Anesthesia - Chapter 1

Disclaimer: Muraki and Oriya belong to Matsushita Yoko. Hirose, Koji, and Akihito belong to Minami Ozaki, who is quite welcome to them; they're much too high-maintenance for me.

Warnings: NC-17 for later chapters. References to non-con and incest, and sometimes both at the same time.

The phone rings just before dawn. When I pick up, a voice on the other end of the line says, "Nanjo Hirose? I'm sorry to wake you…"

I've been awake for hours.

My calf muscles feel like they've been molded out of lead. My heart's been replaced by a car battery that pumps green acid through my veins. I have to use my shoulder to hold the phone to my ear; my fingers are too stiff. They remember too well the shape they take around the hilt of a katana.

I don't tell the voice on the phone any of this. I don't even tell him he's interrupted my morning kata. I just tell him, "Go on."

"It's about your brother, Nanjo-san…"

Cold air licks the sweat from my body. By the time I hang up the phone, I'm shivering.

Stiffness has crept up from my hands like a poison of the blood, and settled at last in the bends of my elbows. My shoulders and biceps ache enough that I don't want to try moving them, so I hold myself rigid as a statue. My stomach feels as small and hard as a fist, but it's nothing a Percocet breakfast won't fix. Chase it down with a swallow of good brandy, and even that phone call starts to seem far away…

The next time I open my eyes, I'm in the backseat of my Mercedes.

I know this because the interior is charcoal gray, like my suit, and leather, like my shoes.

My mouth tastes like cotton gauze, and the sick feeling in the pit of my stomach tells me that I'm on my way to the hospital. None of this sits right with me. I'm going out of my way for Koji, and that's the one thing I swore I would never do. We have an arrangement, my little brother and I, one of the stipulations of which is that we do nothing for each other, and expect nothing in return.

It ultimately matters little whether or not I approve of his lifestyle choices. One fact cannot be disputed: Nanjo Koji can look after himself. But the call I got this morning mentioned something about a car crash. Something about critical condition. It sounded urgent enough that I've cancelled my lunch meeting and sent Akihito into the office in my place. I'm starting to remember clearly now, which means it's time for more pills.

Nothing ever goes away completely, but sometimes you can drive it down deeper than the drugs can touch.

The next time I open my eyes, I'm inside.

The one thing I can't stand about hospitals is how white they are. White the way blood is red; white the way ink is black. White the way money is green. So white that they sting my eyes, and make the preamble to a tension headache appear at my temples.

In the annex outside the emergency room, I've somehow managed to twist myself into a blue plastic chair. It's time for someone to tell me what's going on. I'm beginning to suspect I'm the only one who hasn't been briefed.

All I really want to know is what, exactly, my money isn't good enough to fix this time.

Then, I'm not alone anymore. If I had been watching for his approach, I wonder if I might have been moved by it. But my eyes were closed, and I didn't see him until he was right at my side.

"Pardon me," he says. "Might you be here for young Nanjo-san?"

He's the first person to speak to me since I got here, which I suppose deserves something in the way of thanks. I push slowly to my feet to meet him.

He's wearing white, and his hair is a wing shaped sweep of silver across his face. He wears it in his eyes, in a style a decade too young for his face. And I don't know who he thinks he's fooling with those red junk jewelry earrings…

I hold out my hand to him.

"My name is Nanjo Hirose. I believe you're referring to my brother."

He takes my hand, and his fingers slide across my palm like a silk tie fresh off the rack. Like cool cellophane peeled back from a plate of chilled caviar. And my skin, worn as rough and as hard as the hilt of my sword, must feel like a talon to him.

I savor it.

There's a part of me that wants it to hurt him, for no other reason than that he is beautiful, and I know how much trouble that can cause.

"Indeed." His tightens his grip.

We don't so much shake hands as we do clasp them, like the last survivors of a sinking ship, set adrift on open water.

"Muraki Kazutaka," he says. "I'm the doctor in charge of your brother."

An untarnished silver gaze slips to the chart in his hand. "His injuries were extensive. We've stabilized his condition, but he's suffered severe trauma and is unresponsive to stimuli. There's no telling when he might awaken."

This must be it. Nanjo Koji's final fuck you. One last time, with feeling.

It's not that I didn't know this would happen eventually. I was Cassandra by way of the Society Page. All I ever had to do was switch on the ten PM entertainment news for a look into my brother's future.

"Are you all right, Nanjo-san?" Muraki raises an eyebrow. I just catch a glimpse of it, beneath all that silvery-white hair. "Do you need to sit down?"

"I'm fine."

"You seem angry."

I am angry, but I hadn't known that is showed. I learned a long time ago that nothing makes you weaker than tipping your hand like that. "I don't suppose you can tell me what happened? To Koji, that is."

"I'm a bit unclear on the details. It seems that he was involved in a motorcycle accident on the way to the airport. He was in quite a hurry; perhaps he was going to see someone off…?"

"I wouldn't know."

I'm afraid I said that too quickly, as if I were anxious to disavow the connection between us. I smile at him, but I've never been very good at setting people at ease. "I haven't seen my brother in two years, Dr. Muraki."

