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solongsun As the morning stretched on, the day grew greyer and duller. Ruki spent it with his head in Kyo's lap, feeling the other man stroking his hair every now and again, and he closed his eyes tiredly even though his body felt too tense with anticipation to sleep. They could all feel it; the storm coming. He was wise enough, by now, to know that this was simply the calm before it.
It was as peaceful as it could have been, though; Kyo's hand in his hair, the sound of the other man's heartbeat in his ears, steady and strong. He felt pleasantly surrounded by the smell of him; the same scent he seemed to catch hints of in his dreams sometimes, he realised.
He thought about how wonderful it would be to just go outside and take a walk with him now; how much he'd taken that for granted before. He thought about sitting on top of that hill with Kyo in the pouring rain, the umbrella abandoned, and the high fast note to Kyo's breathing when they sat so close together; the wiry tenseness of his muscles.
I don't dislike being touched.
He wondered how long you had to go without affection to end up so unfamiliar; so almost scared of it. He had wondered that, but now he looked up at Kyo's face and wondered if it wasn't the touch he was necessarily afraid of but how he was supposed to respond to it; how much he was allowed to do before he'd be screamed at, dragged away, treated like a monster.
He shifted slightly in the older man's lap, his cheek brushing the slight swell of his soft cock between his legs, and felt Kyo's hand still in his hair.
He thought about how that hand had felt on him and wondered what it would be like to take Kyo outside again; to lie down with him in the grass.
Lunch was at midday as usual, but it was a quiet meal; with Kai missing from the table and Die so wan and quiet their gathering looked poor. Uruha showed up a few minutes late, saying goodbye to his father in the doorway before sitting down at the table. Aoi kept trying to catch his eye – Ruki could see the little twitches of his head as he kept glancing up at his friend – but Uruha was utterly unresponsive throughout the meal, knocking his fist against the side of his head distractedly. Shinya was taken out of the isolation room and slotted in amongst them, but he was lost in a kind of twilight sleep; he kept his eyes fixed on the table and sagged passively against the wooden back of his chair as an impatient orderly spooned rice porridge between his lips.
Nobody ate very much.
After the meal Shinya was placed in an armchair in the TV room, facing towards but not seeing a programme about the mating habits of salmon; he gazed in an unfocussed sort of way down at his own lap, his hands slipping off the arms of the chair. Uruha was out of his seat before all the plates were even cleared; he strode quickly out of the room, ignoring the way Aoi hastily jerked his chair out to follow him, and even from the dining room Ruki heard his bedroom door slam in Aoi's face.
Die eased himself up, his face an odd greyish colour. He coughed once, roughly, and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand; Ruki saw a smear of red there and made some small noise of alarm.
Die turned his eyes towards the floor, looking ashamed.
'It's just a cough,' he mumbled, his breathing a strange shallow wheeze above his words, 'My throat's raw.'
'Die—'
Die shook his head. 'Let's put on a record.'
It was shocking how evident the curve of his spine was as he walked away, supporting himself with one hand against the wall. From the corridor Ruki could hear the sound of Aoi knocking on Uruha's door, softly begging to be let in, and he closed his eyes tightly.
It was just for a brief moment, but he felt Kyo's hand brush warmly against his arm. When he opened his eyes he found the other man looking at him, an unreadable expression on his face; carefully he fitted his palm to the curve of Ruki's hip, a more deliberate touch. It was quick, but Ruki found himself leaning into it, wondering what the hell had to be wrong with him for his body to be responding to Kyo's touch when the whole world felt like it was falling down around them.
'Let's go,' he said uncertainly. He wasn't really sure where or what he was referring to, not then, but Kyo seemed to understand: he gave him a single nod. Quietly, they walked into the hallway together.
'Uruha. Uru, please.'
Ruki bit his lip; Aoi was in the middle of the corridor, still knocking on the other man's door; his face was set grimly but his voice incongruously gentle as he spoke, 'I'm not going to go anywhere, Uruha. Please open the door. Uruha. Uruha. Uruha, please.'
His knocking grew louder, less rhythmic, 'Uruha, please—' and he flinched backwards violently as the door was slammed open, almost catching him full in the face; Uruha stood in the empty door frame, his eyes red-rimmed and his fists clenched, his legs braced, his face a mask of helpless anger.
