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Though it’s been weeks, he still wakes in the night to a boulder in his stomach and a goblin on his back. Darkness hours spent at his coffee table, elbows on knees, head in his palms, bowing in contrition before his sister’s journal for what he didn’t learn fast enough.
The couch dips as Scully sits beside him, wrapped in his blanket.
‘Samantha?’ She’s carefully quizzical. Her voice, rough with sleep, ripples the surface of the exquisite pool of grief in which he soaks.
‘No.’ The night will absorb his honesty; he won’t have to see it in her face tomorrow. ‘My mom. She never knew that Samantha died.'
'I'm sorry, Mulder.'
'Why would they do this? Why keep the lie alive?’
‘I don’t know.’ He suspects she has theories, but he's not interested anything that might exonerate him.
‘I should have worked faster. She could have –‘ his breath hitches.
His mom cut articles out of the newspaper for him to read after school because she thought they would interest him. His mom, trembling and glassy-eyed, pulled a burnt turkey out of the oven at Thanksgiving. His mom stopped asking when he was next planning to visit.
‘She tried so hard with the hand she was dealt,’ he mumbles. ‘I never told her. I didn’t make it easy.’
Scully lays her head on his shoulder. She swoops her hand up and down his spine, but the shame is too deep to be dusted off so easily.
‘She could have made different choices, if only she’d have known in time.’ There’s permanence in saying it out loud.
‘You were a good son.’
‘’Good’ wasn’t enough.’
‘Mulder –‘
‘Go back to bed, Scully. Please’.
If Mulder was a man of religious faith, he might take solace in the belief that his mother, sister and father are together now. Instead, he mourns that yet another life was needlessly cut short in 1973.