Entry tags:

!complete, jack dawson, yue katou

Who: Katou & Jack
What: Katou's father passes away, and Jack finds him coping in unhealthy ways.
When: RECENT! Like most things~
Where: Wendy's home for Lost Boys
Rating/Warnings: High for mention of parent death, mentions of heavy drug use, mentions of past child abuse, Katou being high off his rocker
Status: Complete!

Katou hadn’t seen his sister in close to a year, not since she had found him at school to tell him that their father had had a massive heart attack and was ill, and that Katou should come visit him. Katou had, of course, not visited his father, because fuck that idea.

That was the same way Sae had found him today. He had been leaving the school with Youji to get lunch, and she had pulled him aside. She told him that their father had passed on a couple of nights before. The wake was to be held on Saturday, the funeral on Sunday, and that he should come to pay his last respects.

Katou had zero respects, or fucks, to give about the whole thing, so he told her to fuck off. And to celebrate, because really, this was great news, he decided to skip his afternoon classes, pick up a bottle of Jack, and head back home.

Wendy and Jack weren’t home when Katou got home, and so he cranked the stereo, turned on some Blood for Blood (not that he would have had much consideration for them even if they had been home), and got to work on celebrating his father’s death, and if there was the added benefit to Katou forgetting, just for a while, how much he had secretly had wanted his father’s approval, well, that would only make the celebrations better.

When Jack came home, Katou was already three-quarters through the bottle of whiskey, and still had the tourniquet from his hit of heroin tied around his arm. “Jack!” he yelled loudly, so he could be heard over the music. “How’sh it goooinnnggg, buuuuuuddy?”

Jack could hear the music almost a block down. He wondered if someone was having a party - something outside? Neighbors were having a get together? Which, hey, party hardy, but when he had gotten closer and realized the music was coming from Wendy’s...

One, that wasn’t Wendy’s style of music, period.

Two, the only other tenant in that house who would listen to that stuff was none other than the youngest of the three.

“Katou, what the fu--” Jack tried not to roll out an exasperated sigh, tried not to look annoyed, because what the fuck was he trying to do, get the cops called? But no, no look of annoyance because what the hell was that on his arm? First matter of business was to just turn the goddamn music off. Completely. “What the hell are you doing?!”

Obviously, he guessed Wendy wasn’t home.

“Hey! I was listening to that!” Katou exclaimed when the music went off, and shot Jack an annoyed look because who just turned off someone’s music for no goddamn reason. He brushed it off pretty quickly though, and then plastered a grin on his face. “I saw my sister today,” Katou said, in an almost sing-songy type of voice. “She says my old man finally bit the bucket, so I’m celebrating.” He picked up the bottle of whiskey, and held it out toward Jack. “Want some Jack, Jack?” And then he burst out laughing, because obviously he was hilarious.

He was drunk. And he was also high - where did he even get--? “I’ll be taking that,” he said, tone as even as could be, and snatched the bottle from him. He even let Katou watch as he went to the kitchen, and dumped the rest down the drain. Then the bottle went straight to the trash.

Jack didn’t think this was a celebration. Katou wasn’t cold hearted - not as tough as he liked to act, either. He hid behind his drugs, his booze, regarded shit carelessly as jokes. And Jack saw himself in Katou, because he’s exactly what he could have become if he had gone down a certain path when it was presented.

“Sit down. And tell me - what the hell happened to your dad?”

Katou grinned when Jack took the bottle, but then Jack was moving toward the kitchen. “Hey! Wait!” Katou called, and went to scramble after Jack. He hadn’t actually tried moving in a couple of hours, and apparently his coordination wasn’t what he had been expecting because he found himself unable to actually climb to his feet.

He sat instead in front of couch, his right arm on the couch cushion propping up his head as he waited for that brief flash of dizziness from trying to stand up too fast to pass. “He had like, a heart attack last year sometime? And I guess his cold, dead heart finally became cold and dead.” He couldn’t bring himself to make more than a weak laugh at that joke though. “So I get to miss his funeral instead of him missing mine, like he wanted. I mean, barely.” His wound was mostly healed now, though it still smarted when things bumped into his scar. “But I still won. Wait. Maybe he would have shown up to my funeral. For appearances. Probably to gloat, too.”

Katou’s rage probably had a good foundation for the coldness of his claims. Some shit must have fucked him up to get him like this so young, and he knew how cruel the world was - knew how cruel your very own family could be. Parents had this ability to rip you to pieces from a very young age; he’d never forget his own father, the coward that would beat his mother to a bloody pulp. Nor could he forget his mother’s irresponsibility and her eventual decision to drop him off the side of the road with his toys and drive off without him, never to come back.

