The X-Files: A Christening

From: shan@nyx10.cs.du.edu (Steven Han)
Date: 12 Aug 1994 10:40:04 -0600

Hi all,

I was so moved by Sarah Stegall's story 'Grey Fox' that I felt inspired to
write a similar story, but one told from a somewhat different perspective.

Now I'll be the first to admit that my writing isn't anywhere near as
good as Sarah's, so I hope you'll bear with me as I attempt put my thoughts
to paper.  Just consider these the ramblings of a bored X-fan waiting
patiently for the second season. :^)

BTW, in addition to Sarah's piece, this story was also inspired by the
10,000 Maniacs song "Tension Makes a Tangle".  If you've heard the song,
you'll understand what I mean; if you haven't, I highly recommend you try
listening to it sometime.



------------------------------------------------------------------------

"A Christening"


Dana Scully sat in her rocking chair, contemplating the pomp and ceremony
that would be forthcoming this day.  Her newest great-grandson would be
christened today, with a big feast planned afterwards.  The entire extended
family would be arriving at her house to celebrate and renew old ties.

At the ripe old age of eighty-four, Dana had become the de facto matriarch
of her family.  With four children, twelve grandchildren, and now seven
great-grandchildren, she had plenty to show for her years.  Her precious
offspring looked up to her as their spiritual and family center, a pillar
of strength that had held the family together through numerous difficult
and trying periods.

Dana had eschewed modern amenities in her home, choosing instead to live a
simple and traditional lifestyle.  Fortunately, even at her age she managed
to stay reasonably active.  Though living alone in the old house, she took
pride in her ability to function as well as a person two decades younger. 
Her daughters would be coming over soon to help with the meals, but she
had insisted on preparing the main dish herself, her famous rack of lamb.

The thought of seeing three generations of her offspring gathered together
in her home warmed her heart.  She looked forward to seeing faces she
saw no more than once a year, and some she hadn't seen in over a decade.
She thought of the pitter patter of tiny feet that would soon be running
through her house, yelling and screaming, in an exuberant display of
youthful energy.  She thought back to the days when a family gathering
meant bringing a few children and grandchildren together.  Even earlier
than that, she recalled the times when it was just her and her husband and
their four kids.

Her husband - dear John, she didn't think about him much these days; it had
been so long since had passed on.  He was a good man, a caring father and
husband, always loyal and comforting.  Though there had been times she
had questioned some of her decisions in life, she could never blame him
for her doubts.  He had always been there for her, there had been no reason
for her to be unhappy.  And yet, there were still those nagging thoughts,
questions she could not think to ponder, of whether things could have been
different, how everything would have turned out...

She began to hark back to those days, the days of her youth, when the
future seemed so open and limitless, and thoughts of children and
grandchildren were the furthest things from her mind.  She recalled her
time in the bureau, those wonderful years of service and adventure. 

She looked over at the wall of her den, at the framed award of merit
signed by the director himself.  Her eyes moved along the wall, to gaze at
the certificate crediting her years of service, as she remembered the
ceremony that accompanied the note.  "Ten years of honorable service, one
our finest agents", she recalled the deputy director saying, as she said
goodbye to friends and colleagues to raise a family.

Sighing at the fond memories, She remembered the momentos hidden away in
cardboard boxes.  It had been years since she had opened them; perhaps a
few years too long, she thought.

Getting up slowly from her chair, she made her way over to the closet.
She knelt down and began pulling boxes of old clothes out of the way.  She
noticed one of the boxes was half open, and lifted up the flap.

Looking inside, she found an old blue dress, at least forty years old.
It brought back a flood of memories, like the time she wore it to her
college reunion, where she met a long-lost friend who had moved to Europe. 
Or the time she wore the dress to a church picnic, where her daughter
skinned her knee from playing volleyball.  And even the time way back when
she first bought the dress, how she thought modern fashion had become so
radical.

The dress looked rather tame to her now.  Of course, by now she had seen
everything, and nothing surprised her anymore.  She put the dress back in
the box and struggled to push it out of the way.

Her strength was not what it used to be, and moving heavy boxes was no work
for an elderly lady.  Still, she eventually managed to get at the wrinkled,
yellowing cardboard box with the letters 'FBI' labeled in magic markers.

Sitting down on the carpet, she pulled the treasured box towards her.  The
box had been opened and closed back up many times before, as evidenced by
the shredded tape and wrinkle marks on the cover flaps.  Drawing a deep
breath, she blew away the dust from the top of the box, and gently pulled
the flaps back one by one.

She reached in and pulled out her old FBI wallet, still bearing her photo
from nearly sixty years ago.  The badges were normally turned in upon an
agent's leaving the bureau, but she had managed to finagle a duplicate from
a friend who owed her a favor.

