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solongsun He could see his mouth moving but the doctor's voice sounded bubbly in his head, as though he was underwater. He let his aching eyes fall shut and rubbed at his ears irritably.
'Ruki?'
He imagined the air around him was cool, clear water. He imagined he could float suspended in the middle of it all, silent as a shipwreck, so he could finally stop falling.
He opened his eyes to see Sato peering searchingly at his face.
'Sorry,' he said listlessly.
'I was saying,' Sato said without a hint of impatience, 'That there's really very little point in you attending these sessions if you aren't going to speak. Talk to me, please.'
'Sorry,' Ruki repeated, dully.
'I do have an incentive, as it happens,' Sato said, and with a raised eyebrow he leant back, slid open a drawer of his desk – the gentle rasping sound it made was horribly familiar, and it made Ruki ache with guilt all over again – and pulled out a letter. Ruki frowned.
'It's from Iwamiya,' the doctor explained, a small smile visible beneath his neat moustache, 'And, not that I'm bitter, but he rarely writes back to me as quickly as he's written to you.'
'To me,' Ruki repeated hollowly, his words seeming to drop to the floor with a thunk. He thought he saw Sato's smile grow a little forced, but it could have been his imagination.
'About your work, Ruki,' the doctor said gently. 'It's your letter and I haven't read it; I don't know if it's good news or bad news, or any news at all. However, I'm not going to pass this letter over to you until I feel certain that you can handle whatever the contents may be; the way you are right now, I'm sure you can see why I'd be erring on the side of simply keeping it in my desk drawer for a few more weeks.'
'Yeah,' Ruki said tonelessly, and Sato leant forward. His leather chair creaked.
'What has happened?' he asked plainly, lacing his fingers together over the desktop. 'Setbacks aren't uncommon, but the change in your demeanour recently has been troubling, Ruki. The nurses are telling me that you've withdrawn from your friends; that you're not creating any artwork any more; for the past two weeks you've sat in front of me and hardly said a word.'
'Nothing's happened.'
Sato smiled at him kindly. 'Liar.'
Ruki busied himself lighting up another cigarette. He didn't want one; he felt ill already. He wanted the window open, but he could see how thickly the snow was falling outside. Several short icicles had grown from the little overhang above the windowpane; he watched them thoughtfully.
'Ruki. I know I don't mean to remind you that these sessions are confidential; that this is a safe space for you. We've been working well together, I've thought, these past few months; I've enjoyed having you as my patient.' He paused. 'Please, do try to have faith in me. I've not done anything to break your trust yet.'
'Are you allowed to guilt-trip me,' Ruki mumbled shortly, and the doctor smiled.
'If it's for a good cause, yes.'
Ruki sighed. 'I can't tell you anything,' he said.
Even to him, his voice sounded stilted and fake, and he examined the end of his cigarette. He was finding it easier to do that, in recent days; finding his attention easily eaten up by a song on the radio, or by the sight of his cigarette flame slowly burning its way through the paper and flaring with his breaths, or by the rhythmic clicking of Shinya's chess playing.
'I see. Why is that?'
Ruki just shrugged, and Sato sighed.
'Indulge me, here. If you don't feel like speaking, then how about this: I'm going to ask you a few questions – just very easy, yes or no questions – and I'd like you to hold up one finger for yes, and two fingers for no. Think you can handle that?'
Ruki sent the doctor a filthy look and he smiled, looking supremely unconcerned.
'Wonderful. Let's have a warm up. Sample question: is your name Ruki Matsumoto?'
There was a pause, and then grudgingly Ruki raised one finger. He chose the middle one, and held it up to Sato defiantly.
'Very good, your name is indeed Ruki Matsumoto. Now: you've been acting particularly unhappy recently. Are you feeling very unhappy?'
He kept his middle finger up, and Sato nodded.
'I see. Would you say that you're feeling unhappy because of a problem with your art?'
Two fingers. Ruki took a shaky drag of his cigarette.
'Are you feeling unhappy because of a problem with a particular person, or personal relationship?'
His tongue tasted like dead ash. 'This is stupid,' Ruki muttered.
'Indeed,' the doctor said. 'Maybe you'd like to use your words instead, then. So, is it a person?'
'Yes.'
'A person here, or at home?'
Ruki sent him a withering look, and the doctor hesitated. 'Help me out here, will you?'
