Jungkook let out a cry of pain. His eyelids parted at the sharp pain shooting through him but he saw nothing but a blinding flash of light. He couldn't tell if the light was real or if it was just a flash of suffering.

     He vaguely felt like he was being moved and heard familiar, urgent voices. And, further, more confused, the indistinct screams of the crowd which persisted and pierced through the walls and ceilings. 

     But his mind was foggy, he didn't understand what was being said around him, he only thought he understood that he was back under the stage. His barely half-open eyes gave him no vision of the new environment in which he found himself.

     Whoever was carrying him gently laid him on the hard floor, first on his back, on his wound, which made him groan in pain, then on his side, in a lateral position of safety, after it was confirmed that he was breathing. The person put a jacket under his head to make him more comfortable.

     "Hold on, Jungkook!" said a male voice that took him a while to recognize.

     Han. The arm of the manager was now smeared with the blood of the young singer. Despite his perceptible stress in the face of this emergency, the man's movements were firm and confident as he was trying to save Jungook's life.

     "Hang on, stay with me!" Han kept talking to keep Jungkook from fainting again.

     Those words, Jungkook understood them. He forced himself to keep his attention on that voice so he wouldn't crumble again. 

       Even if he still couldn't see anything at that moment, he felt the presence of the manager, very close to him, and probably with other people who kept a respectable distance so as not to deprive him of the air he needed to continue to sustain himself. 

    Another familiar voice caught his ears:

    "Han, that's it, the army and the police has arrived, they will regain control of the Stadium shortly. Well, it is to be hoped." 

    It was the voice of Kim Hyun-Jung, one of their team leader during events abroad.

    "And the other boys? Any news?" Han said proceeding to rip Jungkook's T-shirt from the back to access his wound.

     Jungkook felt Hyun-Jung's gaze on him  and not hearing her answer, he understood what she was silently saying to Han. The others weren't there. None had been saved like him.

     "I see," Hand said in a voice that didn't betray how he felt.

     "Will Jungkook be okay?" the worried team leader asked, seeing the injury appear when Han finally took off his t-shirt.

    "He'll hang on, he's a tough little guy," the manager assured while staying focused on Jungkook and starting to squeeze his wound to stop the bleeding.

     "Nnnnnnngh..." Jungkook whined in pain, suddenly forgetting everything that was happening around him.. 

     "Sorry kid, I have to stop the bleeding until help arrives."

     Whith a handkerchief, the man wiped the sweat beading from his forehead, or maybe he was trying to wipe the blood from his face to find out if he was hurt there. If Jungkook had the strength, he could have told him that it wasn't his blood, it was the one on the floor. The blood of...

     Who did it belong to? Jungkook couldn't tell, because what had just happened seemed uncertain to him, like the unreal contours of the dream; he couldn't collect his thoughts and memories. It almost frightened him: why this blood, why this pain? 

      Faced with so many unanswered questions, his heart rate quickened, and he began to breathe faster, helpless in the face of the fact that each breath was torture because of his broken ribs which sink into his chest with each of his breaths.

     "Han, watch out, I think he's having a panic attack!" Hyun-Jung suddenly warned, seeing Jungkook's body convulse dangerously.

     "Hang on, Jungkook," Han repeated, forcing himself to speak in a calmer voice to reassure him, what he wasn't used to doing, continuing to palpate him, "you're going to be fine, keep breathing well."

     Something seemed off to Jungkook. He didn't feel like he was dying. Yet death seemed to hover around him. The end of all happiness. Of all misfortune too. Of any feeling in fact. Where did this feeling of death come from? Was he dead? No, if he were dead, he wouldn't feel his heart pounding in his chest with prodigious speed like that, would he?

    "Jungkook!" Han's increasingly distant voice shouted. It was no longer the same cold voice. It was a scared voice. Weird for someone who hated him, Jungkook thought...  "He keeps losing too much blood, where is our medical team?!" the manager shouted at  Hyun-Jung.

     "They are all in the middle of the crowd with the rest of the staff helping the victims while waiting for help to arrive," the young woman answered, worried.

