Sweat loitered on Bellona's forehead when she woke, tainting her pallid skin with its sticky residue. It had become part of her daily routine, ever since the diagnosis. To wake up, legs entangled - suffocated - amidst the constricting waves of her white bedsheets, convoluted into arrays of wrinkles until their grip left no room for the movement of her limbs. It almost seemed as if they, too, wanted her dead.

Not just that sickness that crept through her body. Not just the wraith that insisted on conquering her brain, lobe by lobe, slowly, steadily, until it reigned victorious over every vein and artery inside of her.

The doctors called it Stage Four Glioblastoma. Cancer. They'd looked upon her with a borrowed empathy stealing across their eyes, only to harden moments later to inform her of the costs. The symptoms. That she'd likely experience headaches soon, and nausea, and that she now owed them four hundred dollars simply because they'd informed her of her impending death sentence.

There was no cure. Only a prolonging of the inevitable, and for that, Bellona insisted that she didn't owe them anything at all. They'd handed her death on a platter. Not a feast. Not healing. And certainly not hope, or any other deed that deemed them worthy of her money.

Bellona wondered when her daydreams had turned into nightmares.

She'd once been a girl of sunlight. A sunflower, per se, yearning for nothing more than to soak up the rays of every sun she rotated around. Her mother, Summer, her classmates. Sam. She used to consider it a hobby of hers to roll in the grass like a child, traipsing across both meadows and grassy plains alike until she got lost in the fantasies of her mind.

Now she was a girl of the coldest hour of night, and she knew it. She saw it in the coloring of her bedsheets, in the linen that used to be as white as the first snowfall of winter, but was now tarnished with a sultry yellow. It was the color of the sweat that peeled off of her like an old skin during the night, and the color of a dreary autumn. She used to think the chilly season was a warning sign of endings and the new beginnings that would follow. She knew the truth now. It was no more than an end - of spring, of life, of the gentle whisper of a summer breeze as it brushed across her cheek. No new beginnings would follow.

At least, not for Bellona Wesson.

Most people would give their souls to have their future laid out for them in stark lucidity. Bellona would never have to. Not when she had it so near, lying like the silhouette of a corpse at her bedside, resting on her nighttable until she picked the wretched papers up and passed it to her doctor to confirm her next appointment.

It was unexpected. It was cruel. And it was her reality.

Even so, she refused to believe that what her mother had said was true. It couldn't have been. Agnes' words of an ethereal bloodline, Hestia's curse, and a pendant that had the power to defeat death - it was all nonsense, the consequence of delusions. Her claim that Bellona was sick, too, had just turned out to be a lucky guess.

A cheerful melody interrupted her forlorn daze and, without looking, Bellona's hand clattered atop her night table until it collided with her phone and shut off the ringer. Seconds passed in the darkness of her bedroom. Her windows had been clamped shut the night before, in hopes that the bright sunlight wouldn't intrude upon what little sleep she got. Not even the rays of morning sun could pierce the murky veil.

The screen of her phone lit up, emanating an electronic blue throughout her room. It reflected off of her dresser, her bookshelves, and her toes that peeked out from beneath her blankets, until a monotone voice sounded: "You have one unheard message."

A soft groan drifted from between Bellona's lips, and she reached to push the button that would play the message. She almost dreaded what it would have to say. She knew, even before the voicemail began, whose voice it would be, and she knew she would not respond to it. It saddened her, how something she'd once desired so greatly had become an item of reproach amid her melancholy.

"Hey, it's Sam," the voicemail began. "I, uh...I'm sorry if I'm bothering you, but I haven't seen you around in a few days, and you didn't answer my last few messages, so I just wanted to make sure you were okay. Call me when you get the chance. Or, if you don't want to, I...I guess that would be okay, too."

Bellona's finger hammered against the bright red button on her screen.

Message deleted.

She couldn't answer him yet. He would have questions, ones that coveted the answers she could not give. Even if she wanted, she couldn't offer him solace in exchange for his inquiries. She couldn't even offer a facade of it to herself.

Instead, she'd peeled the warm, tangerine strokes of bliss from her cheeks and had painted them over with a meek gray. One that trembled in a corner, hissing, teeth bared and lurid in the night. One that ran from simple duties such as college classes and returning voicemails, instead leaving the words of an open heart to die in the dust of her cell phone's speakers. One that remembered nothing but the worst tremors of Bellona's childhood.

The way she fled like a child in the face of her medical obstacle reminded Bellona of her youth. In the days before her parents' divorce, when the shouts had grown a little too loud and the accusations a little too intimate, she'd scamper to her room and close the door behind her. Quietly and gingerly the lock would click, so as not to distract their parents from their agitations with one another.

