Symphonies In Thunderstorms
📅 February 2018
【ᴛᴡ ғᴏʀ ᴍᴇɴᴛɪᴏɴ ᴏғ sᴇxᴜᴀʟ ᴠɪᴏʟᴇɴᴄᴇ / sᴇx ᴀs sᴇʟғ ʜᴀʀᴍ, sᴜɪᴄɪᴅᴇ ᴍᴇɴᴛɪᴏɴ, ᴅᴇsᴄʀɪᴘᴛɪᴏɴ ᴏғ ᴘʜʏsɪᴄᴀʟ ᴀssᴀᴜʟᴛ, ᴀɴᴅ ᴅʀɪɴᴋɪɴɢ】
Things seemed a bit better, after that first night with Isaac. A bit of corporal punishment had blunted the worst of the psychological chaos, for the moment, and so even though Kohao’s head was still kicking the everloving shit out of him, he was managing to feel a little less cornered in it. Or he at least knew he had an outlet. He eyed Isaac’s number, but it was seven in the morning and not even a full 24 hours since their fucked up little tryst and the cuts on his chest were still just scabbed, not scarred. He opened his text thread with Storm, instead.
It’d been a couple days since they’d managed to offer him someone to lean on that night that he’d been spiraling, spiraling too bad to even try properly to get used, and he felt like he should say something.
“Who do you know at TGL?” Kato texted, in lieu of telling them something like, “Hey, you’re probably the only reason I didn’t go home and put a knife in my stomach on Tuesday,” which would have come off melodramatic at best and might have made them decide that now was the best time to worry about having to haul the weight of his friendship around. The burden was there, though, visible to him, so he tried to offset it: He’d been too up in his head to care that particular night, but something had been weighing on them, too...so he decided to ask.
He also wondered...
Nick had been off that night, thank god, but Kato hadn’t mentioned that part of his own motivation for not typically frequenting a more local bar was that he, too, knew someone who worked there.
S: «it took me like a fucken full minute to figure that abbreviation out dude»
S: «holy shit»
S: «just call it Golden like us regs do lmao»K: «i’m not a “reg” and someone i know seemed vaguely put off when i called it “the piss bar.” i’m working with the only option i have»
S: «i wasnt offended by the piss thing»
K: «you’re not the someone i know. So who do /you/ know there»
S: «ah shit lol»
S: «she even told me about meeting you. i shouldve figured you’d put it together»
S: «its too early for this tho K. just come over tonight and let me get a beer in me first»
Despite his confusion—Nick was definitely not a “she” and Kato had no clue who else he was meant to know—he agreed to go over to Storm’s place for a drink that evening. He didn’t need to bother asking questions that could’ve revealed how in the dark he was; he and Storm got shots in them instead of a beer and Storm talked without him having to dig. It turned out that the mystery person on Storm’s mind was Jazz. Who yes, Kato had met, once, just about a week ago—and who he’d seemed to have intimidated the shit out of. He didn’t know if he’d been told where she worked or not. In all honesty, she’d seemed too anxious in personality to be capable of a normal job, but then again, he’d been boiling over with six shades of rage at the time and that might have put her on edge.
Storm had a different conception of her. The pair had met nearly a year ago, Storm related; they’d been on one of the later drives of their workday, back when they’d been driving cabs for a living, carting around a “kind-of acquaintance,” a frequent passenger, whose constant chatter tended to grate on them unless they tuned him out. (“Which is a skill you gotta learn as a cabbie,” Storm had said; “most fares talk too much. I prefer when people shut the fuck up.”) The summer sky had seemed to go too dark too early, that evening. A couple of the streetlamps had blown out along the block for the address they were pulling up to; the pitch-black expanse of the cemetery lay across the road. Their acquaintance—“fare-weather friend,” they joked—got out and came up to the drivers window to pay, or so they thought. Chattering away still; mostly complaining about the price of cabs, and the price of speedballing, and whatever way in which the two were connected.
“I was dumbassing it that night; I’d gotten drive-thru coffee or something earlier and my wallet was just sitting in the cupholder in the open,” Storm explained, their expression chagrined. “He just went for it. He was a skinny little bastard, like you.” A rather uncomfortable laugh escaped them, the humor clearly an imperfect band-aid for the terror of the experience. “But, y’know. An addict. Desperate for cash and wasted up enough to fit through my damn window...”
