The Boy on the Beach (8/16)

Read on AO3 | Tagging@today-in-fic

Chapter 8: The Key Chain

The soundtrack for this chapter is Thus Spake Zarathustra (2001) by Deodato, from his jazz-funk album Prelude. This song peaked at #2 on the Billboard 200 in September 1973 and spent 35 weeks on the charts that year.

November 25, 1973
Chilmark,Massachusetts

Scully had been worried about how to explain her presence to Teena and Bill Mulder, but the boy was unconcerned.

“Let me take care of that,” he had said with a confident smile. “I know the kinds of stories my parents need to hear.”

The trio had stepped off the ferry in Vineyard Haven and approached the brown Plymouth Satellite station wagon. The boy waved Scully into the back seat with Samantha.

He slid into the front, kissed his mother winningly, and told her an outrageous story: that Scully was a teacher on an exchange program from California whom Teena had agreed to host for three days back in September.

“Don’t you remember, Mom?” the boy said, wide-eyed. “Pete Reed’s mom, the one who’s the vice president of the PTA, she’s the one who asked you to do it.”

Teena Mulder’s face had looked startled for a moment, but recovered into a blank smile. “Oh yes, of course.” Teena Mulder made fleeting eye contact with Scully in the rear view window. Physically she looked very different than in 1999: her hair dark and thick, her skin smooth and golden. She bore a much more startling resemblance to her son than Scully had ever noticed. “I’d forgotten, forgive me. But that’s right, the teacher. So pleased to meet you, Miss…”

“Frohike,” Scully said quickly, feeling Samantha’s eyes boring in on her from the side. “I’m Dana Frohike.”

She couldn’t have explained exactly why she had decided to hide her identity, except for that no part of her considered the Mulder parents trustworthy players. The vacant look in this young Teena Mulder’s eyes didn’t convince her otherwise.

The station wagon wound along a two-lane road lined with stark and bare November hickory trees. They drove through Vineyard Haven, into Chilmark, and Scully peered out the window, feeling relatively calm for the moment. She tried to absorb the landscape around her.

The backdrop of the formative drama of Mulder’s childhood. The stalwart New England houses, armored with gray cedar shingles, porches facing the bracing wind. The quick flashes of green pond and gray ocean between jagged breaks in the trees. Storefronts with faded red lobsters and lighthouses painted on wooden hanging signs.

Scully, resting her head back against the car seat, decided it looked very much the same as the time she had been to Martha’s Vineyard in the 1990s. She wondered if the timelessness of the island was a comfort to adult Mulder, or if he found it haunting, a reminder. She regretted never thinking to ask him more questions about his memories, the ones that weren’t traumatic.

The boy and Samantha occasionally pointed out sights to her as they drove – the first stone wall in Chilmark! the best ice cream parlor, so long as you don’t get pistachio! a tree Fox once climbed and got stuck in! the road to Sam’s school! – but Teena Mulder didn’t speak at all.

As they drove around a bend, the car wove over a bank of pebbles alongside the road, causing the car to rattle and bang before it veered back on track. Samantha bent forward to look significantly at her brother in the front seat, her eyes bright and anxious.

“Are you okay, Mom?” the boy said, after meeting Samantha’s eyes. “Because I’m sure Mrs. Frohike can drive if —”

“I’m absolutely fine,” Teena Mulder answered with a tight smile. “Don’t you worry, Fox. Just a wobble.”

The boy continued to stare at her a moment longer. Scully’s attention shifted from his distressed profile to the sliver of Teena Mulder’s face visible in the rearview mirror. Her eyes, now on the road, seemed to have a glassy sheen.

By the time they stepped into the Mulder home in Chilmark, Scully was beginning to form speculations about Mrs. Mulder. Her consistent forced smile, her slightly unsteady gait, her complete lack of curiosity about the strange woman her children brought home with them…

Perhaps she had some cocktails with friends in Vineyard Haven before picking up her children at the ferry. Either that or too much 1970s anti-anxiety medication. Valium, maybe.

Scully briefly considered asking her directly about it, but then dismissed the idea. After all, she was supposed to be pretending to be some sort of teacher, not a doctor. And it would be better to not have the senior Mulders pay her much attention at all.

The question perplexed her, though. Was Mrs. Mulder always like this? Or … did she have some reason to be especially anxious today, some notion of what was around the bend? Scully wasn’t sure Mulder was very clear-eyed on the topic of his mother even as an adult.

“Fox,” Teena said, placing her purse down on the kitchen table, sitting down shakily in a chair. “Maybe you can show Mrs. Frohike around, help her take her bags to the guest room. I don’t know what time your father will be home, so we might eat a little late.”

The boy and Scully both glanced at Scully’s small, lone duffel bag, which Mrs. Mulder had not seemed to notice. “Yeah, of course, Mom,” he said.

“Are you okay, Mommy?” Samantha said, standing wide-eyed in the doorway of the kitchen, still clutching her dance bag. Scully suddenly realized Mrs. Mulder had not asked Samantha any questions about her rehearsal at all. How did it go, sweetie? Did you dance well? Will you be ready for your performance? If she were Maggie Scully, this would be playing out very differently.

“Oh yes, I’m fine, Samantha, just worn out from the drive,” Teena looked over at her, smiling. “You have plenty of time to go … play before dinner, dear.”

Scully did not miss the boy and Samantha exchanging furtive glances again as they walked out of the kitchen.

***

The boy was so obviously proud of his house. He pointed out the view of the pond from the upstairs hall window, and he showed Scully the clawfoot bathtub in the guest bathroom, which he couldn’t have even known was a special interest of hers. He pointed out an antique lantern hanging from the landing that he and his grandfather had restored together.

Scully watched him, saying almost nothing, transfixed. In 1999 his memories of this house were so poisoned. She wondered if there was still some part of adult Mulder who would love and care for a home in this way.

“That’s Samantha’s room,” he said, pointing to a wood paneled door with a Carpenters poster taped rather crookedly outside. As they walked by, he stuck his head inside. “Hey Sam, don’t forget to lay out your clothes for school tomorrow.”

Samantha, reading on her bed, looked up at him and nodded.

“You and your sister–” Scully observed, as they walked past the door.

“We’re a team,” he interrupted, setting his lips in a line. “It’s just the two of us a lot. We have to stick together.”

Scully managed to pull together a convincing smile.

“This is my room,” he said, beaming, opening the next door.

It was much tidier than Scully expected, and more elegant than her and Melissa’s childhood bedroom. The bed was made, a twin bed with a sedate New England quilt in Atlantic blues and grays, and dark built-in bookshelves lined the walls with many, many books. She stepped in, looking more closely at the shelves: comic books, Hardy Boys, Isaac Asimov, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. On a desk by the window she noted a can of freshly-sharpened pencils and a goldfish bowl with a betta fish swirling around.

“It’s impressive,” she said sincerely. “The whole house is. Really.”

“Have you seen my house in 1999?” the boy asked curiously. “Is it like this?”

Scully’s eyes had been moving over his game shelf. Chess, Monopoly, Risk, Stratego. A cold sensation hit her, seeing the Stratego box wedged innocently there. There was real danger here, as homey and psychologically interesting as this all was. Mulder’s childhood fears were real, and they were very close.

“As an adult you live in an apartment,” she answered calmly, swallowing. “In an urban setting. It’s fairly different, although you do like to collect quirky things.” She picked up a little paperweight shaped like the Loch Ness Monster, squinting to see its glass eyes.

“I live alone? I’m not married?” he asked, sitting down on his bed.

“No,” she said, still turning over the paperweight in her fingers. “You’re single.”

“Why aren’t I married? Is there something wrong with me?”

She looked over at him, surprised. He was just a kid, she reminded herself.

“No,” she smiled gently. “Not at all, Fox. I honestly don’t think you’ve really tried to be married.”

He took a moment to digest that. “So it’s not that I’m terribly ugly or objectionable in some way,” he said.

Scully set the paperweight down gingerly. “No,” she trusted herself to say.

“In 1999, you think I’ve ever … had a girlfriend before?”

“I think you have,” Scully nodded with a straight face. “I think that’s a safe bet.”

“That’s good,” the boy said, his face relaxing a little. “That’s— well, it’s good to know.”

“Keep the faith,” Scully said, looking away.

“It’s weird,” he said. “It’s just … I always thought I’d be a father.”

There was nothing he could have said that could have stunned Scully more. She couldn’t formulate words for a moment.

“Really?” she said in a small voice, at last. “You’ve thought about that?”

He was quiet for a beat. “Well, not a lot. But sometimes you think about how you might–” He frowned. “How if you were a dad, you might not make the same mistakes as … as some dads do. How you might do better. How you might treat your own kid, if you could.”

“You think you could do better?” Scully breathed. “Than … some dads?”

“I know I could,” he said in a low voice. “I know I could do better. I know I would listen to them when they spoke. I know I would tell them the truth.”

Scully blinked. She turned around to look at his bookshelves again.

“Well, you’re only 38 in 1999,” she said, keeping her tone as conversational as she could. “You could still become a father.”

“Do you have kids?” he asked. “Are you married?”

“No,” she said softly. She knew what he was wondering. She just wasn’t sure she wanted the question.

Before he could ask it, her eyes fell on a metallic object sitting on his shelf. Looping her finger into the chain, she lifted it up, her mouth dropping open a little in surprise.

“Where did you get this?” she murmured in delight.

“What?” he said, standing up. “Oh, the Apollo 11 keychain? We bought it in New York to commemorate Apollo 11 when I was a kid. Why?”

“It’smy Apollo 11 keychain,” she said, turning it over in her hands. “You gave it to me for my birthday. I didn’t – I didn’t know it had been yours this long. I had no idea.”

“I gave it to you? My keychain?” The boy looked at her curiously. “Why would I do that?”

“You’re a very mystifying adult,” Scully said, still staring at it, moved. “It’s hard to say why you do anything. Is it – is it all right if I take it back to my room and take a picture of it with my camera? I’ll bring it back.”

“Yeah,” the boy said uncertainly.

“It looks exactly the same,” she said, her voice very quiet.

There was a pause, and she sensed the boy’s eyes on her. She felt the question about to pounce.

“In 1999, are grown-up me and you…?”

“No,” she said quickly, still looking at the keychain, thinking of all the questions she never asked him in 1999. “We aren’t.”

Berkeley, California
90 Hours After Scully Vanishes
1999

“You’re worried about whether Georgette can do it.” Anish handed him a water bottle and a banana. “Aren’t you?”

Mulder had returned, like an oversized sea turtle seeking out his home beach, to his established spot on the break room sofa. He knew he was hogging the sofa, which had previously been shared by the graduate students, but he was there, on his back once again, regardless.

“It’s not that I don’t think she’s smart enough,” Mulder said, speaking up towards the ceiling. “That any of you are. I know you know your shit.”

“What is it then, Agent Mulder?” Anish said.

“It’s going to sound ridiculous,” Mulder put the backs of his hands on his forehead. “But I had this dream. Weeks ago now. I had this dream, and it made me think I had this mission to fulfill, that it was all down to me. That I would have to sacrifice to do it. I just hate seeing other people having to step up — if it was supposed to be me.”

Anish didn’t say anything.

“You think that sounds sort of batshit crazy, don’t you, Anish?” Mulder said.

“I think it sounds like it could be some kind of Messiah complex, to be honest,” Anish said. “Possibly something one could actually …diagnose.”

“Messiah complex,” repeated Mulder, making a face.

“You aren’t Jesus, Agent Mulder.”

“I know that, Anish.”

“But I’m not sure you fully believe this yourself. I mean, if it were true, where does your partner fit in? Messiahs don’t have partners. If you’re the savior of the world or whatever, where does that leave her?”

“As a matter of fact,” Mulder said, speaking to the ceiling morosely, “that sounds very much like a point she raised.”

“You obviously value your partner very much,” Anish said. “You don’t really seem like you’re built to be a solo act.”

Mulder rolled over to look at Anish. “I’m not a solo act,” he said. “She makes me a whole person.”

Anish raised his eyebrows. “Oh yeah?”

“I know. You’re thinking it doesn’t sound like a strictly professional relationship,” Mulder said, defensively. “But it is. Kind of. Or at least, it’s about the work, too. We provide counterbalance to one another. We fill in what the other is missing. We need one another.”

“Yet you’re still convinced you’re on some solitary mission?” Anish said.

“Well, it’s—“ Mulder began. He tried to think of a way to explain the power of the story, which, after all, had started with him. With his stolen sister, his ruined childhood. A corrosive narrative that continued to eat away at the lives of everyone who edged near it, even partners who should never have been so close.

“Anish, Agent Mulder?” Paolo stuck his head through the door. “Sorry to interrupt. But we’re getting a new image coming through, if you want to see.”

***
Arms crossed, jaw clenched, Mulder observed the image fill in on the screen, his patience with this process now better honed through practice. Paolo and Anish sat behind him, politely keeping a distance.

The first gray pixels always seemed like chaotic static, but in only a minute or two, they began to give away their secrets, revealing their pattern.

This pattern showed the tips of white fingers, lightly curled around something round laying on the palm of a hand. There were lots of bright white boxes, which revealed themselves to be sunlight, spilling over the hand from a nearby window.

“That’s Agent Scully’s hand?” Anish asked quickly. He knew Mulder well enough by now to know that he would be certain.

“Yes,” said Mulder. “It is. And … oh God. It’s the key chain.”

The key chain lay flat on her hand. The little eagle in its logo was mid-air as always, not quite reaching her inhospitable chosen nesting place, a barren crater on the surface of the moon.

“Apollo 11,” read Paolo.

“Yeah, an Apollo 11 key chain,” Mulder said. “Commemorating the first astronauts to walk on the moon.”

“You recognize it?” Anish said.

“I watched the astronauts on TV with my grandparents,” Mulder said. “They bought me that keychain as a souvenir at Woolworth’s in New York. It sat in my room for years when I was a kid, but I gave it to Scully for her birthday a few years ago. I think she’s …showing me that she found it in 1973.”

In the background, on the right, he noticed a bright triangle of crisply detailed pattern on the image. A swirling paisley. It was a grayscale print on the image, but in real life he knew it had been brown and muted yellow, a mid-century design. He recognized it, with his excellent visual memory, as the pattern of the curtains in the guest room of his house in Chilmark. The owner of the hand was standing in that room.

Impossible to avoid, then. She was there. Somehow, she had not only made it to Martha’s Vineyard, but she had made her way inside of his house. He wondered what story she could possibly have told his family. What story she could have told him.

He couldn’t help but feel strangely touched that she would be able to pull something like this off, that she would know enough about him to get this right. It was like a very delicate and impossible undercover operation, and her briefing was all of the time she spent with him, listening to him, for all these years.

Only one person ever alive could have done something like this. There was no one else who had ever known him so well.

And what good had that done her? She would have done better sticking with studying Einstein.

“You’re positive it’s the same keychain?” Paolo wondered, interrupting his brooding.

“Positive,” Mulder said.

“A key chain for her birthday? How come?”

“Well, she said it represented–”

He broke off. He sat down next to Anish in a chair, ran his hand up and down over the messy and overgrown stubble on his face.

“What?” Anish’s eyes were curious.

“She said it represented teamwork,” Mulder said, his voice rough. “That nobody gets there alone.”

Anish chuckled lightly, slowly letting it unfold into a more robust laugh.

“You’re a really crappy solo messiah, Agent Mulder.” He picked up a folder sitting in front of Paolo and handed it to him.

“Here are some of the preliminary notes from Georgette’s brainstorming session this afternoon. Go learn about how we’re going to work together to get somebody to walk on the moon.”

Source:

Judas-Jesus scene from Martin Scorcese’s 1988 Last Temptation of Christ (inspiration for Scully-Mulder Amor Fati dream scene)

The Boy on the Beach (7/16)

Read on AO3 | Tagging@today-in-fic

Chapter 7: Many Times I’ve Lied; Many Times I’ve Listened

The soundtrack for this chapter is Over the Hills and Far Away, by Led Zeppelin, from their 1973 album Houses of the Holy. This song peaked as a single in July 1973, but the album was a bigger success and was #4 for the year.

Berkeley, California
88 Hours After Scully Vanishes
1999

The grad students thought their voices were much quieter than they actually were. Mulder, flat on his back on the couch in the lounge, hands covering his face, could hear them anxiously conferring in the hall.

“He’s in there? Still?”

“It’s only been thirty minutes.”

“What’s the new photo of?” He thought that was Eujung’s voice. She was one of the new additions to the pool of grad students floating around, helping Anish and Georgette work on whatever it was they were so intently and furtively working on.

“A sign for some dance studio in Cape Cod,” whispered Anish. “Near where he’s from.”

“So that means she…”

“Shhhhhh,” Anish whispered. “Yes. It means she’s there for sure.”

It meant more than that. It meant something else. Something so hard to hold in his head that Mulder was having a hard time parsing through it himself, much less explaining it to the grad students or Skinner.

He wasn’t looking at the photo any more. It was sitting on his stomach, face down.

“Is he flipping out? Losing it? Because he’s armed, you know.”

“He’s fine,” Anish hissed. “Just give him a little more time. It’s a lot for him to take in. Did you read the informational thing I printed out for you about his sister? It will help you to understand what he’s going through.”

Mulder wondered what informational thing that was, exactly. Anish was proving to be quite the little researcher. And quite the Mulder handler, too. An apparently essential position. One recently vacated.

“Agent Mulder,” Eujung’s voice suddenly cut through loudly into the lounge, kind and fake. “Do you want us to get you something to eat? Some of us were going over to the student center.”

“No,” Mulder called back. “I’m much too busy flipping out to eat right now.”

Silence from the grad students.

“I’m okay,” Mulder tried again, more sincere. “Fine. I’ll eat later.”

“Uh. All right,” came Eujung’s uncertain voice. “Well, take care.”

Mulder listened to the sounds of them padding off. He took his hands off his face, looked up at the fissured office ceiling tiles above him. When he felt prepared, he pinched the corners of the picture, lifted it above his face and aimed his gaze at it again.

Falmouth School of Dance. He didn’t particularly remember the sign, but he sure remembered the place.

He began to take himself step by step through a logical series.

If she were in Falmouth, she probably was trying to get the ferry to Martha’s Vineyard. Skinner’s theory seemed to be conclusively proven right.

But. But, but, but. He tapped his fingertips aggressively against his forehead.

He had never told her about Samantha’s dance studio. Had he? He really didn’t think he did. If he had ever mentioned Samantha took dance, in passing, he wouldn’t have had any reason to mention where, specifically.

If Scully had to guess where Samantha Mulder might take dance, she wouldn’t come up randomly with a dance studio in Falmouth, since it was a pain in the ass to get there from Chilmark. He should know. He and Samantha had taken that trip on the ferry often enough. His mother had some connection with that studio; probably some friend with some fancy schmancy society association had insisted it was the place to go or some bullshit. But why would Scully be looking for Samantha at her ballet class anyway? Why not just go straight to the family home in Chilmark?

He looked at the image. The Falmouth School of Dance was not so close to a major thoroughfare that she was likely to just come across it. He could picture exactly where it was, on a quiet side street, in a converted old house. Still there today, if he wasn’t mistaken.

There’s only one way Scully would know to go there. Only one person could have told her, shown her. One person she would trust.

Samantha had been rehearsing in that building for her Christmas recital. He couldn’t remember when, exactly, those rehearsals had been. (If only he did have hyperthymesia, he thought, not for the first time.) But she had extra rehearsals the week before her abduction. The police had questioned him afterwards about it. Questions about the rehearsals, about taking the ferry, about whether they talked to strangers in Falmouth. All of that was dropped early on, he remembered, probably seen as irrelevant to her abduction.

If Samantha had a rehearsal the day Scully arrived in Falmouth, that means he, Fox Mulder, would have been somewhere in Falmouth, too.

Which could mean. Which would imply.

This idea couldn’t quite find a place to lodge in his mind. It kept skirting the edges of his consciousness, not quite planting. He couldn’t bring himself to imagine it.

Instead, Mulder indulged in something secret, something he had done way too many times in the past few days. He pretended he had hyperthymesia, maybe even extreme hyperthymesia. But he didn’t visit the useful memories of 1973.

Instead, he revisited in his mind the moment in Scully’s apartment from a few weeks ago. The moment she told him he didn’t need to sacrifice his happiness.

He tried to recreate the expression on her face, the tender glint in her eyes, but this time, he imagined he didn’t argue back. In his mind’s eye he did what his heart told him, he wound his fingers in her messy hair and kissed her hard. He imagined pressing tiny kisses all over her sweaty body; he imagined murmuring truthful words into her ear.

“Agent Mulder,” Anish stepped into the door of the lounge. “Agent Mulder, can we talk to you?”

“Can’t right now, Anish. Having a meltdown.”

Mulder re-covered his face with his hands. He wanted to hide back inside his soothing fake memories.

“Well, can you take a break?” Anish said. “Because Georgette has been working on something, and we want to show you.”

November 25, 1973
Falmouth,Massachusetts

Scully couldn’t have said exactly what she expected the actual, flesh-and-blood, 1973 Samantha to be like. Her core picture of Samantha Mulder was second hand, impressionistic: the archetypal little sister, long braids, come on, Fox, big toothy smile for the camera. This core image had plenty of noise and static; there had been the Samantha clones, after all. So many false leads, even in Mulder’s memories.

If she had given it serious thought, she would have realized that no little girl is as uncomplicated as her older brother views her. Especially not as he remembers her after he has lost her for decades.

Scully herself was just about Samantha’s age. What would she seem like if she were viewed only through Bill’s memories of her at eight? Would he remember her as she really was?

For that matter… in this new and revised 1973, Scully was a disappeared nine-year old. In the new and revised 1999 that grew from this, for all she knew, her siblings were the custodians of her memory. After all, there would be no Agent Mulder to remember Agent Scully, to wear her cross faithfully.

Samantha walked straight up to her brother, her lips in a line, when rehearsal ended. She wore a mauve coat and carried a trim white dance bag over her arm. Her braids were still pinned up over the crown of her head, with some unruly curls starting to escape around her face. Scully couldn’t stop staring at her: the vanished sister in the flesh.

