[DRRR!!/Durarara!!] Long Live Loneliness

Everything had reached the end of hope, losing all its glory, and even the memory of that glory.

In Orihara Izaya's eyes, I glimpsed a light bright enough to burn through a rainy night. Everything that followed, my muddled, unclear feelings for him and my poisonous, curse-like longing for my homeland, was no more than the briefest flash of that moment, a recurrence and continuation of something already reduced to ashes.

"I've been exiled." I looked at him calmly.

He laughed.

"Congratulations. You have finally touched upon a fate shared by all humanity.

"That is, being alone."

.

People often ask me why Orihara Izaya turned out to be such a scumbag.

Usually, I answer that it's because he's too smart.

He is too clever, acutely sensitive to the smallest, most uncontrollable parts of human emotion, and far too good at exploiting them. Add to that his poor upbringing from childhood and his twisted personality, and you get a long-term side effect: adolescent mania without a conscience.

In the end, the consequence of never outgrowing his chuunibyou was that he chose loneliness of his own accord, reaped what he sowed, and enjoyed every bit of it.

So I always sum up Orihara Izaya in one sentence, and Kishitani Shinra couldn't agree more:

The mind always triumphs, and loneliness is forever great.

LONG LIVE LONELINESS.

AND SAME TO YOUR LOVE.

★ Did I owe you something in a past life, Orihara Izaya?

☆ Original female protagonist, first-person POV, male lead is Izaya.

★ Crossover, primarily DRRR, with a realistic Heisei-era Tokyo cast planned. Also crosses over with Kakegurui, Wind Breaker (WBK), Aoharu x Machinegun, and Only the Pure Magic Lives in the Background. The timeline follows the DRRR novels, starting in 2004.

☆ I got into Wind Breaker and Su Shifu had me completely captivated for 24 hours, so I opened a separate Su Shifu storyline for this novel. Find it in my profile: The Long Goodbye (complete √).

Draft progress: 7 chapters

Theme: attachment to one's homeland, the spiritual wandering of strangers in a foreign land, and the collective affliction of loneliness in modern society