Don't fall in love with me // DNF fanfiction

Chapter two

"My fears?"

"Yes."

"I fear oblivion," he said without a moment's pause.

"I fear it like the proverbial blind man who's afraid of the dark."

"Too soon," Thomas said, cracking a smile.

"Was that insensitive?" George asked.
"I can be pretty blind to other people's feelings." Thomas was laughing, but Nick raised a chastening finger and said.

"George, please. Let's return to you and
your struggles. You said you fear oblivion?"

"I did," George answered.

Nick seemed lost.

"Would, uh, would anyone like to
speak to that?"

I hadn't been in proper school in three years.
My parents were my two best friends. My third best friend was an author who did not know I existed. I was a fairly shy person- not the hand-raising type.
And yet, just this once, I decided to speak. I half raised my hand and Nick, his delight evident, immediately said.

"Dream!"

I was, I'm sure he assumed, opening up. Becoming Part Of The Group.
I looked over at George Davidson, who looked back at me with his dark brown eyes.

"There will come a time," I said.

"when all of us are dead. All of us. There will come a time when there are no human beings remaining to remember that anyone
ever existed or that our species ever did anything. There will be no one left to remember Aristotle or Cleopatra, let
alone you. Everything that we did and built and wrote and thought and discovered will be forgotten and all of this" -I gestured encompassingly- "will have been for naught.
Maybe that time is coming soon and maybe it is millions of years away, but even if we survive the collapse of our sun, we will not survive forever. There was time before organisms
experienced consciousness, and there will be time after. And if the inevitability of human oblivion worries you, I encourage you to ignore it. God knows that's what everyone
else does."
I'd learned this from my aforementioned third best friend, Philza. Philza was the only person I'd ever come across who seemed to;       -understand what it's like to be dying.
- not have died.

After I finished, there was quite a long period of silence as I watched a smile spread all the way across Nick's face-not the little crooked smile of the boy trying to be sexy while he stared at me, but his real smile, too big for
his face.

"Goddamn," Nick said quietly.

"Aren't you something else."

Neither of us said anything for the rest of Support

"Good luck with that. All right, I should go. Monica's waiting for me. I gotta look at her a lot while I can."

"Counterinsurgence tomorrow?" George asked.

"Definitely," Thomas turned and ran up the stairs, taking them two at a time.

George Davidson turned to me.

"Literally." he said.

"Literally?" I asked.

"We are literally in the heart of Jesus," he said.

"thought we were in a church basement, but we are literally in the heart of Jesus."

"Someone should tell Jesus," I said.

"I mean, it's gotta be dangerous, storing children with cancer in your heart."

"I would tell Him myself," George said.

"but unfortunately I am literally stuck inside of His heart, so He won't be able to hear me." I laughed.

He shook his head,just looking at me.

"What?" I asked.

"Nothing," he said.

"Why are you looking at me like that?"

George half smiled.

"Because you're beautiful. I
enjoy looking at beautiful people, and I decided a while ago not to deny myself the simpler pleasures of existence."

brief awkward silence ensued. George plowed through.

"I mean, particularly given that, as you so deliciously pointed out, all of this will end in oblivion and everything I kind of scoffed or sighed or exhaled in a way that was
vaguely coughy and then said.

"I'm not beau-

"You are." he smiled.
After a few minutes of awkward silence a younger girl walked past us.

"How's it going, Tina?" he asked.

She smiled and mumbled.

"Hi, George."

"Memorial people," he explained.

Memorial was the big research hospital.

"Where do you go?"

"Children's." I said, my voice smaller than I expected it to be.

He nodded.

The conversation seemed over.

"Well," I said, nodding vaguely toward the steps that led us out of the Literal Heart of Jesus. I tilted my cart onto its wheels
and started walking. He limped beside me.

"So, see you next time, maybe?" I asked.

"You should see it," he said.

"Okay," I said.

"I'll look it up."

"No. With me. At my house," he said.

"Now."

I stopped walking.

"I hardly know you, George Davidson.
You could be an ax murderer."

He nodded.

"True enough, Clay."

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