BREAK THE LIMITS: 23/33

[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-THREE:

“I know all the things around your head, and what they do to you

What are we coming to? What are we gonna do?”

– ‘Black Star’, Radiohead

We never talked about what happened that day.

Life was lived strangely, afterwards; at last I had a rock and roll lifestyle, because at last I didn’t really want one. Once upon a time, I’d seen glimpses of what I wanted, out of the corner of my eye – the one thing that made me truly happy.

And I’d pushed it away.

It’s not something you can ever get over. The important parts of me stayed close to him; all that was left was the body of a robot; a song-writing machine who took his screwed-up emotions and put them on paper – and tried to pretend that it was better, because it was music, and that was what I’d wanted all along.

Words spilled from me like wine, and bottled themselves within songs; the songs I wrote for him.

I was vaguely aware that we had become something big. We couldn’t leave our homes without hats and sunglasses anymore; crowds of four hundred swelled to crowds of four thousand, and then forty thousand.

And all the while I was writing these songs – songs that, when we played them as a band, put a look of grim determination on Hide’s face, as if he were talking himself out of some stupid idea.

We never did go night-swimming again. And I never did bring it up that I’d lost my shirt at the water’s edge. 

He was still the dream I was chasing. Still everything I wanted and asked for – if a little scuffed, a little lost; this strange man who had a different person in his bed every night and drank himself into states of frightened confusion.

He was scary drunk. I saw it often; the wild, terrified look in his eyes and his complete inability to relate to the world around him. More than once I’d received phone calls at three, four, five in the morning, begging me to pick him up in a panicked whisper.

And I always did.

It was one of those times picking him up – a July evening just after the release of our third album, Jealousy; the years in which Hide began to look ever-so-cutely like a caricature of himself – that he ordered me, suddenly, to stop the car; thinking he was about to throw up, I immediately pulled over.

“Hide?”

“One – one minute…”

I followed him as he stumbled drunkenly out of the vehicle and up to the front doors of an old, hulking, dark building. The few windows were dusty; inside, I couldn’t make out a single thing. Passers-by ignored it but Hide seemed captivated, stretching out a hand to run over the brickwork and staring up at the broken-down structure.

“Hide,” I said again, slightly impatiently. It was cold and the building he was standing before was not, despite what he might be thinking, a bar that might ignore his intoxication in favour of serving him…

“Don’t you remember?” he whispered, swaying back against me, “We used to play here all the time! C’mon…”

And he pulled me straight through the unlocked doors. And what a sight! It was a miserable place; lit only by streetlamps, we could see the charred remains where a fire had been set and crushed boxes where squatters had lain; this place had been closed for a while. The stage had a large hole in the middle; a few dusty, broken chairs were hunched in the corners. The lights had been removed; the L-shaped bar was empty of bottles, although a few dusty empties rolled around noisily on the floor.

“Yoshi…” I tore my gaze away and directed it to Hide, whose face was growing paler by the second as he shook his head, “What happened to this place?”

I just dared to put an arm around him.

“It closed, I guess. Quite a while ago, by the looks of it—”

He shook his head so hard he almost dislodged my touch.

“No, no, we were here just a few days ago – just…we were playing…”

He dropped to the floor and burst into tears.

“Hide!” I helped him lie down, staring into his miserable face, as luminous white as the moon. “Don’t cry…”

I bit my lip. Swallowed. Confessed, “I hate it when you cry.”

“But—” he sat himself up, his hands in the dust as he glanced around wildly, “I can’t – everything’s changing so quickly, and why…why does it have to change at all?!”

“Hide…” I knelt down in the dirt and gently pulled him backwards so his head was lying in my lap, out of the grime, “You wouldn’t go back to how everything was a few years ago, would you? When we were all poor and – and you shared an apartment with Taiji and Pata, remember? You wouldn’t go back to those times?”

“We were poor but I was happy. Or…or no…” fresh tears spurted down his cheeks, “I don’t know! All I know is that then I had hope and now I don’t even have that!”

He was not composed, as he sometimes was when he cried. Instead, he burrowed down into me and simply shook with grief, whilst I was painfully aware that the weak touches of my hands on his shoulders were not enough. He struggled upright once again, pulling free; he turned around and grabbed my warm hands in his cold ones.

“Look at me,” he demanded, and I did. There was dust on his cheeks; I could almost pretend we were back in the basement of Taiji’s apartment building. He held my hands tightly, kneeling on the hard floor, and he shook his head. “Look at me,” he repeated, and the sadness in his voice made me want to kick something. He bit his lip. “Kiss me?” he asked, so quietly I might have dreamt it.

