Note: This short story rose out of a much longer story I was writing post IWTB. I realized that the way Scully left things in the movie was too ambiguous for me if I wanted to have Mulder do anything with his life post random-FBI-clemency, (which is never fully explained, btw), I would have to clear up things with Scully to have her OK with Mulder prodding at weird things again. This didn't fit in the story I was writing at the time, so I took it out and made it it's own short story. Enjoy.
Nothing exists in itself. If you flatter yourself that you are all over comfortable, and have been so a long time, then you cannot be said to be comfortable any more.
— Moby-Dick, Ch. 11
"Watch you watching, Mulder," Dana Scully looked up from her well-tattered copy of Moby Dick, the paperback version she carried with her on trips, to glance at her partner Fox Mulder as they lay on one of the many white sand beaches in Hawaii on the last day of their impromptu vacation.
"I am researching," he murmured distractedly from under his dark sunglasses.
"I can tell that, but what," Scully followed his gaze to a couple of young girls, probably just out of college by the look of them, flirting with two men who appeared to have the same look on their face as Mulder did. She felt her eyebrows arch nearly to her coppery hair.
"So what have you discovered in your extensive research, Mr. Mulder," her tone was as dry as the quartz sand they sat on. He didn't even blink and eyelash.
"So far it is inconclusive, but I am fairly certain that there has been some sort of paranormal, perhaps even extra-terrestrial activity involved."
It crossed Scully's mind for half a minute to be slightly alarmed, that old, familiar tension slammed into her stomach, the forgotten fear like a long-missed acquaintance. But there was something to the twitch at the corner of Mulder's mouth, a certain tone to the way he said it, that made her realize that the joke was on her.
Playing along, she picked her book back up, and pretended to read it. "Anti-gravity chambers again?"
"Nope, alien implants. My guess that these fiends stop at nothing to kidnap poor, innocent, twenty-something girls from right off the street and give them larger breasts." He sounded dead serious, and Scully tried hard not to snort loudly and ruin the moment. "I tell you Scully, it's a crime, and the truth should be put out there."
"And how will you disseminate this information, Mr. Mulder, in you expert opinion."
"I think I have the number for that Girl's Gone Wild guy, I think he's made a long and extensive study of this phenomenon."
"As have you, apparently." She finally grinned widely and tossed her book at his chest, loosing her place while she did it. He grunted with the impact, but otherwise didn't twitch.
"You do that to irritate me," Scully laughed.
"I do it because it makes you laugh," he finally raised his eyeglasses and regarded her out of the side of his vision. "And I like hearing you laugh. It is the first vacation we've had in a long time, you should be laughing."
"It's the only vacation we've ever had." She pointed out. "We've never had a vacation together, as either you were hiding, dead, or wanting to visit Graceland."
"I like Elvis," he defended himself dryly.
She rolled her eyes. "This…this is nice, Mulder."
He didn't reply, but nodded his head, lowering his sunglasses again against the blazing, tropical sun.
Scully watched him for several long moments, not only appreciating how attractive she still found her former partner after all these years, which had been kinder to him surprisingly than to some of their old colleagues. But she also appreciated the manner about him, the air about him that she hadn't seen out of him since she had met him all those years ago, before Bellefleur, before Billy Miles, before he had stood in the rain over an orange X on an Oregon road laughing about the loss of nine minutes.
Had she ever seen this side of Fox Mulder, she wondered briefly, the one that was just being, the one that wasn't chasing the truth or following aliens? It was odd, she knew, he still was chasing those same questions, still looking for those same answers, and knew the horrible, horrible truth that she did. Despite these shining beaches and golden days, in a few, horribly short years time this could all be inexorably in peril. She still knew that, and she knew it ate at him everyday as he pawed through magazines and newspapers, searching for those cases of paranormal activity and UFO sightings.
