Wake and Swell
📅 2014
【ᴄᴡ ғᴏʀ ᴅʀᴜɢ ᴜsᴇ, sɪ/sʜ, ᴇᴍᴏᴛɪᴏɴᴀʟ ᴍᴀɴɪᴘᴜʟᴀᴛɪᴏɴ & ᴀʙᴜsᴇ ᴅʏɴᴀᴍɪᴄs, ᴀɴᴅ ᴍᴇɴᴛɪᴏɴ ᴏғ ᴇᴀᴛɪɴɢ ᴅɪsᴏʀᴅᴇʀs】
At first it struck Kato as absolutely nuts that Leucosia thought she didn’t “fit into his world,” because so much of what made the two of them, well, them, was how perfectly they did fit together.
She understood his world the way no one else around him understood it. Sure, Athena “understood” having an eating disorder; Anarchy “understood” doing drugs; Seth “understood” cutting and trying to up and off oneself. But they didn’t talk about it to him, not how he and Leu could talk. They didn’t understand the pull, the want-to and need-to, or they didn’t understand how he felt it, or if they did, they didn’t want to give it any airtime. Athena didn’t want to talk about anorexia almost at all; allergic to the topic, she snapped shut any potential discussion of their shared high school illnesses with some line akin to “I’m so glad that’s all behind us.”
Sure, she’d confided in him about the appeal of relapsing once or twice, early in recovery, before she’d screwed her head on too straight to ever look back again. But those days were behind them, now, and she wouldn’t or couldn’t talk to him about what it meant to feel that pull. That comfort, that thing about it—and the cutting, and the cocaine—that made life feel in control; that made it feel like there was a weapon to fight the self-loathing with. Sure, it wasn’t true, Kato was aware of the delusion, but the feeling was real, and Leu got it. She got using it as a middle finger to the world, too. About it being vengeful and not just sad sack behavior.
She told him about her poetry being the only way she could communicate it before him; told him about ex-boyfriends not “getting” it; thinking it was all just edgy and cringeworthy. Juvenile. Weak. Stupid. Embarrassing dark poetry about embarrassing pathetic behavior. It sounded familiar.
She’d write them poems and be dismissed or degraded. She’d longed for someone to “get it.” And Kato felt like he got it: That they shared that world, too, the written one, with their verse and vulnerability. He effused over her poems and asked if she planned to publish; she blushed and downplayed her own talents in order to talk about his music instead.
She hadn’t written anything in a little while—writer’s block, she said—and they’d been able to commiserate about that, too, about the crushing weight of one's creative well drying up; how much it felt like desertion—of oneself; by oneself. They got it, everything, about each other.
So how could she think she didn’t fit into his world?
He figured it was about the industry part of things, at first, and so he tried—like he said he would—not to strand her with “the music talk” so much. He checked in on her more during rehearsals; attempted to loop her in on conversations she could more easily contribute to—but fighting the tide of her withdrawal felt more and more like a losing battle. An aggravating losing battle.
Out with other people she just came off as shy, or even a little bored, sometimes. She’d chit chat and smile and make him feel like maybe it was all okay, or okay enough. Then when they were alone, she met his attempts to include her with something sad and lowly.
He’d invite her into “his world” and talk about his lyrics or ideas or whatever and where she used to give him feedback, or hype him up, or just engage, she started to seem just as noncommittal as a stranger on the bus. When he inevitably asked what the problem was, she’d make some dejected comment about how she just wished she had something like music to feel passionate about, in that self-pitying, pathetic sort of tone that stole all the joy from sharing his excitement for the tour and for the next album and turned the conversation into some screwed up thing where he had to comfort her over whatever sadness he’d brought on through his mention of his work. He wound up feeling guilty for being an artist, guilty that he had something he was passionate about; then miserable and angry with her for making him feel fucking guilty about any of it.
He got sick of it eventually. He made the mistake of talking about the music video they were preparing to shoot for his recent single, Young Nero; how excited he was, and the visual effects he was hoping for, and if she thought it would be too repetitive if they went for a double-exposure sort of effect during some parts the way they had with the MV for The Rubicon or if she thought it’d be alright; even thematic. The only response she gave was a singular, doleful, “I’m sure it’ll be fine.”
