From: ephemeral@ephemeralfic.org
Date: 1 Feb 2002 05:45:52 -0000
Subject: Good Partners  by Wylfcynne
Source: direct

Reply To: Wylfcynne@aol.com


TITLE:  Good Partners 
AUTHOR: Wylfcynne
E-MAIL ADDRESS: Wylfcynne@aol.com

DISTRIBUTION: All-XFiles, Crystalship, Ephemeral,
Further X-Plorations, Gossamer,
MulderInJeopardy, MulderTorture, Xemplary, XF-
Digest; XFC, anyone else, please ask; that way I'll
know where it all goes, so I can visit.

SPOILERS: Fire

RATING: PG

CLASSIFICATION: missing scene, MT-lite, MSR

SUMMARY: if I say "black silk boxers" you'll know
what scene this follows... :-)

DISCLAIMER: They certainly aren't mine; if they
were, they'd be having more fun, and I wouldn't
have to save up for a new car! Mulder & Scully
belong to FOX Networks and 1013; I'm just
borrowing them for a little fun and games...I
promise I'll bring them back on time and
unharmed... and they won't remember a thing... 

FEEDBACK: The Wylf howls at the moon for
feedback...

DEDICATION: Overall, all my X Files work is
dedicated to my writing partner, Ravenwald, without
whom I would still be doing all this using a ballpoint
pen, who introduced me to fandom on the 'Net, and
awakened the Muse, who had been sleeping for a
VERY long time. 

This piece is for the Sisters Spooky, for mink roses
and homemade candy, nifty Christmas cards and
fresh-burned CDs, for grins and giggles and healing
candlelight...for being the sisters I never had in Real
Life.

19990325/20020131
=====================================

Scully waited until the door closed behind Inspector
Greene. She still could not help but feel a certain
guilty pleasure in the way Mulder had been relaxed
enough in just his boxers with her, but when Phoebe
stuck her Sloane Ranger nose into the room, he
had wrapped the thick terry robe snugly around
himself.

(*He was shielding himself from her,*) she realized
suddenly. The thought made her very happy. But
then she remembered what he had been saying
before they had been interrupted. "Mulder?"

"Yeah?"

"Tell me about your friend's house burning?"

He turned to study her, visibly evaluating her
reasons for asking him that question. "You aren't
the psychologist on this team, Scully."

She spread her hands in a disarming gesture.
"Humor me. Obviously you haven't dealt with it
well, or you wouldn't have been so disturbed by
today's fire," she said gently. "Talking about it can't
hurt, can it?"

He looked away again, and she saw him wrap his
arms around himself.

"Hey."

He turned, puzzled.

"Hugs are free," she said softly. "But it takes two
people."

He froze.

Scully walked over to him, slid her arms around him.
Slowly, cautiously, he put his arms around her,
expecting her to stiffen against his touch. She did
not. After a moment she looked up. 

"It's not just you alone against the world, anymore,
you know," she said softly. "You're my partner.
Anybody who comes after you has to go through
me, first."

He smiled faintly, though she could see the fear still
lurking in his eyes. 

"Cat fight?" he teased. "I've got some videos you
could study..."

"You'd do it for me," she said confidently. Then she
took a deep breath. "Do you still love her?" She
tried to keep her own opinion of Phoebe out of her
tone.

He let go of her, moved away from her touch. "I...
It was never love," he said very softly. "At first, it
was flattering. She's three years older than I am.
When you're a freshman in a strange country, and
you're all alone, attention from a junior is "

"Very flattering," Scully finished the sentence,
nodding her comprehension. "And she is
attractive..."

"Yeah. And she's from one of those connected
families they have in Great Britain: money from the
Industrial Revolution, some relatives who married
into titled families, but no real titles of their own. So
all my classmates were mightily impressed."

"And that affected your social standing among your
peers."

"Definitely. But then I discovered that she didn't
want to be in love. She wanted to be in control. I
wasn't a lover, I was a possession. I called my
father for help. I didn't want to go back for my
sophomore year."

"Why did you?" She was a little unnerved by the
bleakness of his tone.

"I couldn't explain it to my father in anyway that he
could understand. He told me that if I was a man I
could handle my own love affairs, that such things
were unimportant. I was supposed to be working,
not playing.

"But I wasn't a man. I was a terrified teenager, and
I could feel the chains tightening around me, and my
father was refusing to help me get free. I had no
one else to ask, so I was trapped. I stayed for the
fall semester and resigned myself to the chains."

"How long did this go on?"

"Till early in my senior year." He was not looking at
her.

"How did it end?" she prodded carefully.

"Ugly," he said flatly. "She dumped me out like
spoiled fish."

"Why?"

He shrugged, affecting carelessness he did not feel,
but did not attempt to explain the scandal.

Scully inhaled slowly. "That must have been hard to
take, especially after so long..."

"It was," he admitted. "I was in counseling for
weeks."

That was an admission she had never expected
from him. "Did it help?"

"Yeah. I didn't kill her or myself."

Scully was shocked. "Were you seriously
considering that?"

