Siren Siren

📅 May, 2014

【ᴄᴡ ғᴏʀ ᴀʟʟᴜsɪᴏɴ ᴛᴏ ʙᴜʟʟʏɪɴɢ, sᴇʟғ-ɪɴᴊᴜʀʏ, ᴀɴᴅ ᴍᴇɴᴛɪᴏɴ ᴏғ ᴍᴀss ᴍᴜʀᴅᴇʀ】

Kato bounced his leg at Eocene’s bar and brooded. Which wasn’t necessarily out of the ordinary for him, but he felt pretty alone in it this time around, because Anarchy sucked right now. He’d gotten a girl, which Kato knew in the back of his head was, in fact, his fault, but goddamn, he hadn’t been expecting it to stick! But it had stuck. Angela had stuck. Like pink bubblegum to a shoe, in Kato’s opinion, which Anarchy clearly didn’t share, because he was all distracted now. Angela seemed to be monopolizing all his fucking time. Kato tried to convince himself he didn’t care by spending more time with his other friends—tried to get Anarchy to notice how much he didn’t care by spending more time with his other friends—but Anarchy didn’t notice, because he was always mooning over Angela, and everyone else didn’t get it, and kept having other plans and their own lives, obviously, Kato guessed, but still…
Not that it was or would’ve been the same, anyway. It was special, how he and ‘Key talked, or at least Kato thought so. The wavelength they were on; it was like what he and Athena had before…before everything.

Kato swirled his virgin cocktail around in its glass and debated trying to flirt an alcoholic one out of some stranger. He couldn’t pretend he didn’t miss it. Miss Athena, that was; the depth of the bond they’d shared in high school. They were still close, fuck, she was the one he was leaning on most, now, with Anarchy being all preoccupied, and maybe she didn’t even know that anything was amiss. He hoped she didn’t know that anything was amiss. Fuck, he wished to God that nothing was amiss but it was; there was that dark shard of truth buried in their bond—at least his side of it—where he knew what he did, or almost did; what he chose to do…

He sighed through his nose and gave the crowd a once-over, or maybe a glare. They’d all played a show tonight; opened for Nightshrike—and it was awesome to be being a band, yeah! But just how big Gabe and all them had managed to become in the same timespan as himself and Athena meant that sometimes Kato ended up nursing his pride a bit. Or a lot. Athena was more able to shrug it off and turn it into a “we’re getting there, too, though,” instead of letting resentment swamp her, but Kato? Oh, he sometimes got so fucking mad at Gabe for being so goddamned successful that he could almost straight-up implode from it.

Much to his chagrin, he spotted Gabe in the crowd and then on the approach, his arm around some pale goth-looking girl whose gold eyes and dark hair reminded Kato of w8 traffic signs. 
“Hey Kato,” Gabe greeted, “Do you remember Leucosia? She’s from school.”
Kato curled his lip. “With a name like that, I should.” He gave the girl a once-over, but she looked only as familiar as any generic goth girl would, complete with fishnet arm warmers and bleach-streaked bangs. “Unfortunately you’ll have to reintroduce your girlfriend to me. Blame one of my many jock-induced concussions.”
Gabe chuckled uncomfortably. “Not my girlfriend, actually…”
“Just a friend,” the girl—Leucosia—said. “I went by ‘Lucy’ at school. Trying to get bullied less.”
“Hm. Did it work?” Kato asked.
She laughed, or made some laugh-adjacent sound which struck Kato as familiar. “Of course not. It’s alright you don’t remember me, I didn’t talk to many people. Missed a lot of school, too. I remember you, though.”
“Uh oh. What for?”
She shrugged one shoulder. “Getting beat up. You spat blood into the guy's face after and taunted him. It was ballsy. Also for getting detention when you walked into school with a lit cigarette and put it out on yourself. I was in detention with you that day.”
Kato raised an intrigued eyebrow. “Oh? What did you do?” 
Leucosia smiled but cast her gaze self-consciously to the floor and glanced at him through her bangs. “I…threatened the school nurse if she told my parents some of the problems I’d been having. She did anyway, though.”

