I'm back with another sporadic update. Now that I think about it, the first few chapters of this story are probably going to be sporadic. Because I'm lazy and I don't like going back to read things I wrote over three months ago. Also because I'm trying to keep up with two fics at once, and neither of them are finished.

Sorry.

Well, up until this point it's been nothing but backstory. We're done with that. I promise.

Well, almost. But that's something we'll worry about in another update.

Once more with the trigger warnings: angst, shipping, lethargy, drama, major character death and CANCER. WE CAN NOT FORGET ABOUT THE CANCER.

And again with the self-promotion: follow asking-appelia on tumblr. Because that's me. My posts on there are almost as scattered as the updates I make on here. You can follow my main blog at lord-ravioli if you don't mind getting spammed with reblogs every day. Most of them are pretty worth seeing, though. Otherwise I wouldn't have reblogged them.

Now it's time to figure out where the hell I' m actually going with this story. Thanks for sitting through the background crap. Hope you enjoy the rest of it.

For the record, signing up for the support group wasn't my idea.

I guess you can say I blame Mikasa for getting me into all the deep shit that I'm in now. After all, I wasn't the one who came sweeping through the door one summer afternoon toting a flyer that I'd just ripped off a coffee shop bulletin board.

I was up in my room, as usual, with my shades pulled down and my laptop sitting in front of me on my bed, streaming as much Netflix as I could possibly fit into a 24-hour period. Since the past two summers had been nothing but leukemia, leukemia-related misfortunes and other leukemia by-products, I wasn't really expecting anything from that one. Well, other than another relapse and hospital stay. But at that point in my life, that was something I had sort of started to expect every day.

I almost missed the first warning sign, the slamming of the front door. My headphones had almost completely blocked out the noise. I was lucky enough to hear just the faintest whisper of an exhaustive slam slip through and think to hit pause before the noise of combat boots stamped out their steady rhythm on the hardwood floor of the downstairs hallway. After that came the scattered thump of an overstuffed messenger bag hitting the floor. I took my headphones off just in time to catch Mikasa shouting.

"Eren!" she called from the bottom of the stairs. "Eren, I'm back! You there?"

I sighed and shut the lid of my laptop. "Am I ever not?" I shot back.

Something that sounded like a breathy, half-assed attempt at human speech echoed in the hallway downstairs. A few seconds later, the footsteps in the entryway had moved to the staircase. And they were getting louder.

That was about when my adrenaline kicked in. In a matter of seconds, I'd thrown my shades up and kicked my laptop under the disordered pile of blankets on my bed. I hissed as the afternoon sunlight came flooding into my room, assaulting my eyes with its deathly brightness.

"Hey. I saw that," a cold, level voice said.

I whirled around, my eyes still squinting against the sunlight. Mikasa was leaning against the doorframe. The look on her face was stuck somewhere between indifference and slight disappointment.

I smiled nervously. "Heh. Hey, Mikasa."

Mikasa stepped over the threshold of my door, her arms crossed tightly over her chest. The studs on her green khaki vest glinted in the newly revealed sunlight. I was surprised they hadn't snagged on her scarf. In fact, I was surprised the scarf hadn't snagged on anything she owned yet, since half of it was covered in studs or zippers or whatever the fuck else made clothing look hardcore and she wore that blasted red scarf every day. She looked at me and narrowed her kohl-lined eyes. "What have you been doing in here all day?"

"Um... Y-yeah, about that..." I stammered, my brain scrambling to find a response. I tried to think back to that morning. What had I been doing all day? Nothing especially significant would come to mind. I woke up. That was just about it.

Mikasa sighed. "Nothing?"

I nodded. No getting around this now.

"Have you even left your room today?"

"Well, I did for a while, but that wasn't really-"

"You know what? Never mind. I don't really care." She took a few steps further into my room, her hands relocated to her hips. She looked around at the minor trainwrecked state that my room always seemed to be in, no matter how often I cleaned up in there. A second later, her eyes landed on me. "You're still in your pajamas, aren't you?"

I looked down. Sure enough, there was a rumpled old Black Sabbath shirt and pair of grey plaid boxers hanging off of my just-a-little-emaciated frame.

"Um... yes."

"Do you have any idea what time it is?"

I glanced at the clock sitting on my dresser. It was 3:14 in the afternoon.

Shit.

"Eren, for the love of-" Mikasa growled under her breath and slapped a hand to her forehead. "Okay. I'm going to walk out. And you'd better be dressed by the time I get back. Got it?"

I nodded. I didn't think Mikasa would be too cross with me just for wasting nearly eight hours doing the closest thing to nothing that I could do without being six feet under. She'd never gone all-out on me like she'd done to her eighth-grade ex-boyfriend. And I knew she never would. Besides, it wasn't like wasting days on end like this was anything new, coming from me. But I still wasn't about to screw around with her. For all I knew, if I didn't do as I was told she'd strip me down and redress me herself.

