Brothers in Arms

📅 February or early March-ish, 2014

【ᴛᴡ ғᴏʀ ᴍᴇɴᴛɪᴏɴ ᴏғ ᴀᴅᴅɪᴄᴛɪᴏɴ, ᴅᴇᴀᴛʜ, ᴄʜɪʟᴅ ᴀʙᴜsᴇ, ᴀɴᴅ ʙʀɪᴇғ ᴀʟʟᴜsɪᴏɴ ᴛᴏ ᴄʜɪʟᴅ ᴛʀᴀғғɪᴄᴋɪɴɢ】

A full sleeve tattoo, Anarchy decided. Go big or go home, right? Sure, it was impulsive; an inside joke that would take up his entire arm—but it was for Athena; it was about having met her and Sethfire and Kato. It was worth it. Besides, Anarchy had never gotten a tattoo done professionally before. Might as well see what all the fuss was about.

Kato had offered up the parlours he’d gotten a few of his tattoos at, and while the majority of his tattoos were—artistically—pretty damn clean, and Anarchy did appreciate the input...he wasn’t entirely sure he trusted either artists who had been duped by Kato’s fake ID when he was still underage, or tattooists who had no reservations about inking likenesses of school shooters into someone’s skin permanently. He looked elsewhere.

NYC was full of tattoo shops and big-name artists; studios and people with year-long waitlists and whose work he couldn’t hope to afford. But it was also a city people flocked to to chase their passions; start up their clubs, like Astra, or their bands, like the rest of them, or, in the case of the countless off-beat artists of the world...tattoo parlours. There were innumerable ones, popping up like bodegas, neon-lit and ready to flop as soon as rent went up but clinging to life as long as they could, nursed by the city’s counterculture. 

One had sprung up nearby, within the timespan of Anarchy starting to look for a shop, and something about it had draw. Its owner, ‘Fawkes,’ was still it's only artist, but she seemed to know how to make a navigable website...and one that didn’t look stuck in the late nineties at that. Her online portfolio of tattoo work was small, but she had flash examples and charcoal drawings to show, too. She was talented enough that Anarchy decided...fuck it. Take a risk. Support local artists, right? Solidarity.

A week later, after approving an emailed concept sketch from Fawkes and getting an actual appointment, the tattoo parlour, Cinnabar Ink, wasn’t quite what Anarchy was expecting to walk into, even knowing how recently opened it was. It was clearly still in its early set-up stages and looked like it was in some transitional phase between art studio and tattoo parlour: There were canvases propped up against walls and loose papers strewn across surfaces, decisions about what all to hang up or display still needing to be made. There was one long accent wall covered in a collage of photographs that Anarchy couldn’t quite make out, though a fair few looked like headshots for military service. Though he started forward in order to investigate further, he couldn’t keep his attention from being stolen by the rest of the shop: There was endless art just laying around, stacked up and spread out and scattered. Anarchy was amazed by its diversity: Some of it typical tattoo-studio fodder, fun and stylized and clearly flash—but then there was realism, too, in charcoal and pencil and oil pastels; and yet more art that was looser, rougher, even entirely experimental. As chaotic as the impromptu art gallery was, though, Anarchy found that there were things in it that he...recognized.

Some gesture drawings of a person in loose clothing with the limp posture that came with 'nodding out.' An abstract experimental canvas, mostly monochrome but with scattered bright orange accents painted on that Anarchy immediately knew was a depiction of needle caps in a gutter. 
There were miniature canvases strewn atop the reception desk that could’ve seemed abstract-minimalist, but Anarchy knew the lines and dots and colors too intimately to not recognize the ceiling of a methadone clinic; the beige linoleum floors. 

Then more gesture drawings, and more; loose or polished or with the charcoal smudged, it didn’t matter—because Anarchy could read the poses and Fawkes was clearly an incredible artist: She’d captured the posturing between two people about to fight, one clearly weaker but unwilling to give ground, the other aware of his upper hand—and Anarchy could tell that one drawing of someone laying prone was a sketch of someone sleeping but that a different one was someone dead, and he knew, just knew, Fawkes must have seen this all too, because how else would she be able to draw the nuance so perfectly?

