I've always loved circles, always found the idea that
everything was a cycle fascinating.  I think that it would be
the ultimate irony that if, for all mankind's progress, the
faster we rush headlong into the future, the closer we are to
where we began.  Nothing stays the same, but then, nothing
really changes.

So anyway, I named this story after the old symbol of the Wheel
of Fortune (no, not the game show, though I'm sure that some of
you believe Vanna White has her good points [no pun intended,
for anyone who can construe one :) ]).  If you want to know the
meaning of the symbol, you'll have to look it up, as I'd never
get it right.

I was reading Sarah Stegall's review of "Anasazi," and came
across "...will Scully's continued commitment to the...mind-set
of the FBI bureaucracy turn her in the hatchet man Cancerman
has become?"  This, in combination with references from several
places that Mulder is becoming, or is like, his father,
inspired this story.  It is romance-free (sorry to everyone at
XF romantics!), and it's also pretty dark, so if you're not in
the mood tonight, honey, I understand ;)

There are no real spoilers, though I suppose it would help if
you've seen "Anasazi" before you read this.

None of these characters are mine - they belong to Chris
Carter, Ten-Thirteen Productions, Fox, blah, blah...no
copyright infrigement is intended...I'm just borrowing them
for a while to humiliate myself...

Feel free to put this story in any archive you deem it worthy
of, as long as it remains unchanged and I am given credit for
it.

Thank you to everyone at XF-Romantics who helped me.

The Wheel of Fortune

   Th' hast spoken right, 'tis true;
   The wheel is come full circle; I am here.
               -King Lear, Shakespeare

   And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you
free.
               -John 8:32

   You still believe you can petition heaven to get some
penetrating answer. If you found that answer, what would you do
with it?
               -Trepkos, "Firewalker"

   There is truth, your old friend, if that's all you seek. But
there's no justice or judgment without which truth is a vast...
dead... hollow."
               -Deep Throat, "The Blessing Way"

   You've become your father.
               -Well Manicured Man to Mulder, "Paperclip"

Her heels echoed authoritatively as she strode down the
sterile, harshly lit hall that made up the spine of the
building.  Despite being smaller in size than all the people
she passed, she had an daunting air that drove people to look
away rather than meet her gaze.

She approached the double glass doors at the end of the hall,
and froze for a moment as she saw the silhouette of a lanky
figure lounging in the doorway, smoking a cigarette.  Then he
stepped out into the light, and she saw that he was only the
agent assigned to accompany her.

"Let's go," she said, a trifle curtly, walking briskly to the
car.  He nodded and strolled over to the driver's side, pausing
to grind out his cigarette before climbing in and starting the
car.

She watched the unhurried movements with mild annoyance, though
it didn't register on her face.  Insolent, she noted, and filed
it into the back of her mind, to later make sure she wouldn't
encounter this agent again.  Normally she wouldn't put up with
it for a moment, but she wanted to get this job over with as
soon as possible.  She didn't know his name;  she rarely
bothered with names anymore.  She doubted that many in the
Bureau would recognize her name, though she was a well known
figure, lurking in the background, usually silent.  It gave her
a modicum of pleasure to know that she could intimidate and
manipulate often only with a look, or with her presence.

She had never learned *his* name either, though his mark, his
touch was unmistakable, all over the files, the documents, the
convoluted conspiracy, like the faint, sour smell of cigarettes
that seemed to linger at the edge of her awareness when she
walked down certain corridors of the building.  She often
thought about him, wondered what had become of him.  He had
disappeared a few days after they had been visited by their
mysterious informant, as had many others.  He might have run
away, might even now be living as a businessman somewhere with
a generated past and identity and a large bank account, but she
doubted it.  After all, there had been others, lurking in even
higher echelons of the government, with more power and
influence than he.  The conspiracy wound its way through the
government like the maggot-ridden, rotten core of a seemingly
healthy fruit.  And, in the end, he had been the one who had
made the mistake.

After all Mulder's searching, all her searching, trying to find
some way to access the vast store of information that was
hidden from them, in the end, the knowledge had come to them,
in the form of a furtive middle-aged man who constantly looked
over his shoulder, and who claimed to have information they
might be interested in.

He had come in and talked to them for three hours while their
tape player recorded in the background.  He had a disk, which
he told them he would give in exchange for some money, a car,
and a passport.  He professed to work for "Them," said that he
had been selling information to several sources outside, and
had been found out.  He knew all about her and Mulder, he had
declared, and they were his last resort.  She had been
reluctant to believe him, but Mulder had insisted, had felt
through some strange intuition that the man was the real thing.
She hadn't known he had the resources, but he came up with
enough to meet the man's demands, and they had stood together
at the window of Mulder's apartment holding the disk as they
watched the man leave tire tracks like black claw marks in his
haste to escape whomever he was running from.

