TV Shows » Austin & Ally » Rhetorical
Author: CherriesAndGarlic
1. Prologue — In Which Ally Falls in Love 2. In Which Ally Sucks at Life 3. In Which Austin is a Sucky Driver 4. In Which You Can Say Cliché 5. In Which Ally Swears a Lot 6. In Which Everybody is Frustrated 7. In Which the Everybody Has a Meltdown 8. In Which Ally Has a Good Day
Rated: T - English - Romance/Humor - Reviews: 70 - Published: 01-05-14 - Updated: 04-27-14
id:9998066
So this and the previous chapter was originally one whole chapter, but I ended up splitting it in two because this story is generally made up of short chapters.
Also I like extra reviews :P
WARNING: Penny and Ally are both extremely OOC. Austin's on the borderline.
Disclaimer: I OWN NOTHING BUT THE PLOT AND THE ASIAN DOCTOR AND THE RENEWED PENNY DAWSON. Come to think of it I own most of the stuff in this chapter, actually. DON'T SUE ME.
By the way, someone commented "Ok your summary is genius". THANKS MAN, I THINK IT'S FABULOUS TOO.
It was raining when they got to the hospital.
Miami Medical; the words glowed red on the otherwise dark concrete cube, the color too bright and too alarming.HERE I AM. I HAVE ALL YOUR SICK PEOPLE. COME TO ME.
The minutes between the car's engine rumbling to silence and the "Hi, we're here for Lester Dawson" / "Fourth floor, room three-oh-two" exchange at the front desk passed in somewhat of a blur for Ally. She was quiet as Austin lead her inside the hospital, kept her mouth shut when his warm fingers enfolded her sweaty ones, didn't say a word as the elevator hauled them up two, three, four floors, let the sound of their sneakers slapping on the linoleum hospital floor take over any words that she wouldn't liked to fill the silence.
Numbers flared above the doors.
286, 287, 288…
…she counted not numbers but doors.
289, 290, 292…
…she gripped Austin's hand tighter.
293, 294, 295…
If she hadn't known at what number the elevator had spit them out at, she wouldn't know where they were.
296, 297, 298.
They all looked the same.
299. 300.
Grey, with a green trim, a tarnished doorknob, and a square of double-layered undoubtedly soundproofed glass at eye level.
301. 302.
The sneakers came to a stop.
As she processed her hand reaching for the knob, she realized she wasn't even nervous for her father. She was afraid of seeing her mother.
Her mother. What would she even look like? Ally remembered that she had been beautiful, with thick locks a shade lighter than her own, always loose and carefree over her shoulders. Blue eyes, clear, wide, robin's-egg eyes that Ally always wished she could've gotten instead of her father's chocolate ones. A build like a bird's, slim and small, that been had given away to her only daughter.
As Ally opened the door, she found out that a lot could happen to a person's appearance in ten years.
The room was occupied by three people—a doctor, a father, and a person who didn't really look like her mother. Lester was deep asleep, flat out in one of those hospital chairs that was plugged on every angle with wires. He looked peaceful, his breathing deep, his clothes the ones he had put on that morning. Little did he know they were the last clothes he would ever pick out without a deadline in the back of his mind.
(Her eyes skimmed over the doctor without much processing from her brain).
A collage of x-rays obscured most of a plastic tray that had been set out beside the doctor. The images looked like livers, only more disfigured than they should've been, bulges of white in odd places. Ally quickly looked away. She didn't trust herself to say anything.
Austin did.
"Hi," he said. "We, uh…we came to see what's up."
The face of the doctor was blank. Penny's was contorted with some weird emotion; pain? Regret? Disgust? Then it arranged itself into a smile that looked nearly genuine. And plastic.
"Ally. You look…older."
Ally nodded curtly. "I wonder why that is." She paused for a moment, drinking in the delicious view of a ruined Penny Dawson; so much had changed since Ally had been eight. The hair was wispy and gold but dark at the roots; the waist had acquired a thin layer of pudge; the cheeks seemed full and stiff and Botox-y; even the bright eyes seemed faded. "And you look…blonde."
Penny's thin mouth pressed harder into its forced grin. "It's not blonde. It's Bashful Butterscotch. I got it at this place in Paris a few months ago."
"Yes, and mine is Nifty Nutmeg. I got it from the genes on the set of chromosomes you gave me."
A flash of disbelief illuminated Penny's face for a split second pulling back into that twisted smile. Wondering when her daughter got so cocky, perhaps. Her eyes bored a direct message into Ally's:We'll talk later.
