He wonders, briefly, no real time to consider, what it would be like to have a loving, doting mother.
Maybe she'd celebrate his first day of school with pancakes, waking him up when they were fluffy and warm. Kururi would be balanced on her hip, and she'd turn and smile at him as he came down the stairs, still ruffled from sleep and brushing it from his eyes.
It's funny, he can't even imagine Kyouko's face on her.
Instead, Kururi (or maybe it's Mairu? Who cares, they're twins, pretty much the same anyway) contents herself with chewing on his sock as he pours himself a bowl of cereal.
He's honestly kind of surprised his parents found time to fuck in between jet setting from here to there, but he guesses it doesn't take that long, does it? Maybe they were efficient about it as they are everything else.
"Looking forward to your first day of school?" he asks whichever sibling is chewing on his sock.
"Hm," she says in response. Close enough. Do three year olds talk more? He may have fudged their birth certificates only a teeny bit, what's a year in the grand scheme of thing, but what else was he supposed to do with them while he was in school? They're mobile now with a near suicidal surge to stick their fingers into just about any electrical socket they can reach.
"Where's your sister?"
Kururi/Mairu (Kurmai? Easier to say, certainly) looks shifty, but glances to the left before her eyes return solidly to his face. Izaya follows her eyes to see the other one nearly in aim of her goal, baby fingers stretched out towards the damnable electrical socket.
For a second, a long second, a part of him (okay, a majority) wants to wait and see what happens. Let her achieve her goal and stick her fingers into the socket and achieve her victory, however short lived it (and she) might be.
But he doesn't, because he is a responsible older brother. Or something. Fuck it, he's invested far too much time into these idiots for one of them to die now. (But how long would it take for Kyouko to notice? Maybe he could convince her there was only one to start with? Better yet, pretend one is two? Nah, would never work. Too much that could go wrong.)
He scoops the one closes to him up tucks the other under his arm. It might make maneuvering his backpack on difficult and force him to leave the slowly warming cereal on the counter, but he's running late anyway, and breakfast is kind of excessive anyway.
It's easier than he thought it would be to ditch his sisters at their nursery school, the teacher (as if you could call someone who watch children drool on each other a teacher) cooing over what a good big brother he was, how sweet he is, and he's on his way to middle school.
He's a bit early, but that's fine. So are many other students, nervous and eager. It's the first time half of them will need to make friends in years, probably don't even know how. It's hard to choose where to position himself. On the one hand, too close and he'll be approached. It's the halo effect, see. He's got a pretty face, so he must have an equally good personality to match it. He'd be able to see a few of the daring ones up close, watch for bitten nails or anxiety behind the eyes.
But then he'd miss the larger picture, have to focus attention on the here and now. Sacrifice quantity for uncertain quality. Decisions, decisions.
He's spent too long dithering, and now he's caught up in a rush of students. Drats.
Too bad, might as well make the most of it.
There's a girl moving towards him with a studied confidence he can almost admire, if her posture wasn't too relaxed, her shoulders too far back, eyes too wide for it to be real. She's looking to attract friends to a bubbly personality she doesn't have.
A boy with an aggravated scowl is shoving through the crowd, and half of the students scramble out of his way. The other half are pushed as though by the sheer weight of his gait, nothing more than leaves in the wind. He catches Izaya's eye and is that an honest-to-god snarl?
The fuck?
Coming up the walkway is a familiar face from elementary school, and he lights up on seeing Izaya, hope in his expression. God, this is too easy. He's clearly hoping they'll be glued together by foreign situations into an impregnable friendship, Izaya forced out of his shell. Izaya doesn't move closer, but doesn't move away either as Suzuki moves closer, greeting him with more familiarity than is probably necessary. More than is welcome, at any rate.
"Izaya," he says, cheer bright and not the most forced he's heard this morning. "I didn't know you'd be at Raijin."
It's probably because he didn't tell anybody, but Suzuki doesn't seem to need an answer. He never has.
"What class are you? Maybe we'll be classmates again and you can let me in on some of your study tips," Suzuki gives him an exaggerated wink. "Maybe you'll have a competitor for top student this year, huh?"
Izaya gives the small chuckle he knows is expected of him, the one makes him just a loner instead of an antisocial asshole and says, "Ah, finally. It gets so boring all alone at the top."
And he hears an honest-to-god growl from behind him. He swing his head around to see the angry one from earlier staring right at him, teeth bared, fingers curling and uncurling like he could barely stop himself from beating Izaya within an inch of his life.
Angry Dog turns when a hand lands on his shoulder, another boy, darker skinned than maybe anyone Izaya's ever seen, and follows him into the school.
Interesting.
A faint whine alerts him that Suzuki may have been talking the entire time.
"Wow, what'd you do to piss off Heiwajima that much? I might have to reconsider spending any time around you, haha," Suzuki says, and he's actually edging away from Izaya like he has some horribly contagious disease. Like he's the one infected with terminal dumbassery.
"Who's Heiwajima?" he asks, and he's not prepared for Suzuki and just about everyone in a ten foot radius to stop dead.
"You don't know who Heiwajima is?" says a girl behind him, purple lips parted in surprise.
"He's a monster," another girl says, her face far too close to orgasmic for it to hold any true weight.
"I heard that he took out an entire yakuza gang just because they stole his juice box," a boy says, confidence heavy in his tone.
"Forget that, I don't think Kimoto is out of the hospital yet. It's been months."
And suddenly the air is filled with Heiwajima's exploits, like a dam has broken.
If his new classmates are to be believed, Heiwajima is single-handedly responsible for every act of violence within a ten mile radius, can bench press a truck, and hides under the most beautiful face that God saw fit to bless this earth with (not his words).
The crowd's turned their attention away from him, whispering to each other Heiwajima's latest exploits. He's just about convinced it'll never end, the story just retold and reduplicated to the status of legend here, on the front steps of Raijin, when the bell rings loud over it all.
He starts his day.
He watches as a girl loans another a pencil, disgust in her eyes even as the other girl's light up inside with joy.
As the homeroom teacher's eyes linger just a little too long on legs beneath skirts, twisting his wedding ring all the while.
As a boy in the corner starts breathing a little to fast, sweating just a little too much when all they've done is introduce each other.
As another boy's eyes glaze over in boredom as his posture starts to slip.
He's impassive and above it all. He knows that now that won't score him anything with his classmates. He'll be left alone as he wishes. He know that later, it will only make him more attractive, as girls come closer, desperate to crack his shell. As anyone will want their five minutes of glory as his only friend.
But by then, he'll have been watching from the corner long enough to know what it'll take to break them, to watch them walk away and leave him well enough alone.