Title: Light a Candle for Me Author: Fox's Gal Email: foxs_gal@hotmail.com Category: VA Summary: Agent Mulder celebrates a special birthday Archive: Sure, just please ask first. Disclaimer: Okay, y'all know the drill. These characters don't belong to me, I didn't create them, they belong to Chris Carter, 1013 Productions and 20th Century Fox. I'm not making any money off of this so please don't sue me. I have nothing to give. You'll be wasting your time. Trust me. "Light a Candle for Me" By Fox's Gal Special Agent Mulder's Basement Office Hoover Building October 13, 1998 Mulder gave up the attempt to bring order to the chaos that had accumulated on the desk to watch the doodles flow from the tip of the ballpoint pen onto the yellow legal pad. The doodles turned into names. The same names over and over again. Morphing into one another. Fox&Samantha SamNFox Foxamantha Samanfox. Fox William Mulder Samantha Mulder Samantha & Fox Mulder... Then the pen ran out. "Dammit..." It hadn't been a good week. The one partner Mulder had ever been able to work well with was gone. Shipped out of the basement office over to Quantico like an unwanted piece of office furniture. Scully had been in touch regularly, but the banter they so easily shared was gone, the absent conversations only present in leftover whispers of memory. The ensuing silence was unnerving...potentially maddening. The new spy sent down to the bowels of the Hoover Building sat quietly on the stool Mulder had grudgingly provided for him. The new guy was too much like that bastard Krycek. Too much of a pretty boy and too interested in ass kissing to ever be a decent agent. A quick glance to the mess of paperwork on the cluttered desk answered that question. Simpson. Anthony Simon Simpson. Simpson had been asking stupid questions all day. He tried to come off as a skeptic, but sounded more like an arrogant twit. A quick glance at the wall clock told Mulder that it was time to call it a day. One last paperclip went zinging across the room as Mulder stood up and stretched. The suit had become uncomfortable, stifling, restricting...it needed to be burned. Mulder scrutinized the unsuspecting agent. The gossip around the place was that he was some sort of ladies man. "Hey, Simpson...uh...I'm gonna head on out for the day, okay? Lock up when you're done here. Have a nice weekend." Mulder would have been hesitant to leave anyone alone in the office, but throughout the day it became more and more clear that Simpson didn't even have the scant amount of knowledge it would have taken to make him a threat. "Sure thing." Mulder had no sooner opened the door to leave then did Agent Simpson speak up again. He had slipped off the stool and was approaching Mulder. "Hey, uh....Samantha, I was wondering if you had any dinner plans tonight." Special Agent Samantha Mulder whipped around to meet Agent Simpson's eye with a deadly green glare. "Don't you ever call me that. Do you understand me?" she growled. "Ever." She turned on her heel and stalked out of the building. Her black Taurus was a haven waiting for her in the parking garage. Just a few more steps and she could escape into that cocoon. She used her keyless entry and opened the door. She hadn't realized that she had been holding her breath until she let it out shakily. She took a furtive glance around the garage and bit her lip. Samantha tasted the blood in her mouth and realized how hard she had been biting down. She started the engine and backed out of the parking space. She repeated this mantra to herself as she wove her way through the streets of Alexandria. She stopped at a grocery store and picked up a bottle of Chardonnay, milk, eggs, corn flakes and -the hardest part- the cake. She chuckled at the voice inside her head and ignored the strange looks she got. Her apartment was only a few miles from the grocery store. Her iron determination held her composure in tact, but just barely. She opened the door to the apartment, dropped the bags on the counter and checked her messages. One message. Sam smiled; she knew who had called. She pressed the button on the answering machine and listened to Scully's recorded voice. "Hey Sam, I was just calling to see if you want any company...I know, I know, but I just want to let you know that you don't have to go through this alone. Give me a call later if you want, okay?" Scully didn't understand. She didn't understand that this was something Sam needed to do herself. Ever since her brother was taken from her all those years ago, she'd had to pretend that there was nothing wrong. Every year, his birthday passed and no one acknowledged it. She couldn't stand it. Sam started this tradition when she was 13, buying a miniature cupcake and sticking a single candle into it. It might have been