Chapter Text
Sunday
9:01 a.m.
“So… the time machine’s kaput?” said a forlorn voice over Mulder’s cell phone.
Poor Langly, Mulder thought; consoling his friend was helping him process his own feelings about the matter.
“I know, buddy, I know. It’s not my favorite outcome either, but at least we got to see one, right?”
“Well, I didn’t. Can you describe it to me in painstaking detail? I’d love to get a diagram going.”
“Langly, I’m not gonna use up all my minutes describing it to you on the phone.”
“When do you get back to D.C.?”
“Tonight, and yes, I’ll tell you all about it, then. Hey, thanks again for the tip, okay?”
“Yeah, yeah.”
“Say hi to the guys for us.”
Mulder hung up the phone and looked to his partner. Scully had planted herself in his motel room while he finished up his breakfast; she was writing up a detailed report of their trip on her laptop. Mulder found this quite unnecessary, given the fact that they were on a rogue mission and had no one to turn in the report to. But he enjoyed the comfort of her company so much that he didn’t question it.
“Langly’s bummed that we’re not bringing home a pet time machine,” Mulder said.
Scully glanced up at him. “And you’re not bummed about that?”
Mulder sighed. He had agonized about the lost time machine in the immediate aftermath of its destruction, but he had long ago taught himself how to let these defeats go. Never completely — they compounded upon each other, eating away at his restless soul. But he had learned how to replace each one with the next quest.
“Langly says he’s got another lead on a crashed black helicopter,” he said. “Whaddya say? Wanna check it out next weekend?”
Scully took a sip of coffee. “I’ll let you handle that one on your own,” she said quietly.
“Come on, Scully, it’s in Virginia, it’s local. We can make time for it.”
“Mulder, you know that those black helicopter leads never amount to anything. It’ll only disappoint you again.” She bit her lip, and then said carefully, without looking at him, “We could just relax instead. Have a beer. Watch a movie. Decompress after a week of mind-numbing grunt work.”
Mulder paused; was she suggesting…?
No. Of course she wasn’t suggesting anything resembling a date. That wasn’t a Scully thing to do. He figured she was just trying to deflect away from the conspiracy-related topic at hand.
He sighed. “Fine, fine. I’ll just check out the lead by myself. Hey, Scully,” he said, and he jumped into a new subject before fully processing the dissatisfied look on her face, “You wouldn’t fully admit it last night, but in the cold hard light of day, how ‘bout it? That vision you said you had—”
“It wasn’t a vision,” Scully said. “It was just… my subconscious imagination being rather simpatico with yours, I suppose.”
“You know what? I’ll take it,” he said. “Closest you’ve ever come to admitting you can read my mind.
“There’s a difference, Mulder, between reading minds and simply knowing someone very well.”
Mulder smiled. He felt quite satisfied that his Scully was just a tad bit more in touch with the mystical that she’d ever acknowledge.
His Scully?
No, just… Scully. Just Scully.
Beers and a movie, on the couch with her…
“Hey Scully,” he said, “If you could use a time machine with zero negative consequences, what would you do?” He wasn’t sure what made him ask that question. All he could think of was the fact that they had known each other for a very long time, and had rarely just relaxed together.
Scully’s face remained quite controlled; she finished typing a block of text. Again, she didn’t look at him as she replied, “I already told you I wouldn’t change a day, didn’t I?” She raised an eyebrow at him.
He felt like there were things that both of them were trying and failing to say. But he couldn’t put words to any of it. Lamely, he tried: “Yeah, but… I dunno… if…”
She looked up at him.
At that moment, there was movement at the window; Mulder looked through the peephole, caught somewhere between relieved and frustrated. He wasn’t sure who he expected it would be — maybe the blonde prostitute from the other night, trying her luck again. He was surprised to see a different blonde, with a now-familiar ponytail.
“It’s Kim Wexler looking indecisive,” he said, reaching for the door handle. “I’ll make up her mind for her.”
Kim stood at the door to the Crossroads Motel room, hovering her knuckles near the door and failing to knock. She was wondering if it was pointless to be here, if she should just move on from this whole situation.
