Snakebitten (4/4)
Season 5, MSR
R/NC-17
Part Four
35.
He stood outside the office on the fifth floor and made a deal. He’d knock and if she didn’t answer within one minute, he could leave. He would knock and count to sixty. He had an appointment, sure, but maybe she wouldn’t be there.
“Agent Mulder. Come in.”
Fifteen seconds? She didn’t even make it interesting. He nodded hello and slouched inside.
She was in her fifties and had grave eyes, like she’d seen everything terrible the world had to offer and would not be impressed with whatever you’d come to lay at her feet.
A week earlier, Skinner had seen them in the hallway, waiting to go into a briefing. In a dim corner, Mulder had been sitting on a discarded table with empty, beat-up bankers boxes at one end and Scully had been standing in the wide V of his sharpshooter, outlaw legs, reading him the results of a lab test.
Scully had looked up at him, her tongue darting at the edge of her mouth, and he’d put his hand on her elbow, laughing. Then he saw Skinner out of the corner of his eye, watching them as he went into the conference room.
The next day, Skinner handed him a business card with KAREN KOSSEFF, LCSW embossed on the front, under a blue and gold Bureau crest. On the back he’d written 2:30 Tuesday.
“You cannot tell Agent Scully. Anything. Have I made myself clear, Agent Mulder?”
Common opinion, apparently, was that he was a weak man.
“Talk to her,” Skinner said, tapping the card.
“Would you?”
“This isn’t a conversation, Agent.”
Scully thought he was at the dentist.
Karen Kosseff, LCSW was comfortable with silence. She listened to agents bullshit her all day long. She waited.
When he was sent back to school that January for the second half of sixth grade, he was also sent to see Dr. Gersh. Dr. Gersh had a boxful of puppets with scratched up eyes and he was a nut for checkers. Mulder knew the second fact because Dr. Gersh had told him. “Fox, I’m a nut for checkers. How about a game?”
Did that really work on any of the other sad kids?
Maybe Dr. Gersh thought that one day, Mulder would shout “King me!” and be cured. It didn’t seem possible that they’d let you become a doctor if you were that stupid. Checkers!
Mulder was certain of one thing, even at twelve, and that was that there was no such thing as a cure. Healing was impossible, and if you were guilty, well, then, you had no business even seeking it out.
But every Monday and Wednesday afternoon, from 3:15 to 4:00, Fox Mulder and Dr. Gersh played checkers.
No one seemed to remember the red and black Stratego board that had been on the living room floor that night, and Mulder never brought it up, just dutifully crisscrossed his plastic pieces from one side to the other. Samantha used to sandwich checkers together to pretend like they were Oreos.
He’d saved the Stratego board while men, people his father seemed to know, tromped around their house, and while his mother had the beginnings of what his dad called “a little something.”
“Your mother’s going through a little something, Fox. Why don’t you go outside for awhile, huh?”
He carried the board flat, carefully not to tip the tiny pieces over, and put it on the floor at the end of his bed. He thought he’d have to make excuses for it when his mom came in to take dirty clothes out of his hamper, but she didn’t do that anymore.
Finally, Kosseff spoke.
“Why do you think Assistant Director Skinner asked us to talk, Agent Mulder?”
He shook his head and shrugged.
“I understand that you’re on a difficult assignment. Is the assignment bothering you, Agent Mulder?”
“Bothering me?”
She raised her eyebrows, like she’d done research on the best way to get him to talk. He wiped sweaty palms on his knees.
“No more than anything else.”
“Well, then I guess the question is how much you’re bothered by everything else.”
Mulder laughed and Kosseff just barely smiled, indulging him for a moment.
“Let me be more specific. Does it bother you that you can’t tell your partner what you’re doing? Does it bother you that you have to keep things from her?”
She kept her pen capped, made no motion toward her pad of paper.
“That’s the assignment.”
“And you’re here because you’ve been assigned to talk to me. Is that right?”
“Two for two.”
Kosseff had guiltily, unprofessionally, been looking forward to this appointment since the previous Friday afternoon, when it appeared on her calendar. Fox Mulder. His reputation, as it were, preceded him. He was mythological. Not to mention his small, flinty partner and the way she talked about him. Even when she was dying. Especially as she was dying, right at his side the whole damn time.
“Okay. So let’s start there. Why do you think the Assistant Director asked you to talk to me?”
“Told,” he said. “And the Assistant Director thinks I’m going to tell Scully. Hell, he probably thinks she’s known for weeks.”
“Has she?”
“I haven’t told her a fucking thing.”
He leaned back. This wasn’t a point of pride, Kosseff realized, not telling her. He was ashamed to have followed his orders so resolutely.
“And do you want to tell her?”
“Yes,” he said. “Do you know how many times I’ve gotten this close? And it’s not just because-not because I hate lying to her. But because she would be an asset to the operation, and I think Skinner is putting us both in unnecessary danger by keeping it from her.”
“Do you think it’s possible that the Assistant Director knows things about the situation that you don’t? That perhaps he does have your best interests in mind?”
“Skinner-” He stopped himself. “They make such a big deal about partnership, you know? About trust. I’ve gone over and over and over it, and I cannot come up with anything. Safety is one thing. But lying to your partner. For months. That’s another thing altogether. And when it’s all over, and she knows-”
He rubbed his eyes. He hadn’t meant to say this much.
“Don’t you think Agent Scully might understand the situation? That she’ll understand you were following a specific order for a reason?”
“Sure. Sure, yeah. She’ll understand. But that won’t change the fact that I’ll have lied to her. To her face. Every day. No amount of understanding will change that.”
“I trust him with my life,” she remembered Agent Scully saying. He looked like he hadn’t been sleeping.
36.
The postcard had been slipped under her door. On the front was the Lincoln Memorial at night. On the back, an address written in block letters.
She was in her pajamas when Mulder got there, somehow still looking professional in gray cotton and bare feet, hair damp at the edges.
