Snakebitten (1/4)
Season 5, MSR
R/NC-17
Part One
“We would rather be ruined than changed.” - WH Auden
1997/1998
The sky was a pale, apocalyptic pink. Blood in the bath.
Scully drove north.
1.
The chip was round and under a microscope the texture looked like fish scales.
The procedure was over in ten minutes. Three tiny stitches at the back of her neck with a gauze pad taped on top. It shouldn’t have worked, but it did.
Hours after Skinner left him in the hospital hallway-
“Fox?” He jerked awake when Scully’s mom squeezed his shoulder.
“Is she okay?”
“She’d like to see you.”
“Scully?”
He pushed the door open, not wanting to let too much light in.
“You’re still here?” Her voice sounded rough and tired, but her eyes were bright and wild. She’d witnessed a miracle.
“You want me to leave? Your mom-”
“Of course not.”
He scraped a chair up next to the bed. “They didn’t have any cards in the gift shop for this particular occasion.”
“Have you been sitting out there this whole time?”
“I took a walk when Bill came out.”
She made a bemused “mmm” sound, then grabbed his hand and looked at it like it was the first she’d ever seen.
“Aren’t hands amazing?”
“You still on a morphine drip?”
She pointed out the bones in his hand, touching each of them as she gave their names.
He meant to make another joke, but they all caught in the back of his throat. The room smelled of carnations and bleached sheets. A mylar balloon dipped beside the bed: Get Well Soon!
“Oh. I got you something.”
He slipped his hand out of hers and took the gift shop Moon Pie out of his coat pocket. She held it delicately, like a blossom.
“So the gift streak remains unbroken,” she said.
Driving home, he missed her. He told himself that was silly. He’d see her tomorrow, and if not tomorrow, then the next day. He’d been given an eleventh hour reprieve and there were once again boundless, infinite stores of Dana Scully. Her fingers on the cuff of his coat in a burnt coffee small town police station; her brisk, argumentative reports; her rare and exotic laugh. She only laughed at him. No one else. (“Not at you, Mulder.”) It seemed to him a worthy goal to devote his life to, making her laugh.
2.
The New Spartans had been watching Mulder since the summer.
Special Agent Fox Mulder had security clearance. They couldn’t believe this guy was clean, but apparently he was. He had something of a reputation as an anti-government whack job even as the DOJ signed his checks. He was healthy as a horse, but there were medical records floating around from psychologists and hypnotists.
But the most important thing in their dossier on Fox Mulder was the fact that Fox Mulder’s partner was dying. Almost certainly dying, cancer chewing right through her pretty head.
She was admitted as an inpatient at Trinity in late October. An orderly they paid off had seen him, in her room in the middle of the night, sloppy crying all over the place. He was going to be a fucking mess if she died.
But then she didn’t, which was really too bad, because a man with nothing to live for also has nothing to lose.
3.
A week after she’d gone back to work, he showed up at her door late, talking about the relative molecular stability of silicon. What was required to manufacture this kind of technology?
“If we can figure out where your chip was made, that gives us a place to start. I know it’s not much, but we’ve had less to go on before.”
“Mulder.”
“And if we have a where, Scully, we can find a who-”
“Mulder.”
“What?”
“No.”
He was so guileless sometimes, a charming offshoot of his single-mindedness. His capacity for surprise, for disappointment, was seemingly endless.
“I know what you want to do, Mulder, and I appreciate that, I do.”
It sounded formal and bloodless, her appreciation, considering what he wanted to do was hunt men down like dogs and extract information like teeth.
“But?”
“I don’t need to know. I don’t know if I even want to know.”
“We don’t have to do anything right now, we can-”
“It won’t change anything.”
“Someone did this to you, Scully. And what if you hadn’t put the chip in?”
She shrugged. Her kitchen was too bright. She wished they were in Mulder’s apartment, which would be dark, with streaks of masking tape on the windows and dirty bowls in the sink.
He stepped back from the chair he’d been leaning over. “You think it wasn’t the chip.”
“I didn’t say that.” She took a hand towel from its rack and refolded it.
“You didn’t have to.”
She sat down at the table.
“What good will it do, Mulder? I can’t spend the rest of my life trying to punish someone.”
He could.
“They put something in your body, Scully. Against your will and without your knowledge. And when you took it out, they killed you. Don’t you want to know who the fuck did that? And who gave you this chip? I mean, we’re supposed to just smile and say thank you? Be grateful? If somebody sets your house on fire and then comes back to put it out, you don’t thank them for putting it out. You ask them why the hell they dropped the match in the first place.”
It wasn’t a match, it was a Molotov cocktail.
“Please don’t turn this into a fight.”
He pushed the chair back under the table with a little too much force. “Okay. Well. I should go.”
“Mulder.”
He paused at the door, hand on the knob. “No, you’re right, Scully. It was stupid. It won’t change anything. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
4.
They had no business, either of them, having children.
He’d gone through a dozen plastic bag fish since they’d met. Her dog had been eaten, either by an enormous alligator or a prehistoric lake monster, depending on who was doing the telling. Poor Queequeg.
Emily had been so small in his arms, feverish and sweaty, her little pajamas sticking to her back. His entire hand fit over the back of her head and it made his stomach lurch. He simultaneously wanted to never put her down and to pass her off immediately into more responsible hands.
He wasn’t to be trusted and neither was Scully. Everything they touched died. And yet he’d lied for her when she asked him to, had sat at a table and said she should be allowed to try to protect this tiny, fragile person who had been created to be killed.
Scully believed she, alone, could keep Emily safe. The way she looked at a futile situation and insisted that the problem wasn’t a general one, but rather that she hadn’t tried yet, it was one of his favorite things about her.
No matter how branched and spliced and hybridized it was, some of Emily’s DNA had been Scully’s and that had made him feel wolfishly protective of her. This feeling had surprised him and frightened him. To be so at the mercy of another person for no other reason than because.
5.
Scully sometimes paid lip service to the idea of wanting what she called “a real life,” but come on. Her mom’s friend’s daughter had invited her to join a book club. She said she’d go, then never did, because there was always something more pressing than some book about a Civil War widow finding love again. There was always a mangled body, an autopsy bay. There was always Mulder.
