Title: Anagrams
Chapter: 3/4
Category: MSR, angst and/or RST
Rating: M overall (PG for this chapter)
Summary: This is a series of four vignettes. There are many references to canon but they are all technically AUs: Three ways they didn't meet and one way they didn't end.
In this chapter, the timeline is set prior to Scully being assigned to the X-Files. She is a medical resident still, at a UMMS hospital. It has a Colony/End Game-ish influence. You'll see. This is the third way they [didn't] meet.
iii. still life
Pathology, from the Greek 'pathos', meaning suffering, is the morbid side of histology. It is an undeveloped negative's printed photograph, framed and hung. It is the revelation of latent fingerprints by the sweep of black magnetic dust. Pathology is aftermath and reason, an investigation into the fatal cause of the final effect.
It is Dana Scully's specialty. Or it is going to be, if she can wade through the remainder of her residency. Her current attending is irascible and single-minded, often treating trauma victims like they're already dead, rationalizing all of it. If they're already dead and he can't save them, nothing is lost. There is no failure on the physician's part. If he can't save them, nobody can. But if he can, it's a death-defying victory, the usurping of science over the absurdity of accidents.
Scully wants to respect the idea. She wants to understand that trauma doctors deal with so much death that they must need to devise a way to not see every patient lost as a personal defeat. Except she can't. As long as a person is breathing, and their heart's beating, they're alive and she can't see them as anything else.
The heels of her feet dig into the soles of her shoes. She feels like she's been standing for days. A yawn is building behind the breadth of her sternum. Before it can escape, she's startled too awake by red and white lights flashing intermittent outside of the ambulance bay doors.
The first time she sees him, he's an unconscious lost cause strapped to a stretcher.
The circles around his eyes are plum purple, violet on the inner curve, taupe and fading near his cheekbones. Blood streams from a gash on his forehead. His hair has gravel dust on its ends. His lips are tinted blue.
Paramedics rush closer, reporting a barrage of vitals. Adult male. Severe hypothermia. Single gun shot wound through his left leg, possible tibia fracture. Bleeding is controlled but his temperature is 89 °F and dropping. Blood pressure's barely gaugeable. The identification they found on him says he's an FBI agent. They hand Scully his credentials. She glimpses his name: Fox Mulder.
She stares at him with fascination, an irresistibility to not pause and feel the tremor of fate like a warning, to know inexplicably that her future hinges on this patient, this stranger.
"Scully," her attending shouts, jarring her out of a locked stare, the hypnosis that presages some catastrophe. His name is Benton Howell, Dr. Howell, but in five years she won't remember his name, only this night.
"Are you coming?" He asks, all impatience and intent, walking away from her. Scully nods, sprinting to the patient's side.
The glare of the OR lights is blinding when they push through the doors. Her attending orders the bypass machine be brought to this room and bends to examine the injured leg. A nurse starts Mulder on heated, humidified oxygen and warmed saline.
"Bullet went through clean," Howell says and instructs Scully and another resident to flush the wound and suture his leg and forehead.
Scully approaches slowly, cleaning the splayed skin above his brow, wiping at the trail of blood gravity drew along his temple and starting into a purse-string suture.
She's nearly done stitching when the CPB machine is wheeled in. She watches the surgeon place a cannula into Mulder's femoral vein and begin to withdraw blood and, for the first time in a long time, she feels like she's not witnessing it as clinical procedure, or as a novice doctor gleaning experience, but as a spectator, frozen and anxious and out of place.
Cooled blood has a higher viscosity, but the solution used to prime the bypass tubing is supposed to dilute the blood. Heparin will be injected. The blood will be removed and returned, oxygenated and warmed and bringing him back to life. His wounds will heal, his eyes will open. He'll go home with inscrutable scars and without ever knowing her name.
She is thinking about what they would have to do if this hospital had no bypass machine. Body cavity lavage: the length of the incision, the pour of warm fluids irrigating his abdomen––the chance it may not rewarm enough, or fast enough.
Of course, bypass should work. Minutes pass; she's holding her breath. Extracorporeal rewarming is the fastest method for patients with severe hypothermia, Scully recites to herself like maybe this is just an elaborate oral exam. But as his body temperature rises, his vitals plummet.
This is not a textbook case.
"Rewarming collapse," her attending mutters. The defibrillator charges; epinephrine is pulled from a drawer of the cart. A shock's delivered once, twice. The overhead lights bleed white into the edges of her vision. The shrill echo of a flatlining patient is aural resignation, death's alarm.
A third dose of epinephrin, a final shock and then an audible restart of a human heart. The EKG jerks back to life. Her attending shakes his head.
"Turn off the bypass," Howell says to a nurse. "He's circling the drain."
Scully turns her head in disbelief.
"That's it?" She asks her attending.
"His body temperature is 95°F, and the J-wave is still clear on the EKG. We rewarmed him as much as we can. We cleaned and sutured his wounds—we can monitor him and treat another arrest but I'd be surprised if he makes it through the night."
