of mental disturbance. Or perhaps, a sign of age, though no one in herfamily had ever suffered the loss of faculties that crippled so many.She wished her children to ignore her white hair and wrinkling skin, toignore it as the badge of impending loss it was. She wanted them to believethat life was long and actually improved us, that people were wiser, better,more knowledgeable later than early. She upheld the myth concocted to keepthe young from learning what their elders really were - people no better thanthemselves - and despising and murdering them. Or putting them in the Homebecause of their failing mental faculties. She, like the others her age,wished to keep her children sweet-breathed, unequipped, suggesting to themthat there was something more than regret and decrepitude up ahead.It was important that they believed the lie of her invincibility, of hersuperiority, in case what she was seeing had to be revealed. Because Scullywas not suffering from frailty or lack of vision, but from an excess of it.In all her years of searching for hidden truth, for things lost, her gaze hadpierced the veil between the worlds. And it had brought back with it ashadow that now haunted her and blighted what should have been a time ofcomfort and quiet winding down.She was not in need of psychiatric care, but more in need of a remedy. Amethod to close the door that the thing was using to access her plane ofexistence, to access her yard and her life. Perhaps she could contact theCalusari, though this thing was not really in their realm. Perhaps theremight be a priest somewhere who still believed in such things, and who couldperform an exorcism.She didn't want to look at it any more, to watch its pathetic antics. Shewanted it gone."You know, I've read through all those case files," her son said."What?" she said absently as she watched it pissing on her prize John F.Kennedy."Yeah, I thought they might give me something really unique for mydissertation," he told her."And?""And I was right. I've never seen anything like it. But are you sure hewasn't crazy?" her son asked tentatively. "I know you and Dad both say hewasn't. But the stuff he wrote.... There are ten or twenty dissertationsworth of paranoia there alone. Not to mention the textbook narcissism,megalomania and depression.""That's no way to talk about him, Michael," Scully said, not really able tobe irritated. She knew that's what Mulder's reports must have read like."I guess I still just don't understand what he was to you both," he said."That you kept looking for him all those years. That he had such a hold onyou. It was more than clear that he admired you, Mom, even though what hehad to say about Dad was less than complimentary sometimes.""Your father was in a difficult position, then," Scully said, putting battermix in a bowl. "He had to do a number of things he didn't want to do. Hethought he was protecting us, but that's not the way it seemed to Mulder.
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