From: "Britt Gordon-McKeon" Date: Sat, 01 Aug 1998 13:07:22 PDT Subject: Early Encounter Title- Early Encounter (1/1) Author- risinglight@hotmail.com E-Mail address- risinglight@hotmail.com Rating- G Category- Story Spoilers- none Keywords- Pre-XF Summary- Just a short little piece about a chance meeting between the Mulder siblings and the Scully siblings(well, some of the Scully siblings)... it was a lot of fun imagining Mulder and Scully as kids and deciding how they'd interact, I hope you have as much fun reading it as I did writing it! The young boy carefully tried to slip out of the house, halfway out the door before he mumbled, "I'm going out, Mom." "Fox! Get back here... take your little sister with you." "Aw, Mo-om! Can't she stay home?" "She's been wanting to go out and play... you're her big brother. You're supposed to take care of her." Fox sighed, and shouted grouchily, "Well, hurry up then, Sam!" After a moment, the little girl dashed out and stood next to him, taking his hand and smiling up at Fox. He sighed very deeply, and started to walk. It wasn't fair! Fox was nearly twelve, which meant he was practically a grownup, but he always had to bring Samantha places with him. He loved his sister, of course, but she could be SO annoying... at times like now, when her short legs meant it took Fox twice as long to get to the shore. But of course they got there eventually. The beach was pretty much deserted, which was the way Fox liked it... the busy tourist season could be a pain, but no one came to Martha's Vineyard in October. Well, almost no one, Fox amended himself, as a small red-headed girl, maybe a little older than Samantha, nearly knocked him to the ground as she dashed across the clammy sand at top speed. She tripped and sprawled across the ground, but she pulled herself back up and with a quick "Sorry" continued her run. When she reached the end of the sand, her momentum kept her going up a rocky hill, and she finally stopped and turned around. "Hurry up!" the girl called out impatiently to an older girl who Fox had just noticed. The second, brown-haired girl was taking her time crossing, looking in the sand for seashells and obviously not moving fast enough for the other little girl. As the older girl passed him, Fox shurugged and turned to Samantha. "C'mon, squirt, let's see if there's anything cool to do here." She looked up at him and nodded, and he sighed. Fox had WANTED to check out a cool hole out in the woods that he'd found the other day with some mysterious stuff in it, but he liked having his secrets, and this was NOT one he wanted his seven year old sister to know about. The two of them walked down to the water. Panting for breath, Dana stood at the top of the hill. She pursed her lips and looked out at her big sister, moving leisurely across the sand. "Missy, you coming or not?" Melissa did not respond. Dana sighed. Melissa, the daydreamer, never moved fast enough to satisfy her. Dana always wanted to be busy, always wanted to be moving. "You like to live life at light speed, Starbuck," her daddy always told her. 186,000 miles a second was too big a number for Dana to even think about, but she knew it was really, really fast. Maybe she didn't want to move THAT fast, but Ahab was right. Dana loved to move fast... and Melissa loved to take things slow. Dana kicked at a rock in frustration, and started to look around the hill she was on. She climbed all the way up to the top, and as she looked down, she suddenly noticed something, and she broke into a smile. "MeLISsa! I found a cave!" The older girl had finally made it over to Dana, and she looked at her with mild interest. Looking at it again, Dana had to be honest with herself-- it wasn't REALLY a cave, just kind of an indent in the stone, but it was deep enough to fit a couple of people in, and deep enough to think up lots of games... "Let's see." Dana's mind raced. The cave was perfect to play something, but she wasn't sure what. It wasn't shaped right to be a ship, but how about... "A spaceship! Missy, let's play spaceship! Here, I'll be the captain, and you can be my second-in-command, and we're flying through outer space." Melissa looked less than enthusiastic. "Whatever, Dana." She had found a whole pile of shiny stones in the back of the indent, and was looking through them with interest. Dana heaved a heavy sigh. Sometimes Melissa was no fun at all! Fox took off his shoes, tying the shoelaces together, and hung them around his neck as he waded in the chilly water. He looked out to sea. "Fox?" Samantha looked up at him, holding her own sneakers out awkwardly. He tied the pink laces for her and handed them to her, and she giggled as she put them around her neck. Her steps in the water splashed Fox a little, but when you have a little sister you have to pick your battles, so he chose to ignore it. Suddenly, he noticed something shiny bobbing