Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

“Miss Scully. Thank you for coming during your lunch period. Please…” 

Principal Blevins motioned for Dana to sit. Blevins was not alone in his office: Vice-Principal Skinner was there, too, and a tall, thin man smoking a cigarette leaned against a filing cabinet. A woman sat beside the empty chair where he was clearly meant to be sitting. Dana didn’t recognize these other two teachers, but that meant nothing. Perhaps she was being skipped ahead to other classes. That tended to happen, a couple months after Dana switched schools. 

Principal Blevins pulled out a file with Dana’s name on it. “We see you’ve been with us on the Vineyard for almost two months.”

“Yes, sir.” 

“Before that, you were a student at Our Lady of Sorrows, in Annapolis?” 

“Yes, sir.” 

“Why not the base school?” 

“I was awarded a full scholarship there, sir, before my father was transferred to the Naval Auxiliary Air Facility here on the Vineyard.” 

“Do you find the change difficult, being in a public school?” 

“No, sir. I was in public schools when my family lived in California. My sister Melissa lives there, taking care of my grandmother.” 

Blevins cleared his throat. Clearly, this was not really what he wanted to know. The smoking man seethed quietly, softly shaking his head. (Could he tell Dana was lying? Did he know, somehow, why Missy was really in California?) The woman sitting before him shot a look over to VP Skinner. VP Skinner, who still had shrapnel in him and lousy lungs on account of his service in the Great War before this one, in turn gave Dana a sour face. 

“I believe the principal is asking if you find it difficult to be a student in a co-ed environment, after your time at Our Lady of Sorrows.” 

Dana wondered if VP Skinner knew all the jokes about why, precisely, the school was called Our Lady of Sorrows — namely, the lack of boys. “It doesn’t bother me, sir. I have two brothers.” 

“Your older brother, William, he’s in Norfolk, at Midshipmen’s School?” 

“Yes, sir.” 

“Godspeed to him. And your younger brother, Charles…” Skinner lifted his eyes to her. “Well, that’s why we’re here, today, Miss Scully.” 

Dana’s eyes flicked over to the strangers in the room. Maybe they weren’t teachers at all. Maybe they’d come from the hospital. That would explain why she didn’t recognize them. As Blevins himself just pointed out, they’d barely lived on the island for any time at all. The house wasn’t even unpacked all the way. Charlie got sick, before they could do so properly. So Dana washed the same set of dishes every day, and wore the same sets of clothes out of the same suitcase she’d opened when they moved. It was getting colder, which meant she’d have to open some new crates soon, and hope she got lucky. 

“Is Charlie…?” Her throat began to close. “Has he…?”

“No,” VP Skinner said, abruptly. “Your brother is fine. Both your brothers are fine. Your dad is fine. Everything’s jake. All right?” 

Dana nodded, mute. 

Blevins resumed his questioning. “Are you familiar with a student named Fox Mulder?”

Dana nodded again. “Yes, I am.”

“How so?”

“He’s the one behind me in Latin class.” 

“You mean he sits behind you?” 

Dana shook her head. “No, sir.” Technically, Mulder sat behind all the other students in class, on account of how he was so tall. And also because he hated everybody. Dana in particular. “Is this because of the milk?” 

“The milk?” Blevins asked. 

Dana had hoped this could be resolved quietly. Apparently not. “My Latin name in Mr Incanto’s class is Imilce, and since I started out-scoring Fox on every quiz, he’s begun calling me Milk.”  

The woman sitting across from VP Skinner looked as though she’d bitten into a lemon. 

“So his friends, the Three Stooges — Byers, Langley, and Frohike — over the last long weekend, they jimmied open my locker and left their milk bottles inside, from lunch. The next time I opened it, I had cottage cheese growing in there.” 

“How’d you know it was the Stooges?” Skinner asked. 

“They all have shop before lunch period, and the milk bottles had smudges of machine oil on the caps, where they untwisted them.”

Principal Blevins flipped through her file. “I see nothing like that mentioned here.” 

“Well, no, sir, because I didn’t report it.” 

Scully women did not complain. Scully women didn’t even get mad. Scully women got revenge. And since the hospital categorically refused to let Charlie take his ant farm with him onto the ward, well…

“I just thought that the person everybody else calls Spooky would better understand how harmful nicknames can be to a reputation,” Dana said, loftily. 

“…Spooky?” the woman asked. 

Dana turned to her. “Yes, ma’am. Spooky Mulder. When I first came here, all the other girls in my homeroom warned me I should stay away from him. I figured it was to do with all the dimestore detective novels and creepy pulp magazines he’s always reading. Mostly stuff about murder and monsters, as far as I can tell. But this is a free country, and only Nazis burn books, so Mulder has every right to read what he likes. Regardless of what some hothouse flowers have to say about it.” 

The woman shot both Blevins and Skinner a look of such unvarnished hatred that Dana felt it like a draught in the room. Both men cringed away from her. An awful thought occurred to Dana, suddenly. And the more she considered it, the more likely it seemed, and the more awful it became. God always signed His best work, after all, and that particular shade of tropical blue-green was as good a John Hancock as any.

“Ma’am…?” Dana began to ask. 

“This is Mrs Mulder,” Blevins said, hastily. 

Dana’s stomach flipped over. Just once, she’d like to be wrong about these things. “Ma’am, I apologize-”

“Oh, hush,” Mrs Mulder hissed. “Principal Blevins and I will discuss it later. At the moment, I am here to discuss something important with you, Dana. May I call you Dana?”

Dana nodded. 

“Dana, I’m a member of the Woman’s Club here on the Vineyard. One of our members who volunteers at the hospital met your mother there, recently. They got to know one another, and our club member was very concerned when she put together what all has been going on. That’s how I learned about your family’s situation.” 

Her heart plummetted. They knew. Damn it. She’d been doing so well, up until now. Then again, maybe it was a bluff. Maybe they had nothing. “Our situation?” 

“Yes. The situation wherein your mother is mostly living at the hospital with your brother, and your father is mostly living at the new Navy base, and you, a girl of fifteen, are mostly living alone.” 

Dana opened her mouth and then closed it. Then she opened it again. Just as she was about to say that “alone” was a strong word, and also that she would be sixteen in four months, a ring of smoke silenced her. “Don’t bother lying.” The smoking man stubbed out his cigarette. Taking hold of his pack, he immediately shook out another Morley. (So much for rationing, apparently. A chainsmoker like that probably bought cartons off the black markets. As far as Dana was concerned, that made him a collaborator with the enemy.) “Mrs Mulder and Principal Blevins have spoken to your mother. Mr and Mrs Mulder have agreed-”

“Aren’t you Mr Mulder?” Dana asked. 

The smoking man paused with his cigaratte unlit and the flame of his lighter wavering. “No.” He flicked the lighter shut. The sound made Mrs Mulder flinch. His gaze slid over to her, and then back to Dana. “I’m Bill Mulder’s partner at the State Department. Presently, he’s tied up in Washington. I told him I’d meet you today. On his behalf.” He smirked. The smile failed to reach his eyes. “In case he’d like to know more, about the young lady coming to live in his home.” 

A fine tether snapped inside Dana, and instantly she was adrift. She turned to Mrs Mulder. Then to VP Skinner. And Principal Blevins. They all looked vaguely guilty. Or somehow embarrassed. In fact, the only one in the room who seemed perfectly at ease was the smoking man, who had lit up again. Naturally, all of this was just fine with him. His life had not just gone up in flames, despite his much greater-than-average statistical likelihood of dying in a house fire. Was the State Department aware of how he was wasting taxpayer dollars, hounding Dana and the Mulders this way? There was a war on; did he not have anything better to do?

“It’s true, Dana,” Mrs Mulder said, finally, when Dana remained silent. “You’re coming to live with us for a while. This way, your mother can focus on helping your little brother. And your father can beaver away at his work on the new base. It will be no trouble at all to us. We have plenty of space. You will have your own room, very private, with a lock on the door and everything. It’ll be safer for you. And good for Fox. He needs to be challenged.”

Dana had no disagreements with Mrs Mulder on that score, but she rather doubted the long-term effectiveness of the strategy being proposed. Again, she glanced around the room. “But, Mrs Mulder, your son hates me.” 

A smile tugged at VP Skinner’s lips. Perhaps he’d wondered the same. Or perhaps he was just amused by her impertinence. Judging by the looks on their faces, they all were. Even Mrs Mulder seemed somehow delighted.

“Fox has already agreed to this, Dana,” Mrs Mulder said. 

Dana frowned. “He has?”

Mrs Mulder tilted her head. “Is that so hard for you to believe?” 

“Yes,” Dana said, plainly. “He told Mr Incanto I put the whammy on him!” 

“That’s one word for it,” VP Skinner muttered.

“Dana.” Mrs Mulder reached over and laid her long, white fingers over Dana’s raw, pink ones. The diamond on her hand was the largest Dana had ever seen in real life. “It isn’t appropriate for a girl your age to be living alone. This is a very small island, and you are an outsider. Even my family are still considered outsiders, despite having lived here almost twenty years now. Believe me when I tell you: people will talk. Rumours will spread. Your reputation could be profoundly damaged.” 

Mrs Mulder had a point. Maybe this was her way of asking about Melissa. If so, Dana had to be doubly sure to say nothing. Mom had made it extremely clear that Dana was not to even mention Melissa, if she could help it, for exactly the same reasons that Mrs Mulder had just mentioned. “That may be true, and I am grateful for your concern, really I am, but I doubt my family will live here long enough for that to become an issue. Besides, I’m doing just fine-”

“Just fine isn’t good enough,” Mrs Mulder snapped. “Have you imagined what might happen to you, if a prowler found out that you were living on your own? Or some roustabouts from the new base? Or even just a local drunk? Or, God help me, a firebug? For that matter, what if you’re wrong about who put that milk in your locker? What if it was another student, with a grudge? What if it was a boy with a crush, who felt spurned? What might he do next? Anything could happen, Dana.” Mrs Mulder squeezed her hand. “Anything.” 

Mildly alarmed, Dana glanced over at Skinner. Skinner looked over at Blevins. Blevins seemed to be at a loss.

Mr Mulder’s partner, who still had yet to even mention his name, sighed heavily. “What Mrs Mulder isn’t telling you, because it is extremely painful for her, is that her own little girl, Fox’s younger sister Samantha, disappeared from their home almost six years ago this month. She was eight years old. No trace of her has ever been found. That’s why Mr and Mrs Mulder are so concerned about you being on your own. They know precisely what can happen to a girl like you, if she happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, alone. This is also, I suspect, why Fox finds it so troubling. He likes you a great deal.” 

Well. That would certainly explain all the detective books. And probably the temperament. Mulder was angry all the time because he had lots to be angry about, apparently. But Dana still found it patently ridiculous that she should be expected to trust the word of a man who refused to give his name. Especially when he purported to be speaking for someone else who, in her personal experience, had absolutely no trouble making his many and vociferous opinions abundantly clear to everyone within earshot.  The very concept of Fox Mulder being quiet about anything was, well, tragically misinformed. Dana was about to say as much, when Mrs Mulder spoke up again.

“I am perfectly capable of telling her myself, thank you,” Mrs Mulder sniffed. “Please don’t think that the house is in any way unsafe, Dana. We had new locks put on all the windows and doors, and the basement is entirely sealed. We even felled the nearest tree, so no one can climb up. And we have dogs! Do you like dogs?”

Temptation the likes of which Dana had not felt in years lurched between her ribs. “I’ve never had one, before,” she admitted. “We’ve never lived anywhere long enough to keep any pets.” 

This was not precisely true. But it was what Mom and Dad said when Dana and the others asked about dogs and cats. It was why she’d had to hide the rabbit. She knew Mom would say no. Just thinking about the rabbit made her want to be sick. She was going to screw this up, somehow, and then everything would be even worse-

“Are you afraid of dogs, Dana?” Mrs Mulder asked, carefully. 

Dana re-schooled her features to neutrality. “No, ma’am.” 

“You’ll get used to them. They’re big, but friendly, and they keep the house very secure. Fox takes care of them. He raised them from puppies, you know. They’re quite bright. They came all the way from the Berquist farm in Vermont. Karin Berquist is one of the finest dog breeders in New England. We were on the waiting list for just ages.” 

Again, the smoking man sighed. This time, he seemed a trifle impatient. “Yes. Everything about the Mulder home is idyllic. The very spot that any young lady with all her wits about her would choose, if she had the choice to make. Which is why the Mulders all thought it best for you to live there, until…” He gestured vaguely with his cigarette before tapping ash free of it. 

Dana looked at VP Skinner. His face was blank. She turned to Mrs. Mulder, who reached into her purse and handed Dana an envelope. “Your mother asked me to share this with you, Dana.” 

The envelope was hospital stationery. It bore her mother’s handwriting. “My Darling Dana,” it read, in her looping script. It was sealed.

The letter inside was short. It was unequivocal. It reminded her to be strong. It reminded her to pray, and be good, and mind her manners with the Mulders, and keep her grades up, and make Mom and Daddy and Bill proud of her. It did not mention Melissa. But it did mention Charlie. In fact, the letter was about Charlie. Because Charlie was dying of rheumatic fever. It was in his heart, now. And his brain. The seizures would not stop.

Charlie would be dead within weeks, the letter said. So Mom would not be home on the weekends, any longer. Instead, she would be living in total quarantine at the hospital for the foreseeable future. This would allow her to bathe and feed and care for Charlie, without worrying about bringing something in from outside that would worsen his already weakened immune system,. And Daddy was needed on the base. The work he was doing was very important, and very secret, and the easiest way for him to keep it secret was if he just stayed there behind the wire. So Mom needed Dana to be brave, and take this cross, and-

“Sure.” Dana’s hand snapped the letter shut. She stuffed it back down inside the envelope. There was something else in there. Something that rattled. For now, she refused to look at it. Bad enough that these total strangers had decided to Shanghai her to some place she had never been, to live with a boy who loved torturing her. Dana certainly had no intention of letting them see her cry over it. “Fine. Whatever.”

Dana stood and regarded Principal Blevins. “Sir, may I please have leave to go home, now, and pack my things? I need extra time to clean out the refrigerator and de-ice the freezer. Then I need to shut off the taps and breakers, so the pipes survive the next cold snap. The landlord will void our deposit if he notices damage. And before tomorrow, I need to call the water and power companies. And the post office. And the milk man. And the newspaper. My mother and father should not have to pay for services rendered to an empty house.” 

“Um…” Blevins eyed Skinner. If anything, Skinner seemed impressed. His bald pate was sweating, a little. Dana liked Skinner. Or, she had wanted to like him, until this moment. He was a Marine. His service at Belleau Wood was one of the reasons he was a French teacher, in addition to being a coach. Apparently he had stayed in France through the Twenties. There was even a rumour he had boxed with Hemingway. Dana suspected that, had her mother ever met the man, she would have formed a tiny crush on him. Now, she likely never would. And anyway, Skinner had sold her out. To a member of his own football team. The whole world really was just a boys club. 

“That’s a lovely idea, Dana,” Mrs Mulder said. “Why don’t I drive you?” 

“Great,” she gritted out. “Thank you.” 

Chapter Text

“Last chance, Samantha.” Mulder spun a basketball on one finger and held it out for the possible ghost of his sister. “If you don’t want Milk to steal your stuff, you’d better gimme a sign.” 

Nothing happened. The ball kept spinning. It didn’t even wobble. At any other time, he’d have been smug at how perfectly even its movement was. But he’d been asking variations of this question all day, it seemed, and he was tired of the silence. For the first time in a long time, he wished he were at football practise. They had a game tomorrow. He should be preparing for it, with the guys. It was a big deal that Coach Skinner had even let him on the team. But Coach Skinner was the one he’d told first about his suspicions.

(“Son, if you want to move out after graduation, and Lord knows any red-blooded boy worth his salt does, there’s a recruiting office in Oak Bluffs,” was how Skinner put it. “Yeah, but what if you’re a girl?” Mulder wondered. “What do you mean?” Skinner had asked, and Mulder realized Skinner was trying to ask if he was queer, but in a nice way. “I mean, my friend has a paper route, and this girl, she pays the bill. Not her mom or dad. That’s weird, right? Same for the milk, and the grocer.”)

Between Byers at the newspaper, Langley at the post office, and Frohike’s dad running a butcher counter, Mulder’s surveillance of Dana Scully was complete. He’d engaged that surveillance long before he knew her parents had essentially abandoned her. The moment she mentioned that her father was a Navy captain who’d come to work at the US Naval Auxiliary Air Facility, behind the rolls of barbed wire, Mulder started paying attention. 

Construction on the Naval Auxiliary Air Facility (which the paper sometimes called the Auxiliary Air Station, too) began early in 1943. Because it was originally park land, the Navy was leasing the land from the US government. The islanders, while eager to contribute to the war effort, weren’t too pleased about losing miles of beach and perfectly decent campground. Mulder was among them. Back when he had friends, they’d spent whole summers out there among the scrub oaks and the dunes. 

If Samantha was dead, then her body was most likely somewhere on the island. And if her body was buried anywhere on the island, those woods were the place. Mulder was sure of it. Every other basement, attic, storeroom, boathouse, icehouse, and treehouse on the island had been searched multiple times. She was either alive elsewhere, or her body had been sunk beneath the waves, or it was buried in those woods.

Local detectives, state police, even native trackers and trained bloodhounds had assisted the search parties, and found nothing. But Sam had disappeared at the end of November, which meant early snow kept those men from searching the woods in depth. Her body might still be out there. Waiting. Waiting, maybe, for a US Navy bulldozer to find her, in the process of laying out fresh tarmac for the aircraft being tested on the Vineyard. 

It sufficed to say that Fox Mulder had a compelling interest in Captain Scully’s new workplace. Which meant he had a compelling interest in Dana Scully. And how she might get him past all that barbed wire. 

The Scully family arrived sometime in October. Mulder wasn’t sure exactly when. But he remembered the first day Dana Scully came to Latin class: it was his birthday, the thirteenth, a Wednesday. The day Italy switched sides. The day Mulder turned eighteen, and signed his card. (As a junior, Mulder might be spared the draft another year, though these days it was tough to say. More likely, Uncle Sam would learn why Mulder was a year behind his classmates, and find him unfit.) Mr Incanto clasped his flaky fingers around Dana Scully’s little cardigan-clad shoulders, and told the class her name was Imilce, and that she’d come from Our Lady of Sorrows in Maryland. Somewhere she’d skipped a grade. Possibly two. Either way, she was a sophomore despite being so small her toes barely grazed the floor when she sat down.

When Mr Incanto asked her what she wanted her Latin motto to be, she had considered, and then answered, flawlessly: “Solamen miseris socios habuisse doloris.” 

Mr Incanto had smiled. “Misery loves company?” 

Scully had blinked, and done a sort of double-take, as though having spotted a trip-wire in the conversation. “Not quite, sir,” she said, carefully. “I think a more nuanced translation would be: It is a comfort to the unfortunate to have had companions in woe.”

Mr Incanto had lifted his brows, and played what he clearly thought was his trump card: “You think you’re a better translator of Latin than Christopher Marlowe, Miss Scully?” 

“No, sir,” she said, because of course she fucking knew who Kit Marlowe was. Then Scully offered their teacher a smile that was somehow ice-cold and angelic at the same time, and said in Latin: “I simply think Mephistopheles was not a student at Our Lady of Sorrows.”

Mulder was the only one who laughed. It wasn’t even a laugh — more like a chuckle, or a scoff. A helpless but snide response to her showing up Incanto, who was a known prick, especially to girls in class. Her eyes landed on Mulder like twin pilot lights, and she knew that he knew, and he knew that she knew that he knew, and for a second they were the only two people in the room. Then Mr Incanto ruined the moment by asking Mulder to translate, and it was a whole thing, because he had to explain both the play and the word play, and it delayed their quiz, which pissed Incanto off. After that Incanto started picking on Scully for having had the audacity to correct him on her first day. And on some level, that was on Mulder. For laughing.

In short, Mulder had brought this on himself. He knew this. What he did not know was why preparing Milk’s room was his responsibility. (His own room was a disaster area. Surely, this did not speak well of his organizational prowess.) But Mom said he should bring down some books and paper and pencils and stuff for their guest. (Mulder used this to divest himself of books given by well-meaning but hopelessly naive relatives, who thought he’d actually read Austen and the like.) Mom then also charged him with bringing in a desk and some other furniture for her, and hanging proper curtains in the downstairs bedroom, which meant pulling them down from the guest room where Oma slept sometimes and hanging them up again. 

“Why can’t she just sleep in Oma’s room?” he’d asked. (When he’d sketched this plot in his mind, Dana Scully was always in Oma’s room.) “Because she can’t,” was Mom’s answer. “But downstairs is a servant’s bedroom,” he protested. “Then you’ll just have to make it nicer, won’t you?” was Mom’s reply.

Of course, Mulder knew why Mom didn’t want Dana Scully upstairs. It wasn’t hard to figure out. It was the same reason she wanted the Scully girl to have “real” curtains, despite never having bothered with them before, when they had a housekeeper. It was because Dana Scully was a girl, and pretty. By some odd law of personal physics, she therefore had to be kept as far away from Fox Mulder as possible. Later, Mom said something about civil defense drills and the need for blackout curtains, but Mulder knew the truth: she suspected either Mulder or local beachgoers of being peeping toms, who might spy on Imilce through the windows.

He’d just finished hanging the damn things when he heard the car pull up. His palm opened and the ball fell into it. At the threshold, he turned. The room was clean. The windows were open. The pillows were fluffed. It looked fit for a princess. Which meant Dana Scully would probably find it deeply embarrassing. 

That was fine by him. Anything was better than her staying another night alone in that house. Hell, he’d rather she moved off the island entirely, than-

“Fox?” Mom called out. “Fox, come out here and help Dana with her bags.”

“What bags?” Fox asked, as Dana trooped past him and into the house. 

Dana didn’t bother answering. Why Mrs Mulder had expected her to have copious amounts of luggage was beyond her — they were a Navy family, and they moved frequently. Anything but the most necessary things went by the wayside. This meant, however, that Dana was laden down with a knapsack, suitcase, and train case when a broad-chested Alsatian jumped up, put both paws on her shoulders, and shoved. Her hands being full, she had no hope of fending him off. Instead she managed a pathetic yelp, and managed to pinwheel her arms uselessly, before crashing backward into a pair of hands that steadied her at the waist and a voice that spoke from above her head. 

“Hannibal! Down!” 

“Hannibal?” Dana asked, weakly. 

“See, he’s got that black patch around his eye,” Fox said, nodding. 

Hannibal preened, as though completely aware of being shown off. Fox did the same. Obviously he expected some appreciation for the cleverness and accuracy of his naming scheme. Dana was too busy watching the other dog, who circled Hannibal and sat beside him, tail wagging. This one looked to be the same size. Which is to say, as long as Dana was tall, if not even taller. 

“It’s not because he attacks like an elephant?” 

“Well, there is that,” Fox admitted. “Then again, they’re understandably confused by the presence of a real live gnome-”

Dana straightened and tried to shove away from him. Fox tightened his grip and hauled her back. “Don’t run, Dana. They like running.” 

“So you do know my name, after all.” 

“Very funny,” he sighed. Finally, his hands left her. Then they closed over the handles of her bags. “Come on. Skip! Nibbles! Onward!” 

Fox pushed through the house without pausing to point anything else out. Clearly, having grown up with the grandeur of a gingerbread Victorian complete with turrets and crenellations and stained glass windows, had diminished any impact it might have on him. But Dana had never seen so much house in one place. How did three people live here without an intercom system? And how did they not just stand at the windows all day, staring out at that view? The bay windows in the parlour granted an almost 180-degree vantage of both the Squib-something Pond (Mrs Mulder had mentioned it, and Dana had laughed because it sounded like a made-up word), on one side and the oak forests on the others. 

On some level, Dana was aware that the Mulders had money. She’d had no idea quite how much money until just now: the oak surrounds, marble fireplaces, cherry floors, damask wallpapers, and real lace curtains all spoke to it. The marble-topped telephone table at the stairs had a Tiffany lamp. She would have to stay in her room all the time, just to avoid breaking something expensive.

“Milk!” Fox called out. “Where’d you go?”

“You’re not supposed to call me that, any longer!” Dana insisted. 

“So c’mon over here and make me quit!” 

Dana tried to hear where he’d gone. But the acoustics of such a large, old house were strange, and he sounded like he might be miles away. She leaned one way, and saw a magnificent dining room papered in literal blue velvet. She leaned the other, and saw a mouthwatering library of built-in shelves and Chesterfield sofas. No wonder Fox always seemed so pleased with himself. Dana would be smug, too, if all this was hers. 

“I mean it,” he said, from behind her. Dana jumped. So did the dogs. She yelped. So did the dogs. Fox told them to be quiet. “C’mon. Don’t disappear on me, like that.” 

“I didn’t disappear,” she tried to say, as he took her by the shoulders and frog-marched her toward another room. “I was right there, the whole...” 

The room was gorgeous. A massive bed, Japanese lacquerware dresser and vanity, matching figural lamps in porcelain. The curtains were hung crookedly, but she could fix those herself later with the right tools and a sturdy step-ladder.

“If there’s something you don’t like-”

“I like it!” Dana squeaked. “I’ve just never had my own room, before.” 

“Really?” Fox pushed past her and opened another door. He flicked a light on, inside. “So, do you want to see the bathroom?” 

“The what?” she croaked. 

“There’s no shower, just a tub, and the toilet’s one of those old-fashioned chain-pull kind, but-”

“There’s a tub?” 

“Um, yeah? It’s a bathroom?” He scowled. “Are you feeling okay? Did you eat breakfast?” 

“I need to sit down.” Dana made for the bed. It was so tall off the floor her feet failed to touch. 

“Take your time.” 

Fox seemed bemused. He found a tiny little chair at the vanity and folded himself inside. The dogs curled at his feet. Dana’s feet curled underneath her. Then, panicking, she undid her shoes, and kicked them away, and watched them fall the frankly perilous distance from the bed to the floor. At which point, naturally, she became all too aware of how her socks needed mending. 

“So, this is weird,” Fox said, just as Dana asked, “So who’d you tick off to get stuck with this detail?” 

Fox frowned. “What do you mean?” 

“I mean, why did you agree to this?” Dana asked. “You don’t even like me.” 

Fox seemed mildly insulted. “I’ve never said that.” 

“You had your friends put rotten milk in my locker!” 

“And here I thought the budding chemist would appreciate an experiment in organic fermentation,” he said. “Speaking of which: are you aware that Mr Pfaster worships the ground you walk on? He talks about you to my class. Which is above yours, by the way. Your lab book is our example for perfect notes.” 

Dana felt sick. “Oh.” 

“And he’s always going on and on about how neat and tidy your lab station is. Your mise en place, or whatever. He’s, like, in love with you, or something.” 

Dana hoped not. Pfaster was weird. Enthusiastic about her abilities in a way that most teachers weren’t. At first, she thought it was nice. Now that she knew he was making her sound like a suck-up, though, she wasn’t so sure. 

“Wait, he hasn’t, like…” Fox’s frown deepened. Then he shot a quick look at the open door, nudged it mostly closed with a foot, and hissed: “He made a pass at you?” 

Dana shook her head. “Nothing like that. He did offer to drive me home, once. But it was raining, or it was about to, so he was probably just being nice.” 

“Pfaster doesn’t do nice. He’s a louse. He was making a pass.” Fox folded his arms and crossed his ankles and leaned way back in the chair. “What a creep. You’re all of, what, twelve?” 

Now Dana was the one scowling. “I’m fifteen! I turn sixteen in February!” 

It wasn’t her fault she was short. All the Scully women were somewhat short. Mom had been sick when she was born. She could barely eat anything. Naturally, Dana had come out somewhat puny. It just happened to stick, is all. 

“I’m afraid I’ll need to see a birth certificate, before I believe that one,” he said. 

Dana rolled her eyes. Then she slid her arms out of her knapsack, opened it, and retrieved the oil-cloth envelope with her birth certificate and other documents. She handed it over, just in time for Fox to say, “I didn’t really…” Then he squinted down at it, and up at her. “You were born on Hawaii? Where were you when the bombing happened?”

“Annapolis,” she said. “San Diego, before that. Lots of places, really.” 

“Thank God,” Fox murmured. He ran a hand over the back of his neck and continued staring at the paper. “Jesus, you could’ve…” 

Dana shrugged. “It’s part of living on base.” 

“That’s why you were okay with living alone? You’re, what, just used to the risk?” 

She gave him a sour look. “I was not at risk. Our neighbourhood was perfectly safe. Is perfectly safe, I mean. Technically, I still live there. Otherwise, we have to tell the Ration Board.” 

Fox made a face. “We do not.” 

“We do, too! I checked! If I live here longer than sixty days-”

“Sixty days?!” 

“Yes. Sixty days. Eight weeks. Assuming-” A lump formed in her throat. She swallowed it. “Assuming my mom’s away that long.” 

He sighed and held a hand out. “Let me see that.” 

Dana handed him her ration book. He read over the rules again, the same as Dana herself had done. Then he flipped forward. He eyed her, then the book. “Hang on. When did you apply for this one? Because you cannot possibly weigh that much.”

Immediately, Dana snatched for the book. Fox stood up and held it aloft. She jumped for it, uselessly. “Give it back!” 

“Are you even using these things?” he wondered, peering at the cards. 

“I’m frugal!” 

“Frugal, and furtive.” He held the book even higher and looked down at her, grinning pleasantly. “Isn’t that right? You shopped as little as possible, so the people redeeming your ration cards wouldn’t put it all together? No wonder you’re so short; you’re barely eating anything.” 

Dana folded her arms. She resumed sitting on the bed. “I was doing just fine alone,” she insisted. 

He rolled his eyes. “Why didn’t you tell somebody?” 

Dana lifted her shoulders and let them drop. “Who would I tell? And why? Mom comes home — came home — at night once visiting hours ended. And Daddy came by on weekends. But then Charlie did better when she stayed, and-” Again, the lump threatened to overtake her throat. She closed her eyes and sighed through her nose. “And anyway, now he’s dying. Once he’s dead, I’ll be out of your hair.” 

There was a long silence. Then weight settled a respectful distance from her on the bed. She heard a finger tap the ration book between them. “You shouldn’t give up. Doctors don’t know everything. You know, I was supposed to have a twin?” 

Her face shot up. “Really? You almost had a twin brother?” 

His eyes searched her face for a moment before he nodded. “Yeah. Mom lost him early on, but they didn’t find my heartbeat until she had a follow-up exam. It was a total fluke.” 

Dana wiped her face. “Your twin brother wouldn’t’ve hidden milk in my locker.” 

“Nope. He’d’ve hidden something way worse in there. Like snakes.” 

Dana lifted her nose in the air. “I happen to like snakes very much, actually.” 

Fox seemed deeply dubious of this idea. “You do not.” 

“I do too! They get a bad rap, but they’re very useful for killing vermin, and they just want to be left alone-”

“Oh, that’s why you like them. Now I get it.” 

Dana narrowed her eyes. “If you had a twin brother, what would his name be? Badger? Stoat? Mongoose?” 

Fox beamed. “Actually, I’m named Fox because I was curled up in one corner, and that’s how I survived,” he said, proudly. Presently, he directed his attention toward the door. “Right, Mom?” 

The door swung open wide. Behind it, Mrs. Mulder was pink. “Fox! I’ll thank you not to share those sorts of details with-” She cut herself off just before saying the words a complete stranger, or something similar. “Our guest. She’s had to absorb quite enough new information for one day, I should think. Show her something useful, like how the taps work. Or something nice, like the beach!” 

“Mom. It’s raining.” Fox held up Dana’s ration book. “Did you know that if Dana lives with us for over sixty days, we have to tell the Ration Board?” 

Mrs. Mulder gave her son a long-suffering look. “As a matter of fact, I did, Fox. It may surprise you to learn this, but your mother is a reasonably intelligent adult who pays attention to her responsibilities.” 

Fox ignored the chiding, and barrelled on: “She still has to apply separate from us, though; unless we, like, formally adopt her or something.” 

Dana snatched her book away from him. “You can’t adopt me; my parents are both alive!” 

“Be fun if we did, though, right?” 

“I suspect my big brother Bill wouldn’t think so, no.” 

“How big?” Fox asked. 

“He’s twenty-one, and he’s in officer training at Norfolk, and he’s got a lot of friends,” Dana said, and watched Fox go just a shade paler. 

“Wow. Impressive.” 

“He’s the one who taught me how to shoot,” Dana added, cheerily. 

Fox’s throat bobbed. “How nice.” 

“Very nice,” Mrs Mulder chimed in. “And illuminating. Fox, will you give me a minute before I go out and fetch dinner?” 

“Sure,” Fox said, but he didn’t move. 

“Now, please?” 

“Right. Yeah. Sure.” He shook his head as though to clear it. Then he rose and tapped the book in Dana’s hand. “Remember what I said, Scully.” 

Chapter Text

Mom led him all the way out the front door before she asked the question: “Is this going to be a problem?” 

Mulder made his face the soul of innocence. “What do you mean?” 

“You know exactly what I mean.” 

“No, I don’t. I think you’d better explain it, in detail.”  

Mom looked exhausted. “She’s a child, Fox.” 

She was fifteen, and would likely object strenuously to being described as a child. “I’m aware.” 

“Dana is very vulnerable. Her little brother is extremely ill. He is probably going to die, soon.” 

“Again, I would love to be told something I don’t know, here.” 

“She’s not a toy. She’s not a pet. She’s not a project. She’s a person.” 

“Yeah, a person who’s a lot safer in here than out there!” 

“Are you certain of that?” Mom retorted. 

Something ice-cold crept down his limbs from the spot where his heart had frozen over. “What exactly is it that I’m being accused of, here? You think, what, you’re gonna come home and she’ll be gone? Vanished?” He made a poof gesture with one hand. “Is that it?” 

Too late, his mother saw her mistake. He watched the realization unfold across her face. A curious elation filled him. What a breath of fresh air, to have all this out in the open. “No. Not at all. I didn’t mean it that way, Fox. I just meant that...things happen, and Dana could wind up getting hurt.” 

Mulder trusted his mother about as far as he could throw her. Clearly, his mother trusted him even less. This was the thing between them: deep down, although Teena Mulder would never admit it out loud, she believed that her son was a killer. And every single day, for the rest of their miserable lives, he would have to fight in vain through that suspicion of hers. Sometimes he wished she would just accuse him, already. Anything was better than this bullshit minuet they kept dancing, year after year. But Mulder could at least understand it on principle: the idea of killing a sibling was old as the Bible. Some big brothers hit their little sisters, or worse. That was a fact. That could be a crime of passion. 

Randomly selecting a girl you barely knew and deciding to hurt her? That was a whole different variety of evil. And apparently, his mother thought him eminently capable of it. 

“I would never hurt her,” he spat. “Ever.” 

“You can easily hurt her without ever having intended to.” Mom sounded sad. Rueful. “If nothing else, you might very well break her heart.” 

“Jesus Christ, Mom-”

“You’re eighteen and there’s a war on. You do the math, Fox.” Now Mom’s eyes were bright, and he felt a tiny bit bad. But only a tiny bit. “She’s already got an older brother about to ship out, and a little brother with one foot in the grave. Don’t give her someone else to lose, just because you’re...”

“I’m what?” he barked. 

“I don’t know. Bored. Lonely. Curious.” 

Mulder rolled his jaw. Bored, lonely, and curious? Well, if that wasn’t the pot calling the kettle black. Now he leaned against the doorframe. “Speaking of which: how is Carl, these days?” 

His mother shut her eyes. “Never mind,” she said, and made for the car. “Do what you want. But don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

“Bitch,” Fox muttered, as he slammed the door behind him. Dana flinched. Too late, he seemed to notice her there. “How much of that did you hear?” 

Too much. “Nothing!” Dana squeaked. 

“Why do I get the impression you were spying on me?” 

“I wasn’t!” 

“Because I don’t like people spying on me, Scully. I got quite enough of that six years ago.” 

Dana blinked. Was she supposed to know what that meant? “I don’t understand what you’re referring to.” 

“Cute,” he snarled, and made for the stairs. “You wanna be left alone? Great. Stay down here.” 

Dana watched him vault the stairs two at a time. The door slammed. Something crystalline made a soft tinkling sound. A leaded crystal lamp with pendants on it, swinging gently to and fro in the reverberation of his wrath. It sat on the telephone table by the stairs, next to the pad and pencil and receiver. Dana looked down at the dog. It seemed the one named Hannibal had deputized himself as her babysitter.

“Honest, I just wanted to tell them that the bath powder Mrs Mulder set out is way too nice for me,” she said. 

Hannibal huffed as though he thought very little of this opinion, and trundled back toward her new room. Dana followed. She did not have much, but that was no excuse for not unpacking it.

In his dreams, Mulder heard a soft knocking at his bedroom door. “Fox?”

“Yeah, baby?” he asked, half-asleep, out of habit. 

The knock sounded again. 

“Just come in,” he whinged, and rolled over to one side of the bed. 

Lightning shattered the sky above. Abruptly, Mulder was awake. The room was pitch-dark. The power was out. And he was lifetimes older than the boy who called his baby sister cute pet names. Which meant that the person standing outside his door was- 

“Fuck,” he muttered. “Hang on!” 

Mulder stumbled out of bed. Jumped into jeans. Winced. Fuck’s sake, she was in his dreams, apparently. He ripped the door open. The hall was dark, aside from one tiny flame, flickering above a lighter in Scully’s equally tiny hand.

“Hi,” he said, sounding altogether too pleased to his own ears. The housecoat she wore probably had something to do with it. And the wet hair. And the bare feet. And was he even really awake, right now? Because hot damn if-

“I thought I should get a fire going, but then the flue wouldn’t open, and...” She held up her right hand. Blood sheeted down from a wound along its outer edge. “If you could just point me to where you keep the bandages-”

“Holy Hell!” Mulder reached for her other hand, then thought better of it. There was no way she could navigate the landmine of his bedroom in the dark. “Hang onto me, okay?”

Mulder picked her up and heaved her over one shoulder. Then he brought her into his bathroom. Too late, he realized he’d need a flashlight; he had to dig around in the bedclothes before he found it. When he turned it on, Scully was ashen, holding her bleeding hand over his (shamefully filthy) sink.

“For the record,” she said, in a very worried voice, “I would like to point out that this incident occurred at your house, not mine.” 

“There’s that sassmouth from my Latin class,” he muttered. “Jesus, Scully, what did you do?”

