BREAK THE LIMITS: 11/33

[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 ELEVEN:

“It’s basically the same every day, and you’re pretty much okay with that

But you still look up at the sky, don’t you?”

- ‘Rocket Dive’, hide

Hope. Heat. Hedonism. The three H’s by which we led our lives in those fledgling years between being nobodies and being…well, stars.

And of course, what Taiji and Hide mockingly referred to as ‘the last H’: hairspray.

I still saw my mother often, and she berated me for my unusual appearance: my hair was too long, and did I have to curl it the way I did, and carry on dying it like that boy had used to do? Did I have to wear leather pants and jewellery and boots, like an American? I laughed her off. I certainly didn’t tell her that Hide had returned to my life, for he hadn’t, not really – not the essence of him; his laughter, the closeness.

And God, I missed him. I missed him even when I was around him, and that hurt. In Hide’s place there seemed to be this new stranger with hair that appeared the colour of red wine one day and treacle the next; with clothes that weren’t his old multi-hued clash but black leather – and even though he looked sensational in those tight pants that should have had a parental advisory sticker slapped across them, it felt to me as if he was putting on a costume; dressing up as Hideto The Rocker, just pretending.

His outfits could still put a smile on my face, though, no matter how uniform his pants seemed. Some days he’d wear something as simple as a black vest – other days he’d wear a pure white cotton shirt styled for the English aristocracy, with indulgent ruffles of lace at the neck and cuffs; other days I’d catch him in his old school shirt with a tie. The best days, for me, were when he wore some of his old, colourful, weird T-shirts with the inexplicable slogans: ‘fuct’; ‘white’; ‘green’; ‘speed baby’; ‘hysteric spa’; even a laughably ironic one that read ‘Who’s this ugly duckling?’. It ached, because they made me love and miss him even more, but at the same time they inspired hope within me – that one day Hide would be back, my Hide, and we’d pick up exactly where we left off.

Everything else in the remainder of 1985 was work – solid, hard, unforgiving work; writing notes and lyrics and putting them together in the knowledge that they might fit and might not; playing them and adding chords here, a variation on the bass line here…it was exhausting, but satisfying to watch the songs come together…and even more so when the powers that be decided that some little single by some unknown band would fit their rock and metal compilation just perfectly.

Still, my favourite place of that year became the roof, far away from the grime and labour of the basement – which was soon nicknamed “the dungeon”, for all we tortured ourselves to get it right down there. Although they could have stood outside the front door, or even smoked down there in the basement, really, Taiji, Hide and Pata continuously trekked up to the roof for their cigarette breaks – and when I accompanied them, I found out why. Up there in the daylight, the dust that smeared our hands, clothes and faces was blown away by the wind, and we could see all the way out to the bay. I would climb the last few steps to the roof door and, ignoring the broken padlock, step into a world of sunshine and light; see Pata sprawled lazily upon a deckchair with broken slats; see Taiji tempting fate by sitting upon the low wall that surrounded the perimeter of the roof top; see Hide gazing out towards the ocean, smoking two cigarettes in the time the others smoked one, and he’d have the strangest wistful expression on his face. When it rained, we still went up there, crowding under the ancient, sagging, mildewed canopy. Sometimes we stuck our hands out into the downpour and purged them of the thick layer of dust and grime that always found us down there in that basement. Sometimes I just stood up there and felt the butterflies in my stomach flutter with anticipation, because at last the band was working – the five of us in harmony, complimenting each other; Taiji and Hide the rock stars, the troublemakers; Pata and Toshi the lovable boys next door to look after them and calm them down; myself…

“It wouldn’t have happened without you,” Hide told me, his voice slightly thick; as if he had spent many hours crying, or was recovering from some long illness, “You hold us together. You’re our centre when we spin away.”

And he offered me a smile that couldn’t ever have been happy.

Such warm words, delivered in such a wooden voice…a voice so unlike his own, with a smile unlike his own, and gestures unlike his own; for after he’d proffered his awkward accolade he angled his body away from mine and refused to meet my gaze.

