Character: Dana Scully
Fandom: The X-Files
Rating: PG-13
Prompt: Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship...Rick (Casablanca) Vol 1. Week 15 on scifi_muses on LiveJournal
Setting: Season Five Episode: Unusual Suspects
AN: As with Seasons: Third and Seasons Fourth we are starting after Redux, as they are included in the end of Season: Fourth. No need to read the other Season compilations, but it is encouraged. And I don't own any of this, but I do enjoy playing.
It was good to be home.
Dana Scully was alive, against all the odds that said she should be dead. Whether it was her mother's miracle, her partner Fox Mulder's mysteriously obtained chip laying in her neck, or just plain luck she couldn't say. And perhaps in the long run it wasn't important. She was alive when so many others were not. She had been given a second chance. The question was now, what was she going to do with it?
Currently, she was going to drink her cup of coffee.
Hot, pungent liquid filled her chipped, Navy coffee mug, the faded, gold lettering warming against her skin. Her own coffee, it had been weeks since she had it, standing in the comfort of her own kitchen. The worn comfortableness of her old jeans, loose on her slightly thinner frame felt good after the scratchiness of her hospital gown. After days of lying listless her energy spent on the disease ravaging her body she stood barefoot in her neat, tidy kitchen, home finally. Her life was her own again.
Or it would be once she was allowed anywhere near FBI Headquarters.
Scully frowned petulantly at her coffee as she topped off her mug with creamer and sugar. The order had come from Skinner ostensibly. Scully was on medical leave until she received full clearance from her doctors regarding her health. And perhaps that was standard operating procedure; Skinner had done the same thing after her return from her abduction two years before. But Scully had returned within weeks, and her doctors were already saying it might take a month or more before they were certain that whatever miraculous changes had occurred with her cancer were permanent. And Skinner wasn't about to budge this time.
And while Mulder was playing extremely cagey on his involvement in all of this the whole thing had his hyper-protective fingerprints all over it. What was worse no amount of cajoling or prying, even outright whining seemed to convince her partner to even share a little bit of what he was working on with her. His lone comments, "Stay home, get some rest, get better, I'll overwork you all over again soon enough."
Scully already felt better. She sulked privately to herself as she rummaged vaguely through her fridge for some sort of breakfast product. She felt better, she felt rested, and she felt she had the sort of energy she hadn't felt in years. But she also felt restless, bored. Scully hated to admit it, but as much as she railed against her life being swallowed by Mulder's quest, the truth was she liked it just as much. Hell, it wasn't as if she had anything else at the moment, no significant other, no family, and no pet. Just herself, her coffee, and an empty fridge, and a whole, long, empty day to do…what exactly?
The ringing of her doorbell sounded counterpoint to that depressing note. Scully glanced at the time on her microwave and frowned. Who in the world would be at her apartment at this hour? Certainly not Mulder, he'd already called twice from work that morning, mostly she suspected out of his own case of boredom. Curious, her bare feet padded across tile to carpet as she moved towards the door, leaning on tiptoe to the peephole to see who would bother to visit her this time of the morning.
A large, bug eye behind thick, Coke-bottle glasses returned her gaze, blinking with beady intensity back at her.
"Maybe she's still asleep."
"It's 10:30, who's asleep then?"
"No one with you ringing the doorbell, genius."
Brilliant, Scully sighed with her eyes rolling heaven word as the sound of the bickering rose noticeably outside of her door. Quickly her fingers reached for the locks, undoing the chain and swinging it open on the motley trio standing on her doorstep. They all three blinked and smiled at her in mild surprise, as if they hadn't expected her to actually answer the door, let alone be home. Arms crossing in mild exasperation, Scully allowed her dry gaze to fall on the easiest victim…Frohike standing right in front of her.
"Did Mulder send you over here?"
Frohike at least tried to have the grace to look affronted by her line of questioning. His pug like face turned down in mild hurt at her words, his round shoulders squaring around his barrel body. "What, we can't come here to see a friend?"
