Hey. It's me again, presenting another fanfiction for your soul-destroying enjoyment.

Before I go any further, I'm probably going to want to issue some TRIGGER WARNINGS.

This fic contains ANGST. A LOT OF ANGST. It also contains hospitals, child neglect, tennage drama, major character death and a great deal of sexual tension. And cancer. Can't forget about the cancer.

Basically, this entire fanfic is about cancer.

So, needless to say, if any of these themes present a problem for you, leave. Simple as that.

I wouldn't exactly call this a crossover fic. I am drawing my inspiration pretty heavily from The Fault In Our Stars, but it's not exactly half and half. (not a dead Marco joke. i promise. please don't punch me.) It's still a modern day AU, but it's not exactly Hazel's world.

ANYWAY, moving on.

Welcome to my fanfiction. I hope it doesn't hurt you too much. Thanks for reading it.

Sincerely,

that one fanfiction writer known as Appelia

My name is Eren Jaeger. I am seventeen years old, and I'm dying.

Let me be clear about one thing. When I was a kid, I knew well enough what cancer was. I knew it was a disease. It wasn't always curable, and usually if you had it, you died.

That was just about it.

It wasn't until later that I learned exactly what caused it. I didn't know about the genetic mutations, the cells that divide uncontrollably, and the way they build up in places they shouldn't. I didn't know about the way that the disease eats a person from the inside out and wears them down until there's nothing left. How it tortures them for as long as it wants before the end finally comes.

And believe me. Once I finally knew, I wished that I had never had to find out.

I was ten years old the first time I saw cancer as it truly was.

There had been something wrong with my mom for a long time before it happened. No one thought it was anything serious. It just seemed like she was getting sick a lot. It wasn't anything uncommon for an elementary school teacher. Being around a bunch of greasy little kids all day sure seemed to be taking its toll on her. It seemed like at least once a week she'd wake up drowning in her own sweat with a fever raging under her skin. The occasional aches she'd get in her bones didn't seem all that serious, either.

"It's because you kids are making me get old, that's why," she would say to me and Mikasa, that bright smile of hers plastered onto her face.

It wasn't until she started losing weight that people started to worry.

But still, my mom never acted sick. Every time she was around my us, she was just her normal self. The most I'd ever caught her giving in to her sickness was once when she passed out on the couch while I was playing Mario Kart in the basement with Mikasa. That was the first time I had realized that something was wrong. Not much later, the realization hit me that something had probably been wrong for a long time. I'd just never noticed. All that time, I hadn't been able to see past her smile and the bright, cheerful tone she always used when she talked to me. I hadn't seen how pale she'd been looking lately, or how her clothes were starting to hang off of her like curtains on a window frame. I asked Mikasa about it. She hadn't noticed either.

That was something I'd always admired about my mom. She never let anything drag her down. She was always a fighter, always putting everyone else before herself. Looking back on it now, maybe if she'd been just a little weaker, just a little more selfish, things could have ended differently.

I overheard the conversation in my parents' bedroom two days before the call came in.

My mom's voice was the first one that I heard. "I'm going to the doctor tomorrow."

"Why now? You could have gone earlier. I'm sure that no one would have given you any flack for it," my dad replied.

Oh, right. Did you think I didn't have a father or something? Well, I do. Not that he cared to prove it all that often. I kind of forgot to mention him. But let's not get into that right now.

"I... Grisha, I found something. Here," my mom stuttered. "It's right on my back... There, right in the middle."

Silence for a second. I heard my dad inhale sharply. A block of ice settled in the pit of my stomach before my mom broke the silence.

"I looked up the symptoms online," she said, her voice soft. "It all fits. I don't know when it all started. For all I know, it could have been years since-"

"Karla, how long has this been here?" my dad demanded.

"I told you, I just found it tonight."

"You just..." My dad trailed off and sighed. I heard fabric rustling on the other side of the cracked door.

"Grisha, what are you doing?"

The click of plastic on plastic. Faint tapping, buttons being pressed. "I'm calling the hospital. We need to get this taken care of. Now."

"Grisha, I said that I-"

"I know what you said!" he shot back. "You said tomorrow. I'm not going to wait until then. I don't think you realize exactly how serious this is, Karla."

"I know perfectly well how serious it is. I just..."

"You what?"

"I just didn't want anyone to worry."

My dad sighed again. "Well, what a damn fine job you did of that."

My mom sighed in defeat. I heard the tapping again, then a muffled, one-sided conversation. For what seemed like forever, there was nothing but my dad's voice murmuring scattered phrases to no one in particular.