Jimmy had certainly moved on last night, or at least he was attempting to persuade her he had done so. They’d gotten some food together, and he had tried to speak of other things. It was jarring, actually, the way he had avoided mentioning the intense experience they’d just gone through. When she had brought it up, he’d changed the subject so adeptly that she hadn’t even realized it was happening until it was too late.
He hadn’t mentioned the kiss, either. They never talked about these kinds of things. Whenever they had one of these spur-of-the-moment kisses (or more), like when he’d told her he was going to study to become a lawyer, it never led to any examination of the nature of their relationship.
Maybe she should have invited him over last night. Maybe they could have really talked, and then of course, things would have proceeded in a certain direction…
But she hadn’t. Just when she had been on the verge of inviting him, he’d told her that he planned to go home and spend the entire night studying contract law. When she had looked into his eyes, she’d known he was telling the truth. So for now, the situation was probably for the best… even if her head believed that far more than her heart.
It was unlike Kim to be incapable of making a decision, but she still found herself unable to knock on the door and unable to leave. Before she was forced to decide, the door opened and Agent Mulder stood there in boxers and a white T-shirt.
“Oh,” she said, suddenly feeling extremely awkward. “I wasn’t sure — I thought maybe this was Agent Scully’s room.
“She’s here,” Mulder said placidly, without a hint of embarrassment, and Kim felt sure that she must be intruding on something. But when she caught a glimpse of Scully, the latter was dressed in a business suit and was sitting at the small table with coffee and a laptop, so Kim felt slightly less like an interloper.
“Please come in, Kim,” Scully said, standing and coming to the door. “Are you all right? And Jimmy?”
“He’s fine. I don’t need to come in,” Kim replied. “I’ll be quick. I just…” She found herself turning to Mulder, who seemed to be more receptive to discussions of the other timeline. “I just can’t get one question out of my head: why were you able to have dreams about the other, um… timeline, I guess… but Agent Scully didn’t have those dreams?”
“Oh, don’t count her out,” Mulder said, with a twinkle in his eye. “She had a vision of her own, didn’t you, Scully?”
There was a loud snort from Scully, who folded her arms.
“Well, um…” Kim said. “I guess, then, I’ll ask… why might certain people have access to those dreams, while others don’t?”
Mulder, still grinning, seemed ready with his reply. “I think that those who are more receptive to the visions, for a variety of reasons, were the ones who had them. With me and Scully, it’s obvious why I had them first,” he said, “I’m the believer and she’s the skeptic. It’s kind of our trademark. But we don’t know who else, if anyone, had them, so—”
“And…” Kim hadn’t meant to interrupt, but she couldn’t help herself. “I didn’t tell this to Jimmy, but… I think I was having similar dreams. If I didn’t have one last night, does that mean… the dreams are gone for good?”
Mulder’s eyes brightened. “Really? You too?”
Kim made a dismissive gesture. “It’s possible. I can’t say for sure.”
Mulder gave a significant nod of his head in Kim’s direction, aiming a pointed look at Scully. The agents had a brief interaction with their eyes, and then Mulder continued. He was clearly eager to talk about this; his eyes remained bright as he spoke. “You’ve asked a really good question. I’ve been wondering it this morning, too, since I didn’t have a dream like that last night, either. I think it’s unlikely you’ll have the dreams again, since the time machine has been destroyed. My suspicion is that its existence supported the continuing occurrence of the dreams—”
“And I would caution you, Kim,” Scully broke in, “that I’m skeptical that the destruction of a physical device would have altered what takes place in your subconscious mind.”
“This is uncharted territory, Scully,” Mulder said. “Science might not be the place to look for answers. If I’m not mistaken, there’s an element of poetry to this incident that science knows nothing of.”
Scully rolled her eyes and shook her head, glancing briefly at her laptop as though she couldn’t wait to get back to work — a feeling Kim understood quite well. She vowed to wrap this up as quickly as possible.
“So…” continued Kim, “Jimmy will never be able to see it? To see what I—” she stopped abruptly, not ready to let Mulder know what she had seen.
