FIC: Dangerous (PG-13, Caseyverse)
Title: Dangerous
Author: Amal Nahurriyeh
Summary: Personalities develop over time.
Genre: Gen/MSR. Kidfic.
Rating: PG-13 (language)
Universe: Mulder-containing.
Timeline/Spoilers: Begins somewhere in 2013, continues to 2025.
A/N: Written for enj412, for her generosity during the help_haiti fandom telethon.
This is unbeta'd. Please let me know if you see typos, and I'll try to remember to fix them.
I firmly recommend the restaurant in the third part, though I haven't been there in years.
He never would have predicted that his life would involve being wrist deep in soap and dishwater at ten in the morning, but, well, here he was. The sun was streaming through the window because Scully had decided last week the curtains were dirty and washed them, and he was too lazy to put them back up. Sadie was sitting at the table drawing, and he was plotting elaborate pastry-based revenge. He'd offered to make something for the preschool bake sale, and been greeted with such a condescending oh-the-man-thinks-he-can-bake attitude that he'd had to forcibly keep himself from ranting and raving about it out loud in front of Sadie on the drive home. He was thinking eclairs were a sufficient revenge. Maybe meringues too.
So his thoughts were on pastry and dishes when Sadie speaks. "Daddy? Why does Will live with Aunt Gina and Uncle Paul and not us?"
He dropped the glass he was holding, and it shattered in the bottom of the sink. He turned the water off and reached for a paper towel to start taking out the pieces. How could he even begin to explain this? "Well," he said experimentally. "That's a complicated story."
"I wanna know." She was still coloring, but he could feel that she wasn't playing attention to the picture anymore.
He dropped the largest pieces onto a paper plate by the sink one at a time. "When Will was a baby, things were very different for me and Mama. It was...dangerous. Very dangerous. And we had to run away and hide for a while. And we didn't want Will to be in danger, so we gave him to Aunt Gina and Uncle Paul to keep him safe."
She was quiet, mulling this over, as he put the broken glass and the paper plate in the trash. "But why didn't you go get him when it was safe?"
Because Scully said she'd leave me if I tried, he thought, and I hated her so much for making me choose but I needed her more than I hated her. Truth in parenting was vastly overrated. "It wasn't safe for a very long time. And when it was, Will had been living with them so long that he would have been sad if he'd come back to us, because he would miss them, and they would have missed him. So he's going to stay living with them, and we go visit or they come visit us."
"Where would I go if it were dangerous?"
Even entertaining the thought of giving Sadie up was like getting shot again. He dried his hands and went to sit next to her at the table. "It's not going to be dangerous any more."
She gave him an incredulous look.
He sighed. "Well, when we had to go to the mountain, that was dangerous. So you went and stayed with Grammy for a few days until it was safe to come to meet us. So I guess you would go stay with Grammy again, but we would always come back and get you. Always."
She pushed her piece of paper aside and reached for a new one. "I don't want to go to Grammy's. If it's dangerous. I want to stay with you and Mama."
"It's our job to keep you safe," he said quietly. "It'll only be for a little while."
She thought about this for a while. "Then I want to go to Aunt Gina's like Will."
She was so determined whenever she spoke--it was one of the things he loved about her. He thought of the guardianship papers they'd had drawn up, seven different versions, spread out among the senior staff, so someone inside the bunker could get her, get her safe, if anything happened to them. He thought about Sadie and Will sitting on the front porch at the Van de Kamps' in May, him showing her how to fold a paper airplane and letting her pet his horse. There would be worse places for her to go. "Okay," he said. "You can go with Aunt Gina."
"This picture is for you," she said, and handed it to him.
A series of yellow circles with purple lines around the edges. One whole side was dominated by the letters SADI, with the E on the next line. "It's lovely," he said. "Should I put it on the fridge?"
"No. It's just for you." She slid out of her chair and ran into the living room. He closed his eyes and wished he had never had to save the world.