And yet in these few days there was something about Mulder, a sensation of peace that she had never been privy too in all their long association. He was, she finally realizes, very much a free man. True to their word, the charges against him were gone. No longer did he have to hide out in their Virginia home, waiting for Scully to return while he wiled away lonely days, not daring to make a move for fear it would bring down the wrath of some super-soldier or FBI squad on the fragile life they had built together. She had her patients, her profession, and the hospital to devote herself to, at last a cause of her own. Mulder had been waiting in the dark, with his sunflower seeds and memories of the X-files the only company for his agile and quick mind. The skills he had cultivated in a lifetime of research and investigation, the insane perception into human behavior that had given him the nickname of "Spooky" while at the FBI had festered, while he sat in hiding, his entire life's work in shambles.
Scully didn't know how it was that Dakota Whitney had managed to find anyone who would be willing to let Mulder one hundred miles near an FBI case, and to be honest with the way the girl had flirted around Mulder, she more than suspected another hand really involved in the matter. There were those who were still out there who played their sick games, and plotted with the truths that she and Mulder knew, and who would kill to get their hands on him, or on them both. That was a world that Scully had hoped and prayed they had safely left behind when she and Mulder had run from the authorities. Now that Mulder had a taste once again…she wondered if perhaps the X-files and the FBI wasn't so far behind from Mulder as she had once thought.
"Watcha thinking, Scully," Mulder wasn't looking at her, but he didn't need to be to sense her thoughts were not on the trashy book she had retrieved from the sand where it fell after being tossed.
She couldn't lie to him, she knew that, and even if she tried, the man was as skilled a criminal profiler as ever stepped out of Quantico, he would catch her in a second. It was amazing the number of times she accused him of being taken in, when all he wanted to do was believe…and usually he was right.
She decided on a half-truth instead. "I was thinking about what to do with you now you are a free man, no longer a fugitive."
"Sad you can't keep me chained to the bed anymore," he murmured dryly. Really, he was awful sometimes, she sighed, and wondered if that small part of him that never grew up after Samantha left was the part of him that insisted on the twelve-year-old cracks. She was silent until he finally turned his head to look at her.
"I'm serious, Mulder, you are free to do what you want, you can, I don't know, get a real job now."
"Tired of being my sugar mama, Scully," his tone was light, but there was real hurt in his voice. He hated being cooped up, hated not being able to work, for the first time in his adult life dependent on someone else just for his survival. That, as much as anything else, had made him sullen, morose, hiding away looking for answers in the limited capacity he now had. He couldn't even tap a toe towards any of his old sources without fear of reprisal.
"No, Mulder, I'm not," Scully's voice as firm. "I'm a surgeon, we make disgusting money, and what would I do with it anyway?"
"Pay for a trip to Hawaii," he waved his hands expansively, as if to include the beach they sat on. "And that fetching bathing suit you are wearing. I don't know if I should allow you out the door in a bikini, Scully."
"You are avoiding my question, Mulder," Scully accused gently.
"What sort of 'real job' would you suggest?" He asked in equal accusation, sitting up slowly in his beach lounger and swinging his long lets off into the sand. He leaned his body against his knees, his arms crossed just below where his red swimming trunks ended. She could feel his hazel eyes stare at her behind his brow lenses. "Really, Scully, I'm just curious what sort of job someone like me might get? A man with a dubious record at best, what sort of stuff should I put on my resume, obviously the whole ubiquitous Oxford usual, that will be impressive, till they see a wasted career of fifteen years with an agency whose highest regard for me was to let me dangle on a hook at an illegal sham trial where I was to be killed, before breaking my ass out and forcing me into hiding for the last six years of my life."
"At least the FBI gave you back your freedom," Scully pointed out, "for the work you did on Agent Whitney's case. Cleared your record, with an apology from the Department of Justice and everything," the politics behind that one she didn't want to fathom, all they had gotten out of it was a lame excuse about Senate probes into Attorney General Ashcroft's behavior and lack of due process. Mulder had only snorted, but commented little.
