ABSALOM, MY FATHER
by. Avril Brown
avrilb@mcqueen.com

Mulder was silent on the flight back from Boston, withdrawn and moody, still
only for the occasional flexing of the hand encased in crepe bandage.  He had
refused breakfast and the offer of more painkillers for his cracked ribs, and
the hand he had hurt punching out his frustrations on a wall.  Scully was
horribly afraid that he was off again on one of his guilt binges.

They had had to stay in Boston until the enquiry into Vendt's death was
concluded.  To Scully's continued amazement, no finger was pointed at Mulder,
which was just as well.  Since the attack on Vendt he had been sullen and
withdrawn to the point of being completely non-cooperative.  

The prison staff were nothing short of solicitious towards her partner, and
Scully grew more and more suspicious that every last one of them - including
Mulder - knew something she didn't and that they weren't about to let her in
on the secret.

As Mulder picked listlessly at the in-flight snack, Scully tried to pull him
into a discussion of the report they would have to submit Monday morning.
There were too many loose ends on this one for Scully's liking, dozens more
than she was used to.  She didn't particularly like the feeling of knowing
that the answers were just out of reach, around the next corner, if only she
could just see ....   

Maybe this was how Mulder felt, all the time, catching a glimpse of the
truth, only to have it snatched away every time.

Scully had done the autopsy on Vendt herself. She had wondered at the time
why it wasn't a surprise to find his body stuffed full of massively malignant
tumours.

Open and shut.

Death by natural causes.  No slap on the wrist for the Fox.  The attack on
Vendt was forgotten about, conveniently swept under the official grey carpet,
backslaps from the guards who'd broken them up as Mulder and Scully left the
facility.  Nothing left but that set of cracked ribs, a bruised hand and a
major mood problem to drag home.

Scully glanced across at Mulder.  It wasn't often they managed to get seats
together, especially on such short notice, and she'd given him the aisle seat
to let him stretch his legs out just a little.  She was glad it was such a
short flight;  clearly this wasn't just Mulder in Deep Thought mode, no, this
was deeper, more introspective altogether.

The missing persons were still missing.  The dozens of files they'd dragged
out had been shoved back just as unceremoniously, resigned to the bottom of
the heap again.  Nothing solved or resolved;  just an awful lot of questions
with no answers.

"You okay, Mulder?"  Sometimes Scully thought that in years to come someone
would make that up as *her* line, the straight man feed she gave to Mulder.
It had stopped being a question about six months into their partnership, now
it was something she did, not just to exercise her vocal chords or to check
if he was hurt or not, but simply to connect with Mulder.  

Two words and his name, that was all it was, and yet it said more than a
dozen volumes could hold about their shared history, the depth and detail of
her caring and concern for him.

Mulder started out of his reverie with a grunt.  He realised he must have
dozed, rocked into somnolence by the motion and the noise of the plane, a
giant metal and plastic cocoon hurtling across the sky.  He smiled, just a
little, a slight curve of the lips that went nowhere near his eyes.

"I'm fine, Scully,"

*Now, /that's/ definitely my line*  Scully thought to herself, allowing a
small smile of her own to escape.

The patented Mulder armour was in place, Scully noticed.  He must have spent
the night marshalling his defences, realising that she had seen him
vulnerable, had seen him shed the tears he would never admit to.  

In this mood, Mulder would rebuff all attempts to reach him, refusing food,
coffee and talk in equal measures, so Scully simply sat back, settling for
watching him out the corner of her eye.  

He knew, of course, that she watched him, knowing that she knew that he knew,
and accepted it as something she did;  watching out for him was part of her
contribution to their partnership.

Mulder's carry-on bag was at his feet, and Scully could see the corner of one
of his father's journals poking out.  It itched at her to find out what was
in there, to touch a part of the truth for herself, instead of always hearing
it from Mulder, tainted with his beliefs, the things he saw between the
lines.

He must've heard that particular thought, for he suddenly gave her an odd,
measuring kind of look before bending to retrieve a packet of seeds from the
bag.  He quickly tucked the book out of sight and zipped the bag firmly shut.

* * * * *


They went their separate ways at the airport;  Scully to begin work on their
report, Mulder to - whatever it was he did at weekends.  He had only
half-raised a hand in farewell, barely acknowledging her cry of,  "Mulder?
Call me."

Scully shrugged, manhandling her bags to the cab rank.  She really could've
used a ride home, but in the mood Mulder was in, she wasn't about to push it.
He was on autopilot when he was like this, hardly likely to wrap the car
round a lamppost, but still equally unable to do much more than let the car
find its own way back to his apartment.  

Scully had no intention of weekending with her partner.


