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solongsun He begged his way out of dinner that night by saying that he still wasn't feeling well. It wasn't a lie; he felt sick and shivery, almost feverish, and his head was pounding uncomfortably with what he had learned. He lay in bed, facing the wall so that Toshiya couldn't catch his eye and figure anything out about him, and thought about how cool the sheets felt against his hot face; how small he felt being swallowed up by this too-soft bed. When he'd first arrived, he remembered, he'd found the mattress too slippery. Now it felt normal.
When the mealtime rolled around, he could hear them very faintly from down the hall: the clinking sounds of cutlery and glassware but almost no conversation at all: just the sounds of some of the more spirited nurses chivvying things along with little courtesies; tiny smatterings of conversation that buzzed around Ruki's ears like insects. Without being able to discern the words, he could almost predict them: that chirpy greeting was probably for Toshiya, who seemed popular amongst the nurses and even dared to flirt with a few of them; that downward inflection might be Uruha being chided for arranging his food but not eating it; that small encouraging murmur could be directed towards Shinya, who might have been seeing rice and fish and vegetables on his plate but might just as easily have been seeing poison, or a curled up snake flickering its tongue out softly, or the gently smiling face of his own absent mother.
And who knew, Ruki thought tensely, what Kyo might be seeing?
He had no idea how mad you had to be to see somebody who wasn't there. He tried to picture Kyo sitting beside Shinya in the dining room; tried to summon up the expression on his face and in his eyes, and the set of his shoulders and the line of his back. He would be wondering where Ruki was, or perhaps he would know. Perhaps he would be concerned about him. Ruki thought about his big hands and the shape they made around his chopsticks; he thought about how gently those hands held things, how softly they had touched his skin; thought about how those hands had also ripped and torn and killed.
When he had arrived, he thought dully, everybody had been afraid of Kyo. It should have taught him something, but it hadn't; stupidly, thick-headedly, he had managed to convince himself that he knew better. He had let the man's crimes simply run through his fingers like fine sand, and now look where he was – chilled to the core and shivering to discover that the man they'd all called a psycho might actually be mad.
Idiot.
Maybe the file was actually about somebody else, and the man in the dining room was an imposter.
He closed his eyes. He heard when they all scraped their chairs out and got up from the table, and he heard somebody – it could only have been Toshiya, he supposed – put on a record in the music room, and he heard light footsteps coming down the hallway.
A soft tapping on his bedroom door.
He shut his eyes tighter, pretending to be asleep, and at length whoever it was gave up and went away.
The next few days formed a pattern: he woke early, and forced his numb-feeling, sticky-eyed body out of bed and into the shower before anybody else was up and about in the halls. He would dress quickly in the bathroom, his teeth chattering with cold, and when he snuck back into his dorm the sky would still be dark outside the window and Toshiya would still be sleeping. He slept in a peculiar sort of way; Ruki couldn't say why exactly but it just felt unwholesome, somehow, the intensity of it – his brow almost furrowed and his arms jammed tight against his blanket and his breaths too quick and shallow, kittenish. He tossed and turned, too, wrenching the covers with him whichever way he went.
Ruki would sit and wait; boredom didn't seem to be a problem, these days. He couldn't tell what his thoughts were; they seemed mostly inconsequential. Every time they wandered too close to something troubling, his mind seemed to swerve somehow, as if it was trying to protect him.
He was aware that he missed Kyo, of course. He was aware of it every second.
It seemed important, though, to never let himself know how much.
In time, the rest of the ward would rouse, and Ruki would sit with a heavy weight growing in his stomach as he waited for breakfast to be called. The first meal he'd had with the other men after finding out, he hadn't known where to sit; he had slotted himself in haphazardly between Toshiya and Uruha and pretended not to notice the sudden sharp, assessing look Shinya had shot him. Kyo had walked in last – he wasn't good in the morning – and he hadn't said anything or given any reaction, really, beyond a single pause by the door: just a slight hitch in his step.
Then, seeming to move more quietly than normal, he had sat himself down next to Shinya and laid both of his hands very flat and still on the tabletop. They had looked at each other only once, but it had been enough; their gazes had not so much met as collided, and when Kyo looked away it was with an inscrutable expression on his face and a hot flush creeping up his neck, and the shape of his back and neck as he'd curled them into himself had seemed to sear itself onto the inside of Ruki's eyelids so that he saw it, a neon-lit shadow, whenever he blinked.
Since that first meal they had sat silently apart, neither of them eating much. The fact that Kyo adjusted so seamlessly should have relieved him, but still that heavy feeling of dread settled into him each time he knew a meal was approaching. Every time he saw Kyo he felt his heart do a kind of sickening lurch, as if it recognised the place where it had once been and was anxious to get back there.
