DURARARA!! Vol.6 INTERLUDE OR PROLOGUE E
INTERLUDE OR PROLOGUE E
AWAKUSU AKANE
The girl was blessed by the world.
By usual standards, she got the best food, clothes and housing.
She lived in a single-family house in the Ikebukuro suburbs, so big that it was a wonder for one to see such a house at all within central Tokyo.
Including a loving mother, an understanding father, a feared but respected grandfather, many people looked out for her well-being and her opinions were never ignored.
But that was not to say that she got whatever she wanted. She was not spoiled or pampered, but rather raised to be a healthy, good child.
Ever since she had become aware of her surroundings, she had not spent a single minute of her life not being completely free.
In fact, the girl didn't even know what it meant to be "unfree"; as a consequence, she had no idea either just how blessed her life was.
The girl had been happy.
Until that second when she got to know what her father and grandfather actually did for a living and what had been going on in the lives of people around her.
It all started with a cell phone.
Her father had hesitated saying "Isn't that too early for an elementary school kid?" But out of his concerns for her safety, he eventually gave her a "line" that was all her own.
That line did not only connect her to the people on the other end of the phone.
This invisible line opened a magical door to a new world in front of the girl's eyes by connecting her to the Internet. She didn't have a personal computer, so it was the first time she got to know the thing called the cyberspace.
Although the Internet was nothing more than virtual reality, there was nevertheless something "real" existing behind the wall of virtuality. True, the people she talked to online were wearing masks in imaginary chatrooms, but they were still actual people rather than artificial intelligence that existed exclusively in the cyberspace.
When one browses online content that was not free, one has to pay with actual money. Any fraud or traps taking advantage of that fact were likewise indisputably real.
From the moment she received her own cell phone, the girl was connected to the innumerable "realities" on the Internet.
Even if that was against the wishes of her own.
The girl's life at school was bright, cheerful and almost free from bullies.
"Almost", because she had seen someone being bullied once.
About half a year ago a girl in her class was shunned by everyone, and dead bugs were found inside her schoolbag.
She had, by chance, seen the bullies at it and told her classmates off in a determined voice:
- It's not good to bully other people.
The girl raised in nothing but happiness said so base on her own moral sense.
But for the girl, nonetheless, it took some effort to muster up the courage.
She was little, but she had somehow sensed it intuitively.
- If she tried to stop them, she would probably become their next target.
But even so, the girl still chose to speak up in the bullied one's defense.
She did not regret it.
At least not back at that time.
At that time she had ended up successful in stopping the act of bullying.
But did she become the next target of bullying herself?
The answer was no.
She was in amazing luck. No one tried to bully her in the couple of days that followed, and she and her friends were able to live their lives in peace.
Maybe there were people being bullied in places she couldn't see. So she thought, but there was no sign of that happening, either.
From that time onwards she became the center of her class.
Although she was a class representative, she did not feel superior to everyone else just because of that. She strived to stay on good terms with everyone else in her class, and bright smiles were never a rare sight around her.
She was happy.
She had thought that her classmates who were laughing with her must have been happy, too.
She had not suspected anything. The girl was lamentably simple only when it came to matters like these.
She was no more than a little girl with a schoolbag on her shoulder, yet she had already begun to think just how beautiful life was, and how she wanted to help all those unfortunate people.
That sentiment was sometimes unnecessary and condescending, but -
At least the girl had gotten many opportunities to help solve interpersonal problems and plan hiking or beach trips for large groups of people. She became not only the center of her class but one of the centers of her school as well.
She wanted her future job to be one that would make even more people smile.
She didn't really know what her grandfather did, but her father seemed to be running a chain of galleries that sold paintings.
On the walls of her house hung several expensive-looking paintings of views in faraway places she did not know. The girl had no clue as to how much these paintings were worth. But she knew that they were very beautiful.
- Such pretty paintings would make many people happy when they see them.
- Dad has such a nice job.
- Right, I'm going to paint my own paintings. I'm going to become a painter!
- I'm going to paint many, many paintings, and maybe someday Dad will sell them for me!
