FicWad

This is the life of Tokitoh Minoru. It's early or possibly late and there's pale sickly colored street light pooling on the bed next to his stomach. It's warm under the blankets, he's clean and fed and the air always smells faintly of tobacco. It gets everywhere, into his clothes, under his nails, down deep into his nostrils. Funny, because Tokitoh doesn't remember smoking a day in his life.

Of course Tokitoh doesn't remember much before waking up in Kubota's bed, exhausted and wounded. Actually nothing, just shadows of nightmares and that there's definitely something out there to be sick afraid of. So sick that in those first days he has to run or lock himself in the bathroom and vomit in purple and green, but fuck, maybe that was just Kubo-chan's curry.

Mostly he just remembers to be pissed off. Pissed off at whatever nameless nothing it was that still makes him so afraid he throws up after nightmares and even more pissed off at himself for taking the easy way out and forgetting about it. Pissed enough to scream at his own mind for fucking him over in this pathetic way and taking everything from him, every fucking thing, his entire life, just to hide some stupid trauma he's sure he could just get over already if he knew about it.

Too bad you can't beat the shit out of your own mind to make it give something back. Instead Tokitoh has to find his own things, and the weird part, the really weird part, was from the first time he opened his eyes to find a mild, curious face looking down on him, there was someone to help him do that. And that was Kubo-chan.

Kubo-chan. The nickname was a joke at first, a goad along with a fist to the face, to see what Kubota would say, to see if he was finally going to do something, but Kubota just smiled and didn't say anything at all. And Tokitoh, even remembering nothing, knew that was weird, but if Kubo-chan wasn't going to be bugged by it he wouldn't be either. So it was okay and he sat on Kubo-chan's couch and watched people act like confused idiots on television and played Kubo-chan's video games like someone who had never played a game before in his life.

Of course, most times Kubota tries to touch him when he's awake, Tokitoh tries to wring his neck for him, but that's just instinct and everyone has problems. It's different when the lights are out in they're in bed because then there's always something else, something that Tokitoh doesn't remember, but he recognizes. Like fireworks in the summer or how to string words into sentences. That's what it's like in the dark, surrounded by curls of smoke and Kubota's hands.

Just lately it's been getting easier in the daylight anyway, like Kubo-chan's smoke has slid all the way inside his lungs and now Tokitoh's waking mind recognizes him too. And maybe it's the same for Kubo-chan because he doesn't touch anybody else. Not ever. Not the clerks at the 7-11 or people on the subway or the girls who hit on him sometimes, despite the fact he's too fucking tall and lazy and smiles like he doesn't mean it. Maybe it's the same thing or maybe it just looks the same from the outside but there are certain questions even Tokitoh doesn't ask.

Every question is less important than the first one anyway. The real question of, 'who the fuck am I?' Right now the only answer he has is that he is Tokitoh Minoru and he belongs to no one. And Tokitoh Minoru is a person who lives in this apartment which always stinks of cigarettes, where the walls are stained by them. This apartment which is Kubota's. Which is Kubo-chan's and therefore, is more or less his.

And Tokitoh Minoru has a hand attached to his wrist that is not his. A hand with fur and claws that's stronger than it should be but hooked up wrong. Tokitoh's hand hurts. Not sometimes, on bad days. All the time, in the back of his mind, every time he breathes in and every time he touches something. But sometimes so sharp and harsh he huddles in the shower and lets the water run down his face so he knows he isn't crying.

And he wants more than anything in the world to know what the fuck. Just that. What the fuck. He wants to know what made the person who used to be Tokitoh Minoru with all his memories intact do something so stupid, so stupid and so pathetic that it landed him like this. And then that fucking cowardly wanker asshole had the gall to forget about it.

Tokitoh is so busy thinking about it and being mad and not being able to sleep that he almost doesn't notice the movement next to him in the bed and that the darkness under the blankets has a shape.

A shape and a voice, like velvet and smoke in the morning, and an arm that slides over his stomach and strokes up and down like petting a cat. "Awake so early?" the voice murmurs, sounding only a little bit like you'd expect someone who's just woken up to sound.

"Yeah," Tokitoh mutters and leans into the hand. Definitely cigarette smoke under his skin because it just doesn't bother him at all anymore. It just feels normal. But then again, it's still mostly dark. "Not everyone is as fucking lazy as you and sleeps all the time, you know."

Normal and nice hands that soothe him back to sleep with a gentle rubbing motion and Tokitoh just forgets about everything and closes his eyes.

