Mutually Assured Destruction

📅 late April 2018; about a month after Chey's reappearance & a couple days after To Be Earned

【ᴡᴀʀɴɪɴɢ ғᴏʀ ᴛᴀʟᴋ ᴀʙᴏᴜᴛ ᴄʜɪʟᴅ ᴛʀᴀғғɪᴄᴋɪɴɢ, ᴅʀᴜɢ ᴜsᴇ/ᴀᴅᴅɪᴄᴛɪᴏɴ, ᴅᴇᴀᴛʜ, ᴀɴᴅ ᴠɪᴏʟᴇɴᴄᴇ】

Chey didn’t make sense. Kohao sat at the breakfast bar with the living room in his peripheral vision, brooding. Chey had sprawled himself across most of the sectional, as usual, and lazily scrolled through something on his laptop; behaving just how he kept doing: Totally un-fucking-bothered. Kohao clenched and unclenched his fist, the days-old scabs on his wrists starting to flake and itch. He felt crowded by Chey’s indecipherable presence, the warmth that radiated off of him even when Kohao tried to freeze him out, the way he seemed able to zero in on every vulnerability and never took fuck off for an answer.

“I wanna get sugar gliders but you’re not supposed to own ‘em in the boroughs,” Chey suddenly sighed from the sofa, leaning back from his laptop and turning towards Kohao. “What d’ya think K-O? Pair of illegal marsupials to spice up the apartment?”
“Just don’t get me and Anarchy arrested,” Kohao said flatly. Chey huffed at his icy expression and sat up a little straighter.
“What is it about me, K-O?” he asked, “You trust ‘Key, don’t you? And he trusts me—so why do you always treat me like that?” He was still smiling as though he could be teasing; his tone and eyes alike were light and laugh-ready—but there was some undertone that maybe, just barely, wasn’t. Kohao narrowed his eyes and turned to face Chey fully, giving him a calculating up-and-down.

“What upsets you, Chey?” he asked instead of answering. 
Chey quirked an eyebrow; he still looked amused, like he thought the question might be the set-up to a joke.
“What?” he smiled.
“Well, I insult you and you laugh. I ignore you and you whine,” Kohao drawled coldly. “If I talk about my past you sympathize; you talk about your childhood like a vaguely unsettling story you read; you don’t even act bitter. What’s it take to make you angry? Offended? The only time you even seemed sad was that one night when you talked about Anarchy using, but you and he joke about it constantly. So is there anything that gets under your fucking skin?” 
Chey blinked, then laughed, like he usually did. “You sound like a movie villain trying to figure out my kryptonite.”
Kohao let silence fall for a long moment as he studied Chey.

“…It makes sense, doesn’t it, that what pisses Athena off the most is inequality?” Kohao asked rhetorically, adopting a smoother tone. “With her parents and all, right? And society. Inequality, injustice, all that...that’s what sets her the fuck off.” 
Chey’s brow furrowed as he continued to scroll down the Wiki article on exotic pets.
“I don’t need to know, but thanks,” he said, and there was just barely an edge to his voice; the faintest ghost of something distrustful. The corners of Kohao’s mouth twitched upward and he stood from his bar stool, stretching almost lazily.
“Now, ‘Key—” Kohao said, noticing Chey tense almost imperceptibly, “—‘Key and I probably get along so well because man...so much pisses him off. Dealers. Trafficking. Abuse. The profit made from war, father’s day, people talking down to him, people who defend corporal punishment, fuckin’ imperialism...The list goes on.” 
Chey still stared at his computer screen but wasn’t really seeing it: Kohao had his full attention and knew it. 
“Seth, though, bit harder,” Kohao continued, “Seth doesn’t yell, ya know? Doesn’t bitch like Anarchy and I do. But I still know what sets his teeth on edge.” Kohao took a deliberate step towards the living room. “He hates being told what to do. He hates being told how to feel. He hates his parents, I’m pretty damn sure. He’d deny it, but...eh.” Kohao shrugged and took another step. “What happened to us—to me, to ‘Tae, to Athena—that upsets him. He’ll get pissed off on our behalves. But I’ve never seen Seth quite as fucking angry as he was after ‘Key told him—”

Chey suddenly slammed his laptop shut and threw it to the side as he stood up from the couch. With just a couple strides he stood toe to toe with Kohao, his shoulders rigid. 
“Why are you telling me this.” It was Chey’s voice, now, that was cold and guarded. Kohao couldn’t keep a triumphant smirk off his face.

