In This World (Harry Styles)

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(DISCLAIMER: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. It's important to remember this is all totally fabricated, embellished, and exaggerated for entertainment purposes.)

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See how the leaves are green

Growing bigger than my hand

You know that when they fall again

I'll be back from where I've been

Coming back from where I've been

Back From Where I've Been - William Lawrence

There was a tentative knock on the lounge door and my spleen nearly fell out of my ass as a grave-looking surgeon entered. The hell of those first few moments...suspended mid-air in the approach of a new reality, were impossible to adequately define. I just know time slowed and my breath would not come. My knees gave out then, and the doctor caught ahold of me, dragging me to sit in a nearby chair. He then knelt before me, but nothing he uttered registered as speech in my brain. He was but lines and colors. Dark matter. An ever-expanding blur, rippled by a series of murmurs.

"Mr. Styles...stay with me here. Hang on to the sound of my voice. I need you to focus, sir. It is of critical importance."

"Is he...is he...d-dead....??" was all I could think to say.

There were a few more agonizing moments where I couldn't discern anything that came out of his mouth, until he shook me violently and dragged me forth out of my trance. Apparently he'd survived, thank fuck, but there were many complications during surgery. They had to take more tissue than previously anticipated. There would likely be irreversible brain damage. Soon the full team of physicians arrived to discuss the gravity of the situation with me, since Gray had given them explicit permission to answer any questions I might've have. He told them I was his fiancé, and although I know he only said that to force them to appease my curiosity, it still felt amazing. That feeling was short lived, however, when they began to describe every surgical obstacle they'd faced in detail, and how large and aggressive the tumor had been. They now worried it was malignant and had sent it off for a biopsy, and thus the probability of a recurrence was worryingly high. Fuck's sake, I just wanted to climb to the roof of the building and take a nosedive into traffic already. It just kept getting despairingly worse every time someone arrived to speak with me about a new difficulty. Here I'd been naively praying for him to survive the entire time, thinking the surgery would be the apex of my concerns, but good God was I badly mistaken.

He was in post-op recovery now, and I still couldn't see him for another hour or so. Which would amount to possibly the worst moments of my life, fearful he might slip away just when we thought he was pulling through. Fucking hell, the not knowing and the waiting threatened to break me worse than earlier. There was still the matter of whether he would remember me at all, and if he was even still the same person for that matter. I paced the room, pulling my hair like a madman, then did another lap around the entire ward floor, stopping only to stare out of a window at the end of a vacant hall. There, I gazed out over the gloomy seafront at the Oakland Bay bridge. It wasn't exactly the Golden Gate, but it was just as arresting, particularly the way it veered in one long curve over the water, lost beyond the mists. Seeming to connect two remote worlds. I could only think I wanted to cross it with him the second he woke. I'd break him out of this hellhole, stuff him in the car, and we'd take off together and wouldn't look back. Not for anyone.