She always felt a little nagging guilt after using those words: a real life. It absolved her of responsibility, for one, cannily implying that she’d easily have all that if it weren’t for Mulder.
And for another, it told Mulder that his life was silly, childish, lacking in meaning. She told herself that he knew what she meant, that he could take what she dished out, but she hated being mean to him. He wasn’t a joke, and she hated to think that he might think she felt that way.
And so she booked her trip to Maine without thinking, after getting back from Coats Grove and its bleeding trees. Her favorite pair of boots had a crust of mud around the bottom.
“Sleep in,” she told Mulder gamely. “Read the paper. Play basketball. Have a beer with the Gunmen. Enjoy a whole weekend with me out of your hair.”
“Isn’t Maine pretty cold this time of year?” he said.
She ignored him and continued proofreading a report.
Maine was cold. Slate gray and salty. She wondered at her ability to be unimpressed by locals clawing their eyes out en masse. It felt like Mulder had orchestrated a hidden camera prank and would be jumping out from behind a tree at any moment. “Surprise! It’s an X-File!”
Wasn’t trying not to think about him the same, really, as thinking about him? A Zen koan. Mulder is and Mulder isn’t. She slipped deeper into the tub that wasn’t nearly deep enough, her toes cold on the edge. She should’ve spent more time booking a hotel. She tried to empty her mind.
Her mother had been thrilled to hear she was taking a weekend trip and had given her a copy of something called Affirmations for Women Who Do Too Much. She hadn’t opened it, but doubted that the book’s idea of “doing too much” lined up with any of the things she was actually doing.
She had stopped by Mulder’s the night before she left, dropping off an inconclusive autopsy report, and she’d wanted to pilfer a book off his desk, something well-thumbed and annotated with Mulder’s own marginalia, but she didn’t.
“Don’t miss me too much,” he said when she left, leaning out into the hallway as she walked to the elevator.
“Don’t worry.”
“Eat a lobster for me,” he said, and when she turned back, his door was closed.
6.
There were two ways to recruit: money or ideology. The New Spartans didn’t have any money. They were up to their eyeballs in ideology. It was a trickier needle to thread when convincing an FBI agent to join your cause. The danger would be worth it. If you weren’t willing to die, you didn’t really believe.
7.
They ate barbecue at the Dallas airport, waiting for their flight.
“Scully, do you think you could kill people if you were a vampire?” He was in a surprisingly chipper mood for the night they’d just had.
“For the purposes of this exercise, we’re assuming that vampires exist?”
“Goes without saying.”
She remembered a barbecue restaurant in Wisconsin three years ago as he licked the edge of his thumb.
“Assuming that vampires exist, and assuming that to be a vampire is to require human blood, then I guess I might. I imagine the urge for survival, even in the undead, is strong. But on the other hand: your exsanguinated cows.”
He had a whole file of them-not just the Texas Holsteins-slow beasts all over the world tipped to their sides and drained of blood.
“An ethical vampire. You would definitely be an ethical vampire.”
“And what about you?”
“Nah. Eternal life is a curse.”
8.
In the dream she kept having, she couldn’t move.
She wasn’t stupid. She knew what it meant. It was her subconscious, processing the feeling that she was not in control.
She knew she should probably go see Karen Kosseff or go to Mass or run one more mile or drink more water. She bought some new lipstick, same color as the rest.
Still, none of that could change what had happened to her.
9.
Mulder leaned into her as she unlocked her front door. He was a terrible drunk. It was sweet-almost all anyone would need to do to get him to talk was buy him a few shots of tequila.
“So. What did you wish for, Scully?”
He was warm in his black wool coat at her side, smelling faintly of salty bar food and cigarette smoke.
“If I tell you, it won’t come true.”
Her apartment was dark, only a light on above the kitchen sink and the small lamp in the living room. She leaned her cheek against the back of the couch, where the fabric was cool. Thirty-four and she couldn’t hold her liquor like she used to.
“You know, the way we’re able to metabolize alcohol changes as we age.”
“You’re drunk,” Mulder said.
“Mm,” she said. “Takes one to know one.”
His arm was stretched across the back of the couch and he reached a hand out to move her hair aside with two fingers.
“You always do that.”
She opened her eyes and he tilted his head against his bicep. They looked at each other steadily and he rubbed the strands of hair between his thumb and forefinger.
“Maybe you should get those little bangs you used to have.”
“Shut up,” she laughed, slapping at him. It had only been a couple of years. They’d both been so young.
“I’m going to start a fire.” He half-rolled off the couch and started rummaging around the fireplace.
“Mulder.”
“What? It’s freezing in here.”
“Captain Scully always kept his house at a brisk 68 degrees.”
“That’s perverse. Where are your matches? Do you have those long kind?” He walked back over to the couch on his knees and looked at Scully expectantly.
“Oh, Mulder. You’re afraid of fire,” she told him and then patted his cheek.
“Am I? But where are your matches? Do you need me to go chop you some firewood? I’d chop firewood for you, Scully.”
“I’m going to arrest you for being drunk and disorderly.”
He put his wrists together and held them out.
“Cuff me, g-woman.”
She circled his wrists with her fingers. “Go get me a glass of water, please.”
“I’m turning up your heat,” he called from the kitchen. “Send me the bill and tell Ahab I’m sorry.”
“You’re such a baby,” she said, tossing her coat onto a chair and unbuttoning her jacket, just to show off. She slipped her heels off and sunk her toes between the couch cushions. The heater clicked on and rumbled.
Mulder handed her a dripping glass and gulped down half of his own in one go.
“Where’d you learn how to use a sink?” she asked, flicking water at him.
“I was raised by wolves. So my mastery of the faucet is actually something to be admired, Scully.”
He liked being at her apartment. It was bigger than his, and it smelled nice, and there were always clean glasses in the cabinet and extra soap in the bathroom. He liked it when it got a little messy, too, a glimpse of books stacked up next to her bed and x-rays and lab reports and crime scene photos fanned across her coffee table. Pajamas on the back of the bathroom door and pictures of Bill and Tara’s kid on the fridge.
It was where she had been taken, glass under his feet. Where she’d let him in and laid him down, covered in his father’s blood.
