Title: In Moments
Author: CGB
Archive: I will submit to Gossamer myself but anywhere else is okey dokey by me. Just let me know.
Rating: PG - 13
Spoilers: Tempus Fugit, Max, Memento Mori
Category: V Mulder POV
Feedback: Always good.
Summary: Set in the fabulous fourth season. Mulder has a wee existential crisis trying to deal with Scully's cancer.
Thanks to August for reminding me of the song, Lin 'Cookie' Booth for power-betas and general encouragement (you rock Cookie!) and the Crystalshippers because we can't, we won't and we don't stop!
In Moments
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"It's in this moment, hold on, when everything has come apart" - Lori Carson and Graeme Revell Fall in the Light
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I am experiencing an unreal moment.
Physical surroundings disassociate themselves from my senses and I become acutely aware of my mind at work, tumbling over itself to process information that bears no relevance to my current environment.
Sitting in an hospital corridor, waiting for Scully elicits this reaction in me.
I like to think I have temporarily escaped reality.
I check back with my rationale. A background in psychology reminds me that feelings of abnormality and surrealism often accompany situations of high anxiety. The anticipation of an imagined fear causes adrenalin to seep into the system allowing the mind to become alert in preparation for the 'fight or flight' response.
So I'm a little worried. But perhaps what is more worrying is the satisfaction I am gaining from this feeling of disconnection and unreality, this feeling of slowed time and held moments.
I would like very much to hold on to this moment because the future scares me.
Time will eventually leap forward again. It will slowly increase its pace dragging myself, my mother, the Bureau, the X Files and Scully along a road without deviations. My fear is that it will take Scully faster than I can keep up with her. I have only recently begun to experience the intimacy of having someone I can depend on the way I depend on Scully, and having begun I am unwilling to halt.
Not yet, I plead in my head. Not yet.
My hand is in my pocket idly fingering my latest 'souvenir', a vial with what I have been told are Scully's ova. Whether I choose to believe that or not, the thought of holding something so intimately hers causes my heart to pound in a manner that does little to dissipate my heightened stress.
It would appear I am making a collection of intimate encounters with Scully. Only minutes ago, I read her diary. I, of course, did not know she kept a diary, but I would like to think she always had so that I would not see the passages I read as part of a larger attempt to say goodbye to her family and myself. Maybe she's always done that. Maybe she's been talking to me on paper for years now.
I am not reassured. Scully is writing her legacy.
I have a predisposition for morbidity. I imagine myself sifting through Scully's belongings with Scully's distraught mother after she has died. Her mother's eyes come to rest on Scully's framed photo of herself and Melissa and she dissolves once again into her grief.
And I become like the fish in my apartment, destined to a life of observation. Not feeling. Not participating. Just watching.
I am unready to join Mrs Scully in a relationship that unites us in grief and resigns us to meeting over coffee to remember Scully by. Meetings that become further and further apart until the years pass between our re-acquaintance.
As deplorable as grieving for Scully may be, an existence where that grief is a distant memory is unimaginable.
I am shamelessly relieved to see her exit Penny Northington's room despite knowing that the expected sad event has occurred. Despite noting that she is almost unrecognisable from the devastation caused by chemotherapy and loss.
She is crying.
I don't want to cry. I don't want her to see me cry, so I begin speaking. About the case, about her diary.
She smiles through tears and I keep talking.
She allows me to pull her toward me. I grasp her shoulders and rest a hand gently against the back of her head.
She won't die, I promise myself.
Hang on to me, Scully, and you won't die. Hang on to me and we'll slow time together.
Scully's feet methodically pad away from me in the direction of her hospital room.
She moves on.
Life moves on. The X Files move on.
Scully professes her usual claim to good health and we investigate a plane crash.
I resume my quest with abandon giving Scully once again cause to cringe in the presence of her crazy partner spouting UFO theories whilst those already party to his reputation snicker and giggle around him. The uninitiated are incredulous, not only because I express these views in public but that I am licensed to carry a gun whilst I do so.
