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five.
At the bathroom sink, you unwrap the bandages and flex your hand, watching the scar stretch. It’s still red, not the white of the marks you’ve had for much longer, but it’s fading rapidly. Maybe it’ll disappear altogether.
You don’t really want it to. It’s a brand, almost, and you’re a little bit grotesquely proud. For some reason, though, there’s a memory nagging at you, a voice mocking you for not hating the scar enough.
Oh, right. Before any of this, when he couldn’t possibly have known, when Orihara tried to strike a deal and claimed One day, you’ll be able to meet someone whom you would be dying to be used by .
He’s as wrong now as he was then. You’re not being used, you’re — You think something sentimental, and swipe peroxide over the wound to cut yourself off. You have more power now than you ever have before; you’re sure as hell not being used .
You might kill for Mikado, you think. Not for the way he looked when he was wrapping your hand, and not because he drove the pen through it in the first place. Just because —
There’s a kind of fish called a remora. It sticks itself to sharks and other predators, clearing away parasites that could infect them. As long as it’s hanging around the shark, it eats what the shark eats.
Quid pro quo. You’ll be the right hand in enabling his sudden need to become a tyrant, and your ocean will just keep getting deeper.
three.
You’re kind of insulted that Orihara Izaya considers you two of a kind. Declaring you a rival is a calculated show of respect. He’ll be quick to manipulate you as soon as soon as he believes you owe him in the slightest.
Avoidance, then. It might be easier to rely on him from time to time, because as much as you hate to admit it, the man has probably the best information network available, but you can make do without it.
You weren’t lying when you said that you hated humans. You said it mostly because you wanted to piss off Orihara, to kill his stupid idea that the two of you are anything alike, but it’s true as well. It’s a dull hatred, a low drone of a background noise when you walk through your neighborhood, when you’re sitting through classes and cram school, when you see the kind of kids who chose to follow you without realizing that they’re being used. And above that hum of anger, there’s always been your brother. It’s half fear, you know, a bit disgusted with yourself for it, but it marks him with a target. The rest, you’ll leave be or manipulate when the time is right. Ran — if you can’t have him killed, you’ll have him locked up. For the rest of his life.
You close the door tight when Orihara leaves, and add him to this higher tier. Eliminate him, or get someone else to do it. You won’t trust him, you won’t rely on him, and you sure as hell won’t let him use you.
six.
“Masaomi…”
There’s a certain look Mikado gets sometimes, staring at his phone with softness you never see anywhere else. A sharp square of light reflects in each eye, and you think you might see tears. (You also think you spend too much time looking at Mikado, and turn your eyes to the ground. Whenever he catches you staring, his expression closes into a blank watchfulness that makes your gut twist.)
You’re in the newer hideout in very nearly the middle of the night, long after everyone else has left. He’s huddled against the wall, in the way he sometimes shrinks into himself when he doesn’t have the eyes of the gang on him, and you’re not sure if he even meant to speak out loud.
“Did he send something?”
He does look, then, snapping to attention. You should have pretended not to have overheard. “No, nothing like that. I was just looking at…”
At old messages, or photos, or something else. It doesn’t matter.
“Er, what I was going to say is that Masaomi — I think he’s a good general. I’m not really sure about these things, you know, but I just wanted to say that you should be prepared.”
A wave of anger crashes and chokes you. It’s hard to smile away that ugly, boiling jealousy, but you manage, “I’ll keep that in mind, senpai.”
Kida Masaomi let the Yellow Scarves crash and burn. He did it twice , and ran away with his tail between his legs the second time. And Mikado talks about him like he hung the stars, and the way he looks when he talks about him —
Next to your brother and Orihara Izaya, you place Kida Masaomi. All’s fair in war.
four.
There are bizarre waypoints of normalcy in your life. Most of them, eventually, involve spending afternoons in a messy verbal dance with Mairu and Kururi, out at a cafe or the shopping centers or the pool. It’s almost nice.
They’re fanatics about more things than you’ve bothered to count, which is one of the many conversational landmines you discover. At some point, you let it slip to the twins that you’ve never seen a Hanejima Yuuhei film, and, well, apparently that’s how you get Kururi to emote.
“...Tragic...”
“We’re going to have to do something about that. Aocchi, are you free on Friday night? Don’t say you aren’t, because your life of crime doesn’t count.”
You’d like to say, hey, it actually does, but the twins are consistently impossible to argue with. And so, somehow, it becomes a tradition to spend Friday nights at their apartment, watching weird, oversaturated and overacted B-movies.
