DISCLAIMER: Now I *know* I don't trust 'em with you enough to give 'em back, not that you'd really notice or care if I kept 'em anyway...but for now they're yours and your company's, Mr. Carter, which is getting really dangerous becuase you're just throwing them around and doing with them what you wish, which could be *really* damaging to their psyche... They're not real?! Pshyeah, right. DEDICATION: To my grandfather, who taught me the real terror of dying slowly. ARCHIVISTS: Go ahead, archive at Gossamer, forward on to XFF Fanfic or whatever list this is supposed to be forwarded to (I'd like to be more specific but I really don't know). ____________________ AS WHEN I WAKE by Rachel Nobel (SkyFish785@aol.com) Written May 24-25, 1997 ____________________ I never realized before what an odd thing it is to number a calendar. I bought one yesterday, a cheap package of one-year refills that go with my day planner. They're the kind in which the year and month and date have to be filled in under the respective columns, so you can start off your calendar on whatever odd month you please. It will be June, now, so I scribbled in the word 'June' at the top of the page and absently began sticking the numbers in the little boxes. 1, 2, 3, 4. Father's Day on the fifteenth. Without thinking, I moved on to July--Independence Day--and August--Bill's birthday--and then September, and how on the twenty-second the leaves would begin to change from leafy green to brown and red and gold, and how I would make it a point not to forget Mulder's October birthday. And then Thanksgiving, and Christmas, and the vacation I promised to take around New Year's. And then February. My hand slipped on the 'y,' making it odd and scrawled, more reminiscent of Mulder's sloppy handwriting than my own tight loops. February. One year. A year. In History of the World time, a year is nothing at all, hardly worth a blink or a breath. But in a year, thousands of men can die in a war. In a year, a nuclear threat or a betrayal of nature can change the fate of the world. In a year, and the torture of a promise or a hope or a tear, a child's future can be sealed. A year, and the weight of the world. A dying man once told me, as a tear slid down my cheek, that in the time it took for the saltiness of my grief to reach my mouth that man had walked on the moon. All it takes, he reminded me, is a single step. In Mulder I find the same tortured naiveté, the faith that one man can move mountains if only he wasn't so damn stupid or slow or unwilling to believe. In Mulder I find strength drawn from forgetting and pushing aside and moving on. In Mulder I see the weight of a thousand dying voices, held sacred in the abruptness of his eyes, the way he turns them downcast and looks away. Mulder would hang the moon if his arms were long enough, walk the stars if his step wasn't so faltering. Mulder would leap off a cliff of despair into an abyss of guilt if only the dying promises on his back hadn't kept him tied to this earth. In Mulder's eyes, I see myself. In Mulder's eyes, I am strong and gentle. In Mulder's faith, I am the friendly arm at the edge of the abyss. In Mulder, I am everything. I am Federal Bureau of Investigation Special Agent Doctor Dana Katherine Scully, Medical Doctor--all titles, all capital letters. I am a representation and a manifestation, and I procure truth and justice and holiness and faith and belief. In myself, I am only frightened. Mulder will live. Mulder is a survivor. Mulder will carry on. Mulder will fall apart. I am an ideal to Mulder. I am the truth he has destroyed, the faith he has tainted. I am a craft to be shaped and molded, a tarnished clay smudge on his sculpture of guilt. He draws on my strengths but I feed off his weaknesses--his belief, his obsession, his guilt, his caring. Mulder will care himself to death eventually, and for Mulder there is only the aftermath. When Mulder gets angry in hotel rooms, angry at the world and at himself and at them and at me, he strikes out. He hits and smashes his fists into walls and mirrors and lamps. He overturns chairs. He breathes hard and deep and his eyes strike like firelit matches and he does not speak a word. He cries then, sometimes, and collapses, and falls into dreamfilled sleep. And when he wakes he downs Tylenol for his bruised hand. When Mulder gets angry, he lets it out through violence, and there is heredity in his stance. Mulder, I am angry too. I am angry at you for blaming yourself, and angry at myself for blaming you. I am angry at the truth we have sought but never found, angry at the little girl you reflect in your eyes. I am angry at the men who believe so strongly that they are right that they will stop at nothing to protect it, and I am angry that we never realized that perhaps those men are right. I am angry at