"Yeah, well that will look great on a resume too. 'Was cleared of wrongdoing for finding the truth.'" He scowled, and glanced past the flirting girls to the blue-green waves rolling up. "Scully, that darkness you fear, you know I can't just ignore it, I can't just pretend it isn't there. You said you fear it, and I respect that…but it's who I am, and who I have always been. Ever since they took Samantha that night, since I was twelve, and it's something that I've had to learn to accept that part of myself." He turned back towards her. "It will always find us, you know. The question is, are you strong enough to fight back?"
Silent, Scully pretended to be interested in her toe nails, painted a bright, deep red for a change, a color called "Romeo and Jolliet". She had laughed at the pedicurist when she had said the name, the play on the Great Lakes city and the tragic, romantic heroes, and how it seemed to define her relationship with Fox Mulder, lovers who seemed to be drug from one small, American town to the other, chasing one suburban myth after another. He was her one time partner at the FBI, her one time savior, her one time antagonist, and her only true friend. The father of her long, lost son, the man she had thrown away nearly everything for, the man she had come to love both for his extreme intellect and his stubborn passion for the truth. He danced into hell because he thought he was one of the few human beings who could come out of it, if not whole, relatively unscathed. She followed him in with scars on her body and soul. She absently fingered one puckered spot, just visible above the bikini line, one she had ignored when buying the racy, daring outfit. The rest of her skin had turned a slight gold, with dustings of freckles here and there, but that one scar remained paler than the rest.
"Mulder, we are supposed to be on vacation," she tried to laughingly chided him, but he remained staring at her.
"Don't give up is what he said," Mulder whispered. "And I'm asking you to not give up on me, Scully."
"Why," her gaze flew up to meet his again, and he returned it evenly.
"I am not returning to the FBI, Dana," he said quietly. She could count on one hand the number of times he called her Dana. "But I am returning to my work. The work they've denied me for six years. I want to return to my research…you know I have to."
Scully now sat up on her lounger, in much the same pose Mulder was, and tried as best she could with her much more diminutive height to be on an even par with him. "If you go back…"
"I know the danger it might entail." He nodded. "But to be honest, Scully, I already know the truth…I know what the plan is, I know how they are doing it, I know all their horrible, dirty secrets. They know I know. And they've not bothered once in six years to come and get me. You said it yourself; they could have at any point. But here I am. I know their truth, and they know I can do dick with it." He didn't say this in anger or frustration, but as a matter-of-fact. "They know that I'm I am Chicken Little, even if I scream the truth to the heavens that the sky is falling, who in the world will care enough to listen?"
"So what you are saying is that you feel they don't think you are a threat," Scully's voice dripped sarcasm and doubt, remembering all to well Mulder in his military holding cell, the treatment he received, the fear those first months after they had run, before she had been able to secure their lives there in Virginia. So close, so close, right under their noses, and yet they could see him, couldn't find him.
Well, mostly couldn't, she thought bitterly of Agent Drummy waltzing into Our Lady of Sorrows and back in to their lives. And she wondered, just as bitterly, if that was the point Mulder saw. They could find him; they just chose to leave him alone. Ignore it, and it will go away. She had said it so to Mulder herself.
"What do you plan on doing," she finally asked after several long moments.
He jerked his head in an approximation of north, or as close to north as they could tell on the unfamiliar surroundings of the only US state they had never made it to as field agents. "Starting in Utah first, wanted to check that case there, you remember the Air Force pilot. I wanted to see whatever happened of it. I might go back to Iowa."
"Retrace our steps through the US," Scully shook her head. "Without the FBI's resources?"
"I have my father's inheritance and my mother's. I never used it. I might as well do something with it."
"I thought they would have liked you to have a happy life," she tossed out, sounding more accusatory and less flippant than she intended.
"I do have a happy life," he replied simply. "But I also have a duty to the truth. I can't give up, Scully, I can't…I can't just sit there and lose hope. Those weeks with the FBI reminded me what I got into all this for. It wasn't the work, it wasn't just the truth, and it wasn't really even finding Samantha. It was because I had hope. And I need to find that hope again, Scully. And it isn't in papering the back room in newspaper articles about the zillions of people I had not helped today."
