Title: Getting Out of the Car
Author: MissAnnThropic
E-Mail: miss_annthropic@yahoo.com
Spoilers: Closure
Summary: Mulder's made peace with Samantha's death and has to ask himself what happens next.
Disclaimer: I own nasing! Really, I don't. All you see here (that you recognize, anyway) is the creation of someone else. I take no credit.



Dana Scully drove in silence, glancing over at her partner every few minutes but saying nothing. She knew better than anyone in the world that no words she had would make what her partner was going through any better. Words were an ineffective solace to this wound... it went so much deeper than even the heart... it lent Scully to believe for one brief moment in the human soul undeniably, for when it had happened to her that was how deep her pain seemed to shoot.

When her sister Melissa had been killed, it was like Scully's world was ripped apart at the seams and the earth gaped under her feet to swallow her whole, and no words upon this earth could have thrown her a lifeline that would save her. One person in her entire fucked up world at that time could reach out to pull her to solid ground, harrowed and sad though it was... that was the man sitting next to her... Fox Mulder... her partner.

Mulder had somehow known that nothing he could say would stop the pouring blood that seemed to spill from her very existence to the parched ground of indifference. He knew because he lingered forever in that heartbreak on the brink... always one step away from falling down that chasm of agony and despair... always so close, close enough to stare into the dark pit, that he knew it like he did an old enemy. Perhaps old enemies, in the essence that they are old, become friends regardless of their motives and intents. That was Mulder all right, old buddies with emotional torture... always peering into that dark hole of bleak existence... looking for his sister and instead learning that darkness intimately. Flirting with its power, always two inches away from being burned.

He had seen Scully becoming engulfed, and knew considerate regards and friendly sympathy would do no good, that it would do nothing to offer her salvation from her own grief that was pulling her deeper into the darkness. He knew all too well the grip of his old friend who had reached up to swallow his partner, and he had done the one thing that could draw a victim out of the black nothingness. He reached down into it, fear abated, and grabbed Scully. He pulled her out... he saved her in her darkest hour... and now it was his.

Mulder had taken that one step too far... he'd at last seen a glimpse in that darkness of what he'd peered in and searched for over the course of nearly twenty years, and what he saw pulled him in.

Mulder, just an hour ago, discovered that Samantha, the sister he'd sought for his whole life, was truly gone. That she died nearly twenty-two years ago.

Scully was not sure how Mulder knew this... how it suddenly became so clear to him... so irrefutable. Mulder never let anything that offered even the slightly shadow of a doubt to its validity stand as truth for him... but this had. He had returned from the woods, a resigned sadness on his face.

Scully knew that, in her own heart, (as they had investigated the trail of the lost Mulder girl) she began to feel the dread seep into her. Maybe it was just a response to the growing ever-bleak and discouraging evidence or maybe it was just a sensation tuned after years of working with these kinds of situations. Maybe it was even something deeper... a knowledge in her bones that Samantha Mulder had at some point given up before her brother had, and succumbed... that this little girl put through so much could not hold out until Fox found her. Though, from the paper trail, it seems she'd tried... she'd given it her best..... that was a Mulder all right.

Scully had silently resigned to herself that Samantha Mulder was truly dead. She didn't proclaim this outright to her partner... not when it could so easily shatter him. This was his quest, his life... she couldn't crush it before him just for the sake of being right. She would let him think he was not clinging to a faint hope... she knew he needed this faith that he'd find her alive, it was all that gave his life direction. So when he'd vehemently argued her uncertainties, she'd relented. She watched him with that desperate and frenzied look in his eyes and saw the need he had to still find her. He had to think she was alive, and as a defense mechanism his mind had convinced him that she HAD to be.

Actually, his refusal to believe even in the face of evidence didn't surprise Scully. Mulder would have to see Samantha's wasted-away skeleton to believe it. That was just the way Mulder managed to torture himself. As much as he feared finding only bones, he would have to see them to be convinced, and in a twisted desire for absolution he WANTED to find them if they were all he was bound to find. He had to find them... to let go of his sister once and for all.

But he hadn't. There were no bones, no DNA testing, no confessions of a murderer to the deed... nothing. He had just emerged from the woods and he believed. His sister had died. He hadn't gotten to her in time to save her.

Scully had not offered condolences... she knew from personal experience they would fall on deaf ears. Words don't reach the soul, and right now... whether Mulder believed in them or not, that was what ached in him. She had maintained silence, letting him come to terms with all he'd discovered. It was a big thing her partner had done that night... he'd let go of everything that had ruled his life... just relented to the fact without absolute evidence that he'd truly lost his sister.

