Both Sides Now (1/1)
by Jennifer Maurer
and Leyla Harrison (Leyla passed away in February 2001)

Disclaimer: (yawn) All characters belong to some guy up in Vancouver...CC...yeah, that's his name.
Rating: PG-13
Classification: VA
Spoilers: Memento Mori and Elegy
Keywords: M/S Friendship
Summary: A look into the heads of Fox Mulder and Dana Scully.
 

"And I have the sense to recognize
That I don't know how to let you go..."
 --Sarah McLachlan

Dana Scully is my best friend and she has cancer.

Both of these facts hit me at the same time.  Hit me like a freight train, actually.  I'm not sure which was more surprising.

I don't know, exactly, how long I have taken for granted that she *is* my best friend.  I never introduce her that way, of course.  In the line of duty we're always partners.  "I'm Agent Mulder from the FBI and this is my partner, Agent Scully."  I have never had to introduce her to anyone in a social setting.  "This is my best friend, Dana Scully."   That would get me a raised eyebrow for sure.  I wonder how she refers to me, if she speaks about me to others at all.

There are long stretches of time when I can actually forget that she has cancer.  It's not as though she is dying right in front of me.  She is the same person she always has been.  A brilliant FBI agent.  A
remarkable woman who stands by me no matter what.  I have long since ceased to wonder why and simply thank God that she does.  I would be lost without her.  Professionally, and personally.

I'm never sure if it is okay to talk about her cancer.  I don't want to upset her, but I also don't want her to think that I don't care.  If I ignore it, will she think me unfeeling?  I have a hunch Scully spends a
lot of time trying to ignore it herself.  The nosebleeds are the only time we ever openly acknowledge the cancer, and only then because we are
forced to.

My first reaction when she told me of her diagnosis was to deny it.  I refused to believe it was inoperable, even with her X-ray staring me
right in the face.  There *had* to be some way, I told her.  We would find it.  Nothing had ever separated us before, not for long.  Cancer wasn't about to start.  The connection between us was too strong.  I
stubbornly cling to my delusion that if I flat out refuse to let her go, she cannot die.  I didn't let go when she returned from her abduction.   Against everyone else's odds I hung on and she came back.  I would give anything to be able to work that miracle again.

Scully always goes to her treatments alone.  I occasionally field the calls from her doctor's office but that's the extent of it.  Her mother called me once to ask how I thought Dana was doing. That's when I figured out she's not letting her mother go with her, either.  I want to go with her.  I want to be there to support her, and carry my share of this burden.  I owe her so much and this is the only way I know how to repay.

I don't even know what kind of treatment she is getting.  After that disaster in Allentown, Scully has not shared the research I know she does about her disease.

I'm afraid I will ask and she'll say no and I'll feel even more helpless.

I'm afraid I will ask and she'll say yes and I'll have to watch her suffer, and live with those images long after she is gone.

I'm afraid I will ask and she'll tell me she is fine and I'll resent her for lying to me.

So I take the easy way and don't say anything.  My heart twists a little in my chest every time she walks out the door, but my cowardice keeps me silent.

I want to bridge the gulf between us.  We don't know how much time we have left.  I don't want to be left with a lot of things I wished I'd told her.  They say the first step is the hardest.  Now, as the clock
ticks down for Scully, every time she shuts me out is like another nail in the coffin.

*The doctor said I was fine.*

*I hope that's the truth.*

The shock on her face was evident.

Do I trust Scully?  Absolutely.  With my life.

Do I believe her when she evades my eyes and feeds me platitudes about her well-being?  Not a chance in hell.

I have learned to separate the two Scullys.  I no longer feel betrayed by her evasions.  I am hurt, of course, but over the years of our partnership I have evolved from the Fox Mulder who would take these
white lies as proof of a deeper conspiracy.  I see it now for what it really is: a dance we do, keeping each other at arm's length.  To protect both our hearts.  In my selfish moments I think that the loss, should it come, will be harder for me; I will be the one carrying on alone.  Then I remember that she is the one who may have to leave life, say goodbye in a completely different way.  Walk alone through that
door.  And she asked *me* to forgive *her* for not finishing our journey.  God.

