The Glasshouse: 4/??

[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 | 2 | 3
Notes: 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: Despite the pain, I felt wonderful. The fire that had shot through my head had burned all the sour thoughts and speechlessness to ash. 
I felt purged and clean and ready for a new life. 

CHAPTER FOUR:

I dreamt of bells, but woke up to sterile smells and muffled silence. My vision swam frustratingly. I gathered that I was lying on my back, and that I couldn’t sit up because some drug was holding me down by the chest.
In a gradual kind of way, I realised that I was in a hospital, and that the strange quiet was cut through with a constant metallic ring. Everything was painless except some untouchable point inside my head, somewhere beyond my ears. My lips were dry and crackly as old paper and I licked them lifelessly.
Despite the pain, I felt wonderful. The fire that had shot through my head had burned all the sour thoughts and speechlessness to ash.
I felt purged and clean and ready for a new life.

From several miles away, a distorted voice said, “You’re awake!”
I was awake, but I couldn’t stir, so I waited until a head floated into view. Kaoru’s purple hair appeared above me like a balloon on a distant string. He was smiling and talking rapidly even though he must have known that I couldn’t really hear him. I had already ascertained from the white edges to my vision and the peculiar numbness around my face that there were bandages wrapped over my ears.
The thought that I probably looked like a nun made me want to laugh.
Shinya’s head appeared next to Kaoru’s; another balloon tethered somewhere out of sight. I felt him touch my hands at a remove and tried disjointedly to smile.
“How do you feel?”
He didn’t often speak loudly, so the thought that he was making a special effort touched me.
“I feel brilliant.”
Above me, the balloons frowned and held a quick conference between them. I didn’t care. I drifted like an angel.
“Do you remember what happened?”
I closed my eyes and smiled beatifically.
“Holy fire.”
I didn’t have to see them, that time, to know that their concerned frowns were deepening.
I still didn’t care. I was a blank page; a clean slate; an unhatched egg. In my bandaged world, nobody touched me and nobody invaded my head. Now that they mentioned it, I did recall what had happened – perfectly, actually. It seemed odd that it hadn’t occurred to me before to try and remember.
“The flashbox?”
Above me, the Kaoru balloon and the Shinya balloon nodded gravely. I closed my eyes and imagined that they had both popped.

So: the flashbox. That was why I had felt such a sudden heat. I thought of how wonderful it would have looked when I was framed by that brilliant white light and then shrouded in smoke as I fell. If I had been watching the same show, I might have suspected a conspiracy. In my own head, my actions seemed rehearsed.
I remembered, too, how Die and Kaoru had heaved me up between them, and then a few black-clothed stagehands had taken me to a dark room. There was no sound, but I was very aware of wetness trickling down the side of my head; sweat, and a surprising amount of blood. The thought that it was coming from my ear made me squeamish, but they packed the side of my head with mounds of blossomy tissues so that I felt plugged up.
It occurred to me that I had probably blacked out before I was taken to hospital, because I didn’t remember that at all.
My mind kept drifting back to the talk I’d had with Toshiya. Now that I had time to think and focus myself, I could see that getting him into bed could actually be quite easy, if I played it right. I also thought of a talk I’d had with Die, just the night before. We’d been sharing a hotel room, and I’d been considering the dark shape lying in the bed opposite mine when he suddenly stood up and roamed over to the window.
Thinking about what he had said to me and how he had smiled and been unable to sleep, I felt guilty but not overwhelmingly so. The troubles between them made me sleepy, though, so I kept my eyes shut and tried to focus on nothing. The pure and clean feeling I had woken up with had already worn off, and I mourned it. I was my ugly, dirty self again, and I could feel greasy stage makeup on my face and the crunching sensation of singed hair against a flat hospital pillow.
I felt concerned about the ringing in my ears now. As a child I’d suffered tinnitus and, though I’d seemed to have grown out of it, the threat of it was enough to keep me awake some nights. I thought it was the worst thing in the world to hear that constant buzzing ring. It was like an alarm bell that only I could hear, calling me to evacuate my own traitorous body.

