They’ve never really talked about the inevitable, the two of them.

 

Probably because everytime Jeno tried to steer their conversation to the danger zone, Renjun would always distract him with something so wildly random and nonsensical that he had no other choice but to follow along.

 

Probably it was also because Jeno suddenly remembered, that they’ve only known each other for three years. Two years and a half, really. School friends who met each other on the first day of orientation by chance and somehow managing to keep each other stuck to the hips from that day on.

 

And so on top of his anxiety, Jeno had to also deal with guilt and uncertainty. The fear of facing some uncrossable distance stemming from Jeno’s acknowledgement that he might’ve not earned what it takes to be someone that Renjun could fully trust and confide in.

 

Maybe he already had another friend. Older friend, more trusted, that was chosen by Renjun as a trash bin for all of his more messed up thoughts.

 

But even if he was swimming in the middle of his unkempt emotional state, Jeno still could sense that the situation they were in was kind of unfair on his part. Renjun expecting him to always be there when he needed him, yet Jeno was not allowed to come to terms with a situation that he was essentially being forced into?

 

He wanted to demand justice. He wanted to barge into Renjun’s house and confront him and appeal to him that he too deserve to know.

 

But then, everytime he’d gathered the courage to ask, Renjun would chat him up from his hiding spot at the hospital’s restroom, or call him up from the landline in the nurse’s office, words and voice dripping in such forced display of artificial strength as he asked Jeno to, ‘make me laugh. Please say anything and make me laugh,’ it gave him no other choice but to yield.

 

‘Later,’ Jeno told himself everytime he had to be content with keeping up the hunky-dory charades between them, blocking the text he’d typed up on his phone and deleting it, ‘we can talk about it later.’

 

But later can only mean so much. Later can only have its power if there’s a later to spare. A period in the future that they could go to, together. Later means jack if they ran out of the only currency in life that truly mattered. Time.

 

Later will only be cashed out as nothing but regret if he didn’t say it now.

 

_

 

His later finally came one Friday afternoon, when Renjun called him up and asked if he has any plans after school.

 

“No, I’m free. What’s up?”

 

“Want to come and play at my house? It’s been so long since we saw each other.”

 

Two whole weeks, to be exact. And Jeno would be lying if he didn’t say that he too was missing Renjun terribly. “That sounds fun. But what are you doing at home? Aren’t you missing your doctor appointment or something?”

 

There was a small pause before Renjun spoke again. His words that flowed out after he popped his previously bitten lip sounded no louder than a secretive mumble, “there’s also something I need to tell you.”

 

“Is it good or bad news?”

 

Renjun let out a sharp laughter at that. Bitter, bitter laughter.

 

“Horrendously bad, stupid. As if you can’t tell.”

 

He guessed that at that point, there was nothing else they could do but laugh at the irony and cruelty of it all. How someone who never feared death became the one who attracted it the most, and how someone who feared it terribly became the one who has to hold the hand of someone doomed to walk down the one way road to the great beyond.

 

“I’ll be there in thirty minutes. Don’t die on me yet.”

 

“I will never. Oh! By the way, can you get me some spicy macaroni chips from the cafeteria? I might’ve actually missed that sinful more that I missed you.”

 

‘It’s already that bad, isn’t it?’ Jeno wanted to ask, to beg for Renjun to confirm his worry, even if the knowledge could only afford him just one night of a nightmare-free sleep.

 

Although, as usual, he yielded. Instead, Jeno told him that he’d buy him thirty packs of macaronis, “only if this means that you’ll have to survive for another month to finish them all.”

 

 

_

 

Jeno didn’t know if he should be awed or disturbed by Renjun’s flippant attitude towards his own impending mortality.

 

As he rounded the corner of his dry kitchen, Jeno saw him sitting on a sofa, reading a book, snuggling with his beloved plushie and completely wrapped up in a lump of blanket with his legs propped up on the armrest. He looked significantly less gaunt since the last time they met and Jeno found it hard to believe that this person, this person could’ve lied to him and told him that he only got down with a severe case of the flu and Jeno would’ve believed it in a heartbeat.

 

“Spicy macaroni!” Renjun yelled when he noticed Jeno’s presence in the room, before waving his hand as a way to beckon him over to his cozied up spot.

 

“I hope you don’t mind hanging out here. My room is a total mess,” Renjun said while patting the empty spot right beside him.

