BREAK THE LIMITS: 4/33

[andrew_in_drag]

Title: Break the Limits
Author: andrew_in_drag 
Pairing: Yoshiki x hide
Rating: mature
Warnings: foul language, yaoi, rock 'n roll excess
Genre: AU to bandfic
Note: I first wrote this fic about three (?) years ago, when I was still hallelujah_hide. Oddly enough, I still like it, so I thought I would move it here to my new journal. 
Synopsis: May 1998: Yoshiki Hayashi breaks down in a temple as he tries to take in the news that has changed his life forever - Hideto Matsumoto, the man he has been in love with for seventeen years, is dead. As the other mourners try to comfort him, Yoshiki finds himself falling back through history - to the day when it all began; the day when he met a boy who would, truly, break the limits...

CHAPTER FOUR:

“Memory, you never let me cry,

And you, you never said goodbye…”

– ‘Tears’, X

To this day, it scares me how easily I fell under Hideto’s spell. Before meeting him, I’d never put a foot wrong in my life, but all of a sudden he had me doing something – well, something quite unlike me, to say the least.

Wanna do something naughty, Yoshi?

I honestly couldn’t tell you how much my heart jumped when he first said those words to me. I knew straight away that my answer was yes – yes, I did. More than anything. All I could do was nod, and he wound his stubborn fingers around mine as he pulled me to my feet.

“Can you come see me at work tomorrow?” he asked excitedly, and I blinked at him.

“Sure,” I replied hesitantly, my words stumbled, “I mean…sure.”

He flicked his fringe from his eyes, his smile as devious as a smile ever was.

“And…and sleep over after, Yo. Please.”

I’d never been around Hide’s before, and had no idea what to picture. However, I assumed he had a bed, and the thought of him sprawled over it was a very pleasant one indeed. I was very, very lucky that my parents valued a quiet life; to gain permission to go over to Hide’s house, I wouldn’t have to stamp my feet too hard.

He apparently interpreted my lack of speech as a huge, silent ‘yes’, and squeezed my fingers eagerly.

“You’re the best, Yoshi! My manager’s so clueless he wouldn’t notice if I danced naked in front of him. I went to work drunk before and he didn’t guess a thing, not even when I set off the alarm by falling over behind the till. Have you ever been drunk?”

He said this quickly, each word running into the next, and I had to slow his voice down in my head.

“Is it like pot?” I asked innocently, and he surveyed me with an appraising look in his quick, dark eyes, deciding whether or not I was being serious. Figuring I was, he managed to calm himself a little, and he laid a hand on my arm.

“Sure you’re game?” he checked – although for what, I didn’t know. Aside from the fact that he hadn’t told me his plans, I would have followed him to hell and back.

“Let’s do it,” I laughed, throwing my head back, “Oh fuck, let’s do it!”

The next day happened to be a Saturday – which, for me, meant I was totally free all day. What I’d managed to forget, however, was that Hideto actually worked in a supermarket, a train ride away from where he lived. He also had his after school job, of course: running errands on my side of town for Bubbles’/Jumbo’s owner – mainly walking her dog and buying canisters of hairspray. According to him, she used a lot of the stuff. I concluded to myself that he’d successfully managed to track down the two people in the city who would even consider employing a high-school boy with bright pink hair – and, for that, I admired him.

I could tell my general good feelings weren’t shared by my driver, however, as he dropped me off outside the supermarket where Hide spent the best part of his Saturdays. His shift stretched from eight in the morning until five in the afternoon, and I’d managed to find my way there with ten minutes of his shift to spare. We’d been slightly hazy on our plans the night before, Hideto merely scribbling down his address for me and tucking it into my pocket. Because I knew the name of the supermarket, however, I’d phoned around several branches until I’d found the one that did, in fact, include a pink-haired high-school boy with an adorable smile and bottomless eyes amongst their staff.

And how many of those were there in Kanto?

As Hide had told my parents the night before, he lived right on the outskirts of the Kanagawa prefecture. He worked in Tokyo, which was damn convenient since I happened to live right over on the other side of Tokyo, in Chiba. Our school was located in Tokyo, the centre point between us. Perhaps we could meet up on the bay someday, I mused; take my family’s luxury yacht and just go. Head out and never look back.

“Sir,” my chauffeur interrupted my thoughts, “Are you sure it’s safe to leave you here?”

“It’s fine,” I responded, “Thanks for the ride.”

