Author's Note: Surprise! Here's an entirely unplanned second chapter of this story that came out against my will. Thank you for all the love on the first chapter! Furthermore, since she unsubtly demanded it and is equally obsessed with Scully, this chapter is dedicated to Mari in all its Muldery, pseudo-literary glory. And also because it's her birthday. Lame surprise. :D Happy birthday! 3
Hope: the expectation of something desired; desire combined with expectation. Also: a piece of enclosed land, e.g. in the midst of fens or marshes or of waste land generally. In Christianity: personified as one of the three heavenly graces. In psychology: an optimistic attitude of mind based on an expectation of positive outcomes related to events and circumstances in one's life or the world at large. Of course, like anything, it is a highly contentious subject in his discipline, since the actual real life effects of so-called "positive thinking" call out the skeptics who point out unchangeable adverse circumstances. They insist that hope is not empirically related to survival, and by "they", he means the internal Scully in his head who is scolding him, his constant companion. She balances him out, and yet, he knows her to be a secret optimist who wants these things to be true. Skeptics or not, he is a firm believer in the concept and its powers. Hope works where it results in goal-oriented behaviour that has an actual impact, grounded in the belief in personal agency and dependent upon the social conditions that facilitate agency. Otherwise, all hope would be empty and people would merely be coping. Otherwise, he would be a simple fool. A content, simple fool.
"Why can't you just talk to me?"
It seems that the quieter he gets, the angrier it makes her. She is waiting for something from him, some answer that will explain it all, a vague promise of change that he can't give. It's as if she is trying to undo some combination lock he has the numbers to, and he is refusing to give them to her. But he isn't. He just doesn't know them, either.
"There's nothing to talk about. I just need to work, that's all."
"I agree, but that is not work." She gestures at the papers strewn across the coffeetable, the hibernating laptop balanced on top of a stack of books on government conspiracies, the empty coffee mug that has left stains on a discarded journal article on the SV40 virus in polio vaccines and its link to cancer.
"I'll clean up later."
"That's not the point, Mulder!" She picks up the mug, and he almost reaches out to stop her, but it's the paper that has caught her eye. "SV40? That hasn't been used in vaccines in decades."
"Not true, they never had to get rid of all the batches; it was most likely used in oral vaccines until the 90s."
She gives him that look again, the one that bothers him because they used to be partners; they used to have actual, lively discussions about this sort of thing. Now, coming home from work exhausted, she frowns at his research like it's a silly little hobby or, worse, a symptom of mental illness. She won't even engage, and so he doesn't talk about it, but then she isn't all right with that, either. Either way, he loses. But he would lose if he had no mission, too; she knows that.
"I'm getting close to something here, Scully. I don't know what exactly, but-"
"You've been saying that, but it's just like last time. All this is not even a singular mission, it's disjointed. You're jumping from one idea to the next, you're holed up in here all day, you're either not sleeping or sleeping too much, you're not seeing anyone besides me-"
"I'm fine-"
"You're not fine! And I can't be your doctor, because I'm your…because I'm not objective. But as a physician and, more importantly, as someone who has known you for over two decades, I'm telling you that you are not fine. And I want to help you, but I can't if you won't let me."
He spreads out his arms, opening his palms to her in a helpless gesture. "This is who I am, Scully, it's who I've always been. If I didn't have all this, there'd be no point. No point at all."
She suddenly looks pretty damn hurt at that, her jaw dropping along with the volume of her voice. "Really?"
"I didn't mean it like that."
But backpedalling won't work, not now that she has turned away from him to hang up her coat. She hasn't even sat down since coming home. This is not the time to be having this conversation.
"Dana…" He walks up behind her, reaching for her shoulder, but she slips away from him, heading into the kitchen with purpose.
He is trailing behind her as he always does these days, while she is either away somewhere or back here trying to fix him.
She is starting to take food out of the fridge, since of course, he hasn't started cooking yet like he promised he would this morning.
"I'll do it, you should go relax for a bit."
"I don't want to relax."
"O-kay, then…we could…cook together?" The attempt at charm falls flat.
