"Your agility is out of this world," Shinra remembered telling the informant now lying dead on the cold metallic table. It was merely an observation, but Izaya's response ended up taking him completely by surprise.

"Don't worry, Shinra. This," Izaya had told him in a singsong voice as he pointed to his body, "is all yours when I die~"

It wasn't supposed to be funny, but it kind of was. Celty, as well as the few other unfortunate souls who had the displeasure of hearing them talk so nonchalantly about death, dissection and experimenting on a friend's corpse didn't seem to appreciate their morbid joke as much as the two of them did. Even Shizuo, who claimed to loathe Izaya more than anything and anyone in the world, had nearly punched Shinra that one time when he heard the doctor talk about the things the man was planning to do to Izaya's body once the informant was dead.

"You're fucked up in the head," Shizuo had snarled and glared at him like Shinra was some sort of psychopath. Looking back, it was thanks to Celty's intervention that Shinra had managed to get out of that one unscathed.

The doctor thought how unfortunate it was that Shizuo did not appreciate the scientific value of studying corpses belonging to special individuals. If he could, then perhaps the man would've already offered his monstrous body to be studied upon death. But why think of Shizuo when he had his other friend lying dead in front of him and waiting to be cut open and placed into jars?

As it turned out one chilly autumn morning, Shinra and Izaya's morbid joke wasn't just a joke anymore, and the doctor found that out when he got a call from the hospital informing him of a dead Orihara Izaya that he was supposed to pick up. At first he thought it was Izaya's way of trolling him, but after a few more calls from the morgue and then a last one from Shinra himself who called an acquaintance of his at the hospital to confirm that Izaya had indeed died, the doctor finally went and picked up the man's corpse.

Things were mostly a haze after that, and as he stood there in the filling silence of his own lab, grey orbs roaming over the lifeless body of the closest thing he ever had to a friend, the doctor still couldn't believe that Izaya was no longer alive. He almost expected the man to spring to his feet and laugh in his face, to tell him that it was a joke and that he'd gotten him good, but the stab wound which had led to the man's death shattered Shinra's hope and left him wondering why he wasn't jumping at the opportunity to cut open the infamous Orihara Izaya.

On second thought, he didn't even need to dissect him to know how and why the man had died. While the obviously shattered bones in the forearms might've weakened the informant, what truly got him was the stab wound in the man's abdomen, and Shinra couldn't understand for the life of him why Izaya had chosen to die instead of coming to him for help.

"I was here!" he found himself hissing through gritted teeth while the scalpel trembled in rhythm to the hand meant to be steady in every situation. It felt like he was swallowing glass with every breath he took, and even though he wanted to blame Izaya for everything, he couldn't do it when images of the hotpot party he failed to invite his friend to, as well as many other similar situations, crashed into his mind like one of Shizuo's vending machines hitting the informant and nearly squashing him beneath its weight.

Dead or alive, Orihara Izaya was a mystery, one that Shinra regretted not having solved while the man was still breathing. It was too late now, and the only thing the doctor was left with was a corpse, cold and still like a porcelain doll. He watched the expressionless face through eyes that stung with tears he refused to shed, and he felt a pang in his chest when he realized that he would never again be able to see the corners of the now purple lips curling into the man's trademark smirk. Helplessness weighed him down, forced his knee to bend under the strain, and Shinra had to grab onto the edge of the table to continue standing.

While the man's body was fascinating in itself, what truly made the informant unique were the man's brilliant mind and his ability to manipulate humans (pieces) like a true chess master. With no brain activity, this doll lying on the table was no longer Izaya.

"This is all yours when I die," Izaya's words echoed in his mind, and suddenly they were no longer funny.

The scalpel fell from his hand, and before he even knew what he was doing he was out the door and away from the thing on the table that he wished was still a person and not just a lifeless doll for him to poke, slice and study to his heart's content.

And it hurt…