Durarara!! - Volume 6 - Chapter 4.1

Interlude or Prologue E, Akane Awakusu

The world blessed the girl’s existence.

By any reasonable measure, she enjoyed an extremely high standard of living.

She lived in a large home on the outskirts of Ikebukuro that looked comfortable, not cramped and urban.

She was protected and raised by a kind mother, understanding father, fierce grandfather, and many others in her vicinity who cared for her and valued her opinion.

However, this luxury did not mean she was spoiled. The girl was raised with a healthy mind-set.

From the moment she was born, she never lacked for anything.

In fact, she was so unfamiliar with the concept of need that she had no way of knowing just how blessed she was.

The girl was happy.

Until she learned what her father and grandfather did and the underbelly of the world around her.

It began with a cell phone.

Her father was unhappy about this, opining that a little girl in grade school was too young for her own phone. Eventually, he gave in for security purposes, and she got her own private line.

Not just a phone line leading to other people to speak with.

This invisible line could weave its way through the Internet—a magic door that showed her a brand-new world. She didn’t have her own computer, so this was her first experience online.

Some downplay the Internet by saying that it’s nothing but a virtual world, but on the other side of those computer-generated walls was something in the real world. Online chat partners might be wearing virtual masks, but they were people, not just artificial intelligences that existed solely in the ether.

If she connected to pay sites, her real capital would dwindle. And the malice that led to scams was also coming from the real world.

By having a phone, the girl found herself connected to an unlimited number of realities.

Even if she didn’t actually want that to happen.

In school, she was bright, energetic, and almost never had to worry about being bullied.

—Almost never because of an incident she once witnessed.

About half a year ago, a girl in her class was being bullied. The others shunned her and even put a bunch of dead bugs into her bag.

The girl happened to see them in the act and sternly told off her classmates.

“Bullying is a very bad thing!”

The girl was raised in a happy environment, and her action was rooted in her own morality.

But it was an action that took every last ounce of the girl’s bravery.

Even in her naive youth, she could feel it on her skin. If she did this, she might be the next target.

But she still opened her mouth to speak and protected the bullied girl.

She didn’t regret it.

At least, not at that moment.

The result: She succeeded in stopping the bullying at that point.

So did she end up becoming the new class target?

The answer is no.

Things went stunningly well, and peace returned to the class within just a few days, as if there had never been any nastiness to begin with.

She wondered if it might actually be continuing in secret where she couldn’t see, but there were no warning signs to suggest this.

After that point, the girl became the central figure in the class.

She was the class representative in the student body, but she didn’t hold it over anyone. She did her best to stay on good terms with the other children, and the smiles never ended around her.

She was happy.

And she assumed that all the classmates who smiled and laughed with her were happy, too.

She never even doubted it—that was how pure a heart she had.

At her young school-going age, she began to believe that life was a wondrous, purely joyous thing. If she ever found someone who was unhappy, she wanted to help them, out of the goodness of her heart.

Such feelings often lead to forcing good deeds onto others. But at least in her case, she helped the people around her get along, put together playdates, found ways to visit the beach and mountains, and eventually became a central figure in her entire school, not just the class.

She wanted to grow up and find a job that brought even more smiles to those around her.

The girl didn’t understand her grandfather’s job, but she knew that her father sold paintings to a variety of businesses.

There were a number of paintings around her house of distant vistas, paintings that looked very expensive. She didn’t understand much about the pricing of art, but they did look very pretty to her.

They’re such beautiful paintings, so I bet a lot of people are happy when they see them. What a wonderful job Daddy has. Oh…I know! I’ll make paintings. I’ll be a painter! I’ll make so many, many paintings and have Daddy sell them!

With this idea in her head, the girl began to study art.

The people around her supported her idea, but when she talked about her new dream, she noticed that her father and grandfather shared a strange look.

At any rate, the girl started with blessed circumstances and then found a dream for herself on top of that.

Into this life full of blissful happiness came the present of a cell phone.

The girl treated it as a safety measure and a means to contact her family and hardly ever used the phone—but it ultimately forced her to confront a truth.

She didn’t get a call from someone.

She didn’t connect to some secret school-related site.

The first incident was physical in nature.

Such a simple thing: She forgot the phone at a friend’s house.

The girl rushed back in a panic to retrieve it.

And just when she was about to ring the bell, she heard her friend’s voice from the backyard.

She went around the side to call out to her friend and heard her own name coming from the friend’s mother.

“You better not have caused trouble for Akane Awakusu, I trust?”

Huh?

Confusion stopped her progress toward the yard.

There were three or so friends over at the house at that moment.

