Title: A Lady from a Far Country
Writer: Maureen S. O'Brien
Archive: yes, anywhere.
Rating: G
Category: S
Spoilers: up to The Movie
Summary: Mrs. Mulder, a hospital, the mytharc, and Scully.
Disclaimers: Characters and situations from The X-Files belong to
Chris Carter and Ten Thirteen Productions. This piece of fan fiction
is mine.
Dedication: To Joy, on her thirtieth birthday. Many happy returns of
the day!
--------------------------------------------------

When they came back from Antarctica, first there was warm water, and 
then sleep.

A cool hand on her forehead. A cool hand in her own. "Mom," she
murmured, and slept again.

A feeling that she couldn't move and never would again. She fought her
way through the waves of sleep to the surface and emerged gasping with
relief. She wasn't immobilized. Just an automatic blood pressure cuff
on one arm and an IV in the other. Her brain felt waterlogged with 
whatever drugs they'd given her.

She looked around, trying hard to get her bearings. A hospital,
obviously, but _where_?  There was something a little foreign about
the way this room was decorated, nothing she could put a finger on.
Chile or New Zealand's closest, her brain concluded without her
asking. Ahab had made sure his first mate knew her geography. She
looked out the window and saw a wintry sky, and some kind of seagulls
sitting on a lightpole sprouting from a parking lot. She watched them
for a while. Then sleep rushed back to her, and she turned away from 
the light and put her head on the pillow, prepared to slip back 
beneath the waves.

Mrs. Mulder was at her bedside, fast asleep.

She sat back up again, sleep ebbing away. What was Mrs. Mulder doing
here? She seldom visited Mulder in the hospital back home, much less
coming all the way to...wherever this was. She was too frail for this.
What had she been thinking? And why is she with me, instead of her
son?

Was she here at someone's orders?

Scully studied her partner's mother. Foam-white hair and a navy dress,
pearls and makeup just so. Her skin was rose and ivory, with just the
beginning of the parchment look of the old. But the lines around her
eyes were deep, as if she had spent a good deal of time squinting
against the sun on the water. A sea captain's wife, she decided
suddenly. Waiting for her husband to come home to the Vineyard, except
that instead of trading with China for tea, he was trading in people,
with someone more foreign, for....

What? Scully didn't know. Maybe Mrs. Mulder did.

She studied Mrs. Mulder again, almost wishing she could hate the
woman. But how could she? In the brief time she'd spent in this
woman's house, she had never been treated with anything but politeness
and consideration. She, who had been traded for Samantha -- no matter
that it hadn't really been Samantha. It had been as much Samantha as
the Mulders were ever likely to get.

And now, Mrs. Mulder sat at her bedside and stirred.

"Good afternoon, Dr. Scully," she said. "I'm glad to see you awake."

"Thank you, Mrs. Mulder," said Scully, trying to get her sea legs.
Polite conversation was not normally a worry for her in the hospital.
"Mulder is all right, then?"

Maybe I shouldn't have called him Mulder to his mother's face. Maybe I
should have called him Fox, but it would sound so fake. And 'my
partner' would sound so possessive, but 'your son' would sound
accusatory.

"Fox is fine," Mrs. Mulder assured her. "But the nurses are not
letting him out of bed yet, and he asked me to see how you were doing.
He says if you want the details you'll have to come read his chart."

"He'll have to wait till I can get to my own chart," Scully said, 
smiling. "But I'm feeling much better, thank you."

"He'll be very glad to hear it." Mrs. Mulder's face flickered. "This
was a very near thing, for both of you."

"Yes." I'm sorry, she almost said. I didn't mean to get taken.

Mrs. Mulder leaned in close to her. "If you both left now, They
wouldn't stop you. They would leave you alone."

Scully stiffened. "What do you mean?"

"I couldn't persuade him. But if you asked my son to give up this
fight, he would do it."

"I know," Scully said. "But I can't. I won't." She sighed, too tired
not to tell it all. "Ma'am, they killed my sister. They've stolen all
the children I can ever have. They're spreading a virus they can't
stop, a parasite that may or may not be part of an alien invasion.
And," she added wryly, "flying saucers would seem to be real. What's
the point of leaving? There isn't any place on Earth to hide."

Mrs. Mulder looked into her eyes, trying to stare her down. Scully was
too tired to get angry. She just looked back.

"I should hate you. You're going to be the death of my son," Mrs.
Mulder said. "But you have better sense than I had. If you give an
inch to those people, they will take more than you thought you had to
lose." She stood, and a hitch in her movement revealed a sore spot 
that her straight New England back refused to acknowledge. "There are 
worse ways to lose someone than death, as we both know. I won't speak 
of this again." She turned and walked out the door, too proud to beg
further.

"Are you going back to Mulder?"