"Yes... Yes, of course... Tomorrow... No, we can't... Yes, I'm afraid it's very serious."

Somewhere between five minutes and five years later, I heard my dad slam the phone back onto the cradle. "There. That settles it. Your appointment is at ten tomorrow morning."

"Ten?" my mom said. "I have a class to teach. How am I going to-"

"You aren't, that's how," my dad quipped. "You're not going into work tomorrow. Or any day after that until we figure out exactly what's going on with you."

"Grisha, I can't just skip out of work because of something I read online. I have obligations. I can't go around taking time off whenever I-"

"Yes, you can! In fact, maybe you should have! I still don't think you understand. Karla, you could be dying, for christ's sake!"

His words dug into me, piercing my heart like a syringe. A hand flew up to cover my mouth and stifle the little gasp that had reflexively slipped out. My dad's voice echoed in my head, over and over, the words sinking in deeper with each repetition.

Karla, you could be dying. You could be dying. Dying. Dying.

"Grisha!" my mom hissed, her voice a harsh, biting whisper.

My dad sighed. I heard him settle back down on the bed. "I'm sorry, Karly. I- I'm just worried. That's it."

"I know, but there's no need for you to go shouting it to the world like that."

"I didn't mean to."

"The kids are right down the hallway. What if one of them heard you?"

Too late. One of them already did.

"They're going to have to find out sometime."

"I know," my mom murmured. "But we don't know anything for sure yet. I don't want everyone to start jumping to conclusions."

I heard the soft rustle of my dad's fingers brushing through her hair. "What if there are no conclusions to jump to, though? What if-"

"No, Grisha." I heard my dad's hand drop and land on the sheets. "Listen to me. I don't want you to talk that way. I don't want to hear anyone talking that way until the diagnosis is right in front of me. And until then, we won't mention it. Not to Eren, not to Mikasa, not anyone. I don't want people to start worrying before we know for sure that there's anything to worry about."

I heard more stifled noises drift through the crack in the door. My mom sighed. Dad probably had her in his arms. "Karla..."

"Do you think the kids are still awake?"

"I don't know."

"Would you mind checking?"

I heard the soft noises of someone sliding their legs over the side of the bed, then muffled footsteps slowly working their way towards the door.

At that moment, I turned away from the doorway and ran.

My mom stayed home from work the next day. She didn't tell us why. She didn't need to. I had already heard all that I needed to the night before.

We got the call from the doctor a day later.

I remember the way my mom told us. I was downstairs in the basement with Mikasa. It was a Friday, probably cutting close to 10 pm. We were watching The Final Destination. Or, Mikasa was watching while I clutched a couch cushion to my chest and hid behind it every thirty seconds. A boy was getting dragged down to the bottom of a swimming pool when there was a knock at the door. A second later, it swung open. Light came flooding in and streamed down the stairs.

"Eren? Mikasa? Can you pause that for a second?"

I rolled gratefully toward the center of the couch and sntached up the remote. The scrambled noise of waterlogged screaming was cut short. "What is it?"

"Your mother has something she needs to tell you. Mind coming upstairs for a bit?"

My heart turned to stone and started to sink. For some reason, I could already tell what was coming. No amount of denial could push back the recurring memory of the conversation I'd heard just two days earlier. Mikasa grabbed my hand and pulled me toward the stairs.

A minute later, everyone was sitting in the kitchen. For the longest time, everything was silent. No one wanted to speak. It seemed almost as though we'd been brought upstairs for nothing. Something deep in my soul wished that was the case.

My dad took a breath and broke the silence. "Do you want me to get started, or-"

"No, that's alright. I... I can do this." My mom was breathing so heavily that I could hear her from the other side of the table. Her gaze fixed on me for a second, then her eyes flicked towards Mikasa, then back, bouncing back and forth between the two of us.

"So... I'm sure you both remember that I stayed home yesterday," she began. She paused, waiting and watching Mikasa and me nod in agreement. "Well, I... that was because I had to go to a doctor's appointment."

Mikasa twitched. What she was thinking at that moment, I still don't know.

"And I'm afraid I have some bad news."

My dad decided to pitch in. "You might have noticed that, for a while now, your mother hasn't exactly been her usual self. What with the fevers and everything else..."

"Yes. And, well..." My mom trailed off. She slipped one hand nervously into the pocket of her jeans, the other reaching up to press against her pursed lips. It felt like an eternity before she said anything more.

