Title: Mettle (1/1)
Author: Maria Nicole
e-mail: marianicole29@yahoo.com
Distribution: Anywhere this goes automatically is fine. Anywhere else, 
I'd appreciate an e-mail so that I can visit.
Rating: PG
Classification: SA
Spoilers: Agua Mala, Two Fathers/One Son, SR 819, Anasazi, EBE
Keywords: Mulder/Scully friendship
Summary:  Mulder's POV, post Agua Mala
Disclaimer: I only wish that they belonged to me, but all characters
mentioned here are the property of 1013 productions

Note: I realize that it's unclear where exactly Agua Mala is supposed 
to fit into the X-Files timeline. I'm going to go with the original air
date, or somewhere around there, so this is set a few weeks after Two
Fathers/One Son, but before their first official case in Arcadia.

Mettle
Maria Nicole

I've been dreaming, lately, of the boxcar full of bones that I 
found in New Mexico. In my dreams, though, the bones are those of 
the children, the charred, tiny corpses that we found in the 
hangar two weeks ago, the smaller bodies in the very middle of the
circle. Too many of the corpses that we found were of children,
paying for the sins of their fathers in the worst way possible. 
We've been piecing together these people's lives, their identities,
over the last two weeks. We look at snapshots, at home videos, and 
the normal, smiling people bear no resemblance to their burned bodies.

I can't hate these men anymore, not after I've seen pictures of their
children, of them celebrating birthdays and Christmases with their
families. The hate has died down to a sour, bitter anger because of
what they've done, but I haven't been able to hate them purely since 
I saw a picture of Anna Anderson looking up at her father with 
adoration. His hand rested gently on her hair. 

I dreamt of her, that night. She was eleven, and her pictures showed
her hair as darkening from towhead to light brown over the years.
In the dream, she burned before my eyes, screaming out for her 
father to save her, wild eyes staring past me as I tried to put the
fire out, searching for the daddy in whom she had placed her 
faith.

She burned; she died; neither I nor her father could save her in
my dream or in life. 

In my dreams, the walls of my newly acquired basement office become
the walls of the boxcar become the stacked, burned bones of 
children, and I am trapped inside them. I wake up saying, "It's 
only a dream, it's only a dream, it's only a dream, it's only a 
dream," to the shadows of my apartment.

***

"So that was Arthur Dales," Scully says. Scully's been distant 
lately. Her tone after she had done another autopsy could have put 
out any fire; the curve of her neck as she bent her head over the
diary of a Consortium wife was pale and untouchable, each vertebrae
distinct and somehow fragile. 

"That was Arthur Dales," I confirm. "Founder of the X-Files."

"Mmmm." She closes her eyes, leaning her head back against her coat,
bunched up behind her. We sit together against the wall of the 
terminal in the almost empty airport. We could have chairs, but
the floor is frankly more comfortable.

"Although," I add, remembering, "he told me the first time
I met him that it was a secretary, a woman, who gave them that name. 
A redhead, he said. Freaky, huh?"

"A redheaded secretary," she says quietly, in a voice without 
affect. 

Damn it.

"I wasn't implying that you were a secretary, Scully. I just thought
you'd think it was interesting that it was a redheaded woman who
gave the X-Files their name."

"Right."

Right. I tilt my head back and make patterns out of the ceiling tile.
Arthur Dales, lonely drunk, had told me to hang on to Scully, that
partners didn't get much better than this, that if he'd had someone
like Scully he might not have ended up like he was, a lonely drunk
in a trailer park. 

But I'm lonely even when I'm with Scully, these days. Talking with 
her is like wading through water; the pull of past memories, the 
weight of things unsaid, drags at us. And everything I say, 
everything she says, has sharp edges, even when I could swear we're 
trying to soothe. "Dales was right, you know. If I didn't have a 
partner, I would have quit or been killed long ago."

Her eyes are angry when they meet mine. "You tell me that, Mulder, 
but you seem to want Dales and anyone else to believe that you could
do this by yourself."

"I didn't tell Dales that. I told him that I saved myself this time.
I did, Scully. I saw that cat; I figured out it was the saltwater. By
the time you came out with a bucket of water, I'd already dragged
myself out into the rain, remember?"