***
He had no idea how her thumbs haven't fallen off. Sadie--sorry, Casey, he'd had nine years to prepare and he still wasn't used to the idea--spent nearly every waking moment with something with buttons in her hands. She was talking with her friends. She was playing video games. She was 'doing her homework,' which he somehow doubted but couldn't conclusively prove. He wondered, idly, if low susceptibility to repetitive stress injuries of the thumb was going to be an evolutionarily beneficial trait in this generation.
God, he's old.
There was a shriek from the backyard. His head snapped up, and Casey dropped her phone with a clatter. Thumping steps on the back porch, the slam of the door, and then Scully appeared with a garden trowel in one hand. "Um. There's a snake in the shed."
It would be a bad idea to laugh at the big mean surgeon scared of what is most likely a grass snake. Anyway, he'd been delegating spiders to her for years. "Are you okay?"
Yeah. She crossed her arms, obviously embarrassed. "Um. Would you mind..." She made a vague gesture towards the back door.
"Not a problem." He kissed her on the cheek and went to find his boots.
He used to chase mutated parasites in sewers, he thought as he pawed around in the tools on the back porch for a suitable weapon for snake killing. He once thwarted vampires with sunflower seeds. He saved the world. Now, snakes. He picked the hoe after some consideration and headed back to the shed.
"Yo, Dad, hold up," Casey said, stepping through the back door. She was wiggling her feet into her barn wellies, and had her baseball bat in one hand and a pillowcase in the other.
He couldn't help but smile. "It's okay, Sadie. I can handle it."
She shrugged, all adolescent attitude. "Maybe you'll need backup."
He forgot sometimes who she was, until she reminded him. He gestured at the bat. "What are you, Saint Patrick?"
She rolled her eyes. "And you're just going to chop it in half?"
"What's the pillowcase for?"
"Catch and release."
"After the clubbing?"
"The bat's for chasing it. Thumping the ground to scare it with sonic waves." She demonstrated hard enough that clumps of grass flew up in the air.
He thought for a moment. "You're on bat duty. Give me the bag."
"I got a flashlight, too." She flipped it on.
"Okay. You're in the lead."
She whomped him in the thigh with the bat as she passed him. "And don't call me Sadie. I'm gonna start a jar."
"Yes, Casey," he said as he followed her.
"That's more like it," she said, and paused with her hand on the door to the shed. "You ready?"
"Let's get it on," he said.
She rolled her eyes again and pulled the door open. He followed his daughter into the dark.
***
She'd been missing eighteen hours, and Mulder had started to panic. She'd gone to soccer practice Friday afternoon, told them she was sleeping over at Melissa's house and that she'd call in the morning to be picked up. But when he called Elaine at eleven to find out if the girls were awake yet, he learned that it was Melissa's weekend with her father in Roanoke, and that Casey definitively was not there. They'd called everyone in the ninth grade phone directory and everyone on both of her soccer teams, and she wasn't with any of them. No charges to any of their credit cards, no withdrawals from their checking account or her savings, and the cell phone company wouldn't give out GPS tracking for her phone without a warrant, no matter how much he waved his FBI credentials around. Scully was calling the mothers of girls whose names she recognized from other grades, and he was seeing if anyone he knew at the Bureau was in the office on a Saturday. If they didn't have any luck by noon, they were calling the cops.
He was trying to remember the name of that guy Mo had introduced him to at his Fourth of July barbecue--Zakat? Zakar?--when his phone beeped. He flipped it open to see a message from Will. Missing someone? It read, with a photo attached of Casey from behind, obviously snapped surreptitiously.
"I'm going to kill her," he said out loud.
Scully's head snapped up from the directory. "What?"
"She's in Philly."
Scully leaned forward and collapsed onto her hands on the table. "Oh my god. We should have thought of that earlier."
He texted Will back. Don't let her out of your sight. We'll be on the road in half an hour.
He was glad Will had stayed in Philly after graduating, though he'd never say it out loud. He'd expected him to head westward to be closer to his other parents; they were still on the ranch, and he'd assumed filial duty would draw will back to somewhere more accessible to them. But he'd decided to stay, saying simply that it was a nice town. It was, he supposed, though he had never been fond of it. But he knew this stretch of 95 now, again, like he had back in the day.
