From: lhoward388@aol.com
Date: Sat, 6 Jan 2001 16:27:11 EST
Subject: xfc: Every Day (1 of 1)
Source: xfc

Title: Every Day
Author: Agent L
Classification: V, Scully angst
Rating: G, except for a couple of d***s
Spoilers: Requiem. Nothing from Season 8. 
This is a Doggett-free zone.
Distribution: Anywhere, as long as my name is attached.
Disclaimer: To Chris Carter, David Duchovny, Gillian Anderson, Fox, 
and now Robert Patrick: I know they're not mine, and no money, gifts or 
even chocolate would be expected or accepted for this. 
Summary: Every day she gets up and goes about the business of living.
Author's Notes: I miss Mulder. I wish 1013 would show us that Scully
does, too.
Feedback: Yes, please! LHoward388@aol.com

Every Day

Every day she gets up and goes about the business of living. 
And every day something reminds her of him -- it can be as small 
as a sunflower seed shell stuck in a file drawer or as devastating as 
that daily trip to his apartment to feed the fish, where the room is 
much too quiet, devoid of his nervous energy.  

Her father would be proud. She's a good soldier. She spent little time 
mourning her fallen comrade before getting back to the war. Mulder 
would be proud, too, of how she's continued the work in his absence, 
although most days she feels she's doing a damn poor job of it. 
Many of her colleagues marvel at her tenacity and focus, but
work is a way to survive another eight hours. The work is a simply 
a way to be with him, if only in spirit. 

Every day.

Perhaps some of her colleagues think she's glad to no longer be 
Mrs. Spooky.  Others have seen the growing evidence of her 
pregnancy and have decided that she and Mulder were much more 
than just partners, although that rumor has floated around the 
bureau for years. Maybe that's why no one speaks to her in 
the corridors, why they avoid her gaze. They don't know whether 
to offer congratulations or condolences, confused by her apparent 
lack of emotion concerning his disappearance. Damned if she 
mourns and damned if she doesn't. But she's never let them in before 
and she's not about to start now. Ahab taught her well. She comes to 
work, does her job. She accepts her responsibility. But inside she 
dies a little.

Every day.

She had hoped putting the nameplate in the drawer, as difficult 
as it was, would somehow exorcise the ghost that haunts the 
corners of that basement room -- the smirking spirit that tells 
her she is too rigid, too cemented in her science to be able to 
investigate the X-Files on her own. A voice that is part Fox Mulder 
and part Dana Scully, one indistinguishable from another. But then 
again, just walking down the stairs in the morning, she is accompanied 
by more ghosts and memories than exist in those wretched file cabinets. 
She still awakens at least once every night, generally in the wee hours 
of the morning, positive she heard the phone ring. After six months, 
she still finds herself turning to tell Mulder about something she's 
just read in a file, or that the baby kicked again.

Every day.

People talk to her about closure. If only there was a body, a grave to 
visit, a place to leave flowers, perhaps she could work through her 
grief and get on with life. But missing is not dead. There's no closure, 
perhaps will never be. That thought frightens her. Is she strong enough? 
Can she wait years to find out the truth of what happened, as Mulder 
did with Samantha? Can she wait forever?

So she cannot mourn, but she cannot go forward. She can't forget, but 
she doesn't want to remember. She is trapped, frozen in time, as 
certainly as being caught in the tractor beam of some alien ship. 

Until there is a body, until someone puts indisputable, irreversible 
proof in her hands, until she herself performs his autopsy, she must
believe that he will return. In the past when he has gone missing or 
has been in grave danger, she has always somehow known 
that he was still alive...and this time is no different, although the hope 
has grown faint now, after months of searching. But even though she 
can't explain it, can't understand it, she *knows*. He is still alive. 
She is as certain of this as she has ever been of her science and her 
facts. He is waiting for her to find him. 

Every day.  

The End