TITLE:  Your Beautiful Mind
AUTHOR:  MystPhile@aol.com

Distribution:  Gossamer, Ephemeral, Spooky, Xemplary.
Others, yes, but please ask.

SUMMARY:  The portion of Scully's journal that precedes
the "beautiful mind" quote--from a Scullyist's POV.

Spoilers:  The 6th Extinction

Category:  V, Post-ep 6th Extinction

Rating: G

Disclaimer:  All property of 1013

Feedback:  Please, to MystPhile@aol.com

Webpage, courtesy of Beaker:
http://members.xoom.com/MystPhile/
also at Xemplary and at Galia's site:
http://members.xoom.com/galias/mystphile.htm


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Scully's Journal:

For years, our conflict has raged back and forth, you the 
believer and I the skeptic.  Of course, the edges have 
blurred through time.  Sometimes, we have even switched 
roles,  especially whenever religion is involved.  And here 
we are again, with religion at the very center of . . . of 
everything.

You invited me--in the last cogent words you spoke to me--to 
prove you wrong.  I don't know if that's going to happen, 
Mulder, because, sitting here with the gentle sounds of the 
sea failing to lull me into anything approaching serenity, I 
feel very much at sea.  I am adrift.

For many years, I thought of myself as the anchor, the 
ballast that kept you from sailing off into outer space to 
confront your little green men.  I was the brake that slowed 
the speeding bullet, whizzing and ricocheting toward your 
sometimes random targets.  I thought you scattershot.  But 
along the way I learned that you can be prudent when you 
need to, that you are a man of many facets, not merely a 
loose canon with a short fuse.  

Anyone who has put in the time you have in fruitless pursuit 
of a long-unanswered question has to have learned patience.  
You are so much more than you appeared to be at first, 
Mulder.  You are a complicated, multi-faceted gem.  
Different sides of you catch the light at different times, 
sometimes blinding me with their brilliance.  

However, you are not perfectly cut by any means.  For 
someone who prides himself on his pursuit of the truth, you 
have a distressing and annoying tendency to close yourself--
with the finality of a vault door slamming shut--to evidence 
you don't wish to face. 

I remember standing in an office with you after we lost 
Gibson Praise.  I offered you evidence that you should have 
been salivating to receive:  that all of us may contain 
remnants of extraterrestrial material in our DNA.  In one of 
the saddest moments of our partnership, you didn't even want 
to accept the folder, convinced that I, your partner of many 
years, had somehow turned against you, failed you.

You place so much importance on personal loyalty, Mulder.  I 
guess that's a consequence of having been betrayed in the 
past, first by the disappearance of your sister, then by the 
destruction of your family.  When a boy has been living by 
the sea, foraging for clams and building intricate sand 
castles, the destruction of his castle--that moment when the 
wave comes along and knocks it into an amorphous mass--that 
moment must. .  .make him grow up fast.  

If a home is a castle, and it proves to have as little 
substance as sand leveled by a tidal wave, well, the boy who 
lived in that home--who believed in it up until the moment 
when the wave hit--that boy probably comes to expect further 
blows in his life.  Perhaps all of life becomes his sand 
castle, ripe for destruction.  Perhaps all people in his 
life become ephemeral, because the primary figures in his 
life, in their real form, or in the form that he knew them, 
were all. . . swept away on a tidal wave.  Never to be 
recovered.  Never to be rebuilt.  You don't trust, Mulder, 
because that capacity was removed, as if surgically, at the 
age of twelve.  One might say you had a trustectomy.

We stood in the office.  I pointed out that it all came down 
to a matter of trust.  This didn't influence you in the 
least.  You were wedded to your ideas, not wishing to see 
any evidence that might disprove your beliefs.  It happened 
that my evidence was what you *did* want to hear, so you 
accepted it, and our partnership was once more intact.  But
what if it went against your beliefs?  Would we be history?

I choose to think not.  I choose to think that our sorrows 
and trials have united us.  That we are like materials 
placed in a crucible, mashed together, ignited by common 
purpose, until we form one entity, at least when it comes to 
the pursuit of truth.

