TRIGGER WARING-
So, a warning that cancer is discussed pretty heavily as is alcohol abuse in this chapter. The alcohol abuse will be mentioned in later chapters but not in so much detail, so if they are triggers for you, you may not want to read or read with caution. Also, you may need tissues for this chapter.
This chapter could be skipped as most everything will be discussed in other chapters, but it may result in you being slightly confused going ahead. If you want to reach out and ask any questions if you do skip or are just a bit confused, feel free to PM me or write a review as I read them all and I should be able to get back to you relatively quickly.
Christian's POV
As everyone turns towards us, their mouth's all simultaneously drop open out of sheer shock, I know I've fucked up. I debated all evening about whether or not to tell them I was bringing someone, more specially Ana but in the end, I decided just to show up and see how it went. Boy, was that the wrong idea, I didn't think any of them would recognise her let alone all four of them but here we are. I just figured I'd show up and they'd all welcome her with open arms but now it's clear I've blindsided them. And her.
I knew that even if no one recognised her that they would most likely think she was a date but even that would have been pretty shocking in its own right. I don't really tend to date, so bringing a girl I've never even mentioned to a group night out would be strange anyway. It's not that I don't date, I do it just never seriously, I've just never met a girl I have the kind of connection I want to explore further. Don't get me wrong I occasionally like a girl enough to hook up with her but it's only once in a blue moon and more just to scratch an itch, as bad as that sounds. It's the butt of a lot of group jokes, Kate and Elliot are both sluts, Gail and Taylor are almost always together when he's home, so I'm the only one who doesn't have sex regularly. But that's never really bothered me, believe it or not I'm not your average twenty something guy when it comes to sex, for me it's just never been that important and I don't seem to crave it like most people my age do. I still enjoy sex like any other guy but it's not a need for me, just sometimes when a good old fashion wank doesn't satisfy me, but that probably has a lot to do with the fact that my introduction to sex wasn't exactly normal. Most kids lose their virginity on prom night or to the high school sweetheart but for me neither of those were something I got to experience.
I mean Mia and I were just barely seventeen when she got sick and before that most of the girls in my school only really saw me as Elliot Grey's geeky younger brother but that never really bothered me. Back then everything including my family came second to computers, but then we got Mia's diagnosis and I decided that she needed to be my priority, we'd always been really close, but her diagnosis changed everything. At first, we were told that there was good chance Mia would be able to beat the cancer but given that the location of the brain tumour it was inoperable but previous studies showed excellent results with chemotherapy, so we were all expecting good results.
In the beginning it appeared that the combination of the radiation and chemotherapy was working well, the tumor started shrinking. It wasn't until the second cycle that Mia began to really struggle, the first was a battle because of the nausea despite the fact she was maxed out of anti-nausea medications. The second round however, took so much more out of her than just her ability to eat, not only had she lost all her hair due to the radiation but because of the reduced immunity she very nearly became septic from urinary tract infection, the only reason she didn't was because our mom spotted the signs early and a got her to the hospital right away. That set her back significantly and they had to delay her third cycle because she was deemed to unwell for it to safely be carried out. At the end of six cycles she had a routine MRI to see how the tumor was progressing, we all hoped that it would show that the tumor was getting small or even gone. But I knew from the moment the doctor walked in that it wouldn't be good news, he just had this look in his eye, he told us that although at first the tumor had responded to the treatment it had become resistant and was re-growing and this time at a much faster rate.
At that point we were desperate to find something that would help so we looked into alternative treatments, such as genetic therapy but when they biopsied the tumor they found that it's genetic makeup was too similar to that of the healthy cells surrounding the tumor that any treatment they synthesized would attack the healthy cells as well. It was at that point we all got the new we had been dreading from the start, the cancer was untreatable and would likely kill her within a year or two but that within about eight months the tumor would have grown so far that it would be encroaching on vital structures and would cause seizures, vision issues and chronic pain. So we decided as a family that we would take the next however long we hand and make the most of it together, both our parents took sabbaticals from work, Elliot deferred his college acceptance a year and I enrolled to take my last year of classes online and we completed Mia's bucket list as a family.
