Durarara!! - Volume 1 - Chapter 9

Chapter 9: Double Heroine, Wounded Girl

We rewind the clock.

Right around the time that Mikado and Anri walked into the café, a “pawn” elsewhere in the neighborhood lurched into motion.

Research lab, Yagiri Pharmaceuticals

A dull thud echoed off the walls of the Lab Six meeting room.

“What do you mean…escaped?”

Coffee streamed across the table out of the tipped cup next to Namie Yagiri’s clenched fist. The scalding liquid burned the skin of her hand, but she didn’t bat an eye. Her fist trembled only with quiet rage and panic.

“If the police find out, we’re done for! All of us!”

She scanned the faces of her subordinates, anger and haste glittering in her eyes.

“So you played nice and quiet while you were looking for your chance to escape…”

Eventually she bit her lip to hold the rage inside. Her tongue was painted a darker red than just from her lipstick.

“…Very well. I want our full street-level forces in action. No more skulking around in the shadows now, use every possible resource—and if any trouble arises, have it taken care of promptly.”

“Shall I order them not to harm the target?” asked one of the men at her side.

Namie thought it over briefly, then gave the order in unequivocal terms.

“It would be quite a shame—but in this case, I want our property returned, dead or alive.”

Seiji Yagiri sighed as he made his way to the research lab where he would find his sister.

Yes, this is love. A love that cannot be stopped.

Seiji first met “her” five years ago. As a ten-year-old boy, his sister snuck him face-to-face with his uncle’s secret.

“She” was like a sleeping beauty in a fairy tale, waiting for the arrival of her Prince Charming within that glass case. Despite the grisly appearance of a severed head, Seiji felt not the least bit of fear or disgust. His boyish heart was completely bewitched by the majesty of the object.

As he grew older, Seiji developed reason. But his sense of reason originated from, and revolved around, her head, and she eventually ate away at his mind. The head did not cast a conscious spell on him, nor did it use some kind of brain waves or pheromones. The head just lived. And in the act of staying true to his heart, Seiji Yagiri fell completely in love with her.

Just as Namie Yagiri looked to her brother for love, that brother sought love from a mute head. And that pure desire spurred him into motion.

When his sister took the head away under the guise of research, Seiji thought, I want to set her free from the prison of that glass case. I want to show her the world.

He believed that she would want it that way and waited years for his chance to strike. He stole his sister’s security card, memorized the patrol guards’ routes, then knocked them out with a stun baton. Seiji felt no guilt—he only wanted to see the joy on her face. But even after taking her out of the lab, she did not wake.

The head did not return his love. But that was because his love was insufficient, he told himself. Thus did Seiji continue to believe that his utterly one-sided infatuation was in fact an eternal bond.

Why does love once gained and then lost feel so dear? Seiji lamented, like some preteen in love with the idea of love, as he strode toward the laboratory with severe purpose.

“I know I told sis to handle it…but I just can’t let her be alone in there. Plus, it’s just too cruel to cut open her head and peer inside, even if it is for the sake of science,” he muttered to himself, completely unaware of the dire nature of events. Seiji passed through the entrance doors of the lab.

“I shouldn’t have given her back. I should have fought and argued. As long as I show them the truth of my love, sis and Uncle will understand eventually. And if that doesn’t work, we can just elope.”

They were the words of some star-crossed nobleman hoping to marry a commoner, but there was no hesitation or doubt in Seiji’s intent. By all appearances, he seemed to be a perfectly normal, optimistic teenage boy—but that very ordinariness turned horribly, grotesquely wrong when his love interest was revealed to be a living, sleeping head.

Even worse, however, was the fact that the entire existence of Mika Harima was completely, permanently gone from his mind. She had impacted him directly, but he could no longer recall her face or the sound of her voice. As an obstacle to his love, Seiji had eradicated all traces of her from his memory, and a man who lived on love alone had no need to recall the obstacles he had eliminated.