“Fox,” she said. Her voice was lower and more husky than Scully expected. “Madame Brindell wants to talk to you about the recital again.” She seemed to notice Scully sitting there, and she gave her a questioning look, but did not acknowledge her.

“Sam, there you are,” the boy said, springing to his feet. “Madame Brindell’s going to have to wait.” He lowered his voice dramatically. “Because guess what? We’re on a mission.”

It was startling, his continued use of that word. Scully supposed it wasn’t surprising. He certainly seemed to like it in 1999.

“A mission,” Samantha repeated, her forehead creasing slightly. She glanced behind her at her dance studio. “What kind of mission?”

“This woman is a time traveler,” said the boy, importantly, gesturing to Scully. In a whisper: “She’s from the future.”

Scully, appalled at the boy’s direct, theatrical approach, stood up and cleared her throat. “Samantha,” she said, forcing a smile. “Hi. I’m Dana Scully. You probably can just call me… Scully.”

You’re the mission, Samantha, she didn’t say. You’ve always been the mission.

Samantha gave Scully a small, polite smile, but turned back to her brother, sighing in obvious exasperation. “Fox,” she said, “very funny. Now can you please go talk to Madame Brindell before we leave?”

The boy’s soft jaw set. “No.”

“But she can’t find anyone else. We’ll be missing someone for the recital.”

“I don’t care,” the boy said, impatiently. “I told her no. Didn’t you hear me, Samantha? Important visitor from the future? Mission?”

Samantha’s eyes narrowed. “Did you make this whole story up so you won’t have to dance in the recital?”

“No,” he said. “And Sam, did you happen to notice there is an adult stranger here saying what I’m saying, too?”

Scully turned to the boy, trying to follow. “Her teacher wants you to dance in a … ballet recital?”

The boy waved his hand dismissively. “They seem to have some kind of boy shortage … but I said no.”

“But you know how to dance ballet?” Scully repeated. This was information she couldn’t possibly integrate with her understanding of adult Mulder.

“They just need a boy who can waltz,” Samantha said in a matter-of-fact tone, as though that explained it. “Just to waltz with the girl who plays Clara in the first act, during the Christmas party scene. Just for five minutes on stage. It would be easy.”

“They want your brother to waltz?” Scully said, still not quite getting the mental image.

“Ugh, this is nothing,” the boy snapped. “This has nothing to do with anything.”

“My brother is really good at the waltz,” Samantha said. “Madame Brindell says he’s elegant on his feet. Because of all his ballroom dance classes.”

“That’s a complete lie,” insisted the boy with a little groan. “I’m terrible at the waltz, the rhumba, the foxtrot, all of them. She’s just desperate for someone to do it, and I said no.”

“We need someone,” Samantha said. “You’d be in the recital with me.” Her voice was still casual — she didn’t beg — but her green eyes had an intense cast, the look of someone who wanted something very badly but was holding back.

It was such a familiar expression to Scully. As familiar as picking up sunflower seed shells from a rental car carpet.

“You should do the recital,” Scully said, abruptly to the boy, surprising both siblings.

“What?” He sounded shocked. “Why?”

“You just should.”

The boy looked reproachfully at Scully. “Didn’t you say you were my partner?” he said. “On myside?”

“Iam on your side. I just know more than you, and I think you should do the recital, Mulder … Fox.”

“What could my sister’s stupid recital possibly have to do with anything? Why would I waste time making an idiot of myself?”

Scully only lifted a shoulder in response, hesitant to say too much more. Samantha’s eyes darted uncertainly between the boy and Scully.

The boy exhaled an aggrieved sigh. “I can’t talk to Madame Brindell now, or we might miss the ferry,” he said. He looked unhappily at Scully, and then at his sister again. “But fine. Fine! Maybe I can talk to the teacher at the next rehearsal.”

Scully nodded her head, satisfied. The boy began to walk, huffily, down the path, towards the street, and Samantha watched him, puzzled, as she and Scully began to follow after him.

Samantha gave Scully a sidelong glance with new interest.

“So,” she said, after a moment of walking side-by-side. “Who exactly are you, again?”

***

They sat together on a wooden bench on the ferry, the three of them, with the boy in the middle. They sat inside where it was warmer, within view of the coffee counter, and Scully considered using some of her last coins to buy a styrofoam cup of coffee, but she didn’t. She now found that she rather superstitiously didn’t want to walk away from the Mulder siblings even a short distance if she didn’t have to.

So after she had changed into her stolen clothes in the bathroom – carefully rolling up her San Diego sundress into the duffel bag for possible later use – she stuck close to the Mulders: the three of them a distinct trio, watching other ferry passengers from afar.

When she returned from the bathroom, the boy had been in the process of telling Samantha the whole story as Scully had told him—rather rashly, in Scully’s view, since Samantha was young, and they had not discussed strategy in advance.

He recounted it like it was an exciting action tale, like it was a comic book, and Samantha just stared at him, gimlet-eyed. Maybe it was right to trust him to handle his own sister. Then again, he had a well-documented tendency to make reckless moves, even when he was in his thirties.

When he was finished, Samantha leaned over him and spoke directly to Scully. “You’re really an F.B.I. agent from the future?”

“Yes,” Scully said cautiously, hoping that this experience wouldn’t encourage the Mulder siblings to believe any wild story a stranger approached them with.

“Sometimes Fox tells me things that aren’t true,” Samantha told Scully in the rather low, unchildlike voice she had.

“Sam,” protested the boy.

“Not always in a mean way,” Samantha said. “Sometimes he tells me things that aren’t true so I will … pretend with him. It’s a game we play together. I thought this might be like that.”

The boy, wedged between Samantha and Scully, looked embarrassed and shifted uncomfortably.

“Well, this story is true,” Scully said, and gave the boy a curious look. “I know it doesn’t seem like it is, but it is.”

“What year is it, where you’re from?”

“It’s 1999,” Scully said. “So twenty-six years from now.”

Samantha and the boy sat up in their seats immediately and locked eyes in delighted wonder.

“1999?” the boy said rapturously. “That’s almost the year 2000.”

Samantha swiveled her head back to Scully again. “Do you live in space?” she whispered.

“No,” Scully said. She was alarmed by the nearly identical joyous expression on the siblings’ faces. On adult Mulder, singular, it usually meant an endless series of curious questions was about to unfold, and on children Mulder, plural, she suspected it meant something equivalent.

“Do you have flying cars?” the boy asked.

“No,” Scully said. She considered. “Unless you count airplanes. Which of course you have in 1973, too.”

“But you have time travel?”

“Well, I suppose,” Scully conceded. “Although it was a mistake. If you had asked me only a week ago, I would have said it was theoretically possible but not practical.”

“Do you have robot servants?” Samantha said. “Like on The Jetsons?”

“No – not really. We have computers, which do help us with–.”

“Wait, in 1973, you should be a kid, too, shouldn’t you?” the boy asked, suddenly. “Like me?”

“I was the first time,” Scully agreed.

“So somewhere around 1973, is there a version of you, Dana Scully, who’s my age? A pretty red-headed 12-year old girl? Lonely, looking for companionship?”

Scully smothered a smile. “No,” she said. “I took the physical place of my 1973 self. I woke up in my childhood bedroom. And I’m a little younger than you. I was only nine in 1973.”

He made a face. “Oh. Then you’re really more Samantha’s age than mine.”

“Well, three years’ age difference is essentially the same age when you’re adults,” Scully said, feeling strangely defensive.

“So you’re only one year older than me?” Samantha asked, staring up at Scully. “Really? How can that be true?”

“Sam. I’m three years older than her,” the boy said. He sat up straight, squaring his small shoulders and doing his best to be visibly taller than Scully. He spoke in a fake baritone, waving his finger. “Hello, I’m F.B.I. Agent Fox Mulder.”

Both Samantha and the boy dissolved into giggles, making so much noise that people standing in the coffee line turned to stare at them. Scully, self-consciously flashing an apologetic smile at the onlookers, found she wanted to watch the pair giggle. Laughing like this, without worry, the boy looked almost unrecognizable, very little like her adult Mulder.

Samantha stopped laughing, obviously thinking of something else. “Do you know me, in 1999? Am I an F.B.I. agent, too?”

Scully turned to look quickly out the windows on the opposite side of the ferry at the windswept gray of the Atlantic. “No,” she said, neutrally.

“Can you remember who won the World Series and Superbowl for the past twenty-six years?” the boy asked, quickly. He hadn’t seemed to note her reaction to the last question. Adult Mulder would have, but this was not, she needed to remember, adult Mulder.

“No,” Scully said. “I’m afraid not. But I might be able to remember some of them.”

“Make sure you write down all you can remember,” the boy said solemnly. “We’re going to bet on them. We’re going to make a fortune off this, Sam.”

Samantha grinned widely and leaned her cheek against his arm. “What do you need to do while you’re here? What is the mission?” she asked Scully.

“I’m going to explain,” Scully said. “I will. I just need some time to completely think it through and get a lay of the land. But it has to do with you and your brother. Keeping you safe.”

That quieted the siblings. They didn’t look at one another, but seemed to both be mulling it over, Samantha’s head still resting slightly against the boy’s arm.

“How are you getting back?” the boy asked Scully, his brow furrowing. “To 1999?”

Scully forced a smile. “I don’t know,” she said. “After I complete our … mission, I guess I might try to track down the scientist who sent me here and see what he knows.”

Hearing the words out loud, she could hear how futile, how unlikely that sounded. She could find Hays, but where would he be in his research in 1973? And what if the incident that sent her back was more accident than purposeful anyway?

But she was not ready yet to think about the implications of this, the implications of what in her heart she already knew. That she was, in all likelihood, never going back.

The boy was watching her, she realized, as she blinked back her worry. She would have to be more careful about that. Even though he wasn’t her Mulder, exactly, he was still a perceptive kid.

“So,” she said, clapping her hands together, “what can you tell me about Martha’s Vineyard?”

Berkeley, California
89 Hours After Scully Vanishes
1999

Three grad students sat around the conference table, waiting, all of them with intense, owlish expressions on their faces. Georgette, Paolo, and a tall guy Mulder didn’t know. Their eyes followed Mulder expectantly as he and Anish walked in. It gave him a little twist of anxiety.

“Uh, hey,” Mulder said. “I mean this in the very best way, but don’t you all have any work of your own you’re supposed to be doing?”

Georgette, clearly the one in charge, didn’t respond to the quip. She was tall, serious, very organized. Anish told him her parents had once been Black Panthers and now ran a successful family bakery in Oakland. He wondered how they would feel about her helping F.B.I. agents as a side project.

“Agent Mulder, we know the F.B.I. has been interrogating Dr. Hays.”

Mulder nodded wearily, slumping into a chair. He wasn’t supposed to discuss it with civilians, but he knew there had been little progress with Hays. Skinner had been shielding Mulder, mercifully, from all the internal maneuvering happening on the case at the Bureau, but he knew that there was resistance to his time travel thesis.

The more rational seeming explanation was that Scully’s disappearance had actually been a tragic death, the side effect of an irresponsible experiment set into motion by a mad scientist and a reckless partner. He imagined there were probably going to be agents looking into it as a homicide or manslaughter case. He wondered if they’d be coming to ask him infuriating questions soon.

“Well, here’s the thing. I know Hays pretty well,” Georgette said. “I’m his advisee. And I don’t think he’s going to tell the F.B.I. anything, no matter how much Agent Scully might be in danger. He’s …” She looked at Anish, and then at the other students at the table.

“An asshole,” Anish filled in. “An ego.”

Georgette nodded emphatically. “To say the least. Now we—,“ she gestured among the students, “don’t have access to everything he worked on, but we have access to a lot. We’ve been able to reconstruct some of it. And we think we can go further.”

Mulder perked up. “Okay. You officially have my attention. What do you mean?”

“I mean that I have the key to Hays’ office,” Georgette continued. “I watered his plants for him when he went on vacation. So yesterday I let myself in, and I looked through his desk drawers until I found his password on a sticky note, and then I went on the man’s computer. Since then, Marshall, Paolo and I’ve been going through his notes.”

Paolo inclined his head in the affirmative. Marshall, apparently the lanky guy Mulder didn’t remember seeing before, grinned.

“All right,” Mulder said cautiously. “That’s great. Don’t keep me in suspense. What’d you find?”

Georgette pursed her lips. “So you know that Dr. Hays theorized that extreme hyperthymesia originated with an area of the brain some people call the God module. He believed that the ability to project one’s mind into the past was related to telepathic ability. That it was physiologically possible for anyone, but only developed naturally in certain people. In our research here, he could provoke it in anyone with electrical stimuli, which is what we thought we were doing with Agent Scully that day.”

“What you … thought you were doing?”

“It’s just I’m starting to think that for Hays, the EH was a front, a bunch of smoke and mirrors,” she said. “Or horseshit, as my grandma would say.”

“Why? Why do you say that?”

“Because looking at his notes,” Georgette looked over the papers, “there’s not that much about the EH here at all. I think his real work hasn’t been about EH for quite some time. Judging from his files, I think for years now he’s had a shadow project – he’s been interested in another latent ability of the human mind, one that he also thought he could bring to life with mild electric stimulus. And we think that’s what he was testing out with Agent Scully.”

“The ability to initiate time travel?” Mulder breathed.

Georgette looked at Paolo and Marshall, and then nodded.

“Time travel as a latent human ability? That anyone could develop?” Mulder blinked. “That’s … an enormous claim.” He could just hear, in his imagination, how Scully would object.

Georgette nodded knowingly. “Mmm-hmm,” she said. “It gets more enormous, too.”

“For what it’s worth, we don’t think Hays expected it to work with Agent Scully,” Marshall added. “We think he was doing some preliminary testing while doing the EH, and he was surprised when it worked.”

Mulder’s jaw tightened. “No offense, Marshall, but that’s not worth very much.” At the young man’s startled reaction, he pressed his eyes shut. “No, no, I’m sorry. It valuable to know his mindset. I’m just …”

“Agent Mulder hasn’t been sleeping,” Anish broke in.

“Right. And when I do,” Mulder nodded, “weird, weird dreams. But Georgette, if there’s an area of the brain that can somehow spontaneously time travel, why don’t I investigate cases like that all the time? Why aren’t there people who have developed that capacity on their own, in the same way there are people who have telepathy or EH?”

Georgette bit her lip. “Well, for one,” she said, “Hays believed that all of these abilities were more or less dormant in most of the population because they weren’t … human in origin. I think that’s one reason he came to you to begin with. Because of your reputation.”

Mulder was silent a moment. “Okay,” he said. “Do you believe that, Georgette? About the origin of these abilities?”

She glanced at Anish, lifted a shoulder. “I don’t honestly know, Agent Mulder. I know this is some freaky shit, neurologically speaking.”

Mulder nodded, folded his arms over his chest.

“It could be that this ability is very rare, or even naturally dormant, without the right electrical stimuli,” Georgette continued. “And the other piece here is that, judging from what we’ve seen from Agent Scully’s experience so far, the time travel ability is multiversal. That is, her time travel ability caused her to jump multiverses. That could help explain why we haven’t seen examples of people using it before. If they have, they essentially left our multiverse.”

There was another silence as Mulder processed that.

Marshall cleared his throat. “But Georgette,” he said. “I have a question. What do we think happened to the other Dana Scully? The one from 1973, from the other multiverse?”

“The little girl?” Georgette said. “I think we’re assuming she was replaced, essentially, by our Dana Scully, the grown-up one from our 1999, when she was sent there.”

“So the little girl, what, disappeared?” Marshall said. “Do we know that for sure? What if she was … sent somewhere else? Displaced?”

“Sent somewhere else?” Mulder’s eyes fixed on Marshall anxiously. “Sent where? Like sent here?”

Nobody answered.

“Well, she’s not here, right?” Anish said. “She wasn’t sent to our 1999. Or she’d be … you know, here.”

“Unless she was sent to her original physical location,” Mulder said in a low voice. “Unless she showed up in San Diego.” He swallowed. He couldn’t believe the thought hadn’t occurred to him. He had an unpleasant image of a lost child version of Scully wandering alone through San Diego naval housing in 1999. “I can call San Diego PD, ask some questions. I know her old address.”

“A few of us could drive down and check it out,” Anish offered.

Mulder didn’t know how to cope with a tiny version of Scully, what to tell a likely-terrified kid from 1973. Not to mention, he was pretty certain the San Diego PD wouldn’t easily release a strange child with no apparent connection to him into his custody, much less into the custody of some friendly grad students. It would probably end up being yet another difficult discussion with Mrs. Scully, and legally maddening.

“We should check it out, but I don’t think she’s there,” Georgette said firmly. “That’s my gut. I think people just replace themselves in multiverse time travel. No displaced kid versions.”

“How could you possibly know that, Georgette?”

“I don’t, Marshall,” Georgette replied. “I don’t know anything for sure — none of us do. It’s just my gut. And on that topic…”

She turned to Mulder again.

“Let’s talk about what’s really important here — whether we could do it ourselves,” she said. “Because I think we could.”

“Do what?” Mulder sat up straight. “Do what ourselves, exactly?”

“Send someone to the same 1973 as Agent Scully. And bring someone back.”

Mulder ran his hand slowly through his hair and stared, his mouth falling open slightly, at Georgette. He didn’t know how to react to this unexpected hope.

“What makes you think that, Georgette?” he asked.

“We have most of his notes,” she said. “We’re all pretty fucking smart, all his advisees. I have a good idea of how to do it, if I can get a few hours with some other neurology students to help me troubleshoot. Anish, Eujung, Marshall, Paolo. And, like I said, my gut says we can.”

All at once, Georgette appeared very young to his eyes. She had wide brown eyes, soft rounded cheeks. How old was she, anyway? Twenty-two? Twenty-three? What did he know at that age? How many mistakes had he made?

His face must have revealed his uncertainty. Georgette’s hands, resting on the surface of the table, balled into tight fists. “Agent Mulder, I don’t know if you saw or if you remember, but I was talking to Agent Scully right before she disappeared, when she was sitting in the chair. She was asking me about my research.”

Mulder had forgotten that was Georgette. He remembered the look in the young woman’s eyes directly after Scully vanished, when she turned and looked at him through the glass. Sorrow. Horror. Pity.

“I don’t like that Hays made me a part of her own mind being used against her,” Georgette said. “I think I have a shot at helping to bring her back. We all do. You just need to trust us to try.”

Mulder nodded slowly. “Yeah, okay,” he said. “I can do that. I’m listening.”

For one thing, I have absolutely no choice.

The Boy on the Beach (6/16)

Read on AO3 | Tagging@today-in-fic

Chapter 6: This Boy’s Too Young To Be Singing The Blues

The soundtrack for this chapter is Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, by Elton John, from his 1973 album of the same name, which was released October 1973. For the week starting November 24, 1973, this song was #9 on the Billboard charts.

November 25, 1973
Falmouth, Massachusetts

Scully arrived in Cape Cod on a frigid November day in nothing but a sundress and a sweater, with a scarf and hat she managed to scrounge up left behind on the bus in Manhattan. She was fiercely cold, and she had very little money left.

Gazing around the town of Falmouth, holding tight to the strap of her duffel bag to fight off her body’s alarming involuntary shivering, she felt herself in the grip of a tunnel vision, a singular mindedness that didn’t always come naturally.

Not to her, anyway.

Focus is the gift of not feeling like you have a choice.

Truthfully, she had only been to Martha’s Vineyard once with Mulder, and he had handled the ferry arrangements, and that was in the 1990s anyway. She couldn’t remember much about taking the ferry from Woods Hole, Falmouth, or really if it even had been Falmouth, although the man at the Greyhound station in Boston assured her that was the easiest and most direct way.

The town before her looked utterly unfamiliar. In its broadest strokes it looked like a place out of time, like a location from Moby Dick, like if you squinted it could have been another century. But this was a little melodramatic. There was plenty of evidence of the twentieth century around her: kitschy aluminum Christmas decorations in store windows, oversized seventies cars sailing like ocean liners down the streets. And there were a surprising number of 1973 people milling about, too – tourists, she supposed, still lingering on the Sunday of the holiday weekend.

She spotted a bookstore, a narrow, weathered brick building a few blocks from the harbor. Coming closer, she decided it looked plausibly like it might sell maps or have a kindly shopkeeper willing to give directions. At very least it would be a place to warm herself up for a minute or two.

Inside, the store was dark, musty and crowded, packed high to the ceiling with all manner of reading material, highbrow and lowbrow. It smelled like history and cigarettes. There was an Elton John song playing on the radio somewhere in the back. The shopkeeper, a gruff man with an aggressive Massachusetts accent and a lit cigarette in his mouth—a habit that struck Scully as rather dangerous, given his highly flammable surroundings, was busy helping some tourists find books on Nantucket. So Scully searched out the map aisle herself, cupping her elbows, relieved to be out of the cold for a moment.

She turned the corner and stumbled over a disorganized stack of cookbooks, knocking a few over. As she leaned over to pick them up, she saw in her peripheral vision—with her law enforcement eye—a boy on an aisle near the door looking around surreptitiously. When he was convinced no one saw him, he stuck something under his coat and casually started to walk out.

Her eyes locked on the back of his very familiar head.

With precision focus, she followed him out the door, back into the cold. He was several paces ahead of her, moving quickly.

“Hey,” she called. “Hey.”

The boy turned and looked at Scully with deep suspicious green eyes.

“You … stole something,” she said, feeling strangely calm, meeting his stare.

“I didn’t—” He began his denial. Then, taking in the expression on her face more carefully and completely, he stopped, set his shoulders, and shrugged. “Yeah. I did.”

“What did you steal?” Scully tilted her head. She couldn’t keep the curiosity from her voice.

He reached into his pea coat and pulled out a carefully folded magazine, handed it to her, only slightly sheepishly. Playboy, November 1973.

Scully huffed out something between a laugh and a sigh.

“Jesus, you’ve got to be kidding me,” she said. She put a hand on her head. “You barely seem pubescent.”

“I’m pubescent,” he said defensively, narrowing his eyes at her.

His voice was high, but with a bit of a crackle. He was considerably shorter, but not short. Apparently she had not traveled quite far enough back to learn what it would be like to be taller than him, as they were now, more or less, the same height. (If anything, he was already a little taller.) His shoulders were narrow, bony, a boy’s shoulders; this was one significant difference between him and his adult self. His face was softer, rounder, smoother, but she would have recognized it anywhere — and she had. His hair was shaggy and long, side parted and swept over his forehead, the style of the time.

