But Of Themselves Instead
Disclaimers: Mulder and Scully belong
to Chris Carter, as do the Lone Gunmen;(Please don't sue us! We have no money!)
I refuse to attribute credit or anything else to FOX.
Talia, Sharris and Lily are mine, ours,
and us, and whatever other being appears in this story belongs to itself...
And to quote from Chandri: "Don't judge
us by what our Avatars do, no matter how similar they seem to us; the people we
are when we are here, or there, or online, or anywhere but our dreary, everyday
real lives are not ourselves… or at the very least, not entirely."
In other words, the chars were Talia
and Sharris (and otherwise) long before Shar and I ever used those nicks
online… don't worry. I have about a dozen more. *g*
Time period: just post-Rain King
Rating: Ah, I don't believe in rating
systems anyway… but pretty mild. Some subtle shipper stuff… well, mostly subtle
shipper stuff… and yelling! But look hard! Finding it's the whole point!
-------------------------
Talia Sheppard strode into the FBI
Headquarters of Washington, DC and stepped into the elevator of the five-story
building, Sharris Symon on her heels. They rode the elevator up to the third
floor, where two specific agents had been moved to, when circumstances allowed
them to have an actual office. The clerk at the desk, who might otherwise have
halted them, did not see them at all. The impulse to look in the opposite
direction prevented him from noticing the two women pass through the metal
detectors, which, although not malfunctioning, did not register a thing.
They proceeded down the central
corridor of the level, for the first time having to read the numbers on the
doors to find the correct office.
They soon found it, and Talia
knocked tentatively on the hideously orange-painted door which, somehow, in the
other decor of the hallway, seemed to not stand out in the slightest. The door
swung slowly open at her knock, and she peeked inside, causing a man and a
woman seated on either side of a low, "wood"-paneled desk to look up in mild
surprise. Neither of them seemed particularly shocked to see the two standing
in their doorway unannounced, as if what they had been immersed in deserved
interruption.
In fact, as Talia and Sharris
entered the office, Agent Scully yawned, her awareness only just coming back to
her as her conscious mind emerged from the seemingly endless pile of
agricultural reports on the desk.
"Hello," she greeted them somewhat
absently, and Mulder blinked, his apparent state of wakefulness becoming solid
almost instantly.
He stared at them for a few moments
before realizing that he knew who they were, and nodded to two fold-out chairs
near the desk. They were not being considered top-priority in the furniture
department, that much was evident. Sharris took the chair, Talia declined,
standing with arms crossed, leaning against the wall.
"So," she began, "you said you had
something to tell us?"
"A contribution." Mulder said. "You
said that you were compiling a list of PKs?"
"Not at the moment, but we will be
again soon." Sharris nodded an affirmative.
"Then I have a name for you. And
full information, so you won't have to go find him."
"Name?" Talia inquired.
"Holmon Hart." Mulder answered,
pulling a case file from the pile on the inadequate desktop. Talia was
surprised to note that Scully, for once, was sitting behind the desk instead of
Mulder. Perhaps it was compensation for the fact that she didn't have one; they
had only been allocated one desk. Unfair, perhaps, that they were now treated
with such low regard, but not unexpected.
The agents had been in the Bureau's
evil eye for quite a while now, and they had been diminished more and more
since their return from the Antarctic. Now, every time they tried to pursue an
X-File, they were reprimanded, and the one of the partnership that had not
committed the act of defiance was punished. It was a truly cruel trick that was
being played on Mulder and Scully – and from what Mulder had told Frohike, this
one had been crueler still. Not that he'd given any details, just a conveyance
of a pained expression from both agents that neither had seen on each other.
"I'm going to lunch." Scully said,
pulling on her coat as she stood. Really, she was just contriving a reason to
escape a conversation she would be tempted to question. At almost the same
moment, Lily ran into the office, breathless.
"Thanks for waiting!" she exclaimed
sarcastically.
Talia turned around with as much
sternness as she could muster: "Didn't I tell you to stay in the car?"
"Yeah." Lily replied lightly,
ignoring Talia's gaze, and looking suddenly, instead at the two agents, as if
her eyes had been drawn there by a magnet; her green eyes grew wide abruptly
and her mouth moved silently as if trying to speak, then Talia, realizing what
Lily was doing, slapped her on the shoulder: "Lily!"
Lily immediately lowered her eyes
and closed her mouth. "I'm sorry. I couldn't help it."
Talia sighed. "I know, Lily. Try
harder."
