Rating: PG so far
Category: Drama, Alternate universe
Timeline: season 5
Summary: Mulder and Scully face a mystery in the making: the mystery of their own lives.
Disclaimer: I do not own, I merely play. Will restore them afterwards (or what's left of them)
Special Note: Seeing as this is an alternate universe, the appearance of Mr Chris Carter should not mean this is a fic which contains a real person. After all, there are no similarities between the real Mr Carter and my fictional one. I could have just as easily replaced him with another name, or label him simply 'The Creator'. He is merely an instrumental character and not the focus of the story. This is a story that explores possibilities – and the relationship between author and story has always fascinated me.
THE X FILES – THE FINE LINE
There are sometimes certain patterns that one would rather not see; truths that some would better ignore than come to face. Sometimes we are afraid of a greater happiness as much as we fear blind suffering. Because of the fine line that separates them – we can't say. And then we sacrifice our love for the truth so this lie that 'protects' us can survive. We go around in circles, fearing the obvious, becoming ridiculous in the shields we raise to protect what is already out in the open. Ignorance has taken the place of denial. Instead of waiting for a higher power to set the matters straight, I suggest taking your life in your own hands – taking action. Your existence has been manipulated for too long by powers natural or supernatural. Whether this manipulation was partly your fault – I can't say. But now I know you have the power to break free. TO SPECIAL AGENT FOX MULDER, FBI, 10:13 AM, 16th of July 1999
The Creator found out of its creation's existence. But even worse, the creation found out of its Creator in a brutal way. Not of a God that sets justice and protects, but of a simple man whose sense of justice has been shattered from living in an equally horrifying world like that which he had created. A man, whose spiritual superiority ranked only in his power to maneuver words, words that controlled their lives, and could end them, like so many other lives were ended at his mere whim. A man whose power of creation was destructive. A Puppeteer, not a God. The realization, I must admit, was startling, even for a man who believes in extreme possibilities.
I left that note for him at the FBI desk, hoping to repair some of the damages that had already been done. Apart from the obvious message of taking life into his own hands, the note also had a hidden message that only few people could decipher. It was a call for a rebellion, a little revenge at the authority of the Creator - for me, and hopefully for them too.
At the same time, it meant the discovery of the ultimate truth, which the Creator preferred to leave out there.
ONE WEEK EARLIER
'Mr. Carter, on line two, someone you're gonna wanna talk to."
"Thanks, Joanne.'
The connection was made.
"Hello?"
"Hey, David, what's up?"
"I'm sorry. Who am I speaking to?"
"It's me, David. Shoot."
"Sir, I am Special agent Fox Mulder with the FBI and I want to inform you that you are taken into protective custody for questioning."
"Question me about what?"
"A conspiracy against the American public."
Later, the rest of the team members watched startled as real FBI agents were carrying Chris Carter away. The press was given restricted access so the story did not make the papers.
I had somehow managed to deceive, inveigle and obfuscate my way into the middle of the events, happening to be in the right place at the right time.
"Please', I asked a police guard, 'one of many who were guarding the 1013 bungalow. 'I'm here to see Mr. Carter. See, I won this contest and..."
"Mr. Carter is at the police station. He's being detained."
"Detained?! For what?"
"I don't have all the information myself."
"What about the other staff members?"
"They're on house arrest, being charged with complicity. Nobody is allowed to come into contact with them."
I left the clueless police guard and made my way towards the police station out of some blind faith, without questioning myself about the elevated language used by the guard and the fact that his face looked somewhat familiar. Upon reaching the station I met with two even more familiar looking people. My first thought was 'well, how nice of them to check on their jailed friend' – but soon I realized that they were on the accusing side and not who they appeared to be.
I sometimes look at The X Files with the distinct impression I'm watching Mulder and Scully and not some actors playing their roles. This impression was heightened and amplified as I watched these two people exiting the police station engaged in intimate conversation with each other. I watched them for a few seconds then I mustered up all my courage and approached them.
'Agent Mulder, agent Scully. I heard about this case you're working on. I want to help."
They exchanged their usual pair of looks. This took a while, then Mulder asked me:
"How can you help us?"
"By giving you the information that I suppose will be hard to gather from the involved parties."
Another set of looks.
"Can you prove it?"
"You'll be free to crosscheck it and verify it with other sources. Anyone who cares for the truth will confirm my story."
