Epilogue

Monday, Nov. 10th
1:20 pm

"There's Kessler's car. That must be the house." Mulder points with his chin. His hands are busy fiddling with the velcro straps on his brace.

Scully pulls into the circular drive and parks behind the red Cherokee. Everyone in Warren, it seems, drives a Jeep. "Wait, Mulder. I'll come around and help you."

But he already has the door open. "It hurts less if I do it myself." His voice is tight; his full concentration on hoisting his leg onto the driveway. The thigh-to-toe brace is heavy and awkward to maneuver. Even with the seat pushed all the way back, there's barely enough room.

They should have taken Skinner up on his offer. A Bureau jet would give him room to stretch out, even elevate his leg. Mulder didn't want that, for whatever reason.

"Got it," he huffs, turning in his seat to put both legs on terra firma. He reaches into the backseat for his crutches. "Scully, I told you, I'm fine. Don't make a big deal out of it." He jerks the crutches into the front seat, pokes them out the door, and hauls himself upright.

Apparently, not making "a big deal" of it is worth the misery of a commercial flight.

Fine.

He closes his door hard enough to make her ears pop.

Scully opens her door and gets out, making a point of closing it calmly.

Mulder is already making his way up the broad front steps to the porch. At least part of his mood, she knows, is leftover from their debate this morning, despite the fact that he'd won. It is why they are here.

Kessler's just asking us to stop by for a few minutes and take a look around. I don't see the problem.

And I don't see the point, Mulder. What does he think this is going to accomplish?

Mulder had given her a wearily patient look that made her want to throttle him. Michael was like a daughter to him. He's looking for answers, Scully. I guess he's hoping we can provide some.

And looking at her house is going to do that? How?

Scully catches up with him at the front door just as Sheriff Kessler swings it open. He nods to them and steps back to let them enter.

The house is a rambling Victorian with multiple turrets and dormers stuck here and there as if it had been built in stages over a period of years with no thought to how the pieces would eventually fit together. The end result is a sprawling curiosity surrounded by sedate, Georgian brick dwellings. The front hall where they are now standing is long, dim, and empty. On the right, a steep staircase climbs to the second floor through a high, arched ceiling at least fifteen feet above them. To the left and right are sets of double sliding doors with inset brass pulls. The floor is bare, polished hardwood.

"Thanks for coming," Kessler begins, eyeing Mulder's crutches. "I think we'll skip the second floor."

Mulder straightens a bit. "I'm fine. If there's something up there we should see--"

Kessler waves him off. "Not really." He walks to doors on their right and pushes them apart. "Take a look."

Scully is closest, and she takes a few steps into the room. It's big, high ceilinged like the hall, and empty. The windows are covered with heavy drapes. She turns back to Kessler and Mulder, who haven't moved from the door. "It's empty."

Kessler steps around her. "Not quite."

Mulder follows him to the entry and stops. Kessler walks to the nearest window and parts the drapes. Dusty sunlight streams through the opening, illuminating the far wall. Kessler points, but Mulder and Scully are already moving.

"Dreamcatchers." Mulder leans heavily on one crutch to free up a hand. He fingers the nearest wall hanging. "Dozens of them."

Scully leans in close to inspect one of the more elaborate specimens. "It smells... old." The turpentine scent of pine boughs still clings faintly to the bent wood, but it's mixed with dust and age. The webbing is intricate, interspersed with turquoise stones and ancient, fragile feathers. "These look genuine."

The sheriff nods. "I thought so, too. And they're everywhere."

Mulder turns to look at him. "Everywhere?"

"Every room in the house, except for one. Not a stick of furniture except for Carl's room. Not even the kitchen." He moves to the door and out into the hall.

They follow him through the other set of double doors and find themselves in another large room, as sunny as the other was dim. The far wall is lined with windows that stretch from the polished floor to a coved ceiling, but the drapes here are thrown wide. The walls are papered in a floral print that matches the drapes and the upholstered chairs flanking the fireplace. A neatly made hospital bed and assorted equipment occupy the left half of the room.

Mulder hobbles over to the bed and runs a hand over the sheets. "This was her father's room? He's been dead for six months. If there's no other furniture, she must have been sleeping in his bed."

"I stopped by once a week while Carl was laid up, but yesterday was the first time I'd been back since the funeral. I had no idea..." He makes a sweeping gesture at the room, shaking his head.

Scully moves around the room, touching two fingers to the spotless surfaces. Even the mantle is immaculate. Michael must have cleaned it the day she died. Planning her ninth and tenth murders, and she found time for housework. "Was the house empty before her father died?"

