The Glasshouse: 16/??

[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 | 14 | 15
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: "Life's a game, really. Pass the parcel - that's all you can do, sometimes. And you have to feel lucky and content with that; with what you did. Just pass the parcel. Take it, feel it, and pass it on." 


CHAPTER SIXTEEN:

I listened to the washing machine churn as, gradually, my apartment lost the stale-air-and-blood stench and began to smell of fresh air and laundry. Shinya regarded me over the kitchen table as calmly and ambivalently as a monk. He had made me tea that hurt my throat and the inside of my cheek. My teeth ached where I’d hit them.
“Well,” he said calmly, pushing his cup away, “I suppose you had better tell me what’s going on.”
He had ordered me to take a bath and dress in clean clothes, and then tutted over the fact that I had no clean clothes. I sat opposite him wearing a pair of pyjamas that Toshiya had left behind. I had seen how Shinya’s eyes took in the size and familiarity of them and efficiently connected point A to point B.
The clothes dwarfed me and made me feel like a child. I took a stinging sip of tea and shrugged. He had cleaned up the mess I had made. My kitchen tiles shone and smelled like lemon floor-cleaner.
“I don’t know what to tell you,” I said uncomfortably. My throat felt like gravel, and my voice was curiously quiet and croaky.
“Well.” Shinya rested his chin in his hands thoughtfully, “I think you should probably start with why Toshiya’s pyjamas are in your apartment. I’m assuming that everything else is somehow connected to that.”
“Yes,” I sighed, “Kind of.”
“Well?” he prompted, sitting back in his chair. If it had been anybody else, I’d have wondered why they were so calm, but I had known Shinya for a very long time.
Well, telling him wouldn’t be the worst thing I had done, not by a long way. I took a sharp swallow of tea and pushed my empty cup forwards to match his.

Shinya interrupted me only three times. The first was when I told him about Toshiya and Die, and he leant forward as if he possibly misheard me.
“Die? Our Die?”
The second was when I mentioned my seduction of Toshiya, and he pressed his delicate hand to his lips gently. That wasn’t really an interruption, I suppose, but it made me stop talking all the same. Shinya’s not really very demonstrative. Where he put a hand to his mouth, I suppose somebody else might have yelled or hit me or something.
The third time was shortly after I had finished speaking, so I suppose that wasn’t an interruption either, but the silence was so thick that it felt like one anyway.
“That’s quite a story,” he said at last.
“I know.”
He sighed.
“Oh, you’re a fool.”
“I know.”
“But you’re also unlucky. I don’t just mean that you’re unlucky in terms of what happens to you; I also mean that you make unlucky choices.”
I looked up at him wearily.
“What do you mean?”
“Well…” he folded his hands thoughtfully, “Well really, it’s as if you’ve had two separate wills inside you, all this time. And whenever you come up against a tough decision, the wrong side of you always makes it. Or,” he corrected himself, “Not the wrong side, but whatever side is the most…inappropriate.”
“Well there is a wrong side, Shinya.”
“Oh, I don’t know if there’s anything wrong with wanting to be happy. It’s unfortunate that it had to happen at Die’s expense. But I don’t think you behaved as monstrously as you made yourself sound.”
I sighed.
“No?” I asked sarcastically. He brushed off my tone like he would a fly.
“No. You said that you stole Toshiya, but he is a person, you know. He could have said no.”
“It’s not his fault!”
“Well, why not?” Shinya surveyed me pensively, “If you’re going to judge yourself so harshly, then you should at least judge other people the same way. Otherwise, you’ll lose perspective, and then it will seem like you’re a monster.”
“Toshiya,” I said flatly, “had an excuse. I made him do it. I guilt-tripped him and manipulated him and—”
“And he couldn’t have told Die?” Shinya questioned mildly, “He couldn’t have discussed it openly; talked about the best way to progress?”
“Well…” I sighed, resting my head in my hands tiredly. “I don’t know.”

