Aiden traces a fingertip down the side of Jamie’s bare body. Jamie is turned away from him, but it’s perfectly, serenely silent in Aiden’s head, and he can hear Jamie’s peaceful breathing.

Radiant bliss reverberates through Aiden, the kind he hasn’t known since he was a child.

They’re in Aiden’s high school bedroom. Aunt Sarah must be somewhere else, because they’re alone together.

Aiden lets out a happy sigh, and Jamie shifts against him. They’re still on the comedown from everything that just happened, but the movement sends up sparks in Aiden’s chest.

Jamie relaxes further back into Aiden, and Aiden buries his face into his brilliant hair.

“I love you,” Jamie murmurs.

Aiden smiles, his toes curling. He opens his mouth to answer.

“I wish you didn’t have to leave,” Jamie sighs.

This gives Aiden pause. “Leave?”

Jamie rolls over to face him, looks at him with sad, beautiful eyes. “You’re starting to wake up. You can feel it, can’t you?”

The happy warmth that Aiden was floating in suddenly goes cold.

“What?” He pulls Jamie closer to him. “No, you said it wasn’t a dream this time, you said-”

“I didn’t say anything, Aiden,” Jamie answers, his amber eyes regretful. “It’s all you. It’s all in your head. That’s why you can’t see my face clearly. You don’t know what it looks like now. It’s been years since we’ve seen each other.”

Aiden didn’t realize before, but it’s true. Jamie’s features are only a guess. Aiden’s mind has tried to add years to it. To age Jamie up to twenty-three. That's how old he is, now. Aiden knows that, because he himself just turned twenty-four.

Which means this is a dream.

“No,” Aiden whispers, crestfallen. “No.”

Jamie tips his head to the side, answering with his eyes.

Aiden lets out a heartbroken breath, runs a hand through his hair.

“Okay, well - if this is a dream, then let me stay a little longer."

Jamie looks just as sad as Aiden. “I can’t control it anymore than you can.”

Aiden’s brain recoils from this, refuses to accept it. He gathers Jamie back into his arms, holds him tightly.

“Don’t go,” he begs Jamie, tangling his hands in his red hair. “This is the only place I can have you, don't - don’t leave me, please don’t leave me, I’ll do anything, just please, please…”

“I never left you, Aiden.” Jamie strokes a finger down his face. “I’m probably still in Ketterbridge. You left me.”

“I was going to come back for you,” Aiden says desperately, though he knows now that explaining himself is pointless. “I always meant to come back, but - I had to give up on you, I had to, I couldn’t find what I… you won’t love me, out there. I don’t even love me, I don’t even like-”

He breaks off sharply. Jamie isn’t in his arms anymore. He’s by the bedroom door, suddenly fully dressed. Wearing a flannel, as always.

Aiden reaches for him. "Where are you going?"

“To the kitchen.” Jamie smiles brightly, as if the dream had never been interrupted. "Your aunt is making Persian donuts. I can smell them from here. Don't you want one?"

“No, wait-” Aiden stumbles out of the bed, his heart hammering in his ears. “Wait, Jamie, don’t go! If you leave-”

Jamie steps through the door. Aiden rushes out after him, stops in the hallway - but Jamie is gone.

Aiden races down the stairs, panic and despair crashing through him.

“Jamie!” His shout echoes through the house, unanswered. “No, no no no-”

It’s too late. Aiden is catapulted violently out of the dream. Ketterbridge, his aunt’s house, and Jamie - they’re all ripped away from him at once.

Aiden takes a deep, shuddering breath of real-life air.

His head is banging against something hard. Slowly and repeatedly, over and over again. But Aiden isn’t moving, so - is something banging into him, and not the other way around? It hurts so badly.

Disoriented, frantic, and only half-awake, Aiden struggles to understand what's happening. It takes him a second, but he gets there.

He’s not hitting his head against anything. What he’s experiencing is the beating pulse of a brutal hangover.

“Jamie?” he stammers, sitting up in bed.

No answer.

Aiden’s vision has yet to clear. He feels submerged in murky waters, his brain sluggish and useless. He rubs his eyes, then blinks them open again.

He’s in the tiny room at the hostel, where he crashed last night. He has no idea how he made it back here from the bar, much less into the correct room. He’s still wearing all of his clothes, although he at least managed to kick off his shoes before he crawled into bed.

Still uncertain of his position in time and space, he tries again.

"Jamie?"

Again, no answer.

Dazed and lonely in the barren room, Aiden gathers himself up into a ball on the bed. He could cry for wanting to go back to that place he just came from.

