We’ve Built Bridges Just For Burning
📅 Autumn/winter 2017; after the confrontation in The Waterfront
【ᴛᴡ ғᴏʀ ᴍᴇɴᴛɪᴏɴs ᴏғ sᴜɪᴄɪᴅᴇ, ᴅᴇᴀᴛʜ, ᴅʀᴜɢ ᴜsᴇ, ᴠɪᴏʟᴇɴᴄᴇ, ᴀɴᴅ sᴇʟғ ʜᴀʀᴍ】
Things really started to fall apart, there, as October died. It wasn’t fair and it was messy and Kohao wanted to tear himself apart with how at fault he felt for it all, but no one seemed willing to let him take the blame. Aetos just kept saying, “This isn’t on you. Dominoes just fall, Kohao.”
And it’s true. Dominoes just fall when the first is pushed, and even if one in line would give anything to remain standing, gravity wins out every time. A deck stacked in your favor will still be scattered by a gust of wind if built into a card tower. Sometimes there’s no butterfly that causes a hurricane; sometimes there’s just the rhythmic click, click, click as the dominoes topple.
Kohao’s nose was broken but Fawkes wasn’t the reason for all the chaotic pain, for how everything seemed to be caving in. Kohao had expected her anger when he crossed that threshold—the only shock had been that she seemed pissed he’d gone out to kill himself at all, and Kohao had been convinced that she’d be angry only because he’d failed to do so. She was his ex-girlfriend; she was entitled to hate him. Hit him. He’d seen that blow coming. It was Bryluen’s low laughter and her cruel line of “Punishment would do you good!” that had taken him by surprise and dug like a knife into his gut. He’d been all fragility and dehydration and impulse; teetering already. Dressed in monochrome. A domino.
And honestly? A feather, a breath, a whisper could have done it, he was so fragile—but it was a cold tone and haughty eyes. Harsh words and high cheekbones. And from there—a trigger almost pulled. Blood almost spilled. Tears on his cheeks and that unnerving pin-drop silence.
Click, click, click...
“Dominoes just fall, Kohao.”
—
It took Kohao three days to pull himself together and knock on Fawkes’s door. He’d been unable to meet her eyes at first and whispered his apology to his shoes; said sorry for being selfish, for scaring her, for everything he did and everything he didn’t do.
And despite all the bitter fire she was capable of, she seemed able to read his honesty, his vulnerability. Seemed able to see the truth. Though the air between them still hung tense and heavy, she had conceded that they didn’t belong together; that if they had ever been a match, surely they’d burned like one. And incredibly, despite the tension between them, Fawkes still ended up taking his side, in her way.
“You’re a selfish idiot asshole,” she’d said at one point during their long, fraught conversation, and he’d braced for her to throw another punch. But she had followed it up with a brooding brow-furrow and a snapped, “But Bry shouldn’t have said that shit to you. Bitch. Anyone could see you were fucked up. And I’d already done enough damage.”
“I owed you that swing,” Kohao mumbled to his shoes. “I just wasn't expecting hers.”
“...I think we both owed each other out of that relationship,” Fawkes said heavily. “Before it came to taking swings.”
Even if the acknowledgement was still hurt and somewhat bitter, she clearly shared the opinion that the break-up had been an inevitability. Kohao apologized again for the fact that they’d ended up there; that they hadn’t gotten out of it before either of them had thrown a punch.
She apologized for breaking his nose.
No apology came from Bryluen, though. Not after a day, or two days, or a week. Kohao chewed the edges of his fingers until they bled and wondered if he deserved one, and it was only Athena and Anarchy’s open anger on his behalf that managed to keep him convinced he did. He swung between suicidal self-blame and blinding anger—drank until he puked, railed cocaine until his nose bled. He’d ride his stimulant-induced mania to its crash; wrote his heartbreak, heartache, loss and grief and all his tangled emotions into lyrics until his hand went numb from gripping his pencil too tightly. He dented drywall and played guitar until his calloused fingers cracked.