 

“You’ve seen my room, you know how much mess I can handle,” Jeno retorted as he dropped the heavy plastic bag on Renjun’s lap, watching with gladness as he saw his friend practically bouncing on his seat from utter excitedness.

 

Renjun took one packet out, ripped it open as if he was a smoker in withdrawal and that macaroni was his first smoke in weeks, before proceeding to tip half of its content into his mouth.

 

“Calm down fatso, you’ll die from choking on some stupid macaroni before the cancer kills you.”

 

It was the first time that Jeno ever said the word “cancer”. No longer just it, no longer just the c-word, he was faced with having to surve through the wave of panic and realisation that ‘this is really it’, in the short span of time as he waited for Renjun’s wheezing, breathless laughter to come to an end.

 

“That’s a nice segway,” Renjun’s words came out in a messy mumble as he was using the back of his hand to wipe off the salty crumbs off the corner of his lips, “I need to tell you something.”

 

“Shoot.” He said just that one, short word, and yet Jeno still was unable to hide the fear from gushing through the cracks of his choked up voice.

 

“I’m stopping all of my chemo treatments.”

 

Casual. Renjun said those words so casually. A breezy, lazy tone in his voice and calm demeanor as he tried to hand a near catatonic Jeno his share of spicy macaroni snack.

 

Just when Renjun was about to give up on his efforts and was about to drop the packet on Jeno’s lap, he managed to find enough courage to both open up his hand to take Renjun’s offering, and also his mouth, to crack another one, short word.

 

“Why?”

 

“Why? Because it doesn’t work.” Renjun muttered, casually, through the sound of him chewing on one of the macaronis. As he looked ahead, casually, to stare at the visibly disturbed Jeno.

 

“How… How do you know that and,- and how could you… are you just going to give up?”

 

“If that’s how you want to call it, then go off, I guess,” he chuckled, popping another piece of snack as if they were talking about silly everyday things, “I’m calling it ‘accepting death with dignity.’”

 

In a moment of blinding frustration, Jeno succumbed into his desire to stop Renjun’s nonsense and found himself lurching forward, his hand grasping around Renjun’s terribly frail wrist as it was halfway en route to his mouth. Jeno exerted enough pressure on his brittle bone that he expected it to cost Renjun a little wince of pain. But instead, there was only an annoyed frown plastered over his face, and Jeno was forced to admit that this tiny little thing could never match with the suffering he’s gone through for the past few months.

 

Renjun must’ve known what Jeno was thinking. After seeing the minute shakings of his head and how his eyes were glazed over in tears he was, once again, trying so hard to contain, Renjun finally took pity of him and began to explain.

 

“My hospital room smells like disinfectants and death. I woke up every morning feeling like death. I look into the eyes of the people that treat me and all I see is death. It’s everywhere, Jeno. Death, and this thing. This alien thing that’s invading me.” Renjun could’ve easily yanked his hand away from Jeno’s slacked fingers. Renjun could’ve even done it while wearing a disgusted expression on his face and Jeno wouldn’t have mind it. And yet he didn’t.

 

Instead, Renjun swiveled his hand around, this way and that, until he could comfortably envelop Jeno’s clammy fingers inside his own chilli-flake-laden grasp.

 

“I only have two choices. Wait for it to come while being locked inside a hospital room, or wait for it in the comfort of my own home,” the way Renjun’s fingers began to tap some random rhythm on the back of his hand was enough to take Jeno down from a ten on anxiety scale, to somewhere more in the middle. A six, maybe. He figured that for as long as he had to deal with this unbelievable friend of his, he’d never cross the middle threshold back to the comfortable, simmering two that he couldn’t believe he could ever miss.

 

“Which one will you choose?”

 

“I would’ve keep on trying.”

 

“That’s how you want to deal with death! You!” Renjun used his free hand to sharply point his index finger at Jeno, before swishing it around and jabbing his fingernail onto his prominently jutting collarbone, “I am not like that. Whatever it is that you want me to do? Keeping my faith on something that will just make me die faster?! I can’t. I just can’t.”

 

After their sudden burst of commotion, the silence that followed was deafening. Renjun was no longer chewing on his snack, he no longer tried to comfort Jeno with any of his monotonous finger-tapping. He only sat there, mute but for his ragged breath, staring ahead on an imaginary spot with his eyes glazed over with something Jeno had never seen him convey ever before. Pure, unadulterated rage.

 

“It’s not fair.” It was a stupid thing to say, as if he just pointed out that water is wet, or that getting stabbed in the stomach hurts. But he couldn’t bear spending another second simmering inside the suffocating silence that if saying stupid, painfully obvious statements are what’s needed to end it, then so be it.

