BY: Annie Sewell-Jennings
auralissa@aol.com

DISCLAIMER: The characters of Fox Mulder, Dana Scully, and Walter
Skinner are the property of Chris Carter and Ten Thirteen
Productions. So is the character of John Lee Roche, though he
rests in peace with all of the other characters killed off in
"The X-Files".

SUMMARY: The last victim of John Lee Roche is discovered by
accident, and her parents have an odd request concerning their
lost daughter.

CATEGORY: VA, M/S UST

RATED: PG-13 (violence, vague mention of child molestation)

SPOILERS: "Paper Hearts", "Christmas Carol", "Emily". Before
"Sein Und Zeit" and "Closure".

DISTRIBUTION: ATXC and PhoeniXFic,
http://members.aol.com/auralissa/index.html, and yes to Gossamer
and Spooky Awards. :-)

AUTHOR'S NOTES: I feel like revisiting the fourth season, which
explains the post-"Memento Mori" piece I've been writing. It's
all because FX keeps airing all of the good fourth season
episodes. I loved "Paper Hearts" and wanted to write about Mulder
and Scully finding whom that enigmatic last heart belonged to.

Also, I wrote this piece a while ago, but I felt like posting it.

Thanks to Heather for beta-reading this piece! :-)

*****

THE MISSING HEART

*****

SCULLY: Mulder, it's not Samantha... and whoever that little girl
really is, we'll find her.
MULDER: How?
SCULLY: I don't know... but I do know you.
--"Paper Hearts"

*****

Her name was Sara.

Sara Katherine Ryan, actually. Her school photograph showed an
elfish young girl with becoming gold hair that still possessed
that baby-fine, sugary curl to it, tied back with a slip of a
pastel ribbon. She was remarkably beautiful in a smocked white
dress with a pattern of rosebuds across the chest, with an eyelet
lace collar and sleeves that looked like angel's wings. A shy,
sweet smile stretched across her face, with that becoming little
curve of her chin, her mouth rosy and ripe and revealing two
missing front teeth. She probably had an adorable lisp. The faded
photograph showed a cherubic little creature with the face of an
angel.

And twenty-seven years later, when the hunting dog found her
skeleton in the middle of the woods in Massachusetts, she did not
have a face at all.

The body had been found by accident, which was the only way for
it to have ever been found at all. Two hunters had been looking
for deer when their dog caught a scent and ran off. When they
found him, he had pulled up one skeletal finger, the pinky still
wearing a small gold band engraved with the initials "S.K.R."

She was found buried underneath a patch of wildflowers that had
just begun to sprout for the springtime, all in a multitude of
color and texture. The body had decayed and decomposed so that
nothing remained but her bones, grayed and covered in upturned
soil by her shoddy burial. A rotted cotton nightgown patterned
with lilies and baby's breath hung in a fragile, yellowed state,
her lace collar stiff and brittle, and her ribcage exposed by a
missing piece of cloth, cut in the shape of a heart.

They received the telephone call five days after the body had
been discovered and three days after the girl had been
identified, all thanks to her slender gold pinky ring and a
missing children's list from twenty-seven years ago. The day had
been so simple, nothing more than an uncomplicated day in March,
where the snow had drifted like frozen ash from the clouds and
the sky was the same color as paper.

The call was shocking. The sixteenth Roche girl had been found
in Massachusetts, Sara Ryan, after her molester and murderer
was dead and all of the other little girls' bodies had been
found. The last heart. There was no discussion, no
disagreement. They simply booked the flight and left for Boston.

Mulder had no choice to make when considering whether or not to
return to the Roche case. The final child had been found, and he
still had penance to pay for his recklessness that had almost
added a seventeenth heart to Roche's grotesque collection. Guilt
returned to darken his skies, and it had been raining a cold,
freezing rain after they landed in Boston. Sleet showered on them
in a torrent of frozen precipitation, and soon snow would fill
the cavity of Sara Ryan's exposed grave.

The paisley-patterned curtain fell gently as Mulder turned away
from the window, concealing the cloudy night and keeping the
artificial streetlights from filtering into his plain hotel room.
It had not begun snowing yet, but soon it would, according to the
Weather Channel and Sara Ryan's father. Richard Ryan was a tired
man, with features that were worn by years of grief and loss, and
eyes that had cried too many tears to shed now for the truth
about what had happened to his daughter. The wife, Leila, had
simply sat in silence, rolling her lost little girl's slender
golden ring between her fingers, her fingertips caressing the
engraved initials as though she could invoke her murdered
daughter's spirit.

