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“She was among the recent ghosts and walked haltingly from her wound. The poet of Rhodope received her, and, at the same time, accepted this condition, that he must not turn his eyes behind him, until he emerged from the vale of Avernus, or the gift would be null and void.
They took the upward path, through the still silence, steep and dark, shadowy with dense fog, drawing near to the threshold of the upper world. Afraid she was no longer there, and eager to see her, the lover turned his eyes. In an instant she dropped back, and he, unhappy man, stretching out his arms to hold her and be held, clutched at nothing but the receding air. Dying a second time, now, there was no complaint to her husband (what, then, could she complain of, except that she had been loved?). She spoke a last ‘farewell’ that, now, scarcely reached his ears, and turned again towards that same place.”
⎯ Metamorphoses by Ovid, Book 10, Orpheus and Eurydice
He doesn’t sleep because if he sleeps, he’ll dream.
Sleep has never come easy to him, not since his sister’s abduction turned their shared room into a crime scene. There’s a wayward part of him that takes pride in his ability to go without sleep for long stretches of time, his exhaustion a testament to his dedication to his work, but now he feels himself beginning to fracture despite the concerning amounts of coffee he drinks or perhaps because of it. He remembers his abnormal psychology lectures in college where he learned about bipolar disorders and how reported lack of need for sleep was a symptom of mania. It isn’t mania but he can see how he might look manic to anyone watching.
The first days after her abduction, after Duane Barry took a wrecking ball to one of the few good things in his life, he didn’t sleep. The very thought of allowing himself rest while Scully was in the trunk of a car felt like sacrilege. Who was he to return home and attempt to get some fitful shut eye while she was fighting for her life? It was an insult to her life, to their partnership.
It was his fault, no matter what Mrs. Scully said. In their conversations, during which she insisted he call her Maggie, he would nod and smile through her reassurances, all while he berated himself for the very fact this grieving mother and widow had to spend any of her time at all soothing him. There had to be a circle of Hell dedicated for sinners of that specific kind; perhaps Dante had overlooked them.
After Krycek’s disappearance and Maggie’s insistence he keep Scully’s necklace, Mulder collapsed when he made it to his apartment. He can’t remember taking off his shoes or coat but must have since he woke up on the couch in a cold sweat, the streetlights blotching his unshaven face.
“I knew it would happen this way,” Maggie had said. “I had this dream about Dana being taken away.” She continued having the dream, informing him of every instance over the past two months. They meet for coffee or lunch, although Mulder barely touches his food. It’s a tether of sorts. As long as they keep drinking from their cups and fiddling with their cutlery, there is still a chance Scully will be found.
“You’ve lost weight, Fox,” she tells him, a week after his birthday that he forgot about. “You’re practically swimming in that suit.”
He offers her a smile as he attempts to shift the focus off him. “Know any good tailors?”
He knows she has three other children to think about but part of him wonders if the maternal energy meant for Scully needs somewhere to go and he just happens to be on the receiving end. After Samantha was taken, the arithmetic of his family’s attention shifted in its own bleak way. Where Maggie’s mothering searched for an outlet, Teena Mulder’s dried up. There had never been an abundance to begin with but it seemed to Mulder that the small propensity for mothering she had disappeared with his sister. There is a part of him – a sad and sorry part of him, he tells himself – that is grateful to be the object on which Maggie focuses. This part of him is still twelve years old, staying up late to watch B-movies in the hopes that his mother will catch him and send him to bed for his own good.
In his most pathetic moments, when he allows himself some pity, he thinks of himself as the hatchling from an old children’s book. Are you my mother? It’s the question his subconscious comes back to whenever he is especially wounded. He wonders if he radiates sorrow, if this is what motivates Maggie to keep scheduling lunch.
Maggie’s recurring dreams are a frequent topic of conversation for them. He reemphasizes that it would be scarier to stop having the dream, but he knows this is a cold comfort.
