FIC: Fall Through The Night (TSCC, PG)
This story is a companion/sequel to my story, Fewer Than You Think. Although it is not necessary to have read that story to understand this one, it may help to know that in the previous story John was shot and hospitalized.
I thought I should post this story before it’s Joss’d by Season 2.
Title: Fall Through the Night
Author: Danahid (danahid)
Fandom: TSCC
Spoilers: S1
Pairing (if any): Gen, slightly Derek/Sarah.
Rating: PG
Length: 2,473
Disclaimer: Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles (TSCC) is owned by Fox and many people who are not me. No profit being made. No infringement intended.
Archive/Distribution: Please ask.
Date: 7/14/08 (rev 8/6/08)
Summary: He is dreaming that he sees them standing under the tree, Derek and his mother - Sarah - standing so close that they don’t look like two people but like some new creature that he’s never seen before.
FALL THROUGH THE NIGHT
To assess prognosis and to guide treatment decision-making, cancer is generally assessed using a system called staging. Tumor stages range from Stage I to Stage IV, with Stage I having the best prognosis and Stage IV having the poorest. The staging system takes into account three major features of a cancer: tumor size, lymph node status, and metastasis status.
Sarah sits in the empty room, her head in her hands.
Minutes pass.
Eventually she gets up. She pulls off the paper gown. She stands, swaying slightly, trying to decide whether to wad the gown into a ball, hurl it across the room, vent the violence and anger and despair boiling inside her. After a minute, she decides it is not worth the effort.
She lets the gown drop to the chair. She dresses carefully. She bends down to gather her phone, her keys, her bag. She walks out.
Tumor size can be an important indicator of how quickly a tumor is growing. A small tumor may be small because it is growing very slowly, or it may be small because it is growing quickly and has been found early.
Sarah sits in the living room with the lights off.
She sits compactly, with her arms wrapped around herself and her legs tucked underneath her body. She leans her head back against the chair, stares at the ceiling, thinks about how John has changed since he was released from the hospital. Now when she looks at him, she no longer sees her teenage son. She sees the man he will become: tall, filled out, with broad shoulders and shadowed eyes. She sees a man others will follow, a man whose charisma and decisiveness will be legendary.
She closes her eyes. She thinks: I will not know that man.
Lymph node status indicates whether cancer cells have moved from the original tumor into the lymph nodes. If lymph node status is positive, meaning the lymph nodes contain cancer cells, the cancer is more likely to recur.
Sarah sits in the dark.
Every night, Cameron stops in the living room during her midnight patrol. She tilts her head as if to comment on Sarah’s sleeplessness but says nothing.
Some nights, Derek sits with Sarah. Like Cameron, he says nothing. Sarah wants to ask him why he stays, why he doesn’t speak, but she doesn’t.
In the morning, none of them mention their nocturnal non-interactions to John.
Invasive cancer (also called infiltrating cancer) spreads to the healthy tissue surrounding the tumor. Metastatic cancer spreads beyond the original tumor and local lymph nodes to other parts of the body through the bloodstream and lymphatic system.
Sarah sits in the kitchen with her hands cupped around her coffee mug.
Every morning, she watches John over the cup’s rim. She watches him walk into the kitchen, blinking in the sunlight. She watches him rotate the stiffness out of his half-healed shoulder as he digs through the fridge. When he sits down at the table with his cereal, she watches him eat. She stares at the scar slashed across his chest and shoulder and tries to decide if its edges have faded. The scar’s angry redness is a constant reminder of how close she came to losing him.
Some mornings, John teases her about her staring. On other mornings, John reassures her that he’s fine and she should stop worrying. On still other mornings, John says nothing, just reaches across the table and gently touches her hand.
Most mornings, Derek watches Sarah watching John. Derek watches John too, but he and Sarah do not trade observations over coffee. Sarah doesn’t ask Derek what he thinks. She doesn’t tell him that she thinks that John’s gait has changed in a way that has nothing to do with his recent injury. She doesn’t admit that watching and worrying about John takes her mind off the pain that crashes into her body like waves.
Pathologists classify tumors into one of three grades based on how similar in appearance the cancer cells are to normal cells, and on how many of those tumor cells are dividing. The greater the number of cells dividing, the higher the tumor grade.
Sarah sits.
Finally, after too much sitting and too many sleepless nights, Sarah decides that she needs to do something different. She decides to act as if her diagnosis has changed nothing.
