#x files fanfic

#thanksgiving with the scullys #good luck getting a seat #skinner and his hot damns #mulders mom and her weekly phone calls #xf fanfic #x-files #x files fanfic #my writing #life part 4 series

&&&&&&&&&

She woke him in the dead of night, stumbling over him, making it to the toilet with inches to spare. By the time he woke enough to call to her, ask her if she was okay, her only response was, “we’re adding beef stroganoff to the list of things we are not eating until Beans two and three are born.”

“Duly noted.” Shuffling his way into the bathroom, he handed her a towel, “need some water?”

Holding out her hand so he could help her stand, “nope. Just my toothbrush, please.”

Once back in bed, Mulder bunched her up in front of him, 3:30am entirely too early for her to have left him in the first place, vomit or not, “do you think we can tell the mothers yet? The Skinner?”

Staring into the darkened bathroom, she ignored her sore knees, bruised from her drop to the hard tile floor 10 minutes earlier, “given I’m throwing up at all hours this time around, I imagine they’ll notice tonight when I drop my winning hand and puke on your shoes.”

With a smile and a kiss to the back of her head, “that takes care of that set of parentals. What about my mom?”

Warm and comfortable, she answered with a murmured, “we could always have her down for Thanksgiving.”

“Thanksgiving is at Maggie’s.”

“We can take her with us. Scare her a little with the sheer amount of people we can fit around the kitchen table.”

Mulder snorted, shifting fine hairs on her neck and making her smile, “she’s never seen more than three people at a dinner table.”

“Then maybe it’s high time she does.” Rolling over without unseating his heavy arms, “we’ll just have to warn them not to initiate her.”

“Oh, Lord.”

“You stole my line.”

&&&&&&&&&&

Scully dressed Will in his ‘Big Brother’ onesie yet again but instead of Maggie changing him, Skinner volunteered to do it, whisking the boy into the living room before Scully could do more than draw a breath of objection. Shooting a look at Mulder, who shrugged and gave her a quick, close-lipped smirk, both waited quietly to see just what their overly tall, imposingly large boss might do as he dealt with his 15-pound grandson.

It took only a moment, but instead of a calm, rational, ‘pardon me, have I read this small fry’s belly correctly,’ it was a whooping, “hot damn!”

Scully snorted, Mulder boomed out a laugh, and the rest of the ladies shot looks back and forth just short the speed of sound. Skinner arrived in the doorway a few moments later, Will slung over one arm, facing out, shirt declaring the Mulder-Scully family news for the world to see.

There was more whooping once the information about double the baby came out two minutes later.

&&&&&&&&&&

Scully’s regular pants could only hold out so long. She expanded faster with the latest additions and sliding on her stretchy, elastic, ‘oh thank God the button breaking isn’t going to kill whomever is in front of me’ pants, she sighed in relief, “I have a feeling these kids are going to come out weighing a combined 30 pounds, with full sets of teeth and obscene amounts of hair. Fingers crossed they don’t split me in two.”

Mulder witnessed all of this from the door to their bedroom, holding a wiggling Will in his arms, and ignoring the hair and teeth diatribe, “those pants are going to come in handy with all the food we’ll be eating today.”

Her stomach roiled for a moment, then calmed, “want to borrow a pair?”

“Don’t tempt me.” Handing Will to her, “give me five minutes and I’ll be ready to go.”

“Take your time. I’m going to have to pee again in a few minutes anyways.”

“Are you sure there aren’t three kids in there?” She gave him a good, old-fashioned Scully look and he grinned, “I recall something about wanting five or six kids anyway.”

“Not all at once.”

Once in the car, Scully groped for his phone nestled against the shifter, then held it out to him, “you should call your mom.”

Mrs. Mulder had declined their invitation, citing the long drive and feeling slightly rundown. Mulder, sitting carefully upright, the containers of food stacked on his lap warming his legs through their thermal bags, “I can do it tonight.”

Knowing him as she did, she knew he’d be in some sort of food coma and needing a nap before he finished chewing the last forkful of sweet potatoes, “I love you but you’ll forget by tonight, and besides, she should hear about Bean 2 & 3.”

Knowing she was right, he took the phone, “hey, mom, it’s me.”

The conversation lasted beyond Scully parking the car, turning off the ignition, and leaning back, twisting slightly to watch him finish his conversation. He called his mother almost every Saturday, from the road or the living room, but today’s exchange made him smile wider than normal and ending with, “I will call on Saturday and figure things out, okay?” A moment later, the still oddly-stilted even after decades ‘love you, have a good night’ would never cease to have her putting her hand on his arm, fingers squeezing gently.

“What are we figuring out?”

Mulder, staring from the phone to his wife, then smiling again, “she would like to come for Christmas.”

&&&&&&&&&&&

This Thanksgiving was by far the largest dinner Maggie had hosted to date. Bill was in town, the Gunmen arrived with flaming pudding and bags of homemade rolls, Betty showed up with her mild-mannered husband Jonathan, and the surprise of the evening, John Doggett waved a friendly hello from his station at the stove, where he had been given the job of mashing at least 30 pounds of taters.

There was barely a pause before Mulder waved back and Scully called hello. Skinner, tactful as always, whispered a minute later than Maggie had invited him the night before, when she had answered the house phone that Doggett had accidently called.

Scully grinned, “does she have enough chairs for everybody?”

“She says pregnant people and guests get dibs on chairs but for the rest of us, it’s every man for himself.”

Mulder opened his mouth but Scully stopped him, “no, my pregnancy does not carry over to you.”

Fake punching her in the chin with Will’s little fist, “then you better save me a seat.”

Nibbling Will’s tiny fingers, she looked at her husband with a grin, “sorry buddy, can’t save seats in Maggie’s kitchen.”

He kissed her nose, “you have moved off my favorite person list.”

An hour later, the table was groaning under the weight of the feast and Maggie, after prayers, threatened each and every present occupant of the kitchen, those standing at the counters and those who managed to get seats, “if anyone throws, flings, whips, chucks, whings, or launches anything that should not be naturally in the air, I will not be a happy camper and if anyone here remembers the incident of 1992 first-hand or via re-telling, do not push me on this.”

23 people nodded simultaneously.

Mulder wanted to laugh but feared for his life as well as his dinner. He hadn’t managed to get a seat so he was standing beside Skinner at the kitchen island, but he had a good vantage point of those behind Maggie, who were grinning at her statement but managed to go straight-faced when she whipped round to address them with pointed finger, “I am not kidding.”

Charlie, who had snagged a seat by pushing his eldest to the ground, “yes, mother.”

Jake, who had been picked up off the floor by Mulder, and was now eating on Mulder’s other side, “yes, grandma.”

Maggie bounced her look between the two, “you are both going to give me gray hair.” Settling into her chair, which everyone had wisely left empty for her, “in the immortal words of your late father, grandfather, and uncle, ‘he who eats the fastest, gets the mostest!”

Everyone moved at once, bowls passing from hand to hand, slowly emptying and miraculously being refilled from the many overflow pots and pans in the oven and on the stove. Mulder, wanting another roll, called out to Charlie, who was hording the bread basket, “hey, Charlie, can you send the rolls up here?”

And Charlie, being Charlie, quick as lightning grabbed the requested bread and under his mother’s speechless gaze, slow-tossed it the ten feet to Mulder in a perfect arc, directly over Maggie’s head.

Maggie’s mouth opened to deliver some choice words but Charlie stopped her with his disarming grin and a Scully-pointer finger directed at her, “you can’t yell at me. That was a toss. I tossed the roll to Mulder. You said we couldn’t throw, fling, whip, chuck, whing, or launch. I didn’t do any of those things. I tossed.”

His mother’s squinted stare should have melted his skin off, burned a hole through his skull but he squinted right back at her and all of a sudden, her chin wobbled, then, half-a-moment later, a grin burst forth, a hearty chuckle following which led immediately to out-and-out laughter, tears rolling soon after.

Charlie leaned back and bit into another roll, “love you, mom.”

A spoonful of mashed potatoes smacked him in the center of the forehead and stuck there while he continued to chew.

Maggie, still laughing, licked her now-empty spoon, thankful her aim had been dead-on, “don’t mess with me, boy.”

Once everyone had returned to their normal state of eating, Mulder felt his phone vibrate in his pocket. Stealing a look at the number, he excused himself and headed to the living room, waving away Scully’s sudden concerned look, whispering, “it’s just mom.”

Mulder returned a few minutes later, heading back to his plate but looking not quite as jovial as he had when he left. He joined back in the conversation, diving into the discussion of the current football season with Matt and Doggett, who was standing across from him.

&&&&&&&&&&&

It took another hour but finally the table was cleared, the dishes were done, and dessert was displayed but intact on the table, waiting until there had been some digestion before delving back in. Scully looked around, realizing quickly that Mulder was gone. Handing a milk-drunk Will to Joanna, she went in search of him, finding him upstairs in her old room, sitting quietly in the dark on the bed.

“Hey you. You feel okay?” Looking up at her, she finally saw the anguish in his eyes. Sitting quickly beside him, “what happened? What did your mom tell you when she called?”

“It, uh … it wasn’t my mom who called. It was my aunt.” Leaning forward on his bended knees, he held his chin as he told her quietly, “my mom died about an hour before Veronica called me.”

Sat, 25 Dec 2021 08:31:58

The fourth series reads as follows:

Apple Balancing…Potential…The Newbies…The Dessert…Dinosaurs and Cannibalism…Sassy Sprinklepants…The Secret Vault of Mudlerness…Taco Night…Neckhole Wrestling …The Onesie

To catch up: First series…Second series … Third series

&&&&&&&&&&

“Holy … shit …”

Scully was simply silent.

“Holy … shit …”

Scully drew a deep breath.

“Holy … shit …”

“Would you stop saying that?”

Mulder looked from the monitor to Scully and back to the monitor, fingers nervously touching the screen, then pulling back quickly, wondering if touching the image would make it disappear, “but … there’s two.”

Having regained her faculties, she bumped shoulders with him, losing the connection to her belly but not minding, given she had already captured the picture, “maybe that’s why I’m more vomit-y than with Will.”

He didn’t even call her on the use of the word vomit-y, “How did you not see the first time we did this?”

“All I can think of is one was hiding behind the other and besides, they aren’t that big. Lima Bean 2 may have looked like an air bubble.”

Squinting at her in wonder, “what will you give me to get me to promise never to tell one of our children that for the first two months of their life, you thought they were a fart bubble?”

Wiping the goo off her belly, sliding her shirt back down, “it’ll give them character. I’m fine with it.”

“You’re getting a shirt.”

As she stood up, “I’ll wear it with pride but first,” already moving down the hall, “I’m going to throw up.”

&&&&&&&&&

True to his word, he had a shirt for her which read, “I thought my baby was a fart bubble,” by the time he came home from work the next day but Scully chose not to wear it trick-or-treating, “I don’t want to go declaring things until I’m further along.”

“I know but I think it will go under your sweater just fine.”

Seeing the shine in his eyes and his ‘you’re gonna cave’ grin, she shook her head and pulled sweater off, leaving exposed slightly not so flat belly, “I am going to be huge by the end of May.” She stopped suddenly, “what if they have the same birthday as Will?”

“I know a guy who knows a guy who could do a spell or at least cast a charm that would totally make that happen.”

Oh my God, she honestly thought she might know the guy he was talking about, and with a serious notionative thought that would have scared the bejeesus out of her a few years early, she actually debated on whether to have Mulder get him on the phone.

Sometimes she stopped and wondered what in the world had happened to her straight and narrow life.

He saw first the debate and reached for his pocket, phone within inches, number already floating through the slag to the surface of his consistently cluttered mind, but then he noticed the two seconds of sheer doubt in the entire world and he stopped, reaching into his other pocket instead, to produce a red M&M. Picking off lint, he held it out to her, “this is for you so you remember why you like me.”

Scully ate it from his fingertips, “momentary lapse of reason. It’s gone now.”

Trick-or-treating went well. Scully, Mulder, Dave, and Skinner traveled with the pack while the other parents stayed to pass out candy at Maggie’s. Will pulled in a good haul simply because the alien costume Mulder had made was incredibly adorable, with its green fuzzy material and it hood with giant eyes. Mulder had demanded gray but Scully won, telling him no one would know what he was if the costume was gray.

As a reward for winning, she agreed to share a quarter of her son’s take with his father, “a quarter? What the hell?”

Whispering to him, “three mouths to feed. I get three-quarters.”

He contemplated, then conceded, following with a cocked head, “we’ll have to do things to burn off the sugar high, won’t we?”

“Indeed we will.”

Skinner simply shook his head at the whispering and the giggling of his agents trailing behind, “keep up with the rest of the class, kids. I don’t want you getting lost back there.”

Taking Scully’s hand, pushing the stroller with the other, “come on. Dad doesn’t want us to get lost.”

&&&&&&&&&&&&&&

Mulder walked off the elevator the following morning, immediately bombarded by the smell of patchouli and cigarette smoke. Neither smell was to his liking and he entered the office asking, in an irritated voice, “what the hell is that smell?”

A dark-haired woman turned around, answering him in a no-nonsense clip that he would have appreciated had he not already decided she was a pain in his ass given that the smell of smoke that clung to her was even worse once he was in the room, “my name is Monica Reyes.”

Neither Doggett nor Harrison were anywhere to be seen and Mulder narrowed his gaze at her, “how can I help you, Monica Reyes, because there are only roughly nine people who know we exist down here and you are not one of them.”

Non-plussed by the closed and suspicious tone of one Fox Mulder, she held out her hand, never blinking, never looking away, “you must be Agent Mulder. John’s told me a lot about you.”

Ignoring her hand and knowing he was being rude, he continued, “what brand of cigarettes do you smoke?”

Monica tilted her head at him, finally become irritated, “none. The smell on me is from two days of staying with my stepmother. She smokes Marlboro, not that it’s any of your business, while I have never so much as thought about smoking anything, given she has lung cancer and is on track to die a slow, suffocating death. Her name is Patricia. You could call and ask her yourself but that may be hard, given she breathes, and smokes, through a tube in her neck.”

Mulder felt sufficiently horrible by now and shutting his eyes, he regrouped, this time meeting her hand that continued to hover between them, “I’m sorry. I have innate suspicions.”

“Of smokers? Strangers? Women named Patricia?”

All in, “yes.”

“Are you done being an asshole?”

“Probably not but I’ll do my best to keep it to a minimum.” It felt weird to be called out by someone who wasn’t his wife or his boss, “what can I do for you, Miss Reyes?”

“It’s actually Agent Reyes. I’m up here from New Orleans to talk to both you and to my friend, John.”

He was having a fine morning, “can we maybe start over? Let me come back in here and be … less … total dipshit?”

Monica laughed, “you’re fine. John informed me of your incredibly low tolerance for anyone who wasn’t Agent Scully. I actually expected this exchange to be worse.”

Shaking his head, “for what it’s worth, I’m sorry again and,” looking around, “moving on, where is Doggett? He would have had to let you in here.”

“He’s up stealing us the good Danish. It seems the third floor has the best in the building.”

Mulder’s stomach growled loudly, “I hope he steals enough for everyone.” It finally sank in where she was from, “New Orleans, you said, right? Did you come up here to escape Halloween in the city?”

“I love Halloween in the city. It’s almost as much fun as Mardi Gras but without so many boobs and beads but the best is actually tonight, which is ‘Day of the Dead.’ I’m missing one of the best parties of the year to be here.”

Offering her a seat and heading to his behind the desk, “should I be honored?”

“More like informative.” Sitting, back straight, arms loosely crossed, “I’d like to start an X-Files division down south.”

#accidental fart bubbles #double the fun #monica reyes #muldernscully #xfiles #xf fanfic #x files fanfic #x-files #my writing #life part 4 series

Mon, 20 Dec 2021 06:49:16

The fourth series reads as follows:

Apple Balancing…Potential…The Newbies…The Dessert…Dinosaurs and Cannibalism…Sassy Sprinklepants…The Secret Vault of Mudlerness …Taco Night …

To catch up: First series…Second series … Third series

&&&&&&&&&&

The world was calm for a beautifully short time; Mulder breathing a little easier every day Doggett and Harrison walked through the door. They were quick learners, arguing amicably, which was unheard of for new partners. Mulder listened to them, interjected often, watched them work through things, and in the end, began to get that feeling in his stomach.

Going home one night, late in August, and kissing Scully, he took a deep breath of baby shampoo and Desitin before, “well, it’s happening.”

“What’s happening?”

“The apprentices are catching on.”

After handing Will to Mulder, she folded her arms, giving him a scrutinizing look that would have crippled lesser men than he, “and how are you feeling about that?”

“I thought about that on the way home.” Walking past her and heading to the kitchen, son against his shoulder, “and I have discovered that, while unnerved and slightly sad, I realized I was coming home to you and smallness here and I was much less unnerved and sad than I ever would have thought possible.”

She absorbed this new development in Mulder’s core being in stride, “conclusion?”

“We should go out to dinner, introduce the kid to our first date Mexican place, and discuss how much money we need to open that donut shop of ours.”

Scully, deciding that she would just have to wait this out, nodded, “think he’s ready for salsa yet?”

“Sure, as long as you change the diapers for the next three days.”

“Think we can go to the bookstore?”

“As long as you don’t live out your life-long fantasy of feeding our son salsa before the age of 10.”

She kissed him, “give me ten minutes to get ready.”

Corky had hung a sign explaining the bookstore’s closure to a suitably disappointed Mulder and Scully, “closed for flu and subsequent Indiana Jones marathon. Back on Wednesday. Peace.”

“Do you think that we could open our bakery next door? I think I would like to have him as a neighbor.”

Mulder looked over at her, hiking Will’s carrier back up, “works for me.” Turning her towards Mexican with a nudge to her side, “but right now, I’m starving. Move it.”

Midway between tortilla #3 and margarita #1, Scully gave Mulder a look, her eyes just beginning to swim a poor doggy paddle through waist-high cheap tequila, “are you really ready to leave the FBI?”

Sipping his second glass of designated driver ice tea, Mulder tilted at her, head assuming his patent ‘I am feeling mellow enough to answer your question quite honestly, no matter how much it might unnerve you’ 36-degree angle, “I think that … I want to come home to you … and Will … and not wonder if I’m being followed in the process.”

“We can’t open a donut shop.”

A smile twitched the corner of his mouth, amused she hadn’t lost her contractions yet, “we can do whatever we want. What’s the one thing you’ve always wanted to do but didn’t have the money or the education or the … the,” waving his hands at her, “the courage to do?”

There was enough tequila in her system to answer honestly, “I have always wanted, don’t laugh, to be an astronaut.”

Mulder sat back, dumbfounded, “shit. You would pick the one thing I can’t afford to give you.”

She laughed, picking her fork back up, aiming the tines in his direction, “I think that you should finish out the year, and then, we will look into finding a nice, little house with an office where you can write sci-fi adventure novels about our travels and I can point out all the inaccuracies about your memories of our travels and then we will take road trips every summer and cozy up on the couch every winter.”

“And go to Babar?”

“We will buy a whole beach’s worth of Babar’s so each family can have one and we can all visit together. We’ll be the terrors of Kill Devil Hill.”

Mulder grinned, filing away the astronaut wish as well as a mental note to see how much that little vacant storefront on the other side of Corky’s bookstore was going for.

&&&&&&&&&&

Sooner rather than later, they were home; Will in his crib, fast asleep, full of oatmeal and milk (not salsa) while Scully was sitting in Mulder’s lap on the couch, “Mulder, I believe I am still under the influence of the margarita.”

His hands on her hips, his sober mind pinpoint focused on her breasts eight inches from his face, “I believe you are, too.”

“I also think that you are wearing too many clothes.”

“I believe you are, too.”

In a flurry of neckhole wresting, Scully getting stuck twice and needing rescuing, they were eventually naked, Scully sliding slowly down on him while he continued to hold her upright, “you know what else I want?”

“I can imagine exactly what you want right now.”

As she slowly began moving up and off him, slipping back down, slightly erratic rhythm made up for with clenching muscles and a tongue that made his head spin, “we talked about it before, I think, but I want another baby. I want four or five more, actually, but I’ll settle for making just one right now.” Wigging herself even further onto him, both groaned in unison, “can we do that, Mulder? Can we make another one?”

Words were difficult but the idea was sound as he told her in broken breaths, “I can’t … guarantee … but I am always … willing … to try.”

Half-drunk hand floating down to her clit, sweet strawberry breath against his neck, breast in his hand while the other grabbed her ass, she rode him, couch springs squeaking, slippery sweat slide of legs and chest. Coming faster and harder than both expected, instead of crying out, she had the forethought, hazy as it was, to bury her filthy words in a cushion instead of echoing them off the walls.

It was the dirty words and crystalline fantasies she mumbled as she fucked him that brought him over the edge right behind her, September heat wave having nothing on the joined pair of them moving their world on nine square feet of leather real estate.

The aftermath made him smile, an attack of the giggles rolling her body as she still held him hostage. He would give her the universe and everything in it just to hear that laugh, her lurching chest against him, her arms around his neck. He laughed with her, no idea why but when he laughed, she jerked and shimmied, finally, getting out, between inhales, “when you laugh, you twitch and things move.”

He laughed again and she popped upright, off him in an instant, still giggling, “don’t. Your twitches and my twitches don’t match.”

Oh, good God, he loved her more ever second of every day.

&&&&&&&&&&

They didn’t mention that night again, moving drunken wishes and unfulfilled fantasies to the backburner. Mulder stayed in DC more, letting Doggett and Harrison take cases on their own, a phone call away but still, as Scully whispered to herself in disbelief, at home with her and Will.

At home with her and Will and, from what the little drugstore stick told her, the latest addition to the Scully-Mulder household.

The news of which she happily surprised him with, in the most Mulder way she could possibly think of …

#neckhole wrestling #dirty words #chrystaline fantasies #x-files #x files fanfic #my writing #life part 4 series

Sat, 11 Dec 2021 08:48:08

The fourth series reads as follows:

Apple Balancing…Potential…The Newbies…The Dessert…Dinosaurs and Cannibalism …Sassy Sprinklepants

To catch up: First series…Second series … Third series

#secret vault of mudlerness #mission accompissed #good lord and sweet baby jesus #the ragtag group of nieces and nephews strikes again #xfiles #x files fanfic #my writing #life part 4 series

&&&&&&&&&&

He wasn’t sure how he felt about giving the untested duo of Doggett and Harrison a set of keys to his office and complete access to his sacred space containing file cabinet, slide projector and perfectly proportioned to his ass desk chair. He wouldn’t be there to shut down arguments veering in wrong directions, he wouldn’t be there to explain, in exquisite detail, the evolution of Big Foot and Sasquatch, he wouldn’t be there to keep their sticky paws off his stuff.

Wow, his thoughts spiraled a lot faster than he expected, and shaking his head to clear the nonsense as he gathered up his coat and wallet, he thanked that formless god out there in the universe that no one but him would ever know what went through his mind the last three minutes … except for Scully ‘cause try as he might, he’d spill the beans about his mental relapse the moment he walked through the front door and she said the magical words of ‘hey there.’

He was so completely under her spell it would have been pathetic on anyone but him.

Handing over the keys, he told them not to burn shit down then headed out for his week of beach life, Scully, Will and seven Scully monikered rugrats in tow.

&&&&&&&&

“Kids, we have a mission.”

Sam and Matt looked at each other, excitement building given any kind of mission from Mulder usually turned out to be fairly messy, fairly fun, and fairly entertaining when he got in trouble with Aunt Dana once she found out about the mission, “are you going to get busted by Aunt Dana for the mission, Uncle Mudler?”

“One can only hope, Samuel.”

Speaking for everyone present and one un-present Betsy, who was in the bathroom, “we’re in.”

The mission turned out to be one of many that week. This one in particular was to simply get Aunt Dana to say ‘Good Lord and sweet baby Jesus’ five times. It took Jake two hours before he triumphantly raised his hands in victory even before Scully could let the last syllable fall from her lips, “Uncle Mudler! Mission accomplished!”

Scully got a large chocolate milkshake for her troubles.

The rest of the week was peppered with shouts of ‘Mission Accomplished’ or in Toby and Betsy’s case, “Mission Accompissed.”

Scully was amused for the most part because she never knew what was coming and why but it always made her smile once she found out.

“Mulder, where are you getting this stuff from?”

“The secret vault of Mudlerness.”

She simply smiled and took Betsy by the hand, “come on, small fry, let’s go see how big of a castle we can build before your cousin wakes up.”

Slapping his hands together, Mulder looked at the older kids, “and I think we should see who can slide farthest up the beach after wakeboarding in.”

Needless to say, the children creamed the adult amongst them, hands down, given Mulder was heavy enough to skid to a stop while the kids skimmed nearly to Scully every time.

&&&&&&&&

Then the rains came.

And Scully took over.

“We are going shopping. Everyone in the cars.”

“Where are we going?”

“Wal-mart. We need some games in this place so everybody gets one pick and then we come back here and play them until we need to eat.”

“Can we make pizzas?”

“Can we make cupcakes?”

“Can we make bananas?” Scully looked at Toby when he suggested that one and he shrugged, “I want a banana.”

Mulder ruffled his hair, “we’ll get you some bananas.”

Everyone found a game, Mulder found three, Scully found two and when she realized she picked out the same ones as Hannah, she high-fived her niece, “great minds, Hannah, great minds.”

“Totally, Aunt Dana.”

Groceries shopped for, bananas purchased, they headed home, the day and evening filled with several arguments, one rain-filled beach walk, two tremendous thunderstorms complete with near constant lightning and winds that created waves big enough to swallow all of them up and through Uncle Mudler whole without leaving a trace. Will slept through it all, the rest of them settled eventually, the ocean still churning, the sound carrying in the open windows, lulling even the most restless among them to dreamland.

Mulder nudged Scully and quietly rotated on the bed, swapping head for feet so he could stare down at the seven kids, spread eagle all over a bevy of air mattresses on the floor, sleeping bags strewn accordingly. Scully followed, relishing still in her newfound ability to lay on her stomach after an 11-month hiatus, “what are we doing?”

Her whisper tickled the small hairs by his ears and he grinned, fighting the urge to swat at a non-existent bug, “we are contemplating the family tree.”

“What are we contemplating about the family tree?”

“How we should probably add on to this place to accommodate said family tree. They can’t sleep on our bedroom floor forever.” Rolling to his side to nibble lightly on her ear, “I’d like you to myself every once in awhile.”

Matt’s voice rose from the floor, “dude, we’re trying to sleep here. If you want to make out, go outside, would you?”

Mulder flew away from her on instinct and rolled right off the side of the bed, landing beside Hannah, who only woke because her air mattress shifted, “Uncle Mudler?”

“Go back to sleep, Han, I just fell out of bed.” Quickly kissing her forehead and watching her eyes drop closed immediately, he hauled himself back onto the mattress, amusingly scolding out into the darkness and his oldest nephew’s general direction, “we are not making out.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Goodnight, Matthew.”

Mulder could hear the grin as he called back his own goodnight, then the squish-shift of body turning on air mattress. Meeting Scully’s dancing eyes, “he spends too much time with Dave.”

“We all spend too much time with Dave but none of us can figure out how to not spend too much time with Dave because we all love our Dave time.”

Moving his head close enough to kiss her cheek, “love you, wife.”

“Love you back, husband.”

&&&&&&&&&&

The following morning, Scully woke up to find everyone accounted for but Mulder. Shifting slowly, carefully, she grabbed the baby monitor, turned it on and ventured forth, using the sure step of someone who picked her way through body parts daily, silent thanking prayer to the man upstairs that these were all attached to living, breathing beings and not in a warehouse basement in Tucson like the last time. Wood planks smooth beneath her feet, she saw Mulder’s silhouette through the back door, sun just beginning to debate coming up, sky the lightest shade of night before giving into day. Traversing three rugs and a wayward pile of flipflops, she slid the screen open and settled herself in beside him, bumping his arm gently, “morning.”

He didn’t meet her rolling shoulder, or gravel-y, half-awake quiet word, instead waving the phone in his hand slightly, pointing it towards the water, knuckles white around black plastic, “when am I going to learn not to answer the phone.”

This did not bode well and reaching under his elbow, she wrapped fingers lightly around his wrist, “probably never. What happened? Was it Skinner?”

“Yeah, apparently Doggett and Harrison, am I allowed to call them Bud and Lou or would that be wrong at this stage of the game, I don’t know but regardless, Doggett and Harrison somehow got caught underground, dealt with some kind of venomous lizard/snake hybrid thing, came up temporarily blinded, and are now both in the hospital recovering.”

Scully snorted. She hadn’t meant to but snort she did, giggling into his shoulder for a moment before getting her breath back, “my God, you really did manage to find Mulder and Scully 2.0, didn’t you?”

“Skinner is going to quit, I swear. He’s going to talk to them and go through that final report and he’s just gonna …” grinning out towards the water, Mulder shook his head, “holy hell, Scully, he may just say ‘fuck it’, sweep his desk clean, flip off his J. Edgar Hoover picture and storm out, demanding a God-damned latte on his way out the door.”

Staring for half a second forward, she waggled her head back and forth a few times, then raised an eyebrow at her clarifying mental picture of descriptive storm-out, “I’d kind of like to see that actually.”

Before he could answer back that he’d pay $100 minimum to see it, the murmur of waking children and one pre-whimpering baby floated through the monitor sitting on the step beside her. Mulder, fully awake and ready to spend their last day at the beach being the unequivocal leader of ragtag misfit sandcastle builders and boogie boarders, stood to take care of diaper changing and tooth brushing, “want to start breakfast? We’ll be down to help in a few.”

Standing as well, “chocolate chip pancakes or strawberry waffles?”

“Yes.”

Mon, 06 Dec 2021 06:43:06

the fourth series reads as follows:

Apple Balancing…Potential …The Newbies

To catch up: First series…Second series … Third series

you know what? I had sudden doubts about posting an entire chapter about a dessert and I honestly sat and thought about if I should, then I remembered … this is Life and the Dessert is Life at our house … It should be at yours, too …

&&&&&&&&&&

Scully had to laugh. Mulder came home and talked her ear off the first day Harrison worked with him, “my God, Scully, I want to ask where she’s plugged in so I can disconnect her from her power source every so often. You were never this … this …” hands flapping helplessly, “exuberant.”

“Regretting it yet?”

By now, his shoes were off, and she was pressed against him in a full-body hug, his chin vibrating her skull, “I’ll give her time, but really, she’s the damn Energizer bunny gone wild.”

“Have you switched over to decaf yet?”

“Five seconds after she left the interview, I stole a case from the kitchen upstairs. Skinner saw me and asked, but when I told him Agent Harrison had been by, he held the door to the elevator for me and wished me luck.”

Smiling into his chest, “well, it’s Thursday, and you know what Thursday means, don’t you?”

“Cerulean blue punch and failed attempts at sobriety?”

“And one baby.”

“Rock, paper, scissors you for who’s staying straight and who’s drinking the Kool-Aid?”

Mulder lost.

“This could get dangerous, Mulder. I haven’t had a drop of punch in something like 11 months.”

“Dangerous … or the most entertaining thing anyone has seen in a very long time.”

Finally pulling away, grin widening with every moment, “I pumped enough to last Will through tomorrow, but I only get one glass, understand?”

“This should be a blast.”

&&&&&&&&

Not seriously concerned but wondering just the same, “Mulder, does my looking forward to blue-tongued liquor make me an alcoholic?”

“Personally, I think you just look forward to the hangover breakfast. It’s really the only time you don’t have to explain to anyone why you are making a Pedro’s Taco Hut run at 7:15am.”

“Think we should buy some now so I can just reheat them? Save me a step in the process?”

Detouring to their taco haven, “why not.”

Arriving with baby, bag of tacos, and Mulder, Scully entered the house and stopped dead in the doorway, “oh … my … God … she made cheese-stuffed Italian sausage meatballs and garlic bread and …” taking a deep sniff of the air around her, “oh, lord in heaven, she made the Dessert.”

Following with a bit of trepidation given her sudden and intensely frightening nasal superpowers, “what the hell is the dessert?”

Scully didn’t answer, sliding on stocking feet into the kitchen, calling out loudly, “did you use Heath bars or almond and chocolate?”

Maggie’s voice drifted down from upstairs, “Heath bars. What do you take me for, your Aunt Bethany?”

“I withdraw the question.”

Mulder, behind her with a baby and oodles of curiosity, given the mention of Heath bars, “I ask again, what the hell is the dessert?”

Skinner took Will from him, “a frightening looking layered concoction of pudding and Cool Whip and cake and the aforementioned Heath bars. There are two of them in the fridge, and Maggie swears there won’t be any left by tomorrow morning.”

Scully beelined for the refrigerator, opening the door to survey heaven in twin glass dishes, “was there any cake left over?”

“Maggie hid it somewhere.”

Scully sniffed deeply again, bloodhounds around the world instantly jealous of her flaring nostrils, her movements calculated and slow around the kitchen until she stopped at the pan drawer, “gotcha, crazy woman.” Opening it, she turned over the two nested pans and the Tupperware bowl, finding four pieces of dark chocolate cake, one of which immediately went into Scully’s mouth, “like three layers could stop me.”

The two men looked on in befuddlement, “who is that woman?”

Stashing the tacos in the fridge without really looking at the dessert, “I think she’s Scully, but the devilish mumbling is confusing me.”

“Is Maggie going to kill her when she comes in?”

Scully heard them and laughed, “it’s ‘Find the Cake.’ If you find it, you get it. If you don’t, you chase your little brother around until someone falls down in exhaustion.”

Maggie popped around the corner, spying her daughter, “are you going to share at all?”

