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solongsun That afternoon, the ward stayed silent until dinner.
The staff seemed perturbed, and they showed it. Ruki's door kept squeaking open as one or another nurse popped her head around to check in on them, and in the end Kyo simply got up and pushed the door wide, so they were completely exposed to anybody walking by in the hall. After all, it wasn't as though they were doing anything wrong; Kyo was just sitting, Ruki just drawing.
Dinner that night was some kind of grilled fish with rice and greens, and Ruki watched as Uruha started to dissect his, placing the bones in neat tallies on the edge of his tray, and as Die took a deep breath, struggling against his cough. Aoi hung between the two of them, looking tired but alert; he didn't eat much himself, Ruki noticed. The time oozed by slowly, like molasses.
At the end of the meal, by the time the tea had been poured but the plates not yet taken, there was a sort of shuffling amongst the nurses, a kind of birdlike dipping of heads and ruffling of feathers, and the head nurse walked to stand behind Kai's empty chair. Later, Ruki would wonder if she had planned it like that. If she had, he couldn't see why.
She pressed her fingers lightly against the back of the chair as if considering it, and then lifted her head to face them all. They couldn't have been a very encouraging audience; from left to right Uruha was muttering to himself, Aoi was rubbing his temples, Die was rocked back in his chair looking queasy, Kyo was studying the dark square of sky visible through the window, Shinya's mouth was being wiped by an orderly, and Ruki was restlessly drumming his fingers on the tabletop.
Ruki and Die gave each other self-conscious looks, as if realising for the first time that they might be coming across as crazy. Nobody else seemed to care.
'Gentlemen,' the nurse said in her level, practical voice, adjusting her frameless glasses on her face, 'I'm sure you must have been expecting this. I'm very pleased to announce that tomorrow, we'll have a new patient joining our therapeutic community. Ruki, he'll be your new roommate.'
There was a stunned sort of silence that made it very clear that no, they hadn't been expecting this. The only one who moved was Shinya, absently trying to brush the hand away from his face.
'Couldn't you at least let his bed get cold first?' Aoi said at last, acidly. The head nurse fixed him with her calm, neutral stare. Ruki wondered how she kept her face so still.
'I know it's difficult,' she said. 'These past few days have been very difficult for you all. I would urge you, though, to try to find the positives where you can. This is a new opportunity to get to know somebody; for us, a new opportunity to help somebody.'
'Like you helped Kai?'
There was an ugly quiet after Aoi said his name, and nobody moved except Uruha, rocking slightly and touching his chin to his right shoulder, twelve times, and then his left shoulder another twelve times. Even Shinya seemed to have gathered something was going on; he gazed placidly at the nurse.
'I understand,' she said finally in a quieter voice, 'That some of you will have feelings of anger and blame about Kai's death. These are natural. I would urge you to take comfort in your group and individual therapy sessions, and to discuss these feelings rationally with our staff at the appropriate time.'
Anybody else, Ruki thought, would have winced under the full force of Aoi's glower, but the nurse simply gave her bun of black hair a reassuring pat, as if checking it was still there.
'Our new patient,' she went on, 'Will be arriving tomorrow morning, and I would ask you all to make him feel welcome. I'm sure I don't need to remind you of your own first days here, and how intimidating it can feel when you aren't welcomed warmly.'
Her eyes seemed to flick from Aoi to Kyo when she said that, which felt unfair to Ruki; Kyo might not have welcomed people warmly, but only because he tended not to welcome them at all. Thinking back, he knew he had found the other man's manner disconcerting at the time, but now it felt different. Knowing Kyo, he thought the reason he maybe didn't go out of his way to be friendly with people might be because he felt he didn't deserve friends.
Kyo's face was impassive; it didn't seem to bother him, but it made Ruki's chest hurt. He wondered how it must feel to be badly thought of all the time, and misunderstood and misinterpreted all the time – to be considered weird and different even in a place for weird and different people; to be feared. To be thought of as evil, even.
