Divinities by GeeLady

Title: PhaHks 04 - Divinities
Author: GeeLady
Written: April 2002

PhaHks: Divinities by GeeLady (4th and last book in the Phahks series)

Summary: While Mulder fights for his life, the Agents continue their investigation into a frightening, global X-File.

THIS BOOK IS NUMBER Four IN A Four BOOK SERIES BEGINNING WITH "PhaHks".

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PhaHks/Focus/Foldback Synopsis:

Okay, for those of you who haven't or do not want to read the three previous books, let me see if I can bring you a little up to date. :-)

"PHAHKS".

Prologue: In the early fall 1998 (post "FTF" but pre- "The beginning"), Fox Mulder is abducted by unknowns enroute to his mother's and for eight years is never heard from again. Scully copes.

Parts I, II, III & IV: Mulder's abductors turn out to be aliens and for those eight years he is kept as a "companion" by a powerful, alien warrior female called Veexow. Many adventures ensue that cause much MT, angst and situations where the female gets to "know" him quite well! She eventually realises that he can no longer survive the anguishes life with her brings him and she decides to return him to earth.

Epilogue: Mulder is returned to his home eight years after his abduction a broken man. Scully rescues him and things look as if they might get back to normal. NC-17. Sexual content including a "Slash Minute" and violence! *Sounds rather stupid doesn't it? But you'll have to read it to find out for sure. Rememer, Fox Mulder is returned 8 years after his abduction! He is 45 years old and the year is 2006.

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"FOCUS".

Pars I,II,III & IV: Fox Mulder, returned home by his abductors, is teetering on the brink of insanity and mania and must be institutionalized (by Scully) to regain his rational mind. While living in two seperate institutions over the course of fourteen months, Mulder is assaulted in mind and body. Scully faces her own emotional crisis as she sees the man she loves fighting for his life once again because of her committing him to those institutions. Graphic scenes, folks, including angst and rape. This one is not for the kiddies. NC-17 BIG Time! Remember, Fox Mulder is returned home and enters therapy at age 45. 14 months later, he returns to a "normal" life. So he is now about 47 years old!

"FOLDBACK".

Mulder, out of the hospital and ready to face life, heads west to Seattle to "get back on his feet", only to become involved with an X-File that sends him home to D.C. & Scully. The case, destroying what relationship they had built together, never-the-less draws them further and further into it's clutches. The case still unsolved, eventually, they find each other again and things seem to have turned in their favor. (But we know better than that, don't we?) This book concludes with a shocking discovery regarding Mulder. Angst. Sexual content. Violence. A "Slash Minute". Remember! Fox Mulder lives in Seattle about 6 months, so he is 47&1/2 years old when he returns to D.C.!

*THESE STORIES (from PhaHks to Divinities) TAKE PLACE OVER The SPAN of MANY YEARS!

Now,...on to "DIVINITIES":

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Title: "DIVINITIES" (Sequel to "PhaHks/FOCUS/ FOLDBACK")

Author: "GeeLady".(Author's notes appear at end.)

Rating: NC-17. MT/MScR/MAJOR ANGST!, language, violence, disturbing scenes, adult situations.

Spoilers: "FOCUS/FOLDBACK" by GVBW. Various X-Files episodes' & FF.

THANK-YOU's: I thank this Mulder/Torture Site maintained by SMILEY! (Everything else I did on my own). This story is free for archiving anywhere with my full permission and gratitude. But please let me know where so I can brag.

Disclaimer: The X-Files series, movie, characters, are the property of Chris Carter, Ten Thirteen Productions and the Fox Network. I don't want any credit, fame or fortune from X-Files, I only want to write about your show and characters to entertain myself and others.

This story is fictitious. If there appear to be people bearing any resemblance to actual persons, it is by COINCIDENCE ONLY.

I drool stupidly for feedback. [email protected] or [email protected]

Summary: While Mulder fights for his life, the Agents continue their investigation into a frightening, global X-File.

THIS BOOK IS NUMBER Four IN A Four BOOK SERIES BEGINNING WITH "PhaHks". *THESE STORIES (from PhaHks to Divinities) TAKE PLACE OVER The SPAN of MANY YEARS!

"DIVINITIES"

We shall be fold back unto ourselves. Returning to that which sent us forth. The Divine. The Unblemished Way. We shall become as children with no memories.

(Excerpt from: A Composite of Scripture In the Manner of Songs" GVBW.)

DIVINITIES

The double doors to Skinner's office burst open when a storm hit in the kinetic violence of Dana Scully. She strode in and paused on shifting feet when she saw Director Skinner was not alone but just in the movements of dismissing another agent.

By the time the doors closed after the retreating co-worker, the sails were full set again and she stopped just short of slamming into his desk.

"Look!" She said in a voice tight with terrified fury, throwing a manila folder on his desk with such force, the contents slid across its length, some falling off the other end.

Skinner, putting aside for a moment her tempest-like entry, looked down. Paperwork with chemical equations written in her educated hand. X-ray films. He picked up one of the latter.

"What am I looking at?" The one he was holding showed the typical eerie sight of a human's radiated skull.

But dead-center was a white, opaque mass that looked - for no better description fit - like a tiny, multi fingered hand, "digits" stretching back and down as though reaching to embrace the spine.

"That's Mulder's x-ray your seeing. He's dying."

Skinner looked up and dead serious Scully looked back. "What are you talking about? How is it he's dying? Why?"

Scully picked up a second X-Ray and waved it like a sword. "Because of that Smoking son-of-a-bitch! That bastard has done this to him!"

"You don't know that."

"I believe that. Because that's his style. It's just like him to give something and then take it right back!"

Skinner cleared his throat.

Emily.

Now Mulder.

"Do you think they, as in"They" are the ones responsible for his eight year abduction? Does Mulder?"

"Mulder is over at Mercy Hospital getting "treatment". But there is no treatment. Do you hear me? This," she waved the film in the air, "is ENMS. Emily Sim's Neuro-Morphoses Syndrome, known otherwise as The Nemesis. Emily's Disease. She was the signature case, my daughter. The primary patient. Ground Zero! The same thing that Emily had - the _thing_ that killed her is growing inside Mulder's brain. There is no effective treatment. Do you understand? No treatment! No cure!" She threw the film aside, not caring where it littered.

Skinner had nothing to say to fill the dead silence that followed, excepting, "How did he contract it?"

"The "fingerprint". It must have been that. However they did it, however they manufactured it, in whatever method Mulder received it or from whom, it is my belief that it mutated inside his own DNA. It "piggy-backed" using his genetic code.

"During his abduction, or the time he was exposed to the Black Oil in Russia or the Retro virus, or some goddamn thing that they did to him, until now it's been hiding, maybe mutating all this time. Now it's using his own code; it's copying his tissues at the molecular level and then like a parasite, manipulating them to do it's bidding. It's growing a copy of itself inside him, living off him!"

"Is that the theory of the other physicians also?"

Scully looked down as if the combined knowledge of the knaves known as "specialists" was a collective joke. "The "doctors" have no idea in _hell_ what it is, sir." She explained. "And it is immaterial to me how this was accomplished. Or why. I will not accept this from them. I _do_ not."

Skinner didn't offer comment on that last. Refusing what was evident were words easily said, but often there were no choices otherwise.

Eventually you accepted what the universe threw at you because you couldn't hop a train to anywhere else.

"What do you want from me?"

"One month ago, I came to you and requested the reopening of the X-Files Division. I'm now asking you again. NOW, in the face of _this_, will you reopen them?"

Skinner sat down, slumping over on his desk. "How is that going to help Mulder? He's ill so he's pretty much restricted to desk duty no matter what. He'd have a note on his jacket and wouldn't be permitted to carry a weapon. So, will you enlighten me, how would the reopening of the X-Files Division help Mulder?"

"If I'm right about this - about where this disease comes from and from who, the answers may lie within those files."

"Most of those files are ashes, Agent Scully. Has it ever occur ed to you that Mulder IS where he is because of getting involved with the X-Files to begin with?"

Scully wanted to laugh but inside was hysteria, not humor.

"Yes, I have. But it's a chance and if it means Mulder's life, I'll take that chance. We're already partners so all you have to do is to assign me as the X-Files Division head and complete Mulder's transfer. I'll do the rest."

Skinner gathered the papers and films back into the folder, retrieving the ones that had tumbled to the floor. "Are you sure about his, Scully?"

"Up to this point? I've never been more sure of anything in my life." She took her file and headed for the exit. Skinner followed. "Agent Scully, a moment more if you please."

She stopped, waiting by the door.

Skinner stood close. Real close and leaned over to speak, his breath hitting her cheek somewhere between her ear and her chin. His words were clearly and softly said but as hard as granite.

"Putting aside for a second how I feel about you, if you ever burst into my office that way again, I'll have you snapped back to Protective Services and you'll spend the rest of your career guarding the former President's tomcat!"

Scully flushed. "Yes, sir," she said aware that her breath was falling on his skin and mingling with his particular scent. "I apologize. It won't happen again."

Skinner looked at her eyes now and seeing she meant it, he exhaled, satisfied. "I'm sorry about Mulder." He gave her cheek a chaste peck.

Voice wavering for just a second. "I-I know. Thank you, Sir."

Skinner pulled a set of keys out of his pocket. "Here. Meet me at my car, you know the spot. I'm going to accompany you back to the hospital. Dismissed."

Taking the keys, Scully said:

"Yes, sir."

En route to Mercy General, Infectious Isolation Ward. Skinner's car:

Scully cursed herself and her lack of influencing power over Mulder's actions or those unanticipated events that seemed ever determined to come against him.

"I shouldn't have let him go to Seattle; go off to prove to himself to me that he's worthwhile or prove whatever to people who don't give a damn about him."

Skinner maneuvered the car through afternoon traffic. "Mulder cannot sit on his ass, Scully. Nothing would have kept him at home drinking warm milk and waiting. Even if you had known, he still would have gone." Skinner understood Mulder's reasons for his exit west, things that Scully perhaps did not, but it was best, he decided, to leave them unspoken.

"Maybe. But those first months might have been the crucial time, for treatment and for blocking the growth of this thing, or maybe even reversing it. Now those months are gone."

"How much time does he have?"

"From the time of Emily's diagnosis to her death, it was just under two months." Mulder is an adult, he's stronger, his system less quickly compromised...they're not sure."

Skinner shook his head, turned into Visitor's Parking at Mercy.

Mulder had looked bad upon his return from Seattle, but Skinner had put it down to what they all had: stress. And the knowledge that Mulder was less than year out of long-term psychotherapy. Skinner'd thought Mulder's thin, white face and pinched features in the Men's Room that day was Mulder-Standing-At-The-Edge-And- Thinking-About-It, "IT" being a swan dive into mental chaos, lithium pills and just another patient with a sad history.

Body sickness, plain and simple, had never crossed his mind.

Scully had assured him the doctors were consulting together and, with her input, would formulate of some kind of short-term care. That meant treating the symptoms but not the disease.

Scully mentioned "pain management", "blood pressure and over all physical state monitoring". "For a time".

Skinner took that as an indication that all three conditions would need constant watching. He assumed Scully would make herself the overseer in that regard, and in a day or so Mulder would be released into her care. With his approval, Mulder would also assume limited duties as Scully's assistant on the X-Files.

For Mulder, it was still a step up from the previous year.

Scully spoke:

"I'm going to stay with him in the hospital this afternoon. They think he'll be ready to come home tomorrow or maybe the day after, after we've devised a treatment program. We're already consulting together on one. He'll be able to lead a fairly normal life, however long or short it turns out to be."

"And they don't know for how long? Can you guess?"

Scully fumbled with the words. "With Emily, her- she lasted less than two months from diagnosis to death. Mulder's an adult, he's strong - well, relatively - though right now he's in a weakened state due to...recent events. He'll survive longer they think. With proper treatment, if he takes care at not over exerting himself."

A losing bet if ever there was one, Skinner thought.

"...and vigorous antiviral programs, if it was the retro-virus that even caused this..."

"Did it?"

"Who knows?" Scully knew she did not sound like herself and straightened mental shoulders, "We don't know. He was missing for eight years and according to him, he was ill part of that time but he just doesn't remember how or why, so..."

"So what is the prognosis for him being able to continue working?"

"As I said, if we follow the treatments, if _he_ does, maybe a f-few months."

Skinner heard the catch in her voice. She'd already outlined for him how those symptoms would develop and the underlying physical changes causing them. The bile was still in his throat, refusing to budge.

Mystery illness and who would it find to get cozy with but Mulder? A god awful way to die, prolonged agony (that in its last hours eluded all the strongest morphine manufactured) would be the last call before multiple aneurism, bleeding out and death.

Skinner was not a religious man but he wondered if whatever gods were exorcizing their will had somewhere along the line taken a good long look at Mulder and given an unanimous thumbs down.

The first thing Skinner did after dropping Scully off back at Mercy General was expedite the paperwork regarding Scully's reassignment and Mulder's transfer.

The first thing Scully did after consulting with Mulder's doctors regarding his general state and conditional release from the hospital was call the Bureau and arrange to have an old, empty filing cabinet removed and enough space made for a second desk. Next was to have them place two names on the door and two nameplates made, one for each agent.

She felt that it was the least they - the Bureau - could do. Mulder wanted to work on the God's Children case and they were allowing him to. In her opinion, they owed him that much. Was his illness related in any way to it or was someone getting their rocks off watching him suffer? A nicotine stained fingered old prick came to mind as that possible someone.

Tomorrow night she would bring Mulder home from the hospital, or maybe the next night, and they'd have one evening's peace before it all began, before the case.

Then, together they would delve earnestly into its murky depths while she kept careful guard over him as he began not only this quest for an answer but his unstoppable slide into the horror chambers of ENMS.

In her nightmares, Emily screamed up at her from that place. Emily, her disfiguring and mutating body pulsing with pain, had suffered an agony only the most potent drugs had eased. Emily, her innocent angel child.

Scully's hands shook as she remembered the day, hour and minute that Emily had slipped from her. Her eyes teared at the thought of Mulder's words to her:

"No matter how much you love this little girl, she was never meant to be."

How those words had cut her. How she had rebelled against them and how she had turned cold and hard when he later offered her a shoulder of support. Though it may have welled up from her emotionally irrational center, her feeling soul that had ceased to feel, she'd needed to hurt him back because in her rational mind the very fact of Emily's existence supported the rightfulness of it. She may have been brought into the world in a bastardized way and for a perverted purpose, but once here, she'd had every right to stay.

For some reason Scully couldn't fathom, Mulder had not understood that basic universal truth.

Scully remembered with sadness Mulder's confusion at her sudden coolness toward him. Coolness for a long time. She had not told him so, but after Emily's death, for a time she had seriously considered quitting the Bureau.

In retrospect she was glad she had not.

"Not meant to be.", whatever that meant, had not been true with Emily then, and certainly not with Mulder now.

He had two months, perhaps three. Not enough time to finish what they had started, but enough time, perhaps, to find an answer.

ENMS.

It explained so much.

Mulder's intolerance to changes in air pressure and altitude, therefor his physical distress in the elevator (the only incident about which she was personally aware), and his fainting.

It explained why he had not flown back to D.C. but had chosen instead to drive the entire five thousand miles.

To Scully that said his condition had been developing slowly over the previous year. A year in which something could have been done had she not been so negligent - and stupid - in not getting him to specialist after specialist until the spurious DNA "fingerprint" could be identified and dealt with.

It explained the pain in his abdomen that worsened when under stress, the stress increasing heart rate, the heart pumping faster, heightening his blood pressure, the arteries then expanding and contracting, straining, forcing his blood through cranial and upper body canals that were slowly thickening and growing more ridged with each passing day and stretching and weakening his lower body vessels until a kind of body wide migraine resulted, the worst effect - the feeling of intense pressure in his abdomen as if something were trying to be birthed from the stomach up through and out the gullet.

It explained his headaches, the weakness and malnutrition that was not simply the result of poor eating because of a specific type of hernia that he had suffered for the years since his return, but of what was happening deep in his body and brain tissue.

It explained so much except what to do next.

ENMS was insidious, progressive and ultimately incurable. Mulder was dying and whether it took six weeks, six months or longer, she was helpless to prevent it.

The problem was, no one really knew what ENMS was. They, the specialists with whom they'd thus far consulted, knew what it did. That is, they knew what _Emily's_ ENMS had done to Emily.

They really didn't know what Mulder's was going to do to him, although they had an idea.

In fact, Scully had read the few articles and research reports that had been done on this brand new disease (it's origin one that only she, Mulder and a few others held any accurate suspicions about), that manifested itself in such bizarre, painful and debilitating ways.

Scully had taken notes from those journals and read them over and over to herself while she watched Mulder sleep.

Scully visited the hospital, for hours at a time, the list wrinkled and damp from being held in her clenched fist, her eyes never leaving his face, her heart barely beating in time to anything that was earthly or real.

Simple living and hope seemed as remote from that hospital room as Satan was from being seized with a change of heart and crawling on bleeding knees to Saint Peter.

//"ENMS (Emily's Neuro-Morphing Syndrome): A mutative disorder characterized by a systematic cellular metamorphoses in the central and peripheral nervous system and/or arterioscleroses but without the causal buildup of plaque (the arteries instead becoming tunicated within a sclerechymatous skeleton manifesting crystalline characteristics or calcerated walls).

//"Although ENMS displays some symptoms similar to GBS and CDIP, it is believed that ENMS (originating within the reticular formation in the brain stem), is a spontaneous, mutative and progressive disease that may or may not also have an outside causal factor; virus or trauma not being excluded."//

Scully had read that and more. So much more. And she remembered Emily's face as the agony would overcome her and she would cry and beg her mommy to make it stop.

//"The symptoms of ENMS are varied but generally follow as: Progressive tunication of the arteries and smaller vessels, and all neurofibrotic tissue, causing pain that spreads first to the neck and torso and, finally in the later stages of the disease, the limbs and extremities. Due to the calcareous encasement of first the larger blood vessels, the vascular system is put under such pressure in the lower body and limbs that multiple aneurism occur, resulting in internally bleeding out. The same sclerechymatic involvement of the central and peripheral nervous system result in first tingling, extreme pain and, finally, loss of feeling and coordination throughout the body of the patient.

//"Eventually, foreign material from the invading tissues pollute the blood until the liver and kidneys reach toxicity. At this stage, ENMS becomes fatal."//

Scully shifted in her chair.

Mulder's oxygen mask fogged and cleared as his sleeping breaths came and went. His in and exhales and the beeping of the machinery around them was a steady, comforting music that tore holes in her heart.

//"Tunication of the arteries"//...

Scully felt the room spin.

//"Calcareous encasement"//...

It was cold and quiet.

//"multiple aneurism"//...

She felt as heavy as lead within its chilly air.

//"bleeding out"//...

Nurses came and went.

//"tingling, extreme pain,...loss of feeling,...toxicity"//...

Mulder slept peacefully.

//"...it is...fatal."//

Scully had read it over and over, understood it and knew that, other than the terrible ordeal ahead of her friend and partner, it told them essentially nothing.

The summation of the report, several pages of doctor-speak, could in fact have been written with three short sentences: "We don't know what causes it. We don't have any long term treatments. There is no cure."

Mulder lay sleeping on the single bed, sparkling white sheets under and over him, as yet unaware of his own condition. It would be her job, she'd insisted to the attending specialist, to inform him.

She still could hardly believe it herself.

Finally, Mulder stirred and opened squinting eyes on a bright, white room.

Scully quickly drew the curtains on the sunshine pouring through the window. She turned, "Hey."

Disoriented only for a few seconds, he looked okay. In fact, he looked fine. "Hey. I'm still here?"

Scully gulped down the sickening lump in her throat and swore she could feel it sliding down. "If you mean are you still in the hospital, yes."

Mulder looked at her and nodded. Smiled for her and she wanted, not to smile back but scream bloody, burning hell. She smoothed the sheets over him, straightening the creases. "Mulder-"

"-I know, Scully. Watts told me."

She sucked a quick breath, feeling betrayed and relieved too. She'd wondered if Watts would decide to ignore her request and inform Mulder of his condition himself. It certainly wasn't standard for a friend or family member to do so, medical background or not. "Oh, Watts told you?"

"Um-hmm."

She nodded, suddenly finding she was without courage and couldn't look at him at all. She didn't want to see his handsome normal face while holding the knowledge that it would not remain that way but slowly become distorted and drawn tight by pain and weakness.

But, in this, he would not allow her to evade him and lifted her chin to look at her, forcing her to look back.

And that was, as always, her breaking point; his gentle hand on her, lifting her up; his compassionate eyes upon her, wanting to share in whatever she was feeling, and she began to cry with those long, endless tears, clinging to him, hiding her face away in his hair and the curve of his shoulder.

He continued to hold her tightly. "Looks like I've got us into another fine mess!" He joked in a Laurel/Hardy-ish mock.

It made her giggle just a little, in between sucking heaves and more tears. "You make me crazy. How can you joke?" she asked, her voice muffled by his skin and gown but knowing the answer. It was often how he coped with fear.

Scully raised her head and looked at him, long and hard. "You're...you've got ENMS, Mulder."

"I know, I know." He held onto her hand, so tiny, he noticed not for the first time, in his large one. "We'll work something out."

Mimicking,"work something out."? "Mulder, you're not late with the rent payment. This is ENMS, a debilitating disease." One or two tears still fell but the un- controllable storm of grief for now had passed. "What are we going to do?"

He looked around. "Well, first of all, we get me out of here. Then, while I'm being a good boy and taking all my medication and obeying all those annoying "recovery restrictions" I know the good Doctor Watts and _you_ are going to outline for me, we continue with the case."

Scully blinked. Stared. "The case?? Mulder, to hell with the case. You're sick. That's what we should focus on, finding a cure or some sort of treatment that will work."

He brought her hand up to his lips. "Scully. Right now I feel pretty okay, and what's stopping us from doing both? I can still do research and some limited field work, can't I? Let's get to work."

Exasperated, "Mulder-"

"-Scully. Let me look for my answers," he held her hand tighter, "while I still have time."

She rubbed fingers, nodded. Understood. "Okay."

Compliance.

For now.

Three days later:

The first thing Mulder knew (stable-for-now and released from the hospital) was to find himself sitting at his new desk in his old basement office, reading "Fox Mulder" on a pewter name plate and staring across at Scully, his new Division Head. He had Level 12, though "medically restricted" status. The same level (minus the restrictions) that Scully had achieved after five years under him.

Two days back in the basement and his head was still spinning.

Scully had done this for him. Taken him home, taken him in. Doled out his medication to him every morning. En route they'd (she driving because it was no longer legal for him to), stopped at Heavenly Hole and gotten extra large coffee's and donuts by his insistence. He was sick of hospital food and besides, he made a solemn promise that it would be the last unhealthy liquid or solids to pass his lips as long as he was sick.

Now, in his new and polished swivel chair, he kept looking at her over the top of his computer screen.

Strong, intelligent, goddamn beautiful female!

Sitting there opposite him in three inch heels, chewing on a pencil and yawning sat, he was certain, the future Director of the F.B.I..

Skinner parked in front of her building, sitting a moment before entering and buzzing her apartment. It was a place had been before but not enough times to feel at home or even comfortable.

Scully answered and let him in.

"Here's his old work file, restriction orders, new badge number. It's all there."

He could have waited until Monday and given it to Mulder himself.

"Come in, sir." Scully ushered and closed the door after him, gesturing to a comfortable looking chair. One built for curling legs under and reading.

He sat, not removing his coat. "Is something wrong, Scully?"

She sat opposite him, "No. Other than..."

Than Mulder's dying, Skinner finished in his head.

She took an envelope off her coffee table and handed it to him. "I just thought that since you're here, I'd give this to you today instead of Monday. It's the treatment regime we concocted. Medication, activity restrictions, my recommendations as to filed assignments, daily hours,...for Mulder."

Skinner emptied it and glanced through the medical terminology. Over his career, he'd learned to glean basic information from sometimes incomprehensible scientific language.

"This is a strict regime. Are you sure you can implement all this with him?"

"We'll do everything there is to do."

"He may not be willing to endure the regime of treatment outlined here. We both know Mulder - he'll balk at the first sign of being smothered."

"I'll convince him."

"And if he says no, will you force him?"

"That's not fair."

"If I understand it, you still have power of attorney over Mulder if he is incapacitated, either physically or mentally. Are you going to defy his wishes if he refuses some of this treatment?"

"The treatment could help him."

Skinner looked beyond Scully to the bedroom, where Mulder would be spending his nights beside her. Making love? Touching her, at least. (He'd never seen her bedroom).

"And what about when the symptoms get to be too much and hospitalization is needed? Will you force him then?"

"If necessary. If it comes to that, it'll be for his own good."

"It's not me you have to convince. Let him have the dignity to make his own decision, Scully. From what you've told me and from what I'm reading here, it _will_ come to that."

"If it gives him a little more time to seek an answer, then he will agree."

"And if it gives you just one more day, you don't care why he agrees, as long as he does, do you?"

She was truck dumb by his words. Impacting her mind like a tanker truck because they were undeniable.

No, no she didn't.

He eased off. "What can be done, in the later stages? Surgery? Like with me? The Lazer treatments?"

Walter Skinner was a practical man. If there was a possible solution, seek it out. If there was a course of action to be taken, take it. If a question could be asked, an answer should be forthcoming.

"Yes, we've already discussed Lazer surgery to weaken the sclerenchymatous walls, but there is the risk that it could weaken the blood vessels themselves. In any event, surgery will only prolong his life, it is in no way a cure in this case."

Scully was also a practical woman, and a woman of science. But she was a woman who had seen things that defied laws of time and space again and again, though never admitting as much to herself or to her partner who was now possessed by something unnatural, at least unnatural to what she knew of time and space.

People don't change into something else.

But something, something perhaps alien, was changing inside Mulder. More than that, it was changing _him_, and in the processes occurring within his body, he himself would eventually become the instrument of his own death. "We can make him comfortable as long as possible..." She added with finality that made Skinner wince.

He heard the unmistakable dead ending in the phrase. "Is there anything I can do, for you or him?"

"Let him keep working as long as possible. Let him find an answer, if there is one." She seemed tired to death of saying it. Skinner did not think she believed in answers any longer.

"All right."

Scully thought to spend the rest of her Saturday alone in her apartment.

Tomorrow she would bring Mulder back here and they would resume "living" together. Working. Maybe loving?

