Flower of Death

Ivory skin, once full of color and life, now ashen and haggard.

Frowning mouth, once open and loud, now shut for all of eternity.

Pale lips, once plump and pink, now blue and thin.

Sleeping eyelids, once opened to reveal taunting and devious eyes, never to open again.

Charcoal-black hair, once neatly kept and shiny, now filled with dust and blood.

His raunchy jacket, torn, ripped, and dirtied from an apparent struggle, lay limply around his still body.

Scanning the man up and down in the light of the early morning day, the infamous Shizuo Heiwajima pinched a dying cigarette butt between his thumb and index finger. It was clear to him that the man he was looking down upon had been shot not once, but twice. Also clear to him was the fact that, whoever it was that this dead man was fighting against, had won.

Flicking his burnt out cigarette off into the shadows of the back alleyway in which he was standing, Shizuo bent his knees and crouched down to get a better look at the corpse before him.

Unlike how he would normally handle situations around this being, Shizuo carefully and gently pulled back the man's rugged jacket to reveal the exact locations of where he had been shot. Two bullets straight through the heart; a truly inevitable death.

Rising back up to his towering height, Shizuo shook his head with disappointment. "How did this happen, huh?" he asked, speaking directly to the oblivious and lifeless body before him. "How could you do something this stupid? Going off and getting yourself killed like this. You really are just a flea."

Exhaling a long, drawn out breath, one that probably smelled of chewable mints and cigarette smoke, Shizuo's eyes wandered down to look at the man's sprawled out and wild legs. Another blood-stained, bullet-sized hole was visible just above his knee cap. He was shot a third time.

"So you tried to run, huh?" Shizuo questioned, not expecting a response. "Just like you always do. You always try to run away from your problems."

Scenes of the possible fallouts that could have led to a conclusion such as this one silently played like moving pictures throughout Shizuo's mind. All of them ended up with one man dead and that other getting away with murder.

Sliding down the brick wall that his back had been pressed up against, Shizuo looked down at the ground beneath him. For being shot three times, there wasn't a lot of bloodshed.

Sitting and simply staring, Shizuo remained silent. Bellowing out death threats and screaming to the heavens in rage wouldn't do him any good anymore. What was seemingly the bane of his existence, the one person that gave him the drive to run around downtown Ikebukuro like a deranged mad man, was now dead.

Izaya Orihara was dead. What more, Shizuo Heiwajima was not the one that had killed him.

Puffy grey clouds and gloomy casts of fog swam around in the sky. Winter was coming to a quick end, but spring sure was taking it's time in welcoming the world with its warm and comforting hold. That was something that Shizuo could use right about now: something warm, something comforting...someone to hold.

Running a frustrated and urgent hand through his bleached locks of hair, Shizuo groaned. How could someone do this to him? How could someone strip him of this victory that he had been yearning for for over a decade now?

That was when questions began to race through Shizuo's mind. Was it a mindless act of murder? A kill just for fun? Or did the flea have someone after him? Shizuo was sure that he wasn't the only person in Ikebukuro that completely hated this man's guts, but he was almost one hundred percent positive that he was the one that hated Izaya the most. Everyone and anyone that was within the vicinity of one of their violent quarrels could see that there was a pure and undeniable hatred between the two of them.

All of these questions begged Shizuo to ask himself his own questions. Why? That was the first question. Why would someone do this? How? That was the second. How could someone act out so violently and brutally and just get away with it? Who? To Shizuo, this was the most important question. Who? Who in their right mind would do something like this? Who would take away Shizuo's one and only option to finally feel like he did the world justice, like he did Ikebukuro justice, like he did himself justice. Who...?

Shizuo rubbed the taught skin between his eyebrows, the pain of a headache coming on.

"Shizu-chan! You'll get wrinkles!"

Shizuo's eyes, wide and frantic, shot open. It took him only a second, however, to realize that he was just imagining things.

Cautiously removing his pressing fingers, Shizuo leaned over to get a better look at Izaya's forever sleeping face. He had never seen such an expression like the one he was looking at right now, not from the infamous information broker at least.

Extending his right arm outward, even surprising himself because of this bold action, Shizuo ran a feather-light finger down the hollow of Izaya's sunken cheek.

Ice.

That was what Shizuo's sense of touch had felt the moment his finger came into contact with Izaya's face.

Shizuo, retracting his wandering hand, looked up to the cloud-covered sky. A constant, unsettling feeling continued to linger in the bottom pit of his stomach. Being faced with a situation such as this one, all Shizuo could properly think about was what in the world was he going to do now.

Common sense won over his sinful and darker thoughts as he squatted, hunched and bent over, and ever so gently, ever so carefully pulled Izaya's puppet-of-a-corpse into his arms.

Much lighter than Shizuo could have ever imagined, Izaya's body hung loosely within the blonde's craddling arms, making him look like a bride. A corpse bride.

Scooping beneath his legs and shifting Izaya's dead weight to both knees, then one, then to the both of his feet as the blonde stood, Shizuo almost jolted with surprise and disgust as Izaya's information-free head lolled inward and rested against his chest.

Swallowing back dry saliva, inhaling and exhaling two long and drawn out breaths, and shoving down his pride, Shizuo walked out of the serene silence that enveloped the alley and strode back out into the busied streets of downtown Ikebukuro.