“You’re sure it wasn’t there when you got home?”
“No. I took a shower and I was in there for twenty minutes, thirty, tops. It was on the floor when I came out.”
“What do you think the address is?” he said lightly, already knowing the answer, playing the game she wanted him to play.
“Well, I think Marjorie’s stolen key card will probably get us in.”
“I think so, too.”
Creature comforts made you slow and dull. Sometimes Scully wanted to be a person who could take a hot shower, watch a dumb sitcom, drink some tea, and be asleep by ten. She’d been trying to be that person tonight. What if she hadn’t gone back out to the kitchen for the tea? What if the phone had rung and she didn’t look down at the floor? What if Queequeg were still alive and had eaten the postcard before she had a chance to see it? She’d be in bed right now, reading a book, cozy under the covers. Instead, here she was, putting her shoes back on and picking up her coat and her gun and an unmarked key card she’d stolen from a dead woman’s house.
She felt a jolt of adrenaline when she saw the postcard. Someone had been right outside while she was in the shower. And she felt the same jolt as she and Mulder tripped down the stairs together, out to his car, the hood still warm to the touch.
It would be easier to be in bed. Slow and dull. But she wanted to know. The two of them always wanted to know.
The address took them to an office park a twenty minute drive from Scully’s place in Georgetown. It was 9:30 by the time they were on the road and traffic was light.
The office park was well kept, the polite beiges of suburbia with trimmed bushes in the front. They parked across the street, even though there didn’t seem to be any security around the buildings. No visible cameras, an open parking lot without a gate, no chain link fences. Probably not aesthetically pleasing.
On one end of the complex there was a dental office. “You deserve a smile!” it said beneath the dentist’s name. On the other, an HVAC repair place. In the middle, the glass door was blank, save for the suite number, which matched the back of their postcard.
“Go for it,” Mulder said when they got to the door.
Scully took the silver key card and swiped it through the sensor. A green light, then the door clicked and sighed. She pushed it open with her body, careful not to leave prints on the glass.
There was a small pile of mail on the floor, beneath the mail slot. Mulder picked it up and flipped through it. It was all junk, coupons, ads, addressed to Occupant or Friendly Neighbor.
The lobby could’ve been anywhere in America. It was very clean, with a row of chairs lined up against the front window. A water cooler burbled in the corner. The only sign of life was a dusty peace lily plant. The reception desk was empty. The carpet smelled new.
Behind the desk, Scully put her gloves on and pulled the filing cabinet drawers out. Mulder aimed a flashlight in, revealing emptiness. They went through every drawer and cabinet in the reception area and it was all the same.
Down a hallway at the right of the lobby, there were four individual offices. The nameplates were empty and the doors were standing wide open, revealing small, square offices that smelled of fake lemon and bleach. Vacuum marks were chevroned into the carpet.
“What do you think?” Mulder said as they stood in the fourth office. “Do you think he worked here?”
“I think they did a good job cleaning up, didn’t they?”
It got darker the further away from the front they got. An exit sign glowed green above a door marked AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY.
“Do your thing, Scully.”
She swiped again and opened the door into a small warehouse, dimly lit by emergency lights. Mulder clicked his flashlight on and arced it over the floor as he walked to the center of the room.
“Look at this,” he said. “You can tell there were fixtures here. They tore everything up.”
He pointed the light at spots on the floor.
“You think this is where they manufactured them?” She involuntarily scrunched her shoulders, thinking of her own chip. Welcome home.
“And right on the other side of the wall, they’re doing root canals.”
Mulder crouched down, examining a rough spot in the floor. And as he did, Scully heard footsteps in the corner. She drew her Sig and turned, leveling it at Alex Krycek’s head.
“This is the thanks I get, Agent Scully?”
“Shut up and don’t move, Krycek.”
Mulder stood slowly and walked toward them, trying not to break into a run. She might do it. Tonight, she might do it.
“Hey. Scully,” he said in a voice that he hoped wasn’t patronizing.
She kept her eyes and her gun trained on Krycek, who was lazily following her orders, but didn’t seem too concerned about what she might do.
“Hey, Scully.”
“Why don’t you point that gun somewhere else so we can talk?” Krycek said.
“Shut. Up.”
“Yeah, Krycek, shut the fuck up. Scully.” Mulder touched her arm and leaned close, his voice dropping so Krycek couldn’t hear. This is just for you, not for show, Scully. “Come on. We’re not going to get any answers like this. Okay?”
“I thought you wanted to kill people, Mulder,” she whispered back, still staring at Krycek.
“Well, someone I always listen to told me that enough people have died. Right?”
Her breath hitched slightly, then went out in a puff. She lowered the gun.
“What do you know about the chips?”
“Not much. The technology’s new. It’s not perfect. Pennsylvania was a test.”
“For bigger things,” Mulder said.
“Maybe.”
“You said it’s not perfect. What does that mean?”
“It’s supposed to do two things, as far as I can tell. It cures a very specific type of cancer and it serves as a sort of homing device. But sometimes it does one and not the other. Sometimes it doesn’t do either.”
“So all of these people, all of these deaths,” Scully spit out, “it’s all been a test.”
“You have to break a few eggs.”
Scully moved fast, shoving Krycek against the wall, her arm pressing against his neck. He was caught off guard.
Mulder moved toward them. “Scully-”
She held her hand up at Mulder: don’t come any further. Then she stepped away from Krycek, giving him a shove as she backed off.
“You’re a real piece of shit,” she said with a smile.
“So if this is the plan,” Mulder said, playing the straight man for once, “that also means killing the people who made the chips. Like the owner of our key card.”
“Who said he’s dead?”
Scully was sick of riddles and half answers. “If he’s not dead, then where is he?”
“Maybe he just wanted a new life. Haven’t you ever wanted a new life?”
“Did his wife have a chip in her neck?”
“Was she an abductee?” Mulder asked.
“She was a control subject.”
“Well, she’s dead,” Scully said flatly. “On the bridge in Pennsylvania.”