The mid-size suburban house they drove up to was nice, or would
be if it had been well-maintained.  As it was, the lawn was
overgrown and wild with weeds, the paint was faded and peeling,
and the porch light and lawn lamps were long burnt out, leaving
the house enveloped in darkness.

He parked opposite the house, and she walked across the street,
up the broken flagstones to the front door, knowing he would
wait there until she was done.

The doorbell was broken, so she rapped sharply on the door.
There was no response from within.  She knocked again, louder,
and was rewarded by a muffled voice:

"Coming..."

After a few moments the door swung open, and he blinked
blearily at her, straightening up in surprise as he saw who his
late night visitor was.

"Hello, Fox," she said, and walked past him into the dark hall
towards the light in the living room.

He turned, closing the door as he did, and ran his fingers
through his hair.  She noticed that its color had faded a bit
more towards, and that it was thinning in front.

<Like father, like son> she thought, as a faint, humorless
smile lifted the corners of her mouth.

"Ummm...you look good."

She did, in fact.  Physically, she hadn't changed much since
the days when they had worked together.  Her hair was still a
brilliant red, with just a bit of gray at the temples.  Her
face was unlined, though he would rather it be harsh with the
burdens she bore than the blank, inhumanly serene mask it was
now.

Though she looked the same in that respect, the way she carried
herself and her demeanor were so foreign from the woman who
had once been his partner that he could almost believe that she
was someone else, if he hadn't watched the transformation that
had led to her becoming what she was now, and understood the
forces that set it in motion.  She still wore tasteful,
conservative suits, but her hair was always firmly tied back
now, and her posture was rigidly upright, as if she needed the
extra height to intimidate.  She didn't.  Her eyes were all
that were necessary, glacially blue and cold.

He hurried down the hall after her as she walked into the
living room and surveyed the clothes, magazines, pizza boxes,
and liquor bottles strewn over the floor.

"Sorry...about the mess..."  he mumbled, rushing to throw a
stained shirt off the couch so she could sit down.  He hated
the way she could unsettle him now, the way she was so coolly
professional.  He wondered when it had happened, when that
turning point had occurred, when he had begun to fear her.

"Well, I never thought you had a fetish for neatness."

"Yeah...so, do you want a drink?"  He gestured towards the
empty bottle of scotch on the coffee table, and the half full,
open one beside it.

"No, thank you."

She looked at him, as he ran his fingers through his hair
again.  He did look well, despite the fact that he had begun to
indulge in drinking more and more.  His hair stood up in
several angles from his fingers, and his shirt has buttoned
wrong, but he still managed to look like a chastised little
boy, even though it was obvious that the empty bottle of liquor
on the table hadn't been empty in the morning.  She could tell
he was uncomfortable, but she waited a few moments before
saying,

"One of the files documenting the ACW project got out.  Someone
got clearance who shouldn't have, and made a copy of the file."

"Boy, that brings back memories, doesn't it?"

She quelled his attempt at levity with a look.

"Your name is in those files, Fox."

"So is yours."

"I can take care of that.  It's you that I'm worried about."

"Concern, for me?  I would love to say I'm flattered, but
frankly, I have a sneaking suspicion that you're not being
sincere..."

"Don't give me this bullshit.  I want your assurance that you
will remain silent or deny any knowledge of the project if you
are questioned by *anyone.*"

He looked away at the wall for a minute, shoulders drooping.
He was silent for so long that she looked up from where she had
been studying with distaste one of the pizza boxes on the floor
which was emitting a scuttling sound.

"Well?"

He sighed wearily, and she could smell the alcohol on his
breath.  He looked so tired, so worn out, so defeated, that she
could feel impersonal, even, in a detached way, superior, when
dealing with him.  He wasn't the same man who had tried to
scare her away when she had been assigned as his partner.  The
times when they had worked together, had been so close it had
almost seemed they knew what the other was thinking, had faded
from her memory until they were as faint as a dream.  He had
always been the strong one, the one with the unwavering drive,
the one consumed by his work, but now she was the one in
control, and he looked so weak, so resigned.

She would have to be blind not to recognize the irony.

<Fox Mulder, vanquished by the truth.>  While she had been the
one who had taken charge, who had adjusted, adapted.

