"I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead;

I lift my lids and all is born again.

(I think I made you up inside my head.)"

- Sylvia Plath, Mad Girl's Love Song

The World Drops Dead

Orihara Izaya is briefly reminded of a ghost story—the kind that the other kids tell at school when they huddle in their tight little groups during playtime ("No room for Orihara-kun," they giggle, blowing raspberries over their shoulders as he rounds their tiny, close-knit group, "there's no room for weirdos!") –and he finds himself wondering when the slow drum-beats will pick up, the low drawl of a bow dragging across the strings of a violin as he reaches toward the man and, pulse pounding in his ears, anticipates the moment when he will lurch forward and grab his little hand. What the man will do once he captures him, Izaya isn't sure. The boys have never gotten that far in the story. The girls always start crying and the teacher demands that they play tag instead.

The man is wearing some type of uniform; it's yellow, red, and brown. Izaya finds himself wondering if maybe it's really white beneath all of those colors—if he were to scrape away the dirt and mold and chalky crimson, what color the suit would be. He wonders if it's a deep navy, like the one his father wears. If the color is sprayed with cologne and aftershave; if the man's temple would feel rough against his cheek like his father's when he comes home from a long business trip and envelopes him in the warmest of embraces.

He pulls his jacket just a little tighter about himself. It's cold outside and his breath hangs in the air like rainclouds. His teacher showed a movie during recess yesterday, when all of the children were corralled in the classroom to avoid the chill of snow and sludge outside. It was about Antarctica and Eskimos, and right now he wishes he could bundle up in one of those furry coats. He wishes his mother were here to brush Eskimo kisses across his reddened nose.

His father helped him catch a fish once.

They were vacationing on the coast. The air was heavy with a murky scent of fish and the bite of salt. He'd filtered his breath through his fingers for the first half hour, until his father tugged him out to the harbor. The surrounding fishermen were strong and boisterous, muscles veined and bulging beneath their sun kissed flesh in a way that Izaya only thought possible in anime.

His father had paid one of the men for a few hours on his boat, a gigantic, monstrous thing that lurched and moaned with each passing breeze, and the mountain of a man had chuckled, clapping him firmly on the back and promising that he'd eventually get his sea legs. Izaya hadn't initially understood what this term meant, but he liked to imagine that sea legs were like the elegant fins of a mermaid.

It had taken them less than ten minutes to float so far away from shore that the land was a simple black line against the orange and yellow horizon, but it was nearly three hours before Izaya felt the unusual tug of his fishing line and his father helped his reel in his first catch. It was a small, gasping, pathetic life form, fighting against the hook in its mouth but only tearing its own skin and causing blood to gather where metal met flesh, and it took a few moments of gentle coaxing for his father to convince him to pull it from the line. His parents would later laugh that he was afraid to touch it, that it was too wet and slimy for a sheltered child such as himself, but there was a quiet, darker part of him that wanted to argue, 'No, I wanted to watch it smother in the air. I wanted to watch it beg for its life.'

He'd held the fragile life of that tiny creature in his hands, and desperately, he'd wanted to witness the moment that it realized, once and for all, that no one was coming to save it.

The struggle for survival, oh, it was mesmerizing.

He'd unfortunately let that fish go, but his father later brought him to the market uptown from their hotel. There, he had been assaulted by a myriad of different scents and colors, a canvas of dead eyes staring down at him from fishermen's booths.

Like fogged glass, those eyes followed him everywhere he went, as if those hundreds of fish knew exactly what his classmates and teachers had learned from the very first day, but his parents continued to ignore: there was something terribly off about him.

The man's eyes are dead like all of those terrible fish. They're a worn, yellowed white, like egg yolks against the saturated scarlet of his veins and the bark brown of his irises. His jaw—or what is left of it—hangs limply against his collar bone, skin and muscle tumbling out from the black, festering maggot's nest like strands of crimson yarn. Izaya wonders if those are the red threads that tie him to this world—if maybe, his cords have been cut loose because he's a tired, useless doll. He imagines that marionettes are not as amusing without their strings.

For Izaya, at least, there is nothing fun about a toy that cannot be manipulated.

He doesn't understand the sinister, underlying implications of his interests just yet, however. He doesn't understand why the boys never want to play war with him or why the girls cry when they allow him to join their games of "house". He feels that each war realistically needs a spy, someone to pull the strings from behind the scenes, and he feels obligated to inform the girls that these toy ovens are just practice for when they're grown and chained to the title of "housewife" by a whirlwind of expectations and a man who will want to drown their infant daughters.