If it were Frohike alone perhaps Scully would buy it. The weird little man with in his strange, stalker-ish sort of way had always had a crush on her, and Scully had found him endearing in his oddness. Frohike she knew would move the moon for her. Her eyes drifted towards tall and lanky Langley, proudly wearing an Incredible Hulk t-shirt under his mop of long, stringy blonde hair, before sliding over to Byers. He looked vaguely out of place in comparison to the other two in his neat suit and trimmed beard. One could nearly confuse him for someone she worked with at the FBI if it weren't for his other two companions, standing out like matching sore thumbs in her tidy apartment building.
"I've never had all three of you show up at my apartment before." That was what made Scully so suspicious. Frohike once, yes, in a drunken stupor after the supposed death of Mulder. But not all three, and they all stared at her vaguely as if they weren't sure how to answer her pointed observation.
"We just happened to be in the neighborhood…"
"And Frohike mentioned you lived near here…"
"Yeah, and after everything, we thought we would stop by."
The three of them must have temporarily forgotten she was an FBI agent. Her tongue dug for a long moment into her cheek as she blinked mildly at the three far-too-innocent looks. This smelled of Mulder putting them up to it, but she couldn't prove it. All she had was a sense, a gut feeling. Byers couldn't quite meet her eyes, and Langley was grinning from ear-to-ear in one of those unnerving, trying-too-hard ways. And then there was Frohike.
"We come bearing gifts." His smile was winning. Scully's eyes narrowed.
"If this is another alien autopsy video, you aren't getting past the door."
"No autopsy…I was thinking something much more classic." Smoothly the little man produced a VHS tape, holding it up in front of Scully's nose. Her eyes nearly crossed reading it. "Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman, Morocco, World War II, 'We'll always have Paris?'"
"Casablanca?" Scully breathed in true delight and surprise, grasping the video and chuckling in bemusement at the three of them. "Not something I'd expect out of you."
"I am a man of some taste in refinement," Frohike protested mildly, shooting a furtive look over his shoulder at Langley as if to indicate that he obviously had a step up on some other people. Not to be so insulted alone, Langley snorted at Frohike's implications
"Yeah, Frohike always did have a thing for chick flicks, he likes crying at the end."
"You wouldn't know sensitivity if it bit you in the ass," the other man snarled, spinning on him as immediately Byers stepped into the fray with well practiced ease.
"We all agreed that it was a classic," he intoned firmly, glancing between petulant Langley and glowering Frohike. "Besides, we all agreed she wouldn't want to hear our running commentary on Oliver Stones JFK."
Thank God for small blessings, Scully breathed as the three of them nodded and turned apologetically back towards her.
"Look, we just wanted to stop by and check in on you, see that you were feeling all right," Frohike murmured, still shooting daggers sideways at the smirking Langley. "You gave us all a good scare there."
Scully bet she did. The three hadn't come to see her in the hospital, though judging from the size of the bouquet of flowers she had received they had been well informed of her condition from Mulder. And from what little he had told her about the chip that was used to save her life she knew the three of them were responsible for figuring out it was there and helping Mulder get it to her. In a way they were just as much of a reason why she was standing there as Mulder was.
Slowly she opened the door wide, standing aside to let them in. "Come on in. Kitchen's to your left, make yourself at home."
"I call dibs on the armchair," Frohike called, moving inside as the other two followed. She wasn't sure what she was allowing into her home, but frankly it was better than sitting there all afternoon twiddling her thumbs. Besides, the Lone Gunmen were harmless enough for the most part. And really they were all three very sweet…when you got around the raging, conspiracy, computer-hacking nerd part of it.
"Nice digs," Langley eyed her neat and trim surroundings with a sort of bemused approval, immediately reaching for a nick knack on a table to study and nearly dropping it in the process. Scully thought of their own cramped, closed offices and immediately winced.
"Yeah, just…try to not break anything," she murmured, wandering behind the trio as she moved to the living room and her television. "I assume you all know how to work a VCR?"
Three sets of identical, blank stares met her sarcastic words, as if trying to figure out if she were serious or not.
"It was a joke…computer hackers…VCR…never mind." She flopped onto her couch and watch the three, unintended guests roam her home. Not that it was…bad having Mulder's friends here. Maybe…
"What model television is that?" Langley crouched in front of the one she had, wiping at the film of dust on the glass that had collected during her weeks in the hospital. Scully tried not to bristle as she tucked her feet underneath her.