“So it is something to do with ‘Key,” he said. “Is it like Seth? Is it about what happened to him? But you were with—oh. It’s about after, isn’t it?” His needling tone worked: Chey’s jaw and fist alike instantly clenched; his shoulder jerked upward. His weight shifted and Kohao took an instinctive, defensive step backward; braced for a punch that didn’t come. There was a pause where the two of them stared at one another, some degree of shock evident on both their faces—though Kohao felt impressed while Chey looked distraught. Slowly, Chey lowered the hand he’d half-raised and unclenched his fist.
“I’m sorry,” he said quietly.
Kohao furrowed his brow and frowned, his smirk displaced by his confusion.
“Why the fuck are you sorry?” he asked; “I would have deserved it.”

Chey took a step back and gave Kohao a searching look. For once his eyes weren’t glinting with humor; they were darker and deeper and almost betrayed; his lips were pressed thin and twitched downward.
“You’re not an abusive person, Kohao,” he said, even his tone wounded; “I know you’re not, I said as much a couple days ago. So why are you insisting on finding out where to press so it hurts?”
Kohao flinched.
“It’s not like that! And—I mean, you do the same thing, or you manage to find out all the same shit; where people hurt! And I can’t fuckin’ trust that; like, if people know where I’m weak and I don’t know the same shit about them—? You keep talking like I’m meant to trust you, but—”
“What?” Chey interrupted, his brow cinched up in bafflement; “You think that to trust someone you need to know their weaknesses? For what, insurance? Mutually assured destruction isn’t trust, Kohao, it’s blackmail.”
“There’s not a difference.”

Chey gaped for a moment; his eyes grew wider and more deeply troubled and he seemed at a momentary loss for words. He shook his head as though to clear it.
“Not a differe—? Yes, there is! Trust is—is confiding in someone and believing that they won’t hurt you because they’re a good person; because they care! Not because you have something equally destructive hanging over their head in case they try!” Chey looked almost beseechingly at Kohao, as if with an earnest enough expression he could force the words to sink in. Kohao looked back at him, vaguely wrong-footed but not giving ground. He couldn’t figure out if Chey’s definition of trust made sense to him.
Chey’s expectant, waiting expression faltered; he blinked a couple times before his face finally fell.
“Your version of trust really is me just outright telling you the things that kill me inside, isn’t it?” he said softly. There was some trace of sadness in his tone; almost defeat. Kohao shifted his weight uncomfortably and frowned. Any sense of triumph from before had faded.
“It’s not like you have to,” he mumbled.
“It’s how to earn your trust.” Chey’s tone was still soft, sad, too close to surrender. He took another half-step of retreat and glanced away. “It’s not something that pisses me off, though.” He sighed and then looked back at Kohao, straightening up slightly. His eyes were too serious for him; his posture too rigid. Kohao felt a twinge somewhere in his stomach at how removed this version of Chey was from the one who grinned so easily.

“There’s exceptions to every rule, yeah, but for the most part...I don’t really get pissed,” Chey started slowly, sounding almost tired; “This isn’t anger. It’s shame, and it goes further back than the year after I vanished on ‘Key. I don’t know how much he told you about the beginning, if I was only ever ‘my friend’ to you guys—” Chey’s voice should have taken on a bitter tone, there, but it was something more like grief that came through: “—but I met him in a freight yard when he was fourteen and I was thirteen. He had a fucked up face and I had a fucked up neck and he was scared shitless and I’d just run a fuckload of cocaine across the country and opted for skipping the greyhound ticket back so I could pocket the extra cash, so I felt fucking indestructible.” It all came out in a rush; Chey had to take a moment to pause for breath before continuing. 
“I asked him if he was catching out of Cali too, and lo and behold, he was heading for New York City—just like I was. I needed a friend, he needed a friend. We crossed the fuckin’ country together and I wasn’t going to dump him on his ass after that. I was running drugs, making enough money to not starve. I thought, ‘Hey, I can try and get my boss to employ him.’ I thought I was doing him a favor.”
Chey smiled a hollow grimace with the last word; his eyes had gone dark and dull. “If I hadn’t done that, he wouldn’t have been involved in what happened next. Do you know all this already?”

Kohao shook his head slowly, quailing at the pain in Chey’s voice and hunching his shoulders. He’d been so suspicious of Chey’s incessant sympathy, wanting to scoff at the concept that someone like him could ever relate—but suddenly there was an ache to Chey’s voice that Kohao recognized; something haunted and guilty and far too familiar.
“‘Key was always really vague,” Kohao mumbled. “He’d say stuff like—‘My friend and I got tangled up in trafficking,’ like that. He told me details about shit that happened with Johns. But not...this.” Kohao’s voice was so quiet it was nearly inaudible.
“Great.” Chey’s laugh, like his smile, was hollow. “God, that’s just like him. He never blamed me on the streets either, of course he wouldn’t tell you all this shit is my fault. But it is.” 

