So, I haven't been too active lately, writing-wise. This is due to many things - uni, exams, the effect of said uni and exams on my mental health. Believe it or not, this fic isn't for projection purposes - well, not entirely. It's actually inspired by another story in another fandom. That fic is on FF.net and it's called "Suicide Line" by Nydimen in the fandom for the anime "Yuri!!! on Ice", but the original is in Spanish and I had to use Google translate to understand it. But it inspired me to write this. You can view this as a companion piece to my old story "And I Feel Them Drown My Name", but they're really only connected theme-wise. The title is taken from the song of the same name from the musical "Dear Evan Hansen."
If that sounds familiar to you, yes, I am basically doing what handoverthe_tea has been doing for most of their stories. I have recently started listening to the DEH soundtrack as I've been getting back into musicals. Hell, if you know the musical, this can be like a hunt for DEH Easter Eggs!
Credit goes to @RedReality for designing the cover!
Trigger warning: Mentions of suicide, sexual assault and disordered eating.
The median lethal dose for caffeine in humans is estimated to be 150-200 milligrams per kilogram of body mass.
That equated to about 75-100 cups of coffee for a 70kg adult.
But at this point, 23-year-old Sylvester Cole felt like he could consume all the coffee beans in the world and not feel a thing.
He didn't mind the night shifts. Or at least, he tried not to mind them. They were a godsend for the people who needed them most. But Sylvester was only a person himself. This week had been relatively quiet, with fewer calls than the previous week.
Of course, it was hard to tell if that was a good or bad thing when working at a suicide hotline.
Sylvester Cole lived a comfortable life. He had a nice flat, a loving mother, a sweet fiancée and a job that he found fulfilment in. It was one thing to feel warm and fuzzy when you do or say something nice to someone else, it was another to be the shoulder that a stranger cries on, the bed that they lie on until they can find the strength to get up from it and move on.
And it was another thing entirely when the people who tried to reach out ended up slipping away no matter how hard Sylvester tried to cling on.
He sipped his espresso at the thought in a manner similar to how an alcoholic might take a swig in an effort to forget their own pain. He'd always been a sensitive soul, but he'd taken care not to take a job like this without the support system he currently had. His fiancée, Eva, whom he had been with since he was 19. His mother, Constance, as secure and stable as her name. His best friend Reese, who had found him by sheer chance when he was lost ... so, so lost ...
The phone rang, and Sylvester found himself again.
"Hello, thank you for finding the courage to reach out to us today. With whom do I have the pleasure?"
"... I can't go on," said the resigned voice on the other end.
"Why do you feel like that?" Sylvester asked calmly.
"I can't get out. There's only one way out."
"What's your name?" That, along with the greeting when he first picked up, was the only piece of dialogue Sylvester would say that could be considered "scripted." It was a way to distract a suicidal person from their thoughts and to make them more comfortable with pouring their heart out to a stranger. It was easier if they seemed less like a stranger.
"Ryan," said the voice. "Reeves, Ryan Reeves," he clarified.
"Is that a Scouse accent I hear?" Sylvester asked, noticing how he rolled his R's.
A heavy sigh permeated through the speaker along with something along the lines of 'having a pop at me accent,' before saying clearly, "Yes. Haven't been there in ages, though."
"What brought you to Newcastle, then, Ryan?" Sylvester inquired. "How long have you been here?"
"I'd rather not talk about that," Ryan said quietly. "Not now."
"Then why don't you start at the beginning?" Sylvester said. "Tell me your story."
"It's a long one."
"I have all night."
"Will you last that long?"
"I will if you will."
Ryan sighed. "If you're sure."
"I am sure, Ryan," Sylvester insisted. "I will listen to you for the next twenty-four hours and even more."
The brief silence on the other end screamed doubt at him, before: "It all started on my birthday. Not the actual day I was born but on my birthday. My fifth birthday."
"What happened on your fifth birthday?"
