Thank you for the reviews and alerts! :)

Prompt 027, Bittersweet

"Kisses are like tears, the only real ones are the ones you can't hold back."
- Author Unknown

He's come to detest the white walls of this building, despising the way the paint's chipping in the bottom corners in the same way he loathes the ever vacant corridors that provide no sort of comfort for him. If she were awake, he decides, she would probably hang a poster on the ceiling above the bed they're keeping her in. It would without question be of JONAS because, though she's far over her initial infatuation with them, she still likes poking fun at him.

"Imagine the millions of posters printed each day with your face plaster across it," she would always tease. "You're practically a worldwide sensation."

She can't tease him now - not when her eyes are closed and there are needles sticking in her arm because she can't get the oxygen or nutrients into her body by herself. That's what happens to people when they're in a coma, he's heard before. Now he knows.

His fingertips trace softly across the palm of her open, motionless hand. The coldness of her skin against his still startles him, though he figures he should be used to it by now considering he has been going through this same motion for about three months now.

Today's day one hundred; he's counted.

He tries to keep a tear from slipping past his eyelid, but the lump in his throat has begun to burn and he feels like he's suffocating so he exhales deeply and the tear falls slowly, slipping down his cheek and to his chin before it drops down onto her fingertip. Leaning closer, he presses his lips against the spot where it landed and tastes the salt from his fallen tear. He begins to place soft, quiet kisses on the palm of her hand, the weak pulse point of her wrist, along her forearm, on her shoulder and the nape of her neck and her cheek and the corner of her mouth.

He's done this one hundred times, trying to kiss the lifelessness away as if it's just a mere scrape of the knee. For one hundred days, he's placed a final kiss on her lips in hopes that some sort of miracle will occur and her eyes will flutter open, her lips moving back against his in the flawlessly rhythmical pattern as they had so many times before. For one hundred days, her lips have remained still and his heart and hopes have continued to sink a little lower. He's been staying optimistic, because he knows that that's what she would do if she were awake and that's what she would want him to do, but as he's leaning in to place the last kiss on her lips, his hope is finally lost.

But when he kisses her, there's pressure - he swears that there is. His eyes fly open and he's expecting (hoping) to see her staring back up at him with her chocolate brown eyes, but they remain closed and the heart monitor is still running, the needles are still in her arm, and reality comes flooding back to his world all over again.

Nevertheless he tries again, placing a warm hand upon her frozen cheek as he presses his lips softly down onto hers. There's no pressure this time, and his heart begins tumbling down into his stomach when suddenly the heart monitor starts to race faster, and faster, and faster, and faster…

And he keeps hoping.