Exodus Laughing V/A  (1/2)
Dom Parker (Domino F16@aol.com)

This story is probably rated R for some strong language.

Obligatory Disclaimer: The characters of Fox Mulder, Dana Scully, 
Walter Skinner, Margaret Scully, Jeffery Spender and of course the 
X-Files themselves don't belong to me, much as I wouldn't mind having
Mulder and Skinner, if you get my drift <g> They belong to Chris I-love-
to-keep-em-hanging Carter, 1013 Productions, the Fox Network and the all
the billions of lawyers each corporate entity possess. Please don't sue
me lawyers, I don't have any money anyway.

Feedback: This is my first attempt at fanfic or posting, but I've read
enough to know that this is where I whimper and beg pathetically for
feedback. I'm groveling...flame me or encourage me, I'm not choosy, 
critisism is appreciated, especially constructive :-)

	

	It's so cliche it's pathetic, when your life is reduced to ash
and a burned out shell. It's even more pathetic when it's literal.
	
	Dana Scully stood in the middle of the room and looked around 
at the smoldering ash and charcoaled remains of the last five years of 
her life. Ironic how her life smelled acrid and burned her eyes; funny, 
in a macabre sort of way, how people hovered at the edge of her life,
observing the wreckage with avid curiosity and the sick fascination of 
those who slow down past a car wreck hoping to see blood. Those were her 
colleagues out there, watching eagerly for her and Mulder's reaction...
hoping for a show. Spooky and Mrs. Spooky, what would they do when their 
world was burned to a cinder?
	
	She could count on one hand the people who actually cared that 
two lives had been scorched right along with the X-files; there was her 
and Mulder, and Skinner, and even though Skinner's care was appreciated 
dimly in the back of her mind, the loss was too consuming to make room 
for anyone's feelings but she and Mulder's.
	
	She turned slowly in a full circle, her cream colored trenchcoat 
a stark contrast to the fire blackened room. Her face was almost 
expressionless as she surveyed the damage; she was the Ice Queen of the 
FBI, after all. Her eyes gave her away however. Not totally, but if you 
looked, the horror and almost numb desperation could be seen swimming 
in the blue depths. The X-Files were gone, the black filing cabinet 
drawers pulled open so the flames would be sure to do their work. 
There was no doubt that the fire was intentional and planned. Mulder's 
"I Want to Believe" poster curled up on it's self, as if it had 
attempted to shield it's statement of faith and philosophy from harm, 
and failed. Strangely enough, that was the sight that brought the lump 
to Scully's throat. That stupid poster of what was essentially a pie 
plate super-imposed over a tree line, was what made her want to cry. 
She didn't, and her eyes swept over the desk, which now looked like a 
log from last night's bonfire. It was unsalvageable, and thoroughly, 
and undeniably gone. 
	
	Gone was a word that kept occurring to her; chanted over and 
over in her mind.
	
	Gone was the last five years of her life. Gone was the future 
she had held onto to justify the sacrifices she had made on the alter 
of truth. Gone was the X-Files, she and Mulder's only tool in their 
search for the truth. Gone were the answers they had been so sure were 
contained by the X-Files. Gone was the look in Mulder's eyes as he 
stood, paralyzed amidst the shambles that had been his life even longer 
than it had been hers. He wasn't reacting, merely standing there, his 
eyes fixed and staring, his arms hanging limply at his sides. She 
looked up at him, took a step forward, placed her hands on his upper 
arms and laid her head on his shoulder in a loose embrace. He didn't 
react, didn't lift his arms to offer her similar comfort, but she 
hadn't really expected that anyway. He simply stood there with her, 
accepting her gesture, if he was at all aware of it, and concentrating 
on taking the next breath. Gathered in the doorway, a soft whisper went
up as fellow agents commented on the emotional reaction of the FBI's 
two outsiders. The smell of blood was in the air, everyone in the room 
sensed the two wounded, and it satisfied most of the agents gathered 
around, and they began to disperse. The firemen still moved around, and 
Skinner still stood in the doorway, allowing his agents their grief, 
offering silent support and commiseration.
	