Ever since Hide had thanked my driver, I couldn’t see how I’d managed to be so rude to the man before. To his credit, he acted as if he hadn’t noticed the difference, but as I hopped out of the sleek, black car, I felt better about myself. The afternoon was grey and wintry, a dull stirring in the clouds warning me that rain was on its way – and quite a lot of it – but I knew all that would change once I saw Hide. The street was grubby and the car park outside the place was possibly the least safe place for a car I had ever seen – but that didn’t matter, either. When it came to Hide, nothing did.

The doors opened automatically for me – albeit reluctantly, and with a noise like windscreen wipers on a sticky windshield – and I was greeted by a blast of frigid air. A bucket of water and a mop stood to one side of the doors, next to a collapsed “wet floor” sign and a small display stand of cellophane-wrapped bouquets. Smiling slightly to myself, I selected an unlikely bunch of cattleyas. Their outer petals were a sunny yellow, whilst the inner bloomed blood red; next to the surrounding bunches of whitish stocks, they were vibrant. On second thoughts, I took two bouquets of the stocks, too, wanting to see that same colour contrast in a vase somewhere – somewhere in his room, with his lily-white, silver-adorned fingers gently brushing the colourful petals.

“Yoshi!”

I turned, startled, and broke into a grin to see him waving at me frantically from a checkout, oblivious to the bored-looking woman who was holding her credit card out to him. Another customer, a middle-aged man, watched him as he pumped his pale, skinny arm in the air, the too-big sleeve of his uniform falling down to his shoulder. It was a dark blue, short-sleeved polo shirt, evidently made for somebody quite a few sizes larger, and pinned to it was a tag that read his name in bold roman letters. He was beaming as he took the woman’s card and swiped it, watching me as I joined his queue with my flowers. As soon as the woman had moved on, handing a Clementine to the fussing three-year-old she had next to her, Hide greeted the middle-aged gentleman with a grin, trying not to let his expression waver as the man idly slapped a selection of soft pornographic magazines down in front of him. I hid a smile as he manfully attempted to remain professional – try as he might, his cheeks were flushed, and when he’d finished scanning the straight magazines and found a gay one hidden at the bottom of the small stack, he almost dropped it in surprise. The model on the front had pink hair, I noticed, and I inwardly bristled when the customer gave Hide a nod and a wink, as if of recognition. Now blushing furiously, Hide slid the magazines into a paper bag, handing them over in exchange for a credit card. Hastily he dealt with the transaction and ripped the receipt in half in his haste to wrench it from the machine; crimson, he printed out another, mumbling an apology as he pressed it into the man’s hand. I stepped forwards as he left, handing Hide the flowers and almost melting as he grinned cutely at me through the petals.

“Sick grandmother?” he asked, scanning the barcodes on the cellophane wrappers before looking up at me, one eyebrow quirked, “And they don’t have flowers over in swanky Chiba?”

I smiled to hide my embarrassment. “Actually…”

Hide smelled the flowers rapturously, his eyes closed.

“I filled out an anonymous card requesting that we stock cattleyas,” he admitted, “They’re so pretty. And they’re orchids. They even mean ‘pretty’.”

I paid for them with cash, laughing when he pretended to try and peek into my wallet. He was so cute, so young and so beautiful – I felt like that laugh could make me do anything.

And so together we set out into the cold, windy, litter-flecked world, and Hide’s gentle hands held the flowers as if they were crystal.

We took the train back to Hideto’s home; a rickety collection of six carriages, all past their glory, thundering over tracks smothered by weeds. Even on a Saturday afternoon it was quiet, and we took half a carriage to ourselves. I watched as he tilted his beautiful head towards the window, his feet up on the seat opposite, pointing out the park by the railway line where he sometimes lay and listened to the trains go by. He stroked the flower petals with tentative fingers, smiling at me shyly: he’d never received flowers before, he said. His hands were whiter than the stocks, and his arms looked as delicate as glass where the too-big sleeves of his polo shirt fell around them. He was all points and angles – collarbones that jutted like wing joints, elbows sharp as flint – and it suddenly seemed a marvel to me just how strong a person he was. At that time he had such confidence in himself – an unshakeable self-assurance that turned abuse into applause; slurs into splendour – so much so, he seemed almost invincible, and yet when I looked at him – really looked – I could see just how fragile he was: how positively delicate.

And so, at that time and that moment, I promised myself that I would never, ever hurt him. Later, I would realize that upholding the vow I had made was like trying to keep snow from melting in your hands; later, I would realize that you didn’t have to hit someone to hurt them. A skeleton didn’t have to be shattered for a person to fall apart; the truth could ache like an abscess; when the heart fell to pieces, it hurt more than broken bones ever could.

