King of the Monsters by Amal Nahurriyeh Email: amalnahurriyeh@gmail.com Summary: Because he is obsessive and prone to destructive thoughts, he's thought it through, and has a reasonably good comprehension of what the world might be like without him. Genre: Gen/MSR Rating: PG for literal content, much higher for angst Warnings: ...There's a way in which this should have a warning for suicidal ideation? Except not literally? Probably safe, unless your trigger-point for that sort of thing is set very low. In any case, warning for contemplation of mortality and Attack of The Emo!Mulder. Angst Level: High. Go read the summary again. That high. Universe: Mulder-containing. Timeline/Spoilers: circa 2013. Disclaimer: Intellectual property is a capitalist fiction designed to oppress the working fic-writer. That said, I don't own them either. Author's Notes: For Isk. There are no monsters under the bed, honey; Mommy checked. Thanks to sangria_lila for the beta, amyhit for the Emergency Neruda Consultation, and cityesm for the last minute eyeballing. "Daddy!" she hollers from her bedroom. He stops himself from running, since he knows intellectually it's not actually a crisis, it just seems like one from the perspective of a four-year-old. "What is it, Sadie?" he asks, as he steps into her room, tries to adjust to the dim light from the nightlight. "There's monsters," she says quietly. She's sitting in the center of her bed, arms around her stuffed polar bear, knees up. He knows that a normal person's reaction to this announcement should be amusement. He's not a normal person. Monsters in general are not something he can categorically dismiss. "Where are the monsters?" She points silently to the closet. For half a beat he thinks of going to get a weapon of some kind, but kicks himself: there is a 95% chance there are no monsters behind the closet door, and her imagination doesn't need encouraging. Nevertheless, he's just the tiniest bit prepared for something as he pulls her door the rest of the way open and pokes at her clothes. "Nope. Nothing here. The monsters must be all gone." "Okay," she says, but doesn't budge from her position. "What kind of monsters were they?" he asks, sitting down on the bed and stroking her hair. She's got Sam's hair, poor kid; it's a nightmare to brush, even now. "With terrible eyes, and terrible claws, and terrible roars," she whispers. "Oh." He nods sagely. No more Sendak after five pm. "Well, you know what, Sadie. Those monsters don't normally live in people's houses. They live far away. Remember how Max has to take a boat in and out of weeks and almost over a year?" "He leaves from his bedroom," she says, unconvinced. He tries a new tactic. "Do you want to be the king of the monsters, like Max? Then you could tell them to go back to their land." "No," she says. "You be king." "Alright then," he says, and stands. "Attention, Wild Things," he says in the most authoritative voice he can muster. "In my capacity as your king, I now forbid you to enter Sadie's bedroom, or any other room of this house, without formal permission, and compel you to return to your far-away land." He looks back down at her. "Did that work?" "Yes," she says, and seems reassured. "Can I give you a kiss?" "No. Icey." She holds out her polar bear, and he kisses it seriously. She lays back down and snuggles into it. "Good night, baby," he says, and leaves the door open a crack as he leaves. He tells Scully the story when he calls her that night. She's in Paris, again, just four days this time, but at least they have the rhythm down pat: she calls during the day for Sadie, who has finally, given the prompt of Mama on the phone, learned that they are for talking to, not yelling at. But these calls are for them, twelve-thirty his time is six-thirty hers, which means they're both in bed, half-awake and mumbling at each other. It's like the old days, which neither of them has commented on but he's guessed they've both been thinking. "I should break out the Bettelheim again," he muses. "Mulder, psychoanalytic theory is not the solution to all of your parenting problems," she says. "Do you think that extra shelf of pediatric reference texts you keep adding to is invisible, woman?" "Don't let the monsters get you." "They wouldn't. A coup takes a lot of planning," he replies. When they've hung up, he lays there, staring at the ceiling. He's been the king of the monsters for a long time, he thinks. Nice to know someone noticed. *** He's been dead before, so it should be old hat at this point, but he realizes it occasionally: he should be dead. Not just, if-I- hadn't-ducked, or if-Scully-hadn't-been-there, or thank-God-for- modern-medicine, not even thanks-for-the-backhoe. This death was different, because it hadn't needed to be fixed; it had been erased, never happened, except that it clearly had, for some definition of "happened." He was living a life that shouldn't be lived. This came to him as he sat in the waiting room at the dance studio, trying to decide whether the other parents were giving him looks because he had a Y chromosome or because his daughter thought that ballet needed more roundhouse kicks. It struck him when he wandered into the living room and found Scully and Sadie under the dining table with a collection of Barbies, deep into an elaborate story about alligators. He felt the little nudge of it when he was sitting in a meeting at the Hoover with Mo giving him the silent death glare to stop being such a pain and solve the case already. He shouldn't be here. He should be dead, buried and gone. Because he is obsessive and prone to destructive thoughts, he's thought it through, and has a