“Is it bad?” Scully asked. “Can you see yellow globules? Because that means it hit the lipid layer, and-”

“Please stop talking, before I vomit all over your open wound.” Mulder ran the hot tap. “Let’s wash it, first. This is gonna sting-”

Scully stuck her hand under the water like it was nothing. Then she picked up his soap and started scrubbing. She examined the wound curiously, then flexed her fingers. Blood gushed freely. Mulder’s stomach turned. 

“I’m really lucky not to have lost nervous function,” she mused. 

“I’m about to have a nervous function, here, Scully.” 

She clicked her tongue. “You big baby. This is nothing. Go get me some gauze and tape and bandaging.” 

Having played football since freshman year, these were things Mulder had in abundance. Scully applied the gauze, then held it in place while Mulder taped it down. “Okay, keep applying pressure,” she told him, once it was in place. She held out her bloody hand. “I have to bind this.” 

Mulder took her hand in his. It was so ridiculously small; the cut that had caused the Gothic gouts of blood was barely the width of two of his fingertips. He pressed. She stiffened. “Lighter,” she said, wincing. He lifted his fingers and then replaced them. “No, even lighter than that. You’ll re-open the wound.” 

Mulder had a sudden flash of memory to do with Mrs Fowley. Instantly, he adjusted his fingers. “Perfect!” Scully chirped. 

“I’m very trainable,” he assured her. 

“I have no doubt,” she said, focusing on the white bandaging as she wrapped it carefully around her finger, and then across her hand.

“You should be a doctor.” 

“I agree,” she said, smiling faintly. “But everyone thinks I’ll get stuck in nursing.” 

“Nonsense. Dana Katherine Imilce Scully? Please.” 

“You know, Milk is a stretch, as nicknames go.” 

“Yeah, but Imilce was also Hannibal’s wife, so it was either christen you Milk, or tease you about being married to my dog.” 

Scully narrowed her eyes at him. Having joined them, Hannibal made a querying noise. Thunder rolled in the distance. Mulder decided to brazen it out.

“No, really! If we’d gotten a female, she would’ve been Imilce! Think about how much worse this all could have been!” 

Again, she showed him her bandaged hand. If she were his sister, he would have kissed all over her bandages by now. “You’re really selling it. Hold this dressing in place.” 

Mulder took hold of the dressing and attempted to process this odd, curveball of a thought about kissing her hand. When he thought of Scully, it was not of kissing her. Her hand, or anywhere else. He barely even considered what she might look like naked. Being somewhat confused about her age, doing so had seemed wrong. Also the common wisdom was that pursuing Catholic girls was wasted effort. Besides, Scully was just so tiny and delicate, and obviously a virgin, which meant having to be careful. And why in Hell would he want to imagine being careful? Or gentle? Or slow? Or some other sappy thing? Virgins were a bad idea, on principle. Fucking the more adventurous friends of Teena Mulder while their husbands were away had worked out just fine for him, thus far. There was certainly no need to change up his game now that he had signed his draft card.

Rather, when Mulder thought of Scully, he thought of finally impressing her, once and for all. Or otherwise making her lose control in some righteously vindicating and highly public way. It could be in anger, or fright, or shame. Just something, anything, to get underneath that seamless coating of ice she wore and smash it into huge, jagged, glittering pieces. Scully was just so perfect. And good. So perfectly good. And deep down, in the place where he knew which pitch would sail over home before it was even in the air, Mulder had suspected it was all smoke and mirrors. Nobody was that much of an angel. Maybe the Massachusetts in Mulder was just inherently suspicious of redheads with beauty marks, but he rather thought there was something of a witch, in Dana Scully. Not actual witchcraft, obviously, but she was hiding something. This whole thing about her lying to everyone about living alone? Proved that he was right. 

“What happened six years ago?” Scully asked, now. With her other hand, she dug in her hair. Mulder smelled something like orange blossom. Or possibly vanilla. A baklava smell, almost. There was something wholesome underneath it. Homey. Like bread rising. It increased as she tugged at her wet hair. Curls fell down. Every time they did, she wedged a bobby pin in her teeth.

“I’m still trying to figure that one out, myself. What is that? What are you doing?” Scully looked at him as though he were very dim. Then she made a great show of taking a bobby pin from her teeth and using it to clip the bandaging in place. She did it again from a different angle. “Oh. Right. But why does your hair smell like that?”

“I make my own setting lotion, with linseeds and rice water. And microscopic drops of a perfume that my grandmother gave me, which I do not otherwise care for. But it effectively covers the linseed smell.” She continued pinning the bandages.

“Why do you dislike the perfume she gave you?” It reminded him of a lemon cake from some long ago summer when Sam was still around. The frosting was scattered with candied pistachios and sugared violets. 

Scully seemed thrown by the question. He watched her try to be diplomatic. “The perfume itself is just perfume. I probably would have chosen a different one, if it were up to me, but my grandmother chose it. And she chose it because she said it was high time I became a real girl. So although the gift was well-meaning, it felt mean-spirited. Maybe I never gave Chantilly a real chance, for that reason.”

Chantilly. “Hang on. A real girl? Does she even know you? Is she blind?”

“The California Department of Motor Vehicles certainly seems to think so.”

Mulder immediately clamped his mouth shut. Nana Scully was probably very nice. And making fun of her was bad. Even if a blindfolded man at the bottom of the ocean could probably tell Dana Scully was all girl and then some. Not a normal girl, mind you. And not a weird one, either. Not queer. (A boy could dream, though.) But neither a sweater girl nor a fast one; neither a dame nor an icebox. Bookish but not priggish. Modest but not plain. Flawlessly polite, but-

The hand in his was trembling just slightly. Mulder looked up. Scully had folded her lips inside her mouth. Her eyes shone with tears. For a moment he thought she might be crying because she was actually sad. But then it came: the fizz of laugher in her nose, and then she was doubled over, sagging against his chest, cackling wickedly. “Oh, my God,” Mulder breathed. 

“Your face!” Scully shrieked. “You were petrified! I had you! Bigtime!”

He rolled his head back to the darkened ceiling. “Nana Scully can see just fine, I take it?”

“Uh-huh.” By now, Scully was sobbing with laughter. It shook her whole body. Disconcertingly, it really did sound a lot like crying.

“Hey. Scully. Are you crying? Or are you faking?”

Scully sniffled. “I have no idea. But that was my first real laugh since we moved here. So thank you.” To his everlasting surprise, she circled Mulder with her good arm and hugged him. “I mean it. I really needed that. Thank you.”

Of all the ways Mulder had imagined breaking through her habitual reserve, laughter had never once occurred to him. (To be fair, he would never have considered making the joke at his own expense. And trying to be funny almost never worked. See also: Pendrell. Poor sap was gonna blow a gasket, tomorrow, when he found out where Scully was sleeping.) Now, having witnessed it, Mulder understood this to be a criminal oversight on his part. He could have just made Scully laugh. This whole time, he could have just...made her laugh.

“Happy to break your dry spell,” Mulder said, roughly. He was abruptly very glad not to properly see himself in the mirror behind her, because the who in Hell did he think he was, right now?

(He was the guy with both his arms around Dana Scully, in the dark, literally three steps from his bed. That was who. Fox Mulder was that guy, now. Apparently. For however long she let him be that guy. When had he started holding her? He had no clue. But she was letting him do it. And it was nice. It was just really...nice. It was nice, having someone trust him in the dark.)

Naturally, it could not last. “You said people spied on you, six years ago. What did you mean?” 

Shit. Was this happening, now? It was happening, now. Mulder shut his eyes and tried to memorize every detail of the moment that he possibly could, before it burst like a soap bubble. Scully would shove him away, the moment she heard the truth. She would be afraid of him. Afraid to live with him, afraid to be in the same room, all of it. It was over before it even began. For some stupid reason, he had thought there would be more time.

“I was twelve when it happened. My sister was eight. She just disappeared out of her bed one night. Just gone. Vanished. No note, no phone calls, no evidence of anything. No body, either. Hence the nickname.” 

Scully blinked up at him in seeming confusion. Her sharp little chin balanced precariously on his chest, and her cheeks had actual colour, now. When had that happened? He would miss it, when she turned pale again with terror. “The nickname?” 

“Spooky,” he said. “Because everyone thought I did it. My parents were out at a neighbour’s, that night. I was the last one to see her alive. I put her to bed, went to my own room, and fell asleep. That was the last full night of sleep I ever had. Because when I woke up, she was gone. And she never came back. So I got arrested. A lot. Never charged, but booked on suspicion. I was questioned, and followed by detectives, and tailed by plainclothes officers. They dug up our yard, and they tapped our phones. Then they tapped the phones of everyone we knew. They started showing up at all my games. But that was fine, because I failed all my classes, which meant I could no longer play. Bill Patterson, the sheriff? Still thinks I did it. I see it on his face, every time he sits in the stands and watches me play. So, congratulations, Scully: you’re now sharing a home with a suspected child murderer.” 

Chapter Text

Dana’s jaw dropped, just in time for the lights to return. The power came back with a sudden screech, as though having been roused from a sound sleep. Dana jumped. Fox steadied her at the waist, the way he had earlier. It was easy, with his arms around her already. Wearily, Dana sagged against him again. He was being very nice about how tired she was.

“You okay? You’re shaking.” His arms hovered awkwardly in the air. “You know I didn’t do it, right? Because I understand if you want to, um, not be standing right there. Here. With me. Anymore. Given everything.”

Now Dana did pull back, but only to scowl up at him. Her good hand took hold of his t-shirt. “I already know you didn’t do it. I have several reasons for believing that. But even if I thought it were possible, Christ commands us to stand with the unjustly persecuted. And you were unjustly persecuted.”

This did not seem to have the rhetorical weight for Fox that it might have had for others. He lifted his brows. “You believe me just because God wants you to do the Christian thing?” 

Dana huffed air at her wet-set bangs. “No. Believing someone without question and standing in solidarity with them are two different things. But since you ask: countenancing unsubstantiated rumours and innuendo about someone, especially for a crime no one can prove, is the kind of thing Nazis do. And I am a patriot. It is the right and privilege of every American to make up her own mind when presented with the facts of a case. American men and boys are dying all over Europe and the Pacific, to make sure I keep that right. So I intend to exercise it.”

His eyes had taken on an almost feline green glow. “Oh, so now everyone who thinks I did it is actually a Nazi?”

“I have no idea. I’ve only lived here a little while. This island might be a secret hotbed of fifth-columnist activity.”

Fox vibrated. She had never seen him smile this way. He seemed to be chewing his lower lip just to keep it in position. “Okay. Duly noted. Now gimme the real reasons you have for believing me. Not your principles. Not the stuff that makes you sound like some kind of saint. Save that stuff for your priest, or your teachers, or your mom and dad. I want to hear your reasons for believing me. Your personal reasons. As an individual. Make your case, Miss Scully.”

What a strange way of putting it. “Fox, you were the last person to see Samantha alive. But you’re also quite capable of covering your own tracks, like with the milk in my locker. So even if you wanted to kill your own little sister, which I doubt, you still would’ve waited for the opportunity of a better alibi to present itself.”

His lashes fluttered. She envied his lashes a great deal. Dana felt like a figurative green-eyed monster staring up at a literal green-eyed definitely-not-a-monster. “...A better alibi, Miss Scully?”

“This is an island! You could have drowned her in full view of hundreds of beachcombers on the Fourth of July, and everyone would assume it was an accident! You could have done the same with anyone who lives here! Instead, you were the one implicated in the crime. Would you have done that to yourself? No. Ergo, it can’t have been you. QED.” 

Fox looked down at her hand clenched in his t-shirt. For some reason, he seemed to find the sight oddly fascinating. “Did you just come up with that drowning thing out of the air, or do you just really hate Nana Scully?”

“As I believe I made clear from the perfume story, she is not my favourite person.” Dana smoothed his shirt down and tried to undo some of the wrinkling. “I’m not trying to be cold-blooded or callous about what happened to your sister. I think it was awful. But you were very frank and plainspoken about what happened to you, so I thought I should be the same. Does that make sense?”

It took him a minute. Dana had the sense he might be looking at himself in the mirror, behind her. “Yeah, actually. It does. I guess I’m just used to people never talking about it, or tiptoeing around it. So your argument for my innocence is that I’m...too smart to commit a stupid crime?” 

“In so many words? Yes.” Dana peered doubtfully over her shoulder into his disaster of a sink. It was gross. Really gross. Her blood was probably the cleanest thing in there. Briefly, she imagined her bacteria going to war with his. “Also, you would’ve left behind trails of evidence. Multiple trails of evidence. So it would’ve been really easy for the police to make their case. If they had one. Which they clearly did not.” 

“I’m honestly not sure if I should be flattered or insulted.” Fox frowned. “Are you sure you aren’t kinda scared to be alone here with me? Because my impression is that most girls are.” 

Had Dana not just told him a story in which her own grandmother told her that she was not a real girl? “Why would I be scared? The same logic applies. If something happens to me, then you’ll be held responsible. In fact, you have even more to lose as a former murder suspect, because the police might try to make the other charge stick again. And having endured it before, you now know to take the threat of arrest very seriously. As such, nothing is going to happen to me, because you won’t let it.” 

He rolled his eyes. “Well, obviously, I would never let anything-”

“FOX?!”

A man’s voice thundered up the stairs. Hannibal barked. Scipio joined in. “Aww, Hell,” Fox murmured. “He wasn’t due back ’til tomorrow, I thought.” 

“FOX!” Dana heard pounding footsteps on the creaking stairs, and the dogs barking in the bedroom, and then the bedroom door banging open. “Why is there-” An older gentleman paused, flummoxed, and stared at Dana. And her hand. “I’m sorry,” he said, blinking in confusion. “Do I know you?” 

“Dana Scully, Dad. Dad, Dana Scully.” Fox lifted her injured hand. “She tried opening the flue. By herself.” 

Mr Mulder lifted his brows, which emphasized his widow’s peak. “That certainly explains the rather alarming trail of blood, going up the stairs.” 

“The what?” This was not how Dana had hoped to start her time with the Mulders. She had to clean it up. Dana tried to bolt. 

Fox grabbed her around the ribs with one arm. That arm was annoyingly strong. “Trails of evidence, huh?” 

“I’m sorry?” Mr Mulder asked. Then he shook his head. “Never mind. What are we still doing in this absolutely disgraceful washroom? Fox, you should consider it a minor miracle this gentle creature has yet to faint.”

“Gentle?! She has you snowed, Dad.” Fox raised his hand and covered Dana’s eyes with it. His palm was ridiculously warm. Similarly ridiculous was how his thumb and middle finger could easily bracket her temples. When he pulled, the back of her head tucked inside his shoulder. This was probably how trained falcons felt, most of the time, Dana decided. “C’mon Scully. Avert thine aspect.” 

“Mulder-”

“Do not give into his naming conventions, young lady,” Mr Mulder said. Already, his voice was far ahead of her. “The whole world can call him by his surname. The people in this household use his given name.” 

“You know I already saw the mess, right? Fox?” Dana asked, stumbling forward in front of him when he started walking. 

“You saw nothing. Besides, how do you know I’m hiding a mess? Maybe I’m hiding a surprise for you.” 

“Is the surprise tetanus? Because your bathroom probably gave me tetanus.” 

Mr Mulder laughed, and his son made an indignant noise. “Hey! Whose side are you on, anyway?” 

“Maybe I should call you Cookies, to go with Milk,” Dana suggested. 

“This is Milk?” 

The light between Fox’s fingers changed, and a door clicked shut behind them. Dana pried his hand away to give him a look. Fox gave her a double-take, as though he had intended to keep her blinkered indefinitely. Before he could protest, she asked: “Why does your dad know that name?” 

“I pictured someone taller, personally,” Mr Mulder said, as he descended the stairs. 

“Really?” Dana asked, delighted. 

“Much taller,” Mr Mulder added. “Fox makes you sound very intimidating.” 

“That’s because he’s a big baby,” Dana informed him. 

“Yeah, laugh it up, Scully; I know where you live, now.” 

“You’ve known where she lives for weeks,” Mr Mulder said, absently, and turned on the landing. 

In Dana’s mind, several different dominoes all fell together in a neat line, clacking against one another with a cool, complete certainty. She turned on her heel. Fox took one wary step back. “Oh, isn’t it nice to be suddenly so highly regarded?” 

This was bad. Very bad. Beyond bad. 

“We should check out those bloodstains,” Mulder said.

“The dogs got them!” Dad was simply bound and determined to be unhelpful, it seemed. “Good lad, Scipio.” 

Scully’s eyes had turned to ice chips. “We’ll get to the triteness of Hannibal and Scipio, later.” She stepped forward, away from the stairs, forcing Mulder to take a step back toward his room. “What’s all this about knowing where I live?” 

“This is an island! Twenty miles wide! Everyone knows where you live!” 

Clearly, Scully was having none of it. She shook her head and smirked up at him. Her arms folded. “That’s funny. Your mother needed directions to my house.” 

Shit. Mulder was very close to being made, here. “Byers delivers your paper, and I help him on the route, sometimes.” 

This was true. But it was also true that Mulder had never really helped with the route until Byers told him that Scully had paid for the month up front. And that she was wearing summer clothes in the end of October, leaving her, as Byers so delicately put it, visibly cold. Frohike had asked about the size of her nipples; Mulder had slapped him upside the head. Langley had then asked if her parents were both still alive, because his own mother was gone. And Mulder had flashed on her Latin family tree, which had seemed awfully crowded, but was rather at odds with the echoing empty house that Byers described. He should call the guys, soon. By now, they were probably dying of curiosity.

“Why are you smiling?” Scully demanded. 

“I’m...happy you’re here with us?” 

Scully made a sour face. Her expression was likely meant to make her look very cross. What it did instead was pucker her lips just slightly and hollow out her cheeks a little. It made that little chocolate chip above her lip stupidly visible. “Pull the other one, jack.” 

God help him, if Scully started talking like a gun moll from the pulps, Mulder was done for. “I mean it! What if the power went out at your place and you were all alone?” 

“Then I’d use a flashlight like everyone else, and I wouldn’t have cut my hand open!” 

“You could’ve hurt yourself just as easily there as here,” Mulder said. “What if you, I don’t know, stepped on some broken glass in the dark?” 

“Some of us actually pick up after ourselves when we break things, so that wouldn’t be a problem for me,” she informed him, tartly. 

“What if you pried open a crate and the crowbar got stuck and you ripped your hand open on a raw nail?” 

For just a second, the corners of her mouth turned down. Scully was disappointed at being outwitted. But just as quickly, her scowl returned. “How do you know I’m still unpacking?” 

Because it’s November in Massachusetts, and you won’t wear a real coat, and it’s driving me out of my fucking mind, Mulder thought, with startling clarity. Until this very moment, he’d been entirely unaware that this bothered him. Or that he’d even noticed it as a detail. But there it was, all the same. 

“Byers said he saw the crates and boxes,” Mulder lied. 

(Was it a lie? Really? Surely Byers had mentioned it. The fact that Mulder had started biking the long way home from football practise and once watched her in his field glasses from on top of the hill and saw her breaking down a crate into kindling all alone, that had nothing to do with it. The fact that he started noting whether there was a car in the driveway and at what hour, well, that was just being a good citizen. There were all sorts of pamphlets telling regular folks on the homefront to keep their eyes open. Right?)

“When you paid for the papers, I mean,” Mulder elaborated. 

Scully frowned. “Oh.” She sounded (please God) somewhat mollified.

“Children?” Dad’s voice rang out from downstairs. “I’ve opened the flue. Fox, bring Dana down here so she can warm up.” 

“Coming!” Mulder took her elbow and steered her toward the stairs. “Think of it this way, Scully. Being on the disabled roster gets you an extra week on all your assignments.” 

“Oh. Right. Ow.” When Mulder turned, Scully had (with an innocence that was honestly alarming) pulled up her flannel housecoat to her knee. The skin there was livid. “Wow. Guess I fell harder than I thought.”

“You fell?” It was official: Dana Scully was a walking, talking insurance claim. 

“Well, when the lights went out, I was in the bathtub.” She said it with some asperity, as though he should have put all this together by now. “So it was dark. And slippery. So I fell.” 

“Oh, and I’m sure that never could have happened, at your place.” Jesus Christ. Mulder picked up her left arm and looped it around his waist, and rested his right around her shoulders. Then he started matching her halting, careful steps down the stairs. “Did you hit your head at all?” 

“No, just my pride.” 

Mulder chuckled despite himself. Scully was a good sport. A pain-in-the-neck sassmouth little brat, but a good sport. “I’ll get you some ice for it, once we’re downstairs.” 

“Thank you.” Her head listed toward him, wearily. Mulder squeezed her shoulder by reflex. His thumb rolled over the bone there. It felt like the tip of a wing. “Sorry to be such a bother.”

“Shut up,” he said, heavily. 

“And I’m sure your room is very nice.” 

“It’s a hole. One look and you’d be reduced to gibbering madness, like in a Lovecraft story.” 

“Finally, he admits it,” Dad said, wryly. He gave Mulder a speculative look. One that told Mulder he was fooling exactly nobody. “I almost sent up a search party.” 

“The delay was my fault,” Scully piped up. Bless her. She might not be his little sister, but she was a little sister, and so she knew when to take the heat. “I hurt my knee getting out of the tub in the dark, so I had to go slow.” 

“Oh...” Mulder watched as his father quickly re-assessed the scenario. “That does explain some things. Fox, go get some ice. And perhaps a thimbleful of sherry. Our darling girl needs fortifying, I should think. Poor lamb.” 

Dad’s English mother always jumped out, whenever he was charming someone. Gallantly, Dad offered Scully his arm. He started steering her over to the fire. Then he looked over his shoulder at Mulder, winked, and jerked his head toward the kitchen. 

Between the fire and the sherry and her empty stomach, Dana was asleep in minutes. She awakened to the sound of a door slamming somewhere near the back of the house, followed by a wave of barking and yipping. Panicking for no good reason, she sat bolt upright and promptly banged her wounded hand on the divan. This precipitated a smothered curse, and then whimpering, and then a soft, knowing scoff of a laugh from somewhere below her in the dark. A hand reached up and across and briefly circled her ankle.

“It’s okay. Just the dogs. You’ll get used to it. Really.” Dana groped around with her left hand. Fox sat on the floor in front of the divan, if the position of his hair was any indicator. (Apparently he was just waiting alone in the dark with her. No: the big burled walnut radio was glowing, but its amplifier was set very low.) Fox grabbed her good hand and put it on his shoulder. “Mom got Chinese food from Boston House, I bet. But Dad was due back tomorrow night, not tonight, so they need to have a fight about that outside, before we can eat.” 

None of those words made sense to Dana in that order. A headache had snapped wide behind her eyes. Like a sail gathering wind it was now full, propelling a vessel of agony up between her sinuses. Why would Chinese food come from a place named for Boston?  Moreover: “Why should they fight about your dad being home a day early? Isn’t that just a nice surprise?”

“You’d think so, wouldn’t you? And yet.” His voice dripped scorn. Was he referring to something else Dana that was supposed to understand? Something she had missed? Her own mother would be delighted by such a turn of events. At least, she used to be delighted by them. It was harder to tell, since they had moved to the Vineyard. “For future reference, it’s best just to let them have it out. Don’t get in the way. It makes no difference.”

“It’s probably my fault, for throwing a spanner in the works.”

Again, Fox reached up and over for her foot. This time, he flicked her little toe with his middle finger, hard, as though killing a fly. Dana hissed and folded her knee up to yank the foot away. “Don’t say things like that.” 

“But she must’ve had other plans, and-”

“Sure she did. Who cares? We have a guest. You’re more important. She should be feeding you, feeding us I mean, right now, instead of fighting with Dad or...” Gesturing vaguely, his arm was black against the pale night blue of the window. “Other stuff.”

Now Dana could return the favour. She flicked Fox in the ear, hard, the way he had her. The reaction was not nearly so intense as she hoped; he seemed to feel her coming and rolled his head away at the last second. “Be nice. Your mom was already very helpful to me, today. She called the milkman and the power company and the water authority for me. She said it would sound like a prank, if I was the one calling and asking things to be shut off.” Fox made a non-committal noise. “And then she called the landlord and said she expected us to get our full deposit back, in cash, by the end of the month, so I could have money for Christmas. We just have to find a place to store all the crates by then.”

“Dad can keep ’em in the stables. It’s padlocked. Fireproof.”

“The stables?”

“You didn’t know? This place used to be a horse farm. Then the war happened, and nobody was around to work the farms, so nobody was buying horses. And after that was the Spanish flu, so...” He shrugged. “Mom and Dad are living the American dream. They bought an old, dark house for a song, because it’s probably haunted as Hell.”

Dana sighed. “Fox, are you trying to scare me, my first night here?”

“I don’t know; is it working?”

“No. Ghosts aren’t real. Why should I be afraid of something that isn’t real?”

“Oh, so ghosts are fake, but the Holy Ghost is real? Please.”

Dana sat up behind Fox. She leaned down over him, and he looked up. In the dark, she could just barely make his face out. Her unpinned hair fell, and he seemed to take a deeper breath than usual. “Tease me all you want, but bring God into it one more time, and I will beg your mother to make you take me to Mass. Every Sunday. At nine a.m. In Woods Hole. A whole ferry ride away.”

“You wouldn’t dare,” he murmured. 

“Try me,” Dana said, brightly. “Keep it up, and I’ll throw in a request for confession, on Thursday nights. Or, even better: Bible study, on Wednesdays.”

“No soap,” he said softly, shaking his head. Doing so pushed him back a little against her knees, like a cat asking for his ears to be scratched. “I don’t buy it. You ain’t got it in you.”

Dana arched a brow in a way that usually won arguments, when her mother did it. “You don’t think your parents want their moody, broody boy attending church on a regular basis? Because I can ask them, over dinner. That way, we can plan the weekend accordingly.”

The fire made his teeth glitter in a more animal way, when he grinned. “Can we go back to the part where you told me I can tease you all I want?”

Dana was not to be deterred. She straightened, and stretched. “You’re missing a big opportunity, here, Fox.”

“Oh, yeah? How’s that?”

“Well, I might be wrong, but...suddenly converting to a new religion does tend to annoy one’s parents. The lives of the saints are full of stories that say so. You could really drive them crazy, and they couldn’t say boo about it.”

"Hot damn." He sounded like he seen a shooting star. “Dana Scully’s a sadist. A real, dyed-in-the-wool sadist.”

“I am no such thing,” she sniffed. “It is not sadistic to care about the fate of your immortal soul, Fox.”

“Be honest, though. You love to twist the knife.”

Dana considered. “Draining a wound sometimes means opening it, first. Which, yes, can also involve using a scalpel to make a star-shaped incision, so-”

“Stop.” Fox held his palms to his ears. “I give. You win. No more God stuff. Just please stop with the medical details. Seriously, I hate those.” He shuddered.

“Yeah, ’cause you’re a big baby, like I said.” She rolled her shoulders, then her neck. The latter crunched unpleasantly. Fox hissed in sympathy. “Sorry I fell asleep.” 

“Don’t be. You earned it.” 

“How long was I out?” 

“Not long. Stop worrying.” 

“But if I sleep too long now, I won’t wake up for school tomorrow-”

“You’re not going to school, tomorrow. Dad said.” 

“Oh.” That was nice. And probably for the best, given everything. “I suppose it’d be better to go back Monday, when my hand is in better shape and I can actually take notes.” 

“Yeah, Dad says you might need stitches. Mom can take you to hospital tomorrow. I’ll come back at lunch with your homework. After that I have football, though, and we’re taking the ferry to the game, so I won’t be back ’til late.” 

“Oh.” This deflated Dana more than she’d expected. “Well, good luck.” 

“Thanks. I’ll tell Skinner you said hi.” 

This brought up another of her concerns. “Um...if you’re getting my homework, doesn’t that mean telling my teachers about all this?” 

“Well, yeah, Scully; I can’t very well ask for your homework out of curiosity, can I?” 

He was still irritable. “Sorry,” Dana blurted. 

Now he sighed. “I’m not mad, just...” He reached up blindly, looking for her foot. None was there. Dana returned her good hand to his shoulder. Fox made a little huffing noise as he re-positioned it just so, as though her hand were an epaulet on a uniform that had gotten mussed, and now he had to fix it so he would meet regulation dress code. “Just let me handle it. It doesn’t have to be a big thing.” 

Dana rather doubted that a sudden change of address was not a big thing. Not least because it would confuse her teachers and the school as a whole. “Wait, does this mean your dad signs my report cards, now? And permission slips?” 

“I can sign both of those, thank you very much,” Fox said. “I’m eighteen.” 

“You are not.” 

“I am so. October birthday, so I was already older than most of my class. Plus I had to make up a year, on account of almost going to prison in the sixth grade.” He frowned down at her hand. “Hey, watch the merchandise.” Fox covered her hand again. His thumb swept the back of it like a needle on a meter. “Sure you’e right-handed? ‘Cause your left has a Hell of a grip.” 

“Doctors have to use both, so I try to use both.” 

“You should go out for softball. I think the church league is co-ed, now, what with so many guys being overseas. And at your height, you have a tiny little strike zone. Learn how to swing left-handed, and you could be a real nightmare for pitchers. Might be an asset.” 

“I’m not allowed to play sports.” 

“Why? Does it offend your mom’s delicate sensibilities?” 

“Uniforms cost money,” Dana reminded him. “And we never live anywhere long enough.” 

Fox made a sputtering noise. “Well, okay, yeah, sure, fine, granted. But I mean, if you had the money, the auxiliary base is here. It’s in use. Your dad isn’t just gonna up and leave anytime soon.” 

“It’s not his decision, Fox,” Dana said, softly. 

“Well, but, I mean, that’s just...” He gestured wildly with his other hand. “That’s crazy. He can’t just...I mean, you can’t be expected to...” 

“Move every eighteen months? Like normal?” 

“Yeah! That! I guess. Jesus. Sorry. Not trying to blaspheme, just...” He shook his head and sighed through his nose. The sigh deepened and went to his chest; she felt it there under her fingers.

“Why are you so angry?” 

“Because it’s not fair!” Fox’s voice cracked. Again, he threw his head back again the divan.

“Fox, I doubt the idea of fairness holds much water with the Nazis.”

“Stop calling me-” Under her palm, his shoulder rose and fell with another sigh, this one short and bullish. “This is revenge for calling you Milk, isn’t it?” 

“Possibly.” 

“What’s a name like Dana all about, anyway?” 

“Pearls of wisdom.” Mr Mulder slid open the oak doors to the den. Light flooded the room. Dana squinted at his silhouette. Fox smothered a curse word. “The most beautiful and perfect pearl. That’s what it means in Arabic. And in Persian, it means wisdom. Is that not the case, my dear?” 

“I’m named after my uncle,” Dana told him. “My dad’s younger brother. He died of whooping cough while my dad was in middle school. Mom and Dad figured the name worked for a boy or a girl.” 

“Then your husband shall simply have to endure it, when you keep your surname in Uncle Dana’s honour.” Mr Mulder winked. “You can even tell him it was all my idea.” 

Dana beamed. She liked Mr Mulder. “Thank you. I’ll be sure to say so, if it ever comes up.” 

“I assure you, it will.” Mr Mulder gave her a hand up and tucked her arm into his. “Sooner rather than later, I don’t wonder.” 

“She wants to be a doctor,” Fox put in, from behind them, as though correcting his father on some point of order. 

“Oh, and doctors don’t marry?” Mr Mulder patted her hand. “Please ignore him.” 

“I usually do,” Dana told him. 

“She usually does.” Even without looking, Dana could hear the line of Fox’s mouth.

Mr Mulder led Dana into the beautiful blue dining room, which was lit with actual candles, and smelled like garlicky, gingery heaven. (Dana missed California. She missed California with a bone-deep passion. Much of this passion had to do with the fact that the cheapest places to eat also knew how to season food. All the blue crabs in Maryland could not make up for the loss of moving from the Land of Pozole Rojo to the Land of Boiled Dinner.) She gave an appreciative sigh so deep that Mr Mulder chuckled at it. 

“Teena, I believe this dear child is hungry,” Mr Mulder said. 

Dana nodded eagerly. “I am; thank you so much for-”

The phone had scarcely rung when Fox said he’d get it. He bolted for the hall. Mr Mulder pulled out a chair for Dana. Mrs Mulder smiled at the way he did this; Dana suspected it reminded her of their courtship. Then Mrs Mulder said something about how it was nothing, and only appropriate they celebrate the presence of a guest in the house, and how long it must’ve been since Dana had a real meal, and-

“Scully.” Fox hung in the doorframe. His breath came light and quick. He’d run. “It’s your mom. At the hospital.” 

A cold wash of terror wiped out both her headache and her hunger. Her eyes filled. Already? Dana thought. She’d just barely gotten her mind around this change, and now her little brother was dead. Mechanically, she rose from her seat and went out to the little telephone table by the stairs, where the phone rested off its hook. There were two seats; she took the one nearest the stairwell and sat. Vaguely, she was aware of Fox hanging by the other chair; his father said something and then their voices faded as she mustered the strength to say: “Mom?” 

Chapter Text

Dad tried hustling him out of the hall and back into the dining room. “You eat.” 

Over Dad’s shoulder, Scully was tucking herself into the chair, as though folding herself up tighter would make her grief smaller, too. “But-”

“She needs her mother, Fox,” Dad said, sotto voce. “You were afraid for her living alone, and now she isn’t. Take your win and eat your dinner. I’ll send her back just as soon as I can. Mrs Scully and I doubtless have things to discuss.” 

Mulder seethed all the way back to the dining table. Very carefully, he angled his seat so that he could still hear something of what was happening in the hall. Never had Chinese food looked so unappetizing.

“How did she sound?” Mom asked. 

It took him a moment to understand who precisely his mother meant. “I don’t know. I have no basis for comparison. I’ve never met Mrs Scully, before.” 

His mother rolled her eyes. He watched a thousand different things drift over her face before she finally sighed and reached for a serving spoon. When the spoon dinged harshly on her plate as she served herself some crab fried rice, he finally said: “What? Out with it.” 

Mom took her sweet time laying the spoon aside and reaching for some honey walnut shrimp. “Has it ever occurred to you, Fox, that you might be a little further along in your quest if you had simply decided to be the girl’s friend, instead of tormenting her?” 

“I didn’t torment her!” (He’d totally tormented her.) “And I don’t have a quest!” (He definitely had a quest. Just not the one his mom thought he was on.) “And anyway, I am being her friend. This is me, being her friend.” (Yesterday, of course, this was not the case. Yesterday, they barely spoke to one another. Today, he helped bind her wounds. Today, he made her laugh. Unintentionally, sure, but still. She thanked him for it. Was that not friendship? Or at least the start of one?)

His mother levelled a glare at him that felt like a pillow pressed over his sleeping face. “Let me tell you something, Fox. Unlike you, I have met Mrs Scully. Mrs Scully is a kind, decent, hard-working woman, who’s being pulled six ways from Sunday. And she is trusting us with her little girl. Even though we’re strangers. That is how bad things are. And if you think you can just-”

“What?” The word sounded more like a wail as it echoed down the hall. “What do you mean? When? For how long? What does Daddy say?” 

“Goddamn it,” Mulder hissed. 

Scully’s voice rose in pitch. “But why not? What happened?”   

“Oh, dear.” Mom dismissed him with a nod. “Go.” 

Mulder was out of his seat so fast it almost tipped over.

“And you just believed that? How can you do this? What if-”

He jogged down the hall and was forestalled by Dad’s silent, raised finger. “Just give her one more minute,” Dad murmured. 

“Dad, c’mon, she’s-” 

Scully was in agony. Her face was a ruin. She kept staring at her wounded hand. Mulder wondered if she had gotten a chance to tell her mother about it. Her mother had sounded like she was in a big rush. “You mean you...?” Scully drew in a shaky breath. She hid her face in her knees. “Mom, what is really going on, here? You sound really strange. Are you sick, too? Is something else happening?” 

“Damn it,” Dad whispered. 

“But how long?” Scully shrilled. “When will you know? Why can’t you tell me? Mom! No, I will not calm down! Why won’t you tell me the truth?” 

“Now,” Dad said, and led the charge. He did a quick, soundless Fred Astaire-style dance step that involved rescuing the receiver from Scully’s white-knuckled grip, while also pushing the chair in Mulder’s direction. Bedroom, Dad mouthed, and pointed briefly in that direction, twice in quick succession, with his first two fingers, as though guiding Mulder silently through a trench. Mulder did not need telling twice. 

Scully hardly seemed to have noticed she’d moved. Nor did she seem to really understand when Mulder, finally solving the puzzle of her fear-twisted body, looped her left arm over his shoulder and stood her up. Old muscle memories took over; he snagged her under the knees and lifted from his own. For years, he’d thought that he would never forget the exact weight and tension of Sam’s sleeping body as he carried it to bed. But this other weight seemed to have re-balanced the scales. Dana Scully sagged against him like a ragdoll. If her ration book was ever right about her weight, then it sure as Hell was wrong, now. Hitching her up higher in his arms, Mulder had the sudden awful thought that maybe her lunch at school was her only meal of the day. And not because she was so damn frugal or patriotic, but just because she was sad. Six years ago, his mother had dropped two dress sizes in two months. Even now, Teena Mulder still treated food as a sort of tangential concern, as though Samantha had taken the very concept of hunger itself with her when she vanished. 

“I can walk,” Scully said, miserably. 

Somehow Mulder got the door to her room open. “I know. But I missed practise today, so let’s just call it good. All right?”

Mulder crashed them onto the bed. Scully stayed in his lap while they sat in the dark. Something in Mulder which he could not name, but which had not been at rest all day, now settled abruptly into place. If asked, he might have said it had to do with Dana Scully not being on the phone with her mother, which clearly caused her pain. Really, it had to do with the weight of her head against his chest and the warm curl of her legs across his own and her snuffling breath on his neck. Those points of contact meant he knew where she was for certain. No doubts, no questions, no anxiety. For a minute he just rocked her there. Truly, he could not say who between them was the more soothed by this. But she did not leave, and he did not let go, and his father and her mother kept up their conversation for longer than Mulder might have otherwise predicted. Long enough that Mulder knew the news could not possibly be any good.

“Do you wanna tell me?” 