She told him she was going to find a book from her childhood cryptozoology days, and five minutes later he found her on the bed, fully dressed, as though she’d sat down and had simply fallen sideways like a tree.
He knelt down on the floor and peered up at her.
“Scully?”
“I’m awake,” she said. “So just shut up, Mulder. I’m resting my eyes.”
“Hey, I didn’t say anything.”
“It was preemptive.” She tossed him a pillow.
He squashed it under his neck and stretched out on the rug. Scully turned onto her stomach and trailed a hand down off the side of the bed, over his chest, where he caught it.
He turned it over and around in his. “They say it’s your birthday,” he said.
“Please don’t sing,” she said into the mattress.
She fell asleep and he slowly rose, his knees creaking, and leaned down to press a kiss to her cheek.
“Happy birthday, Scully,” he said.
“Mmm,” she murmured. “Happy birthday, Mulder.”
He pulled a blanket over her and called himself a cab.
10.
Mulder had agreed to be on the panel in Boston months earlier. He wondered on the train up if he should’ve warned the organizers. Maybe they could make an announcement before the panel. We regret to inform you that Fox Mulder is no longer entirely sure if aliens exist. Management apologizes for the inconvenience.
He noticed the man in the hotel lobby when he was checking out, simply because he wanted so badly not to be noticed. He was pretending to talk on the payphone. He had longish hair, ten years out of date, and a Carhartt jacket worn to rabbit-ear softness.
At the train station, the man surfaced again, sat down next to Mulder, and said “Fox Mulder?” out of the side of his mouth. Mulder finished listening to a voice mail from Scully and then slipped his phone into his pocket.
“Who’s asking?”
“Good speech,” the man said.
“Thanks.”
“We’re interested in what you have to say, Agent Mulder.”
“Who is ‘we,’ exactly?”
The man cleared his throat and nervously flipped a tin of Skoal between his fingers. Mulder could tell he wasn’t used to this. He’d never done this before.
“You’ll be contacted.”
Two days later, directions were stuffed into Mulder’s mailbox, between a gas bill and dry cleaning coupons. His building wasn’t new or nice enough to have security cameras. People used an old, warped Yellow Pages to prop the front door open for friends or FedEx or the Thai place that delivered ‘til two.
There were true believers. There were Max Fenigs and Cassandra Spenders. Tremulous and fragile, susceptible to being sucked into cults.
There were conspiracists. Underground groups operating on the fringes that communicated via mimeographed pamphlets and old school mailing lists.
The New Spartans were neither. They didn’t give a shit about aliens. That wasn’t why they’d sent an emissary to Boston, to the forum where Mulder disavowed the past twenty years of his life. Boston had just been convenient. Away from D.C., away from the Bureau, away from Scully.
They wanted Mulder’s access, they wanted his anger, they wanted his frustration. They licked their chops, watching his madness shimmer and shift under the surface like napalm.
Mulder did his research. The first time the Bureau had taken notice of the New Spartans had been 1989, when a kid picked up on weapons charges in West Virginia started to talk. They hadn’t had a name yet. They were small and rudderless.
They didn’t seem to have permanent leadership until the summer of 1991, when Mulder found the first mention of a man named August Bremer.
The Bureau’s tactic seemed to be a glacial game of wait-and-see. For their part, the New Spartans had been relatively quiet.
He didn’t tell Scully. He’d been preoccupied with Cassandra Spender and her guileless, wide eyes and certain smile. She was calm in her prophecies. Mulder thought she was unwell.
But Scully was listening to her. Scully was listening and he didn’t know why. He didn’t understand her and it frightened him. He wanted to press his ear to her neck, listen to what that chip was whispering to her.
11.
“A Case Against Alien Life”
By M.F. Luder
Under review, UFO Magazine
Aliens do not exist. Or rather, they may exist, and in fact likely do, but not in the way that I and many others have conceived of them over the past half-century.
In 1947, an object crashed in Roswell, New Mexico. It was the seed that brought forth years of reports of both UFO sightings and alien abductions, reports that continue to this day. Reports I have both made and believed. It’s often said that conspiracy theorists construct their conspiracies to create order in a chaotic universe, to a give framework and reasoning to bad things that happen.
What I posit here is not that these abductees’ memories and experiences are false or imagined, but rather that the memories and experiences are created by the U.S. government. Gray aliens and flying saucers have been a convenient scapegoat for fifty years of government experimentation on innocent civilians.
12.
He’d played in two different half-court pickup games. His three was on and he was diving for balls, getting wood-burn on his knees and arms as he swatted them back onto the court. He tried to get a third game started, but everyone had someplace else to be.
He was still standing at the free throw line, his t-shirt soaked through, his shoes squeaking, a monastic reverence for the hollow thud of the ball against the boards.
If he’d invalidated his life’s work, if it had all been an elaborate hoax, then what the hell was he doing? Could he spend the next thirty years in the basement, rubber stamping his way through Fiji mermaids and black holes? If not the basement, then what?
Violent Crimes? He nailed five more shots thinking about that. He hadn’t known back then how reckless he was, hadn’t realized how he’d let it chew him up and spit him out.
Scully stopped him from going completely crazy. Having someone who truly gave a shit what you did, what happened to you: it made you act differently. He’d been surprised to find this out, and a little confused at first.
Then, of course, there was Scully.
He had honestly contemplated his gun when Kritschgau had told him the truth last year. There had been a kernel of truth in the cover story for Ostelhoff’s body on his rug.
An elaborate hoax. A pawn.
He’d thought he’d been doing the right thing all these years. As hard as it was, all that collateral damage, at least he’d believed. There was the truth, and it would set you free.
But now, if it had been a lie, it had been a deliberate one and Scully had been sacrificed to it.
The thing about Scully was this: if she didn’t want to do something, she didn’t do it. She didn’t surrender truth at the foot of petty kindness. Even for Mulder. Maybe especially for Mulder. And even in his most self-pitying moments, casting himself as a charity case, he knew Scully would walk away if she wanted to.
But if she had been there these five years under false pretenses, if she had been there because she had been sold a lie, because he had sold her a lie-
He reread the instructions he’d been left in his mailbox. It would be so easy, so very, very easy.
Burn it down. Burn it all down.
13.
There were things a person shouldn’t have to get used to. One of these was seeing someone they loved in a body bag.
