CLOSE by Rae Lynn (rae_lynn05 at yahoo.com) RATING: G CLASSIFICATION: SA SPOILERS: "Sein und Zeit" KEYWORDS: Missing scene. SUMMARY: Scully's thoughts during select scenes before and during "Sein und Zeit." AUTHOR'S NOTES: I blame TNT completely for their seventh-season middle-of-the- night reruns, without which this story would not exist. It turns out I still abhor "Closure" but find "Sein und Zeit" full of interesting possibilities, which is why this story concentrates on "SuZ" and steers a wide berth past all notions of walk-ins, starlight and ghostly figures cavorting to Moby music. DISCLAIMER: All characters contained within are the property of Chris Carter and Ten Thirteen Productions. No profit will result from this story and no copyright infringement is intended. ___________________________ Once, early in our partnership -- before I would become almost as familiar with Mulder's demons as I was with my own -- I came face-to-face for the first time with my partner's incessant sleeping problems. He had been injured: a deep cut on the arm, or maybe a blow to the head -- who can remember anymore? -- and instead of resting as I had advised him to do, he was pacing the length of his motel room, clearly exhausted, pausing by the desk chair to hold himself upright, with that wild look in his eyes that I would later come to learn meantBut I didn't know that, not then-not when Mulder's body language was still as mysterious to me as some of his more bizarre theories. Instead I launched into a stern lecture about the importance of sleep as a body's means of rejuvenating itself after injury. I asked him to take a pill. I can still remember the rigidity in his back as he whirled to face me, the expression in his eyes clear, for once, as a signal of their damnation. You, he seemed to be saying, do not know me at all, and somehow that hurt more than any rejection of my practicality. "No," he had said violently, as if I wasn't perfectly capable of inferring that for myself. "No pills." I think I made an attempt at easing the palpable tension by suggesting that he drink warm milk instead and try to get some sleep. I also think I remember sleeping fitfully myself that night, awoken and re-woken by the noise from Mulder's television and the sound of his laptop keys tapping through the thin walls. But instinctively I knew that I had touched a nerve that night. And for seven years I've endured all kinds of nocturnal disturbances -- Mulder's door slamming shut as he leaves for a run at the first hint of daylight, Mulder's sink running when he splashes water on his face after a nightmare -- without so much as hinting to him that he might consider a sedative. So when Mulder's mother kills herself by ingesting a massive overdose of Diazepam, I consider it the cruelest blow of all to a man who has endured more than his share of tragedy. I've always valued my affinity with logical, dispassionate science, with ration and reason and plausibility serving as my holy trinity of investigative techniques. And despite his frustration with what he perceives to be my close- mindedness, Mulder has, too, his instincts complementing my science in an unorthodox approach to problem-solving that's earned us one of the highest solve rates in the Bureau. But as I steeled myself to knock on the door to his California hotel room, I realized, not for the first time, that common sense plays a very marginal role in my relationship with Fox Mulder. That if it had, there would be no relationship to speak of at all. There was no logical reason for me to stay. Seven years ago, if A.D. Skinner had called me into his office and ordered me to California to retrieve Mulder and his report on the disappearance of Amber-Lynn LaPierre, I would have resented it. I had been assigned to the X-Files to debunk Mulder's work, that much was clear to me, but I hadn't been told that I would be expected to babysit him. I might have protested openly: Mulder is a grown man, I am a capable agent, surely there must be a better use of my time than this. But this time I just nodded resignedly. I had been expecting this. Skinner's eyes seemed apologetic behind wire-rimmed glasses: "I didn't want him near the case, Agent Scully," he said. "But Mulder was...persuasive. He thinks she's still alive." Oh, I can bet he did. I'm certain that no sooner than Amber-Lynn LaPierre was just a memory in her bedroom did Mulder and his gigantic brain of empathetic intuition scramble to get in on the investigation as quickly as possible. Without calling me, of course. I had to call him myself as soon as I left Skinner's office. I used an oldie but a goodie to kick off our conversation -- "Mulder, where are you?" -- knowing there were two possibilities about the Mulder I might find on the other end of the phone: a self-assured, self-aggrandizing Mulder pushing an alien abduction scenario and keyed up about pursuing his own agenda, or a grim, bleak Mulder deeply haunted by what he'd seen in Amber-Lynn LaPierre, a Mulder whose flat, listless voice always left me profoundly unsettled after talking to him. Naturally, I quickly discovered that it was the latter: Congratulations, Dana, today you'll be working with the Mulder behind Door #2! You're the lucky winner of a trip to a personal investigation that will inevitably dredge up your partner's more horrific memories and leave him