“Like I said. That happens.”
Scully’s hand went to her gun.
“Hey, I’m just the messenger.”
“Why, though?” said Mulder. “Why bring us here? Why lead us to Wiekamp?”
“You two keep things interesting. Anyway, the project is being put on ice. Look at this place. It’ll be an insurance office in a month.”
They sat in Mulder’s car, across the street.
“If they’re turning off the lights on this project…” Mulder ventured.
“I know what you’re thinking. Is it the chip itself or is it what the chip’s being told to do.”
He sniffed, nodded, clenched his jaw. Tough guy shit. What if she died.
“I think,” she said, “that any of us could get cancer at any time. Not just me. I mean, we could get in an accident on the way home. A garbage truck could cut us off. A deer could run in front of the car. But I’m alive right now. Okay?”
She reached over and took his hand off the steering wheel, kissed it, then put it back.
“I’m ready to go home.”
37.
The days got longer and warmer. It rained. She couldn’t sleep. And Scully could sleep anywhere. Airport gates, rental sedans, anywhere. There was still something bothering her. It wasn’t the chip. It wasn’t the empty warehouse. There was a last missing puzzle piece. It was Mulder. It felt like he was avoiding her. And maybe that was about the motel in Pennsylvania, but she thought it was something more.
Always a lone wolf, he was disappearing more frequently. He wasn’t where he said he’d be. He said he was going to see the Gunmen. When she called over there like a wife who was being cheated on, they said they hadn’t seen him. She played dumb, “Oh, I just thought he might be there.” She drove past the gym where he played basketball. He seemed to be talking to his mom with much more frequency. Teena Mulder never struck her as the kind of mom who loved to chat. He scheduled checkups at the dentist, the doctor. Mulder, who thought of a health plan as zinc lozenges and Campbell’s soup.
She’d woken up in his apartment that Friday night and he’d been gone. Where? A small, jealous part of her wondered if there was someone else. But how could there be a someone else? You had to be something in order for there to be a someone else. The night after that had been Pennsylvania.
She was in the office by herself when the phone rang. The voice on the other end of the line stuttered for a moment when she answered the phone. Then he cleared his throat and asked for Mulder.
“He’s not here right now. Can I take a message?”
“No-no-no, no message. Thanks. Thanks.” The line clicked and went dead. Scully looked at the receiver in her hand.
Their phone lines were always tapped, probably. And Mulder got plenty of phone calls from people who’d read about him or heard about him and just knew, they just knew, that he would be the one to understand the terrible predicament they’d found themselves in.
So this was probably that. Someone far away who’d finally worked up the nerve to call this lone hope in the basement of the FBI about an alien abduction and then panicked when the right person didn’t answer the phone.
She’d come extremely close, the last few days, to digging through the pockets of his coat, digging through his piles of paper, calling the last number he’d called on his mobile phone. She felt paranoid and on edge.
She had the call traced. It had come from a payphone at the corner of 10th and F. A block away.
The rattling elevators were always reluctant to make the trip down to the basement. And so by the time she got up to the lobby and outside, then ran north on 10th, past the fanny-packed tourists in front of the Hard Rock Café and Ford’s Theatre, there was no one there.
38.
Guilt smelled like wood polish and frankincense.
On the other side of the latticed partition was a young voice, younger than her. Fresh out of the seminary. What would make someone choose that life now? It seemed anachronistic, Old World.
“I’m not sure how best to explain this,” Scully started, choosing her words carefully. “I work in government and there’s… context that I can’t really provide. Even to you.”
“Go ahead. I’ll let you know if I have questions. But only if they’re necessary.”
He had a kind voice. If he hadn’t chosen the priesthood, he might’ve been a teacher, the kind that kids loved because he didn’t try too hard to be cool. The older women in the parish, the ones who took turns dusting the pews on Saturdays, probably loved him, too.
“Trust is an important part of my job. It’s absolutely crucial. And I’m finding…”
Scully stopped, wanting to put this the right way, for this anonymous man on the other side of the wall. Not wanting to make herself look too overbearing or make Mulder look guilty.
“I’m finding it hard to trust someone I need to trust. Someone who I usually trust without question and without fear.”
“Why do you think that is?”
“I lied to him. For… a while.”
“And now you believe he’s lying to you?”
“Yes.”
“Do you feel guilt about lying to him?”
“Yes.”
“Have you talked to him about this at all?”
“No. I mean, I came clean, I told him the truth. He forgave me. But I haven’t asked him about what I think he might be keeping from me.”
“Are you concerned about this from a professional standpoint?”
“I can’t really discuss any of the particulars-”
“No, I know. But it seems to me that you can look at this in two ways. From an ethical, professional view-is he doing something that could harm others at work? And from a personal view. Do you have a personal relationship with him?”
“Yes.”
“When we’re not truthful with those who are closest to us, we break our connection with them.”
She nodded, even though he couldn’t see her, and chewed the inside of her mouth.
“Have you considered that you’re projecting your own guilt onto him?”
“I have.”
“And would it make you feel better about your own lies if he were lying to you?”
Scully laughed. “A little bit, yeah.”
“I think… that we can only be available for other people when we first take care of ourselves. The spiritual equivalent of putting your own mask on before helping anyone else as the plane goes down. I’m assuming that your relationship with him is important to you. Otherwise, you wouldn’t be here, asking me about it. Right?”
“Yes.”
“Here’s what I want you to do: Forgive yourself.”
“Couldn’t you just give me a few Hail Marys?”
“And once you’ve forgiven yourself, really forgiven yourself, you need to talk to him. “
39.
Cherry blossoms covered the paths in Folger Park like a bride’s veil.
Mulder knew where the cameras were. He waited an extra second as Haley drove away from the curb. It would be over soon.
40.
It bloomed white hot in her head. Right where the cancer had been, she thought. She felt blinded by her anger. Sick.