"Fine. You saved yourself. You've made that clear."

I tilt my head back again, feeling the shift of the bandages on my
neck. 

After a moment, she says softly, "Mulder."

"Yeah?"

"I'm sorry. That was...snappish."

"It doesn't matter."

Her smile is small, tentative. "I'm not a very nice person when I'm
waterlogged."

"Maybe our next case will take us someplace dry," I offer.

"If we get the X-Files back, yes," she says. "Someplace dry."

"If, Scully?" I ask her. 

"I meant when." But I suspect she said 'if' because she's
a little superstitious, as I am, that plans will fall through if
we're too definite about our hopes, even though it's a pretty
sure thing that we're going to get the X-Files back. We're back
in the basement, even if unofficially; we report to Skinner,
even though we are still technically under Kersh's direction. 
The X-Files are ours in deed, even if we're still awaiting the
final clearances for them to be ours in name as well.

"Consider this a test run, then," I say. "Before we officially get to
investigate mysterious monsters."

"If it was a test run, we didn't do that well."

"You performed a tracheotomy and delivered a baby, Uberdoctor."

"The deputy died, and you almost got liquefied."

"I didn't, though. We both figured out the monster. That has to 
count for something on the great cosmic scoreboard."

"I hope so," she says, and tilts her head against the wall, closing
her eyes. Her skin looks papery and translucent, free of make-up.

"It's like I said in the car, earlier. We can look back on this as
a test of our mettle."

"I thought I told you...I don't need my mettle tested." The bite is
back in her voice, forbidding argument or even response.

It is to her tired, gentle face, not her voice, that I answer. 
"Maybe I did."

***

Scully and I have conversations over the course of weeks, not 
minutes, so it is no surprise that she doesn't answer me until 
several hours later. She's not looking at me, but out the airplane
window. "You've been through the same six years that I have. Why
do you need your mettle tested? What do you need to prove?"

"What don't I?"

She sighs, continuing to look out at the clouds. 

I take a sip of Coke, placing the plastic glass carefully down into
the indentation on the tray table. "Deep Throat told me something 
once. We were in an aquarium, and he told me that if sharks stopped
moving, they died. He told me never to stop moving."

That does get her attention. "In an aquarium? That would hardly 
have been inconspicuous if someone were following either of you."

"That's not the point."

"So what is the point?"

"Movement. Motivation. Last month, I...stopped moving."

I died, Scully, in those moments in Diana's apartment when I ceased
to care about the future. That my body didn't die was only an 
aberration.

Kersh would tell me that my comment was oblique, but Scully and I
have practice at being elliptical. "At Diana's," she says. "Because
you found out that someone you'd loved had betrayed you?" The 
expression on her face looks as if she's smelling something bad but
is too polite to say so. It's the expression she always gets when
she brings up Diana, and as always I can't help but feel that
she's looking with distaste not only at Diana but at me, the guy
who was stupid enough to trust her.

"I didn't love her. I trusted her. I...this wasn't Phoebe, Scully,
this wasn't some relationship where I was being led around by my 
dick, where it was all sex and bad melodrama. I knew Phoebe was a bad
judgment call on my part even when I was going out with her, but
I tried to follow my head with Diana. We had the same interests;
we had fun together. But that wasn't even it. It was that fact 
that...when do you think they approached her?"

Scully can wound me with a casual comment, but she is never
purposefully cruel. I would say that she doesn't have it in her, but
all of us do; it is more amazing that Scully chooses not to be
hurtful. And so, when she sees that the question is important to me,
she measures her answer carefully. "I can't say I know. Possibly it
wasn't until a few years ago."

"But that's not likely, is it? Given the promotion she got in the
first place, the transfer away from here."

"No, it's not."

"So it's likely that she was on their side the whole time she and I 
were together."

"Not necessarily. They could have recruited her right before she 
left."

"Do you believe that?"

Her gaze wavers, falls. "No, I don't."

