Durarara!!, Vol. 3 (Novel) (20 page)

A strange, different group called the Dollars.

Several weeks later, Raira General Hospital

Saki opened her eyes.

And yet, two weeks after hearing about it, Masaomi still hadn’t visited her.

Once again, he came to the hospital but couldn’t bring himself to walk through the doors.

His legs naturally went dead as he approached, the same way they had before.

Can’t do it. Forget this.

He turned on his heel to leave but was interrupted by an unfamiliar voice.

“Hey.”

“Huh…?”

“You’re the guy from the Yellow Scarves… Kida, right?”

He turned around and saw a man wearing a black beanie, as well as a strange boy and girl hanging behind him.

“Um…who are you?”

“Uh…how to explain? First of all, I’m Kadota,” he said, his face wry.

Masaomi came to a sudden realization. “Oh, from the Blue Squares?”

“You know me? You…aren’t gonna attack me?”

“I heard from Izaya that you betrayed your friends and rescued Saki. Um…thank you.”

Masaomi bowed deeply to the trio, clearly feeling conflicted. Kadota was momentarily taken aback by the boy’s politeness. When he found his voice, he said, “Look, we’re just leaving from a visit to see her. She says you haven’t gone yet?”

“It’s none of your business.”

“You’re not in any position to tell us what rights we have here. Listen, we’re only here because she asked.”

“Huh…?”

Masaomi looked up. Kadota jabbed a thumb back at the hospital building. “You can see this spot from her window.”

“…!”

“She asked us to send a message to you.”

Masaomi went pale.

“…‘Thanks for always coming,’ she says.”

“…!”

Masaomi froze on the spot.

Even after a long silence, he was rooted to the ground.

Kadota watched him for reactions, then eventually sighed and continued, “We told her that you ran full speed to reach her, and it was only a blockade of Blue Squares that kept you from being in time…rather than the truth.”

“?!”

“And she didn’t decide she hated you for
not making it in time
. See ya.”

Kadota started to walk off, but within a step or two, Masaomi bit into him. “Why…why would you say that?! When did I ask you to do that?!”

“You never asked me to do anything. I’ve seen you in town a few times here and there, but today’s the first time we’ve ever talked. And even if you asked me to do something, I wouldn’t listen. You could have asked me not to, and I’d tell her exactly the same thing.”

There was power in his cold gaze. Masaomi lowered his face toward the ground, pushing his anger inward. He grumbled, “You know what happened. I…I ran away. My legs gave out. I couldn’t move.”

“Yeah, I know. And you’re still running away from her now,” Kadota replied, daring Masaomi to deny it, but the younger boy did not show any outward signs of anger.

“You…you want me to lie to her? After I completely abandoned her?!” Masaomi asked, pleading with Kadota. The other man grabbed him by the collar and yanked him upward.

“Get your head outta your ass,” Kadota grunted with just the slightest note of irritation. At a distance, it looked like an older ruffian shaking down a helpless middle schooler for money, but Karisawa and Yumasaki did not budge from their spots.

“I wouldn’t like it if you clicked your heels and said, ‘Aw, gee, thanks. Lucky me!’ But I don’t like your current attitude much, either.”

Masaomi clammed up, while Kadota continued his lecture. “You don’t want her to hate you, but you ditched her. But you don’t want to lie to her. And you still feel guilty about that. You’re like a kid who gets caught shoplifting and says, ‘I’m really, really sorry, just don’t tell the police or my family.’”

“…”

“If you really feel guilty about leaving her there, then you should bear the discomfort of lying to her for the rest of your life. That’s how you can repay what you owe her. And if you don’t want to be dishonest to her…then stop running and say it to her face.”

Finally, Kadota dredged up the past—but in a different way than Izaya had.

“I’ll forgive you for running from the past.” He let go of Masaomi’s collar, and as he turned away, he left a parting comment. “But at least…stop running from the present and future.”

Just as Kadota turned his back on Masaomi, the image of his perfect exit was ruined by the inconsiderate comments of his companions.

“Ohh? Kadota’s dropping some really cool lines over here!”

“Awesome! From now on, we ought to call Dotachin ‘Poet Poe-tan’!”

He stiffened and turned back toward them. “You…you heard that?!”

Kadota turned beet red. Karisawa and Yumasaki looked quite proud of themselves.

“Fweh-heh-heh! I bet you thought it was for his ears only, but that’s pointless against our hearing. Don’t you know we grew up watching late-night anime at super-low volume to avoid the family’s notice?”