He and Scully were in a dangerous line of work, but their record did seem to be something of a statistical anomaly. They were outliers, which he thought sounded about right. But it didn’t make him feel any better as he made the drive from D.C. to Pennsylvania to see if Scully was alive or dead on a bridge.
He didn’t call her mother on the drive up. Not until he knew for sure.
He was a harbinger, the dark shadow before the locusts fluttered to the ground.
“Mrs. Scully?” he always said, a question, the way her own children had said “Mom?” when they were about to burst into tears over something they’d done.
She remembered a look on Dana’s face, five years earlier.
“So, what’s your partner like?” It had been a question only meant to derail her husband’s interrogation of their youngest daughter on the topic of her new job.
“He’s…interesting.” In the space between words, Dana went someplace far away. Saw something in the air that no one else could see. Then she smiled, tucked her hair behind her ear, and asked her father if he’d read an article that morning in the Post about defense spending.
In the hospital, that first time, it had been good to have Fox beside her.
Margaret Scully had long since stopped trying to parse out what Melissa did in earnest and what she did for effect. She remembered her oldest daughter starting a conversation with her in the waiting room about talismans, about how, when you got right down to it, a crystal wasn’t really any different than a rosary. Her sister was in a coma and she was talking about crystals.
And so Maggie was grateful when Fox came in with his caged animal energy, grateful to be able to turn away from Melissa before she got angry with her. Fox was unreasonable and unhinged, which gave Maggie purpose. She would be calm. She would speak for all of them, because Fox was clearly not capable of that at the moment.
His heart was in the right place. As a child, Dana did things just to prove that she could. She knew Bill thought otherwise, but this-Fox-wasn’t that. Maggie sometimes tacked him to the end of her prayers. When it wasn’t making her sick with worry, she found it funny: “And God bless Fox Mulder.”
14.
Back in D.C., with Scully alive in a hospital bed, remembering nothing, he went to see Skinner without an appointment.
“Have you said anything about it to Agent Scully yet?”
Mulder knew he had to be thrilled about this. Walter Skinner had never struck him as a ladder climber, but he wasn’t dumb. An agent under his supervision, infiltrating the New Spartans. It would look good.
“No, I just came from the hospital, but-”
“Good. Don’t.”
“Sir-”
“Look. Just…sit tight. Let me deal with this. Maybe we’ll pursue it, maybe we won’t. But keep it to yourself until a decision is reached. Okay?”
“I want her to be in on this. You know how good she is.”
“This isn’t a question of Agent Scully’s skill or competence, Agent Mulder. The fewer people in on this, the better.”
“It’s Scully.”
He was aware that he sounded weak and puppyish.
“And I am asking you not to say anything to her. Are we clear?”
“Yeah.”
Mulder blustered out of the office, kicking himself for not telling her immediately, then turned halfway back in to say, “Agent Scully’s going to be fine, by the way, I’ll tell her you send your regards.”
15.
When he’d let Heitz Werber look into his head the first time, he was a few months shy of twenty-nine. Scully might’ve argued he’d been old enough to know better, except for the fact that she’d been twenty-nine when she met him, and that was possibly the least cautious thing she’d done in her whole life, blithely throwing her lot in with his. Who could’ve known.
In his car, the parking lot of the medical building, she turned to him, hand on the door.
“The memories you have. Of Samantha and what happened to her. If you’re not sure of them anymore, why do you think anything I might come up with today will be any more reliable?”
“I don’t.”
“Well, that’s reassuring.”
“Well, why not? Why not try, Scully? I don’t have any better ideas. Do you?”
“So if all else fails, stick your hands in there and start digging around in your own head like looking for change in the couch cushions?”
“You’ve got the soul of a poet, Scully.”
He locked his arms against the wheel and peered through the windshield, as though a road were tapering into the horizon in front of him.
“Are you sure you want to do this?” he said.
He turned and Scully smiled at him, an unsettling curve in her lips. She opened the door and got out.
16.
ohgodohgodohgodoh
Too many people watching, too many people listening. A metal table with light in her eyes. I had a baby. They made me have a baby. Oh god. No. How many ways can you cut someone open and put them back together? How many ways before they’re something different altogether?
Snow on the bridge. The smell of charcoal.
ohgodno
You’ll find me dead. Somehow. If not now, here, this time, some other place, some other time, some other when. You’ve found me dead before.
nonononogodno
Shapeshifter, bounty hunter, kill shot at the base of the neck. What am I now? I drove to the bridge. And I don’t remember. I don’t remember how I got there. Snow on the bridge. Lifting up. The smell of charcoal.
The dam. The water rushing. Loud.
They made me-
They made me-
ohgod
oh
17.
They were quiet on the drive home from Wiekamp Airforce Base, the squeak of the wipers and the splish of the rain.
They held hands until they arrived back at their car and were allowed to go. They were tired. They didn’t care what the driver thought of it, if he saw it in the rearview mirror.
18.
Addendum to File x00197321
Agent of Record: Dana Scully
On Tuesday, March 3, 1998, this agent arrived at home in Georgetown at approximately 7:15 pm. On Wednesday, March 4, 1998, this agent was admitted to Memorial Hospital in Washington, D.C. at 11:34 am in serious condition, suffering from vasogenic shock, first degree burns, and slight dehydration. (Please see full medical records for details.)
This agent cannot substantiate directly anything that occurred between 7:15 pm on March 3 and 11:34 am on March 4. This agent’s vehicle was found parked near Ruskin Dam in southeastern PA and towed back to D.C. Agent’s personal credit card had been used at a gas station in Bethesda; agent was captured on security footage obtained from said gas station.
In this agent’s opinion, she drove to Ruskin Dam of her own volition on the evening of March 3. Memorial Hospital (at agent’s request) did a full blood workup, testing for any drugs or unknown substances. Panel returned normal.
Please see tape of recording of agent’s appointment with Dr. Heitz Werber. Agent cannot substantiate the content of what was said during the session, but does confirm that it is her voice on the tape and further confirms that she did consent to the recording of her session. (Please see Harrison and Woodley’s studies in the New England Journal of Medicine on the therapeutic efficacy of hypnosis and memory recovery.)