After breakfast each day, he would hole himself up in a corner of the TV room and read a book or stare at the television. He didn't need to worry about seeing the other man there: ever since that first painful meal, Kyo had turned back into a ghost again. Before things had changed, Ruki realised, he had really been coming out of his room a lot more, spending more time with the rest of the group; he wondered how he hadn't noticed at the time. He was the kind of person who could be invisible if he wanted to be: now it wrenched at him to realise that Kyo had at one point chosen to be more visible, and that now that decision had been reversed.
Around eleven the dread would start to build up again, and the two of them would sit in their separate chairs and force themselves through another sticky, cardboard-tasting meal. After that the feeling of tiredness would be so palpable that Ruki would sleep his way clear through the long afternoons, sometimes, waking up groggy and confused to the announcement of dinner. He let the other parts of ward life – Toshiya's stupid jokes and his breezy chatter; Uruha's tapping and twitching and compulsions; Shinya's whispering – flow straight over the top of his head; it was a relief to not have to follow it. After dinner he'd normally drag himself back into bed, and there he'd alternately doze and lie starkly awake, and at some point Toshiya would come in and tiptoe around getting ready for bed, and then the lights would go off and everything would grow quiet out in the corridors.
And then he slept, and then he woke, and another day would drag itself over the horizon.
It was startling, how pointless it all felt.
Over the next week, the ward grew colder. The sky was permanently gloomy and loomed with clouds, fat-bellied with snow; the view out of the window was blandly, uniformly white, so much that it made Ruki's eyes seem to ache. The pipes of the heating system groaned in the walls, and although most of the rooms boasted western-style radiators, the heat they gave off was pathetic. The central corridor was the warmest place as it was insulated from the outside by rooms on all sides, and despite the nurses' staunch protests most activity and socialising moved there from the TV and music rooms; it was quite normal to see Shinya sitting cross-legged outside the isolation room with a novel in his lap, or Toshiya dragging the record player up to the door, and Uruha took to lurking outside of Aoi and Die's dorm when he wasn't in therapy or at meals. The door to that room stood constantly closed now, which made it feel empty because Aoi and Die had always kept it open, back in the day, lying on their beds and chain-smoking and catcalling to the people who passed by.
To see it closed felt superstitious, but more than anything it just felt sad. Dead, and finished, and sad.
It wasn't locked, though, and Ruki happened to be walking past one day when he caught Uruha looking inside it with a funny look on his usually stoic face.
Carefully he peered around him and felt the sight of the place hit him like a rock: it had been tidied. The beds were neatly made, the way they never had been before; the ashtrays had been emptied and the incense removed; the red sweater that one or the other of them had wrapped around the lampshade on the ceiling had been disentangled, folded, and put away tidily in a drawer. Gone, too, was the scattering of cast-off clothes and LPs that usually littered the floor, and Ruki instinctively knew that if he reached out to touch Die's record collection – now all stored properly in the orange crates that stood at the foot of his empty bed – he would feel a fine, gritty layer of dust across the top of them.
Uruha caught Ruki over his shoulder and scowled, closing the door with a brisk snap.
'What are you doing?' he asked, his voice strangely raspy. Ruki shrugged.
'Nothing.'
Uruha turned to face him, one hand still clasping the handle of Aoi and Die's bedroom door. The other held a book close to his chest, and Ruki nodded toward it limply. 'What are you reading?'
Uruha uncovered the title: The Local's Guide to Norway. Its spine had been mended neatly with sellotape and shone glossily in the overhead lights, but the binding was scuffed and had been crushed out of alignment. From the front cover, Uruha's father's face beamed out against a background of fjords in summertime. Uruha swallowed – Ruki saw it in his throat – and directed his gaze towards the floor.
He didn't seem to want to let go of the door handle; he kept flexing his hand around it, gripping it tighter. His jaw tightened, and he glanced quickly up into Ruki's eyes before looking away again, all the tendons in his forearm standing out under his skin. Finally, with a movement like a flinch, he ripped his hand away and shifted the book from one arm to another – back and forth, back and forth, twelve times in a row. As soon as he was done, he clasped his fingers back around the door handle again. He hadn't changed expression, but there was something harried and stressed inside his eyes; he blinked often, his gaze landing skittishly at different points around the walls and floor.
'You miss them,' Ruki said quietly, 'Don't you?'
No answer.
'Uruha?' he tried, and roughly the other man shook his head.
'No,' he forced, his voice thick and muffled sounding. 'I'm getting out soon.'
