Chapter Text
How happy is the blameless vestal's lot!
The world forgetting, by the world forgot.
Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind!
Each pray'r accepted, and each wish resign'd.
- Alexander Pope
She wishes they’d come up with this years ago.
It would have been handy in the murky grey space between Oregon (second time, not the first) and his body showing up, bruised and broken, in backwoods Montana. She might have found the absolute definition of medicated peace in the little blue pills she’s holding in her hand today, in 2014. She guesses the baby (she’s trying to forget his name already, do some of the pills’ work for them) might have posed a problem. But she thinks John might have agreed to play the part of father. Or Skinner. Or someone else equally as ludicrous and asinine. She thinks it might have worked. At least if he’d been dead and stayed that way.
In hindsight, she supposes she hadn’t wanted to forget him then. Not yet, anyway.
In the empty places between her pregnancy and William’s (damn it) birth, she’d just wanted to be near him. Forgetting would have drawn her further away, and she was far too weak (or strong? She can never tell what type of chemical equation she’s been over the years; balancing or unbalancing; an unstable element) for that then. She’s harder now. Not necessarily more stable, but less prone to breaking. Less likely to curl around him in bed. Less likely to find herself in their crooked, close-knit house at all. She’s all cold hands and hard lines in the mirror. She still thinks of her apartment as new, despite being there two years. The little blue pills in her palm come in a box that says Erado Corp. Delete, literally translated.
She weighs them in her hand. They’re very hard to get, practically black market at this point in their early stage of production. But Scully has always had ties in the underworld; her prescribing doctor a friend of a friend of a very, very old friend. She wonders if she should call him to let him know. Mulder, it’s me. I’m forgetting you and I’m happy. I love you, but I'll be happy to not have to remember that. We're better this way. I’m fine. Really, truly this time.
She doesn’t call. Part of her (the cold, logical sliver of her brain) pretends it’s because she thinks he wouldn’t believe her. The rest of her body (ribs, chest, hands, hips, places he’d touched) knows he always, always will. Besides, how could she explain to him that she’s got a sneaking suspicion she can’t die? She doesn’t know, of course, but she’s always known how to play a hunch. (Or did he teach her that). There have been clues over the years. Blood dried too fast and bullet scars fading before Mulder’s even had a chance to feel guilty over them
Worse is that that’s not the only reason she’s doing it. If that was the case, her suspect immortality, she could wait until he was dead or something close to it and then remove him from her memory piece by piece, pill by pill, night by night. No. She’ll do it now. Because she needs him in that little house and her out here, not remembering but living, still alive, still, separate. She needs to prove this thing to herself, this final Herculean feat. That she can be with out him. Just be, just exist in parallel without pulling a hard right turn and crashing into him like a wayward cart on a high stakes track. She needs the cognitive dissonance she’s crept around with like a secret or evidence of a crime since leaving him two years ago to shrivel and fall away like dead leaves. (How are you here when he’s there when you spent so many years wanting to be somewhere together.) She needs to not remember his face when the world hadn’t ended but they’d really thought it would two years ago. She needs to not remember his face when it hadn’t ended and they hadn't really believed it would fourteen years ago. Needs to forget it all, every part. Not remember the set of his jaw or the gentle tilt of his smile.
She, who has been nothing but the arithmetic sum of things she’s seen, done, survived with him for so many years, she needs to be divided and regrouped. Subtracted. Dwindled down to nothing. She needs to be disappeared.
She says: Mulder, it’s me, to the mirror instead of the phone. Empties the first handful of pills into her mouth and waves goodbye.
Here’s how it works:
90 pills for thirty days. Three a night. At the end of November, she will no longer recognize the name Fox Mulder. Or herself in the mirror, quite possibly. She will wake up in a month in a hospital, where they have arranged to tell her she’s was in a car accident twenty years ago and has been in a coma ever since. She doubts the believability of this fabrication; but her doctor assures her she will find herself so muddled and confused after the last month of nighttime erasures that it won’t matter much. She’ll be reborn, essentially. Weightless.
She’s a peculiar case, her doctor explains when she first comes in for an appointment. It’s William’s birthday, three months after leaving him and she is fresh off a phone call where he’d apologized for so many things, for so many stupid things, that she’d had to hang up without saying goodbye. She is red-eyed and straight-backed. They tell her this procedure usually maxes out after you’ve known the person for a decade, but they’ll make an exception. (She wonders if that’s because they recognize her occult-fame status or because she can hardly get his name out without choking.)
- We can’t just take specific memories from you, Dana.
- Why not?
- Well, simply put, it just won’t work. You’ve known each other too long. From what you’ve told me, he’s tied into almost every part of your life for the last twenty years. Take that away and we’ve got very little to work with.
I really am nothing without him, she thinks. I do not exist. She can remember a time that might have been strangely comforting, in the claustrophobic way she’d found all evidence of his nearness comforting during their hardest, leanest years. Now it feels like she is swallowing cotton.
- Ok. What would that mean for me clinically?
Her doctor shakes his head.
- It would be very painful, physically. Not the procedure, of course. That, I assure you, is painless. Mostly strange dreams. You'll have quite a confusing month, to be sure, but very little else. Afterwards, though, you might experience flashbacks. It would be hard to construct a false history for you, although your lack of family is a plus. Still, almost anything could be a trigger.
She nods. They’d asked that she bring everything that was tied to him into the office, where they would incinerate it. On her first visit the nurse had given her three large trash bags. She’d brought back a paper bag. Inside: her cross, a blurry baby photo, a crystal clear snapshot of them grinning at a crime scene (folded from years in her wallet) and two pennies, joined together to make a jack like shape. The nurse had raised her eyebrows. Yes, she’d said. That’s really everything.
