Disclaimer: I own nothing. The X-Files belongs to Chris Carter and 1013 Productions; the title and poem belong to Margaret Atwood (with apologies), excerpted from her In the Secular Night found in Morning in the Burned House. The Ave Maria is as far as I know public domain.

Spoilers/Setting: Mytharc as a whole up until the end of cancer arc (beginning of fifth season). If you want episodic specifics, they are Little Green Men, The Host, Duane Barry/Ascension/One Breath, Anasazi/The Blessing Way/Paper Clip, Memento Mori, and Redux II.

Notes: I kept thinking to myself as I wrote this This is getting out of hand. The general premise I had in mind somehow mutated from Scully, Mulder, and faith to the present The borderline existentialist fic about Scully, Mulder, and faith that shows how all the arcs are really the same one. So I hope this works; and if not, please don't be afraid to say so. This is experimental in the extreme.

There is so much silence between the words,

You say. You say, the sensed absence

Of God and the sensed presence

Amount to much the same thing,

Only in reverse.

Somewhere between your separation on the X-Files and the brush of your hand against his, you realize he loves you.

Absence makes the heart grow fonder, or so they say: an adage that has stood the test of time to be proven either in a distance that festers or a closeness that grows, until either way, the term absence is relative. Unlikely as it had seemed, the latter had implied itself in your case; and yet, here you sit in a cramped office that reeks of darkness and dinginess, sunflower seed shells scattered not unknowingly, but uncaringly, on the floor.

Such is the nature of love, here, being what it is; not yet leaning toward the realm of the romantic, and certainly not toward the trite. It is at once a tangle of the simple and the complex; steadfast in its presence; its continued strength despite all odds remarkable, and only adding to its strength and determination. What had begun only as a spite against the world remained, and grew in intensity.

"I still have you," Mulder had murmured a moment ago, adding you to a very short list otherwise comprised of himself and his work. An assurance of fact, it was mixed with words left unspoken, though after a year, you understand.

Thus, you are inseparable from a thousand other things, rooted in his life and work through the bonds of need and friendship. While once you would have minded, you are unsurprised to find that now, you don't.

The moment is prominent in your mind only for its indistinguishable commonality that here, in the present, cannot be ignored. Unknown to you, it is one you will come to cherish in the months that will follow; for, in spite of all its melancholy, here there is a promise of something greater to which you aspire; that you seek to find; that you don't yet quite believe in.

A cricket chirps its solitude in some unseen corner of the office that is no longer yours, and you stop for moment in a retrospect that throws everything into anachronistic light. Future and past meet, indistinguishable, and Mulder does not look up at you.

The chirping crescendos, and stops. You walk away before it begins again.

oOo

The week is one of revelations.

Not two days later, you find yourself easing your body, weary from a day of teaching young students how to dissect and analyze death, onto a little known bench along the Potomac. The cold air is still and refreshing. You wonder if you were ever that young.

Mulder, of course, sits next to you, having called you four hours ago, saying about as many words, and hanging up. It was his tone, rather than his abruptness, that startled you. These days he is a long line of quiet dejection troubled by intermittent outbursts of frustration he can no longer hold to himself. You watch him stand as if he can no longer bear to sit; pace with his back to you as if he isn't the Mulder you've always known.

"They don't want us working together, Scully," he says, turning toward your understanding face, filled with frustration that filters, diffused in the night air, from his psyche to yours. It reflects your own.

"And right now, that's the only reason I can think of to stay. "

In that sentence, you are not equated to his work, but the purpose for which he works. Somehow, in the course of a year, you have become as dear to him as his lost sister, or the idea of her. There is a driving force that threatens to crush him where he stands still, and it simultaneously honors and frightens you to know part of that energy belongs to you.

For the first time, you realize he's come to need you without even knowing it himself. It brings a sense of isolation that here, you cannot shake. Your bright red hair blows in the light wind and glows in the night, and in the chill darkness warmed only by faint, blurred specks of reflected streetlights, you could be the only two people in the world.

oOo

Months later, you think that same feeling gave you a false sense of security, as deceptive as it was odd. The strangeness derived not from the fact of its existence, so much as the conditions under which it formed – conditions to which it then clung, like a shroud: a veiling desperation, or desperation veiled. You worked, alone, with only Mulder by your side. The world was closed off for you by your actions, either passive or active; at that now-distant point, you hadn't cared which. The veil slipped, obscuring the specter that would grow, morphing into what would become the rest of your life.

