Fic:: Lullaby For A Stormy Night [XF] 2/2
Fic:: Lullaby For A Stormy Night
by Raven
R, The X-Files, Mulder/Scully UST. Scully is sure this isn't supposed to be happening, and if it is, that there should be a scientific explanation.
part one
It’s easier not to believe in the cockroach that ate Cincinnati. Scully has a nice mental image of a giant cockroach and a skyscraper with a comical bite taken out of it, and sometimes even acknowledgement from her partner that some things are too weird to be true. It’s different, somehow, when it’s an ordinary city apartment, with large windows that let in the distant traffic noise. Scully stands in the centre of the room, avoiding clothes strewn over the floor, and wishes for some hallmark of weirdness, some rampaging monster or double-parked spaceships or Jedi hand-waving, or something.
Nothing happens. She takes a deep breath and walks around the room whilst Samantha perches on the bed and watches her. Their eyes meet. “What?” Samantha asks, amiable to a fault. “Why are you looking like that?”
“It’s so normal,” Scully tells her, honestly.
“Normal?” Samantha laughs. “Did you or did you not get in here through a bathroom cubicle?”
That, Scully thinks, is an unprecedented indicator of imminent weirdness. She said she’d go along with it and she generally keeps her promises; that was the only reason she didn’t give up in disgust when Samantha led her calmly into the ladies’ restroom. She was busy worrying someone else would come in, or worse, that Mulder had for whatever reason emerged from the basement and seen them traipsing around the building, and she wasn’t quite paying attention, and when Samantha leapt upwards at nothing, pulling Scully behind her, she opened her mouth to yell.
And got a mouthful of pillowcase, rolling over and coming to rest flat on her back in a bedroom lit by winter daylight.
“Yes,” Scully says hesitantly. “And this is where you live?”
“This is my apartment, yes.”
“In another universe?” Scully persists.
“Well, yes.” Samantha lies back on the bed. “And here’s your proof - I rolled over in bed and went through the hole we just came through.”
“Not this morning.” Scully is trying to think like a scientist, like an empiricist. “This morning you appeared in my car.”
“There’s the rub,” Samantha says, contemplatively. “But I have a theory about that. Come with me.”
“Of course you do,” Scully mutters, but she follows, stepping out of the room, across a small hallway and into a kitchen. She is sure she has never seen this apartment before, or anywhere like it, but there are brief, disturbing notes of familiarity in the details of the place. Scully picks up a tape off the kitchen table, tugging it out from under a pile of discarded paper. It’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers. She puts it back down.
Samantha is rummaging in a cupboard, muttering to herself. At length she emerges holding something flat and colourful. “Got it.”
“Got what?” Scully asks.
Samantha shows her a painted glass plate, decorated with crooked, irregular whorls “Gift from an ex,” she says, frowning. “I always hated it.”
She sets it on the table, and reaching down, takes off one of her shoes. Before Scully can react, she smashes the stiletto heel into the plate. It doesn’t shatter. Some toughening property of the glass transforms the blow into a spider web of cracks.
“What did you do that for?” demands Scully breathlessly. She recognises the impulsiveness in the movement, the ease with which a single person can make the world break.
Samantha picks up the plate and points to the point of impact. “This is the hole,” she says calmly. “This is where you can fall from my bed into another universe. And these” - her fingers indicate the radial cracks - “are the fault-lines. These are where he falls into the wrong basement and you fall into the wrong bed and I fall into the wrong car.”
Scully hates that familiar intuitive logic, the blind thrusts into the dark that yield the results a scientific analysis of events can’t. She hates it, but sometimes it works. “What do you mean, the wrong bed?”
Samantha holds a finger to her lips. “I knew something made it personal.”
Scully stares at her, says nothing. A noise like an irritated insect cuts through the silence and with a slight sigh, she reaches for her cell phone. “Scully.”
“Hey, it’s me. Talk to Frohike.”
Before she can say anything, Frohike comes on the line, sounding worried. “Agent Scully, we’ve got a problem. Mulder’s here, and um, we found him underneath our table.”
“So?” Scully’s an expert in Mulder’s behaviour because someone has to be, and this sounds strange but not entirely atypical.
“So he says he can’t remember how he got there.” Frohike pauses. “As in, at all.”
“What? Put him back on,” Scully says impatiently.
“Hey, Scully.”
“Mulder, what do you mean, you can’t remember? What’s the last thing you do remember?”
“I’m not sure.” He sounds frustrated, and she can picture him very clearly, probably pacing up and down fretfully while the Gunmen hover like unlikely mother hens. “I remember last night. I was in my apartment, in the shower. The phone rang and I let the machine pick up. I think I listened to it - did you call me?”
“Yes, I did.”
“Yeah... and that’s it, that’s all I remember. I think I might have gone to sleep, but then it goes blank. Next thing I remember, I was on the floor with Langly shrieking at me like a girl.”
“Hey,” says someone in the background in aggrieved tones.
“Mulder, are you saying you drove over there in your sleep?” She’s already thinking about dosages and tabs, wishing he was here so she could track his pupils. “Were you drinking? Did you take anything?”
“No, Scully. I know I didn’t.” He sounds petulant, which probably means he’s telling the truth.
“And he didn’t drive over here either,” Byers reports, apparently giving in to the urge to put her on speakerphone. “Or if he did, we can’t find his car.”
“Public transport? Walking?” Scully snaps.
“No,” Mulder says, in defeated tones. “We can’t find my shoes, either.”
Scully wants for a single horrendous moment to burst out laughing - this sort of thing never seems to happen to anyone else - but she fights it successfully and stands up. “Okay, I’ll be right over.”
“Thanks. Listen, Scully - don’t tell Skinner about this just yet, okay? He’ll have an apoplexy.”
Privately, Scully thinks he’s already having an apoplexy, given that neither of them have come into work today for no immediately apparent reason, but she says goodbye and hangs up without voicing the thought.
Samantha looks at her, smiling a little. “Something’s happened?”
“I have to go.” Almost childishly, she adds, “You can’t come.”
“I kind of figured that. I’ll see you soon, Agent Scully.” She sits on the edge of the table, legs swinging. “Probably whether I want to or not. You know your way out.”
Scully nods. “Yes, I do.”
This time, she notices an earthenware jug on the bedside table, holding a small handful of lilac flowers. Scully breathes in the scent, and trying not to think about it, she sits carefully on the centre of the bed and falls back through the hole in the universe, thudding feet first into one of the toilet cubicles. She’s suddenly very grateful that no one is already in there, and that the room is silent. She waits five seconds just in case, then moves swiftly outside.
The drive through the rain is unpleasant. Her thoughts are following the lines of the drops down the windscreen, slowly edging trails of Samantha, Ohio, the long roads, the dream, blurring into larger puddles of confused memory: the crushed flowers, the woman who knows too much to be lying, Mulder half-asleep and half-forgotten, eyes green, then black, then closed and lost.
She skids to a halt almost with noticing, nearly forgets to lock the car, runs to the door only to find it already open. Langly is standing in the archway, his hair thick with raindrops. “He’s gone!” he yells.
“What?” Scully demands, pushing past him. The room is more of a mess than usual, the low green light failing to hide the nacho cheese stuck to the nearest keyboard. “I told you not to let him leave!”
“We didn’t,” Frohike says, wandering in. He looks far less hysterical than Langly. “He disappeared. Right here, in front of our eyes.”
“What?” Scully says again, sensing that the word is beginning to suffer from overuse.
“Scully, he’s gone. He just... faded away.” Frohike sits down in a swivel chair. “I think something weird is going on.”
Scully thinks about it for a minute before pulling out her phone. She dials and he picks up.
“Hey, Scully.” Before she can say anything, he goes on: “Listen, where are you? Not that I’m not enjoying being Skinner’s blue-eyed agent for a change, but I’m running out of ways to stall him. Pretty soon I’ll have to start telling him that you’ve gotten flu or moved to Cuba or something.”
