Raise It Up by Amal Nahurriyeh Email: amalnahurriyeh@gmail.com Summary: This is a gift. It comes with a price. Fox Mulder, Oct 13, 1961-March 7, 2033. Genre: ANGST ANGST ANGST ANGST. AU. Rating: PG-13 (adult themes, references to sex, drugs, and rock and roll) Warnings: Not a spoiler if it's the summary: Character death. Angst Level: High. Universe: Mulder-containing. 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: Remember how I was writing stories about how Casey came back to the future? This is one of them. However, it's something bigger than that, as well. I should make exceptionally clear that I don't consider this Caseyverse Canon - BTTF 1 is the canon-est one. Insofar as there is canon for a project like this. Thanks to memories_child for the beta work. Vaguely a songfic for Rabbit Heart (Raise It Up), by Florence and the Machine. Title, epigraph, etc. Video here. Also owes a debt of tone, if not meaning, to Linda Blair Was Born Innocent, by the Mountain Goats. View it live on YouTube here. I'm happy to upload them if anyone wants them, There's a joke in here that only makes sense if you've seen this sculpture. This view of it in particular. Excessively Personal Author's Notes: I started this story in January, when I wanted to die. In May, when I was nearly finished it, my father dropped dead of a heart attack. My father was an amazing man. He was funny, he was the nicest person anybody's ever known, he was passionate and creative and so endlessly loving. He was the parent I try to be. And I am still the little girl who drew pictures of herself roaring with him in preschool. *** I start spinning slipping out of time Was that the wrong pill to take (raise it up) You made a deal, and now it seems you have to offer up But will it ever be enough -Rabbit Heart (Raise It Up), Florence and the Machine *** Mulder poured his coffee and considered his plans. Scully had headed out to run errands before stopping by the library bake sale to ensure things were going according to her standards; she had developed some sort of early-rising superpower once she got past 65, which he, unsurprisingly, lacked. There wasn't really anything to do around the house. A nice, calm morning, dew burning off the grass, not yet warm but going to get there, pleasant and sunny, most likely. He'd take his tablet out to the front porch, read the paper, wait for Scully to come home so he could bother her all day. With his coffee in one hand and the tablet under his arm, he pushed open the front door. Next time Will was down, he'd have to get him to do something about the sticking; Scully had made a valiant attempt, but she didn't trust herself with a chisel, and he sure as hell wasn't going to be that stupid. Anyway, that's what you have kids for, to do your bidding. He was distracted, thinking about the door, so it took him a moment to notice her standing there. "Sadie, hon, what are you--" And he stopped. Because, first, if Sadie were coming down from Connecticut, she'd have called, if not before she left, then when she picked up her car share at the train station in Richmond, or from the bakery in Columbia to ask what she should bring home. And second, because she doesn't own exactly that black coat, or wear her version of it so tightly belted against the faint spring chill; her hair is shorter, and she pins it back, doesn't let it flap around her face like this; because she's never looked quite so haunted in her life. He hasn't seen this girl in twenty years, but he still recognizes her. "Casey," he said, setting down his tablet on the table. "Nice to see you again." "Hi," she said. She watched him with a sort of exhausted desperation combined with what he couldn't help but think of as an uncharacteristic awkwardness. This meant something was up, he knew, but he couldn't quite put his finger on it, or, really, didn't want to. "You want to come in?" he asked, feeling like an idiot because he's pretty sure this was her house in every relevant universe, but she stood there like a stranger, not like a daughter. "Okay," she said, and climbed the creaky steps. In the living room, she paused to survey, and he was reminded of Scully at a crime scene, looking for what's out of place. She wandered over to the mantel, where photos were lined up; Will and Maria and the little monsters, Sadie at graduation, kid pictures of both of them, and one lone photo of him and Scully, back in the day, superheroes in black suits. She brushed her fingers along the edge of the frame of a picture of him and her together when she was five, her on his shoulders with an ice cream cone, him brushing rainbow jimmies out of his hair. Her other hand stayed in her pockets, as if not to leave more prints than necessary. He wondered what to ask