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AJ McLean absently rocked himself and the smaller man in his arms back and forth, while humming a long forgotten melody that had somehow found its way into his mind. He didn’t care about the soft light of dawn steadily spreading over the field, nor did he care about the smoldering remains of the fire next to them.

It was cold, and for some reason, that seemed the only condition compatible with his state of mind.

Ice cold.

In another life, a life he had lived months, years ago, his wife was probably freaking out over the phone as she was informed about him being missing.

AJ couldn’t really care about that either.

He took a calm, steady breath, burying his tearstained face in the crook of Brian’s neck, still softly rocking both of them. He hadn’t always been so calm. He remembered that horrifying and excruciatingly slow moment in which Brian’s eyes had rolled back and his body had gone completely limp. There hadn’t been a warning; there were no soft spoken, dying words. One moment he’d been raving about Nick, and then his eyes had closed. AJ had screamed at him for a good, solid three minutes after that.

Yet, he didn’t dare to let him go.

Not that he was dead, no. AJ made sure to keep his hand firmly splayed across Brian’s chest, carefully keeping track of the hesitating, unsteady and slow heartbeat he felt there. He realized, not for the first time, that if it stopped, there would be absolutely nothing he could do about it. And although he was not particularly okay with that, he didn’t think he could muster up the energy to panic about it either.

Instead he just sat there, waiting for whatever was going to happen next, as he felt, almost guided the faltering, shallow breaths rattling the older singer’s lungs. AJ didn’t remember the last time he’d been so close to another human being. Sure, he and his wife were close, and they were absolutely close at certain moments, but this felt so much more different, so much more important, final. He swallowed, tasting the word.

Final. It wasn’t like he had fully surrendered to the possibility that he would lose not only one, but two of his friends in one single night, but honestly, what hope was there? Brian was slowly dying in his arms and there was not a single sign of help coming anytime soon. And this time, unlike with Nick, AJ got to experience every single detail of his friend’s fading moments that slowly came to an end.

Abandon all Hope. He’d often wondered what that truly meant. A saying they used to describe hell or the apocalypse. He’d always pictured hell as a place of fire and pain and torture. But true hell was the saying of Abandon all Hope. It was a cold, empty feeling of helplessness, of letting go of any spark of hope you had left.

That was hell. And AJ figured it probably hurt worse than all the fire, pain and torture ever could.

And it made him thirsty again.

The half empty bottle of whiskey was just out of his reach from where he was sitting, but if he shifted just slightly, he’d be able to grab it. He hadn’t had a taste of alcohol in months, but remembered what it did crystal clearly. It would numb him. It would make him stop thinking about all the bad things and would put him in a dazed stupor until he didn’t know where he was or what he was doing.

He hesitated only a second before making a decision.

Shifting ever so carefully, he leaned towards the bottle, removing his hand from the weakening heartbeat to let it peek out from underneath the thick layer of blanket and clothes he’d piled upon Brian and himself.

Although he couldn’t see much of what he was doing, he only needed a few seconds of blindly grabbing around in the snow before his fingers encircled the cold bottleneck.

Ceremoniously, he raised the treasure in the air, then, without another thought, flung it away with an animalistic scream, hearing the glass finally breaking as it hit the muddy, but frozen ground a few feet from where they were sitting.

“No!” he screamed in frustration, panting from the anger that coursed through his veins. “No! Not like this! You hear me?”

Brian remained as still as ever, but AJ was not finished yet, “Wake up!” he yelled, his breath forming little clouds of smoke as it escaped his mouth, “You don’t get to do this, Brian! You don’t get to leave!”

AJ let a sob escape his throat as he cradled the smaller singer just a bit more tight. Tears dropped into Brian’s already wet hair as AJ lowered his head and cried out in desperation. He couldn’t remember when the last time was that he had cried like this. He knew the last time he actually had cried, had been of joy, probably because Ava had done something she hadn’t done before or something like that.

This, however, came from deep within him. The sobs wrecked his whole body, rocking both him and Brian shockingly. He didn’t know if he had actually ever felt this horrible before. “You don’t get to do this,” he whispered brokenly into the older man’s ear, “You know, that young boy back home is counting on you. God, Bri, that kid looks up to you so much, you don’t get to let him down, that’s the burden of being a dad, remember that?” AJ rambled on, recalling the time Brian had pulled him apart right after he’d become a father to a beautiful daughter, and telling him in earnest that it now meant that he could never, not once, let his kid down. That was the burden of being a parent, in fact that was the whole idea.

And AJ considered dying before your kid’s thirteenth birthday in clear violation of that rule.

He swallowed, his breath shaking and his voice faltering, “Please,” he spoke softly, “Just, don’t die… please.”

Nothing happened. Brian didn’t magically open his eyes to announce he felt fine all of a sudden. He didn’t suddenly turn around to embrace and comfort AJ. He didn’t move at all. Instead, AJ could still feel his friend’s heartbeat. He still noticed the slight jerks of Brian’s chest that accompanied every rasping, labored breath he took.

And he tried to hold on to that. Tried to focus on nothing else but those small signs of life.

Which is why he almost didn’t hear the blades of the helicopter approaching at first.
Chapter End Notes:
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