morbid. It probably seemed sick to some people, but Samantha felt that if she stopped this yearly tradition, somehow she would be giving up on the hope that she would ever find her brother alive. Absently, she put the groceries away. Her mind was wandering through her childhood memories. Fox was your typical older brother. He had picked on her, teased her, and protected her. She in turn, bound by some age old little sister code, had annoyed him, bothered him, and loved him more than life itself. She remembered the night he was taken. She didn't want to remember it, but for some reason, that repression defense mechanism wasn't working when it came to the night Fox had been abducted. His disappearance shredded their family apart. Samantha was sure her mother hated her, like it had been Sam's fault. Fox had always been her mother's favorite. The tall boy with the careless hair and green eyes could have stolen anybody's heart. Even her father had changed. Samantha knew that she was daddy's little girl, but after Fox had been taken he retreated into himself and started drinking. He had passed away not too long ago and Sam had wished she could mourn her father more. It was hard to mourn for someone who had totally cut himself off from the family. The groceries were put away and all that remained on the counter top was the small birthday cake. She forced herself to look at the cake. Sam was sure that Fox would have hated it, for all the yellow icing roses. She was sure he would have much rather preferred something less girly. Her eyes filled up as she looked at the script. *Happy 37th Birthday Fox* "Goddammit!" she muttered. She swiped at her eyes, cursing the tears. She kicked her shoes off and wriggled out of the uncomfortable suit. She made her way to the shower where tears wouldn't matter. She scrubbed herself furiously with the vanilla scented shower gel. Memories assaulted her as she stood under the steaming stream of water. Her obsession with finding Fox. She had joined the FBI so many years before because she was sure that would give her an edge to finding out what had happened to him. Deep down inside, she knew that she probably seemed completely nuts to everyone else at the Bureau. She had been sure that's why they let her continue her work on the X-Files. It was a good way to keep "Supernatural Sam" out of everyone's beeswax. Then They had paired her up with Dana Scully. Samantha knew that even though They said the reason that their partnership was broken was because of a new policy against two women working together, it was really because of the fact that Dana hadn't been doing her job. Oh, the two of them worked famously together and had one of the highest solve rates in the entire bureau. Dana Scully hadn't been doing her "other" job...she was supposed to have been spying on Samantha. Scully had been called in to debunk Sam's work on the X-Files. She smiled mirthlessly as she turned off the water. She toweled off and looked in the mirror. Sometimes she could see her brother in her own face. She could remember his gray-green eyes when she looked into her own. They had always had identically intense gazes. Sam figured that they would have similar jawlines, Fox's only more chiseled than hers. Once again, blinded by tears, Samantha turned away from the mirror and wrapped herself in a thick green terry robe. For just a moment, that robe was a magical shield that protected her from everything. When she was enveloped in that robe, life was good. Unfortunately, that robe was not considered appropriate to wear in the field. Much later, she had changed into heather gray sweat pants and a New York Giants sweatshirt. She curled up on her couch with a glass of wine, watching TV without the sound on. For the nth time, she wondered how people did it. She wondered how people got on with their lives after losing someone. There had been so many opportunities for Sam to get on with her life. She could have been married by now. She was sure that Fox would have even wanted her to have gotten along with her life. That, however, was not an option. There was something in her that wouldn't let her forget Fox. It was this same thing that wouldn't rest until she found out for sure where her brother was. Sometimes she felt like she was in a fog. She was a ship floating aimlessly in a thick fog with no beacon to follow. She used to have a beacon, Scully. She used to have some sort of direction and for what wasn't the first time, she doubted herself. Would this all have been for naught if next week she found the skeletal remains of that 12 year old little boy? A line from "A Few Good Men" echoed in her mind: "You can't handle the truth!" She could come up with no answer for the unspoken question. Sam glanced at the VCR clock: 8:48. She sighed.