The more he looked, the more art popped out at him, visual kinship: Paintings of dusty combat boots. Tattoo flash of dog-tags with morse-code SOS printed on them. New school style tanks and helmets, old school style bald eagles. Olive branches. Olive branches and olive branches and olive branches sticking out of desert sand.
It was a mess of a studio not yet scrubbed up and polished; a gallery of healing before becoming a business, and Anarchy felt suddenly honoured that he was getting to see it like this; raw and pre-marketing, all laid out in the open. His eyes found the abstract of the caps in the gutter again.
...Yeah, he thought to himself; This is a place where it's safe to roll up my sleeves.

Fawkes emerged from the bathroom, then, shaking her hands dry. Her coffee-colored hair was mullet-like but held back in a ponytail and some strands glinted reddish under the light; her forearms were heavily tattooed. She had distinct scarring up the left side of her face that dented her lips at that corner and spider-webbed wanly up to her eye and ear. If Fawkes even noted Anarchy’s eyes on her, it didn’t show: She had a small, nearly appraising smile on her lips and eyes that could have passed for terse if their glint hadn’t been so lively.
“Hey, sorry if you’ve been waiting. Hope the mess is entertaining at least.” She gestured to the room at large.
“No, it’s fine. The mess is more than entertaining.” Anarchy paused, then gestured to the art surrounding them. “You did all these, right? The drawings?”
Fawkes glanced around with an unreadable raise of her eyebrows and nodded. “Yeah. Been a life and a half. Don’t vibe with people who say they run out of inspiration, ya know?” She shrugged. “C’mon, let’s get you set up. Anarchy, right? Neat name.”

Small talk with Fawkes was thankfully absent of any stiltedness, and they chatted casually about nothing in particular while Fawkes set about getting out inks and preparing the stencil. 
Once transferred to Anarchy’s arm, the wing was just about life-size, stretching from his shoulder to his wrist. When they finalized the placement, Fawkes gave a smirk of appraisal and clapped her hands.
“So, you think we can bang this out in a few hours, then? Or you gonna halve the session like a normie? That’s a lotta black on your elbow meat, man, that’s gonna hurt.”
Anarchy snorted and rolled his shoulders. “I’ve been through a few hours of hurting before. Let’s do this.”
“Good man, that’s what I like to hear.”

Getting a tattoo done by machine turned out to be less painful than the stick-n-pokes that had comprised all of Anarchy’s previous ink—or maybe it was that the anticipation wasn’t as bad when you didn’t have to wait to feel each individual puncture. It wasn’t like there was no pain, but it was consistent and the drone of the machine made the experience rather trance-like. Anarchy breathed in the tangy scent of setting paint; an echo of the graffitied squat walls—an echo which was immediately banished by the new-car-smell of the vinyl tattoo chair. More canvases were propped against the far wall, their wood-framed backs towards Anarchy. He wondered what they were paintings of, and why they’d been faced away.

“So, my dude, I’ll bite,” Fawkes eventually said over the hum of the tattoo machine, rousing Anarchy from his thoughts, “Why a snow goose wing? Most people don’t specify, they’re just like, ‘you know, dude, a bird wing.’”
Anarchy half-rolled his eyes with an amused smirk. “Ah, it’s dumb as shit, but my friend was talking to someone about how we met and—well, she and my other bandmates found me passed out on the street, right—? So she was talking about spotting me in that doorway and how fuckin’ pale I was, and she goes; ‘Ya know, I was gonna be poetic and say ‘oh he was like a dying swan in that dark alley’ but he’s way meaner than a swan, so...A goose. You were like a dying snow goose in that alleyway, ‘Key.’ It was funny as shit, I figured I might as well go for it.”
“Bandmates, huh? You play music?” Fawkes inquired, re-dipping her needles. “And okay, spill, why WERE you all pale in a doorway?”
“No, I’m in a band but I don’t play music,” Anarchy said sarcastically. “...Yeah, I'm the bassist. Do uncleans too. And, uh, you're tattooing my arm, I'm assuming you're looking at it. Three guesses as to what I was doing all pale in an abandoned doorway.” He tilted his head at his track scars and raised his eyebrows.