life for failing me, and at death for welcoming me with beckoning arms. It is a strange feeling, a limbo between life and death. It is an in-between referred to breezily as dying. We are dying, Mulder, from the moment we are born. I thought at first that my cancer only brought me closer to the inevitable, that my disease speeds up death. But I know now that this illness only slows it down, prolongs it. Cancer, when it can no longer be fought at with treatment, is a grieving period. But for Mulder, who has never grieved in his life, my cancer is a truth to be sought at and a life to be saved at all costs. Mulder believes that faith, strange optimism and denial, works both ways--if I can be killed, I must also be cured. Mulder seeks endlessly on a quest, this time with a deadline and a horrible price to pay. He is bargaining with my life, with his sister's memory, with his own faith. If Mulder loses that faith, he loses everything. He does not talk, but he speaks to me with his eyes, the searing firepower of them struggling with a terrible choice. A bird in the hand, maybe, is worth two in the bush. Has he dealt? There is an awful part of me that doesn't want to know, would like to believe that cancer remisses and truth is better left unfound. Mulder will save me, but he will lose everything. Everything. All that is sacred and holy and truth-worthy. All that he seeks, lives, and dies again and again for. But what is truth worth if he has paid the price with my life--with his father's life, with my sister's? He uses the weight of the dying as an excuse to martyr them, to seek after false truths in an attempt to lay them at rest. The voices implore and accuse him only because he needs them to fuel his suicidal quest. I am dying, Mulder. I am becoming one of those voices. In death my voice will blame you though I would have it any other way. Mulder has been a lost soul all his life, without the badge and the fancy schooling just another tortured existence. Mulder is desperately seeking redemption, forgiveness, someone to make things all right. Someone who doesn't blame him. Mulder has the Midas touch--everything he lays his hands on turns to gray. Mulder, I am dying. I have no desire to reach outward for the truth. There is no cure in Russia, no magical medical mystery in Hong Kong. There are no aliens in Canada and there is no lost belief in dark smoky rooms. Mulder's faith was stolen from him by a little dark-haired girl close to twenty-four years ago. All the truths in the world can't help to give it back. There is no truth in cigarette smoke. There is only fear, and visions of being lost. There is you, Mulder, with no false hopes to cling to after I am gone. No holy man can bring me back and only death can take you to me. I fear I am ripping away your shreds of trust, that without my martyred truths to find you are truly lost. For a man with overwhelming faith, Mulder has to remind himself so often that he can do nothing but want to believe. For a man with assertive paranoia, Mulder needs daily warnings to trust no one. As much as I fear the aftermath of such paradoxes, I can do nothing but wait, and pray that our two different paths to two different truths don't collide. Someday--maybe as I flip the page to my shakily scrawled 'February'--I will have to give in to death. Unlike my partner, I measure my earthly time carefully, and precisely as Mulder chases outward lies, I will have to give in to my own truths. Mulder, I am so sorry...but I cannot spend my last days racing to find a last-ditch cure, a hope, a stolen child. In dying, I am selfish with my life and hypocritical in my beliefs. I want to be able to see the sun rise and set in peace each day. I want to be able to say my goodbyes and comfort my own dreads, so that I will no longer fear the aftermath. I want especially for you to know this, and understand it, and realize that maybe when we have exhausted the possibility of outward truths, it is time to start looking inward. It is a lofty task for a dying woman and the formidable deadline of a year. But if I cannot convince you of this, Mulder, all you can do for me is believe. A familiar trickle of salty warmth slides down my cheek, and I am reminded of the dying man who told me to be strong. I am reminded that somewhere, in a war on the other side of the world, men are dying with me every day. I am reminded that somewhere, a child is crying for a future and a hope--somewhere he is strong enough, smart enough, sure enough. Somewhere, Fox Mulder will walk on the moon. _______________ AUTHOR'S NOTES: My first real character-thought vignette in God knows how long. (And I dashed this off so quickly it's not even funny.) How'd I do? Feedback joyously exalted over at SkyFish785@aol.com, or if you really want to make my life complicated, SkylandMt@aol.com.