The flexible concept of tomorrow (1/2)
The Flexible Concept of Tomorrow
or
Five Times Donna Noble Remembers Meeting That Bloke With The Stupid Name (And One Time She Doesn't)
or
Five Times Fox Mulder Remembers Meeting That Other Redhead (And One Time He Doesn't)
[Crossover, Doctor Who and The X-Files]
Rating: Adult, but only for language and insinuation
Disclaimer: copyrights belong to the BBC, Fox
Author's notes: Are at the end. Along with the thanks and the sarcastic remarks about smoking the special crack.
* * *
He hadn’t thought of the strange woman with the red hair in years. Yet since he had the heart attack and moved into The Willows, all he has is time to remember: cases and places; the odd things he’s seen; people lost and loved. Scully.
So one day - after dinner but before Amelia comes to check he’s okay for the night - he draws it all out on sheets from a legal pad. There are red, blue and green pens, footnotes, and a timeline held together with tape, for Christ’s sake. But even when it’s done he feels as though there’s something missing.
It’s a good job Amelia won’t be here for another ten minutes. She would lose her mind if she saw him sitting on the floor like a child with a coloring book. Assisted living, they call it, but it’s more like having a strict babysitter. He’s lucky, because he needs only minimal help, he still has all his marbles and he’s pretty spry for an old guy. He keeps himself to himself, the occasional visit from Will aside. There’s not much to nag him about. And he likes Amelia, with her strawberry blonde hair, shy flirting and ridiculous giggle.
He hauls his aching bones off the rug. He wishes Scully were here to see this. First, she’d mock him and then she’d help him figure out all the parts he’d left out. All his life, redheads laughing at him. How he misses it now.
He pushes his glasses back on his nose, leans on the mantlepiece next to the photograph of Scully that smirks at his idiocies every day, and surveys his work from six feet up. He hasn’t seen her for more than thirty years but his strange brand of intuition is insistent that he’s going to see her again.
It turns out he is right. The last time Fox Mulder meets Donna Noble is the day before he dies.
* * *
I - "Now is the time for all good men…"
The first time he remembers seeing her, they’re almost the same age.
Something huge slamming down from the sky just caused a blast wave that knocked him clear off his feet. The bridge is so much floating matchwood and ahead, a fireball consumes the center of a densely packed wood. He walks towards the crash site, flashlight in one hand, gun in the other, one part scared to five parts thrilled at the thought of seeing a ship at last.
He catches a glimpse of red hair ahead of him and just for a moment, his spirits leap at the thought that Scully pushed aside her objections and came out here after all. As he gets closer he realizes that the woman isn’t Scully. She’s about five inches too tall, longer hair, more broadly built and the jacket’s brown leather. There’s something vaguely familiar about her. She’s also walking very fast in the wrong direction, her breath blowing out in white clouds as she labors up the hill.
"Ma’am," he calls out. She turns around. She’s older than Scully, with a scowl on her narrow face. She’s muttering under her breath. "Ma’am, I need you to move away from the crash site. It could be dangerous."
"Should’ve known you’d be here, Mulder," she says, in an accent he immediately identifies as from London. "Great big trouble magnet, you are; just like him."
"How do you know my name?" he asks, the hairs on the back of his neck prickling.
"As if I’m going to forget a name like yours," she says. "I mean, seriously - Fox? What were your parents thinking? Child abuse, that is."
"We’ve met before?"
"Well, duh," she exclaims. "I’m hardly going to just guess your name is ‘Fox’, am I?"
He’s bewildered and speechless for a second, his mouth hanging open, then says: "Ma’am?"
"And cheers for the save, by the way," she says giving him a big smile. "Can’t remember if I said thank you last time."
"Thank you for what?" She starts her determined stomp up the hill again. He takes off after her: "Ma’am I can’t allow you to put yourself in danger."
She turns around, walking backwards. "Tough. And don’t you dare call me ma’am again."
"I’m ordering you to stop!" He can’t believe that just came out of his mouth.
"Order away, sunshine!" she yells. "You can’t make me."
"Did you notice I have a gun?"
She rolls her eyes. "Is it in your pocket or are you just pleased to see me?"
Okay, now he feels pathetic. She turns around again, walking still faster. He’s about to try to catch up when a running man brushes past his shoulder. He’s as tall as Mulder but skinnier, his long brown coat flapping behind him like a batcape. In one hand he carries something metallic green and machined into planes and curves, like a mutant auto part.
"Donna! Got it!" the man yells triumphantly. He grabs her hand.
"About bloody time," the woman - Donna - says, suddenly sounding cheerful. "Come on, then, let’s get the poor sod back in the air before anyone finds him."
They start running towards the crash site and even though Mulder follows, they lose him in the trees inside a minute. Twenty minutes after that, there’s another blast of wind that nearly knocks him to the ground and a triangular ship hovers for a moment, casting green light across the forest, then disappears with the telltale crack of something that has gone from zero to Mach One in no time flat.
The army shows up ten minutes later but he doesn’t tell them about the couple on the hill. He suspects that’s mostly because even he can’t quite believe it.
Scully rescues him from the lock-up two hours after that. "Ball lightning," she says. "It caused a flash fire."
"All that scorched earth from ball lightning? Are you insane? It was a ship!"
"Shut up and get in the car, Mulder."
Fury blazes behind that tight-lipped facade but he’s focused on something else: that she came after him, even though she thought he was wrong. Perhaps this one might stick around.
* * *
II - "Smile, sunshine"
The first time Donna meets him, he’s older than she is.
The first Clinton is in the White House, the Spice Girls are in the charts, the Yankees have just swept the Padres to win the World Series, and even Scully is professing to like baseball - and him - just a little.
