Disclaimer: I own nothing.
Spoilers/Season: End of season four: Elegy, Demons, and Gethsemane.
Notes:I have always wanted to write a cancer-arc fic, namely for the arc-that-isn't-an-arc that is the Elegy/Demons/Gethsemane trio. They feed into each other; and have always seemed like the last desperate stones thrown, the last part of a tightly wound downward spiral, of which Gethsemane is the hard fallout. It's gorgeous in its own way.
oOo
What I couldn't tell Agent Mulder, what I had only just learned myself, was that the cancer which had been diagnosed in me several months earlier had metastasized.
- Scully, "Gethsemane"
oOo
By Friday, she's come closer than he thinks she'd like to admit to passing out on him. Thankfully, there was no nosebleed to accompany the dizzy spell or near-loss of consciousness, but it still unsettles him.
She agrees to get herself checked out; and the promptness of her agreement does little to upset that unsettlement. Scully rarely does anything she's told to unless she's already made up her mind to do so; it speaks badly, though tacitly, of her condition that she's weakened enough to not put up the usual fight for what she thinks is her dignity, and that she's worried enough to consult her doctor.
The office visits were usually made like clockwork; no more, no less. There is a journal inside her desk with careful notes of every symptom, every spell, every signal that the cancer may be progressing; holding data, but no analysis. It has breathed second-hand detachment, and subsequently become it in the form of ink and paper. It's hard for the doctor to become the patient, and this very notebook is testament to that fact.
Opening it in a way he would never dream of doing under normal circumstances, he's not as surprised as he thought he would be to find it riddled, like her body, with evidence of migraines and a brittleness Scully herself won't admit to, splattered in accidental blood on the edges of only a few pages. It refused to keep her peace and her secrets, the sanctity of the pristine, and had long since seeped through the thin paper to one, three, six more pages, until all that was left was a thin imprint, brown and warped with time and deoxidization.
Scully's privacy is something Mulder usually holds sacred; God knows he understands the need for privacy. But his worry couldn't be abated. In hindsight, he thought he should have guessed it wouldn't have abated even had he violated that trust, already on thin ice due to accusations, however merited, that should never have been leveled.
Feeling like the guiltiest man alive, he replaces the journal, so freely and meticulously kept, the sight of the blood on the paper haunting him like Scully's veins standing out through her too-thin skin.
She doesn't come back that afternoon, despite the air of the office that, in a week, has lightened considerably. He calls her that night from his apartment, for his own sake, and purposely doesn't say anything about her condition. He feels her relief, even as his own flees at the sound of her voice.
There is no peace here. What solace there once was, in the sound of her voice and the comfort of her presence in reality, has gone, he hopes not irrevocably. Visions haunt him that night, phantoms of the future and the all-too questionable past, different in place and time, but not in feeling and emotion. Whether they are real or unreal, having any place in reality, he can't say. It's eleven o'clock by the time he gives up on sleep, and after a call to a psychiatrist, chases after relief of any kind.
oOo
The call comes at nearly five in the morning.
It is a Sunday. Scully, once accustomed to rising very early, finds it hard to wake and rolls over to a spike of pain through her cerebrum. She stills, and picks up the phone.
She's saved from her exhaustion only by the rush of adrenaline that follows, which might have been responsible both for saving her life and nearly ending it prematurely – an irony, if she might say so herself – on the road up to Providence.
Mulder, the irrepressible mother-hen, who she once swore was worse than her own mother, had failed to call for a secondary check up on Saturday, a feat that left her both lonely at her house and glad for the solitude. She reached for the phone more than once, to put it down, fill a wineglass with a French Chardonnay, and enjoy the bubble bath she had put off for years. The solitude was a vice, and now, an addiction she neither wanted nor could afford. She felt it like an empty hollowness the expanded with every beat of her heart, every tick of the clock, silence to a question with an unknown answer. Medical school, and molting bodies: she stands, short, over anonymous bodies that no longer belong to a soul, but contain in the form of chemicals all that the soul who once resided within once held dear.