She was doing the same thing now - shoving her fingers in her ears, clamping her eyes shut, and breathing prayers that it would all end. Then, she'd prayed for two things: one, for the fighting to cease, so she could experience harmony until the next argument arrived. And two, the path less wished for - for her parents to acknowledge the unspoken end-all and leave each other behind, therefore offering a more eternal peace to one another.

Alas, the end-all Bellona faced now was much more permanent than eternal. It lived past the days of human memory, past the years of mortal existence. It was death.

It was death or treatments that would reach no victory, and the film on Bellona's lips had been numb ever since she'd realized it. Ever since she'd received the diagnosis in that bland hospital room.

Even so, all dead machinery rises, amidst groaning joints and weary sighs, to walk another day. Whether or not it would be her last time, Bellona would do the same.

◈◈◈

She instantly regretted it.

The oblivion she'd handcrafted out of the pieces of her dormitory had been devilish, but this was much worse. This was an abyss.

A cesspit, swirling and churning, churning seas of inky black remorse, all in the spawn-point of Sam Winchester's eyes.

Those eyes. Those grasping, pleading eyes, with the fleeting mahogany flakes that had once brought her such joy, but now only wrung a blade through her heart. Only this blade was double-edged, one side laced with empathy and the other with betrayal, together inducing a solvent that broke all laws of the budding - dare she think it - romance they possessed.

His gaze met hers and the essence of her very being fell into poverty.

A yearning that grafted itself so deeply into Bellona that she was left with nothing. Always destitute of something. The something that would lead her to Sam if she would only chase it.

And so she did.

She allowed herself this. Just this once, despite her better judgement, because appeasement was never a permanent treatment and she could never hope to have Sam forever. Not with the diagnosis that clung to her skin like a leech.

Sam rushed toward her across the crowded hallway of Stanford, dodging his peers and leaping over stray textbooks, and Bellona allowed herself to stay there and wait for him. Waiting. Always waiting for the boy with the summertime smile, but just like the season, the natures of this world refrained from letting it linger for longer than a moment.

"Bell," Sam gasped once he'd reached her. He stood a few feet away, further than he'd stood the last time they'd encountered one another, a sign that the seasons of the past couple days had weathered them both. Like remembering how to dress in shorts and tank tops after a long winter, they would each have to recall the way they were supposed to behave around the other.

His brows furrowed slightly at the ends, his stare dodging Bellona's, only straying back in intervals. "You've been dodging my calls, so you probably don't even want to see me right now, but I just wanted to make sure you were okay."

Bellona let loose a pent-up breath, remaining silent so as to repress the tears that threatened to spill from her ducts.

Of course she wanted to see him. She just didn't want to see him like this.

This. Sick. Dying. Wasting the time of her friends and family, because no one wanted to love for less than eternity, even when that was all she had to give.

A rustle erupted from Sam's mouth as he cleared his throat. "I...I can leave if you want, or if you're not ready to talk about it. I don't mean to pry, I-"

"No." Bellona's voice cracked, and her eyes widened, horrified at the vulnerability she'd just displayed. "Don't leave."

Sam's eyes widened, eyebrows lifting in curiosity, and he held his hand out to rest upon the frizzled wool of Bellona's sweatered shoulder. Fingers spread, they were tendrils of companionship reaching to comfort his would-be lover.

It was ironic, then, that Bellona would shy away from his touch. His offer of friendship, of solace and of a place to relish in the repose that pulsed from him like an aura, was not a balm she could accept. Not when it was not within her power to return his gracious gift. Not when the close of her journey spent hand-in-hand life was so inevitably near.

How could it not be? Stage Four Glioblastoma was two paces apart from incurable. The doctors hadn't needed to tell her that - she could see in their faces, in the way the skin beside their noses wrinkled every time the phrase foamed from their lips.

Alas, when she backed away, forcing a gap between herself and the most desperate desire of the wicked parts of her heart, the skin where Sam's fingers once lied was immediately tinged with regret. She could feel the ghost of his touch there. It moaned her name like a wailing widow, fingers blue around the nails in stark contrast with her bloodshot eyes, a phantom to all but the one she had opened her heart to.

Or, in this case, he. A he-phantom. Sam.

She'd abandoned him, if only for a few days. Now, here he was, offering forgiveness and welcome all at once, and she'd rejected his precious bounty. Bellona could see the widow in the dejection on his face.

She pressed her lips together, eyes searching Sam. Searching for what, she wasn't sure. A way out of this situation, maybe, a way that would leave them both happy. Or, perhaps, she was searching for a safe way to embrace the man that stood before her, because even if it was destined for failure, the friendship he'd given her was one of her most cherished possessions.