**

It's the next night, stupidly late, when the phone makes this fucking irritating piping noise and Kubota has to rescue it before Tokitoh gets a chance to kill it. Tokitoh grumbles and covers his head with a pillow, figuring it's probably just the quack or someone equally pointless, but then Kubota keeps talking and Tokitoh realizes it's Kasai.

That makes him remove the pillow and watch half the conversation, because if Kasai's calling now that means something's happened. And sure enough when Kubota hangs up the phone he slides out of bed, pulling his gun out from under the pillow-case as he goes.

"Kasai's got a WA body for us to take a look at," Kubo-chan says as he hands Tokitoh his clothes. "He says there's a live witness." Tokitoh mutters something under his breath and picks at the clothes. "Unless you're not interested. Then we can just go back to sleep." Kubota has that grin on his face, the yeah, I like messing with you, grin. He leans close enough to flick Tokitoh's nose.

"Oh, shut up. I never said that," Tokitoh says and gets dressed, without thinking about the fact that he's definitely awake, all the lights are on Kubota just touched him and he forgot to flinch.

The scene isn't the first time that Tokitoh has seen the end result of too much wild adapter, but it never fails to make his hand ache, watching. This one looks like what was left of a girl, her clothes in scraps of blood and guts all around her. It smells bad. People exploding is apparently one of the smelliest ways to die, and this whole club fucking reeks.

But it's nothing new. What is new is the blonde girl in the corner, talking to Kasai. Or at least trying to talk to Kasai, it looks like a kind of a weird three way conversation between the girl, a weird looking guy in a shiny suit and Kasai. When they get closer Tokitoh realizes that it's because the girl is talking some kind of gibberish that only sometimes makes sense and the shiny suit asshole is repeating it so it makes more sense.

"Hey, why is she talking like that?" he mutters, poking Kubota.

Kubota raises an eyebrow and smiles. "What, in English? Probably she's American. Or English?"

"English?" Tokitoh repeats and makes a face. He's seen people speaking English on the television and it never sounded that much like what this girl sounds like. "You're kidding. Fuck, that sucks. Why doesn't she speak Japanese?"

Kubota shrugs. "Why don't you ask her? I'm sure she'll be happy to explain."

And Tokitoh figures, why not? There's no other way to find out things then by asking right? Especially if Kubo-chan isn't going to tell him anything because he thinks it's funny or whatever it is he thinks. Asshole.

But when Kasai is finally done talking to the girl and Tokitoh gets around to asking her she just gives him this weird look, like he's said something amazingly stupid. Well, whatever. He doesn't know. No one tells him these things and it's not really his fault his fucking brain is screwing him over like this.

"What the fuck? Who the fuck are you? Who the fuck is this?" she says in mostly comprehensible Japanese and looks like she wants to start breaking things any minute now. Tokitoh is gratified to know that she can speak Japanese if she really, really wants to. Not that she actually bothers to answer the question.

At that point Kubota sits down next to her, lights her cigarette and starts to speak gibberish. English. Whatever. At least it's a little bit easier to follow when Kubota's doing it. He wonders where Kubota actually learned, though. Whatever Kubota is saying seems to be working, though, because she goes from looking like she wants to kill the whole world to looking like she might settle for beating the fuck out of it instead.

"So, I'm Shelly Ingridson," she says and gives a little bow like someone who read about them in a book. "Dozo yoroshiku."

"Shirri what now?" Tokitoh repeats, staring at her. Her eyes are very, very blue and he wants to scream at her and he doesn't know why.

"Shelly," the girl, Shirri, whatever, repeats, and her pale eyebrow twitches and mutters more shit that Tokitoh can't understand under her breath. Tokitoh has seen eyebrows that color before, but never on someone this close to him. It's weird shit, like seeing a billboard come to life.

"Yes, Shirri. That's what I said," he says, still staring at the eyebrows. They knit together, like she's getting really, really pissed. He wonders if she's going to try to hit him and thinking about that gets him really, really annoyed and maybe he'll hit her first. But then Kubota starts to talk to her again and she calms down. What a freak. Someone here is anyway.

"Thank you," Kubota finally says after a string of nearly impossible to follow back and forth. And then he does something that Tokitoh has never, ever, ever seen him do, with anyone, definitely not some girl. He offers her his hand and she shakes it. Like it's normal, like Kubota went around shaking people's hands every single day. All the time.

"Yeah, fine," she says, like she doesn't even care. Then she points her cigarette, which Tokitoh decides smells exactly like shit when it's burning, at the police. "Let's go somewhere we can talk about this."

So they go, gross smelling cigarettes and fucking ugly blonde girl and all. Tokitoh really, really hopes that she knows something important because otherwise this feels like the most pointless replay in the world. It's just that he can't remember what it's a replay of.