But still, I promised.

Somebody had to.

The train ride was approximately half an hour long, and I found the rocking motions of the carriages lulled us into a kind of twilight state; we smiled sleepily at each other or out of the window, our legs bridging the gap between our seats.

“We’re here!” he announced excitedly, jolting both himself and I out of our stupors. “C’mon Yoshi, c’mon!” The train hadn’t even stopped moving but he was already leaping out of his seat, lurching impatiently towards the doors and grinning at me. “Come on,” he urged again – to the train, this time, for I had caught up with him. Supporting himself on the handles hanging from the roof of the train, he swung his body back and forth easily. I had to look away when his shirt rode up; when his ass brushed my lower stomach and groin, it suddenly became hard to breathe. Frottage on a train, I thought wildly – it was hardly unheard of, but I’d never known that it could be performed unwittingly.

“Hide—” I risked pushing back against him for a moment before stumbling backwards, cursing myself for my foolishness.

“Yoshi!” The train had stilled beneath me. “Did you fall because it stopped so suddenly?” Hide’s grin widened teasingly as he offered me a hand up, “Awww, Yoshi—!”

“Shut up,” I murmured, smiling embarrassedly, and he used our joined hands to pull me off the train – the platform was a foot or so below us, leaving me feeling uncomfortably as if I’d left my stomach in my seat – onto the platform. A bevy of irate passengers pushed past us: several of them performed exaggerated double-takes when they passed Hideto, making me chuckle as I dragged him to the side.

“They don’t even think you’re normal here,” I laughed, breathing in the smoke-and-shampoo smell of his hair, and playfully he biffed me on the shoulder.

“Who wants to be ordinary?” he challenged, “Last one to my apartment is a middle-aged businessman who hates his life!”

For a moment I watched him as he scampered down the grubby, litter-flecked platform, but then I gathered my wits and gave chase. He was dancing around pigeons and puddles, the ends of his pants catching dandelion clocks and shedding their buoyant seeds in his wake.

“Oh Hide,” I laughed, catching him around the middle, “You’ll never be ordinary.”

We completed my sentence in unison, “Thank God!”

Excitable as Hide was, he had calmed down some by the time we’d reached his apartment building. I pretended not to notice the surreptitious looks he was slipping me…well. I surmised that he thought they were surreptitious, but subtlety was not one of Hide’s strong points. I found his bluntness charming, but no doubt he was cursing it as he slid me sideways glances, his gaze turning to his feet or to the sky whenever I looked back. The streets he was leading me through seemed dirty and unfinished; a litter-picker stood in his grimy overalls, leaning against the wall of a pawnshop as he grimly savoured the last of a hand-rolled cigarette; we passed a rubbish bin with an oily orange fire sprouting from its midst; most of the buildings were high-rises, covered with graffiti scribbles as high as a human’s arm could reach. I stopped short in the street, gaping at a man covered with yakuza tattoos, and Hide swore under his breath as he tugged me back in step with him.

“Don’t stare,” he warned, “It’s even impolite where you live!”

And here? I wanted to ask, but his hand felt good on mine so I didn’t. We stopped at a busy crossing where somebody had sprayed black paint over the Walk/Don’t Walk sign, and I was clueless until a car with a missing hubcap and broken window stopped for us. Clicking his tongue distractedly, Hide ushered us across the road and stopped sharp.

“Here we are,” he said abruptly, a slight frown on his face as he eyed the towering apartment block before us. Made entirely from grey concrete, balconies stuck out oddly like broken teeth, and some of the ground-floor windows were broken.

“Okay?” I asked gently, and he gave a determined nod. 

“Fine,” he breezed, “I just spaced out, sorry.” Despite his assurances, he seemed to steel himself slightly before pushing open the door, and with unexpected formality he held it open for me. It made me feel strange, as if he’d realized the difference in our social status and was acting upon the knowledge. Inside, it was bare but clean, and in silence he stabbed the button for the elevator.

“What floor?” I asked, and he hesitated.

“Nine. Look, Yoshi…you aren’t uncomfortable here, are you? Don’t—” he cut off my attempt at ignorance, “Don’t pretend you don’t know what I mean.”

I’d tried acting unaware, and a serious response might have made things more awkward. I decided that there was only one thing for it – flippancy. Rolling my eyes, I curled an arm around his waist and pulled him into the lift, depressing the button for the ninth floor with my elbow.

