House of Cards: 8/??

[andrew_in_drag]

Title: House of Cards
Author: andrew_in_drag
Rating: NC-17
Pairings: Kyo/Toshiya, Kaoru/Toshiya, Die/Shinya, Aoi/Uruha
General Warnings: AU, slash, violence, language, yakuza theme, character death
Chapter Warnings: slash
Previously: The Prodigy | The Rent Boy | The Escort | The Imposter | The Professional | The Shateigashira | The Bargain | The Addict
Notes: this is the prequel to Protect Me. For the yakuza terminology and hierarchy that I'm working with, please see here. I'm also currently on my road trip, so this was written on the way and posted here in glorious Seattle! I also don't have my photoshop capabilities with me right now, so an appropriate chapter heading picture will have to wait. Sawwwree!


When a young prostitute is found with blood on his hands, he catches the eye of the Inagawa clan's prodigy and quickly finds himself tangled up within Osaka's criminal underworld. Taken into a yakuza house and pimped by the mysterious shateigashira, he is desperate for any means of escape - but in a house of cards, can anybody really be trusted?

CHAPTER EIGHT: THE ROOKIE

He was a curious mix.

His eyes were young, but wise; he appeared knowing and yet naïve all at once. His police uniform still had just enough stiffness about the sleeves to look new, and the way he stuck by the superintendent's elbow made his inexperience seem painful and obvious.

“This was not a random killing,” he said, and the superintendent nodded encouragingly.

“Good. You can see that because...”

“There's no obvious motivation for the crime. Nothing's missing from the house, and the victim's family wasn't disturbed. There are security cameras around the property, but all of them were deactivated for the duration of the – the killing. Deactivated, but not broken.”

“Good, Kaoru. Very good. Now what can you tell me about the perpetrator?”

Kaoru frowned thoughtfully.

“Japanese male,” he said carefully. “Somebody prepared, and unknown to the victim. And younger.”

“Younger? Why?”

Kaoru hesitated.

“I think this was professional,” he said. “I think this was a hire job.”

The superintendent nodded proudly, removing his hat and swiping a hand over his shining bald spot. When he smiled, he looked younger. He had a rather wrinkled, weathered face that only seemed to fall into place when he was happy.

“Very nice. Forensics thought so too.” He clapped Kaoru on the shoulder in a fatherly gesture, “Not bad for a rookie. Keep it in line and I might have myself a protégé.” The superintendent paused. “The only thing is,” he continued, “The victim was a major string-puller in the Inagawa-kai, but this doesn't look like some gang killing. There are ways of doing things – ways that they have. A code.”

“So it's not gang related?”

The superintendent smiled again, but wearily.

“I didn't say that.”

Kaoru nodded slowly, understanding. The two of them were standing in a bedroom that was fit for an heir, but now there was blood splattered over the brocade walls and a sheet-covered body in the centre of the rug. It was Kaoru's first dead body. He stared hard at that rug, trying to memorise the intricacies of the pattern so it would be burned into his mind forever.

I will catch the person who did this, he thought to himself. I will look through every single profile and comb through every single clue, until I catch the person who did this.

Ambition rushed through him like a sweet and powerful drug. He closed his eyes and imagined it: rising through the ranks, cleaning up the city.

I will catch the person who did this.

The time will come, and I will know.

The night had slipped shut quietly, like a door, and locked the past away behind it.

Sitting alone by the window, Kyo blinked himself out of his trance. It seemed he'd been sitting for only a few minutes, but in reality it had been hours. The night had fallen so suddenly: the curtain in the theatre, dusty and dim. The first act was over, and now the next one would begin.

His reflection in the dark window offered no answers, and Kyo sighed, rubbing at his forehead tiredly. There was a headache building up inside him like a storm, howling behind his eyes; he felt exhausted, but he knew sleep would take a long time to come.

The house had fallen silent, though. The daytime voices had died out and the only sounds were the old building settling, or breathing, and creaking on its bones. The clock above the mantelpiece read half past two, but that didn't matter. To Kyo, it was infinitely late, the kind of late where morning might really never come again.

He felt a kind of squeezing ache, as if he was bleeding somewhere deep down inside. He could have yelled for hours.

Finally, he stood up from his chair and padded into the kitchen to make a cup of tea. The clock there still read half past two. He rubbed his eyes stubbornly.

“Am I losing my mind?” he said aloud.

For the first time in years, he was conscious of wanting to go home. He took in the dim floor below him and the darkness of the walls and the hulking shapes of the cabinets, born aloft like ghosts in the darkness.

“It's all black and white,” he whispered, and smiled suddenly. “Without the white.”

Without so much as filling the kettle, he turned and left the room. His mind mapped out the dark corridors and steered him: he could have made the walk blindfolded. He didn't know where he was going, exactly, but later it would seem that he had made the decision.

He pulled back the deadbolt and slid the door open smoothly. He had stopped by the cell on enough nights to know that Toshiya slept like a bird, his head tucked against himself and covered by the sleek fall of his hair. Deliberately, he stepped over the threshold and closed the door behind him. The window shade was a black square surrounded by a glittering outline of moonlight; his eyes searched the dark room for the other, smaller patch of darkness that hid the beauty of Toshiya's face from his watchful eyes.

He felt strange. Charged. It was a feeling he had never consciously experienced before: every single cell in his body seemed to be humming and buzzing and connecting to the others in a way they never had before. He felt superhuman. Abnormal, as if he had undertaken some dramatic transformation. At once he felt both powerful and weakened, as if all that charge inside him might surge: for the first time in years, he did not feel in control.