'Leave me alone,' he said in a tense voice, louder than he usually spoke. His face was paler than normal, Ruki noticed, and several of his fingernails were bleeding.
'Uruha,' Aoi said in a pleading sort of voice, making a small movement forward and then ducking abruptly as Uruha yanked a book from the shelf by the door and flung it at him.
'Leave me alone, I said! I don't want to talk to you!'
The book bounced harmlessly off the wall, The Local's Guide to South Korea, and suddenly Ruki understood who Uruha was so angry at. In the middle of the hallway, he clutched at a handful of Kyo's clothing. From the music room, looking exhausted but alert, Die appeared and hovered helplessly by the wall.
It felt like a showdown, Ruki thought sickly; that's why they were all here. Whatever strange force seemed to keep them together had called them to this point, and the feeling was so strong and so oddly tangible that he wouldn't have been surprised to see Kai walk down the hallway and take his place next to them, his smiling face for once clouded with confusion and doubt: why is everybody so unhappy?
'Uruha,' Aoi said softly and another book flew; The Local's Guide to Thailand clipped him in the cheek and he staggered back slightly, eyes watering, one hand pressed to the side of his jaw.
'Go away.'
The next moment, everything changed. Uruha pulled another book from the shelf and Aoi reflexively ducked back, but instead of hurling it at him Uruha threw it roughly to the floor. A strange sort of sound escaped his throat and his face seemed to simply break apart, its angry expression slipping, and Ruki watched with wide eyes as Uruha stamped on the book he'd just thrown down. His eyes were wild as he shoved the remainder of the books from his shelf, ruining their neat arrangement; pages fluttered and spines were crushed as he stamped on them, kicked out at them, his breath coming out in short harsh sobs, and with a grim expression Aoi stepped forward and tried to stop him, but Uruha ripped himself away. He was gasping for breath.
'Get off me,' he spat, his eyes huge and full of tears, 'My dad was right about you. You're trash. You're nothing. You're bad. You— you're a predator. You hurt. You hurt—'
'Watch for nurses,' Aoi muttered over his shoulder at the men assembled behind him, and Ruki saw it just from the corner of his eye as Kyo gave Aoi a brief, silent nod and peeled away, padding back down the corridor towards the dining room.
Uruha was crying. He didn't make any noise but his face was wet with tears, and when Aoi tried to move forward he gave him a violent shove.
'You're bad,' he said again, his voice fraught, his teeth gritted viciously and his breath shaking over the top of his hissed words, 'You're nothing. The – the men you want don't even want you. Your parents don't even want you,' he said, his voice rising unsteadily, 'Your own father doesn't care about you and you hate my dad because he loves me, and my mother loves me, and nobody wants you, nobody ever wants you but you touch them, you touch them, and it hurts—!'
When Aoi darted forwards Ruki thought for a terrifying moment that he was going to hit him, but instead he just grabbed him. In the doorway of his bedroom he wrapped his arms tight around his friend's body, pinning his upper arms down to his sides; there was a terrible struggle and the hairs on the back of Ruki's neck stood up as Uruha gave a choked cry, wrestling wildly. He drew in a breath, his hand fisted and pulling in Aoi's hair, but something strange happened to the air; it broke inside him, seemed to tear him up so that he sagged, and whatever yell was in his throat came splintering out of him as a sob. His face fell against Aoi's shoulder; his poor bleeding hands clutched at his back.
'He touches me,' he whispered, his voice muffled against Aoi's clothes, and Aoi lowered his face against Uruha's bent head.
'I know,' he said quietly, his own eyes wet; he relaxed his tight grip and began to stroke Uruha's back gently.
'He – he's done it ever since I was twelve and – he makes me do things – and I hate it, I hate it.'
'I'm so sorry, Uru.'
'I hate him,' Uruha whispered rawly, his hands making fists in the back of Aoi's shirt, 'I hate him. I hate him.'
Carefully, Aoi stroked his hair.
