Stories I Never Finished

We Could Be Kings

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p r e v i e w

Watching someone you care about delve deeper and deeper into their own insanity is a sensation not many can describe. It's cruel, heartless and exhausting; a train speeding down its tracks and yet never coming to an end, always going further, always falling lower.

Ashton watched his brother become a man he never met, he watched the only person in his life he had ever trusted with his own mentality become a heathen.

Luke was a struggling man, youthful and bright yet plagued by madness, and after a while Ashton had come to notice—despite endless sessions with a psychiatrist Ashton had heard nothing but good about—his brother wasn't improving.
In fact, he had declined into a state of insanity—a sweetheart trapped within the body of a careless psychopath.

Of the many times Ashton had gone to drop off and pick up his brother from the psychiatrist's office, Ashton was yet to properly speak with the strange man 'aiding' in Luke's recovery.

"That's pathetic." Luke was sat in front of their TV, hand held to the remote as he scowled in boredom at the violence and horror plastered on screen.

Glancing toward the tall blond with once wondrous blue eyes, Ashton briefly stopped in the doorway of the vast lounge room and frowned.

He didn't think eradicating empathy was how one dealt with their hardships. He certainly didn't find lack of empathy helped him come to terms with their mother's demise, and so surely Luke wouldn't either.

After months of Luke's steady yet rapid decline of humanity, Ashton was inevitably faced with the most grim of decisions as he stood in the snow-ridden dirt of his front yard; hovering by his black Range Rover he had parked in the driveway of the family home him and his brother inherited.

The night had been nothing but a chilling midnight sky, air so cold and light so dull the street lamps froze over in silence and left their eerily quiet street to the mercy of darkness.

Rugged up in his winter coat, with his scarf, beanie and gloves all dusted in falling flakes of snow, his hazel eyes blew wide in horror at the sight of his brother standing in the doorway of their home; light flooding from inside only to cast him into shadows.

"Lu...?" Ashton cautiously approached, standing within Luke's shadow as his eyes searched for what could be causing such a chilling scene.

It was when he finally came to terms with the sight in front of him, of bloodied hands and crimson splattered clothes, did he realise what had come to pass.

And with a gasp of unsettled dread, Ashton raised a shaking hand to his mouth and let his soul drain from his eyes; stunned.
"Oh god, Luke... what did you do?"

That night, Ashton had been the strongest big brother in town; burying the mutilated body of one of their neighbours in the back of their yard as far down into the ground as possible. He scrubbed himself clean, burning a bucket of clothes until they were nothing but ashes of what they once were, and after it all he cut Luke's ties with the useless psychiatrist.

Luke became trapped under his older brother's word, ink scrawled into every government document available to hand over his thoughts, his rights and his mind, all to Ashton. Luke had nothing after that night, and Ashton had it all; from the younger's bank account to each contact between Luke and anyone who wished to speak with him.

With eyes as dark as the night he lost his brother, Ashton had come to stand within the doorway of the psychiatrist's office; hellbent on tearing open whatever it were the sickly man had planned for his once innocent baby brother.