Love in a Time of Death

4 - Losing strength in every hand

I'm sleep deprived but I finally finished Chapter 4! I really hope you guys like it. I know Nick's a bit of a douche but try not to hate on him, he's been through a lot and is who he is for a reason :)

Please let me know what you think, comments are super appreciated! (and fans and votes obviously, if you think I deserve them :D)

The song for this chapter is Already Dead by Beck

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The words seemed to be stuck in his throat, and all traces of amusement disappeared as he struggled. He was trying, but he just couldn’t.

Jade understood that feeling more than he knew, saying it out loud to someone for the first time was the worst. You have to explain everything, and it all becomes far, far too real. Voicing it makes that weight on your chest double, then triple, and it only goes upwards from there. Half the time you don’t even know exactly what you’re feeling, and everything comes out all wrong until you’re so distraught and frustrated, you want to punch the person you’re talking to in the face.

Basically, vulnerability was a bitch.

“Hey,” she said softly “You really don’t owe me any explanations, I can just as easily leave as stay.” When he still made no response, she figured he’d made his decision and pushed her chair back to leave.

“Have you ever heard of Leigh’s disease?” He barely got the words out past his clenched jaw. He stared at his hands. They were clutching the cheap plastic table as if his life depended on it, the veins cording his forearms becoming alarmingly visible.

No. this is not ok.

Tears sprang to Jade’s eyes and the whitewashed walls wavered as she struggled to keep the black dots from clouding out her vision. Frightened, she closed her eyes.

Don’t cry, don’t cry, don’t you dare fucking cry.

She’d heard of the disease. Her cousin Katherine, or Kat, was a doctor and Jade used to have a borderline obsessive interest in her life in the hospital, probably because back then she watched Grey’s Anatomy like nobody’s business. Leigh’s disease was so rare and brutal that Kat had called her up in tears when her patient died.

Head spinning, Jade sat stock still with closed eyes and clenched fists for a good ten seconds, before she was interrupted with a harsh “Can you handle this?”

She wasn’t sure, could she?

Then before she could stop herself, she choked out “Not one of your kids.”

Unsurprisingly, that threw him. “How do you know I have a daughter?”

Jade was still struggling to pull herself together so could only mumble, “You-you have stains on your suit...I...I play a game.”

He stared at her in confusion for a second before his wiped his face blank, just like that. “You’re not handling this are you?”

“No, I’m fine.” She lied, taking a deep shaky breath. Damn, she used to be better at this. “Keep going, I know what the disease is.”

He nodded, letting it go, “So I have a daughter Emily. She just turned five last week and was diagnosed with Leigh’s disease when she was two. I don’t know how much you know about it but it's a rare neurological disease that affects the central nervous system, and it's pretty much terminal. Patients usually die within a year or two of diagnosis. But it’s been over two years now and she’s still alive. She even doing pretty well considering how far along she is; I mean, she can't move around all that much but she can talk and laugh and understand things perfectly well still." He took a deep breath,