(A/N) Okay so I type all of this onto one long ass document.. Like each arc is one document on google drive, and then I will c/p the chapter into one document that I change the name of to download specifically to upload it here onto . I had to work from seven am to two and ran on three hours of sleep so I am super fucking sorry about this. Thank you to those of you that informed me.

Shit. Shit! Shit!

He just stood there and let Itzal take action against those fuck nuts, and now he was potentially bleeding out in Shizuo's arms and it was all his fault.

He didn't exactly know how to deal with this situation. After doing this for a few years, Shizuo was used to Vorona being hurt and bouncing back immediately on the job, but those were just routine cuts and scrapes. Just like her usual day to day life, she very infrequently actually got hurt. Her persona as Helectric was no different. Itzal was never hit. He was graceful and powerful yet gentle all in the same motion that stole Shizuo's breath away as if it was him getting punched in the stomach. He was everything Shizuo wanted to be, so when that unnatural beauty was smashed by the brutality of some ignorant homophobic dick bags, he wasn't sure how to feel or react aside from an outburst that would have painted him in blood. If not for the way Itzal would tease him for being a hypocrite, he would have turned into the monster Izaya swears he is.

Itzal was so light in the bridal style hold he was tied in. Shizuo knew he was bony from the few moments they had embraced, but this was extreme. Hard pointed bones stabbed like broken glass under taught ivory skin– at least white in the places Shizuo could see it. There are two beautiful scars painted feather light on his skin. It's intricate and delicate. An irritated pink pattern of thin lines traced a thick outline down his shoulders and down his fingers, fluttering out of sight under his gloves. Up close, the lines between Itzal's chin and the swallowing darkness of his hood are better defined. His face is soft. His neck, long and fragile just like his pale wrists and glove covered hands. He's cold in Shizuo's arms, a block of ice being heated by the gentle trickle of blood from the top of his neck down his hand. It's cutting through the shadows of his suit like he isn't wearing anything at all, dripping heavily onto Shizuo's tights and the concrete beneath them as he runs.

Shizuo isn't exactly sure how Itzal's clothing works. He seems to be able to manipulate it like he does those damn spikes, but that doesn't make it any less confusing. Theoretically, he could change it to anything he wants, and suddenly Shizuo thinks of Celty. She can do a lot of the same things as Itzal, but maybe his just has more body to it. Maybe it's more physical like paint rather than a musky fog. He's sure that even if Itzal would explain it to him, he'd still be confused.

He's powerful. Shizuo can feel it against Itzal's skin. There's strength. There's numbers. Shizuo thinks that Itzal is never really alone. Holding this body in his hands, it feels like he's just a shell– like there's hundreds of inhabitants in this one. It's almost surreal. Voices call out to him like they're there, and with him, but trapped inside a box manifesting in the form of this attractive, demented, amazing person slowly bleeding to death in his hands.

"Help me."

Itzal hitches in his hold. Shizuo glances around the city streets he's currently on. That call sounded so close– almost like it was a whisper right in his ear. Right there, but still so distant that Shizuo is half convinces it's a hallucination. Itzal curls into his chest again.

"Help me."

It's barely increased in volume, but so close much closer now that it's still loud and tell tale of multiple people chanting. He can't really be sure as he can only see him and Itzal and the light dribble of blood dusted from the torn skin underneath his gloves. Either way, he breaks off into a sprint. He knows he shouldn't be running away from someone that could potentially be in danger, but the longer he stands there, the more reactive Itzal gets, and Shizuo can't help but feel like whatever this is, it's hurting him some how.

Shizuo dismisses the idea of taking him to a real hospital. There would be a compromise of identities, and safety breaches, and Shizuo thinks Itzal would be mad at him for it. So instead of getting actual professional medical help, he goes to the next best thing.

His childhood friend, Shinra.

When said doctor opens the door, his face pales immediately.

"Shizuo, what happened to Iza- Itzal?!"

He says this as he's leading Shizuo to his makeshift operating room. Everything is pristinely white and chrome. Aside from the polished wooden floors and overhead ceiling fan, it looks like an actual hospital room. He lays Itzal on the bed, mindful of his injuries, and immediately feels Shinra's hand clamp over his shoulder.

"You should leave."

Shizuo pulls a face. "I should what? Are you kidding me?"

"Shizuo, I know this kinda sucks, but you don't know his identity yet, do you?"

"Well... no," he mumbles sheepishly.

"His suit is starting to literally dissipate off of his skin," Shinra whisper-yells.