- What are my options then?
Her doctor leans back slowly in his chair.
- We take it all.
She thinks that should shock her, but it doesn’t. Twenty years and most of what she remembers is defined in terms of Mulder. It is suffocating and it is as it should be.
- Alright, she says. When can we start?
Night 01
The pills go down easy, tasting sweet like vanilla extract smells. She'd almost hoped they would be bitter, that she could taste her failure on her tongue.
She lies in bed and thinks about the note he'll receive in a month. It'll be simple: Dana K. Scully has had you erased. Please make no attempt to contact her. She knows he'll spend hours researching, not understanding, knows he might even go to her doctor, demanding answers. It wouldn't be hard for him to find the clinic. They'd spent years chasing things that were not supposed to exist. He might go there, sure, but he will not ask for the pills. Of all the things she knows he might do, returning the favor is not one of them.
She knows, because she knows him well, not like the back of her hand because really, who could describe the back of their hand in perfect detail? She could talk about his hands, but not her own. And that wasn't the point. She knows him like the periodic table, something so well-worn in memory she could recite it backwards and forwards and never forget a variation. She knows him like this, fully, and knows that some quiet, tortured part of him will be extraordinarily glad to be the only one in the world who remembers how she'd looked with his gun pointed at her across a hospital room, with cancer crawling through her veins, with her daughter dying on the other side of a pane of glass. Some part of him will think he deserves to be the only one left with nightmares. To be the only one left.
She is not unaccustomed to falling asleep thinking of him alone. It always leaves her with a sharp feeling at the back of her throat, but tonight the edge is washed away by the sweet taste that lingers there. Not gone, but dulled. Erased, she thinks. Erasing.
She falls asleep in her cold, white apartment outside D.C. and wakes up warm in Virginia.
She’s facing the windows of their house, looking from the inside out. She doesn’t look around her, but she can tell where she is kinesthetically, comfortably aware of her surroundings in the way that she knows she has two hands and could touch someone with them if they were close enough and she wanted to. The person close enough is Mulder, he’s behind her, if memory serves. She does not want to.
“What are you doing?” he asks.
She remembers this memory even though she thinks she must be inside it, which is a strange feeling, like trying to tickle yourself. It is not their most recent interaction, almost all of those have been by phone or in a haze of bed sheets and candlelight.
(As she thinks of these moments, not lingering on any particular one, they blur, the sound warping. I’m sorry, she hears him say, loud into the room like it’s over an intercom even though she knows those words do not fit this memory, not from him.
I’m sorry, she hears him say. Scully, please.
And then there is a sob - which she thinks is hers - and a crackle and a hum like a line going dead).
It’s quiet. She is still staring out the window. He asks again, “What are you doing?” She is dimly aware that this is now her most recent memory of him. Something deep, below her bones maybe, somehow, throbs and then dissipates. She blinks and turns, seemingly on her own accord, but she gets the sense the action would have been difficult to stop. She did face him before she left, after all.
“I can’t do this anymore, Mulder,” she says.
He looks exactly the same, the way he did two years ago. Dim, is how she registers it now. About to wink out entirely. He steps towards her, his hands relaxed and useless at his sides. She registers the bulk of an overnight bag next to her.
“I’m sorry,” she’s saying before she realizes it. She hadn’t been prepared for this. For this odd mix of astral projection and first person video game. Like she’s in the memory and outside it. Controlling her body but not. Under some heavy, heady influence.
He shakes his head. He looks so tired. He blinks and it takes too long, like it hurts him to have to open his eyes and see her. He’s wearing that grey t-shirt, the one she’d thought about stealing when she packed but couldn’t find. Always her foil, ever after.
He says, “No you’re not. That’s okay.”
She tilts her head at him. She cannot remember if that is part of this memory. It must be.
She remembers the impulse to touch him, or maybe that’s new. Either way, she steps forward, touches his cheek. He closes his eyes. Memory, she thinks when she makes contact. She remembers this. The way he’d leaned into her touch and then away. The way he had not fought for her.
He opens his eyes suddenly, which she doesn’t remember at all. “You’re forgetting me, really?”
She stumbles away. “What?”
He says, “It’s alright.”
(That’s memory — he’d said that, she members that).
She shakes her head. “You can always call, Mulder. If you need me — “ She’s talking without thinking. Her bag is suddenly in her hand. She’s on the porch without having walked there and he’s behind her, but closer than she thinks he should be. She’s not sure if he should be outside at all, but she can’t think because she’s looked beyond the porch. Looked out into vast, empty darkness in the most literal sense.
She becomes suddenly aware that their house is floating in the middle of an unfinished universe, or maybe a rapidly disappearing one. The porch is lit by a single bulb because she could never get him to replace the second and all around them is greedy, hungry darkness. Some scientist had once compared forgetting to a black hole. She thinks this must be what her imagination and the pills have conjured, this pressing black, this utter erasure.
She turns and looks at Mulder. Yes, he’s supposed to be inside the house. He was inside the house before, when she’d left. He says again, “You’re forgetting me” and his voice is half swallowed into echo.
She shakes her head. Even in her fragmented memories of him, he is a lost boy, ever left behind.
“I didn’t know what else to do,” she whispers. “I didn’t know.”
He nods, his eyes going soft. The darkness is not some endless sea they are floating in, she realizes, it is smoke, it is surging around them. The porch light flickers, but Mulder half smiles and everything looks, for a moment, less dim.
“You won’t remember this,” he says and kisses her.
She has time to think: It’s not supposed to go this way. It didn’t go this way. He didn’t kiss me before.
The porch light goes out. Darkness swells and swallows them whole.
To be continued ...