"All the same, as the next of kin you may have to make some difficult decisions, should his condition not improve."

He tilts his head to the side, and his hair shifts and gives me a brief glance at his face. His eye is still veiled like a Burlesque dancer. "There's a very real possibility that your brother may never wake again."

"For a doctor, you're not very compassionate."

Those Burlesque eyes flash at me. "And you're not very compassionate for a brother."

That may have hurt a little. Those words slip in between all the plates of armor I've laid in place.

Muraki turns away from me. "He's resting right now. Would you like to see him? I can take you to his room."

"Yes, please."

I didn't hate hospitals until a few months ago. I didn't understand what people found so revolting about them until I spent too much of the last half year in one. My father is still making me wait for him to die. He's six months past his expiration date, and his liver looks like a plate of runny scrambled eggs. He just an intermittent spike on a heart monitor now, but he won't let go. Men like that are too spiteful to die. He'll never leave, as long as he still has someone left alive to hate him. In some ways, he and Koji are more alike than I'd care to think about. To think is to be reminded that my legacy is a quadriplegic house, a family crippled on all sides.

As if the view from where I'm standing wasn't bad enough, a few steps ahead of me Muraki's hips sway sharply when he walks, and the tilt of his head is arrogant. He's a concealed weapon, this doctor. He's a vial of cyanide with a cognac label.

"Here it is, Nanjo-san."

He opens the door to one of the rooms, and stands aside. I can feel his eyes on me as I go inside. Two hot embers at the back of my neck, tracing the curve of my spine downward.

But I'll attend to matters with Dr. Muraki presently. Right now, my business is with my brother.

I suppose it was too much to ask for Koji to look innocent, even in his sleep. A roadmap of lacerations sprawls across half his face, drawing the corner of his mouth up into a perpetual sneer. The Rorschach splatter of bruises stamping across his jaw to disappear beneath the gauze over his fractured cheekbone makes his face look gaunt with pain.

"Does he… feel anything?"

"No." Muraki shuts the door behind himself, and perhaps there's an extra click when the lock slides into place. Or maybe I'm just imagining things.

But his voice is low with stifled laughter, and I know I'm not imagining that. "Do you?"

"Don't be ridiculous. If I wanted to feel something, I'd go to the theater."

My hand moves over Koji's forehead, lifting his hair out of his eyes. It's shorn to the skin on one side of his head, revealing a row of stitches over his left ear. Ugly and stark and black; looking, as near as I can tell, like they're the only thing keeping his spoiled foolish brains from leaking out all over the pillow. I let the locks of hair in my hand fall over that gash, over the bruised and ruined half of his face, and he's beautiful again.

He's whole again, just like that.

"Siblings can be such a burden, wouldn't you agree?"

Muraki's closer than he was a moment ago, and I don't turn to face him. "I suppose."

"And yet you don't sound certain."

"I was always told that I shouldn't speak ill of the dead."

"Your brother isn't dead, Nanjo-san, I assure you. He could live another decade like this. Another two decades, if your fortune holds out that long."

"Wouldn't that make him a parasite?"

"Yes. And it makes you a god." He laughs, and it sounds like glass breaking somewhere else in the house. "As far as Koji is concerned, that is."

"I hope, for your sake, he cannot hear you say that." My voice comes from a long way off, my eyes are drawn back to my brother. I can feel that powerful magnetism he has…

Muraki sigh, but not like he's tired, though I suspect he's been up all night, well past the end of his shift. He sounds bored, rather, like the last guest left at a party that's ended too soon.

"No," he says. "I really don't think you need to worry about that."

I feel his eyes on me when he tells me, "Don't look at him anymore. There is nothing you can do at the moment, and if you get hysterical…"

Two fingertips brush along the inside of my wrist. Like tiny silver fish, they dart beneath the cuff of my shirt.

This is too much, all at once, without any time to catch my breath. The bottle of painkillers inside my coat is heavy. I can feel it resting just above my heart, but it might as well be in a different world completely.

For some reason, it feels like betrayal.

My hand snaps around Muraki's wrist. Thin bird bones shift in my grip, and there's a delicious moment when the eye he doesn't have hidden from me widens in surprise.

"What the hell do you think you're doing?" My forearm snaps across his shoulders, pushing him back against the wall.

It's not a good hold; he could break free if he fought me a little.

But he doesn't fight at all.

His smile has returned, icy and cruel. He's just a white shadow against white plaster. Like a chameleon, I think, without knowing why.

"How fortuitous," he says. "I was just wishing that you would put your hands on me."

There's a fluttering in the pit of my stomach that I know shouldn't be there. There's something frantic in the back of my mind, like the beating of black wings. Muraki twists a little beneath me, a tiny movement that makes him all long legs and pouting lips and delicate cheekbones.

He looks soft, but hard. Sweet candy fluff with pins and needles hidden inside.

But if I squinted just right, he could be… not a woman. But not a man, either.

Something in between the two.