A huge invisible fist torpedoes through Scully's gut. She looks at the patient, wonders how he got here, in this condition, in her OR. He must have a family, a full life, a reason for doing whatever he did that put him here. The sound of his pulse is temporary relief. She can feel her heart beating tandem with his, whoever he is.
She leaves the OR, her shoulders slumped, her mind racing. She is certain there is something else going on with this patient, more than hypothermia, a diagnosis she doesn't want to find only after an autopsy.
The arterial halls of the hospital offer none of their secrets. There is still stray tinsel along a nurse's station she passes, frosted glass doors, dangling snow flakes and misplaced mistletoe. Christmas has just passed and tonight is one of the few that comprise the dull interlude that's relieved only by the new year.
Scully settles on a bench outside the women's locker room. She drops her face into her hands and sighs. When she looks up, she's facing a painting, a floral still life she's stared at too many times. The canvas is filled with fuchsia and emerald green, a sea colored sky, a cluster of bleeding heart flowers. The shape of the petals curving together, the unlikeliness of it, the imperfection and beauty concentrated in something so simple, ignites something. A thought occurs to her: maybe the way to deal with this, to deal with every exigency in life, is to stand back and look at it as she would look at a painting, as something she could appreciate but only half-understand.
Another idea strikes her––what Howell always does: treat the patient like they're already dead. Scully finds a phone and calls the Medical Examiner's office.
"Dr. Henry, my name is Dana Scully. I'm a resident at UMMS, completing a rotation at the R. Adams Cowley Shock Trauma Center. I'm calling you because we have a patient in our ICU who initially presented with hypothermia but after rewarming has gotten much worse. I was wondering if you've had any unexplained deaths that presented with exposure or hypothermia, swelling around the eyes, and cardiac involvement."
"Actually, yes. We've had a well-dressed John Doe here a week. We're calling the CDC."
"Why? What did you find?"
"Initially, no clear cause of death. No knife or gun shot wounds, no ligature or abrasion to suggest strangulation, his lungs and toxicology were clean. But the blood work, the blood work was strange."
"Strange how?"
"There was evidence of polycythemia."
"How excessive?"
"Unbelievably. The blood curdled in his body like jelly. Something caused the spontaneous overproduction of red blood cells; the thickening of the blood is what caused his heart to stop."
"What caused the blood to thicken?"
"We suspected a coagulating agent, but nothing showed up on the second tox-screen. Further blood analysis showed that this man was infected with a virus, a retrovirus, something nobody here has ever seen before."
"You think the thickening of the blood was an immunological response to the virus?" Scully asks rhetorically. "What else do you know about the virus?"
"Only that by refrigerating the blood we found the virus is inhibited by the cold."
"Inhibited?"
"Knocked out by it. The cold temperature caused the retrovirus to go dormant and hyperviscosity completely subsided."
"Thank you," Scully says hanging up the phone and rushing, running to Mulder's room.
She orders anti-virals and blood-thinners. An orderly comes to take Mulder to an ice bath, but Howell has, by this time, been apprised of Scully's efforts. He halts the orderly, arms crossed and confronting Scully.
"Are you trying to kill this patient?" Howell asks.
"No," Scully says, moving to where the orderly was, nudging at the gurney herself until it's a shove closer to Howell's knees.
"This man has been exposed to a retrovirus, one that's thickening his blood and––"
"Hypothermia was just a coincidence?" Howell contends.
"Hypothermia stabilized him, temporarily. This virus is inhibited by the cold."
"Where are you getting this science fiction Doctor Scully?"
"It's the truth," she starts, unflinching. "And I don't know why you're pretending to care. You've already given up on this patient, what difference do an ice bath and a heparin drip make to you at this point?"
"It wasn't the patient I was worried about. This is blatant misconduct. If you continue such irrational treatment of this man, I'll have no choice but to have you removed from my rotation. I'll recommend they remove you from the whole damn program. This is your career you're jeopardizing. Your future, Dana."
The scene before her flattens, loses one of its dimensions. The din of the waiting room and crowded corridors dribbles down its face. Something is coming. This moment, the very experience of it seems only the thinnest gauze.
"Excuse me," Scully says, pushing through him finally.
With her back to Howell she feels stripped of armor and alone. Will they let her complete her residency? Has she forfeited everything she's worked so hard for? What will she tell her father? And this man, this man she's wheeling to an ice bath in a Hail Mary attempt to keep him alive––why? Why does it mean more to her to save this man's life than her own job?
Bloodwork after the ice bath is nearly normal. This makes Scully's heart leap, hurdle over any reluctance or regret. She will not leave his side.
In a slate blue slant of light, returned to his room, she thinks. She's weak, shocked but buoyant, like a gladiator after a session in the arena.
She is twenty-six years old. His chart says he's not much older. In another life, they might have been husband and wife, colleagues, best friends. In this life, they're reduced to doctor and patient, caught between the thrust and parry of science and reason, not elevated the way she imagined it when she was a child but blunt, unforgiving and inconclusive, the sum of lab work and educated guesses.
