Title: Realization
Author: ceediane	
E-mail: ceediane@gmail.com
Distribution: yes
Rating: PG
Categories: Scully POV, angst
Spoilers: Amor-fati
Keywords: amor-fati, MSR, UST

Summary: Scully comes to a realization of her feelings for 
Mulder in the car in Amor Fati

Author's notes: This is my first story. Feedback please. 


Ever since that night in the parking garage, ache and 
loneliness had become as much a part of her morning routine 
as a shower and coffee.  With the buzz of her alarm came 
consciousness, awareness and the feeling of a dull and 
heavy pressure on her chest.  Upon awaking, she would push 
herself through these feelings like a swimmer, chest deep, 
emerging from a current.  Methodically, she would shower, 
dress, take breakfast and the ache would lessen, ebb, and 
quiet until she entered the halls of the Hoover Building.  
 
Realization was like a billboard. "I love him."  It was an 
image in her brain, interpreted before she had time to 
block or banish it.   "I love him." It was neon and would 
flash, unbidden across her consciousness. "I love him." It 
would come to her on her drive in to work or her ride down 
the elevator.
And always, the thought  was a razor sharp pain. 
 
Before she knew what it was, she welcomed it.  It was there 
in the presence of the lone gunmen.  Standing outside their 
door, she would feel herself knit to him with a fine and 
invisible thread of connection.  He would knock and the two 
of them would enter.  Here she was elevated to the role of 
uber-female, mother, goddess. She.  And in the palpable 
femininity these moments induced, she would secretly warm, 
revel, luxuriate.  Was it that their existence seemed a 
silent acknowledgement of Mulder and Scully's pair status?  
That  they were the children to Mulder and Scully's 
parental unit? Perhaps, it was this:  in the presence of 
other men, she was so clearly the possession of one.
    
But now, that role was called into question.  He possessed 
her heart, but did she possess his?
  
She now felt the tearing apart of their connection would be 
an undoing, a desecration, a painful sundering like the 
loss of a limb or a sensory organ.  She could not do 
without him.  Or if she must--in those moments she allowed 
herself to contemplate this--it would be to go on without 
an essential part of herself.  It would be an existence 
devoid of the capacity for hope.  A year missing one of its 
seasons. Shelter devoid of walls. It would be existing with 
an acute consciousness of incompleteness.  Of missing 
something that once was.  Even if she could "get over it,"  
she would never, ever, ever want to.  How had she become 
this sick? This disfunctional.  She must look for the 
number of a therapist.  Analyze, process and box up these 
feelings.  But if she were honest, part of her didn't want 
to box them up.  Part of her wanted to continue on, 
slightly crazy, a little out of control, and see if some 
"accident" or careless moment pricked, ignited or tipped 
her partner into awareness.
   
Was he aware?
  
There was nothing she could discern--or worse, she thought 
maybe her own feelings and fears had so colored her 
reaction to him that she had no ability to correctly 
interpret him.
   
Was a look a gaze, or just a look?  Was physical contact a 
touch, or simply unintended proximity?  Why was her brain 
interpreting the electrical impulses touched off by 
Mulder's hand differently than that of Skinner or Frohike 
or her mother, for heaven's sake.  Why did the tips of his 
fingers grazing  her skin feel like tongues of fire?
  
And why was theirs such a glacial movement forward?  Had 
there even been forward movement or had her mind simply 
imagined it? 
If she hadn't had cancer, she would never even have 
examined and acknowledged her feelings to begin with.  And 
even those hadn't strayed so far as to include the 
possibility of Mulder.  That period of journaling had 
forced her to answer questions about herself--her need for 
love, her desire for a family--it had emerged as a 
crystalline truth.  Always before, she had set those 
questions aside.  She looked at other couples and saw 
compromise or something worse and she rejected romantic 
love as a lesser calling.  Maybe her work, her freedom and 
her independence were enough.
   
Did she dare hope she could find a man trustworthy enough 
to give over her heart?  Or even more, the heart of her 
children? Did she even want children?  Cancer had forced 
her to look at those questions.  And in the not-knowingness 
of whether or not a future existed, those questions were 
answered in the affirmative.
   
Once the cancer was gone, as much as she wanted to carry on 
as before, it was impossible.  To the outward observer, 
nothing had changed.  But her inner self had grasped truths 
which were now hardened and permanent.  She couldn't deny 
what she wanted.
   
But even in knowing these things, there was one question 
she had yet to examine: the question of Mulder.

In those months after the cancer, it hung there in 
the edges of her consciousness.  It was like background 
noise that she couldn't isolate or focus on because of her 
distraction with the present.  It was that thing she 
couldn't hear until she was alone, in the dark, in the 
silence, listening to a quiet buzz that was a roar.