Before the Storm

 📅 Late August, 2021

【ᴛᴡ ғᴏʀ ᴀʟᴄᴏʜᴏʟɪsᴍ, ᴇᴅ sʏᴍᴘᴛᴏᴍs, & ᴛᴀʟᴋ ᴏғ ᴠɪᴏʟᴇɴᴄᴇ/ᴍᴜʀᴅᴇʀ + sᴜɪᴄɪᴅᴇ】

The year was only just barely half over, but it already had managed to feel pretty confusing, at least to Kato. Actually, the past couple years had been pretty confusing. But this year even the music part of it had been confusing; the one thing that Kato hadn't ever found confusing before—the one consistent anchor point in the chaos of his life. But all his songs were coming out weird, like the rest of him. He felt like shit at a constant, which wasn’t new, but he wasn’t doing as much total self annihilation to cope, which was new, and so his life looked less fucked up and that felt more fucked up.

He wanted something to blame and usually the people closest to him fell victim to that desire—he was aware—and at least he could be consistent with that, because definitely it seemed like it was Anarchy and Chey’s fault, mostly, for how he was feeling and how he was acting and how he was writing.

They'd gotten married, first of all—or, no, first of all they’d gotten engaged, and that had been sort of like having a gas leak in the apartment except instead of carbon monoxide, it was a relentless seep of joy and optimism giving Kato a headache and clouding his brain.
He should have felt pissier and more alone because of it, but Anarchy and Chey were the way they were, and they couldn't even have the decency to third-wheel him properly. He got caught up in them, and their joy, and their overwhelming…’future-ness.’

The future had always seemed elusive, abstract, entirely theoretical and/or doomed, to him, so suddenly finding himself party to and included in A Future was jarring. The Keystones should have been discussing buying a home one day for just the two of them, but for some bizarre reason they talked about him coming, too, and asked him about…the future. Their future, his future, this future that apparently was spreading out in front of all of them and required him to know how he felt about a townhouse vs a condo vs a house (he had no opinion) and if the boroughs got to be pricier than Long Island, how he felt about leaving Brooklyn, and how he might feel about them fostering kids one day.
The obvious answer for everything was “You two can do whatever you want” but then Chey would say “We know, that’s why we’re asking what you want.” So Kato would try to answer.

It wasn’t necessarily some lingering crush on the both of them that made him want to go along with it; it was immaterial if he still felt that way—they were married—and sure, Chey kissed him on the cheek and called him ‘babe,’ but Chey kissed everyone on the cheek and called them ‘babe,’ so it was whatever: Kato knew there was nothing romantic to sow for his own ‘future’, to drive him forward….but still, but still… They were so full of joy and they deserved it, deserved it so much, and he couldn’t wreck that for them. He had to not wreck that for them. So he started trying to not wreck it, and “it” ended up mostly being himself. 

He’d stopped camming—because of them or for them or both, and had sold off almost all his guns during the pandemic to keep the three of them afloat and to help with the wedding, and he got his throat tattoo covered so a threat wouldn't be haunting their wedding album forever. 
He'd come unmoored sometime the previous fall, because he'd started trying to escape his other anchor: Columbine had been less a hyperfixation than it had been scaffolding for him; a shape to mould himself into or lines to color himself between. But Teagan had turned that on its head and he’d colored over all of it; let Fawkes tattoo over all of it and overwrite that self concept with art. Escapism should’ve started ruling him instead afterward, and truth be told he longed for it, but his typical modus operandi for that took a hit, too, because he wasn’t doing coke anymore. Or…he was trying not to do coke anymore. Because…because. Because Anarchy and Chey, because his eyes, because money. 

It was difficult and he was bad at it—actually quitting stayed elusive because he’d get so depressed without cocaine that he’d almost rather piss the bed than have to drag himself across the hall, but he was trying. Trying to “get better.” Usually when shit was rough he’d turn it into music, rough music, but writing recovery struggles instead of rage spun his head somehow and so he ended up stuck in purgatory, writing lyrics that felt less concrete than before, and everything he described in them other than drowning felt theoretical, just like the future.