A warehouse in Newark. Reports of strange blue lights in the sky, a shrieking in the night, and six men found dead in nine days, with missing limbs and ragged chunks torn from their torsos as if something fierce and toothy were snacking on them. The victims are linked to the mob in four of the six cases, so naturally Scully suggests it’s a Mafia warning.
As if the Mob would warn transgressors by making it look as though velociraptors were doing the killing. Are their enemies sleeping with the plesiosaurs?
Scully is deeply unimpressed with this sarcasm, there’s a harsh exchange of words and that is why he is alone in the warehouse right now, like an idiot.
There’s an unnatural soupy quality to the darkness, as though it’s filled with thick smoke, and a fetid stench, like rotting flesh with a topnote of blocked drains. His flashlight won’t reach the corners of the hangar. A sudden deafening noise like the tearing of metal sends him crashing against the wall, his heart pounding like a Gene Krupa drum solo. He can hear thudding footsteps, the scritch of long claws on concrete. He finds an alcove and edges into it so he can see what the hell is making that horrific sound without it seeing him.
If cars felt pain as they were crushed into scrap metal, they would scream like that.
"Stay close!" a man yells in the distance.
"How can I when I can’t even see your skinny arse five feet in front of me?" a woman shouts back. "Slow down."
"Can’t! Perception clouds are tricky. Stay close or we’ll lose each other."
There’s another roar, still nearer, and a shriek about ten feet away. The scritch of claws turns into a loud scrape and thump of something with huge feet, approaching faster and faster. Jesus, the *ground* is shaking. He sees someone hurtling towards him, a woman. Someone with a sharp face, and wavy red hair streaming out behind. Further back, but gaining on her, is something dark, something vast.
Scarcely thinking, he reaches out, catches her arm and swings her into his alcove. The creature pounds past their hiding place, trailing a foul sulphuric fug in its wake. She hits the wall next to him and rebounds off it into a heap, backpack skidding to hit his feet.
It was almost five years ago but his memory is excellent. "Donna?" he whispers in astonishment, stretching out a hand to help a tallish figure in a leather jacket and hoop earrings pick herself up off the floor.
"Who’re you?" she asks shakily, brushing the dirt off her jeans. She hasn’t changed from that night in the forest where she knew his name. Actually, it’s weird, she doesn’t look different at all. Even her hair is the same.
"Fox Mulder."
"Fox? For serious?" She tries to laugh but she’s still catching her breath. "Nah. What’s your name really?"
He drags out his ID, shines his flashlight on it. "See?" he says.
She frowns. "That’s child abuse, that."
"You said that last time," he replies in excitement, "you remember?"
"Oh, I’d’ve remembered a lanky great drink of water like you," she says, looking at him in frank appreciation. "So, Mister FBI Agent, you going to tell me how you know my name?"
"We’ve met. We were near McKevitt, maybe five years ago. You must remember - a goddamned *spaceship* came down from the sky!"
She looks at him, a bit blank. "When you say spaceship, what are we talking about? Was it, like, a rocket, or a sort of…" she gestures with her hands, "saucer-y interstellar carrier, or a little shuttle-y thing?"
He stares. "You’re kidding me, right?"
"Donna Noble, this is not a time for introductions!" a voice shouts. "I need the Radolus Box and some light, right now."
"Yeah, yeah," she yells into the black. "Keep your bloody hair on, spaceman!"
"NOW."
She sighs and looks Mulder up and down. "I never get to just appreciate the scenery. Enjoy the view."
There’s a piercing flash of blue light and that metallic howling far closer than he would like. Drawing in a scared breath, Donna picks up her backpack and squares her shoulders for a fight. "Right, then."
She pulls a silver-grey square out of her back pocket and it flips open like some Star Trek-style communicator, the top screen bursting into life with a picture of sunflowers, numbered buttons on the bottom half lined in blue light. He realises it’s some kind of advanced cellphone. She points it at him.
"Oi! Smile, sunshine."
A flash goes off and he blinks. "Sometimes you’ve got to take the scenery with you," she says with a grin.
"If it comes near you," she adds, pointing at his flashlight, "switch your torch off and on. It hates sudden changes in light. It paralyzes it. Its eyes can’t cope with it."
"What’s ‘it’?" he says. "Donna, wait, who is ‘it’?"
But she’s already shuffling towards where the man’s voice came from. She points the phone out into the darkness. The flashbulb is like a firework in the inky black and there’s another roar from the creature.
"Again," shouts the man. There’s a blast of tinny alien-sounding music filled with handclaps and yelps, nothing he recognizes.
"Damn it!" she snaps, "Sorry, wrong button. Flaming Nokias." The music cuts off and there’s another camera flash.
Another long, roaring scream is bitten off as a bright blaze of blue light fills the warehouse. When it goes dark again, it is the normal shadow-ridden darkness of anywhere on Earth. Moonlight is coming in through the tiny high windows by the roof. He can just make out two figures standing by a small box on the floor, high-fiving each other. But by the time he makes his way over to where they were standing, they’ve already gone.
It’s not until five years later, when he decides that Scully doesn’t dance enough and waltzes her round the kitchen to songs from the radio, that he recognizes the music from the phone again - "Hey Ya" - and has the thrill of knowing for sure that he met honest to god *time travellers*.
* * *
III - Dice and the universe
A Utah jail cell is the last place Mulder expects to see her again.
It’s only three weeks since his mother killed herself. Three weeks since he found out that his sister had died before he had even started looking for her properly. Scully has been trying to keep him close by her ever since, afraid his fragile sense of peace wouldn’t last.
She was right, but he hates the way she can’t help but hover over him. Worse still is being spied on for signs that he is cracking. He needs to be busy, which is why he fled on an early plane this morning while she was stuck testifying in a Baltimore courtroom. He’s not a complete ass about it: he left a message on her cellphone before he switched his off.