She asks about how he’s sleeping. She sees his five o’clock shadow, the bags under his eyes and he tells her he’s sleeping no worse than he usually does. It’s only half a lie. He doesn’t tell her about his own dream, the one he splashes cold water on his face to avoid having. He sets alarms at three in the morning to stop himself from dozing off. His neighbors must hate him more than they already do. There is only so much he can do, though, before even his insomniac body quits on him.
When sleep finds him, they’re back in Olympic National Forest. He doesn’t know how he’s gotten there but he knows she is somewhere in these woods.
“It’s the Hoh Rain Forest, specifically.” Her voice comes from behind him, as if reading his mind. There’s no discovery of her location in his dream. She simply appears at the same moment every time.
On what should have been a quick investigation in the Pacific Northwest, she had worn a multicolored windbreaker, shades of purple, teal, and pink all making her easily identifiable in the swaths of green that surrounded them. He had joked on the drive to the logging area that he no longer had to worry about losing her.
“I can see you from a mile away in that thing,” he said. “Much easier to keep track of.”
“I didn’t realize it was your responsibility to keep track of me,” she teased, watching him from the passenger seat.
“It wouldn’t do my reputation any good if I lost the FBI’s tiniest agent, now would it?” She leaned over and flicked his ear.
“Keep it up, Mulder,” she said. He could hear the grin on her lips. “Just be glad I didn’t bring heels with me on this trip.”
“If you needed a few more inches, Scully, I’ve got some to spare.”
She shoved him, still teasing.
“No,” she says, drawing out the vowel. “Just another weapon in my arsenal. They’re called stilettos for a reason.”
It was casual when they joked about it, as if losing her was an impossibility. They hadn’t been working with each other for a year at that point but had enough close encounters with death or fate (weren’t they the same thing?) that it felt easy enough to become fodder for jokes. Now, he has lost her and despite commandeering an air tram and nearly strangling a man to death, she remains unreachable.
He wants to know if she is still wearing that jacket, but he can’t turn around. He knows if he does, she will be taken from him again. She had looked so small in it. He worries that she’s even smaller now, her months away from him (he can’t use words like “captivity” without experiencing waves of nausea) eating away at her body. He wants to take her to the first diner they find, even if they have shit coffee, and watch her feast on blueberry pancakes drowning in butter and syrup, burgers and fries, a hot chocolate dolloped with whipped cream, whatever she wants. He wants her warm and safe, sated wherever he is because he has done his job and protected her.
“Do you know where we’re going?” she asks. He hears the snap of twigs as they move through the forest.
“We’re going home,” he says. He stares at the forest floor carpeted in moss. It pulses like a heartbeat. The whole forest is alive. He is reminded of his past experimentation with magic mushrooms at Oxford. Phoebe had secured them for an Easter vacation trip to Southampton where she led him to the rumored spot where Gerald Gardner led Operation Cone of Power back in 1940. His high peaked while he studied the bark of the trees, the wood’s patterns mirroring itself and vibrating under his touch.
Is he high now? Were the bugs not the only thing they had to worry about in the forest? Were spores producing psilocybin a concern as well? The details are too real. He worries he isn’t dreaming at all but that the entire thing is a trip gone wrong. He can smell the damp wood surrounding them, can feel the mist of rain that covers his cheeks. The cold seeps into his marrow.
“Mulder, I’m freezing.” Her voice is farther away now. Her voice bounces around the forest, sounding from multiple places at once. It’s part of the trick of the dream, meant to confuse him so he looks back. He feels her at his back but the sounds of her movement are gone now.
“We just have to keep walking.” His throat is tight. “We’ll get you home soon, Scully.”
“But I’m so cold,” she whimpers as she says it and he wants to cry. She wouldn’t be here, stuck in the woods, if he hadn’t asked for this assignment.
She wouldn’t be missing if I hadn’t pulled her into the Duane Barry case.
When he first learned the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, he was appalled at Orpheus’ lack of belief. How could he not control himself? Had Mulder been given the chance to bring Samantha back home under the same criteria, he thought, the sheer resolve of his desire to have his sister back would steel him from any urge to look back.
