He wonders how Izaya’s mask has come to be the way it is, if Izaya’s mask had existed this way since birth or if he’d broken it somewhere along the way.
(Broke his own soul. Or maybe he was just born damaged, some of the older, more superstitious say in whispers. The foxes who’ve lived decades and centuries and millennia. Foxes descended from the very first foxes to bear their curse, who believe the masks were tied to their very souls and damage to a mask was damage to a soul -- and they were a little bit right, in many ways. Magic and souls and mask all bound together within a fox’s tails and to harm one was to harm them all, wasn’t it? Walker isn’t so sure, but legends and grains of truth and all that.)
Walker’s never had the chance to study Izaya’s mask up close before; being together didn’t necessarily mean much when it came to Izaya, more and clever and cunning and slippery-eel than any fox had a right to be. Untrustworthy, lies and honesty with every breathe because he’d taught himself to be completely honest without ever telling the truth and there’s no way to tell them apart because half a mask is no better than no mask at all in their eyes so Izaya had resolved to always be both at the same time just to spite them.
Is the broken edge smooth and sanded down where it ended halfway across his face? Or is it all jagged edges and sharp cracks to the touch? Walker wonders and wonders but never asks, because masks are personal and even half a mask is still a mask and you don’t just ask those things without being invited first. It’s like touching tails, you just don’t.
(The designs, though. Izaya tells him about those one night, a breathless laugh in his voice as they stand on the edge of a skyscraper, looking down on the city below.
I love humans, he’d said as his voice laughed and laughed in a way that only Izaya could ever manage. As a whole, I love their entire species. They’re so interesting, Yumasaki-kun. And so, that is what my mask represents. All this love, overflowing right out of me.)
And then one night Izaya is gone, mask smashed into pieces on their floor, slipping out of Ikebukuro in the dead of night after everything goes to hell. The city is in an uproar, humans and kitsune and spirits of every shape and size flipping their shit as the Black Rider finally finds her head and all of Izaya’s plans converge in one place and in the end it seems none of them ended the way he’d intended them to. Izaya’s gone and all his things and he has no intention of coming back, Walker knows. Not when he’s left without a word, broken the mask with their linked symbols and unspoken promises decorating its edges before running into the darkness without him.
Something inside him cracks, and he thinks it might be his heart but he isn’t actually sure.
His mask is broken in two when he wakes the next morning and he laughs.
(“I will lay a geas upon your people. They shall show only their true face under the secrecy of a mask, until the day you are reborn. And then, one day,” said the god to the fox. “One day, you will be reborn as all souls are. And when your heart breaks, so too will the masks and my geas. And then, fox, I will have my vengeance for the tricks you have wrought.”
And the god cast away the fox with his mask. And the fox ran, but he could not outrun the wrath of the fox people who had been outraged that they should be punished for his tricks.
But time is long and memories are not, and eventually the fox’s story was forgotten and history rewritten.)
