For those of you waiting for a new chapter of The Flood, I promise that I'll get on to that, but it's about time I published this story that I've wanted to publish for a while now. Just hang tight, and enjoy this in the meantime.
It felt like his blood had turned to ice.
At the same time, it felt like he'd plunged into the fiery pits of Hell.
The sheer shock of it all caused the monochrome image in front of him to blur briefly, but he couldn't miss the tangled, messy-looking blob right in the middle of it. It looked like a white paint smear done by a careless child, but he knew that the MRI scanner had been sophisticated enough so as to not produce inaccurate results.
The neurologist and oncologist started explaining what they were seeing to him, but an insistent ringing in his ears mostly drowned them out. Even if he could hear them, he didn't want to concentrate on their diagnosis, afraid of what he might hear.
"It's malignant."
Those words finally wrenched his concentration away from the MRI image.
"He appears to have a Stage 3 anaplastic astrocytoma," the oncologist, Dr Gareth, continued. "It appears to have started growing at T11, but it's since reached T9. If we don't treat it, there is a chance it could grow larger and further compress the spinal cord, or spread up or down the cord."
He felt Mike's arm wrap around his shoulders in a poor attempt to reassure him. The man, who was sitting next to him on the padded table, asked, "What can you do for it?"
"Normally for this kind of tumour, our first option is radiotherapy," Dr Gareth replied, "but it is not without risk, especially in a child. There is a low chance the radiation will affect the non-cancerous cells around the tumour, which increases the chance of the tumour growing back. In that event, we will prescribe a course of chemotherapy-"
"No," Ryan interrupted, his voice returning to him at the mention of 'chemotherapy'. "I'm not having that."
"Ryan," Mike said sternly, though with a hint of sympathetic understanding, "Let the doctor finish."
"I'm not having chemotherapy!" Ryan insisted, ignoring Mike's words. "I'm not going through feeling so rotten that I'd rather be dead anyway because of a small chance that it'll reduce the size of this lump in my back!"
"Look, there's only a small chance that you'll need it anyway," Mike reasoned with him. "It'll only be if the radiotherapy isn't fully successful."
"I'm not taking that chance," Ryan retorted, before turning his attention back to the doctors in front of him. "Is there anything else? What about surgery?"
The doctors glanced at each other briefly, before the neurologist, Dr Preston, said, "For most other spinal tumours, surgery is our first option, yes. But in your case, that could prove difficult as the tumour may refuse to detach itself from the spinal cord, in which case it would be safer to leave it in for fear of causing spinal cord injury and paralysis."
Mike saw how Ryan winced at the doctor's last point, and how his grip tightened on the cane in his left hand. He'd been given the cane as the tumour pressing down on his spinal cord was causing numbness and pain in his legs. That, along with the heavy painkillers he was on for the back pain, made standing up for long and walking more difficult than it once had been, hence the need for the cane.
Ryan swallowed hard, before raising his head and looking Dr Preston in the eyes, trying to figure him out. It would be useful to do this early on - he had a feeling he'd be seeing the man a lot over the next several weeks. "Say I did have an operation, and you remove it completely, spinal cord injury or not - would it grow back?"
"Hypothetically, if we were to go through with that, it would greatly reduce the chances of the cancer growing back," Dr Preston confirmed, "but you would likely never walk again."
"Look, Ryan," Mike interjected, before the boy's imagination could run away with him, "I know you're scared of the side effects of the chemo, but that won't be your first option. Why don't you just have the radiotherapy and we'll see how that goes?"
"I don't want to take that chance!" Ryan let out, choking on his words a little, before his voice quietened and he closed his eyes tight, as if trying to keep the emotions inside. "I ... I don't want to die."
Mike's face softened completely, and he couldn't help but let out a sigh as he looked at the doctors himself. "You can see that this is a lot for him to take in," he implored, "so can you give him a few days to decide what he wants?"
"So ... that's it," Ryan said flatly, refusing to look directly at everyone's shocked faces at the news he had just delivered them.
He was sitting at the kitchen table, with everyone gathered around him to listen to his diagnosis. Normally, he'd try keeping something like this as hush-hush and under wraps as possible, but his using a cane would've immediately tipped them off that something was up.
Besides, it wasn't as if the last two weeks hadn't tipped them off already. It had begun with a sudden shooting pain in his knees and ankles that had accompanied a strong urge to sit down. At first, he'd just dismissed it as a side effect of standing for too long, but when he'd woken up the next morning with his back aching rather a lot, that was when he'd deciphered that something was off.
That was how it went for the next week and a bit, with the pain intensifying and him somehow managing to fall up the stairs on more than one occasion, much to his chagrin, as his ankles became numb. It got to the point where he couldn't walk much further than about 60 feet at a time without either sitting down or leaning against something and recovering. He mostly tried to get out of this by sitting in his room and suffering in silence, though Chloe had noticed and jokingly offered him her wheelchair a few times.
All of it culminating in that very morning, when a moment of jubilant celebration of victory had gone from bad to worse faster than the star-shaped glial cells in his spinal cord. He and Tyler had developed a habit of jumping on each other's backs when they were happy, so looking back, he supposed he should've forseen that his friend would've eventually tried to pry a piggyback out of him - and he wouldn't be able to give it to him.
"Get off!" Ryan yelled, just split seconds after Tyler had jumped onto his back.
"Okay, okay," Tyler complied, getting off with a perturbed look on his face. "Sorry, I-" he started, but he was cut off when he noticed that Ryan had fallen forward, just barely catching himself on his hands. Crouching down to get a better look, he noticed that his fists were tightly clenched, his lips were pressed tightly together and his Adam's apple was practically plunging down and up in his throat, evident of his convulsive swallowing.
