Hotel
The reason is gone, and all logic in Scully's head has disappeared and taken her with it.
"Do you ever think about fate, that maybe we were meant for this—this moment, this room, everything minute we spend time uncovering truths or half truths…?"
"I don't know. It seems…I've always believed at least that there is logic and justice in the universe. The only thing that can't be quantified is the power of the human mind, I don't think I could honestly say whether everything here was fated…even if the universe is ordered in a precise pattern…do you really believe our brain patterns are available in some mysterious, concealed package, just waiting to be found out?"
She gave him her God, her belief, her science. He absorbed it all, and took it to the stars. She cannot make herself believe he was taken against his will. Mulder won whatever battles he wanted to. She knew that he had gone willingly; whether he was still there willingly was a different question. But she hated him for leaving her all the same. The least he could have done was take her with him.
Mulder!
In the stars, Mulder is alive and wishes he wasn't. He wishes Scully knew how sorry he was.
Someone stole her computer, and her poor superintendent says Mulder was here. She could almost laugh if she wasn't so desperate. She rushes to his apartment, lit with a blue green glow of his aquarium and finds nothing but reminders of moments past.
She curls up on his bed and presses her head into his sheets, pillow and shirt. His bed smells like him. It's comforting, and she relaxes as tears mar the perfection of the tangled sheets. It's comforting, but a tiny part of her knows that this bed represented nothing of Mulder.
"Do you want to know the truth, Scully?"
Autopsy, California, Incident Iowa, Little City, Crazy People, Insurrection, Dying Wishes, Farewell Kisses…
She startles awake, gasping into Mulder's bed. He was there in her head, monotonously intoning a million unconnected phrases but she knew he wasn't himself. Face impassive, tonelessly reciting utter nonsense and she believed it all.
At four in the morning, Walter Skinner enters Mulder's apartment with no noise. He observes the things left undone and moves towards the bedroom. There is nothing to be found, except Scully, curled up in his bed with his pillow and shirt pressed to her face. He checks, just in case, to make sure she's breathing, and leaves her there. He's hates that she seems destined for nothing more than this.
She dreams that Skinner takes her to a hotel, a grand, echoing hotel, where a piano player plays in the lobby, and you can look up to the top of the hotel through sky lights and see white light cascading down. She dreams of jungles in the potted plants in the downstairs—she wanders endlessly and she is void of life or expression. She is catatonic in a sea of wildness and desperation, echoes and reminders and no one else. The baby died when Mulder disappeared, she doesn't even know.
She lays in her bed, face impassive and terrorized, staring into space. Scully thinks she can see the future—she knows it—she's there right now.
Rat-a-tat Rat-a-tat, Stephen King, bumblebees, Ice Ages, Different Strokes, There Before Us, Random Notes
Sing a Song, Sing For Me
He sings backwards, and her life unwinds.
In a different reality, she awakes and there is no John Doggett standing before her. She awakes in his empty apartment, feeds the fish, leaves. She takes a taxi to the end of the earth, stands before the precipice, and jumps off.
She flies upwards again.
Scully wakes while it is still dark and sees Samantha Mulder in front of her. She is not dreaming, and stares, wordlessly and the 14-year old ghost in the moonlight.
Do you want to know the truth?
The world hits her, and before Samantha can open her mouth to finish, Scully is trying to scream, to scream loud enough to bring herself out of the haze or to drown out the little girl's words. Because she understands now that no fairytale ends like this, no fairy tale begins like this. This is not the stuffing of white clouds and late morning dreams, this is the madness pushed into nightmares—
But she can't scream, and she's paralyzed in fright—someone's trying to steal her heart all over again—she can't breathe or whisper and it feels like a nightmare but she knows it isn't.
-Do you want to know the truth?-
No!
-This is all that you will ever be.-
Dana Scully recoils in the weight of everything around her, and goes back to the hotel place, because at least there, the scenery is beautiful and she can't feel a thing.
A/N
Thanks to Spo0ky42 for a lovely review. I'm very appreciative!
Disclaimer: The X-Files are not mine.