by Juliettt
Fox Mulder turned off his car's ignition and rested his head
for a moment against the steering wheel. The silence inside the
vehicle was like a palpable weight against his eardrums and was
broken only by the tick-tick-tick of the clock. A reminder. Time-is-
passing time-is-passing. . . .
Time. It had been too much time.
She had been taken more than three months ago. He had
had another birthday. Hadn't celebrated it, though -- hadn't felt much
like celebrating. What he *had* felt like doing was mourning. His
friend, the friend he had thought would make this birthday mean so
much, was gone. And he had no idea how to get her back.
That was when he had made his first plea.
There had been other pleas during the weeks before.
Heartfelt pleas that carried the weight of his very being behind them.
Prayers offered up to a God he thought he'd forgotten. And his more
immediate requests of Skinner and the Lone Gunmen and his new
informant whom he still did not fully trust. He had done everything
he knew to do and now he pled.
And October 13th had come and gone with nothing, nothing
for him. At least, nothing that he wanted. Clothes he didn't have the
heart to cut the tags off and wear, books he had no desire to read,
even the _Superstars of the Superbowls_ video which normally would
have thrilled him still lay in its pristine shrinkwrap on the shelf.
Another year older, and another year begun alone.
It shouldn't have been like this, and it was his own fault.
He regretted it less for his own loneliness than for *her* -- for her
safety, for her health, for her family.
For her life.
He should have taken the closing of the X-files for what it
had been: a warning. "Keep it up, Mulder, and your precious files
won't be all we'll take."
They had taken Sam. The Files.
And Scully. . . .
And so his thirty-third birthday had come and gone with no
revelations for him, no wishes granted, no light and no joy.
Thanksgiving was next. On October 14th he revised his
request: "Please, please bring her back in time for Thanksgiving. No
mother should have to wonder where her child is on Thanksgiving.
Please . . . bring her back in time for Thanksgiving -- safe and healthy.
Safe. For her mother."
But the days stretched on and melted into one another, into
weeks spent with the X-files, blurring into weekends spent alone on
his couch in his empty, lonely apartment. Ducking his calls with
the ringer turned off. He kept it on during the week out of deference
to his job, but on the weekends he shut himself off and shut himself
up in his shell, his ivory tower of delusions-turned-nightmares. He
had given up jumping at the phone weeks ago. He had grown selfish,
he knew, using his answering machine to screen his calls. But it
saved him the energy of trying to pretend he wanted to talk, wanted
to listen. Saved callers the embarrassment and frustration of trying
to make conversation with a stone wall.
Sometimes he would pick up the phone after hearing the
caller identify him- or herself. Usually he did so when it was
Margaret Scully on the other end of the line. Funny -- he would
have thought she would be the one person with whom he would be
afraid to speak, but it hadn't been like that at all. The Lone Gunmen
tired him with their overly enthusiastic theories and vain attempts to
cheer him. Mrs. Scully never tried to cheer him. She would call him
when she felt particularly blue or had an idea he might be. She was
usually right. And he would answer and sometimes they would just
sit there listening to one another breathe because there was nothing
to say. Or she would tell him about grocery shopping or something
one of her friends had said and he would murmur commonplaces when
he felt like it and remain silent when he did not, and she always
understood. He understood as well her attempts to remind him that
the outside world went on, ever on, but he did not care for it anymore.
And once or twice she had called and had wound up crying
softly into the phone while he listened, his chest aching with the need
to breathe and scream and curse and laugh all at once, his mind a
blank, shut against the clamoring of his heart and the traffic outside
and the clock ticking his life -- *her* life -- mercilessly away, shut
against everything but the soft weeping of the woman who had given
his best friend life, whose voice sounded so like hers sometimes on
the phone that his heart leapt and then thudded painfully against his
ribs. Perhaps that was why she always called him "Fox." They had
never spoken of what it would do to him to hear *her* voice say his
name in that expectant, inquiring tone that always seemed to ask
more than it asked.
This last had never been spoken, either, but he knew that
Scully had known. As her mother knew so much without being told.
She had called him one day last week.
"Fox? This is Margaret Scully." A pause while she waited
for him to pick up the phone. "I wanted to ask you to come to
Thanksgiving dinner. Call me, okay? Bye." And then she hung up,
knowing that if he was there he didn't want to talk. Understanding.
Wishing. Hoping.
He had pondered the invitation for days. It had crept into his
mind at the oddest moments of the day and the night. He would be
reading through old case files and would hear her voice. It would be
nice. Not to have to be alone. To sit down to a real dinner with
friendly people who would, if they did not quite understand him, at
least try. Or, if that made him obviously uncomfortable, would just
let him *be*.
But then at night he would lie on his couch in the half-gloom
of his living room, one or another of his videos playing for background
noise and visual stimuli to offer him a constant distraction for his
spinning brain. He only watched the ones he knew for fear that a
new face, a new voice, might remind him of . . . things that haunted
him of themselves in the night.
And as he lay there he pictured the Scully kitchen, the family
gathered around the table, Scully's two brothers arguing over who
would carve the turkey, and he wondered where he would sit. Would
there be an empty space? Whose would it be -- Scully's or her
father's?
And he knew that he could not go. He could not go and
spend this holiday with this woman that he liked when the one he
wanted to be there would not be there. Unless his pleas were
answered.
