Disclaimer: I do not own Arrow.

She always knew that she would die by the hand of some madman, hellbent on destroying Starling and/or The Arrow. She didn't begrudge that fact. It wasn't a sudden revelation she had or an epiphany after patching up Oliver and Dig so many times. It was just a given in her life. The sky was blue, and she was going to be killed by a bad guy.

She didn't dare try to explain this to Oliver. She knew better than that. She didn't even really talk about it with Dig. But sometimes she could see it in his eyes after she got a little too close to danger, or a mission went poorly and everything got shot to hell. Dig had the same look that she knew she had. A resignation of sorts. A 'this is something that could happen, and probably will happen at a later date' kind of look. It was impossible to have good luck always, and as far as she was concerned, she was probably on her fifth life or so already. It wasn't like she wanted to die at all. She was definitely pro-life. Not in the anti-abortion kind of way - not that she would ever say that she was pro-abortion, because that's not what she was at all and she doubted anyone really was, because that's actually pro-choice, which was a different thing altogether but if she was given a choice to live and to die, she would choose to live which kind of made her pro-choice and pro-life all at once and what was she thinking about again?

Pro-life. She was pro her life, absolutely. She did not want to die and had no intention of dying before her time, but she knew that life didn't always go according to intentions. She didn't take any unnecessary risks, she kept herself safe, even training with Sara in self defense, but that didn't guarantee her a long life, free of bad guys shooting at her.

She had made her peace, in advance. Not that she thought her death would be peaceful, really. If anything, she was going out with a fight. Her 'sky is blue' mantra may have sounded calm in her head, but she knew that there was going to be nothing calm about someone trying to kill her. She used to joke with Sara that if she wasn't paralyzed with fear when a bad guy grabbed her, she would probably just confuse the hell out of him by trying to do every self defense move she had ever learned all at once. That's just what she was: a frenzy of energy and life and fight. She didn't want to die, no matter how much 'peace' she had made with it.

Her phone kept ringing incessantly and buzzing in her pocket and she knew she was being that obnoxious woman on the street, ignoring her cell phone. Not only that but she knew that if she didn't answer it soon, she was probably going to be tracked down and rescued by the scariest, prettiest, most caring vigilantes in all of Starling. She gave herself one more minute, just a few more moments of peace, to get herself together, before answering her phone.

She looked down in her hands at the pamphlet she held. It was bright cheery yellow and the words were cartoonish in style and size and she really wanted to punch whoever designed it. She ripped it in half and threw the pieces to the ground. She would get any information she needed off the internet, as always. She didn't need that pamphlet with its fake sincerity and smiling faces.

The paper was heavy, hence only the ripping of it in half, and the pieces fell to the ground as if they were weighted with magnets. They didn't blow away in the wind, they didn't even flip around. They fell exactly as they were, but now with an inch separating them. She looked down and got irrationally angry. She couldn't even rip the damn thing right - she had torn it in half horizontally, not vertically, and all she had accomplished was separating the words on top from the picture of a way-too-happy couple on a picnic on the bottom.

The pieces of the pamphlet mocked her from the sidewalk and she almost raised her heel to step on them, to crush the pamphlet into the concrete just a little bit more, make it dirty and unhappy like it was supposed to be but she knew that if she did, with her luck all she would succeed in was getting it stuck to her shoe. And she didn't want to carry it around any longer than she already had. Her eyes clouded with tears, but she didn't need to read the words on the ground. She had memorized what they said the second it was thrust into her hands by her doctor.

So You Found Out You Have Cancer - Now What?

A rain drop plopped heavily on her forearm at that moment, its weight surprising her. She looked up to see the rain clouds that had moved in unnoticed by her.

The sky wasn't blue today, and for the first time since she had started to work with Team Arrow, Felicity Smoak wasn't entirely sure she was going to die from the hands of a madman.

A/N: Okay, so...oops. This is my first Arrow story that I've worked on, and I really was just interested in what would happen when there was a threat to Felicity's life that Oliver couldn't fight with his bow. I don't think I have seen something like this done before (although it is entirely possible that it has been done - I did not dig through every single fantastic Arrow story out there!) and hopefully the plot is intriguing enough to you guys as well.

It was originally going to be a one-shot, a bit longer than this, but now I've got about 50,000 words written and it is certainly not a one-shot. It is a beast.

I struggled with posting this part first, since it essentially tells you what the story will be about, but figured it wasn't ruining anything, but actually preparing you. In the chapters to come, you will see the weeks coming up to the diagnosis and then everything after it.

This subject matter is extremely close to me and I promise to treat it with the respect it deserves. I'll go ahead and post the next chapter tonight as well, even though it is longer than I intended. (Story of this...story?)