TITLE: After the Ship

AUTHOR: Tesla 

RATING: PG. Bad Words.

KEYWORD: Post-episode.

ARCHIVE: Anywhere, anytime.

SPOILERS:All shows to current are presumed. This is a little fantasy. I'm reposting since Ephemeral didn't pick it up the first time.

DISCLAIMERS: Dude, where's my car?

SUMMARY: After Mulder comes back to life.

Mulder remembered it as heat.

He remembered pinpricks of heat on his skin, becoming dots of burning sensation. He knew he was going to be in pain; he knew he had been in pain.

The memories stopped there.

Mulder was relieved.

~~~~~

Skinner brought in the top experts in debriefing, memory loss, prisoner of war trauma, you name it. Federal. Private sector. Even a consultant who had worked with Terry Waite and other hostages. They stuck Mulder full of drugs, hypnotized him, and had him talk it out. Nothing worked. The memories of his time away were gone. He didn't want them back.

Scully said, "You've had memory problems before. You were gone for hours, and you couldn't remember anything. Your eyes were..." but saw the patient expression on his face. He was so obviously waiting for her to stop talking.

So she stopped talking.

He was as careful of her as he had been when she was sick. He looked up from his desk and smiled at her whenever she walked in; he didn't avert his eyes; he even made the odd wisecrack or two. He acted like the pre-disappeared Mulder; the timbre of his voice, the odd grace of his hands, the way he would pat his jacket for his reading glasses...they were all the same.

But he didn't watch basketball games or eat junk food or read the old X-Files. In fact, he was quite ready to let Doggett have his desk, his office...even his partner. What had happened to his territoriality?

She told herself that Mulder's disappearances and resurrections were par for the course; part of the cost of being Mulder. Who else but Mulder had died and returned so many times?

But he had always come back to himself, to the work, to her. Yes, he was obviously taking a fall so the X-Files would stay open. But it was suspiciously....easy. She knew he was letting it happen.

What had happened to Mulder?

~~~~~

Mulder was grateful that he wasn't like Penny Northern, or Cassandra Spender. He had all his parts, as far as he knew, and his examinations showed no cancer time bombs, no computer chip in his neck, no urge to look up at the night sky and follow the lights.

He knew that Scully and Skinner and the Lone Gunmen all thought his personality had been altered in some dreadful way. He had no words to explain himself to himself; how could he explain himself to them? He lay in his bed at night, before the Ambien kicked in, and felt phantom pains in all his joints. He didn't know whether They had wiped his memory in some way, or if the trauma of being tortured had defied all efforts to recall it. When he looked in the mirror, he looked the same. But when he woke up in the morning, and washed his face, his fingertips seemed to trace an unknown landscape. It wasn't until he dried his eyes and looked back in the mirror, that he knew himself again.

He didn't want to recall it. He didn't want to know if he had had his teeth drilled, or his anus probed, or why the moles on his arm had vanished. He could watch Caddyshack, but not _Men in Black;_ _Ghostbusters_, but not _Star Trek: First Contact._ A game of horse at the gym, a run along his neighborhood streets, a beer, or a quick stroke in the shower, or an Ambien, and he could sleep.

He didn't feel suicidal or depressed; he just felt like a man who didn't want to relive his root canal. Or the returned castaway who found everything the same, his apartment, his clothes, his car, his videos, his half-deflated basketball, yet everything in himself altered._

And he still _missed_ himself. He missed his previous life. When he had looked at his office, or at his computer, or at Scully, he felt like he was looking through the wrong end of a telescope. His memory told him that once he had felt the strongest and truest feelings of his life for that office, that job, that woman. Now, he might as well go to Seattle and be the staff psychologist for Microsoft. Maybe some mocha latte would warm his bones. _Too long a sacrifice Can make a stone of the heart._

Mulder sat on his couch, television on, and looked at his hands. Same hands. Except for the tiny round scars between his first and second fingers on each hand. He supposed no one would really know if it were he, unless Scully could snap on the Latex and get out the Skil- saw.

"Brr-rrr----rrrrummmmm------" he said to the fish, thinking of Scully in a morgue. Sheesh. It was funny how Scully, with her usual efficiency, had made sure someone came in and dusted and fed the fish. Or was it his mother's lawyers? He supposed all the information was in the bulky envelopes stacked on his table. He had just glanced over it; apparently, his mother's estate had paid all his bills while he was gone. All that good Roush stock, probably.

Maybe he had some kind of Prozac implant? He didn't care about the dirty money. He didn't even think about his mom's death any longer; he registered the fact, but he felt detached from her now. He felt detached, now, from all the other dead, whose names he had carried around in his memories for years. And Sam-if she had been in _Their_ hands, he was glad she had stepped into the starlight.