The sound of the rising wind pushed at the window, and freezing
rain pebbled the glass with its rhythmic white noise. It was
soothing, comforting; the slow turning from numb to frozen, and
Mulder pushed up the sleeves on his long-sleeved black tee shirt
to below his elbows, raking a hand through his hair as he
approached the bed. There was an ice storm approaching, one that
would leave the fresh-grown lilies that had sprouted from Sara
Ryan's decayed body shattered and coated in fragile frozen glass.
The trees would be coated in icicles, like tears that had frosted
over while sliding down a child's cheek. Everything that was
regarded as strong and stable would turn weak and brittle, and
something was bound to snap...

With a sigh, Mulder leaned back on the pillows, covering his
socked feet with the thick green comforter, pulling the sheets
tightly around his tired body, but not yet surrendering to sleep.
Whenever he closed his eyes, he saw the photograph of Sara Ryan
imprinted on the backs of his eyelids, engraved into his slumber
and etched permanently into his heart. The rounded shape of her
young face, the sugary curls of pure gold and the angelic wings
of crocheted lace... All rotted and decomposed into nothing, her
heart torn out and her innocence robbed.

A knock sounded at his door, and Mulder propped himself up on the
pillows, knowing who stood outside and wondering why she bothered
waiting for his permission to enter. Their privacy was merely a
formality at this point in their partnership, something that was
rarely enforced or even respected. "Come in," he tiredly called
to his partner, and certain enough, it was Scully who walked
through the door.

Ice crystals had already begun falling from the sky and had
congregated in the interwoven threads of her copper hair, and
they shimmered in the cheap motel lighting like diamonds. More
bits of sleet and frozen rain clung to the collar of her wool
peacoat, and she swiped at the glimmering precipitation with her
bare fingers. Tightly, she smiled at him, shaking off her Doc
Martens and running her fingers through her hair. "I thought that
you'd still be awake," she said, and Mulder nodded, not indulging
her in a smile, not even the bitter one she'd been expecting.

"There's going to be an ice storm tonight," he murmured, his
voice low and gruff even to his ears. "Flights have been
canceled, including our own. We may be stuck in Boston for
another few days." He paused for a moment before continuing. "I
was in an ice storm once when I was a kid," he said pensively.
"We were still living on the Vineyard, when a blizzard passed
through New England." Quietly, Scully approached the bed,
perching herself gingerly on the foot of it, melting ice crystals
moistening her fine copper hair. "The sound of it on the roof was
like wind chimes hailing... And it lasted for three hours. Then
the moon came out, and everything was coated in ice. Power lines
fell, the roads were like mirrors, and our windows were frosted
over." Mulder shook his head, momentarily lost in memory. "God,
it was beautiful."

Her hushed contralto rippled slightly across the distance between
them. "It sounds beautiful," Scully softly said, her own frosted
blue eyes melting along with the ice crystals interwoven into her
auburn hair. It was always odd to him, melting Scully with words
or a gesture, but it could be done. He could utter a memory or a
cry and she would burn, or he could touch her arm or hold her
hand when she was in pain and she would soften. Then she leaned
forward, tilting her head to the side and smiling quietly. "But I
doubt that you were up this late because of an impending ice
storm."

There was no need to congratulate her innate ability to read him;
he was an open book on this case. She had commented to him three
years ago that he had been wearing his heart on his sleeve when
concerning the Roche case, and he now donned his old accessory
again. Guilt and anguish, pain and regret... All were well-worn
ensembles in Fox Mulder's emotional wardrobe.

Quietly, Mulder shook his head. "No," he said in a hushed voice.
"I was thinking about sharing a hotel room with Roche three years
ago."

Scully flinched, obviously pained by the jump back into the past
and Roche's mind games. "It's better not to think about what
cannot be undone now, Mulder," she said, and Mulder dryly noted
how she did not offer him any empty promises that he had not made
any mistakes with Roche. He had. His errors had been potentially
deathly ones, ones that could have left a cherubic little girl
named Kaitlyn dead on an abandoned bus. It was a miracle that she
had lived at all, considering how close it had been... Just a few
more seconds...

Gently, her hand brushed his face, a sudden movement that was
startling and sweet. Her bare fingers were chilled from the cold,
and they made his skin jump to life from the frosty temperature
of her skin. Her fingertips trailed down his cheek in soft
brushes, like fragile snowflakes, and the look on her face was
compassionate and strikingly warm when compared to the frigidity
of her hands. "There's no point in regretting what you can't
change," she repeated, her voice smooth and soothing. "What's
done is done."