"Erm, Ryan, you okay?" Tyler asked, fear and worry bubbling in his stomach.
Ryan's eyes were squeezed shut, and against his rational mind screaming at him to say that his back and legs were destroying him, he nodded.
"Alright," Tyler said slowly. He was sceptical that Ryan really was okay, as neither his position nor the look on his face gave any signs that whatever was afflicting him was letting up, but he knew that he was unlikely to get a straight answer from him - he was too proud for that. "Think you can get up?"
Against better judgement, Ryan attempted to shift his weight from his wrists to his legs so he could stand up - and instantly regretted it as pain exploded in his back and legs once again, only if the first explosion of pain was a single gunshot, this one was a whole firing squad. This time, he couldn't hold the scream back.
"Oh my God!" Tyler cried, his eyes popping. "Ryan, what's wrong?!"
"It feels like someone's dropped an anchor on my back!"
"Oh God," Tyler muttered fearfully. What had this innocent piggyback done to his friend? Had they been doing it too much lately? Had he slipped a disc? But slipped discs didn't hurt this much, did they? "Mike, May-Li! Call an ambulance!"
That had not been a pleasant start to the day, to put it lightly. Now, for Tyler, the only relief that had come from the diagnosis was knowing that the incident that morning hadn't been his fault - well, not entirely. But in all honesty, he'd rather it had been a slipped disc - that was entirely his fault - than what it actually was.
"What are you gonna do?" Jody asked in the end, her expression a mixture of fear and worry.
"No idea," Ryan shrugged. "But I have a few days to decide."
"Are you going to die?!" Floss squealed, causing most of the older residents to look at her like she'd suddenly grown snakes for hair.
"I hope not," Ryan sighed, pressing a hand to his face. He badly wanted to get up and leave the situation, if only for a short time, but even doped up on painkillers, the thought of climbing stairs in his current state was inconsiderable.
"Why won't you just have the chemo?" Sasha asked. "It'll make you lose your hair, but big deal, it's better than having cancer."
This finally lit a spark in Ryan's currently dull eyes, and he flicked his gaze over to her, his unoccupied hand clenching into a fist on the table. "Do you really think it's as simple as that?! If the chemo meant losing my hair but curing my cancer, I would take it in a heartbeat, but it doesn't work that way. Not only are there a bunch of lovely side effects, such as puking my guts out and being permanently exhausted, but it may not do a thing to actually treat the cancer!"
Sasha blinked in surprise, and for the first time in ... well, ever, she found herself actually feeling bad for Ryan. "When you put it like that ..."
"We'll tell Chloe when she gets back, right?" Mo asked. Chloe had gone out on a trip with some of her classmates quite early in the day, and therefore hadn't been around to see Ryan's sudden collapse.
"No," Ryan said with a shake of the head, surprising everyone.
"What?!" Mo let out. "Why not? She needs to know!"
"What am I going to tell her?" Ryan responded.
"The same thing you told us?" Bailey asked.
"No, you don't get it," Ryan sighed. "I just don't want her to know yet, okay? She's probably having a good time right now, I don't want to ruin it."
In reality, Ryan simply didn't want Chloe to know he had cancer. The others would be treating him like he was made of blown glass as it was, he didn't want his sister constantly worried for his health every minute of the day. He knew that she would take it much harder than the other kids, especially when she found out the full depth of this particular type of cancer that he had lodged in his back.
Speak of the Devil, at that moment they heard the door open and Chloe returned with May-Li. Soon enough, she entered the kitchen, seeing the cluster of people in there.
"Hey, what's going on?" she greeted brightly, before she sensed the atmosphere of the room and saw the expressions on everyone's faces.
"Chloe, Ryan has-" Kazima started, before said boy cut her off.
"It doesn't matter," Ryan interrupted, shaking his head. "You're better off not knowing."
"What?" Chloe asked. "Ryan, what have you done, or what do you have? How would I be better off not knowing?"
"I don't want you to worry," Ryan sighed wearily, as he finally mustered up the strength to stand up, using his cane for support. He really wanted to leave the situation now, and the stairs wouldn't stop him.
"Worry?" Chloe repeated. "Look, Ryan, you need to tell me what's going on!" She began tailing him as he made his way to the door. "Whatever it is, I'm gonna be a part of this-"
"No you're not!" Ryan retorted, stopping just as he reached the door, adrenaline temporarily erasing the need for the assistance of his cane to stand up without wobbling. Nonetheless, he gripped onto it tightly. "You don't have to be a part of this, Chloe, and I don't think I want you to be!"
His tone of voice took Chloe and everyone else in the room aback. Ryan rarely raised his voice, let alone showed such full-on, raw emotion such as this.
"You don't need this," Ryan went on, opening the door and placing the end of his cane on the floor as his calves became weaker. He turned his gaze to the doorway directly in front of him, and let out a final statement: "You don't need me."
With that, Ryan left, slamming the door behind him, leaving a shocked and confused roomful of people behind.
Okay ... don't grab your pitchforks and flaming torches just yet ... I know it looks bad now, but I swear on my life, this story won't end in Ryan dying. Mostly because I've already done it twice and the gimmick will be getting old by now, so to settle your nerves, Ryan will not die in this. You have my word.
Some of you may have noticed that I deleted Falling Darkness, the 'teaser' for this. The reason for that is because that tiny little thing was meant to be a teaser for this fic, but since then, I've changed the idea so that no longer fits, hence the deletion.
Also, bonus points to anyone who gets the Steven Universe reference(s) in the last few lines.