Final Gift From lolabeegood
Title: as written on chalkboards
Rating: pg
Summary: Sometimes the truth is as elusive as capturing the wind. Sometimes it's not. Sometimes it's a mixture of all things.
Spoilers/Timeline: season 4
Author's note: Thanks to sanadafaye for the beta.
About a million apologizes for the lateness of this.
“It’s not always about you, Mulder,” she had said.
Was that the truth? Sometimes she has the suspicion the some truths are like air, impossible to grasp conclusively. Sometimes she feels she will never be able to put her fist around these truths, enclose them so she could open her palm when needed and be able to say, ‘This is the truth without any doubt.’
Sometimes the truth is as written on chalkboards in large, bold writing. She still can’t grasp it, but she knows and sees it.
She has cancer. That is the truth. It was a truth she couldn’t grasp at first.
The x-ray looks back at her, clear as bright, sunny day.
&
At the hospital near her home she cannot call her mother. Her mother is the one she should be calling, the first one she should tell. She means to, but she can’t truly comprehend explaining the reality to her mother. The challenge is daunting: she knows how her mom will react.
Instead she calls Mulder. She spends a large chunk of her time with Mulder, her days and nights, weekdays and weekends, their schedule unpredictable and erratic, their job consuming. The structure of her life perhaps makes telling Mulder first appropriate. At the very least she supposes it’s understandable.
In actuality, she grapples with telling either of them. Her mother has already lost one daughter while Mulder long ago ceased to be a stranger from loss.
She contemplates stumbling as she explains what is going on in her body, the telltale sign of fear. The fear of what she cannot see inside her body but what she knows is there, the images clear and impossible to argue against. Her mother cannot see, nor can Mulder. Mulder would blame himself as he tends to do even if he would never admit that aloud.
Before she calls she plans her words. Missy used to tease her for her methodical nature. Missy is gone and she may be gone one day very soon.
The choice is deliberate and simple. No words can mask the undercurrent of what is going on. She is at the hospital. Hospitals are rarely happy places.
“Mulder,” he says when he picks up on the third ring.
“It’s me,” she says.
“What’s up?” he asks. His voice is easy and undisturbed. They don’t have a case and they rarely just call each other up, but he’s not worried.
Their partnership has been somewhat tense lately, but then again she hasn’t told Mulder of the thoughts in her head, the ones that wouldn’t leave. The ones she wasn’t ready to face, not until now. He was unaware of the words Betts had spoken to her that cold, blackened night when Betts attacked her. Unaware of what Betts claimed lingered beneath the surface. The words that were on loop in her head when she woke, more than once, to a bloodstained pillow. The blood: a sign.
She wonders if he’ll re-evaluate their recent past once he knows. That is neither here nor there so she pushes forward. There is no going back. She has started this and she must finish it, has to unburden herself. She would like the situation to be different, for Betts to have been wrong.
“I’m at the hospital. I need you to come here.”
“Scully, is…”
He’s unable to finish the question, unable to ask her what is wrong. His voice is no longer easy. His throat has closed up a little, making his tone thicker than usual.
She tells him the room number. He says he’ll be right over.
While she waits, the day’s cold white sunshine fills the room, casting patterns of light and dark on the hard floor. The brightness threatens to blind her to the image she is staring at, the image of her cancer. Eventually she closes the blinds. She has to see the truth as it’s displayed before her. The sun isn’t completely blocked, but it’s enough.
Mulder arrives with flowers, a spring bouquet in winter.
&
Mulder’s response is what she expects.
She sees the inklings of what will happen next in his words, his stance. He can never just accept her pronouncements, not even when she is sure of the truth. It isn’t his nature; she should know after four years of long days and nights and countless moments together.
The I Want To Believe poster has hung in his office since before she was assigned his partner. There may be a story behind the poster, but she’s never heard it. The poster is in the background most days and she rarely thinks of it, rarely pauses to look and study the grainy image of a spaceship against a dull bluish gray sky. Yet she thinks of the poster as Mulder speaks. The poster usually provided an easy summary of her partner. Not today.
