By  cofax
cofax7@yahoo.com
 

Date: Mon, 19 Jun 2000
Rating:  R
Category:  V, A
Content Warning:  YES
Summary:  A grown woman in an untenable position, making an
impossible choice
Spoilers:  All Things, Requiem
Notes:  This is a follow-up to M.Sebasky's "Woman's Work,"
available at http://geocities.com/msebasky/.  Both of these
stories concern abortion.  If that topic is disturbing to you,
skip this fic.
Beta by Maria Nicole and Virginia.
 

***

Bitter Algebra
by cofax
June 2000
 

This walk from the car to the door of the small brick building
is the hardest thing she has ever done.  Algebra, she reminds
herself; she has solved the equation and this is the only
option. But Mary Mother, it is hard.

She once thought that standing up to Bill was the hardest thing.
He was so much bigger, armed with the superiority of age and the
conviction that as the son and heir he was always right. That
was difficult to contest, especially at twelve.

Facing down her father when she chose to take the offer from the
Bureau instead of the residency at Hopkins: that was hard.  It
took her years to forgive herself for defying him.

Once she joined the X-Files, the difficult tasks came faster.
Getting up and going on, after her abduction, after Melissa,
after the cancer, after Emily.  The words "hard" and "difficult"
began to have little meaning.  Her life was a desperate struggle
to move on, to keep pushing forward against the current.

After a while, she'd started to dodge whatever she could,
conserving her energy for the battles she could not avoid.  She
had Mulder call her mother to meet them in Allentown when her
cancer was diagnosed.  She hid the memory of a great looming
darkness over the ice field in the back of her mind, rather than
pull it into the light and recognize the implications.  She
never did ask Mulder straight out about his history with Diana.

She took seven years to respond to Mulder, too frightened for
the last step, until the world itself nudged her forward.
Reaching out to him on that one night in late spring had
terrified her.  The fear was a fist around her heart, a stone
cold and heavy in her gut, a ringing in her ears.  But she did
it; and he took her in, and the fear dissolved into warmth and
the press of long fingers on her skin.

She thought then that there was nothing more to fear.  That
loving him had been the highest hurdle she had to face.  She
should have known better.  Something harder always comes along.

They had a grace period of some months.  One summer, not golden
but sticky and green and humid with life and love and sex and
the misunderstandings of new lovers.  She is thankful for that
but she cannot bring herself to remember it.

She cannot indulge in the pain.

She has accepted that he has disappeared, but not that he is
gone.  She will find him.
 
 

Telling Skinner was a mistake. She is watched now; Langly found
a camera in her bathroom yesterday. She has known Skinner was
compromised for months. She should have contained her astonished
joy that Mulder had, this once, left her something of his.

But this child is yet another game piece.  That someone made
from love can be considered so disposable is blasphemy, but she
knows it as truth.  Krycek is there, watching, that brittle
blonde with the undefinable accent at his side.  She will not
even have a chance to hold this child, much less raise her to
adulthood.  It goes against everything she was ever taught, to
realize that there is no hope.  But Mulder took her faith with
her and she is left with ashes.

She already has a hostage to fortune and she cannot afford
another one.  She has heard too many stories from Mulder about
what he saw in the labs and the secret installations.  The uses
to which a child of theirs could be put make her brain freeze in
horror.

No, she thinks.  Not to my child.  Not to him, not to her, not
to me.  It ends now.

Which has brought her here.  To a small clinic in Reston, where
she sits in the passenger seat of the ancient VW bus, watching
the activity across the street.  They have been here for twenty
minutes.  She has $2,000 in cash in her wallet, and copies of
her medical records in the pocket of her coat.

Frohike has been very patient.  She told him nothing, merely to
lose any surveillance and pick her up outside a grocery store
around the corner from her apartment.  Now he is unsettled, the
fringe on his gloves fluttering as he taps his fingers against
the steering wheel.

She never told the Gunmen what was going on after her collapse
in their offices, but they must have figured it out.  Mulder
must have told them something about the changed nature of their
partnership.  They were his best friends after her.  Are, she
reminds herself grimly.  Are his best friends.

While Frohike seems clearly nervous, she cannot begin to
identify her own state of mind.  It passed beyond grief and
anxiety and into white noise sometime between 1:00 and 4:00 a.m.

She will do this.  She must do this.  It is the only hope she
has of saving any of them. She has to believe that lives will be
saved, that it is better for her child never to draw breath than
to live the life she would find here.  She has to believe this.
This bitter algebra must be correct, because to be wrong would
shatter her.  She prays not to find out if she is wrong.  She
will barely survive the equation even if she is right.

She sees the irony of her position all too well; it is because
she knows that this child within her is a child, not merely a
bundle of soulless cells, that she is here.  She must protect
her child.

This irony would be lost on the dozen or so men and women
outside the building across the street.  She can see the signs
from here. The pictures are multi-colored, graphic, wrenching
even in the rain from fifty yards away.  The protesters keep
their legally-mandated distance from the door of the clinic, but
when a girl approaches from the parking lot, accompanied by two
women with blue badges on their raincoats, they leap into
action.

One older woman, her face a soft oval, thrusts the picture of a
fetus into the face of the girl.  She says something, the lines
of her face soft with concern.  The girl huddles under the arm
of the woman on her right, and the three hustle to the clinic
door, avoiding the pleas and entreaties of the protesters as
much as possible.

Scully unbuckles her seatbelt and draws her gun.

"Scully?"  Now Frohike really looks nervous.

She shakes her head and places the gun carefully in the glove
compartment.  "I can't bring this in there."  When she unlocks
her door the little man starts to get out of the car as well.
"Please, I'd rather you stayed here."  Habit.

But Frohike isn't Mulder: his feelings aren't hurt. He's tougher
than she thought.

"No way in hell are you walking in there by yourself."  He isn't
afraid to meet her eyes.  She swallows suddenly; tears threaten,
again.  She has wept more in the past week than at any time in
the past year.

When she doesn't say anything he comes around the car and raises
an umbrella over her head.  With his other hand he takes her
cold hand in his, and begins to walk with her slowly across the
street.  As the two of them approach the sidewalk in front of
the clinic the protesters gather, pelting her with prayer and
imprecations.

This is the hardest thing she has ever done.  If she can do
this, there is nothing that anyone else can do that will ever
hurt her more.  The prayers of the protesters swirl around her,
competing with her own for the ears of heaven.

Holy Mary Mother of God, protect my child because I cannot.

***

End

Notes:  I had the honor of beta-ing "Woman's Work" by M.Sebasky,
and she was kind enough to allow me to extrapolate upon her
concept.  She has my support, my friendship, and my gratitude
for her generosity.  My thanks also to M.Sebasky, AliciaK,
Luperkal, and Maria Nicole for speedy beta.
 

***

I'm the darkness in your daughter
I'm the spot beneath the skin
I'm the scarlet on the pavement
I am the broken heart within

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