TITLE: Bad Fox Three - The History of Sea Monkeys
NAME: Mik
E-MAIL: ccmcdoc@hotmail.com
CATEGORY: M/Who?
RATING: NC-17. M/Who? This story contains slash i.e.
m/m sex. Not suitable for children, Baptists or Republicans.
SUMMARY: First time M/Who? If you ever wondered how Scully came back.
ARCHIVE: Only
with my permission.
FEEDBACK: Feedback? Well, yes, if you insist.
TIMESPAN/SPOILER WARNING: Okay...uh...if you haven't seen
every single ep of X-Files you have no business reading this. G'way. KEYWORDS:
story slash angst Mulder Who NC-17
DISCLAIMER: All the X-Files people and all the Whovian people belong to other
people and I'm making no money by twisting their
bendable little bodies into odd shapes, I'm just having fun. And
all your base are belong to me.
Author's notes: I'm new to this specific genre, and if I've appropriated a title already in use, just let me know and I'll fix it. I tried researching to find if it had been used before, but you know how unreliable the internet is.
If you like this, there's more at https://www.squidge.org/3wstop
If you didn't like it, come see me, anyway. Pet the dog.
Bad Fox Three - The History of Sea Monkeys
by Mik
The floor settled with a thump that made Mulder topple backward. He didn't have time to right himself before the whole process began again. He sat, feet splayed across the steel mesh floor, glowering at the back of that leather jacket. "Gthnythin tails are longer than I expected," he drawled.
"There was a little development." The Doctor shook his head, peering at some indicator Mulder could not see from his position. "I really ought to scan police radio before setting down any old place."
"A development? Around my building?" Mulder pulled himself to his feet. "It would be a development if it weren't being mentioned on police scanners." Still holding the rail in case the Doctor decided to take off yet again, he moved around the console. "I have a neighbor who's convinced I'm an alien."
"Now, that's an interesting point. I never thought to check." The Doctor dipped a hand into the inside pocket of his jacket and pulled out something that looked like a tire pressure gauge decorated by Faberge. A blue light not so much shone from it but pulsed. "Yep. Pure human." He tucked the instrument away.
"What was that?"
"This?" He pulled it out again. "Sonic screwdriver. Never go anywhere without it."
"Oh, of course...how could I forget that?" Mulder searched the dash
for whatever screen or speaker had warned the Doctor not to land on
"Well," he paused to twiddle and fiddle, "let's have a look. Oh...lots of your people poking around."
"How do you know they're 'my people'," Mulder complained, squatting a bit to look at the monitor. Actually, they were his people. He recognized more than one of the men from his days at the Bureau. "What the hell...?"
The Doctor was listening to one side of an oversized headset. He frowned. "Someone heard a scream and called police," he relayed. "When they arrived, they found your door open and you missing. Didn't you shut your door when we left?"
"Of course I did," Mulder said indignantly. "That nosy old bas...person probably opened it to see what was going on." Something on the screen caught his eye. "Hey. That's Skinner."
"Skinner. He was your-"
"My-"
"-boss." They both pronounced the word with similar dismay and dissatisfaction. The Doctor said what Mulder wanted to say, "He was derelict in his duty by you."
Mulder shrugged, unwilling to show how much hurt still lingered from that betrayal. "Yeah, well..." He watched the screen for a few more minutes. He'd have to give Skinner credit for aging well, and for managing to appear very concerned. "Well, I'm going to have to come up with a good account for the 'scream and vanish' act, now. I know Skinner, he won't accept that I just started yelling and decided to go for a walk."
"He probably wouldn't believe you if you told him where you'd gone," the Doctor concluded. "Humans are like that. Very few are willing to accept the concept of life-forms elsewhere in the universe, although they spend billions in search of them."
"I believe in them," Mulder said, stung.
"You didn't believe in me," the Doctor countered, eyes still fixed on the monitor.
"I thought you were just a character on television," Mulder retorted. "Hey, that reminds me." He straightened and looked around. "Where are we? Back on the moon?"
"Oh, no," he said as if to say the moon was so five minutes ago. "Only a few blocks away, actually. Look, there's the pair who were trying to open up the TARDIS earlier."
Mulder chuckled grimly. "Well, if they try to describe what they saw to
Skinner they'll be on Parking Detail in
"In where?"
Mulder waved it away. "Just an expression. Means...nowhere...exiled in a very small town."
The Doctor's brow rippled up much the same way Skinner's used to do when talking to Mulder. "How does anal intercourse quantify the population of an area?"
Mulder answered with a gesture he'd learned from Scully, he rolled his eyes. "Wait a minute...we're just a few blocks away? In that same lot where I met you earlier?"