     "Hold on a little more Jungkook, they'll be here soon, I promise you, so stay alive, okay?" Seeing Jungkook's lack of reaction Han added,  after thinking : "for your hyungs, okay?"

     His hyungs.

     Jungkook snapped his eyes wide open and saw the worried faces of Han and Hyun-Jung bent over his. It only lasted a few minutes but Jungkook finally remembered. 

    "That's it Jungkook, you're doing fine," Han encouraged him think of your hyung and hang in there, stay alive for them."

    Jungkook with the last strength he had left, whispered under his breath :

    "I... will..."

     However, even if he desperately wanted to stay awake and speak with Han to get information on the situation, he was quite unable to do so. He knew he didn't have the strength to hold on as Han was asking him. 

      Staying awake was insurmountable to him. The pain was unbearable. When the pain grew too intense under Han's hands on his back, he fell unconscious again in a low moan.

     Jungkook was in pain. But above all, he was cold.

     His ripped jeans and his now bare chest had been covered by a light anti-bacterial blanket that barely protected him from the biting cold and wind of this last night of November which had just suddenly awakened him. 

      His whole body was shaking uncontrollably as his bare skin was lacerated with thousands of frosty prickles. Furthermore, he had lost so much blood that his body temperature had dropped sharply.

     His closed eyelids felt heavy and he couldn't open them. He therefore resolved, to begin with, to guess what was happening around him from the sounds that reached him.

    Screams. Like before he fainted. They were still there. But there were not only cries of despair. Many cries of pain echoed through the night, also cries that reassured them, coming from the stadium or elsewhere. Had he himself already left the stadium enclosure or was he still inside? Impossible to tell with his eyes closed.

     In the blindness of his closed eyelids, the cries suddenly plunged him back into the nightmare of the events of the concert, with clarity this time. 

      The crowd that had pulled him, that had crushed him, had asphyxiated him. 

      Then the knife that painfully pierced him, that pierced Jin. 

    JIN! 

     Suddenly, he remembered. What had happened to him?! His bloody, lifeless face was the last image his mind allowed him to see behind his eyelids.

     That was where this consciousness of death had come from before, he understood at that moment. And where had the rest of his members gone?! Was he the only one to have been rescued from this hell?!

     Unable to bear this vision of horror imposed on him by his tortured mind, he suddenly manages to open his eyes. He gazed at the black sky and, occasionally, the light from the lampposts passing by his side. 

      Everything was blurry around Jungkook but he easily realized that he was no longer inside the stadium. He had been exfiltrated and was now being moved at full speed on a stretcher while around people, especially soldiers, were eagerly running, most of them in the opposite direction to where Jungkook's stretcher was taking him.

     Turning his head to the right, he had a blurred vision of a stretcher very close to his on which a person was being transported. Who was that person? Jungkook's arms were immobilized in his own stretcher, and he couldn't rub his eyes to clear his vision. He therefore contented himself with blinking his eyes rapidly several times, but when at last everything became clear to him, the stretcher had moved away.

     "Where are the others?!" Wanted to shout Jungkook who however only managed to whisper and was not heard by anyone. "Where are the other BTS members?!" he tried again, only slightly less weakly, but in korean, a language that was completely foreign to the two French paramedics who drove him to their vehicle.

     His stretcher arrived in front of the waiting ambulance, the doors of which were wide open to welcome him inside. But Jungkook didn't want to go up there. He didn't want to leave this place without all his members. What was the point of getting through alone?

     He began to squirm on his stretcher, trying to get out of it by all means, increasing the pain in his back. The friction was eased by the compress and the bandages that had been applied to his back as an emergency treatment and that had temporarily stopped the flow of blood.

     "N... NO!" he managed to shout, for those who carried him. "don't take me away from them!"

     "Calm down kid, everything will be fine." 

     Inside the vehicle, the paramedic put an oxygen mask over his face.

     "Are they alive?! Just tell me if they're alive!!" Jungkook shouted, desperate and panting, without being able to worry about anything else. He needed to know if his worst nightmare had come true. If life was still worth living.

     He needed to know if he still had a chance to save his hyungs. To bring them back, Jungkook was ready to dive back into the destructive ocean of that panicking crowd and pull them himself with the strength of his arms.