“Under normal circumstance, highly doubtful.” She did, however, hand over the plate with two large chunks still left, “but since I’m generous to a fault, I will split my winnings in half.”

Mulder took the plate with the smallest amount of apprehension, “why am I still afraid you’ll bite my hand off?”

“You know me.” Kissing his cheek, a crumb or three of cake at the corner of her mouth, “and once again, it’s ‘Find the Cake.’ Mom makes the dessert we all devour, but there’s always cake leftover. She hides it. It turns us all against each other, and then it’s Battle Royale, followed by name-calling and pouting. It’s tradition.”

Mulder turned to his mother-in-law, “you know you’re all crazy, right?”

“You married her, remember that.”

Chewing his mouthful of cake, Mulder’s eyes wobbled in ecstasy, “and I am so glad I did. Had I not, I wouldn’t be related to the baker who made this.” Wondering if he should make a grab for the last piece, “why have none of them ever tasted like this before?”

With a smile, seeing the stealing debate happening, Maggie split the last piece, handing one to her daughter and one to him, “because the Dessert cake is special cake. If you ask any more questions, you’ll get none of the finished product.”

“My God, between Betty and her Punch and you and the Dessert, do you like what I did there, by the way, you can actually hear the capital letters in both Punch and Dessert, you’re on your way to an entire meal where no one knows what they’re eating.”

She swatted him on the backside with the towel she was carrying, “wait until we hit Kitchen Sink night. It doesn’t happen often but when it does, get out of the way.”

Looking towards Scully, whose eyes seemed to glow at the prospect of Kitchen Sink night, “what the hell is Kitchen Sink night?”

&&&&&&&&&

Charlie showed up a little while later, Sarah and their kids gone for the night at her mother’s house, “got enough for me?”

Maggie looked up as her youngest son waltzed into the kitchen, “of course, but I thought you were working tonight?”

“Transformer blew about half an hour ago. I can’t do the updates, and the drive to Sarah’s parents is too long just to turn around and come home, so I thought I’d try to get a halfway decent meal here.”

“Hey, Charlie?”

Turning towards the voice, “yeah, Mulder?”

“Do you know about the Dessert?”

Charlie, for his part, flashed back to 10 years old, and his eyes began darting around the kitchen, reaching for the closest cupboard, pulling the door open so fast it bounced back at him, “where is it? Did you find it already? Please tell me you didn’t find it already?”

Scully laughed at him, bouncing Will against her shoulder lightly, hoping for something approaching a healthy yet non-spitty-up burp, “I beat you by an hour, Charlie.”

“Damn it.” Turning to survey his mother critically, “if I give you $20, can you bake me my own cake, like, right now?”

Mulder would have hugged all of them at that moment if he could have.

&&&&&&&&&

The meatballs were phenomenal, warm, delectable, oozing cheese in every bite, he would have eaten more, but in the middle of dinner, Maggie got up and removed the bowls from the fridge, displaying the Dessert for all to see.

Scully and Charlie slow their chewing slightly.

Finally, dinner was put away, and after the dishes were cleared, the dessert bowls came out. Mulder feared for himself as well as the ladies who just arrived, that they would all be trampled in the clamor to the concoction, but heaping helpings were passed out in an orderly fashion, spoons used instead of scooping fingers, and he breathed a sigh of relief that he most likely would not have to throw himself between Charlie and Scully because someone got an extra dollop of pudding.

Then he scooped up a spoonful.

And ate it.

And forgot the world around him.

There had never been a Dessert, good God-damn, he was thinking in capitals as well as speaking in them, that had ever made him feel this good.

It was cool and slurpy and crunchy and cake-y and whippy and …

Laughter penetrated his cloudy haze and looking up, found all the ladies and Charlie staring at both him and Skinner. Now, he didn’t want to see that look on Skinner’s face ever again, but at this moment in time, he imagined he was wearing the same orgasmic, ‘if I didn’t just get fucked but good’ smile and glad he wasn’t alone in his embarrassment, grinned wider, “this isn’t too bad.”

Napkins, hastily grabbed dishtowels, and one pacifier flew at his head.

He kept eating.

Good to her word, there was nothing left in either dessert bowl by the time the Punch came out. Mulder leaned over to Scully, who was, hand to God, licking her bowl, “you got room in there for Punch?”

“There’s always room for Punch, and given I’ve been off the stuff for a year, I don’t think I’ll be drinking that much anyway.” Then, kissing him full on the mouth, pudding taste everywhere, “you sure you’re okay being designated diaper-er tonight?”

He would have answered, but he was too busy pulling her close to return the kiss, Charlie whining about them in the background while Janet began shuffling the deck.

#it does exist #we eat it at our house #and you cant stop us #we do fight about the cake #and if you dont have heath bars #you get called names #x files fanfic #x-files #muldernscully #the ladies #maggienskinner #life part 4 series #my writing #charlie scully

Sun, 28 Nov 2021 07:16:46

Life is back, jam-packed with M&Ms, Scully family shenanigans, terrible things, and wonderous ones … this series picks up maybe two weeks to a month after series three finished …

Sorry for the delay … life happens … hope you enjoy :)

First series…Second series …Third series

&&&&&&&&

“How close to home are you?”

“About ten minutes but at my rate of anger, I could make it there in four if I ran.”

Scully, baby strapped to her chest, paper plate of apples resting on his sleeping noggin as she read paperwork, “do you need to go to the shooting range before you get here? Take out some aggression on paper bad guys and ballistic foam?”

Mulder, for his part, was sitting in summer traffic, sweltering in the heat, Jeep air turned off to save gas given his empty light came on 24 miles ago and panic not yet overtaking anger at sullen, bitching temporary agents who told him, the ballsy pair they were, that they didn’t think a job in the basement would lead to anything but a dead end.

“I do not need the shooting range but I do need a hefty glass of something cold and to hold the kid for a few minutes. You, too, if available, but at least the kid.”

“Starting to regret this whole ‘find minions so you can come home alive’ scenario yet?”

“Ask me once,” car horn blaring and Mulder yelling obscenities out the windows, colorful and plentiful before coming back on the line, “I’ve showered and gotten gas.”

“How low are you?”

“I’ve got about three miles left in the golden zone, then I might be calling for a refill. Prep the baby for a rescue mission.”

“I’m using him to balance my apples right now but afterwards I’ll put on his cape and we’ll be good to go.”

Finally smiling, having seen the apple balancing act before, “have you read the files yet?”

“Going through them again now. I hate to say it but that Doggett guy is starting to look really good. There’s also a woman named Harrison in here that seems decent as well. Doggett would be the gritty, no-nonsense one and she could play the role of you.” Finishing her last bite, she tossed the plate on the counter and smudge-wiped apple juice drippings from her son’s nose, “we’ll argue it when you get home.”

Finally, finally, finally having pulled far enough along in traffic to coast his way into the gas station, he breathed a stifling sigh of humidity-laden relief, “it’s fucking hot out here. Why aren’t we at the beach again?”

Hearing the sound of the gas pump, she sighed herself at not having to perform requested rescue mission in the 100-degree heat, “give me twenty minutes to pack and we can be on the road by 7. I’ll bring the files, you bring the lead foot.”

“Don’t wave that temptation in my face, young lady. Too hot to fight it.”

“Who said I was kidding?”

&&&&&&&&

Good to her word, she met him at the door twenty minutes later, baby stuff, her stuff, his stuff, food stuff, all that stuff he liked ‘cause it was stuff, piled beside her, “go change your pants. We leave in five.”

He stopped on the front stoop, “you were waiting for me.”

“Always.” Smiling and kissing him as she reached out to pull him inside, “now get your ass upstairs.”

He would have done more to her but given they were on the front porch and in broad daylight and he was soaked to his socks and underwear in sweat and there was a baby between them and stuff would be poking him in the back and his parts, he simply returned the kiss and hauled up the steps.

Sooner than later, he was back in the car, driving east, feeling the pull of a cottage and his family together, work disappearing behind him in the distance, except for the pile of files Scully had stashed in her bag and they weren’t talking about those just yet. Will was sleeping in his seat, facing away from them, mirror showing he was still there and not crawling through the luggage in the trunk. Scully was offering peanut M&Ms to Mulder one at a time, intermingling red licorice twists and grapes, an odd mix in general but highly enjoyed because he had the chance to kiss her fingers, lick her knuckles, taste her skin, “are you trying to make me fat?”

“Trying to keep you awake … besides, the grapes are healthy. It all evens out in the end.”

“I remember a time when you were better at math and made me eat more salad.”

“Would you like me to throw the M&Ms out the window?”

“God, no. Feed me more.”

&&&&&&&&&

Pulling over once for diaper changing and once for real food, they rolled up to the house just before midnight, the ocean air filling the car 20 minutes before they found the driveway, the waves waiting to greet them until he’d shut off the Jeep, giving an instant, relaxed atmosphere and friendly darkness to the late night.

“Did you pack my suit?”

“Don’t want to swim naked in the ocean?”

Reaching across and poking her cheek, “you are saucy as hell today which I love but sand issues notwithstanding, I don’t want fish and sharks nibbling on my balls.”

She couldn’t respond to that except to nod, her grin giddy and free, “I have your suit, never fear. I remember the diatribe on sharks and your balls, believe me.”

“Want me to empty the car before you bring Will in?”

“All you have to grab is his crib, his diaper bag and that red suitcase. Everything else can wait until tomorrow.”

“Aye, aye, cap’n.”

He carried the necessary stuffs in in one major armful and Scully followed with Will, all three soon in respective beds, sheets changed, windows open, baby snoring lightly on his back, Scully snuggled into Mulder, thin pajama barrier between them, “I’ve forgotten how much I love it here.”

Moving her head back to kiss his chin, she kept her voice low, “We need to come here more often so that doesn’t happen.”

“Are you proposing we winter-fy this place and move permanently?”

“Remember what happens when either of us it tempted?”

“We get married; we make babies; we take spur of the moment trips to our seaside shack …”

Interrupting briefly as she guided his hand to her mouth then down her neck, “you buy seaside shacks and show up in the middle of Iowa with stuff and say we’re going on a road trip …”

“I am quite wonderful, aren’t I?”

Lifting her head enough to make sure Will was good and asleep, she wiggled and shifted, turned and waggled until pajamas hit the ground in a silent earthquake of things to come, “a few more weeks and I’ll be able to show you just how wonderful you are but for right now, I can still do plenty of things to you.”

Glad to be able to just touch her, the prospect of anything more made him grin, “two weeks.”

&&&&&&&&&&

“It’s the end of June. Why is the water not warm?”

“Have your toes frozen off yet?”

“Well, no, but …”

Mulder grinned, digging his feet into the sand, “then it’s warm enough.”

“Not for a month-old baby, it’s not.”

“Well, he’ll get his water wings next summer or at the earliest, you’ll both be in by August. The ocean’s a big place, woman, it needs time to heat.”

Wishing she could swim, she instead handed Will to Mulder, gave him that defiant look that sent every one of his molecules into overdrive, then walked into the waves, going as far as her shorts hem would allow, then racing backwards out of reach of the waves. Coming back to him, legs wet, toes coated in sand, “I never said it was too cold for me.”

Glancing no further than her nipples showing through her tank top, “it’s a little too cold for them.”

Head back, laughing, “you have a one-track mind, Agent Mulder.”

“And it’s tracked on you. Now, we’ve got things to do: sunnin’ things and swimmin’ things and eatin’ things and nappin’ things. Which do you propose we do first?”

Settling Will in his shaded nest, “the sunnin’ things. Lotion me up.”

“Ahh, just the words I wanted to hear.”

#life part 4 series #scully and mulder and will oh my #x files fanfic #xf fanfic #my writing

Thu, 18 Nov 2021 11:34:28

Hi there,

Thought maybe ya’ll would want to catch up in preparation for part 4 … just sayin’ …

Life, part 1

Life, part 2

Life, part 3

#muldernscully #mama scully #uncle skimmer #the rest of the brood #x files fanfic #red mms and stuff #my writing

Mon, 15 Nov 2021 07:34:51

Tuesday nights

sequel to: Forgetting

haven’t been around for awhile but this one demanded to be written at 6am this morning … I didn’t fight it … :)

just sayin’ – NSFW …

&&&&&&&&&&

She had several hundred looks, happy, despondent, elated, confused, curious, contemplative …

But the look he caught in her eye when she suddenly pushed back from the conference table, stood and left mid-sentence of the chief in the middle of their debrief, was one he didn’t recognize. Sweat stiff, stringy hair pulled back in an efficient ponytail; grease, gunpowder, and blood still dried on her forehead and cheek; shoulders hunched in a defiant ‘fuck it’. He didn’t try to stop her, though, and neither did anyone else. He had only been half listening and had missed what might have sent her packing, but, with the slightest shrug to the chief and an angry look in return, he remained seated, paying better attention than before.

It took another hour in the room, plus 45 minutes more to finish up the paperwork, before he could finally head out to the main part of the building to find her. He killed another 10 minutes looking in every conceivable corner before finally asking the desk sergeant, “have you seen Agent Scully?”

He nodded, “yeah. She left, oh,” glancing at the wall clock, “about two hours ago.”

Automatically feeling for the keys of the one car they had between them, he found the familiar, jingling lump right where it should be, front right pocket, “do you know if she called a cab or anything?”

“No idea. She just went past like the devil was at her heels.” Knowing they were finished with the case, he knew he better ask now, “do you know if she’s seeing anyone or with …”

Too tired and distracted for that kind of crap at the moment, he nodded, “yeah, for the last two years.”

Good-natured grin settling on his face, “worth a try.”

Mulder was already halfway to her place in his head, and he gave the man a nod, “have a good night.”

“You, too, Agent Mulder.”

&&&&&&&&&&

Finding his coat, he also found hers, plus their pile of paperwork, her extra clip, and her pocket knife. She really had just up and left.

He gathered it all, dumped everything in the trunk, then drove the 25 minutes to her place, looking intently for a five foot tall red-head, sans jacket but with a decidedly angry gate. Not seeing one, he got to her apartment and breathed a sigh of relief at seeing a light on in her living room. Cab it was.

Bringing up what he needed to, he knocked lightly but when the door didn’t open, he found his key and let himself in. He knew she was there by her dirty boots under the side table but not seeing her, he came the rest of the way in, dumping his armload on the floor beside her shoes. His own shoes off, coat hung, he double locked the door, then moved into the room.

She wasn’t in the kitchen but there was a bottle of Long Island and a bottle of vodka on the kitchen table. Neither looked open and as he wondered if he should turn around and go home again, let her sleep, he heard her voice, “I’m back here.”

Turning off the light in the kitchen, he wandered down the hall, stocking feet sinking into the carpet. He didn’t have any expectations of what he would find but honestly, he hadn’t expected to see her sitting, fully clothed, on the edge of her bed. Stopping against the doorframe, “you okay?”

Defeated shrug of her shoulders, “no, but really, is that anything new?”

His smile didn’t convey anything but weariness, “you seem to have left the liquor on the kitchen table.” When that hung between them for a period of time longer than expected, he tilted his head at her, leaning it against wood, “or I can just head home? We both need at least a week’s worth of sleep.”

Her knees already up, feet hooked on the bed frame, she dropped her head of her hand, elbow against her thigh, a sigh emerging from the depths of her toes, but she still didn’t speak, leaving him to sift and interpret as the seconds ticked by.

Not sure if he was barking up the entirely wrong tree, “Third option is asking you if maybe, you would like to forget we work together but without the alcoholic buffer.”

“I tried to drink it. Tried to get my ass good and drunk by the time you got here. I even opened the Tea but then, I just … I cleaned up a little, then ended up in here, sober and waiting for you.” Scully’s eyes shut, one long blink before finally meeting his gaze, “I don’t want to drink our way out of feeling like this. I don’t want to have the only way to deal with our lives is with a blood alcohol level that would have us arrested on the spot.” Shaking her head, she spoke to the ceiling, “God-dammit. I just … I just want to … be normal … do normal things … have a normal life.”

Trying to keep his voice steady, quiet, “with me?”

She flopped back on the bed, “just go get the Long Island, would you? I don’t know what I’m saying.”

“I think you are saying that on some random Tuesday, we should go out to dinner, maybe have some ice cream, then I drop you off at the front door, and, possibly, I give you a goodnight kiss?”

Scrubbing her face with her hands, she groaned, “we don’t have random Tuesdays.”

With a quick smile and glance at his watch, “you realize it’s Tuesday right now.”

“It’s Wednesday.”

“No, Miss Scully, it’s Tuesday.” Finally moving from the doorway, he walked over and stood against her knees, “hungry?”

Looking down at him, standing there all mussed up and adorable, “not really.” Before his eyes could drop to that sad angle she hated to see, “but I could go for a movie and some popcorn.”

“M&Ms?”

“Peanut ones.”

“Are there any other kinds?”

&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&

It was just after 9:30 when Mulder pulled back up in front of Scully’s. Before he had a chance to offer to walk her to her door, “want to come up for some hot chocolate?”

He really should go home, shower, dig the popcorn kernels out of his teeth, but instead, he turned the car off, “sure. I could go for some more sugar.”

Settled on the couch, they drank, they talked about nothing, they watched each other relax, smile, exchange oddly shy looks over the edges of chipped ceramic mugs. Once Mulder had licked the last of his chocolate mustache off his upper lip, he gave her a final grin, “as much fun as this has been, I really need to go home and shower. I’ve been smelling myself since 20 minutes into the movie.”

“I think I smell worse.”

“Doubt that.”

“Do we really want to have this contest?” Standing up quickly, before she could change her mind, she held her hand out, “come on.”

“Are you making me leave?”

Instead of toward the door, she led him down the hall, “no … take a shower.”

&&&&&&&&&&

All plans fall prey to overthinking at some point and Scully’s plan took until she was actually in the bathroom with him to crack. The door was shut, both standing awkwardly in the dimly lit bathroom, overhead light off but nightlight casting pale blue over the room. He’d had some unformed notion that maybe she meant to join him but now that they were actually here, in the room, he had no idea how to proceed. Watching her from his spot in the corner, she took a deep breath, swallowed hard once, then gathered up several towels, washcloths, turned on the faucet in the tub. Never turning back around, she then stripped and hand on shower curtain, stepped in.

Shivers ran continually up her spine and through her bones, pelvis quaking, clit tightening, nipples harder than she’d thought possible but making sure to focus on nothing but soap, water, wash, she carefully undid buttons, clasps, pulled t-shirt over head and pushed jeans and underwear down over her hips. Knowing if she looked at him, she’d lose whatever ground she’d just gained, she instead stepped under the warm spray.

Warm water was one thing; hot, vibrating, naked Mulder stepping in a few seconds later to share shower water and soaped up palms was quite another.

He had his own racing misgivings about the universe in general until he saw bare back, pale, curving hips, and rounded ass. Dropping his clothes, he took his own quick inhale, then stepped in behind her.

She was still facing away from him and, noticing the gooseflesh on her arms, her back, he leaned forward, hand over her shoulder, trying to keep it business-like, “can you hand me the soap, please?”

Her voice was all over the map as she handed him the bar, “washcloth?”

“Yes, please.”

Handing him a fresh one from the shelf just outside the shower where she had put extra moments earlier, “here you go.”

Just as she reached for her own, to begin washing her face, she felt Mulder’s settle on her neck, moving slowly back and forth, sliding smoothly down spine and across back. She hadn’t meant to make the sound but escape it did, a pleasured ‘mmmhhmm’ that automatically drove his other hand around her side to cup her breast, soap trail bubbling behind. It was his voice in her ear, however, that sent her own hand out to steady herself against the wall, “can I wash the rest of you?”

Why, of course he could, as long as her knees held her up long enough to accomplish such a hygienic task.

She doubted they would.

Words weren’t working well at the moment so he got another ‘mmhmm’ and a nod.

That was enough for him.

Washcloth continued its trek over her back, sides, ribs, dipping low over and around her ass, hand leaving breast as he squatted behind her, legs, knees, ankles, feet done. Coming back up, he then reached around, making slow work of her chest, breasts, stomach, and, with a gentle finger, he slid the cloth over and in her parts, not dwelling but definitely feeling her body sway as he ran across her clit several times. Smiling into her wet back, he completed his task by bringing the washcloth back around, slipping in and out of the ass.

Rinsing the cloth, he dropped it on the hanging rack in the corner of the tub, “hair next?”

Obediently, she stepped under the water, hair soaked in seconds, quick dollop of shampoo, lathered and rinsed in less than a minute. Washing her face just as quickly, she drew in a deep breath and turned around, taking him in for the first time.

How she was going to suffer when he put his clothes back on.

Washcloth in hand, her voice managed a “you next” while reaching for the soap he still held.

It may have been possible to get harder but he didn’t think it likely. Nodding, his own voice finally cracked under the pressure, “front or back first?”

“Back. Same as me.”

He was light-headed. ‘Same as’ meant hands in places.

The place.

Turning, he braced himself on the wall, much like Scully had, in preemptive prevention of hitting the porcelain once she actually began touchi…

Cloth on back, soap on cloth, someone else, someone Scully, his someone Scully washing his shoulder blades …

He could very well be dead by the time she hit the important parts.

Vast expanse of muscled back, dimpled dips above his ass and delicious dents on the sides of it … legs long, knees bony, ankles strong, thighs hard, sides planked, arms defined, chest rippled, abdomen sloped, scrotum soft …

He couldn’t help the ‘oh, God’ that rose in his throat when the rough washcloth touched him, then fell away again, returning to clean his backside.

Before he could recover from one sensation, then the other, her hand was back in front, cloth gone, fingers small and hot, using the soap still clinging to him to slowly stroke from one end to the other. His second hand went against the wall, the first not enough to keep him from slithering to the ground.

Another ‘oh, God’ broke the silence and, as Scully pressed her body against him, full length and slick as an eel, his head dropped forward, finally taking in the image of her hand on him, moving, squeezing, pressing, pulling. He desperately wanted to touch some part of her, any part of her but with modern brain capacity shrunk to primitive focus, “please, stop or else I’m not …” he lost words for a moment but rallied, “I’m going to …”

That’s as far as he got because her other hand came around, gripped his balls, rolling them lightly against her palm as she whispered, “come?”

And he did: water dancing across his back, Scully milking him dry, his feet sliding to the sides of the tub, his only hope of staying upright as her movements slowed and stopped. One final drag down his length and she let go, “I’m going to rinse off.”

Mulder understood but could only nod, looking over his shoulder to see her wash a few parts a little more thoroughly, then rinse in record time, smiling at him when she finished, “your turn.”

Waiting until she had climbed out and left him alone, he did the same, stepping out three minutes later, hair shampooed as well. She was already gone, and toweling off like he was attempting an Olympic record, he grabbed a dry towel and headed to her bedroom.

She was standing at the dresser, contemplating a drawer of t-shirts but having absolutely none of that, he grabbed her around the waist, tossing her to the bed, “there will be no clothes for the foreseeable future, young lady.”

It had been a hot button debate ravaging her mind for the better part of that three minutes so she was glad he decided for her.

What she hadn’t been expecting was landing on her back, butt on the edge of the mattress and Mulder dropping to his knees in front of her, “turnabout is fair play.”

She felt her legs being pushed apart, thighs dropping open, the cold rush of air shriveling skin until it was replaced by hot tongue and equally scorching breath.

What the hell?

Oh … oh … hell, he was …

Her back arched involuntarily, pushing his nose up, chin bumping her ass. With a grin, he put his hand on her hip, pushing her back down, “I didn’t realize you were a bucking broncho, woman. Give a man some warning next time.”

She was drunk on the world and her partner, her tongue loosened substantially more than it had ever been with their Long Island getaways. Her words carried to him across the humid air, dripping with anticipation, “let me ride you and I’ll show you what a bucking bronco really looks like.”

Holy fucking hell.

His hips began moving in rhythm with his tongue on her, his hands holding her still as best he could, until that is, he used them to spread her wide, slide his tongue as far into her as he possibly could, his cheeks pushed back against her thighs.

She bucked again and he nearly came himself, her thighs clamping down on him, holding him hostage. Moving out of her, he flicked his tongue up against her clit a few more times until she made a grumbling, throaty, moaning squeak and her hand gripped his hair, a fractured ‘don’t … move …’ keeping him still.

Letting go of him a good ten seconds later, her legs fell slack, and she began to giggle.

Giggle?

He couldn’t help the smile splitting his face.

She giggled.

She was giggling.

He had licked her clit and made her giggle.

He was quite possibly king of the world in that moment.

Crawling up the bed, he kissed her forehead before settling in beside her, “are you laughing at me?”

Turning her head, “at me. I’ve never done that before.” Rolling to her side, “no one has ever been able to do that for me before.” Hand on his face, tracing his upturned mouth, “good Lord, Mulder, can we do it again?”

Rolling toward her as well, he let his tongue lag out, “too tired and out of practice but,” running his hand down her thigh, fingers already finding the sweet spot, “everything else is working just fine.”

Throaty growl, she twisted her hips, lifting one leg for his benefit, “how are you out of practice with the copious amounts of sunflower seeds you eat?”

“Seeds are one thing, girl parts are quite another.”

Her hips were moving lightly against his hand, pubis to palm, “well, then, I may just stay here and enjoy this instead.”

“This is my firing hand. I can go all night.”

Stretching, her muscles shivered, “hang on.” Taking two minutes to arrange a few things, she spread out the towel in the center of the bed, then lay down, beckoning him to lay behind her, “save your wrist a little.”

He did not need to be invited twice.

Molded to her back, hard cock wedged nicely between her thighs, he rested his arm over her hip before resuming his task. Much better position, much better reach, he propped himself up on his free arm, kissing her neck while keeping his rhythm, “can we pretend we’re drunk enough to say things in the heat of the moment that we don’t really mean?”

Intrigued, “like what?”

Groaning into her shoulder, “I really want to grab that beautifully rounded ass of yours while you ride me.”

She felt his hips moving, sliding himself back and forth between her thighs, and went him one better, “how does a reverse cowgirl sound?”

He had to stop moving or else he’d be done, but he didn’t respond.

His stillness was answer enough however, and Scully smiled, admonishing him for his lack of movement in amusement, “who said you could stop moving?”

“Sorry.” Grinning into her skin, “I am so close to the mark again right here … and I recall something about wanting to fuck me but not while drunk.”

Every nerve in her body lit up again, “how close do you think you are?”

“About three seconds and a quarter of an inch.”

“Then what are you waiting for?”

He marveled at how smooth and easy it was, sliding into her, hot, wet, perfection. “I love you but I’m not going to last long.”

Her fingers already helping his on her clit, “is that another one of those ‘heat of the …’ back arching, driving him deeper, ‘heat of the moment’ things?”

Forgoing gentle glides and slow movements, he took her by surprise, eliciting an intake of breath and an exhaled ‘oh, God’ from her, with several hard, thwapping thrusts. He then pulled her back, flush against him, as he came, whispering ‘I love you I love youIloveyou’ on a continuous loop into her spine.”

Knowing this definitely wasn’t a ‘heat of the moment’ thing after all, she fought his embrace, shifting off him in order to roll him to his back, climb on top, get him as deep inside as humanly or inhumanly as possible.

Slack in both mind and muscle, he moved where she wanted him to and through his dazing haze, felt her solid weight sink down on him, rhythmic lifts and drops forcing him to focus enough to take in bouncing breasts and sweat shiny skin.

He stayed hard for her as she leaned back, still riding hard, to rub her clit, a mere foot and a half from his face …

18 inches.

He took hold of her hips and met her in the middle, rising to meet her falling pelvis, the results deep enough to make her second ‘oh, God’ of the night echo off the walls.

When he finally got his wits back about him, she was sprawled across him, her hair sticking to his lips, her warm breath steaming up his chest, “you doing okay?”

“Can this be every Tuesday night?”

Laughing at the slurred whisper of her request, he moved his head to get a clear look at her left eye, colored the softest blue he’d ever seen, “this can be every night.”

“I don’t think my body can do this every night.”

“I’m talking about more than sex.”

Scully lifted her hips slowly, kissing him as she shifted off to lay beside him, “don’t dangle things like that in front of me right now, please.”

“Why?”

“I’m weak and might agree.” Throwing her arm and leg over him, she settled in for a long night’s sleep, “I love you, too, by the way.”

&&&&&&&&&

The next morning, Scully found him with half a frozen waffle hanging from his mouth and a glass of apple juice in hand, staring intently into the fridge. He was wearing sweatpants, thick socks and a t-shirt with a hole in the collar, hair standing on end. Shutting the door, he turned to see her and nearly dropped the waffle when he smiled, “‘sup, Agent Scully?”

Wrapping her old cardigan tighter around her tank top covered upper half, she shuffled an inch closer, ratty slippers sliding smooth across the polished wood floor, “you were staring pretty hard into that refrigerator.”

Aiming his now waffle holding hand behind him, “we need to go shopping. I only found waffles, apple juice, and a questionable stack of vegetarian TV dinners. We can’t survive on that.”

Instead of smiling back, she simply studied him, calculating, recalling, wondering until, “every night?”

He adored watching her accept something as truth and he nodded, “every night.”

“Then, yeah, we should probably take today off and go shopping.”

Without taking his eyes from her, he pulled the magnetic shopping list pad off the fridge and sat down at the table, swallowing the rest of his waffle before uncapping the pen that was attached to the paper, “what do we need?”

Beside him in an instant, she tilted his head back and kissed him, “everything.”

#x-files #muldernscully #forgetting you work together #x files fanfic #peanut mms #waffles

Fri, 08 Oct 2021 16:45:46

It’s throwback Thursday time … this is a goodie from 2009 (dragged kicking and screaming from Gossamer) … oi, these things amuse me at times :)

any and all errors are from the original post and have not been changed to preserve giggles and chuckles :)

#lauras gossamer throwbacks #x files fanfic #xf fanfic #xfiles fanfic #while driving #i miss his metric switching car #grape gum up the nose and walmart wanderings

&&&&&&&&&&

He saw her sitting halfway up the bleachers, amidst yelling parents and clapping children. He knew she’d gone outside a good 15 minutes ago but since she’d neglected to come back, he though he’d better go and collect her. He didn’t move fast, more at his usual long-strided amble given there wasn’t much to hurry about anymore. Since the police station was next to the elementary school fields, he didn’t have far to walk; soon standing beside the rickety aluminum riser seats.

She didn’t notice him at first but when she did a general sweep of her surroundings, as was natural habit at this point, she lit on his face staring up at her and with a barely noticed head-tilt, she gave him a half smile.

Figuring this was an invite of the most discreet kind, he picked his way through the scattered crowd, settling next to her without a word. Silently, they sat together through the last minutes of the game as well as through the exodus of people, kids, strollers and family dogs.

It wasn’t until the last person stepped off the field that Mulder turned to her, squinting against the late afternoon sun, “hi.”

Pushing her hair back, only to have the light breeze ruffle it again, “hi.”

“So, got a little tired of Sheriff Blowhard and his parade of blightless minions?”

“A little. There’s only so much blowharding and blightlessness one can take. Besides,” nodding towards the now deserted field, "they looked like they needed another fan.”

Knocking shoulders with her gently, “you know, if we get our paperwork done, we can get the hell out of Dodge.”

Holding silent for a moment, “promise me our next case won’t be like this. I don’t think I can do this again anytime soon.”

“Well, I’ll try to order us up a nice, juicy monster but don’t hold your breath.”

“Just promise to try. That’s all I ask.”

One glance into her tired, dull eyes made him nod, “promise.”

“All right then.” Standing and holding her hand out to him, “let’s, as you put it, get the hell out of Dodge.”

“If only the place was actually called Dodge.”

“Getting the hell out of Parson Village doesn’t exactly have the same ring to it, does it?”

Finally down on the ground, they walked back across the parking lot, “not really.”

&&&&&&&&&

Working through the last of the forms, they said good-bye and left, glad to be leaving the place behind them. The drive back to the hotel was quiet but a companionable quiet, one where Mulder left the radio off and Scully stared out the open window, enjoying the fresh air and the colors of the setting sun.

Back at the hotel, “do you still want to leave now or wait until the morning?”

He knew she would prefer to go than stay and since he wasn’t tired, “now works for me.” Checking out went by in a flash and once Mulder had made a not so secretive trip to the vending machines, they were off, “you sure you want to drive first? I’m awake.”

Scully just turned the car on, “I’m good for now. I’ll let you know when it’s your turn.”

“Fair enough.” Putting his seat back to a decent incline, he settled in, “mind if we keep the windows open for awhile?”

She gave him a smile, “as long as you don’t mind me having the wind blown look.”

“Naw, you wear it well.”

“Okay, now you’re just buttering me up.”

With a laugh, he rested one arm at his side, the other on the middle compartment, hand dangling by the shifter, “just say thanks, Scully.”

“Thanks, Mulder.”

He was feeling a bit mischievous but held off until they had been on the road for a few minutes. From his position, he could tell no one else was on the quiet country road and in a fairly nonchalant way, he made like he was turning on the radio but instead, pushed the shifter forward into neutral.

The engine revved, Scully looked around in panic, then saw Mulder’s hand beside the stick, “what the hell?” Shoving it back in drive, she swung and hit him near full force in the chest, “are you insane?”

Now for the fun part.

Wincing, he curled his arms to his chest, pretending the blow had actually hurt him, “damn. I was just gonna turn the radio on. I bumped it on accident.” Plastering an appropriate grimace on his face, “there’s less painful ways to kill me, you know.”

Her face scrunching in honest apology, “I’m so sorry. I thought you did it on purpose. I … I’m sorry.”

Rubbing his chest for good measure, “remind me to ask before moving next time.” The urge to laugh nearly won but he held it in, “I feel extremely sorry for any suspects on the receiving end of your fist.”

