A Little Too Soon for Goodbye

8 -Day 1 pt 2

Adrien's pov:

I walk with most of the class to the hospital, considering that it's only about 3 blocks away from the school. Everyone is worried; even Chloe.

When we all get there, I see Dr. Charm filling out a chart on the counter, looking sad. "Dr. Charm?" I say, going up to him, the group following me.

"Ah... yes?" He asks, turning around and seeing me. "Oh! Adrien, how lovely to see you again. What are you doing here?" I give him a confused look, and say, "most of the class and I are here to see Marinette. Is everything okay?"

"I can't tell you anything without her consent." I pull out my phone, and show him the conversation we had earlier right before the morning class ended.

He sighs, and says, "She had an episode earlier. It's extremely uncommon this early on, but it does happen. With how persistent this one hallucination is, it drove her crazy and escalated quickly. Luckily she was strapped down, so even though she was being violent, the most harm done is that she's mad at me. But with her reaction to seeing the medication that put her out, I think she thought it was something else. It looked like water, but who knows what she saw."

"What?" Alya asks, stepping forward. "Hallucinations? What do you mean?" Dr. Charm sighs, and looks at her. "Marinette has a tumor. It is in a certain, tricky part of her brain that effects certain things. Like, her main symptom is the hallucinations. There is also the drastic mood swings, randomly zoning out, and her slight weakness. But along with her cancer, any of those could have been with that. The hallucinations is what gave it away."

"She has cancer?" Nino asks, looking at him. The doctor nods, and says, "Stage 4 metastatic melanoma. Did she tell any of you?" I sigh, and say, "She only told me, like a week ago. When she was told how much time she has left." "What?!" most of them gasp, and I internally curse, wishing I kept my mouth shut.

"The Chemo Therapy and Radiation stopped working, but we didn't catch it until a week ago. In the short time that it wasn't working, it progressed from stage 2 to stage 4. She went from living with cancer, to dying from it. Anyway, with her tumor, she is having hallucinations. About two months into her cancer before, she was diagnosed with the same one, after one of her hallucinations, a very persistent one, convinced her to almost take her life. She was admitted to the hospital 3 hours later, and got the tumor taken out a few days later. After that she was admitted to psych.

"She has her surgery on Monday, so she has a rough few days ahead." "Can you tell us more about her seeing things?" Kim says, looking at the doctor.

"She isn't just seeing things. She is having other hallucinations. Verbal, visual, and one where she can feel things that aren't there. She has a rare type of hallucination, and it is fascinating, but at the same time horrifying. It's like she's living in a nightmare that she can't wake up from. She woke up last night crying because of one of the hallucinations she has. She calls him the Shadow. Now, she may have made him up in her mind, but that doesn't mean that he doesn't have a mind of his own.

"See, he is controlled by the tumor, to put it simply. More like the tumor took over the part of her brain that manages her imagination. It is forcing her to see things she doesn't want to see. Like when you see something out of the corner of your eye, or as if something is on your skin and nothing is there, it's as if your brain forgot to keep it in check, and it sort of played a trick on itself. But when you look and nothing is there, you remind your brain to not do that. But with the tumor sort of invading and controlling that part of her, when she looks, her brain doesn't get that signal that something isn't there. Does that make sense?"

(A/N: I have no idea if that's true or not. I literally made that up. Don't come for me if you find out that that isn't true.)

People nod, and mumble to each other, talking about it. I just look at him, and suddenly everything makes sense. I wondered why she couldn't just stop, and now I feel awful for even thinking that.