When The Sky Breaks

 📅 September, 2021

【ᴛᴡ ғᴏʀ ᴀɴᴏʀᴇxɪᴀ, ʜᴏsᴘɪᴛᴀʟɪᴢᴀᴛɪᴏɴ, ᴀɴᴅ ᴍᴇɴᴛɪᴏɴ ᴏғ ᴀᴛᴛᴇᴍᴘᴛᴇᴅ sᴜɪᴄɪᴅᴇ, ᴅᴇᴀᴛʜ/ᴅʏɪɴɢ, ᴅʀᴜɢ ᴜsᴇ, ᴄsᴀ, & sᴇx ᴀs sᴇʟғ-ʜᴀʀᴍ】

 The pain in Kohao’s chest had hit, ironically, halfway through the last lines of In Truth; sharp and unrelenting. He pushed through it, crossing his fingers for his breathlessness to seem nothing more than emotional overwhelm and hoping his smile didn’t look too strained as he said his thanks at the microphone at the end of the set. It was all he could do to hold his back straight as he walked off stage—and as soon as he got out of sight of the audience, he collapsed against the nearest wall in the backstage room, half bent-over, pressing his right hand to his chest as though it would help ease the pain. 

Teagan and Jazz had already made their way backstage, to be there when the set ended so they could see the pair of siblings they were respectively waiting for—but in the face of Kohao slumping against the wall, their anticipatory smiles of greeting dissolved quickly into something terribly worried. Neither had a chance to speak before Anarchy came through the door, though, and immediately noticed Kohao’s pained stance.
“Oh Christ, Kohao…” he started, his eyes widening with alarm, only to be interrupted by the rest of EoI entering the room after him and being met by the scene of something being undeniably wrong.
His friends crowded around him, wide-eyed and obviously anxious, exchanging glances with one another, prompting him with staggered “What’s wrong?”s and “Are you okay?”s. His head spun but he forced a smile and waved a dismissive hand.

“I’m fine, I’m fine,” Kohao said, trying to downplay it all, even though his strained voice stole credence from his words; “I just get chest pains sometimes. Don’t worry, really. I’m okay.”
“No, you’re fucking not and you know it! Stop lying to our faces!” Anarchy barked. His voice had been driven hard more by fear than anger and he shouldered closer to stand in front of Kohao, looking desperate. 
“You’re fucking killing yourself and we can all see it. I’ve been hearing it, K-O; I’ve heard you puke up your food like you think you don’t deserve to eat, and you barely eat now anyway—Chey and I aren’t stupid! We see you starving yourself. We all see you starving yourself.”

Athena’s visible heartbreak had ached from the start, but Anarchy’s words compounded it; she let out some pained noise and suddenly she was there, crouching directly in front of Kohao; clinging to his hands and bowing her forehead to his knuckles as if in prayer. He stared wordlessly from her back up to Anarchy, whose shoulders were shaking. He looked like he was about to cry, and the echoes of the interaction he and Kohao had had a couple days prior were excruciatingly present. 
“...Your eating’s all fucked up, Chey and I know you’re constantly bumping coke, and you’re getting chest pains,” he said thickly. “I’m so fucking scared I’m gonna walk into your room one day and find you dead.”
“What is this, an intervention?” Kohao choked back weakly. He couldn’t manage to be sardonic; it was the frailest a protest could possibly sound. 
“Sure, it can be; you fucking need one,” Anarchy said, his wavering frown and glassy eyes betraying that despite his defiant reply, he was at the very edge of breaking down. “I know how close you came to killing yourself on Thursday, K. You need help.”