"You know, Mulder…" She turns around, closing the fridge behind her. "I can't keep looking back. Your sister, my sister, your parents, my father, your abduction, my abduction, our son, our lives…you don't have a monopoly on suffering."
"I know." The familiar stone in his stomach drops at her words. Through his fault, through his fault, through his most grievous fault. "I do know that."
She smiles at him sympathetically, and it's the worst thing she could do right now as she leans against the counter, hugging her arms around her upper body. "There were things I wanted, too…"
Another child. Another miracle that wasn't to happen. They don't talk about this anymore. They always knew it was an impossibility, and when this was confirmed through the years, they somehow arranged themselves with it, building their lives around the absence. "Me too."
Hope. Otherwise known as: the positive expectation of her presence. He has this need to touch her, always has done. A hand on the back here, a fleeting squeeze of her fingers there, a brushing of skin against skin. It is something that may not have been entirely professional at first, or appropriate in the context of a working relationship – then again, when were the spooky files ever a "normal" working environment? It's not a possessive touch (he certainly doesn't own her), a concerned touch (she can look out for herself), a needy touch (he is fine without constant hugs, thank you) or a sexual touch (well, most of the time). It's more as if his fingers are reaching out to her, following his eyes to reassure himself that she is really there. She is, quite literally, tangible. They are connected. If she were his Eurydice, he could not resist the temptation of looking back. He will always be looking over his shoulder for her. In a strange way, her touch may be the one thing he misses the most.
He turns it over in his hands, not quite believing it is real, running his fingers across its jagged edges. She has held on to this for twenty years. This stupid, small, meaningless item. It has travelled with her through everything from a time before. She has kept it, despite her initial insistence that it was simply a piece of scrap metal, "space junk" that held no special powers purely because it had been outside their atmosphere. It wasn't even a piece of evidence or something he had really thought about, just a little trinket he gave to her after he got it on their first NASA case, giving her a hard time for her skepticism and insisting she would change her mind. His fingers touch the engraving again, tracing the letters: 'Credo. – Scully.' The simple word says it all. It would be enough to get him choked up if they weren't in public and it all weren't so awkward.
He clears his throat, reaching across the table to cover her hand with his. "Thank you."
She shrugs, playing it cool and pretending that this isn't the most thoughtful gift she could have given him twenty years to the day after their first meeting. "I was sick of having it lying around."
"Scully, I…I feel that…"
"Come on, it's not like I wrote you a love letter."
"No" he mutters. "It's not, dearest Dana. Still, to see you of all people admitting that you believe…can I record this?"
"Your Latin is rusty if you interpret this to mean that I believe in everything. It's more like…we try. We pursue knowledge we may never attain, it all comes crashing down and then we start all over."
"So we're basically Sisyphus."
"We are! And Camus told us we should imagine him happy, because sometimes, the struggle is enough."
"Ha. Well, just look at us…rolling our rock."
Hope, its maintenance compounded by "what ifs". If he had stood by her rather than run, if they had been in this together, maybe there would have been another way to protect William than by giving him up. He keeps this thought locked deeply inside himself, never to be voiced to her, because he knows the effect it would have on her, on them. But he thinks she knows and, like a cancer, the idea has metastasized inside him, driving something between them as she torments herself with the past. It is all catching up with them now through these cases. If he had been less distant, if he had been a father to William… Their alternative life has been looming over them for fifteen years. The first few, hard ones were strangely bearable, when they were two people in survival mode, hiding from the FBI with only each other to rely on. There was no room to ruminate, no environment to raise a child in. The real danger crept up on them once they stopped running. Once they laid their heads down to rest, all the big and small question marks jumped out, and it all led back to the Pandora's box they opened twenty-four years ago.
"Did you know that the old Catholic marriage vows actually used to say 'I want to love you', implying that love is a conscious effort rather than a feeling?"
"Are you trying to propose to me, Scully? I knew I was good, I just didn't know I was that good."
This gets him her famous eyeroll as she pulls back. "In your dreams."
"No, really, I must know what made you think of that."