“...Cool line of work, can’t deny it. Seems like good publicity for me, too, inking up a rockstar,” Fawkes quipped. “I got sober off pills before I had the chance to get tangled up in any IV shit, but man...For what it’s worth, I know it’s a battle and I know plenty of people who’ve been here.” Fawkes tapped Anarchy’s inner elbow with a gloved finger. “You must’ve gotten some rough infections or something, huh? You good now? Or still fighting it all?”
“Yeah. Infections and picking at the scabs and stupid street advice. Putting a cig out on an infected track-mark won’t actually kill the infection, no matter how impressive the word ‘cauterize’ sounds.” Anarchy rolled his eyes. “Pro tip, in case you ever end up being a retarded fifteen year old.” He frowned and swiftly shook his head to clear it of the past. “Anyway, though—yeah. I’m still on methadone, but...Yeah. I’m good. Fighting but good.”
“Good for you, dude. Shit’s hard to kick. The memories, too.” Fawkes gestured vaguely towards the canvases propped against the far wall, giving Anarchy’s arm a brief respite before the assault of the tattoo machine returned. “That’s how I dealt. Get all the shit out in paint and stuff.”
“Yeah...I thought I recognized...things, in your paintings. The caps in the gutter, and nodders and everything…”

“You’d think I did it too, wouldn’t you?” Fawkes asked. “Nah...I wasn’t on the street too long, lucky for me, and I never shot up. But I went to a methadone clinic for group therapy when trying to get clean, and I’ve heard a lot, and seen a lot, anyway…” There was a deep sadness to Fawkes’s voice; a new tiredness to her eyes that dragged the rose hues of her irises down to the skin below them, and Anarchy’s heart twinged in his chest.
“Any of it’s too much. What put you there?” he asked, forgetting how vulnerable a question it was for a moment; “What got you out?”
Fawkes sucked in a long breath through her teeth and leaned back, rolling her shoulders. “Oof. Well, honestly—and I know what they say about assuming, but I’ll risk us being asses—I’m low-key assuming we’re gonna relate about something else here, too, judging by those dog-tags you’ve got. They yours?”
“No, they’re...they’re not.”
“Oh, damn. Even so, though—” Fawkes pulled one glove off and dug a tarnished pair of dog-tags out from behind her shirt collar. “These are mine. My grandad was a military man, my older brother went into the marines. I wanted in, too: Had one of those military obsessions that boys are supposed to be the ones to have. I was a pretty good soldier, I like to think. Dedicated. I was just about to turn twenty when me and a couple buddies got grenaded.” Fawkes frowned, watching her tags revolve on their chain. She took a swift glance at the accent wall of photographs, then looked back to Anarchy and gestured to her scarred face. “This is the visible part. Took shrapnel to basically my entire left side. They can’t get all of it out because of complications with the placement. Chronic pain’s the name of the game, now. They prescribed me something in the immediate aftermath, and, well…You know how it goes.” She tucked the tags back into her shirt and resumed tattooing, with a past-dispelling head-shake just like Anarchy’s.
“Anyway. I saw how I was slipping and was fortunate enough to not spend too long on the streets, myself. Plenty of vets end up there long term. I’m one of the lucky ones; I got clean and now I do a lot of volunteer and advocacy work. Try to help out. But enough about me; those aren’t your tags. So. Who’d you lose?”

“Did your friends…?” Anarchy trailed off, twisting his head to look at the collage wall. It seemed more and more like a potential memorial.
“They didn’t make it, no.” Fawkes hunched her shoulders; the topic was too heavy for it to ever manage to pass for a shrug. “They’re up there. So’s my brother. Anybody who I meet at groups or outreaches, if they’ve lost someone—in service, or to overdose or suicide after coming home—I offer to hang up a photo if they want. Some of the flash I have is reproductions of tattoos some of them up there had. I get the family’s permission, of course. Money from those tattoos goes to donations. Like I said…Trying to help out.”