	The X-Files had already been closed down, she and Mulder had 
already received word that they would be reassigned, but without 
knowing it until this moment, Scully realized that she had counted on 
the X-Files being down here. She had been having a hard time lately 
anyway; her faith sorely tested, her resolve weakened. She had thought 
about quitting, requesting reassignment. But she had derived comfort 
from the thought that the truth was still out there, and that even if 
she and Mulder were no longer the barers of the torch, the X-Files 
would still be there, waiting for another Fox Mulder to uncover them 
and take up the quest for the truth and the holy grail of justice. 
Now even that small comfort was gone. The truth was out there, but the 
tools had been taken away. Mulder has said something like that at the 
end of their first year together, when the X-Files had been shut down, 
now she understood what he meant.
	
	She released him, feeling like one of the walking wounded. She 
knew she should stay. She knew that her place in the partnership was to 
take him home and sit with him until he could talk to her, or until he 
was asleep. She knew that this was where she was supposed to kick into 
maternal mode and lead him quietly away, but tonight she knew that 
wasn't the way it was going to happen. She couldn't, she had lost too 
much, and she was too raw. She didn't have it in her to take care of 
her partner tonight, she wasn't sure she had it in her to take care of 
herself tonight, in fact, she was pretty sure she didn't. Her eyes met 
with Skinner, across the room, and she could feel his fatherly concern 
washing over her in balming waves. It soothed, but it didn't heal, and 
even though she felt destined for a breakdown of some sort tonight, it 
would be solitary, and not in front of a man she barely knew.
	
	Scully took Mulder's hand in her own, hoping to communicate to 
him that while she couldn't be here tonight, she did care about him, 
she was thinking about him. Then her mind flashed on the similarities 
of this gesture and the one she had caught him sharing with Diane, and 
she let his hand drop as if it burned.
	
	What it was about the other woman that had bothered her so, she 
wasn't sure. It wasn't simply that Mulder had seemed interested in her, 
or she had caught them in an intimate moment. Det. Angela White from 
Comity and Dr. Bambi Bernbaum, the entomologist who could have doubled 
for a Playboy bunny had bothered her, but they hadn't made her feel 
sick to her stomach like Diane. Even Phoebe Green, who had also had a 
history with Mulder hadn't bothered her in quite the same way. 
	
	No, what had bothered her about Diane was the way she looked 
and talked to Mulder. Like she had never relinquished the rights to him. 
She treated him like they hadn't been apart, like they hadn't seen each 
other in weeks instead of years. Like she could just walk in, pick up 
where they had left of, and lay 
claim to him, and no one would have a right to dispute that claim. And 
what bothered Scully the most was that she wasn't sure Mulder would 
dispute Diane's claim. What Scully felt couldn't simply be called 
territorial, it was the fear that he would be only too happy to 
replace the skeptical partner he had for the open-to-extreme-
possibilities woman he had a past with. The partnership had been 
strained, and for the first time she wasn't sure if their bond would 
hold.
	She took three more steps back, murmured something about 
checking up on him later, and moved for the door as quickly as she 
could without running, brushing past Skinner with only a ducking of her 
head in acknowledgment. 
	
	Mulder didn't even look at her as she left.




	She had only one stop to make on the way back to her apartment, 
one thing she needed to do before she could go home and curl up on 
herself. Scully pulled her car roughly into the parking lot of a small 
liquor store near the Hoover building. It was silly, it was cliche, it 
wouldn't help anything, but she needed it. She was almost angry with 
herself for being weak, for needing something, anything to get her 
through the night. Independence and control were so important to her.
	
