Title: Ride
Author: onemillionandnine
Rating : R for disturbing themes, language, and sexual remarks -
Definitely NOT a Christmas tale for children
Feedback:kokotheuberchimp@hotmail.com
Category: V, UST
summary: A holiday adventure for Mulder during Scully's Christmas
in San Diego
Archive: oh, sure, whenever, wherever, I put it on the internet
for chrissake, I might as well have rented a billboard
Thanks to: MaybeAmanda for lightning beta with deadly accuracy
Disclaimer: Mulder and the Gunmen aren't mine , not even a
little, but it's December 23 so theoretically I could find them
under the tree in a couple of days. I hope someone remembered to
poke air holes.
~:~:~:~:~:~:~:~
It wasn't the most picturesque haunted house ever. There were
avocado green appliances in the kitchen and weathered posters of
KC and the Sunshine Band and The Bay City Rollers in bedrooms
filled with rat-chewed bare mattresses. But then, things were
rarely picturesque in the real world.
For example, despite the similarities at first glance, the figure
looming over Fox Mulder could not, under any circumstances, be
described as a Right Jolly Old Elf. He was taller than Mulder
by half a head, with a long wavy white unkempt beard. A painted
buckskin coat warred with his massive belly, but it wasn't the
gut of a gentle sedentary life; he made Mulder think of an old
biker, with scarred knuckles and muscle under the fat of too much
beer, too much ham. The smell of tobacco, liquor, and leather
floated like an aura around him. For a second, Mulder caught a
whiff of not-quite-pleasant animal smell as well.
"Don't tell me I'm on the naughty list again," Mulder quipped,
trying to alleviate the tension of two strangers meeting
unintentionally in the otherwise empty house.
"Pfffttt," the figure answered from under his fur hood. Stomping
the snow from his feet, he looked up. "You're small potatoes on
the naughty scale, Mulder."
"How do you know my name?"
More stomping followed. "I know a lot of things."
"Who are you?" Mulder asked after a moment.
"Who do you think I am?" The figure pulled back his hood,
revealing a mane of long wavy hair to match his beard.
Mulder knew who he looked like, in an off-kilter slightly skewed
way. "It would be a bit much to believe you're Santa Claus,"
Mulder said. "Even for me."
"I suppose I could go the mysterious 'I am known by many names'
route, but that about sums it up," the man said. "Call me
Santa."
It took Mulder a second to realize that the stranger was missing
an eye. One socket stared ahead blindly, shrunken and puckered.
"Can you give me a good reason to believe you?" Mulder asked
willing himself to remain suspicious and not stare at the hole
where the man's eye should have been.
The large man shrugged. "Doesn't matter to me whether you believe
or not; most people can't even see me."
"Is that a fact?" Mulder asked in a voice he usually reserved for
Skinner.
"Yes, it is," the man said distractedly. "Usually I can come and
go and all people have is a vague feeling, maybe a smell in the
air." He cast his glance into all the dark corners. "I must have
the wrong room."
"Wrong room?" Mulder asked.
The look he received made it perfectly clear the buckskinned
figure had no intention whatsoever of giving him an answer.
"What are you doing here?" he asked, but Santa Claus had turned
on his heel and headed upstairs.
Mulder had no choice but to run after him. For a large man with a
lot of girth, the stranger moved with surprising speed.
"So how come I can see you, Santa?" Mulder shouted as he took
the steps two at a time in an attempt to catch up with the
towering man.
"I'm not sure," the low voice ahead of him said. "Perhaps you
keep Christmas better than most."
"Oh ha ha," Mulder answered.
"Why is that funny?" the stranger asked. "I think you do and I
would know."
"But I don't." Mulder protested. "I don't keep Christmas at all."
Santa stopped on the landing at the top of the stairs and turned
to face Mulder "Let's see. Since your wife left, you've spent
every Christmas Eve investigating purportedly haunted houses
like this one, looking for ghosts. Every other day of your life,
you search and you search and you don't even know what you're
searching for."
"Says who?" Mulder had finally caught up.