Kyo probably didn't know why Ruki gave him such a sweet smile.
Uninterested as they all tried to act, the wait for the new person began very early the next morning.
It started subtly – just one person happening to look a little longer out of the window as they walked past it, and a lack of chatter during breakfast. By nine, Die had taken the step of dragging an armchair up next to the front-facing window in the music room, and Aoi was perched cross-legged on top of the piano, looking out at the same view. Uruha was sitting on one of the arm chairs, his feet curled up beneath him as he tried to write something; he frowned often and scratched out words, and balls of crumpled paper started to litter the floor at his feet.
Ruki hadn't wanted to wait with them, but there was an almost irresistible drag. In the sanatorium, where time passed so slowly, he hadn't appreciated what a powerful thing it was to have an event on the horizon – something more solid than the eventual release day, which shifted its shape and changed its nature all the time.
At half past nine Aoi went off for therapy; at ten, Die went. Uruha took up their abandoned post by the window, thumbing at his lower lip, but when Aoi arrived back just before eleven there was still no change. Every time a car pulled up they would all tense slightly, but no sad creature folded itself out of the back seat; it was always one or another doctor, or a family come to visit the patients on other, luckier wards.
At a quarter past eleven, though, there was a sort of shift and click: an adjusting of focus. No announcement had been made or car had been spotted, but they all gathered up around the windows even so, and Ruki was reminded of his first look up at the sanatorium – all the faces he had seen, pressed up against the bars on the windows like monkeys gaping out from a zoo.
Die got back from therapy at around half past eleven, and not long after that, a police car was spotted coming up the long, winding drive. Aoi sent Ruki a wicked look.
'You've got a criminal,' he said. 'Whoops. Hope he's not a murderer.'
'Yeah, sweet dreams,' Die added. He lowered himself into a chair, and Ruki noticed that his legs seemed to be shaking slightly beneath him, and that although he was grinning his face was pale and clammy. Wordlessly, Aoi placed a hand on his bony shoulder, but Die just gave his head a short shake.
Together they watched as two police officers, a man and a woman, climbed out of the car into the drizzling rain. The man adjusted his hat whilst the woman went to the back and opened a door, and together they removed what looked like a grey ghost from the back seat, except on closer inspection it was a man so fully wrapped in a blanket that only the top of his head and the lower part of his legs were visible.
Die slid Ruki a look, as if to say, good luck.
Forty minutes later, they all sat down to lunch in a state of great confusion.
It wasn't as though the man in the blanket hadn't been admitted – he had – but instead of being shown into Ruki's bedroom and suffering through the speech where they outlined all the rules, like about signing yourself in and out of the bathroom and not wandering around after lights out and having to ask for a razor if you wanted to shave, he'd instead been hustled straight past them and into the isolation room. The weird thing wasn't just that he'd been put in there at all, it was also that he hadn't been put in the straitjacket – even not knowing him, Ruki felt himself inwardly breathing a sigh of relief – and that the nurse with the perm had done his unpacking for him, but instead of putting all of his clothes into the drawers, she'd kept on running back and forth to the isolation room with supplies: clean clothes, towels, a bucket, some books. It was as though he was going to be living in there, in that tiny padded room about the size of a mattress. They'd even turned a dim light on in there; Ruki hadn't even known there was a light. He wondered what it looked like all lit up; if it still looked as endless and terrifying and void-like as it did in the dark. Probably not.
His name, apparently, was Hara. They'd gathered this when they were sitting around the lunch table and pumping the nurse for information; just like old times, Ruki thought almost fondly, with everybody talking at once. She'd not said much, but the brief statement she had made had given them enough to discuss and pick apart: 'There's been a slight miscommunication. Hara is not quite ready to integrate into our therapeutic community yet. He'll be in the isolation room for now, but we'll probably be able to make some space for him upstairs tomorrow. He'll stay there a week or so before he moves down to our ward.'