She establishes a new morning routine. She makes sandwiches for John and Cameron. She sets up an assembly line down the length of the kitchen island. She moves along the line, pausing to spread layers of mayo and mustard on whole wheat bread, then moving down a couple of steps to insert slices of turkey, then cheese, then tomato. She adds an apple and a banana, then places the completed bag lunches at the end of the island so that John and Cameron can grab them on their way out the door. She finds the repetitive, precise task almost meditative. She can almost forget how exhausted she is.
Derek leans one hip against the kitchen counter, watching her assemble the lunches. His expression is a mixture of bemusement and disbelief. When she starts gathering the sandwich ingredients to put them away, he nods at the two lunch bags. “Metal don’t eat.”
“She needs to pass for human,” Sarah says automatically. She does not look up.
“Yeah, and?”
“And,” Sarah replies, still not looking up, “a human anorexic would get us on the radar.”
Derek shakes his head. He plucks a turkey slice from the top of Sarah’s pile and waves it at the remnants of her sandwich assembly line. “Have you always made lunch this way and I just didn’t notice?”
Sarah rolls her eyes. She hoists the stack of ingredients to carry them to the fridge and is almost there when suddenly the world falls away. Her vision tilts. She sways. The plastic containers teeter. She wonders, half-panicking, if she is about to do something so embarrassing as pass out in front of Derek.
Then the moment passes. Her head clears. She opens the fridge door. She stacks the containers in the fridge. She closes the fridge door.
“Are you okay?” Derek asks from behind her.
“I’m fine,” Sarah says. “Just tired.”
When used appropriately, chemotherapy offers benefits that may outweigh the risks associated with side effects. Chemotherapy can reduce the number of cancer cells that spread to other parts of the body, reducing the likelihood that cancer will return.
Sarah sits in the living room, hunched over and shivering.
When she hears Derek come in, she straightens. She throws her shoulders back. She fists the sweat-damp hair away from her face.
“Anyone home?” Derek calls as he drops his keys on the table by the front door.
Sarah clears her throat and calls back, careful to keep her tone colorless and absolutely normal: “I’m in the living room.”
She listens as he pulls his boots off one by one. She can tell how tired he is by the sound of his footsteps down the hall.
Derek appears in the doorway to the living room, barefoot and haggard. He narrows his eyes when he sees her but doesn’t comment on her appearance, just as she doesn’t comment on his. He sinks into the nearest chair, rubs his hand across his face, says, “So that new Cyberdyne lead was bogus,” and there is no frustration or anger in his voice; he just sounds exhausted. “We’re back to square one.”
Sarah sighs. She doesn’t have the energy to ask him what happened. She suspects it's nearly cost him all the energy he had to say the few words he’s said.
They sit quietly, each lost in thought or tiredness or both, until Sarah realizes that Derek is staring at her. She glares back, stares him down. She is still in charge, despite the pain and fatigue, despite the fact that she can’t remember when Derek started shouldering most of the responsibility for their day-to-day missions. (She suspects it started with moments like these, with her pretending everything is normal and his watching her with sharp eyes that miss nothing.)
Derek breaks their wordless battle of wills first. He looks away, digs his finger into a hole in the upholstery of his armchair, asks: “John home?”
Sarah shakes her head. She is about to remind him that school doesn’t let out until 3 o’clock when suddenly she can’t speak, is coughing, coughing, coughing so hard that her ribs crack. When the coughing fit is over, Sarah wipes her face and mouth with a crumpled tissue.
Derek gives her a pointed look. “Just tired, huh?”
“It’s a cold,” she mutters. “I get colds. I’m human.”
“Good to know,” he says seriously, and Sarah feels her lips twitch at the sincerity in his voice: Derek will always be someone for whom humanity is not a given. It’s a welcome reminder.
“Maybe this isn’t a cold,” Derek continues. “Maybe you’re getting sick because you don’t sleep enough.”
“Spare me the doctor routine,” Sarah snaps before another coughing fit chokes off the rest of what she was going to say. She wraps her arms around herself, abandons herself to the hacking coughs. She is coughing so hard that she doesn’t hear Derek get up from his chair, turn on his heel, and leave the room.
When Derek comes back, Sarah is slumped in her chair, eyes closed, head throbbing, body drained. Derek drapes his quilt around her shoulders, crouches beside her chair, and says nothing comforting or sympathetic, for which Sarah is pathetically grateful.
For a long time, neither of them speaks. When Sarah coughs, Derek grimly hands her fresh tissues. When she finishes coughing, he scoops up her used tissues to throw them away. He stops halfway to the trash basket when he realizes the red stains on the tissues are blood.
