Hey everyone!:) Thank you so much for commenting all your reviews mean the world to me. Hope you all like the chapter! Please comment and review again. Thanks guys.

~Wallflower95

1

10 months later...

People who've had a brush with death usually go on in life with a bucket list in their hands. They say they need it in case death stares them in the eyes again. Me? After my near death experience I do the greatest of all things. Sleep in until 3pm in the afternoon on a Wednesday. Yes I want to be remembered and make leave my mark in the world but hey everyone needs to sleep in and be a lazy ass once in a while. I probably wouldn't have woken up if it hadn't been for my friend Isaac. My phone started singing my favorite video game theme song. I groaned and snatched my phone from my bedside table.

"Hello?" I grumbled. An air horn went off on the other end. I nearly fell out of bed.

"Jesus christ. What the hell?" I said.

"You shouldn't say all those words in the same paragraph." Isaac said. I groaned.

"Yeah well my friend shouldn't set an air horn off in my ear." I said.

"Noted for the future." Isaac said.

"What's up?"

"It's support group today. In three hours." Are you still coming?" Isaac asked. I groaned.

"Right. Yeah man I'll be there." I said. See, my friend Isaac was diagnosed with this extremely unheard of eye cancer. One eyes was take out a while back but now he has relapsed and it has put his remaining eyes in absolute peril. That's the thing about cancer. It keeps coming back until there's nothing left.

"Good." Isaac said sounding pleased with himself. Isaac has been trying to get me to with him to this cancer support group for weeks. I didn't understand why he subjected himself to the torture. Support is not supportive at all. It's a depressing group of people with the killing disease and the only thing they all had in common was that they were all just waiting until cancer came back for them. But Isaac wanted me to go and I'm a good friend so I said I'd go.

"Okay dude. I'll see you in a bit." I said.

"Lates." Isaac said. I stopped.

"Really? Did you really just say that?"

"Too much?" Isaac asked.

"Little bit."

"Okay. See ya." And he hung up. I shook my head. That kid.

At 5:20pm I came out of my room with an unlit cigarette hanging from my mouth. My parents were at the kitchen table with their laptops in front of them. My mom sighed.

"Augustus I really wish you'd stop messing around with cigarettes." She said in her best mom voice. I smiled and leaned down to kiss her on the cheek.

"It's completely harmless mom. It's not even lit." My dad shook his head.

"I still don't get that whole thing." He said.

"It's quite simple. You put the killing thing in your mouth but you don't give it the power to do it's killing. It's a metaphor. Get it?" I looked at both of their blank expressions. I shrugged my shoulders.

"I'm heading to Isaac's dumb support group." I said.

"Have fun." Mom said. I faked a laugh.

"Sure mom." The support group was being held at a church not too far from my house. I jerked and sped into the parking lot outside the church. I slammed my foot on the break and I flew forwards. The seat belt locked and my head hit the head rest. I groaned. One of the many unfortunate things about old prosty is that I can't feel any pressure in it therefore driving kinda sucks. The only reason I have my license today is because of a cancer perk. I turned off the ignition and walked inside. I followed some support group looking people down to the basement. On my left was a table with a sad selection of store bought cookie and lemonade in paper cups.

"Hey." Isaac clapped his hand on my shoulder. Here's how you describe Isaac. He's tall and skinny with blonde hair brushed over his glass eye. He wore big chunky glasses that magnified the real eye. The one in mortal peril.

"Why do you come to this? It looks like a torture chamber." I said, gesturing to the sad group of chairs in the middle of the room. Isaac laughed.

"Believe it or not Augustus I like talking to people other than you." He said.

"Dude I'd rather talk to myself than be here." I said. Isaac smiled. Isaac and I sat down in the circle of ridiculously small chairs.

"Of course you would." I was facing the table when I saw her. She turned and I stared. I just stared at her. The ghost of Caroline Mathers.

