Trapped, as a fly in amber: in a circle of golden light he was held motionless. Around him, people milled like victims of a plane crash, uncertain who to look at, to whom they could turn. He recognized them--Billy, Theresa, Ray; and standing behind them, the man whose face could be anyone's: the alien bounty hunter.

Then, in a flash of white radiance, they were gone. He was standing in an office, in front of a smooth oak desk. The brass nameplate read C.G.B Spender. Seated behind it in a leather swivel chair was the man himself. Deep grooves lined his face, and his thick hair was gray.

"So you came," he said. He reached into his breast pocket and pulled out a pack of Morleys. He lit one with supreme indifference. "Won't you take a seat?"

"Where the hell are we?"

"It may take some time to explain...if you'll excuse the pun...I suggest you make yourself comfortable." He looked up at Mulder and smiled his old smile--a cat with a mouse to play with.

"I was told you were dying."

"Reports of my death were premature, to say the least. You should know better than to trust Krycek by now." He tapped the cigarette in an ashtray. "As to where we are...why, we're still in Bellefleur. But perhaps a more appropriate question is, when are we?"

"What are you talking about?"

"Look out the window."

Mulder eyed him suspiciously for a moment, then moved to the window. Bright spring sunshine dappled a small cemetery across the street. As he watched, a Ford Taurus pulled up in front of him and two people got out...two people so achingly familiar it was as though he was falling into a story told long ago.

The man, tall and with short dark hair, he knew for himself. The woman...he would recognize her anywhere. Watching her, he could see that she was a girl-woman still, not yet shaped by the years that stretched into her future. Her red hair was worn long. From where Mulder stood he could not see her face, but suddenly he remembered the light dusting of freckles across the bridge of her nose and the smile that had come so easily to her lips back then…

"No need to ask if you recognize them." The gravelly voice interrupted his thoughts. "I can see it in your face. I remember the first time I saw her--I never thought she'd manage it..."

Mulder turned back to him, the spell of his memories broken. "Manage what?"

"Why, to earn your trust, of course. You're not an easy man to get to know, Mr. Mulder. You'd rather get a root canal than admit to an emotion. Or, at least, that is how you were." He nodded to the window. "That's how he is."

Mulder felt anger rising in him. "What happened to the light?" he asked. "Where are Billy Miles and the others? Why was I taken?"

The old man's eyes widened in a show of innocence. "I suppose you think I know why. The fact is that you weren't abducted--you came of your own accord. But I'm giving you a chance to go back, if that is what you want."

Mulder was silent. He did not trust himself to say whether or not he wanted to return. He didn't know why he had reached for that light; perhaps because at the time it had seemed like the only escape. He had returned to Bellefleur defiant, prepared to spend money rashly--to provoke the assholes who'd tried to cage him with financial limits. Perhaps to goad them into doing what he could never do himself, to end his quest once and for all. There was nothing there for him but secrets piled on top of secrets, secrets he could tell to no one, not even Scully. Secrets he suspected she now kept from him.

He never told her he was ill. Blinding headaches had forced him to seek out a doctor's help. All without letting Scully know, throwing her own words back at her: "It's just a headache--I'm fine." An MRI had verified the doctor's fears: a degenerative neurological disorder, similar to Huntington's, and just as incurable. He’d hidden doctor’s appointments from Scully by finding excuses to work far from her: leaving her on stakeout and traveling to Minnesota; searching for crop circles in England; during her vacation in Maine. But it was getting harder to continue without painkillers.

Perhaps the only reason he'd been able to disguise his illness was that Scully seemed so determined to hide some weakness of her own. Mulder knew she rarely ate breakfast anymore, pushing away food with vague excuses and a wan face. One morning, when she thought he was asleep, he had seen her staring at her reflection in the mirror above the bathroom sink. Her eyes were full of wonderment and hope, but a hope that was pushed away by sorrow and disbelief.

When she came to his motel room, sick and cold, he thought that at last this time of secrets would end. But somehow silence had overcome them once again. They had fallen asleep in each other's arms, their fears still unspoken.

Did he want to go back to that? To a meaningless desk job, to an uncertain relationship--to a certain death?

Mulder looked down at his old enemy. The man was blowing idle smoke rings, waiting for his reply. "What is this, then?" he asked, waving towards the window. "A trip down memory lane?"

"It's more than that, Mr. Mulder. It's an opportunity."

"An opportunity for what?"

"There are moments in a person's life--times when certain forces come together and give meaning to one's actions. Times when you must ask yourself which road you want to follow. One of these moments is going to happen for you tonight, and I want you to be able to make the right choice."

"The right choice? For whom?"

Stubbing out his cigarette, he said, "For you, Mr. Mulder."

Mulder made a disgusted noise in the back of his throat. "You want me to believe that we've gone back eight years just so that you could make me change history."

