Relax, My Beloved, 1/2, the GazettE, Reita/Uruha/Aoi
Title: Relax, My Beloved
Author: losseflame
Chapters: 1/2
Genre: Slice of Life, Angst, Romance, AU
Warnings: internalized homophobia, whoompy!asthmatic!Aoi, potential triggers for self harm, eating disorders and suicide attempts
Rating: R
Pairings/Characters: Uruha/Aoi, Reita/Aoi, Uruha/Reita, Reita/Aoi/Uruha, Ruki/Kai, Aoi/Yune (sort of)
Synopsis: But then, no one in their little group is anything close to normal. They’re manic depressive art students and co-dependant alkies and self-hating closet cases, so really, what’s a small-town boy in a big city with dreams like wildfire?
Comments: So I found this, half-finished, in the depths of my computer, and I decided to finish it. C:
“It starts like this: Aoi is fresh out of the closet and even more freshly disowned, sitting in a Tokyo train station strumming on a guitar he doesn’t really know how to play yet with all the money he has in his pocket and everything else he owns in a duffle bag next to him, hoping enough people passing by will take pity on him and throw a few coins into his open guitar case. Uruha, bold as anything with cockiness surrounding him like a heavy cologne, walks up to Aoi, crouches, and puts his hand over the one that’s strumming like it has a goddamn right.
“Come play in my band.” Uruha says with a low, private smile - like he’s sharing a heartfelt secret rather than being an asshole - his tone mellow and molasses sweet.
However, it is a sticky slick summer afternoon, air dripping so heavy with condensation a fish could survive just fine on the surface, and Aoi is just not in the mood for mysterious strangers with mysterious smiles and mysterious offers that may or may not actually be orders.
He is, quite frankly, done with mystery in general, so it’s only natural that he, in response to what the mysterious stranger said, lifts up his middle finger and waves it around a couple times. “Suck my dick and piss off.” Which is a kind of purple-black rudeness his mother would never allow - but neither did his mother allow fags in the family, and Aoi winces internally, every reminder of his mother like a finger being pressed hard down on flesh still green with near-fresh bruising. So he straightens his shoulders instead of apologizing, his mother not being here to chide him anyway.
The edges of Uruha’s smile crack and wrinkle into something more genuinely warm, his eyes lighting up with a kind of puckish joy you normally see in the hellspawn child that is trouble for every teacher. This is not a normal reaction to an insult (this is Yune’s reaction to an insult). This is in fact a very mysterious reaction to an insult (Yune was always very mysterious).
The reaction doesn’t make Aoi feel any more friendly.
Uruha introduces himself anyway, prying Aoi’s sweat-clammy hand away from his guitar and manhandling it into a kind of forced handshake, and he repeats what he first said.
“Why would I want to play in your band? It’s probably a shitty band anyway.” Aoi says, his voice still white static rough with the after effects of suppressed grief and razor blades sighing sweetly against the skin of his thigh.
Uruha gives him a very meticulous once-over, starting with Aoi’s hair just starting to knot with fever sweat and two days travelling worth of oil and ending with his scuffed duffle bag bulging with all of his worldly belongings. “Are you planning on doing anything else with your Thursday afternoon? Besides, we need another guitarist, and you need a shower and friends who know how to get bargains on apartments.” Now Uruha winks, fake-coyly, his next words coming out heavy with overdone innuendo. “And I am the master of cheap.”
It’s then that Aoi notices the hint of an accent clinging to Uruha’s vowels, the careful over-enunciation splattered over his other words lost in his sudden urge to be sexualized. Something must show on his face, because Uruha abruptly gets a half-shamed expression on his face. Aoi doesn’t smirk, but he’s thinking about it.
Point one to Aoi. Point nothing to douchebag.
Aoi sighs, realizes he isn’t going to get out of this - realizes that he doesn’t want to get out of it, if he’s being honest - and grumbles as he packs up his things. “You could be a serial killer. You could be planning to murder me and leave my body in a ditch somewhere. This is a horrible idea.”
