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andrew_in_drag) wrote2013-05-24 01:44 am
House of Cards: 10/??
Author:
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andrew_in_dragRating: 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 | The Rookie | The Long Night
Notes: this is the prequel to Protect Me. For the yakuza terminology and hierarchy that I'm working with, please see here.
Also, sorry this one took so long. My travels were awesome but I have stacked up some serious jet lag, and due to the unfamiliar germs (I'm guessing) I've been laid up in my sick bed ever since I got back. Watching the rain. England, I missed you.
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 TEN: THE LIGHTS
There's a feeling that most every person experiences at one point in their life; most of them will feel it – at least to some small degree – every day. It manifests itself as a kind of prickling that skitters up the spine and seems to collect in the base of the skull; a kind of pin-like irritation, an itch: the feeling of being watched.
Kyo had always been sensitive to it and he could feel it now, crawling all over him like an insect as he made his way through the dark alleys of the neighbourhood.
The lack of noise bothered him. It wasn't the usual late night quiet. It was somebody else's silence.
He wasn't sure whether somebody really was tailing him through the shadows or else simply thinking about him; sometimes, he knew, a thought could be just as alert and watchful as a stare. He had the impression of grasping hands running all over his body, and shook his head briskly. It was very important to him that he kept on walking in the same steady pace, hands deep in his pockets and his head just slightly lowered: an early chill had descended over the city, a hint of the misty autumn to come, and he felt cold.
In one week it would be October, and the thought of that made his head ache. He remembered a childhood on narrower, lighter streets, tough cobblestones underneath his feet, and a day in October when the open spaces would suddenly be full of people, masked and dressed like sudden time-travellers. He had always known, of course, that it was only pretend: that they were just costumes.
But still, it made him anxious to see the layers of history blurring into each other like that. The past was something he preferred to keep locked up tightly behind him, separated into its own shuttered box of years that slotted in neatly amongst all the other boxes. He liked to think of it that way, with every day and and week and month closed up and ordered, like those little green drawers that house pinned insects in museums; labelled, but ultimately forgotten about. Stretching so far back that nobody could even walk to touch the furthest ones. Only the most perfect specimens ever went on display, and that was no trouble; after all, who ever had such a thing as a perfect day?
After the historical figures, women would come laden with flowers. He remembered that sea of beaming faces; those veils of petals, like a wedding party with nothing but bridesmaids.
The smell of the flowers would fill the streets for days.
A memory dawned on him suddenly, quite out of the blue, of a story his mother had told him when he was very, very young. It was the time shortly after the death of his grandmother, and he remembered it well because he himself had been concerned about dying; it had occurred to him for the first time in his young life that if somebody as concrete and familiar as his grandmother could go...well then, couldn't anybody?
“Little children don't die,” his mother had told him sensibly. “Only old people die.”
And he had asked her something foolish, or perhaps stated it; something about living forever that had made her mouth smile even if her eyes had remained sad.
“Don't you know the story of the man who lived forever?” she asked him. He had taken this as his cue to slide into bed and pull the sheet up to his eyes. He peered over it at her expectantly, and she sat down on the edge of his futon tiredly.
“There once was a man,” she began, her voice taking on those special cadences that lend themselves only to old wives' stories and fairytales, “Who made a deal with a wandering demon that would enable him to live forever.” She paused, settling herself into her tale. “He traded the demon thirty pieces of gold in exchange for the demon's immortality. Im-mor-tality,” she spelled out, watching her young son process the word. “The man thought the demon must have been a fool to let go of something so precious.”
“He was,” Kyo had interjected, and his mother had stroked his hair that meant, gently, hush.
“At first, everything was wonderful for the man. He could walk through fires and be shot by arrows without ever getting hurt, just like a ghost. He got married and had two children: a girl, and a boy to carry on the family name.”
“Like us.”
“Yes, just like us. And he loved his wife and his children. They were a happy, happy family, and everybody in the neighbourhood loved them too. The man had all the friends he could want, and because he never got sick from working too hard, they were very prosperous. They shared all they had, and became adored by the whole village.”
She hesitated, forming her words.
“But, in time, the man started to notice that his wife was looking different. Her face had wrinkles and her hair was grey. His daughter got married and left, and his son was left with nothing to inherit, to roam the world. One by one, his family and friends got old and died. They died so peacefully, it was just like going to sleep, and their souls never suffered again. But the man stayed on the earth. He got older and older, but he never died, and his body was full of pain. He watched all the people on the earth die, until he was left with only the animals, who all feared him – until one day, a mother bird landed on his windowsill, looking for her youngest child.
'I've lost my child,' the bird said, 'Do you know where the children go?'
'No,' said the old man, 'I am an old man and I have forgotten about my children.'
'What about your wife?' the bird asked.
'No,' he said again, 'I am an old man and I have forgotten about my wife.'
'Well,' the bird said, 'Surely your friends will know.'
'No,' the old man sighed, 'I am an old man and I have forgotten all my friends.' And then he realised that he had been foolish, and that he was doomed to be lonely for all eternity because he could not die.”
Her story over, she had smoothed the sheets over him and nodded. “So you see,” she capped it off, “Dying is an important part of life, and you shouldn't be scared of it.”
Kyo had been sleepy by then, but he had sat up a little.
“Couldn't he be friends with the bird, mama?”
“No, son, no; the birds live very different lives than we do.”
