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solongsun He couldn't explain why, but he waited until gone midnight.
It was a lie: he could explain why. He was scared.
What exactly, Ruki wondered, could all that time in the isolation room do to a person? All the times he'd been in there Kyo had been almost completely uncommunicative, some part of him having retreated into a different world – what reason did Ruki have to believe that a mere change of scenery would have brought that part back? So far as he knew nobody on the ward had ever been forced to spend so long alone in the dark; suppose this time, they had gone too far?
Suppose wherever Kyo had gone to, he had gone there forever?
So he sat up, and he shivered as it grew later and later. A little before twelve, Toshiya fell asleep, his long pale arms thrown over his face as if in denial of something; still Ruki remained still, methodically scratching a small hole into his cotton pillowcase. The moon rose as a sliver, hardly there at all and somehow dirty looking; a chewed fingernail. The sky was rippled all over with thin clouds in odd patterns, like vertebrae, as if it had been layered all over with spinal cords. An owl hooted and Ruki wondered why he never saw it. He didn't know what kind of owl it was, even.
Kyo would have known.
As the clock approached one, he gathered up his file and placed his bare feet very carefully on the floor and stood up. His mattress creaked once, but Toshiya slept on. The white of the floor made his feet look an unhealthy colour.
It was gloomy out in the hallway. The only light was the desk light over at the nurses' station, and it seemed a very small and solitary yellow glow in the depth of the night; stupidly, as if attracted, Ruki walked towards it. He had a bizarre urge to hold his hand under it, to see if he looked as see-through as he felt.
Some strange serendipity, though, directed him to glance into the music room as he passed it, and his quiet footsteps stilled, because there was somebody in there. Well, not somebody: it was a silhouette he could have recognised anywhere, even in his dreams. Maybe it was a dream, even: the feeling of recognition had a strange certainty to it, the way Ruki rarely felt in real life. Dreams, he was much more sure of himself.
Kyo was sitting at the piano, for all the world as though he intended to play it, although the cover was down and locked for the night. His hands rested upon it loosely, and as Ruki moved closer he got that peculiar sensation again, of things being a dream: Kyo simply looked too real, too distinct. Ruki could see the bones in his wrists, touchingly fragile against his big, capable-looking hands; he could see the slight lustre of his fingernails and the way the tendons stood out in his arms, belying the tension in his body. If he touched his shoulder, he knew, it would feel like razor wire, and for that reason he stood back, lingering like a shadow in the doorway. Behind the white-painted bars, he could see his own ghostly reflection in the black window, and Kyo's. Steadily, in that reflection, their eyes met.
Ruki didn't say anything, but he walked forward. Stiffly, Kyo got up from the piano stool and turned around, resting his elbows somewhat awkwardly behind him on its polished wooden surface.
Quite soberly, the two of them looked at each other. Kyo performed a slight incline of his head, a shadow of a bow, and Ruki shifted from foot to foot uncomfortably. Like it was a ticket to enter, he held out his file. When Kyo only looked at it, he tossed it gently onto the top of the piano.
'You did say they'd let me out,' Kyo said finally, his tone of voice very controlled, and Ruki gave an anxious twitch of a shrug.
'I had no idea,' he admitted, 'I just...I didn't want you to give up.' He smiled wryly. 'As if you've ever given up.'
'I've given up sometimes.'
Ruki hesitated.
'With me you gave up. For a while.'
A slight nervous tic: the fingers of Kyo's left hand drummed soundlessly against the side of the piano.
'Correct.'
'Why?'
'I assumed you were done.'
'Done?' Ruki repeated, and the shadow of a smile crossed Kyo's face.
'You're not the first person who's tried to reach out to me,' he said plainly, his voice quiet. 'Everyone gives up sooner or later. Too much effort.' He lifted the hand that was nervously tapping its fingers and dragged it through his hair instead, tugging at the knots, 'I don't offer a good enough reward.'
'I think you do,' Ruki argued, his voice strong but the words sounding laughably weak, and Kyo's gaze lowered itself a fraction.
'There's too much I don't know,' he said quietly, 'And perhaps I've left it too late to learn. I have no idea how to look at people normally; I don't know how to speak to them; how to touch them.'