"I was given some tests after the appointment yesterday morning. They had to send me to the hospital to have them done. Um... well, I've got a new doctor now. His name is Dr. Hannes. He was the one performing the tests. See... I was told I would get a call when the labs finally came up with something. And... and I got the call from Dr. Hannes today. The results came back this afternoon, and he..." She stopped for a second as if she'd forgotten what she was about to say. She picked up again before I could convince myself that it was true and I wouldn't have to hear what I already knew was coming.

"He said I have acute myeloid leukemia." She paused before adding, "It's a type of cancer."

The room went completely silent after that. I could hear my blood pulsing in my ears, air rushing in and out of my lungs. Everything was so still. I could feel my heart beating helplessly against my ribs, as if it were trying to escape.

Cancer. That was what she and my dad had been fighting about. My mom had cancer.

I heard Mikasa's voice next to my ear, broken and squeaking like I had never heard it before. "You... you have cancer?"

My mom nodded. "Yes."

That deathly silence settled again. The only thing that broke it was the sound of Mikasa's head hitting the table and the stifled cry that seeped through the neck of her sweater.

My mom went to the hospital for her first chemotherapy treatment a week later. When I came to see her that afternoon, her hair looked significantly thinner than it had in the morning. So did the rest of her. Paler, too. And there were faint shadows under her eyes that I had never noticed before. She looked so much sicker there than she had at home that morning. Hospital beds and IV drips have a tendency to do that to people.

Little did I know, that was just the beginning.

Within the span of a few weeks, I watched my mother, the only person who I can truly say I had known and loved for my entire life, fall to pieces. First it was her hair. The long, soft waves with the deep chocolate-brown color that I'd been lucky enough to inherit began falling out in clumps. Before long, it was gone. Her peaches-and-cream complexion quickly turned sickeningly pale. The weight loss that had started months earlier only got worse. Before a month had passed, my mom had been worn down to a shred of her former self. It hurt, seeing her like that. Seeing this disease slowly eat away at her. But all the while, the light never left her eyes. She never stopped smiling. She never stopped pulling through for Mikasa. For my dad. For me. Maybe for herself, too. She always stayed positive, even when Dr. Hannes told her that the colony of cells in her spinal cord had spread up into her brain. When her nerves lost feeling every now and again, and when memory started to hit random blank spots because of the overgrown cells strangling everything else around them. And when Mikasa and I had to start going to Shiganshina Hospital if we wanted to see her at all. Even on the day that she was given the final number of days she had left. Because as far as I knew, she wasn't giving up.

And that's what she told us. That's what she told us, right up until the day she died.

And that was it. That was what happened. I wish I could say that she did something heroic, that was being held like a fragile little doll in death's clutches and somehow managed to wriggle free. But no. That didn't happen.

She just stopped breathing.

Two years later, it was my turn. Same symptoms. Same diagnosis. Same disease. Leukemia. The relentless sickness that had killed my mother had somehow made its way to me.

Everything began to fall apart after that.

Like I said before, I was diagnosed with leukemia when I was twelve. So, to make things quick, I'd spent the past four years of my life in constant fear that it would be ending soon. At least, that's what it was like at first. When our mother had been diagnosed, Mikasa had been the first one to cry. When it was my turn to get tossed onto the terminal disease bandwagon, the role of first crier was assigned to me. I don't know what had upset me so much about it. Maybe it was the memory of my mother. At least, what used to be my mother before her disease had morphed her into something else. Maybe I was scared that the same thing would happen to me. Or maybe I was scared of what it would do to the people around me, everyone in my life that I cared about. Whatever the reason, the second the words were out of Dr. Hannes's mouth, the realization hit me like the front bumper of a speeding car.

I was going to die. And there was nothing I could do about it.

That was the third week in July. For the entire rest of the summer, I was getting sent to the hospital, getting screened for tumors, signing up for studies, having blood tests taken and a billion other things that I've either forgotten or blocked out of my memory. They finally settled on giving me regular infusions of the latest magical cancer-killing drug, called Mariatrexate. They said that it contained molecules that would form a barrier over the cancerous cells in my ribs and keep their growth from spreading. Sure enough, the hospital visits finally started to slow down by the time I started seventh grade. So the miracle drug was working. Yay, Mariatrexate.

It was around that time that me and my dad started drifting apart.

It wasn't exactly sudden. He'd been a lot quieter ever since the night that my mom died. He spent most of his time at work, leaving me and Mikasa home alone for most of the day. But he still came home at the same time every night, and he was still willing to talk to us if we talked to him first. Things still had a touch of normalcy to them.

But that was before I was diagnosed.

