Theory of Resistance
By "Marti Mulder"
Keywords: Angst, MSR
Spoilers: Sort of, Season Seven. First two eps.
Rating: NC-17
Summary: The discovery of an actual alien craft has an ironic
effect on Mulder and Scully.
Beware: Artist's rendering of a typical "Chris Carter rant"
follows. *hehehe*


Theory of Resistance


In order for new theories of knowledge to enter into the dialogue
of human epistemology, resistance to static, traditional beliefs
is a necessary condition. I now see past the initial reaction to
such intellectual resistance. Most people do not. Commonly,
people who subscribe to mainstream beliefs devalue anyone who
defies consensus. They forget the absolute necessity of such
people to provide us with those great leaps in the human
understanding of reality. We provide the paradigm, they provide
the paradigm shift.

Mulder is one of those people.

So it shouldn't surprise me that, upon proving what he has so
long sought to prove, he did not experience joy. Could not. Was
not vindicated, but scorned. Much like Socrates, Copernicus, or
Galileo, the societal jury of Mulder's peers met his proof with
resentment. Rather than congratulating him, thanking him for his
quest to uncover the truth, they administered the 20th century
equivalent of hemlock. It hurts to watch. I only hope that I can
do something to help Mulder heal from what could be the final
blow to his psyche.
Personal journal, Dana Scully. 11/19/99

November 05, 1999
FBI Headquarters, DC
3:25 PM

Mulder held the basement door for Scully, and then locked it as
they made their way up to talk to AD Skinner. He was still
bandaged at the head, wearing his Yankees cap. Scully looked at
him as he walked in long strides before her, his eyes down as he
read her report on the events in Africa.

"So, Mulder. How does it feel?" she asked.

"How does what feel?" he stopped, a puzzled look on his face.

"To finally have evidence. To have proof of the things you've
been saying for years. Aren't you the least bit, I dunno,
conceited about it?"

He considered her question, a hint of a smile curling the corners
of his mouth.

"I guess, but I have no intention of showing it. The worst of it
hasn't begun. But it will." he continued walking, Scully beside
him.

"I don't follow. Worst of what?"

"Oh, I'm sure you'll see soon. It's a psychology thing. But I
promise you, things are about to get ugly."

Scully was puzzled, but silently followed him to the elevator. As
the doors slid open,  a man and two women exited. One of the
women waited until Mulder and Scully were in the elevator before
making a remark, rather loudly.

"God, Spooky finally got to her. Now she thinks she's seen 'em,
too." the trio laughed, and the cacophony sounded like hyenas
around a fresh found kill.

Scully caught their meaning seconds after the doors slipped
closed in front of them. They were referring to her and the
evidence of the alien craft. Throwing a quick glance up at
Mulder, she found his face intense, his stare fixed on the floor,
and his full lips pressed tight in a mask of anxiety. He blinked
in a laborously slow rhythm.

"Ignore them, Mulder. They're ass holes." Scully whispered.

"I know." he forced a weak smile for her benefit, and continued
to stare at the floor, her report forgotten in his hand.

Reaching Skinner's floor, the elevator doors revealed a mob
waiting to enter. No one parted to allow them to exit, so they
had to push through the crowd.

"Watch out, they might be contagious." a husky male voice
announced, and mocking laughter ensued.

Mulder walked ahead and ignored the incident, but Scully whirled
around and stared into the packed elevator car. Her vision was
distorted with fiery red anger. Thinking of no witty reply
suitable for a successful one-up, she pushed her foot between the
closing doors. They bucked against her black leather pump, then
slid back open. She stepped back inside the elevator and hit the
red button marked "EMERGENCY STOP." A siren blared, and the
elevator was officially out of commission until a maintenance man
could reset it. The cackling crowd was stuck, and would have to
wait for the next car.

"Have a nice day." Scully retorted, and walked away from the
jeering group.

Mulder stood watching, pain reflected in his eyes. She stopped
briefly, to show anyone who might be watching them that she was
proud to walk beside Mulder. They quickened their pace.

The meeting with Skinner was unexpectedly positive. He granted
them permission to clear all other cases and follow up on the
investigation of the craft. His shock melted to kindness, and he
punctuated the meeting by shaking their hands and congratulating
them on their progress and evidence.

"That went well." Mulder sighed as they left. The remnants of the
angry crowd were still waiting for an elevator. They stared
bitterly as Mulder and Scully rounded the corner.

