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solongsun Rating: mature
Bands: The GazettE, Dir en grey
Pairings: Kyo/Ruki, Aoi/Die, Aoi/Uruha
April 8, 1970: the day of the Ten-Roku gas explosion, and the day that 22-year-old Ruki attempts to end his life. Less than two weeks later, he finds himself committed to the Yamauchi Hostel, a psychiatric hospital in the Kyoto hills. Kept on a ward with a number of other ill young men, Ruki is sometimes frightened and sometimes enthralled by his new friends – and none more other than the 'untreatable' Kyo, whose hospitalisation hides a legacy of dark secrets...
1
Later, when the dust settled and the flames were finally extinguished, nobody could have honestly said that they'd seen him. A slight young man with his coloured hair tucked up under a beanie and his wild, exhausted dark eyes hidden behind sunglasses – no, they didn't see him. And, even after the events that shaped that day were really set in motion – the hazy blue evening sky gone black with death, and bright, oily-orange flames screaming their way through buildings and cars and people – he couldn't say he had seen them, either.
He hadn't seen anything that he could recall since earlier that day, when he'd left the home of E. O., the artist, in a state of some heightened confusion and distress; and so when he got home, the only passing fragments of the Ten-Roku gas explosion that he kept were the faint but through layer of dust on his clothing, and the slight smell of smoke in his hair.
They showed it on the news later, of course, after the last people had died. There were 79 fatalities, all in all. He missed that too, though, because by the time the news came on at six, he had already run a very hot bath and was taking his time easing himself into it, inch by scalding inch, not bothering to hiss at the temperature but breathing just slightly unsteadily, and keeping his eyes fixed solidly on the water.
Steam rolled away in clouds. His skin grew pink. The ends of his hair swayed below the surface like tree roots dabbling into a bog. When he felt he had acclimatised enough to the water, he reached for the supplies he'd set on the side of the tub: a large glass of cold water, and a glass pill bottle.
He could hear the television in the other room, and the sound of somebody clattering around with pots in the kitchen.
When he'd looked inside the bottle there had been more than he had hoped; there were at least thirty or so. Keeping his gaze squarely on the tarnished chrome faucet opposite him, he began to take them swiftly, between gulps of water.
At first, nothing happened for a long time. The water went from hot to warm, and then grew tepid. Gradually though, Ruki's view of the end of the bathtub grew foggy, and his fingers relaxed around the pill bottle, and his eyes slid closed. He felt muffled, as though a tremendous weight was pushing in all around him. Red and blue lights flashed weakly against the backs of his eyelids, his arm slackened against the side of the tub, and the pill bottle shattered against the bathroom tile.
Finally, sleep came like a glad tide and rushed him away.
___
'Well, you were a very lucky young man.'
Ruki stirred in his chair uncomfortably. The good weather had evaporated in the week he'd been in hospital; the sky was a turbulent greyish colour, and a fierce wind was blowing. He could see it in the way it was yanking the trees to the side, and in the way all the pedestrians on the street outside were huddled into themselves, but he couldn't hear it. He was sat in the office of Doctor Ueda, and the windows were the double-thick, hermetically sealed kind that didn't rattle. The walls were painted a soft beige, and the potted plants had leaves so green and glossy, they were possibly not real.
The wall behind the doctor was covered with framed certificates, and Ruki was just setting about trying to read the strange, spiky-pretty words on them, when Doctor Ueda cleared his throat and sort of yanked his attention back.
He was old, like a grandfather. The skin on the backs of his tidily linked hands looked as thin as paper.
'This is a safe place, and I want you to feel comfortable here.'
'Aren't you going to ask me why I tried to kill myself?'
'Not yet, no. Why don't you try telling me what you did earlier that day?'
Ruki shifted again, pulling his knees up to his chest. There was a rip starting in the knee of his jeans; he picked at it absently. The silence inflated like a balloon. When it became obvious that Ueda wasn't going to break it, Ruki shrugged.
'You don't remember?'
Shake of the head.
'But you do know which day I'm talking about?'
Ruki lowered his chin onto his knees, gazing up at the doctor stubbornly.
'Every other day this week I've been in hospital. They only just let me out.'
'And how have you felt this week?'
Another shrug, though the angle of his neck made it awkward and lopsided. 'Tired.'
'Tired. All right.' The doctor flexed his fingers, and then linked them again. 'Now, your mother tells me that this isn't the first time you've tried to hurt yourself; is that right?'
'It didn't hurt.'
'Excuse me?'
