"Those are all Shizu-chan." Izaya held the bangs covering his forehead up to expose faint scars. "Except this." He moved his finger to one on the side of his head. "This is Tokyo Metropolitan Police." His red eyes turned to slits. "Some officer questioning me decided I wasn't cooperating nicely enough so he cracked my head on the edge of the table. Granted, I was no more cooperative while unconscious." He took off his shirt. "The cuts are all street fights. Or attacks." His fingers brushed tentatively over the long fresh pink scar crossing over his stomach. "Shizu-chan doesn't use weapons in the traditional sense of the word. Not that I'm complaining. I would've been long since beheaded by a flying knife if he did." He sighed. "Your turn now. I'm afraid if I take off my pants we may get too distracted to continue."

"I wouldn't mind that." Aoba argued with a sly smile even while his hands curled into fists in his lap.

"Keep your end of the deal first, Aoba-kun." Izaya swatted Aoba's hands away when they reached for the button of his black jeans.

Aoba winced when Izaya took hold of his head and pulled his hair back from his forehead. He knew there was nothing visible there but he preferred for Izaya not to pry. The fractures from where his skull had been cracked twice could be still felt at the back of his head if one were to comb through his hair attentively enough.

Aoba didn't want Izaya to know. It was way too dangerous to reveal any weaknesses to a man like him.

Izaya's hand thankfully slid down to his neck and not to the back of his head. There used to be fingermarks there almost all the time years ago, the memory of being lifted off the ground by hands squeezing life out of him through the murderous pressure on his windpipe one of the least pleasant Aoba had. But these marks were all long since gone, too.

Aoba took a calming breath and did his best to retain his smile. Maybe it wasn't as brilliant an idea as he'd initially thought to sneak into the informant's bed. Was he forgetting about how his body was marked and therefore rendered useless as a means of seducing anyone? How could anyone want it after what it had been through, all at the hands of one boy? With all the faint scars and barely there memories of pain he'd left behind it was always going to be his, not anyone else's, and not even Aoba's own to offer to anyone in the first place.

"Why are you so tense?" Izaya asked softly. He had been way more relaxed if not gleeful while showing off his battle scars.

There was a difference though between getting hurt in fights, like a man, and getting beaten up as a kid who with his feather weight and his body that had been male only on the technical level could only grit his teeth and try not to cry.

No, actually, there were things he could have done, Aoba conceded. He figured it out at one point and the fire he had started in his brother's room had consumed all his belongings before it was put out. Their father broke his brother's nose for endangering the family. Revenge tasted sweet but it couldn't have undone what had already been done.

Aoba held onto the hem of his shirt stubbornly when Izaya tried to take it off him. Not because he hadn't ever been naked in front of Izaya but because before it had always been dark and their minds had been hazy. He didn't want Izaya to look at him in the bright sunlight with the specific intent of finding his scars.

"What are you afraid of?" Izaya asked.

Aoba bit his lip. Of course, Izaya looked right through him. It was indeed very stupid of him to think he could have benefited somehow from sleeping with a man like him. All he was actually doing was handing him cards he was going to use against him in the game they were both playing.

Aoba forced a smile upon his lips, just like he had always done. His brother had always threatened him with an even worse beating if he were to tell anyone about what had been going on so he'd never spoken up. He'd been hiding the fingermarks and bruises under long-sleeved shirts and scrubbing all of the blood off the polished wood floors and his tears had been mixing with the soapy water while at it.

"What happened to you, Aoba-kun?" Izaya asked with genuine interest, leaning down to take a closer look at the small chest, the nearly translucent skin underlain with the faintly blue circuitry of veins criss-crossed by countless small scars. He turned Aoba around and noted how the scars were deeper on the boy's back though not deep enough to be easy to feel during a brief touch. Now that he'd seen them he couldn't stop himself from tracing them with his fingers though. He could tell there was some intent to their design. So that was the reason behind the coldness of Aoba's smile.

"Ran." Aoba confessed tentatively, aware there was no other way to explain it now that he'd been caught. He blinked back tears welling up in his eyes at the thought he had been caught indeed, for the very first time in his life. And not by his parents, who had never been all that interested in looking over his injuries, his mother too preoccupied with her own and his father busy with both hurting her and feeling guilty, not by the doctors whom he'd always avoided like the plague, not by a girl he could have trusted one day, but by his self-acclaimed worst enemy briefly turned an ally.

"The obnoxious brute." Izaya hissed as if that was making him angry.

As Aoba looked down at his own hands and bare arms, he could almost see the bruises, fingermarks and shallow cuts that had been covering them once.

It'd felt so good to set fire to everything Ran had owned. It'd felt even better to make him go to prison. One day, Aoba was going to cause his death and savor the feeling for even longer. He could have done that years ago but he'd chosen his revenge to last, just like the torment had lasted, day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year.

He turned back to face Izaya.

Izaya's brow furrowed when Aoba looked him in the eye, his blue eyes empty and cold like a glint of a blade and his smile even colder.

"And this?" He took hold of Aoba's right wrist and pulled his hand up to his eye level, surveying the fairly fresh scar adorning its both sides as if it had been pierced through with something sharp.

"That's Mikado-senpai, Izaya-san." Aoba said with a smile.

"Do you hate him, too?" Izaya inquired, pressing the scarred back of Aoba's hand to his lips.

The look in Aoba's eyes was enough of an answer, his very essence laid bare for once, cold and sharp and full of malice and anguish, not masked by the usual false politeness. Izaya realized this was the most feeling Aoba had ever expressed in front of him. Not even losing his virginity Izaya had claimed a few weeks ago had moved Aoba in such a way.

It seemed the only way to reach his real self was to inflict physical injury upon him, the kind that left scars. As if he was conditioned to believe that was just how humans stated possessions and formed hierarchies.

Izaya admired Mikado's insight into the boy's soul briefly before taking appropriate action himself.

Aoba winced when he felt the switchblade cut through his skin and flesh though he hadn't even seen Izaya move, much less retrieve the knife and open it. He pressed his hand to his collarbone instinctively, his fingers moving to hold the edges of the wound together even as crimson droplets of blood were escaping his body and starting to run down his chest.

Izaya pushed him down to the floor and bent down to lick his chest and his wound clean, lapping up the blood eagerly.

"Why did you..." Aoba uttered weakly, his head swimming with the onslaught of sensations.

The long buried memories of admiring puddles of blood on the floor before wiping them off, of pressing his small hands against the bruises forming outlines of bigger hands on his body and comparing the size, of enjoying having his perfect existence marred somehow so that he'd at last felt alive exploded under his eyelids, squeezed shut in pain and pleasure and shame at the same time.

"I hate you." He whispered once he regained his senses, panting heavily between words.

Izaya started cleaning his wound with careful jabs of cloth soaked with antiseptic.

"I prefer for you to hate me than to fuck a breathing doll." He said. "It's not like I could have hoped for anything else anyway."

Aoba felt like thanking Izaya for reminding him that he was not a doll indeed. But he bit down his tongue before he could have uttered such stupid words to his enemy.

He opted for a smile that held no substance and no meaning but served perfectly to hide his true self from ever being spotted by anyone but the select few.