Anarchy blinked a couple times, grief and respect mixing in his chest, so familiar a combination when it came to the topic at hand.
“...I’m sorry about your friends,” Anarchy said eventually. “And your brother. That’s who I lost, too: My brother.” He tapped Hunter’s tags with his free hand. “Hunter. He went off to join the army because...Well, because my dad’s a shitting piece of fuck, really. He’d been beating the hell outta us and our mom our whole lives, and Hunter thought...that army paycheck could spring us all. He got blown up instead and my dad cut my face open. You might’ve noticed the scar.” Anarchy averted his eyes when Fawkes glanced up to re-inspect his face.
“...I ran away at fourteen. From Fresno. Hopped freight here, and...well. Got involved with drug running and then...drug-doing.” Shame boiled in the pit of Anarchy’s stomach as it always did when this chapter of his story came up; the part where he’d gloss over or leave out how his body had been sold and not just drugs...And how there’d been someone else with him, too; someone gone, missing, absent but so long as he wasn’t named...not dead. Not persuasively dead. Not to Anarchy.
“Your dad’s the one who did that to your face?” Fawkes asked, jerking Anarchy back out of his head.
“Yeah. Smashed his whiskey bottle and swung.”
“Woof. Jesus…” Fawkes clicked her tongue and turned her attention back to Anarchy’s arm, which was starting to ache rather fiercely. “Wish I were more surprised to hear about that kinda thing. But running how I do, you hear it all. Lots of DV. Unfortunately. I actually kinda…babysit on occasion for other women I work with when they’re going to group or trying to sort out their lives in regards to their partners.”
“Oh? Damn, that’s…that’s really good of you.” The more Fawkes talked, the more Anarchy wanted to keep talking to her; the more he wanted to introduce her to everyone else. She seemed so on their level; crazily compatible with not only him, but Athena and Astra, too; they all seemed similarly driven and bold. And with the dedication Fawkes felt to helping others, maybe she and Seth would get along, too.
“If you’re not busy with one of those kids this weekend, feel free to show up to Eocene nightclub on Saturday evening,” Anarchy offered; “My band’s doing a set. Feel like the rest of ‘em would like meeting you, so, thought I’d invite. My dime, not yours, if you wanna see the show.”
“Aw shit, I can’t turn it down if it’s free, huh? Wouldn’t anyway. I’ll wanna see how ugly this bad boy looks in concert lighting and all scabbed up.” Fawkes grinned and re-dipped her needles. “How many new clients am I likely to get?”
“No guarantees, but we all have ink and I know at least Athena and K-O are wanting more. Some of the Nightshrike crew might take you up, too; Gabe was the one ‘Thena was talking to to spark the snow goose thing.”
“Sick. Let's get this sleeve done, then, so that I can show off to all your friends as much as they’ll be showing their musical skills off to me.”
“Aight. Just go ahead and black my elbow now though. I’m sick of waiting for it.”
Fawkes glanced up; an incredulous, nearly proud grin stretching across her face.
“...You’re showing off to me, too, right now, huh? Beast. Sure, let’s go.”

Anarchy’s elbow was still tender to the touch when he got home a couple hours later and immediately launched into telling the others about Fawkes; how cool she seemed, how much they had in common, that she would probably be coming to Eocene that weekend. Athena was appropriately impressed by the wing tattoo and followed Fawkes on both Twitter and Instagram; her enthusiasm, as ever, bolstering Anarchy’s own. He couldn’t wait to see what everyone else would make of meeting the cool ex-military tattoo artist.
Fortunately, he didn’t have to wait that long.