She forgave him and forgave him and forgave him. She trusted him. He’d made a fool of her. She knew that he’d been somewhere dark. That he didn’t have the strength of his old beliefs guiding him. But to think that without them, this is where the compass would point?
You let me be taken. I had a baby. She died. They killed her. They killed me but I didn’t die. Chemotherapy works by injecting poison into your veins. My sister’s blood on my hardwood floor. I covered the spot with a rug. Ruskin Dam. Pennsylvania. The motel room. The way you say my name. What we might’ve been. How things could’ve been. All gone gone gone gone-
He stood at the curb and let a terrorist drive away.
41.
She sat across from him on the coffee table, holding the ice to his hand. She had a headache, now that the double adrenaline rush of learning about Mulder’s betrayal and his innocence had subsided. She felt wrung out.
“How long?”
“They approached me when I was in Boston. I wanted to tell you, Scully.”
“I know.”
“They knew everything from the start. They knew about you. If I’d done anything, if I’d made one wrong move, they would’ve…”
“I know what they do.”
He experimentally flexed his hand, wincing. “Do you think it’s broken?”
“Probably. Did they do anything else do you?”
She set the ice down and squeezed his arms, feeling up and down for anything out of order. He shook his head no.
“You need sleep.”
“Yeah, right.”
She taped up his fingers in the bathroom with a splint he had in the cabinet from an old basketball injury.
“I was suspicious of you because I’d been lying to you,” she said.
“But you had reason to be suspicious.”
“I like to keep things to myself.” She folded her arms as she leaned in the doorway.
“I’ve noticed.”
“But that usually doesn’t mean lying, I hope you know that.”
“Scully, you’re probably the most truthful person I’ve ever met.”
Mulder popped open a bottle of Advil and shook some out, before bending to the sink for a gulp of water. She took two, using the cup with his toothbrush in it.
“I’m not perfect.”
“I didn’t say you were.” Mulder wiped his mouth with the back of his arm and slipped past her, out into his bedroom. “Are you okay?” He pointed at the Advil.
“Headache. Really, Mulder, you need to get some sleep. What time do you have to be there?”
“Six. When’s the last time you slept?”
“I don’t have to participate in a bank robbery in the morning.”
“If they find out-”
“Mulder-”
“No, Scully, it’s something to consider. And I wouldn’t put it past them to do it during the operation, right there in the bank.”
“You’ll have backup.”
“Not inside.”
“I don’t trust the task force, Mulder. Skinner, maybe, but Leamus? The CIA? They’re using you. What if they’ve been using you all along?”
“Well, they can join the club, I guess.”
He sat down on the edge of his bed in the muddled light. She stayed in the doorway, backlit by the warm yellow bulb over the mirror. He thought of an art history class he took in college. A gold leaf halo on a Renaissance saint.
“Mulder. Last year. Were you-did you think I was going to die?”
He raised his face to her. The answer was plain. He nodded.
Later, after Haley had run off the road, Mulder would never tell her how close he’d come. On his knees, with ripped plastic sheeting snapping in the wind like ghosts. The man next to him, falling forward as the shot rang out. It could’ve been him. Bremer letting him go-what were the chances.
Knowing Scully, when the time came, she’d insist on doing his autopsy, so it was the least he could do to die from something that wasn’t going to rip his body apart.
42.
It is as it ever was and ever will be. There would always be danger, as long as they were doing this. Small lulls in the middle of the night had to be hoarded and held close. A breath before jumping back in.
43.
She left his apartment a little after three. At the door, she fussed with his hand some more, giving him the chance to complain about her hurting him.
“We’ll get it x-rayed tomorrow.”
“If there is a tomorrow,” he said gravely. A joke at the end of the world.
She wrapped her arms around him and he leaned his chin on the top of her head.
“Just be careful,” she said, feeling his ribs rise and fall. She felt him nod against her and that was enough. They could only try.
44.
There’s a photograph pinned to the bulletin board in their office. Scully put it there. Scully, who could sometimes be unsentimental to the point of cruelty.
A crime scene photographer at an office building in Newark took it, testing out her flash before crouching down to catalogue the business of death that had brought them all there.
It was how they looked from the outside, a closed loop like the snake on her back.
They were both wearing boxy Bureau-issue jackets. Scully always swam in them, even the smallest size. They were reading from one sheaf of papers in Mulder’s hand and Scully’s hair looked very red.
She knew Mulder had noticed it, because he noticed everything. Scully thought of it as a pure distillation of their work into one frame. It made her miss it even as she was doing it, working a case, breaking down a lead. Nostalgia for the present that would, one day, be past. The Germans surely had a name for it.
In the photo, it is as it ever was and ever will be. The same instinct that led her to Marjorie Eldritch’s house and the same reason that he agreed to throw in with the New Spartans. To take the journey without hope of ever getting the answers you desire.
“YOU ARE HERE.”
Scully scribbled it on a yellow post-it and stuck it on the flying saucer next to the picture. You are here. Mulder and Scully. As it ever was and ever will be.
AUTHOR'S NOTE
I started writing this not quite ten years ago, somewhere in the post-IWTB lull, before season 10 was a twinkle in anyone’s eye. It’s always had the same general structure, but at a certain point back then, I hit a wall and never figured out how to get around it. So it remained as a print out in a file folder that I would occasionally run into when I was looking for something or cleaning. I still thought about Mulder and Scully, but I figured my fan fiction days were over. I was retired. Then season 11 flicked the proverbial switch. It was good again. They were them again. Even Gillian’s wig had more enthusiasm this time around. And so I picked this story up and started working. I loved writing it and I hope you like it, too.
Thanks, as always, to coast, meatfight, and leucocrystal, who are still here and still giving wonderful notes and are the best email friends in the world. They kept me honest (made me a whole person) when it came to commas, typos, Mulder’s missing dining room, and bathtub water temperature.
Thanks, also, to the inimitable Penumbra, because "Parabiosis" was never far from mind as I was writing this and I hope that my journey through season 5 is even half as good as her season 7.
