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ms31x129 · 5 years

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Woohoo! Time for Chapter 3! I had to make a another DJ! I felt compelled! @cultureisdarkbeer @monikafilefan @today-in-fic

Chapter 1 - Courage to Jump Tumblr LINK or if you like AO3 it is HERE.

Chapter 2: Luck of the Irish Tumblr LINK or if you like AO3 it is HERE.

Chapter 3: Graffiti of the Heart (Click on the name for AO3) or if you like Tumblr just clickity-click on the Keep Reading link below.

{Summary:

Jackson continues his journey, leading him into D.C. and the power of words, mixed with his abilities, and some parental love, allow him to travel back into his younger self. There he delves into a memory within a memory, but whose memory is he recalling?

Oh Jackson, never fret, when you are the son of Fox William Mulder and Dana Katherine Scully, you never walk alone.}

“A vision is not just a picture of what could be; it is an appeal to our better selves, a call to become something more.” -Rosabeth Moss Kanter

Jackson tossed the cabbie a $20 that he’d “won” on a scratch off ticket he picked up at the gas station not far from his house.

“You good, kid?” the man with thick eyebrows and questionable hygiene asked him as he slid out of the back seat.

“I’m good.”

As he shut the door and shoved his hands in his jacket pockets, the man’s window opened and Jackson rolled his eyes at the preemptive attempt to dole out words of wisdom that he knew were surely heading his way.

“You’re a kid alone in the dark, and I’m dropping you off in the middle of the National Mall,” he warned, pointing at the dimly lit public square overlooking the lake as if it weren't completely clear to Jackson as to where he was headed. “Shit happens.”

Jackson leaned down and smirked. “Yeah, I got that,” he waved the driver off. “Thanks for the heads up, but they're the ones who should be afraid of me.”

The cabbie shrugged, probably figuring he’d tried if a sullen news report streamed across his T.V. in the morning about a teenage boy found dead behind some bush near Constitution Ave.

The cab’s tail lights shone in the dark as it drove off down the street. Jackson was left alone to wander and think about what the hell he was going to do next. Running was getting old, fast. Yet, running was all he knew how to do anymore.

After bouncing round from place to place, traveling and sightseeing for months now, he figured he’d stick around more familiar places for a while. And after his little run-in at the house, he decided a larger populated city would be a better area to blend in at. He was fairly certain no one of importance was searching for him after taking a bullet through the skull and had been presumed dead by everyone but his mother, yet he couldn’t be too careful if he wanted to keep what was left of his family safe. So, the busy tourist attraction around the Washington Monument seemed like the perfect place to clear his head before finding a cheap motel to crash at for the night.

The springtime weather was unusually warm for nightfall and the soft quacking of ducklings bathing in the lake in front of the monument caught his attention. He smiled and found an old bench to sit on and stretch out his long legs as he watched how the mother duck encouraged her babies to follow her into the glassy water.

As a little boy, he would run out back behind his farmhouse and sit on a log with his dad to watch the birds and geese swoop down onto the lake during migration. The sky would darken with the mass amount of them hovering and playfully cutting through the air above him. Now when the sky darkened around Jackson, it was not due to nature and its natural way of life, but an unnatural force of darkness that has managed to follow him wherever he went.

“What do I do now?” he wondered to the empty seat beside him, strumming his fingers along the back of the bench. “Alone in the dark…”

As he steadily chipped away at the fragments of the multilayered paint, Jackson noticed letters engraved deep into the weathered bench. With his curiosity peaked, he leaned down to tear away a larger chunk of blue paint and saw exactly what was written.

DKS & FWM

WERE HERE

1994

His eyes widened just before his mouth fell open. “No way! It can’t be,” he shook his head in disbelief. But there it was, etched in precise, even lines that defied all logic.

He could feel her —feel her as if she were sitting right beside him in that very moment. Even with so few letters to go on, there was no mistake to be made. His birth mother had marked her presence for her future son to unknowingly stumble across 25 years later.

“Un-fucking-believable. I guess the past really does screw with the future.”

His fingers traced along the letters, feeling each groove as if he were her sitting in this very spot so many years ago. Was she acting as a lovestruck young woman daydreaming of the man she loved? Was she poking fun at the probable 30 other initialed couple’s forever time stamped into the bench’s frame? Could she have been contemplating her future, her whole life as she scratched each line with purpose?

So many never-ending questions with never enough answers. He did carry one way to find resolution to some of his larger ones that have remained unanswered for far too long.

Jackson reached into his pocket and opened up the letter once again. He inhaled deeply and picked up where he had left off.

And if I falter or fail on this day, know there is an answer my child. A sacred imperishable truth but one you my never hope to find alone.

The last words barely registering in his head when his mind started up like a projector, snapping his head back with the force of the memory.

December 10, 2008

It was a cold day and his mom had him all bundled up in a puffy blue and white jacket. He could hardly move, restricted by the coat and his sweater that hugged him. It chaffed at his pale sensitive skin underneath.

This hospital felt more like a church with pictures of saints covering the walls, crosses with the carved out figure of Jesus bleeding from his hands and feet hanging ominously.

