I Ain't Afraid of Shit
A few days ago
"What happened in Dubai? Between you and Granger?"
"Nothing" Kai tips his head back over the chair, watching the stars from the rooftop of their house, a cigarette tucked between his lips.
Tala pours himself another small helping from the whiskey bottle and knocks it back down before continuing to try and pry information from Kai. It's a difficult task. The man's harder to crack than any of the vaults in their mansions. He's always been this way. Kai. He keeps his shit to himself. Tries to solve every problem he has on this own. Never asks for help. It's a terrible trait. You can't get a word out of him about what he's going through even when he's at the very edge of his sanity.
He makes it hard to work as a team.
"Why are you dating him?" Tala asks, his voice a rough whisper, head tilted as he observes Kai. One finger lightly tapping on the grain of the table as he waits.
He watches his chest rise as he inhales, leant back in his chair, one arm dangling by his side, the other on the arm rest. Smoke pours out from his mouth and drifts up to the sky, veiling his face momentarily as he lifts a hand to move the cigarette away. "For all the reasons why people date," he replies. "To get to know him and spend time with him."
"Because you're in love," Tala adds without missing a beat and there's a moment- when Tala holds his breath and Kai freezes with his hand still in the air, midway through exhaling - then he chokes, on the smoke, and his chair thumps on the ground as its front legs falls back into place and joyful laughter escapes Kai. Tala had his own chair on its hindlegs, his cheeks sucked in. He watches Kai laugh for a moment, till he hears the distinct note in his chuckles that tells him that it's genuine. Then Tala joins in too. Guffawing his lungs out.
Right. Right. They don't. People like him and Kai don't fall in love. People who've seen too much. Know too much. Done too much. Love is for people who are naïve - people like Tyson fucking Granger who think such a thing can exist in this hellhole.
Kai's laughter peters out. He touches the joint to his smiling lips before pulling on it, looking at Tala. "You're a comedian."
Tala's shoulders shake with the last of his chuckles. "You're all wound up," he notes, clearing his throat.
"The tournament is starting soon, isn't it? I can work some of the stress out in the ring," says Kai, some light returning to his eyes. The laughter did him good. With the type of life they lead, stress relief is important. Usually, a few drinks, a couple of smokes and a good lay should be enough after a bloody altercation. And if that doesn't do it, some lines of coke.
Kai likes to blow off steam in the gym too. Or with a good fight. Fights and sex calm him down best. He doesn't like smoking because he cares about his health unlike Tala and Bryan. He picked it up solely because of Tyson.
People like him and Kai don't fall in love because they're fucked in the head. They're too messed up inside to feel something that is pure and healthy for someone else. If they do, it's something wrong. Something that is not quite right. Not quite healthy. A compulsion. An obsession. A sickness. A wrong kind of attachment towards another person in this shitty place.
There's a word for it. Toxic.
If people like him and Kai were to feel things for other people. It would be harmful and damaging to whoever it was directed towards.
Tala knows Kai is not in love, but he is only completely sure of this fact when Kai is present with him in person. Present before him physically and he can see his eyes. See the familiar hardness in them. But when Kai is not with him, his head tells him otherwise. Lovely presents his daddy gave him when he left for Russia when Tala was 6 and then didn't come back for two whole years. And when he did, he only came back to divorce his mother because he had fallen in love with another woman. He barely looked at Tala when he left their threshold for the last time.
Daddy gave him issues he never asked for. Now he distrusts people when they're out of his sight. He worries they would change – just like his father did – and this change would somehow be harmful to him. He doesn't really have much control over these thoughts. He's been to therapy. He's taken the drugs they prescribed. Nothing ever worked.
And as god would have it his dearest person in the world is Kai. Kai who is too good with his words, too cunning, too fast for him to keep up with sometimes. He distrusts him the most. Or rather he fears the betrayal from Kai the most. And Tala has to do this. Pry. Pry whenever Kai does something he doesn't usually do to appease his worries.
Kai is aware. And when Tala gets a little too nosy he throws a punch. Though Kai throwing a punch in anyone's direction is pretty much attempted murder, the pain helps right his thoughts.
It rarely ever gets to that point however. Tala knows how to keep his shit in check.
And it's not like they all don't have their own flaws. Kai has trouble sleeping when he's stressed and he's stressed most of the time. He has to purposefully tire himself out either through working out or fucking. If he doesn't do either, he'll break down.
Kai has dated exactly one person in this college before Tyson. Ileana. Tala had kept a close eye on Kai when that was going on but he didn't give too much of a fuck. Kai was sleeping with other people even when he was with Ileana. Behind her back of course. It was the literal nail in her coffin when Tala finally told her the truth about her relationship with Kai in order to break them up.
But with Tyson, Kai stopped lying with other people not long after he met him. And Tala had tried, hadn't he? He'd intentionally tempted him and tried to make him interested in bedding anyone other than Tyson.
