We Die Soon

Eight

A/N: the last chapter. :) / :(

i'm gonna say what i need to say in this beginning note cause i won't do one at the end this time.

THANKS SO MUCH FOR READING I LOVE YOU. i was afraid to post on wattpad because nothing i've ever published here has ever gotten any kinda love or anything. i know this story isn't like "#1", but just the fact that some people are reading makes me very happy! so thanks for commenting and voting!!

i'll publish another leolivia fic (what other couple would i ever post??) soon, so if you're interested in that it should be coming :)

also, sorry this chapter is short. i wanted it to be longer but i said all i wanted to say.

anyway, onto the final chapter.

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We were kids.

Not anymore.

Eighteen brought about change in the both of us, when I didn't think it would. Whatever we'd had at seventeen, disappeared on our birthdays, and that's when she became distant.

I was having an epiphany.

All of my best memories with Olivia were when we were kids. And we weren't that anymore. We weren't necessarily grown ups, but we had rigidly lost the children in ourselves to the real world and, mostly just in Olivia's case, the fame.

So I realized what it was. It broke my heart in a new way, but I knew I had to accept the sad fact.

Olivia and I weren't anything. We were the past. We were memories. We couldn't go back there.

We could still be something, though, if we tried. It would just have to be something completely new. We'd have to start over and get to know each other as we were then, not as we had been.

Olivia started that process with a question that I had kind of been expecting her to ask since she got there.

"Leo, what's wrong with you? Why are you here?"

"I don't know," I answered.

She rolled her eyes. "Seriously."

"Seriously," I promised, and went on to explain. "I've felt really sick lately, but I haven't mentioned it because, well, you know I hate doctors. But I went to the gym earlier and I just passed out. I don't know what happened. They're running tests, so, I'll find out."

Olivia shook her head and looked down. "I'm so sorry. I hope... I hope it's not... serious."

"I don't see how it couldn't be, to be honest," I said flatly.

"Don't say that."

But would it change anything? I thought. Would it change our relationship any? Renew it? No, that was ridiculous. We had to do that ourselves if we did it at all.

"I'm just being realistic," I told Olivia.

"I need you to be okay."

Those words hung in the air for a long while, and I don't know what exactly she was saying and she probably didn't know either. But they hung around like dust, settling on us, and we didn't speak again until she left.

She just laid her head on my chest, her hand on my rib, really delicately, like she was suddenly afraid of hurting me. I imagined she could feel my heartbeat, and it was beating a little fast, so that almost embarrassed me. It kind of blew my cover. But I just ignored it and put my arm around her, hugging her tight to me.

All I heard was breathing, but there was still a hundred million words unsaid, words that would never be said. We wouldn't get around to saying them. We'd forget about them. We made progress that night, but there was no way we could cover everything. Olivia and I were just... a lot. Maybe a little too complicated. Kind of tiring.

But at times, we were really nice.

The nice times ended, though, just as the bad ones did, because the world never played favorites. In a way, everyone had bad luck, because didn't everyone's life end the same way?

We're all gonna die soon, but no one really knows how soon. I had no idea how soon it would be for Olivia and me. If I had known we'd both have such short lives, I would have kissed her then, and I think if she'd have known she would have kissed back.

I always figured we'd end up together, maybe when we were older, like thirty and ready to settle down. We'd be each other's happy ending. I never stopped to think that maybe we wouldn't have that much time. I never thought that I didn't have enough time; time always seemed endless. That's everyone's problem. Everyone thinks they're immortal. But that's never true. We're all going to die and it will always be too soon.

Some people choose to die. Some people become someone they never wanted to be, and they have a bad breakup and they have to watch one of their best friends die and in the end they can't handle it. They don't like who they are and they just want a way out of it. And maybe they're, I don't know, ultra-famous and the Hollywood life drags them in. So the occasional drunken night turns to consistent drunken weeks and soon their life is over. They're way too young, but it's over. They're in magazines.

There are also some people who do everything right, everything good in the world that they're supposed to do. They listen to their parents and they go to church with their cross necklace on every single Sunday. They eat right and exercise, maybe take up, let's say, martial arts or some fucking shit, and they're fit. They're healthy. They never get sick. Until they do. Maybe they get cancer and it's too far gone to do anything about it so they just die. Just like that.

Of course, that's all hypothetical.

Maybe.