“Is this … have you done this a lot?” she asked, gesturing to the magazine. She meant shoplifting, but he interpreted her question differently.

He shrugged. “I’m told the nude body is a very normal thing for a growing boy to be curious about.”

Scully resisted the urge to roll her eyes, handing him back the magazine. “True enough, although I don’t condone petty larceny for any reason,” she said.

“They don’t sell this kind of magazine to 12-year olds,” he pointed out reasonably. “What do you suggest I do?”

Scully opened and closed her mouth, at a real loss for words. Advice about his pre-adolescent pornography acquisition was beyond her responsibilities as his partner, she decided.

“I don’t suppose you’re the kind of hippie lady who is open minded enough to—?”

“Whatever the appalling end of that question is,“ Scully said curtly. “No. Absolutely not.” He was standing in the street, but not going anywhere. She sat down on the curb, looking him over.

He looked back at her, too, his expression openly curious.

Precocious, obnoxious, far too curious. You should have seen this coming.

“You’re not going to turn me in, then?” he asked.

“No,” she said. “I just have to think for a moment.”

Scully could see him studying her.

“So… do you think it’s morally wrong to look at naked pictures in magazines?” he asked, giving her a sideways look. There was a suspiciously familiar quality to his voice. Like he was trying to bait her into an argument. “Are you some kind of Christian? Or maybe into women’s lib?”

“I would say I’m both, actually,” said Scully evenly. “But so long as everyone working for the magazine is getting paid well and treated respectfully, no, I don’t really have a moral problem with it.”

The boy seemed surprised by her frank answer. He glanced down at the cover model with a slight scowl, as though considering the idea of her pay and her treatment for the first time.

Scully continued, more to herself than to him. “I admit, though, that seeing you steal that magazine has me thinking my own thoughts.”

The boy looked blankly up from his magazine. “Like?”

“Like that adult sexuality can be such a long, depressing, exhausting project,” Scully sighed heavily, looking at her dirty fingernails. “A person is stealing magazines at 12, and then what? Then he’s hiding his movies at 38.”

He has actual relationships with adult women, but how many? For how long? How good? Are the pictures just easier in the end? Are human relationships just too much trouble, too much risk, too much pain? Might the traumatic things that happen to him when he is in the beginning of his sexual development permanently impact his experience of real relationships? Is that why he tells himself he can’t even try?

“You say weird things. For an adult,” he said, sitting next to her on the curb. “Especially to a kid.”

“I’m usually considered a sensible person, actually,” she said, hugging her knees, shivering. “At least I used to be.”

“At 38, I’ll be married to someone who looks like Raquel Welch and we’ll be very happy and rich and have good-looking and smart kids and live in a nice house in the suburbs, so I don’t think whatever you just said will apply to me,” he said, a note of unease.

Somberly, Scully picked up a piece of seashell sitting on the street. She tried not to think about how similar that boyish daydream was to Mulder’s brain surgery vision of suburban life. How Diana Fowley had an unmistakable 1990s Raquel Welch look. So consistent, she thought. He’s consistent. I’m the inconsistency.

“And what will you do for a living?” she asked, watching him closely, rolling the seashell over in her fingers.

“Hmmm,” he said. “Not 100% decided yet. The possibilities are endless. I could play for the Yankees. Or I might be an astronaut. Or an author. Or a doctor.”

“Adoctor? Really?” She turned, her eyes widened in a degree of surprise that did not really make sense aimed at a child she had just met. “What kind of doctor?”

“Whatever the best and smartest kind is. A surgeon?”

She laughed. For a moment, she grappled with the impulse to tell him she was a doctor, but this was a bad idea. For one, she hadn’t yet decided what to tell him about who she was, why she was here, and this all required more strategy than random impulsive revelations.

And she also knew that she didn’t exactly give off the impression of being a doctor right now. In 1973, there were relatively few female doctors, and they probably didn’t tend to wear grubby out-of-season flower child maxi sundresses and ratty oversized sweaters. She didn’t know if he would believe her, and she didn’t know if she could stomach that kind of sexism aimed at her from Mulder. Even this chubby-cheeked, junior-high, Nixon administration version of Mulder.

“I‘m going to take the ferry to Martha’s Vineyard today,” Scully told him. “I need new clothes first. Something warmer. Do you know a place to get them?”

The boy looked at her outfit critically. “Like a secondhand store? Or a head shop? There are a few places, but this is Cape Cod. You should go to Boston.”

“No, no,” she shook her head. “I need a fancier place. Like … a place where your mom might shop.”

The boy looked doubtful. Scully observed the details of his own outfit: a tailored pea coat, wide leg jeans. She imagined Teena Mulder selecting the expensive wool turtleneck sweater he wore. He looked like a prep school brochure.

“There’s a place in Falmouth she sometimes goes,” he said. “It’s called Miss Watson’s. But if you buy something there, you won’t look anything like you look now.”

Scully didn’t plan to actually buy anything at all. She planned to take advantage of the 1970s lack of anti-shoplifting technology. But she couldn’t very well say that to him, not after her little don’t-steal-pornography lesson.

“That’s all right,” she said, gazing thoughtfully into the distance. “I‘m going to change my look.”

“Why are you going to Martha’s Vineyard?”

He said it casually, but Scully’s eyes locked on him at once. He had not mentioned being from Chilmark, nor needing to catch the ferry to Martha’s Vineyard himself. He also hadn’t said what he was doing in Falmouth. She found this youthful guardedness interesting.

“I’ve never been there before,” she said. “They tell me it’s a nice place to visit.”

He nodded, scowling for just a fraction of a second. “They do say that,” he said cryptically, standing up and dusting himself off. “Well. Okay. It was … nice talking to you, stranger lady.”

“Yeah,” Scully said, again at a loss for words.

“Good luck changing your look. Sorry about the uh, shoplifting.”

He raised his hand in an awkward wave, and, spinning around, he turned to dart away down the street.

***

Her instinct was to never leave the boy’s side, not for an instant. But that wasn’t very practical. She needed to make this wardrobe change happen on her own, and she needed to think over what exactly she would tell him.

Besides, she would be able to find him again, wouldn’t she? In all likelihood he was taking the next ferry to Martha’s Vineyard himself, since the one after that was hours later. If all else failed — well, she knew where he lived.

So she watched him walk down the street.

Moving her fists into the sleeves of her sweater to warm her freezing hands, she turned to cross the street, to find this clothing shop.

But she couldn’t stop herself. She turned around to find him again, to allow herself to observe him again walking down the block. He zig-zagged haphazardly past people on the sidewalk, running his hand through his hair, looking ridiculously like a miniature version of his adult self, thinking through some complicated idea, paying little attention to his surroundings.

Abruptly, he stopped, glanced over in her direction. She quickly looked away, pretending to look for street signs.

Let him go, she told herself. You’ll find him again soon.

The pleasant exterior of Miss Watson’s Boutique had what Scully supposed were classy Christmas decorations in 1973 – fake evergreen boughs, plastic red and golden ribbons.

Another version of Scully – a younger version, even just a few years younger – probably would have felt more guilt about her plan to steal clothing from this small, unsuspecting store.

But Dana Scully the time traveler only felt twinges. There might be a way to compensate the store later. For now, her survival—and the survival of the Mulder children—were the priority. Standing outside the shop, three words slipped unbidden into her mind.

For the mission.

She had to do it for this cursed mission that was his, but now hers. Had … always been hers? Was she the loyal disciple after all? Scully felt herself rebelling instantly against that thought, her stomach churning, her brain mounting counterarguments. But there was no time to be wading through all of this.

She blinked. Focus. Single minded.

She slipped inside the store and heard the tinkle of a bell, but no one greeted her. The store was bustling with sets of mothers and daughters of various ages there to shop for winter wear, and only one beleaguered saleslady, who kept running to the back to find more options.

Scully walked around, taking in the festive holly green wool pant suit on a faceless mannequin. She sniffed, wrinkling her nose. Why did absolutely everything smell like cigarette smoke in 1973?

No one in the store seemed to look in her direction at all.

She approached a stack of turtleneck sweaters, feeling the fabric with her fingers, and checking the labels for size.

With considerably more finesse than young Fox Mulder, she carefully lifted one, rolled it up, and placed it directly into her duffel bag. She looked casually around. Again, no one looked at her.

There were wool wide-leg pants hanging on a display rack near the front window of the store. Scully eyeballed them discreetly to find her size. At that moment, a woman and her teen daughter were conveniently arguing over a dress at the other end of the store. From the window, she could see shoppers walking up and down the streets of Falmouth, but they were lost in their own troubles. Scully rolled up a pair of pants swiftly and placed them in her bag. There were some socks on an adjacent table; she impulsively grabbed a few pairs, too. She hoped they would fit under her 1999 boots, and that the boots would not be too anachronistic with the outfit.

Across the aisle, she spotted a blue-gray wool pea coat with a pointed collar on a hanger. It was not unlike the one the boy was wearing, and it seemed like it would be a necessity in that gusting wind. But it was heavy and bulky, and she doubted she could just roll it into the duffel bag.

So instead, she slipped it on over her dress, and she wrapped her scarf directly over it. Risky. Hopefully, no one would notice, and they would assume she wore the coat in. Sometimes a bold move paid off.

Her heart thumping in her chest, she walked over to a rack of clothing near the front entrance of the store. She pretended to look it over, and then made a show of casually glancing outside, like she was looking for someone she was meeting. Calming her nerves, she began to walk towards the entrance.

“Ma’am.”

Scully froze where she was. She heard her breathing become more rapid. Her mind began working out her options. One thing was for sure: she would not be stuck in some Cape Cod jail cell on the evening of November 27th.

“Ma’am, is this … yours?” A woman in her 30s, a customer, was pinching the body cam with her fingers, holding it away from her body, giving the device a strange look. She had a toddler at her side, a sweet-eyed little girl with golden curls.

“Oh,” Scully said, feeling herself exhale. “That’s mine. Yes. Thank you.” It must have fallen out somehow when she stuffed the pants in the bag. She took the body cam from the woman’s hands, hastily placing it back in the bag. That was a sloppy mistake, one she would have badly regretted if she lost the camera.

“What is that thing, if you don’t mind my asking? Some kind of binoculars?” the woman asked, pursing her lips. She had neatly styled blonde hair, a burgundy sweater dress, pearls. Her daughter had a pink bow. They could have been featured in a magazine spread.

“Yes,” Scully improvised. “Sort of. It’s observation equipment. I’m a birdwatcher.”

She hoped that seemed plausible to the woman, who just nodded politely. Scully realized that it didn’t look enough like a 1973 camera to be recognizable as one by sight. That was potentially helpful. It could be useful at some point to pass it off as binoculars.

“Ahh. Good luck with your birdwatching,” the woman said, somewhat skeptically, taking her daughter’s hand. “I wouldn’t think it’s a great season for that, most birds going south for the winter and all.”

Scully just smiled wanly and scurried again towards the door. No one seemed to have noticed that she had magically acquired a new coat, which seemed almost too good to be true. Behind her, she could hear the blonde woman resuming asking a question about when the 1974 spring dresses could be arriving.

Scully felt a jarring gust of wind smack her in the face as she walked outside. With no pause, she began to walk straight and steadily away from the shop.

A childhood’s worth of Catholic guilt hit her, too. Here she was, someone who thought seriously about becoming a mother—and she could shoplift and lie so easily, with so little hesitation! What would that mother in the store say about her, if she knew she had been stealing this coat?

Try to go back later and pay them something if it makes you feel better, Scully tried to soothe her unsettled conscience. You’re not a thief. You’re doing whatever it takes to protect the innocent.

The outside air was already biting through the too-thin dress at her legs, but the coat was protecting her upper body. She dug her hands into the deep pockets, snuggling into the satin lining. The extra layer was going to help. She had done what she needed to. She didn’t have time for the luxury of guilt.

She sped down the sidewalk, past the shops. It was wise to put as much space as possible between her and Miss Watson’s. She might as well go try to seek out the ferry building; maybe there would be some sheltered place to sit.

She had made it about half a block when she became aware that someone had fallen in lock step to her left, walking directly next to her, matching her in pace.

“Do you know what you are?” the boy asked, looking over at her, his voice accusing.

Scully’s head whipped over to him, surprised. “Where did you come from?”

“From my mommy and daddy’s love for one another,” he answered sweetly. “Do you know what you are?”

“No,” Scully sighed. “What am I?”

“A hypocrite,” the boy said. He pointed his finger at her, and it pointed directly at the coat. “A pretty big hypocrite, actually.”

Scully stopped walking and turned to look at him. He was scowling.

“Because that coat you’re wearing – and all that other stuff you put in your bag at Miss Watson’s – is a lot more expensive than a Playboy magazine,” he continued. “I believe you used the term petty larceny.”

“How do you know what I did in the store?”

“I watched you from across the street,” he said, defiantly. “Through the window. You didn’t see me. I was careful.”

“You’re right. I didn’t see you.” Scully paused. “Why did you watch me?”

His scowl intensified. “Because … something is off with you.”

“Off?”

“Yeah,” he agreed. “Off. You look at me like you know me. You talk to me like you know me. But I don’t know you — or I don’t think I do, anyway.”

Scully sighed heavily, nodded her head. She resumed walking again at her brisk pace, and he followed after her. “That’s true,” she said. “You don’t know me.”

“Where are you going right now?”

“To Woods Hole, to the ferry to Martha’s Vineyard.”

“But why? Why Martha’s Vineyard? Why are you going there?” he pressed, suspiciously.

“I told you. I’m a tourist,” she said, biting her lip a little.

“I don’t believe you,” he said.

“Why not?”

“A tourist comes to Martha’s Vineyard by herself, in November, the Sunday of Thanksgiving weekend, no clothes for the weather?”

Scully flashed him an impressed look. “You’re good at that, you know. It’s … interesting.”

“Good at what? Interesting why?” He did a little double step to keep up with her. “Are you selling drugs? Are you a prostitute? Are you an art thief?”

“An art thief?” Scully said. “Is there a big art theft problem on Martha’s Vineyard, Mulder?”

The boy’s eyes went very round. Scully realized her error and inwardly cursed. Conversation with this child had become too easy too quickly. So many sloppy mistakes.

“Okay,” he said, and his voice sounded scared now, and much younger. “Now see. That’s what I mean. That’s just weird.”

“I know – I know it is,” she said, soothingly. “And I can explain it, I promise.”

“How do you know my name?” he said slowly. “And why would you call me that? That’s not my first name.”

“I know,” she admitted.

“Youknow?”

“I do,” she said.

Scully stared back at the boy. The muscles in his face were drawn and taut, and he looked afraid. But there was that other quality there, too: the little brightness in his eyes she knew from his facial expressions as an adult. The curiosity.

“I can tell you more, but not here,” she said. “On the ferry, maybe.”

“How do you know I’m taking the ferry?” His eyebrows furrowed.

Scully paused to more carefully select the right words. As she did, he gave her an exaggerated sideways look. “Are you … my ferry godmother?” he asked.

Scully stared incredulously. “My God, I can’t believe you’ve always been like this,” she said.

“And what does that mean, exactly?”

“Listen,” she said. “I know that I’m a stranger. You really shouldn’t trust me. You shouldn’t even be talking to me. But I have to ask you to listen to me, because what I have to tell you is important.”

He kicked at a loose pebble on the sidewalk. He looked up at her, and his voice had a darker inflection. “But you’re not … exactly a stranger, are you?” he said. “You’re not acting like it.”

“No,” she agreed softly. “Not exactly.”

Something in his face relaxed. “I have to make another stop before I catch the ferry,” he said. “You can tell me there, if you want.”

***

He wouldn’t tell her where they were going. A disconcertingly familiar feeling. She followed him through the streets of Falmouth, staring at the back of his unnervingly low head, until they stopped at a wide white wooden building set off the road with a painted sign out front. She could faintly hear the tinkle of music from the street.

“Falmouth School of Dance?” Scully said, perplexed, eyeing the sign as they walked in the front gate. “You have a lesson?”

“Nope,” the boy said. He checked his wristwatch. “But we wait out here for ten minutes or so until the rehearsal inside is done.”

Scully walked right past him, up the mossy stone walk. As she got closer, the music became more clear, and she recognized it: the Waltz of the Snowflakes, from The Nutcracker Suite. The building was an old Cape Cod style house converted into a makeshift dance studio, with children’s shoes piled up outside and flyers for performances plastered all over the outside of the door.

There was a large picture window facing the street. Inside, Scully could see moving shadows, fingers being extended, legs hopping. Girls in leotards were gathering into a V-shaped formation, their arms in perfect circles. They began moving forward as the music’s chorus sang, slightly wobbling snowflakes.

Scully leaned a little closer to the window. Her eyes began to run over the faces of the ballerinas, searching. At last, her gaze locked on one. Tall for her age. Brown braids pinned on top of her head.

Yes. It was.

Even though she should have been prepared for this moment, and she knew it was coming, it affected her. She felt herself start to tremble.

She turned back to the boy, keeping her voice as casual as possible. “Your sister?”

He narrowed his eyes again. “So you know I have a sister.”

“Is she why you’re in Falmouth?”

“Yeah. Her dance class is supposed to perform the Nutcracker in a week,” he said. “They only have three more rehearsals. They’re terrible, so they need all the practice they can get.”

“You bring her here on the ferry for rehearsals?” It was a bit of a trip, Scully knew, from Chilmark.

“It’s not much trouble,” he shrugged, his tone almost defensive. “She dances; I commit petty larceny. Everyone wins.”

Scully was quiet, thinking about how in the 1999 world she came from, Samantha never got to perform in the Nutcracker recital. Mulder had never mentioned this detail to her, maybe because it wasn’t directly relevant to the evening of the abduction. Or maybe it was too sad.

It seemed relevant to Mulder the man, thought Scully. He took his sister to rehearsals in another town, all by himself, for a recital she never performed in.

Without even realizing she was doing it, she found her hand reaching into the duffel bag, past the rolled-up stolen pants, for the body cam. She glanced at the boy, who was watching her with an intent expression, but she decided there wasn’t any point hiding it. His explanations had to start somewhere.

She pulled the camera out, gripped it between her hands, framed the sign “Falmouth School of Dance” in her sights, and pressed the button.

Whir and click.

“What – what was that?” the boy said, his voice awed. “Did you take a picture?”

“I think so,” she said, slipping the camera back into her bag. “It might not be working.”

“That was a camera? What kind of camera was that?”

“It’s a camera designed to send images back to a lab in Berkeley, California,” she said. “It’s actually supposed to be worn on my head, but, well, it just attracts too much attention.”

The boy blinked. “Are you a spy?”

“No,” she said. “But let’s start there. I’m an F.B.I. agent. My name is Special Agent Dana Scully.”

“An F.B.I. agent,” the boy repeated.

“I don’t have my badge,” she said. “I wish I did. I do have my weapon, but it’s not safe to show it to you here.”

“They have woman F.B.I. agents?” the boy asked.

Scully sank onto a weather-worn wooden bench. “I think the first female F.B.I. agents were in 1972, actually. Didn’t Hoover die relatively recently? He was the one who opposed letting women become special agents.”

The boy, looking at her silently, walked to the bench and sat down on the other side. He folded his hands on his lap. “All right,” he said. “You’re an F.B.I. agent. But you don’t know if you’re one of the first female agents, or even if J. Edgar Hoover died recently.”

Scully bit her lip, again considering her next words.

“Does this have to do with my father’s work?” the boy said, his voice becoming very serious.

She looked at him sharply. “Why do you say that?”

“I – I just wondered,” he said, not meeting her eyes. “Do you work with my father?”

“No,” she said. She took a breath. “I work with you.”

“No offense,” he said. “But unless you’re my second period science lab partner Eddie in disguise, I don’t think that’s true.”

“I work with you years from now, when you’re an adult,” Scully struggled to make her voice sound as rational and measured as possible. “I’ve traveled back in time to this year, which isn’t my own time period, through some means – well, it was an accident, and I’m not exactly sure how it happened. But since I’m here, I want to protect you and your sister from an event that I know is going to happen Tuesday night. And the reason I know this event happens Tuesday night is because you told me about it, but years from now, when you’re a man.”

He stared at her, as still as a statue for a moment. “That’s not a very believable story.”

“No,” Scully admitted. “I know it’s not. It’s a ridiculous story. But it’s the truth, and it’s the reason I know you. And … the adult version of you I know would be open to believing it.”

“Most scientists say time travel isn’t practically possible,” he said.

Scully’s mouth opened, and then she laughed, a tinge of bitterness. “Yes,” she said. “I know. I’ve told you something like that before.”

“You’ve told me that?” the boy said.

“I really have.”

“In the — future?”

“Your future, my past,” she said.

“So according to you … I’ll work for the F.B.I.? I’ll be an F.B.I. agent?” the boy said, wrinkling his brow.

Scully paused. “That’s how I know you. We’re partners at the F.B.I., both of us agents. But I don’t know if …” She took a steadying breath. “If I’m successful in stopping this event I want to stop, I honestly don’t know if you’ll choose to join the F.B.I. or not. It might change how you see things. So… it might not be your future, I suppose.”

“That’s a paradox,” the boy pointed out. “If you change my future, and we never meet, then how would you ever know to travel back in time and change my future?”

“I don’t know,” Scully answered simply. “I’m not sure what the time travel mechanism is. But I know I have to try to stop … this event.”

That gave him pause. “This event you’re talking about … it’s that bad?”

“Yes.” Scully said, unable to meet his eyes. “But it’s not going to happen,” she continued, gently, “because I’m here this time.”

“How do I know you’re telling the truth? Why should I trust you?”

“You already know something is wrong. Something related to your father’s work,” Scully guessed. “Don’t you? I think you do. This thing that happens … it is connected to that.”

The boy’s green eyes shifted away uneasily. He said nothing in response to that, and his gaze landed down at his feet.

“You’re Fox William Mulder,” Scully tried. “Birthdate October 13, 1961. Sister Samantha, mother Teena and father William.”

“Anyone could know that,” the boy scoffed.