	It wasn't really cold out, too close to summer for the nights 
in Washington to be anything but pleasantly cool, but she wore her 
trenchcoat anyway. Even though the smell of smoke clung to it and 
reminded her with every breath what had happened. The only reason it 
wasn't wadded up in the trunk of her car was because it hid the gun 
shoved into the waistband of her jeans and she wasn't positive the 
loose, casual sweater she was wearing would conceal her weapon 
adequately. Running out of Mulder's apartment, after the call, she 
hadn't had time to put on her holster, or to shrug into a suit jacket. 
There had been the call, and then Mulder's tight voice telling her what 
happened, and then they had bolted for the door, and she had scooped up 
her weapon on instinct.
	
	It didn't matter much anyway. Unlike some parts of the country, 
where such an obviously expensive trench coat would have stuck out in 
the dingy liquor store she had selected, this was Washington DC, and 
men in expensive trench coats were often found in dingy establishments. 
Nobody paid attention anymore, what was one more suit? Bells over the 
door jangled harshly, not even an attempt at the friendly tinkle some 
small town stores used to alert the proprietors that people were 
entering. Of course, in small towns, the bells were to summon service 
for the customer, and in DC the bells were to warn whoever was "minding 
the store" that potential shoplifters had arrived. Scully ignored them, 
moving unhesitantly past the bright cellophane packages of chips and 
cookies, directly to the back of the harsh, florescently lit store to 
the alcohol selection. She ignored the wines...they made a miserable, 
vomit extensive drunk anyway, and selected a large bottle of fine, 
strong Irish Whiskey. It was a reminder of Ahab, her father's drink of 
choice, a nod to her Irish roots, and as good a drink as any to get 
completely smashed on.
	
	"Agent Scully?"
	
	Her grip tightened around the neck of the bottle when she heard 
the vaguely familiar voice utter her name. It felt wrong...to be 
addressed as 'Agent Scully'. Agent Scully was detached, cool, logical 
and professional, and at that moment, she was not any of those things.
	
	Her body turned reluctantly and automatically, out of force of 
habit, bringing her face to face with one of the people she hated most 
at that moment. "Spender," she spat out the name with contempt and 
poorly concealed venom.
	
	Agent Jeffery Spender looked down at the bottle in her hand, 
then met her eyes with a blank expression that seemed to indicate he 
was surprised to find her so obviously preparing to down hard liquor. 
For a brief moment she considered smacking him across the head with the 
bottle; but she was still Dana Scully, and her anger, while starting to 
boil to the surface, was still under her control. So, she tightened her 
jaw and prepared to shove past him.
	
	"I heard about the X-Files burning down," Spender said 
factually, but with a hint of something that sounded a lot like very 
condescending compassion. The tone of a father or older brother who has 
told the not-so-bright little girl that something is only going to get 
her into trouble, and when it does, cannot help but deliver an 
I-told-you-so along with his concern.
	
	Considering the little prick had been the one gunning for 
Mulder's, and by extention the X-Files, demise, and the fact that he 
liked to have underground garage conversations with a resurrected 
Cancerman, Scully was not surprised to know he knew about the fire; the 
question was, how much he knew about it.
	
	"I'm sure you did," she spat out the accusation aloud, 
surprising herself.
	
	"What's that supposed to mean?" Spender demanded.
	
	"Mulder told me about your little friend, Spender."
	
	"Who?" At the mention of Mulder's name Spender's voice 
sharpened and he looked irritated.
	
	"Cut the crap!" Scully snapped, and her intense gaze, so often 
as hard and cold as chipped ice, blazed electric blue fire, "If you want 
to play in the same sandbox as that Black lunged Son of a Bitch, be my 
guest; but that puts you pretty high on my list of people I want no 
contact with in this frame of mind...so unless you want me to insert my 
Sig into a very personal region of your anatomy and rearrange your 
internal organs the ugly way, I suggest that you get the hell away from 
me!"
	
	She moved forward, forcing him to move quickly out of her way. 
It was a childish move that would have made her feel like a bully any 
other time, but tonight she only felt a dull satisfaction as he pressed 
himself against the shelves to avoid being walked through or over. She 
didn't look back, even when she reached the cash register, placing the 
whiskey on the counter in front of the young, twentysomething blond 
cashier. The girl was starting to ring it up when Scully said suddenly, 
"I'll take a pack of cigarettes with that. Marlboro." Then her eyes 
fell on the brand next to them, in a similar package, and a sarcastic 
smile twisted her mouth, "No, make that a pack of Morley's. Hard pack."
	