Frohike gave him the location of a small base - he’s kind of fuzzy on where right now, which is worrying - where the guys suspected records were being kept. They’d told him it would be quiet but instead there’s some kind of alert going on, and the place is bristling with guards. He’d managed to sneak into one of the labs and then, nothing. Someone has taken what felt like a baseball bat to his head. They have to hold him upright to walk him into their cells and there’s blood sliding down the back of his neck, soaking the collar of his shirt.
He hears her first, an echoing bellow down the corridor. "Oi! Chunky! You look like a man who knows where the fridge is. What about a sandwich? I’m bloody starving down here!"
There’s more shouting somewhere ahead of him, and he sees a smeary figure behind the dirty plexiglass walls of the cell. "Up yours too, lardboy!" a woman shouts. There’s a flicker of recognition in his mind.
They throw him into the holding cell, and he stays on the floor for a minute, waiting for the room to stop shifting around him.
"Oh my God," says the voice. "Mulder, isn’t it?"
One hand goes to his shoulders. "Can you stand?"
He shakes his head, which was foolish. The pain screams from the back of his scalp as she touches it with her fingertips. She swears in a low, fluent torrent. "You’re in a bad way. I’ll get help." He flinches as she yells again, hitting the thick plexiglass with the flat of her hand. "Oi, you lot! He needs a doctor!"
She grabs his forearm to help him off the floor and Mulder tries to haul himself to his feet. The room tips like a rowboat on a lake and he is spectacularly sick all over someone’s blue sneakers.
"Bollocks," she mutters, puts her hands in his armpits and pulls him upright. She drags him to the cot furthest away from the vomit splatter, sits him down, then toes off her soiled sneakers, picks them up with a dainty thumb and forefinger and tosses them into the far corner. They’re followed by a pair of soaked black socks.
"Sorry," he says woozily, keeling over so he can lie down. "Sorry. Airport breakfast. Lots of coffee."
"Shhh, don’t matter. Never liked those shoes much, even if they are good for running. Felt like copying."
There is a long interlude of yelling as she tries to get him a doctor. Or the doctor; she says both, but no one comes. It degenerates into threats and aspersions cast on the guards’ morality, parentage, competence and general hygiene. He’s not sure how it helps but it seems to make her feel better.
Eventually she flops down next to him and proffers a small white tablet which turns out to be mint gum rather than the painkiller he craves. He chews for a few minutes, until his head hurts too much for even that sort of movement, then makes a small stalactite of it under the bed.
Scully is going to kill him for running away and this wondrous cat’s cradle of an understanding they’ve been building will be entangled. It’ll be months before she’ll let him kiss her again; that’s how furious she’s going to be.
Apparently he said this last part out loud. "I bet she will. I bloody would," Donna says, calm now. There’s a hand stroking his hair. Not the hand he wants but a comforting hand nonetheless. "Come on, sweetheart. You can’t go to sleep, not with a concussion. Talk to me."
Over the next few hours he talks and talks and he doesn’t seem to have many filters - perhaps it’s because she’s very good at impertinent questions. He tells her about Scully, about his sister, about how all he ever wanted to do as a kid was see the universe, but the aliens are not friendly, and the humans are worse.
She tells him about worlds where peaceful beings communicate in song, giant plants compose drum sonatas and of a human empire at peace and stretching across the stars. Either she lives in a fantasy world so baroquely detailed it makes Lord of the Rings look like The Hungry Caterpillar or she’s telling the truth. He wants to believe she is.
"Why do we keep meeting, do you think?" he asks her.
"I think maybe it’s all about patterns," she says. "My grandad says that God does not play dice with the universe."
He laughs, and wishes he hadn’t. "Your grandad is Einstein?"
"No, you prawn, he likes the quote," she says, smiling. "Everything happens for a reason. Sometimes for reasons we can’t see. We just need to find out what they are."
Isn’t that the story of his life?
He’s just clinging on to consciousness with the last of his willpower when he hears her hiss, "And where the hell have you been, you useless bloody Martian?"
"Perspective, Donna. It’s only been a couple of hours - well, all right, seven - but I had a whole computer system to crash and burn." He opens his eyes to see her tall, skinny friend - the Doctor - outside the cell door.
"Nice cell you have here," the Doctor says and points at the mess on the floor, his eyes narrowing in concern. "Not so keen on the floor art, though. Not yours, I hope."
"His," says Donna. "We’ve got to get him out of here."
A blue light glows around the lock and the cell door swings open. After that his memories are like short clips of fuzzy video.
There’s a long walk balanced between Donna and her friend, his arms draped around their necks like scarves, her bare feet slapping on the cold concrete floors.
A big room like an undersea cavern.
Something too hot for comfort on the back of his head but everywhere it touches, it takes a worse pain away.
Donna saying, "Where’s home for you, sweetheart?"
A strange, loud scraping, wheezing sound and a flashing light that hurts his eyes.
The next thing, there are hands on his chest. "Mulder?"
He cracks open one eye, and there’s Scully limned by the dim reading lamp. He’s in her bed, under the covers, fully dressed, his head resting on a dark blue towel on top of her white pillows. She’s leaning over him, wide-eyed in alarm, her right hand on the pulse point in his neck. "Mulder, there’s dried blood all over your shirt. Where are you hurt?"
"Back of my head," he says, propping himself up on one elbow. She slides behind him, sitting on the bed. Her deft fingers part his hair, looking for damage, pressing where there should be an ugly tear in his scalp.
"There’s more dried blood but I can’t see anything. There’s no injury I can find. Get your shirt off."
"Now I know there’s been this whole kissing thing but that’s a little forward, don’t you think?" he teases. He feels remarkably good, if confused as to how he got here.
"Mulder," she growls, pressing her hand down his spine now, feeling for a wound. "You said you were in Utah. I was all ready to come after you and kick your ass."
