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*
"Don't you ever just want to stop? Get out of the damn car?" she'd asked him. And they had and he did.
And then things got a little weird.
*
Scully has a photo of her family on her desk at home, from one of the last Christmases they were all together. It is poorly lit, slightly crooked. Her father had placed the camera on the back of the couch and set the timer, the whole group of them scrambling to assemble in front of the tree before the flash went off.
Her mother is beaming. Her father, her Ahab, ordinarily so stoic and self-contained, is caught in an awkward half-step to his wife's side, reaching out. They are huddled together, the four Scully children, Bill and Missy in the back, Dana and Charlie in the front.
She is wearing a high-necked nightgown, has braces on her teeth, an unflattering haircut. She is also smiling in a free, unfettered way she is certain she couldn't replicate now, not even if she tried.
It's a nice picture. A last vestige of innocence, a fleeting moment caught in time, smiling faces as yet untouched by tragedy, uncertainty, fear. She looks at it, sometimes, when she needs to tear her eyes away from her work. She looks at it, and she remembers, and for a moment, she is happy.
There is a little glass jar on her desk as well, just under the lamp, half-hidden behind the framed photograph. The kind of jar one might fill with brightly wrapped candies, or striped peppermints in crinkling plastic. She does not keep candies in this jar.
It's full of seeds.
She doesn't look at it very often, not the way she looks at the photograph of her family. It does not make her feel happy, or content, or at peace. There is an ache that comes from resting her gaze on the jar, a bruised, empty feeling that is best not to dwell upon.
So she doesn't look at it very often. But she doesn't move the jar from its spot on her desk, either.
*
She has always been The Good One, and has conducted her life in a staggered series of achievements and rebellions in accordance with this.
She is not the kind of person who is sent away. She is the kind of person who leaves.
She is accustomed to turning her back on people who beg her to reconsider, to stay. So it is a shock to her, really, when the FBI cuts her loose.
She'd known what was happening, of course. It was a slow decline, but an obvious one. She could see it in the way that fellow agents had begun to avert their eyes when they saw her in the hallway. The way that the crowd around the coffee pot would clear out when she entered the room. She had become dangerous by association. No longer the rational, sane one debunking Mulder's wild theories, but instead another raving monster hunter sharing his basement.
With Mulder's sudden turnaround from rebel to golden boy, all of the focus has shifted to her. She is the remaining wild card, the unknown variable, the one flouting rules and ignoring direct orders.
They'd always squeaked by, before. But that had been under Skinner, not Kersh. Kersh is an entirely different animal, a man with no humor and very little imagination. He is also, in her estimation, dirty—neck deep in conspiracy, if not actively involved then certainly willing to look the other way.
So. She loses her job.
It's surprisingly all right. Turns out she doesn't have much patience for standard procedure anymore these days.
*
She stands in the middle of the desert, buffeted by chill night air, and says goodbye to Mulder without actually saying goodbye. She has to squint, has to work to see past the body he wears. But his mannerisms are all there, all the movements and expressions she has grown to know and, dare she say, love.
She has never kissed him. She does not kiss him now, although the thought crosses her mind. But it is strange, too strange, him with another face, and she is still too full of the misbegotten hope that they somehow might be able to fix this.
They have always been able to fix it, after all, regardless of the size of the mess.
They smile at each other, and he hands her seeds.
It is, somehow, more intimate than an embrace.
*
She is an ex-FBI agent with a bad reputation and a name that's associated with extraterrestrials and conspiracies. He's a Man in Black with a genuine Area 51 job.
It sounds like the pitch to a bad movie.
It isn't.
*
They can't fix it.
Mulder is wearing the body of a man with very privileged access to very, very sensitive information. She (thanks to him, ironically enough) has a reputation.
He can't just call her. There is already an ongoing investigation, a mole, secrets disappearing from his office. He'd be arrested, disappeared. She doubts there's anything at all like due process for Men in Black.
She misses their late night nonsense conversations. She misses him pestering her, telling her bad jokes, rambling on about aliens and conspiracies and haunted houses.
Morris seems to be enjoying himself, playing at being an FBI agent. He says the right things to the right people. He flirts. Somehow, outrageous things don't seem outrageous coming out of Mulder's very attractive mouth. People respond. Of course they do.
He seems content enough to have dropped the threads of his previous life. He does not speak much of his wife, and when he does it is in a mocking tone. He seems relieved that someone else will have to deal with the minutia, the tedious act of dissolving a failed marriage, the pettiness of divorce. He likes his bachelor pad, his new physique. He doesn't talk about his kids.
He tries, relentlessly, to get her to agree to date him. He sends flowers, wine baskets, a singing telegram. In time, his persistence fades. She does not fool herself into thinking he's got the message. He's just grown bored with the chase.
