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andrew_in_drag) wrote2013-06-24 08:39 pm
House of Cards: 12/??
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: none
Previously: The Prodigy | The Rent Boy | The Escort | The Imposter | The Professional | The Shateigashira | The Bargain | The Addict | The Rookie | The Long Night | The Lights | The Chase
Notes: this is the prequel to Protect Me. For the yakuza terminology and hierarchy that I'm working with, please see here.
Sorry this took so long AGAIN. I got really sick and it bummed me out entirely. I fiiiinally feel inspired again, although this chapter did come out weirdly intense. Also, Kaoru's back! Just kidding - he never left.
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 TWELVE: THE BROTHEL
In his apartment he had thin stiletto knives that were sharp enough to cut through bone. He honed their points before use on a whetstone block.
He had long-range rifles with sights that he tweaked daily for accuracy, sights marked with crosses and dented from the repeated manipulations of his screwdriver.
He had swords, but they were collected, not used.
He had guns in their multitudes, poisons in glass vials – stoppered not with corks, as in the movies, but by rubber plugs that formed a vacuum seal, for safe travelling. He had drugs in pills and in powders; none recreational. He wouldn't touch things like that. He had respect for the body – his own in particular. Bodies were so fragile; so easily destroyed. One tap, it seemed, and they'd fly into a million pieces.
But Reita's favourite weapon by far was the first one he had ever received, a Smith and Wesson Model 29 with a six inch nickel-plated barrel. Double action: no pointless cocking of the hammer. A six-shooter; and when had six ever been not enough? Dirty Harry's revolver. “The most powerful gun in the world,” Clint Eastwood had called it in that gravelled Old West crunch of a voice.
He had to admit that the Model 29 made him feel good. Its virtues were limitless. Above all, it was a popular gun, carving the same popular groove into every bullet it shot. It was such a popular gun that attempted identification from those bullet grooves would be madness.
More importantly, it would not be relied upon in a court.
Reita was a very, very careful person. He checked everything, thought of everything – noticed everything.
Right now there was a man, a young man, following him home. He had been shadowing him cautiously through every street he turned into and every crowd he tried to lose himself in: his follower was inexpert but determined.
Reita took a deep breath and folded himself into the dark mouth of a garbage-smelling alley, ducking quickly behind a row of industrial dumpsters and breathing shallowly through his mouth to cope with their stink.
The two things Reita knew how to do: kill people, and disappear. He placed a hand over his gun and waited.
Stepping inside the brothel was like stepping into a dance hall in which the party has just finished, and finding the floor strewn with abandoned cocktail napkins and all the signs of recent and total evacuation.
The building operated behind the façade of a hotel, and Toshiya stood in what he supposed was the lobby: a wide, shabby room outfitted with several mismatched armchairs and low end tables, and a horseshoe-shaped desk of some wood too improbably cocoa-coloured and glossy to be anything but fake. Flowers one day too old swooned in vases, their petals drooping; they shed a thick orange pollen over the surfaces and floors, like a circular tide line of dandruff. The only movement came from the cut-glass ashtrays littered around; smashed out cigarettes smouldered their last in every single one of them. The smoke curled from a mound of stinking butts: the ashtrays had not been emptied in some time.
Of course, Toshiya did not stand at the desk and ring the ancient brass service bell; flanked carefully by Die and the man who had been waiting in the lobby, he was swept into a side hallway and led briskly up a flight of stairs. The steps and walls were bare concrete, the same flat grey; customers, he supposed, must use the elevator. Each and every door they encountered featured a small keypad where a numerical code had to be punched in to gain entry. The man he didn't know took charge of the code. He angled his back towards Toshiya, both his hands cupped greedily around his secret.
“They're never unlocked,” he declared apologetically, his dark eyes darting to search for a change of expression on Toshiya's face. “The electric locks used to be rigged up so they'd override if the fire alarms went, but we had to stop all that; too many people smoking in their rooms.”
His careful smile sagged momentarily. “I wish they wouldn't,” he said, “The smell gets into the wallpaper and you can't ever get it out.”
