Loss of Faith

Character: Dana Scully

Fandom: The X-files

Rating: PG

Word Count: 1074

Prompt: By the middle, there ain't gonna be any middle any more

And the cross I'm bearing home

Ain't indicative of my place...Porch Wk 35

Setting: Second Season Episode: "Little Green Men"

AN: Borrowed dialogue through out.

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The note she left behind on Mulder's desk, with the single word, "Nixon". It had been appropriate. The Watergate Hotel was a symbol in Washington DC of all sorts of covert activities and clandestine lies. She had only been a small girl, just ten years old the year that Richard Nixon had left office under a cloud of scandal. She couldn't remember caring about the entire situation that much at the time, except that it had interrupted her television viewing for the better part of a week. It wasn't till she was much older that she even began to truly understand what the word "Watergate" truly meant in American politics, and how it would forever be linked with scandal, cover-ups, deception, and the need to hide the truth from the American public.

How appropriate, she mused, that Mulder had chosen this place in all of Washington to meet. She was sure he hadn't given the notion much thought, it was merely a place with a large enough parking garage where they would meet in private without the prying eyes of half of Washington around them. Despite the outrageous parking fee, and the distinctly ominous smells coming from one dark corner of the underground, concrete bunker, Scully had to agree. No one would care one way or the other if two well-dressed, professional people met and chatted.

Not that it mattered to anyone if she and Mulder met and chatted, Scully reflected sourly as something in the distance scuttled in a very unnatural fashion. She shrugged her shoulder in on herself, pacing the floor in front of her car back and forth, her heels echoing loudly in the large, concrete space. By all rights, after that mornings snub by Mulder, she had been half tempted to not show up for this clandestine meeting. In reality she would have rather just called it a day, returned to her Georgetown apartment and nursed her injured pride by ignoring the large stack of articles she meant to read for Mulder. She could finish the novel she had set aside in favor of searching for more information on government research into gene therapy, she could watch a movie rather than trying to cruise through the internet, looking up information on prominent doctors in the field. Scully could be doing anything that moment, except standing in a dark parking garage, waiting for Mulder to perhaps show up.

If he chose to show up at all, she reasoned darkly. He hadn't even bothered to acknowledge her existence earlier that day. Why would he bother with showing up for a sticky note summons left on his desk? It wasn't as if he had paid attention to a single one of her innocent requests about him and what he was doing, her efforts to check in with him in over a month. It was out of sheer desperation she had left the note earlier, hoping he would come just so she could make sure, with her own eyes, he was doing well, that he was continuing the quest, that he wasn't giving up. So that she didn't feel the idiot for giving up so much of her time, effort, and energy looking for answers he himself didn't care enough to look for anymore.

Somewhere above her a large, metal door slammed, and heavy footsteps sounded on concrete. Scully turned, hopeful, her eyes straining in the dark to see who the tall figure was. A man in a trench coat, that much she could make out, but in DC where men of great power worked, such a coat was fairly common sight. For half a wild moment, she thought of Deep Throat, and wondered if this was the sort of hidden, shadowy place he would have taken Mulder, if he would be like that, moving out of the shadows with his half-truths and secrets, offering Mulder the secrets of the universe, one small morsel at a time.

She began moving towards figure, and sighed with relief when Mulder's sardonic, dry voice called from the distance. "Four dollars for the first hour of parking is criminal. What you got better be worth at least forty-five minutes."

Trust Mulder to be a cheapskate when it came to his personal time. Despite her own hurt, just hearing his dry humor caused Scully to break out in a huge smile. She had missed that, she realized, his wit, even his moodiness. She hadn't realized till that moment just how much she missed it.

"You know, Mulder," she laughed at herself briefly, feeling idiotic just for thinking this. "From... from back there, you look like him."

"Him," Mulder frowned in confusion, his hands stuffed into the pockets of his trench coat, his green eyes skeptical.

"Deep Throat," she replied simply.

Her answer agitated Mulder, who paced around her towards one of the tall, concrete support pylons set in the middle of the floor, his steps managing to convey both anger and indifference as they echoed through the giant space. "He's dead, Scully. I attended his funeral at Arlington through eighty-power binoculars from a thousand yards away." He spun on her; a glimmer of hope lurking in what otherwise was the most dispirited expression she had ever seen on Fox Mulder. It was startling and unnerving on him. "Now, the picture frame was turned down, you wanted to talk. What have you found?"

