Author: Melanie

Disclaimer: They don't belong to me. They never belonged to me. They never will belong to me. Don't sue.

Spoilers: This Is Not Happening

Feedback: Only if you want, I'm only putting this up because I felt compelled to do a post-ep for this. So here it is.



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This is not happening, this is not happening.

She kept repeating those words, low and quickly like they would save her when nothing else could. When she became aware that we were there, she looked up at us out of empty eyes.

"He's gone," she said. Literally, it turned out, she meant Jeremiah. But at the time, I thought she meant Mulder. I was inclined to agree with her. We had rushed him to the hospital but without much hope. He had no vitals, and we were sure he didn't have a chance. We were right. He was DOA.

Another one.

My son, I couldn't help thinking about my son. He was disappeared at the age of four, from the park where he was playing catch with his mother, Lisa. My wife. He had gone to find a ball he'd thrown into the woods and he'd never come back. But we found him two years later, lying face down in the middle of an Illinois farmer's field. Meanwhile, Lisa had become a True Believer and joined a UFO cult. She maintained that the 'experiments' had killed him, and when they had, the aliens had returned what was no longer useful to them.

I'm positive that it was a simple case of kidnaping. I don't believe Lisa, and I don't believe Monica, when they say that something more happened to him. All the evidence points to kidnaping, and I go by the evidence, not by blind faith and not by feelings. Nonetheless the perpetrator was never caught.

I would like to believe that Mulder was also simply kidnaped, one way or the other. But there's just a shade to much evidence to the contrary, and I can't believe that beyond the shadow of a doubt. Of course, it doesn't matter much, now that he's dead. A body to match the gravestone he had made for himself. Strangely enough, however, they couldn't find a trace of the mysterious disease that was killing him before he disappeared. Agent Scully apparently found some significance in that.

"The experiments," she said breathily, "they cured him." I saw tears well up in her eyes as she looked at the results of the one autopsy she would never have been able to perform herself. "They cured him and they killed him."

She set down the clipboard just a little too hard and walked quickly out of the room. I let her. I don't know where she went, but I called her at home later and she was there safely, so I left her to heal herself. I couldn't have helped her heal this wound even if she would have let me. As soon as I set down the telephone from calling her, it rang again.

"John. It's Monica."

"Monica. What's wrong?" I went over the paperwork and verifications required to close a case and couldn't think of any that we'd left undone.

"Nothing. John, are you ok?" Oh, good Lord, she was going to start being all psychiatrist on me. No, I wasn't thrilled that we had found Mulder dead, but I'd seen far worse in my career.

"Yes. I'm fine."

"Good, I'm glad. Just checking. I'll let you go then." I was surprised by her abruptness. Perversely, I suddenly had the urge to talk to her. It had been such a long time. She was such a good listener. And I really was frustrated by my experiences during the past few months.

"He was Don Quixote, Monica."

"Excuse me?"

"Mulder. He was a modern Don Quixote, battling windmills and vanquishing flocks of sheep and dreaming impossible dreams."

"And, from what I've heard, righting wrongs wherever he could find them. The world needs more people like him." Not what I was getting at, actually.

"Yes, possibly, but he really was over the edge. He had no fear, that's why he got abducted, or kidnaped. I've read all of his files. He would go to incredible lengths, and no small expense for the Bureau, to find the truth. With a capital T."

"Do you think he found it?"

"I don't know. I'm not sure his Truth was there to be found. Truth is subjective." Monica didn't respond for a moment.

"You have changed since you transferred, John. When I knew you it would have been the facts and only the facts. Now you talk about truth being subjective?"

"I've seen a lot in these past few months, Monica. Not enough to shake my beliefs like Scully's have been, but there's some strange stuff in that filing cabinet. The only explanation I can come up with for it is that two people, looking at the same thing, can see two different things. See what they want to see. So truth is subjective."

"Sometimes the ones who see the strangest truths are the ones who are closest to what is real, not what everybody expects to see."

"Sometimes. And sometimes they expect to see strange truths."

"And Agent Scully? From what I've heard of her, she never expected to see anything she couldn't explain."

"She didn't, not at first."

"Oh?"

"For the first several years, nothing happened that she couldn't explain. Not even being abducted shook her faith."

"She was abducted?"

"Yeah," I said musingly. "She was abducted and she got cancer."

"So why does she believe now?" I stopped short at spilling my eccentric partner's secret.

"I don't know." We sat silent for a moment, then she said something about having paperwork to finish. I hung the phone up slowly.

I had lied to Monica. I knew what had changed for Scully. If Mulder was Don Quixote, then Scully was Aldanza. Don's Dulcinea. To be slowly converted to Don's way of thinking. I don't know which came first, the belief or the love, but I'm sure that they came within a short time of each other. Now he had left his Dulcinea alone and grieving, true to the story. And there was nothing anybody could do for her.

Suddenly the phone rang again.

"Doggett."

"Agent Doggett, it's Skinner. Agent Mulder's body has disappeared."