Storm was no flight-or-freeze-er, and had struggled stoutly with their assailant despite the awkward confines of the cab; restrained by their seatbelt, attempting to both hold him and keep him from stealing off with their money while also trying to beat him into dropping it. They’d taken an elbow to the face that they thought was just part of the scuffle and realized too late had been their opponent reaching for the ace up his sleeve. Or the ace in his back pocket.
‘Thankfully a pocket knife’ was how Storm phrased it, even though they’d taken it in a gash along their back and a searing stab beneath the ribs. Thankfully a pocket knife. Not a tactical knife, not a 6” switchblade, not something that would have left them even worse off than still bleeding out from two wounds, one of which had pierced their liver and poured blood enough to soak their pants.
Their attacker had fled the scene with both their wallet and their phone, leaving them helpless—and gravely wounded. Somehow they managed to open the driver’s side door and fell out of the cab onto the ground; chills running through them, blackness intruding on the edges of their vision. They tried to both start towards a house and call out for help, but managed to only stagger, whimpering, into the headlights of their cab before collapsing again.
And then—from nowhere, it’d seemed—a young woman had appeared: Frantically leaning over them; one eye grey and storm-tossed, the other the gentle umber of the forest floor; both concerned.
“How bad are you hurt?” Jazz had asked.
The last thing Storm said they remembered saying was, “Bad. Call 911...he stole my phone.”
They’d needed surgery to control the bleeding from the stab to their liver, and what with getting their back stitched up, too, it had been nearly 3 hours of unconsciousness when they finally came to in the hospital. And who had been there when they woke up but Jazz.
“Holy shit, I dunno if we’d have stuck around for ‘Key if he’d been out for that long,” Kato interrupted; “She’s fucking dedicated. She didn’t even know you.”
“Right? But wait, get this...she’d gone out in the meantime...and bought me a phone.”
“What? Why?”
“Because I’d mentioned that mine had been stolen!” Storm laughed; the alcohol had lent some pink to their cheeks. “That’s all the reason she’d give, and she’d act confused if I ever gave the impression that it wasn’t...a normal thing to do. But that was how I met her, and...got her number, and everything. How we started talking.”
“Helluva introduction. I mean, pretty typical by the metric of my life, but I know that that’s skewed as shit. But, so...what? You’re mooning over her at the bar waiting for her to save your life again? Or do you need a new Nokia?” Kato smirked as Storm punched him in the arm.
“Shut the hell up. I wish it was the second one, damn, I’d love to be that shallow." They looked at their shot glasses, looked at the vodka, then shrugged and just took a mouthful straight from the bottle.
“I know I’m obvious when I’m talking about her. Describing the color of her eyes and shit...But I saw them, right, and it’s a thing for her about people seeing both of them, too…” Storm rolled their own eyes at themself. “We got to talking, you know...Close. She made stuff feel a little easier. Like, people; she made people feel a little easier. Hence me and ‘Thena being able to bunk up in December and me not being the entire bitch I could have been when meeting you.”
“Right, so. Cheers to Jazz, then.” Kato still didn’t quite get it, unless Storm meant being around someone with such terrific anxiety made them feel better about themself and therefore more outgoing—but maybe he just needed to get to know Jazz better. Or get to know her at all. “...So you’ve got a thing for her. And it bothers you.”
“Tch…” Storm sighed; their face had flushed further. They wrinkled their nose and shrugged. “I dunno, right, brains are fucking stupid. I shouldn’t be talking like this.” They laughed, suddenly; laughed like a punchline had been delivered. Laughed like a page break or a backspace button. “God. Yeah, literally forget about this conversion. I guarantee you it’ll fade on me, like, this puppy-love thing. I’ve just been thinking about her too much. I’ll be over it and cringing in, like, a week, tops.”
“Sure, go for it,” Kato replied, brooding over Anarchy’s old assertions that he’d ‘straighten himself out’ and that their thing ‘couldn’t last’ and whether the parallel was relevant. Kato decided it wasn’t; he was just following every thread he found back to the open wound in him that was his whole ordeal with Anarchy—but it left him feeling guilty and angry later anyway, regardless of any parallels and their irrelevencies.
He called Isaac again that night.