He calls her sometimes, and it sets her teeth on edge when she sees Mulder on her cell display.
It's worse, hearing Mulder's voice on the phone. Morris wears Mulder's skin but does not move like him, does not act like him. He is easy to spot as an imposter in person.
Without the benefit of sight, however, when he is just a disembodied voice, Mulder's voice, in her ear on the telephone, it is harder to tell. She stops taking his calls.
Mulder, her Mulder, the real Mulder, doesn't call at all.
She knows he can't.
"Don't even think about it, Dana," Morris tells her once. "They'll lock him up and throw away the key. Their secrets are worth more than his life, your life, anyone's life. People like him can't just pick up the phone, have a chat."
"People like you," she says.
He grins. "Not anymore."
Mulder, more than anyone else she's ever known, has always been able to set his own wants, his own needs, his own desires aside in favor of his endless quest for understanding. She hopes that he is finding truths. She hopes that there are truths to find. She hopes that whatever he is able to learn is enough to balance out the loss of himself.
*
The Gunmen grieve.
They take it personally, the way that Morris needles them in Mulder's voice, mocks their work, laughs at their theories.
"He keeps coming around," Frohike tells her, irritation and annoyance heavy in his voice.
"You keep letting him in," she counters.
But she knows why they do it.
Langly runs simulation after simulation after simulation. He doesn't sleep, loses weight, develops dark circles under his eyes. He can offer hypothetical solutions to their mess, but nothing that is practical. There is nothing they can do.
She takes a post as a medical examiner. She works nights, dabs camphor under her nose and deciphers the mysteries of the silent dead. It is strange, so many dead people with so many mundane and non-fantastic causes of death. She supposes that she had been so blinded by conspiracy and supernatural and grand-scale atrocity that she had forgotten about the ordinary evils.
She is good at her job. She is always good at her job.
Time passes. The Gunmen continue their efforts, but with a little less urgency, a little less desperation. They begin to accept it.
Morris laughs at them and tells them it was a chance in a million, an accident, a divine stroke of fate. He's pleased with how it all worked out. He'd felt trapped, restless, unhappy. He's much happier now. Not to mention younger, better-looking.
This is the best year of his life since he was in his teens, he tells them.
*
Of course, it falls apart. Morris is a brownnoser, a schmoozer, bureaucrat, a paper-pusher. He is not a genius criminal profiler.
Mulder had been granted a certain level of leniency to pursue his own interests because of his skills, because of his utility. He could skulk around in the basement all he wanted, could embarrass the bureau all he wanted (to a point), so long as he came to heel when called, so long as he performed his magic tricks when someone in a high enough office decided he was really needed.
There is a case. A serial killer, startling in viciousness and intensity. Things ramp up quickly, very quickly. The frequency and violence of the killings escalates faster than anyone is prepared for.
For a time, it seems to be the only headline in the news. An entire nation holds its breath, enthralled, horrified, captivated.
They call. Morris comes to heel, of course, but he has no magic tricks.
He tries to fake it. People die.
The media descends. He is offered up as a scapegoat, a washed-up crazy profiler with delusions of grandeur. Or maybe just delusions. Every last bit of Mulder's sad sorry family history is dredged up and splashed across every newspaper in the nation. There are photos of Samantha, of his father. Question marks on everything. Lurid tabloid headlines, horrible accusations.
She wonders about Mulder, looking on with someone else's eyes, watching from someone else's life. There is no one he can talk to, no one he can tell. She worries for him. It pulls at her.
She calls Morris Fletcher's home number in Nevada from a pay phone. The number is disconnected. She searches, but is unable to find another listing.
Fox Mulder is fired publicly, sent away from the bureau in disgrace. The public applauds. Television talking heads endlessly discuss the decision, wonder aloud why he was permitted to remain for as long as he had.
It takes another five months for the FBI to catch the killer. More people die.
She goes to his apartment on the night the news breaks about the killer's apprehension. She does not know why, exactly, but she thinks it might be the right thing to do.
She stands in a dimly lit hallway on dirty tile and knocks on his door. She does not think about Mulder following her down this very hallway and almost kissing her, once. He was a different person, then. Literally.
There is no answer for a long time, and she is about to leave when the door is pulled open in a rush.
He is wearing Mulder's gray t-shirt, Mulder's jeans. He's unshaven, slovenly. He is putting on weight, she notes, no longer keeping up with Mulder's running and fitness regimen. There is a television blaring loudly behind him.
"Oh," he says, and his mouth does something that might be a smile. "Dana. Come to gloat?"
"People are dead," she tells him, walking past him and into the apartment, uninvited. "There's nothing to gloat about."
"But it's my fault," he goads, following her. "Right?"
