A/N: I don't own TFiOS, nor do I own the "Her eyes were losing but they weren't lost"
She was so defeated. The cancer had spread throughout her body, taking the meat from her bones, the light from her eyes, and the fight from her heart. She lay there in the hospital bed, a tiny, broken thing hooked up to too many cords. Her hair was lost to chemo, her cheeks hollow, every once-soft curve on her body now sharp and unnaturally angular. But, God, she was beautiful.
She was also dying. This was it. We were all gathered around her bed, waiting for that final breath. Her dad was crying; her mom was barely holding it together. And me? I was falling in love. In love with the way she never got used to being bald and always tried to brush her hair back. In love with the way she read the same book over and over, even though she knew how it ended. In love with the way that, even now, she was putting others before herself. She was fighting even though it was time to go.
Her breathing was coming more ragged now, more so than it had been the past few awful months. The oxygen helped her survive, but only for so long.
"Okay?" she asked me between gasps for air.
"Okay," I answered, my voice shaking, knowing I had given her permission to quit fighting.
She looked long at hard at each of her parents, before turning her gaze to me. "Okay," she said, one last time, before her eyes closed and she moved no more. The room was quiet now, the absence of her desperate bid for air sudden and apparent. She was really, truly gone.
My world crashed down around me. The girl who had come into my life just months before, who had changed it for the better, who had made me more happy to be alive, was now gone. Gone before I could tell her I loved her. Gone before I could tell her how much she meant to me. But she knew. Oh, she knew.
I thought of the way she looked at me in her final moments. Her green eyes ever gorgeous, despite what cancer had stolen. Her eyes were losing, but they weren't lost. She could never be lost. No matter what happened, or where I went in life, she would always be there with me, guiding me along the way.