Answers Without Questions

📅 Early February 2018

[ᴄᴡ ғᴏʀ ᴘᴀssɪɴɢ ᴀʟʟᴜsɪᴏɴs ᴛᴏ ᴀʙᴜsᴇ, ᴍᴇɴᴛᴀʟ ɪʟʟɴᴇss sʏᴍᴘᴛᴏᴍᴏʟᴏɢʏ, sᴜɪᴄɪᴅᴇ, ᴀɴᴅ ᴀʟᴄᴏʜᴏʟɪsᴍ]

Athena was used to being her brother’s opposite. She’d grown up with it being a truth—out of the mouths of her parents it had been a cruel take on it: To them, it was that Sethfire tried and Athena did not, that Sethfire excelled and Athena fell short. Out from under their roof, those perceptions of the ways she differed from her brother fell away—but she still differed, because she always had. Not that that was a negative. Sometimes, to her, it seemed the other way around. 
She had always been extraverted: Outgoing and gregarious, eager to befriend people—or at least connect with them to see if a friendship was possible. But Sethfire could have patented introversion, it seemed like. Whereas she had sports teams and social circles and cliques she flitted through and fell out of as she grew up; finding “BFFs” and fair-weather friends both along the way…? Seth just hadn’t had friends, or not close ones. Not in grade school, or middle school, or even particularly high school, at least as far as Athena knew. It should have struck her parents as strange, she’d always thought; kids were supposed to have friends! Sethfire hadn’t been born college-age and obsessed with academia; he’d been a kid at one point, and kids were meant to have other kids to share sleepovers and themed birthday parties and summer vacation with. But he never really had.
 In her earliest memories he was a ten-year-old in a collared shirt, already almost a half foot taller than the rest of his peers and talking over their heads in more ways than one. 

He had kids he called friends, study buddies and people who would speak to him in the hall but who he, as he privately told her, didn’t think would necessarily enjoy his company if he took up with them more frequently.
“I am, unfortunately, rather boring,” he said, as a self-consciously smiling fourteen-year-old but talking like someone three times older; “all I do is read and drone on about science. If I invited them over they would find you much more interesting than me, Athena.”

She’d disagreed even as an eight year old, and maybe he’d taken it to heart, because he did start to hang out with his peers more often as high school went on—though rarely at the house, and he didn’t tend to talk about them. She couldn’t know for certain, but from her perspective, it still seemed like most of the friendship was in that he called it a friendship. In practice...his “friends” appeared just to be company and not much more. He hadn’t mentioned wanting to tell any of them that he was in the hospital after his suicide attempt when he was seventeen, and if there were bonds between them, they were shallow enough to be uprooted by high school’s end, because as near as Athena knew, Sethfire didn’t keep in contact with anyone post-graduation.

He’d moved out for university and so she knew even less about his social experience there than she had his high school one, but when she moved in with him at the end of his fourth year it seemed as though even in college he hadn’t made many close connections. He didn’t mention friends to her, and no classmates dropped by on a whim or called up to invite him out for a Friday night. If he interacted with people on campus, he certainly never brought his social life home with him. 

At one point when Athena, Anarchy, and Kohao had all been living under his roof, some conversation had coaxed a comment out of him, though, that he actually had taken “a few” girls out for coffee while in college, as well as one man, and that had just about bowled her over—because she’d been openly queer for years, and Kohao could barely introduce himself without mentioning his sexuality, and they’d both been bullied over it and bitched about that—and still Seth had never even hinted at the possibility he was anything other than straight.
“...I didn’t want it to seem as though I were making any of the conversations where the topic came up about myself,” Sethfire bemusedly explained when asked about his silence; “There were more pertinent issues at hand during each of them. Besides...it hardly seems relevant.”

Which was another thing about Sethfire, besides his apparent social isolation: He sometimes absolutely sucked at divulging even a reasonable amount of information to other people in his life.

So...maybe Athena shouldn’t have been quite so blindsided when in February he called her and said, “Athena, I’ve been thinking that I would like to introduce you—and the others in the band—to my friend Jazz. Do you have any ideas for how to manage a small get together for it in a way that would not be quite so intense as our typical social gatherings? She struggles with rather profound anxiety.”