her, but she cut him off by speaking first. "You die," she said matter of factly. He'd been guessing this was where they were going, but it was still a vague punch in the gut to hear it spoken. She touched the picture again gently, and then pulled her hand away. "Tomorrow. Sudden cardiac arrest, in your sleep." "Okay," he said. Not everyone got their daughter for a banshee, but he'd take it. She rubbed her forehead, and the gesture was so scarily Scully's that it was disconcerting. "The sooner we get you to a hospital, the better. I did some reading on the state of cardiac care in 2033, and they should be able to head it off pretty easily--" "No," he said. She looked up at him, clearly thrown off by this. "What do you mean, no?" He shrugged. "I mean, no. I'm dying, this time." He has rarely seen his daughter this shocked, but this expression is familiar. "You're kidding." "There's coffee," he said, and turned to walk into the kitchen. "You have to," she said, following him. "Look, it's totally preventable." He braced his hands for a moment on the counter to steady himself before reaching to get her a cup off the shelf. "We don't have any of that coconut whatever you like. Do you want regular cream, or is black fine?" "It's that most people don't have the warning. It won't even be hard." He poured the coffee, added the cream, and turned towards her. "Do you know how many times I've died?" She blinked. "I don't, because I've actually lost count. They even buried me once. Six months in a coffin, and I'm still here thirty years later, so what the hell does that tell you?" He could tell Scully had never told her that; probably with good reason, but she needed to know now. "Even if you save me now, what then? What about the heart attack I'll have six months from now? What if you save me just in time for me to die of prostate cancer or God fucking knows what? You gonna come back and fix it again? How many times can you do this before it breaks you, or the space-time continuum?" Behind her still face he could see the house of cards quiver and shift. If this were his Sadie, he could hold her, but he didn't know this one well enough to try. "You saved me back in Stark, and it was a gift. And I'm grateful. But gifts cost something. I'm 71 years old, Sadie. I've raised my children. I've saved the world. I've met my grandchildren. I've had forty years with your mother. It's time. Everybody dies." He held out the coffee. When she didn't take it, he walked over and placed it on the table, and sat next to her with his cup. She watched it warily, as if she were waiting to be poisoned, but eventually sat down at the table and picked it up. He watched her first tentative sip. "Did I get it right?" "Yeah," she said, not looking up. She turned the cup around in her hands, thinking, and then spoke. "I don't remember." "You said." "No, I mean--" She pushed back in the chair. "I woke up, and I knew things were going to be different. But I didn't realize--" She closed her eyes. "Everything's different, but I don't remember it. I remember the way it was the first time. And I could handle it, I think, if it weren't that--" "That I'm gone too." She looked up at the ceiling, anywhere but at him. "Everyone tells me we were close," she said, and that hurt, because of course they were close, but how should she know that. "There are all these pictures in my apartment I don't remember being in. There's a stack of letters in a box I don't remember reading. There's all this evidence, but there's no..." She made an exasperated gesture with her hand. "There's nothing. I don't know any of it." "How are the scientists taking it?" "They stopped trials," she said. "They think they did some sort of brain damage with the procedure. They don't know that I--you know. Changed things. So, mostly, they're writing prescriptions. Haldol is some good shit, I gotta say." "I remember," he said, and she gave him a funny look. He decided to let that one pass; let future Scully work it out. "How did you get them to let you back into the time machine?" She reached into her pocket, pulled out her gun, set it on the table. "I'm very convincing." Goddamn it: even in his absence she was as stupid as him. He wanted to ask her everything, but she was such a raw ball of pain at the moment. He reached across the table and placed his hand on hers, and felt her shudder. "When do you have to be back?" She swallowed. "I had them set it for twenty-four hours. I wasn't sure how long it would take." "Then stay," he said. "Get something to remember." She nodded, staring at his hand covering hers. . "And if I've told you once, I've told you a thousand times. No firearms at the table. Put it away, Cassandra." She smiled, just slightly, and moved the gun back to her