She saw me looking at her. Usually when you're caught looking at someone it's just smart to just look away and pretend it never happened. I didn't do that. I just continued to stare at her. She looked exactly like her when she was sick. Except for those eyes. Her eyes were green. She had short brown hair that looked like it hadn't been brushed in forever. She wore baggy jeans and a yellow shirt that advertised a band I've never even heard of. She wore chuck taylors on her feet and she had the handle of an oxygen tank in her hand. The cannula wrapped around her ears and the nubbins in her nose. She looked away. A part of me wished for her to look back at me.

She looked back and I still stared. She probably though I was assaulting her or something with my stare. Can you rape someone with your eyes? I don't even know. I just stared. She walked into the circle of chair and sat down across from me and Isaac. Isaac didn't seem to notice my stare down with the Caroline look alike. She looked away just a moment to check her phone. Then I was woken from my dream like state by the older guy. We chanted something stupid. God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can and the wisdom to know the difference. And then I looked back at her. She was pretty. Really pretty. Not only was she just gorgeous but she was also staring at me with extreme intensity.

It was the ultimate stare down going on. I heard in the backround that the older guy was named Patrick and that he was telling us about his cancer. Let's shorten up his story and spare you the gory details. The dude had cancer in his balls. They thought he would die but he didn't so now he's probably a gaming bum with nothing but this support group. I finally decided to give up and show her one of my best crooked smiles. I looked away for a moment. When I looked back at her she flicked her eyebrows up as if to say I win.

"Isaac, perhaps you like to go first today. I know you're facing a challenging time." Patrick said.

"Yeah." Isaac said.

"I'm Isaac. I'm seventeen and it's looking like I have to get surgery in a couple of weeks after which I'll be blind. Not to complain or anything because I know a lot of us have it worse but yeah, I mean, being blind does sorta suck. My girlfriend helps though. And friends like Augustus." Isaac nodded towards me.

"So yeah. There's nothing you can do about it." Isaac said.

"We're here for you Isaac. Let Isaac hear it guys." Patrick said.

"We're here for you Isaac." Everyone chanted. A few other people went on talking about their cancer stories. Michael with Leukemia, Lida who had appendiceal cancer. Just a few more before I became Patrick's next target.

"My name is Augustus Waters. I'm seventeen. I had a little touch of Osteosarcoma a year and a half ago but I'm just here today at Isaa'cs request." I said.

"And how are you feeling?" Patrick said.

"Oh I'm grand. I'm on a roller coaster that only goes up my friend." I said with my crooked smile." And then it was her turn.

"My name is Hazel. I'm sixteen. Thyroid with mets in my lungs. I'm okay." Everyone else went on with their stories of battle and loss. The two of us stayed quiet throughout most of it.

"Augustus, perhaps youd like to share your fears with the group." Patrick said.

"My fears?"

"Yes."

"I fear oblivion." I said.

"I fear it like the proverbial blind man who's afraid of the dark." I said with a smile on my face.

"Too soon." Isaac said, cracking a smile.

"Was that insensitive? I can be pretty blind to other people's feelings." I said. Isaac laughed out loud but Patrick didn't give up.

"Augustus, please. Let's return to you and your struggles. You said you fear oblivion?"

"I did." I said. Patrick seemed lost.

"Would, uh, would anyone like to speak to that?" And then she raised her hand. I sat forwards a little bit.

"Hazel!" Patrick said. She looked a little uncomfortable raising her hand. She took a deep breath and started speaking.

"There will come a time when all of us are dead. All of us. There will come a time when there are no human beings remaining to remember that anyone existed or that our species ever did anything. There will be no one left to remember Aristotle or Cleopatra, let alone you. Everything that we did and built and wrote and thought and discovered will be forgotten and all of this"- she gestured around the room.

"will have been for naught. Maybe that time is coming soo and maybe it is a million years away, but even if we survive the collapse of our sun, we will not survive forever. There was time before organisms experienced consciousness and there will be time after and if the inevitability of human oblivion worries you I encourage you to ignore it. God knows that's what everyone else does."

Everyone was quiet as they all processed her words of wisdom. I broke out in a huge smile.

"Goddamn aren't you something else."

Hope that was to your liking:) gosh I love Augustus! I have a huge fangirl crush on him (but then again who doesn't?) stay tuned for chapter 3!

~Wallflower95