Us Against the “Almost”

📅 late January 2018

[ɴᴏɴ-ᴇxᴘʟɪᴄɪᴛ ᴛᴀʟᴋ ᴏғ ɴsғᴡ ᴄᴏɴᴛᴇɴᴛ + ᴛᴡ ғᴏʀ ғʟᴇᴇᴛɪɴɢ ᴍᴇɴᴛɪᴏɴs ᴏғ sᴇʟғ-ɪɴᴊᴜʀʏ, ᴘᴜʀɢɪɴɢ, ᴅʀᴜɢ ᴜsᴇ, ᴀɴᴅ sᴜɪᴄɪᴅᴀʟɪᴛʏ]

Anarchy sat on his bed and stared blankly at his phone. The screen had dimmed some time ago, but Anarchy hadn’t noticed: His mind was elsewhere; thumbing through the events that had gotten him to here, with his heart feeling like it was a hallway’s width and a locked door away from him. He shut his eyes and sighed, leaning back and letting his forgotten phone fall to his lap. It had been 2015 when it had started started: He’d split up with Anjali in September, sometime, and it hadn’t been too long after that...Maybe a week had passed before that night at the bar with Kohao, getting just to the drunker side of tipsy. Or maybe the tipsier side of drunk. It didn’t really matter: The details ended up fuzzy. Still, some pieces of memory stuck out. The way Kohao had looked on the walk home from the bar that evening; his face slightly flushed from their last round of shots, his eyes alive in the neon lights, his posture loose rather than tense, and the corners of his mouth curled lazily upwards…

“The fuck’re you staring at, Key?” Kohao asked, his tone teasing to match the smile on his face, which kept failing to quite be a smirk.
“Nothing. Shut up,” Anarchy said, shoving his hands in his pockets and looking away.
“Damn, my best friend straight up calling me nothing. Rude as hell. I’m hurt.”
“Oh, fuck off,” Anarchy retorted, rolling his eyes as they arrived at their apartment complex; he pulled out his key fob to scan in at the side entrance and held open the door. “You just looked more relaxed than normal, it was nice.”
“Fuckin’ gay,” Kohao ribbed, brushing past Anarchy with an obnoxious tilted grin. 
“Only if you want it to be,” Anarchy muttered in reply, not giving much thought to his words until Kohao threw his head back and laughed.
“‘If I want it to be?’ Key, are you coming on to me?”
“Dunno, do you want me to be?”

Anarchy stared up at his ceiling, rolling that night over in his head. It had been drunken and impulsive and stupid and he’d panicked the next morning, of course...

“I knew you were going to be weird about this,” Kohao said, leaning against the counter and rolling his eyes, “Calm the fuck down. It doesn’t have to be fuckin’ weird, dude.” 
“How can it not be weird?!” Anarchy asked, still leaning over the sink, opting to intensely study the kitchen backsplash rather than risk eye contact by turning around, “How are you so chill about it? What the fuck were we thinking?!” He nearly jumped at the feel of a hand on his shoulder.
“Key. Look at me,” Kohao said, his tone caught somewhere between exasperation and reassurance, but enough to get Anarchy to face him, “This doesn’t have to fucking mean anything. You’re my best friend, it doesn’t change shit. Yeah, okay, I sucked you off once. So what?”

Anarchy sighed at the memory and pinched the bridge of his nose. ‘So what.’ He supposed it could have stopped there: Could have stayed as a one night stand and a ‘so what’...But it didn’t. It’d been less than two weeks before it happened again, before that October evening where Kohao had kept tossing glances across the post-show club; had gotten goading and flirtatious and murmured “‘Thena just left with Wendy. So, ya know. We have the apartment to ourselves tonight,” as he passed Anarchy on the way to the door. And Anarchy had followed him out.