"I don't know." The sheriff's face is lined with regret. "Carl was my best friend, but I could count on one hand the number of times I've been in this house. Before he had the stroke, it had been years." He scans the eerie perfection surrounding them. "This is like a goddamn shrine."

"That's exactly what it is." The words are out before she's aware of thinking them. Both men turn to look at her. And suddenly, she is about to reveal an aspect of her trip to New York that she never intended to share. "I talked to a friend of Michael's in New York. From what he said about her relationship with her father, I don't think this would surprise him at all."

Mulder's expression is unreadable. "You talked to a friend of Michael's in New York." It's a statement, but his tone makes it a question.

She keeps her gaze steady, fixed on his, and lies. "It was a hunch, Mulder. I didn't say anything because I had no proof."

He studies her eyes for a long moment. "I see." More than she would like, she's sure.

"She worshipped her father. Everybody knew that, including Carl." Kessler shakes his head. "But you suspected her of eight murders, and got in the car with her anyway?" His incredulous tone suggests that he doesn't believe she would do any such thing.

"The point is," she is choosing her words, "that her obsession could have been either the source or the result of her psychosis, but his death triggered the violence. The plagiarism was an excuse." Scully had given them her theory about Michael's collaboration with Jackie Acres as part of her statement. "The timing is right."

Kessler huffs out a breath at the floor, hands on hips. When he looks up again, he trades glances with Mulder, and then focuses on Scully. "She wasn't crazy."

Scully's eyebrows rise in unison. "You prefer to believe that she made a lucid decision to kill eight people over an academic paper?"

"I prefer, Agent Scully, to know what really happened. You don't have all of the facts yet." The sheriff is looking at Mulder as he says this.

Mulder is chewing his lower lip in a very familiar way. It is now obvious to Scully how he spent those two hours with the sheriff this morning while she dealing with discharge paperwork. "Mulder, you have something to add?"

He shrugs, not an easy motion with crutches. "I talked to a couple of Michael's close friends this morning. I think you've met them? Ellis McKenzie and Jerry Atchison."

The hospital orderly who had grudgingly helped her with the autopsies. And the medical examiner. "We've met."

Mulder tilts his head at the sheriff. "They agree with Sheriff Kessler that the change in her was dramatic and very abrupt. It's only in retrospect that they were able to pinpoint the time." Mulder gives the sheriff a nod, passing the verbal baton.

Kessler nods, "We didn't really put it together until this morning. She went to New Mexico to do research just before Carl had the stroke. She was living in New York at the time, and we only heard about it after she'd been living here for a while taking care of her dad. We think that's where she got involved with the dreamcatchers."

Mulder is giving her a significant look. New Mexico. She lifts one brow. "And...?"

"Michael was researching serial killers who claimed insanity as a defense." Mulder tips his head at Kessler. "Will helped her set up some interviews at the state prison we drove by when we first got here. Those interviews formed the basis of her paper. It's how she obtained the grant to pursue it."

"I told Agent Mulder about the dreamcatchers I found, and he told me what they might have meant to her. About how they could have affected her."

Scully decides that following this conversation is a lot like watching a tennis match. "And that is...?" She turns to Mulder. This ought to be good.

"More than just a totem," Mulder begins. "The common belief that dreamcatchers trap the user's nightmares has a basis in Native American religion. There is a belief that the dreamcatcher summons an entity who not only traps dreams, but can make them come true-- and not always in a way the dreamer would like."

The two men have moved from their original positions to face, her standing shoulder to shoulder. Scully crosses her arms and studies their eager expressions for a moment before responding. "An entity. So... you're suggesting, what? That she was possessed?"

Two pairs of eyes fix on hers. Two heads nod. "Yes." They even say the word together.

There's something reassuringly familiar in this debate. Scully drops her head to hide a smile. When she looks up at them again, her expression is carefully neutral. "Okay. Say that were true. How would you prove it, and what possible difference would it make if you could?"

Kessler looks both disappointed and surprised. "Would it make a difference to you whether Agent Mulder here was a monster or a victim?"

"The jury's still out on that one," Mulder chuckles, but without a hint of humor.

Scully starts to respond, but the sheriff holds up both hands, warding her off. "I know I'm asking a lot, after what she did to you. You have no reason to want to find an excuse for her, but that's what I'm hoping you can do." He shrugs, looking once more in Mulder's direction. "Either you will, or you won't." He looks at his watch. "I won't keep you any longer. You've got a plane to catch."