He reaches back for her hand and pulls it into both of his. Their eyes meet and he sees her concern relax into affection. He strains up and kisses her. It’s chaste at first but he can tell the exact moment when she sets aside her desire to rip him a new one for scaring her in favor of deepening the kiss. Her tongue tip traces the crease of his lips until he lets her in, her hand caressing the back of his head, still cautious. He feels a happy kind of dizziness but no pain.
"How did you get into my bed?" she asks, dazed and slightly slurring her words, as he pulls away.
I wished really hard, he thinks.
"Some friends dropped me home," he says, with a half-smile
* * *
IV - Missing persons
The next time he sees Donna Noble is in London, 2010.
He is finally a free man, with a slightly stained character and a passport in his own name again. He decides to make good on a promise he made himself a decade ago, the first time he saw the glorious pale arc of Scully’s naked back in his bed. He had a fantasy then that she was coming to England with him. He was going to get her naked, in a crop circle, and - as a prelude to some serious fun - run his fingers down her vertebrae from her neck to her ass like a pianist playing the greatest fucking glissando in history.
In the end he substituted the crop circles for a bed and breakfast near Avebury - hell, they’re not in their twenties any more and there are places itchy straw should not ever go. Now he’s showing her the sights of London in the summer. They are staying in an apartment out west, by the river, with a bed the size of Times Square.
This, then, is happiness; this is walking in the light.
They’ve run out of milk so he kisses Scully on the cheek and tells her he’ll be five minutes. He jogs down to the High Street, with its spread of late-night convenience stores, cafes and rowdy pubs. He picks up a carton of milk and some of that expensive dark chocolate she has a love-hate relationship with, and is on his way back when he catches a glimpse of red hair. There’s something about red hair that always makes him take a second look, even now, when Scully is not 10 minutes away watching News 24 and waiting for him.
"Hey!" he yells. "Donna?"
It’s definitely her. She doesn’t look any different than the last time he saw her ten years ago, not a day older, and that sets off sparks of delight in him. She’s a time traveller.
Maybe he could find out how she did it, how she kept touching his life like a flat stone skimmed across water. He imagines taking Scully to meet her: finally someone who could understand that senior thesis because she’d lived part of it. It would be proof. Argue your way out of that one, Scully.
Donna’s talking into that tiny phone of hers, the picture-taking, music-playing device that seemed so amazing in 1998 and is now commonplace, even a little old-fashioned.
"Donna!"
She turns around, and there’s no recognition in her eyes at all. He calls her name again. "Veena, can I call you back?" she says. "Yeah. I know. Laters."
"Can I help you?" she asks with brisk politeness.
He smiles broadly. "Hey. It’s me," he says.
"And who’s me?"
"Fox Mulder."
She snorts. "Fox? Seriously?"
He laughs. "That’s the third time you’ve said that to me."
"Nah, sorry," she says, backing away. "I think you’ve got the wrong person."
"Your name is Donna Noble. You travel with this guy, he’s called the Doctor. I never got his second name. We shared a jail cell in Utah, 10 years ago. You were at a warehouse in New Jersey, and you captured a monster. You were at a UFO crash site in West Virginia in 1993 and you looked then exactly like you look now."
"Listen, sunshine, in 1993 I was 21 and working as a travel rep in Magaluf. And I’ve never been to anywhere in America but Orlando and it was shit. You’re thinking of someone else." She turns to leave.
"You travelled in time!" he cries. "I saw it."
She turns to look at him with mingled contempt and fear. "You’ve lost the plot, mate."
She stalks away. He is confounded. He’s certain it’s the same woman. She even has the same name. "Wait a second. Donna! Wait!"
He puts a hand on her shoulder, but she shrugs him off as violently as she can. "Get off me, you nutter, before I call the police," she says in a low growl, striding away. "I’ve never seen you before in my life."
"I’m on your phone! You took a picture of me!" he calls.
She doesn’t turn around again, but she’s jabbing at the buttons on the phone as she stalks away. She looks back just once, afraid, then hurries off down the street.
He stands and watches her until she disappears into the crowds, the disappointment like a bitter taste on his tongue.
* * *
V - A stone skipping across water
He’s clearing away the colored pens and wondering whether to just toss his old man’s folly of a timeline in the bin when there’s a sursurration in the air. Sheets of paper blow off the table, the drapes billow against the closed windows. Washes of pale light flow over the walls. There’s a wheezing sound he heard once before, which fades in and out in time with the beating of his poor overworked heart. He can feel the adrenaline flowing again, like the old days.
He walks into his bedroom. There’s a high, narrow mahogany closet covered with carved runes where once there was a shadowy empty corner. Pale blue light seeps from inside where tiny holes decorate the most beautiful of the carvings. He’d thought he was too old and had seen too much to be surprised ever again but he’s glad he’s wrong. He puts his glasses on and runs his fingers over what feels like wood, warm and grained to the touch. A subtle energy hums through it. There’s a moment of stillness, before the door opens with a movie soundtrack creak.
A tall redheaded woman steps out of the wardrobe. She’s thirty years younger than him now, early forties or so. She’s acquired a shabby elegance with that extra decade since he last saw her, a tailored black suit emphasizing her curves and an enormous, dark gray greatcoat, like a soldier’s, trailing down to her ankles - a little like the trenchcoats Scully once wore. Her red hair is swept up into a neat chignon. There’s also something about her eyes that throws him off-balance, something distant and knowing. She recognises him this time but he’s not sure he entirely recognises her.
"Donna Noble," he says. "Tell me you didn’t just get back from Narnia."
"Smartarse." She gives him a slow burn of a smile.
"Always," he says. "You remember me now?"
Her face becomes serious. "Do you remember me? This me?"
Suddenly he does and it all falls into place. "Why now?" he breathes.
