Ask Me Why And I'll Die And If You Must Go To Work Tomorrow Well If I Were You I Wouldn't Bother For There Are Brighter Sides To Life And I Should Know Because I've Seen Them

"Kellin?" Vic almost appeared startled as I appeared in his office, the door clicking back into place behind me. I guessed he wasn't all that expectant, let alone thrilled to see me at all. I couldn't at all blame him though as I didn't really imagine I'd be the best of company.

"Hey." My face broke out into an awkwardly forced smile as I met his gaze. Honestly, I wondered why the hell I even bothered faking my happiness - this was Vic Fuentes, and if anyone knew just how fucked up I was, it was him.

"Are you okay?" That was of course the first question he leapt into and little did he know just how meaningless it was to me by now; those words had been thrown around without purpose far too many times by now, but that wasn't to be blamed upon him or anyone - that was just how humans worked after all.

"Are you ever going to stop asking me that?" I avoided his question with another, because if I didn't have to answer his question then I didn't have to disappoint him. I think things were better that way, because what Vic didn't know couldn't really hurt him.

"No." He smirked at me, dropping the paperwork he'd been busying himself with in favour of pathetic, worthless, little me. I bet he thought this was all funny; something he could amuse himself with on the side to the important part of his life - the volunteer work that'd give him extra credit for university or something. But I wasn't like that at all.

"Not ever, I don't think." He added, still sunk far too deep into his self-belief.

"Then there's your answer." I countered him with - he didn't seem to share my smirk at all, and all I knew was that he definitely had reason to be jealous. Smirking like you were already beyond the reaches of sanity was truly a talent to envy and despite, because despite its melancholy characteristics it was the only thing I was good for, and that was of course something to hold onto with all I have.

"Kellin-" He began to speak as I began to wonder just what the hell was going through his mind that would allow him to think that anything like this was at all anywhere within the reaches of cause not lost.

"Don't worry - it's okay, but I'm not." I reassured him; half-heartedly, but it was a form of reassurance nonetheless. I think he liked reassurance more than actual emotional progress and development; he'd much rather hear perfectly spun lies than see just a little bit of genuine progress. It didn't make all that much sense, but I wasn't going to question it if it kept that mouth of his shut.

"I'm not okay if you're not." He let what was quite possibly the most idiotic combination of words slip his lips. Thankfully those words were also lies, because despite his claims, Vic was always free from me in whatever way he saw fit, because Vic was going somewhere in life; somewhere important, somewhere big.

Whereas it was quite clear that the only place I was going was six feet under and whatever the hell I dreaded to think would come after that, especially with Mike's condition; I didn't want to be like that - I just wanted to die, fuck man, how hard was that?

"Well then perhaps you really should reconsider just how you're wasting your life." I suggested, my words perhaps coming out harsher than I would have planned, but perhaps I didn't give all that much of a damn. It was apparent that Vic wasn't quite as appreciative of my suggestion as I would have liked, and it was certainly rather apparent that Vic did give a damn.

At least one of us did.

That give us half a damn each.

If Vic cared to share his compassion.

I doubted he would.

I doubted that was even possible.

Even more so, I doubted I cared all that much.

"Kellin, for god's sake..." He ran a hand back through his hair as he let out a shaky sigh, which I presumed to signify his struggle to not completely lash out and brutally murder me or something, which perhaps wouldn't be all that bad. It'd get the job done at the very least - I mean, people were always telling me to look at the positives weren't they?

I guessed this wasn't quite what they had in mind, though.

I guessed I didn't care, though.

I guessed they didn't either... though.

"Yeah." I spoke solely to fill the silence. Silence had begun to unnerve me recently and I still wasn't quite sure as to why; it was supposed to be calmly and it once was, but of course nothing really does last forever and sometimes that's calming, and sometimes it isn't.

"You're an idiot sometimes, you know that?" His face slowly broke into a smile. For what reason I had no clue, but to his sudden apology I had no oppositions. I didn't think I was quite that stupid, well not yet anyway.

"Yeah, I'm aware." I raised my eyebrows at him, just a little unimpressed by the approach he'd now taken on - it was rather childish, in my opinion. Then again, that was just my opinion. "You're an idiot all the time though." I added, again in an equally as childish fashion.

"What?" He raised his eyebrows in return, seemingly utterly unimpressed by my observation, which again brought us to a state of equality.

"Oh I'm just telling the truth." I winked at him, biting back a smirk because society told me so.

"What did you even want to tell me, Kellin? I didn't assume you came in my office of all places for the sheer hell of it." And now I had to actually force the words from my lips, which was of course harder in practice than in my own head.

"Uhh... hey Vic, I love you." And from my lips the words came. Unexpected, of course, but in no way regretted, not just yet anyway.