"I was just a little kid, a happy little boy, and then Chloe fell," Ryan started. "She's my little sister, she was three, and she fell out of the window of our little flat. She was paralysed from it, waist down. Our mum wasn't there, she'd been out shopping, but when she saw Chloe's body lying on the ground, she freaked. I tried to go up to her, but she screamed at me, pushed me away, slapped me, yelled that I had somehow pushed her. I tried to speak up, I said over and over again that I never hurt Chloe, but her word against mine - who was gonna believe a rotten little brat like me?"
Sylvester flinched silently, both at the insult in the last sentence and at the venom tainting the other boy's tone of voice.
"Our mum was an alkie," Ryan went on. "I don't think she even remembered it was my birthday."
There was a brief pause as both males collected themselves before Ryan spoke again. "What's your name?"
"Sylvester," the older man replied. "Sylvester Cole."
"Do you have a mum, Sylvester Cole?" Ryan asked, a hint of envy serrating the edge of the question.
"... Yes," Sylvester admitted, after a brief hesitation.
"What's she like?"
Sylvester paused. It didn't feel right to talk about his mother's strengths after Ryan had just divulged his own mother's failings, but nonetheless, he did as the boy asked. "She's a really strong woman," he said. "My dad left us when I was pretty young, so she had to raise me on her own. When I was younger, she used to call me 'Silver'."
"'Silver'," Ryan repeated. "Did your mates at school call you that too?"
"No, no way," Sylvester replied. "They just called me Sylvester or Syl. I liked it when my mum called me Silver though. She even dressed me up like Quicksilver one Halloween."
"Your mum had to raise you on her own," Ryan stated, like he was processing it, before his voice sunk into melancholy. "What was the difference between her and my mum?"
Sylvester bit his lip. This was what he'd worried about when Ryan had asked about his mother. Swallowing, he continued talking. "Ryan, you don't have to answer this, but what about your father? Was he in the picture at all, at this point?"
"There was never any picture at all," Ryan said. "I know nothing about him, or Chloe's father, for that matter."
"Chloe's father?" Sylvester frowned, before realising. "Oh, you and she are half-siblings?"
"Never been confirmed, but how else do you explain the fact that Mum is blonde, Chloe has dark hair and I have light brown hair?" Ryan said.
Genetic anomalies existed, Sylvester knew, but even so, it was easy to see why Ryan, or anyone else, would be suspicious. Now wasn't the time to be pedantic, however. "What happened after Chloe's fall?"
"I got taken away, of course," Ryan said bitterly. "I didn't know what was going on, I just knew that mum didn't want me anymore. The people there didn't seem like they wanted me either. I was just a kid, being treated like scum. They kept telling me it was because I had pushed my little sister out of a window, and when you're a kid being told something over and over again, and you don't know or trust any better ... you believe it."
"And you were five years old?" Sylvester clarified, trying to stop his voice from shaking.
"Yep," Ryan said quietly. "When people expect nothing but bad things from you, what do you think I gave them?"
There was a pointed silence as Sylvester processed this.
"That's how it was for the next eight years*, until I saw Chloe again," Ryan said. "She'd been writing to me for years before that. I never read her letters, I couldn't bring myself to. But one of my friends at the time talked me into seeing her. It was that day that I found out what Mum did."
"How did you find out?" Sylvester asked.
"One of my housemates found an old newspaper article about it," Ryan said. "Mum told Chloe and everyone else that she was in the flat when she fell and that she saw me push her. But that article, it had a quote from a witness, he said he saw mum out on the street, dropping her shopping and running to Chloe's body ... meaning she wasn't in the flat." The boy's voice was tinted with both anger and crushing devastation. "She let me think that for years, pushed it all onto a little kid. I believed I was no good, did the most rotten things because I thought I was rotten ..." Ryan had to pause there, to allow his cracking voice time to piece itself together again, "... I've done a lot, but I never hurt Chloe."
