![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Author:
![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif){kind=small}
andrew_in_dragPairing: Kaoru x Toshiya
Rating: mature
Warnings: slash, rock 'n roll, drugs, boyish attitudes to the extreme
Previously: 0 | 1 | 2 | 3
Note: beta-read by the lovely
lady_sb!CHAPTER FOUR:
January passes, and Toshiya and Kaoru do an admirable job of ignoring each other. February breaks, ugly and damp, and every day the sky dawns the same dull white. It’s bright but flat. The streets get busier, and everywhere Toshiya goes he feels crammed in and suffocated by the sheer number of people: more people than he has ever seen in his life. He navigates his way around the city pressed up against the walls of tall buildings. He still gets lost easily, but it doesn’t make him panic like it used to. Now he thinks: fine, I’ll stay lost.
At the beginning of the month, Kaoru makes the girl he has been anxiously seeing for weeks into his girlfriend. He announces this like it’s nothing, but the rest of the band can feel it when he gets nervous, and so they understand what this achievement means to him. They are as carefully blasé with their congratulations as Kaoru is with his announcement. Toshiya hasn’t been around long enough to know that Kaoru is a hopeless case with women, shy and awkward and prone to saying the wrong thing, and so he snorts and comments that it certainly took him long enough.
Kaoru says that maybe he would have gotten there quicker if he wasn’t always stuck in the studio, sorting out Toshiya’s mistakes.
Shinya reflexively ducks, just in case something gets thrown.
And so another day passes in a frosty silence. It’s beginning to become a routine, and nobody can really be bothered to act surprised by it anymore.
“Wouldn’t it be nice if those two could get along,” Shinya says dreamily.
“Oh, you want to see everybody be friends,” Die laughs, sounding uncharacteristically shy, “You’re such a good person.”
There is an embarrassed sort of quiet and Kyo sits down heavily between them. He stretches his back so the bones make popping sounds. He cracks his fingers and starts talking about Star Wars.
That February, Kyo turns twenty-one. His birthday is spent taking photos; the band is herded into a spotlessly white room and posed awkwardly. They each adopt stances and facial expressions they would never assume in real life, and they have to put on stiff, scratchy, elaborate clothes that leave them uncomfortable and unable to sit down.
They walk out of separate dressing areas and they see each other and they immediately burst out laughing.
“Die,” Toshiya giggles, holding his fingers under his eyes so his makeup won’t run, “Your hair looks like it’s gonna fly away and grow a beak.”
“Yeah? Well you look hot.” He grabs the bassist’s hand and starts kissing it theatrically, “Truly, so beautiful, I can’t live without you, I—”
“Knock it off, Die,” Kyo says grumpily. “Can we not just get through this?”
“But look at him! He looks like more of a girl than Shinya does!”
“Yeah?” Toshiya challenges, hands on his hips, “Nice lipstick, Daisuke.”
“Nice corset,” the redhead counters, grinning moronically. “Kaoru, look!” He grabs Toshiya by the shoulders and shoves the startled bassist in front of him, still smiling breathlessly, “What do you think?”
There’s a tense silence as Kaoru looks him up and down. Toshiya bites his darkly painted lower lip, feeling strangely nervous. There is a soft look in the guitarist’s eyes that Toshiya can’t ever remember seeing before, and it makes him feel uncertain. He shrugs gently; spreads his hands awkwardly.
“Well,” he says quietly, “Do you like me?”
His voice breaks the spell. Kaoru’s eyes lose that soft, warm look and he sniffs disdainfully.
“You look like a hooker,” he says.
Suddenly it seems like Kyo is standing very still, and Shinya is shuffling his feet anxiously, and Die lets go of Toshiya’s shoulders with a stunned kind of look on his face. The three of them stare at their bassist like he’s a ticking bomb, but all he does is shrug. It’s a strange kind of shrug, and there is an odd little smile on his face, too, like Kaoru has played right into his hands because he’s said nothing more or less than what he was expecting.
It makes Kaoru feel sort of bad. He folds and unfolds his arms, and he touches Toshiya’s shoulder briefly, and then their photographer clears his throat and they are Dir en grey again, the professionals.
The next day is Kaoru’s birthday. He turns twenty-three. It’s an age that makes him antsy: he has a sense of time slipping away from him, and he is aware that he has a very limited frame of time in which to make a visual rock debut. He knows he is breaking into an industry where ageing is not tolerated, and it makes him nervous.
Toshiya calling him “old man” doesn’t exactly help, either.
He covers his insecurity by throwing a party. Mindful of his career, he invites bands that can be considered their contemporaries and collaborates with their management: he persuades their tiny label to contact scouts from other, bigger labels, citing their need to outsource their PR and promotion. He talks a good game. He almost convinces himself. He tells the band that their attendance is mandatory and is touched and embarrassed by their confusion: Die cocks his head to the side and tells him that they want to go; it’s his birthday, and they wouldn’t miss it.
“Oh,” Kaoru says, going red, and in that instant Toshiya almost likes him.
Of course, when they actually arrive at the party, they discover that it’s not really in honour of Kaoru’s birthday anymore.
In the past forty-eight hours, the celebration has become more exclusive. As far as Kaoru can tell, all this means is that it has changed location, and it is now being held at the house of somebody who is apparently very wealthy and very high up in the recording industry – judging by the amount of gold discs decorating the walls, anyway. All of a sudden there are bouncers on the doors and velvet ropes; it’s their very first industry party, and it seems for a moment that they won’t be on the list. They have their IDs cards checked, and Toshiya and Shinya cause some flurry because they are both underage. Shinya responds by giving the bouncer a solemn, steady gaze, like he’s trying to control his mind; Toshiya juts out a hip and lights up a cigarette and gives them a look that dares them, just dares them to tell him that he’s too young to witness what’s going on inside.