And for months it had worked, them being like that: It was casual and occasional and meaningless and Anarchy had stood steadfast in the concept that he was just experimenting. He was straight but confused, surely: His past had fucked his brain up somehow—crossed some wires—and now he was just feeding into it all to snap himself out of it. That made sense, of course it made sense: At some point he’d get over it, manage to undo whatever had happened to make him all...queer. And Kohao all but laughed in Anarchy’s face every time he insisted that at some point their whole thing would have to stop because he’d eventually fix himself.

Of course, though, Kohao had been in the right: It didn’t happen. Anarchy was still as-of-yet-“uncured” that evening in 2016; a little before the release of their third album, a few months after they’d rescued the kid off that bridge railing. Athena had forgone returning home from the studio in order to do some celebratory post-recording clubbing, and left Anarchy and Kohao to their own devices. They’d easily taken hold of the late-spring heat in the nighttime air and brought it into the apartment with them: Ended up making out like teenagers against the breakfast bar; open mouths and roaming hands…

“Ya know, recording today was cool to see,” Kohao said with a breathless half-laugh, breaking the kiss to pull back for air; “It’s neat. Aetos has really come into his own, writing ‘Bridgelight’ for Suburban Casualties and all. So.” He cocked his head to the side, his lips curling upward rather smugly, “What about you, ‘Key? Have you come to terms with being one of us queers yet?”
“I’m just working stuff out,” Anarchy said, somewhat defensively, “I’m, like, bicurious at best.”
Kohao rolled his eyes in response and looped his arms behind Anarchy’s head, pulling him back into the kiss.
“‘Key,” he murmured against Anarchy’s lips, “You’re lying through my teeth.”

Anarchy breathed another shallow sigh at that memory. He’d still been so deep in denial back then. Convincing himself it was all nothing: His attraction to men, for one, but also the way Kohao specifically tended to be who his eyes found or his thoughts turned to. Anarchy hadn’t let it mean anything, though, and it’d been that same year that Kohao began—just casually—hooking up with Fawkes. Which—at the time—had, too, meant exactly nothing to Anarchy. Theoretically. 
Except Kohao had started leaving bars and clubs with her more often and Anarchy had found himself lying awake in bed and thinking more about Kohao’s blue eyes than his mouth. He’d started noticing, really noticing, how Kohao’s hands moved when he played guitar; and he’d known his friend was talented but suddenly that knowledge started to ring different than just respect. But he’d said nothing, done nothing—except pointedly stain his best friend’s neck with hickies whenever he did catch a night with him, and pretended that he wasn’t trying to send some sort of message. It went unreceived: Kohao’s heart and attentions had found a different scarred face, a different pair of rose-petal eyes, and they’d all ended up in the spring of 2017, with Anarchy watching from a distance more often than not; trying to drown jealousy in denial, and denial in anything else...

“Dude. What’s your issue tonight?” Coahoma asked, glancing sidelong at Anarchy and raising a pointed eyebrow, “You’re drinking like my uncle did and you look like you just saw an advert about father’s day.”
Anarchy sighed from where he leaned against the bar beside his friend, who wasn’t wrong: He was drinking hard tonight. Across the room, Kohao and Fawkes stood close, very close: Smiling, laughing, flirting...leaning closer still. Anarchy glowered and jerked his chin toward them.
“He’s gonna go home with her tonight. Again,” he said through gritted teeth to Coahoma, who looked over somewhat quizzically and frowned.
“What..? Are you crushing on Fawkes?” Coahoma asked, her expression caught somewhere between bemused and pensive.
Anarchy choked on his drink. He hadn’t thought before speaking, and became suddenly nervous about replying with an honest “No”—in case Coahoma took his tone of jealousy from before and applied it to the only other person it could have indicated.
“...No comment,” Anarchy mumbled guiltily, knowing it was leading. He stared down into his glass, unable to lie directly to the face of someone so close to him. 
“Hm…” Coah hummed, her gaze still set across the room, “You two do have a lot in common, huh? I’m sorry ‘bout that, Anarchy.”

