Chapter Text
Ikebukuro Station has seen every side of you.
It has seen you eager, disappointed, apathetic, idealistic, anxious and aggravated. And now, as an undergraduate student in Toshima, you can add "heartbroken" to that list, four months since breaking up with your boyfriend of three years beneath the florescent lights. It's poetic and tragic and ironic since that's where you met him for the first time, when you were both still in high school. You would walk together every night and he would wait until the train came, and then he would let go of your hand slowly, one finger at a time, like he wanted to take one with him to remember you by. He would wave until he couldn't see you anymore.
The break up was mutual, you reassure yourself on your way out the door in the morning. It was what you both needed. It was what you both wanted. If you keep telling yourself that, you'll eventually believe it.
It used to bother you, but four months later, you're getting better, sliding back into a routine. You leave early to avoid the morning rush, when the sky is still dark and only a few salary men are standing on the platform with you, checking their watches. You get to campus and study, eat breakfast, and try to keep yourself occupied. You go home at the end of the day, pressed into the train with a hundred other commuters all wanting to do the same thing. You do homework, study, sleep, rinse, wash, repeat, every day. Your friends think you need to get out more, but you know it'll pay off in the end. You're normal, perfectly normal, too normal.
But there's nothing wrong with that, is there?
You never thought so before, but just as you're thinking those thoughts, reassuring yourself that normal is a fine thing to be, something abnormal takes note of you. You don't notice anything out of the ordinary right away, but you notice that there is someone there, because he reminds you of your ex, standing there, waiting beside you at the crosswalk for the lights to change. He has the same dark hair and the same sharp fashion sense, but maybe you're just imagining things and they look nothing alike. Sometimes you lost yourself to the past.
He keeps pace with you when you step out onto the street, all the way down the block and into the local station, where he turns to face you as you both stand at the yellow line. His smile is like any other you know, but soon it will be something very, very different.
"Have we met before?" he asks. You shake your head and smile back, telling him no, you don't think so. "Really? I'm sure I've seen you before. Maybe around here."
It's likely. This is the station closest to your home, and also the one that your boyfriend surprised you at once, meeting you to spend an afternoon together. You see his face in place of the stranger's and turn away to shake the image from your mind. He doesn't say a word the rest of the way, and you leave the train for the platform at your stop, but your eyes meet for just a moment, and the stranger slowly smiles and waves as the doors close between you and the train pulls away.
*
He introduces himself to you as Izaya Orihara, and the only reason you don't turn and run then is because you don't know any better. You have always been the bookish type, "most likely to stay in on a Saturday night," and it finally works against you when the suave terror of Ikebukuro barges into your life and gets cozy. You run into each other every day and reason that you probably only notice him on your route now because you've finally gotten out of your rut and have begun again to appreciate the scenery, never once imagining that somebody might have just decided to start following you.
"You must be going to Toshima," he says, standing over you in the train. It's the seventh day in a row that you've run into each other on your way to the station and ridden in the same car together. The previous day, he told you that he worked in town, and you still believe it. He hasn't done anything to make you believe otherwise, after all.
Yet.
Urged on by the friendly conversation, you tell him he's right and that you're an undergraduate student. He seems interested.
"Is that right?" he asks, "An undergrad? Maybe I guessed your age wrong." You establish that you are twenty, and he is twenty-five.
An older man. You have a thing for older men. You tell yourself to stop staring.
When the train pulls up to your stop, he takes your hand to help you to your feet and it looks like he might kiss it, but he only lets you go. Slowly. One finger at a time. Like he wants to take one with him to remember you by. Your nose burns and your face heats up and you mutter a quick, "see you," and turn on your heel to leave, waiting until you're safely on the train platform to wipe your eyes on your sleeve.
You're stuck in the train station of Samsara, a never-ending loop that seems to take you back to the same places every day where you see the same person and hear the same words and make the same mistakes. The yellow line stretches on forever, the platform goes on as far as the eye can see, and there is no terminal stop. You hope that Izaya will be able to destroy the cycle for you, but you could never ask that of him. The task is yours, and you'll leave when you're ready.
Until then, you'll just keep walking, alone, miserably.
*
There's a six o'clock alarm that goes off on your phone every day that reminds you to eat. Your boyfriend set it for you a few years ago after you let it slip that you hadn't eaten yet that day. "This way, you won't forget to take a break for dinner," he'd said, "I'd take care of you if I was there, but we'll have to wait until we're out of high school to move in together. So for now, take care of yourself."
When it goes off, you feel hungry, and you also feel a dull throbbing in your heart. It wakes you up if you sleep, it brings you out of daydreams and back into reality, from the past to the present, reminding you that you are living today, not yesterday or a day a few years ago, and that things are different now.
You're alone now.
One day, you're sitting on the train on your way home from an afternoon study session with some friends when Izaya boards the train. "You're out later than usual," he notes. This time, he sits next to you. "Not that it's any of my business."
"It's fine," you say, "I was just studying with friends. It does me some good to get out now and then."
He smiles at you. This is not the smile of a stranger, but the kind of encouraging smile that someone who really knows you, knows what you're going through and where you've been, might give you. You tear up at the sight and try to pretend you're stifling a cough. "Actually," he says, "There's something I've been meaning to ask you."
Suddenly, you're on the train three years ago. Your boyfriend--who is not your boyfriend yet--is sitting in the seat next to you, rubbing the back of his head nervously. "It's sort of embarrassing," he admits, "I mean, we haven't known each other that long. But I notice you, and I think about you a lot. So I was wondering...if maybe you wanted to be my girlfriend?"
Your alarm goes off, and you don't catch your phone in time. Izaya catches it, but you don't notice that at all. You see him next to you, and that's all, not your ex, just Izaya. The alarm keeps buzzing and you know you're crying when his apprehensive grin falls and turns into an expression of worry. "Are you okay?" he asks, and you nod.
You are okay. In fact, you're great. It's three years later, and you think you've finally moved on.
Ikebukuro Station is the silent witness to your hazy love-struck eyes and the sharp, clear ones of Izaya Orihara behind you, and it patiently awaits your world to inevitably come crashing down.