Too Late For Fruit, Too Soon For Flowers.
By afg. www.ofnoconsequence.com
Rating: PG-13
Category: Scully angst
Spoilers: Redux
Summary: She wasn't asleep
Thanks: To my Osteopath. Also to Tali for her sterling 
efforts.
Feedback: Yes absolutely, to siggy.63@btinternet.com


Being nearly dead was a condition to which Dana Scully was 
no stranger. This time however, she thought it very likely, 
that this would be the last time she would experience it. Had 
she been able to summon up the strength, she might have 
been angry but after the latest round of last-ditch 
chemotherapy, she found that she was sapped of all energy. 
Even opening her eyes was a task so Herculean, that it was 
quite beyond her. Anyway, what was there to see in a 
hospital room late at night? Nothing, except for the 
occasional nurse, who would creep into her room, secretly 
hoping her patient would be asleep, so that she wouldn't have 
to make conversation with the nearly dead woman because 
there was always the chance that she'd slip up and say 
something stupid. No, there wasn't much incentive for her to 
open her eyes, even if she could.     

As she lay in the not so dark of the room, she found her 
thoughts drifting between subjects as diverse as wondering 
who would discover the vibrator secreted away in her closet, 
to being absurdly pleased that at least she'd managed to keep 
her hair. She found that thinking about what she would do 
once she was actually dead to be too much, it was a big thing 
to have to wrap your brain around, even a brain as lively as 
hers. Faith was all very well when you were feeling healthy 
but doubt, had a nasty habit of oozing in to your thoughts 
when death was dancing around your less than comfortable 
hospital bed 

She knew it was him, she recognised his aftershave, a 
pleasant contrast to the smell of bleach and antiseptic that 
surrounded her. She heard him walk around her bed and she 
knew he was looking at her. There was something wrong; 
something other than watching his partner die, she could tell 
by his breathing. She felt her bed dip slightly as he lowered 
himself to the floor by her head. His hand held hers and she 
felt the spasms of his body as he cried silently. She felt 
strangely unemotional about his evident distress. Perhaps it 
was the bone deep exhaustion from the chemo but she felt 
almost resentful that yet again, Mulder was using her as a 
vent for his emotions. It was bad enough that even when she 
was trapped in this bed, she had to think of ways to get him 
out of the latest imbroglio in which he had become 
enmeshed. She was dying for god's sake, and he still 
managed to upstage her. It seemed that pettiness was a 
surprising precursor to the great hereafter, but goddammit, 
she was tired of being his sidekick, his interpreter for the less 
enlightened world.

She had always been ambitious, even as a child she had 
strived to be the best; whether academically or physically. 
She was slightly hampered by an innate sense of justice, a 
trait, which the truly ambitious manage to avoid. So for her, 
if not her family, a career in law enforcement seemed quite 
natural. She'd done well, excelled herself in fact, until she'd 
been sent to the Basement and Fox Mulder. The barons of the 
FBI had misread her completely, they'd, equated her ambition 
with theirs but she was nothing like them. Where they would 
fuck each other over for any crumb of power they could lay 
their hands on, she would be on the side of the powerless, the 
abused, the victims, because her sense of justice told her that 
it was the right thing to do. In Fox Mulder she had found her 
companion in the struggle. Despite his strange notions and 
enthusiasm for the ridiculous, he too understood justice and 
he pursued it with a tenacity that would have shamed a Pit 
Bull.

Mulder was one of those people who got noticed, he had a 
presence, a personality that positively screamed, "Look at 
me!" He was ridiculously bright but could also be incredibly 
naive about some things. Sometimes, she could not believe 
how easily he allowed himself to be manipulated by the 
covert elements that he sought to uncover. It was as though 
he had all his emotional buttons on display with the words 
"Press Here" in neon letters. But somehow, this made him 
more human to her and ultimately more lovable. 
Because of course, she did love him. Despite the fact that 
doing this job had lost her her friends; any semblance of a 
social life had long since been abandoned. Her family had 
become more and more distant, her sister was dead and then 
there was the question of the three month absence from the 
face of the earth and this current and, almost certainly 
permanent, encounter with the Grim Reaper, courtesy of a 
microchip implanted by the people, or whatever they were, 
who had abducted her.

