BREAK THE LIMITS: 20/33

[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 TWENTY:

“Time may change my life, but I have remained the same to you

Time may change your heart; my love for you never changed…”

– ‘Say Anything’, X

It was like living a week out of somebody else’s life.

For seven days, seven blissful days, Hide was mine and nobody else’s. It was the oddest feeling; like peering in through a window to heaven – except this was real, and I was really living the life that, if I’d been able to keep it, would truly have made me happy.

We did everything together: slept, showered, went shopping; we spent a whole day in bed, just exploring each other and making up for lost time.

And it was paradise, I think – as near it’s possible to get to heaven on earth. We slept in each others’ arms every night, and I swear I’ve never slept so soundly, not before or since. As he dreamed he mumbled softly in my ear and shifted against me; his bare legs would tangle themselves resolutely around mine. Hide’s bright, quick eyes were so expressive that he could look busy even when standing absolutely still, which was rare; probably the only times I ever saw him truly relaxed were while he slept, right after sex or a few moments where he would take my hand and simply look at me, and smile.

Happy.

It felt like the richest, purest, strongest drug of all. But the come-down…

He let me stroke over his tattoo until I could trace its pattern by heart, with my eyes closed. He let me count the tiny, light freckles across the bridge of his nose and tops of his cheeks. He let me kiss him and hold him; he let me become one with him.

“Why d’you love me?” I asked him, stretched out on the sheets of my bed in a post-coital haze. He was flat on his back next to me, chest rising and falling slowly, naked as the day he was born.

“I don’t know. I could say it’s because of the good things about you, but I love the bad, too. You’re so stubborn; maybe that’s why. You wouldn’t give in.” He smiled. “When I think about you, I think about how it feels having your arms around me. And that’s what it is, isn’t it? The way you touch me – like I’m the most precious thing alive.”

He glanced down. “So that’s why I love you. I wouldn’t know how not to love you.”

There was a peculiar feeling in my chest, like a balloon expanding; straight through the boundaries of my ribcage and pushing at my skin, and filling me with helium so that my head brushed the clouds.

Those few days did us good: so much good. It was as if we’d been locked away in the darkness for years, and had only just been granted a week of freedom and sunshine; simply, it just felt wonderful to know that there was such happiness to be had. I wasn’t exactly the happiest person in the world; I held onto rejections and criticisms and occasionally slid into long slumps of self-doubt, but around Hide, I found peace like no other.

And it isn’t fair, because time without him goes by so slowly – but that week, that week was over in a minute; in a minute of lazy mornings, and all of a sudden I realized that Toshi would be back at some point in the afternoon, and that I was down to my last few hours of heaven.

I knew that he was thinking the same thing by the way that his body tensed beside mine in bed. Without speaking, our fingers entwined.

“This,” he said, so softly I could have imagined it, “Has been the best thing I’ve ever known.”

And though he gently offered those words to me, I could not accept them. I shook my head gently, my gaze caressing the sweet curves of his beautiful young body, wishing as hard as I could that I could freeze time.

And again, it isn’t fair. Because now he’s gone, time is frozen in the same loop forever; and instead, I wish every day that I could go back. A moment, see, can last forever. But what’s lost can’t be born again.

We got up so slowly that morning, holding each other tightly in the shower. He washed every part of my body in exquisite detail; I massaged shampoo into his hair for a full ten minutes, coating every single strand in creamy lather. He’d been living in my clothes all week, having not brought any with him; on that morning, though, he put on the shirt and pants that he’d been wearing his birthday night. We hadn’t thought to wash them; they smelled faintly of smoke and snow.

I wondered what I’d do when Toshi got back, to chase the memory of Hide away. I wondered if I’d still see his ghostly outline lounging in the doorframes, dressed in only boxer shorts and one of my shirts; I wondered if I’d still hear his voice from the shower.

I felt bereft, because I was losing him all over again.

“What time will Toshi be back?” he asked me numbly, his fingers playing with his overlong sleeves, and I shrugged.

“Two, three hours.” I rubbed an agitated hand over my forehead, ashamed at how badly I wanted to cry. Hide, for his part, seemed to be under a heavy amount of stress; he kept raking his hands through his hair and I could tell he badly wanted a cigarette.

“You could always stay,” I whispered hopefully, “After he gets back. Just because he’s here doesn’t mean you can’t be. Doesn’t mean you can’t stay until the evening – or even sleep over tonight; you can have my bed…”

“Yoshi…” Hide rested his head on my shoulder gently, “Honestly, I don’t want to be around anyone but you. Not Toshi; not Taiji or Pata…but I can’t share you, Yoshi. I just can’t. I don’t – I don’t want to pretend that there’s nothing going on; I don’t!”