Mrs. Mulder turned back. "Yes."

Scully moistened her lips. "Could you bring him a message?"

Her eyes turned gentle. "Of course."

Scully leaned forward. How could she contain the feelings flooding her
in a single sentence? "Tell him...tell him I miss him."

"I will." And Mrs. Mulder smiled at her.



A cool hand on her forehead. A cool rough hand in her own. "Mom," she
murmured, and woke.

"Good morning," said Mrs. Mulder.

"Good morning, ma'am," she said. "What have you done to your hand?"

"Nothing," she said smoothly, starting to slip away. 

But Scully had learned how to deal with such wriggling from Mulder,
and his mother was not nearly as fast. She held Mrs. Mulder's hand
firmly, knowing the woman was too well-bred to wrench away. Her 
fingers found the rough ridges of tissue again. "There's scarring here 
along your thumb, the webs of your fingers. Old damage. What happened?"

"A minor birth defect that runs in the family," she said impersonally. 
"The excess webbing was removed from my hands when I was younger. 
Mulder was lucky not to inherit it."

"Did Samantha?"

"Yes."

"You should have a plastic surgeon look at it," Scully said, and
released Mrs. Mulder's hand. "The scars are barely noticeable,
but I imagine they're uncomfortable to live with."

"I've lived with them for a good many years," she answered, "It's a
bit late to worry about them now." She folded her hands in her lap

"It's never too late," said Scully, and looked up. "You know, you're 
the first selkie I've ever met."

"Pardon?"

Scully almost smiled at Mrs. Mulder's bewildered expression. "Sounds
like a Mulder story, really, except that I heard it from my dad. Some 
of the seals in the ocean aren't real seals, they say. They can shed 
their skins if they want, and turn into people and walk on the shore. 
And sometimes a man or woman of the selkies would fall in love with a 
human, and have children, and the children would have webbed hands. 

"Probably inspired by high incidence of just such a congenital defect 
in isolated Irish and Scottish islands and fishing villages," she mused, 
shifting to a subject that she enjoyed more.

"Seals?" Mrs. Mulder looked interested. "We used to see a lot of them
on the Vineyard. Sometimes they acted almost human."

"They're very intelligent animals," Scully agreed. "Humans and seals
would have fished many of the same areas, and seal communities would
not have been far from the human ones. The same situation is seen out
in California, with the walrus population. That contact probably
inspired the idea that seals were more than they appeared. Which 
didn't prevent the villagers from eating sealmeat. Except for the 
ones who believed they were descendants of such seals."

Scully attacked the problem from another angle. "The interesting thing
is that selkie/human love stories are almost all tragic. In the song
about the Great Selkie of Sule Skerry, he and his half-human son are
inadvertently killed by his ex-girlfriend's new husband. And there are
countless stories about selkie women who have their sealskins stolen
from them by human men, to force them to become or stay their wives.
When the women find their skins, they immediately go back to the sea,
despite their love for their children or husband. They have to go."

"And the children cannot follow."

"Not in most of the legends."

"But the sea would always call them."

"And the land would call to the selkies."

The quiet lapped between them, followed by the sound of distant cries
and beepers and footsteps slapping against the linoleum like breakers
against rocks. You could go a long way inland to avoid the gulls and
the smell of the sea and a man you once had loved. But now the gulls
were squabbling outside Scully's window.

"I'm sorry," Scully said. "This isn't like me. You probably hear too 
much of this sort of thing from Mulder anyway."

Mrs. Mulder shook her head. "Fox doesn't talk much to me about...the
paranormal, is that the term? When he calls, it's usually to tell me 
about his latest fish mortality, or a movie he thought I might like."

What he doesn't talk about with me, Scully realized. Everything 
compartmentalized for the sake of security. His father must have been
like that, to stay at all sane. And Mrs. Mulder is like that, too.

"I miss him," Mrs. Mulder was saying. "I wish he would visit more 
often." She looked up, and her eyes came back to the present. "It's
just as well. Visits attract too much attention."

A nurse came in just then. "Visiting hours are over, I'm afraid," she
said cheerily. 

Mrs. Mulder rose to her feet. "You see?"


A cool rough hand on her forehead, and Scully smiled. "Good morning,
Mrs. Mulder."

"We're in New Zealand, not Sweden."

Scully's eyes snapped open. "Mulder?"

"In the frostnipped flesh. I guess you and my mom have been getting 
along all right."

"I like her," Scully said quietly. "I wish she'd tell us whatever
she's hiding, but I don't blame her for being afraid."

"She was supposed to go to Europe," Mulder said. "But then Skinner 
called, and she headed here." 

She couldn't understand the anger in his voice. "That was nice."

"But Skinner didn't say where we were. He didn't know yet." Mulder
was seething. "She knew, Scully. She knew where you were."