* * * * *


Mulder drove without seeing, aware enough to respond to traffic signals, to
other vehicles, and latterly to pedestrians.  He knew he wasn't depressed -
not exactly, anyway - and he knew he had been way too hard on Scully, but
this mood had descended on him like his own personal thundercloud, an odd
kind of reversed euphoria that he could luxuriate in for days.

More and more in recent months Mulder had found this particular mental
lassitude stealing over him.  He knew the danger signs, knew what it could
lead to, knowing all the while he should go find someone, talk things out
into the open where the light could shrivel the old fears to dessication.

But the only person he trusted was Scully, and she had her own griefs to live
with.  So Mulder folded each new hurt up very tight and tucked it deep inside
with all the other ones.  At night, he would bring them out into the dark
room lit only by the TV and the fishtank to see if the pain was still so bad.
When he found out it was, then he didn't sleep.

* * * * *


Mulder heaved a sigh, tiny in the empty room.  He had lain awake so long on
his couch that he had finally given up tossing and turning and crawled into
his unfamiliar bed.  Now the strangeness of the cold sheets and acres of
empty space were keeping him awake.

Every time his eyes drifted shut they would snap open again, probing
desperately for the known, the quantifiable, the flicker of the TV, the hum
of the fishtank.

Lacking the energy to throw back the covers, Mulder slid out from under the
barely rumpled bedding and padded wearily into the bathroom.

The bottle was empty.

Scully had gotten them for him when he'd point-blank refused to even consider
it, ignoring his anger at being prescribed sleeping pills.  She had weathered
his rage, smiled - sadly, he remembered - and tucked the bottle into his
pocket.  

When she'd brought him home from Iowa, his face swollen and bruised, and his
throat still cut from the garotte, his head pounding fit to burst, Mulder had
hurled the bottle across the room.  Plastic, it refused to shatter the way he
wanted it to.  Instead it lay on its side, accusing him.  Mulder ignored it
for days, until his desperately sleepless nights drove him into the arms of
an artificial Morpheus.

>From then on the bottle lived in his bathroom cabinet, one of the skeletons
in his deep closet.

And now the bottle was empty.  Mulder really wanted - needed - to stomp and
tear, to smash things until his hands bled.  But he didn't.  That would be
admitting how close he'd been again, how near he'd been to touching the proof
at the heart of his belief.  

To have it snatched away.

Just like Iowa.

He remembered thinking at the time *What is it with me and boxcars anyway?*
Then he'd taken one of Scully's damn pills and slept dreamlessly, waking
dark-eyed and heavy-limbed, too late to go running, and only enough time to
wash, shave and stumble out of the apartment.

And Scully had said nothing, nothing about how he felt, not even an arch
question about how he had slept.  Lacking any kind of concentration, Mulder
had settled for watching Scully wade through the paperwork he had generated.
What had gone wrong between them?  He wondered why it was they were further
apart than they had ever been, even on that very first case in Oregon.

Mulder sat down on the couch, no point in bothering with the lights.  He knew
the book was there, even in the dark.  It accused him, his father's eyes, his
tone of voice.  *You lost her, Fox.  You let them take her.  You betrayed me
- you let me down ....*  

*No, dad,*  he thought,  *You betrayed /me/.*

He had tried hiding the journals away in closets or in drawers, but they
would nag away at him and he'd have to fetch at least one back out, even if
he never opened it.  

Once he'd even gone so far as trying to burn the damn thing.  Instead he used
the flame to light the first cigarette he'd tasted in twenty-odd years.
Smoked it right down to the filter, then puked gloriously, clearing his head
and his lungs as the heaves emptied his stomach.  He had flushed the rest of
the packet with an odd sense of triumph;  Scully wasn't the only one with
teenage secrets.

The pain from his injured side reminded him that maybe he should call Scully.
God, she must be so pissed at him;  he couldn't believe he'd just walked off
and left her there at the airport to get herself home.  What had he been
thinking about?

Mulder let his hand hover over the phone.  Scully had spent most of the last
year being alternately scared to death for him or by him, or else mad as hell
with him, and the saddest thing of all was that he deserved far far worse a
fate than the simple backlash of her anger.  If it wasn't stupid stunts like
Iowa, it was New Mexico all over again.  Or the Arctic, or even something as
patently fucking stupid as going to fucking Norway chasing who the hell knew
what out on the ocean.

Scully had willed him to life in Alaska, been the cornerstone of his bridge
in the Blessing Way.  Now this.  Maybe third time wasn't the charm, but the
curse.  He was cursed, always had been, and he was dragging her down into the
shit with him.

Mulder kicked the book off the coffee table with his heel.  It skidded under
a chair, and sat there like his father, disapproving with a glare.