He sits there for a moment, heartsick.

Get it the fuck together, he tells himself.

Aiden’s movements are wobbly, but he manages to put his feet down on the floor. Doing so brings him more upright, and a wave of nausea sweeps through him.

He staggers towards his backpack, each step costing him enough effort to take a year off his life. Lights pop in front of his eyes, and his thrown balance makes it seem as though the floor is in motion, shifting from one steep angle to another. The short journey across the room feels like spending hours in a funhouse, but not at all in a fun way.

But he’s almost there, and in the front zip of his backpack is his flask. While adding more booze to the mix sounds like a bad idea in theory, Aiden is experienced enough to know that an eye-opener will at least temporarily numb the pain of his headache.

And take his thoughts off of the dream.

Besides, not drinking will only make Aiden feel worse. He’s had the shakes before, traveling through places where it’s hard to get alcohol. That shit sucks, and he already feels fucking terrible.

Through his clouded, rippling vision, he finds the backpack and unzips the front.

But the flask is empty. Aiden doesn’t have to open it to know. He can tell by the weight.

He curses violently at the flask. It’s his only friend in the world, and it fucking let him down. He hurls it at the bed, and it bounces onto the floor.

Aiden fights the urge for a second, then goes over to retrieve it. Only a few drops spill out when he tips it over his mouth.

Yeah, he's gonna need more than that. He tries to take a breath, to remind himself that this is a solvable problem. There’s got to be a liquor store nearby.

But when Aiden makes his way into the bathroom and glances at the mirror, he suspects that no one is even going to let him into their store. Not looking like this. At the very least, he needs clean clothes, or -

Some of Aiden’s thought processes from yesterday thread their way back into his mind. Right, he doesn’t have any clean clothes. That’s why he checked into the hostel instead of sleeping roadside. He goes to hostels when he needs to charge his phone, take a long shower, and do some laundry. Or when he’s getting too sore from sleeping on surfaces that weren’t made for it.

If he doesn’t have clean clothes, he needs a different way to make himself decently presentable.

Moving slowly to keep his nausea at a manageable level, Aiden works his way out of his clothes, and steps into the shower.

The hot water feels good. It finally clears his vision, if not his headache. He braces a hand on the wall, lets the water roll down his body.

A hangover like this would kick anyone’s ass, but the thing about Aiden is, it’s literally never quiet for him. In fact, it’s pretty fucking loud. He hasn’t been back to Ketterbridge since he was eighteen, but its entire population is screaming in his head.

Aiden can usually keep this muffled with the assistance of a strong glass of something, but he’s all out. There’s nothing to help him keep the volume down, and it’s compounding with his hangover to make his brain feel like it’s about to atomize under the pressure.

There are other things the whiskey helps keep pressed down, too. Things that the noises in Aiden’s head are a constant reminder of. The people he left to fend for themselves, when he’s supposed to be their Guardian. His mind only skims the thought, but that’s all it takes to drag him into a sea of guilt.

Voices seem to crawl out of the walls, accusatory and wounded.

You abandoned us, they shout. You weren’t there! We needed you!

Aiden presses his hands over his ears, then over his eyes.

I’m sorry, he answers silently. I’m sorry, please stop, sorry sorry sorry PLEASE STOP I’M SORRY -

The noise level threatens to crush Aiden. He’s too exhausted, too fragile to keep it down. Without some booze to help him out, it rises over him in a seething, angry wave, and crashes through his pounding skull. The roar and force of it is like standing at the center of a tornado.

He gasps, overwhelmed and overrun, frantic for deliverance from this.

A long-buried childhood instinct takes over, and before he knows what he’s doing, Aiden yells for his mom.

But Leigh isn’t there, and she hasn’t been for years. Aiden sinks back against the wall of the shower, clenching his teeth so hard that he half expects them to crack.

“Someone help me,” he sobs.

And Jamie, as he always does, answers the call.

His note comes weaving through all the rest, singing softly and sweetly. So completely distinct from the others that Aiden is able to wrap his shattered mind around it. He seizes hold of it like a drowning man seizes hold of a lifeline. His own note folds itself around Jamie’s, resonating in radiant harmony, amplifying the sound.

Aiden’s heaving breaths start to grow calmer. He puts his forehead against the cold tile wall of the shower. He shuts out everything else, and just lets Jamie sing to him.

Strange, how the song is so bright and beautiful, but has such a quieting effect. It gently gathers Aiden up, holds him, takes him to another realm.

