Character: Dana Scully
Fandom: The X-Files
Rating: PG-13
Prompt:Richard Castle: Please tell me there's been a murder. Otherwise, I'll have to continue writing. (Castle) Vol 3. Week.23 on scifi_muses on LiveJournal
Setting: Season Five Episode: Travelers

AN: Travelers is an elusive episode, and so I moved it here. Since it has nothing to do with the XF timeline at the moment I elected to move it to this spot.

Time seemed to slow down after Emily's death.

As always Scully did what came naturally to her in the face of grief, she threw herself into her work. Not that there was much at the moment. The lull that had been precipitating even before the holidays deepened. Much as Scully had suspected for a long time Mulder's enthusiasm seemed to have hit rock bottom. Even the mystery of Emily's death only seemed to reinforce the blasé ennui Mulder appeared to have now, and it unsettled Scully. She had always admired Mulder for his passion and fire, his determined drive even in the face of all that stood against them. And now that fire seemed to have faded, dissipated, snuffed out by Kritschgau and his truths, and further enforced by her own illness and later Emily's. It was as if the two events further underscored in his mind that he had been a dupe, a fool all along, used and played for the machinations of powerful men who saw in him a useful foil.

Scully didn't know whether she should pity him or kick him squarely in the ass.

For the moment she busied herself with the mundane tasks Mulder seemed to be throwing himself into. She combed through every strange magazine known to man looking for everything from Bigfoot to sightings of ancient dinosaurs. She felt she had newsprint perpetually under her fingernails of a night, and everything from the New York Times to the Des Moines Register was starting to run together in her mind as she looked for anything that stuck her as something Mulder would classify as "unusual, strange, or just really cool."

And so the winter seemed to go for the most part. She hardly seemed to blink before it was February 23, her thirty-forth birthday. When it occurred to her finally that morning as she sipped her coffee over a copy of a Wicca publication, it struck her as such an odd thing. Had it really been a year ago she had been diagnosed with cancer? She hadn't believed she would be alive to see this birthday, to sit there in their cramped little office with Mulder, sipping her fourth cup of coffee of the day and reading ridiculous magazines. This day a year ago Mulder had actually remembered her birthday, had taken her out to that ridiculous pub, the one where Pendrell was shot just days later. Scully's heart still ached thinking of the loss of her friend. She hadn't been back to the pub since.

Now she wondered if Mulder knew where is calendar was in the morass of papers and clippings that covered his desk. He'd said nothing, which of course led her to conclude he had forgot, as was his usual wont, until such time as she discreetly said something. To be honest, she wasn't particularly feeling in a party sort of mood. She'd had her traditional dinner with her mother the day before, just as subdued as it seemed to be last year. Emily's death had affected Maggie much more than she was willing to admit. Otherwise the entire day could have gone un-passed and unmarked for all Scully cared. She didn't have it in her to celebrate.

That's perhaps why it surprised her at 7:30 that night, already home and changed into comfortable clothes, her doorbell rang. Confused Scully tore her eyes from the mindless news program she had been half-watching to the door, raising to peek through the peephole to see who was on the other side. Somehow, even though she shouldn't have been, she was rather surprised to see her partner.

"Thought you could get through the day without something from me, birthday girl?" Mulder grinned proudly as she opened her apartment door, holding up a single cupcake.

"Is that all I get," she asked, arms crossed in mock disapproval.

"You let a guy in the door and he might be able to shower you with the gifts you deserve," he snorted as she moved, bringing with him the smell of one of his staples, Chinese food, and a box of what look suspiciously like eleven other cupcakes where the first had come from.

"You know you didn't have to, Mulder,' she protested weakly as he traipsed into her kitchen, dumping his load on the well-scrubbed table and presenting the singular cake to her once again.

"I promise I didn't lick it, though I did have to wrestle a four-year-old for it."

"Beating up children again?"

"Well, you know, they can get rather vicious when sugar is in the vicinity." Unerringly he turned from her to her cupboard, looking for plates. "I thought about wine but you know after the last time someone showed up at your door with the stuff, I thought perhaps beer was more in order."

