Twenty days AG.

Keeping track of time has been measured in this way- After Gus. Twenty days since Augustus Waters, the lanky, blue eyed boy with the crooked smile and a fear of oblivion limped across this earth. Twenty days since I've been called Hazel Grace. Twenty-eight days since his pre-funeral, where I read him the eulogy I had written him-The Last Good Day of Augustus Waters.

Twenty days ago marked a new era in my life-an era that should not exist. It's the equivalent of adding another book to a novel that had the perfect ending. Except, in this particular case, a spectacularly imperfect ending.

I was supposed to die before Augustus. This was a rule between us, not really spoken aloud, but we both knew it. I was the one with the crappy lungs, I was the terminally cancer-filled one, my fate already determined. He was the survivor. Until one day he wasn't.

And now I, Hazel Grace Lancaster, live in an Augustus Waters - free world, which was not part of the agenda.

I had prepared myself to die. I was ready. Well, I guess as ready as you can be after meeting the love of your short life. I had accepted the fact that I would die, and Augustus would continue living on without me, thus why I had tried to distance myself from him to avoid potential heartbreak, and by the way, failed miserably. I hadn't expected the situation to be reversed. I let myself fall, and I fell hard, fully believing with every fiber in my being that I would be long since rotting in the ground when Gus died.

The universe must be laughing its ass off right about now, watching me in all my oxygen tank glory, sitting on my bed, most certainly above the ground, scrolling through texts between Gus and I. How funny it must be to the universe that the tables have turned, the irony of the potentially cured patient no longer breathing, and the terminally ill one left behind.

I have abandoned the thought of a cancer-free life after being diagnosed. I don't think you can just 'get rid of it.' You may be able to subdue it, put it to sleep, but eventually it will awaken, and it will not go away, unless it brings you down with it.

Augustus Waters: Okay?

Me: Okay.

I blink a few times at the text. Of course, there are many messages identical to this, but all the same I stare at the words on my screen, feeling anything but okay. But it's okay, because we were okay.

I half smile to myself at the memory of when I had first met him, and he'd made a snarky comment about the infinite number of "Always" Isaac and his girlfriend-at-the-time Monica had texted each other over the course of the year. Joke is on us, though, because we treated 'okay' the same way. I wonder to myself if on that day Augustus knew what we would become.

Somehow, I feel inside me that he did.

A/N: Hello! Thank you for reading, and I hope you enjoy all other chapters from here on out! This was mostly just a introductory chapter :)