From: Tory Anderson 
Date: 1 Dec 2004 19:05:08 -0800
Subject: New:  Desunt Cetera 1/1 (PG)
Source: atxc

TITLE:  Desunt Cetera
AUTHOR: Tory Anderson
E-MAIL: tory_anderson@yahoo.com
DISTRIBUTION:  anywhere with these headers attached

RATING:  PG, I guess, for mature themes
CATEGORIES:  V, A
KEYWORDS: Pre-Memento Mori
SPOILERS: Leonard Betts, Memento Mori.  Yes, one of *those.*

SUMMARY:  Desunt Cetera - The rest is missing.

Disclaimer:  Anybody mentioned belongs to 20th Century and... 
who else?  I forget.  Chris Carter.  Not mine.  

Author's Notes:  It's been a long time since I've written any 
fics, but this just asked to be written.  


* x *

Desunt Cetera
by Tory Anderson
tory_anderson@yahoo.com
www.geocities.com/tory_anderson



I am dying.

The news stuns me, and I cannot move.  Mercifully, the 
oncologist leaves the room silently, leaving me alone to 
process what I have just heard.  

I am dying.  

The x-rays are still tacked up to the viewer and I look at 
them again without getting up from the bed.  It's so small, 
so tiny.  The tumor.  It's difficult to say, difficult to 
accept, almost as if by not saying the word, it doesn't have 
to be true.  Until I say the word, I'm fine.  I'm not dying.

But I know it's only an illusion.  The truth is staring back 
at me in black and bluish white.  

And I knew, even before I came to the hospital.  I understood 
what Betts had told me.  I had something he needed.  And I 
knew what that something was.

At first, I had denied that too.  I thought maybe he was 
mistaken, or at least that maybe it was a benign form of 
cancer.  Maybe his radar was off.  

After I woke up with my nose bleeding, I knew for sure.  I 
couldn't sleep after that, lying awake with all the possibilities 
flooding through my mind.  I've always been a logical person, 
but that night I entertained every improbable and wild 
eventuality.  They haunted me, each worse than the last.  My 
palms sweated and I shook from fear.  I didn't want to die.  I 
don't want to die.

Coming to the hospital and requesting a CT scan was the hardest 
thing I've ever done.  Again, I thought that if I didn't know 
for sure, the possibility would still exist that I was fine. 
I had no symptoms.  The nosebleed could have been from anything. 
I tried to rationalize it away.  But deep inside, I knew.  I 
was dying.  I could no longer run from the truth.

The oncologist thought I was crazy, or maybe a hypochondriac. 
But he humored me, and when he called me on the phone with 
that grave note in his voice, asked me to come in so we could 
discuss the results of the scan, I couldn't speak.  I dropped 
the phone and it bounced against the wall on its cord.  My 
worst fear had been realized.  I slid to the cold tiles, 
stunned.  Unable to move.  I wish my heart had actually 
stopped then, as it seemed like it had.  I would prefer a 
quick death to the slow one I have now been sentenced to.

Working for the FBI, it was understood that any one of us 
could die any day, on any particular assignment.  Anything 
could go wrong, and we must be prepared to accept that.  And 
I was.  I am.  I am completely ready to die in the line of 
fire, to lay my life down for my partner, for my colleagues, 
for my country and its citizens.  I was not prepared to 
wither away into nothingness, to die a meaningless death.

I press my lips together to keep the tears that aren't there 
from falling.  My mind skips to every new implication of 
this new truth.  It is very likely now that I won't live to 
see my fiftieth birthday.  I won't have children, grandchildren.  
I will die alone in my sterile life.  

I have always been ambitious.  Though my goals have changed 
considerably since I was a little girl, I have always had 
lofty ones, and I have generally succeeded in achieving them. 
My future is - was - planned out to the letter.  After my 
stint with the X-Files, I planned to take a high-paying yet 
stable position within another department - perhaps back at 
Quantico, perhaps still within the District.  I would finally 
find the man I was meant to be with - whoever he may be - and 
we would marry and quickly have children.  After becoming 
Assistant Director, I would retire to the seaside surrounded 
by my brood of loving family.

None of this will happen now.  In five years, I will be dead.

I am a statistic.

The next time I pick up a paper to read the bold headline 
announcing the percentage of the population that has been 
diagnosed with cancer, I will be included in that figure.  It 
is one club I have no desire to belong to.

I turn my head away from the x-rays and on the opposite wall 
there is a mirror.  Slowly, almost dazed, I push myself off 
the bed and walk over to it, staring at my pale cheeks and 
colorless lips.  I try to see right through my skin and 
skull and tissue to the tumor underneath.  Although sallow, 
I look healthy.  How can it be?  At this point, no one would 
guess that there is a ticking time bomb in my head.  I stare 
again at the point between the eyes of my reflection and fancy 
that I can see it beating there, like another heart.

What would I give to have it gone?

I try not to keep too many regrets about the past, but for 
a moment, I bitterly regret everything.  If I hadn't joined 
the X-Files, if I had requested a transfer out after the first 
month, would I be here right now, in this examining room of 
this hospital with a tumor lodged in my brain?  Or would I 
maybe be happy somewhere, carefree?  

I learned not to think like that after Missy died.  There 
were too many what-ifs.  So maybe if I hadn't joined the 
X-Files, Missy wouldn't have been shot.  Maybe she would have 
been randomly kidnapped and raped instead.  Would that be a 
better ending?  Of course not.  I learned that to dwell in 
the past is to miss the present.  Unfortunately, that lesson 
seems to have escaped me now.

I long for a time machine, to step back to a time four years 
ago, and relive that decision.  I would know the future but 
not yet have lived it, and I would march my younger, healthier 
self upstairs and demand a transfer.  If I wasn't granted one, 
I would quit.  I would be out of a job, but also out of a 
death sentence.  It's a simple request, really.  TO travel 
backwards in time.  I clench my fists with anger.  Why didn't 
I walk away?  Reasonably, I know that there was no way I could 
have known that it would end like this.  Reasonably.  But my 
heart cries out in pain and frustration.  I don't want to die, 
I don't want to die!  A tiny little cell in my brain dares to 
think that perhaps, I would even give up ever knowing Mulder 
if it meant that I could live.

Mulder.

I need to call him.

* x *

the end.  


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