Title: Genii Author: Maureen S. O'Brien Distribution: any and all Rating: PG Category: S, C Spoilers: "The End", "Young at Heart" Summary: Mulder thinks he ruined Scully's life. It's not all about you, Mulder; and it might not be as bad as you think. Disclaimer: Characters and situations from The X-Files belong to Chris Carter, Ten Thirteen Productions, and Twentieth Century Fox. Dr. Samuel Beckett belongs to Don Bellisario. The rest is my strange little mind. Author's Note: This one is for my college friends, especially Heather, Waylena, Sparky, and Joy; and for my present ones, especially Mark and Nancy, Drew and Ginny, Ken and Andy, Tucker, Phil, Scott, and that same Joy. I love you guys! --------------------------------------------------------------- Genii by Maureen S. O'Brien mobrien@dnaco.net "Hello." Scully's answering machine said into the silence. "Please leave a message at the tone." Not even a promise to get back to them, Scully? When did you get this attitude? He snorted to himself. From me, of course. The evil genie bottled up in the basement. When she opened the door, she didn't know what sort of forces she was going to release. Beeeeep. A woman's voice. "Dana? Pick up if you're there. I saw a news report last night about a female FBI agent getting shot, and another this morning about a fire in the basement where you work. Please, call me back and tell me I'm just being paranoid here...." Scully hit the button, then put the phone on speaker. "I wish you were. Mulder's ex-partner got shot last night after she took over a suspect watch from me." Was he after Scully as well as Gibson? Or Diana? Or had the shooter just wanted the agent on watch out of the way? "And the fire...that was our office. Someone burned the X-Files, Kath." Kath? Oh, yeah. Kathy Roudebush, Scully's cellist friend. The one who'd let them go after Barnett at her recital. The one who always showed up at the funerals but never at the grave. One of the few friends who had come to see Scully in the hospital. He was glad Scully had such a friend, but he still wasn't sure how. Having one's cello recital turned into an FBI stakeout, being held hostage by a killer with one lizard hand, who is subsequently shot by one's friend's partner about two inches away from one's head, is generally seen as Nature's way of telling one to get new friends. "I'm sorry," Kathy was saying, in the same tone of voice she'd used to give Scully her condolences at her father's viewing, and by Melissa's closed coffin. "That's...that's a terrible thing. I don't know what I'd do if that happened to me." A concert hall going up in flames, wood burning and strings melting, heat waves hovering over music stands, scores scorching, catching, turning into one great black note.... Mulder caught himself. What had really happened tonight was bad enough without sketching out someone else's nightmares in his head. That wasn't his job anymore. Unless They got him reassigned to profiling. "Look, I don't have rehearsal till this afternoon. I'm coming over." "No. We don't know that the shooter wasn't after me or Mulder. It's too dangerous." "Then put on your darn kevlar again. I'll be there in fifteen." "Mulder's here." "Two shellshocked FBI agents all by themselves? Suuuure, that's safe." She sighed. "Don't argue with me. See you." She hung up. "She's right," Mulder said reluctantly. "If they wanted us dead, they'd have us already." "So they want us alive. To watch us suffer." Scully considered. "That doesn't mean they won't go after Kathy." "No real point. Why expose themselves further?" Shared glances. No need to say what they'd both realized -- burning the X-Files office was itself evidence that it was doing useful work. Arson in the Hoover Building would impress even Janet Reno -- assuming she hadn't been co-opted or controlled by their enemies, of course. They sat in silence some more. Scully stood up and started pacing. Then she stopped short. "You know, Mulder, I made you take a shower, but I didn't take one myself." She sighed. "I'd better take one before Kathy gets here, or she'll think I'm really distraught." "Aren't you?" "Maybe." She sighed again. "But I don't want her worrying about me. I'll be fine." She went off down the hall to the bathroom. "Lucky for me, her fifteen minutes is really thirty. I've got a good twenty minutes left before she gets here." Five minutes later, he heard a knock on the door. "Scully will be out in a minute." "Don't tell me. She thought she had half an hour." Kathy's lips smiled, but her eyes stayed worried. "Didn't have my cello in the car, so I didn't have to drive slow. And I figured I'd better get here fast. She sounds as bad as she did that one time." "What time? In January?" She shook her head unhappily. "Did Dana ever tell you about her physics internship?" "No." What physics internship? "Me neither. She wouldn't talk about it to anybody, not even her parents. She said it was because she was on a classified project, and I'm sure that was part of it, but...." Mulder's jaw dropped. "When was this?" "Her last quarter at U of M. She'd already finished her senior thesis and gotten all her pre-med and physics requirements out of the way. Some admiral who knew her father recruited her into this Project Star Bright. Some kind of really advanced physics, I guess." "Black