BREAK THE LIMITS: 30a/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 THIRTY [A]:

“Well I never pray, but tonight I’m on my knees…

– ‘Bittersweet Symphony’, The Verve

The ceiling of the Tokyo dome was vast, a padded shape, like an enormous quilted blanket had been spread out over the tops of the walls and then forgotten about.

Our footsteps thunked and our voices echoed from the stage in the vast, empty arena.

Later, the place would be filled with people and we would be transformed: now, it was almost disturbingly hollow and quiet, and we looked thoroughly disappointing. We weren’t in our stage clothes yet; our hair wasn’t done. Hide wore cartoon-bright pyjama pants and a t-shirt; next to him, we other four looked old.

Toshi most of all, I realized, and wondered if the dissolution of the band would help recover his vitality.

I had a sudden flashback of the time the four of us and Taiji had played Orgasm in a bistro: I saw Toshi shouting good-naturedly in the diners’ faces and felt a twinge of affection. It felt a long, long time ago. The people in that video seemed distinctly unrelated to the people around me now, but I could still see it, plain as day: the pinkish-purplish edges to Taiji’s fire; Toshi’s rock star strut; the feeling of the drumsticks in my hand and Hide’s aggressively kohl-rimmed eyes, flashing as he played up for the cameras.

It had been a time trip, I realized, all these years of X…just one big time trip. What else could I call it, when I was going to end up exactly where I had been before it all started? It had been sixteen years since I’d first met Hide, and here we were – still standing together, in spite of everything.

I closed my eyes slowly, picturing the various stages of our lives together flicking past, like the pages of a scrapbook: Hide the first time I’d looked into his face, lying tangled up in a stool on the carpeted floor of our old school; Hide smoking marijuana on my bed, the sweet, woody smell of the smoke wrapping itself around me; Hide in his old work uniform, waving energetically at me; Hide in the rain that day I’d confessed my love to him; Hide with his head thrown back in pleasure, gripping my hands in his; …and then a shift, a pause, like a blot on a videotape to make the screen jump, and the images turned to Hide with dark, plum-brown hair, standing at the top of the basement steps; Hide blonde and black and red, on the rooftop in the rain; Hide’s silhouette in the moonlight as he dove into the water; Hide poised to knock on my hotel room door; Hide laughing as snow fell from the darkness; Hide arguing, his whole body poised and crackling with electricity; Hide drunk and curled up in a bar, drunk and sprawled over the floor in a bar, drunk and perched miserably on a kerb; Hide wrapping his arms around me and staring sweetly into my eyes; Hide pushing me, kissing me, loving me, killing me…

Once Hide had told me a story about a puppy he’d owned for a short time when he was a kid. Apart from his guitar, it was the only thing from his childhood that he seemed in any way enthusiastic about; at least, when he spoke about it, his eyes took on that same wistful look and he seemed to brighten for a moment. He described it so thoroughly I could picture it quite vividly, even though I’d never seen it: a mongrel and a runt, shaggy, peculiar, its fur that golden brown that would have darkened with age. He told me it might have had some Labrador genes; or maybe a retriever, or a spaniel, although it was tiny – small enough to fit in its own feed dish, he pronounced happily, gesturing so wildly with his hands that I feared for the glass of whisky that had stood in front of him.

“What’d you call it?”

“Lassie.” He caught my eye and smiled wryly. “Original, huh?”
He told me that the first winter they’d had Lassie, it had snowed, and the clearest memory he’d had of the dog was of it hoisting its chubby little body through the larger drifts, its fur collecting the snow until it’d looked like it had a second coat of pure white.

“What happened to it?”

Hide took a sip of his drink, his lips barely open.

“My dad got her.”

Refilling his glass, I jerked and spilled some of the amber fluid. Hide traced a thoughtful finger through it, drawing some small shape before sticking his finger in his mouth.

“Mmm hm. It was something stupid – the dog smeared its nose over his shaving mirror, or something. It always had the dampest little brown jewel of a nose. I mean, no mirror or window was safe anyway, not at our place, with my dad! But he came back home from wherever, and he was rubbing his jaw the way he always did when he wanted a drink. I remember that. He had the kind of face that always showed stubble no matter how often he shaved. He saw the mirror, went ballistic, grabbed hold of Lassie by the scruff…she was whining and wriggling, and just – bam. Right into the wall. Thing didn’t even bark. She wasn’t old enough to bark; she just made these bleating noises every time she tried.”