“I won’t be long,” she promises. “I just need to ask you something. What have you been doing all morning?”
“Sticking pencils in the ceiling, mostly. Eating sandwiches. Getting into the head of a single white male serial killer from Ohio. Oh, and I alphabetised one of the cabinets. Why do you ask?”
Scully motions to the others to keep quiet. “When was the last time you saw any of the Gunmen?”
“Uh, not for a while. I got Langly to do some background checks while we were in Ohio, but that was by email. Why?”
“No reason. I’ll come in as soon as I can.”
She hangs up without saying goodbye and nods slowly at the Gunmen. “Something weird is going on,” she concurs.
They nod and blink. And after that she has to leave, go to work and go home, because weird things aren’t supposed to happen outside of office hours.
*
In the morning, Scully arrives in the office only five steps behind Mulder, who is walking with head down and muttering to himself about the rain, the greyness, and how the day dictates the virtue of throwing oneself into the Potomac.
“I think I’ll pass,” she says out loud, and he turns to look at her, gives her the rueful grin she recognises as acknowledgement, however brief, that sometimes she’s right and he’s just being melodramatic. He holds the door open for her and she steps inside. The room is cold and dim, and Mulder sits down at his desk without comment, trying absently to get the rainwater out of his hair.
There is something else about him she recognises but cannot place; something half-distracted, half-feral, where he’s too quick to look over his shoulder and too slow to answer to his name. The mess the room is in, spread with paper scraps and pencils stuck perilously in the ceiling, is what reminds her: once again, he’s sharing headspace with a killer. She could do some work of her own, but they’re not partners when he’s profiling and she leaves him to it. He doesn’t look up as she leaves.
Outside, in the rain, she tries to walk off the mood. It isn’t early in the morning any more, but there are still streetlights shining through the dimness, making the world into a black and white movie with added sodium glare. She narrowly avoids stepping in a puddle and tries not to swear. Samantha has no such qualms. She holds one foot up, staring distastefully at the water seeping through the sole of her shoe. “Fuck this shit,” she says after a while.
“Good morning to you, too,” Scully replies evenly.
“It isn’t morning where I’m coming from,” Samantha says. “It’s the middle of the night.”
They walk, silently, down the sidewalk, avoiding the recoil splashes of the passing cars. Maybe Mulder has a point, Scully thinks vaguely; maybe if George Washington first sailed up the Potomac on a day like this one, he would have turned right around.
“It’s dreams, isn’t it,” she says, and it isn’t a question.
“Yeah, I think so.” Samantha nods slowly. “When we’re asleep, we’re making the crossing between worlds. The lines have become too thin.”
“It’s not them.” Scully is definite on this point.
“The EBEs? No, I guess not.” Samantha is chewing on one thumbnail. “Although I wonder if their presence, or the presence of their technology, contributes to the weakening of the space-time continuum in some way. Nothing can travel faster than light, after all.”
Scully ignores this. She is thinking about dreams, about how the mind doesn’t perceive a curve in space but knows, all the same, that it’s there. Last night she dreamed of Mulder again, in the muted light of her bedroom, windows wide open to a city of ethereal quiet, serene in rainwater-wet stillness. With sunrise came a cool, fresh dawn, full of promise, and he was there into the morning, just, a half-seen wraith fading into nothing. She wonders where he is now, why he’s here, freelance profiling, and out there with a cross against his heart and under the Gunmen’s table and somewhere else in the warmth she’s left behind, naked beneath her sheets on a wet Washington morning.
“I thought maybe I should just try and stay awake.” Samantha breaks in, her voice muffled by the rain. “I tried that. But it doesn’t work; I got overtired, and cranky, and then I started to hallucinate, and got to the same place by a different route. Even a slightly altered mental state is enough to punch through into another world. Seems like you can’t ever go home again.”
“This isn’t really happening,” Scully murmurs. “It’s dreams.”
“Define real,” Samantha says sharply. “It’s happening. Whether it’s really happening, I don’t know.”
She stamps one foot hard on the ground, lifts and holds it in mid-air, then stamps again.
“What are you doing?” Scully asks, when a suitably long period of time has elapsed.
“Trying to get the water out.” Samantha stares balefully downwards. “It’s not working. I need new shoes. Jesus, I need a new life.”
Scully tries hard not to agree aloud. “I think we need expert help,” she says, and on the way over in the rain, she tries not to think about how she can’t remember the last time she went shoe-shopping. The rain drips quietly down the windscreen and Samantha doesn’t talk much, so it isn’t easy, but then nothing is.
“Who’s the new kid?” Frohike demands as they enter. “She’s hot.”
“She’s a federal agent,” Scully says briskly, without having to add and she can kick your ass seventeen times before breakfast, and to Samantha, “These are Frohike, Langly, and Byers.”
They look up at their names, nod politely, but Scully can feel something afoot, a sense of purpose in the paper scraps and blinking diodes. At length, Frohike says, “We think we figured it out.”
“You did?” Scully feels oddly like grinning; it isn’t this simple, it’s never this simple. “You know what’s happening?”
“Something’s making a hole in the space-time continuum,” Langley says without looking up. “People - and objects - are dropping through the cracks.”
“Bad science,” Scully says, more sharply than she meant to. “That’s the stuff of science fiction.”
“They have to get their ideas from somewhere,” Byers replies, soft-spoken as ever. “And it’s not a question of hard science, because we’re not at that level of understanding. This isn’t the truth. It’s a convenient lie.”
“Don’t we get enough of those?” Samantha asks, with a gentleness Scully doesn’t think she can match at this point. “Do we need another one?”
“An algorithm, then,” Byers tries. “Convenient tool of calculation. A story we can tell to help us get the results we want.”
“All right.” Samantha sits down on the edge of a table; Scully keeps on pacing. “How do we get the results we want?”
Langley turns his monitor to face them. “There’s a lot of power involved here,” he says slowly. “I could go over the full sequence of calculations” - Frohike coughs significantly - “but I won’t. That hole didn’t come from nothing. It was created somehow, and to make something like that, and sustain it, requires an enormous amount of energy. Our first option, then - a device of some sort.”
Scully catches the euphemism, but Samantha is quicker. “This hole, I should mention, is in my apartment. In my bed. You are not nuking it.”
“You have a hole in the space-time continuum in your bed?” Frohike says breathily, as though it’s the greatest turn-on ever. For him, Scully thinks, it probably is.
“Yes, I do,” Samantha snaps. “And what I want is for there not to be one. Next option, please?”
“Duct tape.” Langley still doesn’t turn around.
“Please be kidding,” Samantha says earnestly. “Please let me wake up and this is all some kind of surrealist nightmare brought on from eating too many Pop Tarts.”
Surprising herself, Scully laughs. “And the third option, gentlemen?”
“We wait and see,” Byers says, still softly. He smiles at Scully, and then at Samantha. “Whoever or whatever is doing this, they’re going to run out of power. And when that happens, the hole will just collapse as though it never existed. All we need to do is wait.”
“So that’s the great plan?” Samantha looks discomfited, like she’s missed a step on an escalator. “We do nothing?”
“Hardest thing to do.” Scully smiles wryly. “Thanks for your time, guys. I’ll keep you posted, okay?”
“Our pleasure,” Frohike replies, and Scully can tell he’s trying to get to them stay longer, but she’s ready to go home. Hurry up and wait, she thinks, and smiles, because it’s never this easy.
On the way out, Samantha says, “I have to go.”
“All right...” Scully begins, but Samantha looks frantic, hands held in front of her, bones contorting into sharp, savage shapes.
“I have to go, I have to, I really have to go.”
And just like that, she’s gone, vanished without trace on the rain-wet sidewalk. Scully turns around on the spot, describing a great circle with her feet, taking in cars and streetlamps and rain and people and silence as the air fills in the space of a body. She has to go to back to work.