He didn't seem to want anyone else. Even in Roppongo. He wanted Tyson but Tyson wasn't putting out. He picked up smoking to quell the restlessness within himself. The excess energy that he couldn't fuck away he spent in the gyms.
Kai may not fall in love. And he may not twist things in his head because he's smart enough to not do that. But Tyson's making Kai do things he usually doesn't do.
And that's a problem.
Tala's silence leaves a gap between them that Kai feels the need to fill after a while. His tone soft as he flicks some ashes off the tip of the cigarette onto the tray. "I had a breakdown the day after our meeting with Gut."
Tala looks up sharply when he hears him. There it is. The truth. Something did happen. It was bound to happen anyway. The smokes and the booze are enough to take the edge off, but Kai had burned bodies that day. All that smell of charred flesh was sure to have triggered something inside of him. Kai needed to work it off. Preferably with someone to make himself feel alive. A confrontation like that. No matter how tiring wouldn't tire Kai out. Boris used to praise Kai for his stamina. (They were making little comments like that about him all the time, weren't they? How strong he was. How resilient. How beautiful he'd look next to a girl.
Thinking about those comments for longer than a few seconds makes Tala want to put a bullet in Boris' skull so he shoves them out of his head.)
More often than not, the leftover stamina from these kinds of fights isn't healthy. It switches on that part of his brain that tells him he can't stop. He feels barely human then. Someone needs to hold him. To clutch and cling and desire him to remind him that he's alive. Alright. Human.
And Tala bets Granger didn't quite do that job. Being the fucking prude he was. And if he didn't, then there's really only one way the following night could have ended. Kai would have stayed on his feet all day. May be for a full twenty-four hours after the fight or whenever his body finally ran out of steam. Then he would have crashed. "Sunday night?" he asks Kai.
"Monday morning. Early. I had one of those…" his lips move over unsaid words briefly, his gaze on the ashtray. "Nightmares" he says and brings the bud back to his lips. He pulls on it. Holds the smoke in his lungs for a moment and breathes out, looking up to meet Tala's eyes. His own are sarcastic. "Tyson was taking a bath when I woke."
"Shit" Tala curses.
Kai nods. Lips smiling drily around the cigarette.
"Shit"
"I dragged him out of there. Told him he could take a bath in the morning. Then I took him to the bedroom and told him…about Ileana."
Oh wow. A full train wreck.
"I wanted him to know what I was doing with him. I hoped he would see the parallels and leave." He shrugs his eyebrows. "He didn't."
Tala barks a laugh then, inappropriately. He can't help it. He puts his eyes in his hands and laughs at the fucking stupidity of it all. He quiets down a while later. "I don't know what to tell you. I'm not sure if there's anything I can or do to help you. You need to find an outlet," he says, looking into his bottomless eyes and pressed mouth. "The smoking clearly isn't helping."
"Why don't you let me handle it?" asks Kai.
"Like you've been doing so far?" Tala throws back at him. "You're going to have another episode like you did in Dubai."
"I'm handling it."
"Like hell you're handling it."
"I'm fine, Valkov, I'm fine," says Kai, staring out at the city. "I got myself a boyfriend."
"I was expecting a...like a normal bedroom," Tyson remarks, staring at the wall covered in newspaper clippings and printouts. The room is pretty small. Much smaller than the one downstairs and cozier too, but in a never-seen-actual-daylight kind of way. The wall behind him is crowded with shelves of books. There's a table, a chair and a bed as well. The bed has a duvet with an actual black and white checkered pattern on it, and a dark flat-as-fuck pillow. "Wow, you got a...you got a lot of stuff in here," he says, peering at an article from 2008 about the world food price crisis.
"Told you I work in here," says Kai, from somewhere behind him. He closed the door when they entered. And locked it. Normally, Tyson should be feeling mildly claustrophobic by now, what with all the stuff in a small space and everything. But surprisingly, he's quite...comfortable. Because even though the room is in a disarray, there's a sort of order to it. A cleanliness and organization in how the books on the shelves are all aligned. The pens are in a holder. And how the papers spread before the laptop on the table have numbers in their corners. And most of all, how the newspaper clippings are arranged so neatly on the wall.
"This is all for your thesis?" Tyson asks, touching the open book on the table. There's a stack of them placed beside the computer. Man's doing actual research for his paper. While Tyson has always known Kai to be a diligent student he still kind of suspected Kai was pulling strings behind the scenes. No shade but it is extremely difficult to receive an A from Professor Gideon who is known for being an absolute bitch. Emily cried trying to get an A in his class last semester. Salima had to sleep with that slimy git and have her name dragged through mud for weeks after. And Kai got an 'A' without any extra 'help' or favours? It was kind of hard to believe. But looking at this...