reasonably good comprehension of what the world might be like without him: not much different. He barely takes any cases, and he's realistic enough to know that if he weren't taking them, someone else would. He's done his bit to save the world, turned over the evidence and let the federal prosecutors do the work; they don't even need him to testify. It's really just Scully and Sadie who care that he's alive--and, well, Will, but Will's dead in that other universe, too, and he thinks he's not going to mention that to anyone unless he has to. So the world would be exactly the same, except that Scully would be a walking automaton running on a potent mix of grief and duty, and the monsters in Sadie's closet would lack a king to banish them, and his son and his family would all be dead. When he puts it that way, he almost sounds important. *** There wasn't any other way around it, he argues against himself. Burning his brain out was the only way to save the world without Will and Casey's intervention. Even his admirable 20/40 hindsight leaves it as the only plausible option. So, her little feat of Time Lording was totally necessary, and he has nothing to feel guilty for. Except. Except. If he'd let Scully knock him out, he might have made it. Gibson had spent the 24 hours after the attacks in a barbituate coma, and had come through just fine, not a single adverse effect. If Scully had drugged him up on the floor there, he probably would have survived. And maybe they could have fought them off, even with him out. But no. Bill the Secret Alien was in the goddamned room, and he wasn't going to let Scully win, not if he could help it. Plus, Mulder knew what the state of the battle was at the point he collapsed. It wasn't winnable, not without some way of guiding the satellites. So. Necessary. Except. Except. He didn't have to be a hero. Scully was safe, and Sadie, and Will; most of his friends in the world were in a bunker under a mile of rock. You could have let her tranq you, the little voice whispers; you could have let her lose. And everyone you gave a shit about would have been safe and sound. They had plans, for what to do if they'd lost: they would have just picked them up and kept on fighting. He didn't like that part of him would have been okay with the death of six million people, just because his people would have made it. *** He mattered. Maybe not to the grand scheme of the world, not anymore, but he was necessary to the people around him. Sadie needed someone to argue with her about the importance of eating lunch, to teach her how to climb trees, to check the closet and under the bed. Scully needed someone to argue with about what color to paint the house, someone who understood what she meant when she failed to say something, someone to talk with at midnight or six in the morning, whether across the miles or across the bed. His friends were glad to see him when they spoke. He was an all-around good guy, at least according to the popular wisdom. It's not nice to realize that you're no longer the center of the universe. He was having that realization more and more each day. *** He read Casey's journal, front to back, a couple of times. The first time, it was for plot: how the hell did she actually do it? Her notes were meticulous in that regard, documenting every step of her process: the faked papers, shooting off the lock of one of his and Scully's storage lockers in Oklahoma, her early impressions of the Stark bunker. There was a gap when it came to her trip inside the consortium, but she had written a few notes, well after the fact, when she was released back to her quarters, and anyway he had her formal statement. It was like reading through a mirror: everything was backwards, but perfectly recognizable. He was fascinated. The second time, it was for character. He realized in reading it how much he loved this woman his daughter had/will/would have turned out to be. (The Hitchhiker's Guide was right: tenses are the major problem of a world with time travel.) She had inherited Scully's firm adherence to the categorical imperative, but somehow combined it with all of his snark and attitude. She was fearless, bold, well-prepared, learned fast, adapted. And she was just funny, in her little notes about the culture of the bunker and her experiences in what was, to her, the past. ("Thing with Monica: Well, this is the dumbest thing I have probably ever done. And yet, I appear to be doing it.") It made him more eager to watch his Sadie, grow up and turn into--well, if not this Casey, a Casey. He read it the third time because he realized it was a letter to him. At the beginning, her voice was a little more muted; he imagines her writing it like she wrote her fieldnotes in Sri Lanka, the careful documentation of an experience, to be mined later for data. But as it progresses, and particularly after she returned with them to the bunker, she's writing to him, about him. It's not just his egotistical desire to read about himself that drives him--well, that is a factor; her observations of him at meetings, in the dining room, and in the gossip nexus of the communications staff are nuanced and frighteningly accurate. ("He's not sure if he's uncomfortable being called *sir;* on the one hand, he keeps trying to negate his authority with casual mannerisms, but at the same time, he accepts his own centrality, and the level of respect directed at him, as if it is the most natural thing in the world.") But she wasn't just curious, wasn't just trying to figure out a problem: she *needed* to know, and that need was present and burning on the page. "He was having a meeting at lunch today, with John and