Scully wracked her brain. So much of her more intimate knowledge of Mulder was more recent.

“All right,” she said hesitantly. “Let me think of what else you’ve told me. Your favorite TV show is The Magician. You like Elvis?” She was quiet for a moment. “You always wanted a peg leg, I think. Or maybe you just told me that for comic effect.”

The boy looked sharply at her. “That’s actually true,” he admitted, after a beat. “The peg leg. Although it seems like a weird thing for me to tell my partner at the F.B.I. when I’m grown up.”

“Yeah, well–” Scully began, a biting witticism about his weirdness on the tip of her tongue. But she stopped herself. This wasn’t adult Mulder. “Yeah. It was.”

A beat. “Are we partners … like on the TV show The Avengers?”

Scully tried to remember the 1960s show, which she only watched occasionally in reruns with her brothers. “Aren’t those characters British spies?” Scully said. “We’re not spies.”

“They’re man and woman partners, too,” the boy said, biting his full lip for a moment. “They fight bad guys. He’s really smart, and she wears this … tight black catsuit and has a gun, and they’re always saying these funny one-liners to each other. I don’t know—it seems pretty exciting.”

His eyes were bright and eager. Scully was charmed—and a little sobered. He was only a child, she thought. How could she ever explain to him what their lives were like?

“Yes,” she said. “We’re like that, more or less. Except the catsuit.”

He looked at her thoughtfully. “Hmm.”

“And I’m really smart, too,” Scully added, as an afterthought.

His eyes refocused to the treeline in the distance, right before the road curved to the shore. She sensed something settling and clicking within him, pieces falling into place in his mind, a process that was comfortingly familiar to her.

“I think I believe you,” he said softly. He was still for a moment, considering. “It doesn’t really make sense, but for some reason, I think you’re telling the truth.”

Scully swallowed. Relief flooded over her. “I’m so glad, Mulder,” she breathed, using his last name again without thinking. “It makes things … simpler.” But not simple, she thought. Still not at all simple.

He nodded. “So,” he said, turning to face her on the bench and regarding her seriously. “Tell me then.”

“Tell you?” Scully repeated.

“Yeah,” he said. “Tell me everything about our mission.”

The Boy on the Beach (5/16)

Read on AO3 | Tagging@today-in-fic

Chapter 5: Who Do You Think You’re Fooling?

The soundtrack for this chapter is Loves Me Like a Rock, by Paul Simon, from his 1973 album There Goes Rhymin’ Simon. This song peaked at #2 on the Billboard Hot 200 in October 1973.

November 23, 1973
Victorville, California

The bus rattled. Scully’s eyes were half closed, and her face tilted at the blurred landscape outside the window. In hazy half-sleep, she saw it again: Mulder’s face, weeks ago, desperate, intent.

“I don’t have all the answers to what you’re saying—I don’t. But whatever else might be true, I know I need you.”

Not weeks ago, decades away now. All by herself on this bus, with no one even to see or to know, the memory made her flush. She had wanted to believe him so badly, and it made her ashamed, so ashamed.

***
The first thing she did when she settled into the seat on the Greyhound bus—hours ago, back when it was still the middle of the night—was pull out the body cam.

Her reasonable side told her it probably wasn’t sending images anywhere. Even if it were, it was questionable anyone would ever receive the images. It was questionable a timeline currently existed where anyone would be looking.

Turning the device over in her hands, Scully knew that just didn’t matter. She knew she would do it. She felt the need to do it almost instinctively. It was like dropping a message in a bottle into an infinite sea: an action you took for yourself, to feed your hope.

With the lights of the bus terminal in San Diego still spilling garishly through the window, she took the camera in her hands and aimed it straight at Mo’s cardboard Ameripass.

Mo giving her the Ameripass had been such a miracle. She should document this little act of human decency, she reasoned, sending the moment out into the oblivion. She pressed the button she knew would take a still photo.

Whir and click.

A few hours later, Scully had fallen asleep with her head pressed uncomfortably against the window. She woke, blinking in confusion, to the fuzzy lights of Los Angeles, streaming past through the glass. It was an unfamiliar Los Angeles, different from the one she knew from so much travel with Mulder. She stared blearily. In her mind, clouded from sleep, it struck her as amazing—like seeing a natural wonder—this L.A. of the past. She wished she had someone to share the experience with.

In the darkness of the bus, she felt for the body cam again, and, barely awake, pressed it flush to the window in the direction of the city lights, placing pressure on the button.

Look, infinite universe, she thought. But that wasn’t honest. She wasn’t really dropping bottles in an infinite sea. She knew who she was talking to, and there was no point in pretending otherwise.

Look, Mulder, she corrected herself. It’s 1973 Los Angeles.

The button pressed all the way down.

Whir and click.

***
Hours before, back in the San Diego Greyhound terminal, just minutes after she said her good-byes to Mo and Silvia, Scully almost had a failure of nerve. Part of it was the sundress. It made her feel short and out-of-character, like someone who should be picking flowers instead of attempting something significant.

Feeling vulnerable, she had walked stiffly to the counter, her lips in a grim line, and presented the Ameripass with the name Maureen O’Byrne typed across it, fully expecting to be challenged. But just as Mo had predicted, the man only glanced uninterestedly at the pass, glanced at her, and handed her a ticket.

“Listen, you have red hair, I have an Irish name,” Mo shrugged, back at Casa Que Pasa. “Nobody is going to question you about the damn Ameripass. Don’t overthink it.”

Once she stepped on to the bus, Scully had followed Mo’s directions to the letter. Find a seat near the front of the bus, Mo said, because the bathroom in the back stinks. Plus, Mo added, you want to be somewhere closer to the driver in case you end up sitting next to a toad.

“But don’t sit directly behind the driver,” Mo warned, “in case he wants to put his own bags on that seat, because then he’ll ask you to move at the last minute. If that happens, you’re fucked. There probably won’t be any good seats left, or only one next to some toad.”

Scully had nodded studiously, absorbing Mo’s words, assuming that “toad” in this context meant something like “creep” or “pervert” or “sex offender,” someone who would not respect the boundaries of a young woman travelling alone on a bus. Mo didn’t know that Scully was armed, or that Scully was Quantico-trained in basic self defense, but this seemed like sound advice anyway.

Mo had just recently returned from an epic, eventful trip to Minneapolis using her Ameripass — good for unlimited Greyhound bus travel anywhere in the continental U.S. — to visit her sister. The pass was good for 30 days, and, Mo said triumphantly, there were four days left. So long as Scully could use it within those four days, she was welcome to travel as far as Greyhound could take her.

“It’s just going to go to waste otherwise,” Mo had said, folding Scully’s hand around the cardboard pass and patting her fingers. “So it works out perfectly. Do your thing, pilgrim.”

Hours later now, sitting slumped against the green-tinted window on the bus — thankfully, no toads next to her — Scully felt a pang of regret at leaving Mo and Silvia behind. For a little while there, in their company, she had not felt quite so alone. Obviously she hardly knew them, knew nothing at all about their lives really, so this sentimentalism was a bit silly. Still, they had shown her such unexpected kindness. For no reason other than just that they felt they should and could.

And they were the only people in 1973 who knew her name.

She sucked in a breath, staring out the window at the bleak brown California landscape rushing by, trying to keep this swell of sadness at bay. She stirred in her seat, limbs restless, looking around the bus at those sitting around her.

A middle-aged couple, sitting a row ahead of her and across the aisle, were sharing a newspaper and a bag of gumdrops. The woman had a beehive hairdo and tortoiseshell cat-eye glasses, like Scully remembered her Aunt Olive wearing at one point in her childhood, and the man wore a bow tie she thought was probably old-fashioned even in 1973.

“You want a section to read?” the man offered a part of the newspaper, noticing her watching him. “It’s yesterday’s paper, but we’re done with the front section.”

“No,” Scully said with a small, tight smile, “but thank you.”

The man lifted the front page and directed it towards Scully, tapping it with his forefinger. “Golly, can you believe this? Ten years,” he said, whistling lightly. “I can hardly wrap my mind around it. Seems like yesterday to me.”

Scully quickly scanned the headline: “Americans Observe Tenth Anniversary of President Kennedy’s Assassination.” Yesterday, she realized: November 22, 1973, the day she arrived.

“I will never forget where I was when I heard that news,” his wife added. “I was at the dentist’s office, and they made an announcement that the President had been shot, and we turned on the radio, and we all just sat there in the waiting room and cried. You remember that, Joe?”

“I was at work,” nodded the man. “Covering Larry’s shift. Can’t believe that was ten years ago.” He turned to Scully. “Where were you, miss?”

In my mother’s womb. Not born yet.

“I was … at home,” Scully said, thinking of something her mother had told her about her own memories of that day. “Listening to music on the radio.”

She leaned back against her seat, introspectively, remembering Mulder telling her once that Byers was born the day Kennedy was assassinated. That meant yesterday was Byers’ tenth birthday. She wondered how little boy Byers spent the day. She imagined him wearing a tiny suit to his birthday party.

“You want some gumdrops?” the woman interrupted her reverie, looking over her glasses at Scully. “We got a whole bag, and Joe gets sick if he eats too many.”

Scully’s brow crinkled. She would normally say a confident no to gumdrops, but she was hungry, and her next meal was not a solidly worked-out plan. “I’d love some,” she said, a hesitant smile. “Thank you.”

The woman leaned over her husband to fill Scully’s palm with a small sparkling heap, and as she did so, Scully noticed her eyes run over her ring finger. “Not married yet?” she said with a sad, sympathetic look, as if it were a shameful secret.

“No,” Scully said, slipping some gumdrops into her mouth to avoid saying anything else. Gelatinous. Sugary. Not especially flavorful.

“Aw, pretty girl like you, I wouldn’t worry too much,” the man said, no doubt attempting to be kind. “You still have some years to start a family.” His eyes took in Scully’s dress and his expression wavered a moment, as if he were second guessing his words, maybe wondering whether hippie girls even wanted babies.

Scully just nodded awkwardly, chewing her gumdrops. Mentioning that her career was a high priority to her didn’t seem like it would get her very far here.

She thought, with a sudden stab of sorrow, of the IVF technology that didn’t even exist in 1973. The technology that might have made her a mother, although probably not the sort this couple imagined. And not with the man you imagined, either.

Her eyes fell on the man’s newspaper again, sitting half-folded on his lap, and she had an idea. “Sir,” she said, suddenly, leaning forward, swallowing. “I think I would like to look at that newspaper, if you don’t mind.”

“Of course,” he said, folding it up and handing it to her. “Yesterday’s news, but it’s like you’re going back in time, right?”

Scully smiled, weakly, looking over the paper. She then subtly shifted her body so that the chatty couple would not be able to see what she was about to do next.

Reaching into the old duffel bag that Silvia had given her, her fingers found the body cam apparatus. Scully’s eyes quickly scanned the back of the bus. The seats were not very full right now. A woman and a small child three rows back were sleeping, propped up against one another.

No one would be able to see. She slowly lifted the camera from the bag, keeping it low and out of sight, and framed the front page of the Los Angeles Times sitting on her lap, making certain the date would be visible.

This is what year it is, she thought, methodically straightening the paper so that it was even. This is where I went, Mulder.

With satisfaction she pressed the button.

Whir and click.

Berkeley, California
20 Hours After Scully Vanishes
1999

Everyone was being tactful about it, but Mulder was being strange and possessive about the images Scully sent. He had them arranged perfectly in two rows of three on the table — the table he had now completely claimed as his domain in Hays’ lab. Anish helped him clear his space of almost everything else, just a desktop computer and a phone, so Mulder was using it as a kind of makeshift office.

Anish appeared regularly with cups of coffee, bagels, questions, and Mulder knew, like him, the young man probably had slept very little. There were now also a few other grad students who were starting to become involved in the case of the time-traveling FBI agent. He found them all surprisingly… helpful. They were open-minded, eager, ready to help him research or brainstorm an idea.

But Mulder was in charge of the photos. He didn’t even like other people touching them.

Now that Skinner was here, Mulder sat very close to the table, refusing to back up his chair, forcing Skinner to stare at the images over his shoulder. Mulder watched the assistant director’s face carefully as he moved from photo to photo.

When Skinner had returned to the lab that afternoon, he’d taken a look at Mulder’s wild hair, rumpled clothes, bloodshot eyes and sighed deeply. He had tried his best to convince Mulder to leave with him—to leave these poor grad students alone—and to go back with him to the field office. But he had also refused, adamantly, to let Mulder speak to Hays. Other agents had that covered, Skinner insisted, and it was better for everyone if Mulder kept his distance.

Unless speaking to Hays were an option, Mulder could see no point in leaving.

The lab was, as of now, his only link back to Scully. He didn’t put it quite like that in his explanation to Skinner, but Skinner’s face seemed to take in his meaning anyway.

So the assistant director agreed to look at the photos with Mulder there, listening to Mulder’s explanations with a kind of cautious interest. He leaned in closely to each image, his eyes skimming over them, closely absorbing the details for himself.

“There’s a difference between the first group of photos and the second,” Mulder told him. “The first photos were accidents, probably taken by the camera on its own. But now she’s sending them intentionally, deliberately choosing her images.”

“How do you know that?” Skinner looked at him, a furrow in his brow.

Because, Mulder thought. Because I know who this message is for. She’s saying, Mulder, it’s me.

“Take this one, for example,” Mulder lightly touched the corner of photo 4. “The one that came around midnight, the bus pass. Those are her fingers, holding the corner of the pass, aiming the corner towards the camera. She wants us to see that she’s getting on a bus.”

“You’re certain those are her fingers?” Skinner said.

“I’m certain,” Mulder answered, looking hard at the photo. Skinner didn’t question why he was certain, for which Mulder was glad. Photo 4 was his favorite. Seeing those small pale fingers, the intention behind what they were showing him, had been almost like hearing her voice.

Skinner regarded him, his expression stony. “Okay, Mulder. What about Photo 5? What’s your theory about what is going on there?”

“Obviously blurry, very little in focus to identify, but it looks like city lights at night. She may have thought she was showing us where she was, but it is harder to see than she might have guessed. We see one sign that says ‘car wash’ over here, and another that seems to be the name of a Chinese restaurant. Possibly this was taken from the window of a bus. We thought it was San Diego, but now we’re not so sure,” Mulder said. “Because of …. well, the next photo.”

Skinner leaned over to look closely at Photo 6. It was a closely framed image, just a newspaper, sitting on someone’s lap, possibly Scully’s.

“Yeah,” Skinner said. “Los Angeles Times. And the date here at the top. November 22, 1973.” He looked sharply up at Mulder.

“Which also fits with what Mrs. Scully said this morning, when I called her,” Mulder said, biting the corner of his lip slightly. The conversation with Maggie had not been pleasant. “I emailed her the bedroom picture, and she also guessed 1973. Scully would have been nine years old, if she were in a typical, you know, timeline situation.”

Skinner rolled a chair up next to Mulder’s at the table, watching him very closely. “Huh,” he said.

“Notice the way the newspaper is perfectly framed in the photo, sir,” Mulder said. “Symmetrical. Not an accident. This is Scully showing us the exact date, the location. So that when we know more from Hays, we’ll know where to get her.”

Skinner nodded grimly. “So somehow she got herself on a Greyhound bus to Los Angeles,” Skinner said. “Why?”

“It’s not her final stop,” Mulder said. “Anish and his friends found some 1973 Greyhound bus routes online for me, and it looks like she most likely had to go north through Los Angeles in order to continue on east. At any rate, I know where she’s headed.”

Skinner crossed his arms and leaned back, eyeing Mulder carefully. “You do?”

“I do.”

“And where’s that?”

“She’s going to Albany,” Mulder said. “She’s going to Albany, New York.”

Skinner scowled. “I don’t follow, Mulder. Why Albany?”

“Because that’s where Hays is in 1973,” Mulder said, bringing his hand down on the table unexpectedly hard. He swallowed. “He’s junior faculty at University of Albany in 1973. Which she knows very well, because we discussed it, and she remembers details. She knows that in 1973 Hays is already working on the research that will lead up to this experiment. And she’s Scully, sir, so she’s strategic. She thinks that her best chance of getting back here is to find him and question him. And she wants to get back to us. To 1999, I mean.”

Skinner exhaled, his eyes still on Mulder, wary. “Okay,” he said, after a beat. “You may be right.”

Of course I’m right, Mulder thought. I am the goddamned profiler, and I am the goddamned expert on Dana Katherine Scully.

“We can confirm as she sends more images,” Mulder said. “I imagine it’s difficult for her, because she probably feels she can’t use the camera device easily in public, and there’s not a lot of privacy on a bus.”

“All right,” Skinner nodded. “Then all we can do is wait for more.”

“But there’s more to report, sir,” Mulder said. “My team and I have been working on more.”

“Your … team, Mulder?” Skinner cast an uneasy glance at Anish, who was at his computer six feet away, pretending not to listen to their conversation.

“Take a look at this,” Mulder handed Skinner a small file of paper, including a printed photo of a middle-aged woman.

“What am I looking at?” Skinner’s eyes were narrowed.

“Our research on Maureen Jean O’Byrne.” Mulder said. “That’s the name on the bus pass. Maureen O’Byrne, known by friends as Mo. Born April 2, 1949, age fifty, resident of San Diego, California, originally from Minneapolis, Minnesota. Social worker. Graduate of University of California, San Diego. Lives with her longtime partner, Silvia Raygoza, who runs a shelter for victims of domestic violence. I spoke to them both on the phone this morning.”

“And?”

“They’ve never heard of Scully,” Mulder said. “Never met anyone by the name Dana Scully, not now, and not in 1973. They were certain. Mo O’Byrne definitely never gave her a bus pass.”

“Well,” Skinner lifted his eyebrows. “Maybe Scully was, uh … creative in how she got her hands on the bus pass. She’s not without her talents.”

“Agreed,” Mulder nodded. “But this is what’s really wild, sir. Mo O’Byrne could be certain Scully never took her bus pass because she still had it. She went to some ancient file cabinet somewhere and produced her 1973 Ameripass from a scrapbook, with four days still left on the pass.”

Skinner’s eyebrows raised. “Okay,” he shook his head. “So help me out here, Mulder. What does it mean?”

“It means that whatever Scully is doing, whatever effect she is having in the past,” Mulder said, “it doesn’t seem to be affecting our present. At least … not yet. We don’t seem to be experiencing the consequences of her actions. Because if Scully had ended up walking away with Mo O’Byrne’s bus pass in the past, then 50-year old Mo O’Byrne wouldn’t have it now.”

“Multiverses,” called Anish, who forgot he was not supposed to be listening. “She’s in another multiverse, on another timeline, that has no causal relationship to this timeline. She might be impacting some Dana Scully’s present, but not ours.”

“Maybe,” Mulder said, his head whipping around to look at Anish. “Or maybe it doesn’t work like that. Maybe the effect builds up … and our timeline changes suddenly, snaps like a rubber band into a new reality.”

“She’s affecting more than bus passes,” chimed in Anish’s colleague Georgette, sitting at the next desk from Anish. She was also not supposed to be listening. “She was in her childhood home, right? Did she talk to anyone? Her family?”

“Her mom had no memory of it,” Mulder said, biting the corner of his lip. “But Scully would probably have chosen not to speak to them on purpose, if she could avoid it. To avoid disrupting the timeline.”

“If she jumped into herself as a kid,” Anish said, “like, if her adult body took the physical place of her child body, then when she left her home, she pretty dramatically changed her timeline. Her kid self basically was kidnapped. From her family’s point of view.”

Mulder nodded gloomily. He had thought of this, too. That was a grave change in an established timeline, the sort that could alter Scully’s whole future, that could send her on trajectories that did not involve medical school or the Federal Bureau of Investigation or the X-files. If there was going to be a sudden switch over into a new reality, an adjusted timeline, Mulder himself might, all at once, not remember Scully at all. She might just vanish from his mind. Be replaced by a new partner, a whole new history. Or, really, who knew what was possible? Maybe he would be dead. Scully certainly had saved his life often enough, and if she had never been his partner, that would no longer have happened in the same way. He felt his jaw clenching.

Skinner was watching him. “All right,” he said. “Listen, Mulder—and, uh, team,” he made a half-hearted gesture to the grad students, “let’s focus on what we know, the information that’s coming in right now. We can’t imagine every worst-case scenario we’ve ever seen in a movie or read in some comic book.”

He looked significantly at Mulder. “You’re not going to be able to work if you do this ‘anything goes’ bullshit, and we need you to be the one to help us with these images, Mulder.”

Mulder nodded, shakily.

Then, his own hands trembling just slightly, he picked up the photo with the bus pass, to stare at Scully’s fingers again.

November 23, 1973
Las Vegas,Nevada

In Las Vegas, Scully needed to change buses, something she found herself looking forward to. She was feeling achy and restless; it had been hours since she had a meal. She hoped there would be someplace in the bus terminal to get some real, non-gumdrop food.

The Greyhound terminal in Vegas in 1973 the Friday after Thanksgiving was as surreal as one might have expected: brightly lit, choked with people, some entirely too dressed up for their environs, others looking wrinkled and despondent and hung over.

There was a little snack counter. Scully, nearly faint with relief and hunger, eagerly purchased a cheeseburger and a milkshake with her 1988 twenty dollar bill.

Everything cost almost nothing in 1973, she realized. Her burger was only 75 cents. She had plenty of change, which was useful; she would need it for the rest of the trip. (And after that, who knew?) She found a vending machine and bought an additional assortment of snacks, which she tucked away in her duffel bag for later.

Unwrapping the foil from her burger with giddy excitement, she sat down on a bench. There was, perhaps, a twenty minute wait before the next bus. Scully sank her teeth into her cheeseburger, closing her eyes, in bliss, to savor it. Maybe she should buy a second one before the bus came, she thought. Only 75 cents, after all.

A flash of something sparkly from the corner of her eye caught her attention. She looked up to see Elvis walking past her, in his complete white characteristic jumpsuit, replete with rhinestones and sequins.

Scully’s mouth dropped. She scrambled around in her seat to see him better.