“What’s life without a little adventure?” Uruha asks, his words carefully pronounced again. Aoi stretches as he gets up, his shallowly severed flesh stinging as he does so. Satisfaction, heavy-burning in the marrow of his bones, zings through him at the careful reminder of being alive.
“A healthy one.” Aoi replies, a heartbeat and a stutter too late, and Uruha lets loose another knobbly kneed, wicked grin.
“A boring one, you mean. Health is for the weak and the young! Besides,” Uruha picks up Aoi’s guitar case, leading him to the exit of the station, “If I were going to do something your body, it would not be something as crude as to destroy it.”
It’s said with the overdramatic, joking tones usually found in frat boys with more money than brains and more libido than people willing to sleep with them, the unresolved urge to hump anything with legs being transferred into making comments to their ‘bros’. Aoi feels his shoulders hunch up and his lips pulling back into a snarl, and Uruha lifts up one hand in surrender.
“You’re a little bit of a bitch, you know that?” Uruha says, his tone irritatingly good natured. He snaps the gum in his mouth Aoi didn’t notice before as they finally make it out of the station to outside. It sounds like a gunshot and feels like one, too, sort of. It’s only one flaw of many that Aoi has, but it hits too close to home.
“I know.” Aoi mutters, because he is, really, and there’s not much point in trying to spare himself from that truth when most likely he’ll be living in a drooping cardboard box in a month or so and he’ll have to start capitalizing on that fact for the money.
It’s muggier out there than it was in the climate-controlled, scratched linoleum environment of the train station, like mudslides and gumbo with too much spice and the thin veiling of scum that covered every surface after a summer storm. The humid weight of the air in Aoi’s lungs makes him regret not remembering his inhaler, and he slows as unconsciously as most people blink, one hand going to his chest to rub circles on his chest cavity like it’ll do something.
It won’t.
“Dude, are you okay?” The joking tone in Uruha’s voice has faded now, concern surging in bright and overwhelming - not at all polite, not at all hung up on the fact that he’s known Aoi for about ten minutes and Aoi has been insulting him for seven of them. For all that an outsider could tell from his tone, Aoi is Uruha’s dearest, oldest friend and seeing him in pain is like driving nails into Uruha’s soul.
It’d be irritating if it weren’t so nice to feel liked.
Aoi closes his eyes for a moment and lets himself crest on the wave of Uruha’s concern, lets it lift him up as much as Uruha’s tone drops. “I’m fine.” His voice comes out constricted, contradictory, but Uruha lets it go.
He can feel the heat of the sidewalk through the soles of his cheap shoes (still battle-scarred with tiny drawings from when Yune assaulted him with a pen and a few disarming kisses), the rough burning heat of it adding to his discomfort.
“You don’t have to play when we get there.” Uruha speaks out suddenly, his voice underlined and bolded by the high-pitched screeching of cicadas. “You can just…chill. Make friends. I wouldn’t mind having a bitchy friend to give me tough-love advice when life gets me down.” He moves to elbow Aoi good-naturedly, catches Aoi’s expression and thinks better of it. But the offer remains like cigarette smoke in the air, swirling in Aoi’s sight.
It’s not in Aoi’s nature to be this spontaneous, but what the hell. He’s already got one foot in the pool, anyway.
Besides, when push comes to shove, he’s always been a sink-or-swim kind of person.
So he decides to leap into the deep end.
“My first bit of advice is to get clothes that don’t make you look like a flamboyant hobo.”
Uruha is still laughing when they get to his apartment.
.:.:.
The ‘band’, as it turns out, is really just Uruha, a broad shouldered guy named Reita and a temperamental guy named Ruki crowded into the living room of an apartment strumming half-assedly on instruments with an abandoned drum set standing in the middle of it all like a shrine to what could be.
They still act like pretentious assholes over it, like potential greatness and greatness that already exists means the same thing, but it seems more like an ever running inside joke, as old and as comfortable as the typical armchair that’s been in the family for decades, gone soft and shaped with use.