I didn't know what his reasons were. I still don't know. He'd never been very straightforward when it came to talking about things that upset him. The best I could do was guess. Maybe it was because he still hadn't learned how to cope with what happened to Mom. Or it could have been because the disease that had killed his wife was now dead-set on doing the same to his only biological child.

I think I might have forgotten to mention that Mikasa was adopted.

Whatever his reasons happened to be, he started spending less and less time around us and more at the lab complex where he worked. He was a microbiologist. He studied infectious diseases and developed medications for some big pharmaceutical company that I can't remember the name of. He'd racked up a lot of renown for himself in the process, too. Apparently his research has done a lot to contribute to the medical field.

Maybe that's what had him so upset. He was being paid to study diseases and figure out how to fight them, but he couldn't do a single thing to figure out how to save his wife and son.

So now not only did I have a dead mother, but a father who did just about the bare minimum to keep Mikasa and me alive and mentally stable.

Seventh grade passed without a hitch. Mikasa got into her first relationship, which lasted about two weeks. I got into a fistfight with some arrogant rich kid who made fun of my emotional trauma. My dad kind of stopped giving a shit about anything. Eighth grade went by in a relatively normal manner as well. I stayed in remission. Mikasa joined the school MMA team and earned herself a whole new circle of friends. My dad switched the oncologist slot in our insurance statement over to another doctor a few miles further away from home because he no longer trusted Dr. Hannes. I had my first appointment with my new oncologist, Dr. Erwin Smith, a blonde medical god who Mikasa and I quickly nicknamed Dr. Handsome. Mikasa and I graduated middle school. I managed to stay out of the hospital for the entire summer, not including the appointments that were scheduled every month to make sure I didn't go into relapse.

Strangely enough, that was what my body decided to do at the start of my freshman year at Shignashina High.

The symptoms that hadn't reared up in over two years suddenly started coming back to haunt me. In less than 48 hours, I was back in Trost Regional Hospital, lying in an MRI chamber with needles jammed into my arms and Dr. Erwin's staff doing a CSI-caliber search of my body, trying to confirm whether the cancer in my rib marrow had spread or not. When Dr. Erwin finally figured out the root of the problem, it turned out that my worst fears had come true. My body had built up an immunity to Mariatrexate. The cancer that had been isolated in the marrow of my ribs had spread to the core of nearly every other bone in my body. The miracle drug wasn't working on me anymore.

After that, I was placed in chemotherapy and had radiation administered for the second time in my life. And for the second time in my life, I was getting torn to pieces by my disease. I was losing weight again, I couldn't keep food down, my hair was falling out from the drugs and radiation... I was a human disaster. I don't know what else to say.

Towards the end, Dr. Erwin assigned me a new treatment drug. Rosevelin, they called it. It was supposed to be more powerful version of Mariatrexate. Something that would be harder to form antibodies against and do a little more to keep my cancer from becoming uncontrollable again. Supposedly I would be getting treatments more often and the new medication wouldn't wear off nearly as fast as Mariatrexate had. I didn't know whether the promises would hold true or not.

By the time it was all over, I'd been out of school for over a month. It was at that point that my dad took me out of Shiganshina and enrolled me in a homeschooling program. If month-long hospital stays were going to become a regular occurrence, then there was no point in trying to keep me on a regular school schedule. I would never be able to catch up.

Despite the new doses of Rosevelin in my system, I ended up in the hospital for a few days out of January, then again in March. Both times the basic leukemia symptoms had come back and hung over my head until I couldn't stand them anymore. And both times they ran tests on me while I waited impatiently for my symptoms to go back into remission. It wasn't anything serious, they said. Just precautions. They wanted to keep the cells controlled. Wanted to make sure that they didn't start growing or spreading. Most importantly, that they weren't taking root anywhere else in my body.

Sure enough, that was what happened in the beginning of that summer. That clusterfuck ended up in another extended hospital stay. I wasted almost my entire summer confined to white plaster walls, gray linoleum and fluorescent lighting that year. I would have given anything to get out of there. To see what was going on in the world outside. But no. As long as the cancer was there, I knew it wasn't possible.

After that was sophomore year. Or at least it would have been, if I were still enrolled in a normal high school. I never realized exactly how much easier it was to keep track of the passage of time when there was a school schedule to adhere to. Mikasa was the only reason why I even knew what season it was. There were another three hospital visits between the scheduled start of the school year and the day Mikasa came home with her last-semester report card. I didn't know which time that was that I had been turned into a hairless skeleton. I'd stopped bothering to keep count at that point.

So, to sum things up, everything sucked.

That was the state of my life at the beginning of that summer.