The Fault in Our Stars: How It Should Have Ended

Chapter 4

Gus was coming home tomorrow. I promised myself I would treat him the way I did before he almost slipped away. I ripped his eulogy to shreds, tried to force the image of his helpless body out of my head.

He was alive. He wasn't dead: Dying was not Dead.

Of course, there was still the option of me outliving him. And as selfish as that was, I'd rather die a physically pained death than live through Augustus's emotionally scarring one.

I feel asleep. A dreamless sleep.....almost like death itself.

'I guess it wouldn't be so bad...' I thought to myself.

And then I dreamt.

All I could see was Gus crying and writhing in his truck. He had called me to the gas station.

His tube was infected. In that moment, I thought Gus was dying. I thought that the last memory I'd have with him would be riding in the ambulance as he died his terrible death.

But he lived. He lived long enough to have a pre-funeral. He saw me cry. He saw me speak about the love i'd never thought i'd be on the receiving end of.

And he cried too.

But not a painful cry like when he was at the gas station in the wee hours of the morning. A cry that said 'i'm going to die and theres nothing I can do to stop it from happening'

But he was wrong about that.

He lived.

~~~~~~~~~

I yawned in my bed, as I stretched to a length taller than my bed; my calves and below dangled off the end.

It wasn't my nightmares that woke me. It wasn't my alarm. It was the doorbell.

I threw on a robe as I combed through my hair with my fingers. I answered the door.

There was Gus.

He still did not have his leg. And now he did not have his left arm.

But instead of me staring at his closed casket, he was staring me straight in the face with those laughing eyes and crooked smile.

He wasn't dead, and that's all that really mattered to me.

I'd take 3/4 of Augustus Waters over a corpse of him any day.