“I honestly can’t tell if you’re celebrating, or…” His eyes went to the empty bottle of jack in the trash, then the wrapping around his arm. “Or if you’re mourning.” Jack scrubbed a hand over his face, biting back a sigh, then sat across from him on the coffee table - at the edge, so his weight wouldn’t make the wood buckle. “What’d he do to you?”

Katou snorted. “I’d be a fucking idiot to mourn him,” he muttered. It was stupid, mourning people who wouldn’t mourn you if you died. He eyed Jack for a long time thinking over what he’d say. Why Jack was concerned, Katou had no idea. He’d been working very hard to get Jack and Wendy to kick him out the last few weeks, and it was fucking bizarre that Jack still cared. Or that he was still living in Wendy’s house. Betray them before they betrayed him. That was Katou’s motto. Well, one of Katou’s mottos.

That apparently didn’t seem to be happening though. He reached for his cigarettes, and stuck one in his mouth. “Nothing som’un like me don’t deserve,” he said eventually. “Knocked me around a bunch. Ga’ me my shitty name.” Did Jack know Katou’s first name? Katou didn’t think he had ever told him. He went to light his smoke.

“If we’re going to talk about this and smoke, we’re doing it outside.” Jack would be adamant about not having Wendy’s house stink like an ashtray again. Both knew it was his way of acting out - he was young, stubborn, but it still wasn’t okay.

He wouldn’t deny the smokes because he desperately needed one too, especially after walking in on all this. “No one deserves to get knocked around. Especially by someone who’s supposed to protect you,” he said, offering him a hand to get up. Jack would help him off the couch and lead him outside, where he actually did have an ashtray waiting for them. “C’mon. Let’s get some fresh air. We’ll talk.”

Katou glared a little at Jack, but, well, outside would probably be nicer than sitting here anyway. He had to lean heavily against Jack in order to stand, let alone walk, but he managed it.

"He don' gotta protect me," he said. "I ain't even his. I got bad blood." Once they got outside, he sat heavily on the ground, took a moment to let the world stop spinning again, and then lit his smoke. "Ya know, I used to think-" that he could make something of himself, maybe, someday. That was the real reason he hadn't dropped out of school yet, wasn't it? The idea was so ridiculous now that he started laughing instead. "Ne'ermind."

It took him a bit to decipher Katou-ism, but… “Bad blood?” Out came the bic lighter and he ignited the end of a cancerous stick. A little fucked how such a terrible vice could be so therapeutic, but that could be sent for worse things - like heroin, for example. Jack took that to mean something like….infidelity? The product of an affair?

“Go on,” he encouraged, the insistence handled with some gentleness. Katou was in a fragile state, but he wouldn’t tell him that - he’d approach this as a willing ear that would listen, no preaching. Not tonight. His father had died and while his coping mechanism wasn’t the best way to go about things, there was still something wrong. “I’m gonna guess he ain’t...really your dad, yeah? Someone else is?”

“Bad blood,” Katou repeated, though he wasn’t really talking to Jack. He repeated the phrase in Japanese - “Warui chi” - the same phrase his father had always used. When Jack asked kept talking to him, he looked at him, his face void of emotion. There was a part of him that wasn’t affected by the drugs anymore, that just never really went numb when the rest of him did. “Dunno who,” he said. “Found a photo of him once. He looked just like me.” The same inconsiderate eyes, pale skin, disgusting, thin lips. “So Father named me, destined me to live a short life and die a worthless loser. Guess it worked in this world and the other. Destiny’s a bitch.” There was no point in going against destiny, was there? You could fight it all you wanted, but you’d just make yourself miserable and destiny always won out in the end.

Ah, so it was that kind of family complication. Well, shit. “Can’t control what goes on, on the other side of things,” Jack mumbled, a puffpuff of his cigarette before exhaling a cloud of nicotine. “Might have died there, but...you’re alive here, aren’t you? Shitty as the dreams are treating you, you still beat through it. Wouldn’t call it the short life of a worthless loser. And destiny’s only a bitch when you let it shove - you coulda died, and you didn’t.”

God, who the fuck would call a child that? Be pissed at the woman that cheated on you, then, not the only innocent thing that came from it. Not that reason mattered now, the man was dead.

A hand went to squeeze Katou’s shoulders, the gesture meant for comfort. “But fuck ‘em. Everyone else, too - they might have let you down but Wendy, her and I sure as hell ain’t gonna let you rot.”

