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

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trigger warning for those with suicidal tendencies. 

• | |before| | •

•••

"Love of mine, someday you will die."

-Death Cab For Cutie, 'I Will Follow You Into the Dark'

•••

"I need to leave." I told the lady at the front office in the calmest voice I could muster. It was two thirty on a Tuesday afternoon in the heart of December, and the Oregon coast was drowning and so was I. Metaphorically. Which was kind of the worst way to be drowning, if you really think about it.

I know I have.

Had.

(Fuck tenses. Fuck everything.)

She glanced up at me, her aged, grayish eyes seeming to appraise me. Is he going to go to Stoner Hill to smoke pot? Is he going to rob a gas station? Is he going to meet his girlfriend and fuck her in the back of his mom's hand-me-down station wagon?

'No' seemed to be the answer to her unspoken questions, as she proceeded to hand me a clipboard and a black ballpoint pen.

"Just sign out here, then. Do your parents know?" She asked, her voice kind of guttural, like she might have a cold. Gray hair fell out of her tight bun in grey wisps onto the gray-tinted skin at the nape of her neck. Everything about her was gray. Faded. Washed out.

I was momentarily relieved that I'd never get old enough to become so monochromatic. Even though I was ending early, I was ending in technicolor.

"I--yeah. I texted my mom earlier." I lied easily. The office lady nodded along, offering me a tight lipped smile that revealed a strip of her grey teeth before she turned back to whatever paperwork was on her desk.

There were certain perks to going to a small school, and being implicitly trusted by all staff unless you were a convicted felon was one of them. I might not know the gray lady's name, but she knew mine, and she had seen me navigating the blue-tiled halls of Harbor High for the past three and a half years, day in and day out--the ceaseless routine. She probably already knew I'd never really gotten into trouble, and that I was in band, and that I used to play soccer before I quit my sophomore year. She probably knew that I got decent grades and wore decent clothes and hung out with decent people and was just generally a very middle-of-the-line, average person. She might even know my mom--everybody was kind of loosely aquatinted in a town the size of Harbor. So, even if I did go smoke pot or rob a gas station or bang my non-existent girlfriend in my non-existent car, eventually news would travel back to her and she could alert my mother and assign punishment as necessary. It was an inescapable kind of loop.

Well, I planned to escape it.

I was going to do something bad--something they couldn't punish me for. Something that was probably on the top of the Things-You-Don't-Want-Your-Teenage-Son-To-Do List.

"Mr. Irwin?" Gray Lady asked as I walked to the door. I turned around to receive her words full on to the face, but instead she just looked at me kind of softly. Like she knew things.

On the short walk home, I jumped over all the cracks--I didn't want to leave my mom with a dead kid and a broken back.

•••

My mom works for a care home called Blissful Parks, except there are no parks by it and the three times I've ever been inside of it, it has been anything but blissful. It smells like death and vomit and dementia, and sometimes my mom comes home after eighteen hour shifts and droops into a chair in the living room and make me promise that I'll kill her myself before I let her go live in one of those places.