“This isn’t just a cold,” he says angrily. Sarah startles at his tone; there is something besides anger in his voice, something that sounds like concern, or maybe even fear.
She pulls the quilt more tightly around herself. She closes her eyes. She thinks: I am not ready to talk about this.
Some of the possible short- and long-term side effects associated with chemotherapy include: fatigue, hair loss, nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, infection, nerve pain, muscle pain, heart disorders, leukemia.
Sarah sits on the bathroom floor, slumped against the cool tiles.
Despite her best efforts to act as if everything is normal, it isn’t. Every morning, her pillow is covered with clumps of dull brown hair. She washes a face she can barely recognize, all bruised eyes and hollow cheekbones. She spends more time in the bathroom than she has ever done in her life. She takes naps.
She covers her face with shaking hands. The worst thing is not the hair loss or the exhaustion; it's not even the endless vomiting. The worst thing is knowing that she is leaving so much unfinished. The worst thing is knowing that she will leave John alone. The thought of her son and his future consumes her.
“Sarah?”
She barely looks up when Derek walks into the bathroom. She is no longer surprised by his determination to take care of her. He completes every mission, whether military or domestic, with the same perseverance and soldierly precision. Taking care of her has become one more mission to him. It would mortify her if she had the energy to be mortified.
Derek drops to his knees beside her, smoothes her sopping hair out of her face, says: “When are you going to tell him?”
Sarah frowns. “Why should I?”
“He should know.”
She starts to shake her head but stops when her stomach lurches. “He doesn’t need to know.”
Derek grunts in irritation. “Then I’ll tell him.”
“If you do, I will shoot you between the eyes.”
“He should know, Sarah.”
“No, he shouldn’t.” Sarah leans forward. “They’re making progress, you know. Him and Cameron.” She watches Derek’s lips tighten at her mention of their Tin Miss, but she ignores it. “You know they’re figuring it out. They’re building a network, a network that he’ll need if he’s going to have any hope in hell of saving the world.” She takes a deep breath, hopes that will settle her roiling stomach. “If I tell him what’s going on with me, it would knock him off-course. I can’t do that.” She falls back against the wall, exhausted. She hasn’t strung so many words and phrases together in weeks.
“You’d think he’d notice something,” Derek says bitterly as he helps her up.
“I’m trying to make sure he doesn’t notice anything.”
Derek is practically humming with frustration. “That’s why you should tell him.”
“Reese,” Sarah says as firmly as she can. “We’re talking in circles. We’re not saying anything to John, and that’s final. I’m still in charge here, last time I checked.”
“Yeah,” Derek says softly, resignedly. “You’re still in charge.” He cups one hand under her elbow as he helps her over the threshold. “Where are your painkillers, boss lady?”
Recurrence is the return of the same cancer after initial treatment. Local recurrence is the return of cancer to the area where a person originally had cancer. In distant recurrence, the cancer metastasizes or spreads to parts of the body other than the original location. If cancer does metastasize, it commonly spreads to the lungs, bones, liver or brain.
Sarah stands under the old oak tree in their front yard. She wiggles her toes in the grass, splays her fingers on the tree trunk, stares up as the light fades from the sky.
Behind her, the screen door creaks. She hears the soft thud of bare feet on the steps, and then Derek is beside her.
“I need you to promise something,” Sarah says without turning to look at him.
Derek waits for her to continue.
“Promise me you’ll look after John.”
“He doesn’t need looking after.”
Sarah coughs. “Promise me,” she insists.
“Sure,” Derek nods. He steps closer, reaches over her shoulder toward the tree. He covers her hand with his. Sarah stares at their joined hands, as if they were some new creature she has never seen before.
“I’ll look after you too,” he murmurs.
Sarah closes her eyes. After a minute, she opens her eyes, lifts up her face to look at him. “Why? Because of Kyle?”
Derek shrugs, unfazed by her raising the dead. “Because of you.” He takes another step closer, and their shadows merge. “Because of me.”
Sarah closes her eyes again. She concentrates on the feel of rough bark under her fingers and Derek’s warmth against her back. She tries to memorize every detail of this moment. She does not hear John swing into the yard, stop, then turn and walk away.
END
Acknowledgments: The story reflects facts and details about cancer and chemotherapy side effects culled from numerous articles on the web. Some specific wording is quoted from this website: http://www.mytreatmentdecision.com. Thank you to these experts for their useful information.
