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andrew_in_drag) wrote2012-03-28 12:00 am
PROTECT ME: CHAPTER TWELVE
Title: Protect Me
Author: ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif){kind=small}
andrew_in_drag
Pairing: Kaoru x Toshiya
Rating: mature
Warnings: sex, rudeness, swears, boyish attitudes, AU
Chapter: 12/??
Previously: prologue >> one >> two >> three >> four >> five >> six
>> seven >> eight >> nine >> ten >> eleven
Synopsis: “Toshimasa Hara. Even now I sometimes find it hard to decide if his name gives me heartache or a headache…”
As a police officer in Shinsekai, Osaka, Kaoru has seen his fair share of trouble. Chaos takes a human form, however, in Toshiya Hara, a young local who seems intent on showing him that sometimes the right way is not always the good way, and that sometimes the wrong way can be the path to redemption…
CHAPTER TWELVE
His hands slid all over me, careful of my crooked arm. Oddly enough, I hardly felt the pain of it; it was heavy, numb, but mostly forgettable, like a chunk of marble.
The indignity, though, ached. Those hands had touched me so many times in so many different ways: he’d stroked me in love and grabbed me in anger, but now he could have been touching a doll. His hands were gentle and insistent but indifferent.
I made myself not say his name. Words were like teeth, and if I bit him I’d choke.
I watched him, though: my eyes fixed themselves firmly to his face as his hands moved all over me. He felt my hair, sliding his hands up underneath it: he felt along my arms – gingerly, with the broken one – and under them; he felt down my sides and round my hips. I looked on as he stripped me of all the trappings of my life: my wallet landed at Kyo’s feet; my keys; my cell phone.
Such a fine actor.
I felt sick. I felt huge and bloated. I felt like a swelling rotten sea where he swam and splashed and bathed; where all the waste and dead bodies of the world washed up on my stinking shores.
My shoulder began to throb. His hands traced the outline of my thighs, making a mockery of the route he had taken so many times before. When I had thought we were going somewhere, he had been taking a thousand little detours to his real destination: right here, this moment. He was finally home.
Toshiya removed my shoes and felt the soles of my feet as if he was preparing to wash them. His head hung low. His hands touched my calves and the backs of my knees; finally, finally, he stepped back. His hands were trembling, and quickly he balled them into fists.
I could have told him that I carried no weapons, but then he probably wouldn’t have believed me. He glanced at the screen of my cell phone and shot me a surprised look when he saw my message; unbelievably, his eyes reproached me: you didn’t trust me, either.
My head pounded. I wondered if they’d fractured my skull. In my imagination, the bones beneath my hair had caved in sickly, a cratered mess.
I wanted them to leave me alone, and they did. I didn’t care about getting home. They could leave me there forever and I knew it wouldn’t matter.
Whilst they were gone I slept and thought. The sleep was cottony, almost drugged; it slipped over me like a hangman’s noose. Every so often I dropped awake, startled, body feeling weighted. My arm had begun to swell, and the handcuff cut into my wrist.
It was some time later that they returned; Kyo, Toshiya, and a few other henchmen. The daylight coming through the blind had waned. They addressed Kyo as an elder brother, or respectfully titled him wakagashira. He called them by their first names. Though he was young, they were little brothers to him.
One of them carried a video camera and the other carried that day’s newspaper. Toshiya held a square of card covered with printed type, which he handed to me without a word. None of them said anything as they set the camera up on a tripod, directing its lens at me.
I looked at the writing. It was a script.
For the first time, I allowed my heartbreak and listlessness to give way to something baser: disgust.
“I’m not reading this,” I said.
I was largely ignored. One of the lackeys attempted to push the newspaper into my hands, not at all being careful with my dislocated shoulder, and defiantly I clenched my fists.
“Kaoru,” Kyo said tiredly, “Hold the newspaper. Read the card. Do what we say and we won’t punish you.”
“Punish me how you like,” I said flatly, “I won’t do it.”
“Kaoru,” Toshiya whispered softly, “Please—”
“Hold the newspaper, or we will break your arms and rearrange them in such a way that you have no choice,” Kyo snarled.