She didn't know and she was afraid to find out.

"Any exertion beyond walking on the level is to be avoided." Watts had said and she had concurred, knowing the risks to him physically. Cardiovascular pressure,...aneurizms somewhere down the line,..bleeding out and death.

She and Mulder had melded for a few perfect hours. For the first time in their lives they'd been physically intimate with each other and she had never felt happier at any time in her memory. Two wonderful days together drinking each other in, even being so gloriously selfish as thinking about nothing but their own wants and feeling so foolishly optimistic as talking about their future and how they would share it and where.

Now, it, once again, had been ripped away like burnt skin. She felt no more like Dana Scully but Dana Scully's corpse.

Loving someone meant touching them, making love _to_ them, and she would never be able to touch Mulder again for fear of hurting him, causing the sickness to worsen and take him from her sooner than she could stand. And as it stood right now, the exit date was killing her.

Scully washed dishes that she had left piled high. Food stuck to the plates like concrete and she had to scrub. One was old spaghetti in a pot and some had burned to the bottom. She scrubbed, making little headway against the sinewy pasta adhering to the glass bottomed boiler. Hard, curled blackened worms under her fingers refused to move until finally, with a scream of rage, she flung the entire mess at the kitchen wall behind her, breaking it into a hundred pieces.

She had hoped the breaking the pot would assist her, help her begin the mourning of her ruined hope and his perfect and loving life, the depths of which she had only just discovered in the exploration of his warm flesh.

But it did not do that.

Instead, it was just a broken pot that she would have to clean up.

She would never be able to make love to him from now until death did part him from her. She swept the shattered glass into a pile, and then into the dustpan, ready for the wastebin.

Hand hovering over the bin, Scully hesitated. Something held her back and she dumped them instead into a brown paper bag and left her apartment.

Two hours later, she entered Mulder's tiny bachelor suite, bag in hand.

Locating a plastic bowl, she filled it with lukewarm water from the tap and with Mulder's tiny fishnet, scooped out his fish from his bubbling tank into the plastic bowl to preserve them alive while she completed her task.

Scully opened the bag over the tank and let the pebble-sized yellow glass pieces, now ground smooth like marbles, fall to the bottom of he tank and spread out. She arranged them a little, smoothing them over the bottom, corner to corner. In the dim light of his sole table lamp, they glowed eerily, as if lit from within like pacific shrimp.

She replaced the fish and they swam contented.

A course was set and she'd go. Willingly and no matter what.

Somehow, Mulder would survive and even if he didn't and she was forbidden to touch him as a lover should, she would hold his head in her hands. If tiny kisses placed upon his hair and temples, if the overwhelming love for him about which she now had no doubts; if any of these things had the power to decapitate this monster emerging from his cells, she would bestow them forever.

And if they proved to be powerless, she would give them still and slap it's hateful face.

God's Children Investigation. Case # 21, Virginia. **

Scully peeled off her fourth pair of latex gloves and tossed them in the white, sterile bag she'd been carrying from room to room.

Mulder was off questioning the workers, leaving her to examine the dead.

In this case - five dead staff and one dead child. He, seven years old, at a cursory glance appeared to be sleeping, curled up on his side dressed in red pajamas with little rocket ships on them.

He should be in his own bedroom in a nice house somewhere watching Saturday morning cartoons and eating Coco-Crunchies, Scully thought. Instead he was lying in an isolation room bed in a State Care Center, his heart no longer beating.

Dead without cause, that's what she would find, just like all the others. Disturbing his flesh by an invasive autopsy right now seemed barbaric thing to her. There remained little doubt in her mind that they would discover nothing new.

Mulder was making his way to her passed the uniforms and apron clothed forensic team.

"How's it going?" When she didn't answer right away, Mulder placed a hand on her shoulder. "Are you all right?"

Scully shook herself from her introspection and straightened, taking the opportunity to stretch. "Yes, I'm just tired of seeing dead children, especially these dead children. I'm just - I'm at a loss, and I think so is everyone."

A sympathetic nod. "This one went down almost in plain view of seven other staff members. You feel up to hearing the details?"

She nodded and they moved away from the crime photographers and the rest of the still living who walked to and fro.

"In a nut shell, three armed, masked figures, we'll assume males, walked in the front door, took the stairs to this ward, shot four of the staff in the usual way." Mulder gestured to the door where beyond lay wards of now empty junior sized beds. "None of the other children were killed."

"Why the difference with this one? At all the other crime scenes, all of the adults and children were murdered by shooting except for the mystery child, the one who is found dead without cause." Scully still saw the little fellow and wondered what had happened in his so unfairly short life that had first brought him to a State run child care institution. Had he a mother once?

"I've been thinking about that and the difference in this case is _this_ little boy was being kept isolated. I'm wondering why."

"Maybe they felt they didn't need to kill everyone in the building if it was the boy they were after."

"But it still doesn't make sense. Why _not_ murder the other children _this_ time? Why not kill all the staff in the Center? Why only those staff working in this ward?"

Scully shook her head as if to dispel a headache. "The children are the key, Mulder. These dead for unknown reasons children, I'm positive."

"Three of the dead staff members were also infected with the Black Oil, Marchbank said you were taking samples. He didn't say of what."

Scully nodded. "I didn't tell him. He's just on loan from Quantico. There's so many bodies..."

Mulder noticed how tired she looked. The whole thing was straining her, stretching whatever reserves she had left after her worrying constantly after him. "If you're finished your examinations, do you want to take a break, Scully? I'll finish up here."

She shook her head. "This Black Oil, whatever it is, whatever it does, I think it's a secondary element in whatever is going on. Even if this is some deep, dark conspiracy with aliens on the one side and CancerMan on the other, and the kids somewhere in the middle playing some pivotal role, still these children should not be dead. They are the primer to the entire equation."

"I think you're right, but without some idea about why these kids are being killed and why they are being killed the way they are being killed, I can't even speculate beyond some fantastic religiously motivated cult murders. And even if these murders were the ritual of some new Millennium Feak-Out Group, why aren't they letting the world know? Why aren't they "enlightening" the rest of us about their reasons and convictions that what they are doing is necessary and "right" in the eyes of their god?"

"What about the faceless men? Maybe these are...I hate to say it, I hate even admitting I'm considering the possibility of it, but maybe these killers are the Rebels. Maybe they're killing off those infected with the Black Oil and these children are the reason.

"Nearly all the murdered adults thus far have been the guardians of the children. Up until now, in each case it was parents or legal guardians but this time, it was here, a correctional youth facility, an orphanage. That dead little boy in there had no parents but for the staff who worked here." Exasperated, Scully tied up her bag of soiled gloves and tossed them aside for the clean up crew to later remove.

Mulder smiled at her and it was only after a moment that she noticed. "Alien Rebels? Scully, you're turning me on big time."

She allowed herself the luxury to return a small grin. "What about the surveillance cameras - anything?"

"Funny you should mention that. They recorded the whole thing, that is, the cameras were functioning, but what we saw when we played it back was ten minutes of static."

Scully raised her eyebrows.

Scully raised her eyebrows.

"Is this a File or what?" Muddling through what she'd said before, "That brings us to another question. What is so special about these kids that anyone - Smokey, the Rebels - whoever, felt they needed to be watched over? I don't think we're going to find the answer to that until we can find one who is still alive."

"How do we do that, Mulder. We have no idea who we're looking for. These children were from all walks of life. Different social and economic backgrounds. Different continents. How in hell do we target the next hit?"

He sighed heavily and was aware of Scully's eyes suddenly watching him. "I'm all right, Scully."

"You may feel okay right now, Mulder, but you're far from all right."

He took her arm. "Scully, don't strain your neck looking after me every minute. I appreciate it but it's going to make it hard for me to do my job. You're not exactly tip-op yourself right now."

"Thanks a lot."

"You know what I mean."

"As long as you're honest with me, Mulder, when you _do_ begin to feel worse, then I'll tell you when I'm ready to call it a day."

"Done deal."

"In the meantim-" Scully's cellular chirped for attention. She pulled it out, "Scully."

Mulder waited patiently for her to finish her call.

Her face was scrunching up by the time she'd ended the call. "Uh, look, Mulder, I have to go back to Quantico, something to do with some mix up with samples or something..."

He watched her eyes look everywhere but at him. "Okay. See you back here in what, a couple hours?"

"Let me call you." She smiled once and hurried off, leaving Mulder watching after her. Dana Scully was not a liar, not even white lies, not even if being completely honest meant hurt feelings, but he had just had the distinct impression that Scully had out and out bullshitted him.

"Agent Mulder." Someone needed his attention and he was forced to delegate any more speculation to a back burner for the time being.

Scully put her explorer in Park and climbed out. The visitor's parking lot was surrounded by trees and groomed pathways, all leading down to artificial pools of leaf-covered water. A few ducks paddled through the leaves, making little pathways of their own.

Scully found a bench and sat, waiting for the subject of her odd phone call.

In only a moment or two, he sat down beside her. He must have walked up from behind.

"Thank you for coming," he said in greeting.

Scully turned to face a stranger. "Who are you?"

"My name isn't important, what I have to tell you is." At first glance, she would have labeled him as a crazy old man.

He was old, though she suspected that he appeared older than his actual years. A lot of fine, white hair brushed straight back from his forehead surrounding a face so lined and wrinkled, it was as though an artist had carved it from an ancient block of oak. Imbedded within those lines and wear was two intelligent, watchful eyes that peered out upon her and the world with decades of accumulated knowledge of good things and bad. He had a thin wide, mouth put there by hard experience.

Scully speculated that those eyes and that face had perhaps taken in far, far too much of the harsh side of life and when he spoke, the sound of his voice reminded her of the winter wind that moves through naked tree branches with icey puffs on its way to an empty place. A take it or leave it voice. Soft. Bleak.

"What do you have to tell me that you couldn't tell me over the phone." She asked.

He didn't answer directly, something that, she was soon to learn, was a trademark of his personality. "You're working on the God's Children case." He began.

She nodded. "Yes. And my partner, Agent Mulder."

He nodded back.

"That's common knowledge," she stated, "it's in all the papers."

He stared directly into her eyes for a few seconds and then turned away to look out over the duck pond.

It disconcerted her. Maybe he _was_ just a crazy old man?

"I used to be involved with some people." He began as if reciting from a written confession spoken for the first time. "Those people, I believe, have taken a great interest in these "God's Children". "

"Who were these people?"

"_Are_. They _are_ a radical religious group who think that their beliefs, their interpretation of the future is the correct one."

"That's true of most religious groups."

"This group plans, in fact I believe they have begun implementing those plans, a plan to write the future. Or to help God do so."

"Are you saying this group of yours-"

"-NOT my group. I left years ago when I began to learn what they really are."

"You're saying this "group" are responsible for the murders of those family's and the deaths of the "God's children"?"

"It is possible they have taken an interest in these kids, yes. As for being the killing force, I have no proof, just speculation."

He rubbed hands together and watched the ducks. "It is also possible that this group was responsible for your recent abduction."

Scully was shocked but it passed instantly when a most logical connection clicked in her mind. "Because I'm on the case?"

"It does follow. If they are somehow involved with the deaths of these kids, and they know you are on the case, it would suit their interests to exert influence; to keep the power in their hands; to control it."

"What power? It wasn't me they were interested in, they-"

"I know. It's your partner, Fox Mulder."

"What do you know about these people? Why did they want Mulder off the case? Why the threats? Why, if they're interested in these children as you believe, would they want to prevent us from finding a way to save them?"

He turned to look at her and his eyes lent an almost physical weight to his next words. "Where were you when the North West Outbreak was occurring?"

Scully thought for a second. "I, we, my parner and I, were in Antartica actually."

He didn't even blink. "I was living in Seattle with my wife and daughter. My wife died of it. My daughter and I were immunized."

"But how was that possible? There was no immunization, at least not at that time."

"They" - the group - provided immunization for me without my knowledge. You may think they were doing us a favor but it was all about wanting control over us. Over me. Power and the exerting of that power to bring about their own ends.

"A short time after the death of my wife, I left the group. When my daughter turned twelve I sent her to live in the East in a location and with people I will never reveal to anyone. I'll die before I'll divulge her whereabouts. I wouldn't let them control me or my family. You could say they were not pleased with my lack of appreciation, they probably thought I should have been eternally grateful that they had spared me. It was only through a good friend that my daughter's life was saved at all. That friend paid for her generosity to them and to me with her sanity and freedom.

"These people are dangerous, Agent Scully. They have representatives that span the nations. They have men and women in positions of wealth and power that allow them near immunity from justice under any human law, and they are very, very focused on reaching their goal. To emphasize to you just how dangerous they are, then believe me when I tell you that they are responsible for the North West Outbreak."

Scully stared. "Hundreds of thousands died in that outbreak."

"I could tell you how I know that, but none of it can be proved. It's the truth. An engineered Prion virus that kills within minutes. It was all part of their goal maybe. Rid the earth of evil, "prepare the way", I don't know. I don't know."

"You still haven't told me what that goal is."

"I"m almost certain these kids are the key..."

Scully gave a start when she heard, so soon, her own words echoed back to her from that windswept voice,

"...to their "vision" and that they believe these kids, these "God's children" are not ordinary children. I'm positive they think these children are supernatural. Divine. Humans with a destiny beyond this earth."

Scully absorbed every word and her scientific and spiritual sides battled with each other. "If that is so, why are the children's families being killed? Why murder the children themselves?! Don't they fear God's wrath for committing such heinous crimes? Acts that directly violate his laws?"

"As I said, they believe they are _doing_ God's work. They think they are his instrument for some Holy Future; their vision of it I suppose you could say."

"So the warning to me to keep Mulder away was to protect their interests? Mulder is a supporter of the supernatural, he believes in things beyond this world, though not necessarily deities."

"Ever since I was a profiler for the F.B.I., I've been watching Agent Mulder, not as a spy or with some hidden agenda, but just out of curiosity. He's brilliant. He's focused and he pursues his passions with everything he is. I think others have been watching him as well, this "group" included. Agent Scully, they believe that Fox Mulder is a kind of prophet, one who preaches against, if you will, the common, accepted picture the governments paint for their subjects."

"Look, whoever you are, you talk in neat little circles. They think Mulder is a prophet so I assume that means they want him alive and unharmed, yet I was threatened with his death if I did not keep him from pursuing the case we're currently on. Do they value him or do they want him dead? It can't be both."

"Ever read your bible, Agent Scully."

"Yes."

"A prophet is not dishonored, except in his own territory". He quoted. Agent Mulder was a welcome and unexpected consort to them and their agenda for years, but now Agent Mulder is looking to finding out not only how the children are dying, but who's killing them and he wants the killings to stop. If there is one thing all scriptures preach, it's that a holy one does not become a spirit until first its body suffers death. Agent Mulder alive is a holy thing. Agent Mulder dead is still holy but out of the way. Don't think they would not carry out their threat."

"So, they've tolerated, in fact applauded, Mulder's work until now, but now they want him shut down?"

He touched her arm, just the lightest touch, but she saw his eyes go dark and clouded for that second. They became pools of black water swirling with images of her own face and the face of another Agent not present but accounted for.

She sucked a quick breath and pulled her arm away.

The old man's face had fallen. "I am sorry,...I didn't realize that they had already..." He didn't finish his thought.

"What?" She stared back, knowing yet not knowing what he was talking about.

"I didn't realize," he said

Scully swallowed. He knew. Somehow he knew, about Mulder, the fact of his ENMS, something no one but no one knew outside the doctors, Skinner and herself.

"They..? They did this?" This new mystery group? They had done this to Mulder? She suddenly had fantasies of tracking down each and every last member, placing her gun against their temples and pulling the trigger.

As if reading her very thoughts, "I don't know for sure, but it is a possibility." Crazy Man said.

"The doctors are hopeful." Pointless to lie to him but she did so anyway.

Yet, Scully believed him - this wrinkled crazy old man- speaking to her of "Them" and "The Group", as casually as Mulder had often done of "Cancerman" and Cancerman's behind the scenes "Them" and "They".

Scully stared into Crazy Man's eyes, now warmed over with sadness for her and for her dying partner, and believed beyond a grain of doubt that he was telling her the truth; that these people were dangerous killers who wanted to rule the future alongside God, and that at the center of it all was Mulder whom they believed to be a now gone wayward prophet who must be kept submissive and silent; her partner and life who was infected with a terrible illnes that would kill him a few short months from that moment.

Scully looked back at the white haired old kook and believed every word. He had no reason to lie. Not about any of it.

And he had no reason to hurt her about Mulder or deny that he now knew as well as she that Mulder was as good as dead.

"Yes," she said, dropping her gaze.

She did not want to see herself in his eyes as she spoke the words aloud. They had been putrifying in her heart so long, she was afraid they, once released, would somehow reach him and worsen his illness by their terrible and painful truth.

"Yes, he's dying." Scully repeated.

"I'm sorry. I wish I could help you. But I can't."

Her white haired, mysterious informant sighed and stood.

She grabbed at his arm. "Wait! How do I reach you?"

"You can't. IF I have anything more to say. I'll contact you."

Scully watched him walk away on the red pebbled path back through the trees.

She wondered if _she_ was going mad.

As Scully entered their shared basement office, she caught Mulder in the middle of popping a palm full of pills and swallowing them down with a few jiggers of water, trying to hide the entire act from her.

"How'd your meeting go?" Mulder asked.

She'd walked in about his regular med.'s time. It was cool and damp as usual in the room, which she reasoned was not a very healthy environment for him in his present condition. Momentarily, Scully argued with herself if whether, by putting in a request, Skinner would assign them warmer accommodation in an office above ground with decent access to heat and light.

Mulder was hunched over his lap top, typing away. Since returning to almost full time work, paper work didn't seem to bother him anymore. For the time being she decided she would forego a request for a new office. Mulder was happy where he was.

"Uh,...fine." Scully also debated telling Mulder of her unusual encounter. Since her strange meeting in the park, she'd come to think more and more that the man had been nothing more than what he appeared to be, a kook.

Scully recalled his words, though, and his ability to almost read her thoughts and his knowledge of Mulder's illness that no one knew about except for a select few.

Unusual man. Odd man. Maybe a little crazy, even. But one she felt compelled to take at his word.

Except there was no proof that what Crazy Man had said was the truth. Scully decided she would keep her secret meeting a secret until she had that proof. Tell Mulder and he'd likely be off like a blazing rocket, trying to find the guy and get it out of him himself.

Mulder was ill. She wanted him near her.

"I was right. Some mix-up. Not worth dragging me away from the investigation, though." She hoped she would not have to tell Mulder any more lies should she meet up with Crazy Man again. Her conscience couldn't take it.

"What happened while I was away?"

"We wrapped it up about an hour ago. When you didn't return, I had them ship the bodies to Quantico, they're there for you whenever you're ready."

"Tomorrow." She had little stomach for more blood and guts that day.

He nodded.

She watched him work for a moment. "You've put in a long day," she said and saw his shoulder's tense up.

"Scully, we talked about this. I feel fine. I'm just typing. That's all, just typing. There's nothing strenuous about it."

She tried to cover her worry. Couldn't help the worry, but tried not to let it be obvious every time she looked at him, knowing what she knew about what was happening inside of him, that it was eating him alive.

And her.

Bit by bit she was dying right along side him. Every sigh from him, everytime he stood to stretch cramped muscles or every time he sat down in a chair to rest, a vision of Emily came to her. In secret she would sneak up and with innocent eyes wide, whisper his name in her ear.

(Three days later):

"We have another multiple killing." Scully placed the file under his nose.

Mulder's face lit up like fireworks and Scully gave her head the tiniest shake of amazement that Mulder did not notice.

Even as sick as he was, it was as if she had placed an all day sucker in the hands of a six year old. Big, round anticipating eyeballs glowed from some deeply powered light, shining out for all to see and be illuminated by.

All while standing out in the rain under an overcast sky.

Despite their years together, despite the disappointments, despite his sickness that weighed over her like the stinking corpse of a beached whale, she loved that look of his.

This, she thought, was why she had stayed.

Despite everything before and anything that might come, they were back together in that crummy office.

Whatever truths needed uncovering, they would be the ones found holding the shovels and their laughing scorners, the Bureau and the whole sleeping, complacent world was someday going to know what had been accomplished here.

History was being written on two gouged wooden desks in the corner of a basement.

Scully waited patiently as her partner read the typed written pages and scanned the faxed photos of the crime scene.

"England and Denmark. Two cases each." Mulder commented.

"Exactly the same M.O.. Dead family by gunshot wounds to the upper back. One other dead child killed by unknown means."

Mulder shook his head. No matter how many of them he read, the circumstances seemed extraordinary. An international cult? Murdered family. One child dead (sacrifice?) but left intact. Except no trace evidence of _how_ the child had died. And in country after country, hundreds of cases all the same. There were now dozens of task forces across the U.S., Canada and a dozen more nations all studying the cases and trying to make head or tails of any of them.

"I don't know if the gunshot to the back is of any significance other than that it is an effective way to kill someone. Death at that particular spot is almost guaranteed." Scully offered.

"Except in the instance of Colleen Allenby, she survived."

"Yes, but it was blind luck that she did." Scully pointed to a diagram. "The caliber of the bullet and the point blank range - every victim had powder burns as well - plus the location of entry would mean the heart would stop almost instantaneously. There would be no blood pumped from the wound at all, just some back spray. A few drops in each case, because in nearly every case, the entry wounds are small."

Mulder nodded. That was interesting. "No back spray? I need to see the next crime scene if it's one we can get to. If there are any more discoveries of the Black Oil on any of the bodies, we need to know that."

"But your status-"

"Even if I can't go to every murder scene, I can go to some. I need to know Scully. Call it a hunch, but I think we're going to find the Black Oil at all of them."

"You think these people, these families were test subjects?"

"I don't know, but it wouldn't be the first time. Emily was placed-" He stopped. "Sorry."

"That's okay. You are right. She was just a lab rat to them. But her parents were not murdered the way these were."

"No, but this could be just a different type of testing. We don't know enough about the Black Oil to know what it all does."

"What does it do, Mulder?"

Mulder didn't respond to the glimmer of skepticism in her tone and answered without pausing, "It controls people; their minds, their will, but that's based on only visual evidence."

"Things you saw."

"Does the fact that it was me who saw them invalidate the evidence?"

Scully could almost see his little defensive wall builders laying bricks. "No. Mulder, just because I question doesn't mean I doubt your perceptions."

"But you need more proof than I do."

"You should expect that from me by now."

He nodded, smiled a bit to ease the little bit of tension that had entered the room. "Sorry, Scully. It's really beginning to feel like old times, isn't it?"

Scully forced a smile back while her mind wept: New "old time's" would not be forthcoming.

As if to prove her correct, Mulder reached into his desk drawer, took out his bottles of tiny, pink blood pressure pills and sundry medications, dry-popping them.

Every hour on the hour. Each bottle had its little paragraph of instructions on how many and when. Each bottle had an "Unlimited Refill" stamp on it too. Each bottle claimed to be part of the treatment that would keep him living for a while. None claimed anything beyond that.

Mulder was dying. Scully reeled every time she thought about it.

Once, three words had changed her life over to such inner joy and peace:

"I love you."

Mulder's sweet words of confession to her after his return. Words she thought he'd found drifting around in his sick mind that meant nothing.

But she'd learned they had meant something, and to her soon they meant everything.

Three other words again changed her life forever:

"Mulder is dying."

those having pulled and picked and yanked on her mind and heart until now she felt herself unraveling.

They also meant everything. Everything that she was losing all over again.

Mulder was dying.

She loved him.

And something must come of those two facts.

Something would be discovered, something proven, something made clear for every long term mocker, even if it was nothing more than the story of how one man persevered through it all.

Together they would work until there was nothing left to do.

And the whole goddamn world was going to know it.

Scully's cellular trilled.

Scully made her second and last meeting with Crazy Man with only seconds to spare.

Again, they rendezvoused at a park, this time, one on the opposite end of town, and this time, he was waiting for her.

Scully approached him. He looked bad. Thin and shaky.

"Please sit down," he said.

"What's going on? Why the call? I just can't keep making excuses and disappearing"

"Yes you can. If you want to solve this. Anyway, this will probably be the last time. The group is watching me now. They have sources even I'm not aware of." He turned to face her, swivelling his legs to face her fully and placing an arm across the back of the carved wrought iron bench. He began to speak quickly, as if time was speeding up for him and he hadn't much left to spare.

"You asked me over the phone why I'm helping you. Let's just say I'd like to see justice done, if there is any of that left around. And you're the only ones I trust enough to divulge the things I have already told you. I used to be important to them, but they won't be pleased by my betrayal."

"How do we find this "They". Who the hell are they?"

"I told you. A dangerous apocalyptic group who have the audacity to believe their version of the truth is the real, the only, one. If you're asking me how to find them, I don't know. There is no club house, no list of members, no affiliations with anything organized except at the most hidden level, no tracks to follow..." He pulled a manila envelope from his shirt and handed it to her. "This is all I have: a few photos taken about fifteen years ago of some of the members, their names at the time,...look over it later with your partner."

Scully raised bemused eyebrows. "A hidden group with a hidden agenda. Where have I heard this before..?" It was rhetorical and spoken aloud.

"Yes, very much like your clandestine "Fire-Devil"," he said, and at her widened eyes, "They know about him of course. That's what they call him. "Devil" because they believe he represents an Evil, and "Fire" because he breaths it and his way leads to destruction of the holy.

"These people will not stop the slaughters until they feel that the "holy ones" are safe, whether that means safe in the physical body or safe in the arms of God,... I don't think it makes any difference to them as long as the presence of evil is removed."

"You seem like an intelligent man, how can you possibly have been associated with these people? Didn't you see what they were doing?"

He sighed from the weariness of wrong turns made and regrets. "Your partner, Mulder, he believes in the paranormal. Would you laugh if I said I have an ability that is unexplainable? That I can read events, understand and see things that happened or that will happen?"

"I don't laugh much anymore."

Nodding, "The group came to me twenty years ago. It was after I'd left the F.B.I., I found I could no longer look upon the evil that was the mind of man. I thought, so nobly, that by joining an association of forward looking "visionaries" because that's what I believed they were, that I could maybe repair the damage I'd caused to myself and to my family. But evil, Agent Scully, is everywhere. You're a woman in a unique position to appreciate that statement."

"So they recruited you. What made you leave?"

