Character: Dana Scully
Fandom: The X-files
Rating: PG-13
Prompt: Sons of Westwood-UCLA Marching Band (Shameless plug for my university) Vol 1. Week 51 on scifi_muses on LiveJournal, (go check us out!)
Setting: Season Three Episode "DPO"
AN: Welcome to Seasons: Third. As you notice, we are actually starting from the 3rd episode of the season, DPO. I like my stories to have nice conclusions, and while TV is great for cliffhangers, not so much for a series of stories. So we begin! You don't need to have read Seasons: First or Seasons: Second to read it, but I'd appreciate it anyway.
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"So this is where you grew up," Dana Scully stretched her short, compact legs as she stepped out of her partner's sedan, a car that was in dire need of a good wash after all the miles it had seen in the last few weeks. Fox Mulder shrugged as he rounded his car, his hands stuffed into the pockets of his dark, blue jeans, part of an outfit that Scully had to admit she wasn't used to seeing on her tall, lanky partner. He looked younger when dressed so casually, his dark hair mussed from the wind blowing in their car as they made the six hour drive from Washington DC to Chilmark, Massachusetts, sitting on the western end of Martha's Vineyard, just off the mainland coast. He looked easier, more carefree…except for the muted sadness in his green eyes as they swept up the raised, green lawn to the house of his childhood. There were far too many bad memories in this house, and certainly too many questions, perhaps more than even the two of them knew about or understood.
It was those questions that had caused Mulder to ask her up on a Saturday to go with him to his childhood home. Despite having just spent the weekend before doing this same heartbreaking duty at her own sister Melissa's home in DC, Scully had readily agreed to the task, in part because she understood just how Mulder felt, sifting through the remains of the life of a departed family member. Yet Melissa's life had been simple, easily boxed and stored, divvied up between friends and family, with no secrets that went beyond sisterly ones. Mulder's family seemingly was filled with the sort of unspoken truths that Scully couldn't imagine amongst her close-knit family. There in the large, Craftsmen style home were possible answers to why Mulder's sister, Samantha, disappeared all those years ago, who these men were working in the government who tried so hard to destroy the X-files and Mulder's work, and why they abducted Scully a year ago and what did they do to her. Perhaps those answers might not be found in Bill Mulder's files, but certainly he knew about what was going on, and perhaps even participated in it.
So it was, hesitantly, Mulder moved up the concrete walkway, bounding up the small set up steps to the wide front porch that covered the front of the house. "Mom's been here every day for the last few weeks, she got most of the family portraits and had the furniture moved or stored. All that is left is Dad's office, really, and she refused to touch it…she asked if I would." He grimaced as he turned to her, reaching in his pocket for a house key. "Thanks for coming with me on this."
"Not a problem," she smiled, stifling the yawn she wanted to respond with. She'd been up far too early, and had slept far too little on the long car ride. "Besides, I've always wanted to see the house where Fox Mulder grew up, throwing baseballs and shooting hoops."
"You make it sound so idyllic," Mulder cracked his first smile of the day as he unlocked the door into a hollow, sounding hallway. Musty air flooded outside as dust motes danced in the air. Just inside, Scully could see the empty house, with its bare-bones furniture, and what looked like paint supplies stacked in the corner by a stairway.
"Mom's getting the place repainted and fixed up for sale," Mulder shrugged, eyeing the buckets and tarps as he moved into the first room off the hallway, what looked to be a living room. He hissed between his teeth as he shook his head in wonderment. "It's hard to believe in just weeks, my entire childhood is gone."
Not that Mulder had much of a childhood left, Scully thought as she followed him into the spacious room that lead to a dining room, also equally empty. "So your mother is getting the house?"