He picks up a paper filled with ink in Kai's handwriting, may be he didn't need to pull anything. May be if Emily hadn't lost her temper with Gideon she would have gotten that 'A'.
Tyson didn't have enough credits to qualify for Gideon's class and that's okay. He just needs enough for a bachelor's degree, not honours. Any degree holder from Toho is assured a job at a top corporation. He's not going to grind any harder than necessary. He'll leave that to the nerds.
"What other 'work' did you think I was doing, Tyson?" Kai asks, and it's mostly teasing, but Tyson thinks he catches a note of real curiosity in his question.
"I don't know," Tyson says, turning around to look at Kai. "I don't think." He leans his butt against the table.
Kai arches an eyebrow. He's leaning against one of the bookshelves. Arms crossed. Tats on display. 'The Unbearable Lightness of Being', reads one of the titles behind his head. Tyson never took Kai for a reader, but he must be the kind of person who doesn't read for pleasure, but for a purpose. Someone who considers books as a means to an end. Tyson wonders why Kai works so hard in college when he's going to inherit his grandfather's company regardless. Unless he doesn't want it. Why wouldn't he want it?
Tyson had looked into Voltaire's trial on the internet when he was back home because Hiro kept talking to him about it and he was curious. The Hiwataris don't have a lot of scandals to their name, but the Sun Valley Scandal was a huge one. Tyson was 9 when the news first made headlines so it's not a surprise that he never heard of it. The whole situation was bizarre. It started strangely, blew up way too quickly, and then died out just as fast. The allegations against Kai's grandfather were shocking and serious. A lot of evidence backed up the claims that Voltaire Hiwatari's boarding school where a lot of orphans lived was actually not a safe space for orphans at all, and the old man and his accomplices were sexually abusing and exploiting these children for their own benefit. About 100-150 children lived in that school year round and they were believed to be in danger. There were claims that some of those kids were kidnapped from China and brought to the Sun Valley Institution for Disadvantaged Children (Voltaire's boarding school) where they were held against will and enslaved to the staff who worked there. Voltaire was going to stand on trial before the charges against him were suddenly dropped and media outlets stopped talking about the case entirely.
Tyson was so enraged while reading about the case, he went and knocked on Hiro's bedroom door in the middle of the night and asked him why the fuck the case was dropped when the man was clearly guilty and those children were in danger.
Hiro had blinked at him blearily and replied, "As far as I know, his boarding school is inspected by cops twice a year and no trace of the scandal remains."
"And the children? Don't they talk to the children?"
"The children seem happy. They never said anything concerning."
"The victims?"
"The supposed victims never said anything either so-"
"That's so fucking weird. What if he wiped their memories or something? Electrocuted them?"
"Wow, Tyson, you need to go to bed."
"Hiro" he had begged.
Hiro had simply shaken his head and moved to close the door. "It's over. That was a long time ago and there's nothing we can do about it now. Just be careful to stay away from his heir. Who knows what he's capable of?" he mused before shutting the door in his face.
Tyson gives the heir standing in front of him right now a quick head to toe scan, wondering for a split second if he was one of those victims. After all, Kai was a child too when that scandal took place, and in great proximity to Voltaire. He could have been in danger too. Tyson would have bodily dragged the old crone out and put him behind bars himself if he believed his suspicions to hold the least bit of truth. He doesn't because Kai doesn't seem like someone who went through something as traumatic as that. Neither do any of the Blitzkriegs.
Moreover, Voltaire wouldn't abuse his own precious heir. (Why was Kai the heir anyway? And not his father who is the eldest among his brothers?)
He wants to talk to Kai about it all but he's not sure how to start the conversation.
"Hey, is your grandfather a pedo?" doesn't seem like a great starter.
The head to toe scan he gave Kai is not missed by the latter however. "You look like you're thinking," he says.
"I was...I was wondering about your family," he replies.
"Fuck my family," says Kai. "I don't want to talk about my family."
"Okay, let's not talk about that..." Tyson says, deciding it's best to not push him. "Let's talk about..." He turns around and opens a large book on the table. "...your thesis. Wait, what's this?" He finds a piece of paper tucked between the pages of the tome with Kai's notes on it. But that's not what caught his attention. It's the paragraph at the bottom of the page, scribbled furiously instead of neatly like the other notes. Tyson picks it up and reads aloud in confusion, "'I dreamt of him last night'?"
There's a thud as Kai straightens from his position and springs into action to snatch the paper from him.
"Oh my god" Tyson strikes an arm out to hold Kai at bay, his hand flat on Kai's chest as he tries to read the rest as quickly as he can. "'I dreamt of him last night. He...was...on...his knees?!' Why was he on his knees?"
"You have a good eye," Kai says in his ear before lunging for the paper.
"I do?" Tyson turns his head to ask him.
"Yes, now give that back," he reaches for it and Tyson moves it out of the grasp of his fingers.
