I love Durarara, but obviously do not own it. Genius characters and stories belong to geniuses, which I certainly don't claim to be. Also, greatest thanks to , Quizilla, Live Journal, Inkpop, etc. for giving all these aspiring writers a space for creativity.

Note: Last chapter of this series! I'm doing something a little different with this chapter, hope you guys enjoy anyways. :] By the way, I'm assuming that Izaya does not usually live with his sisters, and that they do not live in Ikebukuro. Apologies for inaccuracies!

5. Surprise

Kururi stirs, a little. Even these feather-light footsteps gently caressing their home's worn floorboards wake her. The light is weakly, sleepily crawling in through her closed blinds, and the warm body of Mairu is still besides her, hogging the bedcovers as always and snoring loudly— but she's quite used to that, and so it does not bother her much.

"Izaya…?"

In the pre-dawn darkness of the earliest morning, she hears her brother's piercing smile like the ringing of sharp bells in white light, and his hand on her head for an instant, full of warmth and comfort. It's these times she likes best, when the night's too close for them to bicker and argue and fight, and Mairu isn't up to fight with Izaya yet, and even Izaya himself doesn't carry quite so much confident violence in his stride. In this sense, brother and sisters are alike, creatures born of night, yet infinitely attracted to these in-between times of fading or rising sun.

"Go back to sleep. I'm leaving."

She doesn't bother asking where he's going at 5:30 on a Sunday morning, doesn't particularly care. He's always going someplace or another, permanently leaving, and she's never particularly minded being left behind. He has his life and she has hers, and Mairu hers as well.

"Bye, Izaya."

He responds with a centimeter's worth of widening smile and the clean coolness of the air as it sweeps back in to replace his fingers, the creaking door shutting her back in to the almost-sunny warmth of their house. Kururi smiles to herself and easily slips back into dreams.

Izaya slides gracefully on to the train, his foot waving a little goodbye to the floor of the station, the cool key of his sisters' home in his left pocket, his wallet firmly chained to his belt loop by slim silver links of security. Even this early in the morning, the train is far from empty, and Izaya likes this. He sits on one of the dingiest seat-cushions in the train, rests his cheek on a particularly scratched pole, stretches in terribly faded shadows assaulted by the sunlight, and does his favorite thing in the world—observes these ridiculous, lovable humans go about their business. There's something about mornings, he reflects clearly. They're always, to someone with strong intuition like Izaya, a good indicator of how the rest of the day will go, and Izaya feels something special about this day. He felt it in the sleepy murmur of his little sister's half-awake voice, and feels it now in the growing energy of workers who stayed extra hours at their offices speeding home to family in Ikebukuro. He feels it in the mysteries of a thousand sleepy humans whose stories, and whose family's stories and friend's stories and friend's friend's stories, could startle the gods themselves—of which Izaya is one, naturally.

So he watches, like always. He watches a woman in a faded business suit talk on her cellphone, observes her messy manicure and worn shoe-soles, and imagines her conversation for her, her life for her. Where was she ten minutes ago? Where is she going now? Who does she talk to? What business does she have at her destination? The only thing that is certain is that she does not see Izaya, and that's just the way he likes it, both the uncertainty and the certainty.

He arrives in Ikebukuro, and his feet carry him through the streets he both knows so well and does not know the first thing at all about. He passes old shop signs and dusty blinds and cracked glass window-panes, blinks in an almost-friendly manner at firm wooden doors, drying potted plants, and fancy metal gates, and presses his feet against dirty asphalt and old gum. He wonders from what land the wind carried the seed that would become this small tuft of grass sitting forlornly by his shoe in a crack in the street, and crushes it a little with his heel, knowing that it'll spring straight back up after he's gone, ignoring his passing. He follows humans discreetly through the morning hours, living through them. In the wail of a baby, the nagging voice of a wife, the angry grunt of construction workers, footsteps and voices and minds, he detects something of infinity, and is amazed anew. Izaya's laugh rings out against the walls, and yet no one hears it.

Later, Izaya buys himself a little ice cream at some random plaza in the city as the day reaches the heat of a full-blown summer's noon and sits at the old café table, watching people pass by. The sweetness on his tongue is transcendent, and Izaya permits himself to fall into an unusually contemplative mood. What was that saying, he thinks to himself. If one sits here long enough, all the world will pass you by.

Pass you by, pass you by, pass you by. Why do the words echo?

There's something about this day that's bothering Izaya. He doesn't bother taking a breath before diving recklessly and gracefully into the endless pool of his own insanity. He scrutinizes himself, squints his eyes at blurry black bubbles and waves his hand through red water, for Izaya knows that he knows himself inside-out, and the slightest inconsistency in his naturally inconsistent nature is—well, not unforgivable, but certainly strange. Only a maniac can understand a maniac, and Izaya would like not to think that there are corners of his heart he does not know, but in this darkness he is forced to acknowledge the unknowns of the careening depths of his own mind. A bellowing train of conjecture arrives on its crazily curved tracks, and he steps inside. He starts the ride slow, by conjecturing that in this city, there's really no room for someone like him: an observer, an outsider, not a participant. The river flows on to the accepting ocean, and the ocean becomes the clouds that pour in to the mountain lakes that become again the rivers, but he is—well, he is an eddy, a still spot where leaves and detritus gather in some forest somewhere. He watches the river, and he thereby understands more of humans than many philosophers ever have, and yet to Ikebukuro he is nothing, like the raven flying high is nothing to the earth-bound spider weaving sticky strands of existence.

