Fox Mulder, Dana Scully, and all other characters herein are
property of CC, 1013 Productions, and FOX. Don't sue me, you
won't get much anyway.


One More Night


by Pam
(pam@versaphile.com)


Sitting in the dim light, he considered the box in front of him.
His father had left him this, this Pandora's box he held in
his hands. Secrets lay in here. Dark, terrible secrets.
Secrets about his father and his past. Did he really want to
know these truths? he wondered. Or were there truly some
things worth not knowing?

He had wondered what his father had meant to tell him on that
horrible night, still fresh in his mind after all these
months. But he had never gotten the chance to find out. The
gunshot... the blood... He shook himself, uselessly trying to
shake the image from his edeitic memory. No use dwelling on
the past, he told himself.

Ha. At the rate he was going, the past would soon be all he
had. Except for Scully. But he was even losing her. The
distance between the two of them had grown, a great rift in
their partnership that seemed insurmountable. It's just as
well, he sighed. If she left on her own, maybe nothing else
would happen to her. He wouldn't cause her any more misery.
Any more nightmares.

Again he shook himself, and turned his attention back to the
deceptively simple wooden box in his hands. He shook it
gently, the contents shifting and bouncing off of its sides.
He had to know. No matter how horrible. No matter how
terribly evil it would make his father. No matter how it
might change him. Even the truths we don't want to know,
*especially* these truths, have to come out, he told himself.

He cracked the old wooden lid open slowly, peering inside
carefully, as if something inside of the container might
reach out and grab him, hurt him.

Papers. Pictures. Tapes. Evidence of his father's involvement
with the dark men who sought to control what he so
desperately wanted to find and uncover. And a diary. Steeling
himself, he picked up the small, leather-bound volume, placed
the box with its remaining contents on the floor, and opened
it.

Skimming through the first few dozen entries, he slowed and
read more carefully when the name Zeus Faber caught his eye.
His father had gone with two of his colleagues to interview
the last living soldier who had be in contact with the oil
creature that he and Scully now knew had possessed Krycek.
What drew his attention was less the man's description of the
creature than the two men who had been with his father. One
of them he had seen mentioned in previous entries, and he
surmised that the man described was none other than the
black-lunged bastard who had so often tried to shut down the
X-Files and who had ordered the deaths of his father and
Melissa, and had orchestrated Scully's abduction. One day, he
swore to himself, this Cancer Man would pay for his crimes.
He had nearly killed him once, but even in that darkest of
times he had refused to become one of Them.

Now, though, he wasn't sure he would spare Cancer Man's life
if he had the same chance. The past year had taken a serious
toll on him, and he felt less and less of a difference
between himself and his father after every case. The coldness
and cruelty of his father seemed to surface more often than
he liked to think about, and this sometimes scared him. But
he seemed less and less scared the more it happened. A year
ago he felt the opposite, fearing what he had become,
disgusted with himself. But now... now he wasn't sure. So
much had happened because of him, so many horrible things,
that he truly wasn't sure any more.

Dad's dead, Melissa's dead, Sam's gone, Scully was abducted,
and now Skinner had been shot. Never mind that Cancer Man and
his goons had wiped his memory, drugged his water, and killed
him with fire.  (He still shivered at the thought of that
day, the bodies, the decades-old stench of fearsome secrets
hidden from sight far too long, and the harsh, unforgiving
blaze licking at him as he squeezed himself slowly through
his small escape tunnel, created by the piteous creatures he
had crawled under and over.) He hadn't truly cared what
happened to himself in his quest since that long night in
1972. But so much happened to those around him, it was almost
unbearable to think about.

He had briefly considered putting others out of his misery on
a few nights, sitting alone in his lonely apartment in the
night. He had almost done it a few times, gotten close enough
on a few occasions to ending this parody of living he
sometimes found himself in, but each time something always
pulled him back from the edge. Once it had been Melissa.
Other times it was the need to find Samantha, or just to tear
the truth from the claws of the dark men who held it so
tightly and run through the streets with it, screaming it to
the rooftops and proclaiming to the world "Here is the Truth
which we all seek. Look upon its visage and know it."

But it seemed that his reasons for not going through with the
deadly actions were rapidly dwindling. Melissa, who had
bravely come to him, leaving Dana's deathbed to convince him
to see her one last time, was dead, struck down by a dead
man's bullet. Scully was... distant. They no longer shared
their nightmares with each other, their problems and hopes
and all the little things which used to make them such good
friends and more. He briefly wondered how much of their
distance was his fault and how much was hers, but it didn't
really matter in the end.

