February 25, 1998
Arlington, VA
Well, that was a bust, Mulder thinks of the Massachusetts Institute Visiting Lecturers' Forum for the gazillionth time this week, now as he makes his way out of Terminal B at Reagan National Airport.
It pains him to realize how he's been believing in an alien conspiracy for so long, just like those people there, when it's most likely all a part of a government military program. He didn't want to be unkind to Dr. Heitz Werber, a man that had wanted to help him years back when he had undergone hypnosis to find out what had happened to his sister – that's actually the only reason he had agreed to meet this Cassandra Spender tomorrow, before going back to work –, but the doctor is just another sucker for this the-government-is-in-bed-with-extraterrestrials mumbo jumbo, just like he used to be.
Scully is a saint, really, to have put up with his crap for so long.
It's almost nine p.m. when he drives his car out of the airport's long-term parking and all he really wants to do is see her, and tell her how sorry he is that he's roped her into this alien madness, and how thankful he is that she's been this patient with him all these years, but he doesn't want to scare her with how much he seeks her approval, how needy he can be for her. He can certainly wait another day to meet her and tell her how much he appreciates her partnership and devotion to the X-Files.
So, he just goes home and thinks of the ways he can show her he's no longer a traumatized, immature, egotistical crackpot who takes her for granted as he used to be when they had met, but is becoming a grown man who keeps an open mind to improbable possibilities and values her existence even if he still needs to work on his tendencies to lash out and self-isolate due to grave emotional baggage.
No wonder he went into Psychology.
The next morning, after he is done visiting Cassandra Spender at the mental health facility where she has checked herself in and goes to the Bureau, he's already feeling spent – and it's barely nine o'clock. He holes himself up in his basement office for hours, not doing any work at all, ignoring phone calls and e-mails, paper doodling to appease his mind of his wishes to undo his sister's disappearance or at the very least to make his shame at having been manipulated for so long fade away. It's almost lunch time when he hears the clicks of her high heels in his office, but he only looks up when the copy of The Chronicle she throws his way hits his arms.
Scully seems nonchalant, but he can see the fondness in her eyes, the care in the tone of voice she uses to tease him about making the headline for being skeptical of extraterrestrial life on Earth. Maybe she missed him just as much as he missed her, he thinks. So, he banters with her, tiredly ranting with sarcasm about the misguided beliefs he's held for the past years – little green men, he notices the quote written on the newspaper; there was a time he would have corrected that to little grey men, he realizes, miffed. He ignores her jab that he doesn't need her anymore since he apparently has invalidated his own work – of course he needs her, is she out of her mind? – and tries to move the conversation along. Even if she's here with him, his foul mood sticks with him, because he is now certain that there is no alien conspiracy, is now aware of what the U.S. government is capable of, and yet people still don't believe him when he tries to convince them of it all.
It's strongly held by believers in UFO phenomena that there is military complicity or involvement in abductions, but what if there is no complicity? What if there is simply just the military, seeking to develop an arsenal against which there is no defense – biological warfare, which justifies, in their eyes, making an ass out of the nation with stories of little green men? A conspiracy wrapped in a plot inside a government agenda.
He had made that argument during the conference in Boston, which he would have expected people to realize is a much more plausible explanation than alien abductions and flying saucers and extraterrestrial invasions, but then people had thought he was the one ignoring facts.
His partner seems proud of him for a moment, telling him he has come a long way, and he feels at least slightly validated by this one person, the only one he is truly grateful for. Then her face changes as she reads the paper and recounts that Cassandra claims to have been taken from Skyland Mountain and to have an implant on the base of her neck, starts making connections to her own abduction and personal experiences… he suddenly feels like this is an episode of The Twilight Zone, in which they both swapped minds and he is the only one who is aware of it.
He tries to appear busy as he gets up to put on his suit jacket and pretend there is somewhere he needs to be. He does need to be some place – anywhere, really, as long as it's a place away from all of this. And so, he just leaves, forgetting that he had wanted to ask her to lunch when he drove into work earlier, forgetting that he had wanted to tell her they should plan a new era for the X-Files. Forgetting that he had wanted to start a new chapter in his life, to do better.