"I don't know…whatever it says on the front, I got it years ago when I moved back here from California."
"Looks to be a Korean brand, all right, but not as great of a resolution quality as some of the high end ones from Sony." Langley sounded as serious as if she had a termite problem in her house. He turned to her, blinking behind his thick, black-rimmed glasses. "You know, give us an hour or so we can run down and pick up a new one for you, something with a crisper picture."
Scully stared back at the perfectly serious man, mouth hanging. "What?"
"Yeah, check that VCR as well, what's the make on that?" Frohike sat up in the armchair he'd claimed looking intrigued by Langley's suggestion. "Probably one of those $30 jobs you can get that eats through magnetic tape like it was Jell-O."
"You aren't buying me a new television," Scully protested before the conversation took on any more speed. She glanced up helplessly at Byers, the most logical looking one for help. "What I have is fine." Besides, she thought quietly looking between the two disappointed computer geeks. It wasn't as if they had the sort of money to throw around randomly buying her television equipment she hardly used anyway.
"Mulder said the same thing when we went to his house," Langley grumbled disconsolately as he turned on the television and set up the video.
"Yeah, have you seen the ancient tube he attempts to entertain himself with? I think my grandmother's television is newer." Frohike looked relatively appalled.
"I don't think Mulder needs much to watch the type of movies you lend him," Langley snorted without bothering to look up from her VCR.
"And how would you know, Blondie," Frohike snapped, growling at the other man. "It's not like look at my movies either. All you do is moon over your imaginary, large-breasted elf-goddess."
Whatever Langley was fiddling with was forgotten as he spun at Frohike's insult. "Titengail is not an elf-goddess, she is a highly skilled and very dangerous warrior, known for taking on Dark Lord of Morgath single handedly."
"She's an imaginary, pointy-eared, large breasted dork magnet."
"And that makes your porn collection any better?"
"Hey, at least the women on there are real!"
"Parts of them are real," Langley sneered triumphantly.
As Scully watched the interplay between the two snapping back and forth with eyes wide, beside her Byers settled on the couch with a sort or resolute sigh. "See what I have to put up with?"
"Are they always like this?"
"Well…sometimes." Byers grimaced, scratching distractedly at his beard.
"I will have you know that Ms. March is an au natural sort of girl." Frohike uttered his retort as if he was speaking about the Mona Lisa.
This wasn't the sort of conversation Scully imagined herself being privy to today.
"Byers," she murmured softly, glancing sideways at him. "How in the world did the three of you ever get together?"
Her question seemed to give him pause. "What do you mean?"
"You three, Frohike, Langley, you. The only time I ever see you getting along is when you are up to your eyeballs in some conspiracy, usually with Mulder. Otherwise, if you didn't have that going for you…would you three even speak to one another?"
"I would like to think so," Byers offered mildly, nodding at the other two.
"At least my elf-goddess has talent and class, unlike some of your San Fernando Valley plasticized rejects."
"Plasticized? Whose the one with a twenty-four inch, full scale model of your elf goddess he caresses every night before he goes to bed."
Dear Lord! Scully closed her eyes tight against the mental image that Frohike just imparted as her palm came to slap up square against the spot her tumor so recently rested. Her head ached slightly with the impact.
"On second thought," Byers sighed heavily beside her, "I don't know if I'd have anything to do with either of them really." He sounded rather aggrieved by all of this.
Scully had always wondered how it was that Frohike, Langley, and Byers had come together as the Lone Gunmen. She didn't know their back-story. She had asked Mulder on several occasions, and he had always brushed it off, stating that he had found them completely by accident. She hadn't been given a chance to get to know them beyond their connection to Mulder enough to know who they were before they met each other or Mulder and why it was they had given up everything to take to their seedy offices where they undermined the government's informational systems looking for evidence of the same truths Mulder searched for.
"How did the three of you meet anyway?"
"Meet?" Byers looked surprised and startled by her question, his fingers nervously plucking at the nicely patterned tie hanging against his white shirt. "You mean Mulder never told you that story?"