There was a light sound of footsteps coming towards them along the corridor as, moving quickly, Kyo reappeared; he shot Aoi a warning look and the dark-haired man nodded. He reached back, grabbed Die's hand and carefully steered Uruha back into his bedroom, guiding him over the mess of trampled books with Die tailing them like a puppy on a lead. He sent Ruki a quick apologetic look before shutting the door behind them, but there was no need: Ruki figured that was the way it was meant to be, the three of them like that. Kyo bent to pick up the two books on the floor out in the hallway, and he pressed them casually between his back and the wall as one of the orderlies walked by with a spare light bulb in his hand.
The two of them stood uncomfortably in the corridor, and Kyo did something like a shrug. His face was curiously empty, a blank mask, and it made Ruki feel uncertain.
He felt a kind of trembling weakness throughout his whole body, and he thought about Kyo and Uruha and wondered if it was any surprise at all that the two of them had ended up where they were. They'd never had a chance.
Kyo's words seemed to thud oppressively inside his skull: I was born dead.
He thought about Shinya, living his life with that ticking time bomb inside his mind, just waiting to go off and shatter him to pieces all over again; he thought of Die, having a happy normal childhood until something flipped the switch inside of him that made him so broken; altered one of the circuits so it didn't work; a sort of emotional mutation.
Born dead.
He thought of himself, of Eiji, of his own parents. They were both so normal that he should have been normal twice over, but somebody had changed the mould so that he didn't fit.
Ruki noticed that Kyo was watching him, and though he tried to smile he felt his face lapse into a helpless kind of expression. He wanted to reach out for him, but he didn't know what was allowed and what wasn't; not when Kyo looked so far away.
Wouldn't everybody in the whole world feel like a sham, if you'd grown up the way he had?
Eiji's painting seemed to float up in the forefront of his mind: the one that was him and wasn't him. Slowly, turning them over in his mind, he thought about every other portrait Eiji had ever painted of him and kept unexhibited; the lewd ones, the ones of him sleeping, the ones of him working. None of them had been quite right, he realised. Sleeping, he knew he wasn't that serene; he tossed and turned and pulled at the covers, talked in his sleep and had nightmares. Working, he had that grimness; that bright, powerful fierceness. On his knees in front of Eiji, he knew he had never in his life worn such a look of bland complicity, or such simple desire. There had been times when he had been so full of lust he could feel himself burning up with it, but there had never been anything simple about it. In those days, everything had seemed to blend in together, and every emotion was second-guessed, and every single facial expression and sound was double-checked for worrying undertones, for ugliness; for anything that could have been objected to.
All that time, Eiji had been painting a person that didn't exist. It was so obvious that Ruki wanted to shout it in his face; he wanted to show him all the notes he'd taken from Eiji's lectures, where he'd preached about painting what you see and mastering the art of expressing truth in creative ways; he wanted to shove all in front of him and spit at him that he was an old fraud after all.
'Kyo,' he said hesitantly, and watched the other man's eyes pull back into focus. It took a while, struggling down blind alleys, but they found him; they locked onto him, saw him as he was.
'Yes,' he said hoarsely.
'I want to draw you.'
They went to Ruki's room. The whole ward had an oppressive and pervasive air of quiet, but in there it was better; he opened his window despite the cold and they could at least then hear birds outside, and the occasional gust of wind.
Awkwardly, Kyo sat himself down on Kai's old bed, hands braced against the bare frame as if testing it for softness. He didn't seem to know what to do with his body, and he lit a cigarette and gave Ruki a slightly furtive look.
'What do you want me to do?' he asked in his gruff voice.
Settling on his own bed, cross-legged with his paper in a stack in front of him, Ruki lit up a cigarette of his own. As he arranged his supplies he took a puff and let the smoke come furling out through his nose, which Eiji had hated.
You know what you look like when you do that? You look completely common. It's disgusting.
He smiled.
'Just...' he took his cigarette out of his mouth and gestured with it, 'Just relax. Sit like you'd be sitting if I wasn't drawing you.'
'I have no idea how that is,' Kyo said, and despite how shaken he still felt, Ruki's grinned.
'You don't know how to relax?'
'Never done it,' Kyo said drily, and Ruki tapped ash from his cigarette. He'd meant to get it on the floor but he misjudged the difference and it spilled over the knee of his jeans, where he rubbed it in uncaringly. He glanced up and found Kyo's face had softened slightly into a wry smile: 'Disgusting,' he said teasingly. His voice was almost fond, and Ruki felt himself warm a little, opening himself out towards the older man like a flower.