two others from the security staff. She sat on his lap the whole time, leaning against his shoulder, alternately sucking her thumb and playing with one of her little dolls, I forget what they're called. How could I forget that? Whenever he wasn't using his hands to make a point, they always seemed to return to her; he played with her hair, he took one of the dolls and danced it around on the table. She smacked his hand at one point to get the doll back, and he smiled. She seemed to be ignoring him, except that she never broke contact with his body." The first time he read that, and really heard it, he had to close the book and walk away for a while. And he stepped on a Polly Pocket while doing it, which didn't help. The night after the fight over Will--he still can't believe he punched *a girl,* never mind the rest of it--she wrote, "Oppositional behavior is an incredibly potent instinct. It's considered the hallmark of adolescence, but in fact it's crucial at all stages of development: it's the process of differentiating yourself from your parents, which must necessarily occur violently. It's why two-year-olds run into the street as much as why fifteen-year-olds slam doors and climb drainpipes. And it doesn't end when formal separation between self and other has been achieved; that instinct, to push back and make room for yourself against the encroaching identities of one's parents, is always there, laying in wait whenever the force of the other is felt. It's a constant battle: craving the presence of the other, whose continued existence reaffirms and contextualizes your own, and wanting to fully differentiate yourself in a way that makes it clear that your interests and theirs are dissimilar, that you have the right to refuse obedience." Then she skipped two lines, and wrote, "In other news, my father is a douche." There's his baby girl. He asks Scully why she hasn't read it. "You're the only mother in history to refuse to read her daughter's diary when she handed it to you," he says "She's not my daughter," Scully says. "She would have been. But she isn't. I don't want to forget that." A little counterfactual never stopped him from feeling guilty about something, though. *** Maybe he should have died. When he let himself think about it, he knew how dangerous it was for Casey to travel back to Stark. She was an experimental subject, probably among the first human test subjects; the level of detail of the notes at the beginning of the journal about the technical settings and functionings of her device made that obvious. Not to mention that she couldn't have known what would happen if she changed the future, or what would happen when she went back. He's certain she didn't tell the lab that her plan was to travel back in time to save her father from aliens, so clearly she was off the reservation, and he doubted she knew the full range of risks she ran by doing so. She could have died at any point in the process: in the traveling, in the consortium, in the confinement cells at Stark because she was so *obviously* a traitor, or even on the floor of control: she didn't know she was going to be able to save him, or survive the process herself. He could have shot her. It wasn't impossible. And it wouldn't be so bad, life without him. It wouldn't have been unlivable. Scully would have recovered eventually: she could recover from anything, the past twenty years had taught him that. And look at who Sadie turned into. Without him around to spoil her, she turned into a hero herself. Maybe this Sadie never would turn into Casey; maybe she'd just end up a princess with overindulgent older parents and nothing to motivate her. Maybe the disaster is what they all needed. It would have been cathartic, if nothing else. She shouldn't have done it. Too much risk, too many chances for something to go really wrong, too little payoff. And he would have had a hero's death, triumphant, tragic, exactly what he deserved. He'd be a martyr, and that's what he's been going for all these years, so why not end it right? He should have died, there, in Scully's lap, buried under a mountain in Montana. *When I die, I want your hands on my eyes,* Neruda wrote; *I want what I love to continue to live/and you whom I love and sang above everything else/to continue to flourish, full-flowered.* That's what should have been. He knows it, he's always known it. Because this life he's living, this quiet life in the country with an infinite bank account and a brilliant partner and his amazing children: this wasn't Fox Mulder's life. He and Scully lie in bed and talk about parallel universes, about them colliding and flexing like techtonic plates, about what might happen when you cross between them. "Would it have been better if she hadn't?" he asked into the silence. "For the universe? For her?" She looked away from him and closed her eyes. "You can't ask me that, Mulder." That was at least a maybe. *** He opens his eyes to see her staring at him over the edge of the mattress. She smiles sneakily. "Sadie, where are you?" he hears Scully calling as she comes up the stairs. Then from the doorway, "No, Sadie, let Daddy sleep." "It's Fathers' Day," Sadie says, matter-of-factly. "That's right. So we should let him sleep in." "You can't be a father if you're sleeping," she says. "That's a very good point," he mumbles. His daughter breaks into a grin and climbs up into bed. He watches her little bare feet twist in the comforter, and thinks of how much bigger they are than they were when she was born. But they haven't changes shape at all; he doubts they ever will. Of course she's right. He shouldn't bother second-guessing her. Either of her.