A/N: This story is getting harder to write as I consider everything going on at this point in time. All the people that could be touched, harmed, in any way affected by this topic. Sometimes I wish I never started this story. But other times I don't know. I don't know. Any strong feelings?

In my head, the ending changes constantly. There are three different ways I could choose to end it, and I gotta think - which is the most respectful? And which ending makes the story worth the read, worth your patience? Are they the same? It isn't just realism I have to be concerned with, I'm realizing. I'm hoping the story will decide that by itself. But it's not there yet.

"If death meant just leaving the stage long enough to change costume and come back as a new character... would you slow down? Or speed up?"
― Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters

Week Twenty-Two, Day One | April 2013

There have been moments in his life wherein time, as a constant, universal invariant, seemed to slow to a sluggish, tedious crawl. From what he knows of time, however, of its consistency – he knows that could never be true. Instead, he figures that his perception, the whole of his thoughts, simply moves faster. Given a monster of a situation to think through, it seems to make sense.

Time never actually slowed down when he was twenty years old and got the call that his father had died. The train ride back home the very next morning took just as long as it always did, even if his legs did suddenly feel like stone as he stepped onto the platform at the end.

Time did not slow down when he had to watch his mother follow suit, just weeks later. The flatline on the hospital monitor was a normal pitch, a consistent hum.

Such was the same when a young man died in front of him on a derailing train. When Heather Taffet was shot just feet from where he stood. When he himself was diagnosed with his own illness just months ago, offered a slow moving bullet, a delayed propulsion into a glittering subway pole.

And such is the same now.

Time does not slow as his feet take their time walking into Roden's office, as he shakes her hand and sits down. He has abandoned the concept of real clothes by now, and under different circumstances, he's sure that the obvious pajamas visible from under his coat would make him feel self-conscious. But part of him, he thinks, has become far too old to care. Roden clearly doesn't; she pays it no mind.

She calls him by his first name as he greets him, and he's hung up for just a moment, wondering if she had always called him that. And if she hadn't, he wonders when it changed. Hell, his name has been standalone "Sweets" for years, and he's gotten used to it. Few people call him anything else. He reals himself back in.

She doesn't ask how he's feeling this time. He's not sure what to make of it, at first; and then he is.

"Alright, Lance," she starts. "Well, I have the most recent scans of your abdominal cavity back, and there is some… concern… about them that needs to be addressed."

He is silent, listening intently as she pulls familiar laminated pictures out of his file. She moves at normal speed, and within seconds his tumor is laid out for him in six different ways, and he's left to wait for her explanation. And like all things, it comes to pass.

"The first two rounds of chemotherapy, as you're aware, were effective in reducing the size of the tumor. There's a visible difference, however slight, between these scans and the original," she points to each of the first three images. "However…" She gestures to the last three. "The effect on the tumor in the past three cycles has been… less than I'd hoped. I can't begin to explain it, but January's and February's treatments had virtually no effect. And in spite of last month's round… the tumor grew. Just slightly."

The images are all right out in front of him, but hell, he can't make sense of them. He makes sense of her words.

"So that…" he begins, taking a deep breath and wetting his lips. He feels sick, and some distant part of his mind is sure this is not supposed to happen until the line is in. "That means… the chemo isn't working."

There is a moment of gross anticipation before she speaks again.

"It means that the tumor may be becoming more resistant to chemotherapy treatments, which is… honestly unusual for this type of cancer. It's usually very chemo-sensitive. We're going to go ahead on this round, see if this trend continues. Ideally, it should reverse. I'm hoping the growth will stop."

He blinks at her, slow, careful. "And… not ideally?" (Realistically?)

"If the trend does continue, we're going to stop chemotherapy. I won't waste your time on treatment that doesn't work."

He considers this. "Then what?"

"Then," she sighs, placing the scans back into the folder on her desk. "It would seem that surgery would be the only conventional option. I'm not confident that radiation would be effective… and as I said back in November, the placement of the tumor makes this surgery somewhat… risky, in that I can't guarantee its success. But we're not there yet. Okay? Let's focus on this round first, and we'll see where to go from there."

He nods without particularly thinking about it, offers some agreement. And as soon as they're done, he follows a nurse to a generic room in a familiar wing, his feet moving at their normal speed as his mind runs on and on and on – a runaway train.

He calls Booth as soon as his line is in and counts the rings until the older agent answers. It takes three and a half, and Sweets is struck with the thought that he's interrupting something as Booth finally picks up.

"Hey," is all the psychologist says at first.

"Hey, Sweets! I was just getting finished with an interview, then I was going to head over. I was about to call to see if you needed anything."

"Oh, uh – thanks," Sweets replies, then pauses. Then continues. "But I don't need anything. Actually… about that, I was just calling to tell you that they're restricting visitors in the wing for a few days. There's a patient in the next room over that's really infection-prone. They don't really want anyone coming through."

There's a pause on the other end of the line for just a moment, but once it's over, he can practically hear Booth nodding, hesitant.

"Okay… sure. So I won't drive up then. Thanks for letting me know. Still, just give me a call if you need anything, okay? Let me know when I can swing by."

"Yeah," Sweets replies. "Sure thing."

And the conversation is over. He hangs up his phone, slides it back into the pocket of his pajama pants, and finds himself alone in the silence once again until, resigned, he gets up and wheels his IV pole into the bathroom.