When he ran his tongue inside his mouth, he could feel regular bumps. They were in straight lines on both sides of his mouth. _Something from the cloning process?_ He snorted.

Odd tag lines of poetry rattled around in his head; stray lines of dialogue from television. _The centre cannot hold._ Oh, the advantages of a classical education. A quotation for all occasions.... _The best lack all conviction_...

_"Texas Chainsaw Massacre"_, he said, again to the fish, and got up, knees creaking, to look for the video.

At one point, when Leatherface was chasing Sally, Mulder wondered: How would he know if he _wasn't_ a clone?

~~~~~

He said as much to Frank Black, over really good coffee in a doughnut shop in Quantico.

The other man's expression didn't change- it rarely did----but he blinked.

"Seriously," Mulder said. He had found it shockingly easy to spill his guts (Mulder excused himself the pun) to Black; the older man focused on him, nodding slightly, as if hearing an old story.Too long a sacrifice

Black sighed. "My experience has always begun and ended in the spiritual realm", he said at last. "The nature of evil. I don't know anything about alien abductions." He didn't say it with sarcasm.

"You read my reports," Mulder said. He leaned back in the seat, shaking his coffee cup. A waitress appeared, with a warm smile for Black, and refilled both their cups. Black waited for her to go back to the counter before he answered.

"I don't disbelieve you, Agent. It's simply not my area of expertise."

"Yes, it is", Mulder said. He ignored his coffee. "When a man has to start all over again----when a profiler, who sees evil everywhere, has to start over again- ---how do you rejoin the world?"

Black's eyebrows twitched once. "Ah," he said. "But I have a connection to the world. I have my daughter."

Mulder grimaced.

Black reached in his pocket for a couple of dollars. "Yes, Agent Mulder, I'm luckier than you. You have to find your way back without a lifeline."

~~~~~

Scully lay awake in bed. She kept replaying a much earlier conversation with Doggett.

"Frankly, I know your partner's been through a lot. They don't even know what happened to him. " He tapped a pencil on the desk top. " I've got no complaints about him. In his shoes, I'd be pretty pissed to see another agent sitting at my desk."

"What are you trying to say, Agent Doggett?" Scully said.

"He handed the files right back to me. Said he knew he couldn't work them yet, and didn't know when he'd be up to speed."

"Oh."

Doggett hitched one shoulder up. "I just expected someone different. He's not what I thought he would be. But like I said, these things take time to get over. Well, the scars...." He put down his pencil at her expression. "I take it he didn't let you see the entire medical report."

She shook her head.

"Needle scars. All over his body. "

Now, in the dark, she rubbed the baby bump, wishing she could comfort Mulder. She wished she could put her hand on the back of that hard Mulder head and press his face to hers.

When he had opened his eyes and recognized her, she had wept with joy. He had smiled, still looking drained of life, and feebly patted her shoulders as she hugged and kissed him and cried down his neck. Much later, she realized that her fierce embrace must have badly hurt him.

Although he was now physically robust, Mulder, once the most tactile of men, never touched any one. Scully found herself starting to reach for him, and with an odd courtesy, he would put one arm around her and return the hug, but--- -

She had wept and prayed and searched and begged for Mulder to come back. Now that he was back, she wanted to know the price he had paid to return.

~~~~~

He couldn't remember how Scully got pregnant. He couldn't remember if he was even supposed to know. It was important to figure it out, because even at the best of times Scully was touchy about privacy, and personal boundaries, and his transgressions thereof. God only knew what that hormone could rush cause her to do to him.

Once Scully had convinced him to leave Doggett alone, there was really nothing for him to do but not think of Them. How They had squeezed him and left this pulpy mess on legs. The flickers of anger he felt at Doggett were the only new and good feelings he had.

Gratitude. The Gunmen would follow him as long as he gave them a plausible reason, as long as he fed their paranoia. So he was grateful. Skinner had never given up on him, so he supposed he was grateful.

Sometimes, though, when he looked at Scully's belly, he wished she had left him to molder in the grave. When he looked at her, and saw that glow in her skin, but those lines in her face. What danger was she in now? What would his resurrection do to her? And the baby?

Would someone take the baby, like all the other babies?

He was going to be forty years old. He was a psychologist and had been shot at, gone to both poles, escaped from the gulag, from vampires, and yet he still felt like a fool. If he had only read philosophy at Oxford...what steps led him to where he was now? He couldn't even remember how They had taken him. He was in the woods with Skinner....in the woods....how many times had he chased The Other through the woods? Bright lights, suspects, sounds, the Jersey Devil....the woods....it would have been nice to have the kind of life where the woods weren't horrific, where a walk in the woods meant a picnic.

Instead of finding the bodies of children.

Hell, that was reason right there for Scully to hold him at arm's length. He had been held at arm's length all his life. He had to be wounded before....anyone....held him. _That's why you pick the women you pick....someone who won't love you just like Mommy didn't love you._

He took his Ambien and went to sleep.

