The Glasshouse: 14/??

[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 | 12 | 13
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 was aware that everything I was doing was unnatural. I knew that. But I felt my own sanity was something buoyant and high up, anchored by strings like so many balloons, and every time I saw how sad my own actions had made Die another string was cut, and another balloon floated dreamily away into the searing blue sky.


CHAPTER FOURTEEN:

“Hey Kyo, what are these?”
I turned to face Kaoru as he rattled my pill bottle questioningly, keeping my face extremely blank.
“Abi – abiri—” he squinted, trying to read, and I snatched the bottle from his hand. Its translucent brown plastic reminded me of the psychotherapist’s eyes: hard and glossy, fake. The curves of it fit neatly into my palm, and I thumbed rough ridges of the childproof cap slowly.
“It’s medicine,” I said flatly.
“I can see that. But if it’s for something important, you’ve got a duty to tell management.”
“It’s private,” I told him, turning around and walking away, and the sound of his footsteps as he bounded after me was the most irritating thing I’d ever heard.
“Even more so, then!” he told me breathlessly, “If it’s private then you’ve got to tell them so they can keep the secret for you. You don’t want it getting out.”
“I can keep the secret for myself,” I said irritably, crossing into a sparsely carpeted room where Toshiya and Die were knelt on the floor together, painstakingly wiring effects pedals to and from an analogue synth. “I can start right now.”
Kaoru caught the steely tone in my voice and took a startled step backwards, as though I might hit him. I felt myself sneer and turn away.
“What’s all this?” Die rose to his feet, looking confused. “Kyo—? Kaoru—? What secret?”
I stood quietly. Kaoru’s face was flushing.
“What are you wiring up for?” He asked. “We don’t need this for any of the new material; we’re using the digital, we—”
“Rehearsal,” Toshiya said kindly, “For the hide memorial summit. That’s not far off, now; it’s only six weeks or so.”
“Oh yes,” Kaoru murmured. “Yes, we’ll have to – we’ll have to give in a set list, yes.”
I watched as Toshiya took him gently by the arm and started pulling him away.
“Come on,” he said, “I’ll talk you through it.”
He led him from the room like he was an old man, and I could hear the wiry, nervy sound of Kaoru’s chatter leaking from the hallway. I felt bad, but I had no idea what I could do about it. Angling myself away from Die, I popped the cap off my little brown bottle and placed one of the little pills under my tongue. They weren’t what I had expected. I had envisioned those oblong plastic things, halved up in contrasting colours. The drugs I got were plain white and circular, and there was a powdery feeling to them that made me want to gag.
I had searched them online and found picture after picture of those same white discs as well as different coloured tablets; blues, pinks, reds; of chemical structures in their neat arrangements of atoms, molecules, bonds, 3D renderings and science class diagrams; I had seen the words atypical antipsychotic and I had shut the lid of my laptop absolutely soundlessly, and I had sat on the floor tugging on my lower lip until it was time to go to work.

“What are they, then?” Die asked, settling back down on the floor and shooting me an endearing smile, “Nothing embarrassing, I hope.”
“What are you imagining?” I muttered, kneeling down where Toshiya had been to help him. The floor was still warm. I grabbed a handful of wires and considered jamming them into my own brain.
“Not Viagra or anything.”
“What do you think?” I yanked out a wire that had been misplaced and corrected a dial that was showing halfway between the little marks for eight and nine. “You want to be careful,” I muttered, “Don’t turn it on without having all the dials aligned; it gets confused.”
“Fucking archaic thing,” Die said cheerfully, “Do you remember when Toshiya found a dead mouse inside it? That was years ago. I’m surprised he was happy to sit down and connect it up with me; he’s never trusted it since.”
“You’ve broken it off with Toshiya.”
Die looked at me, surprised. I was surprised myself.
“Yes,” he said, finally. “Yeah.”
My hands were streaked with dust; I wiped them hard on my jeans.
“Why?"
Die shifted uncomfortably.
“Secret for a secret,” he bartered uneasily, “What’s in the bottle?”
I rolled it towards him.
“Hard to say.”
“You don’t know?”
“No, I mean it’s hard to say. Abilify.”
He looked at me dubiously, checking to see if I was joking, but my face was flat as glass. I watched him as he studied the label. It contained few clues; a name, an address, a dosage, all on a green and white adhesive label. He handed it back to me uncertainly.
“What’s it for?”
I touched the side of the synth with the flat of my hand, and then rested that same hand on my right temple slowly.
“Aligns the dials in my head,” I told him solemnly, and paused. “Alright, your turn.”
He stared at me.
“Your head?”
“Your turn, Die.”
“What’s wrong with your head?”
It was a difficult question. There was something uncommon and unrejoicing in his gaze that turned the inside of my mouth sour as an old dishcloth, and the sharpness of it made my eyes want to water.
“Kyo?”

