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The sound of little birds chirping outside of Ethan’s window was a nice wake-up call, the gradual shift from lying still in his bed to swinging his legs over the edge of the worn-out mattress was almost an out of body experience, though that comparison was ironic.
His floor was cold, or he remembers it being cold at one point, that is. It always was way too cold in this place. He put his bare feet on the tile floor and stood up slowly, his white, long-sleeve button shirt straightening out and making him look even tinier than he already did. He was far too thin, he had to admit, and the shirt didn't even fit him anyway. Though the doctors hadn't cared when they gave it to him. His pants were large and loose around the legs, but they had a stretchy waistband so they managed to cling just enough to his waist for them to not slide off anytime he moved. It was too long, which is why he had it pulled up to his waist, which was just enough to keep the cuffs from dragging across the dirty floor of the hospital.
The psychiatric hospital was dirty, oddly enough. It always had been, though over the years it had escalated. That was expected after everything that had happened.
Ethan took a moment to just gather himself. He stared at his rustic bookshelf, used to hold trusted items and any extra clothes he had brought from home. He was still upset about them taking the strings out if his favourite hoodie, though being upset at the workers now, after all this time of being here, wouldn't do much good. Ethan just let it go.
The birds were chirping again, sharing their pretty melody with Ethan from outside his barred window. It was useless to bar the window, as it was rather high up and even with Ethan’s thin and smaller frame, he knew he couldn't fit through it. He had tried a few times. Childhood gymnastics paid off, though he was still stuck here so he supposed it kind of didn't…
“No, we don't wake up feeling like that anymore.” Ethan reminded himself, placing his closed fist against his chest and furrowing his brows in determination. Jack told him that they wouldn't wake up feeling like shit anymore, that doctor’s had done that enough beforehand. Ethan and Jack were going to make sure they were at peace now.
With a deep, refreshing sigh and a small, full-body shudder to shake away the bad vibes, Ethan smiled a little and made his way out of his room, making sure he remembered to thank the birds for their song.
The hallways outside of the rooms the patients slept in were messy. Little pieces of dirt and debris were scattered here and there against the wall on the floor, even medical utensils were underneath the ungodly amount of dust collected on the floor. Ethan almost ran into a metal table cart that had been there for who knows how long at this point. The workers here had never been very clean people.
It took Ethan a few minutes to get to the wing where Jack’s room was, but the silent stroll was always peaceful. It wasn't chaos, and that always helped Ethan deal with his anxiety, though his ADHD felt uncomfortable at the lack of noise.
After dodging random medical equipment left askew, Ethan had made it to Jack’s room, though when he peaked in it was empty, and the blanket was left all rumpled at the end of the bed. Ethan frowned and fixed the blanket, making it look tidier. Ethan smiled at his work.
Suddenly he remembered where he was supposed to be. Jack had asked him to meet him in the outside eating area near the side of the building. Ethan never went over to the side of the hospital because he had always stayed in the adolescent unit beforehand, so he wasn't all that familiar with the other units. He was sure he had never stepped foot in the adolescent girl’s unit, but girls and guys who were adults were mixed in together in their units. Jack had told Ethan that the hospital said you were allowed to request a same-sex roommate, though they never actually did anything when someone asked for be switched. Typical.
It took a few minutes longer than it probably should have to find the outside area, but Ethan only got distracted a few times and managed to remember he had somewhere to be, so he pat himself on the back and walked outside of the double doors.
It was probably somewhere around 6:30 AM, as the sky was still a little cloudy and it looked chillier. Ethan caught sight of a black hoodie at one of the roofed picnic tables.
Ethan and Jack’s eyes met, both smiled. Ethan watched his step as he walked across the concrete path and stood next to Jack. His feet and toes were pale, sickeningly pale, and even now Ethan was insecure of it, though Jack was always reassuring him he saw Ethan as beautiful no matter what.
Jack stood and hugged the smaller boy. “Still sleepy, love?” He brushed Ethan’s fluffy brown hair out of his face as he looked down into his eyes. Jack always had the brightest smile.
Ethan nodded with a sleepy smile as he rested his forehead against Jack’s chest as the older man ran his fingers up the back of Ethan’s head and into the mass of fluff on top of his head.
“C’mon, love, sit down.” Jack's voice was tender and gruff.
Ethan complied and sat across from Jack at the picnic table. The Irishman put a styrofoam to-go box on the table and smiled at his sleepy boyfriend. “Hungry? They had strawberries and cake.”
That made Ethan's face light up a little as he tried to keep himself from grabbing at the box and opening it immediately. “What's this for?” He managed to occupy his mind with conversation to keep from grabbing at the box needily.
“You told me one time a long while back that you always wanted to have a picnic out here because of the flowers and because the sun rises on this side of the hospital.” A sheepish smile graced Jack’s handsome face, looking a little bashful at the fact he had remembered something seemingly so insignificant from such a long time ago.
