#ask:aster

Lay Me Down - The Wreckers

Lui had wanted to throw a wild Walt rager, and he must have done a good job, because his head was pounding and someone much smaller than him was tucked under his arm, steering him away from the noise of the party and back towards his cottage instead. He could kind of make sense of the loud noises fading in the distance, and it was only when they were in front of his cottage, a warm voice asking “Is it this one?” did he realize that the person who he’d been leaning against this whole way, the one who’d been keeping his drunk ass from falling over in the street, was Aster Olympus.

Lui nodded, afraid to slur his words if he responded -- and even more afraid of the questions he’d asked. Why had Aster been at a party like that? It didn’t seem like her scene, but if he were sober he wouldn’t want to offend her by asking that... But then again, if he were sober, she would have been the last person he would have wanted to embarrass himself in front of, and for the life of him he couldn’t understand why. He wasn’t sober, though; he was drunker than he’d been in months, and an even scarier thought flitted through his head: maybe Aster hadn’t been at the party at all. Maybe Lui had called her, and that confused him even more than wanting her to think highly of him did.

He didn’t remember giving her his keys; he barely remembered them stumbling through the door and him pointing out his bedroom, either. Thank fuck he didn’t do anything stupid like try to strip off his clothes before getting into bed; the light in his room was bright, though, and he did nearly fall over trying to raise his hand up to shield his eyes. “Just lay me down,” Lui moaned, wanting to add that she didn’t need to do anything else to help him. He didn’t understand anything about Aster Olympus, to be honest -- why she was here helping him, why little things he saw reminded him of her for no damn reason, why he felt more comfortable talking to her about things that were real than he did to anyone else...

And most of all, he didn’t understand why the idea of her leaving right now suddenly felt worse than his hangover surely would in the morning.

Even as he told her she could go, though, she insisted that she was getting him water and Advil and whatever else he’d need to hate himself a little less in the morning. Lui’s instincts, however, screamed for him to do the opposite, and even as he tried to thank her, he heard himself begging instead, “Stay with me? Please? Sometimes it’s just really lonely.”

Lonely knowing that most of his friends were more hook up buddies than people who cared how he felt about stuff. Knowing that Gwen probably would have drawn on his face in markers and laughed at his drunk ass passed out on the couch, or that Kai would have been gone with Tia long before he even got so bad that he needed help... Lui may surround himself with people all the time, but he kept them at an arm’s length at the same time, too, and something about Aster was different. Something about her made him want her to stay... and he’d wake up tomorrow hating himself for wanting something real again, after he’d spent so long being sure he’d never let himself fall just to fuck it up again.

@asterolympus