And he is right. Smoke was clouding around Itzal as a bare, ivory hand slid off the bed and clattered to the floor uselessly. His eyes trace back to the delicate pink lines dancing across his skin. Just as Shizuo was getting a good look at the array of other scars just barely in his view on said wrist, Shinra delivers a hard shove to his back and pushes him out of the room.

"His identity is gonna be compromised to me as it is, but I need to see what I'm working with so that I can actually work on his injuries. I promise I'll call you as soon as I finish, but you really shouldn't be here when he wakes up," Shinra adds with a sense of finality. "Please, Shizuo, I know you wanna be here for him, but you don't know how he's gonna react. What if he doesn't want you to know yet?"

"Yeah," Shizuo sighs, "I get it. I'm not happy about it, but I get it. It's horse shit, but it's an invasion of personal privacy, and despite how I think he's gonna react, it's not my place to make that decision for him. I get it."

He brushes past a confused and tired Celty in the hallway.

"I need a smoke. Call me first thing after he gets up."

Shizuo leaves after that. He barely makes it down the stairs before he lights his much needed cigarette. Itzal hates it when he smokes, but right now the borderline painful burn of the nicotine flowing down his throat is more calming than he would like to admit. No doubt about it, he's angry, but he definitely sees where Shinra is coming from. If he were in the same situation, he hopes Shinra would be sensible enough to remove Itzal from the room before he started removing spandex.

He prays that Itzal isn't mad at him for this. He needed medical attention that Shizuo is in no position to give, so he took him to Shinra. A doctor, who's used to these kind of oddities in his girlfriend and the other people he so intrusively surrounds himself with. Shizuo has super strength and can turn into a bear for that matter. Izaya is... well... Izaya. The people in Shinra's life are all wrong for lack of a better word. There's something off– something that goes without mentioning that this collection of individuals is different from the socially accepted norm.

The butt of his cigarette nearly meets the filter and burns his hand. Shizuo drops it, snuffing the flame out with his foot and immediately lighting another. He can't help it.

Similar to how maybe Shinra can't help but attract these things, he's got a type. That type is demented, demonic, and misunderstood. Those types of people flock to Shinra, and as long as Shizuo had known him, he knew that there was nothing he could do to drive Shinra away. When he was in the hospital for the Pudding Incident with Kasuka, Shinra visited nearly every day after school to check on him and ask how he was doing. Even when he attacked those guys hassling that nice milk lady, Shinra didn't laugh when Shizuo told him how it went down. He didn't call him a liar. He didn't ask Kasuka. He nodded in understanding and asked Shizuo if he could see.

"You did what?"

Shinra looks a little pensive across the table. His chubby fingers are laced together around a glass of untouched milk. Kasuka looks as blank faced as always, and Shizuo looks like his heart is gonna fall out of his mouth.

"I turned into a bear. At least that's what Kasuka says– I don't know. I... I don't remember anything except for the aftermath," he sniffs, tears of shame threatening to spill down his cheeks.

Shinra traces his eyes toward Kasuka, who meets his gaze head on.

All three of them are too young to understand the severity of the situation– too naive to fully comprehend how odd it is. But they all understand that this changes nothing between them. Kasuka still loves his older brother. Shinra still wants to be Shizuo's friend. Shizuo has just found another source of self loathing to hold onto when he's too young to know what to do with it. Nothing has changed. Everything stays. It stays the same and at that table, all three of them stay silent.

Years later, when Shinra visits Shizuo during the summer in middle school, he says Shizuo is a lot like a superhero some guy named "Izaya" from his new school told him about. Shizuo was never one for comics.

Bruce Banner, aka the Hulk. Shinra thought he was a lot like Shizuo, and highly encouraged him to go read some of the Hulk's comics. He didn't really want to– he was already getting picked on enough, and him being a nerd was only gonna make it worse, but Shinra was insistent, and Shizuo didn't feel like arguing.

He started at the beginning, like anyone should when reading a story. Bruce Banner was the son of an atomic physicist father who hated him and a loving stay at home mother. She died when he was young– murdered by his alcoholic father. He... never had a lot of friends in school and was constantly getting bullied, putting him at the receiving end of a lot of physical assault. Banner actually tried to blow up his school, which gave him the opportunity to become a nuclear physicist. He gave himself up for his friend and ended up getting infected with some type of radiation or something– that whole part went over Shizuo's head. Anyway, after the blast, this guy, this normal guy, was turned into a freak. He became a monster when he got into stressful situations, but he was a nice guy. Bruce was in the wrong place at the wrong time. He was a beast in disguise of a man, and yet he had friends and loved ones who thought of him as more than just the Hulk. He was Bruce. Their friend or lover or family- either way, Shizuo was a bit more appreciative of Shinra and Kasuka, and if Bruce Banner could keep people close to him even if he could end up destroying them, then so could Shizuo.