Of course it wasn’t the real Elvis. Why would the real Elvis be taking a Greyhound bus? Although, she realized, the real Elvis was alive in 1973, and maybe somewhere in Vegas. No, this was a convincing impersonator. He seemed to be in the middle of an intense argument with a woman wearing frosted lipstick and a coordinating white halter jumpsuit.

The woman in the halter was saying something angry to Elvis, something difficult to make out and laced with profanity. Scully took a deep, thoughtful sip of her milkshake and watched them closely.

“What it boils down to is that I can’t fucking trust you any more,” the woman said, her voice cracking as she emphasized each word. “You haven’t been the same man since you came back from Vietnam. Everyone says that.”

“It’syou that hasn’t been the same, Nancy,” Elvis hissed. “I’m the same man I always was. You say you love me, but you sure act otherwise, don’t you?”

“You can’t love someone if you don’t fucking trust them,” Nancy retorted, as they walked away.

Scully’s eyes tracked the pair as they moved across the terminal, stray remnants of their angry words still trailing behind them. She swallowed her milkshake.

The couple’s fight should not remind her of Mulder. She and Mulder were not a couple, never had been a couple. It was just embarrassing for her to have these associations. But it only seemed to take the slightest push to tip her over into thinking of that awful morning at her apartment. His determination. Her fury. In the weeks since she hadn’t been able to get any of it out of her mind.

The most horrible moment, the moment that made her physically ill: when his mouth was behind her ear, when painful shivers were moving through her and she was ready to give over entirely, and she was hit with cold, clear certainty. A pattern lighting up before her face, and oh, how metastatic it was. He had peeked inside of her mind, knew precisely how she felt about him, and was looking to use it for the purposes of his all-important mission.

She couldn’t even fully express the violation of that, the humiliation of that. Her creeping suspicion that he might have done it before, even without the insight of literal mind reading, and that it had worked. Her horror that she was so weak, so predictable, so unprofessional.

Scully slowly chewed her cheeseburger. Separated now, across this chasm of time from Mulder, this certainty about his betrayal seemed … less certain. Because whatever else she knew about Mulder, whatever his flaws, surely she knew that she trusted him?

Later, she was getting on to the bus, still sucking the remains of her milkshake through the straw, when she noticed a postcard someone had dropped lying on the curb. It was bright and gaudy, from a casino and hotel she didn’t know, that she didn’t think existed in 1999, The Dunes.

She bent down to pick it up. It was blank, unwritten.

On the bus she turned the empty postcard over again and again in her fingers, thinking of Mulder and his troublesome visions. She had been so angry, so frustrated with him for his talk of putting the mission first. How many more times must she watch him self-destruct? How many more times must she see him put himself, and her, on the sacrificial fire?

She still believed he was wrong. She still thought he had childishly misconstrued his own purpose. Seeing no balance, seeing no gray area. But it was who he was. This was the man he had become when his sister was taken. Wasn’t it simply cruel – and futile – to blame someone for being who they were?

Besides, Scully thought, you are hardly in a position to criticize Mulder for taking on a quest at great personal cost.

She wondered if someone would loan her a pen.

Berkeley, California
84 Hours After ScullyVanishes
1999

Fifteen photographs now. Spread out over the table in five rows of three.

The original three, the outliers, at the top. Those were the three Mulder believed were taken at random by the camera. But since then, as Mulder kept telling Skinner: there was a definite, recognizable pattern.

First, Scully took pictures of things that had some personal meaning to her. Sometimes, the meaning was indecipherable, even to Mulder. Like the sweater. There was a photo of a sweater (a cardigan, he thought it was, technically) sitting on a bus seat on day two, and Mulder’s best guess was that Scully had somehow acquired a warmer layer and was just happy about it.

But usually Mulder could figure out her thought process. There was a shot of a movie marquee sign playing The Exorcist, for example, and he knew it was one of her favorite films. She was probably amazed at seeing it playing in a theater, on its first release, so she took a picture.

Second, there were pictures showing him where she was: giving specific information about her location. For hours the images would stop, and Mulder assumed during this time she was probably asleep. Then, like a miracle, an image would surface again, demonstrating she had moved across the continent some great distance: a picture showing an Illinois rest stop sign, or the identifiable skyline of downtown Pittsburgh.

Sometimes the images combined both purposes. There was one image that showed a road sign marking the turn-off and number of miles to Kroner, Kansas. It showed where she was, yes. But Scully had also seen the sign and thought about lovesick weathermen and flying cows, of that oddball case that was simultaneously in their past and in her future.

Or there was the haunting image from Las Vegas, the image of the postcard. Mulder and the grad students could tell it was Las Vegas because the postcard had the logo of a now-defunct hotel and casino on it, The Dunes.

Scully had written a message, and as the image filled in on the monitor, Mulder just stood and stared at it, his body rigid at the sight of her neat and recognizable handwriting, motionless by reading what she had written: “Saw an Elvis impersonator. Thought of you. Wish you were here. - DKS”

Nothing is going to stop me from getting her back, Mulder promised himself. Even if it means living the rest of my fucking life in this lab.

Knowing Scully as he did, he guessed she had her doubts about whether he would ever see these pictures she was taking. He speculated that she might be taking these photos more for herself than for him, as a way of offering herself comfort.

That idea made him inexpressibly sad. Not for himself, because he did receive her messages, after all—but for her, not knowing that he had. He pictured her writing a postcard to him in some lonely bus terminal, taking a picture, all the time feeling that it was a futile act. That was not what life for Scully was supposed to be. Acts of sad futility were not supposed to be her modus operandi. If happiness was supposed to be sacrificed for his mission, it was not supposed to be hers.

“Mulder,” Anish’s voice interrupted his thoughts. “Heads up. There’s a new image.”

“Is she in Albany?” Mulder said, springing up from his table. “Did she get there?” Her last image had been in Port Authority in Manhattan, so he knew she was close. She would have only needed to take a Greyhound upstate, a relatively short leg of her trip.

Skinner was standing with Anish over the monitor, watching the image finish filling in. He glanced up at Mulder as he approached.

“Well?” Mulder said. “Did she make it to Albany?”

Skinner’s expression was inscrutable. “As a matter of fact, no,” he said. “She is in Providence, Rhode Island.”

Mulder scowled and pushed past them to see. Sure enough, the monitor showed a tourist sign saying “Historic Providence, Rhode Island, Est. 1636” in a swirling typeface, meant to evoke a colonial past. In the sign’s background, he could see the contours and shadows of buildings, a cityscape, downtown Providence. The picture looked to be taken from a bus window.

“Providence,” Mulder shook his head, dumbfounded. He had been so certain he would see evidence she was in Albany. “But …. why? Why would she go to Providence?”

Skinner said nothing, but kept his eyes trained on Mulder.

“Unless the bus was rerouted for some reason,” Mulder said. “But she would have found a way to tell us that, wouldn’t she?”

“Let’s go sit down at your table, Mulder,” Skinner said, touching his arm. Anish, tactfully, moved back to his own desk.

Mulder looked in faint surprise at Skinner. “Do you think she knows Hays isn’t in Albany? Maybe she has reason to believe he is at an academic conference somewhere.”

At the table, Skinner slid a chair out, sat down, and gestured for Mulder to do the same. But Mulder remained standing, still staring, perplexed, across the room at the monitor.

“She isn’t looking for Hays,” Skinner said. “Come on, Mulder. You must have guessed by now.”

“Guessed? Guessed what?” Mulder looked now at Skinner, who had a look of grim certainty on his face that made him uneasy.

“Jesus Christ,” Skinner shook his head and put his fingers on his temples. “This is a hell of a blind spot for you, Mulder. If I’m being honest, you’re scaring me.”

“What?” repeated Mulder urgently. “What do you know?”

“She’s going to Martha’s Vineyard, you dumbass,” Skinner said.

Mulder just stared, dumbly.

“She’s clearly trying to get there fast. Presumably before November 27, 1973. That’s a date you still recognize? You haven’t lost all perspective yet?”

Mulder still said nothing, but sat down now, next to Skinner, in a stunned silence.

“I‘m pretty damn sure she has in mind to offer Samantha Mulder—the Mulder siblings—her protection as a trained federal agent, although I have no idea how.”

Mulder looked at his own hands, considering this. He shook his head, stubbornly.

“No. She doesn’t know what changing the timeline like that would do,” Mulder said softly. “It might make it impossible for her to return.”

“I‘m sure she has given some thought to the implications of that,” Skinner said. “Don’t you think she has? This is Scully.”

“She should be trying to get back,” Mulder said, his voice rising a little. “It— it doesn’t sound like her. To go off-mission like this. To do something so risky and irrational. I don’t think you’re right. She wouldn’t do it.”

“Onehell of a blind spot,” repeated Skinner. “Have you not noticed that she does some pretty batshit crazy and risky things sometimes? And have you noticed she does them always, always, always for the same motivation?”

Mulder looked up at Skinner uneasily.

“You, dumbass,” Skinner said. “For your well-being. This definitely tracks.”

Mulder couldn’t say anything.

Skinner sighed. “All right, listen. How can I put this so you’ll get it?” he said, a kinder quality to his voice. “You know how you feel about her, Mulder? All that stuff you probably don’t tell her? Well, I think it’s … a pretty safe bet that’s how she feels about you, too.”

There was an uneasy pause.

“I don’t think that’s true,” Mulder said.

Because there was no world, no timeline, no universe, in which anyone could feel about Fox Mulder the devastating love he felt for Scully. He couldn’t even put the feelings into words.

Skinner just looked at him with a sad, curious expression that Mulder couldn’t completely process.

Mulder’s voice trembled when he spoke. “Sir, I don’t even know what happened with Samantha that night, exactly. And I was there the first time. I don’t know for sure whether it could be stopped … by anyone, much less a single agent, with no back up, no one to call for help, no Bureau support. I don’t know what kind of danger Scully might be putting herself in.”

Skinner nodded. “Yep,” he said. He sighed heavily. “Yep, I know.”

Neither man spoke for a moment. Skinner looked up at Mulder again. “The good news is, Mulder, everything you know about that night, every detail, she knows, too, since she is one of the few people on the planet who has been listening to you.”

Mulder met Skinner’s eyes, and his view of his boss went blurry. He blinked. A few tears fell.

“I don’t know what one person could do,” Mulder said, his voice broken. “Against … them. Alone like that.”

Skinner inclined his head. “Well, technically speaking, she wouldn’t be all alone …. exactly, would she?” he said. “I mean … she’d be with you.”

A bonus track for this chapter, the number one song on the Billboard chart the week of 11/25/73, the week Samantha Mulder was abducted: Photograph, by Ringo Starr.

Source:

“Learning to Love the Bus on Across-Country Odyssey,”New York Times, 27 October 74

The Boy on the Beach (4/16)

Read on AO3 | Tagging@today-in-fic

Chapter 4: No One Can Do It But You, Mulder

Georgetown, Washington D.C.
One Week Before Scully Vanishes
1999

That early morning, when Scully didn’t answer her phone, when she wasn’t in her apartment, Mulder didn’t panic, because he knew where she was. He knew that this time of morning she often went for a run.

And so he waited for her, leaning against the entrance to her building with his hands tucked under his arms, shivering because it was autumn, and it was early morning, and he hadn’t thought to wear a heavy enough coat, because creature comforts weren’t what mattered.

What mattered was talking to Scully. His sergeant, his way home, the one who told him to get up and fight.

She finally appeared, jogging around the block, tiny in her gray Quantico sweatshirt and leggings. She had been sprinting the last stretch, and now she was slowing, letting her heart rate come down.

When she saw him standing there, Scully came to a tentative halt. Her face was pink-cheeked and damp, tendrils of hair curling around her face, and she unexpectedly reminded him of her younger self, the earnest, less guarded young agent she had once been. The reminder caught him off guard, gave him pause. She put her hands on her knees, looking up at him, breathing hard, trying to catch her wind.

“Mulder,” she said, still panting, eyeing him disapprovingly, “where the hell is your warm coat?”

Mulder kept his voice level and got straight to it. “You told Skinner I shouldn’t get to be Hays’ first subject for the EH test run,” he said. “You suggested it be you.”

Scully’s eyes locked on his immediately. She placed her hands on her lower back, leaned backwards. “That’s right,” she said.

“Why didn’t you tell me that?”

“Because,” she said, arching her body to one side, and then the other, “I knew you would do what you’re doing right now.”

Mulder felt a flush of heat roll over his face, despite the shivers racking his body. “And what am I doing exactly, Scully?”

“You’re getting angry,” she said. “Even though you should know that the very idea of you—only weeks away from whatever those butchers did to your brain—being the test subject for research that involves any kind of electrical stimulus to the brain is absolutely out of the question.”

“I’m angry because you went to Skinner,” Mulder said, his voice rising slightly. “I’m angry because you didn’t even bother to discuss it with me first. That’s not how our partnership is supposed to work.”

Scully fixed him with a weary look. “Mulder, we both know that’s not what this is about.”

“The hell it’s not, Scully,” Mulder said. “I’m sorry—what do you think is going on here? Do you think there’s some other agenda?”

“Some other agenda? Is that a joke, Mulder?”

“I– no, it’s not a joke.”

“Some other agenda besides testing the EH for purely investigative purposes.” Scully put a finger to her lips. “Let’s see. Is there any other reason you could have for being interested in recovering lost memory? Have you ever done anything self-destructive to try to recover memory before? Anything that puts your brain in danger, perhaps? Anything personal?”

“I told you this was personal to me, too,” Mulder hissed. “I would think you would understand that. Why would I not pursue every means possible to find out what happened to my sister?”

“You told me,” Scully said, in the process of whipping off her sweatshirt, and using it to dab the sweat off of her neck and shoulders, “that I would have to be satisfied with the science for us to move forward on this. And I’m not satisfied.”

“Youwere. You were satisfied when we talked about this all this time.” His words sounded strangled. Mulder wanted to slam his hand into the brick wall of the building. She was now only wearing her sports bra, and despite his anger, his eyes were taking in so much pale skin, glittering with a fine sheen of sweat.

“I think the research is interesting and the procedure worth trying,” Scully agreed, her voice maddeningly practical. “But not with you as a test subject. It doesn’t need to be with you. I’m not satisfied that it’s safe for you.”

“I’ve been going over the EH material with you for weeks,” Mulder said, “and I have to think you knew, Scully, that I wanted to be the one to do it. Why wouldn’t you say that all along? Why would you go to Skinner instead?”

Scully rolled her head backwards in frustration. “Probably because I thought you would try to talk me out of it,” she said. “And I was worried you might.”

“No,” Mulder shook his head. “That’s bullshit, Scully. Bullshit.” He was frightened by the intensity of his anger. His eyes fell on a clear trail of sweat snaking between her clavicles, moving down her sternum.

“It’s cold out here,” Scully said quietly and matter-of-factly. “Let’s go inside and discuss this.”

“Maybe you’re cold because you’re in your fucking underwear,” Mulder snapped back. “Maybe you’re cold because you took your clothes off.”

“Don’t do that, Mulder,” she said, her tone a warning.

“Andwhy, exactly, are you showing so much skin right now, Scully?” The tone of his voice reminded him of his father’s, making some ugly comment to his mother over the dinner table, gesturing with scotch glass in hand. “Some kind of power move?”

“Some kind of … power move?” She took a step backwards. He could see the raw hurt, the outright shock moving across her face. He felt himself deflating.

“I don’t know why I said that,” he said, quickly, his voice quieter.

“I was on a run,” Scully said, her cheeks flushing. “You interrupted my run.”

“Yeah,” Mulder said, desperation growing in the pit of his stomach. “Yeah, I know.”

“I was on a run, and you take your shirt off when you’re on a run all the time. You take your shirt off in front of me constantly. Is that a power move, Mulder?”

“No,” Mulder said weakly.

“Then where the fuck is that coming from?” Scully said, her eyes wet at the corners. “What wasthat?”

There is something so broken, so unfixable inside me, Mulder thought. Because of course Scully would never try to distract him from something important by taking off her clothes. That was more Diana’s playbook. His heartbeat throbbed along the border of his hairline, in the spot where a knife so recently sliced into his mind.

“Let’s go inside,” he said. “You’re right. Let’s go in and talk.”

Scully blinked at him, her eyelashes still damp. She was self-consciously holding the sweatshirt pressed up flush to her chest now in a way that made him feel sick with shame. He thought for a moment she might refuse him, tell him to go home, tell him to leave her the fuck alone, and at this point he would applaud her. But being Scully, she didn’t. She nodded tightly, bit the corner of her lip, and swiveled to open the door.

She didn’t speak at all on the walk to her apartment, nor did she speak as she let them in the front door. After unlocking the door, she kept walking once they went inside, straight into her bedroom, closing the door behind her, leaving him standing in her entry hall. Wondering, like an idiot, where he should go.

Holding his head in his hands, he waited to see if he heard the shower start. He didn’t. He could hear faint thumps inside her bedroom.

“It really doesn’t matter who does the EH the first time,” Mulder called to her through her bedroom door. “I think it’s good that it’s you, actually. You should be the one to experience it.”

There was no answer, but he could hear the sound of a drawer slamming shut.

She emerged again from the bedroom in sweats and a faded black tee-shirt he had seen before, her face still set in anger. “Good,” she said shortly. “Because I am going to be the one to experience it.”

She walked past him towards the kitchen, and he stood in the same place, his eyes trailing after her. He wanted to fix this more than he wanted to breathe, even though he sensed that trying was probably doomed, that he was just as likely to fuck it up further. If he had any kind of real compassion for her, he would leave right now. But he never, ever did that, did he?

“The first time, he’ll take you back telepathically to a week prior,” Mulder heard himself saying, following her into the kitchen. “It should be fascinating, Scully. I think you’ll find it interesting. They’ll monitor you in the lab, put a body camera on you, to demonstrate that you’ve not physically left.”

She was pouring herself a glass of water, and her eyes flickered up at him only briefly.

“Then, after we’ve done a few trials, maybe we can try the EH with … other kinds of memories. With your more distant past, your childhood. And then eventually with me, maybe. When you’re comfortable with that.”

“And then what?” she said, her voice low. She was looking at her water glass, rotating it slightly in her fingers.

“What do you mean?”

She drank deeply from the glass. “Then you rush to do the EH yourself, all consequences to yourself be damned, and you telepathically revisit the night Samantha was abducted. What do you hope it tells you, Mulder?”

Mulder scowled. “You know what I hope it tells me. You know I hope it tells me what happened to her,” he said. “Gives me leads I can follow.”

“So you see faces of perpetrators who are now long dead or gone,” Scully said. “Maybe you see car models, license plates from 26 years ago that you can’t check out any more. You see shadows and obfuscations. Are you really investigating her disappearance, Mulder? Or do you just really want to see again, up close and personal, what you could have done to stop it?”

“Scully.” Mulder heard the strain in his voice. “What choice do I have but to try? Do you know me at all? Am I supposed to just …give up?”

Her expression was unreadable; she took a sip of her water. Mulder continued, taking a step towards her, softening his tone.

“I know that you wonder what will happen, if I don’t ever find my sister. I know you worry what it will do to me. I know you picture it in your mind… what I will turn into, if I’ve done this my whole life.”

Scully’s brow furrowed in confusion for a moment, and she took another drink. “I do think about that,” she frowned. “Although I’ve never mentioned it to you before.”

Mulder said nothing, watching her closely.

“You … heard that, Mulder? In my mind?”

“When I mentioned needing to find my sister to you, weeks ago,” Mulder said. “When I was just starting to hear inside people’s heads, yeah, I heard you have that thought.”

“I didn’t realize,” Scully said, looking discomfited, “that you had such precision.”

“Well, it was easier when it was just one thought, one person. It got harder as it got stronger, and as there were more people around. It got more cacophonous, difficult to pick out.”

“Still,” Scully said, an edge there. “I thought it was more … impressionistic.”

“The point here, Scully,” Mulder said, “is that in the end, what this mission to find Samantha does to me personally isn’t important. Even if it turns me into the kind of mess that you worry about. I’m just not supposed to let that be a concern.”

“Not … supposed to? Why the hell not? Why don’t you count?”

“Don’t you see, Scully?” Mulder said, and he began to pace around the kitchen. “This is it, this is the big question that’s left for me. This is what the visions I had were trying to tell me: I have to get back to the mission. All of the rest of it, all of these comforts, these temptations, these are for somebody else, some other guy, not for me.”

“All these comforts and temptations?” Scully said, looking around blankly. “What are you talking about? What comforts and temptations?”

Mulder huffed in frustration, trying not to look at her. He flopped down in a chair at her kitchen table, kicking his long legs out straight. “I mean comforts and temptations like … the parts of life that … some people find meaningful.”

“Oh, I see,” Scully said, her voice growing more subdued. “Like in your vision.” She set down her water glass on the counter. “Romantic love. Family. Home.”

“Right,” Mulder nodded quickly. “I think that’s right.”

Her expression grew grave. “Or you mean … any happiness at all?”

“Maybe, yeah,” Mulder said, very softly.

“Do you think you might be putting too much stock in this vision, Mulder? Or misinterpreting parts of it?” Scully said.

“In the dream, you were the one I could count on,” Mulder answered, firmly. “You were the one who set me back on track, when I slipped off the path.”

“Was I?” She walked over and slid into the chair next to him, grasping his hand. “Then listen to me, because that’s what I’m trying to do now, too. You don’t have to sacrifice your life or happiness for any mission. Not literally and not metaphorically.”

Her hand, pinning his, warm and firm. Her clear eyes, locked on his. A strand of her hair: a lush, messy sine wave over her temple.

There are temptations, and then there are temptations, Mulder thought. There were abstract suburban families with attractive ex-girlfriends in dreams. But then there was Scully.

He frowned at her, because he really, really didn’t want to say to her what he was going to say next.

“Scully,” he said hesitantly, his voice catching a little, “I think I do have to be prepared to sacrifice those things. I think that’s exactly what I have to do.”

Her hand still held his, but her expression froze.

“What you’re saying now,” he continued, “that’s what Cancer Man said in my vision. What Diana said. They said I should relax, enjoy my life. Experience hundreds of little joys, Diana said. And it felt great, but it wasn’t my fate. I think on some level that you know that what I’m saying is true, Scully.”

“You really believe this,” she whispered. A series of rapid expressions played out over her face, so quickly he could barely track them.