“When have I ever given you the impression that I’m a snob?” I enquired, leaning against the elevator wall. “Hide, you never worry about what people think. Why now?”

“I don’t know,” he responded miserably, “I think it’s because I don’t usually care about impressing normal people. But you – I can’t impress you!”

“Hide…” I cupped his cheek in my hand, “When have I ever given you that impression, either?”

He blinked up at me, and I smiled fondly. “Hide, I don’t know whether it’s the pink hair or the earring or the way you always seem to be smiling, but you’re the most impressive person I’ve ever met.”

Before me, he beamed.

“You like the hair?” he grinned, and the odd feeling that I’d begun to associate with Hide slid over me again – the feeling as if, if I let one inch of self-control slip, my lips would be glued to his faster than you could say sex. Hands trembling, I stepped back, trying to smile reassuringly. All of a sudden, the lift seemed to be moving incredibly slowly.

When we finally finished our lengthy ascent, Hide led me left down the corridor, stopping outside apartment 915 to rummage in his pockets for his keys. Thankfully, because he was wearing his work pants, there were only two possible pockets to search through, and he triumphantly flourished his great bundle of key rings. He fumbled for an aged-looking key of dull gold, sticking it merrily into the lock and twisting so vigorously I thought he might sprain his wrist. He nudged the door open with a hip and shot me a shy little glance before sashaying inside, instantly kicking off his shoes and pulling off his deep-blue work polo.

“I hate uniforms,” he explained, dragging me into his bedroom and dumping the bundle of navy fabric into a laundry hamper, “When I grow up, I wanna do a job with no uniforms at all…” he bent to open a drawer, and I knew I would have given my right hand to stop time then and there. The vertebrae in his back traced a neat line into his pants; his shoulder-blades were sharp enough to cut. I wanted to touch it, all of it, and find out if that skin was as soft as it looked. His shoulders were toned but bony; his arms so slender it took my breath away.

I love him, I thought uncontrollably, I love him.

“Yoshiki, are you alright? You look like you’re about to break something.”

He was grinning at me, now wearing a red shirt with the sleeves pushed up. His wrist still sported that dark leather cuff that he’d said was his father’s – but why, if he hated him so much?

Hide’s bedroom was somehow barer than I’d expected. He’d painted the whole room red – including the ceiling – which, in addition to the red carpet (though the carpet was more pink-red, its fibres coming out in little balls of crimson fluff), gave the impression that we were sitting inside a giant strawberry. His furniture was sparse and mismatched, and to help disguise this he’d covered his chest of drawers with a tasselled, dark red throw. No wonder he’d found my house intimidating, with its white walls and sterile ornaments! His few knick-knacks, my mother would have labelled as “tat” – a snow globe photo frame with purple glitter inside (but no photograph); a lava lamp in the shape of a rocket; a stuffed toy on his pillow, the type you used to be able to get from those arcade machines with the claw for grabbing. It was pink and on closer inspection I realized it was a rabbit – perhaps. It had only two legs, but it had a fluffy tail and long, floppy ears. It was a washed-out pink, no bigger than my hand, and the stuffing was coming out of one leg. When Hide saw me looking, his face burned as red as his room, and hastily he snatched the little rabbit out of sight.

“I’ve had him – it – since I was a baby,” he said defensively, “My dad got it for me.”

“I wasn’t laughing,” I reassured, “I just thought he was kind of cute.”

Once again, I realized, he was showing that same inordinate amount of care about what I thought. Why did it matter so much to him? Why was my approval so important?

It would be a full year before I got the answer to those questions, but at that moment he seemed intent upon changing the subject. Within seconds, the rabbit was gone from his hand, replaced by a container of hair bleach that, I swear, seemed to have appeared from nowhere. He grinned at me, showing canines like fangs.

“We,” he said, “Are going out.”

I eyed the bleach nervously.

“What are you going to do with that?” I asked, and his grin stretched even wider.

“Bathroom,” he ordered, guiding me into a small room adjoining his bedroom and pushing me to my knees, “Lean over the bath, and…” he gently touched my eyelids, “Close your eyes.”

The smell of the bleach, the hair dye; the aroma of his skin next to mine, all combined with the bitter gall that rose in my throat when my phone rang. Somehow, I knew it was bad news.

I watched Hide through wet strands of newly honey-coloured hair. He sat back on his knees uncertainly, his face asking questions that I couldn’t find the words to answer.

Finally, I choked them out.

Hide gathered me in his arms.