He spent the rest of the summer reading his comics and watching the Hulk movies. He became more interested in comics as a whole, and even remembers sheepishly asking his few friends to see The Avengers with him. His parents didn't ask, and Kasuka was happy to see his brother direct that severe amount of passion into something. Later in his adult years, Shizuo would still get excited about hero movies. He would favor Mark Ruffalo's portrayal best. And he would get mad about Tony building a machine with the sole purpose of beating the Hulk, just like everyone else.

But that doesn't matter right now. He is not Bruce Banner, and Liv Tyler isn't waiting at home for him. No, he's just some punk who took up spandex as a form of emotional release, and the closest thing he's got to Betty Ross is the physical form of children's nightmares with a pretty voice and a terrible sense of humor.

Itzal was back there right now with his costume literally bleeding off his unconscious body. It enveloped him in a cloud of black like a cocoon he had built to protect himself. Shizuo could have sworn he heard hissing when Itzal's arm had dropped off the side of the bed. Whatever was going on, Shizuo couldn't help but feel like he was abandoning him at the hands of Shinra, and that mental image didn't sit well with him in the slightest. What was maybe the weirdest part was the way Shinra seemed to already know Itzal, and not in the way you know a local celebrity, but really know him. And maybe he did. Shinra had tons of connections, and adding Izaya's outreach probably put Shinra at the top of the mafia's go to list of doctors with a tight lip. For all Shizuo knew, Shinra could have done whatever happened to Itzal to give him his powers. God he hoped that wasn't it. He can't even begin to imagine the wrath he just evoked if that was the case, but Shinra doesn't seem like the type to do something that horrible. And now Shizuo wants a back story. His story is kinda lame. One day he got mad and learned he could pick up kitchen appliances at a young age. A few years later, he turned into a bear. A little after that, with an unhealthy idolization of the Hulk, Shizuo took a dear friend's advice to suit up and go save people, at least the best he could with his strength. But hey, a broken rib is better than dying right?

Shizuo doesn't know why Itzal did it. Maybe it's a similar set of circumstances, or maybe he's just some nut job with demon powers. What the hell even are his powers? Shadow manipulation? It reminds him of Celty, but in a scarier way. He doesn't think that Celty would ever be capable of doing something like murder– in Itzal's defense he was getting better! He hadn't killed anyone in at least a few months, but Shizuo needed to keep in mind that Itzal was dismembering people and honestly thinking it was okay. Maybe okay wasn't the right word. It was more like, morally obligatory in the face of specific circumstances. However he was making an effort to change that view. He knew it wasn't okay. He just didn't feel any remorse for it.

Which, on an undecided, completely metaphorical understanding of it, was a pseudo way of saying Itzal was okay with it, which was bad. It was bad. But it could be worse! He could be like... eating children or something. But he isn't. At least, Shizuo hopes he isn't. All he knows is that he isn't happy with the way he feels about this. He's never had this much cognitive dissonance before, and it wasn't doing anything but exacerbating his anger.

But Itzal has a habit of doing that. He jumbles Shizuo's feelings and thoughts until there's nothing but him and his laugh and his sarcastic remarks. He's a lot like Izaya, Shizuo thinks. Oh no, he is a lot like Izaya.

Maybe they know each other. Oh God what if this is all an elaborate ruse? What if Itzal was hired by Izaya to convince Shizuo to fall in love with him? What, no that's preposterous. There's no way that Izaya would even know that Ursus and Shizuo are the same person.

On the other hand, he did describe, in great detail once in the company of Shinra, that he absolutely despised Ursus, so this could be an amazingly air tight prank. If that was really the case, Shizuo hates to admit that he'd actually be equally impressed as he would be angry. But all of this seems like an incredible amount of work just to break someone's heart. Shinra said that if Izaya isn't sure he can reach his goal in a timely fashion, then he wouldn't pursue it- unless, of course, it was his goal in killing Shizuo.

Maybe he did know.

No. There's no way- at least it's highly improbable.

But Izaya has been aware of other highly specific things about Shizuo that he really should have no business knowing, such as the reason Shizuo drinks so much milk, or that he's allergic to penicillin. Like seriously? Why would he need to know that? It's not even a severe allergy, more like hives.

Either way, it didn't matter. If this was similar to "My Best Friend's Girl," then Shizuo will manage. Tank still got Alexis when the credits rolled, and he can only hope he's convinced Itzal to love him as much as he loves Itzal. Izaya be damned.