     The paramedic, who didn't understand a word of Korean, smiled saddly at him after his desperate speech and patted his head gently. A second rescuer entered the ambulance and quickly closed the doors to allow the driver to drive off in haste, all sirens blaring in the direction of the hospital, not the closest one, but the least congested because of the carnage of the numerous injured people on the Stade de France.

     These closing doors were like a barrier that prevented Jungkook from going out and could forever separate him from his hyungs. This thought was a torture for him. He wanted to get out at all costs, to run towards the stadium again.

     "It's madness outside, what hell!" a man said.

     The other nodded at the word of his colleague and unstrapped Jungkook. Together, the two paramedics tipped him to the side to get a better view of his wound. At that moment, the singer tried to take the opportunity to get back on his feet, eager to return in haste to the others.

    "Please let me down!" he begged as he struggled, fighting against the hands that were trying to hold him in place on his stretcher.

     "Hey, stop it," protested one of the paramedics in a calm voice so as not to rush him, "you can't go back there, you have to go to the hospital. And the pain will get worse if you struggle like that, you have to calm down."

     Exhausted by the intense effort and by the excessive blood loss, Jungkook gave up his fight and fell heavily, allowing himself to be manipulated by the two men. They positioned him so they could access his wound and undid the bandage and the blood-soaked compress. They approved the diagnosis made earlier by the staff in charge of the young man:

     "We have a penetrating trauma : a stab wound. We need to clean it, then bandage it again to prevent more blood loss than has already occurred. There will possibly be a need for surgery depending on internal damage," the first paramedic established in a French that Jungkook could never have understood, even being in great shape.

     The man then immediately began to transfuse Jungkook to inject him with an analgesic and reduce the pain which was increasing and which made the singer moan continuously.

     "Some bruises also seem to indicate the presence of several broken ribs." With one hand, the paramedic gently felt the areas where the purplish skin was bulging, squeezing a new round of whine from Jungkook. "The radiologist will confirm that. But the difficult breathing is telling enough." Then, addressing the boy again in English: "Kid, I'm going to ask you to take a very deep breath, just once."

      There was a pulmonary hematoma and if the boy didn't breathe deeply at least once per hour, he was going to face serious lung problems which would be added to other problems already numerous enough.

     Faced with this request, Jungkook however thought he was failing again. His body instinctively knew a deep breath would hurt him terribly, because his ribs seemed to be trying to pierce his chest at each inhalation and that's why his breathing was so weak and fast at the moment.

      "I...can't...," he managed to articulate.

      "I know you're scared kid, and I'm not gonna lie to you it's gonna hurt. But you have to do it once, just once, and then the oxygen we're giving you will do the rest to fill your lungs."

     Jungkook tried in vain to breathe harder than he was doing but at the slightest pain he exhaled immediately. In desperation, he frantically shook his head in denial.

     "I can't..." he repeated with tears in his eyes.

     "It's ok, I know you've tried hard," the man reassured him before asking, "tell me, what's your name?"

     "Jungkook," the singer replied weakly, still panting.

     "Alright, Jungkook. You're doing great, don't worry. But I'm just going to ask you one last thing. If you can, I'd like you to cough once."

     Coughing only required one try and that would be enough to adequately fill his lungs before artificial aid was sufficient. And indeed, the singer succeeded but had a hard time stopping his cough, and the pain he felt as a result caused the tears that had gathered in his eyes to flow.

     "It's perfect Jungkook, I'm taking over now," the paramedic smiled warmly, stroking his head and drying his tears.

     The young singer smiled back weakly, thinking his suffering was over. However, his back injury still hadn't been disinfected, and it couldn't wait now that his respiratory issues were resolved.

      "Grit your teeth, kid, it's going to sting a bit," the second man warned, after preparing the equipment to disinfect the stabe wound before bandaging it again to prepare it for a possible passage to the operating room.

     To say it stung a bit would be an understatement. The pain was so bad that Jungkook had no more thought for anyone and screamed as if he had been stabbed a second time. But his scream was short as he lost consciousness again, unable to bear such pain.