Katou listened to Jack’s words, and they hit him right in the heart. He had managed to survive in this world, if not the other one, hadn’t he? That was worth something, maybe. Maybe not though. It had been Jack and Wendy who had saved his life, all he had done was lie there and bleed and cry about not wanting to die.

Nevertheless, he had beaten destiny then. Maybe he could do it again, if the occasion to do so arose. And Wendy and Jack… they hadn’t let him down once yet. He had never had anyone in his life who hadn’t before - not in this life. In his dreams, he had had Kira, until Kira started choosing that brat Setsuna over Katou. Before Katou had killed Kira.

Everyone would let him down eventually. “It’s hurts so much,” Katou said, his voice strained. He wouldn’t cry though. He rubbed his eyes with the back of his hand angrily, because he would never cry again, and was pretty sure he managed to hold the tears at bay.

“Hurts like a bitch, I bet,” Jack chuckled, the sound lacking any kind of amusement or cheekiness. It rung of bitterness and understanding. “Good thing is that you don’t have to hurt alone, and people - we get it.” Dreamwise, his parents died when he was fifteen and he’d gone off on his own; no siblings, no other close family. The story here was kind of different. His parents weren’t dead (not that he knew), but they did damage only a parent had the ability to do. A father who used his mother as a punching bad, a mother who didn’t know how to be one. Hence abandonment on the side of the road, but she was at least nice enough to let him keep his blanket.

He sighed, a cloud of cigarette smoke blowing out his mouth. “But this...you can’t--you can’t keep doing this to yourself. You gotta draw the line and kick it, Katou. Because you keep doin’ this and something else is going to win, something else is going to beat you. Life is a gift. Don’t waste it in a high haze, because it’ll pass and then it’ll be too damn late.”

It wasn’t exactly the same, but Jack’s words brought up a strange sense of deja vu. It took a moment for Katou to clue in - he had Dreamed of his father’s death. It had been months ago, and it was well before Katou even knew what the dreams were. “If you don’t fight when you’re alive, your soul will rot,” Kira had said to him. Katou hadn’t fought in his dreams. He had continued to live like he had been, ignoring everything that life threw at him, pretending nothing bothered him, and when things got to be too much, getting blitz out of his mind until he could barely speak.

He was the same here. The exact same. What were the chances he could beat anything here, when he couldn’t beat anything there. But he mulled over Jack’s words for a while, thinking of words to say, though they all flew away before he could get them from his brain to his mouth, until finally one stuck.

“Even if I wanted to beat this,” he looked down, and seemed to realize for the first time that the rubber tube he used for a tourniquet was still tied around his arm. He removed it. “Even if I wanted to, something else would just come by. I just… you stand on the side, and you watch the world pass, and none of it can touch you. None of it can hurt you. S’better that way. Live life with no regrets.”

The first cigarette was smoked too damn fast, so came out the second one. He needed it for a conversation like this. “That’s...not really living, is it? Might feel like nothing can touch you, like it can’t hurt you - but the truth is, it can. One day, and you can’t turn back from that. You won’t have the chance to have any regrets. It’ll be the end of a line.”

Was there more in the house? Maybe. Jack needed to ransack it, look through typical spots and just dispose of it. He might get more, sure, but it had to stop somewhere. If Wendy was home she’d have a damn heart attack.

Katou also went to light another one, because chain-smoking was always something that needed to happen when he was drunk and/or exceptionally high (he was always a little bit high). While he had followed Wendy’s rules pretty well up until recently, he did have a stash or two hidden away in the house, places where he was sure no one would look, such as his guitar case.

“Turning back. Tha’s something that people with regrets do. None for me.” He had reached the end of the line, didn’t he? He was just living on borrowed time now. He sighed, shook his head, and then shrugged his shoulders. He needed another drink. And he needed another hit. “This is getting pretty heavy, man,” he muttered. “I’m gonna… I’m gonna go to the bathroom.” He butt out his almost complete unsmoked smoke. He really hoped Jack would stick around outside while he went inside.

Katou’s hopes were dashed. Also probably flushed down the toilet like recent shit, because his eyes flashed with acknowledgement - they’d even narrowed into a glower, suspicious. “How ‘bout I take you there,” he mumbled around the cigarette, and not in the form of a question. Jack was hardly going to give him a choice. So he could what? Fuck himself into a deeper hole? To hell with that - Katou wasn’t blood but he was one of the closest things to family, he and Wendy.

If that involved watching him take a piss or something even more foul to ensure he wasn’t sticking another dose into his veins, then he’d do it. In a heartbeat.