"When I saw their need to control. A friend of mine went insane with the knowledge she gained. I didn't want that to be me, and for reasons I've already told you. They couldn't control me and because of the things I could see, I began to really _see_ them and what I saw scared me to death."

"Your daughter?"

"Yes, they would have tried to control her, she has these unusual "gifts" as well. She's safe but I will never see her again."

"They'd follow you?"

He nodded.

"Then how do we stop them? Mulder is,....he's not going to be able to continue forever... we have so little time."

"You may not be able to stop them. But maybe you can expose them. It's a long shot and a risk."

"Not surprising. How?"

"Remember Gibson Praise. Remember Kevin. Remember Emily and ask yourself this question: Were they made or were they born that way?"

"Emily was engineered in a laboratory. I saw the data myself."

"Things they _said_? Data _they_ showed you? Can it even be trusted?"

~~From her expression, he gathered she had never considered that she'd been lied to on those points.

He continued:

"_If_ they were made, it's humans and only humans trying to manipulate each other, isn't it? The speculation that malevolent aliens are true and will soon invade? Speculation based on visible evidence but very little physical. Evidence can be faked in many ways. Besides if aliens are prepared to invade earth, then their own plans are well on their way and, in my opinion, already unstoppable. But if the children were born that way..."

He left off the last few words but Scully didn't need to hear them to understand.

"Then they're from God?"she finished with a question.

"Possibly."

"Your daughter,...she was born the way she is." Scully asserted and when he nodded, "That's why you've hidden her away. That's why you're terrified. It's not just her ability that they may want to exploit, it's because they believe she was one of these "holy ones", destined for God."

"If there are holy ones here on earth, then the forces at work are greater than anything we could imagine, and nothing we do can will alter the course of the future."

"Do you think they - the children - are from God?"

"Aliens, devils, angels?' He listed the choices. "I don't know. I can't know. I don't think I want to know."

"Mulder does."

"This group may be responsible for his illness but that's just a guess. The rest? The rest is a curtain before which lay all theories, and we can't see beyond it."

"Then why do anything at all? Why even try?"

"Two millennia ago, one man tried his very best and died, in fact, he was murdered by his own people. Now, one half the population of the planet believe. A means to an end, Agent Scully."

"But we have no means. We have no idea at all who the next child is. There could be dozens, hundreds dying right now, their parents being murdered but unless we know ahead of time who it is going to be..."

"The last child, was there something unusual about him?"

"Yes. He was considered to be a great artist. I was shown samples of his work, they're extraordinary, ingenious really. He was considered a prodigy."

"Seek out the gifted," he said. "These kids all died of something mysterious and untraceable. They all died in unusual ways. Find those unusual kids who are still alive, I don't know how. I'm too old and, to be frank, too scared to help you."

He rose to go. "I don't know if you'll be hearing from me again. Meeting like this could be very dangerous for you and your partner."

Scully spoke quickly, breathlessly, before he walked away and she lost the chance and nerve. "I need to know something. Will my partner, will Mulder, is he going to..?"

Crazy Man understood, considering for a moment before taking her hand in his and holding it tight. He eyes became unfocused for a few seconds.

Then they cleared and he let her go, shaking his head once back and forth. "The future is a curtain, Agent Scully."

Scully sat for a moment, stunned. It was time for more truth and she pulled out her cellular. "Mulder. It's me. Um, listen, we need to talk..."

Convincing the Bureau to fund and organize a huge undercover operation had not been the easiest task, but after two weeks of meetings and consultations with Violent Crimes, the were allotted two task force teams of six agents each.

Director Skinner had read their outline of approach, shaking his head the whole way through.

He was duly impressed with the conjecture contained within the their initial reports on the progress of the God's Children case and secretly frightened by it's paranormal flavor.

Mulder and the strange went together very well, like gunpowder and sparks, Skinner secretly believed.

But no one else had come up with a contingency plan that actually included a psychological profile of the killers.

Skinner looked across his desk at his top agents. "The only thing you didn't list, Agent Scully, was your source. Where did you come by this information about," he read from the report in his hands, "

"Clandestine Apocalyptic Religiously Motivated Group." and it's agenda of murder?"

Scully cleared her throat. "It is a confidential source, sir. One I'm not at liberty to divulge." Not that I know where the hell to find him anyway, she thought.

"Confidential"?"

"As in anonymous." Mulder added.

"I know what it means Agent Mulder." Skinner sighed, staring at both defeated ly, letting his eyes rest longer on Scully.

"Okay. Twelve task force agents from the appropriate departments, your choice. Twenty-four others for muscle, infiltration, sharpshooting, what-have-you, again your choice, and all the equipment necessary to finding these assholes and putting them away. One month. That's what you have to wrap this up or not. One month and if nothing comes of it, we return to more conventional theories and methods of investigation."

"Yes, sir." Both agents agknowledged softly, rising to go.

"Agent Scully, would you remain behind for a moment?"

Mulder looked back on his way to the door and then thought better of it, leaving and shutting the door a bit harder than was necessary.

Skinner stared at the door. "What was all that about?"

Scully looked up at him. Skinner was standing close. "Mulder knows about...I told him about,.." She cleared her throat, "...us."

"Does he understand there is no longer any "us"?"

She nodded quickly. "Yes."

Skinner decided not to pursue the line of conversation. Scully had made her decision. "How is he?"

Immediately she looked haunted. "Holding his own. So far. But it's only a matter of time before..."

Skinner nodded, hands shoved into his pockets to fight the urge to throw his arms around her and pull her in.

"If you need anything,..." Sentimentality was not his strong suit. "If anything happens in the field, if he becomes...agitated,..hurt, what-have-you, call me first."

Scully stepped closer to him. "This is out of line, sir, but..." And kissed his cheek. "Thank you."

Skinner nodded, trying to keep his senses straight and proper.

"Dismissed," he said curtly.

Scully knew it was his way of keeping her at arms length for his own sake and the abruptness wasn't intended to hurt her. "Yes, sir."

Mulder was waiting for her in the hall outside Skinners office.

"What did he want?" he asked, pressing the "down" on the elevator.

Scully flushed. "To know about you."

"What did you tell him?"

She faced him. "The truth. That you're fine for now, that you're holding steady but that it won't last."

"So there's no danger of me being booted from the case duty?"

"No, not as it stands."

The elevator doors opened and they stepped inside. It was empty.

Scully used the privacy to voice something else. "But, your activity on this stakeout will remain limited in adherence with the restrictions on your jacket. No gun and you will not engage any suspect in what-so-ever way."

Mulder leaned against the wall and shoved his hands in his pockets. "I know the restrictions, Scully. They're written across my mind, they're impossible to forget because you keep reminding me of them."

"I just want you to understand how serious this is, your illness, it could turn for the worse at any time, any extra exertion, extra push that your body is not ready for could"

"I know. I won't engage. I won't carry a gun, not even my "leg iron". Solving this case may mean I get one of my answers, and getting those answers depends on me keeping my job and _that_ means adhering to the restrictions I'm under no matter how much I hate them. Even though it feels like someone's pilfered my balls and made off with them.

"I'll stick by your book, Scully. You don't have to remind me every time we're about to set foot outside the front doors."

She looked up at him, then down. "I know. I know, I'm sorry."

She faced forward again. Had to tell him, "I've assigned another ' senior agent to the second team because I want to be on hand in case anything happens. "

"That's not necessary."

She didn't flinch or even change expression. "That may be, but it is my decision. I'm your doctor and you are not only my partner but my patient. Skinner supports me on this so that's how it's going to be."

Mulder rolled his eyes but didn't argue it anymore. "Now I have a babysitter." He muttered.

It disturbed her that he seemed to be taking his illness as an inconvenience only, not acknowledging its seriousness and that one step in the wrong direction could mean a hospital stay. When she reminded him of that his eyes settled back into their sockets and he muttered a couple of okay's. Just to please her, though, she was certain.

"What could happen? I'm just going to be standing around like a mannequin," he said.

He made similar remarks as they set up shop for the stake out until the remarks took a life of their own in humor, smiling as his tease found its mark with her bemused look. "I should look cute in my uniform, huh?"

As soon as she'd smile though the worry lines would return and that bothered him. "It'll be okay, Scully."

Their choice for stakeout was East Virginia Learning Centre, a school for "gifted" children though the senior Mistress advanced vehemently that the term was archaic and the school preferred "advanced".

Mulder, dressed in white pants and white, short sleeved shirt, would pose as one of the school's Safety Monitors, the school's term for Security Guard. Scully was posing as the main desk receptionist in a dark purple suit and cream blouse about which Mulder teased with lewd remarks until she glared.

When the school day began, though, and the kids started to arrive, it was down to business.

"You look ravishing sitting behind that desk."

"Mulder..." Scully had nothing to do as the stand-in receptionist, all calls to the school being rerouted (though monitored), but still...

"Can you at least try to pay attention to your job?" She spoke seriously though she was in fact enjoying his affectionate play.

"We've been here four days, Scully, I'm beginning to think this source of yours was some kind of-"

"Someone's coming up the walk," she said suddenly.

Mulder returned to his place by the door, and, as the lady approached the all glass entrance, he swung it wide for her, giving her his best "Part of my job, ma'am" smiles.

She, a petite brunette dressed in a neat white business suit, walked straight up to the Receptionist desk.

Mulder watched closely. It was still a novelty to see Scully smiling like a waitress and handing out pamphlets.

The lady left after only a moment and when she was gone, Mulder wandered over to the desk again. "Well?"

"She just needed directions."

Mulder frowned. It was going on three o'clock in the afternoon. Soon parents would begin arriving to pick up their children and another uneventful day would draw to a close. Six other agents in stand-in positions and five special forces hidden in prime target areas - classrooms and lunchroom - completed the task force.

"Skinner's going to have to pull the plug."

"Mulder, it's only been one week." Scully reminded him, standing to stretch her stiff legs and back. She had done some office work while in college and had forgotten how exhausting it could be just sitting all day.

~~From the corner of her eye is how she first saw the danger and in the time it took her to turn her head and formulate his name in her mind and say it - "Mulder" - it was already too late.

When Mulder turned to follow Scully's eyes to see what made her eyes go from sleepy to frightened, they were inside the doors and the first of them, glowing like a human sun, advanced, knocking them both down without a touch.

Scully saw Mulder collapse and a second form move to stand over him and look down. But a powerful sleep overcame her in that instant of fear and panic for his safety and in seconds she saw and felt nothing more.

As Mulder fell to the polished floor, the flash of an old memory lighted the corners of his mind. A covered truck-box. A locked metal booth and a man with no face. Then black but glowing figures, an impossible balance, appearing from the air followed by darkness of mind until he awoke to find himself being escorted to a waiting car with Scully there to take his hand.

When he awoke from his split second dream, he was lying on the school floor with a face looked down on him from above. Not a faceless face nor a glowing supernatural vision but a man's fleshly countenance partially hidden by a black wool mask whose eyes, he felt sure, looked upon him with recognition.

"Holy Jesus." The man muttered under his breath.

And in those two words, the eyes behind the mask fell into place with another old memory and, together with the voice, brought the memory to life like a newly oiled obsolete machine.

One that is started up after years of neglect and accumulated rust, the memories halting and noisy at first, finally settling into a comfortable rhythm that had been missed for those many years.

Mulder was going to sleep under the gaze of his enemy or perhaps it was the power that had sent him collapsing to the floor in a weakened heap, but before he did, his mind screamed out the name and his heart cried his belief that he and Scully were both about to die under this man's inhuman feeling contained within his human hand.

Mulder kept his drooping eyes on the wide, green ones above him.

"Kr-r-y-y...cek...."

Then he slept.

Scully awoke to a nurses uniform and the distinct odor of hospital. no matter which one she'd found herself in over the years (and there had been a few), they had all smelled exactly the same.

The nurse, Scully glanced at the name tag, "Ramona" was taking her temperature aurally. "You're awake." Nurse Ramona said, pointing out the obvious.

Scully tried to sit up, and the nurse placed her hands on her shoulders, easing her back down. "Take it easy, you're still weak."

"What happened?"

Nurse Ramona frowned, "Don't you remember?"

Scully licked her lips, they were dry and flaky. "Yes. I think so, but I mean how did it happen? How long have I been here?"

"About twelve hours. You were both brought in at the same time. I'd say you're lucky to be alive."

Scully's heart pounded. This time she sat up and tried to get out of bed. "Mulder! Where's Mulder?"

Nurse forced her to stay seated on the edge of the bed. "Mulder? That's your partner? He's just down the hall. He's being monitored."

"But they may not know about him. He needs special care, his-"

"Doctor Scully. They _know_. Doctor Watts was called immediately upon Agent Mulder's admittance. He's in good hands."

Scully let herself relax a bit. "How is he?"

Nurse turned when the door opened to reveal Watts.

"So, our other patient is awake?" He said perfunctorily.

"Yes, but "patient" isn't a word I'd use." Nurse winked at Scully and walked to the door.

Scully wanted to tell her to ram her humor up her ass, but instead asked, "How is he?"

Watts read Scully's chart while waiting for Nurse Ramona to exit.

"Well, he was having some difficulty when he arrived. Whatever they used on you to knock you out like that must have been very strong stuff. We still haven't figured out what it was."

"What kind of difficulty?"

"Just some shallow breathing. He was under pretty deep and we put him on steady watch just to be safe. Because of his condition we couldn't administer any stimulants at all."

Scully nodded, thank god she'd insisted on Mulder wearing a medical band in addition to his wallet card denoting his special medical status. "What about now?"

"He's not awake yet but as far as we can tell, he's doing fine. that is, considering his underlying illness."

"I want to see him."

"Don't balk at going by wheelchair and you have my permission."

He paged an orderly. "I must state my opinion, Doctor Scully, however you might not agree with it. I think Agent Mulder is risking his life, shortening it even more I mean, by continuing his field work. He needs to be in a hospital where he can be monitored and his treatment more closely regulated."

"There is no treatment, nothing effective anyway. And just for the record, I happen to agree with you, but he's made his own decision."

The wheelchair arrived pushed by a young volunteer worker, who rolled it over to the bed.

"I know Mulder," Scully said, "He needs to work. Take that away and it would kill him anyway."

Watts nodded, thanking the young man. "I'll take it from here."

At Mulder's room, Watts left her. Scully left the wheelchair at the door and softly padded in and over the head of the bed that contained a somewhat pale but generally peaceful looking Mulder.

But for the machines whirring and beeping, the room was quiet.

She took his hand, giving it a gentle squeeze, letting out a breath she hadn't realized she'd been holding in. Mulder stirred under the oxygen mask but did not wake up. However his vitals she decided, after a look at the machines hooked up to him, were normal.

There was nothing about the readings that at this juncture would indicate anything abnormal regarding the physical state of the man on the bed but that he was a healthy middle aged male. No hint at all of the hidden demon sickness that possessed his body and that would soon make its presence more pronounced when it's other worldy hands molded its own body out of his, until nothing human would be left of him and Fox Mulder ceased to exist.

"Oh, god, Mulder." Scully said to herself and to him. "What are we doing?"

Scully sighed, thinking once again of Emily. "You, Mulder, _are_ meant to be, you _are_. I just don't understand."

She hadn't prayed since Mulder's diagnosis and she and God barely tolerated one another now. But Scully wheeled herself to the hospital chapel and lit candles for him, praying silently for a miracle, mouthing the words silently.

"Hear me, hear me..." she prayed.

No other words came to mind but if God read hearts as the good Fathers claimed, her tiny prayer said it all.

Scully felt that if God did not hear her this time, his silence would cause their tenuous bond, wove with painstaking effort over the last ten years, would be severed forever.

Mulder woke to a red halo surrounding the face of a china doll.

Scully smiled at him but here eyes were lined with worry. "Hi."

"Hi." He answered. "We're still around to annoy Skinner, huh?"

"Yes."

He was happy to see that got a smile out of those baby blues.

"Mulder. You've been out for nearly twenty hours."

By long experience Mulder knew she was leading the conversation up to something. Bad news. Something he did not want to hear. In this instance, he knew the maze and the trap waiting at the end.

"And," Scully continued, "Keeping you on this case is endangering your life."

"Don't put me behind a desk, Scully."

She drew her mouth into a thin line. "Mulder, I'm your supervisor and in my opinion, the risk is too high to-"

"-You're my supervisor and you're senior agent, yes, but you're also supposed to be my friend." He softened his tone that he knew was reeking of anxiety on its way to anger. "And more than that. Please don't take me off the case. I _have_ to know. That's all I want, Scully. I have to have that answer I've been looking for for,...too long to quit now."

She set her face aginst him, intending to argue the point. But his expression was one of near terror that she was going to take away his one last chance to find those truths he so desperately sought.

Scully saw that expression and gave in. "Okay. But one more incident like yesterday, one more situation where your life is threatened and I'll recommend Skinner pull the plug on your field work."

He took her hand. "Thanks, Scully." He thought for a moment. "Your "source", the informant, has he contacted you since the last time?"

"No, and I don't expect him to. He said he might not be able to and that he really had nothing more to tell me."

"How certain are you that this group he spoke of aren't just another collection of Cancerman groupies?"

"Fairly sure. He knew about my abduction. He knows about the children. And he knows an awful lot about you and your work, he said he followed your career ever since Violent Crimes. He said that at one time he had worked for Unit himself. I checked the data base by the way and couldn't find any photos resembling him at all. Some agents back then had no photo identifications though, in particular those who worked in covert operations."

Mulder nodded. "He mentioned Gibson Praise and Emily?"

"Yes. And Kevin, you remember him?"

Mulder nodded. The little boy with the stigmata, the case that had sent Scully scurrying for her faith once again after years of disassociation from the church.

"He thinks these people think these children are holy. If that's true, why didn't they kill Gibson?" Mulder asked.

"We never did learn what happened to Gibson Mulder. He may be dead."

"Gibson was part alien."

"We never proved that, remember."

"What do you think he was? Some kind of angel in the flesh? Why would God allow a child to be kidnaped and abused?"

"I don't have the answers to that. What I do have are speculations and no evidence one way or another. We also never heard from his parents again either."

"Gibson could read minds. He knew what Cancer Man knew. If he's still alive, if we could find him-"

"-Mulder. Today, if he's still alive at all, Gibson would be about twenty years old."

"Twenty? Are we that old?"

"Yes." She smiled but thought "and not getting any younger or anymore healthy."

"You are in no shape to go out looking anyway." Scully reminded him. "There's something inside you that's killing you. Alien, human, animal or mineral, it is something foreign and if we don't focus our energy into battling it, that is one war we are going to lose. That's where your greatest fight should be, Mulder. Right here, right now."

"I can't just sit around and do nothing, Scully.-"

"-You won't. I said you can continue in the field and you can, but off duty we're going to seek answers for what's happening inside you. I respect your quest for truth, Mulder, but at the very least I want you to concede that you may not find all those answers in the time left to you.

"Those truths will always keep for others to seek." She placed her hand on his chest and it slowly rose and fell with him as his breath entered and left lungs that in only weeks, would be gasping for oxygen as they hardened into useless cocoons.

"The rest is in here, in you, and that's the answer I want more than any."

He pulled her hand to his mouth. "I love you."

*

Two WEEKS POST ENMS DIAGNOSIS.

"You're relatively stable. For now." Scully emphasized to him.

Mulder sighed up at her from the bed, the guest bed in her guest bedroom.

Because of the illness, she reminded herself, looking at his nude chest, abdomen and groin area barely covered by the thinnest of sheets, that's why the _guest_ bedroom. Last night, he'd, without warning, run a temperature. His blood pressure on the rise - and hers - she had quickly stabilized him and in an hour or so he'd been fine. But it had scared her and clinched what Watts had already emphasized.

No sex. No lovemaking and no even sharing the same bed together in case either one got the raging hormones and ceased to resist the urges of sex. A chance taken like that could be hazardous. Or deadly.

No cuddling, even, because even that, just that simple act of providing physical and emotional comfort could raise his temperature again, or worse his blood pressure.

He had argued with her about it. She argued back, adamant in following doctors orders yet hating every doctor, physician and researcher in the world who were shrugging their shoulders and telling her "sorry-there's-nothing-we-can-do"...

"Do not touch him." Watts had said, making her nearly collapse right there in his office. She knew of course, it would come to that, but not so soon.

Emily's last moments were spent behind a glass partition, screaming for her mommy.

"Mulder. Monday we go to work, just like always. Today you rest and you rest all damn day, either in here or on the couch. You will chase no aliens, no baseballs in the park,..."

She kept her voice light, teasing in fact, because her emotions were so tied up, and her body in such need of touching him, that this seemed the only connecting allowed - talking. Voices verbalizing and exchanging thoughts and feelings. Just like they used to so many years ago when they were first partnered.

"...no ice-cream trucks down the street. You will not jog in place nor dribble a basketball and you will not, but any means what-so-ever, watch any of your own videos as long as you are sick. Doctor's orders."

He smiled up at her, one arm tucked behind his head, the other on his stomach. Sick or not, he looked wonderful in her bed. Smoothly muscled, masculine and made for her. The illness, at that warm moment, seemed an error in diagnostics. A mistake. A terrible, frightening, heart-tearing mistake that could be laughed off later in years with a "Weren't we silly to believe...?" Any minute now, Watts would call and tell her so. "We mixed up the charts"...

Mulder raised his arms above his head and moved under the sheet, stretching like a languid tom cat just waking up and getting ready for a night of prowling.

Mulder, to her always desirable though, when dressed, a gentleman, looked at that moment, so unmistakably sensual, so in-her-face sexy, it shot a bolt of desire straight to her loins flushing her pink.

But in that way, body on body, she could never touch him again.

Not even if he wanted it. "Scully, come here."

"No." Now it was time for the teasing to stop and she drew away a good yard, even if her feet wanted to walk her over there so she could do the opposite and lie down on top of him. Her mind was filled with images of Mulder on her, in her, moving around and moaning, coming in her, it made her sick with desire. Wanting him so badly, a sob nearly burst from her lips as she quickly turned away.

The only escape was to never touch him. Not even get too close to him. "No, Mulder. We talked about this, I just told you..." Scully had recovered her composure almost instantly and he suspected nothing.

She could hear the rustle of sheets as he pushed them aside.

"I know. All I want is a kiss. Just one kiss? What harm can it do?"

She faced him again, face and attitude perfectly Scully. "It could raise your blood pressure."

He sighed and turned his face away. "This,...I hate this."

Scully wrapped her robe tightly around her. Last night was his first night home from the hospital. Along with Mulder, she had acquired several machines and other equipment designated for emergency purposes. Cooling blankets if his temperature spiked for any reason, like the previous evening. Oxygen tanks and breathing apparatus in case he had any hyperventilating episodes. Scully looked across her second bedroom room at it. One whole dresser was covered with equipment all set up and ready to use at a moments notice.

"Come on, time for your low fat, designer breakfast," she said, retreating behind the mental armor of humor and to the physically remote safety of the hallway.

"Oh, I can hardly wait. Mmmm, non-salted albumin substitute _baked_, not fried, so as not to clog my already hardening arteries. Plain flat, cous-cous bread with no butter, only unsweetened raspberry jam and a mug of luke-warm water."

'It's designed to keep you alive and healthy, Mulder. You're going to eat it. All of it."

"You sure are bossy."

"I'm your partner and your doctor. Did you expect any less?"

He threw back the covers and sat up, slowly, as he'd been instructed to. Scully got an eyeful of nude Mulder before turning her back and exiting to the kitchen. He'd done it on purpose to tease, give her a thrill, make her change her mind about the kiss and maybe other things. Lots of reasons probably. She'd have to be on guard and ready to ignore such tactics. And with a physical specimen like Mulder, it wasn't going to be easy.

"_Luke-warm_ shower." She called after him.

"Yes, warden," he said.

A new case appeared bright and early Monday morning, while the Task Force still had not tied up the loose ends to the previous one.

"How many children died at the school?" Mulder inquired. He was speaking into his desk phone, person to person interviews considered too taxing after just being released from the hospital. Scully wouldn't hear of him running around the halls of the Bureau, Skinner wouldn't hear of it and he personally didn't feel up to it anyway.

Mulder nodded into the receiver. No others? What about the teacher's name?" He scribbled., thanked the caller and hung up.

Scully looked at him from across the two desks shoved together edge to edge. "They send in a whole assault team to kill one teacher?"

"Yes. the child was autistic but incredibly gifted in music and art. He was dead at the scene. He - Jeremy - had one tutor who spent the entire classroom time with him only. Rich parents - who are dead by the way - and in the usual way."

Scully read on the latest incident fro the file in front of her, "Well, this new one occurred last night in Mexico, a town called Elduorno, the Dallas field office is taking care of it. We'll get a full investigative and autopsy report just as soon as they can. But, they aren't certain this case is related." She handed him a copy of the police report. "All the usual circumstances, those closest to the child were found shot in the same manner except in this case , it was a street child who was found dead at the scene. No obvious signs of struggle or trauma; nothing to indicate how he died."

"A street child, but one who might have been gifted if we are to believe your source. Has he contacted you lately, about the school shooting?"

Scully shook her head. "No. I doubt he will. He indicated that it might be dangerous for us. Personally, I just think he was scared. He has a daughter and this "Group" he used to belong to know about her. I'd be scared too."

Mulder called up some information on his computer and swivelled the screen so she could read it also. "Well, no one seems to know anything about this group. If they exist or the FBI or CIA know about them, they're keeping it under their hats."

"And we are no further ahead to understanding why these kids are dying or why their closest friends or family are being murdered other than the presence of the Black Oil. Without knowing where the next hit could be.."

"We still have almost three weeks. We'll keep the teams at the schools, except now we have to put a man on each students home as well."

"That's a lot of manpower."

"Skinner's already committed three hundred agents to it. Because we were right about the school, if the FBI doesn't act to save the children of the voters, Ms. President's popularity will go right down the John. Re-elections next year."

Scully nodded. "Mulder, what do you think about these gifted kids?"

"Do you mean why do I think they're being killed?"

"Or their parents."

He shook his head. "I think the kids may be hybrids. I think the Black Oil was introduced into the parents, guardians, friends - those who took care of the child, who watched over them - to control the child's environment maybe. The Black Oil tells us just about all we need to know."

"Except why the one child itself dies during the murders, the one who is present but not shot or even touched."

