Visitor (8/13)
by leiascully

Email: leiascully@gmail.com
Distribution: Ask, please

Rating: T for non-explicit sexual situations and some swearing
Categories: SRA
Keywords: Mulder/Scully romance
Spoilers: XF Revival speculation (spoilers through series and 
IWTB)

Summary: Mulder tries to put his life back together after Scully 
leaves him.  

Disclaimer: The X-Files and all related characters are the 
property of Chris Carter, 1013 Productions, and Fox Studios. No 
profit is made from this and no infringement is intended.

Author's Notes:  I had to get all of my feelings out somehow.  
Stories from all fandoms are archived at 
http://archiveofourown.org/users/leiascully.

+ + + + 

8 - Committee

The first thing he wants to do is call her. Too many years of 
instinct at work, and he's already got his phone in his hand.  But 
better to see her, he thinks.  They have not solved anything 
between them, or righted the wrongs they have done each 
other.  The air is clear enough that he can see she needs time and 
space.  In a way, she fears him, and he doesn't blame her: he 
knows his dark gravity of his past has warped her life.  Their 
orbit is steady now.  As long as he can see the light in her eyes 
on a dark night, he will endure.  

Still strung out on endorphins, still thinking about the purity 
and misery of life in a hundred anonymous hotel rooms, he jots 
down a few words on a scrap of paper:

In the car we were
together:
our love our fear our 
hearts beating
like weary wings, our flight
swift, arrowing away
from the life we had known
On the road we were only
ourselves
only
with each other

They come out in fragments and he leaves them that way.  His sweat 
drips onto the paper; the ink blurs like clouds.  He hasn't 
written poetry in decades.  Since England, possibly; he's sure he 
tried to impress Phoebe with a line or two of verse, and probably 
failed, and got laid anyway.  He will probably never show this to 
Scully, like the baby clothes he bought for William and tucked 
away into a box marked "Mulder - papers - college", but at least 
he has said it in some way.     

He spends the whole restless day cleaning the house.  It's tidier 
than it's ever been, like his apartment after the sudden 
mysterious acquisition of the waterbed.  It's a place that he 
thinks Scully could see herself in again, could make herself a 
space in.  He thinks of their old apartments and wonders how they 
managed for so long to keep living in the shelters they had built 
for themselves over the stains of old blood and the stench of 
fear.  This place could be a home.  He can see, with everything 
put away, the way he was crowding her out.  He put up walls of 
books and papers between them.  He built himself a nest like 
Tooms.  With his notes confined to his study, the house is full of 
sunlight.  Dust motes sparkle in the air like snowflakes as he 
vacuums.  He opens the windows and lets the breeze waft in.

He sleeps well, and that surprises him, but the morning seems so 
full of possibility.  The bed feels empty without her, but it's an 
anticipatory lack, not a hollow.  He pours himself coffee and 
makes an English muffin before getting into the shower.  The 
crossword puzzle seems easy.  It feels like an omen.

The plastic crinkles as he peels the dry cleaner's bag away from 
his suit.  It's newer, the wool still flawless when he brushes his 
palm over it.  His old suits don't look right, even though they've 
been altered.  There are almost invisible lines that show how he's 
changed, which seems like too apt a metaphor.  The tailor assured 
him they'll fade as he wears the suits again, but he still sees 
the scars where the scissors snipped.  Those suits were his armor 
and shield and he knows every seam.  The new suit has no 
history.  He can be a new man in this suit.  

He buttons his shirt and his pants, kicking the crease of his hems 
over his shined shoes.  He shrugs into the new jacket and looks 
into the mirror.  Fox Mulder looks back at him, remade. Age has 
made him broader here and there, and the weights he lifted trying 
to sweat Scully out of his blood have thickened his arms.  His new 
shirts are cut slimmer than his old ones.  They show the shape of 
his body more, but he doesn't mind.  He has a heft now that he 
never had in his thirties, and it gives him some kind of 
authority.  He hasn't had his ass kicked in a long time.