Chey swallowed hard and looked away but continued without being prompted, even though his body language spelled out like flashing neon how little he wanted to be sharing the story.
“We made a living for a bit, drug running. It was fine, it was good. As good as it could get for two traumatized homeless kids, I guess. But oh, fucking traffickers are goddamn smart, huh? Of course it was a setup, but eventually someone paid ‘Key in oxy and he brought it back to me, and said ‘should we?’—and I?” Chey shook his head as if in disbelief, more venom in his tone than Kohao thought he was capable of, all directed towards himself: “I, fucking idiot that I am, I said ‘why not?’” 
Chey tilted his head back and blinked up at the ceiling. His eyes shone; Kohao swallowed hard. He clenched and unclenched one hand, itching for a cigarette and an excuse to escape the scene he’d caused. 
“It was easy,” Chey said, his voice cracking, “It was so fucking easy for them to get us hooked, Kohao; we didn’t get the health class lectures about cigarettes and meth and marijuana. Anarchy got his dad’s belt and I got held under the bathwater, how the fuck were we supposed to know—” Chey wrenched his head around and thousand-yard-stared out to the glass door to the balcony, unseeing. 
“My boss told us there were fewer and fewer mule jobs. Of course there fucking weren’t. But we were kids, we were children still, he was giving us the money we used to feed ourselves, of course we fucking trusted him!” Chey spat. Tears started to roll down his cheeks as he stared out toward the city and Kohao felt guilt hit him like he’d been punched in the gut. 
“Chey, you don’t—” Kohao started, distraught. He wanted to stop it, wanted to undo this, wanted to take the pain from his friend’s voice. He lifted his hands on instinct and had nothing to do with them.
“I’m almost done, don’t worry.” Chey’s tone had gone abruptly, heartrendingly flat. “It’s not hard to get a couple addicts to start doing whatever they can for a fix. So we got booked. Sold. Through the Boss. Everything that happened to ‘Key because of the drugs, the job, all of it—My fucking fault. Once a John forced him to call the guy ‘Daddy’ and thank him after getting whipped. He walked home barefoot over broken glass because he was too out of it to notice and he still told me not to blame myself. But I do, I always did. I couldn’t justify it to myself even when I was in that life with him. And then I got picked up by the cops and he was fucking alone.”

“That wasn’t your fault, though—” Kohao said; quickly, clumsily, guilt-ridden himself. Chey snorted in disbelief.
“Sure. But he stayed alone. They made sure every foster home I got sent to knew I was a junkie and a runner...It’s not an excuse. I should have run. I didn’t. I lost my shit and gave up and settled into sitting around self destructing. I convinced myself that ‘Key was dead and I didn’t look for proof either way in case I was right. I was a coward and I stayed a coward, even after I got off dope, I couldn’t bear to try—what if he’d been dead for years by then, I couldn’t risk hoping…” Chey choked on his words. 
“The only thing that brought me back was that I stumbled across a fucking photo of him, proof that he was alive, and I still went to slink away into the night—like a coward—after I saw him in person. Because it had been years and I thought he’d moved on, that I should take all the hell we went through with me, let him go, and get on with my life too. Ha. What life? What life could I ever live that would be more important than him?” 
Chey made an indecipherable sound at the back of his throat and went quiet for a beat to wipe the back of his hand across his eyes. Tear-droplets still clung to his lower lashes when he turned back to Kohao and forced a wavering, watery smile.
“So there it is, Gunner: Everything I can’t forgive myself for, or most of it. My weaknesses, just like you wanted.” There wasn’t any malice in his tired tone but Kohao looked down anyway, his posture shame-laden. He couldn’t bear eye contact.

“You don’t know all of mine,” Kohao said in a rush, to the floor. “You—you kept figuring shit out and seeing where I’m all fucked up and sad and it was freaking me out, but you don’t know all of it. Some stuff you gotta be told about, you can’t just know by...being how you are.” Kohao could feel the confession in his mouth; heavy and metallic, lead and copper. Ammunition. Chey seemed able to sense it.
“Kohao...You don’t need to tell me—”
“I do! Mutually assured destruction,” Kohao said, looking up at Chey; “Shame. Like with you.” He swallowed hard. “You know about my school shit. Everyone does. People joke—I joke—about what went down when I was sixteen. It’s sick and dark already to be cracking jokes about how I nearly mowed down a bunch of kids but...Most of the rest of them don’t know that I came...really fuckin’ close...to killing Seth.”
Kohao averted his gaze again but he could feel Chey’s boring into him. “I’ve told Anarchy. Seth knows. And I’d rather die than ‘Thena find out. Ever. As far as she or anyone else knows...I had guns, I went to school, Seth talked me down. And I did have guns. I did walk into that school. And Seth had to tackle me to the fucking ground.” Kohao knew his disconnected tone couldn’t mask how haunted he felt behind the eyes; knew Chey had given him the truth and would receive a story full of holes in return. He hunched his guilty shoulders inward and a slight tremor found his hands.