Our talk stopped there; Shinya let me go to sleep. He said I looked tired. He didn’t herd me into my room or draw the covers over me all fussily like Toshiya would have done, and I appreciated it. He reminded of my grandmother, who always called me Tooru instead of grandson and treated me soberly and seriously, like she would an adult. She had no soft edges, but I liked going to stay with her.
So it was funny, but being treated at such a dignified remove made me feel like a child again. I slept for ten hours straight and then lay in bed for a while, thinking about me and Toshiya. There had been no dignity between us; no carefully constructed distance. I could see now that it might have been a mistake, to make things so unlimited. We had gotten out of control; I saw that.
I shut my eyes and rested. I was happily aware that I had suffered some kind of enormous emotional collapse, and that now everything was out of my hands because I had finally become too crazy to deal with it. The disaster I had set in motion between myself and Toshiya hurt terribly if I thought about it, but I was comforted by the knowledge that he was now, at least, free to pursue Die, and that the whole situation had been taken away from me, like the books and films that my mother had used to judge too old.
I had told Die about Toshiya and I, about a month ago, when I was still fighting against the Abilify. It seemed that now I was telling everybody. What surprised me was how, with the more people I told, the weight on my shoulders seemed to get lighter and lighter.
But telling was the thing that I had promised I would never do.  It made me both happy and sad that Toshiya would probably never forgive me.

After I had been dozing on and off for a few hours, Shinya knocked tentatively on my door and wandered inside, a cup of hot tea in his hands. He handed it to me and stood, smiling in a vague sort of way, while I drank it down. I noticed that he had changed clothes; he must have taken my key and gone home whilst I was sleeping.
“How do you feel?” he asked, taking the empty cup away from me.
“Peaceful,” I said.
“That’s good. I thought we might talk about what you intend to do about Toshiya.”
“To make him forgive me?” I asked.
“Oh no,” Shinya said. Matter-of-factly he added, “I’m not really sure if he will forgive you, but you should probably tell him the truth.”
I scowled.
“Why?”
“Well,” Shinya said patiently, “You have the band and your career to think about, for one. You do owe something to the four of us in that respect, don’t you think? Plus, he does deserve to know that you’re crazy about him. I know you don’t agree, but being in love is some excuse, you know.”
I sat back against my pillow dismally.
“You’re so calm,” I told him. “I wish I knew your secret for being so calm.”
He smiled, probably picturing that.
“You don’t suit calmness. You’ve always been sort of hectic. That medication made you calm, but everyone’s been saying how much they don’t like it.”
“Yeah?”
“Oh yes. Kaoru says you should always take what’s prescribed for you, but now that you’ve crushed it all up, I’m sure he’ll come around.”
“Well, he’ll have to.”
We grinned at each other. Shinya cuffed my head affectionately.
“Now,” he said, business-like again, “You’re looking very emaciated. I’ve can bring in some soup I’ve made, a really special kind – comforting soup. Consoling. It’s very healthy.”
I smiled. I thought about how long it had been since I’d managed to eat without throwing up. Now, I was sure the gnawing feeling in my stomach was hunger rather than nausea. Soup sounded just about right.
“Bring it in,” I said happily, “I’m starving.”

All in all, Shinya stuck around for about a week. My days with him took on a classroom-like structure of scheduled, wholesome meals, searing hot baths and long, long talks. While I slept, he cleaned and cooked and aired the place out. For the first few days of our talks, I listened more than I spoke. He seemed to be making sense.
I wondered how he knew so much. I forgot my self-consciousness and asked him question after question, all of which he responded to with his usual unhurried precision. There was no rushing him; he would always go at his own pace. He had a habit for placing a single finger on his lower lip as he thought, and the look of that struck me as scholarly and sophisticated. I thought how much easier my life would have been if I had fallen in love with him instead. Shinya wasn’t gay, but at least I would always know where I stood with him, and if nothing else then I would be able to label myself as hopeless and forget about it. I wouldn’t be happy, but I wouldn’t really be able to be unhappy about it.
I found myself just looking at his face. He had an oval face with oval eyes and an oval mouth. It was a very soothing shape.
I slept most afternoons. I willed myself to dream of him, but Toshiya laughed and blew kisses inside my head.