This time I knew I got their attention. Even if I was there to mislead them, either way, they wanted to hear what I had to say.
They trusted no one. So I haven't been told what Carter had told them, or whether he had told them anything at all. My guess was that he was following his own policy and denied everything. I was honest with them, even if that meant being blunt. I laid it out in the open and left them to decide whether my story was worth believing. I told them how their lives started out as a one-man vision, and how this one man fought to bring his fantasy to life. I told them about the other people involved in this project, about the worldwide fans, about how 'real' life decided fiction. About how they had little or no control over their lives. At first, I could tell by their disbelieving yet shocked expressions that they were wondering which lie to believe. Then they left me, after asking me for a phone number or an address. The next day, when I met them again, I knew my story had been confirmed and they believed it. Even Scully. Later, when I was alone with Mulder I asked him what could possibly have made her believe. He told me that an encounter with her real life correspondent and confirmation of the real reason for the ordeal of her abduction and sterility. That for one woman to have her baby another was left barren. That's when I told him this wasn't the only reason, that another particularly sick mind was behind all this. That the tragedy of it all was that all was reasonless.
Anyway, if these confirmations they had managed to gather by then weren't enough, they were about to experience themselves the truth of what I had said. I later learnt that from the first night in jail, Carter had asked for pen and paper. It was denied at first, because he wouldn't say a word or cooperate with the investigation, but somehow, he had managed to get what he wanted, as always.
Afterwards, it was only a matter of time before he was released from prison a couple of days later by none other than Fox Mulder. Carter hadn't engaged Scully in the same game because he wanted trouble between them. She would feel frustrated, like everyone else, not understanding the reason behind Mulder's illogical course of actions. Once free, the Creator pursued his game of advanced mind control, until something unexpected happened. One of his acolytes decided to join in the fun by testing Mulder's boundaries: how far would he go out of character? Three days of fierce bantering between a frustrated Scully and an equally confused Mulder did little however to destroy the strong beyond words bond they shared. The Creator knew that from the start and never hoped or desired to change that. But one of the scriptwriters dared Mulder to change even that. Imagining that in an unexplainable crisis of insanity, Mulder had let Carter go, he thought that by recreating the same moment he could have him hurt Scully. How far would he go – was the question on everybody's minds but nobody dared to make it happen and face the consequences. Until DD. He had the courage and talent to do it. He tried it, and to everybody's surprise and the Creator's horror, failed. He had watched DD's attempts from the shadows, not encouraging them but not blocking them. And the outcome meant one thing for him: resistance was possible. He dismissed DD and tried his hand at it. But Mulder willfully disobeyed. I was there. I saw it all happen, and I understood everything:
Three days after Carter's clever escape from prison, I was in Mulder's apartment and they were giving me an 'off the record interrogatory'. There was nothing more I could tell them though that they didn't already know or hinted. That's why Mulder was understandingly terrified, which was very inconvenient because it made him more vulnerable and unable to fight the dominance. Scully wouldn't admit that she believed my theory but she was genuinely concerned. She started to say something about locking Mulder up somewhere for his own sake as well as the others. I looked up curiously at her uncharacteristic words, and wondered why would Carter want to have Mulder removed. I was considering that when I should have set my mind to work on a double mode: while processing one's action to foresee and interpret the other's reaction. Like the man in charge was doing. When Mulder raised and did his own out of character thing by smashing the small coffee table to the floor- I knew that Carter wasn't in charge anymore. He tended to focus completely. Without trying to temper him or talk him out of his fit, how the true Scully – or any reasonable person, for that matter – would have done; Scully wordlessly made her way towards the phone. Mulder cut her way and that's when the height discrepancy between the two of them shocked me. Mulder was more than just taller than her, he deliberately made himself bigger, more threatening – and I realized suddenly that he was going to hit her. Before he raised his hand, Scully pulled out her gun. Mulder slapped it out of her hand. At that moment, a horrified Scully realized she was being played. There was no way she would've let the gun go that easily. And me, realizing that, I knew who was the frustrated individual who was making Scully lose this fight. Though I was seeing clearly the course of the events and possibly what they were leading to, I had second thoughts about interfering. If I was to have a talk with somebody at the time, it would have been with the men in charge to try and explain to them that they weren't dealing with fictional characters anymore: that what for them meant a 'little fun' here was a matter of life and death. Mulder brought his arm down and hit her, bringing her to the floor with the force of his blow. She did not make any move, did not say a word. By that time I was positively terrified and revolted at the same time. Then Mulder bent down and straddled her body, pinning her there. And then froze. The next course of action that had been dictated to him meant denying an even more defined part of him than the part that wouldn't allow him to free a prisoner. While Mulder was fighting his alter ego, and I was watching him closely – I noticed again a change in the directory force. Mulder was almost winning the battle: his grip on Scully had loosened and he was about to slide off her. But in the next moment, his tormented expression returned, and his big hands moved to her neck, his fingers expertly examining the most vulnerable point. I started to scream and instinctively jumped to stop him. When I regained my composure, I realized that Mulder wasn't going to give in: he had managed to stay in control. He was still leaning over Scully, but his fingers were caressing where they had previously threatened to hurt. When he looked up, I saw in his eyes the intensity of the battle he had won. It was over.