She had left a while earlier and only just got back to pick up the cell phone she forgot.

So why was her friend’s mother mentioning her just now?

Had she done something strange at the house?

But that didn’t line up with what the mother had said.

What did she actually say?

The young girl considered the possibility that she had misheard.

But her friend’s response completely obliterated that idea.

“I know, Mom! I always make sure to do what Akane tells me!”

…Huh?

Her time stopped.

Her world froze.

It was the annoyed voice of a child who is scolded just before starting her homework and replies, “But I was just about to start!”

The girl was in such a panic that she couldn’t put this together, but an objective listener would undoubtedly assume that listening to Akane Awakusu was treated as an obligation on par with doing homework.

“And I hope that none of the rest of them did anything to upset her, either!”

“We didn’t!”

“Is that true? Because I don’t want anything coming back to hurt us! Goodness, I just hope you wind up in a different middle school,” the mother said.

The girl’s friend sounded bewildered and a bit guilty. “But…Akane doesn’t boss us around or act selfish. It’s okay. You’re just making a big deal out of it, Mom.”

The tone of voice suggested not the defense of a friend, but the generalized dislike of a parent deciding the facts of a situation regardless of the truth.

Breathing heavily, her mother snapped back, “It doesn’t matter if Akane’s a good girl or a bad girl! Those Awakusu people are scary! If you ever get into a fight and hurt her somehow, there’s no telling what they’ll do to us!”

…

…?

…??? …?

Still the girl couldn’t understand what her friend’s mother was saying.

All she could tell was that her chest was feeling hot.

Ultimately, Akane Awakusu ran away.

She shouldn’t be there, she knew. And so she ran.

Her cell phone was still at the house, but she didn’t care about that anymore.

She just wanted to get away from her friend’s house as soon as possible.

She didn’t even attempt to fathom what that conversation was supposed to mean.

But fate did not let her escape.

That night, Akane’s cell phone was delivered to her house.

Her friend’s parents drove it over themselves.

They took the car to give back something that their daughter could easily hand over the next day at school.

She watched them bow to her mother.

Her mother said, “Go ahead, Akane, thank them properly.” As she lowered her head, she tilted it a bit to look at their faces—and saw only polite smiles with no hint as to what lay behind them.

Later on, an older acquaintance of hers remarked, “A cell phone is a little brick of information. They probably figured it was better to return it themselves, before your folks assumed they were prying into their daughter’s life.”

The statement sounded quite matter-of-fact, but Akane couldn’t just say, “Oh, I see,” and leave it at that.

After all, this was the incident that ended up toppling the whole house of cards.

With her cell phone back in safe hands, Akane decided to try connecting to this Internet thing. At first, she was deathly afraid of it and had no idea what she should be doing.

Until that point, she had never been online before. The only thing she knew was the e-mail address assigned to her phone. But as the days went on and she learned more and more, the intelligent young girl began to get the hang of traversing the Net.

She was still going to school like usual. And the friend in question was interacting with her like normal.

In fact, it was so much like normal that it frightened her.

It was enough to make her wish that she’d simply misheard that backyard conversation.

But when she connected to that new world through her phone, the truth she found was cruel and cold.

By the time she had learned how to use search tools, the girl was ready to look.

She typed in the name “Awakusu” and summoned up her courage to browse the results.

Medei-gumi Syndicate, Awakusu-kai

It led her to an article on the Internet encyclopedia Fuguruma Youki.

It contained a detailed explanation of the “organization.”

Some parts of it were too hard for the elementary school girl to understand, but she got enough of the big picture.

She now knew what kind of organization the Awakusu-kai was.

When she realized that was also the moment she noticed she was shivering.

This is wrong.

It must be some kind of mistake.

She had seen the word Awakusu-kai here and there around the house.

She knew that in the room with the family shrine, there were paper lanterns with the characters for “Awakusu-kai” on them.

It’s not right.

It had to be a simple coincidence, a shared name.

She tried to convince herself of that…

Until the moment that she found a picture of her grandfather, labeling him the chairman of the Awakusu-kai, and her world stopped.

Then, on a page from a different search engine, she found text describing them as “hiding in plain sight as an art dealership,” and her frozen world began to crumble.

Even then, she didn’t shout or wail or scream.

She just closed the browser window, empty eyed, and called one of her friends—the girl she had saved from being bullied.

She called the girl she always assumed had been her friend since then and asked, “Why does everyone always do what I ask them?”

Something in the tone of her voice must have frightened the girl. Her friend hemmed and hawed for a bit but eventually broke and started to explain the truth.