Of course, her first suggestion for him had actually been to explain what he was talking about, and who he was talking about, and what and who again, and how long had he known ‘Jazz,’ and what-do-you-mean-since-2013, and what-do-you-fucking-mean-she’s-the-one-who-drove-you-to-the-hospital-last-year?! SETH! WHY HAS THIS NEVER COME UP BEFORE?

Athena’s relief at Sethfire having a friend of his own easily won out over her annoyance with him for never mentioning it, though, and eventually the two of them decided that the lowest pressure brand of social gathering would likely be getting together at Seth’s apartment for a meal; lunch or dinner, probably. After Seth had taken the time to consult with Jazz about her preference (evening, dinner; and sooner rather than later, she’d drive herself crazy with anticipatory anxiety) and Sethfire had returned to Athena and made an averse, long-suffering sort of sound at the idea of having to repeat his explanation about having a friend at all over the phone to everyone else individually, they decided he might as well just throw the dinner invitation into the band group chat.

“Er...maybe I could call K-O for you first, though,” Athena offered awkwardly, “He, y’know, he might prefer a heads-up, and I don’t mind getting shot as the messenger; he’s already pissed at me so it’s convenient—”
“I do not believe that that will be necessary, Athena, but thank you,” Sethfire replied, through something of a tired sigh. Athena’s phone pinged with the invitation’s appearance in the group chat. She cringed.
“Gh...okay, then. Good luck.”
“Much appreciated.”

Bizarrely, Kohao failed to send any overly betrayed-sounding responses, though his “K. See you then” was sufficiently unnerving, especially when it wasn’t accompanied by a phone call to Athena herself with a demand to know if she’d been aware of the situation, and what the fuck was up, and wasn’t she pissed, too? But she didn’t get one; maybe he was still too upset with her for that. Maybe he lost his shit at Anarchy instead. Or Seth himself. Regardless, though, he’d agreed to meet Jazz, as did the rest of the band, despite the short notice—only a couple days in advance. It was a night Anarchy wasn’t working anyway, and Athena met him at his door on her way up, the evening of.

“Thought the three of us could head up together,” Athena greeted. “Where’s K-O?”
“Your guess is as good as mine. He ‘went out for cigarettes’ half an hour ago,” Anarchy replied. He looked over her head down the hall, his eyes tired enough to remind Athena of her brother’s.
“...Well, he must have taken the scenic route,” Athena said, trying to quash the discomfort that rose in her chest. Fear ached in her throat and heart whenever Kohao disappeared, these days, and it was a battle to not fall into the urge to panic; to remember that October’s episode had been an anomaly: His often-petulant vanishing acts were his ‘normal.’
“He has his phone?” she asked.
“Yeah. I messaged ten minutes ago and asked if he was still coming tonight and he left me on read, so...He’s reading his texts.” Anarchy sighed. “Let’s go up, anyway, ‘Thena. It’s good to see you. It’ll be good to meet this girl, too, holy shit. Even if I’d had work, I’d have called off. Crazy to have Sethfire introducing us to somebody for a change! Normally it’s you.”
Athena grimaced a smile up at him. “Yeah, but look where that got us. Rug all ripped out underneath our feet.”
Anarchy frowned and shook his head, then pulled her into a hug. “Quit that, ‘Thena. Nightshrike seemed cool. We all trusted them. I still can’t put it together now, after the fact, okay? Why everything’s fallen apart so bad. And besides...if we’re gonna be faulting ourselves for other people’s bullshit, then that makes Fawkes and K-O my fault anyway, doesn’t it?” He let out a pained-sounding chuckle, like it could have cracked his voice with just a little more encouragement. He swallowed. “See? It’s fuckin’ stupid to look at shit that way. C’mon.” 

His affectionate shake of her shoulder and kind eyes managed to surface Athena from the backwards drift of her emotions, and her spirits rose once again in the short elevator ride up to her brother’s apartment. Anarchy smilingly mouthed the word ‘lift’ at her, as though able to read her mind. She stuck her tongue out at him.