A soft sound of disgust bubbles up from the back of my throat. I shove him back, and he moves loosely beneath my hands, limp like a doll. The back of his head hits the wall with a solid crack, and I find my eyes drawn to Koji for an instant, as if the sound might somehow have awakened him.

When I look back, Muraki's only smiling. "What's wrong? Are you afraid he'll overhear?"

He steps away from the wall, reaching up to rub discreetly at the back of his head with one hand. "This is between us. It's no business of his."

My first instinct is to back away, but I don't. And I find too late, that I have made a mistake. "You're vile. You can't mean—"

His hand moves slowly, like the ghost of a dead lover across the bedroom floor. The next word catches in my throat, and before I can choke it out he makes it all so suddenly and profoundly insignificant.

His long fingers brush my hair back.

His eyes are closed when he stretches up to kiss me. I know, because mine stay open the whole time. I am, for the next moment, helpless. My hands are dead weights at my sides, unable to shove him away. Unable to lash out at him.

Unable to kill him, which is, I think, what I really want to do.

I want to hurt him for feeling lithe and alive against me. For being the same kind of colorless as morphine and aspirin. For tasting like cigarettes, and smelling like antiseptic and goddamn lilac shampoo.

I pass a century in his arms before he pulls away, catching my lower lip between his teeth as he draws back. "To save your brother… will take a miracle. You don't believe in miracles, do you, Nanjo-san?"

I draw a deep breath, and try not to taste him in my mouth.

"My brother will be fine." It's a struggle to keep my voice even; I can hardly hear myself over the throb of my pulse at my temples. "You, on the other hand…"

"Hush." His smile is sweet, and I think that there's nothing right now to keep me from wrapping my hands around his throat and squeezing until he doesn't move anymore.

But I don't.

And he says, "I've been watching you watch me all morning. You must be very worried, Nanjo-san. Your guard is down. You know, I can give you a miracle, if you only have a little faith in me."

"What do you want?"

His gaze warms, and I'm reminded, suddenly, of my brother and the way he does everything wrong, but can still shape people into whatever he wishes. Like a fire, you can't pass through him without being consumed. I've never been able to resist Koji before; ever since he was a child, I have never been able to deny my brother what he really wants.

He makes me helpless.

And while I'm thinking that Koji isn't a boy anymore, and it's really time he learned some discipline, and as soon as he wakes up I'm going to put my foot down… Muraki kisses me again, like a thief, stealing from a house while the owner is away. His lips are hard, and twisted by a sardonic smile.

I'm helpless, and I can't live like that. I don't know how.

"Beautiful," he says, wrapping me in long, delicate limbs: one arm around my shoulders, the other the small of my back. Holding me so close that it's past the point where it's worth it to feel uncomfortable. "Your hair, I mean. Your eyes. That shade of silver is such an unusual color."

"They're the same as yours…"

"Yes," he says.

I can feel the heat off his body, even through all the layers of clothing between us. "We look something alike, don't you think?" He laughs. His fingers curl my tie, sliding lower. "I suppose that makes us narcissists. Not that there was ever any doubt of that."

He's on his knees by then, long coat feathered out behind him. His dry cleaning bills must be astronomical.

When his breath brushes me through my pants, the muscles low in my stomach grow taut, and my suit feels tighter. I step back, and my calves hit the edge of the hospital bed, so I sit down hard beside Koji, close enough that I can feel his hip against my hip.

Muraki must have noticed, how my eyes were drawn to my brother's still face. His hands slide up the insides of my thighs, and I let him ease them apart. "It would hurt him, wouldn't it? If he could see? His doting older brother, too preoccupied to hold a proper bedside vigil."

Obviously, he doesn't know Koji that well.

"Do you like the way that sounds?" he says. "He's hurt you before, hasn't he? I can see it in your face. Wouldn't it feel good to hurt him now?"

"Muraki…" I manage that much, but then his mouth is on me, tonguing me through my pants, and I can't get the rest out.

I didn't plan for any of this. My fingers tangled in his hair, hips angling up against his wet, inviting mouth My breath coming in quiet little sobs as his lips work over me. Nothing, I think, nothing has ever been this hot…

When he pulls back, it takes me a moment to realize, that soft sigh came from me, and that cold laugh came from him.

"What a powerful man you are, Nanjo-san," he murmurs.

I watch his hands dance down the front of my pants, flicking open the buttons. Clever, cool fingers slipping inside the fabric as it parts, stroking. "Tell me you want me."

Something in the back of my mind snaps into place. Like a katana sliding back into the sheath, I'm whole again, complete.

Muraki must have noticed that something has changed, something in the air between us has chilled, because he tries to draw away. I catch him on the jaw with the back of my hand, and his head snaps to the side. A thin ribbon of blood trickles from the corner of his mouth.

"I ought to have you killed," I say, as I push to my feet again,

It takes a moment to get my clothes straightened. My hands are shaking, and I'm still hard. Hard, from his mouth…

As I struggle with the locked door, I can hear the whisper of clothing as he gets to his feet. And as I let myself out into the bleached hallway, I think I hear him say, "I shall see you again, Nanjo-san."

Or maybe he says nothing at all.