"Yeah, but I think we'll find that out eventually. These are aliens, Scully, they might have ways of killing their own that we haven't discovered and I think if these kids are hybrids, they were bred so perfectly that nothing shows on the DNA, no mutation. If there are mutations, those could be simply in the way their brains work. It was a theorized years ago that those truly gifted were not of earth but were aliens among us. Plato, Shakespeare, Mozart, Einstein..."

"That's just one of many self indulgent fantasies many people use to make themselves feel better; those who are not above average or gifted in any way. It's a way to say to oneself: "See no one is really gifted, so no one is better than me." Sometimes it's a comfort to imagine that all people are the same as us and mediocre in our talents but that's not the way it is."

Mulder nodded but she knew her words were all but dismissed. "What do you think these kids are?"

"I don't know. I don't think they're aliens but if they are alien/human hybrids, why are they being killed or being allowed to die? Why go to all this trouble only to see them dead?"

"Maybe the kids are a global experiment and the experiment is done. Maybe in some cases the parents knew they were in danger of being found out to be alien infected and killed the children themselves?"

At her skeptical face, "It is _one_ possibility, Scully."

"As a former mother, I find it nearly impossible to believe that a mother who has cared for and nurtured her child would allow it to be experimented on and then disposed of."

"Not all children were with their natural parents."

"So? Adopted children are often even more cherished than natural ones. What about the children's guardians, then? And this killing force that seems to think murdering whole families is the way to God?"

"Well, I don't have all the answers yet, but I'm pretty damn sure we'll find out. I can tell you one thing I had time to think about when I was in the hospital. When that attacker was standing over me, the one I think was Krycek-"

"You said, you weren't sure."

"I'm not, but it reminded me of something I'd seen before and that cemented something in my mind that's been bothering me."

"What?"

"At Weikamp Air Force Base, when I was in that truck, you remember what I described to you?"

"Yes, you said when you climbed in the back you saw a faceless man, and you saw that big guy, the "Bounty Hunter" you called him, and you saw a bright, white light. Then something floating in through the back of the truck, a figure that may have been a man..."

"Yes. It brought to mind the subway station and your former partner, Beyer. When you were being attacked, something was standing in front of me, you didn't see it at first, you said, but later you remember seeing movement, distortions. And you reported that the man who took you had incredible strength - super human strength is how you put it. I think what I saw in the truck and in the subway were, if not the same creature, then the same type of creature."

She nodded but not convinced. "Don't get me wrong, Mulder, I'm trying to keep an open mind on all of this but what is our theory so far? That a new religiously motivated murderous world-wide terrorist faction, acting in conspiracy under God, is killing what they believe to be evil people, mothers, father, siblings, friends, guardians, (people who are in fact infected agents of the devil) but who are, according to you, not devils but the real families and friends infected by the Black Oil which was introduced to them by Cancer-Man and his group in order to guard what _they_ believe to be human-alien hybrids who are the first seeds in a plot to repopulate the earth with alien babies?

"So the aliens themselves are working with Cancer-Man but against this new group. However, this new group, they don't think these kids are aliens, they think the kids, the ones who are found dead without apparent cause are "Holy" children. Have I got it?"

"Actually, you make it sound more reasonable than I thought it would, but yeah. Or in a nutshell, two factions fighting over who they think are their future saviors or destroyers, depending who you talk to."

Scully shook her head as if to straighten out her tangled thoughts. "If any of this is what we think it is, then we've bitten off a huge chunk here, Mulder, and I don't know if I'm up to the chew."

Suddenly he smiled impishly at her. "You know how sexy you look when you're drawing a metaphor?"

She ignored his change the topic tactic, "Mulder. How are we or anyone supposed to protect these kids when we don't even know how to find them while they're still alive?"

"We do know. We were right about the school."

"That may have been blind luck. And we went down in a second, I didn't have time to even think about drawing and firing my gun. Whoever these people are, they have the use of some power or weapon that can render an enemy immobile in a fraction of a second. Until we can find some way to beat them to the punch, I don't think this is one we're going to come out on, not until a whole lot more people die."

"There's Sam's child."

"That's just a theory Mulder based on nothing but unscientific theory and supposition."

"Thanks. But if I'm right and we locate him or her, we have our living child and the opportunity to discover what we didn't have time to discover about Gibson or Emily. I'm only building on your source's information Scully."

"I'm not sure I believe all that man has told me. You should have seen him, he looked crazy."

"So did Einstein. Look, it's a place to start. Right now we're wandering around in a dark room looking for the light switch. Give it a chance at least. If we're wrong, we're wrong, but at least it's a place to start."

Scully stood. Paced. "All right. But no running down aliens suspects for you,...I'm not going to carry a medical kit everywhere." Scully teased but of course, she _would_ carry one. From now on. Without fail. His life might depend on it.

"I don't know what to believe about this case. I don't know where we can start." Scully ran fingers through her hair. "Children dead without any medical reason. Sleeping peacefully in their beds while their family's are murdered meters away...it's almost as if-" A thought occurred to her. It was a surprising thought since so few of them ever pointed that way anymore.

"As if what, Scully."

"As if they were....choosing to go."

"Choosing??" Mulder frowned, trying to sort out what she meant.

Scully muttered something under her breath, trying out something in her head. Mulder only caught part of it.

"And shall we be changed in the blink of an eye..." she said and looked back at him, not sure whether to even voice her idea, especially not to Mulder. "I'm saying, maybe they aren't aliens." Scully ventured. Why did he always have to look back with that "I understand more than you about most things." face? It had raised her ire from day one.

"What?"

She had joked about the religious aspect of the dead children and now she would have to repair the damage. She went on and to hell with his reaction. "Maybe these children aren't hybrids."

"Then what?" Mulder sounded puzzled but curious.

"We know this Cult Force is killing the parents because of being infected by the Black Oil, so the theory is that this Cult believes the parents are somehow under alien influence - that they are in their eyes devils - but why then are they not killing the children, these sole children who die on their own without being touched, that have been under the influence of these alien hybrids."

"They may not be hybrids, just infected humans being controlled by this alien life force, the Black Oil, that's what it is." Mulder said.

"That's your theory."

"So, what do you now think? That it's not alien related? That it's just...what?"

"I don't know. All I know is, those dead kids were not touched in any physical way. I've performed almost one autopsy per day since this started and I could find nothing amiss in any of them. Perfectly normal children lacking life. In fact, they were more than perfect. They were perfect in every respect except for being dead. No poisons of any kind were found, even when the DNA was tested to the multi-billionth fraction."

"I've seen aliens, Scully, and I've seen this Black Oil in action - I don't see what else this could be."

"My question isn't about the Black Oil, right now it's about the children themselves. Maybe these children are not aliens but more than human."

"I'm not following you, Scully."

Knowing his personal views on the matter, she gulped and said it anyway, "Maybe these kids are angels, as crazy as you may think that sounds, it has some presedents-"

"Presedent refers to established fact or judgement, Scully, something decided upon based upon evidence in a court of law."

"I was speaking of religious presedent. There are other laws besides man's and other judge-seats as well."

He sat back, twiddling a pencil. Scully recognized it as classic Mulder in doubt mode. "-Angels? That's your theory?"

"It's _one_ theory. I think you should consider, Mulder, that there is as much evidence or as much lack of evidence to support good and evil engaging in some earth-bound battle as there is to support the theory that aliens are visiting earth in great ships of light, preparing a planet- wide conquest and breeding program."

"Even after all we've seen?"

"What have we seen, Mulder? Visions of greys. Creatures that seem to have supernatural powers. Beings who are not from earth, beings who communicate by mental telepathy, powerful entities who are fighting other powerful entities. To me that sounds as much like heavenly hosts and Satan's subjects as it does aliens and alien rebels all gathering together to wage one final battle."

"So despite my experience, abducted for eight years by aliens - those were not angels, Scully, who took me, tortured me, mind-raped me, kept me alive and returned me minus sanity - don't you think that after all that time spent among them, those god awful eight years, I'd have a little bit more insight on this than anyone else? And now you don't believe me? What do you think, then, that I made it all up? I cut myself too, is that what you think? That I scarred up my own chest? Or that angels did?"

"No. I believe you were abducted, I believe you were tortured, there is too much physical evidence to believe otherwise but I also believe that what you think you saw and experienced to be true may not have been what you believe actually happened. And what you believe, Mulder, is based upon memories of evidence - not evidence but memories of it. Some of which had to be drudged up through hypnosis. But what if those memories are just you kept strapped and drugged? Abused and then dumped off after they were finished? What if what you remember is an eight year long nightmare played out inside the sensory deprivation of a coma?"

She could see that it had not crossed his mind but as soon as the possibilities of her idea flashed across his face they just as quickly dismissed. "No."

"Mulder..."

"How long have you thought about this? Right from the beginning? Have I just been a joke, indulged for the last two years?" He moved around and stepped away from her, then spun back. "How can you stand there, after everything and question the things we've seen?! After Antarctic and the implants and Gibson, Cassandra Spender, Scully? _And_ your experience on the bridge - your memories! After my abduction, after they took eight years of my life away and you and everything that was important to me?! How can you possibly doubt _now_?!"

He was getting a bit riled and Scully felt and heard the warning signals in her head and heart that told her he needed to calm down immediately.

Shit.

"Hey." She stepped close to repair the damage before it got out of hand. "Mulder. Calm down."

He looked at her, puzzled. He hadn't had a good battle in a while, hadn't been allowed to so as much as an over vigorous belly laugh in the way of espressing emotions. She knew they all must be so bottled up inside, that he was just spoiling to let them rip. Letting them out would raise blood resuure and body temperature. But keeping them inside must be nearly as bad.

"No." He protested. "I want to talk about this."

But she advanced on him, that sick and sinking feeling in her gut telling her she had to diffuse him, right there, right then or the consequences could be so much worse than a difference of opinion and bruised egos.

"Calm down. " She said trying to make it sound not like an order or a plea but just a simple request with a please thrown in. "Mulder, calm down, please." Placed her arms around him and pulled him in. Touched him for the first time in days and how good it felt and how horrible she felt. "Please. Please."

He did. When he felt her touch, he calmed and hugged back, letting his arms fall across her shoulders and around to her shoulder blades, overlapping. "I'm sorry." Mulder said.

"I'm sorry." Scully answered and then added: "I believe what you experienced Mulder, the things you remember, I believe you are telling the truth but I, as a scientist, have to concede that what you remember may not be the actual events but memories created under extreme distress and in a situation that I, as a scientist, did not observe. I have to allow for other possibilities."

"Even religious ones?" he wanted to snap back but didn't. "I know." He nodded and she felt his chin bob up and down on her hair. "But there are none, not in my case. I was abducted by aliens."

"I feel,...so...caught," she said, wanting to acknowledge his convictions and at the same time bolster her own. "I want to believe you, I want to say I know what you remember to be the absolute truth but I can't and yet while I want to argue my case, state an opinion, I'm afraid. If I say something, whatever it is, and it upsets you and you end up in the hospital because of me, then I'll be responsible for..."

"Hey. Stop that. Right now. You are not responsible for anything that I consciously do. I am capable of controlling my temper, you know."

"We have to be careful, Mulder."

He hugged her close, pressed right against her. If he clutched tightly enough, maybe it would be all right. Maybe she wouldn't worry so much, maybe he wouldn't be as afraid of what was down the road for him as he felt. He pretended that everything but the case and Scully were unreal.

The illness was unreal and to be reminded of it at every turn of his head just caused him to push it farther back into his mind until it was nothing but a pinprick at his conscience - nothing to worry about; just a small problem that would eventually work itself out and things could go back to normal.

Scully would call his state of mind classic denial. A text book reaction to such devastating news.

But he'd experienced so much devastation, it had become a way of life, what was happening to him now was no more surprising than anything before it. It was expected almost. There was a kind of comfort in that.

"The persistence of the inevitable" popped into his head. He could not recall where he had heard it, but it was true of most things, well, all things. If something was bound to happen, if things were written to fold back on themselves over and over, they would. How often had history repeated itself despite all efforts toward change?

Murphy's Law.

*

Some coffee for her and some green tea for him had settled both their nerves and it was back to business.

"What else from the last case - the school? What about the Black Oil? Was its presence confirmed?" Mulder asked.

Scully handed him one folder, one still in her hand. "It's all in there. No other infections present."

She fiddled with the edges of the second folder. "But, I also wanted to get this to you. I've already read it. It's the Mueller case - the one where you-"

"-I remember." He took it and opened it carefully. "Sam's case and her kids. Did the Boston P.D. ever locate her husband or any trace of him?"

Scully shook her head, watching Mulder's fingers move over the pages. Soft touches, little strokes. Samantha's case file, the stone cold facts of his murdered sister and her dead children.

"I included in there everything I could find out about Samantha,..uh,.. her marriage, work, life, the births of her children. There isn't much in the way of personal information other than medical." She reached over and flipped a few pages. "Here is the birth records. It seems both pregnancies were difficult-"

"Just like mom." He commented.

Scully nodded,.."Um, one unusual thing in regards to the birth of her son." She pointed to a place on the page.

Mulder read: "Diamnionic-dichorionic fetal demise." He looked up at her with an expression of : I'm supposed to understand this gobbledy-gook?

A smile twitched at her lip, and she perched one cheek on the edge of his desk. "It mean Samantha delivered two placentas, the second having no fetus. Usually it means there was a twin, but the embryo was reabsorbed very early on during the pregnancy." He was listening very intently. She knew the way his mind worked: file this, catagorize that, remember verbatim each sentence and the inflection there-in, the particular pinch of her lips, a raise of an eyebrow,...all neatly docketed and stored away to be retrieved at any time in the future and with almost no effort what-so-ever. Mulder must have pissed of teachers and students alike.

"Reabsorbed? So what's delivered then?" he asked, himself still seemingly absorbed by what she was saying.

"A second, macerated placenta usually."

"And with Sam?"

"She delivered a normal, healthy six pound, three ounce boy and a second fully developed normal placenta but where the embryo had been reabsorbed."

"The placenta was normal? In other words, it could have contained a baby?"

Scully raised an eyebrow. "Could have yes, but it didn't. Twin gestation is more common than generally known, one twin often being lost so early that it isn't even noticed. There are numerous conditions where twins are gestated but only one survives. In monoamnionic twins, a single anmionic sac is shared, sometimes even blood systems are shared, one fetus receiving the greater supply, the result being that one dies of lack of blood supply, or sometimes the other from congestive heart failure. Sometimes both die. In Sam's case, one survived."

"So Sam had twins but only one was born? But you said she had two fully developed placentas only one of which contained a baby."

"Yes. I don't think that is as uncommon as generally known either. Women are undergoing fertility treatments in greater numbers than ever with multiple gestating embryo's, it's not surprising that some don't survive full term."

Mulder sat back. He looked up at her. "Have you ever heard of the Vanishing Twin Phenomenon?"

"If you are referring to fetal demise, yes. As I said, the "Vanishing Twin" is a feature of early pregnancy. When a diagnosis of twins is made prior to ten weeks, the rate of disappearance can be between 65 and 75%. When diagnosis is made between ten and fifteen weeks, the disappearance rate is 55 to 60%. When twins are first diagnosed after fifteen weeks, none had "disappeared". It's a phenomenon not accepted by all in the medical profession but in my opinion it's the best explanation for the presence of two umbilical cords or a second macerated placenta-"

"Some people think there's another explanation."

Scully raised her eyebrows. "What?"

"It''s been theorized that some children are abducted while still in the womb. And before you get that "look" in your eye, grant me the same curteousy and hear me out."

She nodded once but the eyebrow stayed up.

"One explanation for the Vanishing Twin is the concept you mentioned "resorption" or "reabsorption", which means the "vanished" fetus was absorbed either by the surviving twin or its mother. The problem with that theory is research has shown that is simply not feasible after about twelve weeks gestation -- the fetus has by that time grown too large to be "absorbed" by anything. I have read of instances where twins "vanished" at various times late in the gestation process, including one in which two heartbeats were detectable less than two hours before birth, yet only one child being born!"

"So you think Samantha's second baby may have been abducted from her womb by aliens, and that's why she delivered a second empty placenta?"

"I'm not saying that is what happened, Scully, but how else do you explain the fact that the placenta was normal in every way, including size only there being no baby inside?"

"The simplest explanation, Mulder, is usually the true one. The fetus may have been reabsorbed but the placenta was still functional, still getting blood flow until it separated from the uterus wall and was delivered normally, along with the other placenta that contained the healthy body of her son. There is no indication of any complications what-so-ever during Samantha's pregnancy."

"Considering there was a second placenta, don't you think that's a little odd?"

"No. I don't."

"Did she ever have an ultra-sound?"

"Not that it shows here but many women decide not to have them. Also not all obstetricians think them necessary unless a problem is suspected which in this case there wasn't."

"Was she given Demerol or any drug during delivery?'

Scully took up the file and flipped a page or two. "Yes. Demerol for pain. A general injection."

"So she might have been out of it during delivery."

"It can make a person sleepy and disoriented, yes."

"I can't help but wonder that if there was a second child, a twin, if the baby was taken from her during delivery and she was never told about it."

"Firstly, we have no reason to suspect this happened, and secondly, you mean Cancer Man or this new Group?" Scully sighed. It couldn't be ruled out and she hated to admit it. "It's possible."

"Maybe Sam's second baby was one of these kids, these "gifted" children your informant spoke about. If the Syndicate took the baby and we could locate him or her..."

"Those are big maybe's and if's, Mulder. Where on earth do we start?"

"Hospital records, adoption agency records..."

"Well, I have a feeling we'll be relying on Langly and the others to do that kind of sleuthing." Her tone softened, "As sorry as I am about what's happened to Samantha and her family, this has no real connection to our current case so I doubt we could get Skinner's approval."

"I can live with that."

Scully sighed. It was growing more and more difficult to refuse him anything as every hour and day that went was just one day less he would be alive. In the mornings when the sun shone through the curtains of her bedroom, it did not welcome her to life as it used to. Now it was just some horrible clock that relentlessly reminded her that he would die a little bit more that day, and the next too. Case or no case, he needed closure. Answers. _An_ answer. One.

"Okay," she said.

Title: "DIVINITIES" (Sequel to "PhaHks/FOCUS/ FOLDBACK")

Author: GeeLady.(Author's notes appear at end.)

DIVINITIES, Chapter II Continued...

Her phone trilled and she pulled it out of her coat pocket. "Scully."

Mulder watched her eyes narrow as she listened and then looked straight at him, a silent request for his attention. "Wait...." Scully said into the phone. "I can hardly hear you."

Mulder stood and put his ear to the phone also, Scully holding it up to accommodate them both.

"..Don't ask me how I know, I still have some contacts, others who've been disillusioned like me, but if you want to know more, if you want one of these kids alive, then you should speak to Doctor Jerry Parrish. He's the same doctor who delivered my own daughter and in my experience that's enough to suspect him. He's retired now but you can find him at the following address. Write this down because this may be absolutely our last contact. I may have to leave the country...."

"Why?" Scully asked into the phone. Her informant, her white haired Crazy Man, sounded scared.

"Never mind. I don't matter, don't you understand yet? It's the kids, only the kids. The address is Apartment 601, 1313, Dallport Street, Virginia."

Mulder scribbled it down on the back of his hand while Scully continued to talk. "Wait Are you okay? Maybe you should come in, we can provide-"

"Don't flatter yourself, Agent Scully. The Bureau, the C.I.A., name your favorite, have nothing on these people. This is world wide, do you understand? World wide. Maybe millions of members now, who knows and impossible to tell, they don't keep numbers, just names. Like mine. That's why I have to leave, someone's been following me and has been for some time."

"But you'd be a harder target if you came here. If you testified, tell what you know-"

"Testify? My dear, they're just biding their time right now. They could have killed me but they didn't because of, I think, you and your partner and the work you've done opposing those they view as evil."

"That makes no sense." Mulder said.

"Fox Mulder. You of all people should understand what they're capable of. They may have had a hand in your abduction."

"You're wrong."

"Wrong or right, I know the effects,..what happens to people whom they've touched."

Scully knew Crazy Man was referring to Mulder's disease and anger flooded through her. "That could have been caused by a number of things, we-"

"We don't have time to debate it, Agent Scully. Your partner's life has been stolen by these people, so I would think that what I have about them to say would be important to you."

"What are you saying?"

"They're looking for a living child as well. I don't know why. Maybe to re- enforce in their minds by finding a child that what they're doing is the work of God. In any case, my grace is up. I'm just running because I'm hoping they'll get soft and let me, but I doubt it."

"We could protect you." Scully tried again.

"You still don't get it, do you? After the first time we spoke, with _that_ first meeting, Agent Scully, I was already a dead man."

He hung up.

Five WEEKS POST ENMS DIAGNOSIS:

Four people lounged around her living room was about as crowded as her apartment had ever been. Also strewn hither and thither were documents, most of them pirated through hacks by her visitors, Langly, Byers and Frohike.

Scully was seated on the couch between Byers and Langly while Frohike had settled into her reclining chair by the fire.

Mulder was sleeping in his room.

Scully had brought coffee out for all of them and between the paper monster, dirty coffee cups and empty fast food take out containers, she wondered if she'd ever get the place back in one piece again.

"That's all we could get." Frohike commented finally from his restful position. As old and frail as he looked now, his general health was in far better condition than his F.B.I. friend who slept down the hall under the doping effects of several drugs.

"I really appreciate all your work, guys." Scully managed to say.

A terrible depression had hit that morning. Mulder had awoken and just the effort of getting to the breakfast table had not only exhausted him but raised his blood pressure.

Two hours later, just as the Lone Gunmen were arriving with all their printed goodies, Scully had fed Mulder his meds' and ushered him off to bed again. Sleep was one of the easiest and most effective methods of lowering his pressure and taking the strain off his calcifying circulatory system.

"How's Mulder?" Frohike asked.

"Sleeping. His temp and pressure went up again last night."

"What caused it?" Byers asked, always inquisitive as to the why's of everything.

"Nothing." She answered. "Nothing. It just spiked. We should start expecting that, the more time that goes by, the more often it will occur. This time, we got it back down."

This statement was followed by silence in the room. Byers, Frohike, Langly, all knew Mulder's condition. Scully had hld nothing back at all. All had the same information as she did and all were desperately searching for a cure, treatment, anything that would prolong his life. So far, they'd been unsuccessful.

Scully looked over at Frohike slumped in her easy chair. He was thinner, and since she'd delivered the news about Mulder's diagnosis, older than he'd ever appeared. Of all three friends, he seemed to be taking it the hardest. "He's a good friend..." he said into the depressed atmosphere. and even quieter, "...my best friend. This is wrong, what they've done to him. He doesn't deserve this. It isn't right."

Scully bit her lip and had to hold her breath. His simple words, so quietly said, came as a fist to her gut. It took enormous control not to break down right then and there.

"Have you found out anything about it?" she asked them. "What about Cancer-Man? Any luck on locating him? What about Krycek? Mulder said he was sure he'd seen him at the school."

"We've put out the word to everyone we know, nothing so far." Langly said.

"Cancer Man's known to change his location every few weeks. He has no fixed address, there is no way to contact him. No one's really seen him for years. The only time he shows up is when he has something to say."

"Like his visit to Skinner a while back." Byers reminded them.

Scully nodded. Skinner had told her about that incident. Cancer man had spoken in riddles, mentioning a "storm". Their case, the murders, Mulder's illness...all of it bearing down on them like a storm, yes, in a sense - a human and tragic Fury - if ever there was one.

She herself had gone to see him, but now the old cabin in the hills of Augusta had been abandoned. Smokey was gone, maybe dead by now if Skinner's description of him was accurate, Krycek was out murdering kids, the Syndicate wasn't making a peep...the only one who seemed to know anything was her possible former FBI mystery man informant who hadn't contacted her since their last visit and probably would not.

Scully cleared her throat. "I should tell you, that in another three or four weeks, Mulder's condition will have worsened beyond help or hope. Once the bleeding starts, probably in his stomach first because of the concentration of blood vessels there and because of the trouble he's already experienced with it this last year, the decline will accelerate fairly quickly after that. Um,... he will rapidly slip into coma once the toxicity reaches saturation in his liver and once the bleeding out begins in earnest. And after that,...a few hours."

Into the funeral like setting of their minds, "What about reducing his blood volume regularly-?" Byers began.

"-He's already undergone two blood letting procedures.". Scully had concurred with doctor Watts about the seemingly barbaric procedure, but it was a logical addition to the blood thinners in reducing his blood pressure which was critical if he was to maintain any activity at all. However smart their field plan in this particular battle, it was not a winnable war.

"They do provide some relief from the pressure spikes," Scully continued, "but they won't prevent the disease from advancing and they won't prevent the foreign tissue from releasing it's dead cells into his body, which has already started. He'll have to go in for liver and kidney toxicity tests and dialysis and from then on we'll have to monitor him very closely."

"So how long does he have, really, from right now?" Langly asked.

Scully wanted to tell them months but in reality, she doubted it would be that long. "It's been five weeks and he's already showing some serious effects, the blood pressure spikes, fatigue, increasing stomach disorders, pain, in his extremities in particular...so six or perhaps eight weeks. Maybe longer if we keep him in the hospital."

"I don't want to see Mulder lying on his back in some damn, unfeeling hospital room." Frohike stated.

Neither did any of them. Scully looked fondly upon Frohike. They had a friendship based upon long, hard earned trust, despite his unending flirting with her over the years, and she was so glad, so relieved, to have his company and the company of the other two.

Mulder had good friends.

She, like Frohike, also wanted to see Mulder up and fighting for that answer. Fighting for his life until the last second. That's what she told herself for bravery purposes. In the heart of her, what she really wanted was Mulder in her bed where she could touch him and hold him until the last breath left his body.

But he wanted to go down fighting. He wanted his death to have some meaning. Therefor, she would help him find it if she could.

"Okay. There's one other thing I want you guys to look for. Now this is probably a wild goose chase, but I want you to find out everything you can for me on Samantha Mueller: her children, their birth records, hospital records, I don't care how you have to get them. Specifically I want you to check for the possibility that she may have given birth to twins, only one of which we know about. Here's the file we do have on her. It isn't much."

Byers took it from her. "Does Mulder think this child may still be alive?"

Scully nodded. "Yes. But I don't want you telling him about this, you're search. He knows about it, but I'm pretty certain you aren't going to find anything anyway and I don't want him to have any...false hopes at this stage."

Byers nodded, slipping the file in his briefcase. He was dressed neatly but had taken off his jacket.