	It was only fitting after all. A tribute to the unnamed 
antagonist, their preverbial 'greatest nemesis'. The man who had won 
the whole pot with a well placed match. Hell, match nothing, he'd 
probably used one of his damn cigarettes; she had no doubt the irony 
in that would have amused him. She wondered briefly why he hadn't just 
killed them, but the answer was there before her mind had even 
completed the question. They weren't going to risk turning Mulder and 
Scully into a pair of martyrs, they were well known in certain circles, 
and it was too easy to rally behind the cause of the innocent, 
eccentric truthseekers who had lost their lives fighting the good fight. 
But, nobody was going to miss a basement office junked up with UFO 
reports, alien abduction claims, global planetary conspiracy theories, 
genetic abnormalities, reports of psychic and telekinetic phenomenon, 
poltergeist activity, black magic claims, and all the other X-Files 
that could only be filed under "other".
	
	Unaware of her inner termoil, the cashier obligingly dropped 
the Morley's and a lighter Scully had tossed on the counter, into a bag, 
took the two crumpled twenties offered her, and began to painstakingly 
make change. When she had finally unraveled the mysteries of math 
involved in money counting, and had looked up triumphantly, all she saw 
was an empty counter, and the door swinging shut behind Scully.

	Her apartment was dark and deserted, which was exactly the way 
she wanted it. She placed the bag on her kitchen table, then began to 
walk slowly towards her bedroom to change. The smell of smoke clinging 
to her was nothing she wanted to carry around longer then necessary. 
Clothes began to drop behind her in a trail; first her trenchcoat was 
shrugged away, then her sweater was pulled over her flat stomach and 
tossed aside. She had toed off her shoes and socks before she crossed 
the doorway into her bedroom, clad only in the faded 501's and a simple 
white bra, her big Sig Saur still tucked into the waistband of her blue 
jeans. She pulled the gun out of her pants, feeling the heft of it in 
her palm for several seconds before placing it reluctantly on her 
dresser. She fumbled with the button fly, her fingers already feeling 
heavy and thick, then hooked her fingers into the waistband and slid 
them over her hips.
	
	Scully stepped back, looking at her body critically in the 
mirror. It had undergone some transformations in her years in the 
X-Files. When she had first walked through the door of Fox Mulder's 
office, she had been slim, in good shape, but soft and curvy. Her face 
had been rounded, youthful, and her eyes, large blue guiless orbs. 
	
	Then she had been abducted. That was when the first big change 
came. Three months, gone. She had come back changed. It was pretty safe 
to say that her time away hadn't included exercise. She had come back 
more out of shape then she had ever been. Her figure hadn't been bad, 
but she had gained weight, and didn't like it. She'd dropped it as soon 
as humanly possible, and once back to her usual size in clothes, she 
had taken it a step further. She had toned up. The soft lines of her 
body were replaced by smoother, more distinct ones, the curve of her 
jaw became a sculpted angle, her blue eyes went from guiless to fierce 
and often suspicious. 
	
	Then came the cancer, which remaid her body once again, against 
her will. She lost weight, more then Mulder or anyone else ever 
realize; luckily her small body hid the fact that her ribs had gained 
more prominence then was right. Mulder had known she was sick, that she 
had the occasional headaches and nosebleeds, but she never told him 
about the mornings she spent shaking and vomiting over the toilet, or 
the headaches at night, when she was most tired, that would leave her 
curled up, holding her head in her hands and trying not to do anything 
stupid like slam it into a wall to knock herself unconscious and stop 
the pain. She had lost her appetite, she hadn't slept enough, because 
all her body wanted to do was sleep and she wouldn't let it. Her eyes 
had sported dark circles, and she had felt weak and frail. Her skin had 
been as colorless as paper, sometimes her eyes were fever bright. Of 
all the changes, the cancer had been the most horrible. She had spent 
more time applying makeup to disguise the ravages on her body then at 
any time in her life. 
	
