The Glasshouse: 2/??

[andrew_in_drag]

Title: The Glasshouse
Author: andrew_in_drag
Pairings: Kyo x Toshiya, Die x Toshiya
Rating: mature
Warnings: sex, rock 'n roll, mental illness theme
Previously: 1 
Notes: by popular demand, this is the companion piece to 'Fifteen Years', covering Kyo's side of the story. Though they go together, they follow the same timeline, so you won't have to have read 'Fifteen Years' for this to make sense. 
Synopsis: My hands fell away from him and brushed the snow. I wondered what such a beautiful boy was doing resting against me: he seemed far too heavy. There was a cold, wet weight to his hair that made me shiver harder. His body next to mine felt sweet and dangerous. 


CHAPTER TWO:

I’m not exactly sure why, but when Toshiya walked back into my life just under a year after that initial meeting, I smiled and bowed and did everything I could to pretend that we had never met before in our lives.
It wasn’t embarrassment, despite the clumsy way I’d been trying to seduce him.  I just liked the thought of being a different person and then starting again, meeting him as who I really was. Ever since I’d first spoken my name to him, Kyo had become me utterly. Really, everything had changed.
Kyo wasn’t the kind of person who would have started talking to him at that bar at all.
Toshiya had adjusted very quickly, and I honestly wasn’t sure if he had gotten to the stage of actually believing me or not. He had played along, in any case. Then, Die had come down the stairs and caused a scene, and I realised in that instant that they had touched and fucked.
For some reason that knowledge pressed in hard against me, like a set of glass walls. I didn’t feel as if I’d lost to Die in any way; it was obvious that Toshiya had grown up a little, and now that I didn’t long to see his mouth chewing up fruit and ice the fascination was mostly gone. I hadn’t even kept tabs on him, not in the way he’d kept tabs on me. It seemed he’d been following La:Sadie’s through every step we had taken. 
Anyway, he fit in right away. People like him have it easy. I mourned that first Toshiya I had known, who had been so young and stood at such a remove to us.

“Come on, Kaoru, look at the weather. If we stay here much longer, we’ll be trapped overnight.”
I pulled damp hair off the back of my neck and looked around to see who might have spoken. Everybody wore slightly dazed expressions, as if the lights had only just turned on. Sweat ran into my eyes, and as I blinked away the sting I noticed the shadow of snow falling thickly behind the windows that we’d fogged up with our efforts.
A misty version of myself stared back at me, snow falling in his head. I stared as if he would do something if I took my eyes off him.
“Well.” Kaoru looked baffled. His fingers were still placed where they needed to be on the frets of his guitar, as if he just couldn’t bear to give that chord up, “I suppose you’re right. Okay.” He stared around at all of us like we’d just woken him up. “Alright, let’s – alright, pack up then.”
Before he’d finished talking, everybody had begun to shift and clatter, and he was left looking slightly redundant. Uncertainly, he started putting his guitar away.
“Kyo, walk with us,” Die said to me breathlessly. His dark eyes were twinkling pleasantly from under the hood of his parka. “We’re going to have a snowball fight in the park. With you on my team, I bet we can beat these girly boys.” He grinned, all youthful exuberance. From across the room, Toshiya snorted.
“You couldn’t even beat your grandmother at mah-jong.”
I swallowed thickly, trying to clear the hoarseness from my voice. I eyed the clock dizzily: it was a quarter past eight. I had been singing since nine that morning. I thought longingly of the humidifier that sat next to my bed like a life support machine.
“Well yeah,” Die was saying, bemused. “My grandmother’s really good.”
They cracked up with good-natured laughter, and I laughed too even though I felt a little pull of anxiety. I felt like I was on a nature documentary, demonstrating how well I got along with the natives of this strange land I had found myself in. My mouth shut like a trap.
“Come on, Kyo,” Shinya piped, buttoning his coat sensibly, “You can be on my team. The Keihanshin locals versus the tourists.”
“Tourists!” Die laughed, “You’re kidding me.”
“We have to beat them, because we’re on home turf. I’d be embarrassing otherwise,” Shinya added mildly.
“Yeah, come on.” Toshiya gave me a kind smile, “I know it’s getting late and all, but we are still relatively young.”
I watched as they bustled around me, zipping zips and tugging gloves over their fingers and hats low over their eyes. They seemed to have assumed that I’d accepted, and I supposed I had. I hadn’t said no, anyway. I wasn’t as pleased with the idea of snow as they all were – I hated to be cold, and the dry chill air in winter made it feel like my throat was being cut – but all their rushing and excitement had put a kind of jolly, end-of-school atmosphere in the air. Besides that, the way Toshiya had talked to me bothered me. There was a hint of pity in his voice that made me wonder exactly how he saw me.
I supposed he thought that I was strange and I didn’t really fit in; that they were all friends whilst I was merely a colleague.  
For that reason, I followed them outside. I thought that as we walked into the white, whooping and hollering, we must have looked like any other group of young men, like a friendly gang from a sitcom; just a ragtag group of crazy young guys.