Time seemed to have left Langly alone, other than his head sporting a buzz cut, he was still a T-Shirt freak and was wearing one that said: I'LL GET BACK TO YOU ON THAT. "We'll take care of it. Shouldn't take more than two or three days."

"Thanks guys. In the meantime, Mulder and I have a lead we're going to follow tomorrow, if he's up to it." Scully began gathering up coffee cups and cardboard food packages.

"Here it is." Mulder, in the passenger seat, said and read the sign on the building. "Dallport Mews. 1313, Dallport Street. Hope he's home."

He was as stable as twelve hours sleep and all his little pills could make him. No way was Scully going to be getting in on this on her own. Not without him. Not when he was this close to exposing a lie or, at the very least, finding out a truth or two.

They'd tried calling Parrish by phone without any luck.

Scully lead the way, which rather annoyed Mulder, but he said nothing. She was in protective overdrive and he didn't want to ruffle her feathers any and end up being shipped back to the hospital because of a blood pressure altering argument.

They took the elevator and Mulder felt himself subconsciously holding on for dear life when the thing began its vertical assent. The last time he'd been in one that had gone more than a floor or two, he'd ended up on his ass and then in X-Ray learning all kinds of lovely new things about his monster-invaded skull.

But this was an older building and the lift was pleasantly slow.

Apartment 601 was a door like any other and Scully knocked. Waited.

She knocked again. "Doctor Parrish? We're F.B.I. Agents. Please don't be alarmed, we're just here to talk to you about a former patient. We under- stood you might be expecting us." It was a half-truth.

No sound of walking feet could be heard. Scully was about to try the doorknob but her hand paused in midair above it, not touching.

"Mulder."

He heard the warning of her tone and looked down. The wood around the doorknob was gouged and scratched, as if someone had tried to pry open the handle lock with a metal object. The scratches were fresh.

Mulder stepped aside of the door and Scully drew her weapon. He put a hand out to indicate she wait, then pointed to his foot to show he'd deal with the door, and she could do the rush. Mulder positioned himself about three feet from the door, turned his head to her and silently mouthed "On three". Then he held up three fingers, dropping them one by one.

Until the last finger dropped. Raising his leg, he gave a powerful kick and the door flew open, swinging wide and crashing against the inner wall and bouncing back but not before Scully had rushed in with gun trained, checking each and every corner of the interior with her sights. The short front hall and living room were both empty.

As was the small kitchenette off the living room. Scully opened the bath- room door and Mulder went to the one bedroom.

"Nothing here." She called out.

"Something here, Scully!"

Scully found Mulder kneeling beside she could only assume was Doctor Parrish. His chest was bloody. She handed her gun to Mulder and knelt down, checking for a pulse at his throat. "He's still alive but only just."

Mulder called for an ambulance on his cell while Scully checked the doctor's injuries. Three bullet holes in his chest with blood still escaping. Pulling the bedspread down, she used a gathered corner of it to try and stop the bleeding, applying pressure.

Her ministrations caused Parrish's eyes to open. He looked up at her, then over at Mulder, only his eyes moving. His stare stayed on Mulder. "My god."

It was the barest whisper. "My god. They said you came back. I didn't believe them...but here you are."

Scully and Mulder exchanged looks, questioning and mesmerized at the same time by his odd words.

"We were told you had information about the children." Mulder asked straight- forwardly.

"Of course. I will tell you. You _must_ be told." Parrish whispered, his eyes bright with the light of fanaticism. "I have knowledge of several. Holy, divine children. God's little angels on earth."

"Who shot you?" Scully asked.

"The evil ones. Those who try to stop us the devil and his servants - our holy work."

"We need a name. Who do you work for?" She said.

"We need to know where one of these children are." Mulder said.

Parrish's eyes flicked back and forth between them. He decided to answer Mulder's question first. "You were sent to expose the evil. Find the good and holy child. Samantha Mueller. One of my last patients."

"Her child you mean? The other twin! What happened to it?" Mulder asked, firing the questions faster as Parrish's eyes were opening and then closing again for longer intervals each moment that elapsed.

Scully looked sharply at Mulder. "This man needs to reserve his strength, Mulder..."

"No,.." Parrish whispered, it was getting harder for him to speak, and his breath gurgled in his throat. "No, he's correct. There were two. But I only delivered one. The other,...taken..miraculous!"

Mulder gave Scully an "I told you so" expression. "Where is it?"

"Don't you know? But I thought,..I mean, aren't you the one? You're supposed to know these things. That's what they say."

"They" who?" Scully asked, still staring at Mulder.

"We need to know the location of the second twin - Samantha's child!" Mulder urged. Parrish was slowly turning whiter and his breathing shallow.

"Mulder. Enough! He needs to rest." Scully pressed harder on Parrish's wounds in a hopeless attempt to keep him alive. "He can't tell you anything if he's dead."

Ignoring her, "Parrish! The second twin? Where?"

Parrish looked up at the ceiling, then at Mulder. His face broke into a beautific smile, as if he were looking at Michael himself. "For God has said concerning them. "They will without fail die in the wilderness, and so there came to be not a man left among them except...except...."." Parrish's eyes fluttered shut and Mulder grabbed him unthinkingly, shaking him by his collar.

"Enough of the holy rolling mumbo jumbo! Parrish! Where?!"

Parrish did not open his eyes again.

Scully reached out and removed, non too gently, Mulder's hands from Parrish's shirt collar, then checked the doctor's pulse and found it gone. "No points for your bedside manner, Mulder."

Mulder sighed and sat back on his butt, his legs crossed. "He wanted to tell us, Scully, it was important, he knew it was."

"Well, he won't be telling anyone anything now."

Mulder stood up and walked into the other room. Sirens could be heard. The ambulance, not really necessary now, would be there in a moment.

He hadn't meant to shake the man like he had, he'd just acted without thinking. Scully was right to be angry with him. But just the thought that Samantha might have a child living and breathing somewhere out there and they had no idea.....

Scully briefly checked over the bedroom, opening drawers, then followed him into the living room after a moment. Mulder was looking at the books lining the shelves along one wall. Medical books, mostly, but there were a few classics and some mystery. Nothing unusual.

Scully came to his side. "Well, you got what you came for."

Mulder didn't understand. "What?"

"We have a direction now at least."

"What are you talking about, Scully, he gave us nothing but fire and brimstone. He was just another crazy fanatic, probably no different that your mystery informant. We have nothing but crap and religious double talk. I was stupid to believe it to begin with."

"Oh, I see. So now you _don't_ believe it. Arrogance is unattractive, Mulder."

"What is that supposed to mean?"

"It means that whenever YOU decide something is or isn't true, the rest of us are just supposed to line up and shake your hand."

"I'm not deciding the truth, Scully, I'm just facing it, accepting reality as it is, the simplest explanation, just like you always counsel me to."

"Mulder. We have Samantha's medical record. That isn't double talk, it's empirical, scientific data. I was slow to accept the idea at first but I think my informant, crazy or not, is right about the children being special in some way. And I think you're right about a second child. And now from what Parrish has told us, I'm even more certain you both are."

"What did Parrish tell us?"

"He quoted scripture, Mulder." Scully held an old, tattered book in her hand. "This was in his bedside table. Devotee's keep their resources closest to them." She explained to her surprised partner. He wouldn't know it, of course, but it was where she kept hers.

Scully turned pages until she found what she was looking for. "Here. Numbers 26, verse 65. "And God hath said concerning them that they shall without fail die in the wilderness so that there came to be none among them but one man, Caleb." ." Closing it Scully turned to him. "A prophecy concerning God's people, the chosen ones. That they would die in a hostile place, all of them but one, because of the disobedience of the for-fathers, but that one would be granted great prosperity."

"You're saying you think this is what these kids are? A chosen few, holy ones fated to die among all us unworthy?"

"No. I'm saying this is what Parrish thought. And it's probably what his group thinks, this group that seeks to protect them yet they die despite their efforts. I don't understand what's going on, Mulder, though I'm beginning to get a glimmer of what Parrish and his group _think_ is going on. We still have a case. We have a little boy to find and that little boy has a name now,....Caleb."

Skinner read her report. Not an official report, simply a rundown of what she and her partner were accomplishing, which was very little she had to admit. Oh, they had gathered a great many leads and had formulated several theories, some of which she had outlined for Walter Skinner, sitting directly across from her desk and flipping through the pages, shaking his head.

He's come to the basement during Mulder's daily afternoon rest and plopped down in Mulder's chair where he now leaned back, about as relaxed as Scully ever saw him when he was on the job.

Rubbing his eyes. "Do you believe any of this vanishing twin, second child stuff?"

"Mulder does. I'm not sure what to make of anything yet, we're not far enough along, we do have, however, Samantha's medical record in regard to the birth of her children, which did occur under unusual circumstances."

"But this search for Samantha's child seems to have less to do with the God's Children case than with Mulder's personal quest."

"I know. But he's-"

"I realize his time is short, Dana." Skinner interrupted.

The use of her first name from his lips was a rare event but with Skinner, it suited. She preferred it over 'scully' from him. Only Mulder called her Scully. Only ever Mulder. Between them, last names had become the familiar address. Lovers names.

Skinner rocked in Mulder's squeaking swivel chair, fiddling with Mulder's stapler. "Is part of this disease dementia, do you think?"

"Emily showed no sign of it."

Skinner nodded and stood. "I can authorize only so much expense for this newest quest of his."

"There won't be much, sir. Time is short."

"How short?" He watched her go pale and swallow.

"A few weeks at most. Probably less."

Resisting the temptation to kiss her, he merely lay one large hand on her thin shoulder. The stress of what was happening had taken it's toll. She was boney and frailer.

"I wish there was something I could do, Scully."

She appreciated his concern, his kindness, his caring about Mulder when so many did not. She took his hand in hers and kissed the back of it, remembering another time when hey had exchanged far deeper intimacies.

"Thank you for that."

The call on her cellular came through in the middle of the night. Scully had taken to keeping her phone on her bedside table.

"Ms. Scully?"

"Yes?" She recognized the voice of her informant, the Crazy Man as she'd come to call him privately.

"Your search for the child will fail."

Scully went cold. "How do you know? Do you know where-?"

"-I used to be with these people, remember? I suspected as much for a time prior to my leaving them."

"What, baby murders, snatchings from the womb? What else do you know that you haven't bother telling us? How do you expect me to trust you when you hide truths?"

"I expect nothing. I tell you what I think you need to know and can handle at the time. You do with it as you please. I have no personal agenda."

"I find that hard to believe, sir. By the way, thanks for the information on Parrish, except we got there too late. He's dead."

"I know. You'll just have to trust me."

"Why are you contacting me now? I thought you were on the run, I thought they were after you?" She was angry at his hide-and-seek approach to the revelation of facts.

"We don't have time for this Agent Scully. Do you want to hear what I have to say or not?"

She swallowed her anger and her turmoil. She did not know _if_ she should trust this man, but she couldn't afford to take any chances. "Yes."

"You won't locate Caleb through HITS or any law enforcement data base because he's being kept where no technology is allowed to exist."

"Where is he being kept?"

"He's with his father although you won't be able to track Caleb through him. They're in Pennsylvania. I can tell you the specific area, but you'll have to do the fine combing yourself."

"Where?" She repeated.

"A community that keeps itself isolated from civilization and all our wonderful amenities. It's where Caleb's father came from when he was very young. Just track the name: Mueller."

"And the community is what? How about a name?"

"Amish. No technology means no phones, no televisions, no radios, no way for any stranger to enter without being very noticeable or even if disguised, without strange behavior being noticed. They're like a separate nation, Agent Scully. Traditional beliefs, old world practices. Removed from civilization, isolated from crime and the even the laws made to fight it. A perfect hiding spot right here in America. Don't send uniforms or even undercover. You do that and Mueller'll disappear with Caleb and you'll never see either of them again."

"Why does he have him? How did Mueller know his wife Samantha had had a second baby? Nobody knew that, not even the hospital."

"My former acquaintances did. I don't know how they knew but Charles Mueller was a long time member and got a hold of his wife's medical records. He probable wondered if, as we all did, if his wife would deliver a special child. Most likely, he didn't expect those suspicions to come true. It was just, I don't know, ego, like it was with most. But once he knew, I think he suspected the Group right away of baby snatching. He knew of the Groups obsession with Vanishing Twin Syndrome and that in their eyes, it meant a blessed child. Something divine."

"My partner thinks otherwise."

"I'm aware of what Agent Mulder thinks. Aliens? Angels? I hold no views one way or another."

"Were all these children so-called "Vanished twins"? Scully asked, steering the conversation back to potential fact gathering and not pseudo-religious speculating.

"The God's Children? Your case? I doubt it, but there are so many strange things, Agent Scully. I have no way to verify anything beyond my own reasoning. It is always possible. But the belief in blessed children and miracle children was always been an aspect of the Groups belief system."

"Samantha's medical records indicate she did not give birth to a second baby but simply an empty placenta."

"Then I don't know how to explain how Mueller got wind of his second son but the fact is he has him, according to my source."

"I don't suppose you'll divulge that source to me?"

"No chance in hell. Pennsylvania, Agent Scully. Amish communities. Better get started, there's a lot of them. And don't take your weapons or you won't be welcomed."

"I hope your source isn't pulling your leg or mine. Will you contact me again?

"Probably not. Depends where I find myself." He hung up.

Scully tossed aside her covers and padded down the hall to Mulder's room. He'd never forgive her if she didn't wake him and tell him now.

She hated to rouse him, seeing how soundly he was sleeping. It was good for him, it slowed circulation, it lowered blood pressure and other functions. It slowed the progress of his illness and prolonged his life.

She shook him gently until he opened sleepy eyes and looked at her. "We have a lead on Caleb, Mulder."

Five & 1/2 WEEKS POST ENMS DIAGNOSIS:

They set the LoneGunMen (who set the extended membership) and every non law enforcement contact they had on a hunt of every Amish community in Pennsylvania. It took almost two weeks of polite inquiries before they isolated a few particular farms. Those farms locations were faxed to Scully's home computer.

In those two weeks, Mulder's condition deteriorated alarmingly quickly. But he insisted on making the trip with her. "I have to see Caleb, Scully. He's all there is left of Sam."

Going in any kind of disguise would only prove themselves to be untrustworthy should their facade be penetrated so, attired in working clothes, Scully and Mulder, Mulder with a portable oxygen pack, nose tube and walking with measured steps, approached the door to the second farm house of the three left they were to visit that evening. It was unseasonably warm and the sky had that orange electric glow that foretold stormy weather.

A petite plain faced woman in a button less brown dress answered the front door to the large white house. Beyond the door to the kitchen could be seen a middle aged man resting in a chair at the table, drinking coffee.

The woman peeked through the screen. "Yes?"

"I'm Agent Scully." She introduced herself. "And this is Agent Mulder. We're with the Federal Bureau of Investigation. We're looking for a man named Charles Mueller. We have information that he may be here or staying on a farm nearby."

The woman stared for a moment. "I don't believe I've never heard of a Charles Mueller, I'm sorry."

Mulder stepped closer and looked directly at her through the screen. "Ma'am, may I ask you your name?"

"Esther."

"Esther. Esther Mueller?"

She nodded.

"Esther, your father's" nodding toward the figure in the kitchen, "or your husband's last name is also Mueller, isn't that right?"

"He's my father." She corrected him.

"Father, then. Now if I understand the Amish way, they may have very extended families but they keep in pretty close touch. So it seems unlikely that you or your father wouldn't have heard of a man named Charles who's last name happens to be the same as yours and who has been reported as living in this area and maybe right here on this farm. So, if you and your father want to avoid a car trip to the closest police precinct and a whole lot of time spent in a tiny room being asked questions by people a lot less patient than we are, maybe you could jog your memory a little? Or maybe your father could."

She glanced back over her shoulder and then stepped through the screen door into the late evening dusk. "My father isn't well, and I don't know anyone named Charles Mueller."

The sound of a door being closed was heard, just a very soft click.

Mulder pushed passed her and looked through to the kitchen. The chair was now empty. He turned back, "Scully." and pulled the screen door open to admit them both. Scully, able to move the quickest, reached the kitchen first. It was spartan and functional. One huge black iron stove took up one wall. There was an old fashioned ice box on another and shelves of preserves.

A quick check through the premises and a look in the back yard turned up no souls.

"Where'd he go?" Mulder asked the woman who stood in the center of her kitchen, saying nothing.

In front of the stove lay a large carpet woven from scrap material, twelve square feet at least.

Mulder had a thought. "The rug, Scully."

She looked down and it dawned on her what he meant, kicking it aside with one foot.

A wooden door lay beneath with one small finger hole for opening purposes.

Scully lifted it up and let it drop over, cautiously keeping herself away from the opening. Mulder pulled a small flashlight from his coat pocket and handed it to her. She shone it down into the darkness to reveal a narrow wooden staircase that ended twenty feet below with a dirt floor.

"Where does this go?" Mulder asked Esther who showed all the earmarks of fear but also determination. She kept her peace.

"I'll go, Mulder."

"We'll both go, Scully."

Scully put away her gun and the flashlight, placing her foot down onto the first step. "Mulder, this is too strenuous. It's bad enough you've come at all."

"Samantha was my sister, Scully. If Caleb is here, I have an obligation to try and find him."

Esther started. "You?! She was your sister?"

Mulder, puzzled by her odd expression, "Yes. Is her son alive? Is Caleb here?"

She, still staring at him as if seeing an apparition, "Yes. This tunnel leads to an open field at the edge of the trees, about one half mile, down at the end of the east pasture."

Mulder, carrying no FBI issued weapon due to the restrictions on his jacket, had managed forethought enough to bring his tiny ankle gun. He pulled it out and tucked it in at the back of his belt.

Esther put her hands over her mouth. "You brought an instrument of death here? A gun for the murdering of life? That's God's business!"

Mulder looked at her. "I prefer to think of it as an instrument used in the preservation of the innocent, and that's _my_ business since God's interest in it seems to be in mighty short supply these days."

Esther didn't know what to make of the man before her. "I've heard about you, Fox Mulder. Despite the blasphemy, may God go with you today."

"Thanks. Which direction?"

"Go out the back door, through there" she pointed, "and through the gate down by the end of the field. Go all the way to the edge of the willows."

"Why was Caleb brought here? Who is he with?"

Esther stared, she seemed puzzled. "That, of course, is also God's business."

Scully descended the stairs. "I'll meet you there, Mulder. Be careful."

Mulder left Esther after calling out to Scully, "Okay and I will."

Scully followed the tunnel, it went in a pretty straight line with very few kinks until she found herself at the bottom of another ladder that ascended to what looked like just a hole in the ground. The opening was somewhat camouflaged by long grasses that bent and bowed over it, so, from the air or a casual stroller, it would be nearly impossible to spot without an deliberate search.

She climbed and found herself on the edge of a Poplar wood, which she realized was just a stretch of trees between farmlands.

She couldn't see anyone at all.

In the distance, however, she saw Mulder half walking, half jogging across the field towards her. "Do you see them?!" He called.

"No. And slow down." He was working his body far too hard and if he kept it up, he'd be back in the hospital by nightfall.

Mulder reached her. "I'm fine, Scully."

They looked around, night had fallen and stars could be seen, a huge band across the sky. "They could have gone into the woods, Mulder, and that could mean they've headed to the next farm over or it could be just that they're hiding and we'll never find them in this darkness."

In the glow of the half moon, Mulder looked white and shaky. "You have to rest. You haven't taken your pills and you're overdue," she said.

He shrugged off her words when he saw movement he thought at the edge of the trees and called out. "Charles Mueller! We just want to talk to you!"

A deafening sound cut off further attempts at communication as wind screaming all the decibels of a speeding freight train assaulted their ears, almost knocking them to the ground. As suddenly, they were bathed in blinding light from over- head. It was white, or electric blue but to open their eyes for even a second to either confirm or dispute speculation brought pain searing straight to their retinas.

"Mulder!" Scully yelled, losing her orientation. She could not feel him when she stretched out her hands and, even if he did hear her and was answering, she was deafened by the hurricane like force surrounding her.

Then, as suddenly as it started, it ended.

Scully was standing in a peaceful night field. The stars shone.

Mulder was sitting down on the ground not ten feet from her, breathing hard and as white as the moon overhead.

"Mulder. Hey." She knelt down beside him, took his pulse. "Can you stand?"

He seemed confused for a moment, then looked at her, shaking his head no.

Scully pulled out her cellular and called for an ambulance, giving them directions to the farm and field. "Just try and relax, Mulder. Okay?"

He seemed dazed and said nothing. Only nodded.

Scully did not know what had happened but they would puzzle it out later.

By midnight, Mulder was back in the emergency ward.

Scully watched Mulder and he looked peaceful. He was sleeping well and deeply.

But even to a medically untrained eye, that he was anything but well was clear.

He was very pale, because of the blood letting. It still twisted her gut that in a day of such rapidly advancing and often miraculous technology, the only thing that was helping him was a practice so old, it was considered inhuman.

Mulder was thin and would become thinner.

He was sticking to his diet but the fact was food, even liquified which is what he was now reduced to, burned his insides.

Eating hurt.

His stomach, already a mass of ulcers and hernia developed over the last and most physically taxing decade of his life, could tolerate almost nothing.

Watts had provided yet another salt-free ant-acid prescription for the indigestion and ulcerated crevasses that had appeared on his stomach wall, and still another to assist with the digestion process itself.

The paradox was not lost on medically trained Doctor Scully. One medicine to reduce the gastric acid that continually ate at his bleeding stomach wall and another medicine to digest the food that would otherwise putrefy and rot inside it.

Slowly Mulder was losing ground in weight and muscle tone. Already he was weakening. Already he was done in for the day by noon.

She no longer had to coax him to sit down and rest at work. He would do his paper work, take his pills, drink his soup lunch and rest for many hours after.

They'd had no more local God's Children murders to see and since Mulder could no longer visit distant ones, they did much of their work via phone, computer and fax machine.

Scully watched Mulder day by day as his deterioration accelerated with heartbreaking regularity.

Soon, half days were the norm and by noon he would find his way to an employee lounge, make himself as comfortable as possible on one of the long leather couches and sleep until it was time to go home.

Now at the end of his sixth week since diagnoses, perpetual fatigue was quickly overtaking him. No amount of sleep seemed to take the edge off his weariness.

Daily Scully watched while images played across her mind and more and more they returned to those of Emily and her final suffering hours. Often, in that hospital room, Scully had considered ending Emily's life herself.

Already, watching Mulder whom she'd lost before (too many times before), she found herself contemplating such thoughts. Would she take that step this time? Would Mulder ask her and if he did could she do it?

Already his death loomed before her like the figurative Black Angel, his skeleton fingers curled around his crooked staff, and she couldn't help the hatred she felt inside for it and for all those people and circumstances that had brought them both to this point. Neither could she help but be selfish in thinking only of herself because she was afraid. Scared that she was not equal to this. Not after her father and her sister. Not after Emily.

Mulder was dying and she couldn't bear to lose him. Scully was afraid she would not survive it.

Within a day, the fear began speaking louder in her ear.

After two more days, it was screaming.

"Can't you give him something?!" Scully was standing before Watts in the emergency ward, and yelling in his face. Demanding they do something. Act! Perform!

Right now!

"Stop his pain!"

In her mind, she also saw herself from across the room; a crazy woman yelling at the doctor who was only there to, of course, ease Mulder's suffering anyway he could. And, a third perspective, she saw herself with her arms around Mulder as he lay writhing on the emergency ward bed, pressing her lips to his face and head, and his pain disappearing as if by a magicians touch.

"Of course, we are, but we must know what exactly is causing _this_ pain, Doctor Scully. You know that yourself."

She did.

She did but never in all the years of seeing Mulder injured or ill and her tending of him had she ever witnessed him actually thrashing and crying out in agony, as he was doing now. If it wasn't stopped, she was certain she would go mad.

"Okay!" She nodded, running fingers through her hair, turning back to Mulder's side, wanting to touch him except that would only add to his pain.

But she couldn't touch him. She wasn't allowed, and that restriction was becoming almost unbearable.

God could not exist if he allowed these things to occur. For her, the tests of her faith, though always personal, had become too great. In light of what _he_ had lost, she wondered how Job had managed it.

In this trial she would fail. She had too much hate now, stored up in a stinking pile, contaminating her faith, consuming her soul and mind and infecting everything about her life up to and including that very moment in the Emergency Ward.

This agony was the beginning of his very short future. What she saw now here in the emergency ward, were the shades of things coming, uncontrollably, towards them. The foreshadow of his life cut short and hers continuing on without him.

A future she could not fathom and a vision for which she was being given no time to prepare. Here today. Gone tomorrow. Today pain, tomorrow death.

Scully looked down at Mulder. At that moment, as his cries of pain and gasping for air filled her vision and hearing, God's death was made complete.

"Scully," he said between gulps of air.

Already his lungs were being affected and his bronchial passages no longer had the same elasticity as before. With each breath he took she knew what was occurring inside his chest cavity, the straining of the air passages as they tried to obey the autonomic commands and expand as they should, the tiny air sacs getting a fraction less air each hour, his red blood cells getting a fraction less oxygen, all his tissues, body and brain, in turn getting that much less feeding of oxygen and all of those many fleshly parts that made up his body slowly starving to death because of it.

The pressure, too, in his chest, as the struggle to breath became greater hour upon hour. And the pain from all of it clear for all to see and listen to.

Scully could see it all, right there in her head.

"Yes?" She said to him in the kindest voice she could find.

"I want,..I need,..to..."

"Shhhhh. Rest, Mulder. I can get it for you, whatever you want. A Video? Ice-cream? Popcorn?" She could not bear to refuse him anything at all now and what did it matter if he ate a little salty popcorn and watched a fun movie, enjoyed the cool sweetness of ice-cream on his tongue? Maybe laugh a bit?

What the fuck did it matter now if his blood pressure spiked? It didn't, not at all.

His last days were not going to be spent obeying a multitude of rules designed to help him live just a few minutes more if it meant those minutes would be lacking joy. Fuck the goddamn rules! Fuck Cancer-Man and the Bureau. Fuck the hospital and the doctors who were powerless children incapable of real healing. Fuck herself for having known that, upon his return to her two years ago, he had been examined and found to be not physically normal. Fuck her for not starting to right then look for a reason why.

