George Hale (13/17)
by invisiblefriends

Feedback: bettyteddyandray@gmail.com
Rating: PG-13
Summary: After IWTB, life goes on.


Chapter 13

"What do you think of George Hale"

Scully is on leave for this week - another arrangement Mulder
made by convincing Scully that taking a week's leave would make
their moving details easier. She agreed. Now, she is driving her
mother to the hospital to show her where she works; the desk and
office she calls her own. A door without Mulder's name; a desk
without his nameplate. They are in her world now.

Scully needs to pad conversations with safe-talk. No topic is safer
than George Hale. She can't get over how many old habits of being
a Mother's Daughter have returned. Maggie has caught her
daughter up on the nieces and nephews, the brothers, the sisters in
law, even the neighbours. With those safe ones out of the way,
though, she worries that the way is clear, open to dive into the
trickier discussions.

"I was a little nervous when I saw him in the truck at the airport,
though." Maggie Scully says. "He kept bouncing as if he was going
to burst through the door and attack."

"With his slobber maybe. He's only growled once, when he thought
I was in danger. And he's crazy about Mulder."

An opening as good as any. Mrs. Scully waits the appropriate three
seconds and says, "I could say the same about you. You both seem
good together. Not as I had imagined."

"How did you imagine us?"

"To be honest, I didn't know how long you would last together
outside of your lives in DC."

"Neither did I." Scully laughs nervously. "He's a hard man to live
with sometimes. He is a harder man to live without."

Scully imagines this is the moment where her mother pauses and
asks gently. *"Was he worth it? Was it worth what you did to
your family to be with this man?'.* She has composed entire
conversations she expects to hear pop out of her mother's mouth at
any, sudden second, with no warning.

"I was surprised when Fox told me you both bought the house. I
thought you were just renting until-"

*'Until we decide if we are going to go the distance or go our
separate ways,"* she understates and gratefully steers the car into
the hospital parking lot. "We want to be together - I guess we need
to see if we can do it in the real world."

Inside the hospital, Scully introduces her mother to five people.
Four of them make smart-ass comments about finally meeting
someone in Scully's life. They are part of the group who don't
believe there is a partner parked at home. The fifth person to meet
Mrs. Scully is Curt Fraser. He has heard Dana is in the hospital
showing her mother around and this is too good to pass up for the
nosiest man in the district.

"Dana," he sings from the doorway of her office. Scully and her
mother turn around, startled even though Scully should be used to
these arrivals by now.

"Curt, you're not usually this slow on your reaction time."

"I've been indisposed," he says, bi-passing Scully and heading right
for her mother. "Good to meet you, Mrs. Scully. I'm Curt Fraser."

"He's the one I told you about," Dana reminds her.

It takes Mrs. Scully a second. "*You're* George Hale's playmate."

Curt turns to Scully, beaming. "You gave me a title?"

She shrugs. "Mulder's idea."

"He's a great dog, isn't he," Curt gushes back to the guest. "We're
going to get one." Quickly, he turns back to Scully. "Which doesn't
mean I don't want to look after Georgie. This time, he'll have an
animal playmate instead of my kids."

She is slightly embarrassed by Curt's gushing and oddly proud at
the same time. She has made friends. Maybe that is the difference.
Strangers can make asses of themselves in front of mothers all they
want and manage to say nothing. Friends, they tell your mother how
much they love your dog and don't leave out a single, valentine
adjective. And since Scully has joined the *Love-Me-Love My
Dog* club, these things are now important.

"Can you do me a favour, Mulder?"

Scully's soft voice floats across the bedroom to his ears. Mulder,
with the covers up to his chin, is deep in the world of the *Mars,
the Planet I Call Home.* He manages a vague, "Mmmm?"
without lifting his head.

"Use these while my mother is here, please." Scully sends a pair of
pajama pants through the air. They land on his face.

There was a close encounter in the middle of the night before when
Mulder sleepily wandered into the bathroom moments after Mrs.
Scully had just left. Only Scully seemed to notice the near miss.

Mulder pulls the bottoms off his face and digs for his glasses that
are buried in the fabric. "You've got to read this book, Scully. You
can't believe the questions it asks."

She turns off the main light and climbs into bed. "Did you hear me,
Mulder?"

"Why did you throw these at me?"

"Because..." She lowers her voice with a quick look towards the
wall. "My mother doesn't need to see you naked."

"How do you know?"

She yanks the pants from his hand and stuffs them in his face.
"Again, please keep them on."

"Fine." He ducks under the covers and begins to put them on.