"I...I'm not sure, now," he said very quietly. "It was
a long time ago."

"Well, I think she's got a hell of a lot of nerve being
sweet to you, now!" Scully growled. "I wonder how
she'd look with a black eye?"

"Scully!" He was shocked, both at her suggestion
and at her willingness to stand up for him. He could
not recall the last time anyone had taken his side
without some form of coercion or the possibility of
advancing themselves in the process.

She smiled at him, all wide-eyed innocence. "It will
be an accident! I'll be so sorry she walked into the
door!"

He dropped to sit into a chair, ran his fingers
through his hair, still smiling.

"Feel better?"

He looked up. "Yeah, I do. Thank you. Are you
sure you didn't at least minor in psych?"

She shook her head. "I promise. I minored in
Poli-Sci." She sat down in the room's other chair.
"You want to talk about the fire?"

He blinked. "What?"

"We started to talk about the root causes of your
fire phobia. Phoebe was just a distraction tactic."

He stared at her, and then shook his head in
admiration. "You're good."

"You're only now noticing?"

He shook his head, smiling, and relaxed a little
more. He tipped his head back and stared at the
ceiling for a moment. Then he started to speak, in
a calm, emotionless voice.

"My father worked for the State Department," he
began. "When I was little, we traveled with him. I
lived in Brazil, Ecuador, Singapore, Japan and
Kenya before I was five. I went to kindergarten
and first grade in the embassy compound in Riyahd,
Saudi Arabia. I went to second grade in Belgrade,
and third grade in Tunis."

"Sounds exciting."

He looked down and shrugged at little, avoiding her
eyes. "Probably would have been if I'd been old
enough to appreciate it. As it was, Tunis was the
last place we went; the next school year Samantha
was old enough to start school, and in Tunis girls
weren't allowed to go to school. So he sent us
home, then, and came home when he could."

"Where did the fire happen?"

"Tunis," was the answer. "There was no embassy
compound. We lived in the community. It scared
the hell out of my mother: she and Sammy almost
never left the house. An embassy car drove me to
school every morning. I hated being that different
from the other kids, and I tried very hard to avoid
the ride home in the afternoon. I wanted to walk
home with my friends; after all, we all lived in the
same neighborhood! The embassy car would end
up following me home.

"One day, one of my classmates, Ali, asked if I
could spend the weekend at his house. Much to my
amazement, my father approved. I found out later
it was probably because Ali's father was a general
in the Tunisian Army, and the US was cultivating
him, even though they were reasonably sure he was
planning a coup. They knew he had a private army
selected out of the Tunisian Army. Dad figured that
if Ali and I were pals, Ali's father would be less
likely to pull anything outrageous, especially while I
was in his home.

"He was wrong."

Scully leaned forward. "So, what happened?"

"There was some kind of minor revolt that
weekend. I was nine years old I didn't understand
it at the time. There was an attempt to assassinate
the General: rebels fired mortars at the house after
dark. Ali's mother was wounded, his older brother
and sister were wounded, several of their
household staff were killed. The General wasn't
home when the attack happened; he arrived shortly
thereafter. The house was burning. Ali and I were
trapped in Ali's bedroom, caught between the fire
and barred security windows. He used a hand
grenade to breach the exterior wall of the house
and he came in and got us out."

Scully was fascinated. "Were either of you hurt?"

Mulder shook his head. "No. A little smoke
inhalation, a lot of being scared. Once he was sure
we were all right, he asked us for a favor."

She watched his hands tighten into fists, and knew
that, while his fear of fire was probably based on
those minutes trapped in his friend's bedroom in a
bombed-out house, there was more to this story.

"He couldn't spare any men to take guard duty at
the house that was a personal loss, and he had to
be seen as supremely concerned with the national
interests. The house wasn't totally destroyed, and
he knew there would be looters. He gave each of
us a pistol and told us to shoot anyone who
wouldn't go away when we yelled."

Scully stared at him. "The man armed two
nine-year-olds?!"

Mulder shrugged. "The Viet Cong did. Guerilla
forces all over the world arm women and children.
We knew how to shoot; both of our fathers had
taught us already."

"So the two of you were flattered and excited that
the General would trust you with this duty?"

Mulder nodded. "He said there were police nearby,
and that if we made enough of a commotion, they'd
come help us. We both knew that was a fantasy,
but we didn't dare argue with the General. So we
took the pistols, and he went off to quell the
uprising."

Mulder stopped talking. Scully studied him for a
moment.

"And?" she prompted him. "Something had to have
happened."

He shuddered. "It did. Something after midnight,
four rebel soldiers came. From what we overheard
them saying as they approached, they had come to
kidnap us, to use us as hostages against our
fathers, to pressure Ali's father into quitting his
opposition to the rebellion, to pressure my father
into withdrawing US support for the ruling
government."

"What did you do?" she whispered, enthralled.

"Y'know, I've never told this part."

"Why?"