He seemed to be struggling; he swallowed heavily. Uncertain of what to do, Ruki made a tentative motion toward him, and Uruha jerked his head back in affront.
His eyes were filmed with tears, though, and as Ruki watched, one finally broke and rolled down his cheek.
'My dad promised,' he said.
Later that afternoon, the ward was gathered into the TV room to collect their post; because of the thick snow, deliveries only came once a week now, with everything for the sanatorium bundled together in a heavy sack. The scant collection of letters and parcels struggled to fill even a fraction of the space inside, and although he knew he was being stupid Ruki couldn't help but find it symbolic – a sad reminder, every week, of just how much was missing from them all.
Ruki chose an armchair and watched as Uruha settled himself fastidiously in the very centre of the sofa. There was something huddled in his posture, as though he was trying to leave as much space as possible on either side. Gently, Toshiya sat down next to him, and though Ruki expected Uruha to make a fuss he didn't – he simply sat there and tucked his elbows firmly in and started pleating his lower lip between his thumb and forefinger.
Shinya and Kyo were the last in, and Ruki watched as Shinya lowered himself very cautiously into a chair, his eyes squeezed tightly shut and his hands clenched on the arms as though he expected it to explode beneath him. Kyo cast a hard look around at the assembled company, as if daring them to laugh, but there was nothing funny about it; Ruki thought he hadn't seen much that was less funny in his life.
'Is that everyone?' the nurse holding the sack asked doubtfully, glancing around the room. Toshiya lit up a cigarette. Shinya covered his eyes with his hands, and Kyo regarded him grimly.
'Well,' the nurse said, evidently feeling a little uncomfortable in front of such a quiet and miserable gathering, 'All right then. Let's see...Uruha, here's a package for you.'
She smiled widely at him as he went up to accept it. 'And do send our thanks to your father for the lovely chocolates, won't you? He's spoiling us terribly.'
Uruha simply snatched his parcel from her hands. He took it back to the sofa and, without opening it, settled it carefully on the empty cushion next to him. The nurse's smile faltered, and she turned back to the sack gratefully.
'Ruki, your turn.' She held up a small packet and a letter and Ruki rose to get them, his cheeks burning; he fought the urge to stuff them away inside his T-shirt, out of sight. It seemed unfair, he thought vividly as he went back to his seat, almost perverse to do this so publicly, when some people never got any letters at all. Kyo, for example; why did he bother showing up? Did they make him, and if so, why? Or could he still hoping for something, after all these years?
'Shinya,' the nurse called, holding a letter high in the air; he didn't move. Hurriedly, Ruki turned his attention to his own post. The small package was the size and shape of a book, addressed in his mother's script; the letter was from Eiji – he could have seen that from across the room, with the fancy stationery and the address written in such an artfully untidy hand on the front. He wedged both down the side of the armchair, feeling uncomfortably warm even in the chilly room. 'Shinya,' the nurse was saying in an overly tolerant tone of voice, 'Come up here and get your letter, please.'
Shinya made a shrinking sort of motion, as if he thought he could disappear inside his own skin.
'Shinya, don't you think your parents would like you to read their letter? Don't you think they'll be upset if they don't get a reply?'
'No thank you,' he said, his voice hardly audible. The nurse squinted at him, like she was double-checking his existence.
'What do you mean, Shinya?'
He looked up at her, eyes huge, and then directed his luminous gaze towards the dead television screen.
'They can see,' he said in a voice that seemed to float, 'They can see me, through there.'
The nurse seemed to flounder for a moment, almost exasperated, and then yanked her face back into a supportive smile.
'Now, Shinya,' she said gently, 'You know when you sat down with Doctor Kimura, he talked to you about televisions, didn't he? All about how they work, and how we can see what's on the screen, but the screen can't see us? How there aren't any cameras? Your parents can't see you. The only people who can see you right now are the people in this room. Now, don't you want to read your letter?' She hesitated. 'Your parents would be very sad if they thought you were ignoring them, Shinya.'
His indecision was a pitiful thing; he inched a hand out, a frail tendril, and then curled it back as if it ever could have reached the letter from where he was sat clear across the room. He ducked his head back and shook it, hands gripping his elbows tightly.
'They'll know,' he said quietly. 'They'll know when I read it. They'll—'
'Shinya,' the nurse said helplessly, 'Don't work yourself up, now. Try to calm down and think rationally.'
'No,' Shinya said, his voice very clear. His hands left his elbows and started to rub at his own ears.
'Shinya...' the nurse crossed the room, her soft-soled shoes squeaking busily, and knelt down in front of him. 'Would you like to sit in the isolation room for a little while? Until you feel a bit calmer?'
'They'll think I'm ungrateful,' Shinya whispered.
