Us Against the “Almost”

📅 Early February 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: Kato and Leu were having one of their many break-ups; Anarchy had 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 Kato, 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 Kato 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?” Kato 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,” Kato 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 Kato 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,” Kato 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,” Kato 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 Kato had kept tossing glances across the post-show club; had gotten goading and flirtatious and murmured “‘Thena just left with Astra. 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; readily interrupted by Kato's on-again-off-again with Leucosia, 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 Kato 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, Kato had been in the right: It didn’t happen. Anarchy was still as-of-yet-“uncured” that evening in 2016; after Kato finally split with Leu, 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 pre-release clubbing, and left Anarchy and Kato 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 this thing has been cool to see,” Kato 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.”
Kato 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 Kato specifically tended to be who his eyes found or his thoughts turned to, or who wound up in his sketchbooks. Anarchy hadn’t let it mean anything, though—too hand-shy, too much denial in the way—and it’d been that same year that Kato began spending more time with Fawkes. Which—at the time—had, too, meant exactly nothing to Anarchy. Theoretically.
Except Kato had started leaving gigs with her, or going over to Cinnabar Ink to chat with her more than with Anarchy, and would go to her place for a drink afterwards and not come home until the next morning. Anarchy had found himself lying awake in bed and thinking more about Kato’s blue eyes than his mouth. He’d started noticing, really noticing, how Kato’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 his mouth whenever he did catch a night with him, and pretended that he wasn’t trying to send some sort of message.
It went unreceived, anyway: Kato’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, Kato 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 Kato 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 Kato 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!” Kato 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 Kato 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 Kato 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 Kato’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 Kato’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 Kato’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,” Kato replied with averted, weary eyes, “I know.”

Kato 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 Kato 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 Kato had ended up sharing an apartment again, and gradually they’d somehow—wordlessly—started to return to normal, bit by bit. Kato 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 Kato 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 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 that managed to shake off his speechlessness.
“Put out your cig and get over here,” he said, watching with measured exasperation as Kato 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 Kato’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. Kato had started facing Anarchy more often when they hooked up; they’d naturally started kissing 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. Once, they danced in the kitchen. It’d felt like an inevitability when one morning Anarchy awoke to find Kato 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 Kato 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 Kato’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 the afternoon just a couple days ago, with the sunlight streaming in from across the hall and dyeing Kato’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 Kato’s messy, sunlit hair, and letting his mouth run ahead of his brain, “...I think I love you.”
He felt Kato abruptly tense against his chest before rigidly sitting up, something fearful 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.”
“Kato—” Anarchy started, lifting his hand.
“No!” Kato 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, Kato alone in his own, with the apartment all but silent. It had been two days of almost nothing, where Kato 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 Kato’s bedroom door: From behind it, music played too quietly to cover the muffled sound of hiccuped crying.
“Kato, 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, Kato, 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!” Kato 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 Kato 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!” Kato choked out, “Fuck doors, kick ‘em all in then, I guess!”
Anarchy sat down on the bed next to him, and Kato 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.
Kato 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!” Kato 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!” Kato 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. Kato 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.”

Kato 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.
Kato gave a shallow nod and swallowed hard, as if steeling himself, before scooting closer. Anarchy leaned in on instinct and Kato 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 Kato 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 natural that it nearly ached. It was a final, tearful echo of the enigmatic kisses they’d shared before; the unprompted ones, which ended up feeling like a hinted language. But then Kato threw his arms around Anarchy’s neck, pulling him closer, clinging to his shirt, and this kiss was harder and sadder and clearer: ‘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 hands up, too; tangled his fingers in Kato’s hair and the back of his shirt—and for a moment Kato 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 Kato 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 Kato 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 Kato’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 Kato 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.” Kato nodded but stayed quiet, and Anarchy nervously tucked his tongue to his cheek. He couldn’t help but call to mind Kato’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 Kato’s shoulder, and Kato 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 Kato’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.” Kato 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 hopefully 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 Kato’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?”
Kato managed a smile, and after a pause, returned the sign.
“Infinite to the end.”

relationship spotify playlist

Kato’s POV

The afternoon sunlight lanced through the window across the hall, golden and warm, diffusing into a spring-like caress of Kato’s cheek. He could see it through his closed eyelids, laying with his head on Anarchy’s chest, listening to his heartbeat. The moment felt like a breath of serenity, a refuge from all the weight the season had wrought. What the two of them “were” scared him, sure, but it comforted him, too. Maybe he’d been too in his head. Maybe they could just let it be. Talk around the words and not muddy it all up. At least for now, it was enough. At least for now.
“Fuck, K,” Anarchy sighed softly, running his fingers through Kato’s hair. “...I think I love you.”