"No. But not far from that, either. I triangulated on-"
Mulder put his hands around the Doctor's to cease his gesticulation. "Never mind that. You've touched down three times in a short period of time, in a very small area." Suddenly self conscious, he released the Doctor's hands. "Suppose people start comparing notes? I think we've agreed that this thing sort of stands out like a big bruised thumb."
"Bruised...? Oh, bruised...blue...I get it." The Doctor was whirling and twiddling again. "That's very funny."
"Yeah, I do birthday parties and bar mitzvahs." Mulder watched the Doctor's hands. "Where are we going, and is there something I can do to help?"
"Well," he grunted, "you liked the moon so much I thought I'd show you Mars. Grab that lever and when I tell you, pull!"
Mulder wasn't entirely convinced that this wasn't some trick of his oft abused imagination, but just the tiniest chance this man could make him believe it was Mars made Mulder a bit queasy. "Those are my choices? The alley behind my building or Mars?"
The Doctor looked up from his wheels and knobs, a thin veneer of disappointment covering his normally open features. "What would you prefer?"
Mulder started to lean his hands against the control panel and at the last minute shoved them into his pockets, lest he launch the TARDIS toward Alpha Centauri. "Something a little more...earthbound."
The Doctor arched a brow. "Equatorial rain forests?
Springtime in
Mulder didn't share his amusement. "Fine." His eyes narrowed, and he gripped the lever, bracing himself to pull when instructed. "Mars it is."
The thing was...it actually seemed like Mars when Mulder risked a peek out the TARDIS doors. Mulder had studied the Viking Lander photos in school, and what he saw looked pretty similar, with drifting yellow-brown sand, scattered rocks and occasional gusts of wind that would unsettle the scene for a moment. "I thought this was called the red planet," he protested when one such gust drove him away from the door.
"From the view Earth has it appears red," the Doctor explained. "It's the reflection of the sun."
"So, no life on Mars, after all?" Mulder wasn't sure if he were disappointed or relieved.
"Not as you define life, no." The Doctor finished entering some calculations into his computer and came down the steps.
Mulder shot him an over the shoulder glance. "As you define it?"
He pulled a thoughtful frown. "As I define it, probably sixty thousand species."
"Sixty thousand?" Mulder repeated. "Out there?"
"Yep."
"Just how do you define life? Sand?"
"To you that's sand." The Doctor eased by him and pulled the door open a little, dropping his voice to nearly a whisper. "It's actually several different types of minute gastropods...the closest species on Earth would be helix pomatia."
"Snails."
"Yes." The Doctor started to close the door.
"Huh." Mulder still wasn't certain he was buying it. "Anything else?"
The Doctor scratched his ear. "Well, you call them sea monkeys."
"Brine shrimp?"
The Doctor nodded and returned to the control deck.
"And what do you call them?"
The Doctor looked at him the way a person might look at someone of limited mental capacity; incredulity blended with pity. "Sand monkeys," he said as if it were only too bleedin' obvious.
Mulder caught on. "You're just messing with me, aren't you?"
The Doctor laughed as if he'd been waiting centuries to pull that joke.
Mulder wasn't laughing. "No life on Mars?"
"Well, snails, yes...sea monkeys, no."
"And...can you communicate with these snails?"
"I can." He was rummaging in his pocket for that tire gauge. "What do you want to tell them?"
"Stay out of my mother's rose gardens?" Mulder suggested.
The disappointment was back, tinged with contempt. "Do you want to be serious or not? How many humans have had a chance to look at this planet which has always been considered the only option to establish colonies?"
"That's an interesting question." Mulder jerked a thumb over his shoulder. "Think the locals would mind if we brought in a few Wal-Marts and Starbucks? Maybe a Disney Mars?"
The Doctor shuddered visibly at the idea.
Mulder pulled the door open again, just a crack, to look out at the vast, arid landscape. "Yeah, I can see it now...Gravity, The Ride." He pushed the door shut. "Seriously, do you think it will ever happen?"
The Doctor shook his head sadly. "You lot spend so much time arguing amongst yourselves that it never happens. There are going to be too many factions trying to decide too many outcomes for a planet that doesn't belong to you to begin." He settled back in the patio chair that seemed so ridiculously out of place on that platform. "There are the industrialists who want to turn it into a factory, and the warmongers who want to make it into a weapon, the developers want to turn it into resorts and luxury condos, and the tree huggers and pacifists who don't want you to go there at all, and not one plan takes into consideration how the indigenous civilisations feel about it."
"That's not really fair. They don't know there is an indigenous civilization," Mulder pointed out.
The Doctor tapped his nose as if to say 'exactly' and then pointed at Mulder. "You could tell them."
