![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
solongsun Since early childhood, Kaoru has been using doors to travel backwards and forwards through time: a motion he is sometimes able to control, and sometimes not. At the age of 22, he opens a door to the long-ago autumn of 1996 and finds something he never expected – a man who, decades before Kaoru's birth, seems to know exactly who he is...
His posture on the bed is unbalanced, spiky and unreliable. He sits in the way he always has, leaning back on his hands and his knees defiantly spread, but there's a lack of confidence in the way that his eyes keep slipping away from Toshiya's and focussing themselves on the wall behind him or the floor under his feet; in the tense muscle that's flickering faintly in his jaw. When he lights a cigarette, he has to chase the tip of it around with the lighter flame for a moment because his hands are shaking, and Toshiya feels it like a bruise in the chest: I did that.
He's so nervous because of me.
The worst thought of all: because I pushed him away.
'Are you insane,' Kyo says at last. To his own ears he sounds calm, but he's aware of a faint ringing in the back of his head, like an alarm bell going off, and his own thoughts seem to be shorting out on him unsteadily.
He's aware that he's sitting there for one reason, and one reason only: a kind of masochistic impulse to see how much discomfort he can take, gaining a sort of bizarre, heady pleasure in sitting still with his outer layers flayed and his soul laid bare. It's like an adrenaline rush; it's costing him a lot of energy to remain still.
His whole body feels like it's itching all along his nerves.
In front of him, Toshiya is absently squeezing his lower lip together between his thumb and his forefinger, pleating the tender flesh: a nervous habit of his. He gives Kyo an anxious sort of smile.
When he does that he reminds Kyo of a dog, the way they grin and lick their lips and fold back their ears to show that they're not a threat.
'I don't think so,' Toshiya tries, his voice unconvincingly light. In front of him, Kyo's face looks tight; when he speaks his voice sounds tight, too, as if his throat is closing up on him.
'If this is something you concocted to make things less awkward,' he says stiffly, 'then I'm not sure how impressed I am.'
Toshiya sort of flinches a little, like that's hurt him.
'It's real,' he says, his voice almost apologetic. 'He's a time traveller, and I – I really wanted to tell you before, but I knew I wasn't supposed to, and I didn't think you'd believe me.'
Kyo gives him a frank sort of look and Toshiya sighs, laughing in a way that sounds sad.
'You don't believe me now,' he says.
It's a weird sort of night, Kyo thinks. In some strange way it feels almost foreordained, as if it had been planned long ago; looking back, it seems entirely possible that he might have met Toshiya and then lived through the past few years with him entirely for the sake of this moment: the two of them at stalemate, sitting opposite each other on their beds, not speaking.
Toshiya's hurt, but in a way that feels impossible to diagnose, and so for the moment Kyo forces himself to shut it out. He focusses on his cigarette, the smell and taste of it, the smoothness of the paper between his fingers.
'The travelling – that's how I met him,' Toshiya says suddenly, 'When I was six. He wasn't a kid like me; he was an adult, like he is now. He was twenty-eight years old and it was – it was like he recognised me. He knew my name.' He smiles shakily but his eyes, when he looks at Kyo, are quite steady. 'He's always been there,' he says simply. 'After I saw him that first time, he showed up more and more. Sometimes a few months would go by without me seeing him, and then sometimes I'd see him every day...I mean every day, for me. He'd be younger, or older...it confused me. Telling him things again that I'd told him just the day before, because he was younger again and didn't have the memories yet...'
Kyo seems to be concentrating very hard on his cigarette, almost glaring at it.
'I grew up with him,' Toshiya says quietly. 'I felt...I didn't understand how I felt, at first. I was a kid still.' He sighs, running an agitated hand through his hair, 'There wasn't a lot of love in my family, but Kaoru loved me, and I needed it so much. Nobody else treated me like that; like I was something really special.' He pauses. 'He was so gentle with me, when I was young. All he did was look after me, but when he was around I felt safe. I felt surrounded by love, completely, like I could finally have my fill of it; like there wasn't ever going to be an end.'