She goes to speak, catches herself. She is not sure, exactly, what she feels. He should never have gotten involved in the first place, of course. He was out of his depth from the start. It was wrong of him to show up and wave his hands and pretend he could see into a killer's mind. It was wrong of him to play at it, to string the FBI and police along in a series of wrong directions because he'd enjoyed the attention, because he'd wanted to feel important.
She was not there, but she can picture it with perfect clarity. Morris, sweeping onto the scene in Mulder's trench coat, somber and hollow-eyed, unshaven and haunted, because that's the way the television profilers do it.
It had been a game to him. To the victims, to the killer, it had been real.
"It took them five months," she says finally, carefully. "After you were let go. So no, I don't think it was your fault alone."
He doesn't say anything for a long moment. Then he nods.
"You want a beer?" he asks.
She doesn't, particularly, but she did drive all the way over there and not, so far as she can tell, to stand in his doorway and deliver platitudes. So she nods, and follows him towards the living room. She looks at the couch, but does not make any move to sit.
She doesn't like the weird touches he's added to the apartment. There is a leopard print blanket draped over the back of the couch. There are candles on the coffee table, an overwhelmingly large television against the far wall. There is a sleek black stereo system and a CD rack where the fish tank used to be, wired speakers tucked up in all of the corners of the room. There are also empty takeout containers and beer cans strewn all over the place.
"Sweet surround sound, yeah?" he asks her, coming back into the room with two cans of beer. She is relieved to see that hers is unopened.
He sees her noticing, gives her a wry smile.
"I may be a bastard, but I'm not a fucking bastard."
"You stole that line from a movie," she says, and pops the top on her can.
He shrugs. "So I did. Want to watch it?"
"Not particularly," she says.
He sinks into the couch without looking particularly distressed by her disinterest. He looks less like Mulder the more she looks at him. It always takes her time to adjust, particularly when she hasn't seen him in a while. Even the resting expression on his face is slightly different.
"So you're not here for my dazzling wit," he said. "And you've made it clear that the pleasure of my company actually gives you anything but. Soooo…?"
She frowns, looks down at her beer, suddenly feeling self-conscious. She doesn't quite know why she's there. You're wearing the body of someone I used to care about, and something bad has happened to you doesn't seem to hold much water.
"There are—" she said, picking her words carefully, "—very few people. Who might possibly understand what you're going through right now."
"And since you can't talk to the person you really want, I get to be the stand in," he says, and he laughs, but it is a brittle, defeated thing.
She shrugs. "Something like that."
"I just—" he says, shaking his head, bereft.
She doesn't say anything, stands in the entrance to the living room, watches him. The can of beer is sweating in her hand. He doesn't move like Mulder. But the pain in his expression is quite real, well-worn, terribly familiar on Mulder's face.
He looks up at her, gives an awkward half-smile. "I think I miss my wife."
She laughs, a soft, disbelieving, hurt laugh. Because she understands. She gets it. There is a sorrow, a helplessness to it all, the four of them torn bits of paper scattered to the uncaring wind.
He stands up from the couch, stretches, his back creaking. Walks over towards her.
She doesn't plan on it, but she finds herself kissing him.
It's a soft kiss, gentle, the hand not holding the beer can coming up to cup the familiar planes of his face. He breathes against her and it is Mulder's scent, mostly, mingled with the sour aftertaste of cigarettes.
He steps back and looks at her with Mulder's eyes. It is Mulder's lower lip that she releases, slightly damp, pouted.
"Yowza," he says, grinning, and she shuts her eyes.
He misreads her expression. She can hear him stumbling around with sudden eagerness.
"Just—stay right there!" he calls over his shoulder. There is a rattling, somewhere to her left. She opens her eyes.
He has an armful of candles.
"You know," he says, suddenly buoyant, tilting his head towards the bedroom. "I always thought this might happen. I mean, c'mon. You—me—we're both good-looking people. And—"
She smiles, because it is typical of him. Her eyes prickle, because it is typical of him, and that means he has been around long enough to become typical, and that means he is never going away.
She leaves while he is in the bedroom lighting his candles. She can still hear his muffled voice, rambling on about chemistry and syncopation as she shuts the door quietly behind her.
She walks down the dim hallway where a honeybee once almost ended her life. She gets in the elevator, takes one last long look as the doors close.
She does not return to No. 42, Hegal Place, ever again.
*
Her phone rings.
"Scully," Frohike says, and there is a sort of urgency to his voice that makes her jump.
Mulder has been gone for more than a year. There has not been anything, in all that time. Not a word.
They are smiling, when she arrives, and for one brief wonderfulterrible moment she thinks they have figured it out, that they will be able to fix it after all.
"We can't fix it," Byers tells her, his voice gentle, so gentle. "It's not that."