~~~~~

What to do, now that he was out of the X- Files? He had to pay attention, now. Well, he had lots of money, thanks to the years of Bill Mulder's obeisance to the Consortium; it had all gone to Mom, and Mom left it to him. Mom's final slap in the face, to her unworthy son? Or was it payment for Sam? Blood money whichever way you looked at it.

He waited for the other shoe to fall, something to jolt him into Now. But still, he drifted, drifted mentally and drifted physically, jogging along Hegel Place, staring at the trees. Hegel. The philosopher of alienation. That would be funny if he was really a clone. Maybe clones felt dead inside; maybe clones didn't miss their partners, or their sisters, or their mothers, or their jobs. Maybe clones spent a certain amount of down time trying to process their memories....but would a clone be self- aware?

If Scully weren't pregnant, he would throw all this stuff at her; let her laugh his weird theories away. She could get his head straight. Her science....what a fetish he had made of that. Had he forced her into harder positions than she had intended? Had he straight-jacketed them into the stances they held? Now it was all gone from his head. He remembered some conversations with her, and couldn't imagine why he had said certain things. His memory was like reading transcripts of defendant interrogations. The words were all there, and they made sense, but without the memory of the tone of voice, the cadence of the questioning....had Scully raised her eyebrows, or snickered, or given him a disgusted, deadpan stare? How had she said his name?

He couldn't reveal to the examining doctors that he couldn't remember the meanings of conversations with his partner; Jesus, he couldn't drag Scully into it....that he couldn't remember how exactly how she got pregnant, or really remember if he had given her his sample or not; he remembered thinking that he should be more embarrassed about it than he was at the time....given his sample. Was that what the kids called it these days? He felt his face grow warm.

Cheers; an emotion besides anger, at last.

Well, she had her kid. She had what she wanted. He did remember that she just wanted his semen, and that, urgently. It seemed clear that she didn't want the kid emotionally scarred by the famous Mulder child-rearing methods. Why not? Look how well he turned out.

Tears burned his eyes; he stopped and pretended to wipe the sweat off his face with the tail of his sweatshirt. Just in case he was being watched. But, oh, hell, who would watch him now? They had everything. Anyone want to watch a big, brave, former fibbie stand on the street corner and bawl like a baby.

Baby.

Shit.

~~~~~

Scully had thought that Mulder would get over the shocks to his system if she gave him enough time and space. But now, he seem to be regressing rather than improving. "I don't know where I fit in, anymore," he had said. As if she hadn't made herself perfectly clear about his place in her life, a long time ago.

Wait a minute.

She had never answered his question. "I know how much this means to you," he had said. He always thought removing himself from the situation was the best for everyone, like he was some alien virus, himself.

Oh, Mulder. You idiot.

I can't give him more time for this, she thought. I don't have time for Mulder's quixotic gestures. I go out on leave soon, and Doggett needs to be brought up to speed quickly; and Mulder is the only one who can do it. My clock is running.

~~~~~

There wasn't a lot of real world information on clones. "Gee, Mulder, we get all of our stuff on that from you", Langly had said, leering. They were sitting in the Gunmen's dungeon, and Mulder was so distracted, he actually ate the omelet Frohike had cooked.

"No, really, guys." Mulder gave them a sidelong look. "How do we know I'm really me? What if I'm a clone? What if They grew me in a tank and gave me-this me-the original's memories?"

"What if you're the Bounty Hunter?" Frohike asked. "Well, since no poisonous gas came out of you....we ruled that out."

At the end of the table, Byers looked up from his laptop. "Well, actually, that's an interesting thought, Mulder. How would we know? How would you know?"

"That's why I asked," Mulder said. He felt his temper crisping like frying bacon. Great. Temper, and hurt feelings. I'm a such a fool, he thought. He looked up from his beer and saw Frohike looking at him almost tenderly.

"Mulder, you're such a sick fuck. You may have actually been on an alien ship, you were buried alive, you come back from the dead, you survive alien viruses-more than once, now that I think of it----and at the end of it, the only working theory you have is that you're a clone?"

"Dental records," Byers said, having obviously pursued his own line of thought. "But I guess it's possible they would have duplicated the dental work?"

Mulder flinched. Something....teeth...."The scar on my leg is different. Smaller. And I used to have a mole on my arm, and it's gone now."

Langly sniffed. "You're lucky you have any epidermis left. You should have seen what you looked like when they brought you in. Remember Jeff Goldblum in _The Fly?"_

Mulder held his hands out, palms up, and shrugged. "What if I'm some kind of Trojan horse here and I have something else besides a dead virus? What if the virus was programmed to die?"