The first snowball of the season is always a shock. It socked me in the back of the neck with such cold suddenness that I couldn’t move. The streetlights lit the snow in the park orange, and I watched as my black shadow scrambled for ammunition.
Around me, my bandmates’ laughter and groans seemed oddly muffled. The snow made all the sounds reverberate strangely. I felt boxed in.
Laughter skittered in from my left like a crab, and I looked up to see Shinya with two powdery white circles decorating his slender body at the chest and thigh.
“Toshiya!” Die complained loudly, “No crotch shots!”
“That was his hip, you idiot. Where do you keep your dick?”
I glanced up and saw them exchange a look that wasn’t meant for me. Hastily, I busied myself in the snow, but whenever I started rounding it into shape, it would fall apart in my hands. I threw a collection of powder and flurries at them disjointedly, and then sat back on my knees: now that I was out in the cold, I rather liked it. I enjoyed the way the snow turned into chill water that seeped in at odd places: the knees of my jeans, the toes of my boots. It felt sharp enough to cut. Blood would have looked beautiful over the snow. I thought of it all spilling out of me and melting a radius a metre wide.
The sounds of my bandmates zigzagged around me, but they seemed to be growing further away. I pulled off my gloves and dug my bare hands into the cold, hissing just barely. I made vague digging motions, just in case any of them were watching me. My knuckles turned blue and I watched as the temperature of my hands ate away at the layer of whiteness that covered the ground. I liked the thought of leaving a perfect set of prints. If it stopped snowing, they would ice over during the night, and I could visit them the next day. It would be like they marked the grave of somebody I loved.
I smelled it before I felt it, though. That sharp, wet smell to the air gave way to something more earthy and brown, and I drew back in disgust: where my hands had cut too far through the snow, I had uncovered a fetid layer of leaf mulch beneath.
I felt my mouth contorting. It was little more than mush, oozing through my fingers like some horrific body tissue. The odour was the fetid, dog’s breath smell of the sea at low tide.
How like me, I thought, to uncover the dark beneath the light. Now I felt as if I was sitting on a pure, beautiful beach where a swelling and rotten tide washed up and deposited all the filth of the world.