But what had been done? He had put his heart on his sleeve, just
like all of those other little girls, and true to his M.O., Roche
had tried to steal his as well. He'd used him, manipulated him,
and tore him into shreds, all for his own vicious entertainment
and cruel wants. Mulder had become an odd combination between
victim and killer, as his heart was ravaged and ruined and he
became so consumed with the need to know that he stopped caring
about every other human life in the balance. Roche could have
killed, nearly did kill, and it was all because of Mulder's
carelessness and selfishness.

The light glimmered across Scully's shimmering hair, damp and
slightly curling due to the melting moisture sluicing through her
vermilion locks. "This was the little girl that I was trying to
find, Scully," he murmured, and she furrowed her brow, slightly
confused. "I thought that I was looking for my sister. I thought
that I was searching again for Samantha, but it turned out to be
Sara Ryan. So while I thought that I was sacrificing everything
for Sam again, trying to find the truth about my sister, it was
all for this little girl instead."

Understanding glowed in the confines of her sharp blue eyes, and
she nodded slightly to herself. "So you keep thinking that all of
your effort was for Sara and not for Samantha," she murmured. "I
think that I see where you're coming from, Mulder." It only took
a glance to know that she did understand his guilt and his
remorse. He was wondering if everything would have been different
if he had known from the beginning that it was not Samantha
Mulder but Sara Ryan. If it had been this little girl's heart
instead of his sister's, would he have acted differently?

And he knew in his heart that he would have. And that made him
ashamed.

A silence passed as the ice began to fall, in the same beautiful
sound that reminded him of his childhood ice storm. Fragile bits
of frozen rain shimmered to the ground, creating a sound like
collapsing wind chimes, weaving a tapestry of delicate music that
was hauntingly beautiful and ethereal. Scully sat down on the
bed, her leg pressing subtly against his, just a slip of her warm
thigh giving him solidity and solace through the fabric of their
clothing. His gaze slipped away from her, turning across the room
to look at the cascade of crystal rain outside, the hollow sound
of ice hitting glass echoing through the wintry night.

The light shifted, and Mulder saw their reflections in the
frosted glass. They created an oddly poignant portrait, both
dressed in black, his skin pale and his eyes weary, and ice
glowing in the indigo fire of her hair. Captured in the glass
like a framed photograph, separated from the haunting ice storm
only by a breadth of wall, his eyes gazed out in the distance,
but hers remained on his face. The sharpness of her profile was
outlined and highlighted in cool shades and tones of deep blue
and violet, and there was an unfathomable sorrow and aching that
was painted on the lush boysenberry ripeness of her mouth.

"This may not be the best time to tell you this, Mulder, but the
Ryans have made an unusual request of us," she murmured, her
voice low and subtle, adding another eerie element to the
haunting melange of ice and wind outside. He turned his eyes away
from their projected image to the solid woman in front of him,
the one who glowed with a softer flame. Like a candle melting
frost.

"What do they want?" Mulder asked, his voice soft and roughened.

She paused, looking down at her cold hands before returning her
eyes to his. "They want their daughter's heart."

For a moment, Mulder was puzzled, and then he understood.

They wanted the cloth heart that John Lee Roche had cut from Sara
Ryan's nightgown after he raped her and killed her. For some
horrible reason, they wanted their daughter's flannel heart
returned to them, and Mulder's heart tightened with a strange,
clinging sense of fear. "I..." He paused and then started over.
"Of course they can have it. There's no reason for it to be kept
as evidence. All of the other bodies have been found, and Roche
is dead. I'll file a request-"

Scully shook her head, a droplet of melted ice slipping down away
from the crown of her hair to fall on the collar of her peacoat.
"Mulder, you kept the heart after Roche died," she gently
reminded, her fingertips reaching out to touch his wrist gently.
"Remember?"

Slowly, Mulder nodded, remembering placing that last aging
flannel heart in his drawer, wondering who it belonged to, and
wondering for the last time if John Lee Roche had been speaking
the truth. Then he banished his self-indulgent stupidity from his
mind and began paying his penance for his foolishness and for
nearly killing another little girl.

"Yes," he murmured. "I'll send it to them when we get back to-"
He cut himself off, suddenly realizing what he should have
instantly remembered. "The fire." The conflagration inside of his
office had destroyed his desk and the last little cloth heart,
with the fine pattern that Sara Ryan had worn, incinerating it
and turning it into nothing but charred ash. Pained, he buried
his face in his hands. "Oh, God, Scully..."

