BREAK THE LIMITS: 16/33

[andrew_in_drag]

Title: Break the Limits
Author: andrew_in_drag 
Pairing: Yoshiki x hide
Rating: mature
Warnings: foul language, yaoi, rock 'n roll excess
Genre: AU to bandfic
Note: I first wrote this fic about three (?) years ago, when I was still hallelujah_hide. Oddly enough, I still like it, so I thought I would move it here to my new journal. 
Synopsis: May 1998: Yoshiki Hayashi breaks down in a temple as he tries to take in the news that has changed his life forever - Hideto Matsumoto, the man he has been in love with for seventeen years, is dead. As the other mourners try to comfort him, Yoshiki finds himself falling back through history - to the day when it all began; the day when he met a boy who would, truly, break the limits...

CHAPTER SIXTEEN:

“And you run and you run to catch up with the sun but it’s sinking,

Racing around to come up behind you again.”

– ‘Time’, Pink Floyd

Touring.

We were a powerhouse. We put Vanishing Vision in the electric chair and gave it three thousand volts to the skull, and we loved it. Most of it.

Here’s what they didn’t tell us about touring: it’s like drugs. Up and down. We signed to Ki/oon and they sent us around Japan straight away, ‘getting our faces out there’, although in my opinion our faces seemed more hidden than before – for we showed them in two-hour bursts before vanishing once again, either into  hotel rooms, crowds of partiers or back into the damn minibus. The tour was our way of wandering blindly into the strange, dark new world of fame.

Or infamy.

And I was so, so easily seduced. I was in love with the applause; the adulation; the music. I loved the feeling that something big was going to happen every time we rolled, white-faced from lack of sleep and nourishment, into a new town; I loved getting up on stage and showing off, revelling in the feeling of being an exhibitionist for once. It was a strange rush; a feeling of being absolutely invincible, if only for a few hours – a peculiar sensation, part animal and part spiritual, of living in the moment and grabbing life by the balls. One of my favourite things about it was being at the back of the stage, where I was free to watch the others; Taiji whirling around the stage like a dervish, Pata swaybacked beneath his guitar, nodding his head rhythmically, Toshi bent under the weight of the song pouring from him, the microphone clutched in his two hands, and Hide – Hide with his legs apart and head down, moving steadily to the music he created, lost in his own world, his eyes glancing up to fuse with those of the audience, making them fall in love. He could be as wild as Taiji and thrash his small body everywhere at once; he could be as sleepily involved as Pata; he could lose himself entirely in the music and not have to look at what his hands were doing, or think about where he was putting his feet, or plan ahead to the next song…

I tried not to miss any beats as I watched him, and we made it through the shows. It seemed we lived a double life for all those months we were first on the road: the life of the gods, and the life of five people thrown together, cramped into a single vehicle that seemed to leave vapour trails of ourselves; tiny little bits of our souls, spanned over the country. 

The minibus rides were difficult. The seating arrangements were fluid and so the atmosphere within the vehicle was in a permanent state of flux: if Taiji and Hide sat together, the bus would be full of the sound of their chatter, and there would be annoyed groans from those on either side of them; there would be jokes and catcalls and you couldn’t ever let them sit together at the back – not after we rolled into Nagoya and our tour manager wearily asked them to please stop flicking their middle fingers at unsuspecting motorists, and told them that they would be forced to sit at opposite ends of the bus if they continued to plaster ‘help’ signs up to the windows. If Taiji sat with Toshi, the bus would take on a nagging, whiny rhythm of sound as Taiji tried to incorporate our vocalist into his pranks, and complain when he was continuously rebuffed (Toshi sat up straight, reading, the model of good behaviour). Pata was prone to falling asleep on long journeys; whoever had the seat next to him generally took along some reading material or music.

After being separated from Taiji, Hide regularly took up the seat next to me – whenever Toshi wasn’t there first, or whenever Taiji wasn’t badgering me about the details of the next venue, or whenever Pata wasn’t already in the seat, first on the bus and already dozing. I took to trying to beat them all to it; leaving them all at breakfast or in the bathroom whilst I got myself settled and threw my bag onto the seat next to me under the pretence of not wanting company – although the bag would magically vanish under my seat as soon as Hide climbed aboard.

Sitting next to Hide made the long rides bearable. Down long stretches of highway with barren scenery, over a landscape flat and unremarkable as cardboard, his presence would relax me enough not to care how far away from home I was. He sat bonelessly, feet up on the headrest of the seat in front of him or slung over his armrest, his body never touching mine but for accidental brushes. I’d never realized that the sides of my torso were erogenous zones until he brushed over my ribcage, and I felt a surge of desire lodge itself in my groin. We didn’t talk often – we didn’t really need to. He would turn to me every so often, and smile. He sat perfectly, contentedly still: unusual for him (Hide was a fidgeter: a constant foot-tapper and knee-jiggler and hair-twirler).

It was only one morning on the way to some city or other that his shuffling managed to disturb me. I had fallen asleep with my head against the window and opened my eyes to the sight of the sun rising over the horizon. It was so beautiful that, for a moment, I couldn’t tell where the heavens stopped and the earth began, and I thought I must have died, because there was an angel holding my hand.

Hide. Hide’s fingers were clasping mine tenderly, and tears glittered on his cheeks in the early morning sunlight.

“WE ARE?”

“X!”

