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Chapter 9

Posted: 04/11/2020

Status: Ongoing

Izaya was even more fucked than he thought.

Just in case, he threw another one of his knives, but got the same result.

“Crap.” He muttered and rolled to the very back of the elevator, suddenly overcome with intense vertigo. There was no way he’d survive a drop from this height. Not only that, but with how gravity currently was being, he wouldn’t even risk it. Who knew what would happen?

This was too ridiculous to be true, so he pinched his own arm.

“Ow.”

Okay, so it probably wasn’t a dream. The fact remained that whatever was currently happening certainly wasn’t a natural phenomenon. It had to be supernatural in nature, then, much as he loathed the idea. He would have preferred dealing with humans who had too much money and grandiose ideas of revenge. Because, in the end, humans were all the same: predictable in their unpredictability, and they could always be manipulated in some way or another.

Monsters, though? Not so much.

Izaya took a deep breath and punched the button to close the elevator doors. Thankfully, they did, ridding him of this boundless sea of blue and the reversed world above him.

He looked at the buttons in silence then, slowly, brought his hand to the button that should have initially brought him to the ground floor.

At first, the elevator didn’t seem to budge, and Izaya almost pressed another button before all the lights switched off at once, the elevator being plunged in obscurity.

“Of course.” He sighed. Nothing in this world made sense. The supernatural route was getting more and more plausible. Monsters made no sense, after all, their world, or…whatever this place was, wouldn’t either.

He pressed random buttons in the dark, but of course nothing happened.

At the very least, he didn’t seem to be falling (up or down). That was a small mercy.

…

In the meantime, Shizuo and Mirai were still going through the same hall again, and again. They’d switched to walking instead of running around.

There was no point in hurrying if they would always end up in the same place anyway.

Shizuo stopped in the middle of the hallway and sighed.

“We’re going nowhere.” He looked at the little girl who had stopped beside him. “You okay?”

They had been running for a while there, he wouldn’t be surprised if Mirai was tired after all this.

“I’m fine.” She said monotonously. Really, he couldn’t help but see his younger brother as a child when he looked at her. She kinda looked like him too, though she also looked like the flea.

He had no idea what to think of that, so he decided to ignore it, like most things that confused him.

“Well, alright then. Tell me if you ever get tired though.” He said, and she nodded, messy hair bobbing up and down with the movement.

He moved to the room closest to them and opened the door. Maybe the escape was somewhere else? Stairs clearly weren’t the way out.

That, or the hospital had suddenly become humongous and all floors were exact copies of each other.

He’d say it was unlikely but strange things kept happening one after the other in this place. Who even knew what would happen next?

Of course, the room was exactly like the other ones they had seen with Izaya. Just the barest essentials and not much else. Same for all the other rooms on this floor.

“Ugh, is there even a way out at all?” Shizuo grumbled.

“There is.” Mirai’s calm voice interrupted Shizuo’s turbulent thoughts. He blinked at her.

”…What?”

“There is a way out.” She said, not elaborating.

“Right, yeah. We managed to get in, so we should be able to get out.” He said, scratching his hair. “But this place is all weird, I don’t know where the exit is supposed to be…”

She stared at him pointedly, but said nothing. He went back to exploring the small room they were in.

He looked everywhere, opened all the drawers, looked under the bed, removed the covers and even the mattress. Mirai had simply looked at him for a while, then moved her attention back to the window, staring idly outside like she was doing when they met.

Shizuo paused.

The window.

He approached Mirai, then looked through the window. They were on the second floor, it seemed. The street was visible underneath and Shizuo considered his options.

They could keep looking for a way to get to the hospital lobby.

Or they could jump.

Mirai was a child, she wouldn’t survive this kind of fall, but what if Shizuo cushioned her fall? His strength may be failing him, but he was still pretty damn resilient, and if being shot or ran over barely even harmed him, a fall from the second floor of a building wouldn’t kill him either.

“So that’s what you were saying, huh. There is a way out.” He gave the kid a smile, and opened the window. “Hold tight, we’re gonna jump.”

