As seen on Ao3- for skyefullofstars.
The sunlight washes over the streets like liquid gold petering through river rock and reeds. With it, the crowds of the day are swept into the subways and into their apartments, off the streets like fallen leaves on the banks of a river. The stars bubble into the sky one by one and the moon spreads the liquid light over the city again to give the night a current.
The nightlife arises and wades through the moon's tributary fingers, disturbing the shadows like rocks skipping on water. The people do not notice the darkness around them.
Unless she wants them to.
Celty Sturlusen, the dulluhan and the darkness, is a myth only to those too nearsighted to see the truth of the world around them, prey unaware of the invisible danger around them. Fortunately, though, Celty is no predator and no devil. She is a faery pretending to be an urban legend, and succeeding only in slowly becoming human.
She rides, headless, in an ebony suit and on an ebony bike with no lights, through the streets and beneath the radar of the public eye. She has no employer to please tonight and no job to fulfill, and Shinra is waiting at the apartment for her.
But for now, she rides as she pleases, where she pleases. She weaves around the busy intersections and takes as many back alleys and side roads as her bike can tread. Shooter, her steed, quietly whines its engine in tandem with the wind as it whistles by them. The shadows find the highway and follow it, carving a trail blacker than the asphalt, darker than the night sky.
It is also her shadows that see for her, and she takes in everything around her.
Ikebukuro is an ecosystem of people- a neighborhood of locals bound tightly to their home despite the floods of travelers coming to and through. The 260,000 or so people were mostly the minnows, the brim, the water spiders- some weaker, some stronger, but all of them part of the whole. There is never a lack of activity here.
Celty skates around the skyscrapers and thoroughfares from a distance, effectively containing the whole pond of lights and people within her tread marks.
And then, she sees him leaning on the highway boundary with his face raised to look at the reflection of the city's light on the sky. Next to him, a streetlight shamefully bends at a forty five degree angle towards the asphalt, light flickering dejectedly and unable to remain completely on. Celty's friend holds up his cigarette as if to add the dull light of the dim butt end to the cloud of light pollution in place of the broken light.
Celty pulls over and commands Shooter to a halt.
"Hey," he says as she dismounts.
A phone screen glows from within the abyss her form creates. Her words appear on the screen, and she holds them up and out to him. [Last time I checked, walking on a major highway was illegal.]
He stoops down to read her message, and then puts his cigarette back in his mouth. "Well," he says after taking a drag, "Last I checked, so was riding around with no lights on your bike."
Celty looks at Shooter, who, if it had possessed the ability, would have shrugged. [Alright, you got me. I'm breaking the law to enjoy the highway system. What about you?]
"Um", he crossed his arms and tapped his fingers on the snow white of his sleeves. "I went for a walk and decided to go a little farther than usual. Then I smelt…" he narrows his eyes "I smelt a piece of shit and ran after it. The little shit got into a car and I chased that, too. When the car merged there," he points to an exit leading away from Ikebukuro, "I slipped on this," he gestures to a ratty magazine paper stuck to his shoe, "and then I figured that he wasn't going back to 'Bukuro anyway so I could just kill him another day. I have to meet Tom early tomorrow so I don't need to go too far anyway and the city looks nice from here."
Celty shrugs her shoulders. Izaya Orihara- the "little shit"- is not her favorite person, either, but her friend on the interstate hates him so much he swears to kill him one day.
But Izaya will not let that happen. He swears to kill his would-be murderer first.
Celty believes that either outcome is impossible- neither can kill the other. Shinjuku's information mastermind and Celty's friend, Ikebukuro's strongest, sit at a constant stalemate because neither can quite keep the other in a death embrace long enough before they break the hold and slip away.
Still fiddling with his cigarette, Celty's friend wrenches the tattered magazine from his black dress shoes. "Geez. Somebody just bought a magazine and then just tossed it." He fans it at her face in annoyance. "I know these things come out weekly but you'd think someone would try to take care of it longer."
Celty tilts her yellow helmet- the only pop of color on her- to the side at the pink-purple booklet. She remembers seeing them at the newspaper stands as she drove around town on errands this morning.
"Want it? Here," he says, holding it out to her. She takes it and he busies himself with his cigarette.
Nothing about it is particularly relevant to Celty- human pop culture is never relevant to Celty unless it involves video games or urban legends, and this is a magazine aimed at teenaged girls looking for beauty tips and makeup. She flips through it anyway and stops when she sees a familiar face staring back at her.
[Your brother, right?] she holds the pages up. It's a full spread of a celebrity CD advertisement starring the movie star/singer Yuuhei Hanejima. Celty has never actually met "Yuuhei", but she knows his real name- Kasuka Heiwajima- and his elder brother's face well enough to pick out familiar features.