His knuckles and fingertips weren’t the only things he saw splitting, though. There was a rift widening, a coldness setting in that had nothing to do with November’s onset.
Bryluen wasn’t the only quiet one. Whereas Gabe had been a daily-or near-daily texter before, they’d only had one real text exchange since shit had gone down.
He’d texted Kohao to ask if he’d “really just sat in some park, waiting,” and which one it’d been, considering how exhaustively they’d searched.
It felt like a cold, guilt-trippy kind of question in light of everything that had happened, but Kohao still responded: “I guess. Calvert Vaux, in Gravesend. I thought it’d be kinda funny. Idk.”
Gabe’s “Yea well no one else did, K,” had flipped Kohao’s despondance into defensive anger, especially after his own “fuckin clearly” ended up read but unresponded to. It actually seemed like all of Nightshrike was squirreling away; Anarchy said that Bayer had sent some cryptic message about things being messy on that end and that if he was out of touch it wasn’t because he didn’t care, but there was no elaboration other than him responding to one of Anarchy’s texts saying that, in his opinion, an apology from Bryluen was “unlikely to happen.” And then there was silence.
It was a shock to the system, to be in the dark and suddenly stranded from half of his social circle...but also a surprise was Anjali. In being close with Anarchy, Kohao had by default gotten closer to her—but it still took him aback when she called him to check in. She was Anarchy's friend, not his, really, despite them getting along. She’d undoubtedly only been there at the apartment for Anarchy’s sake, and Kohao figured she’d resent the traumatic scene she’d had to witness. Instead, something about that fiasco of an October afternoon seemed to have won him sympathy, and he got blindsided by an invitation to come over for drinks.
He surprised himself by accepting, and was still feeling only halfway rooted in reality while he awkwardly chatted with her on the rooftop balcony, holding his third hard cider.
“How’re you holding up?” she eventually asked, failing to disguise her worried you-look-rough-as-shit sideways glance; “You know that Bryluen was in the wrong, right? No one else thought you deserved to be punished.”
“I do, though.” He couldn’t keep the words inside so he spat them out and tried to burn their taste away with alcohol, but he said them all the same: “I do deserve to be punished. I’m so fucked up over it because she was right, Anji. She was fucking right, and Seth should’ve let me just fucking shoot myself—God, Seth of all people should—and him behind me like that, and the gun in my hand, it was like being sixteen again...I’m saying too much, god. I can’t tell you why but I swear to Christ she was right. I don’t deserve to be alive.”
He’d been unable to hide the agonized ache in his throat, and Anjali sipped her drink as she gave him a pensive, if concerned, look-over.
“I know you feel like you have your reasons for believing that. But whatever they are, secret or not, I don’t agree. Nobody who cares about you does,” Anjali said, slowly and seriously. “Seth knows you deserve to live, and so do I. You think what you think, but your perception’s outnumbered, K. Trust your friends.”
Kohao scoffed. “Sure, trust my friends. I thought she was my friend. An inconvenience…” He hissed some broken noise through his teeth, but without even knowing it, Anjali had applied the faintest salve: ‘Seth knows you deserve to live.’ Somehow, that much was true. Despite everything. Kohao stared down into his drink.
“...Maybe you’re right, I don’t fucking know. But what she said, how she said it...it keeps echoing around in my goddamn brain; it’s like a fuckin’ record on repeat and I can’t turn it off. ‘Punishment would do you good’...It’s like something my dad would’ve yelled at me. I can’t not wanna kill myself.” He shook his head. “She hasn’t spoken to me in a week. Everyone from Nightshrike’s been weird. Barely any texts, no calls, no reason for it, nothing. Gabe sent me one awkward ass message and nothing the fuck else, and apparently Astra’s been squirrely as hell with ‘Thena, too? ‘Key’s had some wierd communication with Bayer, and maybe Coah on his phone, but it’s just more confusing. Something’s fucked up but I don’t know what. Anarchy and Athena have been pissed as hell. I mean, I have too, but...I’ve also been getting every shade of fucked up trying to kill my feelings, so.”
