BREAK THE LIMITS: 22/33

[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-TWO:

“Embracing my trembling body in a rose formed of memories,

I keep my love for you to myself…”

– ‘Endless Rain’, X

Los Angeles had rain-swept streets and store fronts heavy with Christmas decorations. We must have looked weird at the airport; each of the five of us like a small and separate island in this strange, vast ocean. To the other three in the band, Hide was suffering a terrible case of flight nerves brought on by the turbulence that had come as a bolt out of the blue – the sudden storm clouds below us, making the plane pitch and roll.

But he only came back to his seat when the seatbelt signs came on, and Taiji made to stand up to meet him, because he was visibly a mess: white-faced, tear-stained, trembling like a leaf – and it was my fault. And even on solid ground, my three friends were leading him around like a child, out of the airport and into the waiting car. 

Later, watching the rain spatter against my hotel room windows, I wondered when my life had ever got this complicated. I wondered what I had done; what it meant. That I was seriously unhinged, probably.

Los Angeles had high-risers lit up on every floor and roads full of the dying headlights of automobiles.

I was listening to the radio provided by my Very Expensive Hotel room, trying to align the thoughts in my muddled head, but turning on the radio was a bad idea.

I should have guessed at the sound of the synth that it was going to be a sad song, a love song, but I was too damn stupid to change the station; instead, I tilted my head against the cold glass of the window and listened to the first song I would ever hear by a band called U2. It was one of those songs that you’ll always love by a band that you’ll always dislike, and I hear it’s called With Or without You. 

“See the stone set in your eyes, see the thorn twist in your side
I wait for you
Sleight of hand and twist of fate, on a bed of nails she makes me wait
And I wait without you…”

And alright, so it was a song about a girl – some girl. But the feelings were mine, and because of that I flipped the radio off so hard I broke the switch. The plastic splintered and pierced my skin; a little bead of blood appeared, and smudged down my finger as I pulled the radio out of the socket and flung it against the wall.

Breathe.

I padded over to inspect the damage; the casing was cracked but it wasn’t decimated, the way I thought it would be. And as I realized that, my fingers came to life with this sort of itch of anger, and the only way to quell it was to pick the radio back up and hurl it clear across the room, to where the mirror hung on the wall.

Watching the glass break was a funny, pretty thing. It kind of rippled outward before shattering, as if it were trying to bend into the impact before bursting all over the floor. Now there were shards everywhere, and I had a thousand of my own eyes staring back at me. Who was I angry at but myself; but…but Hide, a little, or a lot. But myself most of all, because suddenly everything was a mess and it was all my fault.

I moved forwards, grass crunching into powder beneath my boots. I wrenched pictures off the wall and broke the glass in their frames; launched the telephone out of the window; put my foot through a window – because I was so angry, so fuming, so absolutely filled with rage that I couldn’t even see straight, let alone think—

And it felt good.

I’ve had moments of madness since then. Real, real anger; most often at myself. If I do occasionally trash a hotel room or break a glass, though, it’s okay, because my managers and assistants and the dozens of other people flapping around me think it’s because I’m artistic. But, despite how many momentary lapses of reason I’ve had since that time, I think that first instance was the worst, and thinking about it I shudder. I can see myself quite clearly in my mind’s eye: face stretched with rage and trying not to cry, methodically bashing up every single thing in that hotel room and causing damage to the tune of about one million and forty thousand yen. And because I’d had money and then lost money and was now gaining money again, the sum of my damage seemed both vast and insignificant all at once. But these days, honestly, I spend more than that on therapists.

And when I was finished, I felt so much better – or not better, maybe not that, but incapable of really feeling anything. I felt limp and drained; I knew that the next day I would be suffering from a vicious hangover of sadness, if trashing a hotel room could be comparable to drowning my sorrows – but for that night, I didn’t care. I didn’t. I was moved to a new hotel room amongst wads of waved cash and scolding words, and I didn’t bother to unpack. I just stripped off to my boxers and climbed between the cool, white sheets, and slipped into a heavy slumber staring up at the ceiling.

It amazed me that I slept so soundly.

Dreary days slowly passed me by; the recording, the mixing. Sound City Studios scared the shit out of us by having a control room bigger than our old apartments, and I think we were all feeling the pressure to deliver.

Hide seemed to have regressed into his younger self. I knew precious little of his early life, but I knew it hadn’t all been roses, like mine had: I was aware he’d suffered with a weight problem; with bullying; with whatever his dad had done to him and his brother. And most of all I could picture him in my head; that shy, weird kid with a thousand colourful ideas pitched against his classmates’ monochrome brains. And I could imagine the silence, and hold it next to the Hide we saw in our recording sessions: the one that simply played his piece and then went out for a smoke, or else sat at the small table in the control room and stared at the patterns in the wood grain.