In the landscape of his dream this proves a much more difficult promise to keep. Every sniffle and moan from her weary body triggers the urge to look back, to ensure she is still safe. The facts of how she has returned to him don’t matter. All that matters is he keep them moving forward. He must trust that she is there. It’s never been Scully that he doesn’t trust, it’s everyone else, the forces that assigned them to each other. They’ve already taken her from him once – what’s to stop them from doing it again? He argues with himself, questioning whether the entire scenario is another ploy, whether she’s there. His belief has never wavered like this before.
“The sun is going down soon,” he says. “If we don’t keep moving, we’ll freeze.”
He wants to stop and wrap her in all his extra layers, but he can’t. His body burns with the desire to care for her and it has nowhere to go, not yet.
They come to a dense thicket. A Swiss army knife appears in his hand.
“I’m going to cut our way through.” He crouches to begin the onerous work of slicing through vines and shrubs. He hisses when thorns cut at his hands.
“Let me see, Mulder,” she says. It’s another attempt to lure him into losing her. He wonders if her lips are blue, wonders how she can keep trudging through these woods after whatever she has been through. Mulder hears her step towards him but can’t feel it. The increasing paranoia he’s developed over these two months is coming to a crescendo.
“Just stay there, Scully.” The words come out tense through gritted teeth. “Don’t move.”
He pushes deeper into the thicket, more thorns snagging at his coat. They whisper around him, conspiring with the leaves and soil to trap him here, away from her. He is crawling now, the short blade cutting more than it ever would in real life. The brush grows deeper with each cut vine, like the Hydra growing new heads with each swipe of the sword.
Leaves crumple to his rear. Scully must be on her knees behind him now.
His skin is raw and hot but light pokes through the greenery. We’re almost there, he wants to say, but the words are caught in his throat. Just a little bit longer.
The material of her jacket catches and he hears her whine as it rips.
The blade has dulled with all the hacking, but has it been that long? Everything is slow and fast all at once and he can’t keep track of how long they’ve been walking or how long he’s been in the thicket, but the light breaking through keeps his fingers working at the tendrils of plant life. Then, an opening.
The thicket has led them to a mountain top, the very one he lost her on. In the dream, he doesn’t question this lack of logic, only moves closer to safety.
He tumbles out and lands on his palms. They scrape against the stone, and the sight of his own blood makes him feels lightheaded. The Swiss army knife clatters against the ground. He drags his weight forward, knees too weak to stand just yet and lets out a gasping breath. The leaves rustle behind him and he knows she must be on the ground with him, out of the forest’s edge.
He turns to see her still on her knees, one palm on the mountaintop, the rest of her swallowed by the forest. Coins cover her eye sockets. Her hair sticks to the thin, pale flesh covering her skull. Her chapped lips hover above one another as the two of them realize his mistake.
She reaches out for him, and he scrambles to grab her, to pull her out from the underworld and back into the land of the living but she is lost to him. They take her away again, pulling her back through the very thicket he carved out for her.
She yells out his name and digs her nails into the soil, the dirt ribboning around her fingers, but it’s no use. The thicket grows back as the forest consumes her. He screams out her name, trying and failing to rip and cut at the greenery that has grown back in her wake. The thorns stick to his palms as he hears her scream. The sounds of the forest digesting her are what jolt him awake.
He awakens in his apartment, in the car, behind his basement office desk, wherever sleep has decided to play a joke on him. The reality of loss lands on him like a barfight blow. He expects to spit out teeth from the force.
She is gone, still, and he is to blame. He rubs his palms, the spaces where the cuts he received in his dream should be itching and is frozen by the gravity of his culpability. His shaking fingers move towards his neck where they find Scully’s necklace.
He knows how the dream will end every time. He resists sleep to escape the crush of tragedy but there is a part of him that tempts fate each time he closes his eyes, hoping he dreams a different ending this time. The hope for a better ending is all that’s left.