Happy 12/13/14. Today is the last sequential date that any of us are probably going to see for the rest of our lives, so I had to post a chapter today.

I really don't know what to put in this note. I don't even know if anyone reads these things. I know I certainly don't. So I might as well get the fishing for followers and reviews out of the way now. My author blog is asking-appelia on tumblr, which currently is mostly random crap that I reblog since that's all I really have time to do at this point in my life (thanks, AP classes). I'm also tracking the tags "fic: tmiu" "fic: tmi" and "fic: the monsters inside us" just in case anyone decides they want to post something about this. I probably shouldn't go nuts asking for the reviews, since you can't get any of those without hits. I just breached 200 a few days ago. Hopefully things will get better.

Now it's time to race to get this chapter posted before midnight.

Going to the second meeting didn't scare me nearly as much as going to the first did.

Thursday afternoon was almost an exact replay of Tuesday. Dad dropped Mikasa and me off in front of Trost Regional. She reminded him that the meeting would end at four, and everybody gave a half-assed goodbye since we'd be seeing each other again in an hour. We both stumbled out of the car and watched him drive back to his lab, then started towards the sliding glass doors at the entrance. This time I was no longer itching to bolt in the other direction. That wasn't to say that I had warmed up to this whole group therapy thing after one session. That couldn't have been further from thr truth. I just... didn't hate it nearly as much as I used to.

Mikasa led me down the same corridor through the radiology ward and into the small cluster of conference rooms where 4A was waiting for us with open arms. The loud, steady hum of conversation filled the air inside. As far as I could tell, nothing had changed here since the first meeting. It was all the same kids, same chairs in the same circle, same two LPNs hanging out in the corner and talking about us behind our backs. I slunk over to the table that had once again been shoved into the corner. They'd put the snacks out at the beginning of the meeting this time instead of holding off and using it as a reward for participating. Maybe they expected us to willingly talk about our problems now. That could have meant that the LPNs were either geniuses or completely clueless when it came to the workings of the teenage brain.

"H-Hi, Eren."

That stutter. I had heard it before.

I spun around. Armin was standing a few feet behind me, one hand holding a cup of store-bought popcorn, the other shoved nervously into the pocket of his shorts. "Hey," I said, grabbing a popcorn cup of my own.

"So... how's life?" he asked.

"Boring," I deadpanned in response, picking a few grains out of my cup and tossing them into my mouth.

"Mine too." Armin shrugged and dropped his eyes to the floor. "I guess we really don't do much outside of here, do we?"

"Nope."

"What about during the year? Don't you have school and stuff?"

"No," I said factually. "My dad withdrew me during my first year of high school."

"Why?"

"Spent too much time in the hospital, wasn't really any point in trying to make up for lost time. I've been homeschooled ever since."

"Wow. That's weird"

"What's weird?"

"I get homeschooled too. My grandpa withdrew me in first grade."

I stopped munching and stared at him, my eyes wide. "First grade? Seriously?"

Armin nodded. "Yep. Remember my introduction from yesterday? I was diagnosed when I was really little. I'd been missing out on school for years, but I was always able to catch up. Eventually, though, I started getting penalties for all the absences, and the principal told us that if I kept missing days I'd have to be held back, so he just took me out and enrolled me in a program. It was probably a better idea than trying to keep me in regular school. I probably would've lost it if I had to do the first grade over. Everything was way too easy as it was. I can't even imagine having to learn what I already knew all over again."

"Too easy?" I said, confused. "So, what, did you end up skipping first grade in homeschool or something?"

Armin shrugged. "Um... sort of, I guess."

"How far have you gotten?" I asked, my curiosity spurred.

"Well..." Armin said, dropping his eyes again and flashing a sheepish grin. "Not to brag or anything, but... when I was ten, and I was finally healthy enough to start going to school again, I didn't bother, because... well, it turned out I was way ahead of where I should have been."

"Wait, wait, let me get this straight... you skipped ahead while you were getting homeschooled?"

He nodded, his eyes bright.

"How far?" I demanded enthusiastically.

"I was supposed to be going into fifth grade, but I was learning at a seventh grade math and science level, and my english was eighth. So, technically, I was two or three grades ahead of where I should have been. I probably could have gone into middle school then, but, well... just look at me."

"Okay," I said, my eyes already fixed on him. "What exactly am I supposed to be looking at?"

"Just look," Armin replied, stretching his arms out and flicking his hands back towards himself like he was directing my gaze up and down his tiny body. "Is it not obvious enough or something?"

