Caught

He is caught, just as I am, just as Mulder is, just as all of us are. There
is no stronger prison than ourselves, and no weaker will than that which is
constantly laid siege to.
Gibson was caught from the very beginning, trapped by who he was made to
be, doomed for what he can be. He never asked to be this way. For all his
insight into the minds of others, for all his intelligence, for all that he
is precocious and a genius... he is still a child, one who has been denied
his own life and rights.
The welt on his hairless head is a sign of the horror of what we are all up
against, of the lengths these men will go to to protect themselves and their
conspiracy. I still can't say I believe, without the evidence of science,
but I know this much : those men are cruel.
But the scar also means something else.
It is a constant reminder that Gibson shall never be free, and the only
plausible release for him would be death. He is a threat, a threat because
he can destroy the ones who made him, a threat because he knows that he
should do just that. The blood that pulsed from his wound and into his thick
bandage was about all that they ever allowed to escape their clutches.
He is caught, sewn into his own body and given a mind no child should have
to deal with. But they have placed their stamp on him physically now. They
are no longer simply the ones who made him. As long as he lives, that wound
will force him to remember where he came from; it is a brand, like those
burned into the hides of cattle.
I cannot save him, and he knows this as well as I do. The comforting words
that fall from my lips are lies that even I can't believe. How could a boy,
who has all my deepest secrets at his disposal, be deceived? I want to save
him. He says that I only want to do tests on him, and to some extent, that
is true.
But I want to, I need to save him because I have already seen one child
lost to the purposeless cause of the conspirators. Because I have been
helpless to save my own daughter. I am caught in their web of lies,
helpless, fighting as best I can. I am restricted, perhaps by my own
beliefs, perhaps by what I simply am ill-equipped to defeat.
Gibson is as much a part of that web as Mulder and I are; it is tangled and
confusing, a trap so devious I can never hope to shake the threads of it
completely away. He does not deserve this. He is a boy, wise beyond his
years, tortured beyond my ability to fathom.
We are all caught, stuck inside our bodies, slaves to our minds. We see
only what we want to see. Mulder, for all his liberal and radical thinking,
is as guilty as I am. He sees too much, most of the time, finding things
that aren't there and putting too much into what he does see. But at other
times, he sees too little. Bent on fulfilling his quest and finding his
truth, he neglects the little details, the instincts that he should trust
now more than ever.
Mulder and I are caught in a dance, one we can never end, one that should
never end. We keep each other always at arms' length, at a safe distance.
But even a light-year isn't distance enough. My life is caught up in his,
just as his is entangled with mine. I cannot think of anything which does
not remind me of him, and sometimes, I feel suffocated, trapped, imprisoned.
Whether he gives me reason to leave him or not, whether he wants me to go,
I realise now that I can never do that. I could never give up on Gibson, on
the hope that he might one day be free. I can never give up on the quest
that I have joined so late, the quest that is Mulder's world and is now mine
as well. I will never give up on Mulder.
Because I am caught. Just as we all are.