"Yeah, right." Mulder wandered back to the stairs, leaning heavily on a rail. "I don't have much credibility anymore."
"Well, you don't know 'til you try, do you?" The Doctor lifted his feet to the console. "You don't know it, Fox Mulder, but you've got quite a lot of history to write."
"What?" Mulder was intrigued, even hopeful, but he tried to keep it from his voice. "Are you telling me my future?"
"Nope. That would be wrong. I'm telling you to learn from your history." He dropped his feet with a clatter. "Come on, let's go for a walk."
"Out there?"
"Why not?" He patted his jacket pockets as if to confirm he had something, like his keys or his Metro pass. "Afraid of snails?"
Mulder held back. "No, just partial to oxygen."
"Not to worry, the TARDIS will give us a nice healthy bubble of oxygen for about forty metres. Should be enough for a good walk." He pulled the door open and breathed deeply through his ample nose. "Ah, yes. Certainly better than the stuff you call air down there." He looked over his shoulder. "Comin'?"
Mulder decided he might as well go out suffocating on Mars as in his apartment. "What about the indigenous civilization?"
"They won't attack you, if that's what you're afraid of," the Doctor jeered.
"Actually, I was worried about..." he looked down at his borrowed black running shoes, "stepping on them."
"Watch." The Doctor stepped out the door and as his foot touched the ground, there was a puff of what appeared to be yellowish dust rushing away from his foot. "They're smart enough to get out of the way. Come on." He bounced lightly and lifted off the ground for a moment.
Mulder stepped outside cautiously. Yes, he could breathe, and yes, whatever might be underfoot made a furious effort not to be underfoot. Unaccustomed to the thirty eight percent gravity, he stepped too hard and bounced up enough to almost clear the top of the TARDIS.
"Careful," the Doctor warned, reaching up for him. "The air bubble is only as high as the TARDIS." He caught Mulder's wrist and pulled him down gently. "All right there?"
Mulder nodded, feeling lightheaded and giddy, and just a bit like a balloon on a string trailing behind the Doctor, who never did release his hand. "Why doesn't the TARDIS impose some gravity along with atmosphere?"
"Well, aside from being bad for the indigenous life-forms, it considers thirty eight percent of Earth's gravity to be above the threshold. It doesn't activate a gravity field for anything over twenty five percent. I've lost more pens that way, I can tell you." He paused and extended the hand not holding Mulder in place. "That's as far as we go, I think. But what a view, yeah?"
It was a view. If anything had ever suggested the validity of a Supreme Builder of the universe, it would have been that crystal blackness and sheer vastness of it all. Of course, Mulder reminded himself, it was all a hallucination, a really amazing magic trick, so there was no need to rethink his religious construct, but...looking out at a sky literally littered with lights and dots and misty hazes of unknown histories and futures made him almost wish he could believe in a God. "Yeah," he repeated sadly.
The Doctor looked up at him. "I know what you're feeling. You're depressed and disappointed." He sighed. "It happens every time. You come up here and have to face the fact that you're just one tiny speck in a vast space and time, that you're not the only ones, that there are others out there – some of them bigger and smarter than you."
"No, I've always wanted to know there was," Mulder argued. "But where did they all come from?"
The Doctor smiled beatifically. "That would be telling."
Mulder was frustrated by the answer. Surely his subconscious could come up with a better answer than that. Surely his subconscious had worked out some reasonable explanation for universal genesis. He sighed and turned away. Without knowing the answers, it was just too painful to look at the questions anymore. "Well," he said, his voice huskier than he would have liked, "I guess we'd better get back."
"Back?" the Doctor repeated, still holding him in place. "You've just travelled fifty-six million kilometres to take a walk?"
Mulder twisted around, considering the barren horizon. "Not much left to do, really."
"You're just not looking." The Doctor knelt, tugging him to his knees. "Watch."
Mulder did watch. Nothing was happening. "What?"
"Just watch."
It wasn't that he ever saw anything actually move, but gradually he became aware of something in the sand/snails. Eyes were looking back at him, a face was taking shape, an expression of intent curiosity delineated by drawn down brows and puckered lips, wisps of unkempt hair, stubbled chin. His face. His face being created on the surface of Mars. He was afraid to move, to disturb it, to destroy it.
"They're the historians of the universe, they are," the Doctor said softly and respectfully. "Everything they've witnessed, everything they've encountered is somewhere on this planet. Your face is now a permanent archive here."
"You mean...they'll stay like that...forever?"
The Doctor nodded, urging him back to his feet. "It's what they do." The solemn expression broke into a grin. "Fantastic"
"Yeah," Mulder agreed, taking great pains where he put down his feet. "Fantastic."
End Chapter Three
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