Sethfire’s eyes went wide at Anarchy’s words and he took a lurched, instinctive step forward; a horror-struck “What?” escaping his lips as a half-hushed whisper. The only answer Kohao could manage was a small, cornered noise from the back of his throat. His mounting feeling of heartbreak had nothing to do with the pain in his chest, and everything to do with the anguish in his friends’ expressions in the wake of Anarchy spilling the truth of that secret, maybe-not-quite-accidental suicide attempt. There was no room left for further lying or denial of any sort and Kohao’s shoulders hunched instinctively inward, like those of a scolded child. His voice wavered when he spoke.
“I don’t want to go to a ward,” he all but whimpered.
“God, please don’t make it be a coffin instead!” Chey pleaded. His voice cracked with grief; he burst into tears and buried his face in his hands. Kohao stared up at him, dumbstruck.
“I don’t want to have to have any more conversations with ‘Key about what we’re meant to do if we wake up the next morning and you’re gone, K-O,” Chey choked out tearfully, only managing to lower his hands when his husband wrapped an arm around his shoulders. “Please, please don’t make me have another one. I’m so scared. We love you so much.” 

The lump in Kohao’s throat was feeling more and more like broken glass, and something defiant in him began to crack in the face of Chey’s visible agony. Kohao felt lost, somehow: Suddenly unstable, suddenly uncertain. Chey’s heartbroken plea meant that at some point, Kohao’s closest friends truly had started to see a headstone when they spoke to him; that behind closed doors they’d already begun to dread his apparently inevitable upcoming funeral. 

Funeral. 
Coffin.
...Would they bury me in a suit?, Kohao wondered morbidly.
The only one I have is from the wedding. 
That’s awful, I can’t do that to them...

Kohao couldn’t keep some strangled whimper from escaping him; suddenly overcome, suddenly reeling, smack in the middle of a crossroads he thought he’d always known the direction to go: “Use gunsmoke or concrete as a painkiller / and die knowing that I never fucking meant anything.”
But the lyrics he’d written for this most recent album were different than their predecessors and Athena invoked them; kneeling in front of him, his hands in hers—and she looked so scared, they could have been in high school again—
“In Truth, Kohao, you just sang it, you just fucking sang it!” she said, tears spilling down her cheeks, “Tell us you’ll live for us, for fuck’s sake! I haven’t known what to do, K-O, I’ve been watching you get sicker and sicker...You helped save me from dying just like this, I can’t lose you to it, please...” She bowed her head again and Kohao couldn’t bring himself to speak, though silent tears escaped his eyes, too: Too much came with Athena begging him to live, with her dragging up high school and how she still saw that version of him as heroic, as a saviour, not knowing the reality of what he’d done—

But then the nose he was just thinking about having broken appeared in front of him. Sethfire leaned down to look into Kohao’s eyes and put a hand on his shoulder—and then wordlessly pulled him into a hug. Kohao wanted to break down and weep; it felt so similar to Seth’s embrace when he was sixteen; to that long moment held close again, at the bayfront in 2017 after four days missing and presumed dead. 
Athena had released his hands to allow her brother this closeness and so Kohao returned the hug, finally—not remembering if in either of those past embraces he’d ever hugged back, and now finding himself desperate to do so. Tears kept coming even as he fought the urge to start sobbing, and when Seth stepped back from the hug, his eyes were red-rimmed too. He stared at Kohao for a couple heartbeats, at a seeming loss for words, his extensive vocabulary having finally failed him.
“...Please,” he finally managed, his deep voice choked up and tight; “Please, Kohao. Let us help you. I can get you names and numbers...anything. Don’t…” Sethfire swallowed against the obvious lump in his throat. “...Don’t let yourself die.”

Behind him, Jazz’s lip had begun trembling and she put one nervous foot forward, looking uncertain as to if her instinct to comfort would be welcomed. Feeling unbearably fragile, Kohao let himself open his posture to her; an anxiety-ridden invitation that she rushed forward to accept. She’d been nervous at their first meeting but now she no longer feared him and didn’t tremble when she wrapped him in a hug: She was soft and warm and smelled faintly of lavender, using the gentle hands and motherly arms that had helped save Sethfire to now try and provide shelter to his would-be killer. Kohao felt sick inside and clung to Jazz as he never had before; wishing she knew, wishing she hated him, grateful that neither were true and she could still offer him whatever this painful comfort was.

