Disclaimer: Kazuya Minekura owns Wild Adapter. I do not. But I'll gladly fight her for it.

Warning: Language, slight sexual content (sorry, ladies).

Notes: By the end of this chapter, you're either going to love me or shoot me. The inspiration for the plot line here was an episode of Law & Order SVU. For god's sake, don't ask.

Beretta 9

brkstrtrcr

June 2009

Ryoji doesn't argue when you tell him to handle the Youth Group the next day.

Not really, anyway.

He huffs and sighs and flicks you off over the phone, but you know that he'll do what you ask, and not just because he's technically below you in the Izumo hierarchy. He saw the tourniquet wrapped around Tokitoh's right arm yesterday when you came back from Sanada's office. His brown eyes were worried, but you silently requested that he keep his comments to himself, even as Tokitoh's violet gaze promised a hellacious death to anyone who so much as looked at him. Ryoji nodded and backed off.

The rendezvous with Sanada's crack-medical associates hadn't gone as badly as you'd suspected. They'd poked and prodded and asked questions, and while your roommate had been visibly agitated, you'd been impressed that he'd managed to not kill anyone until they asked for a blood sample.

And once he saw the syringes and tried to rip the attendant's arms off, they didn't ask.

You were ordered to hold him down. And you did. And the only reason that he hadn't ripped you limb from limb had been that unspoken threat that hung in the air, because you both knew that somehow, someway, Sanada was watching. So you'd pinned him to the table with your reassuring weight on his hips and held his terrified violet eyes until they got what they needed and tied a crude roll of gauze around his arm and left him trembling beneath you under the bright, sterile flourescents.

You were fairly certain that Tokitoh wanted to bash your face in after that, but he didn't. He shook violently and didn't let go of your hand for thirty-seven minutes until you walked into the Toukohan, but he didn't hit you again. He refused to leave your side for the rest of the night.

When you woke up this morning he was curled around you like an overgrown house cat. You reached over him carefully and groped around on the floor for glasses and phone before calling Ryoji. And now you're just laying here, running your fingers through his soft, unruly black hair, contemplating the interesting direction that your life has taken in the past few weeks.

You're halfway through recounting that rather interesting little incident in the shower from several weeks ago when your phone rings on the pillow beside your head. You sigh and look at the display in mild annoyance and resist the urge to strangle orphaned fucking children when the little LCD flashes 'Sanada'. This man has the worst timing...

"Kubota," you answer quietly. Tokitoh murmurs in his sleep unintelligibly--something about Street Fighter--and buries his face in your throat.

"I see that you aren't at the office, today," he drawls, exhaling cigarette smoke audibly. Your body tenses automatically, like he'll walk into you room at any moment and demand that you hand over your bed mate, but you hear the traffic flying by in the background and realize that he's at the restaurant. "Are you calling out sick?"

You agile mind supplies you with a snappy retort but you bite your tongue. "I have some business to take care of. I've already contacted Ryoji." Granted, your business involves spending the rest of the day basking in the unnatural heat pouring from Tokitoh's slender limbs, but your boss doesn't need to know that.

Sanada gives a soft 'ah' and then chuckles. "Well, as much as I hate to be the bearer of bad news, I'm being forced to give you a new assignment. It can't wait until tomorrow. I've left the information with your colleague at the office."

You school your voice into some semblance of appropriate politeness and ignore the irritated twitch in your eyebrow. "Of course," you reply.

Tokitoh frowns against the sensitive skin of your neck and nuzzles into the underside of your jaw, muttering at the stubble there. His arm around your waist tightens.

"Oh, and Kubota-kun?"

You cringe at the way he purrs your name into the phone. "Yes?"

"Tell your cat I said thanks for the entertainment the other day."

You hang up the phone abruptly, against your better judgment. You were never one to lose your temper so easily, but there's something about the filthy quality to his tone that enrages you.

Even now, in this dingy, tiny room, miles away from Izumo Headquarters, you can't ever truly escape Sanada's all-reaching omnipotence. He will never forgive the blow to his ego that you dealt him when you calmly walked out of his office and left Izumo, or the way that you smiled and told him with your eyes that you'd rather rip out your own intestines than give yourself to him when he kissed you in the backseat of that stupid black sedan. Money and power don't impress you.