R/NC-17
Part Four
35.
He stood outside the office on the fifth floor and made a deal. He’d knock and if she didn’t answer within one minute, he could leave. He would knock and count to sixty. He had an appointment, sure, but maybe she wouldn’t be there.
“Agent Mulder. Come in.”
Fifteen seconds? She didn’t even make it interesting. He nodded hello and slouched inside.
She was in her fifties and had grave eyes, like she’d seen everything terrible the world had to offer and would not be impressed with whatever you’d come to lay at her feet.
A week earlier, Skinner had seen them in the hallway, waiting to go into a briefing. In a dim corner, Mulder had been sitting on a discarded table with empty, beat-up bankers boxes at one end and Scully had been standing in the wide V of his sharpshooter, outlaw legs, reading him the results of a lab test.
Scully had looked up at him, her tongue darting at the edge of her mouth, and he’d put his hand on her elbow, laughing. Then he saw Skinner out of the corner of his eye, watching them as he went into the conference room.
The next day, Skinner handed him a business card with KAREN KOSSEFF, LCSW embossed on the front, under a blue and gold Bureau crest. On the back he’d written 2:30 Tuesday.
“You cannot tell Agent Scully. Anything. Have I made myself clear, Agent Mulder?”
Common opinion, apparently, was that he was a weak man.
“Talk to her,” Skinner said, tapping the card.
“Would you?”
“This isn’t a conversation, Agent.”
Scully thought he was at the dentist.
Karen Kosseff, LCSW was comfortable with silence. She listened to agents bullshit her all day long. She waited.
When he was sent back to school that January for the second half of sixth grade, he was also sent to see Dr. Gersh. Dr. Gersh had a boxful of puppets with scratched up eyes and he was a nut for checkers. Mulder knew the second fact because Dr. Gersh had told him. “Fox, I’m a nut for checkers. How about a game?”
Did that really work on any of the other sad kids?
Maybe Dr. Gersh thought that one day, Mulder would shout “King me!” and be cured. It didn’t seem possible that they’d let you become a doctor if you were that stupid. Checkers!
Mulder was certain of one thing, even at twelve, and that was that there was no such thing as a cure. Healing was impossible, and if you were guilty, well, then, you had no business even seeking it out.
But every Monday and Wednesday afternoon, from 3:15 to 4:00, Fox Mulder and Dr. Gersh played checkers.
No one seemed to remember the red and black Stratego board that had been on the living room floor that night, and Mulder never brought it up, just dutifully crisscrossed his plastic pieces from one side to the other. Samantha used to sandwich checkers together to pretend like they were Oreos.
He’d saved the Stratego board while men, people his father seemed to know, tromped around their house, and while his mother had the beginnings of what his dad called “a little something.”
“Your mother’s going through a little something, Fox. Why don’t you go outside for awhile, huh?”
He carried the board flat, carefully not to tip the tiny pieces over, and put it on the floor at the end of his bed. He thought he’d have to make excuses for it when his mom came in to take dirty clothes out of his hamper, but she didn’t do that anymore.
Finally, Kosseff spoke.
“Why do you think Assistant Director Skinner asked us to talk, Agent Mulder?”
He shook his head and shrugged.
“I understand that you’re on a difficult assignment. Is the assignment bothering you, Agent Mulder?”
“Bothering me?”
She raised her eyebrows, like she’d done research on the best way to get him to talk. He wiped sweaty palms on his knees.
“No more than anything else.”
“Well, then I guess the question is how much you’re bothered by everything else.”
Mulder laughed and Kosseff just barely smiled, indulging him for a moment.
“Let me be more specific. Does it bother you that you can’t tell your partner what you’re doing? Does it bother you that you have to keep things from her?”
She kept her pen capped, made no motion toward her pad of paper.
“That’s the assignment.”
“And you’re here because you’ve been assigned to talk to me. Is that right?”
“Two for two.”
Kosseff had guiltily, unprofessionally, been looking forward to this appointment since the previous Friday afternoon, when it appeared on her calendar. Fox Mulder. His reputation, as it were, preceded him. He was mythological. Not to mention his small, flinty partner and the way she talked about him. Even when she was dying. Especially as she was dying, right at his side the whole damn time.
“Okay. So let’s start there. Why do you think the Assistant Director asked you to talk to me?”
“Told,” he said. “And the Assistant Director thinks I’m going to tell Scully. Hell, he probably thinks she’s known for weeks.”
“Has she?”
“I haven’t told her a fucking thing.”
He leaned back. This wasn’t a point of pride, Kosseff realized, not telling her. He was ashamed to have followed his orders so resolutely.
“And do you want to tell her?”
“Yes,” he said. “Do you know how many times I’ve gotten this close? And it’s not just because-not because I hate lying to her. But because she would be an asset to the operation, and I think Skinner is putting us both in unnecessary danger by keeping it from her.”
“Do you think it’s possible that the Assistant Director knows things about the situation that you don’t? That perhaps he does have your best interests in mind?”
“Skinner-” He stopped himself. “They make such a big deal about partnership, you know? About trust. I’ve gone over and over and over it, and I cannot come up with anything. Safety is one thing. But lying to your partner. For months. That’s another thing altogether. And when it’s all over, and she knows-”
He rubbed his eyes. He hadn’t meant to say this much.
“Don’t you think Agent Scully might understand the situation? That she’ll understand you were following a specific order for a reason?”
“Sure. Sure, yeah. She’ll understand. But that won’t change the fact that I’ll have lied to her. To her face. Every day. No amount of understanding will change that.”
“I trust him with my life,” she remembered Agent Scully saying. He looked like he hadn’t been sleeping.
36.
The postcard had been slipped under her door. On the front was the Lincoln Memorial at night. On the back, an address written in block letters.
She was in her pajamas when Mulder got there, somehow still looking professional in gray cotton and bare feet, hair damp at the edges.
“You’re sure it wasn’t there when you got home?”