In the days that followed my injury, I slid further and further away from that wondrous feeling I’d had when I first woke up. In my head, I stopped referring to what had happened as an accident: after all, I had stood by as the pyrotechnics were installed; I had attended our management’s sad little seminar on the safety of you and others around you and had the timings and safe zones drilled into my mind like nails.
And yet I’d drifted into the line of fire like I was washed there by my own personal current.
I realised that I had done it on purpose to pay myself back for being so foul-natured.
Then I felt utterly hopeless, because I was forced to acknowledge that my punishment hadn’t changed my mind. I would recover and then go straight on with my plans like nothing had happened; like the horrible screech in my ears was the result of any regular accident that could happen to anybody at all. I didn’t know, at that point, that I would be carrying around the burden of my unkindness for years afterwards. I fully believed that the ringing in my head would stop when the doctors said it would.
But I lay in that hospital bed feeling sick and dirty and wishing that I had something to distract myself from my own inherent badness. I briefly considered snatching a scalpel off of some surgeon’s gleaming tray and slicing my face with it so badly that nobody would ever look at me ever again, but that would have been so impossible to explain that everybody would have probably just assume that I’d gone mad.
And besides, Toshiya would be just the type to think that perhaps I was beautiful on the inside, and find it within his own self to focus on the parts of me that were still normal. Everything from the neck down would still be fine. It might actually work in his favour to ignore all the sour, stewing thoughts in the ugly, cut-up head, and disregard the stupid, broken ears.
Anyway, no surgeon ever passed by me with a tray like that, so it wasn’t even a real option. I would have to find some other way to sabotage myself, if I was going to do it.
It did cross my mind that I could just not try and seduce Toshiya, but that thought seemed false and inconsequential, like when you read a line in a children’s book that paints a version of life that, as an adult, you see is so simplistic and primary-coloured that it functions exactly the same as a plain old lie.
It also occurred to me that he could always refuse my advances and reject me. That was comforting: perhaps I would be the temptation that proved to him that he and Die were meant to be, and in the end I would have just a big a part in the fairy tale as the dragon the prince has to slay to win his love’s hand.
But I think privately, I knew that it wasn’t going to be like that.

“So, how do you feel?”
Toshiya took one look at my face and burst out laughing as he heaved the shopping bags he carried onto my bedside table.
“God, you look bored. I brought some books.”
“Thank you. I am bored.”
“Well, you’ll be out soon. Now that your hearing is mostly back, we won’t even have to postpone any more tour dates.”
Contrarily, I felt a pinch of alarm. I had thought they would keep me in until the ringing stopped, but they seemed to have no solution for it.
“Good,” I said, and the dullness in my voice made him look at me properly. He perched on the side of my bed and ran a gentle hand through my hair. I closed my eyes. Whenever I was sick as a child, I would climb into my parents’ bed, and my mother would stroke my hair just as Toshiya was doing now. I wanted to cling onto that warm memory: I wanted to fall into it.
“Your hair feels disgusting.”
“They haven’t let me wash it yet. I’m not supposed to get my ears wet.”
“It’s sticky and greasy.”
“Alright, alright.”
He smiled down at me.
“You’re being very brave, you know. If I woke up deaf, I’d go crazy.” He smoothed my hair again, despite the feel of it. “I think it’s only fair to warn you that management is planning a welcome back party for you.”
My face must have contorted in some way, because he laughed.
“I thought you’d feel that way. I told them you probably wouldn’t want it, but you know how they are.” He paused. “Some PR guy got paid a lot to draft a press release about you, too. Kaoru signed it.”
“What’d it say?”
“That we had to cancel two shows but you’re fine; you’ll be fine.”
I nodded sleepily.
“Anyway, they were fan club shows so we don’t need to worry. We can make them up later, and none of them are going to kick off. I heard that they’re folding paper cranes for you.”
He hesitated. “You know, I had to talk Die out of coming with me today. He was insisting.”
“Die?” I raised my eyebrows, surprised. “He’s been in every day since I got here.”
“I know. He was frantic when you got taken in.”
“I don’t know why.”
“Oh, you know how he is.” Toshiya sat back, reflectively. “He said that in the days before you got hurt, he was so negative. He could only talk about his own problems, he said. So he felt bad. I suppose he wanted to show you that he cares.”
There was a leading, questioning tone in his voice that made me want to sigh.
“I suppose you want to know what problems he was talking about.”
Toshiya shifted but stayed quiet, and I let out the sigh I was holding in.
“Alright,” he said quickly, “I don’t want to press you.”
“He wouldn’t talk about you with me,” I said flatly, “So it’s nothing like that, if that’s what you were thinking.”
He visibly deflated, and I instantly felt bad.
“It’s obvious that’s what he’s thinking about, though,” I added. “He was watching you smoke from the window, the other night.”
I watched as Toshiya snatched at that little titbit of hope and stored it safely away. In that instant, he was almost pathetic.
But then, I considered, the whole situation between him and Die was pathetic, if you really thought about it.