Her phone rings. “Scully.”
At first, no answer other than tight, ragged breathing, and then Mulder’s voice, “I have to go,” and a burst of static and a clunk, and silence.
*
Scully tries to go home, but she doesn’t quite make it.
It’s quiet outside, it’s still so quiet, streetlights barely shining through the cotton-wool gloom. Scully takes two steps forward, pivots on her heel, takes one step back. There’s a radio a few doors down from where she’s standing, and a kid in sneakers flicking from crackly station to crackly station, great bursts of white noise breaking like waves on the street.
On the stoop next door, there is a woman crying. Scully walks another two steps, then turns back. The woman doesn’t look up, and a car swishes by through the dark, leaves behind a wake of silence. The air smells of salt, and Scully thinks about fog rolling in from the Atlantic, leaving a blanket across the miles inland.
She tried to call Mulder back. The first time he answered, he was peremptory - there had been a breakthrough, he’d call her back - made her feel like normality was extant somewhere, maybe, somewhere not here; but the second time his voice was softer, shifting towards incoherence, and the third time there was only the sound of his breathing, quick and harsh, and the voices calling him back, distant like the ocean in a shell. Siren-song, she thought, and she let him go.
The kid keeps turning the dial. There are faint strains of music, twanging country music, sounding like pick-up trucks in faraway heartlands, a splash of rock, a news-snippet, a brief burble about Ways and Means. A clear voice cuts through, “There’s a storm brewing in DC tonight,” and sinks back into noise.
Scully wavers. When no one emerges from the house, no one comes, she walks deliberately through the curtain of fog and sits on the bottom step. “Are you okay?” she asks, and feels the familiar burst of awkwardness, uncertainty. For a second she misses Mulder, who demands many things from her but never a filled silence, never the meaninglessness of words thrown haphazardly into the dark.
The woman is older than her, but has reached her age with grace; there’s a careful elegance in the lines of her face. “I’m fine,” she says, calm behind the tears. “I’m fine.”
“Sorry, ma’am,” Scully says quietly, “but you looked like you weren’t fine.”
“I am fine. I saw my husband today.” She smiles, looks up, past Scully along the dimmed lines of lights.
Scully nods, slowly.
“He was diagnosed with cancer in 1982. He died of it.” She’s still crying behind the smile, without gasp or sound. “I’m fine. But you’d cry, wouldn’t you? Wouldn’t you cry?”
Scully nods again, and stands up. She lets her hand brush the woman’s shoulder - a tiny touch, the sweetness of space and time without the mess of explanation - and walks the few steps back through the fog. It closes in and for a few moments, the city is entirely silent around her. Looking across, she isn’t surprised to see the kid’s gone, with his radio, no marks in the dust to point that they were there.
Her feet feel heavy as she lets herself into her building, clambers up the many steps because the elevator would be too bright, too empty, and steps into her apartment. The place looks normal when she turns on the lights, and when she’s taken off her shoes, her coat, shed the damp of the night, she belongs to herself.
An hour later, the phone rings.
“A breakthrough of some kind,” Scully says into it, mixing cake batter with her free hand. “No, I got a call from him today before he left. He knows where the next murder will be.” There’s a pause as, with difficulty, she breaks an egg into it. “No, Mom, he isn’t psychic. He’s a profiler. It’s what they do.”
Whisk, whisk, whisk of the batter, and it starts to turn into creamy yellow fluff. She notices she hasn’t yet switched on the oven to preheat, and takes a careful step over to turn the dial.
“It’s what he used to do, before we were partners. Yeah, he had a life before me, who knew.”
Her mother’s laughter drops softly down the line. The batter’s nearly done. “Am I keeping you away from dinner? Oh, you’ve had it already?”
She stops and looks up at the wall clock, then sighs. She never was that great at being deliberately ditzy. “Yeah, Mom, I know. I know it’s midnight for you.
“I’m just not sleeping. Worrying about Mulder, I guess.” It’s true as she says it, but it’s not the reason. She doesn’t want to talk about the fog, the woman on the street. “How about you?”
There is no answer. Scully stops in the middle of her kitchen, holding a phone in one hand and the bowl in the other. “Right,” she says. “I get them too. Yeah, a funny feeling.” A pause, and then, “I love you, too.”
When she puts the phone down, she’s thinking about what might have been and what never was, what might slip through the cracks and hide in the fog, and Melissa, who loved the fury of the storm. When she closes her eyes she can feel it, wet against her skin, sodden leaves getting caught in her hair, the wind whipping through tree branches all around. “Mulder!” she yells out, hoping to hear his voice in answer, but her eyes open and she’s shouting at an empty apartment, getting water on the floor. The apartment smells of warmth and sugar, and she takes a moment to hate herself for being blind and human, for masking the alien with the familiar, for baking a cake to hide the smell of the rain.
Samantha wouldn’t have done it, and neither would Melissa, but neither of them are here. Her mind doesn’t work without a foil, without a citadel to attack - here, alone, she can’t set out into the mystery alone, theorise and explore, and explain this.
The phone rings again at dawn. She answers it, “Scully,” and then knows without being told who it is, whose voice is that cracking and falling-down bleak; and as if waking up from a dream she realises, in the silence of her apartment and the coming of the day, that her bed is empty and she is alone.
*
The next day, the picture on the front page is a dead girl. Scully carries it into the ladies’ room at arm’s length, a distasteful thing blurring her fingers with printers’ ink. The man holding the body is looking away from the camera, but she knows who it is.
Samantha, in jeans and slippers, looks up as Scully steps into the kitchen. “Give that here,” she says, biting into a piece of toast. “You want a croissant?”
Scully peers at her, perched the wrong way round on a chair and reaching impatiently for the paper, and wonders when her life got so normal. She hands it over and helps herself to a pain au chocolat. “I baked muffins,” she says helplessly.
Samantha takes one as she reads it through, checking the date on the paper before letting it drop. “They call this reputable journalism?” she demand. “I could write better than this with my hands tied behind my back.”
“Aren’t you curious at all?” Scully demands, almost desperately. “In what it says?”
Samantha looks up, surprised. “I’m reading it, aren’t I?”
“There’s more than what’s there.”
“Tell all.”
“He phoned me this morning,” Scully tells the floor. “He was… desperate. And then...”
“And then,” Samantha nods, looking more closely at the picture. “And then, and then.” She lays it down and pours out some more coffee. “You want some?”
“Yes, but aren’t you curious as to how?”
“I think I know already.” She gets up to grab a cup. “Sugar?”
“No, thanks. Samantha...”
Samantha drops the paper. Off Scully’s look, she stands up and sits the right way on the chair, folds the paper neatly and clasps her hands in her lap. “Is that better? You want me to tell you the full story that you won’t believe in anyway?”
“As a simplifying assumption,” Scully tells her, and grins.
“Fine.” Samantha grins back. “I’ll say this: you can only put so much pressure on something before it collapses in on itself.
“Thank you,” Scully says, sitting back. “That was exceptionally helpful.”
“Yeah, it was, and it’s all you’re getting. It’s all I know. That, and the fact that soon I’ll be able to sleep peacefully in my own bed again. As will you, I think.”
Scully wants to let that pass, but something stops her, something about the girl’s eyes, familiar to the last. “You knew about that?”
“I’m guessing,” Samantha says, thoughtfully. “I’m a good guesser.”
“Yeah, I’ll bet.” Scully decides she doesn’t mind, and gets milk for her own coffee, watching galaxies of white fade into black. It’s quiet here, quieter than her own apartment, higher still from the street. They sit in silence for a few moments.
“Let’s say this,” Scully says after a while. “If the Gunmen were right - and I’m not saying they were - then whatever was powering whatever was going on has stopped powering it.”
“Elegantly put.”
“Thank you. And now, what? People still slipping through cracks?”