He can hear Scully sigh impatiently on the other side of the sheets.
But in a moment, she has slipped under the sheets next to him and
creating an instant tent

Mulder turns on his side and rests his head on his hand. There is a
romantic soft glow of the light coming through the tent of linen. He
sticks a finger in Scully's ear to get a smile. He gets the smile and a
giggle as well. Hiding beneath the sheets brings out the juvenile side
in both of them. They have had a lot of practice since George Hale
entered their lives and they discovered the Linen Tent of Silence.

"I think my mother is seeing someone," Scully says.

Mulder gasps dramatically. "Anyone we know?"

Scully leans over and whispers, "Skinner."

This time the drama is real. "Are you *kidding?*" he whispers
back hoarsely.

"She keeps referring to him as Walter. Or Walt. She said something
about him being at a restaurant."

"Your mother and *Skinner?*"

"I know."

"Isn't that kind of ... weird?"

Scully can only nod. Weird is only one way of putting it. Skinner is
her boss. Her saviour. Her friend.

"If they got serious, that would make him your... ."

"Mulder, don't say it."

They are interrupted by a sneeze from the guest room.

Mulder jumps. "These walls are thin. There goes my social life" He
snuggles closer to Scully. "Skinner could be your... step-father."

"Watch it...."

"I wonder if it's true. It does make sense. They're relatively close in
age."

"He's a good man."

"She's a good woman."

"I wonder if Bill knows."

Mulder puts his hand over her mouth. "That's going too far. Your
brother hates FBI men."

"No, not all of them." Scully removes his hand and kisses the palm.
"Just you."

"Guess it would be okay," Mulder muses. "Bill could have someone
to sit him down and explain the facts of life to him."

"Mulder...."

"You'd have someone to walk you down the aisle." Mulder realizes
what he has just said. "Scully, I'm sorry. That was stupid."

She has that look on her face, the one that tells Mulder that
whichever answer he gives, it will be wrong. "What was?"

"Well... walking you down the aisle. I didn't intend to refer to
Skinner or anyone ever taking the place of your father."

But this isn't the reason for the expression. Something else has
snuck into her mind. "Do you ever think about it?"

Another no-win question. "Think about ..."

"Getting married."

"To *you?*"

"Yes, Mulder." She flings the covers off of their heads and the tent
is gone. Playtime is over but she knows she has his attention. When
Mulder listens, he listens without distraction. "Have you ever
thought about you and I getting married?"

"Yes. Sometimes. But I'm never sure if it's because it's expected by
tradition or if it's something you want or if it's something I want.
Given my lifestyle, my personality, I have never really considered it
a possibility. I realize that living together and buying the house is a
step in that direction. Beyond that, I haven't come to any
conclusions."

Shit. He's given this more thought that she realized. Irritatingly,
typical Mulder.

"Why don't we talk about it?"

"I'm never sure if... not sure if you wanted to discuss it."

"You could ask."

His eyes widen slightly. "Ask you to marry me?"

"Keep your voice down. No, I meant ask me if I want to talk about
it."

"You could just as well as me if I want to talk about it."

She gives up. "I know. I just think ... with the move, the career
changes - with all of that, there are certain ... expectations. I mean
look at Curt's question about whose name George Hale was under.
We need to think of these things sometimes."

"He is under your name, what's the big deal?"

"The big deal is that it didn't occur to either of us that there was
another name in this .... family - household - whatever you want to
call it. Legally, he isn't even shared property. He's my property."

"And ...." He is waiting for the obvious - or Scully - to hit him but
nothing is happening

"We don't share as much as we should."

"Share...."

"Property - a dog - names."

"You want to take my name?"

Now, she wants to give up. "No, I don't mean - Curt assumed the
dog could have been under mine your name - maybe we need to
come to expect this too."

"The new house is in both our names."

She takes in and lets out a long breath before deciding to speak
again. "Are you really not getting this Mulder?"

"I know names - identities are important. They define who we are,
but they shouldn't define who we are not."

"You mean leaving behind the safety of our last names and baring
our souls under our real identities."

"We don't care what anybody else thinks or wants to know or
would like to share. That's one fact which I do know about both of
us."

"You know, there are times I just want to fit in with the rest of the
world."

He looks at her strangely. "You really want to be one of the crowd,
Scully?"

"Sometimes."

Words he never wants to hear. He would die of loneliness if he
ever truly became one of the crowd

"Scully - look - you know how I feel about you - us. If getting
married is something you want then I'll do it. I'm in; sign me up. But
not because you think that we owe them explanations about our
relationship that are nobody's business but ours."

"I didn't say that's what I thought. Never mind, Mulder. I simply
wanted to know if you had thought about it and you have so, that's
that."

Mulder settles against the pillow, trying to decide if he should
continue this conversation or live peacefully. "Would you be
bringing this up if your mother wasn't staying with us?"

Her voice drops dangerously low. "This has *nothing* to do with
my mother."

