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solongsun It was just a little past three in the morning when the knock came, floating Ruki up from his edgy half-dreams. His face felt hot and puffy, his eyes sticky; he rubbed them hard and forced his feet out of the bed. On the other side of the room, he could see Toshiya's shadowy shape rousing itself, long hair being shaken out and lanky limbs stretching themselves; as their eyes adjusted to the darkness, they met in the black gulf between their beds.
'Ready?' Toshiya asked quietly, and Ruki gave a small jerk of a nod.
Out in the corridor, the smell of radiator dust battled with the sharpness of industrial cleaners, and Die stood shivering a little with a sweater pulled on over his night clothes. Behind him, Uruha was fully dressed and hovering anxiously, still biting at the sticking plaster covering his fingers.
Besides the two of them, the corridor was deserted. The light was on in the nurses' station, but the woman on duty was strangely sagged down in her chair, hands curling pointlessly around the arms, and Die gave Ruki a slightly abashed look.
'Uruha and I pooled our sleeping pills,' he admitted, 'And I slipped them into her tea whilst she was digging out a hot water bottle.'
'Damn,' Toshiya breathed, and Die flushed a little.
'I know it's bad,' he said apologetically, 'But—'
'They do it to us,' Uruha interjected stubbornly.
'What?'
'They drug us. When we don't want them to.'
Nobody seemed to have any answer for that; Ruki gave a halting nod and Toshiya just stuck his hands into his pockets.
It was spooky, Ruki thought, with the corridor so dim and quiet and the bedroom doors all closed and the sky pressing so darkly against the windows, their only company the slumbering nurse at her station; Ruki was conscious of how light their steps grew when they approached her but she slept on, her mouth slightly open and her head nodding onto her own shoulder. They hovered uncomfortably around her, nobody very willing to face her, whilst Die knelt down by the stairwell door to inspect the lock; frowning slightly, he turned back to them.
'It's a bigger key,' he said, his voice quiet but seeming huge in the silence around them, 'The lock is silver but I don't know if—'
'Got it,' Toshiya said casually. Startled, Ruki glanced back over his shoulder to see Toshiya spinning a big tarnished key on a red tag around his finger, grinning at his company's shocked expressions.
It was almost discomfiting, Ruki thought, how easy it was. Unlocking the stairwell door with the nurse sleeping just a few feet away, holding their breaths as they stole up the stairs; he watched them, a ragtag group of hunched, sick men that clung to the shadows, and felt eerily like perhaps they didn't exist. They moved so quietly; their bodies seemed so formless in the gloom; it felt impossible that nobody could have heard them, or seen them leave.
Maybe they were ghosts and none of them had realised it.
Dead already, and clinging to the walls like mice.
It did something strange to the way he thought of himself, escaping so easily and so cleanly, and when he looked around at their assembled faces he thought that at least Uruha might be feeling the same way; he seemed uncomfortable off the ward, his hands twitching often and his face more miserable than he usually allowed it to be, flicking continuous glances down at the face of his shiny watch. His breathing seemed stilted, unnatural, and there was something off about him that Ruki couldn't quite put his finger on until he realised: he's timing it, his blinking. He's even timing his breathing.
The look on Uruha's face made Ruki wonder if, for the first time, he might be aware of how other people saw him and his crazy compulsions – made him wonder if he might be ashamed of them.
Contrarily he thought, doesn't anybody care where we are?
He felt himself shrinking smaller in the gloom.
At the top of the staircase they came across another door, different looking from their own; this one had a circle of reinforced glass set into it, through which white light was pouring out into the stairwell; on this ward, apparently, the lights were never turned out. Biting his lip, Die peered through the little circle, and pressed himself hastily back against the wall.
'Someone's out there,' he said, hardly seeming to move his lips. 'A nurse.'
'Did she see you?'
'No, she's reading a magazine.'
'What do we do?'
Die shrugged helplessly.
'Bigger problem,' Ruki murmured, 'I don't think that key is going to work on this door.'
'What?' Die had closed his eyes to think, but now they snapped open, he examined the key in his fist, and grasped at the lock with his long fingers; it was a tarnished bronzy colour, obviously the wrong shape. 'Shit!'