File x00197321 is considered open, for further investigation.
R/NC-17
Part One
“We would rather be ruined than changed.” - WH Auden
1997/1998
The sky was a pale, apocalyptic pink. Blood in the bath.
Scully drove north.
1.
The chip was round and under a microscope the texture looked like fish scales.
The procedure was over in ten minutes. Three tiny stitches at the back of her neck with a gauze pad taped on top. It shouldn’t have worked, but it did.
Hours after Skinner left him in the hospital hallway-
“Fox?” He jerked awake when Scully’s mom squeezed his shoulder.
“Is she okay?”
“She’d like to see you.”
“Scully?”
He pushed the door open, not wanting to let too much light in.
“You’re still here?” Her voice sounded rough and tired, but her eyes were bright and wild. She’d witnessed a miracle.
“You want me to leave? Your mom-”
“Of course not.”
He scraped a chair up next to the bed. “They didn’t have any cards in the gift shop for this particular occasion.”
“Have you been sitting out there this whole time?”
“I took a walk when Bill came out.”
She made a bemused “mmm” sound, then grabbed his hand and looked at it like it was the first she’d ever seen.
“Aren’t hands amazing?”
“You still on a morphine drip?”
She pointed out the bones in his hand, touching each of them as she gave their names.
He meant to make another joke, but they all caught in the back of his throat. The room smelled of carnations and bleached sheets. A mylar balloon dipped beside the bed: Get Well Soon!
“Oh. I got you something.”
He slipped his hand out of hers and took the gift shop Moon Pie out of his coat pocket. She held it delicately, like a blossom.
“So the gift streak remains unbroken,” she said.
Driving home, he missed her. He told himself that was silly. He’d see her tomorrow, and if not tomorrow, then the next day. He’d been given an eleventh hour reprieve and there were once again boundless, infinite stores of Dana Scully. Her fingers on the cuff of his coat in a burnt coffee small town police station; her brisk, argumentative reports; her rare and exotic laugh. She only laughed at him. No one else. (“Not at you, Mulder.”) It seemed to him a worthy goal to devote his life to, making her laugh.
2.
The New Spartans had been watching Mulder since the summer.
Special Agent Fox Mulder had security clearance. They couldn’t believe this guy was clean, but apparently he was. He had something of a reputation as an anti-government whack job even as the DOJ signed his checks. He was healthy as a horse, but there were medical records floating around from psychologists and hypnotists.
But the most important thing in their dossier on Fox Mulder was the fact that Fox Mulder’s partner was dying. Almost certainly dying, cancer chewing right through her pretty head.
She was admitted as an inpatient at Trinity in late October. An orderly they paid off had seen him, in her room in the middle of the night, sloppy crying all over the place. He was going to be a fucking mess if she died.
But then she didn’t, which was really too bad, because a man with nothing to live for also has nothing to lose.
3.
A week after she’d gone back to work, he showed up at her door late, talking about the relative molecular stability of silicon. What was required to manufacture this kind of technology?
“If we can figure out where your chip was made, that gives us a place to start. I know it’s not much, but we’ve had less to go on before.”
“Mulder.”
“And if we have a where, Scully, we can find a who-”
“Mulder.”
“What?”
“No.”
He was so guileless sometimes, a charming offshoot of his single-mindedness. His capacity for surprise, for disappointment, was seemingly endless.
“I know what you want to do, Mulder, and I appreciate that, I do.”
It sounded formal and bloodless, her appreciation, considering what he wanted to do was hunt men down like dogs and extract information like teeth.
“But?”
“I don’t need to know. I don’t know if I even want to know.”
“We don’t have to do anything right now, we can-”
“It won’t change anything.”
“Someone did this to you, Scully. And what if you hadn’t put the chip in?”
She shrugged. Her kitchen was too bright. She wished they were in Mulder’s apartment, which would be dark, with streaks of masking tape on the windows and dirty bowls in the sink.
He stepped back from the chair he’d been leaning over. “You think it wasn’t the chip.”
“I didn’t say that.” She took a hand towel from its rack and refolded it.
“You didn’t have to.”
She sat down at the table.
“What good will it do, Mulder? I can’t spend the rest of my life trying to punish someone.”
He could.
“They put something in your body, Scully. Against your will and without your knowledge. And when you took it out, they killed you. Don’t you want to know who the fuck did that? And who gave you this chip? I mean, we’re supposed to just smile and say thank you? Be grateful? If somebody sets your house on fire and then comes back to put it out, you don’t thank them for putting it out. You ask them why the hell they dropped the match in the first place.”
It wasn’t a match, it was a Molotov cocktail.
“Please don’t turn this into a fight.”
He pushed the chair back under the table with a little too much force. “Okay. Well. I should go.”
“Mulder.”
He paused at the door, hand on the knob. “No, you’re right, Scully. It was stupid. It won’t change anything. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
4.
They had no business, either of them, having children.
He’d gone through a dozen plastic bag fish since they’d met. Her dog had been eaten, either by an enormous alligator or a prehistoric lake monster, depending on who was doing the telling. Poor Queequeg.
Emily had been so small in his arms, feverish and sweaty, her little pajamas sticking to her back. His entire hand fit over the back of her head and it made his stomach lurch. He simultaneously wanted to never put her down and to pass her off immediately into more responsible hands.
He wasn’t to be trusted and neither was Scully. Everything they touched died. And yet he’d lied for her when she asked him to, had sat at a table and said she should be allowed to try to protect this tiny, fragile person who had been created to be killed.
Scully believed she, alone, could keep Emily safe. The way she looked at a futile situation and insisted that the problem wasn’t a general one, but rather that she hadn’t tried yet, it was one of his favorite things about her.
No matter how branched and spliced and hybridized it was, some of Emily’s DNA had been Scully’s and that had made him feel wolfishly protective of her. This feeling had surprised him and frightened him. To be so at the mercy of another person for no other reason than because.
5.
Scully sometimes paid lip service to the idea of wanting what she called “a real life,” but come on. Her mom’s friend’s daughter had invited her to join a book club. She said she’d go, then never did, because there was always something more pressing than some book about a Civil War widow finding love again. There was always a mangled body, an autopsy bay. There was always Mulder.
