by suspect affiliations

Chronology: post-“Truth”

He lost himself in her sad eyes.

* * * * * * *
there’s battlescars on all my guitars
but still i come out here and play
there’s battlescars on my face & my arms
but you still kiss them anyway
- ozma -
* * * * * * *

Morning in Roswell.

John Doggett knocked tentatively on the door, praying that he wasn’t interrupting; his own night with Monica had been somewhat less than what he anticipated had taken place here. Mostly, they had argued; at about two in the morning, they had given in to exhaustion and need, curled up against one another as platonically as two people desperate for an affirmation of life possibly could, and drifted off into uneasy sleep.

He felt her stand behind him, felt reassured by her presence. Mulder opened the door.

“Come in.”

They did, and the door shut behind them, and it was all Doggett could do to remain standing in the face of this world-for-two in which he and Monica were no longer steadfast allies, but unwanted interlopers. The bed was made, Mulder and Scully were dressed and standing at opposite ends of the room, the two small duffle bags Scully had tossed together at Skinner’s order were packed to go, and why, Doggett thought to himself, why had he bothered to show up?

“Dana,” Monica said from his right shoulder. “I have some bags for you and Mulder. We stopped and picked some things up for you two.”

Scully looked at the two of them, or maybe at Mulder standing at the door behind them, and exhaled a thank you.

Struck by the burning impulse to do something, Doggett moved forward, leaning towards the duffle bags. “Guess we’d better get you guys on the road,” he offered, slinging them over his shoulder, moving back towards the door, towards Mulder, who nodded and followed him outside.

They squinted in the New Mexico sunlight and moved to a pair of nearly identical black SUVs, parked two spots away from each other, dusty with too much travel already. Mulder unlocked one, and Doggett tossed the two bags in the back; Doggett unlocked the other, and Mulder retrieved the Wal-Mart bags of toothpaste and shampoo and Melba toast. He held up an eight-pack of Charmin.

“Good thing to have when you’re on the lam. I should know.” It went in the backseat of the Mulder/Scully SUV with the rest. Mulder slammed the door.

“Mulder.” Doggett’s voice was elsewhere; it got Mulder’s attention.

“Yeah.” They stood close, facing one another.

“Look, Mulder, when Luke – when my son –“ There was a pause in which Doggett tried to remedy the fracture in his tone and Mulder forced himself not to tell the other man that it – this - wasn’t necessary.

“Barbara was watching him. My wife. My son.”

Mulder met Doggett’s gaze fully.

“I never was obvious... but I always – I resented her for it. I thought, if only I had been there, it never would have happened under my watch – and – and I think that’s why we got a divorce, me and Barbara, because in the end – it took so long for me to... to forgive her.”

He had never confessed to a priest, but he imagined this was what it felt like.

Mulder looked at the ground, bit his lip, looked back at Doggett; nodded, and turned back into the motel room.

Doggett stood, squinting at the sky.

* * * * * * *

Evening in Truth or Consequence.

She was asleep, so he rented the room without waking her; parked in front of it and took their bags in before heading back out to rouse her.

He dropped her purse on the bed and something stuck out from it; he pulled at it, looked at the two pictures – her two children – and decided not to wake her after all.

He could drive through the night.

* * * * * * *

Ten days had gone by, and they had gone north.

They were gassing up in Limon, Colorado. Mulder went to pay for the gas and to restock on bottled water; Scully went to the adjacent sub shop to grab some lunch for the both of them.

The man behind him in line coughed. “Hey, man, you look just like that guy in the paper!”

Mulder whirled, all his worst fears playing themselves out in his mind; his voice was deceptively casual.

“What guy?”

“Oh, y’know, there was some story... hey, you guys got a New York paper? Or Washington? I saw it just this mornin’. Some story about some damn government somethin-or-other.”

The cashier, a greasy, long-haired man with a cigarette stub hanging from wide, thin lips, produced a New York Times, scrutinized it, made his pronouncement.

“Man, but you do look just like this fella. This, uh, Moldir? Ha, Fox! Sorry, man, but ya look just like a guy named Fox.”

He slid the paper to Mulder, who read the headline, said “I’ll take this, too,” paid, and walked away with his water bottles and his newspaper.

Scully was waiting for him at the car, sandwiches in hand. He jogged towards her.

“Mulder, what’s going on?” She hissed at him as he slid into the driver seat. “Some people were giving me odd looks. The counterman acted like he’d seen me before.”

“They have.” He dropped the paper in her lap.

She looked at the headline, took in their picture, read the first page of the article, turned to him.

“Oh my god, Mulder.”

* * * * * * *

Midnight in St. Francis.

The room was a mess.

As soon as they’d arrived at the motel, they had thrown down their bags, spread out the paper on the bed, pulled the pages apart so they could view it all at once, read it over dozens of times, argued about it, cried about it, made love on top of it. Now Mulder was feeding Scully some raspberries they had picked up earlier; each one that entered her mouth was accompanied by a quote, a catchphrase, memorized from the articles now torn and wrinkled and wet beneath them.

Doggett told the reporter that they had sacrificed everything; he recited the line and Scully sucked berry-juice from his finger and he lost himself in her sad eyes.

The phone rang.

“Hello?” answered Mulder in a deep affectation.

“Mulder. It was too easy to find you.”

Skinner, Mulder whispered to Scully, and she pressed a kiss against his chest.

“Well, sir, is that a problem?”

