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He doesn’t know what he wants and that’s the problem. He stays and maybe it all turns out okay. Maybe this is what love is supposed to feel like, not some fairytale like the stories tell you but an expected complacency. You are here and are not leaving. An assurance. No, it doesn’t make things okay or understand the words he isn’t saying but love has stayed. It has stayed when everyone else has left.
…
The only cliché love followed with him is that it came on a day when he’d lost all reason to hope.
“Is there any way to slow it down?” He asks. It’s the fifth hospital he’s been to in a month and he knows there’s no use in waiting out her answer but he does anyway. He has to try to save his baba. He has to try to reverse this awful thing he didn’t ever mean to do.
She sighs and places a firm hand on his knee. “There are two things you canna outrun, Zayn. One of them’s time. It’s… biology. Embedded in your DNA and there’ve been researchers looking for a cure for centuries. There is none. ‘Stead of wasting your father’s last days here, you ought to be spending them with him.”
He drags a hand across his wet face. She sighs and leans back in her office chair. “You’ll never get this time back. When you have your own son, you’ll understand how much it’d mean to your father for you to be with him now.”
“No,” he says, standing. “I’ll never have a son. I won’t do this to someone else.”
She shrugs in the patent way that tells Zayn she thinks he’s just some upset kid. Before he can correct her, tell her that he can’t, she says, “Then you’ll die at thirty like the rest.”
…
Zayn is almost 18, and on his birthday, his father will die. He is trying to make knowing that okay.
…
He’s ambling out of the hospital when he sees him. He’s slouched down in an armchair at A&E with a cut just above his left eyebrow. He doesn’t know what made him look over. Maybe he was looking for someone who had it worse off so he could make what’s happening seem more bearable. If someone else has it worse, it can’t be all that bad, right? It is though. It is that bad. But he finds this boy, legs stretched out in front of him and a pout on his lips and he just stops.
He should go. The doctor’s right. His father is out there dying and he should be there. But the boy looks up at him as he’s decided this and Zayn can’t walk away. The boy’s eyebrows start to lift before he winces and gives a sheepish smile. Zayn smiles back too widely, sighs and sits down across from him.
“You’ve got my mark then?” he asks.
“Um,” he blushes and pulls up his shift to reveal a playing card on his side. “And. You?”
Zayn lifts his shirt in turn. “What’s your name?”
“Liam.”
“Well, you’ve picked a shit day, Liam, but I’m glad you’re here.”