Disclaimer: Kazuya Minekura owns Wild Adapter. I do not.

Warning: Language, violence, analytical psychology (ie. Kubota's fucked up mind).

Notes: Short chapter, and this was a hard one to get right. If Toki-boy seems OOC I apologize.

Special: Due to college time management issues, my beta reader has completely crapped out on me. If anyone is interested in helping me out with this, please PM me.

Beretta 8

brkstrtrcr

June 2009

There's just something about seeing him lose his whole fucking mind like this that makes you smile.

The first few hits were enough to wind you, bring you to your knees on the sidewalk behind Izumo Headquarters, and he's not pulling his punches. Your ribs are screaming with every breath you take. Your insides feel like they've been put through a meat grinder. He's standing over you, his fists shaking at his sides, angry tears coursing down his face, and part of you wants him to hit you again. You won't fight back. You'd never strike him. But you won't defend yourself either. You deserve this. You don't deserve him.

He's grinding his teeth together to force back the furious betrayal coursing through him now. His thin shoulders are trembling, his chest heaving, and you want nothing more than to die by his hand right now.

How fucking dare you, Kubota?

You practically handed his skinny ass over to Sanada on a silver platter. Your boss' orders are overriding your common sense, and you're allowing it to happen. So when Tokitoh throws caution to the wind and cocks back and knocks the living shit out of you again, you let him. And when he tackles you to the ground and slams your head into the cold concrete and straddles your stomach and hits you over and over and over in the chest, you smile.

"What the fuck is wrong with you?!" he shouts, his voice cracking with the strain of it all. "Stop fucking smiling!"

But you can't. Because this is all so goddamned ironic, and stupid things like that amuse you. He's beating against your chest with his fists and swearing and calling you filthy names. And you let him.

After ten minutes he seems to tire of knocking you senseless, and he doubles over against you and hits you weakly while crying.

He hasn't done this in years. In fact, the last time his face was pressed into your chest and he sobbed his little heart out like this was the night that he broke your arm in half. You're not exactly a sucker for the waterworks but you understand the frustrated desperation and misplaced anger pouring out of his tightly closed violet eyes, ripping out of his slender throat and past gritted teeth and into your shirt.

"Tokitoh--" you start to speak but he shakes his head and chokes back a violent sob and growls at you.

"Shut up," he snarls against your chest. "Just shut the fuck up!"

You don't argue. You just reach up and put your hand on the back of his head and listen to him cry. If the lowest circle of hell is reserved for people like Sanada, they're going to have to dig a basement for people like you. This kid sobbing furiously into your shirt is the single most important thing in your fucked up, jaded life, and look at what you've done to him.

Tokitoh might have been better off if he'd just given up and died in that alley. This isn't a new train of thought for you. You're almost positive that he'd do more than just bruise you or break bones if you told him that, but part of you knows that you're altogether too talented at harming people. Until a pair of proud violet eyes became your sky, this strong and paradoxically fragile creature became your world, you had no idea how skilled you were at hurting people.

So what the hell are you going to do now?

The easy answer is to kill Sanada and set this building on fucking fire. The hard answer, the one that practically demands to be followed, is to suck it up and handle things the way you have been--play Sanada's little game, give him whatever it is that he thinks Tokitoh contains to unlock Wild Adapter, and get as far from Yokofuckinghama as possible.

But you know deep down in parts of you that are best left in shadow that you were meant to live and die in these streets, with your guts splattered across the sidewalk and your gun in your hand. You've never believed in fairy tale endings, naïve princesses and slaying dragons with gleaming swords that never seem to stain with blood. You aren't bitter about it, either. That's just the kind of person you are.

Tokitoh...

Tokitoh isn't. You sigh heavily and sit up, pulling him up with you, and lift his head to look at his tear-stained face. He meets your eyes and the misery in his is gut-wrenching. What the hell are you doing to this kid?

"I'm sorry," is all that you can force out and you both know that it isn't enough. But he trusts you, even after all of this, and he nods, and he swipes quickly at his eyes with the backs of his fists, and he takes a deep breath before meeting your gaze again.

You like to think that you're intelligent, clever even, but you will never understand what it is that he sees in you that can make the tears stop, push the anger away. Like you're the cure for every problem he could ever encounter. Like you're a fucking superhero.

You're not. You're Kubota Makoto, a twenty year-old drug dealer with a criminal record as long as a school bus and too much emotional baggage. You're relatively lazy, calm to a fault, and--generally speaking--absolutely fucking dangerous.

But maybe that's just your ego talking.

Tokitoh rubs his palms over his face and sighs shakily. "I'd apologize for beating the shit out of you but I'm still pissed," he smiles weakly. You nod and put a hand on the back of his neck, lean forward so that your forehead rests against his. You feel like you've been run over by a subway train, but his scrawny frame straddling yours overrides the ache in your bones.

He chuckles mirthlessly. It's a cold, dead sound that would be more appropriate coming from you. It would seem that he's picked up quite a few of your less enviable personality traits.

"I have to go back in there, don't I?" he asks quietly.

"Yeah."

"You're coming with me, right?"

You meet his violet gaze. "Yeah."

He arches an eyebrow at you. "You're the queen of England, right?"

Your crooked smile steals across your lips. "Yeah."

Tokitoh's smile widens into the more comfortable expression you've seen on his face so many times and he smacks you in the back of the head--much more gently now--and holds your hazel eyes with his purple ones. "Stupid Kubo-chan," he mutters.

"Yeah."

You can't bring yourself to kiss him even now, when the expression on his face says that he wants it, and when the foreign taste of Ark Royals and Sanada on his soft, full lips needs to be replaced with Seven Stars and you.

You still feel too damned dirty, and you don't think that you'd be able to look at your face and all of its livid bruises in the mirror tomorrow morning if you tainted his lips any more.

Okay. I know that Tokitoh does cry in front of Kubota at least once in this series, and I had a difficult time writing this without him coming off as holyshitgirlyandeffiminate, which he is definitely not. It's the same problem I have with the sex scenes. I've just never been a big fan of the infamous 'hurt/ comfort' genre, I suppose. Meh. This makes the most sense to me, because only in these two's dysfunctional relationship could Toki cry while beating the brakes off of Kubo. Ah, love...