The reaction to that reminded Ruki forcibly of his old chemistry lessons in school, where the teacher had used some tongs to place a thin ribbon of sodium metal in some water and – whoosh – like magic it had started fizzing and sparking and zipping around the beaker: a great wave of babble rose all at once and cutting through it all was Aoi's opinionated, obnoxious drawl: 'But upstairs is the disturbed ward.'
Ruki pushed his lunch tray away. 'Disturbed?'
'Yeah,' Aoi said, sounding almost impressed. 'Down here we're, you know, manageable. Right? We're not no-hopers, apart from—' he glanced down at Shinya and Kyo's end of the table and cut himself off, looking uncharacteristically flustered, 'Well, anyway – upstairs is where they put you when you're really bad; there's restraints on the bed and stuff.' He drew up short, again giving Kyo a funny little look, and added lamely, 'Aren't there?'
Every eye swivelled to Kyo, who was taking a long drag of his cigarette. He raised his eyebrows and exhaled the smoke.
'Yes,' he said shortly.
'How do you know?' asked Die interestedly, and Kyo frowned down at the table.
'I used to be on disturbed,' he said hoarsely, 'At first. Then I was moved down here.'
'Oh.' Die ran a hand through his hair awkwardly; his fingers came away snared in bright red tangles.
'So the next person we get might be as crazy as Kyo,' said a quiet, low voice, and like a great spotlight turning every eye swivelled off of Kyo and landed firmly on Shinya, who was looking down at his food in a mild sort of way.
'Shinya,' Aoi said, 'Was that a joke?'
Shinya gave a modest sort of shrug.
'You haven't made a joke in about five years.'
'It's more like eight years, actually.'
'And another,' Die said, his voice sounding only slightly strained. 'Got any more?' he tried, but his voice broke into a cough on the last word; he doubled over, his knuckles standing out white where he gripped the edge of the table, and Aoi rubbed his back. It was weird, the expression that came over Aoi's face then: he looked a lot older, Ruki thought. And a lot wearier.
The rain came on quickly that night, starting with a soft hiss and graduating into a thunder against the windows and a constant drip and crackle from the eaves of the building. There was no wind, and it fell in an unusually straight sort of way, so you couldn't exactly tell if it was going up or down or even anywhere at all: it looked like steel cables keeping the earth fastened to the heavy dark sky.
Ruki watched it from the window in the music room, feeling vaguely unsettled. For the first time, he wondered what Eiji had written in his letter.
Maybe he was sorry about everything.
When he looked down at the drive, his mind kept fooling itself into thinking that he was seeing the blanket-wrapped man staggering forward again. He shook his head hard, so lost in his thoughts that he almost didn't notice the way the gentle babble of voices in the room around him was changing, thinning out and growing tenser, and louder. He snapped to attention when somebody made a shouting sort of noise, and he turned to see Die frozen halfway out of a chair, Aoi standing with his legs braced directly in front of him.
'Don't you dare,' he was saying seriously, his face hard. Leaning down, he gave his friend a push, shoving him back down into his seat, 'I know where you're going, and you can forget about it.'
'Aoi,' Die said tiredly, 'I'm just going to bed, okay? I don't feel great.'
'Bullshit,' Aoi said artlessly.
'Give it a rest, Aoi. Who cares where I'm going? I have to piss, come on.'
He was keeping his voice neutral, but there was a grim sort of set to his jaw, and his eyes weren't smiling like they normally were when he and Aoi were joking around. He gave a lame sort of push to the hand on his shoulder, and when Aoi didn't budge, he gave it a harder one.
'Let me up,' he said, his voice a little edgier, and very deliberately Aoi tossed some hair back from his face.
'Fight me off,' he said simply. 'If you're well enough to go puke your guts out in the bathroom, you've surely got enough strength to fight me off, right? You're taller than me. It should be pretty easy.'