She looked at the picture of the young auburn-headed woman in her mid
twenties, still finding it a bit difficult to believe it was her.  She had
changed so much in the years since, what with four deliveries, the gray
hair, and the soft wrinkle lines on her forehead.  But apart from the
purely physical changes, she had undergone a profound emotional and
psychological transformation since the time the photograph had been taken.

She had entered the bureau straight out of medical school, her head full
of textbook knowledge but still very naive of the real-world mysteries that
were to confront her.  She had been so innocent in the ways of the world
back then, she recalled.  So unaware of the forces that held sway over
everyone's lives, dark and sinister forces, both natural and man-made.  It
had only been her association with agent Mulder that had taught her to open
her mind to new possibilities, to alternate explanations to the seemingly
unanswerable questions that arose in their line of work.

Agent Mulder... Fox Mulder... it had been so long, so very long since they
had been a team.  She had tried not to think too much of him after they had
been separated.  It was simply too painful at first, losing her only beacon
in a hopelessly confusing world of mystery and deception.  Mulder had been
the one constant in her life, the only one whom she could totally and
unequivocally trust with everything, the only one who had always understood
her fears and hopes.

She had been skeptical at first, when she first met him.  His total
devotion to his work, his fanatical belief in the illogical, the
unnatural, the unscientific.  Such qualities indicated a troubled and
delusional personality, she thought.  He was to be watched over and studied,
and restrained and curtailed, if he got out of hand.  But not much more.

But then, she slowly began to understand, to share in his perceptions.  His
rantings and ravings actually began to take on meaning, and his wild
explanations began to make more sense.  At first, she didn't want to
believe.  Her scientific training simply precluded her believing any of
Mulder's explanations.  But as time passed, she could not continue to ignore
the strange happenings, the mounting body of evidence.

Then she was afraid to believe.  What if I became another believer,
like Mulder?  What were the implications?  It would mean rejecting
everything she had been taught, everything she had believed in.  Accepting
Mulder's viewpoint would mean rejecting the Bureau, the loss of her
professional reputation, possibly the end of her career, her entire life
as she knew it.  Her world would come crashing down around her; the very
foundations of her existence would simply collapse.  No, she could not let
that happen, she thought; she would try and rationalize everything away
with a scientific explanation, no matter how unlikely.

But she finally had to give in, amidst all the mounting evidence.  There had
come a time when she could deny herself no longer.  She could only go so
far in telling herself that her eyes deceived her; she could only come
up with so many implausible scientific explanations for the things she had
seen.  At some point, she had to accept the impossible, to have the faith
and courage to move beyond textbook logic.  And once she had, there was no
going back.

It was shortly after that time that she and Mulder had been broken up as
a team.  They continued to work together from time to time, but not
officially as part of the X-Files.  That department had been buried under a
huge pile of bureaucratic red tape, and they would never conduct another
serious X investigation again.

She recalled the anger and frustration Mulder felt, and how she had felt
it too.  But she kept her anger subdued, repressed.  She was too much of a
professional, too well trained to complain.  She recalled at that time
how she finally understood Mulder's degree of dedication, his love for
his work.

Never before, and never since, had she encountered such a person.  Such
total, selfless dedication and devotion to a field, such an immersion of
himself into the pursuit of truth.  She revered him, almost worshipped
him in a way.  He had such an absolute, single-minded sense of purpose,
seemingly overcoming all obstacles in his path by sheer force of will.  She
found his cause to evoke a sense of spirituality - not in a religious way,
but perhaps rather a call to a higher purpose, one which transcended mere
criminal codes and petty bureau politics.

Was it a search for truth, or justice, or of the unknown? or was it simply
the search itself that gave the quest meaning?  She had never really figured
out the answer, but she thought Mulder had, though he never really shared
it with her.  She had asked him once just what his fascination was with
discovering answers to the unknown, and why he was willing to put up with
all the headaches and roadblocks that others threw in his path.  He had
simply replied in his wry Mulderesque tone, "Because, Scully, just because."

As it happened, she had felt a deep sense of emptiness inside her after the
X-Files was shut down.  Not just the tangible loss of the camaraderie that
had been built up between herself and Mulder, but something more.  The sense
of gravity, the urgency, the sheer sense of mission that had accompanied
her work on the X-Files was missing.  Whether she was tracking down
serial killers or international terrorists, the new cases she was
assigned to seemed empty and lifeless compared to the X-Files; she felt as
if she had lost her soul.

Scully paused from her thoughts to look down at the box sitting in front
of her, full of momentos and souvenirs.  Almost unconsciously, she
began looking for a picture of Mulder.  She fumbled through commemorative
pins, paperweights, a bureau baseball cap, and... a yellowing black and
white photograph with curled-up corners.