There’s no unknown in this gray, sterile hospital with its oft-traveled hallways and fluorescent lights. The truth isn’t waiting to be discovered.
Mulder cannot believe.
But then she didn’t believe at first either. Leonard Betts spoke to her and she could not believe.
Eventually she did and, inevitably, so will Mulder. She thinks of saying sorry for some unfathomable reason.
&
The other (abducted) women are dead, dying (like her potentially), and her partner is desperately seeking answers behind this reality. Somewhere there are answers, maybe, but they are elusive, the search for them akin to a child chasing the wind with a jar hoping to capture what they can feel but cannot see directly. This is nothing new.
So Mulder returns to the hospital, leather-clad shoulders slopping slightly. His hands are empty, at least with what they present to her. She compared him once to Ahab and his quest for the great white whale. Time and time again he goes out, hoping to snare his own. This time, like so many others, he is unsuccessful.
She has cancer. There is no magical cure, no simple explanation as to why.
He finds the journal she had been keeping and reads the words that flowed with ease onto the thin paper. She had wanted to leave him with something to hang onto, a reminder of her. The words she wrote when she felt like a doomed woman, her body a weapon against itself, resistance appearing futile.
The words represented what she felt, but not what she wanted. She couldn’t simply succumb to this new reality, curl up in a hospital bed and let herself be treated while fearing the end was inevitable. Her fear of the dark shadow in her body remained after this realization, but she could put aside the journal and rise from the bed. A book of writing wasn’t what she would leave Mulder to possess.
To Betty, the last of the dying (abducted) women she knew, she says goodbye.
Mulder wraps his arms around her, leather tight against terrycloth and cotton. Her arms circle round, her fingers creasing in his jacket. The kiss he plants on her forehead is soft.
She thinks, It’s not time to say goodbye.
&
She marks changes, internal and external. She doesn’t physically note them down, but she records them all the same. Sometimes she longs for the relentless march to cease. At work she tires more easily. Her suits feel loose. If she were a child she could wish upon a shooting star or maybe toss a coin into a fountain.
Instead she must keep up with the march.
Her relationship with Mulder has never been static: its ebbs and flows. Its current is tempestuous before it eases, becomes calm for a period. Then repeat. The same could be said of many elements in one’s life. Change is inevitable as a wise man mostly certainly said at some point in time. There’s nothing unique about them. That could be the truth, or maybe not.
At the same time she finds any change between them, now, unwelcome.
Mulder has taken to bringing her coffee at least once a week. It’s a newfound pattern. She’s sure he has brought her coffee when they’ve been at the office in the past, just as she’s sure she has done the same for him. Generally, they only get coffee for the other when they’re in the field and there isn’t a coffee pot down the hall. The coffee maker in the basement makes only half-decent coffee. They could replace it. They complain, say they will, and never do, merely drink the bitter dark liquid.
He never used to bring her coffee regularly. At any other time, she would welcome the gesture. It could just be a demonstration of appreciation. She isn’t one to refuse appreciation, not from Mulder.
This, however, doesn’t feel like appreciation. Often she feels like the act is a stand-in for another gesture. Often she has the sensation he is searching her face for some indiscernible quality when he hands her the blue Styrofoam cup, their fingers brushing just slightly. If he finds what he is looking for she never knows.
Maybe it’s all an excuse to judge how she is doing. She can’t condone it.
If he asked how she was, she would answer, “I’m fine.” Maybe all Mulder has left are covert options.
At the same time, the conveyance of coffee reminds her of the birthday gift he gave her this year. The first gift he has given her in four years of working together. She should appreciate the gesture, but the Apollo 13 commemoration keychain leaves her uneasy. Clad in her pajamas and ensconced on her couch, she studies the small token carefully. She turns it over in her fingers, trying to understand. The trinket heats under her touch, cheap plastic, and reveals nothing of the giver’s intent.