Scully felt her face turn bright scarlet. She hadn't thought of that moment in so many months. Eddie Van Blundht as Mulder on her couch, chatting with her and making her feel special, important. She had nearly considered the impossible that night, of crossing that delicate line between friendship and something else. All the forbidden and secret visions she denied herself came to the surface in that moment, as she Scully found herself heartily glad Mulder was preoccupied digging around her refrigerator, setting bottles of beer inside, glass clinking as he worked.

Lord, she sighed, settling into one of the chairs by her table, swallowing hard to reinforce her normally cold reserve. It didn't help that Mulder moved about her kitchen with familiarity, his eidetic memory remembering even where she kept her beer bottle opener. She sometimes forgot she owned one of those. He placed one cold bottle in front of Scully, another at one of the empty chairs at her table, and began unpacking cartons of food. She could already tell that many of her favorites were in the mix, kung pao shrimp, Mongolian beef, and that eggplant dish she always liked so much.

"I can't believe you willingly got the eggplant."

"I decided it's your birthday, I would humor you with a potentially poisonous vegetable."

"Eggplant isn't poisonous, Mulder even if it is in the nightshade family. So is the potato and the tomato, and you eat enough of those to not have keeled over yet."

"You know I was reading up on these legends regarding nightshade, there are some professed Wiccan and pagan groups in Great Britain who say that imbibing small amounts of deadly nightshade can lead them to ecstatic visions in which they can see the entire spectrum of their life, even past lives, potentially ancestors as well."

"Mulder, I'm hungry, I want eggplant, and I'm tired of hearing about Wiccans, visions, or anything else." She reached for the eggplant and began dishing it out on her plate, ignoring Mulder's smirk. "Honestly, any more of this and I might start going back to doing autopsies again just for variety."

"Well, sorry things have been quiet." In actuality Mulder sounded rather non-committal on it all. Was he really sorry or was he just afraid of digging up anymore unwanted truths? "I figured after everything in the last year, we needed a bit of a break. You know, finally get that life you were always preaching to me about."

"And look what we are doing right now," she snickered, adding kung pao shrimp to the mix on her plate. "We are eating take-out Chinese again."

"On your birthday."

"True." Secretly she was pleased he remembered her birthday. As much as she didn't feel in the spirit, she was glad that he had noticed. "It's sad, Mulder, last year I complained we never had time to do anything, chasing after one X-file after the other, now I'm complaining that we aren't doing it enough." What was wrong with her?

"It gets in your blood, you know that." He tucked into his own plate heaped with food with gusto. "I remember my first case, it was so strange. It was just a random one off the crap pile too, something having to do with strange lights being seen somewhere in the Adirondacks. But from then on…." He waved a chopstick in the air expansively. "I became the man you see today."

"Oh that's an encouraging thought," she teased, swigging beer at his nettled look. "How did you find the X-files anyway?"

Mulder paused in chewing, thoughtful for long moments. She couldn't tell if he was considering what parts to tell her or where to begin. He returned to his meal, snagging a large piece of broccoli before answering.

"Someone I knew tipped me off about them not long after the John Lee Roche case." He crunched on the broccoli carefully before continuing. "That case…wasn't good for me in a lot of ways, you know that. Anyway, I wanted some time to think, to break away from the serial killers, from the darkness."

Scully had seen the effect Roche had on Mulder even years later. She could imagine the dark places he had been at when he covered serial killers all the time instead of just occasionally.

"Anyway, I was seeing Dr. Werber by his time anyway, and that had brought up the memories of my sister. So out of curiosity I started doing research, looking into events like mine, and when my friend tipped me off on the X-files, I thought I'd hit the treasure trove."

"You didn't even think it was a little crazy?" Was there ever a time, Scully wondered, that Mulder was not the wide-eyed believer he was now?