She glanced up at the two agents who
hadn't even noticed any odd goings-on other than the eleven-year old child's
confusingly amazed stare, and raised an eyebrow in apology, to which Mulder,
suddenly enlightened, raised his own eyebrow at Lily, who grinned sheepishly,
but then stared intently into the agent's face with the haunting, searching
look that Mulder had come to expect on occasion from Lily.
From Scully there came an
exasperated sigh, and she pushed past the three visitors to reach the door,
passing through it impatiently.
"Did I do something?" Lily asked
guiltily, her voice unusually small.
"You know very well what you did."
Sharris said, looking down at her. "It wasn't your fault this time, though."
"Was it?" she looked to Mulder, who
sat uneasily in his chair, gripping the handles.
"No." He admitted with a sigh. "It
seems every time we talk, since we got back... it just doesn't seem to work
right." He sighed again, looking desperately to Talia.
"Well, I did bring you here for a
reason." He handed them the case file. Sharris took it and opened it, looked it
over quickly, then looked to Mulder and her forehead creased; he was up to
something. The information in the file was nearly useless. So why bring them
here?
Then she realized that he was
staring at them, and she 'heard' him broadcasting his thoughts loud and clear,
directing them specifically at them. In exact, a series of images from recent
memory; from the small town he and Scully had just returned from, where the
Rain King had caused such a communal chaos in the small town. And the havoc
that contact with Holmon Hart and his Sheila had wreaked on the long and
fast-held friendship between Mulder and Scully. Scant moments later, it was
over, and Mulder leaned back in his chair, looking at the three Telepaths
expectantly.
"They were right." Mulder said,
finally realizing it himself. "The amount of times he said it... I should have
known he was right."
"See?" Lily looked triumphantly to
Sharris and Talia, who responded to Mulder only with astonished stares. Sharris
at last rolled her eyes, in nearly as much exasperation as Scully.
"Fox Mulder, you are an idiot." She
said simply, and turned to the door, pulling Lily after her to follow Scully.
Lily protested.
"But I want to..."
Her voice faded into the carpeted
walls as Sharris and Lily got further away from the office, following Scully.
When they were gone, Talia turned to
Mulder with her eyebrows raised in inquiry, and a hint of contempt.
"I'm not saying I totally agree with
Sharris, but..." she waved a hand towards him and let the sentence trail away
like sand from an hourglass.
"They were right. But only because they heard it from you first." She
said sensibly. Mulder remained silent, but only until he could not avoid her
glare any longer.
"You really had no idea, did you?"
she demanded.
Mulder shook his head. "Sheila
kissed me. Not the other way round. I
was torn between apologizing and... well... screaming..." the joke fell flat,
and he drew in a deep breath.
"I am an idiot, aren't I?"
Talia nodded solemnly. "Don't worry,
you're not the only one." She gestured in the direction Scully had taken.
"I swear, if you were both empaths,
you'd be better off. Though you probably wouldn't have lasted this long.
And..." she studied his face carefully. "You'd probably drive each other stark
raving mad."
She looked at him again. "You really
didn't see the look on her face? You didn't realize she was on the verge of
emotional breakdown? She held herself in check well, though. I'll give her
that. Not that that's a good thing."
Mulder looked at her, puzzled.
Talia shrugged: "You're both
repressives. It's one of the most irritiating and un-healthy personality traits
in existence, but it's so unbelievably common. You'd be surprised at the amount
of people who are willing and willful enough to bottle up all important emotion
for years and years and years, until it becomes dangerous."
"No, I wouldn't." Mulder replied
after a brief pause.
Talia looked up at him, cocking her
head sadly to one side. "Nah, you probably wouldn't." she flung her hands up in
the air, "Byers is right. You two deserve each other."
**********************************************************************************************************************
The underground parking lot was
dark, cold, and the acoustics were atrocious. Every step Scully took seemed to
reverbrate for thirty meters in every direction. It made her nervous. It made
her breath shake – as it did every time she was upset, as she was now – as she
searched for her car in the dim fluorescent light. She walked from one end of
the cement parkade to the other, cursing her lost (reserved) parking space and
wishing she'd taken a taxi to work that morning.
She finally located her car, in a
spot she'd already passed four times, and barely held in the frustrated scream
that threatened to come out when she saw the two chalk marks on the back of her
tire and the pink slip of paper snapped under the rear windshield wiper. She'd
parked in a handicap space.