Sometimes I really wished she didn't care about me so much.

I watched as Mikasa spun on her heel and traipsed out into the hallway. The door of her room swung shut a few seconds later, then I heard the loud, heavy thump of her combat boots flying off and hitting the door of her closet. I immediately ran to my dresser and ripped the drawers open. Within a few seconds, I'd dragged out a fresh tee shirt and pair of cargo shorts and swapped out my pajamas for the clothes I'd be wearing for however many hours remained of that day.

Mikasa came back three minutes later. "Impressive," she said, a smirk tugging at her lips.

I glanced over my shoulder at her. "Yeah. Because nothing wakes you up like a nice panic attack, right?"

"Come into the kitchen," she said. She walked into the room and grabbed me by the wrist, removing the possibility that there would be any choice in the matter. "There's something I wanted to show you."

I turned and let her drag me towards the door. "What is it?"

"You'll see. Come on."

I shuffled along behind her, still feeling as though I had just woken up. I couldn't even remember what time I actually had woken up that morning, only that by then, my dad had already left for work and Mikasa had gone to meet some people for her volunteer position at the library over the summer. When we got to the kitchen, I didn't see anything out of the ordinary. I started to wonder exactly what it was that Mikasa had wanted me to see.

"Um, Mikasa-"

"Alright, so before we get into this, I just want to explain something," she said, reaching for a crumpled sheet of bright orange printer paper. I stared at it. What was that?

"I stopped at Beans on the way back from the meeting for that position at the library today. You know Beans, that little coffee shop in the middle of town?"

I stared numbly at her. "Yeah. Sort of."

"Well, I was there, just hanging around waiting for my order to come in when one of the baristas recognized me. Turned out that she was one of the senior advisors from last year. She took us around the school for orientation. Her name's Clara. Remember?"

"Vaguely," I mumbled.

"Anyway, she asked me how you were doing-"

"And what did you tell her?" I cut in.

Mikasa glared at me. "You gonna let me finish first?"

I returned the favor. "Mikasa, seriously. What did you tell her?"

She sighed and flicked a stray hair out of her face. Okay, I'll admit it. I might have been getting a little defensive. But Mikasa knew that I got that way sometimes. Or all the time. Either way, I was fairly sure that after putting up me for four years, Mikasa had just stopped giving a shit.

"The truth."

"Which is..."

"Think of it this way. You know what just happened upstairs?"

"Yeah. So?"

"Take that scenario and stretch it out over a span of about four years."

I blinked. Mikasa certainly knew how to put shit into perspective.

She straightened up and started over. "Anyway, Clara said that a couple of people from some organization at Trost Regional came in about a week ago and asked to put some ads up on their bulletin board. She said that it would probably help you deal with... you know. Everything."

I nodded, not entirely sure what I was agreeing with. "Okay. So... what is this about?"

Mikasa smirked and swept the crumpled sheet of paper towards her. She picked it up and shoved it towards me like a gift from an extremely aggressive Santa Claus. "They still had one poster left. There used to be a pull-tabs attached to the bottom with the phone number and everything else, but they'd all been ripped off. The info's on the poster, though, so I just took the whole thing."

I backed up a few inches to read the clear, blocky text.

Suffering from cancer? You don't have to.

Trost Regional Hospital

Join YCSG!

(Youth Cancer Support Group)

June 27th - August 28th

In your struggle with cancer, have you ever felt alone?

Singled out? Unlucky?

Well, believe it or not, there are lots of people who have felt the same.

By joining the Trost Regional YCSG, you will become a valued member of a highly effective peer support group of people just like you. Take the chance to talk to other people between the ages of 12 and 18 who have gone through the same struggles as you. People who will understand.

Build new friendships. Learn how to cope. And above all, stay strong.

You are not alone in your struggle. Our main goal is to prove it to you.

I found myself staring at the paper, suddenly having lost the ability to blink. My eyes stuck to a single phrase at the top of the page. Support group.

Support Group.

"So let me get this straight...You want me to go to group therapy?"

Mikasa rolled her eyes, dropping her hands to her sides. "No, Eren, I want you to go to a giant rave party where everyone just happens to have cancer."

My gaze flickered up from the paper and latched onto her face. "Mikasa, are you fucking serious? I mean, do you actually think I'm that bad? I mean, sure, sometimes you are perfectly justified in hovering over me when I can't get my shit together, but I really don't think that-"

"Of course you don't," she said, turning away and leaving the paper face-up on the table. "I didn't think you would. That's why I signed you up ahead of time."