Izaya reads a lot. He watches the news. He doesn't waste his time with children's books or nonsense cartoons. He cannot understand why his peers are so ill-informed.

"That's real life," he argues, smiling sweetly as something dull and solid pounds through his veins and rests in the pit of his stomach, "you're going to have to grow up eventually, why not now?"

His teacher laughs at that because, she claims, "Izaya-kun, you're only eight."

But he doesn't feel eight as he draws his fingers over the dead man's eyes, pulling the lids over that ugly yellow before staring up at the bare, shuttering branches above. This small nook of woods in the park is not exactly on his way home from school, but as he'd walked the snow-dusted path to his house, he'd noticed a thick, sweet scent in the air, not unlike back on the coast. It was the kind of smell that stuck to the back of his throat and trickled into his stomach, filling his nose and ears until he was pulsating with the scent and clutching at his tiny Adam's apple to keep from vomiting.

He'd followed the smell through a patch of disrupted bushes, noting the broken branches and the lack of frost atop them, and to his surprise, he hadn't found a dead animal, gutted by some sick gang and hung from the branches like a piñata.

No, slumped against the decaying trunk of an old elm, he had found a dead man.

It doesn't cross his mind that a normal child his age would have run away. It doesn't occur to him to get help.

There's blood everywhere. It's a velvety blanket of scarlet atop the snow, and he fights the urge to run his fingers over it. He wonders if this is how God feels. If sometimes he looks over the mess that humans have made for themselves and thinks, 'Oh, if only I could help them.'

He decides that he quite likes this feeling, this distant watching.

And suddenly, the quiet serenity is broken as his tiny, plastic, vending-machine watch chirps to life and he realizes with a start that it's already five in the evening and his mother will be home in half an hour.

So, with one last regretful look at the dead man, with the same mournful grimace of a child who is forced to set a wriggling fish free, he turns his back and trudges through the snow toward home.

He imagines that maybe the dead man is the victim in all of those playground horror stories. He finds that he doesn't really like the victim, thinks that they're very weak, but he decides that he also doesn't really like the killer either.

Maybe, he reasons, he's content being the child who stumbles upon the corpse.

The sky is a dusty dark blue, as the sun hesitates at the horizon and the moon makes its place among the dull outlines of the stars. His gloves are dotted with blood, he notices, and without a second thought, he discards them in the dirty snow of the sidewalk, shoving his hands in his pockets as he scurries toward home. His mother will have a fit if he's late again.

He knows that his family is considered very average. They live in a simple home; his parents have normal jobs, normal hopes, and normal dreams. Their decision to name him something unusual stemmed from the very normal aspiration for their child to be unique. He's not sure why this makes him angry. He doesn't understand why there's this bitter churning in the depths of his belly every time his parents hang his good grades on the refrigerator. It doesn't make sense why spending the holidays together makes him sick, why family vacations make him quiver, why every time his mother says 'I love you', it makes him want to scream. Sometimes he wishes he could fail all of his subjects just to see if his father would still hang the papers up. If he'd even actually look at the paper, or if he would be so stuck in his own monotonous "normal" that he couldn't even imagine it without its customary A+. Sometimes he wants to tear all of the food from the cabinets and set it on fire on the kitchen floor. Maybe then his parents would stop loving him, maybe his mother's eyes would stop smiling, and maybe his father would scream and rave and bend him over his knee, and even hit him.

Izaya is bored, so terribly so. His parents are normal and normal is boring. Normal is boring because normal is so hard to manipulate; normal is a marionette without strings, dead fish eyes staring down at him from battered, wooden booths.

A burst of warm air hits his face as he pushes open the front door. His fingers are stiff and cold, and just as he's standing on the tips of his toes to hang his coat in the closet, he hears his mother's car humming in the driveway.

He kicks off his shoes quickly, grabbing his bag and dragging it behind him into the dining room. His socks are wet and they're sticking to his skin, icy and rough as he slips his feet beneath the kotatsu and pulls his homework from his bag. Just as he hears the lock click in the foyer, he's flipped to the page of his assignment.

"I'm home!" His mother calls, her voice full of music.

He's always felt that she's been singing a secret song all his life, one that only she knows the tune to. Sometimes he feels that they're on completely different wavelengths.