He just leaves.
When he gets back, he learns from Skinner that Scully has gone to the forum for further testimony on the Linda Bowman case, something that had been scheduled the day before and that he hadn't been aware of. Because I've been brooding, rather than communicating with my partner, he admonishes himself.
There is not much for him to do – actually, there is, but he is not able to focus and wants even less to deal with any of his thoughts right now –, so he spends most of the afternoon in his office, doing his best to pretend he's getting something, anything, done.
February 27, 1998
Washington, D.C.
Scully is startled awake at dawn by her dream, in a mix of a daze and panic. It's not even six in the morning, she sees on the clock on the side of her bed, but she has this strange feeling that keeps her from trying to snooze a few minutes more, so she ends up getting up and going to the kitchen to make some coffee before jumping in the shower. Something is off with her, she just knows it.
As she washes her hair, she tries but fails to remember the details of her dream; actually, there is nothing at all she can remember about it. What she can remember suddenly are Cassandra's words from last night, when she stopped by the mental health facility to warn the older woman about the risks she could be facing if she had the chip on her neck removed.
You wake up at night knowing you need to be somewhere, but you don't know where it is. Like you forgot an appointment you didn't know you had.
Of course she has felt like this before – hasn't everybody? – but, for this past week, this impression has been more recurrent, more persistent in her mind. At first, she feared it could be as simple and mundane as simply missing Mulder's company, which made her even more adamant to ignore her senses. Now, she is not sure if she's glad that she's not going soft and that there might be an ulterior motive for it.
She is blow-drying her hair after her shower when she gets the call from Skinner directing her to Skyland Mountain, where a large number of unidentified carbonized bodies has been found. Her instincts are telling her this is something different than other cases, that this is close to her. But she's a good trooper, so she steels herself into Special Agent Dana Scully and finishes getting ready to go do her job.
When she gets to the site, she still can't shake this funny feeling within her. She hasn't been back here since her abduction – one of the things from that time that she had tried to erase from her mind as she moved on with her life – but still there is a pull she can't shake. It makes her uneasy, but not unprofessional, never unprofessional. So, she looks around and learns from law enforcement already at the scene all there is to know at that point about what happened the night before, and when Mulder arrives and meets her over burnt corpses, she is at least prepared to discuss the case with him. Except, this time, the discussion is not one she had expected.
"Mulder, why are you tiptoeing around the obvious fact here?" she finally tells him, when she's had enough of ignoring the subject. "I mean, this is Skyland Mountain. We're right back here on Skyland Mountain."
"And you think it's related to your abduction from the same place?"
She knows he was acting cynical the day before, but this still baffles her. "Well, you can't deny the connection."
"You think this is some kind of abduction scenario?" he questions her, and it feels like he's interrogating her.
"No..." she replies, cautiously. "I'm not saying that."
"Do you have any evidence of that?" He is on a roll with the inquiry.
She is a mix of bewildered and bothered. "What do you mean by evidence?"
"That's what I'm asking you," he continues, and he sounds condescending, just like many of the sheriffs in charge of cases they go to investigate for the X-Files when they don't believe Mulder.
She is most definitely frustrated and annoyed by his attitude. "Well, are you going to give me your theory, then?"
"No," he tells her simply. "I'm going to give you an explanation," he informs her and then walks off, leaving her behind.
She suddenly feels alone, like she hasn't felt in a while.
February 28, 1998
Washington, D.C.
This time, when she wakes up, it's not even five a.m. – she can tell by the stars still shining bright in the D.C. sky.
Scully feels the same odd sensation she felt when she woke up the previous day, maybe stronger this time, like it's… closer to her, if that makes any sense. Absentmindedly, she brings her hand to the back of her neck, where the chip that most likely cured her cancer and saved her life had been surgically inserted. Is this little piece of metal responsible for the blankness she is experiencing?