"Shut up, Mulder. You're ruining it." She unhooks her leg from behind his, and its absence immediately feels cold to him.
He moves his face closer to hers and withdraws his arm from behind her, only to reach up and brush her now messy hair back from her face. She is so wonderfully, so perfectly imperfect, always making herself seem taller and more self-assured. Her breath blows against his neck as he leans in to kiss her forehead, her temple, her eyebrow. It sends little jolts through his body that scare him as she closes her eyes and leans into the touch. He has kissed every curve soft and hard, has seen her scars and she his. His adrenaline levels are still up from the intensity of it all, his senses heightened from that point they reach where they can't communicate with words anymore, only touches and feelings and exclamations of names. In here, they are strangely quiet.
"Dana?"
"Mmh, Fox?" she says teasingly.
"How come we only ever do this when I come over unannounced?"
"Isn't this why you come over unannounced?"
"Um…good point."
"We're keeping things separate, remember?"
"True, but how come you never come over?"
She laughs, and it's the most beautiful sound so close to his ear. "Because you don't have a real bed."
Hope. Somehow, it has always been closely tied to finding all the answers for him. If he could find that one, last piece, if he could somehow make the puzzle fit together, all would be well. If he could locate that which is missing, he would be whole. And yet he has built a life around these holes that are part of him, a whole existence based on it. He has the strength of his beliefs. Maybe the chase is the ends and means. And then he lost the chase, and lost…everything. And he didn't even realise until it was too late and the rock had long since rolled over Sisyphus, and she was gone. But she is back now. Not back in the same way, of course, but the way they work together now, anticipating each other's moves perfectly without speaking even after all this time, feels like home. He needs this, their intellectual connection, more than anything. He feels alive again.
The stars don't look gold or silver to him. They don't twinkle in mysterious allure; they don't call to him. An entire childhood and youth spent gazing at them willing himself away, and all he wants to do now is to scream at them and resent them for simply being huge balls of gas refusing an answer. They are mocking him in their immobility, their deaths thousands of years ago, while he stands here alone. He is infinitely small in comparison, just a human on top of a mountain in the middle of the night, surrounded by the deepest darkness and the rustling of black trees as the moisture from the ground seeps through the soles of his tennis shoes.
He has come again, although he knows he will find no answers here. It is his eighteenth time, and skimming the terrain by daylight has not been much more successful than waiting for something or someone at night. Whatever there is to find, he won't find here. And yet he had to come here, because it is the last place Scully was, the place where he tries to feel her presence. He had to come today, because today, Margaret Scully all but told him that she believes that her daughter lies buried somewhere up on Skyland Mountain, murdered by a monster. And this is not true, because it can't be true. It can't be true and it must be true at the same time, a truth he must learn to accept. He has to let her go.
So here he sits, waiting. Gazing. Longing, his mind full of the potential connections he studied today, looking for patterns that always seem just out of reach. At which point do "patterns" become the ravings of a madman thinking God is speaking to him through his daily paper? None of it makes sense, but it almost does. He just needs that one missing puzzle piece, just like with Samantha. He is her partner, he was supposed to protect her. He is supposed to have hope, he is supposed to trust and believe that she is still out there. But all he knows is that on the off chance that she is still alive, they are hurting her right now and there is nothing he is doing about it. If… He has failed her. Every time he closes his eyes, he sees her blood and hair on that bracelet.
In the Bhagavad Gita, hope and success are related to the correct performance of rituals. So what is the task he needs to perform? He will do anything, even pray. He will offer himself up. "Please come back."
The stars refuse to answer.
Hope. She has grasped both his hands quite firmly, certain in her reach and the proposal to "open their hearts" and "truly listen". It all sounds a bit hippie dippy for her, like she sampled some of that placebo herself, but sure, okay. He can go along with this, waiting for some external sign that will never come and that neither of them needs. He can be that person again. Maybe. Wonders never cease.
The sun warms both their faces, bouncing off her red hair, bathing everything in a surreal brightness. She is smiling. On days like this, it is easy.
Yet in some ways, he is still searching for her.
