Durarara!!, Vol. 1 (novel) (15 page)

“
Well
,” Celty typed, then stopped when she realized what Shinra was getting at.

“This head has its own body now and could only scream when it saw you. What are you going to do with it?”

Her hands lay flat on the keyboard. She had no answer.

“It’s living its own life with its own body and apparently knows teenagers well enough to escape with one. What would you do with it? Cut it off the body for your own sake? That’s a pretty cruel and vicious thing to do.”

After a heavy silence, Celty realized that she was trembling. Shinra spoke the truth. The head did not seem to recognize her. Perhaps it was just the unfamiliar riding suit—but the fact remained that the head had developed its own sense of self that was apart from her.

If I’m going to recover my head for good, it will need to be separated from that body. But is it right to sever a living head from a living body? Could I convince the head to simply stay close to me with its new body? I might be getting it back, but that doesn’t address the fundamental issue. Plus, I don’t feel like I’m aging at all, but what about my head? Will it still be that young decades later? What if it didn’t age while it was isolated, but something changes once both parts of me are back together?

Before she could come to a conclusion, Celty decided to present her basic doubts to Shinra.

“Why does my head have a body that isn’t mine anyway?”

“Well, I didn’t see it for myself, so nothing I say can be taken as fact. But if you don’t mind completely baseless speculation, I can tell you my guess.”

Shinra paused for a moment, then delivered his ghastly theory in a matter-of-fact tone.

“They probably found a girl with a fitting body and simply replaced her head with yours.”

Celty had imagined that possibility, but it was horrifying to hear
stated so bluntly. She was left without a response, so Shinra added further speculation.

“Let’s say that a country—or even better, a secret military agency—got its sinister hands on the head in the hopes of creating a legion of undead soldiers. They cloned a fresh new body from the head’s cells, then replaced the clone’s head with the real one in the hopes of unlocking the dullahan memories hidden within. What do you think?”

“
Sounds like a surefire Razzie winner to me
,” Celty wrote, comparing his idea to the infamous awards for worst movies of the year. Half of her completely disregarded his idea—but the other half thought a secret lab was quite possible.

“Okay, the cloning angle might be a stretch, but it’s possible that they could have sewed it onto a corpse. Either that or they kidnapped a living human, then put the head on right after killing it to see if that would bring it back to life. Logically, it’s an absolutely absurd idea, but logic also says that you and your head are impossible to begin with. Maybe it
could
take over a dead body.”

“This makes me sick. I can’t imagine anyone would go that far.”

“True, it’s not the kind of thing a sane person would do. But people will do just about anything under the right circumstances. Perhaps our mystery person lost a daughter whom he or she wished to keep alive in perpetuity. Or maybe they wanted to
conceal an accidental murder victim by using the body for research
.”

In a way, that idea was even more gruesome than the human experimentation he joked about earlier. Celty typed in a new message, simply to stop him from saying any more.

“Anyway, I want to speak with my head once more. We can talk more after tha—”

Shinra cut her off before she could finish. “And that’s how you’re going to delay coming to an actual conclusion?”

His voice was deadly serious; there was no trace of the tickled, playful air from just moments earlier.

I know. I get it. Now that I’ve found my head in this state, I just have to give up.

She let that resignation sink in for a moment, then reluctantly typed,
“I just don’t want to admit that everything I’ve done over the last twenty years has been for nothing.”

She stared sadly at the string of text. Shinra, who had been talking to her from the other side of the apartment, finally came over to Celty’s room. He sat down next to her and looked directly at her screen.

“It wasn’t for nothing. The last twenty years of your life haven’t been for nothing. Nothing you’ve done is a waste as long as you make use of it in your life ahead.”

“And how will I make use of that?”

“Well, for example…if you marry me, you can simply consider the last twenty years the cornerstone of our marital bliss.”

Celty had no instant response to his shameless nonsense. Normally she’d ignore it as a joke, but it seemed like Shinra took this topic rather seriously of late.

“May I ask something?”

“Please do.”

She wasn’t sure if it was right to just ask her question straight out, but after a few moments, Celty summoned her courage and tapped away at the keyboard.

