Fox Mulder | Not a Green Man (![]() ![]() @ 2013-12-29 13:59:00 |
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Despite the fact that both Christine and Scully had received things from the Tesseract, Fox Mulder hadn’t been anticipating the knock on his door or the SHIELD agent that had handed him an album that he recognized instantly as the photo album from his desk at home. He’d blinked, hardly able to mutter a thank you as the young woman had given him a quick ‘Merry Christmas’ and walked back towards the elevator. It had taken him a good fifteen minutes to be able to open it and during that time he had downed a full glass of wine to work of the courage to do so. Now he was sitting on his sofa, staring down at a family portrait taken up at Martha’s Vineyard, unable to turn the page further. Mulder had been watching through the entirety of the show although the last few seasons had ended up being slow going the primary reason for this being that the subject matter was so difficult. It was one thing to know intellectually that the future you might plan for yourself and the future that you ended up with could be different, but it was an entirely different thing to watch those events unfold with the almost certain knowledge that they would happen this way so far as anyone could tell. It was perhaps a blessing that no one remembered anything when they were sent back - knowing one’s future, particularly if it wasn’t precisely what you had hoped for, was certainly not all it might be expected to be. The silence in the room stretched out as Fox sat unmoving, his eyes fixed - at least mostly so - on the face of his sister Samantha. In the photo in front of him, his mother held her arms around his sister’s shoulders, both were smiling broadly and something about the picture brought forth a quiet aching in his soul and a general unwillingness to move. Without any lights the room began to grow dim. Over the years he’d had so many possible clues about his sister. He’d ran into clones of her both young and old, and they had led him to believe that she might be alive. He’d found samples of tissue that appeared to be recent, but then he’d watched himself discovering something different - that she’d been taken by the Smoking bastard, raised as his daughter - and that brought up a whole other rush of emotions that Mulder wasn’t certain he wanted to try to process on only one glass of wine. His mother had died without him calling her back - he’d been on a quest to find his sister and so certain that something would reveal itself that he had ignored his mother - the one person in his family who was living - until it was too late. He had held this knowledge and tried to ignore the reality of it for weeks now. Weeks wherein he’d ignored watching more of the show for whole weeks and then binged through several episodes in one day - but so long as he ignored the show and the thoughts and emotions it dredged up then it was easy to not think about what he’d viewed in it. It was easier to not ask questions about whether or not he’d made a mistake in how he had pursued the truth of his sister’s life. It was easier to not ask whether or not he still kept looking for her even now and even here. It was easier to not ask questions about his life with Scully, their son, and the future that they would have - or wouldn’t… He’d watched the disappearance and found himself stuck in the middle of a story he not only didn’t remember, but would never remember because it wasn’t his story. His story had become a series of question marks accompanied by a frustration that he wasn’t there for Scully throughout this time. Mulder touched the photo in front of him: “Samantha,” he whispered into the semi-darkness. There were future truths he could not change, but the album represented memories - good memories - that could not be altered whatever the future might hold. Perhaps the Tesseract was trying to remind him of that. |