“Oh.”
He was quiet for a moment longer, his eyelids drooping.
“Mama?” he said again, his voice drowsy.
“Yes?”
“What did the demon spend the gold on?”
In the dim light of the room he saw her smile; her first real smile of the evening, as she looked down at him.
“Oh, some devilry,” she had said cheerfully, “Some evil act or another.”
It seemed funny to Kyo that such a clear, concrete memory should come swimming into his mind at such a moment. He rounded the corner and came out on a pretty, tree-lined street where all the residences had drives that sloped sharply downwards to compensate for how much higher the road was than the houses. They were old, old houses, built in an old fashion, with outside walkways and gently curving roofs. The stonework had collected a soft green moss in the corners that felt surprisingly dense and velvety, and the house Kyo was heading towards had not a paved driveway but a steep, staggered, scratchy little garden, with stone steps leading down to the engraved entranceway.
Protect the weak, oppose the strong.
His eyes flickered upwards.
Most of the windows in the house were dark, but there was one dim light from the second storey. It peered out from underneath and around the edges of a bamboo window shade, a weak but warm yellow that, Kyo knew, did not come from the ceiling fixture but from a small, old-fashioned lamp that usually sat in the attic, but had been brought in to burn in the corner by the door. It was a light to read by. The window shade caught a fluttering, translucent shadow, barely there and then gone; a fairytale, a nymph, combing its hair with its unaccustomed left hand.
A lamp, and then books, and then a comb.
Luxuries that had been placed within Toshiya's reach.
A child, and then a wife, and then friends.
Things that Kyo had lost.
He turned his eyes away from the dull face of the moon and walked swiftly inside the house, punching in the keycode that only a select few knew: it was cold, and the dark was gathering.
I grew up in Mie.
Finger sign: I...grow up...M-I-E.
Where are you from?
Finger sign: Where...you...from?
Die's signs were blunt-thumbed and stiff, but they were correct, and Shinya granted him a slight smile.
O-S-A-K-A, he spelled swiftly, his own movements smooth and elegant. He watched as Die's face took on a frowning shape that he could not read. Unconsciously, he mirrored it, furrowing his brow in what Die could easily recognise as confusion.
“Slower?” Die asked, and Shinya signed it again. Osaka. Die picked it up, that time.
“You go so fast,” the redhead grinned. “I guess signing for me is like talking for you.”
Shinya shrugged. He liked sign language. It was brief, stripped down and methodical; it had its own rules and he knew them well. He had never met anybody who had wanted to learn it before. He didn't know why he had planned to pick it up, himself; it may have allowed his mouth to stay quiet but it was still talking, really. Apart from the smooth kinaesthetic logic of it all, he couldn't understand the appeal.
A strange thought: I have never needed or wanted other people. So...why?
Thinking about things like that made his mind's voice seem to grow more distant, as though it was a thousand leagues under the sea. When it had become apparent that something was wrong, he had shoplifted some abnormal psychology books and spent countless unhappy afternoons shrivelled at his desk, picking through itchy words and trying to diagnose himself.
There had been chapter and chapters on early childhood development and parental influences. Shinya had marked his place with his finger and thought quickly of his parents: his absent father; his...
He couldn't think of a word to describe his mother.
When his father had first left he had read the dictionary. It had been the only thing concise and factual enough to hold his attention.
Still he had no word for her.
His fingers spelled it over and over, osakaosakaosaka, and Die caught them in a large but careful grip. For somebody so tall and spiky-framed, his movements were strangely delicate.
“Like humming,” he said, and Shinya cocked his head a little to the side.
“Or singing,” Die elaborated, “When there's a song in your head and you start humming or singing it without realising. That's what it makes me think of, when you're daydreaming and you start to sign like that. Like you're humming a song with your hands.”
Shinya sat back a little, disturbed. All through his childhood and most of his adolescence, he had allowed himself to retreat inside the safe, comforting world of his own head, where everything clicked together like gears and spun to sane, logical conclusions. Only in there, he had thought, were things real.
But in that moment, underneath the attic eaves and lit peculiarly from the side, Die seemed real as well.
He seemed as real as anything ever had been or ever would be, and the strange thing was that his realness wasn't causing Shinya's realness to fade into the darkness, the way it usually would. Instead, it was bringing it outward. Something strong was emerging.
Kiss, he signed, and bit his lip. Die was still clutching his hands, and Shinya made the little shift that laced their fingers together. Slowly, watching Die's face very cautiously, he pulled Die's arms around him like his own sweet shadow. He caught that look: that same frown, that same confusion. Something he recognised, this time.
“Yes,” he said, and imagined that word like a little bullet hole of light into a dark world.
When he kissed Die, something changed inside his small, personal universe. It was still the same mechanics and codes, numerals and facts, but now there were...differences.
Careful hands resting on his lower back.
Soft lips on his.
Roads, leading out.
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I was actually kind of ill when I wrote that part, and I think being lightheaded was making me write more whimsically >.>
Really though, thank you so much for commenting so regularly. It means a lot to me!
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I love your writing, of course I will comment :)
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For some reason, Kyo as a child is extremely sweet <3 but be already seemed far more clever than kids his own age. Also, I liked how he asked what the Devil did with the gold he got out of the man :p already interested about details~
And aw, look at this, Die and Shinya are kissing <3 I've been waiting for that <3