Directions: Children 12 years old and under - Consult a doctor about use. Adults Take 30 milliliters every 12 hours. DO NOT EXCEED 60 milliliters IN 24 HOURS.

If you were to rank yourself as a person on a scale of 1 to 10, you'd give yourself a 7. You have good intentions, you're generally an amicable person. There was that homeless person you bought a burger for one time. But those past good deeds seem to wane in comparison; you don't think you've ever done something this terrible.

Half sleep-deprived, half-delirious you stumble through the streets. It's starting to rain, and if you don't hurry, the blood will be all wiped off.


39 MINUTES EARLIER

Under the flashlight, you fix two glasses of tea. Well, they're more liked cracked mugs but it's all you have at your disposal. The perfectionist in you winces. As quickly as you can without sloshing the tea, you tiptoe past a snoring Shizuo and make your way to Kida's room.

"Served by a beautiful woman? My lucky day!" Kida croons, dazzling you with his pearly whites.

"Oh, Kida darling," you singsong back as you kick the door closed, "how come you're never this fresh when Shizuo's awake?"

Kida smirks. "Don't want him to feel jealous of mah suave moves ," he slurs, waggling his eyebrows.

You snort in derision. "The vampire costume is getting to your head; I'm not really a Twilight kinda girl."

"You're also not as persuasive as Flo the salesgirl," he retorts, winking. Turning politely to the side, he takes out his vampire teeth, before raising the cup to his lips. This makes you feel like you should shed your costume too; indulging in Halloween shenanigans seems faraway now, somehow childish. You opt to unclip your "Hi I'm Flo! :) " name tag.

The two of you had managed to find a working printer in his room, from which you produced maps of the city (while doing your best to ignore the desktop background image of a smiling couple. They looked unnervingly similar to two of the Feeders you dispatched on the fire escape. You can't help but wonder who the third was. Neighbor? Long-distance relative?)

"So, where are we, exactly?" you ask, peering over windswept blonde hair. Kida has surprisingly accurate spatial reasoning; you want to tell him but you know exactly where he'll take that remark. You smile softly; if you had to slog through this with anyone, Shizuo and Kida certainly make excellent suffer-buddies.

"Here!" He notches a red 'X' onto what appears to be yet another bland square.

"And where is Izaya's apartment?"

"There; about a fifteen minute walk," he responds, yawning. "Of course, that's assuming normal conditions..."

Finding Izaya was Kida's brainchild; you may or may not have encouraged it with some prompting. While Shizuo might be willing and able to rip every skyscraper in Ikebukuro from its foundations to find his brother, you had much different plans. More practical plans. Plans that would actually find Kasuka like aimless searching would not. You'd make yourself indispensable to them; Shizuo would see.

And a morally ambiguous information broker is your best bet.

"Maybe we should try to outline a few different routes," you suggest, watching him. "In case one is blocked or overrun."

"Mmmhmmm," Kida murmurs, resting his head on his arm as he scratches out three secondary routes. "Ugh, I've got the worse headache..."

"You're telling me!" Your laughter sounds high-pitched, a little forced. He doesn't seem to notice. Shizuo continues snoring lightly in the background.

"There we go, all done." Kida autographs his masterpiece with flourish- or at least, that's what it must look like to his half-closed eyes. It's more of a scribble, to be honest, but he's too tired to care.

Not you.

You're painfully awake, strung out on adrenaline.

"So, we go first thing in the morning?"

"Yep!" You don't even need to fake the yawn, so straining is your exhaustion, but your nerves are keeping you attentive. "Better get some rest!"

"Alrighty then..." Kida mumbles to the desk. "Need me to walk you to your room?"

He couldn't have heard your answer, even if you had given one. Delicately, you edge the map out from under his head, replacing it with a pillow. Glancing at his sleeping bliss nearly makes the guilt overwhelm you, but you only gave him half the does anyhow. He probably thought the weird taste was honey.

It takes a little jimmying to open the window of the master bedroom. The blast of cold air that greets you undermines your conviction. You don't give yourself long to think about it. Instead, you don your jacket and slip a rubber eraser in the window pane to hold it open for when you return.

When not if.

Climbing out onto the ledge, you inch your way towards the fire escape. Eight stories above the ground, the wind is biting your cheeks and whipping your hair. You try not to focus on how much it would hurt to plummet into the cement below like those Feeders. In your mind's eye, you are Jason Bourne from that one movie about him kicking ass and taking names. The one with lots of choreographed punches in it. You jump down lightly on the landing, creeping down the stairs.

At the last landing, you make your way to the edge. Too high to jump down- for you, anyways. Crouching, you fiddle with the swinging ladder, struggling to unlock the sliding mechanism. It takes a decent amount of elbow grease, but you manage to pry it loose. You seize it out of the air, lowering it slowly before it has a chance to rat tat tat all the way down.

