Summary: see part one.
Believer, pt II
Please Archive. NO Crossposting.
Rating: PG-13
Thanks to Rad for beta-reading. Thanks to the Finals Gods for making Dr. 
L pop a pulmonary two days before our exam, thereby giving me time to 
write this. And thanks to whatever Dr. L believes in, because as much as 
I loathe her guts, I’m glad she’ll be okay. 
Disclaimer: I don’t own Scully, and don’t sue me. You’d only run up 
against a Great Wall of Student Loans ...  	Elisabeth Shaugnessy is 
mine. 
	The Maimonidean Oath is copyright... uh... Maimonides. Or maybe the 
Einstein School of Medicine. 


Believer, Part 2

November 15, 1996 -- 1 AM

Elisabeth dragged her palms wearily down her face, trying to scrub away 
the dull burn around her eyes that meant she hadn’t slept enough 
recently. Sleep was one of those elusive things, like companionship, the 
aftertaste of ginger-peach tea, and true love. Blinking her exhausted 
vision into focus, she looked down at the legal pad where she’d plotted 
out several possible chemotherapeutic tactics.  The jumble of drug 
abbreviations looked like spilled Scrabble tiles. 

CVP          COP              CHOP
DVP          COPP            COAP

SCULLY

*Jesus, Lissie.*  

She swore aloud, tossing the notepad away from her. It hit the coffee 
table with a less than satisfying whump, and the fact that she couldn’t 
reach it again without moving out of the cocoon of her blanket only made 
things worse. When she stretched to make up the distance, Molly Bloom, 
the enormous, undefinably-colored Maine Coon cat that seemingly had come 
along with the apartment, unfurled her tail strategically onto the 
ticklish soles of Elisabeth’s feet.. 

“All right. You think it’s grub up? At this hour? Learn to open a can.” 
But she rose, with one last glance at her work, and managed to make her 
way to the kitchen with the cat threading its cradle between her ankles. 
A few minutes later, as Molly nibbled moistly at the canned food, 
Elisabeth treated her to a luxuriant ear massage. “So,” she said fondly. 
“How was *your* day?” 

She sighed deeply. Up at one in the morning and talking to a cat. Well, 
there was no one else to talk to. No one else to stay up with, for that 
matter. *This is not a good train of thought.* She scowled, as a 
yellowed paper stuck to the fridge door caught her eye. 

“May I never see in the patient anything but a fellow creature in pain,” 
she read in a murmur.  Obviously Maimonides had never seen anything like 
Dana Scully. Something made the air hum with electric current whenever 
Elisabeth thought of her patient, there was a nervous crackling from 
synapse to synapse along her limbs that made her pause and blot her 
sweating palms on her scrub pants. The response was an immediate one, 
and physical; they might have been meeting for the first time on a dance 
floor and not in a consult room. The feeling had set its teeth into her 
and nagged now for days. She couldn’t have told herself what it was; 
only that she had not felt such a dizzying, marvelous, dangerous thing 
in years.

****
November 15, 9 AM
****
Scully looked fixedly at the wall, her lower lip snagged on her teeth. 
Her IV hand was curling slowly into a fist. It took her last reserves 
not to tear the IV lines from her arm and bolt from the treatment room; 
the only thing tethering her was the thought of the alternative. *If I 
don’t let her do this to me, then I die. They win.  That’s simple. Isn’t 
it? I can’t let this thing kill me. I can’t let them kill me.* Her heart 
was pounding hard enough to send a cold, distant ache through her arms 
and chest. *But if I go into full ventricular fib, can I get out of 
here?*

“This is the cyclophosphamide,” Elisabeth murmured. “You’ll feel some 
localized burning around the infusion point. Try and stand it as long as 
you can. I need to get as much of it into you as possible.” She winced 
as the first shock of the drug hit Scully. “You doing all right?”

“I’m fine.” She was breathing in little sips and gasps, and the room was 
suddenly hideously hot. 

“Today’s menu also features a cocktail of vincristine and procarbazine, 
shaken, not stirred, with a dash of prednisone. You can’t do much better 
than this,” Elisabeth went on,with a dark smile. She tried not to notice 
the droplets of sweat pearled at Scully’s temples. 