He tried talking to Anjali about it but she seemed certain the thing was that he was in love with ‘Key and Chey and hurting about it, and couldn't seem to get that the problem was that no, he was healing about it.
“Take them out of the equation for a second, okay? It just feels like I'm no one, now,” he told her, “Or I'm a fraction of who I used to be. ‘Cause I used to be, like, I used to be Eric and Dylan, and I used to be a slut, and I used to be a total asshole and do whatever to myself for the fuck of it and cuss out anyone who took issue with it. I used to KNOW I was gonna crash and burn and kill myself, I wasn’t even a pessimist, I was dead certain I was a self fulfilling prophecy! Now I don’t have anything left but my music, and even that feels fucked, ‘cause nothing’s coming out as angry as it used to be and I don’t know where I stand.”
“It’s not that you’re no one,” she said patiently. “Maybe before it felt like you couldn’t exist without, like, the infinite damage. But you’re you now instead of you then.”
“I don't know who that is, though,” he argued. “I don’t know who that is, or what he believes, or if he’s supposed to be here! I don’t know what I'm doing.”

He didn't know what he was doing, and Anjali didn't know what he was doing, and really nobody knew what he was doing.

“I want to live,” he murmured to his dark room one night, testing the words out, because he did, he wanted to live, god fucking help him, he wanted to live like Anarchy and Chey were living, but—
But he couldn’t; wasn’t allowed to; maybe if he dropped another ten pounds he’d be able to stomach it. Maybe that’d finally be penance enough…

His tailbone had started to hurt where it dug into his mattress at night; he couldn’t sleep unless he was crashing; nightmares plagued him and left him feeling like a haunted house. He wanted to live. Wanted to live but he couldn’t sleep, couldn’t eat; he wasn’t allowed that—because he had to be her, he had to feel it, had to suffer it, because he killed her like this. He chose to.

He’d never really tried to hide his vices before, and it struck Kato as somewhat unfair that the first time he did try was when he couldn’t manage it. He attempted to keep it all out of sight but the fact was that he was slipping out of sight. The starving and purging whittled him away and two months past the wedding he looked like a stranger even to himself. His cheekbones weren’t just defined, now, they were all that were: His cheeks were hollow in his gaunt face, his eyes looking sunken and dull behind his new glasses, which he couldn’t get used to and frequently misplaced. He kept his spiked choker buckled into the same hole it always had been, where the leather had cracked from wear—but he’d become so thin that instead of encircling his throat, the choker hung loose enough to rest on his jutting collarbone. His skin looked dry and pale; his teeth left his knuckles raw. I want to live. He had to keep his jacket on outside, even in August.

Chey and Anarchy would’ve had to jump through hoops to not notice. Of course they caught on; of course they cared and fretted and of course Kato sometimes ended up sick of it and snapped at them about it. It wasn’t their fault and the guilt burned him up inside but they just didn’t get it; couldn’t get it, didn’t know, because he’d told them but not told them. Just a half truth; a third of a truth. He wanted to tell them it all, but he needed them; wanted to tell them but couldn’t stomach it if they forgave him and couldn’t stomach it if they didn't, either. He leaned against the railing up on the roof of the apartment building, like a sailor’s wife on a widow’s watch, and stared north. 
No one was coming, but he needed someone to be coming. His head felt cloudy enough to be the sky, but he could grasp that he was waiting for someone, or he needed to be waiting for someone, and so someone needed to be coming. His thumb hovered over Gabe’s name in his phone and he paused, wishing for the earlier half of that friendship where Kato would have texted him for certain. But even 3 years of healing hadn’t erased that scar of betrayal. 
He still hesitated. He wanted Gabe; wanted his wit and loyalty and familiarity, but there was a pang associated now that refused to leave. Because Gabe could. Could just leave again, if shit seemed too much—and this, well…this was a lot.

Indecisive, reckless, Kato played Russian roulette with the ‘A’ names in his phone contacts: He swiped to scroll them into a blur and blindly jabbed the screen with his thumb, deciding that if it landed on Athena then Chey was right, Fate existed, and he’d just spill the beans to her then and there and toss himself off the roof afterward. 
It didn’t stop on Athena, though— it was Anjali that his thumb landed on and he had to ponder about that. She’d invited him over that time in 2017, during a different crisis. He’d nearly spilled then. He tapped out a message and listened to the burbled chime of the ‘sent’ notification like a funeral toll.

