Tricking people becomes as easy as breathing. He walks around under the pretense of being someone else all the time. Someone older, appropriate for that job he's applying for to earn some money before moving to the next town, someone who won't raise suspicion.
The hard part is to not get lost into the trick.
He gets up and looks himself in the mirror and talks to himself briefly.
"You are Jackson Van de Kamp," he says, and he repeats it twice, sometimes more.
It feels like no one else in the world knows that except the people who want to hunt him down. He takes the appearances of other guests and sneaks into unoccupied hotel rooms, like a ghost, only seen by himself and CCTV cameras. He once tricked a concierge into believing his library card was a credit card with funds, but he kept imagining the disapproving, disappointed look in his parents eyes so he hasn't done it again.
Jackson never stays too long in one place and never uses his real name but whenever he arrives to a new place he goes to buy some daisies (mom's favourites) and a second hand paperback cowboy novel (dad's favourites) and leaves them at random tombstones in the local cemetery.
He cries. For them, for the loss of his family.
He cries a lot. He cries alone and in places where he doesn't need to appear to be anyone else. He is alone. An orphan. He doesn't even know how to begin to mourn them...
He is sixteen years old. His life wasn't supposed to be like this.
Only…
Only deep down he knows his life was always supposed to be like this. He is just fulfilling a long old prophecy issued by a long forgotten oracle, and he only gets to know what it says as he lives to face its consequences. It's so, so fucked up that sometimes it suffocates him at night.
It's been six months and three states when he sees it in a gas station just outside Nashville: a postcard of a windmill with blades made of old CDs. He buys it on a whim but he doesn't have any address to send it to.
He keeps it in his backpack nevertheless. It makes him feel marginally less alone.
A month later he meets a girl while working as a bartender in a hole in the wall in Paducah. She's older than him but not overly so, he's only appearing to be a guy in his twenties, but she asks him for his name and he suddenly freezes. He has given fake names a thousand times by now but somehow he refuses to give this girl with the greenest eyes and the prettiest smile he has ever seen, a name that's not his own. He can't give her his real name either so he gives her none.
He reaches to her that night, in dreams. He tries, he's not sure how exactly this works because the times they have connected through dreams before have always been completely unintentional on his part.
He grabs the postal from his backpack, the edges are a little bent but he holds onto it for guidance and closes his eyes, tries to fall asleep thinking of her, of what he knows of her.
He walks into a room he doesn't recognize, a kitchen with a big table. She's standing with her back to him, her hair is shorter, brighter, redder.
When she turns around she also looks younger, not too young, but younger. She smiles at him with recognition but doesn't take another step to approach him, and he is glad for it.
"What is the name you gave me?" he asks.
"William."
"He thinks about it for half a seconds, rolls it around to get the feel of it. "William."
It doesn't feel familiar but he doesn't hate it. He doesn't see himself as a William but he doesn't really see himself as any other name than his either. William is okay. Common enough. No, he doesn't hate it.
He turns around to go but he doesn't know where to go. He doesn't control this dream, it's like he is a guest here.
"Are you okay?"
Her voice is strong but kind. He likes it.
"I'm fine," he answers with composure.
She sighs and her smile broadens.
He wakes up.
He finds another postal of a windmill in Lawrence, near Kansas City. He feels tempted to buy some sparkly red shoes and click the heels together. There is no place like home and all that shit. Maybe a tornado will take him away and bring him back to a life where his parents are still alive.
He buys this postcard too and remembers that someone called her "Scully" while he was lying on the floor being bagged. He gives it a chance and looks for her on the Internet, searches for a redheaded female FBI agent called Scully. It's surprisingly easy to locate her, if you know where to look. There are a ton of blogs out there talking about weird shit that she has been involved with, like an investigation about a hundred cows suddenly dropping dead or chupacabra rumors. There are also a ton of scientific papers that could have been written by her, dealing with stuff no less weird than the blogs, including an invisible man and everything.
He doesn't get an exact address but he sends the postcard to the X Files department in the FBI Edgar Hoover Building, Washington DC.
He doesn't write anything else aside from where to send it to.
A week later he dreams with her, as in that they are both in the same dream. He's not sure who has reached for whom this time but if it is an intrusion, it's not unwelcome.