"You really believe that? I know she wouldn't all-out ask if and or
*when* we're getting married but she's here, helping you move
from one world to another where, as you say, certain conventions
are observed, such as moving into a house you are buying with a
man who is no longer your work partner but now your life partner.
Of course it's going to cross both of your minds sooner or later."

*It's what women do,* he thinks but at least is smart enough not
to say.

"Has it occurred to you while you're accusing me of thinking what
other people think - that *you* will go to the ends of the earth
*not* to do something that many other people have done - like get
married?" Scully doesn't pause for more than a second. "Never
mind, I don't want to carry on with this discussion with my mother
in the next room."

"Why, so she doesn't hear us argue?"

"No, so she doesn't have to hear you tell me how much I care
about what people think. Or hear you and I discussing which one of
us thinks about marriage more. "

Scully leans over on her side and turns out the light. This is the end
of the conversation and the beginning of a wave of awkward silence
that will flow into the next day.

"Scully," he says quietly, speaking to the back of her shoulders. He
raises his hand to touch her hair but stops. "I always think we're
lucky we make it from one day to the next, then one week to the
next; even one year to the next. I've never been sure if getting marriage is
something you want. I'm not even sure if it's something I want.
Marriages - at least the ones I have known intimately - fail."

He waits for a sign that he knows isn't going to come. Accusing
Scully of going with the crowd on *anything* is crossing the line.
She spent seven years working with the one person whose
reputation could have ruined hers at any time, for any reason. But
she stayed with him, even when people came up with delightful new
nicknames behind her back, on occasion to her face. Even early on - 
when she had enough of the name calling but not enough of a
history with this man yet - she stayed with him because she believed
in him and, eventually, because she fell in love with him. Sticks and
Stones did break bones, but she never let the names hurt her -
unless they were directed at him. Then, it hurt.


"Fox was out early this morning."

Scully and her mother are out in the shed, going through anything
that needs to be kept or tossed. There are. Her mother sits perched
on an overturned milk crate in the shed, going through cardboard
boxes and recycling boxes of medical journals, newspaper articles,
more paper than she has seen in a while. Today, Scully had
suggested earlier, was the day to clean out the shed.

"Mmmm." Scully says and tries not to catch her mother's eye. She
is working on an overfilled recycling bin she and Mulder had filled
over the year with the ambitious plan of hauling it to the nearest
recycling centre one day. Now, she sits separating the bottles from
the cans from the papers from the garbage from the things she can't
identify.

Her mother makes a sudden noise, the kind you make if you open a
drawer and see a dead animal.

Scully looks up.

Her mother has opened Mulder's box, the one that came to his
door, and landed in this shed soon after.

She tries to lean forward and grab the folder "Mom, no, don't look
at -"

But it's too late. Her mother has opened only one file and seen too
much to forget. "You worked on these kinds of cases?"

The photographs are horrific. The look on her mother's face is
worse.

"No, mom" Scully pulls the entire folder from her mother's hands.
"No - this is from something he must have done before I
transferred."

"But you ... did you work on these kinds?"

*I'll Kill Him* is clearly written across every tense muscle on her
face. "Yes. Not all of them were this bad, Mom. I'm sorry you had
to see that -" She leans over and drags the box away from her
mother's feet.

"Well, the good news is, I won't need lunch today."

"I'm so sorry, I can't believe he left this here."

"Go easy on him, there might be a reason why he - George Hale,
what are you doing?"

Flurries have started falling outside and the wind has sent small
gusts of them into the barn. George Hale is prancing up and down,
trying to catch one.

"He thinks its food," Scully explains and picks up Mulder's box.
One solid heave and she sends it into the corner with enough force
that it splits open. The contents all slide to the ground, one file over
another; one nasty memory after another "If he thinks we're going
back to that," she mutters.

"Ask him," her mother suggests simply. "If you ever speak to him
again."

So her mother has spotted the chill in the air.

"You noticed?"

"A little."

"We're fine," Scully assures her. "Mom...do you mind me asking
how much you can hear from next room?"

"Not too much. I can hear voices but by the time they filter through
the wall, they just sound like mumbles."

Pissed off mumbles.

Scully finds an unopened box and tries for a fresh start in the
conversation. "We're going to make one of the rooms a guest room
in the new house. You'll come to visit, won't you?"

"More than you think."

Scully stops unwrapping an old magazine from its wrapper.

"I've decided to move back into the house once the current tenant's
lease is up next month."

Scully sends the magazine flying as she darts over the crap by her
feet to hug her mother. "That's the best news - I'm so happy."

"I'm glad. I was worried you or Fox might think I was crowding
you."

"You could never crowd us. Besides, old Fox needs all the allies he
can get these days. He can start by helping you move back in."