"It’s time," she says.
* * *
On to Part II
or
Five Times Donna Noble Remembers Meeting That Bloke With The Stupid Name (And One Time She Doesn't)
or
Five Times Fox Mulder Remembers Meeting That Other Redhead (And One Time He Doesn't)
[Crossover, Doctor Who and The X-Files]
Rating: Adult, but only for language and insinuation
Disclaimer: copyrights belong to the BBC, Fox
Author's notes: Are at the end. Along with the thanks and the sarcastic remarks about smoking the special crack.
* * *
He hadn’t thought of the strange woman with the red hair in years. Yet since he had the heart attack and moved into The Willows, all he has is time to remember: cases and places; the odd things he’s seen; people lost and loved. Scully.
So one day - after dinner but before Amelia comes to check he’s okay for the night - he draws it all out on sheets from a legal pad. There are red, blue and green pens, footnotes, and a timeline held together with tape, for Christ’s sake. But even when it’s done he feels as though there’s something missing.
It’s a good job Amelia won’t be here for another ten minutes. She would lose her mind if she saw him sitting on the floor like a child with a coloring book. Assisted living, they call it, but it’s more like having a strict babysitter. He’s lucky, because he needs only minimal help, he still has all his marbles and he’s pretty spry for an old guy. He keeps himself to himself, the occasional visit from Will aside. There’s not much to nag him about. And he likes Amelia, with her strawberry blonde hair, shy flirting and ridiculous giggle.
He hauls his aching bones off the rug. He wishes Scully were here to see this. First, she’d mock him and then she’d help him figure out all the parts he’d left out. All his life, redheads laughing at him. How he misses it now.
He pushes his glasses back on his nose, leans on the mantlepiece next to the photograph of Scully that smirks at his idiocies every day, and surveys his work from six feet up. He hasn’t seen her for more than thirty years but his strange brand of intuition is insistent that he’s going to see her again.
It turns out he is right. The last time Fox Mulder meets Donna Noble is the day before he dies.
* * *
I - "Now is the time for all good men…"
The first time he remembers seeing her, they’re almost the same age.
Something huge slamming down from the sky just caused a blast wave that knocked him clear off his feet. The bridge is so much floating matchwood and ahead, a fireball consumes the center of a densely packed wood. He walks towards the crash site, flashlight in one hand, gun in the other, one part scared to five parts thrilled at the thought of seeing a ship at last.
He catches a glimpse of red hair ahead of him and just for a moment, his spirits leap at the thought that Scully pushed aside her objections and came out here after all. As he gets closer he realizes that the woman isn’t Scully. She’s about five inches too tall, longer hair, more broadly built and the jacket’s brown leather. There’s something vaguely familiar about her. She’s also walking very fast in the wrong direction, her breath blowing out in white clouds as she labors up the hill.
"Ma’am," he calls out. She turns around. She’s older than Scully, with a scowl on her narrow face. She’s muttering under her breath. "Ma’am, I need you to move away from the crash site. It could be dangerous."
"Should’ve known you’d be here, Mulder," she says, in an accent he immediately identifies as from London. "Great big trouble magnet, you are; just like him."
"How do you know my name?" he asks, the hairs on the back of his neck prickling.
"As if I’m going to forget a name like yours," she says. "I mean, seriously - Fox? What were your parents thinking? Child abuse, that is."
"We’ve met before?"
"Well, duh," she exclaims. "I’m hardly going to just guess your name is ‘Fox’, am I?"
He’s bewildered and speechless for a second, his mouth hanging open, then says: "Ma’am?"
"And cheers for the save, by the way," she says giving him a big smile. "Can’t remember if I said thank you last time."
"Thank you for what?" She starts her determined stomp up the hill again. He takes off after her: "Ma’am I can’t allow you to put yourself in danger."
She turns around, walking backwards. "Tough. And don’t you dare call me ma’am again."
"I’m ordering you to stop!" He can’t believe that just came out of his mouth.
"Order away, sunshine!" she yells. "You can’t make me."
"Did you notice I have a gun?"
She rolls her eyes. "Is it in your pocket or are you just pleased to see me?"
Okay, now he feels pathetic. She turns around again, walking still faster. He’s about to try to catch up when a running man brushes past his shoulder. He’s as tall as Mulder but skinnier, his long brown coat flapping behind him like a batcape. In one hand he carries something metallic green and machined into planes and curves, like a mutant auto part.
"Donna! Got it!" the man yells triumphantly. He grabs her hand.
"About bloody time," the woman - Donna - says, suddenly sounding cheerful. "Come on, then, let’s get the poor sod back in the air before anyone finds him."
They start running towards the crash site and even though Mulder follows, they lose him in the trees inside a minute. Twenty minutes after that, there’s another blast of wind that nearly knocks him to the ground and a triangular ship hovers for a moment, casting green light across the forest, then disappears with the telltale crack of something that has gone from zero to Mach One in no time flat.
The army shows up ten minutes later but he doesn’t tell them about the couple on the hill. He suspects that’s mostly because even he can’t quite believe it.
Scully rescues him from the lock-up two hours after that. "Ball lightning," she says. "It caused a flash fire."
"All that scorched earth from ball lightning? Are you insane? It was a ship!"
"Shut up and get in the car, Mulder."
Fury blazes behind that tight-lipped facade but he’s focused on something else: that she came after him, even though she thought he was wrong. Perhaps this one might stick around.
* * *
II - "Smile, sunshine"
The first time Donna meets him, he’s older than she is.
The first Clinton is in the White House, the Spice Girls are in the charts, the Yankees have just swept the Padres to win the World Series, and even Scully is professing to like baseball - and him - just a little.