I suddenly felt as though I'd fallen face-first into cement. "You what?!"

Mikasa turned around to face me. She seemed just as calm and collected as always. "What? You weren't going to do it. Someone had to."

"No," I spat, shaking my head. "No, no one had to do anything. I'm fine. I don't need..." I flicked my hand at the paper. "... group therapy or whatever this shit is."

Mikasa's face didn't change, but I saw her eyes flare in frustration. "Okay. Let me get one thing straight, Eren," she snapped, her voice turning stone-cold and factual. "You've been acting like an emotionally repressed little pansy for the past four years of your life. At first, that was fine. You'd just been diagnosed. That's a lot of deep, dark shit to get dumped onto your shoulders all at once. Not to mention that Mom had just died of the exact same thing. So I sort of expected you to take up the hopeless, lethargic, oh-god-what-do-I-do mentality. But you know what's supposed to happen after that, Eren? You get over it. You accept what your life has turned into and you learn to cope with it."

"And you think that's not something I've been trying to do?"

Mikasa stared at me, taking on an expression I can only refer to as her are-you-fucking-kidding-me face.

"Look, Mikasa, I've given it my best. I tried going to the guidance counselor after Mom died. After I got diagnosed, too. And I kept my grades up while I was still in school. Getting homeschooled wasn't my idea. And it's not like it was something I wanted to do. I just couldn't keep up with all the time I was spending in the hospital-"

"And that's why you should go," Mikasa finished for me as if that were actually what I was going to say. Her face softened again. She stopped leaning against the counter and took a step towards me. "I know that things have been hard for you. And trust me. They've been hard for me, too. It wasn't just your mom who died. And it sure as hell wasn't your brother who'd been given the closest thing to a death sentence that doesn't involve going to court."

My eyes widened. Leave it to Mikasa to make you realize exactly how much of a selfish asshole you really are.

"And let's face it," she went on. "You need to make some friends somewhere."

My brain stuttered. Did I hear that right? "A-are you telling me that I have no friends?"

"Am I the one who spends half his life in the house and the other half in the hospital?"

I fixed her with a deadened stare and pressed my lips into a taut, frustrated line. "Okay, fine. Maybe I do need to get some friends. Maybe."

Her face brightened up again. She leaned forward, flattening out the flyer on the table under her hands. "So are you agreeing to this, or am I going to have to drug you and bring you in the trunk of dad's car?"

I sighed in defeat. "You already signed me on, so I'm just going to take a wild guess and say neither isn't an option."

Mikasa straightened up and smiled. "So the answer is yes, then." She spun around and walked out of the kitchen."Oh, and the first meeting is on the twenty-fourth," she called over her shoulder.

Well. That told me what I would be doing next Tuesday.

On June twenty-fourth at approximately 2:56 PM, I climbed out of my dad's car and planted my feet on the pavement of the Trost Regional Hospital parking lot. Mikasa spilled out of the passenger seat, the support group flyer sloppily folded up and crammed into her messenger bag. She said a quick goodbye to our dad, promising him that yes, it was an hour exactly, and he wouldn't have to wait around for us too long before we got out.

I could not believe I had agreed to this.

Mikasa rounded the front bumper of the car and stood in front of me, digging around her bag for the flyer. I slammed the back left door shut as she unearthed the crumpled piece of paper from the jumbled mess inside. She tugged it out of its fragile origami folds.

"Alright. The flyer said conference room 4A, which is on the... first floor."

I still could not believe I had agreed to this.

Dad backed out of his parking space and rolled back out onto the road, headed back towards his microbiology lab to do whatever infectious disease research that wouldn't help me in the least that he'd been doing lately. Mikasa and I started across the parking lot, drawing closer to the towering structure that I'd seen far too many times in my life. I don't think anything would have made me happier than seeing it burn to the ground. I spent enough time in the hospital as it was. I was sick of this place. If I had to start going twice a week like the flyer commanded, I would go insane.

In no conceivable way could I believe that I had... fuck it. You get the point.

I kept up with the fast clip of Mikasa's boots as we walked through the huge glass-paneled automatic doors at the main entrance. She marched straight up to the front desk, leaving me straggling behind. Clearly, someone was a lot more eager than someone else.

"Hi," she said cordially to the receptionist. "Me and my brother are here for the cancer support group. How do we get to conference room 4A?"

"4A?" the receptionist echoed, looking up from her computer screen. "That's just down the hall to your left, then a right at the elevators. It's a straight shot through radiology from there."

"Thanks," Mikasa said with a nod. She spun around, taking me by the elbow just as I caught up with her. She reassuringly squeezed the barely-there flesh of my arm and tugged me towards the appointed hallway. I sighed. No turning back now. I was going to do this group therapy thing, whether I liked it or not.