	Then came the remission, and once again she had had a say in 
the way she looked. She gained back the weight, but kept the firm, 
sculpted look she had previously acquired. This time she added 
definition to her arms, spending more time in the gym or on the track 
then usual. The feeling of her body obeying her desires something she 
craved and needed. Her eyes had had always been fiercely intelligent, 
intense, her will blazing from them, but innocence had left them long 
ago, leaving her with a suspicious watchfulness that was not natural to 
her, and now there was something hopeless and broken in them that was 
new. She didn't like it and turned away from the mirror.
	
	She slipped into a pair of dark blue silk boxers she had stolen 
from Mulder when he had "died" in New Mexico, and never returned or 
told him about, and tossing her bra aside, pulled a tank top over her 
head. Then she padded barefoot into the kitchen and selected a shot 
glass from her college days from her cupboard. 
	
	She went back into the living room, her face expressionless as 
she began to lay everything out on her coffee table with steady, 
deliberate hands. Her mind was a complete and welcome blank as she lit 
her first cigarette and poured her first shot of whiskey with it 
dangling casually from her lips.
	
	"To the X-Files," she said with an unwholesome gleam in her 
eyes that would have frightened anyone who knew her as she raised her 
glass in a mocking toast, the Morley held loosely in her other hand. 
She tossed it back carelessly, smiling as the burning liquid trailed 
fire down her throat.
	
	For Scully, getting drunk wasn't the easiest pursuit in the 
world, it didn't happen quickly, no matter how much she wanted it 
to-it was genetically impossible. She was Irish, and her father was 
a sea captain in the Navy. However, by the time she had finished off 
half the bottle, she was pretty toasted, and her mind was stripped of 
it's natural defenses. The ones that usually allowed her to refuse to 
think about things she didn't want to think about. She was at the mercy 
of her memories, and she was mad as hell.
	
	The X-Files. How many sacrifices had she placed upon it's 
alter? Some of them hers to risk, some of them things she had no right 
to place upon it. Lives she had no right to place on any alter. Melissa 
was dead because of her. That one was the most obvious, and Scully 
welcomed the pain the thought caused her. Melissa hadn't thought she 
should be alone after Mulder's "death" in the boxcar in New Mexico. 
Melissa had wanted to come over, to offer Dana support in her time of 
grief. Melissa had looked too much like Dana, walking into her apartment 
in the dark. Melissa's brains had been spattered on the hardwood floors 
by men who had wanted Dana dead but didn't check carefully enough to 
determine that they were getting the right sister. 
	
	Scully wondered if Melissa had heard the click of the safety 
being released, wondered if she had realized something was wrong, 
wondered if she had felt the bullet rip into her head and her body hit 
the floor. She wondered if her sister had ever realized that she wasn't 
going to get married, or have children, or see another sunrise or 
sunset, or gaze into a crystal with the faith of a child for the 
mysteries of the universe. She wondered if Melissa had realized that 
she was a fallen pawn, an inconsequential piece on the chessboard of 
the game Mulder and Scully were playing with the Consortium, removed in 
a gambit for an entirely different piece, and that the only regret 
expressed by the enemy at removing her was that she wasn't the right 
person, and her death had exposed their hand, making the same move 
redundant and clumsy, and therefore unusable.
	