And just like that, standing centre-stage in that basement with the stirred-up dervish of dust falling all around, I realized that something was really wrong with him. Terrifying, how time can dull one’s perception; how years apart had made me so slow to realize that my old best friend may just as well have been invaded by the bodysnatchers, for all the resemblance he bore to how he’d used to be.

In the November of 1985, I turned twenty. They toasted me with beer up on the roof, under the canopy, for the November rain was falling thick and heavy. The apartment windows and street lamps blazed orange in the gloaming, and as tears blotted on my eyelashes the city lights fractured into jewels.

“To our glorious band leader,” Toshi announced, raising his beer high about his head, “On becoming an adult…at last.”

We laughed at that; at Taiji, who was the last of us to remain a child of nineteen. Pata had celebrated his coming of age just sixteen days before I had, Toshi had turned twenty in October, and Hide – well, Hide was to begin his twenty-first year that December. He worried deeply about growing older, but that day on the roof he smiled for me, and clashed his beer bottle shyly against mine.

“To twenty more years, kid,” he teased, and I’m sure I blushed to my toes. It was so easy, sometimes, to lapse back into the old ways of our friendship – before stopping, and remembering, and letting the air between us grow cold…but on that day of all days, I laughed, and without thinking I pressed my lips to his cheek.

“Oooooh!”

Taiji, of course. Hide remained silent as I fumbled for an explanation, pressing a small, shocked hand to his cheek as if I had burnt him.

“I’m an adult now, Taiji; I’m free. I could kiss the world today.”

“Or just the brunets,” he teased, tossing his own dark hair, and Hide made some small noise. His hands had strayed from his cheek to tug nervously on the knit beanie hat he wore – had worn, in fact, all day, with his hair tucked up inside. It rose adorably in two points, like tiny devil’s horns, on the top of his head, and upon those little peaks hung tassels that, I don’t mind admitting, I just wanted to use to tug his face into conjunction with mine. At my curious gaze, he shot me a helpless glance and slowly pulled the hat from his head.

“Wanted a change,” he mumbled, running a self-conscious hand through his hair: hair that was now blond, red and black. Funnily enough, it was a style we would all mock later, when he had returned to his signature pink and we could laugh about how big we wore our hair back in the day; at the time, though, we wore expressions of awe, and I thought he looked like some rock star supermodel. It was my affliction: whenever I looked at him, I saw nothing but beauty. 

By the time we had all had a go at ruffling his new hair, and sliding our fingers through it, darkness had well and truly begun to fall, and the sky was a deep, dusky blue.

“Did you do it yourself?” Taiji persisted, his fingers still tangled within Hide’s hair, and my heart flickered with envy when he grinned.

“I’m a practising beautician now, remember? It’d be hypocritical not to. Plus, we’re a fucking expensive bunch. I can’t afford what I sell, Tai.”

The jealous beast inside me began to stir awake, and quickly I looked away. I was stupid, foolish; it was just a hand in his hair, just a smile, just a nickname…

I remembered how he’d used to call me Yoshi, and something stabbed at my gut. Hide was known by his nickname so often; it had seemed weird when he’d brought in his beauty license to show us – upon it, his full name, Hideto, seemed somebody else.

He’d graduated from beauty school with honours. I wish I could have told my mother that.

As darkness fell, and their faces became harder to make out, I gathered Toshi was the first to leave. He made some excuse about tiredness, an excuse I didn’t pay attention to.

Pata followed quickly after, surprising me with a rare hug – all bony forearms digging into my shoulders and curly hair against my neck – but it was sweet, and he smiled his shy smile before bidding me goodnight.

And up on that roof, I think Hide and I both knew that we were waiting for Taiji to leave; sticking it out like an endurance task whilst he drank, and the hours grew later, and finally he declared he had to get to sleep. I don’t know about Hide, but I wasn’t the slightest bit sleepy. Anticipation fired adrenaline through me; I could have stayed up for a decade, waiting for him, and our chance to be alone for the first time in almost three years.