"No, he never did?" Was there something strange about it? Byers' eyes flickered to his sniping friends both of who seemed to finally let go of their need to insult each other's sexual preferences and had caught the third's wary glance.
"Mulder never told you what?" Frohike glowered; still shooting Langley dark looks over his thick glasses.
"How we all got to know each other," Byers replied, suddenly becoming very interested in cuff of one of his suit coat sleeves.
"Mulder never to you that?" Langley looked surprised. "I figured he'd have at least explained it before you met us.
Scully shook her head, shrugging her shoulders under her comfortable t-shirt. "No, he always seemed to brush it off."
"He would," Frohike snorted cheerfully as Langley agreed, laughing. A knowing look passed between all three of them a secret hint of information on Scully's partner that peeked her interest. Why would Mulder want to hide how he met these three? And what was so amusing about it?
"Really, it wasn't his fault," Byers finally looked up from worrying the fabric of his cuffs, looking slightly ashamed.
"No, but it doesn't make it any less funny, does it?" Langley asked cheerfully, sinking to the floor and settling cross-legged on the carpet.
"His fault for what?"
All three of them paused for a long, measured moment, glancing between one another. Scully's curiosity, already stifled two weeks of boredom being stuck at home, ramped up to ten as Frohike shrugged and Langley chortled, grinning madly at Byers.
"We might as well tell her. Someone has to."
"Tell me what?" She cut her eyes at Byers, who pulled fractiously at his jacket, glanced one last time between his two encouragers, and sank unhappily into her couch cushions, looking none-too-pleased with where their conversation had turned.
"That Mulder once spent a week on a mental health ward detoxing from an extremely dangerous and highly effective hallucinogenic substance."
A mental health ward? Detox? What? Mulder had never once mentioned anything about this. "When was this?"
"Eight years ago?" Byers sighed.
"Has it been that long?" Frohike asked, thoughtfully surprised at that.
"Sometimes it feels longer," Langley smarted back, but neither man seemed inclined to pick up their squabbling once again.
Scully frowned, mentally flipping though Mulder's health charts, not even recalling it being listed in the thick file he had amassed in his nearly ten years with the Bureau. Nowhere had she seen any time in any mentally health treatment facility, much less for anything drug related. "I've never seen it in his files."
"I don't think the FBI wanted it there…it was sort of an accident."
"Not to mention the fact he was found naked as a jay-bird and screaming about aliens," Frohike supplied.
Naked and gibbering, what in the hell? "Mulder doesn't usually make a habit of this sort of behavior." Not to Scully's knowledge at least.
"No, and Baltimore PD wasn't too happy about it either."
"Baltimore PD…" Now this was starting to turn strangely weird. "Why was Baltimore PD involved?"
"Because we broke into a warehouse." Byers sighed morosely.
"And Mulder was high as a kite shooting his gun." Langley added.
"And it probably didn't help having all those government agents swarming in, I bet they called the cops in on us to remove us from the equation." Frohike slouched in his seat, glaring at Byers. "None of this would have happened if it wasn't for your girlfriend."
"She wasn't my girlfriend," Byers replied evenly.
"No, but you moon after her like Langley does his elf-goddess."
"Shut up about that, already," Langley scowled.
"Children," Scully brought the bickering to order, to interested in whatever the hell it was this story was to have it sidetracked by another round of schoolyard fighting. "Focus…from the beginning. How did you all meet each other, why did Mulder end up naked, gibbering, and in detox, and…who is this girlfriend?" She looked to Byers.
"A 'girlfriend' would connote we were dating."
"Which you weren't?"
"I only just met her that day," Byers protested.
"Her name was Suzanne Modeski," Frohike grunted as Byers drug out his protests. "She was a chemist who worked for the Department of Defense."
"Except that she was being hunted down by them because she wanted to leave," Langley added.
"So they told the FBI she was a dangerous psychotic who murdered the people she worked with."
Scully shifted on the couch and looked to the quiet Byers. "And this is the woman you…errr…"
"Moon over," Frohike supplied. Scully glared at him, eyebrows raised as cowered away from her annoyance.
"Suzanne came to me for help," Byers replied slowly, sadly, as if this was the sort of memory he didn't like thinking about anymore. "I thought she needed me to rescue her."