Neither of us spoke as Mikasa led me through the all-too-familiar hospital corridors towards whatever waited for me at the end. Finally, after dodging wheelchairs, laundry carts and rolling IV dispensers, we found ourselves in a relatively quiet hallway lined with fake oakwood doors. I glanced at the numbers beside each. 1A. 2A. 3A.

Conference room 4A. Mikasa grabbed the handle and pushed the door open.

I stepped into the room, my eyes darting in a million different directions at once. There wasn't much inside. Just a lot of cheap folding chairs, a projection screen on one wall that had been rolled up into its container, and a long table that had been pushed off to the side. The chairs had been arranged in a circle, leaving a big empty space in the middle of the room. And scattered all around were...

Kids. Just a surprising number of kids. All of them were around my age.

I don't know what I had been expecting.

I took another step and made a beeline for an empty chair in the corner of the room. The area around it looked relatively empty. Maybe that would send enough of a message to the others that I was being held here against my will and I would be leaving once all this bullshit was over and done with.

I could only make it halfway across the room before I felt a huge, muscular hand clamp over my shoulder.

"Hey!"

I whirled around, ready to snap at the stranger to leave me alone, and nearly had a heart attack the second I laid eyes on the person who had dared to violate my personal space. Standing before me was probably the biggest, scariest guy that I had ever met. He must have been over six feet tall and had more muscle on him than I could ever hope to see in my life. I had to step back to get a good look at his face. He had a huge, angular nose, narrow brown eyes and a smile that was so bright it kind of pissed me off. His hair was blonde and crew-cut close to his scalp. Either that or he'd recently started growing it back in.

"U-Um, hi," I stammered. God, he was so friendly it was terrifying. "I-I'm Eren."

"Reiner," he said, offering a hand. I hesitated before taking it only to get my bones crushed by an aggressively warm handshake. "Always nice seeing a new face in the crowd."

I let out a nervous laugh. "Y-yeah, I guess so."

I made a break for the empty chair the second he let me go.

I crash landed on the chair, my hand still numb from that stupid handshake. I made a mental note to stay away from Reiner unless I wanted to get pulverized. My eyes did a sweep of the room, searching for Mikasa. She was standing on the other side of the room, talking to some girl in lavender nurse scrubs with a messy brown ponytail and a pair of thick, nerdy-looking glasses. My sister glanced over her shoulder at me and shot me a triumphant smirk.

Help me, I mouthed to her.

Mikasa turned back to her new buddy and made some quick comment that made glasses break out in smiles and let out a loud, pitchy laugh. Then she turned, walked towards me and collapsed into the chair beside mine.

"So," she said. "Who was that blonde guy who grabbed you by the door?"

"That was..." I searched my memory for his name. "Fuck. I can't remember."

Mikasa smirked again. "Awwww. He's making friends already." She dramatically wiped a few nonexistent tears from her face and placed a hand over her heart. "I'm so proud."

I folded my arms and sighed. "Shut up, Mikasa."

While I avoided looking at Mikasa, just in case she was still smirking like an idiot, my eyes started wandering around the room. There was a surprising number of kids. Before I showed up, I hadn't had the slightest idea of what it was that I was getting myself into. I didn't think Mikasa did, either. I was thinking that maybe it would be a bunch of traumatized basket cases all packed into a single room. Either that or a flock of wilting half-corpses sitting in wheelchairs and dragging around oxygen tanks. But now that I was here, the closest thing that I could compare this to was probably a classroom after a teacher leaves to make copies or something. Everyone was wandering around, seeming just a little confused, as if they weren't used to being left alone in a room without any adult supervision. Some of them were sitting, some of them standing, a couple of them were even talking as if they were already best friends. Most of them probably were.

"Alright, people, we're starting in a few minutes! Everybody take a seat!"

My head swiveled around to find the source of the voice. It was glasses girl. I stared at her for a second. She seemed a little enthusiastic for someone who was running a support group for dying kids. It made me wonder whether or not she actually knew what kind of organization she was running here.

My attention was distracted long enough to miss the tiny blonde chick dropping into the chair on the other side of me.

I looked over my shoulder at the sound of denim shorts hitting woven nylon. A girl had magically appeared in the chair next to mine, her head down and her over-long bangs hanging dismally over her face, her body slumped over underneath a grey sweatshirt that must have been at least three sizes too big for her. She glanced over at me for a split second, as if she could feel my eyes on her and the sensation pissed her off. Something told me she wanted to be here just about as much as I did.

I gave her a casual nod. "Hey," I said.

The second the word was out of my mouth, the girl dropped her gaze, slipped a cell phone out of her sweatshirt pocket and started tapping at the screen.

