From: Vickie Moseley <vmoseley@fgi.net>
Date: Sat, 10 Jul 1999 17:26:43 -0500
Subject: xfc NEW:  A Modest Defense
Source: xfc

Title:  A Modest Defense
Author:  Vickie Moseley
Summary:  There is shipper, and then there is this.  Some call it sap,
some call it mush, some call it mind candy, but I call it an argument
in defense of an action.  You be the judge :)
Category:  M!S!R!, SA MT thrown in free
Rating:  R for adult situations not elaborated
Disclaimer:  Like you'd ever let us see this one on film, CC.  HA! 
Face it, you need us fan fickers to write this stuff so you don't have
to.  But I won't make any money off it and I thereby won't infringe
on your copyright.
Archive: Yes
Dedication:  To Brandon.  Is my license intact?
Additional dedication:  To Shirley Smiley, my webmistress, my friend, 
HAPPY BIRTHDAY!!
Comments to vmoseley@fgi.net


A Modest Defense
by Vickie Moseley
vmoseley@fgi.net

Georgetown University Medical Center

It's 8:30 a.m. and I'm sitting in my customary seat in ICU.  I have
two patients in my direct sight.  One, a bed over, is a bastard I put a
hole through just six hours ago.  The other, directly before me, is
my partner of seven years.

Both have my undivided attention.  In the first case, the one farthest
over, I want to make sure the son of a bitch lives to stand trial.  I
will be thoroughly pissed if the cretin dies here, thus robbing me of
the joy of taking the witness stand against him.  Thus thwarting my
burning desire to stand up and cheer when the judge gavels the
sentence of life, no parole, finding the defendant 'guilty' on three
counts of murder and one count of attempted murder.  Oh, and one
count of assault on a Federal Officer.  Can't forget that one.  

Yes, I want my full measure of revenge.  I want it in glorious
technicolor.  I want it to be a best selling novel for some lucky
journalist in the press box.  I want that red head from Playing By
Heart to play me and that dark haired guy from Kalifornia to
play Mulder in a movie directed by Ron Howard.  I want Tom
Arnold to play the defendant.  No, wait, I like Tom Arnold.  Let the
casting director find some schmuck off the street, a real nobody, to
play the defendant.  If he does a good job, he still might have a
career.

But during the real trial, that moment of glory when our efforts,
literally our blood and tears are permanently stitched into the fabric
of our nation's system of justice, . . . I want my partner by my side.  
That is my most fervent wish, my undying hope.

Partner.  That is such an inadequate word at times.  When we're in
social situations, though they be few and far between, I can't think
of any word that truly defines our relationship.  Hopelessly, I
always fall back on the obvious.  "This is my partner, Fox Mulder."  

Sure, it's accurate.  Even the Justice Department would back me up
on that one.  But it's so confining.  He means so much more to me
than just the guy I work with, just the co-worker on the other side
of the office, just the person at my back, or sometimes running in
front of me, like last night.

No one knows that he's also my 'partner'.  Sure, the same sex
people may have stolen the phrase, but it's time for us opposite sex
people to realize the perfection of that title.  My partner.  Part of
the whole that I am when I'm with him.  My other half.  My better
half, in many ways.

Sometimes, to some people, the urge to 'define' the term is so great
that it almost chokes me.  Like with my mother, for instance.  She'll
casually say 'how's that partner of yours' and it makes me want to
say 'you know, Mom, he was so sweet after we made love this
morning -- he got up and made coffee totally nude'.   It would have
been a factual statement, I wasn't fantasizing the man in my kitchen
or in my bed just moments before.  But it's a secret we can't let out
to the rest of the world.  We have to make it _our_ reality and
everyone else's suspicion.  What's that saying?  Deny everything?

I watch him now, my greatest concern.  I would gladly forego my
gleeful revenge, if it means continuing this life fluttering before me. 
If God has to make a choice, if He won't save them both, let him
save this one, the one I hold on to with all my worth.

