Archive of Our Own ^beta

“What about you?”

Mulder asks her a three-word question casually over his desk one day, sunlight streaming through the skylights, and Scully can only stare at him.

“What about me, what?”

She’s mostly sure she hadn’t been zoning out from what he’d been saying, although he had been mulling over their latest case: a trip to Cambridge, Massachusetts where cryogenics researchers had been working on rapid freezing agents and dabbling in time travel.

Mulder fixes her with an odd gaze just as she blinks at him.

“Where would you go if you had a time machine, Scully? I mean, if time travel were possible, would you…?”

He tails off his leading question, almost expecting her to say something personal, pick seeing her father again, or having one last day with Melissa.

He’s waiting for a reply which will inevitably start with the word ‘hypothetically,’ because God knows she’ll never for one single second seriously admit to the existence of time travel. Even if she did, she’d just use it as leverage to prove him wrong. If her most recent case report is anything to go by, then he’s certainly expecting it to happen that way.

But instead, she looks at him with wide eyes, gleaming in the light of the office, and says three words that leave him completely, utterly speechless.

“November 27th, 1973.”

“...You- You- what?”

His elbow slips off the table but he recovers quickly enough, staring almost abashed as if she shouldn’t have said it, but the truth is out now and there’s no getting away from it. He narrows his eyes harshly.

“What do you mean?”

“If I had a time machine,” Scully clarifies carefully, biting her bottom lip, “I’d… go back to the night Samantha disappeared.”

Mulder opens his mouth and closes it again,

“...Why? You wouldn’t be able to do anything, or change anything, she was-”

Scully cuts him off before he starts talking about alien abductions or blinding lights, the Syndicate dropping unnoticed cigarettes down the long winding roads of Chilmark, Massachusetts.

“I know that,” she says quietly. “And I wouldn’t ever pretend that I could.”

“Then why?”

Mulder’s still staring at her, desperate to know. Of all the things she’s ever said, this is the one that’s stood to floor him so completely. If he’s being entirely honest, at the most extreme, he would have expected her to use time travel as a quick fix to her own abduction, to put that chip back in her neck and stop her cancer from killing her, but… no. She’s not thinking about that at all. She wants back to the night his sister disappeared.

Scully’s oddly serious, sitting opposite him, playing with her fingers without really noticing what she’s doing.

“I just want to see it. To see what it was like. For her. For you. To see the night that turned you into the man you are now. The place that took Samantha away from you.” She sighs heavily. There’s no getting away from it now. “I think about her every time we’re in Massachusetts. Even if we’re nowhere near Martha’s Vineyard, or Chilmark.”

“...Why?”

Mulder can barely get the word out.

“Because I can tell you do.” Scully fixes him with a very specific stare. “I saw it this week, when we were up there in Cambridge. Whenever we cross the state line and you get this big sad homesick look in your eyes, like you want to run as fast as you can back to your parents’ house out on the coast, in the hope that you might find your sister there. In the hope that you might find the things that… took her.”

“Scully...” Mulder’s reply dies in his throat and he just stares at her, wide-eyed and lost for words. “...I-”

“It’s alright. I get it.”

“...How can you possibly?”

He looks at her with a questioning gaze, and she sighs again. The weight of the conversation they’re having, the office might as well have disappeared around them, the amount of attention they’re paying it.

“Every time I walk over the threshold of my apartment, you think I don’t think of Melissa? Of how it should have been me lying there dead? About how I could have saved her if I’d had the presence of mind? I put the key in the lock and it’s like seeing blood sleeping under the door every single time, staining the hardwood no matter how many times I’ve scrubbed that spot clean.”

Mulder immediately looks uncomfortable. “...Then how do you cope?”

Scully smiles weakly, smoothing out the creases in her skirt just to give her hands something to do. “I try not to look down.”

“...Why would you not…”

“Why, with the existence of a time machine, would I not go back and save my sister instead of yours?”

“I never said you could save Samanth-”

“Because yours brought us here.” She interrupts him. “If it wasn’t for that night in Chilmark then we never would have met.”

“If you change that night then we definitely would have never met!” Mulder straightens in his chair anxiously, looking at her with the widest eyes.

Scully regards his new-found panic with some caution.