“Sounds great.” She leaned back, willing her body to relax and not 
rebel. Was this dying? The slow, creeping pain spreading its fingers 
along her body, tracing, in her mind’s eye, the perfect webwork of 
arteries and up again through the veins?  The young oncologist seemed to 
hover just in her line of vision, and the immaculate white of her coat 
was beginning to blur with the walls of the room. Elisabeth’s face was 
fixed in concentration, but her pale eyes held a measure of compassion 
as she looked at Scully. 

“I have to warn you,” Elisabeth said softly. “This therapy is designed 
for speed, not accuracy. We’re trying to circumvent metastasis with 
massive intracellular kill. You’re going to feel it almost immediately.” 

Scully nodded. 

“Fortunately, I think --” She paused, timed the flow of liquid against 
the second hand of her watch -- “you’ll only have to cope with a few 
rounds of this. I plan to focus more on localized radiation, go for the 
mass in situ. It’s pretty terrible, but not so unkind as this.” 
Elisabeth leaned down and straightened Scully’s arm at the elbow, giving 
a light, guiding touch to her opposite shoulder.  *This is no good. Find 
something gentler. No, no, gentler is not going to work here. If I went 
with anything else --*

Scully gasped in pain, a tremor skittering down her limbs and into 
Elisabeth. 

“Doctor Scully?!”

“I- I’m  fine.” She clenched her teeth. *Focus, Dana. Keep breathing. 
Just keep breathing.* Something bright caught her eye, and desperately 
she concentrated on it. It was a few minutes before she had recovered 
enough from the assault to realize what she was looking at. A small gold 
pendant, somewhere between a Caduceus and a Crucifix, centered along the 
soft, symmetric curve of Dr. Shaugnessy’s chest.  

“Oh!” She stammered, though speaking was an effort against the icy 
weight settled on her throat. “I, ah, I -- I wasn’t -- I’m sorry --”

“Oh,” Elisabeth echoed. “Look at whatever you like. I -- I mean, 
whatever helps.” She trailed off, adjusting the IV flow with a critical 
eye. 

Scully sighed, clenching her fists once more until the neat rounds of 
her nails dug into her palms, and tried to ignore the nausea seeping 
into her bones. 

Elisabeth’s voice, when it came again, was low and smooth and confident, 
like a reassuring hand. “Almost finished now. You’ll feel like hell for 
the next few hours. Blame me, if you need to.”

Scully was surprised to find no trace of humor in her oncologist’s eyes. 
The words were seemingly just part of a longer litany of 
recommendations:

“If you feel hungry, stick with Saltines. Plain toast. Simple carbs. 
Drink as much cool water as you can, and try for a nap during the day. 
Hey! Easy, you can’t get up just yet.” Elisabeth’s hands braced gently 
over hers.  “Is there someone I can call for you, someone who can give 
you a ride home?”

The world stopped spinning and she could speak once again. “Mul --” she 
broke off. “My mother.”

****

Scully slid into bed exhausted, though the last weak winter sunlight 
still gave the room a gray light. The simple motions of unbuttoning, 
unfastening and hanging neatly had overwhelmed her. The neat black suit 
she’d worn to the treatment center lay kicked and crumpled on the floor. 

The sheets were blessedly cool to her scalding skin,  and the pillow was 
dented into a precise and comfortable ellipse, but the deep ache of 
every muscle in her precluded rest. She tossed and shifted a few times, 
finally settling on a fetal curl that let her almost ignore the last 
queasiness of her stomach, and stared at the blinded window until her 
vision slipped out of focus and tears teased at the corners of her eyes. 
She thought of her mother, of  the stony silence between them in the 
overheated car. Of Mulder, away somewhere -- the Arctic this time 
,wasn’t it?  
And of the oncologist. She had been with Scully, *with* her, not just as 
a hand to hold briefly but every inch of the way, keeping her anchored. 
Looking as if she  had somehow drawn some of Scully’s pain into herself.  
It made Scully ache to pull the young woman into her arms and comfort 
her,  tell her  this was not her cross to bear.  As she slid down into 
fitful sleep she said aloud,. “Elisabeth...”


End Believer pt II