"No, I am, actually, once everything goes through probate, but Mom got all the stuff inside." He wandered into the next room, his heavy footsteps echoing against hardwood floors in the giant rooms. "I'm having Mom do the work on the place for me to sell it, and I'll split the profits with her. Really, the house is as much hers as it was Dad's. She and I lived here after the divorce until I graduated high school and left for England. That's when she got the place in Greenwich, and Dad moved back here." He opened the door off the dining room that Scully presumed was the kitchen. It was a large, spacious area, filled with the sort of cabinets and countertops she was sure her mother would have died to have while raising her four kids. She tried to imagine a young, rambunctious Fox, filled with his endless, perpetual energy, racing in from a game outside to tell his mother about his adventures, his bright-eyed kid sister tagging along behind.
"You must have had a pretty decent time of it growing up," she murmured as she ran a hand across a marble counter, glancing over her shoulder at him. "At least till Samantha disappeared."
Mulder paused in his wandering, as if surprised by the statement. "Yeah," he admitted as his expression softened considerably, a wry smile tugging at his full lips as he looked out the back window into a sprawling back yard. "Mom made home great for Sam and I. And when Dad got home on the weekends from DC, it was almost like those stupid televisions shows. For a while it was perfect. Big Christmases, trick-or-treating without fear of the neighbors, endless summer baseball games." He turned from the window, glancing down at her as she moved beside him to look out on the slightly overgrown yard. "It's amazing how golden everything looks when you are a kid….before the grown up world of secrets and lies sets in."
"Yeah," Scully murmured sadly as she leaned against the windowsill, watching her partner as he roamed the kitchen, finally moving out again restlessly. She had gotten to hold on to that sense of childhood much longer than Mulder ever had. She wondered when he had finally lost her innocence? Was it that horrible moment when her mother told her about her Sunday School teacher's murder? Was it when Melissa announced quite calmly over dinner that she no longer wanted to practice Catholicism, as she didn't believe in Christianity? Maybe it was the afternoon she had spent in Daniel's office, resting in between rounds at Stanford University Hospitals, when his wife called and she overheard the message. It was that call, more than anything else, that had set her feet firmly on the pathway that led her where she stood at the moment, in the household of Fox Mulder's childhood, helping him piece together the mysteries and tragedies that surrounded his entire family, and lead those back to one of the biggest mysteries of all…just what was the government hiding from the people, and why was it so important to keep secret.
"So which one was your room," she called to him, unseen somewhere else in the house, as she followed in her athletic shoes and jeans, already beginning to feel slightly sticky and damp in the July heat. She had this impish desire to see the room that Mulder had called home, had papered with baseball players, and had filled floor-to-ceiling with comic books. At least, she reasoned, that's how she imagined his room looking as a child. It was most likely empty now, and perhaps had been for years, ever since Mulder had packed bags and headed towards England for school.
Mulder peeked his head from out of the hallway, a puzzled, amused frown on his angular face. "Why," he wondered suspiciously.
"For the same reason you were endlessly amused by pictures of my in overalls and braces," she retorted. He had been fascinated with the pictures of her as a child she had recovered from her sister's belongings the week before.
"Mom has most of my things," he shrugged as she met him the hallway, pointing up the stairs. "Mine was the first room on the right, looking out over the backyard. There was a tree there I used to like to climb in and out of to sneak out of the house and run over to my best friend's house."
"The one whose house burned down," Scully asked curiously. Mulder looked surprised she remembered that story and his fear of fire. Frankly how could she not, with the image of Phoebe Green's tongue shoved down his throat?
"Yeah," he nodded. "Sam's room was right next to mine. There used to be a door that connected the two, so she could come in at night when she had nightmares. I remember I used to put a chair in front of the door to keep her out, but she'd just come in through the other door."
"Sounds like she was as much of a handful as you are," Scully teased lightly.
"Mom always complained that between the two of us she'd go crazy," Mulder shrugged mildly as he moved from the stairs to a room just down the hallway, behind the staircase, to a door that was locked and shut, one that Mulder produced a key to as opened the door and flipped on the light. The musty, unlived quality that permeated the rest of the house particularly filled this one corner, the books, boxes, and dust that filled the air choked Scully briefly as she glanced around the small, cramped space.