"Is what not obvious? Am I supposed to be looking for some kind of deformity? I really don't..." I trailed off and shrugged.

"Eren, I am the physical equivalent of an anorexic midget. I was even more anorexic and midgety back then. Also, if you haven't guessed, I'm a textbook bullying target. I was already tiny compared to kids my own age. If I tried to get into a middle school, I would have have been shark bait."

A second of staring longer, and suddenly it all made sense. The corners of my mouth twitched upward. "Yeah, it was probably a good idea to stick with the homeschooling."

Armin laughed. "That's what I thought."

"Alright, circle up, people! We've got a schedule here!"

I didn't have to look towards the source to know whose voice was shouting over the din of socializing teens. Levi had a very distinct sound.

In seconds, everybody had gathered into the chair circle. Hanji and Levi were sitting side by side. I dropped into the first empty chair I saw that wasn't next to or across from them. I didn't think I'd be able to handle an entire meeting trapped under that piercing grey gaze of his. Not until I'd gotten over my social awkwardness, anyway.

I swear, sitting directly next to Jean was completely unintentional.

By the time I glanced over to my left and realized my mistake, it was far too late. Hanji started tapping her clipboard and kickstarted the meeting.

"Alright, everyone. Before we get started, is there anything that anyone wants to ask that we didn't cover in the last meeting?"

It wasn't too awkward of a question to begin with. However, it became that way within a few minutes. Most of the questions were cancer-related. It made sense, what with this being a support group for cancer victims and everything. For the most part, people wanted to know about how other people had been diagnosed and how well they'd been doing lately. It turned out that Reiner had been a huge athlete all his life and wound up getting sun poisoning during his freshman year of high school which quickly went bad. Bertolt had been diagnosed a few months after finishing his growth spurt and over the course of three years had several of his bones replaced with prosthetics. When Ymir was asked what she meant when she said she had never gone into total remission, she explained that she had been treated but still couldn't keep weight on and got fatigue and muscle pain every now and again. Marco was an open book about whatever the group asked him. Armin's long remission earned him a considerable number of dirty looks from the rest of the group. Krista once again refused to talk about her tragic family history, which no one should have been asking about in the first place, since the mere mention of the subject brought tears to her eyes. Connie asked Sasha how she stayed so skinny, then got smacked over the back of the head. And then...

"Mikasa, are you single?"

...and then Jean happened.

Mikasa stared across the circle at him, her face blank but her eyes livid. I had mistakenly sat down further away from her than I should have.

"Yes," she deadpanned. A self-satisfied grin spread across Jean's horse I mean face. Then Mikasa spoke up again. "Now can I ask you something?"

"Anything."

"Do you always hit on people in your therapy groups?"

A collective "ooooooooh" rippled through the circle. Jean's smile dropped so fast I was surprised it didn't fall off his reddening face and shatter on the floor. Mikasa stared at him, a spiteful smirk turning up on her lips. I almost missed the amused flicker in Levi's eyes that broke through his bored expression for a split second.

"I... Um... I-I..." Jean stammered. A grin broke out on my face and a laugh slipped through before I could stop it.

Suddenly horse-face had spun around and locked his eyes on me. "Jaeger."

My grin disappeared. "Yes?"

"I've got a question for you."

A shot of dread seeped into my veins. It was as if I had known what he was going to ask before he even opened his mouth.

"Why didn't you bring up your mom in your introduction?"

I swallowed. My heart knocked at my ribs like an overenthusiastic door-to-door salesman.

Fuck.

Jean shot me a smug smile. I wanted to claw at his face until my fingernails scraped it off. "Well?" he prodded. "Aren't you going to answer?"

"It's..." I started, trying to ignore the feeling of rage burning in my circulatory system. "It's a sensitive subject."

"But Mikasa brought it up. She's your sister."

"Adopted," I spat.

"Doesn't matter. We're still talking about the same mom, right?"

"Yeah. And I told you why. I just don't like talking about it."

Marco elbowed him in the ribs. "Jean, stop it," he whispered.

Jean didn't stop. "I know, but I'm asking why."

"It doesn't matter why."

"Of course it does. This is a support group. We're supposed to be talking about this sort of thing." Jean shifted forward in his seat and leaned towards me as if getting in my face would make me more inclined to answer. "I'm trying to help you, Eren."