'It's the kind of thing you only learn if you let go with somebody,' Ruki said uncertainly, and Kyo snorted.
'“Let go”? If I let go of myself, I'd fly apart.'
'How do you know?' Ruki argued, feeling an odd rush of confidence. 'You've never tried. Maybe you could trust me to hold you together, if you did.'
Kyo eyed him.
'Big job,' he said wryly. 'You've only got small arms.'
'Don't mix metaphors,' Ruki warned, but his lips were twitching.
'I'm not mixing it; I'm extending it.'
'You're going to argue with me over grammar?' Ruki said, and Kyo shrugged, smiling down at his feet.
'Dr Kobayashi taught me how to read,' he said, a strange deliberateness to his voice, 'She left before you came. I never went to school. There's a lot I don't know.' He paused. 'I don't know how much of my file you read. How much I have left to tell you.'
'I didn't read a lot,' Ruki heard himself saying, 'But you don't have to tell me; not if you don't want to. I brought you mine just to...' he bit his lip. 'I want to be even. And I thought – I could apologise, but – I wanted to show you that I meant it. And I wanted to...'
He trailed off. I wanted to show you that some people are willing to try and make things right, he'd been about to say; I wanted to show you that you deserve to be treated exactly the same as me, that you're worth making things even with, but the words sounded stupid and horribly magnanimous in his head, as if he was congratulating himself, and so instead he just shrugged. 'Dr Sato slipped it to me,' he added. 'I told him...about yours. What I did.'
Kyo looked very still. 'You didn't need to do that.'
'I know.' Ruki shrugged awkwardly. 'Are you going to read it?'
Slowly, Kyo picked the file up from where it was lying next to him. He didn't open it, but simply held it in a way that suggested he was merely testing its weight in his hands; feeling its texture.
It occurred to Ruki that he almost looked nervous.
'It's all in there,' he said a little stupidly, his cheeks feeling warm, 'Everything, I mean. Everything but Eiji. Getting kicked out of school, and trying to kill myself, and Hiroshi. My...abandonment complex, and my inability to put things into perspective, and all my – stupid hang-ups.'
He laughed lamely, but Kyo wasn't laughing. He reached out and touched Ruki's wrist, and unaccountably Ruki's eyes flooded with tears. He blinked rapidly, looking away, trying to clear them.
'I don't want to read this,' Kyo told him, and Ruki smiled grimly.
'So is this you rejecting my apology?' he asked, trying to keep his voice light, and Kyo shook his head seriously.
'No.'
'Well...what is it, then?'
Looking not quite at ease, Kyo leaned harder back against the piano and shrugged his shoulders.
'I suppose,' he said carefully, 'It's me saying that...if you're offering what I think you're offering, then I'd rather have that.'
'And what do you think I'm offering?' Ruki asked, annoyed at how stupidly breathless his voice sounded, and Kyo met his eye solidly.
'You said we could maybe be friends again,' he said, sounding strangely nervous. 'If that's still on the table, then I choose that.'
'What does that have to do with my file?' Ruki asked uncertainly, and Kyo eyed him as if he was insane.
'Everything,' he said. 'I don't care what some therapist thinks of you; I want to get to know you. I'm not borrowing your life from somebody else. I want to learn about you as we go along.'
'Why?' Ruki asked quietly, and Kyo gave a self-conscious shrug.
'Because then the implication is that we get to go along.'
There was a slight pause.
'Let me get this straight,' Ruki said, a smile lifting at his mouth no matter how hard he tried to stop it, 'You're swapping a gross invasion of privacy for the promise of us hanging out with each other?'
'That's exactly it,' Kyo said, deadpan. 'Do we have a deal?'
'That's a pretty shitty transaction for you, you know.'
'Don't tell me how to conduct my business,' Kyo said loftily, raising an eyebrow, and Ruki grinned.
'I just feel like kind of like I'm exploiting you, that's all,' he retorted, and Kyo gave a derisive snort.
'You don't know what you're talking about. Rarity pushes up value, remember? Invasions of privacy are common. There's only one of you.'