Additional Note: The title comes from the song "Did I Say" by Teenage Fanclub, from their compilation CD, Four Thousand Seven Hundred and Sixty-Six Seconds: A Short Cut to Teenage Fanclub.
I thought I should post this story before it’s Joss’d by Season 2.
Title: Fall Through the Night
Author: Danahid (danahid)
Fandom: TSCC
Spoilers: S1
Pairing (if any): Gen, slightly Derek/Sarah.
Rating: PG
Length: 2,473
Disclaimer: Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles (TSCC) is owned by Fox and many people who are not me. No profit being made. No infringement intended.
Archive/Distribution: Please ask.
Date: 7/14/08 (rev 8/6/08)
Summary: He is dreaming that he sees them standing under the tree, Derek and his mother - Sarah - standing so close that they don’t look like two people but like some new creature that he’s never seen before.
FALL THROUGH THE NIGHT
To assess prognosis and to guide treatment decision-making, cancer is generally assessed using a system called staging. Tumor stages range from Stage I to Stage IV, with Stage I having the best prognosis and Stage IV having the poorest. The staging system takes into account three major features of a cancer: tumor size, lymph node status, and metastasis status.
Sarah sits in the empty room, her head in her hands.
Minutes pass.
Eventually she gets up. She pulls off the paper gown. She stands, swaying slightly, trying to decide whether to wad the gown into a ball, hurl it across the room, vent the violence and anger and despair boiling inside her. After a minute, she decides it is not worth the effort.
She lets the gown drop to the chair. She dresses carefully. She bends down to gather her phone, her keys, her bag. She walks out.
Tumor size can be an important indicator of how quickly a tumor is growing. A small tumor may be small because it is growing very slowly, or it may be small because it is growing quickly and has been found early.
Sarah sits in the living room with the lights off.
She sits compactly, with her arms wrapped around herself and her legs tucked underneath her body. She leans her head back against the chair, stares at the ceiling, thinks about how John has changed since he was released from the hospital. Now when she looks at him, she no longer sees her teenage son. She sees the man he will become: tall, filled out, with broad shoulders and shadowed eyes. She sees a man others will follow, a man whose charisma and decisiveness will be legendary.
She closes her eyes. She thinks: I will not know that man.
Lymph node status indicates whether cancer cells have moved from the original tumor into the lymph nodes. If lymph node status is positive, meaning the lymph nodes contain cancer cells, the cancer is more likely to recur.
Sarah sits in the dark.
Every night, Cameron stops in the living room during her midnight patrol. She tilts her head as if to comment on Sarah’s sleeplessness but says nothing.
Some nights, Derek sits with Sarah. Like Cameron, he says nothing. Sarah wants to ask him why he stays, why he doesn’t speak, but she doesn’t.
In the morning, none of them mention their nocturnal non-interactions to John.
Invasive cancer (also called infiltrating cancer) spreads to the healthy tissue surrounding the tumor. Metastatic cancer spreads beyond the original tumor and local lymph nodes to other parts of the body through the bloodstream and lymphatic system.
Sarah sits in the kitchen with her hands cupped around her coffee mug.
Every morning, she watches John over the cup’s rim. She watches him walk into the kitchen, blinking in the sunlight. She watches him rotate the stiffness out of his half-healed shoulder as he digs through the fridge. When he sits down at the table with his cereal, she watches him eat. She stares at the scar slashed across his chest and shoulder and tries to decide if its edges have faded. The scar’s angry redness is a constant reminder of how close she came to losing him.
Some mornings, John teases her about her staring. On other mornings, John reassures her that he’s fine and she should stop worrying. On still other mornings, John says nothing, just reaches across the table and gently touches her hand.
Most mornings, Derek watches Sarah watching John. Derek watches John too, but he and Sarah do not trade observations over coffee. Sarah doesn’t ask Derek what he thinks. She doesn’t tell him that she thinks that John’s gait has changed in a way that has nothing to do with his recent injury. She doesn’t admit that watching and worrying about John takes her mind off the pain that crashes into her body like waves.
Pathologists classify tumors into one of three grades based on how similar in appearance the cancer cells are to normal cells, and on how many of those tumor cells are dividing. The greater the number of cells dividing, the higher the tumor grade.
Sarah sits.
Finally, after too much sitting and too many sleepless nights, Sarah decides that she needs to do something different. She decides to act as if her diagnosis has changed nothing.
