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what doesn't kill you, makes you wish you were dead (1/2)

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The fatal end of Trial by Fire.

Trial by Fire, wrecked by a suspected DUI crash in Shanghai.

Ronan Rutgers, the sole survivor of the tragedy.

Ronan wished he could chalk up the tone of those headlines to the press' flair for the dramatic, but his body bore witness to their truth. For once, if he felt like smashing his phone against a wall, it wasn’t due to the unfair lies in those paragraphs. It was because of the truthful account of how the three friends and band members had stepped into a cab after a party and had ended up rolling over a cliff because of someone else's negligence.

And he knew reading those articles was the last thing he should be doing, yet it was all he wanted to do while lying in that hospital bed. He absorbed every detail, from different tales of the crash itself to those explaining the lives and trajectories of his dead friends. He obsessively took in every bit of information, from what he already knew about how the band came to exist, to details about their childhood he had never heard before.

He chuckled under his breath when reading about Levi's parents wanting him to be a lawyer and their disappointment when he became "stupidly rich and famous" instead. He rolled his eyes at Jun's long list of swimming awards and smiled bitterly when one article included a video with snippets of his best interviews, watching him cockily say how he missed having such a good excuse to show his abs.

Some articles were sweet and focused on honoring their lives rather than exploiting their deaths. Others were cruel, aiming to hit a nerve.

But they all shared the same conclusion: the band had most likely died with them.

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