TITLE: I Want To Believe AUTHOR: Annette Gisby CLASSIFCATION: V, Angst SPOILERS: Paper Hearts RATED: PG EMAIL: annette.gisby@which.net ARCHIVE: Yes, as long as my name and email stay attached. I want to believe. I want to believe that it hasn't happened. I want to believe that one day he'll wake up. I want to believe that it won't end like this. I want to believe that our quest hasn't been for nothing. Mulder didn't believe me. He didn't believe the doctors, the forensic pathologist. He didn't believe that his long search for Samantha was finally over. A search ended in a muddy field only yards from the house where Samantha had been taken. A child's broken skeleton had been found by a man walking his dog. A child who had been wearing a nightgown with a heart shaped hole in it. Roche had taken her after all. Tests were performed, over and over again. It was Samantha. But Mulder didn't believe. He wouldn't believe. He couldn't. I wept for him. And for her, his lost sister. I should have realised how fragile he was. I should never have left him alone. But he wanted me to go, so I left. I will never forgive myself for that. Never. I should have stayed, no matter what he said to me. I should have borne the brunt of his anger, his grief. Not that he would admit that he was grieving. Mulder had been carrying around a Samantha shaped hole in his psyche for most of his life. I knew he felt incomplete without her. What would he do now that he knew that place could never be filled? I tried. God knows I've tried to be there for him. But it was never enough. No woman could compete with the memory of his lost sister. There were times when I've been more than jealous of his sister, but I have never once wished her dead. I knew what it would do to him. And now it has happened and Mulder is lost to me. I get the call at three a.m. I hate getting calls in the middle of the night. Invariably they're bad news, and this one is no different. "Scully," I say. "Dana? It's Byers. I'm afraid there's been an accident." Only it wasn't an accident. It was very, very deliberate. Mulder had taken an overdose of sleeping pills before trying to hang himself. It was chance that Byers had happened to call by and was able to cut him down before he called the paramedics. Mulder was rushed to hospital, unconscious. I'm there now, by his bedside. I've been to see him every day for the past three months. The doctors tell me how hopeless it is, how his brain was deprived of oxygen for too long, how nothing can be done. Mulder is in PVS. Permanent vegetative state. I'm a doctor. I know how futile it is. But still I come. Still I sit for hours and talk to him. I won't allow them to turn off his life support. I don't want to believe that he's gone. I don't want to believe that he would do this to me. I don't want to believe that I am alone. END Feedback appreciated at annette.gisby@which.net check out my x-files fanfic at http://homepages.which.net/~annette.gisby/index.htm