They Go Together Like Butcherbirds and Barbed Wire

📅 2014

【ᴛᴡ ғᴏʀ ᴍᴇɴᴛɪᴏɴs ᴏғ ʙᴜʟʟʏɪɴɢ, ᴄᴀɴᴄᴇʀ, ᴅᴇᴀᴛʜ, ᴇᴍᴏᴛɪᴏɴᴀʟ ᴀʙᴜsᴇ, ᴀɴᴅ ғʟᴇᴇᴛɪɴɢ ʀᴇғᴇʀᴇɴᴄᴇ ᴛᴏ ʜᴏᴍɪᴄɪᴅᴇ】

When Kato had dropped out, one of the biggest reliefs was the idea that all of it was over with: That if he never had to go to school again, never had to go back to his parents’ house again, then all reminders would fall away and he could sever his past like a dying limb and leave it in the dust. No subway rides up to the north shore in Queens, no familiar faces, nothing to hold him in his history except his own memories and fury, and the latter was more or less a choice.

It hadn’t felt like a loss, to drop out. Certainly not socially. He’d really had no friends at school: Mostly he had enemies, and other than them he had witnesses, people who had never been on his side, never stepped in, never offered him anything other than impassive eyes or a cowardly look, the apology in which couldn’t convey because it meant nothing real; backed nothing real. Kato had been on his own, except for Athena.
Sure, there had been other misfits. Some of them had more spine than the others, it seemed like, or hadn’t been witness to a beatdown and therefore never had a chance to look as gutless as all the rest. A few of them bought Adderall off him. One of ‘em was willing to make him a fake ID that continued to work. Maybe if shit had all gone down as planned, they’d have been the ones to walk. But they weren’t faces to miss seeing, and there was no way they missed him. They weren’t friends. He hadn’t had friends.

Then, at some point in January—or maybe it’d been December—Athena had asked, “Hey, you remember Gabe, from school?”
...Yeah.
Yeah, Kato did. Bought addy once, maybe twice. Black emo hair. Had a split lip one of the times he bought; rumor had it he’d spat at a footballer who’d called his brother ‘retarded.’ Been suspended once for bringing a knife to school.
The two of them hadn’t had any classes together, but Kato remembered Gabe. 
Athena had mentioned him, too, during her senior year, because she’d been talking to him more. He did music, apparently. Him and his twin. It was lower-key than what Edge Of Infinity had going on: Less metalcore, more lo-fi or indie folk-rock… So in all honesty, Kato hadn’t paid too much attention. But he remembered. 

It turned out the music had become a deal. Gabe and Gracian were doing it, the music thing: Working under the name Nightshrike and picking up a drummer and collaborators. They’d put out an album, just like EoI had, and a smattering of singles, too, and they were playing shows—and they’d asked Athena about the two bands getting together.

If he was going to be honest with himself, Kato had been jealous when he first heard it all. Maybe more than that, maybe more like angry, or angrily envious, because they were doing what he wanted to be doing, better than he was doing it, for the moment—but he wanted to get there, and be there: Wanted to prove something about his band and their capabilities, wanted to prove something about himself and his own. 
Fine, Gabe had never been judgemental at school as far as Kato had been able to tell, but he’d been at that school and known Kato as his birth name, as David; David-who-got-called-a-faggot, David-who-got-shoved-into-trash-cans-or-thrown-to-the-ground, and that was enough to have Kato on the defensive. 
And then when they met again, Gabe had thrown his hand up for a high-five, called Kato by his actual name, and gaily demanded the two of them actually chill together and shoot the shit.

From there everything had just...happened. It was crazy how fast it happened. But it was like it was there and it was January and Astra was cool as hell and Gabe had sold her on WANOS for them already and yeah, they’d already been a “real band”—they had an album down and another right on its way—but they suddenly were a real-real band, going in through the ‘bands only’ door and being told to choose a date for a first show to play, because c’mon, guys, let’s get y’all rock-and-rolling, huh?

Kato had been fucking aglow that evening, and it had been for all of that and more: Because people kept hearing he was the main lyricist (“Kinda, but just because I’m a tyrannical jackass,” he said through a self-conscious grin) and they’d compliment him on it, or his voice, (“Ah, I only sound good because of the chain-smoking,” he joked) and Gabe had absolutely fucking blindsided him by saying “Did you know I respected the hell outta you at school, or nah?”
Because...nah. Nah, definitely fucking nah.
At school, respect had never been part of the equation, as far as Kato had been aware. To his consciousness, there’d been hatred, there’d been indifference, and at absolute best, there had been pity. 
Gabe laughed humorlessly at the assertion and agreed that “that’s how that whole shitshow of a circus looked, didn’t it?” ….but then said no, he’d thought Kato was cool.
Cool.