	Then there were her children. Without knowing it, she had 
sacrificed every life she would ever have conceived, placed the lives
of her children into the betting pot, and she had lost. They had never 
been corporal, never nestled in her womb, but the little voices she had 
never heard still haunted her. There would never be a chubby arm 
wrapped around her neck, or a small, cheerful voice calling her 'mommy', 
and that pain was more intense then she ever would have believed 
possible. The ability to have children had been ripped from her on a 
cold metal table that she couldn't remember, in a bright, white place 
she occasionally had panicked flashes of. And what had the forces who 
took her and her ova against her will done? They had created, like some 
fucking modern day Frankensteins, a little girl with blondish hair and 
big blue eyes, who's entire life was filled with pain and tests. Emily 
had been Scully's one child to see the light of day, the one child she 
knew of anyway, and Scully had found her just in time. Just in time to 
watch her die, just in time to be able to hope for a miracle, just in 
time to race the clock for cures, just in time to supervise a series of 
painful tests and procedures on her daughter in hopes of producing that 
cure she wanted so desperately, just in time to crawl into bed with the 
body of her dead child as a Christmas present from Hell.
	
	The bottle of whiskey was three quarters of the way gone when 
she heard the soft knock at her door. It wasn't Mulder's knock, so it 
had to be someone else. A part of her was sorry that it wasn't Mulder's 
knock, a part of her wanted to be with him because he was the only one 
who could possibly understand what she felt. But, mostly she was glad 
it wasn't Mulder, because he couldn't take seeing her like this, she 
knew. She stood up unsteadily, her hand reaching for and finding her 
gun. The words Trust No One pounded in her head, and for some strange 
reason she thought, or maybe hoped, that Cancerman stood on the other 
side of her door. The familiar weight of the gun, cold and deadly, felt 
good, and she knew that if he was, she was going to blow his head off, 
and that felt good too. She inhaled on a newly lit cigarette, drawing 
in the ashy taste and blowing it out her nose. He'd enjoy the irony of 
being killed by someone smoking a Morley, she was sure.
	
	She threw the lock, still more coordinated then most people 
could manage when they were as drunk as she was, and opened the door 
without checking the peep hole. Peep holes were to identify the person 
on the other side of your door, and right now she didn't care who was 
there. If it was a friend, she'd tell them to get the hell lost, and if 
it were foe, she'd blow them to hell and feel better for it.
	
	"Dana?"
	
	It was neither friend nor foe...it was mother. 
	
	Maggie Scully looked from the cigarette dangling from her 
youngest daughters mouth to the gun held casually in her hand, and 
gasped at the smell of whiskey radiating from her little girl. 
	
	"Hi Mom," Scully turned and padded back to her couch, leaving 
the door swung open and her mother free to enter.
	
	"Oh Dana," Margaret closed and bolted the door behind her 
before turning back to her daughter.
	
	"Ahhh, pity and sympathy," Scully nodded her head knowingly, 
"My families favorite tone to take with me." She sloppily poured 
herself another drink, "I'd offer you one Mom, but I'm feeling stingy 
right now."
	
	"Fox told me what happened Dana," Maggie wisely refrained from 
telling her daughter that she'd obviously had enough to drink; she 
didn't know exactly how to deal with this new Dana, but she knew 
immediately that telling her something like that would be a serious 
mistake.
	
	"Really?" Scully blew a stream of smoke out her mouth, twisting 
it into a sardonic smile, "Well then he's certainly telling you more 
then he's telling me nowadays. At least he's talking to one Scully."
	
	"Honey, he thought you'd be upset, that you'd need to talk to 
someone."
	
	"But he's too busy wallowing in self pity to be that someone, 
right?" Scully laughed harshly, "Honestly Mom, he's so fucking 
predictable sometimes it's pathetic. I can tell you exactly what he's 
doing right now. He sitting on his couch, holding that damn picture of  
Samantha he has and crying on it. He's telling her he's failed her by 
not finding her by now, and he's crying because he doesn't have the 
X-Files anymore to help him find the "truth", which for him has got to 
be aliens kidnapping her. He's feeling guilty and he's feeling martyred, 
and he's fucking loving it! He's sitting there thinking about how his 
entire goddamned life just went up in a puff of smoke, he's thinking 
he's living a fucking Shakespearean tragedy and he's the doomed, 
tarnished hero. He's correlating his life to Hamlet right now, casting
himself and everyone he knows in it, all of it revolving around him, 
of course. This is his tragedy, his pain, and I've been cast as the 
faithful sidekick, who will mourn for him because that's what a damn 
sidekick does. I get to be his fucking Horatio, and though affected by 
his tragedy, ultimately I'll just move on since I haven't lost my 
*life* here! I mean good God! I'm not really a part of this, he's 
leaned on me for years, expected me to play my part to perfection, but 
it's never been my quest, right? I can just pick up and move on now 
because my fucking sister isn't still out there! Well screw him Mom, 
because he's right, my sister isn't still out there, she's in the 
ground, where I should have been several times over. She's in *my* 
burial plot Mom, and you know what? It should have been me. God I wish 
it had been me. Missy had something to live for, I had the X-Files, I 
had a quest that was doomed to fail. 
	
