BREAK THE LIMITS: 32a/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-TWO [A]:

“I loved you too much,

At that time that's all I did…” – ‘Raison D’etre’, Dir en grey

When I’d told him not to make me love him too much, I wasn’t thinking about it; in hindsight, I almost wish he’d done what I’d asked of him. Loving somebody, really loving them, was riskier than I knew: people were, and still are, so fragile.

And I’d lost Hide so many times already. I’d let him slip straight through my fingers into the eager hands of others too many times before; it might have been me who’d turned him into that ready, willing person – but soon I’d learned that it was sex, not love; or even something more desperate.

“Open your heart,” he’d told me once, solemnly, “To whoever will walk into it. Love the first person you can, if you want to be happy” – and when I realized that he was trying to force himself to love somebody else, I wondered why it couldn’t ever be that simple.

My problem was, I’d done exactly that. I’d let the first person I loved straight into my heart – and then I couldn’t get him out. Whenever I closed my eyes at night, I felt his breath against my neck; when I turned around, I saw him move in the periphery of my vision. If ever I walked through snow, I heard his muffled footsteps just several paces behind mine…but they never were, ever. He was the first thing I thought about every morning: it was as if I fell asleep with his body pressing on top of mine suffocatingly, his face nose-to-nose with mine, and the minute I opened my eyes again – there he was, that ghost version of him, following me around and clinging to my back and making my shoulders stoop and my feet drag.  

But now that he was mine, I could breathe. And when I saw him, it was because he was there, real flesh and blood – as he proved.

So now we had our happily ever after.

There was nothing, nothing at all on earth that could rival what I felt for him: the ferocity of my love surprised even me. It was uncontrolled; when I hugged him, I wanted to crush his body to mine and hold it there for days.

Living with him, I learned all about him. I learned that he couldn’t stand to do nothing; he only went to bed when he was tired enough to drop. He couldn’t sit, as I could, and stare into space; he had to be watching TV or reading or smoking or humming. He brimmed with energy, especially early in the morning, when I was slower: I pictured him running effortlessly ahead of me, urging me to catch up – though he didn’t like to get up and out of bed without me. His answer to this was to tempt me into getting up: his ulterior motive to waking me up with his head bobbing between my thighs.

Did I love him too much?

I don’t know. He grew tired, preoccupied, stressed. He began to forget things and withdraw from me; he turned vague and…not cold, not exactly, but strangely stuck. He sent me wistful looks, sad looks, hopeless looks: when we made love, he clutched at me desperately; afterward, he would turn his head to the side and I would see the tears glinting in his eyes. Everything within him told me that he still loved me, but he seemed edgy, unsure. There was something in his demeanour that felt like paranoia; some wild and unfounded suspicion that seemed to be for his own happiness.

Somewhere along the line, I realized, I had turned into the strong one – or maybe I always had been. Hide had been tough as hell when I’d first known him as a teenager; senselessly brave and energetic and in-your-face vivacious, and in my mind I’d always coloured him like some beautiful, exotic bird.

Now, I wondered. I wondered if he’d simply been trying to beat people back before they crushed him. I saw him as a crab; spiky on the outside and soft as caramel on the inside; I saw him as a spider, with all his fear and weakness tucked deep within the barriers of his exoskeleton. Such strong defences for something so fragile, really, so frail and delicate – but defences that I had destroyed in my desire to worm inside him, to find out everything.

And I’d waited so patiently; I’d held on and pushed and shoved and resisted for so long that I couldn’t stop, now I’d gotten what I wanted. If I was strong and he was weak, it was my job to protect him; something that he rejected violently. Thinking about it turned my heart into a small, fluttery bird of panic, beating its wings against the stubborn fortress of my ribcage: how could this have happened? We had worked for this, paid for this by living our entire lives in the knowledge that we might never have each other; might never be happy.

It was a feeling that strung me on a wire; made me faint and sick.

And I tried to talk about it with him. I sat him down on the bed; did all the right things, but he cut me off halfway through.

“Yoshi,” he said in a strange voice, “Why do you look so frightened when you talk about us? Nothing can threaten us now.”

The rain splattered hatefully across our windows.

“I know,” I said weakly, a lie. For a moment, I truly despised that dark sky over our heads.

He smiled in relief and pulled my body to his, his hands shaking just a little as they slid inside my shirt.

“I love you so much,” he said in that strange voice, “Don’t worry. This’ll work – it has to.”

Before I knew it, he was pulling my shirt off; trailing kisses down my chest and below my midriff. I sucked my breath in but couldn’t stop him; not then, and not when he undid my pants. It was a nice feeling, being undressed like that; as if I was shedding a skin I didn’t need. It felt so good, I had to let him carry on, until we were both naked and pale and I couldn’t help but reach out to touch that beautiful skin.

He closed his eyes; placed a hand over mine reverentially.

“I love you,” he repeated, like a mantra, and gently I lay him down.

It felt like sex with a stranger. Every breath was a tight gasp; just that time, he surrendered to me completely, his will as soft and malleable as molten gold. He wanted, for once, to not have to think or act or do anything but feel.

Conscientious, caring for how he felt more than he did, I prepared his body carefully, whilst his eyes smouldered and bit with impatience. I understood that he wanted the pain, but still I couldn’t bring myself to hurt him. With my eyes boring into his, I pinned his wrists down on either side of his head – like a little butterfly, pinned to a corkboard, wings spread so it was easy to imagine it flapping and fluttering frantically, like something incapable of its own distress – and pushed down, down until his eyes closed with pleasure and his head fell back and his hips lifted themselves to meet mine. He bore my entire weight; my love, my fear, my slight anger, without a word of complaint.

And it was amazing. Electric. I felt as if the whole world was reaching up for me; felt the vulnerability of his body and the passion of the kisses he lavished on me. It was sex on a new level; a sadder, more desperate level that melted our bodies to fluid so we ran into one.

Love. It was different from sex that day, that day when we just felt – different, and ten times more compelling. Something had changed and come loose; something had tilted our world on its axis, so it wobbled more than it glided.

I pushed and pulled the moans from his throat that night, beating both of us down to the place where we belonged – somewhere small and dark and soft and close, where we were the only two people in the world, and I could fall asleep to the feeling of his chest rising and falling against mine; his tears on my cheek; his whispered apologies in my ears.

The next day, I woke up with him still breathing softly next to me. I swept the hair back from his forehead and gently kissed the skin I’d exposed. Silently, I’d cried myself to sleep last night, holding my precious love in my arms.

The thing was, normally, when I hurt, I’d have turned to music – and now that was gone, and life wasn’t as smooth as I’d naively expected, I felt flown-apart with panic.

What are we coming to? I wondered helplessly, and then, What are we going to do?

When the morning turned to afternoon, I phoned them up – Pata and Heath. It was to comfort myself, at first, by hearing their familiar voices, but in the end the words just blurted out of me, like they were something I’d planned all along – and I realized, in a way, I had.

“What do you think about restarting X in the year 2000?” I asked. And then I finished the conversation as quickly as possible, horrified by the implications of what I’d said; of what I’d meant.