Character: Dana Scully
Fandom: The X-Files
Rating: PG-13
Prompt:
Obi-Wan: Luke! Don't give in to hate. That leads to the Dark Side. (The Empire Strikes Back) Vol 3. Week.27 on scifi_muses on LiveJournal
Setting: Season Five Episode: All Souls

Scully wasn't surprised that Mulder so easily found her.

Spring was coming to Maryland. The trees were budding, and the sunshine was warm in the small prayer garden kept by the church, an ancient looking fountain trickling around the feet of a statue of the Blessed Virgin. Scully watched the stream as it ran over her naked marble toes, her gracious smile fixed forever as she stared into the swirls of clear water in brick. It was a place of quiet contemplation, though Scully's thoughts were anything but quiet. She felt as if they were screaming inside of her scull.

"Penny for your thoughts," Mulder murmured, his dry, gravely monotone chuckling slightly as she turned to see the penny in between his long fingers.

"I don't know if they are even worth a penny," she murmured as he settled on the cool brick edge of the fountain, careful not to let his gray suit coat drag in the water below.

"Think Mary would be pissed if I dropped a penny in her fountain?"

"It's not that sort of fountain, Mulder, I think the gardener would be pissed." She smiled slightly as he shrugged and slipped the copper coin into his pocket again, watching the water bubble with quiet thoughtfulness.

"You know the last time I was willingly in a church was a cousin's wedding. It was one of those old fashioned, North Carolina Baptist churches, lots of stained glass but no icons, no paintings on the walls, no candles. I had to admit it was always a little cold and sad to me." Mulder's green eyes flickered to the gray stone and ivy of St. James. "But then we Protestants always had this thing against you damn Papists and your pictures."

"You say we Protestants as if you actually attended church more than a handful of times in your life." Scully chuckled, knowing Mulder's religious upbringing was spotty at best. The son of indifferent Protestants and lapsed Jews, Mulder had never had the religious center in his life she had. Perhaps that was why he found it so easy to believe in the supernatural while she did not. He longed to have the faith in his life that welled up naturally in her.

"It's weird, my father's family is such a mish mash of churches. They started Dutch Reformed, I think there are some ministers in there, and then someone converted Presbyterian. The branch I came from only ended up attending the Methodist church because of some family argument and they didn't want to have to see each other on Sundays."

"Really, Mulder, the depth of faith in your family just astounds me."

"I know, doesn't it? Between Mom's family ditching Judaism the minute they hit Ellis Island and Dad's family using church as a way to network socially it's small wonder that I worry that stepping onto holy ground might bring a lightening bold straight on my head."

"If I toss holy water on you, will you burn?" Scully teased him by dipping her fingers into the fountain and flicking then towards his face. Short of yelping and patting her fingers away nothing much happened from the effect.

"What if I had burned, what would you do then?"

Scully shrugged, smiling for the first time since Father McCue came to her Easter Sunday. "I don't know, perhaps clean off your desk and take it over."

"I've seen you eyeing it, hands off, woman."

Scully laughed, light and airy as she wrapped her arms around herself, a chill breeze rising up in the early spring afternoon, cooling her skin and reminding her briefly of just why she was here. "I'm sorry I left you to make the report alone."

"It's all right." It was Mulder who made the usual rounds of talking to the police, the social service workers, of trying to untangle the mess that surrounded the deaths of the four girls as well as Father Gregory. He had gone with the story that it was likely the work of a religious fanatic, one who targeted the heretic priest and used his words as an excuse to murder the sisters. So far no one questioned Mulder's assessment. Scully suspected the local police were only too happy to go with whatever the FBI told them was going on.

"Have you figured out what you are going to tell the Kernofs?"

Scully shook her head quietly, rubbing her elbows in absent thought. "No. I had hoped to come here today looking for insight. I don't know, perhaps I will tell them what you told the police. It was the work of a religious fanatic who targeted the girls, an evil act of an equally evil man."

"But you don't believe that."

"No." The syllable came out in a breath of frustration and sadness. "I know what I saw, Mulder."

"I know." For once he didn't argue the point with her. "Did you speak to the confessor about it?"

"I did."

"And," he queried, curious.

"I don't know, Mulder." She had gone in looking for nothing more than to bare her soul to someone, to have them tell her that it was all right. Instead she walked away with more thoughts, more questions. "I can't even begin to explain what it was that happened, only that I allowed it to happen. I held Roberta's hand as I took her into that church, towards that light, and I heard…Emily." She choked at her daughter's name, tears rising in her eyes.

"I heard her, Mulder, begging me to let her go."

Quietly across the space between them Mulder reached out and without asking for her leave wrapped an arm around her slight shoulders and pulled her to him. Scully followed, laying her bright head against his chest, sniffing as tears spilled and dampened his ugly silk tie. Professional boundaries crumpled as she gave in to the comfort of Mulder's fingers stroking her hair, saying nothing for long moments as she sobbed quietly against him.

