"Hello?" a husky, male voice answered in English. He had expected as much.
"Hi, this is Izaya. I need to speak to Kyouko." The informant said in fluent English with not even a hint of an accent. His parents both worked in the US, and he had spend his early childhood there, waiting in anonymous hotel rooms for his mom and dad to return from work.
He had learned English very quickly from the several different maids that had brought him food while his parents were away and some day, he had been so comfortable and familiar with the language that he had even talked to his parents in English instead of Japanese.
There was some shuffling on the other side of the line and Izaya tried not to recognize the sound of rustling bedsheets.
"There's some guy on the phone who wants to talk to you." Izaya heard the man's muffled voice say almost accusingly and knew that he had pressed one hand over the cell phone's microphone, thinking it would keep Izaya from hearing what he was saying.
"Tell him I'm busy." A female voice muttered and even though Izaya didn't consciously remember his mother's voice because it had been almost a year since he had last heard it, there was a small part within him that recognized her voice instinctively, maybe from when he had still been a baby. Despite there being no conscious memory of that time, it had obviously left some kind of imprint on him.
"She's very busy right now." The man said coldly and Izaya smiled bitterly. "Who are you by the way?"
It only took a second for Izaya's smile to turn into a devious one, as his eyes glinted with mischief.
"Oh, no one important, really. Let's just say that I'm someone who's intimately familiar with her vagina." He heard the distinctive and very, very satisfying sound of the phone dropping onto the floor and then the line went dead.
It was a petty, childish thing to do, really, but a huge part of him felt smug for giving his mother a little trouble to remember him by. He had every right to do so.
After all, she was the woman who had sent him to Tokyo alone by plane when he had barely been 7 years old, and had told him to wait for a grandmother he had never even met and who seemed to have completely forgotten about picking him up from the airport.
A few minutes later, his phone rang.
"Orihara Izaya speaking." He answered gleefully in English, which was a hint in itself that he knew who was calling.
"Izaya. What did you say to Brad-" Last time it had been Tom. "to make him walk out on me like that?!" His mother said, not bothering to switch to Japanese. She sounded upset, he noted with contentment.
"Ah, nothing much. He was already pretty pissed off just by the fact that a guy was calling you. I think that speaks volumes about your trustworthiness." The informant observed. His mother sighed heavily, as her initial anger retreated.
"I haven't heard from you in a quite a while, Izaya. How are you?" And suddenly, she had switched to being the concerned mother she had never been when he had still needed her protection.
"I'm fine...something like that at least." He said, sounding very indifferent while his side throbbed with what he presumed was the feeling of his ribs trying to grow back together.
"How are you?" Politeness made him ask, not real concern. Besides, from the sound of it, his mother was just fine.
"I'm ok. Pretty busy, I guess." She seemed to hesitate for a moment and the brief silence said almost everything about their relationship, or lack thereof. Izaya's mood darkened and he felt a tug at what normal people would probably call a 'heart'. "Why didn't you come pick me up from the airport when I came to visit for the twins' birthday last June?"
"Huh?" He was slightly taken aback. It had been ten months since then, yet his mother could obviously still recall that. "I did actually."
"Ehh? I waited for two hours, but you didn't show up. I took a cab to the twins' apartment." She said accusingly, sounding a lot like a mother scolding her child for eating candy before dinner.