This time, it was you making a call to Mulder that, unknown to you, would end in your screams for help. Blood on the doorframes and glass on the floor; and you're dragged, nearly unconscious, over pavement and lawn, and then you are unconscious. The darkness of a car trunk, stale air polluted by fear and half-formed thoughts, the stink of adrenaline mixed with blood. The car needs a tune up. The side of your head pressed to the floor of the trunk swells with it all.

You've lost your cross, or it's been torn from around your neck, and you silently wish you knew which. Its reassuring slight weight against your chest isn't there, and you think all hope is lost because of it; a final act, or loss, terrifying in the symbolic implications that manifest themselves unremittingly in your mind. It wasn't meant to happen, you think frantically, and then your fear takes you somewhere outside yourself where the hands wrestling with your desperately straining bound arms are just a fact. Blind calm battles blind terror, contradictory and removed.

Hail Mary, full of grace, your mind thinks somewhere where you are not. The Lord is with thee…

No one comes. You exist in darkness, and are alone.

oOo

Darkness is the absence of light, or perhaps the absence of life itself. There is a line drawn in between the two, one that is remarkably easier to cross than one might think. You know nothing; and perhaps you are nothing.

There is lightness, and there is darkness: the artificial day. Repetition fades even as you do, and the familiar verses fail you as the idea of reality does. Time exists, and this is all you know.

The Lord is with thee, echoes back to you through time and space, undefined. You shudder in relief, and know you must exist.

oOo

You wake in a hospital, and know you're alive. It's enough, before you slip again into darkness, now reassuring, and stark of lakes and boats and heavy obscuring fogs which transform and mutate what light comes from whatever unknown source, your stilled hair hanging heavy in the air the only familiar and bright thing about the place. You exist in darkness, and in dreaming, believe it was a dream.

oOo

You wake again to your sister, and decide she was the one permeating your dreams with metaphysical ideas. You muster up enough energy to smile at her, and accept your mother's hug. They stay beside you, and lying still, you watch the bloodstained light from the window through the darkness of your eyelids, marked by delicate lines of capillaries against the delicacy of the skin they run through. The world is monochrome.

And then, there's Mulder, who you heard Melissa calling only five minutes ago. He holds your hand, briefly, and returns your cross. It's late, and you feel nothing at its return, though you desperately want to.

You saw in his eyes that he would come back, longstanding habits of politeness barely overriding his need to be with you a little longer; and you realize you don't know how long you've been gone. You requested a magazine, saw the date had changed from August to November, and descended again into the familiarity of nothingness.

This is how Mulder finds you.

You think, inanely, that your roles have again switched since you were taken, but it's not entirely true: he still needs you, and you don't need anyone. You let Mulder cling to you, and for the first time, you cry until you believe that you do need him, after all. Your cross hangs around your neck, and impresses between you and Mulder a mark: a claim, or a tattoo. You try to pray, but sense nothing; and think again, that perhaps you are nothing, and never were.

The air is still and empty, and the silence condemns you. You remind yourself you're still alive, and move on.

oOo

You order tests run on yourself, and then cancel them, deciding you're not ready or you don't want to know (you can't decide which); but the note of command has come back into your voice, and you feel every inch the petite doctor, and, when your mom brings your heels, the FBI agent you once were.

You're impatient to begin building up the muscle that has atrophied in your absence, to renew your once-high endurance, because without it, you feel lost and sickly. In the process, you lose fifteen pounds you didn't know you had to lose, and though you look sharper and more angular, it's a test of revival; an unwanted rebirth you do your best to make unacknowledged as possible. Your voice drops an octave in half a year, seemingly the final loss of what innocence you had left. It slips away from you, uncaring.

Released, people avoid you. There is a burning in the back of your mind, now, quiet and uncomfortable until you are used to it. It almost seems to fade with your acceptance, blending into the woodwork of your mind, synonymous with your thoughts, or the cause of them. It clashes with your innermost self, your science, and your religion; and you are changed. Mulder worries over you, because he recognizes the path you're on, or so he tells you. Angry, you brush him off.

