Disclaimer: Kazuya Minekura owns Wild Adapter. I do not.
Warning: Language, sexual references.
Notes: Not much plot development here.
Beretta 16
brkstrtrcr
February 2010
Tie your shoes, brush your teeth. Don't turn the faucet on so high or you'll get water all over your shirt. The front door unlocks to the left, the back door to the right, and the mailbox lock is still broken. No, Kasai isn't really a cop. Yes, I know that he drives a cop car. No, I won't leave you.
It's been just two weeks and Tokitoh won't leave your side. He asks more questions than ever before, blatantly argues with you whenever possible, and all the while your friends look on in awe at your patience, your calm, your parental control. Restraint is something that has always come to you naturally, fled you completely when confronted with this irrational young man, but you haven't touched him once since he woke up and broke your bones a second time. Oh, you've combed his hair and held his hand and pinned him down when he struggles and fights imaginary enemies in his sleep, but you haven't, couldn't bring yourself to touch him the way you used to. Tokitoh isn't the same person anymore.
"Sanada wants you to meet those damned Chinese drug dealers, tonight," Ryoji mutters as he enters the Toukohan through the front door and bows respectfully to Kou sitting behind the main counter, packaging cocaine into individual plastic baggies by grams. It almost makes you smile, the complete hypocrisy of the situation, but then again it isn't really that funny. Tokitoh growls at the television from the floor at your feet and you reach out idly to ruffle his hair. He always did get so worked up playing those video games.
You watch your Yakuza partner flop down on a neighboring couch dejectedly, his sharp brown eyes tracking Tokitoh's pixelated avatar across the television screen as he slays maidens, rescues dragons, fights Heaven and Hell in an epic eight-bit battle that will end with an unwelcome return to real life, because when the console powers down and the screen fades to black, Tokitoh is just as miserable as you are. The difference is that he doesn't understand why.
"What time?" you ask aloud. You know that the shipment comes in at two in the morning. You know that it will arrive by freight carrier at the Yokohama Bay dock company at the end of 14th street, second pier to the left. You're asking so that Tokitoh overhears you, so that you don't have to watch him shed angry tears when he thinks that you're hiding things from him again. He's certainly gotten more insecure since losing his memories a second time.
Ryoji humors you, rattles off the time and location in a sort of easy, practiced way that unsettles you deeply. You've gone from hardcore gang member, murderer and criminal to odd-couple parental unit to one Ushio Minoru, and the dynamic that's crept into your already traumatic relationship with your cat has you shuddering. He sleeps beside you at night because it's familiar to him in some strange way that he doesn't understand, and it's been complete and unholy torture to restrain yourself when you wake to him pressed against you from shoulder to shins. You muse that the only memories he did appear to retain are the physical reflexes he learned over the past few years. He hasn't broken one Playstation controller since he forgot your name a second time. He hasn't smashed a single coffee cup, ripped any door knobs from their hinges or clawed his way through any sheets. His body remembers its limits, its strength, and its surrounding, but his mind is slow to catch up.
You watch him set his jaw in concentration as he guides his binary champion through dungeons and mazes. His tongue pokes out of the corner of his mouth and he's holding his breath as his character leaps across a lava-filled pit to rescue the villagers from the clutches of evil. How long will you jump over fire for him? What happens when you get to the other side just in time to save villagers who draw and quarter you like an angry torch-wielding mob? And who's to say that the nightmarish dragon isn't actually the victim in this silly adventure?
You're making metaphors comparing your subversive war against Sanada to a Playstation game, and that's when you push up from the sofa with perhaps more force than can easily escape Tokitoh's notice, and he watches you over his shoulder with a small frown on his lips, oblivious to the goblins now devouring his on-screen hero. You don't bother to reassure him that you aren't angry with him, that you just need some fresh, nicotine-filled air. He knows that you're lying, even when you don't. It's unnerving but true, so you don't say anything at all. You just leave.
Your boots beat a steady rhythm down the sidewalk as you increase the space between yourself and your cat, and even as your mind compiles vectors and geometric arc lengths in your head, calculating the distance, you know that you need to measure your freedom to roam in not feet but city blocks. As you round the corner of your old street, your former apartment building, you watch Tokitoh throw a slobbery tennis ball to a strange dog, spill ramen down the front of his jacket as he tries to walk and eat with chopsticks, stare out across the city from your highrise balcony over the power lines above. Is there no where in this gods-forsaken city that doesn't remind you of your damned cat? You collapse bonelessly on the sidewalk between a set of abused trashcans, disturbing several unhappy feral strays and a pigeon. The felines hiss and spit indignantly before fleeing to the relative safety of nearby boxes and bags and dumpsters. You watch them leave with a growing sense of dread.