Aiden would follow that sound anywhere. Without fail, it leads him out of the darkest abysses within himself. It fills Aiden’s heart, breathes for him when he can’t do it on his own. Sings for him, whenever he needs it.

Wherever he is, Jamie is sleeping. Aiden can tell from the slumbering pace of his note. But it doesn’t matter. Awake or sleeping, together or thousands of miles apart, Jamie’s note strikes that perfect chord with Aiden’s. Their souls talking to each other, that’s what it sounds like. Aiden has never met anyone else his soul can talk to.

That sublime sound soothes the jagged noise of everything else.

Aiden finds himself taking smoother, steadier breaths. The world finally stops spinning around him.

“Thank you,” he whispers. Jamie can’t hear him, but he says it anyways. “Thank you, I love y-”

Aiden’s eyes fly open, and his hands snap up to cover his mouth. He’s so shocked that he forgets completely about his headache, his hangover, the noise, everything.

He. Almost. Just. Fucking. Said. It. Out. Loud.

Stunned into complete clarity, Aiden has a rare moment of feeling vividly awake and alive, both physically and emotionally. Totally present in his body, totally lucid in his thoughts. This almost never happens, these days. But whenever it does, his thoughts go right to Jamie. More often than not, they were already there, anyways.

But clear-minded or completely fucked up, Aiden has never come that close to saying those words out loud.

He turns off the shower. The water is starting to go cold, so he must have been in here for a long time. He steps out, towels himself off, and stumbles back to bed.

He slept fully clothed on top of the covers last night, so climbing into the cool, untouched sheets brings him momentary comfort. He’s still using Jamie’s sound to prevent the last thread of his composure from snapping, and the peaceful song brings him comfort, too.

But the sound refuses to let Aiden forget what nearly just happened. Is he actually getting worse at suppressing his feelings for Jamie, somehow? Isn’t practice supposed to fucking make perfect?

Aiden buries his face into the pillow. The fabric is cold, and it feels nice against his burning face.

Now that he’s back in bed, Aiden is realizing that he went three days without sleeping before he crashed last night. He was so fucked up and coked-out that he was operating as if on full energy, like those three days didn’t even happen.

But here and now, forced to lay still and process the shock of what he almost just did… Aiden’s body recognizes the comfort of the bed. It still itches for something to drink, but moving sounds impossible.

He stretches out beneath the sheets, then rolls onto his back, keeping Jamie’s song at the front of his mind.

Aiden really tries not to use it. Honestly, he does. Especially since he gave up on ever trying to go back to Jamie. He’s tried to forget everything about Jamie, to cut the ropes completely, to strangle his feelings. To ignore them, in the hope that they might atrophy.

None of that has worked. In Aiden’s heart, there lives an implicit truth that nothing can touch or distort.

When it comes down to it, if Aiden only had a few more hours left on this planet, he knows exactly whose arms he’d want to spend them in.

He’s painfully aware of how strange that would sound to anyone besides himself. Given that he and Jamie haven’t seen each other in years, and never even had so much as a friendship in the first place.

But that song, the bright song of Jamie’s soul... How can Aiden not love someone who sounds like that?

And the note goes so perfectly with his own. Some unrelenting voice in Aiden’s head insists that this means something. That voice is loud enough to shout over the warning that Leigh left him with.

He wants to go back to Jamie so bad.

Self-loathing suddenly rushes through Aiden. Why did he let himself go down this line of thought? He needs to start being stricter with himself. Use Jamie’s sound less often, try harder to forget about him.

It’s never going to happen, Aiden reminds himself. Never. Accept that.

Although… there is someplace where it can happen. And Aiden has already failed at keeping Jamie out of his mind for today, so what the fuck ever.

Aiden closes his eyes, and his exhausted body sends him the message that if he wants to sleep more, he can. That it would actually be very much appreciated.

He lays back, and lets Jamie sing him to sleep.

Just before Aiden’s dreams come for him, his thoughts drift to Jamie’s poem.

Do they shower down on you in your bed, do you smile in your sleep when they find you, the thousands of kisses I send from my dreams...

If it’s possible to send thousands of kisses through dreams, Aiden has sent Jamie that and more.

He hopes that Jamie smiles in his sleep when they find him. That would make Aiden feel better about all this. To know that he’d made Jamie smile, even if he can’t be around to enjoy the sight.

Aiden knows that it’ll hurt to come back, but he lets himself slip away to that place where he can fulfill the unvoiced longing he’s kept within himself since he was fifteen. Where he and Jamie can love each other, and be together. Fall asleep in each other’s arms. Wake up the same way.

It’s never going to happen.

But Aiden can dream.