Saturday came quickly and Anarchy was pretty sure he saw Fawkes’s tell-tale mullet in the crowd that night, but she’d gotten lost in the menagerie of peacock-colored punks and it wasn’t until Anarchy’d dumped his guitar in the back room and made it out to the bar area, post-show, that he got confirmation. Somehow Athena had found Fawkes before he did and the two of them were already deep in conversation by the time Anarchy approached with an enthused “Ayy, you made it! And you’ve met Athena already!”
“Yes I have!” Fawkes laughed, clapping and squeezing Athena’s shoulder before kicking back and gesturing out toward the crowd. “I didn’t expect you all to be a real band with a real concert, I’ll be honest. I thought I’d be showing up to a closet full of crust punk kids drinking stale beer and listening to noise.”
“Great, I live to disappoint,” Kato’s drawl cut in from just behind Anarchy, who rolled his eyes and grinned, “Thanks for coming despite the low expectations! Good of you.” He gestured over his shoulder. “This is Kato. K-O. I mentioned him before?”
“Uh-oh,” Kato deadpanned. Fawkes laughed.
“Anarchy here just said you might be interested in more ink. Nothing bad. Why, should we get some unsavory shit out of the way?” she asked, a glint of challenge to her eyes. 
Anarchy braced for Kato to drop his usual bombs of attempted homicide and childhood suffering. He made grimaced eye-contact with Athena, whose expression echoed his own.
“...Nah. Like I said, I live to disappoint,” Kato responded; “I’ll blueballs you on information now and then—”
“Tell me the unsavory shit after I’ve developed expectations of you? Good, sick plan. Looking forward to it. But moreso to stabbing you when you want your next tat. What’ll it be of?”
Fawkes’s dry, unintimidated tone and her smirk seemed to catch Kato slightly off-guard; Athena and Anarchy exchanged a small, amused smile during the pause he took in responding.
“...Good wording for my masochistic ass, I guess. Though don’t play the stabbing up too hard, you’ll end up disappointing me.” He shrugged. “I want the colosseum ruins. On my elbow.”
“Longing for those good, thorough gladiatorial stabbings of the olden days, huh?” Fawkes asked dryly.
“...Always.” Kato smirked and strode off for the smoker’s pit, leaving Athena eye-rolling while Anarchy offered a half-amused, half-exasperated, “He’s just kind of like that at first, yanno, but a good guy, really.” 
Fawkes laughed. “Don’t worry about it. I’ll just follow him out for a smoke and lock in that appointment.”

By the time Kato and Fawkes walked back in a mere five minutes later, they’d already gotten deep into some conversation that bordered on an argument which Anarchy could only half-follow. As far as he could tell it involved Fawkes’s apparent disdain for Intratec firearms, which caused Kato to bristle nearly as much as her smirked insistence that modern guns were the only ones worth caring about.
“—Intratec went out of business in 2001 for a reason, champ,” she said; “Listen, I was in the military, I know gun nuts like you. But you just can’t argue technological advancement. New guns are better. If you’re singing the praises of outdated models like that, it’s nerdiness, nostalgia, or ego. Nothing else.”
“I’m not fucking saying a Tec-9 could outgun any KRISS Vector SMG,” Kato spat back; “Both me and my ego know there’s no technological comparison at hand! But you can’t pretend that ego and nostalgia aren’t relevant aspects of culture, especially gun culture. You have to take in what certain guns meant for combat and defense at the times they were invented or manufactured, and firearms aren't always about mechanical efficacy anyway! The societal impact of certain guns is important.”
“Ah, we don’t have to get into that, do we?” Anarchy tried to interrupt, but Fawkes was already laughing.
“What do you mean, ‘firearms aren't always about mechanical efficacy’?” she tossed back to Kato, though there was more interest to her expression than the dismissive quality of her voice gave away. “Guns are all about their utility.”
“You would have that opinion, being military,” Kato retorted. “That’s a streamlined system where both the weapons and the people utilizing them are cogs in a machine. In a more human context—”

