Ready To Fall

📅 April, 2017

【ᴄᴡ ғᴏʀ ᴀʟʟᴜsɪᴏɴ ᴛᴏ ɴsғᴡ ᴍᴀᴛᴇʀɪᴀʟ ᴀɴᴅ ᴍᴇɴᴛɪᴏɴ ᴏғ ᴍᴀss ᴍᴜʀᴅᴇʀ】

Fawkes was already awake and pouring coffee when Kato stumbled out of her bedroom and into the pale, early sunlight that had begun to seep into the kitchen. He mumbled a groggy greeting that she met with a kiss, something tender and nearly chaste, without teeth worrying his lip; a kiss not meant to precede anything more. It was new for him.
Leu had been too much like him to kiss that way—too hungry, too hollow. They were either so intertwined as to be one creature or they were worlds apart and apoplectic over it. Fawkes was different. No one who knew her would define her as gentle, and no one who didn’t know her would assume such, either—but she was…defined. When she kissed him, she kissed him, and the boundaries between them didn’t blur and bleed over and blow out. She wasn’t gentle; the kiss was; it was for him. He smiled softly into it. It was recent, the kissing, very recent; had only started sometime after he started sleeping over. Which had been on the couch, mostly. Up until recently, as recent as the kissing. 

He’d cut his hair last year and she’d read him too well, had known it was about needing to shed history, not about aesthetics. He’d defensively reeled off his script about wanting the Lance Kirklin but not the fucking bowlcut part to her and she’d taken it in without flinching, her good eye just as expressionless as her blind one, and had asked what it meant to him to not have Dylan’s ponytail, anymore, and to instead be modeling himself after a boy that Dylan had shot in the face.

It was too much, something he hadn’t even read into himself, and suddenly he’d started seeing her in a whole new light, as someone who knew him, got him, listened to him when he talked and then cared enough to wonder. To ask. And he’d been freaked out as all hell about it, of course, and had tried to snap himself out of it by sleeping with his other best friend more, because Anarchy didn’t ask as many questions and didn’t want to talk about Columbine.

But Anarchy didn’t want to talk about being gay, either, or what they were doing, and every time Kato looked in the mirror he’d thought about Fawkes’s question; churned it over in his head and wondered if she knew him better than he knew himself and if knowing was enough; if knowing was caring and caring was love and when he’d next be able to talk to her; have her talk to him, have her look at him and see him and know him.
He’d been fresh out of his total fucking apocalypse of a situation with Leu, and Fawkes had admitted her interest but said no. Not while you’re rebounding. So he did what she’d suggested instead: Hang around more. See where it goes. And where it had gone had been to her shop, to talk, and then to her apartment, to drink and play video games and talk some more. He came over and played his guitar on her floor; running lyrics past her for singles or potential new albums, or writing scraps of verse for her just to get his creativity flowing. “Tell me what you’re pissed about right now and I’ll start a song about it,” he’d say out of boredom, and she’d reel off about work hours or imperialism or the weather, and he’d slap down some lines that would make her laugh or eye him like a fortune teller she wasn’t sure she wanted to believe. 

He spent more than one night on her couch after getting too smashed to get his ass home—not that he didn’t still try, but she wrestled his keys out of his hand, with a half exasperated, “You’re wasted enough that you could crash a cable car. No way I’m letting you on a motorcycle.” 

Outside of keeping him from DUIs, though, she’d actually been one of the more disappointingly unreactive people when it came to his motorcycle. She’d acknowledged it was a nice ride when he’d first gotten it, sure, but failed to be horrified by his tales of how exactly he’d worked up the cash for his bike. Instead she gave him the same expression she’d worn for his haircut and asked how he felt about it, and if the bike felt worth it to him, and how deep into the “industry” he was and if he needed help getting out. She knew of resources. Plenty of people got in too deep, she said, these places know it’s not just women, if you need a hand I can get ahold of one for you. She’d seemed somewhat relieved that he didn’t have a pimp (“just poor impulse control,”) and that he wasn’t still “working” (it wouldn’t feel right, now.) But she hadn’t lost it, like Leu would’ve, and hadn’t fussed and been furious in equal parts, like ‘Key. 

She was good at being unreactive, really. In general. She emoted, it wasn’t that she didn’t, but her laughter was dry and her answers could be closed; she didn’t recoil from shocking shit he said and she could blanket an entire conversation in sarcasm if she chose to—and she often chose to. It would slip a bit if she drank, though, and so Kato knew he and his ever-present alcohol were privy to a little more openness than perhaps the rest of the world. Still, Fawkes didn’t tend to flip out how he did, and when she talked about “breakdowns” she’d had in her past they usually involved very few things breaking. Sure, a tooth during some fight in the military; a vase in the hospital after she’d lost her leg and been shipped back home…shit like that. But they were events, few and far between and heavily context dependent—a stark contrast to the frequent occurrences of what Kato classed as his breakdowns, where when it came to shit that ended up broken, he could easily end up ticking boxes for his knuckles, his nose, his door-frame and his drywall. 
No, Fawkes seemed even-keeled, generally contained and, for the most part, all shored up: Good company for someone as castaway and washed-up as Kato felt in the aftermath of everything with Leu.