And he ushers them out of the house. When he shakes their hands, he lays his left hand on top and adds a brief shoulder touching hug. Scully is oddly moved by the gesture after the mood a moment ago. When she says good-bye, there's a tightness in her throat that should feel wildly out of place, but somehow does not.

Scully is careful not to hover as Mulder gets himself back into the car. She is equally careful not to comment on the theory he has just espoused solely, she assumes, for the benefit of the sheriff with whom he is suddenly on a first name basis.

It's guilt, she decides. Mulder, in his own inimitable way, has concluded that he failed to identify Michael as the killer in time to save her from herself. He feels the sheriff's pain, and this is his way of soothing it. Scully can relate. Her instincts about Michael were right, but for the wrong reasons. Perhaps, if she hadn't been so focused on personal issues, she might have been able to interpret the warning signs in time to do something.

The flight home is even worse than she anticipated. By the time they reach Dulles, Mulder has dropped all pretense of being 'fine'. When she tells him to wait while she gets the car, he just nods. They haven't talked much since they left Michael's house, though she can see the wheels turning every time she looks his way. Fingers drumming on the armrest, chewing seeds nonstop.

She leaves the engine running to keep him warm when she stops on the way home to buy groceries and fill his prescriptions. When she comes out of the store, he is sleeping and doesn't wake until she parks in front of his building.

She settles him down on the couch and puts the groceries away. "I'll make us something to eat," she tells him, and he doesn't object. It's just after six o'clock and they haven't eaten since breakfast. Macaroni and cheese isn't something she would normally choose, but it's one of Mulder's favorites, and she feels the need to indulge him.

They eat from paper plates and watch Jeopardy in silence. She tidies up afterward, finally giving up on the hope that he's going to voice whatever it is she keeps seeing in his eyes. "I'll stop by tomorrow after work and make you some dinner. Call me if you need anything, okay?"

He nods at the television, and Scully smothers a sigh. He holds his fire until she's almost out of range, one hand on the doorknob, fishing for her car keys with the other.

"You're really gonna make me ask, aren't you?"

"What?" She turns around to look at him, but his eyes are still on the television. "Mulder, what did you say?"

He aims the remote and silences Alex Trebek mid-answer. "I said, you're going to make me ask."

"Mulder, what are you talking about?" She crosses the room and plants herself in his line of sight.

It takes him a beat to look up. "I didn't get it until today. This really is just the way we operate."

His voice is calm, matter-of-fact; it's his eyes that give her a hint of what's coming.

"I'm not following you." She's wracking her brain for what could have put him in this mood.

"Bullshit."

"Excuse me?" She honestly can't believe her ears.

"You heard me." He leans back, fits himself into the far corner of the couch, and waves her to the other end. "Have a seat. Since you're going to make me ask, we may as well get comfortable."

"Mulder, I'm not doing anything until you tell me what's going on."

He chuckles, but his eyes are emerald ice. "You've really got that righteous indignation routine down pat, don't you?" The smile vanishes. "Sit down, Scully."

She approaches the couch as if she expects him to leap at her, not altogether convinced that he won't. Taking her seat, she lifts one hand, palm up. "I'm sitting. Now what the hell has gotten into you?"

Long pause while he studies her face. "The interview with Jacqueline Acres' brother was just an excuse to get you to New York so you could check out Michael Hobart."

"That doesn't sound like a question."

"Humor me."

She crosses her arms. "Okay. Then, the answer is 'no'. I went to interview the victim's brother. The side trip to Michael's old apartment was secondary. Have you been stewing about this all day?"

"Let's just say it started me thinking, and suddenly all the pieces fell into place."

He may not remember, but Scully has seen him use this approach on suspects more times than she can count. He thinks he's got her cornered and is amusing himself until it's time to spring the trap.

"Okay, Mulder. Enough. Why don't you just come out and tell me what it is you think you know?"

He relaxes his posture, like a lion pretending not to notice the gazelle strolling nearby. "You know, I couldn't figure out why you wouldn't want me to get my memory back. When you gave me that speech in New Mexico about how this was my chance at a new life, I thought 'so, the old life must be even worse than she's saying'. I mean, we were lovers, right?" He snorts. "Or maybe, I wasn't very good at that, either."

This is part of his technique: change the subject and keep the suspect off balance, scrambling to keep up until she loses track and spills everything. And it's working.

"Mulder, would you mind coming to the point, if you have one?" Counterthrust.

