SA
Summary: It's a rainy night, and Mulder sits at a crossroads of his life. He reflects on the last 10 years of his life, as he rereads his long-kept journal.
Rating: G

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Rain beat steadily down on Fox Mulder's livingroom window. It was a lulling
sound. Mulder liked it. It suited his mood. He settled back on his sofa,
the worn leather cushions sighing beneath him. The only light in the room
came from a single halogen lamp on his desk, and the streetlights pouring in
diffused through the rain streaked windows.

It had been a difficult time for Mulder. A time of instablility, uncertainty. Of few highs and numerous lows, some rivalling the depths of Hell. And he had survived. He nearly hadn't, but for fate would not have. But for Scully, should not have.

And now, nearly a year past the first of many blows, the road had again
forked. And there he stood. And she. He had believed her finally, and she
was proven right. He had lived a lie. A lifetime of a lie. But, was it all a lie? Or was there some truth to his life? Had nothing he'd seen been real in all of those years? Scully was real. That, he knew. And now she believed, finally believed in what he had, for so long, contended. When he no longer could. Not in good conscience, anyway. But then he had seen. What had he seen? Was that staged? Real? Someting in between? And it had changed him yet again. Shaken his new faith. As he had shaken hers. To the core. And so there they stood. A crossroads; a forked road. Frozen in the moment, not knowing what the future held. For either of them. On a lot of levels.

Mulder ran his finger along the edge of his leather-bound journal. It was in there that he recorded those ideas, those theories about which he could tell no one. His personal observations. His record. The secrets of his heart.

He remembered starting it the day she left, closing the door without a word.
He'd expected it really. Welcomed it by then. It was he that had changed.
But knowledge in and of itself made the wound no less painful, the dagger to
his heart no less fatal.

Mulder sucked in a breath as he opened the book to the first entry. It had
been a very long time since he'd reread any of those early entries.
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February 2, 1990.
I bought this journal today. Reminds me of my Oxford days. Had to keep one
back then. Part of the training. My personal shrink, that journal. It was filled with Phoebe. The pourings out of my heart on lined green paper. But I'm no longer in grad school, so this one is leather bound. Gilded pages, narrow ruled, acid free, archive quality paper. It's important, this journal. For what I've begun to suspect, to discover, I can't put into my computer, write it into bureau reports. No one would believe me and I can't risk looking like a fool or crank, even though that's what, most likely, I've become.

Patterson is, of course, dissapointed that she's left me. Not good for young profilers to be spouseless, need that anchor into reality, to pull you back from the edge when you go too deep. She married a nascent star, she left a misfit. Who could blame her, really.

Oh, well, she knew when she married me that life with an FBI profilerwould not easy. We're prone to suicide, to alcoholism, to all kinds of self-destructive behavior. I suppose I'm no more or less self destructive than most people who surround themselves with evil in a feeble attempt to control it. Sometimes I think we learn our self-destructive tendencies from our subjects, I guess, or we do it to escape from the pain of living inside the head of evil, or the heart of a victim. God, I hate profiling. No, not true. I enjoy profiling, the analysis, the modeling. The jigsaw puzzle of figuring out the who and the why of heinous crimes. I hate what it does to me. What it costs me each time I need to maintain my professional demeanor. I hate it when a family member tells me that I can't understand truly what they're feeling. I can. I do. I've been there. And each day, each time I walk into my apartment, I feel it again. The loss. Somehow I just keep expecting it to happen, for Samantha to just be here, sitting on the couch when I come home. Ask me if I want to play a game of Stratego. Am I crazy to think...no...know with absoulte certainty that Samantha was taken by some alien life force? I don't feel crazy. I feel as clear about this as I have ever felt about anything else in my life.