“Yeah,” he said. But even as he said it, he wanted to take it back, to run his hand through her messy hair instead.

She withdrew her hand, stood up from the table, crossed to the window, and kept her back to him.

“So in this dream, which you now interpret as me urging you to sacrifice yourself, I was … I was your… your constant.”

She said this quietly, her fingers reaching out to trace the stained-glass paneling on the window. He could not see her face.

“Then, back in real life, I’m this nag who holds you back from necessary neurological adventures. And today, I’m also some kind of scheming temptress, although apparently not very good at it. Did I get that right, Mulder?”

No, Mulder thought with a shock of certainty. No, no, no, whatever this was, this was all wrong.

“Even if I could figure that out, how to be the loyal … disciple you want me to be, or whatever it is, there’s no way I could,” Scully said, her voice breaking. “If that’s what it means to you to be your touchstone—to be the person who helps you destroy yourself? I won’t do it, Mulder.”

A familiar cold slice of fear ran through him. Mulder felt his heart constrict.

“Scully, come on,” he said, his voice growing unsteady.

“If it’s as you say, if you’re on this solitary and self-destructive quest, then what do you need me for, really? I’m honestly asking.”

“I need you,” he said, and his voice sounded like a little boy’s.

“You don’t need a doctor if you don’t care about taking care of your physical body,” Scully’s voice sounded distant. “And… you experience my scientific point of view as limiting you, as holding you back.”

She will leave, she will leave, she will leave. And I will be completely alone in this.

“No,” Mulder said. He stood up. “No.”

She didn’t turn away from the window to look at him. “I admit that… I thought I might be helping you in some personal way, too,” she said. “But if what you’re saying is true, then how I care about you personally doesn’t matter, does it? Any… affection between the two of us isn’t what’s important. It’s irrelevant to the mission, right?”

Her head was bent downward now, only a pale exposed strip of the back of her neck visible. And Mulder couldn’t stand it, couldn’t stand the disconsolate sound of her voice, couldn’t stand this brokenness between them.

“Scully,” he whispered.

His pulse racing, he stepped quickly behind her, placing his hands hesitantly on her shoulders. She tensed at the contact.

“I don’t have all the answers to what you’re saying—I don’t. But whatever else might be true, I know I need you.”

“Mulder,” Scully’s voice was frustrated, just a breath, but her head arched backwards, ever so slightly, towards him.

He didn’t think about it at all. His arms circled fast around her waist, meeting one another on the other side, and drawing her body suddenly tight to his. She made a little surprised gasp.

He burrowed his face into her faintly sweaty hair, just behind her ear, and murmured there, darkly, like it was a secret: “I do. I need you, Scully.”

He had never touched her like this before. And it was confusing, it was not on mission. He was breathing, hard, against her hair.

Moving painfully slowly, his lips began to drag down her soft neck, breathing in the scent of her sweat, a gesture he couldn’t have explained. Not justifiable.

Scully’s breathing had sped up. He felt her sigh, a sigh that had the hint of a sound to it, the palest ghost of a moan, her whole body sinking backwards into his. It startled him. Because it seemed, almost, like she might want him to touch her like this, want it as badly as he did.

But then, just as quickly, he felt her muscles grow taut again.

“I think,” she whispered, and he could tell how much effort she was making to control her voice, “that you know exactly how much I want to hear that, Mulder. I think … you know exactly what you’re doing.”

Mulder, scowled, crushed his lips into the whorls of her ear. “I don’t, actually,” he mumbled.

“I think you’ll say or do anything to get me to stay,” Scully said, moving her head away from his. She stared at him, pulling out of his arms, and her eyes were wild, dark, miserable. “You’ve seen in my head. You’ve seen my thoughts. I can’t help but think … you … you know exactly how to get me to stay on mission. I think the mission has always been first.”

She stepped away from him, pushing her hair away from her face frantically.

“I don’t even understand what you’re talking about, Scully,” Mulder said, helplessly. “I’m not using any secret knowledge from your mind to manipulate you, I—”

“I think you should leave, Mulder,” she said. Her voice sounded like someone else’s.

He stared at her. “Do you — will you…”

“I’ll do the EH,” she said. “I don’t know what comes next.”

“Scully,” he tried again, his voice small, broken.

“The best thing for your mission, Mulder,” she said, her eyes locking on his, damp and ice blue, “is to leave right now.”

There was absolutely nothing he could say. There would be no fixing this.

He nodded, swallowing, and turned to leave. The tears he couldn’t quite hold back weren’t for the mission.

The Boy on the Beach (3/16)

Read on AO3 | Tagging@today-in-fic

Chapter 3: You Deserve A Break Today

The soundtrack for this chapter is Killing Me Softly, by Roberta Flack, which was #2 on the Billboard charts the summer of 1973.

Thanksgiving Day, 1973
San Diego,California

What Scully wanted to do, with all of her heart, is go downstairs and see all her family as they were in 1973. Her brothers as gangly boys, and her young, apple-cheeked mother, probably conscientiously preparing Thanksgiving dishes to share with other families on the Naval base.

Her father. Oh God, her daddy, alive and cheerful and smelling like aftershave and peppermints.

But she couldn’t. She knew she couldn’t. She couldn’t appear suddenly as sleek, serious, adult late 20th century Dana, wearing her black suit and gun. This would be a certain disruption to the timeline, and it would be disturbing in every way to her family, too.

Of course, the only other option was going to be disturbing, too. Their Dana, their little 9-year old Dana, was going to disappear from their lives when Scully climbed out the window. They were not going to know what happened to her, and their lives were going to be upended.

There was nothing to do now but to push that aside. There was really no choice. She needed to get out of this house, and then she could reevaluate her options.

The bedroom was on the second floor of the house, but, assessing the situation from the window, there was a narrow extension of red-tile roof from the neighbor’s garage that she thought she could use as a halfway point in climbing down. She had a vague memory that Bill might have pulled off something like that in this house once or twice in junior high—or was it the other house on the base in San Diego? In any case, she just hoped that adult, thirtysomething Dana was as nimble as he was.

She thought about writing something to her parents before she left. But what could she write? And what would they make of her adult handwriting?

She didn’t know that much about what law enforcement was like in 1973, but she assumed they would at very least dust her bedroom for prints. They would only find her own and Melissa’s. It would be quite the puzzle.

Maybe, she thought, it would end up in an X-file, and years later, Mulder himself would investigate it: the disappearance of some girl he had never heard of around Samantha’s age, abducted out of her bedroom around the same time. She imagined Mulder looking at photos of her at age nine, red hair in pigtails, poring over her parents’ recollections, matching it up with his own memories. Maybe he would be trying to convince some other partner that the case had merit. Some other green agent, some stranger that Blevins had decided might be a hindrance to him.

And her breath caught at that. At the idea of that other history—a history of Mulder and the X-files without her at all.

But she didn’t have time for this, didn’t have the luxury of indulging these self-induced anxieties. Instead, she unhinged the latch of the window, and it opened with a creak. Somewhere, deep in the house, she could hear a boyish voice singing along raucously with a commercial on TV. “I can’t get enough of Super Sugar Crisp.” Charlie, maybe? His voice sounded so different, unchanged.

More sadness broke over her. Say a prayer for your siblings, Dana. For your parents, she told herself. For yourself as a girl. For Mulder—for her Mulder, the one who knew her, and for Mulder, the one who was a boy here, the Mulder who might not ever meet her at all.

On that melancholy thought, she stepped out the window.

Berkeley, California
12 Hours AfterScully Vanishes
1999

Skinner wasn’t answering his phone anymore. Mulder had probably called him twenty times, and he had stopped answering more than an hour ago, after giving Mulder a final stern lecture about getting sleep and getting updated again in the morning.

Who are we fooling, boss?

It was about midnight, and Mulder was still in the lab, sitting with his face cupped in his hands. He didn’t anticipate sleeping that night. Come to think of it, he hadn’t slept very well the night before, either, because of… well, because of other Scully-related emotions, like guilt and regret and anger and frustration.

So this was shaping up to be Agent Mulder thinking at his absolute worst when it needed to be him thinking at his absolute best.

His brain, once his reliable ally, had been letting him down so often as of late. He ran his palm across his forehead, still able to feel the slight ridge where the incision had been made. It was healing very well, and the doctors said you would barely be able to see the scar. There was no bandage anymore. But sometimes, he could still feel a phantom pain, the ghost of an intrusive scalpel.

No work, Mulder. Closing his eyes, touching his forehead, he remembered her fingers running across his head, pushing through his hair to check the bandage.

Mulder removed his own hands from his head, unclenched his jaw. You’re a pathetic man.

Anish was still in the lab, too, eating a giant bag of Skittles absent-mindedly as he tapped away at his computer, working on what looked like a graduate school assignment. It turned Mulder’s stomach to see someone eat so much sugar so late, but he supposed that was a perk of youth.

The young man seemed to sense Mulder’s attention on him, and he looked up from his work. “Find something new?”

“No,” Mulder said sullenly.

Three printed photos lay in front of him, arranged perfectly equidistant from one another.

Three transmissions received so far from Scully’s body cam: the rag doll, and two more since.

Mulder had been looking at the photos for hours now. Taking desperate notes. He could practically recite what he had written.

Photo 1: Received at 12:37 pm, approximately seven minutes after Scully vanished. The rag doll. In a child’s bedroom, likely Scully’s in San Diego. Will confirm details with M. Scully tomorrow.

Photo 2: Received at 2:33 pm. Picture slightly blurry, but seems to be a street corner. A car—identified tentatively as a 1968 Chrysler Imperial, light in color—visible driving in background. Looks to be California plates. The front of a McDonalds’ restaurant in right of photo.

Photo 3: Received at 2:48 pm. Picture grainy / shadowy. Nothing can be identified. Camera may have been obscured by fabric. An image in the corner may be one of Scully’s fingers? Wishful thinking?

It had been about eleven hours now since a new image had come through.

Anish eyed Mulder hopefully. The young man had taken on an admiring attitude towards him since Mulder’s attack on Hays this afternoon, which suggested that Hays wasn’t a very good guy to work with. Anish held out his giant bag of candy. “Do you want some Skittles?” he said.

“I’m good, thanks,” Mulder said.

“That car seems like a good lead,” Anish said, gesturing to photo 2. “That means it can’t possibly be any earlier than 1968, right?”

“Right,” Mulder said. “But it could be years later. Because people drive cars long after the year they were produced. Even today, somebody is probably driving a 1968 Chrysler Imperial somewhere out there on the streets.”

“What about the McDonald’s storefront? You thought the design might be important,” Anish said.

“They’re using a logo introduced in the late 1960s, too,” Mulder said dully. “I can’t see much else in the photo.”

“So if she’s standing in front of a McDonald’s, she must have left her childhood home, right?” Anish said. “She must have decided to go somewhere. Do you know where she might have gone?”

Mulder shook his head. “It depends what year it is exactly, what she thinks might be possible,” he said. “I need to talk to her mom. Mrs. Scully will hopefully be able to give me some details about the picture of the bedroom—narrow down what year it could be.” He shifted uneasily. “I probably should have called Mrs. Scully today. But I… didn’t want to have this conversation unless I absolutely had to.”

The truth is, Mulder thought, I’m an idiot, and I was hoping we could magically bring Scully back. And that I would never have to call Mrs. Scully at all.

Anish nodded. “What about …” He lowered his voice, looking around the lab, as though worried he might be overheard. “Dr. Hays? Any word there?”

Mulder glumly shook his head. He would have dearly loved the assignment of interrogating Hays, of getting him to say what he knew about the time travel angle, but Skinner took over that task himself. They had been holed up in the San Francisco field office since Scully’s disappearance, apparently able to hold Hays on some kind of endangerment charge, but Skinner had not been ready to update Mulder yet.

“So Agent Scully and you … you’re partners, like on TV, like cops,” the young man said curiously. “But you two also …?” He looked like he was choosing his words carefully.

Mulder found he didn’t have the energy to be offended by Anish’s obvious implication. He just shook his head. “No,” he said, and it came out as a sigh so obviously charged with regret that he didn’t even bother to disguise it. “No.”

“Oh,” Anish said, looking a little embarrassed. “Well, you two are very close, aren’t you?”

“She’s the person I’m closest to in the whole world.”

That came out easily. It was true. It had been true for years. It would always be true, probably, no matter what. Even if she left him for good. She has left, dumbass, and it might be for good. Mulder felt his eyes welling up like a small boy’s.

Anish took a handful of Skittles, popped them into his mouth, and crunched on them, nodding. His eyes flickered first over Mulder’s work space and then over Mulder’s face.

“Why don’t you go back to your hotel and get some sleep, Agent Mulder? I’m here working late. I can call if another image comes through.”

Mulder smiled sadly at the kid. “Not gonna happen, Anish.”

“Okay, how about this? There’s a sofa in one of the break rooms down the hall,” Anish suggested. “Lots of us have napped there before. Go lie down so you’re fresh when the next one comes in.”

Mulder weighed this option more seriously. He would be better off if he slept a little.

“You’d wake me up right away if another came in?” he said. “Or if you decide to go home?”

“Of course,” Anish nodded in agreement. “It’s the grad school code. We watch out for one another when we’re on unhealthy sleep schedules.”

Mulder ran his hand down his face, noticing from the texture how long it had been since he’d shaved, too. “Ninety minutes,” he warned. “No longer.”

The kid beamed. “You got it, Agent Mulder. Let me show you where to go. There’s even a pillow there, if you don’t mind it being kind of flat. And with an old coffee smell.”

Mulder stood up, already feeling his blinks getting heavier. If Scully were here, she would tell him sleeping was the right decision. If Scully were here, she would insist on it.

He reflected on a particularly treasured memory: one time, when they were working very late in a motel room, he was particularly wired, and she lay down next to him, running her fingers through his hair, running her hand up and down his back, until he fell asleep, before returning to her own room. He fully expected to relive that memory to put himself to sleep on the grad student lounge sofa.

But just as they reached the door to the hallway, the monitor near Anish’s module began to beep again.

San Diego, California
Thanksgiving Day,1973

For a while after leaving her house, Scully just walked, constantly, without a real destination in mind.

She remembered very little about the geography of 1970s San Diego, the streets on the outskirts of the base like this, so she just circled palm tree-lined blocks somewhat aimlessly, sometimes retracing her steps, mostly trying to calm her nerves. Her legs shook, and her stomach grumbled. Sweat began to pool at the back of her neck.

She was also lost in a different way—caught in a sense of the unreal. The way people were dressed, the cars, the avocado and mustard colors of all the advertising: it was like being on a movie set, in a living memory.

Scully found her reflexes were slow, her mind lagging. It worried her. Nothing made sense.

Just blocks away from her family’s home, Scully, walking down the sidewalk, saw a young couple getting out of a large, boxy car, and she found herself stopping to study them.

The woman wore a rust-colored dress, long to the floor, with bell sleeves, and had a patterned kerchief stretched over her Afro. The man had curly dark hair, voluminous, grown over his ears. He wore plaid pants, wide leg. They carried covered dishes and a bottle of wine. The man was teasing the woman lightly about how much food her mother would have on the table.

Obviously, they were going inside to Thanksgiving dinner. Scully envied them fiercely, with an intensity that surprised her.

The couple, noticing Scully staring, gave each other a concerned look. She couldn’t imagine what her 1999 tailored black suit looked like to them. Not to mention the body cam apparatus that had slid down around her neck.

Pressing her lips together and putting her head down, she began walking again, faster, leaving them behind her.

Making her way up one residential street shaded with the twisting branches of jacaranda trees, she found herself walking in a zig-zag to avoid the cars parked everywhere. Somewhere, Scully could hear a radio playing a song she recognized, “Killing Me Softly.” It was the mellow old Roberta Flack version, not the nineties hip-hop cover more recently familiar to her.

She stopped for a moment to examine a newspaper splayed on the sidewalk, slipping out of its plastic sleeve. The San Diego Union. Nixon Attorney Confirms Gap in Watergate Tape. Scully blinked. This was real. She was really here, in 1973.

A distance ahead, she was puzzled by bare feet sticking out the rear of a parked brown pick-up truck, until she heard young voices calling out lyrics to the song. Standing on tiptoe from the sidewalk, she could just barely see a trio of teenagers reclining in the truck’s back, singing along intensely, if somewhat off-key. “Strumming my pain with his fingers, singing my life with his words…” they wailed softly, eyes closed dramatically. One girl held something lit and rolled pinched in her fingers. The faint aroma of marijuana wafted Scully’s way.

She made her way carefully around the driveway with the pick-up truck, unseen by the teens in the back. Those kids were, she realized in quiet shock, actually older than her. That thought made her queasy. She was a person out of her proper sequence.

Just a few houses down, she found the source of all the parked cars, a giant gathering in a tiny stucco house. A faint scowl on her face, Scully couldn’t seem to stop herself from pausing on the sidewalk to observe the waves of people spilling out into the yard: men with sideburns and bellies holding beers; children in earth-tone tee shirts chasing a dog with a rubber ball; middle-aged women in wide-legged pants with cigarettes hanging from their mouths. An overstuffed family Thanksgiving in mild California weather.

Scully looked it over with a sense of remove, taking in every detail. She should be the age of the children throwing the ball to the golden retriever. That should be her.

“Can I help you, honey?” called one of the women with the cigarettes, her eyes narrowing a little as she noticed Scully.

“Sorry,” Scully said. “No, I was … looking for someone.”

Feeling foolish, she walked away again, picking up her pace again. It wasn’t a good idea to play some kind of tourist, she told herself sternly. You’ve got to keep moving.

But moving where? As she walked further, she found herself becoming more anxious. She found herself looking over her shoulder, watching out for someone following her. She felt foolish about it instantly, but she couldn’t seem to turn it off.

Who exactly are you watching for? she scolded herself. Absolutely no one knows you in 1973. You have no record, no identity, no past. You, as you are now, don’t exist.

This thought made her lip begin to tremble. Longing for Mulder hit her with a sharp, sudden impact. She imagined pressing her face into his chest, resting her forehead there, breathing him in.

And that was painful, because it was neither possible nor, really, the way Mulder wanted her to need him. She blinked, and her eyes were wet.

These were not the right circumstances for Scully to operate at her best. She needed to regroup. She needed some clarity.

She found a twenty dollar bill in the pocket of her jacket. It was supposed to be to tip the cab driver in 1999 Berkeley, but Mulder had tipped him first, so her bill was still there. She studied it. The bill said “1988” on it, had the wrong Secretary of Treasury signature, and it would most likely be perceived to be a counterfeit if examined closely, but she thought she could probably use it to buy some food. It looked enough like a 1973 bill that no one would pick it up and scrutinize it.

From a distance, at a busy intersection, she could spot the golden arches that a lifetime’s worth of marketing had taught her to associate with hamburgers. She tended to try to dissuade Mulder from stopping at McDonald’s when they traveled in 1999—so greasy, and there was that thing about the chlorofluorocarbons in the styrofoam packaging that got her out of the habit of eating there in her twenties. But it seemed like it would do the trick now. She could go for fries.

As she approached the restaurant, she heard the whirring and clicking sound again from the body camera around her neck. She grabbed hold of the camera again, looking at it, puzzled. Was it only intermittently working? What was becoming of the images it was sending? The body cam, along with her conspicuous clothing, were problems she would need to solve, and soon. But first, food.

When she reached the McDonalds, the lights were off. The restaurant was empty.

Of course it was. It was Thanksgiving Day, and fast food restaurants were not open on Thanksgiving Day in 1973 as they were in 1999.

Feeling helpless, desperate, she pressed a hand to the glass on the door. There was a brown and yellow advertising poster looking down on her, bearing the image of a happy seventies family eating cheeseburgers and gazing affectionately at one another under the slogan “You Deserve A Break Today.”

I really, really fucking do.

Scully took unsteady steps backwards, sitting almost without thinking at an outdoor table, feeling the tears welling up in her eyes. She put her hands on her head, trying to hold back her sobs, but they were coming now anyway.

So unbelievably stupid. After traveling in time, after seeing her childhood bedroom, after hearing Melissa’s voice, after being in the same house with her father, it was not being able to buy fries from fucking McDonald’s that finally broke her.

She startled as the damn body camera made its whirring and clicking sound again, around her neck, worried that evidence of her little collapse had been recorded, but it hadn’t been pointed anywhere near her face. It was aimed inward, towards her clothes, and probably couldn’t see anything much at all.

Wiping her eyes on the back of her hand, she forced herself to settle down. Figure out the camera, Dana. Do something practical.

Examining the camera more closely, she could see that there was a mechanism, a button. She supposed that if you pressed the button, you took a still image, not video. That was something to remember. There seemed to be a little timer. Scully turned the camera over in her hands, looking at it for any marking or instruction. It was designed to transmit its images digitally. It seemed impossible and illogical to her that any images it would take now could be transmitted back to Hays’ lab—how would that work? How would they be received, between 1973 and 1999? That seemed absurd.

On the other hand, she felt at the margins of her knowledge here anyway, uncertain of the time travel technology at work, uncertain of whatever this was Hays had set into play. There was a Mulder-esque murkiness to all of this that meant almost anything was possible.

If there were any chance the camera could be transmitting its images back to the lab, she should probably try to communicate through this channel, at least give some indication of what happened to her. Give some idea to Mulder.

If the camera worked. If it transmitted images to 1999. If Mulder still had a partner named Dana Scully. If Dana Scully wasn’t just some long-vanished little girl from an X-file.

Placing the body cam on her lap, Scully closed her eyes, and put her hands over her face. All these contingencies were too terrifying to consider right now.

“Hey babe, you all right?”

Startled, Scully looked up, quickly putting her hands in her lap to hide the body cam. She looked around for the source of the voice: a young woman’s head, popping out of a rolled-down car window, pulled into the parking lot.

“Yes, I am,” Scully called back, sitting up straight. “Thank you.”

“You sure?” the woman said. She seemed to shift gears of her car, a battered olive green jalopy of a make Scully didn’t recognize, and she put it in park with a little jerking motion. Scully now noticed she had a friend sitting next to her in the front seat. “You look fucking sad as hell.”

“Yes, I—” Scully struggled a little to make up a lie. “I’m just lost, and I need to get somewhere, and I’m trying to figure it out. But I’ll be fine. I’m fine.” She tried to look casual and disinterested.