She wishes she could talk to Mulder about it, the old Mulder, she amends in her mind, considering now he has become Mr. Reasonable. After he had left her in Skyland Mountain, they spent the day apart – her joining four pathologists to start the autopsies on the burnt victims while he tried to find plausible explanations for the occurrence. They only saw each other again later in the evening, when they had both met at the mental health facility where Cassandra Spender is staying, and she was surprised to see how unbothered by Cassandra's anguish he had been acting, how resigned he is to the belief that this is not an event related to alien abduction. Even when they had been accosted by Agent Spender to complain about them visiting his mother, Mulder seemed unfazed and complacent, maybe even aggravated at being sucked into this matter. She doesn't like this new version of him, all despondent. Still, there is no one else that she feels like she could open up to about this strangeness going through her, so she figures new Mulder will have to do.
She realizes how ironic it is that she's been trying to get him to see things her way for all the years she's known him and now that he's more aligned to her belief system she is hoping he will revert to being a spokesperson for extraterrestrial phenomena.
Scully barely gets ten minutes of her partner's attention when she gets to the basement office that Saturday morning before he leaves again, this time to meet Marita Covarrubias, the informant she least trusts. She tried to tell him about what she's been going through, carefully mentioned that he shouldn't be so quick to rule out what Cassandra Spender is saying when he argued that the people at Skyland Mountain had probably been led there by the government through the metal implants they all had in their necks – just like hers –, but he dismissed her concerns, once again cavalier about her opinions.
She feels at a loss, leaves the office to try and find anything that could support her suspicions, but this weird feeling going through her just won't go away, it rather gets more intense, pulls her in a trance.
When she comes to her senses, she is stunned to see she's in a hospital bed with first-degree burns on her face and superior limbs and also face-to-face with a relieved Mulder staring at her.
What in God's name happened to her?
March 1st, 1998
Washington, D.C.
When Mulder gets to his partner's hospital room, he is comforted by the sight of her sleeping form.
I almost lost her yet once more.
Yesterday, after he had gone to meet Marita Covarrubias and seen evidence of the black oil he knew from his time in Russia, he tried calling Scully to no success – he tried her mobile, the basement office, Skinner's extension, her house, Cassandra Spender's hospital room, even her mother, but no one had heard from her. He had hoped maybe she had taken Cassandra to Quantico, so he drove there, but they hadn't been there all day; he went by her apartment, expectant, but they weren't there either. He had a bad feeling about it, decided to make the long drive back to Skyland Mountain, but came up empty there as well.
He had driven for hours after that with no specific directions, going anywhere he could think of – he searched the FBI headquarters top to bottom, and then went to the Smithsonian, the National Mall, doublechecking if she could be by the Vietnam Veterans Memorial or Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, even the pub near the Bureau where the agents liked to go to on occasion – but no such luck. He made it to his own apartment late in the evening, close to midnight, with this last spark of optimism that maybe he would see Scully there, but that wasn't the case either. She was nowhere to be found.
He had started to feel desperate, his instincts telling him something was definitely wrong. Scully was not the type of person to just up and disappear – the only times that that had happened, she had been abducted, either by unknown forces or psychotic assailants. His brain just started unlocking a whole bunch of scenarios for him to be anxious about. No matter the reason, the thought of losing her, being left all alone, had been enough to make him crumble down on his couch in tears to the point he fell asleep out of exhaustion.
Around three in the morning, the sound of ringing roused him out of his slumber, and he immediately grabbed the phone by his side. "Scully?"
"Agent Mulder," Skinner's voice announced.
The beating in his heart faltered; it was never good news when his boss called him in the middle of the night. "Where is she?"
"Agent Scully?" the A.D. inquired back, surprised. "I don't know, I've tried reaching her but she's not answering her phone. I need you both in Pennsylvania – there's been another mass incineration, this time at the Ruskin Dam."
And then he knew. "She is there, Sir."
A pause. "Why do you say that?"
"The bodies at Skyland Mountains had metallic implants in their necks, just like hers. They were summoned there. I haven't been able to reach Scully all day. She's there, I know it."
"Mulder – " Skinner started, only to be immediately interrupted.