“What’s wrong?” Kato asked, deflated. He immediately wished he hadn’t: It was the same tired shit, over and over, how nothing in her life spoke to her how music did to him; that she was uncreative and uninspired; she didn’t have the drive to write poetry anymore. He knew better than to suggest she try anyway, because she’d just dissolve into further lamentations about her total stagnation as a creative and human being, and he’d have to sit there and feel like the fucking outsider himself while she lay in bed being tragic at him.
“You make me feel like I’m doing something wrong by enjoying my work,” he finally snapped, getting to his feet and throwing his hands up, then raking them through his hair. “Like, I’ll tolerate a lot of shit, Leu, but if you can’t deal with my music, then I’m out. Christ.”
She looked at him like he’d shot her; her eyes had already been threatening tears and the dam burst. “What the hell is wrong with you?” she asked; nearly sobbed. The shock and hurt in her voice overpowered her anger and left Kato rather stricken. He wanted her to apologize for alienating him, or, barring that, to at least yell and call him names. Instead, she cried.
“You promise you’ll never leave me but wow, really all it takes is that I have a couple hard months and you’re ‘out?’ I have depression,” she hiccuped. “I’m not trying to shame you for being happy! I just can’t. Do you think I want to be a problem all the time?”
“I didn’t mean it like that,” Kato surrendered, awkwardly sitting down beside her again instead of huffily pacing. He rested his open hand on the sheets for her. “I’ve just been trying to help you through all this crap and I haven’t felt supported by you, like, at all since we started prepping for the tour. It just seems like my music makes you sadder now and it makes me feel like shit.”
“It’s not that I’m not supportive of you,” she sniffled, reproachfully pushing his hand away and wiping her eyes instead. “I just feel down a lot, and it makes me sad that I can’t connect with you about your stuff. That I can’t have something that makes me happy.”
“Yeah, I’m sorry that nothing makes you happy too,” Kato said, trying and failing not to come off too flat, because fuck, he was doing his best! Couldn’t she be even a little happy for him when things were maybe, finally in his fucking life, going well?! Or at least not make him feel like shit because they were? Goddamn.
She was good at stuffing her feelings but not at acting; he was good at neither, and the friction between them after their little fight could’ve boiled water. She stopped talking about how sad she was, but only by closing herself off entirely. She quit coming to the studio and asking after show dates and tour dates, and her absence hit Kato like an injury. Each day was a limp through the hours without her reaching out, or else sounding like a stranger when she did. He’d felt a lack of support before, sure, but this was outright abandonment. At least before she’d been trying something. Now she let him double text, triple text; leave a voicemail for every stage of grief except acceptance and then finally broke her intermittent silent-treatment with some flat, coin-flippable response so vague that it essentially felt like a continuation of the silence anyway. He attempted to address it, but she insisted she wasn’t acting any differently, she was just ‘busy’ and trying to give him the space he needed for his music.
Yeah, his music…he tried to keep enjoying it, since that had been the whole issue anyway, but couldn’t work on the songs he’d started for her, or the ones he was excited about and wanted to share with her, or the ones he thought she might relate to and like, or any of them, really, without some paradoxical heavy emptiness hollowing a third of his chest out. He missed her laugh and her sardonic humor and the fact that despite causing it, she would have understood the self-destructive, stranded itch under his skin that begged for a blade. No one else did. He couldn’t touch the topic with anyone else. Just bleed.
Guilty and aggrieved in equal measure, Kato went over to her place to try and fix it, again, hoping she’d have a harder time ghosting him if he was standing in her kitchen. She kissed him like a corpse when she answered the door and the stony “thanks” she gave for him bringing over dinner landed more like dismissal than gratitude. Kato couldn’t manage to eat and instead paced around feeling prickly and nervous while her cold quiet chilled the air between them like dry ice. He forced himself to play house and asked about her job, and if she’d felt able to enjoy her hobbies again, and how she was enjoying her new side-hustle of pet sitting; if that was fun or if the animals were well-behaved, at least. She answered everything in a cool monotone and as few syllables as possible while still being a coherent sentence.
“Okay, I know I shouldn’t have been an ass about things before, Leu, but Jesus…” he finally said, raising his hands, exasperated with how she sat on the couch and picked at her food without looking at him. “You say you’re not, but c’mon: You shut me out, you don’t ask about my life at all, I’m not saying you have to subject yourself to the studio again but you know that you’re practically outright ignoring me at this point, right? Are you just punishing me for feeling hurt before?”
