Into the Dark {l.h. + a.i.} || lashton || BoyxBoy

| f i f t h |

| f i f t h |

•••

"I begin to assemble what weapons I can find,
'Cause sometimes to stay alive you got to kill your mind."
- twenty one pilots, Migraine

•••

"Tell me about touching." Luke said to the stars, and for a silent second I didn't realize he was addressing me and not the heavens.

"Touching?"

"Touching." Luke confirmed. We were outside the hospital in a sad little lawn area that had some benches and lifetime acknowledgement plaques scattered about it in a haphazard way that missed the mark of artistic by a lot more than almost, and Luke and I were splayed in the grass. "I've never touched anyone before."

"You touched me, like, an hour ago." I started confusedly. "On my shoul--,"

"Sorry. Felt." Luke corrected. "I've never felt anyone before. If that makes sense."

I thought about it.

"Well, kinda. Like if I touched you right now, you wouldn't feel it?"

"Yeah." Luke nodded. "You could touch me and feel me, but I won't feel you because you're just manifested energy. And the only people I've ever met other than souls are people like me--ethereals."

"And you guys don't...touch? Like, at all? Never?" I asked, rolling on my side to face Luke and studying his profile as he stared up. The moonlight bleached his goldness away and he looked silver--not as precious, but just as beautiful. I liked how his eyes turned paler, not the usual burning gold that seared my gaze.

Luke shook his head.

"No...I mean, there's not a rule against it or anything, but...there's no point. People touch each other to glean some sort of emotion, and like I said, we don't really have emotions strong enough to elicit that kind of desire."

"So you just...what? Try not to bump into each other on the street?"

"Where I live doesn't work like that, Ash. Don't be stupid."

"Ouch." I said, even though it didn't hurt because he was kind of half smiling and gazing at the vastness above us that was nothing and everything. Seeing the solar system in his eyes took away any kind of pain I might imagine, anyway.

"So, touching."

I thought for a second, and then I reached out and brushed my fingers across his cheek softly. He didn't wince, or even acknowledge me for a moment. I was confused until I remembered that though I could feel him, he couldn't feel me.

"I'm touching you right now." I informed him in a way that felt velvet on my lips. I wasn't sure I'd ever spoken to someone like I was speaking to Luke right then--with a sweet, careful voice full of inevitability and rose petals.

Luke turned his head so he was looking up at me. I was braced on my elbows, arched away from the prying eyes of the night sky with my fingers curled in the soft hair of the reason I was a better kind of alive.

"What's it like, then?" He asked curiously.

"Like..." I paused, because he was so pretty, and flattened my hand on his cheek. "Well, you're very warm. That's a lot of what touching is--the other person's heat."

"I notice when it's cold outside, people are always closer together." Luke acknowledged, still looking at me. We were both invisible and completely non-existent to the rest of the world, yet we were still whispering. Not because we really needed to, but because we felt like we needed to, I think. It was a whispering time.

"And...okay, my hand is on your cheek. Cheeks are a nice place to touch because they're always pretty soft. You have soft cheeks." I told him. I felt oddly vulnerable, and Luke looked oddly unguarded, and it was all very strange and fascinating.

"Noted." Luke said with dimples as he pressed his lips together and I wanted to kiss him I did I did I did.

"So...okay, um, soft and warm..." I said, searching for more words to describe what touching was like. Luke was looking at me and I felt it.

"Touching, I guess, is more than what it actually feels like. Physically." I began slowly, tracing his lines and reveling in the feeling of his lovely skeleton beneath my fingertips.

"How's that?"

"It's about....okay, for me, I don't let many people touch me. Do you know why?" I asked, even though I knew he did. However, instead of nodding, Luke cocked his head and shrugged a little.

"Kind of. I know what happened to you on the outside, but not--," he tapped his temple and his wrist brushed my hand without him realizing it, "--what happened."

I nodded and took a deep breath, maneuvering myself so I was sitting up but still facing Luke.

"I'm going to hold your hand now, okay? While I tell you about this?" I asked and announced. "That's another thing about touching. It helps with...hard stuff. Especially if it's with the right people."

Luke raised his hand, and I grabbed it, twining my fingers between his so we were loosely connected. He looked at out conjoinedness consideringly before nodding at me to begin.

"So...you know about the thing." I began. Luke studied our hands and breathed and listened silently. "Obviously that was a long time ago, but...you know, it still affects me with touching. Like, even though my dad had never laid a hand on me inappropriately in my whole life, I was still so terrified of him for so long. I was scared of all men, actually. When--,"

I stuttered to a stop, choking on the name in my mouth of the neighbor boy who had ruined me when I was seven years old.

"--when Carter Williams did that to me, it shattered me. It was so bad, that when my dad died three years after, I was almost...relieved. Like, he hadn't had the chance to hurt me. I think that's the thing I regret the most about my life. I wish I hadn't ever thought that. It makes me hate myself."

"Don't hate yourself." Luke said suddenly. He looked at me with wide-open moon-bleached eyes, and with the reflection of the grass caught in their depths, an almost blue effect was created, and it was beautiful and I wanted to kiss him. "I don't know lots of things about feelings, but I know hate hurts and you shouldn't hurt because I don't want you to, for whatever reason."

"I, um...." I stuttered, a tiny bit shocked and if my heart was functioning, it probably would have swelled with feeling. "Thank you."

Luke nodded. "Keep going."

"Okay. So. Yeah. I got...uh, molested. Very young. And that's kind of hard to come back from, or it has been for me. It's hard for me to trust. It's hard for me to touch. It's just...hard." I told him, in as measured a tone as I could. "So for me, touch and trust are very intertwined. I have to trust people to be able to touch them in any kind of meaningful way. And sometimes I don't want them to touch me, and that hurts people's feelings, but I can't help it because it's so personal and painful for me to remember, because I was so young and I was so ruined."

"You weren't ruined, Ash." Luke told me softly, sitting up and grasping my shoulders in his hands, and I felt it and felt it. "You know that, right? You're just fine."

"I'm so not fine, Luke." I said, laughing bitterly. "I fucking killed myself."

Luke looked at me, and swallowed, and took his hands off of me.

There were several eons of us not speaking before I shattered the quiet crystals.

"So touching isn't just about feeling. It's about feelings. That's why it's so wonderful and terrible." I said. "It's good you can't feel things. It's not really worth it, if something on the terrible side of things happens."

Luke looked at me for an elongated moment and I could barely breathe. Then he reached up to my face and placed his fingertips sososo gently across the ridge of my cheekbone.

"It isn't?" He breathed.

I couldn't answer.

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