“I’m touched,” she had said, and she was and is and yet isn’t at the same time.
Her reactions can be traced to a single denominator. Logically she knows this. Logically she knows there is nothing she can do to prevent change.
And so she has Mulder and his wide, watchful eyes. She has nosebleeds and red suits she can no longer wear. She has coffee in blue, thin containers radiating warmth. She has a keychain with no keys attached.
What she has and doesn’t: she adds them up. Another record to keep.
When she needs rides from the hospital she turns to her mother. She can share her days and nights with Mulder, can reside in adjoining hotel rooms, but she doesn’t want to lean on him. She doesn’t want to be a burden, not on him and not on her mother. Her choices are limited. Since she met Mulder she’s become somewhat of a recluse.
She doesn’t want everything to change. Not because she is sick. Even if she wanted anything to change she couldn’t tell him. She walks by his side, his partner, his friend, but not dependent.
So on the few occasions when Mulder asks how she is, she answers, “I’m fine, Mulder. Really, I’m fine.”
For what she’ll admit to be true that is the truth.
&
After their visit Eddie van Blundht in jail, Mulder arrives one Saturday morning with fresh coffee and donuts from the bakery near her apartment building. She is awake and camped out on the couch, her energy level low. Her television is turned to an old Shirley Temple film.
He holds up his offerings when she answers the door. “I was in the neighborhood,” he says. He carries no casefiles with him, no legitimate work excuse to be at her doorstep. Nevertheless she invites him in, unable to turn him away. He arrived after all even if uninvited, unwanted.
Though, she’s not sure he’s unwanted. Now maybe.
She may not want change, but that perspective is unrealistic. Her parents had been fond of platitudes when her siblings and her were growing up. Her mother had favored glasses half-full, green grasses, and wishes like horses. She knows the sayings.
So she says, “Come in.”
And Mulder says, “Thanks.” He shrugs off his jacket, leaving him in jeans and a t-shirt. She tries to resist any comparisons with the other time, the fake-Mulder in her apartment with a wine bottle and a similar outfit.
On the television, Shirley Temple sings and dances, the constantly adorable child.
They sit on her couch, awkward figures not well-adjusted to causal interactions. When they’re working and alone they can converse for hours, the debates erupting naturally and never truly resolving but in a way that doesn’t sting. They enter those debates fully aware of the other’s starting perspective. He’ll believe in the paranormal, unreal explanation and she will offer the rational counter-explanation. These are their roles. They can talk of random things on stakeouts, skirting topics lightly.
They can be silent too, lacking the need to fill the quiet with inane conversation.
There is no case between them today, just coffee and jelly-filled donuts and the middle cushion of her comfy couch. They aren’t strangers to each other’s apartments, but this sort of morning is unfamiliar. They don’t watch Shirley Temple find yet another family to love her; they solve mysteries and murders.
It’s awkward. They lack whatever are the necessary words and rely on the television to fill the otherwise silent space between them. If she were looking for a cliché she would turn to proverbial elephants in small spaces.
She supposes Mulder is her best friend. The label doesn’t fit quite right, the corners stretched, the middle too baggy. He’s a constant in her life and she can’t imagine her life without him. Even if she at times misses the days before she met him, she could never go back. Clocks can never truly be reset.
Sometimes she would like more with Mulder. She would like to feel able to bridge the cushion between them, slide her hand against his when there is nothing life shattering happening to them. She would like to linger with him and absorb his warmth. But not today.
As much as change is inevitable, some things don’t change all that much. Or they change very slowly.
They spend the morning and afternoon watching old movies. They relax into her couch eventually and maybe near the end it becomes somewhat all right. And yet she can’t escape the cliché of elephants, nor can she escape why her partner is in her apartment.
She fears that one day she will have to leave him.
It is a truth she is not ready to face.