I sighed, rolling my eyes and tilting my head back. "Okay, that's fine," I mumbled. "Whip out your phone and start texting the second someone tries to talk to you. That's really cool."

I heard a disgruntled sigh to my left, then more furious tapping. I turned around to see the girl holding her phone up, the screen centered in the palm of her hand and inches away from my face. It was opened to a note-writing app, and a block of text was stamped across the fake yellow note paper on the screen.

I'm not texting. I can't speak, you insensitive prick.

My eyes flicked back and forth between the screen and her face. Her hooded blue eyes were glaring angry daggers into mine. It was only then that I noticed the tiny white scar at the base of her throat. As soon as I did, I felt the color drain from my face and my insides suddenly seemed to have stopped existing. I took a shaky, nervous breath.

"Oh."

Before that situation could become even more awkward than it already was, the door to the conference room slammed shut. My spine snapped bolt upright and my head spun in the direction of the noise. I hadn't even realized the door had been open in the first place.

"Quiet down, people! We're getting started!"

The girl with the glasses was shouting again. I let slip another exasperated sigh and recentered myself in my chair. Everybody else had taken up a spot in the circle. There was only one chair left unoccupied. Glasses quickly claimed it for herself.

"Okay," she said, her voice sounding just as irritatingly bright as the smile on her face. She was holding a little plastic clipboard now and tapping against it with a pen. "Well, first things first, I want to thank everybody for coming. Welcome to the fourth operational year of the Youth Cancer Support Group! For all our new members, which I think includes most of you, welcome to the group, and for everyone coming back from last year, welcome back! It's great to see all of you again!" She flashed a smile at two older-looking guys sitting together at one end of the chair circle. The gargantuan blonde guy was one of them. I should have guessed.

"Before we start, I just want to tell all of you new recruits a little bit about the Youth Cancer Support Group, just in case you didn't know what you were getting into when you signed up for this."

I certainly didn't. Well, isn't that just fan-fucking-tastic.

"The Trost Regional YCSG is an independently run organization that is funded by the hospital and that's pretty much all they have to do with it. The support group was started four years ago by a group of oncology nurses who noticed that a few of their patients needed a little more help coping with their disease than they were getting. We started off pretty small, and each year, the group has gotten a few more members. This year we've worked our way up to..." She stopped for a second to glance at the clipboard. "... twelve members. Wow. That's more than I thought." She smiled again, crossing her legs and tapping the clipboard on her knees.

"Now, since this is our first session of the summer, we should probably start things out with an introduction. We're just going to start things off by going around the entire circle and telling everybody else a little bit about ourselves. And remember guys, we don't do passes here. This is a support group, so we're supposed to be supporting each other. And I don't think that your name should be something that you'd be uncomfortable sharing with the group. There's no getting out of this, so please don't try." Her enthusiasm dropped for the briefest of seconds before bubbling right back up to the surface. "I'll go ahead and start things off." She stood up, placing her clipboard gingerly on the chair. "Hi, everyone. I'm Hanji Zoe."

I wasn't sure if the rest of the group was supposed to respond with a deadpan "Hi, Hanji" or not.

"I'm twenty-one years old, and I work as an LPN at Trost Regional. I am also a student in Sina State University during the year, and I'm working towards my bachelor's and full RN certification. I've been assisting in oncology for a year, I've been part of the YCSG since my first day, and I don't see myself leaving anytime soon." She finished with another half-witted smile before sitting down and nodding to her right.

The circuit of public embarrassment continued on its course to a nervous-looking guy sitting directly next to Hanji. With an unsteady motion, he straightened his legs out and stood up to his full height. I nearly snapped my neck trying to keep track of his face. He was even taller than blondie, towering over him by maybe three or four inches. His dark brown hair looked uncomfortably damp. So did his clothes. I shuddered. Probably a nervous sweater.

"Um... hi," he started, offering the group a forced smile. "My name's Bertolt. Bertolt Hoover." He paused, glancing over his shoulder at the massive blonde guy who had been sitting next to him. He nodded as if to say go on. Bertolt looked back up and continued. "Okay. I... Well, I'm eighteen years old, and I have osteosarcoma. I was diagnosed when I was fourteen, and I've been in remission for almost two years now. Let's see, what else..." He picked nervously at the edge of his pocket. "I've been part of the YCSG for the past three years, and it's been a really great experience. I met a lot of really great friends through it, and... That's just about it, I think." He collapsed back into his chair the second his speech was over.

"Nice job, Bert. Way better than last year," someone in the circle said.