Found, her mind repeated blankly. Must she have found something to warrant his undivided attention? "I wanted to talk but I haven't found anything."

It wasn't the answer he wanted to hear, and she felt sorry for it. But what choice had he given her really? Her requests to speak with him had remained unanswered, her efforts to even gain his attention were ignored, and short of demanding he meet her in some shadowy hiding space just to exchange pleasantries on the weather, Scully didn't believe she'd have ever gotten him to pay attention to her.

Two rows over, someone started a car, and flipped their headlights on them, flooding them both with light. Scully turned towards it, shielding her eyes as she blinked, as instinctively Mulder moved closer to her, leaning over her in that way he had that was both comforting and frightening. She turned back to glance up at him.

"It's dangerous for us to have this little chat," he murmured, clearly angry that she had called him out for so little. "We must assume we're being watched."

If she hadn't spent a year getting used to Mulder and his paranoia, Scully would have thought such a comment out of him was a sign he was seriously mentally disturbed. She wasn't ruling it out for him, but she at least knew this was much more his standard operating procedure.

"Mulder," she began in a long-suffering sigh, "I haven't seen any indication…"

He waved her off angrily, cutting off her words. "No, no, of course not. These people are the best."

Of course, Scully rolled her eyes, biting her tongue briefly as she counted to three, slowly. When she spoke again, she tried, desperately, to keep her irritation to a dull roar as Mulder paced restlessly in front of her. "I've taken all of the necessary precautions. I have doubled back over my tracks to make sure that I haven't been followed and no one has ever followed me." It wasn't exactly true, she had been careful, but perhaps not to the Mulder level of true, paranoid threat. "The X-Files have been terminated, Mulder. We have been reassigned. I mean, what makes you think they care about us anymore anyway?"

And there it was, she realized, she had said it. She had given voice to the thought that had plagued her all day, and it hit Mulder as surely as if she had shot him in the chest. His gaze registered first hurt, then anger, then a cool detachment, as he paced away from her in irritation. "So why have you bothered to come here covertly?"

His tone was calm, but his words were accusing, and she wondered if it had been a mistake in even trying to reach out to him. "Because I realized that it was the only way that you would see me."

"So what do you want?" His question was flippant and cool, almost as if he didn't care that she worried about him, that she wondered if he was all right, that she just wanted to make sure for herself that the closing of the X-files wasn't tearing apart his drive, his spirit, the passion that made him as bold and as brilliant as he had been the first days he had walked into his office.

So far, nothing in his manner reassured her that any of those things she had seen in Fox Mulder in their year together remained. All she saw was a man angry and resentful, caught up in the loop of his own dark brooding, gone was the shinning brilliance, the almost blinding light of his belief. Perhaps they had beaten him, she wondered with dismay as he stalked the concrete in front of her, moving to lean against the support column as he dejectedly studied his own feet.

She threw up her hands, wondering where to start. "To know that you're all right." She thought of him in the hallway that day, and the fact he didn't even acknowledge her presence. "Mulder, you passed me today within a foot, but you were miles away."

At least he had the grace to look slightly ashamed.

"They've got me on electronic surveillance. White-bread cases, bank fraud, insurance fraud, health care swindles." He sounded so bored and frustrated; she could almost feel his depression swell to her and rise up through the souls of her feet, threatening to swallow her.

"Mulder," she sighed, crossing slowly to his slumped figure, "I know that you feel... frustrated that without the Bureau's resources, it's impossible for you to continue..."

"No, it," he threw up his hands, sliding down the wall much as an angry twelve-year-old would, sitting on the dirty, oily concrete, and resting his arms on his upraised knees.

"Well, what then?" She flashed at him angrily, all sympathy and compassion overridden by her anger with him for ignoring her these past weeks, and the efforts she had taken personally to try and further his work from outside of the Bureau's resources. "When the bureau first shut us down, you said that you would go on for as long as the truth was out there. But I no longer feel that from you."

