By the time I finally got around to getting out of bed, taking my meds, and dragging myself downstairs, I'd almost missed breakfast entirely. It was almost surreal, how someone could look at Marco and never know that however many hours ago he'd been curled into my side, hair messed-up and cheeks flushed and utterly perfect. In the time since then, he'd gone back to being carefully put-together, taking small sips of tea and grinning widely over the top of his cup when he saw me walk out onto the patio. He had on a gray v-neck with a thin blue scarf wrapped not-so-subtly around his neck. I had on my clothes from the previous day and hadn't bothered looking for my hairbrush. But he looked at me the same way that he had the night before when he'd said I was beautiful, and so I didn't dwell on the fact that to anyone else I probably wasn't.

Karma looked a little peaky, pale enough that her freckles stuck out even more than usual as she sat across the table from her son, no food on her plate and a mostly-empty Bloody Mary in her hand. I smirked. "Have fun in Montmartre yesterday?"

"Absinthe is a hell of a drink," she mumbled, digging around in her purse for a bottle of Advil and giving me a weary smile. "I forgot that I'm getting too old for the wild life. I think I'm probably just going to hang out here today, but you two can go do whatever you want as long as you call to check in with me every few hours. I don't want to slow you down on your last day in Paris."

I went and grabbed a cup of coffee and a croissant, shrugging as I sat down next to Marco. He reached over and grabbed my hand under the table. "I don't even know what we're going to do today. I don't want to go back to that house for the sake of going on Hange Zoë's Magical Mystery Tour, do you, Marco?"

He scrunched up his nose and shook his head. "No thanks. I have no desire to relive yesterday's visit."

"Did something not go well with your author meet and greet?" Karma frowned, looking confused.

"You could say that," I said delicately, not wanting to go into detail for fear of accidentally letting something about my actual conversation with Levi slip. "Mr. Rivaille was every bit the prick I thought he'd be, so while I wasn't surprised, it was still a little disappointing."

"Well, they say to never meet your heroes…"

"Exactly. C'est la vie." Or perhaps c'est la mort, given the situation. I plastic-smiled and pretended I hadn't just thought that. "I've decided that I'm going to write Marco an epilogue for The Infinity Vault even though I'm not that wonderful of a writer. Regardless, we've got a day wide open now. Marco, ideas?"

"I don't want to do tourist-y stuff," Marco shrugged, twirling his empty teacup around in its saucer contemplatively. "Maybe we can just go to a park or something?"

"Sounds good to me. The Champ de Mars isn't that far, anyway," I nodded, a little grateful. There wasn't much to do in a park besides sit, and my leg was already protesting painfully from how much time I'd spent on it the day before.

"You boys have fun," Karma yawned, still working on her Bloody Mary even after we'd both finished our breakfast. "Marco, sweetie, there's an eight-hour tank ready to go under the bed upstairs, make sure you switch before you leave. Call me around four to check in?"

"Got it," he nodded, getting out of his chair and kissing her on the cheek before heading back towards the door. "You coming, Jean?"

"Huh? Oh, yeah, sorry." The meds were starting to kick in, and I was a little out of it, stumbling belatedly to my feet and following Marco back into the Hotel. As soon as we were out of Karma's sight, I reached up and grabbed at his scarf, tugging it to the side with a grin. "So how bad is it?"

"Somewhere between 'flicked really hard with a rubber band' and 'trapped in a small space with an amorous piranha.' Hey, cut it out!" Scowling, he made a futile grab for his scarf just as I tugged it the rest of the way off his neck, showing a dark purple bruise tucked into the hollow of his collarbone. Something pervasive and uncomfortably warm settled in my stomach.

"Niiiiice," I smirked.

"You're an idiot."

"Your face is bright red, holy fuck, you're so cute," I laughed, tucking the scarf back into place and leaning over to press my tips to his temple. "And I'm your idiot."

"Which means I have a responsibility to feed you and walk you and put up with your utter dweebdom," Marco sighed dramatically, punching the call button for the elevator and utterly failing to hide a smile. "I never listened to what people told me about how much work it is to have a boyfriend."

I blinked over at him owlishly, unable to find my voice until the elevator doors shut behind us. "Am I your boyfriend now? I wasn't aware."