“So… what?”

“There’s not anything you can say that will persuade me to go through with that.”

“Well, you won’t have to, hypothetically-”

“Hypothetically, or otherwise, I don’t care. I am not about to save Samantha if it means losing you. If it means never meeting you.”

“She’s your sister, Mulder. Your life’s work! Everything you’ve been searching for!”

“I don’t care.”

“...I don’t understand.”

“I have learnt to live without Samantha, Scully. For the love of God, I have spent sleepless nights thinking about the moment I get to see her again, over and over in my head for 24 years, walking into darkened rooms with my eyes shut in the hope that she’ll be sitting there. But I would take all of that in a heartbeat over the living nightmare I would endure if I ever had to live without you.”

“...Mulder-”

“Why do you think I’m still here? Sitting here in this basement surrounded by junk? Why do you think I still do it after all this time?”

“You’re looking for your sister!” Scully almost snaps back at him, vaguely panicked about where this is going. She can’t believe what he’s just told her. None of it makes any sense. “Isn’t that enough?”

Mulder smiles slightly. “Only because you’re here.”

“You can’t just-!”

“If you weren’t here reigning me in, keeping me company on the endless interstates between one bogus UFO sighting to another, I’m pretty sure I would have gone crazy already. Put the real Spooky in Spooky Mulder. Joined the side of the bad guys. Chucked myself off the Golden Gate just to save them the trouble of shooting me ‘cause I know too much.”

“Don’t say that.”

Scully immediately looks heartbroken. She doesn't want to humour that thought. She hopes there’s no way he actually would. But he fixes her with a very specific stare and somehow, she isn’t too sure.

He’s sitting in front of her and she can see it so clearly, behind all of his professional mannerisms, that his life froze at 8:53 pm on November 27th, 1973. Everyone else moved on around him, but Mulder… Mulder’s still here. Sitting behind his desk like he’s going to pull out a game of Stratego and convince her to play, offer out a bright smile before the blinding lights come and obscure everything into oblivion.

Like the night his sister was taken.

Like the night Scully wants to go back to if she had a time machine.

She watches him as he tries to formulate a question, opening his mouth and closing it again before he finally gets there.

“Would you… would you save Melissa if it meant we never met?”

“Mulder-”

“Would you?”

She looks at the man sitting opposite her, and then thinks of her sister, the only constant she’d ever had in her life. She doesn’t want to choose between them. But it seems Mulder already has.

He’s thinking about the possibility of time travel and cryogenics labs, going back and forth in his head over which of the two most important women in his life he could stand to lose.

Scully watches him for a moment, deep frown crossing his features, before she remembers something from years ago. Somewhere in her undergraduate thesis, rewriting Einstein, she’d bared her thoughts on the Multiverse theory. She hopes it might help him now.

“...Multidimensionality suggests infinite outcomes in an infinite number of universes, Mulder. But each universe can only produce one outcome.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning that hypothetically, even if we did find a way to turn back time, whatever we did, Samantha would still… disappear. It would still lead to us meeting one another.” Scully tries to reassure him as best as she can, reaching out across the desk to take his hand lying limp on the table. “Even if that wasn’t the case… I still wouldn’t want to change anything. If we ended up back there, I think I would just want to comfort you.”

---

She doesn’t know how it happens, only that it does.

It’s funny the things that come into fruition.

Without any forewarning at all, in a moment of silence between them, a bright gash of white light appears in the middle of the office. Hanging slightly above the ground, it makes no sound, but it sort of shimmers in a way that tells them it’s entirely otherworldly and both good and bad news all at once. By the time it finishes forming, it looks like something they could step through, letting it engulf them before they could make it to the other side of the room.

Staring at it with her mouth dropping open, Scully has no idea what to say. If she really wants to find an explanation, it probably has something to do with the cryogenics evidence that Mulder has brought back from the lab today. It’s been sitting on his desk this whole time, just waiting for the right moment. It’s definitely picked a good one.

She suspects Mulder wants to say the white light is something to do with psychic transmission, that somehow the new-found invention of time travel has latched onto their conversation about his sister, and provided them with a perfect opportunity.

There’s something about it that looks oddly inviting; as if a portal to another world has just opened up in the middle of the basement, deafening the both of them with its searing silence.