CARTER'S POINT OF VIEW
When they arrested me, it felt funny, till the point of absurdity. Contrived in a bizarre way, that I was called to answer for the fact that I brought their world to life. Okay, so this world wasn't all honey and roses, but is my world any better? At least they had each other – a gift I never taught them or intended them to cherish. They were to take everything for granted, and this is what I tried to explain to them. But I really fell into my own trap, because they trusted no one.
The first day was surreal to say the least. I couldn't gather my thoughts. They came to interrogate me. This used to be my dream, to talk to them. Now it became a challenge. I was doing pretty well in avoiding Mulder's clever tactics, answering questions with questions and making vague statements. But then Mulder told me to cut the crap. He said he knew all about me.
"If you'd really understood all about me, you'd also know you have no right to arrest me."
"You're not officially under arrest ", Mulder said, his voice softening. Oh, Mulder, always such a sucker. "We're giving you a chance to straighten things up."
"You mean change things. Write a happy end. Sorry. It's beyond me." I answered sincerely.
"Then you are making a crime. You are willingly hurting real people. Suddenly, it's not just imagination anymore."
"For me, you'll always be imagination, Mulder. No matter how much you'd beg to differ. And I own you, I own your whole world – and I'll be an unmerciful God."
Mulder stared at me. At that point Scully came forward and told him:
"Mulder, what this man is telling you is a fantasy, the product of a delusional mind. "Or something like that.
They left and then it dawned on me. I had them and I could prove it, to save myself. I asked for instruments to write with and a bunch of papers. They had the audacity to refuse. Probably Mulder instructed them in this sense. But when Frank Spotnitz came to visit me the following day, I managed to transmit my wish to him. A while afterwards, my assistant, Joanne, came to my cell with a notepad and my pen. Now, I thought grimly, it was only a matter of time. I decided however, that I would not mess up with them more than necessary. After all, I still needed them for the Larger Plan. Mulder came to me the next day, blank faced and wordless. I was going to keep him in check for a while. Just him.
Everything seemed in order. But there were complications. There was somebody, a girl, who had talked to Mulder and Scully. She had told them about me. My source confirmed it. I was sure she understood what was happening, how Mulder was being played and so on. But I couldn't state if the situation was dangerous and if so, to what level. If she knew, she could tell Mulder. How much could Mulder's knowledge and inner determination to fight me ruin my plans? Could he really stand up to me? I immediately thought of Pusher. But Vince was an idiot –if I let him gained too much control, it would probably have been the death of the X files. Anyway, I had to know what the limits of my power, of my control were, I thought to test that. I had the opportunity, sooner than I expected, when David came to me with the same idea. But David is a theoretician, a self made philosopher – while I meant business. After a few minutes of moral banter, done for the sake of conversation, David decided to take the matter in hand and curiosity got the better of him. I was observing anxiously, ready at any time to step in. At first, it was all going according to plan. But then, I sensed Mulder resisting. First mentally, then almost immediately afterwards, in exteriorized actions. David noticed it too and retreated, sitting back with an expression of amazed bewilderment on his face. This was a mere mind game to him and losing didn't upset him. Things were rather different with me. I took the lead at once and I felt Mulder jump at the force of my words. I smiled in joy – he knows who's the boss around here – but my smile quickly faded because as soon as I pushed him over the edge, he resisted me in a calm, stable manner – like he had found his way: a way to delude me.
Believe me: I had no intention of making him hurt Scully. I was going to stop him at a certain point: Before he killed her. But I needed to know. And now that I found my answer I wished I had remained ignorant.