Durarara!!, Vol. 2 (novel) (22 page)

Chat room

And just after Celty checked on the chat room…

Ikebukuro suffered one of the worst cases of assault in its history, as fifty-four people were attacked randomly on the street at a variety of locations.

It drifted.

And drifted.

Everything drifted away from the boy.

He only wanted to be loved by someone.

He only wanted to love someone.

The shy boy didn’t even have the bravery to control himself.

He was afraid of hurting the one he loved.

So he decided not to love anyone.

Feared, feared, and unloved.

Time evolved the boy into a monster.

If there was a god in this world whose purpose was to control violence,

then the boy must have earned this god’s love.

More than anyone and anything.

Shinjuku

“And why would Shizu be standing right outside my apartment building?” Izaya Orihara wondered with a smile that could only be described as bitter.

“…Because I’m here to kick your ass, obviously,” replied Shizuo with a humorless smile. Every other part of his being was overflowing with rage.

They were outside the high-class apartment building in the middle of the night. Izaya had returned from a trip to the convenience store to find Shizuo just about to kick the front door of the building down.

He could have left the scene as it was and gotten the police to arrest Shizuo, but Izaya considered another possibility and realized he had to show himself to his foe.

I don’t want him barging into my place and finding the head before the police arrive.

“And why do I deserve a beating?”

“Because I’m feeling pretty aggravated right now.”

“You know, you’re really much too old to be engaging in this kind of childish logic, Shizu.”

“Shut up. If I had to give another reason…it’s because you’re too damn fishy,” Shizuo shot back.

A grimace spread over Izaya’s features. “Fishy? What about?”

“This street slasher who’s tearing up my hood…
How involved are you?
” he asked directly.

Izaya shook his head exasperatedly. “Why would I be involved?”

“Because ninety-nine percent of all the bizarre and violent things that happen here are your doing.”

“What, you’re not gonna trust that this one is in the other one percent?”

“If I were able to trust you with even one percent of my being, I think you and I would get along better… Right, Izaya?”

The veins on Shizuo’s face bulged and popped as he recalled events from the past. The sight was so grotesque that someone who didn’t know any better would assume he had some kind of condition.

“And even if there weren’t this slasher going around, ’Bukuro’s been weird lately. And that’s your fault, ain’t it? What are you plotting?”

“This is quite an accusation,” Izaya stated with a wide smile. He already had a knife clutched in his hands. Shizuo looked at it and grinned, then put a hand on the guardrail out in front of the building.

“?” Izaya felt a bit of sweat break out on his skin. He didn’t know what Shizuo was doing.
He’s not going to rip that guardrail out and fight me with it, is he…?

The problem was, Shizuo Heiwajima was exactly the kind of man who did the thing you assumed he wouldn’t possibly do. Sure enough, as Izaya dreaded, Shizuo clenched the hand holding the guardrail tight.

“…Seriously?”

He’d just have to stab Shizuo before he pulled it out of the ground.

The moment Izaya made up his mind to stab the other man, the smile vanished from his face. When Shizuo noticed that, his own smile got wider: “Do it, if you can.”

And just as the tension reached its peak, the face-off was interrupted by the sudden entrance of a shadow.

The black motorcycle appeared without a hint of sound and cut between the two.

“Well, well.”

“Celty…what do you want?”

She quickly waved Izaya back and showed her PDA screen to Shizuo. It was a copy of the chat log that she’d saved to the device.

He took some time to read it over. Eventually he squinted and asked, “The hell is this?”

Shizuo thought for several moments, and with an oddly calm look in his eyes, he turned back to Izaya. “Is this part of your plot?”

“I dunno what this means, but if I could have calculated that Celty would randomly show up here, I’d have dropped a meteor on your house by now.”

Shizuo kept watching Izaya for a while after that, then clicked his tongue in disappointment and got onto Celty’s bike without another word.

He really was hard to handle.

Ever since high school, Izaya had used everything at his disposal to get to where he was. There was only one person who never acted the way Izaya wanted him to, and that was Shizuo Heiwajima.

At first, I actually thought I could control Shizu
, Izaya thought ruefully to himself as the motorcycle rode off.

“How does an amoeba like him get so sharp?”

His smile was one of both pure joy and irritation.

“This is exactly why I hate you so much.”

Anri’s place

“I’ve done some research on you,” Haruna said, knife in her hand. She slowly got to her feet. That angelic smile never left her face, but her eyes were a demonic red.

“What a stupid, pointless human. Ever since middle school, you’ve been like toilet paper stuck to Mika Harima’s shoe…and now you’ve begun seducing two of your male classmates, and you think you can manipulate Takashi as well?”

Her face wore a smile, but there was nothing but pure malice in her words.

Meanwhile, Anri stayed silent, taking in Haruna’s words. Perhaps she was frantically thinking of what action she ought to take next. But Haruna only continued her outpouring of contempt. She hurled words of despair and disaster at Anri, yet her face was as beautiful and holy as a saint announcing the girl’s end.

“On top of all this…
a burglar broke into your home five years ago and killed your parents?
Apparently you claimed that you didn’t see the killer, despite being in the same room the entire time… How can that be? How did you not see the killer? How did you survive?”

It was a fact that Anri hadn’t even told Mikado or Masaomi. But her face did not change expression. She didn’t even open her mouth. It wasn’t a simple enough matter that she could settle with just facial expressions or arguments, Haruna knew, but she continued her verbal assault anyway.

“Unless you even tried to seduce the burglar? A girl in elementary school? Do you suppose he was a pedophile?”

Even after that barb, Anri’s face was placid. It wasn’t that on the inside her heart was brimming with rage, either. There were only swirling questions.

Why is this happening?

She only wanted a life of peace and tranquillity. What did she do to deserve this chaos?

Anri tried to view the world within the customary picture frame, but the glint of the knife in the hands of the other girl did not allow her to withdraw entirely.

Her tranquillity was crumbling to pieces.

Was there no way to go back? Would her uneventful reality never come?

Would it all fall apart, including the eternal dreamworld she’d made for herself?

There was a solution.

She could just yell something back at the other woman who kept hurling bullshit at her. She could fight. She could crush her opponent.

But just being forced into making that choice was the greatest suffering of all.

I just don’t want to fight. I don’t want to fight with anything. I don’t want to compete with anyone. I just want to lead a peaceful life. I only fight when I want peace. I wasn’t born to waste my life with stupid battles like this…

“It must be easy, living by latching onto other people like a parasite,” Haruna muttered.

Anri finally found her voice. “…Not easy.”

“Huh?”

“It’s not…easy at all. Living off of others, trying to make sure just the right person likes you. I agree,
parasite
is a good term for me. But do you have any idea how much you need to sacrifice…to ensure the person you’re latching onto doesn’t drive you off?”

Now there was indeed a kind of strength in Anri’s eyes.

Most people who lived comfortably in the shadow of another person would become angry and deny it if called out for it. Even they would agree that it wasn’t a cool or admirable way of life. Anri certainly didn’t think that her choice was necessarily laudable—but it was a conscious choice that she made for herself.

She wouldn’t stand for that to be criticized by someone she’d never met until just now. It was this anger that finally wrung the words out of her.

But Haruna only smirked at her statement. Voice dripping with utter loathing, she spat, “That’s what you’ve been doing? Sacrificing yourself so that Takashi will like you…?”

“No,” Anri said, loud and clear. “Mr. Nasujima is not worth doing that.”

She was surprised at how forceful her own response was.