“Hey.” Fawkes cut him off, her laugh abruptly gone. “When I’m talking the military, I’m not talking ‘context.’ Every single one of us there was human, so don’t—”
“I know, but were you treated like it?” Kato matched his tone to hers; both their chins were lifted. Fawkes looked somewhat confused.
“We—” she started.
“I’m saying ‘human context’ as in ‘a context where humans have enough fucking leeway to see themselves and other people as humans,’” Kato said; “A context where humanity applies more than utility. What were you to the military, Fawkes? A human? Or a utility? Did the system treat you like a person when you got back, or like a tool that had outlived its usefulness?” Kato jerked his head to indicate Anarchy. “‘Cause it seems like the military didn’t extend any perceived humanity in that direction, for his brother’s family, does it? And you got dropped on your ass too. Systems don’t operate in a human context. They operate in an industrial one.”

Fawkes raised an eyebrow and crossed her arms, but looked more impressed than anything else. “How old are you, Kato?” she asked.
“Eighteen. Why?”
“Damn, enlistment age.” She conceded a smile that didn’t quite manage to be a smirk and leaned back against the bar. “But you’d have a recruiter running for the hills with all that and it sounds like you don’t need the college tuition offer they’d try to hook you with either. Fine then, I admit the military leaves some humanity to be desired. But even so, ‘in a more human context,’ what? It doesn’t matter how well a gun can shoot?”
Kato looked pleased, if surprised, by the compliment and the invitation to continue; there was a gleam in his eye as he went on, though less defiant in tone; “...In a more human context a gun doesn’t only matter because of how well it can shoot.”

Anarchy ended up losing track of the conversation there, or maybe it was more like purposefully checking out, because as articulate as his best friend was, Anarchy had heard enough already and didn’t really feel like he wanted to listen to the near-reverent way Kato effused about how a firearm’s visual and cultural significance mattered more than its mechanical capabilities in the long run, “since it would remain relevant to society’s emotional memory even when surpassed by modern guns in terms of actual use.”
Fortunately Fawkes seemed intrigued by the take, and Kato moved on to less troubling grounds afterwards with his opinions that weapons had the shortest half life of anything martial when it came to long term relevance anyway—that it was military strategies and leadership that actually endured.
Eventually Kato wandered off to the bathroom or to solicit another drink from someone, and Anarchy slipped into his vacated spot to point out a couple members of Nightshrike to Fawkes and to ask her how she was holding up; he knew Kato could be a bit much.
“You don’t have to look so on edge about him,” she said in response to Anarchy’s concern, gesturing off in the direction Kato had disappeared. “Sure, he talks over my head sometimes and that sucks since he’s a kid, but he has some interesting points of view and knows what he’s talking about. I respect that. His long ramble about the Roman Legion resulted in him booking two additional future tattoo appointments, too, so I’m not interested in shutting him up.”
“That might make you the only one,” Athena cut in with a laugh, suddenly reappearing with Astra and Gabe in tow; “But here are some additional chatty canvases for you…”

Fawkes ended up hitting it off with essentially everyone; just as compatible with his crew as Anarchy had expected her to be. Gabe and Astra playfully gave him shit for infringing on the Nightshrike branding with his bird-oriented ink, then took Fawkes up on brainstorming tattoo concepts for themselves, and maybe even commissioning band-based flash designs. Coahoma got looped into considering more sincerely the idea of back-of-the-neck bird wings that she’d had in mind for a little while, and exchanged emails with Fawkes at Anarchy’s and Astra’s encouragement. Fawkes herself came away damn pleased, ending the night with several new appointments, and gave Anarchy a friendly punch to the shoulder as they headed toward the door.
“Thanks,” she said with a smile; “I’m looking forward to seeing you all around more.” 
Katoo chose that moment to shoulder-check both of them on the way out and she called after him; “Yeah, you too, ponyboy. Don’t blow any more potential tattoo money on building some toy gun.”
He flashed her a smirk and drawled back, “It’s a toy cultural icon, remember?” with a finger-tap to his temple. She shook her head and laughed.
“He has issues,” she said to Anarchy. “I like him.”