virtually unable to function without snapping in two. Be sure to pack your empathy voice! It was night by the time I reached him -- more than enough time, I reflected, for the dark wheels to have set in motion in that ever-churning brain. Sure enough, I could tell what kind of evening it was going to be when I found Mulder sprawled across his hotel bed, fully dressed and completely unable, judging by the deadness of his face as he stared ahead at the muted TV, to look me in the eye. Damn it, Mulder. He told me he was thinking. I asked him what about, as if it wasn't screamingly obvious. He was distracted, clearly already six leagues deep into the case. Head-first. "Amber-Lynn LaPierre," he said. This was great. Obviously I would be the one trying to explain this to Skinner. In some ways it represented a breakthrough, a new record for Mulder. Back in the early days of our partnership, it might have taken five or six days before I was presented with the distinctly tormented Mulder I saw before me; if the case involved children or an embattled member of Mulder's immediate family, as few as three or four. But this -- this was extraordinary, from zero to meltdown in less than twelve hours. One day I would have to ask Amber-Lynn LaPierre how she had done it. "Mind if I turn on a light?" I asked him, my voice sounding shrill and accusatory to my ears. "Yeah. I do," he said lifelessly. This was part of our routine: the more high- pitched and pointed my queries, the duller and more monosyllabic Mulder's responses always became, as if he simply wilted under the pressure of direct questions from Dana Scully. In some of my more charitable moods I've chalked it up to guilt. But this evening I wasn't feeling charitable. "Skinner is royally pissed. At you," I added unnecessarily but pointedly. Mulder was, as I expected, past caring. "I'm sure he is." "He expected a report at noon," I continued. "He waited. Now he sent me to find you, to get it." Mulder didn't react; he barely even moved. "I don't have a report," he said indifferently. "They had to move on the case," I told him, wondering if he even knew what time it was, how long he had been lying here. "The media got wind of the police findings and they're going to broadcast them. The parents are being held for further questioning." "They're not guilty, Scully." "The facts would say otherwise," I said evenly, providing the logical counterpoint to Mulder's intuitive grasp of the outcome as always. "There's no sign of a break-in. Both parents were home when the girl disappeared." "They lied about where they found the note," he said definitively, in a voice that dared me to point out that nobody else who had questioned the LaPierres had ventured to broadcast the same opinion. "Why?" I asked instead. "That's what I've been thinking about." For a moment we were both silent, watching the TV. "Is it the media," I wondered aloud, more to myself than to my silent partner, "or just our own morbid fascination with the killing of an innocent?" This got Mulder's attention. "She's not dead, Scully," he said. No doubt he expected another refutation, another demand for any kind of concrete proof to support his claim. But I'd given Mulder this speech many times before. Stop, I'd said, stop running after your sister. This won't bring her back. And each time he had reacted the same way he had that first time in Sioux City...by walking away. When Mulder's phone rang, I assumed it was A.D. Skinner, calling to find out why I hadn't yet personally delivered a contrite and report-bearing Mulder to his doorstep. But Mulder's face registered a small note of surprise as he answered. "Mom? Hi." Teena Mulder. Now there was a phone conversation I would have paid to tap into. I knew next to nothing about Mulder's mother, only that she lived in Connecticut and, of course, possessed the singular ability to send my partner spiraling into the depths of paralyzing self-reproach more impressively than any X-File ever had. As it was, I had to stand awkwardly by the television and eavesdrop on what was obviously a very uncomfortable conversation from Mulder's end. "Yes, I am," he was saying. "Are you okay, Mom?" At the time I remember thinking that it would be par for the course if Mrs. Mulder was, in fact, not well -- just another personal crisis to push Mulder right over the edge. I had no way of knowing how prescient my unkind thoughts would prove to be. "Well, I'm not sure," I heard Mulder say hesitantly. "I...you know, I...I don't know." There was a small pause; clearly Mulder's response had been a real conversation- stopper. "Okay, I will," Mulder said. "Um...you take care, Mom. Okay?" You take care. Not "I love you" or even "I'll talk to you soon." Mulder, I knew by now, was one of the most verbally articulate people I had ever met. When he said you take care to end a phone call, it meant something. On Teena Mulder's end of the phone line, I was willing to bet, that something stung deeply. I looked at him questioningly. "It was my mother," he said unnecessarily, his brows furrowed in confusion. "She knew I was out here." Of course she knew, I wanted to tell him, you may as well have been wearing a sign across your chest that said "Will Brood Over Child Abductions For Identification With Missing Sister." "Maybe," I said quietly, "your mother knows you better than you think." "What do *you* think?" he said suddenly, turning to face me for the first time. "About?" I replied cautiously. "Amber-Lynn LaPierre." "Mulder..." I sighed. It was one of Mulder's unique talents, that only when he knew I didn't want to give an answer did he press me for my thoughts. "I haven't studied the case, I'm not familiar with the M.O...." "You think she's dead," he said flatly. "I think," I said carefully, "that we'd better get back to D.C." Two days later, as I chauffeured my partner to his dead mother's apartment in Greenwich -- when Mulder concedes control of the driver's seat, I thought morbidly, you know things must be serious -- I allowed myself the small fantasy of wishing we had stayed in California. Forever. Where it was warm and sunny all the time, and the ghost of Samantha Mulder haunted Mulder no more profoundly than the ghost of Christmas past. I glanced over at my partner, who looked as though he was holding himself together by sheer force of will. Who would he be, I wondered, if Samantha had never gone missing? Mulder caught me looking at him, one of the many surreptitious glimpses I'd stolen out of the corner of my eye since we had started driving. "She's done this before," he said tightly, letting his eyes slide shut. My brain was slow to understand his meaning. Committed suicide?, I thought. "When I was fourteen," he continued tonelessly. "Just after she and my father divorced. She took an overdose of sleeping pills." I could feel myself sucking in a deep breath as his face twisted into a bitter smile. "She always told me it was an accident." I remember the forcefulness of his tone, the slight note of panic registering on his normally impassive face. Oh, Mulder. "Maybe it was," I said quietly. "She left a note," he said flatly. "I found it before I found her. I tried to shake her awake, told her I was going to call an ambulance. She begged me not to." Well, I thought, this throws a whole new wrench into the tormented psyche of Fox Mulder. "You did the right thing, Mulder," I said finally. "Did I?" he said. "Willing her to live so I could torture her with my questions about my father, my sister...you know it's a classic parental reaction when one child goes missing to resent the child left behind, Scully. My very existence was hateful to her." I was determined to concentrate on the highway in front of me, but my whole body seemed to ache for him. What he'd said was heart-rending but undeniably true; there is no doubt in anyone's mind that Teena Mulder must have despised her son as much as she loved him and desperately wanted to protect him. "Mulder," I felt myself say gently, as if compelled to speak by some twisted sympathy handbook -- Chicken Soup for the Grieving Partner's Soul -- "you can't blame yourself." He nodded shortly and turned his head toward the window, but the look on his face told me that he could. And he would, over and over, for the rest of his life, long after the truth about Amber-Lynn LaPierre has been unearthed from its burial place. Mulder was unmistakably tense as we entered his mother's apartment, which was still swarming with local police officers. A practiced observer like myself, with my degree in Behavioral Mulder, would take note of the slow, languid pace of his movements, the way his head tipped back in an effort to recover more oxygen, the small sighs that betray him when his brain, working in fits and starts, refuses to cooperate. By the time he asked me to perform his mother's autopsy -- a prospect almost as horrifying as if I had killed her myself -- he had derailed completely, grasping at the remote possibility of his mother's murder as though uncovering evidence of foul play might actually resurrect her. "Mulder," I pled, "please don't ask me to do this." But he was already off and running, playing the trump card with which, he knows, he can expect me to do anything. "Who else can I ask?" he replied. In his voice I heard the unspoken supplication, which from Mulder's lips sounded so much like a prayer: Scully, you are the only one I trust. I protested, but Mulder and I both knew that I could not deny him this. When he tossed in that sacred word, "truth," I knew I was done for. Don't go looking for something you don't want to find, I had told him. Even at the time, my warning sounded absurd to my own ears -- when had Mulder ever been able to resist pursuing the truth? When had *I* been able to resist helping him? Even as my stomach roiled at the thought of autopsying Teena Mulder, knowing what I was likely to find, I knew there was no way to avoid uncovering Mulder's truths. Even if it destroyed him. By the time I was finished with the autopsy, I was exhausted. I could only imagine what Mulder must be feeling, his mother's last words to him wheeling dizzily around his buzzing head. When I arrived at his apartment, he was the Mulder I so often deal with at the beginning of a case: latched onto a theory, alternately wheedling and angry, passionate and tightly wound. My mother was trying to tell me something. He remained insistent, like a man drowning, clutching at this possibility until I had no choice but to softly, brutally, shut him down. "Your mother killed herself, Mulder," I said, barely able to listen to the sound of my own voice devastating my partner's last hope. "She was dying of an incurable disease. An untreatable and horribly