The massive blonde guy who'd grabbed me by the door shook his head at the commentator and sighed before swaggering to his feet. "Hey," he said, starting things out with a bang. "For any of you who haven't met me yet, the name's Reiner Braun. I'm seventeen, and I've been in the YCSG ever since the first meeting. Back when I was in eighth grade, I was diagnosed with melanoma, which looks something like this." He pulled back the sleeve of his shirt to reveal a huge discolored patch of skin on his shoulder.

I immediately wanted to pour bleach in my eyes.

It was dark, drying-blood red in some spots, a peeling-scab brown color in others, with a vague similarity to molting reptile scales. His skin was making mine crawl. While I resisted the urge to vomit, a few murmurs of discontent were emitted from the circle. Reiner probably could have done without giving us that lovely example of his skin deformity.

Thankfully, he tugged his sleeve back down a second later. "So, as you can see, it's not exactly pretty. But being in the support group has really helped me a lot. It's helped me get over the insecurity that my disease had caused, and I've also made a lot of friends through it. It's been an amazing three years so far, and I hope it'll do just as much for you as it did for me." He sat back down with a smile.

"I told you not to show them the skin thing!" the same voice from before shouted.

"Hey, can you shut your mouth until it's your turn?" someone else snapped.

"No."

The girl next to Reiner ignored the side commentary and stood up. I took in her deep tan, even deeper freckles, and dark brown hair, the shortness and choppiness of which seemed to be a choice rather than the inevitable result of cancer treatment. "My name's Ymir," she deadpanned, not even bothering to give the group a greeting as the others had done. No last name, either. "I'm seventeen, and my cancer is rhabdomyosarcomas. If you don't know what that is,then it's basically like what Bertolt has, only it affects soft tissues instead of bone. I was diagnosed two years ago, and I've never gone into total remission. This is my first year in the support group, and..." She shrugged. "That's it." She sat down before that anonymous commentator could say a word.

The next girl seemed like a fairy in comparison to Ymir. She had to be the tiniest person I had ever seen, with big, expressive blue eyes and a peachy complexion that was dangerously close to my mom's. Her golden-blonde hair looked softer than a baby's, falling over her shoulders in wispy, uneven layers. "Hi, everyone," she said. Or sang. It could have been either one, with a voice like hers. "My name is Krista Lenz. I'm seventeen years old, and, well... I don't actually have cancer. But before anyone says anything, I just want to explain something. I might not have cancer myself, but my mother did. She died when I was just a baby, so I grew up with my grandparents, and..." She trailed off, her wide blue eyes staring off into the distance. She shook her head a second later, letting out a breath I hadn't realized she'd been holding. "... and you can ask me about that later if you're interested." She blinked before forcing a smile onto her pretty face again. "Anyway, I've been a part of the support group for two years, everything's been fantastic so far, and that's all there really is to say." She settled back into her chair. The entire circle had its eyes glued to her, mine included. That had to be the most tragic backstory reveal I would be hearing today.

"Yeah, Krissy!" the commentator from before blurted out. Okay, now that was starting to piss me off.

My vision snapped in the direction of the voice. It was coming from the kid in the chair right next to Krista. Or at least he used to be in the chair. Now he was standing up, looking all too eager to humiliate himself. The first thing I noticed about him was that he was completely bald. Well, mostly. There was a thin layer of fluff covering his scalp that hinted at his hair maybe being black, but that was it. His face was drawn up in a huge, stonery smile. It made me wonder if he'd ever even actually been stoned in his life.

"Hey, asshole, can it with the commentary and get on with the introduction," someone hissed.

"Alright, alright," he said, dropping the stoner grin. "Hi, everybody. My name's Connie Springer, and, unlike almost everybody else who's been talking so far, I still don't have my license. I'm sixteen years old, I have Ewing's sarcoma,which I was diagnosed with two years ago. I was put on medication and went into remission pretty quickly, but, as you can see, it's got a few side effects." He suppressed a laugh, brushing a hand over his scalp fluff.

Well, that explained the hair thing.

"This is my second year in the support group, and for all the newbies, I'm just going to put this out there. It doesn't suck as much as you think it will. It's actually pretty cool. And you get a lot out of it that you don't think you will. But you do. Trust me."

With that, Connie dropped back into his chair and tapped the shoulder of the girl beside him. She glanced over her shoulder at him, looking uneasy. He flashed her another of his toasted grins, and she sighed and stood up. She looked relatively healthy for someone in this kind of support group. Her skin wasn't pale or shadowy like some of the others', and her cherrywood-brown hair was still pretty long, by cancer patient standards.

The only problem with her was that she was an absolute twig.

Seriously. It was like seeing a stick figure that someone had decided to give clothing and a face. I was surprised that this girl could stand without her legs snapping underneath her.

