Chapter 6
When Olivia and Peter returned to the lab, alerted by a text from Astrid that the patient was awake and calmer, they found Agent Mulder sitting at a table slowly eating a bowl of soup. He was wearing a teeshirt and loose slacks, doubtless some outfit Astrid had prudently procured beforehand.
"How are you feeling?" Olivia asked gently.
"Considering I was shot in the head and in a coma for fifteen years, fine," Mulder said.
"I'm so sorry this happened to you."
Peter considered apologizing for waking him up. If the last thing he remembered from the world he'd created for himself was boating in Italy, it sounded like a better break than the reality they'd woken him up to.
"So you're ready to believe this is the real world?" he asked instead.
Mulder glanced up at him, then away, like he was looking at something else. "I don't want to believe," he said, and a ghost of a smile crossed the left corner of his lips for a second. "But the more I think about it...In the past fifteen years, things happened...I saw things, knew things, that I couldn't have seen and couldn't have known about. It just...it just all seemed so real to me."
Astrid raised her eyebrows as she poured a cup of tea. "The genie seemed so real to you?"
And then Mulder did smile. He laughed. It was too dry and weak to call the laughter hysterical, and it only lasted for a few seconds before sputtering away. "Yeah." After a moment, he looked up at Peter. "Where's...Bishop. Dr. Walter Bishop...wait...Peter Bishop...Harvard...basement." He frowned as these names plucked at an old memory, something he'd read. Something he'd read in an X-File.
"My father is at home, making cotton candy. He's a little eccentric, but he did manage to wake you from a coma when teams of surgeons and neurologists couldn't, so there is that."
"He's your father."
"Yes, he's my father."
Peter and Olivia glanced at each other as he spoke. Mulder noticed the look. His eyes flicked from Peter's face to Olivia's, then to Olivia's stomach, then back to Peter's face. He lifted a spoonful of soup. "And you work together?"
"Yeah. Long story, and I don't think it's one that would particularly interest you just now."
Mulder looked down and concentrated on eating for a few minutes. "What do we know about Scully's disappearance?"
Olivia answered. "Not much, I'm afraid. Just that she disappeared the same night you were shot. Some of your neighbors remembered seeing her in your apartment building. She's classified as a person of interest in your shooting."
"I can see that," he joked. "It wouldn't be the first time she'd wanted to kill me." But then he clenched his eyes shut in sudden pain. Astrid put a comforting hand on his shoulder. "I never really told her," Mulder said tightly, "how I felt about her."
"She knew," Astrid said. "Women always know."
Olivia gave her a confused frown and half shake of her head, and Astrid returned a quick gesture to play along.
Mulder put his hand over Astrid's for just a second, then he sighed and leaned forward, shrugging her off, and stared into what was left of his soup.
He looked like a man whose whole life had suddenly been ripped out from under him. Peter knew that feeling well. He thought about what his father had said.
"Agent Mulder, do you feel like going for a walk?" he asked.
"As far as I know, I haven't really been outside in fifteen years. It would be good to stretch my legs."