That morning was the first in the new apartment that felt to Mulder as though he were truly home. Granted, his bedroom—the one he was hoping not to occupy for very long—was still half unpacked at best, but he had clothes in the closet, the familiar blanket on his bed. Other elements played a part too, such as recognizing the Indian pop music drifting up from the nearby laundromat, and morning sunlight filtering through the shiny green leaves of the poplar tree that dominated their small yard.
Mulder wandered into the kitchen to find that Scully was already awake, munching on some toast. Don’t overthink it, he decided, and dipped down to kiss her cheek before turning on the coffee maker. Not only did she let him do it, she smiled. His morning was getting even better.
He asked, “Were you able to sleep last night? After what happened with Bright Eyes—”
“That’s what you’re calling him?”
He shrugged. “Remember that music video for ‘Total Eclipse of the Heart’? The glowing eyes? Apparently MTV still has a hold on my imagination.”
“Bright Eyes it is.” Scully finished her toast. “But I slept fine. Simply woke up early and did some thinking.”
“About?”
“I’d already all but decided to leave Genomica,” she said. “And yes, I’m coming back to the X-Files, at least for the time being.”
Mulder smiled. “It wouldn’t be the same without you.”
“Easier? Not being contradicted all the time?”
“Duller.”
Scully tilted her head, studying him. “No, you can’t stand boredom.”
This was somewhat unfair—Mulder could kill time on a stakeout without the slightest impatience—but he understood what she referred to. Without a sense of purpose, without his lifelong quest, he became…unmoored. During their years on the run, when he’d had to remain so deeply undercover, Scully had been able to find meaning in her medical work, but Mulder had had nothing but her.
It ought to have been enough. Sometimes, it was. But sorrow had taken its toll on him, on them.
He kept his expression neutral, he thought. “You keep things interesting.”
Scully cocked her head, obviously sensing that his mood had taken a turn. Her hand rested briefly on his before she rose to finish her morning routine. At any other point in the past months, that small gesture might have lifted his whole day.
Was Scully’s commitment to the X-Files now outstripping his own?
All Mulder knew was, he suddenly felt sharply wary of returning. He’d be putting Scully in danger. Putting himself in danger. Worst of all, endangering their child. And for what? More chasing after answers that never came? Or finding the very last answers they wanted?
Mulder’s mind filled with the repellent memory of that cigarette-smoking bastard’s face as he claimed William as his own son; William, the child Mulder had felt the aching lack of for decades—the son Scully would not even acknowledge aloud anymore.
It hadn’t always been like that. They’d grieved William for so many years, but they’d grieved him together. The way Scully stood behind the house, looking up at the moon at night, or her suddenly snapping off music—those were signs that he needed to go to her, put his arms around her. Mulder wasn’t sure what his own tells were, but in the wee hours of the morning, as he lay motionless and sleepless in their bed trying to imagine the weight of the baby in his arms—invariably, she would turn to him, snuggle close, wordlessly reminding him that they still had each other.
Until they didn’t anymore.
Mulder’s phone chirped with an email notification, bringing him back to the present. He opened it up to see his message from the Federal Bureau of Investigation—also sent to one Dana Katherine Scully—fully reinstating him as an agent and instructing him to report for recertification paperwork as soon as possible.
If he was going to make a different choice, he’d have to make it today.
Scully’s and Mulder’s tenures as FBI agents had not been constant, but the onboarding process hadn’t been this complicated since the first time around.
“You’re sure I can’t keep my old ID photo?” Mulder said as he stood before the requisite blue backdrop. “It was a really good hair day.”
The photographer remained completely straight-faced as she gestured for him to step a little closer to the camera. Scully leaned against the wall, waiting her turn, as she said, “You have to admit we’re overdue for an update.”
“Says you. I retain my youthful glow.”
“Like a candle, Mulder.”
He gave the photographer a pleading look that was the tiniest bit too sincere to be genuine. “Any chance you’re using filters? I like the one that turns you into a cat.”
Still stoic, the photographer just said, “Three…two…one.” Mulder turned businesslike on cue.
In truth, Scully did feel a bit weird looking down at her new FBI identification and seeing a different face for the first time in a long while. Weirder, however, were the far more detailed biometric scans they had to undergo in the name of “security.” She half expected Mulder to object to the retinal scans or face mapping, but he didn’t. Correctly reading her expression, he murmured, “Let’s face it—at this point, the government already has all of this on us, and more. Might as well go through the motions.”
She’d been picking up on a strange vibe from him all morning. Most notable was what she didn’t see in Mulder at the moment: namely, some sense of excitement, or at least purpose. He’d said before that he wasn’t sure about returning, but Scully hadn’t imagined how deeply felt that hesitation must be.
Is he going to leave me to handle the X-Files alone again? Scully wondered. It was a joke, mostly.
Finally, onboarding procedures completed, they headed down the corridors to the elevators. She caught glimpses of a few familiar faces, most of whom were openly astonished to see Mulder and Scully in the offices again. Nobody here but the FBI’s most unwanted, she thought but didn’t say. At the moment, she wasn’t entirely sure Mulder would enjoy the reference. He remained deeply lost in thought until they reached the elevators, when he finally gave her a crooked smile. “I’ll let you do the honors,” he said.
Scully reached out to push the Down button.