Aetos had arrived early and already made Jazz’s acquaintance by the time Sethfire answered the door for them; he had to beckon Jazz out of whatever conversation she and ‘Tae had been engaged in. As she walked over to stand nervously beside Sethfire, Athena found herself thinking that really—? Jazz almost couldn’t have been more different from Seth if she’d been actively trying: She was short and curvy, with pale skin and an anxious gaze, dressed in a pastel-goth kind of style that Athena definitely liked—but that gave her no inkling of how Jazz had managed to befriend her waistcoat-wearing older brother, or what on earth the two of them had in common.
And even walking in knowing about Jazz’s social anxiety, it was something else to see how painfully shy she was: She wrung her hands and her eyes darted repeatedly between her feet and the faces of those around her, as if she couldn’t decide whether it was safer to keep her head down or to stay on high alert. Even standing a few feet away from him, she shied away from Anarchy’s mere presence, pulling her shoulders in as soon as he moved.

“Jazz—This is my sister, Athena,” Sethfire said gently, stepping just between Jazz and Anarchy, stretching one long arm out to indicate Athena, who offered Jazz a soft “Yo,” and a smile. Jazz gave a shy wave, seeming to relax slightly.
“And…” Sethfire stepped back and put a hand on Anarchy’s shoulder, then seemed to study him for a moment. Pride flickered subtly across his expression. “...I believe Anarchy here is the reason we met at all, Jazz. I was returning from dropping him off for a job when we ran into one another in the lift, if I recall correctly.” 
Jazz seemed to perk up at that; Athena caught her mouth the word ‘reason’ to herself with a tiny nod. 

“Yeah, well, ya know, you’re welcome, then,” Anarchy said, nonplussed, though he smiled kindly. His eyes softened and crinkled at the edges as he looked at Jazz. “Actually thank you, though.”
Jazz stared blankly up at him. “...For what?”
Anarchy glanced over at Seth instead of responding immediately; both their eyes grew tired and sadness found their expressions.
“For taking care of Sethy for us,” Athena said, so that Anarchy wouldn’t have to, not with those older eyes and Seth's hand still on his shoulder.
“Oh. I don’t do that. He’s just needed my help sometimes,” Jazz said, her voice somehow managing to both lilt pleasantly and seem nearly toneless. It was a strange, varying thing that intermittently resurfaced as the conversation slipped into the smoother waters of small talk.

Jazz worked at a bar called “The Golden Liquid,” she told them, and didn’t enjoy it a whole lot, but it paid the bills and such. She had an affinity for the color purple and for the moon and stars. She smoked cigarettes and always flipped one over for luck, she said, and asked Athena and Anarchy not to “tell” that sometimes when she was very stressed, she’d smoke the lucky one “too early” and flip a new one over. 
“Tell who?” Anarchy asked, though Jazz only had a moment to appear disconcerted before Athena’s “You could just try carrying the pack around upside-down and make them all lucky, couldn’t you?” managed to redirect her into a potentially-amused, half-chirped, 
“Oh, but then I couldn’t be sure it would work!”

“I am of the opinion that all cigarettes are inherently unlucky, regardless of their inversion or lack thereof,” Sethfire offered from the kitchen. “You will try to quit, will you not, Jazz? Perhaps you and Aetos can coordinate your efforts.”
“If only Kohao wouldn’t offer me them every time I try,” Aetos replied wryly. “And if they weren’t handy for getting more breaks at work. Maybe I’m not repeatedly failing to quit, I’m just sticking it to the man a little longer. I’m meant to do that as a punk musician, right?”
“Yes, exactly, you see?” Jazz asked, her voice reading as one of flat anxiety, even as she nodded enthusiastically at Aetos’s response; going on to chirp some additional defense of smoking to Seth that he waved off, albeit good-humoredly.

In hearing them banter—and in hearing Jazz talk—it was easier for Athena to begin to register some of the things the two of them really did have in common. Not anything typical, like work or dress sense or favorite colors, no—but unconventional ways of speaking…? Yeah.
Seth spoke too carefully, too properly. He casually used words that belonged in a thesaurus or a Jane Austen novel and not an average conversation; he had an odd habit of frequently avoiding contractions. His tone didn’t vary as much as other people’s did, either, and while he wasn’t quite monotone, he was definitely muted. It was something that Jazz seemed to partially share: Her affect, too, often fell just on the flatter side—but she, like Seth, had expressive eyes that made up for the times her tone fell short of her intentions. She didn’t have a tendency to use too-pretentious vocabulary, but she would make connections that Athena couldn’t quite follow, or conjure up a metaphor over something concrete for unknown reasons. She’d sometimes appear to self-soothe by muttering something inaudible to herself, then startle when she realized the behavior had been observed. She also had a vague British accent. 