He sees himself in the mirror and thinks, in that moment, of everything. He thinks of the scans on Roden's desk; he thinks of the plain way she told him their results. He thinks of the tumor settled in his gut, and in the moment, he could swear that he feels it. Each individual, cancerous cell, ripping apart and multiplying over and over and over again, and he glances down at his wrist, at the line that's pumping him full of all the useless doxorubicin and vincristine and cyclophosphamide his body can take.

All at once, he reaches forward and white-knuckles the sink and braces himself to dizzily, miserably puke up whatever breakfast he hurriedly ate in the car, but it never comes. It never comes, and all he does is simply stand there, breathing.

Week Twenty-Two, Day Three

By the time he opens his eyes to the late afternoon sun shining lazily through the window, he is vaguely aware of someone lightly breathing behind him. A quiet presence that must be sitting in chair next to the bed, one he's got his back to.

Sleepily keeping in mind his phone call with Booth, he spends a few moments wondering who it could be before finally, hesitantly turning his head to see.

"Anyone ever say it's weird to watch a man sleep?" he hears himself say, light enough to be a joke, but still betraying the fact that it's true. He turns over and sits up, and he finds himself face to face with a smiling, familiar someone – perhaps the only someone he finds himself wanting to see.

And that someone throws his hands up in mock defense and apologizes. Sort of.

"Ah, sorry, Sharkbait," he says with a grin. "I was getting bored."

Those words, at first, force Sweets' stomach to sharply drop, because being bored implies idle time. Idle time in a cancer center has implications of its own; but he manages a nervous glance down at the other man's left arm and finds nothing. No needles, no lines. His shoulders relax, along with the rest of him. To a point.

Still, he smiles.

"Hey, Gil. Long time, no see."

"Long time, no see, that's all, mate?" Oliver White counters with a splitting smile of his own, lightly punching the psychologist's right shoulder. "It's been what? Five months? How you been, kid?"

He gets that question a lot, though he supposes that Oliver is far more used to it than he is. He knows the answer; there's a big white blotch stuck in his mind's eye.

"I've been better," he says quickly, immediately following the question with its reversal. "How about you? Glad to see you, man, but I was hoping it'd be awhile."

With a smile, the older man says, "Not to worry, no recurrence yet. Here for some follow-up scans, but they've got to sort out a problem with the monitors or something. Just took a peek at the sign in sheet, saw you were here and figured I'd stop by."

There's what Sweets wanted to hear.

"So what exactly do you mean by 'been better,' Sharky?" And that's what he didn't want to hear. Oliver leans back in the chair and puts one foot up on the bedframe, as if to say that he's got all the time in the world to wait for the answer. Sweets sighs.

"I mean… well, I've just had better days."

"Yeah?" Oliver starts. "Feeling that shitty?"

He puts it plainly, but Sweets shakes his head. In this moment, he feels just fine in the way that Oliver means. He looks away.

"No. I'm just… angry. I guess."

Oliver nods but stays quiet, opting instead to let the younger man go on uninterrupted. After a few seconds of building silence, he does.

"I met with Dr. Roden the other day, before my line was started," he holds up his right arm for emphasis he doesn't need. "She said the chemo's not working. And even though surgery might not even work, she's saying it might be the only option."

A pause.

"That's what's got you angry?"

Sweets nods. "That's what's got me angry."

There is a stretch of silence that follows, and once it's over, Oliver lets out a pent up breath.

"Angry is… better than sad. I think." He looks down at the floor once, and then back up. "I'm sorry."

Sweets isn't looking at him anymore; instead, his eyes are fixed on some nondescript point on the opposite wall. Moments pass before he finds more to say.

"More… indignant than angry, maybe."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah."

A pause.

"You know…" he starts, stops, breathes, continues. "I don't like to… don't like to complain. About things in my life, you know? Because sure, it's been… I've gotten a couple bad hands. But I've got it a hell of a lot better than a hell of a lot of people. But still."

He glances down at the line in his arm and can't get the image of the six different white blotches out of his mind.

"It'd be nice to catch a break. I mean – the amount of times I've almost died since the day I was born. I just don't know… I don't know if this is gonna be it. And I don't know if it's gonna be another almost. I don't know if, and I sure as hell don't know when, and that's – it's frustrating as hell."

Oliver lets him finish, and they spend the next few moments sitting in silence until the older man glances his way and nods in agreement.

"It is," he says. "But – I don't know, just a question for ya – do you think… do you think you'd do anything different? I mean if you knew. If you know when you were gonna die, right down to the minute. Would you change anything?"

Machines whir around the room, down the hall, across the wing, all coming together in a static hum. The building is alive.

"I don't know," Sweets admits, looking back at Oliver with his eyebrows pulled together in gentle thought. He is about to return the question when a familiar face pokes into the room.

Dr. Roden smiles softly at the two of them. "Thought I'd find you here, Mr. White. Dr. Sweets. Oliver, the technicians are ready for you."

The man nods. "Right. I'll just be a second."

And she hesitates for a moment – but finally offers a quick alright and ducks out.

Sweets watches, then, as Oliver reaches for the cell phone perched on the closest table, and as he stares, the older man smiles.

"I waited an hour for them, they can wait a few seconds for me. Here," he says, and after a few seconds of quiet tapping on the screen, he tosses it back to Sweets, who catches it in his lap. "Added my number in. Give me a call when you think of an answer – alright?"

Sweets considers it. "Alright."

"Good," Oliver says with a smile on his face, and with that, he walks toward the door. "I'll catch ya later, Sharkbait. Alright?"

And he is gone before Sweets can answer.

Alright.

A/N: Would love to hear some thoughts. If nothing else, how is your day going?