A warehouse in Newark. Reports of strange blue lights in the sky, a shrieking in the night, and six men found dead in nine days, with missing limbs and ragged chunks torn from their torsos as if something fierce and toothy were snacking on them. The victims are linked to the mob in four of the six cases, so naturally Scully suggests it’s a Mafia warning.
As if the Mob would warn transgressors by making it look as though velociraptors were doing the killing. Are their enemies sleeping with the plesiosaurs?
Scully is deeply unimpressed with this sarcasm, there’s a harsh exchange of words and that is why he is alone in the warehouse right now, like an idiot.
There’s an unnatural soupy quality to the darkness, as though it’s filled with thick smoke, and a fetid stench, like rotting flesh with a topnote of blocked drains. His flashlight won’t reach the corners of the hangar. A sudden deafening noise like the tearing of metal sends him crashing against the wall, his heart pounding like a Gene Krupa drum solo. He can hear thudding footsteps, the scritch of long claws on concrete. He finds an alcove and edges into it so he can see what the hell is making that horrific sound without it seeing him.
If cars felt pain as they were crushed into scrap metal, they would scream like that.
"Stay close!" a man yells in the distance.
"How can I when I can’t even see your skinny arse five feet in front of me?" a woman shouts back. "Slow down."
"Can’t! Perception clouds are tricky. Stay close or we’ll lose each other."
There’s another roar, still nearer, and a shriek about ten feet away. The scritch of claws turns into a loud scrape and thump of something with huge feet, approaching faster and faster. Jesus, the *ground* is shaking. He sees someone hurtling towards him, a woman. Someone with a sharp face, and wavy red hair streaming out behind. Further back, but gaining on her, is something dark, something vast.
Scarcely thinking, he reaches out, catches her arm and swings her into his alcove. The creature pounds past their hiding place, trailing a foul sulphuric fug in its wake. She hits the wall next to him and rebounds off it into a heap, backpack skidding to hit his feet.
It was almost five years ago but his memory is excellent. "Donna?" he whispers in astonishment, stretching out a hand to help a tallish figure in a leather jacket and hoop earrings pick herself up off the floor.
"Who’re you?" she asks shakily, brushing the dirt off her jeans. She hasn’t changed from that night in the forest where she knew his name. Actually, it’s weird, she doesn’t look different at all. Even her hair is the same.
"Fox Mulder."
"Fox? For serious?" She tries to laugh but she’s still catching her breath. "Nah. What’s your name really?"
He drags out his ID, shines his flashlight on it. "See?" he says.
She frowns. "That’s child abuse, that."
"You said that last time," he replies in excitement, "you remember?"
"Oh, I’d’ve remembered a lanky great drink of water like you," she says, looking at him in frank appreciation. "So, Mister FBI Agent, you going to tell me how you know my name?"
"We’ve met. We were near McKevitt, maybe five years ago. You must remember - a goddamned *spaceship* came down from the sky!"
She looks at him, a bit blank. "When you say spaceship, what are we talking about? Was it, like, a rocket, or a sort of…" she gestures with her hands, "saucer-y interstellar carrier, or a little shuttle-y thing?"
He stares. "You’re kidding me, right?"
"Donna Noble, this is not a time for introductions!" a voice shouts. "I need the Radolus Box and some light, right now."
"Yeah, yeah," she yells into the black. "Keep your bloody hair on, spaceman!"
"NOW."
She sighs and looks Mulder up and down. "I never get to just appreciate the scenery. Enjoy the view."
There’s a piercing flash of blue light and that metallic howling far closer than he would like. Drawing in a scared breath, Donna picks up her backpack and squares her shoulders for a fight. "Right, then."
She pulls a silver-grey square out of her back pocket and it flips open like some Star Trek-style communicator, the top screen bursting into life with a picture of sunflowers, numbered buttons on the bottom half lined in blue light. He realises it’s some kind of advanced cellphone. She points it at him.
"Oi! Smile, sunshine."
A flash goes off and he blinks. "Sometimes you’ve got to take the scenery with you," she says with a grin.
"If it comes near you," she adds, pointing at his flashlight, "switch your torch off and on. It hates sudden changes in light. It paralyzes it. Its eyes can’t cope with it."
"What’s ‘it’?" he says. "Donna, wait, who is ‘it’?"
But she’s already shuffling towards where the man’s voice came from. She points the phone out into the darkness. The flashbulb is like a firework in the inky black and there’s another roar from the creature.
"Again," shouts the man. There’s a blast of tinny alien-sounding music filled with handclaps and yelps, nothing he recognizes.
"Damn it!" she snaps, "Sorry, wrong button. Flaming Nokias." The music cuts off and there’s another camera flash.
Another long, roaring scream is bitten off as a bright blaze of blue light fills the warehouse. When it goes dark again, it is the normal shadow-ridden darkness of anywhere on Earth. Moonlight is coming in through the tiny high windows by the roof. He can just make out two figures standing by a small box on the floor, high-fiving each other. But by the time he makes his way over to where they were standing, they’ve already gone.
It’s not until five years later, when he decides that Scully doesn’t dance enough and waltzes her round the kitchen to songs from the radio, that he recognizes the music from the phone again - "Hey Ya" - and has the thrill of knowing for sure that he met honest to god *time travellers*.
* * *
III - Dice and the universe
A Utah jail cell is the last place Mulder expects to see her again.
It’s only three weeks since his mother killed herself. Three weeks since he found out that his sister had died before he had even started looking for her properly. Scully has been trying to keep him close by her ever since, afraid his fragile sense of peace wouldn’t last.
She was right, but he hates the way she can’t help but hover over him. Worse still is being spied on for signs that he is cracking. He needs to be busy, which is why he fled on an early plane this morning while she was stuck testifying in a Baltimore courtroom. He’s not a complete ass about it: he left a message on her cellphone before he switched his off.