pocket. "Drink your coffee," he said. She wrapped her fingers around the mug and took a sip. At the sound of the front door banging open, Casey jumped, her head headed for her gun, but she stilled when she heard Scully's voice. "Mulder, you left your tablet outside again. Anyway, I need a second pair of hands, I bought some of Bernadette's pies, they were never going to sell otherwise--" She stopped in the door to the kitchen. "Sadie?" But she realized her mistake as soon as he had. "Why are you..." He watched as she put it together silently: there is only one reason Casey could be here. She sank into a kitchen chair, facing away from them. "Scully," he said. "Stop," she said. "Give me a minute." He wouldn't normally be here to see this, not in this form, anyway, and he suddenly had no idea why people wanted to see their own funerals. Anybody who wasn't an asshole shouldn't want to see what your family is feeling right then. She wiped her cheeks with her hand. "We could--" "No," he said. "Yeah, I know." She closed her eyes and took a deep breath, waited to get herself together again. "Okay," she said, exhaling. She turned to them. "There's pie." "Well, I know what I'm having for my last meal," he said. She glanced over at Casey. "Are you staying?" "For a while," she said. "If it's OK." Scully tapped her fingers on the table. "So. What are we going to do today?" "I don't know," Mulder said. "I haven't really planned it out." They sat at the table in silence for a minute. Casey kept glancing back and forth between them; Mulder found it hard to keep his eyes off Scully. "We could get married," she said suddenly. Casey actually dropped the mug she was holding a hair's-breath above the table, and coffee splashed over the sides. Scully looked him in the eyes and nodded, ever so slightly. "Okay," he said. "When does the courthouse open?" "I'm calling Mother Andrea," she said, getting up to get the phone. "Seriously? Do we have to?" "My only condition." She braced herself against the wall with one hand as she called. While Scully talked her way past the rectory secretary, he went upstairs and looked through her jewelry box until he found their rings. He'd bought them, cash, at a dirty pawn shop fifty miles outside of Las Vegas when they'd been running; they needed to be able to slip in and out of identities, sometimes married, sometimes not, needed the full set of props. He'd wanted to buy her an engagement ring too, but they didn't have enough cash on hand, couldn't wait to transfer more, and the empty look she gave him when he'd said where he'd been had been enough to convince him not to go back for one. Once they surfaced again, he found his grandmother's opal ring in one of the storage boxes Maggie had kept in her basement, and he'd put it on Scully's desk on her birthday. She'd never worn it, but the box kept moving around her scarf-and-slip drawer, as if she took it out to look at it when no one was looking. As he stood there, weighing the old rings in his hand, he heard footsteps in the hall. Scully was still downstairs arguing on the phone, so it must be Casey. He followed the sound to find her in her room, sitting on the thin little bed, coat still on, feet spread but knees together. She didn't turn to see him leaning in the doorframe, but he could tell she was listening to his presence. "This is just wrong," she said, with a half gesture to indicate the room. "Really wrong." He didn't try to answer. "This is wronger than my apartment, even. It's just--" She huffed a little. "Half of this is absolutely right. But that just makes the other half worse." He tried to see the room as an investigator, not like someone who lived here: the dusty trophies from horse shows and language contests, the photos from high school still pinned up on the wall, the collection of stuffed animals slumped in a corner. It was an abandoned room, but it still gave off that odd sense of curation that intact childhood bedrooms had. He folded his arms. "When I went to university my mother emptied out my room. I came back for the winter holidays that year, and all my stuff was in boxes in the attic. She'd left the bed in there, but that was it." He shrugged. "I slept on the couch the whole trip. And I stopped coming home on holiday." "It's weird," she said, getting down on the floor to look at the bookshelves. "Hearing you talk about your family. Mom didn't really know anything about them." She *knows plenty,* he thought, but it occurred to him that not a lot of it was the stuff you told your kids. She pulled a copy of "The Dark is Rising" off the shelf and smiled. But as she opened it and saw the inscription, her smile faded. "Who gave them to you the other time?" he asked. "Librarian," she said, brushing her fingers over his