Automatically reaching over, she wrapped her hand around his forearm, “I’m sorry.”

“S'okay.” Wondering how long she’d keep her hand there, “was kind of funny though, wasn’t it?”

She shrugged, “maybe it will be later but right now, I just feel bad.”

“No harm, no foul, right?”

Keeping her hand on him with no sign of letting go, “right.”

&&&&&&&&&

They switched places a few hours later, Scully beginning to yawn and stretch to keep herself awake. Mulder, who’d managed a nap, readjusted the seat and mirrors before looking over at her, “all set?” Head already lolling on the seat and eyes closed, she only nodded. As always amused by the swiftness she could fall asleep, he pulled the car out of the gas station and back on the freeway.She slept for about a half-hour, then woke again when he hit a bump in the road, “sorry.”

Shaking the cobwebs from her brain, “no, it’s okay.” After re-positioning the seat back, she stared out the window for a minute before, “where are we, anyway?”

When he turned to look around, she swiftly reached over, flipping a small switch on the dash, “we’re about 10 miles from the middle of nowhere.”

“That’s specific.”

He gave her a lopsided grin before looking back through the windshield.

She wondered how long it would take for him to notice.

Not long, she soon discovered.

Taking a cursory glance at the speedometer, he slammed on the brakes, throwing them both forward slightly, “what the hell?” When he had looked, he saw in horror that he was doing 120. Still talking to himself, “there’s no way in hell I was doing 120.”

Playing along, “what?! You’re going 120? I don’t need to die tonight, Mulder.”

“I didn’t realize …”

“Just slow the hell down!!”

He shrank into the seat and heart pounding, he brought his speed back to 75 but when looking out the window, he would swear they were nearly crawling. She then watched him look from the speedometer to the road to the speedometer once again, then to the smile she couldn’t contain, “why the hell are all the gauges in metrics now?”

Reaching over, she re-flipped the switch, turning everything back to normal, “did you really think I’d let the neutral thing go unanswered?”

Instead of being annoyed, he looked at her admirably, “nice.”

&&&&&&&&&

She was sound asleep again an hour later when Mulder discovered he was contemplating how long he could shut his eyes before it got dangerous. Poking his finger into Scully’s thigh, “hey, you awake?”

When she only mumbled, he knew they were both done for the night but with only an hour left to go, he debated pushing it.

Until he heard his tires running on the rumble strip.

Yeah, it was time to stop.

Especially when he saw it … a bright beacon of hope in the distance.

Wal-Mart.

24-hour, anyone can sleep in the damn parking lot, beautiful, shiny Wal-Mart.

He pulled off the exit ramp and soon, he stopped the car in the center of a vast expanse of parking lot. Cracking the windows so they wouldn’t suffocate, he put his seat back, stretched and promptly fell asleep.

A blissful sleep that lasted almost a full two hours, until, “what the hell?”

The sound of her voice jolted him upright and his hand caught the horn, beeping it obnoxiously as he blinked against the painfully bright light in his eyes, “huh?”

By now, she was rolling down the window and being the least polite he’d ever heard her, “what!?”

The flashlight lowered but all Mulder could see was the spot it had burned into his retinas. The spot spoke in a low, male voice, “evenin’ folks.”

Again, Scully rolled off with, “what!?!”

“Just wanted to make sure you were all right.”

He could feel Scully building rapidly towards some other, more improper phrases and heading her off with a hand on her arm, “we were tired and thought we’d take a nap instead of wrapping ourselves around a telephone pole.” As the spot began to fade, he could make out an older gentleman behind the lowered flashlight, “I thought people could park and sleep here for the night?”

“RVs can park but ya’ll aren’t in an RV so I thought maybe you were havin’ some trouble.”

Hearing Scully sigh resignedly through her nose, he spoke again, “no trouble, sir. Just tired.”

“Well, ya’ll be careful.”

As he turned and walked away, Mulder looked at her irate expression, “hi.”

“You’re coming with me.”

“Where?”

Unbuckling her belt, “I have to go to the bathroom and you’re coming with me.”

Opening his door, “why are you pissed at me? I didn’t scare the shit out of you with a flashlight.”

“Just come on.”

She stalked across the parking lot, Mulder trotting to catch up, then settling into an easy gait until they got to the store entrance, “are you gonna make me come in with you or do I get to wait outside the door?”

With eyes narrowed, she left him in the entryway and disappeared into the ladies room. Deciding to go himself, he still beat her back and was leaning on the wall when she came out drying her hands on her jeans. She seemed calmer and leaning next to him, “I’m hungry.”

Gesturing through the doors that led to the actual store, “I bet there’s something in there, if you’re willing to risk it.”

“Lead the way, partner.” Both were shocked by the amount of people in the store, “what time is it anyway?”

Finding her wrist with his hand, he twisted her watch around until he could read it, “um, 1:15.”

“Why are all these people here? Don’t they have homes and beds?”

“Insomniacs make the best shoppers.”

She let a small chuckle escape her nose, “just find me something to eat.”

Well, she should have known not to A) shop when she was hungry and 2) shop with Mulder. She should have also put her foot down when he suggested getting a cart.

An hour later, they were finally through the checkout.

Scully had found some sandwiches, drinks and chips for them both, then stupidly gave Mulder control of the cart. He immediately steered towards the entertainment section and was soon pawing through the $3.99 DVD bin.

That killed a half-hour right there. Damn those bins and their B-movie classics.

After he’d found several handfuls of movies, he veered through men’s clothing for socks, housewares for a new shower curtain (which Scully silently thanked God about), hardware to replace the two flashlights he’d left in their hotel rooms, back to menswear for the underwear he’d forgot on the first trip (black boxer briefs, much to Scully’s amusement), then finally through women’s clothing, where he stopped in front of a rack of slogan t-shirts.

Standing for a moment, he studied them, then picked one up with an alien beside a spaceship who was pointing out and stating, “maybe WE don’t believe in you.” Holding it against her for a second, he tossed it in the cart and finally moved to the check-out.

She followed, dumbfounded by the last hour of her life, “Mulder … why …?”

“Shhhh, it’s too late to argue and too early to win.”

Whatever the hell that meant, she graciously allowed him to pay for their food, along with the industrial size Payday bar she tossed in at the last minute.

&&&&&&&&&&&

As they ate their makeshift dinner sitting in the car, “why did you buy me that t-shirt? Do you really think I’m gonna wear it?”

Grinning with a mouthful of half-chewed turkey, “you will. You’ll be getting dressed for something and you’ll just get the urge to put it on. So you will and you’ll realize you like it and that’ll be that.”

“Is this how you get your shopping done because I can see why your cupboards are bare.”

“Never ask about a man’s shopping habits.”

“Mulder?”

“Yeah?”

“Trade you sandwiches?”

He handed the rest of his sandwich to her immediately, taking her partially eaten roast beef in its place, “no dressing?”

“Nope.”

“So much to teach you, grasshopper.”

&&&&&&&&&

“I’ll drive if you want me to.”

Scully shook her head, “naw, I’m fine.”

“Well, I’m not tired now so I’ll keep you awake.”

With a grin in his direction, “God help me.”

“God’s probably asleep Scully. All you got is me.”

“Again, God help me.”

&&&&&&&&&&

They were finally navigating Washington’s outskirts by 3:30. He watched her staring ahead and fought the demon lurking inside him.

He really shouldn’t.

He really, really shouldn’t.

It would be evil and wrong and cruel and more than likely funny as all hell … if she didn’t kill him afterwards.

…

He’d risk it.

Waiting another minute or so, he spied a light blinking in the distance and as they approached it, he braced his feet against the floor. Once they were about 10 feet away, he yelled, gripping the dashboard and the doorframe, “blinking yellow!!!”

She locked up the brakes, as expected, and bought the car to a screeching halt. The stop flung both forward, then back against their seats, with Scully screaming in his ear, “son of a bitch … it’s yellow Mulder! I don’t have to stop for a blinking yellow!”

Looking at her with as much seriousness as he could muster, “I didn’t tell you to stop.”

“Then why the hell did you yell ‘blinking yellow’ in my ear!?”

“I didn’t know if you saw it.”

He had never witnessed her nostrils flaring before and though he wouldn’t admit it out loud, she looked kind of cute doing it but … “are you trying to get us killed?”

He was now smiling despite the fact she had steam shooting out her ears, “there was no one behind us. I checked.”

Another nostril flare came his way before she turned the car off, still sitting in the middle of the intersection, got out and moving to his side of the car, pulled open the door, “drive.”

Still grinning, he scrambled over the gearshift, Scully sliding smoothly into his seat, putting her head back and closing her eyes.

Silence, he had not expected. Yelling, hitting, yes but not quiet. Quiet from Scully meant planning, concocting, calculating, organizing … quiet meant bad things … quiet meant very deep piles of shit with him underneath.

“Scully …”

“Home.”

Suddenly sober, he restarted the car, “I was just playing.”

“Home,” she repeated, then, instead of returning to sleep, she dug some gum from the glove compartment and proceeded to chew a wad of it, very loudly.

Now, he could take bullets, he could take slime, he could take beratement of the highest degree and, as demonstrated, he could even take bile but he absolutely despised the cud-chewing noises she was making. He withstood it for a long as humanly possible before, “could you please get rid of that? You sound like a damn cow.”

“You want me to get rid of the gum?”

“Yes!”

“Where do you want me to put it?”

His mistake was answering too quickly, “anywhere. I don’t care. Just stop chewing it.”

“Okay then.” Undoing her seatbelt, she twisted so she faced him, and in a gracefully disgusting move, she rolled the gum in her fingers, then proceeded to push it up his nose.

He knew something was coming and completely powerless to stop it, he just sat there as a thumb-size chunk of grape Hubba-Bubba was fitted into his right nostril.

She then calmly sat back down and re-buckled herself in.

He left the gum there as he turned to her, “Scully?”

“Yes, Mulder.”

“I believe we’re even now.”

Her belly laugh echoed off the windows and he began laughing as well, slipping the gum from his nose and putting it in his mouth.

Through her laughter, she grimaced, “eww, that’s disgusting.”

“But it’s grape.”

&&&&&&&&&

They finally made it to Mulder’s apartment and since her brain had drifted completely, she didn’t really notice where they were until he stopped the car, “why are we here?”

“Literally or existentially because I don’t think I can take a metaphysical discussion at the moment?”

“Literal.”

“You drove. You drop me off then drive yourself home.”

“Where’s your car, Mulder?”

Pointing to where he always parked, he saw an empty spot, “your house.” His head dropped to the steering wheel, “damn.” Looking at her out of the corner of his eye, “I’ll take you home.”

“No. I want out of the damn car and I want to go to sleep. Right now.”

“Then grab the bags from the store … I’ll get the suitcases.” They managed to make it in his door before dropping everything simultaneously. Mulder then re-picked up her bag and set it in his bedroom, “I’ll take the couch.”

“No, I will. I shoved gum up your nose.”

“And I yelled ‘blinking yellow’.”

Contemplating for a half second, “you’re right.”

He gave her a grin, “just help me change the sheets first.” Nodding, she had the bed stripped by the time he came back with a clean set. They finished in no time and he stepped back, nodding his head, “two people make that way faster.”

“Anytime Mulder but for now, I’m using your bathroom then going to bed.”

“Aye, aye captain.”

Meeting him in the hall on the way back from the bathroom, “g’night, Mulder.”

“’Morning, Scully.”

Before going to the bedroom, she grabbed one last thing, then changed, crawled under the clean sheets and was out before her head hit the pillow.

&&&&&&&&&&

He woke up leisurely. The phone hadn’t rung, no one had knocked on his door, obnoxious garbage men hadn’t rattled the dumpsters … he had woken up because he had finally caught up on his sleep. Marveling at the idea, he stood and moved silently towards his bedroom to check to see if she was awake yet.

Finding her spread eagle on her stomach, covers twisted around her and bare leg sticking out, foot hanging off the side of the bed, he nearly laughed when he saw her wearing the neon green t-shirt he’d bought the night before.

Deciding to let her sleep, he went to the bathroom, then made himself a bowl of cereal. By the time he’d sat down with his second helping, he heard the creak of his bedroom door. Looking up, he saw her standing there, hair tousled, eyes partially open, wearing only the t-shirt, which fell to mid-thigh. Swallowing the frogs in her throat, “’morning.”

After a glance at the DVD player’s clock, “afternoon.” Without comment, she padded across the cool floor and dropped down next to him, curling her legs underneath her. Covering them with his blanket, she reached over, took the spoon and helped herself to a large spoonful of cereal. Shaking the milk off, she had it nearly to her mouth when he finally spoke, “I thought you said you’d never wear that shirt?”

As the cereal entered her mouth, her lips quivered in the slightest of smiles, “shut up, Mulder.”

Thu, 22 Apr 2021 22:55:53

The Boy on the Beach (16/16)

Chapter 16: Black and White Thread

Exact Time and Date Unclear

Sand slopes under his feet. Walking.

He’s relieved to see Scully is walking next to him, her face neutral and impassive. Mulder wonders what beach this is, this rocky and unfamiliar shore. He wonders what happened to Samantha.

Or to Deep Throat? To Diana, to their false children? His mind is muddled now.

He turns to ask Scully if she knows, but when he sees her, the questions evaporate from his mind like wisps of fog. He can only remember the line from the poem instead.

“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?

San Francisco, California
One Week Since Scully Vanished
1999

In the hospital Scully discovered that the young man, Anish, was very kind. He brought her a bag of snacks and a change of clothes.

“And I brought him fuzzy socks,” he said, setting something fluffy and salmon-colored on the table next to Mulder’s bed. “It can get cold in hospitals. They’re pink, but I didn’t think Agent Mulder would mind.”

“No,” Scully said quietly. “I don’t think so either. Thank you.”

Anish approached the bed respectfully, clearing his throat. His eyes stopped on Scully’s hand, which was always placed over Mulder’s, and then he took in her face, as though he were studying her.

“He hasn’t regained consciousness?”

“Not yet,” Scully whispered. “I hope soon.”

“I also brought these,” Anish said, handing her a folder. “For when he wakes up. I thought he might like to keep them. They were so significant for him. He … wouldn’t let anyone else touch them, you know.”

After he left, Scully opened the folder.

Inside was a stack of printed papers. On top was a black-and-white image of her childhood bedroom in San Diego, with PHOTO 1 written, in Mulder’s handwriting, across the top.

Exact Time and Date Unclear

The path they walk along the sea is circuitous. The wind blows; Scully’s hair is a wild flame, a fluttering streak ahead of him on the path. As they wind their way, Mulder keeps thinking of the lines from Wordsworth, the poem from another dream, turning each word over in his mind again and again like a seashell.

Scully turns around, and he can see her lips move, but the wind picks up in a sudden gust.

“I can’t hear you,” he calls to her.

Her clothes flap around her as she nods solemnly, turns, and walks away from him.

“So be it when I shall grow old,
Or let me die!”

San Francisco, California
One Week Since Scully Vanished
1999

Scully thumbed through the photos in numb amazement.

The picture of the bus pass, photo 4, had a caption. Next to the section of the photo where her hand was visible, Mulder had scribbled: her fingers. This was underlined several times, as though it were the most important detail in the world.

It was hard to construe this notation as anything resembling investigative work. Scully shook her head at his apparent sentimentality, sending a quick look of disbelief at his unconscious face.

There were more notes on the picture of her postcard from Las Vegas – “Thought of you. Wish you were here. - DKS.” He’d rewritten that part of her message —“Thought of you. Wish you were here” — again and again maybe twenty times underneath the picture, the repeated sentences looping around the corner of the image when he had run out of room. Like he was a child being punished in school. Or like he was simply losing his mind.

She bit down on her lip, hard.

She kept flipping through these pictures, this strange documentation of her experience, but she stopped again when she got to the image of the Apollo 11 keychain.

At the bottom of that paper, he’d scrawled three cryptic bullet points:

-nobody gets there alone
-makes me whole person
-the flaw in the mission

Scully leaned over and pressed her face gently against his arm, weeping silently.

Exact Time and Date Unclear

The sea is unsettled, Damascus steel, the surf a chorus of urgent stage whispers. Scully stands with her back to it, facing him. She wears gray, too, a long flowing linen dress.

“Are you still contemplating rainbows in the sky, Mulder?” Scully asks. She stands in the sand, a hole, a fort; she is wriggling her toes. “Or is your mind elsewhere?”

Mulder looks up at the sky, as ominous as the water. Clouds like sharp fangs everywhere.

“No rainbows,” he says wistfully.

Scully follows his gaze skyward. He wonders what she sees, if conditions look as grim to her as they do to him.

“The Child is father of the Man,” she says, still looking up. “Like Wordsworth says.”

“That means our fate is sealed,” Mulder’s words are just sad whispers, so quiet the wind lifts them away.

“Fate is a single cord, black thread braided with white thread, excluding nothing,” Scully said.

“Are you teaching me philosophy now?” Mulder sighs. “That’s kind of tiresome, Scully.”

Scully shakes her head, a close-lipped smile. Behind her, a wall of sea water falls over in a thunderous crash. “You always say you want the truth, Mulder, but lies are a comfort to you. So easy every time.”

I grew up with lies, Mulder thinks. Lies are what I know best.

“You know me,” Scully reminds him. Somehow she is hearing inside his mind.

San Francisco, California
One Week Since Scully Vanished
1999

His eyes cracked open in the early evening.

Scully leaned forward quickly so that her face would be the first thing in his line of sight.

“Mulder,” she whispered, all quiet joy. “Hey. Welcome back.”

He blinked in confusion and wrinkled his forehead. Right away she could tell that hurt him, because he winced.

“Don’t move your head too much,” Scully said, cupping his jaw lightly with her hand. “You have a fresh bandage and a new incision.”

He tried to bring his hand up to his brow, but she stopped him, surrounding his hand gently in hers. He stared blankly at her.

“They had to go back inside in order to deal with – well, it’s not important right now. The surgeon says you should be all right, if you’re careful. And I’m going to personally make sure you’re careful this time. No more risks.”

He nodded gingerly, his eyes not leaving hers.

“You scared me to death, Mulder,” she said. “When you’re entirely better, I’m going to be very upset with you. Lucky for you, that could take weeks and weeks.”

He tried to smile, but it seemed to pain him. “Had dream again,” he croaked.

In a brief flash Scully wondered if that meant more marital bliss with Agent Fowley, but that was pointless to think about right now. She was just happy he was awake.

“Does it hurt to talk?” She ran a finger lightly over his lips. “Oh, Mulder, your lips are so dry. Let me get you some petroleum jelly.”

The nurse had brought them a little packet of Vaseline, and Scully hastily opened it and began spreading it over his mouth, using her fingertip. His eyes tracked her as she worked.

“You’re going to have to take it easy, Mulder,” she said. “Really. No work for a very long time. No projects this time.”

His hand enclosed around her wrist, stopping the Vaseline application for a moment. “The dream…” He broke off. “Was it real, Scully?” His voice was still raspy. “Seemed real, but also … too good to be true?”

She stared down at him warily, dabbing the last of the Vaseline in the corner of his mouth.

“What was your dream?” She hesitated. “Was it the same as before … the comfortable life? With Diana?”

“No,” he said. “Not that.” He closed his eyes, as if exerted, but then opened them again. “The past. My sister on the beach. The … attic bedroom. All true?”

Her eyes couldn’t pull away from his, no matter how much her instincts told her to hide.

“Yes,” she said, after a pause. “All true.”

“Oh God, Scully,” he sighed, clasping her hand. “I’m so glad.” His eyes shut again, fatigue taking him. “So glad it was all true.”

The grip of his fingers relaxed, and she watched him sink back into sleep. She remembered how the boy Fox told her she’d gotten it wrong about adult Mulder, about how he felt about her. She wondered just how wrong she might have been.

State Road
Chilmark, Massachusetts
4 Weeks Since Scully Vanished
1999

He couldn’t sit still in the passenger seat – first fumbling with the radio, then searching for landmarks out the window, then flopping his head over to look at Scully again.

“Are we there yet?” Mulder said irritably.

“You know exactly where we are, Mulder,” Scully said, but her tone was tolerant. “How are you feeling?”

“How are you feeling? You’re the one who’s been driving for hours and hours,” he said.

“My neck is a little stiff, actually,” she admitted. “I’ll be ready to get out soon.”

“I would’ve driven, you know,” Mulder muttered. “I’ve driven this trip a thousand times.”

She just glared at him, the message not needing to be spoken aloud. Driving is not permitted on Dr. Scully’s brain surgery recovery regimen.

Both Mulder and Scully had been granted a generous leave of absence: Mulder, to recover from his second surgery, and Scully, to recover from being a victim of manslaughter, he supposed: some strange Bureau way of acknowledging that they had made a mistake.

Scully was using the leave to approach her role as warden of Mulder’s health with full commitment. While he was being checked out of the hospital back in San Francisco, Scully had picked up the pamphlet the nurse gave him and read the instructions to him sternly.

“Do not dye your hair for two weeks following the procedure,” she had announced. “Do not drink alcohol. Try to walk or get activity everyday, but avoid strenuous exercise or contact sports for three weeks. Do not engage in sexual activity until speaking with your doctor. Change your bandage every two days.”

“Good thing I bring my doctor with me,” he’d said. Her eyes had shot up over the pamphlet, and he’d smiled winningly. “For changing the bandage, of course, Scully.”

The predictable eye roll, yes, but also a tiny, coy smile. There was possibility in that smile.

Recovering from brain surgery was not something Mulder ever wanted to be experienced in, but he knew a little something about it now. He knew, from last time, that he would be incredibly sleepy the first few days. He slept the whole flight home, even though Scully kept waking him up to check his temperature.

He was out like a light again in the cab on the way back to his apartment from the airport, but that was okay, as Scully had wordlessly slid into the cab next to him.

Every time he woke up under the print blanket on his couch, he would lift his head and look around for her, and she would always be somewhere nearby: interminably cleaning up dishes in his kitchen, standing over him speculatively holding a thermometer, curled up in the leather chair across the room reading a novel.

She changed his bandages much more often than every two days.

Mulder had been worried about what would happen to Skinner, so he kept calling into work, even though this agitated Scully, who would prefer he pretend he had no job at all. Their boss had solved the problem of how to get access to Hays’ equipment by breaking Georgette and Anish into the San Francisco field office evidence room in the middle of the night. They’d set up the machines and brought Mulder and Scully back to 1999 right there on the spot. Of course, unauthorized entry into the evidence room was a violation of an untold number of F.B.I. regulations and likely federal laws. But Skinner had somehow managed to cover up the incident and now himself acted like it had never happened. Scully’s sudden reappearance had been a perplexing twist, and at this point, everyone wanted the spooky case with the loose ends just to vanish. So as far Mulder could gather, there would be no further word said about it.

As he gained more energy, he began to go on walks around his block with his personal physician. He liked this because it meant a trip out of his apartment, and also because she always held his hand. Anyone who passed the two of them, bundled in coats, hand in hand, admiring holiday decorations, probably assumed they were just some ordinary couple, out for a walk together.

Maybe they were. They hadn’t talked about what happened in the attic, but she wasn’t exactly pretending it hadn’t happened, either.

He would say she was definitely showing more affection, albeit in a subdued Scully way. They watched a movie on his couch, and she leaned her head against his shoulder in a way she hadn’t before — at least not so intentionally, not so obviously. Pushing his luck and playing the vulnerable patient card, he arched his arm over and around her like a slick teenager, drawing her in a little closer. Not subtle, but she didn’t object.

At first, she was making the long trek back to her place in Georgetown to sleep each night, but that started to seem impractical. She spent one uncomfortable night sleeping on his couch after he’d fallen asleep in his bed, which he only found out the next day because she was cranky, muttering about the kind of grown adults who slept on couches and their inevitable long-term back problems.

The next night, after she confirmed he was sleeping on his side like the brain surgery recovery instructions said to, she crawled into his bed and lay down next to him.

He tensed, not sure what to do with the knowledge that she was right behind him.

Even in the haze of his surgery-induced sleepiness, his brain couldn’t help but experience flashes of her pale body straddling his, the lift off of the dress, the revelation of those perfect, pink-tipped breasts he’d barely gotten to spend any time with. These were images that just weren’t going anywhere any time soon.

He felt her forehead press against his back, just between his shoulder blades. Warm breath against his spine made goosebumps spring over his body. She probably thought he was already asleep. He realized she was intending to comfort herself, not him.

It worked to calm him down nevertheless. He fell asleep not long afterwards, and those were the sleeping arrangements every night since.

He didn’t try for more than that. Not yet. He had read the pamphlet, and if he knew Scully, she probably worried their encounter in the attic had contributed to his aneurysm. To him, it still seemed worth it – wouldn’t have been a bad way to go, frankly, if he had to – but he didn’t think that argument would fly with her.

Still, there were reasons to be hopeful. And he definitely was, more than he could remember in recent years. It’s just that there was a melancholy edge. An old one. From the way Scully’s eyes studied him when she didn’t think he was paying attention, she saw it, too.

And then there was the way her eyes sometimes wandered to a point in the distance, her mind lost to unspoken anxieties he could only guess at. She had some shadows of her own, too. Maybe the possibility of a blank slate was just too much to ask for for the pair of them.

It had been her idea to drive up to Martha’s Vineyard.

When she first raised the idea, it surprised him — that she would permit a road trip. But she said that he was ready for a little more activity in his daily routine, that he could nap in the car on the drive up, and couldn’t they stay in his father’s old house in West Tisbury? Of course he agreed.

Now, driving straight out to Squibnocket Beach in Chilmark — also her suggestion, even though it would be cold on the beach, and it probably would have made more sense to go to the house in West Tisbury first and drop off their bags— he realized he hadn’t asked questions about why she wanted to come. He’d assumed she just wanted to see what the place looked like twenty-six years later. Sightseeing for a former time traveler.

“It looks different, doesn’t it? More rocky? Fewer dunes,” Scully commented, breaking into his thoughts, as she pulled into the beach parking lot. “I walked here one afternoon in 1973—this is where we took the photo on the beach that day.”

“I don’t remember the way it looked back then as well as you. Not as fresh in my mind.”

“You could see this beach from your boyhood bedroom window,” Scully said with a smile. “I loved that.”

“Just barely,” shrugged Mulder. “Although, when we sold that house in Chilmark, you better believe we listed it as having ‘beach views.’”

Scully turned off the engine as a family in matching neon windbreakers walked by on the path in front of the car, two kids arguing loudly with one another. The mother, who was carrying a kite, let it drop it into the wind and put her arms around the children instead. The kite suddenly skittered up a few feet into the air behind her, trailing after them like a guardian angel. Scully watched this intently as they passed.

“More people here than in 1973,” she commented. “Even in the cold weather.”

“The march of progress,” Mulder said, a hint of bitterness.

Tell me something better about 1999, something we don’t have now.

“Are you ready to get out?” Scully said, her eyes boring into him. “Maybe take a little walk?”

“Sure,” Mulder said, hesitantly. “It’s why we’re here, right?”

It was cold but clear, and the sun was beginning to set, the sky steel blue dissolving into periwinkle and gold. Most of the other visitors on the beach were headed the opposite direction, maybe back home to have hearty chowders and hot toddies.

Scully took his hand, but then seemed to change her mind and instead hooked her arm around his, sidling in closer to his black leather jacket. He suspected he was being used for his body heat.

Mulder always loved how rocky and irregular Squibnocket could be. He hadn’t been here for years, but he remembered how it always changed constantly, unpredictably. Not just decade to decade, but day to day. Today, it was scattered with a spray of pebbles as well as the more sizable, stolid rocks. Obstacles large and small.

They hadn’t walked far when Scully approached one waist-high boulder. She ran her hands over it, tracing her fingers through its grooves, scowling, and then looked back towards the road as though gauging the distance.

“I think this is where we took the picture with the body cam,” Scully said. “I think this is the rock I put the camera on, although it looks so different. I suppose it’s just been worn down by surf and wind and time.”

“Yeah,” Mulder said. He placed his palm on the surface, too, and it felt warmer than he expected, baked by the sun. His eyes drifted in the direction he imagined they must have stood in the moment the photo was taken. The faint and ghostly image of kid him, Scully, and Samantha projected before his eyes on the beach like a hologram. A childhood memory he never experienced.

That cloud looks like a ballet slipper, doesn’t it? Or maybe a rainbow?

“You miss her all over again,” she observed.

He looked down and quickly contemplated his hand on the rock.

“Mulder,” Scully said, carefully, watching him, “I don’t think I really understood about your sister’s disappearance — what that must have meant for you as a kid. Not really. I thought I did. I just want you to know that even though I only knew her a little while, I miss her, too … and I wish she were here now. I don’t ever want to give up on finding out exactly what happened to her.”

Mulder didn’t say anything. He turned to look out at the breaking waves, the edge of the surf catching on rocks. This was an offer, he realized. To help him lift something he was used to carrying alone.

“I keep thinking about her in that other multiverse,” Mulder confessed quietly. “Wondering what she grew up to be like in the 1999 there.”

“Me, too,” Scully said. Her eyes fell on the beach before them, like she was also seeing a phantom image of Samantha and young Fox in 1973. “I think she probably turned out a lot like you. She was so much more like you than I expected.”

“You thought so?” Mulder said.

“Yes,” Scully said, placing her hand on his, on top of the rock. He sat with that idea for a moment, the sister who might have grown up to share qualities with him as an adult. A tempting alternate reality for someone who was no stranger to loneliness. But he wasn’t lonely now, not really.

“I don’t regret spending that extra time with her,” Mulder said. “In several respects that was … the best twenty-four hours of my life. Which is really something, when you consider that the first time it was the most traumatic twenty-four hours of my life.”

Scully’s smile was sad. Her eyes shifted to the sea, too.

“And yeah, I’m always going to be angry that she was taken from me. But I also don’t regret my own fate, the course my life has taken,” he said. “Is that strange to say?”

“No,” she said simply, sliding her small arm around his again. “I don’t think it is.”

The wind started to pick up, and she sucked her teeth in reaction. He leaned towards her a moment, allowing his body to protect her from the brunt of the wind. Then they began to wind a crooked way down the beach again, stepping carefully around the fragments of uneven rocks before them.

“Did you drive me here to this freezing island just so you could get me to process my emotions, or what?” he asked.

She smiled her tight-lipped smile. “It may have been part of my agenda. Do you think it’s working?”

“Too soon to say, I think,” he said. “What’s the rest of your agenda?”

“Hmm,” she said slowly. “Would you believe me if I said … a relaxing beach vacation?”

He chuckled. “It’s not exactly bikini season, Scully.”

“Maybe I need to process my emotions, too.”

He stole a look at her then, black coat, her hair flapping in the wind, her countenance as stoic as ever. He wondered what emotions, exactly, she needed to work through.

They walked on the beach together for a long time, the hue of the sky growing darker and darker, a smattering of stars starting to peek out. Mulder’s mood took a turn for the philosophical.

“Scully, if you could travel back to another point in time in your life to revisit it, what would you choose?”

“I think I’m done with time travel.”

“Georgette isn’t,” Mulder commented. “She plans to continue Hays’ research.”

“That’s interesting and admirable, but I don’t especially want to be her test subject.”

“If you chose the day we met, in the Hoover Building, and you had come to me back then with your wacky story about the future, do you think I would have believed you?”

“Of course,” she said. “Without question. I convinced you when you were twelve, didn’t I? And you were much more sensible when you were twelve.”

He smiled a little, deciding she was probably right.

“Scully, do you remember how I told you about the boy in my dream – the one on the beach, building the spaceship in the sand?”

She looked at him with apprehension. “Yes, I do.”

“Do you think it’s at all possible that the boy could be seen as a portent of this whole experience? A sign that I’d be forced to revisit childhood in some more literal way?”

Scully was silent, and her pace slowed.

“Should I take that as a no, g-woman?”

“When you told me about the boy, back in your apartment that day, I thought I knew – I hoped I knew exactly what he meant,” she said.

“You … did?” Mulder frowned. “What?”

“Now I’m not so sure about it.”

She stopped walking. There was no sound but the rush of wind and sea. Mulder waited.

“I had been planning to ask you.” She looked at her feet, taking a slow breath. Whatever was on her mind, he could see it was something that wasn’t easy for her to talk about. “I have a few ova that could be viable, and my doctor thinks the chances are reasonable.” He went completely still. “So I had been thinking of going through the in-vitro process, of having a baby. I had been planning on asking you—before any of this started—if you would consider being the donor.”

He was stunned. That this was something she would want – that this was something she would want from him. That she would seriously think this scenario through and decide he, Fox Mulder, was the guy for this job. But he didn’t fail to notice she wasn’t using the present tense.

“It’s not logical or rational, but I hoped that the boy on the beach might represent – you know, for you …”

“Fatherhood.” He realized it at the exact same time he said the word aloud.

She nodded, looking down at her feet again, her hair blowing over her face. “Because he was digging a spaceship on a beach, just like I had been … in the Ivory Coast? That seemed like a symbolic link to me. I know, I know. It sounds fairly tenuous.” She sniffed. “Like wishful thinking.”

“Scully,” Mulder said, feeling like his heart might break. “It doesn’t sound tenuous at all.” He wrapped his arms around her, and he wondered why he didn’t think of the spaceship on the beach connection, why he always had to be so goddamned self-centered.

After a moment, he lifted her chin with his hand. Her eyes were wet. “You sound like it’s not something you want to ask me any more,” he said, matter-of-fact. He didn’t want to make it a question; he didn’t want to make it sound accusing. He just wanted to let her know that he had recognized it as true.

“No,” she said. “I don’t think it is.”