To make matters worse, only two days earlier he'd learned that his mother had indeed not been murdered, but committed suicide. She gave up on him... just as Mulder must feel Samantha gave up hope in him, his mother had given up on her son. That was the only way Scully could see it, though she would not tell Mulder how she felt. Mulder was hurt... now by definition of the literal term an orphan. He didn't need to hear his partner rage angrily at his lost mother for her cowardice. Scully would never tell him that she thought Teena Mulder was a terrible mother... no... for Fox's sake, she could from now on in memory's sake be an exemplary mother. If Mulder couldn't have a mother in flesh, the least he deserved was one in memory... altered though those recollections may be in a desperate attempt to remember the love of a parent he'd never really had... not in the way every child deserves. And most of all, a good person like Fox Mulder... who deserved it more than Scully could express.

The pain her partner was forced to face... why did everyone in his family give up on him? What did they not see in him that she did? It boggled Scully's mind that anyone who knew Fox Mulder as family would be expected to could ever give up hope. Scully had boundless hope in her partner... as long as he was out there she would never be without hope, regardless of the odds against him. Her faith in him was unwavering... maybe even on the brink of overexpectation... if only he'd not risen to the occasion every time. Why did his own family fail to see this in their Fox when Scully could be with him only seven years and see it so clearly it blinded her? Maybe it was just the way the Mulder family was... prone to give up hope so quickly. Mulder was in that respect the black sheep of his clan.

And yet, there they were, Mulder still coming to terms with the fact his search for his sister was at an end. Giving up... believing it... that she was gone... abandoned him as both his parents had.

Scully had guided Mulder into the car after the 'psychic' had left, still hanging to the hope that he would find his long-lost son alive, despite Mulder's gentle proclamations that the man's son and Samantha were together in a better place. Scully supposed there was a Fox's heart in every tortured soul.

Mulder had sat in the car, speechless. Scully got in the driver's side and started heading home, giving her partner all the quiet and time he needed. She even turned off the radio the instant she started the car... which gave her a lot of time to think as did her partner on the long ride homeward bound in the middle of the night.

Scully couldn't help but wonder how this acceptance would change her partner. Mulder was always fueled and consumed by a desire to seek out his sister... what would he do without that outlet? It was different when Scully lost Missy. Before Melissa died, Scully's passion and drive in life was the quest she shared with Mulder. More specifically, her driving force was her partner... the strength and understanding and unconditional friendship he offered, a doctrine she could trust in without misgivings. What Mulder was going through tonight... that would be like Scully having Melissa die and then have Mulder taken from her. She couldn't imagine how she would have coped, and it made her worry for Mulder.

Mulder had not said a single word since they'd left the nurse's house where Scully alone had heard first-hand enough eye-witness account to confirm what she'd feared... that Fox Mulder was the only remaining Mulder alive. Mulder had just sat in absolute quiet. Scully had seen him do this more times than she cared to remember and yet were memories of the man she knew so well that she treasured them even in their darkness... Mulder had an incredible talent for turning his anger and depression in on himself and finding ways to blame himself for what happened. As if he felt he wasn't receiving enough torment, he had to make it all his fault. Normally Scully would step in and remind him that never had she known a better, more innocent, decent and good-hearted man in her life (which was as true as anything Scully had ever held faith in). This time, though, the pain was different. Scully had no right to interfere in his ways of grieving the loss of his sister whom he'd sought for so long. This time she said nothing... let him have his thoughts, tormenting though they may be.

Scully remembered when her father had died. Mulder had pulled her up from that one too. Strange how someone she knew relatively so short a time frame could manage to rescue her from her own sadness so entirely. She remembered the gentle hand on her face... that one touch had saved her... reminded her that there was life beyond this tragedy in her life. None of the hugs from her family could equal that faint touch from Mulder. Because Scully knew in that touch was more true understanding of the pain in her heart than anyone else knew... more than any good man like Mulder had any right knowing. He'd seen in her eyes then and when Melissa died a grief and agony that nearly equaled his own. How tortured his soul and yet it still ached at seeing another's burn as his did.

That was one of the largest reasons Scully persisted with Mulder in his search for Samantha all those years. She wanted his pain eased... his agony washed away... she wanted to save his soul as he had hers. She wanted Fox Mulder to at last be free.

