Peace.
I can't count all the autopsies I've performed in my life, all the organs I weighed, all the weird and disgusting things I've found in dead bodies.
I can't count them. Maybe he could.
He liked to recite the details from his favorite files to me. He liked to accumulate information in his stubborn head and sort it into unbelievable theories that sometimes weren't easily disproved.
But I never gave up.
On proving him wrong. On showing him the world outside our humid basement office.
On him.
On us.
On comforting him and protecting him.
While I'm opening the freezer door, I know it's the last time. I will never see him again. The coffin will be closed. It's better that way. I don't want them to remember him tortured, violated and lifeless.
I want them to remember him as a man who never gave up, no matter the unsolvable obstacles on the road and the power of the enemies he confronted.
If anybody will remember him at all.
Peace.
Peace is what I always see on the faces of dead people. No matter the terrible circumstances in which they died – and in my line of work they tend to consist of indescribable horrors – after death comes peace. Quietness. The absence of time.
There's none of that on his face. Or I don't allow myself to see it.
As much as he deserves peace, I don't deserve it.
I'm guilty. Because I didn't follow him to the field. Because I let him go without me, without, as usually, having his back. Because I was weak.
Weak because of you, who will not have a chance to meet him.
So I try to remember every line on his face, every wrinkle, every hair. Everything that I looked at daily for years, and am now watching for the last time.
Hair. His short brown hair still looks alive. It's still protruding a little, just like his rebellious spirit refused to stay in place and accept injustice.
No matter the rules.
No matter the price.
From the hair my palm moves towards the forehead, damaged, cold skin that is falling off in big chunks. I bend to kiss him there, my favorite place to kiss.
He doesn't disgust me.
I was never disgusted with him. Not when he was covered with blood or sweat, fluids from numerous different monsters, or alien substances.
I am not disgusted with his death either.
I trail my fingers across his hardened, grey eyelids. Everything is grey on him, just like in my heart.
If I could once more, just once more, look into his cheerful hazel eyes, in the windows of his tortured, but beautiful soul.
Just once more.
But it wouldn't be enough.
If we had another hundred years, it still wouldn't be enough.
I place my fingers underneath his nostrils, in the little dent above his lips. I'm trying to feel the breath that isn't there. I can't help myself.
Air, of course, doesn't flaw, and I break down in tears.
"Mulder," I call him. "Don't leave me alone. Take me with you."
I know that he can't. He knows it too. We both know I have to stay.
Because of you.
Only because of you.
But how?
I bend once more to kiss him again, this time in purple-grey, unmoving lips. He doesn't respond. He can't.
Then in the chin. Round, carved with a deep vertical scar and a few smaller, sparse in little dots with uneven distances.
What did they do to him? How long did the torture last? How long did he fight to survive, to come back to me?
The biggest wounds are on the cheeks. Three in the center of each check, one under another forming a slight half-circle. Tips of my fingers gently fit into them, while I try to heal them with my touch.
But I'm not Jeremya Smith. I am just a doctor. My touch doesn't heal and can't bring back dead.
My tears are now falling down his face, leaving behind a little lighter grey trace. He doesn't have his own anymore. I can only hope that he doesn't need them, that he is in some better place.
And that he isn't alone. That he found his sister and parents, a family of which there's no one left.
No one, but you.
Our little miracle that he didn't have a chance to find about…