The four of them were quiet for a minute, Die agonising over the lock and Ruki chewing on his lip, Uruha hitting at the side of his head with a muffled thumping noise.
'I think I've got an idea,' Toshiya said at last, his voice surprisingly calm. 'Uruha, you have pins in your hair, right?'
'Get lost,' Uruha said haughtily, his voice tight and breathless; rolling his eyes, Toshiya simply leant forward and plucked two of them from where Uruha's hair was pinned back behind his ear. Before the other man's silent, open-mouthed outrage, he quickly bent them into L-shapes, using his teeth to scrape the plastic off the ends.
'I think I can pick it,' he muttered lowly, 'But you guys had better be ready, because it's only going to work once. If I can get it open, I'll run in, all right? I'll run down the corridor, and I'll try and get her to chase me. I can be pretty fast.' He ran his tongue over his lips nervously. 'She can't be the only one on duty up here, so I don't know if you'll be able to get in without being seen. Even if you do, you'll have about half a second to find whichever room Aoi's in. But...' he squinted his eyes, peering briefly through the glass in the door, 'When I was up here, they put me in the room that's just next to her desk there. I don't know what that means; if they might keep that one for temporary patients, or what...but I'd start there.'
He seemed to notice the incredulity of the three gazes that were focussed on him, and shrugged a little self-consciously. 'It might work,' he mumbled.
'I forgot you'd been up here,' Ruki said lamely, stumbling over his words a little; Toshiya gave a brief shrug.
'Only for a week, but I think I have an okay idea of the layout. There's no TV room or anything on this floor, no music room; nothing like that. Because of that, the corridor curves around at the end instead; there are just more dorm rooms, and the room where they...you know,' he flushed suddenly, shaking his head, 'Do the...shocks. I didn't go in there, but it says so on the door. I'll try and get her to run after me around the bend.'
'It's a good plan,' Die said carefully, 'But...you'd kind of be throwing yourself on the grenade, Toshiya.'
'I might not even be able to get the door open.'
'But if you do...'
The implication of Die's words was left hanging in the air: if you do, you're going to be in big trouble.
It took a moment, but unexpectedly, the two of them grinned at each other in unison.
It might have been the longest few minutes of Ruki's life, standing with his back flush against the wall as Toshiya crouched before the lock, a look of fierce concentration on his pretty face and his long fingers working nimbly with the pins; every so often there was a clicking noise and the four of them would stiffen, hardly daring to breathe until Die gathered up the nerve to check the window and whisper that the nurse didn't appear to have noticed.
'It's bad,' Uruha muttered miserably under his breath, 'It's wrong. Criminal. My dad said. People who take drugs are...bad. Criminals. Trash. I...'
He cut himself off, biting on his bandaged fingers agitatedly; his eyes were wide and fixed and swimming with tears. They were not, Ruki gathered, because he was sad, but because he wasn't allowing himself to blink. As he watched, they spilled over, and Uruha knuckled his eyes hard.
Toshiya was silent as he worked. His jaw was set grimly, and every so often he would pull the hairpins out of the lock, tweak their angles a little and start again, pushing and digging delicately; he made it look unexpectedly refined, as though he was crafting something too small for the eye to see.
'Is it working?' Die asked edgily, his eyes flicking up and down between Toshiya and the window.
'Think so,' was the short answer.
It was another five minutes at least before, with a quick manoeuvre, Toshiya managed to twist the hairpin up and around; there was a decisive clicking noise and, looking satisfied, he sat back on his heels.
'Okay,' he whispered softly.
'Done?'
'Done.' He glanced up at them all. 'Last chance to back out, I guess.' Nimbly he got to his feet, handing the now bent hairpins back to a scowling Uruha. 'You realise this is gonna be a kamikaze mission for all of us, right? Even if you guys manage to get in without being seen, there's no way you're gonna get out.'
'We might,' Die said uneasily, but Uruha gave his head a small shake.
'Once they see him,' he said, performing a sort of small flinch in Toshiya's direction, 'They'll lock this door again. We won't be able to get out.'