"Okay, no," I snapped, pushing myself forward to face him. "No, you are not trying to help me. You're being an insensitive douche and trying to jam your stupid, oversized nose where it doesn't belong."

"Eren, calm down," Mikasa hissed.

"Yeah. Listen to your sister, Jaeger."

"Jean," Marco murmured warningly.

"You mean your girlfriend? Oh wait, she's not interested!"

Jean's face flushed red. "That was ages ago, Jaeger. No one thinks it's funny anymore!"

"Then why do you keep bringing it up? If it hasn't occurred to you yet, this is a therapy group, not a goddamn speed-dating service!"

"Okay, that's enough. Both of you, shut your mouths and keep them shut. Your question privileges have been revoked."

My head spun towards the shout. The bored, lifeless look on Levi's face didn't match the authoritative annoyance in his voice. He lifted one hand and extended a finger towards me. "You. Eren."

My face heated up as if his eyes were UV lights. "Yes?"

"Switch seats with Connie. It's probably best if you two stay separated."

I nodded and obeyed him without another word. I heard Jean murmur something that sounded like "Wow. Oversensitive, much?" behind my back, which was cut short by a sharp "Hey. I said mouths shut." from Levi.

The rest of the question session went pretty smoothly. Then the meeting turned into talking about things that people wanted to share of their own free will. I kept my mouth shut like Levi had commanded and glared at Jean the entire time.

The hour rolled by even more slowly than it had on Tuesday. When we were finally dragging down to the last few minutes, Hanji tapped her clipboard extra loud to get the circle's attention. "Hey, guys. We're running out of time and I've got an assignment for the new recruits that I wanted to give before the meeting ends."

"An assignment? I thought it was summer vacation," Jean muttered, earning himself a piercing glare from Levi. He snapped his mouth shut that very second.

"It's just to get you initiated," Reiner cut in as if he'd forgotten Levi's orders from earlier. "Lets the group get to know you better. You're not getting graded for it or anything."

Hanji stopped tapping her pen and pointed it towards him. "Exactly. Anyhow, these are just open-ended questions, no length requirements or anything, and you are allowed to write whatever you want. We don't judge content here. Sometimes they're for the whole group, sometimes just for first-time members. It also gives us a sort of kickstarter topic for the meetings. Think of this as your hazing." She glanced down at her clipboard. "Alright. Today's question is... how do you think of your cancer?" She looked back up at the group. "So, my idea behind this came from something a pediatric patient told me a while back."

Great. We're getting questions inspired by something some child who's probably dead now said while they were dying.

"She told me that she thought of her disease as a dragon and her doctor was a knight who was trying to rescue her from it. And, of course, I thought it was adorable at the time, but it really got me thinking..."

I wonder who that kid's doctor was.

"I feel like everyone has some metaphorical way of envisioning their disease, whether they are aware of it or not. It changes from person to person, and sometimes that affects the way that they cope with it, which is why I decided to bring it up today. All you have to do is write up a response, print it out and bring it in to read out loud next the next time we meet. And we know, we know, public speaking is scary and all that, but it's okay. Remember, this is a support group." I caught her looking sympathetically at Armin. "I promise you we don't judge here.

"And if you can't come up with anything, fine," Levi added. "But we'll know the difference if you just didn't bother with the assignment."

Yeah, I thought to myself. Sure you will.

I hadn't wanted to join that stupid support group. I had never asked for social obligations that I didn't need or another reason to be visiting Trost Regional when I was already sick of the godforsaken place. I had never asked to be given a writing assignment when I already had an endless stream of those coming from my homeschooling program. Obviously I had no intention of doing it. Hanji had said that the assignment wasn't 100% mandatory anyway.

So why the fuck was I sitting in front of my laptop and staring at a blank Word document?

My tutor had come in that day. He went over my grades for the past month of my work in the online classroom, we figured out what I needed to work at a little more, then we had spent a few hours in the kitchen, gathered around the table with my notes and textbooks scattered everywhere. He'd given me a packet of documents from the Gilded Age to write a DBQ essay on. He said it would be due the next time we met. I had no idea when that would be, so I had gotten started as soon as possible. Then I had finished. And then things had just sort of spiraled out of my control and progressed on their own.

I folded my legs up underneath me and leaned forward on my knees, staring at the blank white pixels in front of me. The tiny black line of the cursor blinked steadily on and off, begging me to stop screwing around and start typing something. Footsteps echoed through the house as Mikasa scampered around downstairs, doing whatever the fuck she does while I'm busy not being busy at all. I hardly noticed the difference when they started to get louder.