“Because of what happened in the attic… it makes it too complicated, maybe?”

“No,” Scully said quickly, tightening her arms around him. “Not because of that.”

“Because of some aspect of the whole experience?” he said, trying to keep his voice neutral. “Seeing my messed-up childhood?”

“Oh Mulder, the kid version of you and Samantha,” Scully said, some tears escaping, “they just made me think about it more.” She leaned her head on his chest. “I guess because they looked a little… like what I’d imagined.”

He rested his chin on the top of her head and let that thought sink in slowly. She’d imagined having children to such an extent she’d visualized what they looked like — and they looked, in her imagination, like him and like his sister.

“It was more that when it came down to it,” Scully whispered to his chest, “I put the mission first, too. In some ways I think I’m … more ruthless than you in putting the mission first. I did whatever it took, Mulder. I stole. I lied. I shot someone. I know, deep down, I would have done anything. I’m just not sure I should be a parent, if those are the decisions I make. I worry I’m … damaged.”

“Scully…” Mulder began, but slowed down. He needed to do this carefully, because this was an important argument, maybe the most important one he would ever make to her. “I hope it’s obvious to you that I was wrong about the mission. It is, right?”

She didn’t lift her head.

“About doing it all alone, for one,” he continued, hesitantly.

The word was muffled into his rib cage. “Clearly.”

“Even the whole premise though. The whole objective.”

Scully looked up at him then, her eyes glassy and vivid blue, taking in his face. “How do you mean?”

“I mean,” Mulder said, “I was wrong about the priority of the… It’s not that the answers are…” He wasn’t doing this very well. He searched for his words. “I think the partnership is the mission. It’s the starting place for everything else. And Scully, yeah, of course you do what it takes to protect that. To protect me.”

He cradled the back of her head in his hand, laying his temple on top of her hair. “Whether or not you want to try to have a baby is your choice, and I’ll do whatever the hell you want,” he said. “But I think if you wanted to have a baby, and you wanted me to be involved somehow, that would be an extension of the partnership. It’d be part of the mission.”

The wind gusted abruptly, and he buried his face in her hair, rocking her back and forth in his arms.

“The partnership is the mission,” she repeated, like it was unthinkable.

“Yeah,” he said, feeling a little foolish.

“I think they call partnerships with babies something else,” Scully murmured into his black leather jacket, after a beat. “Some other word.”

“Tomato, tomahto,” Mulder said, ignoring the little rush that comment gave him. “Point is, I don’t think it’s a bad quality that you’d be some kind of superhero, tough, g-woman parent. I think you sell yourself short.”

She didn’t say anything, but kept her face pressed to him. He slid his arms around her back again, folding her in close, completing the circle.

“I’ll think about it,” she said. “Maybe you’re right.”

“That’s my very favorite sentence from you,” he said. “I’m going to have it cross-stitched to hang on my wall: Maybe You’re Right.”

“Not just ‘You’re Right?’”

He shook his head. “Doesn’t sound like you.”

Her frame shook lightly in his arms, and he smiled, too. That he was capable of speaking to her frankly, comforting her, and making her laugh within such a short time frame gave Mulder an irrational burst of confidence. See. Not meant to be a solo act.

After a moment, he slid one hand down to her lower back and set a course back towards the car again. Ahead of them on the beach, a group of teenagers walking together shrieked abruptly in raucous laughter, but she didn’t look up.

“If I did decide I wanted to try the IVF…”

“You’re welcome to whatever parts of me you need.”

She stopped walking and looked at him, and he lifted a provocative eyebrow in response, causing her to laugh again.

“You understand what IVF is, don’t you, Mulder? That it happens in a lab?”

“Whatever parts,” he said, at once more serious. “No parts. All parts. Whatever you want and need. You understand?”

Her eyes raked over his face, appraising. “You’re serious? That’s an enormous offer, and you didn’t think about it for very long.”

“No, I didn’t,” he agreed. “But I am entirely serious.”

If there’s one thing that’s true for me, it’s that the mission has always been first.

“You really are, aren’t you?” She reached out and ran her fingers lightly down his jaw. “But we should both give it some thought, Mulder.”

“If you say so,” he said softly. He lifted her fingers from his face and pressed them to his mouth, gentle kisses.

Her gaze held steady, bright and hot. She dug her fingers into the deep pockets of his leather jacket and leaned forward, first just brushing her lips against his, then tilting her head and pressing in for a slow, careful kiss.

He drew her to him and kissed her back: his partner, his ground control, his Beata Beatrix with a SIG.

She pulled away, her eyes still closed, keeping one hand buried in his pocket. “Let’s get inside, Mulder,” she said in a low voice. “It’s too cold out here.”

“Agreed,” he said, although he didn’t feel particularly cold at all now. Trying to get control of his foolish, involuntary smile, he set his arm around her shoulders and began walking at a faster pace.

“So,” he said, as they finally arrived at the path back to the lot. “This relaxing beach vacation you imagined. Did it entail dinner? I’m starving.”

“Me, too, but I confess I’m not sure what restaurants are open in the off season.”

“Luckily for you, you’re with a local boy,” he said. “I know a place. Historic inn in West Tisbury, lobster, the whole Vineyard thing. I’ll take you there.”

“Sounds promising.”

“So long as you understand that I’m medically fragile and can’t be taken advantage of until my doctor says it’s all right.”

She smiled enigmatically. “I’ll consult with her.”

“Oh?” he said, newly interested. “You think there’s wiggle room on that?”

“You’ll have to live with the uncertainty of fate,” she said airily. “What will be, will be, Mulder.”

He laughed at that, and in that moment, he felt his heart leap at the sense of possibility. At everything they had left to do together, every possible turn they could take. He reached into his pocket and fished out her small hand, now warmed, clutching it in his. They turned together down the path.

Source:

My Heart Leaps Up, by William Wordsworth (quoted in Amor Fati)

Notes:

I’m very grateful to everyone who has read and left kudos for this, and especially to everyone who has written comments or discussed it on Tumblr or Twitter. Seriously, thank you so very much for taking the time to do that. I fell behind in responding to these almost right away, but please know they really have been tremendously appreciated.

You know, when I read fic, I never listen to the songs authors list as soundtrack tracks either, but I’m going to make the case to you that these 1973 songs are pretty tied into some of these chapters. So if you feel like it, here is a YouTube playlist with all the 1973 songs for this fic. It’s also just fun if you like 70s classic rock / pop / funk at all.

Wed, 25 May 2022 07:06:45

The Boy on the Beach (15/16)

Chapter 15: The Rainbow Above You

The soundtrack for this chapter is Desperado, by the Eagles, from the album Desperado, which was released April 1973.

November 28, 1973
Near Menemsha, Massachusetts

“What’s your favorite thing about the future?”

Samantha was perched on the edge of the jagged, crescent-shaped rock they used to call the Fang Stone. Mulder had lifted her up there at her request, and now she was squirming her rear end higher and higher. Every instinct told him to grab her arm to stop her, but he knew he wouldn’t have done that when he was young, and he knew she didn’t need it, not really. They used to climb all over the Fang Stone all the time as kids, and even fall off, because what were bruises to a kid? If she fell now, he was right there to catch her.

“The future?” he said. “It’s not the future to me. It’s my present.”

“Okay.” She made an exasperated face that gave him a soft and warm feeling, because it reminded him of how it used to be between them. “What’s your favorite thing about 1999?”

He cast a brief look up at the cottage. Scully.

“Well, that’s a hard one. I like my fish tank,” Mulder said. “I have a bunch of mollies, some plants, some decorations. It’s something for me to take care of, and it’s peaceful.”

Samantha swung her legs back and forth off the edge of the Fang Stone. Mulder felt hopeful that her ankle looked a little less swollen today. “That’s not what I meant, silly. I meant something we don’t have in 1973. We have fish tanks.” She wrinkled her nose and looked at the sand below her feet. “I wish I could jump off.”

“Don’t,” Mulder warned. “Scully would kill me if I let you injure yourself further.”

“Do you think she’s awake yet?”

“I don’t know,” he said wistfully. He hoped when she did wake up, she would realize quickly where he’d gone. He’d left her a note downstairs, but she wouldn’t see that right away. Would it bother her to wake up alone? Would she want him to stay in bed with her? He thought she would. But Scully being Scully, it definitely seemed possible, at least, that she would wake up and muster every defense, scrambling to pretend nothing had changed.

If she did that, he decided he couldn’t bear to play along. Not after knowing what it had been like the night before. Her perfect little body pressed fully against him, as though she were entirely his. He placed his finger on his forehead, on the spot that ached.

“Tell me something better about 1999, something we don’t have now,” Samatha prompted.

“Hmm,” Mulder said, moving his finger in tiny figure eights on his forehead. “I’m thinking.” He dug the toe of his shoe in the sand, considering how disappointing future technology seemed from the perspective of a kid. “Okay, okay, here’s something. In 1973, you know how F.B.I. agents, doctors, business types are mostly men? In 1999, women are more likely to have that kind of job, or whatever job they want. In theory, anyway. So that’s better.”

Samantha contemplated that, wriggling up the Fang Stone a little more.

“Scully was your age in 1973,” Mulder continued. “She grew up to be a doctor and an F.B.I. agent in 1999.”

“So I should think about what I want to do when I grow up,” Samantha said. “That’s what you’re saying.”

“Sure,” Mulder said, realizing slowly. “I guess that is what I’m saying. Do you… do you have any idea what you might want to be?”

“I think I might like to be an F.B.I. agent,” she said, eyeing him.

“Oh yeah?”

“Agent Mulder, F.B.I..” She flashed him a mischievous smile. “What do you think?”

He grinned. “Catchy.”

“Or… maybe a scientist or an astronaut or a ballerina.”

Mulder chuckled in wonder. The most beautiful thing a kid’s life can ever be, he thought, is a blank slate. He thought of Anish, who wasn’t even born yet, and his far-off career in therapy.

“Scully’s up,” Samantha commented. She pointed up at the cottage in the distance, where Scully stood leaning against the railing on the back porch, dressed again in the lavender dress with a blanket wrapped around her. Scully lifted her hand to wave at them, a small gesture. The sun’s reflection set the top of her cinnamon hair on fire.

He hoped that whatever it was that existed between them was all unwritten, blank slate possibility, too. An uneasy breath expelled from his lips. Even seeing her now at a distance, he felt the pull of something that was probably way too much and way too strong, something he worried wasn’t fully reciprocated. Scully’d probably say he was just sentimental this morning because it had been too long since he’d had sex—or something practical like that. But he knew better.

He waved back at her, and she stood there staring back a beat longer. Then she wound the blanket around her and turned back inside.

“My brother asked her to stay here,” Samantha told him, kicking her legs lightly off the edge of the Fang Stone. From the side she scrutinized him for his reaction.

He had the urge to correct her, to remind her again that he was her brother, but he didn’t.

“He asked Scully to stay?” he asked.

Samantha nodded, a sly look.

“Stay how?” Mulder said.

“He asked her to stay in 1973 and wait for him to grow up and join the F.B.I. with her. I heard him ask her when we were in the tree. They thought I was asleep.”

Mulder raised his eyebrows. “He did?” Twelve-year old him was ballsy as hell. And apparently on the same page where Scully was concerned. “What did she say?”

“Nothing. But he could tell she didn’t really want to,” Samantha said. “He could tell she wanted to come back to you, to her Fox.”

Mulder, moved, said nothing. He kicked the sand idly.

“Then he asked her,” Samantha continued, “why do you do all this stuff for him, if you don’t love him?”

Mulder didn’t dare ask for more, apparently not possessing his twelve-year old ballsiness anymore. But he hoped his sister would keep talking.

“And she said … ‘I never said that,’” Samantha continued. “She said you and her weren’t in love because of you. That you loved her, but not like that.”

“She said that?”

“Yeah,” Samantha nodded. Her eyes ran over his face. “Is that true?”

Mulder hesitated only a second. “No.”

“That’s what my brother said, too.” Samantha had a secretive smile.

“What? He said … no?”

“He said she had it wrong. And that he’d know, because you were him. I guess he was right.”

Mulder blinked, flabbergasted. “That’s so – he’s so —” He wasn’t sure whether to be mortified or relieved or proud that the kid version of him had such insight into his adult heart.

“Brave,” finished Samantha.

“Yeah,” agreed Mulder, nodding vigorously. “Unbelievably fucking brave. Much, much braver than me.”

“Youcursed,” Samantha said, her mouth opening. “In front of a kid.”

“I always cursed in front of you, Sam.”

“You’re still a potty mouth.”

“You’ve got a really good memory,” Mulder said seriously. “To remember that whole conversation so well. I didn’t remember that about you.”

“I’m a goddamn genius,” said Samantha solemnly.

Mulder looked at her, surprised, and laughed. She sounded so much like himself.

***

He carried Samantha piggyback back to the cottage, and they were both damp and windblown. Scully sat hunched at the kitchen table with a cup of instant coffee and a plate of sandwiches. She was writing something, a stack of papers and envelopes in front of her. A hesitant smile played over her face when she looked up and saw them.

“Guess what’s for breakfast,” she said to Samantha, her eyes soft.

“Peanut butter sandwiches again,” Samantha groaned.

“I cut them as rectangles this time. For variety,” Scully said, scooting them towards Samantha.

“Yeah, rectangles taste really different from triangles,” nodded Samantha, rolling her eyes. She sat down and picked one up anyway.

“After Scully and I leave today, you’ll probably be back with Mom and Dad, and you can have a regular meal,” Mulder said in a deliberately casual tone, sitting down next to her at the table.

“Maybe we’ll have lasagna,” Samantha mused, taking a bite of her sandwich. “I hope so.”

Scully’s eyes locked on his. He studied her face carefully. A tiny indentation between her eyes. Those lips drawn together. Maybe they were slightly pink and chafed, he thought, from hard kissing last night, an idea that probably delighted him a little too much. She didn’t look upset, at least not with him. Not with them. That was a very good sign.

He hesitated for a moment, and decided he was tired of holding back. All he wanted to do was feel her touch. So he reached out across the table and covered her soft hand with his, lacing his fingers through hers. Her eyes grew a little round, but she didn’t withdraw her hand.

“What are you writing?” Samantha had been staring down at the papers on the table, chewing on her sandwich.

“Letters,” Scully said. “Two of them.”

“Who for?” Samantha said. “More for the F.B.I.?”

“No,” Scully said. Letting go of Mulder’s hand gently, she picked up and slid two envelopes across the table towards Samantha, each addressed with a first name: one Fox and the other Dana. “When Mulder and I go back this afternoon, I want you to give the letters to your brother – and to the young Dana Scully who will be here.”

Samantha slowed chewing. “There’s going to be a kid you here, too?”

“Yes,” Scully said. “And she’s going to be the most confused, because she’s not going to remember any of this. She won’t know who you are, who Fox is. She won’t know where she is — she’s never even been to Martha’s Vineyard. You’re going to have to help get the police and get her back to my parents in San Diego. You can tell them that the man who died kidnapped you, if you want, or you can blame me – it doesn’t matter, I’ll be gone anyway. I have this letter that will hopefully help her begin to understand, although I don’t know if she ever really will.”

“My brother will want the little Scully to stay around here, so he can tell her everything,” Samantha said. “I know he will.”

“Well, she’s a kid,” Scully said. “She needs to go back to her family. So Fox can’t turn her into his protegee.”

Mulder grimaced, fearing that he probably would have tried to do exactly that. Still, the idea of having met Scully so young, of knowing about a one day future adult Scully when he was only twelve — that was admittedly fascinating to think about. It was a second unpredictable high-impact twist on the personal history of the Fox Mulder of this multiverse.

“So when my brother comes back,” Samantha said, slowly, as if fully grasping for the first time, “I won’t see either of you any more.”

“Right,” Mulder nodded. “Well, not looking like this for a while, anyway.”

“But you’ll be back in your 1999, where you don’t have your sister,” Samantha said to him. “She was taken away a long time ago.”

“Yeah,” Mulder’s voice was rough. “That’s true.”

Samantha took another slow, methodical bite of her sandwich, watching him.

“Then … we probably should go outside and make a sand fort,” Samantha said, after a minute.

“Okay,” agreed Mulder.

“And maybe you should waltz with me on the beach.”

“Waltz? Like dance?” Mulder was puzzled. “Okay.”

“You can’t dance on your ankle, Samantha,” Scully reminded her gently.

“He can lift me,” Samantha said. “He’ll be able to do it.” She took another precise bite of her sandwich. “My brother got really strong as a grown up,” she added quietly, her mouth full.

***

Thirty minutes later, Mulder and Samantha waltzed on the beach, Scully observing them with a tiny smile.

She sat with her legs outstretched on a wool blanket she’d spread over the sand, another wrapped over her shoulders. The beach wasn’t warm by any means, but the sun was breaking through the clouds above them, and the breeze was gentle today, so Scully wasn’t miserably cold.

She wrapped her arms around herself, rocking back and forth imperceptibly as she watched the Mulder siblings dance an awkward waltz for the second time in three days.

Mulder really didn’t understand what they were doing, but he listened obediently to Samantha’s instructions. He gripped her by the waist, lifting her completely off the ground, allowing her to hold on to his shoulder, wrapping her legs around him. He held one of her hands extended out in position. And he apparently did remember how to waltz, because he began sliding his feet around in a formation, bobbing Samantha like a rag doll, around and around and around with unexpected grace.

He tried to hum a Viennese waltz to give them some appropriate musical accompaniment, but Samantha began singing the lyrics to Space Oddity instead. Mulder laughed a little, mystified, but joined in sotto voce, and she wound her left hand tighter around his neck so she wouldn’t fall.

Unlike the boy, Mulder never complained or acted embarrassed about dancing with his sister. Of course he wouldn’t. Scully knew he’d have danced with her forever.

When they’d danced enough to satisfy Samantha, they set to work digging a giant hole in the sand right next to Scully’s blanket, making something they both called a fort. It looked to Scully much more like a giant hole, but the Mulders were in their own mutually agreed upon world on this, talking of fortifications and defenses and egress and ingress.

Both Samantha and Mulder kept calling out for her to look at things – “Scully! Is this three feet deep?” “Scully! Look at this bridge!” “Scully! Do you think this fortification would resist a frontal attack?” — and she would smile appreciatively or roll her eyes, depending on who was calling out her name.

It was all whimsical, joyful, charming. An adult man and his kid sister making sand castles together on a brisk autumn day. But there was still a persistent lump in Scully’s throat. This time with Samantha was a gift for him, yes, but she worried it would mean another wrenching loss.

Mulder’s tower fortification collapsed and crumbled, and he moaned in mock despair. Samantha cackled with laughter, digging deep in the sand with her hands. Scully thought about how she would do anything to spare him more grief. Anything at all.

When the sun was high in the sky, they knew it could happen soon. The timing wasn’t precise.

Mulder produced a small case from his pocket with two remote electrical stimulus patches, designed by one of Hays’ graduate students. He pressed one to his own temple, right beneath his hairline, and then, pushing back Scully’s hair, he pressed the other patch to hers, letting his fingers trail down her cheek.

“Now what?” she said.

“Now we wait,” he said.

So the three of them sat on the wool blanket, Samantha in the middle, Mulder and Scully on each side, watching the green-gray ocean surf crash again and again, disintegrating into lacy bubbles as it slid over the sand.

For a while, they didn’t speak.

Mulder broke the silence. “Sam — I was thinking. Why do you think your brother trusted Scully so quickly? Why do you think he liked her so much?”

Samantha was holding a tiny seashell in her palm, turning it over in her fingers. “Well,” she said. “She’s really nice.”

“That’s true,” nodded Scully. “I am, you know.”

“Well, sure,” Mulder said. “But she was a stranger. He didn’t know her at all.”

“Yeah,” Samantha said. “I know what you mean.” She squinted into the horizon, biting her bottom lip. “I think … it’s that he never thinks grown-ups listen to him very much. And she did.”

In the pause that followed, Scully’s expression grew softer, fonder.

“Oh,” he said. He said nothing for another beat, turning to watch the surf crash again.

So. Same reason then.

Without looking, he reached out behind Samantha’s back and took Scully’s hand in his.

“People should listen to my brother,” Samantha said, turning the seashell over again. “He’s very smart.”

“Yes,” Scully agreed softly, her eyes on the horizon, too. She lightly traced the outline of Mulder’s thumb with hers. “They should.”

They drifted into silence again.

After a while, they leaned backwards on the blanket so that they were all three lying on their backs, staring up at a gray sky harshly bright in the afternoon sun. Scully identified cirrus and cirrostratus clouds for Samantha. An errant gull looped overhead, and Mulder named him Jerome and made up a story about his exciting travels for Samantha. They had to scrunch their eyes shut from time to time when the sun suddenly burst forth from behind a cloud.

Mulder unexpectedly began to wax full of life advice for his sister. With his hands folded on his stomach, he looked up at the sky and told Samantha to wear sunscreen and bike helmets and to invest in personal computers and to take up a sport and to learn another language.

“And when you’re older, if you should want to date someone, whoever it is, just be sure you always introduce them to your brother first, so he can make sure they’re okay – you know, nice people,” Mulder said.

“You really don’t have to do that,” Scully assured her. “He’s going through something right now and doesn’t mean everything he’s saying.”

“She should,” Mulder insisted indignantly. “You didn’t do the time in the VCU I did, Scully. Better safe than sorry.”

“It’s just going to be a normal life for her,” Scully told him firmly. “Normal younger sisters don’t need to run everyone they date by their older brothers. Unhealthy and unpleasant, Mulder.”

She tilted her head on the blanket to see him better, and discovered his eyes were on her already. He gave her a small and inscrutable smile. “I might see your point,” he said softly. “Date who you want, Sam. Just use good judgment.”

“I’m only eight,” Samantha said tolerantly. She pointed upwards at the sky. “That cloud looks like a ballet slipper, doesn’t it? Or maybe a rainbow?”

“A ship on the ocean,” Scully said. “Heading out to sea.”

“Oh, I see,” Samantha said. “The sail, yeah. It does look like a ship.”

“No, it looks like a sharp tooth. Like the Fang Stone,” Mulder said.

“The Fang Stone?” How?” Samantha scoffed.

“That curved part there?” Mulder pointed. “Or maybe like one of those—“

The sky disappeared.

The background noise of ocean surf cut off abruptly.

Oh God, she was spinning, spinning.

San Francisco, California
147 Hours After Scully Vanishes
1999

Scully couldn’t see. All around her was dim, out of focus. She found she was on her feet, standing, the blanket gone from under her, the ground feeling like it was moving up and down. She reached out her palms defensively.

Her hand brushed a human body, and she jerked it back in panic, aware there were people close by, moving around her. Voices faded in and out like a transistor radio tuning in.

“Thank God.”

“He’s not —“

“— wrong.”

The sound of something falling to the ground.

“Mulder?” Scully called out, her voice sounding too loud in her own ears.

“Mulder.” Another voice repeated the word. Skinner’s voice. It was definitely Skinner. “Can you hear me, Mulder?”

“Sir?” Scully called out. She pawed at her eyes frantically, trying to regain some sight. She could tell she was somewhere indoors, from the way the air was so still, but everything was so blurry and dark. Taking a step backwards, she found herself backing into a piece of furniture, maybe a bookshelf. Her ears worked well enough to hear the clatter, and she startled and cried out a little.

“Someone help her,” came a young woman’s voice, more clear now.

“Tell me what’s wrong with Mulder,” Scully demanded. “What’s going on?”

“He’s here, Scully,” Skinner said soothingly. “You’re both back. You’re in 1999. Just stay calm.”

“Agent Mulder, can you hear me?” came a young man’s voice, low to the ground. Scully could make out their silhouettes.

“Mr. Skinner, we need to call an ambulance,” the woman’s voice said, worried. “He’s completely unconscious.”

“What’s wrong with him?” Scully tried to sound authoritative, but her voice quavered. She directed her focus to the ground, taking small steps towards the shape of the woman. On the floor she saw the dark outline of a body.

Oh no, no, thought Scully. How could I be so stupid.

“You’re a doctor, right, Agent Scully?” the young man said. “He had brain surgery not too long ago, didn’t he?”

“Yes,” Scully said, every part of her cold with dread. She lowered herself until she could feel out the contours of the body with her hands: his shoulder, his cheek, his forehead. She peeled the stimulus patch off. Mulder didn’t stir. He felt unnaturally cool and clammy. No involuntary movements or obvious signs of seizure.

“He collapsed the second you got here,” the young man said. “Is it possible the mild electrical shocks for the time travel caused some kind of complication? An aneurysm? I think he might’ve been having headaches and not telling anyone.”

“It’s possible,” whispered Scully. She brushed his soft hair back with her hand, feeling the ridge of his scar. “Call an ambulance,” Scully said. She felt her panic grow. “Right now. Right now, right away. I can’t see well enough to help him right now —- I can’t help him. Right away. Call an ambulance.”

“I’m calling,” Skinner promised.

“We should have asked more questions about his surgery,” the young woman next to her whispered.

“He would have lied anyway,” Scully said, her voice tight.

She leaned over his body, her hands cupping each side of his face. “Mulder, I said to be careful. I told you not to risk your recovery. You didn’t listen, so you better fucking listen to me now. Are you listening?” Her fingertips ran over the stubble on his cheeks. “Don’t even think about any self-sacrificing martyr death. You stay here and wait for this ambulance, Mulder. You understand me? You stay here with me to see what happens in the future.”

Tue, 24 May 2022 07:16:09

The Boy on the Beach (14/16)

Chapter 14: Cool, Cool Rain

The soundtrack for this chapter is Love, Reign O’er Me, by the Who, from their critically-acclaimed album Quadophenia, which was released October 1973. This track was their debut single in the U.S., and charted at #76 in October; the album itself peaked at #2.

November 27, 1973
Near Menemsha,Massachusetts

Scully sat in the living room waiting for Mulder to finish tucking Samantha in, wool blanket wrapped around her. Should she go offer to help him? Did he need her help? Probably unnecessary, perhaps even intrusive. It was his sister, after all, and Scully’s attachment to Samantha was only a few days old.

Her eyes fell on the window.

She stood up, abruptly, and strode to it, drawing back the curtain to peer out. There was no ominous white light pouring in. There was no speck of light visible at all, in fact, only opaque and unknowable darkness.

Placing a palm against the cool glass, she closed her eyes and listened, trying to pay attention to every sound around her. The ceaseless ticking of the clock in the kitchen. Some muffled movement from the downstairs bedroom where Mulder was with Samantha. A slight settling in the house, the bones of the aged cottage creaking. The rise and fall of wind outside, a plaintive cry, like something Mulder would make her investigate. Somewhere beyond that, in the distance, the persistent shhhhh static of the sea.

“You all right, Scully?”

Scully spun around. “Yes,” she said. “I was just… checking outside again. Is Samantha all settled?”

“Yeah,” he said, a weary smile. He stood leaning against the door frame that led from the hall to the living room, looking precisely like what she pictured when she missed Mulder: dark sweater, disheveled hair, brooding eyes. “I think she’s starting to come around a little to the idea of having this elderly brother.”

“I think so, too,” Scully said, taking a half-step towards him. “I really do.” She fought the impulse to cross to him and run her hand through his hair. “Mulder — how are you? You look tired.”

“Do I?” He chuckled weakly. “Well, I haven’t slept very well recently.” He lightly tapped his temple against the door jamb, eyes on her. “My partner actually vanished right in front of me, if you can believe it, and I’ve basically been living in the lab in Berkeley ever since, making all these new grad student friends.”

“How lucky for them,” Scully said.

“That’s who is going to get us home tomorrow,” Mulder said. “Georgette, one of the grad students. She’s in charge. She said she talked to you, right before you came here…?”

“I remember her.”

“She’s a really sharp, organized kid, sort of reminds me of you, actually. We ran into some …snags getting access to Hays’ equipment, but, uh, Skinner worked it out, actually.” He cleared his throat, and Scully could tell there was more to the story. “They told me to estimate early afternoon tomorrow, so we need to be ready then.”

Scully realized she had been worrying the edge of the wool blanket back and forth in her hand. “And it will work, Mulder?”

“It’ll work,” Mulder said. He seemed restless, walking into the room to examine the ship’s wheel over the fireplace. “The grad students haven’t let me down yet.”

“And the boy Mulder – he’ll just … return, after we leave?”

Mulder’s head turned, and he shot her a strange glance she couldn’t quite read. “I did a test run yesterday. Did he return okay after the test run?”

“You came to 1973… yesterday?”

“Just for a matter of seconds,” Mulder said, a finger tip tracing the edge of the ship’s wheel. “When I opened my eyes, I was in my parents’ study in Chilmark. Looking at my grandmother’s art book. I had been planning to talk to you, but I couldn’t find you in time.”

Scully exhaled in realization. “The boy lost time,” she said, putting the pieces in place. “And Samantha – she caught a glimpse of a man in the hall.”

“Did she? I didn’t see her,” admitted Mulder. “But if the boy returned okay after that, then I don’t see why he wouldn’t return fine tomorrow, too.”

“Well, good, because he’s important. I’m relieved.”

“Aren’t you forgetting girl Scully?”

Scully grimaced ruefully. She had forgotten about girl Scully. “She’s also important,” she said, “because my family here has been suffering.”

“God, I’m sure they have,” Mulder said soberly. “What – what do they think happened to you?”

“They think I disappeared through a window,” Scully said. “On Thanksgiving Day. It’s been on the national news, actually. I saw it at your house.”

“Oh,” he said. He leaned his back against the mantel, saying nothing for a moment. The characteristic sadness overtook his expression. “I know how that story goes. I’m sorry.”

Scully shrugged and tugged the blanket across her chest. “It couldn’t be helped.”

“What about you? How have you been?” The words were deceptively casual, questions you ask a coworker after returning from vacation, but his tone was so soft, inviting, cajoling. Something about it made her cheeks warm. “How did you … manage all of this?” he breathed. “The past. Coming to Martha’s Vineyard. Getting young me to listen to you. I just can’t believe that you did it, especially after — how we left things.”

Scully licked her lips nervously, considering what to say.

“While you were gone, I did … nothing but think about what you said that day,” Mulder said in a choked voice, “and Scully, I want you to know that–”

“No,” Scully cut him off quickly. “Let’s not do this.”

His forehead crumpled. “Why not?”

Because you’re so beautiful and broken, and I only want to forgive you. Because I’m still so ecstatic to see you that I might say anything. Because you make it so hard to remember that you don’t want from me what I want from you.

“Because right now we should only be focused on getting ourselves back,” she said, “and… letting you have this time with Samantha.”

He blinked. “Yeah,” he said. “But Sam’s asleep, and you’re…” He stopped, a wounded glint in his eyes. “Okay. Okay, fine, we won’t.”

He walked from the fireplace to the couch, sitting down and leaning his elbows on his knees, keeping his eyes on her. Frustration came off him in waves.

“The boy Fox and Samantha,” Scully said, gently, attempting to change the subject. “I really loved seeing them together. He loves her so much.”

“Yeah,” Mulder agreed, a small smile, his voice hoarse. “That’s true.”

“They’re a team.”

Mulder nodded. Outside, thunder faintly rumbled. His gaze shifted to the window. Always waiting for bright lights.

“And it made me see that … it made me see where our partnership comes from,” she added, her eyes running over his face.

His eyes snapped back to her sharply. “Ourpartnership?”

“The way he is with Samantha,” she said. “Being able to witness that made me really get it, Mulder.”

“How so?”

“I’m about the same age as Samantha. It’s a similar dynamic. You’re protective of me, frustrated by me, we’re a team. I hadn’t completely grasped how much I’ve filled that void.”

His expression was shocked. “No.” The word was quiet, but low, authoritative. “That’s not it.”

“I don’t mean that I replaced her,” Scully added quickly. “I just mean – well, sometimes we unconsciously follow patterns set in our childhoods. You know that.”

“No,” Mulder repeated, standing up.

“It’s just an observation, Mulder,” she said. “It seemed hard to ignore.”

For a moment he just stared, like he couldn’t believe what she was saying. Then he huffed something like a laugh. “Do you remember, Scully, how angry you were when I looked inside yourhead?”

“No one looked inside your head, Mulder,” Scully said in disbelief.

“No, you just looked inside my fucking childhood,” Mulder said, stepping towards her. “And then made things up about our partnership, instead of talking to me about it.”

“Mulder,” Scully was getting angry now, too. His reaction seemed absurdly out of scale.

“Jesus,” Mulder erupted. “That’s not who you are to me.”

“Mulder –”

He turned and left the room, leaving her standing there gaping, her blanket fallen to the floor.

***

Fifteen minutes later she found him making up the bed in the attic bedroom.

She stood in the doorway, watching him tug the old fashioned quilt over the top sheet, his face still dark and sullen. The attic was narrow, with a gabled ceiling that hung low over the edges of the bed, so he had to stoop over on either side to keep from hitting his head.

“There you are, Mulder,” she said, her voice placating. She wrapped her arms around herself. The attic was cool; her blanket was downstairs.

“I thought you’d sleep up here,” he said, his voice flat. “And I’d sleep on the other twin in Samantha’s room.”

“All right.”

“Keep your gun on the bedside table,” he said. He glanced, vaguely, at the little window.

“Mulder, I’m sorry,” she said, although she still wasn’t sure what she was apologizing for.

He just shook his head, leaning over to pick up the pillows from the floor. His jaw was tight.

“I didn’t realize I was making an observation that would upset you,” she added.

“I know you didn’t.” He sighed, lifting the pillows, fluffing them a little. “Scully, why did you even come here? Why didn’t you try to go back to 1999?” He laid each pillow carefully at the head of the bed, then looked over at her. “Why didn’t you try to find Hays in 1973? Ask him questions?”

