Date sent: Sun, 19 Oct 1997 12:00:17 -0800 From: EPurSeMouve@goplay.com Subject: Denying the Evidence - EPurSeMouve Quickie author's note: This story was begun May 17, 1997, at 10:10 PST, exactly ten minutes after the XF season finale. It was meant to be continued by a friend, but it didn't really happen - however, it works well in its own right. And the only assumption made by it is that Scully wasn't in on what happened during "Gethesmane" - everything else is neutral. But this story is being released with a plea. I (EPurSeMouve) do not plan on watching "Gethesmane" again - EVER again. It's blatantly designed to manipulate the viewer's emotions and insult his/her intelligence - very few of Scully and Mulder's actions hold up to the test of history. I won't get into it here, but you can e-mail me and ask for an explanation. If you at all agree with me, please help me by not watching the episode in protest. It won't make a huge difference, but every little bit helps. Category: VA Spoilers: up to "Gethesmane" Keywords: nada Rating: G Summary: Scully reflects on the events of "Gethesmane", questioning their validity. Denying the Evidence By EPurSeMouve For the first time in a long time, Special Agent Dana Katherine Scully was not refusing to believe. Of course, if you had asked her, she would have said that she had never really refused to believe anything during her work on the X-Files - she had simply not casted judgment before having all the evidence, having all the proof she needed to make a firm decision. She would follow hunches, investigate theories, to be sure - but she would not say flat-out "No" to anything. However, if Mulder's eidetic memory had been presented with that argument, it probably would have automatically recalled several instances when she had closed her mind to a case's paranormal aspects. Closed her mind to Mulder's insistence of more complex answers to the problems she saw as simple. Scully herself couldn't do so off the top of her head, but she had vague memories of such instances. Instances that she always ended up apologizing for later at some point. She was now angry that she had apologized. And sitting in her dark apartment, wearing the same suit from that morning's meeting, half-healed bruise still livid and red, Scully was angry at a lot of things. Angry at the past four years of her life, now clearly defined as wasted and the ruin of years ahead. Angry at the trails of evidence gone sour, the conspiracies within conspiracies within conspiracies. And angry at the one who had gotten her involved, mind, body, and soul. As irrational as it may seem, Scully was angry at Mulder. As anticipatable as it may seem, Scully was angry at Mulder And as futile as it may seem, Scully was angry at Mulder. For she wanted him here, by her side, in her dark apartment, in her life forever, more than she could ever have thought possible. She wanted, needed, to yell and scream at him, to curse him for leaving her, while he yelled back about how he hadn't been thinking clearly and how he had made the biggest mistake of his life and that he was sorry beyond belief for the tears it had cost her and he had come back to her now, broken through all barriers, so that she wouldn't be alone- *I have come back from the dead to continue with you...* Yes, that was what she wanted. She wanted to fall asleep and dream of him in her mind reassuring her that he would always come back no matter how many times he ditched her. She wanted to believe that, this time, it wasn't for good, wasn't for keeps. But this time, she was not refusing to believe the evidence before her in lieu of her own hopes and dreams. She was angry at him because she would not get what she wanted. She was angry at him because, this time, he really was dead. But a pause echoed through her line of thought here, as it had been doing every time that she had come to this point in her mind. That is to say, as far as she knew, he was dead. Of course, a corpse is pretty good evidence of such. An identifiable one is even better. But, as she supposedly knew now, the government had been faking E.B.E.s and autopsies for decades - who was she to say that they couldn't pull off a fair facsimile of a man who had his DNA available in the government database? She had seen shape shifters, clones, mutants - she had seen that alien change shape from Mulder to someone else, had seen the pictures of the Gregors, had heard Mulder's testimony of the many Samanthas he had encountered, had been presented with stories of alien corpses being faked for decades now. All of it was evidence which indicated that out there, there was indeed the capacity to fabricate the body of a specific human male if someone desired. The question was who and why.... She cut the voice of her overactive imagination off at this point, refusing to continue along the path that Mulder would have taken, the path she would have followed him along. That part of her life was over now. Over, thanks to the many-times-cursed bullet now lodged in her partner's brain. The bullet she would watch being removed tomorrow - for she had convinced the coroner to let her view the autopsy. She knew that Mulder had specified cremation in his will, and wanted one last chance to see his face of quirks and angles before it was burned to ash. As she rose, stripped off her sweaty clothes, readied for bed, she tried to concentrate on preparing herself for the cold hard reality of the next day, but found that her imagination and its theories were like Mulder in more ways than one - for one thing, they refused to stop pestering her. And she needed them to stop, needed them to drop out of her life like their earthly counterpart had, because as long as she carried them with her, she could never fully mourn her best friend - the one person who she had completely trusted for the past four years. But they hung on with damnable determination. And she found herself wondering once more as she lay down beneath the covers: How could she really know for sure? The End Stop The Inaccuracies! Stop The Pain!