She realizes how much of her hope must have been written on her face.
"Right," she says, and schools her expression. "Then what is it?"
"You know how M—how he is always saying that part of his job was planting conspiracy theories in the news? To distract those who would seek the truth, put them on another path?"
Scully nods, looking from one eager face to another.
"Look," Frohike says, and thrusts a newspaper into her hands.
She looks at it. It is a conspiracy rag, similar to the one they publish. A competing paper, she supposes. Circulating in a very small market. Probably printed in someone's basement.
ELVIS COMES HOME!
She looks up from the headline, lifts her brows. They exchange awkward looks.
"This isn't exactly breaking new ground," she tells them.
Frohike makes a shooing motion towards her. She looks back down at the paper.
ELVIS COMES HOME!
Dana KingNot everyone gets the chance to meet their idol, especially when he's been dead for more than twenty years. Yet, that's exactly what one lucky Graceland visitor says happened last week. Safe in the warm and comfortable confines of the Jungle Room, our informer (name withheld) says that Elvis returned home for a brief visit. Gathering her wits about her was difficult, she admits, so she failed to take a photograph. Evidence of this encounter does not exist, not even on security footage, so we know that some of you skeptics out there are rolling your eyes. Will you suspend your disbelief long enough to hear her story? Go to page four to read more.
She looks up, patience wearing thin.
"Page four," Byers says.
She flips to page four, finds the continuation of the article.
Public have long been enamored of Elvis's legacy. Soon, they will have something new to add to his legend – the fact that he's spent the last twenty-one years in outer space! Talk about a dream come true for Elvis fans and UFO buffs alike! Phone has been ringing off the hook here at headquarters since this story broke. Tonight, we'll reveal more juicy details, so watch the website!
She folds the paper shut, looks up at the Gunmen with their identical grins.
"Well?" Byers asks.
"They need a better editor," she says, crossing her arms. "Are you going to tell me what I'm missing, or do I have to start taking hostages?"
Byers holds out his hand for the newspaper and she passes it back to him. He sits down, goes to work with a highlighter.
"It's rudimentary," he says. "He should have used a better cypher. This is—it's amateur, using the first word of every sentence like a little kid passing notes at school, but I guess he wanted to see if we were paying attention."
He passes the paper back to her. She looks back at the text.
ELVIS COMES HOME!
Dana KingNot everyone gets the chance to meet their idol, especially when he's been dead for more than twenty years. Yet, that's exactly what one lucky Graceland visitor says happened last week. Safe in the warm and comfortable confines of the Jungle Room, our informer (name withheld) says that Elvis returned home for a brief visit. Gathering her wits about her was difficult, she admits, so she failed to take a photograph. Evidence of this encounter does not exist, not even on security footage, so we know that some of you skeptics out there are rolling your eyes. Will you suspend your disbelief long enough to hear her story? Go to page four to read more.
Public have long been enamored of Elvis's legacy. Soon, they will have something new to add to his legend – the fact that he's spent the last twenty-one years in outer space! Talk about a dream come true for Elvis fans and UFO buffs alike! Phone has been ringing off the hook here at headquarters since this story broke. Tonight, we'll reveal more juicy details, so watch the website!
She blinks, looks again. There are tears blurring her vision.
"Oh," she says.
"We're always paying attention," Byers says.
There is silence between them.
"Of course, we don't know which phone," Langly says, almost sheepish.
*
She goes home, sits down at her little desk. The sun is setting, warm and golden and cozy in her apartment. She sets her phone on the desktop in front of her, looks at it.
There is a bubble of anticipation in her chest. She feels like a teenager, awash with mingled anticipation and nervousness and excitement.
She is not sure she will recognize his voice, Morris's voice, cloaking Mulder's words. If he calls. If he can. If his clumsy coded message wasn't so overtly clumsy that it got him into trouble.
Mulder was always good at avoiding trouble, right up until he wasn't.
She tears her eyes away from the phone, looks at the little framed photograph instead. Scullys, untroubled, untouched. Smiling, happy, years removed from pain and heartache and strife.
She taps her fingers on the desk, looks past the photo at the little jar.
A familiar expression on an unfamiliar face. The comfortable brush of a stranger's hand against her own. Seeds, passed like a torch.
She is an ex-FBI agent with a bad reputation and a name that's associated with extraterrestrials and conspiracies. He's a Man in Black with a genuine Area 51 job. And, together, they might be able to bring a corrupt secret government to its knees.
It sounds like the pitch to a bad movie. But oh, she wants to see how it ends.
She opens the jar, shakes one seed, just one, loose into her hand. She sets it on her tongue, rolls it in her mouth. It is dusty, salty. She has never much cared for sunflower seeds.
The sun slips down below the horizon. She looks at her phone.
It starts to ring.
*