"I'm a blank slate. Tabula rasa. You can write a whole new story. If I don't remember any more than I do right now, you get to start your own life over, too. No more politically incorrect x files. No pesky personal entanglements with your lunatic partner." He waves his hands in the air. Abracadabra.

But Scully has stopped listening. Mulder's apartment fades around her, and she's sitting in a cozy adobe house, two thousand miles west and five months in the past, with a searing New Mexico sun pouring in the windows.

The aliens can't give him his memory back because they didn't take it in the first place.

What man wouldn't be tempted by the possibility of a new life?

Helen Minton's words had made no sense to her then. They do now.

"Scully?" Mulder sounds worried, and she can imagine how she must look: mouth hanging open, blank stare.

Everything she has done since then has been meant to give him room. To allow him to remember or not, if he chooses. For his own good, not hers. God, not hers. But now she can see how it must have looked to him.

It never occurred to her to just talk to him about what she was doing. They never talk about the things that matter to them. The more personal a topic, the further in the background it gets pushed. Even as lovers, they never discussed what they were doing. Where it might lead. How it might end.

This really is just the way we operate.

"Scully, talk to me." There's a tremor in his voice now, and she feels his hand wrap around both of hers where they are balled into a single fist in her lap.

Not this man, she had told the woman. Not our work.

It was true. But the alternative is almost too terrifying to consider. He would never have willingly, consciously or not, wiped out his own past. No matter what the aliens did to him, Mulder would have hung on.

No, the threat had to be to the only thing that mattered to him more than his life's work.

It was her. Whatever happened that night in the New Mexico desert had been about Scully. Not just a threat to her life. Something much worse. Something beyond imagining.

And Helen Minton had known it. Somehow, she'd known. That was why she had asked Scully about their relationship. God, it was all so obvious. How could she have been so blind?

"Scully!" Panic, raw and pure.

Her focus snaps back to the present, to the wide frightened eyes fixed on her own.

The words tumble over one another as she struggles to tell him what she's learned, watches a kaleidoscope of emotions transform his expression: first relief, then surprise, and finally understanding. He still hasn't let go of her hands, but his grip is gentle now.

The hardest part is telling him what she thinks has taken his memory away. The magnitude of what must have happened to them both that night. She thinks she is prepared for any reaction, but not the smile he gives her at last.

"We have to go back," he says with utter conviction.

Her first reaction is to ask if he has heard a word she said, but she tamps it down. They don't operate that way anymore. "I know. But there are some things I need to tell you first."

He raises his eyebrows. "There's more?"

She smiles and pulls her hands gently from his, giving them an affectionate squeeze in the process. "You've read all of the case files, and your journals, but there's a lot you don't know."

His grin is wide and adorable, if a bit shaky. "No kidding."

"I can remember exactly how I felt the day I knocked on your office door for the first time. And what it was like the first time we made love." He blushes, and she smiles. "I want to tell you about that, Mulder. And everything in between. Not just what happened, but how we felt about it. What it meant to us. I think it's about time."

He reaches for her hand, and she lets him take it. They sit side by side, watching each other, looking away when they have to, laughing, crying, listening. Talking.

When it gets late, they move to the bed. She helps him undress, and he watches while she puts on one of his tee shirts and climbs in next to him.

They prop themselves up against the headboard with half a dozen pillows, and Scully resumes the story of their lives, leaving out nothing. Every so often, she sees his eyes light up with recognition. Not of the event itself, but of the remnants he's relived in dreams that-- until this moment-- had no meaning.

When there is no way they can keep their eyes open a moment longer, Scully turns off the lights and rejoins him in their bed.

* * *

End (14/14)

* * *
Author's Notes - Finally! If you made it this far, I hope that means you've enjoyed this journey as much as I have. We have one more story to go, but I think it we could all use a break. Look for the final installment sometime this fall.

First and foremost, thanks go to my patient, supportive, and immensely talented beta team: Dawn, Sally, and xdks. I truly couldn't have done it without them. Any typos, plot holes, or other miscellany that remain are entirely my own doing.

Thanks also go to Tali for her relentless pokes and prods that kept me moving when the thought of sitting down in front of this blasted computer one more time was about as appealing as a root canal. She truly is Queen of the Stalkers and we owe her big time for all the fic that would never get finished but for her tireless encouragement and support.

And last, but never least, thanks to the readers who took an interest in this story and its predecessor, enough to hang in there with me through the long dry spells. You're the reason we write. Your enthusiastic encouragement means more than you can possibly know.

~deb - May 31, 2004