Yokohama. If he could live anywhere on earth, it'd still be here.

There are lights in this city that never go off, and plenty of strangeness to keep up with what's left of the darkness. Four-lane intersections breeding half-lane alleyways. His entire world compressed into the space of glass windows and yellow stripes on roads; glass and tarmac reflecting and trapping enough people that, in this place, Kubota can get lost in the millions and feel nothing. Liminality is seeking out the edge and finding the expanse instead. Yokohama yawns in front of him every morning, every evening. It takes the atmosphere and fills it: gas, dust, engine noise, office workers, the acrid wash of neon, fluorescents, dirty water in the harbour. Vending machines on every corner. It isn't hard to find novelty. It's easy enough that newness can become numbing. When the world reinvents itself in every ward with every new season, you begin to recognise only the old.

Kubota moves through it, looking for something he doesn't even recognise. Limitations are necessary, for him. For him to notice anything, for him to need anything; restrictions are necessary. He won't let the world change him, but the world as it is is boring, flat, grey. So Kubota goes - gravitates - to the nearest place of convenience (the convenience store), picks up the flavour of the week (flavour for the week), and buys it because stealing is too easy, stealing dulls the victory that comes with a new taste or a new game or a new sound.

Gravity doesn't last long enough. Kubota floats on, drifts somewhere else; goes back to his empty apartment and decides he needs a new game to play.

The Izumokai is a temporary engagement; he knows that, the other members do not - for the most part - because they can't imagine someone bored or brave enough to leave. People err when they think they have basis to ground Kubota. Kubota's not looking for anything to hold him down. Sanada made him pick up the gun, but he was the one to pull the trigger. Bang- bang. They want something from him, which puts him in a position of power. Sanada does not flirt, but he teases. He tries the usual suspects: money. Power. Sex. The question of heritage, lineage, brokerage. Kubota smiles at him and ducks away, leaving only the rubbed out smell of dirty cigarette smoke in the air.

After a while the other youth members start to move in his orbit for the same reasons Kubota doesn't move in Sanada's. He plays mahjong with them, and destroys them methodically. They come to crave being defeated; in the process they get to see Kubota work, and all of them want to know one thing or another. How does he play so fucking well? Why is he so goddamned fearless? There's a flatness to Kubota, and his expressions, that everyone else slides off.

Komiya tries. Komiya scrabbles, but Komiya needs him as opposed to wanting him - a very different game. Komiya dresses in sharp pinstripes to disguise the fact that the rest of him is bent. He couldn't really kill anyone, and Kubota pities him for it. Komiya wants to, he knows. Komiya wants to beat people off of his mother, wants to break arms and legs and lives, but he isn't built like that. The most Komiya can do is make the collections, keep things impersonal. His eyes shine so fucking bright when Kubota takes down a few men from an opposition gang that Kubota plays him, for a little while. Finds his mother, talks to her, digs his fingers into the gut of Komiya's personal life and drags it out in front of the man, watches him jump and dance and smile. Kubota falls asleep with his head on Komiya's lap. When he opens his eyes again, Komiya's forehead is pressed against his as Komiya inhales, exhales, looks down, needs. Kubota lights them up a cigarette and shares the smoke, giving Komiya second-hand hits and dry-to-wet kisses until Komiya shoves himself up against Kubota's hips and pants dry, tortured curses while Kubota jerks him off in languid, painful strokes.

Komiya ends up dead less than a few months later, crawling around because he let the rest of his life get in the way and smiling like a martyr while spilling out epithets of living and living well. Kubota isn't sure what he feels, looking down at the body, besides apathy and a vague disappointment. This isn't what he's looking for.

Kubota resigns, moves on.

Finds a stray cat in an alleyway, and takes that home.

Why the hell not? One game ends. Another begins.