She establishes a new morning routine. She makes sandwiches for John and Cameron. She sets up an assembly line down the length of the kitchen island. She moves along the line, pausing to spread layers of mayo and mustard on whole wheat bread, then moving down a couple of steps to insert slices of turkey, then cheese, then tomato. She adds an apple and a banana, then places the completed bag lunches at the end of the island so that John and Cameron can grab them on their way out the door. She finds the repetitive, precise task almost meditative. She can almost forget how exhausted she is.
Derek leans one hip against the kitchen counter, watching her assemble the lunches. His expression is a mixture of bemusement and disbelief. When she starts gathering the sandwich ingredients to put them away, he nods at the two lunch bags. “Metal don’t eat.”
“She needs to pass for human,” Sarah says automatically. She does not look up.
“Yeah, and?”
“And,” Sarah replies, still not looking up, “a human anorexic would get us on the radar.”
Derek shakes his head. He plucks a turkey slice from the top of Sarah’s pile and waves it at the remnants of her sandwich assembly line. “Have you always made lunch this way and I just didn’t notice?”
Sarah rolls her eyes. She hoists the stack of ingredients to carry them to the fridge and is almost there when suddenly the world falls away. Her vision tilts. She sways. The plastic containers teeter. She wonders, half-panicking, if she is about to do something so embarrassing as pass out in front of Derek.
Then the moment passes. Her head clears. She opens the fridge door. She stacks the containers in the fridge. She closes the fridge door.
“Are you okay?” Derek asks from behind her.
“I’m fine,” Sarah says. “Just tired.”
When used appropriately, chemotherapy offers benefits that may outweigh the risks associated with side effects. Chemotherapy can reduce the number of cancer cells that spread to other parts of the body, reducing the likelihood that cancer will return.
Sarah sits in the living room, hunched over and shivering.
When she hears Derek come in, she straightens. She throws her shoulders back. She fists the sweat-damp hair away from her face.
“Anyone home?” Derek calls as he drops his keys on the table by the front door.
Sarah clears her throat and calls back, careful to keep her tone colorless and absolutely normal: “I’m in the living room.”
She listens as he pulls his boots off one by one. She can tell how tired he is by the sound of his footsteps down the hall.
Derek appears in the doorway to the living room, barefoot and haggard. He narrows his eyes when he sees her but doesn’t comment on her appearance, just as she doesn’t comment on his. He sinks into the nearest chair, rubs his hand across his face, says, “So that new Cyberdyne lead was bogus,” and there is no frustration or anger in his voice; he just sounds exhausted. “We’re back to square one.”
Sarah sighs. She doesn’t have the energy to ask him what happened. She suspects it's nearly cost him all the energy he had to say the few words he’s said.
They sit quietly, each lost in thought or tiredness or both, until Sarah realizes that Derek is staring at her. She glares back, stares him down. She is still in charge, despite the pain and fatigue, despite the fact that she can’t remember when Derek started shouldering most of the responsibility for their day-to-day missions. (She suspects it started with moments like these, with her pretending everything is normal and his watching her with sharp eyes that miss nothing.)
Derek breaks their wordless battle of wills first. He looks away, digs his finger into a hole in the upholstery of his armchair, asks: “John home?”
Sarah shakes her head. She is about to remind him that school doesn’t let out until 3 o’clock when suddenly she can’t speak, is coughing, coughing, coughing so hard that her ribs crack. When the coughing fit is over, Sarah wipes her face and mouth with a crumpled tissue.
Derek gives her a pointed look. “Just tired, huh?”
“It’s a cold,” she mutters. “I get colds. I’m human.”
“Good to know,” he says seriously, and Sarah feels her lips twitch at the sincerity in his voice: Derek will always be someone for whom humanity is not a given. It’s a welcome reminder.
“Maybe this isn’t a cold,” Derek continues. “Maybe you’re getting sick because you don’t sleep enough.”
“Spare me the doctor routine,” Sarah snaps before another coughing fit chokes off the rest of what she was going to say. She wraps her arms around herself, abandons herself to the hacking coughs. She is coughing so hard that she doesn’t hear Derek get up from his chair, turn on his heel, and leave the room.
When Derek comes back, Sarah is slumped in her chair, eyes closed, head throbbing, body drained. Derek drapes his quilt around her shoulders, crouches beside her chair, and says nothing comforting or sympathetic, for which Sarah is pathetically grateful.
For a long time, neither of them speaks. When Sarah coughs, Derek grimly hands her fresh tissues. When she finishes coughing, he scoops up her used tissues to throw them away. He stops halfway to the trash basket when he realizes the red stains on the tissues are blood.
“This isn’t just a cold,” he says angrily. Sarah startles at his tone; there is something besides anger in his voice, something that sounds like concern, or maybe even fear.