She recalled the moment when she took the picture of him, back then.
It was during the heyday of the X-Files, when they were investigating
UFO sightings in North Carolina.  She remembered they were inspecting
tracks in an area near a dirt road, and she was taking photos of depressions
in the soft clay.  Just out of a whim, she had turned the camera in
Mulder's direction, and catching him in a rare smile, snapped him up with
the camera.

The picture captured Mulder in a 3/4 length shot, wearing his dark grey
suit, black tie, and black overcoat.  His right hand was on his hip, and
his left hand pointed in the direction of a hypothetical alien craft.  He
had just turned his head in her direction, and seen her pointing the camera
towards him.  She remembered his tall, lanky figure standing there by the
side of the road, a physical and psychological magnet for her during those
wonderful yet trying times.

She brought the photograph up closer to her eyes, so she could better
observe the expression on Mulder's face.  His face - that unmistakable
square profile with rounded jaws, with the soft lines that reminded one of
a lost puppy.  His soulful dark brown eyes that radiated intelligence and
cried out sensitivity at the same time.  His brown hair, always appearing
tousled but natural, completing the look.  Sensitive yet courageous,
wondrous yet determined, warm yet intense, was the face she remembered.

With a soft, nearly silent sigh, she lowered the picture from her face. 
Putting it back down on the box, she sat there transfixed at the picture,
as she returned to her moment of reminiscence.

After the breakup of the X-Files, she and Mulder had started to drift
further and further apart.  She went off to work in Forensics for a while,
and he went back to putting his degree to work developing criminal profiles.
Although the separation had been painful, like the loss of an arm, the body
and mind began to heal, closing the wound over time.  Eventually, she began
to displace him almost completely from her mind, preferring to close the
painful chapter of her life rather than continue to relive it over and over
again.

That was about the time when she had met John.  He was a shy colleague at
first, too nervous to even ask her out.  But as they developed their
friendship over time, she came to appreciate him as a solid, honest man, a
comforting sight in a world of uncertainty.  Perhaps it had been her loss
of one confidant in her life that caused her to seek out another.  But
whatever it was, she was drawn to this man, perhaps less out of love and
more out of a need for constancy and stability, a companion in world of
solitude, a kind heart in a world of pain and despair.

She had been a good wife, and he had been a good husband, and they had
by all accounts had a successful marriage, producing numerous children and
grandchildren.  As John continued his career at the bureau, she had
devoted herself to raising the kids, and started a new career writing
childrens' books.  She had been happy in this life, insomuch as one could
define happiness.  Was it a sense of contentment? or a lack of sorrow? if
that was the case, she had indeed been happy.  Even with the passing of her
husband fifteen years ago, she had continued to stay busy with her work
and hobbies, and her role as the family's matriarchal patron.

But even after all these productive years, she could never quite dismiss
the small, lingering thought in the back of her mind, the one that had
stuck with her all these years.  She could never voice the thought; she
didn't dare - to even think it aloud could shake the very foundation of
her life, her very existence.  She found it amusing that she was having the
same fears now that she had when she was investigating the X-Files.  Do I
want to think about this; do I want to even consider the possibility of
what might have been, and the consequences that would have arisen...

Time had such a way of clouding memories, she thought.  What was it she
had really felt back then?  Was there some special, magical feeling between
the two of them, or was it just a sense of camaraderie?  She tried to sift
through decades of memories, through the murky layers of faces and voices,
sights and sounds, things and places.  Images and scenes from her past
came and went, juxtaposed with thoughts of what life might have been like
for her, had things worked out differently.  Quick, was that a memory of a
long lost moment, or was it just a flashing thought? It all seemed so hazy.

It was no use, trying to dig up fifty-year old memories.  Anything she
tried to remember would be clouded by decades of thought anyway.  She
recalled how she once believed she had such a good memory of events, only
to discover later that she had been completely wrong.  She had found that
her memories had been colored and tinged with thoughts and desires about
what could have happened, what should have happened, and how things could
have turned out differently.  Our minds have a way of remembering only the
things we want to remember, the way we want to remember them, she thought. 
Perhaps that was happening all over again, she wondered with a smile.

Still, she couldn't help trying to bring back those memories.  Perhaps
replaying scenes in her mind would help, uncovering a trace of a picture
or sound that had been lost somewhere, gathering dust in the back of her
mind, waiting to be opened up again someday.  She closed her eyes looked
around, searching in the darkness for some familiar bearing, a familiar
face, a familiar thought.

But it was all to no avail.  The harder she tried to remember, the more
the memories seemed to close up upon themselves, jealously guarding their
secrets.  She would have to leave the reminiscing to another day.

Scully heard the doorbell, as the first of her children's families arrived
for the joyous occasion.  She put back the photo and the wallet, and pushed
the box back in the closet.  Sighing, she got up to answer the door.



THE END


--
Steven Han - shan@nyx.cs.du.edu - finger for PGP key

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