“It’s pointless to stop us! Pointless-pointless-pointless-pointless-pointless-pointless!”

“Just use headphones!” Kadota snapped back weakly, rather flustered.

Yumasaki only irritated him further by honestly answering his pointless suggestion with, “Then we won’t hear our parents coming toward the room!”

“Just shut up!”

Masaomi watched the three squalling friends walk off, then turned back to the hospital.

Finally, his leaden legs took him a few hesitant steps forward.

Toward the hospital room of the girl he still loved…

So that he could tell her they were breaking up.

That night, for the first time in ages, Masaomi reached out to his old friend and invited him to the chat room. Seeing how much fun his friend was having talking to him again, Masaomi naturally felt his frayed nerves growing calmer.

But the peace he felt only put his loss into sharper relief.

What could he do to fill it? Could he bury that empty space by falling in love with a different girl? These thoughts swirled in the back of
Masaomi’s head as he chatted. Meanwhile, his old friend shifted gears to a new topic of discussion.

“So I guess we have our big school exams this year. Do you know what high school you want to go to?”

Masaomi imagined the innocent, friendly face of the boy on the other side of the screen, and his answer came naturally.

“I’m going to test for Raira Academy. It’s nice and close.”

He really had no interest in high school plans, but for this moment, he found himself praising the school he would likely attend, playing up its many attractions.

He finished by typing,
“You should come, too.”

A year later.

Masaomi reunited with Mikado and met Anri, a girl who was mysteriously aloof from the rest of the world.

At first, he got along with Anri, using her to tease his old friend and push him along. But as time passed, he realized that she meant something to him, too. Was it the same emotion he felt toward Saki? Was it the same as the emotion he felt toward other girls?

Another year with these thoughts passed…

He found out that Anri Sonohara was attacked by the slasher.

And then he was right back where he started.

He himself had proved Izaya Orihara’s words correct.

Masaomi found himself visiting Saki again.

We return to the present.

Shinjuku

The luxury apartment building sat on the corner of a crowded street.

The throngs that stuffed the nighttime street each had their own pace and their own destination, but almost none of them actually stopped still in the street.

Looking up provided a glimpse of the Tokyo government office and other high-rise buildings, but this particular street was full of a different atmosphere from the business sector and the shopping districts outside of the train station.

A young man sighed as he looked down gloomily at the city below.

“It’s so boring. It truly is tremendously boring not having anything to do. I thought I might do some people watching out the window, but I don’t see anyone I find interesting.”

The young man, Izaya Orihara, surveyed the view outside the window as though watching a scene in a movie. He sighed again.

“Have you considered doing your job?” offered a clinical voice from behind the mournful young man. Standing in stark contrast to Izaya, who was idly gazing out the window, the young lady briskly and efficiently moved around the information agent’s office performing assistant duties—Namie Yagiri.

She appeared to be his age or perhaps slightly older. He held out his arms theatrically and proclaimed, “But you’re doing all of the tasks that I would otherwise be doing. It’s so boring.”

“…Can I hit you?”

“You may not. And why do you care? You’re getting paid for this. Not a smart move to attack your employer.”

“Fine, I’ll punch you after I get paid,” she muttered too coldly for it to be taken as a joke. Izaya shrugged and returned to the window.

Namie proceeded with her duties silently, picking up the document that had just been shunted out of the printer on his desk and examining it as she filed away the other papers in her hand.

“What’s this odd piece of paper for?”

“Send that document to the Awakusu-kai office, like usual. Oh, and…get the blue envelope at the top of the rightmost bookcase and send it to a Yamada in Hagane city by certified mail. Take the sheet fourth from the top on the shelf two below that and put it in the yellow envelope on the middle shelf of the left bookcase. There’s also a verification receipt in the green envelope right above that. Send both of those to the Sakurashin trading partner in my computer’s address log. Once that’s done, copy the debtor registry on my desk and include that in an envelope to President Sagawara of Fandorfeldsand Riverside Finance. After that, send a message to Mr. Shiki from the Awakusu-kai saying, ‘The location of the chocolate is still unknown.’ Once you’ve erased that message from the program history, open the crossword magazine next to the computer to page eighty-four, and fill the empty spaces with ‘broken windows theory,’ ‘shark,’ ‘Transylvania,’ and ‘natto maki.’ Any spaces that are still blank, fill in the answer on your own, because I couldn’t figure them out.”