“Do you really love me, Shinra?”

Shinra read the sentence and gaped up at the ceiling in disbelief.

“Why would you ask that
now
?! Ahh, there is a reason that terrible pain in the chest brings tears to one’s eyes! What is my sorrow? The fact that you have not believed everything I’ve done and said to you! My sorrow is that my love for you does not reach your heart!”

“I don’t have a head.”

“But I’m in love with what’s inside! There’s more to a human being than looks, remember?”

“I’m not human.”

In the end, I’m not a human being. I’m a monster in the shape of a human. The problem is that with my memories trapped in my head, I don’t actually know what I am or why I was born and why I exist.

Complex sentiments and unrelatable thoughts. Countless fragments swirled through Celty’s heart, but the only thing she could impart were simple words on a computer screen.

“Aren’t you frightened of holding affection for something inhuman? How can you say these things to a being that doesn’t even follow the same basic laws of physics?”

The letters sped up across the screen. In response, Shinra’s voice grew harder and stronger. He sounded exasperated.

“I can’t believe you’re asking me that after twenty years together… Why would you even think about this? We share a mutual understanding—if we love each other, what’s the problem? If you decide that you hate me, I guess that’s that… But we’re not just forced to live together out of cold mutual dependence, are we? Can’t you have some trust in me?”

It was rare for Shinra to sincerely plead his own case, but the abundance of ten-dollar words said that he was not yet at the end of his rope.

“I do trust you. If there’s anyone I don’t trust, it’s myself.”

She decided to reveal some of her own insecurity while he was still feeling in control.

“I have no self-confidence. Even if I was in love with you or some other human being, would our romantic values actually be the same? Yes, I probably do love you. I just don’t know if it’s what a human would call romantic love.”

“That’s something every human being goes through in their youth. It’s not as if every human being shares the same views and values. Love to me may not be the same as love to the great writer Osamu Dazai. In fact, it’s probably different… At any rate, I can say that I love you, and you just said that you love me, so where’s the problem?”

He sounded like a teacher explaining something to a student. The dullahan’s fingers stopped moving.

“Yesterday I said I wanted to understand your values as a dullahan—but whatever your answer is, it won’t change the fact that I love you,” Shinra said in a voice free of shyness or hesitation. His expression was completely serious. Celty thought this over for a moment, choosing her words carefully.

“Give me some time to think.”

“I’ll wait as long as it takes,” Shinra replied, his smile serene. Celty had to ask one other thing.

“Is it really me you want? There are so many human women out there, why would you choose a headle…a nonhuman woman? Why?”

“Ha-ha. There’s no accounting for taste, right?”

“You’re one to talk. And don’t make it sound like you have to be a weirdo to like me.”

Even as she typed back her snappy response, Celty felt something hot swirling in her chest. She knew that it was her feeling for Shinra.

If I had a heart, I’d hear it pounding away in my ears.

But that thought, that contradiction, plagued Celty even more. It only underscored the great differences between her and Shinra.

Dullahans had no hearts. According to Shinra’s father after he dissected her, she was constructed much like a human being—but the organs were all for show and did not actually function. There were veins, but no blood running through them. Without any red blood, her meat was the color of pure flesh, like a model of a human body. He didn’t know how her body worked and moved. He didn’t know what she used for a source of energy. And despite that, any wounds she suffered healed at incredible speed.

After the dissection, Shinra’s father asked her, “How do you actually die?”

Ten years later, Shinra said, “You must be a shadow. You’re just the shadow of your head or an actual body in some other world. The source of your energy to move means nothing to your shadow.”

It was nonsense to think of a shadow moving of its own will, but then again, nothing about her existence made sense, so she followed Shinra’s advice and stopped thinking about it. She needed to spend the next few days focusing on her head. And depending on the results of that period, she would make a decision about her life.

Celty clenched a fist and pictured the faces of the two students she saw today.

They both looked serious. The first one glared back fiercely, without a hint of fear toward Celty or Shizuo. The other one showed obvious signs of fright at Celty, but he still had a
smile
on his face when he looked at her. It was the expression of one looking at a demon or monster worthy of fear and respect.