'I can't tell you,' Ruki said from between gritted teeth, 'Because if I do you'll think I'm crazy and you'll keep me here longer; don't you get that?'
'You're not crazy.'
'Believe me on this,' Ruki said moodily, and thought he saw a brief smile cross Sato's face.
'All right, I'll believe you. But if I'm correct about what I think you're referring to, I can promise you that it won't be mentioned in your file. Not now, or ever.'
Ruki felt a queasy thump of panic in his chest, and ground out his cigarette.
'How am I supposed to believe that?' he asked, his voice trembling, and Sato shrugged.
'I suppose you'll have to trust me. And it's difficult for you, I know, because you're bad at trusting people. You feel like they leave you whenever you do. You feel like trusting people is scary; you feel like it's maybe a waste of time. You feel like every time you've put your faith in somebody, they've abandoned you; that you trusted your parents to give you all their love and they didn't; that you trusted your brother to stay by you and he didn't; that you trusted your mentor to love you but he didn't.' Sato paused. 'Not the way you loved him.'
Ruki's face felt like a mask; stiff. His mouth was open, but he couldn't close it; he made a stupid noise in the back of his throat and Sato did something he'd never done before; he got up, came around the desk and sat in the chair by Ruki's side. Delicately, he laced his fingers together again, looking not at Ruki's face but out of the window.
'It is not in your file,' he repeated, his voice quiet, 'It will never be in your file. Trust me, Ruki. It makes no difference to your diagnosis; it makes no difference to how long you'll stay here. There are possible differences it will make; do you want to know what they are? Number one, it'll mean that we might do some work together about healthy, respectful relationships. Number two, it might mean that you finally get to be completely honest with me, and therapy can be a wonderful thing, Ruki; it can work, if you're honest. If you let it.'
Ruki heard his own voice saying: 'How did you know?'
'The way you spoke about him. It was clear he'd hurt you more than anybody else.'
Ruki was quiet, pressing his lips together for a moment. 'But,' he said suddenly, 'But Aoi—'
'—Is not well,' Sato interjected gently. 'But his problems aren't ours to discuss; that's between Aoi and his doctor.'
'But he's here just because he's gay; that's what he said.'
'It's his choice what he chooses to reveal to you,' the doctor said carefully. 'Aoi hasn't had an easy time.'
'But—'
'This is all I'm going to say about Aoi, Ruki. I'm sorry to rebuff you, but I know you can understand that it's his business, and that he deserves to have his confidence kept just as much as you do.'
Ruki's mouth felt dry, and his head seemed to spin peculiarly. Jerkily, he nodded.
'I read Kyo's file,' he said, 'When you left.'
Next to him, Sato stilled. He seemed at a loss for words for a few moments; he leant over and retrieved the packet of cigarettes that lay on his desk, lighting one up.
'That was – very, very wrong of you.'
'I know,' he said miserably. 'I know.'
The doctor was quiet for a moment.
'Why did you do it?'
'I...I don't know. I saw it and I just...I wanted to know. He keeps so much to himself, or I thought he did. But he's been telling me.'
There was a small silence in which Sato tactfully passed Ruki a handkerchief; it smelled of laundry.
'He's been telling me all along, and I just didn't listen,' Ruki said, his voice thick. 'I thought he'd lied to me – or – I don't know what I thought, really. I got scared. I didn't know how I was feeling about somebody who might be – who might—'
His voice cracked suddenly, and he felt his shoulders do a violent shake as he pushed his trembling hands in front of his eyes. Their memories seemed to circle him, pressed into his brain, carved maybe into the inside of his skull: Hiroshi, Eiji, Kyo. Waiting outside school for hours to be picked up by his parents, rain seeping into his shoes; pressing desperately on the buzzer for Eiji's flat and shivering in the November wind; Hiroshi, his handsome face wasted down to almost nothing, trying to drink through a straw. Kyo standing in front of him and Ruki suddenly able to picture the scene from the outside; his own blindfolded self raising his hands to touch and Kyo letting him, his whole body bare, completely vulnerable.
He wasn't sure which of them he was crying so hard for: maybe it was all of them. Crying in Sato's office; he thought he would feel ashamed – was dimly aware that he should feel ashamed – but he couldn't bring himself to be. It just felt too clean, too painful, like he was bleaching his insides until they were pure again; like his tears were boiled water. Whatever burning, tangled mess had been existing inside him and poisoning him, it seemed to be slackening slightly; the knot his heart was in seemed to be easing.