'We might find the key.'
'For all we know,' Toshiya said gently, 'They could check all the beds downstairs as soon as they catch me. Ruki, you're my roommate; there's no way they won't notice you're missing. And Die...' he bit his lip, 'It's your first night back; I don't think they're going to assume that's a coincidence. They'll be checking everywhere, every room; none of us are gonna get out of this.'
There was a short pause.
'I suppose you're right,' Die said finally. 'But I'm still in if you are.'
'Me too,' Ruki put in.
Uruha looked down at the watch on his wrist and nodded once, firmly. 'Me too.'
'All right,' Toshiya said quietly. 'Get ready to run, I guess.'
To Ruki, it seemed oddly like a silent movie. Perhaps it was the colours – the harsh white walls and the white lights, the white and grey of Toshiya's institutional clothing and the black of his hair flying out behind him as he pushed open the door and ran almost soundlessly down the hallway. Maybe it was the strangely choreographical nature of it: Toshiya's long strides and the way the nurse's face froze into a perfect O of surprise before she was up on her feet and taking off after him, her rubber-soled shoes squeaking softly on the corner as she followed him out of sight.
It was almost comic, but Ruki's face felt far too cold and stiff too laugh; he felt a hand on his back, propelling him forward, and he stumbled onto the ward with Die and Uruha flanking him. His vision seemed to work in snapshots: he had a clear picture of Uruha, his eyes very dark in his face and his gaze focussed; he saw Die stronger than he'd ever seemed before, his long hair flying and the cords standing out in his arms and neck.
It was all he really had the time to take in before a long-fingered hand was closing tightly around his wrist and he was being tugged, wheeling through a white-painted door that shut with a click and swallowed them up. He felt himself being forced to the ground, and opened his mouth just in time for Die to clap a hand over it and point sharply up above their heads.
The room they were in was dim, but it was easy enough to make out the rough features of it; it was small, its dimensions cramped, and windowless. The furniture was sparse: a bed, and a small cabinet, and a chair. The bed was covered by a grey blanket, and this was clear because there was a single light source in the room: a white disc thrown over the bed that came, Ruki saw when he looked up, from the door; it had a circular glass pane set into it, just like the door from the stairwell had. For some reason, staring up at it, he had to repress a shudder. That was what Die had been pointing at, he realised; the window, and the chance that they might be seen from the corridor.
Next to him, Uruha rocked himself and tapped on the sides of his head, and the silence from outside was unnerving. There were footsteps, low voices, and then nothing. More footsteps. Carefully, trying not to make any sound, Ruki turned himself and peered through the keyhole in the door, but there was nothing. Just blank corridors; the view of the door opposite.
'Did they get him?' he breathed. Next to him, he felt Die shrug helplessly.
'Must have done.'
'Did you hear them go by?'
'I don't know.'
Moving cautiously, Die got to his feet. Ruki thought he was going to risk looking out of the window set into the door, but instead he drifted forth, slow as a sleepwalker, towards the bed. He became a shadow, indistinct as he turned to look back at them.
'It's definitely him,' he said.
It was hard to understand the tone of his voice. Next to Ruki, Uruha tugged on his own hair so harshly that his eyes began to water, but warily the two of them began to approach the bed. It was hard with that splash of light over the blanket; Ruki's eyes didn't seem to want to adjust to the darkness; but as they drew nearer and stilled they saw Die's shape perch itself lightly on the edge of the mattress, and all of a sudden their three shadows leapt high over the walls as he sparked his lighter. The flame was there for the briefest moment before dying, but that was all right; Ruki felt the sight might have been burned right into his brain.
'Aoi,' he heard himself say.
It was him.
There was a peculiarity to the way that he was sleeping; fiercely, almost intently, as if he was putting effort into it and might wake up more exhausted than when he started. His brow was slightly furrowed and his mouth a little firmed, as though he had decided to take a stand against something. Evidently he hadn't shaved in a while – perhaps hadn't been able to, or simply hadn't bothered – and the stubble on his face was long enough to look rumpled and untidy.
Gently, Die reached out and stroked the hair back off his face. Uruha took hold of the blanket, right down by the edge of the bed, where it was almost unnoticeable.