"You have your hospital, you have your patience, you have Christian, your miracle boy, you have the skills and talents that you set off to medical school for all those years ago to fall back on, Scully. Your work, your ability to save lives and help people gives you hope and purpose to go on when the darkness threatens to consume you, it gives you reason to keep fighting when everyone else tells you it is wrong, hopeless, and all scientific reason is against you. That boy could be dead today if you didn't have that will to fight the darkness, Scully. This is what I have, this is what I am, and this is what I do. And I swear, I'll try as best I can to not turn this into those last, desperate years at the FBI, to remember we have our home, our lives, but I can't sit out there in the farmhouse anymore just…waiting." His voice was slightly pleading now, and very sad.
Scully stared at him for long moments, a million thoughts pouring through her head. She wanted to tell him that other people's problems weren't his burden anymore; that he had all the answers that he had ever sought, he had found his truths, and what had they gotten him in the end. She wanted to threaten him, to remind him of the life they had together, of the pain she still felt over his loss all those years ago, and the hole in her very soul she still felt over the loss of their child. She wanted to tell him that if he wanted to choose his damned quest over her, over them, over what they had built for themselves, he could take his damned inheritance and shove it for all she cared. She had given enough of herself to his damned X-files, to his quest, to his mission, and she had nothing left of herself to give. He spoke of hope…always his damned hope, the very thing that she had fallen in love with him for, his stubborn belief and hope.
"Don't give up," like a ghost, the voice of Father Crissman caused her to shiver, and she wondered if the pedophilic priest would haunt her conscience from the grave. He had uttered that, believed it was a prophecy from God, and yet she didn't believe…Dana Scully, ever the skeptic, didn't believe such an imperfect vessel could ever pass on the message of the divine. And yet, she thought as she stared at her polished toes and listened to the laughter of the other beach goers mingle with the sounds of the crashing waves, she realizes that the message was precise and valid, and it was meant for her. She had given up, long ago, who knows when. She had made a promise to Mulder six years before in a hotel room on the run from the government to not lose hope, and had broken it in that hospital locker room when she told him she couldn't go with him in the darkness. She couldn't follow him there anymore because she had forgotten what hope was, what the light of it felt like and the warmth of it. She had let the monsters from that darkness consume her, and had let them win.
Mulder never did. Despite his years of isolation, his name being drug through the mud of scandal and reprisal, there he sat, boldly telling her he planned to dance back into hell. And what was she supposed to say to that?
"Scully," he whispered, reaching a hand across what felt like an impossible gulf between them, reaching out to touch her face in a familiar gesture that was at once welcome and heartbreaking. "I'm not asking you to go with me."
It crossed her mind to be confused and hurt, but all she managed to get out was a startled, "what?"
"You made it clear to me that day in the hospital. This isn't your fight anymore, and it never was to begin with. You were sent to work on the X-files to spy on me and debunk my work, never to join in it, and never to get caught up in what I was doing. So far all you've got to show for it is pain and regret."
"I don't regret everything, Mulder," she murmured, a note of frantic panic in her voice. She had thought that this trip, what he had said that day at the farmhouse that they would get past this; they would fix this, like they always do.
"Not even the Flukeman," he chuckled.
"Not even that, when it comes down to it," she felt her heart beating a tattoo in her chest. "Mulder, I…I can't stand the idea of you leaving me again." Her voice was a whisper, and despite the warm sand, she felt suddenly very cold. "I've lost everything else, not you as well."
Mulder stared at her through his darkened glasses for several minutes, as if processing the last few lines of dialogue, cocking his head as if thinking. Something must have clicked, as a slow, relieved smile crossed his mouth, and the hand still touching her cheek softly now reached down to her shoulder and without preamble grabbed her and pulled her over to him, beside him on his lounger. She yelped, but moved freely, startled by the action. Once she was settled, she looked up at him questioningly as he held on to her firmly by the shoulder.