&
Weeks later and she’s alive when she should be dead or, at best, in a hospice waiting the final moment. Instead there is no shadowy death lurking in the room, just the sunlight seeping through the hospital windows. It has been cast aside, at least for the moment, her cure either a computer chip obtained by Mulder on his quest or maybe a higher power. At the moment she doesn’t know what she believes, and for now the answer is immaterial.
The cancer is gone. This is the new truth.
Her family crowds around her, joyful faces, frowns turned upside-down in the way her mother always encouraged. There are hugs, cotton and wool rasping against her sensitive skin, some exerting too much pressure, but she doesn’t complain.
They were waiting for her to die. Their relief at this twist of fate is palpable and their joyful expressions unsurprising.
Mulder doesn’t enter her room until hours later. Night is falling, the sky a steely gray, just waiting for blackness to come and conquer. The last time she was alone with Mulder he thought she was sleeping. She had woken to his silent sobbing, a cold and clammy hand next to hers. She hadn’t opened her eyes, unsure if she should intrude, unsure of what she could say. Then she was dying and she lacked any words of comfort except for those trite words that mean very little. She didn’t know how to say goodbye.
At the time, the truth of their end seemed already determined.
She knows all about change. She has spent the last months attempting to deal with more change than she thought she could handle. Now there is another alteration and the need for goodbyes has evaporated. There is no dark shadow inside her body threatening to end it all.
“About time,” she says. She smiles and beckons him closer.
Clyde Bruckman claimed she didn’t die. Maybe this is what he meant: not that she never died, just that she wouldn’t die when it was expected. She doesn’t dwell on the thought. For now it’s irrelevant.
Mulder smiles and presses his hand over hers.
He sits with her as the night grows darker, a deep bruise spread across the sky. Silence surrounds them, interrupted only by the usual hospital sounds. This time the silence is light, possessing an ease, a one-eighty from their Saturday spent at her apartment weeks ago. She can welcome this change.
She doesn’t ask him to stay.
He stays anyways.
Rating: pg
Summary: Sometimes the truth is as elusive as capturing the wind. Sometimes it's not. Sometimes it's a mixture of all things.
Spoilers/Timeline: season 4
Author's note: Thanks to sanadafaye for the beta.
About a million apologizes for the lateness of this.
“It’s not always about you, Mulder,” she had said.
Was that the truth? Sometimes she has the suspicion the some truths are like air, impossible to grasp conclusively. Sometimes she feels she will never be able to put her fist around these truths, enclose them so she could open her palm when needed and be able to say, ‘This is the truth without any doubt.’
Sometimes the truth is as written on chalkboards in large, bold writing. She still can’t grasp it, but she knows and sees it.
She has cancer. That is the truth. It was a truth she couldn’t grasp at first.
The x-ray looks back at her, clear as bright, sunny day.
&
At the hospital near her home she cannot call her mother. Her mother is the one she should be calling, the first one she should tell. She means to, but she can’t truly comprehend explaining the reality to her mother. The challenge is daunting: she knows how her mom will react.
Instead she calls Mulder. She spends a large chunk of her time with Mulder, her days and nights, weekdays and weekends, their schedule unpredictable and erratic, their job consuming. The structure of her life perhaps makes telling Mulder first appropriate. At the very least she supposes it’s understandable.
In actuality, she grapples with telling either of them. Her mother has already lost one daughter while Mulder long ago ceased to be a stranger from loss.
She contemplates stumbling as she explains what is going on in her body, the telltale sign of fear. The fear of what she cannot see inside her body but what she knows is there, the images clear and impossible to argue against. Her mother cannot see, nor can Mulder. Mulder would blame himself as he tends to do even if he would never admit that aloud.
Before she calls she plans her words. Missy used to tease her for her methodical nature. Missy is gone and she may be gone one day very soon.
The choice is deliberate and simple. No words can mask the undercurrent of what is going on. She is at the hospital. Hospitals are rarely happy places.