Mulder wheezed and shook his head back and forth to force words out through the worst agony he had ever experienced. Waves of it - tides - oceans of pain that washed from head to feet and back. Pain that made even thinking a step by step task.

"No. No,...I want, I need,...to go,...go..."

"No. Mulder. No going anywhere right now. Not anymore. No more chasing Cancer-Man or running after aliens. No more thinking all the time about everything and everyone else,.. and trying to fix it all."

She took a chance a touched his forehead with her fingers, gently stroking the fevered skin, the damp hair. Smooth away the wrinkles that stayed and said the agony was not eased by it.

Except maybe her agony. It felt good to touch him.

//Where's that goddamn doctor and the goddamn pain killers?!//

"Just you, now, Mulder. That's all. No one else. It's your turn Sweetheart. It's you who needs the attention now. We need to fix _you_ now." Knowing it was a lie Scully said it anyway. She herself needed to hear it. Needed the hope or else end up insane. "I promise you, we'll find a way to beat this." //With or without God.// "Shhhh, now, Baby, I know. I can see how much you're hurting. Any minute now, and it'll be gone. Okay? Any second"...

Just when she was ready to start tearing the place apart to find Watts, he appeared and administered something through Mulder's I.V. line. Mulder slipped into unconsciousness almost immediately. Watts turned to her.

"We checked his blood and the X-Rays. We had to be sure what to give him. We can't afford to administer anything that would raise his blood pressure or put him under so deep that he'd never come out of it. You remember what happened after the school?" He reminded her, defending what had seemed like tardiness or neglect on his part.

Scully nodded, wiped her eyes. "I know." She took him aside. "I want to know what else I'll need for Mulder. I'm not leaving him here to stare at white ceilings and walls, waiting for this thing to kill him. I want him in a better environment."

"What did you have in mind?"

"There's a place. A real home. Just make a list of the extra equipment I'll need and who you might recommend as a day nurse. I have to make a call."

Watts nodded and Scully left the room, grateful that Mulder was sleeping and that Watts was considerate enough to run the little errands for her. He seemed to comprehend her anguish enough to make concessions in her case. He knew she was a doctor. He knew Mulder was her partner, friend, lover. Watts did what he could.

Using her cell, Scully sought out a small, empty corner of the ward where there was amazingly no people scurrying back and forth and waited for the other party to answer.

"HELLO?"

"Mom? It's me."

"Dana. HOW ARE YOU? HOW's Fox?"

"Um,..he's not well. Worse. In fact, I wanted to- I need to ask you a favor. It's a pretty big one."

"GO AHEAD."

"Mom,...I want..."

Instead of speaking, Scully found she needed to slide down the wall. Cellular still in hand she stayed that way, head bowed, lips curled and pressed up against the mouth piece, shaking from head to toe.

Such a simple question she needed to ask and, surprising her, it was so far proving the hardest thing she'd had to say through all of it. She supposed she understood the reason, but that didn't make the words easier to speak.

They were words she hated and wanted to fight against with everything she was. But words couldn't be fought except with more words. And she found herself muted, silenced within grief. Defenseless.

Yet, once again, other words were whispered in her ear from the demon that had taken Emily and they said it was now time for her to admit defeat and take Mulder somewhere to die.

"M-mom,...I need to,..to,...can I...bring him home?"

Scully waited for her mother's answer while crying into her cellular. One or two people, waiting on news of their own loved one's and whatever tragedies had befallen them did not approach her, empathizing that sometimes, the grieving needed to grieve alone without interruption or awkward attempts at consolation.

Her mother answered the way Scully knew she, of course, would:

"I'll get a room ready. We'll take care of him, Dana."

Scully closed the connection without saying goodbye, her mind beyond speech though not yet incapable of producing the strangled sounds of heartbreak.

She stayed that way a long time, resting on her haunches, crying with the little noises she had never expected to make again. She cried with all the strength she used to reserve for holding tears back.

Sobbed until she felt drained and dry.

Eventually, Watts sought for and located her, handing over his little prepared lists of the things she would need to take with her or arrange to have delivered.

A little slip of paper covered with scrawls, a Doctor's script. She read the words with senses dulled and eyes naked.

Mulder's death certificate.

Ink scratches all about medicines prescribed to ease his many types of pain now and to come and machines designed to keep him comfortable until the monster inside him awoke for good.

Awoke to realize it's goal.

Awoke to reach out it's hands and take his life.

Six WEEKS POST ENMS DIAGNOSIS:

Scully helped Mulder up the steps to her mothers house and Margaret met them at the door. "Hello Fox."

Mulder was subdued, not only due to the stupifying effects of the many drugs in his system, but that Scully had insisted on bringing him here, calling it "convalecense". Even now, she told him lies about his own condition, tried to hide the truth from him.

Her let her, knowing it was herself she was hiding from and that she wasn't yet handling what was happening to him as he was. She needed more time.

But spending his last days or weeks coped up in Margaret Scully's house, even if she was one of the most decent people he'd ever had the pleasure of coming across during his life, grated on him. Already his nerves were on a fine edge though the drugs were taking the sting off at least for now.

"Hello, Mrs. Scully." He replied in a normal, if slurred voice, then soto voce for her ears only, "I'm sorry about all this." He felt he was intruding and that Scully had insisted on the arangement.

Margaret Scully smiled, took his arm and the bag Dana held out to her and spoke back to him just as privately, "There's nothing to be sorry for. I would have insisted, Fox. I'd appreciate it if you'd remember that."

He felt chastized and grateful all at the same time. Of the few dealings he'd had with the Scully family, he'd come to learn that all the Scully women were masters at the tongue. Such masters in fact that all the men in their lives were whipped right out of the gate, and that was that.

Including him. "Yes, ma'am." He murmurred.

As they entered the house, he looked up the one flight of steps with trepidation. Ten mile jog oper day for fifteen years and now...

Who would have thought eleven normal steps would be a frightening prospect? He had suddenly developed a deep empathy for the athritic.

He knew he had a few weeks left at best. Coming here to Maragret Scully's house, as grateful as he was for her generosity (he was reluctant to believe it could be motherly affection for him, or if it was, then it was for Scully), he felt like he had entered his funeral chamber. This was the last mile on a dead end road and each step up the stairs, with Scully on his arm for assistance, made him less and less like the man he had been, depressing him further.

With the last step he ceased feeling like a man with mind and soul intact and more like a walking corpse, unable to comprehend that the time had come to fall over and stop kicking.

"This is only temporary Scully."

Scully wasn't sure if it was a statement, a question or an appology. "I know." She smiled a bit, trying to put him at ease. "At least I get you all to myself for a while."

"Are you sure your mother is okay with this. I can easily go to a-"

"No. This is more for me, Mulder. I want to be with you. And sleeping in hospital chairs is bad for my posture. You wouldn't want me slouching." He was wheezng slightly, she noticed. "That car trip was hard on you. Here." She placed the already set up and waiting oxygen mask over his nose and mouth and switched it on, adjusting the dial. "This should help."

"I can't sleep with this on." He complained.

"You have to have it right now. Just for a few hours."

"Is that on the schedule?" He nodded to the bedside table upon which lay a clip board and his out-patient treatment line-up.

"Yes," she said. "So we're going to follow it."

He'd been given one of the larger bedrooms on the second floor with a large bathroom just one door away. In it Margaret had had "special" amenities installed she had told him earlier, ignoring his pink blush of embarrassment at having his almost mother-in-law talking about the raised toilet seat and "grip-bars" designed especially for him. She then had left Scully to help him get comfortable, muttering something about "seeing to lunch" and made herself scarse.

Eventually Scully left him settled in bed.

Mulder lay there, listening to the conversations coming through the grate from the kitchen below him. He could only catch a word here and there but he recognised whose voice belonged to who and drifted off to sleep listening to Scully and her mother, he was certain, discussing him.

"It's almost Christmas." Margaret Scully said as she fixed instant coffee for her daughter and green tea for herself. Her doctor had warned her about too much caffine and her touchy gall bladder.

"It's five weeks away." Dana said.

Maragret kept her back turned, stirring, getting sugar down from the cupboard, the little silver over crystal sugar dish and matching creamer her husband had bought her for their twentieth wedding anniversary. "When you were little, you'd start talking about presents and lights and Santa as soon as halloween was over. Melissa, she enjoyed the holidays too but for her it was the music and the dancing. For you, it was everything, it was something magical."

"I was just a little girl, Mom."

Marageret turned to face her. "At least you talked to me then. Now you don't. I ask you about things and I get a comforting lie that tells me absolutely nothing about how you are."

Dana looked at her mother's stricken face and felt remourse for her lack of honesty. Things over the last few years had been so topsy-turvy and she'd had to cope with so many emotional issues, she'd had nothing left of herself to share with anyone. "I'm sorry, Mom. My mind hasn't been on myself much."

Margaret brough the cups to the table on a tray with the cream, sugar and spoons. "Then maybe you can tell me what's going on with your life, if not you. What's wrong with Fox? Why is he so sick? You said it was the same thing with Emily. What causes this, Dana? He's what, a forty seven? What could cause a man that young to sudden;y become so sick that he needs a raised toilet seat."

"That's for his blood pressure, we can't afford him the luxury of sitting down normally now, it could cause a rupture in an artery wall. As for the rest, you know what happened to Emily, mom. The doctors, the specialists, don't know. We can keep him comfortable, ease his pain for a while, but there is nothing else that can be done now."

"And who did it to him? The same people who took Emily?"

Her mother'c voice held that edge to it from long experience that said she'd had enough of being put off with half truths or bald faced lies.

"These "men" you keep alluding to and have done for fifteen years and will tell me nothing about? These murderers who stole my granddaughter from me, my daughter Mellissa, and who almost took you twice? Is that who we're talking about? Are they the ones killing Fox now? Or are you going to tell me it's classified or that it would put me in danger to know?"

"Mom-"

"No." Shaking her head, "Don't you tell me anything anymore unless it's the truth. Fox is here in my house, dying because of these men. Don't you know what it does to me to see that? Don't you think I know what's it's doing to you? Your my daughter. You love him, and that makes him part of my family. This is my family, too, Dana, that these men are hurting, not just yours. I have a right to know!"

"Yes, it was "Them", we think. But we don't know - not really. Does it matter? This isn't going to be cured with any computer chip or Rosary beads. Mulder's dying. Is that waht you want to know, Mom?" She knew she sounded bitter but that's how she felt. They'd used Mulder up (and her), and then spit him out. He was dying and she felt cheated.

At her mother's sad face, "I'm sorry, Mom. Thank you for welcoming him, for helping me with this. He had no where else to go."

Margaret took her hand. "He was always welcome, Dana." She underlined the 'always'. "You should have brought him home more often. Then maybe I could have...helped somehow, maybe gotten to know him a little better." She chuckled, "Fox and his "Ma'am"'s. I could have helped you both. It took you two so long to start seeing each other, really knowing the other..."

"And now it's too late, is that what you mean?"

"Absolutely not. Don't you let one second go to waste. Don't you let one hour be thrown away on regrets. Be with him now, Dana. He needs it and so do you."

Four days later, other Scully's began arriving and Dana was dreading the company. As much as she loved her family, it was a complication she did not want right then. Mulder took all her thoughts and attention and that is the way she wanted it to remain.

"It's just for a few days, Dana. This is the compromise for Christmas. I want only you, Fox and I at this Christmas."

"Mom, you didn't have to do that. I keep telling you-"

"Yes, I know, you keep telling me that Fox may not make it that far but why don't we wait and see? Give life a chance, sometimes it can surprise you."

Scully did not argue the point. She'd long ago given up on life being generous or even fair. Not where Mulder was concerned. Or herself. It was hard enough trying to accept his illness and approaching deterioration without watering false hope.

Scully kept a stiff upper lip when Bill's car pulled up carrying himself and his wife. "Aren't the kids coming too?"

"No. He didn't want them to be around-" Margaret bit her lip.

"Mulder? He didn't want them to be around Mulder? That's pretty shitty of him."

"Dana! He didn't want them to have to be around illness. He _is_ their father. And they're teenagers, you know how teenagers are. Visiting grandma isn't cool. They're staying with friends for Thanksgiving."

Scully sighed. Already she was tense and exhausted and the weekend had not even begun.

"So what's wrong with him?" Bill scully asked.

Scully washed dishes, stacking them and keeping her eyes on her task.

Earlier she'd taken the pureed vegetable mash up to Mulder, who'd taken one look at it, turned green and thrown up his breakfast.

Surrounded by his appologies, Scully had helped cleaned up him and the bed and then decended the stairs with a worried frown, intercepting her mother accending with another bowl. "I heard him. I'll get some food in him, Dana. Go visit with Bill."

Instead she went into the kitchen and began washing up the lunch dishes. Her mother had a dishwasher but there were only a few and she needed something to do besides.

Talking to Bill wasn't it.

So when Bill entered the kitchen to help dry dishes, she stiffened, preparring to defend herself, Mulder or whatever because Bill never dried dishes. She knew he had come in to speak to her. The topic would most likely be "this Mulder guy". Scully'd heard Bill refer to her partner that way on more than one occassion and if he said it tonight, so help her, she'd-

"Dana? I asked, what's wrong with him?"

Scully decided to keep it short and to the point. "Mulder's dying of the same disease that killed Emily."

"I'm sorry."

Scully let out a breath. Well, at least he was attempting civilty.

Bill waited for her to continue but she didn't. He bundled the dish towel and tossed it on the counter, crossed his arms and leaned against it beside her so he could look at her face.

Lowering his voice so it would not carry to the livingroom where his mother and his wife now sat talking, "Why did you bring him here?"

That was something else altogether and none of his business. Scully turned to stare straight at him, defying him to argue more. "Because he had no where else to go and because mom invited him."

"Take it easy, I'm just asking." He didn't want an argument.

It was an old discussion. He and his little sister had argued before over this Mulder. It was always Mulder, it seemed. Dana couldn't make the graduation because "She and Mulder, yaddadda-yaddadda".... or Dana was in the hospital again because "She and Mulder this, that n' the other thing"...

Asshole. That had been his opinion of the guy ever since day one.

Which didn't he mean he wanted the guy to die. He knew how Dana felt. At the same time he couldn't help but wish the guy had done just that a long while back. If you're going to die, do it quickly and save those you love some heartache. It was a simple philosophy and he preferred it over lingering on.

When Mulder had been gone those eight years, it had reduced Dana to seeking out therapy. Losing him had shrunken her somehow but, after a while, she'd seemed to recover and slowly got on with her life.

Then what happens but Mulder shows up again. He'd ground his teeth down to nubs that day when his mother had called to tell him. "Fuck!" had been his reaction, right through the phone and into his mothers ear.

"Look, Dana. I know you love the guy. I can't understand why considering what's happened to the family and to you since you met him, but I don't want to see him die. But I also don't like seeing you always being the one to make the sacrafice."

"That's my choice isn't it?"

"Yeah. I guess it is, except have you noticed how the choices you've made so far have affected the people you love? Melissa's dead."

"Are you blaming me?!" She felt a huge lump forming in her throat.

"Of course not. But your job has something to do with it and and don't try to deny that your partner does too. He's been obsessing after this, to use his words, "Thing" for so long, he doesn't seem to give a damn who he hurts along the way."

Scully kept her voice low but tight - taut like a power line -"That is _not_ true. You've been very lucky with your life, Bill, but Mulder has had a terrible time these last years, so forgive me but as a man who has been blessed, you are in no position to pass judgment."

"I tell it like I see it, Dana. He's brought nothing but pain to this family. Why do you think I kept the kids away, huh? I don't want them to see this or him. Or you this way."

"What way?!" She stared definatly but he declined further elaboration. "You never thought that maybe I would have liked to have seen my nephews and neices?" she asked bitterly.

"Not with him here. You had no right asking mom to take care of this guy. She's not young anymore."

"We're having a nurse come in eventually. I would never expect mom to nurse him on her own. _I_ couldn't even do that."

Maragaret appeared in the doorway and said in an angry whisper. "Fox is trying to sleep, keep your voices down."

Bill backed off on his volume that had been rising with each sentence but he was not about to give up the stand he had taken. "I love you, Dana. You're my sister. But if he's dying because of what he's been looking for, because of the things he's gotten involved in, then in my opinion, he deserves it."

Scully didn't know what possessed her right hand to haul back and slap her brothers face until it had actually happened.

Margaret was shocked but not surprised. "You derserved that, Bill."

Stinging cheek, Bill looked at his mother. "Maybe." And at Scully, "But we don't deserve what's happened to us. Why does everyone defend this guy? He's brought it on himself!"

"This is _my_ house and if I say Fox can stay here then he can stay here. I'd do the same for you or Tara or anyone in this family." Maragaret reminded him, standing between her two eldest children.

"He's not part of this family, he's-"

"He's MY family." Scully spit at him. "You _have_ yours. Tara, kids, a house, a dog. Barbecues on the holidays! Congradulations! If I choose Mulder, even if the time we have left together is short, then that's still my business. I'll make whatever sacrafices I see fit to make. It has nothing at all to do with you!"

"There is such a thing as too much sacrafice, Dana. First your career, then your family, now as far as I can see your common sense. I'm just thinking of your best interests."

"Like hell and even if that were true, in case you hadn't noticed, I'm all grown up, Bill. I'm free to choose and make my own decisions."

"And make ours for us, too, it looks like. I'm sick of what this guy has brought to our family. I'm sick of seeing what it is doing to you!"

"Then look the other way!" Scully shot and left the room. She didn't return to the living room or even go up the stairs. She gathered her coat and wallet and left through the back door.

Margaret said:

"She's just going for a walk to cool off."

Bill addressed his mother:

"You know I'm right, mom. This is killing her."

'Yes. I know. But she's right about what she said. She's free to decide. And besides, you've never made any effort to get to know Fox. He's a decent man, a good man and Dana loves him. That's enough for me. It has to be."

"No it isn't. Decent men don't bring constant pain to the people they care about."

Mulder listened to the far away, tinny sounding words rising up through the heating vent.

He removed the oxygen mask and pushed himself up off the bed. Dressed only in briefs and a T-shirt, he as slowly and as silently as possible made his way to the bathroom next door, being extra careful in not causing the floor boards to squeak.

Suffering a pang of guilt for snooping, he quietly opened the cabnet above the sink and fumbled through the rows of bottles sitting there: iodine, muscles rubs, mouthwash, aspirins, little scissors. He paused on those but decided against them and moved on.

That would be too messy. He didn't want there to be any more messes to clean up.

His eyes came to rest on a large bottle of dimenhydrinate tablets.

Generic Gravol. Those would probably do.

He popped the cap and counted out twenty, wondering if that would be enough. Finally, he just popped the cap back on the bottle, tucked it in the band of his briefs, rearranged the bottles on the tiny shelf so nothing looked like it was missing, moving them so the gap was filled in, and then crept quietly back to his room.

The bathroom would be a bad location. He'd been to enough crime scenes to know people often died in bathrooms, on the toilet with the content of their bowels oozing out and making a godawful smell, or in a tub full of bloody water and in this case, he did not want there to be that much trouble or morbidity. It was very tough to move a body found in such a position or location when rigamortis had already set in. He'd seen plenty of pretzeled corpses having to be maneuvered around doorways or their bones broken and legs bent this way and that just so they could be moved at all.

No, Mrs. Scully's bathroom was out of the question. There had to be absolutely no mess and no fuss. A bedroom on the first floor would be ideal because then the EMT's wouldn't have a body to haul down a narrow staircase. But he was stuck in a second floor bedroom.

Anyway, there would no mess and minimal diffculties and that was the main thing.

That was paramount.

The seond floor bedroom would have to do and the sooner the better.

Tonight actually.

After thinking it about it for a few hours, Mulder had decided to drop the idea.

It was a cowards way out.

It was selfish and hurtful and all those things that would mark him as a disappointment to his co-workers. It would hurt his friends; betray them; they would be horrified. In shock and angry. No matter how much he desired to find an answer and no matter how much he hated what his life had so quickly been reduced to, he really did not want to hurt Scully or anyone else by such a pinheaded, ass-faced maneuver.

Mulder cried for a minute, wiped his eyes so no one would know and lay back, so depressed he thought he might die of it. That would, at least, solve the dilema and keep his conscience clear as well.

But reason eventually won out and he abandoned the idea, feeling, funnily enough, still like a coward for not having the guts to go through with it.

Until he had a visitor.

Bill reminded himself as he walked up the stairs that he had never really hated the man himself, just the things he stood for and it seemed those things just did not include safety of friends and family.

Now Fox Mulder was paying for that. Maybe the price was a little high, but then we reap what we sow.

Bill wasn't particularly happy that Dana had chosen to bring her partner here to this mother's house.

He walked down the hall, passed the basthroom and approached his old room.

This year, they were spending Thanksgiving at his mother's instead of Christmas as was the usual practise. Margaret wanted it that way. She'd said she and Dana would need the "quiet time together after Fox is gone."

Again, Mulder was put before the needs of the family. Bill didn't know who to yell at about that.

Now this Mulder guy was dying right there in his old bedroom and that gave him the creeps. Everything about the situation had a kind of unreality about it. He'd never understood what his little sister had seen in the guy because, other that being a crackerjack Agent, according to rumor the man was a loon.

Bill softly pushed the door to his old room open and peeked in.

Mulder was lying on his back but head elevated a little by all the embroidered cushions his own mother must have hauled up the stairs on her own and fluffed under his head. Mulder appeared to be sleeping so he took the opportunity to get a closer look. Dana had said (with an annoyed frown) that no of course it wasn't contagious. But you just never knew.

The guy was asleep under the oxygen mask. He looked like shit.

He hadn't known what to expect really, he had never seen Emily in her last stages of her illness.

He supposed he'd expected Mulder to be sitting up in bed with a thermometer under his tongue and an I.V. maybe. Like a kid playing hookie from school maybe.

That was naieve, he realised but it was the only vision that had enterted his head.

What he had not expected was a whitewashed hollow cheeked manaquin that almost but not quite passed for a human.

Still, Bill couldn't help but ask the question, even though there was nothing awake enough to make any noise back but oxygen pumps and stomach drains and even though the guy really couldn't help being sick:

"You don't have any idea what you're putting Dana through, do you?"

*"You don't have any idea what you're putting Dana through, do you?"*

Mulder, only dozing, knew that voice. The higher-than-thou stiff lippedness of it. The way it pointedly did not use his name when it's words were punched out to fly at him like steel blades.

William Scully and no other. Brother to Dana. Older, protective, subconsciously controlling and overbearing bro'.

This man hated his guts.

When Mulder's eyes finally fluttered open - Bill Scully had awakened him - Mulder saw the "I'm in the Navy" six foot two inches of Dana's brother looking down with bullets in his eyes. Mulder imagined Bill's finger on some hidden trigger, just itching to blow him as far away from his sister Dana as his sister Samantha was from him.

Mulder was in Bill's old room and Bill's old bed in Bill's mother's house.

//"You are one sorry son-of-a-bitch."//. Mulder recalled the longest sentence Bill Scully had ever offered in his direction.

Abso-fucking-lutely correct, Mulder thought as the oxygen mask blew air into his nose every eight seconds.

He was a sick, sorry son-of-a-bitch.

Sorry he was lying there at all. Sorry as hell that, yes, he was putting Bill's little sister Dana through some serious mental and emotional shit.

But what was new after all?

And he was sick. Physically, about the worst off he'd ever been in his sorry-sick-son-of-a-bitching life.

Sick and lying in Bill's bed in Bill's mom's house, smelling up her pressed, country-fresh linen and the carpet. Lovely barf bucket by the headboard. Generally, a stinking mix of sweat, bile, dried bloody smears from where Mulder'd dug his fingers into his palms whenever the pain came steamrolling around the bend, and the indescribably effluent odor of his ulcered, herniad and now fissuring stomach. There was crusted blood on his lips from coughing-up.

Bill noticed these things and hated Mulder for them. He hated Mulder, not because the guy was such a bad sort, he wasn't. No, he hated Mulder because whenever Dana's life was looking like it might take a good turn, Mulder'd had somehow managed to fuck it up.

Like he was doing now, again. Yet Dana loved the guy. It just didn't make sense to him.

Mulder wheezed from the bed and stared slack-eyed up at Bill. He'd lost a whole lot in his life but knew Big-Asshole-Bill didn't give a shit about that. All he cared about what what this was doing to Scully.

Suddenly it occurred to Mulder that he and Bill finally agreed on something.

Mulder ahifted, feeling the comforting plastic bottle still tucked into the band of his underwear.

Except Mulder did not want to agree with Captain William Slightly Running To Fat But Otherwise Healthy As A Horse Mister More Successful Than He'd Ever Get the Chance To Be Scully The Second, with the beautiful wife and the gorgeous kids and the modern house in that new and really terrific area of town.

Bill was speaking to him, now that he could see Mulder was awake and semi alert:

"You btter not die. Whether I like it or not, understand it not, you seem to mean something to my sister, so let me tell you something, you dink for brains, you'd better either live or die real fast."

Mulder listened to Bill Scully's words, agreed with them, felt stirrings in his gut, and then opened wide and let it rip as if he were a firehose and Bill Scully the flames with all the nutricious veggetable puree' that kind, sweet Margaret Scully had so painstakingly and so lovingly spoon-fed him not one half hour ago.

Billy got it square under the chin and it ran downhill from there, all over him.

Mulder fell back on the bed, gazing at the holy mess he'd made of the man who'd hated him for years.

The room smelled inhuman.

"Fuck! Fucking son-of-a..." Bill Scully sputtered.

Mulder smiled then reached up one painful arm (Bill had no idea, no idea at all, how much effort and pain was involved in that simple gesture), and moved his mask aside. He wasn't smiling now. He was crying because Bill Scully's words were, to him, oh so true. And he cried because of the pain he was in and because he'd once again messed up Margaret's carpeting and the bed. And he cried because he didn't want this man to hate him but since he did, Mulder had taken his bit of revenge, the only kind open to him excepting for the words he said next:

"And you're ugly too, but don't worry, Bill, soon you'll get your hearts desire and we can put this whole fucking feud behind us."

That tonight would bring his words to their fruition was almost spiritual. Despite thas pain in his limbs and the embarrassment of crying in front of Mister Navy Macho, Mulder was elated. It had been a vomit for the record books. A puke made in heaven.

One for the road.

The little bottle had warmed against his skin and caused no discomfort at all. Mulder replaced the mask, eased his arm down, and closed his eyes.