“I don’t know,” I said thickly, trying to yank myself back under control. “It’s just…I’m plugged up wrong.” I tugged on the mess of wires in front of me disconsolately, “Just something like that. Something stupid like that. Maybe I’m mad, but what’s mad? They can look for it.” I was aware of my voice growing tighter and tenser, spiteful, “They can stand you up and look you over, look at your clothes, tattoos, smell you. They – they smelled me.” My voice broke. “I could be mad right now. We both could. Look at us, all dusty, messy, sitting on the floor. That’s mad to them. That’s what they look for.”
I buried my face in my shaking hands. I had not talked about my evaluation to anybody, not even Toshiya. He had parked the car outside the building and walked me inside, but he had stayed in the waiting room whilst those two doctors circled around me like buzzards, looking at me all over and taking notes. They asked offensive questions. They made me feel so low that all the sadness and emptiness inside me seemed to blow up like a balloon, and I had sat fat and silent in the car for the whole way home.
Die touched my shoulder but seemed uncertain of what to do. I could feel his desire to help, bulky as a pillow between us.
“Don’t cry,” he said lamely, gathering me into awkward, inept arms, “It’s alright. Don’t cry.”
“I’m not crying!”
Die gave me a pat on the shoulder.
“It’s alright,” he said again, dumbly. “Kyo. It’s alright.”
I nodded and wiped my face roughly.
“Tell me about Toshiya,” I said, and he shrugged.
“Not much to tell,” he said. “I think I just…I got tired. I got old. When we were younger, it was all fun and games. Running around together and keeping it hidden from people. But…”
I waited.
“But,” he said finally, “I realised in the end that we weren’t keeping it a secret; he was. It was his secret from everybody, including me.”
I wanted to tell him, then. It would almost have been easy.
Die, it’s all my fault.
I pictured him slamming my head into the floor until it broke; throttling me with the wires.
“Your hands are shaking.”
“They shake all the time since I started taking these.”
He nodded, and I got to my feet.
“I think I’ll go home.”
“Go – home? Now?”
“I don’t think I’ll be much good here.”
I wavered slightly, and clutched at the synth for balance. My mouth felt like dust, or something older than dust. It felt like those fragments of bandages that they take off mummies. The studio, with its inconvenient, warren-like arrangement of rooms, seemed suddenly utterly stifling. Without waiting for an answer, my legs jerked into motion, and I stumbled away.
“Kyo!”
When I turned back to Die I could barely see him, and horror was rising like bile in my throat.
“Good luck,” he said simply, “With the…”
I nodded and wheeled away. My mind was full of thoughts of how to get home. I was confronted with the staircase, square corners descending into square corner after square corner, and with one hand I gripped the handrail tightly, whilst the other I pressed against the wall to keep me moving in the right direction. Three times I fell because of my shaking legs; on the last flight, I crumpled into a corner and counted the ceiling tiles until I felt calm again. I inched along the floor. It felt miles wide. The toes of my boots brushed the first step and by shuffling and jerking forwards, I managed to reach the ground.
I was aware that everything I was doing was unnatural. I knew that. But I felt my own sanity was something buoyant and high up, anchored by strings like so many balloons, and every time I saw how sad my own actions had made Die another string was cut, and another balloon floated dreamily away into the searing blue sky.

