andrew_in_drag | House of Cards: 40/?? (Reply)

Title: House of Cards
Author:

CHAPTER FORTY: THE NOTEBOOK

Die felt white.

To Shinya he appeared a statue of carved soap, pale and waxen and somehow erodible, degradable, wearing away in a thousand minute ways before his eyes.

He clenched and unclenched his hands, and ran them through his shock of red hair.

“You'll be killed,” he said hollowly.

Breathe, breathe, breathe. Shinya stayed very still but in his eyes, he gave the impression of recoiling: in his mind he was inching smoothly away to where everything was clearer and sharper: it was alright. It was not real.

The world inside his head was one he had never forgotten, not even with the scent of Die's skin on his clothes; stress drove him back there easily. Blessed, blessed blandness. Those roads – those tentative roads that Die had opened up – closed themselves and shut down forever, barricaded themselves off or ended in great rifts and chasms; all protection to keep him alone, safe and—

Alone, all I ever wanted was to be left alone.

He puzzled over that sentence: it no longer seemed to fit.

“You'll be killed and...I should have known. I should have known that something was wrong.” He swallowed audibly. “I need to tell the boss, you know. It's not...you wouldn't understand. I owe him. Everything.”

He knuckled his forehead roughly, hiding his eyes. The skin around them felt hot and raw, and he pressed his shaking fingers against it firmly. The silence between them was a sore and tender thing, like a great bruise. Betrayal to betrayal; a snake swallowing its own tail.

“They'll shoot you.”

They'll shoot me, Shinya echoed vaguely in his mind.

It was a thought that was disappointing but faintly peaceful, as if he'd known all along that hoping for any other outcome would have been foolish: like insisting that a key works when it doesn't, or yelling I got it, I got it as a baseball goes sailing over the hands and out of the stadium; like a shot soldier still running for those few extra steps, the facts not quite sinking in yet: I'm dead, I'm dead already – still then, only then, falling to the ground. Only on that realisation.

Because still, before he'd admitted that it was going to end this way – for a moment, it seemed like it might have been different.

Yes, it really might have all been different.

As Die and Shinya sat numbed, Toshiya was stirring in the bedroom down the corridor. The warmth that had clung to him all the night through had gone, and he gradually shivered himself awake with the feeling of his skin rising in goose flesh and his nipples stiff against the bed sheets: Kyo had gone. Only the light marks on Toshiya's wrists were proof that he had ever been there at all; the bed was cold and he must have been alone for some time.

Outside, it was sleeting. Toshiya got to his feet, feeling heavy and drugged, and gave the door handle a perfunctory twist – locked. He wasn't expecting anything less. He sighed and sunk back down onto the bed, taking in his surroundings with the forced interest of a person with no other stimulation: bare walls, bare floors. Kyo's bedroom had a plain wooden closet, a small bedside cabinet, a narrow bed and a window. The walls were white, aggressively white, reflecting the cold winter morning meanly; underfoot there were naked floorboards that had been scrubbed, over the years, to a dingy greyish colour, although the whole room appeared quite clean. The window was small and square and uncurtained, and its wooden frame was slightly warped from year after year of dry winters and steamy summers: it was a safe place, no doubt, but a severe and unwelcoming one, and Toshiya curled up on the sheets miserably.

How am I ever going to get out of this?

It was a question he had tried not to ask himself because of the sheer helplessness of it all; if he sought to leave, then the only way he was going to do it would be in a body bag – Uruha's death had been stark proof of that. They would kill him and dump his body in a forest, or weigh it down in a river, or else throw it into a cold, unmarked grave with no marker; no words except a name that would die with him. His idea to manipulate the shateigashira's emotions suddenly seemed naïve to the point of stupidity; Kyo's desires were motivated not by love or empathy but by possession. He could go further than any human had ever gone into the shateigashira's heart, and still he would only ever be a toy. Hopeless, he let himself fall back limply and let out a startled yelp – through the mattress, something hard had dug squarely into the base of his spine.

