**A/N:- Please Please read till the end!! Till the Author's Note at the end, please**
--: Jay-Jay's POV: --
The "In Progress" light above the Operating Theater didn't just glow; it pulsed. It was a rhythmic, agonizing reminder that behind those double doors, a war was being fought for a soul that shouldn't have been in danger.
I was back on the floor, my knees pulled tightly to my chest. The polished tiles were freezing, but I didn't care. I felt like I was already half-frozen myself. Every time the doors swung open and a nurse rushed out for more blood or another tray of instruments, I caught the smell of iron and ozone. It was the smell of a battle that was costing too much.
"I hate you."
The words I had screamed at him in the office were the only thing I could hear. They were louder than the hospital announcements. Louder than my own heartbeat. I had walked out on him while he was crying. I had left him alone in that glass cage of an office, and ten minutes later, a stranger was calling me to say he was bleeding out on the floor.
"Please," I whispered, digging my nails into my arms until I drew blood. "Not like this. Don't let those words stay in the air. Let me take them back. Just give me five minutes to take them back. And I won't let you go away."
I wasn't praying for his soul, because the thought of him dying didn't even make sense to me. He was Keifer. He was the sun and the moon. The sun doesn't just stop shining. I was praying for time. I was praying for a chance to scream over his heartbeat that I had lied—that I loved him more than my own breath.
He couldn't be dying. It was a mistake. A nightmare. He was just being dramatic, just trying to prove a point because I had been so cruel.
"Wake up and yell at me," I begged internally. "Wake up and tell me I'm being a liability again. Just don't leave me with those words as the final period to our story."
--: Author's POV: --
The hallway had become a sanctuary of desperate, fragile faith.
Keigan and Keiran were no longer pacing. They had retreated to the small wooden benches across from the theater doors. Keigan had his head bowed so low his forehead was touching his knees, his hands clasped so tightly together that his knuckles were white. He was murmuring—half-broken prayers in a mix of English and Tagalog, begging every god he knew to let his brother be the "Lion" one more time.
Keiran sat beside him, his eyes wide and fixed on the red light. He wasn't crying anymore. He looked like he was in shock, his small frame trembling every time the sound of the defibrillator charging—a high-pitched, mechanical whine—leaked through the heavy doors. To them, Keifer was invincible. He was the one who solved everything. He was their father and mother. The idea of a world without him wasn't a possibility; it was an impossibility they were watching the doctors try to disprove.
Percy stood between them and Jay-Jay, acting as a human shield. He was the only one standing. His face was a mask of stone, his arms crossed over his chest, but if you looked at his boots, you could see the slight, rhythmic tap of a man who was counting the seconds. He was the anchor, the one trying to hold the fragments of the family together while his own heart was splintering.
Every time a monitor beeped too loudly from inside, Percy's jaw would tighten, his eyes darting toward Jay-Jay to make sure she wasn't shattering.
Inside the theater, the atmosphere was a controlled hurricane.
The monitors flatlined—a long, continuous, high-pitched scream that signaled the end of a rhythm. The doctors worked with a frantic, desperate energy. They knew who was on that table. They knew the weight of the name Watson.
"Increasing to 360 joules!" the lead surgeon barked, his face drenched in sweat. "Clear!"
*THUD.*
Keifer's body jolted, a puppet on a wire.
"Again! Charge it! Clear!"
*THUD.*
The surgeons shared a heavy, silent communication. The lead doctor looked at the clock on the wall, then back at the green line that refused to jump. He felt the weight of the girl and the boys waiting outside. He felt the weight of the empire. But medicine has its limits, and the silence of the machine was absolute.
--: Jay-Jay's POV: --
The "In Progress" light didn't flicker. It simply went dark.
The silence that followed was the loudest thing I have ever heard. It was a physical weight that crushed the air out of the hallway. I looked up, my neck creaking like old wood. I expected a nurse to come out and say he was stable. I expected them to say he was being moved to recovery.
The doors swung open.
It wasn't a nurse. It was the lead surgeon. He had removed his cap, and his mask was hanging uselessly around his neck. He didn't come toward us with news; he came toward us with a walk that looked like he was carrying the world on his shoulders.
Percy stepped forward first, his voice a ghost of itself. "Doctor?"
