From: shawntaw@hotmail.com   
      
   Title: Inevitable   
   Author: shawntaw   
   Rating: PG   
   Spoilers: Cancer Arc definitely, minor others here and there   
   Disclaimer: Not mine. Boo Hoo Hoo...   
      
   Summary: Ruminations on life and death   
      
   Note: November was the one-year anniversary of my Dad's passing.   
      
   ************************************************************************   
      
   She thinks back to when it began.  The first time she saw him hurt and   
   lying in a bed, she thinks.  Or maybe the Icy Cape case when she had   
   to inspect it so very closely.  Maybe it was the first time she   
   thought he was dead and gone forever.  She realizes she can't remember   
   exactly how it began, but it doesn't matter because every since she   
   almost died of cancer it has gotten worse.   
      
   Scully is obssessed with watching Mulder.   
      
   She finds herself watching out of the corner of her eye as his long,   
   elegant fingers pick up pencils, flip pages in file folders, toss   
   sunflower seeds in his mouth.  The veins on the back of his hands   
   fascinate her; they carry his blood and this keeps him alive.  She has   
   to stop her medically-trained mind from listing all the functions of   
   the blood, the ebb and flow of it through the human body.   
      
   She hugs him more since the cancer.  Saying goodbye at the end of the   
   day, she holds tight to him just long enough to convey deep feeling   
   but not long enough to scare him. Quickly, she memorizes the   
   beat-beat-beat of his heart.  Engulfed in his embrace for that brief   
   moment, she catalogs the workaday scent of him. His morning-freshness   
   gone by the end of the day, all that is left is the whiff of starch in   
   his dry-cleaned shirt and the faint musk of him as he wraps her in his   
   arms.  She closes her eyes and imagines she can feel the flex of every   
   muscle as he stretches to her and surrounds her.   
      
   Sometimes she wants to cry when he holds her.  She wants to let go, to   
   confess all the strange things she's been thinking about lately.   
   She's become scared to let him out of her sight.  Its as though the   
   brush with her own mortality has brought home to her the inevitability   
   of death itself.   
      
   One of them will die someday.  It will happen.  It is unavoidable.   
   She is horrified by the thought.   
      
   It isn't as though she expected to live forever, but she never found   
   reason to truly dwell on it before her cancer diagnosis.  Now it   
   haunts her; she is surrounded by the walking dead.   
      
   Are we all just ants, she wonders, mindlessly working and working and   
   working to keep our lives busy to no avail when we die?  Do we simply   
   live so we can someday be the subject of conversations that begin with   
   "I remember her.." and then as the years go by not be a subject of   
   conversation at all?   
      
   She sees the people around her as ghosts now, simply in waiting for   
   their departure.  She doesn't want to become too attached, but yet she   
   clings to Mulder.  He's a light she doesn't want to see dim and so she   
   fears looking away.   
      
   She watches him and he feels it, she knows.  She can't help it anymore   
   than she can help breathing at this point, a fact for which she is   
   grateful.   
      
   If she goes first, she thinks, he will kill himself.  She's seen him   
   try to do it.  All the crazy cases and close calls when she was dying   
   weren't coincidence.  Drilling holes in his head.  Taking insane   
   chances. She thinks of the stories her mother has told her of Mulder's   
   behavior during her abduction and the others insinuated by Skinner and   
   others at the Bureau.  Even back then they were becoming one person.   
   And half a person cannot live.   
      
   If he goes first, she thinks, I will wither and blow away.  She knows   
   that he has become her reason for being.  She wonders if his ego would   
   blow up like a balloon and float him away if he knew.  She remembers   
   how paper thin she became when she thought he had died in the New   
   Mexico desert.  The nausea that had risen in her throat when she had   
   declared his suicide to the bureau, even though she knew it wasn't true.   
      
   She's thinking this and staring at him again.  His eyes must be   
   bothering him, she thinks.  He's wearing his glasses, so he must've   
   taken his contacts out.  He has five o'clock stubble that almost   
   camoflauges the mole on his cheek.  Mulder pulls at his bottom lip as   
   he frowns at the file in front of him.   
      
   *He needs some lip balm* she thinks and then blinks as the sudden   
   image in her mind of licking the dryness from his lips.   
      
   As she refocuses, she realizes that Mulder is kneeling beside her   
   chair now.  He's very close and is peering at her through his lenses   
   with a worried look on his face.   
      
   "Scully?"   
      
   "Yeah?" Breathy and caught off guard, this is all she manages as she   
   tries to push all the strange thoughts from her head.   
      
   "Are you alright? Maybe you came back to work too soon," he gently   
   strokes her cheek with one fingertip,"You should be resting at home."   
      
   Scully closes her eyes and focuses on the feeling of that one   
   fingertip.  That one blood-warmed fingertip sets off a spark in her   
   and she feels it spreading to her heart.   
      
   "I've rested enough.  I needed to be here," *with you* she wants to add.   
      
   She opens her eyes.  He's so alive.  So warm.  Her mind refocuses   
   suddenly and she begins to remember stakeouts, laughing together.   
   Walking at lunch.  Loud debates in the basement. Late-night 'work'   
   sessions that involved no work other than closed files on her coffee   
   table and horror movies on the VCR, popcorn in bowls on their laps.   
      
   Something must have sparkled in her eyes, because he smiles softly.   
   He leans forward and places a quick,soft kiss on her own upturned   
   lips. She breathes him in and realizes she didn't even know she had   
   been smiling first.   
      
   "I needed to be here," she finally says after staring into his eyes   
   for a moment, "with you.  With you, Mulder."  She says it firmly,   
   determined that there will be no more hiding.  If this is to be her   
   inevitably-ending life, she will not spend it as one of the walking   
   dead, but will hang onto it for all she's worth, making it count for   
   something.  She will make a loud noise.  She will not be forgotten so   
   easily.  And she will do it with Mulder, she knows.   
      
   "I need you here with me, Scully," he says, choked.  She realizes he's   
   needed to hear her say such a thing for a long, long time and she's   
   sorry she didn't say it sooner.   
      
   "I'm here," she whispers to him, leaning forward to feel his warmth   
   and finally realizes that it is true.   
      
   ***********************************************************************   
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    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)