The doorman in Will's building waved them up--"I got a feeling you'd be coming," he said with a smirk--and the elevator shook no more than usual. Will's apartment door was just slightly ajar. Mulder steeled himself for the fight, and let Scully knock.
Inside, there was the beeping of a video game. "That's Mom and Dad, isn't it," she said, sounding vaguely disapproving. Mulder was taken aback by the wash of relief that flowed over him when he heard her voice. She was okay, she was actually okay.
"Yup."
"You're such a fucking narc."
"Watch your language, kid."
Mulder pushed the door open. Will was sitting on his bed, papers piled around him--he was on slush pile duty at the press these days, he said. Casey was sitting sideways in an armchair in front of the TV, game controller in her hand. Will waved at them over her head. Casey didn't look up.
"Nice to see you again," he said.
She shrugged, and kept playing.
"What the hell did you think you were doing?" he said, trying to keep his volume under control.
"I was bored," she said. The video game made screechy noises.
"Do you have any idea how dangerous that was? There are about forty thousand things that could have happened to you, and we would have had no clue."
"Obviously I'm fine," she said. "I can handle myself."
"You are fourteen years old. You do not just cross state lines without us knowing about it!"
"Apparently I do, in actual fact." The game made a singing noise that probably meant she'd won the level.
"Turn that thing off. Do you have any idea how grounded you are?"
"I'm pretty sure grounded is a binary state. I don't think it really has degrees."
He threw up his hands. "Scully? You wanna try?"
"I think it's interesting," Casey said calmly, still playing the game, "that you ask Mom to intervene whenever you think something logical needs to be done. Is it a personality thing? Or is it because, as my primary caregiver through childhood, you feel that you're my Hegelian Other against which the Self is formed, meaning that threat to my sense of well-being from you is more developed in my psyche, and you're wary of causing damage? I'm just curious."
He lost it. "That's it. Cassandra Rose Scully-Mulder, you get your punk ass out of that chair right this instant. We are getting in the car, and we are driving home, and we will spend the entire eight hour drive discussing exactly how long it will be until you are allowed out of the house unescorted. Is that clear?"
She pressed pause on the game, put down the controller, and looked up at him. "I think we should get dinner first."
"What? No, we are not getting dinner."
"Like you said, it's a long drive. You're going to get tired. And if we have to stop at a rest stop along the way, you have no guarantee I'm not going to hitch a ride with a trucker to Miami. Dinner first makes a lot more sense."
He was about to yell more, but he had the sinking feeling she was right. Actually, he wouldn't put it past her to steal a car. He looked over at Scully, who was fighting very hard to keep her level of amusement at what she called the Mulder and Sadie Show off her face. She made a permissive facial gesture. "Fine," he said. "Dinner first."
She swung her feet off the arm of the chair and bent over to retie her sneakers. "I want to go to that kosher vegetarian Chinese place again."
"Sure. Fine. Whatever."
She zipped up her sweatshirt, picked up her backpack, and walked past them towards the door. "Come on. I'm starving."
Scully patted him on the shoulder and followed her daughter out of the room. Mulder watched them go and tried to fight down the sense of futility. Will came up behind him and slung his arm around his shoulder. "Nice to see you, Dad."
"Need a roommate? She apparently likes Philadelphia."
"I don't think we're that compatible."
"And we are? Come on, they'll be halfway to the restaurant by now."
As she ate steamed buns, Casey described in great detail the exhibit on Sri Lanka at the anthropology museum that Will had taken her to; Scully couldn't help sneaking him amused looks. By the time they were done, and Will and Casey had built a pyramid out of orange peels with their fortunes atop like flags, it was really too late to start back to Virginia, so they got a hotel room. Proving that she was the smartest member of the family, Casey had crammed her bathing suit into her backpack. Mulder and Scully held hands in lounge chairs poolside as she swam laps. The lights of the city were refracted in the steamed over glass tiles.
"She's going to drive me crazy before she turns eighteen," he said.
"You'll live," she said.
Back in the hotel room, she lay down in the second bed and channel-surfed while Scully showered. He sat next to her. "I was worried," he said.