And he had freed himself tonight. As heart-wrenching as it must have been, he finally loosed himself from his self-inflicted chains. Those shackles strapped on so long ago by choice he had finally chose to drop away... he let himself resign to a single fate for his sister. He let himself believe that she had died long ago.

Scully had never before and probably never would again known pain as she had when she'd asked him if he was all right and he'd responded a little wistfully, "I'm fine... I'm free," and turned his eyes skyward. Maybe heaven, if he believed in it. If not, then perhaps the starlight he'd come to believe was taking children away... either way, it was a final glance for his sister... but this time in an intangible eternity from which he could never retrieve her.

Scully glanced over at him again in the passenger's seat. He had been deathly quiet the whole trip. Mulder and Scully spent their fair share of time in cars on long trips, and old patterns from those would dictate that her partner had fallen asleep. She should have known this night would not follow any pattern. She glanced over and saw Mulder sitting languidly in his seat, eyes focused ahead in a preoccupied glaze.

Scully glanced down beside her, finding Mulder's hands resting on his seat beside his legs... motionless.

Scully took her right hand off the steering wheel, reaching over in the darkness and covering Mulder's left hand with her considerably smaller one.

Mulder actually responded, breaking out of his almost pensive catatonic state at her touch. He turned his eyes down to their now touching hands, looking at Scully's hand over his. He looked up at her, but she was just watching the road. She didn't expect anything of him other than to permit the touch... she didn't want anything more than to be in his presence, to be there with him... FOR him.

He felt a great weight lift from him. Certainly not a complete liberation from the grief he felt at the experience of losing his sister all over again or the slowly sinking in realization he had no family left, but a burden released nonetheless. The weight of being lost was gone... for he'd found his way. In her touch, he found his touchstone. His constant was just that... there with him through it all, even as his thoughts spun around his head sickeningly. Even if the whirling confusion caused him to vomit, Scully would be right there rubbing his back. Scully was and always would be there for him.

Mulder moved his hand, turning it over, meeting Scully's palm with his own, threading his fingers between hers and clasping her hand in a clearly understood message... 'I understand.'

Scully returned the snug hold and reassuring squeeze of his hand, never taking her eyes from the road. He got her message through the din in his head... she couldn't have asked for more, and she wouldn't.

Mulder studied his partner a long time. Watching her, studying her as was unnecessary after knowing her almost better than himself over the last seven years, yet another burden lightened from his shoulders. The crippling notion that he was alone. That he was cruelly rendered without family. If one allowed themselves to believe that families were just as much chosen as born, than he was not without family. He had Scully, and she was as close as family to him. Closer even... he'd never been as close to his parents as he was to his partner. The kinship he had with Scully was like that he'd had with Samantha. With a choking thought, Mulder realized... 'perhaps in Scully, I have Samantha back.'

And what was he going to do with it? He was allowed the chance to love a person again as he had loved his sister so long ago... he was given the great gift of being loved so immensely in return. Would he let it go unheeded and taken for granted as he had with Samantha those many years ago?

"Scully?"

His voice broke the hour-long silence so gently and in such a faint and tender voice that Scully had to think for a minute if he'd actually uttered a sound. It was a delicate, almost dream-like voice, and her name spoken with a tone as if the fate of the world rested in her hands. She wasn't sure if she questioned having heard it at all because of its faintness or the fear of what it held in its tone. Mulder was the one who could seemingly hold up the world in his hands... Scully wasn't sure she could fill his shoes during his time of faltering. How does someone as ordinary as her replace Atlas?

Scully turned her eyes to Mulder, seeking to see if he had indeed even spoken or if she had just imagined his voice. He was looking right back at her, eyes dark and shadowed in the night, but she could read them nonetheless. Read them enough to know that Mulder needed her... to answer him and acknowledge him as a time-worthy person... to not turn away from him. She was worried what he might ask of her... not that it was going to be something she wouldn't be wililng to give. There was nothing she wouldn't willingly acquiesce to him. At his request, she would have moved the earth for him... her only fear was that it would be beyond her power. She wanted only to be able to give him whatever he needed... whatever had caused him to break the silence and call her name.

"Yes, Mulder?"

Mulder rubbed a thumb over her knuckles of their adjoined hands, restablishing his homebase in her presence, then that same voice returned. It was not Mulder's voice... it carried with it resignation... the tint of having been beaten. In a sense, something else had won out over Mulder, taking the prize whose attainment had been his world. Mulder asked softly, "Pull over."