Sylvester just sat there, listening on the other end, stunned into silence by the sheer evil that was being recounted to him by its victim. The very thought of a mother doing something so heinous to her own child made him feel so ill that he felt his just-drunk coffee burning the back of his throat. For a long moment, words failed him, before the only thing that slipped out was, "Holy shit ..."
Ryan said nothing on the other end, so Sylvester forced some more out. "That is just awful, Ryan, I'm so sorry. Your mum should never have ..." he trailed off, realising something. "Wait, where was your mum when you met Chloe?"
"America," Ryan said bluntly. "She'd dumped Chloe off into care a couple of years back to run away to America with a guy she met. No idea what the hell happened to him, but I guess in hindsight, I shouldn't have been too surprised."
It didn't surprise Sylvester either. "What happened then?" he urged. "Did you feel a weight off your shoulders, or anything, after finding out?"
Ryan chuckled darkly. "I wish. Old habits die hard, Silver. Really hard."
Sylvester was about to protest at the use of the nickname, but decided it was the least of their problems.
"Somehow, I couldn't change. I couldn't stop doing bad things. Every time I tried to change, it would last for a few days, or a week, before I fucked up again. It was like a security blanket I couldn't take off," Ryan explained. "That was until about two years ago when my mother came back."
Sylvester audibly gasped.
"No idea what happened with her American boyfriend, she didn't mention him at all," Ryan said. "But it didn't matter, she was back and she wanted to take Chloe with her, and I couldn't let that happen."
"How did Chloe feel about it?" Sylvester questioned. "Did she want to go with her?"
"She didn't believe in her," Ryan said. "She really wanted to, but she just didn't. I mean, can you imagine spending every day wondering if this is the day your own mother would ditch you, again? That's not a way to live."
"What did you do?"
"I put Mum in her place," Ryan said firmly. "I met her again, without Chloe. She tried to gaslight me again, telling me it was my fault Chloe fell. But I wasn't having it. It got pretty heated in there, at one point I told her I was gonna tell everyone what a terrible mum she was, so she would never get her back."
"And did you?" Sylvester asked.
"I wanted to, at that point, I really did," Ryan admitted. "But I realised that if I did, I would be just like her, slandering someone else to make yourself look better, so I didn't."
Sylvester breathed out.
"After she figured out it wasn't working, she flipped at the drop of a hat. Suddenly, she was gonna make it up to both of us, be the mum she should've been. But I knew she couldn't change just like that. People don't work that way, I of all people should know that. I shut that down pretty quick, made it clear that she wasn't what Chloe deserves. Hell, she's not even what I deserve, and that's saying something. She even admitted it herself, it was easier to blame me and not face herself. Doesn't that tell you everything?"
"You're not wrong," Sylvester replied, unable to say much else.
"Something in me just ... snapped, that day. I didn't wanna be like that anymore, stuck somewhere I didn't wanna be, being someone I'm not. Shortly after that, I left care. For the first time in my life, I had a reason to believe I'd be okay."
Sylvester sat there taking all this in, before saying, "Ryan, that is so good to hear. It takes so much strength to face your past and the people that hurt you like that. I'm proud of you."
"Thanks," Ryan replied, sounding surprisingly sincere, before he spoke again with his tone so different that Sylvester nearly got whiplash. "But that doesn't mean much to me now. It doesn't matter how strong I was then, do you think I'd be calling this number if it did?"
It was understandable, Sylvester thought, but it didn't mean he couldn't help Ryan find that strength again. "You say this was two years ago? Did anything happen since?"
Ryan sighed. "I'll get to that." His voice sounded heavy with burden. "For the last few months I was in care, I got a Saturday job at a stable, looking after police horses. It was divine intervention how I got there, to be honest, considering how much I fucked up on that first day," he said with a small but more genuine laugh that made Sylvester smile too, "but I got better. I worked there full time after I left care. For a while, I loved it. I was fitting in with people, I was waking up looking forward to the day ahead. The horses were great, I don't really like animals but they're different, they're so gentle. Things were looking up ... for a while."
