#part iv

hey, darlings <3 thanks for all the love with my jason hc's aaa. no seriously, most of my hc's are just probably infused with my own desires, yearnings, beliefs, etc. as much as they are how i actually perceive/want to perceive jason. so i take it to heart that some of y'all relate in yearning for them too! might do a dick grayson version soon but for now, jthc part 4 for ya, fresh outta my notes app :) enjoy <3

“We’ll figure something out.”

“What is there to figure out? This planet doesn't even seem to have animals. I doubt there's even a civilization nearby. We have ration bars” Crosshair gestured with one hand to the pouring rain, “it's only because of that we have water and haven't been found. Probably. And Tech-” Crosshair felt his voice catch and he turned his face away, embarrassed.

“I don't need platitudes. I need plans.” Crosshair bit out, thinking of Tech. A handful of numbers ran through Crosshair’s head, plans the genius had made for if they'd been captured or lost. He'd wondered why the rest of the batch hadn't gotten to Tech. Even with Tantiss's high security Tech would have found a way to get a message out. Now Crosshair understood why he hadn't. Crosshair had had….hope, after they'd found Tech. Mayday had held him together but Tech was the missing piece that built him back up.

He doesn't even remember you.

Mayday let him stew and it was quiet for a long while. Crosshair looked up at a jerk of movement and Mayday cleared his throat.

“Did you fall asleep?”

“...yeah maybe.” He looked sheepish but the dark shadows under his eyes only made Crosshair worried.

Crosshair sighed, “I don't-

Tech groaned softly and Mayday shot to his feet, gun pointed at them.

Crosshair froze as pale-bright green eyes opened to meet his own.

Tech looked confused, then surprised.

“Crosshair?”

“You have got to be shitting me.” Crosshair heard Mayday mutter but he couldn't bring himself to look away as Tech sat up on his elbows, glancing around weakly.

“Wha-where are we?”

“Crosshair -” Mayday's voice was careful, a warning- Crosshair held up a hand.

“Tech, what's the last thing you remember?” He asked.

Tech's brows furrowed, “We were attempting to retrieve information about where to find you - I fell..?” He grabbed at his head. Crosshair reached out and Mayday took a step closer, Crosshair sent him an annoyed look that Mayday only returned.

“I fell…but then I woke up? There was a man-but I cannot remember who….after that I cannot recall much.”

Tech paused, finally focusing on Mayday, then on the gun he had in his hands.

“Ah.”

“It's not what you think.” Crosshair said with a wince, “He's a…friend.”

“I would ask why he is holding us at gunpoint but it would not surprise me that you would have a friend who would do so.”

Mayday smirked, “Well he knows you now, that's for sure.”

Crosshair sent him a glare, then turned to Tech, looking serious, “Tech…Something happened when you woke up earlier.”

“You tried to kill Crosshair.”

Tech and Crosshair's gaze shot to Mayday, both with varying degrees of disbelief.

Crosshair put a hand on Tech’s shoulder, “You got taken to Tantiss, like us. A scientist called Hemlock-” Visions of the man standing above him as he writhed in pain, with that empty look of satisfaction on his face, had Crosshair faltering before he let out a breath, saying quietly, “He likes to experiment…clones are especially expendable. Whatever he did- you didn't remember me. And then you just...”

The words trickled off and Tech's face twisted but he raised his hand to cover his brother's.

“I am sorry Crosshair.”

Crosshair smirked, “Well it's only fair. Turnabout yeah?”

“Technically-” Tech’s hand went instinctively to push at his goggles as he spoke but blinked when he found nothing but scarring. He ran over the beginnings of it but pulled away with a grimace.

Crosshair winced, “We have no clue where your goggles are Tech- we had to escape and they weren't anywhere nearby.”

“I-” Tech looked around the cave, licking at his lips, “I can see perfectly without them.”

His glowing green eyes found Crosshair's. It wouldn't make sense for a soldier to not be able to see. They had worried about it as shinies, when the Kaminoians couldn't correct the oversight. Crosshair remembered how Tech crawled into his bunk at night, clutching at him like it was the last time he'd be able to. And when he started to ask questions like he only had so much time to hear the answers.