Her face didn't move much, but he knew how to read her. "I was going to call you eventually."
"I don't doubt that." He pushed a lock of hair out of her face. "It's just--I spent eleven years not knowing where my son was. I don't want to lose you too."
She wasn't watching what she was flicking through, he was sure of it. "Sorry," she said quietly.
"Okay," he said.
She was grounded for a month.
The next time she ran away, she left a note.
***
He'd managed to escape insomnia for a while, but in his old age it was back; anyway, at least tonight he had a reason. Mulder slipped out of bed, leaving Scully curled under the duvet, and went to go downstairs for a glass of orange juice and some disorganized moping.
The light was on in Casey's room. He should have expected this; she didn't sleep either. He went and stood by her door. She was sitting at the little desk she'd had since she was a girl, examining Casey Murray's bunker ID by the light of the desk lamp. He remembered looking at her through a doorway and a cloud of smoke in Montana, that push of curiosity that lead him in to talk to her. He wondered sometimes if what drove him to be curious about her was that she seemed familiar.
This Casey didn't smoke, at least not in front of him. He didn't know what that meant.
She must have heard him standing there, for any value of heard, because she turned to look at him. "Sorry. The light's not a problem, is it?"
"No, don't worry about it. You okay?"
"Just trying to make it make sense."
He leaned on the doorframe. Why should it make sense? When your parents say "You should come home for Thanksgiving," you don't think they mean "because your alternate-universe self travelled through time in about three weeks, and we need your body in a tank to prevent the universe from developing a big hole in it."
"What was she like?"
He sighed. "She was you. But not. I think you're better with people." She snorted. "She was closed off. I'm not certain if that was the circumstances or in general, though."
She put the ID down. "I don't know if I can do it. I mean, obviously, I'll do it, because I did it, and apparently that's how time works if you're not Olivia Dunham or a Time Lord, but--I'm not sure I could do it. Just decide to go."
He thought of the girl with the gun and the pack of Morleys, and of his daughter. "Yes, you can. You would."
She looked up at him and considered for a moment. "You're right. I would."
Author: Amal Nahurriyeh
Summary: Personalities develop over time.
Genre: Gen/MSR. Kidfic.
Rating: PG-13 (language)
Universe: Mulder-containing.
Timeline/Spoilers: Begins somewhere in 2013, continues to 2025.
A/N: Written for enj412, for her generosity during the help_haiti fandom telethon.
This is unbeta'd. Please let me know if you see typos, and I'll try to remember to fix them.
I firmly recommend the restaurant in the third part, though I haven't been there in years.
He never would have predicted that his life would involve being wrist deep in soap and dishwater at ten in the morning, but, well, here he was. The sun was streaming through the window because Scully had decided last week the curtains were dirty and washed them, and he was too lazy to put them back up. Sadie was sitting at the table drawing, and he was plotting elaborate pastry-based revenge. He'd offered to make something for the preschool bake sale, and been greeted with such a condescending oh-the-man-thinks-he-can-bake attitude that he'd had to forcibly keep himself from ranting and raving about it out loud in front of Sadie on the drive home. He was thinking eclairs were a sufficient revenge. Maybe meringues too.
So his thoughts were on pastry and dishes when Sadie speaks. "Daddy? Why does Will live with Aunt Gina and Uncle Paul and not us?"
He dropped the glass he was holding, and it shattered in the bottom of the sink. He turned the water off and reached for a paper towel to start taking out the pieces. How could he even begin to explain this? "Well," he said experimentally. "That's a complicated story."
"I wanna know." She was still coloring, but he could feel that she wasn't playing attention to the picture anymore.
He dropped the largest pieces onto a paper plate by the sink one at a time. "When Will was a baby, things were very different for me and Mama. It was...dangerous. Very dangerous. And we had to run away and hide for a while. And we didn't want Will to be in danger, so we gave him to Aunt Gina and Uncle Paul to keep him safe."
She was quiet, mulling this over, as he put the broken glass and the paper plate in the trash. "But why didn't you go get him when it was safe?"
