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solongsun Shapelessly, the afternoon wore on.
Ruki wondered why anybody was even bothering.
It wasn't like anybody at the table was even having a good time, he thought; even Die's normally good-natured parents had a pinched, strained look about them, and their son was no better; the sight of the buffet laid out seemed to have made him feel nervous and ill-at-ease, as if he wasn't sure what was expecting of him, and he sat in a way that made him appear shrunken and unwell. On his other side, Aoi's parents carried on a conversation almost in whispers, their voices buzzing incomprehensibly, like wasps. Aoi wasn't saying anything, but his cheeks were covered in red fingermarks where he had gripped and pulled at them, and he kept closing his eyes. He hummed a Buddy Holly song continuously, but in such a grim way that That'll Be The Day had no bounce at all; it simply circled flatly back around to its beginning, broken and sad, like a record that was wearing out its grooves.
His eyes weren't on his parents, but on Uruha.
Ruki didn't know quite what to make of him.
It was clear that he was nervous; he bit at his nails compulsively no matter how many times his mother attempted to knock his hands away from his mouth, and his breathing had taken on a soft, high note that made him sound as though there was something just barely contained inside of him. He was counting, Ruki noticed, not really saying the numbers aloud or even whispering them but letting his lips twitch into their shapes; what he was counting was a mystery. It made loops: one to twelve and back again, one to twelve and back again, one to twelve...
Time seemed to be moving backwards, and Ruki twisted his fingers together anxiously. How could you eat when time ran the wrong way? What sense did that make? What reason could there be for anything if you ate just to find yourself hungry again, or brushed your teeth to find your mouth stale again, or slept to wake up just as exhausted? What was the point of getting over somebody when they could wander so easily back into your life; pick up your hand as though they never left; was it really that easy?
From across the table Toshiya kept shooting him strange little looks, rocking back in his chair, but Ruki let them flick dazedly past him.
He came, his mind kept chanting at him, he came, he really came, he wants to be with you, he came, he wants you back, he came, he really came.
And another voice, layered somewhere beneath that: but why did he have to come?
I didn't need him here.
I didn't even want to see him.
But that voice was a lot quieter.
At around two, tea was poured. Shinya averted his face from it violently, as if it was poison. Uruha sipped at it like a bird. Nobody seemed to have much of an appetite. Kyo had been herded in and instructed rather tersely to eat something, as this was the only lunch that would be served – the nurses appeared a little harried and flustered by the amount of people milling around – but Ruki found it hard to look at him. Already Eiji's appearance seemed like a strange dream, hazy and insubstantial; in comparison Kyo felt almost achingly real, sharp as cold air; too clear, distinct, pure as boiled water. His hands were as angular as something put together by bolts and screws: his face could have been carved from stone. He sat by Ruki, but that might have been only because there were no other chairs available. He didn't say anything.
Aoi lit up a cigarette and puffed on it and hummed, and Ruki supplied the words in his head: you say you're gonna leave, you know it's a lie, 'cause that'll be day when I die...
Uruha tapped on the sides of his neck and shook his head fretfully. Aoi watched him, his face softer than it generally looked. Die held his teacup tightly, as if afraid it might slip out of his hands.
Nothing was wrong, so why did the three of them all look so worried – why did they all look so much as though they were waiting for something? It was as though they were sending out a signal, a kind of siren in a strange frequency that only they could hear but that everyone else could feel: Aoi's parents with their buzzing whispers, Die's parents with their strained faces, Shinya troubled and rubbing his ears over and over, the way Ruki thought he might do when he was hearing things.
Looking at them that way, they were almost ugly. Shinya seemed huddled and somehow furtive, Aoi too brash, Uruha too jittery and Die a bright skeleton, his frame almost brutal in its rawness and savagely exposed – bone, muscle, fibre, sinew; ligaments working out in the open, veins running along the surface, like an anatomical model: a beautiful, ugly human. Even in the cramped room, the three of them seemed so far apart, dying all over again. Die, Aoi, Uruha. Starving, burning, drowning. The alarm bell ringing in all three of their heads, making them stagger away from each other in confusion; Die smiling at Uruha in an odd, sad sort of way; Aoi's hand twitching as though he wanted to reach out. All three of them seemed almost paralysed under the eyes of their parents.
Sighing, Ruki shifted in his chair. It didn't help: whatever was making him uncomfortable, that sharp thing that kept hurting him, it seemed to be on the inside. Outside a set of tyres crunched over the gravel drive and he heard a car door slam: Shinya's parents, he supposed. He tried to find the pinch of curiosity he had felt about them at one point, those nice-looking people in the photograph who never, ever visited, but it was gone.