"Or guessed. Or got another phone call, one we don't know about."
Scully reached for Mulder's upper arm and held it gently. "I don't
know if you can trust her, but at least give her the benefit of the
doubt." 

Mulder didn't look convinced. Scully sighed.


Getting out of the hospital was like a military operation.

"There's my mom with the car." 

Scully started to walk toward the hospital lobby's front doors. 

Mulder held her back. "Wait for her to pull up. You don't have a 
coat yet."

Scully looked up to heaven for strength. "Mulder, this is not 
Antarctica. And I'm not the one who almost got hypothermia."

"No, you're just the one who nearly...." Mulder cut himself off.
"Look, Scully. I'm trying not to be overprotective. But would it
kill you to wait until Mom drives up?"

She looked at him. "I'm surprised you didn't insist on driving."

He mumbled something.

"What did you say?"

"I said, Mom wouldn't give me the keys to her rental."

She was very good. She didn't laugh at him. But she smirked enough
that she hardly felt the chill of the wind between hospital door
and car door.

"Now that we've both been released, I assume we're headed for the
airport."

"Sorry, Scully. We missed the morning and afternoon flights." 

"Then where are we going?"

"Shopping. And then to a hotel."

Scully opened her mouth to protest. It was only going to be a day or
so. Why couldn't she just wear what she had on?

Mrs. Mulder spoke up. "Miss Scully. You are wearing my clothes. They
do not fit you. I do not wish this situation to be prolonged."

Oh. That was why not.


Mrs. Mulder in a clothing store was like Mulder going through files.
She looked at everything once, then went back unerringly to the
things that had caught her eye and handed them to a sales clerk.

"Does your mother have an eidetic memory, too?"

"Yeah. But she's not colorblind."

They sat and watched her, while the sales clerk from the next
area watched Mulder solicitously. But at least Mulder had been 
able to pick out his own clothes. 

"Remind me to pay your mother back as soon as we get home."

"This is bothering you."

"I just don't want to impose...."

"It's bothering you," Mulder diagnosed. "Look, she's probably doing
this out of some sense of guilt because _she knew_, so you might as
well accept it. It's not going to happen again. And she's not exactly 
hurting for money."

"Then remind me to buy your mother a really good Christmas present."

"Why does it bother you so much?"

Scully sighed. "I just don't like being...beholden. To anyone. Even
with family, it's only right to make some kind of reciprocation. And 
your mother hardly knows me."

"Yeah. Well, maybe she wants to." He shrugged. "She didn't call me 
up to complain about me daring to bring you into her house last 
year. Granted, we weren't speaking after that, but that never stopped
her from telling me stuff like that before."

Then Mrs. Mulder was coming back, sales clerk in tow. Time to try 
things on.


Two complete changes of clothing, one on her back and one in a bag; 
one parka with scarf and mittens; one swimsuit and a pair of sandals
(Mrs. Mulder did not buy flipflops); and one carry-on bag to put it
all in. Scully willpower had barely outlasted Mrs. Mulder's 
generosity. She sighed. At least there'd been a pre-season sale on
the swimwear, and the parka had been on clearance. But Mrs. Mulder
had insisted on the swimsuit. For the hotel pool. For 'physical
therapy'. 

Maybe Mulder was right about the guilt thing. 

Mrs. Mulder was also paying for the hotel. It was definitely not a
fleabag. It wasn't even business class. It had stuff for free that 
Scully didn't have at home. 

A tea/coffeemaker in the bathroom. She might never leave.

Scully took a bath without sponges involved. Scully took a nap,
without hearing beeping machinery or passersby in the background.
She was gloriously alone in absolute quiet, and she slept like a 
stone. 

She woke up, stretched, and thought, Guilt is good. 

But then she thought of Mulder and his love of self-flagellation.
Where did he pick up a habit like that, if not from his parents? She
compared Mrs. Mulder's often distant manner to her son's, and asked
herself if they masked the same overflowing feelings, the same
overwhelmed heart.


An hour after they ate, Scully and Mulder went swimming in the hotel
pool. Under orders from Mrs. Mulder. The place was empty, which struck
Scully as eerie. Glass domes with pools under them should echo with
the splashes and excited screams of children. But the shock of 
entering the water was far less than normal; the water must have been
over 80 degrees. The Fahrenheit kind, that is, not the Celsius ones
they used here.

"I don't know about you, Scully, but I'm staying on the kiddie side."
Mulder strolled through the water and followed her to the wall. He'd
only done a couple of laps -- just enough to make his hair slick 
back, dark and smooth as a seal's pelt.

She settled herself against the side of the pool, found one of the 
hidden streams of warm water that heated it, and no longer bothered 
to move. "Just tell me when we're allowed to get out."

"Not until you turn into prunes," said Mrs. Mulder. 