“I suppose I should be concerned about helping with that,” Anjali said, though she gently clinked her hard cider against his, where it sat, near-empty, on the railing. She drank the last of hers, then, and the ‘toast’ felt like a prompt, so Kohao obediently drained his bottle as well.
“For real, though,” Anjali said after they’d set their bottles down again, “I agree that something’s up. ‘Key told me about those weird texts from Bayer; it seems like forward movement is stalling on that end for whatever reason. So why not make the first move yourself? Go over to Bryluen’s place, call her out? Be like, ‘Hey so that thing you did? Was fucking horrible of you.’”
Kohao shook his head. “I don’t think that would get me an apology,” he said dryly, with a sour sort of grimace.
“Yeah, I mean, Bayer said an apology was unlikely, didn’t he?” Anjali said matter-of-factly. “It might happen, it might not. But at least you’d get to say your piece.”
Kohao glanced away. “I feel like everyone’s pretty sick of me saying my pieces. I honestly don’t even know why you invited me over; ‘Key’s the one you were there for.”
He could sense Anjali’s sad gaze on him and she stayed quiet for a long moment; stretched the silence to its breaking point—then sighed.
“I was there because I care about you, too,” she said quietly, before looking back out over the cityscape. “Lots of people do, K.” There was a beat, then she continued: “...I don’t know how Bryluen could look at you, already in that much pain, and decide to drive the knife deeper.”
It was both an answer and a comfort, and in its wake—as Anjali collected their empties to head back downstairs and out of the bite of the late autumn air—Kohao felt distinctly that there had been a change in the wind. A widening of one rift at the closing of another. A shift, an untangling, a scissor-snip and re-knotting of the ties that bind.
Click, click, click...
“Dominoes just fall, Kohao.”
—
Kohao was over $1,500 worth of cocaine binges deep and two self-destructive weeks past their confrontation when he finally managed to make it to Bryluen’s apartment complex. He looked like shit and was well aware of it; sleeplessness had blacked his eyes better than fists or eyeliner, and he’d lost God knows how much weight. Chances were he smelled strongly of vodka and cigarettes, but he wouldn’t know; his nose wasn’t in excellent shape after two weeks of coke on coke on coke. He still felt only seventy-five percent sober when Bryluen accepted his greeting and buzzed him into the apartment building. Stepping across the threshold and seeing her wrenched him violently into sobriety, though. Her eyes met his like ice on steel, and there was defiant unwelcome etched into her face, her posture, her pose. Even as Kohao spat the words, “What the FUCK, Bryluen. I would never fucking say that shit to you!” he could only think one thing: She doesn’t think she did anything wrong.
Sure enough, she raised her eyebrows as if skeptical.
“Say what kind of ‘shit’?” she asked innocently, setting his teeth on edge.
“Don’t fucking do that, I’m not crazy. Or maybe I am, but I’m not deluded. I don’t treat you like—”
“You’ve never said something that could be misconstrued during a heated moment?” she interrupted, “It’s not as if you—”
“As if I what? As if I’m not an asshole? As if I’m not a cynical bastard? I fucking am. But not to you,” he snapped, betrayal and anger painting his voice. “And what the fuck am I misconstruing, Bry?! Enlighten me! How did I mis-in-fucking-terpret ‘Punishment would do you good; you’ve been such an inconvenience’?” Kohao’s voice took on a sing-song tone as he mimicked Bryluen’s words, baring his teeth.
She opened her mouth as though to speak, but Kohao plowed on ahead, preventing her from getting a word in edgewise:
“Honestly, what the fuck? You think that spending three nights cold and alone with a gun to my head isn’t fucking punishment, Bryluen? Do you think I was having fucking fun? Do you think that I’m doing all this—” he frustratedly yanked the collar of his shirt down to expose the years of scarring that criss-crossed his chest, “—for shits and giggles?! I can’t fucking believe you,” he said, shaking his head in wounded disgust. “I don’t say that kind of shit to you, Bryluen. I’m a piece of shit but I’ve never fucking—I don’t tell you that you’re ‘causing a mess’ or being an inconvenience when you’re fucking counting calories, dropping weight you can’t fucking afford to lose. Because I fucking cared. Because I thought you were my friend.”