"Scully, I'm not leaving you either," he sighed, shaking his head as if he couldn't understand where she had gathered the idea. "Can you accept the idea that perhaps I like having a home to come to with someone in it, and something more than pornography to keep me company at night?"
"Mulder," Scully began to protest, but he held up a hand.
"I can't get back that year for you, Scully…and it was perhaps one of the stupidest things I had ever done. I only ever have had you to trust, and I didn't even trust you with the one thing I should have. I should have trusted that you trusted in me. And I'm not making that same mistake again."
"I'm not taking you with me, Scully, because you have your work, you have your life, and you have your calling, and I can never take you away from that. But I can use it as my light to get me home from the darkness, can't I?"
"Your personal lighthouse," she snorted, with little humor.
"You have the hair for it," he pointed out, reaching up to play with one, copper colored strand.
She sighed heavily, glancing down at Moby Dick still clutched in her hands. The chapter she was on now lost. Not that this was a major calamity; she knew the book so well from her many readings of it with her father. He had been her Ahab then, the name had stuck to him because he was a real like sea captain, and she was always at his side, his first mate.
"I think Mulder," she said slowly. "A better analogy would be that you are Ahab, always chasing your the damn whale no matter how foolish it is, and I will always be you Starbuck, the person trying to keep you from the edge of madness."
Mulder knew the analogy as well as anyone, she had confessed her nickname for her father to him years before when Luther Boggs had nearly driven her crazy with his so called 'messages' from her recently deceased father. He nodded his head in appreciation, and hugged her close, whispering, "I think you are my Starbuck, Scully, keeping me sane in an insane world."
He kissed the top of her head lightly, before continuing in a much more teasing tone, "But if you think that it is going to be your sick way of calling me your daddy…"
Scully looked up at him in wide-eyed, amused horror. "Mulder."
"I'm just saying," he had broken the awful tension between them, and was grinning madly at her. "Besides, Starbuck didn't have your nifty medical background, hence one of the reasons I need you to stay where you are."
"What, so I can run lab tests and autopsies for you again," she quirked a disbelieving eyebrow at him. "I'm a doctor now, and I have had my fill of dissecting…weird things."
"What, you have no desire to dissect an invisible man anymore?" Mulder pretended to sound outraged.
"I think I have more than enough medical mysteries to last me without having to dissect invisible men, yes," she did smile, a wide smile, a smile for a memory that didn't hurt from the past. "I still wish I could have published something about that."
"I'm glad you didn't, no one would take you seriously as a doctor now if you did." Mulder pulled her closer to him, and ran a hand along the back of one bare thigh. "Speaking of which, what would the nuns at your hospital say if they saw you wearing this?"
"Probably ask me if I had a good time and why don't I take more vacations," Scully replied impishly.
"How in the world did I let you out of the door in this fetching number anyway," she could see his eyebrows meet in a frown behind his glasses as he reached up to pluck at one of the straps of her top. "Your practically naked out here."
"I doubt with alien-enhanced twenty-something's on this beach, anyone is going to be paying attention to a woman in her forties wearing a bikini."
"I don't know about that," Mulder leaned in closely to her ear, "How did you get it past me in the first place?"
'Purchased it in the downstairs gift shop while you weren't looking."
"Is that one of the tricks they taught you in Quantico?"
"I learned a lot of other things in Quantico, Mulder," she grinned suggestively.
"As long as it doesn't involve pistol whipping and handcuffs, I'm game."
She outright laughed, standing up from the lounger, book in one hand, the other reaching out for his. "All right, Mulder, you win. I suppose I will have to show you my bag of tricks."
"That's more like it," his smile was wicked as he took her hand and rose to follow her back to the hotel.
"Hey Scully," he said as they wandered back across the sands.
"Mmmm," she replied, her thoughts on the comfort of their cool bedroom and what they could be spending the afternoon doing.
"Thanks for not letting the whale take me down with the ship."
She smiled softly, squeezing his hand gently.
"Just try no to harpoon the damn thing while I'm not looking."