The day had already been monumentally shitty. The worst of the worst days. An absolute steaming-pile-of-crap day. So, really, it was only natural to finish it with a perfect cherry on top - his call from Death-Cast.
He was alone when the unmistakabl...
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𝙲𝚊𝚕𝚞𝚖 𝙳𝚎𝚌𝚎𝚖𝚋𝚎𝚛 𝟸𝟷𝚜𝚝, 𝟷:𝟷𝟺𝚊𝚖
His heart was pounding out of his chest as he took the stairs two at a time. The only thing that kept him upright was some morbid sense of duty telling him he needed to take care of Michael; he needed to make sure that this day wasn't spent in front of some grainy monitors in a creepy house at the top of a hill. He needed to make sure Michael was content and at peace, even if Calum himself was falling apart at the seams. His best friend was dying. The person he spent nearly every waking second with... would be gone. Just like that. Calum would blink and life as he knew it would be over. He couldn't think about that. If he did, he knew his knees would give out beneath him.
He slid to a stop outside of his boss's bedroom, hastily lifting his knuckles to rap on the wooden door. The sound echoed, reverberating in Calum's hollowing mind. He hardly waited to hear the okay to enter before he was storming in, clearly a man with a sense of purpose. He opened his mouth to speak before he was even through the doorway, but did a double-take upon actually getting sight of his employers. All three of them were there, Harry and Louis and their kid, Ashton, on the bed. The couple sat, Harry in Louis' lap, both with haunting expressions on their faces. Harry was... sad, maybe. Longing, even. Louis, though, he was mad. Mad as Calum had ever seen him. And the kid, curled in on himself with his knees to his chest on the opposite side of the mattress, a good ways away from the couple, stared blankly at the wall, seemingly no idea that Calum was even there, as opposed to Harry who seemed to be trying his best to compose himself with a shaky smile stretching on his lips. It was nothing like his real smiles, though. Harry's smiles were notorious for brightening any room. This one just seemed to darken it.
"Is everything alright, Calum?" Harry asked, voice strained and higher-pitched than usually. It was the slightest bit nasally, like he'd been crying. That much was obvious, though, from the red surrounding his eyes and water staining his cheeks. Calum wondered vaguely what in the hell their heathen kid could have done now to warrant this kind of behavior in the middle of the night. If circumstances were different, he probably would've gone back downstairs to gossip with Michael about it, but now...
"No, I- I just came to tell you that Michael-" his voice broke. He took a deep breath and composed himself as much as he could before going on. "Michael got his call... from Death-Cast. He needs to go home."
This seemed to snap Ashton back to reality. His eyes were all of a sudden glued on Calum, his jaw slack and face drained of any energy or expression. His voice was low and free of any of its usual snarkiness or cockiness.
"Michael got his call?"
Calum nodded, utterly confused at Ashton's interest. Of the three people living in that house, he would've thought that Ashton would be the last to give a shit that Michael was dying. Apparently, he was very wrong about that, because Ashton was on his feet and walking up to him before he could say anything else.