"I'm getting the feeling there's a 'but' coming," Sylvester said bluntly, detecting Ryan's deflating mood.
"Yep," Ryan sighed. "Eight months ago, I heard the news from Chloe. Our mum fell off the wagon one night, drank herself into a stupor. Not quite sure how she did it, but she fell out of the window and smashed her head in."
Sylvester blinked sharply, stunned once again. Not only by what Ryan had just told him but the way in which he said it. After everything Ryan had recounted, maybe it shouldn't have been overly surprising, but even so, it was unnerving to hear someone talk about the death of their own mother in such a matter-of-fact manner. "I would say 'sorry', but I have a feeling you wouldn't agree."
"Chloe didn't either," Ryan said, his tone coloured with resentment. "She was upset, of course, because she'd been with her for longer, but she didn't understand why I wasn't mourning her - and she knows about everything mum did!"
"Grief is complex, Ryan," Sylvester explained. "It's possible she may not have been thinking straight. She may have wanted to share her grief with someone who might understand, and she got upset when you didn't."
Ryan scoffed. "Well, too bad for her, because I'm not gonna play a game of pretend, I've done enough of that for one lifetime," he spat. "After all our mother put me through - put us through - what does she expect me to say? That my world has gone dark without her light?! She took away the light in my world, for crying out loud!" His voice was becoming more and more tense, like a burning fuse growing ever shorter before he exploded. "And now Chloe wants me to pretend it wasn't true! That she wasn't the monster I always knew she was!!"
The pregnant silence that followed echoed down the phone line, except for Ryan's faint panting. It lasted for far too long before Sylvester managed to find his voice again. "That's quite some brutal stuff, Ryan," he began, still reeling slightly from the boy's outburst. "I can see this is getting closer to home for you. We don't have to talk about this anymore if you don't want-"
"I need to talk about it!" Ryan insisted. "I need to talk about it because if I don't, you won't understand and you'll try and stop me. Well, you're gonna try and stop me anyway, but I just ... need to get it off my chest."
"Then do it, Ryan," Sylvester said firmly. He often found that once a suicidal person actually got to thinking and talking about why they wanted to bite the big one, they were more likely to realise that their problems had solutions and not all was lost. "Tell me as much as you can, but you can still stop if it gets too much."
Ryan took a few deep breaths before continuing. "Chloe didn't understand why I wouldn't mourn with her, or come to the funeral. She told me that she thought I'd changed, that I was actually becoming a decent person, and that if I still couldn't change after everything that had happened, then she was done with me. She literally said I was a lost cause." Ryan gulped hard. "Basically confirming what I'd believed about myself for years."
"She was wrong, Ryan," Sylvester said. "You have every right in the world to not forgive the person who abused you, whether they're alive or dead. It doesn't make you a bad person."
"Doesn't matter who's right or wrong," Ryan muttered. "After that, when I tried contacting her, I found she'd blocked me**."
"My God ..." Sylvester replied. Out of everything Ryan had been through, the way he'd said that conveyed that it had easily been the most painful.
"I spent more time at work after that," Ryan said. "I tried to forget her by spending more time with my colleagues and the horses. I didn't tell my colleagues anything, but I did talk to El Niño. He's my favourite horse there, quite old but still sturdy. He doesn't talk back, of course, but it made me feel a little better. It wasn't easy, but I tried to move on. I tried my hardest to feel happy again, I tried so, so hard to believe, but somehow I didn't see what was really there ... until about a month ago."
Sylvester noticed Ryan's speech becoming more and more staggered as he went on talking, like forcing the words out was becoming physically strenuous. "I repeat, you don't have to-"
"I guess I should've noticed, really," Ryan interrupted, before he could change his mind. "My boss, Richard, he was kind of ... touchy. Not in a major way at first, just the occasional pat on the back, but then he started ... putting his arm around me, pulling me closer towards him, making me really uncomfortable. But I didn't want to focus on it because I was trying to feel the least bad I possibly could. But then-" Ryan cut off abruptly as his voice broke.