The woman got out of her car, and Scully could see now how young she was, no more than mid-twenties, possibly younger. She was slight, pretty, her hair very dark and long, dressed in a long fringed crochet vest and jeans.

“Pilgrim, right?” the woman said, pointing a finger at Scully with a knowing smile.

“W-what?”

“You’re a pilgrim, right? For Thanksgiving?” the girl gestured to Scully’s torso. “But you’re a man pilgrim, not a chick pilgrim, which I dig. You can wear whatever kind of costume you want.”

Scully looked down at her 1999 black suit, the pointed white collar poking out the top. “Oh,” she said. “Yeah, I suppose I could look like a pilgrim.”

“She doesn’t have one of those, like, fucking hats though,” said the second girl, who also stood out of the car. “Like, with the buckles.”

“I’m not dressed as a pilgrim on purpose,” Scully said. “I just don’t have any other clothes. I—lost all my belongings. Would you all happen to know where I could … get some more clothes? Very cheap? Today? And maybe some food, too?”

The first woman didn’t answer, but gave her a funny, concerned look. “I’m Silvia,” she said. “This is Mo.”

Scully felt the urge to shake hands, but it seemed too formal for the circumstances. She managed a wan smile. “I’m Dana.”

“Dana,” Silvia said, fingering the end of her long hair, “if some asshole husband beat you up or kicked you out, you know you are not alone, right?”

“That’s right,” Mo nodded, pursing her lips. She had curly red hair, darker than Scully’s, that framed her head like a wild, frizzy halo.

Scully scowled. “That’s not exactly what happened,” she said. Her voice sounded dry and brittle as she considered the girls’ faces. “But … I am in some trouble, and I could use some help.”

Silvia and Mo looked at each other. Mo raised an eyebrow, and Silvia shrugged.

“We can’t leave a pilgrim in front of a fucking McDonald’s alone and crying on Thanksgiving,” Silvia said.

Mo threw open the car door, gestured, and Scully, grateful but trepidacious, climbed inside.

***

Silvia and Mo were twenty-four years old, roommates, and—Scully thought—possibly girlfriends. In the car, she saw Mo grab Silvia’s hand, lightly run back and forth over her knuckles with her thumb, and she wondered. It could be a friendly gesture, but it could also be the way you touch someone you love.

Truthfully, it was a gesture her own knuckles recognized. She could feel the ghost of Mulder’s thumb, brushing over her fingers, even just thinking about it, even just seeing it between two other people. On her lap, in the back seat of the car, her fingers reached out involuntarily for his.

She was, apparently, very wrong about what that kind of touch meant from Mulder. So maybe her intuition couldn’t be trusted about anyone’s relationship.

In any case, Silvia and Mo’s relationship was probably none of her business, and it seemed unlikely to come up. The potential complications for two women in a relationship could be different in 1973, even for young people who identified with the counterculture in the way that they clearly did, and she didn’t want to risk making them uncomfortable.

They lived in a ramshackle bungalow a block from the beach—“Casa Que Pasa,” Silvia said affectionately, as she pushed open the screen door. Scully thought wistfully that this housing could only be possible in the seventies, because a house in this prime location in San Diego would definitely not be affordable in 1999, no matter how decrepit the building might be. The house smelled a little funky, had wooden crates for furniture, tie-dyed sheets for curtains, and old-fashioned woven rugs on the floor. There was a mattress with a faded batik bedspread. But a breeze from the sea blew through the windows, setting some hand-made windchimes into song. You could see the appeal.

“I know you’re hungry, Dana the Pilgrim, so I’ll make you a peanut butter sandwich,” Mo assured Scully. “And I think we have some Tang.”

“Thank you,” Scully said. She didn’t even know the last time she had Tang, or if it still existed in 1999. “That sounds … perfect.”

Silvia reached into a closet and pulled out a maxi-length sundress in a bohemian print and handed it to Scully. “We’re the same size, probably. Go put it on, and if that fits, it’s yours.”

Scully, taking in the modest furnishings and limited belongings in the house, felt guilty taking their food and clothes, but she also knew her options were limited. And the generous cut of a maxi sundress would be good at disguising what she needed to: a body cam, plus her gun in its holster, strapped flush to her.

But as she began to undress in the bathroom, she found her conscience would not leave her alone. Scully knew the two women did not quite believe her when she said she had not been kicked out of the house by a boyfriend or husband, and she had let this fiction hang in the air, as it seemed preferable to trying to make up another lie. The looks on their faces, their serious, compassionate expressions, she suspected one—or maybe both—of the pair had some experience with domestic violence themselves. Their sympathy was hard won.

That’s a terrible thing to exploit, thought Scully, pulling the sundress over her head.

She regarded herself in the cracked mirror in Casa Que Pasa’s bathroom. The sundress had cap sleeves, a high laced waist, a light purple bohemian pattern, and was loose, flowing in tiers all the way to the floor. Under the folds of the dress, her weapon was completely obscured, as was the bodycam she had strapped on to her holster.

Scully swallowed. She looked believably like she belonged to the year 1973, although her hair still stood out. With both hands, she fluffed her hair aggressively, trying to get it to fall differently, to part down the middle, maybe. But she suspected it was just too short and cut wrong. Her efforts mostly just left it looking messy.

She tilted her head to the side, noticing other flaws. Her eyes were wide, slightly bloodshot. Her face was pale. She looked older, weary, less energetic and youthful than Silvia and Mo, even though they were actually, literally, chronologically, fifteen years older than her.

She sighed.

Then she noticed the problem of her bra. The champagne-colored straps of the bra peeked out the edges of the neckline of the sundress, as well as the top of the cups. The bra had a sleek late nineties lift-and-compress technology that didn’t seem very seventies-friendly, and she suspected the most authentic look for the time period and the outfit was just to lose the bra altogether. She reached into the dress and unclasped the back, wriggling it off and threading it out the sleeve, rolling her eyes a little as she did. She hated not wearing a bra in public.

In fact, bohemian was never her preferred look. Looking at herself in the mirror—the dress, the bralessness, the lack of makeup—she thought she probably looked more like Melissa than she ever could remember. Maybe like Melissa in her mid-twenties, in her Jerry Garcia phase, when she always smelled like pot and patchouli.

“You okay in there, Pilgrim?” called Silvia.

“Yeah,” called Scully, hastily wrapping her bra up into a little pile with her black suit and shirt. “Coming out.”

She stepped out of the bathroom self-consciously smoothing down the dress, but Silvia clapped her hands together. “Oh shit, you’re not a pilgrim any more. It fits you perfectly,” she said. “Fits you better, actually.”

“I’m really grateful,” Scully said, her brow furrowing. “I can’t thank you enough.”

“Stop thanking us,” Silvia said. “We want to help you out, man. ‘Tis the season.”

Mo had a sandwich and potato chips on an aluminum plate, and Scully, with shaky hands, accepted the plate and the cup of Tang, sitting cross-legged on a cushion on the floor to eat it. She could have wept to see the food. But as she was biting into her sandwich, she looked up to meet Silvia’s eyes.

“Listen,” she said, swallowing her bite. “I need you to know that I’m not … I wasn’t beat up or kicked out of my house. That’s not what happened to me. I just don’t want to mislead you two, when you’ve been so kind to me.”

Silvia exchanged glances with Mo, who was lying on the mattress, eating potato chips from the bag. “All right,” she said. “If you say so. But something fucking bad happened to you.”

Scully nodded. “Yeah,” she said, and she was surprised by how shaky, how small her voice sounded. “That’s true enough. Something bad did happen.”

“But you can’t talk about it?”

“Probably not,” Scully said wearily. “No.”

Mo studied her face. “Okay. So now what?”

Scully scowled. “Now what? What do you mean?”

“What’s next for you? What’s your mission? What do you need to do to be okay again?”

Scully swallowed another bite of her sandwich, staring at it. She was silent for a moment. She looked up at Mo again, and she noticed that Silvia was leaning back against the mattress now, resting her head against Mo’s torso casually. Scully felt a warm tingling in the back of her own head, the insistent press of a physical memory, of resting against someone’s shoulder.

For the first time since she had arrived in 1973, she found herself able to have a clear, unambiguous thought. She took a breath. Put her sandwich down.

“I think I …. need to go out of town,” she said slowly. “To fix things, I need to find someone.”

Silvia and Mo again looked at each other. “Well,” Silvia said, slowly. “If you need to go somewhere, then today really is your lucky day.”

Sources:

“You Deserve A Break Today,” 1973

The Boy on the Beach (2/16)

Read on AO3 | Tagging@today-in-fic

Chapter 2: Touchstone, With Casserole

Four Weeks Before Scully Vanishes
1999
Alexandria, Virginia

She came to his apartment that day to check in on him, cradling a casserole dish of warm rigatoni in her arms, a baguette tucked under her elbow. She was there to show her care with a home cooked meal, the way her mother had taught her. Or so went the story she told herself.

That day, Scully wasn’t wearing black. That day, her shirt was soft and light blue, like sky, like open sea. Her face was still browned and freckled from her time in the sun on the beach in the Cote d’ Ivoire.

“You’re kidding. A casserole?” he crowed with delight, eyes on the pan, stepping aside to let her in. “I really must have been close to death, because she decided it went beyond takeout.”

“It’s not that exciting,” Scully said, flushing a little. “It’s rigatoni.”

Mulder took the pan from her, making a point of inhaling it dramatically. “It smells amazing. And … this is an actual casserole pan? You own a casserole pan?”

“I’m Maggie Scully’s daughter,” Scully said. “Of course I own a freaking casserole pan.”

Mulder laughed at that, and she felt her face bloom into a smile, too. He still had the bandage swaddling his skull, of course, but he looked very good, considering: well-rested, dressed, freshly-shaved. As he moved into his kitchen carrying the rigatoni, she followed him, trying to visually assess the state of the gauze around his head. Did it look clean, well-tended?

“You’re staying for dinner, right?” he said. “Two plates? Two glasses?”

“No wine,” Scully said. “You shouldn’t drink.”

“I know, Doc,” Mulder said, rolling his eyes. “I’m a model brain surgery recovery patient.”

“If that’s true, I’d find it very surprising.”

“Just serving up water tonight,” he said lightly. “Hey, it’s good you’re staying to eat. I have something I want to run by you. Something I’ve been thinking about.”

Scully, edging past him in the kitchen, found a cutting board and began slicing the baguette, her face composed. “Sounds pretty serious,” she said. “It’s always dangerous to give you time at home.”

“Oh, Scully,” Mulder said, nudging her with his hip. “You know I can be dangerous wherever I am.”

“Right,” she nodded, concealing a smile. “So what’s on your mind?”

“Is that a brain surgery joke?”

“Absolutely not.” Scully shot him a look.

“It’s … just a project I think will be perfect for getting me back into the swing of things at the office.”

She stopped cutting for a moment, her eyes on the bread. “This is about work?” she said.

He huffed a little laugh. “What else, Scully? This is me we’re talking about. I’ve got to get back to the calling.”

“Right,” she said, resuming her slicing, “I don’t know what I was thinking.”

***
They ate the rigatoni and bread off plates on their laps sitting on his couch, the same place they had eaten countless dinners from takeout containers and pizza boxes.

Mulder finished speeding through his second helping— his appetite, apparently, having recovered nicely— and placed the plate on the coffee table. He stretched back on the sofa, folded his hands behind his bandaged head, and fixed his eyes at a point on the wall.

Scully, feeling something coming, continued to eat her dinner and waited, her eyes trained on him.

“So you know, Scully, I had these … visions while I was in surgery,” he said, as though he were considering where to begin.

“You mentioned,” Scully replied. “Of choosing another life. A more comfortable life, where you had your sister.”

“I was married to Diana in that life,” he added. “We even had children. We lived in some perfect suburban neighborhood, where everyone knew everyone else. Almost like the Falls at Arcadia.”

Scully placed her fork on her plate very slowly, very carefully, so that it made no sound.

Belatedly, Mulder seemed to realize that this might be a delicate topic. “You have to understand that it was all a lie, Scully. It was meant to be a lie. Not my real path.”

But it was meant to be a beautiful lie, Scully thought. A temptation. Something you should not choose, but that you desperately want. Not this fate you have ended up with. Not this damaged partner.

She quickly blinked her eyes to keep Mulder from noticing any involuntary telltale evidence of her reaction, but he wasn’t watching her anyway.

“There was another part to the vision, too,” Mulder said. “It was just me on a beach, watching a little boy building something in the sand. I keep thinking about this part of the vision, because I think it’s harder to interpret, and I think it means something important.”

“What little boy?” Scully said. She cleared her throat. “Did you know him?”

“No,” Mulder said. “I didn’t. Although he did … feel familiar. His project in the sand kept getting destroyed by the sea. And I told him he could rebuild it. In the end, I realized the little boy was building a giant spaceship.”

“A boy on a beach,” Scully repeated. She studied his face. “What do you think it meant?”

“Children in dreams and visions normally represent our own pasts, the parts of us that are still children,” Mulder said. “It could mean that for me – you know understanding my past is so important to me. But then I got a call from a scientist, Scully, and I realized … the child might represent something more specific, something relevant to what this man studies.”

Scully shifted in her seat, suddenly restless and uncomfortable. She knew what was coming, and she was trying not to feel despair. Some outsider offering Mulder some magical hope. Another sparkly white whale.

“His name is Dr. Simeon Hays,” Mulder said. “Neurobiology department at University of California at Berkeley. And he says, Scully, that he can make it possible that an investigator can go into someone’s mind and revisit their memories.”

***
It was clear that Mulder adored Simeon Hays. It was, he said, the freakiest research on the brain out there.

“You’ll love it, too,” he told Scully. “So much of what we have taken to be ‘supernatural’ in origin he says we can understand just through a better conception of the poorly understood areas of our brains. So much of what the artifact brought out in my own brain activity.”

Scully was trying, she really was. She could tell Mulder wanted her curiosity, at least, if not her enthusiasm.

“Let me guess,” Scully said. “His work would help explain everything in the X-files.”

“Not everything, but yes, a great deal of it,” Mulder said earnestly. “And he thinks if his lab works with the F.B.I., we can pioneer a kind of investigative technique that allows a law enforcement officer to revisit a crime scene in someone’s mind, mentally, psychically, and observe a crime in the past. Imagine the potential. You can see who the perp is firsthand and search for relevant evidence.”

“Time travel,” Scully said, scowling. “Or telepathy?”

“Both,” Mulder said. “Sort of. I can show you the work, Scully. I’ll come in Monday and show you the slide show.”

“No work for you yet,” Scully said firmly.

“I might as well recover sitting in the basement as sitting at home, right? You’re a doctor. I’m actually safer with you.”

“When is your next follow up, Mulder?” Scully said. “What has your doctor been saying about inflammation?”

“I’m healing well,” he said, his eyes soft and pleading. “Scully, I need a project.”

Don’t need a project, she begged internally. Stay home. I will stay with you, tuck you into bed, lie beside you, and check your head for infection until I can breathe easy again.

“You shouldn’t be working on a case yet,” Scully insisted. “Skinner won’t agree.”

“It’s not a case,” Mulder replied. “It’s an experimental investigative technique with relevance to the X-files. Skinner agreed we could look into it.”

Scully slumped down a little on the sofa, feeling defeated, betrayed by Skinner.

“Tell me. What do you know about hyperthymesia?” Mulder said, standing up, starting to pace.

“Is there anything I can do to stop this, Mulder? Anything at all?”

“Hyperthymesia?” he said. “From the Greek roots hyper, meaning excessive, and thymesia, memory.”

“It’s the ability to recall the details of one’s own life with an unusual degree of accuracy,” Scully sighed, reluctantly. “Not to remember details from an image, say, as in an eidetic memory, but specifically the chronology of your own life.”

“Precisely.” He smiled at her, delighted, and her stomach flipped in a way it really shouldn’t. It really, really, shouldn’t.

This had always been one of her favorite versions of Mulder: Mulder presenting the facts. Brimming with energy and wit and anecdote and flirtatious riposte.

Mulder with fast-blinking bright eyes. Mulder with some carefully-curated slide show of curiosities. Mulder slyly tracking her every word, her every expression. It was the first version of Mulder she met, in the basement, back when neither of them understood the significance of the pattern they were setting.

It was also, probably, the happiest version of Mulder. And it also suggested intriguing clues as to what he might be like as a lover. Eager. Endearing. Engaging. Hyper attentive. Mulder in bed, Mulder as someone’s besotted boyfriend or spouse – a possibly even happier version of Mulder, she thought speculatively.

Was it wrong that Scully had hoped she might see that Mulder? That she was frustrated that the slide show seemed stuck, that it couldn’t quite advance?

Perhaps that was the version of himself he saw living in his dream, married to a woman who was not Scully—a woman who was now dead, she realized. Perhaps that version of Mulder was dead now, too.

“What is the difference, Scully, between revisiting a memory and actually traveling back into the past?”

“I would say it’s a considerable difference,” she said. “It’s the difference between perception of an experience and having an actual experience, which is significant.”

Mulder nodded, a little smile, as if he expected this answer. He picked up a baseball from the desk, and he began tossing it in the air.

“Hays has been studying people with extreme hyperthymesia,” he said. “These are people whose recall of events go beyond even the impressive recall of typical hyperthymesia.”

“How so?”

“With typical hyperthymesia, a person might remember what she ate for lunch fifteen years ago, and what time her doctor’s appointment was on June 2, 1989. But Hays’ subjects, with this extreme hyperthymesia, could also remember the people they passed on the street that day. What other items were on the menu at the restaurant. What songs were playing on the radio in the waiting room.”

“That sounds more like eidetic memory,” Scully commented.

“No, it’s more like telepathy,” Mulder said, throwing the baseball up triumphantly and catching it. “Telepathy with the past!”

“I assume that isn’t a technical neurological term.”

“When these extreme hyperthymesia patients are recalling a memory, the same parts of their brains are activated as … me, when I was Mr. Mind Reader,” Mulder said. “And documented psychics and telepaths. This extreme hyperthymesia is somehow related to telepathic ability.”

Scully frowned. She was imagining Mulder’s hopes for this all too clearly.

“So you can imagine, Scully—a person with this capability who was in the vicinity of a crime, who could be used as a witness? That person could be asked to call up memories to observe details, people present, cars parked in the area, whatever you want.”

“Mulder, I thought typical hyperthymesia was fairly rare,” Scully said. “Fewer than one hundred known cases.”

“That’s right,” Mulder said, smiling charmingly. He tossed the baseball again.

“Let’s assume for a moment the science on Hays’s theory checks out,” Scully said. “How does this play out realistically for an actual investigation? We would need to employ the services of someone with this extreme hyperthymesia, which I assume is even rarer?”

“No,” Mulder said. “This is the genius part. Hays thinks he can activate, using mild electric stimulus, this region of the brain in anyone. So a brave FBI agent and a witness together could enter into that person’s memories, and could see the scene of the crime themselves.”

Scully said nothing. She ran her hand over the scratchy surface of the patterned blanket that always sat at the end of Mulder’s couch.

“It’s at least interesting, isn’t it?” Mulder said. “Worth looking into?”

“Of course,” Scully said. “So long as we take it slow. And your expectations are low.”

There was a pause. It was obviously too late for keeping expectations low. She could almost feel Mulder’s heightened hopes, making the air thicker around them, making it hard to breathe.

“You have some reservations, I take it?”

“This is about new investigative techniques,” she said. “But obviously… it’s about your own personal quest, too?”

Mulder smiled sheepishly. “I know, I know, you’re thinking about holes drilled in my head. And yeah, obviously, Scully, any technique that improves memory and recall makes me think I might be able to get closer to my questions about my past,” he said. “But this has hard data behind it. You can talk to Dr. Hays yourself. Until you’re satisfied.”

“Until I’m satisfied,” Scully repeated. “You promise?”

“Of course,” Mulder said.

She smiled at him, pretending like it was a good enough answer. He threw his baseball into the air and was fooled. He was always fooled.

***

Later, when she was leaving with her empty casserole pan and a hollow feeling in her chest, she thought about the boy on the beach again. She didn’t entirely understand why Mulder thought the boy was necessarily connected to Hays’ research, but she couldn’t bear to ask him follow-up questions about it.

She didn’t want to hear his madcap theories about what the boy symbolized, about what youth stood for in dreams, about memory and the past and hyperthymesia.

Not when his theories were wrong. Not when it was obvious to her who the boy could be, should be. Might be.

It was unfair to be upset with Mulder for not seeing what she did. She had not yet mentioned the idea of doing IVF to him, not told him she had looked into it, gone to appointments, thought through possibilities. He didn’t know she had the biggest question of her life on the tip of her tongue, a question she might never work up the nerve to ask.

But even not knowing any of that, Scully thought, as she slid into her car, he should have seen the boy on the beach didn’t just relate to him. That part wasn’t hidden. That was obvious.

She and the little boy had been the same, hadn’t they? Digging a spaceship for him on a beach, searching for a way to wake him up. She and the little boy were working in symmetry, in connection. Whoever the little boy was, he was linked to her, too.

As she started her car, she thought about Mulder, always circling back again to the same ideas in a different form. Her human ouroboros. He saw his answers as lying somewhere buried in the past waiting to be found, hidden under some layer of sand. But what if he were wrong? What if the answer was something he was supposed to build? If it was, could she ever convince him?

The Boy on the Beach (1/16)

Read on AO3 | Tagging@today-in-fic

Prologue

“My heart leaps up, said Wordsworth, when I behold a rainbow in the sky. So was it when my life began; so is it now I am a man.”

“And is that the case for you?” says Scully, for whom the truth is always irrevocable, a fixed star. “Does your heart leap up?”

Mulder considers the question. Did my heart ever leap? Leap to what, to whom, to where? And if it had, would I remember?

Chapter 1: The Empty Chair

Berkeley, California
Thirty Seconds After Scully Vanishes
1999

One moment she was sitting in the chair. Her chin up, her expression ice. And the next moment she was gone.

No one had to tell Mulder something had gone wrong. No one had to tell him the difference between having Scully and lacking Scully. In that distinction he was expert.

And after all, he knew they were not supposed to be staring at a fucking empty chair.