"Stairs." Scully declared. Mulder nodded, and they turned around
and headed back the way they had come.

"I think I'm gonna knock off early, Scully. I don't want to be
here anymore." he announced as they descended the stairwell.
"Let's get out of here. Take the night off."

"Fine by me." she said softly.

They walked down what seemed like an endless number of stairs and
proceeded to the parking garage. Mulder followed Scully as she
walked along the rows of cars. She assumed he was walking her to
her car. As they approached it, four agents from Murder's old
department walked by. Scully didn't recognize them, but she did
recognize the looks on their faces. Mocking crooked sneers.
Knowing glances passed between them. A prim looking man in a dark
Armani suit saluted with a flourish of his bony fingers.

"You two still driving? I thought you'd be BEAMING everywhere by
now." the agent sneered.

"Yeah, 'beam me up, Scotty.' I mean, Scully." another put in,
making transporter noises with his mouth.

"She can't take no more captain, she's goin' to BLOW, sir!" a
third said in a bad Irish accent.

"Too bad she's not green, aye Spooky?" the fourth man said over
his shoulder as they passed.

Mulder was off in a flash. He grabbed the jacket of the last
speaker and spun him around. He punched him square in the nose,
and turned to the others, expecting to be jumped. Blood flowed
from the wounded agent as he fell to his knees, his hands
covering his  face. The men each grabbed him, and Mulder only got
one more good punch in before being wrestled to the ground. His
fist had connected with the eye of the first agent to speak. Two
agents held his arms behind him as the other, still standing,
held his eye. His expression recovered quickly, a mocking sneer
curling his mouth.

"Man, that's gonna bruise. You psychotic sonofabitch. We ought to
have you arrested." he brushed off his lapels, as if the scuffle
has wrinkled his garment. He pushed his face up close to
Mulder's, put his hands on his shoulders, and then brought his
knee up hard into Mulder's stomach.

"Go ahead Schular. But you're all gonna apologize to Scully."
Mulder coughed, resisting their attempts at restraining him. He
jerked back and forth, the fight still in him.

"Let him go. You bastards provoked him into this. Mulder, let's
just GO." Scully yelled, her hands up, palms flat, in a gesture
of restraint.

The men shoved him forward, and Mulder caught himself with his
hands as he went down. They stalked off. "I still may report
this." one of them shouted.

Scully approached him, and extended a hand. He ignored it and
stood, his eyes closed and his hands balled up in fists. He was
shaking, full of adrenaline and fury.

"Let it go, Mulder." she cautioned. "They aren't worth it."

"I have to get out of here." he started to walk away. Scully
grabbed him.

"I'm not letting you drive in this state of mind. Come on." she
barked. He ignored her, and kept walking. "I said Stop!"

He stopped, and turned to look at her. Eyes squinting with the
instinct to kill, he stared at her. She didn't even blink. His
expression softened. Looking around, he rubbed his face,
defeated.

"Goddamn it. I'm sorry, Scully." he said through clenched teeth.

"Get in." she said, squeezing his shoulder and pulling him toward
her car.

*           *          *          *

The instances of ridicule continued until Mulder stopped showing
up to work. Scully covered for him, of course, but his isolation
and depression became incapacitating. She would go to his
apartment, to find him either gone, at work at his computer, or
curled in a ball on the sofa, staring out the window with a
glazed expression on his face. Hoping that being out in the field
would help to bring him out of his catatonia, she called to
inform him that they had a case to solve.

Mulder met her at the airport on schedule. He said little, except
to ask for the case assignment. He read it during the flight to
Myrtle Beach. A series of unidentified relics had been found on
the beach, washed in by the tides and a recent hurricane.
Residents reported thirteen people missing, but the hurricane had
not come close enough to cause fatalities or major damage, other
than flooding. Watching him periodically, Scully saw none of his
typical enthusiasm, no facial expressions, no life in his eyes.
He looked thinner, pale. Tortured.

She thought he might be dying.

"Mulder?"

"Huh?" he murmured, not bothering to raise his eyes.

"Nevermind." she said. He'd just tell her he was fine, she knew.

Scrambling to figure out how to help him somehow, she sat and
thought. Feeling utterly helpless, she stared out her window. A
lightning storm was exploding below their altitude, bolts of
energy streaking between two immense, forboding clouds. They
expanded exponentially, great black billows rushing outward and
reaching up toward the plane. Light flashed violently,
illuminating the angry swirls as she silently prayed that they
wouldn't be overtaken by the bright blinking darkness.