“No. I took a shower and I was in there for twenty minutes, thirty, tops. It was on the floor when I came out.”
“What do you think the address is?” he said lightly, already knowing the answer, playing the game she wanted him to play.
“Well, I think Marjorie’s stolen key card will probably get us in.”
“I think so, too.”
Creature comforts made you slow and dull. Sometimes Scully wanted to be a person who could take a hot shower, watch a dumb sitcom, drink some tea, and be asleep by ten. She’d been trying to be that person tonight. What if she hadn’t gone back out to the kitchen for the tea? What if the phone had rung and she didn’t look down at the floor? What if Queequeg were still alive and had eaten the postcard before she had a chance to see it? She’d be in bed right now, reading a book, cozy under the covers. Instead, here she was, putting her shoes back on and picking up her coat and her gun and an unmarked key card she’d stolen from a dead woman’s house.
She felt a jolt of adrenaline when she saw the postcard. Someone had been right outside while she was in the shower. And she felt the same jolt as she and Mulder tripped down the stairs together, out to his car, the hood still warm to the touch.
It would be easier to be in bed. Slow and dull. But she wanted to know. The two of them always wanted to know.
The address took them to an office park a twenty minute drive from Scully’s place in Georgetown. It was 9:30 by the time they were on the road and traffic was light.
The office park was well kept, the polite beiges of suburbia with trimmed bushes in the front. They parked across the street, even though there didn’t seem to be any security around the buildings. No visible cameras, an open parking lot without a gate, no chain link fences. Probably not aesthetically pleasing.
On one end of the complex there was a dental office. “You deserve a smile!” it said beneath the dentist’s name. On the other, an HVAC repair place. In the middle, the glass door was blank, save for the suite number, which matched the back of their postcard.
“Go for it,” Mulder said when they got to the door.
Scully took the silver key card and swiped it through the sensor. A green light, then the door clicked and sighed. She pushed it open with her body, careful not to leave prints on the glass.
There was a small pile of mail on the floor, beneath the mail slot. Mulder picked it up and flipped through it. It was all junk, coupons, ads, addressed to Occupant or Friendly Neighbor.
The lobby could’ve been anywhere in America. It was very clean, with a row of chairs lined up against the front window. A water cooler burbled in the corner. The only sign of life was a dusty peace lily plant. The reception desk was empty. The carpet smelled new.
Behind the desk, Scully put her gloves on and pulled the filing cabinet drawers out. Mulder aimed a flashlight in, revealing emptiness. They went through every drawer and cabinet in the reception area and it was all the same.
Down a hallway at the right of the lobby, there were four individual offices. The nameplates were empty and the doors were standing wide open, revealing small, square offices that smelled of fake lemon and bleach. Vacuum marks were chevroned into the carpet.
“What do you think?” Mulder said as they stood in the fourth office. “Do you think he worked here?”
“I think they did a good job cleaning up, didn’t they?”
It got darker the further away from the front they got. An exit sign glowed green above a door marked AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY.
“Do your thing, Scully.”
She swiped again and opened the door into a small warehouse, dimly lit by emergency lights. Mulder clicked his flashlight on and arced it over the floor as he walked to the center of the room.
“Look at this,” he said. “You can tell there were fixtures here. They tore everything up.”
He pointed the light at spots on the floor.
“You think this is where they manufactured them?” She involuntarily scrunched her shoulders, thinking of her own chip. Welcome home.
“And right on the other side of the wall, they’re doing root canals.”
Mulder crouched down, examining a rough spot in the floor. And as he did, Scully heard footsteps in the corner. She drew her Sig and turned, leveling it at Alex Krycek’s head.
“This is the thanks I get, Agent Scully?”
“Shut up and don’t move, Krycek.”
Mulder stood slowly and walked toward them, trying not to break into a run. She might do it. Tonight, she might do it.
“Hey. Scully,” he said in a voice that he hoped wasn’t patronizing.
She kept her eyes and her gun trained on Krycek, who was lazily following her orders, but didn’t seem too concerned about what she might do.
“Hey, Scully.”
“Why don’t you point that gun somewhere else so we can talk?” Krycek said.
“Shut. Up.”
“Yeah, Krycek, shut the fuck up. Scully.” Mulder touched her arm and leaned close, his voice dropping so Krycek couldn’t hear. This is just for you, not for show, Scully. “Come on. We’re not going to get any answers like this. Okay?”
“I thought you wanted to kill people, Mulder,” she whispered back, still staring at Krycek.
“Well, someone I always listen to told me that enough people have died. Right?”
Her breath hitched slightly, then went out in a puff. She lowered the gun.
“What do you know about the chips?”
“Not much. The technology’s new. It’s not perfect. Pennsylvania was a test.”
“For bigger things,” Mulder said.
“Maybe.”
“You said it’s not perfect. What does that mean?”
“It’s supposed to do two things, as far as I can tell. It cures a very specific type of cancer and it serves as a sort of homing device. But sometimes it does one and not the other. Sometimes it doesn’t do either.”
“So all of these people, all of these deaths,” Scully spit out, “it’s all been a test.”
“You have to break a few eggs.”
Scully moved fast, shoving Krycek against the wall, her arm pressing against his neck. He was caught off guard.
Mulder moved toward them. “Scully-”
She held her hand up at Mulder: don’t come any further. Then she stepped away from Krycek, giving him a shove as she backed off.
“You’re a real piece of shit,” she said with a smile.
“So if this is the plan,” Mulder said, playing the straight man for once, “that also means killing the people who made the chips. Like the owner of our key card.”
“Who said he’s dead?”
Scully was sick of riddles and half answers. “If he’s not dead, then where is he?”
“Maybe he just wanted a new life. Haven’t you ever wanted a new life?”
“Did his wife have a chip in her neck?”
“Was she an abductee?” Mulder asked.
“She was a control subject.”
“Well, she’s dead,” Scully said flatly. “On the bridge in Pennsylvania.”