disfiguring disease called Paget's carcinoma. She knew it. There were doctor's records. She didn't want to live." Mulder rested the tips of his fingers lightly on his forehead, his lips pursed as if concentrating hard on somehow reaching out to his mother's spirit. Then, without warning, he swiftly leapt to his feet and rocked his desk violently, up and down, futilely trying to break it apart. "She was trying to tell me something," he said furiously, but already I could recognize the signs of an imminent breakdown. "She was..." And suddenly he was slumping over, away from me, as I tried to pull his heavy body toward mine even as it began to wrack with sobs. "Mulder, she was trying to tell you to stop," I said, my own voice tearful. "To stop looking for your sister. She was just trying to take away your pain." I doubted he could even hear me, but he was reaching out for me, desperately, and as I held him I was afraid to break our embrace...to shatter Mulder's faith in what he's always believed: that somehow I can save him. So we sat like this, rocking on the floor of Mulder's apartment, for a long time. When Mulder went quiet, with a long, shuddering breath, I briefly imagined that he had fallen asleep as an infant would in someone's arms. Gently, I pulled him off me, only to find that his eyes were unfocused and wet but open, staring past me. "Mulder?" I said quietly. He shook his head abruptly as if coming awake. "I'm sorry, Scully," he said in a low voice. "I never should have asked you to..." "Mulder, stop." I grasped his hands with mine. "You needed to know," I said. He closed his eyes, squeezing them shut as if to block out what must have been a relentless parade of images: Amber-Lynn LaPierre's shy smiling face on TV. His mother, her jaw set, grimly setting his childhood aflame. "I'll never know, Scully," he said brokenly. "I'll never know what she wanted to tell me. I'll never know the truth." And if she had truly wanted you to know, she would have told you before she killed herself and left you grieving the destruction of your entire family, I thought callously before I could help myself. I knew how horrific it can be to face the prospect of a painful terminal illness. I knew that Mrs. Mulder had her reasons. I also knew that there is no deeper place in hell than the one my partner was enduring right then. "She was your mother," I said. "You have to know that she cared for you. That she wanted you to be safe." "I couldn't find her," he said mindlessly, not hearing me. "I tried to find Samantha for her so many times. I just wanted her to know." Judging by his mother's spectacularly well-timed phone call on the day after Amber-Lynn LaPierre's disappearance, I thought it was a safe bet that she knew more than Mulder thought. But that was something I wisely chose to keep to myself. Instead I fell back on a tried-and-true technique for dealing with my partner on a meltdown: When you have utterly failed to give him even a small modicum of comfort, insist that he get some sleep. "Mulder, you're exhausted," I said. "You need to try and rest." He shook his head. "I don't..." "I'll stay as long as you need me to," I assured him. He stared at me for a moment and then stumbled to the couch, where he collapsed onto it and flung a hand over his eyes. "Thank you," he said in a muffled voice. I got up to bring him a glass of water, but to my surprise, Mr. "Go Ahead, Just Try to Make Me Go to Sleep" was already breathing deeply when I returned, his chest rising in and out. Oh, Mulder. I found myself drawn to him, bending down to cup his face in my hands. I had always thought that Mulder, in sleep, looked so young, all the tension that gripped his face during the day somehow loosened from it in slumber. But tonight my partner looked as if he had aged twenty years, and suddenly it occurred to me that he wasn't a young man anymore -- that Teena Mulder must have seen this when she looked at him, seen the weight of his missing sister on him and what it had cost. I don't know how long I kneeled there by his couch, looking at him. Only that when it came there was no warning -- no fitful tossing and turning, no moan that prematurely escaped from his lips, no sheen of sweat that broke out across his brow and lips. Instead Mulder abruptly bolted upright, his eyes wide, a harsh, guttural breath sounding low in his throat. "Mulder?" I said cautiously. He stared at me as if he didn't know me while the silence stretched interminably between us. Then he sagged back against the couch. "God, Scully," he said hoarsely. "What time is it? You should go home." "Do you want to talk about it?" I said quietly. Mulder shook his head. "No. No." I moved to the couch and sat next to him, tentatively reaching for his hand. "Then we'll just sit here," I said. And we sat until his breathing evened out, more regular, less shallow, but the haunted shapes in his eyes refused to pass away. Whatever the morning holds, I thought -- for Mulder and for his mother, for Samantha and for Amber-Lynn LaPierre -- I could only pray that at the end of it all, somehow, Mulder would find peace. END. ______________ Thanks for reading. Apologies for the abrupt ending; I had to shut it down before it got too close to the whole "starlight" subplot at which point my brain explodes. I gratefully accept and acknowledge feedback at rae_lynn05 at yahoo.com.