budget," Mulder told her over his own shock. "Rumor has it they were trying to make an interstellar drive." "That should surprise me," said Kathy. "But it doesn't." She suddenly remembered the paper bag in her arms, and looked at it as if it had teleported there. "Let me get this into the kitchen, and I'll tell you why." Kathy set the bag down on the counter and started opening cabinets. "Where does Dana keep her pots and...okay. One frying pan. Now all I need is butter...or margarine...or low-fat vegetable spread, whatever that really is...." She put the pan on the burner with the butter, then produced a carton of eggs from her bag, along with milk, sugar, and a bowl. As she introduced them to each other, she began her tale, talking tensely and at top speed. "The reason I'm not surprised -- Dana had this project she was doing for fun, for our gaming club -- you know, role-playing games, war games, little lead figures and dice? Well. She was figuring out different kinds of FTL drives for GURPS and Traveller and stuff, and then she was painting these lead ship miniatures, one for each kind. Well, she took them with her to New Mexico or wherever this internship was. And then she came back early from her internship because the funding had been cut. "And the first we knew about it was when she showed up at the club with her box full of notes and all the minis, and told us that if nobody else wanted this stuff, she was going to throw it away. And that was it. She looked half-dead; we all tried to get her to talk. But she never said anything else about it, and she told MIT thanks but no thanks, and she went to med school instead." Mulder sat there, trying to reconcile this picture with a woman who'd marched into his office and debated him about the logistical problems of travel between stars. It fit. Damn, it all fit. "What do you think happened?" Kathy poured some of her mixture into the pan and watched it carefully, spatula in hand. "Just a guess, but I think she had some kind of problem to solve, and she didn't. And I think she thought that if she had, that the project would have gotten its funding. But since she hadn't solved it, and she hadn't saved the project, she just wasn't cut out for physics." She pushed her spatula around under the sides of the mixture, which was turning into an omelet. "A few years later, when Dana and I were sharing an apartment, and she was almost done with med school, that admiral came back, and he brought another guy with him. I thought the other guy was a physicist, but then he started reminiscing about med school, so I don't know what the heck he did. But they wanted Dana to come work on some new project." She flipped the omelet and watched it cook, continuing to use the spatula. "Dana couldn't believe it. But the other guy said something about how not all problems had solutions, and nobody can solve a problem without sufficient data -- that's the other reason I think what I think. Dana brightened up a lot after he said that, and I think she was really tempted. But by then, she'd fallen in love with pathology, and she may even have been thinking about the FBI, 'cause I know she'd gone on some kind of field trip to Quantico with all the other students. But after that she seemed a lot more at peace with herself." Kathy took the omelet out of the pan, put it on a plate, and put it in front of Mulder. "Since Dana's still in the shower, looks like the first one is yours." "What is it?" "Sweet omelet. It's good with jelly on top." She reached inside her paper bag and pulled out a couple jars and butter knives. "Strawberry jam or peach preserves?" Mulder's appetite had come back as he smelled the omelet cook. He picked both. Kathy went back to the stove and started making another sweet omelet. She didn't say a word more. It was startling after the flood of words to see the faucet just turn off. "Are you going to want another omelet?" she asked a bit later, as she stood eating her omelet by the side of the stove. "Yeah." Mulder brought his plate over to the stove. "You know, I never think of Scully having problems like that. I always thought she had just a normal, happy life -- well, until she hit the X-Files." "Normal? Dana?" Kathy laughed. "Where did you get that idea? I mean, this is the woman who went to every really disgusting horror movie that came down the pike. She saw _Grim Reaper_ something like ten times." "The _Grim Reaper_? Italian flick about cannibals?" "That's the one." Kathy shuddered. "Yuck. I don't know where Dana got her cast-iron stomach. Sometimes I think she loved horror just because she was the only person we knew who was never grossed out by anything. She used to love watching our faces and making comments." Mulder suddenly had a vision of some cosmic force looking down at all the smart-aleck horror fans in the world, and choosing the smartest aleck of them all for a little instant karma. Chaco Chicken for each comment on _The Grim Reaper_, _Children of the Corn_, and _Deliverance_. Cecil L'ively for _Firestarter_. And God only knew what for all the rest. "But she got depressed a lot," Kathy was continuing. "I guess she'd never really made a lot of friends in school, maybe because her dad got transferred so often. There was a bunch of us who hung out together, and then there were all the folks in the gaming