'Aoi,' Die said softly, 'Aoi, wake up.'
Ruki pretended not to notice the tenderness with which Die's hand found the knob of Aoi's shoulder under the blanket and shook it. His gaunt face contorted slightly, the brows knitting themselves together, and he said in a careful tone of voice: 'They've tied him down. I can barely shake him. Look at the sheet.'
It was true; as Ruki's eyes readjusted to the gloom, he could see where the ends of Aoi's bed sheet had been fastened to the railings on his bed – a hospital style bed, not the normal ones they had downstairs. It made Ruki feel uneasy.
Without consultation, they began to untie him. Ruki's fingers slipped against the cotton and a small sound escaped Uruha's throat. When eventually they had it loosened Aoi stirred, as if that was what he had been waiting for, and when Die stroked his hair again his eyes opened, blinking confusedly in the darkness. He seemed to take a while to find them.
'Is this a dream?' he asked hoarsely.
'It's not a dream.'
Aoi's thin, strong hand found Die's and gripped it hard.
'You're alive.'
'They've been giving you shocks?' Die asked, his voice low and urgent, and Aoi hesitated.
'Yeah.'
'Fuck.' For a moment Die seemed to be at a loss; he just squeezed Aoi's fingers tighter. 'How do you feel?'
'Oh, you know. I'm ecstatic.'
He smiled suddenly, tiredly. 'Ex-static...get it?'
There was a pause, and then Die laughed and groaned all at once.
'I can't believe you. That was dreadful.'
'Are you surprised?'
'Shocked,' Die said, and suddenly lurched forwards, folding his friend up in his arms. 'It's really good to see you.'
'Yeah, it's pretty good to see you too.'
It might have been the strange effect of the light coming in from the door, but Aoi's eyes looked suspiciously shiny, and his own arms faltered a little before coming up and encircling Die's back. He clung on tightly, his fingers wrinkling Die's clothing, and with an oddly uncharacteristic movement he buried his face in the other man's bony shoulder. Uruha didn't make a sound but Aoi flung out an arm, grasping around the bedclothes for his hand: when he found it, he squeezed it tightly and drew it towards him, pressing it against the centre of his chest. Ruki watched as Die smiled at that, lowered his cheek against the top of Aoi's head; as he reached out and touched Uruha's waist through his clothes. It was a strangely intimate sort of gesture that made Ruki feel oddly left out, and he surprised himself by wishing that Toshiya was still there with them. He wondered where he was now; what kind of trouble he had possibly got himself into up on this quiet, mysterious ward.
None of them mentioned it, but Aoi seemed different. It wasn't just his sleepiness, the way he sagged a little sitting upright, swaying against Die's shoulder and rubbing at his eyes; it was his new reticence, the strange air of confusion he seemed to have about him. For one, although he knew exactly who he was talking to, he seemed to keep forgetting that Die had been away; every time he was gently reminded he turned shame-faced, an expression so unlike him that it made Ruki want to shake him, almost.
'Of course,' he murmured, 'No, I know. I really missed you. And I didn't know...I didn't even know if you were alive.'
The third time he remembered he buried his face in his hands and fell quiet for a long time, his whole body shivering, and when he finally looked up again his eyes were red-rimmed.
Not only that, but he seemed hazy on the sequence of events that had led to him being moved; when Ruki mentioned Toshiya he said 'Who?' in a foggy sort of voice and simply shook his head.
It was an odd, scary sort of feeling, as though something was missing from him. Every so often he would stare at the circle of light coming through the door as if mesmerised by it, and the thought of the cold, stark hallways outside made Ruki realise how sinister it felt to have a place permanently lit up, quite unlike the comfort of the soft darkness that surrounded them. It made it seem unreal, confusing; it made it seem like a place where the sun might rise on time or might not, might set and might simply linger; a place where the night could go on forever and ever and you would never know.
'How did you get up here?' Aoi asked finally, his voice croaky sounding, and Die poured him a glass of water from the jug that sat on top of the little cabinet at his bedside. Carefully, he held it to his mouth and supported his head whilst he drank, and there was that scary feeling again; was this really Aoi, their Aoi – their funny, feisty, prickly friend, so docile?