They continued to chat, and though Jazz didn’t talk at any depth about her childhood or more distant past, as the conversation deepened at least to the years since first meeting Sethfire, back in 2013, she gave more clarity to her experience of anxiety and paranoia. It turned out that at current she was as non-anxious as she’d ever been, really, and it was in her expanding on her historical feelings of isolation, of not getting people, or social interactions, that Athena felt she could yet more firmly grasp the depth of the friendship that her brother had found; the reason for the softness in Sethfire’s eyes when he looked at Jazz. 
What they most seemed to have in common was that they were two people frequently misunderstood, or frequently un-understood, and maybe what they'd found in one another was that understanding they’d been unable to find elsewhere. 

Athena couldn’t help but muse over that; the distance between her brother and everyone else. It had bothered her even before she’d considered herself to be someone he might feel distant from, and the pain in the space she now knew to be between them had only intensified in recent years. Listening to Jazz talk, she contrasted it with how she herself talked, how she herself thought—or how Anarchy talked and thought, because he was similar to her and his responses to Jazz weren’t far from her own. Her heart heavied, mulling over what it was or could be about their ways of being that put a gap between them and Seth; wondering what they had at their disposal to close it. 

Her own muted heartache drew her attention closer to Anarchy’s demeanor: He’d been sad lately, Athena had noticed; sadder. They’d all been messed up in one way or another, after October and everything with Seth and Nightshrike—but the past week or so he’d looked more downcast than he had in two months. And still he was gentle despite it all; he already seemed protective of Jazz.
“...And I don’t know...I try not to be so afraid of everything, but there are so many scary men at the bar I work at,” Jazz frowned, waving a hand. “They make comments and—get handsy, sometimes, and I freeze up. It’s frightening.”
Concern flared in Anarchy’s eyes and he straightened up; Athena’s own “That’s fucked, Jazz,” ended up clipped by his serious, dismayed, “The fuck? You shouldn’t have to put up with that.” 
He glanced into the kitchen, where Sethfire and Aetos were inoffensively bickering in hushed voices over some aspect of the spaghetti sauce recipe. 

“...I owe you one, Jazz,” Anarchy said, peeling his eyes off Seth and looking back at her; “But honestly, even if I didn’t…? Fuck anyone treating you like that. Creeps at bars. I bartend too, but I double as a bouncer—so if you need a motherfucker thrown, just let me know.” He turned to meet Athena’s eyes and cracked a small smile. “Or ‘Thena. She might beat me out for distance.”
Athena was about to respond when the door opened behind her and Anarchy’s expression changed. She couldn’t quite read the way it closed, but it did—and when she turned around she saw why: Kohao had arrived, looking about as friendly as a recently-stepped-on rattlesnake.

“Hey, K-O. Welcome to the party,” Anarchy greeted, though with some degree of strain to his voice. Kohao refused to look at him, instead opting to glare at the floor until Seth greeted him and stepped over to introduce him to Jazz. 
If she’d quailed from Anarchy on instinct, it was nothing to how she nearly limbo-leaned away from Kohao—but really, Athena couldn’t blame her. Kohao had been a loose cannon for as long as Athena had known him, but recently he’d been more like a live grenade or nitroglycerin. There was a way that rage and unpredictability could just roll off him; leach into the air like fuel fumes waiting to be lit by the blaze in his eyes.

“This is Kohao, Jazz,” Seth said delicately. “He is our band’s main clean vocalist. He has apparently made Nicholas’s acquaintance already—he heard about you through him prior to through me.” Sethfire and Kohao exchanged a look while Athena raised an eyebrow at Anarchy, then Aetos. Judging by their bemused expressions, neither of them seemed to have heard about ‘Nicholas,’ either. Jazz appeared slightly comforted, though—or so much as she could with Kohao holding himself in front of her like a stalled F5 tornado.
“You know Nick?” she asked timidly.
“Probably not as well as you know Seth,” Kohao responded, short enough to make Jazz flinch and Sethfire frown.