He felt purged, and so he leant forward and cried roughly into his hands, taking the doctor's silence as confirmation that it was okay to do so.
It wasn't until early in the evening that it finally stopped snowing, and the sky started to clear and darken. The first few stars that came out appeared dim and hard and somehow brittle, like shards of some crystalline rock; Ruki hovered by the window and watched them. As the sky grew darker the reflection of his face got clearer and clearer, and it was appalling to see how tired and used up he looked.
Sato hadn't given him the letter, of course. He was aware that he should have cared, but he couldn't seem to manage it. Even the thought that an opportunity could be slipping through his fingers didn't worry him the way it might have done before; he experimented with allowing the thought into the forefront of his mind and watched his reflection as his face hardened.
He deserved it.
What he hadn't been able to tell Sato was how strangely paralysed he felt; that he wasn't just not drawing because he was miserable, but because the act felt pointless – felt inadequate, almost.
Now, standing in front of the window, he realised that whenever he had drawn before it had always been fuelled by some kind of fierce emotion, spilling over into his work like ink: sorrow at the loss of his brother, lust for Eiji, the tense boredom of being locked up day after day. This, though – the feeling that opened up within his chest whenever his eyes met Kyo's in the dining room or whenever the other man happened into his mind – it felt impossible, too big. How to express it; how to channel all of that wild, unwieldy feeling? Like trying to thread an ocean through a needle.
He wondered, briefly, if this was how Kyo had felt to have his secrets so violated: as though he had been flayed entirely open.
Sucking in a slow breath, Ruki turned away from the darkened window. The television was was on and the scene before him was a strange one: Uruha had placed himself in the very centre of the sofa again, his positioning so precise he might have measured it with a ruler. He held a book in his lap but it was obvious he wasn't reading it; he hadn't turned a page since he'd sat down and opened it, and his gaze was glassy and unfocussed and the only still thing about him; over the last few weeks, his compulsions seemed to have gotten worse. Now as he sat he blinked his eyes in a timed sequence, touched his chin to each of his shoulders in turn, cleared his throat often. He wore the shiny Piaget watch on one thin wrist but it seemed to be bothering him; he rubbed that wrist hard against the seat of the sofa, like a dog trying to scrape off a collar; in time he started rhythmically banging his wrist against his own knee, and then his shoulder, flinching agitatedly.
In the old days, Ruki thought, Aoi would have been able to stop him. But now he wasn't here, and neither was Die, and there was nobody else Uruha allowed to touch him.
He wasn't alone on the sofa: by his side sat Toshiya, all long gangly limbs, focussed on the television – it was tuned into some kind of comedy show; the audience kept laughing in an artificial sort of way – and whenever there was a swell of response, Toshiya would smile and nudge Uruha, or at least make a gesture towards the air around him, as if trying to draw him in. On the floor a few feet away from them, Shinya was huddled over the chess set, his delicate hands arranging and rearranging the pieces over and over in a fluid, endlessly varying sort of pattern that Ruki couldn't follow.
Each and every one of them looked hopeless.
His mind seemed to be going very dim and quiet.
'We should do something.'
Ruki blinked, unsure of how long he had been drifting for. He had been thinking of the day he'd been kicked out of his school; how his tutor had turned kind, pitying eyes on him and asked doesn't your work interest you, Ruki?
He remembered how he had felt like screaming his answer, as if that would make it more convincing.
It was Toshiya who had spoken; he was still sitting on the sofa but his posture was different, less relaxed; he was digging his fingernails into his upper arms and his knees were pulled up to his chest so that his legs made a violent zigzag shape.
'Like what?' Ruki asked dully, and Toshiya bit down on his lower lip.
'Anything,' he said. 'Watch something together, put on a record, play cards, play monopoly; anything.'
'I'm trying to read,' Uruha said in an irritable tone of voice, and Toshiya immediately let his body slump to the side, his chin resting on Uruha's shoulder.
'Yeah? Whatcha reading?'
Uruha gave him a very dirty look and shrugged him off.
'Get lost,' he said lightly. 'I don't want to talk to you.'
Toshiya closed his eyes for something longer than a blink, but then rocked backwards and used the forward momentum to power himself smoothly up off the sofa and onto his feet. He moved around the room almost too quickly, making it look smaller.