“You’re one to talk!” she retorted, raising her eyebrows. “You’re so self absorbed. Every time I’m struggling, you decide it’s all about you. You don’t care if I’m suffering, you just need to come over and be a jerk and tell me if I feel sad then I’m wrong, whether I talk to you about it or not! Fuck!” She slammed her takeout container onto the coffee table. It tipped and spilled. “God, there you go. Clearly I can’t do anything right. For you or at all.”
“I didn’t say that. Quit insulting yourself on my behalf. If I wanted to, I fucking would.” He righted the container and frowned, then sighed and took a seat next to her on the couch. “I just want to feel like you give a damn about me. That’s it! Even if you’re sad. Okay? I’m not trying to tell you you can’t have a hard fucking day, I’m always only two steps from the ledge my goddamn self, I get that. We used to fucking talk about it.” He looked down at his own hands in his lap and swallowed. “...Been feeling two steps from the ledge a lot lately. Shit feels emptier without you,” he confessed, letting the anger drain from his voice. “I miss you, Leu: I miss actually connecting with you. I miss when you’d talk to me for real. You can’t convince me you’re being normal or whatever, if we didn’t get together in person we used to text or call every fucking day! For at least an hour. Now I’m just waiting. And waiting…I guess I deserve it. I’m sorry I made you feel like you couldn’t share things with me.”
She stayed quiet, but her expression seemed to soften by a degree and the silence felt less punishing; more pensive.
“I’d rather have you with me, and sad, and talking to me about it than have you be so distant and us both be feeling all fucked up and alone,” Kato said. He risked resting one of his hands on her leg. She didn’t rebuff him. “I know I let my own bullshit get in the way, but I’d rather have you regardless than not have you there at all. I am really sorry. Maybe I am self-absorbed too, but it’s not true that I don’t care. I miss knowing how you’re feeling. I miss having the chance to make you laugh. I miss us both feeling…understood.”
She leaned against him and let out a sigh; a sad one, not an angry one, finally. Her lip trembled.
“I don’t like who I am when we’re fighting,” she mumbled.
“Yeah, well…me neither.”
“No, I mean…I don’t like who I am without you. Like if you don’t understand me, or you’re not there understanding me, then it feels like there’s nothing there to understand, or worth understanding. ‘Cause everyone else always treated me like that, so I always end up back there…” Her frown steepened. “I missed you too. It just didn’t feel like you were there either. It made me feel like crap.”
He put his arm around her shoulders and pulled her more tightly to him; she gave in completely and let herself fall across his lap. He stroked her hair.
“I know. I made you feel like I didn’t want to hear it,” he apologized again. “I’ll work on my shit more, I promise.”
He tried. He really tried to “work on his shit” more. The issue Kato kept running into was that he didn’t know, exactly, what his shit was. He needed to be better at listening to her, obviously, and to make sure she felt valued, and to not shut her down: She’d been shut down enough in her life. It felt more like he just flipped the script instead of fixing anything, though, because he couldn’t figure out how to not trigger her without having to stifle his own reactions in case it made her freeze him out again. He didn’t go full nuclear winter or anything; he didn’t want to, fuck, he was trying to reconnect! But he pretended it didn’t bother him when she either forgot or ignored a message he sent and dove instead into a bad day or dream that she’d had. He preemptively brushed himself off, frustrated with his own selfish nature, when she didn’t have time or mental space to talk about whatever thing it was—lyrics, shows, tour merch, some history documentary he just watched—that felt exciting to him, exciting enough to want to share with her.
He asked after her days, and work, and feelings, the same as he always had, and he tried to take heart with the times when she did get back to him about his own life, with a “Cool,” or “Wow they look amazing,” or “u did great,” but some shallow sort of grief seeped into the cracks left by the fact that she used to ask more questions, be more curious—would match his fucking effort, for Christ’s sake. She’d want to know what he was doing or thinking, actively want to know, and if he shared his work then she’d gush praise like a fountain; could talk for half an hour or type out multiple paragraphs about details she noticed and loved in his music, the same as he did for her poetry. Now…well, now she never seemed to have the energy for more than a word or a half sentence. Now, he never seemed to be worth the energy. Her misery sucked all that up.