'Aoi.'
'Come on. I'll give you first hit. Come on, Die; shove me. Hit me. Kick me or something.'
Grudgingly, Die did attempt a kick at his shins, but Aoi was standing too close for him to get much momentum behind it; the dark-haired man didn't even flinch. 'You'll have to do better than that,' he said matter-of-factly, 'Or you're never gonna be able to throw up. Then all those calories you managed to choke down are going to start doing all those things they do, like burning themselves to stop you from sh-sh-shivering all the time, and giving your muscles fuel so they can actually move, muscles like your fucking heart and your diaphragm and all the shit that you need to live—'
'Piss off,' Die said mutinously, 'I'm not fucking around tonight.'
'Yeah? Neither am I.' Aoi leaned closer, placing one bent knee on the chair beside Die's thigh and making a cage out of his body. With his hands gripping to the back of the armchair and his legs on either side of Die's the two of them weren't actually touching, but there was something unmistakeably sexual about the position; Die seemed to get flustered, and his weak hands attempted to push at Aoi's knees.
'What's the matter?' Aoi taunted, and Ruki realised that he could hear him even though he was speaking softly; nobody else was talking and the record on the player had been allowed to run down to its soft, crackly hiss. He watched Die attempt to wriggle out of Aoi's trap and had a sudden, sad impression of the two of them on the night of Kai's funeral; Aoi crying in that horribly raw, vulnerable way and the way that Die had gathered him up – simply swept all his messy limbs up together and hugged onto him tightly, as if it could change anything.
'Get off me,' Die said now, his eyes dark; there was something in them that Ruki thought looked like panic, and his efforts to get Aoi to move were growing more frantic, 'Get off me, Aoi. Let me up.'
'Fight me off,' the other man hissed, his face only an inch or two from Die's, 'Come on, if you're so tough you can afford to lose more strength; push me off. Come on, I'll make it easier; look, I'm only holding on with one hand.' He waved the other in front of Die's face in a mocking way and Die swiped at it, knocking it out of the air forcefully.
'Bet you'd like that,' he said from between gritted teeth, 'Sitting on me like this, you dirty fucking homo.'
If Aoi was surprised, he didn't show it; he laughed lowly, the sound sending a weird shiver up Ruki's back. He noticed that Uruha's face looked completely fraught; if he'd been holding something more fragile than a book it would have snapped in his white-knuckled grip.
'You didn't use to mind,' Aoi said in a deadly quiet voice, something strangely snakelike about the soft sway of his head and the way he kept his eyes fixed on Die's, 'I wasn't so fucking dirty when I was sucking you off, was I?'
Die's face seemed to go almost as red as his hair, and he glanced around at the other men in the room furtively.
'That hasn't happened in months,' he muttered, his voice almost apologetic.
'No, it hasn't. And you know why not, don't you?'
'Aoi—'
'It's because you can't get hard, can you? Not any more. How about that; you don't even have the strength to jerk off. Do you even have a sex drive, any more? Is there anything in your fucking, fucking stupid head apart from calories, and fat, and—'
'Shut up!' Die snapped, his efforts doubling; Aoi slipped back dangerously but just about managed to keep his balance, 'If you – if you don't let me up, I'll tell them. I'll tell them all about it, and then they'll never let you leave.'
For the first time, Aoi looked rattled. 'I beg your pardon?' he asked in a poisonous hiss.
'You heard,' Die said breathlessly; he started to cough, roughly, and shoved Aoi's hand away when it went to him in concern, 'I saw – I saw your notes. The essay you're writing all about how you're better, and you don't think about men that way any – any more—' he broke off, coughing violently; when he next spoke there was a horribly pink foam around his teeth, 'And how you're ready to rejoin society and live a normal life – well, I'll tell them. And they'll never let you out.'
Aoi looked disconcerted; he swallowed audibly.