Cursing vigorously under her breath,
Scully maneuvered her way around the cement post and made her way to the car
door, crumpling up the ticked as she went. She wasn't paying any damned tickets
until she got her own desk.
She pulled her car keys out of her
pocket then, and promptly dropped them. Then she turned around to get into the
car, and saw that the car across the aisle from her had been parked about three
feet past the end of the parking space, blocking her way out. Penning her in.
Scully's temper broke. She pounded
both fists on the roof of the car and swore: "Damn!"
The one syllable echoed several
dozen times around the parkade before tapering off into silence. Scully had
dropped her keys again. She reached down to retrieve them, but when she
straightened again, she received quite a shock – Lily was on the roof of her
car.
She hadn't barged in, mind you. One
moment, she had not been there, and the next, she was sitting cheerfully
cross-legged on the silver-grey roof of Scully's car. Scully hadn't even heard
her.
"You didn't hear me 'cause I didn't
make any noise." Lily replied to her unspoken question.
Scully looked up at the child with
offense and daggers in her face: "How did you know that?"
Lily's eyes widened: "Oh? Oh! I'm
sorry! It's habit, I guess. But you do show."
Scully shook her head. That
telepathic mumbo-jumbo-crap again. She didn't think she believed in it any more
now than she had before. But she looked up again as her subconscious forced her
to re-examine the last thing Lily had said.
"What do you mean, I show?" Scully
demanded again, in a tone that would intimidate the bravest (normal) eleven
year-old, and melt the most submissive.
Lily shrugged. "You show. What you
feel, and things."
Certain that this was nonsense,
Scully calmed down and pushed further:
"What do you mean? I don't
understand."
Lily cocked her head to one side in
typical childlike fashion and clicked her tongue: "Well, it's hard to explain
in words. People... humans who... can..."
she looked up and, seeing Scully's expression, realized that this particular
method wasn't working. She sighed heavily, and spoke slowly and deliberately,
as though Scully were the child and Lily the adult.
"People... True-Seen people. People
who can see like us." She tapped her temple. "They look different to me. I can
see them."
Scully watched Lily carefully. "And
you're saying I look like that?"
Lily nodded emphatically. "Your
colours... your... Talia called it an Aura. They're brighter than most
people's. And they change with the engergies."
"What energies?"
"The ones around you."
"Do you mean... do you mean that I
can do that?"
"Uh huh. Everyone who has bright
colours like that has PK. I've never been wrong." She answered with a certain
degree of pride in her tone.
"I don't believe in that." Scully said quickly, and to her surprise, Lily made
the switch from child to adult again.
"Why not?" she asked bluntly.
"Because it can't be proven."
Lily laughed. "Of course it can! You
mean scientifically."
"Well, yes. I can't accept anything
that can't..."
"...that can't be proved by
science." Lily finished the sentence, apparently amused by the concept.
"You go to church, don't you? Can
the existence of God be proven?"
Scully sighed. She'd had this same
argument with Mulder countless times and was not about to get into it with a
child.
Scully shook her head and started to
get into her car.
"What's wrong? Afraid to be wrong
when a "child" is right?"
Lily put her words together
carefully: "What if... What if the science to prove the existence of
Psychokinesis just hasn't been invented yet?"
"It still doesn't..."
"What if I had told you a thousand
years ago that human beings would harness the power of lightning? Or create the
Internet? Or walk on the moon? The existence of electricity wasn't proven then,
was it?"
"You're putting ambiguous reference against something totally unrelated. You
can't compare "psychic abilities" with electricity."
"Can too." Lily returned. "And we
don't call it "Psychic". That's a word created to promote propaganda and PR for
fakes and charlatans."
"And anyone with enough money to
hire a bunch of ugly women, dress them up like gypsies, invent a whole lot of
standardized garbage and put on weekly infomercials."
Lily nodded. "Something like that.
Most real PK's find that sort of
thing insulting. I know I do."
Scully suddenly realized that she
had been arguing theology with an eleven year-old.
"You know what I find the funniest?"
Lily asked as Scully made a third attempt to evade the discussion.
"What?" Scully asked, tossing her
things into the passenger seat.
Lily pulled a kleenex from her
jacket pocket and held it out to Scully. Scully stared at it, bemused for a few
seconds before she sneezed. She took the kleenex. She also decided not to ask.
"That even when you've seen things
with your own eyes, you won't accept them as real. Not until you've dissected
them a thousand different ways and irradiated them under a microscope. But
you're only verifying its validity, then, by your own standards."
