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andrew_in_drag) wrote2012-11-29 11:28 pm
Superstar: 2/??
Author:
andrew_in_drag Pairing: Kaoru x Toshiya
Rating: mature
Warnings: AU, slash, rock 'n roll excess
Previously: 1
Synopsis: He's more than a superstar. He's an idol, a hero, a god...
As teenagers, Kaoru and Toshiya share a dream: to get famous or die trying. When the opportunity arises, Kaoru betrays his friend to chase his future, but years later Toshiya is the star - and the lifestyle has him heading towards ruin...
Notes: Not much to say about this except that I will try to keep the daily updates coming, but my life is very busy and Canadian, so there might be a few gaps.
CHAPTER TWO:
From the minute his spaceship landed, I was his biggest fan.
Never mind the boy in my bedroom; I never spoke to him again. I collected stories about Toshiya the way other kids collected coins or stamps; the way those rich weirdoes collect bad artworks or old wines.
In my head I filled scrapbooks. I found out that he’d moved from Nagano because he’d been kicked out of his old school, and though nobody exactly knew why, the rumour was that he’d been found in a compromising position with a teacher.
I liked him already.
He lived with his grandmother, like I did, his mother’s mother, only his was no weak and docile old woman; when I was growing up, Toshiya’s grandmother was the neighbourhood witch.
As chance would have it, his grandfather was old Nakamura. A witch-hunter if there ever was one. I waited with bated breath to find out whether or not Toshiya had heard the rumours about the cowshed. I had a recurring fantasy in which he cornered me in the field and asked me to perform a re-enactment.
Toshiya became a celebrity in every corner of our school. He confused the teachers and therefore scared them; he sat in his classes as silent as a mouse but still, somehow, as disruptive. He became a common fixture of the corridors, just waiting, hands in pockets or arms folded. There always seemed to be this secret little smile on his face, like he was mulling over some great inner joke that, everybody suspected, they were the butt of.
In his first week of school, he begged and wheedled and cajoled the principal into letting us have our own soccer team. He then steadfastly refused to join it, and when the boys were practising, he would linger around the edges of the field and smoke cigarettes and smirk. There was a look on his face that confirmed that he could have run circles around all of them, if he wanted to – but he didn’t.
The school erected two goalposts, traced the field in white markings, put up bleachers. I got in the habit of watching the soccer team, myself, always sat a respectable distance away from Toshiya, of course – just in case he got the wrong idea…
Actually, I’d given up. I had decided that whatever magic he had within him was far beyond my own, and so I dismissed him as an impossibility. I’m glad I did that. If I hadn’t finally started to ignore him then he wouldn’t have leant over to me and said
“What are you looking so stuck up about?”
“Huh?”
He was wearing sunglasses, in winter. He hooked them off and grinned at me, cigarette tucked snugly between his fingers.
“You heard. You’re not jealous of them, are you?” he gestured towards the field with the slightest flick of his head. “Look at them. They’re like a herd of fucking cattle. I’m surprised cobwebs haven’t grown over those goalposts.”
“No,” I said defensively. “Why are you watching? Thinking about the star you could have been?”
He snorted, but I know I didn’t imagine it: he shot me a quick, appreciative little look.
“They wish. They need somebody to pop the cherry on those goals, but it’s not going to be me.” His eyes flickered up and down, taking me in but never resting. “I’m going to be famous.”
He offered me a cigarette. I took it and leaned into the glow of his lighter, inhaled, and told myself not to cough.
“Me too,” I said.
He smiled.
“You already are famous. I heard about you, Kaoru.” He took a drag from his cigarette and grinned at me. “You were caught on my grandpa’s farm…so it goes.”
“My bedroom, actually,” I countered. “Not that it matters. And you were caught in a classroom.”
“In the woods, actually,” he parroted lazily, “Not that it matters.”
“With a—”
“With my geography teacher.”