"Kellin..." He looked at me oddly for a moment before he reciprocated the gesture. "I love you too, you know." I wondered if my gesture was only returned because it was given in the first place - I didn't blame myself for thinking so, because in all honesty it probably wasn't even that far from the truth.

I let out a sigh, wondering where we could possibly go from here, especially with the huge secret I was carrying on my shoulders - the secret about Mike.

From morality's perspective, I probably should have told Vic.

Morality was wrong.

"Is everything alright with you?" I opted for a simple yet of course odd query.

"What?" Now he got confused of course. It seemed my emotional padding hadn't quite worked as well as I'd planned.

"With the whole thing about Mike and ugh... it's dawned upon me that you're hurting too." I admitted as much of the truth I could let slip without mentioning just what had happened to Mike. Or well, what hadn't, because he didn't feel all that dead, not really. I mean, if I killed myself and ended up like him, I'm just saying that I wouldn't be all that satisfied at all.

"Not as much as you though, Kellin." He met my gaze for what felt like the thousandth time and honestly I was getting rather fed up of those fucking brown eyes of his. Honestly, I was getting rather fed up of him in general. "You're so important, you know?" And here we go, yet more bullshit - lovely.

"Mmm..." I shrugged, disagreeing but not quite brave enough to voice it. Or perhaps I just didn't care enough - I couldn't even tell anymore.

"Trust me." He continued, but I didn't.

"Seriously, Vic." I pulled back up the topic of conversation for fear it would be lost within a void of some sort, but maybe that wouldn't have been all that bad. Who knows?

"I'm fine. I don't want you to worry about me, okay." He protested like a fucking stubborn child, which I couldn't complain about without being too much of a hypocrite, so I passed off my complaints to the next one.

"I want to worry about you though." I continued, for what reason I couldn't quite pinpoint. Guilt, perhaps? Guilt, yeah. Guilt, I reckoned.

"Oh shut the fuck up you sound like me." It took a moment for what he'd just said to settle before the two of us were reduced to laughter.

"I'm sorry, I guess. Now you know what I feel like all the time, huh?" I winked at him, perching myself on the end of his desk and sitting here like I generally just didn't want to kill myself and that I didn't know the ghost brother of the guy sat next to me.

"Hmm... I have my reasons. I need to check up on you." He joined me on the end of his desk; the space between us not far from non-existent.

And I was not far from not caring.

"I'm fine, Vic." I protested, in untruths, but a protest nonetheless. "Trust me I'm fucking fine."

And he had the fucking nerve to laugh at that. "Kellin, that's bullshit and you know it."

"I know what this is, Vic. You're just full of guilt that you couldn't save Mike, and now you're determined to save me because of that, but here's something I think you need to know - I don't need saving and neither did he." I didn't know just what came over me there, but quite honestly, by now I didn't care - the truth was something we both needed by now.

"Kellin-" He choked out, and I tried not to smirk at the fact that I'd well and truly rendered him unable to speak. Because sadism was really the only thing my fucked up head had left going for me.

"Please just stop this all, because if the only reason that we're friends, and if the only reason that you love me is manifested guilt, then honestly, I can't and just don't want to do this anymore." And once I'd started I just couldn't stop, perhaps that was for the better, but most likely it was for the worse. I didn't care though, not really, not anymore.

"Kellin, please, you know I care, you know I do." He begged me, our eyes meeting and the pain was bittersweetly bearable. Perhaps I didn't give a damn, more likely I stopped giving a damn long ago.

"I know you care, but I'm not sure I know why." I countered him, with still completely set in my position of distrust in him - I just liked to play around a bit with his emotions, after all, it wasn't like he did that to me, was it?

"It doesn't matter why." He pleaded like a guilty convict. "It just matters that I do."

"I don't see things that way at all." I concluded. "You only care because you feel guilty and honestly I'm not some quick fix for your guilt - not at all."

"Kellin, you're right, you're not. You never have been and you matter." He grabbed my hand as if to emphasis his words, but I pulled my hand away and broke his heart in the process. I wasn't sorry at all.

"So you don't feel guilt for Mike?" I continued, eyebrows raised.

"Of course I do, god every fucking day..." He spaced out a little, his eyes fixating outside the window and I left him there, almost disappointed when his voice filled the silence once more. "It hurts like hell, you know? I don't want to loose you too."

"You don't want to loose me?" I scoffed. "Have you ever thought about how it feels to loose yourself." He hit me with a blank expression, which served as nothing but a confirmation for my suspicions. "You know I wasn’t always like this... you know this wasn't just a switch that I flicked - this happened and I lost my happiness and who I used to be completely."

"I'm sorry-" He spluttered out.

