The twins wake him up every morning with a foghorn of shrill shrieks. They are too old to scream, but they do.
They're hungry. Mom and Dad are abroad again. The calendar has their return marked in pencil about 5 weeks away. It's in pencil, because they keep postponing their return.
The twins are always hungry slash angry in the morning so he feeds them first. He does this before he makes his toast and coffee. A lot of days he doesn't want to eat, so he doesn't.
Things like homework become inconsequential. He's not intending on doing anything he needs an education for anyways.
He leaves the fed twins with the neighbor. She's old and doesn't do drugs. That for now is enough. On the days he doesn't go to school, he watches people. On the TV, out on the street. He loves them like he loves everyone; in a detached sort of way.
He eventually realizes he loves his parents in the same way. Even the twins as they grow become more than a nuisance than anything.
It should be sad, but he doesn't feel sad anymore. It's like going out in the rain for too long and being so cold that you don't feel cold anymore.
"You're very bright! We were astonished by your IQ test!" His teachers say.
When the twins started talking he told them they were two halves of a whole. He wants to see how that affects them as they grow.
In school Izaya meets a boy who will change his life forever and he doesn't even know it until it's far too late.
"You get hurt a lot," Izaya sneers at him, "Do your parents beat you?"
"Shut UP! No they don't!"
Shizuo breaks a lot of bones. He doesn't understand why Izaya hates watching his sisters, because he loves Kasuka so much. Izaya can also see how jealous he is, when his kid brother starts getting famous.
Mocking Shizuo about it is hilarious.
Izaya almost feels sorry for him sometimes, when he breaks something (like a bone or a window) and has that shame.
He envies him a little too, that he can still feel guilt.
Shizuo has good intentions, and a kind heart when he isn't rampaging. Izaya sometimes wants to go to school because he'll be there, probably causing trouble after getting teased too much, or eating far too many sweets at lunchtime.
"Do you miss your parents?" Shizuo asks once.
"I don't even remember what they look like." Izaya answers honestly.
The honesty Shizuo prompts him into is startling, not like him, and has to be stopped.
The twins draw straws to pick their personalities, based on the comment he made so long ago. They hate him, but who cares. Everyone hates him. Probably even Shizuo who walks him home will eventually hate him.
The change that shakes everything up comes as swiftly as a car pulling up alongside him as he's walking.
"You know who I am?" The man in the backseat asks. It's a fancy car, and the well dressed man inside shouldn't be scary, but Izaya can smell danger on him like the man can probably smell the fear on him, like a shark and a swimmer with a bleeding cut.
"If you try to grab me, I'll scream." Izaya quickens his steps.
"Your parents owe us a lot of money. They will need to pay us back."
Izaya's always wondered what it was that his parents did. Apparently something illegal.
"I don't have any money." Izaya says softly.
"You have an IQ of 178, and a talent for making people do what you want them to. You, are going to work for me. That is how the debt will be settled."
"Like hell I will, old man!"
The car stops, and so does Izaya's heart.
"It was not an offer. You have no choice. Wouldn't it be nice to have a steady income, for little Mairu and Kururi?"
Ah… So it's like that.
"I won't let you hurt them." Izaya says. He sounds calmer than he feels.
"Good. You will be initiated tonight. Get in."
Izaya feels like punching someone and vomiting all at once.
The twins are his only family.
He gets in. The locks click once he's seated.
They drive to the industrial part of town. He is led by the leader and a few other men from the car. He's fast and he's smart, but he's outnumbered.
There is a woman sitting tied to a chair, bag over her head, expensive fur trimmed trench coat on her slender frame.
"The only thing I ask you to do, to work for me," he explains quietly, "is anything I ask without question."
He takes a gun out of a bag one of the man had carried with him. He clicks off the safety, and hands it to Izaya.
"This woman has spent all her chances with us. Shoot."
"To… To kill?" Izaya feels surreal. Like none of this is real, it's some sort of nightmare he needs to wake up from.
"Yes. Do it now. It will help settle the debt your parents left behind."
The woman is shaking.
"They're going to kill my sisters!" Izaya near shouts.
"What, are you asking permission? Do you really think she'll give it! Shoot! Now!"
Izaya shoots.
She dies. Even through his horror, he's kind of relieved he only had to shoot once.
"There. Good."
Izaya is shaking harder than he ever has in his life.
"Cold?" the man says casually, "Here. Take this." He removes the woman's fur coat and puts it on Izaya's shoulders.
It relieves the physical cold, but not the one he feels in his soul.
It dawns on him like a creeping doom.
"You said the debt my parents 'left behind'"
He nods, "Yes. They already paid part of it." He takes two rings out of the bags. They are simple silver bands. Their wedding rings.
"They paid all they had, and the rest, I will collect through you."
Izaya doesn't cry. He's too cold. He decides to wear the rings and the jacket forever.
He gets driven home, and all he can thing about is the phrase "to cross the Rubicon." It's a final and fateful decision that can't be reversed.
He crossed it today.