Aoi isn’t used to friendliness from more than one person, so he jerks his shoulders up to his ears when Ruki leans against him to pass Reita something, or when Reita grins sweet and bright at Aoi, enveloping his hands into Reita’s much larger ones in a strange double-handshake.
The atmosphere is sweet and muzzy like the pink cotton candy Aoi’s dad hadn’t let him get but his older brother bought for him anyway, sticky underneath Aoi’s tongue whenever he opens his mouth to speak. But it’s nice. Good.
They don’t ask why Aoi’s here and he doesn’t offer up any explanation, the words going sour and hard in the back of his throat when he tries. What they do instead is invite him into the little group like they’ve known each other since childhood. And Aoi observes, studies, because once upon a time in a land filled with unrealized sexuality and scar free wrists he’d been a grade A student.
Ruki is anger-tightened, tense like a piano wire strung too tight, ready to snap at the push of air. Every word a is weapon or a wall and every action is screaming affection he’s not happy he feels. They’re similar, him and Ruki, in an abstract, conceptual, stained glass and thick thoughts sort of way, so Aoi listens as Ruki rants and asks nothing of him. Watches, sort of proud of himself and sort of not, as Ruki’s eyes go from diamond hard to something more porous and friendly.
Ruki is straightforward and not a mystery at all, and Aoi likes his black and white world. He reads backdated, dog-eared fashion magazines when they aren’t practicing, leaning against the arm of the couch and surveying the room like a king looking upon his three person kingdom. Usually Aoi scorns people who read that sort of stuff, thinking meanly that they’ll never have a chance to use what they learned. That replacing makeup you can only buy in New York with drugstore CoverGirl won’t get them anywhere, that they’ll never buy designer clothes or dine at the Nobu. That no matter how much Cosmo they read, they’ll still be a waiter in some backwater nowhere with specials on Duplin country wine and that they’ll never be more than exactly what they are when they read the magazine in the first place.
Or maybe that’s because Aoi used to read those magazines, before he realized that that’s not what men do. That real men aren’t interested in soft-sweeping colour on their eyelids or shaping their hair into something beautiful or wearing bright cotton clothes fashioned for curves.
(Not like Aoi does, and he hates the prison-feel of a plain grey t-shirt almost as much as he hates the prison-feel of what he’d rather be wearing. They’re both brands, trapping him in other people’s perception as either invisible or deplorable.)
But Ruki makes it work, somehow, and Aoi doesn’t mind it so much when Ruki leafs through the accessories article and grumbles half heartedly about what he sees there.
Ruki is easy to figure out, easy to see the different pieces of his personality and arrange the puzzle in Aoi’s head. It’s the Other Two.
Which, yes, is a capitalization squarely underlined with confusion, bolded with interest, and italicised with curiosity.
At least he won’t end up like the cat in this one. (He doesn’t think, but sometimes the Other Two’s eyes go sharper than the razors he has tucked away as they slowcrawl over Aoi, easy pleased in a way that puts warmth in the base of Aoi’s stomach.)
Because there is Uruha and there is Reita, but they seem to be more of an UruhaAndReita, the edges that separate them into individuals blurred and smudged to create something singular. They surround one another like, in their eyes, the other is a planet and they are both satellites, adjusting and readjusting their courses to fit around one another. An action from one spurns a reaction from the other, and Aoi has known them for all of about five hours when he figures out that Reita comes with Uruha, Uruha comes with Reita, and that friendship with either of them is a package deal.
It’s good, he guesses, because Reita treats him with the same blown-open friendliness Uruha threw his way like he just had too much of it and needed to share it with the most bitter looking person in a twenty foot radius of himself.
At the end of the ‘practice’ for a band that’s more of a childhood dream then anything concrete, Ruki shakes his hand like they’re in a business transaction and says he’ll get in contact with an apartment offer (and fuck it if Aoi knows how Ruki will do anything about it) and Reita ambles off with quiet grin.