“Like I said. That happens.”
Scully’s hand went to her gun.
“Hey, I’m just the messenger.”
“Why, though?” said Mulder. “Why bring us here? Why lead us to Wiekamp?”
“You two keep things interesting. Anyway, the project is being put on ice. Look at this place. It’ll be an insurance office in a month.”
They sat in Mulder’s car, across the street.
“If they’re turning off the lights on this project…” Mulder ventured.
“I know what you’re thinking. Is it the chip itself or is it what the chip’s being told to do.”
He sniffed, nodded, clenched his jaw. Tough guy shit. What if she died.
“I think,” she said, “that any of us could get cancer at any time. Not just me. I mean, we could get in an accident on the way home. A garbage truck could cut us off. A deer could run in front of the car. But I’m alive right now. Okay?”
She reached over and took his hand off the steering wheel, kissed it, then put it back.
“I’m ready to go home.”
37.
The days got longer and warmer. It rained. She couldn’t sleep. And Scully could sleep anywhere. Airport gates, rental sedans, anywhere. There was still something bothering her. It wasn’t the chip. It wasn’t the empty warehouse. There was a last missing puzzle piece. It was Mulder. It felt like he was avoiding her. And maybe that was about the motel in Pennsylvania, but she thought it was something more.
Always a lone wolf, he was disappearing more frequently. He wasn’t where he said he’d be. He said he was going to see the Gunmen. When she called over there like a wife who was being cheated on, they said they hadn’t seen him. She played dumb, “Oh, I just thought he might be there.” She drove past the gym where he played basketball. He seemed to be talking to his mom with much more frequency. Teena Mulder never struck her as the kind of mom who loved to chat. He scheduled checkups at the dentist, the doctor. Mulder, who thought of a health plan as zinc lozenges and Campbell’s soup.
She’d woken up in his apartment that Friday night and he’d been gone. Where? A small, jealous part of her wondered if there was someone else. But how could there be a someone else? You had to be something in order for there to be a someone else. The night after that had been Pennsylvania.
She was in the office by herself when the phone rang. The voice on the other end of the line stuttered for a moment when she answered the phone. Then he cleared his throat and asked for Mulder.
“He’s not here right now. Can I take a message?”
“No-no-no, no message. Thanks. Thanks.” The line clicked and went dead. Scully looked at the receiver in her hand.
Their phone lines were always tapped, probably. And Mulder got plenty of phone calls from people who’d read about him or heard about him and just knew, they just knew, that he would be the one to understand the terrible predicament they’d found themselves in.
So this was probably that. Someone far away who’d finally worked up the nerve to call this lone hope in the basement of the FBI about an alien abduction and then panicked when the right person didn’t answer the phone.
She’d come extremely close, the last few days, to digging through the pockets of his coat, digging through his piles of paper, calling the last number he’d called on his mobile phone. She felt paranoid and on edge.
She had the call traced. It had come from a payphone at the corner of 10th and F. A block away.
The rattling elevators were always reluctant to make the trip down to the basement. And so by the time she got up to the lobby and outside, then ran north on 10th, past the fanny-packed tourists in front of the Hard Rock Café and Ford’s Theatre, there was no one there.
38.
Guilt smelled like wood polish and frankincense.
On the other side of the latticed partition was a young voice, younger than her. Fresh out of the seminary. What would make someone choose that life now? It seemed anachronistic, Old World.
“I’m not sure how best to explain this,” Scully started, choosing her words carefully. “I work in government and there’s… context that I can’t really provide. Even to you.”
“Go ahead. I’ll let you know if I have questions. But only if they’re necessary.”
He had a kind voice. If he hadn’t chosen the priesthood, he might’ve been a teacher, the kind that kids loved because he didn’t try too hard to be cool. The older women in the parish, the ones who took turns dusting the pews on Saturdays, probably loved him, too.
“Trust is an important part of my job. It’s absolutely crucial. And I’m finding…”
Scully stopped, wanting to put this the right way, for this anonymous man on the other side of the wall. Not wanting to make herself look too overbearing or make Mulder look guilty.
“I’m finding it hard to trust someone I need to trust. Someone who I usually trust without question and without fear.”
“Why do you think that is?”
“I lied to him. For… a while.”
“And now you believe he’s lying to you?”
“Yes.”
“Do you feel guilt about lying to him?”
“Yes.”
“Have you talked to him about this at all?”
“No. I mean, I came clean, I told him the truth. He forgave me. But I haven’t asked him about what I think he might be keeping from me.”
“Are you concerned about this from a professional standpoint?”
“I can’t really discuss any of the particulars-”
“No, I know. But it seems to me that you can look at this in two ways. From an ethical, professional view-is he doing something that could harm others at work? And from a personal view. Do you have a personal relationship with him?”
“Yes.”
“When we’re not truthful with those who are closest to us, we break our connection with them.”
She nodded, even though he couldn’t see her, and chewed the inside of her mouth.
“Have you considered that you’re projecting your own guilt onto him?”
“I have.”
“And would it make you feel better about your own lies if he were lying to you?”
Scully laughed. “A little bit, yeah.”
“I think… that we can only be available for other people when we first take care of ourselves. The spiritual equivalent of putting your own mask on before helping anyone else as the plane goes down. I’m assuming that your relationship with him is important to you. Otherwise, you wouldn’t be here, asking me about it. Right?”
“Yes.”
“Here’s what I want you to do: Forgive yourself.”
“Couldn’t you just give me a few Hail Marys?”
“And once you’ve forgiven yourself, really forgiven yourself, you need to talk to him. “
39.
Cherry blossoms covered the paths in Folger Park like a bride’s veil.
Mulder knew where the cameras were. He waited an extra second as Haley drove away from the curb. It would be over soon.
40.
It bloomed white hot in her head. Right where the cancer had been, she thought. She felt blinded by her anger. Sick.