“Why did you do it?” he asked me. “I don’t see what you could have to gain from telling Toshiya all those bizarre things.”
I shook my head vacantly and rested back against the pillows. I could still smell fresh air, but when I looked up, the glasshouse was crawling over my ceiling like a spider.
I smiled up at it and turned my attention back to Shinya. He wouldn’t perch on the side of my bed as Toshiya had done, but he had pulled in a chair from the kitchen for our long talks.
“Well,” I said slowly, “I wanted a way for him to be able to blame it all on me. So he won’t feel guilty about going back to Die.”
“But that’s not really your problem.”
“Yes it is,” I argued agitatedly, “Because it’s my fault. I want things to be normal again.”
Shinya waited as I struggled for words.
“Maybe it’s even true,” I managed at last. “In what sort of world would I fall in love with him, anyway?”
 “Well.” Shinya hesitated. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
I closed my eyes.
“He talks so much,” I said quietly. “He’s so…impulsive. He’s loud.”
Shinya smiled, leaning forwards to brush some wrinkles out of my bed sheets.
“You always were crabby,” he said fondly, “What’s so wrong with how Toshiya is?”
“Nothing’s wrong with it. It’s just…he’s so much. So big. He makes such a huge difference in my life. Everything changes, and I change too. He makes me happy, but it’s not natural for me. I mean, he makes me more happy than it’s natural for me to be.”
“And you don’t like for things to change?”
“No, I don’t.”
Shinya sighed, leaning back in his chair like I’d disappointed him even though he must have anticipated my response.
“Maybe that happiness is the natural you,” he told me, and smiled at my frown. “Or maybe not, of course. But there’s always the possibility.”

By the day he left, I was out of bed and walking around. My throat was entirely healed, and the bruises I’d made on the frail skin around it were fading, day by day. It was almost like a dream, but I remembered all of it. I remembered the day in the bar and the snowball fight and the flood in his apartment, and I remembered a thousand moments onstage where I had confused the love he’d had for his job with a love he’d had for me. I remembered dark nights and bright afternoons when he pushed me down on the bed and administered his therapy. Everything.
I only had one more question for Shinya. Besides that, I felt completely at rest. There was one last piece of the puzzle that I wanted to slot into place.
“What would you do about it?” I asked. “If you loved somebody so much, and you couldn’t have them? I mean – I don’t know what I mean, really. How would you talk yourself around to it, to reach a point where all that…I don’t know, all that longing…how would you make it alright?”
Shinya had been sitting next to me on the sofa, casually flicking through a magazine. He was reading an article about building up arm muscle, and he frowned at it intelligently as he spoke to me.
“I’d say that sometimes that’s your lot,” he said simply. “Life’s a game, really. Pass the parcel – that’s all you can do, sometimes. And you have to feel lucky and content with that; with what you did. Just pass the parcel. Take it, feel it, and pass it on.”
“But how do you do it?” I pressed curiously. “When you want something so badly – how do you stop yourself from trying to take it?”
“Well,” he said, “I just listen to my heart.”
He must have caught the repulsed look on my face, because he burst out laughing.
“Not like that, silly. Not in that Disney way. I mean, I listen to my heart. I listen to it beating in my ears. And it makes me take a step back and just think about everything; I mean, it brings me inside myself. It’s like it has a voice all of its own, and I suppose that helps me figure out what to do.”

I thought it was a lacklustre, unsatisfying answer, but that night in bed, I closed my eyes against the darkness and slowed my breathing right down. My heart throbbed in my ears, and I listened to it. I had expected some earth-shattering revelation, but all I heard was either disappointing or miraculous, depending on whom you were.
It was a plain old heartbeat, whispering away to me and saying the same thing it had been saying all my life.
And I had never really realised what a comforting thing that was.
I am, I am, I am. 


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