"From what?" Scully felt her irritation with the three of them melt under Byers moroseness.
"From the men who control all of this, who do all of this!" Byers' still arms flailed suddenly in a giant, all encompassing gesture, as if taking in the world in them. "The men who run our government, who drive these conspiracies, who nearly killed you."
His sudden vehemence surprised her. Uncharacteristically for Byers there was anger in his words, even when speaking of her illness, touching her as she watched him run agitated fingers through his hair in frustration. Surprisingly both Frohike and Langley watched their friend in sympathetic silence; quiet at the story she knew they both probably knew as equally well as Byers did.
"We were all at a computer show in Baltimore," Byers continued. "I was there on behalf of the FCC, my employer at the time."
"He was a nark," Langley supplied, trying to sound helpful.
"I was a public affairs officer," Byers corrected loftily, earning eye rolls out of the other two. "I was once like you, Agent Scully, a respected member of the government out to do my job and stop crimes against our country from happening."
"Yeah, before he wised up and came to the dark side," Frohike mumbled from the depths of the armchair.
"Anyway," Byers ignored Frohike's dour look. "It was before I realized what the government I worked for I used to go to these events to try and foster an open policy between the FCC and those interested in information technologies."
Open policy? Scully looked towards Frohike with his balding hair pulled back into a nub of a ponytail and Langley who screamed comic book geek. They didn't look like they were the type who appreciated communicating regularly with anyone who worked for an agency that went by a three-letter acronym. But then…they did speak to both her and Mulder.
Byers continued. "This beautiful woman came up to my booth, Suzanne." He paused, a brief, distant smile lighting his face for an instant.
"She was hot," Frohike qualified.
"More than that," Byers insisted, "She was scared…she needed help. And out of all the people there that day, out of all the men who would have fallen all over themselves to help her, she came to me."
"Cause you were the only one who screamed 'nark' standing there," Langley snorted derisively, obviously not as impressed by this fact as Byers was.
"You didn't see her, you and Frohike were too busy squabbling over your stupid TV splitters."
"Langley Vision," the blonde man corrected him. "I wasn't there peddling cheap crap, I was offering free television for the masses, not trying to control it like some people."
Before yet another snark fest could ensue, Scully grabbed the reins of the runaway wagon and pulled it back on track. "Suzanne Modeski, in trouble…go on."
"She was in trouble, she told me that. She told me that her ex-boyfriend had taken their daughter and that she was trying to get her back, but without the boyfriend knowing."
"She's looking for assistance in getting back her daughter at a computer fair?" Something about that didn't sound right to Scully. "Why didn't she go to the police?"
"She told me they couldn't help? Besides, she needed someone to look up something for her, something she knew had to do with computers."
"What Romeo genius over here didn't know was that she was wanting him to hack into the Department of Defense and find out information on an advanced research project," Frohike jumped in, cutting off any response Byers had. "And being the gallant white, nark knight that he was, he wouldn't hack into the DoD database, but he knew someone who could."
"Theoretically," Langley grumbled from the carpet.
"What we didn't know was that hacking into it would cause the military to actually notice." Byers took up the thread of the narrative again. "But what we did find out that what Suzanne told us wasn't exactly the truth."
"We were played," Frohike groused, looking insulted.
"More like lover man was played, I was doing my thing, DMing my Lord of the Rings game."
"I saw how hard it was for you to resist trying to hack the DoD for fun." Frohike replied, shutting down Langley's protests. "We get Lord Manhammer over here in on the hack, start looking up the man she claims it the psycho ex-boyfriend she claims took their kid. Turns out he's not her boyfriend, he's not even psycho."
"Well, he's not psycho much," Langley clarified.
"Instead he's a commondated Fibbie with a psych degree from Oxford with the VCU."
"Mulder," Scully murmured as his place in the entire story finally became clear. "But why would she say that…"
"The Defense Department was claiming she blew up one of the labs at a facility in White Mountain, New Mexico where she was working. They said she killed four people as she tried to escape." Byers spoke with the conviction that this mysterious Suzanne Modeski didn't do what she was accused of. "She was being set up though, she just wanted out, they wouldn't let her."