Kohao looked up and over Jazz’s shoulder in time to see Aetos take his own step forward into the impromptu intervention. He was older than he’d ever been and looked the part; a man now, with a dark beard and a teaching degree on the horizon. He wasn’t the anxious teenage boy Kohao had been able to intimidate on that bridge five winters ago, and the wisdom he’d accumulated in the intervening half-decade showed in his eyes now.
“Kohao, you wrote Kintsugi for this album. Please, follow it,” he said quietly, using Kohao’s own lyrics as persuasion, just as Athena had; “Let in the light. Start again.”
“You already have,” Teagan said suddenly. She’d wrapped a comforting arm around Athena and now spoke up from beside Kohao’s oldest friend, her eyes as piercing as ever, but the intensity of her expression not the one of distaste he’d forced her to wear around him for so long. 
“You’ve already started, Kohao, I’ve watched you start to start again,” she continued, leaning forward to put a hand to his right shoulder. “Keep going.”

Kohao felt horribly lost, surrounded by people and yet a world away from them; stranded by their outreach and his indecision. The pain in his chest was waning but it had been replaced by a deep sense of anxiety, and he swallowed hard and stared at the floor, wishing he was anywhere else. It was the distress in Anarchy’s voice that made him lift his head again.
“Please, K-O…” Anarchy said softly, his voice cracking, “Don’t make me find your body. Don’t make me help carry your casket. My brother’s was heavy enough.”
Kohao’s throat ached at the pain in his best friend’s voice, at the worry set so deeply in everyone’s eyes. Finally he found the courage to nod, and let out a shaky breath.
“...Okay,” he all but whispered, “Yeah. I’ll…I’ll at least find a therapist.”

The sleepless circles under his flatmates’ eyes and their persistent pestering meant Kohao did end up making good on his promise, and eventually found himself a little ways’ downtown during the daylight hours, walking into an office building and feeling intensely alien. To him, the therapist office waiting room seemed like a hostile environment; it smelled strongly of potpourri and filing cabinets and Kohao felt he wouldn’t have seemed more out of place in anything short of a nursery. Unsettled, he sat rigidly on a too-cushy couch and fidgeted. 
He’d filled out the initial intake and HIPPA forms online already, but had also written some of his history out on a scrap of paper, for himself...just in case words failed him when the appointment began. As the minutes ticked by out in the waiting area, he nervously folded and unfolded his makeshift script until the abused paper threatened to tear from his anxiety-fueled origami.

Eventually an older woman stepped out of her office and greeted him. She was easily a foot shorter than he was and her hair had gotten halfway to gray, but he found her intimidating nonetheless and walked into the room she ushered him towards with his head bowed and eyes on the carpet. Upon sitting down he was immediately handed another form—crisis assessment—and wanted to be biting over the amount of paperwork...but couldn’t manage it. Instead, he honestly circled the the answers to indicate that yes, he was having serious thoughts of suicide, and yes, they had been daily over the past two weeks. 

He silently scribbled Chey and Anarchy down as his emergency contacts on the last page, having to cross out Anarchy’s actual name, which he’d reflexively written, and replace it with his birth name. It looked wrong. He waited uncomfortably while the therapist flipped through the stapled pages, her expression a severe looking one that he couldn’t quite parse. Her steely eyes were still unreadable when she looked up, with an unrevealing:
“Okay. I read your intake forms and know generally what you’re coming to me about, but would you care to say it in your own words, rather than on a series of number scales?”
“Um. Yeah.”

Kohao unfolded his scrap of paper and looked at it for guidance, but ended up rambling off script several times, feeling like he’d lived too many lifetimes and couldn’t sum them all up in the amount of time he had. He started too recent: With his chest pains and his eating disorder, but that had its roots in high school and everything had its roots in childhood. 

He felt insufferable, whining about his parents not loving him, when he’d never had it as bad at home as Anarchy or Chey. Then his lips went numb over trying to articulate his sexual abuse at school and he eventually gave up trying to say it aloud, instead pointing to the word ‘raped’ on his piece of paper. He skated around “this fucked up thing” he almost did in high school, and felt legitimately crazy while mumbling to the floor about having psychotic episodes that, yes, he’d experienced before ever using cocaine. He rambled his way through his apparently infinite list of various breakdowns and unhealthy coping mechanisms, then finally put his head in his hands and confessed he’d only stopped using sex and sex work as self-harm the previous year and that he’d nearly shot himself in the head a couple weeks ago.
“...Everything just feels fucking impossible now,” he said, raising his head again. “I don’t think anyone can actually help me, honestly, I’m so fucked up. I’m only talking to you because my friends...well, they think...I need to go in a ward.” He half-hoped the stone-faced woman across from him would laugh, or smile; just offer him a reassuring “Of course not” at the very least.