She always felt a little nagging guilt after using those words: a real life. It absolved her of responsibility, for one, cannily implying that she’d easily have all that if it weren’t for Mulder.
And for another, it told Mulder that his life was silly, childish, lacking in meaning. She told herself that he knew what she meant, that he could take what she dished out, but she hated being mean to him. He wasn’t a joke, and she hated to think that he might think she felt that way.
And so she booked her trip to Maine without thinking, after getting back from Coats Grove and its bleeding trees. Her favorite pair of boots had a crust of mud around the bottom.
“Sleep in,” she told Mulder gamely. “Read the paper. Play basketball. Have a beer with the Gunmen. Enjoy a whole weekend with me out of your hair.”
“Isn’t Maine pretty cold this time of year?” he said.
She ignored him and continued proofreading a report.
Maine was cold. Slate gray and salty. She wondered at her ability to be unimpressed by locals clawing their eyes out en masse. It felt like Mulder had orchestrated a hidden camera prank and would be jumping out from behind a tree at any moment. “Surprise! It’s an X-File!”
Wasn’t trying not to think about him the same, really, as thinking about him? A Zen koan. Mulder is and Mulder isn’t. She slipped deeper into the tub that wasn’t nearly deep enough, her toes cold on the edge. She should’ve spent more time booking a hotel. She tried to empty her mind.
Her mother had been thrilled to hear she was taking a weekend trip and had given her a copy of something called Affirmations for Women Who Do Too Much. She hadn’t opened it, but doubted that the book’s idea of “doing too much” lined up with any of the things she was actually doing.
She had stopped by Mulder’s the night before she left, dropping off an inconclusive autopsy report, and she’d wanted to pilfer a book off his desk, something well-thumbed and annotated with Mulder’s own marginalia, but she didn’t.
“Don’t miss me too much,” he said when she left, leaning out into the hallway as she walked to the elevator.
“Don’t worry.”
“Eat a lobster for me,” he said, and when she turned back, his door was closed.
6.
There were two ways to recruit: money or ideology. The New Spartans didn’t have any money. They were up to their eyeballs in ideology. It was a trickier needle to thread when convincing an FBI agent to join your cause. The danger would be worth it. If you weren’t willing to die, you didn’t really believe.
7.
They ate barbecue at the Dallas airport, waiting for their flight.
“Scully, do you think you could kill people if you were a vampire?” He was in a surprisingly chipper mood for the night they’d just had.
“For the purposes of this exercise, we’re assuming that vampires exist?”
“Goes without saying.”
She remembered a barbecue restaurant in Wisconsin three years ago as he licked the edge of his thumb.
“Assuming that vampires exist, and assuming that to be a vampire is to require human blood, then I guess I might. I imagine the urge for survival, even in the undead, is strong. But on the other hand: your exsanguinated cows.”
He had a whole file of them-not just the Texas Holsteins-slow beasts all over the world tipped to their sides and drained of blood.
“An ethical vampire. You would definitely be an ethical vampire.”
“And what about you?”
“Nah. Eternal life is a curse.”
8.
In the dream she kept having, she couldn’t move.
She wasn’t stupid. She knew what it meant. It was her subconscious, processing the feeling that she was not in control.
She knew she should probably go see Karen Kosseff or go to Mass or run one more mile or drink more water. She bought some new lipstick, same color as the rest.
Still, none of that could change what had happened to her.
9.
Mulder leaned into her as she unlocked her front door. He was a terrible drunk. It was sweet-almost all anyone would need to do to get him to talk was buy him a few shots of tequila.
“So. What did you wish for, Scully?”
He was warm in his black wool coat at her side, smelling faintly of salty bar food and cigarette smoke.
“If I tell you, it won’t come true.”
Her apartment was dark, only a light on above the kitchen sink and the small lamp in the living room. She leaned her cheek against the back of the couch, where the fabric was cool. Thirty-four and she couldn’t hold her liquor like she used to.
“You know, the way we’re able to metabolize alcohol changes as we age.”
“You’re drunk,” Mulder said.
“Mm,” she said. “Takes one to know one.”
His arm was stretched across the back of the couch and he reached a hand out to move her hair aside with two fingers.
“You always do that.”
She opened her eyes and he tilted his head against his bicep. They looked at each other steadily and he rubbed the strands of hair between his thumb and forefinger.
“Maybe you should get those little bangs you used to have.”
“Shut up,” she laughed, slapping at him. It had only been a couple of years. They’d both been so young.
“I’m going to start a fire.” He half-rolled off the couch and started rummaging around the fireplace.
“Mulder.”
“What? It’s freezing in here.”
“Captain Scully always kept his house at a brisk 68 degrees.”
“That’s perverse. Where are your matches? Do you have those long kind?” He walked back over to the couch on his knees and looked at Scully expectantly.
“Oh, Mulder. You’re afraid of fire,” she told him and then patted his cheek.
“Am I? But where are your matches? Do you need me to go chop you some firewood? I’d chop firewood for you, Scully.”
“I’m going to arrest you for being drunk and disorderly.”
He put his wrists together and held them out.
“Cuff me, g-woman.”
She circled his wrists with her fingers. “Go get me a glass of water, please.”
“I’m turning up your heat,” he called from the kitchen. “Send me the bill and tell Ahab I’m sorry.”
“You’re such a baby,” she said, tossing her coat onto a chair and unbuttoning her jacket, just to show off. She slipped her heels off and sunk her toes between the couch cushions. The heater clicked on and rumbled.
Mulder handed her a dripping glass and gulped down half of his own in one go.
“Where’d you learn how to use a sink?” she asked, flicking water at him.
“I was raised by wolves. So my mastery of the faucet is actually something to be admired, Scully.”
He liked being at her apartment. It was bigger than his, and it smelled nice, and there were always clean glasses in the cabinet and extra soap in the bathroom. He liked it when it got a little messy, too, a glimpse of books stacked up next to her bed and x-rays and lab reports and crime scene photos fanned across her coffee table. Pajamas on the back of the bathroom door and pictures of Bill and Tara’s kid on the fridge.
It was where she had been taken, glass under his feet. Where she’d let him in and laid him down, covered in his father’s blood.