"Hey. What are you up to?"

I looked up from my irritatingly blank support group assignment. Mikasa was leaning into my room, her hands clinging to the doorframe and her feet on tiptoe out in the hallway."Hm?" I mumbled in response.

My sister walked into my room without waiting for an invitation and leaned over my shoulder. "Why do you have a Word document open?"

I glanced back and forth between her and my laptop. "Just... writing something."

"Oh," she said. And then... "Wait a second. Are you actually doing that thing they assigned to us in support group?"

I craned my neck around to look at her and cocked my eyebrows. "Are you?"

"No. I'm not the one with cancer. How would I have an abstract vision of something I don't even have personal experience in?"

I shrugged. "I don't know. You could write about me. Or Mom, maybe?"

"No. It's not personal enough," she said, flopping down behind me on the bed and shaking the mattress. We heard the distant hum and gravelly scrape of a car pulling into the driveway. "Hey. Sounds like Dad's home."

"For once," I scoffed, turning back to my blank document.

"Well, good luck with writing about your abstract visions of cancer. I really didn't think you had it in you." She straightened up and turned towards the door.

I looked up at her retreating back. "Where are you going?"

"I'm going to say hi," she said, her voice clipped. It sounded as if I should have been thinking the same thing.

"Okay," I replied. "I'll be down later."

We both knew I was lying.

Mikasa walked out of my room just as the front door latch clicked and the door swung open. I returned to staring at my blank assignment, my twisted-together fingers pressed to my lips, doing nothing but think. The more I contemplated it, the more I realized that I didn't really think about my cancer in any abstract way. I just thought it was horrible. There was never really anything else to it.

I started thinking back to when I was ten. The ten I had been before I was diagnosed, when it had been my mother who had leukemia, not me. Everything always seems different when you're younger. I tried to remember if there had ever been any huge, fantastical imaginings that I had made up about my mom and her disease. As far as I knew, there weren't any. At least, none that made any sense. The only thing I had ever imagined about her cancer was her being able to beat it. I had come up with about a million different situations where my mom would live and everything would be okay. Where her tumors started shrinking, or someone came up with a surgery to replace every ounce of bone marrow in her body, or even where her body started attacking the cancer itself. I'd come up with so many of them. I had an entire arsenal of scenarios in my head that I was wishing harder than I had ever wished before would happen. The worse she got, the more I created. I must have thought that if I came up with enough situations, one of them would eventually come true. But none of them did. I just watched her get sicker and sicker, watched the cancer leaching off of her like an angry parasite, eating away at her more and more until finally there was nothing left-

I froze. My eyes widened. Cancer. It eats people. That's what it does.

That was it.

I slammed my hands down on the keyboard and started typing.

By the time the next support group meeting came around, I was prepared.

A pattern had started to develop around it. My dad dropped me and Mikasa off. We walked in. I grabbed some food. Armin somehow found his way over to me. We talked until the LPNs told us to get into the circle.

"Okay. Did all of our new recruits remember their assignments from the last meeting?"

A few wary gazes shifted around the circle. A face or two flushed with shame. Annie stared straight ahead, looking just as angsty and bored as she had every time I'd seen her before.

"Um, Hanji? If it helps, I wrote something to get everyone started."

I looked around the circle for the source of the voice. Marco had shifted forward in his seat, a folded-up slip of paper in one hand.

Hanji brightened up. "Aw, you didn't have to. Go ahead. Show 'em how it's done."

"Okay," Marco said with a shy smile. He unfolded the paper and looked the words over once, then again for good measure. "This might not be all that great, but I wrote it in about half an hour, so just bear with me, okay?"

"Just shut up and read, Shakespeare," Jean said, giving Marco's shoulder a friendly nudge.

A slight flush lit up behind his freckles and he looked back down at the paper. "Alright. Here goes..."

"I know that so many people have said this before me, and I probably won't be the last one to put it this way. But there really isn't a better way to put it. When I think of cancer, I think of a battle. We are the soldiers, and our disease is the enemy. We don't really know what its objective is. Maybe it doesn't even have one. But we all do our best to fight it off anyway and survive as long as we can. The fight lasts longer for some than for others. Sometimes we come out alive, and sometimes we are lost in the battle. And for us, that's all it really is: a battle. The war itself is ongoing. There is no definite cure. Cancer is not something that can be defeated just yet. But people are still being diagnosed. Soldiers are still being sent to the war front to do battle with this relentless disease. For now, there's no way to tell who will be the victor. All we can do is keep fighting. One day, all of this will finally be resolved. And the soldiers just need to stick it out until that day comes."