Anjali, to Kato’s measured surprise, had no reservations about meeting up with him for a drink; his invitation to hang out for a couple hours on the apartment’s roof and shoot the shit so that he could “give the newlyweds a break from my third-wheeling ass,” was readily accepted. Really, Anjali seemed almost pleased to be Kato’s company of choice.

They hadn’t started hanging out one-on-one until her invite 4 years ago got the ball rolling, but it’d been a slow roll. Admittedly, Kato’d stuck with Athena first when Chey arrived on the scene and made it feel like everything was falling apart before Kato realized he was actually putting it all together. 

Kato’d been prickly at best during it all, hot to cold and back again over the span of a conversation and sarcastic enough to pickle something. He wasn’t great company and wasn’t dealing with change well and didn’t think many people actually enjoyed his company. Those few months, probably very few of them did. Chey claimed to have, even though he’d had the least right to it, and Kato trusted him on it, but Chey generally enjoyed being alive and so the bar stayed low. The fact was that Kato only finally managed to follow up with Anjali because he was crashing with Athena so often and ‘Thena and Teagan and Anjali all got along well and would hang, so he accidentally got reminded that hey, yeah, she was his friend and actually he did enjoy her company. He managed to thank her again for having been there for him, and apologized for being incommunicado, and she was chill about it and said she’d figured he’d been recuperating; she wasn’t offended.

Their similarities won out in the end. Her passion for her job as an archivist meshed well with his chronic nerdiness and they picked up where they’d left off when she and ‘Key were “dating” and he’d bring her over for the night and she and Kato would turn the History channel on and Anarchy would fall asleep. It was funny in retrospect; sad in retrospect; both? Probably both. Kato frowned at his phone and wondered what the hell he was doing. Again.

They’d fallen into a friendship, bookish and accepting and unlike any of the other bonds Kato had. The last text above his invitation to her was a link she’d sent him to a pdf download of The Cambridge Ancient History Volume 2, Part 2: The Middle East and the Aegean Region, c.1380-1000 BC. Who else but her would send him that? Well, Seth…But that was the thing, wasn’t it? 
She knew all the insufferable nerdom well enough. She might as well get to know the rest of the dislikeable parts of him.

Her smile of greeting fell by a degree when she arrived to join him on the roof and stepped out of the stairwell to find him already up there, leaning against a concrete parapet with an opened bottle of vodka in hand and no shot glasses in sight. 
“Hey-o, K-O,” she said, a borrowed Athena-ism that made his eyes crinkle at the corners. Joy, pain, grief, what did it matter? She eyed his bottle with something akin to consternation and he rocked it by the neck.
“Yeah…I suppose I should have gotten ahold of a mixer for the non-alcoholics among us,” he joked. 
“Is it at least flavored?” she asked, grabbing the bottle to stop him swirling it around so she could see the label.
“Dunno, it’s vodka. It’s fancy, though.”
“Ciroc? Sure, I mean, fancier than Kirkland Signature…So you’re not too far gone, I guess,” she ribbed.
“Guess we’ll see about that,” Kato replied, letting her take the bottle from him, though his answer paused her giving the spirit an apprehensive sniff and she looked with trepidation, instead, at him.

They both attempted some sort of superficial normalcy; discussing the wedding, or Anjali’s work, or Edge of Infinity’s recently released fifth album. She sipped the vodka and asked in a tone that failed to truly be light, how full the bottle had been when Kato first got to the rooftop.

“I dunno. A third fuller,” Kato guesstimated, an emptiness working its way into his tone. The conversation felt equivalent to walking on the snowpack over a crevasse, each word resounding with the fact that all beneath it was hollow. Her expression betrayed her worry and he wasn’t sure if it was because he seemed inebriated or simply ill. His skin was dry and pretty chronically sallow despite the liquor; it was August and yet his leather jacket was on and halfway zipped up. She wasn’t stupid; as a matter of fact, she was downright astute. 