It seemed to upset him. He led Toshiya and Die through another door that opened into a narrow, low-ceilinged corridor that was lit by delicate-looking glass sconces: a dim light and hazy but ultimately warm light. Underfoot there was carpet of a faded red, flattened in wide semicircles to mark where each of the wooden doorways down the hall had opened and closed. There were a lot of doors; Toshiya guessed the rooms beyond them were small.
“So what if there's a fire?” he asked finally.
“Burn in your room.”
All three of them turned at the interruption, and the man Toshiya didn't know made a huffing sound that was halfway between annoyance and polite amusement.
“Aoi—” he said helplessly, and turned back to Toshiya. “What a thing to say.”
Aoi lounged in his doorway, gazing at them challengingly. He wore only a black dressing gown of some faux silk, tied carelessly about his waist. It trailed long, fraying threads from the hitched-up sleeves, and the hem was drooping.
Toshiya noticed, in the dim sort of way that you notice the colour of somebody's eyes or their hair, that there was a livid red lovebite on his neck. A cigarette burned slowly between his fingers.
“Oh, Aoi,” the man Toshiya didn't know said sadly, “Can't you at least smoke out your window?”
“Can't you eat me?” Aoi responded sweetly, and turned his lazy smile on Toshiya. “So: you're here. I wondered when I'd be seeing your face.”
“Missed me, did you?” His voice was sharp, but Aoi's smile didn't falter.
“You're cocky now,” the prostitute said softly, “But that'll change. Have they told you about the pits yet? Have they told you when they'll be sending you down there? How'd you like it, Toshiya, with me or with somebody else here; you're moved out now, you're one of us, so what do you think? Ass to ass with me? They have to put condoms on the dildoes, they've been used so much they'll never come clean, and you think you'll be up on a nice high stage but you're wrong; you're down there with them, you can feel their breath on you—”
“Die!”
Aoi's eyes had started growing slightly pink around the edges as he spoke, and he sagged forwards so much in the doorway that it seemed he would have fallen if Die hadn't been there to take him by the shoulders. It was the man Toshiya didn't know who had called his name; now, Die shot him a quick, unreadable look before tucking Aoi more securely under his arm and steering him gently back into his room.
“We'll continue alone,” the unknown man told Toshiya awkwardly. “Sorry about that. You'll get used to Aoi; he's not a bad person, really.”
Toshiya's only response was to quietly ask what the pits were.
“The pits...” the man frowned, “It's not really called that; it's just a nickname. It's a – like a little club, downstairs – way downstairs, I mean, in the basement.”
“A club.”
The man seemed to be unable to meet Toshiya's eyes. He hesitated in front of a door that had a laminated paper placard bearing Toshiya's name freshly glued to it.
“A club,” he repeated. “Where sometimes, there are performances.”
Toshiya felt a horribly pale, heavy feeling fill his limbs, as if they had been poured full of some molten metal.
“Sex shows,” he supplied, almost inaudibly.
The man didn't look at him, but after a moment or two he nodded.
“The boys work together,” he said. “With toys, sometimes, or props. Don't let Aoi worry you, though; everything is very clean, very clean, thoroughly disinfected, and we pride ourselves on running much – much more above-board than a lot of sex shows. We never use children, or animals. This is for gentlemen.”
Toshiya felt he was making himself vulnerable in a way he might regret for the rest of his life, but he couldn't help it; large tears of panic swam over his vision and blurred the world; he could feel the colour sliding from his face like the blood was pouring out of him through a spigot. He dropped to his knees, not falling forwards but crumpling slowly, straight down.
“Mister,” he said, his voice a child's, “Please. Please, no. I can't do that.”
“Oh, er, now, Toshiya—”
Toshiya gripped his hand fiercely, staring up at him through tear-filled eyes.
“You don't want to do this forever,” he said desperately, “Why would you; it's no life; not for a person like you; you're nice, you're good, I can feel it. We can get away together. I'll stay with you forever if you get me out, I promise, oh please—”
“Toshiya...”
He was being dragged to his feet. He allowed it. He saw a flash of red hair and realised that Die was back, straight from propping up one whore to propping up another, like a man desperately sandbagging against a flood.
“It's alright,” Die said, a firm and reassuring voice in his ear, “You're not – you're not doing that.”