"Well, yeah," he admitted carefully. "I don't believe everything that comes across our desk even now, Scully, I carefully weigh it and try to decide how much of it is fact and how much of it is fiction. And in those early days most of it was just…crap. The place had been used for years just to dump stuff in, no one had cared, and it took a lot of weeding out."

"How did the X-files even come into existence?" Scully had never heard the whole story. She knew that there had always been X-files, paranormal and unexplained cases, and she knew Mulder had been working on them ever since she had joined the Academy. But no one else really knew how they even came into being.

"I'd like to claim existence for them, but I didn't open them up, at least not the first time."

"They've been open before?"

"Yep," Mulder nodded, shoveling rice off of his plate. "Man named Arthur Dales was the first agent on the X-files, some forty years ago."

"Arthur Dales…never heard of him." Scully leaned back in her chair, prepared for a story.

"Not surprised, seeing as the FBI was probably no fonder of discussing him than they are of me." Mulder was rather cheerful regarding his whole black sheep of the Bureau status. "I ran across Dales after a case came off the blotter from Wisconsin. Someone had sent it along to me just because of the strangeness of it. A routine eviction of a tenant lead to the discovering of a body and the near murder of a county sheriff, and it ended in the death of the tenant, one Edward Skur."

"Sounds like a straightforward murder to me." Scully knew there had to be more to it than that.

"Well, it sounds like it, but the victim had all of his soft tissue removed. And Skur as he lay dying on the stairs kept repeating one name over and over and over again."

"What?"

"Mulder," he replied, eyebrows raised in dramatic delight as he sipped from his beer impishly. He knew he had her hooked and was pleased he did.

"Mulder?" That would be mystifying. "Did he know you?"

"I can honestly say that despite my reputation of hanging out with pathologists, I don't know other people who take out the soft tissue of their victims on a regular basis."

"Well, is Mulder a terribly common, Dutch name? Maybe he just knew other people with the name."

"Not terribly common, but it was a possibility, so I looked into it out of curiosity. I looked up Skur in the database and found an old X-file on him. Sadly most of the file had been redacted long ago."

"For what purpose?"

"I didn't know, but I decided to ask the agent of note, which happened to be Arthur Dales. He'd retired twenty years before, but still had a DC address. So I showed up to see if he could give me any further information, an insight into what lay behind the lines with the Sharpie through them."

Something about Mulder's tone seemed to indicate Arthur Dales was less than pleased with this development. "So how helpful was he?"

"Before or after he slammed the door in my face?"

Scully snickered, plucking up shrimp from her plate. "So I take it that you didn't learn much off of him."

"Oh I learned a lot. Like why it was this man kept repeating Mulder over and over again."

"Why?"

"He knew my father," Mulder replied. There wasn't even the slightest hitch as he said it, no hesitation as he claimed Bill Mulder as his father. Scully was pleased to hear that, even if she too shared the same questions regarding his true parentage. "Edward Skur once worked in the State Department, along with my father."

"I'm sure a lot of people did but none of them died with your last name on their lips. And what about working in the State Department would make any of this an X-file?" Scully was curious now.

"You and I both full well know what my father and the State Department were up to that makes this an X-file." Mulder muttered grimly. Scully felt her mood and her stomach sink slowly as he continued.

"So how did Arthur Dales get mixed into all of this?" She could hardly believe that the men who had kidnapped her, who had created Emily were any more keen in the 1950's to have the FBI involved in their work than they were now.

"See that's the thing, Dales and his partner worked straight, regular Bureau cases. You have to remember that this is the days of J. Edgar, and right smack in the middle of the Committee on Un-American Activities business. Suspicion was rampant, average Americans were being spied on and brought before the Senate for nothing more than having once worked with someone who happened to have attended a Communist party meeting once. Dales was just one of the many agents whose soul duty it was at the time to track down those suspected of un-American activities and arrest them."

"And Skur was somehow mixed up in all of this?"

Mulder nodded, leaning back in his chair as well, dredging up the facts from his perfect memory. "The story was, as best as Dale's remembered, that Skur was implicated as having been involved in Communist activities. At the time the committee was trying to weed out anyone and everyone within the government who even had the hint of being Red, and the State Department in particular. Skur was a mid-level employee, no one particularly important."

