From: mgreten Date: Mon, 18 Dec 2000 10:40:06 -0800 Subject: IN OTHER CONTEXT: When Truth Be Told by Mary Greten Source: direct Disclaimer: NO infringement on anyone's copyrights is intended. loc's appreciated and answered: mgreten@xtalwind.net Spoilers: Folie a Deux and Field Trip a must for understanding. Archive: I'll send to Gossamer eventually. All others please inform me so I can send you its url or the latest revision. S: V: PG: Summary: What do a giant bug and a giant mushroom have in common? Episodes dialogue: Chris Carter and 1013 writers IN OTHER CONTEXT: When Truth Be Told ISMS ARRANGED by Mary Greten. ORIGINAL MATERIAL by Mary Greten. The Emergeny Room's florescent lights tormented Dr. Dana Scully. Their constant subliminal flickering wore at her eyes producing a headache rivaling a softball hitting the center of her forehead. A long time had passed since she's pulled three straight shifts in ER. The headaches began again at the hospital where she and her partner, Fox Mulder, were examined after the last X-file case in which they were nearly had their bones picked by a carnivorous fungal "entity" ten acres in length at least. Fearing the return of her cancer, she had herself thoroughly tested. She checked out 'fine'. "Like hell, I am". Scully muttered while rubbing the bridge of her nose. To avoid the florescent lights in her basement office, before she officially returned to work, she requested and received, post haste, her own office on A.D. Skinner's floor. So post haste, she wondered if Skinner had bartered a few favors in her favor. He didn't have to. The powers that be, whoever they were that day, decided that an agent, also an M.D., also a forensic pathologist and also an instructor at Quantico should have never been relegated to a basement office in the first place. It wasn't politically correct. What would A.G. J.R. think? "Riiight. Janet Reno has eighteen months left on her term. Where the hell was "Political Correctness" six years ago when Blevins assigned me to the X-Files?", Scully mused at the irony. Now, she had daylight streaming through her office window and a GE soft light in her desk lamp. Why hadn't her headaches subsided? A bright white light flashed before her eyes. "I want a cart in here NOW. This man is coding." Young Dr. Scully yelled to no one in particular and every one in general. The cart and personnel arrived in prescribed time. She performed all the procedures to be followed for the middle age, never sick a day in his life, father of five. After minutes of flat lining with nary a quarter of a pulse, Scully pronounced him. She consoled the deceased's weeping wife until responsible kin arrived or until the next crisis tore her away. Sometimes even the best care is not enough. Law number one in Medicine: "Do no harm". Law number two: "Patients die." Law Number three: "Get used to it." Yet, she never delivered a baby without an obstetrician present nor was she ever senior enough to execute a living will by removing life support although she did witness the drama and trauma of the event. To distinguish herself, she eventually chose a field in which all her 'patients' were D.O.A. Their plugs had already been pulled. Her job was to determine when, how, why, who. Her vision re-focused on the center of her desktop. Scully inhaled long, held and exhaled longer until her pulse rate stabilized. Steadying herself with her hands at the edge of her desk, she rose to test her balance. No dizziness nor nausea. No...pain. "Where'd that damn headache go?" She blurted. It disappeared so fast, she was tempted to check the floor to see where she had dropped it. Instantly, she was on the phone. "Mom, is every one in the family ok? Anything you haven't told me?" "No, Dana. I've not heard a thing." Mrs. Scully answered. "And, you know I'd tell you. Dana, What's wrong?" "I'm fine, Mom." "I hate those words, Dana." "I had a flashback to my ER tours and when I returned my headache was gone. Just to be certain, I'll see Dr. Van Assendelft immediately. Will you tell him I'm on my way? Thanks... Yes, I'll take a cab." With no problems found but with the advice to seek mental health counseling, Scully arrived back after a decent lunch stopping to visit Mulder in his office. Because of her recurring headaches, he agreed to write up their report on the giant man-eating mushroom. He was not there. He did leave a post-it on his bulletin board near a scorched picture of the two of them reading an unfolded map. "E-mailed report to you. Following a small lead. Expect dead end. Cover." Scully smiled as she surveyed the old homestead. "Hello, walls. What's new? Never mind, I really don't want to know.", She waved to the air as she left. At her desk, Scully read Mulder's report. She found it to be woefully wanting. Skinner would never accept as skimpy a report as Mulder's without questions equal to the number of dalmatians in a Disney movie. She wrote a addendum to flesh out the lean report. She incorporated their office squabble which evolved into a shuttle ride debate over empiricism versus intuition. She included her own hallucinations not forgetting the one just prior to Skinner pulling them out of essentially a big giant mushroom. A sense of deja vu overpowered her. Not as prepossessing as her earlier flashback, but enough to place her in the proper time frame. "What was it last year about this time? Oh yes. A big giant bug.", she recalled. "Mulder in a psychiatric ward. Best diagnosis: Folie a Deux." Her headache returned with a fucking vengeance. It wasn't exactly a thunderclap headache which would have sent her to an ER suspecting a