Safe To Say

 📅 Winter 2017

〚ᴛᴡ ғᴏʀ ɴᴏɴ-ᴇxᴘʟɪᴄɪᴛ ᴛᴀʟᴋ ᴏғ ɴsғᴡ ᴄᴏɴᴛᴇɴᴛ, ᴍᴇɴᴛɪᴏɴs ᴏғ ᴀʙᴜsᴇ, sᴇʟғ ʜᴀʀᴍ, sᴜʙsᴛᴀɴᴄᴇ ᴜsᴇ, ᴀɴᴅ sᴜɪᴄɪᴅᴇ〛

Words had been trapped behind Kato’s teeth for months. Looking back on it, maybe years. It was fucked up. He was fucked up. Everything was fucked up. 
Anarchy had been busy. Busy, that’s how Kato decided to categorize it. Way back when, in 2014—Anarchy had been busy. Busy because he couldn’t back down from a challenge and so he went and had whatever it was with Angela, who didn’t know anything about him and didn’t know anything about the world either and still somehow managed to be interesting enough to Anarchy to make Kato feel shitty and irritable. 
So he’d ducked out of his own experiment and got stuck with Leu. 

For two years fucking writhing in it, drowning in it, ruining himself and someone else along with him until they were just tortured corpses wrapped around each other, each blaming the other for the rot between them. And Anarchy had picked him up off the bathroom floor afterwards and pressed gauze to his wrist. They’d hooked up a couple times already by then—impulsive, frequently drunken, little flings that Kato had laughed off, at least for the most part. Without Leucosia in the picture, though, it started happening more. And Kato watched him play bass and scream and draw and felt…soft. Softness, yeah, that was the only word he could use.

But Anarchy wouldn’t acknowledge it. Anarchy vehemently denied being gay, denied attachment, even when drawing pictures of Kato like a muse, and he shoved those out of sight just like everything else between them. 
Kato hadn’t called it ‘love’ or anything stupid then, either, even if the inkling had danced around the fringes of his consciousness. It had just been pain, been shame, been being a dirty little secret. And so he’d tried to tear himself away from it and chase something that he could call love. 
Instead he’d gone and turned another relationship into fights and lit fuses, and when he finally blew it up, it blasted a hole in all the rest of his life too.

Afterward, just about everyone else in his life was driving Kato insane; from Athena’s blatant abandonment of them all to Sethfire’s selfish, silent downward spiral behind doors he refused to open. Nightshrike had stabbed him in the back and gone ghost, and Kato spun out so frequently over all of it that his emotional slipstream could’ve spawned a tornado outbreak. But then there was Anarchy. Somehow the words he said made sense, and even when they didn’t to Kato, Anarchy was still so…on his side. So present, so warm. He could catch him before he crashed out and could put off the apocalypse, at least for a bit—and even when he couldn’t and Kato hurt himself or had to slink back home, half-high and reeking of vodka, having thrown a fit again and disappeared for half a day, Anarchy would have stacked his phone with texts and a call for him to come home, to be safe, and would hear him out instead of scold him. With Anarchy he could resurface from the chaos; shoot the shit, joke around, feel like he wasn’t falling apart. Or at least like he was being put back together.

And like that, they were back. With the dust settling, though they were still nursing their wounds, Kato ended up in Anarchy’s room again. It called him like a refuge, a gateway to some easy, normal routine from the past, where he could shed his anger along with his clothes and wouldn’t have to think anymore about Athena’s empty bedroom or whether Gabe would ever return another text again. 