The hallways to the children’s section had windows with tiny squares, reminding him of a jail cell from a show on T.V.. The nun brought them down another hallway with big blue bears and bright yellow giraffes painted on the walls, stuffed animals and toys inside the rooms on shelves and beds. All of it couldn’t hide the cold hospital walls, hard industrial floors, or the thick flat wood of hospital railings holding the stench of sickness and antiseptic.

It all made his stomach turn and chest feel tight with worry. The sound of machines beeping played in the background as his anxiety grew.

Another room now.

This one was baby blue in color with animal prints dressing the windows and children’s drawings mounted for all to see. It was meant to be friendly, but it only had the hair at the back of his neck standing on end. He wanted to run. He wanted to cry. No more tests.

Everyone passed with purpose; expressions dark with evil, lingering stares for such a holy place. Jackson made up his mind. There was no way he’d ever return to this place again.

They turned the corner quickly and he swung himself wide, stretching out his arm, tugging at his mother’s hand and was suddenly hit by a moving object in a white coat.

Stumbling back, his gaze scanned up towards the woman in front of him. Her face was blurred by a file, but her feelings of defeat, of a battle lost, of helplessness, of the world closing in was in full high-definition. Her kind blue eyes framed by vivid tendrils of hair never quite met his, but they were the softest blue he had ever seen. Like water in the pool at his friend Mikey’s house, floating peacefully in chaos.

“Oh, excuse me. I’m sorry,” she murmured, reflexively placing a soft hand to the top of his head and leaving a spattering of goose flesh along his skin.

He heard the stress in her voice, saw the tightness in her neck, her hair reminding him of a blood moon casting it’s red shadow among the wheat grass swaying in the fields by his house. She was beautiful.

“Mother,” the word rising unbidden from his throat in a mere hoarse whisper for no perceptible reason. His eyes followed her as she swiftly rounded the corner to disappear from which they just came.

“You’re not hurt are you, Jackson?” his mom asked as she leaned down to give him a once over.

“No, Mom. I’m fine,” he mumbled back sharply as they continued down the corridor.

The nun conducting their tour had his father’s ear, relaying information in cautious tones “...once he begins to show promise in his progression he will visit Dr. Goldman for additional testing...”

That last word, “testing,” burrowed into his ear and burned at his throat as if he had swallowed shards of glass, lighting his stomach on fire.

The word hit him so hard that it pushed him back into the present. His brain rattled fiercely inside his skull. The heel of his palm massaged his brow at the ache firing in his brain until his anxiety settled.

It wasn’t going to stop him this time. He would push the physical and emotional pain away to continue on. Determined, he read the next line:

Chance meeting your perfect other, your perfect opposite, your protector and endangerer.

“Ah!” His small index finger screamed in pain. Something sharp was in his coat pocket, stabbing at it, pricking the skin. He dug it out in the privacy of his bedroom. It was one of those guardian angel pins like the one his mom used to wear and place inside Christmas cards when she sent them to people that were special to her. It must have slipped into his pocket from the woman who had bumped into him in the hallway earlier. Mother . Jackson recognized the birthstone as his own. The angel pin flipped around his naive tiny fingers and he realized he was, once again, trapped inside another flashback. Back into the abyss he plunged, opening into the eyes of another .

A ceiling came into view. A foreign bed, the softest of pillows, and a warm comforter surrounded him as a strong consoling arm wrapped around his waist. Deep, complex resonating emotions filled him—pain of loss, regret, and a heavy emptiness that hovered over him so thickly that it nearly suffocated.

“Do you think God is losing any sleep?”

His perspective shifted and a man’s face came into view. He had a beard worn almost as a mask, drawing attention away from the honest truth he held in his eyes.

Harrowing truths he carried on the cross he bore for ‘her’ and for… a sister. His eyes reminding him of the first of spring, when the grass just started to grow, but the death of winter remained underneath.

“Why bring a kid into the world just to make him suffer? I don’t know, Mulder, I’ve got such a connection to this boy,” Jackson said in a tender voice that was not his own.

“How old is he?” the man asked and his eyes softened further, concern flooding through his vocal cords.

“You think it’s because of William?” she wondered as if she were afraid of his answer.

“I don’t know... I… I think our son left us both with an emptiness that can’t be filled.” As he spoke his eyes revealed an intricate mosaic of an endless devotion—caring and love built up inside a never ending staircase like the one in the MC Escher art book that had caught his eye in the library.

“Just go to sleep,” the man said and tightened his comforting embrace. His lips rested at her temple for reassurance. “Let me curse God for a while.”

Unfamiliar long lashes fluttered shut and a sharp pain sang through the center of his brain.

The vision rapidly zoomed out, blurred and tunneled, focusing in on the toy box in his old room and the angel pin in his hand. He heard his parents talking in hushed tones just outside his bedroom door. He was there for a brief moment, only for him to be forcefully sucked out again.

His consciousness jolted back from his own eight year old body and violently threw him forward into the present.

His birth mother's angel pin vanished, the letter now in its place, clutched firmly within his shaking hand. He had just watched a moment in time through Dana Scully’s eyes, and that man was Fox Mulder.

“Oh. My. God.”

#xf fanfic #today-in-fic #xfiles fanfic #xffanfic #the xf fanfic #chimera #msr fanfic

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