“...Your friends are right,” she said instead, crushingly. She gravely thumbed through his papers. “What I'm seeing and hearing here is a young man who will absolutely die by his own hand or from medical complications without intervention. I’m 100% willing to work with you, but what you need right now is, yes, an inpatient setting. These are your roommates?” she asked, waving the emergency contact forms.
“...Yeah,” Kohao said meekly, shrinking back in his seat by a degree.
“Do you know how much danger you’re in?”
“...Enough for you to call them?”
“I’d much rather you call them and request help in voluntarily committing yourself,” she said seriously, “but looking at you, and hearing from you, if you were to refuse and storm out of this office—it would be criminally irresponsible of me not to call these two and tell them to wrestle you to an emergency room whether you want to go or not.” She looked deeply concerned. “Do you want to make that phone call?”
Kohao wanted to refuse, wanted to fight. He couldn’t. He remembered Chey, bursting into tears backstage. “...Yeah,” he finally sighed. “...Can I do it in here?”
“I’d rather you did.”

Kohao stood up and walked to the office window, which he stared out of without seeing, his hands beginning to shake as he waited for Anarchy to pick up the phone. He could sense his best friend’s chronic panic by how quickly his call was answered, with how he heard Anarchy’s tight draw of breath the same instant he picked up.
“K-O? Are you alright?”
“Yeah, ‘Key...Or...I, uh…” Kohao swallowed hard. “I’m finishing my therapy session and...I’m willing to go to a hospital. Will you come with me when I, like...check myself in? I know...I know I need help.” Through the phone, he heard Anarchy make some fragile noise that couldn't be anything except near-crippling relief.
“Yes, of course I will. Oh, thank God, K...Thank God...”

Epilogue

“My individual therapist here says I’m borderline,” Kohao found himself saying more to the table than to Sethfire, who’d come to visit him that first week at the hospital. “...That’s the bad one, isn’t it?”
“Hardly. You could be Narcissistic, like my mother and father,” Sethfire said neutrally. “Or Antisocial. That would be far more worrisome. Or...would be more worrisome where the safety of those of us in your vicinity was concerned.” Sethfire seemed able to tell levity wasn’t working and leaned forward until he could make eye contact, despite Kohao’s dropped gaze.
“Borderline Personality Disorder is not a life sentence, Kohao. And you couldn’t have clearer traumagenic origins for it. With therapy…? There’s no reason to think recovery isn’t well within your reach. Are you starting DBT?”
“...Yeah. She thinks EMDR might help me, too.” Kohao sighed. “How long have you fucking known, Seth?”
“I haven’t known. It would have been unethical of me to be diagnosing my friends. But...your symptoms have been evident for some time.”
“My symptoms meaning ‘the fact that I make life hellish for everyone around me’?”
“Your symptoms meaning that you are desperate for love, terrified of losing it—to the point of self-destruction—and even when you receive it, you find it almost impossible to internalize. Have you ever let yourself be aware of the fact that I love you?” 

Kohao stared and Sethfire seemed to crumple apologetically in some small way, though he kept smiling. 
“...Perhaps that’s unfair,” he said softly. “I don’t know that I’ve made that clear enough.”
Kohao looked determinedly back down at the table and sniffled. He felt very, very young. 
“How?” he asked. “How can you love me?” His shoulders shook. The anniversary was within days.
“...Without condition,” Sethfire said after a brief pause. “The same as with my sister.”
“We’re not related, though, Seth, that doesn’t make sense! By blood—”
“Blood,” Sethfire interrupted, his eye contact steady, “has likely never meant less to anyone than to the six of us.”