Anarchy remembered how his heart had felt, sinking, as he’d watched Fawkes and Kohao leave the bar together that evening; how hollowed he’d felt by the creeping, preemptive grief that came with knowing that things were about to change. Sure enough, it hadn’t been that much longer beyond that before the April morning when Kohao returned from another night with Fawkes, bright-eyed and beaming, with the news Anarchy had seen coming:
“‘Key, holy shit, you’re never gonna believe it—but Fawkes and me? We’re fuckin’ official!” Kohao had exclaimed as he’d let the apartment door slam behind him, “I’m still fuckin’ reeling, I thought for sure she’d shut me down!” 
Anarchy shoved the memory away with a wince: He could still feel the bitter, gut-punched drop of his stomach that he’d felt back then. But Kohao had been all smiles and had looked so genuinely happy...So Anarchy had forced himself to swallow his heartache, to return the smile, to clap his friend on the back and say; “Only an idiot would turn you down. Congrats, K-O.”
And of course everything between him and Kohao had come to a hard stop then and there, and Anarchy had pretended it was just as casual on his end as it’d been on Kohao’s. He’d watched from the sidelines for months from there on out: Trying—always—to play his role as a supportive friend, and not as a jealous ex waiting in the wings for things to fall apart.
Things did anyway.

Anarchy mulled over that day in late October where the crash-and-burn had become clear: It’d been early morning when he’d picked up the phone to Kohao’s tired request for cardboard boxes and a hand moving out; and it had come as no real surprise. In the face of his friend’s despondent eyes and fresh heartbreak, it hadn’t taken any real effort for Anarchy to stay firmly behind platonic boundaries, then—even if deep in his chest, there had been some flicker of something more to when he’d offered his opinion on the dent in the drywall and the hunch of Kohao’s shoulders:
“You both seem to bring out the worst in one another, you know,” Anarchy said softly, hoping the shoulder-squeeze he offered his friend was any comfort at all, “At this point, ending it really does seem like the right thing to do.”
“Yeah,” Kohao replied with averted, weary eyes, “I know.”

Kohao had been exhausted and distracted and sad; Anarchy remembered the broken tone with which he’d mumbled his guilt over having kissed Fawkes goodbye that morning. It was clearly no time to even think about attempting to rekindle what they’d had before, and there had been no pause before shit really hit the fan anyway: Anarchy’s stomach still lurched sickeningly even now—three months later—at the memory of those days, those four fucking days where every sign had pointed to Kohao being dead. Dead and gone or disappeared like Chey, never to return…Then even after they’d found him, everything hadn’t stopped shattering: Their lives had continued to fall apart spectacularly after that fiasco of an afternoon, with Nightshrike going ghost and Sethfire’s gauze-wrapped throat. It had been chaos and chaos and more chaos, and the exact opposite of the time to try and reignite the spark of something that had never even managed to be a romance.
...But in the aftermath he and Kohao had ended up sharing an apartment again, and gradually they’d somehow—wordlessly—started to return to normal, bit by bit. Kohao would cast a smirk across the room at Anarchy, that familiar glint in his eyes; his touch would linger longer than necessary. He’d still been out of reach, but growing closer. And then one day, late in November, Anarchy had been laying in bed doing nothing but thinking, exactly like he was right now...

“...Hey,” a voice said from Anarchy’s doorway, and when he looked up he suddenly found Kohao in his room, leaning against the door frame like he would before: Shirtless, leather jacket half-off his shoulders, cigarette dangling lazily from one hand. Anarchy blinked rapidly, somewhat floored, and Kohao smirked at his stare.
“...Like what you’re seeing, ‘Key?” he drawled, flicking his hair from his half-lidded eyes and raising the cigarette to his lips. Anarchy huffed an amused smile that managed to shake off his speechlessness.
“Put out your cig and get over here,” he said, watching with measured exasperation as Kohao took one final drag before ashing the cigarette in a forgotten coffee mug on the desk as he passed it. He shrugged his jacket off completely, dropping it to the floor before climbing into Anarchy’s bed and straddling his lap. 
“Fuck, I missed you,” Anarchy sighed absentmindedly, his hands moving to rest on Kohao’s hips.
“Nah, you missed my ass.”
“You are an ass. Now shut the hell up and kiss me.”