The moment shattered and Kato wrenched his head up from Anarchy’s chest to stare at him, like a deer down a gun barrel. He gave a sharp, nearly spastic, shake of his head.
“No, you don’t!” he said, shoving himself backwards, “You don’t, and you didn’t say that.”
“Kato—” Anarchy started, lifting his hand.
“No!” Kato 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, locking the door behind him.

The first thing he did was bury his face in his mattress and scream. It came out hysterical, like he may as well have just witnessed a suicide or something. Then he cried. Sobbed, more.
Anarchy knocked on the door.
“Go away,” Kato snapped, his voice coming out shattered. He could feel Anarchy’s own grief, pooling in through the crack under the door. Eventually he heard him slowly walk away.

It was just…too much. Suddenly the rose-gold sunlight filling his room seemed a taunt from the universe: A cruel, beautiful backdrop to the experience of his chest caving in. He cried until the sun slipped away to let moonlight jeer at him instead; until his cheeks burned from the salt and his head pounded and his throat had worn so raw that no noise left it anymore, and then he curled up on his bed and shook with still more awful, dry, silent sobs that refused to abate, even though his body could no longer realize them.

Anarchy tried to talk to him again: Knocked, said his name. Kato couldn’t have spoken if he wanted to, so he stayed silent and hoped anarchy would assume he’d fallen asleep.
The footsteps dragged away again.
Kato had a panic attack instead of feeling relieved.
The only thing good about it was that by the time it was over, he was so sick with exhaustion that he couldn’t have stayed awake even if he wanted to. Unconsciousness, by that point, was a fucking blessing.

The morning was hell. He’d started sleeping in Anarchy’s bed too often. In his groggy half-sleep waking up, he’d reached out on instinct, briefly confused by the cold, empty bed; then irritated that Anarchy hadn’t kissed him before going to the gym that morning, because obviously that’s where he’d left to—then the memory of the previous day hit him like a .50 cal straight to the chest and he was crying again.
He balled up his sheets in his fists and kneeled on his bed, keening, like a widow on a grave. Eventually he crawled out onto the fire escape to smoke, but threw up instead. He contemplated jumping. He contemplated climbing the steps and banging on Seth’s window and telling him everything. He wanted to burrow under the covers of the spare bed he used to sleep in and have Seth ask if he was okay, and if he wanted any tea, and to bring him one of the books from the big shelf and say, ‘I read this in college, I think you would like it,’ and make him feel like he was smart and worthwhile.
He wanted, more than anything, to be someone softer and safer who wouldn’t crush anything good that came his way in his bare hands. But that’s what he did. That’s what he always did. Even Seth couldn’t fix it. Hell, if he’d gotten his way before, even Seth wouldn’t have survived it. If he’d gotten his way before, then everyone would be dead.

Kato stumbled back into his bedroom and turned on his music so that Anarchy couldn’t hear him crying, and so that he could pretend he didn’t hear Anarchy knocking.

He dodged Anarchy’s eyes and touch when he eventually left his room to piss, but how Anarchy lingered in his doorway—sad and uncertain, silent despite his mouth opening to speak and his hand ending up frozen in a purgatory on the way to outreach—overwhelmed him. Unable to pass him in the hall a second time, Kato fled the scene again and instead wandered the cemetery for several hours. He texted Anarchy a curt, ‘I’m walking,’ so he wouldn’t freak out, but couldn’t bring himself to respond to Anarchy's reply of ‘please can we talk’ with anything other than silence and a thumbs down react.
Just hate me, Kato thought. Just hate me and you’ll be safe from it. From me.
He waited until Anarchy’d left for work before coming home.