If I have to, I’ll just steal her keycard again, Seiji thought as he watched a cleaning van race out of the laboratory’s parking lot.

Seiji knew they were not cleaners, but the so-called “underlings” of the lab: kidnappers doing its dark bidding. And not kidnappers involved with slavery rings in some far-off country, but the kind dealing with illegal human experiments.

On top of that, Seiji knew that they got into this abduction business because of their research on her. They ran experiments on the kidnapped victims using the cells, genetic data, and even liquids they extracted from her. It baffled him why they needed to go to these paranoid, urban legend lengths to study an actual head that really existed, but it probably had to do with the pressure being put on Yagiri Pharmaceuticals by that Nebula company. At least, as far as Seiji understood it.

Apparently the experiments were not cruel, grisly vivisections, but conducted after using anesthetics to put the subjects into a coma. Once they got the data they wanted, the victims were released alive in a park or some other location. They would choose victims that couldn’t otherwise go to the police about their abduction—illegal immigrants or criminal types without the backing of one of the powerful mobs—but there were also rumors that the underlings would kidnap runaway girls and other lucrative targets to make their own money on the side.

The bastards make me sick. Have they no respect for human life?

Seiji glared at the van as it passed, filled with a righteous anger—then noticed that someone was stuck to the rear door of the van.

The thing—no, the person—clinging onto the back of the vehicle had a scar running around her neck.

And above that scar—was the head of his dearly beloved.

The lightless motorcycle sped down the street outside the train station without a sound.

It passed directly in front of the police box, but the officers did not notice the dark, silent vehicle. At worst, the occasional pedestrian looked on in confusion at a motorcycle emitting no engine sound. It was trying to stay relatively inconspicuous in that very public location, so it wasn’t reckless—if anything, the rider was careful not to let its darkened bike cause other vehicles to collide. When it did speed up, it let the engine roar a tiny bit, just to alert the people around it of its presence.

The headless horse—the Coiste Bodhar—could frighten people with its roar, and that had not changed since its spirit had been transferred to a motorcycle, but occasionally it had the opposite effect, drawing the excited interest of onlookers instead. Despite her alarm at the varied nature of the humans around her, the dullahan had learned how best to ride through the town over the years. She just didn’t realize that she had become the stuff of urban legend.

When she didn’t have any work, Celty wandered around the town searching for her head—but naturally, she never just happened across a severed head lying on the ground, so it was an essentially meaningless activity. The dullahan understood that perfectly well, but she couldn’t stand the idea of just sitting around doing nothing, and so she wandered.

To her surprise, she had seen essentially zero fairies or spirits aside from herself since coming to Japan. On very rare occasions, she might sense the tiniest sliver of something from the trees lining the center of a park or along the entrance to 60-Kai Street, but she had never seen them for herself. She had felt many more of her kind back in Ireland. Celty thought it would be better to have another dullahan along to help her look for the head, but that was out of the question now. Twenty years later, the security around ship stowaways and smugglers was far stronger. It would take the presence of that very head of hers to leave Japan at this point.

It eventually dawned on Celty that it might be completely impossible for her to find supernatural entities like herself within the limits of her abilities here.

That’s just the world of man for you. I suppose it would be the same in New York or Paris. Perhaps if I looked in the forest of Hachioji…or just traveled all the way to Hokkaido or Okinawa, where there’s more nature…

But without her head, she could not travel anywhere without Shinra’s help. There was only so far a person could go wearing a helmet without drawing extra suspicion.

Besides, she couldn’t leave Tokyo until she had found her head. What if she left for a different region now, and when she came back, that faint sensation she’d followed here was gone for good?

By checking the locations that she could no longer sense the head against a map, Celty knew that wherever her head was, it was centered in Ikebukuro. But without a way to narrow that down to anything more specific, her only option was just to wander around the area in search of it.

Ultimately, that search was in the form of a simple type of street patrol. If she found something curious, she looked it up on the Internet, and anything more suspicious than that required the help of Shinra or Izaya to identify. That was the best she could do.