It's when your foot is on the second rung before the last that you hear it- footsteps shuffling on the pavement. The sound is off, like the culprit is limping. Suddenly a hand snatches at your back.

Your blood freezes.

Heart leaping to your throat, you bite your scream, releasing an awkward gurgle. Without thinking, you turn swing to the side and sink your heel into its chin. The Feeder goes staggering back, but it's too late. The momentum is too much for you and you tumble forward, arms flailing. Your ankle hitches on the rung, leaving you dangling in midair, hands scrabbling desperately as the world bobs up and down.

ohcrudohcrudohcrudohcrud

Snarling, it gears for a second attack, moving towards your now exposed back.

This is it. You're completely vulnerable and your predator is readying to pounce. This is your comeuppance, the sun melting your wax wings for daring to fly too high. You can scream all you'd like, but Kida's too addled on sleep medication to hear you. Shizuo will never get to you in time.

Movement echoes in the alleyways ahead of you.

You thrash around like a rabbit caught in a snare. Pulsing your body upwards, you kick your leg free and fall flat on your stomach. It misses by centimeters, passing closely enough that you could smell its rancid breath. Pushing off the concrete, you sprint forward. It's the wet blood that gets you, twisting your foothold and sending you flying onto the pile of dispatched Feeders you dumped from the fire escape.

You're not breathing; that much is clear from the black spots popping in your vision. You're hyperventilating, clawing madly to drag yourself out of the pits of rotting flesh you've found yourself in.

The Feeder shambles towards you and collapses at your feet, clammy hands descending on your ankles. You allow yourself to scream, piercing the still night air and kicking so hard the Feeder jiggles-

But not quite hard enough to let it go.

Attracted by the ruckus, the second appears in full view and tears stream down your face. You have vastly overestimated your stealth and cunning, too caught up with ridiculous ideals that you could never fulfill. You should have just jumped in the damn van when you had the chance, instead of following Shizuo on this inane suicide mission. Maybe then you and Kida would be on a train out of this hellhole, instead of meeting your doom in a dark alley or drugged to sleep in a barricaded apartment.

The Feeders descend.

You kick and scream and cry and plead; you are a one-girl-emotional circus but they don't let up.

And then, through your hysterical sobs, you realize they're not actually biting you.

Maybe you're actually dreaming next to Kida, and this was just a nightmare induced by tonight or maybe you never really lived tonight at all and you're still sleeping in your Raira dorm room, but they're not biting. They're snouts and paws are all over you- you refuse to give them the decency of human physiology, that's a prestige you cannot part with- sniffing, padding along the length of you. They trace you like this from the tips of your hair to the edge of your elbow to the hollow of your ankles to the bottom of your toes. All the while, you sit stock-still, breath baited.

Inexplicably, they retreat, circling around you once, twice each time making the arc wider. Hollow black eyes glare at you suspiciously.

And then you realize that they never saw you. Smelt, felt but not saw. Smelt and felt the smears of flesh, the sludge of intestines covering your body.

Gagging, you realize what you need to do with nauseating clarity. Taking a deep breath, you role around in the pile of death that used to be three Feedees, staining every inch of fabric that covers you with blood and guts. To be safe (what a joke! ), you dig through the pile and pull up a shattered fleece jacket tied along the waist of what you think was a male. Dunking it in and out of the pile, you wait until it's faded blue cloth morphs into a grainy red-brown until you slip it on over your own. The smell reaches down into the pit of your stomach and squeezes, bile launching up your throat.

Well, you didn't come this close to death for nothing. The Feeders are still within range, their attention loosely directed towards you. You decide to test your theory, padding towards them as quietly as possible. Their heads follow you, but they make no move. You feel their hollowed eyes piercing your back as you move and it takes every ounce of self-control you have not to dash away screaming.

The shuffling starts up again.

Muscles taut, you ready yourself for the flesh to be ripped from your spine-

-the bite never comes. The sound is receding, they're moving away, you realize and you reward yourself with a big gulp of air.

Pulling out Kida's map, you dive into the night. Thunder rumbles overhead, and if you have a shred of a chance at survival, you need to make it to Izaya's before the smell of blood washes off.


This is the wrong apartment, you convince yourself. You are actually bleeding to death in that alley and this is a hallucination. You're actually insane. Maybe all three.

Because you met little resistance as you made your way. A few curious stares, a snarl here and there. You are so bold as to imagine that they were greeting you, their fellow abomination.

Did you knock? You can't quite remember. You're exhausted and hungry and soaked and you smell like a butcher's backroom, probably look like one too. A few of them followed you into the foyer of the building, the scent must have been wearing off, but they couldn't figure out how to get past the door of the stairwell. Guess their intelligence varies.

You leap back when the door opens.