“Mulder,” he says when he picks up on the third ring.
“It’s me,” she says.
“What’s up?” he asks. His voice is easy and undisturbed. They don’t have a case and they rarely just call each other up, but he’s not worried.
Their partnership has been somewhat tense lately, but then again she hasn’t told Mulder of the thoughts in her head, the ones that wouldn’t leave. The ones she wasn’t ready to face, not until now. He was unaware of the words Betts had spoken to her that cold, blackened night when Betts attacked her. Unaware of what Betts claimed lingered beneath the surface. The words that were on loop in her head when she woke, more than once, to a bloodstained pillow. The blood: a sign.
She wonders if he’ll re-evaluate their recent past once he knows. That is neither here nor there so she pushes forward. There is no going back. She has started this and she must finish it, has to unburden herself. She would like the situation to be different, for Betts to have been wrong.
“I’m at the hospital. I need you to come here.”
“Scully, is…”
He’s unable to finish the question, unable to ask her what is wrong. His voice is no longer easy. His throat has closed up a little, making his tone thicker than usual.
She tells him the room number. He says he’ll be right over.
While she waits, the day’s cold white sunshine fills the room, casting patterns of light and dark on the hard floor. The brightness threatens to blind her to the image she is staring at, the image of her cancer. Eventually she closes the blinds. She has to see the truth as it’s displayed before her. The sun isn’t completely blocked, but it’s enough.
Mulder arrives with flowers, a spring bouquet in winter.
&
Mulder’s response is what she expects.
She sees the inklings of what will happen next in his words, his stance. He can never just accept her pronouncements, not even when she is sure of the truth. It isn’t his nature; she should know after four years of long days and nights and countless moments together.
The I Want To Believe poster has hung in his office since before she was assigned his partner. There may be a story behind the poster, but she’s never heard it. The poster is in the background most days and she rarely thinks of it, rarely pauses to look and study the grainy image of a spaceship against a dull bluish gray sky. Yet she thinks of the poster as Mulder speaks. The poster usually provided an easy summary of her partner. Not today.
There’s no unknown in this gray, sterile hospital with its oft-traveled hallways and fluorescent lights. The truth isn’t waiting to be discovered.
Mulder cannot believe.
But then she didn’t believe at first either. Leonard Betts spoke to her and she could not believe.
Eventually she did and, inevitably, so will Mulder. She thinks of saying sorry for some unfathomable reason.
&
The other (abducted) women are dead, dying (like her potentially), and her partner is desperately seeking answers behind this reality. Somewhere there are answers, maybe, but they are elusive, the search for them akin to a child chasing the wind with a jar hoping to capture what they can feel but cannot see directly. This is nothing new.
So Mulder returns to the hospital, leather-clad shoulders slopping slightly. His hands are empty, at least with what they present to her. She compared him once to Ahab and his quest for the great white whale. Time and time again he goes out, hoping to snare his own. This time, like so many others, he is unsuccessful.
She has cancer. There is no magical cure, no simple explanation as to why.
He finds the journal she had been keeping and reads the words that flowed with ease onto the thin paper. She had wanted to leave him with something to hang onto, a reminder of her. The words she wrote when she felt like a doomed woman, her body a weapon against itself, resistance appearing futile.
The words represented what she felt, but not what she wanted. She couldn’t simply succumb to this new reality, curl up in a hospital bed and let herself be treated while fearing the end was inevitable. Her fear of the dark shadow in her body remained after this realization, but she could put aside the journal and rise from the bed. A book of writing wasn’t what she would leave Mulder to possess.
To Betty, the last of the dying (abducted) women she knew, she says goodbye.
Mulder wraps his arms around her, leather tight against terrycloth and cotton. Her arms circle round, her fingers creasing in his jacket. The kiss he plants on her forehead is soft.
She thinks, It’s not time to say goodbye.