Kyo's face could be carved from stone.
'I...' Toshiya takes a deep breath, but loses it almost instantly. 'I don't want to hurt you,' he mumbles. Kyo's face doesn't change.
'Go on,' he says woodenly, and Toshiya digs his fingernails nervously into the skin of his own wrist.
'When I started getting older,' he says in a rush, 'Things changed. Kaoru – he wasn't as comfortable with me. I was turning into the man he knew, and he knew our relationship would change; he just didn't know when. He thought—' he breaks off suddenly, turning his face to the side, and swallows.
There's a small silence.
'I think he thought he'd be betraying me,' Toshiya says finally, speaking slower. 'And I think...I think he might have tried to change it. I think he had this idea that he could control things; that he could maybe stay being my friend, and keep me from falling in love with him.'
Kyo blinks up at him, the look in his eyes inscrutable. 'Why,' he says, not bothering to add a question mark.
'I guess he knew he'd always be disappearing. The travelling – he can't control it, not really. Sometimes it happens when he's asleep, but most often it's because he sees a door.'
'A door,' Kyo repeats. It's impossible to tell from his voice what he's thinking.
'Yeah. It's – well, I guess it's more about – there's a certain kind of doorknob, a round one made of brass; it appears for him. Sometimes he sees it coming straight out of walls, places where there aren't any doors; but it makes them into a door, you see. When he was a kid, he it happened with a tree. He went straight inside it.'
He risks a glance into Kyo's face, but it isn't encouraging.
'A round, brass doorknob,' he says lamely, 'It's – there was that exact doorknob on my closet when I was a kid. When we first met, I took him to it. Kyo, I know how this sounds, but I also know what I saw.' He pauses, biting his lip. 'Kyo, he opened the door of my closet and he disappeared.'
'Disappeared,' Kyo mutters, and Toshiya's eyes leap to his face, but he seems to simply be turning the word over.
'Disappeared,' he repeats, his voice a little firmer. 'I remember – I watched him go and then I ran right over to the closet and got inside it. I guess I was looking for a secret door in it, or a Twilight Zone portal or something.' He snorts, but then smiles a little ruefully, 'I wanted to see if it would transport me, too. But it didn't, of course.'
There's a wistful tone in his voice that makes Kyo think that maybe Toshiya would have preferred it if the closet had transported him, but even following that train of thought is making his head ache. He feels stuffed full of contradictions; he shakes his head stubbornly.
'You understand that what you're telling me is crazy,' he says flatly, and Toshiya hesitates before giving a small nod.
'Yeah, I do.'
'So you understand that I can't actually believe this, right?'
Nervously, Toshiya smiles at him. 'If I thought that, I never would have told you.'
Kyo stares at him blankly. 'Well, I hate to let you down.'
He's quiet for a moment, looking at Toshiya hard, and then he sighs. 'Let's just say,' he says a little wearily, 'That hypothetically, I believe you. So he uses doors to travel back and forth; can't he just stay in one place? If he's so attached to you, if he's always been there, shouldn't he want to stay here with you?'
'It doesn't work that way. He's tried.'
'To stay?'
Toshiya nods. 'He can only last here until he falls asleep. When he does, he dreams of the door – dreams of opening it; he can't help it. He disappears.'
'That's convenient,' Kyo mutters, and Toshiya shoots him a look that's suddenly hard.
'It's not a line,' he says sharply. 'I've seen it happen, don't you get that? I've watched him vanish; I've seen it. I've...' he stops abruptly, the hardness leaving his face, 'I was the one who told him. I told him, the first time – his first time – that we met; how it would work when he fell asleep.' He laughs in a strained kind of way, gripping his own head, 'I'm not making sense.'
'No, you're not,' Kyo agrees, not unkindly.
'What I mean to say is that...the first time we met, when I was six, it was only the first time for me. He'd already met me; Kaoru already knew me, as an adult. The first time he ever met me, I was nineteen.' He bites his lip, 'Do you remember the night that I asked you to go sleep at Rie's place?'