handwriting. "Mom--" "Had never heard of them." She reshelved it and kept pawing through the bookshelf. "But she read me the Oz books, so there's that." She glanced up at him. He nodded. "I did a good chunk of the reading, but they were her idea. Girl books. Not my department." She nodded and stood, bumping into her desk. The photo of her at her first dressage competition tottered, and she reached to catch it. "Aw, Hippo," she said with a soft smile. It was more human emotion than he'd ever seen from this Casey. He took a shot. "You named your horse Hippo?" he asked, as incredulously as he could muster. She looked at the photo contentedly while she answered. "It's short for Hippolyta, but yeah. From the Latin, hippus meaning horse. I also considered Kitty, from equidae, but--" She glanced up, and caught his smile. "Fuck you," she said, but it was companionable, and her mouth stayed just slightly smiling as she set the picture down. "It's nice to see you happy," he said. She brushed her fingers over the desk and looked out the window. "Is she happy? I mean, generally?" It took him a moment to realize she meant herself, Sadie, the one from this timeline. "I think so," he said, cautiously. "She has her broody moments, which are probably inevitable given she's our daughter. But, yes. She's happy." "Good," she said. There was a certain hesitation, and then she asked, "Is Mom?" He felt like snapping at her *don't make me think about Scully tomorrow,* because how could he not? It wasn't like he didn't have some sympathy, but he was the one dying here. "I think so," he said. Her face twitched a little, and he couldn't tell if it was a good twitch or a bad one. "Mulder," Scully called from the bottom of the stairs. "I think we should head over now. She's not convinced yet, but I don't think I can budge her any farther over the phone." "Come on," he said, as gently as he could manage. "Your mother's going to make an honest man out of me. The world may actually end." "Can't have that," she said. He felt her pause as they left the room, but then she fell right into step behind him. Scully was waiting for them, holding his jacket. She'd put her hair up again, and her face showed no sign of tears, but there was a tremulousness to her as she helped him slip the jacket on, and he brushed his hand against her arm. She smiled, and he took the liberty to touch her cheek. Forty years, he thought, and we're still skittish about this. We are so fucked up. Casey cleared her throat. "We're going, we're going," Mulder said, and put his hand on Scully's back as they walked to the door. Mulder went to the driver's side of the car, but Scully stopped him. "Wait. Are you okay to drive?" She turned to Casey. "Is it...I mean..." "Um, no," she said, shifting a little. "He's, um. He's got the whole day. I think. He should be fine." "Can we go now?" Mulder tapped the roof of the car with his fingers. "We don't know how her arrival distorted the timeline," Scully said, opening her door. "Just--I don't know. If you don't feel well, pull over. I'd rather you not take us all with you." "Thanks, that's a pleasant thought." He opened his door and climbed in, and spent a good minute getting the seat out of Scully-position. Casey sat behind her mother. "What about rings? Do we need to stop somewhere?" He shook his head. "We're set in that department. How long have you been refusing to marry me, Scully?" "Are we counting all the times you didn't actually mean it?" "I always meant it." The gate stuck, and he hit the remote with his hand to get it to keep going. "Let me rephrase. Are we counting all the times you would have had an aneurism and died if I'd actually said yes?" He thought for a moment. "No, you can skip those." She smiled, and leaned against the window. "Six. Six times between 2001 and 2009. You stopped asking after Sadie was born." "Sounds about right." He decided to take the scenic route to Columbia, and found himself noticing things he usually didn't: the faint soft aura surrounding the trees about to leaf, the bright blue of the sky between the branches, how the little creeks they crossed were swollen with the last of the melted snow. This is my last day to see these things, he thought, and the thought wasn't as crushingly depressing as he had anticipated. This was a perfect death, he realized: short, relatively painless, and foretold. He was a lucky man. "You keep calling me Sadie," Casey said, out of nowhere. "Did she not change her name?" "No, you did," he said. "You granted me an exception. I kept forgetting." There was a pause. "You had a decade to prepare. How the hell did you forget?" "Oh, you know. Because I'm an asshole." Scully snorted. Columbia wasn't busy; just an ordinary day, nothing to see or do here. He