Uruha shows him where the shower is, gets the bed made up, and lets Aoi crash there, and it’s only when Aoi is about to fall asleep that he realizes that he has yet to say ‘thank you’.
.:.:.
He dreams about Yune’s wide open smile and wide open legs, the way he laughed through sex and held Aoi like he was special, like he was worth holding onto in the first place.
He dreams about the first time he felt something dark and ugly in his veins after his father first expressed his opinion on fags, writhing and twisting itself up, demanding his attention and eating him alive from the inside out, a pair of raven’s wings spreading to full flight underneath the shield of his solar plexus.
He dreams about the time Yune helped him with that, drawing a blade down the bony mountain ranges of his ribs (he stopped eating well after a while, leaving his body emaciated and pale) between sweet kisses and promises to make things better. And it had been better, for a bit, the rush of darkness finally out, at least for a while. So Aoi asked him to do it again, in different places, with duller blades, until Yune stopped and Aoi started doing it himself.
And he wakes up in a cold sweat to the feel of Uruha holding his hand, loosely but warmly.
Uruha just gives him a smile and even though Aoi really has no goddamn clue what he’s doing here, he doesn’t feel like leaving.
If Uruha’s a serial killer, he’s a damn good one.
.:.:.
After a week of Aoi crashing on a stranger’s couch, hanging out with said stranger’s friends during the day, and cooking the stranger food because he managed to burn PopTarts the first day Aoi stayed over, Ruki walks into Uruha’s apartment without invitation, shoves Aoi’s legs off the couch without invitation, and tells him that he found Aoi a very cheap apartment and a job at a local café.
Aoi isn’t quite sure he knows how Ruki manages to do all this, seeing as he’s a struggling art student who wakes up in public washrooms with no clue how he got there, eats cigarettes, and works three part time jobs before painting out all of his angst onto large canvasses.
But he’s never been one to look a gift horse in the mouth, so he gathers up his things and follows Ruki out the door, forgetting to say goodbye.
It’s not like it matters much, anyway.
.:.:.
It doesn’t matter much at all, really, because Uruha - and by association, Reita and Ruki - have seemed to have imprinted on him like baby ducklings with an inappropriate patriarchal complex.
So he meets up with them, still, at dirt-cheap restaurants with scuffed linoleum floors manned by tired over-thirty waitresses in crumbling makeup who slouch like the weight of the world is on their shoulders and wear expressions that say they’re used to it. They eat greasy food and drink alcoholic swill that would kill anyone older and smarter then someone in their twenties and wander streets burnt yellow with chemical streetlights and laugh like they aren’t just distracting themselves from how far from somewhere they’re going.
It’s not what Aoi thought he’d be doing at this age when he was fifteen and still spit-shined and earnest about life, framed with his sensible shoes and best intentions. But it’s enough.
Uruha still manages to rope Aoi into strumming on his guitar with them every Thursday and Sunday, and Aoi goes along with it because there’s no reason not to.
Also, being closer to this - to light and warmth and the occasional arm slung over his shoulders - pushes back the darkness, in small ways that almost make the razor he keeps in the bottom of his messenger bag seem irrelevant.
It’s better than Aoi expected and much better than he deserves, and everything would be perfect if it weren’t for the fact than his stomach flip-flops and the air seems to get heavier and more energy filled, like a prelude to a lightning storm, whenever Uruha sends him a sideways glance.
That’s when the blade at the bottom of his messenger bag becomes relevant again, when shame slipslides underneath his skin and burrowing into his teeth until he clenches his jaw, pooling in the base of his stomach like roiling bile and he hates what he feels, just wants to be normal.
He can’t be that, but he can be calm, so it’s around this point - when he’s straddling the edge of a breaking point - that he excuses himself and curls up in his shitty apartment bathroom and slices long, thin lines on the outside of his thighs, watches impossibly thin streaks of red trickle onto his cracked tile floor, and feels relief.
