Aiden stares out with unseeing eyes at the park, taking slow, ragged breaths of autumn air. In a few minutes he’ll lay down to try and get some sleep, but he’s not drunk enough to pass out yet.

He takes another long swig from his flask, then closes his eyes and leans back against the tree. He sinks one hand into the grass surrounding his sleeping bag, but no real sensation comes from it.

It takes Aiden a lot of effort to really notice anything, these days. Mostly he doesn’t bother to try, doesn’t see the fucking point. But even when he’s fucked up, now, he can tell that something has changed. Something is undeniably different.

Or - not something. Everything.

It doesn’t matter what town, village, city, or open stretch of land Aiden is passing through. It travels with him from place to place, relentlessly. Sometimes he looks over his shoulder at whatever road he’s leaving behind, thinking he might actually see it following after him. He keeps waiting for there to be a break in it, but that hasn’t happened. If anything, it’s getting worse all the time.

It’s the dull, lifeless, greyed-out pallor of everything Aiden sees, every sky his eyes wander up to.

The streets, the buildings, the natural formations, even little things like the lampposts and benches - they seem steeped in misery to Aiden. Like some deep, profound sadness was built right into their foundations. Everywhere he goes, places are starting to look the same to him. Like the hollow, crumbling bones of whatever beautiful thing they had been before.

Nothing has any color. Nothing glows with warmth. It’s all washed out, desolate - hopeless.

Not just the places. The people, too. All of them are blurred, transient, barely there. Their voices seem to come from very far away, too far away for Aiden to hear or understand anything. The people he meets are gone from his memory as soon as they’re behind him. They glance off of him without ever really touching him, like shadows.

Aiden is restless for some body assurance, warm hands on him, but he hasn’t slept with anyone in a long time. He likes one-night flings, but he’s not into meaningless sex. It has to mean something, and everything feels meaningless to him, right now. He used to go looking for someone when he was craving closeness, shared warmth, intimate human connection. But he feels no connection with anything, anymore.

He’s lost his appetite, in every sense of the word.

In the deep down, hidden places of himself, Aiden is terrified about it. The constant, unshakeable sense of total emptiness and nothingness… it scares him like nothing has before.

He’s passed through entire towns and cities without speaking a word to anyone, so he’s had a lot of time to silently fret about it. What began as a nagging worry has swollen into a frantic, desperate panic that Aiden feels at the core of himself.

But even that doesn’t touch him in any real way, doesn’t rise up to the surface. Aiden knows that he’s sitting here blank-faced and unmoving and uncaring right now. He’s aware of something within him crying out for help, but only distantly, like a scream coming from a faraway TV. It can’t reach him through the mile-thick layer of numbness.

But in some obscure way, it’s been driving Aiden to do things that might fix the problem.

He impulsively bought himself some expensive food. Tasted like nothing. He went home with a girl he met at a bar, but his heart was so disconnected from what they were doing that it overrode his body. He ended up making some excuse to get out of there before she could even take his clothes off. Or did he just leave without saying anything? He doesn’t remember.

He's tried slowing down a little as he walks, giving himself time to let his eyes roam. He’s tried lifting his face to the sunlight, the rain, the wind.

Aside from bars and hostels, he typically only stops into places when he needs to get warm by walking around in a heated environment for a while. But he randomly stopped for an hour in the last city he passed through, wandered into an art gallery to look at some photographs.

None of it has helped at all. Nothing touches Aiden. Pleasure, passion, connection, intimacy, closeness - he remembers those things very distantly. Like they happened to him once, but lifetimes ago.

No flight of any kind. Something cut off his wings.

Aiden may as well be sleepwalking. He may as well be a thousand miles away. Can a person die, and then go on walking around for years? Did he somehow die before his body did? How? What killed him?

He wonders if eventually he’ll just fade away, disappear. If one night he’ll just quietly blow away on the wind. That would be okay. Whatever. What difference does it make? Aiden can barely make himself care about it.

But that goddamn little voice in him - it’s screaming for him to save himself.

And he’s alone with it, right now. Sitting with his back against a tree, in some lonely park in who knows what country, in some city halfway between the town of wherever and the other city of what’s-its-name.

Aiden stares with dull, blank eyes at the park. The souls of Ketterbridge are in his head, roaring like Niagara Falls, but he doesn’t really care. He’s only half here, if that.