"Anyway," Penny said, turning back to the doctor, "would you mind explaining to my daughter what you just explained to me? I believe it is important for her to understand how dire her father's situation had become before he collapsed earlier today."
The doctor blinked. She was a small woman, her features strictly Asian, her jet-black hair in a tight coil at the base of her neck. She was pretty, but her young face looked lined beyond repair; probably a product of having delivered a lot of bad news a lot of times in her career. "Yes. Yes, of course." She rummaged through the scans on the tray beside her and held one up to the light.
"So…so you see here," she began, her finger tracing down the patterns on the dark plastic. "This is an x-ray of a healthy liver. And this…" (more rummaging) "…is an x-ray of Lester's liver."
Ally saw it. The outline of Lester's liver was speckled with pale knobs in places where the healthy scan was blank.
"This big white spot here is a tumor. We see it appear only in patients with cases of severe alcohol overuse. This extra alcohol damages the cells of the liver, which results in a disease called cirrhosis, and cirrhosis greatly increases the chance of getting cancer." She set the scans down. "This is what's happened with your father."
"And…" Ally's throat felt tight, her tongue thick. "And there's no cure?"
The doctor looked down at her lap. "Not that we know of, unfortunately."
Suddenly Ally remembered Austin standing at her shoulder and his fingers wound in hers. She let go of his hand and let herself sink into a chair beside the door, tucking her elbows in her lap and cradling her head in her palms.
"Five months," she breathed. "You say he's got five months."
"Yes." The doctor spoke softly and gently in a way that made Ally feel just a little comforted, and she wondered if the woman had training in this type of thing. "There's two options. We can keep him here, feed him as many medicines as we can that might help, and see how long we can keep him running. Or we can send him back home with you tomorrow and let him go on with his life, until he's too sick to continue." She paused. "I recommend the first option, but it's…it's your choice."
"It's mine too." Penny's voice shattered the gentle silence, a little too harshly. "I'm his ex-wife and her mother. If he stays here, I become her only legal guardian."
Ally's head shot up. "What?"
"I vote he stays here," Penny continued. "I believe that sending him back to his…normal ways will only shorten the time he has left."
"That's not fair!" Ally exclaimed, louder than she'd intended, but whatever. "How d'you think he'll feel when he wakes up from all of this and find that anything he's got left had been taken away? And how do you know I'm okay with you being my guardian, Penny?"
Penny folded her arms. "You don't have a choice, dear."
"Don't call me dear!" Ally stood up, her nails digging into the flesh of her palms. "This is your fault! You're the one who divorced him and abandoned me, and made him fall back on beers, and got him cancer! You've practicallykilled him, Mom! Where were you these past ten years? Screwing every guy you bumped into while you were 'traveling the world?' Because you 'needed space'from my father? How come you never came back to see how I was doing? Your only daughter, thrown away and ignored for all these years with nothing but an insane alcoholic and a rundown music store left!"
Ally took a breath, her heart pounding in her chest, hot, sweet anger driving the words forward.
"We never had a penny to spare, you know, because everything we earned went straight to the rent and the rest was for the beer. How did that make me feel? You never even called! And now you can't just…you can't just waltz in and expect me to be okay with living with you after all that, you just can't!"
There were many more terrible things she wanted to say, but Austin had her by the shoulders and was steering her out of the room. She kicked and screamed past the endless rooms, the front desk, out into the cold night air and into the musty van. She was sobbing by the time she was all buckled in and the engine had clattered to life.
Austin was silent as the car stopped in front of his house. "You're sleeping here tonight," was all he said as he wrapped an arm around her waist to bring her inside and deposit her in his bedroom. In a whirl of voices—Mike's and Mimi's and Austin's—she caught the wordsLester and cancer and mom and she's hysterical. Then he returned to the bedroom, helped her out of her clothes and into an oversized sweatshirt of his, tucked her into his bed, flicked off the lights, settled on the floor.
To the sound of his breathing, she fell into a fretful sleep.
I want to acknowledge that after minimal research, most of anything cancer-related in this story is made up. I've never seen a scan of someone who has cancer, but I imagine that's what one would look like.
The only parts that are real are those about it infecting the liver with cirrhosis (thank you !)
Like? Don't like?
Kudos to everyone who actually read Ally's entire rant.
Okay, so I did the math: 54 reviews divided by six chapters equals nine reviews, so therefore the average amount of reviews I receive on each chapter is nine reviews. And 54 plus 9 equals 63…so I'll update when I hit 63 reviews.
Copy-paste your favorite part!
63 reviews. I'll update then.
I love you guys, you know that?
~Mia
