InsaneJournal

Fox Mulder knew the directions by heart and yet he still found himself questioning turns -- perhaps not surprising considering that the landmarks he knew were those of an entirely different reality. Every time he found himself saying ‘I don’t remember that’ there was the reminder that he didn’t quite fit here. Finding himself out of place wasn’t a new situation, but when he turned off on to the wrong street and drove six miles before he realized he had, it became a need to stop and get gas.

Mulder did so, pulling the rental car into a station and pumping the gas before he walked into the station to buy a drink and a paper map. His cell phone sat on the floor of the car and he’d been in this world long enough to know that he could put the coordinates of at least the town into that phone and have it give him step by step directions in a pleasant female voice, but he’d turned the phone off and had no intentions of giving into the peculiarities of this dimension.

The odd look he’d been given had resulted in him saying something off-handed about a battery lacking charge, followed by a curious look that he didn’t have a car charger, and then an attempt to get him to buy one. Ultimately Mulder had to protest that he didn’t see something for his model before he laid a ten dollar bill down on the counter that would more than cover the diet soda and map he’d just purchased and he headed for the door before there could be further protest.

He’d locked himself into the car, opened the diet and reviewed the map. It was just familiar enough to feel like home and just different enough to feel as though you had been invited to an old hour you’d once lived in only to find that the current owners had switched the dining room and the living room and town out a wall between the living room and the kitchen. Still it did precisely what he’d needed it to do - finalise his way onwards. He started the car up again and pulled back out onto the state highway, making his way back towards the direction he’d just come until he reached the road he still needed to be on and turned back onto it - moving onwards towards the coast.

There was no definitive answer to the question of what he expected to find upon arrival. Mulder was not even certain he knew what he was looking for. He was well aware that his home wasn’t likely to be there, and that despite the familiarity of some roads, the total strangeness of others only reinforced that. Should his childhood address exist in this dimension he would not find his sister, his mother, or his father there and more than likely he wouldn’t find any other answers there either. That knowledge didn’t stop him from pushing forward, pushing the speed limit but not so much as to make him likely to get a ticket from a bored Massachusetts state patrol.

The sense of the familiar yet strange continued as the roads got smaller, as they ran into small coastal towns and into the ferry docks. Mulder paid his passage and pulled into the line waiting to board, his window still down despite the chilly winter air. His body on one side was heated beyond belief, while on the other hand, the air was cold enough to draw goosebumps on that arm. He left it like this while he boarded, pulled into the indicated location. He put the car into park, raised the emergency brake, and rolled up the window before turning the car off. He leaned his head back against the car seat.

If he could answer the question of what he hoped to find in Martha’s Vineyard, perhaps he would answer the larger question of what he was supposed to be doing here. When he had devoted the past four years of his professional life to finding out what had happened to his sister, when in fact in this reality his sister was nothing more than a fictional character, the shadowy government figures that had perhaps been involved in her kidnapping equally fictional, and the aliens he believed did exist were not the same as those that did exist here - what was he looking for?

He’d always said he was looking for the truth of Samantha’s disappearance, but as he’d worked his way through the show he’d watched himself come to the conclusion that she had died. He’d found his beliefs about his family and his parents knowledge of the process shattered. He’d watched the man he called his father murdered at the order of the man who was his father, and he’d ignored his mother’s call to put things to rest instead retreating into a case with a single-minded focus until he could no longer ask her anything at all.

The pursuit of the truth and the belief that he could possibly enact some justice had lost him his family: both past and future.

Perhaps even Scully -- for whatever he had said in a way of offering her some hope - that they were still together all those years later -- he didn’t know and certainly throughout the past two season’s worth of episodes they had been apart more frequently than they had been together.

Mulder brought his hands up to his forehead and pushed against his temples, his eyes closed as he tried to ignore many of the visual memories he’d received as a result of watching the television show and yet the pressure against his temples did nothing to relieve the pressure against his heart. It had been continuous since he’d watched Scully sitting over their son’s cradle, making a decision that she ought never to have had to have made.

He raised his head and looked at the back bumper of the car in front of him. Others had exited their cars for the duration of the ride, but he couldn’t bring himself to go out and enjoy the fresh sea air. It made it seem too much like a vacation and too little like a quest for something so pivotal to his well-being that it might inform every decision he made from this moment forward.

Perhaps he was looking for proof that his life here was not his life at home: that this reality didn’t have government conspiracies or abducted citizens: that this reality didn’t hide things from its citizens and respected the foundation of the constitution: that if he treated it as a fresh start that he could have the guarantee of a just life so long as the Tesseract left him here. Perhaps it was an impossible proof - as impossible as proving the existence of extraterrestrial life forms seemed to be at home. And Perhaps that was an answer in and of itself - that he had everything he had ever needed here even with the deeper answers could not be found.