“It’s so stupid,” I said firmly.
“What?”
“Die’s attitude.”
“I suppose he can’t admit that he’s gay. Or bisexual, or whatever he is.”
Toshiyasexual, I thought.
“Not even for you?” I said disgustedly. “It’s foolish.”
“Well, maybe I’m not such a great incentive.”
“Are you kidding?” I asked him dourly, because that kind of attitude annoyed me. He knew full well that he was perfect, and it made me a little cross that he should want somebody like me to assert that to him. “Fifteen minutes with you? I wouldn’t say no.”
He laughed as if I was joking.
“Well, I’d want more than fifteen minutes,” he teased, pretending to scold me. We lapsed back into a companionable silence and he resumed his stroking of my hair. I closed my eyes again, but gave his wrist an effortful pat to let him know that I hadn’t gone to sleep.
“Tired?” he asked me softly.
“Just a little.”
“I don’t know why. You sleep all the time.”
“There’s nothing much else to do.”
“I guess not. Want me to read to you?”
“No. I like talking to you, but every word you say is like a rock dropping on my head.”
“Are you hungry or thirsty?”
“Not really.”
“Well, isn’t there anything you’d like?”
“Yes.” I opened my eyes. “I’d like to see a mirror.”
“Oh.” He bit down on his lower lip for a second. “Maybe you shouldn’t do that.”
“Don’t be stupid.”
“Well,” he said uneasily, “You just don’t look so good right now.”
“I guessed that much. I want to see.”
Toshiya sighed, but bent down and scuffled around amongst his possessions until he came up with a little compact mirror. Reluctantly, he flipped it open and held it over my own face for me.
The stranger that greeted me was somebody I wasn’t prepared for. The Kyo in that mirror looked corpselike and holy. His lips were so chapped that they were white, and there were circles under his eyes like he had been punched.
The bandages around my head formed a crisp white halo. I closed my eyes happily. There was a kind of large invisible structure balanced over me that, I dreamed, was there to protect me. In my days of lying flat on my back, I used my mind to lift the separate panes of it and cement them together flawlessly. I was preserved, like an insect behind glass.
That was what it was: smooth, impenetrable glass. I lay there and I built my glasshouse.
“Kyo?” Toshiya sounded worried.
“It’s alright. I’m going to sleep now.”
He was silent, but placed a light kiss on my forehead, like a parent would to a child. I didn’t really feel it. I heard him leave the room, and then hugged my own arms around myself rapturously. I felt like I was caught up in an ugly, deathly cocoon, and soon I would be reborn and resurrected.
Back from the dead. I repeated it over and over in my head. I would be, I imagined, unstoppable. 

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