Chapter Text
PROLOGUE: Alternate Timeline
June 1998
Washington, D.C.
“Hey man, didn’t you used to be the spooky guy?”
Oh, Mulder is used to this. “Depends on your definition of spooky,” he says, binding his billionth ream of old files and transferring them to his millionth cardboard box.
The fresh-faced new agent rests his arm on the file cabinet above him and stares as though Mulder’s a white alligator in a zoo. “Yeah, you used to be on those… what were they called. X-Files. The weirdo beat. What happened to that?”
Mulder sighs. Whenever he’s forced to dwell on what he used to have with the X-Files, he knows he’s one step closer to leaving the Bureau.
“I guess it just… didn’t pan out.”
“Yeah, no wonder the Bureau shut that down. Wacky stuff. That was a while back now, right?” The agent sips his coffee, and Mulder nods. He used to try to get out of these conversations, but that inevitably prolonged them.
“Back in ‘93.”
The new guy clicks his tongue, downs the final sip of his coffee, and tosses it in the trash. “Tough break, Spooky.” He straightens up and looks around at Mulder’s workstation. “So what, you’re just a lone wolf now? No partner even?”
“Nope,” Mulder says. “No partner. It’s fine — I work best on my own.”
He thinks back to 1993, right before the X-Files were shut down. There had been talk of getting someone to partner up with him — to debunk his work, he assumed. Some young agent with a medical degree. But she had never materialized. Diverted to some sort of white collar crime investigation, apparently.
Maybe if she had shown up in his basement office back then, the X-Files would still exist, and he’d actually have a partner. But those are big assumptions, he reminds himself.
The agent opens his mouth to ask more questions, but he can’t seem to think of any. So he meanders away, and Mulder remains alone.
June 1998
Boulder, CO
“So. Nebraska. It’s not crazy far from Colorado, but it’s far enough.” Her date takes a generous swig of his Pinot Grigio. “What brought you here, Kim?”
Kim Wexler traces a circle around the stem of her wine glass. “Oh. Well, it was for school — CU Boulder; let’s go Buffaloes. I was pre-law.”
His eyes widen in mild interest. “Oh! So you’re… in law school now?”
It still pains Kim to think about this, about how she had tried and tried to make the financing work, and constantly come up short. She’d heard about a potential opportunity out in New Mexico a while back, but then the firm in question downsized and… no more opportunity. So here she still is, in Colorado, with one semester of college still unfinished and a hefty amount of her mother’s debts still to pay off. “Um… not currently. I’m an administrative assistant now.”
He nods, and she could swear he looks a little relieved. He’s got a small business, and he probably suspects that she’d make more money than him as a lawyer. And he seems like the kind of guy who wouldn’t take well to dating a more successful woman. “Well, I bet you’re the best damn administrative assistant our fine Centennial State has ever seen!”
This guy’s smile is way too smooth, his compliments flow too greasily. Kim reminds herself to avoid blind dates in the future.
He holds up his glass. “To us,” he says, “and to a wonderful night together.”
Kim gives him a tight-lipped smile and takes a drink, avoiding mentioning that the night will be ending directly after the main course.
No dessert.
June 1998: Main Timeline
Takoma Park, Maryland
“Langly? Come check this out.”
“Frohike, I swear to God, if this is another prank I will delete your spank bank folder. I am on the verge of something earth-shattering and highly sensitive over here, and I will not be interrupted for your shits and giggles.”
In his corner of the Lone Gunmen headquarters — kept dark and cool due to the necessity of maintaining equilibrium on all of their highly refined detectors, scanners, and servers — Richard Langly placed his ninety-eighth playing card on his house of cards. Six more to go, and then I’ve got two whole decks here.
“Don’t even joke about my spank bank,” Frohike’s voice shot back. “This is the real deal.”
Langly silently balanced another card. Ninety-nine…
“Fine,” called Frohike, “if you won’t come, where the hell is Byers?”
