The Glasshouse: 12/??

[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 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11
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. 


CHAPTER TWELVE:

I probably don’t need to tell you that we didn’t see the doctor the next day.
When I woke up, Toshiya was already there. At first I thought he simply hadn’t left, and I smiled at him until the bleariness cleared from my vision and I noticed the pallor of his face; the redness around his eyes. His nails, always short, were little more than chewed off stubs, and the skin around them looked raw and painful.
“God,” I mumbled sleepily, “What happened to you?”
He smiled so brightly I cringed.
“Nothing,” he said, and his voice sounded as if he had a cold, “Nothing. Allergies. Come on, if you’re up then get up. We need to make you an appointment. I was looking through the phone book, and—”
“Toshiya, it’s January.”
He stopped and pressed his lips together briefly.
“Well, so?”
“It’s not allergy season,” I reminded him gently, “And you don’t get allergies. You’re the healthiest person in this damn band.”
“Oh, well.”
“Kaoru always getting food poisoning wherever we go, and Shinya and Die with their stupid diets, and—”
He looked up, interested, but I folded my hands in my lap primly. “What’s wrong?” I asked. I reached to touch him, but something in the way he pressed his sore fingertips to his lips stopped me.
I pulled myself straighter upright and blinked. There were bags and boxes everywhere.
“Toshiya…?”
He sniffed and pressed the backs of his hands to his eyes briefly.
“Well,” he said, “Surely you didn’t think I’d let you stay alone, during this time? I wouldn’t have gone back last night, except…except…”
His voice scared me, skipping like a cracked record, and gradually it faded away. I pulled his hand from his lips and pressed it between both of mine.
“He’s kicked me out,” Toshiya said palely. “He’s gotten rid of me.”
He swallowed. “Say I can stay here,” he said, and I pulled him roughly into my arms. I could feel his breath against my neck; hot, like he was about to cry. He was shivering.
I remembered, all of a sudden, sitting in a science class and watching an amoeba take in some kind of dark dot of food under a microscope. I sat there on a high stool, breathing in the science classroom smells of hot plastic and earth and disinfectant, and I watched the little jellylike thing as it stretched to accommodate its meal and then moved on, slower now, as if laden down.
Through all the years, all the terrible things I had done had been like that amoeba eating; dark, unidentified things that I’d had to stretch to accommodate.
I thought that this was maybe the last dark dot that I just couldn’t absorb. I closed my eyes tight and held him as he cried.

My family always used food to comfort ourselves. When I was young and sick, my mother would bring me hot broths and bracing cups of tea: thin, watery, fragrant things. She was good at those. My sister made soups and stews in winter, when the dark days made us all feel sad and sleepy, and served it up with such lively chatter about the chill outside and the relative cosiness of our little house that there was always a kind of reassembly of thoughts, like a click into place, and my mother and I would jolt into her optimistic way of seeing.
So I made Toshiya hot drinks and rich broths and stood by his side as he ate and drank. He didn’t have much of an appetite, he said, but I think he took the food just to please me. The hot things put the colour back into his cheeks and lips, and whenever he finished I whisked the bowls and cups away and tucked him back into bed. I changed the sheets often, because I always was a great believer in the restorative powers of fresh bed linen. At night I lay next to him but did not touch; did not allow myself to touch.
The alarm bell screamed in my head, but I drowned it out with the rival noises of hissing kettles and clattering pans. I laid his possessions out in drawers because I wanted him to stay. He traipsed after me to and from work, and when we got home he fell asleep almost straight away.
That period lasted just over a week, and I lost count of the hours I had spent herding him into the kitchen or shower, or brushing his hair. I could always brush his hair, even though it made me self-conscious, as if I was trying to play a parent.

Of course, it didn’t last. One day I walked into our bedroom in the early evening and he was sitting upright in bed, the phonebook in his lap and his cell phone in his hand, flicking industriously through the pages.
“I’m looking for a consultant,” he told me matter-of-factly, “Not a therapist. What good’s a therapist?”
I sat down next to him.
“Did you tell Die?” I asked haltingly, “About me?”
“Of course not.” He set the phone in his lap and then picked it up again, shaking his head, “I wouldn’t do that.”
“Well, maybe you should.” I bit my lip. “He might forgive you; he could understand—”
“No,” Toshiya said firmly, “No, I don’t think so. Anyway, I’m looking for a doctor with some experience; that’s the problem. I don’t want somebody just out of school. They’ll—”
“Toshiya, why can’t you tell him?”
“If we get some young doctor he might – they might – well, they might not be able to handle you; they’ll want to send you away.”
“He’d understand.”
“I put the number of a suicide hotline into your phone,” he told me, and the raw sound of that word made us both blanch for a moment.
“I…I put the number in your phone,” he repeated slowly, “In case you need it. It’s – it operates twenty-four hours a day. Seven days a week. Even on national holidays and Christmas.”
My lips had gone numb. I saw his throat ripple as he swallowed.  
“Do you still think about it?” he asked quietly. He wasn’t looking at me.
“Not every day.” I hesitated. “It’s more like it’s just underneath. When you’re asleep and I think about how upset you are, then I think, what’s the point of it?”
“What’s the point of what?”
“Of me,” I answered simply. “Nobody really needs me. I don’t have anybody so in love with me that my dying would destroy them.” I paused. “It’s a coward’s way out, isn’t it? But I’m a coward. I always have been, really. I lost everything I loved because I was so scared.”
Slowly, he closed the phone book.
“I don’t understand.”
I smiled and took his hand carefully.