Somehow they scraped through another day that way. He couldn’t face Anarchy’s sad, confused eyes, so he ducked his gaze and avoided them crossing paths however he could. He cried. He didn’t eat. He cut up his arms and put cigarettes out on his clavicle where Anarchy used to press his lips. He sat on his bed and stared at his lockers, not even hearing the music he’d put on to try and drown out the world.
He had no plan, no direction. He couldn’t even try to make one. Usually his head was rife with noise—lyrics, poems, old arguments and words left unsaid. Resentments and wants and thoughts and fears, all crashing over one another like roiled surf. Now he couldn’t think: Every synapse had become dedicated to feeling.
He felt like a burn victim. He felt like he’d died. He hiccuped like a child, alone on his bed, and finally constructed a thought.
Simple, just three words.
‘I love you.’
Then he cried until he threw up again.

It was just so fucked up. He knew Anarchy loved him. They’d been ‘being in love’ for fucking ages, it wasn’t like it was a shock. But it felt like the words had cleaved it into two things, because being in love and acting in love was different than saying it. Saying it was committing to it. And the words felt…threatening.
Kato tugged at his hair, his temples aching. He felt like he was missing something, something foundational. ‘I love you’ had never fit in his mouth right. Something about it always felt contaminated.
It’s me, he lamented, rocking himself. It’s that it’s me.

Kato knew what his love looked like: Rabid. What would Anarchy do with it, if they tried to make it into something real? Something closer? As friends, he still had space; still had an ‘out.’
Kato stared at the dents in his drywall that his knuckles had made only a couple months before. There was broken glass in his wastebin, still, from him throwing an empty vodka bottle into it as hard as he could. He had a crack pipe stuffed in the back of his dresser drawer and pieces of filmy plastic kicked under his desk that had before been twisted around ounces of cocaine.
How long would Anarchy be able to handle that shit without a buffer? Anarchy, who’d escaped addiction after it nearly stole everything from him, including his life? Anarchy, whose dad had punched holes in walls, blind drunk—smashed empty bottles, one of which had literally, physically, scarred him?
Anarchy, having starved out on the street to the point that when he moved in one of Seth’s belts could nearly circle his waist twice—he was supposed to just take it on the chin if his boyfriend went around using sex work money to buy a pizza just so he could puke it up again?
It was grotesque.
And the drugs…god, the drugs. What was the best case scenario? Anarchy getting too disgusted to stay? The idea of the alternative—of him getting sucked back in—nearly stopped Kato’s heart.

Kato pressed his palms to his eyes, wishing he could dig his fingers into the sockets and gouge out every twisted piece of diseased grey matter behind them.
It’s me.

Anarchy knocked on the door again, three days in. “Kato, please. Talk to me,” he called softly.
Kato bit his tongue and tried to stifle his tearful breaths. He heard the doorknob jiggle against the lock.
“C’mon, Kato, please!” Anarchy snapped, aggrieved, slamming his palm to the door, “Let me in; talk this out with me!”
“We’ve got nothing to fucking talk about!” Kato responded, but his voice cracked with grief and he heard Anarchy sigh—a heartsick, broken sort of sound that made Kato hide his head in his arms.
“We’re talking this out one way or another, K, I’ll break this door down if I have to,” Anarchy called.
Kato tightened his arms around himself, pulled his knees to his sternum, and tried to curl up into nonexistence. Yeah right.
“Alright, fuck it.” Anarchy’s voice seemed more muffled; further away. Hopefully he was giving up.

Suddenly, a crash. Kato snapped his head up and the idea that he’d been calling Anarchy’s bluff splintered, like the wood around his door’s latch as it gave and swung open.

“What the fuck, that’s gonna cost money!” Kato spat, shooting Anarchy a shocked glare when he crossed the threshold, and 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!” Kato choked out, “Fuck doors, kick ‘em all in then, I guess!”
Anarchy sat down on the bed next to him, and Kato pressed his forehead back to his knees to hide his swollen eyes. For a few silent moments, Anarchy sat beside him, looking at him. Kato could feel his gaze.