She wondered if he understood how insulting those questions were. “You don’t know why?”

“No,” he said. “I really don’t.”

“The mission,” she said, and her voice shook.

Maddeningly, he looked down at the bed. Smoothed out the quilt with his hand.

“The all-important mission?” she continued. “The throw-your-life-on-a-fucking-pyre mission?”

She had known him long enough to know exactly when he was about to deploy an argument: the twitch at his jaw, the lift of his eyebrow, the way he bit his beautiful lip. He walked out from behind the bed, and she braced herself.

She even knew precisely what he was going to say: That it wasn’t her mission. That it wasn’t supposed to be her who made spectacular, meaningful sacrifices. He would say it with painful confidence, no trace of doubt. She felt her pulse speed up in anger now even anticipating it. When tragedy happened to her, it was collateral damage; when it happened to him, it was destiny.

But when he faced her, she saw the argument simply die out in his gray-green eyes. He let out a quiet sigh. She saw only defeat in him now.

“Yeah,” he said. “I know. Right. The mission.” He massaged his forehead with two fingers. “You must be tired, Scully.”

“I am, yes.” But I sure as hell don’t feel like sleeping.

“I should probably … leave you to it then.” He gestured half-heartedly at the bed. “If you need anything, you know where I’ll be.”

He was walking past her to the door of the attic when she unexpectedly grabbed hold of him, fingers wrapping tightly around his forearm.

Of course he stopped and looked back at her, waiting for an explanation.

The moment could have been saved if she said something sensible — maybe Mulder, good night, or Mulder, I need a washcloth. Instead she stood there motionless, her hand still gripping his arm.

They stared at one another, their eyes widening at the same time.

“Scully?” The question was so gentle, so soft. Puzzled.

She released him, coming to her senses. She realized her hand was shaking. The attic was cold, she told herself.

“Sorry,” she said, flustered. “I — sorry.”

He didn’t move. He stood watching her, an astonished expression moving over his face like a shadow.

“Are you … cold?” he said, almost a whisper.

She nodded, uncertain.

With an unreadable expression, he took a step toward her and placed his hands gently over the cap sleeves of her dress, as though to warm her.

She blinked, her breath catching a little at this contact. She had no idea what he was about to do.

For a few seconds he held his warm hands in place there, his thumbs lightly stroking.

Then, watching her, he began slowly, slowly trailing his hands up and over the curve of her shoulders, across the horizontal of her neckline.

She stilled, taken aback by the gesture. His hands were so large that they easily spanned the breadth of her clavicles. Mulder’s long elegant fingers, the light pressure of his touch: these were so familiar to her; nevertheless, the surface of her skin hummed to life everywhere his hand came into contact with.

God, what was he doing? This touching was like Mulder himself: strange, impossible to interpret, probably misleading, unreasonably arousing. She should ask. She should step away. She should go to bed.

His hands started to slide up the contours of her neck, tenderly, still so slowly, the sensation of the pads of his fingers making her tremble. The heels of his hands found a landing spot on each side of her jaw, and he leaned closer into her. His body, now proximate, gave off waves of heat. His thumbs glided back and forth over her cheeks.

She closed her eyes. She thought he intended to kiss her. Her chin tipped back ever-so-slightly in anticipation.

He didn’t. She opened her eyes. He had an all-too-familiar expression on his face: fascination. She wondered, with a stab of anxiety, what this might be for him: an experiment? Comfort? Some desperate proof for an argument she didn’t even understand? A lapse from the mission he’d regret soon after? The intensely focused look in his eyes worried her. He studied her face, her mouth, her neck. Then he studied the fitted bodice of her dress.

He took a breath, and began to move his hands again in slow, slow, methodical paths downwards from her jaw, again tracing the outline of her neck, examining the shape of her small frame underneath his palms.

Nerve endings lit up like bright lights. Her legs quaked under her. Somewhere outside, she heard thunder rumbling.

His hands stopped at the top edge of the dress’s bodice and his eyes flashed to hers. Permission needed for this. She nodded quickly, swallowing. Whatever this means for you, Mulder, I don’t care, I don’t care, I don’t care.

His hands began to slide again.

They followed the rim of her collar, then traced down the lace-up bodice, like he was sculpting the edges of her breasts, slightly grazing her tightening nipples within the dress. Through the thin material she could feel this all completely: the heat of his large hands, the pressure of each individual finger.

She could tell, by the way he was now sucking in long, uneven breaths, that he could feel her, too.

His hands kept moving down the slope of her waist, coming to rest on her hips. The look in his eye now was something new. Not just fascination. Desire, without question, but it was dark and furtive, like he was still holding back, like some part of him was ashamed. No shame, Mulder, just touch me.

She reached up, wrapping her hands around the back of his neck, and drew him towards her. She paused just before their lips met, but he understood at last what she wanted, and he moved the rest of the way, pressing his mouth to hers.

His kisses were soft and slow, but also somehow just as demanding as she would expect Mulder’s kisses to be. His mouth was intent, persistent. Her lips pushed back, opening to respond, a rapid-fire conversation. Oh, she was lost in this, so lost. She was beginning to lose her breath.

His hands began grasping at her dress, gathering the fabric in his fists and causing it to ride up her legs, exposing her to the cool attic air. The tips of his fingers came into contact with the bare skin of her thighs and he paused, his breaths heaving.

“I want to—is this okay?” His voice was hoarse.

She bit her lip and nodded again. His palms slid over the bare skin of her thighs, and his breath caught. He stroked the skin lightly, and at this gentle touch, she felt herself buckle, letting out a tiny whimper.

“Scully,” he said in a low voice, sliding his hands up the back of her legs, curving around the round cheeks of her ass.

Then he raised his eyebrows. No panties.

“No clean laundry,” she whispered, rolling her eyes in embarrassment.

“Jesus, Scully,” he croaked. He met her eyes and gripped her firmly, pulling her flush to him. She could feel him, hot and hard against her. He kneaded her ass roughly as his mouth worked its way down her neck, his kisses more frantic.This was what it felt like to be the object of his full attention, of his full devotion. She felt little hot tears starting in the corners of her eyes, but blinked them back.

“Mulder, I want—” God, his hands, his hands, creeping in between her thighs. She lost the words.

“What do you want?” he murmured into her neck. “Tell me.”

“More contact with your skin.”

He pulled back to look at her, definitely a little dazed himself.

“Sweater,” she prompted, tugging on his clothes. “Jeans.”

He stepped back, removing his hands from under her dress and working to pull his sweater over his head, then the gray tee underneath. Scully unfastened his jeans, her hands trembling, tugging them down his legs.

Clothes removed, he had his hands quickly up her dress again, sliding the skirt up her thighs, cupping her rear, lifting her. She understood and hitched her legs around him. They both felt frisson as she ground against him, only the layer of his boxer shorts between them, and Mulder let out a choked gasp. Pulling him to her, he walked backwards towards the bed.

He fell backwards onto the mattress, her still on top of him, and they kissed: heady, dizzying kisses, his hands still under the dress pulling her firmly against him.

Closer, he seemed to be saying. That was what she wanted, too. She lifted her hips away from him slightly and reached down between their bodies, slipping her hand under the waist of his boxers to find his cock. She suppressed a groan at the feel of him, thick and smooth and so hard it made her heart race. Wordlessly, she positioned the head of him at her impossibly slick opening, then lowered herself down slowly.

“Scully,” he moaned in wonder as she slid onto him, and her eyes stayed on his, because his face looked so beautiful right now, vulnerable, longing.

He was fully enclosed inside her. She could hear herself exhaling as her body adjusted, leaning into him.

“Let me see you,” he breathed, lifting the hem of her dress.

Scully watched his face as she loosened the laces in the bodice and lifted the dress over her head. He was glossy-eyed, awed, openly staring at her breasts, but she didn’t feel self-conscious, because it was Mulder, because he felt so good inside her. She leaned forward so he could touch her, and his fingers stroked over pebbled nipples, cupping her breasts as she began to move up and down.

They mutually gasped, once, twice, again. Above them rain began to drum on the roof, and Scully began to think, this isn’t real, none of this real. She began to drift backwards, arching, closing her eyes, but Mulder immediately grabbed her wrists and pulled her forward.

“Look at me, Scully.” He reached out and pinned her cheeks in his hands, forcing her to meet his eyes, stroking the falling pieces of hair away from her face.

His eyes were sea salt green, pupils darkened, so wide, so serious, so filled with mystery and adoration. So filled with something else she was afraid to think about, something so overwhelming it made her desire intensify, tighten.

She fell towards him, her nipples trailing over his smooth warm skin, her forehead touching his. His hips bucked up under her, a new angle with more purchase for him. Their pace was increasing, and now she found it almost unbearably intimate, her face so close to his, their panting mingling, no place to hide. She felt herself building, and she saw it on his face, too, in the rapid staccato rhythm of his breaths. His hands kept hold of her cheeks. His eyes kept her pinned. All their unspoken words and unmet desires built and built as she rocked against him. The snap of his hips was now making clear thought impossible.

Desperately, she kissed the fingertips cradling her face, ran her hands through his hair. Look at him, see the look in his eyes, it’s possible he wants exactly what you want.

That was what pushed her over the edge, and she cried out, burying her moans in his shoulder, gripping him as each wave hit her. He followed soon after, shaking under her and arching his back. His arms went around her, pulling her flush to him, and as they both came down, she lay there with her cheek pressed against his chest hair, catching her breath, listening to his rapid heartbeat, its pounding in syncopation with the rain above them.

“Scully,” he said breathlessly, and he ran his fingertips up and down her bare back. “There’s been no one like you, ever, in my whole life. No prototype relationship. No previous version.”

She was afraid to say anything, running a hand in circles across the planes of his chest.

“Do you understand what I’m saying?” he whispered.

“Sounds like the oxytocin and dopamine talking to me,” she said to his sternum.

“Scully,” he said, plaintively, lifting her chin. “Come on.”

Her eyes locked with his. “I understand,” she said softly. “I do.” He kissed her gently.

“Besides,” he said, flopping his head back on the pillow, “who are you calling a dopamine?”

When she closed her eyes, pressing her face to his smooth chest, she dared to let herself think the forbidden words: she loved him, she loved him so much. She stole a few tiny, secret kisses, her lips just barely dusting his skin, and then she fell into sleep.

***

She slept deep and dreamlessly. The next morning, she woke up shivering, a feeling of something amiss, and she opened her eyes uncertain where she was, when she was. Above her, the wooden grain of the dark beams of the gabled ceiling came into focus, and she remembered.

The space next to her in bed was empty. Cold. She was alone.

Sitting up, she felt herself go rigid. For so long she had worried that this was the worst possible mistake. From the very first months working with him. Had she done the unthinkable—put everything at risk? She pressed her eyes shut.

Somewhere, faintly in the distance she could hear voices. Opening her eyes, she sprung from the bed, wrapping the quilt around her nude body, to try to peer out the small window. She could just see Mulder and Samantha walking down towards the beach together, the girl leaning on him and hopping to keep from putting weight on her ankle. Mulder was leaning down to her, pointing out something he saw in the direction of the sea.

Scully felt her body unknot. The haze of sleep cleared from her mind. Right. Of course he couldn’t stay all night with her, upstairs in this bed. He had to watch over Samantha – he had to be there when she woke up. That was the appropriate thing for him to do. That was the caring thing for him to do. Mulder had so much love to give.

His lean silhouette cast a purple shadow against the sand in the early morning sun. She wondered if she would ever know what it was like to wake up in his arms.

Special thanks to @sisterspooky1013 (or as I like to call her, the Smut Doctor) for considerable assistance on this chapter.

#the x-files #xfiles fanfic #x files fanfic

Mon, 23 May 2022 07:28:00

The Boy on the Beach (13/16)

Chapter 13: Unrecognizable and Upside Down

The soundtrack for this chapter is So Very Hard To Go, by Tower of Power from their eponymous album, released April 1973. This track reached #17 on the Billboard Hot 100, and #11 on Billboard R&B charts.

November 27, 1973
West Tisbury,Massachusetts

Mulder’s heart leapt. It was Scully.

Scully in a way he knew and loved her: holding a weapon, tousled hair, mud-stained clothes.

She stared back at him, her eyes shocked. Standing stock still, as though she had forgotten to take a breath.

He descended slowly down the stairs, his gun on Spender and his attention on Scully. There was a man’s body crumpled on the floor – fresh, from the looks of the still-expanding circle of blood. He stepped carefully around the perimeter of the body.

“What’s going on, Scully?” Mulder asked, keeping his voice calm and measured.

Now he could see her hands around the SIG were shaking; her face was damp with sweat and dappled with fresh scrapes. Scully was rattled. Much more rattled than typical when she was under pressure.

“Samantha?” she managed to say.

“She’s fine,” he answered, and he couldn’t prevent the tiny smile from creeping over his lips at those words. “She’s confused, but she’s fine. She’s upstairs.”

“And the other man?” Scully said, almost a whisper.

“Well, he’s not doing so great,” Mulder said.

“Who’s this?” Spender’s voice cut through sharply, forcing Mulder to give him his full attention.

He was a quarter century younger from when Mulder had last seen him, telling him tempting lies in his dream on the operating table. His face was smoother, hair darker, his mannerisms the same. With precision, he arced the aim of his small pistol from Scully to Mulder, his lips pursed.

“It’s kind of a long story,“ Mulder told Spender, a wan smile. "And you’re not my top priority.”

“Mulder.” The word seemed to burst out of her—part sob, part laugh of relief. Her eyes were bright-hot and wet, only meeting his in half-second increments, darting back to keep Spender constantly in her aim.

“Glad to see you, too, Scully,” Mulder said softly, his gaze running over her. No sign of the anger she had for him before she left.

Spender’s attention snapped back and forth between them. “I’ve not had the pleasure of meeting this Mr. Mulder.”

“God, your head,” Scully remembered, ignoring Spender, her voice still quavering. “Mulder, your head– you’re in recovery, you shouldn’t have come…”

“Don’t worry about that now,” Mulder said tenderly, like it was just the two of them. “Couldn’t do anything about it.”

“You know a way to get back? We can both go back?”

“Yeah,” he said. “And I can explain it to you, but … maybe not right this second.”

“How did you even know where to find me?” Her face clouded. “How could you know where I went?”

“I’ll explain it all to you,” he said. “But don’t you think—”

“You’re Fox Mulder,” Spender spoke with a hushed realization. “You’re the boy, grown up. I see it now. You resemble him.”

Mulder reluctantly pulled his focus back to Spender, something cold and unpleasant coiling in his stomach.

A chilling smile spread over Spender’s lips.

“The technology of the future,” mused Spender, tilting his head. “Time travel. It’s extraordinary. Human in origin? Or … from somewhere else, perhaps?”

Mulder could hear Scully’s breathing speeding up.

“Oh, it doesn’t matter, I suppose,” Spender shrugged. “Well, naturally you’re an important player, Fox, given your parentage.” He tightened his grip on the pistol. “It gives me no pleasure to say that you’ve turned out to be a threat to me, rather than an asset. Fortunately, I’ve already got an idea of where you’re most vulnerable.”

He redirected the aim of his pistol from Mulder to a point somewhere over Mulder’s shoulder.

Whatever he had in mind, he wasn’t fast enough. Or maybe he just underestimated Scully. Mulder had no time to think it through.

A shot rang out.

Spender dropped to the floor, his forehead erupting in vivid fountains of blood. Scully stood with her SIG extended, a few bright droplets spattered over her face.

Mulder, petrified in shock, just gaped at her. Her eyes found his, and he was locked in her stare for a few breaths, unable to make sense of what had just happened.

“Scully,” he whispered.

“I had to protect them.” She looked down at Spender’s body, a crease on her forehead. “They would never be safe, when we went back, once he knew the boy would grow up to be a threat.”

Mulder shook his head, not knowing what to think. She understood that he was the boy, right? That he was one of the them she was talking about? Did she understand they weren’t in their own multiverse? He stared at Spender’s body, his feelings a stew of ambivalence. The man was, in all likelihood, his biological father. He was also a man who had cut into his brain with little compunction — who had done any number of other unforgivable things, for that matter. Witnessing Spender’s death in this multiverse didn’t greatly trouble him, but something about watching Scully shoot him did.

“Scully?” came another voice.

Mulder and Scully turned in tandem to look up the stairs. Samantha stood trembling at the top, holding on to the railing for balance. Had she been the intended target of Spender’s shift in aim? Had Scully seen that unfolding? Would it have mattered to her one way or the other?

“We’re okay, Sam,” Scully called up the stairs instantly. “It’s going to be okay.” Seeing Samantha seemed to be a reminder to pull herself together. She tucked a strand of hair behind her ear and ran a hand over her face, unconsciously smearing Spender’s blood a little over her nose.

“More men are coming any minute,” she said to Mulder. “We should get Samantha out of here now. Can you – can you carry her? Her ankle is injured.”

“Yeah, of course,” Mulder nodded, his eyes still hungrily examining her. “But Scully, you’re … okay? You seem…”

She took a step towards him, gripping his sleeve. “Mulder,” she said. “It’s Samantha. It’s your sister. Don’t worry about me right now. Go take care of her.”

He wanted to say more, but she leaned down to pick Spender’s pockets. He did what she said and turned for the stairs.

And there she was, clinging to the railing: Samantha.

An aura of unreality around her. Messy braids. An injured foot. Dirty, exhausted. Otherwise, she looked exactly as she did in the picture on his desk, the picture that trapped her forever in one sunny moment.

When he had opened his eyes in 1973, he had found himself holding a small warm hand, standing in front of a blur of white light. Blinking rapidly as the world came into focus, he could see that the light was a window, and the hand – suddenly violently wrested away – had been hers.

Samantha had recoiled from him, hopping back in frightened shock, no recognition in her eyes.

It hadn’t taken her long to say she understood, at least in theory, who he was. He had rushed to explain it to her, using his most patient adult agent voice. She had nodded quickly — she already knew what had happened to Scully, after all. She got the picture enough to be able to tell him what was happening. When they heard the man coming up the stairs, she trusted him enough to defend her.

But when Mulder came up the stairs towards her now, Samantha looked at him like he was a complete stranger.

“Sam,” he said, trying to remember exactly how he used to talk to her when he was a kid. “I need to carry you on my back. Is that … all right?”

Her chin lifted up and down, her expression inscrutable.

He turned around and lifted her easily on his back, also picking up the duffel bag she had with her. She wrapped her arms around his neck, and she smelled of little kid sweat. The smell brought to mind visceral memories of childhood, like the two of them tripping over their feet racing one another to the beach on sun-glazed July afternoons. He was there, he realized. He was in his childhood. It wasn’t as simple as memory.

Scully had procured some car keys from the pocket of the corpse at the foot of the stairs. She stood there waiting for them as they came down, watching Mulder closely with dazed eyes, like she still couldn’t quite grasp his presence there.

“Ready to roll, Scully,” he said, his voice sounding surreally casual, like they were just finishing up some regular case. He hitched Samantha’s knees over his hips more securely. “Do we have a car?”

“A Cadillac.” Scully held up the keys. “I don’t exactly have a destination in mind, though.”

“Why don’t you let me drive?” he suggested. The mental image of those July afternoons on the beach had wiggled loose another memory. “I have an idea of where we might go.”

***

The black Cadillac was an enormous parade float of a car, with a wood-grained steering wheel and an 8-track player. Mulder gathered that it had been driven by the men who were now dead, men who had apparently chased down Scully, Samantha and the young Fox. So he tried not to show the immature kick he got out of driving such an obviously badass early 70s automobile.

Scully kept twisting around in the passenger seat looking anxiously out the back window. She turned around, frowning and rubbing her neck with her hand.

“You can rest a second,” Mulder said gently, adjusting the rear view mirror. “Really, Scully. I’m capable of watching for a tail, too.”

There was so much to talk about, so much to ask her, but more than anything else, he had a powerful urge to take care of her, to settle her down, to wrap her in his arms. But he had no real reason to think that was the response she wanted from him.

She was relieved to see him, he could tell that she was. Still, when he looked at her even now, it was so easy to remember her cold expression when she told him to get out of her apartment.

Scully nodded, a thin smile, and closed her eyes. She looked so tired.

He knew where they were: West Tisbury. But it all looked so different, so much sleepier and less developed. Fewer vacation homes, fewer shops and restaurants, more ramshackle barns, more glimpses of the wild. So often change comes in small ticks, tiny increments, he reminded himself, not spectacular explosions. Easy not to notice when it’s happening.

Scully spun around in her seat yet again, all nervous energy. “How’s your ankle, Samantha?”

“It’s okay, I guess. It still hurts, but not as bad.” Samantha’s words from the back seat sounded distant. “Where … where are we going?”

“I thought we would go to Grandpa Mulder’s old beach cottage,” Mulder said to her, seeking her eyes in the rear view mirror. “What do you think, Sam? No one will be there, right? It usually just sits empty. We could stay there tonight, find some food, talk, get some sleep, and no one would be the wiser.”

Samantha blinked at his reflection. “Yeah,” she said. “That’s probably a good idea.”

“I haven’t been there in years. I sold it after …” After his father died. He stopped. “Well, I sold it.”

There was a pause.

“My brother loves the cottage,” Samantha said. “He carved his initials on the shingles, down low on the side where Dad can’t see.”

Mulder anxiously bit the inside of his mouth. “Yeah,” he said. “I know, Samantha.”

“He’s coming back, right? My brother?”

“Oh Samantha.” Scully‘s voice was so weary, so sad. “You understand that this is your brother, right?”

“I know, but … my Fox,” Samantha said. “He’s coming back?”

“Yeah,” Mulder said. “He will. Tomorrow, some time in the early afternoon.”

Scully’s head turned towards him. He would need to talk through the logistics of their return plan with her. One of a long list of items they had yet to discuss.

“You know, Sam, I just …” He heard himself run out of words. Because what is there to say to her that could possibly be adequate? “Hopefully, you and I might get a chance to talk, too. Maybe later. I’d like to.”

“Okay,” said Samantha, turning to look out the window.

He felt Scully’s eyes on him. He glanced over at her.

“And maybe you and I, too?” he asked her.

“Of course, Mulder,” Scully said, leaning her head back into the seat.

She sounded as distant as Samantha. A little vibration of panic thrummed through him.

***

Rain began a light patter as Mulder pulled into the driveway to the cottage. He told Scully and Samantha to wait in the car while he went to open the door.

For just a moment, letting the fine rain dampen his hair, he looked at the old place, temporarily struck by the sight of it, exactly as he remembered.

He put a finger on his hairline, where his mind still softly throbbed.

Yeah. That was a constant thing now. He glanced back at the car, reminding himself not to draw attention to it around Scully.

The cottage was remote, tucked away, and had its own little private swath of beach. You could almost miss seeing the place; that was probably part of its appeal. The house belonged to the coast, like a piece of battered driftwood, brown-shingled and rough, fused with the trees and rocks that surrounded it. It had been the property of his father’s father – a fishing shack long ago, converted in the fifties into a snug little house, almost like a cabin, nothing fancy.

God, he used to love to come there with his father, when he was little. With his father and Samantha, usually, on summer days. In those sunlit parts of his memories before everything in his childhood became so weighed down.

Because he’d parked the Cadillac out of sight from the road, he had to run a little distance in the rain to reach the house. In 1973, the key was hidden in the exact same spot it was hidden in 1995, the year he sold the house: under the quirky little statue of a whale wearing a captain’s hat sitting outside the door. He found it easily and opened the door.

Inside, it smelled of cedar and damp, perhaps a whiff of wool. He shivered. The details were all just so, just as in his mind: the multicolored braided rag rugs, the old brick fireplace, the burnished ship’s wheel over the mantel, the constant ticking of the fifties kitchen clock. This was stepping into a place he never should have been able to visit again.

He had to run back out to the car to get Samantha, who nodded stoically when he asked if he could give her another piggyback ride. She didn’t say a word as he carried her into the little house, jogging so she didn’t get too wet, pushing open the door with his foot and setting her down gently on the little sofa. He looked around for the woolen blankets the family usually kept on hand. Finding one on the rocking chair, he tossed it over her.

“So you remember coming here?” she asked him suddenly, pulling the blanket up to her chin. Curiosity and apprehension fought in her eyes.

He looked down at his feet, ill at ease and too tall for his surroundings. “Sure,” he said.

“What do you remember?” A little challenge in her tone.

“Fourth of July,” he said, slowly. “Eating slices of watermelon on the beach. The sand fort with the plastic army men that took us all day to make. It’s all a long time ago for me, Samantha — but I remember.”

She didn’t say anything, just seemed to reconsider him.

Scully came in the front door, carrying the duffel bag and the brown sack of groceries he’d stopped to buy at the corner market. She paused and looked around the living room, surveying the fireplace, the rugs, the woolen blanket over Samantha. Mulder felt strangely anxious, waiting to hear her impression. But she just nodded at him, as if to say, this will do fine. He stepped forward to take the bags out of her hands.

“Who wants a sandwich?” he said. “There wasn’t a huge selection at the market, but I can definitely whip us up some peanut butter and jelly.”

“I can’t eat anything, Mulder,” Scully shook her head dismissively. She sat on the couch next to Samantha, starting to lift Samantha’s foot. “I’m still so— I can’t eat. You did get a bandage for Samantha, right?”

“I got a bandage, yeah,” he said, reaching into the bag and tossing it to her. “And you should try to eat something, Scully, or you’ll feel sick. I’ll make you a sandwich. You, too, Sam.” He grinned at Samantha. “Don’t worry. I didn’t get grape jelly.”

“You don’t like grape jelly?” Scully asked her, working on unfastening Samantha’s shoe.

Samantha shook her head, a sideways glance at Mulder. “It doesn’t taste like real grapes.”

“You like strawberry jam, and you like your crusts cut off,” Mulder said. “See? I remember.” He watched for a moment as Scully rolled up Samantha’s wide pant leg. “How did she hurt her ankle?”

For half a second he regretted the question, because both Scully and Samantha looked stricken. But he was curious – and tired of awkward pauses. He had to start asking questions somewhere.

“We were driving the Rothenbergs’ Chevelle,” Scully said matter-of-factly. “The Cadillac ran us off the road, and Samantha’s foot got pinned in the crash.”

“The Rothenbergs our neighbors?” Mulder asked in disbelief. “You stole their car?”

“You stole their car,” Scully said crisply as she examined Samantha’s foot. “You were watching their house for them, while they were out of town for the season. You let us into the garage and found the key.”

“Oh,” Mulder nodded. “Okay. Wow. And then you ran into the restaurant?”

“No, we hid in the woods a while,” Scully said, sounding tired. “Tried to make it on foot.”

“Fox helped us climb a tree,” Samantha added. “We sat in the tree for a long time.”

“Fox and I took turns carrying Samantha,” Scully said. “He’s not as big as you, obviously – so it wore us both out.”

“He did all of that?” Mulder’s most important memory of age twelve was of a catastrophic failure to take decisive action. This alternate picture of some resourceful kid was almost unfathomable. “I don’t remember being so … capable.”

“You –” Scully hesitated. “He was great. He was amazing. Precocious.” She smiled to herself, examining Samantha’s ankle. “I liked him a lot.”

Mulder felt a twist of something stupidly like jealousy. Well. That’s fucking irrational on several levels.

“He’s great. Really, really great,” Samantha said, a hitch in her voice.

“Yeah. Sounds like,” Mulder said, keeping his voice light. “So …uh, I’m going to go make the sandwiches. There’s a bathroom around that corner, if you want to wash up.”

Maybe that kid’s just a superior Fox Mulder, Mulder found himself thinking, walking into the kitchen. And if he grows up with his sister, imagine what a superior guy he’ll be by my age. Imagine the superior life he’ll get to have.

In the kitchen he unpacked the grocery bag, setting the peanut butter and white bread on the counter, and chastised himself for his self-pity.

What difference did it make if they were charmed by a younger, less broken version of him? Why was he so obsessed with the question of what life he might have had, if things were different, if he had been in this multiverse? None of that mattered at all. His only job right here and now was to think of Samantha and Scully, the only stars in his personal constellation.

***

Scully did want to wash up. She wanted to be scrubbed clean in every sense imaginable. In the old-fashioned bathroom, she stared in the mirror and was appalled to see blood smeared across her face.

But first things first. Before she cleaned herself, she worked on Samantha, wiping her down with a washcloth, every visible smudge and scratch. She located a change of clothes for her in one of the bedrooms, a set of boys’ flannel pajamas. Too small for young Fox at age twelve, but clearly his at one point.

Once Samantha was clean and changed, then she worried about herself. She took a hurried, bracing shower in the cottage’s rustic bathtub: no warm water, a bar of soap that seemed to be mostly lye, some astringent shampoo likely made for men.

Clothing proved a challenge, because the two turtlenecks that Scully had stolen from the shop in Falmouth were too dirty to put back on, one stained with mud and the other just worn too many days in a row. She held the second one up and seriously considered it, but couldn’t do it. Not on her freshly showered body.

That only left her one option from the duffel bag, the lavender flowered bohemian sundress from San Diego, which she had managed to hand wash at the Mulders’ house in Chilmark. It would mean being a little chilly, but there did seem to be wool blankets all around the house. It also meant she could skip the filthy bra.

She slipped the dress on over her head, then frowned. Looking at herself in the small mirror, she tugged at the laces on the dress’s bodice to see if she could make her breasts settle into it differently. She didn’t remember feeling quite so … open to the elements wearing it on the bus.

Well. It was just going to feel different with adult Mulder there.

Scully stared at her face in the mirror, running her palms over her damp hair, her clean face. She was caught again on the memory of seeing Mulder coming down the stairs holding his gun on Spender, speaking to her like they had only been apart a few days doing fieldwork, like he had just been out of town. Not like he had been separated from her across some Stygian temporal chasm.

God, she had felt such sheer … joy. That was really the only accurate word for it.

She hadn’t heard his full story yet. She found she almost couldn’t bear to ask. She was feeling way too needy, way too desperate for his affection and attention right now, and it was obvious where his focus needed to be. Samantha. Reconnecting with his sister. Scully had gone to such lengths to keep her safe for him.

Scully could see now, too, that the boy and Samantha had been such an absorbing diversion for her, too. They kept her anxious about logistics, thinking through how to take care of them. And they also gave her love a soft place to land.

Adult Mulder brought back adult Mulder problems.

“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.”

She shook her head. Truthfully, at the moment Scully didn’t trust herself. Too much churning under the surface. She needed a good night’s sleep, to think clearly.

When she went back into the living room, Mulder had placed a plate of peanut butter sandwiches on the coffee table, way too many, cut in triangles, the crusts cut off. Samantha was eating one in her pajamas on the couch, wrapped in a wool blanket, Mulder sitting beside her.

“Sandwiches, Scully,” Mulder said brightly. He looked up at her standing in the doorway and did a tiny double take upon seeing her attire. His eyebrows shot up. “That’s a different look for you, Sister Moon Flower.”

If she wasn’t mistaken, his eyes caught on her bodice for just a moment, but he was subtle. She heroically fought the impulse to cross her arms over her chest, which would only draw attention to the fact she was self-conscious. “My weather-appropriate clothes are all unwearable.”

“Where did you get all the seventies clothes?” he asked, looking down quickly at the sandwiches. “Because I know you didn’t get that dress from anyone in the Mulder household.”

Scully spotted another wool blanket folded on the hearth and walked to it, unfolding and wrapping it around her, as Samantha had. She sat in a leather chair on the other side of the fireplace, facing Mulder.

“This dress came from San Diego,” she said. “Where I first found myself after Hays’ lab. I met these girls who were really kind to me. They gave me food — a peanut butter sandwich, actually.” She smiled a little, reaching over to pick up a triangle off the plate. “And this dress, and a bus pass.”

“Maureen O’Byrne?” Mulder asked in his soft, thoughtful voice.

Scully paused mid-bite. “That’s right. How could you know that?”

“The photo you took of the Ameripass,” Mulder said, a shy smile. “I saw all your photos.” He sat up on the couch, reached into his pocket and fished out a piece of white paper folded over into a small square. He carefully handed it to her.

Her eyes met his as she took it in her fingers, Samantha looking between them with curiosity. Scully unfolded the square and was greeted with a grayscale printed image of her, Samantha and young Fox on the beach yesterday, smiling and singing and looking windswept.

“My photos were sent to the lab in Berkeley?” She ran her fingers over the image in wonder.

“Yeah,” Mulder said, looking at the paper.

“Every one? That whole time?”

“I think so,” Mulder said. “Obviously I don’t know for sure, but I was tracking you pretty closely. The bus trip across the country. The dance studio. The key chain.”

Scully wanted to laugh. All that time, she had been thinking of the photos as something for her, something private, something to think of him. She handed the paper to Samantha so she could see, too.

“I actually spoke to Maureen O’Byrne on the phone, too,” Mulder admitted.

“You spoke to Mo in 1999?” Scully did smile now, imagining that phone call. “Oh, Mulder … that’s unbelievable. I love that. She must have been middle-aged, right? Was she still with Silvia? That means … I could actually thank them again, when we go back.”

“They won’t remember you,” Mulder said, watching her carefully. “They didn’t know who you were.”

“But…” She stopped. Took a breath. “It’s not our multiverse.” It was so clear to her all of a sudden. It explained everything.

His head bobbed up and down in an affirmative.

“And what we change here…” she drifted off. What they changed didn’t affect their own multiverse.

Her eyes fell on Samantha, who was studying the picture while chewing her sandwich absently.

He tracked her gaze and then looked back up at her with miserable eyes, seeing that she had understood.

Oh. Yes. Of course.

