They didn't go to the shooting range.

Of course they didn't. Because Izaya was a sleazing liar.

At least that's what Shizuo kept telling himself. They didn't stop because the other man became utterly (and stupidly in what might've been an endearingly childish way if he wasn't such a flea) fascinated with wax hands.

The flea must have some ulterior motive. Something that involved wax hands.

Wax hands.

Out of all the things in the amusement park, it had to be wax hands. Those silly looking things with dip-dyed colors that didn't even match. And you had to stand there like an idiot dipping your hands in who knows what for how long. And force whoever was with you to stand beside you, like you guys were twin idiots.

Fucking wax hands.

"I want a heart," Izaya decided with a note of finality.

"Tch. I don't know why you would bother. You have none," Shizuo scowled.

The dark haired merely blinked. "Care to join, Shizu-chan? Memory sake."

"Like I said before, I don't want any memories from today. It's bad enough that you're constantly in Ikebukuro to keep my memory fresh."

"Fresh like the fresh milk Shizu-chan likes," the other hummed.

"Don't compare yourself to milk," the blond snapped.

"Wow. I'm not even worth as much as milk. Ouch," the informant dryly remarked.

"A heart doesn't fit you," Shizuo continued with his original train of thought.

"It doesn't matter whether or not it fits me. I can get it if I want," the smaller insisted. Softly, he whispered to himself. "I can get it but I can't have it."

"What'd you say?"

"I said," he repeated, loud and clear. "I can get a heart if I want to."

The monster of Ikebukuro snorted. "Whatever. I hope your hands burn when you make it."

"My hands won't burn. It's only about 40 degrees in the wax." He paused. "That's around… your internal temperature when you have a bad fever, in case you were wondering. I know Shizu-chan isn't good with numbers."

"I know how hot 40 degrees is," Shizuo snapped.

"Did you also know that water boils at 100 degrees Celsius?" the informant mockingly asked.

"That's common knowledge, flea."

"Besides," the dark haired continued conversationally. "You could always build up an immunity to something. If you experience enough pain, mentally and physically, you'll eventually stop feeling it."

"Really?" Shizuo meant it as a challenge, not a question. The flea, however, seemed to take it as one.

"Yes, really. Say you keep experiencing… a hea – stomachache. It persists. You can't do anything to stop it because it's inside you and your body is just reacting on its own. You keep feeling it and soon, you learn to ignore it. You learn to work your schedule around it, maybe indulge it a bit when you go to the city. But you can't let yourself get too busy with it. That would hurt too much. You can never have that."

What the actual fuck was going on? Izaya was definitely talking about something else, not just stomachache immunities or burns. What sort of thing persists and hurts when left too long… no, more importantly, why would the flea leave it for so long?

"What the fuck are you saying, flea?" the blond narrowed his eyes, as if the point would be made clearer. "What 'indulge' and 'city'? Why do you need to go to the city to take a shit?"

The resident of Shinjuku stiffened. Very slight but obvious to Shizuo's trained eyes. "I never said 'city'. I said 'busy'. I said 'when you go to do the busy'. You let yourself sit in the bathroom for a while if your stomachache was that bad. …that's what I meant anyways."

He wanted to throw the other across the park. But he resisted. If he started the whole throwing-flea-across-wherever thing again, they'd end up in another chase and the flea would probably just manipulate his memories somehow.

And Shizuo can't have that.

"No, no. You obviously said city," he stabbed a finger into the other's shoulder. "Why are you saying that? You don't waste words. Everything you say has some kind of double meaning that fucks up innocent lives."

"Not every word I say fucks up lives," Izaya frowned.

"Why. Did. You. Say. 'City'. Fucking. Flea." The former bartender was hell bent on finding out. What city? It obviously had to be Ikebukuro. The flea had some kind of plan with Ikebukuro and since Shizuo lived in it, he was, by default, to make sure the city wasn't fucked.

The informant sighed irritably and waved a hand. "Freudian slip."

"Feud what?"

