WARNING: Shizuo curses occasionally. I don't think this is an issue, but just in case. Also, Shooter is the name of Celty's bike/horse- no lie.

Part Three- Don't Fear the Reaper

The sun wasn't going to set for another few hours, but Tom had decided that the "impending rain" would drag them down when they visited clients. "After all," he said to Shizuo, "Doesn't it suck to have to chase idiots down in a downpour? I feel and smell like a wet dog afterwards, and I hate that. So does my girlfriend." Shizuo obediently agreed with his boss and the two parted ways.

Rather than a wave of sour storm clouds, the only thing Shizuo saw floating across the sky was powdered sugar. He knew that there was little to no chance of rain and that Tom had invented that excuse to get off work early and see his girlfriend. Not that he had to make an excuse- Tom so frequently cut his kohai slack that Shizuo wasn't reluctant to give it back.

In other words, anyone would be glad to have a boss as kind and understanding as Tom Tanaka, so Shizuo would never dare challenge his decision to skip out.

Normal people usually have something in mind that they want to do when they acquire some free time, but Heiwajima Shizuo was, among other things, not normal. Sure, he liked to take walks and he liked to watch wrestling, but one can only repeat the same activities so many times before longing for a little variety. He was at a loss with what to do with himself today.

With a flick of his lighter, he ignited a cigarette and began to aimlessly meander around the streets of Ikebukuro- it was a walking free day, apparently- until he settled down in his usual park in his usual spot (on the side of the fountain that got the most shade) and exchanged his burned cigarette for a new one, fiddling around for the old smokes' disposal bag in his front pocket.

His particular attention towards this current trash's destination contrasted sharply with his disregard for the park's orderliness during his last visit. But that's neither here nor there.

Shizuo looked up at the sky again. That cloud looked like a hippopotamus, and that one looked like a… tooth? Weird. He took a drag of his cigarette. The tooth moved softly in the wind. Absentmindedly, he messed with his cigarette a little more before he shifted his attention to the people in the park around him.

There were the old men, their wives, the giggling girls and boys, the group of women in the store, and the happy little birds. Even the tree he'd uprooted had been replaced by a new little sprout. He could feel the fountain supporting him from below, so he knew that it was there, too.

In fact, nothing was missing from his previous episode with this little slice of tranquility, for, lo and behold, that stupid notebook was right across from him yet again, turning to and fro as if it were mocking Shizuo for not exposing its contents when he had the chance. How infuriating!

No. He refused to let this new episode in his park life be a rerun of the last one- he couldn't afford to destroy the same park again so soon. Besides, today had been too good to end on such a bad note. He took a drag of his cigarette and looked up at the clouds again. That terrible tablet of paper couldn't make a spectacle out of him if he pretended it wasn't there. In his head, he convinced himself that the day would only get better. If he believed hard enough, it could happen, right?

And it got better-an eerie whinny lit up his ears and Shizuo was delighted to see Celty appear soon after it faded. He held up a hand in greeting.

She returned the gesture and proceeded to use her other hand to retrieve her PDA.

[How are you?]

Shizuo took a moment to read the message and took his cigarette out of his mouth. "What's with the concerned tone? You make it sound like you're worried about me or somethin'."

[It wasn't meant that way.] He seemed to be stable, so she joked with him a little. [Would something like, "How's the weather?" have been better?] Truthfully, Celty had indeed been worried that he'd been angry. Shizuo's temperament and the weather were uncannily similar, so Celty kept the weather question's secretive double meaning in mind for later- she would inevitably need to test him again.

"Well, the weather's nice. Particularly the clouds." He tapped some ashes on the ground and scooted over to invite his headless friend to sit down. She obliged him and turned her helmet skyward. "See, there was this tooth- there." He pointed it out to her. "But now it kind of looks like some weird octopus- thing."

Her PDA surfaced into his vision. [Or a Gorgon.]

Behind his sunglasses, Shizuo visualized the serpentine locks of Medusa, but they suddenly transformed into Tom and his dreadlocks. He coupled it with the octopus comment and suddenly the boss-man had traded in his signature 'do for an eight-legged cap. Shizuo laughed.

"I just got a mental image of my boss with an octopus for hair."

Celty, who had only seen Tom in passing glances, couldn't recall who that was. She cocked her head to the side.

"He's the dude with dreadlocks and glasses."

Celty thought for a moment longer, but she did eventually place him- the guy in the tacky striped collared shirt and suit. Her smoky imagination added wild-colored rings to Shizuo's hair-octopus, but she didn't really find the humor until the sea critter let loose a squirt of ink onto Tom's face from above. Daintily, she brought a hand to the mouthpiece of her helmet as her make-believe man stood dripping black in her thoughts.