They were like test instructions meant to measure the subject’s mental age. Izaya delivered them all without pulling his eyes from the window. When he finished, he turned around and saw Namie carrying out the orders without any doubts or questions whatsoever. She silently reordered his tasks into a more efficient order and performed each and every one of them without a mistake.

“…The last remaining word in this puzzle is ‘tocopherol calcium succinate.’ What kind of horrible person designs a crossword of commonsense answers with this technical term thrown into the mix?”

“Brilliant,” Izaya beamed, clapping his hands in admiration once she had finished all of her tasks.

“It’s also brilliant that you can point out such accurate locations of things without even looking.”

“Only because you’ve organized them all so neatly.”

“By the way…what’s the ‘chocolate’ in this message I sent to Shiki from the Awakusu-kai?”

“Hmm? A gun. Why?” he asked nonchalantly. Namie froze for an instant. “Listen, about a year ago, right after you came to work for me, someone stole some guns from the Awakusu-kai, remember?”

“The one that horrible dullahan was chasing, right? I remember the sight of the monster swinging its scythe on the TV.”

“Right. Celty managed to recover most of the guns before the police could, so nothing came of it. But the problem is, one of them’s still missing. Well, some kid found that last gun and apparently tried to use it in a recent armed robbery. Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!”

“…I just pray that no one has this room bugged.”

Namie spontaneously searched for her next task to fulfill, thinking to herself that Izaya’s cheerful but opaque smile was terribly creepy. Suddenly, the intercom buzzed.

“Who could that be? No appointments, and I doubt the police would ring the doorbell for a raid.”

“It’s not people from Yagiri Pharmaceuticals, is it…?”

Namie was originally a high-ranking member of Yagiri Pharmaceuticals, but circumstances had forced her to go on the run from the company. She examined the monitor on the intercom, squinting.

The screen showed the entrance of the building, rather than the door of the apartment. The system was designed so that no visitors could get inside without a resident’s permission, which kept most unwanted characters out.

“Oh…it’s just a kid. A teenager maybe?” Namie wondered, looking at the boy in the monitor curiously.

The apartment received young visitors fairly often, but they were usually the girls who formed Izaya’s retinue. They ranged from Gothic Lolitas to dolled-up ditzes, but they all seemed to think he was nothing more than a fancy fortune-teller.

But it was rare to see a man. Perhaps he was the brother of one of
those worshipper girls who had flown here in a rage. But Izaya patted his fist into his palm happily.

“Oh! He’s already here! He just called ten minutes ago, but I assumed he’d be coming tomorrow. Thing is…it’s almost too soon.”

He was peering at the screen over Namie’s shoulder. As soon as he recognized the boy in the monitor, he pressed the button to unlock the building door for him.

“Who is it?” she asked suspiciously.

“A friend of mine. Or perhaps like a close little brother. To sum it up in one term,” he said frankly, “a king…that I can sacrifice.”

“Why, Masaomi… I figured you’d be coming.”

A few minutes later, Izaya was welcoming Masaomi inside. The boy’s eyes danced in empty space, full of a whirl of emotions.

“When was the last time? When we ran into each other on the street last spring?”

“That’s right… It’s been a while.”

“That expression looks familiar. It’s the old you. You were only in middle school at the time, but you wore the face of an adult. So I will greet you in the best way for acknowledging times gone by,” Izaya said, chuckling at the grave-faced Masaomi.

“Welcome back.”

That was it.

It was the greatest of sarcasm and insults—and also the greatest of welcomes from Izaya.

Masaomi knew Izaya too well to say anything in response. The man was a monster who devoured others with words. Say the wrong thing, and he would entangle that statement with one of his own, raking them over the coals, tearing them apart, swallowing them whole.

Masaomi knew this because he had been swallowed before.

When he had to race out to save Saki, why did he have no option but to rely on this man?

Since then, he had done everything in his power to avoid Izaya and had actively warned his friends against associating with him.

But now he needed Izaya’s help again—even if it meant he would be used.

In all honesty, ever since Kadota had introduced Izaya as “the man who’d met the boss of the Dollars,” a certain doubt had been planted in Masaomi’s mind: the nasty suspicion that Izaya Orihara himself might be the boss of the Dollars.

Surely a man of his caliber could easily conceive of the Dollars and make them a reality. But that also meant that he could have used the slasher and built an army to attack the Yellow Scarves.

He could not be underestimated in either ability or lack of ethical behavior.

