Chapter 10: The Cancer Begins
POV: Marcus
February 25th, 2008. The day that changed everything. Marcus sat in his Honda Civic across from the medical complex, watching the entrance like a sniper choosing targets.
The building squatted on Central Avenue between a fast-food restaurant and a tire shop, institutional brick and glass that promised efficiency over comfort. Inside, Walter White was receiving news that would transform him from high school chemistry teacher to the most dangerous criminal in the American Southwest.
Marcus had been here since 8 AM, watching patients shuffle through the automated doors with the resigned expressions of people who'd learned that medical buildings existed to deliver bad news efficiently. Walter's appointment was scheduled for 10:30. The diagnosis would take fifteen minutes. The world would never be the same.
At 10:47, Walter emerged from the building clutching a manila folder like it contained his death warrant. Which, in a sense, it did. His face wore the blank expression of someone whose brain had simply shut down rather than process information too terrible to comprehend.
Marcus watched Walter walk to his Pontiac Aztek and sit motionless behind the wheel. Twenty minutes passed. The engine didn't start. Walter just sat there, staring through the windshield at a future that had suddenly contracted from decades to months.
Marcus's hand hovered over his door handle. He could go over there. Could offer comfort, support, could somehow intervene in this moment when a man learned he was dying. Could create a door to anywhere—a hospital in Houston with experimental treatments, a clinic in Switzerland where miracles happened daily, anyplace that might offer hope instead of despair.
But he didn't move.
Instead, he watched Walter finally start his car and drive away, probably toward the high school where he'd spend the rest of the day pretending to care about teaching chemistry to teenagers who'd never need to know the difference between ionic and covalent bonds.
Marcus followed at a distance, using his knowledge of Walter's routine to stay invisible. The school parking lot, the familiar routine of afternoon classes, the slow march toward evening when Walter would drive home and decide whether to tell his pregnant wife that their unborn daughter might never know her father.
"I could have stopped this," Marcus thought, gripping his steering wheel until the plastic creaked. "Could have prevented it entirely."
The technology existed. Cancer-fighting drugs that could be delivered anonymously through doors. Experimental treatments available in other countries. Even crude interventions—slipping supplements into Walter's food, arranging anonymous health screenings, somehow forcing early detection when treatment might still be effective.
But Marcus had frozen. Paralyzed by the knowledge that saving Walter White meant preventing Heisenberg, which meant allowing other monsters to operate unchecked. The cartel would continue its reign of terror. Tuco would keep beating people to death over twenty-dollar shortages. Gus would build his empire without opposition.
And somewhere in Albuquerque, an unknown player with supernatural abilities would continue operating without the chaos that Walter's transformation would bring. Maybe that player was worse than anything Heisenberg might become. Maybe preventing Walter's cancer would allow something more terrible to flourish in the shadows.
Or maybe Marcus was just a coward who'd convinced himself that inaction was noble restraint.
He screamed inside his car, slamming his palms against the steering wheel with enough force to bruise bone. The sound echoed off the Honda's interior like gunshots, releasing frustration that had been building for weeks.
"Why didn't I act? Why didn't I save him?"
The answer came like acid in his throat: because saving Walter meant losing his advantage. His foreknowledge of events was predicated on the timeline proceeding as he remembered it. Change too much too early, and he'd be operating blind in a reality he couldn't predict.
Saving Walter would have been the right thing to do. The moral thing. The human thing.
But it would also have been the dangerous thing, and Marcus had chosen safety over righteousness. Had allowed a good man to receive a death sentence because preventing that sentence might complicate his own plans.
The realization made him sick. Made him understand why Ryuk found him so fascinating and so frustrating. He had godlike power and the moral flexibility to use it, but he was too calculating to embrace the chaos that came with genuine divine intervention.
Marcus drove to a liquor store and bought a bottle of whiskey that he drank alone in his apartment while staring at maps of Albuquerque spread across his kitchen table. Red pins for criminal territories, blue pins for legitimate businesses, yellow pins for significant locations.
Soon he'd need green pins for crime scenes where Walter White—Heisenberg—would leave bodies in his wake.
Ryuk materialized in the chair across from him, those yellow eyes reflecting the amber liquid in Marcus's glass.
"So you're going to play god after all," the death god observed.
"No," Marcus said, his voice hoarse from whiskey and self-recrimination. "I'm going to play dungeon master."
"Elaborate."
"I won't stop Walt's transformation. That's too big a change, too many unknowns. But I'll guide it. Keep the people who deserve saving alive—Jesse, Hank, Skyler, the kids. Let Walt become Heisenberg, but try to minimize the collateral damage."
"And if Walter becomes something worse than you remember? If your guidance pushes him in directions you can't control?"
Marcus poured another drink, watching amber liquid catch the kitchen light. "Then I'll use the Death Note and end it. But not until I'm certain that the cure isn't worse than the disease."
"Practical. Cold. Very unlike the humans who usually receive Death Notes."
"Maybe that's why I got one."
Ryuk laughed, the sound like breaking glass. "Maybe. Or maybe you got one because you're exactly the kind of human who'll use it correctly. Sparingly. When necessary rather than when convenient."
"Light Yagami thought he was using it correctly."
"Light Yagami was a child playing with adult concepts. You're an adult who understands that power without restraint leads to destruction." Ryuk's grin widened. "Though I wonder how long that restraint will last when people you care about start dying."
Marcus didn't answer. Instead, he studied his maps, planning intervention points that might save lives without derailing the larger timeline. Jane's overdose in April 2009—preventable without changing Walter's arc. The plane crash that killed 167 people—avoidable if Jane survived. Hank's murder by Jack's gang—possibly preventable if Marcus positioned himself correctly.
Small changes. Surgical interventions. Saving individuals without disrupting the larger system that would eventually destroy itself and take worse monsters with it.
It wasn't heroism. It was crisis management on a cosmic scale.
March arrived with desert winds that carried the promise of change. Walter White returned to teaching with cancer growing in his lungs, unaware that he had months to live and less time to decide what kind of legacy he'd leave behind.
Marcus went to work at the pharmacy, serving customers who might become addicts, who might die in drug-related violence, who might survive if he made the right choices at the right moments. The weight of future knowledge pressed against his chest like a tumor, growing heavier each day as the moment of Walter's ride-along approached.
"Two months," Marcus thought, watching Jesse Pinkman buy cigarettes at the convenience store across the street. "Two months until Walt sees Jesse escape that DEA bust and realizes his former student knows the business. Two months until everything changes."
The clock wasn't just ticking—it was counting down to an explosion that would reshape Albuquerque's criminal landscape and test every assumption Marcus had made about power, responsibility, and the price of playing god with other people's lives.
Walter White had cancer. Soon, the world would have Heisenberg. And Marcus Sullivan would discover whether his careful plans could survive contact with the hurricane that was about to be born.
The game was beginning. All the pieces were in position. Now came the hard part: playing it correctly without losing his soul in the process.
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