Her voice was a croak. “They found a bed for Charlie at a hospital for children in Boston. The doctors there are better equipped to help him. So Mom is leaving. With him. Tomorrow. She’s staying out there. In Boston. Indefinitely.” Her breath trembled. “She lied to me, Fox. Her letter said she was staying on the island, in the hospital. But the moment I agree to stay here, my very first night, she suddenly decides to jump ship. All along, this whole time, she was just waiting for an excuse to leave me!”

Shit. “They do that,” Mulder said. “Parents. Sometimes. Lie, I mean.”

“But this required plotting! Premeditation! Malice aforethought!”

Abruptly, Scully began coughing. Her tears were going down the wrong pipe. Mulder ran a hand up and down her back. He continued rocking her a little, trying to hush her down. Like Sam, after a nightmare. For some reason, it was always his bed she came to. Even when she went down just fine, if she woke up for any reason, she wandered into his room instead of returning to her own. Sometimes at night he swore he felt her slight weight there on the bed, and the ghosts of her little knees digging into his kidneys. For years he had complained of exactly this phenomenon. Then it vanished overnight. Now he would do anything, anything, to feel it again for real.

“Maybe she did plan it this way. But I doubt she wanted to leave you, Scully. I don’t think she could ever leave you on purpose, like that.”

“Yes, she could,” Scully insisted, with complete confidence. “She could send me away with no trouble at all.”

“Send you away?” Mulder caught himself holding her more tightly. Scully made no complaint. He doubted she even noticed. “That’s not what happened. She didn’t send you away.”

“Yes, she did. She sent me here. She sent me to stay here so she could-”

“Scully, no. You don’t get it. This...” Damn it. Speaking of lies and plots, Mulder was in them up to his neck. “This wasn’t her idea, you coming here.”

He felt her wet lashes blinking out her confusion. “It wasn’t? She didn’t ask you?”

“No. We asked her. Or anyway Mom did, I guess. Formally, I mean.” That much was true, at least. But the plotting, the planning, the observation, the investigation, the oh-so-casual questions to Skinner and his mother, those were all Mulder. And so was the request that Mom never inform Scully of this. Because the truth made him sound like a huge creep. Because Mulder was a huge creep. “We offered, Scully. So if you’re mad, be mad at us.”

Be mad at me, Mulder thought. Be furious with me. Tear a strip off me. Rip me apart. Do whatever you want, just please never go back to that house all by yourself.

“You...” She sounded as though he had made an error in his Latin syntax. “You wanted me here? That makes no sense. You don’t even like me!”

This was true, Mulder realized. He did not like her. Dana Scully was a prickly pain in his ass. She was a mouthy little know-it-all brat who out-scored him on every test, and was constantly convinced that she knew better than him. She was a quietly wicked, deeply vindictive alleged goody two-shoes who had every teacher on the island wrapped around her little finger. But Mulder had moved Heaven and Earth to get her safe under his roof, because that moment her eyes lit on him in Latin class felt like discovering an entirely new species. Like she was some sort of missionary from another planet who had studied books about Earth very closely, but had no practical experience of the place, and Mulder was the only one who had recognized her as an alien. Her brief time in his home had done nothing to dissuade him of this. In fact, the more time he spent with her, the more mysterious she became. As of this evening, Mulder felt like one of those tragic mathematicians getting fitted for a straitjacket over a single un-solved equation. 

No, I do not like you, he thought of saying. We have nothing in common. We are not friends the way other people are friends. But you are also the only person I failed to figure out inside of five minutes. Which, for some reason, means I need to know where you are every minute of the goddamn day. Trust me, this is just as inconvenient for me as it is for you. More so, in fact.

What he finally said was: “Oh, and it somehow makes more sense that your mom cooked up a whole scheme to get you to move in with Spooky Mulder? Given my multiple arrests, I am not exactly considered prime child-minding material.” 

“Stop saying things like that.” With lazy but unerring accuracy, Scully reached for a nipple of his, and twisted it like it was a goddamn bottle cap. Screaming red hurt radiated from his chest to his shoulder and down his spine. Mulder jumped about a foot in the air from a seated position, dumping her off his lap. 

“Sweet mother of fuck, Scully!” It would be bad if he howled into her pillows, right? Christ, Mulder would feel this for days, probably. Long after the bruise faded. Scully was a sadist. A natural-born one. “Where in Hell did you learn how to do that?”

“Catholic school.” Scully folded her legs up to her. “And I think Mom would like you, if she met you. Provided you apologized about the milk.”

“Well, you just killed any plans I might have had to apologize. Next time, just slap me like a normal girl would.”

(Mulder maybe, on some level, wanted her to do the same again on the other side. For the sake of symmetry. With the hurt fading to a dull pulsing throb, he now found her attack to be oddly elegant. Scully had known just what to do, and had done it without hesitation. Worse, it worked. His entire train of thought was successfully derailed. For one white-hot second of blinding pain, she was the only other creature on Earth.)

“What have you been doing that makes normal girls want to slap you?” When he tried to protest, she hugged her knees and continued: “I just have no idea why Mom refused to tell me about her plans. I would have understood. All she had to do was tell me the truth.”

“I know. She should have.” This was a thing with Scully, apparently. Arguing the principle instead of indicting the betrayal. Re-iterating the rules instead of explaining the hurt. “But Scully, maybe your brother really was on a waiting list or something, and your mom just forgot to mention it. Or she might have been afraid to get your hopes up. You last saw her when? Days ago? Weeks ago?”

“She called me every night,” Scully said, defensively.

“Either way, the win here is that Charlie is seeing better doctors. Right? Maybe the doctors in Boston will catch something that everyone else missed.” It took her a moment, but Scully nodded. “What’s your dad got to say about all this?” 

She hugged her knees closer. “That was the other thing. Mom says she can’t reach Dad. She tried to call him at the base a bunch of times, to tell him about Boston and about where I am, but they wouldn’t let her talk to him.” 

“What? Why?” Mulder reached up and flicked on a lamp. Instantly the room glowed a sort of peachy pink. “Because he’s out on maneuvers?” 

It took him a moment to understand she was hiding her swollen face from him. “They wouldn’t say. But she plans to leave anyway.” She reached blindly; Mulder took her injured hand before she hit it again on something. “Fox, I think...I think my mother might be leaving my father!” 

That was a big intuitive leap to make. “Has your mom said something about that, recently?” 

Scully wavered. Literally. Her body teetered from side to side. “Well...” She was hedging. “If she were planning to leave him, isn’t this one way she might try? Pack up for a new city, get a new apartment so she can stay near the hospital, and then send for me later? Like luggage?” 

Mulder winced. He reached over and flicked Scully on the ear, hard, the way she had tried to do with him earlier. She seemed to barely notice. “Stop saying things like that,” he echoed. “Have they been unhappy?” 

There was a long moment before she answered, during which he felt progressively more ill at ease. “Yeah. You could say that.”

“Fighting a lot?” Again, she nodded. Goosebumps unfolded down his neck and over his arms. There were a few reasons a woman might quietly move to another city with her youngest in tow, without telling her daughter until the last minute. In fact, it was exactly the sort of thing she might do if she were terrified of her husband. Stashing said daughter in the home of a State Department investigator was another. “Scully, has he ever put hands on you?” 

She scoffed. “He would have to be around, for that.” 

“Answer the question.” 

“He, um...” Scully took a long time deciding how honest to be, it seemed. “He hit my sister. Melissa. Knocked her down. Recently. This summer. Before we came here. I saw it happen. And everything’s been different, since then. He barely speaks to me.” 

As far as Mulder was concerned, Captain Scully had forfeited the right to so much as look at his little girl, much less speak to her. And if he came to this house and tried swinging his weight around, he would find out just what Mulder had trained his generals to do. “He’s probably just ashamed, Dana. Mostly because he should be.” 

“I always thought he of him as such a gentle person, and then...” Finally, Scully turned to face him. Her face was pink and her lashes matted with tears. “Was I just stupid? To believe he was better than that?” 

Another random curveball thought sailed past Mulder. This time it was cacophony of endearments rising unbidden in his throat. God, no, baby; of course not, sweetheart; no, honey, never. Mulder blamed Dad for this; all the dear girl this and darling girl that was seeping into the groundwater of his mind. She looks just like an angel, Dad had said, watching Scully sleep. I do hope you know what you have taken on, Fox. 

“No,” Mulder said, instead. “You drew a conclusion based on available evidence. And then you discovered new evidence, which contradicted your hypothesis. That’s just science. A doctor makes a new diagnosis based on new symptoms, right? I mean-”

He trailed off. Unlike that moment upstairs, this time Mulder had no doubt: Scully was crying. Really crying. The freight train of endearments roared through his head again. He raised his arm and put his hand very lightly on her nearest shoulder. “C’mere.”

Wonder of wonders, she did. She curled right into his arm, and he slid himself over the rest of the way, and then she was tucked up against his side. “Fox, what if he hurt himself?” she blurted out.

“You mean like an accident? Is he a test pilot, or something?” 

“No. I mean, what if he-” Her face crumpled. “What if the reason they can’t find him is because he did something...?” She gestured, vaguely, at her own throat.

“No,” Mulder started saying, immediately. He gathered her up closer to him. “No. Stop. Stop thinking that way. That’s not happening. Hear me? That is not happening. Don’t think like that.”

“My mind won’t stop,” she moaned. 

“I know. But you have to focus on the stuff you can actually fix. Okay?” Mulder had never considered that what his family had endured when Samantha disappeared might someday become a useful asset to someone else. Now, though, it was as though everything every well-meaning adult had told him was just packed away in a trunk, waiting to be deployed in the effort of making Scully cry a little less. He set his chin on her head. “Look, tomorrow, you’re gonna go to the hospital, and get your hand seen to, and then you can ask for a forwarding address and phone number for your mother. And you can leave ours for your dad, in case he calls the hospital looking for your mom. But your first priority has to be getting that hand looked at. Right? The most important thing is that you’re not hurt, and not in any pain.”

Scully nodded solemnly. “Thank you.”

Mulder scoffed. “For what? You got hurt here, remember?”

“No one has ever said that to me, before.” She cleared her throat. “About it being important, I mean. That I not be hurt. I mean!” She squirmed. “Obviously, everyone tells everyone else to avoid getting hurt. And I do try to avoid it. Getting hurt. But no one ever...” She dug her head into his chest. “Fox, my head hurts.”

“Well, that is on us, too, because somehow you still haven’t eaten any dinner. Pete’s sake, it’s almost nine o’clock. Where are we, Spain?” 

Incomprehensibly, Scully giggled. Naturally, Mom and Dad chose this time to come in. Mulder straightened, but Scully still listed toward him, a little, as though needing the lee of his body to keep an especially harsh wind off her face. The winds of change, Mulder thought, dourly. He had known Scully was in trouble, but had no idea things were this dire. Now he felt bad for not saying something sooner. Scully could have been safe and warm and not alone for that much longer. 

“What did she say?” Scully asked, as Mulder asked, “What’s going on?” 

“Your brother is very ill,” Dad said, diplomatically. He pulled up the tiny chair Mulder had sat in, earlier. “And your mother is exhausted. And your father is unreachable, at present. That second part, I can look into. As for the first, your family will need to stay in Boston at least another month. Likely more. My guess, knowing the glacial pace of hospital administration, is that they all won’t be out until the new year.” 

I get to keep her for Christmas? Mulder wondered, and immediately despised himself. 

“Hospital administration?” Scully croaked. “What does that have to do with rheumatic fever?” 

Mom cleared her throat. “My husband simply means that hospitals like to take their time and be sure, dear. Your brother might have nerve damage, and the options for occupational therapy are much better in Boston.” 

Mulder was familiar enough with his mother’s lies that he spotted this one right away. Over Scully’s head, he narrowed his eyes at her. Mom gave him an estimating glance, and a tiny shake of the head. Dad pulled his seat closer to the edge of the bed. He took Scully’s uninjured hand in his. 

“Dana, I want you to know that you can stay here as long as you like.” The sincerity in Dad’s tone made Mulder’s eyes prickle up. He had not heard this precise tone of voice in six years, now. “I know you’re nervous, but you have no reason to be. We’re very happy to have you. Not least because we can finally get a decent game of bridge going.” 

In one corner of the room, Mom wiped her eyes quickly with a knuckle, so as not to disturb her makeup. 

“I told your mother that Teena and I both think you’re a lovely girl, and we couldn’t be more pleased to have you with us. But I also said that even if it were somehow difficult, we would still do it, because it’s part of helping men like your father do his best for the war effort. Why, all over London and the other target cities, the government sent children out to the countryside to spare them the blitzkrieg. Big manor houses opened their doors to become nursery schools. Surely this is no different?”

“I...” Scully swallowed. “I guess not?” 

“In fact this is better, isn’t it? Because this way you can stay at your own school, where Fox will look after you.” 

“He will?” Scully asked, clearly dubious. 

To Mulder’s confusion, Dad beamed. He reached up and tucked some of Scully’s hair behind her ear. Mulder heard the old endearment for Samantha before Dad even said the words out loud: “Yes, he will, my little love.” The sense-memory associated with these words was so visceral, and so breathlessly painful, that Mulder almost missed what Dad said next: “Fox would never want you to be hurt or harmed, in any way. Isn’t that right, my dear boy?” 

“Right,” Mulder rasped. 

“Now, I know you’re very independent, and very self-reliant and you want very much to be grown up straightaway, so you can become a doctor and help everyone,” Dad continued. “And I know those things because your mother told me so. She thinks so very highly of you, Dana.” Dad was struggling. “More than you can ever know.” 

“Mr Mulder, you don’t-”

Dad shook his head and held up a finger. She silenced immediately. “What I am saying is that your mother and I, and Fox’s mother too, all agree that although you’re very bright, and very capable, and very mature, it would be nice if you could just be a little girl for a wee bit longer, and not have to worry so much. And this is just the place for that. All right?” 

“But-”

“No,” Dad said, very fondly. “No buts. Your mother can’t possibly focus on your brother unless she knows you’re letting yourself be looked after, can she?” 

Mulder reeled. Usually he thought of his mother as the master manipulator in the household, but occasionally Dad reminded him how he’d scored a job in diplomacy. Despite knowing her for all of an hour or two, Dad had found Scully’s primary weakness, and ruthlessly planted a bomb inside. 

“He’s right, Scully,” Mulder said, into her hair. 

“Oh, Fox, do stop speaking to our darling girl like she’s hauling in bycatch beside you; it’s so terribly common and uncouth. If you must insist on using her surname, give it the due respect of putting Miss in front of it.” Dad’s words were acidic, but his tone lacked all bite. He sent Mulder a tiny, private smile before giving Scully (Dana) a much broader one. “Dana is a perfectly lovely name. It’s soft, and lilting, like little waves lapping up onshore.” 

Dad was officially Not Helping. You’re not helping, Mulder told him, from over Scully’s head, with his eyes. Perversely, Dad seemed to take a rare and special glee in this. He promptly directed that gleeful gaze down at Scully.

“When Fox was a little boy, my mother had all sorts of very English endearments for him. Mostly to do with food. Cabbage. Lamb. Chicken.” 

“Dad!” 

“Chicken?!” Scully squealed. 

Dad’s smile told Mulder that he had brought this on himself. Now he had to take it on the jaw. “It means something quite different in England, I assure you.” 

“Speaking of which, it’s time Fox made you a plate,” Mom said. “I did not wait on line with all those beer-guzzling hooligans just to let the food get cold. He will make you a tray, and make sure you eat some dinner, and then-”

“Then he’s reading to you,” Dad said, solemnly. 

“He’s what?” Scully asked.

“He is?” Mom asked. 

“I am?” Mulder echoed. 

“You are indeed,” Dad informed him. “Your diction has been very rushed, lately. You’re forgetting to breathe naturally through complex sentences. It’s down to all those fast-talking film reels of yours, I shouldn’t wonder. You’re starting to sound like a Howard Hawks picture!” 

Chapter Text

Dana was starving. Fox was hungry, too: they neither of them had eaten lunch, apparently. They descended on their food like ravening wolves. “I should get you a radio for in here,” Fox said, seemingly annoyed at the silence.

“I can go out to the living room.” 

“Yeah, but you need the weather, to help you decide which coat to wear.” 

“I can get a Farmer’s Almanac.” The sudden infusion of calories helped her remember something important: “When Missy left for California, she couldn’t take her portable wind-up gramophone! It’s still at the house!” 

“So why didn’t you bring it, then?” 

“It’s in a crate, but I don’t know which one. There wasn’t time to open them all up when I was packing to come here. Your mom was waiting for me.” 

Fox rolled his jaw. “Any of your winter clothes hiding in one of those?”

Dana winced. “Sort of.” 

He blinked. Dana felt something akin to a sudden shift in barometric pressure. “What do you mean, sort of?”

“Well, at Our Lady of Sorrows, we wore uniforms.” 

Fox’s face went perfectly blank. His chop suey slipped off his fork. Dana sneaked an overlarge bite of egg foo young. She swallowed audibly, and Fox’s lashes fluttered. “Sorry. What?” 

“So we had winter uniforms, and it meant I didn’t really need so many winter clothes, and before I got my scholarship there, we lived in California, so...” She quickly shovelled more food in before she had to explain any further. 

Fox put his fork down. “So...?”

Dana chewed methodically. Then she drank some of her chamomile tea. Mr Mulder had insisted she needed it, and it was best to have it while it was still hot. Fox refused to be distracted. Patiently, he waited for her put her teacup back in its saucer. “So, I might need to pillage more of Melissa’s things.” 

He took a deep breath and sighed it out. “What if we went back there on Saturday, to get more stuff?” 

Dana leaned so far forward her plate slid toward her bowl and the  soup inside sloshed dangerously. “Can we? Please? Will you let me?” 

Again, Fox’s lashes batted rapidly. It seemed as though he might be in pain. His throat worked. “Yeah. We can do that.” Nodding down at her food, he added: “Now finish up that green soup, or Mom’ll make me eat it.” 

Not wanting to read any of the books he’d left downstairs for her, Mulder dashed upstairs for his Holmes omnibus. Out of habit, he lightened his steps past his parents’ room. In an act of what he believed to be truly impressive restraint, he did not linger at their door, despite very much wanting to listen in. -a good idea, Mom was saying, and Dad was saying, Teena, really, in the tone that meant he was just a thousand percent done with all her nonsense. 

Her nonsense, in this case, likely having to do with Scully. And Mulder. And Mulder and Scully in the same room, away from Mom’s watchful eye. At Our Lady of Sorrows, we wore uniforms, Scully had said, like that little tidbit wasn’t the skeleton key to a thousand different doors inside his mind. Oh yeah, what kind, he’d almost asked. Skirts? Jumpers? Blazers? Ties? (For some reason, he suspected she’d look absurdly cute in a tie.) Nobly, he contented himself with the idea that he’d get the answer when they ransacked her house for whatever might still be of use.

Can we? Please? Will you let me? she had asked, as though he were in some position to refuse or object. As though she needed his permission to leave. (Did she need his permission to leave? What, like he was supposed to let her go alone? Obviously, she was never going back to that place by herself. But was Mulder...in charge of her? Did she have to do what he said? She had to do what he said, right? He was older, after all.) This all seemed like stuff he should maybe have asked about, earlier.

It wasn’t until he was back downstairs again, at Scully’s door, that Mulder remembered Sam’s door was just slightly open as he hurried past it. 

“Fox?” Scully asked, and he dismissed the thought, and told her he was right there. When he entered the room, both dogs were on the bed with Scully. Mom would throw a conniption if she ever saw it, so Mulder said nothing. “I think they’re trying to crush me,” Scully said anxiously, following the track of his gaze. “They jumped up here as soon as you left.” 

The dogs had an odd way of fulfilling Mulder’s wishes without his actually expressing them. Sometimes, he was not aware of having wanted to do something until they themselves were doing it. Like running down the beach, maybe, or scaring Hell out of that tall, creepy Fuller Brush man with the bald head. The one who always looked at Sam’s picture from the corner of his eye, while selling Mom on something she didn’t need.

“That’s their job,” Mulder said, lightly. 

Scully looked doubtfully at the dogs on either side of her. “Their job is cuddling me?” 

No, that’s just a perk that comes with the job, he almost said. “Looking after you when I’m not here, I mean,” he said, instead. “They’ll be with you all day, tomorrow, except when you see the doctor. You can go down the beach or by the pond or wherever you want, as long as they’re with you.” Was he in charge of her? Did that mean making rules for her? Mom and Dad could always change them if they disagreed. In the meantime, she had asked: “But don’t go anywhere by yourself without them. And no going into the water or the woods without me. Okay?” 

“Okay,” Scully agreed. She spoke in a tone that was so meek and so obedient he did a double-take on the assumption she was faking, and about to chew him out for making the frankly absurd suggestion that she might go swimming in November. But she wasn’t faking. Her eyelids were very heavy, though. She’d nestled in between Hannibal and Scipio. And for reasons Mulder couldn’t divine, he felt as though somebody were trying to pry his chest open with a crowbar. 

This was wrong, he realized. This was all kinds of wrong. Sure, Mulder could go on and on about how Scully was safer here (wounded hand notwithstanding), how it was dangerous for her to be all alone, how she needed care and feeding (especially feeding), and how they had lots of space. And yes, obviously Mom and Dad wanted a perfect little goody-two-shoes to look after and not a messy, recalictrant murder suspect, and all the rest of it, but-

“Thank you,” she murmured, sounding so wearily grateful that Mulder actually had to look away for a second. 

“It’s nothing.” 

But it wasn’t nothing. He’d brought her here for selfish reasons. Base reasons, pun intended: Mulder wanted Scully to get him on the base. Everything that happened on the base was secret, or it was supposed to be. So if the US Navy discovered Samantha’s body on the base, they might just cover it up. He had to know. He had find out. Nothing else mattered. 

Right? 

Only Scully looked so terribly fragile just now, lying there with one hand tentatively rested on Hannibal’s glossy shoulder. She looked so pale and tired and small. Like maybe she wasn’t really the smartmouthed stuck-up little brat who insisted on doing everything by herself, that he properly knew her to be. Like maybe she really was what Mulder had described her as, when cooking up this whole scheme: alone, in a new place, probably scared, and in need of protection. 

“In the year 1878, I took my degree of Doctor of Medicine of the University of London, and proceeded to Netley to go through the course prescribed for surgeons in the army,” he began. 

Scully was asleep before Holmes and Watson even met. This was fine by Mulder. He liked that part; he wanted her awake for it, so he could really perform it. What he found less fine, however, was how neither Hannibal nor Scipio came when called, after he turned out her light. 

“Nibbles,” he hissed. “Skip. Come.” 

Scipio lifted his head, pricked his ears, and then put it back down behind her shoulders. Both dogs had slotted up around Scully like spoons. They were canoodling her. If Mulder caught a pair of human brothers doing the same, much less refusing to leave, he’d have every right to load up the Winchester. 

“Guys. Come on. You can’t sleep with her.” 

Hannibal’s tail wagged. Whether this was meant dismissively, or in delight at the idea, Mulder didn’t know. What he did know was that he had raised them from puppies, hand-feeding them himself, and this, right here? Was downright treasonous. 

“I know you want to, but you can’t. Come on.” 

Hannibal sent him a look that said if Mulder hadn’t wanted them to play with Scully, then he should not have brought the dogs a new toy. Which, as he thought of it, was probably what the dogs assumed had happened. Wow, gee, thanks, Fox, they were probably thinking. We’re herding dogs without a flock; a tiny co-ed to boss around is just what we need!

“Fine, but just see if she saves you those giblets you like.” 

Mulder was about to quit the room, planning to leave the door ajar so the dogs could escape, when he noticed something. One window remained open and propped, from when he’d aired the room out earlier. Wincing, Mulder tiptoed past the bed and closed it. Then he locked it. Then he checked all the other locks on the other windows, including the one in the bathroom. (Having Scully on the first floor was so stupid. Hell, anybody could get to her down there. Maybe the dogs should stay, after all.) When he was sure they were locked up tight, he went to leave. This time, Scipio jumped soundlessly off the bed and trotted after him. Hannibal, having laid his claim the moment Scully walked in, looked from her to Scipio, and reluctantly followed.

“Oh, so you were just waiting for me to finish the job, huh?” Mulder asked, as he slowly pulled her door closed. The dogs made an equivocating noise. “A likely story.”

Dana awoke twice before properly getting out of bed. 

The first time happened very early in the morning, and she heard Fox hiss, “Hannibal,” from just outside her door. Then the sound of claws on the floor and and opening door. 

The second time, she heard a thunderous pounding on the stairs, and Mrs Mulder insisting on quiet. Then Hannibal and Scipio bounded into the room, leapt onto the bed, and barked as though to alert the Mulder family to her continued presence. Yup! they seemed to be saying. Still alive, despite her best efforts!

“Not you, too, Skip; Jesus,” Fox said from the door, as Dana sat up. 

“What time is it?” She rubbed her eyes. “Is it your lunch period already?” 

“No-” Fox seemed to swallow a curse word. Deliberately, he looked away from her. “It’s still the morning. Go back to sleep.” 

Dana went to move, forgot her hand, and suppressed a little cry. “I should help your mother-”

“You should do absolutely no such thing whatsoever,” said Mr Mulder, from behind his son. The older man darted around the younger one. When he snapped his fingers, both dogs left the bed. Mr Mulder took the seat where Fox had read to her, and said, “Dear me, we must switch this out for something more comfortable. Fox, do switch the chairs when you come back this afternoon. Dana, let me see that hand. Is the wound throbbing at all?” 

Dutifully, Dana stuck out her injured hand and shook her head. Mr Mulder turned it over. “This is an exceptional field dressing, by the way.” 

Dana smiled. “Thank you. I have Red Cross certification in basic first-aid, and emergency first-aid.” When Mr Mulder looked impressed, she added, “In California and Maryland.” 

Mr Mulder laid a cool, papery hand over her forehead. “No fever. Are you hungry?” Again, Dana shook her head. Fox had refused to read to her until her plate was clean. “That means Fox is right, and you should still be sleeping. So I want you to be a good girl, and close your eyes, and get some more rest. And when you wake up, my dear wife will take my dear girl in for stitches. Meantime, Fox and I will go and square everything with your teachers. Won’t we, Fox?”

“Uh, sure? I guess? Yeah?” He sounded confused. “Wait, are you on the island, today?” 

“My dear boy, I could hardly make it to Washington before noon at this late hour,” Mr Mulder scoffed. Privately, he winked at Dana. Behind his father’s back, Fox made a quacking duck gesture with his thumb and fingers. Dana beamed. “Ah, there it is,” Mr Mulder murmured. “So she does smile, after all.” 

This made Dana want very much to go back under the covers and hide. “Dad, you’re embarrassing her,” Fox said, flatly. 

“I’m sorry about carrying on before,” Dana said quickly. Obviously she was a pain to be around if people were surprised at her expressing any kind of enjoyment. “I’m really not a crybaby, honest; I just-”

“My darling girl, what on Earth are you on about, now?” Mr Mulder clicked his tongue. “Perhaps I’m wrong, and we ought to take your temperature. These are clearly the ravings of a fever-addled brain. Aren’t they, my love?” 

Fox groaned as though he were being put to the question by the Torquemada. “Dad, you’re being painfully English right now,” he sighed. “American parents don’t call their daughters my love. It’s weird.” 

“I call my son my love, too,” Mr Mulder protested, all innocence. 

“Yeah, and I have begged you not to, on multiple occasions!” Fox whined. 

“Then I shall go straight to the source: Miss Scully, what do you call your father?” 

“Ahab.” 

Mr Mulder crowed his laughter. Over his shoulder, Fox mouthed the word, Bullshit. Dana insisted: “No, really! And he calls me Starbuck!” 

“Oh, dear.” Mr Mulder looked a little sad. “A lone Quaker voice of reason, struggling in vain against a maniac’s quest for vengeance? Between us, I should hope you have much higher hopes for yourself.” 

Dana frowned. “But Starbuck’s the only one who’s right!” 

“Yes, my darling. But he doesn’t act on being right, does he, despite knowing that he is, thus dooming himself and the entire crew. Bravery is rarely convenient.” He tapped her on the nose, and stood. “Fox, go and get a carafe and fill it up with water and bring it back here, in case your mother decides Dana needs a pill.” 

“I don’t need a pill,” Dana told Fox. 

“But you might later on, after your stitches,” Mr Mulder said, patiently. When Fox rolled his eyes and left, his father asked: “Did Fox behave for you, last night?”

Dana nodded. 

“He read to you?” 

She nodded again. 

“Didn’t keep you up?” 

She shook her head. 

“Because if you’re at all unhappy with his conduct, I can have him lashed to the mast and flogged.” 

Dana burst into giggles just as Fox returned. Mr Mulder winked again, and left. Fox ducked into the bathroom and noisily filled the carafe. He did so in fits and starts, as though deliberately delaying. The room was quiet for a full minute before he came out again. 

“Don’t mind him,” Fox told her. “He’s not trying to be, you know, odd.” 

“I know.” 

“I mean, he likes you. But in a nice way. Not like how Pfaster likes you. Or that weirdo janitor, Tooms.”

Dana pulled a face. “The janitor looks at all the girls that way. It’s not just me. The other girls in my homeroom all told me so, my first day.” 

Fox appeared to calculate something in his head. “Okay, so Pendrell, then.” 

She looked around for something to throw at him. “Be nice. Pendrell isn’t creepy or weird like that.” 

Fox’s eyes glittered. “I’ll be sure and tell him you said so.” 

“Don’t do that! Are you nuts?” 

“You’re late, Fox,” Mrs Mulder said, appearing at the door. “And Dana needs her rest. You can see her later, at lunch.” 

“So?” Frohike asked, at the lockers after second period. 

“How’d it go?” Langley wanted to know. 

Byers checked his watch. “Has she run screaming in terror, yet?” 

“Oh, piss off, the lot of you,” Mulder growled. 

“You were late today,” Langley pointed out. 

“Must be worn out from last night,” Frohike cracked. 

“Shut the fuck up, Melvin,” Mulder snapped. 

“No, but seriously, Mulder,” Byers prodded. “Did you have to chain her up in the basement, or something? Where is she?” 

Mulder slammed his locker shut. “She hurt her hand, all right? Mom’s taking her for stitches! Jesus!” 

“Are you on your monthly, or what, Mulder?” Langley eyed him distastefully. “Cool out, already.” 

“Do not tell me to-”

Down the hall, Skinner leaned out from the door to the coaching office and raised his brows. The implication was obvious: if Mulder got in trouble during classtime, he would not be on the field later at game time. Mulder gave him a tiny nod, and then turned back to the others. 

“She’s fine. She’s great. She’s still in bed.” 

“How would you know?” Frohike asked. 

“Melvin, so help me God-” The bell rang. For once, Mulder was glad of it.

Byers took up the march down the hall beside Mulder. They turned a corner toward Pfaster and Chemistry. “I suppose now’s the wrong time to tell you about the rumour.”  

“What rumour?” 

“That she’s your sister,” Byers said. “That Dana Scully is really Samantha Mulder, returned.”

Chapter Text

“But that makes no sense at all!” Dana protested, when Fox told her of the rumour. “My parents live in town! Or, anyway, they used to.”

They were in the kitchen, which like everything else in the place was enormous. Clearly, it had once been a working kitchen built for serving the needs of a much larger family: a decrepit system of service bells hung prominently near the door. It also boasted a big farmhouse double sink big enough to wash babies in, skirted in gingham, and an old cast iron wood stove, with ornate cabinets stretching all the way to the tin tile ceiling, and Delftware on display. The table at which Dana sat could seat all twelve Apostles on a single side.

“That’s just it. No one knows them. And now they’re gone. Or at least, not around to argue. So now everyone thinks you were in a coma, or have a tragic case of amnesia, or got kidnapped and brainwashed by the Soviets to spy on Dad, or something.”

“What, like on some stupid radio drama?”

“Don’t knock it, Scully; it would make a good episode of Suspense. Or The Mysterious Traveler. Or-”

“But I look nothing like you!” 

“You’re around the right age, though,” Fox said, glumly.

Looking at Fox standing at the wood stove (he said lighting it would warm her room), Dana felt a sadness open up in her for how empty the house was. If Mrs Mulder had already lost one baby with Fox, then maybe it was difficult for her to carry another, again. That would have made losing Samantha even harder. Because the family had obviously adored Samantha. It was there in every picture. The frames containing her photographs were all heavy silver, or leaded crystal. Someone had clustered them all together on a trestle table with white lace on it; Dana suspected the lace had once been part of a baptismal gown. Looking at the photos felt like contemplating an icon painted with gold leaf. Only the little girl in the images was much happier than the subject of any icon or stained glass window Dana had ever seen. She loved the beach, and she loved her brother, and she loved a calico cat she was often photographed with. 

“And your eyes are the right colour,” Fox continued. “She was fair, like you, too. More freckles, though.” 

“But my hair is all wrong!” 

He frowned. “How would you know?” 

Dana gestured in a way she hoped encompassed the rest of the house. “There’s this groundbreaking new technology called photography, Fox. You should really check it out.” 

Fox pulled a face. “Scully, the reason my room was so dark before is because it is literally a darkroom. Half those pictures of Sam are the ones I took myself. And I hate to break it to you, but nobody believes that’s your real hair colour, anyway.” 

“What?” 

He winced. “Sorry.” 

“But you know it’s real.” She scowled. “Right?” 

Now he just looked uncomfortable. “Well…” 

“Fox! Look at my lashes! Look at my brows! They’re ginger, too!” She narrowed her eyes at him, now. “Do I have to do a Punnett square, right now, to explain the principles of Mendelian inheritance?” 

Perversely, this idea seemed to delight him. “Nah. Save it for the Stooges. Frohike refuses to believe your hair could be real. It makes him question his atheism. If you want a soul to save, his is low-hanging fruit.” With his chin, he nodded down at her lunch. “Eat. Dad’ll have my hide if you don’t.” 

Lunch was all the Chinese food leftovers dumped into a stock pot and covered with water and a Bovril cube. It was not bad, and Dana had told Fox as much, because he had done the job himself. In the winter, Fox told her, they would keep the wood stove going all the time. Doing so would help keep the pipes from freezing. When Dana asked if the winters were hard on the Vineyard, Fox gave her a sharp look and asked again if she had hit her head when she fell out of the bathtub, yesterday. 

“Before I go, I’ll get Mom to take you to the doctor.” 

Mrs Mulder was upstairs. There had been a number of phone calls, that morning. Now, Dana suspected she herself might be the cause of them. The thought made her a little sick. It must be awful for Mrs Mulder to have to answer questions from nosy neighbours about the charity case she’d taken on. 

“Maybe I should go back to Our Lady of Sorrows,” Dana mused. 

“What?” Fox, who had already finished his soup, was now preparing multiple sandwiches. He looked over his shoulder. “Are you crazy? Shut up.” 

“They board some students, and might still have a bed open-”

“Shut up, I said!” He turned back to his work and made a stronger slice on the diagonal than was strictly necessary. 

“But if people are spreading rumours about you, then-”

“Better this rumour than any other ones,” he said, darkly. 

She frowned. “Like what?” 

“You know like what.” Fox refused to turn around. 

Dana didn’t know. “No, I don’t know.” Then it occurred to her: “You mean about people thinking you…” She looked around quickly for Mrs Mulder. Despite not seeing her, Dana lowered her voice anyway, just in case. “That you’re responsible in some way for what happened? Like if everyone thinks I’m Samantha, then they’ll know you didn’t do anything wrong?” 

Fox leaned way over the sink. He drummed his fingers to the sides of it. Once, twice, thrice. “Sure,” he said, finally. “Let’s go with that one. Yeah.” 

Dana huffed air at her bangs. She watched him folding waxed paper around his sandwiches. These were probably his pre-game supplies. “Anyway, how’d everyone find out so fast?” 

Now, Fox turned and levelled her with a look. “Scully, it’s an island.” 

“Well, excuse me for thinking the people of Martha’s Vineyard might be more circumspect! I thought New Englanders were supposed to be dignified and reserved!” 

“They are. They’re also gossipy, curtain-twitching busybodies. Trust me; I should know. Drink your orange juice.” 

Fox seemed to hold great faith in the healing powers of orange juice. “You know, you would love San Diego. Everyone has orange trees. You can pick the oranges right up off the lawn every morning. And they’re huge!” 

He smiled crookedly. “Yeah?”

Dana nodded. “Yeah. Even on base, which never happens, because all the trees are so new most of the time. But in San Diego everything grows really fast, so we had oranges, and our neighbour grew avocados, and our parish priest trained grapes on a trellis over the patio that he grew just for the birds.”

“What about when you lived on Hawaii?” 

Dana’s memories of Hawaii were less distinct. Just endless green, and the smell of cooking rice, and rain that didn’t feel like rain, but more like the mist from a nearby waterfall. “We had an awapuhi plant that my mom loved.”

“A what now?” 

“Awapuhi. White ginger. It has these red flowers that look sort of like pinecones, and they fill up with sap-”

“You’re making this up.”

“I am not! They fill up with this sap, and the sap smells heavenly. It’s called shampoo ginger, because the native women use it on their hair. My nanny would wash my hair with rice water and awapuhi and hibiscus, to make it grow faster and come in more red.” 

“You had a nanny?” 

Dana shrugged. “More like a student who lived with us. Her name was Akane. I think she watched us in exchange for room and board. She was born in Japan. My first word was actually in Japanese.” Her eyes filled with tears. By now, Akane was probably in some awful internment camp where everything was covered in shit and mosquitos, and there was typhus and malaria everywhere, and-

“Scully?” When she looked up, Fox had soundlessly crossed the room and now stood poised at the kitchen table, fingers digging at the irregularities of its grain as if by habit. He looked almost scared. 

“I just really hope that wherever they put her, she’s okay,” Dana said, and burst into tears. 

Fox made a noise under his breath that sounded like God, or honey, but was more likely a curse of some sort. (So much for not being a crybaby. He probably thought she was on her period, or something.) Abruptly he sat down beside her inside the banquette, and looped an arm over her. He tugged. When she leaned into him, his other arm joined its mate. 

“She’s probably dead,” Dana heard herself say. 

“Don’t say that. You don’t know that.” His arms tightened around her. 

“She was so kind to me, Fox. Akane was so kind to me, and now she must feel so betrayed, and-” 

Dana had never said these things out loud, before. The one time she had brought it up, Dad told her that immigrants who truly loved America would understand the sacrifice they had to make. Even if it meant being penned up like farm animals. Everyone had hardships in life, and this was theirs. Or something. Dana had been so angry she could hardly breathe. But now Dad was unreachable. Or possibly missing, like Samantha was missing. Maybe he was just too busy to come to the phone; the whereabouts of his mousy middle daughter were obviously less important than the war, or Charlie being sick. Whatever the reason, with her mother and Charlie in Boston, Dana no longer had to pay lip service to the opinions her parents held. She no longer had to pretend to agree all the time. In the Scully home, disagreement was treated like disrespect. But the Mulder home seemed to thrive on a sort of dynamic tension.