Aoi leant forward on his elbows, away from his parents, propping his chin in his hands.
'Think anybody likes being here?' he asked, his voice so low it wasn't really clear who he was talking to. Die shot him a troubled look. There was the sound of footsteps in the stairwell now; the clatter of the door being unlocked.
Ruki saw two things happen; Die's mother reached out and squeezed her son's elbow, and a single tear fell from Uruha's eye onto his cheek. Unconsciously, Ruki reached out and gripped the edge of the table.
He thought if Eiji had asked him then, he would have said yes. He would have gone anywhere to get out of this room and away from the people in it; from whatever mountain-sized truth seemed to exist around them, too big for him to wrap his mind around all at once. He heard Aoi light up a cigarette.
Why are they sitting so far apart? he thought helplessly, and the door to the dining room opened behind him. He heard the rustle of starched clothing as a nurse stepped through, her head lowered respectfully, and then a different kind of sound – still a rustling but a stiffer one, almost creaky, and he turned awkwardly in his chair to see two police officers in their blue uniforms step into the dining room. It was a tight fit; there was some strange shuffling, everyone silent as they watched the officers try to find space for their feet.
Uruha sniffed, wiped at his eyes with the back of his hand, and then scrubbed at his own tear-stained skin hard with the fabric of his T-shirt, as if he could obliterate it. As if his tears were made of something filthy.
'Mr Takashima?' one of the officers said.
But it was obvious that it wasn't Uruha they were talking to.
The dining room was a strange tableau. For what felt like forever, the only thing that moved was the occasional flurry of snow, spiralling delicately past the slightly foggy windowpane; that, and the smoke rising slowly from Aoi's cigarette. When Ruki chanced a glance at him, moving only his eyes, he found the dark-haired man with his gaze lowered, staring straight down at the table he was leaning on. When Ruki searched further, tipping his head up an inch, he found everybody else in similar states: Shinya with his hands covering his eyes, Die looking down at his lap, Kyo with his head turned away and Uruha with his eyes lightly closed, the lids trembling, tears sliding slowly but steadily from beneath them.
'Mr Takashima?' the police officer said again. They were a man and a woman, and it was the woman who spoke this time, her voice clipped and pleasant as a nurse's but no less serious.
Ruki wondered why neither of them stepped forward, but kept on lingering awkwardly in the doorway, where there was no room. Like uninvited guests, they hovered, and as stern as their faces were there was a question in their eyes: exactly what have we walked into, here?
What is this?
'I'm Mr Takashima,' Uruha's father said calmly. 'And this is my son; also Mr Takashima.'
Ruki watched the tear drop from Uruha's chin and into his lap.
'May we speak with you?' the male officer this time. 'Just yourself at this point, though we'll have questions for your son later.'
'I don't understand what this is about,' Uruha's father said politely, but nobody could have missed it: the way he touched his son's shoulder to try and still the way he was beginning to rock in his chair, pressing his spine into it as if it could have saved him.
'Just a few questions, Mr Takashima.'
'Is this routine?'
His tone was so polite as to seem deadly; the officers exchanged quick glances.
'If you will come with us, Mr Takashima, we can give you more information at the station in Kyoto.'
'Ah.' His hand tightened on Uruha's shoulder, 'But as you can see, I am visiting my son today. He is very unwell.'
Ruki found his eyes attracted by Mrs Takashima, sitting slightly apart from her husband and her son. She didn't appear to be breathing; her head was held in a rigid, birdlike way that made the cords of her neck stand out against her necklace. With her body tensed, her jewellery looked oppressively tight.
'Yes,' the male police officer said a little helplessly, 'We can see that. But even so, Mr Takashima...'
'My son's condition,' Uruha's father continued steadily, 'Is very unstable. And he has a lot of difficulty differentiating between reality and fiction. I really would prefer to avoid confusing him. You see, he has expected me to visit for a certain length of time today, and—'
'Mr Takashima,' the woman officer interrupted, 'I'm afraid we must insist.'
Uruha's mother's lips looked as though they had been sewn together. Slowly, she knotted her fingers together in her lap, as though she was praying.
'I do have rights,' his father was saying patiently. 'And unless you are arresting me...'
There was a small pause.
'You are being arrested, Mr Takashima,' the female officer said plainly. 'Please, if you could co-operate. We do not want to upset these young men or their families.'
Very lightly, Mrs Takashima pressed the tips of three fingers to her forehead, as if she had a headache.
'This is preposterous,' Mr Takashima said, and though his voice was perfectly level there was a hint of something in it – maybe just a high, nervous breath behind it – that belied its flat calm.
