BREAK THE LIMITS: 27/33

[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-SEVEN:

“The two who turned their backs on each other have nowhere to go

They can't even hear the sound of the heavy, pounding rain.”

 – ‘Undecided’, Dir en grey

Even now, it’s difficult to tell this part of the story: what happened to Hide in those last fateful years before X split up for good. The thing was, I’d made the mistake of thinking that Hide knew best; that he was thinking only of the band; that if I fought back, forced him to confess the love between us, I would destroy us both.

When really, all those years, Hide was just waiting for me to change his mind.

And I just had to be so damn conscientious, sinking slowly but surely into my own skin. Everything I did between Taiji’s departure and the Last Live was pre-decided, programmed in: everything to do with what I thought and nothing at all to do with how I felt. I did a lot of things in the name of righteousness and nothing at all in the name of love.

And that’s what makes everything so much more painful: I could have stopped it all – could have saved him, or at least could have had those years…those precious years that I wasted, stubborn, acting the martyr.

Fool.

It was ironic, really. I should have been on top of the world, but all I really wanted to do was…I don’t know, stop everything, somehow; freeze time so I could breathe, think. Being a musician was an incredible, incredible thing, but it seemed that I shrank as X grew. And, not for the first time, I had the weird feeling that I was being fed off. Oh, yeah—! I was crippled by the paranoid disease that grips all rockers at some late point or other – except I was experiencing the worst of the symptoms at age thirty, and that didn’t seem entirely fair. And this was meant to be the best time of my life! Except it wasn’t, because every day he was slipping away from me, and that meant I was pushed to the side like everyone else, a respectable distance away from his world, forced by love to watch him hurt himself but powerless to stop it.

There is a feeling you get, like a sick clenching in your gut – something bitter enough to make you double over and grit your teeth and squeeze your eyes closed – when you realize that everything you have worked for in your life, the only thing that keeps you going, is keeping you from the one thing that could ever truly make you happy.

When I say Hide was hurting himself, I’m still not sure to what extent I mean that. I knew he would get drunk and scare himself when he couldn’t sleep; I knew he liked to experiment and I knew the risks: cocktails of valium and whisky or Bacardi or vodka (all depressant and no stimulant: unusual behaviour, lowered heart beat, fainting, respiratory problems, coma); ketamine placed on the tongue as a pill or snorted (inability to move, panic attacks, depression, fainting, suppression of breathing and heartbeat); speed, mixed in a drink on a night out or snorted or swallowed (anxiety, depression, paranoia, strain on the heart – and, mixed with alcohol, death). I knew this, because it was invariably me ferrying him home after he plaintively whimpered for help over the phone, giving me a street address for some club or bar, and putting him to bed. Sometimes he’d pass out and my number, as the first on his speed dial, was called to come fetch him. My life was spent trying to get the perfect balance between avoiding him and the strain he put on my conscience and willpower, and being the one who was always there, picking up the pieces and protecting him. It was like trying to take care of an egg that kept trying to hurl itself to the floor; I wondered dimly what would happen if he made it, some day.

I picked him up on nights good and nights bad; in rain and wind and sleet and hail – in my car, not a cab. I picked him off floors and carried him, I steadied him, and I put up with his speed-induced, incomprehensible chatter. I saw him pale and shivering, or sweating, his hair damp around the temples, and I saw him flushed with fever, his eyes shining and cheeks stained red. His hands shook and stilled and curled compulsively. He bit his nails no matter how many times I knocked his hands away. Sometimes, the scarier times, he wouldn’t say or do anything at all; he’d just sit slumped in his seat, gazing unseeingly out at the street lights and neon signs that flashed past; all the young people having the time of their lives. Scarier still, he’d be passed out and wouldn’t wake up. Scariest of all was when he’d gaze at me and see right into the very soul of me – scary because I would have to be the sensible one; Iwould have to say no, and face once more a night of thinking of him and facing loneliness.

It was a ketamine night, because when he’d seen me he’d sidled up close and begun stroking my body through my clothes and pressing hot kisses to my neck, oblivious of the giggling people around us. His whole body had felt warm enough to melt; two bright fever spots stood out on his cheeks and he slumped to the side immediately after I’d got him in the car with his seatbelt done up.

“What’re you thinking?” he asked quietly, his eyes not meeting mine but following the progress of something only he could see across the floor of the car. Half-heartedly, he began to brush something invisible off his sleeve, the actions repeated and mechanical.