For one, Fox seemed to enjoy it when Dana poked back at him. It was fun. In her admittedly limited experience, living with him was fun. Dana liked it. She liked him. She had always liked him. But living with him was also this: warm, soothing, sweet. Dana could not remember the last time her big brother Bill had held her like this, or stroked her hair, or simply comforted her. (Missy used to. But then Missy was the one who needed all the comforting, and then Missy was gone.) Dana had done nothing to deserve such tender care; despite knowing her hardly at all, Fox seemed to presume she was somehow worthy of it. In a strange way Dana did feel a kinship with Samantha Mulder. It was as though the Mulder family had been waiting for an understudy to take over her role, so their performance could continue. And the longer her own family was in crisis, the longer Dana could stay here, and-

“And I think I might be a terrible person,” Dana whispered. 

“You’re not,” Fox rasped. “You’re practically an angel, damn it.” He kicked uselessly at the table legs.

“Why are you mad at the table?”  

“I’m not mad at the table, Scully. Jesus. Just…” He sighed heavily through his nose and set his chin on her head. “Can you just sit here quietly, for me, please? If Mom comes in and sees you crying like this, my ass is grass.” 

Snuffling, Dana nodded. She had no desire to get Fox in trouble. “Okay.” 

“Good girl,” he muttered. He sounded somehow bitter about it. 

“Why are you so mad at me?” 

His voice turned very crisp, as though he were giving an oral report on a book he’d read that he didn’t like. “I’m not mad at you; I’m mad at your brain. Your ideas. Your philosophy. Because if you think you’re a bad person, then there is literally no hope for humanity.” 

She wiped her face. “I don’t understand.” 

He picked up her injured hand at the wrist and settled it on his chest. “Aside from a tendency toward chimney-related recklessness, and a stubborn insistence that you can do everything all by yourself, you’re perfect, Scully. Annoyingly so. Which means if you’re a bad person, then everyone else is like a thousand times worse, and there’s no point to anything. Okay?” 

Dana caught herself fussing with a stitch that wouldn’t lay right, in his shirt. “I’m not perfect. I never said I was perfect.” 

“I know, but-”

“Insisting on things by myself is a major fault of mine. Mom says so, too. She says self-reliance can become self-importance, which becomes pride, which is a mortal sin. The sin of sins, actually: the one that turned Lucifer from an angel into Satan. Because it leads us to believe we are above God, and leaves no room for Him to humble us through His intervention.”

Fox hissed as though he had touched the wood stove with his bare hands. “Scully. C’mon. Tell me you don’t buy that.”

“Even if it were not the case, there are other things, too. I am too aloof; I make no friends; I care too much about my own interests and pursuits, and not enough about those of others; I cry too much but have no idea how to make others feel better; I have no athletic ability or physical grace, and I lack feminine talents.”

One of his knees had started jigging up and down, like he wanted to be somewhere else, but Fox had yet to let her go. If anything, his arms seemed to have locked in place. “Feminine talents? What on Earth are those supposed to be?”

“Things other girls know how to do. Things they care about, or have an interest in. I only know how to do boy things, so most everyone in my family says I will probably be useless as a wife.” 

“A wife? You’re fifteen! What century does your family think this is?” 

Dana shrugged. “Boys may not be trained to be husbands, but girls are trained to be wives from a very young age. It’s like the perfume story I told you, before. Missy was so good at things like that; she always helped me, so I never even learned how to braid my own hair. But without her, I have no idea how to do...” She held up her injured hand. “Girl things. That was why I liked Our Lady of Sorrows: wearing a uniform meant I could never wear the wrong thing. And makeup was forbidden, so I never had to worry about it. And we only had one dance a year, so I never had to learn. Everything was so much easier!” 

Fox made a thoughtful noise. “...You really don’t like the Vineyard?” 

She shook her head. “It’s not that. But everywhere we move, I have to learn new rules, and by the time I finally figure out how to do everything right, we have to move again. So there’s no point in making people like me. Even if they did, I would just have to leave.” Dana frowned. “Not that I find the people of Chilmark terribly impressive. They thought you were a murderer, and they gave you a bad nickname because of it. Which means they’re stupid. And mean.” 

He made a rueful sound in his throat. “So you believe me, but nobody else on this whole damn island does or ever will. You’re my one in five thousand. Which means I could give a shit if you can braid your hair, or not.” As if to prove his point, he tugged her hair a little. His hand did not leave. Rather, he leaved her hair between his fingers. “Huh. I guess it is real, after all.” 

“What are you talking about?”

“Your hair. It’s never been dyed. Too soft.” 

He’d taken up kneading the place where her skull met her neck, and now Dana very much wanted to sleep again. “Told you.” She yawned. “In San Diego, Missy put lemon juice in my hair, so the sun would turn it blonde. It almost worked.” 

A sort of sub-sonic purr emitted from his chest. Fox took a breath so deep it actually re-distributed her weight more evenly across his chest. His knee slowed to a stop. The fingers of his right hand kept kneading. Dana was reminded of a cat, making biscuits. His left fingertips found her right arm; they stroked up and down the tricep. The pressure of his fingers on her scalp and nape increased. Dana’s neck went slack. The tension melted out of her shoulders. He chuckled a little. “So that’s the right spot, huh? One of ’em, anyway?” 

“Hmm?” 

Fox made no effort to explain. He seemed to be considering something. “Just you’re wound up pretty tight, if this neck is any indication. You know, Scully, I used to think you needed shaking up, but now it seems more like you need, whaddya call it...” It was rare for Fox not to know the right word for something; his vocabulary was quite broad. Perhaps he was having trouble picking just one. “Gentling, I guess. Settling. Soothing. That’s what Karin Berquist calls this kind of thing. Skinner would just call it a cool-down, probably. Like after practise, you gotta get all the kinks out, or you might lock up later on and it can really hurt. Either way, I think you get so worked up, you have to actually concentrate on relaxing. Like you forget, sometimes? Or you can’t quite do it on your own?” 

Dana made a skeptical noise. She could relax. Sometimes. When there was time. (If you have time to lean, then you have time to clean, and so on.) It was simply more difficult, lately, what with everything. There was so much to manage. And there was less to manage, here at the Mulder house. Besides, the Mulders let her stay home from school, today, and she spent almost the whole morning in bed, just like Mr Mulder told her to! 

“You falling asleep, on me?” Dana shook her head. “No? Just resting your eyes?” She nodded. “I envy your ability to sleep, you know. I’m terrible at sleeping, but you make it look really easy. Did you sleep okay, last night?” Again, she nodded. “Better than before?” Dana continued nodding. “Because, um…” She heard him swallow. “Because you were a little scared, maybe? At the other place? By yourself? At night?” 

Dana saw the rhetorical tiger trap she’d fallen into just as its logic neatly impaled her earlier arguments about doing just fine. She squirmed, and made a hmmpf of disagreement, or at least protest. Everyone felt that way in a new place, and the rental house was a new place. And every time someone left, it felt like a new place again. By the same token, the Mulder home was a very new place. Last night was her first one here, and Dana could barely keep her eyes open. She had not even dreamed. So maybe the other place was scarier than she wanted to admit.

“Were you scared, sleeping here?” Now Fox sounded a little scared, himself. On her neck, his hand had paused its work. Dana felt his middle finger under her jaw.

“Mm-mm.” Dana shook her head. Why would she be scared? And when would she have the time to feel that way, what with all the goings-on? (For that matter, where had Dana heard the name Karin Berquist, before? It was familiar, but she forgot from where.) She frowned. “Are you trying to tell if I’m lying based on my pulse?” 

Fox gasped as though genuinely surprised at being found out. But his voice sounded rather delighted. “Ten points,” he crooned. He added another finger beside the first. “But you would never lie. Right? What with being such a good girl and all.” 

“An angel, you said,” Dana reminded him, grinning. 

“I did, didn’t I?” Lifting his hand to check his watch, Fox clicked his tongue. “Well you better pray pretty hard for me, angel, ‘cause I am real damn late.” 

“I will humbly ask Saint Christopher to intercede on your behalf to ensure your swift, safe return to school and home, and also to protect your journeys over water.” When Fox seemed confused, Dana added: “He’s the patron saint of travellers.” 

“Right. Thanks for that. Should I put you back in bed, you think?” 

Dana made a non-committal noise. Bed would mean moving. At present, she was not inclined to move.

“Because it kinda seems like I should,” he murmured. Dana lifted her shoulder in a silent shrug. “I’ll carry you,” he wheedled. 

Immediately, she sat up. “Really?” 

Fox looked oddly dazed. “Yeah,” he said, slowly. “Koala-style, this time, though; I have a game tonight. Stand up. Over there. That white square. The one with the crack in the tile.” He nodded; Dana moved. When she looked back at him, he was checking the corners of the kitchen, and the windows, and appeared to be listening carefully for something. Then he rose and, in a single motion, picked her up at the waist. Her legs, clad in trousers since she wasn’t at school, folded around him like a koala bear. 

“That’s more efficient, huh?” Dana nodded. She placed her chin on his shoulder and tightened her grip with her arms and legs. Fox huffed a little. “Legs like that, I barely have to carry you at all, do I?” he muttered. 

“You wish I were heavier?” she asked, confused. 

A little scoff left his throat. “Uh, no. That’s not it at all.” 

His hand resumed its position on the back of her head, as though he were afraid of her bumping it somewhere. He started walking. The journey to her bedroom was no kind of journey at all; it was off the kitchen. But he was very deliberate about it, and when he got to the bed he didn’t drop her so much as bend over to lay her down. His fingers took their time leaving her neck, as though she were an infant in special danger of skull-plate or collarbone injuries. When her eyes fluttered open, he seemed to be staring his hands on either side of her head. Dana twisted to look at them, too, and he pushed back quickly. Blinking rapidly, he picked up her knees and folded them up and back, looking progressively more alarmed as she failed to protest his treatment of them. 

“I’m double-jointed,” she told him. His hands froze. Her knees were now almost at her shoulders. She held an arm out. “I can do this thing with my elbow, but to show you I have to be bent over on the floor-”

“Please don’t.” Fox held both hands up, fingers splayed. “I believe you. Get under the covers.” 

Dana wrinkled her nose at him as she wriggled up the bed. “It’s not that weird, Fox. Between ten and twenty-five percent of the population has hypermobile joints. Just because I’m really flexible-”

“Less talking, more sleeping.” 

“You’re weird,” she groused. 

“Now she notices.” Fox pulled the covers all the way up to her chin. Then he took hold of her injured hand. “Can you please try not to get maimed or mauled again, before I come home?” 

Dana nodded. Her eyelids were very heavy. “If you agree not to get hurt at your game.” 

“No unnecessary roughness. Got it. Sure thing.” His index finger sketched the cross-hatching of bobby pins on her bandage. “Well. Bye, I guess.” He shook his head, quickly, as though he wanted to take it back. “I’ll come home as soon as I can, okay?” 

Dana smiled. “Okay. Be careful.” 

“Fox?” Mrs Mulder’s voice rang down the stairs. “What are you still doing here?” 

Fox rolled his eyes. He rose to his feet. At the door, he winked at Dana and then leaned out to yell: “I don’t know, Mother; why are you still here and not at the hospital, getting our guest her stitches?”

Chapter Text

“So?” Skinner asked, once the bus was finally on the road past Woods Hole and the team was properly on their way to the game. “How are things at home?” 

“Not you, too,” Mulder muttered. 

He’d been getting this all day, from all sides, and he was sick to his back teeth of it. It wasn’t just the Stooges, or even the guys on the team — it was literally everyone at school. People who had not willingly chosen to speak to Mulder in years. Six years, to be exact. All of them had come out of the woodwork, like termites, to ask about Scully. And him. About him and Scully. About the two of them living together, as though his parents were somehow not part of the equation. Like overnight, Mulder’s creaky old Victorian had turned into a Turkish seraglio, or one of those hayseed petting parties for kids who had never seen an ocean. Like Scully was just a bouquet of flowers he’d had delivered, to position and admire and occasionally bury his nose in and marvel at the softness and fragrance of. 

(Okay, maybe there was something to that last one. But still. Mulder was trying to be good. Really, he was. Even when she wrapped those cute little legs all around him and held him tight enough to support her own weight. That was his own fault. What was emphatically not his fault were those cute little legs wearing an absolutely lethal pair of jeans. They had likely once belonged to her brother. This meant they looked like she had picked them up off his own floor to wear, for reasons Mulder really needed to stop contemplating, right this goddamn minute.) 

And while everyone at school masked their sudden rubber-necking as bleeding-heart concern about Scully’s little brother, or what have you, Mulder heard the unspoken question under all the other more polite ones: are you gonna kill this one, too? 

Skinner blinked. “You wanna try that again, son?” 

Mulder sighed. “She’s fine. She hurt her hand. That’s why she’s not in class. She’s getting stitches. Dad wrote her a note!” 

“That’s not what I’m asking.” 

“Oh yeah? Lay it on me, then.” (Mulder thought of Scully laying on him, literally, drowsing against him in a way Mrs Fowley never let herself do.) 

Skinner heaved an exhausted sigh. “Is it hard, Mulder? Having her there? Because I can see how it might be.” 

It was plenty hard, all right. (And how!) The moment he mentioned anything remotely of this nature to Skinner, though, Scully would wind up in a group home for girls or some other equally awful place. If he wanted to hold onto her, he had to hold onto her a little less. “What are you talking about? Why would it be difficult? We have the space. She lives on a whole different floor from me!” 

Skinner seemed surprised at this. “That’s something, I guess,” he said, more to himself than Mulder. 

“Her door has a lock on it.” (Why would I need that? she had asked, when he showed her.)

“Good.” 

“Oh, so you think I’m gonna kill her, too. Great. Thanks, Coach.” Mulder went to stand and make his way to the back of the bus. Skinner wrenched him by the wrist back down into his seat. 

“Sit your ass down.” 

Mulder thudded his head backward on the seatback, and made his empty-handed I’m waiting, gesture. 

“For one, I know you’re not gonna kill her, Mulder. I never believed that story. I have no idea what happened to your sister, but I know you didn’t do it. Are we clear?” 

You are my one in five thousand, Mulder stupidly told her this afternoon. (But it felt that way, damn it. It felt like she was the only one. The only one who never wondered, at the back of her mind, if he might be guilty.) So Mulder blinked at his coach. “Really?” 

Skinner gave him a look that said he was being very dense. “Son, if you think I’d let a cold-blooded killer near a single one of my players, then you do not know me. Period.” 

Mulder folded his arms. Maybe if Skinner was his coach six years ago, things might have been different. “Okay. Fair. Thanks.” 

“But I also know what it’s like to suddenly find yourself living with someone who’s almost your polar opposite.” 

“From the Marines?” 

Skinner appeared to consider. “Sure.” 

Skinner was going somewhere with this, or trying to. Clearly, he didn’t want to go very far with it. Maybe this was all about the difference in their respective reputations. “Are you asking me if it’s hard to live with someone who’s such a goody two-shoes, or something? Someone my parents probably like better?” 

Because Scully was a good girl. Such a good girl. Until recently (but especially this afternoon), Mulder himself had no idea that Scully had such a big heart, or that it felt every injustice so keenly. She hid that fragile, precious heart under layers of logic and good behaviour. But inside her was a girl who cried over people who had probably forgotten her name years ago. Who made no friends but still worried about him. (Him! Fox Mulder! Murder suspect!) Who felt more concerned about Heaven than Homecoming. Who had not even the faintest clue what she did to him, just by letting him hold her.

So if his parents decided they preferred her to their own son, Mulder could not exactly blame them. Dad was obviously gone for her, already. Mom would come around. Maybe they really would adopt her, after all. Mulder could see them doing it, especially if they got bad news about Captain Scully. Technically, that would make her his sister. Which would be weird. And bad. Really weird, and very bad. (Could he still keep calling her Scully, if her last name was Mulder?) But if it meant keeping her, then-

“First, your parents do not like Miss Scully better than you. Second, what I am asking is if you’re feeling a rapid sense of disillusionment.”

“Disillusionment?” 

“You thought it would go one way, and it went another. From a distance, it looked like a mountain you could climb, but up close it’s Everest.” 

“I know what it means, just…” Mulder shook his head. “No, actually. If anything, I wish she’d moved in sooner. Scully was in a really bad way, before. Her ration book says she lost weight since coming to the Vineyard. And I think she might not even own a real winter coat.” And her dad hit her sister, Mulder thought, but did not say. And my mom is lying about something to do with her mom, and I have to figure out what it is, before Scully decides to hate me.

Skinner still seemed skeptical. Clearly, he found these answers unsatisfactory, or else he thought Mulder was fibbing, in some way. Like maybe he found it impossible for Mulder to be so sincere. “You know, most kids would envy her, getting to live own and not having to answer to anybody. And most girls in her position would probably be mad at whoever snitched.”

“I didn’t snitch; I said I was concerned. I was being a good citizen. What, you don’t want me looking out for other people, now? I should just ignore it, when somebody is in trouble? She could be dead, right now!”

“Easy, Mulder; easy. Simmer down.” Skinner reached up and clasped the back of his neck briefly. This, Mulder now realized, was why he did the same for Scully. He tried not to think about his hand on her neck while Skinner was still talking. “No one’s asking you to stop caring about other people. Certainly not me. And I think it’s criminal, that girl being left holding the bag, like that. For one, the Navy ought to be looking out for its own people so this kind of thing doesn’t happen.”

There it is, Mulder thought. The part that really bothers him. The truth. 

“I guess my real question is how Miss Scully feels about all this. Seems like a big change, for her, in a short period of time.” 

“Well, she’s sleeping better, so that’s a nice change.” 

Skinner’s brows went on a Lewis and Clark expedition into new territories of his bald head. “I beg your pardon?” 

Too late, Mulder heard what he’d said. And what it implied. Especially in the sinfully proud tone he probably spoke in. (Because he was proud of it. Sinfully so. Proud of Scully sleeping in his house, under his roof: safe, warm, contented, melting against him like a cat in sunlight, trusting him so completely despite everyone in Chilmark saying he was a murderer.) “She told me so,” Mulder said, quickly. “This afternoon. At lunch. After I got her back into bed-”

“Excuse me?” 

“I put her down for a nap!” Mulder tried to explain. 

The entire bus went silent. Mulder squeezed his eyes shut. His blood throbbed in his face. This is not happening, he told himself. Someone’s bubble gum snapped.

“You did what now, Mulder?” asked the gum-snapper. 

“Shut the fuck up, Krycek!” 

“Language,” Skinner reminded him. 

“Little baby girl needs her daddy to sing her off to sleep, huh?” 

“Krycek,” Skinner warned. 

“I think it’s great, Coach!” Krycek chirped. “About time Mulder’s pendulum swung from lonely housewives to-”

Mulder rocketed up out of his seat and started to climb over it. “Krycek, I swear to Christ-”

“Break it up!” Skinner’s arms looped under Mulder’s. He hauled him off the seat and tossed him aside. “Great. Now neither of you are starting. Have fun riding the bench, you two.” 

Krycek beamed beatifically. His goal in life seemed to be fucking with Fox Mulder. Lately, he was getting extremely good at it. When Skinner turned, Mulder gave him the finger. Krycek winked one eye and gave him an air kiss. Then he went back to sitting with Colton and Cardinal. They were the only other guys on the team slimy enough to put up with Krycek’s bullshit. 

Mulder sank back into his seat. “You should be a better friend to him,” Skinner said, like he always did. 

Mulder rolled his head back. “Not this, again. Please?” 

“Alex has had it rough. Like you.” 

There was no arguing this point. Alex Krycek was Jewish. Over successive pogroms, his family escaped Russia into Poland, and then Poland into America. Still in Europe, his older brother had disappeared. In Poland, disappearing meant Auschwitz. And Auschwitz meant dead. Mulder knew this. He just had no idea how to bring it up. Or if Krycek even wanted to talk about it. Given his own experience, Mulder suspected he would rather not.

“I know,” he said, softly. 

“And it would benefit the team, if my wideback and my tailback could actually communicate,” Skinner added. “Exley has enough to contend with out there on that field. He doesn’t need you two stepping all over each other.” 

Before Krycek came along, Mulder had played tailback on account of his speed. Krycek was equally fast, but a lot smaller, so now Mulder was in wide receiving position, replacing Modell. (Now Modell was a tight end, which he hated since it put him next to the tackles, so he bitched about it to Mulder and Krycek whenever possible.) Worse, Krycek kept telling Mulder about all the empty spots he’d missed after each play, because the wide receiver’s job was spotting opportunities, and Mulder never saw them. Ideally, Mulder and Krycek would switch positions. But, as Skinner pointed out whenever they suggested this, Mulder had fingers that could pluck a fly ball out of the air like it was a peach in August, and an arm that could actually block Exley, in basketball. As a wideback, he frequently used both. 

“Did you know he’s in a lot of Miss Scully’s classes?” 

Mulder’s eyes snapped open. “What? I mean, no. I didn’t. Why should I know that?” 

“She’s your housemate, Mulder. I thought you might be familiar with her class schedule.” 

“Yeah, well, I’m not.” 

He wasn’t. He just knew the precise days and times in which he was most likely to pass her in hallways or on the stairs. And maybe that was weird, but the Vineyard was an island. Everyone was in everyone else’s pockets. It wasn’t Mulder’s fault if he focused intently on the first new element to arrive in his orbit in years. And it wasn’t like the other guys weren’t curious. There had been speculation across multiple lunch tables and lockers about her age, her Catholicism, her virginity, her real hair colour, her-

“Maybe you should be,” Skinner was saying. “Maybe you should know those things, Mulder. About the person you live with.” 

“Okay, yes, that’s true, I should probably know those things.” 

“You should probably know which other gentlemen are in her classes.” 

Mulder shot his coach a speculative, corner-of-the-eye glance. 

“It might help,” Skinner continued, staring dead ahead and sounding very bored. “That way, you would know who she was studying with. Who might be appearing at your house. I know Krycek’s in her classes. Jerse, too, I think.” 

The idea of Alex Krycek or Ed Jerse in Mulder’s home, peering over Scully’s shoulder to look at whatever love notes Pfaster had scrawled in the margins of her lab book, was genuinely disconcerting. Even more disconcerting was the fact that Mulder himself had not anticipated it. And he had not anticipated it, because he had not imagined that anyone might actually brave the Mulder house. Even the Stooges’ parents liked having him over to their homes, rather than sending their kids over to Mulder’s house. It was still the house where a little girl was stolen out of her bed. 

But now Mrs Scully was letting her own little girl live there. Which meant their reputation might change. Mulder could just picture Scully now, sticking up for her hosts: No, the Mulder home is NOT haunted; that is a cruel thing to say, and ghosts aren’t real, anyway, you big baby.

“She’s got Paddock for homeroom,” Mulder started to say, counting them off on his fingers. Skinner was his own homeroom teacher, primarily so Skinner could spot the truancy slips that might keep Mulder off the field. Most of the team was in his homeroom, for this reason. 

“Lovely,” Skinner said, dryly.

The Paddock name was an old one, in Massachusetts. Some of Mrs Paddock’s earliest ancestors had died on the end of a rope, or at the bottom of a dunking pool, after being accused of witchcraft. Mrs Paddock had actually been quite helpful: she’d collected all Scully’s homework so Mulder didn’t have to go from teacher to teacher. It was convenient and all, but the whole time Paddock had her back turned, Mulder felt like her python was watching him on her behalf. 

“And Pfaster for Chem, Bruckman for History and Reilly for English, plus Banton for Physics, Gogolak for Home Ec, and Incanto with me on Fridays during study period.”

“That’s a pretty full course load,” Skinner remarked. 

“She wants to be a doctor.” 

Skinner looked impressed. “Well, they are allowed to join the ranks, these days. Women doctors, I mean. Uncle Sam might even pay for her to attend medical school.” 

Mulder found the idea of Dr Dana Scully in some sweltering jungle, treating grabby Navy guys for crabs and the clap in addition to yellow fever and malaria, to be sick-making in itself. 

“Have you thought about whether you’ll take the ASTRP this month, or the V-12?” Skinner asked. 

Mulder did not exactly relish this change of subject. He’d gotten to dodge the tests in prior years on account of maybe having murdered his sister. This year, though, he had to pick one. 

“You know my preference,” Skinner said. “But Captain Scully would also be a good man to ask.” 

“If I ever get to meet him, sure,” Mulder muttered. 

“What do you mean?” 

Shit. “Just, you know, he’s busy. At the new base.” 

“You’ve never met him? Not even once?” 

“Well, no.” At Skinner’s dumbfounded blinking, Mulder added: “If Captain Scully had all kinds of free time to meet people, then none of this would be an issue, would it?”

“But the man does know his daughter is living at your house. Right?” 

It was possible he didn’t know. It was also possible he was dead. Or working on a secret project of some sort. And Mulder suspected that Scully didn’t want Skinner knowing that, because the more Mulder turned it over in his mind, the more it looked like she was right: Mrs Scully might be leaving her husband. Even if she wasn’t, Scully likely didn’t want her family’s business being discussed even more than it already was. And Mulder well knew what it felt like to be the subject of endless gossip.

“I believe it’s Mrs Scully’s job to inform her husband of things like that, not mine,” Mulder hedged. 

“So he doesn’t know.” Skinner peered at him over the rims of his spectacles. “Just to be on the safe side, let’s you and me start putting in some time with the speedbag.” 

Mulder opened his mouth to refuse, as he normally did whenever Skinner brought up boxing. Then he saw Scully’s pink face and glittering lashes, and how small she curled up, and he felt the phantom weight and heat of her body tucked up against his. The enormity of her trust in him was humbling. She (and her mother, and his own parents) just expected him to keep her safe. Like that was a thing he was born knowing how to do, and not a project he’d started. And her dad had hit her sister. Knocked her down. Scully herself admitted as much. 

“Yeah, okay,” Mulder said. 

“Are you serious?” Before Mulder could re-neg, Skinner said, “You’d have to come in early. Zero hour.” 

Mulder winced. That would mean getting up earlier, to look after the dogs. He could ask Scully to do it, sure, but soon enough it would be pitch black in the early mornings, and he didn’t like her out there by herself in the dark. She didn’t know the beach, for one. On the other hand: Alex Krycek and Ed Jerse in his house, with Scully, allegedly studying. And it wasn’t like he slept anyway, right? That was what study period was for: his nap. 

“Could I cut out early sometimes and see Hoffman about the paper? I keep missing editorial meetings on account of practise, so you’ll score points with him if you let me go.” 

“I do not need to score points with my fellow instructors, Mulder. It’s a high school, not Capitol Hill. We do what’s asked of us, and we help each other out when we can.” 

Mulder gave the other man a patronizing pat on the shoulder. “That’s some real heartwarming optimism on your part, Coach.” 

Skinner rolled his eyes. “Fine. Square it with Hoffman, if you can.” 

Then Exley and Dales came up to ask Skinner about the starting lineup since Mulder and Krycek were off it, so Mulder tuned out. Until Exley said: “Congrats on the new sister, Mulder.” 

“She cute?” Dales asked, before Mulder could say anything about how Scully was not, in fact, his sister. 

“She’d be like a Munchkin next to you, Dales. Literally half your size.” 

“Oh, so she’s perfect for the top of the cheer-amid?” Exley asked.

“Cheer-amid” was the name they’d made up for the pyramid formed by the cheer squad. And being both comically tiny and absurdly flexible, Scully would be perfect for it. Further, cheer would also mean keeping Scully with him after school. Separate buses to games, sure, but the same field (and court, and then field again). Which meant the same schedule. Mulder could keep an eye on her all the time. Her, and her uniform. 

“It’s not the worst idea,” Mulder mused. 

Skinner snorted. 

“What, you don’t want Scully participating in student life?” Mulder threw up his hands. “Exley’s right. She’s really small, lightweight, double-jointed-”

“Double-jointed, huh?” Exley eyed Mulder up. “How’d you figure that one out so fast, Fox?” 

“She told me so herself!” (She told him so herself, yes, after wrapping killer legs around him and letting him lay her down joint by joint on her bed, while she stared up at him with sleepy baby cat eyes.) “What, I’m not allowed to get to know the person who lives with me?”

“Get this guy. The person who lives with me. Wow.” Dales lifted his brows at Mulder. “What do you call your mom? The woman who gave me life?”  

Mulder smiled pleasantly. “No, Dales, that’s what I call your mother.” 

Skinner cleared his throat, loudly, before Dales could pop Mulder one. “I just want to make sure we’re each thinking about the same Dana Scully, on top of a pyramid.” Skinner gave Mulder a sidelong glance. “A pyramid made up of Angie White, Linda Modell, Ellen Adderly, Jenny Uphouse, and Terri-and-Margi. Plus Polly Turner.”  

Skinner had a point. Those girls did not strike Mulder as Scully’s kind of crowd, so to speak. White was okay, and so was Adderly. If you got them away from the rest. Which was tough to do. Cheer was like a coven, or something. Those girls did everything together. Also Mulder vaguely recalled rumours about a hazing ritual in the woods for new members of the squad. Something about jumping naked over a fire? Which had sounded brain-meltingly sexy. Until he imagined Scully taking part. Now it sounded brain-meltingly sexy and terrifying, because Mulder knew Scully was just reckless enough to do it. 

Exley snapped his fingers and pulled Mulder out of his reverie. “Right, I forgot about that creepy little freshman they’ve got, now. Turner.” 

Dales shuddered. “That kid gives me the willies.” 

“Agreed,” Mulder said, as a peace offering to Dales. “She looks like a mannequin in a shop window that came to life, somehow.” 

“That’s it!” Dales pointed. “That’s it exactly!” He elbowed Exley. “Didn’t I say? Didn’t I say something just like that, the other day?” 

“You did,” Exley said, patiently. He wrapped a fond arm around Dale’s neck. “And now I need you to stop saying it, before the other team finds out my big, bad inside linebacker’s scared of a little girl.” 

“He ain’t the only one,” Skinner muttered. 

Chapter Text

“Nothing to be afraid of,” Dr Waterston told Dana.

He was younger than any other doctor Dana had ever met: tall and lean and tanned, with blue eyes, dark blond mustardy hair, and an impressive moustache. The nurse who assisted him was obviously mad for him, to an almost embarrassing degree. Perhaps for this reason, Mrs Mulder seemed to radiate disapproval the moment she set eyes on him. Dana wondered what disability could possibly have kept such a young man out of the service for so long. Was he some sort of conscientious objector? The Quakers had a long tradition of doctors; Hodgkin and Lister were Quakers. Possibly, Dr Waterston was the only one supporting his elderly parents. And, Dana reasoned, now that the island had a Navy base and an influx of new residents, having another doctor around could only help. 

“In ten days or so, it should be good as new. But I want you to keep it clean and dry for the next forty-eight hours. After that you can wash it with soap and water, but no soaking it in the tub or the stitches might loosen. Wash it, dry it, and change the dressings daily. Boil the bandages if you run out. And wear that sling, all right? It’ll help prevent further injury.” 

“Yes, Doctor,” Dana said, nodding. 

“And itching is fine, but throbbing, oozing, fever, or a dull ache? Those are-”

“Those are signs of infection,” Dana said, brightly. 

Dr Waterston smiled. “Let me guess. After graduation, you want to become a nurse.” 

“No, sir; a doctor,” Dana said. “All my Victory Corps activities are with the Red Cross. I have Red Cross certification for two kinds of first-aid. And I’m taking a Latin class now so I can pass Anatomy, later.” 

Behind her, Dana felt rather than saw Mrs Mulder prick up her ears, as though suddenly paying attention. Dr Waterston looked similarly intrigued. “I hope you like Pennsylvania,” he said. 

Dana guessed that he was referring to the Women’s Medical College of Pennsylvania, which had accepted women the longest. “Actually I’m aiming for Yale Medical School,” she said. “I would rather support an institution that’s integrated all the way.” 

“Well, we islanders are in full support of that,” Dr Waterston said. “And if you ever feel like volunteering here, we could always use another set of hands. But only after yours is mended.” 

“I would love to,” Dana said. “I’m much better at sewing sutures than wound dressings for Home Ec.” 

Dr Waterston blinked. “You’ve given stitches, before?” 

Dana nodded. “Sure! Once, when I was around thirteen, my dad stood up too fast under where some bikes were mounted, and his scalp caught on the teeth of the gears. He’s bald, so he let me do the stitches right away to avoid scarring. After we disinfected everything, of course.” 

Dr Waterston narrowed his eyes in an estimating glance. “Sure this alumnus can’t tempt you over to Stanford, Miss Scully?” 

“Do they have a good pre-med program? Because I’m looking for one in California. My sister lives there.” 

“They do indeed. We should make an appointment to discuss it.” 

“Perhaps you might decide on a time and place after Dana’s stitches have been removed,” Mrs Mulder said. “After all, Thanksgiving is just around the corner, and with the holidays, I imagine you shall be putting in extra shifts.” 

“Correct,” Dr Waterston said. “If this doctor has neither bad oysters nor Christmas tree fires to deal with this year, he shall be a very happy man. You don’t stuff your raw bird with raw oysters, do you, Mrs Mulder?” 

“Oh, goodness, no. I don’t hold with that Yankee nonsense. My dressing is made with cornbread, like God and my grandmother intended.” 

For some reason, Dana had forgotten about Thanksgiving entirely. Had her mother been around, they would have been planning how to stretch the ration stamps to feed everyone. “Everyone” was already going to be different this year, what with Missy gone and Bill still in Norfolk, and then with Charlie in the hospital, but this year was supposed to be one of the few that Daddy would be around to celebrate with them. Now, Dana would be focused on getting their house ready to be rented by another family. And Charlie might be dead. 

“Who should I speak to about a forwarding address for my mother?” Dana asked Mrs Mulder, when Dr Waterston had dismissed her.

“Possibly the children’s ward,” Mrs Mulder said. “I imagine they will have communicated with the hospital in Boston.”

They proceeded on to the children’s ward. Dana knew some of the nurses, but not all of them. At the nurses’ station, she introduced herself and asked for the address and phone exchange for the hospital where Charlie had been sent. Children’s Hospital Boston was apparently affiliated with the Harvard Medical School; Dana drew some small comfort from the idea that her brother’s case might be helpful to future doctors. 

“And do you have the phone exchange where my mother is staying?” 

“Oh yes, it’s-” The nurse looked up at Dana and Mrs Mulder. Then her face fell. “Wait. No. Darn. I was wrong. This is for another patient.” 

Dana looked down at the slip in the nurse’s hand. Quickly, the nurse folded it in half. “You will need to call the children’s hospital and ask them,” the nurse said. “Your mother probably hasn’t found a place to stay just yet, but the hospital will have her contact information. Just give it a couple of days.” 

That did make a sort of sense. If Fox was right and Charlie was on some sort of waiting list, then Mom probably wouldn’t have had time to find a place to stay between last night and this afternoon. She likely would have been too concerned about Charlie to focus on herself. 

“What about my father? Captain William Scully? Has he called here for the same information?” 

“I’m afraid not, Miss Scully. Your mother probably left him a message at the base.” 

“But you have the information about where he can reach me, if he calls here looking?” 

“Well…” 

“I’ll leave it with you again, just in case,” Mrs Mulder said, and gave the phone exchange (ChapterHouse 5-2718) and address (1501 Larkspur Lane) for the house. When she was done, she smiled at Dana. “Not to worry, dear. I know things are unsettled now, but it’s only been a day or two. By Monday, we’ll know more. Just try and enjoy the weekend, hmm? Fox said he wanted to help you bring over some other things to the house, tomorrow. He asked to use the car.” 

“Yes, ma’am. That would be a big help.” 

Mrs Mulder reached up and touched Dana’s hair, then quickly withdrew her hand. “Let’s go home and have some tea.” 

“Thank you,” Dana murmured. 

In the car, though, Mrs Mulder put the key in the ignition, but didn’t turn it. Instead, she sighed. She folded her gloved hands in her lap. “Can you keep a secret, Dana?” 

Could she ever. First the secret of why Missy was in California, and now the secret of what had happened in the kitchen. The latter secret was somewhat easier to keep, because Dana herself was still uncertain what, precisely, had happened in the kitchen. Only that things now seemed...different. Fox had not explicitly asked her to keep anything a secret, necessarily, but he had acted secretively: constantly looking and listening to check if they were being observed. More curiously, and somewhat disturbingly, Dana herself was pleased at not being watched. Pleased to share something with Fox that they had not shared with other people. Something private. Confidential. It was not unlike the act of stitching a wound: it required trust. 

“Yes, ma’am, I can.” 

Mrs Mulder turned to her. “I hate Thanksgiving.” 

The admission was such a non-sequitur that Dana almost laughed. “I suppose everyone likes Christmas best,” she said, carefully. 

“No.” Mrs Mulder waved her hand. “It’s not that. You see, Samantha disappeared the Tuesday after Thanksgiving. We came back from seeing my sister and her family in Raleigh that Sunday. Bill went back to work Monday. On Tuesday evening, I went out to see friends. On Wednesday morning, Samantha wasn’t in her bed.” 

She drew a deep breath. “But Fox had played football with his cousins, all weekend. So he was covered in scrapes and bruises. And the police thought-” Her eyes shut. “They thought…”

“They thought he did it,” Dana said. “He told me.” 

Mrs Mulder’s eyes flew open. They were red and wet. “He did?” 

Dana nodded. “I guess he thought I should hear the whole story. That it wouldn’t be fair to me, otherwise. But please don’t worry. I already know he didn’t do it, Mrs Mulder. And I told him just the same.” 

Now Fox’s mother seemed even more surprised. “You did?” 

“Yes, ma’am.” 

“If you don’t mind my asking, Dana, how can you be so sure? Because the people of this town have been somewhat more difficult to convince.” 

Dana rather suspected that her earlier explanation, that Fox was simply too smart to commmit such a stupid crime, would go over like a lead balloon with Mrs Mulder. “I just know,” she said, shrugging. “Nobody who took those pictures of Samantha, the ones in the nice frames, could ever hurt her.” 

Mrs Mulder removed a handkerchief from her purse and dabbed at her eyes. “He told you he took those?” 