What Kubota is unfamiliar with is dead weight. The cat's heavy, and completely unconscious. If anything, Kubota's more used to leaving bodies where they lie. This one he has to drag up his apartment and put together, his identity and his life one great puzzle with pieces that aren't easy to find. It's interesting to find that the cat - Tokito - has no real idea who he is, or where he came from. Everything before Kubota picking him up is a blank slate. Eyes like those on Tokito tell the truth when they aren't screaming it from the rooftops, so Kubota believes him. It doesn't take long for him to learn that Tokito also can't lie worth a damn.

'Kubo-chan,' Tokito always end up complaining. 'Why do you have so much junk in your apartment?'

Kubota lets Tokito call him whatever he wants, because who else is Tokito going to talk to? The cell phone Tokito has comes from Kubota. The contact list is empty. The apartment still has Kubota's, and only Kubota's, name on the front door. Tokito prowls around, afraid but adapting, and doesn't think about the world outside at all. It's Kubo-chan this, Kubo-chan that. And then nothing - Tokito doesn't go anywhere. Doesn't have anyone to go to. Kubota lets him rant and pace and settle, sitting next to Tokito on the couch and waiting for the eventual relaxation, the lowering of hackles, the inevitable press of Tokito's thighs and shoulders against his own. Kubota's first moves are to touch the back of Tokito's neck with the tips of his fingernails, scratching at first and then tracing figures, random numbers, lines and patterns, until Tokito is accustomed to it and falls asleep. Then Kubota traces the outline of a collar, runs his thumb bump-bump-bump up and down the ridges of Tokito's spine.

Kubota brings Tokito around his city, gradually and slowly, giving Tokito time to assimilate and learn. They go down to the pachinko parlours, the sex clubs, the movie theatres. Tokito squawks, but doesn't pay them much attention. He curses out Kubota for his weird taste and drags them both back home, where he changes into Kubota's old t-shirts and works on the Playstation for hours. It's the closest thing to normal that Kubota can theoretically understand.

Kou tells Kubota to give Tokito shots, since Kubota seems so insistent on rolling the boy through the mess that his questionable history is producing. Kubota laughs and shrugs, but Tokito makes repeated appearances with every mention of the new Wild Adapter drug, and eventually Kou asks if Kubota wants a bell to tie around the boy's neck. 'So you can hear him when he's coming,' Kou shrugs, smiling elliptically. 'And so that you'll always know when he's not around, from the silence. You've a fine specimen there, after all.'

Something changes in the air, a smell like ozone. Kubota lives in a world constantly thrown out of focus; he only needs to see the vague shapes and shadows to guess at the way things may move. He calls Kou at three in the morning because he can no longer tell if Tokito is going to come back, or why Tokito's left, or why Tokito would leave. How he could let Tokito leave. Kubota listens to Kou relate Tokito's visit to his store, but he's distant. (Why should he let Tokito leave?)

'According to witness testimonies,' Kou tells Kubota, 'it seems he may have been abducted by members of the Izumokai youth group working out of Yokohama.'

Kubota doesn't say anything immediately. Izumokai - Sanada. An old memory of Ark Royal cigarettes, cloying on his tongue. The way Sanada wanted him; a possessiveness blunted by logic and re-sharpened by the ability to move and do and act. Kubota carefully pushes the memory aside, and lets himself acknowledge that he recognises that in Sanada only because of the parts of him that work the same way. He closes his eyes and traps the phone between his ear and shoulder and thinks of Tokito: the look on Tokito's face when he grits his teeth together and tries to hold back the noises he makes, the small and desperate keens that threaten to push free when Kubota spreads his legs and lets (makes) Tokito fuck him. He knows, more than wonders, how his eyes are when he keeps them open to watch Tokito shudder and break as he comes, Kubota's name on his lips and nothing else but Kubota in his world.

Kou breaks in. 'Kubota-kun?'

'I told you, didn't I?' Kubota says, opening his eyes and reaching into his pocket, digging for his pack of smokes. He lights one up, and makes a decision. 'I won't let go of him just yet.'

'Ah,' Kou says.

'I think I'll need another wok,' Kubota murmurs as he begins to sense the world sharpening and realigning, forced into place by the human jealousies, pettiness and desires he's always wanted to be able to feel.