Shinra is packing when Izaya gets back to the apartment.
Izaya can hear the noise from the front door. Shinra must be in his bedroom and moving with more force than care; Izaya hears no less than two things fall to the floor while he's slipping off his shoes in the entryway, one of those followed by a faint "Oh dear!" that speaks to some kind of breakage as a result. Izaya raises an eyebrow at the sound, although there's no one to see him, feels his mouth tugging on amusement, and when he moves down the hallway he stops in the doorway to Shinra's room before continuing on to his own.
"Afternoon," he offers from the entry, crossing his arms and leaning a shoulder against the support of the frame as he considers the absolute mess Shinra has made of his room. There are clothes everywhere, scattered across the bed and half-unfolded from the dresser; Izaya can only see the very edge of the textbooks usually left open on the meister's desk under the heaps of loose notepaper that have been tossed somewhat precariously atop them. He raises his eyebrow higher, tips his head to consider Shinra where he's currently on his knees and rummaging through boxes in his closet. "Have you decided to stage an evacuation drill or something?"
Shinra emerges from the shadows of his closet, straightening to look back at Izaya in the doorway for a moment. He looks breathless, a little dusty from his efforts and with his glasses askew on his nose before he reaches up to adjust them. The bright mania behind his eyes Izaya ignores entirely; that's something he stopped worrying about weeks ago, after he realized that's just the way Shinra looks at everything all the time.
"Ah, Izaya!" Shinra chirps, sounded as surprised as if anyone other than his weapon partner is likely to wander into the doorway of his room. "You're back! How was the test?"
"Easy," Izaya says, dismissing the memory of the introductory test he went through as casually as he dismisses Shinra's question. It was intended for the younger or newer weapons, the ones who don't yet have good control over their weapon form; with the razor edge of a switchblade humming possibility inside his veins, Izaya long ago had to develop the self-control the test was meant to establish. "What about you?"
"I've been wonderful," Shinra sighs. There's a strange softness under his voice, a dreamy distraction that proves to have spread across his whole expression, when Izaya looks for it; Shinra's gazing up at the edge of the ceiling, now, his focus clearly abstracted away from Izaya's face and into whatever he is seeing in the theater of his own imagination. "Today I fell in love."
Izaya can feel his mouth twist on amusement, can feel laughter pressing against the inside of his chest. "Oh good," he says. "Congratulations."
"Thank you," Shinra replies, apparently entirely oblivious to the slick bite of sarcasm under Izaya's words. "I've never been so happy in all my life."
Izaya turns to press his back against the frame of the door instead of his shoulder, settling himself in for what promises to be one of Shinra's more amusing personal anecdotes. "You definitely look it. I've never seen you look so human."
"She's brought light into my monochrome life," Shinra sighs, clasping his hands in front of him and fixing the ceiling with a hazy smile as if the aforementioned she is just beyond the plain white of the ceiling overhead. "I saw her from across the classroom and I just knew, she's the only one for me."
Izaya fights for control over the laughter that is trying to break free of his chest. "Really," he says, attaining something only barely passable as calm. It doesn't matter; he's fairly sure Shinra won't notice the failure. "Another meister, then? Who's her weapon?"
"Oh no," Shinra says, shaking his head vigorously as he unclasps his hands and turns back to whatever he's trying to do in his closet. "She was coming in to help the professor with a demonstration. She's a scythe, a black one, dark as the velvet embrace of night itself!"
Izaya grins at this display of unprecedented poetry from his up-until-now rational meister. "Soon you'll be composing sonnets to win fair lady's heart."
"Do you think she'd like that?" Shinra asks without emerging from the closet.
Izaya rolls his eyes to the ceiling. "I don't know, Shinra, I've never seen her. Probably, as long as they're not horrible."
"It's worth a try, anyway!" Shinra unfolds from the closet again; he has a box in front of him and is shoving carelessly at the mismatched shapes inside. "I'm willing to try anything on behalf of my love!"
"You're very devoted for having seen her maybe five minutes," Izaya observes. "Do you already know her birthday and who her meister is, too?"
