By Mary Kleinsmith
Buc252@aol.com

Category: Angst, Mulder POV
Summary:  Mulder ruminates on his lifestyle
Rating: PG at worst
Spoilers:  Season 1 and the beginning of S2, but only periferally
Keywords: MT, but only emotional
Disclaimer:  This Mulder belongs to me, although his experiences belong to
10-13, Fox, and Chris Carter, as does Scully.
Archive: Yes, Gossamer, Ephemeral, MIJ, anywhere else. Just keep my name
attached.
Author's notes:  I've never been one for reading "thought" pieces, let alone
writing them, but this one came from inside and demanded immediate attention.
 Don't worry, there'll be more "active" pieces soon.
Feedback:  Yes, please.  Let me know if it was worth reading.

Invisible
By Mary Kleinsmith

He'd been invisible.  Okay, maybe not literally, but if somebody had insisted
he prove otherwise, he knew he wouldn't have been able to.  He walked past
the same people he passed every day.  He nodded to the same neighbors.
Greeted the same security guard at the Hoover building, emailed the same
coworkers, so-called friends, acquaintances.  Occasionally, one of them even
wrote back, but that was a rarity.  He drove to his folks houses where he'd
be shown to a seat and never addressed again.  He'd sit, try to talk, and
eventually give up on filling the silence and go home.

He told himself he didn't mind.  It was normal for him to be this way.  Even
fated.  He was meant to be alone - it was the burden he had to bear, just as
others had their own burdens.  It was his life, and he'd grown used to it.
If a moment became particularly desperate, there were places he could call to
corroborate his existence.  Restaurants who would bring food to his apartment
- delivered by a real person who would talk to him and take his money.  And
the women at the nine-hundred number who would talk to him as if he made a
difference in their lives, as if they cared for him.

At times, at the very worst, he wondered if he was really alive at all.  How
does one prove one's own existence?  It was an old philosophical discussion
come strikingly real for Fox Mulder.  And when it got that bad, he had his
movies, and the reactions they awakened in his body.  And then, just for a
few moments - moments of heat and rising waves and visions of a woman pressed
against him - he felt truly alive.  There was no denying the life that flowed
through his body as he crested.

But even that high couldn't last long, and soon, he'd be back on his solitary
couch in his solitary apartment, suffering from feelings he couldn't beat.
If he couldn't rid himself of them, though, he could at least run from them
for awhile.  So he'd take to the streets, sneakered feet pounding the
pavement until the breath was crushed from his lungs and he just couldn't run
another step.

Maybe that was why he took on the X-Files and the Consortium.  With this,
there was finally something he could do to get him noticed.  The only thing
that had succeeded in breaking the invisibility before was his profiling, but
that was worse, almost driving him to complete insanity.  Invisibility was
better than that.  He sometimes wondered if chasing mutants and government
conspiracies was any better way to confirm his existence, but until he found
something better, he was going to stick with it.  Because, even if he was
invisible most of the time, at least he was alive.

If only it didn't hurt so damn bad.  No matter how much he tried to tell
himself that it was okay, that it was his life and his fate, it still hurt in
a place deep in his chest.  For a time, he'd gotten into going on line, for
there he could find people who would messenger him or message him back if he
initiated a conversation.  But that never lasted either.  Those faceless
names would just disappear one day, stop messaging, or stop responding to his
messages.  They grew too busy for him, with their lives, their families,
their children.  Making conversations with teenagers, despite occasional
accusations of being adolescent, just didn't do it, and he'd be back to being
invisible again.

Then, uninvited, life changed, in the form of a petite woman who walked
through his basement door.  She drove him crazy.  Second guessed his every
move, challenged his every hypothesis, demanding more of him than anybody had
in a long time.  And when she looked at him, he felt that his eyes, at least,
were no longer invisible.  He knew she was looking inside him through those
eyes, and if he wanted to raise his barriers, the need to be seen overpowered
the instinctive protectiveness of his walls.

And saw him she did.  He'd go home each night chastising himself for letting
her so close - it was dangerous and foolish.  But he needed it as much as he
needed the air he breathed or the food he consumed.  Maybe more.

So he let her get closer, trying to silence the voices in the back of his
mind that warned of just how much she would be able to hurt him when she,
inevitably, turned on him.  Or, worse, walked away and left him to fade into
nothingness once again.  He didn't think he could stand going back, and in
life, you either moved forward or backward.  You couldn't stand still.  He
let her in, and before he knew it, his entire head was visible.  Well, that
made sense; she'd been reading his mind for months by the time they ran into
Tooms the second time.

He found that, now that he was partially "visible," the loneliness wasn't
quite so bad.  He could talk to her, and she talked back.  He could call her
on a dark, solitary evening and she'd be not only willing to see him, but to
sit down and share a meal with him.  She entreated entry to his heart and he
granted it wholeheartedly.

The amount of time with her increased, and he realized he was taking a more
solid form.  The security guards at the Hoover said good morning when Scully
walked by his side.  There were even people who stopped to talk to him,
purely because he was her partner, he believed.  And if the talk was
disdainful, he didn't care.  Even antagonism was better than invisibility.

By the time the Bureau grew wise to just how good they were together and
split them up, she was as necessary to him as breath, as water.  He feared
them, feared her absence from his life, but he knew how dangerous it could
be.  So he stayed away, and while she prospered in her teaching position at
Quantico, seeing him only occasionally, he felt himself begin to fade away.
But those chance meetings, visits with her in a dark hotel garage or an
emergency room cubicle in a small town, were enough to keep him in this
world.

And then, she disappeared entirely.  And so did he.

The End
 

Mary  :-)
Read my Fic at:   <A HREF="http://mary-buc252.freeservers.com/MarysJarofMindCandy2.html">Mary's Bowl of Mind Candy</A>