Because, she was powerless to do anything else.
*          *          *          *

They interviewed exactly twenty-seven residents of the city. No
one had seen anything in the night sky, because they hadn't been
looking. The edge of the hurricane had disturbed the city late at
night. It wasn't supposed to be very damaging, and only some
flooding occurred as a result of the storm. The thirteen people
had disappeared from their homes and work sometime between four
and five A.M.

The investigation into the artifacts recovered from the beach
proved to be puzzling. They were not similar to any known
aircraft, nor to the craft Scully had worked on in Africa. A
spectral analysis revealed the metal did not occur naturally on
Earth, and was not in the periodic table of the elements. It was
a heavier form of iron, so dense that the spectrograph had
trouble reading the atomic signature.

Mulder and Scully were driving to the motel, when Scully had
enough of the uncomfortable silence between them.

"Any theories?" she asked, her voice attempting nonchalance.

"I can't figure out how so dense a metal could get torn apart.
There wasn't any carbon scoring, so if it was an aircraft and was
shot down, it would have to be by some kind of weapon we haven't
even fathomed yet." he returned, then fell silent again. She
waited, but he just continued to drive, staring ahead.

"Maybe it was those other aliens you described to me. The ones
with their faces sealed over." she suggested.

"I thought you didn't believe that story." he said flatly.

"I didn't, at the time. A lot has changed since then."

He glanced quickly in her direction. Before she could meet his
gaze, he had already turned his eyes back to the road.
*          *          *           *

After three days of investigating turned up no new information,
Scully reluctantly suggested they head back to DC with the
artifacts and close the case. Mulder nodded, offering no
resistance. He sank onto the bed in his room, staring at the
ceiling like some kind of android who'd had it's "off" button
pushed. Scully sat down beside him and took his hand. He
continued to stare.

"Mulder. I'm..." she tried to think of something to say that
wouldn't trigger a negative response. "I'm concerned about you.
Is there anything I can do to help you?"

"Turn off the lights on your way out." he said coldly, and closed
his eyes.

Scully felt as she were stricken. She recoiled from him, pulling
her hand back. Staring at him for a moment, she turned tearfully
and retreated from the room, leaving the lights on. The door
closed hard. Mulder arose, to try to say he was sorry again, but
she'd already gone. He cursed, and got up from the bed to look
for her after a few minutes of debating how exactly to apologize.

He went to her room, but she wasn't there. He dialed her phone
number, and heard it ring inside the locked door. He walked
sullenly out the lobby door and across the street to the beach,
hoping to find her out walking in the unusually warm night.

Mulder found the beach deserted, but noticed Scully's shoes on
the beach beside her blazer. Something was in the water a few
hundred feet from shore at the horizon. It was too far away to
notice any detail, if it was a person or an object. A storm was
blowing in behind him, and the warm night erupted into rain. A
cool wind blew, and though the bandages were removed days ago, he
still wore the cap. He took it off, letting the wind tousle his
hair. He stared off at the horizon, hoping like hell that the dot
he could see as the lightning flashed was not Scully. 'Wasn't she
afraid of the water?' he wondered. The dot grew smaller in his
vision, almost beyond the threshold of sight now. He began to
panic. As thunder cracked in a tympanic burst around him, he
tossed the hat to the sand, along with his shoes and socks, his
shirt, and his watch.

"Sculeeeeeeee!" He shouted as he ran through the waves, which
were up to about three feet. The once placid waters were capped
with white foam, and moving as if they were alive. Angry.
"Sculleeee!!!"

Once the water reached his thighs, he dove in and swam as best he
could against the waves. Fighting for air, walls of water
capsized over his head and threatened to suffocate him. Two waves
collided as he swam, and he was tossed into the air. Straining to
keep the figure within his sight, he fought hard against the
resistance of the water, arms and legs furiously pumping.

Scully had heard someone shout, and turned toward the figure on
the beach. She realized Mulder was standing there, and tried to
call out to him. Suddenly, he stripped to the waist and headed
into the churning water. She turned and ran as fast as she could
manage in the sand. New tears fell in the drying tracks of the
previous ones, and she began screaming "NO!" over and over. "What
the hell does he think he's doing?!" she said to herself. Had he
finally snapped? Had he finally had enough abuse for one
lifetime, thank you very much, and decided to swim out in the
middle of a storm?