Mia had so many dreams in life and even though we all tried our hardest to complete them in time, everything came to a blinding halt when she found and lump on her ribs almost three months after the final diagnosis. We went straight to the doctors, but they only able confirmed what we already expected, the cancer was progressing much faster than predicted. Mia no longer had a year or two she had six months at the most; the secondary lymphoma spread much faster through her body than the tumor was in her brain. Within a few weeks she had widespread pain that medication didn't ease and started losing weight faster than we could replace it and not even a month after the re-diagnosis she was bed and wheelchair bound because she was too weak to stand on her own. Instead of completing her bucket list like planned we all spent her final months spending as much time with her as we could and trying to complete what we could, but within two months she was gone, and it was still unfinished. From beginning to end it took less than a year for the cancer to take her. Fuck I miss her!
When she passed, I went into a downward spiral, I didn't care about anything anymore, not if Mia wasn't here to experience it with me. Once night shortly after we started college, Elliot and I got drunk and that was the first time I didn't feel that crushing sadness that followed me around, so the next night I did it again and then the next and so on, just so I didn't have to feel anymore. I started drinking to black out just so I didn't have to feel, it didn't seem fair that she was gone and I was still her so I gave up; I went out almost every night to a club or a bar with a fake ID and I would drink the night away until I was numb, then I would be too hung over to make it to class any time before midday and then it would start all over again. I was failing almost all my classes but at that point I didn't care, if Mia wasn't there to get an education why did it matter if I did or not.
It was on one of my benders that I lost my virginity, the sad truth is that I barely remember it, one night I was at a college party dancing with a girl, the next I was waking up the next morning in her bed completely naked. When I woke up that morning, I couldn't remember a single thing that happened, it was only when she told me what had happened that anything started to come back to me. Even after the hangover had lifted, I still couldn't put all the piece back together and to this day I don't remember it all just enough to know that it happened.
Mia had passed away the summer before we were set to start college and she made me promise that I would go to college so I could live out a dream that she would never be able to. To her it didn't matter that instead of taking French and Spanish like she would have I was taking computing and even though I was never going to be a teacher like she envisaged she still wanted me to go. But looking back now I was in no way ready to go I should have deferred a semester or even a year, just so I would be in the right headspace to go.
Elliot also went to college that year but instead of being in the year above like he had been my whole life he was in my year as he deferred a year so he could be there with Mia. Instead of going to St Louis Montana like Elliot had planned he decided to stay back and go to NYU with me, I wanted to stay so I could be closer to Mia, that's what Elliot said to. But looking back now I think it had more to do with me than Mia, I think he could see where I was and wanted to be there with me when I was ready for help.
The night I lost my virginity was the first time Mia did that I didn't make it back home, although given the state I was in back then it's a minor miracle that it hadn't happened sooner. Even if it didn't happen until early hours of the morning, I still managed to make it home but that night I didn't and honestly that scared me more than I wanted to admit at the time. That night was just before fall break, I decided then and there that I couldn't do this anymore, that Mia would have wanted more than this for me. So, I was done fucking around, I got my head down and started to catch up on all the work I had missed and went to every single class. I didn't touch a since ounce of alcohol that week, but when Halloween night rolled around and I caved, I didn't really think about how the holiday was going to hit me. During the week I'd pretty much locked myself in my room or the single study rooms in the library when I got bored of my room, so it hadn't really been something I'd thought about. Mia's favorite holiday was always Halloween, not because she got to dress up or loved all things horror, for her it was about the kids, she loved handing out all the candy and seeing them all so happy. She was always made to be a teacher or caregiver in someway so when she wasn't there to do that it hit me like a ton of bricks and everything, I'd managed to push away during that week came back with a vengeance all at once.
Since I'd started school, I'd managed to avoid seeing my parents in person, but I knew that I would have to go home at least for the weekend. I'd blamed my absence on school and struggling with the new course load but even though I'd begged of coming home for the entirety of the weeklong break, I went home Halloween night to be with them and Elliot who had been home the whole week. I managed to force myself to stay another night, but only because I found my dad's scotch to get me through the night, when I got back to school, it all started again, and I stayed out all night and got drunk and fell behind in my classes again.