'I'm sure they won't—'
'I'm a bad son.'
'Shinya—'
'They'll think. But they know. But I...'
His face crumpled suddenly and he spilled forward, his arms reaching up to clasp at the top of his own head, grabbing fistfuls of his hair. 'Stop staring at me,' he said miserably.
But when she carefully slipped her hands under his arms and started to pull him out of the chair, he went with her as docilely as a lamb. He was crying, Ruki saw, the tears running down his face quickly and silently, and his walk as the nurse guided him from the room was shuffling and old.
Kyo closed his eyes and tipped his head back a little in his chair, and Ruki thought that he looked exhausted.
There was a strange quiet in which Uruha picked up his parcel and left, a frown on his pretty face, and Toshiya stretched out his arms and, with a casualness that didn't quite seem real, sauntered over to the sack and dug through what was left. He glanced at one envelope and pocketed it with an unconvincingly careless expression, and then he pulled out another and Ruki saw the muscles in his back stiffen through his T-shirt. He turned around and looked at Ruki questioningly, holding it in the air.
'It's for Aoi.'
Ruki frowned. 'Aoi never gets post.'
His voice sounded cracked and rusty through lack of use; he cleared his throat painfully.
'Can't think why,' Toshiya said lightly, and shot Ruki an uncertain smile. 'Think I should put it back, or...?'
Ruki bit his lip. 'No.'
'No?'
'No, I...' he hesitated. 'If you do that, I'm not sure if he'll get it. I don't know if they'd give it to him.'
He glanced nervously at Kyo in case the older man was going to give some sort of conformation of what life was like on the upper floor, but his eyes were still closed and he was doing an admirable impression of being asleep.
'I think we should put it in his room,' Ruki said finally, 'Under the covers of his bed, or something. So it's hidden, but he can read it when he's back.'
'Ah.' Toshiya's dark eyes met his, and something passed between them: a sort of slotting into place of some knowledge. Ruki watched Toshiya glance at Kyo, and then glance back at him, and although his jaw tensed nervously Toshiya just gave him a mysterious smile.
'Yeah, let's do that,' he said. 'I'll do it now. Then I'm going to lie down, so...' he paused, 'So – that's where I'll be.'
Ruki felt weirdly as if the other man was repeating lines that had been written for him, and his lips felt numb. 'Okay,' he said.
And it felt rehearsed, again, as Toshiya walked out of the room and left them there, sitting in silence. With legs that seemed to shake slightly, Ruki got up and turned on the television. He had no interest in watching it – he couldn't even force his eyes to take in what was on the screen – but he needed something, he felt, to break up the quiet.
At the blare of sound from the TV set Kyo gave a start in his chair; maybe he had been asleep, after all. His eyes met Ruki's almost guiltily.
'Sorry,' he said in a careful voice. He rose to his feet and made to leave, but paused. He turned with his back half to Ruki and his face in profile, the line of his body a strange question mark.
'Can I make it right?' he asked at last, his voice quiet and very neutral. Something about it made Ruki shift uncomfortably in his chair, unsure how to answer; stalling, he lit up a cigarette, but Kyo waited. He was still but for one hand, which picked over and over at the hem of his T-shirt, a rare nervous tic.
All at once Ruki felt far, far too tired to lie, and he stubbed his freshly lit cigarette out.
'I saw your file,' he said expressionlessly, 'In Sato's office. I read parts of it. So I know...' he faltered a little, his voice wearing thin. 'I know you're really...ill. That you're really mad.'
The word had a shocking sound in the empty room, like a slap. Kyo didn't move, and it was quiet for a long time.
'I see,' he said finally, the tone of his voice giving nothing away.
'And you...' Ruki curled his hands into fists to resist the urge to start biting his nails, 'You lied to me. I – I told you about Hiroshi; I trusted you. And you said you had a sister but she wasn't – she wasn't real.'
'I did not lie to you,' Kyo said quietly.
'But you did,' Ruki said tiredly, and Kyo seemed to hesitate before he turned, meeting Ruki's gaze head-on.
'What makes something real?' he said, a little painfully. 'How do you know the things you see are the same things everybody else sees? You have dreams that feel real. So how do you know you've woken up?'
'But—'
'I don't care if she was only in my head,' Kyo said, his voice calm. 'She was all I had.'
'Reality is real,' Ruki said dully, rubbing at his temples, 'Nothing else is. That's...that's just the way it is. That's the way it has to be. If you start believing in things that aren't real, where do you stop? How do you know if I'm even real? Doesn't that bother you?'
Kyo let out a long, slow breath. 'I know you're real,' he said steadily. 'But so was she.'
