Chapter 1

It starts with bruising. Ryan is an active 17 year old boy and he's almost always had a few bruises, but then one day he wakes up and his side is covered in bruises, purple, yellow and blue bruises. He shrugs it off at first. He was always training, always running around with the rest of the group.

But it makes him a little uneasy; because he remembers that it started this way with his dad, too. But he brushes it off, because it’s just a some bruises and he is sure that eventually they will fade and he will think back at it and laugh at himself for being so paranoid.

Then the nose bleeds start. He had gotten them before, but this was more often, a lot more often. That's when he starts to worry, especially when he realizes that he is rarely hungry. Before this he was always hungry, always. He’d been known to put down a whole pizza by himself. It surprises people because he is relatively thin. But he doesn’t want to worry is mom, but he knew that I would hurt her more if he lied and it did turn out to be something.

"Hey, Mom?" he says and his mom can hear the fear in his voice and she puts down her silverware and looks at Ryan calmly. He can feel the tears beginning to form in his eyes. "I, um, think I need to go to the doctor."

His Mom goes pale and for a moment Ryan is afraid she'll pass out but then she gathers herself. "What's wrong?" she asks that question as if the answer will kill her, and Ryan isn't sure how she knows that this is serious, but she does and Ryan isn't going to dance around the truth.

"I've been getting a lot of bruises, too many, and then I started getting nose bleeds." Ryan doesn't rush to get this out like he does with everything else, he's in no hurry for this to become real "I’m never hungry anymore, and I, um, remember that dad was like this before… before he found out and… I made an appointment with dad’s doctor”

His mother has to take a moment to compose herself before she can answer. "I'll take you.”

The thing is, they shouldn't be this afraid. Sure, it's enough that Ryan should probably see a doctor, but not enough for them to be so sure that he's that sick. That he needs to see a cancer specialist. But they watched his father die of cancer and maybe they're just too sensitive to the disease, because Ryan just knows. He knows exactly what he has. He just doesn't know how bad it is. His mom seemed to shrivel under all the chemotherapy her husband went through. Jonathan Sails looked tortured when no one was looking, he would hide it for the benefit of his wife and child, but every mask has its cracks. Ryan had been only 9 when it finally ended.

---

The car ride to the hospital seemed to come to an end far too quickly. Ryan doesn’t have enough time to collect himself, he thought that he would have time. More time in every sense. But that’s not the case. The waiting room is uncomfortable. Everything smells like rubbing alcohol and plastic gloves.

The test results are taking too long to come back. After he gets them everything changes. The doctor's visit is a blur. In fact, when asked to look back, he can't remember much of anything. He been living in a constant state of dread, waiting for the other shoe to drop.

And when it did, it's actually worse than Ryan had imagined. The words echo through his head and he can't actually take in anything else the doctor says. All he can hear is "acute lymphoblastic leukemia" and then white noise even as he watches the doctor's lips move but nothing can be heard.

Ryan cannot remember walking out into the hall, or riding in the car, he just knows that somehow he has shown up in his room. Ryan wants to cry, but nothing's quite sunk in yet. You can't prepare for news like that. It just doesn't work that way. You can try, you can run it through your head a million times, preparing for the worst. But that’s not what it feels like when the words are actually said aloud. It’s like every word is a punch and every doctors apology is a brick. Brick by brick they form a wall and you lose yourself on the other side. Become obsessed with replaying all the words, all that you can remember, trying to find a little hope, any hope to hang on to. But it is hard.

And he wants so badly to just ignore the problem until it goes away, but it will only get worse if he does. His mom would never forgive him for giving up, because they were alone. They had each other of course but even that is lonely sometimes. Ignorance will kill him faster. Not that he knows he's going to die, because he does remember hearing about chemotherapy and he knows that they wouldn't talk about treatment if there wasn't any hope.

He's big on hope. He really, really likes hope. Hope is the only thing he's got right now, because he knows that his mom is terrified. He might not remember how he got to his room, but he remembers all too well how his mom deals with her world falling apart, she detaches herself from everyone and everything. Ryan is his mother’s world and he is dying, just like his father had before him, of the same disease, so Ryan knows that his mom is breaking. She is pulling out before it gets to close. For once, Ryan doesn't resent her for that, maybe that’s what she needs to get through the day, and Ryan gets it.

But he also knows that he has to pull it together, because he has to wake up in the morning like he had done every other day and go to school. Ryan knows then, as he thinks of his fragile pack, that he can't let them know, he can’t destroy them too. They had suffered so much already. Ryan himself knows all too well the icy hands of ghosts that put out the flames or reality. Blurring your mind, making it hard to see what’s real and what’s not.    

Ryan remembers all too well that feeling of helplessness and it's bad enough that his mom will have to go through it again, he won't let the pack go through it too. He knows it would destroy Julia, send her back to the dark place that he worked so hard to pull her from. Not Julia, whose already lost her best friend once, shouldn't have to watch her boyfriend die. It won’t be sudden either, it will be slow and painful, he can’t let her feel that way again. No, Ryan can't do that to his girl.

Ryan thinks of ways to hide it, from everyone. If it's not out in the open, if everyone doesn't know, then he can pretend that he's not sick. Pretend that he's not terrified. Because he is. 

Author's Note

Please?