“Yes, ma’am.” Dana decided not to tell Mrs Mulder about the dumb rumour about her secretly being Samantha. “I said I’d looked at the photos, and he told me after that.” When Mrs Mulder said nothing, Dana asked, “Did that pretty lace on the table come from her christening gown?” 

“Yes. From Bill’s mother, in England. Real English lace. Fox wore it, too. You really are quite observant; I can see why...” She trailed off, shaking her head. While Dana took the information that Fox had indeed been baptized and filed it away somewhere, Mrs Mulder dabbed at her eyes again. “The police thought those images were evidence of some sort of depraved obsession. Fox made me beg him to put them up and let them stay. He kept facing them down again. Even now, he refuses to look at that corner of the room.” 

“Well, I’m glad you put them up. It’s good you have those. There are hardly any photos of my dad in our albums. Mom’s always saying she wishes she had more. Though sometimes I think Daddy is just has happy to avoid the camera, since he lost all his hair.” 

Mrs Mulder heaved another sigh. She offered Dana a weary, watery, womanly expression. “You’re very worried about him, aren’t you, Dana?” 

“Yes, ma’am.” 

“And about your mother and younger brother.” 

It was odd that she mentioned Mom first. But it was true. “Yes, ma’am, I am.” 

“What a solemn young woman you are, Dana. Have you ever considered taking the veil? Is that why you attended Our Lady of Sorrows?” 

This question came up, a lot. Somehow everyone thought Dana wanted to be a nun. “No, ma’am. I want to have a family of my own.” 

Mrs Mulder smiled, apparently glad of the change in subject. “You do? I thought you wanted to be a doctor.” 

“I want to do both.” She frowned, thinking of her conversation with Fox. Feminine talents? What on Earth are those supposed to be? Certainly not medicine, to hear Granny Scully tell it. (Nana Lynch, on the other hand, said she and Missy and Mom came from a long line of women who knew how to heal people.) “If I’m blessed with the opportunity to do both, that is. There’s no guarantee I’ll get into medical school. And even if I am accepted, I may not win the scholarships to pay for it. After that, assuming all goes well, there’s still the matter of finding the right man for the job-”

Mrs Mulder waved a dismissive hand. “That will be trivially easy, for you. If anything, your trouble will be deciding between suitors.” 

“I appreciate your vote of confidence, ma’am, but I’m trying to be realistic. My chances aren’t that good, honestly. Not many men want to be married to a doctor. And choosing between boys was always more my sister Melissa’s problem than mine. She’s the pretty one.” 

Mrs Mulder made a strange gasping noise, almost like she’d found a stray pin in her dress only after it had pricked her. “Oh, Dana,” she whispered. “Who in the world told you that?” 

“I don’t know. Everybody?” Everybody, with one important caveat: “Everybody who’s seen us both, that is.” 

“But Melissa isn’t here now, is she? You get to be your own woman. Without being compared to her.” 

Dana’s lip trembled. “All the same, I think I’d rather have her around, even if it means being the plain one forever. I miss her.” 

“The plain one. Honestly, Dana. The things you say.” Mrs Mulder folded her handkerchief one way, and then the other. Her thumb ran over the embroidery, stroking it into place. “I had a beautiful older sister, too, you know. Margaret.” 

“That’s my mother’s name!” 

Mrs Mulder smiled tightly, like someone with an awful canker sore inside their lip. “I know, dear. I suppose, to be perfectly honest, I took that as a sort of sign that you belonged with us. Because if this had happened to my own Margaret, then I would have taken in her little girl. If she’d had a little girl, that is. She always wanted one. But it simply wasn’t in the cards. She envied me-” One hand rose to her chest as though to choke off her breath before she could utter the words. Her thumb rested inside the hollows of her clavicles. “She envied me my own little girl. Until that morning when she didn’t.”  

There was something about the way Mrs Mulder was arranging her sentences that reminded Dana of all the photos clustered together on the little table. “Is your sister no longer with us?” 

“No, she is not. She died, about three years ago.” 

“I’m sorry. Was she sick?” 

It took Mrs Mulder a long moment to answer. She stared hard at the clock embedded in the dash. If Dana listened carefully, she could hear the soft ticking sound it made. “Yes. Very sick. She was very sick, for a long time. Only we didn’t know exactly how sick, until it was too late.” 

“I’m sorry,” Dana repeated. “I’ll pray for her. And Samantha.” 

“Thank you.” Finally, Mrs Mulder turned back to the windscreen. She started the car. Then she put her driving gloves back on. “Which of the churches were you attending on the island? Fox mentioned you wanted to go.” 

That was a surprise. Maybe Fox was trying to steal a march on Dana, before she could make those requests for confession and Bible study that she had threatened. “...He did?” 

“Should he not have? Is it not the case?” 

“No, I do want to go back to St Augustine’s. It’s the only one open year-round,” Dana said. “But to be honest, I stopped going once Mom stopped coming home. I don’t have a bike, so I had no way to get there. If I’d asked for the parish carpooling service, they’d’ve found out I was on my own and I’d’ve wound up in some kind of group home, probably.” 

Mrs Mulder nodded, as she pulled out of the lot. “Yes, Fox was worried about something like that happening,” she said, absently. 

That made no sense. “He was? Why? He doesn’t even like me.” 

Mrs Mulder laughed like Dana had told a joke. “Is that what he told you?” 

“Well, no, ma’am, but consider the evidence. I believe that nickname speaks for itself.” 

“Milk, you mean?” 

“That’s the one, ma’am.” 

Mrs Mulder made a soft, considering sound. “Do the other students really call him Spooky?” 

“Only when they’re being mean. And only behind his back. Not to his face. Though I barely see him during the day, so I might simply have missed it.” 

“But Fox calls you Milk to your face?” 

Dana hadn’t really thought of it that way. “Yes, actually. He relishes it. But we only have the one class together, and it’s only on Fridays. So he’s really just making the most of the opportunity.” 

“The opportunity to do what?” 

Dana frowned. There was no easy or quick way to explain what happened in Latin class. At least not so Mrs Mulder would understand. Only that when Fox looked at Dana it felt like a lighthouse lamp sweeping over her, and it functioned much the same. Faced away from him as she was most of the period, she could never be completely certain when he was looking or not. But more often than not, lately, her intuition was correct. Because every time Incanto lingered over her shoulder and started praising her work, Fox made sure to either cough very loudly or drop a pencil on the floor or to ask an annoying question. Obviously, he was envious, and wished he were back on top of the class rankings.

“To remind me of my place, I guess. Fox used to be top of the class, after all. So now he hates it when Mr Incanto pays attention to me.” 

Mrs Mulder gave her a quick glance. “Mr Incanto is the one with the unfortunate skin condition?” 

“Yes, ma’am.” 

“And Fox...” Mrs Mulder drummed her fingers on the steering wheel. The leather of her driving gloves matched the leather on the wheel. Both were a sort of dove grey. “Seems not to like it, very much, when Mr Incanto pays special attention to you?” When Dana nodded, Mrs Mulder pressed: “There couldn’t be any other reason for his behaviour?” 

“Aside from the class rankings?” Why else would he care? 

“Might he be attempting to get a rise out of you? My son excels at being provocative. He might be taller, these days, but that much has yet to change from when he was in short pants.” 

To be fair, Dana had gotten rather…piqued, when the nickname didn’t die. And Fox had seemed amused by her annoyance, but not in the same way that Bill or Charlie were, usually. There was no real way to explain this difference, either. It was like chemistry, or cooking: the difference between golden brown and burnt-to-a-crisp was taking your eye off the pan for a half-second. This, Dana realized, was part of why it confused (and therefore vexed) her so: Fox was not mean to her in the way that Bill was mean to her. Dana had no script for it his particular brand of teasing. But her reaction had been the same, because it was the safest: to ignore it and move on. Only, while this was the way to stay safe from Bill, it for some reason made Fox more persistent. Like a dog digging under a fence. Like she was a bone he had buried and no matter how much snow fell or flowers grew, he knew she was there, and he wanted to chew on her some more. 

“I suppose that’s possible. But I doubt he’d find that worth his time and effort.”

“Because he’s such an effective manager of his time?” Mrs Mulder asked, skeptically. 

Dana decided to take the question seriously, regardless of the tone in which it was asked. “Well, I wouldn’t really know about that, having only the one class with him. But it doesn’t make sense to me that he’d work so hard at getting a rise out of someone who’s probably going to leave soon, anyway. We’re Navy. We’re never anywhere for very long. So focusing on me would be a poor investment, on his part.”

Mrs Mulder gave Dana a sort of double-take look. “Dana, do you not make many friends?” 

This, again? Apparently today was her day to politely explain to the Mulders what a raw deal they got. “I’m afraid not. My mother and sister call it one of my worst faults. They say it makes me look snobby, or cold. But I think of it as being honest. Missy, my sister I mean, always cried and cried about the people who never wrote, after we moved. So I know I’ll just lose any friends I happen to make, as soon as we move.” 

At the stop light, Mrs Mulder frowned at the steely sky and the ocean it reflected. “I’m afraid you might have to work very hard indeed, to lose this one.” When the light changed, she pointed them homeward. Or, at least, toward Larkspur Lane. “Dana, have you ever wondered if perhaps you might plan your social life more effectively, if you had a deadline?”

“...A deadline?”

“A timetable. A schedule. If you knew how long you were staying in a place, you might be able to plan accordingly, the same as you plan out any other itinerary. A social calendar is the same as any other calendar, is it not?”

“Well, yes, ma’am. But I never know how long I might be staying anywhere. Even before Pearl Harbour, the Navy was keeping an eye on things. So we gathered no moss.”

“...I beg your pardon?” 

“A rolling stone gathers no moss. That’s what Dad always says. And Mom says most American families have no idea how great this country really is, but families like ours do, because we spend so much time in different states and we see how so many different sorts of people around the country live.” 

Mrs Mulder smiled softly. “And how many states have you lived in?” 

Dana winced. “I count the bases, not the states, since some of them are outside the country. But we’ve lived at Norfolk, Pensacola, Great Lakes, Seattle, Alameda, San Diego, Quantico...we even lived at Coco Solo, in Panama, and Halifax, in Canada. Mom liked Halifax the best, I think. Maybe even better than Pearl Harbour.” 

“But, Dana, that means...” Mrs Mulder looked somewhat alarmed. Dana had begun to suspect that social calendars and reputations were profoundly important to Mrs Mulder. That would explain why she felt so strange about not truly enjoying a major holiday, despite having a perfectly understandable reason for doing so. “That’s ten bases in fifteen years.” 

“Yes, ma’am.” Dana lifted her brows. “You see now why I wasn’t so concerned as you were, about how living alone might damage my reputation. I’ve never really had a chance to develop a reputation of any kind, good or bad. I mostly just focus on going to Mass and getting good grades.” 

“Well, those pursuits should benefit your reputation in any case,” Mrs Mulder sniffed. “But I hope you’ll forgive me for failing to grasp why your mother would pick up and follow your father each and every time. Would it not be better to establish your family in one spot, and let him return to it when he can?” 

Dana smiled. This, at least, she had an answer for. “Mom says a man with access to real firepower should have to look his wife and children in the eye as often as possible, so he has them in mind when he makes decisions that might impact another man’s wife and children.” 

“Oh, Dana.” Now Mrs Mulder reached up and over to stroke her hair. Perhaps Fox had learned the habit from his mother. “I certainly hope your father truly is as noble a man as your mother believes him to be.” 

Dana tried not to be insulted. Fox had said that his parents fought regularly. Besides, having a whole town baselessly suspect your son of murdering his sister was no recipe for trust in humanity, much less a firm belief in any inherent honour or nobility among the human race. “I think we should hope the same for all men, ma’am. Not just my father.”

“Yes. Of course. All men.”  A hunted look entered her eyes, as they scanned the road ahead. “Despite all evidence to the contrary.” 

“All the evidence to the contrary is not entirely dissuasive. There is also the evidence of things not seen. That’s why we need faith: believing that no one can change for the better is just another way of giving in to despair.” 

Mrs Mulder squeezed her shoulder. Her hand returned to the wheel. For a moment, she was quiet. She appeared to be deciding something. Nodding to herself, she asked: “Dana, would it bother you terribly if I brought a cup of tea out to Mr Mulder, at the stables, when we get back? I want to tell him what the doctor said, and plan out the weekend, while I still have it all fresh in my mind.” 

“Why should it bother me? That sounds like a really nice thing to do.” And it did sound nice. It sounded lovely. It sounded lovely and nice and blessedly normal. Her own mother would be grateful to be able to do such a thing in the middle of the day. At least, Dana had thought so, once upon a time. Now, with her father possibly AWOL and her mother seemingly unreachable in Boston for the moment, she felt a little less certain. 

Then again, Dana felt less certain of everything, these days. Her family was gone, but the world didn’t end. She cried and snapped and had the audacity to require attention and effort and care, but the world didn’t end.  She moved in with the person who seemed Hell-bent on driving her nuts, but the world didn’t end. She let him pick her up and carry her and hold her in his lap, and pet her hair and stroke her neck and tell her what to do and call her an angel and put her to bed, but the world didn’t end.  

The world kept not ending. If anything, it seemed to be daring Dana to live in it. 

Chapter Text

“Hey. Mulder. Isn’t that your little tzarina?” Krycek, currently pulling his elbow behind his head to stretch out his tricep, nodded with his chin up at the stands. 

“My what, now?” Mulder asked, scowling. 

Krycek cocked his head and blinked his girlish long lashes at Mulder, as though transmitting intelligence via semaphore.

“Yup, that’s Dana,” Colton said, from down the bench. 

Oh, this was not good. This was really not good. In fact, it was the exact opposite of good. It was second down, the Vineyard Reapers were losing, and Mulder was off the starting lineup. Dad would decide to attend this game, after missing so many others. And now Scully was here to observe his failure in person. Worse, Krycek had a front-row seat for the whole show. 

“Hey, why’s her arm in a sling?” Colton asked, frowning.

“What the fuck?” 

Mulder leapt off the bench and turned. He followed the direction of Colton and Krycek’s gaze. Sure enough, there was Dad, and there was Scully standing beside him. Naturally, Mom was nowhere to be found. (Or, more likely, she’d been found by someone else.) Scully wore a little fur-lined cape and matching hat Mulder remembered his mother wearing years ago. Somehow it made Scully look even tinier. And yes, her right arm was in a sling. 

“Oh no,” Krycek purred. “Did somebody get rough with Daddy’s little girl?”

“Piss off, Krycek.” Was Mulder not allowed to simply take care of Scully without it being weird? Sure, he fed her and read to her and carried her to bed, but she was hurt. And scared. And alone. Krycek had no idea how alone she was, or how badly she needed looking-after. 

“You should be careful with that one, Mulder.” 

Mulder turned to Krycek. Had his feelings really been so transparent, on his face? “Excuse me?” 

Now Krycek stretched his arm in such a way that obscured what he was saying from anyone who might be looking. Some habits died hard, Mulder realized. “I’m just saying. I know her from homeroom. She’s a little, you know, touched. Special.” When Mulder said nothing, Krycek added: “I mean she’s innocent, Mulder.”

Somehow Krycek saying something about Scully’s innocence made Mulder feel twice as guilty. (And why was her being special such a bad thing, anyway?) Mulder had no time to argue the point. When he caught Scully’s eye, he pointed toward Dad, and she tugged on Dad’s sleeve and pointed down at him. Dad waved alongside her. Mulder Signed: <<Her. Arm. Broken?>>

“What are you doing?” Krycek asked. 

Dad made an exaggerated shake of his head. <<All OK>> he Signed. 

<<Arm. Why?>>

“The Vineyard has always had a big Deaf population,” Mulder explained, out loud. “Their sign language caught on with the farmers, because it let them communicate across the fields quickly without shouting, and the English and Portuguese speakers could both butcher it equally. So we all pick up some basics.” 

It had taken Dad a minute to figure out what to Sign. <<Hand. Rest.>>

Mulder sighed. He ran his hands through his hair. “The sling’s to keep her hand from banging into stuff, I guess.” Colton no longer seemed to be listening. Mulder Signed, <<Her. Dinner?>>

Dad gave him a thumbs-up and then an OK. 

<<Thank you>> Mulder told him. 

<<Relax.>> Dad Signed. <<Play.>> Then he turned to Scully, motioned for her to sit down, and began giving her what was likely a version of the history lecture Mulder had just given Krycek. Mulder turned away (he felt her eye on him, still, like a bee trapped under his collar) and sat down. Krycek sat down with him. 

“What’s wrong with her hand?” 

“She cut it open trying to open up the chimney, in the dark.” 

Krycek laughed a little in his nose. “That’s Dana.” 

Mulder peered over at him. “What do you mean?” 

“I mean she’s like that. You know that skinny little creep, Lively?” Mulder nodded. “Asshole started a fire in the Chem lab, and Dana went over and covered it with a bell jar like it was nothing. Smothered it. Cool as a fucking cucumber.” 

Skinner looked over his shoulder at them. “Gentlemen, if I have to warn you about language again, you ain’t touching grass after the half, either.” 

Krycek grinned. “Can’t help it, Coach; I learned English in a refugee camp.” 

“So now you can’t curse in Polish?” 

“Trust me: the Polish curses are even dirtier, Coach.” 

Skinner gave a weary shake of his head. The two of them were dancing on his very last nerve, and Mulder knew it. Worse, Exley was getting the hurt put on him, out there. And the fact that the other team had it in for Exley meant that Dales was distracted, so both the offensive and defensive lines were being cut to ribbons. If that continued, they’d lose. And every time the Reapers lost, it undermined Skinner’s decision to integrate the team. Which in turn put his job in jeopardy.

They were one of the few such teams in the district. And everywhere they played, the opposing team and their families made sure everybody else knew it. The one time Mulder had seen Skinner lose his cool was when he caught the nose tackle transplant from Boston spitting on Exley. Skinner lost it on the kid’s coach, bald head beet red, while the other coach gave him a shit-eating grin and told him to “let the boys get it out of the systems.” 

It was a home game, so Blevins was in attendance and Skinner walked away, eventually. But by then Mulder had decided he really didn’t like the other coach, so he a moment later he wandered over and said, casually, “Please don’t mind him. He means well.” When the other coach grunted appreciatively, Mulder had added in his friendliest tones: “Besides, it’s me you should worry about. I’m the one who’s been arrested for murder.” 

This little act of information warfare encouraged the jackass coach to change his lineup. His team started eating shit, soon after. True to his name, Mulder had spooked him. And he had a feeling he might have to do the same again, before the night was out. Because as the clock started again, the pattern continued: Exley got crushed, sometimes before he could even snap, and then Dales got messy, with neither man keeping their lines in formation. 

“They got no defense,” Krycek said, now stretching the other arm. “They got one play, and it’s killing Ex.” 

“That’s not why they’re running it that way, Alex.” 

“I know,” Krycek said, and his voice was at once so soft and so cold that Mulder actually looked over at him in surprise. Krycek kept his eye on the other team. Unlike the other guys on the bench, he watched the defensive line. Or rather, the lack thereof. He was right: they were shit. “Believe me, it looks the same no matter what uniform it wears.” 

This was the closest they’d ever come to talking about it. The war. The Nazis. Death. How narrowly Krycek and his parents had escaped certain doom. “Ain’t that the truth,” Mulder muttered. 

Krycek windmilled his arms. “You should warm up your legs. You’re gonna be running. A lot. Soon.” 

“Bet?” Mulder asked, standing. 

“Nope. Kinda hoping I’m wrong this time, to be honest.” He wrinkled his nose at Mulder. “I said warm ‘em up, Mulder, not stand there like a big pink flamingo. Pick your knees up, already.” 

“Look, pal, I don’t know how it is in Warsaw, but out here you buy a guy dinner, first-”

A sickening crunch. Than a long whistle. And then dead silence. Silence on the field, and silence in the stands, until there came the shuffling sound of an entire crowd standing in unison. Mulder whirled. Krycek was already on his feet. They ran at a dead heat for the knot of Reapers. Betts and the other guards and tackles crouched or stood. And when Mulder reached them, he saw what they were looking at: Exley, on the ground, struggling to breathe. 

“Ex!” Dales burst through the crowd just as Skinner and the opposing coach got there. He went down on his knees and grabbed Exley’s hand. “Ex. Ex, look at me. Squeeze my hand.” Exley’s breath was coming light and fast. Too light. Too fast. “Josh?” Panic bled into Dales’s voice. “Josh, c’mon-”

“Give him room!” The others backed away at Skinner’s booming command. Dales didn’t. 

“It hurts,” Exley choked out. “Art, it really hurts-”

“I know,” Dales said, nodding. “We’ll fix it. We’ll get a doctor.” He looked up at Skinner. “Is there a doctor?” 

“For him?” the opposing coach asked. He curled his lip at Exley like he was roadkill. “Not in this part of town, that’s for sure. You’ll have to-” 

“You’ll have to shut your trap right now, if you know what’s good for you,” Skinner snapped. He held up a finger. “And don’t think for a second this is turning into a forfeit.” 

“Wouldn’t dream of it,” the other guy said. “But good luck finding somebody to patch up your boy before the half.” 

Mulder could not suppress the utterly gleeful sound he made just then. Skinner shot him a filthy look. So did the other coach. “Gimme a minute.” Mulder started running. 

“The Hell are you off to?” Skinner called. 

Briefly, he turned and ran backwards. “Getting the team medic!” 

Turning, Mulder sprinted for the stands. Dad and Scully were standing up, as were the other parents and friends. The cheer squad was doing something that looked a lot like a prayer circle. (At least, Mulder hoped it was this, and not some other kind of ritual.) Mulder waved to Dad; Dad waved back. 

<<Her I Need Down Here Now>> Mulder signed. Scully turned to Dad. Dad translated. Then he started escorting Scully down the steps toward the rail. Mulder jogged over to meet them; when he got there, Scully was leaning over. 

“Is it his neck or his ribs?” she called down. 

“I was hoping you might have the answer to that!” 

Scully looked left and right for the exits. “I’ll meet you-”

“Just jump.” Mulder pulled at the air with both hands. Scully gave him a look that said he was clearly cracked. “C’mon. Just jump. It’s not even that far, I promise.” 

“I am doing no such thing! I already got one set of stitches today!” Scully looked down at the rail. “I can’t even climb over this with just the one arm.” She bent at the waist; Dad grabbed her hat before it toppled entirely. Then, as though she were made of liquid and not flesh, Scully threaded her body through the bars and was abruptly on the other side of the rails. “Um, now what?” 

“Stand really still.” Mulder grabbed her around the legs and did a 180. As he did, her body slid down his front with agonizing slowness, until she stood on solid ground beaming up at him. Now, her hands twined behind his neck. 

“Thank you,” Scully said. Mulder nodded. It was easier than trying to breathe.

This, he realized with startling clarity, was how the other guys (the lucky ones, anyhow) felt at the end of every game. Sure, Mulder got laid more than his teammates did, but those were affairs. The women who slept with him were not his girlfriends. They could never go out with him in public like this. Prior to this moment, that secrecy was perfectly fine by Mulder. No one at school or on the island would want to be seen making time with the guy suspected of killing his baby sister, anyway. After Sam disappeared, the girls his own age were all terrified of him; he had to take what he could get. And in that spirit, Mulder had hoped that occasionally holding or carrying Scully, like he had done an absurd number of times over the past forty-eight hours, might be enough for him. Clearly, his premise was profoundly flawed.

Scully seemed to interpret the riot currently unfolding inside his chest (and obviously registering on his face) as fear for Exley: “Don’t worry, Fox. Let’s go.” 

Mulder followed a step behind. He’d regained some powers of speech by the time Scully wove in between the other players and knelt at Exley’s side. Enough to give her Ex’s name, anyway, and tell her he seemed lucid. 

“Mr Exley?” Ex nodded. “I’m Dana Scully, and I have Red Cross certification in first aid. Can you follow my finger with your eyes? Yes, like that.” 

Scully arced her finger steadily over his face. “Thank you. Can you flex your left foot for me?” She watched the foot. “And the right?” She watched that one, too. “And your left hand?” He clasped it open and closed. “What about the arm? Can you lift it?” He lifted it. “And the right? Can you lift that, and-”

Exley howled. 

“Okay, so the good news is that you still have nerve function in all your extremities, which means your spine is probably intact,” Scully informed him. “Now, I have to touch you; is that all right?” 

“It’s all right with you?” Ex asked, just as the opposing coach snorted. Skinner shot him a silencing look.

“Of course it’s all right with me,” Scully said. “Why wouldn’t it be?” She ran her left middle fingertips along Exley’s right collarbone. “I’m just sorry I can’t use my right hand. My left isn’t as good. Not as sensitive. Does this hurt?” She tapped just under the clavicle. 

“No.” He was still struggling to breathe. 

“Where does it hurt?” 

“Middle. When I breathe. I can’t-” His eyes roved wildly in his skull. “I can’t-”

“It’s okay, Josh,” Dales murmured. He turned to Scully. “You want I should pull up his jersey?” 

“That would help, yes.” Mulder watched Scully school her features to neutrality when Dales delicately pulled up the material. A dark swarming something was there under the skin. “Josh? I’m going to put my hand right here-”

Exley made a terrible sound behind his teeth when her fingers rested gently across his skin. The opposing coach spat on the ground. Not at Scully, per se, but very close to her. Mulder’s face shot up. He was already moving when Krycek darted nimbly in front of him. 

“Don’t bother, Mulder. Let him hit a Jew, first. With a mug like that, and a gut his size? It’s all he’s got left to live for.” 

The coach reared back. Instantly, Skinner put himself between Krycek and the coach. “Touch one of my players, and you’ll never work in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts again.” 

“We’ll see about-”

“Shut up!” 

At least twenty-two different heads swivelled down to look at Scully. Her little face was paper white, save for two points of angry colour in the apples of her cheeks. Her eyes had gone a lovely winter blue, the colour of those breathtakingly cold, clear skies that stopped snow from melting. And her voice had sunk an octave. When she spoke again, Mulder felt it hook under his ribs, low and sharp as a scythe mowing through summer wheat. 

“I am attempting to determine if Mr Exley’s pneumothorax is partial or total. I cannot do that without quiet. So please leave. No one wants you here.” 

The other players all took a step back, as though Scully were firecracker whose fuse had just been lit. The other coach sputtered. Clearly, no one ever spoke to him this way, and he had no clue how to handle it. Some remote part of Mulder acknowledged that although he adored irritating her (he could watch that thing her lips did when she was mad all day long), he had barely scratched the surface of the hard, unblinking hate she could unleash at will. She stared at the other coach as though he had betrayed her personally, like the useless waste of skin standing before her now were uniquely responsible for all the ills of the world. Furious did not begin to describe it. Incandescent was more appropriate. She glowed. God knew she was cute, before; even pretty, sometimes, in an entirely too clean and wholesome way, but now-

“In fact, I suspect the only place you might be any use is in Berlin, using all that disgusting spit to shine the Fuhrer’s jackboots. So why don’t you goose-step out of everyone’s way, before I report you to the State Department for un-American activity?” 

“Try it, sweetheart,” the coach said. 

“She just did.” Dad’s hand landed on Mulder’s shoulder. His other held out an ID. His voice was very pleasant. The last time Mulder had heard his father being this pleasant, he was in handcuffs, and Dad was talking to Sheriff Patterson. It was when his father was at his most pleasant that he was also his most dangerous. “Bill Mulder, State Department investigations bureau. Was there anything else you wished to say to my children?” 

His fellow teammates shot Mulder a look. Mulder shot one to his father in turn, but said nothing. Dad merely continued smiling coldly at the other coach. In the ensuing silence, Scully (who was supposed to be his sister, now, apparently) stretched her little body over Exley’s much taller, broader one. She covered her right ear with her bad shoulder. Belatedly, Mulder dropped to his knees beside her and covered her ear himself. She nodded her thanks. “Okay, Josh, now just try to take a slow, deep breath. Go slow as you can.” 

Exley inhaled until he whimpered. Scully wriggled down closer to the bottom of his ribs. She laid her ear on his bare torso. Mulder followed her with his hand. It occurred to Mulder that there were probably states where what she was doing was a crime. Where Exley would be arrested — or simply strung up — for even letting her do this much. Judging by the grim look on Skinner’s face, the set of his shoulders, and the clenching and un-clenching of his fist, he was considering the same. 

“One more?” Exley tried to breathe. His knuckles paled around Dales’s. “Okay, Josh,” Scully said, sitting up. She smiled so gently that for just a second, Mulder felt a stab of jealousy and wished he was the one on the injured roster. “You’ve broken a rib, I think, and it’s pressing on your lung. That doesn’t mean there’s a hole in the lung or anything, but some of the air inside escaped when you got tackled, and now there’s an air bubble between the lung and the ribs. So the bubble is causing the lung to deflate a little bit. Air bubbles are really painful, but they disperse on their own, I promise. This should be temporary.” 

“Yeah?” Exley asked. 

“Yes. You still need a hospital to look at that rib, and you need to do as the doctor says, but you got lucky. This could have been a lot worse.” 

“Oh. Good. Thanks,” Exley said, and passed out. 

“Josh?” Dales snapped his fingers. “Josh, c’mon. Come back.” He whirled on Scully. “What the Hell is this? He was fine, and now-”

“Dales!” Skinner barked. “That is not how you speak to a lady on my field. Or anywhere. Period. Because I will not tolerate conduct unbecoming among my players. So unless you plan to show Miss Scully the respect you would show to my own mother? You need to leave this field. Now.”

Scully twisted to face Mulder. All the fear she had held back now flooded her little face. “Fox?” She pulled at her sling. “Help me out of this thing so I can take his pulse.”

“I can take his pulse,” Dales said, roughly. “Just need a watch.” His fingers were already jammed up under Ex’s jaw when Dad brought out his pocket watch and flipped it open for Dales. Mulder, Scully, and the rest of the team watched the tension drain out of his shoulders as he counted. Eyes bright, Dales turned to Scully. “Sorry. I just...”

“I understand,” she said, in a tiny voice.

Dales seemed to snap back to his old self all at once. He glanced over at Mulder. “Mulder, get her up off the ground; she’s freezing. Shaking like a leaf, over here.”

“It’s just adrenaline,” Scully said, miserably. Mulder levered himself to stand and pulled her up with him. Scully was indeed shaking. He chafed her arms a little, as though to work some warmth into them. “It’s nothing, really,” she insisted, a little panicked, as Mulder folded her up under his chin. Her shoulders hitched slightly. “It’s a perfectly normal response to strain; nothing to fuss over...”

“So is this one,” Mulder assured her. Over her head, he saw the lights of an ambulance finally swinging toward the field. He spoke into her hair. “So stop fussing, okay? The ambulance is coming. Doctor Scully did great.”

As though Mulder had loosened some cornerstone inside her, Scully sagged against him wearily. It happened so suddenly that he stumbled a little, and had to hold her tighter just to keep her upright. “Okay.”

“It’s all right,” he heard himself say. “Better this way, actually. Pretty sure he’d rather not be awake when they put him on the stretcher.” 

Scully balanced her chin on his chest. Her eyes were enormous with worry, but she spoke in a whisper. “But what if I’m wrong? What if-”

“You’re not,” Mulder whispered back, confidently. “But say you are. You still stepped up and gave Ex a shot at getting better faster. That’s more than any of these local yokels were willing to do, right?”

For a moment it seemed like she was pouting. Like she was annoyed with him for being right. But no, it was worse than that: she was thinking. Her thinking face was a pouty face, with her lips puffing out and everything. And because Dana Scully was thinking all the time, this meant that Fox Mulder was fucked. 

Mulder folded her back into his chest to avoid looking at her (adorable, pouting, sweet) face. “What am I gonna do with you, huh? Now you gotta come to all the games and practises, just to keep us in fighting trim. Just think: by the end of the season, you’ll have set your first bone!”

Behind them, Krycek coughed. Loudly. When Mulder turned, Krycek coughed again, pounded his chest with one fist, and used this as an excuse to incline his head toward Skinner and Dad. Both men maintained identically blank faces. But Dad made a tiny motion with his fingers that, when Samantha was little, meant: give her to me; I can carry her upstairs. Once upon a time, Sam used to fall asleep listening to the inner parlour radio, after dinner. She would do this in his arms. Then Dad would carry her up. 

“C’mon, Scully,” Mulder said, a little too loudly, so everyone would hear him using her surname. Not Dana. Not darling. Not any of the other things Mulder wanted to say: honey, angel, baby, sweetheart. Down the field, someone was opening the gates for the ambulance to drive up across the grass. “We gotta make way. And Dad’s gotta get you a hot malted. Team needs a healthy medic, right?”

Chapter Text

“So…on the way back last night, before you got in the car with us, I asked your dad about what he said,” Dana said to Fox, as he backed out of the garage the next morning. 

As promised, Fox was taking Dana back to the rental house to get more of her things. They were getting a late start, owing to how long the game had run the night before with the extra stoppage time. But after Skinner re-organized the lineup following Exley’s departure, the Reapers had managed to eke out a win. (The ref also seemed to change his tune in a big way, after the ambulance left. Dana suspected Mr Mulder flashing his ID had something to do with it.) Fox was so pleased, he insisted on getting in the car to go home with them directly, as soon as the team bus made it to the ferry. (The ride between the game and the ferry, he explained, was for Skinner’s de-brief and as such was non-negotiable.) After a shower, he came straight to her room and said he would read to her.

...Which he did. With funny voices. At first Fox tried doing a Basil Rathbone impression, until Dana said she preferred his own voice to that of Mr Rathbone. In A Study in Scarlet, she pointed out, Holmes was supposed to be a young man still making use of a university laboratory. Therefore, Fox himself was closer in age to Mr Holmes than Mr Rathbone was, and probably more capable of a truthful interpretation of the character than an older man, regardless of accent. And anyway, how was she supposed to relax with the voice of a stranger, in the room? If the goal was soothing her to sleep, then it would be much better for Fox to use his own voice. Not because he made her sleepy, of course, but because it was easier to sleep with him in the room than someone else. Sorry, Fox apologized, after a long and quiet moment in which she wondered if she had perhaps said the wrong thing. I stopped listening after you told me you liked me better than Basil Rathbone. Naturally, Dana threw a pillow at him. Fox refused to give it back. Instead he hugged it to himself across his lap, and kept reading.

“What Dad said about what?” he asked, now.

“When he called us both his children?” 

The car came to an abrupt halt. Both Dana and Fox rocked forward a little. “You just came right out and…asked?” 

Dana had thought this was a patently obvious question to ask. Hadn’t it bothered Fox, the way it bothered her? She could have sworn the glance he threw his father, when Mr Mulder said the words, had indicated as much. It had seemed to surprise Coach Skinner, too. And Alex, who had seemed to find it wildly funny and visibly suppressed a laugh. She suspected he would corner her about it in homeroom, on Monday. 

“Generally speaking, one does pursue a line of inquiry when seeking to obtain information,” Dana said, with some asperity. “Besides: I have every right to ask! You’re not the one figuring out if you need to start calling another man Dad.” 

Fox looked like he might be ill. He continued nudging the car out of the garage. Shell gravel crunched beneath the tires. The Mulders drove a black 1941 Ford Super Deluxe sedan. Mr Mulder said it was one of the last to be produced before the company, like all the auto manufacturers, switched over to wartime production. The rear bench had a Hudson Bay blanket over it, to keep the upholstery safe from the dogs. It was covered in little cigarette burns. In fact, the entire vehicle reeked of tobacco.

Nervously, Fox gave her a little glance. “Well? What did he say?” 

Dana sighed. “It’s complicated.” 

“I don’t like the sound of that,” Fox said. 

“It was actually a very nice conversation,” Dana said, quickly. She did not wish him to think his father had been at all rude. In fact it was quite the opposite. “I asked your father why he referred to us both as his children. Then he asked if I had a problem with it, and I told him that my dad might, if he ever heard about it. At which point your dad said that my dad could find him anytime he wanted to, and take it up with him personally, because the Vineyard is a very small island.” 

Your mother asked you to stay with us; you cannot fault yourself for obeying her wishes. And if your father finds it bothersome, he can come tell me so himself, man to man and face to face, he’d said. It’s an island, Dana. Captain Scully can find me if he really wants to. 

That was just the thing. Daddy could find Mr Mulder, if he really wanted to. And the fact that he hadn’t yet done so said that he either couldn’t, because he was away or in trouble, or that he simply didn’t want to. And if Daddy didn’t want to find Mr Mulder, then maybe he didn’t want to find Dana, either. Maybe it made no difference to him, now, where she lived or whose daughter she claimed to be. Once upon a time, it had seemed like she was special to him. They shared inside jokes. They gave each other nick-names. And then she watched him knock Melissa to the floor. After that, everything was different. So different, in fact, that when Charlie first complained of being ill, Dana thought he might be malingering for extra attention. Some doctor she would make. 

“Are you worried your dad will think you’re being disloyal, or something?” Fox asked, now.

Dana considered. It was less that she worried about disloyalty than she did inaccuracy. It wasn’t right to allow people to just go on being wrong, was it? What if they found out the truth later, and were embarrassed? She would feel embarrassed, if she made such a mistake. After her father lost all his hair, porters occasionally assumed that her mother was another one of his daughters. This never failed to make his scalp glow red. 

“I guess I’m worried everyone in town will think we’re spreading lies on purpose, or playing a prank on them, or something. Or that we have something to hide.” 

“We have nothing to hide,” Fox put in. 

“Exactly! Nothing! Nothing at all!” Dana cleared her throat in the hopes that her voice might squeak less and make her sound less mousy and pathetic. “And, well, I also said that I worried that being referred to as your sister might make you think I was trying to replace her. Which I have no desire to do.” 

Fox shot her a look that was more awake and alert than any she’d from him all day. That morning she’d watched, dumbfounded, as he mowed through his breakfast like the bottom of the plate had a finish line on it. Mrs Mulder had a headache that morning, so Mr Mulder made them beans on toast with a fried egg on top, which he served with strong tea. (For Dana, he included a spoonful of Horlicks, which he said had more vitamins and minerals than Ovaltine.) When Fox began eating, his eyes were barely open, but his hands worked with the speed and efficiency of someone crewing a factory line in Detroit. Now that awareness seemed to have spread to the rest of him. His eyes were a different shade of green: a lagoon colour she remembered dimly from childhood. 

“You don’t want to be my sister?” He sounded out each word carefully, as though he’d never said them out loud before. “Are you afraid what happened to her might happen to you, too?” 

