Review, I love hearing from readers. Durarara! is a smaller fandom than what I usually write for, but I really love these characters.

Less than Human

Masaomi Kida shuffled one foot lazily in the dirt behind Raira as he waited for Mikado and Anri. This was nice, this lull of normalcy that he'd missed for so long. Excitement was really overrated. Mikado's nervous smiles and Anri's soft voice were better than any of the thrills he'd ever dreamed of as a kid or achieved as a leader of a high school gang.

The paper note rested scrunched up in his pocket, and he wasn't going to look at it.

He wasn't going back.

Especially not now.

.

Within seconds of shrugging on his lab coat and opening the door, Shinra felt a switchblade against his throat, pressing against his jugular like with an almost careless intensity. He threw his hands up immediately and looked back at Izaya's smirk.

"I don't know what I did, but I'm pretty damn sorry!" He cried, closing his eyes as the metal glinted against his skin.

"Oh, play nice Shinra~" Izaya's tone was playful, but it came out sounding slightly pained. "All you need to do is give it back. And for both our sakes, I hope you haven't handed it off to Celty yet."

Shinra took a deep breath, before blinking in confusion. "Um, give what back?"

"The head. You took it. It could have only been you." He lowered the blade and stepped into the small apartment, closing the door behind him. It smelt like burnt rice, but he couldn't see any traces of black smoke inside.

"Wait… Celty's head?" Shinra followed him to the sitting room where he had helped himself onto the couch. "Listen, I didn't take anything, I swear."

Izaya's eyes narrowed slightly. "There weren't a lot of people who know that I had it. My suspect list is conveniently short." He watched as the doctor sat jerkily beside him, giving him a look of pure horror.

"Celty's head. You mean Celty's head is-"

"The valkyrie's head," he corrected. "That thing doesn't need a name, even if its body had taken one. It's still a monster, after all, but your efforts to humanize it are nevertheless fascinating."

Shinra's hands clenched. "Stop calling her that. Sure she's not human, but she's better."

"Ah, and that's where we differ. Nothing is better than human, Shinra. The Valkyrie is only remarkable in how closely it resembles humanity without actually being a human." Izaya shot back. "But I didn't come here to talk to you. I came to see Celty and her head."

There was a brief silence in the room, before Shinra's brows furrowed. "You asked for her yesterday. Don't you remember? She's on a transport right now, to Tokyo."

Izaya sat up quickly, and pulled his phone out of his pocket. He clicked through every entry made during the previous day, holding it up to display the glowing screen. There were various anonymous calls, a few made to Mikado, one call to Mairu, and the rest were labeled 'Awa'.

"Well not you exactly," Shinra amended. "I got the call from Namie. She said you asked her to deliver the message, and she did pay Celty the down payment money from your account, so there seemed to be no harm in taking it. Your office number is untraceable, but do you wanna see the money for proof?"

Izaya froze.

It was strange, this prickling worry. After having everything go by chess-piece plan for years, he'd almost forgotten the sudden lurch that came with the unknown. It was uncomfortable. Most humans were used to things like this, but he'd avoided it for too long and now it crashed harshly against his every nerve.

"Shinra, I highly doubt that your monster girlfriend is anywhere near Tokyo."

He stood sharply and turned to leave. Before he could take a step, there was a hand curled around his arm, holding tightly.

"Listen, I don't care what you do to the head. But if Celty doesn't get back by the time she said she would, I'm not going to stay out of the way."

Izaya nodded, almost on instinct. Shinra had never sounded this serious.

Five minutes later, he was halfway back to his apartment. He needed to talk to Namie and Shiki. Namie's confusion at seeing the empty case had seemed real enough, but she was a good actress when she needed to be, and maybe it hadn't been completely secure to leave her in the same room as his treasure. He paused mid-step, bit his lower lip when he realized that he really had done something wrong, and now his chances of seeing Valhalla were slipping away by the hour.

And the back streets of Ikebukuro were quiet, strangely quiet, quiet like the life had been sucked out of the city.

He dodged the first one that came sailing at his head, and shot around with a smirk already playing on his lips, looking in the direction the knife had come from. They should know better than to mess with him, who'd gone toe-to-toe with Heiwajima Shizu-

But he didn't feel the second knife until it had already embedded itself in his leg.

.

His jacket was gone, and his cell phone had been in its pocket. That was the first thing Izaya noticed when he woke up with his cheek pressed to the stone floor of a familiar abandoned warehouse and the reek of fresh blood filling his nose.

"Who the fuck told you to open your eyes?" Someone grunted from nearby. He swiveled slightly, pushing against the floor for leverage until he could see a blurry figure slowly come into focus.

The man was completely unfamiliar. Izaya couldn't say the same about the blue bandanna he wore. Or the yellow cloth tied around his upper arm. He frowned and let his eyes scan over the rest of his surroundings, spotting two older girls beside him. One of them was sitting silently on a dusty concrete block, wiping off her knife.

The gleam of a gun barrel caught his eye, and he looked down sharply to where it was pressed against his throat.

"Leave him," one of the girls drawled. "You don't need to be so mean, we're not in a middle school gang anymore. This is real shit, Kuroda, and if he's not scared already, your gun isn't gonna help it along." She wore the same blue bandanna, and Izaya found himself scanning her for yellow. He gritted his teeth when he spotted a scarf around her leg.

The gun barrel receded from his neck. But the kick came out of nowhere, slamming into his stomach with the force of a freight train, leaving behind a dull throb of pain.

Izaya coughed twice while he recovered, and then lowered himself back to the floor to look up at them with a smirk. "What are you, some kind of hybrid gang? Where's Kida? I'll speak with him."

No one responded. Finally, the girl with the knife glanced at him. "We've been told that you wield your words better than we use our guns. You can blabber all you want, but no one here is going to listen until our employers arrive."

He frowned. They seemed serious about that. And the lightheadedness from his blood loss was beginning to catch up with him, seeping into his mind and slowly scraping away at his consciousness. Izaya peered over his body at where his leg was a bloody mess against the stone floor. He looked away quickly.

The Valkyrie's head. That was his priority. Not the sight of his leg, which was close to making him black out. Not this strange new addition of pawns moved by a player still unknown in the game.

But these pawns had guns, and that made them a temporary annoyance.

The lone ache in his stomach pulsed red as he turned and curled up into himself, shaking from blood loss, reaching one hand into the side waistband of his underwear. His fingers felt near his hip until they located his second cell phone, then drew it out.

From there, it was the agonizing process of skimming for a certain phone number long buried in his list of contacts while hiding the glow of the screen from his watchers, who had gone back to scouting outside the warehouse and waiting for whoever employed them. Once he was certain he had it, he pressed his fingers to call and placed the phone over his mouth. It rang faintly, once, twice, while he blinked the darkening spots of near-unconsciousness from his sight. Then a familiar voice filled his ear, asking who the hell he was.

"Hey… Shizu-chan," he spoke jerkily into the glass.

"Oi! He's talking to someone!"

"Wanna… come fight?"

"It's a phone, you idiots! He's got another one! I told you to strip him, dammit!"

"I'll be waiting at Kida's factory…"

The phone dropped from his grip as a foot crashed into the back of his neck.

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