**WARNING: EXPLICIT MENTIONS OF DRUG & ALCOHOL ABUSE THROUGHOUT THE ENTIRE CHAPTER. PLEASE SKIP IF YOU BELIEVE YOU'LL BE TRIGGERED OR UNCOMFORTABLE - I WILL DM YOU A BRIEF SUMMARY OF THE CHAPTER. PLEASE STAY SAFE**

// a/n: this was one my favorite chapters to write btw //

God, Ryan knew he shouldn't smoke.

For fuck's sake, he just turned eighteen, but you'd think he's in his twenties by how much he smokes and what it's done to him. The heavy bags under his eyes and the hollowness of his cheeks were enough evidence to prove that he had no business ever putting a cigarette to his lips.

His demons, however, had other plans for him. He was only ten when the first demon picked up his father's pack of cigarettes from the coffee table and slipped one out. His mother was at work - pulling a double at the hospital like usual in order to not have to come home to a drunken husband and a delinquent child - which made his escape to the outside stairwell easy. The first drag of the stick made him nearly cough his lungs out, as expected, but he pursued on, sucking in the chemicals and the smoke easier and easier each time.

By the time his eleventh birthday rolled around two months later, he was a smoking professional, making his older friend Pete Wentz very proud of the damage he'd caused. Pete was a repeating junior in high school while Ryan was just beginning the sixth grade, which meant that anytime the pair were spotted together, it was very frowned upon. The older male would sneak out of his sixth period English class every day to drive across town to the elementary school, where he would drive Ryan home and together they would burn through half a pack of cigarettes.

This continued on even after Pete had graduated high school until Ryan himself was a junior. One particular day after school, the honey eyed boy waited for nearly three hours for his older friend to show up and take him home from school before giving up and walking home on his own. When he arrived home, he sneaked his cellphone from his mother's bedroom and proceeded to call Pete a copious amount of times within a five minute time-span before giving up and calling his mother.

He wished he'd called her first.

The seventeen year old boy fell to the floor with tears in his eyes as the woman on the end of the phone hysterically explained everything as best as she could, the words "...tried to wake him up..." along with the gut wrenching "...had already stopped breathing..." and the sickening "...needle was still in his arm..." was all Ryan needed to know to understand that his best friend, his protector, his goddamn brother was no longer with him.

He didn't want to believe it at first, but it was hard to ignore the truth that was being told to him. Even at the funeral, he was hoping that Pete would hop up and laugh at everyone for thinking he was dead and tease Ryan for crying "like a little bitch." Pete's mother stayed stoic through the entire funeral, which was to be expected from how hysterical she'd been through the whole week.

A mother shouldn't witness her son die at twenty-four.

Days turned to weeks, and weeks turned to months as Ryan resorted to the only two things that could calm him down. Bottles of Jack Daniels and packs of Marlboros became his best friends, and with each shot he took and each stream of smoke he exhaled, his demons became stronger and harder to fight. He didn't even enroll in school the next year despite his mother's insisting that he needed to move on, but how could he? It's hard to think when losing someone so close and so dear to you only makes you want to scream.

The bottles scattered along his bedroom floor should've contained enough alcohol to kill a grown man, but Ryan felt dead already. The drinks only numbed the pain, but didn't make it disappear as much as he begged and begged them to. Then, the day came when his mother had finally had enough and threw one of the empty glass bottle at the wall, causing Ryan to stare at her with wide eyes as she began to scream at him. When one of the only people left in your life starts to tell you that you're turning into the one person that you both hated, you start to get a grip on what you're doing.

Ryan didn't want to become like his father - dying from kidney failure that should've, by all means, killed him before Ryan was even born. His mother didn't want that. Pete wouldn't have wanted that. As fucked up and as much of a junkie as Pete was, he never resorted to alcohol as a friend of choice. At that moment, Ryan let himself break down into body-wracking sobs as his mother held him in attempts to console the broken soul that belonged to her son.

Few months later, around his eighteenth birthday, he'd quit drinking and told his mother he was moving out. Detroit had too many memories and too many ghosts that continued to follow him around, to the point to where he couldn't even sleep anymore. His mother - understanding as she was - hugged her son with teary eyes and told him she'd help him however she could. She paid for his apartment, settling all the down payments and even having a bank account open with twenty-thousand dollars to pay his rent and bills for the next year.

He didn't deserve that woman.

Flash forward five weeks, and you'll find the eighteen year old boy covered in bruises with a busted lip and shaking fingers as he places a cigarette between his lips wishing he'd stayed in Detroit. The girl with the blonde hair and beautiful brown eyes sitting next to him doesn't speak, and neither does he. He's trying to push the event from a few days ago into the back of his mind; the man who had his hands all over him, touching him in ways that made him continue to feel like his body was covered in spiders. The way he punched the girl and shoved her to the ground filling him with rage as no woman should ever be treated that way.

Mostly, though, he couldn't forget him.

The man who had eyes the color of soft chocolate and a face that seemed to have been carved by angels. His dark hair carefully styled atop his head and not a single strand out of place even as the wind whipped around them. He looked at Ryan like he was so fragile that just speaking too loudly would break him, and it made the honey eyed boy feel safe; even more so when he was directed to the same man seated at the bar, nursing a glass of whiskey in his hand as he told Ryan he just needed to make sure he was safe. At this point, he was beginning to believe that everything was going to be alright; maybe he would continue to be safe.

However, when a scream erupted through the bar at approximately two forty-seven in the morning and Detective Urie paged dispatch to announce that there was "another one," Ryan knew that nothing would be okay as he pulled out his cigarettes and began to drag on them anxiously.

Everything's an illusion, anyway.

God, he knew he shouldn't smoke.