possible aneurysm, but, it was viscious...like pincers squeezing as if a big giant bug was attacking her. She understood the message: "Pay Attention!!". Then, she fathomed the depths from which the warning came. Not from her mind, not from her heart even. But, from a place much deeper... ..."Father McCue, Miss Scully is here, requesting a face to face," announced the long time parish secretary. "She has no appointment but I know you never deny a Confession." "Dana?" It had been four years and he still asked which Scully girl. "Yes, of course. Send her in and pass any other calls to a curate." Scully offered a hand to her mother's old friend. He would accept nothing less than a hug. When he released her, took his purple scapular from his pocket and placed it around his neck. "Is here, ok?, Dana, or would you prefer the confessional?" "Here is fine, Father." She sat in a leather chair in the far corner of the rectory office which she assumed was for this precise purpose. The elderly priest sat in its mate facing her. "Why are you here today, Dana? What couldn't have waited until Saturday's scheduled hours for confessions?", he asked worriedly. "Father, you know my work sometimes requires me to live just this side of the commandments and canon law and sometimes I trespass". "Yes." "What I am about to tell you is not classified. Still, I feel I cannot discuss this with anyone not canopied under client privilege to the utmost degree." "The Seal of the Confessional is indeed that.", the priest solemnly agreed. "Please continue." When Scully finished, Father McCue remained theologically perplexed. "Dana, what sin have you committed?" "It's the one I will commit, Father. Not for the first time, but more resolutely, I am considering a lie of omission by not telling the whole truth to my superior. Either way I betray someone." "I don't understand, Dana." Scully re-deliberated the most probable scenarios aloud both for her review as well as the priest's comprehension. "Father, if I don't report my last hallucination, as subjective as it was, in which Mulder kills my superior to prove that he was right, Mulder could go off 'half cocked'. He has done so before with near dire consequences. If the next time it is with inescapably grim results, then the X-files will be closed. I am to blame. "If I do tell my superior, then my prognosis is Mulder will be sent for counseling and put on probation at most. The X-Files will be closed. It will break him. "Beyond that, Father, I tell you this with no sense of pride or accomplishment: at this juncture in time-space, Mulder and I are part of the last best hope for humanity. I can't do it alone; neither can he. We must be ready." The experienced priest never wavered at how such a relatively young woman, half his age and less that his size, could shoulder humankind from horrors worse than he had seen as an Army chaplain. Instinctively, he recognized she was the one to do it. "Do you feel your hallucination contains a kernel of truth?" As was her habit when about to reveal something emotionally wrenching, Scully wet her lips with the tip of her tongue. "Father, when I was diagnosed with my cancer, Mulder kept me going with his the simple faith that the truth would set me free; that the truth would set us both free." Her words stopped the working of her diaphram. They almost died in her throat. "But, now, I have never felt so conflicted and constricted." The priest decided to approach her dilemma from another standpoint. "Dana, as a doctor, your medical ethics surely include the Principle of Double Effect." "Of course. But medicine is a narrow field compared to global annihilation of the human race." She bowed her head to hide a smirk at herself. "I know it sounds megalomaniacal." Not dissuaded, the priest continued. "Let's go through the conditions of the principle that must be met: "First, the act itself must be morally good or amoral. Second, you don't positively will the bad effect but merely permit it. Third, the end never justifies the means. Four, guidelines are that: the needs of the many outweigh the need of the few, an inevitable effect deserves greater consideration than one merely probable, and morality reigns over materiality." Scully nodded that these rules were not at all foreign to her. "Dana, you can't get past the first rule and I can't give you dispensation to lie. If your superior has the right to this information to use at his discretion, to make appropriate decisions when necessary, you must tell him." Scully looked down at her taut, folded hands. "But," continued the priest, "since the information is highly illusory, I suggest you report it without commentary. Elucidate only upon request. Then, leave it in God's hands. He is, after all, the Truth and the Light." Scully noticed how tired the seventy year old priest had become in the hour she spent with him. She remembered her liturgical manners. "Father McCue, may I have your blessing?" "Of course, my child. No. You don't have to kneel." He rested his left hand lightly on her head and raised his right hand in the benediction of the Sign of the Cross. Outside, Scully shivered in her trench coat. The chill came from the abyss in her soul. All these years, she dodged the circumstance. Now, she has no alternative but to give the X-Files to her Deity. Would her partner's deep respect for Truth in the abstract, survive the rigors of Reality that may destroy X-files or at very least remove him from them forever? Would she endure his condemnation of her? If the time came, could they still fight side by side? Because when truth be told, she... pulled the plug. `````