Because Scully said she'd leave me if I tried, he thought, and I hated her so much for making me choose but I needed her more than I hated her. Truth in parenting was vastly overrated. "It wasn't safe for a very long time. And when it was, Will had been living with them so long that he would have been sad if he'd come back to us, because he would miss them, and they would have missed him. So he's going to stay living with them, and we go visit or they come visit us."
"Where would I go if it were dangerous?"
Even entertaining the thought of giving Sadie up was like getting shot again. He dried his hands and went to sit next to her at the table. "It's not going to be dangerous any more."
She gave him an incredulous look.
He sighed. "Well, when we had to go to the mountain, that was dangerous. So you went and stayed with Grammy for a few days until it was safe to come to meet us. So I guess you would go stay with Grammy again, but we would always come back and get you. Always."
She pushed her piece of paper aside and reached for a new one. "I don't want to go to Grammy's. If it's dangerous. I want to stay with you and Mama."
"It's our job to keep you safe," he said quietly. "It'll only be for a little while."
She thought about this for a while. "Then I want to go to Aunt Gina's like Will."
She was so determined whenever she spoke--it was one of the things he loved about her. He thought of the guardianship papers they'd had drawn up, seven different versions, spread out among the senior staff, so someone inside the bunker could get her, get her safe, if anything happened to them. He thought about Sadie and Will sitting on the front porch at the Van de Kamps' in May, him showing her how to fold a paper airplane and letting her pet his horse. There would be worse places for her to go. "Okay," he said. "You can go with Aunt Gina."
"This picture is for you," she said, and handed it to him.
A series of yellow circles with purple lines around the edges. One whole side was dominated by the letters SADI, with the E on the next line. "It's lovely," he said. "Should I put it on the fridge?"
"No. It's just for you." She slid out of her chair and ran into the living room. He closed his eyes and wished he had never had to save the world.
***
He had no idea how her thumbs haven't fallen off. Sadie--sorry, Casey, he'd had nine years to prepare and he still wasn't used to the idea--spent nearly every waking moment with something with buttons in her hands. She was talking with her friends. She was playing video games. She was 'doing her homework,' which he somehow doubted but couldn't conclusively prove. He wondered, idly, if low susceptibility to repetitive stress injuries of the thumb was going to be an evolutionarily beneficial trait in this generation.
God, he's old.
There was a shriek from the backyard. His head snapped up, and Casey dropped her phone with a clatter. Thumping steps on the back porch, the slam of the door, and then Scully appeared with a garden trowel in one hand. "Um. There's a snake in the shed."
It would be a bad idea to laugh at the big mean surgeon scared of what is most likely a grass snake. Anyway, he'd been delegating spiders to her for years. "Are you okay?"
Yeah. She crossed her arms, obviously embarrassed. "Um. Would you mind..." She made a vague gesture towards the back door.
"Not a problem." He kissed her on the cheek and went to find his boots.
He used to chase mutated parasites in sewers, he thought as he pawed around in the tools on the back porch for a suitable weapon for snake killing. He once thwarted vampires with sunflower seeds. He saved the world. Now, snakes. He picked the hoe after some consideration and headed back to the shed.
"Yo, Dad, hold up," Casey said, stepping through the back door. She was wiggling her feet into her barn wellies, and had her baseball bat in one hand and a pillowcase in the other.
He couldn't help but smile. "It's okay, Sadie. I can handle it."
She shrugged, all adolescent attitude. "Maybe you'll need backup."
He forgot sometimes who she was, until she reminded him. He gestured at the bat. "What are you, Saint Patrick?"
She rolled her eyes. "And you're just going to chop it in half?"
"What's the pillowcase for?"
"Catch and release."
"After the clubbing?"
"The bat's for chasing it. Thumping the ground to scare it with sonic waves." She demonstrated hard enough that clumps of grass flew up in the air.
He thought for a moment. "You're on bat duty. Give me the bag."
"I got a flashlight, too." She flipped it on.
"Okay. You're in the lead."
She whomped him in the thigh with the bat as she passed him. "And don't call me Sadie. I'm gonna start a jar."
