From: juliettt@aol.com (Juliettt) Newsgroups: alt.tv.x-files.creative Subject: NEW: "All I Want For Christmas" by Juliettt Date: 19 Feb 1996 05:34:07 -0500 "All I Want For Christmas" by Juliettt@aol.com (completed December 3, 1995) [Okay, first of all, my apologies. I wrote this one and hung onto it because I wanted to write the sequel and post them together, but then what with one thing (studying for PhD comps, which I take next month) and another (computer problems) I didn't get that one finished (yet) and forgot I hadn't posted this one. So I pulled it out and decided to go ahead, as it's set in November of 1994, anyway, and the sequel (if there is one) will be some years later. Besides, who says Christmas has to come in late December? It can happen when . . . well . . . read this and you'll see. . . .] Howdy, folks. This one is an unabashedly emotional, angst-riddled piece that is set during Scully's abduction. Very little plot, lots of introspection. Dana Scully, Fox Mulder, and the other characters, as well as the premise of _The X-Files_, belong to Chris Carter, 10-13 Productions, FOX Broadcasting, and probably a lot of other people who were smart enough to obtain some sort of stock in this show, and I am borrowing them (again) without permission (still), although I don't intend to tread on anybody's toes (creative or otherwise). This story, however, is mine. ********************************** "All I Want For Christmas" by Juliettt@aol.com ********************************** Fox Mulder turned off his car's ignition and rested his head for a moment against the steering wheel. The silence inside the vehicle was like a palpable weight against his eardrums and was broken only by the tick-tick-tick of the clock. A reminder. Time-is- passing time-is-passing. . . . Time. It had been too much time. She had been taken more than three months ago. He had had another birthday. Hadn't celebrated it, though -- hadn't felt much like celebrating. What he *had* felt like doing was mourning. His friend, the friend he had thought would make this birthday mean so much, was gone. And he had no idea how to get her back. That was when he had made his first plea. There had been other pleas during the weeks before. Heartfelt pleas that carried the weight of his very being behind them. Prayers offered up to a God he thought he'd forgotten. And his more immediate requests of Skinner and the Lone Gunmen and his new informant whom he still did not fully trust. He had done everything he knew to do and now he pled. And October 13th had come and gone with nothing, nothing for him. At least, nothing that he wanted. Clothes he didn't have the heart to cut the tags off and wear, books he had no desire to read, even the _Superstars of the Superbowls_ video which normally would have thrilled him still lay in its pristine shrinkwrap on the shelf. Another year older, and another year begun alone. It shouldn't have been like this, and it was his own fault. He regretted it less for his own loneliness than for *her* -- for her safety, for her health, for her family. For her life. He should have taken the closing of the X-files for what it had been: a warning. "Keep it up, Mulder, and your precious files won't be all we'll take." They had taken Sam. The Files. And Scully. . . . And so his thirty-third birthday had come and gone with no revelations for him, no wishes granted, no light and no joy. Thanksgiving was next. On October 14th he revised his request: "Please, please bring her back in time for Thanksgiving. No mother should have to wonder where her child is on Thanksgiving. Please . . . bring her back in time for Thanksgiving -- safe and healthy. Safe. For her mother." But the days stretched on and melted into one another, into weeks spent with the X-files, blurring into weekends spent alone on his couch in his empty, lonely apartment. Ducking his calls with the ringer turned off. He kept it on during the week out of deference to his job, but on the weekends he shut himself off and shut himself up in his shell, his ivory tower of delusions-turned-nightmares. He had given up jumping at the phone weeks ago. He had grown selfish, he knew, using his answering machine to screen his calls. But it saved him the energy of trying to pretend he wanted to talk, wanted to listen. Saved callers the embarrassment and frustration of trying to make conversation with a stone wall. Sometimes he would pick up the phone after hearing the caller identify him- or herself. Usually he did so when it was Margaret Scully on the other end of the line. Funny -- he would have thought she would be the one person with whom he would be afraid to speak, but it hadn't been like that at all. The Lone Gunmen tired him with their overly enthusiastic theories and vain attempts to cheer him. Mrs. Scully never tried to cheer him. She would call him when she felt particularly blue or had