I played in a daze, heedless of the dull ache in my wrists. Hide was laughing, his arm slung over Toshi’s back as he leaned over to bawl into the microphone, “YOU ARE?”

“X!”

A thousand screams. X.

Last song. In the majority of our sets, we walked out to Dear Loser; began with Vanishing Love and ended with X, which had become a surprise success. Every single person who had got their hands on a copy of Orgasm screamed along to the lyrics; when Toshi used the interlude to announce us, they hollered all the harder: a taste of the fame that was to come when we released Blue Blood.

Before I knew what had happened, Toshi had dumped half a bottle of water on my head, startling me into laughter. I flipped hair from my eyes, standing to jump off the drum riser and hurl my sticks out into the audience. Beside me, Hide flicked a single plectrum into the crowds at the front of the stage and yawned provocatively. They were squealing his name; some of the girls had taken their shirts off and stood around in their bras. I didn’t blame them – sweat was pouring down me, and I could feel the heat rising through the ground beneath the stage – but even so, I wished Hide wouldn’t always pick a girl out to wink at.  

I stumbled back and he caught me, arm around my shoulders, so close I could smell his skin. Cigarettes and soap. I closed my eyes, inhaling.

“Yoshi,” he whispered, “We’re in a hotel tonight, right?”

I nodded. I wished we weren’t. I was alone in a room; Hide was meant to be sharing with Taiji, and Toshi with Pata. I wanted to share a room with Hide; I wanted to sleep on the bus next to him, and wake up to him holding my hand.

I wish I could have asked why he’d been crying, what pain he’d been feeling; but to do that, I would have had to admit that I’d felt him hold my hand – and I knew that if I did, Hide would make up an excuse to make me doubt myself, and make sure that it never happened again.

Not asking what was wrong: another mistake. It was a selfish error made because I couldn’t stand to lose him – even though, in lots of ways, I had lost him already.

I sat on my bed in the hotel that evening, contemplating what I knew. I knew Hide would be far, far away: savouring the glory of our performance with a groupie wrapped around his neck and a drink in his hand and a cigarette propped between his lips.

I had a sudden flashback of him sobbing in my bedroom, ranting about how I would replace him.

But who had replaced whom, in the end?

The rub was, I wasn’t particularly special. I was the consolation prize; the person he’d taken as a friend because he couldn’t find anybody else; the person he’d slept with because he was horny and I was easy, safe. Maybe he had loved me once, but my qualities were as common as air. Loving somebody else would be as easy as appreciating a song he’d heard once before, and as for sex—

I closed my eyes, rocking backwards on the slippery hotel bedspread under the gruesome weight of the images before my eyes: Hide and A Stranger, bodies locked, Hide with his head tilted back in pleasure and his limbs shaking with excitement and his dick straining; that tangle of limbs, that utter irreversible togetherness…

I stifled a cry, the images in my head solidifying, the illusory moans and pants growing louder and louder—

I leapt to my feet: the jealousy, I couldn’t stand the jealousy! I knew then that I had to find him, find him, and demand that he acknowledged that he was mine!

I burst out of the hotel door, worked up to the point of tears, and flew straight into somebody else, knocking them to the floor.

“Yoshi!” a shriek cut into my envy-fogged mind, “Goddamn it, I’m a human! My ribs aren’t made of iron!”

I panted, blinking at the shape below me.

Him. Of course, him, like fate had planned it. Of course, him, ready to start the whole dreadful, beautiful cycle once more.

He still had one hand raised, poised to knock on the door. His eyes lost their annoyance and his face softened with something I couldn’t quite recognize – and all at once I became exceedingly conscious of the fact that I was lying on top of him, our bodies flush to the groin, and he wasn’t trying to push me off.

He swallowed. I felt it. Our eyes were locked, like a challenge; I couldn’t have moved if I tried. Like magnets suddenly switched to attract, we lay perfectly still and close.

“Yoshi,” he said at last, weakly, “You’re – you’re a little too close.”

But even as he said it, he slid his hands up around the small of my back.

“I know,” I breathed back, “I know, and I know I shouldn’t be, but I—”

“No,” he murmured, his hands slipping under my shirt to burrow up my spine, “Yoshi—”

“And I’m sorry,” I husked, “But I honestly – I just feel like…”

“Don’t say it,” he begged, but pressed me close, and very delicately I laid a chaste little kiss upon his slightly open lips.

Silence. I kissed his nose, his forehead, his eyelids. I kissed my way down his cheekbone; kissed his chin.

“Stop,” he exhaled, “Yoshi, stop,” and he tipped his head to allow my lips access to his neck. I pressed my lips to the hollow of his throat and he gasped, his body rocking upwards against mine in a way that made me moan against his skin. His hands had slid down my back and were cupping my ass to pull our lower bodies closer, and I could feel his breathing as it sped up. His heart was pounding in his chest; I could feel that, too.

“Yoshiki,” he said, and I pulled away reluctantly. Our faces remained no more than five centimetres apart, nose to nose; he stared at me as if he hadn’t seen me in years.

“I love you,” I told him softly, and he closed his eyes. He was wound around me tighter than a tourniquet; still he seemed unsure, regretful, his dark eyes hovering on the brink of tears. Leaning down, I kissed him, full and deep, sucking on his lower lip passionately, and he groaned – because he was such a hedonist, addicted to the rush…no matter how wrong it was.

And I guess I was the same. Because once I started kissing him, I couldn’t stop.