He folded the paper back up with a relieved smile, his cheeks turned a shade brighter. I was surprised the circle didn't stand up and start a round of applause. I'd heard the "cancer is a battle" speech at least a thousand times over, but never like that. I had no idea Marco was so eloquent.

"Fantastic start, Marco," Hanji said, her voice breathless. "Alright. Who thinks they can follow that up?" She looked expectantly around the circle, an eager smile on her face.

Krista was the next to stand up. It was kind of weird. It seemed that the only people who had done the assignment were the ones who hadn't had to do it at all.

Krista's speech compared cancer to a black hole. No one knows why it had to evolve the way it did. Its only purpose is as a destructive force, like the implosion in the core of a dead star. It doesn't have to be the way it is, but it is regardless. And once it appears, it's only a matter of time before it destroys everything around it. And once those things are gone, they never come back.

I wondered if this was Krista's attempt at justifying her cancer-free presence in the group.

Sasha was the first newcomer to stand up. She described her cancer as an incinerator, something that did its best to burn up everything that was thrown at it. I wasn't sure if she was talking about her cancer or the whacked-out digestive system it had left her with.

Ymir hadn't written anything. She didn't bother trying to elaborate.

Armin volunteered next. He quickly explained for the third time that he'd been diagnosed at a younger age than anyone else in support group and his description might sound stupid, but that was because he'd come up with it when he was seven and didn't have a better imagination. He went on to speed-read a paragraph about a purple blob monster that lived in the side of his neck, where a tumor had once appeared in a lymph node there. He crumpled up the document in his hands the second he had finished reading, dug his fingers into his thick blonde bangs and murmured "That was so embarrassing" as soon as he thought no one was listening anymore.

Judging by Annie's attitude so far, I was sure she hadn't been one of the poor souls who had actually done the assignment. To say I was surprised when she dug her phone out of her pocket and handed it over to Reiner would have been a massive understatement.

Reiner started reading from the tiny screen in his hand. "I don't really have an abstract vision of my cancer. This is mainly because it barely even exists anymore. After my surgery, my symptoms went into remission and haven't relapsed since. But if I had to compare my cancer to anything, I'd compare it to a strip of duct tape that was stuck over my mouth. I'd always been kind of quiet, and I didn't think I'd be losing much when my doctor told me the only way to get rid of my disease would be to remove my vocal cords. It turned out that I would miss speaking a lot more than I thought I would. I don't miss not being able to talk to my friends, since it was something I hadn't done very much in the first place, but I quickly found out that I needed my voice for a lot of things I hadn't even bothered thinking about when I agreed to get it cut out. Now I can't even ask my dad to get me something from the grocery store without taking the time to write it down somewhere. People think that just because I can't speak, that means they don't need to listen to me anymore. Communicating has become nothing but an inconvenience for me. I never realized exactly how much I needed my voice until it was gone. My cancer has silenced me more than I ever imagined it would."

The entire support group went almost as silent as Annie. Reiner gave his script another once-over and let out a long exhale. "Wow. That was..."

No one offered anything up to help him finish the sentence. He looked over Bertolt to the little blonde sitting two chairs to his left. She leaned over and stared expressionlessly back, then extended a hand to take her phone. Reiner dropped it gingerly into her palm.

"Don't worry, Annie," he said. "We're here to listen to you." He looked expectantly around at the circle. "Right, guys?"

The group immediately sprang to life.

"Yeah, of course."

"We totally are."

"We're here for you."

"We're listening, Annie."

"It's a support group, what else is it for?"

Annie didn't seem to give a shit either way.

"Who's up next?" Hanji asked, glancing around the circle.

I knew the answer was me, but I wasn't about to go announcing it to the world. I tugged a folded-up piece of printer paper out of my pocket and started working at the creases. "I... uh, wrote something..."

Hanji's eyes brightened up behind her glasses and she pointed her pen in my direction. "Eren!"

No backing out of this now. I took a deep breath and started to read.