'Vividly,' Kyo says sourly.
'That was the night. He came into that bar I used to work in, and I kissed him, and he was horrified.' He gives a snort of laughter, but it's unconvincing; his eyes are wet. 'He didn't know who I was, didn't understand how I knew who he was...it was a mess.'
'So what, he knew what he was but he couldn't have guessed that he'd met you in his own future?' Kyo says in an acid tone, and Toshiya shakes his head a little fretfully.
'He had these rules,' he says. 'It was always – it used to scare him, travelling; he never used to want to. When he did it, it was mostly by accident, and he wasn't going around talking to people; he was just trying to get back as quickly as possible.'
'But he ended up talking to you.'
'Because he knew that he already had. He couldn't change it any more.'
'But initially—'
'There is no “initially”, don't you see? He was nineteen, he had these rules, and then he ran into somebody in the past who knew him. He didn't get to break the rule for the first time because he'd already broken it, in the future, and he'd already broken it in the future because he'd already broken it in the past. There is no beginning. It's...for you, time is a straight line. It starts when you're born and it stops when you die; everything that happens is plotted in order along that line. But if it wasn't like that, how do you know what's already happened and what's yet to happen? If something's happened and you just haven't experienced it yet, is it ahead of you or behind you? If you can go back before the time that you're born, where's the beginning?'
He feels so exasperated at Kyo's pigheaded refusal to understand that he actually thumps the bed with his fist, his eyes wide and bright. Slowly, giving nothing away, the other man nods.
'I suppose that makes sense,' he says, his voice suggesting that it makes no sense at all.
So they're back where they started: each of them sitting on their own beds, not really talking any more, Kyo smoking more than feels good and Toshiya tugging at his lower lip absently.
There's that same weird sense again, of things feeling foreordained. Kyo can't tell if it's a real feeling, or if Toshiya's ramblings have somehow sunk into him.
His lungs are heavy and thick and his breaths seem to cost him some effort. He grinds his cigarette out against the windowsill and lights another.
He remembers very clearly when Toshiya moved in; the irritation that Die had sent him another stray, and the way the annoyance had faded into nothing when the four of them had got together and Toshiya had played with them for the first time.
Perhaps with that – the ease in which Toshiya had fitted himself among them, the perfection of his sound blending with theirs, the feeling of things falling neatly into place – Kyo had used up his share of fate.
Tentatively, he allows himself to explore the thought, testing how much it hurts. Suppose that when Toshiya first stood in front of him that day, there had been something like a fork in the road, and one fork was the band and music and late, late nights with tired eyes and ink-stained fingers, and countless day jobs and sweating under stage lighting and feeling the ring of applause in his head.
Suppose that the other fork had been something different entirely; suppose Toshiya hadn't worked out with the band, but their paths had kept crossing anyway, or that he'd stayed on in the flat anyway.
Might then his allowance of fate had been used up some other way?
He straightens up.
'I don't know whether I believe you or not,' he says a little haltingly. 'I need to think about it. And I'm going to have more questions.'
Toshiya's smile is strained.
'That's about as good as I could have hoped for, I guess.'
'About this morning,' Kyo says abruptly, and watches Toshiya's face change.
'Kyo—'
'I'm only talking about it,' he says heavily, 'To tell you that I don't want to talk about it.'
'I...' Toshiya scrapes his thumbnail along the seam of his jeans, fighting the urge to chew on it, 'I kind of feel like we should talk about it, though.'
'No.' Kyo smiles at him stiffly. 'I think it's better if it never happened.'
'Do you want me to move out?'
'Neither of us can afford that.'
'We could...' Toshiya gives into temptation and gnaws at his thumbnail for a moment, 'I don't know, maybe we could give up this place, if it's easier; I could move in with Die and you could go live with Shinya, or—'
'I don't want to stop living with you,' Kyo says tonelessly. The skin around his eyes looks stiff and tense, the way it always does when he's stressed, but when he speaks again his voice is gentler than Toshiya expects: 'Dumbass.'