Izaya admonishes himself for this thought, smiling discouragingly at himself, shaking his finger. He shouldn't care—he is above humans. Better the crow than the flies, after all. Still, though, he watches thoughts thunder by violently, dangerously outside the train, the glass of the windows straining and cracking in slow motion. He picks out a few strands lazily, letting his fingers disintegrate in the darkness, melted by his own mind, and doesn't even hiss at the pain.

If you're above this all, where does that leave you? If one's existence is comprised entirely of watching and mocking and interfering in the existences of others, then what can you call your own? If everyone else died and you were left alone, would you be alive or a living ghost with none to define you? The thoughts burn him relentlessly. Izaya pauses and his smile widens crazily as he turns a corner and confronted with the enormity of existence.

This question bothers and fascinates him. It scratches at his skin, producing bloody streaks, and his mind is swallowing his body whole, hungry lips devouring his feet and ugly tongues licking at the backs of his eyelids, and Izaya loves it all. There's nothing he likes better than a puzzle to solve, a game to beat, a challenger to grind into the dirt—especially with a time limit included, because that makes it more exciting—and here it is, Izaya versus Izaya. The game is the answering of the question, and he will either win or lose. There is no middle. This might take a while to figure out, he admits to himself, and laughs cruelly to think that the one person to challenge him would have to be himself, as only is appropriate. After all, he is alone, and always will be. The thought tickles his mind, and he feels proud, facing the world with no one behind him, born without parents and dying without a god.

The day wears on towards afternoon, and Izaya balances himself on the edge of absolute chaos. Discovering your true feelings is like throwing yourself down a bottomless pit—every step of self-discovery is slippery with trouble and danger, every other corner filled with landmines or poisonous snakes or other such hazards, and Izaya inhales it all, adrenaline viciously pummeling the walls of his blood vessels. No one notices him, no one wonders about him, and he is dead and alive at the same time, made so by unseeing eyes and unspeaking lips. And as Izaya wanders past the sushi shop of Simon—

"Izaya! Have some sushi, it's fresh and cheap!"

—steps around Erika and Walker's enormous colored advertisement for a new manga-ka's book signing—

"Did you hear about the Dollars?"

"Eeeeeh??? No, why? Did something exciting happen?"

" I heard that the leader showed up in…"

— trails his fingertips along Saburo's precious car and startles Mikado and Anri behind a wall on their awkward semi-dates—

"Crap! It's that Orihara Izaya person Kida-kun told me about!"

"Let's get out of here!"

— as Kadota barely stops himself from running in to him—

"Yo, Izaya… Izaya?"

— and Seiji dodges rapidly out of his line of sight—

"That was way too close!"

—he becomes tangled quickly in his own web of thought. This young man is eternally on his own, even with an army of pawns scattered at his feet, because in his arrogant knowledge of his own uniqueness Izaya has forgotten something rather important, that in his heart there still sits a child that was born old, knew it, and forgot to grow up.

The day grows late. When. Suddenly.

Like a gunshot in to the already foaming rapids of Izaya's mind, tumbling to unknown ends.

"I…. zaaa…. yaaaa….. –KUN," and the last syllable of supposed affection is smashed in with a full refrigerator's worth of irony, a horrible white cymbal crash to end the show. And Izaya is close to home, now. Just give him a few minutes. Shizuo wouldn't have time for Izaya's ridiculous, sudden journey of self-discovery, won't let it interfere with their game, if he actually noticed. And even if he did, Shizuo would probably just feel even angrier at him.

Izaya turns, after an eternity and looks the bartender straight in the eye,

Shizuo reads him in less than half a second, like a book with letters the size of the clouds in the sky, the whiteness of the page startling against the black holes of the words. For someone as brutal as this non-peaceful island of a man is, for someone as complex as Izaya is, Shizuo sometimes has astonishing insight into Izaya's mind. It comes from hours spent chasing the man through cities, days of ears filled with his taunts and months of nostrils flaring with the stink of Izaya's very existence. But it truly is too easy, this time.

Fine. If that damn flea's going to be distracted, so much the better. If Izaya wants to sink into madness, Shizuo will follow him, push deeper and deeper until he kicks Izaya to the utmost bottom. Shizuo will then grind Izaya's cheek into the floor, and will further proceed to drag Izaya back to the surface, where he will then drown him again, and again, until Izaya doesn't want to go down, until he begs for air.