"I'm in here!" He replies, nudging a smile into his words as he writes the date atop his homework.

She's humming when she makes her way into the adjoining kitchen, grocery bag in hand, and Izaya relishes the sound. His mother's voice is incredibly average. She isn't particularly talented or good-looking, but she isn't ugly or talentless either. She's not particularly funny or gossipy. She doesn't have any idiosyncrasies or terrible secrets.

He often finds himself lamenting on how it must feel to be so normal, so ho-hum, so mediocre, but he can't bring himself to hate the woman for it.

Anymore, however, he can't really bring himself to hate anyone.

Even when his classmates harass and ostracize him, he laughs, he smiles, pretends it's a game, because maybe it is. He finds himself thinking only, 'How interesting that you are so quick to turn on one of your own, how empowering your mob-mentality must be.'

And his teacher says that he thinks too much, that he spends too much time watching and not enough living, not playing like the other children. She pulls old, tattered books from the shelves and prompts him to read, she provides him with paper to write, a sketchpad to draw, anything to tear his gaze from the crowd.

She thinks that he's lonely, he presumes. She's very kind—a tall and lanky woman, with a long, straight nose and thin, stringy, ebony hair. Her skin is a deep tan, a color that most women bleach out of shame, and Izaya wonders if her lack of this is why there is no wedding band on her finger.

His homework poses one single question—a four to six sentence miniature essay: "Who do you admire the most?"

He finds himself grinning as his mother goes on about her day, setting the plastic bag on the counter and grabbing random items from the refrigerator.

'I admire all people,' he writes, pencil squeaking against the waxy pages of his work book, 'but if I had to choose one, right now I admire Teacher the most.'

His mother takes a fresh fish from the shopping bag, and he scowls as it stares knowingly down at him.

'Teacher has sad eyes. I think she feels very alone.'

He enjoys the way his mother sometimes hums off-key. He likes that she doesn't ask too many questions, that even though it sometimes smothers him, her love his something he can rely on.

He adores that she is so very human.

'Although Teacher is lonely, she doesn't wear makeup and doesn't care if her skin is dark like a Ganguro girl.'

The fish is still observing him from where his mother has left it on the counter. Its eyes are a mantra of accusations. He wishes he could gouge them out with his pencil.

'I like Teacher because her loneliness is her own fault. She's very fun to watch.'

He idly counts his sentences as his mother chops vegetables and heats up the rice. Sometimes she asks him to help her cook, but like any normal parent, she's leery of letting him near the cutlery and keeps it locked away in the cabinets high above his reach.

Sometimes he's tempted to climb onto the counter and peer inside, to run his fingers across the glossy surface of the blade and experience the power that surely comes from being on the right side of its handle.

His mother has told him that he can use the knives when he is older, however, and Izaya finds that there is no game more entertaining than waiting for what he wants, no reward as sweet as one that he's earned.

Izaya is not a cheater, he doesn't play dirty, and he doesn't lie about the things that really matter.

He feels that he's a fairly good person. Just as good as the next, he supposes.

"Izaya-kun," his mother nearly sings, winking at him fondly over her shoulder, "would you mind turning on the TV for me? My hands are covered in fish."

Taking a moment to appreciate that the fish's head has been exiled to the trashcan as his mother chops its body for their meal, he nods, giggling childishly as he stretches over the counter and turns on his mother's tiny, counter-convenient television. She says that she likes to watch the news over coffee in the morning, soaps over tea in the afternoon, cooking shows in the evening while she's preparing dinner, talk shows over brunch—she has a schedule for every time that she's gifted a reprieve from her career, and Izaya wonders if she finds a way to work that schedule in while she's gone on business.

He holds down the arrow button until it reaches the channel of her usual cooking program, but frowns when it's replaced instead by the news.

"What's going on?" his mother questions, ignoring the fish in favor of the television as the vegetables simmer and the rice cooker ticks away, "it must be important since they're interrupting regular TV."

A handsome reporter is dusting the snow from his shoulders as he stands just meters away from the park where Izaya had spent the better half of his afternoon.

"The victim has yet to be identified, but is an approximately thirty year old male. He is roughly 180 centimeters, 70 kilograms. At the time of discovery, he was wearing a dirty business suit. Authorities say that the murderer may have returned to the scene just earlier this evening, as the body has been slightly disrupted postmortem—"

Izaya sighs, turning away from the TV in favor of picking up his schoolwork. His mother is still tuned in to the television. It feels as if the fish is still watching him, even from the confines of the trash.