If they had been talking face to face, Sylvester was sure that Ryan would've been biting his lip and tensing his body tight. It only took a split second to realise where this could possibly be going. Before he could respond, however, Ryan was talking again.
"I guess I should've known better than to stay late after work with only him there," Ryan uttered. "I was in the backroom just putting some stuff away, and Richard came in and said he wanted to have a ... discussion ... with me. I didn't realise-" Ryan cut himself off again as the broken sound threatened to tear itself from his throat. "I didn't realise he'd locked the door until it was too late. I-I tried to fight back ... I really tried ..." At that point, it finally seemed too much for Ryan to recall and he devolved into hitching breaths.
Words were failing Sylvester far too often in his conversation, but what was there to say? There was nothing he could say that could make it better. The sheer injustice that had been dealt to this one boy over the course of a lifetime - no combination of words in the young man's vocabulary felt adequate as a response. But he couldn't leave Ryan suffering in silence. "Ryan ... do you want to take a break? Just breathe with me right now. I'm right here, I'm not going anywhere."
Contrary to his intention, Ryan let a few sobs cascade forward, before saying, "Please, stay with me, just for a moment."
"I'll stay with you until the end," Sylvester reassured. "Now, I know we can't see each other, but I want you to try and listen to my breathing, okay?" he instructed, taking deep, loud breaths.
"Until the end," Ryan choked out, trying to copy him.
It took a solid two minutes of breathing before Ryan felt grounded enough to speak again. Over that time, Sylvester heard the whooshing of fast-moving vehicles on a road nearby. He now had a pretty good idea of where Ryan was but decided to keep this to himself for the time being and hastily scribbled down what he knew into his notebook. "I'm sorry," Ryan sniffed finally.
"Don't apologise, you are not to blame for any of this," Sylvester replied. "I want you to listen to me very carefully, Ryan - it is not your fault. The only one to blame is the one who did this to you, and he should be reported.
"There's more," Ryan said (causing Sylvester's internal monologue to scream How much worse can this get?!). "Not a lot more, but ... it's enough. That was a month ago, and I haven't gone back to work since, I can't go back and face him, I just can't. I considered reporting him, really I did, but when my colleagues tried to reach me and I tried to tell them, they didn't believe me. They said I was trying to defame their boss and get them all fired - along with myself, apparently. Needless to say, I wouldn't exactly be welcome there if I went back. I was considering reporting him almost immediately, but that's the main reason I didn't."
The second he said this, Sylvester grabbed his pen and hastily scribbled down the details he knew - a man named Richard that worked at a police horse stables in Newcastle - and made a note to track him down and report him himself. The man deserved it for driving an already fragile kid to this state.
"They fired me, eventually, of course," Ryan went on, sounding resigned. "I've had no income for the last few weeks. My water bill alone will probably bankrupt me because I keep having showers because I feel so dirty," he said, his voice filling with a new emotion - disgust. "Tainted, like there's a mark on me everyone can sense, and it never goes away no matter how much I wash. I've barely slept because I can't stop seeing him, I close my eyes and he's there. I'm eating less and less just to extend my food supply, going longer and longer without eating. I actually haven't eaten since Friday, right now."
It's Sunday evening, Sylvester realised, his eyes widening in panic. "Ryan, please, tell me you're still drinking." He tried to keep the quaking out of his voice.
"Yes, I am," Ryan said quickly, which caused Sylvester to release some of the tension in his body. Not all of it though, he was listening to Ryan with bated breath. "Not that it matters, pretty soon I won't be eating anything ever again."
Not if I can help it.
"Sylvester, where can I go from here?" Ryan asked rhetorically. "There's nothing left for me. Even if I don't die tonight, I'll probably starve to death eventually, or end up out on the streets."
