Broken Up
Scully imagined herself painting over every memory. Her first kiss with a beautiful girl, she painted yellow. The moment with Monica was so unbelievably yellow, lying in the desert with a telescope, surrounded by brush and cacti, a picnic blanket under their bodies. And Monica kissed her, and the sun shone even in the night.
For the first time she saw Monica cry, she painted it blue. The urge she felt to take away all of the pain that Monica felt, every terrible moment. She wanted to replace all of them with happy ones.
For every moment since Monica had told her she was going away, she painted it with white. If it was whited out, it didn’t have to exist. And she started letting it go.
Scully started the way Melissa had told her to: directly addressing the problem. She would have given everything to ignore Monica’s calls and texts until July, when she would have no choice but to go away without another word.
With shaking hands, Scully picked up the phone. She steadied herself. After everything she had survived -- her father’s death, the move, her mother’s default setting to deny: she could survive this. With steely resolution she called Monica.
After three rings, Monica answered. “Dana.” What was that in her voice? Suprise? Relief?
“Hello.” Everything about her emotions were unsteady, and she tried her best to stay cordial. Dana wanted to scream, to cry her eyes out and beg for anything else, for Monica to change her mind, but she pushed that back.
Monica recoiled at the harsh tone her girlfriend spoke in. Behind her whirling thoughts, she knew what this meant. Scully had a change of heart, and it was all over. D-Day five weeks too early.
“You left in a hurry last night. I was worried about you.”
That infuriated Scully.You were worried about me? You should’ve been. You shouldn’t have done this to me.
“Yeah. I just had some things that I needed to think about. I’m okay, though.”
Monica sighed. “I know you’re angry and hurt because of what’s in store for me - for us - and I understand that.” She took a breath and Scully interrupted.
“I don’t want to hear your lengthy apology, Mon. I don’t accept it.”
“Please don’t do this to me.”
“I’m not doing this for you or against you. I’m doing it for myself, because I’m in pain. I can’t sit around and pretend that everything is okay, waiting for some clock to tick down before you leave. It’s killing me.”
“I love you and I don’t want to let you go.”
“Here’s the thing, babe, you made a distinct decision when you got your letter. You made the decision to put this town behind, and me with it. And I don’t fault you for that. I’m trying to be happy for you, and accept that you had a choice to make.” Scully took a deep breath. Her hands were shaking. “But I’m making a decision now, too. I can’t keep waiting. I’m ending it now.” Her mascara was running, leaving black trails across her cheeks. She was so incredibly exhausted. “It doesn’t mean that I don’t love you. It just means that I need to move on.”
Heartbreak has been described a lot of ways over thousands and thousands of years. Monica was feeling it as if she was a snake shedding her skin, growing out of an old shell that was starting to be just too tight. She was moving on to a new skin, a new path. Scully was part of the old skin she’d have to leave behind. Forcing herself to let go of the present and move onto the future was the hardest decision she’d ever made. For Monica, heartbreak felt like determination to let it go, burying it deep and steady her head to look ahead.
For Scully, heartbreak felt like the world ending. It was like her father died all over again. All she knew was crumbling down around her, and she was choking as dust whirled around her. She knew what she could rebuild, but there was so much that she didn’t know where to start. In the eye of the hurricane, she bowed down and made plans for every day after this. Maybe she would love Monica forever, but there was future. It was too cloudy to see yet, but it was inevitable.
The girl with the head of fire fell asleep with her first peaceful thought in weeks, dreaming of the stars.
---------------------------------------
It had been two weeks since Samantha disappeared. The Mulder family was still blatantly denying that anything had changed-- it was as if they were pretending they were in an alternate universe where they had never had a daughter in the first place.
Mulder hadn’t been sleeping well. After several nights trying to get his mind to still in his own bed, he’d moved permanently to Frohike’s couch, and some times the floor of Byers’ room. Frohike got up to pee every hour, left a mess everywhere, and snored, but it was better than his own house.
Byers got up early to watch cartoons with his younger sister. Byers ate breakfast with her, and Mulder couldn’t stop thinking about how he and Samantha had always argued over what to watch, especially when they were younger. Mulder couldn’t stop thinking that Samantha’s favourite cereal was Lucky Charms, and she always managed to get most of the box.
Everything in his mind was consumed with powerlessness. No one had ever gone looking for an abductee before. The protocol was to speak at a press conference to pump up the fanatics, but there was never a police investigation or anything of the like. It was widely accepted that no one, not ever, came back once they were abducted.
His whole life, Mulder had seen this happen to families in the community. They grieved quietly because grief wasn’t good for business, cops weren’t good for business, the FBI wasn’t good for tourism. If people started snooping around, then the fleet of believers stopped.
Most folk went along with it. It seemed commonplace. But now that Mulder was experiencing that grief firsthand, he couldn’t imagine how this had gone on for so many years. Everyone wanted to keep him quiet.
It was a tourist town, after all. A dusty ridethrough on the cross country roadtrip, tumbleweeds blowing through the road, driving through the desert and shitty motels. The people of Federal didn’t matter unless they had lost someone. Their story only mattered if they had lost someone to the phenomenon.
“C’mon, Mulder, you’ve gotta eat something.”
He kept claiming he wasn’t hungry. No, nothing was wrong with him, he just wasn’t hungry. Food just wasn’t appetizing. Scrambled eggs were a mountain that Mulder didn’t have the energy to climb. Everything he ate seemed to be completely forced, and he felt like a machine.
Two bites, chew, swallow. Drink three sips of water. Take a deep breath. Repeat the whole process again until the plate is clear and they’re done nagging you. Everything was tasteless. Chewing cardboard.
Sometimes Mulder would wake up from a impromptu nap, absolutely terrified that he couldn’t remember the exact color of Samantha’s eyes. Blue, blue-- ocean blue ? Cornflower blue? Indigo? He couldn’t breathe.
Her laugh-- bells, windchimes, bubbling and skipping across the lake surface?
Oh god, oh god.
He’d realize later it wasn’t slipping away from him as he feared. Her eyes were powder blue, and her laugh chimed around corners and through cracks in the walls.
Mulder wouldn’t answer his mom’s calls. She called after breakfast and after dinner, like clockwork. Every time it rang, he was tempted, but realized he had no words to say to her. If he answered that phone, his mouth would open and close like a fish without air until he got so angry again that he hung up.
Langly drove to get their stuff. The Mulder parents begged him to relay a message, which he took but never gave. He got Mulder’s toiletries and clothes and some books and CD’s. He also grabbed Mulder’s dusty typewriter, sitting on his desk which faced the window.
Byers loaned him a copy of The Pale Blue Dot on audiobook. Frohike loaned him all his VCR recordings of the Twilight Zone and those things softened his pain and rage.
The first night Mulder slept -really, deeply slept- was when he listened to the tape of :The Pale Blue Dot. He put it in and fastened the headphones, sprawling out as much as he could on the couch.
The narrator's voice was silky and steady, with few rises and falls. He read the words slowly, carefully, escalating as he continued, the passage building around him.
“From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of particular interest. But for us, it's different. Consider again that dot. That's here, that's home, that's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.”
Mulder found himself overwhelmed by a sense of being miniscule, feeling tears rolling down his cheeks.
And then he was so exhausted. He had been carrying the weight of the world, the weight of his guilt and the weight of his parent’s mistakes.
And for the first time in two weeks, he slept; dreaming of spaceships.