The Oriharas’ living space seems too big for just the two of them, but is so cluttered that you don’t notice at first. Everywhere you look are stacks of books and DVDs, wrinkled clothing, empty plates and bowls, and once-glossy teen magazines. You’ve never asked about their parents, and it doesn’t seem like the kind of place an adult has stepped a foot in for years. You also don’t ask questions like, how did you afford that flatscreen TV , and have a feeling you’d rather not know anyway.
Maybe they should invest in a bigger couch instead, because all they have is an overstuffed loveseat. The three of you all have to squeeze into it, and always like so: You are on the left, pressed as far into the arm as possible; Kururi is in the middle, posture ramrod straight until she begins to get tired, when she leans onto you, head dropping on your shoulder if she falls asleep during the movie; Mairu sits sideways on the right, legs flung across both your laps so her feet rest on your thighs. It is torturous.
The movies are also torturous, in a way that begins as entirely different and eventually turns to remarkably similar. There are certain elements you begin to notice in repetition. Yuuhei’s shirts are always falling open, his hair always artfully tousled by battle. His vampire characters always restrain themselves manfully before giving into temptation and plunging their gleaming fangs into a swooning maiden’s exposed neck. He spends an exceptional amount of time soaking wet.
The movies are formulaic enough that you can predict the patterns and make your way back to the fridge, Mairu huffing as you push her feet off you without ceremony, whenever you sense that Yuuhei might, for instance, be drenched by rain in what your Japanese teacher would call pathetic fallacy. It’s not so much a realization as a confirmation of something you had figured you’d deal with later.
“He’s hot , isn’t he?” Mairu asks when you return, her eyes glittering demonically. It’s too knowing a look — and still too knowing when she settles her feet back on your lap — and you think you even see a slight smirk from Kururi. Then again, neither of them has made it a secret that they swing both ways. It’s not like you were looking for kinship, but if you have to have it forced on you, you could pick worse people.
Regardless, you roll your eyes.
nine.
The last ever movie night is two weeks after the three of you graduate. You ran out of Yuuhei films a while ago and have been filling the time with whatever the twins decide on, but they seem to have gotten their hands on the latest one long before it comes out on DVD. It’s another thing you don’t ask. Spending time with them makes you appear deeply uncurious, but in general, you’ve gleaned that while knowledge is power, knowledge is also frequently a massive nuisance.
As the credits roll, Mairu stretches exaggeratedly. “Aaand, that’s it! From now on, Aocchi, it is your sacred responsibility to seek out friends and show them these movies, since we will no longer be in your life. Bring honor to the fanbase!”
You have a lot of questions, but can only manage to articulate, “Wait, what?”
“...Leave.”
“Yep! It’s a really, really long story, but we’ve been getting all these emails and phone calls from people who know Iza-nii. We were able to track their locations, and use some of his old contact information, to get a pretty good idea of where he is now, or at least where he’s been recently.” She shifts to sit on the arm of the sofa, pointy elbows resting on her knees as she fixes you with a stare. “We’re going to go find him again.”
Your mouth is dry. You shouldn’t be surprised that the only friends you wanted, you can’t keep, but it still feels like something’s been ripped from your hands. “Why?”
Mairu tilts her head the same way Yahiro always does, but you don’t move to mimic her the way you would with him. “We want to yell at him for leaving everyone without saying anything! It’s pretty rude, don’t you think? Anyway. He’s still family, even if he’s an awful person, so we have to check that nobody’s murdered him yet.”
You’re annoyed with yourself for having to break eye contact. “You don’t, really.”
Kururi tips her head against your shoulder. “...Understand.”
Mairu doesn’t take much note of either of you. “And we don’t have anything keeping us here — We’ve got friends, obviously, but it’s the twenty-first century! We have phones, too! — So we’ll keep travelling after that. The bounds of Ikebukuro cannot hold us,” she concludes, with a dramatic sweep of her arm. As an afterthought, she adds, “Besides, I have no clue what else to do here.”
Later, it’s that one word from Kururi that sticks in your mind. You’ve never picked up her sister’s knack for interpreting her single-word sentences, but you fill in a paragraph around that understand .
two.
Your brother and father sometimes both seem like stretched-out caricatures of people to you. They’re tall and lanky, with long noses and mouths. You’ve always been small for your age ( “fucking runt” ), round-faced and snub-nosed. By the time you turned eight, you were already sick of old ladies pinching your cheeks and patting your head, but you learned quickly how to tolerate it and smile just long enough to get what you wanted. You never get in trouble at school, and know that a grin and a tilt of the head can deflect questions more quickly than a lie.
Ran is the first to point out how little you take after your father, but he isn’t the only one. Sometimes total strangers take in the family as a whole, and their eyes catch on you. Your father grits his teeth.