&
She marks changes, internal and external. She doesn’t physically note them down, but she records them all the same. Sometimes she longs for the relentless march to cease. At work she tires more easily. Her suits feel loose. If she were a child she could wish upon a shooting star or maybe toss a coin into a fountain.
Instead she must keep up with the march.
Her relationship with Mulder has never been static: its ebbs and flows. Its current is tempestuous before it eases, becomes calm for a period. Then repeat. The same could be said of many elements in one’s life. Change is inevitable as a wise man mostly certainly said at some point in time. There’s nothing unique about them. That could be the truth, or maybe not.
At the same time she finds any change between them, now, unwelcome.
Mulder has taken to bringing her coffee at least once a week. It’s a newfound pattern. She’s sure he has brought her coffee when they’ve been at the office in the past, just as she’s sure she has done the same for him. Generally, they only get coffee for the other when they’re in the field and there isn’t a coffee pot down the hall. The coffee maker in the basement makes only half-decent coffee. They could replace it. They complain, say they will, and never do, merely drink the bitter dark liquid.
He never used to bring her coffee regularly. At any other time, she would welcome the gesture. It could just be a demonstration of appreciation. She isn’t one to refuse appreciation, not from Mulder.
This, however, doesn’t feel like appreciation. Often she feels like the act is a stand-in for another gesture. Often she has the sensation he is searching her face for some indiscernible quality when he hands her the blue Styrofoam cup, their fingers brushing just slightly. If he finds what he is looking for she never knows.
Maybe it’s all an excuse to judge how she is doing. She can’t condone it.
If he asked how she was, she would answer, “I’m fine.” Maybe all Mulder has left are covert options.
At the same time, the conveyance of coffee reminds her of the birthday gift he gave her this year. The first gift he has given her in four years of working together. She should appreciate the gesture, but the Apollo 13 commemoration keychain leaves her uneasy. Clad in her pajamas and ensconced on her couch, she studies the small token carefully. She turns it over in her fingers, trying to understand. The trinket heats under her touch, cheap plastic, and reveals nothing of the giver’s intent.
“I’m touched,” she had said, and she was and is and yet isn’t at the same time.
Her reactions can be traced to a single denominator. Logically she knows this. Logically she knows there is nothing she can do to prevent change.
And so she has Mulder and his wide, watchful eyes. She has nosebleeds and red suits she can no longer wear. She has coffee in blue, thin containers radiating warmth. She has a keychain with no keys attached.
What she has and doesn’t: she adds them up. Another record to keep.
When she needs rides from the hospital she turns to her mother. She can share her days and nights with Mulder, can reside in adjoining hotel rooms, but she doesn’t want to lean on him. She doesn’t want to be a burden, not on him and not on her mother. Her choices are limited. Since she met Mulder she’s become somewhat of a recluse.
She doesn’t want everything to change. Not because she is sick. Even if she wanted anything to change she couldn’t tell him. She walks by his side, his partner, his friend, but not dependent.
So on the few occasions when Mulder asks how she is, she answers, “I’m fine, Mulder. Really, I’m fine.”
For what she’ll admit to be true that is the truth.
&
After their visit Eddie van Blundht in jail, Mulder arrives one Saturday morning with fresh coffee and donuts from the bakery near her apartment building. She is awake and camped out on the couch, her energy level low. Her television is turned to an old Shirley Temple film.
He holds up his offerings when she answers the door. “I was in the neighborhood,” he says. He carries no casefiles with him, no legitimate work excuse to be at her doorstep. Nevertheless she invites him in, unable to turn him away. He arrived after all even if uninvited, unwanted.
Though, she’s not sure he’s unwanted. Now maybe.
She may not want change, but that perspective is unrealistic. Her parents had been fond of platitudes when her siblings and her were growing up. Her mother had favored glasses half-full, green grasses, and wishes like horses. She knows the sayings.
So she says, “Come in.”
