Before the Storm

 📅 Late August, 2021

【ᴛᴡ ғᴏʀ ᴀʟᴄᴏʜᴏʟɪsᴍ, ᴇᴅ sʏᴍᴘᴛᴏᴍs, & ᴛᴀʟᴋ ᴏғ ᴠɪᴏʟᴇɴᴄᴇ/ᴍᴜʀᴅᴇʀ + sᴜɪᴄɪᴅᴇ】

Storm had no reservations about meeting up with Kohao for a drink, to hang out for a couple hours on the apartment’s roof and shoot the shit. To “give the newlyweds a break from my third-wheeling ass,” as Kohao had put it. Really, Storm felt pleased to be Kohao’s company of choice. He’d been prickly at best when she first met him; hot to cold and back again over the span of a conversation and sarcastic enough to impress her. But their similarities had won out in the end, it seemed; they’d fallen into a friendship, a kinship. After three years she still kept lyrics he’d written for her folded in her wallet like a prayer card, and he still chose her, out of everyone, to invite to a one-on-one rooftop happy hour.

Her anticipation of normalcy dropped like her heart to her stomach when she stepped out of the stairwell and onto the roof, though. Kohao was already there, leaning against the concrete parapet with an opened bottle of vodka in hand and no shot glass in sight. He looked almost a different person entirely than the best man whose photograph Storm had taken at the wedding she shot two months prior. It wasn’t just the half-frame glasses, which were a new feature and clearly unfamiliar to him; he kept fidgeting with them—it was something else. At Chey and Anarchy’s wedding, Kohao had been thin enough, sure, and he’d been a bit thinner at his 26th birthday. But his cheekbones weren’t just defined, now, they were all that were: His cheeks were hollow in his gaunt face, his eyes looking sunken and dull behind the new glasses. His spiked choker was buckled into the same hole it always had been, where the leather had cracked from wear—but he’d become so thin that instead of encircling his throat, the choker hung loose enough to rest on his jutting collarbone.

“Hey, Kohao.” Storm did her best to offer a normal greeting and held out her open pack of Newports to him, as had become a tradition between them: Many of their early conversations had been held together only by hard-headedness on both ends and their congruent taste in nicotine. He did his best to follow the routine too, and flashed her an attempt at his signature smirk as he took a cigarette, with a (now sarcastically-sarcastic) “Thanks”...but his dull eyes looked distant and she knew her expression betrayed her worry.

They both attempted to abandon their natures and pretended to be people capable of talking around the elephant in the room; discussing the wedding instead, or Storm’s photography, or Edge of Infinity’s recently released fifth album. She sipped the vodka and wondered how full the bottle had been when Kohao first got to the rooftop, though he seemed less inebriated than simply ill: His skin looked dry and pale despite the liquor; it was August and yet his leather jacket was on and halfway zipped up. There was an emptiness to his tone, too, like conversation was equivalent to walking on the snowpack over a crevasse, each word resounding with the fact that all beneath it was hollow.
Storm decided she couldn’t count on the ice eventually breaking of its own accord.
“...So, we both know something’s up. What’s going on with you, Kohao?”

┈

Kohao gave Storm a swift-but-tired up-and-down, as though a glanced assessment could tell him anything more about her than he already knew. All he gathered was some fresh concern behind her verdelite eyes, so he looked away to take a long, tongue-loosening pull from his vodka bottle and a longer drag from his cigarette. It had been three years since the last time he’d allowed himself to get confessional, and the guilt had only grown in the meantime, festering all the while.

“...I've done some bad shit, Storm,” he finally said, through an exhausted breath of smoke; “Feel like fuckin’...Lady Macbeth about it, ya know. ‘All the perfumes of Arabia’ and all that. I’ve done such bad shit in my life...Everyone around me thinks they know it, but they don't. Even the people I’ve told already didn’t get the whole truth...I’m always trying to sanitize it…‘perfumes.’ I shouldn't tell you but, ha, fuck it…” He trailed off and stared hollowly out over the city.
“...I have a feeling you're going to tell me anyway,” Storm said. It might have been partway to a joke, but Kohao didn’t care. He just shrugged and pulled his jacket tighter around his shoulders.
“...Yeah, maybe I will...Maybe it doesn't matter what I do anymore.”
He saw Storm stiffen in his peripheral vision but felt too tired to bother about the transparency of his powerlessness. He’d thrown himself into the undertow of Karmic Fate some time ago—ten years—and he was reaping the reward: Becoming too weak to fight the current. All he could do now was cough up honesty, like water from his lungs.