Having made up her mind, the girl began to take art lessons.
People around her were very supportive; but for some reason, her grandfather and her father had exchanged a look when she had told them about her dream.
But even so, the girl was blessed with a dream and a goal now on top of everything else she had already been blessed with.
As part of her life enshrouded in endless happiness, she obtained a cell phone.
The girl had almost never used the cell phone except for to call her family or the police when her life was threatened. But the cell phone had nevertheless brought one fact to her attention.
It was not because anyone had called her.
Not because she logged onto the internal network of her school.
At the first, the incident was a physical one.
An extremely simple incident, in which she forgot her cell phone in her friend's home.
The girl had hurried back to her friend's place.
Just as she was about to ring the doorbell, she heard her friend's voice coming from the yard.
She walked towards the yard to try to talk to her friend - until she heard her own named mentioned by her friend's mother.
"You haven't been bothering Awakusu Akane-chan, have you?"
- Eh?
The girl stopped in her tracks feeling confused.
Three other kids had been with them when they played together at her friend's house.
Only she had to return because she remembered that she had forgotten her cell phone.
Then why did her friend's mother mention her name?
Did something strange happen in her home?
But even if that was the case, the conversation still sounded weird.
- What was she talking about?
The little girl thought that she must have heard wrong.
But her friend's voice that followed blew her thoughts to pieces.
"I got it, Mom! I always do what Akane-chan tells me to do!"
- ……Eh?
For the girl, time stopped.
For her world, everything froze.
It sounded as if the mother was angry that her daughter didn't do her homework and the daughter shot back saying "I'm just about to do it!"
The girl, confused as she was, did not dwell as far on the matter -
But had anyone been there to hear their voices, they would have thought that way.
- That doing as Awakusu Akane told her was an "obligation" just like doing her homework.
"You're sure that no one else made Awakusu Akane-chan unhappy, right?"
"Of course!"
"Really? You'd better be sure because if anyone did, I won't want those people to target us as well! Goodness, I do so hope she's not going to be in the same middle school as you……"
The child, confused at her mother's words, muttered in a somewhat guilty voice:
"……But Akane-chan has never told us to do anything we don't want to do. It's fine, Mom, you worry too much."
Though it sounded like she was defending her friend, the daughter was actually more pestered by her mother jumping to conclusions about people and telling her what to do.
The mother, on the other hand, began to breathe heavily as she shot back at her daughter:
"It's got nothing to do with whether Akane-chan is a good girl or a bad girl! The Awakusu-kai people are terrible! Just try getting into a fight with her or hurting her and you'll know! You have no idea what they're going to do to you!"
- ……
- ……?
- ……? ? ? ……?
The girl did not know what her friend's mother was talking about.
But she did know that her chest felt painful and she could not breathe.
In the end, the girl - Awakusu Akane - turned around and ran home.
She should not be there.
With that clear thought on her mind, she simply kept running.
Her cell phone was still left in her friend's home. But she could no longer bring herself to care.
She just wanted to get away from her friend's home as soon as possible.
She had given up on trying to understand just what the conversation between her friend and her mother had meant.
But fate was not about to leave her in peace.
That very night, her cell phone was brought to her home.
Her friend's parents had driven all the way to her home.
They could have just let their daughter give it to her the next day in class, but they came all the way themselves to give it back to her.
Her friend's parents bowed low in front of her mother.
Her mother had said "Here, Akane, come and thank them properly." She had lowered her head and seen their faces for a second - and they had worn forced smiles that didn't tell her a thing about what they were thinking in their heads.
When she had told an older friend of hers about this -
"That's because cell phones are filled with information. They wanted to make sure that they gave it back before your family started to think that the information stored in their daughter's cell phone had been seen."
That was what the friend had told her. Of course, for Akane it was not something she could dismiss with a simple "Huh, I see."
Because it was the incident that had led to everything else afterwards.
With the cell phone that had been returned to her, the girl logged on to "the Internet". She was so nervous at the beginning that she did not know what to do.