"And yet he was a Communist?"

"He was arrested for failing to appear before the committee, but was found with a card on him."

"Strange thing for a man who works for the State Department during that period to be carrying."

"Yeah, I thought so," Mulder mused, reaching for his beer. "Anyway, it seemed pointless as Skur apparently killed himself that night, hung himself in his jail cell."

Visions of Emily's father came to mind, but Scully brushed them aside. "We can assume that was staged. Obviously it had to be, Skur was found in Wisconsin decades later."

"Oh, but it gets better," Mulder replied. "Dales was the one who broke the news to the man's wife. He drives out there, calls on the family, and as he's leaving he swears he sees Skur running off into the darkness."

"It seems logical. The first place the man would want to go back to is his family."

"Except no one else believed him, and Justice immediately rushed to cover the whole thing up."

That sounded all too familiar. "So Dales got suspicious."

"As any good follower of the truth would. As it turns out the next day he gets called out to a strange case out in Maryland. A body turned up, a famous German doctor who had made a home in the US. He was found in his house dead."

"Any connection to Skur?"

"Dales said he wasn't sure until he was called by my father."

Now they were getting to the heart of the matter. "What did he have to do with all of this?"

"Dales said Dad was the one who told him about a program, one that engaged in using Nazi research on innocent people. Something about grafting animal and human characteristics together, putting a monster inside of a human. Skur had undergone a surgery that put some sort of…thing inside of him that was attacking and killing innocent people."

"Mulder," Scully protested, choking on rice as she coughed and spluttered. Eyes streaming she reached for her beer to try and calm the convulsions. The image alone sounded like something straight out of Mulder's B movies. "Something inside of him?"

"That's how Dales described it. But hell, Scully, it could have been anything. You know better than anyone the games that these men play, that they continue to play." Mulder glared stormily at his pate. "Anyway, Dales, said that Skur disappeared, vanished. He hadn't heard a thing about him until I showed up at his door nearly 40 years later."

"And they don't know where he got to or how?"

"No," Mulder shook his head. "I thought about broaching the subject with Dad, but I never could bring myself to do it. We weren't speaking much by then, and when we were together I was busy trying to keep the peace." He prodded at his plate with a chopstick disconsolately.

"Dales always suspected that someone let him loose again, but when, it is hard to say. They could have experimented on him more and let him go, he could have escaped from them. Someone could have taken pity on him, maybe even my father, I don't know." Mulder worked at his bottom lip, sucking it in between his teeth. Scully remembered Bill Mulder doing that the one time she met him. She wondered if Mulder even knew that was where he got it?

"Wow, was that story a downer for your birthday or what," Mulder sighed good-naturedly, downing the rest of his beer and rising for another. "You want anymore?"

"Still working on this one," she held up her now lukewarm beer, thinking over Mulder's story as he rummaged in the fridge to replenish. "So what happened to Dales?"

"Well, what you might expect," Mulder replied, opening his beer and returning to the table. "He began asking questions, no one wanted to answer for him, least of all my father. And he started getting nosey. In his spare time between regular casework he began poking around some of these unexplained files. Soon they got into his blood as well."

"And he started the X-files, then?"

"Well more or less. He didn't have the luxury of working on them full time like I do. And you think the crap we put up with is bad, try doing these investigations in J. Edgar Hoover's Bureau of the 50's and 60's. No, Dales was a pioneer in a lot of ways. But he got his fair share of crap for it too. His career was ruined. He was pretty much forced to retire in the end. And after he left they files were boxed up, shoved in a storage room we now euphemistically like to call an office, and were forgotten till I dredged them up eight years ago."

"Ah, how history repeats itself," Scully shot back dryly.

"Yeah, well I have one thing that Dales didn't have?"

"Certainly not your sanity."

Mulder snickered. "No, that's what I have a partner for."