They are in a park, walking. It is sunny and warm and she looks older this time, but younger than when he saw her in person. Her hair is straighter, it reaches her shoulders and she smiles in a quiet, peaceful way.
"I walked you in this park when you were a baby," she says.
He looks around, nothing seems familiar. His hands look small, like they did when he was eight or nine years old.
"I loved my parents," he says, not entirely out of the blue. It seems important somehow that she understands this.
"I know."
They keep walking in silence. It's more comforting than he had previously thought it would be.
He turns seventeen. He has never been one to celebrate his birthday in a big fashion but his mother always made a cake and his father always ate half of it by himself. He misses them so, so much.
He cuts his hair and grows some poor excuse of a beard and goes to visit Graceland once he reaches Memphis, God knows why, he has never been a fan of Elvis or anything.
All this moving around is starting to make him feel restless. He remembers when his family moved back when he was ten and it was such a big deal, now he just takes his backpack and drives away.
She whirls him in a nightmare, because there is no way this one is on him. Someone has been shot in the chest and she is trying to contain the blood coming out the chest but the thick blood leaks from between her fingers pooling on the floor. He approaches them but before he can have clear picture everything changes and this time she's crying next to a coffin. He takes her hand and she looks at him with so much pain in her eyes that he wants to wake up. She starts to run so he runs after her. She shouts for someone but he doesn't understand the words and then they are showered in white light and she's dressed as a surgeon next to an operating table. On it, a little girl lies unmoving.
She looks at him but he can tell she is not really seeing him.
"I can't lose you, too," she says to whomever she is speaking to. Her voice breaks. His heart breaks a little too.
He looks like young Malcolm X for a while driving through Mississippi. Not only nobody picks up the resemblance but he is stopped by the police like a million times in two days. The amount of uneducated racism is so overwhelming that he drinks himself to a stupor one night.
He is not even sure he is dreaming this time. He is still in his cheap, technically unoccupied hotel room and everything is kind of spinning around him when she appears next to him out of thin air.
"Drink water," she says. She seats on the side of his bed.
"I'm not thirsty."
"It helps prevents dehydration from alcohol poisoning. Drink water. You'll thank me in the morning."
She is wearing a ponytail today. She looks very different with her hair up somehow.
"What are you, a doctor now?"
"I've been a doctor for quite some time now, actually."
Now that he thinks about it all those scientific papers he read some time ago were signed by a Doctor D. Scully so it makes sense, he should have thought about that.
She brushes the hair away from his sweaty forehead with cool, slender fingers.
"Can you do stuff too — brain stuff? Like I do?"
He asks because she never seems scared of the things he can do. His parents were terrified when he tried to begin to explain it to them and sent him to a psychiatrist, so there must be something there.
"No," she says calmy. "But your father could, for a while."
The next morning he wishes he had drunk like ten times more water because he feels like shit. His mouth tastes rotten and his head hurts with every little move. It's fucking terrible. He stays in the room for two days straight drinking gatorade and watching bad TV.
Charlotte feels closer, although he doesn't know to what. Like deja vu even though he has never been in Charlotte before. He doesn't feel as lonely or as sad anymore, either.
He picks another postcard, not even a windmill, some generic nice landscape and sends it to the same address as before.
This time he writes. "I'm still here." Not sure who he's trying to convince or reassure of the fact.
Somehow it's not strange that he doesn't know her full name yet, he has come to know other things about her, important stuff, like where she likes to go when she dreams of happy places, for instance.
He is a little surprised when he finds himself on a beach one night. It's sunny and empty, and there is a sharp shaped UFO being washed away by the sea. She is not there, instead there is someone else but he can't distinguish the figure, just the presence of someone being there resonating to him, like the feeling brought out by a familiar smell.
"I think I know who you are," he says to the presence.
"Somedays I think I know who I am, too."
The words don't come to him like a real voice, more like floating concepts that reach his brain. He has no certainty if the presence is male or female but he makes the educated guess that this must be his biological father, whomever that might be.
"So you are here."
The presence smiles, it feels to him like the presence smiles.
"I've always been here. Waiting."
If you asked Jackson, this is not a bad place to wait. The sun, the sea, the weird UFO. It's all weirdly peaceful, as if suspended in time and space, a parallel reality, a reality within a dream. Something.