"I've heard people describe cancer in a lot of ways. They always say that it's a noble fight, and the people who get diagnosed are heroes, and that spending hours in the hospital getting bombarded by chemicals and radiation is actually a worthwhile way for someone to spend their life. But the truth is, it's all a lie. There is no fighting when it comes to this disease. Cancer is a monster. It's huge, and relentless, and almost indestructible. It eats people from the inside out. Thousands of people are lost to it every year, and there is nothing anyone is able to do. A surefire cure doesn't exist, and the treatment options are almost worse than the disease itself. While we're all struggling along, cancer feeds off of us without a care in the world, eating away at its victims until there is nothing left. Once cancer is there, it never leaves. It's a threat that hangs over you for your entire life. You can never escape. The cancer will always be there, waiting to devour you as soon as it gets the chance."

The second I stopped reading, I immediately wished I hadn't started in the first place.

The entire support group was staring at me. The room had gone silent, save for the nervous throbbing in my chest. Everyone's face had gone rigid with shock. Except Levi's. His face was just rigid. Hanji had stopped her clipboard tapping. Armin was staring at me as if he were relieved that his speech was no longer the worst. Krista's eyes were huge and glassy. At least someone here gets it, I thought.

I was the one to break the silence. I owed the circle that much, since I was the one who had created it in the first place. "Sorry about that. I'm really not any good at writing, and I guess I was kind of angry when I came up with the metaphor-"

"No, no," Hanji said quietly. "That's perfect. That's exactly what we were looking for."

"R-really?" I stuttered.

"Of course," she replied. "This was an assignment to express yourself. And... that's how you do it, I guess."

Reiner pitched in. "Believe it or not, that's actually not the darkest submission we've ever gotten."

I raised my eyebrows. "Then what was?"

"Well, there was this one kid who joined the first year who wrote-"

"Please, Reiner. I thought we agreed never to bring this up again," Bertolt said.

"What? It was a cool story."

"Then we'll explain it to him later," Marco cut in. He turned to me, his soft brown eyes fixing on me. "That was cool, Eren. I never looked at it that way before."

"Because you're not a cynic, Marco," Jean added. Marco rolled his eyes and gave Jean a soft kick in the ankle.

"Dark stuff is something we're sort of used to," Connie said. "I mean, did you miss the black hole speech and the duct tape thing? That's what cancer is. It's dark. Cancer sucks, and there's not really any other way to put it."

"He's right," Marco agreed. "And that's just how you see it. That was the point of the assignment, right?" He glanced over to Hanji for confirmation.

Levi ended up being the one to respond. "Exactly."

The rest of circle time went by without a hitch. We all talked about what we thought of the compositions we'd heard and the different ways we all pictured the disease, and Armin had to explain the theory behind the purple neck blob. (He'd seen images of lymphoma under a microscope and decided that was what his cancer looked like.) 4:00 seemed to come around more quickly than it had at the first two meetings. Before I knew it, we were disseminating from the circle and going our separate ways.

I blindly followed Mikasa to the sliding glass doors of the cancer center exit. I didn't even register the faint sound of footsteps behind us.

"Hey, brat. Nice work today."

I spun around. Once again, Levi had managed to sneak up on me. "You really think so?"

"I'm assuming you don't," he said, his short little legs somehow carrying him so fast that he had to slow down to keep pace with me.

"No," I replied, jamming my hands into the pockets of my shorts. "I feel like such a dick for writing what I did. It's like I just told the entire support group that they're going to die and there's nothing they can do about it."

Levi's next words came out of nowhere. "Some of them probably are."

I would have stopped dead if Mikasa weren't power walking on ahead of us. My head whipped around towards Levi. "What?"

"Some of the kids in the group are probably going to die," he repeated, his voice just as flat as it had been the first time he'd said it. His face somehow retained its bored, level expression. "It's a cancer support group. Almost every single person who showed up in that conference room today has a potentially lifelong disease. Odds are, at least one or two of them are going to end up going terminal. I've seen kids die their way out of YCSG before. It happens every year. No matter how you slice it, the cake is always the same."

I opened my mouth to say something, but I couldn't find the words to respond. My head swiveled forward again and I stared straight ahead at Mikasa. We were almost to the exit. Something in me quietly hoped that my dad would show up late that day.

"What is it now?" Levi asked. "Was that somehow even darker than your little hopelessness speech?"

"No," I said. "I just... I haven't thought of that in a while. That this is a support group for dying kids to help them deal with the fact that they're dying."

"No truer words have been spoken, brat," he said, his eyes glinting in the sinking sunlight that streamed through the huge window panes at the cancer center entrance.

The front doors slid open in front of Mikasa. I picked up my pace and sprinted ahead, hoping they wouldn't slide shut again before I reached them. I looked out into the parking lot. My dad's car was nowhere to be seen.