Scully warmed at the soft smile and intense sincerity in his hazel eyes. For all of Mulder's many faults his heart and emotions were always honest, and she always appreciated that about him. "Not that it's helped you out much more than Dales."

"Oh, I think it has. You never fear speaking truth to me, Scully, and you always keep an eye to the work, which is more than I can say about myself at times."

"Even when we aren't doing much work?" She arched an eyebrow pointedly at him. He chose to ignore it, reaching instead for a Chinese food carton.

"Something will come along." He hardly seemed worried. He was evading this. She knew he was, for all of his talk of the X-files being in the blood, Mulder's faith had been horribly shaken. Why was he still in this if it wasn't for his beliefs?

"So about this cupcake," Mulder eyed the lone cupcake Scully had set on top of the box containing it's fellows. "You want me to stick a candle in it or something?"

"I don't own birthday candles."

"Why is it still sitting there, uneaten and alone?"

"Because we are eating dinner," she replied primly, much to Mulder's undisguised disgust.

"You are one of those people who only eats desert after they've had dinner."

"Grow up in a strict, Catholic household, Mulder and you develop good manners too."

"It's not good manners, it's indoctrination." Mulder reached across the table for the singular cupcake, plucking it up.

"Hey," Scully protested as he began peeling the paper off the cake itself.

"You aren't eating it."

"It's my birthday cake."

"There's a whole box," he protested before her suddenly sulky gaze.

"That's the one you gave me specifically."

He paused, looking down his aquiline nose at her. "You try that look on all the men in your life?"

"What, this 'you-just-kicked-my-puppy' look?" Scully tried not to sound too innocent as she deepened her unhappy frown and stared sadly at the cupcake in his hand.

"Yeah, that one," he grimaced.

"On most of the men, I have to admit," she replied with a long-suffering sigh.

"And did it work?"

"Almost always."

"Damn it," he growled, handing over the prize she took with a triumphant smirk. "It's a good thing it's your birthday."

"You would just be a cold hearted bastard to me the rest of the year?"

"Why break up a good pattern," he shrugged cheerfully, reaching for another cupcake in the box. Snagging what looked like a chocolate one he held it aloft briefly. "Happy birthday, Dana Scully. Already this one is looking much more promising than the last one."

"Particularly since there is no cancer, no downed plane, and no one getting shot," she replied with a dry smile as he took a huge bite of frosting and cake, nearly swallowing the thing whole. Scully snorted, returning to her food, shaking her head as he finished off the pastry in another bite.

"Really, you have the table manners of an animal, you ever learn how to eat properly?"

"I grew up in a proper, New England family, what do you think?"

"You are such a rebel, Mulder."

"I do try." He wiped fluffy frosting from off his chin. "But you're the one who has put up with me for nearly five years."

"I suppose we have to wonder about my sanity as well." Scully smirked, finding that for the first time in many months, perhaps a year she felt truly happy, content. It was her birthday and she was surprisingly happy, despite everything that had happened to her in the last year.

"Thank you, Mulder."

"For?" He topped off his cupcake with another bite of kung pao, and that couldn't possibly taste appealing.

"For making what had been a rather quiet, crappy birthday into a good one. For being my friend enough to show up with Chinese and cupcakes, for being with me with Emily, this last year….for just being here." To be honest Scully wasn't so sure how she would have managed without him there….even if he did steal her cupcake.

He was quiet for some time, chewing thoughtfully. "Just don't make things like this a habit, Scully. I can't be a superhero all of the time."

"And here I was thinking of getting you a cape."

"Just don't make me wear it in my underwear, I think I'm cool."

"I know so many women who will be disappointed by that."

She couldn't tell if Mulder was pleased or horrified with that idea. "Tell you what, let's just enjoy your birthday as it is, like you said free of drama, free of angst, and me remembering it for once."

"I know, two years in a row, a girl gets spoiled like this."

"Don't get your hopes up, Scully, this may not happen again."

"Shut up, Mulder," she sighed, reaching for her partially unwrapped cupcake. "It's my birthday."