Of course, my wanting to think that doesn't make it true. By 
no means.  You sit in your office at your desk speaking of 
your quest and how the X-Files are your life.  I often 
wonder if you recognize my role, Mulder.  You even informed 
me, with an infuriatingly smug smile, that you are right 
most of the time, leaving me to wonder what I'm doing here, 
beating my head against a wall.  Or *here*, sweating at 
midnight, my moist hands smearing the ink on the journal.

I don't do it all for you, Mulder.  I've never wished to be 
a servant or a handmaiden.  I want to follow my path in 
life, to choose where I will go, what I will do and with 
whom, and whom I will believe.  The fact is, you are not the 
only one of us who is multi-faceted.  You tend to look at me 
as an obstacle, someone who will stop you before your 
spinning legs carry you over the cliff, or, more negatively, 
someone who will trip you up as you race toward the Truth 
finish line.

When I was transferred, you told me that you needed me, that 
I made you a whole person.  I'm not sure what that means.  
Personally, professionally, both?  I was glad--very glad--to 
hear that you value me, since so often you give the 
impression that you know it all and would be just as happy 
to go it alone.  You with your secrets, your shadowy 
informants, your taking off for mysterious foreign parts.  
(Of course, look where I'm sitting as I write this!)

But I don't stay because you need me, Mulder.  As I said, I
am not a handmaiden.  I am a trained agent, a forensic 
pathologist, and a curious person in my own right.  I have
seen incredible things on our journey, and I plan to find 
out the answers.  If I seem resistant, it's because I refuse 
to accept everything I see, or you claim to see, at face 
value.  Everything deserves the test of scientific rigor.  
If it cannot pass those tests, then it remains in the realm 
of speculation.  There are great differences between 
hypotheses and facts, Mulder.  I choose to deal in facts.

You might claim that this is not true where religion is 
concerned.  You who lost faith along with trust when your 
castle was washed away.  I wonder if you would have been 
less bereft if you'd not been on the verge of puberty at the 
time.  If you'd been sixteen when it happened, would it have
affected you so permanently?  We'll never know.

It's so late.  My mind keeps shooting off on tangents.  I 
was writing about religion, my beliefs.  There are no facts 
to support my belief in God, that is true.  But my God is 
not a panacea, a magic cure for whatever splinter is 
festering under my nail at the time.  I have read Aquinas 
and the rest, giving a great deal of thought to the creation 
of the earth, the miracles of our existence.  It's within 
the realm of logic that there was a first cause, something 
that set all we see in motion.

I believe that there was an entity that put us here.  I'm 
not sure that entity has much to do with us now, although, 
being a practical woman, I tend to cover my bases and visit 
the church now and then.  But, to be candid, this entity has 
let me down too often to leave me convinced that anything 
out there takes a personal interest in my well-being.  My
mother would protest if she heard me, but I have my doubts.  
Every time I think of the ashes in Emily's coffin, the agony 
in which she died, my doubts blossom.

I'm not simple, Mulder, any more than you are.  I think we 
tend to get into a rut, in the way we view each other.  We 
need to look deeper, both of us.  Stop performing that 
perfunctory dance you once spoke of.

My religious beliefs, like all of my beliefs, are open to 
revision--if facts appear that give me reason to 
reinterpret.  I stay with the X-Files and with you not simply 
because you need me.  That's only part of the reason.  I 
like to be needed--of course!--to feel of value both as a 
person and as part of a project, one with such potentially 
far-reaching consequences.  

But I'm not just here to follow you, Mulder.  I choose to 
stay, despite all the conflicts and occasional lack of 
trust, for me as well.  I have a personal stake.  God, do I 
ever!  So much evil I have encountered.  So many bad men who 
must be put away and prevented from doing further harm.

But it's not just personal for me, either.  Sometimes, I 
fear it is for you.  That that's your greatest weakness, 
Mulder, the thing that will eventually bring you down, 
despite all my watchfulness.  

I could say a few thousand words about Fowley, but it's late 
and I'm exhausted.  Too sweaty to sleep, but exhausted.  
Let's just say that you need to keep your eye on the ball, 
Mulder.  The real ball.  This whole thing is not about your 
loss of Samantha.  She is, as important as the loss was and 
is to you, merely *your* first cause.  