Marco looked over at me with a deadpan that I could almost physically feel. "Not to be vulgar, Jean, but given where parts of me were in relation to parts of you last night, I'd say that yeah, you're my boyfriend now."

I laughed so hard that there were tears streaming down my face by the time we got to his room, my stomach aching as I flopped down on his bed and wheezed for air. Marco blushed again. "Sex jokes, Marco? Honest-to-God sex jokes? You really have been hanging out with Eren too much."

"Yeah, yeah, whatever," he grumbled, tugging the oxygen tank his mother had mentioned out from under his bed and switching it out with the one already in the cart. His face softened into a muted glow of a smile when he looked up at me. "I love you."

"Okay," I said with a shit-eating grin, remembering the post-post-post-post-post-script of the note he'd left on my pillow about what would happen if I used the word.

Marco cursed under his breath and threw a pillow at me, whispering something about me being infuriating before he crawled up onto the bed and yanked me forward by my shirt, crushing our mouths together. I let out a muffled little laugh against his lips, trying to tug him forward and lay down, but he shook his head and pulled back, eyes flicking over at the door. "Mom, remember?"

"So we can go next door to my room."

"We have less than twenty-four hours left in Paris, Jean, I'm not spending it… canoodling in a hotel room!"

"You'd rather spend it in a park?" I snickered. "And did you really just use the word canoodling?"

"Yes I would, yes I did, and we can canoodle all we want when we get home," Marco huffed, climbing off the bed and glaring at me. "Brush your stupid hair; you look like you just stumbled out of a crack house."

"Such tender endearments from my apparent boyfriend," I sighed, grabbing his hairbrush off the dresser and complying before leaning over and kissing him again, gentler this time. "I love you. There, happy? No more 'okay's."

"I'm still charging you a Euro in the jar for the first one. I love you too."

It was surreal, I thought as we headed back downstairs, how three days had changed everything. Three days ago, he'd recoiled from the simple fact that he'd woken up holding my hand on the plane, and now his fingers were braided up with mine like it was the most natural thing in the world as we got back on the elevator and headed downstairs, an easy, happy smile sitting on his lips like it belonged there. The Marco I'd met and come to love was world-wise and a realist and so, so guarded, every movement and word measured to cause as little damage as he could. A self-aware supernova. Now it was almost like our positions had switched. I loved him like this, how everything he did seemed earnest and real in the quietest of ways, but it made a hot knife of guilt slice its way between my ribs whenever he looked at me. The tables had turned, and now I was the one trying to hold back the kerosene in my veins and trying not to worry about the fact that I'd always seen Marco as a living flame. I wondered if this was how he'd felt all the time before that moment on top of the Eiffel Tower. The thought made me feel sick.

"Are you all right?" he asked as our arrival on the ground floor dinged through the speaker in the elevator.

"I'm fine," I nodded, squeezing his hand and carefully constructing a look of contentment. "Just a little tired, which is your fault, for the record."

Actual supernovas had it much easier than metaphorical ones.

His smile was so distracting that I walked right off the elevator and into another person, stumbling backwards and blinking confusedly. "Oh, I'm sorry, wasn't watching - Hange?"

Her hair was up in the same high ponytail, glasses perched haphazardly on her nose. She had on slacks and a pretty purple blouse that matched the amethyst studs in her ears, but the more attention-drawing accessory was the tiny body clinging shyly to her hand, bright red hair wind-tossed and gray eyes watching me so analytically that I felt a bit uncomfortable.

"No, no, I am sorry. That's why I'm here," Hange rushed out, her accent thickening around the words as she stumbled over them. "I had to email the St. Rose Foundation to figure out where you were staying or I would have come sooner. I wanted to apologize for what happened yesterday."

"It wasn't your fault, Hange," Marco said kindly, and I was reminded again of how disturbingly good he was, forgiveness coming as easily to him as cynicism came to me. He'd been the one getting his dreams demolished, and he still had it in him to smile. I loved him. I loved him. I loved him.