Samantha, once his only true purpose in life, was now being
used against him as she was used against their father. It
seemed that the prospect of her return was becoming harder
and harder to keep believing in. He had almost come to accept
her as a lost cause, as a windmill he could never reach in
his Quixotic journey. And the Truth was becoming another far-
off windmill he could never touch, or when he could, when he
could see it, and even brush its farthest edges with his
fingertips, it was rudely stolen out from under him, leaving
him flailing wildly at wind and empty space, left to regain
his balance in the cold, lonely night.

He perused some more of his father's diary, but stopped
before he reached the year before Sam's abduction. He wasn't
sure if he could truly face the truth from his father's own
hand tonight. When he had heard the words spoken from Victor
Klemper's mouth, seen some evidence of what had really
happened in the folder with his and Sam's names on it deep
inside the heart of the Virginian mountain, he could still
tell himself that he wasn't truly sure what the truth was;
that he didn't really know if his father had easily
participated in a cruel trade of one of his children's lives,
and in the extermination of so many innocent lives in an
agreement with Nazis and aliens. It all sounded so absurd
that he could almost easily deny himself what he had seen.
Deny everything, he thought ruefully.

But to see a confession from his father of these truths, to
actually and definitely know the real actions was nearly too
much. He set aside the diary, face down on the table beside
him. He got up and headed towards the window of his small
apartment and looked out into the night sky and to the stars.
He had once thought that his actions had been justified, that
all he believed in had been true. His encounter with the
alien bounty hunter and the Gregors had made everything seem
so clear to him then. And Scully's warm smile when he woke up
so cold in that gray room had made him feel truly happy for
just a second. But the scars of those two weeks had not been
healed then by Scully's warmth and the admissions of the
bounty hunter, and they were surely not healed now, with the
sharp knife of time slicing more of his heart and soul to
shreds, leaving just enough each time for him to heal before
striking again.

He still had his father's gun, which he had taken from
another, smaller box of snakes. The picture he had held in
his hands, with his father, Deep Throat, Cancer Man, and that
British man who had warned Scully about Krycek and the
Hispanic assassin while he was in New Mexico and had recently
warned him about Skinner's second near-death at the hands of
that same now-dead assassin, was from that same box. He
picked up the gun, a heavy weight in his hands. It was oddly
comforting to him, despite his knowledge of what this gun had
been used for in its long existence. It was loaded, he knew.
He had made sure.

He briefly thought of his mother, who had led him to this
position. She had overdosed on sleeping pills, unable to live
with the stress of living. She had left a parting message on
his answering machine, as quiet and deceptively calm as she
had been in life. An all-too short good-bye and an all-too
shallow apology for her last action and the grief she had
caused him in the past had left him with an empty house which
he had no desire to see again and, as he had found when he
sorted through the contents of the old Massachusettses rooms,
the box that lay on the floor before him. Her death had hurt,
but they had stopped being mother and son when Sam
disappeared. They were strangers to each other, each only
acknowledging the other when forced to.

So now he sat in his apartment, his father's diary on his
right, a box full of secrets at his feet, and his father's
gun in his hand, contemplating his future. He half wondered,
raising the gun to his lips as he had several times before,
if Scully would miss him. A year ago, he realized, she would
have. But a year ago he wouldn't be so deadly serious about
doing this.  He sat there, in the dark, wondering and hoping
if the phone would ring and Scully would be on the other end,
telling him some thought that had come into her head or some
nightmare she needed to talk to someone, anyone, about and
that he was the only one who would truly understand. But he
knew better than that by now.

He hadn't written a note. He didn't think anyone would need
one. Or care enough to want one. A small part of him still
rebelled at the idea of suicide, shouting at him in a tiny
voice that his death would just mean that They had won, that
it would be accepting defeat in everything. But that part of
him was dwindling smaller and smaller each time he touched
cold metal to his skin. And it had gotten so very small now.
So very, very small.

A lone tear leaked down his cheek. He didn't think he had any
left to shed after all this time. To his suprise, several
more trails of salty liquid slid down his face, and he found
himself sobbing, gasping in choked breaths. He dropped the
gun, curling his arms protectively around his waist, trying
desperately to regain control. He couldn't stop crying,
couldn't stop the tears of sorrow and rage and fear and hate
at himself and his life and his father and everything he had
seen and done and heard racking his body.

After what seemed like hours, he found he could open his eyes
again. His cheek pulled at the leather of his couch as he
lifted his head up to look down at the floor, at the gun he
had dropped an eternity ago. He eyed it carefully, then
picked it up and placed it into the box of secrets, followed
by his father's diary. Another night, he told himself. If I
can make it through to another night, maybe someone else will
do the job for me. And then my secrets will die with me.

Fox Mulder turned out the lights in his small apartment,
closed his eyes, and wished for a dreamless night he knew
with a dead certainty that he would not receive.


End.