The pairing is AsumaTonbo, and this is set in a sort of AU that just popped into my head. It's not significantly different from the normal Narutoverse; it's just full of substance abuse. Isn't that loverly?
Warnings: A little bit of cursing, a lot of cynicism, a lot of denial, and slash. Oh, and drugs.
Characters: Asuma, Hayate, Tonbo.
Tonbo doesn't love Asuma.
Hayate asks, once, watching them share one of those oddly tender moments that they sometimes have. Asks, "Do you love him?"
Asuma just gives him a little smile and takes a deep drag on his cigarette, while Tonbo laughs. It's a bitter sound, low and throaty and dark, like warm dark chocolate melting on his tongue.
He says he doesn't love Asuma. Sneers the word 'love', lips twisting as if even tasting it disgusts him. Love, Tonbo says, is a fairytale thing, and fairytales are for little kids to believe in under their covers, at night, when it's dark and silent and they can imagine anything they want into the world. Not for bitter, angry men drugging away the anger in a ramshackle shed, addicted to feeling different and driven by that addiction to such lows.
It seems impossible that any man can look regal while sitting at the back of a shed clouded with smoke, breathing in a potpourrii mix of every drug anyone could think of, but Tonbo manages it. With the way he sits, knees lazily splayed apart, arms draped over the back of the stained couch, head tilted back just slightly, he looks like a king. The blind king of the dregs, surveying his kingdom of stoned outcasts from atop his threadbare throne. Reigning over the junkies and whores and beggars who all owe allegiance to the same ruler that governs him: the grinning chemical monster that dances with them until it wears them out, and then throws them away while it seeks a new partner.
If you love someone, he continues, you give them things, right? But Tonbo doesn't have anything to give Asuma. He's got a crown of reeking smoke and a throne with broken springs and a whole fucking empire all made of dirt. He's got a hot, tight kernel of anger that always burns in his chest, spreading up into his throat, and it coats every word he speaks, making each syllable come out sharp and edged and cutting. He's got bitter, warped opinions on all the world's beautiful and fragile things, and he tries to break them every time he touches them, because he can't have them.
He already gives Asuma his body. That's enough for him, for both of them. It's not anything like love or even anything like gentle. It's fucking, fucking like animals, biting and scratching at each other, panting and gasping and swearing and screaming. It's hard and rough and fast and dirty, and it leaves them both sweaty and exhausted and bloody. Not love at all, which is why Tonbo likes it so much. Because it's not some stupid, silly dime-store novel, not some idealistic illusion spun from mist and smoke and wishes, but real and harsh and painful.
Even if Tonbo does love Asuma, he's sure as hell not going to say it. He's got no illusions at all about what kind of person he is: bitter and crippled and angry. There's no romance there, nothing kind there, nothing to warrant recieving love. He doesn't deserve love and he doesn't want love. He's not a child anymore, he tells Hayate, not a little kid who still believes in ghosts and fairies and that hiding his head under the covers will make it okay, because if he can't see the bad things they're not there.
Tonbo can't see anything, anymore, good or bad, but he knows it's all there. He knows what's there and he knows what's not there and he knows what's real, and love isn't one of the real things. Love is just a hopeless wish, something for idealists to cling to in a broken world that's trying to break them too. The only way to survive and keep sane is to crumble and break and fall to pieces, and who would want to share a life like that?
Tonbo doesn't have any illusions about himself. He doesn't love Asuma, and he knows he doesn't, and he even knows why, not that he will ever tell anyone that reason. The only person it's important to already knows it, anyway.
Tonbo doesn't love Asuma because he hurts, and he hurts everyone around him, and he will only let Asuma down and make him hurt. He doesn't love Asuma because the world is broken and rotten and love isn't a fairytale, but a nightmare, an addiction even stronger than the one that's given Tonbo his worthless kingdom of broken filth. It's too cruel by far for even bitter, angry Tonbo to inflict that on anyone else. He doesn't love Asuma because he doesn't want to hurt Asuma.
Tonbo doesn't love Asuma because he does.