Desperate to bridge the gap—and maybe make her feel less sad, less like no-one cared—he spent several weeks secretly writing her another song. It was raw, intimate—more poetry than music, really, built off of one of the poems he’d shared with her a couple months back. He poured everything he had into it, trying to put to verse what he couldn’t seem to articulate in conversation: You’re worth it all to me. Talk to me. I’m on your side.
Maybe even ‘I love you.’
It was stripped-down and a little rough, still, by the time he sat on her floor to play it that evening while she curled up on the couch, but it was for her. Hopefully she’d like it, even somewhat unpolished.
“Oh, my wayward stray north star above,
my moon-stained raven; storm-dark dove,
let the waves not clip your wings
Gannet-plunge; claim both sea and sky
call my ship to your sunken harbor, I’ll
join you in showing them how the siren singsSo stake your claim
on wake and swell,
On my heart and bleak spired stone;
Be my beacon and we’ll feed fleets to the sea
and call the carnage homeDaughter of Melpomene—
You paint your wounds with salt and shame
But even birthed by the Muse of tragedy,
Surrender’s flag need not be your name.Rebuild yourself with pack ice
white-capped waves and frothing surf
Bleached bone hag-stones; corpse-pallid truth:
fallacy and prophecy and all of Eris’ mirthYou may bear Demeter’s curse;
I’m not one to till the fields but to salt the earth
So let me sing with you, lyre-bird
if they deem us monsters, then let’s freeze the seas to glass
Take this winter’s mirror to them and let their prayers amass
I swear I’ll be the tide to you; the power to your song
Together we can shape the world,
put right where we were wrongedSo stake your claim
on wake and swell,
On my heart and bleak spired stone;
Be my beacon and we’ll feed fleets to the sea
and call the carnage homePart the waves or raise them,
you know I’ll brave the brine
Salt my lungs but don’t leave our song unsung;
if you can’t write your verse, take mine.”
She’d seemed to be listening at first, but by the time Kato looked up from strumming the final cord, she’d picked up her phone and was looking at it rather than him; picking absently at the edge of her thumbnail and then scrolling through…something. Kato attempted to swallow his hurt, like he’d taken to doing.
“Was it okay?” he prompted. “I wrote it for you. Obviously. I don’t have a title for it yet, though.” He thumbed a string but pressed it silent immediately. “…I couldn’t decide between ‘verse’ and ‘vows’ for the last line,” he confessed, his heart skipping with the disclosure. He glanced nervously up at her.
She’d started at the sound of his voice, blinking like she forgot he was even playing. “Oh! Yeah, it’s nice,” she said. She didn’t react at all to his allusion to writing vows for her—really, Kato felt like she couldn’t have said something more noncommittal if she’d been actively trying.
“Nice, huh?” He forced a chuckle and pushed himself to smile, even if it maybe read as a tooth-bared, gut-punched grimace. “Nice, cool. Great. That’s what I was going for.”
He failed to soften the edge in his voice and Leucosia finally sat up straight and properly looked at him. “What? Did I say something wrong?” she asked, abruptly defensive.
Before, in similar situations, he’d started saying things like, “No, it’s nothing, you’re fine,” even though he’d wanted to scream, “Why don’t you care? Why can’t you fucking see me when I’m two feet from you? Why do you make me feel fucking useless for bleeding out artwork for you?”
But he hadn’t. Because he was selfish and that was the issue; because she was fragile; because he learned that when she felt cornered, she shut down and iced over and he couldn’t handle it.
“Guess I was just hoping for more than, like, one syllable,” he muttered this time around. He plucked at a string again instead of looking directly at her, but caught her frowning in his periphery; obviously sensing his frustration.
“Sorry, I don’t know what you want me to say.” She punctuated her sentence with a weak shrug and a return to her phone that left Kato feeling like a pin-pulled hand grenade. He set down his guitar with a sharp clack.
“I want you to listen when I’m, you know, saying shit to you,” he snapped. “Or singing shit for you. I’m not doing it for myself.”
Leu bristled. “I was listening.”
Kato let out some bitter ghost of a laugh and shook his head. “No, you weren’t. You were scrolling. I’m just background noise.”