He knelt down behind Toshiya's sleeping body and touched the younger man's arms, just gently. His skin was cool. Kyo's hands slipped easily down over elbows and wrists, led by the smoothness of his skin. One long limb was cut into abruptly by the cuff and Kyo enjoyed that, the hard and soft together; it made his grip tighten. Toshiya stirred.

“What?” he whispered drowsily, “What's going on?”

“I don't know,” Kyo said, and realised that it was true. Black hair fell away from a pale neck, and without thinking Kyo kissed the skin he found there. It felt good. He closed his eyes and felt drunk in a way he had not felt in years: room spinning, ears humming. Head on the ground, feet on the ceiling. He felt like a monster.

Smiling.

“Yoshimizu's dead,” he said, and felt Toshiya's shoulders tense slightly under his hands.

“I know,” the younger man whispered in response.

“Murdered.”

There was a pause perhaps just a second long, but it felt like hours in the darkness.

“Why?”

The handcuff clicked as it was loosened and slipped off.

“It was his time.” Kyo hesitated. “If you try to run, I have to kill you.”

“I know.”

He felt Toshiya turn towards him, something fluid in the dimness. “I won't run.”

Kyo felt something inside him then, like a kind of unravelling or a slipping away: a loosening, as if some great heavy chain inside him had been yanked free. Toshiya's skin was so very, very soft. He didn't know the last time he had touched something that soft, and it made him feel clumsy: it infuriated him.

“Lie down,” he said, brusquer than he intended. “Please.”

Toshiya did so.

“Are you sad?” he asked interestedly. He was aware that his heart was going a mile a minute, a rabbit skip, but he felt strangely calm.

Kyo didn't answer, but his hands pressed themselves gently around Toshiya's hips. He could feel how the younger man's body responded to his touch, curving upwards like a shell on a black beach; he flattened his palm against Toshiya's belly slowly, as if hypnotised. His eyes were open, but not seeing. He looked like a sleepwalker.

“What do you want me to do?”

“Nothing,” Kyo said, his voice strangely broken up, “You don't have to do anything.” Carefully, he bent down and rested his cheek against that smooth skin. It was as if Toshiya's body was a hot bath that he was lowering himself into by degrees: hands, cheek, lips. He kissed the skin below his navel and felt how he shivered.

It was comforting and he wanted comfort; it was sweet and he wanted sweetness. With every careful touch he could feel all the spite and staticky worry inside him ebb away like a tide, back and forth and growing steadily more distant, and he heard with a sudden and shocking intimacy Toshiya's heartbeat, and his breathing. He heard the nervous dryness in his throat when Toshiya swallowed; when he licked his lips anxiously and opened them to speak.

“Lie down with me,” he whispered.

His eyes in the dark room were young and scared looking, and Kyo sat up.

“No.”

“Why not?”

“You're too young.”

“I'm nineteen.”

Kyo's lips twisted in a wry smile.

“A child.”

Toshiya pushed himself up on his elbows, his smile a challenge.

“So look away,” he suggested. Slowly and deliberately, he pushed his right hand below the waist of his pants. His cock was already half-hard and warm to the touch, flushed with blood, and he wrapped his fingers around it with a small sigh of pleasure.

“You don't sleep,” he said. “I've never seen you eat, or even drink. Don't you fuck?”

Kyo sat back, resting his forearms on his bent knees. A slim shaft of moonlight crossed his face as he moved, and then he was back in shadow.

“Not hookers.”

“You don't want to pay for it?”

Toshiya's other hand was toying with the waistband of his pants, inching them lower and lower on his hips. With a short gasp, he pushed them past his cock and ran a ready finger over its tip.

“I don't care about money,” Kyo said shortly.

Toshiya smiled, his eyes following his hand's movements.

“Then what?”

“I don't want something like that.”

He watched as Toshiya's head tipped back slightly. His breath was coming out faster now, hot from between his parted lips; he smudged a drop of precum over his cock and moaned lowly.

“Why not?” he breathed, and bit his lip fiercely as his hips bucked up into his hand.

Kyo couldn't find the words to explain what he meant, not exactly.

I don't want something I have to share.

I don't want somebody who...

I don't want to feel something I can never have.

“It's weak,” he said instead. “Only weak people go to prostitutes, and I'm not a weak person.”

“Weak people,” Toshiya repeated and laughed quietly, although he cut himself off with a pleasured groan. “Like Yoshimizu?”

Roughly, Kyo caught his hands and yanked them both away, pinning them down by his sides. His own fingers were trembling, and he forced them to still. He could feel his dick stiff between his thighs.

“Don't talk,” he said from between gritted teeth, “About things you don't understand.”

Easily he snapped the handcuff back on, jerking Toshiya's wrist up harshly and twisting it in a direction that made the younger man bite down on his lip to keep from yelping. Even though he was angry he appreciated that: the restraint. He thought how strange it was that Toshiya should be so happy to masturbate in front of him, and yet so unwilling to cry out in pain.

He sat back, his spine ruler straight, and lit up a cigarette. By the trembling flame of his lighter he could see Toshiya's body, twisted up and needy and just begging to be touched.

Kyo exhaled grey smoke.

“Use that free hand to tough yourself,” he said gruffly, “And I'll cut it off.”

Breathe in, breathe out.

“I've got all night.”