“Damn, Gabe, you should’ve been saying that to me in tenth grade. ‘Thena tell you why I ditched that hellhole?” Kato drawled. He and Gabe had found themselves leaning against one of the graffitied walls near the back hall, their other friends talking amongst one another nearby but with Athena too engrossed in her own activities to sense the topic and elbow Kato in the ribs or try to silence him with a glare.
“Said you needed to get out,” Gabe replied with a shallow shrug.
“Damn straight. The rest of the student body needed me out, too. Safety reasons.” Kato smirked and tugged down the collar of his shirt to expose the muzzle of the Tec-9 tattooed on his chest. “Might have tried to pull something.” 
Gabe raised his eyebrows but the smallest insuppressible smile made a bitter bid across his lips.
“Woulda brought that in for Trent and crew?” he asked wryly, nodding at the inked-in gun. 
“Mostly them, sure.” Kato leaned back and studied Gabe, whose expression flirted with ambivalence but couldn’t quite get there, past some cold, vindicated shadow.
“Who else, then?”
“Myself. Admin. And anyone who got in my way.”

Gabe looked slightly more startled at that reply and straightened up a bit, his flicker of a smile from before having inverted; a weak frown in its place. “Jeezus. How close did it come? Like…”
Kato cracked his neck. “I’m not showboating. I had guns and everything.” He tilted his head in Sethfire’s direction. “It came down to him standing between me and the hall I wanted to go down. That close. Luckily he’s persuasive: Therapist in training, ya know, so he knows how to deal with psychos. Am I still fuckin’ cool?”

Gabe snorted at the question—though the disquieted look in his eyes failed to fully dissipate—but even as he twisted his expression into an acceptably circumspect one, he waved one hand and ended up looking apologetic as he said,
“...So, that's really fucked up, right, and I'm meant to be like, ‘you’re really fucked up,’ right, but ya know—Sure, that’s not ‘cool,’ like at all, but—Can you really go to public school and not end up able to understand why someone might want to do that shit? With everything that happens there?”
“I wouldn’t know. I'm the whackjob that wanted to.” Kato huffed some half-humor through his smirk. “You’re really not flipping out, though. Probably should be. Might wanna get your head checked, Gabe, you might be a psycho too.”
Gabe let an amused ‘tch’ through his teeth and rolled his eyes. “I mean, if it’d happened I dunno where I’d be. Probably in the ‘man, no-one deserves to die for that, it's just kids stuff’ camp. But it didn’t, and I heard you’d get kicked until you puked, so… Maybe I’ve just got empathy and it’s society that needs the shrink, not me.”
“...Right on. And sure, yeah, kids’ stuff. Like trying to kick my stomach up into my chest cavity.”
Gabe seemed to note the edge in Kato’s tone. “I didn’t mean that for real,” he said, “Just that’s how everyone always phrases it on the outside.” His expression hardened with sympathy. “...I got suspended once ‘cause I flashed a knife at a dude who’d been pushing my brother around. If people had been doing the shit they did to you to Ian…? I’d have been thinking pretty damn hard about murder, too.”
“Mm. If only I’d been your brother, Gabe,” Kato responded dryly, surprised when Gabe’s face fell for a moment.
“Yeah, that’s what you needed, huh? A brother in arms…” Gabe pushed away from the wall and punched Kato lightly in the shoulder, tilting his head towards another circle of their intermingled friends and motioning for Kato to follow. “C’mon, K. Stick around, you’ll see.”

The night had gone great, and Edge of Infinity had really started spreading its wings afterward, but Kato hadn’t actually or individually known what to make of Gabe’s “you’ll see” until suddenly he did, because there was a way that from there Gabe had dedicated himself to being a kind of brother in arms.
He texted often, called often, checked in and came over and made sure Kato knew it wasn’t all for Athena. He retweeted jokes or announcements, posted shout-outs, name-dropped members of EoI—usually Athena and Kato—in some of his and Ian’s Q & A live-streams. 
As time ran on, it seemed stranger and stranger that they hadn’t been closer in school; it wasn’t just music and mutual experiences of social ostracization in adolescence that they had in common. Early on Kato noticed a frostiness that crept into Gabe’s gaze and tone whenever his father came up, even though Ian tended towards a more sympathetic affect.

“So...what’s the baggage between you and your dad?” Kato asked one afternoon at Gabe’s apartment, waiting around while Gracian set up for a livestream in the other room; one on which Kato’d been invited to guest. “You visit him but you hate him?”
Gabe laughed. “Ah shit, it’s that obvious, still? And I’m trying so hard to get over it, too. For Ian’s sake, mostly. I don’t hate him...”
“Naw. Just look like you wanna break something whenever he comes up.”
Gabe gave a sheepish sort of chagrined smile. “I’m just still unpacking some stuff, yanno?”
“Sure. So. Wanna unpack? No pressure.”
“No, no pressure at all. It’s fine, I guess, I know you’ll get it anyway, K…” Gabe frowned and glanced out over the view of the park across the street. 

