Kaera was back in the hospital. Again. It shouldn’t have surprised anyone — she’d been in and out of medical facilities since her diagnosis — but something about this trip seemed to have people on edge. Her mother paced the length of the room and her father bit the sides of his nails, Lou had called her in a panic, begging to know if she would be okay. She was fine… as fine as she ever was.

She knew she would die someday, she’d been told to prepare for it since she was five when the doctors first came into the waiting room with heavy hearts, telling her parents their one and only child had cystic fibrosis, and a young death closed in on her with every breath she drew. Kaera tried not to mind it, learning to enjoy the time she did have, find friends, and not think of how they might react when she goes. There was no point in praying for a set of new lungs that could buy her another ten or so years of life, for there were simply too many people in need and too many people disappointed. She would not put herself against the torture of hope.

A knock on the door called her mother to her feet, opening it and greeting a heavy-hearted doctor, who could only smile dimly in Kaera’s direction, avoiding her eyes. But it’s not Kaera’s eyes that tear up when he tells his already grieving audience that Kaera’s lungs were functioning at 12% compared to a stable lung. She was running out of time. Time. What nearly everyone begs for more of and what nobody can get. She knew she wouldn’t get any more than she was given, she knew that. But, deep in her heart, she desperately desired exactly that, however cliché it might be. Her whole life, everyone has been waiting for Kaera to die… but she vowed to live more of a life than all of them.