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

| s e c o n d |

| s e c o n d |

•••

"Have you heard the news that you're dead?

No one ever had much nice to say

I think they never liked you anyway

Oh take me from the hospital bed

Wouldn't it be grand? It ain't exactly what you planned."

-My Chemical Romance, 'Dead!'

•••

"So, what else did my file say about me?" I asked Lucas as I walked behind him into the sunshine. It was a mockingly nice day outside, and my street was the picture of placid suburbia.

"Six foot one, have a thing for hats, like spaghetti. Favorite color is red. Two younger siblings, one half and one whole. Dad left when you were young. Distinct feeling of never quite belonging. You feel like your friends dislike or look down on you most of the time, especially Michael, who you've had a minor crush on for three years that you refuse to acknowledge. You, oddly, never self-harmed before your suicide, which is slightly unusual. You're pretty clean--only smoked one time at a party, and only been drunk two times. It doesn't appeal to you. Strawberry smoothies are your favorite thing to have when you're sick because your mom used to make them for you when you were little. You--,"

"Jesus Christ." I interrupted. "What don't you know?"

Lucas shrugged. "Well, I can't, like, read your mind or anything. So there's that."

"You memorized everything about me?" I asked him, hearing sirens in the distance and wondering vaguely where they were coming from.

"I guess. I dunno. My mind works a little differently than yours. I have, like, the pressure of the entirety of Heaven kind of weighing on me to do my homework, so I jump in with both feet. As one tends to when faced with the wrath of God and all that stuff." Lucas shrugged, striding out so I had to jog to catch up with him. "Can you call me Luke?"

"God would get mad at you if you didn't learn stuff about me?" I asked him, a little breathless because apparently being essentially weightless still wasn't enough for me to up my cardio game.

"Dunno. Never met the guy. Uncle Peter says he's chill as fuck, though. Will you call me Luke?"

"Uncle Peter? As in Saint Peter? You're related to him? He's met God?" I asked him, wide-eyed.

"Jesus, you're gullible. No, I am not related to Saint Peter, or related to anybody at all, really. And I have no idea if he's met God, or if he's still around or anything. Are you going to call me Luke?"

"You're not related to anybody? How do you exist, then? What made you? How do you not know if Peter's still around? Do people die? I thought that people in Heaven were already dead." I babbled between sharp breaths because Lucas was really putting his all into his power walk.

"I'm not like you, Ashton. I don't have a mommy and a daddy that did the dirty and got a gift from the stork nine months later. I just...am. I don't know how to explain it." Lucas answered, sounding a little exasperated.

"How does it work?" I asked him, sensing his annoyance but not really caring.

"Christ, you're nosy. Okay. Um...you know how on Peter Pan, when a baby laughs for the first time, a fairy is born?" Lucas asked, turning right onto the street to the school.

"Yeah?" I asked more than answered.

"Something like that. Kind of. Except for way different and minus fairies." He said. "Are you ever going to answer my question?"