He feels like he's only his body. The empty shell of himself. Who he is, the actual Aiden, has stepped outside and gone away. Must’ve hated it here too much. Couldn’t cope.

So why is something in Aiden so desperate to get himself back? It’s constantly at the back of his mind, pleading with him, trying to get his attention. He’s gotten pretty good at ignoring it, but it keeps trying to give him frantic warnings.

It’s telling Aiden that he’s losing himself. That the fire in him is finally, truly about to burn out and go cold.

Aiden closes his eyes, wonders vaguely if there’s anything he hasn’t tried yet to solve the problem. In theory, once he’s tried everything, he can just accept that this is how things are now. So - what’s left?

Out of nowhere, something suddenly rises to the top of Aiden’s memory.

No, not that, he thinks urgently, too late to stop himself. Don’t-

Too late. The lightest graze of Aiden’s thoughts against Jamie’s note, and it bursts into song in his head, instantly silencing all the other noise.

It cuts right through the drunken haze and brings Aiden wide, wide awake. Unthawed in an instant. In a heartbeat, his every nerve is ablaze with humming, fiery life -

God, this song… it’s a waking dream.

Aiden thinks there’s not a man on earth who could hear this song and not lose himself in the sheer, infinite beauty of it. So endlessly, boundlessly bright and sweet. It makes Aiden’s soul want to get up and run alongside it. Some music lifts you into the sky, but this takes Aiden all the way out into orbit, past that, he’s soaring weightless through the stars…

Aiden gasps and shudders as it breaks over his head. His eyes blink open wildly, and suddenly everything is different.

The night sky overhead is glittering with stars, like thousands of icy jewels spilled out on a velvet blue carpet. Soft autumn air is caressing Aiden’s face, and his sleeping bag is soft beneath him, too. The golden trees sway slowly in the breeze, which stirs and ripples the bed of grass blanketing the park. Above and beyond the treetops, the lights of the city are blinking and flickering against the darkness.

It was all here seconds ago, just like this. But suddenly it all looks like something again, it all feels like something again. It was all so bleak and barren before, but now it all looks brilliant, vivid. Throbbing and teeming with life, all the hidden beauties unlocked.

Aiden is taking big, heaving breaths, and he can taste the night air on all of them. He’s shivering all over, suddenly forced back into himself, into contact with the real world. His senses are so charged up that he can hear the wild, chaotic fluttering of his own heartbeat in his ears.

Jamie’s song melted the ice that his heart was locked in, let it beat again.

But now Aiden can feel the wound in it again, too.

“No,” he moans softly, half a dry sob.

The anguish, the homesickness, the loneliness and despair - they all rush from that broken place in Aiden’s heart and surge through him in crushing, overwhelming waves that make him choke on every breath he tries to take. He sinks down against the tree, tears flooding his eyes faster than he can stop them.

He remembers now why he was trying so hard to forget about everything, to feel nothing. It’s because he’s hit rock bottom. Been confronted with a bitter truth he can’t bring himself to face.

He's never getting back to Jamie.

That’s exactly why he didn’t let himself listen to Jamie’s note for so long, isn’t it? Because he can’t bear knowing that beautiful, heart-stopping song for what it is. The last echo of something that’s over.

And this, the waking coma Aiden has been trapped in for way too long - that was him trying to get used to life without Jamie on the horizon.

Aiden chokes out a quiet, raw sob, hugging himself tightly. Crushed beneath the weight of all of his mistakes.

It wasn’t supposed to be like this. It was supposed to be him and Jamie, him and his angel… it was supposed to be butterscotch eyes to look into, and Aiden’s fingers buried in red, red hair, it was supposed to be Aiden drinking that song right from Jamie’s lips…

A tear rolls off of Aiden’s cheek.

“Ruined everything,” he whispers to no one, closing his eyes. “I ruined everything.”

He’d thought that maybe he could get through this. He knew he would feel the loss for the rest of his life. Forever have an aching, empty place in his heart where Jamie used to be. But one day it would get easier, slip into the past, and Aiden would move on. Let it go and get over it. He thought maybe he could be okay, even if he couldn’t be happy.

But this is… Aiden can’t do this. He can’t take this.