Anjali frowned and apparently decided she couldn’t count on the ice eventually breaking of its own accord under the weight of the elephant in the room.
“...So, we both know something’s up. What’s going on with you, Kato?”

Kato gave Anjali a swift-but-tired up-and-down, as though a glanced assessment could tell him anything more about her than he already knew. All he gathered was some fresh concern behind her chestnut eyes, so he looked away to take a long, tongue-loosening pull from his vodka bottle and a longer drag from his cigarette. It had been three years since the last time he’d allowed himself to get confessional, and the guilt had only grown in the meantime, festering all the while.
“...I've done some bad shit, Anji,” he finally said, through an exhausted breath of smoke; “Feel like fuckin’...Lady Macbeth about it, ya know. ‘All the perfumes of Arabia’ and all that. I’ve done such bad shit in my life...Everyone around me thinks they know it, but they don't. Even the people I’ve told already didn’t get the whole truth...I’m always trying to sanitize it…‘perfumes.’ I shouldn't tell you but, ha, fuck it…” He trailed off and stared hollowly out over the city.
“...I have a feeling you're going to tell me anyway,” Anjali said. It might have been partway to an attempted joke, but Kato didn’t care. He just shrugged and pulled his jacket tighter around his shoulders.
“...Yeah, maybe I will...Maybe it doesn't matter what I do anymore.”
He saw Anjali stiffen in his peripheral vision but felt too tired to bother about the transparency of his powerlessness. He’d thrown himself into the undertow of Karmic Fate some time ago—ten years—and he was reaping the reward: Becoming too weak to fight the current. All he could do now was cough up honesty, like water from his lungs.

“I tell my story over and over, Anjali,” he started, painfully aware of the hollowness in his own voice. “I tell it over, and over, and over. I’m sure everyone else is fuckin’ sick of it, but it’s like I have to. ‘I was sixteen. I was angry. I’d been treated like shit. I went in to shoot up my school, and Sethfire stopped me.’ Do people really think that’s all there is? Do you? Do you believe that?” He turned to look at Anjali, whose trepidation was visible; Kato wondered if he’d been wrong and he really was sounding drunk already.
“...I’m guessing now that there’s more to it,” she said slowly, and Kato indecisively ran his tongue across the back of his teeth. Anjali had known Anarchy before she’d known him; was certainly closer to Anarchy than to him; she’d been running with Athena and Teagan for the past couple years with more frequency than she sat and watched a docuseries with him and it seemed reasonable to expect her to feel greater loyalty to both honesty and any of them than to him. Telling her was a risk, a monumental one...but the winds had caught his caution a million times before. Maybe this would be the last time he’d ever have to say it all; it felt that way. 
Maybe that was the intention.
“...I’d rather die than Athena ever know,” he said tersely. 
Anjali pursed her lips in clear discomfort and spent a long moment apparently just evaluating him before she finally gave the shallowest of nods: It was in her hands, now. Kato sighed deeply. 

“...Then...Then it was almost a full decade ago and I was sixteen, Anjali,” he said. “I was sixteen and you’ve heard all those details before. Guns, plans, the shirt I fucking wore. I tell it like that, don’t I? Every time. And the details fucking end at the school...Why?” he asked, rhetorically. He wanted to sound anything except weak and failed when his voice cracked. 
“...Because there’s more,” Anjali replied, though she didn’t need to. Her voice seemed too soft even for her. Kato stared at the rooftop concrete and nodded, his eyes burning, his tongue glued to the roof of his mouth by reluctance. His shoulders shook.