He spoke again when she finally stilled. "You know you could have talked to be about this at any time."

"I didn't know I needed to." She sniffed, reaching up to wipe at watery eyes. "Emily was so…strange and raw, and I didn't know how to begin quantifying her and what she meant in my life. I thought I was handling it fine."

"Dana Scully, the queen of compartmentalization," he chuckled, the sound of it a low rumble against her cheek.

Scully felt her tear-swollen face pull up in the slightest of smiles. "I will never have children of my own body, Mulder. Emily was…something of a mystery and a miracle, just as I was. I survived that cancer when so many other women didn't, and I wanted to believe that Emily could make it too, because I wanted to love her. And when she didn't…."

She paused, her throat thickening with the words burning in her heart.

"When she didn't, you began to wonder why it was God took something so good away from you again. Why was it God allowed an innocent girl to die and what purpose was in it?"

For a man whose faith didn't extend into the realm of God and the church his perception was astute. Perhaps, Scully realized, that was because it was the same question he asked when he was a twelve-year-old boy, trying to make sense of why his sister disappeared. "I knew the very questions the Kernofs were asking because I had asked them too."

"And you hoped to find your answers with this case?"

"Perhaps. If not, find closure, maybe. Acceptance."

"Or perhaps forgiveness," Mulder offered, his arm squeezing her slightly as he nodded. "You did everything you could with Emily, Scully."

"But it wasn't enough," she sobbed as tears threatened again. "All the medical knowledge afforded me and it wasn't enough."

"That's because she didn't belong, Dana." He was soft and sad, and spoke from a wealth of his own painful experience as he held her. "Emily didn't belong anymore than those girls did. If your legend is right, those girls were a product that were never supposed to be, a cosmic mistake."

"Does that justify their deaths, Mulder, or Emily's?"

"I don't know." It was an honest answer. "I don't know if there is a justification for loss, Scully, but it happens. And sometimes it's for reasons that none of us can understand."

"You've spent your life looking for reasons."

"And look where it's gotten me?" There was more than a hint of bitterness in his voice. "I've lost my career, my family, I've cost you so much. Perhaps it would have been better for me to accept Samantha's loss, to move on and believe that there was a purpose behind all of it. But it takes a certain level of faith I guess I don't have."

His words stuck Scully. She had never considered that before, the idea that Mulder the believer was a man who did so because he lacked a faith in the rightness of everything in this world. In his black and white sense of justice, in his incessant need for the truth lay a kernel of deep doubt that there was a purpose for good in any of this. And she supposed she could see that, what sense did Samantha Mulder's disappearance make? Mulder's life was defined on asking that question.

"No, Mulder," Scully murmured, pulling up and away from him to meet his sorrowful expression. "I don't think that you should stop asking those questions. I don't think you should accept Samantha's loss, not yet, not till you know for sure that this woman you met is your sister and if not what became of her. Till you know what the truth is, don't give up. Because in the end that makes everything we've both suffered…that makes even Emily pointless."

She didn't want this all to be pointless. She wanted that there was some purpose to it all, even if there wasn't a thing she could do to fix any of it. "But you are right, there is a certain sense of faith in accepting loss. I have to believe with those girls and with Emily that they are in a better place, free from the pain of this existence, in situations much happier and safer than any I could have given them here. I have to have faith in that. And as for Samantha…I have to have faith that no matter what you will find the truth about her, good or ill, and that it all had a purpose, Mulder."

"A purpose," he sighed, as if he wasn't sure what that word meant anymore. Nodding, he reached carefully for a tear that was attempting to dribble off the edge of her jaw, his thumb brushing it away as he gave her a sad sort of smile. "Perhaps for now you can have faith for both of us?"

"For now," she murmured, blinking away the last of the tears as Mulder rose from the uncomfortable perch.

"So what say you, Scully, you want to go find some grub, or do you think I can pester your mother for eats." He stretched and patted his taught stomach under his now damp tie.

"My mother is going to believe the only reason you ever see her is to mooch food."

"I had her meatloaf in San Diego, I've been dreaming of it ever since." Mulder chuckled offering her a hand. She accepted it, rising as she brushed the grime off her slacks and fell into step beside him.

"You realize that San Diego is St. James in English," she pointed out for no real reason other than it was top of mind for her. She glanced at the graying façade that took that man as their patron saint. "James and his brother John were on the seashore when Jesus came to them and said, 'Follow me,' and so they did." Just as Scully had followed Melissa's phone call, and Emily's vision, and now she was following Mulder…always following Mulder.

"So they were just on the seashore, minding their own business, and Jesus shows up and says, 'hey, come on', and they went along with it?"

"So the Bible says."

"You Catholics believe the craziest things."

"I don't know, Mulder," she replied as he held open a gate for her to exit. "I think we are just more honest with ourselves about the mysteries of the universe than everyone else."