 

It worked, thankfully. Even if for just a tiny bit. Because it managed to coax a chuckle out of Renjun, and that little acerbic smile on his lips was a much better accessory for his face than any downturned grimace could ever hope to be. “You tell me.”

 

“How long?” Jeno asked that question even before Renjun had finished saying his last sentence. Cutting them in two between tell and me. Because he knew, if he yielded this time, then there might never be a later that they can ever go to.

 

Instead of answering, Renjun used his index finger to carefully fix Jeno’s glasses that’d slid down his nose in the midst of their heated conversation. Slightly annoyed, Jeno swished his hand in front of his face to keep Renjun from messing with his glasses, and repeated his question with a somewhat firmer tone.

 

“Three,” Renjun finally answered while wiping his oily fingers on his pajama pants.

 

“Three what? Months? Years?” It was clear, from the way he spoke (like someone slipping down an icy decline, all messy and confused), that Jeno was very much panicked after hearing Renjun’s sudden revelation. But instead of joining him on getting his nerves strung out like an electric cable stripped raw, Renjun decided to mess with Jeno by flashing him on of his much missed mischievous grin.

 

“Weeks?! Days?! Renjun don’t do this to me!”

 

The longer Renjun played up his coy front, the more Jeno panicked, and the more amused Renjun became. It was an endless loop of good-natured cruelty that was only broken when Renjun couldn’t keep a straight face any longer and broke off into a loud, ringing laughter.

 

Sometimes, Jeno would contemplate if it was a good idea to make Renjun laugh. When they exchanged stories over the phone, he couldn’t really sense it all that well, even though he knew of what was happening. But now that it happened in front of his own eyes, Jeno could see, and hear, how much effort was exerted for Renjun to do something so basic and simple as laughing. His ribcage seemed to be rattling on its hinges, and Jeno was so afraid that his lungs would suddenly collapse in and on itself from how hard Renjun’s wheezes sounded. It scared him that Renjun’s laughter sounded less and less like a laughter and more like a painful fit of coughs.

 

“Months! Months Jeno,- god I can’t believe how slow you can be,” he spluttered, wiping the tears that’d collected at the corners of his eyes, “but they also told me at the start of my treatment that I could go on for another year or so. And hey, here I am. So I mean, three months, one month, two weeks, you’ll never know, I guess.”

 

But Renjun always begged Jeno to make him laugh, and will never listen to Jeno’s advice that ‘maybe laughing after you just had a gastroscopy isn’t a very smart idea’ .

 

It wasn’t even jokes. It was mostly just requests for Jeno to tell about any weird things that happened on his life, truthfully, because even Jeno himself was weirded out by how Renjun was able to laugh that hard when listening to his non-existent sense of humour.

 

Between the two of them, Renjun has always been the funny one. And after he was diagnosed, his brand of humour would more often than not fell into the box labelled ‘morbid black comedy’ and often Jeno would wonder if the drops of tears that were collected at the corners of his glasses frame everytime Renjun cracked a joke so wrong it made his stomach hurt, were fully caused by his laughters.

 

“Boys, Renjun, dinner is almost ready. Can you please help set up the table?” His mom’s head popped into the living room’s doorway, instantly enticing an excited hoot from Renjun’s throat. He shocked Jeno when he kicked off the blanket from his legs and scurried his way to the kitchen, a surprising display of agility and speed that he didn’t expect for Renjun to still have.

 

Jeno could only follow his steps, helping Renjun pick out some cutleries while giving Mrs. Huang a polite smile when she gave him an equally polite nod. He silently observed the sweet gestures that Renjun’s mom did as he was walking back and forth from the kitchen to the dining room, only averting his gaze when she leaned in to give Renjun a kiss on his forehead. A scene much too intimate it sent a sharp pang of pain on his chest. “Don’t forget to take your drops, love.”

 

“Oh my god, it’s 420 blaze it time.”

 

“It’s the what time,-?”

 

Renjun looked at Jeno as if he forgot to introduce his name after talking to a stranger for a prolonged period of time, “I’ve never shown you?! Man, you’re missing out. Wait here.”

 

The loud bangs and clutters when Renjun rummaged through a big serving tray filled with medicine packets only amounted to a small, stained glass bottle that he held with such pride and care as he showed it to Jeno.

