All Eyes Lead to the Truth | Gesthemane (4x24)
“Thank you for coming, Father,” Margaret Scully said. She sat down across from him at the kitchen table, sipping from her cup of tea.
Peter McCue wrapped his hands around his own mug. The grandfather clock in the foyer ticked, its steady beat echoing through the house. There were so many people over last night, he hadn’t noticed it before. “Of course. Although I’m afraid I don’t have much news to relay.”
He hadn’t been able to accomplish much before Dana had departed for work. It wasn’t a rare thing for a member of his congregation to drift from the church, but whenever it happened, he struggled not to take such disappointment personally.
“I suspected as much.” Margaret sighed.
“I couldn’t help but notice she still wears a cross around her neck,” he pointed out. “It might not mean much, but it’s something.”
“Yes,” she smiled. “I gave it to her when she was a teenager.” Margaret closed her eyes, pensive, doing her best to keep it together. Peter remained silent: for the most part, his job was to listen.
“I’m afraid, Father,” she said. A confession.
“What are you afraid of?”
“Of losing her.”
Peter had known the Scullys for years. His intimacy with their family had been much like it was with his other parishioners: that of an observer, a confidant. Ever since Bill Scully had passed away, Margaret had been coming to confession more frequently; not because she had more to confess, but rather due to loneliness, he suspected. Her sons had both been scattered to various winds, and within the past year she’d lost her eldest daughter and was in the process of losing her other one. He felt great sympathy for her.
He’d watched the Scully children grow, but had lost touch with them, their personalities by default having crystallized in his mind as their younger selves. Whenever Margaret spoke of them by name they appeared to him like phantoms, not actual people but extensions of herself.
Dana, however, was different. She’d remained near home, attending services with her mother on a fairly regular basis. He’d known her as an adult: her hopes and fears, her joys and sorrows. He’d known her faith, seen its ebb and flow over the years. But ever since Margaret had spoken of Dana’s cancer diagnosis, she’d been markedly absent from her usual pew.
“My daughter has always been strong,” Margaret then said. Her eyes darted down to her cup. “She’s always known exactly who she was, even when her father and I felt we misunderstood her. But I fear now… she may be lost.”
When Margaret said this, a memory stirred for Peter: a story Dana had told him after her abduction experience. How close she’d come to dying, how she’d nearly given up. But she hadn’t. Her faith had come from God, yes… but it had also come from another, less expected source. Perhaps it still did.
He leaned forward. “Years ago, back when Dana disappeared, you came to me then as well. Do you remember?”
Margaret looked up, her eyes shiny. “Yes.”
“The situations weren’t the same, of course, but you said the same thing, as I recall. That she was lost to you.” He smiled. “You’d lost your faith, remember?”
Peter was often witness to tragedy in his church families: to death, to hardship, to devastation. But he remembered this one acutely; so soon after her husband’s death, a daughter disappeared. He remembered a tombstone discussed before a body had even been found.
“There was someone who did have faith that she would return, wasn’t there?” he asked her. “Her friend, her FBI partner. He was the one who wouldn’t give up on Dana when she was lost. And if I recall correctly, he was the one who gave you strength, even after she was found.”
Margaret wiped a tear, nodding again. “Yes, Fox. They… I think they’re very close.”
Fox Mulder’s name had come up enough times in Dana’s confessions for Peter to know that was indeed the case. “They still must be, yes?”
She nodded. “He’s the one who held onto her cross when she had gone missing… he kept it safe until she was found. Then he returned it to her,” Margaret explained.
Peter gave her a gentle smile. “So… how can you be so certain she is lost?”
Margaret’s eyes widened as she took this in. The clock in the foyer chimed loudly.
“I don’t believe Dana has lost her faith,” he said firmly. “I believe she’s stronger than ever, and what she needs right now is your support.”
A look of relief swam into Margaret’s eyes, and Peter realized: he’d been summoned to help Dana, but he was really here to help her mother.
“Thank you, Father,” she said, and Peter covered her hand with his own.
He then thought of what Dana had said during their brief conversation at dinner the night prior.
I have strength.
Perhaps it wasn’t coming from the place Margaret (or he) would have expected, but what mattered was that she still had some. And the little redheaded girl he remembered, the one who always outsmarted all the other kids in Sunday School… she would fight. Especially with Fox Mulder by her side.
Read the rest of All Eyes Lead to the Truth on Archive of Our Own!
@admiralty-xfd
4 notes
·
View notes