The Fault In Our Stars (Alternate Ending)

A Different Death, A Different Life

Hazel Grace Lancaster. The most remarkable woman in history, mainly because she didn't want to be remembered by everyone, just that one special person in her life. And his name was Augustus Waters. Hazel and Gus had something in common. They both had cancer. Hazel's was incurable, but there had been a time when Gus' cancer was gone.

Hazel Grace had fallen in love the way you fall asleep, slowly, and then all at once. Gus had been in love with her from the beginning, when she just wanted to be friends. When they were in Amsterdam, Hazel realized her feelings for Gus. Later in their trip, Gus decided to let Hazel know what he had learned when she was in the ICU.

Gus had gone in for a pet scan, only for it to light up like a Christmas tree. His cancer had come back, and it was practically everywhere. Hazel still treated him the same, of course, but now she knew that they were both dying. Soon after they had returned home from Amsterdam, Hazel woke up with her lungs filled with fluids. She could not scream, or even call for help. She died before her mother came in to wake her up, before Gus could call.

Gus didn't take the news very well. As soon as his mother had left the room, he started breaking all the trophies Issac had not. He went to her funeral and gave his eulogy, thanking Hazel Grace for their little infinity. Immediately after the funeral, he took out his pack of cigarettes, put one in his mouth, and pulled out a lighter. With shaking hands and tears running down his face, he reached up, and for the first time, lit his cigarette.

It was no longer a metaphor. He wanted the thing that did the killing to have the power to kill him. He wanted to die. He didn't want to be in a world where Hazel Grace was just a memory, just a story. He couldn't deal with the fact that she was gone, and she wasn't coming back. Within a few weeks, his cancer had progressed so much farther, thanks to the cigarettes, that two days after the latest treatment and pet scan, he, too, passed away.

When he saw Hazel Grace in the afterlife, she was livid.

"What did you do that for?" Hazel screamed at him. "Why would you throw your life away?"

"I don't want a life if you're not there," was all Gus could say, all he needed to say. And then Gus woke up. Throughout the whole day, Gus kept wondering who this Hazel Grace person was, and why he felt like he really loved her.

But he never knew, not when his children were born, or his grandchildren, or his great-grandchildren, not even on his dying day when he was 97 years old. But he finally found out when he met Hazel Grace in the afterlife.

The world wasn't a wish granting factory, until it was. The world had granted one wish. One wish to a seventeen year old girl in love. But like everything, there was a price to pay. The world had given Augustus Waters more days, but it took away the memories he once held dear. Augustus had forgotten ever meeting Hazel Grace. But everything had actually happened, all up until the night he passed away at eighteen. That was only a dream. That was the one night that the world become a wish granting factory.