When the red fog finally cleared from Aoba's field of vision, Izaya was no longer in the city.

Because it had been weeks.

Aoba had been apparently going to school every morning and coming back home to his mother every night during that time, going through the motions of his days as usual, circling Anri's shop aimlessly for hours whenever he had nothing to do, waiting for her to give him further orders. She'd never given him any. She'd just been keeping him sedated like that.

Kuon wasn't returning his calls anymore after that time and always found some excuse not to talk to him at school. The discussions on the Dollars boards had been going their own way for weeks and Aoba, being as out of the loop as he was, didn't feel like engaging with them again when there was no purpose to it all anymore.

He went to Anri's shop after school and walked through its door for the first time since she'd subjugated him like that.

"Are you proud of yourself?" He asked her right away.

She was standing behind the counter, staring at its top.

"I don't regret what I did." She said after a while of silence. "What I regret is that I didn't cut Masaomi, too."

"Izaya ran away because of you. You caused Kida's death to be in vain."

"I talked to Celty-san, Aoba-kun." Anri looked up. "She told me that because of some things she'd done when she had been a Dullahan, Izaya's in an unnatural situation now. If he's killed, he gets to relive the moment of his death until he finds a way to survive. It's nearly impossible to kill him."

"And you believed that?"

"I have a cursed sword inside of my own body. And Celty-san is my friend. I did believe her."

"Well, if that's true…" Aoba shrugged. "I still hope he gets to suffer for what he did to his sisters. Hopefully, someone somewhere will get him and slaughter him, repeatedly if need be. Too bad it won't be me."

"It won't." Anri agreed.

"If you're going to be like that, we might as well make the most out of it, Anri-chan."

Anri didn't seem surprised that he'd called her that all of a sudden.

Maybe because it was not entirely his own idea, he thought. The uncertainty about that was going to be constantly there from now on and it was going to be insufferable. But he was still unable to stop himself from speaking the next words.

"After I finish school in the spring, let's get married, Anri-chan."

Izaya didn't enjoy his new surroundings, mostly because he'd made a conscious decision not to explore them in depth. There was nothing left for him to do like that, other than waiting around for the right time to make his final move.

He had been thinking about Kuronuma at times, about how he'd been subdued by a monster who did as it pleased with him. He had conquered his monster himself. Even if it didn't feel that way when he had to let it kiss him, with the possibility of more still floating in the air.

Once they'd settled down properly and Shizuo had found a job, bringing in pitiful amounts of money that would have never been enough anyway in the long run, Izaya started executing his plan. It took months because every step hurt and every day was one too many to get through and also because he wanted to wait but the years he'd once planned would have been too much. He drudged along somehow, went out to meet some people he'd heard about when Shizuo wasn't home and for once arranged for him to be dealt with properly.

He'd tried so many times before, renting trucks to run Shizuo over, arranging for heavy machinery to fall on him, preparing explosions for him to die in, not to mention all the times he'd personally wounded him with his knife. To no avail. Maybe because he was never serious about ending things like that. Shiki had gotten pretty close, because he had no such qualms, but at that time, it had been too soon to let Shizuo die. Now, the right time was drawing near.

The hanami season started again and everything was ready.

"I appreciate what you did for me, Shizu-chan," Izaya said on the night before with a smile.

Shizuo seemed quite unsettled by him bringing that up.

"I hope it was worth it," Izaya continued.

He knew Shizuo actually had doubts and suffered for it. That was the point of using him to kill Kida in the first place, that and getting even for the time he had not helped him.

On that night Izaya let Shizuo have his way with him to deal with how upset he'd become, and it seemed like they reached some kind of a twisted balance in what they'd done to each other.

"Let's go watch cherry blossoms tomorrow," Izaya offered.

Shizuo didn't answer him, already asleep, which was just as well, Izaya thought, because he didn't really mean it.

The explosion that killed Shizuo on his way to work the next day wrecked several buildings and destroyed a dozen cars. There were no other victims but him.

"Have you heard, Kuronuma-senpai?"

"Heard what?" Aoba said into the phone.

He had been putting on his cufflinks before Kuon had called and didn't really appreciate the interruption at this particular moment even though it was the first time Kuon contacted him in months.

"That yakuza executive for whom Orihara Izaya worked before he left, Shiki." Kuon said. He sounded very amused. "He has just had his wife and kid murdered last night."

"Kuon, I don't have time for this," Aoba said, taking a deep breath and looking himself over in the mirror. "Not inow/i."

"I'm pretty sure Izaya was behind that. What's more important than that?"

"I'm getting married." Aoba saw his eyes turn red briefly in the mirror.

"Ah, right, I forgot about that." Aoba bet Kuon hadn't forgotten. "Good luck then. I'll call you later." Kuon ended the call with that.

And somehow what he'd said evaporated from Aoba's memory right away and the next day, when he looked at his call history, he couldn't remember why Kuon had called him at all.

"It's all right," Anri whispered to him.

It was not all right though and Aoba clutched his head as if he could crawl the parasite that had invaded his mind out like that.

Having tied up the loose ends, Izaya left again. Shiki should have been smart enough not to look for him, but who knew if witnessing the aftermath of what Izaya had arranged to happen to his family wasn't going to make him lose his edge.

All that was left to do was wait for death. But first he went to see the cherry blossoms, on his own. They reminded him of Mikado and of a lot of different things. But that was fine at this point and he actually enjoyed their beauty.

END