"Yeah." Pride, nervousness, inferiority. She can pick it out from beneath the cover of a placid face. She can see it in how he shifts his feet. He realizes he is talking to the shadows, and his nerves dissipate. "…He's getting even more popular these days." The tension passes.
[I see. I know you are very happy for him.] Celty continues flipping through the magazine- she is in no hurry. Shinra will be there all night and the most he can do about her spending time with a friend is whine that she did not come home early enough for extended cuddle hours. She can always cuddle him extra thoroughly to make up for lost time.
Besides, something catches her eye in the magazine. What's this? she thinks, but her phone is tucked away in her suit.
"Oh, you interested in horoscopes?" He looks over at the magazine.
[How does it work?]
"Well, your birthday correlates to something… stars? I think? And supposedly it reveals stuff about your personal life and personality." He straightens his bowtie. "I think it's a bunch of bullshit for airy teenaged brats and old women, but I guess I'm neither of those so I wouldn't know."
Celty ignores his skepticism. She is a headless rider in an ongoing search for her missing head- if there is any chance that these horoscopes could point her in its direction, or reveal something about it to her, it constitutes a solid lead even if her friend thinks it is bogus.
And after all, she herself is supposedly mythical and yet real- she is a faery and she knows for a fact that she is real. Just like she knows that zombies and monsters and mermaids and, God forbid, aliens are also real. Celty Sturulsen believes in destiny, science, and magic, and she is ready to believe in astrology, too.
But she cannot remember her birthday or if she even has one. Her memories disappeared with her head, locked away inside her mind like treasures in a chest. Her shoulders slump and she lowers the magazine. Instead, she looks up Shinra's birthday.
GEMINI
May 21st-June 20th
You've got broad tastes and interests- some people think you can change topic and tone so fast that you've got dual personalities! But hey, that duality makes you the life of the party! You are a lively and entertaining friend and lover, and that is an advantage of your dual nature! The flip side is that you can get temperamental and fickle when you get bored. But who likes being bored?
That sounded about right. Celty skipped to the "Love" section.
It's best that you are in a relationship with an interesting partner- you can't let yourself stagnate. Your best bets are someone with the sun sign of: Aquarius, Libra, Aries, or Leo! But beware of Pisces; they might be too emotional and clingy for you!
Celty frantically pores over the Pisces article to make sure she isn't one. She cannot really be sure, and the thought just worries her more and fretting will not do anything for her. She looks for a distraction, and finds the man in the weskit lounging around front of her. [Hey, what's your birthday?]
She rouses him from his perch of the highway boundary. "Hm? Oh. January 28th. Why? You gonna look me up?"
She bobs her helmet in affirmation and scans the page with a delicate licorice hand. He just chews on his cigarette.
Celty skims the text, glances at the love section, closes the magazine, and stands by her friend.
"So what did it say?"
She smirks without a mouth. [I thought you said you didn't believe in that kind of stuff.] Her phone reappears in her right hand and the magazine falls to her side along with her left.
"Well, yeah, but…" He scratches at his bleach-blonde hair, running his fingers through it like one would through a dog's fur. "You made me curious. And you sure seem enthusiastic about it. You might even believe whatever it was it said!"
As if she could ever begrudge him for any of it. [They are large generalizations. They don't tell me anything I wouldn't already know about you, or wouldn't already know was untrue. However.] She flits her fingers in the air before returning them to her phone keyboard, [It also said that you are the perfect match for my Shinra.]
His eyes flare in surprise, and then his face changes to stone. Celty cannot read his expression clearly. Idly, she wonders if he is going to get angry, but his wrath can't hurt her. He wouldn't let it, either.
"I'm not going to steal your mad scientist boyfriend," he finally says.
Celty holds her stomach and laughs, noiselessly. [Wait, did you think I seriously felt threatened? I was messing with you! I thought it was funny!]
"Oh." Satisfied, he shrugs and abandoned his cigarette into a little trash pouch he carries to free his hands. Then he sets both palms onto the stem of the prostrated street light right where it bends. It flickers in fear and reverence. "I made a real mess," he says. "But it wasn't too bad this time."
Without a word, he effortlessly bends the metal street light back into its original upright position. The light stays on for longer periods of time before routinely dying.
"That's an annoying flicker, isn't it?" he muses, eyeing his handiwork.
Celty traipses over to Shooter, mounts, starts it up, and gestures for Shizuo to take a seat behind her.
When he keeps his mouth shut- which is almost as often as Celty herself- the people fail to notice him because he never confronts them; he floats in behind or around them in order to observe and feel included without ever becoming troublesome. He's somewhere between an island and a ghost- seemingly self-sufficient and silent- but if anyone were looking, they would find him immediately. Celty knows- she's had to track him down before. He fails to fit in completely.