"Ryan, that's not true," Sylvester said. "I know you feel like nobody's there for you, like you've been forgotten, but I'm here for you now. I can help, I can direct you to people that can help you, they'll come running right to you if you reach out to them. I'll even report Richard for you, he can't get away with what he did to you."
"Will they believe you?"
"I'll make them believe me," Sylvester said, with more certainty than he felt. All he really had was Ryan's testimony, which was unlikely to be considered adequate, especially if Ryan himself was unwilling to speak about it. But he had to do something, he couldn't let a monster walk free. "There are support groups out there for people in your situation, they can help you heal. You are not alone, Ryan, no one is. I know you're in a dark place right now, I can't imagine how awful you must've been feeling for these past weeks, but you will be found."
There was yet another pause on the line, before more noise poured in from the end. At first, Sylvester thought Ryan was sobbing, but as the sounds grew louder, he realised he was actually laughing - or laughing and sobbing at the same time? It wasn't pleasant on the ear. "You don't get it, do you, Silver?"
"What do you mean?"
Ryan let out a breath as he calmed down slightly. "Look, Silver, I appreciate your efforts, I know you're just doing what you think is right, but they can't help me. It's not a matter of whether someone will find me. I mean, you found me easily enough. It's about whether they can fix me, and I think I've gotten to the point where I'm too broken to be fixed. I mean, would they like what they saw? Doubt it, I think they'd hate it too."
Sylvester's heart ached at the boy's words, but he couldn't give up on him now. "I don't hate it," he said. "I don't think you're a bad person, Ryan. I think you're a good person to whom bad things have happened, but that doesn't mean you can't rise above it. You'll just need some help this time, and that's okay, you've been fighting on your own and winning for so long now."
"When Richard did that to me, I left that place with nothing but the worst of me," Ryan said, the disgust creeping back into his voice. "Chloe hates me, my dad is God-knows-where, my mum died hating my guts, my colleagues hate me, my boss clearly doesn't think very much of me, and I hate myself more than all of them put together now. Literally no one wants me around, so why should I stay?"
Sylvester felt himself running out of options.
"When Chloe fell, everyone in the area heard her fall," Ryan stated. "She screamed all the way down. Everyone came running, tried to help her. No one noticed when my mum fell, she wasn't found until several hours later, apparently. Can't help but wonder, did she even make a sound when she fell?"
Just like a fallen tree. "Wonder if I'll make a sound when I fall," Ryan mused.
Fall?! Was Ryan currently standing on a high surface near a road, like a motorway bridge? It would make sense, the hotline number was often seen engraved near high bridges for a reason, after all. Sylvester grabbed his pen and recorded more details, his heart pounding in his chest. "Ryan, why did you-"
A loud BONG in the background cut him off, followed by another, then a third, and a fourth, and more until the count reached twelve. Both males were silent as the clock tower announced the arrival of midnight and the start of a new day.
"Hear that, Silver?" Ryan's voice said, causing Sylvester to release the breath he didn't realise had been bursting his lungs. During those long seconds, he'd been terrified his correspondent would hang up - or worse. "It's my birthday. I'm eighteen now."
Sylvester had to physically clamp down on the instinctual "Happy birthday," that almost tumbled from his lips.
"There's a reason I'm doing this now and not earlier," Ryan continued. "Everything started on my birthday, it's only fitting that my birthday be the end of it all as well."
The chime of the clock tower gave Sylvester another clue as to where Ryan currently was. He added it to his notes.
"Eighteen is big, Ryan," Sylvester said. "You're an adult now, you can do so many things you couldn't do before. So many doors open for you. Do you really want to close them all for good?"
Ryan let out a mirthless laugh. "Don't be silly, Silver," he replied. "You do realise that you need money to do most of those things, right? To get money, you need a job. Even if I still had my job, with the pay I was getting, I could barely afford a can of beans."
"What about a can of beer?" Sylvester asked. "Have a taste of adult life, at the very least."
"No, no way," Ryan said hurriedly. "I'm not touching alcohol, not after ..."
Sylvester mentally kicked himself. Of course.