He bowed his head until his elbows rested on his knees, his face obscured by his white-knuckled hands. Carefully, I set a trembling hand on my back. Inside, I felt a deep kind of itch, as if I might jump straight out of my skin.

I don’t know how long we sat there, him shaking his magnificent head sadly and trying to comfort me as I tried to comfort him. I pressed my face into his hair and inhaled the delicious scent of him, and gently he butted his head up so our lips brushed.

“We’ve got to promise now,” I gasped, “That this is – this is it. That we’ll forget each other.”

When he looked at me sadly, I cried, “It was your idea! I never wanted this to end!”

“But it has to,” he murmured, tangling his fingers between mine, “It has to.”

“Why?” I muttered, my voice shaking, “Why does it have to end here?”

“Yoshi, one day you’ll understand—”

“Understand what?! I want to understand now!”

He winced and so did I: I hadn’t meant to shout. Taking a deep breath, I ran my hands through my hair, ruffling it up. “Look,” I said levelly, “You’ve got to understand how this feels – how it feels when all you know is that the love of your life is leaving you…again.”

“Love of your life?” he asked quietly. He had a look on his face as if he had just stumbled across something infinitely awe-inspiring and precious; just that stunned and tentative.

He folded his hands into my hair like they belonged there; he pressed his cheek softly against mine. I understood, then, that this was not a reunion; this was goodbye.

My hands were steady on his spine, no matter how I shook inside. My lips against his ear were silent; from his, I heard only shallow, quick pants of breath. He let his head slid down until his forehead was cradled in my neck; he kissed me, squeezed my hands in his.

“I have to go,” he croaked at last, “This is killing me.”

But he made no move to leave. I had a sudden, jolting mental image of the two of us sitting huddled up in a subway station with no trains, watching the ceiling above rattle and buckle, and waiting for the bombing to end.

I placed my hand on his knee.

When I thought about it, being famous like that – well, like what was to come – was like taking a jump on a motorcycle. Thrilling, sure, but short – short in the way that one moment you were watching the ground beneath you drop, and the next you were plummeting back down to earth with a fifty-fifty chance of surviving the impact. And whether you made it or not, it was still one hell of a ride – but up there, soaring through the ether, it could get as lonely as hell.

I turned to Hide and kissed him gently, first on the cheek and then, more demandingly, on the mouth, using the hand that wasn’t on his leg to tenderly angle his face towards mine. That was short-lived, too; the moment he pulled back to protest I simply left his lips and began to journey down his neck, trailing a string of soft kisses in a path that crossed over the graceful hollow of his throat and down to his collarbone, where I focused on marking him as mine whilst his breathing got heavier. He tipped his head back and placed his hand shakily over mine; neither guiding it nor pushing it away, but simply feeling it move as it slid between his thighs.

“Yoshi—”

“Shhh.”

I pressed my free thumb lightly against his lips as they opened in a pant. It was strange to feel him growing hard; the resistance increasing against my palm as his arousal became more evident. His cheeks were flushed and it was odd to see him blushing and panting when I was still in control. His jerky movements formed sensual stills in my mind: Hide with his head tipped back; Hide with his hair caressing the side of his face; Hide biting his lip to stop from moaning when I unzipped his pants and pushed my hand easily into his boxers.

He pressed his face against my shoulder, and I could feel his warm breath against the side of my neck. It made me shiver and realize just how much I loved him, all at once, and I stifled a sob as I pushed him back onto the bed and crawled on top of him, closing my eyes against his moan as I ground against him.

Wrong. It was. We knew it.

Somehow, groping wildly through my haze, my hand found its way to his dick, which twitched excitedly as soon as the rough heel of my hand brushed against the head. He was helpless beneath me; loving it, wanting it – until we heard a noise and jumped away from each other, Hide leaping to zip himself back up and try to look respectable.

The heating system hummed into life. Not Toshi. He wouldn’t be back for another hour, at least.

I looked at Hide. His face was flushed and his chest rose and fell with each heavy, quick breath; his hair was ruffled – he looked, in short, guilty as hell.

But also beautiful, flustered, horny, mischievous, sad…the million things that made him who he was. And as I watched, my erection straining against my pants, he slowly unzipped his pants and both them and his boxers off over his hips, curling his hand around the stiff skin of his dick.

“If we’ve still got time,” he said, “I’d really like to make the most of it.”

There were tears in his eyes and his voice was ragged. And when I tried to smile, it dropped at the corners, but I didn’t look away. Instead, I let him undress me, only faltering once.

“I’m shy,” I murmured as he threw my jeans to the side. And then, as if to disprove it, I wound my naked body around his.

And when I came, I cried his name with such feeling that my voice shattered like glass.