The surgeon stopped three feet away. He didn't look at Percy. He looked at me, then at the boys who had stood up, their faces full of a terrifying, fragile hope. The doctor's eyes were full of a deep, professional grief. He took a long, shaky breath and shook his head slowly.
"I am so sorry," he whispered, his voice cracking. "We did everything. We tried every stimulant, every shock... but the trauma to the chest and the sudden respiratory failure was too much. His heart... it wouldn't restart."
"No," Keigan gasped, falling back against the bench as if he'd been punched. "No! You're lying! He's Keifer! He doesn't die! Go back in there!"
"I am truly sorry," the doctor repeated, his eyes wet. "Time of death: 03:21 AM. We... we couldn't save him."
The world didn't just tilt; it vanished.
I didn't scream. I didn't cry. I felt a cold, numbing sensation start at the tips of my fingers and race toward my heart. It was like the London fog had finally found a way inside me, filling my lungs with ice.
I looked past the doctor. Through the narrowing gap of the theater doors, I saw a gurney. I saw the shape of the man I loved—the man I had just insulted, the man I had pushed away—lying perfectly still under a white sheet that looked like a shroud of snow.
"Keifer?" I whispered, but my voice didn't make a sound.
It wasn't possible. He couldn't leave me with those words. He couldn't leave the boys. He was the Lion. The Lion doesn't fall.
"Ate..." Keiran wailed, a high, thin sound of a child who had lost his hero.
I couldn't move to comfort him. I couldn't move to help Keigan, who was now clutching his chest as he sobbed. I just stared at those doors.
My mind kept replaying the office—the way his eyes had looked when I said I hated him. I had thought we had a lifetime to fix it. I thought we had fifty years of fights and reconciliations ahead of us.
I didn't know that fifty years had just been cut down to ten minutes of silence.
Aries and the others were still hours away. They were flying into a world where the Lion was dead. They were coming back to a kingdom with no King.
I felt my eyes roll back in my head. The white lights of the hospital ceiling began to spin into a vortex of grey. The last thing I heard before the darkness swallowed me was the sound of my own name being screamed by Percy, but it sounded like it was coming from the bottom of the ocean.
He was gone. And the final thing he knew of me was my hate.
--: Author's POV: --
The heavy, soundproof door of the private room clicked shut, sealing out the sterile hum of the hospital and trapping the four of them in a world where the air felt like crushed glass.
There was no more medical equipment. No more frantic shouting. There was only the low, golden glow of a single bedside lamp and the terrifyingly still silhouette of Keifer Watson.
Percy was the first to move, though his legs felt as if they were made of cooling lead. He had spent years as the "cool-headed" one, the bridge between Keifer's cold logic and the rest of the world. But as he stood over the bed, looking down at the man who had been his brother in every way that mattered, the mask of the composed protector finally shattered.
"You idiot," Percy choked out, his voice cracking into a jagged whisper. He reached out, his hand hovering over Keifer's chest for a second before he pulled it back, unable to handle the lack of a heartbeat. "You weren't supposed to let them get a clean shot. You were supposed to be untouchable."
He turned away, his shoulders shaking violently as he leaned his forehead against the cold windowpane. Outside, the London streets were waking up, unaware that the city's most powerful young titan had been silenced.
At the foot of the bed, Keiran was small. He had climbed onto the edge of the mattress, his small hands clutching the hem of the white sheet. He wasn't screaming anymore; he was just gasping for air, his face buried in his knees.
"Who's going to tell us what to do now?" Keiran's voice was a high, thin wail. "Who's going to fix things when we mess up? Kuya... please... I'm not ready to be a Watson without you."
Keigan, usually the most hot-headed and expressive, was the most frightening to watch. He stood on the opposite side of the bed from Jay-Jay, his eyes fixed on Keifer's pale face with a terrifying intensity. He looked like he was waiting for a command that he knew was never coming.
"Clyde did this," Keigan whispered, the words sounding like they were being dragged over gravel. He wasn't crying. His eyes were burning with a dark, lethal fire that transformed him from a teenager into something much older and much more dangerous. "He came into this room. He took the air from your lungs. And now he thinks he's won."