parked around the corner from the church. "We shouldn't go in together," Mulder said. "You don't look exactly like yourself, but, still, we don't have a good excuse for someone who looks eerily like our daughter being here." "Does she know me? The priest?" "Not really," Scully said. "You don't attend, and you weren't confirmed here. That was--" "At St. Mary's. With my class." Scully watched her in the rear view mirror. "What's your confirmation name?" "Jeanne. D'Arc, obviously. I was feeling dramatic. And briefly Francophilic. What's hers?" "Teresa. Teresa of Avila, I think." She laughed. "Someone gave me an art history book." Mulder grinned. "What do you mean?" Scully asked. "No way I'm fielding that one," Casey said. She opened the door. "I'll be in the back. Meet you here afterwards." In the rectory, Mother Angela was visibly nervous. "It's not really procedure," she said. "You don't have a legal marriage license. I haven't done any of the mandatory pre-Cana counseling. Marriage isn't a sacrament to be entered into lightly." "We have two adult children," Mulder said. "I think we're pretty much stuck at this point." "I realize it's irregular," Scully said, "but we'd much rather have this done in the church than at the courthouse." Mulder could have said something at that, but the look she gave him suggested it would be unwise to do so. Mother Angela looked between the two of them for a moment. Nobody on the Scully-Mulder side of this conversation was budging, she realized. Also, she had a hard time forgetting precisely how influential Dana's presence had been in the months after her appointment to keeping the congregation going. Or whose signature had been on the check that paid for the new science labs at the elementary school. "All right," she said, with an air of quiet resignation. "Let me get my vestments on." Casey saw them enter out of the corner of her eye as she lit a candle in the back corner. She'd always wondered how these things worked when she was little; learning that you actually just dropped money in a box and pressed a button had been the beginning of the end for her as a Catholic, she was pretty sure. Once she was sure the priest was occupied with setting up for the ceremony, she settled herself into a pew in the back, far enough away that she'd look like any penitent. She knew this church; enough childhood Sundays deciding that reading the hymnal was more interesting than staying home alone, the occasional pancake breakfast she'd been corralled into volunteering for, the endless and really fucked up drama of Good Friday service. She ran her hands over the wood of the seat in front of her, and was struck with a vague memory of sitting in this pew, this exact pew, too young to see over the backs of the people in front of her, swinging her feet in boredom, watching the pearls on the bow of her Easter shoes track in the light. She remembered the hand catching her foot, to stop it. It wasn't her mother's. She didn't know how she was remembering, but maybe she was. The priest spoke quietly, so quietly that Casey couldn't hear her, so it was like watching a silent movie: her mother closing her eyes as the priest raised her hands, Mulder watching her with a sort of intensity she couldn't quite place. His hands shook, just slightly, as he slid the ring on her finger, and her mother laughed at him, the first sound breaking through the murmur of the church. He laughed too, and Casey felt an irrational wave of jealousy surge through her, the whisper that she remembered from deep in her childhood of why she, precisely, was never enough for her mother. It's silly and she knew it, to expect a woman who'd lost almost everything to be like this one, who'd won it all back, but it turned the screw in deeper to see her like this. In the room where she'd been waiting to be taken in to the time-travel machine, the first time, her mother had sat with her, silently, holding her hand. "I need to tell you something," she'd said suddenly, and Casey had been sure it was some detail about Stark, or some piece of information she might need. But it wasn't. "If you have to choose." Mama swallowed. "I want you back. You need to come back. Do you understand?" And she had blinked and agreed, and then Avner had come to take her in to the machine. And that had been what she'd been thinking, as they'd tied her into the tank: she'd been trying to decide whether or not her mother had been lying. She'd been distracted; they were kissing now, and everybody was smiling. Their elation poured across the room, that slightly giddy feeling of breaking a rule. *I did this,* she thought: *I made this happen, even if I can't remember a minute of it. Twice now, actually.