Anxiously, Ruki looked up and met Aoi's eyes; his face was strained, and he was holding his cigarette too tight between his fingers; he shot Ruki a look that he couldn't quite grasp the meaning of.
'Preposterous,' Uruha's father was still saying a little breathlessly, 'Completely absurd, I—'
'Mr Takashima, if you just—'
'Absolutely ridiculous. I don't know what kind of tale you've heard, but I won't be going anywhere until I can—'
'Mr Takashima, if you do not—'
'Go with them, dad.'
Uruha's voice should have been too quiet to interrupt anybody, but everyone fell silent. Uruha's father gave a soft flinch, his face contorting briefly; it was uncanny how much it made him look like his son.
'Uruha,' he said quietly, and another tear slid down Uruha's cheek.
'You have to go with them,' he repeated, his voice soft. 'I'm sorry.'
Soberly, father and son looked at each other. Mr Takashima swallowed. His face was a peculiar colour, Ruki thought; almost grey.
'This was you?' he asked, a wheeze audible over his words, and Uruha closed his eyes tightly as he gave a small, jerky nod.
'I'm sorry, dad.'
'But you're not well, Uruha. You don't know what's happening; you don't – this is a mistake, a silly mistake—'
'No,' Uruha said quietly. Carefully, he pulled his sleeve over his hand and used it to wipe the one fearful tear that had beaded at the corner of his father's eye, 'No.'
'Uruha. Listen to me. What did you tell them?'
His one word answer was almost silent, but clear: 'Everything.'
Ruki felt a sudden desire to throw up, and swallowed against it. His mouth flooded with sour tasting saliva, and he gripped his own hands together tightly.
'I don't understand, Uruha. I don't understand at all. Haven't your mother and I always given you everything? Haven't we – haven't we— how could you do this to us? Make up lies like this?'
It wasn't his television voice, Ruki thought distantly; it was gaspy and full of holes, like something being torn apart, a split lung, full of rot, full of softly disintegrating tissue, pulpy and thin. He gulped dryly, his eyes rolled; where his son had dried his tear he gripped at his hand, and Uruha tensed his shoulders and looked uncomfortable but allowed it.
'I'm sorry, dad,' he whispered, 'But you hurt my friends.'
'I hurt your— for god's sake, Uruha, these people are not your friends! They're sick, don't you see that? They're mad!'
'Mr Takashima,' Die's father said, 'Control yourself.'
'They're sick, Uruha; they're all sick in the head and they're trying to poison you against me, can't you understand? I'm the one who loves you; your mother and I, we're the only ones—'
'I love him,' Die interrupted simply. Uruha's father looked up at him, his mouth working silently, and Die shrugged.
'I love him, too,' Aoi said.
Aoi's father performed a sort of convulsive motion with his hands, as if he itched to reach out and slap his son – or else choke the words out of his throat. Ruki looked quickly down at his lap.
'We all love him,' Die said.
'Even though he can be a real pain in the ass sometimes,' Aoi added.
'You hurt my friends,' Uruha repeated in a whisper.
'Uruha,' his father said, barely contained, 'There will be a trial. You will have to speak in front of a lot of people who will know you're lying, and if they believe you, they'll put me – they'll put me in prison.'
It was funny then; the strange little smile that came over Uruha's face. It wasn't happy; wasn't triumphant or mocking or any of those things; it was just gentle, and a little sad, and with one of his painfully bitten hands he touched his father's cheek.
'It's all right,' he said. 'Because – because remember when you took me here, and you said that I'd be fine, because I'd be around people who were like me?' He tried to widen his smile, reassuringly, but failed. 'That's – that's you now, dad. You don't have to worry. It'll be people like you.'
Uruha's father raised his hand and hit his son hard across the face. One of the police officers made a threatening movement forwards, but nobody else moved; even Aoi seemed frozen in his seat.
Carefully, Uruha touched his cheek. A smeary red hand print began to burn against his skin and he placed his own fingers over it, as if he was sizing up their different hands to check the fit.
His voice broke a little when he spoke: 'You can relax now, daddy.'
Nobody moved, or said anything, for a long moment. But before Uruha's mother fainted – slumping in an oddly vertical way, her stiff clothing doing something to hold her up – and the nurses started shepherding people out of the room and flinging open windows, and Ruki found himself borne along on a drift of people in the corridors that led him back to his own bedroom, and the officers clicked some handcuffs around Mr Takashima's wrists and led him, unprotesting now, down to their police car – before all that, Ruki joined everybody else in watching as Uruha pressed his forehead lovingly against his father's; cried with him; comforted him. They listened as he told him that it would be okay.