She then thought about herself.

But perhaps that’s all just my own selfish interpretation.

She took her interpretation of the others’ feelings from their expressions, including the eyes, but she couldn’t be certain that it was true. She did not have her own eyes or face with which to express delight, anger or sadness. She didn’t have a brain to process human emotions.
She didn’t even know where her thoughts or feelings were coming from. How could she accurately sense the emotions of others?

Angry eyes, sad eyes, human morals—these were all pieces of knowledge she had picked up in this city. TV shows, comics, movies—Shinra’s tastes biased her selection of these things, but her actual experiences in town and news reports helped to balance that out. The problem was that all these things were just information gleaned from elsewhere. She wouldn’t know if they were
true
or not unless she was a human being herself.

That was why she was always plagued by the insecurity she revealed to Shinra earlier. She didn’t know if she truly had emotions. It was a thought that constantly troubled her.

In the past, she didn’t care about these things. She was too busy seeking her head. But in the last few years, as the Internet gave her increased opportunities to contact people, she couldn’t help but wonder how close her feelings and values were to those of humans.

At first, she found it frightening and needed Shinra’s help, but now Celty was at the computer at virtually all times when not working or searching for her head. Once she got a model with a built-in DVD drive and TV tuner, she could get her movies and TV shows there, which only increased the time she spent before the computer.

Celty increased her contact with others over the Internet. People separated by their PCs did not know each other’s faces or pasts. Which was fine with her, because she didn’t even have a face. And yet, the connections were real. In real life, she only knew a few people through Shinra, and only he and his father knew exactly what she was. Rumors had spread about the headless rider, but the rumors didn’t identify her as a woman or a dullahan.

She didn’t feel a particular need to hide these things, but neither did she plan to reveal them.

Even after what Shinra said, I still want to have human values. If the persona that I own now is “human,” I don’t want to lose that.

Celty was not a human being. But she still felt anxiety. If she got back her head but the memories did not return, what should she do? What kind of face would a human make in this situation?

Her knowledge contained the answer, but she herself could not say what it was.

The Yagiri Pharmaceuticals lab

In the meeting room of Lab Six, seated on a chair in the corner, Seiji grumbled to himself, head downcast. His sister Namie gently embraced him in an attempt to ease his discomfort.

“Everything’s fine, Seiji. Leave this to us. We’re going to get her back. Don’t worry about a thing.”

The police dragged Seiji to their box station after Shizuo knocked him out, but without a victim to finger him or even a firm consensus on who
was
the victim, he was released without any charges or punishment.

Maybe it was my sister pulling strings. She did arrive to pick me up extremely fast,
Seiji thought. It didn’t actually bother him.
I know she’s in love with me in some kind of sick way. It only comes out of a weird possessiveness. But I don’t mind. No matter who else loves me, it won’t change my own choice. I live for my own love and nothing else.

And if I have to stomp all over the love others give me in order to do that, so be it. I’m sure she’d be happy knowing she served as a stepping-stone for the sake of her beloved.

Meanwhile, Namie could read Seiji like a book. But she didn’t mind. As long as that head was in her possession, Seiji needed her. That head, the very target of her darkest jealousy, was the key to the equation. Namie grinned in self-mockery at the irony of it all.

The sight of her shamelessly doting on her brother put a kind of fear in the minds of everyone who witnessed the scene.

One of her employees overcame his consternation and called out for her attention.

“You don’t need to worry about a thing, Seiji. Leave everything to us.”

And with that, his sister quietly left the room.

“Do we have details?”

“We’ve got the address of this Ryuugamine that Mr. Seiji spoke of. It’s a run-down apartment building right next to Ikebukuro Station.”

Namie was receiving the report from her subordinates slightly down the hallway from the meeting room. The fact that the employee was giving Seiji that title spoke to the strength of the Yagiri family within the company.

Unlike her warm, loving manner in the meeting room, Namie was as cold as ice as she gave the orders.

“Then gather up the underlings and retrieve the target.”

“That’s a conspicuous place for a daylight operation—”

“I don’t care,” she stated flatly, brooking no further discussion.