Mortification turned Dana’s guts to glue, and filled her lungs with concrete. She’d tried not to hope for any one reaction in particular, but this nevertheless seemed the exact opposite of what she might want. “No! Of course not!” She reached for Fox’s hand, but it was on the gearshift, so she had to settle for uselessly kneading his shoulder. “I just know I can’t take her place, is all! No one can! It would be wrong to even try! I would never presume to-”

“Calm down.” Fox lifted his right arm and slung it over her shoulders. When he pulled her very tight to him, his fingers could just hit the gearshift. Dana’s own hands had no idea where to go; she clasped them together as though in prayer. He chafed her arm a little. “Scully, has anyone ever told you that your priorities are way out of order? You think nothing of telling off a football coach four times your size, or staying with a murder suspect, but God forbid somebody suspect you might have been a little bit presumptuous.” 

“I just don’t want to hurt your feelings,” Dana insisted. Beside her, along the length of their bodies where his ribs and hers seemed to almost dovetail one another, Dana felt Fox freeze. His hand paused on her arm mid-stroke. Even his breath seemed to stop. Was that the wrong thing to say? “Is that so strange?” 

“Yes.” He spoke more quietly than before. “You’re the first person to give a damn about that in long time.”  

“That’s not true,” she said. “Your parents love you. Very much.” 

“They think I did it, Dana.” His voice brooked no argument. “Or anyway, Mom thinks I might have. Which amounts to the same thing.” 

“I’m not sure that’s the case,” Dana said, carefully. 

Now his hand came up and clasped her head. Fox made a mildly frustrated sound; in anticipation of all the work to be done, Dana had wrapped her hair up in a bandana. She’d made a hash of it though, given as one hand was all wrapped up. He tugged at it for all of two seconds before her hair spilled free, then tangled his fingers there. When he did this, it became far more difficult for her to argue with him, mostly because it was hard to think of anything else but the warm pressure of his fingers on her scalp. Already, her eyelids were drooping.

“That’s it,” he murmured. He tipped her head closer to him, until it was on his shoulder and she could dig into it. “Good girl.” 

“See, this is what I mean,” Dana said, sleepily. It was easier to say these things with her eyes shut. “Your dad asked if it was hard for me to imagine you as my brother, and I said yes, because you’re much nicer to me than Bill ever was. He never read to me, or made me lunch, or anything like that.” 

Anything like this, she wanted to say. But of course Bill would never do anything like this with her. This was different. 

“Well, he was missing out, then.” 

“And it’s no use comparing you to Charlie, because, um…” 

Dana shrugged, and used the opportunity to stare at her lap. These were Melissa’s jeans. Before that, they were Bill’s. Mom used to joke that they were becoming a family heirloom; Dana would have to take care of them, if Charlie were ever to wear them. But Charlie would never wear them, now. 

“Hey.” They pulled up to a stop sign. Fox tugged her hair a little. “Today’s Saturday. We can call Boston on Monday. Let’s just take things one day at a time. Right?” 

Dana nodded. 

The car lurched forward. “So, you were saying? About how Bill is a jerk?”

Dana laughed. “Yeah. He is. Once, when I was little-”

“So, like, this summer?” 

“Fox!” 

“Ooh, two whole syllables. Double points.” He tugged her hair again. “When you were little?” 

“Yes. When I was eight or nine, Bill took me out to the woods with Charlie, to teach me how to shoot, and he made me shoot at snakes. He said I’d be too chicken to do it, and I wanted to prove I wasn’t, but…” 

“Did something happen?” Fox asked. When she didn’t answer, the tension in his fingers increased. “Wait, was this when you lived out in California? Don’t they have rattlesnakes out there?” 

Dana nodded. 

“Is that what he took you out to shoot?” She nodded again. “And did you find some?” When she nodded a third time, his fingers spasmed in her hair. “Those things have enough venom to kill a kid your size!” 

Dana sighed, glumly. “I’m taller now than I was then, Fox.” 

“That’s not what I meant,” he seethed. “What I meant was, you were way too little be out there with wild animals that could literally kill you. And your brother is not just a jerk: he’s a moron!”

“I still wussed out,” Dana admitted. 

“You didn’t wuss out; you just refused to do something stupid that could’ve got you killed!” 

“Oh, I did that part. I walked right up there and shot the rattlesnake. And then, um…” Dana took a deep breath. It was easier to avoid crying when she pressed her face into his shoulder. She tried to get it all out in a rush: “And then I looked down, and I realized it was a mama snake and all her babies, her eggs, and I felt so bad I threw the gun at him and I ran all the way to the nearest bus stop, and took it to our church and begged our priest to give me confession. But I got turned around on the way, so nobody knew where I was for hours and hours, and Bill got in trouble, really bad.”

“Good. He deserved it, putting you in danger like that, and then-” Fox swallowed audibly. “Losing you. Anything could’ve happened to you, being all alone out there. Miracle some pervert didn’t make off with you.” 

“Well, I think Bill wished I’d stayed lost, because a week later he put a dead snake in my bed. And he said if I told, the next time it would be a live one.” 

“He what?” Fox abruptly veered over to a lookout at the side of the road. The shift in momentum shook them closer together. He yanked the keys from the ignition with his left hand. The keys were still in his fingers when he prodded her chin up to look at him. Dana was vaguely aware of the sound of gulls. His breathing was much louder, in her ears: it matched the ticking down of the motor, somehow. For a moment, he looked desperately sad. “Are you for real, right now?” 

“You’re actually the first person I’ve ever told.” Dana realized this as she said the words. The realization made her both sound and feel more cheerful about it. “I could never tell Melissa, because Melissa would tell Mom. Or she’d do something to get back at Bill, and it would start all over again. So, you see?” Her eyes smarted. “You can’t be my brother, because I tell you things I can’t tell them, things I never thought I’d tell anybody.” Unbidden, a sob rose in her throat. “Fox, what happens when-”

“Nothing,” he vowed, and wrenched her to his chest. He sighed shakily, chest working like a bellows. She felt his chin on her head. “Today we’re packing up your things and I’m bringing you home and you’re staying. Full stop.” 

“Until Mom wants me to go,” Dana whispered. 

“No, until you wanna leave,” Fox answered, stonily. He pulled back and tipped her chin up again. “You may not be my sister, but I’ll be damned if I let somebody else get taken away on my watch. Never again, Scully. That is not happening. I-” 

A truck pulled in beside them, on Fox’s side, pointed the opposite direction so the driver could lean out the window. “Hey! Mulder!” 

Fox’s head shot up. “…The Hell?” He twisted. “Oh. Dales. Hi.” He lifted his hand. “And Mrs Exley. Hi, Mrs Ex.” 

“That the team medic you got in there, Mulder?” 

“Uh, yeah. We were just-”

“Why don’t you let her out for a minute? Ma Ex wants to meet her.” 

“I should tell her not to wrap Josh’s ribs too tightly,” Dana said, already making for the door. “Otherwise he could get pneumonia!” 

“God forbid,” Mulder muttered. 

Dales watched Scully and Mrs Exley introducing themselves for a moment. Then he hopped out of the truck, jogged over, and let himself into the family Ford. From there, he continued watching Mrs Exley and Scully speaking to one another with what seemed like increasing earnestness. 

“You know, Mulder, right up until now, I’ve never been able to figure you out,” Dales said, still watching. “Just never got a bead on you. Frankly, I’ve always thought the whole Spooky moniker was under-selling it.” 

“Uh…thanks?” 

Dales’s hand clamped down on Mulder’s shoulder like it was made of pigskin. “I’m gonna tell you this one time, Mulder. Once should be enough, given often you took it on the jaw from Patterson and the staties, about your sister.”

Mulder threw off Dales’s grip. “Fuck you, Dales; I never hurt my baby sister.” 

“Don’t be a dipshit. This isn’t about your baby sister. It’s about your other sister.” He pointed over toward Scully. “If the state finds out she’s living with you? And they disapprove? For any reason?” Dales lifted his brows. Mulder felt the back of his neck heat. He flinched, when Dales snapped his fingers. “They will take her away faster than you can say Jack Robinson. And they will put her in a home for girls. You know what happens to girls like her, in places like that? Because it makes your little field trips down to town lock-up look like a day at the fucking beach.” 

A lump formed in Mulder’s throat. The stinging heat of shame climbed from his neck to his ears and lips. “I wasn’t-” he tried to say. “We weren’t-”

“I know you weren’t,” Dales said, patiently. “But as your team captain, I’m telling you: you need to be careful. So I’m not gonna catch you out here alone with her at a lookout spot again, am I?” 

Silently, Mulder shook his head. 

“And I’m not gonna see you in the halls or on the field doing anything with her you wouldn’t do with your own sister. Am I?”

Mulder shut his eyes and made himself shake his head. I like you better than Basil Rathbone, Scully told him last night, in her half-asleep voice. Why would I want a stranger when I have you? Which meant Mulder was no longer a stranger. She trusted him. And now his arms ached in all the places she longer was. (It was terrifying, how willingly she went into his arms. Terrifying, and humbling, and addictive.) But now Dales was saying- 

“Matter of fact, you’re gonna let me or one of the other guys take her out, on occasion. To prove how cool you can be about it.” 

“She’s fifteen-”

“That’s fifteen reasons for you to watch your ass, then,” Dales snapped. “Look at me.” 

Mulder opened his eyes and stared at him, mutinously. 

“You think I like giving you the third degree? Well, I don’t. But after last night, I owe her. Which means I owe you. And I am telling you right now: there are people in this town who think you killed your sister, and they are just itching for you to fuck up.” Dales hove into Mulder’s field of vision and forced Mulder to match his gaze. “So if there is even a whiff of something untoward? You will lose that girl.”

“I know that much, Dales; I’m not a complete moron.”

And Mulder did know it. Rationally. Intellectually. Just the other day he had reminded himself to keep his trap shut about Scully when talking to Skinner. But it was different, hearing the same thing from a guy his own age. That made it real. And hearing it from a guy his own age was painfully different, after Scully nestled into him like his body was built just to keep hers safe and warm, and told him she did not (could not!) see him as her brother. After she let him cradle her close and tilt her face to his and stare at her mouth like it was the one doing his breathing for him. 

“Sure. Fine. Whatever. What you may not know is that even if you never lay a finger on her? I promise you the wardens at wherever the state puts her definitely will. Then they’ll do it again, and again, and again, until-”

Mulder swung on him. Dales grabbed his wrist, and did something to Mulder’s thumb that sent pain ringing up his arm. He kept it up until Mulder bent over and said some version of uncle. Relinquishing his grip, he watched Mulder with absolutely no pity on his face whatsoever. In fact, his face seemed...blank. Empty. As though he were somewhere else entirely. Only a gull landing on the hood, and Mulder frantically waving it away before it hurt the paint job, drew him out of his thoughts.

“Know where I learned that trick?  A boys’ home, in Boston. Believe me, Mulder: you do not ever want your little gingersnap over there walking through the doors of a place like that.”

“…You were in a boys’ home?” Suddenly Dales’s skills on the field made a lot more sense. (His little gingersnap?) 

“Yeah. Because I made the mistake of admitting how much my dad liked showing me his belt, while my mom was out of town helping my aunt with her new baby. She worked her tail off getting me back, and she’s never let me forget it. Never forgiven me for it, either. She loved my old man. Tells everyone he’s some big hero, now, ‘cause he happened to be a merchant marine when he bought the farm. It’s horseshit.” 

This was the longest Mulder had ever heard Dales speak about anything that wasn’t football. “But you seem so…”

“Normal?”

“Perfect,” Mulder said. “You’re everyone’s favourite.” 

Dales smiled thinly. “Yeah. That’s ‘cause I keep my personal life just that: personal. Which means it stays at home. Understand?” 

Mulder frowned. “Well, obviously you don’t want to talk about your dad-”

“I don’t mean before. I mean now. As in, today.” With his eyes, Dales pointed at Mrs Exley. 

Mulder looked out the windscreen at Mrs Exley and Scully. Somehow, they were still holding hands. I owe her, Dales had said. At first, Mulder had assumed Dales meant he was sorry for how he’d bawled Scully out last night. But then Mulder ran the film of his memory again. This time, he saw the blind panic in Dales’ face, and how he never let go of Ex’s hand, and he heard Ex saying, Art, it really hurts. Their inseparable friendship was the kind of miracle only possible in places like the Vineyard, where the towns were too small for Jim Crow. But most everywhere else, Exley was shut out of every place with a Whites Only sign. And in the armed forces, the two of them would be split up. Even if they served together, and fought in the same battles, they would likely eat and sleep in separate buildings. They might even be treated by different doctors, and ministered to by different chaplains. 

“Now, if anyone asks,” Dales continued quietly, “I’m bringing Ma Ex to get Josh because I’m a real nice guy, and Mr Exley gets but one day a week off and he needs to sleep. And that’s true: I am a nice guy, and Pa Ex is at home sleeping, right now.”

The word home snagged on his mind like a burr on a sleeve. Maybe because Mulder had spent so much of the past few days re-thinking what the word even meant. But there was something in the way Dales said the words at home that was....familiar. Worn-in. Like he was talking about his own home, too, and not just the place where his best friend lived. 

“I’ve never seen your mom pick you up from a game,” Mulder realized. “You always go home with the Exleys, because Josh is your best…” He turned back to Dales. With his eyes shut like that, Dales looked like one of those stained glass window paintings of a saint enduring exquisite torture for his refusal to stop loving Jesus. But when they opened, the same panic Mulder saw in his face last night at the game, after Ex was hurt, hemmed in the corners of his mouth. As though Dales were walking along the edge of a cliff, and had just heard a pebble pulling loose underfoot. As though he were about to lose the one thing keeping him tied to this earth. 

Oh, Mulder thought. And then: Oh, God. 

“Wait, you...” Mulder gulped. Maybe he was wrong. He wanted to be wrong. It was an unusual feeling, wanting to be wrong. But if he were right, it would mean everything he thought knew about Dales and Exley was wrong, instead. And that was worse. The consequences for the two pillars of Vineyard Reapers football would be even worse than that, if they were found out. People on the island were pretty tolerant. Admirably so, most of the time. But as Mulder himself knew all too well, once the islanders thought of you as degenerate, they could turn on you faster than a winter wind. “...You live with Josh?”

Dales rolled his eyes. “Jesus, Mulder; get a grip. It’s not like we have our own place, or something. I just sleep over there a lot.” 

With each question, his voice felt thinner: “You...sleep? Over there? A lot?” 

“Yes. I sleep over there, a lot. Often enough that I have my own keys to the house and the car. Which the Exleys gave to me, after Dad died and Mom hit the bottle. Not so different from you and her, is it?” Dales nodded over at Scully.

Mulder thought of himself reading to Scully. Watching her sleep. Soothing her down. His finger tracing the vein of her neck. The spark that arced from his hands to his heart when he steadied her from behind. How she melted into him, and how her trust instantly made him feel ten feet tall. The touches themselves were innocent; if Sam were at home he might well do all the same things, especially if she were hurt or sad or scared. (Maybe by now they would fight like cats and dogs, and the only time he held Sam would be to hold her back from moving the radio dial.) Mulder never let his hands stray too far afield. But the same could be said for Dales and Exley. Mulder thought of their arms slung around each other. How Dales took the aisle seat on every bus and at every table, walked the outer edge of every sidewalk, never left Ex alone in the locker room. My big, bad inside linebacker, Exley called Dales.

Were they really queer? In the pulps, queer guys were always fairies. They minced. They lisped. They never seemed like the kind of guys who played football or baseball. (Or, for that matter, like the kinds of guys could beat the shit out of somebody for looking at Exley wrong, which Dales did at least once a year and which now made a different sort of sense than it had, before.) Dales and Exley were two of the most popular guys in school. They were pals with everybody. Girls loved them; teachers adored them. Mulder had on some level always suspected that this was a put-on, and the two of them were getting up to all sorts of trouble when not under the watchful eye of adults. But this kind of trouble was an order of magnitude greater than any Mulder had imagined. If they were ever found out, they might get arrested on indecency charges, or even locked away in a state hospital. In the Army, they would be given a Section 8 discharge. That would go on their records. Dales would get shut out of every respectable job in the country. And Exley might find himself excluded from the few places in the country where he was actually permitted to go. 

It stays at home, Dales had said. Because home was the safest place for them. 

“Wait, so the Exleys…they know?” 

“What’s to know? They know their son makes good grades, starts every game, goes to church every Sunday, never runs into problems with the law because I am always with him, and hasn’t once got a girl in trouble.” He frowned. “Speaking of which: if you knock that girl up, Mulder, I’ll make you shit your teeth for wasting my time on this talk.” 

“Dales, for crying out loud, she’s-”

“Fifteen. I know. Wanna take a wild guess how old my mom was, when she got married? Here’s a hint: she left school in the tenth grade.” 

“For your information, Scully takes sophomore classes.”

Dales shot him a look of abiding weariness. “Mulder, that girl is like a little orange tabby cat you found crying outside and smuggled home in your coat. That makes her your responsibility. So if she has kittens? You have kittens.”  

“Says the guy who just told me he wants to take her out.”

“She’s safe with me, you nimrod! That is what I am trying to tell you!” Dales raised his brows. He made the start the clock gesture Skinner made when he wanted the guys to hustle harder. It took a moment for the penny to drop. When it did, Mulder deflated. Of course. With Dales, Scully would be in no danger whatsoever. If anything, every other girl on the island would probably want to know how she cracked the code to getting rationed by the captain of the team. This realization must have registered on his face, because Dales continued: “Which is why you’re not gonna make a fuss if I take her out, on occasion. You’re gonna take it on the jaw like a man, because that’s what you signed up to be when you put her under your roof: a man. Not some sad sap creaming all over a slice of God’s own cherry pie.”

“Jesus, Dales!” 

“Look, pal, I’ve got eyes, okay? She’s cute. You’re not the only one who sees it. It ain’t like you unearthed some diamond in the rough, here; you just happened to be the one with balls enough to pick her up. How that happened I have no idea; you could stand to demonstrate some more of that initiative on the field, in my opinion.”

Mulder almost told Dales that initiative had nothing to do with it. Initiative implied mustering his willpower to do something he had no inclination to do. Figuring out what was going on with Scully was, for him, the exact opposite of that. Scully was a mystery. Mulder liked mysteries. Sure, it started out with his curiosity about the new Navy base, and whether the process of building it had turned up anything about Samantha. But things changed when he found out how alone Scully was. When, following a tip from Byers, he started biking past her place after practise and noticing night after night how the front windows were dark and the only light on was in a bedroom at the back of the house. There was something about that lonely light in the dark that hit him like a bullet. 

He almost said these things, but then he saw the faraway look Dales wore, and the grim set of his mouth. “For what it’s worth, I hope Ex is okay. And I hope...”

Dales narrowed his eyes at Mulder. “What do you hope?”

“I hope, when the war is over, you find a nice place,” Mulder said. “The two of you, I mean. Best friends get to have that, right? No reason two people who grew up together shouldn’t get to grow old together.”

“Sure. Assuming we both make it out.”

“Dales. C’mon. Exley smokes you on that field. He can definitely outrun a bullet. Especially a shitty German one. Worry more about yourself.”

The linebacker scoffed a little, in his nose. “Yeah, well, if this is about handing out advice, mine is this: let me take the team medic out on some dates, let her down easy, and clear the way for you to swoop in. And then you marry that girl, as soon as you can swing it. Because like it or not, Mulder? The Commonwealth of Massachusetts looks a lot more kindly on a married girl living with her husband and her in-laws, than it does on Red Hot Riding Hood shacking up with the Big Bad Fox.” 

Chapter Text

“…Did Art say something to make you mad?” Dana asked, after a few too many minutes of complete silence, in the car. They were within moments of rolling up to the rental. Fox had barely looked at her, the whole drive. 

“What?” Fox asked, quickly. “No. Why?” 

“You seem pensive.” 

“So what else is new?” 

There was one new thing: “Mrs Exley would like to have us over for dinner, after Josh is feeling better,” Dana told him. “She says Art will be there.” 

“Where do you get off calling him Art?” Fox snapped. “Nobody calls him that.” 

“Josh calls him that,” Dana observed. “At least, he did at the game.” 

“Well, yeah, but that’s because they’re-” Fox’s mouth made a line. “Best friends,” he muttered. 

Dana frowned. “So what do you call him?”

“Dales. That’s his name. And I call Exley, Exley. Or Ex. Most people call him Ex.” 

“Well, Mrs Exley calls them Joshua and Art. And since it’s her home, and her ration cards, I think we should follow her lead.” 

“Fine.” Clearly able to sense Dana peering at him, Fox whipped around to face her and asked, “What is it, now?”

“Nothing! Sorry!” Now she stared at her hands in her lap. Something must have happened. Something bad. Fox had seemed so…warm, before Art and Mrs Exley had pulled alongside them. In fact, for just a second there, it had seemed like he might be about to- “Did I do something wrong?” 

“What?” He threw another quick glance her way. “Scully. No. C’mon. Just…” He rolled his jaw a little and sucked his teeth. “Dales says he wants to take you out sometime.” 

“He can’t,” Dana said, automatically. 

Fox gave a little pfff of disbelief. “So the captain of the football team ain’t good enough for ya. Is that it?” 

“It’s not about that! I’m just not allowed to date!” Dana folded her arms. She felt Fox give her a double-take. To forestall him, and therefore her own further mortification, she added: “Not that it’s ever come up. In fact, I find it hard to believe he has any sincere interest in me. But this-” She almost said, This summer, after Melissa. “This posting, I guess because our school is co-ed and I went to a girls’ school, before — Mom and Dad told me right up front that I wasn’t allowed to date.” 

Fox’s mouth opened, then closed. “But they let you live with another guy,” he said, slowly. “Who’s older than you.” 

“And your parents! It’s not like we have the whole house to ourselves.” Dana grabbed her kerchief and began tying her hair back with it, again. “I’m a literal red-headed step-child, almost.” 

Fox laughed. Dana didn’t think it was funny. Being a step-child implied one’s parents had already split up. An awful thought slammed into her: what if that was where her mother and father had vanished off to? Were they were their respective new flames? It was a danger of being married to an active duty servicemember; everyone knew that. But for nearly sixteen years now, Dana had been convinced that her parents would be the ones to beat the odds. 

“My very own wicked step-sister. Just what I always wanted.” 

“It’s not funny,” Dana spat. 

“It’s a little funny,” Fox wheedled. 

“What’s so funny about it?” 

“Uh, for starters? The fact that, despite not being allowed to date, you’re about to spend your Saturday with four different guys. Alone.” Fox pointed at the boys sitting on the brick stoop of the rental house. 

Dana turned to him. “What are they doing here?” 

“Helping me help you move,” Fox said, smoothly. 

“I’m helping you to help me move,” Dana told him. 

“You also have stitches, and the doctor said you should keep your hand in a sling, so we are doing the moving.” 

“Oh.” Sometimes he was annoyingly clever. “Right. That’s a good idea. Thank you.” 

He smirked. “Also they want to make up for the milk. So just let them, okay? They feel bad, picking on some girl whose brother’s in the hospital.” 

“Charlie was already in the hospital when the put the milk in my locker.” 

“Yeah, but they didn’t know it was serious,” Fox elaborated. 

“Oh, like you had nothing to do with it,” Dana huffed. 

She watched him come to a decision. Doing so appeared to please him, because his grin became at once very warm and very sly, and he jumped out of the car. “Gentlemen,” he called out, as Dana warily left the Ford, “tell Miss Scully why you put the milk in her locker.” 

John, Ringo, and Melvin looked at one another. “The truth?” Melvin asked.

“The truth,” Fox said, nodding. 

If anything, this seemed to alarm them somewhat. “Are you…sure?” Ringo asked.

“Very sure. It’s in the interests of diplomacy, as Dad would say.” Fox gestured. “Go on. Time’s wasting.” 

Melvin and Ringo looked over at John. Looking decidedly put-upon, John said: “We did it to get Mulder’s goat, not yours. To bother him, not you.” 

“That makes no sense at all,” Dana informed them. “Why would he care?” 

“Why indeed?” Melvin asked, brightly. 

Ringo scoffed. “We did it because he wouldn’t shut up about this new-”

“Safe-cracking kit,” Fox interrupted. “That I sent away for. I was bragging that I could open any locker in school with it. So they decided to test me.” He added a little pause, with his brows raised, seemingly so that his friends would understand what a terrible idea this was. “What they forgot was, I had a game that Friday, and I was on the bus right after lunch. So I never saw them put the milk there, and I wasn’t around for them to tell me about it until long after the school was locked up for the weekend. And since it was being locked up for Navy usage, I had a snowball’s chance in Hell of getting in.” 

“Perhaps Miss Scully has some idea what top-secret project the United States Navy was doing, at our school,” John suggested. 

“Those men were getting treated for crabs,” Dana explained. Melvin made a wheezing noise as she breezed past him toward the front door. She fished in her pocket for her key. “That’s what Dad said, anyway. Some guys were stationed at a Department of Agriculture facility in Miller’s Grove, and, well, they were pretty popular. Apparently.” 

“What was a Navy squadron doing at a Department of Agriculture facility?” Ringo wanted to know. 

Dana hated this key. It was sticky. Why was she always the Scully who wound up with the sticky key? “Bodyguarding some scientist,” she explained. Her hand paused as she considered. “An entomologist, to be exact. So maybe his insect specimens escaped containment, and bred with the lice the men brought back from leave. That would explain the need for quarantine.” 

“You’re saying the Department of Agriculture and the Navy may have inadvertently created a new species of louse.” John sounded at once dubious and delighted. 

“To be fair, they may be planning to honey-trap Hitler with über-crabs,” Fox said, while Dana tried again with the key. 

“Fox, be realistic. Neither the Navy nor the Department of Agriculture is trying to give the Fuhrer crabs, über or otherwise. That would be wildly inefficient.” 

“Oh, yeah? Why’s that, Scully? Is Adolf a one-woman man?” 

Dana looked over her shoulder and sighed. Finally, the key turned in the lock. “I have no idea. But I do know that he lost a testicle at the Somme, giving these hypothetical crabs of yours only half the surface area their species is accustomed to colonizing.” 

Fox rolled his lower lip under his teeth, as though aware he was smiling too broadly. His arms were folded so tight he seemed to almost hug himself. “Are you telling me the Nazi crabs just want a little more breathing room?” 

“I’m telling you to stop discussing it within earshot of the neighbours.” Dana turned back to the door and let herself inside. She made it two steps before the keys dropped out of her hand.

From behind her, Dana heard Melvin asking in a plaintive little-boy voice: “Please Dad, can we keep her?” 

“Shut up,” Fox hissed, and then she felt him behind her. His fingers touched the small of her back; she jumped inside her own skin. “Scully? What’s wrong?” 

“The furniture’s all gone,” she said. “Our crates and boxes are all still here…” She pointed at the conspicuously well-organized zigurrat in the centre of what was once the parlour. She had definitely not arranged them that way, not even in the oh-dark-thirty depths of her sleepless anxiety. “But the furniture’s gone.” 

“…Someone stole your things?” 

“No. I mean, we were renting it — the unit came furnished. The furniture was delivered the day before we arrived in town. I remember because the landlord got the number of beds wrong, and we had to…” Her hand rose to cover her mouth, before she could give more of the story away. 

“Scully?” Fox took light hold of her elbow. “C’mon outside. You can explain it to me there.” 

Dana let herself be led back outdoors. The day was so beautiful; it was the kind of New England autumn day that everyone who came to California from there said that they missed. It was at complete odds with the nameless panic rising up inside her. 

“The landlord has a warehouse — that’s where he keeps all the furniture and appliances for the furnished units, when they’re not being used. Like an inventory depot. Dad and I went there, together. It’s part of his insurance policy; the landlord can’t leave anything that can be used to start a fire in the empty units, or his premiums go way up.” 

Fox nodded slowly. “Okay, so…he took the stuff out of the unit. There’s a new base, with new people; maybe he had another family to give the stuff to. What’s the problem?” 

“Well, for one thing, we’re paid up ’til the end of the month, and he had no right,” Dana sniffed. “And for another…” She lowered her voice, and Fox leaned down. “When I left here on Thursday afternoon, this place had furniture in it. When Dad and I returned things to the warehouse, it was because the landlord couldn’t get a truck out to us on a Friday or Saturday. Those are his busiest days, and the trucks always get reserved early. So either he got a truck and a crew out here to empty the place the same day, or…” 

“Or he got the tip-off ahead of time,” Fox said, grimly. 

“Why did he think no one was coming back here?” Dana whispered. “What does he know that I don’t?” 

Fox straightened. He stared hard at the house. His thumbs swept little speedometer needles across the bones of her shoulders. “There may be a simpler explanation,” he mused. Digging in his pocket, he called out, “Byers! Catch!” and threw John his keys. 

John caught them. “…Do we need something at the store, Mulder?” 

“If I’m not out of there in five minutes, or you hear anything strange, I want you to drive her straight home.” Fox pointed at the house, then Dana, then the car, as he spoke. “Take the others with you. Wait for me there.” 

“What’re you gonna do?” John asked. 

“Make sure the house really is empty,” Fox answered, cheerfully. 

“Fox!” Dana’s hand circled his wrist and yanked him back. “You can’t do that! What if-”

“What if hophead squatters broke in, sold your stuff for ration cards, and nodded off inside?” Fox squeezed her hand. “I wondered that myself. Longshot, but lemme check anyway.” 

“There’s a gun inside,” Dana breathed. “It’s my father’s. I didn’t bring it with me on Thursday because your mom was watching me like a hawk, but if someone’s in there-” Her throat closed. 

Again, he sucked his teeth and stared at the house. “Was it in a lockbox?” 

“No,” she said, miserably. “A hatbox. Mom hid it there while Dad was gone. I kept it in my room, under the bed. I thought it would be safe here until I came back for it, but I never expected anyone to be back here before I was, much less moving things around!” 

“And here I was, worrying after Annie Oakley all by her lonesome,” Fox chided. When Dana didn’t smile, he took her face in his hands. “Scully. Hey. Don’t look at me like that. It’s gonna be fine. I’ll be back in two shakes. I promise. I just can’t let you in there, right now. Okay?” He smiled ruefully. “Who knows — in a year or two I might be doing this same thing for Uncle Sam. Right? So I better get some practise in while I can.” 

“Please be careful,” she squeaked, through trembling lips. 

He thumbed her temples. “What am I gonna do with you, huh?” He looked from her to his friends and then back, as though to see if they were watching. They were. Clearly, this annoyed him. And clearly, they knew it, because they turned around as a unit, as though the front yard were suddenly terribly interesting. “Okay, I’ll make you a deal: if I’m not out by the time you say a whole rosary, I’ll let you do the other one.” 

“The other what?” Dana asked. 

“That’s a fun riddle for you to work on until I get back.” Gently, he disengaged her hand from his, and ran for the house. 

The house was thick with quiet. It was the eerie inland quiet of a completely empty house: no people, no pets, no waves, no radio, no clunking refrigerator coil or hissing burner or whistling kettle. “Hello?” Mulder called out. “If there’s anybody in here, you got two minutes to clear out, right now. There’s a backdoor off the kitchen; I won’t even see you leave.” 

Nothing. 

There was no one here. How Mulder knew this, he couldn’t say, but as a person who was frequently alone, he simply knew in his bones when he wasn’t. And he was alone, now. Still, it didn’t hurt to check. 

So he opened the parlour closets: nothing. He proceeded into the dining room: empty. Beyond that was the kitchen: small, cupboard doors left hanging open, gaping wounds where the stove and icebox used to be. The place reeked of bleach. If thieves had visited, they were the cleanest bandits he’d ever heard of. 

Mulder then proceeded to Scully’s bedroom. How he knew it was her bedroom he refused to admit. If she asked, he would say it was the crates with her name on them. The hatbox was in a closet, on top of some folded bedding. As promised, the gun was inside, wrapped in a chamois. Mulder checked the magazine, un-loaded the rounds and pocketed them, then stuffed the gun down the back of his jeans. After that, he proceeded to check the other rooms: Charlie’s bedroom (he picked up a baseball bat that was too short for him but would do Scully just fine, then grabbed a mitt); the bathroom (even the shower curtain was gone); and the front bedroom. 

Each room had crates inside, labelled with the room’s owner. Some marked MELISSA were in Scully’s room. So far, so good. In fact, Mulder was about to tear down the blanket tacked up to the front window and knock on the glass to let them all know the coast was clear, when he saw it: an ashtray. A full one, sitting on a crate stacked low to the floor, so it might function like a table. Lipstick stained maybe a quarter of them: Victory Red. The house itself did not smell of cigarettes. And neither Scully nor her clothes ever smelled of smoke. It was something Mulder enjoyed about being near her; she always smelled so clean. The smell of her skin was the smell of her skin, not the smell of her skin through a choking blue haze. 

Now Mulder knew why this window, unlike all the others, was still covered. And he knew which brand of cigarettes he’d find in the ashtray. But he forced himself to pick the thing up just to confirm. 

MORLEY, they read. 

“Fuck you both,” he muttered, and reared back to throw the thing at the wall. But he fumbled it, nearly dropping the thing, when the phone rang. Mulder ran for the kitchen. He skidded on the tile and nearly dislodged the receiver from its housing. “Hello?”

“Who is this?” The voice on the other end was raspy, but feminine. 

“My name is Mulder. I’m a friend of Dana Scully’s.”

“Dana doesn’t have any friends,” the woman snapped. “Who are you, really? I don’t have all day.” 

“I’m the guy who’s about to hang up this phone if you don’t quit bad-mouthing my friend,” Mulder said. “So who in Hell-”

A knock sounded on the kitchen window. Langley. “We cool, or what?” he shouted, through the glass. The girl on the earpiece was still talking, but Mulder put it down and opened the rear kitchen door. “Clear,” he said, and went back for the phone. 

“-and let me talk to my sister, please?” the voice on the phone asked. 

“Your sister?” Naturally, Mulder’s voice chose this moment to crack. “You’re Melissa?”

“Yes. I am. Now: Who. Are. You? And why are you in my parents’ house, answering their phone?” 

“Um…” Mulder winced. Where was Scully? Was she really praying a whole rosary? Jesus Christ, she was probably praying a whole rosary. “Well, that is, my name is Fox Mulder, and I’m in Scully’s Latin class-” 

“You’re the jerk from her Latin class? The one who gave her the stupid nickname?”

“Well,” Mulder hedged. “It was all in good fun-”

“You’re the guy who has a crush on my baby sister?” 

Mulder had never really understood the term death rattle, before, but he suspected the noise currently emitting from his throat might qualify. Suddenly his ashtray discovery seemed vanishingly distant and unimportant. “Um…why would you say that?” 

“Because it’s obvious. I live in Los Angeles, three time zones away, and I only get to speak to my sister for ten minutes a week, and it’s still obvious. I’ve told Dana how obvious it is, too; but she refuses to believe me.” 

“Well, she does have a very skeptical nature,” Mulder agreed. Thank God. “Which is probably one reason we’re living together, at present.”

Melissa made a sound that was either a laugh or a cough. “As what, man and wife?” 

“No,” Mulder groaned. (First Dales, and now Melissa? Was Mulder the only one who approached marriage with the appropriate degree of suspicion?) “This is Martha’s Vineyard, not Mississippi. Scully’s mom-”

“Her name is Dana.” 

“Your mother’s name is Margaret, actually,” Mulder sneered. “And she took your little brother Charlie to a children’s hospital in Boston. She’s there now. Dana is staying with my parents and me, while they’re gone.” 

“…For how long?” The suspicion in Melissa’s voice got his back right up. 

“I don’t know. The duration?” He heard a step that was lighter and more nimble than all the others, and looked up to see Scully skating through the dining room and into the kitchen. Finally, his angel had arrived. Mulder pulled the earpiece and receiver away from his face. “It’s your sister. She already hates me; you talk to her.” 

Scully flew for the phone. She didn’t even take the earpiece and receiver so much as close her fingers over Mulder’s and pull them down toward her face. With her right hand in a sling, she could really only manage the earpiece, anyway. She stood on her tiptoes until Mulder compensated and held the receiver somewhat lower. “Missy?” 

“Dana?”  Mulder could just make out Melissa’s voice.

“Melissa…” Slowly, Scully began sinking to the floor. With his hands in hers, Mulder sank with her. This was how he wound up on the kitchen floor with Scully seated between his legs. Byers entered the kitchen with his mouth open to ask a question. Seeing them, he turned around immediately, before Mulder could even wave him off. “Melissa, they left me here,” Scully said, oblivious. 

“Who left you where?”

“Mom’s in Boston with Charlie, and Dad’s gone, and they left me here. Mom left me here; she’s been planning it, I can tell-”

“Dana? Honey? Slow down, please. I only have like five minutes left. Tell me where you’re staying.” 

“1501 Larkspur Lane, Chilmark, Mass,” Mulder said, when Scully said nothing. “The exchange is ChapterHouse 5-2718.” 

“Five twenty-seven eighteen,” Melissa said. 

“And the name is Mulder: Mike, Uncle, Love, Dog, Easy, Roger.” 

“Roger,” Melissa said, wryly. 

“And where are you?” Mulder asked. 

“Dana knows where I am,” Melissa said, smoothly. “Now let me talk with her alone.” 

“I’m okay,” Dana whispered to Fox, when Melissa did her best to dismiss him. He seemed loath to leave. For a second he looked around for his friends. Not seeing them, he rested his palm against her face for a second, looked at her sadly, thumbed her tears back, and stood. 

“That boy is in love with you,” Missy said, flatly.

“Shut. Up.” Dana pressed the earpiece closer to her ear as Fox wandered into the dining room. “He is not.” 

“He is too. He is literally moving you into his home. Do you know how many times I begged Steve’s mother to let me stay with them? Because it was a lot.” 

Dana wiped her face. “How are you?” 

“I’m fine. What’s this about William being gone?” 

Ever since this summer, Mom and Dad were Maggie and William for Melissa. She saw no reason to continue referring to them as her parents. “Mom said she couldn’t reach him on base, before she left for Boston.” 

“Couldn’t reach him? What does that mean?” 

“I don’t know. That’s all she would tell me.” Dana drew her knees to her chest. “But Melissa, all our furniture is gone, even though we’re all paid up. And our things are packed up like she was planning to move us.” 

Missy made a thoughtful noise. The two-minute warning bell rang. “What exactly did Maggie say, before she left?”

“Not much. She wrote me a letter telling me to be patient and behave myself. Mrs Mulder gave it to me at lunch, on Thursday. Then-”

“This Thursday? As in, two days ago? This all happened two days ago?”