She told him she was going to find a book from her childhood cryptozoology days, and five minutes later he found her on the bed, fully dressed, as though she’d sat down and had simply fallen sideways like a tree.
He knelt down on the floor and peered up at her.
“Scully?”
“I’m awake,” she said. “So just shut up, Mulder. I’m resting my eyes.”
“Hey, I didn’t say anything.”
“It was preemptive.” She tossed him a pillow.
He squashed it under his neck and stretched out on the rug. Scully turned onto her stomach and trailed a hand down off the side of the bed, over his chest, where he caught it.
He turned it over and around in his. “They say it’s your birthday,” he said.
“Please don’t sing,” she said into the mattress.
She fell asleep and he slowly rose, his knees creaking, and leaned down to press a kiss to her cheek.
“Happy birthday, Scully,” he said.
“Mmm,” she murmured. “Happy birthday, Mulder.”
He pulled a blanket over her and called himself a cab.
10.
Mulder had agreed to be on the panel in Boston months earlier. He wondered on the train up if he should’ve warned the organizers. Maybe they could make an announcement before the panel. We regret to inform you that Fox Mulder is no longer entirely sure if aliens exist. Management apologizes for the inconvenience.
He noticed the man in the hotel lobby when he was checking out, simply because he wanted so badly not to be noticed. He was pretending to talk on the payphone. He had longish hair, ten years out of date, and a Carhartt jacket worn to rabbit-ear softness.
At the train station, the man surfaced again, sat down next to Mulder, and said “Fox Mulder?” out of the side of his mouth. Mulder finished listening to a voice mail from Scully and then slipped his phone into his pocket.
“Who’s asking?”
“Good speech,” the man said.
“Thanks.”
“We’re interested in what you have to say, Agent Mulder.”
“Who is ‘we,’ exactly?”
The man cleared his throat and nervously flipped a tin of Skoal between his fingers. Mulder could tell he wasn’t used to this. He’d never done this before.
“You’ll be contacted.”
Two days later, directions were stuffed into Mulder’s mailbox, between a gas bill and dry cleaning coupons. His building wasn’t new or nice enough to have security cameras. People used an old, warped Yellow Pages to prop the front door open for friends or FedEx or the Thai place that delivered ‘til two.
There were true believers. There were Max Fenigs and Cassandra Spenders. Tremulous and fragile, susceptible to being sucked into cults.
There were conspiracists. Underground groups operating on the fringes that communicated via mimeographed pamphlets and old school mailing lists.
The New Spartans were neither. They didn’t give a shit about aliens. That wasn’t why they’d sent an emissary to Boston, to the forum where Mulder disavowed the past twenty years of his life. Boston had just been convenient. Away from D.C., away from the Bureau, away from Scully.
They wanted Mulder’s access, they wanted his anger, they wanted his frustration. They licked their chops, watching his madness shimmer and shift under the surface like napalm.
Mulder did his research. The first time the Bureau had taken notice of the New Spartans had been 1989, when a kid picked up on weapons charges in West Virginia started to talk. They hadn’t had a name yet. They were small and rudderless.
They didn’t seem to have permanent leadership until the summer of 1991, when Mulder found the first mention of a man named August Bremer.
The Bureau’s tactic seemed to be a glacial game of wait-and-see. For their part, the New Spartans had been relatively quiet.
He didn’t tell Scully. He’d been preoccupied with Cassandra Spender and her guileless, wide eyes and certain smile. She was calm in her prophecies. Mulder thought she was unwell.
But Scully was listening to her. Scully was listening and he didn’t know why. He didn’t understand her and it frightened him. He wanted to press his ear to her neck, listen to what that chip was whispering to her.
11.
“A Case Against Alien Life”
By M.F. Luder
Under review, UFO Magazine
Aliens do not exist. Or rather, they may exist, and in fact likely do, but not in the way that I and many others have conceived of them over the past half-century.
In 1947, an object crashed in Roswell, New Mexico. It was the seed that brought forth years of reports of both UFO sightings and alien abductions, reports that continue to this day. Reports I have both made and believed. It’s often said that conspiracy theorists construct their conspiracies to create order in a chaotic universe, to a give framework and reasoning to bad things that happen.
What I posit here is not that these abductees’ memories and experiences are false or imagined, but rather that the memories and experiences are created by the U.S. government. Gray aliens and flying saucers have been a convenient scapegoat for fifty years of government experimentation on innocent civilians.
12.
He’d played in two different half-court pickup games. His three was on and he was diving for balls, getting wood-burn on his knees and arms as he swatted them back onto the court. He tried to get a third game started, but everyone had someplace else to be.
He was still standing at the free throw line, his t-shirt soaked through, his shoes squeaking, a monastic reverence for the hollow thud of the ball against the boards.
If he’d invalidated his life’s work, if it had all been an elaborate hoax, then what the hell was he doing? Could he spend the next thirty years in the basement, rubber stamping his way through Fiji mermaids and black holes? If not the basement, then what?
Violent Crimes? He nailed five more shots thinking about that. He hadn’t known back then how reckless he was, hadn’t realized how he’d let it chew him up and spit him out.
Scully stopped him from going completely crazy. Having someone who truly gave a shit what you did, what happened to you: it made you act differently. He’d been surprised to find this out, and a little confused at first.
Then, of course, there was Scully.
He had honestly contemplated his gun when Kritschgau had told him the truth last year. There had been a kernel of truth in the cover story for Ostelhoff’s body on his rug.
An elaborate hoax. A pawn.
He’d thought he’d been doing the right thing all these years. As hard as it was, all that collateral damage, at least he’d believed. There was the truth, and it would set you free.
But now, if it had been a lie, it had been a deliberate one and Scully had been sacrificed to it.
The thing about Scully was this: if she didn’t want to do something, she didn’t do it. She didn’t surrender truth at the foot of petty kindness. Even for Mulder. Maybe especially for Mulder. And even in his most self-pitying moments, casting himself as a charity case, he knew Scully would walk away if she wanted to.
But if she had been there these five years under false pretenses, if she had been there because she had been sold a lie, because he had sold her a lie-
He reread the instructions he’d been left in his mailbox. It would be so easy, so very, very easy.
Burn it down. Burn it all down.
13.
There were things a person shouldn’t have to get used to. One of these was seeing someone they loved in a body bag.