* She stood while the priest was distracted with handshakes and congratulations. In the vestibule, she stopped to cross herself with the holy water; on the steps, she lit a cigarette, and headed to the car to wait. Scully held Mulder's hand as they walked back to the car, and he wondered what it would have been like if he'd dragged her to the courthouse while she was still too anemic and sleep-deprived from William's birth to object too heavily, if they'd have been marginally less fucked up the past thirty years. Probably not; they were pretty good at being dysfunctional. Casey was skulking by the car. He wondered whether his Sadie looked like this sometimes, if she hung around in a trenchcoat with a cigarette looking like James Bond. Maybe this one was more his daughter than the other. "You should really quit, you know," he said. "That stuff'll kill you." She flicked the butt away and hummed the Wedding March desultorily. "How did you get such a terrible attitude?" He unlocked the car and went to open Scully's door for her. "Oh, you know. I grew up in a broken home," she said. "Yeah, but the other one's got it too." Casey shrugged. "I can't explain the mysteries of the multiverse." She climbed into the car. They stopped at the barbecue place to pick up a massive order of ribs, and, for Casey, a side of macaroni and cheese, and another of collards. ("Make sure I can't actually see the dead pig in them," she said to the woman behind the counter, who suppressed a smile.) On the drive home, he fiddled with the radio until he found a station playing something tolerable. Scully reached out to change it, and he put his hand over it protectively. "You get to pick from tomorrow on. My turn." She dropped her hands down to her lap, and stared at them. After a moment she looked up and brushed her hair out of her face. "Don't make me cry. It's my wedding day." He took her beringed hand and drove with the other. "You could have married me years ago, you know." She pressed her fingers against his, and looked out the window. "No. I couldn't have." At home, they ate the barbecue on the porch. Casey sat on the steps, her back to one of the poles, and pointedly didn't watch them except when she thought they wouldn't notice. Mulder watched Scully lick barbecue sauce off her fingers, and thought that, possibly, he was dying now because his life was absolutely perfect, and fate was an asshole. It did seem to be the trend. "So, Mulder," Scully said, dropping a bone into the bag between their feet. "What's next on the agenda?" "I've been contemplating," he said, running a piece of cornbread through the sauce. "I was thinking about finding where the home movies are." "You took home movies?" Casey said from her perch on the steps. "Really? And you want to watch them?" "At least until the horror marathon comes on TV this evening," he said. "You are so weird," she said approvingly, and drank the liquor from the bottom of the greens container. Scully thought she knew where the home movies were, and ordered Casey to go dig them out of the closet. "I'm too short, and you're dying," she said firmly to Mulder when he objected, and he couldn't precisely argue with that. She rewired the television to talk to the DVD player and then settled in on the couch, leaning against him. He stroked her ring finger. "Do you think you'll keep wearing it?" She held it up and considered it. "I don't know. I might switch to the opal. This one doesn't have the best karma attached." She sighed, and let her hand drop. "Do you want to be buried in yours?" He hadn't even thought about it. "Ask the kids first. If either of them want it, they can have it. But if not, yeah. Yeah, I do." She was silent as if in anticipation, and he waited for her. "The last time, I buried you with my father's wedding ring. Your fingers were so swollen, I couldn't get it over your knuckles, so I put it in your suit pocket. They must have lost it in the hospital, when they cut the suit off to intubate you." He reached down to touch her face. She looked up at him, eyes a little bright with tears she was trying not to shed. He leaned down and kissed her softly, then less softly. He'd say he wouldn't want to put her through this, but, really, could he handle being the one on the other side of this? She'd be better at it, in the end. When she finally pulled away and buried her head in his chest again, he became aware of Casey standing by the stairs with the box of DVDs under her arm. "I could go," she said quietly. "I don't need to stay." "No," he said, stroking Scully's arm instinctually. "Give it a couple more hours. Besides, I think I want to mortally embarrass you with the contents of that box." She looked down at it suspiciously. "Really, I could go." "Sit your punk ass down, daughter, and pass the box over." He stomped on