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Izaya had always been far more poisonous than Shizuo.
Shizuo was tall and lean, with sharp edges - where his elbow jointed together the two parts of his arm, the front teeth that he rolled cigarettes between, the edges of the street signs he swung through the streets of Tokyo, slicing through the heavy summer air. But Izaya, small and slight, had even sharper edges - and he wasn't just sharp, but also malicious.
Izaya was sharp everywhere Shizuo was, and even where Shizuo wasn't; while Shizuo smiled geniuely, his teeth showing passively, Izaya's smiles where always smirks - cold and superior, only showing his teeth with aggression, only smiling as a taunt. While Shizuo's vest and shirt settled over his arms evenly and smoothly, Izaya's hood spiked about him in all directions; a wreath of thorns hanging from the back of his shoulders.
Izaya may have been more venomous than Shizuo, but if Shizuo could get shot by a gun and not even realize he'd been injured, a little snakebite wasn't going to hurt him any. Besides that, he was much physically bigger, and stronger, than Izaya.
And it was fairly obvious who was going to win on that infamous night, after Izaya flipped through the air to thud to the pavement, with both arms broken from Shizuo's punch.
Shizuo didn't truly regret it - he knows it was him or Izaya, and if he could take it back, if he could do it differently, he wouldn't (he couldn't). But he didn't feel any pride or satisfaction in Izaya's defeat, either. He resigned himself to not focusing on the fight- deeming it an unpleasant, but entirely necessary, occurrence. Because Izaya was relentless - he wouldn't stop until the stalemate they had been locked in was resolved. He wouldn't stop until one of them lost and the other won.
Izaya had been fully aware that it might not be him that ended the victor. He knew what he was getting himself into. He provoked Shizuo, he asked for it, demanded it, stole it when he was denied it.
These justifications, however true, do nothing to change the fact that Izaya is gone.
Where he's gone to, Shizuo doesn't know. No one seems to know. There are plenty of theories - some think he's fled to Russia, other believe he's hiding within a different part of Japan. But he majority of the rumors are the ones that insist he's dead - that he'd bled out across the pavement of the city which he loved; that he'd "painted the town red" one last time.
The swapping of theories and rumors causes quite a buzz about Izaya for a few weeks, more talk about him than usual. But then people lose interest with deciding Izaya's fate, they pick up on fresh gossip, they move on to other things; and Orihara Izaya, once a self-proclaimed god among humans, becomes nothing but a memory. People stop talking about him. Newcomers to the city never learn of him, when once upon a time, he would have been one of the first names they knew. The passage of months fades his legacy just as the passage of years fades a photograph.
But even as the last echos of "Orihara Izaya" vanish into the city sky, Shizuo's name is still whispered with the same consistency as it always has been. Shizuo still walks these streets, still dyes his hair an intimidating blond, still goes off into rages. The rages are less frequent, with Izaya gone, of course; but, although Izaya used to set Shizuo off more than any other solitary factor, he certainly wasn't the only thing to trigger Shizuo's rage. Shizuo could be set off by someone mentioning Kasuka, by someone being particularity difficult on a job with Tom - even just by someone who looked at him wrong.
Vending machines and shrieking bodies still flew through the air. Signs were still ripped from the cement to be swung like a bat or to be used as projectiles. Shizuo's name was still the topic of gossip in the chatter of classrooms, in the conversation of the subway tunnels, in the text lines of chatroom threads.
And now, when the question was posed of who The Most Dangerous Person in Ikebukuro Was, Izaya's name wasn't even on the ballot. Nowadays, Shizuo won practically by default; Izaya had been the only one who could rival Shizuo in that regard.
Izaya may have antagonized Shizuo to act monstrous. But, when Izaya had still skipped along the streets of Ikebukuro, Shizuo hadn't been the only monster in the city.
Now Izaya was gone, and Shizuo was still here.
And without Izaya's darkness to overshadow his, he was more a monster than ever.