He and Scully were in a dangerous line of work, but their record did seem to be something of a statistical anomaly. They were outliers, which he thought sounded about right. But it didn’t make him feel any better as he made the drive from D.C. to Pennsylvania to see if Scully was alive or dead on a bridge.
He didn’t call her mother on the drive up. Not until he knew for sure.
He was a harbinger, the dark shadow before the locusts fluttered to the ground.
“Mrs. Scully?” he always said, a question, the way her own children had said “Mom?” when they were about to burst into tears over something they’d done.
She remembered a look on Dana’s face, five years earlier.
“So, what’s your partner like?” It had been a question only meant to derail her husband’s interrogation of their youngest daughter on the topic of her new job.
“He’s…interesting.” In the space between words, Dana went someplace far away. Saw something in the air that no one else could see. Then she smiled, tucked her hair behind her ear, and asked her father if he’d read an article that morning in the Post about defense spending.
In the hospital, that first time, it had been good to have Fox beside her.
Margaret Scully had long since stopped trying to parse out what Melissa did in earnest and what she did for effect. She remembered her oldest daughter starting a conversation with her in the waiting room about talismans, about how, when you got right down to it, a crystal wasn’t really any different than a rosary. Her sister was in a coma and she was talking about crystals.
And so Maggie was grateful when Fox came in with his caged animal energy, grateful to be able to turn away from Melissa before she got angry with her. Fox was unreasonable and unhinged, which gave Maggie purpose. She would be calm. She would speak for all of them, because Fox was clearly not capable of that at the moment.
His heart was in the right place. As a child, Dana did things just to prove that she could. She knew Bill thought otherwise, but this-Fox-wasn’t that. Maggie sometimes tacked him to the end of her prayers. When it wasn’t making her sick with worry, she found it funny: “And God bless Fox Mulder.”
14.
Back in D.C., with Scully alive in a hospital bed, remembering nothing, he went to see Skinner without an appointment.
“Have you said anything about it to Agent Scully yet?”
Mulder knew he had to be thrilled about this. Walter Skinner had never struck him as a ladder climber, but he wasn’t dumb. An agent under his supervision, infiltrating the New Spartans. It would look good.
“No, I just came from the hospital, but-”
“Good. Don’t.”
“Sir-”
“Look. Just…sit tight. Let me deal with this. Maybe we’ll pursue it, maybe we won’t. But keep it to yourself until a decision is reached. Okay?”
“I want her to be in on this. You know how good she is.”
“This isn’t a question of Agent Scully’s skill or competence, Agent Mulder. The fewer people in on this, the better.”
“It’s Scully.”
He was aware that he sounded weak and puppyish.
“And I am asking you not to say anything to her. Are we clear?”
“Yeah.”
Mulder blustered out of the office, kicking himself for not telling her immediately, then turned halfway back in to say, “Agent Scully’s going to be fine, by the way, I’ll tell her you send your regards.”
15.
When he’d let Heitz Werber look into his head the first time, he was a few months shy of twenty-nine. Scully might’ve argued he’d been old enough to know better, except for the fact that she’d been twenty-nine when she met him, and that was possibly the least cautious thing she’d done in her whole life, blithely throwing her lot in with his. Who could’ve known.
In his car, the parking lot of the medical building, she turned to him, hand on the door.
“The memories you have. Of Samantha and what happened to her. If you’re not sure of them anymore, why do you think anything I might come up with today will be any more reliable?”
“I don’t.”
“Well, that’s reassuring.”
“Well, why not? Why not try, Scully? I don’t have any better ideas. Do you?”
“So if all else fails, stick your hands in there and start digging around in your own head like looking for change in the couch cushions?”
“You’ve got the soul of a poet, Scully.”
He locked his arms against the wheel and peered through the windshield, as though a road were tapering into the horizon in front of him.
“Are you sure you want to do this?” he said.
He turned and Scully smiled at him, an unsettling curve in her lips. She opened the door and got out.
16.
ohgodohgodohgodoh
Too many people watching, too many people listening. A metal table with light in her eyes. I had a baby. They made me have a baby. Oh god. No. How many ways can you cut someone open and put them back together? How many ways before they’re something different altogether?
Snow on the bridge. The smell of charcoal.
ohgodno
You’ll find me dead. Somehow. If not now, here, this time, some other place, some other time, some other when. You’ve found me dead before.
nonononogodno
Shapeshifter, bounty hunter, kill shot at the base of the neck. What am I now? I drove to the bridge. And I don’t remember. I don’t remember how I got there. Snow on the bridge. Lifting up. The smell of charcoal.
The dam. The water rushing. Loud.
They made me-
They made me-
ohgod
oh
17.
They were quiet on the drive home from Wiekamp Airforce Base, the squeak of the wipers and the splish of the rain.
They held hands until they arrived back at their car and were allowed to go. They were tired. They didn’t care what the driver thought of it, if he saw it in the rearview mirror.
18.
Addendum to File x00197321
Agent of Record: Dana Scully
On Tuesday, March 3, 1998, this agent arrived at home in Georgetown at approximately 7:15 pm. On Wednesday, March 4, 1998, this agent was admitted to Memorial Hospital in Washington, D.C. at 11:34 am in serious condition, suffering from vasogenic shock, first degree burns, and slight dehydration. (Please see full medical records for details.)
This agent cannot substantiate directly anything that occurred between 7:15 pm on March 3 and 11:34 am on March 4. This agent’s vehicle was found parked near Ruskin Dam in southeastern PA and towed back to D.C. Agent’s personal credit card had been used at a gas station in Bethesda; agent was captured on security footage obtained from said gas station.
In this agent’s opinion, she drove to Ruskin Dam of her own volition on the evening of March 3. Memorial Hospital (at agent’s request) did a full blood workup, testing for any drugs or unknown substances. Panel returned normal.
Please see tape of recording of agent’s appointment with Dr. Heitz Werber. Agent cannot substantiate the content of what was said during the session, but does confirm that it is her voice on the tape and further confirms that she did consent to the recording of her session. (Please see Harrison and Woodley’s studies in the New England Journal of Medicine on the therapeutic efficacy of hypnosis and memory recovery.)
File x00197321 is considered open, for further investigation.