“I’m the one that broke Seth’s nose,” he finally burst out, starting too far in and having to double-back; “It’s all crooked, you know? He—he confronted me, at the front doors, and told me to give him my backpack. I refused and tried to just sprint for my classroom—I thought I could outpace him and that once bodies started falling he’d get out and call the cops—but he tackled me to the ground and I broke his nose to get out of his grip. I...I told him to get the fuck out. But I knew he wouldn’t, Anjali, I knew he’d never run for it. I was already reaching for my Glock when I said it.” Kato’s voice had grown panicked, despairing; the scene unfolding in his mind’s eye making his words and hands both start to shake. 
“I knew he wouldn’t,” Kato repeated, “I knew he wouldn’t run. I’d come to terms with having a body count that day and I knew he wouldn’t go—” Kato choked, gagging on the memory of his hand closing on his pistol. “I can still feel the gun in my hand, even now, I can fucking feel it,” he gasped out, “I chose to kill him, Anjali, I chose to kill one of the two people I cared about, who cared about me! I made that choice! …But he was stronger than me and he pinned me down and he told me he’d give me somewhere to go if I dropped out. That he’d get me out of school, away from my dad. He gave me an escape route. And I said okay—because I didn’t think I’d be able to fight myself free and kill him.”
Something akin to a dry sob worked its way out of Kato’s throat and he slammed his hand against the low concrete wall of the rooftop, jolting the ember off the end of his cigarette.
“He gave me everything! He gave me an out, he lied to Athena! He said he broke his nose because he ran into the second set of glass doors at the school—he knew she’d never forgive me for hurting him! He lied to her face! For me! I owe him everything I have and I only let him save me because I couldn’t kill him! I don’t deserve any of it, Anjali, I don’t deserve anything about the life I’m living now—I don’t deserve to live life at all! I’m fucking evil! I chose to kill him and I would have!” Kato wrenched his voice raw with the final sentence; his shoulders shook with the effort it took to keep from crying.

Honesty offered no catharsis, though, and even having expected as much, the retelling of events left Kato feeling acutely empty. It seemed like he couldn’t convey what all of it truly meant, anyway: Because Anjali, while appropriately wide-eyed and frowning, still had that look—that one that Anarchy had had, that but-he-isn’t-dead expression that couldn’t be broken through. She seemed like she might speak.
You don’t understand, Kato thought desperately at her; He is. I’m watching him die every day now.
“I—I chose to kill him, Anjali, I can tell you’re not hearing it. You have to hear it, I need someone to hear it!” Kato said, a deep sense of urgency sending words tumbling from his mouth before she had the chance to comfort him; “I chose to, okay, I chose to kill him, I turned him into an obstacle and I killed him only I didn’t! But you need to understand that I did, okay, you have to hear me out because I knew how it would look; I planned to pull that trigger and I watched him die and I chose to do it.” 
Kato’s chest was halfway to heaving and he knew he had to look unhinged by now, staring wild-eyed at her, clutching his vodka and claiming credit for a conceptual homicide.

“...I am hearing you,” Anjali said slowly; “Just processing. But I’m hearing you.” She looked and sounded very much like someone trying to make a nonsensically verbal compromise with a wild animal; ‘Okay Mr. Grizzly. You can have the cooler. We’re going to back away slowly.’
Kato was only feet away from her, yet indescribably stranded. It was the dog days of summer yet he was freezing. He couldn’t read her expression.
“Then fucking hate me,” he said. A plea, almost a whimper. “If you’re hearing me, then hate me. Athena’s brother. Seth! Sethfire! Seth who carried ‘Key to the hospital on his back even though his spine’s jacked up and his joints give out! Fucking Seth, Anjali, fucking Seth who’s never hurt anyone except himself in his entire goddamn life! Ten fucking years ago this September I tried to put a bullet through his chest!” Kato suddenly found himself yelling and sobbing, his voice having risen like a cresting wave and then crashed over him, leaving him choking for air. 
“I’m not going to hate you,” Anjali said swiftly, a clear attempt to soothe.
“Then you don’t understand,” he gasped, resisting her attempts to comfort him; “It’s everyone with him, Anjali, because ‘Key and ‘Tae and probably Athena would’ve died without him! Athena, God, and I knew about Athena, too—”
“Kato, breathe—” Anjali was sounding increasingly alarmed and Kato could feel the hyperventilation tearing at his lungs, but couldn’t heed her;
“No, God, Anjali, I fucking knew about Athena! I knew Seth was who saved her and I knew living with him was the only reason she was better and I made the choice to kill him! I made the choice to send my best fucking friend back to her parents’ house to starve herself to death all alone! I SHOULD BE IN HELL. I DESERVE TO BE DEAD AND BURNING IN FUCKING HELL!”