"I'm not sure," he admitted. "I usually just tell about
the fires. Ali's house wasn't the only house burning
by then, and there was no fire department. Fires
burned until they burned themselves out. We were
relatively safe in a stone garden shed, but the sky
above us was orange with the flames, and smoke
was all we could smell. The primary part of the fire
had blown past us pretty quickly, but..."

"And these soldiers were sent to kidnap you?"

He nodded, his eyes staring backward into history,
watching that night play back from his perfect
memory.

"What did you do?"

"We killed them."

Scully stared at him. At first she was not even
certain she had heard him correctly.

"What?" she whispered.

"They were coming for us, for Ali and Fox. This
wasn't just 'the bad guys,' or 'the rebels' that Ali's
father was fighting. They were coming for US.
They had assault rifles AK47s. We had two
ancient forty-five caliber US Army Colts. We were
both scared to death, but we were cornered. There
was no place to run, no place to hide. We'd been
ordered to guard the house, and we couldn't
abandon our post. So our choices were simple: we
could fight back, or we could surrender, and let
ourselves be taken. We decided to fight."

"And two terrified nine-year-olds killed four
experienced soldiers?"

Mulder shrugged. "I doubt they were very
experienced; those rebels were more of an armed
rabble. We had cover, and they didn't expect us to
be willing to fight, or to be armed. It wasn't even
hard to do, though that old Colt kicked like a mule.
The hard part was stripping their bodies of
armament so it wouldn't be used against us later.
Just as we were stashing the rifles in our shelter,
an airstrike hit a block away, and lit up an entirely
new horizon of fire. We barred the door with a rifle
barrel, and sat back to back watching the windows
until dawn, when a company of Marines from the
embassy came looking for me. Ali's dad had finally
managed to get a message to my father about our
situation.

"The Marines were proud of me when they found
the evidence of what had happened out in the yard,"
he said wistfully. "They made me their company
mascot, an honorary Marine."

She smiled. She had been brought up in the
military, and she knew how military children longed
to belong somewhere, no matter how much their
parents tried to help them.

"That must've been wonderful."

"It was," he nodded. "I don't remember ever feeling
as accepted as I did, then. But my mother was
horrified, and couldn't bear to even look at me once
she learned what had happened. And she wouldn't
let Sam near me."

Scully swallowed hard. (*His parents should have
been taken out and shot!*) But she did not say
anything: Mulder was still talking.

"My father never said anything about he felt about
it all he talked about was how Ali's father and the
President felt. He treated it all as if it had been a
political move designed to further my government's
agenda.

"It hadn't been political, at all," he whispered. "It
was survival, pure and simple. And I had
nightmares for months of the fires blowing back at
us, of our guns misfiring, of the dead men coming
after me to avenge their deaths, of their families
coming after the infidel whose son had killed their
son, and of me coming home from school to find my
parents and my sister butchered in our home in
retaliation for what I'd done..." He shivered and
looked away.

She could not help but believe that these
guilt-ridden nightmares were the basis of his
life-long guilt over his sister's abduction. It was not
reasonable, but it made perfect sense that as a
child he would have blamed himself for anything bad
that happened. Samantha's abduction must have
almost been a relief: the bad thing had finally
happened. He had finally been punished for the
murders he had committed. 

"And wild fire brings it all back?" she asked softly,
gently. 

He nodded mutely, unable to articulate an answer.

"You have every right to that fear, Mulder. That
scenario would be awful if it was just something you
dreamed, it would be bad enough! For it to be
real...? My God!"

He shivered a little, again, and then squared his
shoulders and threw it off.

"What about you, Scully? What's your deepest,
darkest, most shameful secret?"

"You shouldn't think of any of that as shameful,
Mulder," she said sharply. "You did nothing to be
ashamed of! You know full well that those men, or
their superiors, would almost certainly have killed
you and your friend eventually. And that by the time
they did, you would probably have been grateful for
it."

He sighed. "I know that now. I didn't, then."

"Mulder. You were nine years old. You killed two
adults armed with rifles whose intent was to kidnap
you and use you to blackmail your government.
How were your actions anything but admirable?"

He looked at her expressionlessly. "'Thou shalt not
kill'?"

She snorted in disgust. "'Thou shalt not commit
murder.' And you didn't."

"We fired from cover without warning."

"You were outnumbered, outgunned, in a war zone.
Survival is the ultimate morality, Mulder. You
deserve to try to survive. You succeeded. And I,
for one, am very glad you did."

He cocked his head to one side, but did not ask.

"If it hadn't been for you, my application for field
assignment probably would have landed me in
Domestic Terrorism, and I'd have to kill someone if
they assigned me to that for very long," she said
with all seriousness. "Or else my application would
have simply been denied, and I'd still be teaching at
Quantico. And I'd be so bored I'd probably have
killed someone by now, just for the excitement."

"You getting enough excitement, Scully?" he
drawled. "I don't want you to get bored and leave."
He did not realize how revealing that was until it
was too late to stop it.

Scully smiled slowly. "Don't worry," she assured
him. "I'm not planning to leave."

"Good. Good partners are hard to find."

"Yeah," she nodded, studying him. "They are."