So perhaps unsurprisingly, she had gained no hints whatsoever in twenty years.

Facing another day of undoubtedly useless searching, Celty heard Shinra’s words echo inside of her heart.

“Just give up.”

That wasn’t an option. She wasn’t exactly unhappy with her life as it stood now, but in order to stifle the feeling that swirled within her, she needed to find true tranquillity. She needed her head back.

The light turned red, and Celty came to a silent stop. As she waited, a figure at the side of the intersection called out to her.

“Yo, Celty.”

She looked over to see a man wearing a bartender’s outfit. It was Shizuo Heiwajima, whose name meant “Quiet Island of Peace”—or, as Shinra called him, the “guy in town who least lives up to his name.”

“Can I talk to you for a sec?”

Celty had been patrolling Ikebukuro for twenty years, and for much of that time, she’d known this man. Of course, he had no idea of Celty’s true nature or her gender, but Shizuo was also the kind of man who didn’t bother with little details like that. When the light turned green, Celty turned left and pulled over to step off the bike.

Shizuo’s clothes were ripped here and there, as though slashed by a knife. He had probably just been in a fight.

If anyone could have cut up Shizuo’s outfit like this, it was probably Izaya Orihara. Sure enough, that information came straight from the horse’s mouth in seconds.

“Izaya’s back here in Ikebukuro… I was just about to sock him a good one, but Simon stepped in to stop me in the nick of time.”

Based on just that statement, Shizuo was indeed a laid-back, well-behaved person. But that was only because Celty never talked.

Shizuo snapped at the tiniest things. He got irritated and angered over words, so the more talkative a person, the quicker he became enraged. She’d seen Shinra and Shizuo have a conversation once, and it was as tender and tricky a situation as handling a stick of dynamite with the fuse lit.

He especially hated people who argued in logical circles, and thus Shizuo and Izaya Orihara were always at odds. For his part, Izaya hated people that his logic didn’t work on, so the two of them kept antagonizing the other.

Until Izaya moved to Shinjuku, the two fought on 60-Kai Street nearly every day, until Simon broke up their brawl and forced them into his sushi shop, each and every time.

As a parting gift when he moved away, Izaya framed Shizuo for several crimes and was crafty enough not to attract any attention to his part in them.

After that, their rivalry was set in stone, and trouble always followed whenever one visited the other’s neighborhood. “Trouble” meaning simple fights, of course, but Izaya was clever enough to maneuver such that they never got the police or yakuza involved.

“Unlike Kadota or Yumasaki, when I get into trouble I’m always alone. I think the same goes for Izaya. He doesn’t have any friends or partners. Which isn’t to say that I don’t get lonely myself. I want to have connections to other people, even if it’s only going through the motions.”

Celty nodded to show the grumbling brawler she understood.

A bartender in sunglasses and a shadow wearing a helmet. It was a surreal pairing at a glance, but the people around them barely did more than look and showed no signs of interest.

Shizuo had clearly been drinking, probably at Simon’s sushi place. Celty felt it would be cruel to just leave him hanging, so she let him speak his mind for a bit, until…

“What I want to know is, what’s Izaya doing back here?”

Celty knew the answer to that question. Ikebukuro was simply the setting for Izaya’s latest twisted interest. But there was another detail weighing on her mind.

The strange thing is that he was here for two days in a row.

Izaya’s base for his information brokerage business was in Shinjuku. He wasn’t the kind of man with time on his hands every day. If he was hanging around, especially with Shizuo’s presence, he had to be doing so with a specific purpose in mind.

“Now that I think about it, I’m pretty sure I saw him speaking to some kid from Raira Academy…”

Shizuo stopped in the middle of his thought. He looked through the crowds.

“What’s that?”

Celty turned to view the surrounding area. Amid the mass of people coming and going, a number of them were watching a specific person. Right at the center of those gathered gazes was a single woman.

On the street behind them was a woman in pajamas, probably in her late teens, tottering through the sunset on uncertain legs. Perhaps she had been hurt, or perhaps she just escaped from the clutches of some of the city’s unsavory residents.