"Kubo-chan?"

The smile that tugs at your lips, genuine and real, does impress you. Tokitoh's innate curiosity and subtle naivety and all-around kind heart impress you. And maybe a tainted, jaded man like you doesn't deserve a pure soul like him, but you'll be damned if you tell him that.

You glance down at your counterpart to find his sleepy violet eyes half-open and watching you. Tokitoh yawns loudly and stretches, his back popping audibly and he groans in appreciation. You sigh as his lithe, slender frame presses against your side and you feel his noticeable erection grind against your hip.

His face flushes in mild embarrassment and he pushes away a bit on the small mattress. "Sorry," he mutters. You don't respond aloud; instead, you slide an arm around his back and pull until he's sitting on your lap, lean thighs on either side of yours, and you rock your hips up against his meaningfully. His eyebrows shoot up to his hairline as he realizes that you're just as hard as he is.

Tokitoh smiles nervously at you. "Okay, then. I'm not sorry, you pervert." And he rolls his narrow hips down into yours and you hiss quietly at the pressure.

Sex is something that you really didn't think about too terribly often, until Tokitoh grabbed your shirt and threw you down onto your own bed and cuddled up against you naked two years ago. Since then the subject has crossed your mind from time to time, with growing frequency. Right now it's scrolled in neon letters at the forefront of your brain.

You let him pin your wrists to the mattress on either side of your head, rock against you slowly, and get himself worked up. The lazy half of your mind approves of being able to just lay there pliantly underneath him. And the way his lips part and he starts to breathe more heavily and his heart rate triples as he grinds against you is ample motivation to let him do whatever the fuck he wants.

And then your phone rings again and you stare up past his crestfallen face at the ceiling of this tiny room and imagine that you must have been a serial rapist or something equally as horrible in a previous life. Karma is not fond of you.

You answer the phone without looking at the display this time. And before you even have a chance to open your mouth and structure your mounting frustration into some manner of a calm voice, Ryoji is barking into your ear. "Kubochii, you need to get your ass down here pronto."

Tokitoh cocks his head to the side inquisitively at the urgent tone in your friend's normally cool voice. You've both lost complete interest in the rising heat between your half-clothed bodies. "What's going on and where are you?" you ask, because he isn't talking to you as the second-in-charge of the youth gang. He's speaking as the reporter who took your cat in a year ago, the guy who genuinely cares about you both.

That's mildly disconcerting, to say the least.

"That fucking file that Sanada's creepy ass left! That's what's wrong! And I'm on the train heading to West Yokohama!"

You pull the phone away from your ear several inches--he's practically fucking screaming--and chew on your lower lip in contemplation before responding. "What was in the file?"

Ryoji growls. "Your new assignment. Remember your old pal Mr. Slice and Dice? The one that tried to make sashimi out of Tokki?"

Oh, how could you forget? Your gaze jumps instinctively to scar on Tokitoh's slender throat, the single long, thin white line that runs from behind his left ear to his Adam's apple. You ignore the flare of anger that rises in your gut. "Yeah."

"Well apparently word travels pretty quickly in this town; he knows about you coming back to Izumo." This news doesn't surprise you in the least. Sekiya was always a 'who's-who' of the Yakuza, after all. "He's ordered his guys to find Tokki and bring him in. And this is supposed to go down in the next seventy-two hours."

Tokitoh stares down at you in a mixture of fear and rage, and you decide that you're really very tired of seeing that look in his eyes, that fight-or-flight response that triggers so often these days. "What's the assignment?"

Ryoji snorts. "Oh, Sanada just wants you to kill Sekiya and the rest of Tojou's youth gang. That's all," he growls sarcastically. "That should be a fucking middle school field trip, right?"

You close your eyes and rub your temples with your free hand. Once again you've been dumped into the middle of a brewing shitstorm between rival Yakuza factions. But that's what junkyard dogs are for, after all. Maim intruders, kill survivors, and keep the master's hands clean. You were born to fight, roll in blood and shit, and die for the good of the cause.