“Kyo, what are you doing?”
A slim, jumping shadow darted across my face, and I gathered handfuls of fresh snow to clean the mess from my hands. I heard the quick pulls of Toshiya’s breathing as he squatted next to me and used his teeth to tug off his own gloves. He took my hands in his and felt them for cold.
As soon as he touched me, the inferno begun. His hands were too hot to bear, and I yelped. Pins and needles peppered my skin, and my bones seemed to have become inflexible iron rods. I was aware, suddenly, that I was shivering.
“Die chased Shinya past those trees,” Toshiya explained a little breathlessly, “I’m not sure how we’ll even find them, in this.” His cheeks were flushed a violent red from the chill air and the excitement, and his hair was soaked dark because he didn’t have a hat. The snow continued to fall thickly, and it slowly started to cover up the holes I had made.
“You laugh like a moron,” I told him, my voice juddering out of control.
“I know.” He regarded me with concern. “You sound cold.”
“I am cold.”
“Why did you take your gloves off?”
“Oh…” I jittered. “You can’t make snowballs like that. You need the heat of your hands to make them compact.”
He laughed in surprise.
“I thought you hated winter. I didn’t think you’d be such a snowball expert.”
I smiled and shrugged, arranging my gloves with the thumbs pointed upwards at the edge of the foul oasis I had made. The fingers looked like beaks, dipping in to drink up the mouldering stink. I looked at the way the snow landed in his hair and settled before melting. It reminded me of blossoms; he looked like a bride.
“You and Die seem to be getting along better,” I said. He laughed white.
“Sure.”
“Has he forgiven you for letting him fuck you yet?”
Toshiya huffed, but sat down cross-legged next to me and began to run snow through his fingers meditatively.
“It’s so creepy the way you do that.”
“What?”
“Just know things like that.”
“Well, it’s obvious.” I swallowed cold air, shifting forwards. The beaks around the hole dipped stupidly, like pelicans at red tide. “You shouldn’t hold the snow in your bare hands, you know. They’ll get sore.”
“You’re doing it.”
“Well, your hands are more valuable than mine.”  I flexed my fingers experimentally. “Think of what kind of crowds we’d gather if the singer was a double amputee.”
“That’s horrible,” he said, surprised.
“Yes, it is.”
He paused.
“I don’t think Die has forgiven me.”

The snow swirled around the castle above us as we looked at each other. I thought Shinya and Die might well have been in a different country, by that point; perhaps they couldn’t find us. Perhaps they would rake through the heavy drifts until dawn, searching us out.
“What makes you think that?” I asked carefully. I tugged my beanie down further over my eyes.
“He…” Toshiya was rolling stones into little balls and stacking them up. I watched as his pile grew larger and larger, and rocked unstably. “I don’t know. I just…it’s between us.” He held a wet hand an inch from his face, palm flat. “It’s right here, whenever we look at each other.”
I felt a prick of curiosity.
“Was it good with Die?”
“Kyo!” Toshiya’s eyes widened, “You can’t ask that.”
His fingers raked grooves in the sides of the small tower he had built. It was on the verge of toppling, but he didn’t seem to realise.
“We can’t even talk about it,” he said at last. “When I try, he gets angry.”
I gathered snow with a savage enthusiasm, not wanting to look at him because he sounded upset, and I was no good with people who were upset.
“It’s so stupid, but I thought maybe we could have something. I know a relationship would be hard in our situation, but it’s not like we’d be the first. ABBA did it, and so did Fleetwood Mac.”
There was a lot I could have said about that, because both of those bands had split, but I held my tongue.
“What I mean is, it was special to me. The way he looked at me…” Toshiya laughed sadly, “I thought it had been special to him, as well. When he was touching me, he was so tender. He was behaving like I was something really valuable.”
I shifted uncomfortably. I could picture the two of them going at it quite easily, and it was awkward to me. I looked up at him briefly: he seemed to be waiting for a response. I couldn’t think why he had chosen to confide in me.
“He’s not even that good looking,” I muttered, “Up close, I mean.”
“Yes he is! Of course he is. Oh, I’m just mad for the way he looks.” Toshiya considered me. “But you’re so sweet to try and make me feel better.”
Had that been what I was doing? He wrapped his arms around my shoulders and nestled his head in the curve of my neck. Stunned, I patted him limply. My neck was cold, but his breath was hot.
“When he’s old and lonely,” Toshiya mumbled against my skin, “He’ll wish he’d married me.”
My hands fell away from him and brushed the snow. I wondered what such a beautiful boy was doing resting against me: he seemed far too heavy. There was a cold, wet weight to his hair that made me shiver harder. His body next to mine felt sweet and dangerous. 

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