…

Izaya remained there, in the complete darkness, for an unknown period of time. It could have been a few minutes just like it could have been hours, he had no way to tell.

He had searched in all his pockets and found none of his phones, only a few knives here and there but they certainly weren’t going to help him guess the time.

He reached for the elevator buttons to try and make it move one last time—

…However, his hand was met with thin air.

He wheeled himself ahead to find a wall and find his way to the buttons this way, but found none. He kept going forward, and never once met any obstacle.

“Oh, wonderful.” He said aloud to no-one in particular, voice full of sarcasm. He kept going forward, the only solid surface being the floor underneath the wheels. After a while, he started to perceive his own body again, yet the world around him remained pitch black. “Am I having hallucinations, is that it?”

“Close, but wrong.” A familiar voice piped up from behind him, startling him. He would recognize that low grumble anywhere.

He whirled around using the controls on the armrests and was faced with a very familiar face.

In front of him stood Shizuo…or at least, a man who looked like he could be his twin. His golden eyes were identical, although they looked softer, more tired. His hair was about the same length and in the same state of disarray as usual, but it was an unbleached brown instead of the bright blonde Izaya was used to seeing.

To top it all off, he wasn’t wearing his usual bartender getup, but what looked like hospital robes instead.

“Who are you.” Izaya demanded, observing the doppelganger warily.

”…You can call me Tsugaru.” The man answered calmly, so unlike Shizu-chan.

“Right. So, ‘Tsugaru’, you wouldn’t happen to know what is going on in here, would you not?” He gave the man a threatening grin. Tsugaru didn’t seem bothered by it.

“I do, but that’s not why I’m here.” He spoke.

“Oh, really now.” Izaya’s eyes dangerously narrowed to slits.

“I came here to get you out of here.” He said as he approached the informant. Izaya immediately wheeled himself back and away from the man.

“Stay away or I’ll slit your throat.”

Tsugaru sighed.

“Fine. I was gonna bring you to the exit, but alright. Follow me, then.”

“And why should I trust some man who looks like a copy of my worst enemy? Do you even hear yourself?” Izaya refused to budge, except to get away whenever Tsugaru made a step towards him.

The man looked up with an exasperated expression.

“Come on, we don’t have time to waste. Stop being a baby and follow me or I’m carrying you all the way to the exit.” He snapped at Izaya, a familiar expression of annoyance showing up on the familiar face.

“No.” Izaya said petulantly and the Shizuo lookalike threw his hands up in aggravation, then launched himself at Izaya, completely ignoring the repeated slashes and stabs all over his arms and back as he took him and threw him over his shoulder.

“We’re going, whether you like it or not. We need you alive.” Tsugaru said, then jogged in a specific direction, leaving the wheelchair to disappear in the darkness. Izaya kept struggling and stabbing him in various places all over his back, ignoring the pain all that moving around was giving him. Tsugaru let him take his anger out on him. Not like he felt any of that any more than a regular person would mosquito bites anyway.

“Put me down this instant.” Izaya ordered, but it fell on deaf ears. “Hey, are you listening to me, amoeba?! I said to put me down!”

Tsugaru grit his teeth but remained silent, he couldn’t afford to mess up here. He was almost there, he only needed to go a bit further and—

Izaya opened his eyes and was met with the familiar streets of Tokyo.

He looked down at himself. He was sitting in the chair Mirai had given him.

He looked around and recognized all the buildings around him, but something was wrong. Those buildings were all familiar to him, and that was exactly why he knew something was very, very wrong.

After all, Sunshine 60 was nowhere near his apartment, yet here they were. Standing right next to each other.

He could recognize various buildings from different wards of Tokyo, all standing in the same space.

The man, Tsugaru, was gone as well. Izaya frowned.

He went back to observing the buildings. The more he looked at them, the stranger they seemed. It was looking at a word for so long it stopped looking like a word altogether. The more he stared, the less real they felt.

It was like reality was falling apart.

As he came to a realization, Izaya was startled by the sound of something heavy hitting the ground behind him.

Author's note: Stuff is happening.