'I said it didn't hurt. The pills. Didn't hurt.'
'I see. Well, shall we say that this isn't the first time that you've tried to harm yourself, then?'
Ruki scowled, but rubbed the heel of his hand against the side of his head tiredly, and seemed to give in.
'What happened the first time?'
'You know what happened. You have my file open in front of you.'
'That's true. But I want to hear what you have to say about it, in your own words – if you don't mind.'
Ruki's face suggested that he minded an awful lot, but the doctor waited patiently, and finally his huddled little patient gave a big sigh, ruffling the strands of hair that had fallen in front of his face.
'I drank bleach,' he mumbled.
'How much did you drink?'
'About three big swallows.'
'Had anything happened to upset you?'
'I got kicked out,' Ruki whispered. 'Of school.'
'It says here that you were at art school.'
'Osaka University of the Arts,' Ruki said, like it was a correction. He noted that the pride he normally felt associated with the name of the prestigious place was gone.
Good riddance, he thought.
'Why did you have to leave?'
'I didn't do the work.'
'Did you want to do the work?'
'Yes.'
'Did anything in particular stop you?'
Ruki visibly swallowed, his throat working rhythmically. He didn't meet the doctor's eyes any longer; instead, his gaze leapt erratically around the room. His posture had changed; it was stiffer.
'Everything I made was rubbish,' he said. 'I thought I couldn't make anything meaningful or significant. So I spoiled it. I tipped ink over it all and threw it away.'
'And then you drank the bleach?'
Ruki gave a tiny, flinchlike nod.
'A that time you were living in student dorms. Did you move back in with your parents afterwards?'
Another nod.
'And how was that?'
A jagged shrug.
'Your mother tells me that when you took those pills, you didn't lock the bathroom door, because you wanted to be found. She thinks you didn't really want to die. How do you feel about that?'
'I don't know.'
'You don't know how you feel?'
Ruki sighed, and knuckled his closed eyes. 'I was confused that day.'
'Were you upset by the accident on the subway?'
There was a long, long pause after that; so long that Doctor Ueda, who had spent the entirety of their meeting leaning co-operatively forward in his chair, sighed softly and eased himself back, tipping his head back slightly, studying the wall somewhere above Ruki's head. There was a print there – a framed Paul Klee landscape in peaceful shades of blue and green.
It had hung in the doctor's various rooms ever since his days as a student; it had been given to him by a girlfriend, who had said the walls in his dorm were too plain. He must have looked at it a thousand times, but on that April day, he noticed for the first time that something was printed down in the corner. Hunching forward again, he squinted up at it. The girlfriend had been very very long ago, and so he wasn't looking for a love-note; he expected it to be title of the piece, as it was, and felt a little entertained that he had never thought to find out before. Oceanische Landscape.
Oceanic Landscape. Ueda did not know a lot about art. Knowing that about himself, he could only smile at the thought that he had been gazing at the same painting for more than thirty years, and had not once realized that the life it held, its whole landscape, was underwater.
He cleared his throat and noticed that his patient had opened his eyes, and that they were huge with tears.
'The explosion at the subway station,' Ruki whispered, 'I didn't notice.'
The Yamauchi Hostel wasn't much like he'd imagined. He and his parents had set out very early that morning to catch the train from Osaka to Kyoto, and now the three of them were sitting silently in a cab, which had turned off the city streets some twenty-five minutes ago and was now rattling cheerlessly along a country road. The fare meter was up over sixteen thousand yen already, and his parents still had to make the return journey. Their train tickets hadn't exactly been cheap, either.
'How much does this place cost?' Ruki asked colourlessly, and his mother began to fuss with the strap of her handbag.
'Never mind that,' she said, very prim. 'Just concentrate on having a nice rest.'
'Am I here for a rest?'
'That's what the doctor said, isn't it?'
'A rest—'
From the front passenger seat, Ruki's father made a warning noise, and his son sighed, tipping his forehead against the window. His breath clouded the glass. The road meandered up and between hills, and the scenery on each side had changed from meadows to dense woodland. The trees were skinny, with greyish, wintry-looking trunks and spindly branches. Ruki closed his eyes.
'I'm not crazy,' he said.
'I know, dear. We both know.'
The driver, who'd been cast into a thoughtful silence by their destination, flicked on his turn signal. There were no other cars on the road to see it, Ruki thought irritably. He was just making a point. They turned onto a smaller but more evenly-surfaced road, and the asphalt gradually turned to gravel, which crunched regularly under the wheels of the car. The trees were thicker now, but greener, and all at once they fanned well out and away, and gave way to a large, circular drive set in front of a low stone building. At first glance, it could have been any kind of place, even tucked all away up here; an old house, or part of a farm.
