The Glasshouse: 6/??

[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 | 4 | 5
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: I could see ghost versions of myself reflected all around me in the walls of the glasshouse. In time I sat back from my desk and stared at them.
They reflected me from a baby to the age I was now, and every single one was defective in some way.


CHAPTER SIX:

The first shock was that my night with Toshiya wasn’t the miracle cure I thought it would be.
It made me wonder how I ever could have thought up such a stupid idea.
The two of us woke up dazed and sticky in the morning light that streamed through the window, and though he smiled at me there was something hectic and barely-contained in his eyes. He looked like the people you see on the news, standing on the edges of tall buildings with a crowd of ant people scattered below. Even if they walk back to safety, there’s still something insect-skittish in the way they look at the cameras.
“Last night,” he said, smiling strangely, “That was sort of unexpected.”
“Could you shut the blinds?”
He got up to do so and I lay on my back numbly, feeling ill.
“I suppose…I mean…” he raked his fingers through his long hair agitatedly, “I suppose we can’t tell anyone.”
“Tell who you like,” I said, trying to move my lips as little as possible, “Nobody will believe you.”
My words settled between us like one of those patches of cold water you suddenly encounter in the shallows of warm oceans.
“But you won’t tell anyone?” he pressed.
I shrugged.
“Kyo.” He sounded on the verge of tears, “Don’t tell Die.”
“That I ate you out?” I said crudely. “He’d probably hit me.”
Awkwardly, he perched on the edge of the bed next to me.
“He wouldn’t hit you. I wouldn’t be worried about that.”
“But?”
“He’d hate me.”
I shrugged listlessly. Toshiya was staring fixedly up at the ceiling, and I felt a sudden bolt of worry that he could see the glasshouse hanging above me and was going figure out that inside of me, everything was sparking off wrong like so many faulty wires.
I felt sick and sure of it, but then I realised that he was just trying not to let the tears in his eyes spill down over his cheeks. I thought how awful it was that I should be so relieved.

Toshiya and I didn’t talk about it anymore after that. He went to take a shower and probably shed a few tears there, because sometimes there’s nothing like a good cry to make you feel better, and when he came out he did seem better. He was looking a little pinched, but he had a brave smile on his face, like a lady who has just given birth to a baby and is trying her best to love it, despite all the pain it’s caused her.
It made me feel rotten. The brighter he acted, the lower I felt. I sat in front of my desk all day and I didn’t write a single word. It got hotter and hotter and even though I opened every single window, my apartment grew more stifling by degrees.
I could see ghost versions of myself reflected all around me in the walls of the glasshouse. In time I sat back from my desk and stared at them.
They reflected me from a baby to the age I was now, and every single one was defective in some way.
I picked up a piece of paper and a pen and wrote, in letters as big and simply formed as I could make them, there is something wrong with me.
The window hung wide like a mouth, and I tore the paper up and fed it to the wind.

Toshiya lived in my apartment for five days and we had sex thirteen times. There was something insatiable and self-punishing inside him, the same way there was inside of me.
I don’t know why he kept coming back. I thought he had been kind and brave to not call me out on my behaviour after I crawled into his bed, because it was obvious that the whole situation had been my fault. He hadn’t even really done anything. He had let me pleasure him and the thoughts of Die in his head had swum in him just as clear and pristine as his own dark eyes.
But on the next night, he followed me into my room like it was only natural, and when I sat down uncertainly on the edge of the bed he started to take his clothes off.
“You don’t have to,” I said. I watched him grasp his cock with one hand and sat suddenly bolt upright: the ringing in my ears had stopped.
I shook my head experimentally. Silence filled me up like air.
“There must have been a reason why you wanted this,” he told me seriously, and I gazed up at him in wonder.
“You made the ringing in my ears stop.”
“Your ears ring?”
He sauntered forwards and straddled me, knees set carefully on either side of my lap.
He didn’t know what he had done. The glasshouse hovered but the quiet in my head was like cool, clean water. I grazed a hand up the side of his thigh and felt like I was touching some holy relic.
“This is amazing.”
He laughed, his fingers tugging gently on the hair that fell over the back of my neck.
“It’s not me,” he said fondly, “It’s a coincidence, of course.”
But he kissed me in a soft way that showed, I thought, how he was a little flattered that I had placed such significance on his presence. My mind turned like a well-oiled machine in its sudden emptiness. I felt I had been cleaned out, and though I was aware that it probably wouldn’t last, I was still unaccountably grateful.
I thought of my day sitting at my desk and stewing behind the glass, and splintery barbed wire wrapped itself around my throat. I watched him carefully as he started to stroke himself off, and waited for the speechlessness to pass. With each movement of his hand it ebbed further away, like the ocean’s tide.
One day I was unable to speak; another day I was unable to write. It terrified me to think what would be next.
The only logical solution seemed to be to keep him near.   