“I tell my story over and over, Storm,” he started, painfully aware of the hollowness in his own voice. “I tell it over, and over, and over. I’m sure everyone else is fuckin’ sick of it, but it’s like I have to. ‘I was sixteen. I was angry. I’d been treated like shit. I went in to shoot up my school, and Sethfire stopped me.’ Do people really think that’s all there is? Do you? Do you believe that?” He turned to look at Storm, whose trepidation was visible; Kohao wondered if he sounded drunk already.
“...I’m guessing now that there’s more to it,” she said slowly, and Kohao indecisively ran his tongue across the back of his teeth. Storm had known Athena before she’d known him; was likely closer to Athena than to him, and it seemed reasonable to expect her to feel greater loyalty to both honesty and Athena than to him. Telling her was a risk, a monumental one...but the winds had caught his caution a million times before. Maybe this would be the last time he’d ever have to say it all; it felt that way. 
Maybe that was the intention.
“...I’d rather die than Athena ever know,” he said tersely.
Storm pursed her lips in clear discomfort and spent a long moment apparently just evaluating him before she finally gave the shallowest of nods: It was in her hands, now. Kohao sighed deeply. 

“...Then...Then it was almost a full decade ago and I was sixteen, Storm,” he said. “I was sixteen and you’ve heard all those details before. Guns, plans, the shirt I fucking wore. I tell it like that, don’t I? Every time. And the details fucking end at the school...Why?” he asked, rhetorically. He wanted to sound anything except weak and failed when his voice cracked. 
“...Because there’s more,” Storm replied, though she didn’t need to. Her voice seemed too soft for her. Kohao stared at the rooftop concrete and nodded, his eyes burning, his tongue glued to the roof of his mouth by reluctance. His shoulders shook.

“I’m the one that broke Seth’s nose,” he finally burst out, starting too far in and having to double-back; “It’s all crooked, you know? He—he confronted me, at the front doors, and told me to give him my backpack. I refused and tried to just sprint for my classroom—I thought I could outpace him and that once bodies started falling he’d get out and call the cops—but he tackled me to the ground and I broke his nose to get out of his grip. I...I told him to get the fuck out. But I knew he wouldn’t, Storm, I knew he’d never run for it. I was already reaching for my Glock when I said it.” Kohao’s voice had grown panicked, despairing; the scene unfolding in his mind’s eye making his words and hands both start to shake. 
“I knew he wouldn’t,” Kohao repeated, “I knew he wouldn’t run. I’d come to terms with having a body count that day and I knew he wouldn’t go—” Kohao choked, gagging on the memory of his hand closing on his pistol. “I can still feel the gun in my hand, even now, I can fucking feel it,” he gasped out, “I chose to kill him, Storm, I chose to kill one of the two people I cared about, who cared about me! I made that choice! …But he was stronger than me and he pinned me down and he told me he’d give me somewhere to go if I dropped out. That he’d get me out of school, away from my dad. He gave me an escape route. And I said okay—because I didn’t think I’d be able to fight myself free and kill him.”
Something akin to a dry sob worked its way out of Kohao’s throat and he slammed his hand against the low concrete wall of the rooftop, jolting the ember off the end of his cigarette.
“He gave me everything! He gave me an out, he lied to Athena! He said he broke his nose because he ran into the second set of glass doors at the school—he knew she’d never forgive me for hurting him! He lied to her face! For me! I owe him everything I have and I only let him save me because I couldn’t kill him! I don’t deserve any of it, Storm, I don’t deserve anything about the life I’m living now—I don’t deserve to live life at all! I’m fucking evil! I chose to kill him and I would have!” Kohao wrenched his voice raw with the final sentence; his shoulders shook with the effort it took to keep from crying.

Honesty offered no catharsis, though, and even having expected as much, the retelling of events left Kohao feeling acutely empty. It seemed like he couldn’t convey what all of it truly meant, anyway: Because Storm, while appropriately wide-eyed and frowning, still had that look—that one that Anarchy had had, that but-he-isn’t-dead expression that couldn’t be broken through. She seemed like she might speak.
You don’t understand, Kohao thought desperately at her; He is. I’m watching him die every day now.
“I—I chose to kill him, Storm, I can tell you’re not hearing it. You have to hear it, I need someone to hear it!” Kohao said, a deep sense of urgency sending words tumbling from his mouth before she had the chance to comfort him; “I chose to, okay, I chose to kill him, I turned him into an obstacle and I killed him only I didn’t! But you need to understand that I did, okay, you have to hear me out because I knew how it would look; I planned to pull that trigger and I watched him die and I chose to do it.” 
Kohao’s chest was halfway to heaving and he knew he had to look unhinged by now, staring wild-eyed at her, clutching his vodka and claiming credit for a conceptual homicide.

“...I am hearing you,” Storm said slowly; “Just processing. But I’m hearing you.” She looked and sounded very much like someone trying to make a nonsensically verbal compromise with a wild animal; ‘Okay Mr. Grizzly. You can have the cooler. We’re going to back away slowly.’
Kohao was only feet away from her, yet indescribably stranded. It was the dog days of summer yet he was freezing. He couldn’t read her expression.

