Only Time - by silmarwen_85 (Oneshot)

And here i have another fanfiction oneshot for you. i actually wrote this for a university course on philosophy. we were allowed to choose any topic and any form...so i did mine on time and on a short story form. what i basically tried to do here, was show how sometimes when SO many things are happening at once and you think that hours have already passed, it is actually just a couple of minutes that you've been experienced it...and the same the other way around. that when you think of only one thing, and you think only around ten min. or so passed, you've actually been sitting there hours already. i tried showing that with time stamps and long or short paragraphs, but i dunno if i achieved it....it's hard to judge if you're the writer...and if you haven't written stories for a few years too. anyway, i also touched a little on how we tend to be stressed over things that we THINK are out of our control, time wise, but that WE are actually the ones that decided what rules our lives. okay, long story short...on to the fic...
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Author: silmarwen_85
Title: Only Time
Rating: PG-13ish
Summary: Little AU. The bomb has just gone off and Brian has rushed to the scene, only to find that Justin was badly hurt. Brian thinks he has to change a few things in his life.
Warnings: Bombing victims but nothing too graphic, possible OCCness, un-betad.
Genre: AU 510
Word Count: 869
Disclaimer: Characters belong to Cowlip and Showtime. Taking the original plot this direction was my idea.
A/N: For a Philosophy Course at UNI.


Only Time

People were rushing by in ones, and twos, and threes. Huddling under blankets and taking care to get away from the burning building as quickly as possible. There was none of the diversity of the people left that had been so evident at the party, they all looked the same now, covered in cuts, and dirt, and ash.

.....10:42 p.m.

Brian was in the middle of it all, rooted to the spot, watching the flames that rose from the demolished dance club. There were still people rushing out of the building, scurrying around like ants fleeing from the flood of their hill. So many. Gosh, so many.

Brian watched it all in a trance. The paramedics practicing first-aid on the wounded, firemen rushing to douse a newly erupted fire, or covering a rescued corpse with a thin sheet of fabric, trying to keep those dead eyes from hunting the living in their dreams. It was all happening in slow motion, though in reality there were so many things happening all at once so that Brian couldn’t have taken it all in, couldn’t have fully comprehended what was happening before his own eyes.

A somewhat fleshy man was standing to his left, shivering not from the cold, but from the shock that had invaded his bones. A teenage girl was hurrying past him, screaming from the top of her lungs looking for her girlfriend among the throng of escaping partygoers. A paramedic to Brian’s right was working frantically to still the blood flow from a severe neck wound on an older man’s already broken body, not knowing that his patient was HIV positive.

Tonight they were all the same though, victims of a hate crime, whether they had been present at the time of the bombing or not. The explosion itself only lasted a fraction of a second, but the aftermath felt like an eternity of misery.

As if under some kind of spell, Brian turned his head to the side and spotted a gurney being directed toward the closest ambulance. A gurney that was carrying a body attached to a head with a shock of sunshiney blond hair.

Justin.

Justin, covered from head to toe in his own blood. Again.

Flashes of the baseball bat bashing four years ago came rushing to the forefront of Brian’s mind.

.....10:44 p.m.
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Brian sat down heavily on the uncomfortable chair in the sterile family waiting room of the hospital, eyes unseeing, body so rigid as though he was dead to the world.

.....11:56 p.m.

The only thought that ran through Brian’s mind was: Why did something have to happen to him?

Why him?

Why him?

Why him?

.....01:13 a.m.

What if he’s loose Justin now? If Justin would leave him behind now, he’d never know that Brian loved him. And just because Brian was too stubborn to admit it.

.....01:51 a.m.

To stubborn to admit to the fact that Justin was more to him than just a trick that spent the night more than once. Brian wouldn’t even have to say it out loud. Showing Justin that he loved him through actions alone would be enough.

.....02:34 a.m.

Brian always blamed it on having too little time to spend with Justin, though thinking about it now made him realize that loosing time for work would be a much smaller sacrifice than loosing Justin now. What was time anyway?

.....03:05 a.m.

All of Brian’s time was used for work. Once he was finished at his Advertisement Agency, Kinnetik, he’d go home to his loft, take a shower, and then just work some more in his home office. He even felt like he didn’t have time to do work, always cramming things into his schedule of the day. He felt as though time was the budgeter of his life, telling him what he could do and what not, just as a budget did to a feature film.

.....03:55 a.m.

But Brian didn’t want that anymore! Again, what was time anyway? It always felt as though time was having control over him, but actually time was nothing without him! If he wouldn’t be there, his time wouldn’t either. So in reality time wasn’t controlling him, but he was controlling time. And had done a piss-poor job of it as well. He was the one making up his own work schedule. He was the one who decided when to go do his job and when not to. He was the one who chose to not spend time with his family on weekends, and he was the one who decided what he would stress out over and what not. Time actually didn’t exist in itself, it was just a sequence of appointments, dates and work to be done. Or it could be a sequence of adventures, quality-time and ‘I love you’s. It was his choice.

.....04:32 a.m.

Suddenly the doors to the family waiting room sprung open, and a doctor covered in scrubs and wearing a look of exhaustion burst into the room. Brian jumped up from his chair immediately. The doctor already saw Brian’s question reflected in his eyes, and Brian saw the answer reflected right back at him:

Justin was going to be alright.

The End