Title: Irony of Fate
Author: MissAnnThropic
E-Mail: miss_annthropic@yahoo.com
Summary: Fate is not without a sense of irony.
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.



I had always believed that fate, destiny... whatever it is that rules our existence and the events therein, did not have any kind of sense of humor.

Of course, there had never before been any provocation for me to believe it did. My sister was cruelly stolen from me when I was just a little boy. As if that wouldn't have been bad enough in and of itself, it had to happen when I was the only other person home... it had to happen right in front of me. It had to happen in such a way that her disappearance was in some part my fault. I've seen shrinks before, I know as a trained psychologist as well that I shouldn't feel responsible for Samantha's abduction. I know clinically I shouldn't... my heart still tells me I could have done something to stop it if I had just moved faster.

There was certainly no amusing irony in that event in my life. My sister was ripped from me, my last legacy of her being the sound of her voice screaming my name as I sat there motionless... helpless to hold her back from being taken as she pleaded for me to... her voice filled with faith that her big brother could save her. I couldn't.

After she was gone my family was ripped apart. Whereas once we had been a four-member unit, we were now three loners living in the same house. There was certainly nothing comical in the way both my mother and father pushed me away. There was nothing even remotely hilarious about the way I was abandoned by my parents, completely on my own emotionally by the time of my thirteenth birthday.

The same chariot of misfortune seemed to plague me as I grew. Maybe in more of a cruel joke of nature that had no punch line, I turned out to have an incredibly above-average IQ and nearly a photographic memory. Neither of my parents have the intellectual talents I do... it was bestowed solely upon me through some million to one combination of genetic material. As a result, I was forever doomed to be an outsider amongst my peers.

That was another jab at me that seemed to hold not even the slightest underlying humor. Maybe if I had been able to find such a chuckle in fate's incredibly twisted sense of humor, I could have dealt with it better. As it was, I could only suspect that whatever force governs the lives of men had it out for me from the beginning, driven entirely by malice without a lighter side to its purpose.

So I went through my early adulthood suffering the pokes and prods of all those who fit into the norm and ostracized me for my failed attempts to fit in with them. They teased me, called me 'Spooky', taunting me for what I had, when all I ever wanted was to give it away, give it back to whatever gave it to me. I wanted to be them... forever barred from it by that humorless monster that seemed to direct my life.

I thought salvation for me was out of the question... that I would never find a place of solace, never find a port in the night. I was at least wrong about one thing. Dana Scully came to me at a point when I'd silently reached my wit's end with the untainted evil of that force directing the course of my life. I was, by that time, so tired of it all... the perfunctory cruelty of everything in my life, that I was becoming progressively more cynical than merely existential.

It took me a long time to realize that I'd found my light in the dark in Scully... I was so pessimistic that I just didn't recognize something good in my life when I saw it standing right in front of me. When all I've known and seen is pain, a little beckon of happiness was not at first acknowledged or recognized for what it was.

Bless Scully for her perseverance. She seemed to sense that I was (and had been for a long time) living in a very dark, cold place inside myself. I myself had grown to mistake the darkness where I was held captive as the blackness that was me. Scully saw me for me... she didn't see the darkness of my cage and think it was what I was... she saw the real me. She saw the humanitarian, the shunned hero, the protector, the loyal friend, and the hurt little boy... she saw everything that I was inside. And she saw my ignorance to these features. I had fed into the illusion others had of me... that my cold prison was what I was. She stuck by me... she led me out of the darkness to a place where I could look back at it and disentangle myself from the cold recesses of my inner prison. To a place where I could, for the first time, distinguish between it and me.

For that, I have to thank her with all that I am, now that I know what that is. I may retreat back to that cold, black dungeon that I will always have inside me, but I from there on out knew that the bleak environment was not who I was. And Scully was always there to lead me home.

Scully saved me. She's saved me in ways I never imagined I could be saved. She's everything to me... in a deeper sense she is me. Without her, I would have folded into myself and that dark, cold place that for so long had been mistaken for who I was inside. She showed me light, she showed me ME, and she showed me love. All three were foreign to me, but she took my hand and led me through. Dana Scully, my tour guide to myself and life as I had never seen it.

Scully is without question the most important thing in my life. She respects me like no one in my life ever has. She cries when I do, she smiles when I do, and she is angry when I'm upset. It's like we live together, breaths matched, heartbeats synchronized, minds thinking as one. She is the other half of me... the better half. I know I would never be even a fraction of the man I am now had it not been for her.

I love her for that. But that's not the only reason I love her. I love her for every imaginable reason one might conjure up. I love her for her trust, her integrity, her faith, her determination, her respect, her fidelity... I even love her for the things that make up the interesting valleys in her personality she would deem her character flaws. I love the way she'll slip up sometimes and think with her heart and not her head, how she'll get frustrated with her other male coworkers for playing 'the good ol boys club', how she'll get so focused on a job she disregards rules or conventions, the way she lets down her guard against her will to love me at my most insufferable.

She is not beautiful like a model is. She is short, has what she thinks are 'stubby' legs, and a mole over her upper lip she insists on covering with make-up. None of this matters to me. I started loving her from the inside and worked my way out. After I knew her heart and her mind, and fell in love with them I feel in love with the rest of her. There is nothing about her I don't love. I adore that she's arguably the size of a junior high schooler, I've grown to fancy her not-exactly-long legs, and damnit, I think that mole over her lip is the most adorable thing I've ever seen.

There's nothing about her I don't love... I love everything about her.

Or at least, I know I would.

From birth, I was cursed with yet another affliction whose purpose in my ongoing torment hadn't seemed to make sense then. I have been red/green colorblind my entire life. It never bothered me... I just had a duller Christmas than everyone else. I always felt it was kind of fitting... a holiday that was cheery and bright and filled with love to everyone else kind of deserved to be gray in my eyes.

Now, that feature of me makes sense. Dana Scully has red hair. My light in the dark, my touchstone in chaos, my faith in doubt, and my friend in combat has red hair.

The woman who is my everything... who is the better parts of me, has red hair. She is a constant presence in my life... I've been closer to her than my own family members, and I've never seen the color of her hair... not the true color. The woman I love beyond life itself, who I could not bare to live without, and I've never seen what her hair looks like, and nor will I ever.

I suppose fate does have a sense of humor after all.



END