From: eponine119 Date: Mon, 04 May 1998 11:58:19 -0700 Subject: NEW: Better Travelled "Travellers" 1/1 Disclaimer: 1013, Fox, Carter, not me. In answer to Lee Ann's challenge to rewrite an episode we didn't like and make it better. I don't know if this would make a better episode, but it would have been more fun to see, I think. I wrote it without watching the episode again (I couldn't!) and some of this is humor, so.... _________________________ Better Travelled "Travellers" by eponine119 eponine119@att.net April 17, 1998 _________________________ 1 9 9 8 Mulder stood at the door of former FBI Special Agent Arthur Dales. His hair was parted on the wrong side and hung awkwardly over his forehead. He reached up to try to brush it away, failing miserably. He wondered where Dales was. He had to be in there. Mulder didn't know why the man wasn't answering his door. Authoritative footsteps behind him made Mulder turn. Soon Dana Scully was standing beside him, as she always did. She raised her eyebrows and he felt compelled to answer her. "He's not opening the door," Mulder said. "What'd you do to your hair?" Scully asked, wetting her fingertips on her tongue and reaching both hands up over her head to give Mulder's hair a thorough brushing back. His eyes closed momentarily with the pleasure of feeling her fingers against his scalp. That was the moment when Arthur Dales chose to open the door. "Am I...interrupting something?" he asked in a wry, dry voice that reminded them both of someone. "No, no of course not," Mulder said, straightening himself upright. "I'm Fox Mulder, with the FBI." "Mulder," commented Dales as though it was a name he'd heard before. "This is my partner Dana Scully," Mulder continued. Dales looked her over, but said nothing. He turned and walked into the small, messy apartment and sat down on the couch, leaving the worn armchairs to Mulder and Scully. Deep Throat, Mulder realized, he reminds me of Deep Throat. "I'm here because a murderer we apprehended the other day died with my name - my father's name - on his lips. When I looked him up in my file cabinet, I came up with this." He plopped the thick X File down on the coffee table next to the ashtray. "An X File, from 1953. This is all it says." He flipped it open to the first page. Every line was crossed through with black ink, except for a small window left on the first page with three names in it. One of those names was Bill Mulder. "Bill Mulder. My father." Mulder stabbed at the paper with his finger. "I need to know what this is about." Dales was staring at him. Staring at them both, really. "Why?" he asked. Mulder made another nervous pass at his hair and Scully fought the urge to slap his fingers away. "My father worked for the State Department," Mulder explained. "He was also involved in something darker. It was called the Project, which doesn't really give me any clues as to what he was doing. My sister has been missing for thirty years and if this case..." "Why don't you ask him?" Dales challenged. "We don't really speak," Mulder answered ironically. Scully could see that Dales wasn't impressed, so she answered the way Mulder should have. "He's been dead for three years." Dales's eyes slid to her, as though he was curious about what she really cared about any of it. "Would...you...like something to drink?" he asked, shuffling to his feet and jamming his hands into the pockets of his bathrobe. William Shatner, Scully thought, he reminds me of William Shatner. She exchanged a look with Mulder, but neither of them requested a beverage. When Dales returned, he had a stack of papers and pictures in his hands. He dropped them on the table next to the X File. "Have I got a tale to tell you," he said. "That's me, when I was an FBI agent in the 1950s," he began and Scully picked up the photo that was on top. He was cute, in a rugged, rough sort of way, she thought. Not like Mulder. Not like Mulder at all... About an hour later, Dales was most of the way through an implausible tale about WW2 veterans that had been operated on against their will and implanted with spiders, of all things. Scully was growing frustrated because every time she asked Dales a question, he paused and looked at her, and then went on with his story. "...And so, after driving for an hour or so out of the city, William Mulder stopped the car," Dales was saying. "He handcuffed his charge to the wheel and got out. He began to walk and when he turned to look back, he saw that the man had driven away. Free." Dales stopped and looked satisfied with himself. Mulder looked puzzled. "Well, we know one thing," Scully said. "What's that?" Mulder asked, leaning forward and looking at her while he put his fingers in his mouth as usual. "Your father had the same penchant for losing prisoners and bureau property as you do," Scully replied. Mulder looked away quickly and she realized her words, though true, had been unkind. He fished in the pocket of his trenchcoat