"No, it was," she shook her head, looking positively guilt-ridden. "I completely ignored the fact that he gets… worse than usual around this time of year. I know it might not be any comfort to you now, but I feel the need to tell you that Levi is not what he comes across as. He's a good man and a good father and all of his shortcomings are the result of some very tragic circumstances that I'm not at liberty to discuss, but sometimes he can be… blunt. Especially when it comes to sensitive subjects."

Sensitive subjects like cancer, something that took the best part of his life away from him. Yeah, I could understand that. But Marco couldn't, because he hadn't been there to hear the story. Even so, he gave Hange a gentle smile, reaching out to put a hand on her shoulder. "It's okay. I spend the majority of my time with this dork; I'm used to people being inappropriately blunt and making everything into extended metaphors."

"It's not okay," replied Hange, her face ashen. Amelie was slowly becoming less shy and more curious, more of her emerging from behind Hange's leg as she watched the three of us. Hange's hand smoothed down her hair reflexively, keeping her close enough that she couldn't wander off. "I could have prevented this whole thing by just taking the time to think things through. It wasn't fair to either of you. It wasn't fair to him."

There was something strained hitching at the edges of her voice on that last sentence. I decided not to ask her about it, although the answer was kind of implicit in the fact that she'd come all the way down here with Amelie in tow just to justify Levi's actions. I thought of how he'd watched her leave the room in tears the day before, his face drawn tight as if he'd realized too-late that he'd hurt her. My conclusion was that they were both oblivious and that the world had a very interesting sense of humor. "Don't beat yourself up too much. We're both tough, and I know that I, at least, have heard worse."

Marco abandoned the conversation in favor of squatting down so that he was eye level with the smallest member of our collective, grinning over at her. "Bonjour, Amelie."

"Parlez-vous français?" she asked, an eyebrow raising in a skeptical expression that was an exact mirror of her father's.

"Non. Well, not very well, anyway," he shook his head, laughing.

"That's okay; I speak both," Amelie said, smiling back at him brightly and making a flawless switch to English, although she had a slight pull of a French accent along the edges of her vowels. "I like your scarf. What's your name?"

"Thank you, I actually bought it at the shop down the street. I'm Marco. You answered the door when I came to your house yesterday, remember?"

"Uh-huh. And then Papa sent me upstairs, but I sat in the hall and listened." She grinned conspiratorially before her head tilted to the side. "What's on your face?"

"Amelie!" Hange chided.

"It's fine," Marco looked up at her with a soft smile before turning back to Amelie. "It's called a cannula. I have trouble breathing and it helps me."

"Would it help me breathe?" she asked, the kind of earnest curiosity that only little kids have sparking in her eyes.

"I don't know. You wanna try it?" Marco replied, unhooking the plastic lines from behind his ears and situating them over Amelie's. For as small of a change as it was, he looked drastically different without the thin tubes angled down over his cheekbones, lighter almost, like he wasn't saddled with the usual burden of carrying around his illness like a neon sign. I loved him.

"It tickles," Amelie giggled, pulling the lines off her face and scrunching up her nose as she handed them back to Marco, who had started to wheeze a little in the time he'd been oxygen-less. "Are you going back to America?"

"Tomorrow, yeah," he nodded, tucking the cannula back into place and breathing a little easier.

"Do you want to be pen pals? We're supposed to get pen pals for school next year."

"If that's okay with your dad and Hange, sure," Marco laughed, getting back to his feet and ruffling her hair. "But hey, Jean and I are gonna go to the Champ de Mars, so we'd better get going. It was nice to see you again."

"Okay! Mademoiselle Hange, can Marco be my pen pal?"

"We'll see, Spatzi, I'll talk to your papa when we get home," Hange nodded, reaching down to grab her hand before looking over at me and extending her hand. "Good to see you again, Jean. Safe travels home."

"Thanks, you too," I said, shaking her hand. I felt folded edges of paper pressed into my palm, closed my hand around it when I pulled away. Hange turned around to talk to Marco, and I took advantage of having his back to me, unfolding the note that Hange had slipped me and scanning the elegant, spidery writing on the wrinkled paper.

Our conversation yesterday before I could make a crucial observation. Unethical bastard though I may be, consider the point I'm trying to make. If you really want to protect him, tell him. You're only denying him the small amount of closure he can have if you don't. You've seen what happens to people who have that taken away. Do you want Marco to turn into me?

