Heiwajima Shizuo Episode
This is a story of the past.
A story of twisted past.
Somewhere in Ikebukuro. An alley.
“Um, you’re Heiwajima Shizuo-san… right?”
“What?”
Heiwajima Shizuo, now a third year in high school, frowned unconsciously as this voice addressed him.
Standing before him was a girl barely into middle school.
She was dressed unassumingly in casual clothes, and it was hard to imagine her as the type of girl that would approach a delinquent with dyed-blond hair.
“Um, my name is Kinomiya Kazane. I’m sorry if I approached the wrong person.”
“…No, I’m Shizuo. You need something?”
Kinomiya Kazane. He thought for a while, but it was a completely unfamiliar name.
Could bullies have dared her to approach him?
With this thought, Shizuo glanced around.
But as he saw that no one was observing them, he grew increasingly uncertain.
As he did this, the girl started, timidly,
“Ah… Um, sorry if I’m interrupting something.”
“No, I’m… pretty much done with my business already.”
Shizuo replied, cracking his neck.
His ‘business’ was piled high in a mountain behind him.
Although dressed in varying attire, at a glance the men were clearly gangsters.
As usual he had been challenged without any real reason, and barraged by more than twenty opponents; yet as of just now Shizuo had retaliated and come out of the fight nearly unscathed.
Yet this girl spoke to him as though they were friends, nervously but clearly.
“Um… There are some things… I want to ask…”
“Are you on a dare? I’m exactly what I look like.”
Thinking he must have been approached by someone seeing him as no more than an exotic beast at a zoo, Shizuo dully jerked his head to indicate the prone forms of the delinquents behind him.
“I’ve no mood to spell things out one by one. Sorry.”
Not knowing how he should be treating a girl younger than himself, Shizuo opt to distance himself from her.
But the girl’s reply threw him for a loop.
“You’ve gotten it wrong! The one I want to ask about isn’t you… it’s Kishitani Shinra-san!”
“…Shinra?”
At those words, Shizuo slowly grew more hesitant.
“Yes, I’ve been looking into Kishitani-sempai for some time now. Before today I asked this person called Kadota-san, too… But I want to hear more from different people… About what kind of a person he is, or what he likes, things like that…”
Heiwajima Shizuo, elementary school era.
“Uwaaaahh!”
Shizuo had returned to class, having completed his term at the hospital after dislocating a multitude of bones throughout his body.
He was received by the fearful wailing of his classmates.
His various dislocations were due to having performed an act beyond the capacity of his own body.
In other words—infuriated by the teasing of his classmates, he had performed the superhuman feat of raising a desk and flinging it at a velocity exceeding 100km/h.
The table had flown past the perpetrators of the teasing, and pierced the wall of the classroom.
If its path had diverged by ten or twenty centimetres, even in the best case scenario, at least one of his classmates would likely no longer be around in the world today.
Even as children, the classmates responsible for the teasing now understood this on an instinctual level, and staring at Shizuo, they cried out, blood draining from their faces.
A few days passed.
Shinra, who had only approached Shizuo with a smile, had had his wrist sprained. With the spread of this rumour, Shizuo’s days of being ostracised by his classmates continued for a time.
Shinra himself seemed unaffected. ‘You see, normal people don’t recover in such a short time. Even a sprain takes a few days to heal, this can only mean your body is special! Not only that, it might be growing even more unique as we speak!’ He would prattle on excitedly about this even though Shizuo could care less.
“…Hey, Shinra.”
“Yeah?”
Quietly.
With a tint of frailty to his voice, fear lurking in the darkness of his eyes, Shizuo murmured.
“Doesn’t being with me… make you scared?”
He averted his eyes as he spoke. Shinra tilted his head.
“Why?”
“You know Hiruyama who was teasing me, and even the rest of the class, they all call me a monster behind my back?”