the floor in front of him to indicate where she should sit. They picked their way through the box, starting with the slightly disjointed videos he'd taken of her as an infant, which consisted mostly of her chewing on things while he provided narration. "I was trapped in the house all day with someone who was nonverbal. I had to do *something,*" he said, in response to Scully and Casey's laughter. There were several tapes of her at three and four explaining elaborate edifices she had built with Legos, indicating where the crocodile moats were and where the horses were going to stay. A slightly hilarious video that Sadie had taken of Will, on his first trip to Othma; Mulder noticed Casey leaning in slightly, as if trying to assemble this together. (Will, he realized: there's no Will in the other universe, which means she's got a brother she only remembers as an eleven-year-old who she armed.) A couple of her and the damn horse, one that consisted of her interviewing Scully about whatever occurred to her while Scully, valiantly, attempted to continue responding to her work email. "You work too much," Sadie said petulantly after six minutes of this. Scully turned the eyebrow on her, and Sadie huffed, "Fine," and turned off the camera. "Oh my God," said Casey. "I was a really obnoxious kid." "Pretty much," Scully said, and patted her shoulder. "It's our fault. We encouraged you." Eventually Casey brought out the pies from the bake sale, set them out on the coffee table, and passed out forks. After a round of sampling and passing, Mulder settled down with the sweet potato, Scully with the cherry, and Casey with the coconut cream. After wincing through a fairly impressive father-daughter air guitar performance of Matthew Sweet's *Girlfriend,* circa 2018, Casey also managed to find a dusty bottle of tequila in the back of a kitchen cabinet. "How do you know where the liquor is?" Mulder asked suspiciously. She snorted. "Next you'll want me to tell you where I hid my weed. Honestly." (Two shots later, after she nearly started crying watching herself have a snowball fight with Will the first winter he lived in Philadelphia, he did ask her. "Mom had a box of your shit in the attic that she never went through." "You're welcome.") They watched her hit a homerun for her softball team; they watched her and Will play in the leaves in the backyard; they watched every tape in that box, watched Scully's hair turn gray and Sadie's turn purple, red, blue, orange, watched Will get married and Sadie win awards and the earth turn, and turn, and turn. They ate pie. When the trip down memory lane had run out of territory, Casey stayed in her spot on the floor, even when Scully got up to go throw the pie pans away. She stared blankly across the living room, and Mulder wasn't sure what she was seeing. "How can you do this?" she asked. "Sit there and know you're going to die, and not do a damn thing about it? I mean--isn't there enough to keep you here? Are you, like, ontologically bored or some shit?" He tried to find an answer for her. "I won't trot out any of those bullshit 'death is the next adventure' platitudes, because I respect you more than that." "Thank you," she said, making a very Scully-like face. "But there are things worth dying for, and then there are things that aren't. I've been willing to die for your mother, for you kids, for some sort of epic quest to save everything in a psychologically misguided but, on balance, probably beneficial kind of way. I thought that was worth it. And now..." He sighed. "Now I'm willing to die for the coherence of the universe. And I understand that you're willing to die to stop me doing that, but that's an incredibly stupid idea, and you really need to get over it." She's looking at her knees now. "Was it stupid the last time?" He stood up and walked over to the mantle, pulled down the picture of the four of them at Will's wedding, and put it in her hands. "You tell me." Then he left her, holding the picture in her hands, and went to find Scully. Casey stared at her own unrecognizable face for a long time. And then she knew, with a strange sort of clarity, that it was time to go. Maybe she was picking this up from the brainwaves from the kitchen--probably they wanted her gone, anyway. She could imagine that they both have their own shit to work out right now, and didn't need to be babysitting their overly dramatic alternate-universe daughter. But she also needed to get away, if she was going to let this happen, if she was going to listen to Mulder. Listen to her father, she told herself. She was Sadie, and she needed to figure out how to act like it. When Mulder and Scully emerged from the kitchen, he was surprised to see Casey tying her coat back around herself. "I'm gonna