It was pointless trying to sleep, Mulder knew that of old. So he sat staring
back at his father's journal, trying to deny it.

* * * * *

"Mulder."

"It's me."

Silence.

"You okay, Mulder?"  Definitely a question this time.  They'd been back since
Friday;  it was Sunday night now, and still no word.  No visit, no midnight
call.

"Yeah,"  His voice was hoarse, as if he hadn't spoken at all since they'd
parted at the airport, or else he'd been screaming incessantly all that time.
Knowing Mulder, either was equally likely.

"You set for tomorrow?"

"Yeah,"

"Do you want to go over the report before I hand it in?  Check I've got it
all down?"  She could visualise his head shake in the long silence that
followed.

"No."

"Hey, are we not speaking here?"

"No,"

Scully sighed heavily,  "You're not making this easy for me, are you?  Is
that a:  "No, we're not speaking,"  or a:  "No, we're *not* not speaking"?
Help me out here, will you?"

Mulder sighed in turn,  "I'm sorry, I just - I just don't feel like talking
right now.  I'm sorry."  And he hung up.

Scully stared at the handset in disbelief.  He'd hung up on her before, lots
of times in fact.  Generally when she'd been haranguing him for his own good.
But it had never been like this, this terminal feeling of disconnection.

She grabbed her coat and keys.

* * * * *


Scully didn't expect him to answer the door, so she let herself in without
bothering to knock.  The apartment was in no worse disarray than usual;  in
fact, it was remarkably tidy, as if he had spent the weekend doing precisely
nothing.

Mulder looked up from where he sat on the couch.  *He was expecting me.*  She
sat where she always did, on the chair opposite him.

The journal lay open on the table between them, a silent witness.

"Mulder, whatever you're feeling right now, Vendt's death wasn't your fault.
The Warden personally exonerated you of any blame.  There'll be no mention of
what happened between you and Vendt in the report.  Vendt was so full of
cancer, it was a miracle he lasted this long."

Mulder laughed then, a sound so devoid of humour it hurt.  

"What?  What is it, Mulder?  I'm trying to understand here.  To connect with
you a little.  Can't you at least let me in?"

He met her eyes for the first time in days.  "Inside my head is the last
place any sane person would want to be.  Don't you hear what they say about
Spooky Mulder?"

"All I hear is a bunch of crap, Mulder, from a bunch of guys so full of their
own shit they -"

"They what, Scully?  Wouldn't know a crazy man if they worked right beside
them?  I know what they say about me, Scully, and I know what you think.
I've seen it in your eyes."

Scully shook her head,  "No, Mulder.  No, you don't know me at all.  Not if
you believe that."  She smiled, just a little,  "Oh, your theories may be
wild, your logic skewed, your actions out of line, but you've never been
insane.  At least, not that I've ever seen."  *And they told me about when I
was gone.  How glad I am that I never saw that.*

Mulder spun on his heel, unwilling for once to see the trust in her eyes.  He
shoved his hands in his pockets, and stood, shoulders hunched, a tight bundle
of misery.

It was enough.  Scully grabbed his shoulder with a reach and strength she
didn't know she had, and spun him to face her.  "Don't you dare do this to
me, Mulder!  Don't do it to yourself!"

Mulder rocked back on his heels, so much did Scully's intensity stun him.  He
gestured helplessly with one hand.  "How can you ever understand what it was
like, Scully?  Your father *loved* you ...."

"And yours didn't ....?"

"He probably wasn't even my father,"  Mulder's eyes were bleak.  "Don't you
understand, Scully?  *They've* been here far longer than we ever dared
believe.  The date of our conquest was set long before either of us was ever
born.  Those are the secrets he left me in these books"

Scully's jaw dropped without her noticing as Mulder continued,  "The man who
called himself Bill Mulder, who masqueraded as my *father* " - and the quiet
despair in his voice was a terrible thing to hear - " Was always a part of
that hidden agenda."

There's was a pindropping silence.

"But Mulder,"  Scully's voice quavered a moment until she regained her
equilibrium,  "You have no proof ....

Another strangled sound that pretended it was a laugh,  "I have my proof.
If you don't want to see the truth, that's up to you."  Mulder moved towards
the door, and Scully understood she was to go now.

"Mulder, just remember your father wasn't a well man, not laterally.  He had
lung cancer, you know, and you told me yourself he had an alcohol abuse
problem ....."

Mulder turned back to his window, and Scully left quietly.

* * * * *

Mulder's face was ashen, the only colour a fever spot high on either
cheekbone.  He sank deeper into his chair.

"He - my father - he engineered this?"