"Oh, she doesn't have a meister," Shinra says cheerfully without looking up from the box. "She's just starting at the Academy. It's only because she grew up here that she came in for the demonstration and to meet us all. I don't know if she's ever met so many meisters all at the same time before; she looked a little overwhelmed and didn't say a word the whole of class."
Izaya shrugs. "I'm sure she'll adjust soon. Once she has a meister partner she can figure out the rest of it from there."
"Yep," Shinra agrees, and reaches to fold the top of the box in over on itself. "I'll definitely be sure to take good care of her!"
Izaya doesn't get Shinra's meaning right away. He's usually quick to pick up the thread of conversation, to shape meaning from the overt declaration of words and the often unintended implications of voice and volume and body language; he's not sure why in this moment his awareness refuses to process what Shinra is saying, why it is he huffs a laugh and says, "You better hope she doesn't have a jealous meister for you to deal with" as if he's only hearing the most obvious portion of Shinra's communication to him instead of the layers of suggestion underneath.
"That won't be a problem!" Shinra tells Izaya, as cheerfully direct about this as he ever is. "I caught up to her after class and asked her to partner with me!"
Shinra's not looking at Izaya. His focus is entirely on the cardboard box in front of him that he's currently sealing shut with a line of tape; it leaves Izaya without an audience for the first rush of shock that hits him, with no one to see the way his shoulders tense against the door and his mouth comes open on a rush of sudden understanding as his stomach goes cold with awareness.
"Oh," he says past lips gone numb with the first rush of unpleasant adrenaline. "It's going to be hard to pull off, you know, even for you."
"What is?" Shinra says as he sticks down the trailing edge of the tape against the side of the box.
Izaya swallows hard, fighting to get moisture back into the dry of his mouth around the spreading suspicion that is crawling out into his veins like unseasonable chill in the air. "Working with two weapons at once."
"Oh, no," Shinra says, so lightly Izaya has a moment of hope, a brief heartbeat of desperate relief trying to gain traction on him as if it can justify its own existence through sheer force. Then Shinra looks up from the box, and smiles wide, and Izaya can feel all the attempts he might make at saving the situation crumble to dust in his anxious grasp. "I'm going to devote all my attention to Celty. It's the least she deserves, with as perfect a weapon as she is going to become! Not that she's not already perfect, of course-" as he pushes to his feet and picks up the box to set alongside two similar ones on the mess he's made of his bed, "-but she'll be even better once I make her into a true Death Scythe!"
Izaya looks around the room - the row of boxes on the bed, the open bag in the corner, the array of clothes spread on every available surface - and feels his jaw set on too-late understanding, as he finally sees all the signs of impending abandonment his everyday comfort blinded him to when he first came in. "You're leaving."
"As soon as I finish packing," Shinra agrees, as blithely unconcerned as if he doesn't hear the set distance under Izaya's words. He actually might not; in the few months they've been partners Izaya has gained an understanding of the distance Shinra keeps between himself and everyone else, up to and including his weapon partner. It's always seemed entertaining to Izaya, an interesting quirk of the boy who asked to partner with him on the first day of class; it's been that same distance that has let them work so well as partners, when every other meister Izaya's ever tried to work with has caved to the involuntary and invasive effect of his possessive soul wavelength. Izaya never expected to feel the edge of that distance like the cut of his own blade turned back around on him.
Shinra's still talking, as oblivious to Izaya's personal crisis as if it's not happening at all. "Celty has an apartment closer to the Academy; I'll be moving into the living room until we can find another place with more bedrooms." He laughs, the sound bright and warm with cheer; Izaya feels it like ice down his spine. "Or until I can persuade her that we only need the one." Shinra looks around the room, frowning consideration at the array of items around him. "I should get my books from the living room before I forget!"
