5 Seconds of Summer BoyXBoy one-shots

And I got a soul // Muke

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That had been the last time Michael had acknowledged Luke's existence, the look he'd been sent as the older boy walked away, and the feeling of utter satisfaction he'd expected when they came up with the plan had been absent. He'd laughed with the rest of them but he'd felt strange, he'd felt empty. Michael hadn't been in school the next day or the day after that and with every passing hour the emptiness inside Luke had turned into fear. What if Michael had done something stupid?

By the end of the week he had been sitting on nails, both in school and at home. Whenever a teacher had entered the classroom, every time his parents had come home after a day of work, his heart had sped up and he'd expected them to tell him that Michael had killed himself, the humiliation after what they'd done having been too much for him to bare. This, of course, hadn't happened but it'd taken Michael two weeks to return to school and once he did he'd acted like Luke had never mattered to him.

They must all have realised they'd gone a bit too far because once the prank was over they rarely spoke about it, or about Michael. He was still the group's laughing stock and Luke had a feeling the others laughed about what had happen a lot when he wasn't around, but as a group they hardly spoke about it anymore. Graduation came and passed as did summer, a wonderful summer spent on the beach during the days and on the town during the nights, most of the time with drinks in hand. It was the last summer they'd have together, because as it came to an end some of them would go on to university and some would get thrown into the 'real world' head first. Luke tried his best to forget about what they'd done, about the look on Michael's face when he'd realised he'd been played with, but the emptiness inside him refused to go away and it slowly made him realise just as close he'd gotten to Michael during the time they'd spent together.

Some time passed, Luke had started at university and was trying his best to keep up with both school and his friends, most of them having decided to work rather than keep studying. The gang still met up occasionally, sometimes all of them and sometimes in groups of two or three, and from Jack, who had gotten a job delivering fresh produce to local restaurants, he found out that Michael was still living in the area, working as a dish boy in an Italian restaurant not far from where Luke lived. This led to Luke walking past that restaurant a lot more than necessary during the following weeks, not seeing Michael even once. Eventually he stopped doing this and he didn't think of the older boy as much as he once had.

During the second year of his university studies, Luke got the opportunity to go study in the states for a year, an opportunity he wasn't about to pass up on. And so he packed his bags and hopped on a plane that took him to New York. He spent a year there, only going home for Christmas, and when the second semester was over he decided to stay for a little longer, having spent most of his time there in his dorm room. He wanted to see the world, he wanted to grow as a person, preferably as much as he'd grown height wise over the past few years, and his travels eventually took him to San Francisco. He fell in love with the city, so much so he wasn't bothered in the least by all the tourists enjoying the summer there just as he was. He didn't care that the place he stayed at was worn down to say the least, he didn't care that he had to share a room with nineteen other people, the majority of them snoring or talking in their sleep. No, he just loved being there, he loved meeting new people from all over the world and getting some idea of what their cultures was like. He loved the food, the atmosphere and the colours, all the colours seemed to be different here.

But no matter how many wonderful people he met, both men and women, he just couldn't seem to fall for anyone. He went to strip clubs, gay bars and small cafés hidden away in narrow alleyways but he could just as well have spent his days locked up in the bathroom, the people all passed by in a blur. It was a beautiful blur but a blur all the same, half forgotten by the time he laid his head on his pillow just as most of his dreams were half forgotten the moment he opened his eyes in the mornings. All dreams but one.