Fanboy (boyxboy)

Ten Days

"I know you're scared, Eli, just hang in there. I'll have Dax call you later."

"Is he okay?"

"Everyone's gonna be fine. Love you, Eli, hang in there."

"Wait-"

"Take care of yourself, okay? We'll see you in a few days."

Eli could barely keep his eyes open at work that day. He hadn't been able to fall asleep at all after his talk with Justin. The fact that all Justin did was try to reassure him without saying anything about what happened didn't help one bit.

Gideon opened the gas station at 5 and though Eli wasn't supposed to be at work until 9 he went in when his dad did at 8. Sitting at home wasn't helping him at all. He just kept staring at his phone and wishing Dax would call and tell him it was all a misunderstanding.

Maybe it was an allergy attack. Maddox was lactose intolerant, maybe he had other allergies too. Then again, why wouldn't Justin have just said that over the phone?

"Take care of yourself, okay?"

Eli took his laptop out from under the counter as soon as the morning rush ended. He opened tumblr, hoping to fall into something that would distract him, and noticed he had about a million more messages than he'd had the night before. Most of them were people hoping he knew something about Dax. But mixed in with all of that mess were some messages asking about him.

The first ones he read were nothing special, just random people "checking in." But then Eli saw a username that seemed familiar. From the way it was written, it sounded almost like someone he knew:

"I know you love Dax so I'm worried that you'll hurt yourself if anything happened to him. Please, Eli, don't."

Eli clicked over to see who it was. He wasn't following them but he liked the look of the blog and all the posts. It wasn't a Daxaholic blog but a few posts down was a picture of the new boyband people were getting excited about, Complicated or something like that. There didn't seem to be any posts about Dax so Eli wasn't sure how this person had even found him.

He opened the "about" page and saw a picture of two cute guys and a short bio for one of them, a guy named Jack. Nothing in his bio explained how Eli might know him or why he was following Eli.

So Eli did the only thing he could think of and messaged him back. Not even a minute passed before he had a reply.

Jack: "My friend reblogged one of your posts one day and asked us to pray for you."

Jack: "Cause you were talking about killing yourself, I mean. I'm glad you didn't do it."

It took Eli a minute to figure out how to reply. He'd never realized anyone cared so much that they would ask their friends to pray for him. The idea was a little overwhelming.

Eli: "I tried, but my brother found me in time. I'm glad I lived."

Jack: "Oh god. Me too."

Jack: "My best friend killed himself last year."

Jack: "I've been messaging you for like months though, begging you not to hurt yourself, I'm surprised you wrote back."

That sent Eli on a frantic dive into his tumblr messages. Sure enough, he had a bunch from Jack that he'd always just ignored. It really was weird that he'd noticed that day's messages, especially since he had so many other ones he really didn't care about.

Eli spent the rest of the morning messaging Jack. It wasn't until about 12:30 that afternoon that Maddox sent out a tweet - it was so vague and fake-sounding that Eli knew right away he had every reason to worry.