“The fuck?” Toshiya muttered aloud, scrambling to the edge of the bed and grazing both of his bare knees where he dropped to the floor; he shoved his hand between the mattress and the box spring and his fingertips brushed something – something – he yanked it out in a small puff of dust and squinted at it.

It was a book – a book with slightly yellowed paper and scuffs and tears along the binding, and its pages were covered not with printed type but with spidery, scrawling, spiky handwriting that belied the identity of its owner as clearly as if it had written his name; Kyo, in his own hand, dashing out rough and indecipherable thoughts – Toshiya turned a few pages carefully, fascinated. The script was mostly illegible, but rough phrases jumped out at him as he skimmed:

swaying

a dream of primary colours

be a flower be a butterfly prick me with a poison thorn

swaying

sickle moon

ants swarm the lily

Coming to him as clearly as if Kyo had muttered them in his own ear.

Black wings are growing forth from my back.

Ants swarm the...

There were indentations on the backs of every page where he had bore down too hard with the pen; little ghosts of words under Toshiya's fingertips, like braille. The flow of writing was interrupted periodically with harsh scribbles that were sometimes little sketches but most often just formless jagged cross-hatches, brutal lines. Among the drawings, Toshiya's own eyes flashed back at him, and he dropped the notebook to the floor listlessly. A terrible chill seemed to have stolen through his limbs, and he took a deep, shuddering breath: god, what chance did he have of understanding a person like this? What possible chance did he have of managing to stay one step ahead of the shateigashira's whims; of living around him and retaining his own sanity in the process? Being in the same space as Kyo was like balancing on the edge of a knife, and it was all the more terrifying not because Kyo was volatile but because he was precisely the opposite – calculated. Precise. Sure. His actions had a measured quality that suggested everything was playing out as according to his own personal rehearsal; that he could see the future and plan reactions and never, ever be taken off guard. If he was going to fuck he would fuck, and if he was going to kill then he would kill, and there would be no changing either of those facts; the only hope was to live in the future and try to pre-empt them; to stand directly in the crossfire of the shateigashira's wild, unpredictable desires.

He'd go mad if he had to live like that.

He'd die outright.

It was only by a tremendous effort of will that he'd dragged himself through the last few months, and the thought of all those years spiralling ahead of him was enough to make him feel sick and dizzy. Ever since he was a kid, he'd always lived moment to moment; after his parents' divorce and his subsequent shuttling from place to place, he had learned to stop obsessing and planning ahead. All he had ever been able to do was solve the problem in front of him, and once he had fallen into foul hands in Osaka, he had found that the only way to survive was to live each moment as if it was going to be his last. To stop thinking. To try to live as best he could, rather than waste his whole life waiting.

The pages of the book were turning slowly where he had let it drop, as if they had been held open at a certain point for a great length of time. Toshiya watched hazily as they flipped back almost to the very first page and stopped finally on a particularly dog-eared entry, where most of the space was taken up by an old black and white photograph – it looked like a clipping from a newspaper. It had been pasted in haphazardly but evidently smoothed down with great reverence; the ink was slightly blurred, but Toshiya could plainly see that it showed a young girl in full kimono, her hair up in an intricately decorated wareshinobu style complete with fluttering kanzashi similar to the one Toshiya had worn. She wasn't pretty, exactly, but Toshiya could tell why somebody would cut the picture out and keep it: she was arresting, or striking; above all, there was a strange familiarity to her, although of course Toshiya had never seen her before in his life. There was a softness to her that spoke to a craving that Toshiya hadn't known he he had; how long had it been since he had seen anybody who looked caring, or yielding, or gentle? He had a terrible urge to rip the picture out and steal it.

The caption beneath gave the girl's name. It had been violently slashed through but Toshiya could just about read it: Kasumi Takehara's debut.

“Kasumi Takehara,” he whispered.

The name didn't trigger any memories at all. Still, he didn't look away.