“In the john.” Despite his disbelief, Langly couldn’t help asking. “What have you got? Supposedly?” One hundred! There we go…
“It’s… look, you’re not gonna believe it, but I’m serious. It’s the temporal tracker.”
Langly let out a high-pitched squawk of a laugh. “Right. Because, of all the equipment in here, the one we all have the highest expectations of is the freaking time machine.” One hundred and one…
“It’s not a time machine and you know it. It’s a time machine detector. And we’ve got something here.”
“Right, right,” Langly said. “I’m supposed to give up an hour’s work to go check on something that could never possibly detect anything.”
Across the room, the door to the bathroom closed. From his vantage point, Langly could see the third member of their trio dusting off his suit jacket as he exited. Why Byers persisted in wearing suits into their cozy dungeon of an office eluded him (he eyed his own Ramones T-shirt with fondness) — but, he supposed, if their two favorite FBI agents wore suits to their basement office, that was a decent precedent.
“What’s all the fuss about?” Byers asked.
“Frohike’s trying to prank me again,” Langly explained patiently, focusing his eyes intently on his house of cards, readying the placement of his next card. “He claims there’s activity on the temporal tracker.” Hundred and two…
In his peripheral vision, Langly could see Byers frown. “But we’ve always known that that device was a long-shot at providing us with actual information. It would never display a signal if someone had gone back and simply changed the past; we’d have no way of knowing that our current timeline had been overwritten. If this equipment even still existed. If we even still existed.”
Byers cleared his throat, obviously not enjoying this prospect. “No, someone would have had to go back… change things… and then change them back exactly the way they were before, so we could still arrive at this precise moment in time.”
“And I’m telling you,” Frohike called back, his voice getting an edge to it. “That’s what we’ve got here. But don’t take my word for it. Check this out, Byers. Langly’s clearly triangulating the signal for D.B. Cooper’s treasure trove over there, but since your pressing business has already been attended to in el baño, you’re free to come and confirm.”
Byers lifted his chin as he walked. “Frankly, Frohike, I don’t care for pranks either. But just for the sake of certainty…”
“Sucker!” Langly called. His building wobbled a bit, and he took a breath before continuing. Hundred and three…
As Langly carefully analyzed the structural integrity of his creation, he waited for Byers’s inevitable scoff and his brisk walk back to his desk. But it didn’t come.
Langly frowned. “Come on, Byers, what’s Frohike got for you? A cat wearing a sweater-vest? A new Star Trek fan site? A naked chick? No, that’s too obvious…”
But Byers’s face appeared next to his desk, mouth slightly ajar, head tilted to the side. “Huh,” he said.
Langly tore his eyes away from his structure. “No,” he said. “Not you, too.”
But Byers was no prankster, and as Langly inspected his face, he knew that it must be true.
While he had never dared expect it, of all the devices in this place, the one that Langly had always secretly hoped would ping was the temporal tracker. Heart racing, he leapt to his feet, his hundred and fourth card falling to the floor, and ran over to where the other two stood.
Sure enough, behind Frohike’s smug, jowly smirk was the monitor in question, up and whirring. On the black screen, the innocuous white line that delineated the flow of time was bisected by a single red spike, with a few tiny lines to the right of it. A green message flashed in the upper left corner of the screen: ACTIVITY NOTED.
“Holy crap on a crouton,” Langly breathed. “Where did the signal come from?”
“Albuquerque, New Mexico,” Frohike said. “And I’ll take a ‘sorry I didn’t believe you’ any time now.”
Langly let out a whoop and clapped his hands, running to the phone. “This is freaking awesome. Let’s call Mulder right now.”
Byers sighed. “But the X-Files are closed, remember? Mulder will never get the authorization to investigate this.”
Langly was already dialing. “Since when did Mulder need authorization for anything he’s ever done?”