“You're so sweet, Jack.” Ethan had a similarly soft smile on his lips and a warm blush staining his pale and thin cheeks. The brunette grabbed Jack’s hands from across the table and held them, rubbing his thumb over the Irishman’s knuckles tenderly.
“Want breakfast?” Jack finally opened the styrofoam box to reveal the promised goods from earlier. Ethan longed for the authentic experience of eating his favourite foods again, but the effort and thought Jack had put into this made up for it. “Sorry it's not as romantic as a basket or something. I could only find these.” Another shy smile from Jack, as if he were embarrassed about a minor detail.
Ethan grabbed a strawberry from the plastic cup in the box, biting the tip of it. “It's perfect.”
They sat there in silence for the morning, only the sweet chirping of the birds just waking up and the breeze rusting the crispy leaves struggling to cling to their branches filling the absence. Ethan cleared all of the strawberries, though to be fair, Jack had said he got them for Ethan and that he could have as many as he wanted. So Ethan felt completely justified in his hoarding of the sweet fruit. Jack was drinking a coffee and eating some toast, gazing out at the scenery around them and just enjoying the crisp freshness of the early morning.
It didn't take them long to finish their breakfast, but they sat at the table for a while afterwards to enjoy the quaintness of the morning.
“Wanna go stand at the fence?” Ethan asked softly, his nimble fingers wrapping around Jack’s own.
To say that denying those pretty hazel eyes would be easy to deny with some assertiveness would be a bold lie, or someone had never had the pleasure of having those hazel beauties gazing longingly into their own. Jack nodded and walked with his boyfriend to the guarded fence that surrounded the entire outside space, meant to keep the patients in. There wasn't even much to look at on the other side of the fence, just overgrown bushes and tall trees in the distance that hid away the hospital from the rest of the world. But it was freeing to just see the outside now and then. Ethan tended to look outside a lot, just staring longingly at the outside world.
They wouldn't be able to leave right now if they wanted to anyway, and Jack wished he could find some way to let Ethan just dig his feet into the grass on the other side of the dreadful fence. Obviously, it was still the same grass, but something about it being on the other side of that goddamn foreboding fence made it all the more precious. Jack didn't like sitting by the fence like Ethan did, he accepted his confinement to the hospital years ago.
Though Jack could understand why Ethan had such a child-like curiosity and hopefulness to him.
“I remember when I first got here…” Ethan mumbled, the corners of his eyes crinkling as he smiled. Jack could see the faint sadness in them though. “It was on my fifteenth birthday. I had tried ending all the shit the night before. I didn't want to make it to my fifteenth birthday.”
Jack could still see the scars on the inside of Ethan's wrists.
“I ended up surviving though, and they shipped me off here. My parents were so worried… I felt awful. I imagine it couldn't have been easy to go through something like that. They must have felt so out of control and helpless as parents.” Ethan's hold on the fence tightened a little as he reminisced.
“What about you, Eth? You were the one having to stay at a psychiatric hospital. Not them.” Jack looked at Ethan's face with knitted brows.
The boy looked over at Jack with a soft smile that crossed somewhere between nostalgia and grief. “But imagine being a parent, and all you want to do is take care of your kid, your baby. You do everything you can, and then one day it's not enough, so your kid has to stay somewhere else where they can get help. It's like you weren't enough, but you're the parent. You're supposed to help your kid, and when you just… can't… ” Ethan trailed off, his face looking sadder the more he explained.
Jack supposed he could understand where Ethan was coming from, but he didn't have that same luxury with his parents. They never got along with him and nothing ever seemed to be like how a family should be. Jack longed for that tender family experience.
He had Ethan now though, and that was better than anything.
“God, this place is in the middle of nowhere. I remember thinking to myself on the way here in the ambulance, “what if this turns out to be some secret murder house and I'm going to die here?” I didn't really… Well,” Ethan's eyes glanced down for a moment as he was reminded of how things are now, his eyes distant. “I never thought I'd actually die here…”
“Me neither, Eth.” Jack rested his head on Ethan's shoulder. He tried not to look at himself, and he was thankful for his hoodie to help with that. He didn't like seeing what he had to carry into the afterlife from his last moments alive.
Ethan ran his fingers gently over the splotchy burn scars on Jack's neck that peeked out from beneath his hoodie, they were a prominent shade of a slightly reddish-pink.
“I used to like baths.” Jack's smile was like Ethan's, nostalgic but sad. “Never thought my last one would be the reason I'm now confined to this godforsaken hospital.”
“You can hardly call what they did to you a bath, Jack.”
“I was in a metal tub filled with water, wasn't I? I mean I didn't have a ducky or soap but technically—”
“It was filled with water around two hundred degrees fahrenheit.”
