Help || 5SOS a.u [completed]

11 - The Pain

*song of the chapter: Say Something by A Great Big World*

Ashton was dead. That was all the three boys could think. Those three words, swimming around and around in circles through their minds. Taunting them, making them feel the same pain he had felt throughout his death.

Ashton, dead? He couldn't be.

This was Ashton, that happy, smily, curly-haired optimistic boy with shining hazel eyes could not be dead. It just... it wasn't possible.

Luke couldn't deal with this information. The nurse had come out of the emergency room, her eyes tearing up because even she - a complete stranger to Ashton - had been upset as she witnessed his death. Luke had immediately realised, Michael had watched it dawn on his friend. He had seen the blue eyes immediately brim over with tears when he saw the nurse.

Michael had called out for the blonde boy as he retreated out of the room, but Luke wouldn't turn back. Calum was outside the hospital making sure Evie didn't do anything, and Michael knew he had to go and see Ashton. Well... Ashton's body...

That one single word tangled onto the name that could only bring happiness made Michael choke. It was such a painful thing to think. It wasn't Ashton. It was his body. The lifeless, emotionless vessel that carried around the forever-happy soul that made even the people deepest in depression smile.

Michael had grown up with this boy, and as he walked into the room that he was lying in he saw all the images of their life together. Every single memory had a smile, laughter, sunshine.

How could one girl turn everything around?

But then again, that was what had happened with Ben. Ben Hemmings had been in Evie's same position, but he had never killed anyone. He had only ever hurt Luke, once. That was when we had realised it wasn't him anymore. It wasn't our Ben that we knew and loved so well.

Michael had been standing in the room for ten minutes, thinking over everything, and then he realised that Luke and Calum should have come by now. Maybe Evie was causing trouble?

Michael didn't acknowledge the tears running down his face as he left the room, resisting the urge to look back at Ashton (and failing), and then walked out of the hospital. The first thing he heard was sirens, loud, high-pitched screams whaling from police cars surrounding the hospital. Doctors ran to and front the doors beside Michael, shouting rushed orders at each other, looking back and forth. Nobody noticed the confused, overwhelmed boy staring at the three people who stood out most from the busy crowd. They were the only three people not moving.

Suddenly, the tangy, nauseating smell of blood hit Michael like a wave, and made him feel back, covering his nose. The smell was like when he walked into Ashton's living room, although much stronger.

His eyes fell on two of the three people unmoving. These were the two lying on the floor. They were being picked up now, carried into the hospital. And when they went past Michael, he refused to recognise them his only other two friends. He wouldn't recognise the ketchup-splattered breadstick as his best and most loyal friend Luke. He wouldn't recognise the Asian-but-not-Asian boy as his most kind-hearted and generous friend Calum.

It only hit him when he laid his eyes on Evie. She was staring coldly at him. She had barely lasted a day before she had slipped. It was unnatural, unreal. She should have lasted lonely.

She began to walk up to him, the knife clutched in her hand. Where had she got that from? Why had nobody grabbed her yet?

His three best friends were dead, he didn't care about the answers.

So, when she inevitably reached him and lifted the knife, he made no resistance. The last thing he saw was her lifting the knife covered in at least three people's blood already to her own throat and killed herself after him.

// a/n I know, confusing af I am so sorry, but anyway hopefully it'll become clear in the next update. Um, I've decided to finish this story early because it is very unpopular and I want to start something else which I am so excited for. Maybe I'll continue Good Girls. But yeah, next update is the last, and I'm hoping to get it up tonight. //