Izaya doesn't move from the doorway. He's not entirely sure he could, not sure the chill turning his blood to ice will allow him the flexibility to move even to make space for Shinra to get past him. The other doesn't hesitate as he approaches; he just turns sideways to step past Izaya standing in the entrance to his room, his smile back in place and his gaze already focused on the living room at the end of the hall. Izaya lets him pass, lets the other start to move away down the hall; it's not until Shinra is turning that he says "Shinra," cold and clear like ice on his tongue.
He's not completely sure Shinra will stop. There's the sound of another footstep, a scuff of hesitation; but then "Yeah?" as calm and unsuspicious as if he's done nothing wrong at all.
Izaya keeps staring at the opposite side of the doorframe. He doesn't want to turn to see the casual unconcern in Shinra's face. "What about me?"
Shinra's laugh is piercing in the enclosed space of the hallway. "That's easy!" he says. "You'll find another meister partner. I'm sure there's someone better suited to your weapon type than me anyway." There's the sound of movement again, the rustle of pages against themselves as Shinra closes the textbooks left open at the coffee table. "We've never even been able to Resonate, you're bound to get along better with someone else."
Who, Izaya wants to say but doesn't. I don't know anyone else here. I'm not friends with anyone else here. Who am I supposed to find who doesn't already have a weapon partner of their own?
"Sure," he says out loud. "Easy. No problem."
"It'll be better this way," Shinra says, without a trace of apology anywhere in his voice or words. "It's just the way it goes sometimes. There's no fighting with love!"
Izaya turns out of the doorway to Shinra's room and looks out to the living room instead. Shinra is bent low over the coffee table, his back to Izaya and his focus devoted to stacking the books he's collecting with far more care than that he just showed Izaya himself. He's humming to himself, Izaya thinks, or maybe that's the ringing in his own ears, the adrenaline of horror with nowhere to go except twist in on itself in his chest to press breathless weight against the rhythm of his breathing. Izaya's hands are limp at his sides, his shoulders slack and unresisting; but it would be easy, he thinks, somewhere in the distance of his mind, alongside the white noise of his heartbeat ringing in his ears. Shinra's back is turned to him, will be for minutes still; he won't turn at Izaya's approach, won't think to react even if Izaya draws close alongside him. The weapon in Izaya's blood is trembling to be given form, thrumming under his skin like the razor edge of the blade is ready to cut through his own flesh and bone to break free, to grant him the voice for protest that he can't find amid the cold hurt tamping his throat to silence. He could step across the distance, could lift his hand, could...but Shinra is humming to himself, and Izaya's hands are slack at his sides, and when Izaya moves it's to turn away instead of stepping closer, to move down the hallway to the darkened frame of his own room where he can shut the door on Shinra's casual cruelty.
His room is dark with the door shut. There's homework out on the desk, reading assignments he was meant to do in preparation for next week's practice fights; it's useless to him, now, when he'll have to backtrack over the months of work he and Shinra have done together and start all over again with a new meister, with someone he doesn't even know yet. He's have to go back to the class with the new students, he thinks, the ones he sat through forgotten for three weeks before a meister wearing a lab coat and with mania behind his eyes introduced himself as Shinra and asked Izaya to partner with him. Izaya wonders how long it will take, this time, for someone to notice him from the crowd of new weapons, wonders if anyone will at all, if maybe he'll just be left alone in the corner of the room to watch the other students smile and giggle and fall into pairs established by friendship, or gender, or interests that Izaya doesn't share and doesn't care about. Maybe he'll stay there forever, too dangerous to be left alone without a meister partner and too forgettable to be selected from the crowd in which he too-readily dissolves himself.
He doesn't realize he's moving until his knuckles hit the wall, until the force of the impact bruises human-soft skin against fragile bone with an agony that travels all the way up his arm to ache in the back of his head with the dull persistence of physical damage. Izaya doesn't draw his hand away from the point of contact with the wall, doesn't lift his head to look at the dark bruise coming in under the fingers he didn't bother to convert into the rigid steel of his weapon form. He just stays where he is, head bowed and arm extended, his knuckles throbbing dull hurt where they're still pressed to the wall.
Shinra doesn't come to ask about the sound. Izaya tells himself he didn't expect him to.