I rubbed his knuckles. They were tense, white, even though he kept up a nonchalant tone. And I remember thinking something so selfish it made me cringe: that it was so unfair he’d had to suffer so much fear in early life, and not just because I felt sorry for him. Any time we were walking along together, I hoped for some danger – a mugger or a runaway car – so I could protect him. It just seemed so unfair that when we were together, nothing could touch him at all; but when he might have actually needed me, I’d been out of reach.

After what happened, people were inclined to remember him in just one way; the happy, bouncy, playful figure they’d seen on stage…and though it was a good way to be remembered, I itched to tell everyone that there was more to him; that at different times he’d been scared and scary, angry, bitter, remorseful, unhappy, lost, bereft…

The different Hides swam before my eyes, so that when the real thing came up behind me I could hardly tell which one he was.

One hour before the show began I heard the doors grind open and the stadium filled almost immediately with a roar of excited chatter, and when it was time and we each got ready in our positions beneath or around the stage, I felt…suddenly fearful. Every time I ascended that vast stage, I had the feeling I was climbing into the gaping jaws of some predator, and why not? Our New Years Eves at Tokyo Dome, with all those thousands of chanting people, could feel almost…tribal. And though it was great to bring it all down, to close the year in such a visceral, primitive way…this evening, I couldn’t help but feel a little shaky, probably because there was no appropriate way to go about this. Cheering at a Last Live seemed almost like laughing at a funeral; wrong, somehow, when it was breaking us apart.

But it was what I had wanted, and still I stood shaking! But, an amazing thing happened.

On his way to the side of the stage, Hide slid his hand along my back, his touch burning through my thin shirt.

“Memorize this night,” he told me, quoting from the voice-over that would soon resound through the stadium, “We’ll spend it together.”

And he gave me the purest, most sincere of smiles; the type of smile I hadn’t seen from him in sixteen years, and in the stadium, the music began; the song I’d composed, Amethyst, and I felt the notes wrap themselves around me and pool warmly in the bottom of my heart, spreading out in my blood, filling my entire body with the unique feeling that music gave me.

“Hide,” I blurted, and he paused.

With a jolt, the thought muscled its way into my head: even if I didn’t have Hide, I’d always have music.

But he smiled at me once more, and squeezed my hand, and I reconsidered, because you could have fame, but it wouldn’t be enough…and you could have money, and it wouldn’t be enough; and I could have music, and it still wouldn’t be enough, if I didn’t have love.

The air was thick with screaming and the lights washed over me like old friends; stoic, I stood, feeling the weight of thousands of eyes as they crushed into me and washed over my head in a swell, like waves. Behind me I could feel my friends and bandmates, as if their energy was radiating out across the arena; and, in a way, I guess it was. A great deal of my ‘memories’ of The Last Live come from watching the footage of it later; now, I imagine I can recall the way Hide half-skipped, half-ran out from the  side of the stage, almost tripping over his own feet but recovering, laughing, glowing…

When I think about it, I can see Toshi, calm and almost reverential beneath the spotlights, gazing out over the crowd with a strange nostalgic smile; I can see Pata’s shy wave; I can even see myself, standing comfortably before retreating to my rightful place behind the drums, ready to knock seven bells out of anyone who wanted to view this as a sombre occasion – through the power of my sticks and pedals, of course. I wasn’t ready for a lawsuit, not on top of everything else.

I laughed suddenly – real, honest laughter – and waved, letting the responding roar fill me from my toes up to my skull. At the end of one of the long catwalks that protruded from the stage, I could look back on where I had been – and where I would go.

On the main stage now, I could see Hide, whipping up the crowd with his playful actions. He caught my eyes, and grinned, catapulting me back to the days of our high hair and stage make-up. I saw him resting one of his boots on the little brass runner around the bottom of a bar, pretending to be blasé as he tried to get a rise out of whatever industry man he was talking to.

A time trip. I closed my eyes just briefly.

I raised my arms, and the countdown began.