Leucosia exhaled and crossed her arms. “Well, maybe I’d have more to say if you actually were here for me. I have a lot on my mind, okay? Music’s your life, not mine. It’s not like you were talking to me.”
Kato stared at her. His jaw dropped at first, but quickly closed, then clenched. “Wow. Excuse the fuck out of me for forcing you to listen to my elevator music, then. Holy shit.” Betrayal tugged his upper lip like a fish hook, and the resulting half-scar, half-scowl of a sneer etched across his lips seemed to force Leucosia to drop her gaze.
“I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said it like that,” she said, more softly. “I just…I don’t know how to be part of your life anymore, you say you want me in it but it’s always about the band and albums and stuff.”
Kato could’ve rolled his eyes at the weak attempt to backtrack and ended up baring his teeth instead at the impotent ‘sorry’ which only served to fucking pivot directly into self-pity rather than acknowledge anything about his feelings.
“How are you back on this shit again? I’m literally right here, Leucosia!” he snapped, raising his voice. “I’ve been making time for you and writing you into my lyrics; been turning the music into you! I’ve been choosing you! But no matter what, you don’t fucking listen, you brush me off with one-word responses, and then you act like you’re being left behind! I do want you to be part of my life, but you just—God, you make it so fucking hard!”
“I make it hard?!” Leucosia had flinched at his volume but she returned fire, her voice rising too. “I didn’t know I was supposed to have the energy to write a whole Rolling Stone article every time you play a few chords!”
“You used to. But I guess that’s only when you need to reel me back in, huh?” Kato scrubbed a hand down his face, letting a barbed breath through his teeth. “But you know what? Fuck that,” he nearly snarled, frustration cracking his voice, “I’ve been stuffing my feelings for ages because I knew this would happen. I knew if I said anything, if I even hinted that I was feeling fucking neglected again, you’d go and shut down completely or act like I was a selfish asshole for wanting anything from you.”
Leucosia tightened her arms around herself but held her ground. “If you decide not to tell me how you’re actually feeling, that’s not my fault, Kato.”
Kato gave a curt, humorless laugh; a bitter sound, more of a hiss. “Right, of course not. Nothing ever is. I bet you’ll try and tell me you’re not acting any different again, too. It’s all in my head, right?” He couldn’t suppress the angry curl of his upper lip and the attempt only served to give his near-snarl a violent, trembling twitch. It wasn’t worth it, this shitshow wasn’t worth it, whatever “it” was.
“I don’t know where I’m fucking up because I’m giving this my all, but fuck me; the door’s always half closed now. You used to give a shit,” he spat. With a broken scoff, he stood abruptly to leave, grabbing his guitar and slinging the strap over his shoulder, not caring that it was twisted and the studs were digging into his shoulder.
“I do give a shit!” Leucosia objected as he started to the door, the anger in her voice still dominant, but fringed by a new note of panic in the face of him going rather than groveling, how he’d been doing.
Kato spun to face her again, his eyes burning. “Save it! I’ve spent months trying to hold this together, trying to make you feel wanted, trying to prove I care—” he shook his head, furious: His heart pounding; breaking; freezing over and cracking. “—but you can’t appreciate any of it, and you definitely can’t be fucked to do the same for me! It’s like you want to be abandoned just so you can blame me and be the victim and not have to pretend to care about anyone but yourself.”
Leucosia’s breath caught and her stormy expression flickered, but Kato turned and marched to the door, wrenching it open. “Fucking congrats. You win,” he snarled over his shoulder.
“You said—you—” Leucosia choked, accusation lacing her tone as she jumped to her feet; shaking, eyes wounded but ablaze: “You said you’d never leave!”
Kato sneered. “Well, everyone makes mistakes.”
She threw her phone at his head. He slammed her door closed behind himself in time to hear the Samsung shatter against it.
He’d gotten used to being the one who caved; who writhed around in the loneliness until it got too unbearable and forced him to go crawling back to her door with an apology on his lips like a prayer. It was an exercise in being pathetic and he was sick of it; nauseous with it, or maybe nauseous without her. He made himself puke half the meals he ate and decided that vomiting and vindication felt similar enough; he’d rather believe the strain on his heart was from the purging than anything else, anyway. Anything weaker.