Carefully, as if Kyo was a stray animal he was trying not to alarm, he picked up his pencil. The older man still looked frozen and awkward, but he was thawing; the more Ruki talked, the more he thawed. Ruki licked his lips.
'When I was at art school,' he said, 'We had to do life drawing.'
'“Life drawing?”'
'Naked people,' Ruki explained, and Kyo raised an eyebrow. Unconsciously, the tense line of his shoulders seemed to have softened.
'Is that what you're expecting?' he asked, a little sarcastically, and Ruki ducked his head to hide his smile and the little spark that seemed to have fizzed through him.
'Maybe next time.'
'There's going to be a next time?'
'That depends.' He tapped his pencil against the paper idly; took another drag from his cigarette without taking it out of his mouth. 'They used to split up an hour session into a few different drawings. First you'd do a five minute drawing, then three minutes, then one minute, then five minutes again.'
'What's the point of that?'
'So you can see what's important. The first five minute drawing is a mess; you don't have a lot of time to get everything down, so you're trying to put down as many lines as quickly as you can. Then, the three minute drawing, you knew you'd have to be more selective, and the one minute drawing, you just got shapes. So, you see the shapes then, you see? The real ones.'
So lightly Kyo might not even have noticed, he placed the tip of his pencil on his paper and drew one crooked, angular line; the side of his torso, draped in that too-big, sanatorium-issue white T-shirt. He wondered how it would feel to know that not even the clothes on your back were your own.
'Once you have those basic shapes – the important bits...' he paused, frowning slightly as he concentrated, blinking the hair out of his eyes and exhaling smoke, 'Your next five minute drawing is a thousand times better. Because you've tricked yourself into seeing things better.'
'So how are you supposed to see things?'
'Not like it's a human,' Ruki answered simply. Another brutal, jagged line; the other side of his torso. The cotton was thin and he smiled a little as he drew the darker shape of a nipple he could see through it. A zigzag of collarbone. 'If you're trying to draw something and thinking it's a person, I'm drawing a person, you won't do it right. Same with anything. You have to look at it; really look at it. You have to ask yourself just what something looks like; not what it is, or anything else.'
The hollow of a throat, the shadow where the pulse flickered, a sharp jaw. 'At least, that's what works for me.'
He pulled his pencil back from the paper uncertainly, scrutinising what he'd already done. He closed one eye and looked at Kyo, using the length of his pencil to measure the rough proportions of him; face here, body here, shoulders here. He screwed up his top sheet of paper and started over on the next page, smoothly, not breaking his momentum.
'Did you like life drawing?'
Ruki shrugged, eyeing Kyo quickly before he began to draw again. He drew a few lines, scrapped it quickly, and turned to a fresh page.
'It was okay. I was never all that interested in drawing people, though.'
'I can tell,' Kyo said, deadpan, and Ruki looked up at him a little shyly.
'I just couldn't find the beauty in it. Or, it was too obvious. Something like that.'
'You think drawing me will really help with that?'
Ruki smiled, and he thought he could make some witty or sarcastic response, but looking at Kyo, it sort of died on his lips.
The thing was, he had relaxed, and it was beautiful. Back straight, arms loose.
The pulse in his neck slow, glorious; lips a little parted; legs a little open.
Eyes soft, hair ruffled like it always was, and Ruki began to draw as quickly as he could: the lines of him, the shapes of him, standing out through his clothes; chest, belly, heart, lungs, worn on the outside like jewellery; knees, thighs, bones, skin; the most naked person with clothes on Ruki had ever seen.
His own heart was in his mouth, he realised.
The blue of his veins visible in his wrists, in the crooks of his elbows; the angles of his bones through his skin, rib to elbow to spine; the way the muscles sat; the way the tendons pulled; his whole body a drawing, a blueprint. It was like a map.
And he couldn't avoid them, because all routes led there: the eyes he gazed into. The lips he had kissed.
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I could just strangle Uruha's dad with a guitar string. Doing something like that to a child is unforgivable. Of course, even if he admitted the abuse to the staff, no one would believe him. Must be so frustrating for Aoi, not being able to protect him.
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