"Looks like someone was here recently," she pointed out to a jumble of photos and papers on the battered, worn desk against one wall as Mulder flipped on the single light in the room.
"Yeah, me," Mulder gathered the pictures up carefully. "This is where I found the photo with Victor Klemper." He held up another photo for her as he gathered, another black and white photo of two men standing together talking. She took it between her fingers, as Mulder continued to shuffle papers and photos, lying the in a box nearby.
"Is this your father," she frowned as she studied the photo from what looked like the late 60's or early 70's. Short, sturdy Bill Mulder, then with a shock of dark hair, gesticulating as he spoke with another taller, leaner man. He too was dark haired, longish, and there was something about him that struck her as so very familiar.
The smoldering cigarette in his hand was the link as she gasped, her blue eyes flying to Mulder's knowing, green ones. He didn't stop working, even as she shoved the photo under his aquiline nose.
"You know who that is," she demanded, half accusingly, half curiously. Mulder nodded slowly as he continued to pull out desk drawers filled with papers and files.
"I believe that's the same, black-lunged son-of-a-bitch we know and love," he smiled grimly as he pulled out a handful of files from a drawer and began sorting through them quickly. "I don't know his name, and Mom conveniently doesn't remember. Maybe he doesn't have a name, I don't know." He shrugged, neatly stacking some files on the desk, and tossing others to the floor carelessly, as if he planned to throw them away.
"Mulder, this means this man is someone you might have known growing up," the enormity of it struck her like a thunderclap, a lightening strike to her brain. "Do you remember him at all?"
Mulder had an eidetic memory, but she didn't think it went back as far as his childhood. "My father had many of his co-workers over for parties. It wasn't uncommon to have them stopping by randomly when I was young. To be fair and honest, I don't remember much of the adult parties around here. Mom tried to keep Sam and I out of Dad's business, and as he worked for the government, I was fine with that. It was boring, grown up stuff." He shrugged as he reached for more files from his father's desk. "Compared to the other secrets Dad's been keeping, him knowing our mysterious, smoking friend seems pretty tame."
"We don't know what his work entailed, Mulder," Scully cautioned as she slipped the photo of the smoking man and Bill Mulder in the box with the others. "After all, you said it yourself, your father went to work for the State Department right out of college. He might have got drawn into something well over his head, and was unable to get out of it. After World War II the government was bringing over all sorts of scientists that the Allies would have cheerfully liked to see tried at Nuremburg? Maybe your father couldn't help the role he played in what this all eventually became."
"Perhaps," Mulder replied distractedly as he tossed a stack of files aside on the floor. "But does that explain about Samantha?"
Scully felt her stomach clench slightly as she leaned against a corner of Bill Mulder's desk. She had come to the same conclusions herself the minute she realized the part that Mulder's father played in the mysterious tests they had found evidence of in the now missing DAT tape. What if there was more to Samantha Mulder's disappearance than just a simple case of child abduction? What if the work his father did had something to do with it? He had said that he was partly to blame for her disappearance, that he had been warned. And the well-spoken, British man who claimed to have known Bill Mulder told his son directly that Samantha had been taken to keep their father compliant, to prevent him from spilling the secrets of the secret consortium and their projects. If it were true, then what had happened to Samantha? Why was she still gone? And why were there clones of her running around the country? Had she been forced to undergo the same tests that Scully had? Or had she been subjugated to something else completely different.
"Do you really believe these people took her to keep your father's silence," Scully asked frankly as Mulder finished going through his father's files and gathered up the ones he wished to keep, setting them in a pile at the doorway of his father's office.
"I don't know what I believe, Scully," Mulder admitted slowly as he reached for another desk drawer. He paused, glancing up at her slowly as he sat down heavily in the ancient desk chair his father had in the room. "It makes sense, in hind sight. If these men are as powerful as they say they are, and if they did indeed fear my father revealing their secrets, then what did Dad know, and how devastating was it that they felt the need to take my sister? And why her, why not me? I saw my name on the file. Was I supposed to go instead of her? Why? And why did Dad let me feel that I was responsible for it for all those years, knowing that it was the fault of the men he worked for? Why…why couldn't he just tell me?" Mulder threw his hands up slightly in the air, looking and sounding lost and confused.