If we wait for nightfall, my brother’s going to run off and try to find this Ryuugamine on his own.

Namie cared more about Seiji’s safety than the danger of the situation. But she was professional enough not to show the tiniest ounce of this priority when Seiji wasn’t around. She was all business.

“Inform all of our available muscle at once. I don’t care who’s there or if they’re taken dead or alive. Depending on the circumstances, I may want you to dispose of them on the spot.”

There wasn’t a shred of humanity in her eyes. The other men felt cold sweat trickle down their backs.

Today was the start of normal classes for Raira Academy. But even then, it mostly consisted of teacher introductions and guidance on the course of the entire school year, and the only classes with real lectures were math and world history.

Nothing else noteworthy or problematic occurred. The first day passed by.

If anything weighed on Mikado’s mind, it was the absence of not only Mika Harima, but now Seiji Yagiri, the Health Committee representative. After Anri had explained what happened between the two of them the day before, it was hard not to feel a connection in their absences. An uneasy murmur rose in his chest.

On top of that, there was also his unease over the girl with amnesia back at his house.

She did not remember anything more after waking up this morning and refused to go to the hospital or police. The suggestion of the hospital, in particular, brought a look of terror into her eyes.

“Oh…I’ll be fine! I’ll just stay here and wait for you!” she said, looking far calmer today than she had the day before. In fact, she looked quite secure and focused for someone suffering memory loss.

That at least gave Mikado enough confidence to leave her behind while he was at school, but he still had no idea what to do with her after that. Without knowing her identity, there was no getting around the fact that she’d need to be handed over to the police at some point. He thought about the option of Masaomi’s house, but Masaomi commuted to school from his family’s home.

Mikado spent the entire day mulling over what to do, and before he arrived at an answer, the day was done. There was a brief introductory meeting for all of the class reps, after which he headed outside with Anri, hoping to ask for any updates on Mika Harima.

“Have you heard from her?” Mikado didn’t have anything else to talk about and felt awkward not saying anything, so he decided to be direct.

“Actually, I haven’t heard a thing from her since yesterday afternoon…”

“Oh, I see…”

He shouldn’t have asked. Now he was even more worried about the fact that Seiji was absent as well. He began to wonder about the possibility of some kind of murder-suicide but didn’t dare say that out loud to Anri.

Masaomi’s presence would have helped out a lot, but from what he heard, the Discipline Committee was still busy with introductions. Apparently, Masaomi and the representative from Mikado’s class had launched into an argument that no one else was quite able to stop.

He decided his best action was just to go home for today and was preparing to say good-bye to Anri at the ornate Western-style front gate when someone shouted at them from the side.

“Aha! That’s him, Takashi, right there!”

A girl was pointing in Mikado and Anri’s direction. It was the one whose cell phone had been stomped by Izaya yesterday, and she was escorted by a burly looking guy.

Before he could even register a sense of dread at the unfolding situation, Mikado was lifted up by the collar.

“I hear you know the guy who busted my girl’s cell.”

“I don’t
know him
know him—”

You should be telling the police about this, not your boyfriend
, Mikado wanted to yell at Bully A next to the guy, but he couldn’t speak with a hand pulling him up by the collar.

“So where’s this dick you were standin’ around with?”

Straight as an arrow—he asked about Izaya directly, without allowing Mikado any say.

Elusive as quicksilver—a pitch-black bike silently appeared behind the man.

Swift as the wind—still on the bike, a humanoid shadow kicked Takashi to the ground.

Survival of the fittest—out of nowhere, Izaya Orihara landed on the fallen man’s back with both feet.

Man’s inhumanity to man—Izaya jumped up and down on his back repeatedly.

Like greased lightning—this happened before Mikado’s eyes in the span of ten seconds.

“Thank you.”

Izaya bowed ostentatiously in the direction of the shocked Anri, her bully, and all the other students who happened to be passing by. He was still standing atop the unconscious Takashi.

“You knew that hitting girls wasn’t my thing, so you made sure to prepare a guy for me instead! Now that’s the sign of a dedicated
woman. I’d love to make you my girlfriend, but sorry. You’re just not my type. Get lost.”