'It's not the same,' Ruki said numbly, 'Hiroshi – he was my real brother. He was alive. And then he wasn't. He actually lived in this world and I loved him; don't you get that? Don't you see how it's different?'
Kyo looked for a moment as though he was going to say something, but he didn't.
I thought we were the same,' Ruki said, his voice quieter but less even. 'I...were you ever going to tell me?'
'Tell you what?' Kyo asked then, his voice ragged sounding, 'The truth? I did tell you the truth.' He shrugged jaggedly. 'It was my truth. That's all I can give you.'
Ruki's head seemed to be buzzing; he tangled his free hand in his hair and squeezed hard, as if it would help. His mind felt thick, confused; he pressed against his own temples until he could hear the blood throbbing in his skin. He lit up a fresh cigarette and pulled on it deeply; it tasted toxic. Kyo's expression had hardly changed at all, but there was something about his posture that made Ruki feel sick with guilt and apprehension, with the danger that he had made some mistake, done something really unforgivable: the set of Kyo's shoulders, high and defensive, as though Ruki was a stranger.
And it happened with the sight of him standing there like that – all alone in the middle of the floor, his angular body braced for an attack and his head gently lowered – a sudden rush of feeling through Ruki's body, not just of blame and fear but of a fierce protectiveness; a desire to wrap his arms around those stiff shoulders and kiss the bent head, to comfort the rigid body; to snarl at anybody who might interfere. He took a deep breath, clutching at his head harder than ever; it felt too much; he felt full.
It was the first time they'd spoken since Ruki had read his file, and it was breaking Ruki's heart because in ignoring the other man and avoiding him, all he had managed to do was to shut out the fact of how much he still wanted him.
Even if he was completely insane, he still wanted him. He wanted the wry little twist Kyo's lips did when he found something funny, and the uneven gruffness of his voice, as though he hadn't used it for years and years and it had never quite recovered; he wanted the way he spoke so quietly, and so slowly, not at all like Ruki's nervous chatter. He wanted the way he sat stiller than normal people sat, like a cat; he wanted the feeling of warmth that came from knowing that Kyo was sitting beside him and yet expecting nothing from him, content to just be. He wanted the frisson that went through him when their arms brushed; when their hands touched.
Most of all he wanted the feeling of contentment he seemed to have lost; that strange sense of rightness, of belonging.
He thought that was why, looking at the jagged, wounded angle of Kyo's body, he felt so deeply bereft.
'You shouldn't have read it,' Kyo said at long last, and Ruki nodded. There was a ringing in his ears that he couldn't seem to clear; he swallowed over and over.
'I'm really sorry,' he said unevenly.
He risked a glance up at the other man's face even though he knew it would hurt: he could see him struggling with something there, his eyes distant and dark.
'It was private,' Kyo said painfully.
'I know,' he whispered.
The silence between them felt big then, felt related to the fumes of the thousands of cigarettes that had been smoked in the room they sat in; something heavy and poisonous, smothering out the fresh air.
'Why did you do it?' Kyo asked finally.
'I don't know.'
There was a mixed up sort of excuse in his head, something tied up in the way Kyo had always been so mysterious, always so closed off when it came to his background; how Ruki had just wanted to know; had just wanted to feel like they knew each other. It didn't feel good enough. He thought about all the little flares of honesty between them – everything Kyo had told him, the forthrightness of his voice as he had done so; every moment they'd spent together; Kyo letting him touch him, letting him put his lips on him.
Mad. Crazy.
The first time they'd kissed, and feeling like he really meant it.
Insane.
He had been, he realised, so stupid.
'I wanted to know if you were crazy,' Ruki admitted softly, his eyes falling closed so he wouldn't have to meet Kyo's gaze. 'If you would ever get out; if...'
'Why,' Kyo asked, no question mark in his voice, and Ruki shrugged.
'Because I was scared,' he said hollowly, 'that I might be – that I could have been falling for you.'
It was a feeling so desperate it made his head spin; made him clutch at himself so he wouldn't simply fly apart.
Silence.
It stretched on for so long that Ruki felt his cigarette burn down to his fingers, and he let it fall to the floor because his arms felt too heavy to reach for an ashtray. It smouldered until it extinguished itself there, giving off a sharp, chemical smell.
'I would have told you,' Kyo said at last, his voice uncharacteristically heavy and shaken-sounding, 'Everything. I just needed time.'
Ruki felt a tear trickle down his cheek. 'I know.'
And it was ridiculous, stronger than him no matter how violently he wanted to rail against it; the urge to be the one to walk out, to leave before he could be left.
Ruki found himself getting to his feet. He walked out of the room.