"Oh, hey! Shizuo-san! Shizuo-saaaaaaan!"

Try as he might, Shizuo could not ignore the sound of his name being called. He took a deep breath, turning on his heel in the middle of the sidewalk. All around him people kept a wide berth; scared off either by his reputation or the intensely annoyed expression on his face.

Neither seemed to phase the two girls currently skipping up to him.

"Ne, Shizuo-san. You weren't ignoring me, were you?"

Orihara Mairu blinked up at him, mischief painted all over her face. Beside her, Orihara Kururi also gazed at him with blank curiosity, as if she actually wanted to know Shizuo's answer.

He clicked his tongue. "I was trying to. You guys know Kasuka isn't home at the moment, right?"

Ever since he'd been picked up by that talent scout, Kasuka had hardly had a moment of free time. From being a clothing model in magazines, to television ads, and now even filming a show of his own. Shizuo didn't know how these kids knew that Hanejima Yuuhei was actually Heiwajima Kasuka (possibly their fleabag brother, but not necessarily; they had their own strange ways of finding things out), but they did, and they bugged him incessantly.

Mairu laughed. "No, no, it's okay, Shizuo-san. We're not here to talk to you about your brother."

Kururi nodded. "Question… for… you?"

Shizuo sometimes wondered what his relationship with these two would be if they were more like their brother. Sure, they were weird and sometimes annoying, but totally manageable. He'd never once felt the incandescent rage that took over whenever he saw Izaya, towards the twins (even if their faces were similar enough to make his eye twitch).

It would horrify him if he ever did, he thought. They were hardly even pre-teens; Shizuo wasn't sure if they'd even had their eleventh birthday yet. If they ever managed to make him angry enough to see red, Shizuo didn't think he had the self-control to not kill them where they stood.

Surely though. Surely they knew him well enough that they wouldn't provoke him like that. The fact was that they weren't like their prick of an older brother. They were strange, but in general, they were good kids.

Which was why they could have a civil relationship like this in the first place.

"A question for me? Shoot, I guess."

Bouncing forward on her toes just a little, Mairu grinned at him. "Have you heard, Shizuo-san, about the new guy in Ikebukuro?"

He snorted. "There are always new people in this city, kid. You're gonna have to be a little more specific."

"Swords?" Kururi held her hands out as if to say 'ye big', but-

Her arms were stretched to their full reach; the gap between her hands was enormous. Was she trying to say there was a guy running around with a sword almost as long as she was tall?

Just about to shoot her down, Shizuo paused. There was something, a vague recognition tugging insistently at the forefront of his brain. Crossing his arms with a frustrated huff, he cast his mind back.

Social interactions had been especially scarce these last few weeks, so it couldn't have been something said to him directly. He had to have picked it up out on the streets, or overheard it at work.

"Dude dressed all in black?" He murmured, feeling the memory come back in increments. It had been at work; he'd been waiting tables at the same place for almost a month now, and he'd learned early on that the cooks were incurable gossips. One of them had taken great relish in passing on the details of the latest myth to hit Ikebukuro, to anybody who would listen.

Shizuo was rarely one of those people.

"That's the one!" Mairu cheered, pumping her fist in the air. "Do you remember anything else?"

"Not really," he said, shrugging. "I didn't really pay any attention when it was mentioned."

She waved a hand, as if physically brushing his words away. "Don't mind! There isn't much concrete info to the legend anyway. Just that one day a man appeared out of nowhere in the middle of Ikebukuro, wearing black robes and carrying two black blades. They say that he can walk on air, and not everybody is able to see him. People online have even said that when they spotted him, friends right next to them couldn't see a thing."

Kururi wriggled her fingers in Shizuo's direction. "Spooky."

He snorted. "Sounds like an urban… myth…"

Mairu clapped her hands. "Aha! Exactly, Shizuo-san! We of Ikebukuro have no room doubt it, because we have our very own Headless Rider!"

Celty.

Shizuo felt like an idiot.

To be fair though, for Shizuo, Celty was Celty, and that was it. In the last few months, ever since she'd started her courier job, rumours about the 'Headless Rider' had started making their way around the city, but to him, she was still just his friend Celty.

If Shizuo could accept the existence of an Irish faery looking for her missing head in Japan, it wouldn't be too much of a stretch to accept a sometimes-invisible dude walking around in mid-air.

Even though he had no idea what the hell that dude could possibly be.

"Okay, so say he exists. Why did you guys want to ask me about him? Want me to keep an eye out?"

It wouldn't be the first time the twins had asked him for a minor favour, and it wasn't like Shizuo minded. They'd never asked anything particularly annoying of him.

"Mm-mm." Kururi shook her head. "Warning."

Shizuo, who'd been interacting with these girls for several years now, understood immediately.

"You're warning me about him?"

She nodded.

"What for?"

Something ominous stirred deep in his gut. Pre-annoyance, maybe? There was no reason Shizuo could think of for this supernatural stranger to have an issue with him, except his own supernatural strength. And whenever anybody came looking for Shizuo over that…

It pissed him off.

"Oh!" Something must have shown on his face, because Mairu was waving her hands again. "No, it's nothing like that, Shizuo-san. It's just that this guy – Ichigo, his name is Ichigo – has already been snapped up by our despicable Iza-nii!"

"Body… guard…"

"Right! And we thought you should know, because, well, you know…" Mairu trailed off, looking at Shizuo meaningfully.

Shizuo hmphed. He knew where they were going with this; oftentimes, the mere sight of Orihara Izaya was enough to send him into a mindless fury. It didn't matter if the flea had managed to snag a bodyguard with otherworldly powers; the violence that overtook Shizuo was almost never a conscious decision. If the bodyguard took his job any sort of seriously, he would almost definitely be forced to defend his boss from Shizuo's instinctive desire to crush him the next time they encountered each other. He didn't bother kidding himself; he'd never been able to control his rage in his life.

Shizuo had never gone up against anything non-human before either.

For the first time, he wondered if his strength would be enough.

AN: Shizu-chan joins the chat! I really love the twins, in case you couldn't tell. Lmk your thoughts, as usual~ and take care of yourselves!

- Kelly