“No, I wouldn’t say that.” Samantha rests her head on her hands. “You’re still able to come and steal my breakfast for the time being. I think that in a while it will be as if this never happened.”
“No bad thing.” Scully takes a sip of the coffee and smiles appreciatively: Jamaican Blue Mountain.
“Yeah,” Samantha says, but she’s wistful, and Scully regrets saying it. She finishes her breakfast, and the room becomes more comfortable as the quiet moments tick by, easing away the silence of strangers.
When Scully stands up, Samantha follows her. “Let me come with you. The last time.”
Scully nods. “Okay. That’s the end of the story, right?
“Right.” Samantha nods, smiles, goes to get her coat.
Scully hasn’t quite finished. “But before we go, tell me this: how does a person come back from the dead?”
Samantha gives her a small, sad smile, and says, “Fox Mulder is dead.”
Scully steps through into the world and there’s nothing more than that, except the quickening of her heart when Mulder comes in after dark, eyes wide and lips parted, with dirt and exhaustion and the scent of lilacs clinging to his skin.
*
Night falls while Scully reads the police reports. She was found after dark, left by her killer - who was a single-minded sexual obsessive, a loner with disturbed tendencies, because Mulder is always right - with her tiny body almost bled out, and picked up by the profiler who’d failed to save her, ducking his head from the flashbulb.
She was found wandering the woods, freezing cold and alone, talking about a rainstorm and a song she’d heard at school, and carried all the way home, Schrödinger’s two worlds blurring into the rain. Those aren’t the words she reads, but Scully remembers the cloudburst, the way the storm broke, in her apartment in DC, in those Ohio woods, some parallel place in every parallel existence.
The next report Scully reads is from Martha’s Vineyard in 1973; this was probably the most exciting case they had all year. She knows the scene without having to pay attention to the details. It was early evening, board game and pieces spread over the floor. Watergate was on television. The girl was taken in the midst of bright white light.
The only witness was the other child, who was found in a glassy, wide-eyed catatonic state with fingers curling, grasping at nothing. The younger child’s body was never found, and the elder grew up to exhibit terrifyingly accurate insight into the mind of a killer.
If she’d been investigating the case - and it pains her to even think it - she’d have taken that child and put him into protective custody, just for a while. Just while his story checked out. Just while it was made perfectly clear he had an off-scale IQ and no autistic disorder to go with; spent the summer playing baseball but didn’t use the bat for anything else; got straight A’s but didn’t go in for premeditation. She wasn’t investigating the case, as it happened; but there was movement behind the scenes, she guesses, shadowy figures in the federal government who got that child above suspicion.
It was the least they could do, Scully guesses. It would have been one sacrificial lamb too many.
“Why don’t you hate him?” Samantha asks, with calculated, painful lightness. “I would hate him, if I were you.”
“Why?” Scully asks, and she’s surprised that she doesn’t sound defensive. She puts down the reports.
“He’s obsessive, isn’t he,” she says, still so careful, so casual, still with the undercut of pain. She’s pacing up and down, movements tight and controlled. She motions at the room, the overflowing cabinets, the posters, the clutter and the clippings. “He’s like a maelstrom. Everything, including you, gets dragged down into the dark. You had a brilliant career, I think. You could have been something so much more than… more than this.”
“It would have been a lie,” Scully replies evenly. She walks to Mulder’s desk, standing by the poster, beneath the glare of the skylights. The light is always filtered by the time it emerges here, becoming white and clean. “The truth is there somewhere, waiting for us to find it.. Sometimes I almost believe it. And I always know I’m needed.”
She nods, turning slowly, awkwardly. “He needs you. He’d die without you.” She tries to laugh, but the sound turns sour into thick silence.
Scully watches her, thinking about it. She could do an autopsy on this family, she thinks; with both of them, maybe she could cut skilfully through the layers of subcutaneous bullshit to the old scars, find the traces of past abuses like badly-healed breaks. It’s easier to think that than to think about the living people. But right now, she thinks she understands what the treatment should be, and looks up as she says, “Go ahead. This is as whole as he gets.”
Samantha understands. Flustered and awkward, she moves towards where Mulder is sleeping, almost tripping over her feet. She touches his head, very careful not to wake him up, and Scully is grateful for that. She wonders if sleeping, he can feel the touch and the moment, absorb the sweetness and somehow escape the pain of waking to what’s been lost.
Samantha laughs softly. “He’s rather nice,” she says, with a half-deliberate childishness. “I wish I could meet him.”
“You never have,” Scully says, sighing.
“He’s not mine,” she murmurs, and the look in her eyes is directed downwards, at the sleeping man on the desk, and it’s formed by a different face, with softer lines and longer lashes but Scully recognises it regardless. She shivers, hopes her voice isn’t shaking as she asks, “What happened to him?”
Samantha walks around the desk, walks back. Her heels tap loudly in the quiet. “It was 1973. I was eight,” she says at last. “He was twelve, just. Our parents had gone out, left him in charge, or at least that’s what he said. We were playing a board game.”
“With blue pieces,” Scully says softly. “Watergate was on TV.”
“You’ve heard the story.” Samantha smiles, slightly. “I wanted to watch some movie. He wanted to watch...”
“The Magician,” they say together.
“We were arguing. He said he was in charge because Mom and Dad weren’t home, I called him the rudest things I knew. And then there was the light, and he lost consciousness and I… I couldn’t move. I was paralysed. I didn’t do anything and they took him. He was never found.”
She sighs, starts pacing again. “According to you, he’s like me. I’m like him. Maybe we’d have driven each other crazy. Maybe he’d have been another family member I never talk to except on Pesach. Maybe it would be like when we were kids, him and me versus everyone else. The point is that I don’t know, I never got a chance to find out.”
Scully thinks they’re like each other; that they would have worn away at each other’s sharp edges; that they would have argued themselves into distraction, thrust following parry following thrust; that they would yelled at each other and banged down receivers at each other, that they would have shouted at each other and screamed at each other and cried for each other. That would have been okay, she thinks.
“But you don’t believe he’s dead?” Scully says, and wonders why she has to ask.
Samantha frowns, and something changes in her. “I don’t believe it. I know he’s dead.” She breathes in, breathes out before continuing. “I know they took him, a child, and I know they hurt him, and violated his mind and body, and when they had no further use for him, they killed him. And I know the government will continue to cover it up. No one will ever know the truth about his death, unless I find it.”
She’s looking straight at Scully, straight into her eyes, and this is a silence Scully doesn’t dare break.
“And speaking of which,” Samantha says, and the tension drains through the genuine lightness in tone, “I ought to be getting back to it. The door won’t be open for long.”
Scully nods. “You should go.”
Samantha walks to the door, but she looks back. “Goodbye, Agent Scully. You won’t see me again.”
“Hopefully not.” Scully smiles at her, watches her take her last, brief look at a man who isn’t her brother, and the door clicks neatly closed on the two of them who are left.
Mulder hasn’t moved. Scully walks deliberately across to him and runs her hands around his neck, feeling for a chain that isn’t there, and holding still as he wakes up. “Come on, Mulder. Time to go home.”
“I don’t have a bed,” he mutters, eyes still closed and voice blurred.
“Who said anything about going to bed?” Scully asks. “Come with me and we’ll watch Return of the Killer Tomatoes.”
“Return of the Killer Tomatoes isn’t...”
“I have it on tape. Come on.”
He laughs suddenly, a snuffling sound through layers of sleep, and stands up with her. She holds him until it becomes painfully apparent that she’s a foot shorter than he is, and they settle into each other, the long-stride-short-step-brief-pause rhythm that comes naturally, like breathing. They walk out of the basement in silence, up into the bullpen where the night is creeping in, and out beneath the dome of the sky, cloudy-and-starlit like a child’s drawing.