"Yes, Casey," he said as he followed her.
"That's more like it," she said, and paused with her hand on the door to the shed. "You ready?"
"Let's get it on," he said.
She rolled her eyes again and pulled the door open. He followed his daughter into the dark.
***
She'd been missing eighteen hours, and Mulder had started to panic. She'd gone to soccer practice Friday afternoon, told them she was sleeping over at Melissa's house and that she'd call in the morning to be picked up. But when he called Elaine at eleven to find out if the girls were awake yet, he learned that it was Melissa's weekend with her father in Roanoke, and that Casey definitively was not there. They'd called everyone in the ninth grade phone directory and everyone on both of her soccer teams, and she wasn't with any of them. No charges to any of their credit cards, no withdrawals from their checking account or her savings, and the cell phone company wouldn't give out GPS tracking for her phone without a warrant, no matter how much he waved his FBI credentials around. Scully was calling the mothers of girls whose names she recognized from other grades, and he was seeing if anyone he knew at the Bureau was in the office on a Saturday. If they didn't have any luck by noon, they were calling the cops.
He was trying to remember the name of that guy Mo had introduced him to at his Fourth of July barbecue--Zakat? Zakar?--when his phone beeped. He flipped it open to see a message from Will. Missing someone? It read, with a photo attached of Casey from behind, obviously snapped surreptitiously.
"I'm going to kill her," he said out loud.
Scully's head snapped up from the directory. "What?"
"She's in Philly."
Scully leaned forward and collapsed onto her hands on the table. "Oh my god. We should have thought of that earlier."
He texted Will back. Don't let her out of your sight. We'll be on the road in half an hour.
He was glad Will had stayed in Philly after graduating, though he'd never say it out loud. He'd expected him to head westward to be closer to his other parents; they were still on the ranch, and he'd assumed filial duty would draw will back to somewhere more accessible to them. But he'd decided to stay, saying simply that it was a nice town. It was, he supposed, though he had never been fond of it. But he knew this stretch of 95 now, again, like he had back in the day.
The doorman in Will's building waved them up--"I got a feeling you'd be coming," he said with a smirk--and the elevator shook no more than usual. Will's apartment door was just slightly ajar. Mulder steeled himself for the fight, and let Scully knock.
Inside, there was the beeping of a video game. "That's Mom and Dad, isn't it," she said, sounding vaguely disapproving. Mulder was taken aback by the wash of relief that flowed over him when he heard her voice. She was okay, she was actually okay.
"Yup."
"You're such a fucking narc."
"Watch your language, kid."
Mulder pushed the door open. Will was sitting on his bed, papers piled around him--he was on slush pile duty at the press these days, he said. Casey was sitting sideways in an armchair in front of the TV, game controller in her hand. Will waved at them over her head. Casey didn't look up.
"Nice to see you again," he said.
She shrugged, and kept playing.
"What the hell did you think you were doing?" he said, trying to keep his volume under control.
"I was bored," she said. The video game made screechy noises.
"Do you have any idea how dangerous that was? There are about forty thousand things that could have happened to you, and we would have had no clue."
"Obviously I'm fine," she said. "I can handle myself."
"You are fourteen years old. You do not just cross state lines without us knowing about it!"
"Apparently I do, in actual fact." The game made a singing noise that probably meant she'd won the level.
"Turn that thing off. Do you have any idea how grounded you are?"
"I'm pretty sure grounded is a binary state. I don't think it really has degrees."
He threw up his hands. "Scully? You wanna try?"
"I think it's interesting," Casey said calmly, still playing the game, "that you ask Mom to intervene whenever you think something logical needs to be done. Is it a personality thing? Or is it because, as my primary caregiver through childhood, you feel that you're my Hegelian Other against which the Self is formed, meaning that threat to my sense of well-being from you is more developed in my psyche, and you're wary of causing damage? I'm just curious."
He lost it. "That's it. Cassandra Rose Scully-Mulder, you get your punk ass out of that chair right this instant. We are getting in the car, and we are driving home, and we will spend the entire eight hour drive discussing exactly how long it will be until you are allowed out of the house unescorted. Is that clear?"