I held her, the morning after Penny Northern died.  I wanted her close to me, as much for my comfort as hers.  Sometimes I dream about that moment.  Scully comes to me and I wrap my arms around her.  Then before my eyes, she dissolves into my arms until I am left holding nothing.  I open my embrace and stare before me, dumbfounded.  She must have slipped from my grasp...but then I realize the truth.  I have consumed her.  She has vanished into my darkness.  I wake up screaming.

It is almost beyond believing, even for "Spooky" Mulder.  This is one truth I would gladly bury.  The monstrous unfairness of it drives me insane with rage sometimes.  That someone so young, with such a
promising future, should have to face this.  It goes beyond all my it-should-have-been-me recriminations.  This shouldn't happen to anyone.  That Scully has been given this cross to bear in my place makes the pain different.  Much worse.  I can't imagine it getting worse even though I know it will.

I will be without her someday, as I was once.  Incredibly, there was a time when Dana Scully was not a part of my life.  It is almost impossible to remember now.  It seems I have been blessed with her
friendship all my life.  I can never go back, not now that I would know what I was missing.  There has never been someone like Scully for me, and there never will be again.  She is not a substitute for my sister,
she is not merely my FBI partner.  She is something that I have trouble finding words to describe.

I revealed myself to her, piece by piece, starting with the largest of all: the abduction of my sister Samantha.  I knew what Scully thought of such things, yet she heard me out, without ridicule or scorn.  That
earned her the first crumb of trust, even if I couldn't admit it at the time.  Had I been asked, I would have said no, I don't trust her.  She is a spy.  Yet I reached out to her immediately and was met half-way.  The dividing line between us shifts constantly.  She stepped into my arms, weeping, and let herself be vulnerable.  Other times it is me showing weakness.  We cycle around, being strong for each other when
necessary, leaning when we have to.  The timing always works.  We haven't crumbled yet.

Despite some outward appearances, we have never betrayed each other.  The only way we lose the connection is through manipulation.  They drug my water.  They flash subliminal signals through her TV.  Unnatural acts, disturbing our natural rhythms of trust.

That says a lot, I think.  We have had our moments of tension and perhaps even hatred, but we come out stronger in the end, the thread that links us doubled over, stronger than before.  It passes back and forth between us, a cat's cradle that grows more intricate every day.  Every time she doubts my theories but listens anyway, every time I have no faith in science but hear her out, we add another stripe to the pattern.  We weave a bridge between our worlds.

A safety net, if you will.  One that has caught each of us before we hit bottom.

Will it be strong enough to catch her?  And even if it is, will she allow herself to fall into it?

******

"I grieve in my condition
For I cannot find the words to say I need you so..."
 --Sarah McLachlan

Mulder.

I often wonder what he is to me.

That's not completely true -- I know exactly what he is to me.

Partner.  Friend.  Trusted confidante.

That last part sounds so ridiculous.  Who has trusted confidantes in this day and age?  It's more of a term that was used back in the 50's and 60's, when young women had close girlfriends and the word "confidante" was an accurate description of those friends.

Although I cannot say that I don't trust Mulder.  I do.  I trust him with my life.

When I was first told about the cancer, he was the first -- and only -- that I called.  Not my family.  Not a friend.  I called only Mulder.  He came in to find me gazing at that x-ray in that quiet room, and his voice almost broke as he told me that it wasn't possible, that he wouldn't accept it.  If it hadn't been for the catch in his throat I would have thought that he was speaking about some paranormal activity
that he put his beliefs in so strongly.  But I knew that it was different.  I knew that he didn't want to accept what I was telling him because for once, he didn't want to believe.

I tried to talk to him calmly, rationally, about what it was, what it meant.  I avoided the one question we both wanted an answer to.

How will this change us?

He doesn't talk to me much about the cancer.  I know why.  He thinks that he's going to upset me, although at the same time he knows deep down that he can't upset me any more than I already am.  He doesn't want
me to think he's avoiding the issue and therefore by extension not caring about me.  I know this isn't the case.  I know that he is scared, scared shitless that he's going to lose me to this cancer because he knows something as well as I do, even though I'm not sure how he's figured it out.

He knows that I'm getting tired -- tired of fighting, weary of waking up every day and looking in the mirror, seeing nothing but cancer and pain and death.

Mulder has a knack for knowing me.  Sometimes I think that he knows me better than I know myself.