Scully was sure that he loved her too, although sometimes 
she worried that he loved the idea of her and not who she 
actually was. Mulder was a romantic in the true sense of the 
word; his passions were felt to the bone. The search for his 
sister, the hunt for extra terrestrial intelligence, the proof of a 
conspiracy, so heinous, that it boggled the mind. All these 
were large concepts, so huge in their scope, that they reduced 
everything else to a two-dimensional blandness for him. At 
times, even she became superfluous to his 'Quest'. He had 
sucked her into his life, until it had become her life as well. 
His desires were hers, she had invested herself to his passions 
and at the last hurrah what had she to show for it? She would 
only be remembered as Agent 'Spooky' Mulder's partner, his 
one woman cheerleading squad. Her ego was crying out for 
recognition, for affirmation that she was important in her 
own right and not an overwritten cipher for the Cassandra in 
Armani, pariah of the FBI. 

After long minutes, Mulder stopped his silent weeping. He 
knelt on the floor with his head resting next to hers on the 
pillow. His hand gently holding her still, cool fingers. The 
tension in the room had lifted and it seemed as though he had 
reached some sort of resolution. Scully just hoped that it 
wasn't a resolution that would get him into even deeper 
trouble.  Mulder was deeply loyal to his friends and had a 
tendency to throw himself to the wolves, if he thought it 
might help a friend in need. She didn't want him to sacrifice 
himself for her, she didn't want to die knowing that he was in 
danger or about to be thrown in jail. She just didn't want to 
die. It wasn't fair; she couldn't leave him, what would he do? 
What would she do? Watch him from the veil of the spirits, 
while he ran headlong towards disaster? Scully thought she 
was all ready closer to the dead than to the living, as she 
seemed to be channelling her sister. Melissa was the believer 
in all things whacko. Scully would find it toe curlingly 
embarrassing when Melissa started up on one of her New 
Age, crystal spinning, astral travelling sermons, that she 
would regularly inflict on her sceptic of a sister. God, she 
wished she was with her now, she'd give almost anything to 
have her here, she'd even let her do that ridiculous aura-
stroking thing that she was so fond of.  

The noises in the corridor, outside her room had started to get 
louder. The chatter of the nurses changing shifts, the rattle of 
drug trolleys passing by and the whistling of one of the 
cleaners as he mopped the floor. She heard Mulder shift and 
lift his head, she felt him looking at her for the longest time, 
it didn't feel uncomfortable, it felt good, heavy and warm, as 
though a much loved quilt had been laid over her. It was 
incomprehensible, how much she was going to miss him, 
whilst a part of her resented his hold over her, another part of 
her recognised that he hadn't made her do anything she didn't 
want to do, they'd been her choices and despite all the losses, 
his as well as her own, it had been the right thing to do 
because that's what she was here for, to do the right thing, at 
last she thought, her father might have been proud of her.

 Now, at the dawning of a new day, her only regrets would be 
of a personal nature. Her tense relationship with her brother, 
Bill, loosing touch with her best friend, Ellen and most of all 
not loving Mulder the way she wanted to. To have touched 
him as a lover, to have him touch her with those long elegant 
fingers, to have felt the weight of him over her, to have taken 
him inside herself. It had never seemed the right time. Now, 
time was measured in needles full of poison and visits from 
her mother, whose face, had taken on a permanent expression 
of bemusement, unbelieving that it was really possible to 
watch two of her children die.

She heard Mulder's knees crack as he rose to his feet. He was 
going to leave. She felt the urge to grab him, to cling on to 
him so he couldn't walk away. She had an embarrassingly 
vivid vision of him dragging her across the floor as she held 
on to his leg for dear life. She got a grip; there was no need to 
completely humiliate herself. It was bad enough that she had 
to lie here in a gaping hospital gown, with tubes up her nose 
and intermittently vomiting over the occasional nurse who 
wasn't quick enough with the emesis bowl, without throwing 
herself, bodily at her partner. No, she didn't have much left 
but she would be damned if she wouldn't hold on to the last 
remnants of her tattered dignity.

 She felt his warm breath as he bent down and kissed her 
gently, his soft lips barely brushing the downy hairs on her 
sallow cheek. "Thank you," he whispered against her ear, and 
she felt her blood rush warm in her veins, "You're welcome," 
she thought, and it came as no surprise to her, that she meant 
it.

The End


End Note:
If some of you are wondering where I got the title of this 
little angst fest, then wonder no more. 'Too Late For Fruit, 
Too Soon For Flowers' are the disputed last words of the 
poet, Walter De La Mare.