 

“Give me your hand,” but the way Renjun grabbed and forced Jeno to open up his palm undermined his soft request. He then dropped two dots of darkly colored oil and gestured for Jeno to it up.

 

He only did it because he trust that Renjun could never possibly screw over him so hard that he deliberately gave a strong cancer medicine to a healthy person. Although, he should’ve known better than to trust Renjun blindly, because no sooner after he gave his palm a , a strong odour of something that he could only describe as ‘salty, clipped grass left in the sun for too long,’ hit him straight on his sinuses, and he heard Renjun’s amused giggle after he saw the look of disgust on Jeno’s wrinkled nose.

 

“Hemp oil. Weed oil. . Highly illegal, eh?”

 

“So what now? Did I just broke the law? Will I soon see you as a headless chicken?”

 

“None of that, sadly.”

 

The real use of it was far less adventurous, and it left a bitter taste at the back of Jeno’s throat that he couldn’t distinguish from the taste of the oil that’d begun to coat his mouth cavity in a pungent, slimy screen.

 

“This helps me eat,” he said after dropping half a pipette worth of oil straight to his mouth, “cool, isn’t it? Not only am I cancerous, I’m also a weed addict.”

 

Renjun capped it off with a loud smack of his lips, “I hope you’re not ashamed for being my friend.”

 

He already disappeared back to the kitchen before he could hear Jeno’s response to his un-question.

 

No worries, though, they both knew the answer anyway.

 

 

_ _ _

 

Renjun promised that after dinner, they could spend the entire evening playing whatever game Jeno so choose. But when the time came for doing just that, the loading screen hasn't even finished buffering when he looked back and found that Renjun has passed out cold on the sofa. His head resting on his arms, one dangling down to the floor and causing occasional clacking sound each time his fingers twitched.

 

In fact, his whole body seemed to twitch every few seconds or so, and each time his face would scrunch up, before he would let out a quick murmur of the indiscernible sort. It was as if sleep was the only time he would allow himself to let down his guard, because it was the first time Jeno was able to see him be vulnerable, for once.

 

"Jun," he called out, first soft, because from how disturbed he looked, Jeno deduced that it couldn't be that deep of a sleep. Jeno only repeated it again, louder this time, when he didn't get anything in response, "Renjun."

 

"Mmh-what?"

 

"Go sleep in your room."

 

There was a little bit of delay before he responded, a few seconds spent with him only blinking his eyes before he picked his arm from the floor, and gave Jeno a smile so simple and innocent he nearly experienced a memory whiplash. As the last time he ever saw Renjun gave him such a smile, was on the first month that they spent getting to know each other. "I want to see you play."

 

"We can do this tomorrow." He hasn't finished his words when Renjun cut through it with a weak scoff. A tiny panic that amounted from the thought that he'd said something wrong began to crawl up his spine, but Jeno didn't have to wonder for long because Renjun gave him the answer to his wonderings with a soft pat on his shoulder.

 

"There might never be a tomorrow for me."

 

That silenced him real quick, awkwardly nodding his silent yes-es before he settled his back at the empty spot of the sofa, at the makeshift nest that was naturally formed from the way Renjun positioned himself on it. Framed by Renjun's knees on his left, and his dangling arm on his right, Jeno felt like he was nearly suffocating from the sudden drop of lightness in the air. A natural cage that he couldn't seem to escape from.

 

He absently skipped through the first few moments of the game's cutscene as his mind wandered to the spot a few centimeters away from his. He swore he saw a scowl on Renjun's face. Angry? Was Renjun angry at him for insinuating that he will have a longer life than him? His unbearable sense of guilt was starting to make his fingers shake to the point where he could no longer hide it, proven from how often he missed the timing at the game. It came to the point that he had to pause it, right at the moment when the enemy's arm was on a sure trajectory to give him the last hit needed to knock him out of the level.

 

"That was ," Renjun mumbled from behind him, some sort of a gigglish chortle escaping his semi awake mind state.

 

"I,-" Jeno swore, the reason he turned to face Renjun was because he wanted to apologise. For what, he didn't even know. But the word 'sorry' was hanging so closely at the tip of his tongue that he figured, letting it drip while he was looking straight into Renjun's heavy lidded eyes was a much more preferable option that to say it while still pretending to be engrossed to the game and risk offending him even more. But the moment he looked at Renjun's face, and was greeted with a pleasantly surprised pout that slowly shifted into a curious smile, Jeno was thankfully proven wrong for his assumptions.

 

"What?" Renjun asked when Jeno ended up only staring at him with an empty expression for the next five seconds.