Anarchy screwed his eyes shut. That’s where they’d been, where they’d gotten to. “Back to normal.” Except not really, because it had been different. Kohao had started facing Anarchy more often when they hooked up; had started kissing him more often and without it being foreplay: “Hello” kisses and “Goodbye” kisses and “be safe” kisses and ones with no clear motive. They started doing things together, that yes, of course they’d done as friends—but with a different undertone: Their fingers would intertwine on the couch; movies and shows they started watching together on Netflix would get forgotten, preference given to the pressure of one another’s lips. It’d felt like an inevitability when one morning Anarchy awoke to find Kohao had stayed with him in his bed through the night. 
And inevitable too had been the disappointed jealousy that’d risen in Anarchy’s throat like grief those nights that Kohao stayed out late; found some stranger at a bar to take him home. Neither of them mentioned the fact that when it happened, the hickies Anarchy bruised Kohao’s throat with the next day seemed more pointedly numerous than usual. Because that was the thing: They didn’t talk about it, not about what they were. Even though at some point they’d certainly crossed some line between friendship and romance, there was this unspoken, anxious boundary that dictated they didn’t bring it up; didn’t try to put words to what they had become to one another. The fragility of that avoidant silence meant it had to break eventually.
Which brought them to that late January afternoon just a couple days ago, with the sunlight streaming in from across the hall and dyeing Kohao’s hair gold; illuminating the curve of his nose and the angle of his cheekbones as he’d rested his head against Anarchy’s chest…

“Fuck, K,” Anarchy sighed softly, mindlessly running his fingers through Kohao’s messy, sunlit hair, and letting his mouth run ahead of his brain, “...I think I love you.” 
He felt Kohao abruptly tense against his chest before rigidly sitting up, something fearful and disquieted glittering in his blue gaze. He looked Anarchy in the eye and sharply shook his head.
“No, you don’t!” he said, shoving himself backwards, “You don’t, and you didn’t say that.”
“Kohao—” Anarchy started, lifting his hand.
“No!” Kohao scrambled off the bed and out of reach; started hurriedly scooping his clothes off the floor. “I’m sorry, ‘Key, but I—I can’t do this,” he said, then turned tail and fled across the hall, shutting the door behind him, leaving Anarchy empty-handed in his suddenly sunless room.

Anarchy flinched away from the recollection and sat up, cupping a hand to his face. That had been where everything had fallen apart around them, and he was stuck sitting where he’d landed in the aftermath: Alone in that same dark bedroom, Kohao alone in his own, with the apartment all but silent. It had been two days of almost nothing, where Kohao dodged eye contact and avoided conversation; took those long walks that scared Anarchy half to death, now, or locked himself in his room and sobbed. 
Abandoning his rumination, Anarchy padded out of his own room to stand, heavy-hearted, in the hall. He rested a palm against Kohao’s bedroom door: From behind it, music played too quietly to cover the muffled sound of hiccuped crying.
“Kohao, please. Talk to me,” Anarchy called softly, rapping his knuckles gently against the door. He got no response and tried the handle, even though he knew he’d find it locked. “C’mon, Kohao, please!” he snapped, heartsick and frustrated, slamming his palm to the door, “Let me in; talk this out with me!” 
“We’ve got nothing to fucking talk about!” Kohao responded, but his muffled voice cracked with grief and Anarchy scrubbed his hands down his face with a pained sigh. He stepped back and hesitated. He could let it continue: The avoidance. The silence. The nothing. 
He looked the door up and down.
“We’re talking this out one way or another, K, I’ll break this door down if I have to,” he called, then waited.
No response.
“Alright, fuck it.”