And if governments would keep secrets from their citizens, and those who were supposed to do good and support justice accepted bribes and self-serving motivators rather than looking for right, and if people knew there were truths untold but didn’t know what the ramifications might be - perhaps these things mattered only in the context of standing for truth - even when the world thought you were spooky. The question Mulder couldn’t answer - the question that continued to evade him - was the question of the personal cost. He had seen in a very real way how high that cost might be and what gave him reason to believe that here it might be different?


He placed his hands on the steering wheel as he noticed people returning to their cars - the sign that they would soon be docking at the island and he’d need to continue.

And as the signal that the cars could be started changed, Mulder turned the keys, undid the emergency break, and realized that this was a journey he’d had to take before, but one he’d been able to throw into work. That when Scully had been taken abducted and when she’d been returned, he’d felt so incapable in the aftermath - but he’d thrown himself into finding the truth about aliens - to find his sister - and work had become the shorthand to avoid facing another truth. Here the short hand had been different, but over a year of time in this reality and he was still seeking peace and avoiding an undeniable truth.

The roads away from the dock held firm in the familiar yet strange tradition and Mulder turned twice onto roads he’d thought were one thing, before realizing they were another. Ultimately he found himself sitting on a road named Vine Lane, staring at a house that was not his boyhood home, and yet the two one-hundred fifty year old trees sitting on the front of the property were familiar in every way. He’d climbed them so many times as a boy, and the right had held a platform he’d built himself even when the house had been sold.

Mulder pulled the car over to the side of the road carefully ensuring that it wouldn’t be likely to be hit by driving the right tires into the ditch and leaving his hazard lights on. He turned the car off and opened the door, crossing the street and standing on the other side of it outside of the fence surrounding the property.

This wasn’t his reality.

And here was the evidence to support that hypothesis. This was the final straw to reinforce that this was not the world that he knew and that its problems and its trials were its own, but that the important things held fast.

The importance of justice: the reality and need for truth: the faith that life was worth it regardless of what it might throw at you: Scully.

“Sorry sir, are you having car problems?”

Mulder turned around to see a blue pick-up pulled up just in the gravel drive of the house he’d been staring at. “No,” he shook his head. ‘No, sorry, I used to live on the island as a kid. I’m just - the house doesn’t look like I remember at all.”

“Burned about twenty-five years back,” the woman, an older woman with grey hair that upon closer inspection looked a bit like his mother, nodded her head towards it. “The family sold the property then and the new folks built this place. They were a nice family but they hadn’t visited for years when it happened.” She stared at him. “You the boy?”

Mulder looked back at the house, a much newer model than the original cape cod style that had sat there. He shook his head. “Just passing through.”

“That’s a shame, I’d have told you to say hello to your sister. She was always such a sweet girl. What was her name - Elisabeth or Samantha or something like that.”

His sister’s name in connection - even a faulty memory connection - with the family that had once lived in this place hadn’t been something he expected and he looked up sharply. “Samantha?”

“Yeah, I’m pretty sure that was it. She was a real clever little thing. I heard tell she went onto Harvard doesn’t much surprise me. Her brother was a bit quieter, but a harder worker I’ve never seen. Anyway, look at me rambling on through memory lane and disrupting your own travels,” she offered him a smile. “You look awful familiar to me, that’s why I thought you were the boy.”

That was a comment Mulder was used to getting and he just offered his own smile in return. “It’s fine, I’m going to head out now I think, but thanks.”

Mulder turned to head back to his car and then stopped and turned back to the pick-up truck. “Library still on state road?”

“Just off on Cournoyer Rd actually,” she supplied. “They’re doing a remodeling project at the State Road location for a bit. They’re only open for about thirty more minutes today though.”

“Thanks,” Mulder said. “I’m planning on being here for a few days so I’ll check them out later this week.”

“Enjoy your visit,” the woman backed the truck up and returned the way she’d been going after Mulder had crossed the street and he unlocked the car and put the key back in the ignition staring back at the two trees framing the view of the newer cape cod that sat on the property now.

It was a coincidence, but nothing more. An eerie coincidence to be certain, but in his time on the X-Files he’d seen stranger things.

But if anything that coincidence served as further proof that this was not his reality. This Samantha had gone on to Harvard and even if the family had stopped coming to this house, it had not been for the reasons the Mulder family had sold their home. The rest of his proof would hopefully be in the Public Library and he could put this particular search to rest.

In the meantime - food and a place to stay for the night all seemed like very good things. He turned his eyes to the street in front of him, turned the key in the ignition, and without another glance at the residence on Vine Lane not Street, he returned towards the main center of the village of West Tisbury.