Hanahaki

f i f t e e n

- Dedicated to my friend X0_Littlebitz because the hated my ending, oops-

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The entire room filled with roughly thirty people is silent apart from the sobs of Tobi's parents and two other boys. Ashton stares at the back of one of them, his blonde hair curling away from his face and his brown eyes hidden behind his hands folded in front of him. A woman sits there rubbing his back sympathetically, her face concerned as she stares at him. He can see the tears in her eyes too, but he wonders if they're for his dead lover or for the man next to her. 

The other boy crying stares at the casket, his mouth covered with his hand. Tears flow over his fingers and drip onto the carpet so harshly that Ashton can hear them hit in the silence. Ashton's face is blank as he turns to stare at the casket, boards filled with pictures of Tobi bordering it on either side. His lips stay slightly parted and the image of her dead body sits fresh in his mind, never leaving. The blood coating the kitchen stays in his mind, eyes open or closed. It feels as if it's still soaking into his skin, dripping off of him. 

Ashton leans forward on his knees and covers his face with both of his hands, scrubbing it. Why do I lose everything closest to me? He asks himself as he parts his fingers to stare at the bland carpet under his feet. His mind wanders to the envelopes tucked into his jacket, all of them labeled with the title of someone important to her. He still hadn't read his. Couldn't. It was too fresh in his mind. Hadn't fully set in yet. 

A hum settled in the back of his mind as he thought of every expression of her's. Now she wouldn't make all those faces for him. She couldn't. Now every expression was locked safely within his mind, separated from the plastic looking version of her that sits in the casket in front of this crowd. Lifeless. 

Finally, the tears begin pouring from his eyes and he has to bite back a sob as his shoulders tremble. Everything he'd ever seen and talked about and listened to and everything in between with her flashes in front of him as he weeps, his face scrunched in mourning. He wondered if he could've done something if he had stayed with her instead of going to try and catch a flight that he ended up missing anyway. He wondered if they would've still been together if he'd convinced her early on to get it removed surgically. Had he done that, would they still have been together?

He didn't know, but if he'd convinced her then... maybe she would be alive. Maybe they still would've ended up together, in love. Maybe he wouldn't have had to attend the funeral of the best person he'd ever met in his eighteen years of living. But maybes don't do any good. Maybes only drive people further into grief. 

✿✿✿

"Excuse me," Ashton mumbles to the woman sobbing on the stairs at the front of the building. 

When she looks up, he takes in a sharp breath. She and Tobi look almost exactly the same apart from their eyes. "Yes?" Tobi's mother whispers, her voice breaking. 

Ashton sits a short distance from her and stares ahead of him. "I'm sorry for your loss. Tobi was an amazing woman." She doesn't respond, just hides her quivering lip behind her hand. For a long moment, they're both silent before Ashton lets out a sigh, his hands fidgeting with the letter inside his jacket. Holding the edge between his forefingers, he says quietly, "My name is Ashton. I was..." He trails off. Was. "I was a friend of your daughters."

Her voice breaks as she asks, "You're that young man that found our daughter, aren't you? The one who called all of us?" 

Her words make the image all the clearer in his mind, and he has to focus intensely on his shoes to keep himself from breaking down. "Yes, I am." He remembers dialing all of the numbers on the paper, his throat dry as he told all of them what he'd found, the disbelieving silence following. The sobbing just after the silence. He thinks about the box he'd pulled from under the bed, his fingers numb. Shaking his head, he continues quietly, "I have to give something to you. It's... from her."