Mulder’s terror slowed his body. Made his limbs thick and heavy, like he was underwater. He watched the scientists helplessly through the glass. He felt like one of his goddamned fish.

The assistants, probably graduate students, were putting on a good front. But Mulder, watching in surreal slow motion, could see they were giving each other uneasy looks, murmuring to one another. One of them, a young woman who had been speaking with Scully just a few minutes before it happened, began tapping the counter in front of her with nervous energy. Eventually she fidgeted and glanced behind her, making accidental eye contact with Mulder through the glass.

The look in the young woman’s eye was unmistakable: pity. And this was enough to wake Mulder from his stupor.

He discovered his feet again, began walking, faster and faster, and then he pushed into the room in a straight, unerring line until he was face-to-face with Dr. Hays, who stood, slack-jawed.

“Hey.” His voice was loud, echoing through the lab. “Hey. Why is that chair empty?”

It sounded like a simple question. But even Hays, who couldn’t know all the rumors about Mulder, could hear the dangerous undercurrent.

“It is … unexpected,” Hays said, smooth, placating.

“Yes, unexpected is one word for it.” Now Mulder’s tone was a rubber band being stretched. “The investigator has completely vanished. I would say that’s a little fucking unexpected.”

“Mulder,” came Skinner’s voice. He was entering from across the room, no doubt sensing trouble.

“I’m afraid I don’t know quite yet what happened, Agent Mulder,” Hays said. “It’s one of several possibilities.”

“Help me understand the possibilities,” Mulder continued, burrowing his stare deep into the scientist’s face. “Because this should not have affected her physical location. This was a telepathic exercise. We all understood this.”

“Agent Mulder, we are working to figure it out,” Hays said, a wan smile. “I am going to have to ask for your patience until we can assess the situation.”

“Dr. Hays,” Mulder hissed, “understand that I’m asking this as patiently as I can. Where is Scully? Where the hell is my partner?”

“Her body camera,” one of the technicians spoke up from across the room. “The body camera she had on. I think it just transmitted something, Dr. Hays.”

“Video footage?” Hays’s eyes lit up.

“No, a single image. A still photo.”

Twenty minutes earlier—when Scully was still in the room, avoiding conversation with him, dressed like an avenging angel in black—Mulder had been told to stay out of the control room. He had been told in no uncertain terms to wait patiently behind the glass with Skinner. He had been told he would be in the way, a distraction. He was to observe only.

Mulder decided that this rule no longer applied the moment Scully disappeared into thin air. Scrambling across the room, he made it to the technician’s monitor before Hays and Skinner did.

The image was still loading, small bars of grayscale appearing at an excruciatingly slow rate. Mulder peered over the technician’s shoulder, unable to rein in his impatience. He sighed loudly.

“Yeah, uh, this image should help us find her,” the technician said, nervously glancing at Mulder, who was standing uncomfortably close to him. He was young. Probably also a grad student. Mulder didn’t respond.

“What’s your name?” Skinner asked the technician, appearing to stand with crossed arms behind them.

“Anish,” the technician said, looking unhappy.

“Her body camera is designed to transmit pictures, Anish?” Skinner asked.

“No,” Anish said, watching the screen. “It was actually designed to send video, but the tech will revert to sending still photos at regular intervals if …”

“If sending video is impossible,” Hays said, also coming behind to watch, his eyes bright.

“And under what circumstances would sending video be impossible?” Mulder said, looking sharply at Hays again.

No one answered him.

“Look, here it comes now,” Anish said softly.

The image began to take on some form.

At first it only looked to Mulder like abstract shapes, shadows, corners, all in gray, white, black. Then, as more filled in, it began to fall into place as a recognizable pattern.

“It almost looks … like a face?” Anish whispered.

A face, perhaps, but unsettling. A suggestion of eyes, nose, mouth, but with a quality that was somehow inhuman. Wrong.

“It’s not a human face,” Mulder realized quickly. “It’s a doll, I think.”

It was a rag doll, he deduced. With yarn hair and round dark circles on each cheek. As more of the picture filled in, he could see that it was sitting propped up at the end of a bed, a bed that seemed to be covered with a blanket, some sort of busy flowered pattern.

In the background there appeared to be a faintly blurry bookshelf with books and toys, more obscured details along the walls. Mulder leaned in to try to make out anything he could, but the closer he got, the image only turned into unrecognizable pixels. Some of the picture, at the top, was still filling in.

Skinner was crouching next to Mulder now, peering over his shoulder. “It looks like a child’s bedroom, maybe?”

Mulder rubbed his eyes, nodding. “Yeah. A young girl’s bedroom,” he agreed, his voice rough.

“What’s that in the bottom right of the image?”

Mulder placed his finger on the screen at the darkened triangle Skinner was referring to.

“You think that could be Scully’s foot?” Skinner said. “Like she is sitting with her leg up?”

Mulder was silent, looking at it for a moment. “Yes,” he said. “She was wearing black boots this morning with that shape to the toe. The camera was on her head, so if she were sitting with her leg up, we would be seeing … yeah. Her foot.”

“You have any idea how she would end up in a kid’s bedroom, Mulder?”

“No,” Mulder said. “I don’t.”

In silence they both regarded the image. The technician coughed uneasily.

The dulling sensation of panic. Mulder felt it, creeping over his body again, making his blood freeze, threatening to overtake his capacity to reason through this.

Scully could talk him through this. He felt her absence like a threat. Like fingers closing tighter and tighter around his neck, sealing off his windpipe.

Sucking a breath roughly through his teeth, he made an effort to calm his respiration, to shut out what was threatening to take over. In his attempt to get his shit together, his eyes picked out a detail on the image.

“Wait,” he said. “Can you … can you zoom in at all?”

“Sort of,” Anish admitted. “We don’t gain quality, but I can make it bigger.”

“I need to see the book spines on the shelf,” Mulder said. “As much as you can.”

Skinner leaned forward. “Where? There on the bottom left?”

Anish fussed with the image, enlarging it and trying his best to bring it into sharper relief.

“Little House on the Prairie.Nancy Drew.Alice in Wonderland. And there, Moby Dick,” Skinner said, “It’s Moby Dick by Herman Melville. Isn’t it?”

“Yeah,” Mulder said grimly, his stomach tightening. “Moby Dick.”

The picture in Mulder’s mind was starting to fill in, too, like a grayscale image, pixel by pixel.

“Moby Dick is a pretty grown-up book for a kid’s room. That mean something to you, Mulder?”

“It might mean something,” Mulder said. “Or maybe it’s just all a huge, fucking ominous coincidence.”

Mulder turned around to search for Hays. The scientist was now facing the other direction, no longer looking at the monitor at all. Mulder glowered at his thin gray ponytail.

“What’s going on over there on the right of the screen? That picture there on the wall?” Skinner asked, pointing at the monitor.

There was something on the bedroom wall with prominent faces and a swirly typeface. Anish centered it on the screen, zoomed in to see it better.

“A poster, maybe?” Anish suggested. “Some kids’ band? Hanson? Spice Girls?”

Mulder blinked at it.

“It is a poster,” Mulder said woodenly. “It’s a poster for The Partridge Family. You can see the beginning of the word ‘Partridge’ right here.”

“The Partridge Family?” Skinner scowled. “The old TV show? Are you sure?”

“In a kid’s bedroom?” Anish commented doubtfully.

“It’s not a popular kids’ show now,” Mulder said. He began to raise his voice now, aiming it across the room at Hays’ turned back. “But when Scully was a kid, it was.”

Hays now swiveled, slowly and deliberately, to meet Mulder’s eyes. His lips were pursed, ever so slightly. Mulder was now certain: Hays already knew.

“Mulder,” Skinner said, taking a deep breath. “Are you suggesting what I think you are?”

“I think Scully is in her own past,” Mulder said. “I think she’s in her own childhood bedroom.” His voice tapered off at the end.

“Time travel?” Skinner looked abruptly at Hays. The technician, bewildered, did, too. “Is he right, Hays? Is that possible?”

Hays examined his own fingernail, pensively, a strange little half smile on his face. “Well, yes. As a matter of fact … he might be right. And it’s extraordinary, isn’t it?” He sighed. “Time travel. Such a … breakthrough.”

In under a second, Skinner anticipated what Mulder would do next.

Mulder’s wrists were caught, easily, by Skinner before his fist reached Hays’ face.

And thirty seconds later, the Greek chorus of white-coated assistants and technicians were standing around in a semicircle watching, open-mouthed and horrified, as Skinner wrested Mulder back into a chair across the room.

“All right, all right, Mulder,” Skinner hissed, pinning Mulder’s arms behind him. “You’re going to need a cooler head here.”

“It was supposed to be me.” Mulder didn’t even recognize his own voice.

“It was never going to be you,” Skinner said calmly, like he was talking to an angry child. “It was never, ever going to be you. She and I agreed on that. So you can let go of that guilt right now. And the important thing now, I am sure you can agree, is to figure out what to do next.”

“How do we get her back?”

The chorus of assistants and technicians looked at Hays, too.

“That’s the thing,” Hays said, combing through his hair with his fingers, his maddening half smile still on his face. “I am not sure we do.”

Exact Time and Date Unknown
San Diego,California

When Scully opened her eyes, she felt the world rotating rapidly under her. She felt like she had been on a rickety spinning ride at an amusement park, the kind of ride she had never enjoyed and usually avoided.

She also couldn’t see. With her fingers she rubbed her eyes rapidly, then blinked them open and shut in panic. Everything in her field of vision appeared as pink and orange, soft and blurry blobs of light. Her hands stretched out, patting around her. She could tell she was sitting somewhere soft. Someplace with pillows. Maybe a bed.

“Mulder?” she croaked, from a deep-seated instinct.

There was no answer. There was no echo either.

Also from instinct, she reached in her jacket for her holstered weapon. It was there. That comforted her somewhat, although it was an irrational comfort. You had to be able to see to fire a gun.

Slowly the world came into focus. The first thing her eyes could really make sense of was a rag doll. Somewhere close by, dimly, she heard a whirring and clicking sound that she couldn’t quite place or process. She shook her head, trying to shake the confusion, and instead looked again at the face of the rag doll.

Which was familiar. Very familiar.

Louisa. That was the doll’s name, it came to her. She got it for Christmas in kindergarten, and she and Melissa had named it together. She slept with it on her bed every night until she was in high school. Now, Louisa should be in a box somewhere in her mother’s house, probably in her attic.

Not here, not sitting facing her on this bed, in this room. This room. Scully forced herself to take a deep breath, to swallow. A deep uneasiness was creeping over her.

This room itself was vaguely familiar. At least familiar in its component parts, in pieces and fragments.

For instance, she was crouched on a tiny twin bed with a bright bedspread and a wicker headboard. It was unquestionably her childhood bedspread: cheerful pink and orange daisies, shapes she had traced idly with her fingers countless times. And this was her bed’s pale green headboard—the one she would, as a teenager, cover in Joy Division and the Clash stickers — but now looking clean, pure, sticker-free.

Across the room, the identical twin of her bed sat in perfect parallel, piled up with pink and orange daisy throw pillows. Melissa’s prized bear, Captain Mel, sat perched on top. A picture of David Cassidy and a flyer for a Christmas concert at Immaculate Heart of Mary School were haphazardly Scotch taped up above the pillows.

Scully’s attention turned to the bookshelves. The porcelain dolls, which they rarely played with. A globe of the world she used to spin and put her finger on, imagining visiting the place upon which her finger landed. Twister. Hungry Hungry Hippos. Her Nancy Drew collection.

Next to that, Melissa’s Partridge Family poster. The pious sampler their grandmother stitched with two red-headed little girls saying their prayers and the inscription: “Now I Lay Me Down To Sleep.”

Scully, moving her head in a slow, shaky circle, let her eyes scan the room’s contents. She heard herself take a ragged breath.

Whatever this was, it was a mistake. This is not where she should be. This is not what was supposed to happen. Her mind began the familiar and comforting process of sifting through explanations.

She could be simply experiencing the extreme hyperthymesia the experiment was aimed at creating, couldn’t she? She could simply be very intensely remembering her past. This was not the memory they had been attempting to revisit; Hays had wanted her to start by targeting a day at the office the week prior. But maybe it was not as easy to target as expected.

Still, this was not the way the EH had been described to her. Why would she be remembering this experience as occurring in her adult body? She looked down at herself: her suit, her weapon, her post-pubescent, thirtysomething physiology. That was not how the phenomenon was supposed to work. If this were simply an extremely vivid memory, she would be remembering this time as it happened. She would be remembering it as a child.

Perhaps this was some kind of hallucination. Maybe this room was a convincing sensory experience constructed by her brain, informed by her childhood memories. Maybe this was some side effect of the process Hays hadn’t mentioned.

“Daaaaaana.”

A young girl’s voice, coming somewhere outside the room, startled her out of inaction. She leaped up off the bed, and stood there, wobbly-legged, uncertain, in the middle of the room. Her heart thumping, she looked back and forth around the room in a panic for a place to hide. She felt like Alice in Wonderland having eaten the “eat me” cake: absurdly too big, impractically out of scale with her surroundings.

“Dana! Come help with the potatoes!” insisted the voice again, closer. She was aware of the sound of feet pounding up stairs.

God, it was Melissa. She recognized the voice with a sudden, certain jolt.

Closet, she told herself. She ducked into the small closet adjacent to their bookshelf, pushing herself towards the back, wedging herself awkwardly behind the clothing. The hangers holding her girlhood church dresses and school uniform skirts swung gently back and forth, creaking very lightly. She waited. Listening. Trying to slow her breathing.

It smelled so painfully familiar in this closet. A mix of scents that Scully could never have described if asked, yet were somehow exactly the smell of her childhood: her mother’s old lemon laundry detergent. The strawberry shampoo she and Melissa used to use as girls. Double Bubble gum. Penny loafer shoe leather.

If this was a hallucination, it was a very detailed one, involving multiple sensory inputs. But she didn’t, in point of fact, believe that it was only a hallucination. She believed, somewhat implausibly, that she was actually here. In her past. In her childhood bedroom.

Mulder would be so proud.

Is it any more impossible than what you saw in Africa, or what you saw in me?

Through the closet door, she heard the sound of the bedroom door being thrown open, and then the impatient footsteps of a child pounding inside. “Dana! Didn’t you hear me?”

Silence.

“She’s not in here, Mom!” shouted Melissa. “That’s weird … I thought she was. She must have gone outside.”

Scully swallowed, breathing fast, feeling hot tears pooling in her eyes. Whatever was happening, that certainly seemed like her big sister outside that door. Very young. Very alive.

There was the sound of a child’s aggrieved sigh. And then clomping, heavy footsteps leaving the room. Scully could hear Melissa complaining as she went back down the stairs. “She can’t sneak off and not help with the potatoes at all,” Melissa called. “That was supposed to be Dana’s job. And what about the boys, Mom? Bill hasn’t done one single thing to help! Do I have to do everything?”

Her voice grew more distant—and was answered, somewhere, faintly, by her mother’s voice, high and young.

Inside the dim closet, Scully didn’t move for a moment, trying to process.

When she felt safe enough to step into the room again, she rubbed her wet eyes, blinking. She looked around the bedroom again, seeing it fresh.

This bedroom itself was not a room she remembered well. The Scullys moved often, in her childhood, at least up until high school, and she and Melissa normally shared a room, at least until Melissa was old enough to begin doing things like following the Dead or getting jobs at bead shops, but that all seemed to be several years away. She thought this room might belong to the second stint of naval housing they lived in in San Diego. That did not last long, only a year, because her mother didn’t like the house and they eventually requested a bigger place on the same base, a place Scully remembered better. Scully could not quite remember what year that made this, or how old she should be.

What year that made this. Scully sat down, her legs trembling, on the edge of her bed.

This was not … There was a lot to parse through here.

She tried to piece together what might have happened. She remembered being in the chair in Hays’ laboratory—and before that, Mulder, his … mission, the pain of their conflict. But that’s the last thing to be thinking of.

She needed focus.

She looked down at her clothing. She was wearing what she had been wearing in the chair: a newer black suit, fitted at the waist, her boots. Reaching her hands to her head, she realized, with a start, that she still had the body camera strapped around her head—it was lightweight, and in her anxiety, she had not remembered it was there. The whirring and clicking sounds she heard before must have been the camera recording footage, right after she woke up in the bed.

Where that footage was going, if it could possibly be transmitted anywhere… well, that was a problem to consider later.

If Hays’ little project had gone wrong, if she had somehow been sent physically to her own past, both time and place, a feat of reverse time travel that certainly should not be possible, then it raised the obvious question: where was her child self? Melissa had expected to find child Dana in the bedroom, but she obviously wasn’t.

Scully more carefully examined the surface of the bed, and this time, noticed a small green notebook sitting splayed open. Nearby, she spotted a shiny pink pencil about to roll off the bed.

She ran her fingers over the notebook’s cover. In black marker, written in straight and neat penmanship: Property of Dana Katherine Scully. Do Not Touch.

Something familiar hummed inside Scully. She flipped through the pages, seeing lines jump out, written in her own childish handwriting. “I punched Bill in the face, but he’s the one who got in trouble because I told Dad he hit me first.” and “Sister Spooky says if we dip our pencils in holy water we’ll do better on our spelling tests. Stupid.”

The last entry had only 8 and a half words. “Dear Diary, For Thanksgiving dinner today I am supp—” The last word was interrupted, the pencil mark trailing off.

And Scully could picture, with the clarity that usually came more easily to Mulder than it did to her, exactly what had happened. The child Dana’s body, sprawled here on the bed writing in her diary, was suddenly replaced, physically, by the body of her time-traveling adult self.

There was a lot she didn’t understand about the time travel mechanism at work here. From what Hays had described to her and Mulder, there wasn’t supposed to be a physical time travel mechanism at work here. Either Hays had lied, or some kind of unimaginable mistake had been made.

But her grasp of paradox, her general conception of physics and the flow of time, gave her cause to be worried. If adult Scully had replaced her child self, then her child self was no longer living the timeline that she had previously lived. This was a rupture in the established history of Dana Scully.

Whatever the … emotional situation had been with her and Mulder before she left, once it was obvious she had physically vanished, she knew Mulder would be losing his mind trying to figure out what had gone wrong.

That didn’t change about Mulder. No matter what. After all, she thought bitterly, she would become part of the all-important mission.

But that was assuming Mulder knew who she was. That the timeline hadn’t been altered. That she had grown up to be the Dana Scully she was. That she had gone into the F.B.I., that she had met Mulder, that they had taken this case.

Stay calm. There are too many unknowns to panic. Take one step at a time. Scully put her hands on her head, making herself inhale and exhale, and felt again the elastic band of the camera apparatus under her fingers. She would have to decide what to do with that 1999 camera attached to her head if she was going to leave this house and go on a 1970s adventure.

She looked down again at her interrupted child self’s diary entry. Specifically at the top, where she had written today’s date.

Thanksgiving Day, 1973.

She should have been nine years old.

Mr. Perfectly Fine

Author: SammyLovesASOIAF

For:@gaycrouton

A misunderstanding between Mulder and Scully gets out of hand.

Link Here

#XFHurtComfort 9/28

mulder, md

Author:@himb0mulder

For: twomicroscopes

“You don’t look fine,” he insists, leaning in closer as if to examine her when she doesn’t respond.

She sighs, giving in — she knows he’s not going to rest until he gets an answer out of her. “The blood drive is today. I went, and now I’m feeling a little unsteady. It’s nothing to fuss over.”

Link Here

#XFHurtComfort2022 8/28

Red-Haired Angel

Author:@msrisallaround​

For: Violetta_Valery

While on a case Mulder faces his fears in order to save Scully from a burning building.

Link Here

#XFHurtComfort2022 7/28

A Jerk About It

Author:@tempestwolfe

For:@sisterspooky1013

Mulder finds out that Scully called him a jerk, and he’s understandably hurt. It’s going to take some serious explaining for Scully to apologize, assuming she realizes why he’s so upset.

Link Here

#XFHurtComfort2022 6/28

The Things We Lost

Author:@sisterspooky1013

For: DiegoJoani

A second chance at a million lost moments.

Link Here

#XFHurtComfort2022 4/28

Author: trulla2211 

For: Exuberant2302

While Scully enjoys a nice weekend with her family in San Diego, Mulder is confronted with the shadows of his past.

Link Here

#XFHurtComfort2022 3/28

Author:@fandomsandxfiles

When some interesting news about the marital status of two agents finds it’s way to back to the FBI, questions are raised, the main one being that the agents in question don’t remember getting married.

Link to Story

Prompt:  msr getting married BUT they are both drunk when they have done that and they are with the lone gunmen in that scenario  - only they became aware of it when skinner asks them about it PS.i think someone did this prompt before but i wanna see more fics about it

Link to Free-For-All Prompts List

#XFPrompts #19

monster dog by skuls 

Fox Mulder and his unlikely rivalry with a Pomeranian. 

The Listby@leiascully

Scully would have an encyclopedic list of exquisitely minute retributions to deliver, and neither rain nor sleet nor gloom of night would distract her, if she turned her mind to it. 

The List by@30xf

The Listby@scullywolf

Gossamer Fics Tagged “The List”

Author:@kyouryokusenshi​

For:@youreneverjustanythingtomescully​

After Mulder is exonerated by the FBI, the impossible happens.

Link Here

#XFHurtComfort2022 26/28

Author: twomicroscopes

For: trulla2211

Mulder’s invited to the Scully 4th of July picnic, and he starts feeling sick. Why? 

Link Here

#XFHurtComfort2022 25/28

Author:@sculderfan​

For:@cassiopeia462​

Scully comforts a devastated Mulder after the destruction of the basement office through the fire at the end of The End. Some conversations just have to be had.

Link Here

#XFHurtComfort2022 24/28

Author:@writer-rabbit​

For:@baronessblixen​

Getting through April 30 is difficult for Scully, but vocalising her feelings just might be more so. After a half-disastrous ending to a case, Mulder helps her with both. They talk, about things they should have long ago, about things they never thought they would, and about things they didn’t even realise they could. There might be tears, there might be cuddles, and a weird amount of it all might take place at the cemetery.

Link Here

#XFHurtComfort2022 23/28