PROTECT ME: CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

[andrew_in_drag]

Title: Protect Me
Author: andrew_in_drag
Pairing: Kaoru x Toshiya
Rating: mature
Warnings: sex, rudeness, swears, boyish attitudes, AU
Chapter: 22/23
Previously: prologue >> one >> two >> three >> four >> five >> six 
>> seven >> eight >> nine >> ten >> eleven >> twelve >> thirteen 
>> fourteen >> fifteen >> sixteen >> seventeen >> eighteen 
>> nineteen >> twenty >> twenty-one 
Synopsis: “Toshimasa Hara. Even now I sometimes find it hard to decide if his name gives me heartache or a headache…”

As a police officer in Shinsekai, Osaka, Kaoru has seen his fair share of trouble. Chaos takes a human form, however, in Toshiya Hara, a young local who seems intent on showing him that sometimes the right way is not always the good way, and that sometimes the wrong way can be the path to redemption...

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO 


Sometimes, my kidnapping seems like a nightmare that I might have dreamt, one night, and that creeps away from me as the day passes on. 
Toshiya, too, was a dream. It seemed I thought about him constantly, trying to replicate his exact appearance in my mind: in the days following my release, I saw him everywhere. There was were was press, reporters; there were colleagues and well-wishers and doctors and nurses. In every camera flash I saw his smile; every touch could have been from his hands. 
I declined to give interviews. Whilst the world ran in the sunshine, I crept through fog. They set and strapped up my dislocated shoulder easier, and before too long I was back at my desk at the police station. 
I needed work. Though I was offered more time off, trauma counselling, whatever I needed, I opted to go back just for the distraction. I happily took on the most menial and repetitive of tasks; I cleared piles of paperwork taller than I stood. The other officers treated me like a celebrity, but I just wanted to be ignored. I wanted peac and space to think of him; to wonder if he was thinking of me. Maybe in some small way I believed that if I could lull myself into such a perfect state of quiet and stillness, he would come back. 

I had difficulty sleeping. If I dreamed, I dreamed of him, but usually my nights were spent tossing and turning, trying to rid myself of various images of him: his eyes as he said goodbye; the thought of him and Kyo together at that very moment. 
What troubled me was the question of how I could ever, ever forgive myself, knowing what my love had done to him. I'd consigned him to a life in the shadows - to no life at all. What kind of love, I wondered desperately, could he possibly share with Kyo? A fraught, servile relationship was no relationship at all - no way for him to live, not at all.
So I thought of him; so I dreamt of him. 
I pictured him growing older in that house; the fire inside him dying out. I realised there might be a day when he would give up entirely and completely succumb to the prison I had unwittingly created for him. 
Truthfully, my heart died. I closed myself off to everyone but him. Some evenings my phone rang and rang until I unplugged it. I got used to not speaking. 
If you had asked me, I probably would have said that my most fervent wish was to just speak to him again one more time, but that wasn't strictly true. Despite how I craved him, my deepest desire was simply to know that he was free: it was all I wanted for him - to be able to love and leave at will; to know what a free life was. 
I was so powerless to save him, and yet I couldn't give up. 

People started saying that I was crazy. My boss urged me to take time to myself. I saw a doctor who prescribed me valium. I didn't take it. 
It's true that I became obsessed. I laughed my own private investigation into finding Kyo: I ran his alias through our files; I met with a sketch artist and made sure every officer in my precinct saw a copy of the drawing; in my spare time, I trawled through the countless photographs on our database, just looking for a possible match - a positive ID that I could pin to this demon. Once I sat at my desk all night long, red-eyed and white-faced, just flicking through image after image: it was impossible, I thought to myself, for a man to live such a life of crime and yet leave no trace behind. 
How could it be that we didn't even have a picture of him? 
One surprise was that, browsing through all those photographs one night in October, I came across an image of the silent man, looking utterly lost in the glare of the camera's flash: a rabbit in headlights. His photo was no mug-shot: it had been taken in the station, but in our staff room; he had worked for us. Our database gave his name as Shinya Terachi and did not list him as a mute. I read that he had once been a police informant, working undercover to infiltrate a yakuza clan; three years ago, it said, he had dropped off the radar completely. He was wanted on suspicion of carrying out the gang-related murder of a police officer - he had succumbed to the forces he lived with; he had joined them. 
Uselessly, the program listed his last known address as somewhere in Tokyo. 
Missing, it said beneath his photograph. 