Celty had no desire to draw extra attention, but given that someone’s life might be hanging in the balance, she let herself focus on the woman anyway.

And froze on the spot.

It was her face as she remembered it from the water surface or the reflection of windows.

Hair as black as darkness, just tracing over her eyes, features that were carved into her heart long in the distant past—right atop the shoulders of the woman stumbling across the sidewalk in her pajamas!

Celty’s emotions exploded. She raced forward. Shizuo followed her over to the woman, curious. She grabbed the unsteady woman by the wrist and forcefully turned her for a better look. The woman swallowed in shock, then shrieked madly, trying to undo Celty’s grip.

“Ah… Aaaah, noooo!”

The crowd turned its attention on Celty, but she was too agitated to notice. She only wanted a better look at the woman’s face, but the situation was too chaotic to pull out her PDA for a message now.

“Uh, please calm down. We’re not here to hurt you,” Shizuo said helpfully as he approached. He put a hand on her shoulder, hoping to calm her down.

Thukk.

A shock ran through his side. Something felt very wrong around his thigh, just below the buttock, sending both cold and heat into his pants.

“Wha…?”

Shizuo swung around to see a young man wearing a school blazer, crouched down and stabbing something into Shizuo’s thigh.

It was an ordinary office-use ballpoint pen, the kind one would find anywhere. The boy’s bag was half-open—he must have pulled the pen out of that and stabbed it into Shizuo’s leg.

“What…?”

“Let go of her!” the boy shouted.

Celty turned to see what this new disturbance was, noticed the sudden bloodshed, and stopped in her tracks.

Sensing an opportunity, the girl in the pajamas tugged herself free of Celty’s grip and started running down the street. Celty moved to follow her but held up at the last moment, looking back. Shizuo was standing there with two pens jammed into his thigh, while the young man in the blazer was pulling out a third.

The crowd burst into worried murmurs, several of them falling back in panic. Some affected a mix of nonchalance and fear, trying to skirt around the crowd as though nothing was happening, while others just walked straight through the scene in complete ignorance. Some even pulled out their phones to snap pictures. There were two police boxes in the vicinity, but the situation erupted directly between both of them, and it would take a three hundred–yard run to reach either one.

With a brief glance at the crowd, the young man in the blazer looked in the direction the girl in pajamas went, his third pen still in hand.

Then he muttered, “Thank goodness…”

Celty was going to demand what he meant by that, but Shizuo thrust out a hand first. His palm snapped to a halt right before the edge of her helmet, and he smiled as though nothing was wrong.

“I’m fine. Too drunk to feel much pain. You go after her. I don’t know what’s going on, but you need to follow her, don’t you?”

He folded up his sunglasses and tucked them into his shirt pocket, then smacked his own face.

“Ha-ha! Always wanted to say that one. ‘I’ll handle this. You go on ahead!’”

That line was usually reserved for when the enemy was unfathomably strong, and if anything it was the student boy whose life was now in danger—but Celty decided to indulge Shizuo rather than worry about the young man’s well-being. Besides, if she stuck around and they got caught by the police, she might be able to explain that Shizuo was the victim, but she wouldn’t be able to explain who she was.

Celty put her hands together in apology, then straddled her bike to chase after the girl. People in the crowd exclaimed in surprise at the Black Rider’s presence in their midst. Her trusty steed roared high, drowning out the onlookers as it echoed throughout the night city.

“Stop!” The boy in the blazer tried to chase after her.

“That’s what I’m saying.” Shizuo grabbed the boy by the back of his collar and dragged him backward. “Is that your girlfriend?”

“Yes! She’s my soulmate!” the boy—Seiji Yagiri—stated with absolute confidence, flailing wildly in an attempt to escape.

“Why is she like…that?” Shizuo asked, still entirely calm.

“I have no idea!”

“What’s her name?”

“How the hell should I know?!”