“They’d never give him authorization to investigate this anyway,” Frohike pointed out. “No prosecutable crime has been committed. ”
“Yeah, prosecutable awesomeness has been committed,” Langly said, as he listened to the ringing of the phone in his ear. “I’m calling.”
“Alrighty, then. Say hi to Scully for me,” Frohike added, a faraway gleam in his eyes.
The line clicked into action. “Fox Mulder,” came the voice from the other end of the call.
“Hoo boy,” Langly said, “fasten your seat belts, because we’ve got a fun one for you.”
On the other side of the room, Langly heard his house of cards come crumbling to the ground. But you know what? For some time travel shit, it was worth it.
One Week Later
Thursday, 11:05 a.m.
Albuquerque, NM
The back office of Los Pollos Hermanos somehow didn’t smell like fried chicken the way the rest of the fast food joint did. It was amazing; Scully couldn’t figure out how so pervasive a scent wasn’t penetrating the small, shadowy office of the owner, one Gustavo Fring, whom they had been speaking with for less than ten minutes.
Fring was one of the people who had been in attendance at a swanky restaurant called Forque on the date and time when the temporal tracker’s signal had emanated from it, as determined by the Gunmen. Mulder and Scully had spent the morning interviewing members of the Forque staff, none of whom appeared to have the resources or inclination for time travel. That had just been a formality.
Now, they had moved on to the wealthy restaurant-goers, which should yield some more interesting results. And Fring was interesting indeed. Scully felt like they were finally getting somewhere. But, as usual, Mulder apparently had other ideas.
“Thank you for your time,” Mulder said, standing. Scully stood too, surprised. She felt like the interview hadn’t gone on long enough. She could tell that this man, for all his smooth mannerisms, had something to hide.
“No trouble at all,” Fring said, smiling pleasantly and shaking Scully’s hand, and then Mulder’s. “I’m always happy to help law enforcement, particularly the FBI. You are both fighting the good fight, as they say. I’m sorry I wasn’t of more help.” He blinked twice, wide-eyed and as innocent as could be. Scully didn’t quite trust it.
“No worries,” Mulder said breezily. “We’ll be in touch if there’s anything more we need.”
Mulder bought a Coke on the way out, and they both donned their sunglasses.
“That was a very brief interview," Scully said pointedly. "Why the rush?”
Her partner sipped his soda loudly. “I think it’s a dead end, Scully. That man’s too careful and cautious to be messing with time travel.”
“Mulder, you know my thoughts about the time travel question; we discussed this last year during the Lucas Menand case.”
“You mean when his buddy time traveled back from the future?”
“I believe nothing of the sort. Look, I’m as interested as you are in determining what triggered the Gunmen’s device, but I simply can’t believe that time travel is possible. The consequences would be too catastrophic; it’s hard to believe that anything of the world we know would survive if anyone, ever, even far into the future, acquired the means to travel through time. I think it much more likely that someone might be experimenting with some type of hacking software, which is much more dangerous and, frankly, more within our current purview.”
“Our ‘current purview’,” Mulder mused, “is a huge bummer.”
They reached the rental car and opened their respective doors. Over the top of the car, rather enjoying the hot summer sun, Scully said, “Since we’re here outside of the Bureau’s jurisdiction, I’m just along for the ride. But you’ve got pretty good instincts, Mulder; didn’t you get the feeling that he was hiding something?”
Mulder nodded earnestly, light glinting in his sunglasses. “Yeah, I did.”
She folded her arms. “Aren’t you curious to know what that’s about?”
“I’m pretty sure I do know what it’s about.”
“Really? Enlighten me.”
“Well… the guy used to be mixed up with the Juárez Cartel.” Mulder finished his soda with a dramatic slurp.
Scully raised her sunglasses to the top of her head. “Excuse me?”