And Mulder says, “Thanks.” He shrugs off his jacket, leaving him in jeans and a t-shirt. She tries to resist any comparisons with the other time, the fake-Mulder in her apartment with a wine bottle and a similar outfit.
On the television, Shirley Temple sings and dances, the constantly adorable child.
They sit on her couch, awkward figures not well-adjusted to causal interactions. When they’re working and alone they can converse for hours, the debates erupting naturally and never truly resolving but in a way that doesn’t sting. They enter those debates fully aware of the other’s starting perspective. He’ll believe in the paranormal, unreal explanation and she will offer the rational counter-explanation. These are their roles. They can talk of random things on stakeouts, skirting topics lightly.
They can be silent too, lacking the need to fill the quiet with inane conversation.
There is no case between them today, just coffee and jelly-filled donuts and the middle cushion of her comfy couch. They aren’t strangers to each other’s apartments, but this sort of morning is unfamiliar. They don’t watch Shirley Temple find yet another family to love her; they solve mysteries and murders.
It’s awkward. They lack whatever are the necessary words and rely on the television to fill the otherwise silent space between them. If she were looking for a cliché she would turn to proverbial elephants in small spaces.
She supposes Mulder is her best friend. The label doesn’t fit quite right, the corners stretched, the middle too baggy. He’s a constant in her life and she can’t imagine her life without him. Even if she at times misses the days before she met him, she could never go back. Clocks can never truly be reset.
Sometimes she would like more with Mulder. She would like to feel able to bridge the cushion between them, slide her hand against his when there is nothing life shattering happening to them. She would like to linger with him and absorb his warmth. But not today.
As much as change is inevitable, some things don’t change all that much. Or they change very slowly.
They spend the morning and afternoon watching old movies. They relax into her couch eventually and maybe near the end it becomes somewhat all right. And yet she can’t escape the cliché of elephants, nor can she escape why her partner is in her apartment.
She fears that one day she will have to leave him.
It is a truth she is not ready to face.
&
Weeks later and she’s alive when she should be dead or, at best, in a hospice waiting the final moment. Instead there is no shadowy death lurking in the room, just the sunlight seeping through the hospital windows. It has been cast aside, at least for the moment, her cure either a computer chip obtained by Mulder on his quest or maybe a higher power. At the moment she doesn’t know what she believes, and for now the answer is immaterial.
The cancer is gone. This is the new truth.
Her family crowds around her, joyful faces, frowns turned upside-down in the way her mother always encouraged. There are hugs, cotton and wool rasping against her sensitive skin, some exerting too much pressure, but she doesn’t complain.
They were waiting for her to die. Their relief at this twist of fate is palpable and their joyful expressions unsurprising.
Mulder doesn’t enter her room until hours later. Night is falling, the sky a steely gray, just waiting for blackness to come and conquer. The last time she was alone with Mulder he thought she was sleeping. She had woken to his silent sobbing, a cold and clammy hand next to hers. She hadn’t opened her eyes, unsure if she should intrude, unsure of what she could say. Then she was dying and she lacked any words of comfort except for those trite words that mean very little. She didn’t know how to say goodbye.
At the time, the truth of their end seemed already determined.
She knows all about change. She has spent the last months attempting to deal with more change than she thought she could handle. Now there is another alteration and the need for goodbyes has evaporated. There is no dark shadow inside her body threatening to end it all.
“About time,” she says. She smiles and beckons him closer.
Clyde Bruckman claimed she didn’t die. Maybe this is what he meant: not that she never died, just that she wouldn’t die when it was expected. She doesn’t dwell on the thought. For now it’s irrelevant.
Mulder smiles and presses his hand over hers.
He sits with her as the night grows darker, a deep bruise spread across the sky. Silence surrounds them, interrupted only by the usual hospital sounds. This time the silence is light, possessing an ease, a one-eighty from their Saturday spent at her apartment weeks ago. She can welcome this change.
She doesn’t ask him to stay.
He stays anyways.