<God, we were so naive then.  We thought that we could find the
truth and hold it up like a shiny prize for all to see, and
that the conspiracy would crumble into ash in the sunlight like
some kind of vampire.  Only we found out that the government
and the conspiracy were so intertwined that it was impossible
to tell them apart anymore.  We hadn't even begun to imagine
the scope of their vision.>

She hadn't placed much trust in their informant at first, and
even Mulder had had his doubts.  They had both seen too much to
believe that anything was likely to be as it first appears.
But, when Mulder found out through a friend of his who worked
at a police station that the car they had gotten for the man
had been found abandoned in a road in the middle of the woods,
with evidence of a scuffle surrounding the vehicle, they became
convinced that what their source had told them was the truth,
and even more so when the cigarette-smoking man who had become
their nemesis disappeared, along with many of the stone faced
lackeys who had haunted their work.  It had seemed almost
surrealistic; there hadn't been a ripple of unease at the
Bureau, as if no one had noticed that those who had disappeared
had even been there in the first place.  And how would they ask
about people whose names they had never known?

Disclaimed in Part 1

The files on the disk confirmed a lot, but there was so much
more that they hadn't guessed, and there were so many holes.
They had sat together for hours, listening to their informant's
harried voice telling his story over and over again until the
tape became stretched and his voice sounded warped, like a
schizophrenic's nightmare.  The smoking man was gone, but they
knew that he, too, had had people to answer to, people who had
in all likelihood gotten rid of him to protect themselves, and
the information they had wasn't enough to touch them, wasn't
enough to prove anything.

After long days of talking, of arguing, of speculating, they
had decided on a radical plan, one that was doubtful at best.
She had requested a transfer out of the X-Files, siting that
she had problems working with Mulder, and had settled into
mainstream investigation, working diligently, gaining
promotions, and with them, higher security clearance.  She had
gotten as much information as she could without attracting
attention, trying to gain the trust of those who had tried to
thwart them before, and had shared what she had learned with
Mulder in squalid, remote diners while pretending to snub or
avoid him on the job.  He had continued to gain knowledge
through whatever outside means he had at his disposal.

In retrospect, the precautions they had taken seemed almost
amusing.  It had been ridiculously easy to get information,
even though most of it was at a higher clearance level than she
had.  Promotions, too, came by too freely.  If they had just
stopped to think, it would have been obvious that those shady
figures they sought to defame knew what they were doing and
were letting them have the information they sought, but they
had been so eager, had felt that, for once, they were near the
real truth, that they had pinned their ready success on the
absence of the figures who had plagued them before.

She couldn't hate them now, even realizing that they had
manipulated her then, had guessed what her reaction would be
when she discovered the truth.  Now she knew what secrets they
had been protecting, and there was little she could fault them
for.

Slowly, slowly she had begun to grasp the extent of their
power, of their reach, and it felt like she had climbed a
mountain expecting to look down and finally see civilization,
only to see the ruins of everything she had hoped to find.
Though the corruption, the lies, the blatant disregard for
human rights both repulsed and sickened her, she understood
that there was no way what she had learned could become public
knowledge without immense repercussions, without the crumbling
of order throughout the country and perhaps the world.  That
was the reason, when yet another incident occurred, she had
been the one who arranged for it to be covered up.

<Everything you've seen here is equal to the protection we give
it.>

Something inside Mulder died when he began to see things as she
did.  She never would have expected that Mulder, her "Spooky,"
paranoid Mulder, had some optimism, some faith in the goodness
of human nature and in democracy buried deep within him, but
apparently he had, and it was destroyed along with his drive,
his belief, his quest.  Everything he had hated, the layers and
layers of smothering fabrications, became justified in his
mind, if very wrong.

After a while, the flagrant indifference over the value of life
and rights no longer shocked or angered her, even when she
found herself guilty of it, for she realized that ends
justified means, and eventually, she began to believe that it
really didn't matter, for as long as their elected official
saluted the flag and spoke of truth, justice, and the American
way, the people would be happy.  They didn't really want to
know what was hidden in the shadows cast by the government, for
if they did, there was no way that the government could have
kept those secrets the way they had.  The way they still did.
Even when they blundered and things became known, like Area 51,
the "secret" military base hidden deep in a mountain, or the
experiments in which they had fed radiated vitamins and cereal
to unknowing, poverty-stricken families in the south, or when
it seemed more and more unlikely that quavering, insignificant
Lee Harvey Oswald had shot the president from that Texas book
depository, people speculated and blustered, but never really
did anything, and in a government run by the people, for the
people, there are no secrets unless the people don't want to
know.