"What have you been waiting for?"
"You. The end of the world. Either. Both."
It all seems logical to him in a way that it is completely irrational. He tries not to think too hard about the implications of any of that.
"I like this place."
"You can come whenever you need — whenever you want."
He takes off his shoes and watches the waves until he wakes up.
He doesn't dare to go back to Norfolk so he keeps driving and driving until he hits Atlantic City.
Boy is that a mistake.
The cassinos, the clubs, the night life… the city is full of security cameras and he cannot run from those. Before he can earn some extra cash to flee, they find him.
There are a couple of stern looking guys at the door of his hotel when he tries to go back to his room. He hides in plain sight in a coffee shop nearby and spots at least three dark, suspicious cars parked on the street. They'd have his car on the radar too, for sure, so he has almost no cash, his backpack and nothing else.
He is terrified, almost to the point of inaction. He is so scared that the fake image of himself starts to glitch so he makes a run for the bathroom and screams silently for help. He screams and screams and screams with his brain, and then tries to compose himself and goes back to his table to think of a plan and finish his coffee.
He takes out a notebook and a pen and starts to brainstorm his options. To everybody else he looks like a seventy year old doing a crossword.
He doesn't think of anything when he hears the barista call the order for some "Bob" like four times in a row, but the next thing he knows is that somebody is sitting next to him in his booth.
He tries very, very hard not to panic. "What do you think you are doing, young man. This entire booth is taken. Have some respect for your elders," he says with what he thinks is a convincing old man, grumpy thone.
He recognizes this man. It's the man that was with her back in Northfolk, her law enforcement partner or something.
His heart skips a beat. This means she might be near, she might have heard him, she might be able to help him.
The man smiles a little knowing smile. "I think I know who you are," he says, his own words thrown back at him make his breath catch in his throat.
"I don't—"
"We met on a beach. Actually we met for the first time a long, long time before that."
He doesn't know what to say. Across the street, a couple of guys that look like they could work for the WWE come out of a black sedan, like God, could they be any less conspicuous?
The man puts a hand on his forearm and he feels that sensation again, the one that comes from smelling something comforting and familiar.
"She's in the back with the car ready," he says in a low voice. Jackson hasn't confirmed his identity yet but that doesn't seem to slow him down even a little. "Her hair is rather easily to pick up from a distance."
Jackson nods once. Puts his notebook back on his backpack and they both get up, go for the back door. They make a run for the car and as soon as they are both inside, before even the doors has closed completely she hits the speed pedal.
Jackson is too afraid to check if they are being followed at high speed. He drops his façade. He's not even really conscious of having doing so until he hears her sigh.
"I told you Scully, we've never had the same auditive hallucinations at the same time before. It had to mean something."
If this is really them, if they are still together after all this time, Jackson has made a lot of wrong assumptions along the years.
"Where are we going?" he asks. His voice sounds high pitched and a little frantic, yet it's far calmer than how he feels.
"Wherever you'll be safe," she says like she has been ready to give him that answer for half a life.
"Are you guys, what, going to drop out everything and help me escape those douchebags forever?"
"Yes," he says not skipping a beat and that shuts Jackson up for about fifty whole seconds.
"Are you two for real? You can't do that! Who does that?"
The guy looks at him on the rearview mirror, smiles broadly and it reminds him of that feeling when the presence in the beach smiled.
"Well, we know where he gets all the scepticism from, Scully."
She looks quickly at her partner and then proceeds to ignore him.
"Yes, we can do exactly that," she answers him instead. "We have prepared ourselves for what might come for a long time," she says in a conciliatory tone.
Jackson breathes deep. Once, twice. Tries to wrap his mind about what's happening, what might happen from now on. These are his biological parents. He still doesn't know their names.
"Why do you call her Scully?"
"We are not big on first names around here." He then makes a face.
Well, he has been giving so many fake first names that he isn't big on them either, and maybe these people think of him as William but he is not sure he is ready to be called solely that.
"I'm Mulder, by the way. You can be VK, short for Van de Kamp."
Everything he is, everything he has is inside this car, with these strangers that aren't quite totally strangers. VK seems fitting, like a new beginning that doesn't forget the past. It feels like who he is deep inside.
"VK. Yes. I like that."