Frohike gave him the location of a small base - he’s kind of fuzzy on where right now, which is worrying - where the guys suspected records were being kept. They’d told him it would be quiet but instead there’s some kind of alert going on, and the place is bristling with guards. He’d managed to sneak into one of the labs and then, nothing. Someone has taken what felt like a baseball bat to his head. They have to hold him upright to walk him into their cells and there’s blood sliding down the back of his neck, soaking the collar of his shirt.
He hears her first, an echoing bellow down the corridor. "Oi! Chunky! You look like a man who knows where the fridge is. What about a sandwich? I’m bloody starving down here!"
There’s more shouting somewhere ahead of him, and he sees a smeary figure behind the dirty plexiglass walls of the cell. "Up yours too, lardboy!" a woman shouts. There’s a flicker of recognition in his mind.
They throw him into the holding cell, and he stays on the floor for a minute, waiting for the room to stop shifting around him.
"Oh my God," says the voice. "Mulder, isn’t it?"
One hand goes to his shoulders. "Can you stand?"
He shakes his head, which was foolish. The pain screams from the back of his scalp as she touches it with her fingertips. She swears in a low, fluent torrent. "You’re in a bad way. I’ll get help." He flinches as she yells again, hitting the thick plexiglass with the flat of her hand. "Oi, you lot! He needs a doctor!"
She grabs his forearm to help him off the floor and Mulder tries to haul himself to his feet. The room tips like a rowboat on a lake and he is spectacularly sick all over someone’s blue sneakers.
"Bollocks," she mutters, puts her hands in his armpits and pulls him upright. She drags him to the cot furthest away from the vomit splatter, sits him down, then toes off her soiled sneakers, picks them up with a dainty thumb and forefinger and tosses them into the far corner. They’re followed by a pair of soaked black socks.
"Sorry," he says woozily, keeling over so he can lie down. "Sorry. Airport breakfast. Lots of coffee."
"Shhh, don’t matter. Never liked those shoes much, even if they are good for running. Felt like copying."
There is a long interlude of yelling as she tries to get him a doctor. Or the doctor; she says both, but no one comes. It degenerates into threats and aspersions cast on the guards’ morality, parentage, competence and general hygiene. He’s not sure how it helps but it seems to make her feel better.
Eventually she flops down next to him and proffers a small white tablet which turns out to be mint gum rather than the painkiller he craves. He chews for a few minutes, until his head hurts too much for even that sort of movement, then makes a small stalactite of it under the bed.
Scully is going to kill him for running away and this wondrous cat’s cradle of an understanding they’ve been building will be entangled. It’ll be months before she’ll let him kiss her again; that’s how furious she’s going to be.
Apparently he said this last part out loud. "I bet she will. I bloody would," Donna says, calm now. There’s a hand stroking his hair. Not the hand he wants but a comforting hand nonetheless. "Come on, sweetheart. You can’t go to sleep, not with a concussion. Talk to me."
Over the next few hours he talks and talks and he doesn’t seem to have many filters - perhaps it’s because she’s very good at impertinent questions. He tells her about Scully, about his sister, about how all he ever wanted to do as a kid was see the universe, but the aliens are not friendly, and the humans are worse.
She tells him about worlds where peaceful beings communicate in song, giant plants compose drum sonatas and of a human empire at peace and stretching across the stars. Either she lives in a fantasy world so baroquely detailed it makes Lord of the Rings look like The Hungry Caterpillar or she’s telling the truth. He wants to believe she is.
"Why do we keep meeting, do you think?" he asks her.
"I think maybe it’s all about patterns," she says. "My grandad says that God does not play dice with the universe."
He laughs, and wishes he hadn’t. "Your grandad is Einstein?"
"No, you prawn, he likes the quote," she says, smiling. "Everything happens for a reason. Sometimes for reasons we can’t see. We just need to find out what they are."
Isn’t that the story of his life?
He’s just clinging on to consciousness with the last of his willpower when he hears her hiss, "And where the hell have you been, you useless bloody Martian?"
"Perspective, Donna. It’s only been a couple of hours - well, all right, seven - but I had a whole computer system to crash and burn." He opens his eyes to see her tall, skinny friend - the Doctor - outside the cell door.
"Nice cell you have here," the Doctor says and points at the mess on the floor, his eyes narrowing in concern. "Not so keen on the floor art, though. Not yours, I hope."
"His," says Donna. "We’ve got to get him out of here."
A blue light glows around the lock and the cell door swings open. After that his memories are like short clips of fuzzy video.
There’s a long walk balanced between Donna and her friend, his arms draped around their necks like scarves, her bare feet slapping on the cold concrete floors.
A big room like an undersea cavern.
Something too hot for comfort on the back of his head but everywhere it touches, it takes a worse pain away.
Donna saying, "Where’s home for you, sweetheart?"
A strange, loud scraping, wheezing sound and a flashing light that hurts his eyes.
The next thing, there are hands on his chest. "Mulder?"
He cracks open one eye, and there’s Scully limned by the dim reading lamp. He’s in her bed, under the covers, fully dressed, his head resting on a dark blue towel on top of her white pillows. She’s leaning over him, wide-eyed in alarm, her right hand on the pulse point in his neck. "Mulder, there’s dried blood all over your shirt. Where are you hurt?"
"Back of my head," he says, propping himself up on one elbow. She slides behind him, sitting on the bed. Her deft fingers part his hair, looking for damage, pressing where there should be an ugly tear in his scalp.
"There’s more dried blood but I can’t see anything. There’s no injury I can find. Get your shirt off."
"Now I know there’s been this whole kissing thing but that’s a little forward, don’t you think?" he teases. He feels remarkably good, if confused as to how he got here.
"Mulder," she growls, pressing her hand down his spine now, feeling for a wound. "You said you were in Utah. I was all ready to come after you and kick your ass."