“…Actually…everyone said we should pick on you next, Akane. They told me that if I picked on you, they would leave me alone. But…then one of the kids said that your dad was scary and that we shouldn’t mess with you…”

When one of them let it slip to their parents, the rumors spread quickly around the neighborhood families. “Our children are attempting to pick on the granddaughter of the Awakusu-kai chairman!”

Some of the adults panicked and started to command their children, “Don’t you dare disobey whatever that Awakusu girl says to you.”

She was the beloved granddaughter of the Awakusu. And if it came to light that their children were the ones tormenting her and the mobsters raised a fuss, they would have no moral leg to stand on.

So the obvious choice was for those parents to lay down strict rules for their kids: “Don’t you ever upset Akane.”

And if they ordered their children to stay away from Akane, that might be seen as shunning, another type of bullying. On the other hand, if they got too close and wound up having an argument and hurting her, that would be bad as well.

So the adults ordered them to uplift Akane Awakusu and make her feel good.

This was around the time that TV stations started doing pieces on secret school websites. Those terrified parents worked the URL out of their children and browsed the bulletin board to see if their children were bad-mouthing Akane there.

The extreme reactions of these concerned parents drew notice, spreading to other parents and children, until ultimately, no one dared to cross Akane.

She became the queen of the class, and she had no inkling of the true reason why.

Akane never looked down on anyone. She always assumed they were on the same level.

But she didn’t know that everyone else was treating her like a precious doll placed far above their heads.

No one could really answer the question, Would the Awakusu-kai’s chairman and waka-gashira actually throw around the name of their organization to threaten civilians over their daughter’s school relationships?

But the demonstration of abject fear from a portion of the parents spread to the others like wildfire.

If they didn’t take precautions and Akane did end up the target of bullying within the class, could they say for certain that the Awakusu-kai officers wouldn’t come after them with threats?

The lack of a firm voice guaranteeing their safety meant that fear was allowed to grow unchecked, thus leading to this rather twisted state of events.

She couldn’t glean all these subtle details just from what her friend told her, but the perceptive girl was able to grasp the general atmosphere surrounding her.

After hanging up, Akane stared at the floor of her room in total shock for minutes.

She thought she was happy.

As a matter of fact, she had been.

But she also thought that everyone else was just as happy as she was.

She believed that her class was an ideal one without bullying, where everyone was free to speak and be valued.

But her very existence was stealing that freedom from her classmates.

Yes, it eliminated bullying from the class. But now, that result meant nothing to Akane.

Time passed by her numb senses until she heard her mother calling from the dining room. Dinner was ready.

Her father and grandfather were often busy, so it was quite common for Akane to eat dinner with just her mother, but she never thought of it being lonely. Whenever she did see her father, he was kind and gentle to her. She loved her father.

The girl summoned her courage and went down to eat dinner with her mother.

She wore her usual smile and carried on with her usual lively conversation.

But on the inside, she told herself, Don’t let your guard down.

After dinner, she kept that fake smile on until she closed the door of her room and started to clean up her desk for something to distract herself.

In the midst of this, she dropped a sketchbook while moving it off the desk, and it fell open to a drawing.

It was a portrait of the class eating lunch. On each and every face was a delighted smile.

Very, very happy smiles, heartfelt and full.

Looking at that drawing finally caused her to break down.

“Aah…aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!”

She tore the drawing out of the sketchbook, wadding it up, ripping it apart, throwing it aside.

“I’ll make so many, many paintings and have Daddy sell them!” Her childhood dream echoed in her head.

The young girl cried and wailed, not even understanding why she was so sad, and tore up more and more drawings.

The things she had seen, those happy smiles on her classmates—all lies.

And it was her existence that had forced those lies into being.

In a wild fit, she tore her drawings, her dreams, to shreds.

Just a few seconds felt like a long, long eternity to the girl.

And that elongated time negated all the happy life she’d led.

But halfway through tearing out the sketchbook pages, she stopped.

It was a drawing of her father’s and mother’s faces.

Upon seeing this picture of her family, the girl came to a realization.

While she was shocked to learn what the Awakusu-kai actually was, she could never actually bring herself to hate her family.

“Akane? Akane! What’s the matter?!”

Before long, her mother had rushed into the room, drawn by her daughter’s screams.

Akane didn’t know what she should do. She leaped into her mother’s embrace and cried.

The world blessed the girl’s existence.

But that blessing did not guarantee her happiness.

For a while after that, the girl led a life that was somewhat broken.

She could sense that her heart’s distance from her family—especially her father—was growing steadily.

Her father Mikiya could sense that his daughter had realized what he did for a living and was trying to keep close to her so she couldn’t drift away.