If you had left Tokitoh in that alley, would your chest hurt as exquisitely as it does at this very moment? If you had handed him over to Sanada, hadn't killed a battalion of Yakuza to protect him, would you be in that man's pocket so deeply today? If you died tomorrow, would he notice your absence, or would he find someone else to burrow into in the dead of night, in the deep of sleep, to sweat and curse and cry against as his pursuers match his strides in the darkest of dreams?
"Kubo-chan?"
Your mind snaps out of its downward spiral and focuses intently on that voice. Your eyes dart up from your contemplation of your own denims to find liquid violet watching you warily from half a foot away. He was always so quiet, despite how clumsy he is naturally. You seldom hear him approach, but today you weren't expecting it at all. This is something that Tokitoh used to do—follow you on your city-wide marathon walks as you think and stretch and see. Watching him watch you as he squats down in front of you between your sprawling long legs is both familiar and awkward. You want to get up, to move away from those honest, criticizing indigo eyes but you don't. You're tired. You don't want to fight anymore. You don't think it's worth it anymore if he doesn't know your name, doesn't remember your life, doesn't return the heart-shattering, soul-shredding, mind-fucking feelings that you've harbored for him these past few years.
"You're bleeding," he says quietly, taking one of your hands into his. You watch him carefully uncurl the fist you've unwittingly made, pull your long slender fingers back and reveal the angry red crescent welts dripping down your palms from your fingernails digging into thin skin. His claws feel cool against your fingers. He doesn't wear his glove anymore. Instead, he's taken to tugging the sleeve of his sweatshirt over his hand until just his fingertips and curved nails protrude. You haven't felt brave enough to demand that he wear that hated glove in public and open that particular shitstorm of trouble. "What's wrong, Kubo-chan?"
His shoulders slump dejectedly and he holds your hand like a lifeline. You don't know how to answer his question, one of so many to which you've pondered the appropriate responses lately. Talking to Tokitoh used to be easy, effortless, honest, but now it feels more like homework ever did the few times you actually showed up for high school. You're clever with words that are hollow and hold no meaning. You're utterly lost when it comes to the feral, worried creature squatting before you on this filthy sidewalk. You reach up and grab a handful of his sweatshirt and drag him toward you so that he falls against your chest as you kiss him with bruising force. You pray to a higher power that you believe in conditionally to let Tokitoh claw your guts out, hot and red and wet into your lap, to rip your ribs aside and maim your heart so that it stops beating, stops feelings, stops breaking.
You're so very tired. Always running, always shooting, always lying and stealing. When does it end? When do the games cease, the crimes halt, the bad guys go to jail? When does Kasai and the police force scour Yokohama of the drug dealers, the pimps, the gangs and hookers? When does Kou file his business taxes? When does Ryoji cut his hair and get a real reporting job? When does Tokitoh remember who he is and go to college like a normal kid? What happens when everyone else finds their place in life and leaves you behind? Maybe it was you, and not Tokitoh, who was saved the day you dragged him home from between these trash cans and gave him a name? Maybe he's still saving you with every day, every touch, every question?
Maybe you aren't worth being saved? You were born an animal, to live and die alone. You pull back and look into those beautiful amaryllis eyes and smile self-deprecatingly. He watches, dumbfounded, as you gently push him back, then stand to your full height and walk away. Every step you take makes it a little bit easier not to glance over your shoulder at him. You're a lone wolf. You always have been. You trust that he'll make his way back to Kou's shop unscathed, but right now you can't look at him without wanting to strangle newborn babies with your bare hands. You aren't cruel by your very nature, but then again you've never been very good at reigning in your anger, bridling your rage, and those are emotions with which you've become intimately familiar. This raw, swollen and infected ache in your chest, the lead weight in your gut as you walk away from him is not the same manner of beast as your misdirected aggression and occasional homicidal jaunts. This is the type of overwhelming pain that brings about bloodshed on a biblical scale.
You lash out at a stray beer can on the sidewalk as you go, kicking it into a nearby building and shaking your head at how Tokitoh-like you've become. When have you ever felt the need to assert your animal dominance over inanimate objects? He's infested you like a virus, replicating and multiplying in your mind until your can't remember where you end, where he begins, when all of this started or how it could possibly end without one of you in a bodybag. At the corner of 13th and Bay Avenue you stop. Kou's shop is a few minutes away to the left. Sanada's headquarters is an approximately equal distance to your right.
You shake your head in wry amusement as your mind supplies countless poetic metaphors for standing at the crossroads of a decision in your life. You don't normally turn to literary inspiration to solve your own fundamental issues, and your path diverged in an urban wood several years ago. Unfortunately in Yokohama there are no roads seldom traveled. The path of least resistance would push you towards a night of bloodshed and mayhem, siren wails and spent shell casings in Sanada's office. It does seem to be a favorite hunting ground of yours. But you like to think that you've outgrown such knee-jerk, childish outlets for your frustration, and if you aren't back soon Ryoji will come looking for you.
You tell yourself that's the only reason you turn to your left and trudge down the street and into the heart of Chinatown.