He still drives the route downtown like an expert, though he's 
only made the trip from the new place a few times.  He takes his 
visitor badge with good grace this time, moderately assured of 
having his own credentials again one day.  He isn't making some 
kind of pilgrimage to Scully's office in hopes of receiving her 
blessing today.  He's setting the scene for his own redemption.  
 
His feet know the way, carrying him through the halls and into the 
elevator.  Skinner is as gruff as ever, glowering over the 
polished wood of his desk.  "Agent Mulder. Thank you for coming in 
today." 
 
"It's my pleasure, sir," Mulder says in his best company voice. 
Last time he saw Skinner, they were both drunk as hell, Mulder out 
of his mind after Scully left, Skinner downing whiskey in quiet 
solidarity.  
 
"There's your chance, Walter," Mulder slurred. 
 
"I wouldn't do that to either of you," Skinner told him.  He 
hadn't even flinched.  Mulder respected him for that.  Skinner had 
always stood his ground, even when he wasn't certain of his 
footing.  "There are choices people shouldn't have to make." 
 
Mulder dragged his fingertip through the pool of condensation his 
glass had left.  "I've seen the way you look at her." 
 
"Can you blame me?" Skinner asked softly, not saying a word about 
professionalism or the way Mulder had always looked at her or the 
reasons why she'd left and Mulder was grateful. 
 
"No," he said. "I can't blame you." 
 
Skinner bought him one more round and then called them both 
cabs.  Mulder thought that at least he had managed to say thank 
you, as if that covered the last twenty years of saving their 
asses and staring down their united front of blank faces by way of 
justification. He is sure Skinner endured the hangover as 
stoically as he'd endured all the rest of it. But now here they 
are, back in the office where Mulder sat so often with Scully that 
he thinks he sees her out of the corner of his eye. 
 
There are other people in the room, five of them, sitting quietly 
in the corner. Mulder doesn't recognize any of them, which is nice 
in a way. If Ritter or Colton had been promoted, well, they both 
have open accounts he'd like to settle, a little equity for blood 
and sweat shed in pursuit of justice.   
 
"Agent Mulder, as you are aware, we've been discussing your 
possible reinstatement to active duty," Skinner says, organizing 
the files on his desk in that meticulous way he has when he's 
thinking hard.  "Your extensive sabbatical requires that we 
initiate certain procedures." 
 
Mulder tries not to smirk. Sabbatical is an optimistic euphemism 
for his banishment and the charges of treason, and more recently 
for his convalescence from the long-delayed reaction to his 
abduction and death. He supposes it's technically accurate, given 
the promises made in the deal about the case of the psychic 
priest: come home, all is forgiven. Their records expunged, the 
charges dropped, their titles reinstated if they choose. Scully 
had not argued much; she had always walked as if she wore her 
badge, stern and official. She couldn't take it off, though he had 
enjoyed watching her try, those months on the road, to be someone 
new, a woman who didn't case the corners of every room or touch 
the small of her back looking for her gun in a tense situation. 
 
"Agent Mulder," Skinner says, "would you please summarize your 
work on the X-Files for those who may be less familiar with your 
history?" 
 
Mulder restrains a sigh.  Skinner gives him the ghost of a Look, 
and it's just like every meeting Mulder has endured, trying to 
justify his existence to the skeptical higher ups.  "I originally 
became interested in the X-Files as a means of investigating my 
sister's abduction, which I believed at the time was due to 
paranormal or extraterrestrial forces. The work interested me and 
I began to pursue it for its own sake. The nature of the cases 
necessitated a certain investigative method and a particular 
liberty for agents assigned to the division. Bureau administration 
had some difficulty accepting that non-conventional methodology 
despite its success. Agent Scully was assigned to the X-Files 
division because administration assumed that her scientific 
background would enable her to debunk the work, allowing the 
division to be shut down. However, her integrity and her strict 
methodology led instead to our having the highest solve rate in 
the Bureau, both on our own cases and those on which we were 
requested to consult. We were not always able to scientifically 
explain those results, but our effectiveness was undeniable. 
Despite this, our superior experienced pressure to rein in our 
efforts and close the division. We believe this was a result of 
the information we uncovered about a conspiracy that extended to 
the highest levels of the government, a conspiracy intended to 
mislead the American people about the existence of 
extraterrestrial life and the group's collaboration with these 
beings,as well as their attempts to oppose the alien colonization 
project via the creation of hybridized humans or super soldiers." 
 