"All of it, Fox.  Pushed you so hard you quit the US for England.  Pushed you
to excel at Oxford.  Pushed you out onto the limb that would eventually lead
you to the FBI."

He took a long drag of the cigarette.  "Without his influence, you would
never have gotten into the Bureau in the first place, not with your -
history.  You understand that now, Fox, don't you?  He made sure they saw
what you were, whose child you were.  How useful a - tool you could be.
Little did they know."

Mulder was frozen, each heartbeat a painful thump in his chest.  The blood
was ice in his veins.  His father.  The man who had given him life.  All of
it, the hurt, the pain, the lies, even the truth, all of it was his doing.
Every last goddamned bit of it.

"Fox, you have to understand.  Your father was a brilliant man, a genius in
his time.  But you, you eclipse him.  Even in his prime, Bill Mulder could
never hope to come close to your brilliance.  Sometimes I thought he could
never live with that, that something he had created had outgrown, had outdone
him.  But in the end, when They called in his insurance and he had to
surrender a child to the Project, he still chose you.  He loved and cherished
his daughter, but it was he chose to become the instrument of his vengeance."

Another drag on the cigarette.  A pause to gauge the effects of his words.

"In the end 

"I was the boy and  the better weapon."

Something resembling a smile crossed the cigarette smoker's face.
"Precisely.  If Samantha had been Samuel, who knows?  You started out life as
an experiment in genetic manipulation and became the retribution of a dead
man.  Quite the evolution, don't you think?  Tell me, Fox, how does it feel
to be a ballistic missile?"

Mulder wanted to plaster the man's smugness to the walls, pound and pound
until his head was mush, but he couldn't move.  Everything, everything he
was, was a lie.  None of it was his.  Not his life, his body, his mind.  All
of it engineered.

He was sick to the heart.

Mulder tossed his chair aside, stumbling outside to vomit again and again.  

As the sound filtered through the darkened room, the cigarette smoker leaned
back and smiled.  This was Mulder's final truth.

* * * * *


At first Mulder thought he would get drunk, stopped to buy a bottle of vodka
and bourbon.  Use the alcohol to numb himself into insensibility where none
of it would hurt any more.

He set the bottles out on the table, uncorked the first, then paused with it
halfway to his mouth.  He was numb already.  Cold inside and drained.  Mulder
was tempted to get a knife and draw it across the palm of one hand, just to
see if the blood really had stopped flowing like he suspected he had.

He wished he could cry, could rage or storm, something - anything to fill the
void.  If he was able to feel, he thought it might be a terrible aching
sorrow, such sadness that all he had known and lived for was a lie.  Now he
had his truths, finally the truths that mattered, yet still he was no closer
to her.

Samantha.

His sister.  What a fucking joke.  They were no more related than a bug and a
monkey.  Just a common name they had been given.

Mulder had nothing.  Not a single thing.  Every last achievement he had
earned, had worked for, all of it a fucking lie.

And he was prepared to bet William Mulder was laughing himself fit to burst
wherever he was.

"I hope you rot in hell, you fucking bastard,"  Mulder contemplated the
bottle in his hand for a moment, studing it thoughtfully before lobbing it, a
graceful overhand shot that tumbled it end over end until it smashed against
the wall.  The stain was decorative, if not artful.

* * * * *


Mulder let the phone ring until it annoyed him and he pulled the jack out of
the wall.  The answering machine was in bits on the floor,  mixed in with the
components ripped from his computer and the pieces of his cellular.

The destruction had been methodical, painless.  An orgy born of senseless
rage might have been a safety valve, might have been the way for Mulder to
clear his mind and get on with his life again.  But he was in no mood for
that.

He had been planned and programmed with care and attention and precision all
of his life.  Now he would respond in kind.  

Mulder knew he didn't have much time.  When Scully found his line dead and
his cellular out of action she would be there, with her care and concern and
consideration.

And he couldn't take that, not now.

* * * * *


Mulder saw Scully's car as she turned the corner.  He had just made it.  She
never looked, never saw him, didn't know he had another car now.  As he eased
away from the curb, he resisted the impulse to hit the accelerator hard and
be free.

* * * * *


Later, on the interstate north Mulder had time to reflect that he had been
more than unfair to Scully.  He knew the devastation he had left behind him,
and remembered the panic he had felt in her apartment after she had been
taken by Duane Barry.  Scully, Scully she had suffered so much because of her
association with him.  Practised reached for the non-existent cellular, just
one call to let her know he was safe ....

Mulder snatched his hand back to the wheel.  "Fuck it!"  And this time he did
floor the accelerator.

It would be a long time before he slowed down.


CONTINUED IN "NEVER AN END"