“Look at yourself,” I bit back, suddenly furious, my voice shaking with lack of control, “Drunk again. High again. C’mon, what was it this time – speed, coke, what? God, Hide, you’re a mess.”

“Sh-shut up…”

“Let go of me,” I ordered, wanting to kill him, just because I loved him so much. “What the hell do you think you’re trying to do to me, Hide? I come to pick you up and you end up just – just sprawled in my lap asking me to kiss you? Well, I would – and you know I would – except it wouldn’t be a kiss, it’d be fucking mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. And if you weren’t so fucked up you’d know that.”

My heart was pounding fast with fear, because I’d almost given in. I’d almost let myself kiss him, and set myself up to get torn apart again.

And I was tired of getting torn apart.

“Now – now let go of me,” I repeated, and his hands ripped away from my skin as if I’d burned him; the movement was so sudden it unseated him, and he fell heavily onto his side.

“Fine,” he yelled as I got to my feet, “Fine! Just fuck – fuck you! Fuck you!” he pounded the floor with his fist, “FUCK YOU!”

I let the door of the old place slam behind me and pressed myself against it, breathing heavily. God, I’d come so close. And what had I done? –Hurt him, to stop from getting hurt myself. And left him, shouting and swearing to himself, on the dusty floor of one of the places we once ruled.

By the time I reopened the door, he had stopped yelling. He was sitting hunched over on the lip of the stage, his head in his hands, and as I stepped closer through the gloom I heard the soft sounds of him weeping and muttering chastisements to himself.

“Stupid…so fucking stupid…but I love him, I do…”

“Hide?” I asked tremulously, and instantly he looked up, rearranging his face and wiping away his tears with his dusty hands. For once I couldn’t read his eyes; all I could tell was that he was hurting: hurting enough to rip him into two.

Slowly, I moved to sit down next to him. We didn’t say anything, but I shifted to grip his hand tightly.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered. “I know I drink too much. I know I’m pathetic. But I miss you so much. And I’m so tired of just watching you living your life away from me.” He straightened up and looked at me seriously. “I want to be the biggest thing in your world. I don’t want you to think about anyone but me – I want you to just, I don’t know, close your heart to every love but mine. ‘Cause then maybe – maybe you’ll know just a little bit what it’s like to be in love with you the way I am.”

“And what is that like?” I asked in a single breath. He shrugged, sniffed; pretended he wasn’t crying.

“Horrible. Amazing. Scary. Like I’m throwing myself against the door of heaven, but nobody will open it.” He looked at me. “It’s heart-breaking, Yoshi.”

“No,” I sniffed, and I realized that I was crying too, “No, don’t say anymore…”

“It’s okay,” he told me, his voice shaking as he squeezed my hand tighter, “I always knew it’d have to be this way. I always knew the music would have to come first for you. I always knew there’d be limits; I knew you’d be noble enough to stick to them.” He half-laughed, half-sobbed bitterly, “I just didn’t know it would be so hard, that’s what I didn’t know…”

“We’ve got something so precious,” I burst, “It’s – it’s just too good to give up. Even if we go back to how we were when we were just…just together when we could be. Every week, every two weeks, I wouldn’t care—”

He let out a breathy, miserable laugh.

“Every two weeks? But then I’d wish that every two weeks was every week, and every week was every day, and every day was every night…”

I felt weird then; like crying and kissing him both at once. “I wish I could explain,” he said abruptly, his voice slurred, “Why we can’t be together.”

I shook my head, holding him tightly.

“I know, it’s the band, you don’t need to say—”

“You,” he mumbled, “You get depressed when you can’t write songs, don’t you?”

I gave a small nod: it was true, I did. I got depressed and angry and not at all fun to be around. If I couldn’t write my music, I felt as if there was a bomb inside me constantly threatening to go off – only putting pen to paper and letting it out could help, like a limited explosion.

“Yeah,” I answered breathlessly, and he gave a sad little nod. “Maybe…” I said tentatively, and he looked up at me sharply. “Hide, I have the feeling that I’ll never be able to stop loving you, and if I let you go without…without eventrying…I might never be able to forgive myself. Can we just…try? Just try it?”

His silence killed me.

“What d’you think?” I mumbled at last, casting my eyes down to our unyieldingly clasped hands. “Please, Hide. I can’t stand to walk away from you every day.” I took a deep breath, unsure why I was feeling so bold and so reckless, “You’re the best thing in my life, and I just…” I hung my head. “What do you say?”

“I think,” he began, and his voice broke. “I think that would be wonderful.”