"Hello. My name is Sasha Braus," she said. "I'm sixteen, going to be seventeen in a month. This is my first year with the YCSG. I know Connie from school, and he's the one who got me into it. My disease is colon cancer, which wound up giving me a malabsorption disorder after getting about a third of my digestive system removed, so please don't ask me how I stay so skinny. It's not exactly a choice." She paused for a second, as if this had all been scripted and she had forgotten her lines. "Um... I've been in remission for about a year after the surgeries and everything. I was diagnosed in seventh grade, and it was a really big shock to my entire family. The new lifestyle and everything has taken a lot of getting used to, and... and I'm glad that Connie got me into this support group, because I really needed it." She took a deep, shaky breath, then glanced over her shoulder at the guy sitting next to her. He offered up a small, reassuring smile and gave her a subtle thumbs-up. Sasha dropped back into her seat without a second to spare. The next victim stood up.

"Hi. I'm pretty sure most of you already know me. My name's Marco Bodt."

Marco immediately struck me as the kind of person it would be impossible to hate.

I don't know what it was about him that was just so... inviting. His dark hair looked soft and springy, as if it hadn't been too long since it had grown in. He was pretty tall, had a cheerful collection of freckles sprinkled across his face, and could probably have passed for a healthy teenage guy to some random stranger off the street. But not to someone who knew the signs of a cancer sufferer all too well. The longer I stared, the more I noticed that his skin was just a little too pale, that there were faint shadows under his eyes, that his clothes seemed to hang off of him just a little too loosely. But for what it was worth, he hid his symptoms well.

"I'm seventeen years old," he continued, "and I've been a part of the support group ever since it first started. I was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer when I was eleven. I was already in stage IIB, so things were pretty bad to begin with, and I've been in and out of remission since then. As of now, it's been almost four months since my last relapse, and I don't plan on going back for a while if I can help it. As for things to say about the support group... well, I guess it's up to you guys to decide what to think." He sat back down on his chair, a satisfied glow just behind the freckled surface of his face. He cast a sideways glance at the guy next to him, as if he were expecting something. The guy didn't move. Marco sighed. "Jean, aren't you going to say something?"

"What? Me? Dude, no. This is for the support group." I recognized his voice as the one that had snapped at Connie a few introductions ago.

"But you're in the support group."

"Not really. I just show up at the meetings. I don't have-"

"Tell them your name, at least."

With an exaggerated sigh, the guy stood up. He was relatively tall, lanky and skinny in a way that seemed a lot more natural than the way Sasha or Marco or anybody else in the room was. Not that it made him any prettier. His vaguely horse-like face took care of that.

"Okay, if you didn't hear Marco bitching at me before, my name's Jean. Jean Kirschtein." Even the sound of his voice pissed me off. And his name. Jean. Jsheaahhn. His parents must have thought he would grow up to be fancy or something.

"I don't have cancer. Honestly, I'm just here for moral support. I've been friends with Marco since second grade, and when he started going to the support group meetings, I started going too. That's the only reason I'm here, really." He sat back down without another word.

Jean Kirschtein was clearly the biggest man-bitch I would ever meet.

"Armin. Hey, Armin, you're up next."

The sound of Hanji's voice broke through the sound barrier of my personal bubble. I realized that the room had been quiet for almost a whole minute. I glanced around the circle, trying to figure out exactly where it was that we left off.

"What? Me? Oh, sorry..."

My gaze settled on a tiny, frail-looking kid sitting in the chair next to Jean. I stared at him for a while, not sure what to make of... well, I wasn't really sure if it was a him or not. There seemed to be nothing about him or her that struck me as exceptionally gender-related either way. He/she/it had wide, sky-blue eyes peeking shyly out from under a thick layer of dirty blonde skater hair that reminded me vaguely of a coconut shell. The kid was probably the scrawniest excuse for a human that I have ever seen, with a body that probably could have belonged to either a really skinny guy or a really underdeveloped girl, making the whole gender situation even more confusing.

"Hi. I'm Armin. Arlert. I'm... I'm Armin Arlert," he stuttered. At least I thought so. The voice was a little too low to be a girl. Pretty squeaky by guy standards, though.

"I'm sixteen years old, and my cancer is non-Hodgkins lymphoma. I was diagnosed when I was six, and I've had it pretty much all my life. Apparently lymphoma is a really common thing in my family. We've never been able to figure out if there's a genetic link or not, but lot of my relatives were diagnosed with the same thing, but a lot later than I was, and, well... most of them aren't around anymore. I guess I was lucky that they caught mine so early on." He jammed his hands into his cargo short pockets and took a breath before continuing. "Other than all that, I guess I have to say I've been doing pretty well. I've been in remission for almost six years now, and my last cancer-related hospital visit was more than a year ago, which is actually a record for me. So I guess I'm okay as far as all that is concerned. I haven't been declared cancer-free or anything yet, but... Things are looking up, I think." He dropped back into his chair, red-faced and breathless.