It has always irritated me when people compare others to angels. It’s such a bland, overused sentiment that I can hardly take it. It’s even more clichéd than ‘I love you’, because at least ‘I love you’ is plain and simple. Calling somebody an angel is meant to have more floweriness, I suppose; some kind of prissy, one-dimensional purity that fills me with irritation.
If I was to picture an angel, I’d have it long-legged and long-haired. Their bodies would be toned and they’d have sweet eyes to offset my sour ones.
Toshiya was an angel to me only because he was part of a superior race that I couldn’t understand. Next to him I felt squat and deformed but also somehow blameless, as if being part of a lower order justified acting on instinct in the way I was.
On the Saturday afternoon it was too hot to have sex, but when I took his hand he followed me anyway. In his uniquely idealistic way he had seemed to accept that I was somewhat in love with him, and I didn’t have the strength to shrug off his pity and reveal my true motives. My dependency on him had nothing to do with human emotion at all. The thought was almost foolish.
“What are you thinking about?” he asked me. I opened my mouth to answer, but nothing came out. Gently, he bit my earlobe. The air had the thick cooked smell of undisturbed heat, and I felt a drop of sweat tickle its way down the back of my neck like an insect.
“It’s so hot,” I said. His bangs had plastered themselves damply to his skin, and he blew upwards into them. “I wish it was winter.”
He grinned.
“But when it’s winter, you always wish it was summer.”
I nodded.
“Well, you won’t enjoy life that way.”
“I just don’t like being too hot or too cold. In the summer I can’t get anything done. And the air in winter hurts my voice.”
“But allergies bother you in the spring and autumn.”
“So I don’t like those either.”
He laughed. “So you don’t like anything. Don’t you think that’s a bit neurotic?”
I shrugged, bored, and pulled my shirt off. His fingers glided to the muscles in my abdomen like they were of some talismanic importance.
“I could sit down with you for a year and never understand a thing,” he said, smiling even though he sounded serious. He kissed my chest. “You can get at least one thing done in summer.” 
I watched with interest as he sank to his knees in front of me and busied himself getting rid of the rest of my clothes. He found me hard and made a gratified little sound before gently flicking his tongue over the head of my cock.
The wetness was cool and wonderful, and I pushed forwards gently against his pretty lips. He smiled at my impatience and wrapped a hand around me.