Shizuo was right on track with her, and they both snickered when the spineless thing quavered from imaginary-Tom's upward glare and tried to clean his glasses by using its tentacles as window-wipers.

Infuriated, Tom tried to push it off his head, but it held fast to his face with its arms. When he finally peeled it off (A fiasco within itself- Shizuo pictured Tom using a crowbar before ending up on his butt, trying to shove it off himself with his feet and hands; Celty just imagined that he snapped his fingers and made Shizuo take it off for him), little sucker-marks were left all over his face and newly-bare scalp.

Incidentally, they both finished their little mental movies by deciding that the octopus's name was Jerry.

Who says you need words to communicate?

They grinned and looked at clouds for a substantial amount of time. In fact, Celty would have continued this routine for the rest of the day had she not noticed that her tall friend's gaze was being periodically pulled away from the sky and across the park.

[I notice that you keep glancing away. Do you need to go meet your boss, or something?] She swiftly added another phrase. [I didn't mean to keep you.]

Shizuo paused for a minute before shifting his cigarette to his other hand and waving off her apology. "Nah, that's not what it is. I keep looking at, well," he fiddled with the smoking tube in his hands, "it's going to sound really stupid and nosy. It's not really something I want to talk about." At least, that's what his mouth said. The sidelong look he cast at Celty, however, shouted, "I really wanna tell you!", and they both knew it.

He started talking before she even showed him her curiosity typed out on her PDA. His enthusiasm was rather charming- if Celty had a mouth to smile at him with, she would have.

"Okay, so I keep seeing this sketchpad or a notebook or something popping up everywhere. Like, at Simon's place, it was lying there on a stool. And in this park, I- well, I wrecked the park over it, but anyway- it's been showing up at this park even more than me. Isn't that odd?"

Shizuo, being Shizuo, had neglected to mention that the "sketchpad or notebook or something" had been the same one each time and how his aggravation with it sprung from his curiosity over its contents. Celty may be in sync with her bleach-blonde buddy's imagination, but as soon as words got thrown into the mix, she frequently found herself lost. Usually, she could overcome this- she'd wait for Shizuo to empty his head of all of his thoughts and puzzle out what he'd meant once he'd put all his pieces on the table, but this direct question after such disjointed information left little room for anything but blind speculation.

[Maybe a lot of people in this town like to write or draw? Is that a bad thing for them to do?]

In the span of one blank stare, Shizuo realized how badly he'd botched what he was trying to say.

"I'm a moron. Sorry." Luckily, he wasn't annoyed (at least, not dangerously so) or deterred by his failure, so he tried again. "There is some person who keeps coming here to write or draw or whatever. I keep seeing them in the park. It's not such a big deal except that they get so into whatever they are doing that I want to know what they are doing." Celty watched him take another drag of his cigarette before he continued.

"And then the other day I saw the notebook-thing sitting on a stool at Russia Sushi, so I reached out to open it and see who it belonged to. Well, okay, I was also going to take a peek at what was inside." He shrugged his shoulders and ducked his head a fraction. "But I seriously did intend to return it. But anyways," he ground out his cigarette, adjusted his sunglasses, sat up straighter, and began to vigorously gesture, "I got distracted at the last second and looked away, and suddenly, it was gone!"

Shizuo was on his feet now. "But even before that, I saw the person in this park, just goin' at it-" he began to mime that he had an invisible pad of paper in one arm and started to drag his dead smoke across the air as if it were a pencil and the world his notebook, "-and turning the stupid thing this way-" his body and cigarette-pencil were drawn off the "paper" and onto the park to his right, "-and that way-" to his left, "-and then I got all distracted by some birds-" and then finally he forgot all about the imaginary paper and his real cigarette when he flung them both to the wind and flung his hands around to accentuate what he was saying, "—and then one of them shat on me and I lost it!"

To anyone but Celty, though, it just looked like Shizuo was letting his hands go willy-nilly. But point of view is, as we have discussed, relative.

Shizuo suddenly whipped around and bent himself over to get face-to-helmet with the Celty. His eyes were wide, and Celty couldn't tell if he was angry or just excited. "The notebook disappeared then, too! I can't get ahold of it, but I can't escape it, either, see? It's even here right now!" He pivoted and thrust a finger at the park bench parallel to the one the headless rider was sitting on.

It would have been a perfect replay of Professor Layton (or so Celty thought) had there actually been a person and notebook where he'd harpooned his finger.

Instead, they both just froze there, staring at an empty bench. Celty's cool gaze was unperturbed, but Shizuo seemed a little too frozen.