But the sign said Yamauchi Hostel. And there were bars on the windows. When he looked harder, squinting as if it was too bright, Ruki noticed that each set of bars had a few faces pressed up against them, watching the new arrival with interest. He pulled his gaze away, and swallowed thickly.
A deep tremor started in the pit of his stomach and shook him to the tips of his toes and fingers, and right up to the top of his head. Even in April, the thin, cold mountain air smelled of winter, and it banged his teeth together uncontrollably. The skin on his face felt much too tight.
He was aware that if he opened his mouth, something like a whimper might come out, so he shut himself up tightly.
I'm not crazy, he wanted to say again. He wasn't stupid enough to think there was any point, though.
He wondered if E. O. knew where he had gone, or if he would hear about it through the grapevine. Possibly not – once Ruki had left university, he'd become pretty cut-off from the art world. E. O. had been his only remaining link to the bustling community of young-to-middle-aged artists he'd used to hang around with, and he'd been a pretty tenuous link, anyway. You couldn't exactly be part of a scene in secret.
Maybe he'd write him a letter and tell him all about everything that had happened, and then he'd mail it and know that E. O. would probably feel awful. He'd spent a lot of his time in hospital doing that – imagining how E. O. would react to things. The problem with writing a letter was that he'd never really know what the reaction was; everything would have to come from him. He could describe the hollow thunk of the car door closing, the gravel crunching under his feet and the feeling of his mother's hand on his shoulder, or the cold hard lump of panic lodged in his chest and the way his breath seemed to be whisking away from him before he'd really used it, in the minutest of detail – and at the end of it all, he'd have no way of knowing if E. O. had even read it.
'Please, take your time to read this before you sign. I understand that your doctor will have gone over the finer points with you, about life and treatment here, but I need to ensure that you fully comprehend that you are signing yourself into our care, and that once you do so, you will only be able to leave this facility once formally discharged. You may apply for discharge at any time, but the success of your application is to be decided by your doctor. Do you understand?'
Ruki scratched the back of his neck uncomfortably, feeling the little knobs of vertebrae pressing smoothly against his fingertips.
'I'm just here for a rest,' he said.
The woman at the reception desk suddenly gave him a wide, lipsticked smile, as if she'd just remembered that he was totally insane and thought he might be dangerous.
'Everybody has to sign the same admittance form.'
She waited, supremely composed, whilst Ruki flipped the pen they'd given him back and forth between his fingers a few times, and squinted down at the printed document in front of him. He hit the pen at a bad angle, and a large blue blot of ink spread rapidly over the dip between his thumb and forefinger. Underneath the dotted line for his signature, there was one for a parent or guardian, too; below that, there was one for a doctor, which had already been signed by Ueda.
'Do my parents need to—?'
'How old are you – twenty-one?'
'Twenty-two.'
'Your parents won't need to sign. You're an adult; this is your own decision.'
Ruki gave a twitchlike nod, biting down on his lower lip. He thought about how much money his parents had spent to travel here, and how much this place would cost, and hesitantly drew his name on the line.
'Thank you very much, Mr Matsumoto. On behalf of myself and all the staff here, welcome to the Yamauchi Hostel. In a moment, we'll take you through, and you'll have a short tour of the facility. Then, you'll have a shower and search, your personal belongings will be inspected, and you'll be given some clothing to wear for the time being. You'll notice most of the patients here wear their own clothes – this is a privilege, amongst many others that you can earn. Clothing with drawstrings, chains, belts, and any detachable sharps are forbidden; if you have brought any with you, they'll be given back to you upon discharge. Would you like to say goodbye?'
Ruki's attention wasn't with her. There was a heavy wooden door to one side, open just a crack, and he had caught a small flurry of movement behind it. As he stared, his eyes met those of another person, who quickly ducked away. He took a curious step forward, but was derailed by his mother, who clasped him hard around the shoulders, pinning his arms to his sides so he was unable to hug her back. She was crying, he realised; he felt her tears wetting the hair just over his ear.
His father wasn't crying, though, and so Ruki chose to look at him instead. He was talking quietly to the receptionist, but Ruki couldn't hear a single word. The whole building was silent. The only sound was the desperate rabbit skip of his own heart in his chest, and he thought it was the loneliest sound he'd ever heard in his life.
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I'll read the other chapters when I get chance.
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