Marisol
Always believe something wonderful is about to happen.
The feeling of tragedy always felt the same no matter the gravity. The feeling of someone tugging on your heart hard enough to pull it down to the deep, hollow pit of your stomach. This one felt no different, just embraced by the feeling of nausea, fear, and adrenaline.
My father, the incredible, persistent, and troublesome, Fox William Mulder was missing and presumed dead.
This man, someone I had barely gotten to know in my twenty five years of life, the gift that whatever god ruled over this universe had gifted me, was torn from my grips by whatever force there was that wanted our family line snuffed out.
I stood trembling in the foyer of his drafty farm house, my eyes zoning in on the green, peeling paint that he had proudly showed me when I had confronted him all those years ago, his demeanor soft and curious, a hint of youth sparkling through the wrinkles of his aging eyes.
The living room was atrocious, papers and boxes strewn over every item and empty surface, and for him, that was limited to his entire floor. Furniture was torn, shredded, and tossed around the home, broken glass littered the hardwood, and crunched under my boot, causing me to shudder and pull my scarf around myself as my mind raced ten miles a minute.
An x dimly projected on his window, glowing steadily through his ancient lamp that he proudly gloated about, how he had preserved it from the early nineties, and how it still managed to get the job done. I sucked in a breath and looked carefully under the shade, a thin piece of painters tape crossed into an "x" sat melted onto the bulb.
"Miss Mulder..." An elderly officer bellowed, making me spin away from his desk and tilt my head up towards him, sucking in a hasty breath.
"Doctor." I corrected, making him raise an eyebrow at me, his age and upbringing plastering across his face almost perfectly as I put him in his place.
"I'm sorry...?" He questioned, but I just folded my arms and squared up to his towering stature and expansive waistline and shoulders, something that I had taught myself in my first year of my program, being the only person who had gone directly from my bachelor's degree to my PhD program, and of course I was a lowly woman of color who should've kissed the boots of all the men who had paid their way in. Stand tall and stare down, no matter your stature.
"Doctor Mulder." I exhaled before averting my attention back to the matter at hand. "Your father seems to be gone without a trace, now we are scanning the room as a favor for a fellow agent, but given the evidence, I don't think we are going to find him." He reported, making me narrow my eyes at him and inch closer, closing the gap between the both of us.
"You are joking, right?" I began, shrugging my scarf off and shoving it into my large purse. He shrugged and began to drift his mind off towards all things but the safety and well being of my father. "My father had hundreds of enemies, all of which probably had motives to take and or kill him. There are papers everywhere in this house, and there has to be some DNA or piece of evidence here that can link us to where he is." I cried, now crouching down to get a closer look at a pile of glass beneath one of the shattered windows, along with small droplets of blood.
"Look, blood, you can take some of that!" I called, some officers and agents moving like molasses to glance at what I was motioning to, but the large agent just dragged his boots towards me and yanked me to my feet with his beefy, calloused hand.
"Look, Doctor Mulder. You aren't an agent yet, you aren't anything except a kid straight out of medical school who has a father who was notorious for being a grade a pain in the fucking ass, so don't tell us how to search for him. We'll get the evidence and we'll do what we can, but from the looks of it, he's dead." He declared, his sweaty cheeks beet red from the simple physical effort that his threats took.