"Jesus." Bill, freshly showered and changed, muttered as he entered the living room. Tara and Dana were drinking coffee together. Tara seemed to be hovering a bit over his sister, perhaps doing her best at damage control after he'd stuck his size eleven's in his mouth earlier.

"Dana. I'm sorry. I really am." He tired to be nice but. Just after being sprayed with the man's stomach contents, it was damn hard.

"I know." Dana said.

He'd been forgiven, he realised.

Dana had come back and hearing the shower, her mother had explained tyhat Fox "had had a little accident." Upon hearing the details, though, Scully knew instantly that it may have been a calculated accident. She'd smiled. How she would have liked to've been a fly on the wall to that event.

"Is Mulder okay?" Tara asked her husband.

He nodded. "I guess so, other than being a morbid basta-..eh.. _guy_."

Scully looked up at him. Her eyes were underlined in charcoal. "What do you mean?"

"I think he said it to piss me off, guilt trip, I don't know."

"Said what?"

"Just that..." He wasn't sure of he should tell her. She _knew_ of course, that Mulder was dying, but he didn't think it would be good to remind her of it. "It doesn't matter."

"Did he alk about dying?" she asked.

He nodded. "Sort of. He said our fued would be over soon enough. That was just after he puked on me, the ass-..*ahem*." Bill, clearing his throat over his almost fau pax and looking uncomfortable, walked into the kitchen muttering "Mom. Any more coffee?"

Scully got up. "I think I'll just look in on him."

"Do you want me to come?" Tara asked kindly.

Scully smiled a little and shook her head, trotting up the stairs.

It only took her a moment of searching between the matresses to find them.

When Mulder awoke, she held them up for him to see. "And just were your plans for these?"

Mulder saw his badly hidden booty in her fingers. "You have to ask?"

"How could you, Mulder? You were just going to check out, huh? Leave me holding the bag, you selfish..." She cut off the curse word balancing on the tip of her tongue.

"That's not what I want. I don't want to be here, Scully. I don't want to end up tended like a baby and unable to wipe my own ass."

"It's been done before."

"I wasn't conscious of it then. I didn't see it coming down the road from a long way off. With this I do. ENMS is going take me and make me into some kind of half human/alien vegetable and then kill me. I'd rather not be around to feel it happen."

"Well, you know what, I don't care what you want. How dare you give up?!"

"Scully, you know-"

"We know nothing at all. When I had cancer and there was virtually no hope, Mulder, and you came along with your litle speech about "coming out of this" and a kiss on the forehead. Well, now it's you and I am not going to let you give up or take the coward's way out!"

"Cowards way?"

"You heard me. You don't like the ways things are right now? You don't like being in Bill's bed or my mother's house..."

"-I didn't say that."

"But you're thinking it. Well, too bad. Live with it. Because I'm not going to let you give up. Not yet."

He said nothing. Just wheezed under the damndable oxygen mask that was chafing the bridge of his nose. Finally, "So that's it?"

She leaned over him, and waited until he relented and looked back at her. "That's it. Another stunt like that and you'll be staying at Skinner's house."

He mentally cringed. "Jesus." It was a frightening prospect.

"I'm not kidding, Mulder. He offered, you know."

She saw him pale at the thought. Mulder liked and respected Skinner as a boss and friend but Skinner had never lost that ability to intimidate, and he had become an expert over the years at some major Mulder managing.

"I'll be good." He promised and she kissed his forehead.

"I _will_ hold you to that."

Scully had a roll away moved into Mulder's room, much to his protests about her not trusting him.

"This is for me as much as for you." She explained.

That night, listening to the machines pumping fresh, cool oxygen into his stiffening bronchial lobes, listening to him moan in his sleep as an occasional ripple of pain traveled through his body (he was too drugged up to awaken but not so drugged that his brain did not register it and try to snap him out of his stupor to repair the problem), Scully spent the night staring at the celing, weeping silently every-so-often and watching the white disk of a moon float across the sky outside the bedroom window. It was on its way to the other side of the earth and in a few weeks, it would shrink to a thin sliver and then be born anew to start its journey again.

Scully watched it disappear in the slow pink light of dawn.

When it was gone, she realized that Mulder would never see another full moon-lit night.

Mulder would die. The moon would be reborn.

How she hated God.

*

DIVINITIES, Chapter 3

Dinner was a silent meal eaten on a table filled with bowls of guilt and shame.

Every night, each was worse than the last and it was because, Scully felt, she could sit at a table and eat substantial meat, morels she could feel under her teeth and he could not. Remorse ate her up that she had the opportunity to enjoy things he never would again.

Guilt bit her because her mother had worked to prepare meals and do her best to take up some of the burden of the crippling-ly ill man her daughter had brought home to die.

Shame that she had waited until he was dying before bringing him home at all.

She, the daughter, had been hollowed out because of this sick man. She, the daughter, was being punished by God for loving an unbeliever.

Scully felt that she should not be enjoying and did not deserve eating a meal with her family who still loved her when Destiny the Bitch had decided that Mulder must not have anyone. His old family was dead, his new only allowed to stand by and watch him sicken more and more.

They stood with fear and guilt, keeping their eyes on the clock of his body that was winding down to zero.

Scully knew they felt sorry for him and her but dealing with their pain was delegated to someday. She had no palate for it.

All things tasted alike to her. Food. Family.

All of it now had taken on the flavor of mere sustenance and forms moving through empty space. Sustenance was simply solids and liquids the body craved so it would not dehydrate and die and her appetite for them had gone because they demanded time and effort.

Family were mere strangers who looked upon her with pity and she shunned their displayed care because they expected acknowledgment and gratitude and she was too exhausted to grant either.

The silence in the room reeked of sorrow and she was responsible for bringing that home to them as well.

As the weight of things accountable crushed her shoulders and her mind chastised her heart for any fleeting feelings that perhaps Mulder was also in part at fault, that he was, in some way, responsible for bringing this illness home to them all, Scully felt eyes upon her.

Scully dropped her fork on her plate, looked up at her mother who turned away reddening.

"Mom, it's okay." An effort made, hopefully it was enough to divert their words and words piling up, dying to be said.

"It's not okay." This came from her left and her brother Bill's mouth. "He should be in a hospital."

"Bill, please..." Margarete admonished.

"No. Dana..."

Scully turned her face to him with a softening in her eyes but her body remained stiff and unyielding. She loved her brother but needed to stand her ground with whatever she had left. It was Mulder's ground too.

Bill spoke:

"I may not like the man but I don't like seeing what's happening to him. And I don't like what it's doing to you. Have you looked in a mirror lately? Have you looked at him? Really looked, I mean? The man is dying. He's suffering. Last night, he woke me twice with his moans,...it's obvious the medication isn't doing it's job."

Scully could see her mother's face blanche at her son's stark words. Did she seem that fragile to her now? That mere words could penetrate the frozen landscape she'd made of her feelings? Words bounced across it, barely touching, and launched them- selves again into the stratosphere like tiny stones in the gale.

She couldn't nurture a thing.

But Scully heard them non-the-less. Took them in for what they were, letters and syllables and strings of both, examined them via her ears, and withing the lake blue of her eyes. She could hear them and _see_ them and knew Bill was right in his choice of them.

However, though they held meaning they had no power over her. If she allowed them to convince her, if she succumbed to their rightness, Mulder would be ambulance away to a sterile environment and into the hands of pain-killing needles and blank stupor. It would be, in the end, his final journey, one not befitting a man such as he had been, and he would be lost to her forever in too many ways to calculate.

Scully could not allow that. She loved him. Surely to God, there was power in that as well.

"No," she said quietly, looking at her brother whom she knew deeply cared for her. "No, Bill. Mulder stays here. I refuse to accept that he will die, not yet. We still have time. I know you would do no less for Tara."

Her brother swallowed, pushed his plate away and rose from the table. "Mom, will you talk to her?"

Scully looked across the left over turkey and empty dressing bowl.

Margaret looked back at her daughter, then rose and started gathering dishes. "It's Dana's decision. There's nothing more to say."

Scully's eyes teared in gratitude. On her way up the stairs with Mulder's watered-down, pureed vegetable and turkey mush, she stopped and hugged her brother Bill from behind. It seemed to melt the icy feeling that had developed between them since Mulder's condition had deteriorated ever so much more in the last week.

Bill was frightened for Mulder, she realized, and for her love for Mulder. Her determination not to quit despite all the evidence that said she would be disappointed. Bill did not want to see hr with her fists up, striking at the air.

//Little sis' isn't acting like the rational Dana he is used to.// Scully knew what he was thinking, loved him for it but said nothing to dispel his fears. There were no words that would.

New Years Eve' was the next day. One year and four months since Mulder's release from GreenLawn and Doctor's Petrillo's invaluable care. Why had every Christmas been a hallmark of either great joy or heart-stopping grief?

"Dana..." He started to say, helpless to understand but hopeless in his concern and that he could offer her nothing to change the course she was on. Not even render the well chosen words of advice in order to turn her from it.

"Bill. It's his choice also. And I love him. I _have_ to do this."

"Mulder." She smiled, half painted on and half genuine. Enough to please them both. He did not see the lie behind her eyes.

"Mmmmm," he said, mocking the dinner she'd brought to him. "Let me guess. Mush or mash?"

She took up the spoon and scooped a leveled measure. "Hey. You're getting room service, here, don't knock it."

"You know, I am capable of feeding myself," he said while opening his mouth, letting her slowly scoop the food in. Slowly, so he could take his time swallowing.

Bit by bit it would go down. Bit by bit it would be digested while little by little his stomach acid would eat at the open wounds in its perforated lining. Little by little the food would be incompletely broken down in his malfunctioning digestive track and then be expelled in watery stools that Doctor Watts would want to have examined.

Bit-by-bit they would know more exactly how little-by-little he was dying. All the tiny ways his body was breaking apart from the inside out would be recorded in tiny numbers and letters in his file. Mulder's ENMS and his death was going to make someone's career.

"Can't a girl have some fun? Now sit up."

"Nag, nag." He complied. She placed an extra pillow behind his back.

Scully smiled and scooped more. She would feed him until he said enough. There was no point in force feeding. In fact, there was danger. His stomach, with its ulcerated fissures laced with stiffening blood vessels, could endure no solids, no pressure, no extra ounces at all.

"Any word on Caleb or his father?"

She shook her head. "I keep hoping Crazy Man will call." //Among other things hoped for.//

"Have the LoneGunMen send out word to their other chapters. They're always whining about wanting to be in the action, let them do some sleuthing. Maybe if they nose around enough, they'll turn up something." Mulder suggested.

"Already done. Langley called this morning."

"And?"

"And nothing so far. He asked after you and assured me they'll call the minute they hear anything." She reluctantly put the bowl aside when he shook his head at the far from last spoonful. Half a bowl three times a day was not going to keep his weight or his strength level. "So relax."

"That's about all I've been dong for a week."

"Until your strength returns, that _IS_ all you'll do."

"Then how about a Laptop and a dial-up? I can't just lie here, Scully, I'm losing my mind."

"I suppose if I say no, you'll sneak out one day anyway, so alright, that I'll arrange. Then you can talk to The guys yourself." She stood, picking up the unappetizing remnants of Mulder's dinner. "Anything so I don't have to hear another joke from Frohike." She handed him pills and water and walked to the door.

"Hey, Scully, how about a movie tonight?"

"Are you sure you're up to it?"

"Yeah, I'm strong enough for a date."

"Oh, really? Okay, but I get to choose. No action, no science fiction, I've seen enough of that in my own life, and under no circumstances what-so-ever, _anything_ from your own collection."

"Party pooper."

** Mulder's bi-weekly hospital trip had her pacing the halls until Watts kindly suggested she get some coffee.

Crowded hospital cafeterias were not the ideal location for quiet contemplation. When she left Mulder, at least he was asleep. Their little examinations would go easier for him and them.

Quiet is what she had been looking for but the hunger pangs had argued a good case. Scully looked at the remnants of her late afternoon lunch, one third of a mushroom chicken burger and a few limp french fries waited questioningly but her stomach was satisfied.

She was thinking about a second cup of coffee when her cellular trilled in her jacket pocket.

"Scully," she said and watched the other people consuming their food. Patients and visitors, a doctor and nurse. The place was mostly empty.

"It might not just be the gifted." The voice on the other end said hoarsely into her ear.

She recognized the gravely whisper of her informant. "What?"

"I don't think...what I told you may have been incorrect."

"What was incorrect?" Scully stood and walked out of the cafeteria, away from the ears of the curious. "What do you mean?"

"The kids. It's not just the gifted, I think it could be others. I think my daughter may be in jeopardy. You have to help me."

"The only way I can do that is if you come in. Come in and I guarantee your safety."

He was silent and she wondered if he'd simply walked away from whatever phone he was using. "Are you there?" She asked.

"Yes." He sounded ground up, in pieces.

"Come in. Come in and we'll do everything we can to help your daughter and you."

She thought she heard him sniff. "I can't." Strangled words, said because he had no choice but hating them all the same. "I don't know who can be trusted anymore."

"Then why did you call me? Why call unless you want help?"

"I can give you her location. And her name. Please... understand..that if I could...come in...I would."

She felt sorry for him. She knew what it was to lose a daughter. "I want to thank you for your help with finding Caleb, for the tip, for everything."

"You're welcome. I'm sorry it didn't turn out better."

Scully took out a note pad and pen, "What's her name?"

"Sydney. She's dark haired, long hair, curly, about five foot seven..twenty two years old now." He was crying now, "I haven't seen her in ten years."

Scully scribbled the information. "You knew this was coming, didn't you? You knew these mass murders were going to occur."

"Yes. I was with them once, remember? I got out."

"What do they expect to happen?"

"The War of God. I don't know if they're right but even if they are, their way of giving God a helping hand shouldn't be heartless, systematic slaughter. I couldn't be a part of that. I wouldn't."

"Where do we need to go? Where are these kids?"

"The New Hope Evangelical Ranch. It's a dumping ground for orphans, the physically and mentally challenged - unwanted children, fetal addicts, HIV positive,..."garbage can" kids. Children most of society consider a waste of resources. Humanity isn't always humane even when they wear their morals on their sleeves."

Scully had to agree, considering the doing of deeds of his former "worshipers". "And your daughter is there?"

"She's one of the Guardians, she was always at risk from The Group, because of her abilities. She volunteered to go there and care for the less fortunate. But this place has come under the attention of my former associates and I'm worried she may be a target for elimination now, because of her betrayal. They are nothing if not exacting in their demand for loyalty."

"Why did you tell me your daughter had left the country?"

"I told you. I didn't know who to trust. I still don't."

"Will you come?"

"It's too risky. If I'm followed, they'll know she's there for sure, and they'll feel even more certain there's something special about these children."

"Wasn't it risky to place her with any children at all?" When he didn't answer, she left behind rebuking. "How did you find out about them?"

"My daughter..Sydney...had a dream about them."

"A dream?"

"Yes. In it men called from heaven to men. And they went out to meet together in a storm while the demons of hell burned up in a fire. It sounds like religious symbolism and we have no interpretation. Even my daughter doesn't. If it had been anyone else, I expect I would have ignored it, but I've come to trust my daughter's abilities. I won't speculate, I'm just afraid."

"We'll do everything we can."

"Please act quietly and go as soon as possible."

Scully could not imagine any Bureau operation being "quiet". all they could do was try. "I promise we'll do all we can. When will you call me again?"

"I don't know. I'm not well..."

"Please call if you need anything."

"Goodbye, Agent Scully."

He hung up and Scully let out a breath. She dialed Skinner's direct line, informed him of her latest contact and returned to Watts and her sleeping partner.

*

"What?"

She was dumbfounded. Numb because it simply wasn't possible. Science rocketed out the window, shattering everything she knew as reason as it flew.

The overhead fluorescent bounced off of Watts' forehead, adding to the mind blindness he'd just conjured up within her by his markings on paper chart via ballpoint pen. Cruel strokes that had no mind or feeling in them, together summing up Watts' five word update:

"A few days at most."

Scully returned to Mulder's room, walking like the dead. It was a stupid expression. The dead don't walk, they were scrubbed and stuffed into pretty boxes, dumped into the ground and buried under six feet of dirt and gravel. They were gotten rid of, out of the sight of those who would miss them.

Whole human lives reduced to an hour ritual and a big, big bill.

It was a Play put on for the universe. Or they were playthings for unfeeling spirit creatures who had no idea what it was like to see the grim reaper walking up your sidewalk.

The Death of Mulder. Once upon a time a great man was born who fought to make the world a better place and then he died. The End.

Scully had been unprepared to hear "a few days". A few weeks she might have been able to deal with. But the prognosis for Mulder's shortened life had just been cut by a week at least.

It was another nail in his coffin and, for her, in Gods. How dare he create creatures with minds to conceive of eternal life and then deny them any hope of it?

"That is what heaven is for." The nuns would answer.

But you had to go through death to get there and death for some was no different as a roller coaster trip through Hell. Wonderful incentive, Scully thought as she entered Mulder's room and cast away God from her mind as she already had from her heart.

Perhaps someone other than God would lend a hand, even if she had to go to the Devil himself to find a path to Mulder's life, so be it.

** "These children were completely unexpected. None of knew what the colonists were up to. How could we?"

Speaking was a middle aged, balding man who stood nervously by the cabin's sitting room window. His eyes never stopped moving.

The players changed but the game hadn't until now, he thought as he listened to the other man's words and to his own disintegrating lungs. Even the portable lung, carrying oxygen to his pin-holed alveoli, couldn't repair a life time of scoffing the Surgeon General.

Samantha Mueller murdered, her children slaughtered. Even the Associates didn't know why. Speculations abounded but the colonists had left them in the dark.

His Helper, expressionless, stood back, silently watching the discussion and offering no insight.

There had been no word from the Colonists for weeks. Suddenly, without explanation, they had cut off communications.

But the murders had not stopped and the Elders were very worried. What about The Work? Was it finished? Should we continue? Should we side with The Rebels if one could even be located?

What do we do!?

The one who had spoken was a newer, younger member who had signed over his millions to further fund the Project. He especially wanted to know. It was, after all, money!

Cancer Man smiled to himself. He could almost read those words in the mind of the younger member. He was too inexperienced to know that money was nothing. Money provided the means to forge ahead with the Project started so long ago it seemed, back when they had all been young and thought they had found the answer to the future of all mankind. Young enough that they still possessed the arrogance to make a decision, one that would forever radically alter the quality of life of every human being across every continent on the planet, without so much as a telegram to The White House.

Money did not mean life, it meant perhaps, if they were lucky and did all the correct things according to plan, it would help them attain _a_ life of some sort. For themselves maybe. For their children, almost certainly.

He himself had given up many things for The Project, the Work Bill Mulder had had a hand in sparking and then spurring on. But if it meant life for a few of the worthy, it was worth it.

Any sacrifice.

"We couldn't have known. Even my Helper didn't know." His tasted fresh, cool oxygen with each inhale, blood with each exhale.

"Maybe your helper knows more than he says." The nervous man retorted, glancing toward the thick necked assistant of the one they all knew as The Smoker. The old man's portable oxygen tank made a hissing noise whenever the wrinkled fossil took a breath. It was annoying. It made him restless.

"No one knew!" Smoker insisted. "The colonists have broken our agreement with them. How were we to know they were creating their own hybrids, their own race, right under our noses?" Cancer Man coughed.

"Well, what are we going to do about it?!" Nervous Man asked.

"This other Group, whoever they are, might be solving the problem for us."

"You heartless old skeleton, they killed your own daughter!"

He made an attempt to sit forward, anger welling in him, but unable to complete the movement, fell back, cursing his weakness. "We have all had to make sacrifices! What family I have left is all I am concerned about, as you should be. Now's the time for all men to look after their own."

The others, all silent until now, seemed to fade in strength compared to the old one who had been with The Project since the beginning. Few of them liked him, but there was no doubt the old guy demanded their respect. One of their other older members spoke:

"He's correct. The Work is all but finished. We have all made our...arrangements...in the event of something like this. It's time we took our families and called and end to it."

The meeting broke up. Men in all manner of business and casual dress filed out the door into the night. Cars and trucks were started and a convoy of vehicles left on a road that winded down from the mountain to the highway.

In the cabin, the oldest surviving member of the Consortium sipped tea brought to him by his Helper.

Helper watched as his In Charge lifted the cup to his thin lips and drank. And drank again.

Satisfied, Helper took the cup and arranged a pillow under the old human's neck.

He returned to his place and watched.

Cancer Man felt tired and leaned back in his chair, letting his head fall to his chest.

So tired. Some sleep would revive him.

"Samantha.." Cancer Man mumbled in his stupor. "Fox,..." He dreamed they were dead and regretted it. But they were free of whatever was upon them. The storm. The End.

Dreamed. "...yes, yes..." Their deaths had served a better purpose.

His grandson would live. Something would survive. Not everything would die. "Caleb.," he said as his heart stopped.

Through trees that shaded him from the cool, yellow star, he carried his burden with methodical, even steps.

Odd sensations. Dirt under his feet, sun on his face, the odor of grass and pine. A dead human over his shoulder.

They had death as well, but theirs was simpler - instantaneous decomposition.

Three hundred and twenty-one shovels of dirt later, he dragged the trussed up remains of his former In Charge to the six by three by four foot hole.

The old man would have finally succumbed to his bodies disease, so it was no betrayal to have spared him a few extra hours of struggle.

His own kind did not bury their dead.

But this had been a human and required a hole. He knew of their death rituals and that they believed in a deity and mouthed offerings during their significant life events.

Such as at death. But he was unsure of the words and so made himself content that burying the corpse was enough; a gesture of respect out of their many years together in The Work.

His peers might provide him with a new assignment or they might not.

The Work was so close to being completed, another In Charge was unlikely. He had not been able to complete his In Charge's last request. The Watchers were being murdered by a rebellious faction of humanity but that trouble would soon be over. The invasion was imminent.

Nothing else needed to be accomplished. Even the puzzle of the unusual human offspring was no longer a particular consideration, although they would still be watched where possible, because The Time was nearly complete.

The body slowly disappeared under black soil and rocks as he scooped and dumped.

He stood, stretched the body's confining muscles and skin.

At the cabin, he gathered up only those things which would have provided the human authorities with information about The Work. Removing fingerprints or accessories such as clothing was unnecessary.

His In Charge was dead, his body buried a mile away under shrubs and soil, there was nothing left of him for the authorities to find. They would trace the fingerprints and look, yes, but evidence beyond that would not be uncovered.

Soon he would return to his people, his part in The Work that had spanned seventy-five years, finished.

He had done his job and if he could feel the human emotion of gladness, he would have.

Outside the cabin, the night sky became bright cobalt blue.

It was time to leave.

** Scully found the cabin, north of Augusta, as she had before.

The door hung on one hinge, like a torn lip, the hardwood, at one time waxed to a shine, was strewn with leaves, cans and debris that had been scattered by animals from inside cupboards left open and the all the litter of the forest floor that the wind had blown in.

She walked through the abandoned rooms. The occupants had left in a hurry and there was linen lumped on an unmade bed, now peppered with animal droppings.

Cobwebs hung in the corners of the room and in between the panes of the broken windows, as if the insects had tried to repair the human damaged glass.

The stove still had on its surface, sitting in their proper places, blackened, oily pots. Grease was smeared on the stainless steel counter.

It had been 6 months and the forest had reclaimed the structure almost completely.

"You won't find him."

Scully spun, gun drawn. Stared, mouth open. "_You_?" A strangled whisper, after finding her voice again.

"He's gone."

"Where?"

"Dead. He wouldn't have been able to help anyway."

"Of what? What did he die of?"

"I don't know. Everyone guessed though. Cancer probably."

"What are you doing here, Krycek?"

"I heard you were looking for him. I heard Mulder is sick, maybe dying. I was surprised that day at the school, to see him again. As shocked as he was to see me I'm sure. When did he get back?"

She kept him in her sights, not dropping her barrel for a second. "I'm surprised you don't know. Didn't Cancer Man give you all the dirty little details?"

She hoped not. She hoped Krycek didn't know that Mulder had suffered a breakdown and spent all those months in therapy bringing himself back from the brink. She hoped Krycek knew nothing at all. Nothing, that is, but one very important thing. The one thing she wanted. "You know what's wrong with him, don't you?" She said, testing his knowledge.

He shook his head. "No. If you came here looking for the antidote, you've wasted gas. The alien virus, if that's what he has, has probably mutated anyway. Even if I did have the Anti- viral, I doubt it would cure what he has."

"I thought you said you didn't know anything?"

"You've been talking to one of our former members. Word gets around. I know about Emily. I know Mulder's sick like she was."

Scully's countenance faltered, as if someone had pulled the stopper from her heart and her hope was pouring into the void that had opened beneath her, Mulder and life funneling away like so much sand.

"Mulder isn't supposed to die. It's not right. He didn't do anything to deserve it. He wasn't even abducted, he wasn't part of the experiments!"

She wanted to shoot the man before her, make him - make somebody - pay for what was happening to Mulder. Make someone else suffer like he was suffering.

"Mulder was protected because of who he was." Krycek said, on his voice just a hint of envy.

She swallowed her grief, kept control because she wanted an answer from him. "What do you mean?"

"I thought you knew. Mulder does."

"Knew what?!" She shouted, suddenly furious, her finger tightening on the trigger. If Krycek noticed, he didn't show it.

"Mulder's mother and Cancer Man, they..._knew_ each other. A long time ago."

"That's a lie."

"Come on! Didn't you ever notice the resemblance? I saw it right away. Why else would the old man have protected and helped him for so long?"

"He tried to kill Mulder!"

"Don't be naive'."

She wanted him to shut up. Mulder was not tainted by that sickening old man and if he was dead, the world was a better place for it. "Do you know where I can get the Anti-viral?!"

Krycek watched her trigger finger. "No." May as well be honest. He came here to do that, speak some truth, but it was probably too late to be redeemed in her eyes or anyone else's.

Scully suddenly hated Krycek more than she thought she could ever hate anyone. He represented all that had come before, all the rotten tricks and disgusting lies. All the needle points of pain and hurt that had finally resulted in the gaping red wound inside her: Mulder's impending death.

"You've changed sides again, Krycek." She sneered. "You're killing _babies_ now." BIG MAN! her sarcastic voice cut. "Why? Not enough sadistic satisfaction in slaughtering those your own size, you son-of-a-bitch!?"