Then came the goggles.

Tech had made them on his own. They fit his face perfectly, barely shifting during combat, even designing his bucket around them.

He showed he wouldn't falter.

Part of Crosshair missed the contact after. Tech no longer came to him for comfort but he flourished. He was confident and became wholly his own person. In a wave of clones it was a good thing. But even though they were a defective batch to other clones, Crosshair selfishly wanted Tech to still be his twin.

It was too complicated of a feeling to really put into words.

But seeing Tech now, without his goggles, made Crosshair feel like a shiny all over again.

He was so tired of it.

Tech cocked his head and that, at least, was familiar, Crosshair's hand tightened over Tech's.

“Well honestly that helps one glaring issue.” Mayday's voice broke up the stale air between them.

“What issue?” Tech questioned, like Mayday wasn't holding him at blaster point.

“We need to contact someone to get us off-planet-”

Because now, even without his goggles, Tech's gaze was sharp.

Tech stood, Crosshair let his hand slip off Tech's shoulder. Mayday's aim followed but he ignored the weapon and ran his hand along the wall of the cave, looking for a minute at the pouring rain, before turning back.

Now instead of feeling left behind Crosshair felt...hopeful.

The Otherness created for them in Rebels is resolved in their reunion. The Journey into Adulthood is complete. If all goes according to plan, they get to live Happily Ever After.

Together.

Married.

"It was a simple story about a boy who was lost and a girl who was broken."

Star Wars Rebels is about Sabine and Ezra, and so should its continuation be. Two kids without a Home and Family found new ones, and it was there that they found each other to make a Home and Family with for the rest of their days.

As the new Kanan and Hera, Sabine and Ezra should get to live out their days after the war the way that their mentors didn’t get to because their relationship existed before the war. There should be a payoff for everyone’s sacrifices.

The First Story needs its completion in the Second.

At the end of Rebels, the Epilogue reflects on what both Sabine and Ezra gave up in order to see the rewards it wrought - for everyone else. Then Sabine leaves, sacrificing Home once again, in order to get Ezra and bring him Home. To her Home. With her. It’s very much positioned as a moment of hope that anticipates a share in the peace time rewards for them, too. Together.

In the end, Happily Ever After means that the Good Guys win and the heroes return home. It means that there is hope for the future, that life will go on, that we will have people - perhaps even that one perfect person - to share our lives with, and that new life, new stories will arise long after we're gone.

The simplest fulfillment of this Happily Ever After - Home and Family as marriage and babies and community - isn't the natural outcome for every character in every story.

But it is for Ezra and Sabine.

Luckily, Chris Carter solves this puzzle for us-- or, more accurately, for Glen Morgan (who went above-and-beyond to undermine CC's final say, on and off the set, post here):

October 1997:

Another problem arose when William B. Davis announced he hated the script. “I thought Bill was going to be thrilled to have a show about him,” Wong said. “I had dinner with him, and basically he spent the entire time telling me, ‘This is a terrible script! This is horrible! I can’t do this!’ He didn’t like anything about it. He thought it didn’t make sense, that that he didn’t know who this person was, that it wasn’t him. He hated it.” Davis promptly called Carter to ask if this was the real history of the Cigarette Smoking Man (Carter told him no), and he continued to express his concerns with the script throughout the shoot. And then there were the timeline inconsistencies, which Morgan and Wong didn’t even know about until the episode aired and Morgan logged on and was bombarded with dozens of internet posts complaining that the events of “Musings” couldn’t be for real, because they contradicted the teaser to “Apocrypha.” In the “Apocrypha” teaser, which is set in 1953, a young Cigarette Smoking Man (already smoking), a young Bill Mulder, and a third man, all in civilian dress, question a horribly burned submarine crewman who had encountered an alien in a flashback shown in the previous episode, “Piper Maru.” Morgan’s version proposed an entirely different history, with the young Cigarette Smoking Man and Bill Mulder, both Army officers, first meeting in 1961 at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. The Cigarette Smoking Man doesn’t even smoke, until he takes his first nervous puff late in the first act. Although Morgan and Wong had seen “Apocrypha,” they didn’t remember the events of the teaser.... 