“Yes. That night, when I was already over at the Mulders, Mom called me from Charlie’s ward as the island hospital. She said they’d found a bed for him in Boston, and that she was going with him. Then she talked to the Mulders for a long time. Probably thanking them, profusely. Fox says this was all their idea; they asked Mom if they could take me in, because she was gone at the hospital so often and they worried about me being alone all night, every night.” 

“Yeah, I’ll just bet they did.” Dana could practically hear Melissa shaking her head in disbelief. She decided not to tell her sister about Samantha. Melissa still had questions: “Wait, so you haven’t seen Maggie? At all?” 

“No, and I have no idea where she is! The hospital here just told me to call the children’s hospital in Boston to get her new information!” 

“So? What did that hospital say?” 

“Nothing; Mrs Mulder told me to wait until Monday to call. I guess she expected Mom to get in touch before then.” 

“So...when was the last time you saw Maggie face-to-face?”

“Um...” Out of habit, Dana looked to the spot on the wall where the calendar had hung. Naturally, it too was now gone. “It’s hard to say. Maybe last week, sometime?”

“She didn’t take you to Mass?”

“Mass doesn’t happen every week, here. The island population is too small, in the off-season.” When was the last time Dana had seen her mother? 

Again, Missy made her thoughtful, somewhat disapproving noise. “Are her things there?” 

“Her suitcases are gone, but the photo albums are still here.” 

The one-minute bell rang. 

“Does she have the car?” Missy asked. 

The car! Why had Dana not thought to check for the car? “I don’t know,” Dana confessed. “I didn’t check.” 

“Check. If it’s not in the garage, that backs up her story. And it also means Maggie can come back easily enough, on short notice.” 

“…But if it is there, in the garage, that means Mom drove it from the hospital to the house, and then got on the ferry and into Boston some other way, with Charlie.” Dana found this possibility unlikely, but not implausible. Perhaps her mother was simply too over-wrought to drive. Or maybe the local hospital needed to hand Charlie off to the one in Boston themselves, for some picky paperwork reason.

“If she went to Boston,” Melissa said, darkly. “If she was telling you the truth.”

“What reason would she have to lie?” Dana ignored her goosebumps and deliberately refused to wait for an answer. “Mom might have left the car behind if she thought Dad might need it, too, right?”

“William can requisition a Jeep from the base whenever he wants,” Melissa reminded her. “Damn. I have like ten seconds. I love you, honey.” 

“Are you really okay?” Dana shrilled. “Do you promise?” 

“Just make sure you don’t wind up in the same situation,” Melissa warned. “I love you.” 

“I love-”

“Miss Scully’s phone privileges for the week are over,” said the chilly voice on the other end of the line. 

“I hope your house was built on a fault line,” Dana snarled, and hung up. 

In the doorway, Fox clapped. “Well done,” he said. “Excellent work. See, guys? I told you. The temper is real.” 

Clustered in the dining room door, the guys seemed singularly unimpressed. Dana could not tell which of them the Stooges were less impressed by. The disappointment seemed evenly split.

“I hate that switchboard lady,” Dana admitted. Slowly, she rose to stand. For some reason all her limbs felt heavier, now. “She’s mean. She’s how come I can say the rosary so fast, because I’m always in confession about her. Or I was. At our other parish.” 

“Oh yeah?” Fox asked. “Did you also tell her to lick the Fuhrer’s jackboots, or is that reserved for the coaches of opposing teams?”

“One time, I told her to play in a tar pit with all the other dinosaurs.” 

Fox folded his lips inside his mouth and looked at the floor. Then the ceiling. Then his friends. Then the floor again. 

“It’s mean!” Dana insisted. 

“So mean,” he crooned, as though complimenting a child’s drawing. “Very mean. Cruel. Vicious. Sadistic, even.”

“It implies she’s ancient! A fossil! Which is an insult to both her looks and her attitudes!” 

Fox patted her head. “It’s true. You’ve been a very bad girl. A real holy terror. I am simply appalled at how unladylike you were, just now.”

“Wow, Mulder, does that mean she needs-”

Fox turned on a dime, snapped his fingers, and pointed at his friends. Melvin and his question were silenced instantly. John and Ringo were visibly suppressing laughter.

“I’m checking the garage,” Dana muttered.

Chapter Text

“Mulder, I hate to say it, but I think you have a problem,” Byers said, when the kitchen door to the breezeway and garage had slammed shut behind Scully.

“I have no such thing,” Mulder replied, out of habit. “Wait, which problem is that, exactly?”

Byers gave him a look. “Please be smarter than this. This is not tilting at windmills; this is tilting at the Empire State Building. Even you cannot pull this one off.”

“Pull what off? I’m not pulling anything off!”

“Except yourself,” Langly chimed in, with the requisite jerk-off motion.

“Langly,” Byers hissed. 

“Look, Byers, just because my name is Fox does not make me some sort of trickster figure.” 

“A safecracking kit?” Byers folded his arms and leaned to back against the wall. “You expect Scully to believe that?”

Mulder scowled. “Hey, I’m the one who calls her Scully. That’s my thing, not yours.”

“Whatever her name is, I wanna marry that girl,” Frohike sighed.

“Get in line,” Mulder told him. The others scoffed. “No really; you’ll have to form a queue. She’s not allowed to date. Told me so herself.” 

“Yeah, I’ll just bet she did,” Langly cracked. 

“Piss off, Langly. It’s a rule her parents made, right before…” 

He trailed off. I only get to speak to my sister for ten minutes a week, Melissa had said. And Scully had told him the landlord got the number of beds wrong. Clearly, Melissa was on the original move-in manifest. But then something happened. Something that made Captain Scully hit Scully’s sister, and then send her away. Suddenly his conversation with Dales came roaring back through his head. If she has kittens? You have kittens.

“Christ, I’m such an idiot,” Mulder said. “Gimme a few minutes. Put everything with her name on it in the car, okay? Please? Thanks.” 

Mulder jogged across the breezeway and into the garage. Was it just him, or were there more neighbours out raking leaves than there were, when they arrived? “Hi,” he said, nodding. I’m Fox Mulder, he added, in his head. You may remember me from that time six years ago when everyone thought I murdered my baby sister. Anyway, please excuse me while I corner this tiny co-ed alone in a garage.

“Scully?” he asked, opening the side door into the garage. 

Scully sat on the passenger’s side of a late-thirties Pontiac Six four-door sedan: one of those called a “woodie wagon.” She stared dead ahead. Mulder had expected floods of sobs, but there were none. Just her stoical white face, empty of all expression, which was somehow much worse than tears. Mulder closed the door quietly behind him, and loped warily around back of the car. Scully seemed not even to notice him, until he let himself in on the driver’s side. In Mulder’s books, Captain Bill Scully was bad news. A real piece of work. But somebody had kept this car pristine. Even the interior was wood: blonde planks and beams arced overhead. Trust a Navy man who called himself Ahab to buy a car that looked like an old whaling vessel. 

Thinking these things over gave him time to consider how to ask the next question. Finally, Mulder landed on: “Was Melissa calling from a mother-and-baby home?” 

Scully made a tiny mewling noise deep in her throat, and nodded. 

“That’s why your dad hit her, this summer? And then sent her away?” Again, Scully nodded. “When is she due?” 

“Christmas,” Scully whispered. As though remembering something suddenly, she whirled on the seat and grabbed his right hand with her left. “Please don’t tell your mother and father. Please. It’s private, and…and…I don’t want them to think…” Her face twisted. “They might kick me out, if they think I’ll wind up the same way.” 

“I would never let that happen,” Mulder assured her. 

Her eyes went very wide. Two high points of colour appeared in her now very pale face. “...Let what happen, exactly?”

“You getting sent way! I’d never let that happen! What did you...” Mulder trailed off as his heart began to race. It was as though his body had heard his words before his mind did. The words could not get out of his mouth fast enough: “Oh, Jesus, Scully, no, that’s not what I meant, I swear-”

“Okay, I thought as much, because it’s not really your decision, but-” 

“I mean, not that I’m some kinda saint or anything. Quite the opposite, actually. But-”

“To be fair, it’s not really your decision in either case; it’s in the hands of-”

“To be fair, I tend to assume the woman in question has a say in it, too. And in my experience, most of them are extremely careful, and they like it when I’m the same.” In fact, as Mulder had discovered, what they most often preferred was staying at third base. This had the benefit of getting off without risking a pregnancy and allowed them to say they (technically) had not fucked another man. At her absolutely mortified expression, Mulder added, “See? Now we both have a secret from my parents. Isn’t that nice?”

“Not really,” Scully croaked. She looked as though she might be ill. “I had no idea you had such an illustrious career. Anybody I know?”

“No. They’re all older than you.” 

“Oh.” Now she looked impossibly sad.

Mulder waved a hand dismissively. “I’m kinda over all that, now, though, to be honest. There was somebody I was completely gone for, and I thought she felt the same, but she didn’t.”

Not that Diana (Mrs Fowley, he corrected himself) had ever told him so to his face. What she did was call the house on the Tuesday after July 4th, and ask for his help with something around her place, like usual. Then she let him find the FOR SALE sign in her yard all by himself. And after he brought the bike around back and came in through the kitchen door, he found her fully dressed and smoking a cigarette with some of her eggless, butter-less, flavour-less cakes on a plate, and they fought. He called her a coward and a liar and a slut, and she slapped him, and they fucked, and he cried, and she cried, and they fucked again, and they took a bath, and cried some more together. After that, she hired a moving company. 

“Well, she was stupid, then,” Scully said, loyally, squaring her shoulders and raising her chin.

“Yeah, well, she’s also married, so-”

“Fox!” 

“Wow, that was almost three whole syllables, that time. What do I have to do to get you to four?” 

“I shudder to think,” Scully snapped, and stared out the windscreen. 

Mulder clicked his tongue. “Don’t be mad.”  (He loved when she was mad. It was so much better than when she was crying, or afraid, or uncertain. If he had his druthers, Mulder would pick Angry Scully off that menu every time.)

“I’m not mad; I’m worried!” 

He scoffed. “Worried? About what? Nobody’s more careful than a married woman, Scully. That’s one of the advantages of the whole arrangement.” 

“I am worried, Fox, about some cuckolded husband blowing your fool head off!” 

Scully had a point. Some women found that prospect exciting; Mulder found it nerve-wracking. With Mrs Fowley he had never worried about it: Captain Fowley was shot down on a bombing run over Germany, and her baby was stillborn soon thereafter, necessitating the hysterectomy that brought Mulder to her house to begin with. Abdominal surgery meant she was under orders not to stand for long periods, take stairs, or carry anything heavy, for at least six weeks. Her sister in Florida was supposed to come and help, but then her own children caught whooping cough. So on his way home from school every day that term, Mulder delivered her groceries and took out her garbage and shovelled her walk, and made sure she ate something. Until one Sunday, February the 14th, after she failed to answer the door on Friday and refused to pick up the phone all Saturday. On a hunch, Mulder rode over. He found the door unlocked, and Mrs Fowley on the bathroom floor, covered in vomit and half-digested pills. 

Diana begged him not to call a doctor. Mulder, in turn, begged Byers to cover for him, and told his mother he was staying the night there. Which was the first and only full night he spent with her, holding her while she cried and wondering if she needed a hospital. (Then again, Aunt Margaret had been in a hospital, and look how that turned out.) After that, Diana filled his afternoons, and he filled her, again and again. Sometimes twice a day: once at lunch and again after school. Mulder simply could not be inside the same room with her and not be inside her, too. For five months they carried on that way, even after baseball started. They were cosy together: she taught him how to make coffee and roll cigarettes and take stains off. Having been pregnant, Diana now had more ration points than she knew what to do with; she showed Mulder how to sear chops and roast chickens. His grades improved; she went over his homework with a fine-toothed comb. Just before summer break, Mom came home to find him casually stuffing an early striper with preserved lemon and olives unearthed from the basement stores; when she asked where had picked up the recipe he said, Diana showed me, and she said something about making sure Mrs Fowley had time to herself, to which he replied, I thought you liked having me out of your hair. 

“That was a concern, I guess. But I’ve been, um, lucky, thus far.” 

“Oh, really? How nice for you. I’ll just stop worrying, then, because you’re so lucky.” 

He rolled his eyes. “You should stop worrying anyway, because all of that is over and done with, now. We have enough on our plate as it is without borrowing trouble. Right? We agree on that?” Reluctantly, Scully nodded. “So stop worrying. Besides, if you can’t date, then I...” He frowned. “Well, honestly, I never dated any of them. That would mean being seen in public. But you know what I mean.”

Now she was back to looking enormously sad. “You shouldn’t see people who won’t be seen with you, Fox.” 

In his eighteen years, Mulder had witnessed a few more cruelties than other guys at school his age. It came with being arrested multiple times and having a whole island think he was a child-killer. (Having Teena Mulder for a mom did not exactly help, either.) But those hurts now seemed like bruises next to the wounds left behind by the gossamer-thin blade of Scully’s innocence. She was just so...good. It was so painfully, disgracefully good, how she wanted what was best for Mulder despite barely knowing him at all. The kind of good that made Mulder realize all over again how not-good the rest of the world treated him by comparison.

“And you shouldn’t deprive yourself just because of a rule my mom and dad made, either. That isn’t fair to you. For one, you’re eighteen. And for two...” She squirmed in her seat before looking down at her lap and whispering: “I don’t want you to be unhappy because of me.” 

“Unhappy? Where in Hell do you even get this stuff? Scully. C’mon. Please.” I am depriving myself already, Mulder thought. Or rather, Fate had already deprived him. After Diana, he barely noticed other women at all, much less girls. Even if the girls at school somehow magically stopped thinking of him as a murderer, how in Hell was he supposed to take them out on dates, when he was already accustomed to helping a woman brush her hair and button her dress? His ideal assignation was leaving practise, getting in a bathtub with Diana, drying off in bed, and fixing her something while she punctuated his essays. “What I was trying to say, before you suddenly turned this car into a confessional, is that I’m not letting you go back to someone who hits women. Or puts dead animals in your bed.” 

“I’m not so sure you should worry about anyone coming back for me at all,” Scully whispered. 

“What?” Mulder scowled. “What are you saying?” 

“Fox, look around.” With her chin, she pointed at interior of the Pontiac. “If my mother were planning on coming back soon, wouldn’t she have brought the car with her, to Boston?” 

He frowned. “Not necessarily. Boston has streetcars. Using those would save her gas rations. Certainly easier than dealing with Boston drivers.” Scully didn’t smile. “Look, it probably just means that she and Charlie went over on the ferry with one of his doctors. It was a Friday; I bet Dr Weiss drove them up that morning, so he could get to Boston before sundown and go to synagogue on Saturday. Your mom would want to go with Charlie, right?” 

The venom in her voice was real, this time: “She certainly didn’t want to see me; that’s for sure.” 

“Oh, yeah? How’d you figure that?”

“My mother took the time to drive this car all the way from the hospital and park it here, but didn’t think to stop at your house on the way, and say goodbye to me in person.”

Mulder winced. Scully was onto something, there. Even if someone had picked Mrs Scully up on Friday morning to drive her into Boston, then why would she not just visit the Mulder home Thursday night, instead of calling the house on the phone? It was a twenty-minute drive from the island hospital to their place in Chilmark, this time of year. The weather was fine. Cold, sure, but they had yet to experience the first blizzard of the season. Mrs Scully had no snow or ice to contend with. And even with the presence of the Navy base, very few people on the Vineyard observed blackout advisories. There were other cars out on the road.

“Maybe there was fog,” he said, trying to be charitable.

“Fog?!”

“Okay, yes, that is a lame excuse. But maybe she had a headache!” His own mother was eternally using headaches to get out of things. Mulder wished that excuse worked half as well for him as it did for Teena.

“If that were the case, she could have just told me. And someone re-arranged all those crates. It certainly wasn’t me.” Scully lifted her gimpy hand.

Mulder made a dismissive noise. “Yeah, it was the movers, getting stuff out of the way so they could take the furniture.” 

“But Mom would have overseen that, to make sure they didn’t take the wrong stuff,” Scully insisted. “Besides: all Mom’s luggage is gone. Mom colour-codes all our luggage, because we move so often.” Of course she does, Mulder thought, as Scully explained the scheme: “My cases all have a purple ribbon on the handles; Missy’s have red, Bill’s have blue; Charlie’s have green, Dad’s have yellow, and Mom’s have white.” She pointed over his shoulder, toward the door. “There are zero suitcases in that house with white ribbons on them. None. All her things are gone.” 

Mulder thought of the ashtray he’d found, overflowing with Morleys. Someone had overseen the movers, but he doubted it was Mrs Scully. But that theory just compounded the problem: if his mother and Carl had packed up the house on Friday evening while Dad and Scully were with him at the game, then Mrs Scully would have had ample time to visit the Mulder home on Thursday night, to say goodbye to her daughter in person. So why had she not done just that? He thought again of Scully asleep on the divan behind him that first night, the even tide of her breathing stirring the hairs on his nape, and how watching the skies darken and the waves roll in while she slept made him feel like his bones were corded steel. They were home for hours before Mom returned with dinner. And home alone, together, while Mulder (stupidly) fumed and Scully hurt her hand, before Dad came home. At the time, Mulder assumed Dad came home early on the Thursday ferry to meet his new house guest. Now, he wondered. Where was Mom, all that time?

“How can you be sure of that? We haven’t gone through every crate. Some of her stuff might still be here. What about valuables? No way she brought her valuables, like jewelry and stuff, with her all the way to Boston so she could wear them to a hospital.” 

Scully looked at him as though he were being especially slow. “What valuables? The most valuable thing my mom owns is her wedding band and-” Her good hand clapped over her mouth. Her eyes rose up to him, wide and terrified. 

“What is it?” Mulder asked. 

“Her cross. Her little gold cross. It was in the envelope, with the letter your mother gave me on Thursday. I thought Mom was just fobbing me off, somehow. You know, trying to keep me sweet, and make sure I behaved. I found it insulting, that she thought I would need a bribe to do that, but if she’s gone, then…” Scully squeezed her eyes shut. Her lips shook. When she spoke, her voice was tiny, and getting smaller by the word. “She’s not coming back; she’s never coming back…”

“No,” Mulder rasped. “Scully-” Baby, he thought. But that was wrong, in part because of how very right it felt, in his head. He folded her close to him and pulled the kerchief off her head yet again. (Why on Earth she would ever cover that hair up was beyond him.) He stroked her hair. “Dana. No. It’s not like that. She just didn’t want it to get stolen. That’s all.” 

Muffled by his chest, she said: “She didn’t even say goodbye; she didn’t even want to see me.”

Parts of Mulder were splintering that he had assumed were reduced to cinders, years ago. “No, she called-”

“It must’ve been so bad; whatever I did, it must’ve been really bad-”

Did you ever give your sister a reason to run away? Patterson asked, in his head, as clear as if he perched on the bench seat behind them. Did you fight, that day? Did you do something, to make her want to leave?

“You did nothing wrong,” Mulder said, desperately, uncertain of whether he spoke to her or to both of them. He hugged her tighter. “And if you ever did screw up, how would she even know? She was barely home! You could’ve hosted a damn hootenanny in this place, and invited the whole school, and she’d’ve never found out!” 

“You think I could host parties?” Scully croaked. “Me?” 

Mulder couldn’t help himself; he laughed. “Of course you could.” Then, because it seemed like it might be allowed, he pressed a kiss into the top of her head. Or, if not a kiss, at least rested his lips there for a second, while she failed to pull away. (Why on Earth did she have to smell so good, too?) “You can do anything you want. If you wanna become the Vineyard’s next social maven, I bet Mom would love to help.” 

He felt her considering, for a second. “No, thank you,” she said, and burrowed more deeply into him. “This is enough for me.” 

When was the last time Mulder was enough for someone? (Never. He had never been enough. Not for anyone.) A little sob shuddered out of him. Scully reared back in a panic. “Why are you sad?” Her voice spiralled up and up: “Did I say something wrong? Should I-”

“Dana, stop.” He rested a hand on her wet face. Across from him, Scully went still. “I’m sad because you’re sad. That’s all. Okay? I’m sad because I know what it’s like to have someone disappear and not know why. But I want you to look on the bright side.” 

“There’s a bright side?” Scully sniffled. 

“Yeah. We’re sitting in it.” He made his voice sound all slick, like a radio announcer: “Dana Scully has her own car!” 

Her eyebrow rose. He felt the pull of her skin under his thumb. “…Fox, I have no license.” 

“Fox Mulder and Dana Scully have their own car!” Mulder corrected, in the same radio-announcer tone. Scully giggled. “Speaking of which, we should load her up with stuff, and save ourselves a trip. You go open the…” Mulder turned and peered down at the Pontiac’s burled-wood dash. “Where in Hell is the starter button on this thing?”  

“You need the ignition key before you can think about that,” Scully reminded him. “Or this will be a pretty short trip. Mom has a key, but Dad usually hides one…” As Mulder watched, Scully leaned over him until she was practically in his lap, and flipped the driver’s side sun visor down. “Damn. Hang on.” 

She disappeared under the seat. 

“Um,” Mulder said, staring down between his knees. He was beginning to reconsider the existence of a supreme, all-knowing deity who loved him and wanted him to be happy. Until now, the notion had seemed extremely far-fetched. But there was Scully, crouched under him in the dark, feeling around with her one good hand and pausing, inexplicably, to reach under the hem of his jeans to pull up his sock, then giggling softly when electricity zinged up his spine. 

“Are you really ticklish?” she asked. 

“No,” Mulder lied. God, if you’re out there, he thought, please do not let anyone walk in right now.

“Found it!” Scully crowed. She wriggled around, and now her body stretched out across his feet and against his shins. This meant Mulder could no longer do the smart thing and pull his knees to his chest to give her more space to move. “Mom and Dad don’t smoke, so they never use the ashtray. And that’s lucky, because the handle popped off during one move or the other, and now…” She growled a little in frustration. “Now it’s really hard to open. Usually if I can get my fingers in at the corners and sort of nudge it a little…” 

That does tend to help, Mulder thought, and did not say. “Scully, don’t take this the wrong why, but why, exactly, are you on the floor trying to open the ashtray?” 

“Because,” she said, in a tone implying he was a little dense, “that’s where Dad hides the spare key.” 

“Oh. How silly of me, not to have known.” 

“It’s a good hiding spot!” Mulder heard a click. “See? Now I just have to reach in and…ow!”

Her hand. Shit. “Scully, get up here before you pop your stitches, c’mon.” 

“Something cut me!” 

“Lemme see.” 

Scully slithered back up into the seat beside him, holding the ashtray in the sling of her arm and sucking on the fingers of her left hand. Inside the ashtray was a key with a piece of tape on it, and another piece of metal, also adorned in tape. The latter was triangular, and about the size of a deck of playing cards but wafer-thin, almost like tissue paper. Despite its dimensions, it seemed fantastically strong.

“I think it got under my nail,” Scully whinged. 

“What is it?” Mulder asked. 

Scully shrugged and made an I don’t know sound, around her fingers. Slowly withdrawing them with a wet pop from her mouth, she frowned down at the piece Mulder now held. “I’ve never seen it before. It looks almost like a piece of broken record, though — see the etchings?”

Mulder flipped the piece over to the side without any tape. Sure enough, there were etchings — fine, square ones, almost like the fractal patterns in bismuth, or some other crystal. “Ten to one you can’t dance to it,” he said. 

They locked the gun and the mysterious metal piece in the glove compartment of the Pontiac. Fox kept the bullets, just in case. Once Dana got the garage door open, and showed Fox how to prime the carburetor after his first attempt to start the Pontiac, he managed to back it out. Luckily, he stopped it just before it tapped the Ford’s nose. “Damn thing drives like Noah’s Ark,” he muttered. 

“I think you mean The Pequod,” Dana said. 

“You said it,” Fox agreed, staring warily at the wood-panelled wagon. 

“That is, in fact, what Dad calls the wagon,” she told him.

Fox cast her a long-suffering look. “Oh, come on.” 

“I mean it! We call it the Pequod!”

“The whole family, huh? Not just you and your dad? You sure about that?” Now his smirk was back. For a moment, he rolled his lip under his teeth. For a somewhat longer moment, they kept staring at one another. Long enough, in fact, that John cleared his throat to get Fox’s attention. At which point, Fox directed them to put everything not marked DANA or MELISSA in the Pequod. 

“And the books!” Dana added. There weren’t many, but her dad’s copy of Moby-Dick would be in there. And the family Bible. “I want the books!” 

“And the books,” Fox agreed. “If it’s in the Ford, we can unpack it right away; if it’s in the Ark, then we can let it sit.” 

“I’m telling you, it’s the Pequod!” 

“I’ll make you a deal: when your dad drives it, it’s the Pequod.” Fox jerked a thumb at himself. “But when I drive it, it’s the Ark.” Now he pointed to her. “And you will be just as faithful to my nomenclature as you are to his.” 

“Faithful?” Dana asked. 

“Devoted. Respectful. Obedient. Did you know that the Latin root for religion is-”

“The same as the one for ligature, yes. Everyone knows that.” 

“I didn’t,” Melvin commented. “That’s bizarre.” 

“Every Catholic knows that,” Dana amended. 

The guys scoffed. Fox froze. An odd prickle went up Dana’s spine. “What’s so funny?”

“It’s funny ‘cause we’re heathens,” Ringo said. 

“Godless sinners,” Melvin added. 

“Atheists,” John said, pleasantly. His gaze swung on Fox like a weathervane. “Tell her the name, Mulder.” 

“What name?” Dana had a bad feeling about this. 

Ringo grinned. “Go on, Mulder; I thought you loved the name.” 

Fox winced. His eyes were screwed up tight, when he said the words through clenched teeth: “The Four Horsemen.” 

Dana laughed. “But Fox, you’re not an atheist.” 

Now the guys laughed. Except for Fox. Fox, if possible, was wincing even harder. “I’m not exactly a believer, either, Scully.” 

“Fox!” 

“There it is,” he said, pointing ruefully toward some invisible spot on the horizon. “Four syllables. And all it cost me is my immortal soul.”

“That’s not funny,” Dana insisted. 

“You’re right. It’s not.” He beamed. “It’s hysterical.” 

“But…” For some reason, this possibility had simply never occurred to Dana. She knew Fox was no regular church-goer. Many islanders were not; the size of the population guaranteed monthly services for some, not weekly ones. But to be a non-believer was something else entirely. To not believe was to live in an arid spiritual desert, bereft of mercy or grace. “Who do you pray to?” 

“No one,” Fox said. “Or anyway I try to avoid it. It makes me feel weak.” 

“But that’s what prayer is for,” Dana said, scowling. “It’s for moments when we feel weak.” 

“I’m feeling weak the longer I carry these damned crates,” Melvin pointed out. 

“Sorry,” Dana said, quickly. “I’ll just…make sure we’re not missing anything.” 

But they weren’t missing anything. The house had been expertly packed. Dana had done some of this on the afternoon she left — cleaning out the fridge, setting aside the toiletries to bring with her, sorting out which canned and dry goods Mrs Mulder could absorb from the household. Even the aspirin and Alka-Seltzer and the tin of Band-Aids that she’d so foolishly left behind, in case Dad might need them, were all packed up in a bandbox left atop the toilet lid. 

Dad had taken his shaving kit with him to the base, along with his shoe polish and the brushes he used to keep his uniforms clean. Most of Charlie’s clothes were already at the hospital; one pathetically-small box named TOYS was already in the Pequod. Most of Melissa’s clothes were with her, in Los Angeles. And Mom’s things were…wherever Mom was. It was as though since having received their orders to get to the Vineyard, the whole Scully family had been peeling off, one by one, like the petals on a flower. They love me; they love me not. They love me; they love me not. They-

“Uh…Scully?” 

She turned. It was Ringo. “Oh. Hi. Sorry. I was wool-gathering. And thank you. For all your help.” 

“Sure thing. Um…” Ringo peered nervously over his shoulder. “Is everything okay? At the Mulders?” 

Dana nodded. “Yes.” 

His eyes landed on her injured hand. “Are you sure?” 

“Oh! Yes. Definitely. I did this myself, on the flue.” It was odd, for Ringo to suspect his friend. Maybe Fox was right, and everyone on the island really did think he had done away with Samantha. “Fox would never hurt me, Ringo.’ 

“Oh, believe me, I know.” Ringo rolled his eyes. “But I also know Mrs Mulder can be a real shrew, sometimes. She’s not, like, making you sleep in the basement, or something, right?” 

“Well, she did put me in the room off the kitchen, where the basement door is-”

“The servant’s quarters?” Clearly, Ringo was scandalized. 

“Um…” Dana thought of the ancient bell system just outside her new bedroom door. Her heart sank. Fox must have thought her so naive to like her new room so much. “I guess so, yeah. She said it would be more private.” 

“Well, sure. Means Mulder has to sneak all the way downstairs just to see you.” 

Dana frowned. “Why would he need to sneak anywhere, to see me? He sees me every day. I live there.”

“I meant, like…” Now Ringo was the one frowning. He gestured broadly at the empty space, as though there were something she had forgotten to pick up. 

“You mean when he reads to me?” 

Pure glee wrote itself all over his angular features. “He reads to you? At night?” 

“Yeah. His father asked him to.” Dana hugged her bad arm with her good one. “I guess Mr Mulder thinks I’m a big baby, or something.” 

Ringo shrugged. “So what if he does? He is missing a daughter, after all. Just go with it, Scully.” He pointed with a thumb over his shoulder. “I think that’s all of it, though. Byers and Frohike are fighting over who gets to drive the woodie, and Mulder said I should ask you.” 

“Byers,” she said, immediately. John was the one Mulder had tossed the keys to, earlier, which meant he trusted John’s skills behind the wheel. “I mean, John. Unless you want to drive it?” 

Ringo gestured at his glasses. “Been a while since my last prescription. Probably shouldn’t chance it. Mulder’s in the Ford, whenever you’re ready.” 

“Oh. Um…” She winced. “I guess I should lock up. Will you please help me check the windows, just in case? I can’t reach them all.” 

“Sure thing.” 

They checked the windows and doors. Plugged the taps. Ringo watched her lock the door, and then piled into the Pequod with the other guys. Then it was time for her to get inside the Ford. Fox didn’t even acknowledge Dana, when she slid inside. Fox told John to go on ahead. They would be right behind him. John gave him a wary look, but started up the Pequod and drove off. Fox drummed his fingers on the wheel of his dad’s Ford, then abruptly stopped. They sat in the ensuing silence for a long moment before he spoke. 

“I want to believe.” Audibly, he swallowed. “I just can’t. Any more. I can’t let myself. Because if I believe, I start to hope. And the hope is like this open wound I can’t stop picking at, so it goes septic. Eventually, it’s better just to lose the limb.” 

“I’m sorry,” Dana said, because there was nothing else to say. 

“It’s like red and green. I can’t really see them, the way other people see them. So where people see God, I just…” Fox lifted his hands off the wheel and dropped them. “Don’t.” 

“Do you think I’m a fool, for believing?” 

“What?” He scowled. “No. But the founders — who hated Catholics, by the way — wanted religious freedom. That includes freedom of religion, and freedom from religion. Right?” 

Dana nodded slowly. “Right.” 

“And the freedom to read and think and say what you want. And the freedom to change your mind. That’s what sets us apart from the fascists, right? They think you can only be one thing, forever and ever. They need people to be only one thing, because that makes them simpler to categorize, program, and easily reference, and people on lists are easier to kill. The fascists want most folks on a list of people to keep out, and we want most folks on a list to let in. It says so, on the Statue of Liberty.” 

Blindly, she reached for his hand. This, Dana realized, was the most important thing they had in common. Until now, the swiftness and seamlessness of their camaraderie had puzzled her. It made no sense. On paper, they were polar opposites in everything: sex, class, religion, romantic experience, even athletic ability. But what united them was not the Latin, or their grades, which seemed to be neck-and-neck. It was not their pride in their intellect or their habit of needling one another. It was not even the loss of a sibling. It was this. Their values. The truths they held to be self-evident.

“Thank you. I’ll pray twice as hard for both of us, at Mass tomorrow.”

He scoffed a little, squeezed her hand, and started the Super Deluxe. “You do that, Scully. God probably listens to you, first.” 

She shook her head. “You’re thinking of the saints.” 

“Damn right I am.” He nudged the car out onto the street.

This gave her the courage to ask her real question. “Did you think I was stupid, liking the servant’s quarters so much?” 

Beside her, Fox froze. “Figured that out, huh? Well, for the record, I wanted you upstairs. Like family. Mom’s the one who thought you might want to lock your door.” 

“Why would she think that?” 

“Probably assumed you’d be scared of Spooky Mulder, just like all the other girls at school.” 

“Pansies,” Dana muttered. 

“Well, I’m not dating, same as you, so it makes no difference, does it? Once football is over, you and I can be homebodies until 1944.” 

“Fox, it’ll be 1944 in…” Dana’s eyes bugged as she did a quick count. She sat forward and twisted to face Fox. “Six weeks?!”  

“Yeah, but we’re only in class for four of those weeks, and I’m only in football for three, on account of finals.” When she made no response, Fox gave her a quick look and added: “Scully, you are aware this week is Thanksgiving, right? That’s why Skinner pushed so hard to finish our game without a forfeit; it was one of the last of the season.”

“I guess it hadn’t sunk in yet,” Dana mumbled. 

Would her little brother even live to see 1944?  Or would he and Melissa’s baby pass one another at Heaven’s pearly gates? All at once, Dana realized she would never meet that baby. Her niece or nephew. For her whole life, Dana would look at every fellow red-head about sixteen years her junior and wonder: are you my flesh and blood? And so, for that matter, would Melissa. 

“…Scully?” 

Dana waited until he’d turned the corner before speaking. “I was just feeling sad about the baby, is all. And then feeling bad for feeling sad, because I’m just losing a niece or nephew, but Melissa’s losing her firstborn child. So I really have no business complaining-” Her voice broke. “Because my loss is nothing next to that, and with Charlie so sick I thought Mom might…”

“Change her mind about your sister?” Fox asked. “Or maybe convince your dad to change his?”

“I just thought she might understand,” Dana murmured. “Fox, how much is a train ticket from Boston to Los Angeles?” 

Warily, he eyed her up and down. “Why d’you wanna know?”

“Think about it,” she said, warming to the idea. “If Mom went with Charlie to Boston and then got on a train to Los Angeles, she could arrive there and spring Melissa before the baby is born.”

“And before your dad cottoned on to her plan,” Fox agreed, nodding. “She might not tell you about it, either. That way you wouldn’t be forced to lie to your dad, if he asked if you knew anything. You think a man losing a child might re-consider his position on losing a grandchild?” 

She smiled weakly. “I certainly hope so.” 

“In that case, maybe both your parents are hunting the White Whale, so to speak.” Dana gave him a sour face. As usual, Fox was undeterred. “See, it’s funny, ‘cause in this particular instance the figurative White Whale is a girl who’s eight months pregnant, and presumably has the same problems getting a tan that you do.” 

Abruptly, Dana faced the windscreen. “Joke’s on you, then. Melissa tans beautifully, just like she does everything else. She gets all golden in the sun, and her hair turns blonde, and she never gets freckles, and she’s so much taller than me, and…” Dana sighed. “I just know her baby will turn out pretty, too. If it’s a girl, I hope she looks more like Melissa, or Mom, than me.” 

“Hey, shut up.” A sharp sting hit her ear,  where he flicked it with his thumb and middle finger. Dana hissed as Fox continued: “The only reason you’re so short is ‘cause you were born in ’28, a year ahead of the Crash. And then, with the droughts all through the Dust Bowl, there was hardly any food to go around. No wonder your growth got stunted.” 

Dana had never really considered it this way. Her mother didn’t often speak about the time when Dana was small. By the time they left Hawaii, the Depression had the mainland by the throat. Shortly after they left, Mom had gotten sick. With what, Dana could not recall. All she remembered was her mother crying behind a closed door. And Melissa walking her to her first day at the new nursery school. After that, Mom’s mother Nana Lynch came for a long visit. 

“Mom was worried about the same thing with Sam, and she was born in ’29,” Fox added. He seemed very far away for a moment, then said: “Anyway, Mom was sure the Depression was why Sam had all the ear infections. No cereals. That’s why Dad’s obsessed with you getting enough vitamins. He says you need extra iron, for some reason.” 

Dana was about to tell him that, generally speaking, all women needed more iron than men. She was spared the need to have that particular awkward conversation, however, by spotting something even more troubling. All told, she might well have preferred a chance to explain basic biology. “Isn’t that the Pequod?” she asked, instead.

Dad’s wagon was pulled over to the side of the road. A base jeep had sidled up to it. Two men in uniform stood on either side of the wagon. As they watched, John exited the vehicle with his hands up. Fear washed down through her. 

“Fox, what if they ask to see the vehicle registration? It’s in the glove box. With the gun.” 

Chapter Text

“Shit.” Mulder pulled over to the side of the road, ahead of the Ark. Sure, they’d locked the glove compartment, but the key on the ring Byers was using would probably open it. Mulder killed the engine. “Stay in the car.” 

“I will do no such thing,” Scully informed him. “That is my father’s property they’re about to commandeer.” 

Obviously, Scully had missed the subtle Sign for “leave” or “go” that Byers gave to Mulder when raising his hands: right palm upraised, coasting along, left palm downward, staying in place. Now Byers was facing the vehicle and getting a frisk-job from one of the guys in a weird grey uniform, while the other one, dressed in a shearling flight jacket over olive drab, opened the passenger-side door and asked Langly to prepare for the same. 

“Hey,” Mulder said, just as Scully said, in the exact same tone that annoyed the Hell out of Mr Incanto: “Excuse me, Commander, but why have you stopped my father’s vehicle?” 

Of course Scully knew how to recognize rank from uniforms alone. The commander in question straightened up. His face fell the moment he saw Scully’s hair. Mulder experienced a brief moment of deep pride in having removed her kerchief.

“Are you…?” Clearly, the commander, whose breast read JOHNANSON, did not know precisely which Scully he was referring to. Mulder was willing to bet that the two Scully sisters looked a lot more alike than the younger one would ever acknowledge. 

“My name is Dana Scully. I’m the daughter of Captain William Scully. This vehicle belongs to him. Why have you stopped it?” 

The commander seemed at a loss. The guy in the shearling jacket, however, said: “Yeah, that’s Ahab’s kid, all right.” 