She had never used the Internet before. About her cell phone all she knew was its number. But after a couple of days, the receptive child gradually learned how to "walk around" on the Internet.
Of course, her life at school stayed normal.
The friend treated her in exactly the same way as she had before.
She actually felt afraid at finding out just how little had changed.
Maybe she did hear them wrong that day - she began to harbor such hopes again.
But the world the cell phone had connected her to was about to tell her the cruel truth.
When she felt comfortable using the search tool, the girl made up her mind to look something up.
She typed the word "Awakusu" into the box and looked at the results.
"Medei Group Awakusu-kai"
"Fuguruma Youki", a free online encyclopedia.
It had a detailed entry on everything related to this organization.
As an elementary kid she didn't understand every single thing that was written there, but she came to know one important thing -
What kind of organization Awakusu-kai was.
Akane found herself shaking all over as this realization hit her.
- This is not right.
Someone must have gotten it wrong.
She had seen the name "Awakusu-kai" in various places in her home.
She knew that the paper lanterns in the room with the shrine had the words "Awakusu-kai" on them.
- This has to be wrong.
She was sure that it was another organization that just happened to have the same name.
She was almost convinced, but -
The moment she saw her grandfather's photo, under which the caption read "Head of Awakusu-kai", the girl felt her world come to a grinding halt.
And that was not all -
On another website she found using the search tool, she saw the words "…selling paintings as a legal camouflage." and with that, her frozen world began to crumble to pieces.
But even after that, she neither made a scene at home nor screamed.
She simply turned off the network connection with still, glassy eyes, and dialed the number of one of her friends.
It was the girl whom she had defended in front of the bullies.
She had thought that they had become close friends after that incident. So she called her and asked one question.
"Why……does everybody just listen to what I say?"
She asked.
The girl must have realized that her voice was somewhat trembling.
The girl, her close friend, hesitated but eventually began to tell her everything word by word.
"……Actually, everyone was saying that they were going to bully you next, Akane-chan. They told me if I joined them in bullying you they would stop bullying me. But……one of them said that Akane-chan's father was a really scary man, and it would be a bad idea to make him angry……"
Some of the kids told their parents, and the rumor spread like a wildfire among parents in the neighborhood.
"Our kids were planning to bully the granddaughter of the Head of Awakusu-kai!"
Some parents panicked at the thought and told their kids over and over:
"Never, never upset that girl called Awakusu Akane!"
Because she was the granddaughter of the Head of Awakusu-kai.
What was more, if their kids bullied her at school, they would have had no moral excuse even if the other party made a false charge against them.
Before something like that could happen, some parents began to warn their children:
"You should never piss Akane-chan off."
If they told their kids to stay away from Awakusu Akane, it might have been seen as a form of bullying.
But if their kids got so close to her that they fight over something trivial and hurt her in the process, it would have spelt trouble as well.
So the parents told their kids to always make Awakusu Akane look good.
When TV programs began to discuss the internal networks in schools, some parents became so paranoid that they made their children tell them the address of the internal network and checked to make sure that no one had written a bad word about Awakusu Akane on the website.
What these parents did became gossip material in itself and in turn affected other parents. The kids, too, told each other about the rumors they heard - and in the end, everyone knew better than to say a single "No" to Akane.
Akane herself, on the other hand, had no idea that she had become the queen in the classroom.
She had always thought that she was at level with everyone else. She had never looked down or been condescending on anyone.
But little did she know that everyone around her were just dolls propped from below to match her height.
Did the Head or Young Head of Awakusu-kai threaten non-yakuza people with the name Awakusu-kai on their daughter's interpersonal matters? In fact, no one could say yes to that question.
But the paranoia spread because some of the parents kept overreacting.
Had they not overreacted, would Awakusu Akane already be bullied, and would her father who was an executive of Awakusu-kai or her grandfather who was the head have done something of that sort about it?
No one could be sure that they would "never" do something like that. That was the reason why this twisted web of interpersonal relationships formed around her in the first place.
Though that kind of analysis was beyond her ability just from hearing what her friend had told her, the girl - whose intuition was sharp for her age - was able to get a general idea of the kind of environment she was in.