He takes to looking at you the way a teacher goes over an essay, looking for errors. You study his face back, and see the same eyebrows, the same chin, and hate the similarities just as much as you realize he hates the differences. He doesn’t hit you, doesn’t yell at you anymore, just stares. That’s when the arguments start, and you and Ran are both quietly glad when your parents are too focused on each other to notice you. The solidarity is strange and unwelcome.
You’re too young to pay much attention to the details of the divorce proceedings, but phrases like suspicion of infidelity bounce around often enough that later, an understanding of the implications crash down on you all at once. Your father won’t find out until almost a year afterward that you’ve had your name legally changed, and he won’t even mind.
You are someone else’s child, you think with something like glee, not a smirking, blood-hungry bastard like them. You’re free of them, even in your blood.
Or maybe you aren’t.
seven.
You catch Kida Masaomi outside the hospital and think, something heavy in your stomach, that he must only be going out for air, because he’s alone. He’s still leaning heavily on his crutches and looks spacy, probably from painkillers, but his eyes sharpen the moment he sees you.
“What are you doing here? Again?” he snaps, limping toward you. Even hunched over the crutches, he seems to be holding himself to appear bigger than he is, as if he could single-handedly block your path.
“I wanted to talk to you , actually,” you say, and flash your brightest smile, just to annoy him. It works, his scowl growing darker, and you become a bit less nervous. It isn’t until it starts to fade that you notice the anxiety that’s been clinging to you in clouds.
Masaomi looks like he’s considering walking away right then — or just telling you to fuck off — but finally asks, “What?”
It’s hard to keep up the grin, and your hands ball up a bit in your jacket pockets. “What,” you start, aware you’re weighing your words too carefully and he’ll be able to tell how hard it is to ask, “what happened on top of Tokyo Hands?”
You’re absolutely certain then that he won’t answer, his jaw tight and lips tighter, but he jerks his head toward a bench by the sidewalk and stalks, hobbling, to it, not looking behind to see if you’re following. You are, of course, but don’t sit down even after he does. Instead, you shift your weight and keep curling and uncurling your fists, waiting for an answer.
You get one. His voice is dull, the story oddly impersonal. That makes it marginally more tolerable, you think, and just wait for him to stop.
“Don’t start crying ,” he says when it’s over. You hear disgust in his voice, but chance a look at his expression and see something close to gentle. Pity from Kida Masaomi is almost enough to actually make you cry. There’s been a burn in your eyes and throat, and you’re not sure you trust yourself to speak.
There isn’t anything to say, anyway. Gratitude and hostility both seem equally pointless. You veer off script.
“See this?” You pull your hand out of your pocket and take a step closer to Masaomi, letting him see the little starburst of scar tissue, long since turned white. He isn’t a total idiot, and from the way his eyes narrow, you can see his thoughts jumping ahead. His hand goes to his leg, and you notice for the first time where the fabric of his jeans is wrinkled, pulled over what must be bandages. “He stabbed me with a ballpoint pen .” You’re smiling without meaning to from the ludicrousness of it all, and Masaomi looks like he wants to hit you, so you start to leave. “I don’t hold it against him, though. I pretty much deserved it.” You’re walking away and not talking over your shoulder, so you’re not even sure if he hears you. There’s a clatter of crutches and the sound of uneven steps behind you, so you add, “None of it really matters to me now. You can relax. I don’t need him anymore.”
He stops following you. You hate him and you hate Mikado and you hate yourself for caring about any of it. You keep walking.
ten.
It turns out that before ditching Ikebukuro for good, Orihara Izaya’s secretary left his old office to the twins. She took some of the stuff and cleared his hard drive, but we were able to find a lot of information , Kururi tells you in an email before leaving town. Most of his old contacts were still in one of the computers, so we’ve been selling some things to finance our whirlwind tour of the nation.
We don’t really need it anymore, though, so we were wondering if you would like an official location for conducting your nefarious business.
It feels awfully close to relying on Orihara, even if it’s a bit more like stealing from him, but you can’t help thinking about how helpful it would be. All that information at your fingertips, as they say. A workplace, and maybe a place to sleep that isn’t your mother’s apartment or one of the hideouts. You more or less begged off the possibility of university — your collaboration with slash exploitation of the Kotonami siblings has been profitable enough to prove that you can get by indefinitely without anything resembling a real career. Mairu and Kururi are always wry about how you make your money and spend your time, but it’s strange to think: stripped of your cover as a student, your only descriptor is criminal . You’ve gone full-time.
So you take them up on the offer, and Kururi sends you an address and a security code. They’re both there when you arrive, and seem to have expected you even though you gave no indication of when you’d be coming. It’s enormous for an office, the kind of place you’d expect to belong to a C.E.O. You’d been predicting something seedy, but it’s sleek, expansive, and high-tech. That, at least, you’d expected; Kururi is absorbed with something at the desktop computer, not even looking up when you enter, while Mairu lies upside-down on the couch, watching the news on the television.