"How do you know?" It was the first question that came to mind for her, the logical question that was the most obvious. "This woman shows up out of nowhere, accuses an FBI agent of being something he isn't, then convinces the three of you to willingly hack into DoD files without explanation? How do you know she was innocent as you believe her to be?"
"The tooth," Byers replied promptly, looking suddenly ill, his face paling under his beard.
"There was a tracking device in the filling of one of her teeth," Langley explained, pointing to his own jaw for emphasis. "She yanked it right out of her own head."
"And there was the gas," Frohike added.
"That too," Byers agreed.
"Gas?" The story was becoming increasingly more complicated as Scully struggled to follow the broken narrative.
Byers explained. "Suzanne worked at the White Mountain facility on a type of histamine gas, one that they packaged in an aerosol inhaler, just like asthma medication. It was a drug that induced paranoia in its subjects, the government planned on testing it on people here in DC and Baltimore. Suzanne was tracing down the shipment."
"Testing a histamine on people?" The eerie similarity to her own situation with the strange alien virus, her cancer, and the chip caused Scully to shiver in revulsion slightly at the idea of another, unsanctioned test. "How did she know?"
"She found out, she tried to quit. And they framed her to remove her before she could blow the whistle on them."
"So how is Mulder involved in all of this," she asked Byers, who looked to Frohike.
"The DoD made Modeski out to be a crazy and got the FBI to look for her. Mulder was there because she was considered violent and a killer. Who better to go after crazy murderers than Mulder?"
"Except that Suzanne wasn't crazy and he didn't know any of this." Byers stepped back in. "Anyway, so Suzanne found out about the shipment, and she wanted to go get proof of what was going on. So we went with her."
"Only we didn't know that Mulder was following us." Frohike supplied.
"So when we got to the warehouse, he stopped us and tired to arrest Suzanne. And that's when things started getting a little…weird."
"Weird?" As if it wasn't already a strange enough story?
"These guys show up and try to cover the whole thing up," Frohike replied in obvious disgust. "Guns shooting, we hide. Mulder gets caught behind the spray of the punctured aerosol cans, and he's screaming like a loon. Some weird guy in black shows up, threatens our lives, Byers chickadee runs for the hills, leaving us holding the frickin' bag, and who looks like idiots with egg on their faces when the cops show up?"
"Never trust women, man, they will break you heart," Langley solemnly intoned from his seat on the floor, giving Scully a knowing nod. Perhaps he forgot for the moment she was a woman?
"So we were arrested, and Mulder was taken to the hospital screaming about aliens, and we had to explain ourselves to the police." Byers held up his hands at the end of his tail, glancing between the two men he hadn't known till that day and now were the only people she ever saw him associate with. "And we finally learned the truth about our government. They watch everything, hotel bibles, your fillings, even your medication."
"And they will stop at nothing to cover it up," Langley nodded, "Even to the point of knowingly gassing one of their own FBI agents."
Langley's words rang disturbingly true for Scully. What had Michael Kritschgau said when he had confessed to her the whole secret plan behind Mulder? He'd been manipulated from the beginning.
"The truth is," Byers murmured quietly. "You can't trust anyone…not even the entities that you think you should be able to trust."
Scully's finger's trailed up to her neck, to the tiny lump she felt there, the one thing that she suspected kept her from a certain death from cancer. "No, you can't trust them can you?"
A pensive silence fell on the room as all four of them sat quietly, considering Byers' words.
Frohike finally broke the quiet, sighing solemnly. "But Suzanne was really hot."
His words shattered the moody spell. Langley snorted loudly, rising from the carpet. "Hey, Scully, you got anything to eat?"
"Classy there," Frohike intoned.
"What?"
"Just…in the kitchen guys, help yourselves," Scully waved Langley off in the general direction of her fridge. "There's coffee, tea, I think Mulder left beer in there somewhere."
"Coffee," Frohike leapt up at the sound of that, moving to follow Langley into raiding her stores for sustenance.
"Mugs are over the coffee machine," she called as they disappeared, murmuring and squabbling into the other room. She and Byers watched them go, Byers shaking his dark head softly as they went.