"So... undefeatable cancer monsters?"

I crossed through the door and spun around. I wasn't aware that Levi had still been following me.

I glanced over towards Mikasa. She'd stopped at the edge of the sidewalk. She must have noticed the absence of our dad's silver Toyota in the parking lot. I watched her turn around and make her way towards one of the random benches that occasionally present themselves for people to sit on while waiting for things outside a hospital. Her eyes caught mine for a split second, just to let me know that she'd seen me.

I turned back to Levi. "Yeah," I said, shrugging. "No clue where the idea came from, but... there it was."

"It kind of makes me wonder..." he murmured, staring out at the parking lot as if it were a beautiful sunset. "Where exactly did you learn to be so grim?"

"I guess I learn from the best."

He let out a noise somewhere between a laugh and an unusually quiet sneeze. "Well played, brat."

I glanced over at Mikasa again. She'd taken her phone out of her bag and was now fixated on it, her fingers tapping furiously at the screen. She stopped and locked the screen, then started up again a minute later. Probably texting a friend or something. I tried not to think about what a bang-up job Mikasa did of unintentionally reminding me of my spectacular lack of a social life and failed miserably.

Levi's voice dragged my thoughts out of their pit of despair. "So, about what I said earlier..."

"You mean about helping the dying to die easier?" I asked, my voice sounding automated.

"Yeah," he said. I cast a sideways glance at him and his grey eyes held mine for longer than I had ever intended them to. "Look, I didn't mean to sound like a killjoy or anything, and I just want to clarify something. Cancer kills people. It's a fact. Hell, it's a goddamn statistic. But what I said was just referencing things that have happened before. I wasn't forecasting the future for this year or anything."

"You sounded pretty sure of yourself when you said it."

"I know. That's because I was speaking from experience. But I'm not saying that the same thing is going to happen this year. I'm just trying to think realistically. Some of the kids in the support group might end up dying, or they might not. There's really no way to know until it actually happens."

A small smile twitched at the corners of my mouth. "So it's like Schroedinger's support group."

"Basically."

A memory from last summer's surgery episode resurfaced somewhere in the minute of silence that followed.

"If that's what you really believe, then why did you tell me that before the operation?" I asked distantly.

Levi blinked, his eyes clouding with confusion. "Tell you what?"

"That I would be okay," I said. "I mean, if the surgery hadn't happened yet, then there was no way of really knowing, right?"

"That was different," Levi said, turning to stare out at the parking lot again. "First of all, when a patient is having a panic attack, a good rule of thumb to stick to is not to tell them there's a chance they could die. You already seemed to be completely aware of that, so I kept my mouth shut on the subject. Secondly, Dr. Erwin has dealt with surgeries way more complicated than yours. In the two years I've spent working for the guy, he's taught me a few different bits and pieces about tumor locations. Your cancer was relatively isolated and could be removed without your needing an entirely new liver. He'd figured that out ages before the surgery. So I'd have to say the outcome was a little more definite than normal for you."

"And that was why you 'just knew'?"

"Precisely, Sherlock," he deadpanned.

Things went quiet again after that. Levi and I leaned up against the wall, staring out at the cars, while Mikasa sat nearby on the bench, silently reminding me that she had friends to text and I didn't. A spark realization had started to sputter in the back of my mind. But when I turned to ask Levi why he had followed me outside, I was cut short by the sound of tires scraping over concrete. I looked back to see my dad's Highlander pulling into the parking lot. "Finally," I murmured under my breath.

"You just can't wait to get rid of me, can you, brat?" Levi snipped. His stock-still face wouldn't let me know whether it was a joke or not.

I risked the assumption that it was and shrugged him off. "If that's me, then I can't even imagine what you're going through."

Levi rolled his eyes. "Whatever. See you around, brat."

With that, he spun on his heel and headed back inside.

My dad pulled up alongside the curb by the entrance. Mikasa stuck her phone back into her messenger bag and stood up. I followed her, and we climbed into the car. The drive home was nothing more than a long, drawn-out awkward silence that didn't end until we were dropped off in the driveway of our house.

That night, I somehow found myself in the backyard and lying sprawled out on our trampoline.