It wasn't until a few weeks later when I was stumbling home one night that a girl helped me home and everything changed. The only reason I'd managed to hide everything from my friends and brother was purely because none of them had overlapping classes or lived near me at the time. So, I managed to stay under their radar, I'd still go out on a Friday and Saturday night with them, but they would all get drunk with me as college kids do and they thought nothing of the hungover Sunday brunch because they were too. I lied about how college was going to all of them just so I didn't have to feel like such a failure, the only person I didn't lie to was Taylor but that was only because I didn't get to speak to him while he was in Basic Training.
The night I met Ana was a few days before Thanksgiving, I broke down that night, and I let myself do something I hadn't done since Mia died. I let myself feel, feel everything I'd tried to move past without actually dealing with. I don't remember much before coming home, but meeting Ana was a sobering experience, I do remember her helping me back to my room and crying. The crying session wore me out and that coupled with the alcohol meant that I passed out. Waking up the next morning, in bed and tucked up with a garbage can made my heart hurt at the kindness and compassion she could offer to someone they barely knew. Once I finally stopped hurling that morning, I broke down again, this time I called Elliot, confessed everything, that I wasn't coping, that I couldn't keep doing this and that I needed help. He was the one who called our parents and told them because I wasn't strong enough at the time to do it for myself.
When he turned up a while later, I was still a broken mess, he held my while I sobbed, and he cried to, it made me feel a little less alone because if anyone could understand my pain after losing Mia, it was him. By the time our parents turned up we were both cried out, and exhausted, my parents helped me pack my stuff and told me that I was moving home until at least the New Year so I wouldn't have to worry about anything but getting the help I needed so I could start to move on. My parents sorted everything with the school, allowing me to take some time off and have my course load sent home so I wouldn't fall any farther behind. I started seeing a therapist specializing in grief counselling, at first, I didn't want to talk, even though I knew I couldn't keep going this way anymore I still couldn't bring myself to let someone in. It took until several days after Thanksgiving before I was finally ready to start talking and let someone know how much pain I was in, I think because before that it felt like if I moved on that I would be losing her all over again but that wasn't true.
Once I started to feel more like me again, I began to catch up with all my work. Elliot made sure to come home every weekend just so he could be there for me, at first it just pissed me off but eventually I realized how grateful and how lucky I was… am to have him; even Kate and Gail also made sure to pop by on a regular basis. It wasn't until Christmas hit and I didn't feel that pressing need to numb myself just to make it through the day that I realized how far I'd come, by that point we'd all agreed that I no longer needed the daily sessions and was down to three a week. In the New Year both my therapist and I agreed that I was ready to go back to school, it wasn't until about a week after school started back up again that I tried to look for the mysterious girl who probably saved my life or at the very least turned my life around. I hacked into the school's, CCTV feed for the elevator to see if I could get a picture of her to run through facial recognition. But when I did there were no matches, and definitely not to any Anastasia's at NYU, so as a last-ditch attempt, I asked the group if any of them knew her, maybe she was a friend of a friend. But no one knew her, I didn't think they would remember her but by the looks on their faces they all clearly do.
I don't realize how long I've been stuck in my head until and angry 'Christian' is shouted at me and when I focus my vision to find out who shouted, it doesn't take long for me to figure out who it came from if the enraged look on Kate's face is anything to go by.
"You're a fucking moron, you know that?" I must give Kate a look of pure confusion because she points just to the left of me in clarification, I realize notice Ana is no longer standing next to me. I spin round to try and find her, I only just spot the end of Ben's tail as they disappear out the door. I run after her shouting her name and trying to apologize, but it's only when I catch up to her that I realize I have no idea what to say.
This chapter got away from me, I fully intended to just write a little about why Christian didn't tell the group Ana was coming, but this chapter just kept going and who was I to deny it.
Also, please excuse any errors I edited this chapter myself.
Anyway, thanks as always for reading.
FearfullyBrave.
P.S. Sorry if I made anyone cry.