Mulder aimed his empty cup like a basketball and tossed it casually into a trash can several feet away. “Byers has a specialty in Cartel research. Fring’s partner was murdered by the Cartel back in ‘89, so I was initially thinking he might have good reason to go back and change the past. Plus he’s got the means and the intellect. Seriously, this guy has quite a history. You should hear about what happened in Santiago, it’ll make your eyes pop—”
“Mulder, I’m standing over here thinking that no crime has been committed, and now you tell me this guy has ties to the Cartel?”
She thought about the work awaiting them when they got back to Washington: a big pile of surveillance tapes, waiting patiently to be transcribed. They had gotten away with the flimsiest of explanations to justify their trip to Albuquerque, and planned to be back at the Bureau by Monday… but she couldn’t say she was looking forward to the return trip. Frankly, she rather hoped they’d find some excuse to stay longer, and this seemed like as good a reason as any.
“Yeah, it’s a juicy lead. But Byers’s info was from almost a decade ago. From what his source was able to determine, as of now, Gus Fring is just a chicken mogul. As far as that goes, he told me to leave the past in the past.”
Scully felt the corner of her lip twitch. “Except when it comes to time machines.”
Mulder pointed the index fingers of both hands at her and gave an emphatic nod. “Yes! You get it, Scully.” He grinned.
Scully regarded her partner on the other side of the car, silhouetted against the Sandia Mountains. Their paranormal investigations were over and done with, according to the Bureau. But she had known Mulder wouldn’t be able to toe the line a hundred percent. And while she almost wanted to be the type of agent who simply followed orders… she wasn’t quite that kind of agent. She’d witnessed so many unexplained things over the past five years that she was, at this point, almost as incapable as Mulder of going through the motions of traditional FBI work. As much as she’d questioned this little extracurricular field trip, she had never once considered not coming along.
She missed it, their usual caseload. She missed it more than she could ever admit to him.
At least they were still partners.
As they sat down in the car together, buckling their seat belts, Mulder’s grin widened. “Three hour drive to Roswell, Scully. Whaddya say?”
She chuckled. “Sure. If we’re ditching our actual work for this, might as well do it right.”
But Mulder loved novelty almost as much as he loved hunting for aliens, and Scully knew they weren’t really leaving the city just yet.
“So,” she inquired, “who’s next on the list of Albuquerque's most rich and powerful?”
Mulder checked their roster of the customers who had had lunch at Forque the previous Thursday. “That depends. Wanna start with the science geeks, the finance bros, or the lawyers?”
Well, that was an easy one. “Science geeks. Please.”
11:40 a.m.
Gretchen and Elliott Schwartz didn’t initially strike Mulder as the types to go out on a time-traveling limb. For all of the pioneering work being done by their scientific research company Gray Matter, they seemed incredibly by-the-book, assuming the name of the book was Soft-Spoken Yuppies Wearing Earth Tones. It wasn’t his cup of tea.
Literally. They’d insisted on serving him and Scully buckwheat tea in the spacious, sunlit Gray Matter conference room as they sat in the startlingly ergonomic chairs. Mulder took a sip and tried not to grimace. Apparently the super-rich had the luxury of enjoying comestibles that tasted like utter shit.
“We’re honestly happy to help out in any way we can,” Gretchen was saying, “but we just want to make sure that we don’t need a lawyer present. We have nothing to hide, of course, but you understand…”
“Absolutely,” Scully said. “As time travel is currently impossible, no laws exist preventing or regulating its usage. Thus, we are here purely on a fact-finding mission. We previously ran a division of the Bureau that specialized in unexplained phenomena, and to my mind, this looks not only unexplained, but impossible. So you really have no need to—”
“Oh, but it’s not impossible!” Elliott said, leaning forward, his hands clasped on the conference table. “Even I can’t claim to understand how all the pieces would fit together, but… honey, we’ve dabbled, haven’t we?”
“Only slightly, for sure,” his wife affirmed, nodding. “Just… theoretical conversations.”