God, she wants him to open his eyes, to feel him look into hers and know that what she did was right; she wants the hope of them being more, more than a vigil-keeping medical student in the ICU as a visitor, not an employee, and an unconscious FBI agent who knows nothing of her, of being here, or what happens next.
The traffic sounds outside ride the night air in waves of trigonometry: the cosine of a siren, the tangent of a sign, an axis, a logic to all of this chaos. Scully reads textbooks, medical journals, magazines. She watches the monitors, afraid his vitals will plummet if she takes her eyes off any screen for more than five minutes. She dozes, but never long; she startles herself awake when the sound of his breathing fades in and out.
Mulder lies in bed like a man overboard, far from any harbor, keeping adrift only for the sake of it, waiting for his strength to give out. Except she is here, this azure-eyed young doctor who refuses to let him drown, shining a searchlight through the fog of his failure. She is his lifeline.
It is early morning on the third day after being admitted when Mulder's eyes open, slowly, the daylight a permeating brightness, a sky-warm answer to the question of his survival. He sees her in silhouette in front of the window. He sees her in teal scrubs, white sneakers, legs crossed and exposing a pale shin. He shifts and turns and she does too and he sees her face then, sees the relief in her eyes, something unconditional on her lips.
"Agent Mulder," she starts. "My name is Scully, Doctor Dana Scully. You're in a UMMS hospital. Do you know what happened to you?"
He nods. He smiles. "I know exactly what happened to me," he says in a hoarse rasp.
Mulder, who she finds never wants to be called Fox, tells her the most fantastic story, one of a far-reaching conspiracy, of human clones, inhuman assassins and the origin of the virus that nearly took his life. By the end of his account, Scully's heart is somersaulting inside her ribcage.
She is leaning on her elbow, still watching his vitals. His blood pressure and body temperature are normal. They will keep him one more day, run blood work one last time and discharge him. She will never see him again. Now though, she is absorbing the vicarious exhilaration of what it must be like investigating the things he investigates, to grasp at and touch the unknown. She wonders if it's more exhilarating than saving a life.
Scully watches him in disbelief, staring at the scarlet ladder of sutures along his brow, frostbite on an earlobe, a crescent scab on his bottom lip. Every question she asks, he answers, citing evidence or experience to support the strange and impossible explanation, the truth, Mulder says. There is such relentlessness in him, such conviction.
"You don't believe me," he says as he finishes, trying to decipher the expression on her face; she's either incredulous or impressed.
"No. I mean yes. I mean, I want to believe it. A lot of what you said fits with what little I found out about the retrovirus."
Mulder nods, stares at the grayish tiles on the floor, letting a beat pass.
"Thank you," he says quietly, reaching to rest his hand on hers.
"For what?"
"For realizing something else was going on, and for not giving up on me."
"You're welcome."
She has no idea what else to say and squeezes the row of his fingers, never so glad to feel body heat reciprocated.
"I should go," Scully adds, suddenly self-effacing. "Visiting hours are almost over."
"Visiting hours?"
"I'm no longer employed here."
"What? But you saved me."
"I took unnecessary risks. I was insubordinate. I broke protocol."
"But you saved me."
Scully smiles, walking slowly away from his hospital bed. "You're right, I did."
He wants to ask her why she did so much for him, risked everything, never left. When her eyes meet his eyes to say goodbye though, he knows. This will not be the last time they see each other.
. . .
Less than three months later, Scully receives a letter in the mail. The FBI is recruiting forensic pathologists. They're expressing interest in her. They want her to call and schedule an interview.
This is not the only job offer she has to consider. Earlier that week she'd accepted a position at Saint Sebastian's.
She wonders if this letter from the FBI is Mulder's doing. She scoffs at that idea, reminding herself that the FBI is a huge institution, a bureaucracy with a thousand employees. Even if she ended up there, she might never see Mulder, never work with him. Still, the impulse to assign meaning to what they went through, to refuse to let it be a missed connection does not escape her.
Melissa phones the next morning and Scully confides in her, tells her that she's reconsidering things.
"Reconsidering what Dana?"
"Everything."
"Like what we talked about at Christmas?"
Scully had almost forgotten. The night before Christmas, knowing her residency was nearly over, that in a few months she'd be a doctor, she admitted her disappointment in the finality of it. Beside her sister on the family couch, she wondered if it was a huge mistake. She said that practicing medicine no longer felt right, that she didn't know what did anymore. Melissa asked her what she'd do instead and Scully could only shake her head.
Now she knows.
The following week Scully strides into the J. Edgar Hoover building for her interview, shakes hands and, some time later, walking away, wonders why it feels so right to accept this position. She wonders if she's leading or being led, if the hands of fate are spelling her future out with a plastic planchette on some cosmic Ouija board. Until she's completed training and her first assignment is not teaching at Quantico, it's not Violent Crimes (her second choice) or any field office. It's in the basement, resuming her entanglement in his crusade, reunited by a fate she doesn't believe in.