“The Cigarette Smoking Man’s flashbacks were my idea, because I indeed wanted the episode to be a memoir,” Morgan said. But the idea that Frohike could be the real narrator was a Carter-imposed addition to the script, to make it seem as if the events of the episode were not real. Carter even changed the name of the script, from “Memoirs of a Cigarette Smoking Man” to “Musings of a Cigarette Smoking Man.”

[Wong]: …“The line where Deep Throat says, ‘Maybe I’m not the liar’ was another change imposed on the script so you could make the leap that perhaps this is all. a dream, or the ramblings of Frohike.”

Musings, then, is a retelling of "historical" facts, not the facts themselves. And since the mytharc continued to build off Travelers-- including Agua Mala's and The Unnatural's pit stops-- then we are left to assume that Travelers, indeed, is the correct timeline.

Which throws a wrench in the biological question.

THE MULDER FAMILY'S EMPTY NEST

From Traveler's 1952 to Fox Mulder's birth in 1961, Bill and Tena Mulder were-- for approximately ten years-- childless.

What are some possible explanations?

Bill and Tena suffered a series of miscarriages before Mulder was born.

Bill and Tena had a previous child who died sometime before Mulder was born. (This seems extremely unlikely, since Mulder was not only never informed but also never stumbled upon mementos or burial records while digging deep in the FBI.)

Bill or Tena was infertile.

The first and third points are particularly salient: with only a three years' difference between Fox and Samantha, it's easy to dismiss Point 1's premise to favor Point 3's theory-- that infertility plagued Bill and eventually led to Tena's "miraculous" pregnancy (in the possible arms of one Carl Spender) instead of a series of unfortunate, though tragically common, events.

In order to weigh these theories correctly, we need to pick apart the evolution of the Paternity Question.

THE X-FILES WRITERS' BUILDING BLOCKS

To properly unwind the spool of mystery around Mulder (and Samantha's) parentage, we have to establish two basic principles:

Chris Carter-- and the writers by extension-- had no conclusive plans for The X-Files: only a vague sense of its direction and a fainter glimpse of its fairy-tale conclusion (post here and here.)

Chris Carter did not intend for Mulder to be CSM's son as late in the game as Season 6.

Chris Carter did intend for Samantha to be CSM's daughter as early as Redux II.

Principle One

Kim Manners summed it up best after One Son wrapped: "I've said for years that the show really resolved itself, if you will, by accident. The whole story line of the Syndicate and the bees and the aliens and the chips in the neck, they all seemed to just accidentally fall into place and create an intriguing, mysterious story line that eventually got so mysterious and so intriguing that Chris had to blow it up [One Son], because he couldn't deal with it anymore." (Post here.)

Carter also admitted, "…I feel like Lewis and Clark: I know where I’m going, but I don’t know what the hills and valleys and streams that I have to cross are.... Everything else I do past this is a big question mark to me,” he says thoughtfully. “I don’t know if it’ll be a hit or miss. It’s a business of failure mostly. While I’ve got this garden growing, I want to make sure that I tend it and that it represents my best efforts.” (Post here.)

Principle Two

CC maintained consistently, for years, that CSM and Mulder's father were separate identities: to David Duchovny (who kept lobbing the idea of a merger)--

Brian Lowry's The Official Third Season Guide to "The X-Files":

The exchange between Mulder and the Cigarette-Smoking Man [in "Talitha Cumi"]... was not surprisingly generated considerable speculation even within the show as to whether the shadowy character-- in a 'Star Wars'-like twist-- might really be Mulder's biological father. "Oh, people will say that," Chris Carter sighed prior to shooting.

For his part, David Duchovny considers that a very real possibility in adding to the series' epic mythology, and William B. Davis says he has contemplated such a scenario in the past and that such thoughts were guiding him in part when he played those scenes....

"I know that I've talked about it with Chris," Duchovny concurs.