The words seemed to take on more meaning hanging in the air like that; a little uncomfortably, Kyo rubbed at the back of his neck. When Ruki went and stood next to him, he didn't respond, but nor did he flinch or stiffen when Ruki gently bumped their hips together. Instead, Ruki thought, it was the same kind of sensation that he got sitting by him in the isolation room: that he might have been still, might not even have been looking at him, but that some part of him was opening up in Ruki's direction. Sort of plantlike, sort of rare: a flower that blooms once a lifetime.
And it was such a strange feeling, he thought, standing by somebody who was the same height as him. It made him feel adequate, for once, like he was enough; well-proportioned, as if the entire world was scaled to fit him.
Over the next few days, Ruki worked. He was working at a pace that he knew looked feverish on the outside but felt to him cool, smooth, like swimming very quickly through still water. The faster his hands moved the more seamlessly his mind adjusted, and he spent whole stretches of days lying on his front on the music room floor, lower lip caught between his own teeth, smudges of ink and graphite all the way up his forearms. It was cold, but he liked being cold.
Around him, the music room was rarely empty. Instead of curling up under blankets to keep warm, or sitting with their backs to the radiator in the corridor, the ward seemed to have collectively decided to huddle together for warmth, like strange birds: Die and Aoi stalky, thin, their bodies making strange shapes as they danced to the records that they put on; Uruha and Shinya hunched, almost inside of their own selves, Shinya tracing out an endlessly looping pattern on the spotless white floor and Uruha capture in a large armchair, a piece of paper in his lap; he wrote something that he constantly revised, over and over, never crossing things out but simply starting again. He blinked exactly once every six seconds. His face when Ruki studied it was thoughtful, distant; not unhappy precisely. Every so often a look would pass between Die and Aoi and one skinny white hand or another would land on his shoulder, which he accepted. Everything else, he flinched; retreated further inside himself; drew shutters over his eyes.
And there was Kyo, who read. He sat in his usual spot beneath the window, snow falling steadily over his head, and wore his way through the pile of paperback novels at his side. If Ruki added a book to the pile he would pick it up next and read it without a word, simply accepting it as a player accepts a hand of cards dealt out to them; later Ruki would find his returned books neatly stacked outside his bedroom door, their covers tenderly smoothed flat.
It seemed forbidden, or secretive, like some covert communication. He was sending signals just as clearly as he was receiving them, but he had no idea what they meant. The books in Ruki's collection were tattered and odd, scavenged from charity shops or libraries that were closing down, given away in bundles from the houses of dead people with no family; The War of the Worlds, he gave him, one of a bundle of dog-eared science fiction novels printed on flimsy paper, picked up cheap because the books were being sold by the lot and not individually; Jane Eyre with a cover so old the many creases were bleached white, from a shop that dealt in odd Victoriana; Candide, hastily stolen from a pretentious café near campus that kept stocks of French literature to be admired but never read.
Thinking about that, he had an image of himself in his art student camouflage, all his clothing items that could have been pilfered from Eiji's own wardrobe: the jeans with holes in the knees, the shabby overcoat, the knitted cap. He saw himself swamped in those oversized clothes – European clothes, chosen for their foreignness and draped over his bony Japanese frame – stuffing the book into his beaten up leather rucksack and winced. That boy drank black coffee and smoked imported cigarettes; he dropped his own work in an instant to go attend to another's. He seemed a thousand miles away from the creature Ruki had become, stained and rumpled on the sanatorium floor, his whole body so unadorned that it felt light enough to float away. Around him lay maps, maps, maps, charts of lives and experiences laid out on carefully hand drawn grids; here Uruha's face with a marching regiment of endlessly opening and shutting eyes, like a stutter; here Aoi and Die as a single entity, sprouting limbs like a tree; here the lines of Kyo's body duplicated in the bars over the windows and the angles of the furniture, stunted and espaliered, a plant growing within wires. Around him, the pages of the books seemed to blur. They drifted like snow.
What Ruki loved about these second- or third- or fourth-hand books were the marks of other people; of those who had read them before him and underlined passages that meant things to them, left their indecipherable notes in the margins, inked their names on the flyleaf. 'For my darling imperialist, 1964', read a messily pencilled dedication in the front of The Quiet American; 'to the girl who always buys the flowers herself' was lovingly inscribed on the inside cover of Mrs Dalloway.