"Do you think he even told your mother," Scully wondered aloud, remembering what Bill had said about his wife's anger with him, how she hated him for destroying his children.
"Mom knows something," Mulder conceded heavily, fiddling with a stapler he pulled out of the desk drawer. "She knows something but she doesn't want to discuss it. That's been Mom's standard MO since the night Samantha went missing. If she doesn't talk about it, and pretends it didn't happen, she doesn't have to deal with the pain it caused for her and others. Mom is and always has been the Queen of Denial," he tossed the stapler into the drawer haphazardly. "I love Mom, I do. I think she always thought that if she ignored the problem, then it would fix itself eventually. Except Samantha never came home, and Dad was murdered in the end by the very men whose truths he gave so much to protect for years, and I have to know why that happened. I need to know what was on that DAT tape, why we found all of those files in that mine in West Virginia, and what they have to do with the work Dad was doing…and if any of that has anything to do with my sister."
Scully glanced around the dusty, moldering room, filled with what looked to be fifty years of files, books, and papers. Somehow she highly doubted that Mulder would find much here beyond the photos of his father, and perhaps a few cryptic, vague files that may or may not shed any light on anything. But it was a start. And after the loss of the DAT tape with all of the evidence of what the government's secret plans were involving their strange tests and their genetically engineered virus, this was the only other lead they had that might help to set them on anything resembling the right track.
It wasn't quite as bad as starting over from square one again, but it sure felt awfully damn close, she sighed as she gazed up at the shelves. "Whatever your father was doing, Mulder…whatever secrets you uncover about him and his work, I firmly believe one thing. Your father loved you. And I think that whatever decisions he was forced to make, in the end he couldn't have been prouder of you and the man you became. I think for your father you became everything as a man he always wanted to be, always wished he could be." She thought of the sad, regretful person she met at the hospital. "I think his hope for you, Mulder was that someday you could do what he could not in his lifetime. Stand up to those forces he knew were out there threatening the world. And as frightened as he was of losing his only son, I think that in his own ways he tried to help you as well."
Mulder studied the open drawer, filled with office supplied, leaning his elbows heavily on his knees as his dark head bowed down. She couldn't see his expression, but the set of his lean shoulders fell slightly, as if some silent weight had just slipped off of them quietly to the floor.
"Do you really believe that, Scully," he murmured so softly she almost couldn't hear him.
"Yes," she replied simply. She had to believe that. She couldn't fathom the idea of the man she saw in Alaska not loving and caring for his child. "And whatever you find out about Samantha and your father's involvement in her disappearance…I think your father was put in the most horrid of situations. Don't judge him harshly, Fox. There might be reasons behind why he did what he did that you don't understand yet….reasons that I don't understand yet. But I can't believe he did any of this out of malice or evil. I have to believe he did what he did because the choices he was given were no choices at all."
Mulder's head tipped up finally, his eyes shining brightly in the dim light with tears that filmed them. "I have to believe that too."
Gently, Scully reached across the desk for the top of his head, running her fingers through his soft, dark hair, a gesture of comfort and affection. Her heart ached for Mulder's loss, as surely as it ached for her own. His father's death only added to the wound of his that had never healed…would never heal until he understood the bitter drama that swirled around his parents and sister, and threatened to drag him down with it as well.
"Do you think the sins of the father will be passed down to the son," Mulder asked quietly as he looked up at her sadly, leaning back in the chair, away from her reach, picking up the photograph of Bill Mulder and the smoking man in the box that still sat on the desk.
"I think the son was meant to redeem the sins of the father," Scully replied, glancing at the picture in Mulder's long fingers.
Mulder nodded quietly, his gaze inscrutable, as he studied the picture in silence.