She pulls the quilt more tightly around herself. She closes her eyes. She thinks: I am not ready to talk about this.
Some of the possible short- and long-term side effects associated with chemotherapy include: fatigue, hair loss, nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, infection, nerve pain, muscle pain, heart disorders, leukemia.
Sarah sits on the bathroom floor, slumped against the cool tiles.
Despite her best efforts to act as if everything is normal, it isn’t. Every morning, her pillow is covered with clumps of dull brown hair. She washes a face she can barely recognize, all bruised eyes and hollow cheekbones. She spends more time in the bathroom than she has ever done in her life. She takes naps.
She covers her face with shaking hands. The worst thing is not the hair loss or the exhaustion; it's not even the endless vomiting. The worst thing is knowing that she is leaving so much unfinished. The worst thing is knowing that she will leave John alone. The thought of her son and his future consumes her.
“Sarah?”
She barely looks up when Derek walks into the bathroom. She is no longer surprised by his determination to take care of her. He completes every mission, whether military or domestic, with the same perseverance and soldierly precision. Taking care of her has become one more mission to him. It would mortify her if she had the energy to be mortified.
Derek drops to his knees beside her, smoothes her sopping hair out of her face, says: “When are you going to tell him?”
Sarah frowns. “Why should I?”
“He should know.”
She starts to shake her head but stops when her stomach lurches. “He doesn’t need to know.”
Derek grunts in irritation. “Then I’ll tell him.”
“If you do, I will shoot you between the eyes.”
“He should know, Sarah.”
“No, he shouldn’t.” Sarah leans forward. “They’re making progress, you know. Him and Cameron.” She watches Derek’s lips tighten at her mention of their Tin Miss, but she ignores it. “You know they’re figuring it out. They’re building a network, a network that he’ll need if he’s going to have any hope in hell of saving the world.” She takes a deep breath, hopes that will settle her roiling stomach. “If I tell him what’s going on with me, it would knock him off-course. I can’t do that.” She falls back against the wall, exhausted. She hasn’t strung so many words and phrases together in weeks.
“You’d think he’d notice something,” Derek says bitterly as he helps her up.
“I’m trying to make sure he doesn’t notice anything.”
Derek is practically humming with frustration. “That’s why you should tell him.”
“Reese,” Sarah says as firmly as she can. “We’re talking in circles. We’re not saying anything to John, and that’s final. I’m still in charge here, last time I checked.”
“Yeah,” Derek says softly, resignedly. “You’re still in charge.” He cups one hand under her elbow as he helps her over the threshold. “Where are your painkillers, boss lady?”
Recurrence is the return of the same cancer after initial treatment. Local recurrence is the return of cancer to the area where a person originally had cancer. In distant recurrence, the cancer metastasizes or spreads to parts of the body other than the original location. If cancer does metastasize, it commonly spreads to the lungs, bones, liver or brain.
Sarah stands under the old oak tree in their front yard. She wiggles her toes in the grass, splays her fingers on the tree trunk, stares up as the light fades from the sky.
Behind her, the screen door creaks. She hears the soft thud of bare feet on the steps, and then Derek is beside her.
“I need you to promise something,” Sarah says without turning to look at him.
Derek waits for her to continue.
“Promise me you’ll look after John.”
“He doesn’t need looking after.”
Sarah coughs. “Promise me,” she insists.
“Sure,” Derek nods. He steps closer, reaches over her shoulder toward the tree. He covers her hand with his. Sarah stares at their joined hands, as if they were some new creature she has never seen before.
“I’ll look after you too,” he murmurs.
Sarah closes her eyes. After a minute, she opens her eyes, lifts up her face to look at him. “Why? Because of Kyle?”
Derek shrugs, unfazed by her raising the dead. “Because of you.” He takes another step closer, and their shadows merge. “Because of me.”
Sarah closes her eyes again. She concentrates on the feel of rough bark under her fingers and Derek’s warmth against her back. She tries to memorize every detail of this moment. She does not hear John swing into the yard, stop, then turn and walk away.
END
Acknowledgments: The story reflects facts and details about cancer and chemotherapy side effects culled from numerous articles on the web. Some specific wording is quoted from this website: http://www.mytreatmentdecision.com. Thank you to these experts for their useful information.
Additional Note: The title comes from the song "Did I Say" by Teenage Fanclub, from their compilation CD, Four Thousand Seven Hundred and Sixty-Six Seconds: A Short Cut to Teenage Fanclub.