"Says me. The X-Files. Ha! X stands for the unknown. But if you
don't know what you're looking for, Special Agent Fox Mulder,
FBI, how will you know when you've found it ?"
"How did you-?" Mulder started
"He sees you when you're sleeping," Santa started in a lush
baritone, "He knows when you're awake-"
"- oh, right, you're Santa -" Mulder said, rolling his eyes.
"-He knows when that hot little partner of yours asked you what
you wanted for Christmas your first thought was to ask her to sit
on your face."
Mulder's mouth shot open, but before he could speak, from behind
him came a great black flapping of wings and a rush of hot air.
He felt his feet begin to slide out from under him. He would
have fallen if the large man hadn't reached out and grabbed him
by the collar.
Two identical young black men, unremarkable except for the
amazing darkness of their skin, now stood on either side of
Mulder. "Zwarte Piet," the bearded man said solemnly. "If they
had been here a few minutes earlier, I wouldn't have wound up in
the wrong room."
"No, of course not," Mulder replied, as if it made sense.
The tall man frowned. "'Santa Claus conquers the Martians,'" he
said at last. "Make time to watch it with Emily. I think she'd
appreciate it."
"Emily?" Mulder asked. "Who's Emily?"
"You ask a lot of questions, Mulder. I don't have the time to
answer any more of them. My duties await, and contrary to
legend, I work every night of the year."
"What duties are those?" Mulder asked.
Instead of answering, the old man, now seeming even older, walked
away, opening a door that barely hung on its hinges.
"There you are," Santa said.
Mulder peeked around the door frame. Inside, huddled in the
corner was a tiny figure, a girl somewhere between the ages of 5
and 7. Her hair was a muddled blonde, both unwashed and
unbrushed. Silver duct tape crisscrossed her pink fiberfill coat.
"Tamara's mother is out turning tricks," Santa said, "but she's
not very professional about it. She's doing it, none the less, so
she can afford a real meal and maybe a toy for the child."
Mulder nodded.
"As I said, she isn't very professional, Mulder. A professional
would know to get a little high before a John than very high
after. Tamara's mother is overdosing as we speak. She isn't
coming back for the child. No one is."
Mulder reached for his cell phone. "I'll call-" he began.
"No need," Santa answered as he entered the room.
"What are you...?" Mulder gasped as Santa lifted the child in
one hand, curled like a kitten, more like the carved figure of a
sleeping child than a living breathing little girl.
As Santa opened his great black bag in some terrible satire of
the Christmas images Mulder had seen all his life, spreading its
terrible maw for the sleeping girl.
A moment of clarity came too late for him. A vortex made of two
black birds descended upon him and Mulder, desperate, lunged
forward, and dove, head first, into the sack
He had paid no attention to the bag before, but now it appeared
to contain all time and space. As his body flew toward it, he
saw stars, not the sort of stars that were preceded by a blow to
the head, but the every-night-out-the-window kind of stars, with
the sort of depth that can't be faked and only comes with
millions of miles of distance and --
-- and the sack was rimmed with gold. How had he missed that?
Just past the edge of the bag Mulder saw the Martha's Vineyard of
his childhood; Samantha exhausted in a sea of spent wrapping
paper and grey sky out the front window. He saw his adult self
and a silent little brown haired boy. He saw a somber blonde
girl, no older than four, with a Mr. Potatohead in her hands. His
hands reached for the sides of the bag as he watched Scully pull
a sheet over the child's face.
Chaos overtook him.
He screamed.
It took some time before he was able to make any sense of
anything that was happening. There was hot fur in his face and
calls from all around him, deafening and angry. At first he was
unable to sort them out, but soon he realized they were the
screams of hunters, the barking of dogs, and he was clinging to
the back of a reindeer, but a bigger, sleeker, more menacing
reindeer than he was aware existed. The sound of its hooves rang
out like an angry bell.
He looked forward through the massive horns. The mob of hunters
was huge and motley. Some rode reindeer just as he did, while
others sat astride donkeys and horses, even ostriches and swans,
while the most beautiful woman he had ever seen rode a hog the
size of an elephant.