“Mulder-!”

Scully makes her first objection as Mulder makes to stand, striding over to the light, almost reaching out to touch it. She doesn’t know what’ll happen if he does. If he puts his hand in it, it could be the end of everything. She doesn’t know much, but she knows all the scientists up in Cambridge had all met their fair share of sticky ends.

“Aren’t you coming?”

He looks back at her with such a promising expression that, in the heat of the moment, it’s impossible to resist. Scully stands from her chair, stepping over to the patch of bright light, gazing right into it.

Walking into it feels like freezing and burning all at once. Her head’s spinning, and she thinks she won’t be able to keep standing up straight for much longer. But as soon as it starts, it’s all over. A couple more steps forward, she’s out of the light again, but she’s not in their sunlit office now. Not by any means.

Instead, she and Mulder are standing outside amongst unfamiliar trees in the middle of the night. A cold breeze makes her shiver, hugging her arms to her chest, scanning around the wood. Right now, they’re as defenceless as they could be, and she doesn’t know why it feels like something could come out from behind the shadows and attack them.

The bright light is still shining behind them, hopefully offering them a way back from wherever it is they’ve ended up. Considering the options, they could be standing in the middle of literally anywhere.

But it seems Mulder’s not going to dwell on it.

Taking Scully’s hand gently, he picks his way through the trees, pointing towards a glow of a streetlight a hundred yards away. It’s a beacon in the blackness that might at least tell them where they are. When they are. She knows there’s no point asking. She knows he doesn’t have a better idea than she does.

Stepping over fallen branches, brushing through the leaves, they make it out into a deserted country road, the moon shining from high above intermittently through the clouds. Mulder whips his head around, catching sight of a few people disappearing down a lane a little way off, narrowing his eyes before jogging over the street to a notice board creaking softly in the wind.

Chilmark, MA. Church Notices
November 1973

The effect is immediate. Scully’s never seen anyone run quite like this before. The second he reads the heading, Mulder takes off into the night, sending up dust clouds, and it takes all of her effort to follow him. Winding his way through the darkened streets of his hometown, it doesn’t look like he’s ever going to stop. But halfway through sprinting down the asphalt, his white work shirt drenched with sweat, he changes his mind. Grinding to a halt in the middle of the road, he stares at the different pathways of a forking road with wild eyes. Swinging around to face her, she can feel the blood pumping in her ears.

“When in November, Scully?”

“It didn’t say-”

“You don’t think-?”

“I don’t know-”

At the moment, they’re both ignoring the fact that they seem to have time travelled in favour of the bigger question. Certainly, it’s a feat she would have put down as mere science fiction this morning, had it not been for the cryogenics labs and the gleaming white light that appears to have transported them twenty-four years into the past. Five hundred miles away from where they were five minutes ago, all things considered, she thinks making sure Mulder’s okay is the most important thing she can do right now.

Even if it is the night that Samantha disappears, she has no idea whether they’re too late to watch it happen. She has no idea whether Mulder would even want to see it. For all of his talk about learning the truth, she doesn’t know what it’d do to him if he actually came face to face with it. She’s not particularly sure she wants to find out.

Clearly having the same train of thought, Mulder takes her hand again, holding it tightly, inclining his head to the glow of police lights glimmering on the horizon half a mile up the road.

“Stay close.”

His voice is barely audible in the New England air, but Scully hears it clear as day. It’s not a question, he’s not asking her to do it. It’s a request from the man on the brink of a precipice. He’s relieving the worst night of his life, and there’s nothing either of them can do about it. Scully squeezes his fingers back, gently.

“I promise.”

---

The scene unfolds like a nightmare the closer they get to it. The things Scully has only read in police reports come alive in front of her eyes. They turn left up a driveway to a familiar house, and their worst fears are confirmed at the sight of the police cars, the fluttering tape, the villagers muttering between themselves about The Mulders and their young daughter who seems to have vanished without a trace.

November 27th, 1973.

The one date she thought she’d never see.

She catches sight of one old man’s wristwatch in the moonlight and it reads 11:00 PM.

It happened two hours ago. Samantha’s been and gone, and there’s nothing they can do about it. Even if they had wanted to.

