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andrew_in_dragPairing: Kaoru x Toshiya
Rating: mature
Warnings: slash, rock 'n roll, drugs, boyish attitudes to the extreme
Previously: 0 | 1
Note: beta-read by the lovely
lady_sb!CHAPTER TWO:
It’s much too late, of course, but Kaoru realises that he shouldn’t have volunteered to sleep on the sofa.
He can put up with the discomfort, really. The lack of a pillow is a bother, and he suddenly notices an errant spring under the left cushion, but these are all things he can deal with – or all things he would be able to deal with, if it weren’t for the city lights streaming in through the windows.
He turns onto his left; he turns onto his right; he turns onto his back. He curls up and stretches out. Kicks his legs free of the blanket and covers them again.
He has never been able to sleep without total darkness. In his bedroom there are heavy blackout curtains to block out the light, and the window backs onto a dank little courtyard between his and another apartment block – not the nicest view, perhaps, but a dark and peaceful one. He can’t really explain why the light bothers him so much: he can cope with the traffic noise and the sound of his neighbours, if he puts in earplugs and talks himself out of listening. He can block out his own anxiously revolving, stressful thoughts, if he puts his mind to it.
But the light is a different matter. He tries squeezing his eyes tighter closed, but all that gives him is a tense little headache. He is first too hot and then too cold. He decides to get up, but doesn’t want to: the sofa is warm, and he’s tired.
He groans, hits his head irritably against the arm of the couch and forces his feet onto the floor. He has vague ideas of getting a drink of water, or perhaps just knocking his head against the cold tap until he either passes out or the sink breaks, leaving him able to kill the time until morning by fixing it.
These are his intentions, dreamy and hysterical though they may be, but he finds himself hesitating outside the door to his own bedroom. He feels unaccountably homesick. He touches the cool wood with his fingertips and slowly spreads his hand out over it, feeling the wood grain against his palm. He rests his cheek against it carefully. He can pretend he just wants to feel it, which is strange enough but explainable – he’s overtired, he’s been dozing his way into short, agitated little half-dreams, and there are human teeth marks on his hand – but in truth he is listening. He strains his ears and over the distant hum of engines and horns he can hear slow, steady breathing. It’s actually quite a nice, soothing sound, and Kaoru closes his eyes and allows himself to get lulled by it for a few moments.
It’s only when he finds himself swaying on the spot that he reminds himself that Toshiya is, after all, pure evil, and that thought spurs him on to slowly twist the door handle down.
Silence. He pauses. The handle seems to creak minutely as it makes its descent, click after click after click, and Kaoru doesn’t breathe again until it is pointing all the way south. He bites his lip. Carefully, he pushes the door open, and breathes a huge sigh of relief and wistfulness: all is silent and beyond the threshold, darkness swims.
It can’t hurt. He steps inside.
Kaoru’s first thought is: Toshiya sleeps like a fucking log.
He tiptoes closer to the bed, going mainly by memory, stopping sharp when he misjudges the distance and hits his knees on edge of his bedside table. He waits patiently for his eyes to adjust to the darkness, staring at the bed and letting Toshiya’s form gradually materialise in front of him. When it does, Kaoru is almost surprised; he is almost disappointed. Toshiya really is asleep. In a way, Kaoru had doubted it. Maybe he’d expected him to be hooked up to some kind of machine that sucked the goodness out of human souls, or something, or at least hung upside down like a bat.
But Toshiya is sleeping peacefully, and that is the biggest surprise: it is the first time, when Kaoru thinks about it, that he has actually seen his bandmate’s face at rest. It’s almost kind of cute. Toshiya has yanked all the pillows out of order, making a sort of nest out of them; his head rests directly on the mattress but there is a pillow hugged tight to him, sort of pouching his lips up so he looks like he’s pouting. He has the covers dragged up to his chin, and his feet would probably hang off the end of the bed if they weren’t curled up to him so tightly. The whole picture is close to being adorable, and Kaoru cocks his head thoughtfully. He has never really had a person bug him so much in such a complex way. As much as he dislikes Toshiya, he is fond of him too. It’s a peculiar feeling; realising that. He thinks about it and can’t really escape the suspicion that his days might actually be quite dull without having an almost hourly fight with Toshiya, and he certainly can’t deny that their rancour is productive: with the two of them constantly trying to outdo each other, their debut EP is getting written in half the time.
He can’t understand why, but suddenly he feels furious.
“You big dummy,” he whispers fiercely, like a kid. “You idiot.”
He just barely resists the urge to slam the bedroom door behind him when he leaves. He climbs back onto the sofa and is still awake when the sun comes up.
Perhaps it’s the sleepless night, or perhaps it’s the disturbing revelation that his creative drive feeds off his own dysfunctional relationship with his bassist: either way, when morning finally comes, Kaoru is wound tight as a tourniquet. He can feel it in his own face, the way his jaw is clenched so tense it feels spring-loaded and the way the frown line is etched deep between his eyes. He showers in a daydream, leaving plenty of hot water for Toshiya just because he doesn’t feel up to the row. He eats his breakfast in silence. He feels far away. He’s had sleepless nights before, but the morning light has never made him feel this sick. He leaves his breakfast half-eaten and huddles over coffee instead, absentmindedly listening to the shower run. He stares at the paper and doesn’t read a single word.