Some part of her — the logical, thorough part of Scully — must have known this already, must have realized it the moment she saw adult Mulder appear like magic on the stairs. Two plus two equals four, and her Mulder, calling out her name, equals the Same Past He Always Had.

She had saved Samantha—for some universe, for some little boy. But not for her own multiverse. Her Mulder’s Samantha would still be gone. This brief time with her would be all he had.

Scully lowered her sandwich, the weight of it all beginning to bear down on her.

“We have this evening,” Mulder said to her significantly, keeping his tone casual. “And then we have tomorrow morning, until after lunch.”

She just stared at her sandwich. She hadn’t actually taken a bite, but she felt like if she did now, she would choke.

“Scully,” he said, gently. A note of pleading. He was pulling a deck of cards out of his coat pocket. “Let’s have a good night. Who wants to play cards?”

“Go Fish?” Samantha asked, looking interested.

“Well, I don’t like to brag, but I play a fierce Go Fish,” Mulder said. “You probably remember.”

“I remember beating you,” Samantha said, smiling slyly. Mulder didn’t miss her use of the second person pronoun, and a genuine smile spread over his face. “Scully?”

She forced a smile, too.

***

Now everything seemed so significant, and no moment was ever going to be big enough.

They played cards and listened to the radio and ate more sandwiches. It rained lightly outside, just enough to make Scully feel a little drowsy. Eventually, she found some powdered hot chocolate and marshmallows in the kitchen and managed to come up with some convincing mugs of cocoa.

Samantha didn’t treat Mulder as naturally or affectionately as she had the boy, which was hard to watch. It was unreasonable to think she would. Still, Mulder was charming. And as Scully knew well, the boy was in there, somewhere.

After the third or fourth hand of cards, Samantha began to laugh at his jokes. And God, Mulder made so many jokes, even for him. Every possible pun about playing cards, about cocoa, about sandwiches. He was trying so hard.

In the evening, after it got dark, Samantha told Scully to open the dark wooden cabinet in the living room. Inside was a blocky, old-fashioned RCA TV with round silver knobs, the kind Scully hadn’t seen in years

“Our old black and white TV,” Mulder said, overjoyed. “The fabled Mulder family TV of my early childhood, Scully. I forgot we stowed it here at the cottage. Turn it on.”

“The reception isn’t always good,” Samantha warned. “Dad wants to get rid of it.” Scully snapped it on, and she began experimentally toying with the antenna. On the screen, gray static gave way to black lines looping endlessly. Scully responded by moving the antenna again, and some outlines of images began to appear.

Mulder squinted. “Wait! Hold on to the antenna, and step a little to the left, Scully.” Scully shot him a long-suffering look, but stepped left. “That’s it! Look. Is that … Hawaii Five-O?”

“Yeah,” Samantha agreed, enthusiastically. Scully started to walk away to see the screen. “No, no! Keep holding on to the antenna.”

“Try another channel,” Mulder suggested. “But don’t move a muscle, g-woman. You’re doing great.”

“I’m not doing this for very much longer,” Scully said with dignity. But standing still, she turned the dial again. A slightly more clear image appeared of a man walking side-by-side with a woman. This time, they could make out some dialogue, and they listened for a moment.

“Ohhh, I know what this is,” Samantha said. She turned to Mulder. “It’s The Magician. My brother loves this show. Do you remember it?”

Mulder’s face showed no expression. He stared at the TV.

“I remember,” Mulder said in a monotone. “I never saw this episode.”

“It’s kind of a stupid show,” Samantha said, softly. "I don’t know why he likes it.” But she was watching Mulder, a little concerned crease growing in between her eyebrows.

Scully let go of the antenna. “Mulder…?”

He stood up, abruptly. “Scully, what have I been thinking?”

“Mulder—”

“I was so happy to be here — it’s like I …forgot what day it was.” He ran his hand through his hair. “God, we ought to be armed right now, Scully. And I should go – I should go look around the place. Make sure it’s secure.”

“All right,” Scully said, warily. “All right, that’s probably a sensible idea.”

He swallowed. Then he turned and walked out of the room, leaving Samantha watching after him with wide eyes. She turned to Scully.

“He remembers me being taken away,” Samantha said softly. “Right?”

“That’s right,” Scully whispered, standing frozen in place.

Samantha seemed to absorb that. “And he really missed me, after I was gone?”

“Oh,” Scully said, and her voice broke, “so much.”

Samantha nodded, watching the tears on Scully’s cheeks without saying anything else.

***

An hour later, Samantha fell asleep on the couch as Mulder was trying to teach her to play poker.

He lifted her up, one arm under her knees and one behind her back, and carried her into the downstairs bedroom, the one with two twin beds. There was an attic bedroom with a double bed, but Scully knew Mulder didn’t want Samantha to sleep upstairs by herself.

Mulder was always remembering windows opening. Mulder was always remembering bright lights. And it was still November 27th, 1973.

Sources:

The Magician, Season 1 - see Episode 7, Lady in A Trap, original air date 11/27/73

Sun, 22 May 2022 07:45:27

The Boy on the Beach (12/16)

Chapter 12: The Dam Breaks Open Many Years Too Soon

The soundtrack for this chapter is Brain Damage, by Pink Floyd, from their 1973 album The Dark Side of the Moon. This album would spend one week at #1 on the Billboard charts in April 1973, but it’s famous for holding the record as being the album with the longest run on the Billboard 200 chart, 937 weeks, from 1973-1988.

November 27, 1973
Chilmark,Massachusetts

Only an hour had passed, according to the boy’s wristwatch. It felt longer.

There had been no more footsteps from below. She heard only birdsong. The irregular rise and fall of the wind, rattling the dried leaves still in branches. Samantha’s inhale and exhale. The boy’s interminable squirming.

Now that her adrenaline had diminished, Scully could feel the deep aches starting in her muscles, the effects of the crash. Her neck had seized up. Her rear end hurt from sitting on the curve of the branch, too.

The boy sat with a leg dangling on either side of the branch, his eyes dark as he restlessly peeled pieces of bark off the tree. Every once and a while he looked up at Scully, or over at his sister. She could tell he wanted, badly, to talk.

Samantha was leaning against the trunk, her eyes closed. Scully wasn’t certain if her ankle was a sprain or a mild fracture — she would like to confirm it at a hospital — but she wrapped it with a section of the scarf she found on the Greyhound bus, an imperfect compression bandage. They propped her foot on the duffel bag for elevation, and now Samantha was breathing evenly, possibly asleep. Scully made the boy loop his belt around the girl’s wrist and an adjacent branch, just in case Samantha began to slump over.

“We should probably try to move again soon,” Scully said to the boy.

He looked up at her, interested.

“We’ll let Samantha sleep a little longer. Then we’ll try to stick to the woods, stay out of sight. We’ll walk towards the ferry, and maybe we can eventually steal another car. There are other houses along here that are vacation places, right? We might be able to find another car.”

The boy nodded. Pressing his lips together, a small dent between his eyebrows, he appeared to be thinking about something.

“Are you okay, Fox?” she asked.

He didn’t answer right away. She waited, feeling a pang of concern.

“I was thinking,” he said quietly, “that you could stay here.”

“In the tree?”

“No,” he said. “In 1973. Once this is done.” He wasn’t making eye contact with her. He was looking intentionally away. This artfulness made him seem older; it made him seem more like her Mulder.

“If you stayed here,” the boy added, “then in ten or fifteen years or so, I could join the F.B.I., and we could still be partners. You wouldn’t be so old. It could be the same. The same as you remember.”

She didn’t say anything, the irony and poignancy of the situation threatening to swallow her up.

“I know,” the boy said, his voice cracking a little. “I know what you’re thinking. You don’t want to do that, do you? You just want to go back and be with the other Fox Mulder.”

“You’re the same Fox Mulder,” Scully said, kindly. “He’s you.”

“Is he?”

“Of course. He’s just grown up.”

“That’s not necessarily true, though, right?” the boy said. “I’ll be a different man from him. You’re trying to make me different. By changing my life.”

Scully said nothing. The ebb and flow of Samantha’s breath filled the space.

“I don’t understand, though,” the boy said hesitantly. “You do all of this for him, for me … but you don’t … lovehim?”

“I didn’t say that,” Scully said quietly.

“But you said it wasn’t … like that, between you,” the boy said. “Why isn’t it like that? What’s wrong with him?”

“He just—” Scully felt startlingly close to tears. Not appropriate, not helpful. “That’s not how he sees me, Fox. Not how he feels about me. He does love me, but not like that, not how you’re thinking. Ours is a different kind of relationship.”

The boy said nothing now, but rapped his fingers against the tree branch a little, like knocking on a tiny door. After a beat, there was a whispery little laugh. “Ha,” he said. “No.”

Scully furrowed her brow. “No?”

“You’re wrong,” he said softly. “You’ve got it wrong somehow.”

“How could you possibly know that?”

“I’m the same Fox Mulder, remember?” the boy said, rolling his eyes, shrugging. “He’s me.”

***

She didn’t know how long they could go on foot. Scully just couldn’t quiet this worry; it had been troubling her since they came down from the tree.

Once they had their feet back on the ground again, they began making their way through the trees, headed in the direction of West Tisbury. They traded off carrying Samantha on their back. It was slow going, and Scully thought it might take hours to reach the ferry. It seemed like there were far too many ways the men in the Cadillac could catch up with them.

Every once in a while, Scully could hear the sound of a car engine whirring by on the road, which wasn’t very far away. It made her freeze in place, listening close. She also jumped at every pop of a twig, or gull’s cry overhead.

“You’re worried,” Samantha said softly in her ear. She had her arms looped around Scully’s neck now. “You keep looking around.”

“I’m just being careful,” Scully assured her. “It’s going to be okay.”

“If you didn’t have to carry me, we could go faster,” Samantha murmured.

“Everyone has to be carried sometimes,” Scully said. She was trying to conjure up the kind of positive, encouraging things her mother might say, and coming up short. “Once, your brother carried me out of an underground base in Antarctica. I couldn’t walk at all. I wasn’t even awake some of the time. He had to carry me up a ladder.”

The boy’s eyes shot over to her. “Really?”

Scully nodded. “These situations always seem impossible,” Scully said. “You just have to … keep going.”

She tried to believe her own attempt at sunny words, but in truth, it sounded fake and empty to her. Mulder was the more natural optimist of the two of them. She supposed the boy did look fairly upbeat even now – no small feat given the day they’d had.

They walked and walked. The woods seemed to become less and less dense, the trees thinning out, wooden fences beginning to demarcate parts of the land, outlines of houses here and there.

“I think this is going to start to become farms,” the boy said to her, seriously. “We’re probably in West Tisbury now. We need to try to get a car again, because we’ll be too exposed if we keep walking this way.”

“Do you have any experience stealing cars?” Scully said, giving him a wry look, trying to catch her breath. Samantha was resting with her head on Scully’s back.

“Nope. Only magazines,” he said apologetically. “Want me to run up and see if that house looks occupied? It could be a vacation place.”

“No,” Scully said quickly. “We’ll look together.” She didn’t think she could stomach him going ahead on his own.

The house didn’t look boarded up, but it did look empty. It was possible, the boy speculated, that its owners were simply out for the day. They peered at the house and grounds from a safe distance from behind another sizable oak, trying to see if it held anything useful for them.

“No car,” the boy commented, looking at Scully. “Should we go closer?”

“No,” Scully whispered. “Too risky.”

“Look, those are bicycles,” the boy said. “We could use those. Samantha could ride on my handlebars. I think over the top of that ridge is a road we could take to Edgartown. We could catch the ferry from there.”

Scully frowned. “I just think that –”

Her voice was drowned out by the rattling sound of a car pulling down the stone driveway of the house.

Scully and the boy instinctively pulled their heads back behind the tree, out of sight.

“What kind of car was that?” Scully whispered urgently. “Did you see?”

The boy slowly peered around the tree again. “Shit,” he said, swallowing. “It’s the black Cadillac. They must be looking for us.”

Scully closed her eyes, nodded. She could hear Samantha sniffling nervously behind her.

“All right,” Scully said. “No time for the bicycles. Our best bet is to try on foot to make it over the ridge and back up on the road without them seeing us.”

She chanced a glance behind the tree. The black Cadillac had parked in the driveway, and the two men were still sitting inside, talking.

“It’s best to go now,” she whispered. “We’re going to try to keep to the perimeter, right around the line of trees. Are you ready?”

The Mulder siblings nodded seriously, their eyes wide, the color of green tea.

Scully started to move, gripping Samantha’s leg wrapped around her waist with one hand, her weapon with the other, trying to be as fast and as inconspicuous as possible. She felt the boy moving behind her doing the same. They darted from tree to tree, attempting to keep a safe distance from the house.

“Scully,” Samantha hissed. “Scully, they see us.”

Scully’s head whipped around. The two men, out of the car, were now directly headed towards them. Something dark and indeterminate, perhaps a weapon, was in one of their hands.

“Run,” Scully told the boy, her voice again in a panic. “We need to run, now.”

Scully’s muscles were already screaming from overuse today. She bent down under Samantha’s weight and began to push into the ground with her leg muscles, trying to run, run, as fast as she could.

The boy could move faster. He began to sprint, and his young legs sped him ahead of Scully, past the trees, up and over the ridge. Scully chased, still running with bent knees to move faster with Samantha, followed along in his path.

From behind her there was a single gunshot. Her chest tightened. She couldn’t see where it hit.

Keep moving. Don’t stop. Samantha needs you to go faster.

From the top of the ridge, she could see the boy moving at full speed across the road, headed purposefully for a white clapboard house set a little off the way that seemed to be converted into a modest restaurant, closed up for the off-season.

Yes. Good, Fox. A place to hold them off, at least.

The boy had managed to shove in the door to the restaurant by the time she caught up with him, and he was already scrambling inside. She followed him.

Before she shut the door behind them, panting for breath, she could see the men in suits emerging from the woods. Hopefully, it would take them a moment to figure out where they’d gone.

“Quickly,” she said to the boy, wheezing. “Upstairs.”

It was dim inside, dusty: a summer restaurant with windows protected from nor’easters and tables covered up for the winter. They ran, weaving around the tables, heading straight up a narrow set of stairs to the second floor.

As they reached a landing at the top, Scully’s legs were starting to buckle under Samantha’s weight. She was definitely out of wind. She gasped, trying to get oxygen in her lungs.

“In here?” The boy threw open a door. It was a mostly-empty bedroom converted into a storage room for the restaurant, with a few crates of linens and folding chairs haphazardly tossed inside.

Scully nodded, still trying to catch her breath. She followed the boy into the room, gently lowering Samantha off of her back.

“Keep to the corner,” she told the two of them, her hands on her knees, her voice raspy. She gestured to the old fireplace. “On the far side of that hearth. Don’t move, no matter what, you understand?”

“What are you going to do?” The boy’s voice was tight.

“Just protect your sister, Fox,” Scully said.

He put his arm around Samantha, frowning at Scully. She turned out of the room, closing the door behind her, gripping her weapon.

In the shadows on the landing, she let the edge of the bedroom obscure her from sight. She could hear the men downstairs as they walked in, but hopefully, they couldn’t see her.

“Goddamn,” one of them said. “I swear I saw them go in here.” He was out of breath, too.

“Go look in the kitchen,” the other said. “I’ll check upstairs.”

“Jesus Christ, I just want to find them and be done with it,” the first man replied. “It’s just a broad and some kids, not the fucking KGB.”

The other man grunted. Scully could see their legs now, silhouettes moving around the tables. One man headed towards the staircase. She watched him, amazed by how clearly she could see him without him spotting her. She could see the laces on his shoes. The pimple on his nose. The pistol in his hand.

She had a good shot from her vantage point.

“Freeze,” she said, in a low voice. “I’m armed, and I’m a federal agent.”

He stopped where he was, craning his head to peer up the stairs, aiming around with his pistol.

“You’re a federal agent, ma’am?” he repeated, his tone disbelieving. “How’s that?”

“Put your weapon down,” she said.

He took a deep breath, and then he chuckled a little.

“Yeah,” he said. “Here’s the thing. I’m not doing that. Because I don’t think you’re actually armed, and even if you are, I don’t think that you’re going to be able to shoot a man in cold blood. It’s not as easy as it looks, honey.”

“You’re very wrong,” she said, her voice cool. “And I’m giving you one more chance.”

“Sven,” called the man, turning his neck down the stairs. “Sven, I found them. You better find a phone and let him know. She says she’s armed.”

He took a slow step up the stairs, extending his pistol further. Scully knew if he got much closer, he could see her easily, and he’d have a clean shot.

She didn’t allow herself to think about it much more. She extended her weapon and fired.

The sound of the gunshot reverberated through the house.

The man fell backwards, then slid, bumping in a sickening way all the way down to the foot of the stairs, a red stain blooming in the white shirt visible under his black suit. Scully knew it was going to be fatal. Still, she had a ridiculous, nonsensical urge to go down to see if she could help him as a doctor.

She backed away from the staircase, swallowing repeatedly, and ran a hand over her face.

Stay calm. Stay calm.

Cracking the door to the bedroom, she looked in at the Mulder children. They were huddled together in the corner near the hearth, as she instructed, the boy putting both arms around Samantha, who had buried her face in his shoulder. Both looked up at her with wild, panicked eyes.

“What happened?” whispered the boy frantically. “Are you okay?”

“I’m okay,” she whispered back. “It’s fine. Stay where you are.”

From downstairs, she could hear the second man cursing wildly, and his clomping footsteps across the restaurant. Slowly, she moved to her vantage point on the landing to see and hear better, trying not to pay any heed to the body at the foot of the stairs.

Somewhere, in the bowels of the building, she could hear the second man trying to use the telephone.

***

They couldn’t leave the second floor. Their remaining pursuer hadn’t repeated his colleague’s mistake, hadn’t attempted coming up the stairs, but he set himself up as guard downstairs, sitting at a table in the dining room of the restaurant. Scully suspected he was waiting for something or someone. Back up, possibly.

Scully waited in the bedroom with the children, looking over every possible nook and cranny, considering every means of escape. She walked the entire perimeter of the room, never taking her hands off of her gun, listening constantly.

The boy looked miserable. “I shouldn’t have run into the restaurant,” he said. “I thought we could hide. I thought it was a good idea.”

“It wasn’t a bad idea,” Scully reassured him, staring down out the window. “We had to do something. We weren’t going to be able to outrun them.”

“I’m not helping enough,” he said, shaking his head. “I should be helping you.”

She turned and looked at him, a sudden rush of affection hitting her. “You always blame yourself when you’re a grown-up, too, Fox,” she said.

“I don’t think it’s anybody’s fault,” Samantha said softly.

Scully’s eyes shifted to Samantha, who looked so pale and vulnerable. Scully gave her a grateful little smile. She wanted to hold the little girl, to stroke her head, rebraid her hair, put ice on her ankle, tell her everything would be fine.

“Do you think that–”

The boy’s question was interrupted by the sound of the front door to the restaurant opening, and voices sounding below again.

Samantha took hold of the boy’s arm, and he looked at Scully questioningly. Scully placed a finger on her lips, and she crept on to the landing to hear better.

The voice was familiar, calm and erudite, a voice she associated with evil.

It was the smoker, C.G.B. Spender, in his younger iteration, mid-conversation with the surviving man from the Cadillac.

“And you’ve not attempted again?” he was asking.

“You didn’t tell us she would be armed. You led us to believe she was just some lady, some babysitter.”

“Still, I assume you are armed as well.” The smoker’s voice was deceptively pleasant. “Who exactly is this young woman, that she has managed to elude professionals such as yourself for hours?”

“Is there back up on the way?”

“Of course,” the smoker said. “But she is one small woman, accompanied by two children. How many men are required, exactly?”

Scully went back into the bedroom, suddenly feeling very calm. She walked to her duffel bag and hunted through it a moment, finding an envelope. The Mulder siblings watched her silently.

“Here,” she said, carrying the envelope to Samantha. “I’m putting this envelope in Samantha’s pocket. It’s a letter that explains much of what I know about — about the men that are trying to abduct you – and who you are in danger from. Specifically this man, C.G.B. Spender, who is now downstairs. Yesterday I mailed a similar letter to an FBI agent, too, a man named Arthur Dales.”

“Why are you giving us that?” The boy’s voice was suspicious; his face was expressionless.

“You and Samantha are going to have to try to climb through this window,” Scully said. She looked out the window again. “It’s risky. I did something myself like this, a few days ago, in San Diego. You’re going to have to jump to the roof of the storage shed below. Then you’re going to run to the woods and head for the bicycles we saw, and you’re going to go to the police. You’ll say you were abducted by the man downstairs. Whatever story you want to come up with, really. You can say I was part of it if you want to.”

“And you?”

“I’m going to go down and distract them, hold them off,” Scully said. “I should do it now, while there are only two of them. They said there’s more coming. If I do that, they won’t notice you going out the window.”

“You’ll … you can’t…” the boy began.

“I can’t jump from a window,” Samantha protested in a small voice. “My ankle.”

“You’re going to have to try,” Scully told her. Because it’s better than the alternative. “It’ll be scary, and it might hurt a little – but Fox will help you.”

“Scully,” the boy tried again, close to tears, “the men downstairs – you’re not going to be able to…”

“Yes, I will,” she said fiercely. “Don’t worry about me.”

“I won’t let you,” the boy insisted, his voice cracking into a deeper pitch. “I’m supposed to be your partner.”

“Your sister is the mission,” Scully told him, her voice breaking, too. “She’s always been the mission. She needs you, Fox.”

The boy’s eyes cut over to Samantha, whose lip was trembling, and he put a gentle hand on her shoulder. “But why can’t you–”

“No more discussion,” Scully said, a tiny shake of her head. “You can do this, right?”

He nodded, blinking quickly, and wiping his eyes with the back of his hand. “But I’ll see you again, Scully?”

Scully met his eyes, his tearful, childlike Mulder eyes, and holding his stare, she nodded purposefully. “Yes. Yes, of course, you will.”

Before she could think any more about it — about whether she was telling him intentional lies — she turned and left the room, gripping her gun, willing herself not to cry.

***

She kept her gun trained on the smoker as she came down the stairs.

“Don’t move,” she said. “Not a muscle, or Spender dies first.”

The second man, Sven, hadn’t drawn his pistol. “Put your gun on the table,” Scully said, still standing on the stairs, her voice a world calmer than she felt. “Take three steps back.”

Sven did as she said, throwing the smoker dark and resentful looks as he did. Scully kept walking steadily down the stairs, stepping carefully around the sprawled body slowly weeping dark blood at the bottom.

“Our mystery lady,” the smoker said calmly, taking a drag of his cigarette. “At long last. I see you know my name, but I don’t have the pleasure of knowing yours.”

“You don’t,” agreed Scully. “Sit down, please, in that chair.”

“Whoever you work for,” the smoker continued, “I’m sure that whatever they pay you, I could double it. Triple it, maybe. Think of all the baubles a lovely young woman such as yourself could buy on that salary.”

Scully smiled a small, bitter smile. “I don’t think you would understand if I told you who I worked for.”

For a brief moment she actually enjoyed the baffled look on his face, the confusion that there might be some part of the picture that he didn’t understand. But he mastered his expression again quickly.

“Let’s be clear, miss,” he said, stubbing out his cigarette in an ashtray on the table. His tone was chillier. “This isn’t going to end well for you.”

“We’ll see,” Scully said. “Can you open your coat, please, so I can determine whether you’re armed?”

“Don’t bother. I’ve got her, boss,” Sven said.

And Scully looked over to see that Sven had another gun trained on her, apparently produced from an ankle holster.

She cursed, shifting her gun to aim at him.

“Not very ladylike language,” the smoker said. “But since you asked, as a matter of fact, I am armed.” He also removed a small pistol from his jacket pocket, standing and holding it out on her as well. “Sven, go upstairs and fetch the children, please.”

Scully’s chest tightened so painfully she thought she would faint. She had been hoping to give the Mulders as much time as possible, to get as far as they possibly could. Had it been enough?

Please let them already be gone. Please let them be in the woods by now.

In Scully’s peripheral vision, Sven moved across the room, holding his gun on her as he walked. He was stepping over the body. Ascending the steps.

“Who do you work for?” the smoker was asking her, narrowing his eyes, his gun still aimed at her. “How do you know who I am?”

“What’s your interest in the Mulder children?” Scully replied, her eyes tracking Sven.

“I’m surprised you don’t know.” The smoker’s voice was faintly mocking. “You seem to know everything.”

She could see Sven’s feet on the landing upstairs. Moving towards the bedroom door.

“Did Bill Mulder hire you to protect them?” the smoker asked speculatively. “You seem an unlikely choice.”

“No,” she said. Her hands were starting to shake again, waiting with dread to hear what happened upstairs. She tightened her hold on the gun.

“In fact, you seem an unlikely choice for any of our … colleagues,” the smoker said. “I admit, it has me curious.”

A gunshot upstairs.

And then another.

“Oh God,” she whispered.

She didn’t bother to control the shaking of her hands now.

She took an unsteady step towards the stairs, her legs nearly giving out under her.

“Sven,” called the smoker loudly up the stairs.

She turned to look at him. His eyes were glinting with anger. He was upset, she realized, that the logistics of his abduction might be thrown off by something like the murder of children.

Rage overtook her. She lifted her gun up directly to his face.

“What are you doing?” he said, reacting to her expression, keeping his gun on her.

“If they’re dead,” she said in a dark, low, hopeless voice she didn’t know, “you’re dead.”

“Calm down,” he said. “Let’s be reasonable. No one was supposed to die.”

“If they’re dead, you’re dead,” she repeated, her tone rising.

“Sven,” he called again.

“Fox?” she shouted. “Samantha? Are you there?”

The smoker had sweat beading on his upper lip. Scully wanted, very badly, just to pull the trigger into his face and be done with him. She kept her eyes on him, fighting the urge, and she heard someone’s steps coming down the stairs. She heard herself choke out an involuntary sob.

“Scully.”

In slow motion, she turned, open-mouthed, towards the staircase.

Where Fox Mulder stood facing her.

Not Fox Mulder the boy. Fox Mulder the man, her Fox Mulder, from 1999.

With an FBI-issued SIG Sauer aimed directly at Spender.

Sat, 21 May 2022 07:58:37

The Boy on the Beach (11/16)

Chapter 11: The Past Is Gone

The soundtrack for this chapter is Dream On, by Aerosmith. This track was on their debut album, which was released in 1973, but didn’t chart until 1976 most places — with the exception of Aerosmith’s native Massachusetts, where it actually played in heavy rotation and charted in the summer of 1973.

Berkeley, California
118 Hours After ScullyVanishes
1999

The next morning, Georgette came in like a storm, dressed in a lab coat, with copies of the day’s plan for everyone. She turned off the music, which made Marshall glower and sulk. Georgette wordlessly dragged him by the scruff of his sweatshirt onto his feet, and back into the lab to check over equipment with her and Paolo.

Mulder’s head hurt.

He hadn’t said anything about it to anyone, even though he didn’t think the grad students even knew the whole story about his brain surgery. Although you never knew what information Anish could dig up.

Of course he thought about what Scully would say if she knew his head hurt. If she knew what he was planning to do anyway. It gave him a dull ache in the center of his chest imagining it. But what could he do? He had to be the one to go. She would have called it self-sacrifice, but she had been showing a real self-sacrificing streak herself these days.

Besides, maybe it felt like a regular headache, a headache from not sleeping or eating especially well and from worrying and from seeing a photo of your long-missing sister. Not a brain surgery complication headache. Whatever those felt like.

He had spotted some ibuprofen on someone’s desk earlier, and he’d managed to subtly steal a couple a few minutes ago, so he just hoped it would kick in soon and he’d feel better.

“How’re you feeling, Agent Mulder?” Anish said, coming up to take a seat across from Mulder at the conference table. “You want this fruit cup?”

“Did you see the image from last night?” Mulder asked, dodging the question but taking the fruit cup, some sort of reasonably-appetizing looking plastic cup of chopped fruit salad. “The one that came in late?”

Anish shook his head, opening some yogurt. “No. What was it?”

Mulder slid the image across the table, the print out he had been carrying around. Anish put down his yogurt and picked it up, examining it closely.

“That’s Agent Scully,” he breathed. “And that’s…?”

“My sister,” Mulder said. “Samantha. Scully’s there with her for sure.”

“Well,” Anish said, his gentle brown eyes on Mulder, “you already knew that, didn’t you?”

Mulder shrugged.

“That boy must be you?” Anish tapped the young Fox Mulder’s face.

Mulder hesitated. “A boy like me maybe, but not me,” Mulder said. “Because nothing like… that, like standing on that beach with Scully and Samantha, ever happened to me.”

“I see what you mean,” Anish agreed, thoughtfully. “To some extent, we are our experiences. But we also always contain multitudes of possibilities, don’t you think, Agent Mulder? A person is more than simply what happens to them.”

“Hmmm,” Mulder replied. “That’s interesting, Anish.”

What is there to me, what core of me exists, outside of the sum of my experiences? Who is Fox Mulder, if he isn’t the boy whose little sister was taken?

He took a forkful of his fruit and regarded the younger man for a moment. “Hey, uh, what’s your career plan, after you finish your degree here?”

“Not sure,” Anish said. “But my research has always involved a clinical dimension, and I’m starting to think that’s where I make the most sense. Maybe more than research.”

“A therapist?” Mulder wondered.

“Something like that,” Anish said. “I’d have to specialize.” He gave Mulder a cautious look. “In law enforcement, maybe? What do you think?”

“We’d be lucky to have you,” Mulder said, sincerely. “In whatever capacity. Just don’t expect everyone in law enforcement to be such fascinating fucking messes, because I’m a beautiful unicorn.” He smiled and gently rubbed his temples.

“Do you have a headache, Agent Mulder?”

“Not really,” Mulder lied. He removed his hands from his head quickly and stabbed a piece of honeydew with his fork. It felt like the headache might be going away. That’s what he told himself, anyway.

Mulder hadn’t heard the door to the lab open, so the sight of his boss walking towards him startled him. Mulder brushed off his shirt and looked around anxiously, like a teenager feeling the need to hide evidence of misbehavior.

“Mulder.” Skinner’s voice carried across the room. “I’ve been trying to reach you. You haven’t had your phone on.”

“No?” Mulder said. “I must have forgotten to charge it.”

Skinner fixed him with a skeptical look but waved his hand dismissively. “Doesn’t matter,” he said. “I have some news. It’s important.” He approached the table and leaned on the back of one of the chairs, eyes intently on Mulder, and lowered his voice. “Hays is dead.”

Mulder breathed in sharply. “Seriously? How?”

“He managed to hang himself in his cell,” Skinner said. “I guess he didn’t see an outcome to all of this that he liked too much.”

Mulder turned to Anish, who was shaking his head imperceptibly. “Does that seem right to you, Anish?”

“It surprises me that he would commit suicide,” Anish admitted. “It’s a … shock. He had such an overwhelming confidence in his own intellect. I’d have guessed he would have believed there was always hope. I guess it can be tricky to predict who will have suicidal impulses.”

Mulder ran his hand over his mouth and turned to meet Skinner’s eyes. He could tell Skinner was wondering the same thing he was. Was it possible someone wanted Hays’ research to stop with him? Is it possible there was something else at play here?

“Anish, you mind letting me talk to Agent Mulder alone for a moment?” Skinner said. Anish nodded solemnly, gathered up his yogurt, and made his way to the break room, glancing back at Mulder a few times. He looked rattled, Mulder thought, and he made a mental note to check in with the kid later.

“Mulder, you need to understand, as far as the Bureau is concerned, this is probably going to tie a bow on the case,” Skinner said, not unkindly. “They’re going to frame it as manslaughter with Hays as the responsible party. Some questions will come up about your involvement, but I think Hays will end up as their conveniently-dead fall guy.”

“Manslaughter with no body?” Mulder said wearily. “No evidence of an actual death?”

“You know better than anyone how hard it is for people to accept this kind of science at the margins,” Skinner said.

“Yeah,” Mulder said, tapping his fingers on the table lightly. “I presume my testimony and my photographic evidence would be less than convincing.”

Skinner nodded grimly. “There’s more,” he said. “I don’t know what you and your student friends have been up to here, but I have my suspicions. You need to know that they’re going to come and take all of Hays’ notes and lab equipment into custody, and you’re going to lose access to it.”

“What?” Mulder sat up straight, feeling his chest tighten. “When?”

“Probably today,” Skinner said. “Could be as early as this morning.”

“No,” Mulder shook his head. “No, we need it. You have to stop them, sir.”

“I can’t do that,” Skinner said in frustration. “You know that if anyone has been using Hays’ equipment, it’s probably been unauthorized anyway.”

“We need it to get her back,” Mulder responded urgently. “To get her back, sir, so this isn’t bullshit, it’s – it’s the whole point.”

A muscle on the side of Skinner’s forehead twitched. “Goddamn it, Mulder,” he muttered. “I knew you were up to something.”

He swallowed, closed his eyes for a moment.

“Just delay it a few days,” Mulder said.

“Who do you think I am, Mulder? What kind of power do you think I have?” Skinner folded his arms, shaking his head.

“If we could just have—“

“Just let me think,” Skinner cut him off. “I just need a second to think.”

“But sir –”

“Jesus, Mulder,” Skinner said, “shut up. You’re giving me a headache.”

November 27, 1973
Chilmark,Massachusetts

The morning of November 27th was gray and overcast; there was a chill in the air. The Mulder siblings and Scully put on the act of going to school: bowls of cereal, sack lunches, book bags, casual good-byes to Bill Mulder.