This is not what might have been, what could yet be; this is just the start of a season, a touch on his shoulder and a hand through his hair; this is just the quiet moment in the dark when she takes him home, and their footsteps fall softly through the rain.
finis
by Raven
R, The X-Files, Mulder/Scully UST. Scully is sure this isn't supposed to be happening, and if it is, that there should be a scientific explanation.
part one
It’s easier not to believe in the cockroach that ate Cincinnati. Scully has a nice mental image of a giant cockroach and a skyscraper with a comical bite taken out of it, and sometimes even acknowledgement from her partner that some things are too weird to be true. It’s different, somehow, when it’s an ordinary city apartment, with large windows that let in the distant traffic noise. Scully stands in the centre of the room, avoiding clothes strewn over the floor, and wishes for some hallmark of weirdness, some rampaging monster or double-parked spaceships or Jedi hand-waving, or something.
Nothing happens. She takes a deep breath and walks around the room whilst Samantha perches on the bed and watches her. Their eyes meet. “What?” Samantha asks, amiable to a fault. “Why are you looking like that?”
“It’s so normal,” Scully tells her, honestly.
“Normal?” Samantha laughs. “Did you or did you not get in here through a bathroom cubicle?”
That, Scully thinks, is an unprecedented indicator of imminent weirdness. She said she’d go along with it and she generally keeps her promises; that was the only reason she didn’t give up in disgust when Samantha led her calmly into the ladies’ restroom. She was busy worrying someone else would come in, or worse, that Mulder had for whatever reason emerged from the basement and seen them traipsing around the building, and she wasn’t quite paying attention, and when Samantha leapt upwards at nothing, pulling Scully behind her, she opened her mouth to yell.
And got a mouthful of pillowcase, rolling over and coming to rest flat on her back in a bedroom lit by winter daylight.
“Yes,” Scully says hesitantly. “And this is where you live?”
“This is my apartment, yes.”
“In another universe?” Scully persists.
“Well, yes.” Samantha lies back on the bed. “And here’s your proof - I rolled over in bed and went through the hole we just came through.”
“Not this morning.” Scully is trying to think like a scientist, like an empiricist. “This morning you appeared in my car.”
“There’s the rub,” Samantha says, contemplatively. “But I have a theory about that. Come with me.”
“Of course you do,” Scully mutters, but she follows, stepping out of the room, across a small hallway and into a kitchen. She is sure she has never seen this apartment before, or anywhere like it, but there are brief, disturbing notes of familiarity in the details of the place. Scully picks up a tape off the kitchen table, tugging it out from under a pile of discarded paper. It’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers. She puts it back down.
Samantha is rummaging in a cupboard, muttering to herself. At length she emerges holding something flat and colourful. “Got it.”
“Got what?” Scully asks.
Samantha shows her a painted glass plate, decorated with crooked, irregular whorls “Gift from an ex,” she says, frowning. “I always hated it.”
She sets it on the table, and reaching down, takes off one of her shoes. Before Scully can react, she smashes the stiletto heel into the plate. It doesn’t shatter. Some toughening property of the glass transforms the blow into a spider web of cracks.
“What did you do that for?” demands Scully breathlessly. She recognises the impulsiveness in the movement, the ease with which a single person can make the world break.
Samantha picks up the plate and points to the point of impact. “This is the hole,” she says calmly. “This is where you can fall from my bed into another universe. And these” - her fingers indicate the radial cracks - “are the fault-lines. These are where he falls into the wrong basement and you fall into the wrong bed and I fall into the wrong car.”
Scully hates that familiar intuitive logic, the blind thrusts into the dark that yield the results a scientific analysis of events can’t. She hates it, but sometimes it works. “What do you mean, the wrong bed?”
Samantha holds a finger to her lips. “I knew something made it personal.”
Scully stares at her, says nothing. A noise like an irritated insect cuts through the silence and with a slight sigh, she reaches for her cell phone. “Scully.”
“Hey, it’s me. Talk to Frohike.”
Before she can say anything, Frohike comes on the line, sounding worried. “Agent Scully, we’ve got a problem. Mulder’s here, and um, we found him underneath our table.”
“So?” Scully’s an expert in Mulder’s behaviour because someone has to be, and this sounds strange but not entirely atypical.
“So he says he can’t remember how he got there.” Frohike pauses. “As in, at all.”
“What? Put him back on,” Scully says impatiently.
“Hey, Scully.”
“Mulder, what do you mean, you can’t remember? What’s the last thing you do remember?”
“I’m not sure.” He sounds frustrated, and she can picture him very clearly, probably pacing up and down fretfully while the Gunmen hover like unlikely mother hens. “I remember last night. I was in my apartment, in the shower. The phone rang and I let the machine pick up. I think I listened to it - did you call me?”
“Yes, I did.”
“Yeah... and that’s it, that’s all I remember. I think I might have gone to sleep, but then it goes blank. Next thing I remember, I was on the floor with Langly shrieking at me like a girl.”
“Hey,” says someone in the background in aggrieved tones.
“Mulder, are you saying you drove over there in your sleep?” She’s already thinking about dosages and tabs, wishing he was here so she could track his pupils. “Were you drinking? Did you take anything?”
“No, Scully. I know I didn’t.” He sounds petulant, which probably means he’s telling the truth.
“And he didn’t drive over here either,” Byers reports, apparently giving in to the urge to put her on speakerphone. “Or if he did, we can’t find his car.”
“Public transport? Walking?” Scully snaps.
“No,” Mulder says, in defeated tones. “We can’t find my shoes, either.”
Scully wants for a single horrendous moment to burst out laughing - this sort of thing never seems to happen to anyone else - but she fights it successfully and stands up. “Okay, I’ll be right over.”
“Thanks. Listen, Scully - don’t tell Skinner about this just yet, okay? He’ll have an apoplexy.”
Privately, Scully thinks he’s already having an apoplexy, given that neither of them have come into work today for no immediately apparent reason, but she says goodbye and hangs up without voicing the thought.
Samantha looks at her, smiling a little. “Something’s happened?”
“I have to go.” Almost childishly, she adds, “You can’t come.”
“I kind of figured that. I’ll see you soon, Agent Scully.” She sits on the edge of the table, legs swinging. “Probably whether I want to or not. You know your way out.”
Scully nods. “Yes, I do.”
This time, she notices an earthenware jug on the bedside table, holding a small handful of lilac flowers. Scully breathes in the scent, and trying not to think about it, she sits carefully on the centre of the bed and falls back through the hole in the universe, thudding feet first into one of the toilet cubicles. She’s suddenly very grateful that no one is already in there, and that the room is silent. She waits five seconds just in case, then moves swiftly outside.
The drive through the rain is unpleasant. Her thoughts are following the lines of the drops down the windscreen, slowly edging trails of Samantha, Ohio, the long roads, the dream, blurring into larger puddles of confused memory: the crushed flowers, the woman who knows too much to be lying, Mulder half-asleep and half-forgotten, eyes green, then black, then closed and lost.
She skids to a halt almost with noticing, nearly forgets to lock the car, runs to the door only to find it already open. Langly is standing in the archway, his hair thick with raindrops. “He’s gone!” he yells.
“What?” Scully demands, pushing past him. The room is more of a mess than usual, the low green light failing to hide the nacho cheese stuck to the nearest keyboard. “I told you not to let him leave!”
“We didn’t,” Frohike says, wandering in. He looks far less hysterical than Langly. “He disappeared. Right here, in front of our eyes.”
“What?” Scully says again, sensing that the word is beginning to suffer from overuse.
“Scully, he’s gone. He just... faded away.” Frohike sits down in a swivel chair. “I think something weird is going on.”
Scully thinks about it for a minute before pulling out her phone. She dials and he picks up.
“Hey, Scully.” Before she can say anything, he goes on: “Listen, where are you? Not that I’m not enjoying being Skinner’s blue-eyed agent for a change, but I’m running out of ways to stall him. Pretty soon I’ll have to start telling him that you’ve gotten flu or moved to Cuba or something.”
