A/N: Hello, everyone, Iggy here. I felt like writing a really depressing fic, so, yeah, that's what this is.
I don't own Izaya or Shizuo, they belong to Ryohgo Narita. I also do not own "The Waste Land", that belongs to T.S. Eliot.
The wind sighs through the broken windows of buildings. The sky's the gray-yellow of stormclouds, as it's been for weeks, now. It's oppressive, like a low-hanging ceiling, about to fall on his head.
He doesn't like going outside anymore, though he doesn't have to watch for flung vending machines or a monster brandishing stop signs. He misses those days, now that he thinks about it. They were like a game, a show he put on for the world, even himself. He wishes he could go back; life was simpler then.
He'd hoped that, if there was more life out there, they'd be human on a bigger scale. Just as easy and fun to toy with, opening whole new vistas to his view. Instead, they were more monstrous than Shizu-chan had ever been. They razed the world to eat it and left the shell in their wake. Months after they'd ripped islands from their moorings and sent the ocean running wild, humanity was gone.
He still lived, and so, he thought, did a few others. He couldn't really be sure.
If there were any others in Ikebukuro, he doubted they'd recognize him now.
He'd never been especially large, but his body had grown weak, nigh-skeletal as of late, from lack of food. He doubts he could even jump a few feet, much less vault as he'd used to. His hair hangs lank and greasy, flopping into his eyes when he turns his head. He still wears his coat, of course, he doesn't feel himself without it, but it's grown threadbare, and hangs all too loosely on his stick-figure frame. The light rucksack on his back, filled with whatever necessities he can scrounge from the wreckage, is like the weight of the water on a drowning man's back.
He feels like a maggot in the corpse of a giant.
He thinks he hears footsteps. They're in the same rhythm that Shinra used to walk in, light, but not hesitant. He turns to greet his friend, but there's no one there, of course. It was the crash of stone against stone as rubble settled, nothing more.
Shinra's gone, of course, though he finds it hard to remember. Shinra, Mikado, Kida, Mairu and Kururi, Kadota, Simon, the Dollars, the Yellow Squares, all, all have fallen. Shizuo vanished, and Celty left long before. He's alone, as ever, but...
He feels as though he's surrounded by ghosts. He wonders, if they are there, what they think of him.
Izaya Orihara, the most dangerous man in Ikebukuro, reduced to the status of a rat.
Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to death's other Kingdom
Remember us—if at all—not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men
The stuffed men.