 

Assumptions are just that. Assumptions. In such little time that they had left, Jeno decided to turn his oath, from 'no fear in apologising for my mistakes as I don't want him to haunt me for the rest of my life', to 'no assuming in the first place so I don't have to make mistakes.'

 

"I want to get some water. Do you want me to get you some?"

 

_

 

His mom was washing the dishes when Jeno arrived at the back kitchen with two mugs on either of his hands. He contemplated for a short while to just quickly and silently fill them with water and bailing out of there before she noticed. But before he could do just that, she decided to take his ability to make said decision out of his hand by looking over her shoulder, after she was alerted by Jeno's own blunder of nearly tripping over a tea towel discarded haphazardly on the floor, and asked him with a warm sounding question, "how was the food?"

 

"Very great auntie." He could feel his cheeks warming up into a blush and so Jeno quickly ducked out of her gaze and pretended to wrestle with the cap of the water bottle standing at the corner of the kitchen's prep table. But his theatrical act was cut short when his eyes landed on the phone screen that was blinking animatedly on a cutting board that she must've used when preparing for their meal earlier.

 

'Project manager Mrs. XX - 2 missed calls'

 

'Ms. YY PA - 3 missed calls'

 

'Mr. OO CTO - 2 missed calls'

 

And rows and rows of similarly ignored calls and messages that fully covered the screen of her phone, which, was still blinking at the moment when he finally caught on with the extent of her sacrifices. Jeno was sure that if he dared touch it, the phone would've burned the tip of his fingers from being overheated to hell and back again.

 

He looked back up from Mrs. Huang’s phone and only then did he realise how sloppy the state of the kitchen was. Grease stains on the handle of the fridge, crusted smears of peanut butter and spills of chocolate sprinkles mingled with dried ts of carrots and onion husks like a haphazard rendition of Christmas decorations, and eggshells crushed into dust under the repeated trips that she did from the sink to the dining room. The floor was somehow slippery and sticky at the same time and Jeno involuntarily regretted the fact that he decided to take off his socks.

 

A quick glance to Mrs. Huang and her sight told him the same story as her kitchen did. Locks of hair escaped from her messy bun like leaked stuffing from an old plushie, and the creases on her work attires showed that she hasn't bothered to iron them for god knows how long. Only then did Jeno remember that he never really had any conversation about Renjun's situation with her if he didn't count the 5 second phone calls when he asked her if Renjun would be coming to school or not.

 

"Auntie," he didn't know why he did that. He didn't know why he dared reach out to her like that and risk a certain death of his own when he felt that regret was quickly climbing up the chamber of his throat and causing him to feel as if his tonsils has grown five times their normal size. Well, he didn’t need to wait too long to find his reason. He instantly knew why when she turned around, wiping her drenched hands on her dull pencil skirt and looking at him with an encouraging look that only mothers would have. Like she was telling him to 'go on' with only one quick raise of her eyebrows.

 

He'd never seen her be as tired as this. Not even when she stumbled into the dining room in the middle of their uneventful Friday game night that they’d spend doing essentially jack . He would ask Renjun for why she’s home that late and he would tell Jeno that 'you think this is late? She's been going home at 12 AM for nearly two weeks now.'

 

But she always returned with late night snacks for Renjun, and for Jeno too, if he stayed behind for a few hours too long on those uneventful Friday nights. She would put it on the floor in front of them, ruffle Renjun's hair before giving his forehead a quick kiss, wave her hand on a pink-as-a-rose Jeno, before she disappeared up the stairs with a certain amble to her gait.

 

That ritual of theirs seemed to happen so long ago. A complete cycle of a lifetime ago. Now, she walked towards him with a visible hunch on her usually proud shoulders and Jeno could see the years catching up with her in a nearly vengeful manner from the silver tufts of hair around her temple that she no longer bothered to dye.

 

"What's the matter, are you okay?" When she first asked this, Jeno could feel her motherly sense seeping out of her pores in droves. But when he didn't answer for an extended amount of time, long enough for her to first discern that yes, it was a silence that contained something other than nothing, and long enough for her to study his unfocused eyes and gather by herself the unsaid message that he was not able to say, it was gone. All of it. Everything. Gone.

 

It was as if he was standing in a room with only one lightbulb hanging above him and all of a sudden, it was turned off. He was lost in the middle of nowhere, essentially. In a panic, he tried to search for that sense of dependability and reassurance that he would always feel from authoritative figures that he trusted, but for the first time in his life, he couldn't find it.

