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

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| e i g h t h |

•••
"We're the kids who are dead inside
But we're the ones who feel alive
We dream cause we don't sleep
We'll never get rest, but we got this."
-As It Is, 'Cheap Shots and Setbacks'

•••

"Just remember, I don't want to do this. But I have to." Luke whispered in my ear as we walked up to the houses I'd been inside of just hours before, watching my best friend as he found out about the maybe-ness of my being alive.

Now, 14 hours later, there was no maybe-ness left. I was gone.

"I...know." I responded to Luke lowly.

We passed through the door of Calum's house.

"He just got home." Luke told me. "He was at the hospital until really early this morning, and then he fell asleep in his car until about an hour ago. Now he's in the kitchen with his mom."

"Okay." I mumbled, and I could tell I was already about to cry.

We rounded the corner into Calum's kitchen, and it smelled just like it always did--like cedar and smoke--and for a second I was brought back to before everything, before the pills and the planning and the sadness that had finally overtaken me. I remembered Calum in his bedroom, laying on the floor and tossing a soccer ball in the air while I sat at his computer desk, reading piratical band names off of Reddit.

"Hispanic! At the Dicso." I'd said jokingly.

"Except none of us are Hispanic." Calum laughed.

"Screaming Steven and the Semen Demons." I had tried to deadpan, but cracked up at the end, and soon I was on the floor next to Calum, and we were both laughing so hard little tears escaped the corners of our eyes, and I'd just felt so good right then.

But it wasn't then. It was now.

And right now, Calum was crying again, but not on the floor next to me, and not because he was laughing so hard he couldn't breath.

Right now, he was slumped over the kitchen table with his face cupped in his hands, his back heaving with unsuppressed sobs. His mom, who I'd never seen as a very emotional woman, was sitting next to him, her left arm wrapped around his shoulder, mumbling "I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry," over and over and over. It felt like gunshots in my chest, the reverberations of her apologies.

"Mom." He sobbed.

"I know, darling. I know." She responded after a second of silence, and I realized that she, that Calum's mother, the woman who'd only ever allowed me to call her Mrs. Hood and who made me take my shoes off at the door and never really seemed to like me much at all, was crying too.

That killed me.

"He's--Ashton's--," Calum choked, and then he looked at Mrs. Hood in this terribly desperate way, his cheeks all marked up with sadness and his eyes all bloodshot with pain. "Why?"

"Sometimes people are sad." Mrs. Hood told him in a broken-hearted way. "Any you don't always know it."

"He didn't seem sad." Calum told her thickly. "Mom, he was fine. He seemed fine."

"You don't always know the whole story, no matter how close you are." She said. "I know he seemed fine, but who knows what was really going on inside of him?"

"Why would he kill himself, Mom?" Calum said in the crack of his voice.

Mrs. Hood sighed softly.