And for a long time they kept it at that, at company. They hung out a lot, sure; eventually he was spending a good third of the week at her place and more than that with her if he counted the hours shooting the shit at her shop, and they’d get lunch or dinner or something and they sat close on the couch during movies and sometimes their touches maybe lingered, but he also slept on the couch when he stayed over. Hell, the first time he’d slept over in her bed had been an accident: They’d been in the bedroom for some reason or another, talking, with her tipsy and him nearly toppling over, and they’d just fallen asleep. 
“I promised myself I wouldn’t sleep with you. Now look at me,” she’d joked the next morning.
“That been a hard promise to keep?”
“Oh, excruciatingly.” And she’d rolled her eyes and kissed him and then rolled off the bed to get dressed for work before he could even process it. 

He’d started sleeping in her bed with her more regularly after that, and kissing, and this morning— as had also become routine—Fawkes handed him his coffee with creamer already in it; not too sweet and the exact shade it would be if he’d made it himself. She told him not to not to comb out his bedhead because it suited him, so he didn’t, immediately at least, and wasted as much time as he could getting ready to leave; letting his coffee go cold twice so he’d have to over-reheat it and then wait for it to cool down. He let Fawkes talk him into having breakfast with her, and he nearly burnt their sausages because he and she fell into a conversation that deepened and then lightened so easily—time flew like a bird with her—that the waffles she was in charge of came out rather thoroughly toasted as well. Throughout breakfast they chit-chatted and playfully bickered over the fact that he preferred salted butter and table syrup to her unsalted and genuine maple.

“You don’t say ‘sorry’ nearly enough for you to be justified in being offended on behalf of Canada,” he said, “You’re already not true to your ancestry. Besides, you risked your neck for the American army—that’s corn syrup, baby.”
“How dare you,” she laughed; “The French is the dominant half of my French-Canadian roots anyway, that’s what prevents me from saying ‘sorry.’”
“Can’t be.” Kato waved his fork dismissively, dripping syrup on her counter. “You having balls enough to join the military precludes you from identifying with Frenchness, either.”
She laughed.

They cleaned up together and both seemed to take as long as possible to do that; Kato was still hesitating about heading out even as he lingered in her doorway, zipping up his jacket with an unlit cigarette between his lips.

“It’s nice to have you here,” Fawkes said, as though reading his mind. “I miss you when you’re not.”
“Hm. Maybe I should move in,” he joked; half-joked. “Though…” he paused, the question on the tip of his tongue, just behind his cigarette. 
She raised an eyebrow. “‘Though…’?”
“We’d…Well, we’d probably want to make things official before we did anything crazy like that,” he started, haltingly, as he removed the cigarette from his lips, “I get if—I mean—I’ll get it if things have changed for you, or if this is just…not, you know, but since before, you said—and I really…don’t think I’m rebounding, like, that’s not what you are to me.”
“What am I to you, then?” she asked with a small smile; that one eyebrow still raised, a spark in her good eye.

“...Inspiring,” he settled on saying. He fiddled with his cigarette and still couldn’t keep eye-contact, abruptly waiting for rejection, because surely if she was still on board with making them something permanent she’d have said so already. Yeah, they had fun but maybe it was just fun, not chemistry like he’d been feeling, and for her ‘seeing how it goes’ was more like seeing it until it’d gone.
“Don’t get so romantic, I’ll swoon,” she laughed—but not at him, even he could tell. It was a laugh for him, with him, just like with the syrup. 
“I’ll catch you if you do,” he chanced, still nervously rolling his cig between his index finger and thumb, the faintest ghost of a half-smile playing on his lips. “You’ve kind of got me spellbound, Fawkes, being honest.”
“Idiot,” she said, then laughed again and stepped closer to him, sweeping her hair out of her face. “‘I’ll get if things have changed’? You moron, I’m the one who told you to give this a shot! Of course things haven’t changed. Or, you know, they have, but…into this. Yeah. Consider us official.” 

She gestured the ‘this,’ as the minimal space between them and then stepped in to close it, and his heart alit with the ‘this:’ ‘This’ where it wasn’t just him; ‘this’ where things had deepened for her, too, and she really did appreciate how the morning sun brought out the blond in his hair; where she knew he took his coffee with just enough creamer to change it from near-black to something more umber in color. She covered everything with a sardonic tone just like he did but clearly it was true that she’d been hoping the whole way through that it was a matter of when he’d eventually be ready for ‘this,’ himself, not if he would. 

“I mean, we get along, you’re funny when you’re not annoying, and now you’re acting all weird and sweet, so I might make a decent boyfriend out of you yet. Why wouldn’t I go for it?” she teased him.
“...Are the justifications for my benefit or yours?” he still asked, unable to rein in his self-sabotaging cynicism even as she reached up to cup his cheek. Luckily she smiled.
“Yours. I’ve never bothered justifying any of my bad decisions to myself.”

She kissed him again, and it was like the one before; softer and new in that softness, fond and easy and untainted by the taste of hard liquor. A morning kiss, a daylit kiss; a sober and shameless and unshrouded kiss.

Fawkes was still smiling when she pulled away.
“A boyfriend,” she said with a disbelieving shake of her head, “Never thought I’d see the day. The disfigurement and rabid feminism always seemed to kind of shallow my dating pool.”

“Hey. You’re beautiful.” Kato smiled back at her and he could feel it in his eyes, too, the corners of them crinkling; even as he went to put his usual cigarette back in his mouth, his stubbornly upturning lips threatened to drop it. “But yeah, I thought I’d never date again and you’re only the second woman I’ve been with. So, there’s that. We’re an all-round statistical improbability, I guess. Maybe it’s fate,” he said as he turned to go, his hand on the doorknob. Fawkes scoffed.
“You don’t believe in fate.”
“Nah,” Kato replied easily, “But I think I might believe in you.”