and withdrew a packet of Morley cigarettes and his trusty gold lighter which was engraved with the words, "Trust no one." Scully watched Mulder light up, sit back and sigh. "If you're going to smoke, can I have one too?" she requested. Mulder nudged the pack toward her and she helped herself. At least smoking kept him from messing with his hair, she thought, turning on Dales. "I have questions." He didn't say anything, just barely nodded and looked bored. Scully supposed the man couldn't help it - he was raised in a different era and had worked in Hoover's FBI, one without women. She flicked at one of the papers on the table. "What's this?" It was a photograph of young, cute Arthur Dales sitting on a desk beside an attractive woman with red hair. The woman had a capable smile. Dales chuckled as he looked at it. "That was the office Christmas party. She was my secretary. The one who actually invented the X Files, when she ran out of room for unsolved cases under 'U' and decided to put them in X. We had some good times..." "I thought the X stood for the unknown," Scully commented. "Like in algebra." Dales didn't answer her. It was just one of many inaccuracies in his story. Scully stubbed out her cigarette and asked another question. "How were the spider things able to live inside the mens' esophogases and escape at will to attack others?" No reply from Dales. Mulder looked uninterested. "And were the spider things actually spiders, or were they the beginning of experimentation on humans to hybridize them with extraterrestrial beings?" "Scully, I thought you didn't believe in extraterrestrials," Mulder said. She'd retrieved his attention. "What do you know about that?" Dales asked in that sneaky sounding way that he had. "Quite a lot, actually," Scully replied, "Considering I've been abducted by what I believe were some form of extraterrestrial life who have colonized our planet and have begun a war over the human race. Just last week I was burned by -" Dales yawned and she closed her mouth tightly, refusing to bore him with another word. Stupid man, she hadn't yawned once during his story, even when he started telling her about his partner Michael Hayes's pet cat Myrtle and she suspected the man was spinning the tales of a lonely David Caruso fan. "You met my father," Mulder said finally. Dales nodded. "There was something odd about his eyes," he said, "As though the light were always too bright for him." "My father never did work in the light," Mulder said. "I don't think he was speaking metaphorically," Scully stated, "Are you saying William Mulder was a drug user?" That would explain about the spiders, she thought, as many drug users often reported sightings of strange insects that... "Did you ever see him with another man?" Mulder asked in that raw voice he got sometimes when he was asking questions about his family's sordid secrets. Scully caught her breath and looked at him. She'd never suspected that he suspected that his father had... "What do you mean, Agent Mulder?" Dales asked. "A man who smoked." Dales cast a glance at the chain of butts Mulder'd left in his ashtray, and Mulder continued to try to explain. "I don't know the man's name, I don't even know what he would have looked like in 1953, I just know that he knew my father, that he worked on this project with him -" At that moment, Scully's cell phone rang and she rose to move away from the conversation to answer it. "Scully." She returned to the table a few seconds later. "Who was that?" Mulder asked. She shrugged. "Spender." Mulder grimaced. "What did he want?" "He was wondering if I was free for dinner, actually," Scully said with a bit of a smile, "Apparently the Society of Skeptics is having a meeting at seven and -" "I hope you told him no," Mulder said. "Why's that?" Scully demanded. "He whines too much." "Look who's talking!" Scully cried. "Besides," Mulder said, looking deep into her eyes and reaching for her hand. "You don't wear this ring for nothing." He rubbed the gold band on her finger. "Neither do you," she pointed out, and she knew if they kept looking at each other that way they were going to be kissing right there in front of Arthur Dales in a moment and she really didn't think she wanted that to happen. "Did you say Spender?" Dales burst out. The two agents looked at him. "Yes," Mulder said desperately. "Is that a name that you know?" Dales was frowning deeply, but he didn't answer, as though he was lost back in the past. He was just about to speak when an alarm clock began to ring. He rose from the couch and walked to the television, almost like a zombie being called to a shrine. "Mr. Dales?" asked Scully. "I have to watch 'Gunsmoke,'" Dales answered. "I wrote for it, you know, in the 70s, after the blacklist began to end." "You were blacklisted?" Mulder asked as Dales turned on the TV. Dales nodded as soon as a tampon commercial replaced the opening theme. "After I was kicked out of the FBI, I