a/n: Shizaya because Akatsuki Fatale requested blind!Izaya. I love torturing my favorite characters. Squick warning for aftermath of gouged out eyes, not everyone's cup of tea. Happy holidays! Also, a reminder that I do accept prompts/requests!

dedication: to Jokerface.

disclaimer: I do not own Durarara!

summary: It's tempting to try and hurt Orihara Izaya. Most people know better than to succeed. – hurt!Izaya.

blind

we live with all our senses, but perhaps our sight most of all

stranger

He feels a bit unnerved but doesn't mention it aloud. The prone figure on the ground is silent, despite all their kicks and taunts. It had screamed once, when Rai had pushed his fingers into its eye sockets. Kyo can still remember that scream – it echoes in his ears as Rai finishes taunting their prey.

"Not so important without your precious eyes, huh, pretty boy," he laughs, and Hiro and Dao laugh with him. Kyo feels the taste of bile on his tongue as he looks down at the red blood staining that white face. "Let's see how invincible Ikebukuro's information broker is, without his information!"

With a raucous laugh, Rai leaves and the other two go with him. Kyo lingers for a moment in the alley. This is an act of humiliation and torture, not one of death. This is a message to the smirking demon that rules Ikebukuro with a smile. This is a carefully crafted revenge and it is served very cold indeed.

Kyo looks at the empty eye sockets, glistening red in the moonlight, and just barely manages to hold on to his dinner.

enemy

Shizuo is awakened in the middle of the night by an unknown caller and he is tempted, for a moment, to throw his phone out the window. But rationality tries to calm down temper and Shizuo angrily presses accept and snarls into the phone, "What?"

"I need help," responds a hoarse voice. It sounds vaguely familiar but Shizuo is stunned by the words themselves. He is so shocked that he doesn't respond, prompting a curse from his unknown caller.

"Dammit, Shizu-chan, I need your help," the voice breaks halfway through the sentence and Shizuo recognizes that peculiar combination of arrogance and genius and madness.

Only one person has ever called him Shizu-chan.

"Izaya?" he asks, half-sure this is a dream. The other half whispers much darker things and he ignores it. He's had a lot of practice in ignoring impulses.

There is harsh breathing on the other side, with the faint sound of whimpers. Shizuo gets out of bed, now certain that this isn't a dream. He doesn't know why Izaya would ever call him for help, but the voice is broken and in pain and Shizuo has always acted on instinct.

His memories sing trap, trap but Shizuo ignores them. He sniffs the air – he's always traced the flea by scent, by the faint odor of danger and death that only he can smell. Izaya is a dangerous man, but he is not alone in that qualification and that is what makes Shizuo hurry.

Where Izaya is dangerous, others are deadly.

friend

Shinra is having pleasant dreams when he is rudely woken up by a pounding on his door. Celty half turns to him, her smoke forming a question mark and Shinra smiles at her and her revealing neckline – reality, in this case, is much better than the dream.

Then the pounding starts again and Shinra sighs and moves to extricate himself from the sheets. Only Shizuo can be so loud and Shinra prefers to see what the debt collector wants before he decides to break down the door.

And he opens it, finger pointing accusingly and a rant ready on his lips – a rant that dies as he stares at the small figure in Shizuo's arms. He recognizes the plain black clothing and the messy black hair but when he searches for Izaya's red eyes, he's met instead with crimson blood weeping out of empty sockets.

"Guest bedroom," Shinra orders, covering his horror with the steely persona of a doctor. He has a patient to attend and, for the moment, it doesn't matter that someone gouged out his best friend's eyes. It will, in the future, but not now.

"Celty," he says and his girlfriend comes out of the bedroom, black smoke turning to a pale gray as she sees Izaya. "I need your help." He doesn't notice Shizuo stiffen at the words and orders Celty to get his equipment as he tries to figure where to start. He bandages the cuts and looks for broken bones. He feels inside sockets, probing for smaller cuts and injuries, ignoring the shudders of the body beneath him.