"Where should I meet you?" you ask quietly.

Twenty minutes later you're sitting at a booth in a middle-class family restaurant in West Yokohama Crossing, playing idly with a spoon and a cup of coffee. Tokitoh sits beside you, head buried in his arms folded on the Formica tabletop. The conspicuous bulge of his Beretta stuffed haphazardly into the front of his jeans is hidden from view by his slumped frame, but it makes you feel better to know that it's there.

Strange, that. Two years ago you had no qualms with playing the role of his defender, but after everything that's happened with these Yakuza groups you understand that he feels the need to be able to protect himself, and his little kitten claws won't always do the job. Sometimes range and distance are essential.

You wonder when you became so open to the idea of him dirtying his hands in blood the way that you have.

The waitress sashays over to your table, coffee pot in-hand, with a smile and too much makeup and winks at you. "You need another cup, handsome?"

Tokitoh lifts his head from the folds of his arms and glares at her. You want to laugh, but instead you smack him amiably in the back of his head to redirect that possessive anger. It works like a charm; he jerks around in the seat. "What the hell was that for?!" he demands, but you grab him in a rough headlock and smile at the waitress, who looks positively confused.

"No, thanks. Could we have a Coke and an order of fries?" you ask politely. She pauses, her eyes on your fuming cat still struggling against your grip, before smiling nervously and walking away from the table much more quickly than she'd come.

Once she's safely out of range you let go of your roommate and he punches you in the arm. "You really should control your temper," you admonish him gently.

"Fuck off," he grumbles. "She was hitting on you."

You arch an eyebrow and give him a look that clearly states, 'And your point is...?' Tokitoh glares at you darkly. "She's only doing it so you'll leave her a tip," he points out matter-of-factly, before reaching over and snagging your coffee without asking. This time you do smile.

"You have no manners whatsoever," you sigh. He's too busy gulping down your coffee to care. He looks at you over the rim of the chipped mug.

"Whaddaya mean?" he asks around the lip of the mug.

"Normally," you explain as if you're speaking to a small child, "one asks for permission before taking something that belongs to someone else."

He rolls his eyes, finishes draining the cup, and slides it back over to you. "That's stupid. What's mine is mine. And what's yours is mine."

Is skill with logic is absolutely fucking astounding. You smile crookedly at him and he frowns. "And don't talk to me like I'm five. You aren't my dad."

No, you are most certainly not.

"There you guys are!" You both look up and watch Ryoji glance nervously over his shoulder before sliding into the booth across from you. He adjusts his shoulder holster under his jacket with a little too much effort and leans forward. "Is it safe to talk here?" he asks quietly.

Tokitoh leans across the table towards him and, in a stage whisper, replies, "Yeah, just ignore those two Tojou guys behind you."

Ryoji's brown eyes widen and he whips around to find the booth behind him empty. Tokitoh collapses onto the tabletop in a fit of hilarious laughter. Ryoji kicks him under the table.

"Well, if you two are finished playing, I suppose we should get down to business," you drawl, shoving Tokitoh's useless form out of the way. The kid's laughing so hard that he has tears in his eyes.

Your second-in-command frowns and crosses his arms over his chest. "Yeah, I didn't want to say too much over the phone but apparently Tojou's already mobilized and they're looking for you, right now. The only problem is that they're too scared to come onto our turf, and the Triads already made it perfectly damned clear that Chinatown is off-limits. They won't hesitate to kill Yakuza for a territory infraction."

You nod. "So Sanada wants me to get rid of the problem. I suppose that would make sense. To my knowledge Sekiya is the only one from Tojou who's seen Tokitoh in person."

You casually leave out that the others who witnessed you and Sukiyaki's little gunpoint exchange are dead now. By your hand.

"Well, we have to assume that the whole youth gang knows what he looks like, now." Ryoji lights a cigarette and leans back, one arm stretched out along the back of the booth. "Why now, though? Why are they just now going after Tokki?"