Her breath lodges in her throat and she has no idea what Mulder is thinking. What on Earth his state of mind is. He’s keeping his head down, focusing on his shoes taking one step at a time across the front yard of his childhood home.

“Talk to me, Mulder?”

She offers carefully, trying to find a way to gauge the situation. If he wants to turn around and head back already, she wouldn't waste a second. Even if there isn’t another chance of them coming here again.

“I’m… I’m not… “

It’s clear he has no idea what to say. He’s looking up now, scanning around, searching hopelessly, almost frantically, for his father, for the Cigarette Smoking Man, for aliens, for Samantha, for anything.

“Do what you need to.” Scully whispers gently, running fingertips over his wrist. “But I don’t think I’m here for her.”

She’s been thinking about it ever since they arrived here. Ever since she started contemplating the existence of time travel.

She breaks away from him, walking past the police cars and the flashing lights and the entire town that seems to have gathered to watch a breaking news story unfold in real time. She spots Bill and Teena Mulder, on the front steps of their house, the Galbrands, the neighbourly dinner hosts, the police chief stands grimly, taking notes;

But still she keeps walking.

Round the back of the house, in the dark and the quiet, she stops just as she enters the garden, involuntarily feeling her breath catch.

Dead ahead of her, there’s a young boy sitting on the swing-set. Entirely alone, he’s staring into the distance with his back to her, almost as if he doesn’t really belong in the world anymore.

She’d recognise the way his hair falls anywhere. His long arms and the shape of his shoulders, the profile of his face caught in the height of the moon.

“...Fox?”

Slowly, he turns to look at her. His eyes are bloodshot, creases in his King jersey crisscrossing from where he’s bunched it up to swipe angrily at his free-falling tears. He’s got powder burns on his hands from his father’s gun that he didn’t get to use in time, firing randomly at the wall when the blinding lights came and took his sister.

“Are you the police?”

Voice hoarse from screaming Samantha’s name, his accent is more New England than she’s ever known it. It’s coated with the promise of coastal beaches and family holidays, blending in with boyhood charm and the local population found in the small Chilmark middle school.

Scully hesitates.

Her FBI badge pushes flat against her chest pocket, but she decides against it. After all, it’s 1973, it won’t be valid for another 17 years. Regardless of whether he’d ever trust her if she pulled it out.

“I’m…a friend.”

She doesn’t really know of whom. She’s certainly not a friend of his father, Bill Mulder, the man who’s seemed oddly blasé about this whole situation ever since it happened, hiding behind the conspiracy of silence that’s prevented his son from ever knowing the truth. And neither has she ever got on particularly well with his mother; the woman who keeps him in the dark just as much and with even less empathy. On the rare occasions Scully’s seen Teena, she’s always batting away Mulder’s questions, calling him Fox even though she knows he hates it.

And true, Scully had let his first name slip out of her mouth tonight, but it’s the only thing she could think of to do. The only way she could think to separate them.

This little boy and her heartsore work partner, she wants to pretend they’re completely different from each other. She wants to give his younger self a chance to have childhood innocence, to be carefree and unburdened, just once -

But the truth is, they’re already identical.

The blinding lights have already come for Samantha, but she isn’t the only thing that’s been taken tonight.

The little boy who wanted nothing but to watch The Magician at 9:00, aggrieved with his parents for having to watch over his kid sister, he doesn’t exist anymore. He’s already gone. Lost, the moment the aliens came, the moment the men in black dropped their last cigarettes.

He’s sitting in front of her, framed in the police lights, and she can see grown-up Spooky Mulder gazing right back at her.

They’re exactly the same, in the way they hold themselves, in the way they look desperately around this one little house in Massachusetts trying to find the one thing that will forever be lost to them. He’s fiddling with his pockets and Scully knows without needing to be told that they’re full to the brim with sunflower seeds. In his left, he keeps them intact, and in his right, he puts the remnants of the discarded shells.

She’s spent enough time rummaging through his work jacket looking for scrap paper and pens to know it’s true. There’s just something extremely sad about knowing it’s a habit he must have been keeping for years.

She doesn’t exactly want to say I’m your friend either, because the 12-year-old boy sitting staring in front of her would never understand that. On the worst night of his life, he doesn’t seem up for understanding anything.

