Ghost ⇔ Cake ✓

Twenty Four: What is Left?

TRIGGER WARNING: a bit of graphic violence in this chapter that might be hard to read. Read at your own risk!

Calum had always kind of pictured his life going differently.

As a kid, he had big dreams. He wanted to become a musician, a bassist, specifically. He wanted to play music, have a ton of friends, travel the world in a first-class seat. He wanted to meet someone he loved and spend the rest of his life with them. He wanted to see Mali get married. He wanted to grow old somewhere cool, like Italy, or Los Angeles. He wanted to live.

Never would he have imagined his life to end at just seventeen years old, like he was a tree just beginning to sprout its leaves, right before his roots were pulled from the earth. He could almost still feel it, brushing underneath his fingertips, the life he could have had. It was right there. So close.

Living the way he was now wasn't really living. He knew that. But he had been able to push that to the side of his mind. A second chance, perhaps. He got to feel Luke's lips on his again, got to see his mother's face, despite how much it hurt. He got to hang out with his best friends again. He got to feel.

He knew it was too good to be true. People don't get a restart button. People don't get to come back to life after they've died. He just wished he could have pretended, just a little bit longer.

The next week was spent warily, uncertain glances and tight heartstrings as Calum's conditions worsened. Calum would spend most of the day pacing around his tiny shoebox of an apartment, picking up and touching random things just to see if he still could. Sometimes he was successful. Sometimes he wasn't. There was something so disheartening about feeling this second change start to leave, while he was desperately grasping it with just his fingertips, tears in his eyes, stones in his chest.

When Calum wasn't fretting about the apartment, Luke was doing it for him. He ignored Calum's requests for him to go back to school, that being a high school drop-out was never something Luke had wanted.

"You're dead, Calum," Luke had snapped in response. "I don't care about anything anymore, especially school."

So he stayed in Calum's apartment, too scared to go back to his house since the incident with the gunman. He left it up to his parents and the real estate agent that filtered customers in and out all day.

The end of that week brought a light at the end of the tunnel–– Michael called and said he was about to board a plane back home from Stockholm. Luke and Calum, listening to Michael's voice through speakerphone, could practically feel Michael's temper radiating through the phone screen.

They met him at the international gate of the airport, just the two of them. Well, one of them according to onlookers.

Michael arrived with a swear word already forming on his mouth. His held a large duffel bag over his shoulder, tattoos peeking out from beneath the sleeves of his t-shirt. His hair was now bleached such a stark blonde it was almost white.

Calum could only just stare at him as they reunited, Michael already swearing and grumbling about his parents and Stockholm and the plane and anything else he could complain about. He wanted to get in a good look of his best friend while he still could. Calum didn't get the chance to truly appreciate them before. Maybe this really was a second chance.

Michael's face was clean and pale, just a thin layer of stubble covering his lower face. His hair was sticking in every direction, as always, the black eyebrow piercing being one of the many things of Michael's that makes people cross the street in front of him. His mouth is in a snarl, eyes narrowed, shoulders stiff, but Calum could see right through the exterior to see how relieved he was to be back. Nobody hated his parents more than Michael.