The crowd, watching at a distance, felt a sudden chill. The man in the bartender’s outfit, who had seemed relatively normal and nice, now had veins bulging on his face. The warmth drained out of the air.

All of that heat sucked out of the surrounding space was added to his rage—and Heiwajima exploded. “What the hell is that?!”

The young man flew.

“No way!” the crowd shrieked.

Without a shred of hesitation, Shizuo tossed Seiji’s body directly into the street. He slammed into the side of a delivery truck that was waiting at the light. If the light had been green, Seiji might easily be dead in seconds. Even more shocking was the sheer distance for one human being to throw another. Every person watching the scene sucked in a freezing breath.

“Isn’t it just a liiittle irresponsible, not even knowing your girl’s name? Huh?”

Seiji’s bounce off the truck landed him back on the sidewalk. Shizuo walked over and grabbed him by the collar again, pulling him up to chest level.

But even numbed by that powerful shock, Seiji met Shizuo’s monstrous glare with a powerful gaze of purpose.

“Names don’t matter…when you’re truly in love!”

“Huh?” Shizuo glared at him even harder, but Seiji did not falter in the least. “How do you know she’s your soul mate when you don’t even know her name yet?”

“Because I love her. I don’t need any other reason! Love cannot be measured by or put into words!”

Shizuo glared back at him, deep in thought. Seiji held his arm high, pen still in hand.

“Which is why I use actions! I’m here to protect her, and that’s all there is!”

He thrust the pen downward toward Shizuo’s face. The older man easily stopped the pen with his other hand. His eyes were red with rage, and a devilish smile split his face.

“I like you more than Izaya, at least.”

Shizuo ripped the pen away from Seiji’s hand and held the boy out at arm’s length.

“So I’ll let you off with this,” he said and yanked his arm in so that his head smashed against Seiji’s forehead. With a pleasant little crack, Seiji fell to his knees.

Shizuo dropped his victim and made to leave the scene.

“Ugh, these are gonna bleed if I pull them out. Gotta buy some bandages before I extract them. Or maybe instant glue would be better…”

Muttering, Shizuo walked off the street down the alley. The crowd split into two around him, desperately trying to stay out of his path—and one by one, they returned to the mass of pedestrian traffic. Eventually, it was as if nothing had ever happened. Seiji unsteadily climbed to his feet, and the only people watching were doing so out of the corners of their eyes from the distant street corner.

“Damn…” Seiji quietly walked on, his head screaming in agony. “Gotta find her… Gotta help…”

Two police officers approached the stumbling boy.

“Are you all right?”

“Can you walk on your own?”

They had received reports of a fight and came to see, but only Seiji was left, and there were no other traces of the altercation. Shizuo never pulled the pens out of his leg, so whatever blood he lost was all on his pants.

“I’m all right. I just fell, that’s all.”

“Now, now. We just need you to come to the outpost with us.”

“We only want to talk. Besides, you shouldn’t be walking in that state.”

The policemen appeared to be genuinely concerned for him, but Seiji didn’t have time for any of this. He looked around for any signs of her—then heard the growl of that black motorcycle.

He shot around in the right direction, then saw the Black Rider racing for the entrance to the subway…chasing after the girl in pajamas.

“Yama, that’s the bike!”

“Forget it, that’s above our pay grade. Let Traffic handle it.”

Seiji heard none of that. He only had eyes for the girl.

She disappeared into the underground entrance, pulled by someone else. In fact, it looked like—

“Mikado…Ryuugamine,” Seiji muttered, recognizing his class rep. He started off for the station.

“Hey, wait!”

“You’re gonna hurt yourself!”

The police held him down, and Seiji struggled helplessly. At top condition, he might have been able to momentarily break free, but the damage caused by Shizuo prevented him from using his full strength.

“Let go! Let go of me! She’s there! Right there! Let go, let go, let go! Why, dammit, why?! Why is every damn person in the world trying to ruin my love life?! What did I do to deserve this?! What did she do to deserve this?! Let go, let go, let gooooo!”