I developed a trick, long ago.  When I realized that just sitting and
staring was driving me insane, and based on the paranoia that I
caught from Mulder years ago, I sit with my hand around his wrist,
my index and middle fingers resting on his pulse point.  I don't trust
the monitors.  They can be rigged.  I need to feel the life in him, the
heart beating, the blood flowing through his veins and arteries.  Just
watching his chest rise is soothing, but my medical expertise
acknowledges that it's often artificial, like now.  A machine can
make a chest rise and fall long after the body has ceased to
function.  But nobody has figured out how to make the blood flow
to the extremities quite as well as a living heart.

I know that heart.  I know it better than I know my own.  I've seen
it broken, I've see it soar.  I've felt it beneath my hand and my
cheek.  I've even coaxed it back into working, like last night.  That
heart and I are on very intimate terms.  It is mine, just as my heart
belongs to him.

So I tell it firmly to keep doing its job.

I used to think, back when delusion was easier to face than reality,
that it would be harder on me if we became lovers.  That the main
reason for us to stay at arms length was the pain I would feel in
moments just like this.  As if knowing his touch on my bare skin
would make watching him fight for life that much harder to
experience.  As if having felt us become one would make the idea
of being separated by death more awful to bear.  

It almost makes me laugh, the mindlessness of those thoughts.  I
was so completely naive.  Our bodies were just an afterthought. 
We'd been making love for years . . . with our eyes and our minds. 
Oh, I can't say it was love at first sight.  I distinctly remember
wanting to scrub a smug look off his face with a cheese grater, the
first day we met.  Our connection, our 'relationship' snuck up on
me so soundlessly that I was shocked when I realized it was there. 
And though I wasn't ready to admit it to myself, our connection of
minds forged our love long before our bodies decided to get in on
the fun.  

I don't think I can remember a moment when the thought of losing
this man didn't crush me, threaten to drag me into an abyss so deep
I would never see the light of day.  I can think back to a hundred
separate moments, the Venerable Plaza in Boston, the dock by
Lake Jordan in North Carolina, a lonely desert ravine in New
Mexico.  Each and every time, I felt my own heart imploding,
almost to the point of ceasing to beat.  It's always been that bad, so
why deny ourselves the 'good' side of love?

It took a little longer to put that thought into action.  There never
seemed time.  And it always seemed so final.  Like it was something
that would mean the end to everything.  I think, to some extent, we
had silently agreed to hold off our own pleasures until we'd solved
the problems of the world.  That meant tearing down the threat of
invasion, exposing the plot of the consortium, finding Mulder's
sister and making the world safe for all time.

OK, so it was a bit far-reaching.  And a tad unrealistic.  Not to
mention, just plain egotistical of us to think we could accomplish all
of that in one lifetime.  But that doesn't mean we aren't still trying.

It just means that when the two of us happened to be quarantined in
the same room for a month, well, hormones tend to override plans
of world salvation.

I refuse to think of it as a mistake.  A surprise, yes, but never a
mistake.  The fact that we made love the first time in the small
bathroom shower stall, because there weren't any security cameras
in that room, might make it look like we were considering it a
mistake.  But afterward, as the shower spray turned from warm and
soothing to icy cold, I'm sure we both realized we had finally
corrected the mistakes we'd been making.  We were finally on the
right path.

That was a few years ago.  We've managed to keep it quiet all this
time.  Stolen moments, quite weekends.  Casual dinners that lead to
wrestling matches on his couch or my bed.  Sex during my cancer
was difficult, we seemed to tear at each other in desperation as
much as we drew comfort from the moments we shared.  But it's
been that way.  Peaks and valleys, just like any relationship.  Ups
and downs.  Moments of bitter despair and endless joy.  When that
water bed showed up in his apartment, I don't know which of us
was more surprised, or delighted.  

He had mistakenly thought I'd hate the waterbed and hid its
existence from me.  Since I'd never stepped foot in his bedroom,
for fear of attack by some mutant sex-crazed mouse fat on old
PlayPen magazines,  I thought nothing of it.  But when he let it slip,
after it sprung a leak, let's just say I took advantage of the
situation.  We're not teenagers anymore and that couch was putting
a serious kink in my spine.