“Then fucking hate me,” he said. A plea, almost a whimper. “If you’re hearing me, then hate me. Athena’s brother. Jazz’s close friend. Fucking Seth, Storm, fucking Seth who’s never hurt anyone except himself in his entire goddamn life! Ten fucking years ago this September I tried to put a bullet through his chest!” Kohao suddenly found himself yelling and sobbing, his voice having risen like a cresting wave and then crashed over him, leaving him choking for air. 
“I’m not going to hate you,” Storm said swiftly, a clear attempt to soothe.
“Then you don’t understand,” he gasped, resisting her attempts to comfort him; “It’s everyone with him, Storm, because ‘Key and ‘Tae and probably Athena would’ve died without him! Athena, God, and I knew about Athena, too—”
“Kohao, breathe—” Storm was sounding increasingly alarmed and Kohao could feel his hyperventilation tearing at his lungs, but couldn’t heed her;
“No, God, Storm, I fucking knew about Athena! I knew Seth was who saved her and I knew living with him was the only reason she was better and I made the choice to kill him! I made the choice to send my best fucking friend back to her parents’ house to starve herself to death all alone! I SHOULD BE IN HELL. I DESERVE TO BE DEAD AND BURNING IN FUCKING HELL!”

Kohao’s throat was raw and he didn’t know when he and Storm had ended up kneeling; he couldn’t remember having sunk to the ground but he accepted it, not knowing if he was sobbing or dry-heaving anymore as he clutched his arms to his stomach and bent his forehead towards the concrete. Storm stayed beside him, rubbing his back and utilizing the fact that she finally had the opportunity to get a word in edgewise.
“I’m listening to you, I swear I am. I’m hearing every word you say and it matters to me,” she said, “It’s fucked up, I get that. It’s fucked up on every level you say it was—but it’s been ten years, Kohao, and you’re not the boy who tried to pull that trigger anymore. I never met him! I don’t know how I’d feel about him, but even he didn’t kill anyone and you can’t convince me to hate you with something he almost did. Everyone’s alive, K, everyone’s alive. You didn’t kill anyone, we could call any of them up right now. We could go down a couple flights of stairs and see Seth. You’re...you’re not at fault for anything. Please breathe, it’s going to be okay.”

Kohao shook his head like an oppositional three-year-old, hating the concept that a world so wrong as the one letting him live, live unhated, could ever feel ‘okay’. His chest was searing with pain as it had taken to doing, lately, and he hoped in vain that the heart within it would just stop beating. It stubbornly continued, though, just as Storm continued to be close and kind; intimacy equally as painful as his sustained heartbeat.
“You think I want something I don’t, Storm,” he keened. “You think I want reassurance. Maybe I used to; maybe everyone else I told, I told because I wanted that...But I don’t anymore, I don’t.” Kohao’s limbs and eyelids were suddenly heavy, his will suddenly weak. Drained, he finally let himself slump, shaking, into Storm’s arms. 
“...We don’t always get what we want, I guess,” Storm said quietly, with a rather tentative pat of his shoulder. “Sometimes people are really fucking frustrating and keep seeing the best in us.”

┈

Storm cradled Kohao in her lap, providing what comfort she felt she could offer and despairing over how inadequate it all seemed. Years of her own trauma and suffering hadn’t prepared her for the poverty of language that there was when it came to this, and all that kept her from draining the rest of Kohao’s vodka to fight the overwhelm was the profound sense that she needed to be the stable one. 

She wasn’t used to the role she’d found herself having to take: In control but not dominant, feminine but as a nearly maternal force. Her fallbacks of bitchisms or quick-witted snark had no place in the middle of this breakdown, and the empathy she’d been able to let Athena lean on when the two of them had met couldn’t quite fit the bill here: Kohao was playing both the part of the dying brother and the surviving sibling, both the gravestone and the aggrieved—except the death he felt such guilt for had never even occurred. He was the only one dying. And it was obvious he was.
Where Shadow had put up no red flags, Kohao had dyed the very fabric of reality crimson: He was too light a weight against Storm’s body; his skin too cold for the summer air. He was her close friend, her sarcasm-spouting partner in cynicism, a guilt-ridden attempted murderer...And he was dying. Storm felt overcome by her fear for him, even as his breathing slowly leveled out in her lap. She pulled out her phone and quietly tapped out a text to Anarchy, trusting Kohao’s closest friend for much-needed back-up.

「 key, im really worried abt KO. like actually scared. he's really fcking sick |
Ⓐ「 i know, we’re scared too. he looks like a skeleton. chey and me are trying to figure out what to do |
「 its not just that, he sounds suicidal |

“Who are you texting?” Kohao asked from Storm’s lap, not bothering to raise his head. His tone had lost all inflection. “Athena?” 
Storm couldn’t tell if it was a prompt or paranoia.
“It’s not Athena, K, I’m just letting you rest. I think we should go downstairs soon, though. Inflict ourselves on the happy couple.” Storm tried to wedge a sliver of levity into her tone, to recapture any essence of their typical banter. “I undercharged for those wedding photos, I’m sure, so I gotta shake them down.”
Kohao mumbled something that might have been a reply; Storm thought she caught the words ‘tell her’ and ‘shoot myself.’ She turned back to her phone, tapping out another message with increasingly frantic fingers:

「 please do something about his guns |
Ⓐ「 im on it, storm |
Ⓐ「 i swear to god |
Ⓐ「 we’re trying so hard to save him |