Shinra wraps Izaya's eye sockets in white gaze and his fingers never tremble.

employee

Celty knows Shinra, knows that he's enveloped himself in his job to shut out all his emotions. She doesn't – she can't – do that and therefore has time to speculate, as Shinra stops the bleeding and Shizuo lurks in the corner, what has happened.

Someone has hurt Izaya. Rather grievously, and Celty is not just talking about his eyes. Someone that is most likely not Shizuo despite all evidence to the contrary, because the volatile man is looking at Izaya like he'll fracture if he looks away.

Celty sits and thinks while Shinra fixes. Sits and thinks and uses logic and reason so that when Shinra strips the bloody gloves from his hands and lunges for Shizuo's throat, she is ready with her shadows to catch him.

"Let me go!" Shinra screams at her and Shizuo is taken aback. Even Izaya twitches from his position on the bed because of course Shinra couldn't wait until they relocated to the living room. "I'm going to kill him!"

Celty wishes she has eyes to roll, because she definitely isn't going to let him go after that. Shizuo still looks surprised and Celty is thankful for small mercies. Shizuo has knocked Shinra out with just a poke before.

"How dare you?" Shinra resorts to using words instead of fists and glares at Shizuo with a fury that surprises Celty. She knows that Izaya is Shinra's best friend but cannot equate hours of bickering with this coldblooded rage. Shinra will try to murder Shizuo if Celty wasn't in the way.

Shizuo blinks, and frowns, beginning to catch on. But it is the thin, rasping voice that makes Shinra freeze.

"It wasn't him."

Celty whispers a silent thank-you to the man because her phone was nowhere in sight and she was very close to clubbing Shinra on the head and dealing with it in the morning.

Shizuo frowns even deeper, as if it is the highest offense to be accused of harming someone that he's repeatedly tried to kill.

"Give me the names," Shinra responds coolly, if not calmly and Celty's bonds tighten. Shinra is only human and Izaya's world is made of monsters.

"No," says Izaya in a voice that very nearly makes Celty let Shinra go, let him hunt down the attackers and stand by his side while he eviscerates them.

Shizuo and Shinra – and Celty, nonverbally – all protest, but the information broker sits up, white bandages wrapped around his head.

"No."

Shizuo huffs and stomps out but Shinra stays, staring at the man even though he cannot see his gaze. "They hurt you," Shinra says quietly, "Let me deal with it."

Izaya smiles and it is a terrible thing. Celty could tell his smirks from his smiles by the mischief in twinkling red eyes and she stares at this twisted parody, feeling the urge to scream even though she has no mouth.

"This is my fight," he says, and Celty is alarmed by the calmness of his tone. This is a man who, just minutes ago, was shaking on the bed. "And I will fight it by myself."

acquaintance

Mikado cannot believe his eyes. He literally cannot believe them – he rubs them a hundred times and keeps pinching his arm in the hopes that this strange dream will dissolve. It doesn't unfortunately, and Anri shoots him a side glance when he pinches himself again.

Mikado stops, but he cannot stop himself from staring. Izaya is lounging on the couch like it's a throne, completely calm even though Shizuo is sitting a few feet away. There are white bandages wrapped around Izaya's head, ruffling his black hair, and Mikado can see the edges of yellowing bruises peeking out of black clothes.

But the thing that makes Mikado stop and stare is the sunglasses perched on Izaya's smug face. Sunglasses.

Mikado glances at Shizuo and finds him eyeing Izaya in a way that suggests contentment rather than hatred. He is so absorbed in this earth-shattering development that Anri has to drag him out of Celty's apartment.

"That was rude," Anri admonishes in her own, soft way, "You didn't have to stare at Izaya-san like that."