“...Hey,” he said from Anarchy’s doorway, 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, agape, and Kato 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 and managed to shake off his speechlessness. “Put out your cig and get over here,” he said, rolling his eyes when Kato took one final drag before ashing the cigarette in a forgotten coffee mug on the desk as he passed it. 
Kato shrugged his jacket off completely, dropping it to the floor before climbing into Anarchy’s bed and straddling his lap. He was warm, sturdy. They could talk like no time at all had passed. With just them, between these walls, it could feel like the halcyon days were yet ongoing; like the rest of their world around them hadn’t all caved in. And hadn’t Anarchy always felt that way? Kato’s shoulders relaxed of their own accord.
“Fuck, I missed you,” Anarchy sighed softly, his hands moving to rest on Kato’s hips.
“Nah, you missed my ass,” Kato deflected, though it softened his smirk to a smile. 
“You are an ass. Now shut the hell up and kiss me.”

It was easy, so easy, too easy, to fall back into. Naked in Anarchy’s bed again, Kato facing toward him instead of away this time, Kato found Anarchy’s eyes—soft, deep, their gaze on his body like a caress—and then the gentle, breathless smile on his lips, and Kato thought, oh fuck. 
Because Anarchy was handsome and had been handsome, because Anarchy was strong and had been strong; because Anarchy had rescued him every single time and everything felt right, there, in bed with him, with their eyes on each other, and it always fucking had. Kato nearly threw up but kissed him again instead.

In a way he couldn’t stand it; terrified, convinced he'd ruin everything, as was his apparent pattern—but he couldn't make himself leave. It was like Anarchy’s bullshit with being gay all over again, flipped around to him this time, convincing himself that if he didn’t label it like that, then he wouldn’t have to face it. 
So he didn’t. He didn’t label it anything. He didn't call it love; didn’t call it a relationship; and definitely didn’t ask Anarchy for clarification. 

They went around like that, as “normal,” while piecing together a cathartic (if rushed) EP with the rest of the band, and Kato acted like he wasn’t wigging the fuck out over the fact that he knew deep down that what they had between them was, at least, love. And probably had been for years. When had he started flirting with ‘Key? 2012? A couple months after they met? Fuck. He’d convinced himself it was just to get a rise out of his friend. Sure. His handsome friend, his understanding friend, with the sharp square jaw and the firm chest and broad hands…
Kato wished a hostile foreign country would nuke Brooklyn from orbit. 

 But they were in love, fuck, they were in love. There was no way around it. One time a hug in the kitchen turned into some goofy half dance and Anarchy spun him and they both laughed and so Kato, of course, had a fucking panic attack afterwards. Dancing in the kitchen, laughing, ducking his head and twirling under Anarchy’s outstretched arm, what the hell was he thinking? Didn’t he learn anything? 
Why did ‘Key have to make it so easy?

“Do your next girlfriend a favor and pull the trigger before you fuck her up as bad as you fucked me up.”
That’s what Leu said. And he hadn’t: Hadn’t eaten lead and instead had taken Fawkes, with her steadfastness and her volunteer work and everything good about her and he’d chewed and chipped and fucking tore away until he’d made a military woman who’d witnessed her friends get blown up cry. Made a woman who volunteered with DV victims take a swing because his silence made her feel worthless, feel beneath his consideration. Like he didn’t care to look at her, answer her. She’d understood him and he’d taken her understanding and twisted it like a drunk driver twists a fucking sedan into scrap metal.

Anarchy was different and that was terrifying, because the more they kissed (and danced, and cuddled, and did all the shit they weren’t supposed to do because it was gay) the more Kato saw what they stood to lose—how long their history was: That they’d been clumsily patching together a romance or some shit for 6-odd years and now it felt like a robin’s egg in his grip—pale and beautiful but too fragile, him not gentle enough to keep it safe; to let it become anything more than a guilty mess and bloody hands. 
He’d freak out sometimes and resort to hooking up with randoms at a skeezy bar as though that could stop him from falling in love, could stop him from having already fallen in love, could stop him from ruining it all again and even worse.

“I wish you wouldn’t,” Anarchy said softly about it at some point; his voice as gentle as his lips on Kato's neck, his eyes sad when he pulled back.
“Why?” Kato asked; hoping and dreading.
“…I want you safe.”