“So your head was walking around, attached to a different body, and just when you thought you had her, a student interfered, and when you pursued the girl, a different student stepped in and took your head away—and you want me to believe that nonsense?”

Shinra spread his arms theatrically in the middle of his apartment, wearing his usual white lab coat. Celty paid his gestures no mind, her fingers limply sliding over the keyboard.

“I’m not demanding that you believe me.”

“Oh, but I do. You’ve never lied to me.”

Shinra put on a rousing speech from the other room, hoping to cheer Celty up.

“They say a man’s best friends are honesty, sincerity, and wisdom, but in my case, you’re the only one I need! Honest, sincere, and wise: I’m proud to have such a perfect life partner!”

“Who said we were life partners?” Celty typed back, but nothing in her reaction suggested disgust at Shinra.

“We could change those three qualities to effort, friendship, and victory instead. How about that?”

“Listen to me. No, not listen—I mean, read the words on the screen,” she typed, exasperated. The doctor continued talking, paying her no attention.

“Then I must do my best to live up to them, sparing no effort or expense in traversing my game of fate with you to victory.”

“What about friendship?”

“You always have to start as friends, don’t you?”

Celty couldn’t be bothered to get seriously angry at Shinra’s nonsense. She shrugged and decided to take a look at tomorrow’s schedule.

“At any rate, I can’t sit around feeling sorry for myself. It’s possible that I could finally retrieve my head. I’m pretty sure those uniforms were from Raira, so I’ll stake out the school’s front gate tomorrow and wait for that student.”

Shinra took a look at the unusually long message and cast her a mystified look.

“What comes after that?”

“Isn’t it obvious? I’ll demand to know the location of my head.”

“And then? What will you do?”

“Well,” Celty typed, then stopped when she realized what Shinra was getting at.

“This head has its own body now and could only scream when it saw you. What are you going to do with it?”

Her hands lay flat on the keyboard. She had no answer.

“It’s living its own life with its own body and apparently knows teenagers well enough to escape with one. What would you do with it? Cut it off the body for your own sake? That’s a pretty cruel and vicious thing to do.”

After a heavy silence, Celty realized that she was trembling. Shinra spoke the truth. The head did not seem to recognize her. Perhaps it was just the unfamiliar riding suit—but the fact remained that the head had developed its own sense of self that was apart from her.

If I’m going to recover my head for good, it will need to be separated from that body. But is it right to sever a living head from a living body? Could I convince the head to simply stay close to me with its new body? I might be getting it back, but that doesn’t address the fundamental issue. Plus, I don’t feel like I’m aging at all, but what about my head? Will it still be that young decades later? What if it didn’t age while it was isolated, but something changes once both parts of me are back together?

Before she could come to a conclusion, Celty decided to present her basic doubts to Shinra.

“Why does my head have a body that isn’t mine anyway?”

“Well, I didn’t see it for myself, so nothing I say can be taken as fact. But if you don’t mind completely baseless speculation, I can tell you my guess.”

Shinra paused for a moment, then delivered his ghastly theory in a matter-of-fact tone.

“They probably found a girl with a fitting body and simply replaced her head with yours.”

Celty had imagined that possibility, but it was horrifying to hear stated so bluntly. She was left without a response, so Shinra added further speculation.

“Let’s say that a country—or even better, a secret military agency—got its sinister hands on the head in the hopes of creating a legion of undead soldiers. They cloned a fresh new body from the head’s cells, then replaced the clone’s head with the real one in the hopes of unlocking the dullahan memories hidden within. What do you think?”

“Sounds like a surefire Razzie winner to me,” Celty wrote, comparing his idea to the infamous awards for worst movies of the year. Half of her completely disregarded his idea—but the other half thought a secret lab was quite possible.

“Okay, the cloning angle might be a stretch, but it’s possible that they could have sewed it onto a corpse. Either that or they kidnapped a living human, then put the head on right after killing it to see if that would bring it back to life. Logically, it’s an absolutely absurd idea, but logic also says that you and your head are impossible to begin with. Maybe it could take over a dead body.”