Just like any relationship, there have been times of
misunderstanding.  I couldn't comprehend how he could keep
defending that traitorous bitch, Diana, while laying next to me
naked and sweating.  But then, he couldn't understand how I could
be attracted to a man I'd never laid eyes on before after just making
love to him.  What neither of us understood was that he wasn't
really defending Diana, and I wasn't ever attracted to Padgett.  But
then, I'm not sure if we understood those things ourselves, either.

At one point, Mulder could read minds.  It was frightening, for both
of us.  But it taught us one thing.  We'd always been able to read
each other's hearts.  When he realized my fears for him were not
just jealousy, when he finally let himself accept that I know his
commitment to me and mine to him, the tension between us
disappeared.  We were one.  So much so that I could leave him,
though it was the hardest thing I'd ever done, and travel half a
world away, just to save his mind.  We are together, always.  How
could mere physical distance threaten our bond?

How, indeed, could death?

The nurse comes up and changes the IV bag.  She checks over the
monitors, although she's got the same screens right at her desk.  I
like her, she even does her own check of his vitals, using an aural
thermometer and a stethoscope.  She smiles reassuringly before
going over to the son of a bitch in the next bed and taking the same
care.  A good nurse.  A real professional.  But her caring, her
compassion, in no way compromises her diligence to her job.

That's what we finally figured out.  What Mulder and I had been
running from with abandon, we finally figured out only made us
stronger.  Of course, we figured that out a long time after we'd
been sneaking around, but the realization made us feel a little better.

And much to my surprise, I'm glad that we've come this far
together.  I'm happy that I can sit here and still feel his skin, warm
beneath my hand.  I have no regrets, not a one.  Not even the
flukeman thing.

My love for this man starts to overflow its bounds and I feel the
sting of tears in my eyes.  Just as one falls free and splashes down
on our joined hands, I feel a tug on my palm.  Fingers wrapping
around my wrist, linking our arms in a firm grip.  I move my gaze
to his face, and see narrow slits of hazel blinking at me through
dark lashes.

I smile, like I always do.  I used to only smile like that at these
moments, when we'd just chased Death out of the room.  Now,
I've found, I smile like that whenever I wake up and find him next
to me, or watch him wake up in my arms.  It's not a smile to keep
in the top drawer for emergencies.  It's a smile I love to feel on my
face.

He swallows against the tube, but he's too weak to fight it. 
Instead, his eyes slide shut in silent resignation of his fate.  We both
know the drill.  But the time lines are important to us both.

"Intubation till this evening," I tell him and he blinks.  "About 12
more hours, probably," I answer his unspoken query.

His eyes open and I can hear his voice in my head, asking more
questions.  "Branyard is still alive.  He's critical, in the next bed. 
I'm making sure they take _real_ good care of him," I say with a bit
more force than necessary.  Mulder knows my feelings on justice.

Finally, the important one.  "You'll be out of here tomorrow and in 
your own room, ifyou're good," I tell him with as much warning as I 
can muster.  He blinks again and squeezes my hand.  

I don't need an interpreter for that body language.  It comes
through loud and clear.  He's told me a thousand times how much
he loves me in just such a manner.  A hand to the small of my back,
a touch of my necklace.  Swiping the hair from my face to look me
in the eyes.  Foolish man, he thought he had to say the words aloud. 
I know better.

I squeeze his hand and smile again.  "Me, too," I tell him.  Me, too.

the end

Vickie

Come visit my web page, brought to you by the fabulous Shirley Smiley!

http://www.geocities.com/Area51/Dimension/5821/index.html

"When you start, you make certain choices, and those choices accumulate and
create a number of [other] choices.  The story starts to tell itself, and
that's been very exciting in a way.  There's so much that has come and been
told that you are, in a way, a slave to the facts you've created, and it's a
really fun way to tell stories.  That's not to say it's simplified.  In fact,
it becomes complicated, but it all starts to make sense, and that's been a
really wonderful thing."

Quote from Chris Carter on development of The X Files