"What are the odds that someone would dig you up?" Frohike countered. "That's wasting a perfectly good Mulder clone."

Mulder blinked down at him.

"Look who you're talking to", Frohike said. "Next to you, we're the most paranoid men in North America. Don't you think we'd notice if you weren't you?"

"Don't you think _Scully_ would notice?" Byers asked.

Mulder felt helpless. He couldn't pound the table and shout, "God damn it, something's wrong with me! I'm not the same!" Because, obviously, he wasn't the same. He had been taken someplace and brought back, and left for dead. The unofficial Bureau gossip, which, in time- honored fashion, would be the official story one day, was that he had been held hostage; they left out the little details of his funeral....moldering in the grave. He shuddered, not realizing how much misery clouded his face for a few moments.

"Here", Frohike said, and put a shot glass in his hand. Mulder drank the Cuervo Gold, and held his glass out for more. Langly and Byers nodded, and the four sat together and drank, amid the debris of Frohike's huevo rancheros.

~~~~~

Mulder wouldn't answer his telephone or his cell phone; he had either broken his answering machine, or never bothered to clear the messages. Absolutely unable to be idle any more, Scully finally took herself and passenger to Mulder's apartment. "I'm having it out with him", she told the baby. "We're going to get some answers if I have to sit there until I deliver." She thought for a second. "Well, maybe I won't do that to you. Mulder as midwife is a frightening thought."

And I don't care, Mulder, she thought, even if you're looking up autoerotic asphyxiation on the Internet, and trying to remember your slipknots, I'm barging in. You are talking to me. She rattled his key impatiently as the elevator creaked up the floors."Mulder?" she called, her voice more tentative than she planned. "Mulder--" She stepped inside, closing the door and switching on the lamp.

Oh, God. He was lying face up between the sofa and the coffee table. _(Remember the corpse lying there with its head blown off? And you had to say it was Mulder.)_

Shoving the coffee table aside, she fell on her knees at his side. "Mulder!"

He slowly opened his eyes. "What?" he said, a little thickly. The dj vu hit her like a blow. How many times had she hovered over him, waiting for him to open his eyes?

Disgusted, insulted, outraged and relieved all at the same time, Scully pulled herself back up to her feet. "You reek," she said. Her legs were imperceptibly shaking with the fright, but her voice was coroner-sharp.

"Well, Jesus, Scully, if I'd known you were coming I would have got out the after-shave. What's going on?" He sat up, leaning against the sofa. "Just checking on me?" he asked. "I'm unemployed, Scully. Or, technically, on extended leave without pay." Wincing, he rotated his shoulders. "Huh?"

"You won't answer the phone. You haven't talked to me in days. Where were you all yesterday?"

"I was with the Gunmen. We've decided in the movie version, Nicole Kidman for you, Robert Duvall for Skinner, Kevin Spacey for Frohike, William H. Macy for Byers-- he wanted Kevin Spacey but he was outvoted----Jim Carrey as Langly, and we couldn't decide on me." He looked prepared to sit on the floor all morning and begin naming directors and cinematographers, but his face had that guarded, tap dancing for effect, look. "But Arnold Schwarznegger stole the concept." He rubbed his eyes. "It's about a clone." He looked up. "A clone who comes back and thinks he's the original." He sat there and waited.

Scully had a sudden flash of insight. "Is that what you've thought all this time? That you were a clone?" He shrugged, with that bullshitting half- smile, and she had to keep herself from slapping him. "You're not a Goddamned clone!" She kicked the leg of the coffee table, making it jump.

Mulder elbowed himself up and sat back on the sofa, his face turned up to her. The lines were still there around his eyes, but his expression had lightened fractionally. "If you say so, Scully."

She had a lot to say, months of it, still all dammed up, but, now, almost aggressively, she asked, "What color _are_ your eyes, anyway?"

Mulder looked steadily at her hands cradling her belly, and looked back up at her face. "They change," he said.

Finis.

"The Second Coming", by William Butler Yeats
First Published in 1922

Turning and turning in the widening gyre 
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; 
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, 
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere 
The ceremony of innocence is drowned; 
The best lack all conviction, while the worst 
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand; 
Surely the Second Coming is at hand. 
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out 
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi 
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert 
A shape with lion body and the head of a man, 
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, 
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it 
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds. 
The darkness drops again; but now I know 
That twenty centuries of stony sleep 
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, 
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, 
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Notes: No MulderClones were harmed during this story, which wouldn't be finished except for excessive prodding and volunteer beta by the CloneMistress herself, Amanda. But she's so good at it.