A distracted hand tugged at the ends of her hair. An explanation of why she'd been ignoring him was the least she owed Sam for everything he'd done for her. And maybe then, once she'd explained away all the absences and unanswered voicemails, Sam might just believe her when she tells him she didn't hate him no matter how things seemed, and that she hoped he didn't hate her either.

"Can we go somewhere to talk?" Bellona asked, though it passed between her lips as a squeak. "Somewhere more private with less, uh..." Her gaze drifted across the hordes of students surrounding them. "Less traffic."

Sam readily nodded. "Of course."

Bellona turned out the door she'd just entered through, the taller man sauntering behind her. She could hear the soft click of his boots on the sidewalk pavement behind her, the rustle of his jeans as they inched nearer to the deserted campus lake, and she could sense it then. A foreboding she'd felt since the moment she'd first been blinded by white doctor's coats - a wrenching in her chest more severe than heartburn to be considered treatable.

She was going to lose Sam Winchester. The lilt of a giggle, escaping his own lips and taking him by surprise. The gentle curve of his nose as it tilted upwards ever so slightly at the tip, the soft fabric of his flannel that she felt in the moments when his elbow would accidentally brush against hers - all of it gone within months, and there was nothing to be done about it.

She hardly even knew him, she tried to remind herself. It's okay to let him go.

And yet, when they slowed to a stop beneath the shade of an old oak tree, and Sam stopped to brush a thumb across the pores of one of its leaves, the aching pulsed. It made it all the more difficult to deliver the news that lied, festering, on her tongue.

"Sam, I..."

Bellona forced herself to swallow, cringing at the abrasiveness of her trachea. Sandpaper lined the insides of her throat, soaking up all of the moisture from her mouth and gifting a caustic trait to every word that dripped from between her chapped lips.

Sam bent his knees, slowly lowering himself until he was seated in a patch of grass beneath the tree. Bellona watched as he hurried to yank off his flannel and lay it on the ground next to him, the red and brown lines contrasting the yellows of the decaying grass. He patted the wooly shirt. Once, twice, and then a third time until Bellona deciphered his unspoken words and sat atop it next to him.

"Take your time." His voice emanated from his mouth like warm honey. "I'll be here."

Bellona nodded, forcing the faintest of smiles onto her face. She wanted to. She wanted to take all the time in the world, lying here, enveloped by serene nature in the presence of the person whose company she was beginning to value most.

She knew she couldn't. If she didn't tell him now, she was afraid she never would.

"I have cancer," she said.

Just like that. She hadn't bothered weaving the pedantry of common speech into her words, hadn't bothered lacing her announcement with sugar to make it easier to swallow. She'd handed the news to him raw - lacking preparation, softening, and all other necessary components of easy comprehension.

Sam didn't answer. He simply sat there, lips slightly parted, looking down. She followed his gaze to his hands, where his fingers were curling around one another.

Amid her anxiousness, she started speaking again. "The doctors, they uh...they said it was Stage Four Glioblastoma. There's not really a cure. They can prolong...what's coming, or they can try to make things better, but if they do that, then there's a chance it'll make my condition worse, and I-"

She stopped. She tugged the cuffs of her sweater until they extended past her fingertips and took a long, shaky breath. Her eyes shot up to their lids until the saline that was swelling there subsided. "I'm scared, Sam."

He was going to leave. She knew he would, because what reason was there for him to stay? No morsel of commitment lingered between the two of them - only blossoms, sprouts of a commitment that might have bloomed if disease hadn't been so almighty. There were no strings tying the beautiful Winchester boy to the sickly Wesson girl.

He had his whole life ahead of him. To stay would be to abandon his future and every opportunity that lies before him.

Nonetheless, there he was. Still next to her, still seated. Still ever so constant in his place by her side. Mere seconds passed, and Sam's now-bare arm weighed down on her shoulders. She allowed her body to curve into his - just one more sliver of appeasement - and her head to nestle into the crook between his neck and shoulder. There was a gentle tugging on pieces of her hair, sending shivers along her scalp and worms of infatuation creeping down her back, but instead of ignoring it, she savored it. This was what it felt like to deserve abandonment and receive companionship instead.

She wasn't sure how long they stayed like that - seconds, minutes, hours even. She would have stayed there forever if Sam hadn't broken the silence.

"Will you meet me here tomorrow?" Sam whispered, careful not to speak so loud and disturb Bellona's fragile serenity. "At noon, right here under this tree. I have something to show you."

Bellona sat up and turned so that her eyes met Sam's, but his hand still lingered on her upper arm. She hesitated. She knew she should say no. She should say no and then leave him behind to live the rest of his life, absent of the worry of having to chase a dead girl. But sitting there, enclosed by his embrace and gazing at his timid smile, she couldn't make herself say no.

She nodded.