on the waves a little way out. He stared at it in curiousity, but he couldn't make out what it was. Bending down, he rolled up his pants legs as high as he could get them, wading out farther, but he still couldn't make it out. His interest was caught now, though. He ran over to the bordering woods as fast as he could, and grabbed a long forked branch. Then he dashed back, so intent on his purpose that he barely noticed passing a panting Samantha on his way... "Fine, I'll play by myself then!" Dana was very frustrated with her big sister. She found a big rock to be her control center, and carefully pictured out in her head all of the buttons and levers and wheels. "Okay, we're taking off..." Dana made ringing and buzzing sounds as loudly as she could. She was probably annoying Melissa a lot-- good! That was her plan. It was a lot less fun to play all by herself, she noticed sadly. She looked out her "cockpit window"... and was suprised to notice a little girl looking back at her. Dana smiled broadly at the girl. "You wanna play?" She nodded. "Of course you can," she responded, throwing an icy look back at Melissa. "Well, we're playing spaceship! We're zooming through space, heading towards the secret planet where all the aliens are, and we're gonna fight 'em! Come here." Dana took the girl by the hand-- she was tiny, though Dana guessed she wasn't much younger than herself-- and took her to the "control center". "Look at that! Do you see that spaceship?" Dana pointed, and the little girl nodded enthusiastically, a smile on her face. "Well, I'm looking at our radar, and that's not a friendly ship! We'll have to shoot at them." "Shoot them?" "Well, we tried to avoid them peacefully, but they shot at us first, so we've gotta get rid of them since they're a threat to the galaxy." Dana was grinning widely-- she loved spinning stories like this, and she especially liked having someone to play with who didn't contradict every word she said. "Do I have to shoot?" " 'Course not, though I think it's lots of fun. But look, here's the steering wheel. You see it?" Dana pointed at a nondescript patch of stone, and the little girl nodded solemnly. "Well, you steer us around, and I'll shoot them. Okay?" After a few moments of that, Dana started to get bored. "Okay, we beat them. Now we're in range of the alien planet! I see it... we're landing on it. Oh my goodness, there's an alien." She whispered to the girl, "Now, you've got to go be be the alien, okay? Run outside the ship..." Fox waded as far out as he could, the cold water giving him goosebumps, as he poked his stick across the water. Almost there, almost there, almost there. Holding the end of the stick with the tips of his fingers, he managed to knock the object, which he'd by now recognized as a bottle, a little closer. Bit by bit, gradually, Fox brought the shining bottle to him. Finally, he picked it up... and then threw it back in frustration. When he had realized it was a bottle, he was still intrigued by some sort of object inside. But it had turned out just to be a bottle cap. A bottle cap and a bottle, some mystery. He splashed back to the sand with a pout on his face. Now what? he thought. Looking around, he tried to figure out something more interesting to do... and suddenly remembered that he hadn't come here alone! His eyes scanned across the beach rapidly about a dozen times, but his sister was nowhere in sight. "Sam! Samantha!" Dammit, dammit, dammit! How could he have lost his little sister? How could he have been so stupid? His mom would kill him if he couldn't find her. He started to run around the area. He was going to be SO dead. Where was she? After a minute, he stopped and closed his eyes. He really couldn't believe he had been so stupid. She was such a little girl, and so many bad things could happen to her by herself. She could drown in the water, or she could get hit by a car, or maybe a strange person would kidnap her or beat her up. And it would be ALL HIS FAULT for not taking care of her. Fox's heart quivered in his chest. Right now he didn't care how mad his mom would be. She could yell at him all night, if it meant Sam would be okay. I'm gonna do this carefully, he decided. He couldn't see her anywhere on the open beach, so he started to walk around its perimeter, looking everywhere that she might be. Slowly and carefully, he walked around it. When he reached the opposite side, with its rocky crags and openings, he felt like crying. She was nowhere! What was he going to do? Fox felt like giving up... and then suddenly he saw a very familiar figure coming out from the rocks. "No, no, no," Dana said patiently. She took the little girl's arms and tried to move them in a more alien-like way. It wasn't looking right... "Sam!" A very loud and very relieved sounding voice preceeded a dark-haired boy running down towards Dana's cave. He grabbed the little girl