I hesitated over Shinya's picture for a good long while. The silent man: he had been my only hope, my only ally; he'd been my only friend in that land of demons. 
Biting my lip, I clicked in to edit the file. I entered the program from the master account we used for overrides - only for emergencies. I changed Shinya Terachi's height from five feet and seven inches to five feet and four; his eye colour from dark brown to grey. I fabricated a five-inch scar in the shape of a cross on his left lower back; I renamed him at random. 
For the finishing touch, I took out missing. I relabelled him deceased. 
A chance for a chance, I told myself; a life for a life. In some small way, the kindness he'd shown had sustained me; saved me for another day. 
I hoped he would have the sense to keep a low profile, now, and to shed his yakuza connections. With his name cleared, he was a free man again. I wshed there was some way of letting him know, but of course there wasn't. I would have to accept that this was as far as I could go to save this one; I would have to be aware that it would never be enough; that against saving Toshiya, my efforts came in at a poor second best. 

I had just finished tampering with Shinya's file when another officer tapped me on the shoulder; guiltily, I whipped around in my office chair, sling thumping against my chest uselessly. I vaguely recognised him as a young man who had joined the force just two years ago, though I couldn't remember his name. It didn't matter; nobody else really mattered anymore. 
"Sorry to disturb you, Kaoru," he said apologetically, "But we've taken somebody in who I think you'll want to talk to." 
I sighed, pinching the bridge of my nose tiredly. 
"It's almost three in the morning," I told him, suddenly feeling incredibly weary, "I was about to go home. Can't this wait until daylight?" 
The young man shuffled awkwardly. 
"Sorry, Kaoru," he repeated, "But you'll want to talk to him now." 
"Why would I want to talk to him?" I asked irritably. 
"Oh, he said so," the young officer replied brightly, "He said, 'believe me, Kaoru wants to talk to me'." He pressed his lips together a little anxiously, bouncing slightly on the balls of his feet. "He won't talk to anybody but you."
I rolled my eyes, already put off by the detainee's apparent cockiness, but got to my feet stiffly.
"We got him in for possession," the officer told me brightly. "Says he's got yakuza ties." 

Of course, then it struck me: it could be Kyo. 
Yes, it could very well be Kyo. 
And with that in mind I began hurrying my steps until the two of us were almost jogging down the hallway, the other officer shooting me strange looks as he tried to match my pace. 
"We've cuffed him," he told me uncertainly, "In case he gets rowdy - well, you know, with your arm still..." he trailed off. I was hardly listening anyway: cuffs, good. I didn't want to face Kyo uncuffed. I wanted him to know that I was every bit in control of him, the same way he'd been in control of me; I wanted to look him in the eye whilst all he could do was struggle, and let him know that I was willing to do everything in my power to make sure he never saw the light of day again. 
Oh, he could bet I wanted to talk to him. I listened to my boots squeaking along the polished floor of the corridor; took in those grey walls; took in those grey walls, the flicker of the fluorescent lighting. Unwittingly, I was clenching and unclenching y fist; I was aware, dimly, that I was shaking. 
Maybe, I worried, I wouldn't be able to hold myself: maybe I would just get in there and start begging. 
"This one, Kaoru," the officer told me, stopping smartly outside the door of one of our interview rooms, "Good luck." 
He transferred the key to my hand, and I took a deep breath as I unlocked the door. Nothing, though, could have prepared me for what came next. 


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