The headless rider went on damage control. [I'm sure they'll be back again, Shizuo. Next time, you could-] He hadn't even turned around to be placated before he took off running.

"NO, DAMMIT! I AM NOT HALLUCINATING!"

Celty knew she had to stop him- she called Shooter to her side and mounted as soon as he leapt over the trees and bushes and grounded himself. With a haunting whinny, they took off after the world's most inappropriately named person.

Now, Shizuo was fast, but Shooter was, in Celty's mind, the greatest horse alive (or otherwise), so they pulled up next to him in no time. She frantically tried to get Shizuo's attention-

[Wait! Shizuo, you've got to stop!]

[What will you do when you find whoever owns the book? You can't hurt them- you'll never get to see it that way!]

[What if you destroy the book?]

Celty weaved through several lanes in order to avoid hitting other vehicles, particularly Saburo's van.

[Shizuo!]

[SHIZUO!]

The intended recipient of the message had been even with the headless rider for this entire chase, but his tunnel vision was worse than Shooter's.

He jumped on top of an old couple's parked sedan (not that they noticed- they were deaf and half-blind and not fit to drive it anyway) before leaping from it onto the side of a truck that happened to be pulling over. Instead of hitching a ride on the side of the truck by grabbing on, Shizuo busted through its wall and cannonballed out the other side, choosing instead to latch onto the ambulance that was passing the slowed truck.

If the emergency patient inside the ambulance wasn't suffering from a heart attack before, he certainly was now.

Finally, after Celty had weaved through the Ikebukurean jungle to match up to her friend's traffic acrobatics, she pulled up next to the flashing emergency vehicle, stood on top of the handlebars of her bike-horse hybrid, and pressed her PDA to Shizuo's sunglasses.

When he still didn't seem to react, she snatched away the little device, wiped its screen off on his sleeve, removed his sunglasses, and put her PDA in their place.

[DO YOU EVEN KNOW WHERE YOU ARE GOING?]

Lord knows why Shizuo does what he does and gets what he gets, but it was most likely divine doings (and the fact that Shizuo wasn't too terribly infuriated to begin with) that led him to see, comprehend, and respond to Celty's message. His head recoiled in surprise and, after glancing at Celty, he hopped off the moving emergency vehicle. A deafening crunch sounded as his feet hit the asphalt.

Shizuo's footprints would remain in the broken road for about two weeks before the city of Ikebukuro decided to repave over them.

When Celty finally doubled back and parked next to the now-stationary Shizuo, he was scratching his head with one finger outstretched, like an ape. The resemblance was even more striking when he used his other arm to adjust the piece of his weskit that had been wedged beneath his armpit during his brief ambulance ride.

"Yeah," he began, "I have no idea where the owner goes after they leave the park. I didn't really think that one through. Sorry about that."

On impulse, Celty furiously typed into her handheld, [DON'T TELL ME, TELL THEM], but erased it when she noticed Shizuo's reaction to his manmade traffic jam.

"Well, that'll come out of my paycheck, too, I guess," he muttered dejectedly.

The particular frown he wore didn't suit him in the least- he looked pitiful without his sunglasses to shield his face from the world. Oh, right, his sunglasses! She reached out a hand to stop him so she could return them, but flinched when a piercing scream cut through the city streets.

It wasn't a human scream, but the scream of a siren- and it didn't belong to the ambulance, either.

Motorcycle cops. The white bike was coming!

Celty hopped on her own black bike and revved up the engine. Oh, but Shizuo-! They were after her, not him, but this destruction would certainly not go unnoticed… and that man on the white bike was so callous! There was no way Shizuo could interact with them and not enter a new, more permanent, fit of rage.

So, with the help of some urging from her PDA and her shadow giving him an extra push, Shizuo found himself on the back of the black bike, hurtling towards a new destination.

...And that was chapter three, with lots of my two favorite characters- Shizuo and Celty! Added bonus to the real owner, Mr. Narita, 'cause they are both the best of friends.

It was totally intentional that Shizuo gave his "First Words" that the reader can read to Celty. Ooooh, I'm sooooooooooo deep or something. Not really.

Where are they headed? You'll just have to guess- a guess in a review'd be nice. I hate to sound like a jerk, but I write these for public enjoyment... and the self-serving purpose of improving my writing, character development/portrayal, sense of humor, choice of topic, and even (in some cases) grammar. I would be ecstatic if you guys'd drop me a hint as to how I'm doing and what you'd like to read. I'm only unflexible in that I will not write porn. That is, like, the only stipulation I have. So, please, please read and review, if you would be so kind. Feedback- even hysterical flames, sometimes- is more fun.