“This makes me sick. I can’t imagine anyone would go that far.”

“True, it’s not the kind of thing a sane person would do. But people will do just about anything under the right circumstances. Perhaps our mystery person lost a daughter whom he or she wished to keep alive in perpetuity. Or maybe they wanted to conceal an accidental murder victim by using the body for research.”

In a way, that idea was even more gruesome than the human experimentation he joked about earlier. Celty typed in a new message, simply to stop him from saying any more.

“Anyway, I want to speak with my head once more. We can talk more after tha—”

Shinra cut her off before she could finish. “And that’s how you’re going to delay coming to an actual conclusion?”

His voice was deadly serious; there was no trace of the tickled, playful air from just moments earlier.

I know. I get it. Now that I’ve found my head in this state, I just have to give up.

She let that resignation sink in for a moment, then reluctantly typed, “I just don’t want to admit that everything I’ve done over the last twenty years has been for nothing.”

She stared sadly at the string of text. Shinra, who had been talking to her from the other side of the apartment, finally came over to Celty’s room. He sat down next to her and looked directly at her screen.

“It wasn’t for nothing. The last twenty years of your life haven’t been for nothing. Nothing you’ve done is a waste as long as you make use of it in your life ahead.”

“And how will I make use of that?”

“Well, for example…if you marry me, you can simply consider the last twenty years the cornerstone of our marital bliss.”

Celty had no instant response to his shameless nonsense. Normally she’d ignore it as a joke, but it seemed like Shinra took this topic rather seriously of late.

“May I ask something?”

“Please do.”

She wasn’t sure if it was right to just ask her question straight out, but after a few moments, Celty summoned her courage and tapped away at the keyboard.

“Do you really love me, Shinra?”

Shinra read the sentence and gaped up at the ceiling in disbelief.

“Why would you ask that now?! Ahh, there is a reason that terrible pain in the chest brings tears to one’s eyes! What is my sorrow? The fact that you have not believed everything I’ve done and said to you! My sorrow is that my love for you does not reach your heart!”

“I don’t have a head.”

“But I’m in love with what’s inside! There’s more to a human being than looks, remember?”

“I’m not human.”

In the end, I’m not a human being. I’m a monster in the shape of a human. The problem is that with my memories trapped in my head, I don’t actually know what I am or why I was born and why I exist.

Complex sentiments and unrelatable thoughts. Countless fragments swirled through Celty’s heart, but the only thing she could impart were simple words on a computer screen.

“Aren’t you frightened of holding affection for something inhuman? How can you say these things to a being that doesn’t even follow the same basic laws of physics?”

The letters sped up across the screen. In response, Shinra’s voice grew harder and stronger. He sounded exasperated.

“I can’t believe you’re asking me that after twenty years together… Why would you even think about this? We share a mutual understanding—if we love each other, what’s the problem? If you decide that you hate me, I guess that’s that… But we’re not just forced to live together out of cold mutual dependence, are we? Can’t you have some trust in me?”

It was rare for Shinra to sincerely plead his own case, but the abundance of ten-dollar words said that he was not yet at the end of his rope.

“I do trust you. If there’s anyone I don’t trust, it’s myself.”

She decided to reveal some of her own insecurity while he was still feeling in control.

“I have no self-confidence. Even if I was in love with you or some other human being, would our romantic values actually be the same? Yes, I probably do love you. I just don’t know if it’s what a human would call romantic love.”

“That’s something every human being goes through in their youth. It’s not as if every human being shares the same views and values. Love to me may not be the same as love to the great writer Osamu Dazai. In fact, it’s probably different… At any rate, I can say that I love you, and you just said that you love me, so where’s the problem?”

He sounded like a teacher explaining something to a student. The dullahan’s fingers stopped moving.