Jack went quiet after that, his smile dropping along with his gaze.
Ethan turned to look at the Irishman, taking his face into his pale hands and looking all over the scarred skin. So many burn scars, but Ethan didn't care. “Jack, I'm sorry. I know you don't like talking about your living days, but please, you always tell me that we're going to finally be at peace now that no one else is here. Take some peace for yourself. You deserve it after all you've been through.”
Jack leaned into Ethan's thumb gently rubbing over one of his cheeks, keeping his eyes on the overgrown grass at their feet He noticed Ethan's pale, bare feet standing out against the green. “It's hard to be at peace when you were boiled to death like a fuckin’ lobster, Eth.” Jack's voice was quiet, barely above a whisper as he tentatively met Ethan's big, beautiful eyes.
“We're finally away from the people who did that, we have been for nearly five years now, Jack.”
“You have for nearly five years, Eth. I didn't die 'till two years after you did. I was twenty-seven, you were nineteen.” Jack didn't want their day to be sour, but he had been down lately and getting all of this out helped.
“Yeah… It was my nineteenth birthday when I died. Someone forgot I was allergic to peanuts and I went into shock. Someone thought adrenaline would help, so they injected some into me and I had a heart attack. Not my favourite birthday.” A sad smile presented on Ethan's face at the light joke.
“You can make jokes about your death but I can't make any about mine?” Jack had a sad, playful smile as well as he looked at Ethan with teary eyes.
“I'm not still harbouring resentment.”
Jack felt his smile drop a little again at that. He couldn't help it that he still held something against those who took his life away because they were sick fucks themselves.
“It was because of your death that I even died. I loved you so much and when I found out you had died… I didn't know what to do with myself anymore.” Jack felt the tears well up in his eyes at the memory of that day. He hadn't ever felt something so heart-wrenchingly painful. “I acted out and eventually they decided trying hydrotherapy.” The Irishman bit his lip as he looked away from Ethan's face. “They filled the tub with hot water the first few times. But the fifth time it wasn't just heated water, it was like, on a burner or something it seemed. It was bubbling and boiling. They tied my wrists and ankles and tossed me in so I wouldn't jump out and run.” He looked down at his hands, the entirety of his left hand was covered in a burn scar, nothing left of the once healthy skin. His right hand was about 90% covered in burn scars. “I sank to the bottom of the tub and they boiled me alive. They believed it would help with my behaviour. I guess in a way it did. They didn't have to deal with my behaviour anymore after that.” His hands rubbed the burned wrist a little as he let the wretched memory play in his head.
“Your death was the reason the hospital finally got shut down. They could write mine off as an accident because of my allergy. Yours was premeditated and cruel.” Ethan kissed Jack softly in the sunlight. His hands still cradled the Irishman's face. Jack sighed into the kiss and rested his hands on Ethan's waist.
Jack was speaking the moment they parted, “I remember the first time I kissed you. We were dead and you hugged me so tight. We weren't allowed near each other most of the time we were alive because we were in different units.”
“I still don't understand why they didn't move me to the adult units when I turned eighteen.” Ethan slid his hands around to the back of Jack’s neck as they spoke.
“They're a bunch of lazy bastards.” Ethan giggled at Jack's exclamation. “I remember when they would have little events and we were all allowed to mingle, you would come and find me immediately. You were adorable.”
Ethan blushed a little as he grinned. “Remember when I convinced you to let one of those face painters at the big mingle event paint a four-leaf clover on your cheek?”
A roll of Jack's eyes and a sigh were the first things he did as he was reminded of that goofy memory. “God, yeah. When I explained to that lady that you wanted me to do it because I was Irish she found it to be precious. I even got complimented on my accent.” Jack smiled as he looked at the land beyond the fence to their left.
“Don't you always though?” It was adorable how Ethan cocked his head to the side a little. Jack couldn't resist how precious he looked and he pecked the boy on the lips quickly.
“Yeah, but it's just because American’s seem to go crazy whenever someone has an accent from the east.”
Ethan only nodded, not even attempting to deny the claim. “I was obsessed with your accent at first. I used to dream about you just talking.” Jack's suggestive eyebrow raise at that statement made Ethan's cheeks glow red.
“So does that mean you're not obsessed with it anymore? I'm hurt, Eth.” Jack took a hand off of Ethan's waist to place it dramatically on his chest as if he were offended.
A little grin and a quick peck to Jack's nose was Ethan's response. “Well after hearing it for so long in the form of yelling…”
“I'm Irish, Ethan. It's just what we lads do.”
“Well I can't handle your lad antics.”
It was quiet for a moment as they just looked at each other, big smiles lighting up their faces and the sun shining down on them.
“But you still put up with them.” Jack pointed out cheekily, only letting Ethan roll his eyes before he captured the boy's lips in another kiss.