A MOMENTARY LAPSE OF REASON: 24A/25

[andrew_in_drag]

Title: A Momentary Lapse of Reason
Author: andrew_in_drag
Pairing: Kaoru x Toshiya
Rating: mature
Warnings: sex, swears
Chapter: 24a/25
Previously: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23
Synopsis: When it comes to healing broken hearts, Toshiya is a professional. Good-looking and charming, he makes his living by gently helping the jilted to go on with their lives, whilst steadfastly refusing to settle down himself. Boasting a one hundred percent success rate, Toshiya is sure his method is flawless - until he meets Kaoru, a lonely academic who, despite Toshiya's better judgement, starts to get under his skin...

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR (A):

Summer that year came late; it was well into June when the harsh winds finally stopped blowing. All in all, it was set out to be a very unsatisfying season: the weather was hot but the sky was overcast almost constantly, rumbling every so often with the threat of storms. The atmosphere grew muggy, and everything outside seemed to almost sticky; it was as if heat had acquired a texture, and was coating everything it came across in a gluey, sweaty sap.
Toshiya didn’t care. He lay on his bed, completely naked, the windows flung wide open to tempt in a non-existent breeze. Sweat covered his skin and soaked the sheets he lay on. He didn’t mind about that, either. He was newly born, he imagined, slick with amniotic fluid; his mind and soul and heart were blank as an infant’s.
Outside his window, lighting flashed across the sky. He didn’t blink straight away, and when he did close his eyes, a blinding zigzag was seared into the back of his eyelids.
In those weeks after Kaoru found out, Toshiya had found it easiest to lock himself away. It was the closest he could come to disappearing completely. Trapped flat between the stifling but safe walls of his hot, boxy little flat, he could lie to himself in the way he had not been able to lie to Kaoru: I’m not here. This isn’t happening.

His days, for the most part, blended seamlessly into one. In the earlier days he dealt with his insomnia and waited patiently for sleep, but his dreams disturbed him. He experienced the worst day of his life in flashes, over and over again: in his dreams, his phone rang on, the sound harsh and accusatory. He woke up to images of Kaoru’s face in front of his eyes, sad and angry both: it had been the first time he had ever seen the other man cry. His red eyes; his pale skin; those devastating, devastating tears. Kaoru had scrubbed them away roughly, but Toshiya had seen them all the same.
When he awoke, he always lay still, staring at the ceiling and continuing the rest of the dream in his mind. He was haunted by the way Kaoru’s face had looked. He flinched in spite of himself, his mind mentally reproducing how it had felt when Kaoru had rummaged through his wallet and thrown at him the money he was owed. The bundle of soft, crinkled notes had burst against his face, and they had drifted to the floor around him like shed feathers. Toshiya had been crying by then. A single ten thousand yen note had stuck to the tearstains on his cheek, and he had batted it away as if it physically hurt him.
Kaoru had backed down after that. He had retreated to the armchair Toshiya had been sitting in, his elbows on his knees and his head in his hands. When he had spoken, his voice was almost too soft to hear, and Toshiya realised that he was talking, not to any of them, but to himself.
“I really loved you. I was really in love.”
Toshiya had clapped his hands over his ears, unable to bear it.
I loved you too. I still love you. I’ll always love you, Kaoru, don’t you see that?
You know me; can’t you look into my eyes and see that?
Can’t you please just look at me?
It was only when Kyo looked up at him that he realised he had spoken aloud, and Die had clasped a long, thin hand around his upper arm. The touch had been comforting, but commanding. Without Die saying anything, that hand suggested that Toshiya should leave, straight away: it told him that he shouldn’t come back.

Over those difficult weeks, Die came to visit Toshiya several times.
Toshiya didn’t mind. It was obvious to him that the redhead felt at least partly culpable and, though Toshiya was unable to behave normally towards him, he was still glad of the company. Die had become the only human in his life who wasn’t a grocery store clerk or a fleeting voice on the street.
Sometimes he still missed Die’s visits, though. His dreams troubled him so that he began taking sleeping pills, always going one or two over the prescribed dose – just for luck – and though he preferred the drugged and dreamless sleep, it wasn’t often that Die’s knocking was able to rouse him from one of his eighteen hour naps. Even if it did wake him, he often found himself unable to stand; he was aware, perhaps, of sunlight on the ceiling or drool on his cheek, but his limbs would not work and soon his eyes closed again: back to darkness.
Die’s visits brought worrying news. The redheaded man would sit at Toshiya’s little table and morosely drink beer, relaying the details of Kaoru’s life as gently as he could: Toshiya learned that Kaoru wasn’t making it out of the house much, either. Die painted a picture of his life in which Kaoru seemed to have aged fifty years overnight: he had gained the perfect insularity of deafness; he was prone to trail off in the middle of a sentence, letting several minutes pass by before he suddenly restarted again. Die said it reminded him of a record player that occasionally got stuck and needed a bump before it would work again. He didn’t tell Toshiya how, whenever it happened, it made him want to cry or scream or stamp his feet; how it often prompted him to take hold of some small part of Kaoru’s clothing right down by the hem, where he wouldn’t notice.

