#ashton-ryder

The moment breakfast rations had been served and she made sure Roman was settled, Charlie told him where she was going, kissed him goodbye and headed down to get a plate. Her plate. But her stomach wasn't accepting food anyway that morning.

Tray in hand she'd hesitated at the door, unsure what she would find on the other side and preparing herself. Mal had been a mess, Roman had been half dead, for all she knew Ashton could be both. Sure enough, when she'd finally pushed open the door and set the tray down on the kitchen counter, Charlie found him in his bed. Though his face had been wiped clean he still looked almost like a corpse.

"Ashton..." Voice breaking even through her cowed gasping of his name, Charlie stared at him in disbelief and heartbreak for a moment before finally making her way over and crouching down so she could be at eye level with him without actually touching him yet.

The moment everything had gotten quiet outside and everyone had been locked down or in their places for the night, Aggie had snuck out. All along his progress through the building she'd followed, having been ducked around the corner of the stairwell door to the ballroom, where she'd taken to watching the guards sometimes, when she'd seen him. From the bowels of the penthouse's lower floors they'd dragged him, and Aggie knew to where he'd gone.

Flying down the stairwell she'd beat the elevator there, breaths coming hard as she pushed through the door just in time to watch the doors slide open and Ash's humiliation parade begin. Almost the moment his door was closed and locked, the rest were ushered away for curfew and Aggie had been shooed off to her own floor. Not that it mattered she had something to get.

All it took was waiting for the guard's first bathroom break for her to make her move.

The perks of the doors knobs being backwards was that the locks were on the outside and it was only too easy to flick them over so she could let herself in the crack she made to open it, just large enough to sneak through, shoebox pressed to her chest. Closing the door as quietly as possible behind her, Aggie crept her way further into the apartment.

When : April 12th

Where: Ash's new home

Eleven days.

Six months of living Hell and it had only taken eleven days for his entire world to implode. Jeremiah was bitten. Charlie was knocked up. His best friends were held captive at the hands of the woman he called mother. And now he was left with no one but himself to rely on. Somehow an even scarier thought. He could count on less than one hand those who'd seen this side of him. However, the depth to which he could fall had always been his and his alone. No one had been blessed with the opportunity to see John-Paul truly at his worst.

Until now.

There was no need for him to hide the beast within anymore. No reason to fight back against the control it had always wanted. If he wanted to survive - if he could even call it that anymore - he no longer had a choice but to shut everything down and succumb to the numbness. He'd worked so fucking hard to keep his demons at bay and away from those he loved, but now....well, now, what difference would it make to keep playing nice? His anger had been quelled long enough and would now be set free. The monster everyone seem to believe he was would soon be unleashed upon the world within the Wexley. He just wished it had been under different circumstances with different people - his hurt never ending despite his acceptance of thier fates.

His grip on the tray of food shifted as he prepared himself to come face-to-face with Ashton. The one person, aside from Charlie, he always thought was the light at the end of the Rose's very long and dark tunnel. Especially Jeremiah's. The man who, until recently, he thought he could tell anything to. One of his most trusted confidantes. An outsider to the family whose own mother had been the one, true piece of normal he'd ever felt. The Ryders had given him hope by making him a part of such unconditional love.

It was just too bad he'd been wrong. About everything. This life was his normal. It always had been. If he had just accepted long ago that he was rotten to the core instead of trying to be the good person he wanted to be, then he could have avoided the shattering devastation his heart sustained when everyone's lies came to light and opened his eyes to the reality of who he really was.

Hector unlocked the door for John-Paul and stepped aside to let him through. The usual chaotic and bubbling energy that usually followed the middle Rose had become nothing more than a memory of his old self. The John-Paul that stood in front of Ashton was cold and unmoving - his presence alone seeming to suck the air from the room. The tension of his unpredictability that now followed him couldn't have been thicker. And while hurt could still be seen in his gaze, if one looked hard enough they could see the emptiness behind his eyes as it swallowed it, leaving behind a void filled with only empty darkness.

Ashton cost her millions when he and his team raided a branch of her operation. To this day she holds that grudge, and has taken every opportunity to make his life hell. Due to his closeness with Jeremiah, she does a lot of it quietly and with different people. She used a contact that worked with the cable company to stash shrimp around his apartment, including in the hollow tubes of his curtain rods. She prefers that people think he's being paranoid and ensures that nothing can truly be tied back to her. How could she possibly get into his locked apartment, after all?

For a short time Sada had a tiny cell following Ashton's mother around, just enough to make her paranoid enough to mention it to him. Though Ash confronted her on it, she denied everything, told her people to keep it up for a few more days and then come home. Just enough to plant the paranoia in them both so that even once her people were gone, they'd see gang stalkers everywhere. She had never planned on hurting Ms. Ryder, she was just another means of psychological torture to her son.

The single reason Ashton is still alive when it comes to Sada is because of The Roses. Jeremiah made the case for his life and she accepted it. Accepted it just enough to secretly turn it into a game of 'Torture Ashton'. When Jeremiah asked her if she had anything to do with the things happening to Ashton, she played dumb and said that he must be paranoid because of the closeness with herself and The Roses.

''Oh gosh, Ashton. He's like this big old bumbling man in this super hot young body. Like Giles in Buffy if you made him like maybe fifteen-ish years younger in the pilot, and instead of like demons and stuff, it'd totally be space. Or maybe sweet potatoes. You know I still don't entirely know what sort of space experiment you would do with sweet potatoes here on earth, but like.. go off, King. I used to think he was super mysterious and sexy, but like that's so cringy now. He's turned out to not only be like actually just kind of awkward instead of mysterious, he's also turn out to sort of have more big brother energy than Toby ever had for me. Like... ever."

Courtney had been trying to pull Ashton out of his shell from the moment that she met him in the elevator of The Wexley. She thought his stoicism was funny, and had made it her mission to make him laugh as often as possible.

Many a time, Ashton would just seem to sort of appear when she'd be playing her violin up on the roof. He'd always request the same song, Hey Jude, and she'd play it for him without question, though she'd started to play it in different styles just to change it up for him.

Courtney had clocked the way Ashton looked at Jeremiah Rose the very second she first saw them together. From the point on, she'd done her best to sheep dog them together under the mistletoe so she could see if she could get them to finally kiss, but she never ended up succeeding.

Just as with all his new residents, Mr. Wexley showed Ashton to his apartment personally when he first moved in. He made a point to chat with the young man and get to know him a bit before leaving him to it. In the entire four years he's lived there, Tobias has never had a problem with him, and if he were asked he'd probably say that the young man was an ideal tenant.

Tobias has an incredible amount of respect for Ashton, not just as a veteran but as a person. He can see the intelligence and kindness in him, a softness to him that reminds him of himself of a part of himself when he was younger.

The reason it took literally zero time for him to find himself thinking of Ashton as a son of his own now that Toby is missing is he's unconsciously using Ashton to fill that void.