“Wearing—”
“My sister’s school uniform.” He leant back against the bleachers, stretching his back like a cat, “What, did you read the fucking press release?”
I don’t know what it was – maybe just that way he sprawled out, just the right degree of unstudied, or maybe just the tone of his voice – that lazy, don’t-care tone – but I leant forwards suddenly, seized by inspiration, and my neglected cigarette burned away between my fingers because I had too much to say.
“You wish there was a press release, don’t you?” I asked quickly. “And interviews, and cameras. You wish it was something you could give an autograph for. You’re not happy unless everybody in your little world knows your name.”
He was quiet. For the first time since he’d walked into my life, he looked just a little uncertain.
“Are you?” I added, a little lamely, trying to jerk an answer out of him. “Because if you are – I mean, it’s alright. Because I’m the same. That’s what I mean. I’m the same as you.”
“The same as me?” he asked slowly. “What am I, if you’re the same?”
He wasn’t looking at me. I swallowed. I don’t think I’ve ever felt more nervous than I did on that day.
“The kind of person who…” I bit my lip, “The kind of person who’s going to leave this town, and never come back. You’re going to leave this place. With me.”
He ditched his cigarette.
“Freak,” he said gently, “I thought you’d never ask.”
And he smiled at me so sweetly it took my breath away.
From that moment onwards, we were inseparable. There was no Kaoru and no Toshiya, no me and no I: there was simply an us, a them that served as all the definition we needed. I fell into him like deep water.
He told me about growing up in Nagano: about how the mountains looked in the winter, and how the air felt, and how the snow soaked up all the sounds and flattened the landscape and made him itch with boredom. He told me about how it looked like the jagged tops of the mountains were tearing holes in the sky, leaking clouds; he told me about the quiet, and the stillness, and how it made him want to scream.
“And here?” I asked.
He ground his cigarette out against the frozen winter soil.
“Worse,” he said.
I heartily agreed. Our little village was farmland, and unproductive farmland at that: the earth was dusty and the winters were too long and too dry. Like the plants, I felt starved there. Toshiya was my only sunshine, and I grew towards him. Once I stopped being scared of him, I learnt how to make him laugh; quite unlike the dry cackle he reserved for those he thought little of, his real laugh was a full, genuine, happy sound that betrayed his youth. When you got to looking at him, his eyes were young, too. Back then, I thought he was such a grown up; now, in my memories, I can finally see that he really was only a boy.
He was a beautiful boy, though. Sometimes I felt like I only got him to myself as much as I did because everybody else was so confused by him; by the way he was pretty like a girl at the same time as being handsome like a boy, the perfect balance of both. When he painted his nails and grew his hair long, and when he darkened his already expressive eyes with layers of black liner, he could be a girl enough to fool. The first time I saw him in a dress, I gaped, and he grinned at my shyly and gave me a gentle punch to the upper arm.
“You think I can do this?” he asked me softly, “On stage? You think everybody would laugh at me?”
At that time, I was eighteen and he was fifteen. He stood in the dim light of my bedroom and his hands self-consciously flattened the garment to the contours of his body; I don’t think he even knew that he was irresistible. I took in long legs, a slender waist; he stood and tried not to fidget whilst my eyes drank him in, every perfect inch of him.
“They won’t laugh,” I managed to say. “Nobody – nobody would laugh.”
“But if they do?” he asked me, and grinned. “No, I know. I don’t care if they laugh. I’ll deal with it.” He nudged a shoulder against mine, and his hair tickled as it swept over my collarbone. I felt him smile. “There’s nothing else to do. Just take it like a man.”
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already like the setting, how K sits in the crowd, unable to draw his attention from that smile, that shine. it literally sucked me in and now i'm waiting how they go on and what will be, when they leave town, and wether they do shine together without stealing another's light.
Love it.
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I felt so terrible about discontinuing On A Highway, but I just hit such a wall. It's made me so nervous to write again! But I couldn't fight it any longer :)
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