But he tightened his grip on the back of the armchair.
'Fine,' he said, 'They'll never let me out. So I'll always be here to keep you from chucking up your meals. Great plan, Die.'
'Fuck you,' Die said, his eyes shining suspiciously. His fingernails were digging into the arms of the chair tensely, and as Ruki watched Die tensed his jaw.
'I tried to warn you,' he said in a low, tight voice. 'This is all your fault.'
His hand shot suddenly up towards his mouth, two fingers slipping between his own lips, and Aoi gave an inarticulate cry of horror as Die started forcing them back, hitting them against the back of his throat harshly; Aoi tugged on his hand, his fingernails scrabbling uselessly at Die's knuckles. There was a horrible retching noise, and Aoi gave a yelp as Die threw up his undigested dinner over their two hands and his own lap.
There was a very nasty silence. Ruki realised that he'd been holding his breath so long his head was spinning; he breathed in dizzily.
Stunned, Aoi let go, and Die wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. There was a look on his face that Ruki thought he might never forget as long as he lived; all the self-righteous anger was gone, and in its place was a deep and terrible shame, making him drop his eyes and lower his head. Slowly, shakily, Aoi got back to his feet and stood up straight, his vomit-spattered hand held away from his body.
'Don't even think,' he said deliberately, 'About sleeping in the same room as me tonight.' He paused, biting at his lip briefly but violently, 'I've had it. You want to die, go ahead and die.'
He swallowed heavily. 'I give up.'
The quiet that he left behind him seemed almost to ring. They heard Aoi as he slammed his way down the corridor and into the bathroom, and the heard the gurgle of the pipes in the walls when he evidently cranked on the shower.
Twitchily, Uruha got to his feet. He tugged hard on a handful of his hair, twelve times on the left side of his head and then twelve times on the right, and then he stood uncomfortably in front of Die in roughly the same stance as Aoi, bent over him. On Uruha it looked all wrong.
'You can sleep in my room,' he muttered, 'If you want.' He paused and then called, much louder, 'Nurse.'
Grimacing slightly, he grabbed Die's soiled hand and wiped it down the front of his own T-shirt. There was a squeak of rubber-soled shoes on the polished floor, and a white uniform slotted itself neatly around the door.
'Did somebody call? Oh, Uruha...'
'Sorry,' Uruha said, his voice passably weak-sounding, 'I guess I must be ill. I just threw up all over him.'
'Oh, dear. Oh dear, boys – well, you'd better get cleaned off. Come along. Uruha, do you still feel sick?'
Uruha's eyes seemed to collide with Die's; even from across the room, Ruki flinched at the impact.
'A little bit,' he murmured.
'Come along, then. A nice shower, and then straight to bed, all right?'
Ruki wondered why she didn't seem to see it; the way every tendon in Die's arm stood out lividly as he worked to get himself out of his seat; the way he rocked dizzily when he did so; the way the remaining colour drained out of his face. He took a step forward and tottered, but the nurse was busy fussing over Uruha.
There was nobody else to catch him – Shinya was gazing raptly at the insides of his own wrists, apparently monitoring his own pulse – and so Ruki placed a gentle hand on Die's back, steadying him somewhat. He felt ribs moving under skin, and Die nodded at him. 'Thanks,' he said and coughed harshly, wheezing, and Ruki saw tears glittering on his cheeks.
He was left alone in the room with Shinya, who was still studying his own blue veins intently, and it was weird how much it felt like his first day.
A vision of Eiji's letter, whole and new again, seemed to dance in the front of his mind.
He was so homesick he could die.
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Shinya is so sweet, deflecting the uncomfortable questions away from Kyo by making jokes. Everyone really underestimates him, I think.
But that last scene... watching Die starve himself to death is so painful. You can really feel Aoi's helplessness and frustration are coming to a breaking point. It's obvious Uruha was trying to protect Die by what he did, but it almost seems counter-productive.
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