“I could have loved you,” I said clearly, “If I’d been brave enough. God, Toshiya, I remember every minute and second of the day I first met you. I was sitting there and feeling you draw me and I was trying to be so removed and aloof because inside, I was just begging you to fall in love with me. Your face was so sweet and open. You were so beautiful and absorbed in what you were doing that I thought, wouldn’t it be so wonderful?”
He was sitting very still.
“But?” he prompted softly.
“But you were too sweet. Too beautiful. I thought there was no way that I would ever have had a chance, so I didn’t even try. I didn’t even ask for your phone number. You wrote your name and the name of your band on your drawing when you gave it to me, but I shut it away just so I wouldn’t have to look at it and remember. I didn’t follow your band. I didn’t do anything, because I was so scared that I’d look like an idiot, and I was so embarrassed that I was such a fool for you straight away.”
I sat back and, in time, let his hand slip from my own. He stared at me with eyes that didn’t seem to be as dark as mine.
“Why didn’t you say anything?” he said at last, hoarsely, and a tear fell down his cheek. “Why didn’t you at least tell me you remembered?”
I bowed my head.
“It was too much,” I told him lowly. “I couldn’t tell you anything, because…I’d have told you everything. A lot of things that you wouldn’t have wanted to know. How I’d have treated you like…God, or something. I’d have bought a house with a yard just in case we had a baby.”
He gave a laugh like a sob.
“But instead—”
“I pretended.” I shifted awkwardly. “I pretended you were like Jesus and you were just dying to save me.” I smiled. “Made myself crazy, instead of just crazy for you.”
There was a peculiar feeling inside me, like I was lighter than air. I felt sick and fearful, like I might break loose from my moorings and fly away at any moment, but also like some great burden had been lifted. I sighed softly, trying to feel content. I watched him as he stared at his hands.
I noticed, at a remove, that the ringing in my ears had turned to a kind of rushing sound, like somebody was trying hard to tune the radio in my head. I smiled.
“You were too scared to say any of this?” Toshiya asked at last. “I’d have listened, Kyo.”
“Well.” I shrugged, bit my lip, looked down, “I didn’t know that.”
He shook his head sadly. His hand, when he touched me, very nearly burned.
“Oh, Kyo,” he said softly, “All you had to do was ask.”

We spent the rest of that day unpacking the rest of his clothes; it seemed to have been agreed that he would be staying for a little while. We moved around each other more or less in silence: there wasn’t a great deal to say.
I felt surprisingly peaceful. He dialled the phone and handed it to me and I made an appointment to see a doctor, just as docile as one of those sacred, well-fed, liquid-eyed cows that they decorate with garlands and lead through the streets in countries hotter than this one. Toshiya had some kind of old wooden chest where he kept his memories and keepsakes, and when I shyly requested to look inside he seemed pleased. He showed me old photographs and medals and certificates. I had a kind of itching desire to see him at his worst, running around with motorcycle gangs and keeping his grandmother up at night with the worry, but all the photos I seemed to be passing showed him as a baby. They were mostly black and white, with a few jarring colour shots. I passed those quickly: the reds were too blue, and although the baby was sweet and charming, I couldn’t relate it to Toshiya in any way. I flicked to the back of the photo album he’d handed me, impatient.
“Are you looking for something?” he asked, surprised.
“Don’t you have any teenage pictures?”
“Hm.” He took the album from my hands and turned a few pages reflectively, “Well, here. I was fifteen here.”
I took the album from him and examined the picture. It was colour, of course, but better colour. It showed a thin teenage boy, already tall, standing awkwardly in front of a scratchy, boring kind of landscape. He had an unsmiling, watchful kind of face. It must have been summer, because the grass at his feet looked brown and prickly. There was another boy next to him, but I knew that wasn’t Toshiya even though they resembled each other so closely. The other boy looked older than fifteen, and he was smiling happily.
Then again, I wasn’t so sure either of them were Toshiya. I squinted, frowning at the photo.
“Are you sure this is you?” I checked. He frowned.
“Of course I’m sure.”
“This can’t be you.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Well, it’s so sad.” I handed it back to him, “That can’t be you. You look like some kind of…victim!”
He studied it for a few moments and then shrugged.
“Oh, well then, maybe it’s not me.”
But I noticed that he tucked the photo very carefully back into its place, and he shut the album so gently that it didn’t make a single sound. As if that had been some kind of signal, we both reverently replaced all the items in the chest. I handed him a picture of his parents and he spent a good few minutes wiping all our fingerprints from it with the hem of his shirt.
Then, he shut the chest and the two of us went to bed. For the first time in what felt like a long time, we slept curled up together. 


>> to Chapter Thirteen >>

Comments

[tcharlatan.livejournal.com]

Ugh! It's all just so damn -sad-! Like neither of them can ever win... I need broth and fresh sheets now.

[andrew-in-drag.livejournal.com]

Hahaha!
Gosh, I know. I'm actually surprised that I did something so angsty.

[kaiser1103.livejournal.com]

their moments unpacking and looking through old photos felt very calming and sweet

[n3uromanc3r.livejournal.com]

I liked how it seemed that taking care of Toshiya, feeling useful, having such a important responsibility made him forget about his own problems for a while.