From: Ms Tory Anderson Date: Wed, 1 Dec 2004 19:01:11 -0800 (PST) Subject: Desunt Cetera by Tory Anderson Source: direct 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. Am making no moolah. Author's Notes: Just something that 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. www.geocities.com/tory_anderson