The thought of Toshiya naked in his apartment is as strange as angels, and seems about just as real. In some ways he already knows that they won’t be getting Toshiya’s bass back. He doesn’t know how he ever could have believed that they would. What’s gone is gone, and instead of going down to the bus station he’d rather just shell out the money and get to the tiny little studio they’re renting so he can settle down and start his day.
Although actually, he doesn’t exactly have the money he needs right now. Toshiya’s going to love that.
He hears the bathroom door unlock and wonders if he can drown himself in his cereal.
By the time the band is assembled at the studio that day, Toshiya feels like he’s going to have some kind of dramatic, rage-fuelled stroke.
It’s not just the fact that Kaoru refused to go down to the bus station with him. In fact, that’s actually a very small part of it. Really, he’s angry because he woke up angry, and he woke up angry because he had a dream about his stupid big-headed band leader staring down at him, and he’s even more angry because when he woke up, confused, it was only about five o’clock in the morning, and whenever he fell asleep after that he immediately started having erotic dreams about Kaoru.
Sucking him off, fucking and fingering him. In the most vivid dream, Kaoru has him bent over the bed and is pumping him with no fewer than four fingers, stretching him and acting so merciless and so dominating and so sexy it takes his breath away.
He wakes up gasping and finds that he’s sticky with cum. On closer inspection, so are Kaoru’s sheets, and Toshiya actually considers twisting them into a noose and hanging himself with them rather than face this new humiliation. He knows Kaoru loves nothing more than embarrassing him, and he feels sick when he pictures the delighted smile lighting up the guitarist’s face.
He deals with it, in the end, by angrily stripping the bed and carrying the sheets straight past Kaoru without a word of explanation. He has the damp patch folded in, but even so he imagines he can feel it seeping sticky over his fingers, and it makes him shudder a little because though there are times when he loves the feel of cum on his skin, there are other times when it’s seven o’clock in the morning and the cum is his own, and it feels cold and embarrassing. He crams the sheets straight into the washing machine down in the laundry room, with Kaoru tailing him interestedly the whole way. He doesn’t intend to say anything about it, but of course Kaoru just can’t resist opening his big fat mouth.
“What, did you wet the bed or something?”
A forgivable joke, but an ill-timed one, and Toshiya grits his teeth and forces himself to reply that his grandmother always taught him to wash the sheets after being an overnight guest, because it’s polite, and what, was Kaoru raised in a ditch?
And it makes him even madder because just looking at Kaoru makes him think of his dream, and his face gets hot and red. He calls Kaoru disgusting, and Kaoru calls off the trip to the bus station, and they take separate transport to work.
“Oh my gosh,” Shinya says, wide-eyed and bending over Kaoru, “What happened to your hand?”
He’s bandaged the wound, mostly because the teeth marks in his skin are deep enough to be crusting over and are very obviously made by a human bite. He pauses with his hand on his guitar strings, flexing it painfully.
“You know what,” he says, his eyes flicking over to Toshiya, “A dog bit me.”
There is a horrible rippling discord from Toshiya’s substitute bass that makes Shinya jump, Die jump and Kyo jump awake. Only Kaoru sits unperturbed, glaring daggers at his bandmate.
“This really big, mad-looking dog,” he elaborates stiffly. “With these horrible jagged fangs. All uneven in its mouth. Snarling away at me. Ugly old thing.”
“Oh no,” Shinya says miserably, a hand over his mouth. “Did you report it? You didn’t, did you?”
“Maybe it could smell how much you suck at guitar,” Toshiya says acidly, and though a muscle twitches in Kaoru’s jaw he ignores it.
“No, I didn’t report it,” he says kindly. “It was owned by this poor little old lady. I guess it got too big for her to control, really.”
“Poor thing,” Shinya says unhappily; he shows more empathy to dogs than humans.
“The old woman said she didn’t even get the dog for herself; it was just some mutt that her daughter and son-in-law used to have. But they fobbed it off on her, because it was a psychopath and nobody wanted it.”
There is a crash as Toshiya lets his instrument fall to the floor, and everybody but Kaoru watches in honest surprise as he storms out of the studio. The door slams tight. His footfalls echo like thunder on the stairs down to the street.
“Wow,” Shinya says, “I wonder what’s wrong with him today?”
Kaoru shrugs and goes back to his guitar. Shinya shifts his feet and looks uneasy.
“I should go after him,” he says at last, and Kyo stands up.
“I’ll go,” he says tiredly. “He’s in a fucking foul mood.”
“He’s got a split lip,” Shinya says meditatively. “I wonder if he’s been fighting.”
“It’s his own business, but it makes me worry about the band.”
“We don’t want somebody who can’t keep their temper.”
“Maybe we should – you don’t think—?”
“Hey,” Kaoru interrupts, feeling newly anxious, “That’s a bit much, isn’t it? Toshiya’s one of us. I’m sure he’s got a good reason why he’s in such a bad mood.” He pauses.
“I’ll go after him. I can’t play much anyway.”
He shrugs awkwardly and gets to his feet, setting his guitar carefully in its case. He feels like what he’s about to do is downright suicidal, but he knows that he went too far.
Die and Shinya shrug, already losing interest. Kyo's eyes follow Kaoru’s back all the way down the stairs.
>> to Chapter Three >>