Scully looked up, and saw that the glint of Mulder's eyes in his
deadpan face was mirrored by his mother's. Mulder turned around
and crossed his arms on the top of the pool wall. "Then you have to
come in, too."

"Fox! My hair!" 

Mulder rolled his eyes. "And you won't have to go to your salon 
after spending hours sleeping on the airplane?"

She sighed. "You're not going to give up, are you, Fox?"

"No." He grinned at her, waiting. 

Mrs. Mulder walked over to a chaise lounge, dropped her terrycloth 
robe and crossword, stepped out of her sandals, and padded over to 
the deep end. Then she slipped into the water like a icepick into its 
sheath.

"We went to Quonochontaug every summer, Scully," Mulder said. "That's
a lot of swimming practice." He swam out to join her.


They checked out next morning, bound for the airport. 

"We could have stayed in bed a little later. We're going to get 
there almost three hours early."

"Better to be early than late," said Mrs. Mulder. "I don't want to 
miss the plane."

"I can drive, Mom."

"Did you bring your international license?"

Mrs. Mulder drove. 

When Mulder warned her that they were going the wrong way to get to
the airport, she contradicted him. Scully saw her ignore signs to that
effect, as well. Was this the aftereffects of her stroke, or the
beginning of Alzheimer's?

She did not stop until they got to the shore.

"Oh, dear," she said, stopping the car and looking out at the winter
waves. "Fox, we'll have to get out and take a good look at this map.
It doesn't seem to be getting us there." She got out before Mulder
could stop her; he had to follow after.

Scully put on her parka and went around the front of the hood, where
Mulder was arguing vehemently. She smiled at the smell of salt.

"Good. You can settle this discussion, Dr. Scully." Mrs. Mulder held
the map in the air in front of them all. "What symbol would you say
this is, according to the legend? And don't turn around, Fox, but 
we are being watched."

Mulder stiffened, but the winter coats would help disguise that,
Scully thought. "Why did you really come?"

"To tell you two a few things that I didn't dare, back home." She 
continued to trace roads on the map with her finger. "The woman 
you met last fall wasn't our Samantha. Just another clone." Her 
voice was bitter. "They promised they'd send her home when she was
grown. Another promise they broke. But your father was desperate. He
wanted at least one of his children to survive Colonization, even if 
it meant changing her into a hybrid. He chose you at first, but then 
he decided that you would have a better chance to...understand what 
you saw when the Colonists came, and learn what you could. They don't 
speak to the adults," she explained. "He was so angry when you said 
you couldn't remember. He was sure you were someone else who'd been 
bought by the Colonists' offers, another person lying to him...." 
Her voice trailed off, and her finger stilled for a moment on the map.

She had a stroke, Scully reminded herself. She tires easily, too.
Scully raised her hand to the map and traced out an alternate route.

Mrs. Mulder pulled herself up. "Dr. Scully, they underestimate you. 
But your science will save you. It may save us all." She turned back
to her son. "What has happened is evidence. It may help you reopen
the X-Files. But if the FBI gives you a dead end, you two will have
to strike out on your own. Don't be squeamish about using your 
father's money; it is as much a weapon as that gun of yours." She 
sighed. "And I hope you know that I would have come to see you more 
often, if I'd thought it wouldn't put you in danger." She put one 
gloved hand on his.

Scully looked up. The glint in Mulder's eyes and his mother's was 
the same. 

"All right, Fox," she said. "You're right. We'd better hurry if
we're going to get to the airport on time."

"We've got two hours," he said. "That's plenty of time. What's wrong,
Scully?"

Scully turned around. "I thought I heard someone call out. A woman."

"That was just the wind. Or maybe those seals barking over there."

Mrs. Mulder waited, her straight back looking as though it wanted to
bow. "I'm feeling a bit tired. The wind must have taken it out of me.
Would you please drive us, Fox?"

Mulder took the keys, his eyes concerned. His mother walked around
to the other side, not looking at him.

Scully thought of hybrids, and how well they could swim under water.
She thought of how much she loved the sea, and Mulder loved the sea
of stars. She thought of Mrs. Mulder's silence, and of countless 
daughters whose mothers would never know them. 

She heard the cry again. Imagination? Projection? A woman?

Five billion men and women, crying for life.

She got in the car. They drove away.

------------------------------------------
Sad the land is, sad the land,
Eating people for their food.
See how the chief of all our men
Burns on the hot and round fire?

I am Hugh mac Ewen's daughter
And I know the skerries well.
And woe is he who dares to strike me,
A lady from a far country.

Come the mavis, comes the thrush,
Come each bird that seeks its nest,
Come the salmon over the sea;
Till the day comes, I will not move.

-- translation of "The Seal's Lament", 
Gaelic song from the Hebrides