At school, she put on her best fake smile so as not to let her true feelings show.

She was both shocked at learning the truth that her personal world was coated with lies and unable to summon the strength to break down those lies.

The rest of the class continued to play along with Akane, and she allowed herself to play along with their lie.

It was a world of nothing but lies, including her own.

That world blessed the girl’s existence.

And then, several months later…

The girl made up her mind to finally run away from home.

Not because she knew that she could make it.

It was just on faith that if she went to a place where no one had heard of her or the Awakusu name, something might change.

She used the Internet function on her phone to gather information on running away.

Searching a few helpful keywords pulled up a number of good sites.

After hesitantly dipping her toes into the forums there, she was approached by a man with the username Nakura.

He helpfully answered her questions, no matter how naive, and offered thoughtful advice. In a sense, it was inevitable that Akane, with her lack of Internet knowhow and damaged state of mind, would grow to trust this man.

Then, he suggested that they meet up. Even Akane grew wary at this, and she decided to stake out the meetup place to ascertain what kind of person her chat partner was—only to find that it was a beautiful woman with long hair.

The girl timidly approached, and the long-haired woman smiled and said, “Are you Akane? Hi, I’m Nakura.”

Akane’s eyes bulged. She was not expecting this beautiful, smart-looking woman.

It had never once seemed to her that Nakura would be a woman.

She was very kind to Akane, enveloping the girl’s damaged heart with warmth. The release and rebound from her fear that Nakura would be a frightening man was so strong that Akane immediately opened herself up, and they met a number of times after that.

After a few meetings and conversations, the woman introduced her to a man.

“I hear you want to run away from home?”

This young man, who called himself Izaya, was a work partner of Nakura’s.

In the presence of these people with a strange knack for working their way into her mind, Akane finally explained her situation.

And as soon as she said it, she regretted it.

Akane realized her legs were trembling. Would they be afraid, too, now that she’d told them about her link to the Awakusu-kai?

What should I do?

What should I do? What should I do? What should I do?

They’re going to be terrified of Dad and Grandfather, too.

But instead, a gentle palm landed on top of her head.

Izaya caressed Akane’s hair and smiled at her kindly. “If I told you it’s all okay and there’s nothing to be afraid of, that would be a lie…but you’re still you, Akane.”

Her heart was already halfway broken. And those cracks were all it took for him to worm his way inside.

From that point on, Izaya fed her all kinds of information and taught her special web addresses only cell phones could reach and novel ways to use her device.

Then, one month became the next…and she realized that she had run away from home.

It really was as sudden a realization as that.

She hadn’t been home since late April.

She was sending her mother texts that she was staying at a friend’s house and not to worry, every single day.

The first night, she really was at a friend’s house: Nakura’s. She wasn’t lying.

The next day, Izaya took her to a manga café, and the day after that, she slept in a twenty-four-hour restaurant.

All her actions were according to Izaya’s instructions.

But she didn’t find this to be strange or questionable.

She recalled that this was exactly what she’d hoped for—an environment that would see her for who she was, not just the daughter of the Awakusu family.

It was true that she was a little lonely being separated from her parents.

But maybe if she ran away from home, her father and grandfather would think twice about their work and how it frightened people.

Deep down, she knew it wasn’t that simple, but a part of her glowed with optimistic hope and kept her dedicated to her cause and numb to homesickness.

But then, when it finally felt like she was going to give up, Izaya asked, “Do you hate your grandpa and dad?”

Taken aback, Akane recalled when she tore up her drawings. She looked down and mumbled, “I don’t know.”

Izaya smiled kindly at her. “This isn’t the kind of problem I can give you the answer to. Just think it over until you know,” he said. But then his expression went dark, and he murmured, “But there’s no guarantee they’ll be safe by the time you have your answer.”

“Huh…?”

“Well, your dad and grandpa cause fear in many people. That’s what you were worried about, right?”

“Y-yeah…”

Whatever it was that he was talking about, it was frightening her. Izaya held out a piece of paper. It was a photograph of a man with blond hair and black-and-white clothes. Behind the lenses of his sunglasses, his eyes were sharp and lupine.

“This is Shizuo Heiwajima. He’s considered the most dangerous hired killer in Ikebukuro.”

“K-killer?” She held her breath.

And with an absolutely straight face, Izaya told the frightened girl, “And it’s possible he could be going after your dad and grandpa.”

“…What would you do if that were the case?”

There was no compulsion in his statement at this point.

It was just a question.

But it was also just another string tangling itself around her heart.

And then she was caught in the midst of the fray.

While still blessed by the world, as she had been since birth.