"Freudian slip. Means that instead of the word you intended to say, you mistakenly say what your subconscious mind has been thinking. I only said 'city' because I saw the cityscape on that booth." Izaya pointed to a nearby photo booth, designed to look like a city on the outside.

Shizuo blinked at the booth. He had always thought those sort of booths were always decorated with pink and glitter shit.

But back to the matter at hand. "You don't get affected by that feuding shit. Or have bad stomachaches, for that matter."

Because Izaya was that type of piece of shit.

The dark haired merely raised a brow and smiled serenely. "Don't I?"

The fuck was that supposed to mean?

And just when Shizuo was contemplating throwing the flea into a booth, said flea said. "That wasn't even the whole point of this conversation. We were talking about me getting wax hands and temperature."

"I hope your hands burn. Hope they burn in hell with the rest of your body and your already charred soul."

"You know, even if 40 degrees was supposed to give a mild burn, it would have been counteracted by the freezing water here. I wouldn't feel a thing."

The former bartender frowned. "Then I hope your hands fall off from hypothermia."

"Ooo. Big words from a protozoan. Are you planning to med school now?"

"Hypothermia isn't even a big medical word. Everyone knows what that is."

"Really. Shizu-chan could've fooled me though."

"Shut the fuck up and go scald yourself." He hadn't forgotten the conversation though.

"So you just dip your hands in that container then the other container then that container and the other container and – "

"Yes, okay. I dip my hands in container one, which contains cold water, then in container two, which contains melted wax. I do this over and over until she – " here, he gestured to the stall owner "- tells me otherwise. What is so hard about that?"

Shizuo shrugged. "I just don't get how wax comes out from that process. You're basically doing the Thriller dance from one container to another."

It's not his fault this whole thing was stupidly simple. He expected the flea to pick another activity that was… more complicated, to say the least. …or maybe it was complicated. Maybe this was all the flea's plan to overly simplify things so that 'big brute protozoan' Shizuo got confused and thus pissed off. Maybe it was –

Izaya glared. "I don't do Thriller dances."

The informant adjusted his hands into the correct position and then plunged them into a container. He almost gasped at the paralyzing iciness hitting his hands. The coldness seeped into his skin, etching itself deep within before it slowly crept up to his wrists.

"Or maybe it's more like getting a Spanish manicure. Everyone knows you're into that sort of girly shit."

The dark haired paused, hands hovering midair. "It's a French manicure. Bull fighting and piñatas are from Spain."

Shziuo scoffed. "Same thing."

Izaya dipped pale hands into the other container – the one that smelled a bit nauseating. He took his hands out and once again, submerged them into the first container. He took them out again.

Shizuo merely blinked at the now cooling wax dripping off. The stall owner smoothed the wax before leading the informant's hands back into the hot wax.

There was a pause before the resident of Shinjuku spoke conversationally.

"I've been thinking, you know how you get really pissed off when you see me?"

"Like right now? Yeah," the taller groused.

"Now that I think of it, Shizu-chan's kind of like a bull. A bull sees a red flag and it immediately charges at it. You see me and you immediately charged at me," Izaya mused.

The blond snorted (though he probably shouldn't have, considering what he was going to say next). "I'm not a bull."

"No. You're a protozoan," the smaller readily agreed. He continued. "Besides, bulls can't even see colors. You wave blue flag in front of its face and you're still going to get impaled."

He blinked. "No, I'm won't."

Izaya scowled. "Of course you wouldn't. You'd just break off the horns or throw the bull to its death like the monster you are."

Russet eyes blankly stared at the hands covered in wax. "But really, you have to wonder now. Do you just attack me because I'm moving? Which, by the way, isn't fair because I can't just freeze on the spot just for you. I have a life."

"I don't attack you just because you're moving," the former bartender countered. If he did that, he'd be attacking everything that moved. And that would include everyone else in his vision. And that would lead to violence. And that would be bad.

Because Shizuo Heiwajima hated violence.

"Then that leads to another question. Why do you immediately attack me? You don't randomly go around attacking other people." The man kept his voice low, eyes never leaving the moving of his hands.

