"He's not." She shook her head, her hands stone cold. She thought she might die of the frostbite. "Is he?" Her lips withered as if she hadn't absorbed water in decades. She was dying.

"It's not what you think," he drawled, his voice barely audible as if his throat had been clogged.

"Then what is it?" She took a step forward but it was heavy. It was hard. She couldn't walk. Walking was tiresome. It required strength and she seemed to have none at the moment as her heart went haywire. She needed answers, dammit.

"He... uhh... has cancer... Blood cancer." It took him eternity to spill those words as they locked themselves around her like an irrevocable noose. So tight. So splintering she might as well just stop breathing. A crippling fear snarled itself around her writhing body like a deadliest serpent as she choked on the clogging tears, blocking her airway. God, she wasn't breathing. She choked. She coughed. Her hands went clammy, her throat closing in on her.

"Ms. Hayat!" He had just taken a step forward when Arham grabbed her by her squeezed shoulders. Azlan moved back, pulling his hand back while Arham made her sit on the chair. He rubbed her back.

"Stay here, I'll go grab some water." He sprinted out of the corridor. Within a minute he was back with a bottle of cold water.

She grabbed it with her quavering hands as the cold water splashed its way down her clogged throat. Cold was good. It pacified her. But the fear wasn't letting go. And it was justified. She had lost someone else to the same illness. Someone who was so close to her. Someone she was a part of. Someone who always took care of her. And someone after whom her life became a miserable wreck.

Her mother.

She still remembered the day she lost her. It was dry, as if signaling her that the doom was near. She had prayed to Almighty nth times to grant her mother mercy but some trials are the hardest as she left her alone in this cold and harsh world. In the hands of people who were her own but never acted like one as they treated her like a black sheep in the swarms of holy saints with their holier-than-thou, heaveir-than-earth attitudes.

She was wounded by her own people. Bruised. Broken. But still rising through her ashes like a Phoenix because what else choice did she have? Dying only meant burning in hell because what she had done clearly wasn't something to be put in heaven for. Not that it stopped her. She had tried to end the misery but ending her own misery meant starting it for someone else so she ended the misery itself. She had plucked it from the root, torn it, and finally wrecked it.

"Why didn't you inform me?" She gritted, clutching the seat below her tightly, as Azlan sat beside her, keeping a distance of one chair between them. Her face had turned the brightest shade of red as if she had chugged down a bottle of petrol instead of water.

"I didn't want to-" He paused as the words stuck in his parched throat. He didn't want to what? Worry her? Isn't that exactly what he had come here for? To drive her crazy to the point where she'd start doubting her own existence? Then why was humanity switch he had turned off for her was yearning to be back on?

She looked up, her eyes blood red as they whacked him right in the face with accusatory glances. "You had no right to hide it from me." The blood rushed through his jutted veins like streaks of rivers.

"I know. I'm sorry. I got scared." Oh, he had his own fair share of fear as he had lost someone at the exact same age. Someone who was his only reason to live. After whose death his suicide thoughts triggered because he simply couldn't free himself from the pain when the person he loved so deeply was suffering, too. And when that person died, his reason to live died, too. He didn't deserve it... he thought.

He didn't know what else to say to her. Both were suffocated with their own fears and both were hiding it from each other. Both were dying from inside yet both were breathing, dying a slow death.

"Can I see him?" She sniffed, her voice breaking into fragments akin to her heart.

"Yes, he is sleeping right now. His intrathecal therapy will commence the day after tomorrow."

She nodded. If only she could steal all that pain away from that poor child and have it inflicted on her!

******

She wanted to be strong, at least in front of Ayyan so he wouldn't get worried, but the tears weren't leaving her alone as if stuck to her eyes like an adhesive.

"You're acting as if you're the one suffering from leukemia, and not me." He giggled, flashing his teeth, his cheekbones jutted out. "At least, don't steal my thunder."

"Oh, my love, I so wish I were the one suffering from it instead." She caressed his soft face with her shaking hand. Also surprised that he was still laughing and not afraid of the deadly disease he had.

"Don't say that." He scowled, his nostrils flaring. "Why do you think I can't fight it? Do you consider me that weak?" He was disappointed in her.

"No. Not at all. I know you can fight it, beat it, and smother it over." She left a fleeting kiss on his cold forehead as she softened the scowl.

As she pulled away her eyes fell on the swollen lymph nodes around his neck and she felt as if a honed knife warped through her heart and cut it in pieces. The cancer cells were spreading fast and the treatment needed to be kicked off quickly.

She sniffed as she tore her gaze away like the way she used to do when she would find them on her mother. Not because they made her queasy, but because she didn't want to cry in front of her. She was already suffering so bad, let alone her daughter adding more to it.

"Promise me, you'll fight through this. You're not alone in this battle. We all are with you and you have to promise me, you won't give up, that you'll never give in this illness. You'll fight like a true little warrior that you are. Promise me!" The same words she had begged to her mother in her innocence and fright. But they didn't work back then and who guaranteed they'd work, now?

"I promise. I'll survive." He swayed the rolling tears away from her cheeks with his small and frail hands. She held them together in her big ones and kissed them.

"Okay, now you're just using my hands as a substitute to handkerchief for removing your snot." He made a face and she laughed.

"Come on, I'll give you a proper bath." She said as she pushed the sheets off him.

******