Kato’s throat was raw and he didn’t know when he and Anjali had ended up kneeling; he couldn’t remember having sunk to the ground but he accepted it, not knowing if he was sobbing or dry-heaving anymore as he clutched his arms to his stomach and bent his forehead towards the concrete. Anjali stayed beside him, rubbing his back and utilizing the fact that she finally had the opportunity to get a word in edgewise.
“I’m listening to you, I swear I am. I’m hearing every word you say and it matters to me,” she said, “It’s fucked up, I get that. It’s fucked up on every level you say it was—but it’s been ten years, Kato, and you’re not the boy who tried to pull that trigger anymore. I never met him! I don’t know how I’d feel about him, but even he didn’t kill anyone and you can’t convince me to hate you with something he almost did. Everyone’s alive, K, everyone’s alive. You didn’t kill anyone, we could call any of them up right now. We could go down a couple flights of stairs and see Seth. You’re...you’re not at fault for anything. Please breathe, it’s going to be okay.”

Kato shook his head like an oppositional three-year-old, hating the concept that a world so wrong as the one letting him live, live unhated, could ever feel ‘okay’. His chest was searing with pain as it had taken to doing, lately, and he hoped in vain that the heart within it would just stop beating. It stubbornly continued, though, just as Anjali continued to be close and kind; intimacy equally as painful as his sustained heartbeat.
“You think I want something I don’t, Anjali,” he keened. “You think I want reassurance. Maybe I used to; maybe everyone else I told, I told because I wanted that...But I don’t anymore, I don’t.” Kato’s limbs and eyelids were suddenly heavy, his will suddenly weak. Drained, he finally let himself slump, shaking, into Anjali’s arms. 
“...We don’t always get what we want, I guess,” Anjali said quietly, with a rather tentative pat of his shoulder. “Sometimes people are really fucking frustrating and keep seeing the best in us.”

┈

Anjali cradled Kato in her lap, providing what comfort she felt she could offer and despairing over how inadequate it all seemed. Anarchy had never really needed comfort when he’d confided in her about some of his traumas all those years ago; he’d been matter-of-fact and, sure, uncomfortable, but his honesty had just been honestly and had in no way prepared her for the poverty of language that there was when it came to this, whatever this was; some shotgun blast of a Catholic confession with no priest around to offer absolution. There was just her. Just her and her ailing friend. 

He looked like a corpse laying in her lap; he kept telling his story like everyone else was dead and he’d killed them—he’d “chosen to”—but she’d seen them all at the wedding, vibrant and alive; Sethfire had even finally put on a little weight and looked healthier than she’d ever seen him. The death Kato professed such guilt for had never even occurred—rather…he was the only one dying. And it was obvious he was.
He’d been starting to look sickly even as a smiling best man and by now he was far too light a weight against Anjali’s body; his skin too cold for the summer air. He was her close friend, her Ancient-Rome-obsessed partner in pdf piracy, a guilt-ridden attempted murderer...And he was dying.
 Anjali’s fear for him quietly overcame her, even as his breathing slowly leveled out. She pulled out her phone and quietly tapped out a text to Anarchy, trusting him—him above anyone, especially as Kato’s closest friend—for much-needed back-up.

「 key, im really worried abt KO. like actually scared. he's really fcking sick |

Ⓐ 「 i know, we’re scared too. he looks like a skeleton. chey and me are trying to figure out what to do |

「 its not just that, he seems suicidal |

“Who are you texting?” Kato asked from Anjali’s lap, not bothering to raise his head. His tone had lost all inflection. “Athena?” 
Anjali couldn’t tell if it was a prompt or paranoia.
“It’s not Athena, K, I’m just letting you rest. I think we should go downstairs soon, though. Inflict ourselves on the happy couple.” Anjali tried to wedge a sliver of levity into her tone, to recapture any essence of banter. “I know you smoked all your taste-buds away, but I need a mixer for vodka.”
Kato mumbled something that might have been a reply; Anjali thought she caught the words ‘tell her’ and ‘shoot myself.’ She turned back to her phone, tapping out another message with increasingly frantic fingers:

「 please do something about his guns |

Ⓐ 「 im on it, Anjali |

Ⓐ 「 i swear to god |

Ⓐ 「 we’re trying so hard to save him |