He poured himself back into his music with a vengeance and tried to turn his focus to the upcoming tour. He hopped in on a couple of Nightshrike’s livestreams, posted promos…And shut Leu out just like she always did to him, even though not texting, not calling, not going to see her and even not opening their stagnant message history 6,000 times “just in case” felt like refusing to scratch an itch. Or maybe like refusing to address internal bleeding.
It wore them both thin, the silence, it always did and he knew it—but finally she was the one to crumble first. He’d wrapped up a Q&A with the twins and when he left she was standing on the sidewalk out front of their flat, standing under a streetlamp like a ghost, pale and forsaken.
“I know it’s weird,” she started, then burst into tears. Instinct carried him to her before he could think about it and she fell into his arms.
“I’m sorry, I saw the stream and I knew you’d be here,” she sobbed.
“You could have messaged me,” Kato replied. He couldn’t tell if he sounded flat or gentle. Neither seemed quite right. With the indecisive aversion of his gaze, he suddenly noticed that the arms around him were bandaged, but poorly: Cuts peeked out from behind the gauze and plasters and his lips jerked downwards. “Jesus, Leu, your arms,” he breathed.
“If I sent a text you might’ve just blocked me, I don’t know—and you don’t have to pretend; I deserved it, I’m so sorry, I know I was awful,” Leucosa bawled into his shirt. “I love you so much—I didn’t mean to ruin your music for you and everything, I swear I’ll do better! I listened to your singles, the ones you put out the past couple months—they’re amazing, you’re amazing.” She sniffled and stepped back only far enough to look up at him. She gave him an agonized, watery smile; her face shone. “You were managing to write such incredible stuff and do everything even though I was being useless. I’m really, really sorry. Please—”
“You didn’t need to hurt yourself over it,” Kato interrupted. He swallowed; a lump rising in his throat over how horrible he’d made her feel. “I get it though. But I don’t…like, I don’t agree that you deserved it. And…I know what I said was shitty, too. I’m sorry.” He pulled her to his chest again and she clung to him, still softly hiccuping.
“You’ll still take me back?” she asked. The pain in her voice felt like his own.
“It’s been us the whole time, Leu,” Kato said. “To me. I guess I was just…waiting. Waiting to see if you wanted it back.”
“I do, I do…I’m back. I’ll make it how it was again, I promise…I’m sorry you were waiting.”
Kato couldn’t help but feel somewhat handshy around the promise, however soothing her return and her remorse that night had been, but the next morning he woke up to a text from her, asking when he’d next be at the studio and if she could please come hang out for a session again. He told her. She showed.
Her effort did, too: She hid in her phone less, and when she used it, she generally used it to find funny memes or something to share with everyone. She asked about the additional tour dates and managed, despite her anxiety and her demanding boss, to get two days off so that she could attend the final two in-state shows at the end of the tour: She’d be there in Syracuse at The Lost Horizon and they could come back to Brooklyn together.
The last rocky couple months seemed to melt away as the tour approached, with the enthusiasm on all sides and how hard she was obviously working to make everything from before all up to him. She poured over his work like she used to and talked endlessly to him about her favorite parts; asking about his inspiration, the influence, what his vision was for music videos not yet made. She doodled for the first time since middle school while listening to Ten of Swords, and shyly showed him the ballpoint pen rendering of a sad-looking girl standing in a barren, burning field, his lyrics overlapping in the background to fill in a darkening sky overhead.
“I’m sorry it looks like a kid did it,” she said.
“Are you kidding? I want to get it screen printed for, like, tour-exclusive shirts or something, if I can,” Kato beamed, gratified by the return of her smile and the way her eyes re-lit; “Is that alright with you?”
“...Yeah, that would be cool.”
“It’ll be even cooler once you sign it. Then the shirts’ll be a double collector’s item when you publish your poetry book and blow up.”
She blushed like a sunrise. He basked in it.
He basked in the tour, too—was able to bask in it; thankful that they’d managed to iron things out before he had to leave. The crowds were…well, amazing. Some show spots ended up sparse, but even playing for five kids in a basement stage was worth it when they were decked out in merch and psyched to be there. But damn…being three states from home in a packed 2,000 capacity venue that still didn’t visibly empty even when the Luenne fans had been sated by the opening act…? That was something else.
