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, and though she never kissed gently, never kissed chaste, it was a kiss all the same and a kiss without teeth worrying his lip; a kiss not meant to precede anything more. He couldn’t quite remember when they’d started doing that, just kissing, but it must have been recent, very recent; sometime after he started staying until morning.
“It’s nice to have you staying ‘til sunrise, now,” Fawkes said teasingly against his mouth, as though she could read his mind; “I get to see your neck all marked up. Inspect my handiwork, you know.”

Yeah, she didn't get to do that before. It used to be that he’d leave at the end of their nights; she’d never have a chance to see the hickies she’d left on his throat in daylight because he’d be out the door before the moon reached its height in the night sky. After a while he started staying a little later, started leaving in the early morning—it wasn’t that much different though; he’d still be gone and the bed would be cold by the time Fawkes really woke up. But he’d been staying past sunrise, recently. And he’d been coming over more often—it was almost routine; half of the week, he’d be there by evening, would stay until morning. 

He still never stayed longer than it took for him to finish his coffee and put his clothes back on—it was rarely more than fifteen or twenty minutes between his mumbled “g’morning” and him shutting the door as he left—but today as Kato got ready to leave, standing at her front door and zipping up his jacket with an unlit cigarette in his mouth, he hesitated.
Fawkes had handed him his coffee that morning with creamer already in it; not too sweet and the exact shade it would be if he’d made it himself. She’d kissed him good morning and told him not to comb out his bedhead because it suited him. And even though she’d asked it like a sarcastic joke, she’d asked if he was ever planning to stick around for breakfast.
Maybe…

Trying to force himself to speak felt like trying to force himself out of an airplane as a skydiver. They were fuckbuddies, that was all; they were casual and just-for-fun and he knew, outright knew, Fawkes didn’t ‘date.’ They were friends-with-benefits, but very much friends with benefits: He knew her and she knew him and they both knew that they shared an attitude towards relationships and intimacy. He didn’t do what he was thinking about doing now. He slept around, notched up other people’s bedposts, kept his eyes and heart guarded and laughed at the idea of love or romance. But at some point, things had shifted for him towards her.

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, who listened when he talked and 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 and it seemed like the best way to keep sex meaningless was to have more meaningless sex.

But every time he 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 ended up spending half his spring in her bedroom and found himself lingering in her doorway, with averted eyes and the question on the tip of his tongue, just behind his cigarette. 

“You know, Fawkes—” he started, haltingly, as he removed the cigarette from his lips, “We could—I mean—I’ll get it if it isn’t this way for you, but we...” he faltered, his confidence ebbing too quickly for him to hold onto, and shook his head. “...You know what, never mind.”
“No, spit it out. What’s up?” Fawkes asked.
Kato heaved a sigh of surrender and shrugged one shoulder.
“I was just thinking…if you wanted, we could make something out of this. Make it real. You know. Date. I could take you out to dinner before we fuck or something.” He fiddled with his cigarette and still couldn’t keep eye-contact, waiting for rejection and knowing his posture could only betray what his blunt, half-sarcastic tone failed to cover up.
“Don’t get so romantic, I’ll swoon,” she laughed—but even as she threw back her snarky reply, her tone softened somewhat and she tilted her head. He felt her gaze on him; studying, searching.
“...You mean it?” she eventually asked, speaking slowly and carefully, like she was having to pick her way through verbal brambles, “You’d do that? Make this…‘real’? You?”

He couldn’t read the intention of her tone but glanced up at her, still nervously rolling his cig between his index finger and thumb, the faintest ghost of a half-smile playing on his lips.
“...Yeah,” he said quietly, “You’ve kind of got me spellbound, Fawkes, being honest.” His face fell as resignation seeped back in, and he looked away again. “I’ll get it if it’s not the same way for you, though.”
“Idiot,” she said, then laughed and stepped closer to him, sweeping her hair out of her face. “Fuck it. Why not, right? Why...Why not.” There was a nervousness deep in her chest that Kato could hear, just barely, and knew it to be knotted up in the shadows of her past—the same shadows he’d assumed dark enough to blot out any hope of...this. This, ‘this’ where it seemed that his ‘maybe’ had been right and it wasn’t just him; ‘this’ where things had changed 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 maybe it was true that at some point she’d started wondering when he’d eventually stay for breakfast, not if he would—and she’d been looking forward to the morning he eventually did. 

“I mean, the sex is good, we get along, and now you’re acting all weird and sweet, so I might make a decent boyfriend out of you yet. Why not go for it? Try?” she teased him gently, seeming gratified by the pleased surprise that lit his face when he shook himself from total shock and met her eyes.
“...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 laughed.
“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, of a different cloth than the nighttime ones where they’d bruised one another’s lips with their teeth; exchanged breaths while tangled up in her sheets. This was different; 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.”

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.
“Well, I don’t date either and you’re the only woman I’ve been with. So, there’s that. We’re an all-round statistical improbability. 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.”