Teena Mulder drove Scully and the boy to school in the Plymouth Satellite. As they stepped out of the car at the curb, she beckoned to her son and kissed him on the cheek, a small fond smile. She waved a pleasant and absent good-bye to Scully. She didn’t even notice that Scully was carrying her duffel bag.

Scully watched the station wagon drive away and wondered if, later that day, Teena Mulder would have the impression both of her children were taken by the Syndicate.

No matter what else Mrs. Mulder may have done or not done, that was cruel. Unspeakably cruel.

The boy turned to her and raised his eyebrows, and she nodded in silent agreement. They turned and walked off school grounds, side by side, moving in a straight line.

Scully stole a glance at him. This 1973’s Mrs. Mulder would get both of her children back. Her temporary suffering was just another necessary evil.

They walked quickly but did not run, just like Scully told the boy they should. Running attracted notice. They needed to be ordinary, invisible, not worthy of anyone’s observation. The pair walked down the street, past the storefronts, and veered into the grass, cutting through a field, a shortcut the boy knew.

For fifteen minutes they walked along a low stone wall, neither one feeling entirely at ease in the gloomy overcast morning.

Now that they weren’t in public view, the boy wanted to pepper Scully with anxious questions, but she told him to wait. She wanted to get them safely in the car.

At last they reached the turn for the Rothenbergs’ house, down the road from the Mulders’. When they arrived at the back of the house, they found Samantha sitting on the rear steps in her mauve coat, hugging her knees, her book bag beside her.

“Took you long enough,” she called as they walked up. Following Scully’s instructions, she had pretended to go to her bus stop that morning, and then walked to the Rothenbergs’ to meet them instead.

“Good work, Samantha.” Scully exhaled. “Very good work.” Some of the tension dropped from her shoulders, seeing the little girl there, safe and sound. This had been one aspect of the plan that made her uneasy – Samantha walking all on her own. “Now Fox, you go unlock the garage and uncover the car. The key is…?”

“In the glove compartment,” the boy nodded.

Ten minutes later, after a few harrowing false starts, Scully managed to get the engine of the Rothenbergs’ Chevelle to roar to life. Samantha sat shivering in the middle in the back; the boy sat in the passenger seat beside Scully, looking like he might pass out from worry.

“I’m sure the engine was just cold – and it’s probably been a while since it’s been started,” Scully said reassuringly to the boy. “We’re fine. It sounds fine.”

She jerked around the stick shift – it had, truthfully, been a while since she had driven anything but automatic – and she threw the car into reverse, easing out of the Rothenbergs’ garage carefully, starting up their narrow country driveway.

She waited while the boy bounded out of the car to close the Rothenbergs’ garage door and lock it up, and she ran her hands over the controls of the Chevelle. It was a few years old, from the sixties, probably; she didn’t know if she’d ever driven a car made so long ago.

“I have a spelling test this Friday,” Samantha said to Scully. “I really don’t have to study for it?”

Scully looked quickly at her in the rearview mirror. She was frowning, her arms wrapped around herself, sitting slumped against her bookbag.

“It’s going to be okay, Sam,” Scully said gently, using the boy’s nickname for her. “I promise.”

“You don’t know that,” Samantha said. “We’re changing the parts of the future you know about.”

“I know myself,” Scully said firmly. “I know your brother. I know the two of us would do anything to keep you safe.”

The boy opened the door and slid back into his seat before Samantha could respond.

“All locked up,” he said, slamming the door. “I guess I’ll probably lose my job watching the Rothenbergs’ place once they know I stole their car.”

“You’re being kidnapped,” Scully said, looking over her shoulder as she backed down the driveway. “They might forgive you. What time is it?”

The boy checked his wristwatch. “It’s 8:55,” he said.

Scully nodded. She planned to catch the 9:30 ferry from Vineyard Haven, which meant they didn’t have very much time to spare. She had planned a route, using a Martha’s Vineyard map she had found in the Mulders’ study: the South Road through West Tisbury.

Once they were off the island, she would drive them somewhere outside of Providence, probably, purchase some simple supplies, and find a quiet motel to lay low a few days before she could get them to New York.

When the car turned on to South Road, ready to wind up the island, she kept her hands on the wheel tightly, keeping a sharp watch on the two-lane road ahead. Trees hung overhead, obscuring the light a little, and low stone walls lined the edge of the pavement. There weren’t many other cars, so all she had to do was mind the occasional gentle curve.

After a while, she found herself relaxing a little. Nothing was setting off alarm bells so far. Just keep your wits about you and get to that ferry. She looked in the rear view mirror at Samantha, who watched out the window, biting her lip.

“That man we saw yesterday, after the beach?” the boy said, breaking the silence. “The one smoking? You knew who he was, didn’t you, Scully?”

Scully didn’t say anything, but she nodded, keeping her focus on the road.

“I did, too,” Samantha piped up from the back seat. “He came to visit Dad a few weeks ago while I was practicing piano. When Fox was at the store with Mom.”

“Is that right?” Scully said sharply, her eyes seeking out Samantha’s in the mirror again.

“Yeah, he listened to me play for a while. Then he talked to me,” Samantha said. “Asked me questions. About what I liked to do. About what Fox liked to do.”

No one said anything for a moment. Scully’s fingers curled and uncurled around the steering wheel.

“It’s weird that yesterday he didn’t say anything about recognizing you,” the boy said, his voice sounding younger than usual.

Again there was only the sound of the car rattling lightly around them.

“Maybe we should try to listen to the radio,” suggested Scully. “Why don’t you–”

She was distracted by sudden movement in the rearview mirror. A big black car, a Cadillac, coming fast around the curving stretch of road behind them.

“What is it?” the boy said, turning around.

“Someone behind us moving very quickly.” Scully kept her voice casual. “In a big hurry, I guess.”

“Abig hurry,” echoed the boy.

“They’re not slowing down.” Samantha’s voice was high.

“No,” the boy said, panicked, “they’re going to–”

Bam.

The impact came fast and sharp, like being kicked violently from behind. Scully felt her chin whipped upwards, and out of the corner of her eye, she saw the boy jerk forward, too.

The Chevelle, knocked off course from behind, careened to the right, skimming the side of the stone wall with a terrible scraping sound that sounded too much like a scream.

Scully pressed her lips together and forced the wheel to the left, trying to keep the car on the road. She could hear Samantha whimpering in the back.

The black Cadillac was still bearing down on them. Its driver was gunning the engine so that the enormous hulk of a car was now in the opposite lane, going the wrong direction, running directly parallel to Scully. She sped up, trying to clear out of its way, but the Cadillac kept easy pace with the Chevelle.

Gripping the wheel, her breath coming fast, Scully stole fast looks at the car’s occupants: two men dressed in dark suits. Men she had never seen before.

The driver looked over at her with a void expression, his eyes like blank holes. Setting his jaw, he wrapped his fingers purposefully around the wheel and squared his shoulders.

And she knew what was coming next.

“Oh God,” she managed to warn the Mulder children in a strangled voice. “Hold on, hold on.”

The Cadillac lurched to the side, slamming into their car once, sending the Chevelle in a bumpy diagonal off the road. It ricocheted with a jarring jump off the edge of the stone wall. Scully wrestled with the steering wheel again to try to pull it back straight on the road.

The second time the Cadillac slammed into them, Samantha cried out. Maybe the boy did, too.

For a few seconds they seemed to fly through the air.

Berkeley, California
119 Hours After Scully Vanishes
1999

“But that gives us no time,” Georgette sputtered. She stood, arms crossed, directly in front of the chair from which Scully vanished, As though she were afraid Skinner himself would try to take it away. “We won’t be able to get through all the checks, for one.”

Mulder sighed heavily. “It’s this or nothing, Georgette. Because once this equipment gets taken away, who knows when it’s coming back?”

“If ever,” Skinner added darkly.

“Agent Mulder,” Georgette said, gesturing to him. “To get back, you and Agent Scully will need to use the remote electrical stimulus patches Paolo designed. They connect back remotely to the lab, the same way the cameras do. But we can’t just instantly pull both of you back the way we did with you in the test run. We’re going to need at least an hour to reset the systems.”

“That will be too late,” Skinner said gruffly. “You’ll have lost the equipment by then. It will be in custody.”

The three of them stared at one another. Mulder felt a tiny thumping pulse, painful, at his temple. He slowly let out a breath.

“Well,” he said in a soft voice, “we’re going to do it anyway. As soon as we can.”

Georgette stared at him in disbelief. “What? What do you mean? We’re gonna leave you both in 1973 forever?”

“You know how to get Scully and me back, Georgette,” Mulder reached out and touched her shoulder. “You’ll be able to recreate Hays’s hardware. Might take you a while, but you’ll figure it out eventually. ”

“It could take months, years…” Georgette murmured incredulously. “You’re ready to be stuck there that long?”

“He would prefer to be stuck there with her,” Skinner said, “than here without her.” He sighed, giving Mulder a knowing look. “You shouldn’t even be going at all.”

“Jesus, for the last time, there’s no one else,” Mulder said in frustration. “I explained this to you.”

“I had a 1973 body,” Skinner insisted. “I could go.”

“Oh yeah? Where’s your 1973 body, sir?” Mulder bit back. “In Vietnam? What, you feel like a trip back there for old times’ sake? How does that help get Scully back from Martha’s Vineyard?”

“Do you know how many promises I made to her, Mulder? About keeping you from doing shit exactly like this?”

Georgette put her hand on her forehead. “Seriously? This is a terrible idea. I hate the number of fucking unknowns here.”

“I agree,” Skinner said.

“Unknowns?” Mulder practically spat. “What we know is that we have a way to bring her back, and we have to try it, soon, before we can’t any more. We need to do it now. Set everything up. Call everyone in.”

There was a pause.

“Agent Mulder,” Georgette said, her voice uneasy. “I can’t do it like that. It’s not right.”

Mulder felt cold fear taking over his entire body again, slowing his movement. He stared at Georgette and then at Skinner.

“So what are you telling me then?” he heard himself say. “What exactly are you suggesting that I do?”

November 27, 1973
Chilmark,Massachusetts

Scully was trembling. Her hands, when she stared at them, still on the steering wheel, were shaking almost out of control.

There was no time for shock.

“Fox? Samantha?” she heard her voice say, turning her head, bracing herself to see them.

The boy and Samantha were both conscious. Thank God. They were both sitting in their seats, vacant, stunned expressions on their faces.

She quickly assessed them visually. Samantha’s mouth hung slightly open, her eyes flickering to the ground, towards her leg. Her left foot looked to be pinned between the seat and the distorted metal of the drivers’ side of the car. There was some blood trickling down the boy’s arm, and Scully realized the window on his side had shattered.

The car had been knocked off the road, crashing through the stone wall, rumbling a considerable distance through the woods, finally coming to a stop when it smashed against some trees, Scully thought. At least she thought it had been trees –something with impact. The Rothenbergs’ Chevelle was now banged up – especially, she could see, the drivers’ side right behind her, where the Cadillac had rammed them, crushing Samantha’s foot.

“We have to get up,” Scully said, her voice distressingly shaky. “We need to move fast.”

“I can’t,” Samantha whimpered.

“Whoever was in that car – they’ll be coming for us,” Scully said, making intentional eye contact with the boy.

The boy understood and came to life, opening the door and sliding carefully past the broken glass. Scully grabbed her duffel bag and slid after him out that door, as the other side was too damaged to open. She felt for her weapon as the boy opened the back door for Samantha.

“Is your foot injured, Samantha?” Scully said, her voice coming out as a hoarse whisper. The men could be anywhere nearby. They needed to keep their voices down.

Tears had begun streaming down Samantha’s face. “Yeah,” she said in a tiny voice. “It hurts so bad.”

“I’ll take a look at it when we’re somewhere safe,” Scully whispered. “Right now, you’ll have to be brave.”

Scully kept watch with her weapon drawn, and the boy clambered in the back seat.

As he disengaged Samantha’s foot, his sister yelped softly. He cautiously slid her over the seat with his arms under her armpits. “I can carry her on my back for a while,” he whispered to Scully. “Put your arms around my neck, Sam.”

“We’ll take turns,” Scully responded, studying them hesitantly. Samantha was fairly tall, and the boy was not adult Mulder-sized. “But we need to move now, Fox.”

Scully again surveyed the woods around the wreckage of the car, listening closely. No sound of men coming yet.

She and the boy took off at a fast clip through the trees. Her fingers tightened around the grip of the SIG Sauer, keeping it low, her eyes scanning before her. Although they didn’t speak, they were hardly inconspicuous, crunching gracelessly through piles of dry leaves, snapping every stick they stepped on.

Samantha bit her lip and squeezed her eyes shut as she held on to the boy’s neck, probably in pain. The boy didn’t complain, but Samantha was heavy for him, Scully could tell. His face was strained. He didn’t have the upper body strength she knew he would one day have.

They were never going to be able to outpace two adult men. Even without an injury, there would have been a limit to how fast they could go. This wasn’t her and adult Mulder working in easy tandem together.

Off in the distance, she heard the sound of steady, relentless movement through foliage. The men were on their way. Scully tightened her grip on the gun and swallowed.

“Is that them?” the boy turned to her, barely breathing the words.

“We need a place to hide,” Scully whispered, thinking aloud. “Some place fast.”

Truthfully, she hadn’t expected him to have such a quick response. “Can you climb?” He looked up at some towering branches overhead. “That’s one of our impressive local oaks. I’m pretty damn good at climbing.”

“Potty mouth,” Samantha whispered to the boy’s back.

“I think I can climb,” Scully said softly, her eyes aimed above her.

***

The boy was good at climbing: lithe, limber, fearless. He scrambled high up into the oak tree’s giant, sprawling branches first, and then gestured for Scully to follow him.

Her task was harder. Climb a little, then help Samantha ease up behind her. Eventually the boy backtracked and helped her lift Samantha’s arms and shoulders up, too.

Silently, they went from branch to branch as high as they dared, finally crawling down the center of a giant shoulder of the tree twenty feet off the ground. The boy, his eyes serious, pointed towards the tree’s heart, where the thick tangle of branches would do the most to keep them from being seen from below. Scully nodded, agreeing with him.

They crawled their way towards the heart of the tree slowly, on hands and knees, minding their balance, with twisting branches reaching up all around them like a cage. Samantha could manage to crawl, too, as it didn’t put weight on her foot. Scully made her crawl ahead so that she could keep an eye on her.

Below them, the crunch of footsteps in the leaves drew closer. Gradually the muffled rumble of men’s voices became audible.

Scully froze where she was, and she motioned for the children to do the same.

Her gun was stuck in the waist of her pants. Moving her hand as if she were in slow motion, she placed her palm on the grip of the gun — then stood absolutely still again.

The sound of Samantha’s rapid breaths suddenly seemed overwhelmingly loud. Scully didn’t know if the little girl’s breaths were coming fast from pain, fear, or both. Calm down, Sam, Scully prayed. Relax. I don’t want to shoot these men in front of you, but I will if I need to. You will be safe.

The boy turned his head around to face them. His expression was stone, completely empty. Scully recognized it as one he wore to express terror as an adult. He reached out and put his hand on Samantha’s. Samantha’s breathing slowed.

She hoped they weren’t easily visible from the ground, but she couldn’t be entirely sure. A single limb could be sticking out. Some little flash of color from their clothing. Samantha’s mauve coat, maybe.

Snatches of mumbly conversation floated up from below. She strained to hear more clearly, but could make out only free-floating phrases in low men’s voices.

Can’t make it far. Under surveillance. The farms near the pond.

Don’t move, she willed herself. Don’t make a single sound. Give them no reason to look up.

And then she could hear the sound of their footsteps crashing away, their voices carrying as they walked off. The sounds became more and more faint, until at last she couldn’t hear them any more.

She and the Mulders waited in silence, expecting at any moment to hear them turn back.

“Are they gone?” Samantha whispered, after several minutes had elapsed. “Can we get down?”

“No,” the boy said in panic. “I want to make sure they’re gone.”

“We’ll wait here longer,” Scully agreed, exhaling.

They might as well, she thought, as she had no idea what they would do next. Maybe, if she could let her heart rate settle, she’d be able to come up with a sensible new plan of action.

The boy let out a long sigh and shifted from his hands and knees to his rear end, sitting more comfortably on the tree limb, and Scully did the same. She discovered she could even lean back, just lightly, against a branch behind her.

“Let me look at your foot, Samantha,” Scully said, working to keep her voice steady and calm. “And then … probably the scrapes on your arm, too, Fox.”

Somewhere in the woods, a songbird trilled abruptly.

All three of them jumped.

Fri, 20 May 2022 07:07:08

The Boy on the Beach (10/16)

Chapter 10: Floating in a Most Peculiar Way

The soundtrack for this chapter is two tracks:
Top of the World, by the Carpenters, from their 1973 album A Song for You. The week of November 27, 1973 it was #3 on the Billboard Hot 100.
Space Oddity, by David Bowie, which was released originally in 1969 in conjunction with the moon landing, but was re-released as a single in the United States in 1973, reaching #15 on the Billboard charts that year.

November 26, 1973
Chilmark,Massachusetts

The fall beach had a desolate beauty: dunes with russet-colored grasses, lightly craggy, windswept. There were only a handful of other beach goers visible, and Scully surveyed them carefully. A couple and a dog ambling along at a steady pace, headed away from them. A young man running athletic drills in the sand. A trio of young people sharing a wool blanket in the rocks at the rim of the dunes listening to music on a transistor radio.

“In the summer, they’d probably be naked,” the boy told Scully, gesturing to the young people. “We’ve got nude sunbathers here on Martha’s Vineyard, you know. It’s just like Europe or San Francisco, even though it’s Massachusetts.”

“Very impressive,” Scully said to him. But her eyes were on the athlete, making sure he looked above board. The college-age kid seemed preoccupied with his exercise, his full energy directed to his grapevine runs back and forth, but you never knew. She decided she would keep tabs on him, just in case.

“I don’t mind it. Obviously, as a growing boy, I’m pro-nudity,” the boy continued.

“Gross,” Samantha said. She looked as though she were cold, uncomfortable, shifting from foot to foot, her hands deep in her pockets. Scully decided they should start walking, and so they did. She kept the athlete on their left.

“Plus, the naked beach hippies make my parents so angry,” the boy said. “Especially Dad. He says that people confuse hedonism with meaningful self-expression. He says that if the most interesting thing you can say about yourself is your nudity, then you’re not very interesting. But what if they’re not trying to be interesting? What if they’re just trying not to hide behind their clothes?”

“Fox talks a lot when he’s worried,” Samantha told Scully.

“I know,” Scully said thoughtfully, considering both of them.

“What did we come to talk about?” Samantha asked. “Shouldn’t you tell us now, Agent Scully?”

“Just Scully,” she said. “And you’re right.” She slowed her pace, slightly, hugging herself a little in the wind. “I think the first thing you need to understand is that some people will be coming to your house tomorrow night to try to … take Samantha away.” She took a breath. “I know that’s a scary thing to have to think about, Samantha, but I want you to know what’s going on.”

Samantha looked stricken. “Who are they?”

“They’re part of a group of men,” Scully bit her lip, deciding what to say carefully, “who I think are trying to give your dad a message. And that’s why you also need to understand that if something goes wrong, and they can’t take Samantha, they could decide to take Fox instead.”

The Mulder siblings were both silent. The boy matched his pace to Samantha’s and placed his hand on her shoulder wordlessly.

“I can defend you, and I am armed, but there’s only one of me,” Scully continued. “So I believe the best plan is to … leave.”

“Leave?”

“Leave. Get out of here. Get off this island, but do it unexpectedly, in secret, so even your parents are unaware.”

Scully paused, pressing her lips together, aware she was leaving grim and horrifying details out. Details she hoped the bright, sensitive Mulder children never had to know.

Such as: it’s possible your father, and maybe even your mother, actually know this is coming. So we just can’t risk tipping them off, because I can’t be absolutely certain they will be on the side of protecting you.

And:it’s possible there will be repercussions for your parents if I protect you, even terrible repercussions. But they’re adults, and these are their choices, and you are the mission, not them.

“I was thinking I could keep you a day or two, and then you could go to your grandparents in New York, if that seems reasonable to you,” Scully said.

Samantha frowned. “Won’t these men come and try to get us again later?”

“Yes,” Scully said levelly. “That’s a possibility. But I’ve got a few ideas for how we might handle that. Right now, we need to concentrate on how to get out of here tomorrow. Do you all have any money?”

“Yeah,” the boy said, deep in thought, walking closer to her. “I can get money, and if you want, we could borrow the Rothenbergs’ car? They’re neighbors who don’t live here in the off-season and they keep their Chevelle covered up in their garage. I have a key because I check on the property for them when it storms sometimes.”

“That could be useful,” agreed Scully. “Yes. I think we’ll try to leave shortly after you go to school tomorrow so that we can make as much progress as possible before we’re noticed.”

The boy nodded eagerly. “Yes, good. We can pack tonight. I’ll help you, Sam.”

“They’re going to think you kidnapped us,” Samantha said suddenly.

Scully slowly nodded. “That’s probably right.”

“Wait.” The boy looked alarmed. “That’s no good. They’ll arrest you.”

Scully smiled, constantly scanning the horizon. “I think it’s unlikely they’ll arrest me, actually. I’m fairly clever. I’ll tell you two exactly what to say to the police. And law enforcement will find no record of me at all. I don’t exist as an adult.”

“You won’t be able to come near us after that, though,” the boy said. “It’ll be dangerous.”

“Yes,” Scully agreed. “At least for a while.”

The boy looked somber, kicking the sand too energetically in exactly the way that Maggie Scully always said not to, so that the wind picked it up and it scattered against Samantha’s coat.

“We’re not going to be in my Nutcracker recital, are we?” Samantha said, realizing.

“Oh Samantha,” Scully said gently. “I don’t think you will.”

Samantha nodded, but Scully could see tears pooling in her eyes.

“I’m so sorry,” Scully added. “I wouldn’t ask you to miss it if I didn’t think … it was very important.”

“Yeah,” Samantha said, wiping her eyes with her sleeves.

“You’ll have other dance recitals, Samantha,” the boy said.

Samantha looked up darkly at him. “I wanted to go to this one.”

“But obviously this is a high priority, and after all, one stupid dance thing—”

“Shutup, Fox,” Samantha said.

“I’m only pointing out that—”

“I wanted to do it.” Samantha’s voice sounded choked. “We were going to have a real Christmas tree on stage, and I was going to have silver glitter on my face…” She hid her face with her hands. “I just wanted to do it, so shut up,” she added, her words muffled.

There was a tightness in Scully’s chest as she watched the boy’s face, the set of his jaw. How could she ever explain why she wanted him to be nothing but endlessly kind to his sister? How could she convey to a twelve-year old boy the brokenness of a thirty-two year old man — a man who would sit on a motel room floor, speaking to his new partner in hushed tones about the defining loss of his life?

But the boy’s face softened on its own, without her saying a word. He lightly tugged on the end of Sam’s braid.

“Hey,” the boy said, and his tone was now familiar, the hopeful voice he used as an adult to promise Scully little things like cures for cancer or answers to all the questions of the universe. “When we’re done with all this, I’ll bring you back to the dance studio in Falmouth and you can put on the costume and the glitter and we will make Madame Brindell put on the dance recital again, even if it’s just you dancing.”

Samantha looked sideways at him. “Yeah?”

“Absolutely,” he nodded. “Hand to heart.”

“Maybe you’ll even dance the waltz with me?”

He smiled sheepishly. “Sure, of course, Sam.”

“Will you dance it with me now?”

The boy’s eyes bugged. “Now? On this beach?”

“Yeah,” she said. Her lips curled into a little smile.

“Well, I would,” he said, “but I can’t dance without music.”

“I’ll go ask those people on the blanket if we can borrow their radio for a minute,” Samantha said, and she tore off in a run across the beach, hopping over rocks in her way.

“Samantha,” Scully shouted futilely after her. The wind carried her voice the opposite direction.

The girl’s small shape continued across the beach, beelining towards the strangers sitting near the dunes. Scully sighed and began running after her, feeling the boy trailing behind her. Samantha approached the long-haired young people on the blanket, had some sort of conversation with them.

By the time Scully and the boy had reached her, she had the transistor radio in her hands already and was walking back towards them.

“Sam,” the boy said, his face pink, his tone a little frantic. “You can’t run off like that.”

“I got the radio,” Samantha said earnestly. “We’ll just borrow it for a few minutes.”

Samantha pulled the boy by the hand, guided him down the sand away from the dunes, about midway to the ocean. Scully visually checked in with the athlete, who was now doing sit-ups on the ground, and then wrapped her arm around herself, watching the two siblings. She wanted the boy to dance with his sister, and she didn’t mind waiting a few minutes to make sure it happened.

“Haven’t you been listening to Scully?” the boy huffed. “It’s not safe. You have to stay with us. You can’t just run off like that.”

“I’m okay,” she said. “I got music for you.” Samantha was fiddling with the controls on the radio, trying to find a radio station. She found a station and turned it up, turning to her brother mischievously and raising her eyebrows. “Ohhh. Listen to what song they’re playing, Fox.”

The boy rolled his eyes spectacularly. “I’m not dancing to that, Sam,” he said. “No way.”

“What is it?” Scully asked curiously, squatting a little to hear the small speaker better.

“The Carpenters,” Samantha said to Scully, sighing. “Fox hates them just because he knows I like them, and he’s kind of a buttmunch that way.”

“No, Samantha,” the boy said, in a patient tone. “I hate them because it’s terrible music with terrible lyrics, and because I am an older, wiser buttmunch than you.”

Samantha made a face at him but turned the dial. “We can find a station with whatever kind of weird music you like, Fox.”

“I don’t want to dance on this beach,” the boy groaned. “I’m self-conscious.”

“There’s almost no one here,” Scully pointed out.

“You’rehere.”

“Oh, this isn’t even going to make the top ten of embarrassing things I’ve seen you do,” Scully assured him. “Not even top fifty.”

The boy winced, as if that didn’t comfort him. Then he leaned in to listen to the station Samantha had just tuned to.

“How’s that, Fox?” Samantha said, looking up at him, still holding the dial. “You love this song, don’t you?”

The boy closed his eyes to mouth the lyrics dramatically for a few lines. Opening them, he turned to Scully. “This song is Space Oddity, by David Bowie. It’s about an astronaut who…”

“Yes, yes, ground control to Major Tom. I know,” Scully nodded, waving her hand dismissively. “You should dance with your sister.”

“This song is not a waltz,” the boy protested. “It’s going to be impossible to dance to.”

Scully was slightly unsuccessful at smothering a laugh. She wasn’t sure how anyone actually danced to Space Oddity—unless one was really, really stoned out of one’s mind, as she and Melissa had absolutely been when they memorably saw David Bowie play at the Spectrum in Philadelphia in 1983. Still, she was fascinated to see.

Samantha grasped the boy’s unwilling hands in hers.

Facing her brother, she stretched their arms out between them in an open oval. The boy, sighing, stepped in and placed his right hand on her back. She rested her left arm over his shoulder. Their other hands grabbed one another and extended outward, slowly and carefully, with strange childlike grace.

They began to glide together in a box step, only slightly awkwardly. The boy was anxiously watching his feet, his eyes sometimes shooting up to Samantha’s face, sometimes over towards Scully. Samantha was unconsciously singing the lyrics to the song under her breath, stepping with imperfect confidence. The two Mulders lurched up and down in a similar way as they stepped: an unthinking coordination in movement that, combined with the David Bowie soundtrack and the deserted beach backdrop, just slightly tinged with the soft pink of early sunset in the sky, gave the scene a sense of the uncanny. Or maybe, Scully thought, the transcendent.

She found her hands applauding for them enthusiastically almost without thinking. The boy was a respectable ballroom dancer, which was something she wished she had known, although she didn’t know why. She wasn’t one herself. There were no ballroom dance classes in her 1970s childhood. She would never have been able to dance with him, in that suburban dream world where he might have gone out dancing with his wife.

“Check ignition,” Samantha sang softly, “and may God’s love be with you.”

The music started to build, swell, imitating an astronaut’s take-off, and Samantha gripped her brother’s hands tighter and broke the pattern of the waltz step, starting to spin him around, faster and faster. He stumbled over his own feet at first, hesitant, but gradually began to play along, starting to drag her along, too.

As they gasped out laughs and spun each other in circles, Samantha began to scream, and Scully smiled, too. But the tight feeling in her chest was there again.

These two weren’t the simple past, she realized. They were also the future, the future that might have been.

She reached into her peacoat, up inside her turtleneck, and felt inside for the body cam, where she had buckled it to the holster of her gun. She slipped the body cam out.

“Wait, wait. Are you going to take a picture of us?” the boy said, seeing her pull out the body cam, instantly ceasing his spinning. He held up a palm. “No, no, no. Not me dancing.”

“That’s a camera?” Samantha said, panting, out of breath. She put her arm around her brother and smiled. “Should we pose?”

“Why don’t we all three pose?” the boy said. “Is there a timer?”

“I think there might be, actually,” Scully said, looking at the buttons on top of the body cam. She looked up and down the beach. Almost no one within easy sight. “I can set it on top of that rock over there, and maybe we can give it a try.”

***

Later, when they walked in from the beach, Scully and the boy each held Samantha’s hand between them. Samantha had returned the radio but was still giggly, goofy from the dancing and spinning, tugging playfully on their arms.

It reminded Scully of walking on the beach with her nephew Matthew in San Diego. He was so small that when his pace slowed, she and her mom could lift him by his hands high in the air, swinging him a few steps forward so that he squealed in joy. Samantha was, of course, too big for this trick.

When the dunes were underfoot, Scully stopped the children and glanced back, wanting to survey the beach one more time. The athlete seemed to have stopped for the evening, gathering together his belongings and then walking off in the opposite direction. The young people weren’t even looking at them. No one else was visible.

“What are you looking for?” the boy asked.

“I’m not sure,” she said. “Anything out of place.”

“The sun’s setting,” the boy pointed out, watching her. “It’ll be dark soon.”

“Yeah,” Scully nodded. “We should try to be efficient and get home quickly.”

They began back on the winding path through the dunes, letting go of each other’s hands so that they could move single file. The wind had died down, so it was very quiet, only the sound of their footsteps. Scully suddenly wrinkled her nose.

“What’s wrong?” asked Samantha, glancing behind at her.

“It’s just –” Scully made a face. She lowered her voice. “I had forgotten how, in 1973, absolutely everything smells like cigarette smoke. It’s not as common to smell smoke in 1999.”

“I don’t smell anything.” Samantha sniffed.

“Where could it be coming from?” Scully said. “There’s no one else around.”

“Maybe whoever walked along the path right ahead of us smoked,” the boy suggested.

“I didn’t notice anyone,” Scully said quietly. An icy feeling crept over her. “Still. Why not let me go first?”

She stepped in front of the children on the path, and she slid her hand casually up her turtleneck past the body cam to her holstered SIG Sauer. Very carefully, she slid it out, placing it instead in the deep pocket of her peacoat. Behind her, she could feel the boy’s eyes watching this process closely.

Their walk seemed even quieter now, if that were possible. Scully tried to tell herself the smell of smoke wasn’t getting stronger.

When they were over the dunes, she looked right and left for a sign of anyone. There was nothing but an empty road lined by a wood of trees, one small squat house shaded in the trees. No people in sight. Scully released a breath.

“Nobody here,” the boy said, his own breath mid-exhale, too. “Let’s get home fast.”

But as they began to hurry down the road, Scully realized they hadn’t noticed someone leaning against a tree.

A man in a dark suit half-obscured in shadow, casually smoking a cigarette.

When Scully noticed him, she startled, instinctively grabbing hold of both of the siblings’ arms.

“Good evening, miss,” the man said. “I didn’t mean to startle you and the children. I’m just out here indulging in a cigarette before dinner.”

Scully peered at him. At his face.

And then she forced her expressions under her control. “Good evening,” she said, a tight smile flickering across her lips.

“Enjoying your time here on Martha’s Vineyard?” the man smiled pleasantly, tilting his head slightly. “Care for a smoke?”

“I am, thank you, and no, thank you.”

The man shrugged, sucking on his cigarette and smiling ever-so-slightly.

His eyes then fell on the boy, on Samantha. The Mulder children looked back at the man with identical dazed expressions. Scully gripped them both by the arm and began to pull them along with her as she walked away.

“Well, have a nice night,” the man called courteously after her, as she marched away. “Best make it home safe before dark.”

“Yes, thank you,” Scully answered, her voice high.

Her heart was beating out of her chest now. She kept walking, willing herself not to turn around and look back at him. Keep going, keep going, keep going, she told herself. There was no sense in providing him any more information, giving him any whisper of a clue more than he had.

Because Scully felt certain about three things now.

First, that man was a younger version of the smoker. In his 40s he looked troublingly like Jeffery Spender – and yes, yes, disconcertingly, a bit like Mulder, too, although she would never admit that out loud. Never.

Second, she was certain he was there to lay eyes on the Mulder siblings, and he had. What’s more, she was pretty certain, judging from the expressions on their faces, they had some vague idea who he was, too. She would have to confirm this with them later.

Third, he had been fishing for any detail about her, because he obviously had absolutely no idea who she was. Which made her an unanticipated variable. A factor he hadn’t accounted for.

For him, this would almost certainly make her an unacceptable threat. For her, it might be her only advantage.

Berkeley, California
108 Hours After ScullyVanishes
1999

The image had come in two hours ago, when everyone else had already either retreated to Hays’ office to start looking over data for tomorrow or gone home to sleep. Mulder was the only one there, in the main lab. He had been considering going back to the motel himself for a while.