"Have you thought about what that means? That means they planted her
in the first place. Think about that, Scully. That means they kept
track of the X-Files from the beginning. And possibly even that they
intended me to have the X-Files. All along, I've thought that I was
defying them, somehow, but what if me having the X-Files was part of
the plan? What if every action I've taken over the last ten years 
has been...not only monitored, but engineered?"

"Mulder, the fact that these people ended up dead could hardly have
been part of their plan. They may have intended to use you, to use
us, but I doubt that they've always been successful."

"But I didn't know that then. I was sitting in her apartment, facing
the fact that any action I took might have already been accounted 
for, and...I stopped moving. There didn't seem to be much point."

"I refuse to believe that. I don't believe that they could know
you--know *us*--so well that they could predict or control our 
behavior over the years. We're not lab rats."

"I know that, now, but it...I don't know, it made sense at the time.
Or nothing made sense at the time, so it made as much sense as 
anything, to give up. But Scully, I gave *up.* I failed myself,
failed you." I stop, feeling the hard knot of shame in my stomach,
that I've been carrying around for the last two weeks. Scully keeps
going despite the chip in her neck that could be turned against
her; Skinner helps us when he can, despite the infection dormant
in his blood. But me...

It is a long time before she answers, and when she does her voice
is quiet. "Yes, you did."

Two of the people across the aisle are fighting over which section 
of the newspaper they will read next. The third is drooling onto
a pillow, face slack in sleep. His headphones have gone askew,
and I can faintly hear music playing through them.

Her fingers are cool when she lightly touches my jaw to turn my 
face back to hers. "Yes, you did. You made a mistake; you 
gave in to a moment of despair. It was wrong, but it's 
forgivable."

"Is it?"

Her hand drops down to mine. "I forgive you," she says. She turns 
her head away after a moment, but her fingers stay firmly woven 
through mine.

***

"But you see," I tell her downturned head a little later, when 
her words of forgiveness have sifted down through enough layers 
of sediment that maybe, maybe, I believe them, "you see why I 
needed to save myself this time around." 

"Now, I do. Then...it seemed like you were repudiating our 
partnership, or my part in it, back in Dales' trailer. It felt like
we were right back in the Lone Gunmen's office, with you acting as 
if I was an idiot for questioning Diana.

"I owed her at least some measure of loyalty, Scully. And the 
evidence...it was circumstantial."

"It wasn't that you believed in her, Mulder. But you acted as
if I didn't even have a right to ask the questions, to dig for
hard evidence. It was like...this was only your personal quest,
and I could only be a part of it on your terms, if I followed
your lead, if I behaved myself. As if I was a secretary who
had overstepped herself."

"You know I don't think of you that way."

"No, Mulder, sometimes I don't know that."

It is, of course, at that moment that the stewardess chooses 
to come by and collect our garbage. I drink the rest of my 
Coke hastily before discarding the glass.

"You're not having trouble swallowing, are you?" Scully asks when
the flight attendant has passed by.

"No, I'm okay."

"Good. I would not want to have to perform a second tracheotomy."

"I wouldn't want you to either. Scully, what you said, I don't
think of you as my secretary."

"That's good, because I'm not doing more than my share of the
filing after we get the X-Files back." And the expression on
her face is closed again, indicating that this subject is
over.

"So, Scully, are you ready to get them back? The real thing?"

"Yes, I think I am. Are you?" 

"Yes," I say to the sound of the intercom clicking on so that 
the pilot can tell us that we are nearing DC.

***

I still dream of Anna Anderson, every so often, another of the lost
children that I've stumbled across in my quest. She burns in my
dreams, as she did in life, as her father did, beyond any
earthly salvation.

And I wake up in my apartment, gasping, to tell myself that it's only 
a dream, only a dream, only a dream. Sometimes, remembering the 
cool touch of Scully's hand on my face as she told me she forgave me,
I believe myself.

End
Feedback always appreciated at marianicole29@yahoo.com 

===
"It's _A La Recherche du Temps Perdu_ by Marcel Proust. 
It's missing a couple of pages, but seeing as how the book 
is one long run-on sentence anyway, I didn't think you'd
mind."
--Benton Fraser, _Due South_