“Kinda...Backstory? Mom died when we were in middle school. Me and Ian. I guess we should’ve seen it coming, right, because, like, cancer. But you always just kinda think, ya know, when it’s someone you love, they’ll beat it. They’ll beat the odds. It, uh….it’s hard to do that with Glioblastoma. Brain cancer,” Gabe explained. His eyes clouded. 
“Mom was great. No-one talks shit about dead people, I know, but she was great. She played piano so well, even when she was sick and all, she’d play. She played at our b'nei mitzvah even though all her hair was coming out, yanno? I think the worst part about being in the hospital for her wasn’t even that she was dying, it was that she couldn’t play piano or see her birds.” A spark flickered back into Gabe’s eyes; he seemed to perk up. 
“That’s the name, you know? ‘Nightshrike.’ She loved birds, we had so many bird books growing up. She adored nightingales, so they’re Ian’s favorite, too. Me...ha, I liked the raptors and the shrikes. Nightingale. Northern shrike. Nightshrike…” The spark flickered out; Gabe’s expression crumpled.
“She didn’t really know what birds she liked by the end, there...Or the piano. It was like...it just got real bad, real fast, and she wasn’t really our mom the last few weeks. Brain tumors and shit can just...change your personality and...I mean, it’s your brain dying. I think it really messed with dad.”

“Mm. It sounds...real fuckin’ rough,” Kato said, because he didn’t know what else to say. Thankfully Gabe didn’t appear offended by the inadequacy.
“Yeah. These days, looking back, and with Ian and all, I can see that it was dad not...coping well with grief? He was mad at the world for taking mom away like that. But me and Ian were closer at hand than, say, God. So we caught a lot of it, after. Not, like, physical anything, but he’d yell.”
“...What the fuck? How does that work? You were kids, you’d just lost your mom.” Kato scowled. A morose echo of the same expression flickered across Gabe’s face.

“I dunno, I don’t think it worked too well for him. He’d have his outbursts over something minor, like, grade slips or loading the dishwasher improperly or whatever, and they’d descend into how messed up the world was and how he’d worked so hard in life, and how expensive cancer treatment had been just for it not to work? But he’d be yelling it at us, like, angrily, like it was our fault. Then he’d have weeks where he’d just...go catatonic, basically. Depression, obv, but it sucked. We were 13, 14 years old and having to parent him, basically. Ian was better at it than I was; he’d be all nice, like, ‘Come on, dad, you gotta go to work, you gotta eat breakfast, it’ll be okay, I’ll tell you about my day when you get home, blah blah.’ I was a bit more like… ‘Get off your ass, pops, if you recharge too long you’ll start screaming again.’” 

Kato snorted despite his effort to suppress it, but Gabe seemed heartened by it; he rolled his eyes and offered up a sliver of a smirk.
“...Yeah. I dunno. We’re making it on our own, now—or, Bry’s helping us make it on our own—and I think seeing us independent from him kinda shocked him into the present a bit. And Ian convinced him to join a grief support group or some shit and start seeing a shrink, and that’s done something. We still check on him to make sure he’s not in a depression coma again, and I guess stuff’s better. Ian wants to have a functional relationship with him. I’m trying to get there, but it’s always like… ‘Hey, you’re the guy who made my life even more miserable than it had to be after my mom died, so...fuck you a little bit.’”

Kato’s own situation hadn’t been the same, and even ‘similar’ would have been a stretch, but he related, related hard, to having an antagonistic relationship with one’s father. He curled his lip.
“Yeah, Gabe, that’s shit. If I were in your shoes? I wouldn't even be checking in. Waste away, motherfucker. Guess you’re a better man than me, ha.” 
“See, I knew you’d understand,” Gabe said. “But, like, K...if my dad had been your dad, I might not be showing up either.” 
Kato raised an incredulous eyebrow and let out something akin to a scoff, not quite sure what to make of the comment. “Damn, am I really selling Dr. Walt Winters down the river that bad?” he asked.
“Dunno. But my dad was good to me ‘til I was thirteen, right? I don’t get the sense you got even that much.” Gabe shrugged. “Really, man? I just appreciate you hearing me out about my sitch. You could’ve been like, ‘well at least your parents cared while they could.’ But you’re not like that; you take the time to get it, instead.”

That comment had hit Kato like nothing else, really. Having his suffering seen and acknowledged was a rush for certain, of course—but he found himself thrilled, too, at being seen as a confidante; as someone who did take the time to ‘get it.’ As, maybe, a brother-in-arms himself. Hell...maybe that was something he could manage to be.
It at least made him want to try.

“Yeah, ya know. I know what it’s like to not have people get it,” he said. “But you get me. So why the hell would I brush you off? ‘Course I’ll get it. Birds of a feather and all that shit, right?” He was pretty sure the allusion to birds would make Gabe smile. It did.
“Damn right. Thanks, K. Flock together.”
Gracian leaned out of the hall just as Gabe gave Kato a gentle, friendly punch to the shoulder.
“You two ready to go?” Ian asked; “I’ve got the stream up.”
“Sure. K?” Gabe stood up.
“Yeah; flock together. Let’s go do it.”