But once he heard the sound of the image beginning to fill in on the screen, that went out the window. At first it looked like it might be three strangers standing side-by-side on a beach—a woman and two children, perhaps a mother and kids.

When the whole image continued to fill in, and all the detail, he could see that the picture depicted no strangers.

No. No strangers at all.

All three people in the photo were laughing and speaking, their mouths open, like the camera had caught them unaware.

Samantha’s mouth was open the widest, almost like she was shouting something, singing maybe. She looked exactly as he remembered her looking the day of her abduction. Except she was happy.

Scully was wearing a 1970s peacoat and a turtleneck that reminded him vaguely of his mother, and she was looking towards the camera. He hadn’t seen her in days. She looked beautiful. She was also smiling, her lips slightly parted, as though she were mid-sentence.

The young Fox Mulder was unmistakably, unquestionably, looking straight at Scully. It was inconceivable to Mulder that even this very young version of himself—this kid who had so little information about the world—would know enough to look at Scully. Why would he do that? What did he even know about it? What was going through his mind? Was that instinct? Was that fate?

The three of them appeared to be holding hands. Imagine that. It was fucking staggering.

This Fox Mulder, this fortunate stranger child, got to hold hands with Samantha and Scully at the same time. Within the span of a single heartbeat. Within the span of one breath.

Mulder became aware that he was crying. It was the first new photo he’d had of Samantha in 26 years.

Thu, 19 May 2022 07:14:29

The Boy on the Beach (9/16)

Beata Beatrix, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 1864

Chapter 9: The Wrong Time

The soundtrack for this chapter is Right Place Wrong Time, by Dr. John, from his 1973 album In the Right Place. This song peaked at #10 on the Billboard Hot 100 in June 1973.

November 25, 1973
Chilmark,Massachusetts

Bill Mulder had been home for thirty minutes now, but he hadn’t spoken to anyone in his family. Scully found it unsettling.

From the stairs on the landing, she could see the back of his head, his dark hair, emerging from behind a leather chair in the den. Scotch sat at his hand. A halo of cigarette smoke curled slowly around him. The evening news played idly on the TV, more details about the unfolding Watergate scandal in the White House.

Scully offered to help set the table with Samantha and the boy, so they were placing thick earthenware plates at each spot, bracketing them with silverware. Teena Mulder, busily moving around casserole dishes in oven mitts, seemed perfectly steady on her feet now. Her lips were set in a neutral, unreadable expression.

When the table was ready, Teena surveyed it with a little nod. “Go tell your father dinner’s ready, Fox.”

In an obedient burst he bounded around the corner into the den. “Dad,” Scully heard him say. “We’re ready to eat.”

There was a sudden catch in his breath.

Scully didn’t have to think. She was so alert to his signals, even at this age. She rounded the corner behind him in three steps.

What she saw first was Bill Mulder, bemused, standing up to look at his son.

What she saw next was her own face on the TV screen. It was her 3rd grade school picture. Not her favorite photo from childhood: bangs and pigtails and wide, wide overbite smile. Underneath, in scary capital letters: DANA SCULLY, SAN DIEGO GIRL MISSING FROM HOME SINCE THANKSGIVING DAY.

“What’s the matter with you?” Bill Mulder was saying to the boy.

“She- she just looks like someone I know,” the boy said, eyes on the screen. To his credit, he didn’t turn around, didn’t give a whisper away. Scully took an unsteady step closer so that she could hear the TV.

“…authorities continue to treat the case as a possible abduction,” the reporter’s voice was saying. “Meanwhile, the Scully family asks for help from the public.”

The image cut to Scully’s parents standing together in front of a microphone on the front steps of the San Diego police station, Bill, Melissa and Charlie huddled close next to them. Bill stared straight into the camera, stoic, no flicker of expression. Melissa was burying her face in her mother’s arm. Charlie, who was very small, never lifted his eyes from the ground.

“We ask that if anyone has any information about Dana,” her father said into the microphone, “anything at all, that they don’t hesitate to come forward.” His voice broke. “This has been so hard on our family. Please help us bring our little girl home.”

The screen jumped back to the anchor in the studio. Scully stood completely still, all breath gone from her body.

She had done that. That damage, wrought all over her mother’s face, all over her whole family’s faces, was her handiwork.

“That’s sad,” the boy’s voice was raspy, almost a whisper. He glanced over at Scully. “That’s really sad.”

No one said anything. Scully sensed the tension rolling off the boy, who was shifting restlessly from foot to foot beside her. The news cut to a commercial for cigars. It’s the quality taste of tobacco, for a man who knows what he wants out of life.

“Yes, it is sad.” The ice in Bill Mulder’s scotch glass tinkled as he brought it to his lips and back. “But sometimes sad things happen, son,” he said, dully. “You have to try not to feel everything so deeply.”

The boy’s eyes cut immediately to his father’s. “Dad, a missing kid. Something like that … some things really should be felt deeply. Don’t you agree?”

Bill Mulder let out a ragged sigh. “Well of course, ideally. But if you go through life like that, well, you’re going to get knocked around. It’s an unpredictable world.”

All the horror Scully felt at seeing her face on the TV changed direction, channeling suddenly towards Bill Mulder. She felt herself swaying back and forth on the balls of her feet, filled with a sudden surge of fury at his words, at their implications.

It’s a lot more of an unpredictable world than you fucking know, Bill Mulder. You and all your suited associates, who think you understand all the variables at play. None of you even know my name.

Stubbing out his cigarette and sighing heavily, Bill Mulder didn’t pay any attention to Scully at all. He didn’t ask who she was or why she was there for dinner. Not the way Bill Scully would have treated a guest in his home, greeting a stranger in a warm and booming voice, extending his hand and telling a joke. Bill Mulder just walked over and turned off the TV, and strode right past her to the dining room table without giving her a second look. As if she were a ghost.

And wasn’t she a ghost, she thought, standing there staring at the empty TV screen? Wasn’t she all that remained of the real Dana Scully, a little girl with bangs and a big smile – a vibrant little girl with a family who loved her, whose biggest problem was bickering with her sister?

All that was left was this … hollowed-out adult. So colorless, so grim. Who floated around in a time she didn’t belong in.

The boy was just standing there gaping at her. When his eyes found hers, he pointed emphatically at the TV and silently mouthed the word: “You?”

She nodded. Lightning fast, she wiped her eyes, but she suspected not fast enough; he’d likely seen the tears there.

His eyes slowly grew rounder, as if he were understanding something. They were such soft and wide versions of her Mulder’s green eyes. They were far, far too easy to imagine on an infant’s face.

“Maybe you can go try to explain to your family,” he whispered, “so they don’t worry?”

“Maybe,” she nodded. “After the mission.”

What happened to her family had also happened to him, she realized with a chill, following him back to the dinner table.

Or, more accurately, it had happened to her Mulder.

She had known this all along, of course, but the real horror and trauma of it now stared her in the face. What her family had been like on TV: that had been what Mulder lived through, what he had already survived for as long as she had known him.

But he had done it alone. Unlike the members of her family, her Mulder had no one else to cling to, no arm to bury his face in. He had wept and wept for his sister, and he had been told by his father not to feel things so deeply.

Berkeley, California
100 Hours After ScullyVanishes
1999

A little hope had done Mulder a world of good. At last he had been convinced to visit his much-neglected hotel room and take a shower, which was pretty much a necessity at this point. It had been cruel to the graduate students to keep smelling as he did. Newly clean, shaved, in fresh clothes, he even managed to collapse on the motel bed and sneak in a short nap.

He woke up with the sound of Scully’s voice in his ears, the crisp ends of her consonants just fading away. The memory of the hush of the ocean.

He lay on his back for a moment, trying to restart the motor of the memory, but he couldn’t piece the dream back together. He told himself not to worry. It seemed like a good omen to dream about Scully in any case.

As he pulled his own motel room door shut, he paused to let his eyes rest on the nondescript door directly next to his, the door to the room that belonged to her. He wondered if he should try to go inside and gather up her belongings, move them into his, and officially check her out of the hotel room. No doubt the Bureau would prefer that. It would save them money.

He decided against it. Screw the Bureau. He didn’t want to risk ruining his relatively upbeat mood. If Georgette had her way, Scully would be back to pack her own damn bags before long anyway.

When he arrived back at the lab, resolute with new purpose, he had his arms full, precariously balancing a stack of pizzas and keeping steady a cup of coffee. As he backed his way through the glass doors at the entrance, he nearly collided with Skinner.

“Mulder.” Skinner looked him over quizzically, taking a few of the pizza boxes for him. “You’re looking … better. Much better.”

“The team and I have been making good progress,” Mulder said lightly, moving to the conference table with his boxes. “I’m encouraged. So encouraged I brought pizza. Young people still like pizza, right?”

“That’s great news,” Skinner nodded, giving Mulder his kindly sympathetic look, that look that always made Mulder feel a little embarrassed. “Mulder, I was wondering where you got – that.”

“What, the coffee?” Mulder looked down at the fragrant cup still steaming in his hand. “Some very Berkeley café a few blocks away. Brewed Awakening? Human Bean? I know it had a coffee pun in the name.”

“I meant that,” Skinner had set his pizza boxes down, too, and was now pointing at the notes scattered all over the conference table. “That looks like Hays’ notes.”

“Oh,” Mulder shrugged. Keep this vague, he thought. “Yeah, the grad students have been recreating what parts of Hays’ work they can.”

“To what end?” Skinner said, arching an eyebrow. “Do they actually think they can…?”

“Maybe,” Mulder said, carefully. “It’s a possibility.”

The lab appeared empty, he noted. Just untidy computer stations and the constant hum of power running under everything. But he could hear little sounds in the back hall. Faintly, possibly the echo of the music the students were perpetually listening to. Maybe the students were gathered in the lounge, taking a break. He hoped they stayed put. The less anyone told Skinner at this point, the better.

Skinner gave him a knowing look. “Okay, Mulder,” he said. “Just make sure you remember that it was only a matter of a few weeks ago the inside of your head was on the outside.” He opened up a pizza box, helped himself to a piece. “That is to say, don’t do anything stupid to compound our problems.”

“Never, sir,” Mulder said blandly. “Is there any update about Hays?”

“That’s what I came here to tell you,” Skinner sighed, chewing on his pizza. “He’s stopped talking altogether. And eating, too. He says he’ll only give us information if we allow him full access to his lab, no guards.”

“No way,” Mulder felt his jaw set and shook his head. “No telling what he has in mind if he does that. Maybe he thinks he can travel into another multiverse himself.”

“That was my read,” Skinner agreed, “although there are some at the Bureau who … think another approach is warranted. Who aren’t as convinced the lab is a danger.”

“You have to convince them,” Mulder said. Or at least hold them off a little while longer, he did not add. “Hays – he’s a wild card. If we can convince him to help us, he could be useful. But if he’s given access to what he has here, I’d say he’s a flight risk.”

Skinner took another thoughtful bite of pizza. “It’s good,” he said, chewing slowly, looking down at the slice. “The pizza. A step up from that crap you and Scully order all the time at work.”

“I won’t stand here and listen to you insult Mama Nina’s like that, sir.”

“I’ll do my best with Hays,” Skinner gave a short nod, turning to go. “You’ll keep me updated on whatever the hell you’re doing here?”

Mulder blinked. “Of course. I’m just working with the graduate students.”

“Yeah,” Skinner said. “That’s going remarkably well, huh? When this is over, maybe you should really spend more time teaching at Quantico. Or I should get you some interns. You’ve got a certain … rapport with them that surprises me.”

“Eh, I’m just doing what it takes,” Mulder said uncomfortably.

“I’m taking this with me,” Skinner gestured with the slice of pizza. “Stay out of trouble, Mulder.”

“Have an excellent day, sir.”

That was apparently a shade too polite. Skinner turned back to give him one more concerned, suspicious look before heading out the door.

Mulder exhaled, cradled his fancy coffee in his hands, and rolled his head around in a deep circle, his neck making some promising pops and cracks. All he had to do was hold off the pressure from the Bureau until he could get her back. Nobody could argue if she simply showed up again, could they? It just meant that they didn’t have the luxury of unlimited time.

“Is your boss gone?” called Anish, his head appearing through the back hallway door.

“Were you hiding back there?” Mulder said in amusement. “I’m the only one who needs to hide, you know.” He folded himself into one of the swivel chairs, took a deep swig from his coffee, and watched as the whole team made an unwieldy reentrance. Georgette was carrying her laptop and an enormous stack of papers, which no one helped her with. Marshall had a pillow and a map of imprinted red lines over his face. Paolo looked like was holding a yoga mat and a CD player.

“You shaved!” Anish said. “I’m overjoyed. And you brought pizza?” He turned around. “Guys, Agent Mulder brought us pizza.”

“I feel loved,” Eujung said, coming in. “Did you shower, Agent Mulder? Because that’s what would really show your love.” Anish elbowed her as they both reached into the box to grab some pizza.

“Can Agent Mulder solve the music dispute?” Marshall said testily, also grabbing a slice. “Because I think three hours of The Roots is unreasonable. Agent Mulder, do you think three hours of the same album is conducive to a good working environment?”

“Marshall, no one wants to listen to your music,” Paolo snapped back. “Including Agent Mulder.”

“Nobody even knows what kind of music Agent Mulder likes, Paolo, because no one has been consulted about music except for–”

“Hey.” Georgette cleared her throat. “Okay. Can we do this? I’m ready to get started. Everyone get your pizza and sit down.”

Marshall and Paolo, eyeing one another sulkily, slunk into chairs and started wolfing down pizza as others filled in around them. Mulder normally wasn’t put off by immature behavior from brilliant minds; he had, after all, once seen the Gunmen practically reduced to tears in a knock-down fight over who ate someone else’s mozzarella sticks from their communal refrigerator. But he still felt a flicker of anxiety. He needed to be able to trust these kids completely to help bring Scully home.

“I have an update,” Georgette said, once everyone was settled. Her laptop was set up in front of her, her papers in a meticulous spiral at her fingertips. He had to admit; she, for one, did inspire confidence.

“We’ve been combing through Hays’ most recent notes,” she said, “and we think we understand now what he was working on. We feel ready to do a test run.”

Mulder sat up straight so quickly he jostled his coffee, and he moved quickly to wipe it up. “A test run?” he said, his voice sounding slightly unsteady to his ears. “What does that mean?”

“It means we send someone back to the same approximate point in time, 1973, but only for a matter of seconds. We want one limited electrical stimulus to that region of the brain, one that can sustain a trip there and a trip back, no more. So this will be very limited in scope.”

“How does it work?”

“The person needs to visualize the right day,” Georgette said. She frowned, picked up a pencil absent-mindedly. “The destination time originates from your own will, your own mind, or at least that’s what Hays believed.”

Mulder said nothing. That raised the question of how Scully ended up in November 1973 in the first place. Why November 1973 would be so much on her mind. It had to be because of their argument, didn’t it? She was thinking of the mission, of his desire to find out what happened to Samantha? That meant this was his fault in an entirely new way. He tucked that thought away, to think about later.

“Then, once the test subject travels back to 1973, we believe they will take the place of their 1973 self. Because, as you were able to confirm with the San Diego PD, there doesn’t seem to be any 9-year old Dana Scully floating around 1999. She seems most likely to have been replaced – temporarily, we hope – by her time-traveling adult self from another multiverse. So our test subject is going to travel via their own 1973 body.”

“Tell him about the personnel problem,” Anish urged.

“Right,” Georgette nodded. “So that raises a personnel problem. Because it means that our test subject needs a 1973 body to travel into. And most of us don’t have one.”

“I don’t follow,” Mulder said. “Why don’t most of you have one?”

“We weren’t born yet,” Georgette shrugged, as if that should be obvious. “Most of us–” she made an inclusive gesture around the table “–were born in the mid-1970s. So we would have no body existing yet to jump into.”

Mulder ran his fingers over his newly smooth shaved chin. “Right,” he said, contemplating this. “You’re young. I get it.” He leaned forward on the table on his elbows. “But … it doesn’t matter anyway, Georgette. It’s clear that it should be me. I have a 1973 body, and my 1973 body is actually with her, so potentially, I’ll even be able to somehow communicate in those few seconds, give her an idea of what is going on.”

The graduate students looked at one another, clearly a little nervous, and then at Georgette.

“I agree it makes some sense. But…” Georgette began delicately, “wasn’t there something about you just recovering from brain surgery? I didn’t hear all the details.”

“Eventually, when we do this for real,” Mulder said, “it has to be me who goes, Georgette.”

“This is the Messiah complex thing? He thinks he’s Jesus?” Georgette said to Anish.

“I really don’t,” Mulder said. “Well, not in this particular circumstance. And you know I’m right, Georgette. My brain … it’s a risk, but this is a risk that’s worth it. I’m the only person who’s in the right place at the right time.”

The other graduate students turned solemnly to Georgette. Mulder could hear the persistent tapping of her foot like a tiny countdown clock. Her lips unmoving, she raised an eyebrow in question towards Anish, and his head did a little dip in return that Mulder couldn’t decipher.

“All right,” Georgette said slowly to Mulder. “Let’s say it’s a go. We need to begin immediately working on the test run. We have a lot to do, because I want to do it this afternoon.”

Mulder felt like leaping out of his seat. “This afternoon?”

The possibility of seeing Scully, even for a moment, so unexpectedly soon.

“Why not? No time like the present,” Georgette said dryly, stacking her papers.

“Ha,” Eujung said, rolling her eyes and biting her pizza. “No time like the present. I get it.”

November 26, 1973
Chilmark,Massachusetts

Monday was a school day. Why wouldn’t it be? No one but Scully knew it was the day before Samantha was scheduled to disappear.

No, Scully corrected herself. Someone knew. Somewhere, someone was planning for it. But the tragedy hadn’t touched the Mulder family yet. They woke up and took showers and got dressed and ate a quiet breakfast at the kitchen table on that dark November morning.

The boy’s improvised cover story —that she was a visiting teacher from California— required that Scully be dropped off at school with him, although she didn’t need to stay there. After a fitful night’s sleep, she had showered and dressed this morning in her stolen woolen pants, another turtleneck sweater, her 1999 boots, her 1999 bra. Her weapon and the body cam were both holstered discreetly to her.

She had looked herself over in the small mirror over the vanity in the Mulders’ guest room. Did she look plausibly like a 1973 teacher? No one better be paying so much attention to her chest in the turtleneck to notice the period-inappropriate bra. The weapon and camera were not too lumpy, as the waist of her pants were a little loose. The ends of her hair were now curling haphazardly around her face because she had showered last night and not blow dried or styled, and she had no make-up or jewelry at all, besides her cross necklace. It felt unpolished by her personal standards, but hopefully, it came across as a natural look.

There was a knock on the guest room door.

“Samantha caught the bus to her school,” the boy said, standing in the door frame, awkwardly, appearing to be all legs and arms. “Mom’s going to drop you and me off in a few minutes. After that you can go … wherever you’re planning on going.”

“All right,” she nodded. “I’ll get my coat.”

“Agent Scully?” he said.

“Scully,” she corrected.

“I was thinking. This event that happens? It’s got to do with Samantha, doesn’t it?”

Scully paused midway through putting her arm through her pea coat. She looked at him, leaning against the door frame.

“You wanted me to do her recital so badly. You didn’t say anything about what she did in 1999. You looked … kind of sad when I talked about her and me being a team.”

“Yes. You’re right,” Scully said matter-of-factly. She finished putting the coat on, began buttoning it up. “But it doesn’t matter, Fox. Because it’s not going to happen here. Not to you and her.”

“It’s tomorrow, right?” He stood up straight. “Shouldn’t you be telling us what to do soon? Shouldn’t we be … going over the mission?”

Scully nodded. “After school today. I’ll work it out.”

He didn’t meet her eyes, his eyes shifting downward. She could see a crease in his forehead, above his eyes, that she recognized, although she had not yet seen it on his younger face.

“Mul– Fox. Look at me,” she said. She put her hand on his small shoulder. “I don’t want you to worry. I’m used to watching out for you. I’m not going to let anything happen to you or Samantha.”

He smiled a little halfheartedly.

“You don’t seem like the kind of person who would lie to make me feel better,” he said.

Scully found herself huffing a laugh, unexpectedly. “No,” she said. “I’m really not.”

***

While the Mulder siblings were in school, Scully checked out Chilmark – as best she could, in a limited way, on foot.

It was too much to hope for, she supposed, that she would see Spender sitting ominously in a black car, or that she might spot a fleet of unmarked vehicles parked a distance away from the Mulder home. She deduced that whoever took Samantha must have had access to their own transport off of Martha’s Vineyard, either boat or otherwise, and if she had 1999 Bureau resources at her disposal, she might have tried to track down all the possible ways to leave the island besides a ferry. But as it was, she could hardly do that on her own with no vehicle and no F.B.I. badge to flash.

By the time the school day was over, a plan had begun to emerge in her mind, the plan that would most effectively keep the Mulder siblings out of harm’s way without requiring much material support.

It wasn’t … ideal. And she was going to need their buy-in.

Teena Mulder drove Scully and the boy home from school that afternoon, and Scully was relieved not to be asked any questions about how she spent her day as a visiting teacher.

Once again, Teena Mulder seemed distracted. Not impolite, and not as disoriented as she had been the first day, but as though her mind were somewhere else. Her eyes seemed perpetually fixed on a distant point. The question was, Scully wondered, how distant, exactly?

Samantha had to practice piano, and when they arrived home, she was already dutifully banging out “Fur Elise” somewhere in the house. So the boy and Scully waited for her in his room, where he sat on the floor cross-legged and methodically unpacked school materials from his backpack, in that selectively systematic manner Mulder always had.

“You’re in sixth grade?” Scully said, curiously, watching him.

“I’m in seventh,” he said, flipping through a binder. “I should be in sixth, technically, given my October birthday, but they moved me up due to my great intellect.”

“And you do well in school?”

He looked up and sighed. “Academically? Sure. But I think everyone thinks I could win more friends and influence more people.”

Scully smiled slightly. “Ah, well. That’s overrated.” And it will surely get easier, she thought. Being tall, good-looking and athletic never hurt any boy I ever knew in high school or college. She moved to the window over his desk and pulled back his curtain slightly with the tip of her finger. “You can see the ocean a little from this window, can’t you? I would have liked that, when I was your age. To always be able to have eyes on the sea.”

“It’s Squibnocket Beach,” the boy said. He had stopped unpacking the backpack, and was now still, tilting his head, studying her in a way she found unnerving.

“What’s wrong?” She smoothed back her hair self-consciously.

“In the light from the window there, you look just exactly like … someone from a painting,” the boy said, appraisingly. “I didn’t notice it before, but now I really see it.”

Scully gave him an apprehensive look, stepping away from the window.

“You look like Beatrice, in that famous painting by Dante Rossetti. You know the one I mean?”

“No,” she said. That wasn’t quite true. In her teens she and Melissa had collected postcards of artwork featuring redheads, which she had made into an impressive collage on their bedroom wall. She did have some vague image, in the back of her mind, of the painting he meant: of the red-headed heroine, leaning back, in a divine trance. “You know about art, Fox?”

“My mother and my grandmother,” the boy said, “are big fans. And donors. The Met in New York, mostly. My grandparents, my mom’s parents, live in New York, so we go all the time, just about every month.”

“That often?”

“At least,” the boy said. “I mean, I like to go. We go see shows, to the zoo in the park. My grandfather takes us to games – the Yankees, the Knicks.”

“Oh,” Scully said, that information clicking in place. Mulder had never mentioned these New York trips specifically. She suspected they stopped after Samantha’s disappearance, and she wondered why.

“My grandmother loves the Pre-Raphaelites,” the boy said seriously. “We have a picture of the Beatrice in a book in the study. Do you want to see?”

“Sure,” Scully said, faintly curious.

He hopped up, giving her his eager-to-please quirked smile. “I’ll be right back.”

Scully smiled, too, and turned to look out the window again at his little fragmented view of the beach. The boy was exactly what she might have expected in many respects. Yet there were sides to him that deeply surprised her, bright threads running through his personality that were much more muted in 1999 adult Mulder.

And then … there was already more of a melancholy streak than she might have guessed, she thought, pulling the curtain back in place. A darkness that predated Samantha’s abduction. She had assumed all sadness in Fox Mulder sprang originally from that one formative event. Adult Mulder seemed to believe that to be true, too; it seemed integral to the story he told her on their first case together, the story that he thought made him who he was. But now that she saw this version of him, she wasn’t as sure.

She heard him step back into the room, and turned to see the boy standing there, his expression wooden, Samantha standing uncertainly beside him. He had no book in his hand.

“Did you find the book?” Scully said, concerned.

“No, I —” His face was ashen.

“Fox?”

“Something happened. I was in the study, and – then I wasn’t. I think I must have passed out.”

Scully moved to him right away, placing her hand on his back. “Do you feel dizzy? Sit down on your bed. Have you had water this afternoon?”

“Yes,” he said, sitting, wobbly, lowering himself on the edge of his bed. “I mean – I don’t know, I guess? No more or less than usual.”

Samantha looked at Scully, her eyes fearful. “He was standing in the hall, like he didn’t know where he was,” she whispered, although the boy could clearly hear her.

Scully willed her face to reveal nothing, but she felt her stomach clenching. Lost time. Disorientation. She didn’t like the sound of this. It also didn’t seem consistent with any account she had ever heard from Mulder of the time of Samantha’s abduction. “Has this ever happened to you before, Fox?” she said gently.

He shook his head. But Samantha swallowed.

“Agent Scully– when I came into the hall, I thought I saw a man there,” Samantha whispered hesitantly.

“A man?” Scully repeated, urgently, leaning in towards her. “What kind of man?”

“A man standing in the hall,” nodded Samantha anxiously. “A man I didn’t know. I ducked my head around the corner, and when I looked back, all I saw was Fox.”

Scully felt, almost without thinking, for the outline of her weapon underneath her clothing. Feeling its presence there allowed her to relax, just slightly.

“All right,” she said, calming herself down, too. “All right, I have an idea. After we give Fox a moment to get his feet under him again, why don’t the three of us go for a walk before dinner? Maybe to the beach? Squibnocket Beach, you said, right, Fox?”

The boy and Samantha looked at each other. “Yeah,” the boy said. “Squibnocket.”

“That will be a good place to talk,” Scully said.

“It’s going to be windy.”

“That’s okay. Once we’re there, I can keep an eye on … things,” Scully said. “And I’ll tell you what the three of us are doing tomorrow.”

Samantha frowned, her small face looking from Scully back to the boy. “Are we going some place tomorrow?”

Berkeley, California
105 Hours After Scully Vanishes
1999

Success, declared Georgette. The test run was an unqualified success. There and back without incident.

“So that’s it then?” Mulder said, following her around. “You’re satisfied?”

The graduate students were sprawled everywhere, drinking red Solo cups full of champagne they definitely weren’t supposed to be drinking in the lab. In the background Marshall and Paolo were arguing about what music to put on. Mulder, who had a slight headache from his lighting-fast time travel experience, put his hands over his ears subtly. He hadn’t had a sip of his champagne at all.

“I’m overjoyed,” Georgette drank deep from her own Solo cup. “This is gonna be huge.”

“And then what’s next?”

“You know what’s next,” Georgette said. She was beaming. “The real thing. We’ll go over our data again tonight to double check, but this is definitely some Apollo 11 moonwalk shit we’re doing here, Agent Mulder.”

“You’re giant leaping like nobody’s business, Georgette,” Mulder agreed, sitting down in a swivel chair, beginning to lightly apply pressure to his temple.

“Enjoy yourself — and rest up,” Georgette smiled, going to refill her cup. “You’re our Neil Armstrong.”

Truthfully, he thought to himself, massaging both temples, from his very limited Mulder point of view, the test run was disappointing, small steps indeed.

Like Scully, he had started here in the plastic chair in 1999. He had received the electrical stimulus to his brain. Unlike Scully, he had been very intentional about what he was visualizing: Scully herself, in his parents’ house, shortly before November 27, 1973.

And then suddenly he wasn’t in the chair any more. The sensation of the plastic seat was gone from beneath his ass and legs. He was … standing somewhere, in the darkness.

No, not darkness. Mulder just hadn’t been able to see. He had become aware he was holding something in his hands, and it occurred to him it was a book.

He aimed his face downward, in the direction of the book, and slowly, painfully, bright spots began to blossom in front of his eyes. He blinked once, twice, a dozen times. And suddenly he could make it out.

Mulder recognized below him, on the page, the image of Rossetti’s Beata Beatrix, and right away he had known what book he was holding. It was the coffee table book on the Pre-Raphaelites. It had originally been his maternal grandmother’s, but she had loaned it to him for most of his boyhood; it now sat on a shelf somewhere back home at Hegal Place.

At once he could guess why his child self had been getting the book off the shelf and opening it to this page.

Thinking back on it now, at that point he should have shouted, made more noise, but his reaction was to rotate around in open-mouthed wonder, to take in the dark, wood-paneled study of his childhood home, all the books, the model ship, all of which was painfully and eerily familiar. There was no one else in the room but him.

He was overwhelmed by the sensory experience of it. It smelled like home. It smelled like dinner. He could smell something cooking from the kitchen: the piquant oregano edge of his mother’s spaghetti sauce.

He shook his head, knowing there was no time. He needed to find Scully. He needed to tell her what was going on, that they were working to bring her home.

He strode into the hallway quickly, ready to find her wherever she was in this too-familiar house.

And then, as suddenly as it had begun, it was over.

It was too late. His precious seconds of the test run were gone. In a flash he found himself staring up again at the fissured office ceiling of the lab in 1999, and he was greeted by the raucous cheers of the graduate students all around him.

Now, as he sat at the conference table with his temples under his fingertips, he wondered what the young 1973 version of him experienced.

Did the young Fox Mulder remember feeling displaced? Did he just … lose time? Was it painful? He hoped it wasn’t. Would he talk to Scully about it?

He thought about the young Fox Mulder and the book about the Pre-Raphaelite artists. It gave him a strange and unsettled feeling trying to imagine what the young version of him might be telling her. What he might think was appropriate to say. Could his child self inadvertently reveal aspects of his adult psyche he would prefer to keep private? He feared it was possible. He knew he had been a tiresomely adult-oriented kid.

When Scully first was assigned as his partner, he had thought about that book. About Rossetti’s Beatrice. Of course he had. He had looked through his grandmother’s book five thousand times as a kid; it was his grandmother’s favorite, so it was his, too. Later, as a university student, he visited the painting in person at the Tate in London. It always made him think of his grandmother, whom he had once been very close to, who they stopped seeing very often, after Samantha’s disappearance. When Scully first showed up in the basement, how could he not see the resemblance? Scully looked like Beatrice in the painting. And like Beatrice, she was beautiful.

But that’s all a bit … much to say to a new co-worker, and especially one so determined to be taken seriously, and Mulder had wanted to get their partnership right.

Later, when he and Scully were closer, when he might have reasonably said it in some casual way — perhaps leaving out the “and you’re beautiful” part — he just didn’t have the stomach for the comparison any more. The model for Rossetti’s painting, Elizabeth Siddall, had been Rossetti’s beloved wife, who had died young, wasted away. Elizabeth Siddall was most famous for being the model for tragic heroines. For drowning Ophelia and dying Beatrice.

And after abductions and serial killers and cancer, Mulder just didn’t want to compare Scully to a tragic heroine anymore. He didn’t want her steeped in pallor and draped in rosemary and shrouds and ethereal light and dying in some beautiful and romanticized way.

He wanted her living, flawed, cranky, sarcastic, warm, with flyaway hair and coffee breath and a gun in her hand, aimed at the threat in front of them. He wanted real, living Scully. God, how he wanted her.

Ignoring the sounds of the graduate students’ music now thumping around him, Mulder bore the weight of his head fully in his hands, and felt the weight of his worries start to fall upon him, too.

What would happen if Scully were there when Samantha’s abduction happened? What would happen if she were unable to stop Them, if she put herself in danger, too?

What would happen if she were successful?

Sources:

Wed, 18 May 2022 06:20:32

The Boy on the Beach (8/16)

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)

Tue, 17 May 2022 07:29:57

The Boy on the Beach (7/16)

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.

Mon, 16 May 2022 07:05:27

The Boy on the Beach (6/16)

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.”

Sun, 15 May 2022 09:08:55

The Boy on the Beach (5/16)

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

#x files fanfic #xfiles fanfic #the x-files

Sat, 14 May 2022 08:18:16

The Boy on the Beach (4/16)

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.

Fri, 13 May 2022 06:48:10

The Boy on the Beach (3/16)

“You Deserve A Break Today,” 1973

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:

#xfiles fanfic #the x-files #x files fanfic

Thu, 12 May 2022 06:59:41

The Boy on the Beach (2/16)

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?

#xfiles fanfic #the x-files #x files fanfic

Wed, 11 May 2022 07:31:36

The Boy on the Beach (1/16)

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.

Tue, 10 May 2022 08:16:34

Mr. Perfectly Fine

Author: SammyLovesASOIAF

For:@gaycrouton

A misunderstanding between Mulder and Scully gets out of hand.

#XFHurtComfort 9/28

#scully #mulder #x-files #x files fanfic #fanfic #xfhurtcomfort2022

Sat, 30 Apr 2022 20:48:01

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.”

#XFHurtComfort2022 8/28

#scully #mulder #x-files #x files fanfic #fanfic #xfhurtcomfort2022

Sat, 30 Apr 2022 20:36:32

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.

#XFHurtComfort2022 7/28

#scully #mulder #x-files #x files fanfic #fanfic

Sat, 30 Apr 2022 18:41:30

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.

#XFHurtComfort2022 6/28

#scully #mulder #x-files #x files fanfic #fanfic #xfhurtcomfort2022