--to the public (who were clamoring for theories after each mytharc tease)--

April 1999:

“We all know that Agent Spender is the Cigarette Smoking Man’s son, so that creates an interesting dynamic and if you’ve paid attention, you know that Mulder’s father and the Cigarette Smoking Man have some history together. We’re playing with a big, familial story here that I think enriches the idea of The X-Files in a very personal way for the characters.”

I wrote up a thorough (and compelling) timeline that tracks Carter's static ideas on the topic here; but that still leads us smack against his sudden pivot in Amor Fati, his abandoned 180° turn (again) in a deleted Requiem scene, and his final line-in-the-sand "revelation" in William (scripts and meta here.) CC wanted to flirt with "the truth"... until Season 9's numbers proved that the show's plug would have to be pulled. That, then, sealed Mulder's biological ties to Jeffrey Spender-- there would have been no time to shift again, realistically-- which, in turn, knotted him to CSM forever.

Principle Three

What about Samantha's paternity?

February 05, 1999:

Left unanswered: the burning question of Fox Mulder’s paternity. (Duchovny is going the Star Wars route, assuming CSM is Mulder’s Darth Vader of a father: ”It makes mythological sense.” Carter will only add, ”We haven’t said definitely not. What we have said is that he is definitely Samantha’s father.”) 

Post Fight the Future and the narrative crafted in Demons and Redux II has not changed; post One Son, the narrative has not changed; post Closure, the narrative remains firm. Samantha Mulder, then, is canonically confirmed to be Carl Spender's daughter-- which makes sense why he kept her with him, and aligns with his twisted form of love (inflicting pain on those closest to him ala Jeffrey and Cassandra and Mulder and Tena and Deep Throat and Bill Mulder and etc.)

Although Mulder's paternity was in a constant state of flux, Samantha's was not; and even though CSM shifted his opinions on Mulder's paternity ("Bill Mulder's son" in One Son, "my son" in Amor Fati)-- and canon still waffled as late as Requiem-- his beliefs of Samantha's did not.

Which makes the Clone!Samantha situation in Redux II that much worse... especially considering that even William B. Davis thought she was the real deal:

May 1999:

What about the scene in Redux with Samantha, for example? Well, he certainly thought she was the real Samantha and that’s how he played it. Then a year later, he heard someone say, “No that wasn’t her,” and his reaction was “huh?”.)

The Conclusion to This Mystery

In short: the writers did not plan for anything; Samantha was cemented as CSM's before they extended the patriarchal branch to Mulder; and Mulder's biology was an afterthought-- like many aspects of the show-- that became crippled in service to the "next big thing."

So: what does this mean for Bill and Tena Mulder?

WHAT IS THE TRUTH?

The X-Files's writers originally wrote Mulder and Samantha to be normal, though tragically separated, siblings; and would have created (and cast) their parents with that idealized conception in mind. However, as canon evolved, so, too, did their aspirations; and so, too, did the bounds of believability.

If Bill and Tena Mulder are the biological parents of both children, then either one (or both) would have had to suffer from infertility until the successful birth of Fox Mulder. Streak now broken, it would-- theoretically-- have been easier to conceive Samantha three years later: a bump enough in the timeline to logically point to another round of fertility struggles.

Or their quick turnaround could serve as proof that Samantha was CSM's-- a shortcut for Tena, exhausted and unwilling as she might have been to wait another ten years to (perhaps) become successfully pregnant again.

If CSM and Tena Mulder are the biological parents of both children... that raises more questions.

At what point did Carl Spender suspect that both Mulder children were-- if they were-- his?

Samantha was traded in her brother's stead, but that was a decision that came directly from Bill Mulder. Did he suspect that Samantha wasn't his? I don't believe so: Bill was genuinely fragile after "Samantha's" return in Colony; and genuinely grieved, shattered, and angered after her "death" in End Game (projecting that pain onto Tena to guard himself.) Further, Mulder stated that Samantha's disappearance "tore the family apart": the comfort and love both children received from their father (as shown in Dreamland II's family videos) came to an end as Bill retreated into his alcohol and Tena into her bitter condemnation. It was a matter of time before Mrs. Mulder and young Mulder moved out, leaving Mr. Mulder to his broken misery.