an idea he might be. She was usually right. And he would answer and sometimes they would just sit there listening to one another breathe because there was nothing to say. Or she would tell him about grocery shopping or something one of her friends had said and he would murmur commonplaces when he felt like it and remain silent when he did not, and she always understood. He understood as well her attempts to remind him that the outside world went on, ever on, but he did not care for it anymore. And once or twice she had called and had wound up crying softly into the phone while he listened, his chest aching with the need to breathe and scream and curse and laugh all at once, his mind a blank, shut against the clamoring of his heart and the traffic outside and the clock ticking his life -- *her* life -- mercilessly away, shut against everything but the soft weeping of the woman who had given his best friend life, whose voice sounded so like hers sometimes on the phone that his heart leapt and then thudded painfully against his ribs. Perhaps that was why she always called him "Fox." They had never spoken of what it would do to him to hear *her* voice say his name in that expectant, inquiring tone that always seemed to ask more than it asked. This last had never been spoken, either, but he knew that Scully had known. As her mother knew so much without being told. She had called him one day last week. "Fox? This is Margaret Scully." A pause while she waited for him to pick up the phone. "I wanted to ask you to come to Thanksgiving dinner. Call me, okay? Bye." And then she hung up, knowing that if he was there he didn't want to talk. Understanding. Wishing. Hoping. He had pondered the invitation for days. It had crept into his mind at the oddest moments of the day and the night. He would be reading through old case files and would hear her voice. It would be nice. Not to have to be alone. To sit down to a real dinner with friendly people who would, if they did not quite understand him, at least try. Or, if that made him obviously uncomfortable, would just let him *be*. But then at night he would lie on his couch in the half-gloom of his living room, one or another of his videos playing for background noise and visual stimuli to offer him a constant distraction for his spinning brain. He only watched the ones he knew for fear that a new face, a new voice, might remind him of . . . things that haunted him of themselves in the night. And as he lay there he pictured the Scully kitchen, the family gathered around the table, Scully's two brothers arguing over who would carve the turkey, and he wondered where he would sit. Would there be an empty space? Whose would it be -- Scully's or her father's? And he knew that he could not go. He could not go and spend this holiday with this woman that he liked when the one he wanted to be there would not be there. Unless his pleas were answered. But November was drawing to a close, the days spinning out colder and darker and more and more unforgiving. He knew the morning he got up and couldn't start his car that the year sensed its end and was taking a breath for the final push. He wondered whether whoever had invented the holiday season had done so to make them forget, to make them all forget the sadness of another year lost to the past. Hallowe'enThanksgivingChristmasNewYear's, all like ducks in a row. Or a row of fake books on a photography studio shelf that looked separate but, when you picked them up, were all of a piece. A sham for reassurance. And his holidays were like that. AloneAloneAloneAlone. ***** Now, he sat with his head bowed against the steering wheel of his car and breathed in the bitter chill air. It tasted like the coming of night, the coming of winter and the long dormant season when the sky dropped white sheets over the world like a summer resident winterizing a home. They covered everything against the dust so that all would be in readiness for their return come summer. And if they didn't make it back the next summer, it would wait. It could always wait. He opened his eyes and sighed, then shivered. It was cold. It seemed that lately it was always cold. He got out of the car and went inside. Dark here. Dark when he had left in the morning for his run, not yet light when he had left again after his shower for work. He moved in constant darkness these days. The light was harsh, brutal, revealing to him things about himself that he didn't like. Didn't like to admit. And so, like all creatures of the night, he shunned the light. He stripped slowly, mechanically, shedding his formal presence almost gratefully. In the shower he stood for a long time in the steam, feeling the hot water wash away the physical and emotional grime of his day's work. Almost December. Almost Thanksgiving. This thought brought with it the memory of the unwelcome task he had undertaken earlier