'There must be something to do for fun,' he said, a relaxed smile on his face but an edgy sort of look in his eyes, 'I mean – there must be something.'
Fun: Ruki turned the word over in his mind dimly. In the old days, he realised, Aoi and Die had been the entertainment: they had, in their own obnoxious way, dragged the light in. In his head they danced together, spoke in unison, lit up cigarettes; he scanned his eyes desperately across the room and his mind showed him a snapshot of Die standing on the polished floor, legs spread apart to keep himself upright and Aoi's pale foot braced in his hand. He'd been struggling more than he let on, Ruki knew, to support the other man's weight; Aoi had...had what? Had tossed his hair back; tied some more balloons to the ceiling for Kai's birthday.
'I have great feet. Die, aren't my feet great?'
He saw it clearer now than he had done then; the way Die had looked up at him, the lightness and softness glowing in his eyes even as he'd flung back some sort of sarcastic retort. It was a look that had never faded, even through all their violent rows and cold silences and Aoi's stiff orders to eat, delivered from between gritted teeth; no, it had never gone away, and the worst part – the part that hurt – was the realisation that it was that warm, luminous look that had been the real Die; the part of him that struggled against his traitorous mind; the part that had pushed back. His skeletal frame, breathlessness, weakness – that had all been something else; some imposter. Hiding food and making himself throw up, his skinny body contorting into sit-ups on the hard music room floor. Camouflage.
He wondered if Kai would be disappointed if he knew how broken and ruined and torn apart their little group had become.
He twitched suddenly back into reality: Shinya was looking up at Toshiya with his big, round eyes, fingers playing nervously with the ends of his hair.
'Stop walking around like that,' he said, and Toshiya halted his nervy pacing uncertainly.
'Sorry.'
Uncharacteristically, Shinya just shook his head, turning back to his chess set. He was really no more than stirring the wooden pieces around, Ruki thought, and Toshiya shot him a doubtful sort of look before edging closer.
'Are you all right, Shinya?' he asked, his voice more polite than he normally cared to make it, but Shinya didn't give him any response. He shook his head, but not like he was saying no, more like some small fly was buzzing around his head and bothering him; he tilted his head to the side, as if he was listening out for some sort of sound that only he could hear.
Carefully, keeping his movements very slow and calm, Ruki started to move towards him. Toshiya was closer; he squatted down on his heels on the other side of the chess set, and Ruki felt a warning on the tip of his tongue but bit it back.
'Hey,' he said gently, 'I'm sorry I was moving around so much. I didn't mean to make you uncomfortable.'
'You're the bad one,' Shinya mumbled, and Toshiya gave Ruki an anxious sort of glance.
'Shinya,' Ruki tried, his voice gentle and coaxing, 'Nobody's bad. Do you...do you want to speak to one of the nurses, maybe?'
Without any warning, Shinya suddenly slapped himself sharply across the face: the sound of it seemed to ring around the room for a moment. Tears sprung to his eyes and Toshiya made a startled little yelping sound, but Shinya's face remained still and just faintly miserable.
'Shows what you know,' he said. The sound of him was a shock; it was the loudest Ruki had ever heard him speak, and it was obvious he wasn't used to it; his voice came out croaky and seemed to threaten to collapse, and the tone of it was spiteful and harsh. It made it feel like it wasn't him talking at all; it made Ruki think of ghosts and demons, something that might have crawled inside of him and started to manipulate his mouth like a puppet.
'Shinya,' he said again, pointlessly, and Shinya started rubbing agitatedly at his ears.
'You can all be quiet,' he muttered, 'Because I'm not going to do it. Not this time, absolutely not.'
'We should get somebody,' Toshiya said fearfully, but to Ruki's surprise, he stretched out and covered Shinya's tightly fisted hand gently with his own. 'A nurse, or...?'
'They'll only drug him,' Ruki said worriedly, and Toshiya gave him an exasperated look.
'Is there much alternative? Hey—' he grabbed at Shinya's free hand as he jerked it upwards to strike himself again, and wrestled it back down by his side, 'Don't hurt yourself, okay? Just sit tight—' he looked back towards Ruki, widening his eyes meaningfully, and Ruki gave him a quick nod as he scrambled out of the door, his heartbeat skipping oddly in his chest.