To add more credence to my claim, I defer to the Well-Groomed Man's revelation in Fight the Future:

"Without a vaccination, the only true survivors of the viral holocaust will be those immune to it - human alien clones. He allowed your sister to be abducted, to be taken to a cloning program, for one reason..." [to survive.] "Your father chose hope over selfishness. Hope in the only future he had, his children. His hope for you was that you would uncover the truth about the project. That you would stop it, that you would fight the future."

Bill Mulder, then, believed both children were his; and Bill Mulder, then, died believing both children were his-- his daughter who he traded away, and his son who he lied to and begged to "forgive me" on his deathbed.

TWO FATHERS, ONE SON

Despite canon's later solidification, I find One Son rather fascinating to study through the lens of Bill Mulder as Fox Mulder's biological father (as was originally intended):

In a deleted flashback (with Mulder's father arguing where Krycek now stands), Bill predicted the holes in his compatriots' plans, horrified in the face of the anticipated trade:

The scene then immediately transitions back to Mulder, the parallel between their dispositions and circumstances carefully planned and executed: parallel father and son, yet distinctly different men--

What's particularly striking is that the script actually had purpose for Fort Marlene's ill-fitting shoes: symbolism. Mulder has to (metaphorically) take up his father's mantle; and finds that it doesn't provide enough room-- Bill Mulder was a "smaller" (though well-intentioned) man than his son has become--

During the confrontation in Diana's bedroom, CSM refers to Jeffrey Spender as "my son" and laments that Mulder has turned Jeff against his sire-- as Bill Mulder attempted to do with the Syndicate, all those years ago:

CSM continues to draw parallels between both Mulders, establishing that he, himself, does not know Mulder is his biological child (if he is....)--

--and after psychologically subduing yet another Mulder--

--he leaves the younger man defeated and broken in the dark: history repeating itself.

And, as a thought exercise, I went back even further to Colony and End Game: Bill Mulder was severe and cold and unfeeling in both scripts (thanks be to the actor's decision to inject some nuance and personality)... except for one moment:

Mr. Mulder briefly cracks through the crust he'd built up in self-protection at the thought-- the culmination-- of his daughter's return. Bill Mulder, then, still needs her to come back but is too burned, beaten, and fearful to truly believe or hope (unlike his son.)

Although Chris Carter, Frank Spotnitz, and the rest changed their minds later, this "tell" stands as a powerful moment, nonetheless. (...And proves that CSM was still in the dark about Mulder's paternity. I wonder if he found out after Jeffrey Spender's bloodied DNA matched Mulder's in the system? Who knows.)

THE LEGACY OF THE MULDER CHILDREN

Fox and Samantha Mulder were born into a destiny neither of them chose: parents who threw them into the jaws of a Conspiracy in an attempt to save the future. Fate, then, decreed they were doomed to a dark world on the brink of teetering hope.

Freewill, however, fought it back: Bill Mulder was sucked into a game beyond his control, yes; but he let Edward Skur go (Travelers), tried to save both his children through a convoluted stratagem (Fight the Future, One Son), and was willing to face death to regain his son's last shred of respect and understanding (Anasazi.) Samantha Mulder was bartered to an alien race (Pilot, One Son) and returned to brutal tests inflicted by her biological father, yes (Sein und Zeit); yet, she escaped, and ran for help, and chose her own end (Closure.) Fox Mulder inherited his father's quest and expectations, yes (Travelers, Pilot); but he chose to trust in "the truth" as a principle and Dana Scully as his touchstone.

In a way, the nature of Bill Mulder's life-- and his children's, by extension-- can be fulfilled (fate) or subverted (freewill) with interesting degrees of similarity: either Fox Mulder and Samantha Mulder share CSM's tainted blood but choose to rise above it, or Fox Mulder (at least) carries on Mr. Mulder's legacy (genetically-- via his DNA-- and characterologically-- via the same impulse to expose the truth.) And perhaps both can be true: that the spirit of Bill Mulder lives on in his children-- his children, no matter what.

Regardless, Bill Mulder left his mark.

CONCLUSION

And that concludes the last of the Mulder Family meta saga (hopefully.)

Thanks for reading~