5 Seconds of Summer BoyXBoy one-shots

Knee Deep In My Heart // Mashton

~ It's short, it sucks but at least no one dies so yeah

dedicated to @cliffxcked becaue I like you very much ^.^ xx /M~

Ashton never really believed in love. He never understood why you'd want to give your heart to someone, not knowing if they'd accept it and give you theirs in return or just throw it away. But then again, Ashton hadn't experienced it. He lived his life doing the same things every week, going to school and seeing his friends over the weekends. Nothing exciting ever happened to the hazel eyed boy, life was running past him and he was stuck living with the same patterns, the same routines day in and day out.

A lot changed the summer he turned nineteen, but at the same time nothing did. His two best friends came out to him, telling him they had been dating for the past three months, keeping it hidden because they didn't know how he'd react. This made Ashton feel bad, realising he'd given the impression of not being okay with...well with love. Ashton was more than okay with it, he just didn't believe it. He wanted his friends and family to be happy, and if living with the illusion that love was real made them happy he was okay with it, but he didn't believe it. He didn't believe in anything. He wasn't even religious, and it wasn't due to lack of effort. He'd been dragged to church every sunday his whole life, but as soon as he was old enough to think for himself he'd realised that God and heaven and hell were things that just couldn't be real. There were days when he wished he could believe, that he could put all his faith in a higher power, fully believing that things were going to be alright like the rest of his family, but he couldn't. And most of the time he was fine with that.

Ashton still loved his friends the same after finding out they were together, he still loved hanging out with them and he loved seeing them happy, but he didn't think it was love. He wasn't saying people couldn't like each other, he remembered growing up and having crushes on the boys and girls in his class, but he knew better than to think it was love. He'd talk to them about it sometimes, usually when it was just him and one half of the couple since he felt that was easier, asking them how they could know they were in love, and most of the time they'd just shrug and give him answers that were just like the ones he'd get when he asked someone from his mother's church how they knew God existed, avoiding and unclear. It was frustrating, extremely frustrating, and only gave him more reasons to doubt the existence of both love and something more than just life, something more than him, something almighty.

~

He didn't see it coming, he most definitely did not expect it, and to say he was caught by surprise would be an understatement. He wasn't stupid and he knew that he liked the boy who had come crashing into his life, literally. He knew that the green eyes that had been filled with anger the first time they met, anger over having his favorite Green Day shirt ruined by a slushie, made him weak in the knees, that he would love to touch the dark blue hair just to see if it was as soft as it looked, but to him that was all it was, something he liked, something that would pass.

So what Ashton realised as he laid awake at four am on a Wednesday scared him, but at the same time it felt so normal, so natural. It surprised him that Michael had managed to break down his walls enough to get inside them, that he'd managed to get so far before Ashton caught him, but he did. When Ashton did realise what was going on Michael was already knee deep in the older boy's heart, and he couldn't just throw him out and build his walls up again. And if he was to be honest to himself, he didn't want to. He loved the way Michael would make him laugh even in the most awkward situations, he loved how the boy always would keep him guessing but somehow always manage to get it right. Michael always seemed to have Ashton figured out, He loved how Michael always seemed to make the world bright and sunny when he was happy, and how he would walk around pouting when he didn't get his way, just like a small child. Michael was, without a doubt, the sweetest yet sexiest person Ashton had ever met, and once he understood what was going on, Ashton was surprised he hadn't realised it sooner. He suddenly understood why Luke would look at Calum the way he did, why Calum would act as if the world was ending when he couldn't see Luke for a couple days. He understood, because he felt the same way for Michael.

~

It wasn't easy for Ashton to build up the courage to actually ask Michael out but eventually he did. The date itself was nothing special, they went to a restaurant and had dinner before walking back to Ashton's place to watch a movie, but it was better than all the other dates he'd been on, all three of them, together. After that things escalated pretty quickly and it didn't take more than a month before Michael practically lived in Ashton's apartment with him. Ashton, who'd never been too keen on living with people, loved it. He loved going to bed with Michael at night, he loved laying awake thinking with the pale boy snoring softly next to him, he loved waking up with a pair of arms wrapped around his chest. Michael had somehow managed to steal his heart, he'd done the perfect crime, and Ashton was more than willing to do the time for it, to walk the line. And so he did. They were just walking home from Calum's place, where the four of them had watched a movie, and he stopped, making Michael face him. And right then and there, standing in the middle of the road with the cold wind pulling in their hair and clothes, he said the three words he never thought he'd say to anyone.

"I love you."