He doesn't go with me for the treatments at my insistence.  I stubbornly cling to the belief that I can face this, that I can deal with this -- even this -- alone.  Doctor's offices are sterile and cold places.  There's no room there for Mulder, who is alive and warm.

I spend evenings with large mugs of peppermint tea, installed in front of the computer, downloading all the latest statistics and clinical trials from the Internet, from the CDC, from the National Cancer
Institute, from various medical centers, from anywhere that has any information about cancer.

Not just my cancer.  There's scant little information about my cancer.  So I look into other cancers, similar cancers, cancers that are completely different from mine.

I even check out web pages that have been put up by people, cancer patients just like myself, who have put up information and links to cancer centers and support groups.  I read the personal stories with a clinical detachment.

"I'm 25 years old and I have melanoma, which is a fatal form of skin cancer."

"I'm 31 years old and I have breast cancer."

"I'm 17 years old and I have Hodgkin's disease."

"I'm 32 years old and my three year old daughter has leukemia."

What would my personal story say?  "I have a naso-pharangeal tumor that is inoperable and untreatable."

The evenings are quiet and still in my apartment.  The nights are just as quiet and even more dark.  My body refuses to sleep.  So instead I move from room to room, sitting in the dark, occasionally turning on a
light and looking out the window, watching the cars that drive by.  Sometimes I'll pick up a book, but it doesn't distract me.

From time to time my mind tells me that if I go to sleep I'll never wake up, that the cancer will claim me while I'm dreaming, that I'll never know that it happened, and that I won't have had the chance to say
goodbye or to have set my affairs in order.

Every time I leave the office at the end of the day I can't say goodbye to Mulder.  I can't accept the fact that it may be the last time, and so I say nothing, instead just nodding my head to him, seeing the
disappointment flicker across his face like a shadow.  And I ignore it.  I walk out anyhow.

I know it hurts him.  I know that it destroys him just a little more each time I do it.  Why does he continue to stand by me even though I continue to hurt him?

The morning that Penny Northern died was one of the hardest moments of my life.  My defenses were down.  I was physically and emotionally drained of all my energy, and at that moment, Mulder was there.
Standing in the hospital hallway dressed in all black, a kind of angel that only I could appreciate.  There was little talk.  He held me.  I felt safe.  I let him protect me for moments that are burned into my memory.  When he released me, our eyes held and I felt for the first time that I was maybe going to be able to get through this after all.

Mulder blames himself for my cancer.  I know that.  And I cannot take that guilt away from him.  It is something that he has to bear on his own.

I don't blame him -- I never have, not really, and I never will.  This cancer is something that was orchestrated to push us farther apart from each other, until one day I would be pushed so far away that I would be gone, out of my misery, and out of his life.

We have come to depend on each other so much that it is hard for me to remember what my life was like before I met him.  Quantico, the Academy -- all of it sometimes seems to be a blur.  Even my childhood, high
school and college years seem to pale in comparison to the moment when I met Fox Mulder for the first time.  We connected, whether we wanted to or not.  We disagreed much more back then than we do now, but we
respected each other.  We always respected each other.

We still do.  Regardless of what we have been through, we still respect each other.  It's what keeps us strong.  I know that we've been through so much together and I know that people have tried to separate us, but we will always have that strength, whether or not we are together or not.

We have been linked forever, I think.

Which makes me wonder if Mulder knows how absolutely terrified I am.

Terrified of the pain and the sickness.

Of death.

I've lost my father.  My sister.  But even the thought of being with them again is not enough to assuage my fears of dying.  I'm not ready to go.  What about my life?  What about a family?  What about my future?

The cancer has taken away my future.  It has taken away my chances at ever having a family and a future life.  And it is trying to sever the bond I have with Mulder.

The question is, am I going to stand by and allow that connection to be broken or am I going to fight it?

Do I have the strength to fight it?

It is always easier in life to give up, to give in, to not fight.  Even if it means losing something or someone important, it is easier to let it go than to fight for it.

But as my mother reminded me, I've always been the strong one.  What she meant was that she didn't want this cancer to beat me -- that I had to fight to beat it.

By extension, if I choose to follow her veiled advice and fight, then I have to fight to keep Mulder as well.

The bond we share should be enough to make it easier for me -- it should cushion the path that I know will be bumpy and painful.  I have to decide if it is enough.  I have to decide if I want it to be enough.

I know my answer.
 

******
END