club, and she was fairly socially ept... but there weren't too many of us who were really close to Dana. Ellen and I were about it -- well, and her sister." She shrugged. "So I guess she was happy enough in college, and at med school. But it wasn't till she joined the FBI that she really started to seem happy with her life. So yeah, the last few years have been hard on her, whatever you two have been up to. But even in January, she wasn't as depressed as she was way back when." They heard the shower shut off and went silent again by mutual consent. The smell of Dana's lemon-fresh shampoo spread down the hall, covering the odor of smoke today instead of formaldehyde and corpses. Scully was in her bedroom no more than five minutes before she emerged once more to greet the day. "Mulder?" she asked as she came down the hall. "Something smells good. Are you cooking?" "Not guilty." He grinned at Scully as she walked in the kitchen and took in the domestic little scene. "You should have trusted Ms. Roudebush's ETA, o skeptical one." Scully paused for a moment, then walked over and gave Kathy a stiff hug. "You shouldn't have come, you know." "I know. But I'm here." She leaned in closer and lowered her voice, but Mulder could still hear her whisper, "Don't worry, Dana. He's not my type." Scully turned absolutely red, Mulder saw with surprise. He glanced at Kathy, who looked equal parts delighted with the success of her joke and interested as to why. She glanced over at him with a speculative look in her eyes. Mulder tried to look innocent. Scully's blush faded and she changed the subject. "What're you making, Kath?" "Sweet omelets, Dana." "Did Mulder eat one?" "Two." "Did you tell him where you got the recipe?" "Nooo." Scully looked amused. "When were you going to tell him?" "After I complimented him on his shiny hair and healthy skin." Mulder broke in. "Should I be writing my will here?" Kathy laughed, and Scully almost did. "Should we let him in on the joke, Dana?" "Go ahead." Kathy turned to Mulder. "Back in college, I was always loaning Dana classical music tapes and she was always loaning me books. So one time, she loaned me this one book. And I liked it, but what I really liked was the recipe for sweet omelets in the first chapter." "Okayyy." "Unfortunately," Scully chimed in, "it was a mystery novel. And the recipe was given as part of the judge's summing-up in an arsenic poisoning trial." Mulder didn't know what expression had emerged from his face. But Scully was chuckling. "I can't imagine why Dana didn't want to try the recipe," Kathy said innocently. "Even more unfortunately," Scully continued, "I got a stomachache not long after I did." Mulder gulped. "And since you were taking pre-med classes...." "I was half-convinced Kathy had decided to off me." Kathy continued to look virtuous. "Hey, if your roommate dies during finals week, you get an automatic A." "So why were you taking pre-med classes?" Mulder wondered. "Physics didn't keep you busy enough?" "I had a scholarship that covered my tuition, so I could take or sit in on any class I wanted." "But why pre-med?" Mulder sensed she was holding something back. "German, sure. That goes with physics, in a way. But...." "Anatomy _is_ physics, to an extent. Much of pathology involves physics problems: vectors, parabolae...." "Oh, come on! _Everything_ is physics to an extent," objected Kathy. "Why did you start taking pre-med? Going for a double major?" "No. Nothing that sensible." She looked embarrassed. "We had one of the country's leading theoretical physicists visiting the faculty, and the department invited all of us physics majors to a reception for him. And when the department chair introduced our visitor, he also listed all the doctorates that Dr. Beckett held. "He held quite a few. And one of them was in medicine." "Sounds like he made quite an impression on you, Scully." And he's not that old, he thought, consult his eidetic memory. And not bad looking, I guess. But married. Happily. Good. "He did." She said it without embarrassment. "I started to wonder if a double major would be a good idea. I wasn't particularly interested in emulating his doctorate in ancient languages or most of the others. But I'd always been good at biology, and medicine sounded interesting. As it happened, one major was more than enough. But I signed up for pre-med classes whenever I could fit them into my schedule. "But that was later. At the moment, I just wanted to meet Dr. Beckett and ask him a few questions. Which I did, both at the reception and at a talk he did later that week. "Both times I was impressed, and a little envious. I'd always been the smartest person I knew, even among my brothers and sisters. I was pretty sure that I was brighter than my physics professors. But I was not in Dr. Beckett's league at all." The admission left her tongue reluctantly, even now. Kathy rolled her eyes. "Considering that he and that Austin James guy split the Nobel Prize a few years back...." Mulder met her gaze more sympathetically. "I remember my first few weeks at Oxford. First time in my life that people had to explain arcane jokes to _me_." Scully looked down. "But not for long, I'll bet." "No. But what does that prove? Can you play music like Kathy does? Can Kathy chop bodies?" "Kathy can't even chop lettuce," answered