Too Long and Not Long Enough

by Trekkerpoet29

A short one shot that I wrote a few days after I read The Fault in Our Stars for the first time. I'm just posting this now because I can. I've thought of continuing this, but now that this has been out of my system for some time, I can't seem to get it to go anywhere, and in truth, I think I stopped writing it initially because it didn't go anywhere. Anyway, here it is.

Too Long and Not Long Enough

A short one shot that I wrote a few days after I read The Fault in Our Stars for the first time. I'm just posting this now because I can. I've thought of continuing this, but now that this has been out of my system for some time, I can't seem to get it to go anywhere, and in truth, I think I stopped writing it initially because it didn't go anywhere. Anyway, here it is. One less fanfic of mine that is confined to my hard drive, and one more for you, my dear readers.

I don't own the characters, Bluie included, and I didn't come up with Phalanxifor, but Hazel and Gus's reunion did come out of my own shipper mind, and so this plot is copyright.

"Hazel Grace Lancaster."

"Augustus Waters."

"You might be wondering…"

"Okay?"

"Okay."

"Okay. Now kiss me. It's been too long, Gus."

"I agree whole-heartedly, Hazel Grace."

The meeting of our lips, or maybe not our lips, just where our lips might have been if Capital-S Somewhere allowed for a corporeal reality, was the perfect mix of new and awkward and comfortable and familiar. It had been too long since the last time we'd kissed, but it also felt too soon, like the months and years spend in Philip, draining amber fluid from lungs with mets that didn't grow due to gradually increasing daily-recommended allowances of Phalanxifor had not been and could never have been sufficient. I had missed Gus every minute, ever hour, every day, and had known that whatever amount of time I had left would simultaneously be too long and too short and it was all so very unfair, and now it was gone.

I didn't quite have a Last Good Day. I mean, I neither gave up nor offed myself, but I didn't have one. I mean, I guess I must have, but life went on. Nothing particularly changed in the day to day. I slept a bit more, went for drainings more frequently, then one day, I hugged my parents goodnight, cuddled Bluie, and woke up to Gus's voice, but he didn't vanish when I opened my eyes. I wondered if Gus might have used up my suffering when he died, then dismissed the thought of shared suffering as a load of crap. We all suffer. Sentimentality is a side effect of dying, but I wasn't dying anymore; I was dead.