"I've been waiting for things to get better for over a decade now," Ryan went on. "I've tried to change myself for the better, move on, and for what? I've lost my entire family, I can't go back to work, I'm at a dead end with no way out. That's just my life and it'll never change. I'll never be any more than I've always been. Just save your time and breath on someone who can be saved."
Sylvester swallowed. "If you're so sure about that, why did you call this number?" he replied. "Think about it, why did you tell me all of this if you thought that nothing would come from it, that I wouldn't care? I think that you-"
"Stop telling me what I'm thinking!" Ryan interrupted harshly. "I've had enough of people gaslighting me, fucking around with my head! Don't pretend I'm something other than this mess that I am!"
The realisation sliced through Sylvester like a sudden icicle falling from the ceiling of an icy cave. Ryan's whole life had gone downhill because of acts of manipulation, gaslighting, believing that he'd done things he'd never dream of doing. Why would a young man scarcely older than Ryan himself imploring him not to take his own life be any different?
The harsh realisation morphed into sickening dread. "Where are you?!" Sylvester finally demanded to know, his free hand shaking on the desk, itching to call 999. No, to get up from this desk and physically stop Ryan himself.
"I'm sorry, I shouldn't have burdened you with this," Ryan let out, his voice cracking on the lump in his throat. "You'll probably have me on your conscience now ... or not, I don't know how many people you talk to, you probably can't remember them all. I don't blame you if you forget me, I never thought that I would get this far. I guess I just ... wanted someone to know I was here, even for a brief moment."
A faint revving could be heard on the other end, as tiny and significant as a butterfly's wing.
"A-ha, right on schedule," Ryan announced, his voice dripping heavily with forced lightness, before falling again as the revving grew louder. "I have to go now, my ride is almost here."
"Ryan, please, just tell me where you are," Sylvester pleaded. "It sounds like a road, are you at-"
"It's been nice knowing you, Sylvester."
The phone hung up before the young man could get another word out.
***
Sylvester refused to listen to the radio the next day. He already knew what he would hear if he did.
This wasn't the first time this had happened, not with him nor anyone else working at the hotline. But each and every time it did, it felt like a breach had been torn deep into his soul, like he was paying for their lost souls with pieces of his own.
There was no way of knowing whether the proportion of people who didn't take their own lives after calling outweighed that of those who did. Even if they had seemingly come around after calling, it was far too easy for them to fall down that brutal pitfall trap again.
Even so, he felt like a failure. Ryan had been broken so many times, mentally, and had been forced to try and heal on his own. The kid was incredibly strong to have found a way out of it at all, but it wasn't until both his body and brain were torn apart for the final time that he felt he couldn't fight anymore.
"Sylvester?"
The young man looked up in surprise at one of his colleagues holding a handset towards him. "There's a boy on the other end. He's asking for you," she explained.
Sylvester's eyebrows raised slightly, but he took his colleague's place with the handset. "Thank you for finding the courage to reach out to us today. With whom do I have the pleasure?"
Over his time working at the hotline, Sylvester had heard all manner of horrors and tragedies that spurred the deepest darkest corners of the mind to overtake the rest of it. Hearing them now still hurt, but they didn't really surprise him anymore, which only made it hurt more.
At that moment, hearing the voice on the other end felt like enough to undo all of it.
"Hi, Sylvester, it's Ryan again."
*This is working off of the assumption that Ryan was 16 when he left in Series 7, meaning he would've been 13 in Series 4 when he saw Chloe again.
**As far as I know, most phones don't tell you outright if you've been blocked by a number you're trying to contact, but there are ways you can tell if you've been blocked.
To each and every person reading this, I need you to know that if you are struggling right now, whether your struggles are big or small, you are not alone, you never are. There are people out there that understand and that can help you and support you through it and out of it. If you or anyone you know is contemplating suicide, please look into suicide prevention services in your area/country. No one should have to feel like dying is the only way to stop suffering.
Love you all,
Justice xxx