"I'll be there in about four hours," he said before hanging up.
He had made it to the Ruskin Dam in under three hours.
When he surveyed the area and spotted all the body bags, his mind immediately conjured up the worst possible thought. He tried his best to appear the least frantic possible as he met A.D. Skinner in the middle of all this chaos, but his adrenaline only came down a little after seeing his partner – Scully, he sighed to himself – being airlifted to the hospital.
She was alive.
He had managed to stay on the scene for a good fifteen minutes before announcing that he was driving back to D.C. to go straight to the hospital to see her – his boss, of course, didn't even try to stop him; actually gave him a weak excuse by instructing him to go see what she remembers.
So, as he quietly stands here at the hospital and gently brushes a strand of his partner's hair out of her face, waking her up, he can honestly say this is one of the few times he has actually followed orders.
They don't get much of a chance to talk at first, with the nurse interrupting them out of concern for Scully's health, so Mulder leaves and spends the better part of the morning interviewing a few other survivors, none of whom has any recollections of what happened. Eventually, he makes his way back to his partner's room, shows her the pictures of what happened at Ruskin Dam, tries to convince her that the government is responsible for this event and that they need to figure out a way to prove who manufactured the chip in her neck, argues that the truth they have been looking for is now in her.
She is overwhelmed by all that he is saying, by what has happened to her, by her lack of memories. She usually trusts him blindly, but these past few days have thrown her for a loop, and she needs to stand her ground, no matter how much she wants to please him.
"Mulder," she starts, looking at him sitting next to her bed, "when I met you five years ago, you told me that your sister had been abducted... by aliens. That that event had marked you so deeply, that nothing else mattered. I didn't believe you," she admits, "but I followed you – on nothing more than your faith that the truth was out there. Based not on facts, not on science, but on your memories that your sister had been taken from you," she tells him freely, hoping he understands how much he means to her if she's been willing to follow him all this time in spite of all her scientific training. "Your memories were all that you had," she continues, trying to rationalize to him how she's feeling.
"I don't trust those memories now," he affirms, not understanding the true meaning of her words.
"Well, whether you trust them or not, they've led you here," she explains. "And me," she adds, once again showing him the magnitude of this. "But I have no memories to either trust nor distrust, and if you ask me now to follow you again, to stand behind you in what you now believe, without knowing what happened to me out there, without those memories… I can't," she admits, chagrined. "I won't," she adds, decidedly.
He is at a loss. He expected her to get on board with this idea without fuss – she's been trying to get him to be sensible for years –, but now she is the one questioning a down-to-Earth explanation, even if it involves a conspiracy. He looks out the window, trying to organize his thoughts. "If I could give you those memories," he speaks up, finally. "If I could prove that I was right and that what I believed for so long was wrong..." he tries to reason with her.
"Is that what you really want?" she asks, the underlying meaning not lost on either of them.
Do you really want to disprove everything you've believed to be true for so long?
He wants to look certain, wants to convince her and himself that he has no qualms about it, but she knows him well enough to know that there is still faith lingering in him that he hasn't been a complete fool all this time to believe in an alien conspiracy. No matter how invested she's become on this journey, she still dreads the possibility of eventually being the one to tell him he's been wrong about this.
After the silence grows too long, he sits back down on the chair by her side and confesses, "I need to know the truth, Scully. No matter what that is."
"Okay," she tells him as she lifts her hand to him; he takes it immediately. "How do you suggest we go about this?"
"I'll talk to Dr. Werber to make an appointment for a hypnotherapy session for you," he says, and he sounds like the Mulder she is used to. "We can start there."
"Okay," she agrees with a smile.
Author's Notes:
This chapter is important to explore Mulder and Scully's difficulties in accepting unusual behavior on both of their parts and also because it's an important link to the next few chapters, story-wise. We'll wrap this arc in the next chapter and move the story back to the IVF and more MSR evolution. Don't forget we also get to see Scully dealing with the Nephilins in All Souls and undercover Mulder in Pine Bluff Variant. I am also excitedly dreading the arrival of Diana Fowley soon haha