She had heard him on the other end of that phone the fateful night he had called and told her the X-files were closed. He had told her, had promised her that he wouldn't give up, not as long as the truth was out there to find. And now, as he sat gloomily on the floor, staring into the shadows surrounding the parking garage, he looked as if he had done just that. The FBI hadn't just shut Mulder down, they had destroyed him, had killed whatever it was in him that drove him, that fueled his passions.

Everything she feared for Mulder, for the truth, for the X-files looked as if it were coming horribly true.

"Have you ever been to San Diego," Mulder asked, absently.

For a laughable moment Scully wondered if the FBI had managed to take Mulder's eidetic memory as well. She blinked at him, astonished for a moment, wondering when he had forgotten that she had spent a good portion of her childhood there. "Yeah?"

"Did you check out the Palomar observatory?"

Unsure where he was going with the question, she shook her head. "No." Palomar was located out in the deserts to the east of San Diego, and well away from the city center, closer to the naval base where she and her family lived.

It didn't seem to faze Mulder. "From 1948 until recently, it was the largest telescope in the world. The idea and design came from a brilliant and wealthy astronomer named George Ellery Hale. Actually, the idea was presented to Hale one night. While he was playing billiards, an elf climbed in his window and told him to get money from the Rockefeller Foundation for a telescope."

An elf, Scully wondered sympathetically, as finally she allowed herself to feel sorry for her partner. She knelt down beside him, sitting back on her heels, refusing to dirty her suit with whatever was on the floor as she regarded him finally at eye level. "And you're worried that all your life, you've been seeing elves?"

"In my case," Mulder sighed heavily. "Little green men."

Oh Mulder, she silently sighed, as she realized what this was about. Dr. Werber's tape of Mulder's hypnosis suddenly came to her mind, and his last, agonizing comment on the tape. "I want to believe." He wanted to believe what his memory told him was true; he wanted to believe his sister's mysterious disappearance wasn't a strange fluke of a child's imagination, a way for an angry boy to confront a truth he couldn't understand. He wanted to believe all of his work over the years with the X-files was not a waste of his life…or hers.

"But, Mulder... during your time with the X-Files, you've seen so much."

"That's just the point," he countered. "Seeing is not enough, I should have something to hold onto, some solid evidence. I learned that from you."

Scully smiled briefly, a sudden warmth dispelling much of the anger she had allowed to build up in the weeks since their separation and the closing of the X-files. At least in this, she realized, she had achieved some success. She had finally gotten it through Mulder's head that he needed to back his wild theories with the proof of evidence, something tangible he could use to back up his hypothesis.

She hadn't meant to impart that to him at the expense of what made Mulder so very special as an investigator…his enduring faith and the strength of his beliefs. "Your sister's abduction, you've held onto that."

He looked away, dropping his gaze, but not before Scully could see the doubt and depression written there. "I'm beginning to wonder if... if that ever even happened."

It hurt her to hear him say that. And it angered her, more than she believed possible, not at him, but at those who dared to shut him down, to shut him up. The first moment Fox Mulder had ever opened up to her was in the cold, dark hotel room in Bellefleur, Oregon, leaning against his bed as she curled up on it. He had poured his heart out to her, a relative stranger to him at the time, confessing the truth about his sister, about her disappearance, and the raw, open wound it had left in his soul. Despite all of the craziness of that case, all of the doubts she had, and everything she had seen that had smacked down her beloved science and reason, that one moment between them had cemented her desire to help Mulder in whatever way she could. Not because she believed in alien life, or that this was the reason his sister had disappeared. She wanted to stand by his side because he believed that. The strength of Mulder's beliefs drove her to continue, to use her science and reason to assist him in finding whatever truths he needed to further his search. Even if that meant she would be forced to question some of the very beliefs that she clung to her entire life.

She reached a hand towards one of Mulder's, hanging loosely over one knee. She squeezed it briefly between her fingers, trying to reconnect to him, to remind him she was still there. "Mulder, even if George Hale only saw elves in his mind, the telescope still got built. Don't give up. And next time," she let go of his hand and rose, smiling down at him, a rare occurrence for her given their height difference. "We meet out in the open."

He said nothing as she turned and walked away from him, crossing to her car not far away. As she unlocked the door and stepped inside, she glanced back at him, still sitting on the floor, staring at the wall gloomily. How had he lost his faith in his own quest so quickly? And worse, what could she possibly do to help him find that faith again?