Time seemed to stop. Multiple heads turned. Seemingly thousands stared.

Not one of them dared to ask a single question.

Tired eyes hidden from behind his blue sunglasses, his bartender apparel gradually becoming soiled with Izaya's soaking blood, Shizuo walked passed hundreds, not interesting in looking at any of them. All of Shizuo's will power and focus was on the trophy within his arms; the trophy that he could not even rightfully claim.

Minutes faded into miles and clouded daylight shifted over into masked darkness. It had been a long and strained walk. Izaya's body, although initially light, was beginning to weight Shizuo down.

Changing the dead man's position, Shizuo placed Izaya's body down onto the dusty path in which he had been traveling.

Squatting down and draping Izaya over his back like a curtain of night, Shizuo pressed forward.

Hour after hour had passed. Shizuo's cellphone had rung multiple times, but he abruptly continued to ignore the chirping calls. He had predicted that all of the alerts and messages were from Tom, his trusted friend and co-worker. Knowing how frazzled and worried his long-time companion must have been getting, Shizuo made it a priority to call him later.

Tranquil sounds like those of the rushing water from a fishing river nearby and night crickets waking up to rub their wings in romantic mating calls entered Shizuo's direct range of hearing. He liked these sounds. Unlike many things, they were unchangeable. Water, no matter the many murders and births in this world, would always be water. Crickets, no matter how many evenings were to pass, would always search for their midnight lovers through the process of high-pitched clicks.

Collectively stumbling upon the infamous "field of death", a grassy land filled to the brim with blood-red flowers, flowers to which no one knew the breed, Shizuo cast his eyes up to the sky. Like the many ghost stories of the forbidden land that he had heard through tall tales and chatty classmates back in middle school, the sky appeared as if it were only meters away, appeared as if the gate to Heaven were within human limits, appeared as if the blackened sky could eat you whole.

It was mesmerizing.

Shizuo didn't believe in fables, so the rumors that whoever entered the flowered valley never returned didn't phase him one bit.

Walking further and further into the flower field, a vulgar fragrance expelling from the petals beneath his feet with every step he took, Shizuo ultimately refused to breathe through his nose any longer.

Gulping strong and bold lungfulls of air, Shizuo felt his throat begin to tighten and constrict.

It was said in the tall tales, to add more detail to the general story, that whoever swallowed the strange scent of the unnamed flowers would never make it out of the field alive.

Shizuo, dizzied and incredibly exhausted from his long journey, collapsed to the ground, causing Izaya's limp body to fall off of his shoulders and crash down with him.

Rolling over onto his back, petals of red kissing the skin of his cheekbones, Shizuo closed his eyes. This action caused wrinkles of distress to line his forehead.

"Shizu-chan, what did I tell you before? Do you even listen to me?"

Laughing warily, high off of the intoxicating flower fumes, Shizuo rested a lazy wrist over his forehead.

"Shut up, flea," he whispered, his voice dry and salty. "Just shut up..."

Turning his head and parting his eyelids to look at the man that he had spent hours traveling with, Izaya's face of death silently looking back at him, Shizuo couldn't stop himself from smiling.

"Looks like we're both going to end up here being here forever. Kind of pathetic, wouldn't you say?" Shizuo asked, again, not expecting an answer.

A devil and a monster served no place in the town of Ikebukuro. All that could be expected from the daring duo was madness; madness and turmoil.

Shizuo looked up to the enormous sky surrounding him. With what little strength he had left, he spread his arms wide, looking like that of a soaring eagle.

"God, does a monster like me have a place in Heaven?"

Like a message from above, the clouds within Shizuo's view parted, revealing millions of billions of silvery, shining stars.

Stars were a rarity to see in Ikebukuro. The city and street lights "scared them away", like the little children that lived there would say.

Staring at the beautiful view within his focal range, Shizuo's eyes glazed over with fatigue.

With his irises diluted and his eyesight and brain function going fuzzy, Shizuo couldn't say for certain if he had laced his fingers through Izaya's ice-cold ones or not. All he could say, though, was he felt it. He felt cold. He felt death.

With sleepy breaths and wavering eyelids, even the strongest man in all of Ikebukuro became drunk with everlasting unconsciousness, never to open his monstrous eyes again; never to see those shining stars smiling down upon his face. Never again.

Before death met him at his doorstep, Shizuo, clinging on to his last thread of life, whispered the words that he knew would finally, for once and for all, be able to be fulfilled:

"Izaya, stay out of Ikebukuro..."

Forever...

Hello everyone! Chappy here! (:

I'd like to thank all of you for reading this one-shot of mine! It means a lot to me, it really does! (:

I know this story was probably very tough to read, though... It's kind of weird and sad. :I

I've been in a sad mood ( kind of ) for the past week now, so I just really had to get all of my emotions out by writing.

If you know me on Youtube, you most definitely know why I'm sad. XD

I'm getting better, though. Things just take time.

I am in no means searching for pity reviews here, though, so please, if you choose to review, tell me how I did! Constructive criticism is always welcome! (:

I'm a new writer in the Shizaya fandom, and this story is very much lacking in Shizaya-ness, so please bear with me! I'm going to try my very best to make a happy story next time! (:

Until then, have a great day! (:

- Chappy.