He is aware of how quiet the room is as he speaks, only the rustle 
of papers in the corner.  If Scully were here, she would be 
telegraphing quiet sturdy defiance at their evaluators and 
resignment at him.  They will always sound foolish, to skeptical 
ears.  They will always sound as if they have wasted their lives 
chasing lights in the sky.  Maybe they have.  But look what 
they've seen, in the dark hours of the night.  And no one is 
questioning that, only him. 
 
"And did you find your sister?" Skinner asks, and for a second, 
Mulder is furious with him.  As if Skinner doesn't remember 
California, young girls disappearing, a twisted Santa Claus, 
Mulder's mother's anguish, Scully defiant and protective at his 
apartment door too early to have slept in her own bed, Samantha's 
loopy careful handwriting on the pages of her diary.  He swallows 
against the whiskey burn of grief and anger.  Skinner is doing his 
job, trying to make them all look conventionally competent, saving 
what's left of Mulder's career from the wreckage of the basement 
office. 
 
"I believe I did, sir," Mulder says.  "Though her disappearance 
was not the result of extraterrestrial intervention, it was a 
consequence of that same government conspiracy which Agent Scully 
and I had uncovered.  She had been kidnapped by men who were 
deeply involved in the project." 
 
"Can you discuss what happened in Bellefleur, Oregon in May 2000?" 
Skinner asks, and there is a glint of compassion behind his 
glasses. 
 
"I was abducted," Mulder says, and leaves it at that. 
 
"By aliens?" asks one of the observers. Mulder hasn't seen her 
before; she has dark skin and hair and eyes, with a lilt to her 
voice that suggests Afro-Caribbean heritage.  Her suit is elegant 
and her composure reminds him of Scully's, unreadable to the wrong 
eyes.  She reminds him of his therapist, but with more hints of 
sharpness in the way she watches. 
 
"By unknown parties or forces which may have been extraterrestrial 
in nature but which have never been substantiated as such," Mulder 
hedges.  "No definitive evidence was recovered from the scene by 
either Agent Scully or Assistant Director Skinner.  I was 
eventually returned by my abductors with no explanation for either 
my release or my comatose state of near death, or for my 
subsequent and apparently spontaneous revival."  
 
"After your recovery from this mysterious illness, you continued 
your work on the X-Files with an Agent Doggett," says the woman. 
 
"Yes," Mulder says.  "Agent Scully had gone on maternity leave and 
the division was inadequately staffed to handle the ongoing 
investigation into the conspiracy that seemed to have had a hand 
in my abduction." 
 
"And Agent Scully's maternity leave was due to the fact that she 
was pregnant with a child you had fathered, correct?" she asks. 
 
"To the best of my knowledge, yes," Mulder says, trying to keep 
his tone even. "The circumstances surrounding her pregnancy were 
complicated and the child's parentage was uncertain, but we both 
consider him our son."  He thinks about correcting himself, but he 
cannot refer to his son in the past tense.  Wherever William might 
be, thriving or interred, he is still their son. 
 
"You and Agent Scully had become romantically involved by this 
point?" his inquisitor continues. 
 
"Yes," Mulder says, and leaves it at that. The rest of it belongs 
only to him and to Scully, the nights of frustration and longing 
and the sweet moments of relief. 
 
"And given that this relationship violated Bureau policy, you 
understood that this jeopardized your professional relationship 
and the future of the X-Files," she says. 
 
Mulder says nothing. 
 