But November was drawing to a close, the days spinning
out colder and darker and more and more unforgiving. He knew the
morning he got up and couldn't start his car that the year sensed its
end and was taking a breath for the final push. He wondered whether
whoever had invented the holiday season had done so to make them
forget, to make them all forget the sadness of another year lost to the
past. Hallowe'enThanksgivingChristmasNewYear's, all like ducks in a
row. Or a row of fake books on a photography studio shelf that
looked separate but, when you picked them up, were all of a piece.
A sham for reassurance.
And his holidays were like that. AloneAloneAloneAlone.
Now, he sat with his head bowed against the steering wheel
of his car and breathed in the bitter chill air. It tasted like the
coming
of night, the coming of winter and the long dormant season when the
sky dropped white sheets over the world like a summer resident
winterizing a home. They covered everything against the dust so that
all would be in readiness for their return come summer. And if they
didn't make it back the next summer, it would wait. It could always
wait.
He opened his eyes and sighed, then shivered. It was cold.
It seemed that lately it was always cold. He got out of the car and
went inside.
Dark here. Dark when he had left in the morning for his run,
not yet light when he had left again after his shower for work. He
moved in constant darkness these days. The light was harsh, brutal,
revealing to him things about himself that he didn't like. Didn't like to
admit. And so, like all creatures of the night, he shunned the light.
He stripped slowly, mechanically, shedding his formal
presence almost gratefully. In the shower he stood for a long time
in the steam, feeling the hot water wash away the physical and
emotional grime of his day's work.
Almost December. Almost Thanksgiving.
This thought brought with it the memory of the unwelcome
task he had undertaken earlier this week. Margaret Scully had called
and for once he had felt like talking. But when he realized that *this*
call had a purpose, and understood what that purpose was, he cursed
himself for picking up.
He had had no
idea.
She had asked him to accompany her to a small shop he had
never visited before. The stone had been there -- Scully's stone. The
one he had sworn time and time again he would never see. It was his
*job* to prevent that stone from being carved as surely as if he had
been given the task of staying the sculptor's hand.
He had felt the sickness wash over him when she relayed, in
quiet, wavering tones, her request. He had felt revulsion upon entering
the shop. But when the man had unveiled the thick gray tablet with its
sad, short, incomplete story, a wave of panic had washed over him. It
was as if simply *seeing* the stone made its pronouncement true. Her
life had begun a scant thirty years ago. On February 23rd, he knew,
though the marker gave no date. There was no closing date. It seemed
Mrs. Scully had thought noting the precise start of her daughter's life
without noting the precise end might arouse questions. The round
figures of the years were anonymous and *safe* and distanced the
casual viewer from the tragedy they represented. They hid the fact that
there was no exact date because there was no body, no certainty.
That there might never be any certainty. They denied what had
happened to her. They relegated their owner to the status of some
historical icon, depersonalized her, as it were. The words beneath
seemed innocuous enough to all but the initiate:
"The Spirit is the Truth."
Dana Scully had been sacrificed to the truth.
And Mulder knew this, but he could not accept it. With the
part of his brain that delighted in rainbows even after he had learned the
very scientific nature of their composition, the part that always marveled
at the appearance of the first star of evening in the precise position the
astronomers said it would hold, he still maintained the stubborn belief
that she would be found -- alive. He would not stop believing because he
*could* not. To admit that Scully was gone would be to admit that the
universe was fundamentally unstable, that things might not always be
as they had been and should be, that the sun *might not* come up in
the morning or that gravity *might not* hold them to the earth as it spun
its way through time and space. In the midst of the rational it was the
irrational that kept him sane.
And he had told Mrs. Scully this -- all of it -- if not in words,
then in the look in his eyes when he told her that they couldn't give up.
But she, it appeared, had given up. And if Margaret Scully had given
up on her daughter, who was he to hope?
He bowed his head under the shower head and the hot water
streamed down his cheeks in place of the tears he could not shed.
He towelled himself roughly and changed into jeans and a
long-sleeved t-shirt. He flopped onto his couch and closed his eyes.
The time was growing short. It had always been an
indeterminable length, like a string whose other end he could not
see. But he felt it as surely as the trees felt the slowing of the sap,
felt the time spinning away into nothingness. And he had no idea
what was beyond the end. If he never found her. . . .
He remembered reading of old maps drawn before the
circumnavigation of the world. The cartographers, unsure of what
lay beyond the reaches of the charted waters, had written carefully,
"Here there be dragons." An admission of their shortcomings as well
as a clear warning to those who would trespass the limits of
experience in search of further knowledge. "Go back. Dangerous
waters ahead. Enter at your own risk."
And that's what his own life had been. A voyage into the
abyss, stepping out into the darkness with both the faith and fear of a
child, a fascination with the night and a healthy dose of fear. But he
had not meant to risk anyone else in his explorations.
He squeezed his eyes more tightly shut and sent up a final,
desperate petition.
"Please. Please bring her home to me. It's all I want for
Christmas. . . ." He squeezed his eyes shut so tightly his face hurt,
but still he prayed. Finally, he opened his eyes and stared at the
television screen where a video was playing. He fast forwarded it, not
paying attention, his mind still on his plea.
The phone rang. . . .
For the rest of the story, please go watch "One Breath". . . .