"Helllooooooooo Nurse!" Izaya chirps, swinging the door wide open. You want to remind him that what you're wearing is, in fact, a 100% genuine Flo-the-Progressive-Insurance-Girl costume soaked with 100% genuine Feeder blood but you're too taken aback by his devil-may-care attitude to bother. You can't decide whether it's comforting or disturbing that, amidst all this chaos, Izaya is as obnoxious as ever.

He peers down the hall, as if expecting your entourage but finds none. Outstretched arms welcome you into his humble abode. It's spartan and yet tasteful, meshing sleek metal with swarthy wood for an ambiance that exudes an effortless chic. His place is surprisingly simple, far more elegant than you would have predicted for a guy traipsing around in a fur coat. You expect to hear cool lounge music floating through the air any second now.

You wipe your blood-soaked sneakers on the mat, and Izaya appreciates this. To thank you, he gives you fresh clothes and demands you change. When you emerge in Izaya-hand-me-downs (purple v-neck, Namie's spare jeans, and some girl's leather jacket) he directs you through the foyer and to his desk, which stands before an enormous twelve-foot window surveying downtown Ikebukuro. Orange streetlamps pierce through the darkness like fireflies, joined by the reds and greens of blinking neon advertisements. The masses swirl below like marching ants. From this lofty place in the clouds, you can almost fool yourself into thinking that nothing is amiss down below.

Izaya emerges from the kitchen with a tray bearing two cups of tea as you drop into a chair. Quite the gracious host! Tea should be the last thing you want to see right now but you're chilled to the bone. Also, propriety. You move to take a cup but he wordlessly walks past you, settling down at his desk. Slackjawed, you stare at him, thinking perhaps he forgot you were here. Did he seriously just pour two cups of tea for himself while excluding you? I mean, it's not like you really expected Izaya to be the poster-child of decorum, but this...?

He carries on like this, working on his tea in quiet sips while you stare wide-eyed. It takes five solid minutes before he dissolves into sharp peals of laughter and gives you a lecture on the perils of presumption. Only when he is satisfied that you understand how stupid you looked does he reward you with the second cup of tea.

"So to what do I owe this pleasure?" Izaya asks, returning his attention to his laptop. His workspace is surrounded by top-notch surveillance technology, likely military-grade and even likelier illegal. It goes completely against nature that someone so young can afford to lounge around in a hub of state-of-the-art equipment but here he stands. You imagine it sort of looks like a spaceship, manned by a sociopath.

"Well...," you begin, and you cannot suppress a mental Houston, we have a problem, but that's probably just one of the side-effects of sharing Izaya's company. But then you come up short. There are black dufflebags, stacked neatly one atop the other, by the side of his chair.

Four of them.

Faster than you thought you could move, you dart to the side and snatch his laptop off of the desk.

"You knew," you snarl.

He leans back in his leather chair, stretching like a cat. "It's my job to know," he responds, yawning.

"You knew about all of this and you didn't even warn us!" You screech, dangling his laptop behind you like a hostage. "We could have DIED out there-"

"You could have died yesterday just as easily," he returns, eyes flicking to the door.

"That's not the point," you hiss, reminding yourself to keep your voice down. "You selfish slimeball!"

At this term of endearment, he grins wickedly. "Did I ever pretend otherwise?"

You have half a mind to chuck his laptop out the window, but rapidly-deteriorating sanity urges you to reconsider. If it's the only thing Izaya was focusing on prior to leaving his apartment, it has to have something important stored on it. Potentially a backup of his contracts, assets and targets, which could lead you to Kasuka, among other things. City blueprints, escape routes, the possibilities are endless. Even, potentially your father. You try your best not to hope too strongly.

"Bull-chan," he says calmly, sliding out of his chair "I'm going to need you to hand that over, please."

"Like hell!"

Is what you would have said if he hadn't moved like lightening. In one swift motion, Izaya knocks the back of your knees, seizes the laptop out of the air and deposits his prize safely on the desk. All you can process is that one second you are glaring daggers at him and the next you are face first on the floor, making this the third time you've hit your head this evening. Your headache flares back up full-force and you lay there dazed.

You hear a drawer opening before dark leather boots come padding into view. You move to roll out of the way but Izaya slams a knee decisively into your back, pinning you down. Pressing his weight into you, Izaya binds your wrists with coiled wire as quickly as your thrashing will allow.

"Settle down, settle down Bull-chan," he coos, putting the finishing touches on the knot. "You don't want to chafe your wrists, now do you?"

You snarl and inform him what else will chafe if he doesn't let you go, but he only laughs and ruffles your hair like Aw, what a cute little hogtied spaz . In a businesslike manner, he dusts his hands off and returns to checking his laptop. You sneak a glance at the monitor and promptly resume shrieking at him.

He's playing Minesweeper.

As the world is ending.

Amidst your screaming, you don't hear the growing footsteps coming up the stairwell.


A/N: Bonus points if anyone can tell me where "Hello Nurse!" is from :)