Whirring, detachment.
She's glad Mulder called her, and focuses her attention on worrying over his condition. It's a welcome distraction, for the moment.
She's procrastinating, she knows. The beginnings of a conversation she doesn't want to have spin around in her head like her blades, fast and blurred, mere inches away but secure in her hand, as she continues to fumble with time.
Mulder cancer metastasis blood heart head mind months weeks days
She refocuses.
"If this is a hemorrhage, it can drop you in a second!"
That's all she needs, for Mulder to die of a brain hemorrhage before she dies of a brain tumor; the ironies there being too many to count.
She refuses to think about it. Here is Mulder, on speed dial, cold and shivering before her, shower water running down his back in a cloud of steam as obfuscating as the questions that surrounds him, a little boy in the midst of chaos and defeat. There is comfort in the familiar, and in the ability to comfort itself. She rests, cradled in it.
Time, as the ultimate intangible, leaves only one thing to grasp: the present. She latches on with a desperation that frightens her. Tangible, she grasps the questions; tangible, she strokes back his hair, and feels for head injuries.
It slips through her fingers, and she refuses to think about it, concentrating instead about the remark Mulder's making about how she's still in her pajamas, with only a business jacket as a cover. Footies – well, at least her feet are warm.
Here the present resides, and time runs short with a meaning other than the one that she faces, now, daily, staring back at her from the mirror. She hadn't put any makeup on this morning, and her appearance is garish. Mulder doesn't notice, caught in what he sees in the past, before. Uneasily, she thinks she's grateful.
The past is comfortable, Scully knows, like a warm glove or a soft sofa; familiar like your mother's living room. The past is one's own, a retreat in one's mind that the mind itself has transformed, sometimes through subterfuge, as a haven.
The past is a lake and fog and a wooden dock that bridges past and present, reality and nonreality. She can understand it, and allows it, her grip ever looser.
By Wednesday, Mulder is in the hospital, and once again, she is alone, having had enough of hospitals, and knowing that he is safe, if not untroubled. Her burden, for the moment, is off his shoulders, temporarily forgotten in the whirlwind of his own, and she's grateful. She carries it alone, and hates him for it, even as she writes a last report to Skinner on Mulder's condition in melancholy and caring tones she dredges from an instinctive, unsupressable place deep inside of her, words flowing through her fingers subconsciously.
She hands it in the day Mulder goes home. Skinner is surprised to see her. She doesn't blame him, and goes home, falling asleep, eyes closed against the harsh rays of the sun.
oOo
He wakes alone in an unbearably while hospital room, to remember vague images, too heartbreaking to keep in his mind too long. The drugs drain out of his system lethargically, and the visions recede, and reality once more cannot be fled, relief cannot be had. He thinks he remembers Scully coming in once, shadows of ghosts in her eyes, her face drawn and her hands gentle on his as he shook. The look on her face had been tender, and unbearable.
A mere flash, and it's gone. He physically shakes, in abhorrence of himself.
Are you going to kill me, Mulder?
Her words are ironic in his head, dull, useless things. A nod. Her resignation is invisible, having been present in her face for too long to now be distinguishable from any other emotion, whether separate or intermingling.
Escapism that had nearly cost what was left of his partner's life, already in ruins around her feet as it was. Hysteria borne of a drug trip. Detox makes him feel his college years again. Shame washes over him in waves.
Her head rests, for a moment, on his sweat-soaked back, weary and in pain, matching his own. She disappears in a haze, surrounded by phantoms of his sister and his mother, like her, too bright and discolored.
oOo
When she comes in for work, Mulder thinks she looks worse than she usually does.
She looks artificial, from her overtly-red hair, dyed as what he can only assume is overstatement, to the makeup coating her face. She looks too like a doll, too carefully perfect, from her warm-toned foundation to the careful blush on her cheeks, mascara filling out her hollow eyes, the reds and browns of her eyeshadow giving the sallow skin of her eyelids color. There, before him, she is too brilliant, like a candle outshone by the unforgiving glare of fluorescents; a subtlety that in the end must succumb to its own ephemeral nature.