She forgave him and forgave him and forgave him. She trusted him. He’d made a fool of her. She knew that he’d been somewhere dark. That he didn’t have the strength of his old beliefs guiding him. But to think that without them, this is where the compass would point?
You let me be taken. I had a baby. She died. They killed her. They killed me but I didn’t die. Chemotherapy works by injecting poison into your veins. My sister’s blood on my hardwood floor. I covered the spot with a rug. Ruskin Dam. Pennsylvania. The motel room. The way you say my name. What we might’ve been. How things could’ve been. All gone gone gone gone-
He stood at the curb and let a terrorist drive away.
41.
She sat across from him on the coffee table, holding the ice to his hand. She had a headache, now that the double adrenaline rush of learning about Mulder’s betrayal and his innocence had subsided. She felt wrung out.
“How long?”
“They approached me when I was in Boston. I wanted to tell you, Scully.”
“I know.”
“They knew everything from the start. They knew about you. If I’d done anything, if I’d made one wrong move, they would’ve…”
“I know what they do.”
He experimentally flexed his hand, wincing. “Do you think it’s broken?”
“Probably. Did they do anything else do you?”
She set the ice down and squeezed his arms, feeling up and down for anything out of order. He shook his head no.
“You need sleep.”
“Yeah, right.”
She taped up his fingers in the bathroom with a splint he had in the cabinet from an old basketball injury.
“I was suspicious of you because I’d been lying to you,” she said.
“But you had reason to be suspicious.”
“I like to keep things to myself.” She folded her arms as she leaned in the doorway.
“I’ve noticed.”
“But that usually doesn’t mean lying, I hope you know that.”
“Scully, you’re probably the most truthful person I’ve ever met.”
Mulder popped open a bottle of Advil and shook some out, before bending to the sink for a gulp of water. She took two, using the cup with his toothbrush in it.
“I’m not perfect.”
“I didn’t say you were.” Mulder wiped his mouth with the back of his arm and slipped past her, out into his bedroom. “Are you okay?” He pointed at the Advil.
“Headache. Really, Mulder, you need to get some sleep. What time do you have to be there?”
“Six. When’s the last time you slept?”
“I don’t have to participate in a bank robbery in the morning.”
“If they find out-”
“Mulder-”
“No, Scully, it’s something to consider. And I wouldn’t put it past them to do it during the operation, right there in the bank.”
“You’ll have backup.”
“Not inside.”
“I don’t trust the task force, Mulder. Skinner, maybe, but Leamus? The CIA? They’re using you. What if they’ve been using you all along?”
“Well, they can join the club, I guess.”
He sat down on the edge of his bed in the muddled light. She stayed in the doorway, backlit by the warm yellow bulb over the mirror. He thought of an art history class he took in college. A gold leaf halo on a Renaissance saint.
“Mulder. Last year. Were you-did you think I was going to die?”
He raised his face to her. The answer was plain. He nodded.
Later, after Haley had run off the road, Mulder would never tell her how close he’d come. On his knees, with ripped plastic sheeting snapping in the wind like ghosts. The man next to him, falling forward as the shot rang out. It could’ve been him. Bremer letting him go-what were the chances.
Knowing Scully, when the time came, she’d insist on doing his autopsy, so it was the least he could do to die from something that wasn’t going to rip his body apart.
42.
It is as it ever was and ever will be. There would always be danger, as long as they were doing this. Small lulls in the middle of the night had to be hoarded and held close. A breath before jumping back in.
43.
She left his apartment a little after three. At the door, she fussed with his hand some more, giving him the chance to complain about her hurting him.
“We’ll get it x-rayed tomorrow.”
“If there is a tomorrow,” he said gravely. A joke at the end of the world.
She wrapped her arms around him and he leaned his chin on the top of her head.
“Just be careful,” she said, feeling his ribs rise and fall. She felt him nod against her and that was enough. They could only try.
44.
There’s a photograph pinned to the bulletin board in their office. Scully put it there. Scully, who could sometimes be unsentimental to the point of cruelty.
A crime scene photographer at an office building in Newark took it, testing out her flash before crouching down to catalogue the business of death that had brought them all there.
It was how they looked from the outside, a closed loop like the snake on her back.
They were both wearing boxy Bureau-issue jackets. Scully always swam in them, even the smallest size. They were reading from one sheaf of papers in Mulder’s hand and Scully’s hair looked very red.
She knew Mulder had noticed it, because he noticed everything. Scully thought of it as a pure distillation of their work into one frame. It made her miss it even as she was doing it, working a case, breaking down a lead. Nostalgia for the present that would, one day, be past. The Germans surely had a name for it.
In the photo, it is as it ever was and ever will be. The same instinct that led her to Marjorie Eldritch’s house and the same reason that he agreed to throw in with the New Spartans. To take the journey without hope of ever getting the answers you desire.
“YOU ARE HERE.”
Scully scribbled it on a yellow post-it and stuck it on the flying saucer next to the picture. You are here. Mulder and Scully. As it ever was and ever will be.
AUTHOR'S NOTE
I started writing this not quite ten years ago, somewhere in the post-IWTB lull, before season 10 was a twinkle in anyone’s eye. It’s always had the same general structure, but at a certain point back then, I hit a wall and never figured out how to get around it. So it remained as a print out in a file folder that I would occasionally run into when I was looking for something or cleaning. I still thought about Mulder and Scully, but I figured my fan fiction days were over. I was retired. Then season 11 flicked the proverbial switch. It was good again. They were them again. Even Gillian’s wig had more enthusiasm this time around. And so I picked this story up and started working. I loved writing it and I hope you like it, too.
Thanks, as always, to coast, meatfight, and leucocrystal, who are still here and still giving wonderful notes and are the best email friends in the world. They kept me honest (made me a whole person) when it came to commas, typos, Mulder’s missing dining room, and bathtub water temperature.
Thanks, also, to the inimitable Penumbra, because "Parabiosis" was never far from mind as I was writing this and I hope that my journey through season 5 is even half as good as her season 7.