10 minutes of oddity. 50% chance it's Jonah. 50% chance you'll never know.

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Once, when he was eight, he had to go to the emergency room. Retrospect told him it was nothing serious, really. He was in there, they looked at him, he left. But at the time it had seemed overbearing, horrible.

He couldn't breathe. It was a wonder he could remember what had happened there at all, because at the time, there was only one thing he could think of, and that was the struggle to draw the air in, get it at least into the main airflows, even if he knew that it would never get further than that. He couldn't breathe. He was choked from the inside, and that prospect terrified him--if there was nothing to remove, how could he ever breathe again? He couldn't breathe, and the fever was overbearing, making the waiting room surreal with color that shouldn't be, and he couldn't breathe.

He remebered that feeling so well.

He would always feel it, to some degree. The asthma, a lazy disease that only made one sick enough to be miserable but not sick enough to be pitied, would make that feeling known, from time to time.

They all said he had a severe case. But in all the time he had it, he was only in the ER once. He could remember that he had a fever of 109, but not the severity of that.

All his life, he thought he'd rather have cancer. At least then, he'd get to sit in the hospital, and everyone would love him and cry.