She pressed pause on the game, put down the controller, and looked up at him. "I think we should get dinner first."
"What? No, we are not getting dinner."
"Like you said, it's a long drive. You're going to get tired. And if we have to stop at a rest stop along the way, you have no guarantee I'm not going to hitch a ride with a trucker to Miami. Dinner first makes a lot more sense."
He was about to yell more, but he had the sinking feeling she was right. Actually, he wouldn't put it past her to steal a car. He looked over at Scully, who was fighting very hard to keep her level of amusement at what she called the Mulder and Sadie Show off her face. She made a permissive facial gesture. "Fine," he said. "Dinner first."
She swung her feet off the arm of the chair and bent over to retie her sneakers. "I want to go to that kosher vegetarian Chinese place again."
"Sure. Fine. Whatever."
She zipped up her sweatshirt, picked up her backpack, and walked past them towards the door. "Come on. I'm starving."
Scully patted him on the shoulder and followed her daughter out of the room. Mulder watched them go and tried to fight down the sense of futility. Will came up behind him and slung his arm around his shoulder. "Nice to see you, Dad."
"Need a roommate? She apparently likes Philadelphia."
"I don't think we're that compatible."
"And we are? Come on, they'll be halfway to the restaurant by now."
As she ate steamed buns, Casey described in great detail the exhibit on Sri Lanka at the anthropology museum that Will had taken her to; Scully couldn't help sneaking him amused looks. By the time they were done, and Will and Casey had built a pyramid out of orange peels with their fortunes atop like flags, it was really too late to start back to Virginia, so they got a hotel room. Proving that she was the smartest member of the family, Casey had crammed her bathing suit into her backpack. Mulder and Scully held hands in lounge chairs poolside as she swam laps. The lights of the city were refracted in the steamed over glass tiles.
"She's going to drive me crazy before she turns eighteen," he said.
"You'll live," she said.
Back in the hotel room, she lay down in the second bed and channel-surfed while Scully showered. He sat next to her. "I was worried," he said.
Her face didn't move much, but he knew how to read her. "I was going to call you eventually."
"I don't doubt that." He pushed a lock of hair out of her face. "It's just--I spent eleven years not knowing where my son was. I don't want to lose you too."
She wasn't watching what she was flicking through, he was sure of it. "Sorry," she said quietly.
"Okay," he said.
She was grounded for a month.
The next time she ran away, she left a note.
***
He'd managed to escape insomnia for a while, but in his old age it was back; anyway, at least tonight he had a reason. Mulder slipped out of bed, leaving Scully curled under the duvet, and went to go downstairs for a glass of orange juice and some disorganized moping.
The light was on in Casey's room. He should have expected this; she didn't sleep either. He went and stood by her door. She was sitting at the little desk she'd had since she was a girl, examining Casey Murray's bunker ID by the light of the desk lamp. He remembered looking at her through a doorway and a cloud of smoke in Montana, that push of curiosity that lead him in to talk to her. He wondered sometimes if what drove him to be curious about her was that she seemed familiar.
This Casey didn't smoke, at least not in front of him. He didn't know what that meant.
She must have heard him standing there, for any value of heard, because she turned to look at him. "Sorry. The light's not a problem, is it?"
"No, don't worry about it. You okay?"
"Just trying to make it make sense."
He leaned on the doorframe. Why should it make sense? When your parents say "You should come home for Thanksgiving," you don't think they mean "because your alternate-universe self travelled through time in about three weeks, and we need your body in a tank to prevent the universe from developing a big hole in it."
"What was she like?"
He sighed. "She was you. But not. I think you're better with people." She snorted. "She was closed off. I'm not certain if that was the circumstances or in general, though."
She put the ID down. "I don't know if I can do it. I mean, obviously, I'll do it, because I did it, and apparently that's how time works if you're not Olivia Dunham or a Time Lord, but--I'm not sure I could do it. Just decide to go."
He thought of the girl with the gun and the pack of Morleys, and of his daughter. "Yes, you can. You would."
She looked up at him and considered for a moment. "You're right. I would."