Because I haven't given Izaya a voice in a long time. Literally.

This is a fairly quiet one-shot with craploads of information written between the lines. The others in the series will probably be louder and more obnoxious.

Butterflies

There is one thing that distinguishes thirteen year old Izaya from the person he grows up to be.

It's a little thing called everything.

This is not an exaggeration. "Everything" means exactly what the dictionary says it ought to mean, which is convenient, because that doesn't usually happen with Izaya - not with adult Izaya, anyways.

Izaya at thirteen is a different matter.

He isn't even fast enough to outrun the yakuza yet, much less his own sanity. He is constantly bored, and just as often, boring. He's incredibly bad at staying entertained, but not quite bad enough for adult Izaya's taste. He has no people to love, he has no love for people. The only personal weapon he owns is an old penknife that doesn't flick open, and it's so impractical to stand there trying to pull the blade out with his fingernails that he never uses it.

Above all else, he is subtle, and who the hell has ever heard of a subtle Izaya?

It's inexcusable how careful he has to be to pursue his hobby of manipulating people (this, at least, has always been a part of him), but at thirteen, he doesn't have the influence over the local law enforcement that his future self takes for granted. He has to get creative - because police officers are so unimaginative, you know, and none of them would appreciate his attempts to make the world a more interesting place.

But precisely because they are so unimaginative, they have no idea that someone like Izaya is behind the string of bizarre crimes in the city. Izaya is free to do whatever he wants, short of causing the apocalypse. He's saving that particular game for a rainy day.

Here's the thing, though: Izaya's still a kid. He's not a normal one, admittedly, and it's true that most of his inner child will actually follow him into adulthood, but right now being a kid means that he's stuck in the only period of his life when he has to actively avoid jailtime. Which means that he goes about doing things the most complicated, indirect way possible. This takes time. And planning. And information. Lots of it.

But the breed of information that thirteen-year-old Izaya collects is shamefully unremarkable, because it's the sort of thing even normal stalkers could figure out: a simple mixture of daily routines and nightly shenanigans. He hates being in the business of predictability but he needs this information to make sure that people meet and bounce off of each other the way he wants them to.

In the future, he will not worry so much about making schedules match up, because he will be able to create new ones for his humans at the snap of his fingers. But this is not the future. Izaya is not yet a walking coincidence. So, he stockpiles dozens of - hundreds of - thousands of spreadsheets with long, fluid timetables. His version of the stereotypical childhood rock collection, if you will.

He cuts into people's lives at the various points where they intersect. And it's so easy he could cry, except he hasn't learned how to cry on command yet either.

It only takes a change of ten seconds to throw off - or correct - somebody's fate.

And Izaya may be young but he already knows how to wind the clock, sometimes a little fast, sometimes a little slow, but always with the very best intentions in mind.

It isn't something that he has to teach himself - nor is it something that can be taught, in general.

It's just something he can do.

If he pulls the timeline this-a-way today, he can force a bus driver to leave home ten seconds too late, sitting impatiently in traffic behind the scene of an accident instead of running his normal route, causing a pregnant woman who is waiting at the bus stop to stand in the heat with her groceries for fifteen minutes, which wilts her bean sprouts beyond recognition, forcing her husband to leave work early the next day for a quick grocery trip to satisfy her cravings, which allows the unscrupulous Tuesday cashier to steal his credit card information. Of course, the timing has to be perfectly exact for that particular scenario, but typically Izaya doesn't need such precision to cause a disaster anywhere, anytime.

It's so simple that a thirteen-year-old could do it.

It's so simple because it is a thirteen-year-old that's doing it.

Izaya thinks of this method as cheating because, at any given moment, the average person just so happens to evade millions of possibilities to get through their day unscathed. All he has to do is ask for a ten second delay somewhere and boom. It's so easy that he could do it in his sleep (and he actually has, you know, which is why he has to change his computer password every few days so that his fingers never get enough muscle memory to type it in his sleep).

The chain reaction that connects the tiniest of events together is very tenuous, like spun cotton candy, but Izaya has vision, and a really big reservoir of luck. He is far more successful than he ought to be.

There is, for instance, nothing significant about the fact that Molly-san the expatriate Englishwoman on the first floor has a cat named Poppy. And across the street, seemingly unrelated, lives a quiet girl named Mitsuko who has debilitating hypnophobia. There is nothing particularly interesting about her, either.

But. Look. Look! Holed up in the apartment on the floor below little Mitsuko, a quietly desperate wife is dressed in unseasonably warm clothing that covers her skin, and she is staring at the cans of cheap beer that her husband has been drinking all night.

In the various degrees of separation between the three of them, there is the easily distracted mailman who loves animals, the chatty mail-order pharmacist who writes Good luck on all of prescriptions that her company fills, the psychiatrist who prescribes Mitsuko a bottle of potent sleeping pills, and the bottle itself, which ends up in the wrong person's hands...all because Izaya borrows Poppy without permission for a day or two.

The mailman is the technically first domino to fall when he rushes through work to help Molly-san search for her kitty, but he is also the last step in the process, because everything else is already done for Izaya.

This is how the quietly desperate wife ends up with a brown paper package on her steps, marked by a scarily personal-looking note that says Good luck.

You figure the rest out.

He once managed a twenty-step chain reaction. It's still his record, in fact.

But by that point, the game bores him so much that he only plays occasionally.

The obvious problem is that, after a while, the same scenario begins to repeat one too many times, and it becomes far too effortless. No challenge, no fun.

The deeper problem is that Izaya sticks to static characters, people whose personalities are fleshed out and solid and stubborn. They are easy to predict and they slide neatly into disaster scenarios, but there is no spontaneity. Just like with reality television and holiday mistletoe, the entertainment value of a really bad situation comes from eyebrow-raising surprise.

He needs to get other obsessive habits, and to improve the ones that he already has.

And he doesn't want to wait.

But Izaya is still thirteen years old, and puberty is hellish enough without him trying to grow up faster.