Mrs. Scully takes a look over at George Hale and his progress with
the snow flakes. He has given up and is now trying to dig his way
through a very old bale of hay.

"Mom?"

She turns back to her daughter. "Nothing. Fox doesn't have to do
anything. Most of my furniture is still in the house. As for the rest of
it, I'll see if ... maybe Mr. Sk - Walter could lend a hand. "

There's hesitancy in her mother's voice that her children have
learned to pick out of a roaring crowd. The way she doesn't look at
her daughter directly in the eye is a new twist; it hides the
embarrassment of being caught at something that's neither terrible
but might not be welcome either.

Scully pauses for courage and goes for the gold. "Are you and Ski - 
Walter ..."

"Yes."

"Oh." Scully sits back and buys some time by pulling her gloves up
higher than they are meant to go. "That's ....great." How polite she
can get is still up in the air. She has dealt with tragedy, changes,
near-death experiences, alien beings ... but not this. Not her mother
dating a man who is Scully's former boss and mentor and savior.
But her mother dating someone who is not her husband.

"Is it?"

"Yes. Yeah - I think it's great. He's a wonderful man."

"Your brothers were a little taken a-back."

"The *boys* know?" She is used to being the one in the know. Her
brothers are always on the trickle-down end of the information
food chain.

"Yes. Why wouldn't they?"

There is something in her mother's words that Scully instantly
translates to *'Because you were not here to tell,'*

"I know," Scully says. "Of course they would. So you and AD
Skinner..."

"Walt," she corrects patiently. "Dana, between you, Fox and Walt
and your FBI Last Name Only codes, sometimes I'm almost about
to call you Scully. Does Fox even remember your first name?"

Scully isn't fooled. She knows a dodge from an awkward topic
when she hears one because she is the queen of changing the
subject. "How long have you two been.... dating?

"A few months - well, six."

A dry, forced smile tiptoes across Scully's face. "Wow. Well -
that's good. I'm - I'm happy for you, Mom. I am."

"Thank you," Mrs. Scully says, grateful this secret is now out. Of
the three children, she worries about Dana's reaction the most - not
because the man in question is Dana's friend; because he is not her
father.


Mulder's truck pulls up next to the house at three o'clock that
afternoon. He has had a bad, long, tiring day. When he drove over
to the new house to see how the floors were coming, he discovered
that the contractor has used the wrong kind of wood. Again.
Mulder lit into him about *How Hard Is It to Read in Bold Face
Type.* He wasn't proud of himself when he drove away but hell,
how hard was it to read a simple shade of wood?

"Hey Scully," he calls wearily. He is tired and he feels like crap.

Scully is sitting at the table, trying to make sense of a pile of forms
she packed away two years ago. She has been staring through the
papers all afternoon, thinking about her life and her mother and
futures and pasts and why one follows you with constant reminders
of failures but the other doesn't give you a clue about future
successes.

"Don't slam the -"

The door slams shut behind Mulder before he can grab it.

"....door."

"Sorry." He kicks his boots off. One lands against a stack of boxes
by the stairs. The other just misses Scully's leg.

"Damnit, Mulder," she snaps and flings the boot back towards the
doorway.

He steps over it and wanders into the room. "Where's your mom?"

"Out for a walk."

"George Hale?"

"With her."

She waits for a crack about empty houses and consenting adults.
Instead, he walks past her and disappears into the bedroom,
mumbling something about a nap.

Scully picks up one of the files they found this morning and follows
him into their room like the lion who has been waiting all afternoon
for the prey to wander into the trap without a clue of the danger he
is in.

"What the hell is this, Mulder."

He is sitting on his side of the bed, leaning forward with his arms
across his lap, and he is staring out the window. "What's what?"

She tosses the file on the bed. "I found this in the shed in a box of
other files. Actually, my *mother* found them."

He glances over his shoulder and sees the file. The damn box.

"Why are you keeping these?" Scully asks.

"I'm not. I meant to throw them out."

"Mulder?"

He turns around sharply. "You honestly think I want to keep
these?"

"They why do you still have them?"

"Because it arrived a few minutes before I needed to pick up your
mother up at the airport and I didn`t have time to go through and
see what was it in. Is that okay, Scully? I don't need to keep every
photo or report from these cases because I'll never get them out of
my memory for as long as I live."

She would dearly love to apologize to him but her rage is just too
strong to let that through. Poor Mulder doesn`t deserve this. He
rarely does when she gets this way; too ahead of herself and too
wound up to remember what she is actually upset about.

"Please throw them out before we move." She waits until she sees
the back of his head nod. "Fine." She snatches the file in question
and leaves the room and wonders when she learned how to turn
into such a bitch.