“Speed of light, gravitational fields, et cetera.”
“Yes, that sort of thing.”
“But you’re talking about future time travel,” Mulder said. “Moving forward in time, a one-way trip. The readings we received indicated a foray into the past, followed by a second trip to the exact same spot which returned things to exactly the way they had been. Gray Matter hasn’t ever come up with any revolutionary ideas on that front?”
“Oh, let me make myself clear,” Elliott said, “None of these conversations were had on behalf of our company — just by ourselves, out of the office. It’s well out of our field of expertise, and I wouldn’t dream of trying to clear the funding for it. No, it was all on our own. But… and Gretchen, tell me if I’m wrong here… I have never encountered a shred of evidence that would suggest backward time travel is possible, short of rotating a black hole.” He laughed as he finished his sentence.
Gretchen shook her head, laughing lightly with him. “Or stumbling across a… rogue wormhole.”
Mulder leaned back. “If either of you could go back and change anything in the past… what would you do?”
“Well, I wouldn’t want to change anything,” Elliott said, smiling at his wife and taking her hand. “We’ve got a pretty good thing going here, don’t we, honey?”
“We absolutely do,” she said, and the intimate look they shared made Mulder feel… something. Guilt? Regret? Wistfulness? He tried not to examine it too much.
Gretchen lingered in the moment with her husband for several beats, and then spoke. “If I had a time machine,” she said carefully, “a real one, I might feel something of a responsibility to do some real good with it, even at great risk.” Elliott nodded encouragingly at her, and she continued. “It would be difficult to pinpoint, but… I do believe… if one could find the perfect moment in history, one could alter the course of human evolution…” Her eyes traveled far, far away, out of space and time. “...to the point where our species could be shaped to such a degree as to be… entirely peaceful. No war. No violence. No… unreasonable anger and petty jealousy. Just… peace.”
Mulder cocked his head, considering this. It was quite a departure from the motivations he had been imagining for his suspects, and it piqued his interest. “If you were to do that, you would almost certainly alter the course of history so much that neither of you would ever have been born.”
Gretchen nodded. “I don’t say this lightly,” she said. “I’m aware of the consequences. But if it led to true peace on earth, wouldn’t it be worth the sacrifice?”
Elliott looked a little shaken at first, but quickly rearranged his features to be purely supportive. He patted her hand and murmured his approval.
“Peace on earth,” Mulder said. “I like it.”
He liked them as suspects, too.
4:03 p.m.
After an entire afternoon of interviews, Mulder was trying to keep himself from dying of boredom. This felt far too much like their current FBI work, and he was getting antsy to find someone else with a crumb of interest in the space-time continuum. Plus, some meathead finance guy with a dreadful vanity license plate that read “KEN WINS” had leered disgustingly at Scully, and Mulder had wanted very much to punch him in the face. Instead, he just stuck a wad of chewed-up gum on Ken’s car.
This whole afternoon might be pointless.
But he had to keep investigating, he reminded himself. This was more important than he’d even let on to Scully. Those dreams he’d been having…
Focus. Don’t think about that right now.
The only thing that had intrigued him about the current crop of interviewees was the absence of one of them at work. The most senior partner of the law firm Hamlin, Hamlin & McGill, who had dined at Forque on that fateful day, had left work early today for reasons that the only remaining Hamlin refused to divulge. Smiling widely and fixedly and looking rather like a wax statue, Howard Hamlin told Mulder and Scully that Charles McGill was currently “...under the weather.” The length of the pause before Hamlin spoke these words told Mulder that something dramatic had happened that morning.
But ultimately, what were the chances that a stiff-upper-lip lawyer had gone all Doc Brown on the world? This line of inquiry was probably fruitless.
Still, Scully was a completist, and she insisted they should visit Charles McGill at home. Mulder’s brow was still furrowed as they approached San Cristobal Road.