"You sound surprisingly skeptical. There was a time you believed anything you saw, and quite a few things you didn't." He paused, but Mulder made no reply. "I'm giving you the ability to avoid all the suffering you’ve endured over the years. And not just you, but Scully as well."

"What do you mean?"

"For years you've been seeking what you call truth. Trying to bring me and my compatriots to justice. As close as you've come, we've always been ahead of you. But this silly 'quest' of yours has caused so much pain in both your lives."

He remembers:

Skyland Mountain under summer stars, Duane Barry's mad laughter, the light in the sky taking his hopes away.

Sitting on a hill in Los Angeles with her small gold cross in his hands, the acrid stink of woodsmoke nearly choking him, lost without her.

His father's blood, warm and sticky, flowing over his hands to the cold tile of the bathroom floor.

A white hospital hallway, an X-ray marking death's slow approach, and words of empty comfort that could not erase Scully's cancer from existence.

Himself, lying ill and empty, unable to communicate and feeling thoughts as loud as words, trapped in a dream world listening to the myriad voices in his head.

His mother's voice on the phone, begging him to understand secrets she had never revealed, leaving him behind and finding her way into the starlight.

Scully's tears on his shoulder when her last chance of children was denied her, and the piercing sadness of his inability to give her a miracle.

Reaching for the light--

"Come with me, Mr. Mulder. You can make a life better than this. You can escape your past."

Mulder followed him out of the office. He allowed himself to be guided to a dark sedan parked on the street. The old man drove down the dark streets, then pulled into a parking lot.

"Remember this place?" he asked.

Mulder nodded. "It's the motel we stayed at the first time we came to Oregon. The one that burned down."

"You lost all your hard evidence in that fire. Tissue samples. X-rays."

"Scully kept the implant..."

"And then gave it right back to me. Even with the boy's testimony, you never had a hope of finding the ones responsible for the tests. There was no trace of me or of my associates."

"If it hadn't been set on fire--"

"Then your life would have been very different, indeed." He smiled and lit a cigarette. In the darkness, its burning tip blazed like hell fire. "With that evidence in hand, you could have been lead to us. Oh, you never would have discovered all the levels of our organization. But there would have been enough to find your sister."

He imagines a past different from the one he has known:

The door bursts open under the quick thud of a battering ram. Mulder, unmindful of the danger, pushes the fragmented door aside and rushes into the room. A frozen tableau greets him: men he knows from a picture found in his father's lock box, caught like deer in the headlights, shocked that he has come upon them unawares. The SWAT team follows him in, searching for any exit. There is none. They are trapped. He has won...

The man identified as C.G.B. Spender is charged with kidnapping Samantha. A jury convicts him of felony murder based on testimony given by a man known in another lifetime as Deep Throat. The judge condemns him to life imprisonment, and he is found hanged in his cell the next morning...

Mulder comes up from the basement to a new corner office. The X-files remain behind, stacked in dusty boxes, a part of a past that died with the mystery of his sister’s abduction. He works as a profiler, and there is none better. He rises in his superiors' estimation. They give him high-stakes assignments, and he handles them well; he learns once more what it is to work with others, to be a team player...

One day, a woman with long dark hair walks into his office, a secret smile playing about her lips--Diana Fowley. When he looks at her he remembers what they once had together. She has been investigating terrorism in Tunisia, but is now assigned to the head office. He smiles back at her and promises with his eyes that they will take up where they left off...

There is a brief flurry of activity in the office when they announce their engagement. Champagne is brought out. Amidst the party, he sees a woman across the room, a petite redhead. She is vaguely familiar and he thinks perhaps they worked a case together years ago, but then Diana speaks to him and he turns away, forgetting again...

They start a family and live well. He takes his daughters out to Quonchataug to go waterskiing. He drives the boat and waves to his mother on the shore. Later they travel to Martha's Vineyard for dinner with his father. On the way home the girls sleep in the back seat and he and Diana sit together in empty silence. They have said all the words before...

"That is not my life."

"No. But it is what your life could have been. Your mother and father still alive. Your sister's whereabouts no longer a mystery. Your sense of justice not outraged."

Mulder shrugged. What he had seen had felt possible, and more than anything else that convinced him of its reality. He knew he was capable of leaving his life's work behind. Somehow, the X-files no longer gripped his attention the way they had a decade ago, a year ago, even six months ago. In finding his sister, he had found a measure of peace with himself. He no longer had the drive, the will, the energy to pursue those answerless questions. It was not just his illness speaking: it was the fact that his quest was over.

In fairy tales, when the hero wins out, he lives 'happily ever after'. Whatever that means, thought Mulder. His search was over, but there was no instant happiness waiting for him at the end of the line. There was only more cases, more work, and more realizations that he was no longer living the life he wanted.

After all these years he was finally ready for the life Scully had longed for. And this future, or past, that he had been shown was exactly that. The regulation two-point-four kids included. But the vision was a hollow shell of the past he remembered. It all simply flowed together in a hazy dream of happiness.