It didn’t matter; understanding dawned on Mulder’s face. He nodded and leaned in closer to Kim. “I’d venture to guess that if the time comes for him to see it… he’ll see it.”
Kim wondered if Jimmy would tell her, if he ever did have a dream or a vision of the other timeline. She hadn’t told him, after all. It was likely that they would simply continue on as they were, both holding their revelations close to the chest.
She looked around; the Crossroads Motel was not a pleasant place to be. She made a firm decision to be done with this whole situation — with any luck, Jimmy was done, too. There was nothing more for her to find out.
“Thank you,” she said. “I’m not sure I’ll ever really understand what happened here, but above all else, I’m glad that we were able to keep Jimmy safe.”
She reached out a hand and shook Mulder’s, then Scully’s. She felt connected to the agents in this moment, for they had all seen something that she had — and Jimmy hadn’t. She wondered, as she turned and left, if he would ever truly understand what he had risked.
Epilogue One
George Washington University Hospital
Washington, D.C.
Late August 1998
Scully lay in her hospital bed. Mulder was, in a rare instance, not at her side; after all, he had to go home and feed his fish occasionally. And it afforded her the first block of time she’d had, in several weeks, to reflect on a certain incident. Under other circumstances, this would have been all she could think about. But Scully thought she could be forgiven for putting it aside. After all, she’d been unconscious for a good portion of it.
They had almost kissed.
In that moment, as he’d poured out his heart to her, told her she had made him a whole person, Scully’s mind had flashed back to that moment on the pedestrian bridge in Albuquerque. She had thought of Jimmy and Kim, about how they were able to physicalize their relationship in the most heated of moments… and how she finally knew she had the courage to do it, too. She hadn’t had any idea what was going to happen next, but she’d known with every fiber of her being that she would kiss her partner.
And then… it was all gone. Ripped away from her like the stinger from her apian assassin.
Now, it all felt different. Why had that catastrophe happened, at that exact moment? The devout Catholic in her was terrified and humbled: did God disapprove?
A bored nurse entered the room to check her vitals, interrupting her train of thought. By the time the nurse left, Scully’s mind had soothed itself.
No. God couldn’t possibly disapprove, not of her and Mulder. But maybe it just hadn’t been the right time. She thought again of her vision, of a life without Mulder. God couldn’t want that for her. She wondered if there was a timeline out there where there had been no bee, where she and Mulder had kissed and maybe more, and where he was by her side now as her true partner and lover.
But even if that wasn’t the case, she knew now, as she once again thought of Jimmy and Kim, that she had the fortitude to alter this one. She’d break through the barriers of monomania and habit that prevented him from acting on the potential between them; she would make it happen.
It was only a matter of time.
Epilogue Two
Best Quality Vacuum
Albuquerque, NM
March 2010
In the hidden bunker underneath the Disappearer’s shop, Saul Goodman (formerly Jimmy McGill, soon to be an unknown nobody hiding out in Omaha, Nebraska) lay perched on an elbow on a squeaky cot, trading conversational oddities with a murderer.
“Hey, you’re a scientist, right?” Saul asked Walter White, who was banging on a drainpipe or something equally absurd, kneeling on the ground and rendering it impossible for Saul to sleep. “So, uh, I have a question. What would you do if you had a time machine?” It was a question he had posed to quite a few people over the past twelve years.
Walt let out a cough. “A time machine?”
“Yeah, um, from a scientist’s point of view.” Walt inspected the drainpipe as Saul continued talking. “You can go backwards, forwards. Um, where would you go?”
“A meaningless question.” Walt chuckled derisively, then coughed again. “‘Time machine’ … Look, time travel, the kind of time travel that you’re thinking of, is a scientific impossibility. It would violate the second law of thermodynamics.”
“Uh, but what about a wormhole?”
“Oh!” Walt cried, in mock-interest.
“Well, I was watching NOVA, and Alan Alda seemed to think…”
“Oh, well, then Alan Alda... he's the expert.” Walt stood up and shuffled cantankerously over to the water jug. “Oh, Christ. Are you kidding me? Quantum mechanics? We’re discussing that now? Stay in your lane.” He poured himself a drink of water as he was beset by another fit of coughing.