and hugged her tightly. "Are you okay?" "I'm fine! We're playing spaceship," she said to him. The boy looked up at Dana for the first time, seeming to measure her with his eyes. He was pretty old, older than Melissa probably, Dana thought. And he looked pretty serious. After a moment, Dana looked back at the little girl. "Anyhow, I was telling you, aliens don't move like that. You've got to kind of move differently, and make weird noises..." "Hey, she could be right," interrupted the boy. "You don't know what aliens are like." "Of course I don't," Dana retorted. "That's 'cause they don't exist." "How do you know?" asked Melissa, wandering towards the front of the cave and giving her sister a look. "Yeah, how do you know?" echoed Fox. This was the same little redhead that had crashed into him earlier, and presumably her sister. "There could be aliens somewhere." "Oh, sure, SOMEWHERE," the girl said with her hands on her hips. "But there's no conclusive evidence"--the girl pronounced the words slowly and accurately--"that there's life anywhere else but here." "What's con... con..." Samantha stumbled over the words, but the redhead jumped in. "It's stuff that shows that something's real... or not real," she said, with a pointed look at Fox. "And there isn't any, which means aliens could be just as real as dancing trees, or something." Samantha giggled at the imagery. "Or, they could be just as real as Pluto," Fox countered. "There was no 'clusive evidence about Pluto for a long time, but it was always there." He grinned at her, feeling like he had to come out on top in front of his sister. Then he looked into her eyes for a long moment. They shined with so much spirit, that it surprised him. He had started to resent this fiery little girl, but he suddenly decided that maybe she wasn't that bad. "You never know," Dana said finally, breaking the silence. "But I like proof." That annoying yet intriguing boy had been looking at her kind of funny, and it made her feel strange. "And I like to keep an open mind," he said, and took the little girl by the hand. "C'mon, Sam, we've got to get home." Sam nodded at him, then looked back at Dana and Melissa. "See you around," said Dana to her. "You're lots of fun to play with!" She ruffled the shorter girl's hair, then looked up at the boy. Melissa, unexpectedly, took the girl's other hand, pressing something into it, and smiled at her. "Take care," she said. "And be nice to him... he loves you." Sam looked up at her very solemnly, and nodded. Then she looked at the boy. "Watch over her. Watch over her always. She needs you." The boy gave Melissa a funny look, then turned away. A few feet away, he glanced back, and met Dana's eyes again. He was weird, thought Dana, but he was very... different. And somehow special. Oh, well, she thought as they broke eye contact. I'll never see him again, so it doesn't really matter, does it? "Time for us to get back, Dana," Melissa said, and Dana nodded. The spaceship game was over for her anyway. It was silly for ANYONE to think aliens were real. She climbed out of the cave, and Melissa followed her. "Race you back, Missy," she said hopefully. "Ready, set, go..." Dana took off. She knew her sister wasn't following her, but she liked the wind in her hair and the feeling of speed. And besides, maybe someday she'd find someone fast enough to keep up with her. Meanwhile, it was almost time for dinner! "Were those girls nice to you?" Fox asked his sister with concern as they made their way back through the streets. Something about them made him think that everything was alright, but suddenly he felt compelled to protect Samantha as much as he could. But the little girl nodded, with a broad smile. "It was lots of fun! She was so smart, wasn't she, Fox? And the other girl was weird, but she was nice too." He nodded vaguely, not really thinking about either of the girls anymore. "Fox?" "What is it, squirt?" "Are aliens real? I mean really. You know, don't you?" Fox was torn. He really wanted to look smart in front of his sister, but he knew he had to give her the truth. "No, I don't know about aliens. No one does. But you can never, never be sure. Keep looking up at the sky, Sam, and maybe someday you'll see." She smiled at him and moved closer to him. "I love you, Fox," she said. Fox looked down at her. He had almost lost this little girl today. What would he ever do without her? He promised himself, inwardly, that he would always protect her. Always. "I love you too, Samantha," he answered finally. Then they turned in onto their yard and were safe at home. THE END --------------------------------------------------------- Well? What'd you think? This is my debut piece, so I'm dying to hear from anyone and everyone. (Oh, and yes. The last sentence IS irony.) ______________________________________________________ Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com