Time, once on the peripheral edges of both your lines of vision, has entered the equation, if not to conflict with fact, then to question it. What was once his quest has now become yours as well, as, already inseparable, you become the quest.

oOo

You wear your cross, once a constant against your neck, sporadically, for no reason but that you feel like it.

Your mother commented once at Sunday brunch, and you brushed her off. She looked hurt, but not surprised, and you wonder if that should have been your first clue. You stop attending mass, after that.

And then with a suddenness that startles you out of the lethargy of the passing weeks, Mulder is dead, and you're on the edge of a breakdown, and you only want to cry and cry on your mother's shoulder. Missy tries to tell you she can feel your pain, that she can feel Mulder alive in some far off distant place she can only designate as somewhere.

Like hell you can, you want to scream in your sister's face, because she has no idea of the magnitude of your loss, and even if you could confine it for examination and introspection, you couldn't possibly begin to describe it. You want no hopes to hold on to, unfulfilled.

The world, desiccated, implodes; and you are now the only one present to feel the effects and aftershocks of its torturous survival. You go to sleep only to wake up to nightmares and knocks on the door, sweating in your freezing apartment.

The next day, you arrive at the FBI via the front doors, the humiliation you should be feeling drowned by the gnawing in your stomach and the burning in your brain.

You fail the security test, though you have nothing on you.

"You wearing a necklace?" asks the security guard, wand over the back of your neck.

Started, you turn around, hand automatically pressing where the charm would have.

"No, no, not today," you say softly.

It is because of the absence of your cross that you find an implant where the clasp should have rested. Violated, you have it removed.

Later, you wish you never had, thinking you should have taken it as a sign.

oOo

You know, intellectually, that the bullet in your sister's brain was meant for you; you've lived in fear of it for the past two weeks, picking up the flack that was paranoia well enough to make Mulder proud.

To you, it sounds inaccurate; for you have sat unharmed and living, if fearful, for the past month. It's a broken resurrection Sunday, Mulder's life for your sister's. Your life for your sister's. It makes no sense, however you mull it over, and breaks upon you at the same time with perfect clarity. You want to sleep.

Your eyes burn against the rush of cold air from the vent, and sit still. Here your sister died for you, her life at the same time bargained for your partner's in a cruel twist of the Fates, of a game you don't understand and don't care to. You sense God's presence here, for the first time in a long time, and you wish you hadn't. It feels like a punishment.

Perhaps things greater than oneself should be left alone; but there has always been a streak of defiance in you, and you rebel. The flame that burns in your mind is now unquenchable with a thirst for revenge for too many things to count. You want justice.

You close your eyes as Mulder pulls you against him, and stay that way for quite some time. Here, you are the only two people in the world that is only of your own making.

The realization burns. Your sister's presence haunts you.

oOo

You realize his once steely reassurance of your solid presence had gone from calm assurance to a dangling thread from which his hope hung, now laced with desperation and reassurance that fluctuated with normality. Time exists, as do you; separate variables that must surrender to the role of either the independent or the dependent.

You know yours.

It's no surprise that for some time you've felt like a time bomb; and now, in a terrycloth robe, sans makeup and hair disheveled, you feel as if at long last, you've detonated. You are exhausted mentally and emotionally, having stared your own mortality in the face, and it has sapped your vibrancy and cost you your beauty.

Time becomes fear, to take root in your very marrow, obfuscating the thoughts in your mind. Mulder, stands before you in black to your white. The world is monochrome.

Illusions drop and fade, as they always must in such settings, prompted by fear and driven by desperation. You stand, small and tired and unglamorous, raw and unartificial; simultaneously a relief, and a humiliation, for which the will to feel embarrassment eludes you. Accepting of you in your totality, he gently takes you against him, and under his chin, you no longer find the will to care.

Hail Mary, full of grace, your mind whispers. A tear slips down your cheek, involuntarily; a rosary through your fingers. The answer echoes through space and half a year before it reaches you, now weak on a hospital bed, your lips forming the words softly, soundlessly, a thousand times in the interim.

The Lord is with thee.

And once again, you are alive.