“Don’t glare at me like that,” Izaya said to Masaomi, who was staring holes in the older man. “Are you suspecting me of being the head of the Dollars or something?”

The information dealer had successfully drawn first blood.

“…No, I’m not…,” Masaomi responded weakly, looking away. Izaya smiled gently and guided the boy to his guest room.

It was dark. The “guest” room was only so in name—it was stuffed with cabinets and documents. The space was surrounded by shelves and paper. The sunlight through the windows did not penetrate the room; the only source of light was a weak lamp. The overall effect was one of extreme pressure on anyone trapped inside with Izaya.

“I think I know what you’re here to ask about. Of course, I could have told you over the phone, but I’m guessing you wanted a more serious conversation than that.”

“…”

“I heard your friend got attacked? Her name is, uh…Anri Sonohara, I believe? Sounds like a couple of the Yellow Scarves were hit as well, but the girl seems to be more important to you.”

Masaomi was not rattled by the mention of Anri’s name. Normally, he never talked about Anri to anyone other than Mikado or his classmates, but it was not a surprise that the information dealer would know these details.

He was determined to stay calm and speak as little as possible, but
Izaya found just the right words to break that resistance. It was like he was playing a game.

“Does she remind you of Saki a little too much?”

“Don’t do that.” Masaomi looked away.

Izaya leaned slightly, trying to stay in his line of sight. He stared right into the boy’s face, the corners of his mouth twisting with delight. “If a girl you liked got hurt because of the war between the Dollars and the Yellow Scarves… Yes, yes, I see. It really is just like what happened to Saki.”

“…”

Izaya was not put off in the least by Masaomi’s silence. “So what is this? Are you thinking that if you stand up this time instead of running, you can make up for the mistake of your past?”

“That’s not what I’m thinking.”

“You’re just trying to convince yourself that’s not what you’re thinking, aren’t you?” Izaya said, refusing to accept Masaomi’s answer.

He propounded a theory in a clear voice that resounded off the walls, like a veteran actor practicing a speech. Clearly, so clearly. But it was not a theory as much as a figment of imagination, a thinly veiled desire.

“Let me guess your thought process: ‘I really did love Saki, but I was too afraid to save her. Maybe deep down, I just didn’t love her as much as I thought I did. What if my love was an illusion? What if it was only lust? What if I was only after her body?’ And the more you thought it over, the more you wished it was the case. Because that means you would only risk your life to fight for someone you truly loved. And now this Anri Sonohara is a test case to see if your theory is correct, isn’t she?”

His speech was so firm, so unrelenting that Masaomi didn’t even have time to murmur acknowledgment at any point, much less interject to argue.

Namie listened to the whole speech as she carried out her duties, shaking her head in exasperation.

I’m surprised he can spout that garbage so naturally.

It probably wasn’t that Kida boy’s original train of thought, but after Izaya’s cunning arguments, he might certainly be wondering to himself if that was the case after all.

Namie focused on the conversation happening on the other side of the shelves, curious about the boy’s response. But the words she eventually heard after a heavy silence were far calmer than she expected.

“…If that’s how you choose to see it, Izaya, then sure, let’s say that. But I still want to go through with this.”

“Through with what? Vengeance against the slasher? The destruction of the Dollars?”

“Depending on your answer, it could be both.”

“That’s the spirit,” Izaya said, satisfied with his answer. He clapped his hands and stood, then spun halfway around theatrically and loudly proclaimed, “All right! It’s for the sake of your forward progress. I’ll tell you the facts, the truth, and the unavoidable reality, just for you. These three are usually distinct things, but at times they’re all the same, and this is a good example of that!”

“…?”

Masaomi was silent for a completely different reason this time: He had no idea what Izaya was talking about.

“By the way, how is Mikado doing?” Izaya asked, bringing up the name of the boy’s childhood friend just to put a nail in his confusion.

Abruptly, so abruptly.

“Huh…?”

“You know, the friend you introduced to me last spring, Mikado Ryuugamine.”

“Why would you bring his name up now?”

“Well, I just figured he would be really worried about you, given the way you’re acting,” Izaya noted, as though it were nothing more than social chitchat. But Masaomi was growing more and more irritated—just what the other man wanted.

He broke his silence.

“He has nothing to do with this. I’ve never told him about the Yellow Scarves, and he’s as fine and happy as ever for a guy as shy as he is. Unlike me, he actually enjoys his life.”