She ran into the surf at the point on the beach closest to his
position.  She saw his body surface a few times before being
eclipsed by the opaque and convoluted waves. His limbs flailed.
Crying out, she threw herself in and tried to tread water.

Mulder could see the form more clearly now. It looked like a
raft, the inflatable kind that people used in swimming pools to
sun themselves. It was out at least forty feet. He wondered if he
ought to try to reach it, to keep himself alive as he tried to
get back to shore. He couldn't see Scully anywhere. He cursed at
himself again, knowing Scully would never have done something so
stupid. 'No, stupid is my forte lately.' he mused. As he swam for
the raft, he prayed to a God he didn't even believe in that
Scully was safe.

Because he couldn't do anything else.

Halfway to the yellow raft, he was pulled under the water by
surging waves. He was tired, and stopped fighting the mad
jostling and irrational currents of his surroundings. 'Just ride
it out. It's futile to keep going. Just let it go.' he said to
himself. His body sank into the water, and he could feel it turn
cold as he glided into the depths of the ocean. 'No point in
fighting anymore, really, is there?'

He began to exhale slowly. Bubbles tickled his face and chest,
and he realized he must not be upright anymore. He didn't know
where "up" was. Behind him? He let that go, too. Strange things
ran through his mind, and he held fast to images of Samantha and
Scully. So many images. Smiles. Quirked grins reacting to one of
his wise cracks. Eyebrows high with shock. Tears. He tried to
play back the memory of Scully licking her lips, one of his
favorites. All he saw against his eyelids was her reaction to...
What was the last thing he said to her tonight?

"Turn off the lights on your way out."

'Fuck.' he thought. 'I can't let her think I did this on purpose.
That's exactly what she'll think, too. That she failed. She
didn't do or say that one perfect thing that would have snapped
me out of my depression. Oh, damn. Gotta get back. Can't do
this...'

He began to panic again, and let some air out of his mouth to see
if he could tell where the bubbles went. He felt no air brush
against his skin. Hands searched, but he couldn't tell where he
was, or which way was up. Groping in the darkness, he tried to
calm himself enough to listen for some hint of knowledge, some
clue as to what he ought to do. He heard the waves breaking in a
staccato of violence, then cascade back into the liquid mystery
of the ocean. He swam in a circle, until his head was where his
feet had been, or at least he thought that they were. With his
last gasp of air, he let the bubbles trail out the corner of his
mouth. They tickled his face from his lip to his forehead. Up. He
fought, choking as the water invaded his mouth and nose. He
didn't stop swimming, climbing, and tried not to cough. The water
was strangling him. There was no light, no temperature, no hope.
His head felt funny, and he realized that his hair was being
blown by the wind. Approximating the backstroke, he struggled and
choked as air filled his lungs.

"Mulder? Mulder!" Scully was screaming.

'She's alive!' he thought, thankful that he had decided to
continue on. He looked around frantically, and thought he saw her
disappear behind a gigantic wave, foam tipped and horrifying. He
wondered if he was hallucinating from the lack of oxygen, as a
face seemed to appear in the spray. Slanted eyes and snarling
mouth. Evil. It crashed around him.

"Sculleeeee!" he screamed, declaring his intention to survive.
"Sculleeeeeee!"

"Mulder!" followed by coughing. She was out here.

"Scully, keep shouting...Can't see you..." he kept swimming.

"Mulder! Mulder!" she looked for him, spray slapping her for her
efforts. The droplets stung her eyes. Blinded and searching, she
imperceptibly gasped "Mulder..."

She was under the abyss, then above again, then under. He reached
out and grabbed a handful of skin. Her arm? He kicked his feet as
he pulled her up so they wouldn't fall beneath the surface again.
She rose out of the churning water, shook her head, air escaping
in a soft moan. Her eyes opened tentatively, and she saw his
face. He watched the smile transform her lips, take them over.
Grabbing him, she wrapped her arm around him, and he wound his
around her as he paddled against the disorienting mass that
continued relentlessly to toss them into chaos. She pressed her
lips into his skin at the side of his neck. Once, twice, three,
times, before leaving them there against his pulse. He could feel
her flesh against his, and he was suddenly warm.

"Scully, we gotta get to land. Honey, you have to help me."

She heard him, and their bodies separated. He kept a firm hold on
her shoulder as he swam around, his back to the shore so he could
paddle backwards and keep an eye on her. She knew he was a strong