mr nice guy
Short Durarara!! fic. AH HA HA WHY NOT. Can you tell I’m procrastinating? Because I’m procrastinating pretty hard. The random ficlets will continue until I no longer urgently need to be doing other things. XD
This takes place between volumes 3 and 4 of the light novels. I’m almost certain that Kida hasn’t really run away to Yokohama, but it would be…funny if he had? Funnier, certainly, than if he were still hanging around Ikebukuro doing such incredibly stupid things as working for Izaya, which is what I suspect he’s actually doing, but I’m only halfway through vol. 5 and therefore don’t know for sure.
KIDA, ARE YOU MADE OF POOR LIFE CHOICES?
Mostly, though, this fic is about Kadota. &HARTS. Poor guy. Why is he the only normal person he knows? XD
Spoilers through vol. 3. Durarara!! doesn’t belong to me, and, for the record, I don’t actually have anything against Yokohama. ^_^
Mr. Nice Guy
It’s raining in Yokohama.
It’s raining in Yokohama, and Kadota has recently come to the conclusion that he hates both the rain and Yokohama. This has all the earmarks of a really lousy day.
Not that he’s ever seen Yokohama’s good side-he’s only been to Koganecho, Kotobukicho, places everyone agrees are pits. (Well, they have tried to doll up Koganecho lately, for what that’s worth. It’s like they think crime disappears if you push it out of a neighborhood, when, in fact, it just moves itself to a new neighborhood. But fine. Kadota guesses they can believe whatever makes them happy.)
So yeah, judging Yokohama based on those neighborhoods would be like judging Tokyo based on…well, Ikebukuro, say. Someday, Kadota’ll have to give the town a proper look, see if his hatred is legit.
Possibly unfair dislike of Yokohama notwithstanding, this definitely isn’t his kind of job. Espionage has a slimy feel to it-a little too Izaya-esque, maybe. Kadota likes breaking up human trafficking rings. He enjoys a bit of heroic rescuing of children. Maybe some righteous bashing in of the faces of assholes.
Spying on children, though, that creeps him out. It would creep him out even without the helpful commentary from the back of the van, and, in the event, they’re at their eloquent best. At the moment, they’re busily drawing literary comparisons ranging from Lolita to Kuroshitsuji. Not one of them flattering to Kadota, obviously.
Still, it can’t be helped. It’s a favor for the boss. Not an order, but a favor, and God knows they all owe the boss. Kadota would’ve found it easier to turn down an order. In his more paranoid moments, he suspects the boss knows that.
I’d like to know what he’s doing, the message said, though it’d probably be best not to talk to him. Then the line that clinched it: See if he looks like he’s eating enough.
So here they are, in the rain in one of the seedier holdouts of fucking Koganecho, watching Kida Masaomi skulk from shady pawnshop to shady pachinko parlor like the sad little alley cat he is. And he doesn’t look like he’s eating enough. Or sleeping enough. He doesn’t look like he’s taking care of himself in general. And the question one has to ask oneself is, what the hell does he think he’s doing? He’s not Korean enough to blend with the local yakuza. He’s not old enough to pass as important, not young enough to pass as harmless. He’s fast headed toward another ass-kicking, is what. Only this time, he won’t have Kadota and Dollars and mystic forces of the beyond like the Black Biker and Saika to save him. No, he turned up his nose at all of that.
Kadota knows exactly what the stupid little shit is doing, actually. He’s running away, like he always does. It was Kadota’s mistake, thinking he’d stopped. All he’s done is found something new to run from.
The alley cat metaphor is a little too appropriate; Kadota can’t unsee it now. An alley cat, scrawny and drenched and alone. Kicked so many times he can deal with being kicked-that’s not what scares him. Now the idea of having a home scares him.
Such a fucking kid.
“This reminds me of that scene in Audition,” Yumasaki says thoughtfully. “You know. When he’s looking for her-the Stone Fish bar, the ballet teacher.”
“Was it raining in the movie?” Karisawa asks.
“Hm. It should have been, don’t you think? Symbolically, I mean. Was it raining in the book?”
“I can’t remember. It rained in his book about the guy with the ice pick obsession, didn’t it?”
“Which one?”
“Piercing.”
“Oh yeah. Did it rain, or was there just a shower scene? You know, when he shows up to stab her.”
“Shower, shower…was that before or after she tied him up with electrical cord?”
“Of course it was way before.”
“But why would she take a shower if she-”
“No, and then she cut herself, remember? The hospital-”
“Oh, right! And then-”
“If you two don’t stop talking,” Kadota says slowly and deliberately, “I don’t know what I’ll do.”
The subsequent silence lasts for all of thirty seconds. Nice to know he’s spent the past however many years (don’t think about it) building up thirty seconds worth of authority. His life is amazing.
“Do you think,” Karisawa hisses in what she doubtless thinks is a sneaky whisper, “that Dotachin would stab us with an ice pick?”
“No no no, that’s not scary enough,” Yumasaki hisses back. “Maybe he’ll hang us from a tree in the woods and call down vengeful ghosts.”
“What would they be vengeful about?”
“The way we were messing up their tree.”
“That makes no sense. Why would they even have a tree?”
“Maybe they were buried under it. You had a Tokyo Babylon phase, didn’t you?”
“Don’t call it a phase! I-”
“Get out,” says Kadota.
They protest. They whine, they cry, they complain about abandonment and oppression and the weather. Kadota, however, spent the entire drive to Yokohama listening to their bullshit, and at this point, just the sound of their voices is pissing him off. He has no mercy left.
Detecting this, they eventually slump off into the rain, leaving the side door open in a final, sad act of passive aggression. Kadota clambers into the back and slams it shut with some satisfaction.
They’ll be fine, anyway. They’ll go crying to Kida in a minute, and he’ll get them home.
Technically, Kadota wasn’t supposed to talk to Kida, and technically, he hasn’t. But Kida, for all his faults, is a bright kid, and he’ll put together Karisawa and Yumasaki and come up with Kadota. He may even come up with the boss of Dollars.
It’s good for scrawny alley cats to know people care about them. Even if (especially when) they wish that no one would.
“That was harsh, boss,” Togusa murmurs.
“Yeah, life is harsh,” Kadota agrees. “Now shut up and drive. I hate this place.”
ETA: Now with Kida art by shiroyue ! :D