He wonders if it was a bad idea to close the man's eyes. He wonders if that will make it harder to find the murderer.

He finds that he doesn't care. He still dislikes both the villain and the victim. He still refuses to be one or the other. He wishes that they made comic books not just about heroes, but the men who walk the fragile line between right and wrong, good and evil.

Izaya doesn't like comic books, but he considers this to be a character he could follow.

"I don't want you walking home alone anymore, Izaya-kun," his mother draws out fearfully. Part of him wants to ask how he's supposed to get home then, before she adds, "you should start walking home with your friends."

He almost laughs, but instead uses his most convincing, "Yes mother" before reasoning that it's not lying since he doesn't really have any friends. So, in a way, he's walking home with all the friends he has every single day.

This thought makes him feel better, somehow.

The rice cooker rings as his mother throws the fish into the pan with the vegetables. It smells nice, Izaya supposes, but it always smells nice. There's nothing notable about his mother's cooking, but he's not particularly surprised.

He's asked to grab them both bowls from the cabinet, and by the time he makes his way back to the table with them, his mother has already set the serving dish on a potholder in the middle of the kotatsu. When his father is away on business, they sneak and eat dinner beneath the warmth of its blankets.

He assumes that this too is extraordinarily normal.

The reporter is still going on about the murder as they're giving thanks for their meal. His mother is eying him in the critical way that she does when she wants to ask him something.

He scoops a spoonful of food into his bowl, feeling suddenly famished as he serves himself extra. His mother doesn't comment on it, but instead asks, in a low, questioning voice, "Izaya-kun?"

His mouth is full, so he can only nod, but she takes the hint and continues nonetheless, "Your father and I have been thinking of having another baby. Would you like to have a little sister or brother?"

He stares at her blankly, setting down his chopsticks carefully and wiping his mouth on his napkin. The reporter says something about the victim's name, but he doesn't quite catch it in time.

"Yes," he answers simply, watching as a smile stretches across his mother's face.

She's extremely happy, more than usual, and this change in pace sets fire in his veins. He finds himself wondering if maybe his parents are easier to manipulate than he thought.

"Well," she adds hurriedly, seemingly finding it hard to keep the joy out of her voice, "we're very busy—your father and I—so it might be awhile before anything happens, and being a big brother is a great responsibility, you know that, right—"

"Yes Mother, I understand."

She laughs excitedly, patting him gently on the head.

"You're a very good son, Izaya-kun," She coos.

He's painfully aware of the fish's presence in the trashcan as the reporter goes on about the dead man's family. They call it a tragedy, they call him a victim.

Izaya isn't at all shocked.

After dinner, as his mother puts away the leftovers and sets their bowls in the sink to soak, he offers to take out the trash.

And it's only when he's standing in their tiny backyard, lifting the lid of the metal bin and tossing the bag inside, that he allows himself to scowl.

He can still feel the fish's eyes through the dark plastic of the trash bag.

"It's not my fault," He hisses, "he was already dead."

He is met with silence, shivering shoeless in the snow.

"Stop looking at me like that."

But he can still feel those eyes following him, even as he slams to bin closed and saunters into the warmth of his house.

They haunt him as he takes his bath, as he's shimmying into his pajamas and tucking himself into bed. He can see them in the dark corners of his dreams, following him, judging him, and knowing, somehow, that there is something so terribly wrong with him…

And he hates it.

Fin.

So I'd just like to point out that I have no idea what they ate for dinner. I know absolutely nothing about Japanese food, so all of my characters just end up eating some type of stir-fry.

I like to think that Izaya was always a smart kid—just a little too smart for his own good and sort of trapped by the normalcy of his life. I tried to capture that here, but… who knows?

Thanks to Chappy-the-Bunny for not only introducing me to this series, but for beta-ing this story!

A Kotatsu is defined as "a low, wooden table frame covered by a futon, or heavy blanket, upon which a table top sits" while a Ganguro girl is a Japanese girl who rebels against Japan's beauty norm of pale skin and dark hair by bleaching her hair blonde, tanning, and wearing heavy makeup. Think of the girls who always pick on Anri.

Anywho, thank you so much for taking the time to read this and please feel free to leave a review and let me know what you thought!