“It’s just a thought experiment,” Saul said meekly. “There’s gotta be something you could go back and change if you could.”
“Oh, you are not talking about a time machine, which is both a real and theoretical impossibility,” Walt said, as though speaking to a witless child. Not so witless, thought Jimmy smugly, as he had every reason to know it was possible. But he didn’t feel the need to poke this particular bear. “You are talking about regrets,” Walt continued, “So if you want to ask about regrets, just ask about regrets and leave all this time-traveling nonsense out of it.”
“Okay. Regrets, then.”
“Regrets.”
“Yeah.”
“My regrets. All right, well….” He hemmed and hawed for a while, before his mind settled on something innocuous enough to be palatable for his addled brain. The story he told was bland enough to start with, just some failed business enterprise. But as he continued, a light bulb flickered on in Saul’s head.
…started a company…
…thought they were my friends…
…commercialize discoveries that I had made…
…stepped away…
Of course. Of course Walter White was the man Gretchen had risked reality for all those years ago, who had nearly ruined her. Saul had made the same mistake as Gretchen, and unlike her, he didn’t have a damn time machine to fix it.
Oh well.
“How come you never told me about this?” he asked. “We could’ve done something with this. Wrongful termination, intellectual property theft, uh, patent fraud… I mean, I coulda sunk my teeth into this!”
“You’d have been the last lawyer I’d have gone to.”
“Yeah, sure.” Right. The last lawyer, indeed. Walt sure knew how to fool himself; no “respectable” law firm would have been able to do what Saul could have done with the Gray Matter case.
A real and theoretical impossibility, Walt had called it. Saul felt incredibly smug at the knowledge that he knew something Walt didn’t know, about the nature of reality and about Walt’s former lover. So smug that he almost didn’t realize that Walt had asked him about his own regrets.
He floundered for a moment too long, almost long enough for Walt to give up on him — Saul could see it in his eyes.
“Wait, I got one.” He didn’t.
And then, all of a sudden…
The time machine.
In that moment, he finally saw it: the other timeline. The one that that FBI weirdo had said he’d had dreams about all those years ago:
Going on dates that went nowhere. Never becoming a lawyer. Certainly not ending up in this bunker, sure, but getting fired from the mailroom and moving back to Cicero and drinking himself into a stupor with Marco, unsure as to which of them would end up dying first, Marco from his heart attack or Jimmy (or Saul? Who could tell?) from liver disease. Destitute, no more help from Chuck, and no one to keep him in check.
No one to ground him.
It lasted for only a fraction of a second, but somehow he understood, with a greater level of clarity than he usually allowed himself. Back in 1998, he hadn’t allowed himself to envision a life without Kim. But now, it was all he knew, and the vision was finally available to him.
There was a difference, though.
In that fraction of a second, he saw an entire life. And in that life, no matter what had happened to him in this one, his soul was more fractured and broken for the lack of Kim Wexler.
Kim… God, Kim, if only, if only…
But he couldn’t finish the thought. Even after all this time, he had no answer as to when he should have gone back to. Was there anywhere or anywhen he could have gone that would have saved him? Saved them? Surely, there must have been.
He felt the full burden of his regrets, then, although he couldn’t label their true nature. The forefront of his mind told him that he regretted not using the time machine to fix everything, as he had wanted to initially — after all, he’d lost Kim anyway. But he knew that wasn’t right. There were more practical regrets that he could access if he really tried; they nearly crushed him with their weight at the back of his mind.
But Saul Goodman the Brash and Brassy was robust, and he rallied within the next second. He didn’t think like that anymore, and he wasn’t going to start now.
He started in on a stupid story about his past persona of Slippin’ Jimmy taking a scam-related fall, and Walt was characteristically dismissive of him.
There. Done, no more. He was finished with asking people about time machines. Never again; it was utterly pointless to think like that.
But as he lay in bed that night, trying to visualize his upcoming life in Omaha, he couldn’t fend off his final thoughts before going to sleep:
It isn’t possible, I know it’s not, but…
If I can ever fix things with her, I will. I’ll do whatever it takes. If she’ll let me.