this week. Margaret Scully had called and for once he had felt like talking. But when he realized that *this* call had a purpose, and understood what that purpose was, he cursed himself for picking up. Her words echoed unpleasantly, with a painful resonance of the words another Scully woman had spoken once. And for that reason, if for no other, he would help her. He had had no idea. She had asked him to accompany her to a small shop he had never visited before. The stone had been there -- Scully's stone. The one he had sworn time and time again he would never see. It was his *job* to prevent that stone from being carved as surely as if he had been given the task of staying the sculptor's hand. He had felt the sickness wash over him when she relayed, in quiet, wavering tones, her request. He had felt revulsion upon entering the shop. But when the man had unveiled the thick gray tablet with its sad, short, incomplete story, a wave of panic had washed over him. It was as if simply *seeing* the stone made its pronouncement true. Her life had begun a scant thirty years ago. On February 23rd, he knew, though the marker gave no date. There was no closing date. It seemed Mrs. Scully had thought noting the precise start of her daughter's life without noting the precise end might arouse questions. The round figures of the years were anonymous and *safe* and distanced the casual viewer from the tragedy they represented. They hid the fact that there was no exact date because there was no body, no certainty. That there might never be any certainty. They denied what had happened to her. They relegated their owner to the status of some historical icon, depersonalized her, as it were. The words beneath seemed innocuous enough to all but the initiate: "The Spirit is the Truth." Dana Scully had been sacrificed to the truth. And Mulder knew this, but he could not accept it. With the part of his brain that delighted in rainbows even after he had learned the very scientific nature of their composition, the part that always marveled at the appearance of the first star of evening in the precise position the astronomers said it would hold, he still maintained the stubborn belief that she would be found -- alive. He would not stop believing because he *could* not. To admit that Scully was gone would be to admit that the universe was fundamentally unstable, that things might not always be as they had been and should be, that the sun *might not* come up in the morning or that gravity *might not* hold them to the earth as it spun its way through time and space. In the midst of the rational it was the irrational that kept him sane. And he had told Mrs. Scully this -- all of it -- if not in words, then in the look in his eyes when he told her that they couldn't give up. But she, it appeared, had given up. And if Margaret Scully had given up on her daughter, who was he to hope? He bowed his head under the shower head and the hot water streamed down his cheeks in place of the tears he could not shed. ***** He towelled himself roughly and changed into jeans and a long-sleeved t-shirt. He flopped onto his couch and closed his eyes. The time was growing short. It had always been an indeterminable length, like a string whose other end he could not see. But he felt it as surely as the trees felt the slowing of the sap, felt the time spinning away into nothingness. And he had no idea what was beyond the end. If he never found her. . . . He remembered reading of old maps drawn before the circumnavigation of the world. The cartographers, unsure of what lay beyond the reaches of the charted waters, had written carefully, "Here there be dragons." An admission of their shortcomings as well as a clear warning to those who would trespass the limits of experience in search of further knowledge. "Go back. Dangerous waters ahead. Enter at your own risk." And that's what his own life had been. A voyage into the abyss, stepping out into the darkness with both the faith and fear of a child, a fascination with the night and a healthy dose of fear. But he had not meant to risk anyone else in his explorations. He squeezed his eyes more tightly shut and sent up a final, desperate petition. "Please. Please bring her home to me. It's all I want for Christmas. . . ." He squeezed his eyes shut so tightly his face hurt, but still he prayed. Finally, he opened his eyes and stared at the television screen where a video was playing. He fast forwarded it, not paying attention, his mind still on his plea. The phone rang. . . . *End* For the rest of the story, please go watch "One Breath". . . . There will be a follow-up story, when I get a chance to write it, called "Everything I Want for Christmas." Juliettt@mail.aol.com Troupe Leader, Dragon Posse, Lone Gunwoman #7, Eden Agent, Clan McBride, Wolfpack, DDEB 3, Extreme Possibilities, Faultliner, WWtBJLSWWGU, SKKS co-founder, BBTG!