That day, she blatantly tells him again that her oncologist has said she's fine, hoping the undertone in her voice and the new fear in her sunken eyes would be belied by that statement, and ignored. For her sake, he lets it go.
That day alone, she has three nosebleeds; more likely continuous than separate, she tells him. He finds himself protesting not the validity of that statement, but the effectuality. He's run out of unstained handkerchiefs.
The air retains its heaviness, once thought by Mulder to have dissipated in the week since the psychiatric center. But in place of discomfort on a basic level was Scully's worried looks, her disappointment, and her migraines, all continued reminders of his own failure when both she and he himself are concerned.
She leaves early one day, and Mulder realizes how close Christmas has come. He asks if she's staying with family; With her mom, she replies. Bill's in town, so they're all staying over for a family Christmas.
The look on her face says she knows the reason.
She leaves, and the air becomes saturated and weighted enough to be suffocating, until he receives a phone call from a Mr. Arlinsky at the Smithsonian, and after that, everything is forgotten in an instant.
His excitement is tempered by her dispassion, and he calls her on it – she, who as much and perhaps more than he, wants to know the truth to all things.
This is not the way to the truth, her voice whispers, an anachronism, noncorporeal, a shadow in his mind, then addled by chemicals and a desperation for the truth, a truth, any truth. Her low voice resonates, echoing, with a melancholy imbued by the moment, or his own guilty mind. Her eyes, at once soft and accusing, irises reflecting what little light the room contains, sharply.
Now, her blue eyes pierce him with a newly discovered apathy, a disillusionment that radiates from her softened gaze.
This is your holy grail, Mulder, she replies, wearily. Not mine.
oOo
The truth is, as she suspected, comprised of long sentences, poetic in their scientific prose, and all the more destructive for it. The truth is not found in age-old ice samples or in the far reaches of space, but in men who have kept it for years, men who without purpose experiment, taint, and kill, unless as before, they are given a purpose not to.
The truth comes in sentences not spiteful or trustworthy, but believable. Left with little else, she believes, her cross hanging heavily in the hollow of her throat, its dull shine hidden from her. A small manufactured chip bears witness to the fact of a government within a government, without morals or restraint: a step further in an experiment that is both logical, and sickening.
Mulder is on another quest that is only a part of the macrocosmic epic she has inserted herself into, foolishly, and with dignity she worries she will have lost by the time she quietly slips out of its overwhelming disreality. The truth is not in aliens or the possibility of extraterrestrial life, but most simply, in her.
The truth is life; and resides in the spirit. It is a fleeting specter that once lost, can never be recovered again; and behind Mulder, searching for the damning evidence she knows he will not find, she suddenly knows that without this understanding, Mulder will never find the elusive and indefinable truth he so relentlessly searches for.
You already believe, Mulder. What difference would it make? I mean, what would proof change for you?
If someone could prove to you the existence of God, would it change you?
Only if it were disproven.
Her limbs are heavy with it. She moves lethargically after his agitation, movement so fast as to dizzy her. Unchanging, the truth cannot be disproven; as ever evasive, it can never be found.
Cerebral hemorrhage vasogenic edema nasalpharangeic metastasis days
Words fail her.
Her own anger rises out of the depths of her mind to match his and invigorate her in his inability to understand, and more, to want that understanding, and all that comes with it.
"What the hell did that guy say to you that you believe his story?" he demands of her.
Scully hesitates. "He said that the men behind this hoax... behind these lies... gave me this disease to make you believe."
Mulder stops, the look on his face frozen, and now unreadable, and then stalks away to leave her alone, small and drained. A single word appears in her mind: elegiac. It whispers seductively to her. She thrusts it away, repulsed.
The shadows of the dead rise around her.