You frown. That's quite the valid question. Your first and only encounter with Sekiya had been on his terms; you and Tokitoh had gotten mixed up in Tojou's little WA investigation. Truth be told, when your stray was initially kidnapped, you had suspected Sekiya before Sanada had even crossed your mind.

Your train of thought is interrupted by your waitress' return to your table, and she eyes Tokitoh warily while setting down his drink and food. He grins at her. She takes a step back and turns to Ryoji, but he waves her off irritably. She leaves the table with a confused look on her overdone features.

"Regardless of their motivation, I think we need to consider our options," Ryoji sighs. "We can either meet this head-on and attack first, or we can play defense and wait for them to come to us."

You nod and your eyes drift to Tokitoh. He's cramming french fries down his throat like a starving man, but you don't bother to remind him of the existence of table manners. You smirk, and turn back to Ryoji, who's watching your roommate's antics with an expression of fond disgust on his face. "Of course, we could always use Tokki here as bait."

Tokitoh pauses mid-bite and looks up at Ryoji to determine whether or not he's serious. When he decides that he can't read your partner's face, his violet eyes swivel to you. You light a cigarette and consider this option carefully, holding Tokitoh's gaze. This plan could work brilliantly, but it might be too obvious. If Sekiya smells a setup he could either kill your cat outright or back out, and then you will have lost the advantage of surprise. He's probably expecting you to come storming into his headquarters in a hail of gunfire...

"Oh, hell no--" your roommate starts to protest when a slow smile spreads across your face. You pluck the fry from his fingers and pop it into your mouth, chewing thoughtfully. This does appear to be a promising plan of action, but there are still too many unknown variables in play. You'll have to determine several things beforehand, and Ryoji is already listing them off aloud.

"...Recent Tojou movements, how many of these little bastards there are, profiles on their top members, the location of their new offices..." He trails off and ignores your fuming counterpart. "We need a shitload of information if we're going to get away with this. Who do you know that deals in information?"

You arch an eyebrow at Ryoji while playing idly with a spoon in your coffee cup. "That isn't a problem."

He rolls his eyes. "I meant specific information. Actually," he frowns. "Y'know, I did hear that some of the Tojou youth punks frequent this one particular bordello on their turf. Cherry something-or-other..."

Tokitoh blushes furiously and drops his eyes to the floor. What the hell is that all about? You weren't even aware that your stray knew what a brothel was, let alone that he had ever been to one...

"What's with him?" Ryoji asks curiously.

"I don't know," you murmur, and you lean down to catch Tokitoh's eyes but he's trying his damnedest to become invisible, right now. "Tokitoh?"

His ears are bright red and he mutters a name that makes you drop the spoon in your hand. It clatters into your empty coffee mug and Tokitoh winces visibly.

Anna-chan. Oh, you had almost completely forgotten about her. Almost. And you never did find out how Tokitoh knew about her.

Ryoji chuckles across from you. "Tokki, is that the hooker we pumped for information when Kubochii got locked up a year ago?" Tokitoh nods miserably. You look over at your Izumo counterpart for answers. "Chill out," he sighs, but you're almost certain that your face is still it's usual unreadable expression. "She gave us the name of the murder suspect so that we could get you out of jail. Although I did always wonder how Tokitoh knew her." He turns his warm brown gaze on your roommate. "You don't exactly seem like the 'I pick up prostitutes' type, kiddo."

You aren't sure what happened exactly, but apparently it was bad enough that your cat looks like he'd love nothing more than to melt into the booth, right now. You nod absently and reach out to put a reassuring hand on Tokitoh's head. He won't meet your hazel eyes, but he doesn't throw your hand off either. That tells you two things; first, that he feels guilty about... something, and second, that it's probably going to take a threat of physical violence to get any answers out of him.

And here you thought that Sekiya was the worst of your problems.

You fish around inside your jacket pocket for your phone and hit the second speed dial button, holding the device between your shoulder and jaw, your eyes lingering on your roommate. "Yeah, Kou, it's me. I need some information."

This is turning into a giant fucking WA character reunion, ain't it?