What is at stake is evil run amok in the world.  Plots to 
enslave people, either by evil conspirators or an 
intelligence that comes from elsewhere.  This is so much 
bigger than us, Mulder.  Us and our spats, our petty 
arguments.  It doesn’t matter who's right.  What matters is  
what we do, how we meet the challenge.  

And I am prepared to stand beside you--not behind you--to 
fight whatever this force may be.  When we uncover enough 
facts to be convinced exactly what this force is.  This 
would include some sort of proof.  Not the shadowy, self-
serving mutterings of shadowy men who have lied before.  Not 
slimy assurances of trust from a shady woman from the past.  
No, don't go there.

At any rate, and Christ, am I tired, I'm sitting here in an 
insect-ridden tent with sweat trailing down my back because 
I want answers.  For myself.  For the fate of the world.  
See, you have convinced me that this is big, important 
stuff.  That the danger is out there, that it is real, that 
it is imminent.  I stand ready to fight, if I only knew what 
to fight.

Unluckily, you have provided a focus.  You, in your present 
condition.  I have taken off, for all the world like a 
pseudo-Mulder, camped out in a foreign country getting a 
really bad back ache from being crouched over an object that 
looks mysteriously as if it could have come from outer 
space.  Yes, I am a scientist.  I do know that objects land 
on the earth that do not originate here.  The question is, 
whether this is one of them and whether it was sent here by 
some intelligence.  I'm working on this.  I'm gathering all 
the evidence I can.  I hope to present this evidence to 
experts in all appropriate fields.  I am not a theologian, 
nor a professor of religion or philosophy.  One thing 
science teaches you is to respect what you don't know.

God, there's so much I don't know!

There are multiple possibilities here, among them that this 
is a spacecraft.  It could also be a hoax since we know our 
enemies have astounding powers.  If I had eyes in the back 
of my head, I could look down at the scar on my neck and see 
proof of that.  The chip.  From here----or the wild beyond?  
Like the craft outside my tent, it exerts a strange power.  
Over me.  

However, I am still functioning.  You are an emergency.  To 
find answers here, we need to act, and to do that, we need to 
put our team back together.  I think you were right when you said 
you needed me.  You'd be dead without me.  Literally, 
because you fling yourself into danger knowing I'll back you 
up, hunt you down, or stop you before you leap.  
Figuratively, because you need my cooler approach and my 
toughness of mind and clarity of thought.  I only hope--
desperately-- that this is a time I'll be able to pull you back 
from the brink.

And, as I've always known, I need you.  Neither of us can do 
this alone, Mulder.  Your leaps, your imagination--the magic 
of your intuition are sorely needed here.  I am surrounded 
by data that I am unable to interpret.  I NEED YOU TO COME
BACK!   

Come back to me and deal with this information, Mulder.  
Wherever it came from, it may be the key to the threats that 
hang over the world.  I need you to come back to me, Mulder.  
I freely admit it.  For me.  And for the world.  Without you, 
this is just. . . futile.

And. . .I'm here to save you, Mulder. Whatever this is, it's 
power has overwhelmed you.  I can't bear the thought of you 
in a rubber room, all of your brilliance dimmed, shouting 
like a two year old in a tantrum.  When I recall my last 
sight of you, I'm not sure whether it's tears or sweat which 
make my writing so blurry.

I will continue here as long as I can... as long as you are 
beset by the haunting illness which I saw consume your 
beautiful mind. What is this discovery I've made? How can I 
reconcile what I see with what I know? I feel this was meant 
not for me to find but for you ... to make sense of -- make 
the connections which can't be ignored... connections which, 
for me, deny all logic and reason. What is this source of 
power I hold in my hand -- this rubbing -- a simple 
impression taken from the surface of the craft? I watched 
this rubbing take its undeniable hold on you, saw you succumb 
to its spiraling effect. 

Now I work to uncover what your illness prevents you from 
finding. In the source of every illness lies its cure.

And I will find the cure for you, Mulder.  I have never been 
more determined.  Trust me.

END