Regards,
Levi

A leaden weight sank into my stomach so hard that I could almost feel the floor give beneath my feet. I looked over at Marco, who was talking animatedly with Hange, leaning down to give Amelie a hug, that inherent light beneath his skin shining so brightly that he could have powered a whole solar system with his smile. I tried to imagine him jaded and bitter, that smile dulled forever and every word he said a rusty razor on someone else's skin.

No. No, I didn't want that.

We stood in the lobby and watched Amelie and Hange walk back out into the street. Marco turned back to me and raked a hand through his hair, still grinning. "What a cute kid. Almost impossible to believe she's Levi's genetic material."

"I think Hange's had a lot of influence there," I said tightly, feeling like I was choking on the words. "Hey, can we go back upstairs real quick?"

"Sure. You forget something?"

"Yeah," I nodded, stepping back onto the elevator. Every lie I told him made it that much harder to reach down in the hollow of my chest and wrap my shaking fingers around the truth.

There was no hiding it by the time we made it back to my room, my breath hitching and my entire arm trembling as I struggled with my key, practically collapsing inside and grabbing the door frame for support.

"All right, you're not okay," Marco said decisively, shutting the door behind him and walking over to cradle my jaw between his hands, tilting my head up so that I had to look at him. I wished he wouldn't. "Jean. Baby, look at me. What's going on?"

The term of endearment made my guts drop to my shoes. I didn't deserve this. I didn't deserve him worrying over me and pushing my hair back from my face and loving me, not when all I'd been doing for almost a month was feeding him lie after lie after lie and now it was all about to come crashing down around my head.

I wondered how long it would take him to walk out the door, started counting down the seconds I had left where he could still be mine.

"I need to talk to you," I croaked, throat parched and constricted. "I'm sorry, I know you wanted to go to the park, it's stupid we can do it later we can-"

"Hey." His lips brushed mine softly, cutting me off, eyes dark and heavy with concern as he watched me falter and start to break. "Forget the park. Talk to me. Tell me what's wrong. Did I do something?"

"No! God, no." Shaking my head hurriedly, I reached up and pressed my hand over his, my voice unbearably small the next time I spoke. "Do you really love me?"

"Of course," Marco nodded, leaning forward and resting his forehead against mine. "I have for a long time, actually. Since the night I ended up in the ICU. Is that what this is about? Because I'll tell you I love you every ten seconds if that's what you need."

I shook my head again, a sharp back-and-forth motion. "That's not it. I… you… can we sit down?"

He was frowning now, a hand pressed to the small of my back as I fell bonelessly down onto the edge of my bed, elbows perched on my knees as I leaned down and put my hands. Words had always been my willing companions, coming as easily to me as breathing, and now I could neither speak nor breathe, fixated on the scenario replaying again and again in my head of him realizing what I was and what I'd done, walking away and suffering my presence on the plane tomorrow and never speaking to me again, of seven months with nothing to do but mull over how I'd lost him above everything else I was losing. But then that image of him being another Levi crossed my mind again, the idea that my lies could turn him into that. I took a deep, shuddering breath.

I cared more about his chance at happiness than my comfort. As a selfish individual, it was a new, awful sensation.

"The night you ended up in the ICU," I said tremulously, "I felt this really awful pain in my leg. It had been bad for a few weeks before that, but I thought my liner was just going bad. I was running upstairs to get in my car to go to St. Rose, and this pain just hit me out of nowhere, knocked me right off my feet. It happened again at the hospital. And again a few hours later."

Every trace of color drained from Marco's face.

"I wrote it off and told myself that it was probably just because I'd been up and around more than usual, but I had this nagging feeling and I was already at the hospital, so I called my doctor and got signed up for a PET scan," I pressed on, eyes starting to burn and throat closing off.

"No," Marco whispered.