“I won’t be long,” she promises. “I just need to ask you something. What have you been doing all morning?”
“Sticking pencils in the ceiling, mostly. Eating sandwiches. Getting into the head of a single white male serial killer from Ohio. Oh, and I alphabetised one of the cabinets. Why do you ask?”
Scully motions to the others to keep quiet. “When was the last time you saw any of the Gunmen?”
“Uh, not for a while. I got Langly to do some background checks while we were in Ohio, but that was by email. Why?”
“No reason. I’ll come in as soon as I can.”
She hangs up without saying goodbye and nods slowly at the Gunmen. “Something weird is going on,” she concurs.
They nod and blink. And after that she has to leave, go to work and go home, because weird things aren’t supposed to happen outside of office hours.
*
In the morning, Scully arrives in the office only five steps behind Mulder, who is walking with head down and muttering to himself about the rain, the greyness, and how the day dictates the virtue of throwing oneself into the Potomac.
“I think I’ll pass,” she says out loud, and he turns to look at her, gives her the rueful grin she recognises as acknowledgement, however brief, that sometimes she’s right and he’s just being melodramatic. He holds the door open for her and she steps inside. The room is cold and dim, and Mulder sits down at his desk without comment, trying absently to get the rainwater out of his hair.
There is something else about him she recognises but cannot place; something half-distracted, half-feral, where he’s too quick to look over his shoulder and too slow to answer to his name. The mess the room is in, spread with paper scraps and pencils stuck perilously in the ceiling, is what reminds her: once again, he’s sharing headspace with a killer. She could do some work of her own, but they’re not partners when he’s profiling and she leaves him to it. He doesn’t look up as she leaves.
Outside, in the rain, she tries to walk off the mood. It isn’t early in the morning any more, but there are still streetlights shining through the dimness, making the world into a black and white movie with added sodium glare. She narrowly avoids stepping in a puddle and tries not to swear. Samantha has no such qualms. She holds one foot up, staring distastefully at the water seeping through the sole of her shoe. “Fuck this shit,” she says after a while.
“Good morning to you, too,” Scully replies evenly.
“It isn’t morning where I’m coming from,” Samantha says. “It’s the middle of the night.”
They walk, silently, down the sidewalk, avoiding the recoil splashes of the passing cars. Maybe Mulder has a point, Scully thinks vaguely; maybe if George Washington first sailed up the Potomac on a day like this one, he would have turned right around.
“It’s dreams, isn’t it,” she says, and it isn’t a question.
“Yeah, I think so.” Samantha nods slowly. “When we’re asleep, we’re making the crossing between worlds. The lines have become too thin.”
“It’s not them.” Scully is definite on this point.
“The EBEs? No, I guess not.” Samantha is chewing on one thumbnail. “Although I wonder if their presence, or the presence of their technology, contributes to the weakening of the space-time continuum in some way. Nothing can travel faster than light, after all.”
Scully ignores this. She is thinking about dreams, about how the mind doesn’t perceive a curve in space but knows, all the same, that it’s there. Last night she dreamed of Mulder again, in the muted light of her bedroom, windows wide open to a city of ethereal quiet, serene in rainwater-wet stillness. With sunrise came a cool, fresh dawn, full of promise, and he was there into the morning, just, a half-seen wraith fading into nothing. She wonders where he is now, why he’s here, freelance profiling, and out there with a cross against his heart and under the Gunmen’s table and somewhere else in the warmth she’s left behind, naked beneath her sheets on a wet Washington morning.
“I thought maybe I should just try and stay awake.” Samantha breaks in, her voice muffled by the rain. “I tried that. But it doesn’t work; I got overtired, and cranky, and then I started to hallucinate, and got to the same place by a different route. Even a slightly altered mental state is enough to punch through into another world. Seems like you can’t ever go home again.”
“This isn’t really happening,” Scully murmurs. “It’s dreams.”
“Define real,” Samantha says sharply. “It’s happening. Whether it’s really happening, I don’t know.”
She stamps one foot hard on the ground, lifts and holds it in mid-air, then stamps again.
“What are you doing?” Scully asks, when a suitably long period of time has elapsed.
“Trying to get the water out.” Samantha stares balefully downwards. “It’s not working. I need new shoes. Jesus, I need a new life.”
Scully tries hard not to agree aloud. “I think we need expert help,” she says, and on the way over in the rain, she tries not to think about how she can’t remember the last time she went shoe-shopping. The rain drips quietly down the windscreen and Samantha doesn’t talk much, so it isn’t easy, but then nothing is.
“Who’s the new kid?” Frohike demands as they enter. “She’s hot.”
“She’s a federal agent,” Scully says briskly, without having to add and she can kick your ass seventeen times before breakfast, and to Samantha, “These are Frohike, Langly, and Byers.”
They look up at their names, nod politely, but Scully can feel something afoot, a sense of purpose in the paper scraps and blinking diodes. At length, Frohike says, “We think we figured it out.”
“You did?” Scully feels oddly like grinning; it isn’t this simple, it’s never this simple. “You know what’s happening?”
“Something’s making a hole in the space-time continuum,” Langley says without looking up. “People - and objects - are dropping through the cracks.”
“Bad science,” Scully says, more sharply than she meant to. “That’s the stuff of science fiction.”
“They have to get their ideas from somewhere,” Byers replies, soft-spoken as ever. “And it’s not a question of hard science, because we’re not at that level of understanding. This isn’t the truth. It’s a convenient lie.”
“Don’t we get enough of those?” Samantha asks, with a gentleness Scully doesn’t think she can match at this point. “Do we need another one?”
“An algorithm, then,” Byers tries. “Convenient tool of calculation. A story we can tell to help us get the results we want.”
“All right.” Samantha sits down on the edge of a table; Scully keeps on pacing. “How do we get the results we want?”
Langley turns his monitor to face them. “There’s a lot of power involved here,” he says slowly. “I could go over the full sequence of calculations” - Frohike coughs significantly - “but I won’t. That hole didn’t come from nothing. It was created somehow, and to make something like that, and sustain it, requires an enormous amount of energy. Our first option, then - a device of some sort.”
Scully catches the euphemism, but Samantha is quicker. “This hole, I should mention, is in my apartment. In my bed. You are not nuking it.”
“You have a hole in the space-time continuum in your bed?” Frohike says breathily, as though it’s the greatest turn-on ever. For him, Scully thinks, it probably is.
“Yes, I do,” Samantha snaps. “And what I want is for there not to be one. Next option, please?”
“Duct tape.” Langley still doesn’t turn around.
“Please be kidding,” Samantha says earnestly. “Please let me wake up and this is all some kind of surrealist nightmare brought on from eating too many Pop Tarts.”
Surprising herself, Scully laughs. “And the third option, gentlemen?”
“We wait and see,” Byers says, still softly. He smiles at Scully, and then at Samantha. “Whoever or whatever is doing this, they’re going to run out of power. And when that happens, the hole will just collapse as though it never existed. All we need to do is wait.”
“So that’s the great plan?” Samantha looks discomfited, like she’s missed a step on an escalator. “We do nothing?”
“Hardest thing to do.” Scully smiles wryly. “Thanks for your time, guys. I’ll keep you posted, okay?”
“Our pleasure,” Frohike replies, and Scully can tell he’s trying to get to them stay longer, but she’s ready to go home. Hurry up and wait, she thinks, and smiles, because it’s never this easy.
On the way out, Samantha says, “I have to go.”
“All right...” Scully begins, but Samantha looks frantic, hands held in front of her, bones contorting into sharp, savage shapes.
“I have to go, I have to, I really have to go.”
And just like that, she’s gone, vanished without trace on the rain-wet sidewalk. Scully turns around on the spot, describing a great circle with her feet, taking in cars and streetlamps and rain and people and silence as the air fills in the space of a body. She has to go to back to work.
Her phone rings. “Scully.”