"For the record," Skinner breaks in, "they had disclosed the 
nature of their relationship to me and I found it had no impact on 
their professionalism or the caliber of their work." 
 
Disclosed is a strong word, Mulder thinks, flashing back again to 
Scully's rumpled shirt and tousled hair as she faced down Skinner, 
but he is grateful for the intervention. 
 
"Is it your intention to return to the X-Files if reinstated?" the 
woman asks, her pen poised. 
 
"Not at this time," Mulder says.  "Although there is still work to 
be done on cases that fall outside the Bureau's usual scope, I 
feel that I've put in my time and gotten the answers I sought. I 
would be happy to consult on an X-File-type case if necessary, but 
my preference would be to return to profiling. I got killed less 
often when I was assigned to that division." 
 
"An important concern," she agrees with a slight smile. 
"Especially as a parent." 
 
"Agent Scully and I no longer have custody of our son," he says, a 
pang stinging through his chest at the thought of his son, a 
teenage stranger now, flesh of his flesh living some other life 
than William Scully's, or so they pray. "We believed his life was 
in danger due to those who opposed our work, and that giving him 
up for adoption was the best way to ensure his safety." 
 
"The charges of treason that were forgiven," the woman says, as 
they as flip a page in their files. "Can you explain the 
circumstances under which you were accused?" 
 
"I was thought to have been involved in the death of an individual 
whom I suspected of being a product of a government program 
intended to genetically engineer a stronger, faster strain of 
humanity who might serve as invincible super soldiers," Mulder 
says. "Those charges were dropped." 
 
"Due to your cooperation on another investigation seven years 
ago," she clarifies. 
 
"I can't speak to the motivations of the court or the justice 
system," Mulder hedges. "But the charges were dropped." 
 
Skinner nods almost imperceptibly. 
 
"And since then, Agent Mulder," he says, "you have been on an 
extended leave of absence from active duty due to medical 
reasons?" 
 
"The Bureau had some understandable concerns about how my 
experiences might have contributed to my diagnosis of PTSD," 
Mulder tells her.  "My absence was by choice. Neither Agent Scully 
or I wanted to return to the Bureau immediately.  We had both 
found other work that allowed us to recuperate. My engagement has 
been limited to the occasional consultation when the usual methods 
failed to yield results." 
 
"Your therapist is pleased with your progress," Skinner says, 
shuffling through his papers.  "She's recommended that you be 
allowed to return to active duty if you so choose." 
 
"Contingent on the approval of this panel," says the woman. 
 
"Of course," Skinner says. "If reinstated, you would need to 
undergo re-evaluation for psychological fitness, competence with 
firearms, the usual checklist. Additionally, we could offer no 
guarantee that you would receive the assignment you request." 
 
"Of course," Mulder parrots.  
 
"Are you prepared to accept these conditions?" Skinner asks, his 
voice as level as his eyes.

"I am, sir," Mulder says, equally even.

"We'll contact you to let you know our decision," Skinner 
says.  "I imagine you'll hear from me by this evening."

"Thank you, sir," Mulder says, getting up.  After all these years, 
he knows when he's dismissed.  He nods slightly to the committee 
in the corner.  Skinner twitches his lips in silent reassurance, 
and Mulder nods again and closes the door behind 
himself.  Kimberly smiles at him.

"Back to work, Agent Mulder?" she asks, as if she hasn't given him 
the death glare a hundred times.  They're all older and wiser 
now.  Maybe they've forgiven and forgotten.

"We'll see," he says.

"It's been good to see Agent Scully around the building again," 
Kimberly tells him.  "I hope it goes well."

"Thank you," he says sincerely, and lets his feet carry him out of 
the building again.  He drives home in a reverie, catching himself 
almost making the turn to go to Quantico, but he straightens the 
car out in time.  Not yet.  There will be world enough and time, 
he thinks, whatever happens, for him to meet Scully on their 
common ground.


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Feedback is welcome at leiascully@gmail.com.  Stories from all 
fandoms are archived at 
http://archiveofourown.org/users/leiascully.