Of Silence and Warm Hands

by kaori54432

(Terminally ill!SMQ fic) The news hit her like a truck. Hodgkin's Lymphoma? Cancer of the lymph nodes and blood? He only had a month left to live? What? Cancer was so overused in dramas but for someone you know to be diagnosed with it by the time they'd reached stage 4? (Read the full summary inside;389 characters isnt enough and if i included the sentence after, it wouldn't fit)

2. Ch2: Maybe You

Of Silence and Warm Hands ch. 2

Ch2 Maybe you're just not eating enough

There was no need to tell them that they don't eat enough in a day. They ate enough, or at least by the standards of homeless children, they did. Their happy little trio consumed enough carbohydrates to get themselves through the day and ate about three 'meals' a day, other nutrients were probably neglected.

Or at least that's what Ye Xiu usually thought. The boy was surprisingly perceptive, considering his upbringing. He turned his gaze to the boy beside him, happily chatting away as they ate their meals. He wasn't quite sure if he was imagining it, but the lighter haired male seemed to have gotten thinner. It was no secret between the two that Su Muqiu occasionally ate less so his sister would get to eat more consistently, although they tried to keep that a secret from the girl.

The more he thought about it, the more confused he became. He mentally tried to compute for how much Su Muqiu had been eating. He was pretty sure he ate relatively consistently, consuming about the same amount of food a day, on average. Maybe, he had just not been eating enough? Ye Xiu was very sure in that he wasn't sure why the thought that the slightly older boy had been getting thinner. Even when he ate less sometimes, it wasn't supposed to be a large enough difference to cause him to lose weight, was it?

He wasn't sure of what kind of expression he was making at that point, but he'd probably kept it up for a while now, since the Su siblings eventually paused and looked at him, as if expecting him to say something at this point.

"So… Is there something on my face?" Su Muqiu asked, tilting his head to the side like a confused puppy encountering an agitating loud noise for the first time. Well, if someone stared at you for a really long time, wouldn't you think something along those lines as well? Ye Xiu wasn't sure how long he'd been staring at Su Muqiu but he'd probably been staring for a while. The fact that Ye Xiu's cup noodles were mostly still untouched probably made it all the more glaringly obvious that he was inspecting the other boy. Why? Well, to find out why, wasn't that why Su Muqiu had stopped and asked? To know why the darker haired boy was staring at him so intently?

There was a pregnant pause.

"Hey… We spend mostly the same amounts of money on food every day, right?"

Su Muqiu looked at the other boy quizzically. "Yes?-"

Before the lighter haired boy could continue with what he was about to say, Ye Xiu managed to cut him off. "I guess it's just my imagination, then. It's nothing."

He wasn't going to mention it within earshot of Su Mucheng. It was an unspoken rule the two boys shared. Su Muqiu managed to pick up on it, but, well, he didn't really know what it was about his eating that Ye Xiu was going to mention, and so they continued to leisurely chat while eating. The conversation continued. They changed topics enough times that the idea was forgotten….

In the distant future, Ye Xiu would hit himself over this, but, right now, he would dismiss it and eventually forget about it.

Maybe, he's just not eating enough? He'd told himself before pushing the thought aside. After all, they just had to feed themselves enough. It didn't need too much of a brain to figure out why that was a logical progression of thought. They were basically homeless. Their financial situation didn't need to be questioned; hence, the conclusion was simply maybe that they hadn't been able to spend as much to feed themselves.

Four years later, he'd look back at this moment when he thought that maybe they just weren't eating enough. As he'd eventually find out, the cause of the lighter haired boy's unexplained weight loss wasn't their lack of money for food. Oh, no. It was something far more serious.

At least, when they do find out, they'd have the money they won from the first championship. Much emphasis on at least. Still, that money wouldn't be enough to cure Su Muqiu. Cancer had no cure, but it did have a treatment. Even with treatment, there was no treatment that fixed the patient 100%. There were cases of relapse with people who'd thought they'd already beaten it. There were also cases where, even though the form of cancer diagnosed was the one with the best prognosis, the patient still died.