Anarchy took a deep breath and then kicked the door in at the handle; he felt the vibrations shoot up his leg from his heel, but his kick was true and the wood splintered around the latch as it gave: The door swung open, Anarchy stepped in, and Kohao snapped his head up to shoot a shocked glare from where he sat on his bed, his knees pulled up to his chest.
“What the fuck, that’s gonna cost money!” he spat, failing to sound furious.
“I can spare the cash and we’ve gotta talk,” Anarchy said, stepping over a scorch-marked patch of floor near the foot of the bed, which he gestured to, “Besides, we’re not getting our security deposit back anyway. You put cigs out on your carpet.”
“Fine, whatever, sure!” Kohao choked out, “Fuck doors, kick ‘em all in then, I guess!” 
Anarchy sat down on the bed next to him, and Kohao pressed his forehead back to his knees to hide his swollen eyes. For a few silent moments, Anarchy just studied him, somewhat sadly: 
Bruised hands, scabbed knees. Slowly fading marks on his knuckles from sticking his fingers down his throat. The mix of old, pale scars and recent but healing cuts that covered his right shoulder, his forearm, both his wrists. Closed posture; self-protective. Defensive. 
Kohao was...difficult. That was the best way to put it, the only way to put it. He was difficult to get along with, difficult to understand, made himself difficult to like. He pushed and pushed and pushed people away and then punished himself for it—and it tore, achingly, at Anarchy’s heart.

“This is hurting you, too, K-O,” Anarchy eventually murmured, “I don’t wanna pressure you into anything, believe me—but if you’re hurting too, why can’t we just try? It—it doesn’t have to be out in the open, no one has to know. But we could, you know, we could be—”
“You don’t know what you’re saying!” Kohao spat, jerking his head up to glare. His face was wet with tears but he still snapped like a rabid dog, his voice raw and angry and scared: “You don’t know what it’s like to love me! To be loved by me! I can’t do it right: I don’t know how! I’ll ruin it, Anarchy, I will fucking ruin it. That’s what I do to the things that matter to me.”

“...My dad didn’t ruin me,” Anarchy said slowly, his tone staying gentle even as he lifted his chin, “The streets and the trafficking didn’t ruin me. Heroin didn’t ruin me. How could you?”
“I could be a damn echo of all the fuck of them at once, Anarchy!” Kohao yelled, desperately slamming one fist into his other palm, “I could be a violently unstable, wall-punching, destructive drunk who fucks people for the pain of it and snorts nameless pills off of stranger’s counters! Love me?! How can you look at me?!” He choked on a breath that hitched in his heaving chest, and tears started rolling down his cheeks again.
“You could beg me,” he said, his voice cracking, “You could yell into my face that you could bear it, you could scream yourself hoarse trying to convince me you could. But it doesn’t matter: I won’t let you do that to yourself. I’m not someone you're safe loving. Not the way I am now.”
“...I'm not going to beg. It doesn't mean I think you’re right,” Anarchy said softly. Kohao shut his eyes and hunched his shoulders inward, gritting his teeth. He looked heartbreakingly like a child bracing to be hit.
“Please don’t hate me for this,” he said, his voice strained to begging, “Please don’t abandon everything else here, what we are as friends. I just can't and you just can’t and it’s so much; life, and everything, and I’m not ready or able, ‘Key, it’s that too! I can’t be with anyone; please don’t hate me for that—”
“I’m not gonna hate you!” Anarchy interrupted earnestly, “Hate you or leave you! I’m not. You’ve always been my best friend before anything else. That’s not changing.”

Kohao went quiet, there, looking downcast and weaker than Anarchy had ever seen him—but eventually he slowly unfolded himself from his defensive position and tucked his legs beneath him.
“...then can I have one last thing? And have you not hate me for it, either?” he asked, tentatively raising his eyes to meet Anarchy’s.
“...Yeah, of course,” Anarchy replied, feeling somehow like he already knew what it would be.
Kohao gave a shallow nod and swallowed hard, as if steeling himself, before scooting closer. Anarchy leaned in on instinct and Kohao brought his hand up to the back of Anarchy’s neck, thumb resting on the curve of his jaw. There was a beat, a split second where Kohao hesitated, where he seemed to crumple inwards however slightly.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered brokenly; almost to himself and all but inaudible; “But I guess this is what I always do.” 