The corridor was deserted, the nurses' station empty even though it wasn't supposed to be. He turned stupidly, as if a white uniform might suddenly materialise behind him; he knew, logically, that there had to be nurses around; that perhaps they were sitting around chatting and playing cards in the dining room; that perhaps...
His feet started to take him down the corridor, and he forced himself to pound on the door before he could lose his nerve. He waited a split second for an answer, and then knocked again, feeling his knuckles bruise from the force he was using; the door swung wide, and he realised from the sudden sharp pain and the taste of blood in his mouth that he'd just bitten down hard on his own tongue.
Kyo looked sleepy, as if he'd just woken up, but when he saw Ruki his eyes became instantly alert, and his body stiffened.
'It's Shinya,' Ruki babbled, his voice coming out high and fast, 'He's freaking out and I can't find a nurse. Please come.'
Kyo didn't answer straight away, just blinked, and Ruki had a tiny moment to savour the appearance of him, to gather as many tiny details as he could: his wrinkled clothes drooping slightly from his frame; the pillow creases across one cheek; the bluish shadows under his eyes. His hair was rumpled; he ran a hand through it. He looked paler, to Ruki's eye, and smaller.
He looked, he thought, so beautiful, and he clenched his fists tight to stop his hands from reaching out for him.
'Okay,' Kyo said, his voice deep and hoarse from sleep, and together they set off down the hallway.
In the end, it was nothing miraculous. Rubbing his tired eyes, Kyo had simply gestured for Toshiya to back off a little, and then sat down beside Shinya on the floor. Their conversation had been too quiet to hear, for the most part, but Kyo seemed to be agreeing with him a lot; he nodded often, the movement gentle and hypnotic, and gave short, soft-sounding answers to Shinya's hasty tumble of words – more words than Ruki had ever known him to say. He and Toshiya retreated awkwardly to the wall by the window, and Ruki focussed on the patch of floor beneath his feet so that he wouldn't have to watch.
His hands were shaking, and it had nothing to do with Shinya.
He couldn't help but feel that he had wounded himself in some serious and obscure way; it wouldn't have surprised him if he'd found that he was bleeding.
He could convince himself, if he tried, that he had seen some brief flicker of something warm – hope, affection – in Kyo's eyes as he'd opened the door, but he knew in his heart that it wasn't true.
Wordlessly, Toshiya reached out and gripped his arm. Ruki tried to smile at him, but it came out more like a grimace. He stared at his shoes as Kyo got to his feet and carefully guided Shinya up with him; he heard it as Shinya stumbled over the chess pieces still scattered over the floor. The two of them went off down the corridor, Kyo not so much as looking back.
Ruki let out a breath that he seemed to have been holding for a long time, and because he didn't want to look Toshiya in the eye, he took himself dully off and let his body fall into an armchair.
The rest of the evening seemed to pass in a dazed kind of way, without any clear shape to it. Ruki was aware of Uruha making agitated little noises over his book, and of Toshiya hovering by the window, but what was the point of it; of any of it? The chess pieces over the floor looked like a crime scene; like a massacre on a tiny scale.
Sleepy, Kyo had looked softer than usual, all the hard angles of his face blunted.
He wondered if anybody had ever told him that he was beautiful, and he felt sick and hollow at the thought that he'd had the chance so many times, but hadn't done so. What had he imagined to be more important than that?
Maybe an hour passed; the sky was completely black outside the window, deep and cold looking, and Toshiya was staring out at it watchfully. The only sounds were soothing ones; the sound of Uruha's hair brushing over his shoulders as he moved; the occasional hoot of an owl from outside; the sound of car tyres coming up the gravel drive. From by the window, Toshiya made a strange sort of noise; Ruki ignored it. Everything felt far away anyway, sort of like a copy of a copy, just that vague and indistinct.
He felt it more than saw it when Toshiya came and perched on the arm of his chair. Gently, in his no-nonsense way, Toshiya reached down and wiped Ruki's cheeks with the sleeve of his sweatshirt.
'Hey, Ruki?' he whispered. 'I think I've got something that'll cheer you up.'
'Yeah,' Ruki said dully, meaning it as a question except it sounded too flat.
'Yeah.'
But there was something strange about Toshiya's voice, a sort of barely-restrained quality that reminded him of a pot that was just about to boil over. Wearily, he raised his eyes to his roommate's face and watched as it split into a nervous grin.
'Ruki,' he breathed excitedly, 'Die's back.'
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