Chapter 2

How could it be that end of the world could be summarised in three little letters? A few little strokes of a pen; they would be so quick to write. And they were spinning around in his head now; it was as if those little letters were the only ones he knew.

DOA. You couldn't make much from them. DOA, oad, oda, ado. Much ado about nothing. He wished.

The plastic chair was hard and unforgiving beneath him. Aaron shifted, but he'd already learned that it was impossible to get comfortable on these seats. Somehow he doubted he'd ever be comfortable again.

The world was moving past his eyes. People came and went around him, sitting and standing, running or walking, but they all seemed to be moving in a different span of time from him. They were moving on into the future; he was stuck fast in the present, clinging to the past as though it could raise him from the depths of the ocean.

Yesterday. That had only been yesterday. One day ago, twenty seven hours. Spencer would have known how many minutes, how many seconds, but that was beyond Aaron. All he knew was that the last four of them had been plagued by those three letters, and that they had been the worst of his life. And it was never going to get better.

"Hi, JJ. No, I'm fine. You don't need to come over. Could you phone Spencer's mum? She needs to know. Thanks. Bye."

He closed the phone. Had JJ heard, as he had, the strangeness of his voice? The monotony, the flatness; it was not his voice. He had become someone else; a stranger, someone he would not recognise if he looked in the mirror. And he didn't want to know himself. Because it was his fault. All his fault.

"Agent Hotchner?"

His thoughts were disturbed by this voice, yet he didn't look up. It was as though the man was talking to someone else, someone in a different world. Someone who still felt alive.

"Agent Hotchner."

He looked up at that, at least.

"I'm sorry, Agent, but we'll have to move Mr Reid out of the ICU soon. Do you want to see him?" The doctor was young; she had to have only recently become a resident yet already there was a stoical detachment about her face and voice. She had seen this before, she knew she would see it again, and it just washed over her. The same way that after a while his job washed over him. You had to let it, because otherwise it destroyed you.

Not that he needed a job to do that. Family sufficed just as easily.

"Dr," he said mechanically.

"Excuse me?"

"He's a Dr."

The doctor nodded, gentle and almost too understanding. "Are you waiting for anyone, Agent Hotchner? Family, friends, anyone you want to do this with?"

"Do what?" Aaron said brazenly. "He's just my lover. I don't need anyone holding my hand to go and see him."

"You don't have to do this on your own. There's a phone, if you need to tell someone-"

"Tell them what?" Aaron demanded, and his temper flared. "There's nothing to tell! It was an accident, just an accident! It was just a bullet, just one bullet."

For a moment the doctor's calmness changed to confusion, which faded quickly into sympathy. Aaron didn't like that look.

"I'm sorry, Agent. The paramedics tried, but there was nothing they could do. He was dead on arrival."

There it was again. DOA, DOA, all the time, the letters bouncing around in his head until they lost all meaning; they were just letters, a code, a code that would tell him what to do, a code that Spencer could break, but Spencer was not there...

"Stop saying that! He's just acting, pretending in case the bastards who did this come back – but it's not for real; you've got to understand that, you've got to help him! You can't just give up!"

"I'm so sorry, Agent. Do you want to see him?"

And then the confidence collapsed. Aaron shook, and when he looked up at the doctor he saw her through a veil that blurred her into a indistinct colors and shapes.

"He can't die," he whispered. "He's my lover. And I never got to say – I never told him that I loved him." He was crying in earnest now, though he had not noticed; silent tears spilled down pale cheeks. "But he'll come back," he said suddenly, and though he was still crying his eyes lit up. "He wants to know I love him. That's what he's waiting for. If I tell him, he'll come back!" A new sense of purpose filled Aaron. He felt stronger, he felt complete again; he stood up and felt fire in his heart.

But the doctor only laid a hand on his arm, her eyes telling Aaron things that he refused to accept. "You can tell him, Agent, but he won't hear you. Not anymore."

He was proud of his lover. He always had been. But sometimes he wished Spencer could have been born without a scrap of intelligence. Because then he wouldn't be walking along this cold corridor with legs made of lead, he wouldn't be fighting the world just to move or even force air into his lungs. If his lover had been stupid it would have been him lying on the gurney, it would have been him that could be labelled with the three cold letters DOA. And how he wished it had been.

JJ and I had been holding him up, in the office. He knew, and the world had begun to pass dimly on in front of him much as it had been ever since. But some of the words of the paramedics had permeated his detachment.

"No pulse."

"Hypervolemic shock."

"CPR..."

"Exsanguinations?"

And that final, fatal pronouncement.

"DOA."

And then without realising it I was standing by the large window to a room with a single bed, and I was staring at my lover. His young lover, his face pale and still and cold. And Aaron could not go in. He couldn't enter the room, he couldn't stand beside his lover because it was his fault, all his fault.

Now it was Aaron that crumpled to the floor, leaning with his back to the window, and sobbing his heart out onto the cold plastic linoleum.

That was how his team found him an hour later; still sobbing though he barely had any tears left. And without a word spoken Rossi sank to the ground beside him, and drew him into a crushing hug. Now the letters haunted them both, and they always would.

"Hey, Aaron?" Spencer, leaning against the sofa, deposited his half empty glass on the coffee table next to his lover's feet. They had migrated to the living room. "Yeah, Spence?" Aaron smiled easily at his lover, ruffling the younger man's hair from his position of power above where Spencer sat on the floor.

"Love you."

"I know, Spence .I know."

He had thought there would always be time. But there wasn't. There never would be again.

"I love you too, Spencer," he whispered, drowning out the echoing letters in his mind. "I love you too."