Akane hung up the phone and kept her head low for a while as she sat in the room.
She had thought that she was a fortunate and happy girl.
Yes, in fact, she was.
But she had thought that everyone else had been as fortunate and happy as she was.
She had thought that there were no bullies in her class, and everyone was free to say what they wanted to say.
But it turned out that it was she who had taken the freedom away from her classmates.
As a result, she was never bullied by anyone.
But that result no longer mattered to Akane.
Time ticked away as she sat there frozen. From the kitchen, she heard her mother calling for her.
It looked like the dinner was ready.
Her father and her grandfather were both busy, so she and her mother were usually the only ones at the table. But Akane had never felt lonely. Her father was always extremely caring when she was able to meet him, and she really liked her father that way.
The girl tried to cheer herself up as she had dinner with her mother.
She smiled her usual smile and talked in the same merry voice.
She had to pretend that everything was alright.
So she thought as she finished her dinner and returned to her room with the forced smile still on her face as she closed her door. Trying to find a distraction, she began to tidy up her desk.
In the middle of that, one of her sketchbooks on the desk was swept to the ground and laid open.
It was a drawing of her classmates eating lunch together.
Everyone had a happy smile on his or her face.
A truly happy one, from the bottom of the heart.
The minute she saw the drawing, she finally collapsed.
"Ah……ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!"
Akane ripped the drawing off the sketchbook, crushed it into a ball, tore it into pieces, and threw them away.
- "I'm going to paint many, many paintings, and maybe someday Dad will sell them for me!"
The girl was reminded of her own dream.
She did not even understand why she was so upset. The little girl cried, screamed and kept destroying her own drawings.
Everything she had seen -
The happy faces of her classmates - they were all lies.
And the one who made them lies was no other than herself.
As if out of her mind, she kept destroying her drawings - destroying her dream.
It all happened in mere seconds. But for the girl it felt like eternity.
In her distorted sense of time, the girl no longer thought of her past life as happy.
But as she got to the middle of the sketchbook, her hands stopped.
It was a drawing of her father and mother's faces.
Looking at the page with her family drawn on it, Akane at last realized something.
Even though she was shocked when she got to know what her father and grandfather did at Awakusu-kai - she simply couldn't bring herself to hate her family.
"Akane? Akane! What happened!?"
Having heard her daughter crying, her mother rushed into her room.
Akane did not know what to do. She simply dived into her mother's arms and kept crying.
The girl was blessed by the world.
But for her that bliss did not always mean happiness.
The girl went back to her normal life with a heart broken in places.
She knew that she was feeling more and more distant from her family, or her father in particular.
Mikiya, her father, seemed to have noticed that his daughter was aware of what he actually did for a living. He kept trying to see how distant they had become, but that was it.
Everyday, she put on a smile at school in order to not show her real feelings to anyone.
She was shocked when she knew that the world around her was built upon layers of lies. But it was even harder now for her that these lies were destroyed and replaced with reality.
Her classmates acted as Akane wanted them to. Akane acted as she was expected to in front of the lying faces.
The world consisted of nothing but lies. Even herself was a lie.
That was the world she had been blessed by.
Several months later -
The girl made up her mind to run away from home when she felt that she couldn't take it any more.
She did not think it would do any good.
But if she went to a place where no one knew about her or the name Awakusu, her life would probably be changed. So she believed.
She used her cell phone to look up information she needed to run away from home.
After trying a couple of keywords, she had already found some sites that looked useful.
With shaking hands she posted on the discussion boards -
And a man with the handle "Nakura" immediately came into active contact with her.
He answered Akane's childish questions patiently and thoughtfully, always putting himself in her shoes when he volunteered to be her counselor. It was perhaps only natural that Akane, who did not know a lot about the Internet and was too devastated at that time to remain vigilant, gradually came to trust him.
After that, they agreed to meet offline. Akane did not lower her guard; she wanted to see with her own eyes what kind of person "Nakura" was before she talked to him -
But the one who awaited her at the agreed meeting spot was a beautiful woman with long hair.