Later that evening, it began to snow again. Quietly, Toshiya and Ruki sat on their beds and watched it; there wasn't a great deal to say. A great, yawning tiredness seemed to have descended over everything, like an enchantment, and to Ruki it felt oddly like finding the beginning of a circle: tired, again. Dull, again. Everything underwater. Time the wrong way. A whole wide river, flowing upstream.
A view of his own feet as they carried him down the street, and a fleeting memory of the smell of catastrophe being in the air: soot and smoke and oily orange fire at Ten-Roku station. He saw it now even though he hadn't then: loose ash in the air, ambulances in the street. And Eiji, and school, and the bathtub full almost to the brim, the way the water had reddened his skin.
Tired again. Ready to check out again. Time to stop, and admit defeat, and quit.
'What do you think is gonna happen?' Toshiya said finally, and Ruki shrugged.
'Dunno.'
'Have a good time with your visitor today?'
Toshiya didn't seem to be expecting an answer to that one. Pensively, he lit up a cigarette and went back to staring out of the window. In the dark, the falling didn't look white; it was black, as though pieces of the sky were flaking away and falling to the earth.
'They think they'll win,' Ruki said quietly, his voice sounding hoarse in his own ears, 'But they won't.'
Toshiya didn't look around at him, but his neck seemed a little stiffer, and Ruki knew that he'd heard.
'They who?' he said finally, tiredly, and Ruki smiled sadly.
'Aoi. Die. Uruha. They won't get away with it.'
'Are you serious?' Toshiya said softly, and Ruki shrugged.
'Nothing ever changes.'
'Things change all the time,' Toshiya said.
He didn't sound sure, though, and when he looked over his shoulder at Ruki the smiles they exchanged were weak.
'You okay?' Toshiya asked carefully, and Ruki shrugged jerkily.
'Sure.'
'Right.' Toshiya's smile grew a little more natural, 'You're a shitty liar, you know.'
'Noted,' Ruki said moodily, and Toshiya rolled his eyes. Stubbing out his cigarette, he got untidily to his feet – it crossed Ruki's mind, not for the first time, that just because Toshiya had long arms and legs it didn't necessarily mean that he knew how to control them – and sat himself down on Ruki's bed instead, making the mattress tilt and sway.
'What are you—?'
His question got swallowed up by those long arms when Toshiya hugged onto him, big hands pulling him close. Ruki wriggled at once, outraged, but heard Toshiya snort softly next to his ear.
'Stop being such a baby,' he said gently, and Ruki slowly let his body relax. He could feel the thud of Toshiya's heartbeat, slow and steady; it was comforting. He wondered if Toshiya thought about it much when he shot up – the way each beat of his heart would push the drug around his body; the way it would muddy and foul up his blood.
'I'm not being a baby,' he mumbled.
'Yeah, yeah. Want to talk about it?'
'Absolutely not.'
'That's okay.'
Ruki felt Toshiya preparing to pull away, and his fingers did something strange – betrayed him by clutching tightly at his clothing, pulling him closer. He butted his head down, burrowing it deeper into the comforting darkness of Toshiya's chest; he smelled nice, like cigarette smoke and clean clothes. It wasn't the right smell, in the same way that his body somehow wasn't the right shape, but it was comforting and close and warm. Ruki closed his eyes.
'Think it's selfish that the only person I can think about right now is myself?' he mumbled, and felt Toshiya smile against the top of his head.
'Yeah. You're a horrible bastard.'
Against Toshiya's front, Ruki snorted a little. The sound came out small and choked, though, so much like a sob that there might not have been any practical difference, and he felt his shoulders shudder as he breathed raggedly against his roommate's chest. Faintly, as if from a great remove, he felt Toshiya stroke his back.
This was all he had wanted, he had thought: just darkness. Just quiet. Oblivion.
Had that really been so crazy?
He wondered if Toshiya had ever considered it, sticking a needle into himself: the chance, every time, that it might kill him. He wondered how much time his roommate had spent turning over the decision: passing it back and forth between his hands, flipping it like a coin; was it, or was it not, worth it?
Toshiya's hand slid clumsily up into his hair, and he thought of Eiji.
And he thought of Kyo, sitting across the table from him, his gaze fixed at the window. Just his face, almost in profile. The smoke rising from Aoi's cigarette.
The clearest image in his head was of the bright red hand print on Uruha's pale cheek.
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Uru's dad pretty much hanged himself when he started talking like he already knew what he was being accused of before any charges had even been mentioned. And the fact that his mom fainted makes me think she at the very least had suspicions of what was going on there, even if she didn't actually know. I hope she burns in hell too!
And then there's poor Ruki in a muddle about Eiji. Maybe another day to process everything that was said will bring him some clarity. *fingers crossed*
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