It was all very cruel, but the girl was off and running before he even finished speaking. She didn’t even spare a backward glance at Takashi underneath Izaya’s feet. Mikado had to admit that he felt a bit sorry for the guy.

The girl’s face already vanishing from his memory, Izaya turned to Mikado.

“Heya, it’s too bad we were interrupted yesterday. I don’t think we have to worry about our friend Shizu butting in here. I thought it would be rude to look up your address and barge in, so I decided to lie in wait at the school entrance instead,” he said, smiling all the while. Mikado didn’t know why Izaya was smiling or what reason he would have to seek him out. But that actually wasn’t true—he knew of one possible reason. Mikado couldn’t openly acknowledge it, though. He clenched a fist.

Seemingly unaware of the boy’s train of thought, Izaya tilted his head in confusion.

“By the way, what’s the Black Rider doing here?”

I could ask the same of you
, Celty thought to herself.

She had indeed found the student who escorted her head away yesterday. She intervened to save him from being pounded, but Izaya’s presence was a mystery to her.

Celty couldn’t imagine Izaya getting involved with an ordinary person, much less a teenage student. Was he the son of some powerful politician? Or some kind of despicable pusher, spreading drugs to children in elementary and middle school?

But whoever the boy was made no difference to Celty now.

All that mattered was whether he knew the location of her head or not.

Mikado snapped to his senses with a shock when he realized that Anri was even more dazed by the incident than he was.

“W-well, Sonohara, I should really be going!”

“Huh…? Um, okay…”

And with that awkward farewell, Mikado quickly left the scene. As he suspected, the shadow and villain followed him. Once a safe
distance away from the school, he timidly turned back and decided that Izaya was more likely to understand him.

“Umm… I don’t know what’s going on here… But if you’d like, we can go back to my…”

Mikado stopped and held his breath. If he took them back to his house, the Black Rider would find that girl. In fact, she was probably the only reason that the Black Rider had come for him in the first place.

“Uh…well, actually, there’s something I’d like to ask the rider in black…”

Celty pulled a PDA out of the shadow riding suit and typed, “
What is it?
”

So there was a way for them to communicate after all. Mikado was slightly relieved but also noted that the situation was taking a turn into even more surreal waters.

I feel like crying.

Just a few minutes away from the station by foot was a building. It was hard to guess exactly how old it was, but the countless tiny cracks in the walls and the abundant ivy said enough on their own.

Once the building came into view, Mikado stopped and said, “Well, my apartment is on the first floor of this building…but I want an explanation first. Who in the world are you people?”

Celty avoided mentioning anything about her head or her true identity. She only typed,
“I recently ran into a girl I knew who had gone missing, but she fled for some reason I cannot fathom.”

But Mikado was not naive enough to take such a transparent excuse at face value. Celty decided that she didn’t have a choice but to give him the truth.

She asked Izaya to give them some momentary privacy, then took Mikado around the back of the building. Summoning her courage, she started typing on the PDA.

“How much do you know about me?”

Mikado stared at the tiny LCD screen, then gave the question some thought.

“Well…you’re sort of an urban legend, and you ride a motorcycle without headlights that makes no sound. And…”

He paused, sucking in a deep breath, then letting it all out at once. Along with the fear in his voice, there was something expectant, even excited.

“…you don’t have a head.”

Celty typed,
“And do you believe all of it?”

She showed him the screen, then immediately regretted it. What human being would possibly believe that? But Mikado nodded.

Huh?

She couldn’t hide her shock. Mikado went on.

“Um…can you show me what’s inside your helmet?”

Celty stared him right in the face.

Aha, just like yesterday.

That strange expression again, a mix of fear, expectation, despair, and joy all in one. And the student with all of these emotions in his eyes wanted her to expose her true face to him. Celty hesitated, then typed in her PDA.

“Do you swear you won’t scream?”

She knew it was a stupid question, but she had to be sure. Celty hadn’t removed her helmet for anyone in the last twenty years but Shinra. There had been a few times it popped off in the middle of a fight, but the only reaction she got from the witnesses was a grimace of terror.