Mulder continued working, and once she reached the nameless
position in the rafters of the Bureau she arranged for him to
become Assistant Director, knowing that he would authorize
anything she wanted and keep others from getting too close to
the truth, as they had.  He had changed, as if some integral
part of him had been crushed, leaving him hollow, empty.  He
began drinking, and after a while, she let him drift away,
calling it an "early retirement" though he was far too young
for it.  She still kept track of him, but he had withdrawn into
near isolation, staying alone in his house outside the city.

Mulder shifted uncomfortably under her stare as she broke out
of her reverie.  He looked away again, and then sat up,
straightening his spine, and the look in his eyes made her
think of the old Mulder.

"No."

"What?" she asked, not yet angry, only incredulous.

"No.  I've thought...I've thought about what we've done for a
long time, and I'm sick of it, sick of the dishonesty.  I feel
like it's been clinging to me, a layer of scum that's polluted
everything that I've touched.  Let them answer to what they've
done, let the consequences be damned!  I'll answer for my sins,
as long as they answer.  They have no right to cover up the
truth!  We had no right!"  His voice gained strength as he
spoke, until he was shouting in the end.

"Don't be ridiculous, Fox.  You know very well what would
happen if this got out.  It wouldn't be left at
this...everything would start to unravel...we have a
responsibility!"

"We have a responsibility to who?  You're scared, admit it!
You're scared of what would happen if people knew the truth,
what would happen to you, what would happen to the government
you work for-"

"You knew the truth too!  You knew everything that happened,
Mul-"  She stopped, taking deep breaths.  "Fox.  You knew what
happened to your sister, what your father did, what they did to
me!  Don't give me this grandiose self-righteousness!  You knew
the truth, and who did you tell?"

She was angry, it was obvious, angry at him, but more angry at
herself for this crack in the wall of restraint she had
erected.  She stood looking at him for a moment, her chest
rising and falling noticeably from the strength of her
outburst, then she turned and walked towards the window.  The
show of anger reassured him that somewhere inside her was the
woman he used to know, and gave him the courage to try once
more.

"Scully-"

Her head whipped around and he felt frozen beneath her laser-
intense gaze.  Slowly she turned to face him in full.

"You have permission to call me Dana, Fox."

He swallowed convulsively at her icy tone, but continued
blindly.

"Please, look at what you've become!  What we've become.  We
set out to expose the truth, but they've changed us.  You've
gone beyond the point of protecting the truth because of the
damage it would do.  You've given them your loyalty.  Why are
you doing this?"

"Because...I believe what I'm doing is right."

It felt like they stood, looking at each other for an eternity.
She broke the silence at last.

"Well, you've always been your own man, Fox.  But I urge you,
when they come...deny everything."

She walked over to the door, and he followed her, standing in
the doorway as she walked outside.

"Goodnight, Fox," she said, holding his eyes a bit longer than
necessary before she turned and he watched her walk away until
the night swallowed her and he could see nothing.

The agent stole speculative glances at her as he drove them
back to the J. Edgar Hoover building.  She had slammed the door
shut with a bit more force than needed after she had gotten in,
and she seemed a bit piqued.  This, combined with the raised
female voice he had heard coming from the house that was the
first sign of emotion from her he had even encountered, was
almost enough to convince him she *was* human, underneath all
the layers of glacial ice that had accumulated over the years.

He escorted her to her office, holding the door open for her
and walking to the corner to turn on the lights.

"Leave them off," she said.  He returned to the door, waiting
to see if there was anything else she wanted.

She turned and fixed her cool blue eyes on him.

"He'll have to be taken care of."

He studied her face.  He had always been fascinated by her, by
the way she could so imperturbably manipulate the lives of so
many.  Unobtrusively he had listened to the conversations of
those he worked for, asked around about her.  He knew who it
was she had met in that house, and, unlike most, he knew what
the man's relationship had once been to the woman standing in
front of him now.  He also understood perfectly the tacit
command underlying her words.  Yet as he looked at her face, he
could see no trace of regret, no sadness, nothing.  He revised
his opinion of her.  She may have been human once, but whoever
she had been, that person was gone now.

He nodded his assent, and she turned her back on him, walking
over to look out the window.  He recognized the dismissal and
left, closing the door behind him.

Alone in the darkness, she cried, for the death of hope, of
faith, but most of all for the death of Fox Mulder, who had
once dedicated his life to finding the truth, and for the part
of her that had once been Special Agent Dana Scully, his
partner, who had been afraid to believe.

*********

Please send your comments and constructive criticism to
lethe@earthlink.net, but be nice, lest you crush my fragile ego
and plunge me into a lifetime of psychotherapy :)

Raphaelle
 ----'----,---{@
We work in the dark
We do what we can
We give what we have
Our doubt is our passion, and our passion is our task
The rest is the madness of art.                        -Henry James

[Prev][Next]