“That’s different and not your business at all. And I am your friend—” Bryluen protested, but she was rolling her eyes as she said it so Kohao laughed at her words; a barking, hollow, bitter noise that sounded more like the gallows than the humor.
“Sure, Bry. You’re my friend,” he said, “You’re my friend who thinks a broken nose is punishment but being trapped alone with my faults and regrets for nearly four fucking days isn't? That being suicidal is ‘causing problems’ but starving yourself to a pretty, perfect early grave is no-one else’s business? Sure. Maybe you think that you can just treat people badly because you’re pretty or talented. Maybe you think it won’t hurt them because you never let people get close enough to hurt you. I don’t know, but it’s fucking low.” His tone slowly crept from angry betrayal to something quieter, more measured in its hurt, and he narrowed his eyes decisively before going on, even though Bryluen had looked away; her eyebrows high, haughty, and entirely disinterested.
“You don’t give a shit, but I fucking hate myself, Bryluen. I know what I’ve done, what I’ve almost done, all the fucking shit in my head...I know the punishment I deserve and I’d fucking do it if I mattered as little to everyone else as I apparently do to you.” He turned away then, and muttered the last words over his shoulder as he walked towards the door to leave; “God, dying alone would be a privilege if all my friends were like you.”
Every step away from her felt like another domino falling, and his heart sank deeper with every stride of distance that opened between them without her calling him back—to explain, to apologize, to justify her words. Metaphor rang as truth in the steps of his steel-toed boots against the hardwood floor. The tap of his rings against the doorknob. The sound of the door shutting at his back.
Click, click, click...
“Dominoes just fall, Kohao.”
—
Maybe it still could have been salvaged somehow, even from there, if everything else hadn’t been falling to pieces. Maybe if they’d had Sethfire’s calm diplomacy, maybe if Athena had been in any state to try and reach across the divide...But they didn’t, and she wasn’t. Seth always started to struggle in autumn and November hit hard. The gauze around her brother’s neck drew all of Athena’s attention; she could spare no time trying to single-handedly bridge an ever-widening rift. With Sethfire’s spiral and Kohao’s own nosedive, Edge of Infinity—as a whole, it felt—turned inwards.
Kohao felt the ache of Fawkes’s absence in his life, knowing he’d lost not only his romantic relationship with her, but a lot of the closeness of the friendship they’d shared, as well. They wordlessly removed themselves from one another’s immediate orbits as best they could, and even though he hated the distance it added by default between her and him and everyone they knew in common, he knew they each needed space for now and it couldn’t be any other way.
Sure, Fawkes still texted them all, and the band still talked and played and practiced together; everyone attempted to carry on like they didn’t feel emptiness as a heaviness. But all the tangled threads of fate that had held their social circle together before suddenly seemed less like lifelines and more like tripwire: Because carrying on wasn’t to be confused with a return to what once had been, and the loss of that was undeniable. With a baffling poverty of outreach from Nightshrike—with no apology from Bryluen and getting awkward, piecemeal withdrawal from everyone else—eventually that rift widened, painfully, to severance.
It was all over but still unending by December and Kohao knew they were recording Concrete As A Painkiller far too early, with too little practice—but they all needed something to do. Needed mics to sing or scream into; needed music to drown themselves in or devote themselves to. Athena finally brought up the lyrics as she adjusted their equipment at the recording studio.
“When you were writing all this—was it about Fawkes or Bryluen?” she asked Kohao, and he didn’t know how to answer.
“It’s about heartbreak,” he said, then shook his head.
“It’s about loss,” he tried, but that didn’t fit either.
“…It’s about me.”
Athena didn’t reply—or even look at him, but she nodded with silent understanding and turned the knob up on his amp.
Click. Click. Click.