“...I'm not going to beg. It doesn't mean I think you’re right,” Anarchy said softly. Kato shut his eyes and hunched his shoulders inward, gritting his teeth.
“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.”

Kato went quiet. He couldn’t look Anarchy in the face, not now. He trusted him. He trusted him not to leave, not to hate, and he’d begged for that but—but how could he live with it himself? How could he live with Anarchy there, a room away, a foot away, not leaving and not hating him and not doing anything to make it easier to bear that he loved him? Because fuck, fuck. Kato loved him. Was in love with him, had been in love with him. And could never have him again, never dance under his arm again, never exchange breaths under the same sheets or run a thumb over his stubbled jaw again.
To save him, Kato begged himself inside his head, a plea of a mantra. To save him. If I can’t do anything else good in my life again, just let me save him.

Slowly he 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. His voice was so tender. Kato was terrified he’d never hear it so tender again.
Nearly steeling himself, Kato gave a shallow nod and swallowed hard before scooting closer. Anarchy leaned in on instinct and Kato brought his hand up to the back of Anarchy’s neck, thumb resting on the curve of his jaw for the last time. For a beat, Kato hesitated; tried to cling to the moment, to hold it and memorize what it felt like, here, in his room like this with Anarchy; their lips nearly touching and their eyes still meeting as lovers’ did.
“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 suddenly he was wrong, because this wasn’t what he always did. The kisses he’d thought he was echoing had always been short and swift with a hollow grave ahead of them; before, he’d kissed like a soldier and both times it had felt like an ending, at least to his mouth. This was different and the way their lips met felt so easy that it ached. It felt like continuation of all that they’d had, and like it shouldn’t be final, couldn’t be final, not when it felt like life aligning again.
But it needed to be. It needed to be final, however it felt, and Kato couldn’t say the words aloud so he pulled Anarchy closer, tightening his fingers in his shirt, and pressed his ‘I love you I love you I love you’ against Anarchy’s mouth 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. Anarchy knew what it was; Kato could tell—he could feel the grief tighten his expression and Anarchy brought his hands up to tangle his fingers in Kato’s hair and hold him. For a moment Kato allowed it to stay that way: Let them be close, be kissing, be—still—touching one another like lovers. It couldn’t last. Kato forced himself to pull away; Anarchy allowed his hand to fall.

“Before—you said you couldn’t do this now. That you weren’t ready—” Anarchy started, but Kato cut him off with an uncompromising shake of his head.
“Don’t try and wait for me to be,” he said, even though that was all he wanted. “I know you did before—waited. While I was with Fawkes....Don't do that this time. Don’t try and wait.”
It wouldn’t be fair, and it would still keep ‘Key too close. He deserved better than that. Better than watching a person he loved fail to change, even for him. Better than wasting tender touch and care and hope on someone twisted up and ruined.

Anarchy hesitated for a moment, and in it the sun slipped past the top of the window frame as afternoon turned to evening, blushing the side of Kato’s face again with soft yellow light. His bedroom washed peach-pink and gold once more, and they sat together again in a single, gilded second.

“...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.”
Kato nodded but stayed quiet, not trusting his voice to stay steady, not trusting more tears to not come, and Anarchy gave a small frown.
“...Are you gonna be alright?” he asked, reaching out to grip Kato’s shoulder.
Kato raised his head; met Anarchy’s eyes and blinked a couple times; and though his eyes burned, they didn’t spill over. “...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 Kato’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.”
Kato swallowed hard and slowly nodded again. “...Okay,” he said quietly, “Then...then yeah. I’ll be alright.”
Maybe. Maybe he could be. Maybe it really could all still work out in the end, if it wasn’t ruined and they could, still, have the friendship. Yeah…as long as they could have that. As long as Anarchy was still there. Kato tried to affirm his words with a shallow nod, however sad.
Anarchy offered him a soft smile in return, perhaps feeling things weren’t quite stable enough for a hug. “Then I will be too. And we will be.” He let go of Kato’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?”
Kato managed a strained smile, and after a pause, returned the sign. “Infinite to the end.”

This is the only way, he reminded himself, his heart aching behind the symbol formed by his fingertips. This is the only way to have the infinite. The other way could only ever end.