I just stared at him, letting the newspaper slide off my lap and onto the floor. Kyo smirked.
“Don’t care, huh?” For the second time that day, he pulled his blade; I could already imagine how he doted on that thing. It looked well cared for. I imagined him cleaning it and polishing it. I thought of how curious that was, to have such a devotion to an instrument of death; I thought of what that said about him, and how it scared me.
“Alright, Kaoru.” He moved to squat in front of me, staring me right in the eye. “I get you. You probably don’t believe me, but I understand you better than you think. Right now, I think you want to play the martyr.” He shrugged. “That’s alright, if you’re playing with your own life.”
Very deliberately, he extended an arm and pointed straight to Toshiya. “What about his life?”
He got to his feet.
“Toshiya’s played his part well, Kaoru – very well. I might have considered his debt to us paid, now that he’s held up his end of the bargain.”
Affectionately, he slid the flat of the blade along Toshiya’s cheek.
“He owed us a life, and he gave us yours. But if you won’t co-operate, I’m going to have to go back to my original plan with him.” He smiled. “Kaoru, if I know you – and I think I do – you probably had such a plan for him. I’d wager yours was a little different from mine. I bet you thought that one day he’d settle down with you and get a job, didn’t you? You might even have thought you’d adopt a couple of kiddies. You pictured taking him home and introducing him to your parents.”
I stayed quiet, hating him. As he spoke, he was pulling off his jacket and shirt, and despite myself I stared at him. Ink covered his arms, his hands; when he turned, I saw it covered his back. Shapes swirled on his abdomen and upper chest, and his neck; I wondered how many hours of pain he had endured in order to display this, his unwavering allegiance to the crimes of his brothers. Even though I had been expecting them, those tattoos surprised me. In the same way that Toshiya had made me look at him differently, I found myself examining Kyo in a new light: what made a man do the kinds of things that he did; what made him illustrate the fact upon his own skin, ensuring a lifetime of almost ultimate alienation?
“You thought that, didn’t you, Kaoru?”
“Fuck you,” I said quietly. He smirked.
“If nothing else, you pictured yourself fucking him for the rest of your life.” He shook his head, “I’ll never understand that urge. Coupling and settling down – it’s not for me. But then, you probably imagined that you loved each other very much, and you thought that fucking was the perfect expression of that…deep, deep feeling.”
The blade found its way to Toshiya’s chest, nudging down the neck of his shirt easily and coming to a rest over his heart.
“I imagine you thought of him as part of you, even.” Slowly, he raised his left hand and wiggled the smallest finger in front of my face. I noticed the tip was missing, and he nodded in satisfaction as he followed my gaze. “They cut it off, you know, because I made a mistake. I deliberately broke orders, and so they punished me. And now, I can see that they were right to do it. But sometimes I still feel the end of that finger tickling, you know? In the middle of the night – sometimes it wakes me up. Tickling.”
He tapped the blade against Toshiya’s skin delicately. I could see how his heart was pounding; see the shuddering of his breath.
“So tell me, Kaoru, because I’m very curious: when I cut him, where’s it going to tickle you?”
He took a step back and surveyed me. My head, formerly heavy, now felt light as a feather.
Whatever you do, I told myself grimly, do not faint.
“Set up the camera,” Kyo told his little brother. “He’ll hold the newspaper.”
And in the end, I did. I held the newspaper so they could film the date, and I read from the card they had given me. It was in that way that I learned my fate: I was a hostage, to be kept until the release of the following from custody, and it didn’t surprise me to find out that the names were those of the yakuza I had arrested myself. Co-operation, I stated in a monotone, would ensure my safe return.
Lack of co-operation would ensure the lack of my safe return.
Four criminals for the life of one police officer. Was that a good deal?
Whenever I closed my eyes, the vision of Kyo’s amputated fingertip flashed across my consciousness.
>> to chapter thirteen >>
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Poor Kaoru... too good of a person for his own life.
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as ever, thanks so much for reading and commenting ! xx
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...On the other hand, that means there is nothing to make me suddenly stop posting, short of my gruesome and untimely death.
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