At first, no answer other than tight, ragged breathing, and then Mulder’s voice, “I have to go,” and a burst of static and a clunk, and silence.
*
Scully tries to go home, but she doesn’t quite make it.
It’s quiet outside, it’s still so quiet, streetlights barely shining through the cotton-wool gloom. Scully takes two steps forward, pivots on her heel, takes one step back. There’s a radio a few doors down from where she’s standing, and a kid in sneakers flicking from crackly station to crackly station, great bursts of white noise breaking like waves on the street.
On the stoop next door, there is a woman crying. Scully walks another two steps, then turns back. The woman doesn’t look up, and a car swishes by through the dark, leaves behind a wake of silence. The air smells of salt, and Scully thinks about fog rolling in from the Atlantic, leaving a blanket across the miles inland.
She tried to call Mulder back. The first time he answered, he was peremptory - there had been a breakthrough, he’d call her back - made her feel like normality was extant somewhere, maybe, somewhere not here; but the second time his voice was softer, shifting towards incoherence, and the third time there was only the sound of his breathing, quick and harsh, and the voices calling him back, distant like the ocean in a shell. Siren-song, she thought, and she let him go.
The kid keeps turning the dial. There are faint strains of music, twanging country music, sounding like pick-up trucks in faraway heartlands, a splash of rock, a news-snippet, a brief burble about Ways and Means. A clear voice cuts through, “There’s a storm brewing in DC tonight,” and sinks back into noise.
Scully wavers. When no one emerges from the house, no one comes, she walks deliberately through the curtain of fog and sits on the bottom step. “Are you okay?” she asks, and feels the familiar burst of awkwardness, uncertainty. For a second she misses Mulder, who demands many things from her but never a filled silence, never the meaninglessness of words thrown haphazardly into the dark.
The woman is older than her, but has reached her age with grace; there’s a careful elegance in the lines of her face. “I’m fine,” she says, calm behind the tears. “I’m fine.”
“Sorry, ma’am,” Scully says quietly, “but you looked like you weren’t fine.”
“I am fine. I saw my husband today.” She smiles, looks up, past Scully along the dimmed lines of lights.
Scully nods, slowly.
“He was diagnosed with cancer in 1982. He died of it.” She’s still crying behind the smile, without gasp or sound. “I’m fine. But you’d cry, wouldn’t you? Wouldn’t you cry?”
Scully nods again, and stands up. She lets her hand brush the woman’s shoulder - a tiny touch, the sweetness of space and time without the mess of explanation - and walks the few steps back through the fog. It closes in and for a few moments, the city is entirely silent around her. Looking across, she isn’t surprised to see the kid’s gone, with his radio, no marks in the dust to point that they were there.
Her feet feel heavy as she lets herself into her building, clambers up the many steps because the elevator would be too bright, too empty, and steps into her apartment. The place looks normal when she turns on the lights, and when she’s taken off her shoes, her coat, shed the damp of the night, she belongs to herself.
An hour later, the phone rings.
“A breakthrough of some kind,” Scully says into it, mixing cake batter with her free hand. “No, I got a call from him today before he left. He knows where the next murder will be.” There’s a pause as, with difficulty, she breaks an egg into it. “No, Mom, he isn’t psychic. He’s a profiler. It’s what they do.”
Whisk, whisk, whisk of the batter, and it starts to turn into creamy yellow fluff. She notices she hasn’t yet switched on the oven to preheat, and takes a careful step over to turn the dial.
“It’s what he used to do, before we were partners. Yeah, he had a life before me, who knew.”
Her mother’s laughter drops softly down the line. The batter’s nearly done. “Am I keeping you away from dinner? Oh, you’ve had it already?”
She stops and looks up at the wall clock, then sighs. She never was that great at being deliberately ditzy. “Yeah, Mom, I know. I know it’s midnight for you.
“I’m just not sleeping. Worrying about Mulder, I guess.” It’s true as she says it, but it’s not the reason. She doesn’t want to talk about the fog, the woman on the street. “How about you?”
There is no answer. Scully stops in the middle of her kitchen, holding a phone in one hand and the bowl in the other. “Right,” she says. “I get them too. Yeah, a funny feeling.” A pause, and then, “I love you, too.”
When she puts the phone down, she’s thinking about what might have been and what never was, what might slip through the cracks and hide in the fog, and Melissa, who loved the fury of the storm. When she closes her eyes she can feel it, wet against her skin, sodden leaves getting caught in her hair, the wind whipping through tree branches all around. “Mulder!” she yells out, hoping to hear his voice in answer, but her eyes open and she’s shouting at an empty apartment, getting water on the floor. The apartment smells of warmth and sugar, and she takes a moment to hate herself for being blind and human, for masking the alien with the familiar, for baking a cake to hide the smell of the rain.
Samantha wouldn’t have done it, and neither would Melissa, but neither of them are here. Her mind doesn’t work without a foil, without a citadel to attack - here, alone, she can’t set out into the mystery alone, theorise and explore, and explain this.
The phone rings again at dawn. She answers it, “Scully,” and then knows without being told who it is, whose voice is that cracking and falling-down bleak; and as if waking up from a dream she realises, in the silence of her apartment and the coming of the day, that her bed is empty and she is alone.
*
The next day, the picture on the front page is a dead girl. Scully carries it into the ladies’ room at arm’s length, a distasteful thing blurring her fingers with printers’ ink. The man holding the body is looking away from the camera, but she knows who it is.
Samantha, in jeans and slippers, looks up as Scully steps into the kitchen. “Give that here,” she says, biting into a piece of toast. “You want a croissant?”
Scully peers at her, perched the wrong way round on a chair and reaching impatiently for the paper, and wonders when her life got so normal. She hands it over and helps herself to a pain au chocolat. “I baked muffins,” she says helplessly.
Samantha takes one as she reads it through, checking the date on the paper before letting it drop. “They call this reputable journalism?” she demand. “I could write better than this with my hands tied behind my back.”
“Aren’t you curious at all?” Scully demands, almost desperately. “In what it says?”
Samantha looks up, surprised. “I’m reading it, aren’t I?”
“There’s more than what’s there.”
“Tell all.”
“He phoned me this morning,” Scully tells the floor. “He was… desperate. And then...”
“And then,” Samantha nods, looking more closely at the picture. “And then, and then.” She lays it down and pours out some more coffee. “You want some?”
“Yes, but aren’t you curious as to how?”
“I think I know already.” She gets up to grab a cup. “Sugar?”
“No, thanks. Samantha...”
Samantha drops the paper. Off Scully’s look, she stands up and sits the right way on the chair, folds the paper neatly and clasps her hands in her lap. “Is that better? You want me to tell you the full story that you won’t believe in anyway?”
“As a simplifying assumption,” Scully tells her, and grins.
“Fine.” Samantha grins back. “I’ll say this: you can only put so much pressure on something before it collapses in on itself.
“Thank you,” Scully says, sitting back. “That was exceptionally helpful.”
“Yeah, it was, and it’s all you’re getting. It’s all I know. That, and the fact that soon I’ll be able to sleep peacefully in my own bed again. As will you, I think.”
Scully wants to let that pass, but something stops her, something about the girl’s eyes, familiar to the last. “You knew about that?”
“I’m guessing,” Samantha says, thoughtfully. “I’m a good guesser.”
“Yeah, I’ll bet.” Scully decides she doesn’t mind, and gets milk for her own coffee, watching galaxies of white fade into black. It’s quiet here, quieter than her own apartment, higher still from the street. They sit in silence for a few moments.
“Let’s say this,” Scully says after a while. “If the Gunmen were right - and I’m not saying they were - then whatever was powering whatever was going on has stopped powering it.”
“Elegantly put.”
“Thank you. And now, what? People still slipping through cracks?”
“No, I wouldn’t say that.” Samantha rests her head on her hands. “You’re still able to come and steal my breakfast for the time being. I think that in a while it will be as if this never happened.”