"They aren't so bad to be around I suppose,' Scully offered, sensing the gloominess hadn't left Byers as readily as it left his companions.
"Not so bad," he replied vaguely.
"But they aren't Suzanne, are they?" For all of teasing from Langley and Frohike, she sensed they were hitting a sensitive spot with the most quiet of the three Gunmen. Byers turned to her, shrugging in that way all men had when you hit a sore spot. It was almost like a physical response to something they had no words to vocalize.
"She was taken, right off the street, from right in front of us." He shook his head, even years later not understanding. "I've spent years looking for her, searching. She's never turned up."
The hidden depths of John Byers, Scully realized that she hardly knew him or any of the Lone Gunmen really. "I'm sure she's fine."
"They would have killed you to get to Mulder, Scully…what makes you think they wouldn't have killed a troublesome chemist?"
He made a good point, and Scully couldn't deny it. "I'm not dead yet, you know…thanks to you guys. If you could save me, I'm sure you'll find her."
"We didn't save you, Mulder did. All we did was study the chip."
"But you helped him figure out what it did. And without that he might have never convinced me to use it."
"Perhaps," Byers wasn't immediately willing to concede on that argument. "I don't know, I just keep thinking that if I had just grabbed her hand, tried a little harder, stopped at nothing to find her…maybe we'd be together today."
Scully felt her heart ache for the man sitting beside her, a man hopelessly in love with a woman he only knew for hours and had mourned for eight years. "I'm sure you did the best you could."
"You didn't see Mulder when you were sick, Dana." Byers' use of her first name surprised Scully as she blinked at him. She didn't think he had ever uttered it in her presence before. "I mean, yeah, it's Mulder, he's an FBI agent, he's a hero, he's come back from the dead at least twice. But you just knew…you had this feeling he would stop at nothing to do something to keep you from dying. He wouldn't allow it. It wasn't in Mulder's worldview. And here you are, alive and whole. If you were taken to the ends of the earth, he would come and find you. That's who Mulder is. Me…even if I found Suzanne, I let her go for this long. What's to say she would even want more or remember me? Maybe she never felt for me what I felt for her all those years ago."
Byers obviously attributed a lot more to the relationship she had with Mulder than Scully did. There was something of the hopeless romantic about him, which was endearing and also so very fragile. In many ways Byers was much like Mulder, a man who just wanted to do his job but couldn't let go of his memories. Slowly she reached out to him, resting her hand against his shoulder, fingers tightening in a gesture of comfort.
"Maybe she did, John. And maybe she's still out there, and thinking of you as well."
Her words seemed to cheer him somewhat. "Perhaps she is. And that's why I'm still looking. I keep hoping I'll be given a second chance."
Second chances. Scully had been given one. She hoped that Byers could find one as well, and perhaps get a chance to tell his Suzanne exactly how he felt.
"So tell me the truth, Byers," she murmured, leaning back into her seat, eyeing him with over exaggerated suspicion. "Did you three come up with this, or was this all Mulder's doing?"
Of the three Lone Gunmen he was the one the worst at lying to her. His ears reddened under her pointed gaze. "He might have said something about you wanting company."
"I knew it!"
"The movie was Frohike's idea though, however I was the one who convinced him on Casablanca. Really, their running commentary on Oliver Stone…after the third of fourth time it's tiresome."
"Good choice on your part." From out of the kitchen there was an ominous clatter, the sound of smashing glass, and a loud epithet from the mouth of Frohike, followed by verbal berating from Langley. Byers looked on with worry.
"Perhaps I should go and….see…" He rose, rushing to see what destruction his friends had wrought on her house. Scully was tempted to follow, but figured that Byers was at least adult enough to get whatever mess there was cleaned up and the two children hustled out into the living room unscathed. Though if she had to put up with an afternoon of continued arguing between the two she might kick the lot of them out of her house and sick them on Mulder for good measure.
An afternoon with the Lone Gunmen, good company, and a story to bug Mulder with when next she saw him, perhaps the day wasn't a total waste after all. And besides, the three conspiracy theorists were starting to strangely grow on her. It could be, in the words of Louis in Casablanca, the start to a beautiful friendship.