sunflowerseedsandscience:
When she thinks about it, it seems almost inevitable that cancer should eventually make a reappearance in their lives. It’s almost as though she expected that, one day, she would sit in an office like this, across from a doctor who would impart this news wearing this exact expression (a mixture of sympathy and trepidation, overlaid with an aura of “I’ve done this ten times already today”- do they learn this look during their oncology residency?). Cancer rearing its ugly head again is hardly unanticipated.
What she failed to anticipate, however, was that this time, it would strike Mulder.
Normally, during doctor’s visits, Scully is the one who gathers all of the initial information from the doctor, asking complicated technical questions, breaking down the responses to explain everything to Mulder. But this time, her brain hiccups at the word “cancer,” begins to shut down at the word “pancreatic,” and ceases to function all together at the words “stage four.” She sways slightly in her seat, holding the base of the chair to anchor herself to the world, an ill-defined buzzing filling her ears and a fog creeping in at the edge of her vision. She dimly hears the doctor outlining the options for chemotherapy, for radiation, for palliative care, but it’s Mulder’s voice that finally snaps her back into the present.
“No. No, I don’t think so.” The doctor frowns.
“Which part, Mr. Mulder?”
“All of it,” he responds calmly. "I’m not interested in treatment.“
“Mulder,” says Scully, her voice a strained croak, “you can’t be serious.” He turns to look at her, his face kind, but already stubbornly set. He has made up his mind. Made it up weeks ago, probably, running over worst-case scenarios between doctor’s visits and tests.
“Scully, I’m seventy-eight years old,” he says gently. "Be honest- did you ever think I’d live past fifty?“ He smiles at her, but she cannot find it in herself to return the smile, not while he is tearing her heart apart. "But I did, and I got to spend most of that time with you. I’d call that a win, wouldn’t you?”
“But we could have longer, Mulder,” Scully protests. "With treatment-“
“How much longer could chemotherapy give me?” Mulder asks the doctor. "Two years? Three?“ The doctor clears his throat.
“Three years would be optimistic,” he concedes. "In my opinion, a realistic estimate would be a year with treatment, three to six months without.“ Scully feels a sob threatening to rip its way out of her throat, and she stifles it.
“And on chemo, I’d be sick the whole time, from beginning to end,” says Mulder. "Scully, would you make that decision for yourself?“
"We’re not talking about me, Mulder,” she protests weakly.
“But you’ve been through that. You’ve been through the chemo and the radiation, you’ve been through the vomiting and the exhaustion. Would you really go through that again if you knew it wasn’t going to get you much time?”
“Why don’t the two of you take a few days to discuss this?” suggests the doctor. "Talk it over with each other. You do have a valid point, Mr. Mulder. You wouldn’t be the only one of my patients, at your age, to make this kind of call.“ He stands, ready to usher them out. "There’s no right or wrong answer here; only what’s right for you. Take some time and decide what that is.”
——–
Scully is silent in the passenger seat of their car on the way home. Mulder steals glances at her as he drives, at her frozen expression, waiting for the inevitable moment when the dam will burst. The fading sunlight fills the car, settling in the tresses of Scully’s hair, filling it with a glow that Mulder admires each time his eyes wander from the road. Of the many iterations of Scully’s hair over the years, this is by far his favorite: equal parts silver, red, and gold, falling in soft waves down below her shoulders. She has long since stopped trying to fight her hair’s natural curl, ditching the severe haircuts right around the time they both ditched their FBI badges and finally retired.
Scully keeps it together for the entire drive, up until Mulder parks in front of the house and shuts off the engine. They don’t get out; he senses, somehow, that she’s going to speak her mind here, in the car. They always seem to handle serious conversations better in the car, as though the years of passing the long miles with talking have made it so that they have difficulty communicating anywhere else. He thinks about how, given the choice, he would simply drive with her forever, endless distances with her by his side, never more than a foot away, always within his grasp. She had told him once that she wanted to stop the car, to get out, to have a normal life, and they had, after a fashion, and it had mostly been wonderful, but now he’d like to turn the car back on and drive away with her again. He ponders this impulse as she finally begins to speak.