Gabe withdrew his arm from Leucosia’s shoulders and offered Kato a nod. “I thought you two might sorta be another missed connection, like we were, K. So…” he said, before Kato could ask Leucosia what problems she’d been having.
“So you're foisting a friendship upon us troubled outcasts,” he finished Gabe’s sentence for him. “Great, thanks. Appreciate it.” He looked at Leucosia and waved his hands in brusque apology. “The sarcasm’s not, like, for you. About you,” he clarified. “It’s, ya know, nice to meet you. How did we miss each other?”
She slipped into the barstool next to him, a welcome distraction from Gabe being waved over somewhere else; probably to a fan who wanted an autograph, or something. 
 “I’m not sure, I wish we hadn’t; I like your music,” she offered, blinking at him. Her blue eyeshadow glimmered in the cyan neon lights, a cold contrast to her warm, honey-colored eyes.
“T-Thanks,” he stuttered. “Sorry. I think you do look familiar. You look like that Evanescence album.”
She laughed and blushed, her pale skin pinking like clouds at sunrise. “Wow, that’s a compliment and a half. Bring Me To Life, why don’t you, Kato?”

He snorted. She was easy to talk to, definitely easier to talk to than most of his other friends were right now. She liked the same music as him; knew the sting of high school how he did. She’d known Athena only in passing, she said, and lamented not having gotten closer, having tried to get closer, but she was hand-shy around other girls because so many of them had been backstabbers or blatantly mean. Not that boys had been much better, she confided; half of her withdrawal in school had been because of shitty exes who both isolated her and made her feel unlikable.
“Yeah, men are shit,” Kato mused. “But I just can't stop selling my goddamn body to them, can I?”
Leucosia gave him an appraising sort of look. “Are you, like, actually gay?” she asked. “I heard the rumors and everything, but, you know, school’s school.”
“Bi,” he said, then realizing that it came out more curt than he wanted, “Thanks for…taking the rumor mill with a grain of salt. I appreciate it. I just meant that I get it, I guess.”
“You probably do…All of it. All of me. Getting bullied, and getting treated like a piece of meat too…” She gave him a small, swift, shy kind of smile, and scratched at her arm. Her leg bounced; he realized his was, too.
“I need a cigarette, I’m sorry,” she said, “I’m getting antsy. Talking about school sucks.”
“Let’s stop, then,” he said, standing up. “I could go for a smoke, too. Can I join you?” 
“Yeah, definitely.”  

They weaved their way through the throngs of club-goers out into the cool air of the smoker’s pit together. Kato noticed scabs on the knuckles of her right hand as she fumbled her pack out of her purse in the dimmed neon; they reminded him of when he’d punch walls and purge meals in high school. 
“Getting into fights?” he asked.
She almost laughed. “Sure, in a way.” 

His sleeve fell back when he raised his cigarette to his lips and he clearly wasn’t the only eagle-eyed one: Her gaze flickered over the scars on his wrist and then found his face, and he knew that she’d caught that he’d spotted the ones on hers when her mirror of his pose caused her bracelets to slip down her forearms.
“Do you ever wish that someone would walk in on it and stop you?” she asked, as a breath of pale blue smoke. He frowned and made an equivocal noise. “Or maybe even…that you had someone to like…do it with?” she appended. He couldn’t quite read her tone.
“…The latter, I guess,” he answered, after a pause. 
“But that would be crazy, of course,” Leucosia said inflectionlessly.
“Of course.” 
They studied each other.