The FBI headquarters’ basement had been vaguely dispiriting even when the building was new. All these years later, what had been merely bland had become dingy, and a faintly musty smell had taken up residence in the hallways. Scully had heard rumblings that a new HQ might soon be funded, but she doubted that would land the X-Files in a cushy corner office with a view. At least they’d already gotten things in order during their most recent time on the job and would be confronting nothing worse than a few weeks’ worth of dust.
On the final door still hung the basic plastic plate reading X-FILES. Mulder pushed the door open, snapped on the light, then said, “Cleanup on aisle seven, please.”
Scully’s first thought was that, in their brief absence, the office must have become a kind of garbage dump of unwanted files. Boxes upon boxes filled the room, leaving only narrow paths to walk through. In some places, the boxes were piled higher than Scully’s head. Most of them appeared to be stuffed to capacity, complete with bulging cardboard sides and lids that perched atop protruding files.
“So much for the FBI going paperless,” Mulder said.
Scully became irritated. Would the Bureau lend them any personnel to clean this place out? Or were she and Mulder stuck working as custodians before they’d even have a chance to get back to their real jobs? “What is all this junk?”
Mulder had already opened the first box to look inside. “Not junk. At least, not this.” He pulled out the file to show her. “Reports of some kind of carnivorous moss hanging from the cypress branches in Louisiana.”
Scully took up the next file and leafed through. “Four bank robberies in Montana have been committed by a perpetrator who seems to…hypnotize bank staff into believing they’re the real thieves? They use their knowledge to get the cash out, then take it to a designated location, where the perpetrator waits for them.”
“I’m still stuck on carnivorous moss,” Mulder admitted. “How do you handcuff that?”
“Are these all X-Files?” Scully opened the lid on another box to review yet one more file. “Carnivorous spiders in Maine.”
“Give me moss any day.”
“I can’t believe this.” Scully rechecked the dates on the files nearest her. None dated more than three months prior. “How many cases are there?”
“Hundreds. Maybe thousands.” Mulder’s eyes had, at long last, taken on some of the old zealous glow. “Are they all as recent as these?”
“It’s going to take a while to check,” Scully said, “but when we returned to the Bureau after more than fifteen years, the backlog was nothing like this. We weren’t even gone very long this time.”
“And just wait until we get into the digital files.” Mulder shook his head slowly. “Back in the day…I used to comb through local papers, looking for unusual items. Cases of the unexplained that might turn out to have some substance to them. Sometimes I got seasick from hours of scrolling through microfiche.”
Just the word “microfiche” made Scully’s head ache, a lone stab of remembered pain.
He continued, “This isn’t just crap somebody made up on Reddit for likes, or fake poltergeist videos on TikTok. These are only the cases that have been taken seriously enough to make it to the FBI. Can you imagine how much more is out there?”
“Why now?” Scully said. “Why this…explosion?”
Mulder straightened. “Avatar. This is what she was trying to tell me. She said that the Inheritors were trying to profit from what the Syndicate had already loosed on the world. From the alterations introduced into human DNA, and maybe not just human DNA. What if this phenomenon, this radical increase in the number of X-Files, is the result of alien DNA working its way into our biosphere? What if mutations are occurring throughout the plant and animal kingdoms, to cataclysmic effect?”
Scully tried to take that in. “I’m not seeing how the ‘Inheritors’ or anyone else could profit from carnivorous moss.”
He laughed out loud. “And there’s the Scully I know and love.”
She struggled through the cardboard-box labyrinth to her old desk. The chair was among the many elements of the office that had not been updated, but she sank into it gratefully. She’d worn heels today; old habits died hard. “Run it by me again.”
“Genetic manipulation is possible, and its capabilities are rapidly expanding. Some people, like your coworkers at Genomica, use that manipulation for the best possible reasons. But we’ve always known there were players using that manipulation for far darker purposes.” Mulder shifted a box over to create a makeshift stool next to her and took a seat. “The Syndicate thought they could dictate what humanity would become. But nature isn’t so easily controlled.”
“Life finds a way,” she murmured. Did Karen Jones’s discovery about her telomeres suggest that Scully was also affected? But what had been done to her—that, she sensed, was more personal. This operated on a vaster scale. “The result of such widespread new mutations in the human genome would have to be even more mutations, albeit ones far more difficult to predict.”
“And impossible to control.” Mulder looked almost a decade younger. It had been that long since she’d seen him this charged up. “That’s why the FBI called us back in. The problem’s become too significant to ignore. They want us to start handling cases before the full truth of what’s happening spills over and becomes common knowledge.”
“If the files in this room have accumulated just since you and I were last working with the Bureau—Mulder, it won’t be long.” Scully couldn’t comprehend how people weren’t already rioting in the streets.…
But people were rioting in the streets. About other issues, vitally important ones, so much so that the discontent and unrest in the nation could eclipse even such a phenomenon as this. Scully wasn’t about to blame anyone for considering the political situation in the United States, or the climate situation affecting the whole planet, more vital problems than rumors about man-eating moss.
We have to keep it that way, she thought.
Before, their job at the X-Files had been about dragging what was hidden into the light. Perhaps their job now was to try to stem the flood of these mutations so that it could, possibly, remain dark.
“Scully?” Mulder looked at her strangely. “Are you laughing?”
“We save the world from this, so everyone else can save the world from everything else.” She squeezed his hand. “We’ve got work to do.”
He smiled, once again enraptured by the bizarre. It felt like he’d been given back to her whole—or, even better, maybe he’d been given back to himself.