'We stole the key,' Die reported, 'And Toshiya picked a lock.'
Something seemed to clear in Aoi's eyes.
'Junkie trash,' he sighed with a tired smile, and nestled his head more comfortably against Die's shoulder. Reaching out, he picked up Die's free hand and twined their fingers together. With an expression that looked a little more like him, he pressed his lips together.
'I didn't mean any of what I said,' he said lowly. It was such a non sequitur that Ruki felt lost for a second, but evidently Die understood.
'I know,' he mumbled. 'Neither did I.'
Slowly, Aoi shook his head, messy hair trailing over his shoulders as he stared down at the blankets.
'If you had died,' he said in a quiet voice, 'I never would have forgiven myself.'
Die didn't seem to have anything to say back to that. He fell quiet, running his thumb absently over Aoi's tensed knuckles.
'You need to come back,' Uruha said suddenly, breaking the silence. 'We need you.' He closed his mouth firmly.
'We do,' Ruki added.
'They're right.'
'You two had better look after each other until I'm back,' Aoi said, and glanced up at Ruki. 'I already know who's looking after you.'
Ruki didn't say anything; just smiled. There was a harsh burn in the back of his throat that threatened to choke him when he swallowed around it.
'I don't know how to look after anybody,' Uruha said in a strange, stiff voice.
'You've been looking after me all these years,' Aoi said quietly.
'You haven't needed any looking after.'
But Uruha moved closer to him, and he allowed Aoi to rest his head on his shoulder. The three of them formed a strange shape in the gloom, more like one creature than many; like some old god, three-headed, a tangle of limbs and one bound-together torso. Six lungs, three hearts. Uruha closed his eyes and looked restful.
Like a god, in that moment, they looked invincible.
They stayed that way for a long time; the three of them perched on the bed and Ruki on the chair beside it, leaning forward with his head resting upon his arms on the mattress. He felt a strange lack of panic; it was as though he had fulfilled his quota for fear and could go no further. The quiet between the four of them was sleepy and Ruki allowed his thoughts to drift by him: unformed thoughts about the three of them huddled together at the top of the bed; hazy images of Toshiya running silently down the corridor; memories of Kyo, rising slowly towards him like something floating up from the deep. It should have been painful – ordinarily it would have been painful – but surrounded by his friends, he felt oddly calm. He allowed himself not to dwell on the memories but to instead inhabit them; gave himself a moment of pretending that he was in Kyo's small, cramped little room, drawing a portrait; that he was lying beside him in his own single bed in the predawn, the night of the funeral; that with his eyes covered the other man might be standing before him, naked but hidden, a shiver in the strength of his hands as he slid his fingers gently through Ruki's hair. It called up the same feeling that thinking back of Hiroshi did, a melancholy that was almost, in its way, pleasurable – a clean sort of feeling.
A knowledge that the person might be gone now, but at one point they had stood there, safe and whole.
Submerged as he was, he couldn't feel any rush of anxiety when the door opened. Light flooded them and, blinking against the brightness, he raised his head from his arms to look not over at the door but at his three friends, sitting resolutely together on the bed.
He saw Aoi smile, a real smile; saw him slip an arm around each of their waists. He saw Die return that smile with a grin of his own, reaching out to touch Uruha's cheek and allow his hand to fit around the shape of his jaw; he saw Uruha bite his lip, smile excitedly, an expression so unfamiliar that Ruki almost rubbed his eyes. Free of his usual tense frown, he looked years younger, and he could see why Aoi looked so elated suddenly – so delighted, so unbeatable, with that rebellious look flashing back into his eyes.
When they moved inwards it was like some beautiful trick of the eyes; like turning a kaleidoscope. Slightly clumsy, just a little shy, they folded into each other and three sets of lips met in the middle. Where they touched they stuck softly, a tongue licked gently: a wonderful, daring, almost breathtakingly sweet kiss.
It was like a mirror in triplicate, the number hypnotising. The room filled with uniforms, but there wasn't any fear.