To make good on his plan, a signpost is torn out of the ground by Shizuo with astonishing speed, and Izaya finds a smile cracking his lips, making them bleed. This man. Somehow, all the time, after years and years, they have never failed to meet. Izaya doesn't understand Shizuo, and so he keeps coming back to try and try and fail and fail, time after time, to defeat this one man. And another half-second later, the metal of the pole connects with a loud crunch with the side of Izaya's distracted head.

Izaya staggers and almost falls, and the pain transforms his smile in to a full-blown fevered laugh which pours itself like pestilence in to Shizuo's itching ear, and the not-so-eternal still whirlpool is defeated, the raindrops dancing in the lowering sun to join the river again, and it never felt so good. Izaya feels himself grow warmer, touched by the fingers of the sun's rays once again.

"Shizu-chan."

They pause, though the lines are well-known, have been read a thousand times and performed on the stage of the city's floor too often to count, and the silence is tense, yet comfortable.

"You damn flea. I thought I told you not to come back." And his voice is a threat, the voice of the city which is a home of sorts to a wanderer without even a real birthplace to call his own.

"But Shizu-chan missed me, didn't he?"

Another second, and Shizuo and Izaya are off, racing after and around each other in a game that never ends, a dog chasing its own tail in the forever afternoon sun that laughs and laughs and laughs. And Shizuo's answer to that question is Izaya's answer to his own. Does he exist?

They round the corner containing Yagiri, who's still seeking, seeking. They almost run over Kadota, and Kadota staggers back, eyes wide, and thinks this is really getting ridiculous—really, twice in a few hours? Mikado and Anri are running, too, and can't believe the luck they have when they hear breathless insults being hurled through the air—so now both Orihara and Heiwajima are here? Saburo screeches to a halt at a green light, swearing and breathing hard, damning those two maniacs who don't understand or care about the rules pedestrians are supposed to follow. Erika and Walker smile out loud, yell and clap and cheer for whoever's losing, though it's not clear to either party who that would be. The flyers scattered on the pavement in front of the Russian sushi shop fly up like paper dust underneath their burning heels, and Simon grunt a little in annoyance, though he supposes that it's good Izaya is here for Shizuo to vent his ever-building stress on.

And they're still going, and now the two are beyond these existences we've followed, these stories intermingled in the melting pot of Ikebukuro, and into a space uniquely their own, smashing in to cars and jumping walls and scaling chain-link fences, two blurs of identical light traveling at warped speeds in the warm embrace of the airy infinity of the universe, the wind cutting their skin in the most comfortable way, their hearts bursting in their chests and their muscles burning with hate and the sky so huge, so close, the clouds grazing their fingertips, that Izaya wants to cry with the feeling of it. Izaya's mouth is open in a lopsided smile and he's probably catching flies, but let them come, he doesn't care.

Because. This is.

This is one hundred percent living emotion, distilled to the purest of golden droplets, and Izaya surrenders his aloof position willingly for this half-hour, at least. At this instance, six billion people are going about their own lives, but for once Izaya doesn't have time to love them all, to watch over them as they sleep, because he's busy with something a little more personal. Because Izaya knows now beyond all doubts that he was born, that he has survived twenty years on this Earth and that he is alive now, because he is human, and that fact shouldn't be okay, shouldn't be right or acceptable but in this instant it is because everything in this moment is okay, is right and is acceptable and lovable. After all, if he pisses Shizuo off this much, then the answer to that question is undoubtedly yes, and Izaya is honest enough with himself to admit that that is the answer he wanted. It is a surprise, and a beautiful one too.

And we're watching, too, and each and every of our lives connected because we see Izaya and his inevitable humanness. I don't know about you, but I want to laugh with him sometimes, he looks so ridiculously happy, and yet I'm glad for him.

That Orihara Izaya is living his life.

Only the beginning

Story notes: Well, it may be "just the beginning," but this is the end of Five Times Orihara Izaya Became Human. I'd like to say it was hard to write and that I struggled and sweated, but truthfully under the influence of great music and a real interest in this wonderful series, it actually was quite easy. I never thought this story would be so well-received, and I definitely plan to write more in the future, whether for this fandom or another. Thank you again for everyone who has supported me along the way, all you people who leave encouraging reviews and whatnot.

Oh, and most importantly, I offer my sincerest apologies to Izaya for beating you up, making you cry, and forcing you to be the star of this series. I know you never wanted any of this. ;]

Especial thanks for extra encouragements to this newbie writer: ChocolateLizz, Chi, Ash Engel, iRishou, ArdiChok3, Catastrophic Monsoon, Giraffe Attack, terracannon876, xXDeath-N'-HellXx, mysisterthinksimavampireII, maa6chaaaaaan, The Nameless Girl, Gekkou Kitsu, ChocoBits Daioh, .But Friends Make Secrets, Nekotsubasa, xmichikox, Zairal, imaginedreams22, TheContheDistance, Uphill Both Ways, KarixTakayuya, and Meepy! All of your kind words are a great support to me!

For the last time, thank you to all readers, and "see" you later!

~Three Small Crows~