 

"He told you."

 

Mrs. Huang was alive, well and breathing. Jeno could still feel her human warmth emanating from her body with them standing so close to each other as they were then. But Jeno sensed nothing but a terrifyingly cold and empty, desolate wasteland the next time she looked at him.

 

At that moment, they were thrown off the pre-existing rungs of social status quo. Not in a sense that she stepped down from her seniority ladder and looked at him as a scared child, or him stepping up and giving her a comforting more wise than his age would have been able to muster up. But in a sense that they were stripped of their identity as human beings. She was no longer a mother of someone and he was no longer a son of someone. Just two lost souls floating in the cosmic ether who couldn't begin to comprehend the way their terrifyingly chaotic universe worked.

 

But in one blink of an eye everything snapped back into place and Mrs. Huang seemed to be so disturbed by the experience that she had to retreat to the tall kitchen stool in order to gain back her bearings.

 

"He decided on it himself. I couldn't stop him," in the calmness of an empty kitchen on a late afternoon, she talked with such unnecessary haste in her voice that Jeno could only assign one reason for why she did so. Throwing away blame from herself. Mrs. Huang's fingers visibly trembled, just like his, when she rubbed the bridge of her nose. She rubbed it so firmly the skin turned the shade of a sickly yellow the moment she let it go and clasped her hand in front of . Seemingly in a way to hide from him the fact that she was just as terrified as a 17 years old child, "what scares me is how… I didn't try harder to stop him."

 

She was silent for a long while that Jeno had started to nervously fiddle with the metal cap of the water bottle when Mrs. Huang took a sharp breath and unceremoniously spat out her confession, "Am I a bad mother?" It didn’t come off as a question. More like a way for her to beg for a confirmation because she was tired of hearing people telling her an answer that she didn't want to hear. "I didn't… I didn't,-" notice it sooner, do anything sooner, try harder, give him a better treatment, make more time to be with him, think that I would give him the curse by birthing him in the first place. The burden and guilt that'd seemingly haunted her from the day they all found out three months ago was straining to be said, only held back by a weak barrier created from her thinly pursed lips. But in the end, she decided against it and the unsaid sentences only rolled across her glistening eyes like the blurb of headlines running along the bottom of the midnight news broadcast.

 

“I don’t know,-” what to do, he wanted to say. But similarly to her attempt of saying her confession, it was cut short. Because he knew that if he said any other peep, even if just for one word, he would burst into tears and he didn’t know of he was ready to let himself fall that quickly to the deep end in front of another living and breathing soul. But his words could also take a double meaning, in a way that he too didn’t know if Mrs. Huang is a good mother or not because yes, Jeno told himself that he wouldn't assume. But it was so easy to guess what Mrs. Huang was thinking when they were also the thoughts that constantly flashed inside his mind's eye. Did he blame her for some of the things that happened to Renjun? He would be lying if he say that he didn’t.

 

She seemed to know of what he was thinking, judging from the bittersweet smile she put up on her lips as she gestured for a hug. Hesitating, Jeno still clutched the handle of his mug with a terrifying amount of strength when he yielded and went in for the hug. It was just a miracle they didn’t disintegrate under his worrying fingers.

 

“I’m sorry,” she only said those words during the long duration of their languid hug, the hug of two mentally and physically exhausted people. Was it to atone for her sins, beg for his forgiveness, or because she knew the treacherous journey that awaited the both of them in the future, he didn’t know exactly why. But he’s started to feel her motherly warmth crawling to the tips of her limbs and for just that one moment, he was glad that they didn’t lose her. They couldn’t afford that to happen.

 

 

_ _ _

 

 

 

'My mom is a strong, independent, modern woman.
She doesn’t need any underaged to keep her company or anything.’

 

‘You’re making everything sound creepy.
I was just trying to be nice!’

 

‘And I’m just trying to be realistic.’

 

‘...
-_-’

 

‘Told you,
You don’t need to do anything weird.
Just come to my funeral, cry a lil bit, go home.’

 

‘She’s going to be alone.
With you and Sicheng gone, technically.’

 

‘Continue living your life. All that shiz.’

 

‘Please? Let me be there.
At least until she’s… feeling better.’

 

‘Gosh there’s no stopping you, isn’t it?
Whatever then.’

 

‘Thankyou.’

 

‘But if I see you do anything bad,
I’ll be the one sending you straight to hell.’

 

‘........

-_-’