.:.:.
Uruha seems to be good at picking up strays, because once the thick, soup-like heat of summer mellows into clear, easy-to-breathe autumn, he brings along a smiling, painfully shy guy named Kai to one of their practices, and Kai finally takes up the throne of the drum set, glorified in its position in the middle of room.
Kai is easysweet grins and molasses slow demeanour, every word and action drawn out to full significance. He fills a room with his stutters and earnestness, and when they go out to one of their dirt cheap restaurants for celebration, he looks at the waitress who brings their orders straight in the eye and says ‘thank you, have a nice night’ like he means it. Like he wishes so hard that this forty-something, chain smoking veteran of life will be happy, like he’s actually grateful to her that’s she’s doing her job.
He’s bright and hopeful and painfully honest, a little supernova wrapped in big eyes and slightly crooked teeth.
It’s not normal, in Aoi’s well studied opinion.
But then, no one in their little group is anything close to normal. They’re manic depressive art students and co-dependant alkies and self-hating closet cases, so really, what’s a small-town boy in a big city with dreams like wildfire?
.:.:.
So Kai slips into the spaces not filled by others, squirming under everyone’s skin like a well-meaning parasite until when he smiles Aoi and Ruki have to smile back, because otherwise they’d be something close to a monster (Uruha and Reita never have any trouble with giving smiles back to people).
Aoi falls into his job easier and the air gets colder and he stops choking on heat-heavy air, his lungs untroubled but his mind less so.
Uruha is still a presence, weighted against Aoi’s skin, replacing the humidity that was lost to the change of the seasons and just as good at stealing Aoi’s breath.
Aoi’s never been comfortable with who he is, thinks he probably never will be, and it’s hard to grit his teeth and hold onto composure in the face of Uruha’s self acceptance. He kisses girls and boys and smiles like bodies don’t matter, people do, and Aoi wishes he could believe that but it’s kind of lost to the remembered feel of his mother’s slap and his father’s booming voice.
But Uruha never presses, and Aoi just deals with his heart in his throat and the rush of warmth that follows every kind thing Uruha says to Aoi. The darkness is always close at heels to this rush of warmth, and Uruha sidles closer and stays longer whenever he has a chance to.
(Aoi doesn’t give him many chances.
Not like it seems to matter.)
Aoi’d be surprised at how easy the friendship is if he hadn’t already known that Uruha could have the world at his feet with a grin and a few charming words and only sticks to easy game like Aoi for lack of ambition.
It’s good, most days, when the darkness is manageable and Aoi works hard enough to be exhausted at the end of the day.
For the days he still has enough energy to think by the time his shift has finished, when his blood warms up enough that Uruha’s smile when he says something the wrong side appropriate sticks to the back of Aoi’s eyelids and that not-right want slips through him -
It’s easy enough to let it out.
(The razor in the bottom of Aoi’s messenger bag always stays relevant.)
.:.:.
Midwinter and Aoi gets a call from his mother, on a Thursday night when the band should be practicing but they’re getting drunk instead, Ruki taking the opportunity to put a hand on Kai’s thigh without needing an excuse. Aoi keeps his eyes averted and his head down, ignoring the small part of him that squirms, slow and thick and unchangeable, with something he isn’t calling jealousy.
“Helloooo….?” Aoi drawls out, loose and languid, relaxation spooled down his spine like the first inhale of weed and small, thin cuts slow-burning like self-confidence along his stomach. Uruha starts to laugh at the sound, and Aoi opens his mouth to taste the sound, sugar sweet and more addicting than the cocaine he's tried twice, before offering his own giggle-snort. It stains the air and lessens the quality of the whole thing, really, but Aoi’s reached the point where he’s too drunk hate himself but not drunk enough to hate everything. Reita smiles at them both and makes no comment when Aoi sways sideways to prop himself up on Reita’s arm.