That might have been the secret message he was trying to communicate, he thought as he watched Kyo read through them, his dark eyes thoughtful and focussed: that there were, and are, others. The world is not nearly so small.
It seemed to be that Christmas was a much bigger deal on the ward than it was in the rest of the country. In Ruki's family it was mostly ignored, and Ruki was willing to bet that the same was true for most everyone else on the ward, but inside the closed world of the asylum it took on an almost magical significance: something to look forward to, something different. As a break in the routine, it felt special.
And the nurses, he thought, were trying. For a start, the visiting schedule for Christmas day was written up on the blackboard ahead of time, trying to drum up some anticipation, though Ruki was confused to see his own name on there: he hadn't thought his parents would be able to afford it, and it seemed strange that they wouldn't mention it. Had they perhaps wanted to keep it as a surprise? He was sure his mother had told him in as many words that they didn't expect to be able to get out to Kyoto again until the new year at least – although of course, she had added quickly, he might well be out by then.
The idea that they might be trying to surprise him both touched him and made him feel a little sad. It seemed unfair that such a modest plan had been foiled.
Both Die and Uruha were on the schedule too, of course, but Ruki was more than a little surprised to see both Shinya and Aoi's names written beneath theirs. There was more than a pinch of curiosity associated with that, as well as a feeling of strange foreboding: Ruki wasn't at all sure he wanted to see Aoi's reaction to his parents, or vice versa, and the idea of Shinya's parents gave him a strange feeling; they had looked so loving, so close to each other in the photograph Shinya had – so why didn't they visit more often? It seemed unlikely that they wouldn't be able to afford it; they could obviously pay to keep him here for years on end, and their appearance in the photo had been unpretentious but clearly wealthy, with tasteful clothes and nicely groomed hair. Too busy, perhaps? But that seemed altogether too heartless.
All in all, he didn't appear to be the only one who felt ill at ease with the contents of the blackboard. He'd seen Aoi standing underneath it for a good minute, a grim sort of smile on his face, and when Uruha had seen it he'd stopped in his tracks but looked away quickly, begun to mutter, counting something – counting anything, maybe, Ruki thought; counting air molecules or individual motes of dust; counting his own nervous heartbeats in the way Ruki himself did, counting the whorls of his fingerprints.
Kyo and Toshiya were the only two names missing from the visiting schedule, in the end, and they were the only people who had no reason to pause next to the board to check it. Neither of them seemed to mind – or at least made no show of minding – but Ruki had to wonder how it would feel, watching everybody else prepare to meet with their families, even if they were obviously gritting their teeth and steeling themselves to get through it. He wondered how many of them might not have been on the ward if their families had been different; whether he'd be here if Hiroshi had never been unwell, or if there was some hidden, genetic streak of instability that had caused Shinya to slip so irreversibly over the edge.
Pointless to speculate, of course. But as Aoi might have said, it passed the time.
Christmas morning that year dawned dull but mostly clear, only an occasional flurry of snow spiralling down from the clouds; the nurse on duty had reported, somewhat anxiously, that the roads from the sanatorium into town were open and clear, and that no delays were expected. This news didn't appear to have the impact that she'd anticipated: it was obvious from the demeanour of her patients that they expected their guests regardless of any earthquake, avalanche or apocalypse, and were waiting docilely for them to arrive.
For nobody appeared to have the will to do anything, much. They gathered untidily in the TV room, clutching various activities like props – Ruki with his sketchbook and a pencil, Uruha with one of his father's books, Aoi with his silver cigarette lighter – but forgetting what to do with them: Uruha opened his book neatly in the middle and stared down into the dark split where the pages met, Aoi flipped his lighter from one palm to another, and Ruki drew a single line and then abandoned it. The feeling in the pit of his stomach was jittery and uncomfortable, as if he had swallowed something still living.
'Nice thing about the holidays,' Aoi muttered, 'You can really see whose parents care about them enough to visit them once a year. Enough, but not too much, know what I mean?'
There was an unfamiliar sound to his voice, Ruki thought. It took him a while to identify it as nervousness.