“No bad thing.” Scully takes a sip of the coffee and smiles appreciatively: Jamaican Blue Mountain.
“Yeah,” Samantha says, but she’s wistful, and Scully regrets saying it. She finishes her breakfast, and the room becomes more comfortable as the quiet moments tick by, easing away the silence of strangers.
When Scully stands up, Samantha follows her. “Let me come with you. The last time.”
Scully nods. “Okay. That’s the end of the story, right?
“Right.” Samantha nods, smiles, goes to get her coat.
Scully hasn’t quite finished. “But before we go, tell me this: how does a person come back from the dead?”
Samantha gives her a small, sad smile, and says, “Fox Mulder is dead.”
Scully steps through into the world and there’s nothing more than that, except the quickening of her heart when Mulder comes in after dark, eyes wide and lips parted, with dirt and exhaustion and the scent of lilacs clinging to his skin.
*
Night falls while Scully reads the police reports. She was found after dark, left by her killer - who was a single-minded sexual obsessive, a loner with disturbed tendencies, because Mulder is always right - with her tiny body almost bled out, and picked up by the profiler who’d failed to save her, ducking his head from the flashbulb.
She was found wandering the woods, freezing cold and alone, talking about a rainstorm and a song she’d heard at school, and carried all the way home, Schrödinger’s two worlds blurring into the rain. Those aren’t the words she reads, but Scully remembers the cloudburst, the way the storm broke, in her apartment in DC, in those Ohio woods, some parallel place in every parallel existence.
The next report Scully reads is from Martha’s Vineyard in 1973; this was probably the most exciting case they had all year. She knows the scene without having to pay attention to the details. It was early evening, board game and pieces spread over the floor. Watergate was on television. The girl was taken in the midst of bright white light.
The only witness was the other child, who was found in a glassy, wide-eyed catatonic state with fingers curling, grasping at nothing. The younger child’s body was never found, and the elder grew up to exhibit terrifyingly accurate insight into the mind of a killer.
If she’d been investigating the case - and it pains her to even think it - she’d have taken that child and put him into protective custody, just for a while. Just while his story checked out. Just while it was made perfectly clear he had an off-scale IQ and no autistic disorder to go with; spent the summer playing baseball but didn’t use the bat for anything else; got straight A’s but didn’t go in for premeditation. She wasn’t investigating the case, as it happened; but there was movement behind the scenes, she guesses, shadowy figures in the federal government who got that child above suspicion.
It was the least they could do, Scully guesses. It would have been one sacrificial lamb too many.
“Why don’t you hate him?” Samantha asks, with calculated, painful lightness. “I would hate him, if I were you.”
“Why?” Scully asks, and she’s surprised that she doesn’t sound defensive. She puts down the reports.
“He’s obsessive, isn’t he,” she says, still so careful, so casual, still with the undercut of pain. She’s pacing up and down, movements tight and controlled. She motions at the room, the overflowing cabinets, the posters, the clutter and the clippings. “He’s like a maelstrom. Everything, including you, gets dragged down into the dark. You had a brilliant career, I think. You could have been something so much more than… more than this.”
“It would have been a lie,” Scully replies evenly. She walks to Mulder’s desk, standing by the poster, beneath the glare of the skylights. The light is always filtered by the time it emerges here, becoming white and clean. “The truth is there somewhere, waiting for us to find it.. Sometimes I almost believe it. And I always know I’m needed.”
She nods, turning slowly, awkwardly. “He needs you. He’d die without you.” She tries to laugh, but the sound turns sour into thick silence.
Scully watches her, thinking about it. She could do an autopsy on this family, she thinks; with both of them, maybe she could cut skilfully through the layers of subcutaneous bullshit to the old scars, find the traces of past abuses like badly-healed breaks. It’s easier to think that than to think about the living people. But right now, she thinks she understands what the treatment should be, and looks up as she says, “Go ahead. This is as whole as he gets.”
Samantha understands. Flustered and awkward, she moves towards where Mulder is sleeping, almost tripping over her feet. She touches his head, very careful not to wake him up, and Scully is grateful for that. She wonders if sleeping, he can feel the touch and the moment, absorb the sweetness and somehow escape the pain of waking to what’s been lost.
Samantha laughs softly. “He’s rather nice,” she says, with a half-deliberate childishness. “I wish I could meet him.”
“You never have,” Scully says, sighing.
“He’s not mine,” she murmurs, and the look in her eyes is directed downwards, at the sleeping man on the desk, and it’s formed by a different face, with softer lines and longer lashes but Scully recognises it regardless. She shivers, hopes her voice isn’t shaking as she asks, “What happened to him?”
Samantha walks around the desk, walks back. Her heels tap loudly in the quiet. “It was 1973. I was eight,” she says at last. “He was twelve, just. Our parents had gone out, left him in charge, or at least that’s what he said. We were playing a board game.”
“With blue pieces,” Scully says softly. “Watergate was on TV.”
“You’ve heard the story.” Samantha smiles, slightly. “I wanted to watch some movie. He wanted to watch...”
“The Magician,” they say together.
“We were arguing. He said he was in charge because Mom and Dad weren’t home, I called him the rudest things I knew. And then there was the light, and he lost consciousness and I… I couldn’t move. I was paralysed. I didn’t do anything and they took him. He was never found.”
She sighs, starts pacing again. “According to you, he’s like me. I’m like him. Maybe we’d have driven each other crazy. Maybe he’d have been another family member I never talk to except on Pesach. Maybe it would be like when we were kids, him and me versus everyone else. The point is that I don’t know, I never got a chance to find out.”
Scully thinks they’re like each other; that they would have worn away at each other’s sharp edges; that they would have argued themselves into distraction, thrust following parry following thrust; that they would yelled at each other and banged down receivers at each other, that they would have shouted at each other and screamed at each other and cried for each other. That would have been okay, she thinks.
“But you don’t believe he’s dead?” Scully says, and wonders why she has to ask.
Samantha frowns, and something changes in her. “I don’t believe it. I know he’s dead.” She breathes in, breathes out before continuing. “I know they took him, a child, and I know they hurt him, and violated his mind and body, and when they had no further use for him, they killed him. And I know the government will continue to cover it up. No one will ever know the truth about his death, unless I find it.”
She’s looking straight at Scully, straight into her eyes, and this is a silence Scully doesn’t dare break.
“And speaking of which,” Samantha says, and the tension drains through the genuine lightness in tone, “I ought to be getting back to it. The door won’t be open for long.”
Scully nods. “You should go.”
Samantha walks to the door, but she looks back. “Goodbye, Agent Scully. You won’t see me again.”
“Hopefully not.” Scully smiles at her, watches her take her last, brief look at a man who isn’t her brother, and the door clicks neatly closed on the two of them who are left.
Mulder hasn’t moved. Scully walks deliberately across to him and runs her hands around his neck, feeling for a chain that isn’t there, and holding still as he wakes up. “Come on, Mulder. Time to go home.”
“I don’t have a bed,” he mutters, eyes still closed and voice blurred.
“Who said anything about going to bed?” Scully asks. “Come with me and we’ll watch Return of the Killer Tomatoes.”
“Return of the Killer Tomatoes isn’t...”
“I have it on tape. Come on.”
He laughs suddenly, a snuffling sound through layers of sleep, and stands up with her. She holds him until it becomes painfully apparent that she’s a foot shorter than he is, and they settle into each other, the long-stride-short-step-brief-pause rhythm that comes naturally, like breathing. They walk out of the basement in silence, up into the bullpen where the night is creeping in, and out beneath the dome of the sky, cloudy-and-starlit like a child’s drawing.
This is not what might have been, what could yet be; this is just the start of a season, a touch on his shoulder and a hand through his hair; this is just the quiet moment in the dark when she takes him home, and their footsteps fall softly through the rain.
finis