"He was wearing Shizuo's sunglasses," Mikado whimpers and Anri sighs and leads her confused boyfriend away.

prey

He strolls through Ikebukuro like he always has, listening in on half-heard conversations, smelling the distinctive scent of a sushi shop, feeling the sharp edge of the knife tucked in his jacket. He can't see the bright lights and delicious expressions on his humans' faces, but that's alright. Izaya is an information broker and it would be remiss of him if he could only gather information one way.

He walks on the busy streets, smiling every time he hears the hushed gasp that means that someone has recognized him. It's been a week, after all, and that's a long time in the information world.

The unnatural silence that falls after those gasps is even more entertaining because Izaya knows who's walking a half-step behind him. Knows the weight of blue-tinted sunglasses on Izaya's nose, knows the faint odor of cigarettes – Izaya threw a knife at Shizuo every time he lit one of those damn cancer sticks, but that didn't make the protozoan stop – knows the careful, measured pace of someone just barely in control.

"Shizu-chan?" Izaya hums, taking a left. Shizuo pushes him slightly aside and he takes the correction in stride, continuing to walk down the path.

"What?" the blond mutters impatiently. Izaya knows that tone – he's itching to light another cigarette. He represses the urge though, and Izaya is surprised.

Izaya is always surprised when it comes to Shizuo.

"Do you think it'll rain tomorrow?" he asks nonchalantly, a question that makes several onlookers slump in a pile of drool. Orihara Izaya talking civilly to Heiwajima Shizuo is something out of Ikebukuro's wildest dreams, after all, and Izaya is nothing if not a troll.

"…Don't know," the man says after a pause and Izaya hums but accepts the answer. It will, of course, because Izaya's sensitive nose can smell it, but that wasn't the point of the conversation anyway.

Izaya takes another turn and Shizuo again stops him from running into a wall. He is very useful, rather like a seeing-eye dog. Izaya briefly entertains the idea of putting a collar on Shizuo before deciding, blind or not, Shizuo won't hesitate to throw him off a building.

They're nearing their destination anyway and Izaya gracefully moves a few steps aside to let Shizuo tear the warehouse door off its hinges. The air smells like unwashed bodies and now terror, as Shizuo heaves the door to the side with a tremendous crash.

Izaya wrinkles his nose but steps through the open doorway. This was the compromise because Shinra proclaimed 'doctor's orders' in a steely tone that signified sharp implements and Shizuo's mood just grew darker and darker until he put a hand through the fridge.

Izaya can compromise. He can let Celty drop him off at his office to search his contacts, he can let Shinra equip him with a phone that has raised numerals, he can let Shizuo follow him around all day like a hovering mother hen.

But this he will not compromise on. He steps into the building and flicks open a knife. It doesn't matter that everything's dark because Izaya lives for the dark. It doesn't matter that he cannot see because Izaya can hear the whimpers and gasps and snarls of the four men that attacked him.

Izaya has always had perfect aim.

He works meticulously because Shizuo is guarding the door to the warehouse and Celty is waiting a few minutes away and he has all the time in the world to dig his fingers into the indents in their skulls. Dig and pull and squeeze until blood runs over his hands, until screams fill the warehouse, until the last struggling body breathes his last.

Izaya stands over the mutilated bodies of Kyo and Rai and Hiro and Dao and laughs and laughs. No tears stream over his face – Izaya will never cry again.

But that's fine. Izaya is hurt but he's been hurt before – Simon's punches and Yadogiri's knife and countless others who didn't like the mouthy information broker that had screwed them over. He's been threatened by more people than he likes to count – he does it anyway. He's drawn up a spreadsheet and everything.

People don't whisper about him in alleyways because he's a god that can't bleed. He is not invincible. But people still fear because of the lesson he keeps reminding this city of.

Do not poke a sleeping dragon in the eye.

fin

a/n: I tried for hours to get a read on Izaya's thoughts during the attack and then realized that looking through others' eyes was the better option in this case. I hope you guys liked it!