"If you knew me in middle school you wouldn't recognise me now, because I've been fucked up and changed so much, and you know why, because people and the whole fucking world is a rut, meant to screw you over and drive you well down the route to insanity." I met his gaze. "I don't blame Mike, you know."

"You're fucking jealous of my dead brother?" He exclaimed in a mixture of shock and disgust.

"Something like that, yeah." I shrugged it off like I hadn't just admitted something utterly disastrous.

Then again, disastrous was kind of my style.

-

"I thought it'd stop at first, you know." I ended the silence that had ensnared us for several minutes now, causing Vic to take a cautious glance in my direction. "The emptiness, the hurt inside, the inability to be happy or even sometimes feel anything at all. I thought it'd end. After all, I was only fourteen so much foolishness was pretty much a given, but it didn't and as I went on this way, I gave up not just on myself but on any hopes of feeling better at all."

"You should never give up." Vic interrupted with some useless positivity quote that he'd probably found on mumsnet or something.

"What really? Should the people on the titanic have stayed on board and not given up on the sinking ship?" That did thankfully confuse him just as much as I had intended it to.

"That's different, people can be changed and saved, sinking ships can't."

"Well I feel an awful lot like a sinking ship, you know." I added, watching his reaction. "The ocean's just pretty deep - I haven't quite hit the bottom yet. Or maybe there just isn't one, because everything just always seems to get worse - it doesn't stop, let alone get better."

"Kellin, things always get better, you just have to stick it out-"

"Well, I can't not anymore." I pushed my words out with force as I struggled to bite back my tears.

"Kellin, you have to let me try, and listen to me at the very least... please." And there came the puppy dog eyes.

"Did you say all that to Mike?" He nodded. "So shouldn't you know by now that it's not going to work?"

"I don't know why I fucking try with you." He stood up, yelling at me and I didn't blame him at all. I think perhaps I would have yelled at me too. "Seriously just go fuck yourself, Kellin. If you don't want my help at all, then fine, fuck off - go!" He screamed, gesturing to the door and giving me a shove in its direction and honestly I didn't need telling twice.

And most of all, I didn't need him.

-

"Mike?" I felt pretty fucking stupid shouting some dead dude's name from on top of a cliff, but eventually it did get the job done, as he seemed to glide out from between two trees.

"Kellin?" He looked me down, a little taken aback by my 'summoning' of him, because for me to want to see him was not something of the ordinary. "Not planning to jump, are you?"

"No," I glanced towards the cliff. "Not today, I don't think."

"Oh."

"Yeah, Mike, we need to talk." There was really no other way to go about this, despite how much I hated it.

"What about?" he appeared confused, of course, but this didn't amount to just how confused he was about to be.

"About you." I answered just about as briefly as I reckoned I could.

"Dude, what the hell? I'm not important." He exclaimed.

"I know about you, Mike." I chose the direct, if not slightly blunt approach to this.

"What?" He stopped still a moment, his face reddening a little, considering his lack of mortality, I chose to simply not dwell upon just where this blood was coming from.

"I know how you died."

"Oh." He let out a sigh, his eyes wandering over the cliff top. "How?" He spoke as he turned back to me. "How?"

"I know your brother." I explained.

"Oh my god, Vic! Is he alright, god fuck, what... how is he?" And then just about everything left his lips at once.

"Vic, Vic's alright... I... He told me about you the other day. He told me what happened and showed me this picture of you he still has, and then I just knew that was you, and honestly not a lot of this makes sense, but from what I can understand you're a ghost?"

"I would assume I am. The whole white floaty paranormal creature thing isn't quite working for me, though, do you think? I look pretty normal in my opinion."

"Can I ask as to how you died?"

"Well, the plan was jumping from the cliff, but things happened, I saw people down on beach, they had a lifeboat and everything - they'd rush me to hospital so that wouldn't do. I ended up shooting myself; even though I promised Vic I wouldn't... the body, fell down the cliff somewhere down the coast a bit. Personally I haven't gone looking for it."

"You promised Vic you wouldn't?" I was confused at that one.

"Yeah, after he saw my gun he only asked me to promise him I wouldn't shoot myself with it and not that I wouldn't kill myself by any other means." He admitted, his head bowing a little. "I still feel like shit you know- wait, does Vic know that I'm a ghost or anything?"

I shook my head, "no. I honestly doubt he'd believe me, and I'm pretty sure I fucked things up between the two of us by now."

"How so?"

"I told him to stop trying to save me."

"I understand where you're coming from. He's horribly persistent - it's annoying."

"He only cares about me, because he feels guilty he couldn't save you." I proclaimed.

"Understandable. That's just how human minds work."

"It doesn't make it any better though, does it?"

"Of course not." He reassured me. "Getting better is a myth, because nothing ever does."

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