He made his body a crutch, shoring up Toshiya carefully as he turned to face the man, who looked utterly shocked.
“He's not to be doing that,” he said clearly, “That's orders from the boss. The boss doesn't want him doing shows.”
The man Toshiya didn't know looked at Die strangely.
“It's an exclusivity thing,” the redhead explained awkwardly. “If you look – the letter he sent you. It's all in there. He's not doing shows, alright?” He paused. “I'll need your word on that. It's really important to Ky— to the boss.”
“Right. Right, of course.” The man flashed Toshiya a tense smile, patting his hand absently. “There you go, see? You won't be performing.”
He knew he should have been reassured, but Toshiya could only manage the weakest smile. He also knew that he should pull away from Die, stand on his own two feet, but somehow he couldn't bring himself to leave the shelter of that warm, strong arm.
Pretend care. The kind of care you give to a fragile and valuable object: a crystal vase, an ancient artwork; something pretty, delicate, empty, teetering alone on a wide and lonely pedestal.
It was raining.
Kyo watched it quietly. He had always liked watching the rain fall; he found it soothing; mesmeric even. He was sat in the shrine, cross-legged and mostly protected by its steeply tiled overhang, letting the weather lull him into a trance.
Toshiya was gone.
The rain made a rushing noise that sounded like people whispering behind their hands. It was the kind of rain he liked: heavy and straight, thudding straight into the ground in a series of bass thumps; flattening grass and hammering windows, pounding the loose dirt into rivers of mud. Like a river: destructive but serene. Kyo closed his eyes and offered his upturned face to the clouds.
Rain like steel coils slamming into the earth.
Gone.
He had thought the house would feel bigger, but it didn't; it seemed smaller, somehow. The walls were closing in and the ceilings were dropping and everywhere he turned there were things, pointless furnishings that he wanted to tear to pieces. He wanted to smash every chair to sticks and rip every curtain to threads; wanted to burn them, dance around the fire like a wild man and then start again, fresh empty house, calm and tame as a monastery.
And he would be a modern monk, shaven-headed and wise.
A modern monk who deprived himself of everything and lived blamelessly.
Rather than a gangster with a cracked and shaded set of morals that he dusted off every once in a while; rather than a glorified thug with an eight o'clock time-slot at the best brothel in Southern Osaka.
He sighed and turned his face away from the tranquil gaze of the slender stone Buddha.
The brothel with its floors and floors of sex, its keycodes and secrets; the unspeakable fervour of the pits.
Ash city.
Manic sexsweat.
He lowered his head to the downpour, a hopeless sinner.
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Oh oh oh oh oh!!!!!!!!!!!
Toshiya was sent to work in the brothel? Oh poor baby!
but but but what's going on with poor Aoi and Uru????
<//3
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Well, Uruha will, I mean. Aoi is already here, there and everywhere ;)
Thanks for commenting darlin'!
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I love the strange relationship between all the character especially between Kyo and Toshiya... XD
Thank you thank you thank you!!!!
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I'll try and keep this updated pretty promptly, too. I'm just full of inspiration right now!
Thanks so much for a sweet comment :) x
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And somehow, it seems a lot of things happened! :o that's the kind of chapter that make you squint your eyes, and want to go back to the previous chapter, just to be sure you didn't miss one XD
Things are going to happen. Soon. I can feel it 8D
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Yeah, this was a 'hurry along' sort of chapter. I got so frustrated with writer's block that I realised I had to just make stuff start happening.
PENIS STUFF
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Got to get that D.
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Looks like I might have to bump it up the list and watch it NOW to make sure I don't accidentally steal anything else. Original inspiration came from just researching sex shows (grim). Maybe I read the same things the director of RfaD read ;)
Do they actually show the orgy? Scenes like that can be really upsetting.
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That's exactly my ideal film: well shot, shot through with black humour, and ultimately bleak. Loved it, so thanks for moving it up my list ;) Though that scene was really almost exactly what I was imagining - especially with the crowd-level stage; that was really important to me to include just because of the increased vulnerability.
So I'll have to make my peace with the similarities. It's a really effective scene!
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Once again, nice to see you back, keep up the good work.
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