Kathy. "I'd be a total failure as a lunatic killer unless they let me use poison." Scully's expression lightened for a moment, but then darkened again. "I don't have much intuition, frankly. Dr. Beckett understood physics and his other studies on levels I barely know exist, much less can reach. Things I worked out by equation, he understood by hunch and then found the equations to fit. For him, physics was...like walking on water. People like me have to make do with swimming or boats." Kathy looked unbelieving and played a little air-violin. "Oh, you have such a low IQ. Give me a break, Dana." "Oh? Tell me you don't want to be Yo Yo Ma." "I don't." Scully blinked. "That's not what you used to say." Kathy shrugged uncomfortably. "I used to be a stupid kid. But I grew up. No, I'll never be one of the great virtuosi. But they'll never play like Kathy Roudebush, either. Yeah, I learn new stuff about technique, and I steal from the best." She grinned. "But most of what makes me a good player is inside me. I've learned to trust my own playing, instead of trying to emulate anyone else's, and each year I'm learning more about what I'm capable of. I'm learning to play with other people without compromising anyone's vision, and I've gone back to composition." "I thought you said...." "It was a waste of time? I was wrong." Kathy shrugged again. "So it's not deathless art. I like my little tunes, and writing them out is good for me. So if other people don't like them, too bad...unless what they say gives me a better idea." "You don't need to envy intuition, Scully," Mulder said quietly. "First of all, it's a pain in the ass to figure out which leap to a conclusion is valid and which one worthless. When a problem comes along that needs someone who's used to swimming or sailing, it sucks to be nothing but a water-skater. And finally, I've seen you intuit stuff before. If you need to save somebody's life, you find a way, don't you?" "By reasoning and tests...." "Which you do to support the answer you've already found." "Sometimes." "Lots of times. And when the doctors and nurses come by, I hear them talking about you." He grinned. "They usually don't remember to ask if you're licensed in that state until we're on our way out." "It's true, Dana," Kathy agreed. "Your kind of mind doesn't come along very often. If I'd been in any kind of science, you would have scared the hell out of me in college. I know you kept disconcerting the U of M physics department, 'cause every time I went to pick you up from class, you were badgering the heck out of some poor prof, asking her questions she'd never even thought of. They let you walk right over them, you know? "Anthropology isn't a science, luckily," (Scully and Mulder both swiped tsking fingers at Kathy, who grinned back unapologetically) "so that's why that anthro prof of yours made such a good freshman adviser for you. That and the fact you loved all his gruesome stories." Scully snorted, "Like you didn't, Miss Addicted-to-Mysteries." "Yeah, but I liked mysteries for the surprise endings. You always had them all figured out before the detective did." Kathy started clearing plates. "I hated to hear that when we discussed them afterward. Boy, it would've served you right if I _had_ poisoned your omelet." "So you went from science fiction and horror to mysteries," Mulder mused. "My reading patterns were almost exactly the opposite. Interesting." "Does he do this kind of Dr. Freud thing often?" Kathy inquired. "No. Not out loud, anyway." "Maybe you should give him more overt material," Kathy decided. "If your partner's a profiler, at least get your money's worth out of him." "So you do music, murder, and financial advice?" Mulder retaliated. "I'm sure there's an interesting profile there." "That's all right," Kathy forestalled him hastily. "No need to tell me anything about myself I don't want to know. I was just leaving, anyway." Scully chuckled. "No, really," Kathy assured her. "I ought to get going so I'll be ready for rehearsal. But thanks for letting me come over. We really don't do this often enough, you know?" "No, we don't," Scully said, a little disappointed. "I know I don't call you as often as I should, but I get so caught up in things. If I don't call you, you call and harass me about it." "I will," Kathy promised. "Mulder, it's been nice tag-teaming Dana with you. We'll have to do it again sometime!" "I'd like that," said Mulder sincerely. "You seem to know where all the bodies are buried...I hope only figuratively." Kathy did her best evil grimace and crazed eyes. "And by the way," he said, a little embarrassed, "I'm more into classic rock than classical, but I really liked that CD you did with Maggie Sansone. I'd like to hear you play sometime in person." "Why, thank you, Mr. Mulder!" Kathy said, surprised. "If you ever want to hear me perform without some loony impeding me, just ask Dana for my concert schedule. Or just bring him along sometime," she said, turning to Scully. "You know I love to play for friends." "Show off for friends, you mean," Scully replied. "O genius of music." "Pot, kettle, black, my fellow genius." She grinned at them. "Or rather, genii." ------------------------------------------------------------------- Maureen S. O'Brien mobrien@dnaco.net http://www.dnaco.net/~mobrien/fanfic/