“I guess I got in my head that we were really just sort of riding Bryluen’s coattails,” Kato confessed to Leucosia over the phone, close to midnight after their Boston show. “I saw the ticket sales and the Twitter followers and the streaming numbers and everything but on stage in Brooklyn I always in my head was like, ‘it’s because we’re local, it’s because of Nightshrike and Bryluen.’ But…there are people here for us. Like, over a thousand people here, for us. Isn’t that crazy?”
“No, what’s crazy is your imposter syndrome,” Leucosia laughed. “I can’t wait to see it though. See you. I miss you.”
“I miss you too. Just a couple more days, though, right?”
“I know. I just wish it could be now,” she said.
“Yeah, me too.”
“No you don’t! You’re loving the stardom too much.”
“Well, yeah, okay, I am,” he conceded, grinning, “but I do miss you.”
He did, and though starting the loop back home was bittersweet for sure, part of the ‘sweet’ was her presence there in Syracuse. Only a couple hundred people to the crowd—ha, “only”—she spent the show practically perched on one of the stage monitors, beaming and bouncing; whooping and waving like a fan whenever he made eye-contact with her. At the end of the concert he reached down and pulled her by the hand up onto the stage to join them in their exit.
“The inspiration for Wintertide, everybody,” he said into the mic, clipping it back onto its stand with one hand and presenting Leucosia with the other. “Thanks again for coming to see us, Syracuse. Buy one of her shirts if you want a souvenir, yeah?”
“Stay infinite,” Leucosia squeaked, blushing, standing on her tip-toes despite her platforms in order to get her lips to the microphone. Shakily she held her hands up with her forefingers crossed to her thumbs, forming the infinity symbol the way Anarchy usually did at the end of shows, drawing another wave of cheering as a return of the salute rippled through the crowd until a hundred infinities were waving above their heads like lighters. Kato beamed.
“You did great,” he told Leucosia, backstage, still aglow. “Who says you’ve got anxiety?”
She ignored the compliment in favor of throwing her arms around his neck and catching his grin with her lips, kissing him so hurriedly that her black lipstick ended up on his teeth.
“I missed you so much!” she said, almost wept—if it weren’t for her smile she’d have come off bereft. “I’m so happy for you, oh my god—I saw some videos from the other shows—you were amazing; I’m so sad I couldn’t be there with you. I’m so glad you’re back.”
“Hey, yeah, I mean, almost—one more show. It’ll be awesome to have you with me for it, too.”
Kato’s face ached from smiling by the time they got back to her hotel room. Athena’d asked if he’d come back to the tour bus in the morning, but Leucosia had gotten so watery-eyed over the idea—“You said we’d head back home together,” she reminded him—that he told Athena he’d just meet the rest of them at Strangelove the following evening.
A solid decision, it turned out, not just because it kept Leu happy: She’d brought “treats” with her, having felt terrible that she’d been too stressed to celebrate “properly” when the tour first got confirmed.
“You look like you’ve lost weight,” she said while digging the 8-ball and the ecstasy out of her purse.
“Ah, maybe,” he deferred. It gave him pause; she said it like a compliment, albeit with a trace of envy to her tone, and he knew it wasn’t weight he exactly needed to lose, so it felt a little strange that it was complimentary. Not that it didn’t perk his ears a bit anyway.
“So modest.” The moment was quickly glossed over and she was talking again and cutting them each a line. Compliments and catching-ups poured from her lips; they couldn’t keep more than an atomic amount of space between them. He kissed her neck and licked a candy-colored MDMA tablet off her palm instead of taking it with his fingers.
“I missed you so bad. We can really make a night of it,” she said. They did.
She apologized again, afterwards, sometime after dawn started to pale the sky and birds began to offer their groggy songs to the coming day, for having been “so terrible” before the tour at first.
“You get it though, don’t you?” she asked, looking up at him with wide, pleading eyes, her pupils still somewhat dilated. “I just always worry people will like…leave me behind.”
“Yeah. Or, well, ‘leave me behind’ is too passive. I feel like they’ll dump cargo, you know. I feel like people will fucking jettison me.” Kato frowned and pulled her closer. She nuzzled against his sternum. “I know what you mean, though. When it feels like someone might not give a shit anymore…it’s like breathing barbed wire. It’s the gallows.”
He rested his cheek atop her head. “Let’s just not leave each other behind, how about?”
“Never,” she promised.