get out of here," she said. "You can stay," Mulder said. "As long as you need to." "Aren't you supposed to be pushing me out of the nest or something?" She shuffled her hands into her pockets and looked down. "No. If this is going to go down the way you want it to, then I have to be gone." He understood that. He couldn't watch people die very well, either. "Nice of you to drop by." "Yeah. Glad to be the bearer of terrible news," she said, eyes still on the floor. This was bullshit, he realized; he hadn't touched her yet, because he'd been trying not to scare her, but this was the closest he was going to get to being able to hold his daughter one last time, so he was going to take the shot. He put his arms around her, and acted as if she weren't stiff as a board and faintly quivering with excess everything. After a moment, she relaxed fractionally. "It'll be okay," he said, running a hand over her hair. "So you say." "And I'm right." He pulled away from her so he could see her face. "I was right when I said aliens were coming to kill us all. I was right when I said there were no monsters under your bed. I was right when I said that Janice Russell breaking up with you two weeks before prom was not, in fact, the end of the world. And I'm right about this." She closed her eyes, and he could tell she was trying to see if she knew how to be a person who listened to her father about things like this. When she opened them again, the look she gave him was a set as anything her mother ever had. "OK," she said. "Yeah." She stepped back, looking down at the floor, and seemed as if she were looking for an escape route. Scully stepped over and touched her on the shoulder. "Am I there? When you come back?" Casey's flinch seemed to indicate she had never considered it possible that her mother wouldn't be there. "Yeah." "OK," Scully said, and pulled her into her arms for a hug. "I'll see you when you wake up," she whispered into her ear. Casey nodded. "OK, Mama." She leaned back, and seemed to be set now. She walked over to the door, and they followed her. She sighed as she opened it. "Have a good night, I guess." "We'll try," Mulder said, and slipped his arm around Scully. She eyed them critically. "Don't do anything I wouldn't do." "I doubt that's difficult." "Yeah." She smiled at them, and then turned and walked down the stairs, head just slightly bowed, hands in the pockets of her coat. They stood at the screen door and watched her go. Casey paced through the field between the house and the tree line. Probably she should get somewhere with cover; not a good idea to suddenly disappear in the middle of a field. She could hear the front door of the house close behind her, knew they had left if only by their echoes. This was right, she told herself, even if it was fucked. Past the first few trees, and she turned around and surveyed. Yeah, this was right. She pulled the small silver device that she'd been fingering since she'd left the house out of her pocket, and turned it over in her hands. Slowly, she took a breath, and then winked out of existence for the fourth time in the last two weeks. *** "Well," he said, catching his breath. "At least that didn't kill me." "I'm glad," she said, her hair splayed across the pillows. "Something like that would have put me off sex for life." He glared over at her. "Scully, you are 69 years old. Who the hell else are you going to have sex with?" "I won't bore you with the list," she said. "Put some pants on. I'm not explaining that to the coroner." He grumbled as he dug around in the sheets. "You stay naked, though." She watched him as he lay back down, now decent. "I don't want to sleep," she whispered, voice shaking just a little. "Me neither," he whispered back. "But I don't think I want to be awake for this." She slid across the space between them, and he wrapped his arms around her. She was trying not to cry; he had decided it was a waste of energy to try to stop. "I'm going to miss you. So much." "You'll be okay." "Not the point." He stroked his thumbs across her face, wondering if it would do any good to try to memorize it. "So. On the off chance I'm wrong about the whole God thing, how fucked am I?" She shrugged. "Just be sorry. It goes a long way." "I'm sorry." He smiled. "There. That wasn't so hard." "Well, you've got practice." She moved closer, pressed her forehead against his. "I love you." "I love you." Her skin was warm and soft, and he focused on it. "Go to sleep. You'll have a lot to do tomorrow." *** When she woke up, the arm she was curled against was cool to the touch. She lay there for a long time before she reached for the phone. *** Casey wakes up in handcuffs. Again. The hand holding hers is wearing a wedding ring. This time, she lets herself cry.