“Kyo?”
My bedroom was dark but Toshiya walked in anyway. He hovered by the door for a moment, and then I blinked and felt him sitting down on the bed next to me. I couldn’t look at him. When he placed himself in my line of vision, I looked away. There was no glasshouse, but there was nothing else either. I lay on top of the sheets as impassive and emotionless as one of those stone figures that lie on top of the graves of important people.
“Kyo?”
I could feel that saliva was wetting my lip, about to run down my chin, but there was nothing I could do about it. The effort of getting back to my apartment had left me so empty that I had no bones to move. Despite what I had attempted in the bath, I knew I was closer than I had ever been to feeling dead.
I was scared, but incapable of panic; sad, in a deep and untouchable way, but unable to say why.
Toshiya pulled my pill bottle out of my limp, cold hand, scanning the contents to see if I’d taken too many, but I’d been sticking to the rules. He touched my hand and my face, wiped spit from my chin. I stared towards the window instead of looking at him. Nothing could touch the clarity of the picture I had of him in my mind, so I stared towards the slivers of daylight showing between the gaps in the blinds until my eyes burned.
“Kyo, talk to me,” he said worriedly, “What is it? Is this the drugs working? Is it…”
He broke off and waited, and when I was silent he pressed a worried hand to his mouth.
“I know,” he said quietly, grabbing my hand in both of his, “That you are trying to talk to me. Please, try harder.”
But I wasn’t trying to talk to him. I didn’t see the point.

I lay still on the bed and it was like all the fogginess of the years had cleared away, and I could see everything I had ever done stretched out before me.
I didn’t have a single excuse except for love, and even that wasn’t quite right. It wasn’t love but the idea of being in love; the idea of somebody loving me back. Like a fool, I had fallen for him and somehow believed that I might have been able to make him return my feelings. Sex wasn’t therapy for me; it was for him. His body had held no magical, mythical powers after all. The cure had lain in my own stupid delusions.
Fool.
I closed my eyes as he pulled down my pants and underwear, crawling over me on the bed. He bent, taking my dick in both his hands like a precious object and lapping lightly at the tip, drawing back, sucking on it. He stripped himself from the waist down and knelt over me, cock in hand, stroking himself to hardness whilst I barely watched. I knew what he was trying to do, and I hated it.
“Kyo, come on…”
It took him a while. I saw as he closed his eyes and pictured Die, imagined him; I saw as his hand slid up his own belly and disappeared under his shirt. He toyed with his nipples whilst I watched; he pinched one, and moaned softly. His hand worked smoothly, rhythmically, between his thighs, and I studied him as he bit his lip. His cheeks were reddening. A beautiful network of muscles worked and twitched below his skin; his hips wanted to buck upwards. He grabbed a messy handful of his own hair and tugged at it roughly, working himself up so that he groaned.
The sound that spilled from his lips was so beautiful I wanted to grab at it. I wanted to touch him, to feel for myself the silky heat of his skin, but my arms were lead. All I could do was lie and watch, blank and quiet as a gravestone as his wrist jerked and pulled, and the fingers in his hair travelled to his mouth. I closed my eyes, almost in pain as he lapped and sucked at them; as he pushed them inside himself.
“Oh, fuck,” he panted, burying his fingers deep, “Oh, Kyo, don’t you want to touch me?”
I did. I wanted to so badly it burned, and my hands shook on the bed. I stared so long without blinking that my eyes filmed over and stung and teared up of their own accord. He fucked himself harder, moaning as his dick leaked translucent droplets over my stomach; whimpering, he pushed forwards and came, his cum spattering over my chest and face.
I watched his chest rise and fall, rise and fall. His cheeks were as red as if I’d slapped him.
“Kyo,” he said dimly, “Kyo, I…”
I opened my mouth and his cum trickled, salty, over my lip. It fanned over my tongue and I tasted it like a baby tastes its mother.
“Kyo…”
He looked sad enough to cry. He took my cock in his hand and began desperately stroking it, his fingers trembling. He smeared his own cum over me. He kissed me, over and over, live lips on dead ones, and when I couldn’t respond he rolled off me in frustration.
“Kyo—”
“Get out.” Get out and go to Die, I wanted to say, but I couldn’t. Even when I hated myself for not saying it, I couldn’t allow myself to sabotage my own love so terribly.
Monster.
Real tears pricked in my eyes.
“But…” he sat up slowly, “Don’t you – don’t you want me to finish you off?”
“Get out,” I said.
“But I—”
“Please.” My voice was quiet and broken up. I saw fear gather like tears in his beautiful black eyes. “Please,” I said, “Leave. Just leave.” 


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