He closed the gap between them and the way their lips met felt so familiar that it nearly ached. It was a final, tearful echo of those enigmatic kisses they’d shared before; the unprompted ones that’d had no discernable motive—or maybe had had a motive that Anarchy was only allowing himself to acknowledge now: Because this kiss was harder and sadder and clearer and a language all its own: ‘I love you I love you I love you’ as the desperation of chapped lips and salt-stained cheeks. ‘I love you’ as a kiss, ‘I love you’ as silence, ‘I love you’ as a coup de grâce. And Anarchy knew it; knew: ‘This is it. This is what he’s leaving me with. It’s ending.’ 
He couldn’t stop it so he tried to make the most of it: He brought his hand up, tangled his fingers in Kohao’s hair—and for a moment Kohao allowed it to stay that way; let them be close, be kissing, be touching one another like lovers. It couldn’t last and Anarchy knew it: He allowed his hand to fall; let Kohao pull away.
A stubborn ember of hope still flickered in his chest, though, refusing to quite go out.
“Before—you said you couldn’t do this now. That you weren’t ready—” Anarchy started, but Kohao cut him off with an uncompromising shake of his head.
“Don’t try and wait for me to be,” he said with tired resolution, “I know you did before—waited. While I was with Fawkes...Don't do that this time. Don’t try and wait.”

Anarchy hesitated for a moment, and in it the sun slipped past the top of the window frame as afternoon turned to evening, illuminating the side of Kohao’s face in soft yellow light. His bedroom washed peach-pink and gold; knuckle-dented walls and cigarette-burned carpet softened to something gentler under the sunlight’s touch. Against the halcyonic backdrop, Anarchy studied Kohao again. The dark circles under his eyes stood out in the over-saturation of sunset; the eyeliner he never bothered to wipe off lended black to the tear-tracks on his cheeks. He looked young, Anarchy realized; looked young and unsteady and wartorn and, yes...unready.
“...Okay,” Anarchy finally murmured, “I won’t try and wait. I’m going to be here, though. I said it before: You’re my best friend before anything else.” Kohao nodded but stayed quiet, and Anarchy nervously tucked his tongue to his cheek. He couldn’t help but call to mind Kohao’s guilt over having kissed Fawkes goodbye that past October before going out with the intent to die; nor the fact that he knew his best friend had done it before; had apparently kissed Athena the day prior to his attempted revenge-and-suicide mission at age sixteen. And what he’d said…‘I guess this is what I always do.’
“...Are you gonna be alright?” Anarchy asked, reaching out to grip Kohao’s shoulder, and Kohao raised his head; met Anarchy’s eyes and blinked a couple times, looking somewhat timid.
“...Do you promise we’re not fucked up?” he asked softly, his voice worn thin, “Like, that we really haven’t fuckin’ ruined this? Being friends?”
“Of course!” Anarchy said with a firm squeeze of Kohao’s shoulder, “Of course I promise. I’m with you the whole fuckin’ way, anyway, right? Through everything. No matter what, K-O. That hasn’t changed.” Kohao swallowed hard and slowly nodded again, looking distant and introspective.
“...Okay,” he said quietly, “Then...then yeah. I’ll be alright.” The words were sad but genuine, and Anarchy offered him a soft smile, feeling things weren’t quite stable enough for a hug.
“Then I will be too. And we will be.” He let go of Kohao’s shoulder and crossed his hands in front of his chest, index fingers and thumbs out to form the infinity symbol. “Infinite to the end, right?”
Kohao managed a smile, and after a pause, returned the sign.
“Infinite to the end.”