I’ve always loved the sounds of sex, and Toshiya indulged me beautifully. I’m not talking about that horrible groaning and screeching you get in pornos; I mean all the real sounds. I could listen for hours whilst somebody’s breathing gets faster and more laboured by degrees. I like creaking bedsprings; gasping sounds, sucking sounds, moaning sounds. There’s a whole variety of slick, slapping noises that come with fucking. I would put them into a song if I could.
As Toshiya sucked me, he was making these enthusiastic little swallowing noises that seemed to belong to him alone, and there was a deep moan waiting in the back of his throat that made me want to come straight away.
He cut off, panting, before I could get there, and sat back and smiled at me. His lips were red and a little swollen, and I watched as he pulled off his own clothes and settled back on the floor with his hand between his thighs. There was something hypnotic about the way he wet his fingers and slid them inside himself: I had never known anybody so unashamed.
He didn’t say anything, so I watched his fingers go in and out of his own body. There was something gluttonous about the way he moved, like he wanted all of everything he could feel at once, and when I knelt down between his legs I was almost too caught up in the way he was fucking himself to do anything at all. His fingers made slick noises.
“Where do you want me?” he breathed, his free hand teasing the head of his cock, “On the bed? Sofa? Desk?”
“Here is fine.” I pulled him towards me and reluctantly he stopped working himself up. The hand that had been fisted around his cock grasped my hair as he kissed me; a long, slow, deep kiss to distract me from the way he inched downwards over me. Greedily, the slippery heat of his body swallowed me up. He let out an impatient groan and bucked fiercely against me.
The most important thing was to look at his eyes. They were glittering and hectic and they inspired new life within me, so that I grasped at his hips with both hands and urged him onwards.
“Fuck,” he gasped, riding me, “Oh fuck…”
He placed his hands on my chest to give himself more leverage. Looking up at him, I imagined some god was touching me. For a moment, I felt perfect.
He collapsed against me.
Whispered, “I’m going to Die’s tomorrow.”

My grip on his hips fell away and instead I placed my hands on his back, wishing he hadn’t fallen against me. I wanted to see his face, but he stubbornly hid it in my shoulder. Even on his back, my hands felt like two alien objects that I was trying my best to command.
He misinterpreted my touch and rocked against me, his dick pushing hard against my belly, and I waited whilst his actions got more and more frantic and heated, and finally he came with a strangled cry. His cum spattered wetly over my neck and the side of my face where I had let my head fall to the side. He was panting heavily.
I touched my cheek and my fingers came away wet. Now that he was leaving, the feeling of his sweat and cum desecrated me.
What had I expected? He bustled around cleaning himself up, but when he put his damp cloth near my face I swatted his hand away.
“Kyo?”
My vision retracted into two little unfocussed pinpoints, and the only thing that stuck out at me from the haze was the copper head of a thin black snake. Frowning, I reached for it, but the snake bit.
I tried to cry out for help but all that came out of my throat was a choked gargle of sounds. My ears weren’t ringing but clicking like a charged fence. I felt my hands slam and flatten against the floor like they had been glued there, and my whole body jolted like I was caught up in a frenzied jitterbug.
A blue screech filled my head.
Then it was over.
I was still and Toshiya was sobbing and the first thing he did was slap me hard around the face.
“What did you do that for?! You fucking idiot! You…idiot, you could have killed yourself! Why the hell did you do that?!”
But I felt the most miraculous calm, like I could just go to sleep. My gaze picked out the copper colour as a bald spot in the electrical cord that stretched from the plug socket in the wall to my fan. The fan had been nodding and spinning lazily, but now its blades were coming to a disjointed halt. All the sounds in my head were quiet again, and the glasshouse was nowhere to be seen. If it had been inside my own head, I wondered if my electric shock had burned it to the ground.
“You need to go to a hospital,” Toshiya was saying, piling clothes onto my chest and yanking the plug out of the wall all at once, “We need to get you to a hospital. Why the hell did you do that?”
“I’m sorry,” I said numbly, lips prickling, “I didn’t see it.” I blinked heavily. “I don’t need to go to hospital. I’m fine.”
“Kyo—”
“It’s a very low voltage.”
“Oh my god.” Toshiya was a sharpening shadow, striding naked around the room, “You’re not in your right mind at all.”

By a small effort of will, I managed to sit up and walk around as normal and laugh and joke with him until the colour came back into his cheeks, and he was sure I was alright. I convinced him that I had been grabbing at the wire to yank it out of the socket and stop the fan, and he believed me because, after all, what kind of person would electrocute themself on purpose?
Inside, the usual racing of my mind had slowed right down to a pleasant, leisurely pace. I caught a doped smile on the Kyo in the mirror and knew that it was on my face, too. For once, it was a perfect reflection. The doppelganger had gone. 


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