“I told you before that you couldn’t trust me. Because I know...I know what I thought about doing back then. Seth came to talk but I tried to just sprint for my targets; he tackled me and we got into a struggle for the backpack. I ended up with my hand on my pistol and...I realized I could...kill him. Aim and fire and...get on with it all. I feel like...if he hadn’t pinned me, then, and given me an out…? He and I and fuck knows how many kids could be dead. I thought about it. Killing him. What if I’d done it? I came so close.” Kohao stared down at his hands and talked to them, not wanting to see whatever expression Chey wore; not wanting Chey to see more than meant and terrified that out of anyone, he was the one most likely to see straight through. 

Chey inhaled. “Kohao—” he started, but Kohao didn’t want him to say anything, not yet, so he forced himself to look up and meet Chey’s eyes—which were wide, yes, and maybe a little too searching, but thankfully absent of reproach.
“I don’t know how or why Seth has forgiven me,” Kohao said quickly; “It doesn’t make sense. But you—you said ‘Key’s never blamed you for what happened to you both—and I know he’s right about that. It’s not your fault. You were thirteen, Chey. Your intentions in getting Anarchy a job were fuckin’ good; you wanted to help him! And like you said—how the hell were you and ‘Key supposed to know anything about addiction? Fuck, even if you did—with the shit you’d both already been through? You couldn’t be faulted if you’d started using 100% by choice. Seth drinks, I drink, ‘Tae and I both smoke—even if it’s my fault he does—People cope! You were kids. You were coping.” 
“Yeah, but—” Chey said; he started to shake his head. He looked hopeless; it didn’t suit him.
“You were, and same shit after you got snatched off the streets, it sounds like. Self destructing is coping too.” Kohao’s arm twitched involuntarily. “You said you should’ve run. But then what, Chey? The new places weren’t your first foster home. They’d call the cops, they’d get you caught. What if you’d gone, met back up with Anarchy again and they’d found you both? They could’ve shipped him back to his dad in California.” Kohao shook his head. 
“Besides—your instincts were right. He should be dead. He was dead. His heart stopped. If Athena hadn’t been so observant, if we hadn’t been passing, if I’d pulled the trigger on Seth? You’d have made the right choice, because you’d still be able to half hope. It’s a fluke that we’re able to stand here and discuss fault.” Kohao hesitated only for a moment before reaching out and briefly clasping Chey’s shoulder, relieved that his hand wasn’t shaken off.
“I’ll say it again: It’s not your fault. ‘Key knows it and so do I. You’re a good fucking person, Kaspar Cheyenne.”

Chey seemed to be fighting some sort of internal battle and looked away for a silent moment, his lips pressed thin; his eyes distant. The pale scar encircling his throat seemed to stand out in the absence of his smile.
“I try,” he said, finally, “I really try to be a good person. I think I’m getting better at it now that I’m back with ‘Key. Now that I’m not running scared.” He paused and slowly returned to eye contact. “I can’t forgive myself for it all, though.”
“Do you hate me as much as you hate yourself?” Kohao asked bluntly. Chey’s eyes widened in confusion.
“What?”
“You’re wringing yourself out because, what, ‘Key got hurt? Could’ve died? I just told you I could’ve killed him through Seth.” Kohao felt a stab of anxiety in his chest, like maybe he was pushing too hard, being too convincing, and he’d end up forcing anger into Chey’s expression even without the honesty of would-have. Instead, the faintest flicker of light returned to Chey’s eyes.
“...But you didn't. He's alive,” Chey said quietly. The ghost of an introspective smile flitted across his lips; his gaze seemed to soften. “They both are. All you ever did was think about it, anyway, K—and you’re not that person, anymore, either. If that’s who you used to be, how you used to think, it’s not who you are now. I know it’s not.”
“Yeah, well. There you go.” Kohao stuffed his hands in his pockets and shrugged one shoulder, trying to hide the guilty lump in his throat. “Use that for yourself. You were never trying to hurt anyone anyway, so...Just let yourself off the hook. I’m whatever the fuck I am but you are a good person. And...I trust you. But because you’re trustworthy, not because I have some kind of...emotional collateral. That’s what friendship’s supposed to be, right?”

At first Chey just blinked at him, but a smile slowly spread across his face, crinkling the corners of his eyes. He seemed, somehow, to brighten.
“...You’re a good person too, I’ve seen it,” he said softly; then, tilting his head, his smile broadening: “We’re friends?”
“...Yeah, if you’ll still have me,” Kohao replied. He offered Chey a small smile; something tentative but genuine; not the sarcastic smirk he usually wore. Chey positively beamed.
“So...How about those sugar gliders?”
Kohao sighed in amused surrender. 
“Yeah, fine. Let’s do it.”