I didn't know why we even still owned the stupid thing. It had been fun at one point in my life. But that had been a long time ago, when I still thought that cursing was actually a bad thing and kissing scenes in movies were gross. And when I didn't have cancer. And still had a mom. We'd bought it just a little bit before we adopted Mikasa. The first few times I'd spent jumping around on it were pretty lonely. I had never had many friends, not even when I was still enrolled in a normal school. Then I had Mikasa. I remember that for a while I had thought that she had only wanted to come home with us because we had a trampoline. Then after that, we invited friends over and we would all sit up there and hang out, making up games and trying to do stupid stunts without any real fear of getting hurt.

But then things changed. I changed. More accurately, my cancer changed me. Soon, I was too weak and tired to spend all that much time bouncing around on the thing. So I just stopped. I hadn't even gone near the trampoline in what must have been years.

I hadn't been expecting to hear the back door creak open and slam shut again. But I still wasn't startled. I heard the sound of bare feet padding across the pseudo-wood planks of the deck, then the grass. Mikasa landed haphazardly next to me, the rubber mat dipping under her weight and tilting me in her direction.

"There you are," she said. "What are you doing out here?"

"Nothing, really," I mumbled. The sun was finally finishing up its rounds and sinking below the horizon. It must have been almost nine. Dad still wasn't home yet.

"Then why did you come out to the trampoline to nothing when you could have nothinged just as easily inside?"

I rolled my eyes. "I don't know. It was a nice day and I wanted to enjoy it before the sun went down?"

"Yeah, sure you did." Mikasa sprawled herself out next to me and stared up at the darkening sky. "I was looking for you."

"Why?"

"Why not?" She rolled over onto her side to look at me. "I wanted to talk to you about something."

"What was it?"

"Support group."

I let out a long, growling sigh. "I thought we talked about that enough today. You know, at the actual support group meeting."

"I'm not asking about the stuff we talked about at the meeting today. It's about the group itself."

"Haven't we been over this before?" I asked disdainfully.

"Yes," Mikasa said. "But I felt like I should keep up with it. Just in case anything changes."

"Okay..." I mumbled, replaying that day's meeting in my head. "I don't exactly hate it, but I'm also not thrilled that it's something I do. So I guess that makes me pretty indifferent."

"Hm. It's an improvement over hating it, I guess."

I stared blankly up at the sky for a while longer. I remembered the feeling of the woven black rubber holding me up. It had been a long time since I had felt it last.

"We used to have a lot of fun on this thing, didn't we?" I said.

"Yeah, we did," Mikasa absently replied.

Things went quiet for a while longer.

"You know, if you'd been really adamant about saying no, I wouldn't have made you go."

A miniscule jolt ran through my body as if I had been disrupted in the middle of falling asleep. "What?" I said numbly.

"I wouldn't have forced you to join the support group if you really hadn't wanted to."

I sat up and looked down at Mikasa's blank, daydreaming face. "Then what was all that about drugging me and bringing me to the first meeting in the trunk of dad's car for?"

"Hey, you drew that conclusion yourself. I didn't do anything but agree with you."

"Then why did you spend... what was it? Twenty minutes convincing me that it wasn't a complete atrocity of an idea?"

"I just wanted to make sure you had the facts before you made your decision. I knew you'd fight me about it at first, but if you kept on fighting I would have stopped. And you didn't. So here we are."

I dropped back down onto the trampoline. "Well, don't I feel stupid now."

It was Mikasa's turn to loom over me. "What makes you say that?" she asked.

"I..." I opened my mouth and drew in a sharp inhale to start berating her with reasons why I never had any motive for going other than her. I suddenly realized I didn't have any. In that instant, every single argument that would have seemed perfectly viable a week ago had fallen flat.

"I... don't know."

Whether I liked it or not, something in me had wanted to go to that support group. And now...

"I didn't think so," Mikasa murmured.

I took a deep breath and stared up at the sky. The sun had disappeared, and the vivid bluish-grey was fading quickly into black. The color reminded me of something. I wasn't entirely sure what.

"So what were you and Levi talking about?"

I looked over at Mikasa. "You mean while we were waiting outside?"

"Yeah. It seemed pretty important."

"I thought you were listening."

"Come on, Eren. What kind of prying snitch do you take me for?"

I rolled onto my back and closed my eyes. "It wasn't much. Just philosophy and cancer stuff."

"Certainly seems like the subject of the day, doesn't it?"

"Yeah. It does."

I have no idea how long we spent lying out on the trampoline. The sky had long since gone dark. I probably would have fallen asleep out there if it weren't for the sound of my dad's car pulling into the driveway letting me know I had to go back inside.