He just wants to find his sister.

And that sentiment will shape the rest of his life.

It will lead him on, head buried in Psychology textbooks, staring out of telescopes, scanning the sky for any sign of life. It will lead him down avenues towards the worst kind of people, to Violent Crime, to Behavioural Sciences, to Oxford, England, to manipulative women who make him walk through fire just to relive childhood nightmares of escaping burning buildings. They’ll be people who push him to his limits just because they can, calling him names, spreading rumours, creating reputations, all because they think he’s just some heartbroken fool with the mind of a genius who’s one step away from turning into a monster. That is, if the elastic band pulling him in this one precise direction ever snaps.

But eventually, the search for his sister will lead Fox Mulder far away from Chilmark, far away from Massachusetts. It’ll lead him to the FBI, to Quantico in Virginia and to the J. Edgar Hoover Building in Washington where the tired old forgotten-about basement office will bear his name on the door.

And then one day, 19 years from now, this little boy sitting on the swing-set in Martha’s Vineyard might finally understand why the red-haired agent who’s just walked into his life looks so familiar to him.

March 1992, and the second he saw her, he’d looked at her like he knew her, but couldn’t quite remember from where. Like she was someone he met at a party he never made it to, or a holiday he could never have been on. A familiar face from a night he can only remember when he’s put under hypnosis. She’d seen the look cross his features, and it was a definite moment of clarity. In that moment, he’d met her for the first time, but had seemed to know her all his life.

She walks back around the front of the house again a little while later, finding Mulder standing next to a crowd of townspeople that haven’t looked twice at him. They’re too busy craning their necks past the police line, searching for shadows in the living room window, for the little boy who’s just lost his sister.

He steps out toward her, fixing her with a very specific stare, running his tongue over his teeth in perplexed disbelief as if reliving the worst night of his life isn’t enough to send him to therapy for the next ten years. He narrows his eyes, trying to place her face, cocking his head as if something might just come to him.

“...I remember you.” Massaging his temple, a slight headache flooding his brain with new memories. “...At least I think I do.”

Scully takes him gently by the wrist again, wordlessly rubbing her thumb across his skin. She’s not going to tell him. Not until he figures it out for himself. In a way, she thinks it’s kinder.

“Do you want to stay?”

“...No.”

His legs are shaking, so he lets her lead him away. Turning out of the driveway, down the asphalt road, through the trees and to the blinding white light, leaving Chilmark far behind them, back the way they came.

---

The Washington basement comes into focus around them, the afternoon sun streaming through the skylights. The portal of white light disappears behind them, and it’s a little while before they speak again.

In fact, it’s several hours later they talk about it explicitly, Mulder slipping back into the office with his coat drawn around him, sidling up to her just as the night sets in.

“I went for a hypnosis session.”

“Mulder-”

Scully has to stop herself from sighing. He just holds out his closed fist and she knows what’s coming.

“Thank you,” he whispers quietly, crinkles by his eyes, dropping a cassette tape into the palm of her hand.

It’s not exactly a mixtape of his favourite college songs, offered with a smile, a hopeful here’s how you get to know me better, but it’s something far more important than that. She thinks it always will be.

When he leaves the room again, she sits down and listens to it; the moon now high in the sky like it was the night out on Martha’s Vineyard on November 27th, 1973.

She hears his voice, tired and thinking hard, emotionally exhausted under the influence of hypnotherapy. He’s a hardened FBI agent and a 12-year-old boy both at the same time, and it almost makes her breath catch.

Elbows on the desk, she puts her head in her hands and listens. Mulder’s voice plays quietly through the grill.

“...There’s a woman. I don’t know her name. She says… she’s a friend. I think… She's my friend. Someone I haven’t met yet.”

“What does she tell you?” The interviewer asks, his question cold and professionally detached.

“She tells me that she’s here to comfort me. She knows I’ve just lost my sister.”

“Does she know where your sister is?”

“No. …But she tells me to keep looking.” Mulder sounds encouraged by the thought of it. “She says I’ll find the answers, and that I’ll only fail if I give up.”

“Do you trust her?”

“Yes.”

There’s no hesitation on Mulder’s part now.

“Why?”

“Because she’s telling me the truth.”