Work Text:
Every time Kawi looks in the mirror, he can’t shake the feeling that something isn’t quite right.
It’s strange: he keeps checking his clothes, but they’re fine, his teeth—clean, his skin—no blemishes, his hair—perfectly in place… He can’t understand where this weird feeling keeps coming from. It’s probably just the general fear of failure his father instilled in him. Be perfect or die.
He sighs, avoids the gaze of his own reflection, and pushes the thought away.
His whole life has been planned out for him, and he follows the steps he is supposed to take, a small cog in a vast machine.
Every morning when he gets dressed, it’s like putting on a personality. Kawi isn’t sure it’s his own personality he’s wearing, or maybe something that was predetermined for him—it probably doesn’t make that big of a difference, anyway. There’s a safety in suits and scrubs, a way to hide behind his profession. People don’t even call him by his name at work, they just call him "Doctor".
Every morning, Kawi dresses up as a doctor, dresses up as his father’s obedient son and heir, dresses up as his sister’s protective older brother, dresses up as Pam’s boyfriend.
Every morning, Kawi dresses up as a man.
He’s done it for so long that he’s used to it: when he wakes up, it’s like there is a hole in the world in the shape of his body, an outline around a vague nothingness, and every day he pulls a mask over his face and wonders if there is anything beneath it.
Sometimes, very rarely, when he’s got time, he likes to sit and watch people.
It’s mostly women who catch his eye, which makes sense for someone who is attracted to them. The way they walk and talk, the way they move, the way they laugh.
And right inside him, in the middle of that mass of nothing, is a pang of sadness.
He wants…
He wants…
It’s dangerous to want anything.
He wants to be something other than he is, but he can’t be, his father has made that abundantly clear. Why would he want to change anything, anyway? His life is good. His career is going well. His father is generally satisfied with his performance as a son. He has a beautiful, kind-hearted, hard-working girlfriend. His life is going exactly according to plan.
There’s a video he sometimes watches in secret, when he’s alone at night: it’s not the porn itself that makes him rewatch the thing again and again. There’s a scene of the two girls cuddling afterwards, one of them starting to laugh unprompted, a completely candid moment of sincere joy. Kawi doesn’t know how often he’s watched her lips part into a soft smile before she’s overtaken by giggles, how often he’s watched her press her face into the other girl’s shoulder, both of them still naked, glistening skin against glistening skin.
It always makes him profoundly sad, and yet Kawi is obsessed with it for some reason, keeps seeking it out in the dead of night, his whole body shivering with guilt.
He’s not sure where all the guilt comes from, actually. It’s not even that weird for men to watch lesbian porn, although Kawi suspects that most other people don’t rewind on that particular moment of post-coital intimacy.
It’s like Kawi feels instinctively that what this video clip is making him feel shouldn’t be part of his experience of the world. It’s chafing against the path that has been laid out for him, against the fate his father has planned for him, against the bars of the cage he is confined in. It would be better not to touch those bars at all. It would be better to make himself small, to squash any inkling of inconvenient desire within him.
He wishes…
He wishes…
He wishes he could laugh like that, carefree and happy and loved.
Pam doesn’t want to touch him, and in a way, Kawi is relieved. He wouldn’t know how to handle being touched. He supposes it must happen eventually, when it’s their turn to produce heirs for the family, but as long as they turn the lights off and touch each other as little as possible it’ll probably be fine. As with everything else his father demands of him, Kawi will get through it.
As long as Pam doesn’t see him… Kawi doesn’t want his body to be seen. Not by anyone. Not even by himself.
It’s not even something that bothers him too much. He just doesn’t like looking in the mirror. It’s easy to avoid, if you only focus on specific things. Never look at the whole picture, and then the details can be judged on their own merits: whether his tie is crooked, whether his shirt is wrinkly, whether his hair is getting too long—taken on their own, these things can be evaluated objectively. There doesn’t need to be any emotional reaction at all. Just the cool logic of observable facts.
Sometimes, looking at his own life, cold dread threatens to suffocate Kawi, and so he takes care not to look. He’s usually too busy anyway, too tired to lay awake at night angsting about his place in the world, too overworked to stop and actually think. If he ever stopped, he might just fall apart, and he’s not allowed to fall apart. He is a cog that needs to keep turning at all costs.
In the center of the nothing that is Kawi lives a seedling of desire. Kawi can feel it, sometimes, turning towards the light, towards something big and unspeakable, and he does his best to smother it and shut it away in the darkness. There’s no room in his life for anything big and unspeakable. There is only room for small things. Small mercies that keep him from total starvation.
A little doll at the back of his desk drawer, carefully hidden away for almost twenty years, ever since his father sternly told the babysitter not to let his son play with toys for girls. Nobody noticed when the doll vanished: Rak had been too young to really differentiate between them, putting whatever she got her hands on into her mouth indiscriminately, much to the chagrin of the babysitter, who spent most of her time wrestling various objects out of the little girl’s hands. Their mother had bought them new toys almost weekly in an attempt to buy her children’s love, then donated whatever she thought they didn’t play with to charity, resulting in several terrible melt-downs on Rak’s part when her favorite plushies had suddenly vanished. Their father had barely even looked at them when they were kids, content with giving immovable instructions, like a king pronouncing laws. Don’t let him play with toys for girls.
A pink ribbon tied into a bow, gifted to Kawi in the third grade of primary school by a rowdy classmate, who kept pulling Kawi by the hand while on her way to getting them both into trouble, and who had one day ripped that ribbon out of her hair and tied it around Kawi’s wrist to show everyone that they were best friends forever.
Kawi had had the good sense to take the ribbon off his arm before going home so that it wouldn’t get confiscated. His best friend forever’s family had relocated to the United States a few months later, and Kawi had never seen her again.
A pair of his late grandmother’s earrings: he had been fascinated by them as a child, watching them dangle from her ears, until his grandmother had laughed and given them to him, with the twin instructions of not telling anyone else in the family that he was in possession of them and to give them to his future wife to wear. His grandmother had tearfully told everyone else that she’d lost the earrings—she’d always had a tendency towards theatrics.
Kawi has kept the first of the promises. He has kept them secret, kept them hidden, kept them safe for all these years, together with his other little trinkets.
He doesn’t know if he wants Pam to wear them, though. They don’t even match her style… Truth be told, he has no intention of giving them to her. And she’s not his wife, yet, so he’s technically still keeping his promise.
Sometimes…
Sometimes…
No. He mustn’t think about it.
His life has been planned out for him, and he must follow that path.
He would probably look ugly as a girl, anyway.
The outside of the cage is scary as hell. Imagining a different life, no, that’s better left to other people. People like Rak, who dared to stand up to their father and demand freedom for herself. And where has that gotten her? Kawi sees his sister working herself to the bone just to pay her rent, sees her struggling to put food on the table and while he admires her, he lacks the strength to take that same step into the abyss.
He’s safe, where he is. Numb and sad and lonely, but safe.