Down in the genkan, Kyo stamped his feet against the cold, brushing sleet from his hair agitatedly; his scarf was soaked damp and he felt numb all the way through, although he was aware that wasn't entirely due to the weather. The whole way home he had felt positively exposed, as if he had been walking naked. He had felt watched, even though he knew in his heart that those burning gazes he'd imagined weren't looking into his present; they were looking into his past.

He'd thought he'd hid it all so well. From the fourteen year old boy who had gone missing, he had changed almost beyond recognition; his body had changed, his hair had changed, his name had changed – even something in his face, in his eyes – something there had changed, too, something indefinable. He looked like a poor copy, a bad imitation, and it suited him down to the fucking ground. Kyo wasn't just a name, it was a disguise, and with the new addition of the Inagawa family name it had become perfect: there it was, his whole history now securely faked. The oyabun's son was all he had ever been.

He was conscious of keeping his footfalls light as he climbed upstairs, although he wasn't sure why. His feeling of exposure had granted him an extra layer of sensitivity, a kind of painful awareness, and he had extended a little part of himself into every cold corner of the house to find its inhabitants flattened away from him, pressed against the walls to avoid treading in his dangerous path.

Except for his bedroom. There – a tiny heat glowed, a little warmth, like rubbing his hands together. That was it; a warmth not of kindness or fondness but of friction; two people sparking off each other – to fight or to fuck.

And Toshiya would already be pissed off, left alone and locked up; naked, too, unless he raided Kyo's closet for something too short or – a stupid thrill ran up the shateigashira's spine – put his own soiled kimono back on. Kyo's steps grew more eager: there was something about Toshiya's body – its languidness, perhaps; its strange, dreamy elegance – that lent itself so perfectly to debauchery; something about his sweet young face that seemed to beg to be dirtied – hair tangled and red-lipped, red-cheeked, little nymph, cum running down his chin like he'd bitten into some overripe fruit. His hand shook slightly as he unlocked the door and—

It was immediate: a dull, hot flare of rage. Toshiya was sitting on the floor, still entirely naked, and resting in his golden hands was the book.

Kyo's notebook, and his bright little pinwheels, little firecrackers of thoughts sparking off over the pages.

And the photograph.

That photograph.

Kyo took him by the throat.

A/N: This is a really fucking big A/N section, so I'm sorry.

1. First of all, I still have troubles with this chapter. I like each section individually, but I just could not find a way to say what I wanted to say and still keep any kind of flow or cohesion. Sorry guys, this version is kind of the best of the worst.

2. Maybe it's just too late at night, but I'm seeing Harry Potter characters all over this fic. Kyo is kind of a pre-Voldy Tom Riddle and the Oyabun is Dumbledore (darker sides included!); Aoi is Malfoy (you'll see); Die is (rather tragically) Ron.

Toshiya is of course the eponymous Harry, and does share a connection with Tom Riddle. Only in this case, it's less to do with magical scars and way, way more to do with cock.

2. Obviously, the excerpts from Kyo's notebook all come from Dir en grey songs: Saku and KR Cube, but mostly Audrey. Audrey is a song that really intrigues me somehow. From title to lyrics to music everything is quite...odd. In a good way. Er, but anyway. Credit where its due: these translated lyrics come, of course, from the good folks over at centigrade-j.

3. This note is important credit: a lot of the knowledge I have collected about various minarai, maiko and geiko hairstyles and ensembles have come partly from the inexhaustible wikipedia, but mostly from the fantastic autobiography, Geisha of Gion, by Mineko Iwasaki. Mineko Iwasaki was a top geiko, working in Gion, and graciously agreed to be interviewed by Arthur Golden prior to his writing 'Memoirs of a Geisha' – on the one condition that she would remain anonymous.

Golden not only betrayed her by publicly crediting her for her story; he also twisted her tale to create a more sensationalist and western-friendly version of events. Because of this, she was compelled to write her own book to set the story straight.

I would encourage anybody with an interest to read her book. Not only is it a truly fascinating insight into the world of Kyoto geiko and maiko; it's also a wonderful personal story of a brilliantly brave and tough woman, who managed to get to the top of her field whilst taking precisely zero shit from anybody.