"My whole body was a neon sign, Marco." And there it was. In that moment, I was my mother five years ago, unable to physically say Jean has cancer. Instead, I draped it in metaphor and dressed it up in pretty turns of phrase, my last effort to protect him caving in as a sob tore painfully through my throat, hands fisting in the rumpled blankets. I could see the dent in the pillow next to mine where his head had been. I wanted to die right there to save him the trouble of waiting around. "It's everywhere. Back in the leg, my liver, the lining of my chest, everywhere. I couldn't tell you, not when you were just out of the ICU and I was so glad that you were alive, and I… I was so goddamn selfish. I didn't want to fuck up my chances of you falling in love with me, so I kept saying 'I'll tell him soon, I'll tell him when the time's right,' but I can't lie to you anymore, not after… Fuck, I'm so sorry, I'm such a piece of shit, I'm so sorry."

It was a repeat of that first breakdown I'd had in my car the day my scan came back, every plastic smile I'd put on for the past month shattering into deadly-sharp shards around my feet and digging into my skin as they fell. I was a shaking, sobbing mess, curled in on myself and feeling like I was drowning, unable to breathe or move or think of anything other than continuing the countdown to when Marco walked out the door and out of my life.

But he didn't. A few torturous seconds passed where he didn't move, didn't speak, didn't do anything. Then he kicked his shoes off, scooted back a little on the bed, and pulled me into his lap, still blubbering and completely incoherent. I'd expected him to push me away, and his arms were locked around me so tightly that I was surprised even through the breakdown tearing across my consciousness, thinking that he was stronger than he looked. He didn't walk away, didn't yell at me or tear into me for being a lying bastard or take back his love entirely. He sat there, fingers lacing through my hair, and held me.

I loved him.

"Hey, it's okay," he said thickly. He was crying, too. "It's okay, I forgive you, it's okay, you're okay. I love you. I love you. I love you."

He kept saying it until I could breathe again, great shuddering gulps of air that hit my lungs like cold blades. All of me ached, from my swollen eyes to my overworked muscles to my heart. I'd dampened pretty much the entire front of Marco's shirt with tears, and the top of my head felt wet when I sat up and ran a hand through it, sighing shakily. "I'm sorry. God, Marco, I'm so sorry. You should hate me."

"Don't tell me what to do," he said tearfully, swiping his palm across his cheeks and sniffing. "I love you. Deal with it."

"I just… I figured you'd be mad as hell that I neglected to tell you I had cancer until after you fucked me," I laughed thickly and without any real humor, so incredibly tired. "It's kind of like naming a new puppy and then finding out it's got heart worms."

"You're not a puppy, and what happened last night was hardly fucking, okay, it was…"

"I swear to God if the words 'making love' come out of your mouth I'm making you your own Metaphor Jar and charging you a hundred dollars."

Marco breathed out a laugh, reaching down and grabbing my hand. "Regardless. I don't hate you. I don't think I could ever hate you. But how could you not tell me for a month?"

"I mean, it helped that we were both busy. You were shopping for the trip and going to your appointments, I had chemo…"

"But if you've been in treatment for a month, your hair…" he said, reaching up and smoothing the mess it had become back into place.

"New drug," I said, shrugging. "No hair loss. Extra puking. It seemed like a fair trade-off for you not having to worry."

"Jean, you're a dumbass." Sighing, Marco reached over and pulled me into his arms again, burying his face in my neck. "And now we're in this together, so no more lying to me. Have you been doing okay?"

All right, now tell him the rest. Tell him no. Tell him 'seven months.' Tell him that it's best if he moves on now, because there's nothing obligating him to stay in your orbit while everything you are collapses.

I couldn't do it. "Swimmingly. Don't you worry, Bodt, I'm going to fight this shit and be around to annoy you for a good long time."

In that moment, I decided to shoot for the five percent and stop wallowing in the ninety-five. If anything was worth the fight, it was Marco.

"D'you still want to go to the park?" I asked wearily.

He shook his head and scooted up to the top of my bed, pulling me up with him until I was lying with my ear pressed against the steady thrum of his heartbeat. "No. I want to spend the rest of my time in Paris canoodling in a hotel room."

"I love you," I muttered.

"I love you too. But you owe me like seventy Euros in the jar on top of your current tab," Marco smiled. My heart splintered.

I had loved his smile so fondly that it was all too easy to tell the real one from the plastic one he'd put on for my sake.