Every time he realizes that Jamie is gone from his life, forever - Aiden feels himself falling back into grief-stricken, heartbroken, all-consuming darkness. It hurts him in some way too deep for him to understand, hurts on a level beyond tears. He has the hopeless sense of having no way out, no way back, no path back to the light. This dark place where he is, that’s where he’ll be. Permanently.

The thought that Aiden is never going to get to tell Jamie how he feels. That the knowledge of this love is going to die with Aiden, unspoken, never made real. That Jamie will never even know. That the beach where they talked that one time in high school is just like any other beach to Jamie. That it doesn’t mean anything to him. That Aiden doesn’t mean anything to him, and never will, after all these years of hoping to come back to him…

Aiden’s heart rips right down the middle, and he feels the agonizing tear of every single thread that breaks.

He’s been so unsure about so much in his life. He’s been confused and lost and felt like the ground was shifting beneath his feet. He’s worried over everything and questioned himself a thousand times, had fears and doubts of every kind. But the one thing Aiden has always felt sure of is that he's the one for Jamie. He always believed in the dream of him and Jamie.

He never said a word. Jamie’s probably forgotten what his voice even sounds like, by now.

Aiden still remembers exactly what Jamie sounded like, and what he looked like. He’s going to have to make himself forget. But the thought that there might come a day when he doesn’t remember the sound of Jamie’s laughter or Jamie’s sweet smile, when he looks back and realizes that the memories are fading away… even that hits Aiden with a sense of loss that he can hardly stand.

But he has to. He has to accept that it’s over.

Aiden drags the back of his hand over his eyes, then gathers his knees closer to himself and stares up at the night sky.

When he left Jamie, the world seemed so rich with possibility. The dark parts of life were still there, but the possibilities… Aiden has tasted something sublime, something perfect, and now his eyes are forever open to what could be. Everything else pales in comparison. What’s left for him, now? How is he supposed to go on, aware that he’ll never know what it means to have the one thing his heart wanted?

Aiden knows that the only way forward now is to give up, forget, put it behind him. But his whole soul cries out against it, screams that it would be a catastrophic mistake. Aiden lives by his instincts, and his instincts are begging him not to do that.

What’s the alternative, though? Living like this, in this choking darkness, it’s torture.

Aiden doesn’t understand how he’s even gone on this long since that night. The night when it finally sank in that he’d searched everywhere. That he wasn’t going to find what he was looking for, and it had all been a pointless, unforgivable waste of time. He drank enough to land himself in the hospital, that night. How did he keep going, after?

Maybe it’s because… in spite of everything, Aiden hasn’t accepted this yet. He's not willing to give up Jamie for lost. There must still be one single thread of hope left in Aiden's heart. And he can almost hear the fibers fraying.

Let them, he tells himself, sniffling quietly in the autumn night. Let it break. It’s time. You know that it’s time.

Aiden tenses up and holds his breath, waiting for Jamie to finally slip out through his ribs. But all that happens is that after a moment Aiden lets out a strangled, jagged sob, then drops his forehead onto his knees.

It’s Aiden’s most precious, most cherished dream. His one bright, glowing hope. How the fuck is he supposed to give it up?

Aiden begins to breathe harder and faster, then fumbles for his flask. He finds it and downs everything that’s left, trying to push himself back to how he was before he woke himself up with Jamie’s song. At least he could breathe, that way.

His vision begins to blur. His eyes fall closed, and he falls to curl up on his side on the sleeping bag, waiting for the booze to knock him out. At least no more tears are falling. He used them all up.

Aiden focuses all of his attention on that one last shining, golden thread in his heart.

Break it, he tells himself again.

But instead he finds himself clinging desperately to it. It’s his lifeline in the storm, the only thing keeping him from going overboard. He's never felt so hopelessly lost in his life as he does right now...

A faint crashing sound disturbs the quiet of the park, like someone just took a fall into the blanket of dry leaves. Aiden ignores it. He’s so fucked up that he's probably imagining it, anyways.

After a moment, through the whiskey haze, Aiden hears what sounds like someone falling to their knees on the grass before him. Still, he doesn’t open his eyes. He's sinking all of his concentration into that one thread left to him…

Gentle, trembling fingers touch Aiden’s cheek. A familiar voice reaches him through the intoxicated swirl of his thoughts. A warm, compassionate, masculine voice. But more mature than Aiden remembers it, and for some reason fragile, shaky.

“Aiden,” it whispers.