“Tomorrow’s paper will be less exciting for you two.” Skinner’s voice was abrupt, but still authoritative; Mulder knew things were not dire, or his former boss would be speaking desperately.

Mulder waited.

“Kersh was shot today in front of his home in Chevy Chase. Killed.”

“Any leads?”

“The _Times_ reporter that he provided today’s expose to will be all over it, I’m sure.”

All of the air left Mulder’s lungs. “Kersh –“

“Was the source. The anonymous source at a high level in the FBI,” Skinner quoted.

There was a long pause. Mulder stroked Scully’s hair, mimicking the motions of her hand on his abdomen.

“What do you want us to do,” Mulder conceded quietly.

“Come back to DC. At this point it’s only easier for them if you’re hidden – then they can kill you without any repercussions. Right now the publicity might be the best thing to keep you both alive.”

“Yeah.”

“Mulder... is she OK?” Skinner’s concern offended Mulder for a reason he couldn’t quite name, a reason that was apart from his usual tolerant disdain for his boss’s feelings for her, a reason he suspected was related to his having been absent from her life for so long and Skinner telling him that she’d given up their child.

He thought of Doggett’s words to him, of two photographs hidden in the folds of her purse. He rubbed a few strands of her hair between two of his fingers.

“We’re fine.”

* * * * * * *

Finally, DC.

Their flight from Kansas City arrived in the early afternoon and Agent Reyes greeted them; Doggett and Skinner had spoken enough in the press that they were too high-profile to keep it a quiet event.

They made it to the Hoover building without incident; once there, it was all flashbulbs and microphones and a struggle to get through the door. They were an easily recognizable pair, and right now, they were as It as J.Lo and Ben.

When they made it to Skinner’s office there were hugs and relieved faces and then Gibson Praise, standing forlornly against the wall, stepped forward and hugged Scully and told her not to be afraid.

They decided they’d really like to just go home.

Reyes drove them to Georgetown and they made their way through the throng of reporters camped out on Scully’s doorstep, she with her head down against the gale, he with his arm wrapped protectively around her, pushing her forward, making her his armor.

Inside, they closed the blinds and undressed each other and spilled onto her bed, where they were too drained to do any more than hold each other and sleep.

* * * * * * *

They held press conferences, avoided photographers, sat through long meetings in Skinner’s office. They restocked the refrigerator, had dinner with Maggie Scully, and were received at the White House. They changed their phone numbers, paid the bills, and worked with Doggett and Reyes to recall as much of the X-Files as possible as Skinner tried to track the files down.

They never once opened the door to their son’s room.

Three weeks after their triumphant return, Mulder found himself in her – their – apartment on a Saturday afternoon, waiting for her to come back from Safeway, mindlessly clicking between ESPN and ESPN2. At a commercial break that coincided on both channels, he stood to stretch and in the corner of his eye saw an elephant begging please, please acknowledge me.

He expected the door to be welded shut, to be held by mystical forces, to be somehow impossible to open, but the gesture was so much easier than he expected, just a flick of the wrist, really.

The room was cleaned, but nothing had been moved out; he stood in the doorway, took one, two steps inside, and observed the crib, full of bedding with “WILLIAM” stitched on it, the dresser, the bassinet, the mobile, and his eyes watered and he saw their son in this place.

He did not hear her enter the apartment; he was oblivious as she called out his name, put the bags of groceries on the kitchen table, turned off the television, and walked down the hall, expecting to find him napping in their bed only to be shocked at the open door and his shadow on the hardwood.

She stood just outside the door, staring at the ground, and it took a few minutes for Mulder to realize her presence and to look at her, to see that she could go no further, and so he stepped towards her and placed his hand on her back and gently drew her inside.

She couldn’t look at him, so he pulled her closer, so that there was enough air between them but they could still lean in and tenderly touch foreheads if the occasion called for it, as they done for so long, before one or both of them had said fuck it, enough of this platonic crap... before they had come together and made a baby, and before one of them had given him up.

He pushed the thought aside and tried to forgive her.

She was shaking.

“Scully.” He slurred her name, rendered it grief-stricken.

His hand left her back, traveled across her shoulder, up her neck, to her chin. He lifted her face towards him, searched her expression, found only tremors and no answers.

“Scully. Why?” He asked gently, he didn’t want to scare her off, but he also asked desperately, because he did want an answer.

She crumpled under his gaze, wilted like an overexposed flower, and he tasted salt and felt cruelty.

She looked away, stepped away from him, grasped the railing of the crib so hard that her fingers began to turn purple, and, gaspingly, answered his question.

“I saw her,” she told the pillows, quietly and huskily, and he knew instinctively that “her” was her first child, felt it from an accidental discovery in Truth or Consequence.

“Emily.” He breathed her name, the name of the child that he was not allowed any jurisdiction over, and he felt the same punch to his gut at his powerlessness now; he wished her steel to soften, her grief and fear to admit him and accommodate his own.

“She said –“ Her head shot up as she choked back a sob; “she said to let them go. She said, Mommy” – and here the sobs were no longer held back – “Mommy, let us go.” She looked back down, swallowed her tears, spoke again to her son’s pillows. “That’s what she said,” she whispered, releasing her grasp on the rails, sliding her delicate hands down the bars of the crib as she slowly collapsed.

He sat on the ground beside her and pulled her into him, and they cried together; for hours they cried, saying nothing, clinging to one another and he thought to himself, we are both haunted.

* * * * * * *

end “quanta”

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