She shook her head, obviously wracked with her own form of guilt.
"I debated whether or not to tell you at all, Mulder," she said.
"There's nothing that can be done about it. But I thought that
maybe you would want to know." Her slender shoulders shrugged
under the slender black coat, and she continued to gaze out the
frosting window and at the beauty of the freezing night.

It was another error that he had thoughtlessly made in the Roche
case, keeping what he had thought may have been Samantha's heart.
It was a stolen memento, no matter what permission had been
granted to him in regards to Roche's cloth hearts. He had not
kept it in the event that the girl would actually be found one
day, though that had been a small piece of his reasons for
keeping it. He had kept the heart because of his own personal
anguish and agony. He had kept it because it was a piece of
Samantha.

And because of his stolen heart, the heart that he had taken to
remind him of Samantha, he had nothing to give Sara Ryan's family
but an apology that would mean nothing to them.

His voice sounded hoarse and choked to his own ears when he
spoke, and he knew that she would hurt at the sound of his
strained voice. They always made a strange, bitter banquet of
each other's anguish, feasting on their shared grief, until it
culminated into agony and torture. "Why would they want the
heart, Scully?" he asked. "Why would anyone want a reminder of
their daughter's murder?"

This was what bothered him now. He could not help but wonder why
any parent would want a memento of a child's torture and death.
He could understand their request for their daughter's ring, but
wanting the cloth heart that their daughter's murderer had
stolen... He shook his head, searching for answers.

And Scully gave him the answers that she had, in the quiet,
gentle fashion that was hers and hers alone.

Her slender, precise and nimble fingers slowly reached into the
inner pocket of her suit jacket, withdrawing her black FBI badge
and wallet. Silently, Scully lay the badge on the bed, abandoning
it for the wallet, and then her cool fingers unfolded the small
leather square and unzipped the change pocket. Scattered change
chimed in unison with the sound of the falling ice outdoors, and
her manicured fingers procured a small, slender plastic bracelet
from the pocket.

Puzzled, Mulder looked at the bracelet, and Scully quietly spoke.
"It's Emily's hospital bracelet," she murmured. Scully's
daughter. The child that she had only known for days before her
merciless death. The only child that she would ever have and the
child that she never should have had in the first place. "I
always carry it with me, along with my badge, my license, my
passport and so on. I keep it with the rest of my essentials, the
rest of my identifications, because it is essential to me and it
is part of my identity." Slow fingers began caressing the
circumference of the laminated bracelet bearing her child's name,
and her eyes roved over the label as she read the identification
for herself. "You see, Mulder, I was a mother once. It may have
only been for less than a month, but I still had a daughter." Her
smile was tinted with pain and violet ice. "Her name was Emily
Simm, and this was the proof of her existence and the proof of
her death. This was part of who and what she was, and so this is
something that I preserve."

She passed the tiny bracelet in his direction, offering the
memory of her daughter for him to identify, and yet Mulder did
not take only that. His large, slender hands cupped her palm and
bracelet in his own, the chilled fingertip and bracelet warming
in the engulfing heat of his own skin. Curiosity and concern
marred her smooth skin, but Mulder shook his head, looking at her
with dawning understanding.

"They should have had their heart, Scully," he murmured. "I
should have been able to return that part of their daughter to
them, and because of my error, my selfishness and my mindless
quest for my own evidence, they won't ever have her." It was the
missing heart, the daughter that would forever be remembered in
an innocence that had been stolen from her, and in a way, John
Lee Roche had won from beyond the grave with the incineration of
that last cloth heart.

Scully shook her head at him, holding his hands in her free one,
looking at him with eyes the color of fathomless seas. "I'm
sorry, Mulder," she apologized, her voice trembling slightly from
a guilt that darkened her eyes and weighted her voice. "I
shouldn't have brought it up. There's nothing that you can do
about it now-"

Agonized, Mulder shook his head. "But there was something that I
should have done about it then," he whispered, looking into her
eyes and pleading with her not to forgive him. He wanted this
guilt, wanted to feel this sort of remorse, because he deserved
this sort of punishment. He deserved to be punished for his sin.
His quest for Samantha had collected a wake of dozens of victims,
from the possibility of little Kaitlyn's death to the lack of
resolution that Sara Ryan's family would have to cope with. And
the victim who had suffered the most because of his selfishness,
Dana Scully, could not forgive him so easily for his calculated
cruelties. She could not let him off the hook before he had hung
himself.