There's affection in that voice: painful and stunted, with nowhere to go, like a plant trying to grow in the dark.
Toshiya leans forward and buries his face in his hands; lets some of the awful tension inside of him break apart. He can hear his own shuddering, uneven breaths; can see the darkness of his own palms.
Seeing this through Kyo's eyes, he suddenly can't imagine how his own life became so strange.
'He wanted me to break up with him,' he says in a strange, gritty voice, forcing it past his lips, 'When I told him about you. He told me that I should try to make a go of it with you; that you're a good man.'
Kyo snorts roughly.
'He's wrong about that.'
'Kyo,' Toshiya says helplessly, 'You are good. I know you're good.'
'Do you.'
'You're my best friend, Kyo. I'm glad you don't want me to move out, because – to be honest, I don't know what I'd do without you.'
Kyo's silent for a moment.
'You'd live,' he says at last, brusquely.
But both of them know his heart isn't in it.
They don't talk for much longer, that night. Toshiya's clearly exhausted, his whole body sagging, and Kyo experiments with ushering him into bed, shutting up his sleepy attempts at conversation, and discovers that it doesn't feel that bad. He tests his capabilities gently, but a broken heart isn't like a broken limb or a slashed throat; he can still move and speak and do everything the same as before.
If anything, he thinks as he settles himself down in his own bed, it's not really a pain so much as a weight. It lies heavily on his chest, not really enough to cut off his breathing; just enough to make it a little ragged.
He stares stubbornly up at the ceiling. It's possibly all right to cry – he feels like the weight might slacken a little if he does – but he's not sure that he'll be able to. At the very least, he has to wait until Toshiya's breath evens out and he starts his gentle snoring.
He feels alternately hot and cold, hot and cold. Feels the inside of his chest flashing from heart to stone.
Something he hadn't even been able to force himself to say to Toshiya: even if all of this is true, if he's gone all the time, how can you believe anything he's said?
If you're here in this time, then who's there in this time?
What if you've made him your everything, but you're not that much to him? What if you're just his twentieth century boy?
Risking a quick glance across the room, he knows it's no good. Toshiya lacks that cynical side; he doesn't have any of Kyo's hard edges. At his heart he's still the naïve country boy he was when he first walked into Kyo's life almost three years ago, losing himself in daydreams and settling himself into a stranger's apartment like it's no big deal; getting too drunk on cheap beer and falling down laughing; stripping off his clothes in the heart of the summer and standing naked in front of their single window, happily anonymous in this huge, alien city. Forcing his way into Kyo's heart with his clumsy openness, his unselfconscious affection, the look on his face when he gets lost in the music they're making together.
Toshiya's asleep now; his breaths are slow and deep. Kyo swallows, a tight little wince of a motion, and thinks that maybe he can't cry; that maybe the inside of him is like the weather when it's too cold to snow.
When he searches for the bad, evil, vengeful feelings inside of himself he finds them all twisted together in a bunch but numbed, for now. They'll be back, he's sure. There'll be time to separate them, one by one, from each other; time enough to peer into them and turn them inside out and let them flow, eventually, through his hand and onto paper.
Shortly before he falls asleep, he wonders if this is really what's best for him. After all, this is a love that he can't fuck up; this is a love that can never flower but can also never die. A stupid, sad, evergreen love.
He allows himself a rare moment to dwell on happier times; a habit he doesn't indulge in often. It's obvious and maybe even a little creepy, but the memory most comforting to him is that single vision of Toshiya with his clothes stripped off, sweat shining on his bare skin, summer sun beating into their tiny, boxlike apartment.
Toshiya's breathing is quiet and the hum of the city is dulled. In their shared home, the loudest sound is made by the Toshiya of nearly three years ago, crossing to the window to try and tempt in a non-existent breeze.
From:
no subject
It's not particularly surprising that Kyo doesn't believe what Totchi's saying. He probably will eventually, though. I like the way you've described his heartbreak - not sharp and stabbing, but just weighing him down. That feels very realistic. I wonder what things go from here.
From:
no subject
From:
no subject
From:
no subject