	"Believe the Lie. That's one of those pithy little sayings 
Mulder and I keep stumbling across.
	The Truth is Out There.
	Trust No One.
	Deny Everything.
	Apology is Policy.
	Deceive Inveigle Obfuscate.
	All Lies Lead to the Truth.
	Resist or Serve.
	Then there's "Believe the Lie". Wanna know what the lie was 
Mom?" Scully tossed back another shot, "The lie was that two people 
willing to risk everything could make a difference. The lie was that 
Mulder and I could lose everything else, but the X-Files and the truth 
would always be out there for us. The lie was that we had a snowballs 
chance in hell to find the truth and get any kind of justice. We were 
the lie Mom, everything we fucking believed in, even each other. 
	
	"He thought it was fate you know. Us, we were fated to have 
found each other and take up our quest. If that's true then I've 
stared into the face of Fate and he has a shit-eating grin. 
	
	"Hamlet my ass! We're fucking Don Quixote and not Mulder's 
version either. Because when we're not being Hamlet and Horatio in 
Mulder's personal plays, he likes to torture himself by thinking he's 
some quixotic tragic jester who's tilted at windmills for years, fully 
believing them to be giants, only to realize that he's given up a life 
to be slammed around by inanimate wood. Of course, his casting leaves 
me to be his very own Sancho Panza, where I follow him around on my ass 
bandaging him up and encouraging him because I've taken pity on his 
miserable existence as he tries desperately to capture Dulcinea, played 
by Samantha, of course.  Not very flattering for me, being the loyal, 
but not quite bright sidekick who follows around an exercise in 
futility and gives up her own life because she's fond of him.
	
	"Nope, Mulder and I get to share the cloak of Don Quixote. 
Because I believed in the giants too. I risked everything on the belief 
that our quest was righteous. Mulder's holy grail was Samantha, and 
mine was justice, but the quest, the truth, was the same for both of 
us, and so I followed him. Now our quest has ended with a whimper, and 
neither of us are a step closure to our holy grails, and Mulder's 
forgotten that I have a holy grail, so to him all I've lost is a job. 
Not even that, since the Bureau will reassign me. He's probably 
justified my loss under the guise that it's better for me in the long 
run anyway, while he's lost too much and gone to far too be able to 
ever find peace again. I love him Mom, but he's such a bastard 
sometimes. As if I could ever have peace now either. I can't just turn 
back the clock and go back to being good little Special Agent Dr. Dana 
Katherine Scully who's gonna move up the Bureau ladder because she's so 
damn smart and ambitious. For better or worse I'll be Mrs. Spooky for 
the rest of my career, and since I have no other life, that makes me 
Mrs. Spooky period. Not because I've worked with Spooky Mulder either, 
it's because I've seen too much to ever be the same, and I've lost too 
much to be able to move on. I'll never have any sort of closure now, 
and I'll never have the truth, I'll never see justice done. They've 
won, and I can't do one goddamned thing to stop it. That motherfucking 
black lunged son of a bitch ruined us both."
	
