Work Text:
Perseverance. Challenges. The struggle to maintain.
Mulder hangs up the phone, brushing frustrated tears from his eyes. Pathetic, says his father’s voice. Right on cue.
He’s always been quick to tears, something his father tried unsuccessfully to beat out of him. “You get this from your mother, this overly emotional nonsense,” Bill Mulder had told him, more than once. Even as a kid, this always struck Mulder as false—his whole childhood, he only ever remembers seeing his mom cry once. The night Samantha was taken. In the years that followed, Teena Mulder became a shell. Tears would have been an improvement, proof that she was still in there, beneath the narcotic haze of the meds she took for her “anxiety”.
Bill Mulder would occasionally raise a fist to his son, but he wasn’t abusive, at least not in the way that Mulder has come to understand abuse. Working in Violent Crimes, he had witnessed the worst of the worst, and for all the damage his own parents had done, he has to give credit where credit is due. They could have been so much worse.
Losing a child can’t have been easy. This was something he reminded himself often, on the long nights of heavy silence before the divorce, and every subsequent weekend visit with his father, all stunted conversation and being left to his own devices. Other children of divorce got two Christmases; Fox Mulder got two empty houses to haunt.
Even before the X-Files, before the FBI, before any of it, a small, immature part of him held on to the fantasy that one day he would find his sister, bring her home to his parents and everything would be okay again. They would be a family.
Then he recovered his memories of that night, then the X-Files, and suddenly the fantasy felt like a real, solid thing. Something he could touch, if only he could reach out across the border between worlds and grab it. What a fool he’d been.
Now, he sits in his empty apartment in the dark, Scully’s voice ringing in his ears.
What are you going to do?
They were close to something. Too close.
He sighs, scrubs his hands over his face. Outside, a car backfires, a single blast like a gunshot in the dark. He was barely conscious on the bridge when Deep Throat was killed, but he remembers the gunshot. He remembers Scully’s hands briefly moving over him, before she ran to check on their informant, a man whose real name remains a mystery. But it was too late to save him. There was nothing she could have done.
Fuck.
He slams his fist against the desk. All their work, gone. Scully will go back to teach at Quantico, and he’ll probably be shipped off back to Violent Crimes to profile serial killers, to study the worst of humanity until it eventually becomes too much and he finally puts a gun in his mouth. On the phone, when she asked what he was going to do, he told Scully he wasn’t giving up. But now, sitting alone in the dark, he wonders if he really has it in him to keep going. Without access to the files—and without Deep Throat—he has nowhere to start, nothing to go on. He’s back at square one.
He’s not much of a drinker—having walking cautionary tales for parents is enough to put a man off addictive substances—but tonight he feels he’s earned it. He pulls a dusty bottle of scotch from the bottom drawer of his desk, hesitating briefly when he spots the gun, a few loose bullets rattling around with it. He slams the door shut with his foot, before the old, black thoughts floating up from deep within his subconscious can reach the surface. For a moment, he sits and stares at the bottle in his hands, before sighing and placing it on the desk. Suddenly, a drink doesn’t seem like such a wise idea.
He glances at the clock. Almost midnight. Before he can change his mind, he jumps out of his seat, grabs his keys and a sweatshirt and shoves his feet into a pair of worn sneakers. He jogs out into the night, taking off into a run. His feet pound the pavement, arms pumping, breath tearing from his lungs. He runs until he is pure energy, no thoughts, his mind as still and silent as a lake.