Claire said I had become obsessed with this notion. But I need to find her.
Claire asked me why. Sometimes I wonder, myself, what compels me. I think
it's the need for some semblence of family. Dad and I haven't spoken for
three years. Since midway through Quantico. He was dissapointed (yet again) that I hadn't chosen a more appropriate path within government service. He'd sent me to Oxford to study International Relations, I chose Criminal Psychology instead. He'd still had hopes as I completed my PhD. Plenty of room at State for psychologists. Anything but law enforcement. Even something as elitist as the Bureau wasn't patrician enough for dear old dad.

Oh, where was I? Claire. She didn't want me to go to Dr. Werber in the first place. She thought it was foolish, childish. That I would learn nothing. But there was a gnawing feeling, a pull that I couldn't, can't, resist. I needed to know.

So, she left me. Or rather, booted me out. Take my dusty old files, ficus
pant and computer and get the Hell out. Georgetown Lawyer Claire. Leave it
to her to have arranged a no-muss, no-fuss divorce. Prenuptial agreement in
hand, I moved on. I like this apartment. I was very lucky to come accross
it. Reggie was right. It's me.

For better or for worse, wasn't that it? She kept the "better" part of the
contract. We used to laugh together when my fellow agents, gentlemen all,
would call me "Spooky." Spooky, who knows all, sees all, can know what a
serial killer is thinking before he even thinks it. It was a title of awe,
respect. Then. Before I became tainted with the need to find the truth of my past; before she began to think of me as psychologically damaged goods.
Before my esteemed colleagues began to find more imaginative reasons to call
me Spooky Mulder.
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Mulder closed his eyes against the memory of her. Funny, he hadn't thought
much about Claire. Repressed the memory, he'd reckoned. Ah, Claire, where
are you now, he mused. No doubt remarried to some fast-tracker. Probably not an FBI agent. Probably some easily-cuckolded handsome geek, with lots of money and no street smarts.

He flipped to the next entry.
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April 2, 1990

I'm burning with nervous energy, the likes of which I've never felt. Just
came back from a 6 mile run, hoping that it would exhaust me and let me sleep.

It's 3 AM. I've just finished up an extraordinary case. I'm not sure what to think or what to make of it. I've made a terrible discovery. Dad was
involved in some way with the HUAC back in the early 50's. Right in the thick of McCarthyism. He'd been somehow involved in a cold war project. Not surprising, in and of itself, given his position with State. But according to retired FBI Agent, Agent Dales, that I'd contacted, somehow, Dad was involved in helping to destroy the careers and lives of ... way to go, Dad. Why not apply your home experience to work? Why does none of this surprise me? But there was an irony that I can't quite figure out here. Apparently, he saved the life of this one subject, this Leonard Skur. A killer by any stretch of the imagination, but one created by some sort of horrific, scifi medical procedure. Apparently, Dad let him go somewhere in the great open spaces of somewhere in the hopes of ... what? That he'd never kill again? That he'd live off the berries and jackrabbits? But Dad was wrong. He did kill again. So, what have I learned? Dad was involved in some lovely little experiments that would rival what the Nazis did. History repeats itself? No, that's not how Dad would see it, would he? It's raining again.

Another discovery. The X-files. A whole treasure trove of unsolved cases.
I'm inexplicably drawn to read them. These files, these cases "designated" as unsolved. Dales had made a distinction to me about these cases not
necessarily being unsolved, but "designated" as such. I've read about 10 of
these case files so far. It's almost like a drug. Cult activity, reports of monster-killers, half-human predators, people abducted. Yes. How like my own recollection did that case sound? I've always had an interest in this kind of phenomenon. Of course, as it applied to the criminal mind. Like Monty Props.
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Mulder closed his eyes, remembering. It *had* been like a drug. Pouring
through the X-files. But he was less interested in the mutant-men than he was in hoping for more shreds of information about his father, and his involvement in whatever it was that he'd gotten himself involved in. Mulder had soon thereafter opened an X-file of his own. This one on his sister Samantha, who, like others in the files, had disappeared without a trace in a flash of light, never to be seen or heard from again.