	Margaret Scully looked at her daughter, who had abandoned her 
shot glass during her monologue and finished up the whiskey straight 
from the bottle, and was curled up in a corner of the couch, the bottle 
held between her knees as she shakily lit another cigarette. She 
wondered briefly when Dana had developed such self-destructive 
tendencies, and was at loss how to comfort her. The empty space in 
Dana's blue eyes was beyond disturbing, it was frightening, and Maggie 
suspected there was only one person who could really understand it.
	
	"Honey, maybe I should call Fox..." she made the suggestion 
tentatively, because she knew how Dana would feel about her partner 
seeing her with any loss of control.
	
	"No thanks," Scully laughed bitterly, "I'm fine."
	
	"Dana, Fox cares about you, and he'd want to be here with you 
if he knew what was going on." 
	
	"Well maybe that's the fucking point Mom!" life flared suddenly 
behind Dana's eyes, and she hurled the bottle across the room, 
shattering it against the wall, "Maybe he should have known I'd need 
him tonight, and maybe we should have been here for each other, instead 
of him going home to feel sorry for himself, and leaving me on my 
own...again!"
	
	"Is that really fair Dana?" Maggie sat next to her for the 
first time, laying an unrestraining hand on her arm, "Don't you think 
he would be here if he had even the slightest idea you felt this way? 
Did you tell him you needed him?"
	
	Scully looked back at her with tired, defeated eyes and shook 
her head slowly.
	
	"I didn't think so." Maggie's voice held no hint of accusation, 
"Dana, you're a strong willed woman, you don't like to admit you need 
anyone or anything, you're a lot like your father that way, and you 
like to have your crisis in private. All the time you were sick you 
told everyone you were fine, and I could see that you weren't, but 
anyone who tried to push you into any other answer got their head 
bitten off. Now I'd be willing to bet that you never said anything 
about needing support tonight, and I'd be surprised if you didn't walk 
away from Fox before he walked away from you, and if that's the case, 
then it's really not fair to him or you to blame him for giving you the 
space you've always demanded from him. It's not fair to him, because it 
cheapens how much he cares for you, and how much he gives you, and it's 
not fair to you because it sours everything the two of you have 
together."
	
	"Oh Mom," a shudder ran through Scully's body and she turned 
her head into her mother's shoulder, hiding away from the world in a 
way she hadn't done since she was a small girl, "That's what I'm scared 
of."
	
	"What Baby?" Maggie stroked her daughter's silky red hair, 
damp with perspiration, away from her brow with soothing strokes.
	
	"What we had together was the X-Files. We were partners, and 
when we were good together it was like nothing I've ever had with 
anyone. But sometimes we weren't so good, Mom. Right now I can be 
sitting in the same room with him and I won't have any idea what he's 
thinking, it's like our lines of communication are severed, and I look 
at his face and it's so blank and he looks at me and there's nothing 
there. There have even been a few times recently, where we're working 
on a case and he'll be going somewhere with it, and I won't have any 
idea where it is, or how to follow him there. And he doesn't tell me; 
he knows I'm not with him, and he won't help me get to him, like he 
doesn't care if I am or not, or maybe even doesn't want me there," 
tears swam thick in the back of her throat, "Without the X-Files, I 
don't see any reason for that to change, there's no reason for him to 
try to reconnect with me. It was the one thing between us I knew he'd 
fight for...now it's gone."
	
	"He cares about you, Baby," her mother crooned into Dana's hair.
	"I hope so," Scully's voice seemed to be coming from far 
away, "But I know one thing Mom, there's nothing left for me at the 
Bureau. Without Mulder or the X-Files I don't have a future there. I'm 
gonna quit, okay?"

	"Whatever you want, Dana." Maggie felt her heart bleeding for 
her only living daughter, felt tears running down her face at the 
broken sound in her little girl's voice. When she had first met Fox 
Mulder she had seen it there, with the second sight that only a mother 
can have she knew that something in him was broken that might never be 
fixed; to hear it in her girl's voice was almost more then she could 
bare. She tightened her hold on Dana, rocking her in her arms until her 
exhausted, ragged breathing evened out and unconsciousness claimed her.