"Because you piss me off. You immediately piss me off just by being alive, you know that? Other people aren't like that. Other people don't piss me off. I can't fucking stand you."

Did he really need to clarify this? This – whatever this was called: information, fact – was common knowledge between them. Hell, it was common knowledge between everyone that lived in Ikebukuro, Shinjuku and whatever districts that had heard of them.

The dark haired took a deep breath, cutting a glance to the other man. "You're with me now. And you haven't tried to kill me." He paused. "Well, not to the full extent."

Full extent? Come to think of it, had he ever held back when it came to the flea? He knew he did when it came to other people – or at least tried. Deep down, he never really believed in holding back. If you were going to do something, do it to your fullest potential.

Though violence wasn't exactly the type of thing you wanted to do to your fullest potential.

Shizuo sighed and looked away. Shit, he really needed a smoke. When was the last time he had one? In the morning? Damn, he really had been distracted, hadn't he?

"It's because we have a deal. Otherwise, your whole head would've been dunked into the wax container by now."

At this, the stall owner paused and looked at him. The debt collector merely blinked back.

Izaya merely laughed. "Shizu-chan, I don't think my head would fit in that small container."

He didn't look at the monster of Ikebukuro.

"Didn't say your big, egotistical head had to fit."

"Um, excuse me. Would you like to add color to this or…."

The resident of Shinjuku shook his head. "I think I'll keep it white."

"Are you sure? You don't have to pay extra for color."

Izaya smiled at her like they shared a secret. It pissed the debt collector off. "Well, no one knows what the exact color of love is, yes?"

Shizuo lit up a cigarette and watched the woman expertly worked to get the wax hands off in one piece. The hand-heart didn't look bad. The flea had slim fingers and each knuckle stood out, making the wax less of a blob.

"Oh, and I would like this to be filled with wax. Makes it sturdier, though by how much is hard to guess."

The blond would bet his entire bank savings that the other knew exactly how much sturdier the wax hand would be.

"You just have to be careful with wax. If it's let out too long in the sun, it'll melt. It breaks pretty easily too. The safest place to put this thing might be in the freezer, away from other things," the owner joked as she poured wax into the mould.

"But wax is supposed to burn and melt, not be cold in the freezer with the chicken,"
he murmured. Then, "Ne, Shizu-chan?"

"What?" the monster of Ikebukuro snapped.

"Don't you agree that that – " here, he gestured to the wax hand-heart in the stall owner's hands "- should burn and melt, not sit in the freezer?"

Shizuo furrowed his brows. "A heart?"

Why would a heart burn or melt? A heart can't melt because it's a muscle and… could a muscle even melt? Or was the flea talking about the symbolism of hearts? Love burning and melting? The fuck?

The flea's eyes stared at him, almost imploringly. Then, they blinked and Izaya turned away.

"No, no. Not the heart. The wax. Shouldn't it melt?"

"Tch. I don't know. Wax is wax. A heart is a heart. What do they have to do with burning and melting?"

"Wax candles in a shape of a heart, maybe?"

"I don't give a damn, okay? If you want to use it, burn it. It'll melt. If you don't want it, then throw it out. You don't have a damn use for it," Shizuo growled. It was as simple as that. What sort of trick question was the flea asking?

"Is it really that easy to throw out a heart?" Izaya murmured to himself.

"Are you done? Just pay already, flea," the blond kicked the smaller in the foot. He was careful to make sure it was light or else, the flea's foot might break and he'll have to carry the other home. And there was no way that was happening.

"Alright, alright."

Hi.

Sorry it took so long. It was exam month so I was super busy and then that turned into summer so I turned into a lazy blob. Just not feeling that motivated, you know?

I have never done wax hands before so I don't really know the feeling. I've seen some of my friends do it and read instructions online but I don't have a wax hand experience. Yet.

Hope this chapter turned out well. It just felt kind of off... For the next chapter, I'm not exactly sure what to do so if any of you feel inclined to give out some ideas, leave them in the review/PM.

Thanks for reading! Hope you enjoyed it!