A/N: This fic was inspired by a wonderful Demotivational Poster, if you want to see it just type in 'what does izaya worry about at night demotivational poster' on google in order to find the owner of the poster on deviantart.

This fic might be structured a little odd but when I wrote it, it just seemed right to me and I didn't want to change it. So I didn't. I have nearly half of this fic already written so there is a guarantee of updates and I have a good idea of where it's going so I can also say it will be completed sooner or later.

Warnings: I don't think there are any in this chapter.

Nothing to Fear

Prologue

Rhythmic taps were the only sound in the wide room, echoing in the darkness of the four walls. The lights of the monitors he worked at only reached a foot or two behind him before fading into shadows, his own a monstrous thing against the wall. Midnight had come and gone an hour ago, yet he still typed and typed and clicked and absorbed every word that flickered across the three screens. It was an everyday occurrence, no one would say it was out of place for him.

But this was obsessive. When nighttime came, when darkness crept in and hindered his knowledge of what lay in it, this rhythm became a damaging march.

He stopped only once, to stare up at the dark and then glance out the window, taking some small solace in the wide balcony doors admitting the city lights of Shinjuku. The sound of steps rattling around the room send his eyes back into the darkness, watching with a distance he hopes he can maintain.

More steps, a flash of silver from a source of light conjured only by his imagination.

A glowing sneer that curls unnaturally.

A pair of bright malevolent eyes dancing wildly.

A whisper too soft to understand but with sinister intentions dripping like poison.

He knows They are there and he can't look away as They multiply. Hypnotically, multiplying.

He drags his eyes back onto the monitors, the rhythm a broken and stumbling thing. If he can just keep going, if he can find that distance to Them and keep going and going and going-

Cold fingers wrap around his neck and drag him off his chair. Cold fingers that appear on his wrists and seem to faze through his shirt to clutch at his flesh. Cold enough to paralyze him as he is dragged back.

Distance.

Distance.

The flashes of silver, glowing sneers, and shining eyes dance around him now. He can't keep track of any of Them. The steps are growing louder, as though They are running at him –or is that his heart- and now the whispers are all but in his ears and he still can't understand the words that make him cold under his skin as well.

His lips move soundlessly, buried underneath the darkness and things that hunt him in the dark.

He tries again, choking on the distance that is shrinking from the reality, that cold under his skin becoming something more recognizable.

He was scared.

No, he didn't want too. He didn't want this to be how it happened!

"I don't," He choked out as the whispers screamed –still soft, still unintelligible- in his ears and the glowing, shining, flashes descended on him, "I don't…"

He was consumed into oblivion-

"..want to die."

Red eyes opened to the well-lit room of his flat, monitors humming softly, faint sounds of Shinjuku's night life audible even through the balcony doors, and Izaya Orihara slowly sat up from where he had been sleeping on the couch. One quick glance at the clock told him it was 4:00am. He had gotten a full three hours of sleep tonight. It wasn't a bad amount compared to his normal naps he took along the night but he would had accepted less to be spared that dream.

Izaya stood up and made his way to the bathroom, intent on splashing some cold water on his face to chase both dream and his sleepiness away. Looking at himself in the mirror, he could see his own weariness, unshielded in his privacy. He would need to try and gather a few more hours under his belt before noon. If he was going to Ikebukuro he needed to keep his wits about him in case Shizuo crossed his path. Drying off his face, he wandered back into the main room and fell into his chair, absently scanning the bright monitors.

With nothing disastrously interesting going on, his mind snatched onto his latest scare.

'Well, latest is a bit of a stretch when I've had that god damn dream for years…' Izaya mused bitterly to himself.

Being an underground information broker had its ups and downs just like any other job out there in the world. It's just that one of the down sides of being an underground information broker happened to be that people who were pissed off with you had the mindset and often times the means to kill you.

He could list off the various entertaining ways that people who suffered from the information he sold tried to end his life. It might take a few hours but he was fairly certain he could list all of them. At first the attempts had been met with some degree of fear and anxiety, but after the first thirty times, he had mostly gotten used to it. Taken steps to avoid it as much as possible without infringing on his own schedule.

Being one of the Awakusu-kai's top information brokers helped immensely for his 'maybe-I-should-think-twice-about-this' aspect.

Most of the time it was amusing, or at the very least annoying. However there were the times that Izaya truly believed death was around the corner, just waiting to wrap him up and pull him into the oblivion that lay beyond life. Those times still made him shudder and were responsible for the dreams that drove him to waking with a cold chill that would not disperse until noon's sweet heat reaffirmed his surroundings again.

Home invasions had occurred more than once, though the first time he had been lucky to be pulling an all-nighter and was able to incapacitate the gun-toting man. A quick call to Shiki had gotten the body disposed of (and a disconcerting conversation where Izaya was pretty sure Shiki was offering to keep a guard on Izaya's hotel floor for protection without really saying it aloud. Izaya had of course turned down the untold offer in a similarly unspoken way, it would probably scare away his clients, and that was that.)

The second time hadn't been luck, nor any of the times afterwards, because Izaya had realized something. He was defenseless when he was sleeping. Izaya liked to think he was a very powerful opponent but any human asleep was a vulnerable target and Izaya, human as he could not deny he was, was just as vulnerable as anyone else.

So he taught himself to work on little sleep. He got just enough to function, for the kind of work he did anyway, and no more. He didn't sleep either. He 'napped' multiple times during the night for short intervals of time. Izaya was now quite a light sleeper. Paranoia, justified paranoia he might defend, had forced him too.

Whether it was this lack of sleep or the itching anxiety that spurred it, he would occasionally have that dream. Where all of his enemies got their bloodthirsty hands around him and…

Izaya ran a hand over his face and then sat up straight, rolling his chair closer to his computers. Bringing up his chatroom, he smirked when he saw Setton lingering online. Logging in, he greeted her enthusiastically, relieved to find such a promising distraction.

Please review for Izaya's sake?