She vaults backwards off the sofa when she sees you and starts waving like an overwound gear toy. “You found it!”
“Yep.” You give the place a better look, and start to notice areas that seem to have been gutted. There are conspicuous gaps in the bookshelf, for example, and no chair behind the desk, meaning that Kururi is working standing up (though she hardly seems to notice or mind). “So you’re just giving me this?”
“It’s not worth that much,” she says, switching off the TV. “The actual place itself is, I guess, but we’ve kind of been having a virtual estate sale.” Her smile makes you think of your old shark mask, shoved now into the back of a drawer. “You can only get rid of a chair or a DVD player once, but you can sell a secret to a dozen different people if you’re fast enough. So most of Iza-nii’s information isn’t worth that much anymore, but you can probably find something to do with it, right?”
You nod, absent. “I owe you,” you say, and it isn’t entirely in gratitude.
“I know.” Mairu half-tackles you in a hug and hisses into your ear, “We’ll be back to collect.”
It isn’t until she starts gleefully prodding at your cheek that you notice that you’re smiling.
The weeks roll past, and you’re too busy to pay much attention to your new acquisition. There are issues with IkeNew, as always, and the bikers pressing in on your territory. Half the time, you catch a few hours of sleep in the van and then collapse on the couch in the office before you have time to get anything done. It’s like the last days with Mikado, you think hollowly one morning when you wake up slumped in the chair you finally bought for the desk. But then, not really at all .
You go through your rounds of checking each email account. Orihara had set up well over a dozen, and it’s long since stopped sitting right with you that you rely on them. It’s not depending on him, it’s stealing , you tell yourself. I’m screwing him over . You’re not convinced.
Finally, the account you set up yourself. At the very top of your inbox is a message from an unknown address, and you should know better, but you open it anyway.
My lovely little sisters just paid me a visit. I hope you’re enjoying the new digs. Can’t wait to see what you’ve done with the place. (・◇・)
You’re out of the chair before you have time to think about it, digging through your backpack until you find the little cardboard box and slide it open.
Water is your element. Fire is a utility, but that doesn’t mean you can’t love it from time to time. You strike every match in the box, dropping them as you pace the office, and lock the door behind you when you leave.
Or maybe you do none of that, and delete the email as you ignore the gnawing in your stomach.
one.
You’ve always liked water: swimming pools, waterfalls, the sound of rain on the rooftops and sidewalks at night.
Ran has you pinned to the ground, a bony knee pressed into your stomach and the overwhelming smell of cigarette smoke making you nauseous. He has his lighter out and flicks at it again and again, the flame closer and closer to your face. You squeeze your eyes shut and think you feel your lashes burn, even though you know you’re just imagining it.
If you scream, your father will come in. He’s never beaten you. He beats Ran. You don’t scream.
A faucet running cold, dewdrops in the morning, blood in the sea and sharks circling.
eight.
It’s different when Mikado returns to school. Half your second year passes without him, and when you finally begin to see him in the hallways again, he’s… different is still the only word you can find. Preoccupied, maybe, absent, maybe. He has glasses now, and the faint smile he gives when you pass in the corridor makes you feel like you’re looking at a stranger.
When your senior year begins and you find out that he’s repeating his because of the time he missed, you’re actually glad that you’re not in the same class. Every time you see him, you want to kick something.
For some reason, the worst part is that you still talk. Hi, Mikado-senpai — you’re never sure whether that’s the right honorific anymore — how’s your day been, I’m just fine, can’t complain. Underclassmen are being a pain, you know how it is . It’s all agonizingly fake-casual. Actually, that’s the worst part; you’re not sure it’s faked at all for him. He has a perfect mask of unconcern. It means nothing at all to him when he mentions, unbidden, I’ve been helping my girlfriend at her shop and a rushing in your ears drowns out the rest. It’s hard to really hate Sonohara Anri, but you give it your best effort.
It’s normal to visit the library more than usual as a senior. Everyone’s there, cramming for university entrance exams and the tests the teachers seem to spring on you more and more often. You stay after school sometimes, when there’s no one left but the dutiful president of the library committee. Isn’t it a little bit weird, you’d like to ask him, to let go of all that power for this? Once, you actually chase him down into the stacks to ask him that. Something about going up to his desk feels too public, so you follow him between the shelves.
He turns, and there’s a flash of suspicion. Or recognition. It feels like you’ve cut through something, cleared away some kind of fog, and you’re so desperate to keep it that you don’t think.
You do not ask him the stupid question you wanted to ask. You grab the lapel of his awful bland blazer and kiss him.
Or maybe you don’t. You’re not sure if he kissed you back, or if he would’ve.