“Okay, but that’s a 5-year bar to beat, apparently. I will be impressed if you kept ‘Nick’ secret from me that long, though,” Athena interjected, trying for a friendly, tension-diffusing tone but shooting Kohao a nearly pleading look: Let Seth have this. I know you’re upset, but let Seth have us meet his friend.
A scowl flickered across Kohao’s face but he shuffled backwards a step and seemed to make an effort to shed some of his visible rage. Or at least to make Jazz feel less like she was in the danger zone.
“Well, I’ll have to continue to be unimpressive to you, Athena,” he said to the floor, then swept in a wide swerve around the kitchen island out to the balcony, where he turned his back to the door and lit a cigarette. Anarchy sighed, then stood up and followed, with a mumbled, “I’ll talk to him.”
Jazz looked close to tears. “Did I do something wrong?” she asked, her lip trembling.
“Of course not,” everyone in the room responded. The synchronicity at least seemed to reassure her.

The rest of the evening went unfortunately similarly. Anarchy’s exchange with Kohao out on the balcony had looked standoffish at best and hadn’t tempered Kohao’s emotions much, if at all. He seemed potentially at least somewhat drunk already and was obviously too upset with just about everyone in the room to be particularly friendly, and Jazz seemed well enough scared of him. He sat sullenly between Anarchy and Athena during dinner and refused to eat, instead opting to get up after everyone had sat down to go and openly pull a bottle of whiskey out of a cabinet, then silently return to the table with it. Seth ignored the pointed move with grace and everyone else followed suit, but Athena noticed how her brother rarely let his gaze pass over that section of the dinner table afterwards. 

Conversation was stilted, and though Kohao was most polite to Jazz, even those responses were so curt that it didn’t take long for her to avoid engaging him. He only talked to her diagonally, by ambiguously speaking to the room at large and ping-ponging a topic across the other people at the table, rarely acknowledging if he got a suitable answer to whatever prompt he’d provided and spending an inordinate amount of time in silence.
Anarchy was the one Kohao talked directly to the most, still, but even so, Athena could tell that something had happened between the two of them. She didn’t even need to ask. Their expressions around one another recently had been too closed off; their tones were too tight when they spoke; they stood too far from one another. 
Kohao excused himself early, looking just as upset as when he’d come in, tossing an inflectionless “Good to meet you” over his shoulder without even looking at Jazz as he left. He didn’t offer a goodbye to anyone else. Athena caught Anarchy’s steep frown and the bite of his lip.

“...He’s so angry,” Jazz said to Seth in the wake of Kohao’s exit; “…You're sure it's not me?”
“It is not you. Me, more than likely,” Seth replied, sounding at the crossroads of exhaustion and exasperation.
Anarchy sighed and glanced rather apologetically at Athena. “...Honestly, Jazz, you’re probably the only person in this room he isn’t angry at right now,” he said.
“He didn’t seem too upset with me, either, but it could have been he was ignoring me,” Aetos offered, his tone dry. 
“Eh, he was probably preoccupied with glaring at the rest of us and it wasn’t pointed, ‘Tae, don’t take it to heart,” Athena half-joked, then turned back toward Anarchy and cocked an eyebrow. “What did you do to him, though, ‘Key? I know I moved out, but…”
Anarchy stayed quiet for a few beats, at first offering only a shallow shrug. “...Dunno,” he finally said, too softly. “I’m sure he thinks he has his reasons.”
 Athena frowned, wondering what the story was. She made a mental note to ask him—later, privately—if he needed to talk.
 Jazz continued to look at the door, as though seeing through it and clairvoyantly following Kohao’s stormy retreat. Her grey gaze grew sad.
“...He needs to heal a lot of things.”

Athena blinked, startled by the assertion—especially when as far as she could tell, Kohao had been far too aggravated to come off as pathetic at this particular introduction, instead reading primarily as ‘hostile.’ But maybe Jazz grasped things better than Athena had supposed she did. She’d somehow connected with Seth, after all...
“...Yeah, he does,” Athena said slowly, “But don’t let him hear you say it.”