Fox Mulder | Not a Green Man (basementman) wrote in thedoorway, @ 2013-06-23 13:39:00 |
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A pencil flew upwards, hitting the ceiling with a thump and just barely holding. Fox Mulder shifted his hand reaching for another one, but this one he kept in his fingers, moving it from side to side, his mind half-attuned to the smoothness of the wood, but mostly engaged elsewhere. Over the past week or two his room had gone from being something with the bare minimum of furniture supplied by SHIELD to something more akin his apartment at home as he’d gathered papers and supplies for a possible private paranormal investigation service and had began making notes and clippings to that end. Two large file cabinets sat next to the SHIELD provided desk, and the wall behind it held a familiar poster, as well as a handful of drawings and notes. The file cabinets were, admittedly, mostly empty, but he had started by making a file for every source listed as the SHIELD notices came out, and most of the Marvel Comic characters that he could come up with from interactions on the network and out of the deep foggy recesses of a geeky fifteen-year-old boy's mind. He had no idea what or if it would be useful in the future, but making connections between the dots was always easier if one actually had the dots in front of one. Of course most of this work had been completed before Scully had sent him the text that had spun his world upside down and round about and seemed to be continuing to do so despite his best intentions. For all the things he might have guessed about his future a relationship with Scully - a child with Scully - wasn’t something he would have supposed. No, perhaps that wasn’t entirely true if he were being terribly honest with himself. Leastwise not about the relationship bit. After all, from the moment she’d walked into his office she had demanded his attention. Even when he hadn’t trusted her and even when he’d been certain she was there only to spy on him he had not been able to ignore her. Rational and intelligent she’d demanded excellence from him and in a way that had meant he had to respect her views and her morals and behavior had meant that he had to respect her as well. When Fox had first arrived he and Scully were partners and friends. Somewhere within the more recent memories the tesseract had dropped him was the memory of a 'perhaps' He had simply never allowed himself to dwell on the thought. He tossed the pencil upwards. This one hit the ceiling wrong and bounced; he followed it with his eyes and a glare being too lazy to actually chase after it and try again. He reached for another pencil and spun it once more in his fingers - lightly touching the lead with his finger to test it: Perhaps the other simply hadn’t been sharp enough. Then there was Christine. Christine whom he’d had chemistry with the first moment they’d talked on the network. Christine who had kept him from silently going mad by taking the time to come and bang on his door. Christine who had ignored the mess of the main room and the sunflower seed shells everywhere, and who had drug him back out into the world. She had kept him calm and sane when everything else felt as if it were falling to pieces. She was beautiful and fun, and she made him laugh, and she’d listened to him go on and sort out what he was doing here and what his purpose might be. The idea of the tesseract pulling her away and of losing that friendship wasn’t something he liked to dwell on. Mulder rarely considered relationships in traditional terms, when he spent time considering them at all, but he knew he could count on Christine to be there and however much his discovery of future events might complicate, well, everything, he didn't plan on messing things up with Christine, either. Fox flicked the pencil upwards, and it wavered as if it had almost too much momentum, but it held in the ceiling and he turned away from it, his eyes turning to the poster on the wall. The UFO on the poster seemed chintzy under the circumstances. Here alien life was a given. Characters like Thor were as real as the shape shifting bounty hunters of his own reality, and perhaps were more accepted. SHIELD was an actual organization and Mulder could text Bruce Banner or Clark Kent for god’s sake. Yet when he’d found a copy on the internet he’d bought it without hesitation. The UFO in the poster had never been the point - not really. The point had been a belief in the truth and that the truth could be uncovered and that the truth could be known. And while the truths and obfuscations in this reality might be different than his own there were still truths to be told, and obfuscations and denials existed as well. It seemed governments could lie to their own people without the assistance of Cancer Man. Or perhaps every reality simply had their own version of Cancer Man. And of course there was SHIELD. As a boy he’d read comics about Nick Fury and SHIELD, but as a boy he hadn’t had years in the FBI to make him doubtful of the altruism of government related agencies as a whole. Plus, at home SHIELD was fictional (and therefore likely the obvious good-guys). Here it wasn't fictional. And he was certain there was likely information about SHIELD he hadn’t read - he’d stopped reading comics as he’d gotten older, so anything after the seventies he was knowledgeable about only if it had made some sort of giant splash in pop culture. Pile together his experiences at the FBI with a very dated understanding of a SHIELD organization that wasn't quite the same as the one here in this reality and he’d been uncertain about joining with the organization. Following the broadcasts however, he found himself once again at a crossroads of sorts. Was starting a paranormal investigative agency with Scully the best idea under the circumstances? It would be work, and they would work together, and it would give them things to talk about that were not either of their respective futures, but he knew at some point he was going to have to tell Christine what he’d learned about his future in his reality and he had no idea how she would react if she knew that he and Scully were going to be seeing each other on a daily basis. (He valued Christine and the friendship and companionship that she brought him, but if she put a foot down and said she didn’t want him and Scully working together, what then? It was a choice Mulder didn’t want to have to make and if that made him a coward - and it did perhaps - he supposed he could live with that designation. In the meantime he was simply praying she did nothing of the sort when he finally figured out how to mention it.) He was certain they would have work from the information available on the Internet, but was it the best thing he could be doing with his skill set? He reached for another pencil and tapped the eraser against the arm of the chair in a repetitive movement, wondering idly if Spock would hear the noise from his rooms - just how good was vulcan hearing? He couldn’t ignore the broadcasts that had been played. And while Fox Mulder had no particular desire to work counter-terrorism he couldn’t ignore that the broadcasts were unsettling - and were no doubt was intended to be. The fact that comic book characters like Tony Stark and Captain America were walking around this reality all of the time meant that 'normal' rules did not apply - comic rules did. And in the comics the bad guys were usually deeply villainous, and this truth had the effect of altering the conversation somewhat from a conversation he might have had at home: changing it into something entirely different. But into what, Mulder wasn’t certain. He knew he no desire to get stuck as a cog in a system, where there were rules and procedures to be followed, and higher-ups to stand guard over the institutions and to protect power, because even the best of them - and Assistant Director Skinner was certainly among the best - still did that and Mulder wasn’t certain he could do it here. He glanced over at the yellow pad on the desk. Scribbled on it were dozens of notes in shorthand, the beginning of a profiling piece on the voice they’d heard on the television. Could he help SHIELD? Probably. Would he be happy there? That was a more extreme possibility. A part of him wanted to simply say ‘Christine let’s move out of Potts Tower and move to the country and never look back.’ To have the chance of a normal existence when he wasn’t certain that would ever describe his existence in his own reality - regardless of what relationship status he might have in the future - was attractive. And yet Mulder had been inside the systems in his own world for too long. He’d read too many Marvel comics as a boy. And he would never leave Scully either. “Shit,” he sighed, throwing the pencil down on the pad of paper and glancing back to the poster. There was truth and it was by its nature exclusive. You just had to find it. The truth of this reality might be different from his own, but it was no less alluring for its differences. He still believed that it could be known. Perhaps Scully was right and he was doomed to forever be Captain Ahab on his quest for the White Whale of truth. Regardless, he couldn’t leave, and he suspected he might no longer be able to avoid the possibilities of this reality. |