Keigan reached down and took Keifer's hand, his grip so tight his own knuckles turned white. "I promise you, Kuya. I'm going to find him. And I'm going to make sure he remembers your name every second before.... before he joins you."
--: Jay-Jay's POV: --
I didn't hear them. I didn't hear Keiran's sobbing or Keigan's vows of revenge.
I was sitting in the chair I had occupied for what felt like a thousand years, my body leaning forward until my chest was almost touching the edge of the bed. I was staring at Keifer's mouth. I kept waiting for his lips to twitch. I kept waiting for him to sigh, to open his eyes, to reach out and pull me toward him for a kiss.
I reached out and touched his cheek. It was cold—a deep, biting cold that seemed to sink into my fingertips and travel straight to my heart.
"I didn't mean it," I whispered, the words finally breaking through the wall of shock in my throat.
The image of our fight in the office played on a loop in my head. I could still see the pain in his eyes when I told him I hated him. I could still feel the phantom sting of my hand hitting his face.
"I was just so tired of the fog, Keifer. I was so tired of feeling like I was losing myself. But I didn't want to lose you."
I stood up, my legs trembling so badly I had to catch myself on the bedframe. I leaned over him, my hair falling around his face like a dark veil, cutting the rest of the world out. I pressed my lips to his forehead, then his eyelids, then his cold, silent mouth.
"I love you," I breathed against his skin. "I love you. I love you. Please... don't leave me with that lie. Don't leave me as the girl who broke you."
Percy walked over and placed a hand on my shoulder, but I shook him off. I wasn't ready to let go. I wasn't ready to accept that the "Lion" was now just a memory under a white sheet.
"Jay-Jay," Percy said, his voice thick with tears. "We have to... the nurses... they need to move him."
"No," I rasped, clutching Keifer's hand to my chest. "They aren't taking him anywhere. He's staying here. He's going to wake up. He's just... he's just resting."
Keigan looked at me, and for the first time, I saw a flicker of sympathy in his hard, glossy, sad but angry eyes. He walked around the bed and pulled me into a hug, but I stayed stiff as a board, my eyes still fixed on Keifer.
We stayed like that for a long time. Four broken souls huddled around a silent King.
In the quiet of that room, the "Real World" had finally caught up to us. The fantasy of the Mariano and the Watson standing against the world had been shattered by a single bullet and a snake in the grass.
The pack hadn't arrived yet. Angelo, Aries, and the others were still somewhere over the ocean, flying toward a funeral they didn't know they were attending.
I sank back into my chair, my hand still linked with Keifer's. I wasn't going anywhere. If the fog wanted to take him, it would have to take me too. I closed my eyes, praying for the darkness to take me back to the office, back to the moment before I walked out that door.
But when I opened them, the sheet was still white, the room was still silent, and the Lion was still gone.
.
.
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Author's Note:-
Please Put Down the Pitchforks!🔱🏳️
Dearest Readers, my beloved (and currently traumatized) readers,
First of all... I AGREE. I am the worst. I am a monster. I am the absolute villain of this story. Please, feel free to virtually throw your shoes at me, scream into your pillows, or even schedule a formal "Cancel the Author" meeting. I deserve all of it.
I know, I know. Making Keifer...dead... was a terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad idea. My heart is currently in as many pieces as yours are, and my keyboard is basically waterlogged from my own tears.
BUT! Before you delete this book from your library and block me forever, please hear my desperate plea:
The Promise: I swear on Ashdres, I swear on being an ARMY too— I AM GIVING THEM A HAPPY ENDING.
The Endgame: It is JAYFER OR NOTHING.
I repeat: JAYFER IS THE ENDGAME.
I am not changing course. I am not pivoting to a new lead. My heart beats for Jay-Jay and Keifer only.
The Process: Sometimes the fog has to get really, really thick before the sun can finally break through. This is part of the journey (a very painful, soul-crushing part, I know).
Please, please don't stop reading. If you leave now, you'll miss the payoff that I've been planning. Stick with me through the dark, and I promise to bring you back into the light.
You can kill me in the comments, you can haunt my dreams, but please don't give up on Jay-Jay and Keifer yet.
Holding onto the ledge for dear life,
Your (Currently Hated) Author✍️😭💔
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