Sitting alone in an armchair – strange to see him there, Ruki thought, uncomfortably elevated from his usual huddle on the floor – Shinya frowned and examined his fingertips. They heard the sound of car tyres crunching over gravel outside, and he made a flinching sort of gesture, his eyes sharp. Only Die hopped up from his seat to cross over to the window, pressing his forehead lightly against the bars.
'Yours, I think,' he said to Aoi over his shoulder.
'How would you know?' Aoi said a little nastily, sinking down in his seat so his chin rested on his chest; Die shrugged, unperturbed.
'It's not my parents, and it's not Uruha's.'
'Could be Shinya's. Or Ruki's.'
'Yeah, but they don't look like Shinya or Ruki, you dolt, they look like you.'
'How fortunate for them,' Aoi muttered. He dug around in his pocket for his cigarettes and lit one up a little shakily. 'How's my mother looking? Got her hair pulled up into a tight bun? She does that to stretch out the wrinkles.'
'Dunno, they've gone inside.'
'Fuck,' Aoi said thoughtfully. He took a deep pull of his cigarette and got unevenly to his feet. 'All right, I'm fucking off to our room. I'd stay out unless you want to hear about how you could be good looking if you only got a little flesh on you and gave that awful hair a cut.'
Ruki noticed that Uruha was sitting up very straight, staring at Aoi fixedly. He slipped something into his book and then shut it tight, eyeing his friend miserably as he walked from the room.
Quiet, then, for a while. Die remained hovering at the window, and though Aoi had closed the door behind him they could hear the sound of faint voices from the hallway – somebody saying something in a rather haughty sort of tone, and Aoi's terse reply – until Uruha, twitching softly, got up and turned the television on. It was only picking up snow, but nobody said anything.
'Another car,' Die announced after a while, rather unnecessarily; they'd all heard it pulling up. It had a much less smooth sound than Aoi's parents' vehicle, Ruki realised, and he felt his stomach twist anxiously.
'Whose is it?' he asked, hardly moving his lips, and Die shrugged.
'No idea. Could be yours. It's a taxi.'
He was quiet for a moment. 'Only one person,' he added then.
'Can't be mine,' Ruki said colourlessly, 'They'd both have come.'
But his heart seemed to be doing something peculiar, ticking away like a bomb and crammed up far too high in his throat. He tried to swallow around it, but the feeling was like choking; he stared down at his hands. It was a good fifteen minutes or so before the door to the TV room opened, and although he didn't look around to see who it was, he felt a hot blush spreading over the back of his neck.
'Ruki,' the nurse said in her soft voice, 'Your guest is here. There are a few refreshments laid out in the dining room, if you'd like to talk in there.'
Stiffly, almost mechanically, he got to his feet. His sketchbook slipped from his lap and onto the floor; Shinya made a tense sort of noise, but Ruki didn't bend down to get it. He was stood completely still, as if frozen, his eyes very wide and fixed, and though the familiar figure stood by the nurse nodded to him, he made no bow in return.
'You,' he said at last, the word tasting sour over his tongue.
Eiji.
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You know, it's a wonder Aoi doesn't have an eating disorder as well, what with the way his parents sound. I wish Uru and Die were allowed to be with him while he sees his parents. After all that electroshock treatment, he doesn't deserve their judgmental attitudes. (Still worried about what's going to happen when Uru's dad shows up, TBH.) I wonder how Shinya will feel seeing his parents; I hope it's one of his good days so that he can enjoy the time with them.
Eiji... *throws a shoe at him*
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Anyway, as bad as Eiji coming may seem, I think it's the best thing for Ruki. He can get some closure now, which is exactly what he needs and perhaps Eiji can see the error of his mistakes?
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Seriously, what a pain. I'm glad it's something the docs have been able to diagnose, but that eyedrop routine feels like right hassle.
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My vison must be getting better, though I haven't noticed, I'd had to zoom in LJ quite a bit to see it when I left my previous comment and just unzoomed it because it didn't need to be so big. Still a little zoomed in, but not "Why don't you get glasses?!?" big. (I already wear glasses but of course they're not fixing the eye condition).