It was only when Die mentioned that Kaoru had begun to go to the library again that Toshiya started to give some thought to leaving the house himself. He frowned when he imagined it. How many weeks had it been? He had no way of knowing. His phone showed multiple missed calls from his manager at the boutique, but he could not bring himself to call back, or even listen to the voicemails. He guessed that he was probably fired.
His cell phone was a traitor anyway. He hated the way its screen glowed so benevolently, displaying missed calls from everyone apart from the one person that mattered. Staring down at it, he burst suddenly into tears and pounded it violently against the windowsill, over and over again until the screen had shattered and its insides were mangled, and small chunks of debris littered the floor. He stamped on what remained in a fury before falling to the floor himself, sobbing desperately. Later, he would pull no less than twelve splinters of plastic from the palm of his right hand. That didn’t bother him; he hardly felt it. He made himself use antiseptic and a bandage, but his heart wasn’t really in it. He took a triple dose of sleeping pills that night, wondering dimly if he would die.
He woke up twenty-four hours later to vomit, and that was that. He brushed his teeth, took two more pills and slept until morning.

It was the first day of July by the time Toshiya actually left the house for something other than the necessary food shopping. He couldn’t seem to force himself to dress nicely or groom himself. His clothes were old and not entirely clean. His stringy, messy hair grew heavy with sweat in the oppressive heat. Still he crept towards the library, seemingly unable to help himself.
What if…?
And wouldn’t it be wonderful?
Each click of his heels on the pavement seemed to send a small hot blade through his head.
After the walk, the library’s air conditioning was a relief. It focussed him a little; made him wonder how offensive he looked and smelled. He noticed a few people backing away from the sight of his stumbling walk and red eyes; he supposed they probably suspected he was a drunk.
Still he crept forwards, past the children’s books and the adult fiction shelves. Last time he had been here, it had been the tail end of winter. Kyo had not existed to him yet; neither had Kaoru. Something was wrong with a world in which people came and went so quickly.
His heart thudded painfully in his chest as he rounded the corner to where he knew Kaoru’s shelves to be; to where his favourite table was. Toshiya frowned. He checked the bathrooms. He navigated his way through the maze of bookshelves; through the magazines and periodicals, past the microfiche cubicles and the bank of computers. He could feel distress rising in his throat like the urge to cry. He gripped the closest bookshelf to him with shaking hands, sliding down to the floor until he was kneeling, his hot forehead pressed against the cool spines of books about pet care and veterinary science. He had covered every corner of the vast library, and now he could no longer escape the truth: Kaoru was not here.
Despite himself, he sobbed weakly. The unevenness of his breath condensed into violent and painful hiccups, and he bit down on his fist agitatedly.
“Toshiya?”

It was a moment before he could even look up. His hopes rose and fell. A concerned face that he just barely recognised hovered over him, dim and distorted. It was not Kaoru’s face, anyway. That was the important thing.
“Toshiya?”
He didn’t bother to answer. He closed his eyes. When soft hands touched his shoulders, though, he let his companion pull him to his feet, and he walked where he was led. He kept his eyes fixed on the floor, and obediently walked through the bathroom door when it was held open for him. He allowed himself to be pushed into a cubicle and sat down on a toilet seat lid; none of that was offensive, and he had nothing better to do anyway. He realised there was probably still a little sleeping pill in his system. It made him vague and utterly incapable of his own panic.
His companion was gently patting his face with a cool, wet wad of paper towels. His hand had pushed Toshiya’s hair back from his forehead; Toshiya wondered how he could stand to touch it.
“Toshiya? Can you talk? Do I need to call an ambulance?”
Finally, reluctantly, Toshiya opened his eyes. Again, he noted that the face peering so worriedly at him was familiar, but he could not for the life of him give it a name.
He sighed. “No, I’m okay,” he lied. His companion handed him a bottle of water.
“Good. Come on, sit up straight. Don’t you remember me?”
Toshiya took a sip of water and squinted.
“Neighbour?” he guessed at last.
“No…no, Toshiya. It’s Shinya; I’m Shinya. Kyo’s—” he cut himself off, smiling a little breathlessly. “I’m not surprised you don’t remember me. I only saw you that one time. I remember you, though. Not many people stand up to Kyo. He mentions you quite a lot.”
Toshiya swallowed.
“How does it feel?” he asked. His gaze seemed to sway around Shinya’s face, keeping his eyes mostly locked.
Shinya smiled worriedly. “Pardon?” he asked, his voice polite. Toshiya shook his head wearily, getting to his feet.
“I said how does it feel,” he bit, clearer. He left the rest of his sentence hanging in the air; he pushed past Shinya easily and did not look back until he stumbled out of the library’s front door, tripping down the stone steps the led up to it and grazing both his elbows.
He heard laughter from somewhere. He forced himself to sit up; to stand up.
“How does it feel?” his own voice pantomimed mockingly inside his head.
How does it feel to be so loved?
To be so lucky?

A/N: Okay, so 24a and 24b? Cuuuurve ball! 

to chapter twenty-four (b) →

Comments

[lady-sb.livejournal.com]

I think my heart just broke more >_< to see how Toshiya has become and how Kaoru reacted. I think a part of me just ached.

And I was expecting you to possibly split it up, was thinking how could you resolve it in 2 chapters! LOL

Can't wait for part B! If i wish it, will it come faster?