Which was precisely what he had been promised. Why wasn’t it enough? He asked, "This is the life you're trying to offer me?"

"It is the opportunity I'm giving you. What you make of it is your decision, of course."

"And what about Scully? What becomes of her life?"

The cigarette faltered for a moment between hand and mouth. "Why, she avoids the same suffering as you. She is never touched by cancer. She is given every happiness."

He pictures her life without him:

Her assignment to the X-files ends with the capture of the men on 46th Street. She leads the investigative task force for a few months before her father's heart attack brings all her values into question. She wonders if the FBI is the correct choice or whether it is the rash decision of a young doctor trying to make a name for herself...

Ethan, the television journalist she has been dating, proposes on the anniversary of their relationship. She accepts, and they buy a home together in Alexandria. Ethan travels widely for his job, and she stays behind to build her practice...

Their first child is born, a daughter, and her entire family gathers around her in the nursery: Melissa and Bill Jr. reconciled at last, Charles managing to finagle a leave of absence from his base, Margaret clucking over them all like a worried hen. Ethan talks politics with Bill, meditation with Melissa, and travel with Charles. They all hold the baby and coo over her crib...

Years later Scully visits Tom Colton at the FBI and catches a glimpse of a man she once worked with. A tall, dark woman is hanging over him and whispering into his ear. She feels uncomfortable and makes her excuses to Tom, wondering why she should suddenly want to hurry away, but in the rush awaiting her at work she forgets...

Her practice is extremely successful and her daughter is a constant joy. Often Ethan's job prevents him from being home, but sitting in her house she believes herself to be happy. She has earned her father's pride at the last...

It was all so complete that it itched with strangeness. For a moment Mulder wondered what it was he thought should be missing, and then he realized it was himself. Scully had once told him that not everything was about him, but only now was that truth brought home to him. He was not necessary to the life she'd created for herself with Ethan.

But the important thing is that she's well, he argued to himself. And she has Melissa by her side. And she's finally got the child she'd always wanted. A daughter, dark-haired like Ethan, and with his brown eyes.

And again the question returned: Why isn't that enough?

Why isn't happiness ever enough?

"This opportunity you keep talking about," Mulder said. "It's the fire in the motel that makes the difference. Is that what you want me for? To stop the arsonist from setting the motel on fire?"

The old man chuckled and shook his head, blowing out a cloud of smoke. "There is no arsonist, Fox."

"What do you mean?"

He raised an eyebrow at Mulder's anger. "Just what I say. Look."

Mulder turned to face out the car's side window. He saw his younger self and Scully rushing out of one of the rooms to the car. With a flash of headlights, they left the parking lot. The door to the room was left open.

"That was when Theresa Nemmens phoned us," he said, almost to himself. "Peggy O'Dell had run in front of a truck."

"Come."

Mulder got out of the car and followed the man's trail of smoke to the motel. He pushed the door wide and gestured for Mulder to enter first. The sense of deja vu crashed over him as he walked into the room. The power was still out, and candles guttered on the beside table.

"Why are you showing me this?" Mulder demanded. "What will you gain by changing the past?"

The cigarette smoking man shrugged. "I've always held a certain affection for you, and for Scully. Is there a better reason?"

"I don't believe you. You'd do anything to snake your way out of being caught."

"You don't believe that I'd sacrifice myself for the good of the project? If you and Scully hadn't worked on the X-files for those many years, we would have accomplished so much more. We would have found a vaccine to fight the alien virus. We could have won."

Mulder watched the dancing flame at the end of the candle's wick. Smother it, and have peace, happiness, a family life he'd never dreamed of. Watch it grow, and live through the pain, the deaths, the lies, but with Scully at his side.

"It's a such a simple thing, really, to change a life," the old man said. "A single breath, and these candles could be extinguished. In the instant between thought and action, there is only time to realize that this is your last chance."

Sirens wailed as their car pulled up in front of the motel. Red light flickered over the faces of policemen and firefighters. Mulder ran from the car, briefly identifying himself to the officer at the scene.

"There goes my computer," Scully said, joining him as he approached the blaze.

"Damn it!" he yelled. "The X-rays and pictures." He closed his eyes briefly in defeat, then looked out over the crowd. For a moment he paused, thinking he saw a face strangely familiar among the bystanders. Perhaps only his reflection in a car's window. Before he could look more closely, a girl ran towards him.

"My name is Theresa Nemmens," she said. "You've got to protect me."

Mulder looked at Scully, then back at the girl. Evidence or no evidence, he would follow after any lead he was offered. The face in the crowd was already forgotten in the heat of the investigation. He would find his sister, in the end. He nodded to Theresa and said, "Come with us."

Feedback
Back to Pan-Fandom Stories
Back to The Written Realm
Spring 2001