Another case, another blushing debutante. This time an NTSB investigative officer. Someone else to believe what Scully won't.
I think I must be garnering a flock of them. And yet the one that has been with me the longest is the one hardest to win over. Scully, my most fervent believer and my biggest critic. If she were a religious person, and sometimes she is, I would say she enjoys presenting a paradox.
The case gets personal. Max Fenig is something of a soft spot for me and Agent Pendrell is a soft spot for Scully. It would appear that both are dead.
Poor Agent Pendrell. He'll never know how deeply his death affected Scully. It was all over the bureau that he had a crush on her but then I know he wasn't alone in his misplaced affections. Half the young ones have a crush on Scully. She fulfils all their adolescent fantasies of having a pretty scientist hanging on to their every word whilst they explain a complex theorem. Scully bursts their bubble a little when she pauses their monologue to get to the relevant part but they forgive her for that.
Scully, wants meaning for Pendrell's death as though we're on a mission from God. She wants redemption. She wants absolution.
Lately, these things are of tantamount importance to her.
And I try desperately to convey this meaning in the form of my own conviction but Scully's seen all that before. How long will it be before even the strength of my faith isn't good enough for her?
Max Fenig's words have been ringing through my head ever since I watched his home made video.
"I've devoted my life to providing all you disbelievers out there with proof".
Where have I heard that one before?
Scully and I don't win this time and neither does Max. The proof he died for eludes him and myself, once more.
The faithful gather in Max's trailer afterwards for something of a memorial. Max's girlfriend and fellow abductee Sharon Graffia, myself and Scully bear witness to Max's recordings of himself, once again, to remember his eccentric and partially crazed personality fondly.
In a time when I should be reassuring Scully, I instead draw her attention to the similarities between myself and people she no doubt sees as rambling lunatics spinning paranoid fantasies of alien abductions and conspiracies, reminding her how close her partner is to bridging that gap between passion and madness. Hasn't it been said that the scariest thing about a fool is the power of his conviction?
I switch Max off. Max's legacy is handed over to his devotee, Sharon Graffia, who asks for his tapes. I often thought it would end this way, with Scully pouring over the ravings of her one time crazed partner who has documented his propensity to see monsters in windmills. Scully being left to ponder the futility of my passions and the meaning inherent in my existence when I am long gone.
I wonder whether Max ever had a chance to realise how lucky he was to have someone who would take a part of him with her when he was gone?
Probably not.
We step outside the trailer. The night air is cold and yet we linger a little longer in its presence, soaking up emotions elicited from the retelling of Max's story.
Scully is fingering her key chain. I gave it to her only days earlier on the one occasion in the last four years where I actually remembered her birthday. She is strangely moved by Max's story and she launches into a dreamy monologue on man's monuments to the well meaning.
"I think you know, Mulder, that there are extraordinary men and women, and extraordinary moments when history leaps forward on the backs of these individuals......"
And it all stops.
Everything halts. A bird flying overhead is held steadfast in the middle of the sky. A moth having just entered my field of vision is now paused there in front of my face indefinitely, it's once impossibly fast beating wings now frozen in time.
And there's Scully mid sentence, in the grip of poetic reverie, her face reflecting the ecstasy of someone who has found answers however, remote.
The single light of the trailer park reflects off her hair in dazzling colour.
There is that moment. The one that holds all the possibilities. They radiate from myself at the centre diverging through and around Scully and she is many of them.
There is Scully. There is always Scully and She is everywhere.
But it is the poignancy on her face that reminds me of the sentiment behind her words.
I release her back into the present so that she can finish her thoughts.
"...we can not forget the sacrifice of those who make these achievements and leaps possible."
She concludes and is pleased with her findings. She gives an embarrassed grin suddenly self conscious at having been caught in the rapture of self discovery.
I grin back.
"I just thought it was a pretty cool key chain," I say.
We swap smirks
As we head back to the car I find myself revelling in the satisfaction of having bestowed upon Scully something so significant with such little effort. A small appeasement in this time of emotional upheaval.
And time is a poor substitute for meaning.
Fini