We were all pretty young. None of us really knew how to handle this new, withdrawn Hide, who was smoking and drinking like a seasoned rocker. And maybe doing more, though we didn’t really talk about it.

Incomprehensibly, the worse he got, the better and more detached I could act. Never had I seemed so untouchable, although I had the eerie feeling that Hide could see straight through me. But the cooler I acted, the worse I felt: kind of sick and limp, a feeling like disappointment: why didn’t anybody notice anything was wrong?! Hide and I were clearly not ourselves – I was a robot and he was a zombie –, why didn’t anybody try to help us? I needed somebody to shake to me up; somebody to yell in my ear, “Come on, show some life, will you?!”

We’d only just started when, with a shock, Christmas came. After the miserable spell I’d cast over myself, the break from work seemed almost laughably ill-timed; I needed music, distractions, not one or two days to enjoy the scenery.

The city was quiet, but in the quiet, I missed his noise. The feeling – I can’t describe the feeling. It’s like the worst kind of ache; the worst kind of numbness; like pins and needles of the soul. It’s sickness and fever and it was feeling like I was going to pass out every time I thought of him. I guess the best thing I can relate it to is some kind of internal apocalypse; the knowledge that with each day that passes, life will get just a little more unbearably worse. It’s hopelessness, that’s it – the way you’re stuck knowing that you will never move on, never get over it, never fall in love or be happy again.

Love. It’s the most destructive survival instinct in the world. And it’s so difficult to understand how a single person can just – can just cut you to shreds like that, or disarm you with a smile. But love was what it was all about. Endless hours of crying or being too sad to cry, like the weather being too cold to snow; endless crumpled faces and bouts of slamming my own fists against my own stupid forehead. Love. It was killing me.

It took a while for me to break, this time. At least a few days until the endless refrain, what am I going to do?, got the better of me. If you’ve ever taken a fish out of water, you’ll know what I felt like; the way they either flap around in a blind panic, or else lie still as they rasp out dying breaths. But when I knocked on his hotel room door, there was no answer.

Like the stupid, broken-up thing I was, I twisted the handle and sucked in my breath as I walked in. And the sounds of sex, they reach into your universe like nothing else can. But even as anger and sorrow and heartbreak were rising in my throat like bile, I was creeping closer to the half-closed bedroom door, and so caught my technicolour evidence: my sweet, precious love and An American Stranger, fucking like there was no tomorrow on the hotel bedspread. And for some reason I watched.

I didn’t feel ashamed, because nothing could have turned me on less – it was just something I had to do for myself; something to help me believe that it was all over.

It’s weird; standing rock solid whilst your world breaks apart in front of you. Weird and so, so inevitable; so unstoppable. There were tears pouring down my cheeks, I know, and I had a hand over my mouth to smother the cries of anguish that were welling up within me: I was too late.

Thinking about it now, my hands still shake. Something curls up within me, the way paper curls as it burns. Inside me, I screamed out your name, and you never heard me!

And time is too long, and time is too painful, and the dreams don’t stop—

Hide…

I am broken.

I stared at him as he twisted his head sleepily to the door.

I lost you.

He saw me and gave a terrible wince, as if in pain, and I was there as his eyes clouded with tears that spilled over to dampen the sheets. Merry Christmas, Yoshi, I could almost hear him say, now you are set free. And he just kept staring at me.  

I love you.

I ran.

Comments

[juuu-chan.livejournal.com]

Fuck, you made me cry.
I feel like the drawing in your profile picture..
The end.. it seems all so real, and then man, listening to say anything in the background.
I really really think you're an amazing writer, and seriously, this story is so heartbreaking... I feel myself being on the edge of tears all the way trough, also because of hide, and man, today I was already kinda feeling sad...

[andrew-in-drag.livejournal.com]

Aw, I'm sorry to upset you, especially if you were feeling down already! I hope nothing too serious is troubling you. I'm very grateful to get this comment though, and very pleased that you're enjoying my writing!

Though I will caution you that this one doesn't have a happy ending, I'm afraid! x

[juuu-chan.livejournal.com]

It's nothing to bad, I'm just sad cause my internship is over, and I REALLY enjoyed it, and now I'm really gonna miss the people I worked with etc. *I'm emotional that way*

And I understand it doesn't have a happy ending, I am bad with happy endings anyway, *well not always* but most of the time.
I have a depressing creative mind..XD So I always write/draw anything at all, depressing.

[andrew-in-drag.livejournal.com]

Oh, I know totally how you feel! I'm leaving my current uni to study in a different country next year, and I'm going to miss all of my friends so much. Congratulations on finishing your internship though!