As she edged closer, the woman with long hair smiled slightly and said:
"Are you Akane-chan? Nice to meet you, I'm Nakura."
The intellectual aura around the woman surprised Akane. She stared with round eyes.
She did not even expect Nakura to be a woman to begin with.
The woman was extremely kind, warming Akane's damaged heart with her words. Probably overjoyed by the fact that Nakura was not a fearsome bad guy, Akane immediately opened up to "Nakura" and met with her several times afterwards.
After they had met several times, she introduced a man to her.
"You said you wanted to run away from home?"
The young man who introduced himself as "Izaya" told her that he was "Nakura"'s colleague.
With "Nakura", he often met with the girl and heard her out.
"Nakura" and "Izaya" broke into her heart in an incredible way. In the end, Akane began to tell them what exactly had happened to her.
As soon as the words were out of her mouth, Akane regretted it.
These people would definitely be afraid too when they've heard the name Awakusu-kai.
Akane realized that her legs were shaking uncontrollably.
- What should I do?
- What should I do? What should I do, what should I do…
- These people are going to be afraid of Dad and Grandpa, too.
But instead, she felt a gentle hand on her head.
"Izaya" stroked her hair gently as he smiled softly at her and said:
"It's alright. If I tell you that I'm not afraid, I will be lying……but Akane-chan is just Akane-chan."
The girl was little, and her heart was already damaged.
That one sentence was really all one needed to break into her heart through its leaks.
After that, "Izaya" provided the girl with all sorts of information, sometimes giving her links to special websites or teaching her ways to use her cell phone one wouldn't normally use.
And one month after that -
Before she even realized it, the girl found herself running away from her home.
"Before she even realized it" might sound like an exaggeration, but that was exactly how it had felt.
Since the end of April the girl had never been home.
Every day, she would send a text message to her mother saying "I'm staying with a friend. Don't worry."
In the first few days, she did.
She stayed at Nakura's place.
She did not lie. The next day, "Izaya" would take her to a manga cafe, and the day after that they would go to a 24-hour family restaurant to let her make up for some sleep.
Akane did these things because "Izaya" told her to.
But for Akane, it did not feel weird or unreasonable.
She felt like this was what she had originally wanted.
An environment in which no one thought of her as the "Daughter of Awakusu" and everyone saw her as nobody else but herself.
Of course, if asked whether she felt lonely not being able to see her family, she wouldn't have said no.
But maybe, just maybe, her running away from home would make her father and grandfather stop doing things that made people fear them.
She knew that things were never that simple. But her heart clang on to that little "maybe" - and all thoughts of going back home were numbed.
Just as even that thought became not enough to hold herself back, "Izaya" told her something.
"……Do you not like your grandpa and your dad?"
Upon hearing the sudden question, Akane was reminded of the time when she was destroying her drawings. Lowering her head, she answered quietly:
"……I don't know."
"Izaya" smiled kindly at her and said:
"It's not up to me to judge you on that. Take your time to figure that out until you know for sure."
But his face suddenly darkened. In a serious tone, he said:
"I can't guarantee that your dad and your grandpa will still be alright by the time you figured that out, though."
"Eh……?"
"Your dad and your grandpa are, well - just like you said you worried about - feared by a lot of people, aren't they?"
"Y - Yes……"
Akane felt afraid not knowing where the conversation was leading to. "Izaya", however, simply showed her a piece of paper.
On it she saw a blond-haired man dressed in black and white, his eyes behind those sunglasses looking predatory like a wolf's.
"He is Heiwajima Shizuo. People say he's the most dangerous assassin in Ikebukuro."
"A - Assassin?"
The girl inhaled sharply at the ominous word.
"Izaya", on the other hand, looked serious as ever as he said the most unnerving words.
"He might be already after your dad's and your grandpa's lives."
"……If I told you that, what would you do?"
The man's words were far from a compelling force at this point.
It was simply a question.
But it was still a part of the string that pulled at the girl's heart.
After that, the girl became trapped in the arena of conflict -
All the while still every bit as blessed by the world as she had always been since her birth.