Her fingers slipped away from their intertwined hands and wrapped
around the nape of his neck, her cool but warming fingertips
cupping the base of his skull and her fingers brushing through
the fine fringe of brown hair that hit the top of his spine. "I
need to finish, Mulder," she murmured. "I understand why the Ryan
family wants Sara's heart. I understand their need for that piece
of their daughter. But the fact is that it's just cloth. They
have a thousand and one memories of her from when she was a
child, and those are memories that John Roche never could steal
from them. Those are what will immortalize their daughter for
them, not a little scrap of cotton."

He was aware that he wanted to cry, but he bottled his tears. He
was not worthy of sharing the Ryan family's grief, not when he
had been the cause and contributor to so much of it. And he
didn't deserve this sort of compassion from a woman who had also
suffered because of his damnable search. He was inadequate,
worthless, and lame before this childless mother's touch and
judgment.

Anguished for all that he had done to her, Mulder turned his eyes
away and looked at the reflection painted in the window. Ice was
falling steadily now, raining down from the heavens and coating
everything with its delicate beads of frost, turning even the
most strong of items into fragile and frail glass. There, set
against the background of the beautiful play of violets and
blues, was them. Her hand was clasped between his, her hand
trailing up and down the nape of his neck, and her fingers
threaded on the short strands of hair that fringed the base of
his skull. The pleading in her eyes, the pain, and everything
else...

"What do you have, Scully?" he whispered, looking at the glass
reflection of her rather than the solid reality. "Other than a
plastic bracelet and a handful of days, what do you have of your
daughter?" What did she have that he hadn't selfishly stolen
away? What cure, what truth, what sort of hope had he not given
her? What future and what possibility had Fox Mulder raped from
Dana Scully?

The glass Scully, painted in shades of late night and falling
ice, leaned closer to the glass Mulder, her lush and generous
mouth dangerously close to his ear. A fragile lock of moist
vermilion caressed his cheek, and he felt the faint tickle of her
hair on his skin. From the reflection in the window, they looked
sensuously intimate, intertwined so intricately that they were
nothing more than melding and melting ice. Mulder became so
mesmerized by their projected image on the glass that her words
were startlingly real.

"I have the memory of a sunny day just after Christmas, where my
daughter sat and played with paper dolls like any other child,"
she murmured, her lips caressing his earlobe in an electrifying
and soothing motion. "I have the memory that my daughter was
happy before she died, and the knowledge that she had been happy
for the short breadth of her strange existence." Her voice
lowered slightly. "And that's enough for me."

Then her eyelashes caressed his cheek as she craned her neck
around, landing delicate butterfly kisses on his face, before she
pressed a soft, aching and wondrous kiss on the corner of his
mouth. Then the length of her slender body curled against his as
she laid on the bed, the fingers of one hand tangling through her
daughter's hospital identification and the fingers of another
fanned out on his chest. Subtly, her palm pressed against his
heart while his pulse slowed and sleep began to tug at him.

Slowly, he closed his eyes and the picture of Sara Ryan came to
mind. Innocent, bright, naïve and lovely, with the comely
cherub's face and the hair of spun sunlight. That was the child
that the Ryans would remember. That was the little girl that they
would always carry. And then another photograph came to mind, and
it was of Emily, the girl that his partner had loved and he had
loved in turn. The captured still of her, sitting on the floor,
coloring pictures and charming him with that rare smile that her
mother had always charmed him with. And that was Scully's
daughter.

The ice continued to fall, scattering across the pavement like
bells ringing, and the lights flickered faintly in the darkness,
threatening to fall into darkness as the electricity began to
fail. "If the power goes out, it'll get cold," Scully murmured
across his chest, and he nodded in return. "Maybe I'll just..."
She didn't finish; he had already wrapped the comforter around
her and blanketed her in warmth. She did not speak again before
slipping away into sleep, still loosely holding her daughter's
bracelet in her slackened fingers.

Mulder himself closed his eyes, and instead of seeing children or
memories, all that he saw was darkness, and all that he felt was
warmth. Mistakes were made. Errors were committed. And sometimes,
hearts were lost. But it wasn't the mistakes that were
remembered, nor should they be. It was the good. It was always
the good.

As the ice storm began in full, he fell asleep, protected by the
good of his partner and the warmth of her body, lulled to sleep
by the fragile fall of frost outside and nothing else, as his
heart slowed and a blissfully dreamless slumber overtook him.

And all was well.

*****

(end)

*****

Feedback would be muchly appreciated at auralissa@aol.com. I'd
love to hear from you! :-)

*****

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"And I'm supposed to do this just out of the evilness of my heart?"
 --Spike, "Buffy the Vampire Slayer"
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