“Mulder,” she says, her tone suggesting she’s taken the entire drive to marshall her thoughts, to prepare her argument, “the time the chemotherapy could buy you could lead to other opportunities. New cancer treatments are being discovered all the time. There are clinical trials you could get into… I still have friends at the hospital, they could make it happen-”
“Scully,” he says gently, “I’ve made up my mind. I’ve had a long life, longer than I had any right to expect. I don’t want to spend what little time I have left bent over a toilet.”
“What about when it was me in your shoes, Mulder? When they told me I was going to die, that no surgery could save me, that treatments could only prolong the inevitable? Did you let me give up? Did you let me, even for one second, give up and stop fighting?”
“It’s not the same and you know it,” he says. "Your disease was engineered. It was given to you. It was a fabricated disease, with a fabricated cure, and all we had to do was find it. Not to mention, Scully, you were young.“ He reaches for her hand, but she yanks it out of his grasp, angry tears coursing down her face. "I’m an old man, Scully. Nobody gave me this disease, nobody planned this for me, nobody made me sick in an attempt to destroy evidence. This was probably always going to happen. It’s normal life, Scully- as close to normal life as you and I ever get.” He reaches out, takes her by the chin, turns her gently to look at him. "What would you want me to do if the tables were turned, Scully? If you were the one getting this diagnosis and this was the choice you made?“
She doesn’t have to think very hard about this. She could lie, and claim that she would never make the same choice, that she would fight with all of the time she had left, but even after forty years, the memory of the horror of aggressive chemo is still sharp in her mind. She remembers how terrible it was to go through that in her youth… and he is nearly eighty. He’s taken care of himself, but still, he’s right: he’s an old man. Can she ask him to put himself through that, when the end result will be the same, and only delayed by a few months, if he’s lucky?
She thinks back to the day she told him she was dying. If circumstances had been different, if she had never been abducted and had instead gotten terminal cancer as part of the natural course of her life, and had made the decision to forego treatments and simply make the most of the time she had left, what would he have done?
She doesn’t need to think about this part at all, really. He would do exactly what he’s always done: if he disagreed, he would try to change her mind, but in the end, it would be her choice to make. They are partners, they are equals, and he respects her ability to make her own choices. He always has. And she owes the same to him.
He can read her answer in the way she hangs her head, knows the conclusions she’s drawn without her having to say a word. He reaches for her, and this time, she comes to him readily, her body shaking with the sobs she can no longer keep inside. Strangely, he doesn’t feel like crying, himself; he meant every word he said, about having had a long life, about being grateful for every day spent by her side. This woman, this love, this space of time are more than he ever dared dream he’d be allowed. Really, he’d thought he’d reached the pinnacle of happiness decades ago on the day she first told him she loved him, and everything since then has been gravy.
"What will you do?” asks Scully tearfully, from where she is curled into his chest. "If you’re not going to be treated? We can’t just sit at home and wait and pretend everything’s normal.“ He agrees.
"I was thinking, Scully,” he says, and she looks up at him. "What would you say to going for a drive?“ She frowns.
"A drive? Where to?”
“Nowhere.” He grins. "Everywhere. Let’s just pick a direction and go. See how much of the country we can cover in three to six months. If it gets bad, we’ll come home to ride the rest of it out… but until then, let’s just drive.“ The corner of her mouth lifts: she understands. She always understands him.
"You want to get back in the car.” He nods, still grinning. She considers, and he knows what’s going through her mind: the long miles, over terrain both bland and beautiful, talking and laughing and arguing and sometimes just being still, but always, always together, just the two of them. And finally, she smiles, and kisses him.
“All right, Mulder,” she says. "Let’s go for a drive.“