🏆Featured on TeenFiction | Head Over Heels
To Leroy 'Lee' Hiew, home's never felt like home. He has a huge mansion, a big car, and more money than he could ever spend. And yet, the idea of home always seems to elude him.
Armed with his dog, Socks...
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When lost boys die, they leave behind nothing but their dreams.
Lee's not dead yet, but his dreams definitely are---cast away into the dust, where they've always belonged.
For the next two days, he lingers in the black hole of his emotions, drowning, drowning, drowning. They pass in a blur, and he lets them, ignoring the stabbing pangs of guilt in his stomach in favour of holing himself up in Jack's room even though he knows he's overstaying his welcome---but then again, he always does, even in his own home.
Nothing's new.
Jack's parents try to get him off the ground, then James, and finally Jax, but Lee just---can't, really. Too consumed by the devils in his head. Demons everywhere. Demons on the ground. Demons in the air. Demons in his heart---where the memories of his mother lie.
Jax is stubborn. She pounds at Jack's bedroom door and threatens to kick Lee's ass if he doesn't get it out to the dining table so they can fucking feed him, but still, Lee doesn't listen. He just lies there, a stone on the hard wood of Jack's bedroom floor, listening to Jax beg for his attention until Jack, who hasn't left Lee's side except to eat and use the toilet despite how fucking uncommunicative Lee's been, tells her to fuck off. And through it all, Lee is numb, caught in the endless writhe of grief and pain and blinding, burning agony.
He tries to get out. He really does. But the sinking feeling that gathers in his stomach, growing, growing, growing, spreading its vines of twisted rapunzel through his belly until it bursts through his skin, roots him in place and bends his will to its melancholy whims. Sadness is what most people would call it, but it's not the right word even when it's capitalised and italicised, not for the demons tearing him apart from the inside, all claws and teeth and agony. Agony that leaves him breathless, that digs its nails into his limbs and pushes them deep, that sends him retching into the toilet for half an hour after Jack freaks out about him not eating and shoves two apple slices down Lee's throat.
Eating doesn't sit well with Sadness. Nothing does, really. No matter how hard Lee attempts to drag himself off Jack's bedroom floor, Sadness punches him back down, down, down. And so he sits there, lying on the hard wooden ground, ignoring Jax's pleas for him to talk to her and Jack's insistence on him eating something.
It's on the third day of Lee being utterly consumed by the demons of his past that Jack's had enough. He's persistent, more stubborn than Lee sometimes, and Lee's sure he's given him too much trouble---after all, he only moves to cry or roll into Jack's open arms.
"Come on," Jack orders, snatching a towel off his bed. It's the same one he's used for at least half a week already. At Lee's house, the night maid changes the towels every day---but they're not at Lee's house. They're at Jack's home, and he's overstaying his welcome as he always does, moping around like the world owes him something---here, there, everywhere, and all he wants to do is to roll over and continue staring at the ceiling, finding his mother in every speck of cracking plaster.