I kept my mouth closed and focused on driving. He was sagging beneath his seatbelt, head bending wearily.

“Stop!” he croaked urgently, seeing the traffic lights turn red in the distance, even though there were few other cars around and I was coasting along at the thirty limit anyway. “The lights!”

“You going to throw up?” I asked impassively, and he hung his magnificent head, shaking it gently. He looked like a scolded child. My vision blurred. I wondered why things couldn’t just be simple for us.

“What’re you thinking?” he repeated dully. I closed my eyes for a split-second.

“What am I thinking…” I considered. “I’m thinking about how when I see you like this, I’m not sure whether to hit you or kiss you. I’m thinking about how much I want to just leave you rotting in some bar somewhere but I can’t because I love you. Damn it!” I slammed on the brakes as the car in front of me lurched to a stop. “You want to know what I’m thinking?! I’m thinking about how much I wish I could just…just not care, anymore! You can sit there all spaced out on whatever shit you’ve taken this evening, all nice and numb, like I can deal with my pain and yours as well. Shit!” I punched the steering wheel hard, the horn blasting into the night.

“So go on,” he said hollowly, after a moment. “Hit me. Kiss me.”

“Why d’you do it?” I breathed painfully. “It doesn’t make you happy; I can see it doesn’t.”

He cracked a tremulous smile that looked more like a grimace of agony.

“I do it,” he said slowly, “’Cause when I pass out and wake up in my bed, I know it’s you that’s put me there. You come and pick me up and drag me into your car, and take me home, and it’s like I’m safe for one more day. I’m not losing you, after all.”

I pulled silently into the car park of his building, but didn’t try to get out of the vehicle. Instead, I folded my hands on the steering wheel and cradled my head against them, slumped, crying silently. I heard him scrabbling at his seat belt to try and get to me, but I didn’t care. I wept with the intensity of a newborn; my whole face hot and damp, tears flowing down the steering wheel, my eyes squeezed shut. I felt him finally free himself and wrap his arms around my chest, a frail shell around his paltry prize – me.

As suddenly as they had started, my tears stopped. I could hear his shallow, shuddering breaths in my ear and feel his heartbeat thudding slowly against my back.

“C’mon,” I said abruptly, “Let’s go.”

Patiently, I helped him up the stairs, half-carrying and half-dragging him when he wilted into a faint. Exhaling slowly between my teeth, I forced myself to remain methodical and professional as I ran my hands all over him, searching for evidence of his keys. With a face completely lacking in emotion, I fished for them in one of his many pockets, pretending I couldn’t feel the heat of his skin through his clothes.

His apartment was dark and messy, littered with traps: clothing strewn over the floor and empty bottles rolling around. He wavered in and out of consciousness, kicked off his shoes and stumbled over, fainted and came around when I laid him shirtless on the bed and started sponging his too-hot skin with cold water.

Slowly and very deliberately, he placed his hot little hands around my neck and slid them upwards into my hair, pulling my head down towards his.

“Hide—”

“Please,” he interrupted, and took a deep breath. “Please.”

When you wrestle against yourself, there’s no real winner. A split second was all it took for me to mentally knock seven bells out of my responsible self, sending that part of my consciousness floating up to the ceiling to watch as I bent my head down and kissed him; his lips, his chin, all the way down to the hollow of his throat, where I pressed my lips down until he gasped. His fingers were stealthily dealing with my clothing, pulling the jacket and shirt from my back to get at my skin.

“Please,” he repeated, sounding almost frightened, “Oh please…”

I watched as my hands slid down his sides; as my lips closed over one light tan nipple and made him writhe on the bed. His long red hair was covering his chest like a fan; tenderly, I pushed it to the side and rose to my knees, straddling him, trying to fathom the unreadable look in his eyes. His hands were gripping at the backs of my thighs, gliding slowly upward to make me smile, and slowly he traced his thumbs around the waist of my pants until he reached the fly.

And I was kneeling above him, trying so hard not to tell him I loved him – because even if we knew, we just weren’t strong enough to face what words like that could mean for us. If I said it, we were done for – doomed to pull apart again, refuse to face each other, and I would have to make sure that I never, ever gave into such moments of weakness again.

Because it was moments of weakness that had us where we were at that moment, and as he stripped me I realized that I’d felt exactly as I had aged sixteen – that there were no directions for where we were going; no road maps or street signs to guide us or show us where, if anywhere, we’d end up this time.

I took a deep breath, snaked my arms around him, and we fell backwards into the darkness together.