"What are you talking about? They're the standards of a few billion people!"
"No, they're not. They're the
standards of one person, that were adopted by a few more, then a few dozen,
then a few hundred, then a few thousand, ten thousand, hundred thousand, and so
on and so forth. They're just a lot of people without personal theories that
decide to use someone else's. That's all science is, you know. Popular
philosophy. Deciding what's true and then verifying everything else by that one
standard you've developed inside your own head. It really has nothing to do
with anyone else."
"But science gives solid evidence as
to what's real."
"What if science is wrong?" asked
Lily, and Scully was taken aback.
"What if everything Humankind has
developed scientifically over the last several millennia is wrong? A fable
created by humans to serve humans? What if we really are just a drop of water
inside a Universe inside a drop of water? What if the Universe is shrinking?"
The child and the FBI agent stared
each other down for almost a minute before Scully said: "And what if? What else
could we possibly believe?"
Lily grinned. "That's the beauty of
simple human nature. Our perceptions really, truly do form our realities. We
believe what we think should be believed. In the end, the world is just that.
Just that simple. Whatever we want."
Scully considered that for a moment.
"And does emotion fall into this category?"
Lily shifted back halfway into child
mode. "Maybe. Maybe not. Sometimes. Some things are a set pattern, but others
aren't. I think soulmates are pre-destined, if you believe in Destiny, or
linked eternally, by energy patterns or whatever if you don't. Whatever you say
about your solid, scientific beliefs, Scully, you still wear that cross. Even
you can't live without a little open-mindedness about the Universe. Even you
can't lie to yourself forever. Nobody can."
"Lie to myself about what?" Scully
asked.
"You tell me." Lily answered. "You
know I already know what happened to you two on your last case, even if you
don't believe where I saw it or how I know. But what I do know is that you two
will eventually either make each other very happy or drive each other nuts."
Scully actually chuckled at that
one.
Lily smiled. "It's true. You knew it
already, didn't you?"
Scully didn't answer.
Lily cocked her head to one side
again. "The funny thing, you know, is the fact that you and Mulder, two
intelligent, educated, reasonable people, can possibly be so oblivious."
"I beg your pardon?"
"Oh, gimme a break. You know what I
mean. Or do you?" Lily studied Scully's face for a moment, then laughed
ironically.
"You really don't, do you?"
There was another prolonged silence,
and then Lily hopped down from the roof of the car to stand beside Scully.
"You and Mulder kept giving what you
thought wrongly was inexperienced or badly experienced advice. You kept
advising them, but ended up speaking of yourselves instead."
Scully got into her car and sat
silently as she slowly realized that Lily was right, in part, at least. She
shook her head.
"If science is wrong, Lily," she
said, using Lily's name for the first time. "then what do we go on? How do we
prove anything?"
Lily simply shrugged. "Realistically
speaking, we know nothing. Einstein himself said that we don't know one
millionth of a percent about anything. And he was right. We don't. Even if we
know nothing, even if everything you've learned your whole life is untrue, it
doesn't really matter, because it's all perception. In the long run, it just
matters what you believe to be the truth. Not what others say is the truth."
"I can't accept that." Scully said.
"Most people can't. It's too
grandiose for them to understand. No offense. The human mind, as it is, is too
limited. At least with the parameters that the outside world programs into it.
Most people can't pass them."
"And what if we're right?"
"Then we're right."
Scully looked over her shoulder at
the crooked car. Lily followed her gaze and grinned again.
"Like I said, perceptions only
matter if you're the perceiver. Not vica versa. And in the final analysis, the
only true statement..."
Lily stared at the crooked car,
which suddenly rolled out of the parking space and back in, now straight and
far enough in so Scully could maneuver. Scully started the car.
Lily looked back at Scully. "...is
that nothing ever really can be proved."
Scully turned her head to back the
car out of the spot, and when she looked back, Lily was gone without a trace.
"How the hell does she do that?"
Scully muttered to herself, still a little in awe from the discussion.
That little girl thinks too much for her own good. Scully thought, giving up on finding her and speeding
the car towards the exit. She had the feeling that once Lily vanished of her
own accord, she didn't become visible again until she wanted to. When she
reached the ramp to daylight, Scully floored the accelerator and peeled up the
ramp and out of the J. Edgar Hoover FBI Building Parkade.
Mulder pushed open the doors from
the elevator just in time to see Scully's car squeal away. He'd just missed
her. He was always just missing her.
FIN
