Chapter Text
You once told me that the human eye is god’s loneliest creation. How so much of the world passes through the pupil and still it holds nothing. The eye, alone in its socket, doesn’t even know there’s another one, just like it, an inch away, just as hungry, as empty. Opening the front door to the first snowfall of my life, you whispered, “Look.”
~Ocean Vuong, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous
Whenever someone mentions Izaya, Shizuo growls something about how he better not set foot in Ikebukuro again, but at night he wakes from nightmares about Izaya’s bones and no amount of milk and cigarettes can calm him and carry him till morning.
“Do you ever sleep?” Tom asks him one day, and after that Shizuo is careful to always have his shades on, lowered so that they cover the bruises under his eyes.
No, Shizuo doesn’t sleep, and the reason why he hesitates before passing Orihara Mairu on the street is because she doesn’t look like she sleeps much either.
It’s not the first time he sees her, after. He’s bumped into the twins a few times over the past few months, and they always seemed their old selves, Mairu talking too fast to pause for a breath and Kururi speaking even more in all her silence, the both of them needling him about Kasuka, and it might have been paranoia that every time Mairu’s eyes seemed that tiny bit colder than they ever had before and that Kururi would look away from him sooner, as if she couldn’t bear his sight.
Now, Mairu is nothing like herself – alone at a crossroads, hands in pockets, eyes rubbed red and something more resigned than hatred in them as she stares into space. Resentment, maybe, and Shizuo’s never seen someone this young make a face like that, not even himself at his own reflection after those first few broken bones and after hearing his mother apologize over the phone on his behalf and cry into her pillow later.
“You’re too young to be out so late,” he says, almost stuttering on ‘young’ because, more than that, she looks small. Maybe it’s an Orihara thing, he thinks, trying not to remember Izaya spread on asphalt with his arms all wrong and how it was already too late, how Shizuo couldn’t stop himself from destroying him even as something inside him broke and cried and cried and cried.
Mairu smiles a tired smile without looking at him, and tilts her head back to stare up at the sky, even though there’s too much light pollution over Ikebukuro for her to see any stars. Shizuo sees Izaya in her the way the lines of a painted-over sketch might be spotted on a canvas if you just look hard enough – the shape of her ear, the corner of her mouth, the red-tipped nose – and he wonders if everything would have gone differently, had Izaya spent more time looking up than watching from above.
“Shizuo-san,” she says, only an echo of her usual enthusiasm in it. “Long time no see.”
“It’s not safe to be out alone like this,” he tries again, and he doesn’t know why it feels so important to have her go home, back to safety and out of his sight. She reminds him of a pigeon he saw once, pecking at nothing in the middle of the road, not bothering to fly away even as cars sped towards it.
Maybe that’s an Orihara thing, too.
“Right,” she says, smile widening but shoulders falling. “I should be careful now, shouldn’t I, with no one in the city to send help were I in danger and pretend he didn’t later.”
“Well, at least you know how to defend yourself,” Shizuo says, as if girls good at throwing punches can hold their own against Ikebukuro’s worst monsters.
“Say, Shizuo-san, do you have a cigarette to spare?” Mairu says, and there’s no way he can say no with one lighted and caught between his teeth.
“You’re too—”
“Too young, yes, yes,” she says, and he doesn’t know when she reached into his pocket, but she already has his lighter in hand, cupping her hand around the cigarette even though the city’s too dense here for wind. When she’s done, she slips the lighter back into his vest, and smiles so wide that he almost forgets about how she shouldn’t be alone, and about how Izaya shouldn’t be God-knows-where, and about how he himself shouldn’t be talking to her at all, after all that happened. “I don’t smoke, so don’t worry about me getting lung cancer or something. I’m strong, anyway, even if I don’t look it. Nothing will kill me that easily, you know?”
She seems sad about it, somehow.
“If I were sick, I’d call—”
She cuts off, and chokes on the smoke, smiling at him sheepishly. She looks ridiculous with the cigarette, like a child trying to walk around in her mother’s high heels.
“If I were sick, I wouldn’t have to go to school, but I actually like going a lot,” she says.
If I were sick, she doesn’t say, I wouldn’t call anyone.
Back when Shinra first mentioned the twins in high school, Shizuo was so surprised that he stopped fighting Izaya just to ask him if he really had sisters. He still has the scar Izaya’s knife left that day below his collarbone, closer to his heart and deeper than even the most vicious of the other’s later cuts.
It’s never occurred to him before that it might have meant something.
If you’re ever sick, Shizuo doesn’t say, you should call him.
It’s not his place.
After, it took weeks before he thought of the twins – really thought of them, two teenagers whose brother he almost—
It took him weeks to wonder how they must have felt, and now he wonders again, wonders if, just like him, Mairu inhales smoke so she doesn’t have to breathe in the lack of Izaya. God knows there seems to be more of it than there’s oxygen in the city.
God knows cigarette smoke is nowhere near as bitter.
“Do you know,” Mairu says, crashing her cigarette with the heel of her shoe. “I never wanted to grow up into missing him.”
Shizuo reaches out to put his hand on her shoulder, only there’s instantly a flash of a blade, the knife slashing into his sleeve and keeping his arm in place, suspended between them. Mairu smiles at him like she knows he could shake it off any moment, and he wonders what it took for her to learn wielding a knife so easily, if she ever cut herself while trying.
“I found it under a loose floorboard in his old room,” she explains, voice bright. “He must have forgotten it, or maybe he left it for us? Anyhow, I don’t mind you touching me, but I think it’d kill Iza-nii if he saw you doing it, so I won’t let you.”
Shizuo stares at her, and almost tells her that he didn’t want to grow up into almost missing Izaya, either, but before he can make up his mind to do so, she’s already walking backwards and waving goodbye, and all of Ikebukuro’s neon lights aren’t enough to keep the night from swallowing her.
*
Once, after, Shizuo stared at his hands, and wondered who decided whether bones should grow stronger or weaker after a break. It made him think there must have been a god after all, the fortuity of it – as if someone bored up there would decide those things by rolling a die.
Die, die, die, and Izaya almost did.
Shizuo would have broken his own fingers in three places each, back then, if he’d believed it would make him too weak to hurt anyone ever again, and not the opposite. Instead, he had to live with himself and with how he’d destroy things every time he remembered destroying Izaya, a lamp, a phone, a mug breaking in his hands, the blood from the shards of porcelain so red that for a moment, he could never be sure if it was even his own.
He couldn’t decide, the first few weeks after their fight, if Ikebukuro was calm, asleep, or dead. It took him months to realize that it was as awake as ever without Izaya there, and the only reason why it didn’t feel so was because Shizuo himself wasn’t. He would go to work, go for sushi and go to Shinra and Celty’s meet-ups, and he’d use these hands of his – the hands that broke and broke and broke bones – and he’d think about marrow.
He must not have had it, he’d think, remembering how easily Izaya’s bones gave under his knuckles. His bones must have been hollow.
He’s been trying to forget Izaya for months and all that the effort did was make him remember and remember and remember.
“Hello,” he says, then, when the twins open the door the next day. “I want the two of you to tell me about your brother.”