s break up.”
To cut her off.
Her consolation was nothing but pain to him.
And at the time, he chose to escape that pain by suggesting that they break up.
“Thinking on it with a calm head…I really was a totally disgusting creep…”
Masaomi spoke out loud to the ceiling, reflecting on the events of two years earlier.
“I wonder what Saki could possibly have seen in me that she thought was cool.”
Maybe it was all on Izaya’s orders in the end. At this point, he would never know.
Or so he thought.
“Maybe it’s that weird way you can be honest with yourself.”
“Bwah?!”
He was not expecting a response from the other side of the room.
Masaomi’s eyes snapped in that direction and saw that Saki was leaning up against the wall. He hadn’t realized that he was in the same building, on the same floor, as Saki’s hospital room. Perhaps it was a considerate move from the staff who recognized him on the way in.
“Wh-what the hell, Saki? When did you get here?”
“A while ago. I didn’t want to wake you up, so…”
She was staring at him intently without her usual smile. “I heard the whole story from Kadota.”
“Oh, great… So do you hate me, then? I ran away from trouble back when you needed me, and yet today, I charged into the midst of the enemy all alone. It’s a miracle I only got it this bad,” he noted wryly, looking away. Her expression only got cloudier.
“You idiot. You really are an idiot, Masaomi…”
“You knew that ages ago.” He clammed up after that.
A long silence reigned over the room. It was Saki who broke first. But it was less that she broke than that she made up her mind.
“Well, um…there’s one thing that I need to apologize to you for, Masaomi,” she said, walking over to the side of his bed. She was using her own two feet, not the crutches propped against the wall or the wheelchair she always sat in.
“That night…the truth is…I let them capture me on Izaya’s orders. I knew. I knew what they would do to me. But Izaya said…that would be the end of everything. So I went! I went by their hangout that night…right near…by…and…then…Izaya…told them…where…I was…”
Saki’s face was pale and terrified as she talked. Her voice was trembling too much to continue, and silence returned to fill the room.
She’d been certain that she would never walk again. Masaomi kept a straight face as he listened and sat up. Pain shot through his body as he did, but he made sure not to show it. He summoned a confident grin.
“What, is that all?”
“…Huh?”
“I knew that,” he lied. “C’mon, don’t you know I’m psychic?”
He’d had no idea. But now he did.
So Masaomi pretended that he had known this all along, making sure not to show that he’d ever been plagued b
y the idea that she might never walk again.
“And what did he tell you next? Pretend not to be able to walk, so I won’t be able to leave you behind, right? So he wanted to turn me into a pawn. Probably thought it was all some grand experiment… Sheesh. You shouldn’t be using a hospital as a hotel. I think the only reason this place let you stick around is because they have so many empty rooms,” Masaomi grumbled to hide his falsehood.
Saki put on a teary smile for him. “For the first time…I went against what Izaya told me to do,” she said. Did she believe what Masaomi told her? He couldn’t tell.
But under the room lights, her smile and her tears were precious to him.
“You know…I think I can say it now.”
“Say what?”
“I should have gone, but when I needed to save you, I didn’t… I’m sorry.”
They were the words he never said two years ago.
The words he avoided speaking because he was afraid of admitting them.
He finished with another thing he’d been too afraid to say.
“But…I still love you, Saki.”
“…”
“Please don’t leave me.”
It was strange how easily they came out. Silence filled the room again.
After what felt like minutes, when Masaomi wondered if he ought to repeat himself, she pressed herself onto him.
“Gwuh!” Masaomi yelped as the shock sent a wave of pain through him. “What the hell—” he started to complain, until he saw the deadly serious look on her face and stopped.
“You…you really are an idiot, Masaomi… The biggest idiot ever…”
As the tears pooled in her eyes, Masaomi recalled something she’d said to him once and decided to throw it back to her.
“I can’t help it, can I? You can at least overlook one little flaw.”
And sure enough, she recognized those words and repeated back what he had told her in return: “If you know it’s a flaw, then fix it.”
They faced each other, reliving and reaffirming their past.
“Together…we can start over fresh.”
Outside, the rain was falling again, coating the room in the cold sound of its pattering.
But no one inside found it to be depressing.
Durarara!!, Vol. 3 (Novel) Page 22