“Quiet down, Bud.” Commander Johanson held out his hand. “You’re Starbuck?”

Scully did not seem to appreciate the fact that other people outside her family (or rather, her families, plural) knew her nickname. She held out her hand, too, and warily allowed it to be shaken. “My father calls me that, yes.” 

“Just I’ve heard him on the phone, sometimes,” Johanson said. “Honestly, I only asked these kids to pull over because I thought they were joy-riding in your dad’s wagon.” 

“I’ve never been joy-riding, before,” Scully said, frostily. Mulder could listen to her tell legitimate authorities to go fuck themselves forever. “Does it normally involve carrying crates and boxes?” 

Commander Johanson winced. “No. But I wanted to ask about those, too.” 

“Those crates are my family’s property. I’m moving them to my new billet, for lack of a better term.” 

Johanson seemed relieved, somehow. “Oh. Great. Where are you billeted?” 

“It’s not by official order, you understand.” Scully seemed extremely concerned that the commander understand this point. “Unless you count my mother’s orders as official ones.  Which I have to. And she’s ordered me to live with the Mulders, now, while my mother stays in Boston.” 

“...Mulder?” 

The commander and the guy in the flight jacket, who was apparently called Bud, threw each other a quick glance. They knew Dad’s name, or at least recognized it. Was Dad doing something for the State Department, on the new base? Or had the island’s rumour mill simply been working double-time? 

“That’s our name,” Mulder said. “My name is Fox Mulder. Scully lives with me.” 

Johanson gave Mulder a once-over that reminded him of his times in lockup. Bud’s gaze flicked up to Mulder. “Well, ain’t you a lucky guy?”

“Don’t mind Budahas. He’s from Idaho. The last lady of any quality he spoke to before joining up was probably a prize sow at a state fair.” Johanson took Mulder’s hand and shook it. “Ahab would want us looking out for Starbuck, you see.” 

“That reminds me! Commander Johanson, could you please pass along my new address and phone number to my father?” 

Again, Johanson and Bud glanced at one another. This time they seemed even less comfortable. Something was wrong, Mulder realized. Something was terribly, terribly wrong. 

“Sure,” Johanson said, slowly. “I can take the information down, anyway. Sure he doesn’t have it, already?” 

“He might, but if so then I certainly have no idea about it,” Scully explained, acidly. “My mother tried to leave a message for him before she left for Boston, but-”

“What’s in Boston?” Budahas wanted to know. 

“The children’s hospital where my baby brother is dying of rheumatic fever,” Scully told him, with the kind of wounded dignity Mulder suspected it had taken Teena years to master. 

“Dying?” 

Johanson seemed surprised by this. He looked over at Bud. Bud’s eyes narrowed. He looked about to say something, and then gave Scully a second estimating glance. Mulder was a little too familar with this particular glance, as he’d seen it from most of the football team last night. It was the kind guys gave Scully when they weren’t entirely sure of her age, and worried she might be just a tiny bit young. As in: too young. Mulder watched Bud make this exact same calculation: too young. And right there, in that second, Mulder’s heart sank into his guts. It stayed there. 

“Yes, dying,” Scully spat, before either man could say anything further. Either she had missed this glance entirely, or she was so used to receiving it that she was completely inured to the sensation. “Which is what tends to happen when a patient has multiple seizures per day, because the infection has reached his central nervous system. Should I draw a diagram about how the streptococcus A bacterium produces a fiendish combination of enzymes and exotoxins whose sole purpose is devouring blood cells and connective tissues, causing rapid organ failure? Or is my word enough?”

Budahas was thoroughly unimpressed. “When’s the last time you saw your daddy, sweetheart?” 

“Bud!” Johanson hissed. 

“It’s still a good question, though, Dana,” Byers chimed in, straightening. “When did you last see Captain Scully?”

Scully chose to introduce Byers instead of answering. “This our friend John Byers. He and the others are helping us — well, me — move in.” 

“His dad runs the local paper,” Mulder put in, helpfully. 

Johanson paled slightly. “Oh.” 

“Yeah,” Mulder drawled.

“Shouldn’t you be writing all this down?” Scully asked. “Or is this not an official stop?” 

“It’s not anything.” Budahas flipped up the collar on his jacket. “It never happened. Come on, Chris. Let’s go. They don’t know anything.” 

“Correct,” Byers agreed, eagerly. “We know nothing about anything, and are happy to be on our way. Thank you. Langly, get back in the car. Now.” 

“Know anything about what?” Scully asked. 

Johanson’s face registered another expression that Mulder recognized, but which he suspected Scully did not. This time, it was curious, and pitying, and a little anxious. The kind of face you saw when your baby sister (or brother, in this case) was already presumed dead. Mulder felt himself stepping up behind her before he was consciously aware of having done so. “Scully-”

“About where your father is,” Johanson blurted out. “You have no idea where he went.” 

“What do you mean, where he went?” Mulder had expected panic, but Scully was all indignation: “Are you accusing my father of going AWOL?”

“Chris! Let’s go. Now.” 

“No, I want to hear this man to explain himself,” Scully snapped. “He’s accused my father of deserting his post, when everyone knows he’s been busy on the base for weeks now! That’s why he hasn’t called! That’s why he never visited my brother in the hospital!” 

“Aww, baby doll…” Budahas looked almost embarrassed for her. Apparently, Scully was right all along: someone had lied to her. Bigtime. “Just forget we said anything, okay, sweetheart?” 

“Don’t call me that! And I won’t forget!” She marched straight up to Johanson and grabbed him by the lapels. Johanson threw Mulder a pleading look while Scully continued railing at him: “What aren’t you telling me? Is my father in danger? Is he hurt? Is he MIA? When did you see him, last? Why won’t you-”

“Scully.” Gently, Mulder rested both hands on her shoulders. “Let him go. He can’t help you.” 

“It’s a simple question!” 

“No, Miss Scully.” Commander Johanson picked up her hands and removed them from his uniform. “I’m afraid it’s not simple at all.” 

Scully grabbed for him again. “But-”

Mulder looped an arm around her from behind and held her fast. “He can’t tell us what he doesn’t know, Scully. That’s why he pulled the car over: he wants the same answers that you do.”  

“Is that true?” she whispered. 

Johanson looked about ready to say something else, when Budahas came around the front of the Pontiac, warning: “Chris! If she has questions, she can reach out via official channels, same as everyone else.” 

Mulder had plenty of experience with official channels. They were the channels that told you your sister was still missing, her body hadn’t been found, and nobody was doing shit about it. “Oh, so she can get the big kiss-off on formal letterhead? Great. Excuse us if we don’t hold our breath waiting.” 

“Shut your trap, kid,” Bud snapped. 

“Make me,” Mulder told him. 

The airman lunged at Mulder. “Hey, fuck you, you little punk-ass piece of-”

Scully slipped his grasp and darted out in between Budahas and Mulder. She was trying to stop the fight. Mulder had an instant to admire her misplaced chivalry just before Bud clotheslined her. His arm swung out like a batter aiming right for the cheap seats. For two precious seconds, her little feet left the ground. Then Scully hit the asphalt on her injured side. When her body connected with the pavement, Mulder heard her little yelp of pain. 

All other sound abruptly died. Everything became blissfully sharp and clear. Bud was tall and solid, yes, but his posture was loose and his centre of gravity all too high. Just before Mulder tackled Bud to the ground, he vaguely recalled Dales saying something about demonstrating initiative on the field. Then he heard the wind leave the other man’s lungs. Mulder thought of Scully’s little hands on Exley’s body, how good she was, how tender and gentle and everything he himself was not, especially while cutting his knuckles open on this miserable bastard’s teeth. 

“Mulder, Jesus-” Byers struggled to catch hold of him. Langly helped. “You’re gonna kill him, come on, stop!” 

Johanson started hauling Budahas back, too. “You’re certifiable!” the airman howled. “I’ll have you brought up on charges!”

“Oh yeah? You wanna tell all your fellow pilots how you got the shit kicked out of you by a high school junior, for knocking down a ninety-pound girl?” Mulder had missed the taste of blood. It was salty and tangy and it meant he was doing something. “Be my fucking guest, asshole.” 

“Mulder!” Apparently in the commotion, Frohike had ditched the wagon for Scully. Now he was trying to help her sit up. “She’s bleeding!” 

Her wounds had re-opened. Seeing this, Mulder lunged again. Byers and Langly cursed, and wrenched him back. Now helping Scully to stand, Frohike jerked his thumb at the Ford. “Check the ration tag, nimrods! See that letter X? It means Bill Mulder outranks you. Now leave us the fuck alone, before we tell your CO you hit Captain Scully’s little girl.”

Johanson cast one last regretful glance at Scully before hustling his friend into the Jeep. It peeled away in a cloud of blue exhaust, going way the hell over 35. Delayed pain throbbed in Mulder’s hands. He turned. “Scully-”

She shoved him, hard, with her good hand. “What is wrong with you?” she shrieked. 

“Scully, come on, he-”

“He could have killed you!” Scully kept shoving. Mulder kept walking backwards. Soon he felt the wood-panelled wagon pressing up against his back. “He could have had you arrested, again, and put away somewhere horrible, and-”

“Scully, no, these guys, they’re all-”

“How dare you do something so stupid! If they send you away, then…” Her breath wheezed slightly. She was very pale. A trail of blood followed their progress across the asphalt. “Then I…” Her eyes went glassy. “Mulder? Something’s wrong…”

“Scully?” Her knees were crumpling. Mulder grabbed her around the shoulders, and then under her knees. Scully was ashen, and sweating, and her eyes refused to open. “Tell Dad we’re going to the hospital!” 

“There’s our girl,” someone said. 

“Daddy?” Why did Dana’s hand hurt so bad? “What time is it?”

“It’s a little after seven, my love. You’ve had a long sleep. But if you wake up now and keep your dinner down, they’ll let you come home with us.” 

“But there’s no furniture,” Dana reminded him. “Just boxes. Lots and lots of…” She sat upright in the dimness. Her shoulder twanged in protest. “Fox! Dad! Where-”

A light flicked on. Bill Mulder sat to her right; Fox to her left. The latter jigged his left knee up and down compulsively. His lip was split. A bruise had formed on his jaw. Blood spattered his t-shirt. Tears filled her eyes, and memory flooded back. 

“Dad’s really missing, isn’t he?” Dana asked him.

Fox nodded. 

“They have no idea where he is. They don’t know anything. They didn’t even know about Charlie.”

Again, he nodded. 

Her lip wouldn’t stop curling down into a tragedy mask. “Are you okay?”

“I am now,” he said, roughly. “But never, ever do that again. I mean it. Please.”

“You’re the one who-”

“I mean it, Scully. You cannot put yourself between people who are fighting. You can’t. Period.”

“Well, maybe you shouldn’t have been fighting!” 

Fox rocketed up out of his seat. “He threw you down on the ground like a sack of potatoes! While your arm was in a sling! Your skull could’ve cracked wide open! What else was I supposed to do?”

“Children,” Dad (no, Mr Mulder) said, gently. “We can discuss this later, at home, when Dana isn’t shaking off a sedative. Yes?”

“Sedative?”

“They had to put your arm back inside your shoulder, darling,” Mr Mulder informed her. “And re-close your stitches. So you’ve had some nitrous, just like at the dentist. And some aspirin. Nothing to worry about.” 

“My arm?” 

“Fox says you fell awkwardly, probably while trying to protect your hand, and that’s how you dislocated the joint. The pain must’ve been excruciating; it’s likely why you fainted.” 

“I didn’t faint!” She turned to Fox. “...Did I?” 

“Well, you weren’t exactly awake, Scully.” Her confusion must have registered on her face, because he said: “You got mad at me for tackling that pilot, and then you passed out mid-rant. So I put you in the car and brought you here. You scared the Hell out of me, by the way. Thanks for asking.” 

“Fox, go find Dr Waterston and tell him our Dana’s awake,” Mr Mulder said, crisply.

“But Dad-”

“Now, Fox.” 

Fox sucked his teeth, heaved a massive sigh, and stalked out of the room. As his hand closed over the doorknob, Dana saw gauze on his knuckles. As soon as the door clicked shut, she drew her knees to her chest and hid her face there. 

“Oh, darling, please don’t cry,” Mr Mulder said. 

“I’m sorry he got hurt,” Dana said miserably. “It’s my fault, not his. He’d never’ve been there if it weren’t for me, and now he could get arrested, and…and…”

“Hush, little one, hush…” Mr Mulder pulled out a handkerchief and put it in Dana’s good hand. “If anyone’s to blame, it’s myself. I should have gone with you to oversee things.” 

“I’m sure you had much more important things to do,” Dana said, wiping her eyes. Her face crumpled all over again. “Please don’t send me away.” 

“Send you away?” Mr Mulder looked downright offended. “Wherever did you come by that foolish idea? Did Fox say something like that, to you?” 

Dana shook her head. “No, but I got him in trouble, and he got hurt, so you’d have every right to get rid of me, and-”

The door squealed open. “Scully? What’s wrong? Why are you crying?” She heard Fox’s sneakers squeak across the tile, and then his arm was around her, and she had something to shiver against. “Why is she crying?” 

“Dana seems to think she’s gotten you in terrible trouble, and that I’m preparing to send her away. Little does she know, your mother and I spoke to our lawyer Mr Michaud this afternoon, while you were out, about that very issue.” 

Fox’s fingers tightened on her shoulder. Dana felt him preparing to move. “…What?” 

Mr Mulder sighed. “The issue of keeping her with us, Fox; not sending her away. Obtaining a signed affidavit from her mother granting us guardianship for a time. Doing everything above board, so there’s no question whatsoever about where Dana should be.” 

“Mr Michaud knows how to reach my mother?” Dana asked, twisting to face Mr Mulder. His son continued holding her. 

“Mr Michaud has a number of connections in Boston,” Mr Mulder said. To Dana, that did not seem like an answer. 

Before she could say as much, though, Fox spoke: “It’s only been a couple days; why do we need to file anything with the courts, now? What if Mrs Scully comes back by Thanksgiving?” 

Mr Mulder looked almost…shy. Reticent. Guarded. “Well, Fox, the truth is, with the war going the way it is, I could be called away at any time. For an indefinite period. With no guarantee of reliable communication. And I want you and your mother to have every possible avenue of support when it comes to keeping Dana with us.”

Something rippled through Fox’s frame; Dana felt it echo through hers. Fear, she realized. Unlike Dana, Fox had clearly never worried before about his father being deployed. “They’re sending you to Europe?” 

“Fox, even if that were true, you know I could never reveal it to you.” 

“When?” Fox barked. 

“Fox, please…” 

“Am I interrupting?” Dana and Fox flinched in tandem. At the door, Dr Waterston took a half-step backward. He held up both hands, fingers splayed wide. “I can come back later, if you would prefer.” 

“Please come in,” Dana said. “The sooner you clear me, the sooner I can go home.” 

Dr Waterston smiled. “Well, in that case, I’ll have to ask these two gentlemen to leave.” 

Outside Scully’s room, Dad took out his pipe and fitted it to his mouth. “That poor child,” he murmured, around its mouthpiece. 

Mulder gamed out several directions their conversation could go. He imagined them like the plays Coach Skinner drew out for them before a practise — the ones Mulder had so much trouble reading. In his own head, though, the possible lines of scrimmage were hard and bright and clear. That made it easy for him to pick one. 

“If you’re leaving the country, you have to tell me what’s going on,” Mulder said, evenly. 

Dad shook out his match. “What do you mean, Fox?” 

Mulder rolled his eyes. Then he shoved himself away from his stance on Scully’s door, and wove right into Dad’s line of sight. He watched Dad take in his blood and bruises. “Where’s Charlie?” 

Dad’s eyes fell shut. He sighed smoke. Suddenly he looked ten years older. Or maybe he just finally looked his real age. “Fox…” 

Mulder spoke through his teeth: “Those airmen, or sailors, or whoever they were? They know Captain Scully personally, and they were very surprised to hear that Charlie was in Boston. Scully thought it was because they had no idea about his illness, but I think you and I know different. Don’t we, Dad?” 

Dad made his face the portrait of innocence. “What in the world could you possibly mean?” 

“Those men acted like they believe Charlie is already dead,” Mulder hissed. 

“And why would they believe that?” 

“Because they have no idea where Captain Scully is. They as much as told us he’s AWOL. And losing a child is one of the few things that could make a career Navy man abandon his post and desert his men in wartime.” 

Dad pinched the bridge of his nose. “Fox, that isn’t evidence of anything. It’s purely circumstantial.” 

“Fine. Then where is Mrs Scully?” 

“Boston.” 

“Where in Boston? How come Mr Michaud knows how to find her, but her own daughter has no idea?” 

“Because Mr Michaud is not a fifteen-year-old girl who has recently been separated from her entire family,” Dad said, calmly. “Fox, you heard that last conversation with Mrs Scully. You saw how it hurt Dana. Is more of that really the best thing for her, do you think? Or did it perhaps sound as though they needed time apart?” 

This gave Mulder pause. Dad had a point: that brief phone conversation with her mother had torn Scully apart. And as of this afternoon, Scully was convinced that she had done something awful to make her mother leave her behind without properly saying goodbye. What did that say about their relationship? Nothing good, probably. What if everything Scully feared was true? What if Mrs Scully really had abandoned her little girl? What if Captain Scully really was AWOL? If those things were true, then...

...Then his parents would be doing all the same things they were doing now, Mulder realized. “Why can’t you just tell me the truth? Don’t you trust me?” 

“Of course I trust you.” Now his eyes and his voice had the same fine edge. “If I didn’t trust you, you wouldn’t be allowed to keep her.” 

Mulder felt his heart find his throat. “What?” 

“You can lie to yourself all you like, my boy, and I cannot stop you. But by the same token, you cannot you force me to play along with your little game of Let’s Pretend.” 

Mulder scowled. “Let’s Pretend? I’m not pretending anything! And I’m not lying to anybody!” 

“Yes. You are. Perhaps yourself most of all. And you’re making a hash of it, I must say. The only reason dearest Dana doesn’t know is because she’s all of fifteen years old. To everyone else? It is extremely obvious.” The tobacco in his pipe crackled as Dad inhaled. Dad squinted at him, lips working, before he exhaled. “That includes your mother, by the way.” 

“Speaking of ignoring the obvious,” Mulder snarled. 

The slap was short and sharp and close. It landed precisely on his bruising. “Never, ever let me hear you speak to or about your mother in that tone. Never again, Fox. Never again. Ever.” 

“Sorry, Dad. But that’s gonna make it pretty difficult to ask Teena why I found an ashtray overflowing with lipstick-stained Morleys in Captain and Mrs Scully’s bedroom, this afternoon. With a blanket tacked up over the window. Think she’ll thank me for disposing of the evidence, before anybody else saw it?” This time, Fox caught his father’s hand. “Don’t,” he said, coldly. “Where was she, last night? Why’d you bring Scully to the game? You miss my games all the time. Why was last night different?” 

Dad lifted his brows. “I don’t know, Fox; might it possibly have to do with entertaining our houseguest?” 

Mulder shook his head. “It might. But it didn’t. Mom and Carl were packing up the Scully house because they knew — and so did you — that the Scullys weren’t coming back. Any of them. Ever. How did you know that?” 

Of all the reactions Mulder expected, a smile was lowest on the list. But Dad was smiling. Warmly. Brightly. Proudly. His hand landed on Mulder’s face gently, this time.“I do love you, my boy. And I love that little girl in there, too. Almost as much as you do. Your heart is in the right place. Your instincts are good. But there are things I cannot tell you, and things you cannot know. Not least because if you knew them, you might tell your little compatriot. And then she might do something terribly rash. It would pain me, deeply, if you had to hold yourself responsible for that, too.” 

Chapter Text

The other three Horsemen of the Apocalypse were waiting for Fox and Dana when they arrived back at 1501 Larkspur Lane. They poured out of the inner parlour like in a clown car circus act. Immediately, they began interrogating Fox. Their voices were only slightly quieter than those of Hannibal and Scipio, who began barking the moment the car pulled up.

“What happened?” Melvin demanded. “Yeah, are you going to jail?” Ringo wanted to know. “Your mother invited us to stay and wait for you, even if you came back late,” John explained. 

Speaking of Mrs Mulder , she drew an arm around Dana the moment she got in. This helped to steady her, as the dogs tried knocking her down in their eagerness. When she spoke, she had a trace of the Carolinas in her voice. “Oh, Dana, you had us all so terribly worried. The boys told me everything. These new young men on the base are completely beyond the pale. Manhandling a young lady like that. Honestly. They have no respect whatsoever for this island or the islanders.” 

“I’m sorry, Mrs Mulder,” Dana mumbled. 

She’d never really thought about what an incident like this would mean when it happened in such a small community. But Mrs Exley had reacted in a similar way: as though Dana were representing the Vineyard itself when she helped Josh. Or as though what had happened to her son had happened to the whole island, too. Was that how Mrs Mulder felt?

“You can apologize by waiting for Fox after school, from now on, so he can drive you home himself in your father’s Pontiac. I don’t want you walking anywhere alone, with all these uncouth…” Mrs Mulder gestured vaguely. “Miscreants taking over the island.” 

“Yes, Mrs Mulder.”

“Dana, darling, do call us something a little less formal,” Mr Mulder said, hanging his hat and coat. “I don’t know, schoonvader and schoonmoeder might do, or-”

“Dad!” From Fox’s expression, it seemed like his father had used a swear word. In what language, Dana had no idea. 

“You know, when I phoned Mr Byers, I told him I plan to raise this issue at the next meeting of the Women’s Club, and that his paper should expect a letter from our steering committee,” Mrs Mulder continued, as though not having heard this byplay. Mrs Mulder let her go, then went over to Fox. Fox sidestepped her. Undeterred, Mrs Mulder turned back to Dana. “These young men were very helpful in getting your crates into your room, Dana; I simply had to serve them dinner while they gave their story to Mr Michaud. The overflow is in the kitchen. Tomorrow, we’ll go through your and your sister’s clothes, and I’ll measure you for alterations.” 

Dana was still confused about how the unpacking process had worked. On the way home, Mr Mulder had said something about the boys unpacking the Pontiac in the old stables. Then he drove the Pequod to the hospital, gave John the keys to the Ford, so he could drive it back home. (Given the X stamp on his windshield, Mr Mulder rightly worried about gas being siphoned from his vehicle.) Apparently Mrs Mulder had directed the unpacking process.

Thinking of how hard they’d worked, and how little she’d done to deserve it, Dana smiled weakly at John, Melvin, and Ringo. “Thank you very much.” A word emerged from the group that was a combination of sure and yeah that sounded like scheah. “And I’m sorry for causing you so much trouble.” 

“De nada,” Ringo said. 

“Or Mother Mulder and Father Mulder,” Mr Mulder put in. 

“That makes this place sound like a convent!” Fox protested.  

Fox had been oddly silent the whole drive home. (The Mulder home, Dana reminded herself.) It seemed like maybe he and his father had a fight out in the hall. Possibly related to what had happened today. Now, when his gaze swung to meet hers, his eyes seemed…haunted. Hollow. Dimmed. 

“Fox has a point,” Dana admitted. 

“He can consider some other names upstairs, while he cleans his room in advance of his guests,” Mrs Mulder said, archly. 

Fox’s jaw actually dropped. “Why can’t we sleep downstairs? We always sleep downstairs! It’s where the radio is!” 

“Fox.” Mrs Mulder crossed her arms. “Do not make me question my offer to your friends. Dana needs her rest, and she won’t get it if she has to listen to you four nattering on all night.” 

“Oh, it wouldn’t bother me,” Dana said, before she could think. “I’m used to sharing a much smaller house with five other people. Or, I was. Until recently.” 

Fox gave his mother a weapons-grade hangdog expression that Dana took to mean: Now look what you did; you made the sad girl even sadder. 

“Personally, I’m concerned about Commander Johanson and Lieutenant Colonel Budahas coming back for retribution, and bringing their fellow servicemen with them,” John said. 

Mrs Mulder blanched. Her immaculately-manicured fingers quite literally clutched at her tasteful, minimal strand of pearls. She looked first at her husband, then at Fox, and finally over at John. “You are?” 

John shrugged. “Dana did give them this address, and it is a Saturday night, and those men do have a beer ration.”

“What he said,” Melvin added, pointing. “Safety in numbers.” 

“The children have had a rather unsettling day, Teena,” Mr Mulder said, gently. “Our Dana might well feel safer with the boys in shouting distance. I know I would.” 

Dana felt fingers at her back. “I’m checking your windows,” Fox told her. 

The dogs followed him. Dana followed the dogs. This was how she bumped into Fox, where he stood just inside her bedroom, dumbstruck and staring at what lay across her bed: a set of baby blue flannel pyjamas, and a camel-coloured corduroy house robe with a quilted brown flannel collar and cuffs. 

“Those are mine,” he said, sounding a tad put-out.

Immediately, Dana intuited what had happened. Mrs Mulder had gone through his things and absconded with them on Dana’s behalf. Probably without asking, first. Her own mother was frequently guilty of this. “Would you like them back?” 

“No, it’s not that; I stopped wearing them when…” He swallowed. “After the police took them. I was wearing them that night, but I changed clothes after Mom called the police. Patterson thought they might be evidence. He kept them for years. They were too big when he took them, and too small when he gave them back.” 

There was nothing for it: with her good arm, Dana encircled him from behind, and lay her head between his shoulderblades. One of his hands closed over hers, while the other took hold of her arm as though it were a piece of shipwreck he might float away with. 

“I thought you’d be safer here,” he said, miserably. 

“I am.” 

He shook his head, but his whole body swayed with it. “No, you’re not. This was stupid. I was stupid. You were right to want to stick it out on your own; none of this would’ve happened if I’d just left you alone.”  

“What do you mean?” Dana asked. “It was someone from the Women’s Club who introduced our mothers.” She felt it, under her cheek and her palm, when his head hung low and his pulse climbed up. Something in her flipped, abruptly; it felt like those moments at Mass when Dana realized she’d transposed her numbers and gone to the wrong hymn, because everyone else was singing a different song. Parents do that, sometimes, he’d said, in this very room. Lie, I mean. “That is what happened, isn’t it?” 

“I might have…” Fox cleared his throat. “Pointed you out. To Mom. And Dad. And Skinner. You know, told them that your brother was sick, and it seemed like you might need help.” 

You’ve known where she lives for weeks, Mr Mulder had said to Fox, the other day. 

“Oh, my God,” Dana murmured. 

He whirled on her. “Please don’t be mad. Please. I was scared, Scully. I was afraid what happened to my sister could happen to you. Someone sneaking in and taking you away and your family never knowing what happened. And the more I thought about it, the more I couldn’t stop thinking about it, and…and you just have to believe me, okay?” 

“I want to believe you,” Dana said, “but why did you lie?” 

“Because the truth would’ve sounded weird!” 

Dana squinted up at him. “Why would it sound weird? It’s normal to be concerned about other people. Isn’t it? Because it should be.” 

Fox opened his mouth, then closed it. Wincing, he said: “It’s not normal for me to be concerned about other people, I guess.” 

“Well, that’s understandable, what with how this town has treated you,” Dana told him. (It didn’t speak well of Fox, per se, but this was an island, which meant Dana was the only new person he’d met, aside from Alex Krycek, in possibly years.) She frowned. “So, when you told me that it was your family’s idea for me to come here, it was really your idea?” Pursing his lips, and bracing himself as though to prepare for a slap, he nodded. “And you suggested it to your mother, and then your mother approached my mother?” 

“Yeah.” 

Dana held her bad arm with her good one. “Why didn’t you just ask me, then, instead of giving me the runaround?” 

Fox looked like he might be sick. “I thought there was no way you’d ever agree to it, and I’d rather have you here, hating me, than somewhere off by yourself, without any help.” 

“I don’t hate you. I’ve never hated you. You’re the one who hated me.” 

Furiously, Fox shook his head. “No. Never. I swear.” 

“But you always act up when Mr Incanto pays attention to me!” 

“Yeah, ‘cause he’s a fucking creep who puts his hands all over you, every chance he gets!” 

“He’s like that with all the girls, not just me!” 

“I mean, she’s not wrong,” Melvin said, from behind her, and Dana jumped about a foot in the air. 

“Fucking Hell, Frohike!” Fox grabbed something from her bed — her Latin composition book, Dana noted with some dread — and whapped Melvin over the head with it. “Don’t scare her like that!” 

“Her?” Melvin pointed. “You’re the one having a conniption, Mulder.”

“At least he finally told her the truth,” John drawled, as he poked his head in. His brows rose. “Wow, Mulder. Scully’s room is way cleaner than yours.”

“How come he gets to see your room with the lights on and I don’t?” Dana asked. 

Glee ran rampant over John’s face. “You’ve only seen his bedroom in the dark?” Fox tried to whap John over the head with her composition book, but the latter elegantly sidestepped him. “It’s a perfectly legitimate question! I am simply looking out for our new friend’s wellbeing!” 

“Oh, yeah? ‘Cause your being ain’t gonna feel so well, if you keep this up,” Fox retorted. 

Ringo leaned his head past the threshold and jerked his thumb behind him. “Mulder, your mom wants you to leave Dana alone and let her get some rest while we take apart those crates.”

Frantically, Dana shook her head. “Oh, no, you don’t have to do all that!” 

“Well, you can tell his mom that, ‘cause I sure ain’t gonna,” Ringo told her, flatly. 

“She’s right, Scully.” Fox gave her a very gentle tap, more like a touch, on the top of her head with the composition book. Dana grabbed it and hugged it under her good arm. “You can’t be opening those crates with your hand like that; you’ll pop your stitches. Again.” He slung an arm over her shoulder. “They’re like dogs, Scully. We gotta wear ‘em out before bed, or they’ll keep us up all night.” 

Dana elbowed him in the ribs. “That’s not a nice way to talk about your friends.” 

“What are you talking about, my friends? They’re your friends, too! Did these fine, upstanding young men not just help you move in, today?” 

“Only because you asked them to!” 

“Asked us?” Melvin turned to Ringo. “Do you remember being asked? Because I don’t remember being asked.”

“Being asked would’ve been nice,” Ringo agreed.

Fox ignored them. “They’re still your friends by the transitive property.” 

“You mean like in-laws?” 

“Yes,” he said, smirking. “Instead of brothers-in-law, they’re your buddies-in-law.” 

Dana considered, while the others made indignant noises. “I guess that makes sense. I never make friends on my own. But inheriting them is different.” 

“Inheriting them?” Fox looked affronted. “What, I’m dying, over here?” 

“Yes, because your mother is going to kill you if you don’t do as she says,” John said, taking Fox by the arm. 

“Yeah, Mulder.” Ringo took his other arm. “How do plan on reading Dana to sleep, if she doesn’t have her jim-jams on?”

Mulder twisted in his friends’ grip. “You told-”

Scully’s door shut firmly in his face. 

“I know where you live!” he called out. 

The unmistakable sound of a bolt sliding into place was her reply. 

“We expect you to read to us, tonight, too, by the way,” Frohike said, grinning. 

Mulder wrassled himself out of their grip. “No way.” This ignited a chorus of high, mocking oh c’mon please oh please oh please Fox please noises. “I’m getting blankets,” he declared. “And a crowbar. And if you’re lucky, I won’t use it to pop your tops.” 

He had just entered the inner parlour to begin laying the spare blankets down on the floor, when his mother and father silently signalled him to enter the dining room. When he did, Dad shut the doors behind him and they were plunged into their usual deep blue gloom. At the far end of the table, their old Smith-Corona typewriter sat open and ready, with a sheaf of papers beside it. 

Noticing the direction of his stare, Mom said: “Mr Michaud’s secretary typed up the boys’ statements, about this afternoon. In case the aviator decides to press charges.”

Christ. Mulder was in for it, now. He decided to forestall his parents before things could get any worse. “Look, I’m sorry, okay?” When Mom and Dad appeared nonplussed, Mulder continued: “Actually, you know what? No. I take it back. I’m not sorry. I’m not sorry at all. That thug knocked her down, and he was calling her names, and she asked him to stop, and-”

“This isn’t about that, dear.” His mother’s lip twitched. “Although I must say, when the boys gave their statements to Mr Michaud, it sounded as though Dana really gave that commander what-for.” 

“Tore a strip off him, all right.” It was nice, Mulder thought, to not be the only person with a temper in the room. Sure, he had a shorter fuze, but Scully’s powder was just as dry. 

“And is what they said true, about how she jumped in between you and that pilot you were provoking?”

Heat boiled up the back of his neck. Mulder glanced over at his father. His father seemed content to let him twitch at the end of his own rope. “Um…yeah.” 

“I don’t approve of starting fights, Fox.”

“Mom, come on, he-”

“But I do approve, wholeheartedly, of finishing them.” A vicious little smirk flitted across Mom’s face, and Mulder briefly saw a piece of himself in his mother, reflected like the glint of a watch face in plate glass. “Furthermore, I would also approve of burning up those wooden crates Dana brought, once she’s emptied them.”

“We’re low on kindling?” This was news to him. He’d been drying those cords since July.

“No,” Mom said, mildly. “But when Cortés landed in the New World, he burned his ships to encourage his men.” 

“And to that end,” Dad said, before Mulder could do so much as a double-take, “Mr Michaud will be here tomorrow to collect Dana’s signature on a petition for guardianship.” 

Mulder frowned. “I thought he was already working on an affidavit.” 

“He is,” Mom said, gently. “But that’s a temporary grant of guardianship. The maximum he can ask for is ninety days. If he gets it, that brings us to-”

“Her sixteenth birthday,” Mulder said. “Wait, you’re not…?” His gaze flicked between his mother and father. They looked…guilty. Sneaky. Reticent. They were hiding something. Mulder’s throat began to close. The ladderback of the nearest chair creaked in his hands. “You are not turning her out of here at sixteen; so help me God, you will never see me again if-”

“No, Fox, darling…” His mother looked fragile in a way he hadn’t seen her in years. Very carefully, as though she expected him to vanish in a puff of smoke, Mom came to him and held his face in her hands. When he winced at her thumb on his split lip, she winced, too, and hugged him around the neck. “It’s not like that. I promise you, it’s not like that. We adore Dana. We want her to stay with us. And if she brings the petition herself, she can. For good. We can ask for a decree of guardianship, which would last until she turns twenty-one. Or marries.” 

“Or…marries.” Mulder’s mouth was full of sawdust. 

“Whichever happens first,” Dad said, lighting a match.

For some reason, all Mulder could see was Incanto’s flaky hands on Scully’s shoulders, explaining the vagaries of ancient Roman marital procedure. If a woman married “cum manu,” her husband’s family adopted her, severing all legal ties to her father’s family. Legally, she became a daughter to her husband: a sister to her own children. It remained the one time Mulder had heard Scully use a curse word. It was in Latin, but it was still a curse word. 

“Being her guardians by decree would also grant us the authority to consent to her marriage, if she wished to marry before the age of twenty-one,” Mom added.

The hairs on his arms rose. What was it Dales had said, about how the Commonwealth of Massachusetts would look at Red Hot Riding Hood and the Big, Bad Fox? “Why are you telling me this?” he murmured. 

“We want you to understand what’s involved, Fox.” Dad wreathed himself in smoke. “We want you to know what’s at stake.” 

“This is delicate, darling,” Mom said. 

His alarm went exactly nowhere. Something was wrong, here. Something that Mom and Dad and Johanson and maybe even that slick Doctor Waterston knew about, and Mulder didn’t. “What aren’t you telling me?” Mulder asked. “Why is this so delicate?”

Dad sighed through his nose. “We mean that until Dana brings a petition herself, one of her other family members could contest our petition, and take her away from here.” 

“Melissa won’t be doing that,” Mulder said, before he could stop himself. “And Bill’s at Midshipmen’s School; he can’t-”

“William Scully, Jr. could easily be re-deployed Stateside, if he were found to be the sole available caregiver for his sister,” Dad said, heavily. “Would Dana like living with him, do you think?” 

Sole available caregiver? What in Hell was Dad talking about? And why was his tone so...knowing? Distantly, Mulder recalled a story Dad had told about hiding a radio transistor in a vehicle so it would pick up on a conversation between two suspects. “Did you…?”  When his eyes landed on Dad, Dad looked away. Mulder’s stomach turned. He removed his mother’s hands from around his neck. “What is going on, here? Where are Captain and Mrs Scully? I know that you know. Just tell me. Now.” 

“Watch your tone,” Dad snapped. He gestured with his pipe. “What’s going on here is that your mother is terrified of losing another little girl, Fox. That’s what’s going on. We’re in a delicate legal position as possible guardians because of your sister’s disappearance. Judges have long memories. Given our history, even the ones who have known us for twenty years might still blanch at granting us custody of Dana.” 

Shame boiled up inside Mulder hotter than anger or lust. This was about Samantha. Everything was about Samantha. Still. Six years later. No matter what he did or how he tried to atone, it would still all come down to the fact that he was the guy who lost his baby sister. And now, it might mean sending Scully back to her asshole brother or her heavy-handed dad. Dana doesn’t have any friends, Melissa had said. This is enough for me, Scully had told him, burrowing into Mulder’s chest like he could actually protect her.

“Scully can’t go with them,” he rasped. “Her dad hit her sister, and her brother put a rattlesnake in her bed. I promised her, Dad; I swore I’d never let them-”

“It’s all right, sweetheart.” Mulder flinched when his mother’s hand landed on his shoulder. Carefully, she stroked his arm. “But if you could write those things down by tomorrow afternoon, then Mr Michaud can include them in his court filing.” 

“…Oh.” Mulder blinked. “Is that all?” Why had they been so cagey, about something so simple? “You mean like a letter, or a report?” 

Dad looked exhausted. “Either is fine. But it should communicate in detail all the reasons that you wanted Dana to come live with us. And any events you describe should be done so in chronological order.” 

“Events?” 

“Things you noticed, or things that happened, which gave you reason to suspect she needed help.” He arched a brow. “And if you could address her as Dana or Miss Scully, on paper, it would help. I’m not having a judge throw out our motion just because you talk about that girl like she’s an enlisted man.” 

“Yes, sir,” Mulder said, softly. 

“And we need Dana to do the same,” Mom said. 

Mulder came back to himself. “What? Why?”

“The judge will want to hear her story, Fox. And the more detailed her written account of what has befallen her family, the fewer questions Dana herself will have to answer.”

Again, a sick feeling twisted his guts. “Questions? What questions? You mean like in court?”

“Yes, dear.” Mom seemed surprised at his surprise. “Family court.”