This is his life now. The only thing he can thing of is to be so awful, so good at being bad that everyone feared him. He'd be above just working for someone. People would work for him one day.
He never wants to feel like this ever again. So damn powerless.
"You okay?" Shizuo says. He's sitting on a nearby bench, chewing a piece of gum and looking at Izaya with concern.
Izaya hates that he wants to cry and tell him everything. But if the twins are in danger, so is Shizuo.
I want him to hate me so he stays away.
Izaya knows he'll have to cross that rubicon too. He just needs one last moment of peace before he ruins his life permanently.
"Will you kiss me?" He blurts. Shizuo blinks furiously at him. He doesn't look angry at least.
"Are you gay?"
"Probably. I haven't thought of it at all until now. Will you?"
Shizuo looks around to see if anyone's watching. He nods.
"Okay! I'll close my eyes." And so he does. He looks, silly, youthful, expectant.
So sweet that Izaya doesn't deserve it.
Izaya kisses him. Chaste, closed mouthed, and it almost means nothing.
Except it's his first kiss. It's soft and innocent like his life never will be again.
Shizuo's gum is the cinnamon flavored kind.
"So? What's happening that you're so upset you want a kiss?" Shizuo asks quietly when they part.
Izaya takes a look at him, a really good look. The cast on his arm that Kusuka had drawn a cat on, the new sneakers Shizuo's mom had bought him, his boyish, teenaged youth and knew he wasn't going to understand.
Izaya wants to study humans. He wants to learn what happens when you push them to their brink. He wanted to know hard it is to break someone's mind, if it was more enjoyable that watching a faceless woman in an old warehouse die by his hand.
The leader wanted him because of his IQ maybe, but he must have known there was darkness inside him.
"Why the hell would I tell you that?" He answers. He walks away from Shizuo and doesn't turn back.
They don't see each other again until Shinra introduces them. Being introduced to someone important to him should be funny, but it wasn't.
Shizuo is tall and blonde now, and even more dangerous. Izaya doesn't want these soft feelings because they compromise what he's earned.
He needs to be cold. He needs to do his work. He has crossed the rubicon. That's all there was to it.
The slash of his switchblade on Shizuo's chest sparks the beginning of their new relationship. It doesn't go as smoothly as he wants it to. He has to smash the feelings down. The coat, the rings, and his coldness, were all his true self. Originally they were masks, but he never took the mask off, so this was his face.
"Let go of me!" Izaya snarls. Shizuo's caught him, his breath hot in his face, his voice loud in his ears.
"You! I told you to stay out of my city!"
Izaya laughs, feeling particularly cruel tonight.
"Remember when it was our city?"
Shizuo huffs, "of course I remember." He looks slightly defeated. "But you went and fucked that up didn't you?"
Yes. Yes he had.
He says nothing.
Izaya feels alive, with Shizuo's hands on his body. He could pretend for a moment that it was an embrace and not a stranglehold.
"Do you even remember?" Shizuo demands, he loosens his grip a bit, "Do you even remember it at all, or did it mean nothing?"
Izaya says nothing.
The rubicon. The woman he shot. His parents. The twin's lives in the balance.
Shizuo snorts, releases him. "Of course not." He stomps out of the alley.
Izaya is so tired of being cold.
"You were sitting at the park bench chewing gum. I had just found out my parents were killed but I didn't tell you that. I asked to kiss you."
Shizuo stops just outside the entrance to the alley. He's listening.
"You looked around to make sure you wouldn't be seen and you closed your eyes and waited. You looked like an idiot. You were cute. It's was a beginner's kiss, very simple because we were younger."
Shizuo steps closer. He looks expectant like he did then.
"And yes. It meant something." Izaya admits.
Shizuo's mouth is on him in the next second, stealing his air. It's no beginner's kiss, it's perfectly filthy and has Izaya feeling perfectly breathless, Shizuo's hands on his body, his own hands buried in soft dyed hair. The warmth starts to heat him, thawing out some of the cold that had been there for so long, he wasn't even aware he was freezing.
He needs to stop this before it's too much but he can't. He hasn't been warm in so long.
Maybe we can do this more often. Maybe I can have this sometimes. Maybe I can feel something other than pain for once. No! Don't be stupid..
It's over far too soon. Izaya wants to be kissed again. He wants to be held, and to be listened to. He wants to cry hysterically into the man's shoulder, the man that was the boy he used to love.
This is why they need to hate each other. Nothing else made sense.
Once you cross that river, it's over. Nothing will save Izaya. He pulled the trigger after all, and did a million other bad things afterwards.
"I'm sorry about your parents. Get the hell out of Ikebukoro."
And like that he's gone.
Izaya stands in the alleyway for a long time. Eventually he laughs. He laughs so loud and so hard that anyone watching would think he's crazy.
They'd be right, too.
Izaya isn't warm anymore. But he isn't frozen now either. He addresses the empty alleyway with an amused sadness.
"Who would have thought after all this time, you monster, that you'd still be chewing nothing but cinnamon gum!"