"The Shoes on Your Feet"

Space is dark.

Darker than winter in Russia. Darker than the unlit
cabin of the Warlock's captain. Even darker than her soul.

She looked out the tiny reinforced window and wondered
once more why Marcus hadn't made more of a plan than
"get to the alien machine and give my life." Hadn't he
ever heard of sharing? Didn't he have any inscrutable
Ranger buddies who'd help him out? No?

And to make matters worse, she'd just unpacked her 
personal belongings and found a few things that she'd 
been sure she'd left in storage. Like the printed book
Marcus had given her last year for Chanukah: an omnibus
volume of Mulder and Scully's books about their
adventures in the FBI. 

She knew of them, of course. There was another movie
or TV show every ten years or so. But she'd never read
their story in their own words, and she'd learned they
could write as well as they could investigate. The books
were a blend of adventure and thesis. These Lawless Men: 
How the FBI Exposed the Conspiracy. Here Be Monsters:
Mutants, Murderers and Humankind. And their final
book, their autobiography: Two Feds Are Better Than 
One. (Scully said right in the dedication that the 
title was all Mulder's fault.)

He'd given everybody who knew about the time travel
mission similar gifts. He'd underlined the bit in the
book where they talked about him and written some sort
of comment in the margin. Yeah. "I am immortalized in 
print."

Idiot.

She suspected that he'd ended up telling them when he
was from. They didn't let on, of course, but there was
a certain air of amusement in the reference.

And then he'd come back to his own time and
done the stupidest thing he could do. Damn the
man!

What had Scully done? Besides demand an autopsy
of Mulder's body, a prudent act even when he
appeared to have died in bed of old age, as
he indeed had. Had she railed, demanded those
famous lost minutes back? Had she accepted it,
resigned? Had she sat there, wondering how to
go on?

No. She had gone back to work. She had written
her final book on pathology, mentored a few more
young and curious students, and given her time
generously to her family. Work helps, she'd said.

Work, yes. That's what she needed. But work somewhere
else, where not every corridor held a story or the
memory of a certain cloak-clad and shadowed form. 

She'd been offered a ship. She'd always wanted one of
her own. So that's what she'd do. That would fill her
days admirably, give her pride and maybe even joy.

And when the wolf hour came, and she was alone with
her grief instead of sitting kaddish, and the unmorning
dark between the stars entered into her soul, she might
even take out his books to read, and remember the two
who had also known him.