"No. Why? I need to know what dream you had that frustrated you so much you couldn't concentrate on your research and had to write about it to sort out your feelings."
"What fucking feelings?" Kai breathes against his lips, both his hands on Tyson's waist who is bending as far back over the table as he can. "Give me the paper back. It's mine."
"No" Tyson pushes at his chest with his free hand. "I wanna read it. Who is it about?"
"Who the fuck do you think it's about?"
"Me?"
"No, my uncle."
Tyson laughs, then stops. "That's gross"
"Tyson, don't fuck with me," he says and this time he makes a real attempt to rip the paper away from him. Tyson, quick as ever, slips out of his hands and under the table to read, kicking out with his legs when Kai tries to reach for him.
'I dreamt of him last night. He was on his knees. My cock in his mouth.' There's parts of it scribbled over so it can't be read, but he can read the last line. 'I woke up with the front of my pants soaked through.'
Tyson bursts into laughter.
"Oh you came in your pants like a thirteen year old boy from a wet dream about me," Tyson says loudly as Kai finally manages to grab hold of both his feet and drag him out from under the table. "That's so cute." He laughs, lying on the floor, looking up at Kai, holding the paper to his chest like it's something precious. Kai stands and stares at him, done. His jaw working. And the tops of his cheeks dusted the lightest pink. "Pink is a good colour on you."
Kai leans down to snatch the paper from him fingers. He rolls it up into a ball and throws it into the bin, making a perfect shot without even looking. "This is coming from the person who jizzes in his pants when I so much as touch him for longer than ten seconds," says Kai and Tyson narrows his eyes when his words hit a spot within him.
His smile fades.
"You're in no position to be judging."
Tyson thinks for a second that Kai won't help him get up, and he'd have to do it on his own, but then he reaches down, and Tyson takes his hands in his and lets him help him to his feet.
When he's vertical again and meets Kai's eyes from almost the same height, he can see the sudden depth there. The seriousness. And he knows that this is the moment. That they are going to talk about it. Address the elephant in the room.
The reason why Kai invited him up here and locked the door.
So he wouldn't run from this conversation.
That's when the room first starts getting uncomfortable and suffocating for Tyson.
Too small. Too small to hold all of their feelings.
"Tyson" says Kai. "Do you like being touched?"
"What?" He doesn't understand.
"Do you like it when I touch you?" Kai's voice. He's speaking so softly. It's suffocating.
"Yes" says Tyson. "Of course"
His presence is large. He looks at his lips. His soft, soft, pastel coloured lips.
"I think I know what your problem is."
"Yeah?" Tyson feels the bottom of his stomach drop out. What's that?"
"I think you're scared," says Kai.
"Of what?" asks Tyson immediately. Defensively. "Of sex?"
"Of gay sex," Kai clarifies.
Tyson goes stock still, feeling his ears heat.
Kai's putting his hands into his pockets. He's picking his words very carefully. Tyson can see it. He can see his mind working. Trying to choose words that won't offend Tyson. "I think you know what you want and what that would require of you but you don't want to do it because of the implications of doing those things."
Tyson's heart beats very loudly. Loud enough for Kai to hear. For the room to cave in from the vibrations of it alone.
His ears are on fire. He hates this room. He doesn't want to be here anymore. "I'm not scared," he says at last, backing a step from Kai, in the direction of the door.
"You aren't?" asks Kai, not believing a word that just came out of his mouth. He drops his attempts to be considerate when he sees Tyson backing away anyway. "You didn't go online and read about it and scare yourself? You didn't wonder what your bother would think? You're telling me the reason you come too fast and feel overwhelmed and tell me to slow down - a problem you never had with any of your exes- is because-"
"You don't know what you're talking about!" Tyson shouts. "You're not a mind reader! Let me out!"
Kai shuts up. Tyson feels humiliated.
There's a beat of loud silence where they stare at each other, Tyson's eyes glistening, Kai's alight, then Kai steps toward the door and unlocks it, swinging it open and holding it there for Tyson, who walks out of there stiffly.
He feels too hot and messed up. His head clears a little after he walks all the way from Kai's house to the dorm, but he's still feeling quite raw when he enters the building and starts climbing up the stairs.
"Hey, Tyson, where you going?" asks a voice behind him when he's a few steps up.
He turns around to see Rick. "Hey man, I was just heading up to my room."
"You busy?"
"No"
"Well, a bunch of us are hanging out in the main hall. If you want to come join us..." Rick looks at him expectantly or as expectantly as he could ever look at someone.
"Yeah" Tyson agrees.
"We have snacks and stuff."
"Yeah, yeah, that sounds like just what I need right now," he says, shooting Rick a smile. He climbs back down and goes to the main hall with Rick.
A/N: Hey guys, I'm baaaaack. Did you miss me?