It works, and he is the first through. He turns and gives his band a shy smile, and he disappears into the darkness beyond.
The surprising is that no matter how big the house is, and how much money is being thrown around, the party is still just a party. It’s still, at its heart, the kind of event Kaoru attended with his school friends: it’s still just a dark room filled with hot and sweating people; the drinks are still only drinks; the music is still only music. The house is humid and filled with the sounds of banging doors from different rooms. The air is thick with heat and cigarette smoke, surfaces are sticky with spilled drinks, and because Kaoru talked them into arriving fashionably late, things are already starting to disintegrate: over by the staircase, there is a boy with a bloody nose berating a man in a suit. His cheeks are flushed and the blood is trickling over his lips; somebody is holding his arms back, and his shirt is rucked up below his armpits. He shouts something furiously, and a group of people laugh. Against a wall, a man is kissing a girl’s neck, and Kaoru can see the flex of his elbow as his hand moves between her thighs.
Once he sees this, it seems that all around him there are clothes getting torn and people falling down in piles, and he though he keeps calm and stands still his eyes are flickering everywhere, searching desperately for his friends. He has told them to fan out and talk to as many people as possible, and it seems they’ve obeyed him, but he suddenly wants them back. He feels vulnerable, standing so alone. He feels like he is a teenager again and all the time out of place: there is a kind of frustration in it; a kind of anger. He wants somebody to look at him and recognise that he has changed from what he was. He needs somebody to notice this so he can pretend he believes it.
But at least, he thinks, he has the music. It’s loud and obnoxious – some old band that enjoyed their fame five or ten years ago, when Kaoru was growing up – and the feeling of irritation that it stirs up within him is pleasantly familiar. It makes the party manageable. It gives him the power to stand not lonely but aloof, and he holds onto that little itch of annoyance because, when he feels so stupidly inferior, he knows the only thing that he can do is feign superiority and hope that people believe it.
Irritation is the key, and the feeling of being above it all is intoxicating. Irritation. He smiles to himself. He thinks he will go and find Toshiya.
This is the thought he has after first arriving at the party. Three hours later, his hairline is damp with sweat and he smells like alcohol even though he hasn’t drunk any, and the bassist is still nowhere in sight. Contrary to the end, Toshiya appears to have vanished into thin air. The house is full of turns and corners, and Kaoru walks with one finger following the wall, feeling like it’s the only thing stopping him from getting lost.
Where are you?
He is so uncomfortably out of place that his passing thought has turned into an obsession. He knows that with Toshiya, he can assert himself like he can with nobody else. The bassist makes him feel angry, but also invincible.
After three blind hours, though, he is ready to give up. He is lost, and he is so disorientated that he can hardly tell if he is upstairs or down; there are different staircases that seem to go to different places, and a floor up seems to have been two floors down ago: he is sober, but he is drunk on this house. His finger against the wall touches glass, and he is so relieved to have found a door so straightforward – inside to outside – that he goes straight out, breathing in the fresh air gratefully and closing his eyes as the February wind tousles his sweaty hair. Until he is cold, he doesn’t realise how hot he has been.
Even the fresh night air hasn’t escaped the touch of the party, though. By now Kaoru is so alienated by the events inside that he feels like it’s some kind of disease; that hot air shrivelling plants and making people collapse, one after another, like dominoes. Outside there are bottles rolling around everywhere, and he has to be careful where he walks. There are people wilted around the edge of the pool, still looking flushed even though it’s cold, and this is where Kaoru finds Toshiya.
He’s not slumped; he’s not collapsed. Kaoru’s first impression is that of some kind of mischievous fairy, dancing amongst the drooping partygoers and stealing their energy away, and it is not so farfetched: he shines alone. His cheeks are red and there are lights in his eyes, and even though his gaze is unfocussed and his body is trembling, it is obvious to Kaoru in that moment that he is a star. By the water’s edge there is a group of men, and their clothes indicate a mixture of ex-rockstars and current music executives. They sit in a huddled group. They watch Toshiya like he is their own private television, and they talk.
And for some reason Kaoru feels incredibly anxious.
Perhaps it is the way they are talking not with Toshiya but about him; the fact that they are not engaging with him, but observing him. Their eyes and attention seem to say that he is beautiful but not rare, and it makes Kaoru angry because they are wrong, and Toshiya is special. He knows they’re looking at him and seeing a young body, and it irks him because that’s all they are seeing.
“Toshiya,” he says, intending to say something to drag him away.
Toshiya sings in response, and wraps his arms around him. It’s like walking into a sauna: Kaoru has the impression of being slammed by a great wall of heat, and when he pulls away he sees something glittering and hectic in Toshiya’s eyes. The warmth of his skin is something chemical; his scent is different. His voice has broken into a foggy croak that’s appealing but disorientating, and even after he pulls away Kaoru can feel the heat of him: like a star, he’s burning.
“Look,” he says in a hum, addressing his audience, “Look, this is who I was telling you about; this is the birthday boy; this is Kaoru.”
He talks in jitters. His hair is wet with sweat and when he looks at Kaoru, his smile has slid out of place. Behind it, there is something lost.
He pulls his shirt off over his head. He takes Kaoru’s hand and says, “Swim with me.”
>> to Chapter Five >>
