Chapter Text
There's a room in Ashton Irwin's apartment that he rarely goes into. Sometimes, in a fit of cleanliness or procrastination, he'll go in to dust and vacuum. For the most part, however, the room is left undisturbed.
But Ash always leaves the door wide open, day in and day out. Sometimes the person he loves most comes back, comes home, and uses that room, and that person has tacked dozens of posters, hundreds of photographs, and what seems like a thousand sticky notes with arrows, question marks, and a familiar scratchy scribble.
While Ashton closes his eyes to much of the content on those walls, there's one exception, and it's the reason he leaves the door open, despite the questioning and cautious looks of guests, despite his own doubts in the reality the walls put forth. Tacked up, in the middle of that jumble of nonsense and impossibility, is a large photo, clumsily framed in red yarn. It's a photo of Ashton with his best friend, Michael Clifford.
It's a great photo, really. And to Ashton, it means that, somewhere in a mind cluttered with delusions of UFOs and government coverups, Michael might think of him as much as he does Michael.