“Yeah, that’s true, I think you must be some kind of monster or demon too, you know? What’s with this all of a sudden? There’s no way human child could have put a desk into a wall, is there?”
Shinra stated this readily. Yet he only proceeded to tilt his head further in confusion and ask a question of his own:
“So, what has that got to do with being scared?”
“…You’re seriously saying that.”
Shizuo sensed something foreboding from Shinra, who had said those words not to console him, but out of genuine perplexion.
He sighed deeply to shake off that trace of fear, and told Shinra,
“Anyway, just leave me alone. You’ll get bullied.”
A few days later.
Hiruyama and his group, the ones who had started the entire chain of events, suddenly came to him and apologised.
Their eyes were fearful, but rather than Shizuo, those eyes were directed at Shinra, who stood behind them, smiling happily.
Both Shinra and Hiruyama and company had bruises on their faces, and scuffs on their bodies from what must have been a serious fight.
After accepting the apology from Hiruyama and chasing away the group, Shizuo frowned and asked Shinra,
“What happened?”
“Ah well, I just said they should apologise. Then some stuff happened and we ended up in a fight.”
A fight. One could hardly imagine a word like that having a place in the life of the flimsy-looking, bespectacled boy.
Shizuo, brow furrowed, asked Shinra.
“You… Why would you go so far for someone like me?”
There Shinra looked startled for an instant, before he laughed and waved it off.
“Ahh, no, no, it wasn’t because of you. I wouldn’t go around picking fights with people just for your sake.”
Shinra said this casually, before he crossed his arms and pouted.
“But you see, Hiruyama-kun and his friends were horrible, you know? It’s one thing if they call you a monster—”
“So you’re fine with that?”
“It doesn’t matter to me even if you’re a monster, Shizuo-kun. Though you might be human too. That’s why I’d love if you’d let me dissect you, so I can find out… Anyway, that’s not the point right now.”
Shinra uttered such inhuman words nonchalantly, before going on to say,
“But hear me out, Shizuo-kun. Those guys, they said, ‘Monsters can’t get along with humans,’ and, ‘Someone should get an adult to exterminate him’, you know? Don’t you think that’s horrible? Exterminating someone just for being a monster! So then I got angry and ended up fighting with them…”
Shinra had calmed down by now, but there was real anger in his voice.
It was almost as if someone had badmouthed his family; Shizuo tilted his head at the other boy in confusion for a moment, before he sighed.
“…You’re a weird guy, huh.”
In a rare display, Shizuo expressed his true heart to someone outside his family. Shinra widened his eyes at him in surprise.
“…I never thought I would be hearing that from you.”
A few years later. Ikebukuro.
“Then things just snowballed from there. We went to different middle schools, but we met again in high school, so here we are.”
“So that’s how it is…”
“So, well, what I can say about him is very simple. He’s weird, and he’s a good-for-nothing. But even if he’s a bad guy, I don’t think it would be from the core of him, yeah?”
After a moment of hesitation, he smiled wryly and continued.
“…After all, he really saved me when I was a kid.”
As he reached this point, the thought suddenly came to Shizuo.
Why was he confiding this much of his past in this girl?
As this thought came to him, Shizuo realised.
That somewhere, somehow—he sensed the same air from her that Shinra had had in their elementary school years.
“Hey… are you afraid of me?”
“In other words… you can’t complain if you die, haaaaaAAAAAaaahHH?!”
On the roof of an adjacent building.
A boy looked down at the girl running off against the backdrop of Shizuo’s roar of rage.
“Now, putting aside whether Shizu-chan will die against that many people… that girl’s been showing up a lot around here.”
The boy in the black uniform—Orihara Izaya—murmured to himself as he watched the girl.
“Maybe I should have her looked into just a little…”
And the city began to twist again, beginning with the words of the boy who was to become an ‘informant’.
While even the very people who were being twisted remained clueless of what would be born of this, in the city, in the distant future.
****EPISODE END****
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