Scully nodded. She didn't need to know why he wanted her to... at this point whatever he wanted was not too outlandish to ask for. He could ask for the shirt on her back and she'd just ask him to hold the wheel so she could slip out of it.

Scully reclaimed her right hand, setting it back on the steering wheel as she slowed the car and pulled it over to the shoulder. They had been driving in relative nothingness... empty fields spanning out on either end of the highway. The roads were silent at this hour... no one noticed as the small Taurus slowed to a stop on the shoulder of the darkened highway.

Scully put the car in park, leaving the engine running and lights on. She sat back, looking over at Mulder and saying nothing. Mulder was looking out his window, thoughtfully quiet. He had been doing more thinking in the last hour than he'd done in a while. That worried Scully even more; Mulder thinking never led to something good, but she did not speak to him to interupt his thoughts.

Without a word, Mulder reached down and pulled the door release, opening the car door. It swung open, turning on the overhead light in the car. Scully didn't get to use the new light source to search Mulder's face... he soon after had his seat belt unbuckled and was vacating the car.

Scully sat silently in the car, just watching him.

Mulder stepped out of the car, standing in the doorway a moment before slowly walking out into the blackness of the clear night. A nip in the air that hinted of the approaching winter created a fog to each of Mulder's exhales... leaving a trail of expelled heat as he walked. Finally, about ten steps out, he stopped, back to the car. He just stood there... not moving. The only indication he was a man and not a statue was the rhythmic appearance of warm fog around his head as he breathed in the cold night air.

Scully sat a while, watching him. After a while, she got that she was supposed to join him. It was not so much a special sense as it was their highly complex unspoken body language. From the way Mulder stood, even by the timing of his breath, she knew he was waiting for her.

Scully unbuckled, opened her own door and stepped out of the little cabin of warmth. She moved around the car, moving quietly after Mulder.

She reached his side, stopping beside him. Mulder was staring out into the darkness, nothing to hold his interest and yet letting everything interest him. Scully tugged her jacket tighter around her body, fending off the cold and stepping slightly closer to Mulder to bask in the body heat emanating from him. Like his heart, his body was always so warm.

Mulder glanced down at her as she moved closer, regarding her a moment in a kind of light he'd never looked upon her with before.

Scully allowed the silence to engulf them in the black night for a few minutes before she asked softly, "Mulder... are you okay?"

Mulder returned his eyes to the darkness before them. He pushed his hands into the pockets of his jacket. He sighed slowly, considering his answer and inflecting in his tone his honesty as he answered, "I think I will be."

Scully nodded. She took a deep breath of the crisp night air, then asked, "Why did you ask me to pull over?"

Mulder didn't answer for a while. He turned his eyes skyward again. The stars were so brilliant away from the city lights... they were like a million little suns in the blanket of the dark heavens, all competing in their own right for the chance to burn brighter than their neighbor.

Scully followed his gaze upward, knowing he must be thinking about Samantha again. For that reason, his return comment took her off guard, "Scully... you remember when we were on the road to Groam Lake?"

Scully thought a moment, then answered, "Yes... when you had an alleged informant working in Area 51 who wanted to give you some information."

Mulder nodded, smirking despite himself at the fact that even at a time like this Scully could still manage to interject her skepticism. 'Alleged' informant. So Scully of her, like her small declaration at who she was... as if Mulder didn't have a clear picture of that by now.

Mulder's smile faded when he became soft-spoken and serious again as he continued, "You asked me once if I ever wanted to get out of the damn car, settle down... try to live something approaching a normal life..." Mulder trailed off and turned to look down at Scully. Scully turned to give him her undivided attention.

Instead of speaking at first, Mulder looked over his shoulder in the direction they'd come. Scully followed his eyes to the vacant car a short distance away, its passenger's side door hanging open and the overhead light on inside only to illuminate an almost errily empty interior.

Mulder returned his eyes to Scully. Scully looked back at Mulder, trying uselessly to search for his eyes in the darkness of the starry night, and yet not needing to. She could feel what was in Mulder's eyes... it was in the way his body near hers smelled, the way the white puffs of heat from his face as he exhaled matched her pace of breathing, the way his undefined eyes seemed to stare into hers despite the blackness. She felt him with every sense she had, and it was more than enough to make up for not seeing it in his eyes. Mulder's voice broke into the brilliantly star-filled night to reach Scully just a few feet from him, stating gently and with a finality that forced out of Scully's body any sense of cold... filling her instead with a warmth only Mulder knew how to ignite, "I just wanted to get out of the car."



END