He reaches back for her hand and pulls it into both of his. Their eyes meet and he sees her concern relax into affection. He strains up and kisses her. It’s chaste at first but he can tell the exact moment when she sets aside her desire to rip him a new one for scaring her in favor of deepening the kiss. Her tongue tip traces the crease of his lips until he lets her in, her hand caressing the back of his head, still cautious. He feels a happy kind of dizziness but no pain.
"How did you get into my bed?" she asks, dazed and slightly slurring her words, as he pulls away.
I wished really hard, he thinks.
"Some friends dropped me home," he says, with a half-smile
* * *
IV - Missing persons
The next time he sees Donna Noble is in London, 2010.
He is finally a free man, with a slightly stained character and a passport in his own name again. He decides to make good on a promise he made himself a decade ago, the first time he saw the glorious pale arc of Scully’s naked back in his bed. He had a fantasy then that she was coming to England with him. He was going to get her naked, in a crop circle, and - as a prelude to some serious fun - run his fingers down her vertebrae from her neck to her ass like a pianist playing the greatest fucking glissando in history.
In the end he substituted the crop circles for a bed and breakfast near Avebury - hell, they’re not in their twenties any more and there are places itchy straw should not ever go. Now he’s showing her the sights of London in the summer. They are staying in an apartment out west, by the river, with a bed the size of Times Square.
This, then, is happiness; this is walking in the light.
They’ve run out of milk so he kisses Scully on the cheek and tells her he’ll be five minutes. He jogs down to the High Street, with its spread of late-night convenience stores, cafes and rowdy pubs. He picks up a carton of milk and some of that expensive dark chocolate she has a love-hate relationship with, and is on his way back when he catches a glimpse of red hair. There’s something about red hair that always makes him take a second look, even now, when Scully is not 10 minutes away watching News 24 and waiting for him.
"Hey!" he yells. "Donna?"
It’s definitely her. She doesn’t look any different than the last time he saw her ten years ago, not a day older, and that sets off sparks of delight in him. She’s a time traveller.
Maybe he could find out how she did it, how she kept touching his life like a flat stone skimmed across water. He imagines taking Scully to meet her: finally someone who could understand that senior thesis because she’d lived part of it. It would be proof. Argue your way out of that one, Scully.
Donna’s talking into that tiny phone of hers, the picture-taking, music-playing device that seemed so amazing in 1998 and is now commonplace, even a little old-fashioned.
"Donna!"
She turns around, and there’s no recognition in her eyes at all. He calls her name again. "Veena, can I call you back?" she says. "Yeah. I know. Laters."
"Can I help you?" she asks with brisk politeness.
He smiles broadly. "Hey. It’s me," he says.
"And who’s me?"
"Fox Mulder."
She snorts. "Fox? Seriously?"
He laughs. "That’s the third time you’ve said that to me."
"Nah, sorry," she says, backing away. "I think you’ve got the wrong person."
"Your name is Donna Noble. You travel with this guy, he’s called the Doctor. I never got his second name. We shared a jail cell in Utah, 10 years ago. You were at a warehouse in New Jersey, and you captured a monster. You were at a UFO crash site in West Virginia in 1993 and you looked then exactly like you look now."
"Listen, sunshine, in 1993 I was 21 and working as a travel rep in Magaluf. And I’ve never been to anywhere in America but Orlando and it was shit. You’re thinking of someone else." She turns to leave.
"You travelled in time!" he cries. "I saw it."
She turns to look at him with mingled contempt and fear. "You’ve lost the plot, mate."
She stalks away. He is confounded. He’s certain it’s the same woman. She even has the same name. "Wait a second. Donna! Wait!"
He puts a hand on her shoulder, but she shrugs him off as violently as she can. "Get off me, you nutter, before I call the police," she says in a low growl, striding away. "I’ve never seen you before in my life."
"I’m on your phone! You took a picture of me!" he calls.
She doesn’t turn around again, but she’s jabbing at the buttons on the phone as she stalks away. She looks back just once, afraid, then hurries off down the street.
He stands and watches her until she disappears into the crowds, the disappointment like a bitter taste on his tongue.
* * *
V - A stone skipping across water
He’s clearing away the colored pens and wondering whether to just toss his old man’s folly of a timeline in the bin when there’s a sursurration in the air. Sheets of paper blow off the table, the drapes billow against the closed windows. Washes of pale light flow over the walls. There’s a wheezing sound he heard once before, which fades in and out in time with the beating of his poor overworked heart. He can feel the adrenaline flowing again, like the old days.
He walks into his bedroom. There’s a high, narrow mahogany closet covered with carved runes where once there was a shadowy empty corner. Pale blue light seeps from inside where tiny holes decorate the most beautiful of the carvings. He’d thought he was too old and had seen too much to be surprised ever again but he’s glad he’s wrong. He puts his glasses on and runs his fingers over what feels like wood, warm and grained to the touch. A subtle energy hums through it. There’s a moment of stillness, before the door opens with a movie soundtrack creak.
A tall redheaded woman steps out of the wardrobe. She’s thirty years younger than him now, early forties or so. She’s acquired a shabby elegance with that extra decade since he last saw her, a tailored black suit emphasizing her curves and an enormous, dark gray greatcoat, like a soldier’s, trailing down to her ankles - a little like the trenchcoats Scully once wore. Her red hair is swept up into a neat chignon. There’s also something about her eyes that throws him off-balance, something distant and knowing. She recognises him this time but he’s not sure he entirely recognises her.
"Donna Noble," he says. "Tell me you didn’t just get back from Narnia."
"Smartarse." She gives him a slow burn of a smile.
"Always," he says. "You remember me now?"
Her face becomes serious. "Do you remember me? This me?"
Suddenly he does and it all falls into place. "Why now?" he breathes.
"It’s time," she says.
* * *
On to Part II