It was like a merry-go-round, he thought. Only live. Only
dangerous beyond description. Only insane.
Finally sure enough to relax his grip on Ol' Blitzen, he craned
his neck. Santa was at the head of the pack, on a huge spotted
horse that, no matter how hard Mulder looked, appeared to have
more legs than any horse ought to.
Mulder willed the beast he rode forward, toward Old Nick at the
front of the group. It was a strange sensation, now, almost as if
the animal had become his legs. His heart beat hard in his chest
when he realized they were chasing something; something real.
He caught sight of a hart just beyond the snapping dogs as he
reached Santa' s side. Tamara sat in front of the old man,
between his huge belly and the neck of the terrifying beast he
rode, but she didn't seem at all afraid. Mulder heard her laugh
out loud, gleeful and shrill, the sound rising above the din of
the hunt for a split second. Then she clapped her hands.
Santa turned to Mulder. In that instant, his face was not the
face Mulder had seen before; what faced him now was a death's
head wrapped in creased and weathered skin, wrecked yellowed
teeth like broken piano keys smiling at him. Tamara beamed
beatifically.
"Merry Christmas," the low voice said.
In terror, Mulder raced ahead of the hunt. He came, for the
shortest of seconds, in sight of the deer. Bambi's father
didn't have anything on this guy. He glowed with a light Mulder
had seen attributed to gods and saints, but never to an animal.
It was the truest example of majesty he had ever seen.
He found himself bewildered in the face of it, though it was lost
to his sight again in seconds and the rest of the hunt was soon
beside him.
Again he surged forward on his reindeer, but this time it took
much longer, hours it seemed, to break from the pack and catch
sight of the hart again. And as he did so, he saw, in a
twinkling, something he could not believe.
Scully.
The hart had transfigured, and become Scully.
Special Agent Dana Katharine Scully, MD. In her black pants
suit, and the white shirt with the wide lapels, gold cross laying
flat against the hollow of her throat.
She looked him in the eye with all the keen intelligence at her
disposal, and even the power of thought left him. In a flicker,
it was the hart that stood before him again.
Now he knew it was a holy thing, the only holy thing he'd ever
seen face to face.
He felt dizzy. The sound of hooves and hounds and screams
reaching out for him Mulder looked down to realize that all this
time he had been flying, his mount running on air. Behind him
little Tamara let loose a shrill banshee cry of joy.
What was he looking for? What had he been looking for all these
years?
He let go of Blitzen and fell and fell and fell for a very long
time.
~~~~~~~~~~
It was a very headachy Mulder who awoke on a couch in Takoma
Park, Maryland to find six eyes staring at him. Or maybe it was
twelve. His vision jumped. No, just six. That was plenty.
"So who was it, dude?" He was clearly able to make out Langly's
low twang and lank hair as his eyesight cleared slowly. "NSA?
CIA? FEMA?"
"McDonald Douglas?" Frohike asked. "Time/Warner/AOL?"
"Are you all right?" Byers asked, worry in his voice.
"What? No Merry Christmas?" Mulder groaned.
"Whoever it was they musta used some primo shit, muchacho. You
snored all the way through the holiday," Frohike snorted.
"And the day after," Byers added.
"how did I-" Mulder started, then, wisely stopped.
"We found you knocked out in the alley Christmas morning,"
Frohike said.
"Banged up plenty too," Langly said.
"I guess that beats banged out and knocked up." Mulder squinted.
Langly rolled his eyes. Frohike half-laughed, half-coughed.
"So, what happened?" Byers asked.
"If I told you I was sure, I'd be lying. But I think I took a
ride with Saint Nick," he said, breathing in the smell of fur and
gingerbread that still clung to his shirt.
The gunmen only stared in reply
So Mulder spoke again rubbing his forehead. "For some strange
reason I keep waiting for the short kid with the crutches to say
'God bless us, everyone' but that might be the wrong story."
"Would you like an Aspirin?" Byers asked.
All Mulder could do was nod.
(
geocities.com/xmas_files)