I could have sworn I heard the voiceless girl next to me whisper Why is he even here?

She was the next to stand up. The circle waited for her to speak up and introduce herself. Instead, she pulled her phone out of her pocket and started poking at the screen again. She crossed over to Reiner and tapped on his scaly, disease-ridden shoulder.

"Hm?" he mumbled, looking up at her. She pushed her phone shyly towards him. "Me? Oh. Okay." He took the phone in his huge, brawny hands and began reading from the screen.

"My name is Annie Leonhart," he read out loud. He glanced over at the little blonde. "Leonhart? That's a cool name." He went back to reading. "I am seventeen years old. This is my first year with the support group. Well, welcome to the club, Annie." He kept going back and forth between her and the introduction she'd given him. "I was diagnosed with laryngeal cancer when I was thirteen. I contracted it from secondhand smoke from my grandparents, who I spent a lot of my childhood with. Two years ago I had to have my vocal cords surgically removed because of a tumor that could have possibly gone malignant, which is why I can no longer speak." Reiner stopped and stared at the palm-sized screen in front of him. He switched his focus to Annie again, sympathy in his eyes. "Wow. I- I'm so sorry to hear that." His face taking on a slight frown, he turned back to her cell phone only to see that there wasn't any script left to read. He handed Annie's cell phone back, and the both of them sat down, one looking significantly more stunned than the other. I felt an elbow dig into my ribs.

"Hey, Eren," Mikasa whispered to me. "You're up next."

"Huh? What- oh." I looked around at the rest of the support group. Everyone's eyes were on me. My pulse thundering in my ears, I took a deep breath and forced myself to stand.

"H-hi, my name is Eren Jaeger," I began. My face was heating up more than a bad sunburn. "I'm sixteen years old. This is my first year in the support group, so I don't really have anything to say about it just yet." I stopped for a second, my brain scrabbling for more details. What had everyone else used? What came next? Oh, right. Diagnosis. Cancer stuff. "I have acute myelogenous leukemia, which was diagnosed when I was twelve. I've been in and out of the hospital in the past few years, but I've been in remission for just a little over three months. And..." I trailed off, trying to find something else to say. My mom. There was always my mom. She was certainly a conversation starter. Walk into a room, bring her up and suddenly Hey! Not only is this kid dying, but he's also half an orphan!

I took another deep breath and decided against it. I didn't care how much of a plot hole it would leave. I didn't want these people to start feeling sorry for me. I just wanted to get this over with and leave.

"And that's all there is to it, really," I deadpanned. I collapsed back into my chair like a faulty Jenga tower. Mikasa stood up without a moment's hesitation.

"Hi, everyone, my name is Mikasa Ackerman. I'm Eren's sister. Adopted, but I still consider myself his sister. I don't have cancer, so I guess that means I'm here for moral support. I've tried to be there for Eren, but we both agreed that he needed to get help from a few people other than me. You see, the funny thing about Eren's cancer is that it was the same kind that we lost our mother to when we were ten."

My eyes widened and my mouth fell open. The entire support group was staring at Mikasa. Except for the few of them who were staring at me instead.

Well, that was one way to drop a bombshell.

"So it's been a rough road so far, but we've been doing our best to pull through. And that's what we plan to do for as long as we can."

Leaving it at that, she sat back down. I immediately turned to her and stared, my eyes practically screaming WHAT THE FUCK, MIKASA?!

She glanced at me, responding with a sorry, but hey, they had to find out somehow face.

We'd almost made it completely around the circle of social suicide. Hanji was two chairs away from me. Mikasa was blocking my view of whoever it was that had been sitting in the third chair this entire time, and I hadn't felt like putting up the effort of leaning over to see who it was. They didn't make any move to stand up. Maybe there was no one sitting there at all.

I considered the possibility for a while. Then I stopped when Hanji turned to the silent spot between her and Mikasa and said, "Well? You're the last one."

I heard a heavy sigh come drifting up from the chair. Then the stranger sitting in it stood up for all the support group to see.

I felt my heart stop the second I saw him.

It was a guy. I could have sworn that I'd seen him somewhere before. I recognized the dispassionate, almost bored expression on his face, the neat undercut of straight, jet-black hair, the sharp gray eyes that seemed to pierce through my skin and into my soul. He was short, really short, but still struck me as someone who could take down a man twice his size. It was probably his arms. They were sticking out of the short sleeves of his mint-green scrubs, just as toned and muscular as the last time I'd seen them.

He started up his introduction the same way everyone else had. "Hello. My name is..."

I knew what he was going to say before the words were even out of his mouth.

"Levi Ackerman."