I Read About the Afterlife (But I Never Really Lived)

01-Better to leave than to be replaced

The first thing Ryan sees is blue. And then there's screaming

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The first thing Ryan saw when he opened his eyes was blue.

There was a blue-haired boy sitting on the floor in front of him, his back to Ryan. Tyler was curled around him, his face in the other boy's shirt, his breathing steady and his eyes closed. The brunet guessed he was asleep.

"Am I dead?" Ryan wondered aloud, because that was the only obvious explanation. He could see, for fuck's sake, and he didn't have any scars from when he had tried to kill himself. Come to think of it, neither did Tyler. From what Ryan could see, his best friend's skin was perfectly clear, not a trace of what had happened that night left on him.

At the sound of Ryan's voice, the blue-haired boy (Ryan had taken to calling him Blue Boy in his head) jumped up and spun around, and stared. He stared right at Ryan and Tyler like he'd never seen another human being in his entire life.

And then he screamed.

"I'm not going to hurt you!" Ryan exclaimed, jumping up and pushing his palms away from his chest. "Please stop screaming, somebody might hear you!"

"I already heard him! Jesus Christ, you do this every time, calm down!"

There was another boy standing in the doorway to the room they were in with dark brown hair and dark brown eyes, wearing a low-neck gray tank-top and red plaid boxer shorts, and he was looking at Blue Boy with a look of complete exasperation. When Blue Boy didn't stop screaming, the other boy (he was admittedly very attractive, but there was no way in hell Ryan was going to refer to him as Hot Boy in his head, no way, not at all) ran a hand roughly through his hair and sighed audibly before approaching Ryan.

"Don't worry about it," Hot Boy (okay so maybe he'd been lying to himself, whatever) said, locking eyes with Ryan. When he did nothing, the other boy reached out a tentative hand to touch Ryan's arm. Oh. He'd been asking for consent to touch him? "This literally happens every single time somebody shows up here, so don't take it personally. This is just what Josh does."

So Blue Boy's name was Josh. Good to know.

The screaming was becoming a bit annoying, Ryan had to admit, but nothing prepared him for a very small boy with blond hair and a fedora to run into the room, look quickly between Ryan and Hot Boy and Josh and Tyler, break out into a grin, and then also start screaming. "God damn it, Patrick!"

Blond Boy "Patrick" just kept grinning and screaming and smirking at Hot Boy who was looking exceedingly pissed off at this fact, and Ryan sent a nervous glance over at Tyler, worried that all of this shouting and yelling and, dear lord, the screaming, would wake him up.

And sure enough, after about seven more seconds of this, Tyler was sitting up and groaning and blinking his eyes to adjust to the unnaturally bright lighting of the room that they were in. He took one look at Josh and Patrick, and was also set into screaming. "For fuck's sake, you're going to wake up Pete!" Hot Boy yelled, and Patrick ceased making that god forsaken noise for a moment to let out a string of giggles and then continued to scream. At this point, Ryan was annoyed at the screaming, he had a massive headache, and he was absolutely terrified of whoever this "Pete" was, because if Hot Boy was scared of him, then Ryan should probably also be scared of him.

"Why the hell is everyone screaming!"

The screaming abruptly stopped - except for Patrick - as a tall guy with bleached blond hair that was brown at the roots (he was only a couple of inches taller than Patrick, from what Ryan could tell) and with a lot of tattoos stepped into the room. Josh looked absolutely and utterly terrified while Hot Boy just looked smug, and Tyler was hiding behind Ryan.