Six-foot-tall Asian. Bleached hair. Bartender outfit. Sunglasses. Smoker.
She is night shade in a biker suit. But nobody stops them, and nobody even stares.
They stop in Nishiguchi Park and loiter. They watch the other people and a few street performances, both of them standing in an invisible bubble just far enough away from everyone else to be separate from them.
A couple nearby enters a fight. The girl obviously wants to go home. Celty's friend takes out a new cigarette and lights it.
The girl begins to cry. The boy grabs her arm.
Celty's friend fidgets.
The girl breaks contact and runs off. The boy looks dejected and upset, but he turns around and leaves.
The last time Celty and her cohort had witnessed something like this, it had gotten messy. Several cars were damaged.
Although, all things considered, that was not a very big mess, either.
Celty looks at the magazine from the highway. It would be nice to know her birthday so she could at least read the pop-colored article about her personality and horoscope. Maybe she was also an Aquarius- she was always distant in crowds, although that could be because she wasn't human…
"Don't let it bother you," her friend says. "People make their own choices and address their own weaknesses. You don't need a weekly rag to tell you about yourself." He wipes his nose. "I mean, you make your own destiny and you… you decide your own path. So something like that isn't really important." His tongue pushes around his cheeks as he thinks.
Celty nods.
When she finally leaves to go home, he calmly waves and says he'll see her around.
A few minutes later, a vending machine breaks the surface of Ikebukuro's skyline and sinks back to the bottom with a distant crash. Celty can faintly hear her friend shout Izaya's name.
She turns around and guns it back to Shizuo to make sure he doesn't destroy the city, but when she gets there, the commotion has already died; he stands in the middle of the street with a few street signs and cement and steel flotsam littering the area, but Izaya is gone and her friend's fighting stance has eased up. He waves for her to go and pulls out a new cigarette, obviously annoyed. Celty nods and leaves. Her friend wants to be alone and Shinra is waiting for her.
Shizuo Heiwajima- the name means tranquil man, peaceful island. That's her friend's name. He is Ikebukuro's strongest, the Fighting Doll. Sometimes, he's called the God of Destruction.
Shinra tells scientific almost-fables about Shizuo's strength and resilience and how it can be explained, but Celty has seen it firsthand No matter how engaging and charismatic Shinra is, his words do not hold a candle to seeing Shizuo in action.
She hears him shout again, and so she watches quietly from a nearby alley.
Izaya specializes in knives and words. He uses both as he slinks around a building and charges Shizuo.
Shizuo uses his hands and he doesn't use them correctly, but they don't break and they don't ever pull punches. Izaya is faster, and he dodges and slices at Shizuo. The few cuts that do land don't seem to hurt at all.
Izaya Orihara gathers information and sells it to anyone who is willing to pay the price for it. Nobody nice wants what he sells, and Izaya is possibly worse than all of them; he causes trouble, and he manipulates people. It is his job, his fascination, and his purpose in life.
Shizuo works as a debt collector for a dating service because neither his temper nor Izaya let him keep any other job. But his real purpose is probably to keep Izaya from taking over Ikebukuro.
Shizuo can't be manipulated, and Izaya hates him for it. Shizuo hates Izaya for being a troublemaking bastard.
They've hated each other on-sight since the day they met.
Shizuo wrenches a slab of concrete from the sidewalk and hurls it at Izaya like a Frisbee. Izaya jumps over it and rolls to the nearest building. He climbs the wall and darts away, using the drainage pipes as a foothold. Shizuo throws a car at him.
Shizuo Heiwajima is Aquarius, the water bearer. Supposedly, the sign means he pours water onto the world like knowledge. Celty thinks it just means that he protects something precious.
Not actively, of course. Shizuo never set out to protect anything except for perhaps his brother's true identity, but his marked hatred of Izaya frequently protected Ikebukuro in some roundabout way.
He isn't part of the system of Ikebukuro so much as he stands within and aside from it. He observes, and he carries something so heavy that only someone like him could support it. Somehow, he evolved from simple cup-bearer to Atlas and he never even noticed.
His job has a uniform- the weskits from his brother are a symbol of perseverance and loyalty and the bright hair for everyone to know he is dangerous, not like them, and they should stay away.
Shizuo runs after Izaya and rounds a corner. A few moments later, Shizuo's frustrated scream sent waves through the city and he lumbered back to the park on their wake. The bystanders gape as Shizuo pulls out another cigarette to calm himself down.
He inhales. The world holds its breath.
He exhales and it starts turning again.
Celty drives home.