Anarchy was inside with Angela, Gabe was off being successful, Athena was buying in and Kato was honestly kind of mad at everyone else, too, but everyone else seemed to fade to the background, standing under the eaves of the club and talking to Leu.
They ‘got’ him, but they didn’t get him-get him. They badgered, fucking bitched, about his anger, his drinking, his cigarettes, his sex life. They got those long-suffering expressions when he showed them new lyrics, new tattoos; when he talked about Columbine or Ancient Rome. Sometimes they made him feel downright fucking boring. Leu…didn’t. 

“That’s Dylan’s handwriting, isn’t it?” she asked, tracing her pinkie finger at the corner of her eye, in reference to the tattoo next to his. Kato stopped in the middle of whatever he’d been saying and stared at her. She just looked back at him and continued; “You have his symbol on your arm too. On the crow skull. The-”
“The Everlasting Contrast. Yeah,” Kato finally managed to say, nearly tripping over his own sentence to add, “and yeah, it’s his handwriting. You—you recognize it?”
She gave him a cryptic sort of smile and let her hair fall into her face. “School was bad for me, too, like we touched on,” she said. She took a drag from her cigarette. “Little bit of overlap between the sad-girl tumblr blogs and the…”
“Columbiners. Sorry—the TCC. You recognize his handwriting and call them by their first names though. That’s not just overlap. What’s your handle?”
Her smile grew broader but shyer, a cute sort of paradoxical expression that made him want to smile, too. When she somewhat reluctantly shared her url, swiftly appending “don’t look at it though, it’s embarrassing,” and waving her cigarette to ward him off, Kato realized it was a bit late for such warnings: He recognized it. Not enough to remember exactly which one it was, and she flushed again when he asked if she was “one of those flower crown edits types,” but it was still familiarity, still as fated-feeling as an olive branch to the ark. 

He pulled his ponytail to the side to show her the bolder, bigger Everlasting Contrast tattooed on the nape of his neck, reassuring her that he wasn’t going to find her embarrassing at all: He had ‘KILL MANKIND’ tattooed on his chest; ‘Sad God’ on his bicep; <<VoDkA>> on his thigh. One of the songs on his most recent album was called “Everlasting Contrast.” The conversation drifted from there to his other lyrics; his other ink: The Rubicon; the broken pillar on his inner left forearm. He tugged the hem of his shirt up to show her Emperor Tiberius and she traced the inked-in eyes of the emperor with light fingers and opened a short venture into Kato’s passion for history by asking “Why him? Who was he?”

Kato couldn’t help himself from talking lyrics; Latin; the origins of his new name, even—though he changed direction and delved into her name before she could lose interest like ‘Key always did. Kato rambled about sirens at length, but did manage to reel himself in eventually and skipped getting into Pliny the Elder’s opinions on them in favor of clumsily ending with something along the lines of Leucosia’s her name fitting her. Quickly he clarified, “I mean, like, in the modern sense of the word, sirens being, uh, beautiful and all. Not that you look like…half-bird or something. Though Gabe would be after you, then.” 

She laughed, hopefully at his joke and not at his awkward compliment. She’d seemed attentive while he rambled, at least.
“I guess he would,” she said, still smiling. “I didn’t really know any of that. I thought sirens were all mermaids. I didn't pay attention in school, so much…but listening to you is different.”
“Good to know conversation with me doesn’t hit like a fucking school day,” Kato said, rubbing the back of his neck. She laughed again, her silver angel bites catching the club light and accentuating her smile. She really was beautiful.
“More like a snow day, Kato Winters,” she said, tossing her hair over her shoulder. “I have to catch the Q home though…working tomorrow.”

He wanted to keep talking to her. He wanted to not be on the outside looking in with everyone else. He asked if she wanted to chill together again sometime.
“I’d love to,” she replied; “I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone like you before. I wish we’d talked in school.”
“Me too,” he said, aglow. “Hell, maybe then I wouldn’t have tried to shoot up the place.”
“Hm. Or we’d have been terrible and Mickey-and-Mallory-ed it,” she offered while putting her number into his phone.
“Well, in that case I wish it twice.”