“Yesterday I said I wanted to understand your values as a dullahan—but whatever your answer is, it won’t change the fact that I love you,” Shinra said in a voice free of shyness or hesitation. His expression was completely serious. Celty thought this over for a moment, choosing her words carefully.

“Give me some time to think.”

“I’ll wait as long as it takes,” Shinra replied, his smile serene. Celty had to ask one other thing.

“Is it really me you want? There are so many human women out there, why would you choose a headle…a nonhuman woman? Why?”

“Ha-ha. There’s no accounting for taste, right?”

“You’re one to talk. And don’t make it sound like you have to be a weirdo to like me.”

Even as she typed back her snappy response, Celty felt something hot swirling in her chest. She knew that it was her feeling for Shinra.

If I had a heart, I’d hear it pounding away in my ears.

But that thought, that contradiction, plagued Celty even more. It only underscored the great differences between her and Shinra.

Dullahans had no hearts. According to Shinra’s father after he dissected her, she was constructed much like a human being—but the organs were all for show and did not actually function. There were veins, but no blood running through them. Without any red blood, her meat was the color of pure flesh, like a model of a human body. He didn’t know how her body worked and moved. He didn’t know what she used for a source of energy. And despite that, any wounds she suffered healed at incredible speed.

After the dissection, Shinra’s father asked her, “How do you actually die?”

Ten years later, Shinra said, “You must be a shadow. You’re just the shadow of your head or an actual body in some other world. The source of your energy to move means nothing to your shadow.”

It was nonsense to think of a shadow moving of its own will, but then again, nothing about her existence made sense, so she followed Shinra’s advice and stopped thinking about it. She needed to spend the next few days focusing on her head. And depending on the results of that period, she would make a decision about her life.

Celty clenched a fist and pictured the faces of the two students she saw today.

They both looked serious. The first one glared back fiercely, without a hint of fear toward Celty or Shizuo. The other one showed obvious signs of fright at Celty, but he still had a smile on his face when he looked at her. It was the expression of one looking at a demon or monster worthy of fear and respect.

She then thought about herself.

But perhaps that’s all just my own selfish interpretation.

She took her interpretation of the others’ feelings from their expressions, including the eyes, but she couldn’t be certain that it was true. She did not have her own eyes or face with which to express delight, anger or sadness. She didn’t have a brain to process human emotions. She didn’t even know where her thoughts or feelings were coming from. How could she accurately sense the emotions of others?

Angry eyes, sad eyes, human morals—these were all pieces of knowledge she had picked up in this city. TV shows, comics, movies—Shinra’s tastes biased her selection of these things, but her actual experiences in town and news reports helped to balance that out. The problem was that all these things were just information gleaned from elsewhere. She wouldn’t know if they were true or not unless she was a human being herself.

That was why she was always plagued by the insecurity she revealed to Shinra earlier. She didn’t know if she truly had emotions. It was a thought that constantly troubled her.

In the past, she didn’t care about these things. She was too busy seeking her head. But in the last few years, as the Internet gave her increased opportunities to contact people, she couldn’t help but wonder how close her feelings and values were to those of humans.

At first, she found it frightening and needed Shinra’s help, but now Celty was at the computer at virtually all times when not working or searching for her head. Once she got a model with a built-in DVD drive and TV tuner, she could get her movies and TV shows there, which only increased the time she spent before the computer.

Celty increased her contact with others over the Internet. People separated by their PCs did not know each other’s faces or pasts. Which was fine with her, because she didn’t even have a face. And yet, the connections were real. In real life, she only knew a few people through Shinra, and only he and his father knew exactly what she was. Rumors had spread about the headless rider, but the rumors didn’t identify her as a woman or a dullahan.

She didn’t feel a particular need to hide these things, but neither did she plan to reveal them.

Even after what Shinra said, I still want to have human values. If the persona that I own now is “human,” I don’t want to lose that.

Celty was not a human being. But she still felt anxiety. If she got back her head but the memories did not return, what should she do? What kind of face would a human make in this situation?

Her knowledge contained the answer, but she herself could not say what it was.