was blacklisted everywhere. It was a very difficult time for me." His eyes focused on Mulder sharply. "It's not a good thing to be called insane and fired from your job. Believe me. Guard against it." "Thank you, I, uh, will," Mulder replied, getting up. Something in Dales' warning made him nervous. It made Scully nervous too, and she wasn't sure why. "Are you going already?" Dales asked, taking on the petulant tone of a lonely old man. "After Gunsmoke is a fine show on the SciFi channel called 'Kolchak the Night Stalker.' I don't think I wrote for it, but I could have. They have such wonderful stories every week, like the one about the mutant who returned every thirty years from hibernation to get something from victims to sustain him." As Mulder and Scully edged toward the door, Dales found his TV Guide. "Oh, but tonight is the one about the man who's able to regrow his head. A fine episode, very fine -" "Thank you, Mr. Dales," Scully said, in a rush to leave. "Come again, any time," Dales invited. "Thank you, we will, sir," Mulder replied. "But don't be offended if some time passes - we'll have to wait till next season, but I promise we'll be back." "I'll try to think of a good story for you by then. Maybe one about that guy...Spender," Dales promised. Scully rolled her eyes and turned the knob on the door. "Mulder," Dales said, and her partner stopped. "They're going to call you crazy and you're going to lose your job." "How do you know?" Mulder asked. "It happened to me when I started getting involved with the X Files. Trust me. It'll happen to you." With those words, Dales turned and began to watch "Gunsmoke." After a moment, Mulder turned to Scully and they let themselves out into the hallway. "That was interesting," Scully said mildly, not willing to share her real opinion and hurt Mulder's feelings. "I don't know, Scully, he didn't really tell me anything new, or that I could use," Mulder commented as they walked together down the stairs. "So my father was involved with weird things in the State Department. I already knew that. Dales didn't really elaborate about the project, did he?" "No, Mulder, he didn't." They emerged and it was dark outside. Scully set the pace as they headed for the car, which was parked up the block. "Scully, do you really think they're going to call me crazy and shut down the X Files again? Drum me out of the bureau and all that? After this much time?" Mulder faced her earnestly over the top of the car. She sighed, not knowing what to say. "I think things are going to change, Mulder, but I don't know why. I think maybe they already have changed." "Changed how?" She shrugged. "Little things, I don't know. The small touches here and there, the cases that used to keep life interesting, that used to give us answers without raising a thousand new questions - they just aren't there any more." "I've noticed that too," Mulder said. "And now you believe." "I don't know if I believe, Mulder, but you don't believe." "I'm trying to believe," he told her and she nodded. "If only things were the way they used to be," he said wistfully. "Were they really so much better back then?" she asked. "Cats in the sewers and vampires and chupacabres?" "Compared to killer dolls and hazelnut trees? Maybe not," Mulder replied. "Do you think I'm crazy?" "No more than the rest of us on most days, Mulder." "Do you think they'll use it against me to close the X Files permanently? With Blevins gone, you never know -" "You never do," Scully replied. "I think it depends on what you do." "What I do?" Mulder asked. She nodded and got into the car. A moment later, Mulder joined her, jamming the key in the ignition and starting the engine. "What I do?" he asked again, but she shook her head, indicating she was not going to answer. "Just be careful, Mulder," she warned him. "Think before you act or speak. And try to remember not to wear your ring to work," she cautioned, twisting the ring on her own finger before removing it and dropping it into her handbag. "I almost got caught once before," Mulder replied, taking his off and setting it on the dashboard. Scully seized it and held it up to the light a moment before tucking it into her bag as well. "I think you did get caught, Mulder," she replied in a mysterious tone that made him look at her. But she smiled her enigmatic smile and Mulder floored the gas, carrying them farther into the sunset, where they could ponder their future silently and to themselves. Until the sun travelled another day, and they found out. The end. The Blacklist is nothing to laugh about, and a real man named Arthur Dales did indeed write for "Gunsmoke" in the 1970s. I assume this is the man the character is named for. Comments solicited, appreciated, and answered. eponine119 - eponine119@att.net -- ________________________________________________________ ________________I REFUSE TO BELIEVE_____________________ ________________________________________________________