“You know, Scully, I think we should put our focus on the Schwartzes. After meeting them, I think they’re exactly the kind of quasi-visionary nerds who’d take on a project like creating and implementing a time machine.”
Scully frowned thoughtfully. “Mulder, forgive me for asking, but… why are you anticipating that people will lie to you about this? We’ve prefaced all our interviews by stating that this isn’t an official federal investigation and no laws have been broken.”
He shook his head, deep in thought. “I know what I would be thinking, if it were me being questioned. Uncle Sam shows up on my doorstep, right after I’ve cracked the riddle of the space-time continuum? I’d be assuming they’d want to confiscate my tech, because they considered it either a national security risk or — probably more likely — a national security asset.”
“Little do these poor souls know how meager the scope of our influence is,” Scully said, plucking a piece of lint off Mulder’s lapel as he drove.
“So what do you think? Think the Schwartzes tried the beginning-of-time thing and then realized they wouldn’t still exist, so they fixed it?
“I don’t know,” Scully said. “How many people would truly be altruistic enough to erase themselves from history to achieve world peace? Seems more likely to me that they were just trying to make themselves sound good. Plus, wouldn’t that kind of time travel have negated their very existence when they returned to our timeline, making it impossible for them to go back and set things right?”
“Well, look at you!” Mulder was tickled pink. “Getting invested in the narrative. I like it.”
“This is all still hypothetical, of course. Anyway… we’re here, aren’t we? Let’s just interview McGill so we can make sure we haven’t missed anything.”
They parked in front of his residence, a quaint but expansive yellow-tan house. Unsurprisingly, there was a Mercedes in the driveway, but another car sat parked in front of the house, indicating that there might be a visitor. That car certainly wasn’t Charles McGill’s; it looked to be from the mid-’80s and was quite worse for wear.
“Charles McGill?” Mulder called out, after knocking on the door and at first receiving no answer. “FBI, we’re here to ask a few questions.”
The door opened to reveal a thirty-something man with a crinkled brow and hair as brown as his secondhand suit. “Uh, hi. What seems to be the trouble?”
“My name is Fox Mulder, and this is my partner Agent Dana Scully.” They displayed their badges to the man. “We’re federal agents here in an unofficial capacity. We just have a few routine questions about a technological matter, nothing to be concerned about.”
The man looked warily at them. “Look, my brother is a lawyer,” he said, jerking a thumb at an unseen person in the house behind him, “so if you’re lying, you’re gonna have your federal asses handed to you.”
“It’s fine, Jimmy,” called a voice from another room. “It’s all right. Come on in, I have absolutely nothing to hide.”
The man named Jimmy stood indecisively at the door, looking like he had half a mind to shove them both bodily out onto the lawn. But finally he stepped back and allowed them in.
“Fine. Come in. He’s in there. Just — watch that cord there.” He kicked the plug of an electrical cord out of the way. “My brother’s a bit indisposed today, so just… don’t tax his resources. Got it?”
As they made their way through the house, Mulder saw that there were candles lighting the hallway: a random, haphazard assortment, including a styrofoam packing block with birthday candles stuck into it. They stood at the threshold of a room that looked like a combination of living room and study, and saw that the owner of the house was sitting on his couch, dabbing his forehead with a wet cloth and giving the distinct impression that he had recently been lying down. As Mulder peered around, he noted with increasing curiosity that every electronic device had been unplugged and disconnected in haste. A flashlight lay on the desk at the far end of the room, with its battery cover off and batteries nowhere in sight.
While Scully examined a brass candle holder, she leaned over to Mulder and whispered into his ear, “I take it all back, Mulder. You were right: we appear to have time-traveled to 1850.”
Suppressing a chuckle, Mulder entered the room, only to be greeted with the sight of a familiar novel sitting on the coffee table. He had the very same edition back at his apartment, in fact.
The Time Machine, by H.G. Wells.
He and Scully shared a significant look. This visit might prove to be promising after all.