Is this Shiroyama Yuu?” His mother’s voice is quiet, timid in the face of Aoi’s obvious intoxication, each word stepping carefully, politely, over-pronounced, out of her mouth. Like how she used to walk into church, Aoi thinks, shoulders bowed under the weight of her inadequacy, eyes to the floor like she couldn’t bear to see the Saviour at the front of the room, not with the sins of the past week still filmed over her eyes like shame. She was so tightly wound, then, as if the consequence of one misstep in a holy building was a crack opening in the floor underneath her, leaving her to fall to Hell.
She’d stopped worrying so much about her own damnation when she’d walked in on Aoi and Yune curled around each other, hands linked and lips too close to be just friendly.
“Mom?” Aoi’s voice is raw like unprocessed oil, black and ugly and vile as it drips from his lips. The words splatter to the floor messily, falling at Uruha’s feet, and Aoi takes a large breath, stumbling upright and shrinking away when Reita tries to help him. “Why are you - how did you get this number?”
The band has gone quiet now - and what fucking band, really, they don’t even have a fucking name and Aoi’s pretty sure the only reason he’s channelling his hate into the band is that he’s already twisted enough without hating his mother on top of the whole thing - and Aoi staggers to the door as the room swings around him.
“Yuu, sweetheart -” His mother starts, all tentatively distant.
“I thought you said,” Aoi cuts in, his voice broken glass over gravel, hunching in on himself. “I thought you said I didn’t get to have that name anymore. That I wasn’t your son anymore, so I didn’t get that name?” He slurs out, the edges of his words sharp enough to cut. A laugh burbles up in the back of his throat, acidic and horrible and nearly a year in the making, and he can’t do this here, alright, he can’t do this with his only four friends in the background.
He can’t loose them because he looses it over the phone.
So he swipes at the doorknob, desperately, swearing under his breath when the world twistturns and refuses to co-operate. He doesn’t notice the footsteps coming up behind him, but he does notice when suddenly Uruha’s body heat is spread across his back - and God, even now, that’s enough to make the breath dry up in Aoi’s lungs, all sudden, flash lightning underneath his skin - and his hand is reaching around Aoi to open the door for him.
Aoi surges out of the doorway, too fast to not trip over air, and he feels Uruha try to follow him before Aoi turns and snarls. “Just fuck off! I never fucking wanted this.”
Uruha stops, stock-still and blank-faced like Aoi’s slapped him hard enough the area is numb for a second before the pain starts.
“Yuu?” The voice on the other end of the phone is tinged scared now, and the world is a kaleidoscope of everything Aoi’s been avoiding for the past couple months, no angle catching something he can look at without self-loathing bubbling in his stomach.
Hating yourself is like eating bad Pad Thai every day of your life, only Tums doesn’t do shit and vomiting only makes it worse, because then you’re a faggot and a bulimic.
“What, Mom? Just say your fucking piece.” Aoi spits out, the bitterness he thought had gone away with the summer heat surging up hideously. He’s walking through winter streets in a thin sweater and jeans, he probably just suicide bombed his relationships with everyone - if he hurt Uruha he hurt Reita, and if UruhaAndReita is hurt you might as well just include Ruki in the injured party, and Kai’s pragmatic enough to know when to stick with the majority ruling - and he’s done, he’s so done, and the darkness chokes him up in a way he doesn’t think a razor blade can solve and he thinks about how easy it would be to step off the edge of a tall building.
“You can come home, baby.” His mother says, and the politeness breaks, crumbles in on itself, and leaves an aching desperation in its wake.
Aoi freezes, a wounded sound crawling from the base of his throat and leaping off his tongue to its death. He curls his fingers around his ribcage to dig into the cuts still littering his side. He stops walking, a block from his apartment. “What?”
“We found a program, honey, we found a program that says it’ll fix you, a remediation one, you can come home -” His mother is overjoyed, happiness dripping thick and syrupy from her every word.
Aoi hangs up.
Aoi walks up to his apartment, ignoring his phone when it starts ringing again, and then when he gets there, he tries to drown himself in his bathtub.
Part 2