The Runaway | Ashton Irwin AU

Part 5

        

        

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A/N: Just want it to be clear that this chapter and the previous one are set during the same time. So both chapters are just about what happened since they left high school.

Also this chapter is dedicated to ksstories because she is an awesome person and takes her time to read my stuff. Go check out her book To Build A Home, it's great! (it's a Calum Hood story)

Vote? Comment? Love.

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[Ashton's POV]

[Three years later]

Life certainly hasn't turned out the way I had wanted it to. It's been three years since I've graduated from high school, and here I am, still in Page, Arizona. I didn't plan on staying here. I had wanted to go to college. I had actually gotten into all of my top picks. I was going to be a sound engineer, but that changed after my grandmother fell ill. It was sudden, neither of us expected it to happen. One day she had a slight cough and a runny nose, and the next she was put up in the hospital with leukemia.

It was called Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia. It starts in the bone marrow, eventually invading the blood before spreading to other organs such as the liver or spleen and then eventually death. But that was the worst case scenario. If she got treatment she would do better, but the doctors said that at her age it was hard to tell how it might all affect her.

I loved my grandmother. I'd be lying if I said she wasn't one of my closest friends, really she was my only friend. Anyone and everyone I may have known in high school had gone to college or are still here in Page, working as a farmhand or in a bar. There really weren't many options when it came to work around here, but either way, I couldn't bare the thought of loosing my grandmother. She had been more of a mother figure to me than anyone else.

It's been almost nine years since my mother shipped my out here. She had never been a good mother. My father abandoned us when I was still a child and I still believe to this day that my mother blames me for him leaving. I believe that she couldn't bear to look at me because I reminded her of the husband who had left her behind. So she decided to leave me behind too.

I think I've spoken to my mother maybe three times since I've been here. I'm no longer angry with her for doing to me, what my father did to her. All the anger I once had I got out through playing my drum kit or driving out into the middle of the desert, standing on the top of my truck and screaming my lungs out. I no longer see my mother as anything other than another stranger that I used to know.

It was only a few months ago that my grandmother was diagnosed and has been in and out of the hospital ever since then. She gets treatments once a week, but every time I come home after work I see her getting more and more tired. It scares me. But there are good days. And I love those days.

I don't hate my job per say. It's more like an annoying little brother that you just want to have leave you alone, but it's never going to happen because your related.

I am the manager of the local book/music shop Fact and Fiction Tunes. A silly play on words, but I get paid well enough and get to stand around listening to good music all day, so I can't complain. I've been working here since I was a freshman in high school, so it was only right after that amount of time that I was promoted to manager. I worked everyday, except weekends. That was my time to spend with my grandmother, or alone if she didn't need me for anything. I wouldn't exactly call it the best life, but I was perfectly content with where I was at the young age of 21.