Krycek breathed fast, in and out. "I'm - _we're_ doing what _has_ to be done! For the human race! Don't you see what's about to happen, you stupid bitch?! We're about to be snuffed out!"

Scully asked again but believing him or not would be something she'd decide later. "So why are you killing children? Families? Why are your pals committing mass murder, huh? Who are they? And what are the God's children dying from?"

"I'm with them because what they said made sense. We're ridding the planet of the "watchers", the Infected ones Cancer Man's people put in place to watch the kids. The kids are special."

"Special how?!"

"I don't know! They don't tell us everything, but I've seen what they can do, I saw what Gibson could do. The kids are the key and we have to have control or-!"

"I have the gun, Krycek, and don't think for one second I won't blow you away unless you tell what I want to know!" She screamed at him, knowing she sounded almost crazed. Good, maybe he'd be afraid enough of her desperation to speak. "What did Cancer Man want with these kids!?"

"We thought the kids were alien-human hybrids put in place by the aliens themselves. We,..they,..Cancer Man, the Elders, thought the colonists had betrayed them and the Work by starting their own hybrid breeding program behind their back. Breeding hybrids right under their noses, from within. Some of us came to the conclusion that the Elders were nothing but pawns, that they were just being humored to keep them in line until Invasion. The colonization had already begun decades before." He lifted his chin. "But a few of us got smart."

"Did you?" She meant it as unflattering and it found its mark in his reddening face.

"Yes! We found others, another group, who were looking far ahead, who seemed to know more, who had different ideas about what was happening. I didn't agree with all of their ideas, but I agreed with their solution. Not to _work_ with the aliens but wipe them out, one by one if necessary and that meant starting with those who were infected. Those who were being controlled by the Black Oil.

"The Mill-...the group I'm with used the knowledge I brought them to further their work against the aliens - what they call The Evil ones, the Dark servants, they had a dozens names for the Infected. The labels don't matter. But somebody had to take a stand."

"But the God's children were never touched. Why did they die?"

He shook his head. "We don't know. They were always dead before we got to them. Every time. The Elders thought maybe the aliens were killing them somehow, to deprive us of using the hybrid kids against their plans for further invasion."

"How convenient that sounds. What else?! What happened to Gibson Praise?"

"I don't know! But he was one and not the only one."

Krycek was lying. Or he was crazy and telling what he thought was truth. Or he was telling the truth and if so, the truth was crazy. But it didn't matter. She alone could not stop any alien invasion. Krycek's companions were impotent. Powerless. If aliens were on Earth's doorstep like Mulder (and now Krycek) asserted, then they'd been there a long time and possessed the power to do as they pleased.

Humanity would go the way of the buffalo. Wiped out.

But one more thing before extinction. "Where is Caleb? Samantha's other son?"

Krycek shook his head. "I can't tell you. I'd be killed. He has to be protected."

She took careful aim at his left eye. "You'll be dead anyway."

He stared back but his brave defiance weakened. "You don't have-"

"-GODDAMN IT!-.." She forced her voice into calmer tones, "I hate you Krycek, but other than that, I have no personal vendetta against you. All I want is for Mulder to see Caleb. That's all. Mulder needs this. Just this one thing."

She stepped closer, ensuring that when she pulled the trigger, she'd be close enough not to miss and the back of his skull would be blasted clean away. No margin for error. "Lie to me Krycek and I _swear_ I'll kill you."

He heard her and understood, maybe not for the first time, that for Mulder, she would do it. Anything.

"So Mulder _is_ dying? It's not just a story?"

Scully's hand trembled. "Shut-up!"

Krycek's expression was neutral, his voice was almost remorseful.

"I'm sorry. I can't help you. I can't help myself either. And despite what the group is trying to do, it's probably too late to protect these kids. We think the invasion is well under way. It's too late for any of us now."

"You're a liar."

"Believe what you want, Agent Scully. Caleb is with his father. Mueller. We don't know where. But I think you already knew that much."

He turned until his back was facing her and paused, as if waiting to see if she'd shoot him in the back.

After he left, Scully stared at the door a long time until in the distance she heard a car engine start up and wheels spinning on gravel.

Sinking to her knees, she let her gun fall to the floor with a soft thump, letting it fall where it may.

Light from the late afternoon sun poured through the door, across the worn two by sixes and over to her. She could feel the heat from it near her. But its light did not touch her skin or even the hem of her jacket, now coated from the neglected dusty cabin floor. She shivered.

Cold like the dead fall over the hard clay on the mountain came over her. Frozen solid fear in the pit of her stomach, just like it happened to the heroines in the adventure novels she kept piled on the night stand beside her bed. She didn't know that it really happened that way.

Scully had felt fear often. Felt dread and terror and it has always been a hot emotion, a thing that moved her to action. Even her cancer had stirred fight in her. Even Emily, though a terrible painful loss never to be forgot, had not frozen her in place.

It had not made her ice-covered and lifeless.

Mulder would become that cold in his urn. She'd be the one to pick it out. Choosing style and engraving. Decide the location for a memorial. Chat with his distant relatives whom she had never met and never would again. Strangers who did not know him.

"I hope all will be well....I cannot choose but weep, to think they should lay him i' the cold ground. "

She was going mad.

Shivering there on her knees in a tumbling down old house in the hills, quoting tragedy to no one.

Words had no meaning anymore. They accomplished nothing except to dry the throat.

And words - lies or truth - spoken for their own sake were cold on her skin.

Like her father and her sister and her daughter were cold.

Words sounded and ended.

Like Mulder's father and Mulder's sister. Like, soon, Mulder.

With that cold, colors and normal body warmth had faded again to black and white and ice water, just like years ago. Like the time when Mulder had been taken and brought back somewhat physically intact but insane.

She could do nothing for him then but send him away to the doctors.

But no cure was forthcoming this time. Krycek the liar had told her so and it was tragically ironic that she found herself believing him. Why would he lie?

She knew the truth and the truth had not set her free but enslaved her in it's pain. Truth itself was a liar.

"But. This. Cannot. _Be_," she said aloud.

Beyond the broken door her God was silent from behind his brilliant sun.

** Scully drove steadily for several hours on autopilot. It was soothing in a way, just seeing the highway appear before her out of the dark in her headlights, where nothing was visible beyond their beams.

Cancer Man was dead. Krycek was off fighting his version of Armageddon. She didn't even hate him for it, he was too sad a reality for her to hate him.

She could feel sorry for him almost now. Feel sorry for a double crossing, lying murderer. Forgive him in his sin.

But she couldn't render to God the same compassion. God was supposed to be beyond the need for anything.

He was powerful and if he wanted to, he could end it all. Every terrible thing, all pain. Death. He could end death if He so choose. Why _didn't_ he?!

Highway disappeared and street lamps lining suburban roads appeared. Buildings grew from points in the distance and whizzed be her eyes as blurs.

A steeple appeared, taller than the homes surrounding it with their shiny cars parked in driveways and darkened windows.

She pulled in.

"Father? Are you there?"

"Yes. It is late my child. Have you some to confess?"

Out of the corner of her eye, Scully could see the shape of the Father through the cross-crossed wooden slats. It obscured his features, making him into a faceless man. Like the words in scripture made God just another character in a book.

Why did there have to be such separations? "No. No, but I do have a question."

"Yes?"

"Why does God allow evil?"

"Evil has always existed. God battles it, as should we."

"Why does God not win?"

"What evil have you encountered? What brings you here?"

"The human kind of evil. Perhaps something more. Do you believe in angels, Father?"

"Of course."

"So, if there are angels, there are also devils? And there must also be Satan, isn't that what the Church teaches?"

"If you are a catholic, you must know these things."

"I've read about them, but that doesn't mean I believe."

"Yet, you question."

"Yes. If there is God, if there is a Good, why must there be a bad? A creature, a spirit who is the enemy of God?"

"It is a basic Christian belief that the struggle will always exist, even if it is only within ourselves, until we achieve the reward."

"That sounds like a riddle. I have one for you."

"Go ahead."

"Satan is the head of Evil. He is the master of the underworld. The one who oversee's the punishment of evil-doers for all eternity."

"Yes."

"Who sends them there?"

Scully waited for the priest to answer her. When he didn't, "Is it not God who sends the wicked to hell? So isn't Satan an agent of God. Is he not God's helper? Does that make sense to you?"

"The way you say it, it does not."

"You know what, Father, I don't know anymore what is evil or good. Sometimes I don't see a difference."

"Do you pray?"

"I used to."

"Why not now?"

"Because a friend of mine is dying. He's dying because all his life he fought against evil. Those who would hurt others in order to save themselves by making dirty deals with terrible men, deals agreed to in darkness."

"It is not always obvious who is the winner in a struggle for life. Sometimes life moves on. Sometimes the life is a spiritual one."

"Is it? I'm no longer convinced there is a heaven, or even a hell. But I can say this much for certain. There is evil in the world, and God should do something about it."

"He will child. He will, in his time. In his way."

"That sounds like an excuse."

"Does it? Do you believe in the President of the United States?"

"Yes, of course."

"Have you ever met her personally?"

"No and I know what you're trying to say, you're trying to reason that just because I have never met God, that is no reason to lose my faith in his existence, but that is not the same. Ms. President can be seen on television. There are eye-witness accounts of her."

"As there are of God. And though there are no pictures of him, since he is a spirit, that is not so unusual."

Scully did not say anything. She was angry. It was an anger that came from nowhere and every part of her too. It had no origin, it seemed, and nowhere to focus but this priest sitting in the wooden confessional. Though she did not lash out with it, Scully reveled in her anger. She needed it, it gave her a sense of power and will. She did not answer him.

"Let me ask you something." The voice of the priest said.

"All right."

"Does Lady President call you when it's time to make decisions that will affect the entire country, even if they are decisions that will affect you in ways in which you do not approve?"

"No."

"But you believe that God should call on you."

Scully felt her anger reach the rim of her understanding until she felt weak with fatigue and helpless in ignorance.

"No." She began to cry. "But why doesn't he ever answer me? When this is the only request I have ever made of him? I would give my life for the answer."

"You mean for your friends life."

"Yes."

"Perhaps God has something more in mind for him. Or for you."

"It's not fair."

"I'm sure Jesus Christ felt the same way at times. Even he asked for the trial to be removed from him, yet, he said to God: "Not as I will, but as you will."."

"I know." Tears flowed silent and steady. Her heart ached but it was a better ache than before. It was almost, very nearly, good. "I want him to live."

"Have faith, child. Sometimes, it is our only weapon."

"Are you well?" Scully's mother asked as she stepped inside the house.

Scully nodded but quickly changed it to a head shake when she saw her mother's disbelief.

"He's dying and I can't do anything."

"He knows you love him."

She nodded. She'd said it. Often enough she hoped, resolving to correct it if it proved to be inaccurate.

That thought became hope by the time she reached his bedroom and heard the respirator going full.

Hope became a vacuum expanse by the time she swung the door open.

The vacuum threatened to suck her into its void by the time she reached his bedside.

In perhaps a few days at most, she'd be visiting him in a far more public place with grass under her feet instead of carpet.

Love and not grief won when he opened his eyes to look at her. Something good stood up inside for the time being and gave her the wherefor all to smile and take his bone-thin fingers in her own.

"Hi."

He cracked a smile in response.

She knew it was especially for her because it hurt him. Nothing now was free, he paid for each movement of living with pain. Each moment exacted a price.

"Skinner's arranging a task force to the New Hope site. There's a chance some of the "special" children are there. We may learn something new."

"You told me."

Scully nodded. It was a "Oh? Yes, that's right. I did, didn't I?" nod. Words and movements designed to replace rooms far too full of uncomfortable despair

"Are you all right?" he asked

He'd seen inside her; her carefully sculpted hope collapsing in upon itself, she guessed.

What eyes that see!

She nodded to him anyway. If you're going to lie, try to make it a convincing lie. "Yes. I'm okay. I was just thinking about how much I love you and how little I've mentioned that."

"Enough." He wheezed. "Plenty."

She looked at their entwined fingers. Her small, flesh colored and his thin, white, nearly bloodless appendages looking like the fingers of his "Greys".

Soon into death he would travel, an alien in a alien place. In living experience and in current state, he knew and was becoming something very like them. Mulder had sought for aliens all his life for many reasons. Now there was one growing inside him, making him over to suit itself.

Talk about close encounters.

"Mulder..." she couldn't speak another word. Shivered but felt his heat. It was warmer than the sun outside his bedroom window which she'd driven all night long to see once more.

"I know, Scully." Gasping. Tightened his grip. To anyone else an almost imperceptible increase in pressure, but she felt it.

"I,...I..." She wanted to speak and make the words mean something. Something great and powerful and everlasting. Words that would change the way people viewed the world and everything in it.

Sayings that would find Cancer Man in his grave and slap his face.

Utterances that would reach up to heaven and convince God that Mulder was worth saving. Prove that he was the only and last thing Dana Scully would ever ask for and if He would only grant her this, she'd serve Him with total humility and the deepest sanctity forever and ever, Amen.

And they would be true words.

"It's okay." Mulder assured her from the other side of the wall of his suffering. "It's okay."

She saw her tears fall and wet both their hands. Spoke those words in brief.

"I,...I wanted to marry you."

** Margaret Scully watched the three strangers file through her living room, and without being obvious, tried to make heads or tails of Dana's companions.

Her daughter took up the rear, instructing where they should turn once they reached the end of the hall. "Just left, Langly, we'll work there."

Margaret understood. Her husband's old den had a large comfortable easy chair where Fox could lay back and rest without too much discomfort but still be present and participate.

Langly was a tall, thin fellow in T-shirt and jeans with a buzzed blonde 'do and wearing Lennon type eye glasses.

Following him after stopping to introduce himself with a hand- shake was a much older, balding man in glasses who appeared to be in poor health. He seemed very pleasant.

Dana's third and last visitor impressed her the most. A clean cut, well dressed office type, she surmised. Probably a family man as well.

"Close the door, Frohike, will you?" Mulder asked.

He did so and asked "How are you, Mulder?"

"Fine." Mulder and endured a kind shoulder squeeze from his friend.

Scully seated herself in her dad's old cushioned desk chair while Byers sat in a hard one next to it. Langly just leaned against the wall as was his habit.

"So?" Scully opened the informal meeting. "What do you have?"

Byers spoke:

"Nothing new. The media's already made the connections, they know these child murders are occurring in other countries, it's all over the news. Interpol, CSIS, FBI, CIA, NSA, the British Secret Service, the DCGA, the Japanese, the Russian fragments and all their agencies, are all trying to find the hub of the God's Children Spree Killers, the "Millennium Makers" or whatever they call themselves. No one's had any success."

"We even had an inquiry about the approaching year, 2010, sent out to every apocalyptic group or doomsday sect we could think of to see if there was some kind of religious significance to it. Nada."

"Hell. We even had some astrologers in and other than I should be dating a Libra, the couldn't tell us a thing." Frohike said, then added, "Scully, what's your mom's birthday?"

"Forget it Frohike." She opened a file folder and said to them all, "Well, it seems to have no historical weight either. 2013 might have, it'll be the 100 year anniversary of the start of World War One, but that's it."

"Crime is down." Mulder said. "Nations at present are mostly at peace, the Big Arms Race was over long ago, rumor has it Saddam's got cancer, Pakistan and India are still chilly but not bombing each other, we haven't had a whole-scale civil slaughter in any third world nation for the last six years, there seems to be nothing happening anywhere to explain why suddenly this previously unknown "Glory of God" Club would start killing families."

"I don't think the reasons for any of it are cut and dried." Scully said.

Mulder sighed. "Crazy doesn't mean a person can't be intelligent. Religious doesn't mean goodness."

"I didn't say it did. But they might be suffering from some kind of mass delusion."

"World wide? Why isn't it affecting others? Why only the God's Children Murderers?"

"I don't know."

"I don't think this has anything to do with God." Mulder dismissed the idea.

Frohike seemed to sense an argument building and asked "Why these kids? Are these kids like Gibson was? You never told us what happened to Gibson, Mulder."

"We don't know, but my opinion is Gibson was part alien. Or he'd been altered as a child. Abducted and genetically manipulated, that's why he could read minds."

"They tried to kill him, Mulder."

"No. they tried to study him, control him. Maybe Gibson was a failure. I think that's why they're after these kids. Maybe these kids are the successes. They put Oil infected control subjects in place or infected parents already present to watch the kids, to retain that control."

"Then why are they dying or being killed?"

"I don't know. These religious fanatics are obviously well organized and maybe they recognize, somehow, what's going on. Maybe their solution to the world's woes is to remove the "tainted"."

"They seem too well organized to be crazy." Scully said, still stinging from his comment.

"Look at John List, a family man, an accountant who stuck to routine and who, verified by the testimony of friends and co-workers, worked to effect a normal American family life - who wanted things to be "nice". But one day he wakes up and decides the answer to all his troubles is to brutally murder his ill and alcoholic wife and then his three children one at a time, afterward lining up their corpses in a row like popsicle sticks. Why do we believe that madness must by definition also mean chaos? Can't there be orderly, methodical, even logical, insanity?"

Scully bristled. "I think that it does not always clearly manifest itself, yes. I think sometimes it comes in disguise and fools us all."

The room was suddenly very uncomfortable. Langley, Byers looked at the floor, the walls. Frohike made himself occupied with the goings on outside the room's one window. They looked anywhere but at the two other occupants whose mutual tension was as thick as cheese.

Bluntly, "Do you think I'm crazy?" Mulder asked her.

She was shocked. "Where did that come from? You know I don't."

"But I believe aliens abducted me for eight years. And I believe that now, we're seeing aliens on the verge of an invasion. I think these kids are tied to it. I think it's been planned for decades and someone has to try and stop it."

"Do you think I'm crazy for not believing that, Mulder? Am I crazy for thinking that maybe, just maybe God does have a hand in things and even if aliens are about to destroy all human life, He will have something to say back to them? That they could also be a creation provided with free will and that He might stop this himself?"

An interruption in the way of Margaret Scully halted further words momentarily. She apologized, carrying in a tray loaded with cups filled with coffee, saucers, cream and sugar and a plate of squares. Byers went to take the tray from her.

"Thank-you's" issued from the group as she nodded and left, closing the door again behind her.

A few minutes were spent doctoring up cup. Frohike helped himself to two of the cocoanut topped confectionaries.

"Frohike." Scully said in protest.

"I know, I know. I've decided to ignore my doctors advice for a few minutes. Let an old man enjoy a few pleasures." He took a bite. "These are incredible. What else is your mother good at?"

Amused, Scully shook her head and gave up.

Mulder didn't take a coffee or anything off the plate. He'd had his morning meal, barely recognizable as food if he remembered right. Yellow mush that tasted vaguely like bananas.

Scully had brought her meal to his bedroom and after, he'd felt well enough to join her in the T.V. room. The morning had been spent just enjoying each others company.

He wanted to repair the damage and looked over at Scully. She was staring at her coffee cup. She looked sad and it was because of him.

Their eyes met when she looked up and a private word was exchanged. It said they were each sad, each sorry, each wishing for things to have turned out differently. It said love and plenty of it.

Mulder nodded to her, the gesture made to once again draw the others into the conversation. "Scully has a right to her own opinions on this, but we're working together toward the same goal."

"Yes." She added. "We're just working from different mind sets." She addressed the group, and then just Mulder smiling, "When have we not?"

To all:

"I believe something is going on, something big. But, personally, I'm also trying to keep a faith that the very worst will not be the outcome, no matter what we do or are unable to do. Don't worry guys," She said to the three Gunmen, "Mulder and I all right," To Mulder, "aren't we?"

Mulder nodded.

"Then let's get to work. "

Scully took the floor once more. "All we have is what my informant has told me, which is still, I remind you, somewhat questionable. He can give us so little concrete information and nothing that targets any one individual, so he is almost a dead end. The names he gave us of some of the members of his old clan turned up possibles but the information is a decade old and it could be a dead end."

Byers reported. "I did a web search. There are organizations that call themselves the "Millennium Children", people who believe they were abducted from the womb, taken to the "mother ships", "altered" - made into geniuses the reasons for which they can't say, then returned to the womb for normal birth.

"There are chapters who also think that they have or still have somewhere,a twin who was the abductee, removed pre- natally from the mother and taken to the aliens ships, the other twin being left behind as the "control subjects". That ties in with Mulder's theory to some extent."

"Except they're not abducted to be made into geniuses. They're test subjects for the aliens, for their breeding program or the Black Oil infection-" Mulder added.

"Those people are deluding themselves, guys." Scully said. "They desire something beyond mediocrity and, based on a dream or a sense of "incompleteness" or "invasion" that could be explained by anything from a lack of iron or a rhinovirus, they decided that they must have been abducted and they are now super humans endowed with superintelligence or talent and the main liners of the future. There is nothing scientific to sup[port their claims."

"There was nothing scientific to support mine." Mulder reminded her.

Scully didn't look at him, biting her too wuick tongue.

"anyway, there's been no sign of the Black Oil in any of the dead children," she said. " And none of this goes any where in explaining how those children who are found dead died. None of them showed trauma of any kind. Not even raised adrenaline levels in the blood."

"But it does explain Sam's child."

"We all want to believe our children or our family is more special that the rest, but it's just one theory." Scully answered but didn't look at him. The case had become a web of threads that did not lead back to each other but simple away. Each dead family added to the unbelievable. None of it made sense. Nothing fit. Nothing answered to normal avenues of scientific investigation.

"Where does your friend Krycek fit into all of this?" Langley asked.

"He was never anyone's friend." Mulder said. "And we don't know yet, but he's one of the baby killers."

Byers cleared his throat, "Back to the reason why. The only thing happening in the world seems to be a lack of newsworthy events. the "why" just isn't clear."

"Krycek knows. We need to find him." Mulder said.

Scully had not mentioned her encounter. It had been held for an entirely different purpose, but "I doubt he knows much," she said, just to stave off the pangs of conscience over her secrecy about having gone.

"We have our chapters on it, everything we know about him. So far, zip." Langley said.

"Scully, what's the word on Caleb?" Mulder asked. That was what was most on his mind. The case itself had gone world-wide, whoever was doing the killings, it now seemed far more important to stop them than to know all the reasons behind why, other than the why might eventually lead them to the culprits. But Caleb.

Caleb was personal.

Scully seemed distracted.

"Scully?"

She looked up at him, as if she not heard. "I'm sorry, something Byers said made me think of something. It's nothing."

But she had aroused Mulder's curiosity. "What?"

All their eyes were on her now.

"That the only significant "Event" is that there is none. No wars, no uprisings, things seem good. It...uh..reminded me of a passage in Luke 12:40, "she quoted for them, "at a day you do not think likely, the Son of Man cometh."."

"You think God is behind all this?" Mulder asked.

Scully pursed her lips. "No, but I think it's interesting that something this wide reaching is occurring now, when things seem fine. When there seems to be no catalyst, that such a world-wide and obviously organized group would see _now_ as the time for action. What is it about _this_ time, about _now_?"

"They're religious fanatics. For some, that's all they need: The "call to serve" ." Mulder said and shifted, even the padded chair was growing uncomfortable.

As if to apologize to Scully for his flip comment, he addressed the group, "Scully and I think differently on the possibilities of why, whether angels, demons, aliens or just bible thumping zealots suffering from mass psychosis, families and children are being murdered. It has to be stopped."

The groups silence was an agreement and a sign the meeting had come to a close.

Mulder sat forward and started to rise with the help of the cane Margaret had kindly provided. Frohike moved to help him up but Mulder waved him off. He looked embarrassed. "I have to go take my doc's-" He nodded in Scully's direction, a humorous twist on his mouth, "one hundred and one pills."

He limped out of the room.

When Frohike was sure he was out of earshot, "He looks bad, Dana."

She nodded. "He is."

It seemed to pull Frohike's face down, hearing it without any punches pulled.

"How long?" Byers asked. They all knew what he meant.

She stood to follow Mulder and they trailed after. "Uh...days. That's what Watts said, but science has been known to be wrong."

If they were shocked to hear her say it, it wasn't evident on their faces.

But they were all thinking the same thing. Days if Mulder took care. But they all knew he wouldn't.

Frohike stopped her, letting the rest file passed and down the hall.

"If you need any help with anything,...uh,...arrangements,...you'll call me? Us?"

His hand on her forearm, his kind offer, his gentle words almost broke the fierce control she'd been practicing since the hospital yesterday. With eyes watering, she lay one hand one his arm and both stood there, two old friends in grief for the cherished third.

Lip trembling, she nodded.

Then, with Frohike right there, being so honest with her, so caring about Mulder, she wanted to share something more. "About Krycek. There's a place I went. Someone I had to ask something..."

Frohike frowned, then understood. "You went to see him. Cancer Man."

She nodded. "But he wasn't there. Krycek was. Don't tell Mulder but Krycek knows nothing that can help us."

"Or if he did, he won't say."

"Yes." She sighed. "Mulder's already dying, and so will more children. What could he have told me that would have made any difference? Even if we knew everything about them, I doubt we could stop them."

"You could have been hurt."

Scully shook her head sadly. "Mulder's dying Frohike. They wouldn't need to punish me anymore than that. There's nothing I have that they already haven't taken away."

** Skinner assigned her to lead the Infiltration Team on New Hope.

They were here to find and protect Sydney Black, daughter of Frank and Catherine Black.

Catherine Black, the mother who had died during the North West Outbreak by her own hand.

Frank Black who had lost himself inside a frightening doomsday Sorority. Frank who had embroiled his family in something that ultimately caused him to destroy them, wither in death or separation. Frank who had put his trust in his religiously guided millennium seekers who believed one effective method of eradicating evil was infecting the populous with a prion carried virus that killed in seconds; one that caused its victims blood to cease clotting and all blood carrying vessels to break down and leak like wet rice paper.

It was a well conceived virus that brought a truly biblical vision to life before the horrified stare of any unfortunate observer: the sufferer bleeding from the mouth and eye-sockets, as even the capillaries on the tongue and in the eyeballs broke down, eventually spilling their fluid out onto the face.

A very effective method of eradication. But one from men, not from God. Distributed by men who had cast their deadly bread upon the waters and then took measures so it would not come back to them.

A very terrible way to die, but at least it was quick. ENMS was agonizingly slow for both victim and those who in horror, had to stand and watch.

These diseases were death for men by men because their brand of destruction murdered the innocent while leaving the guilty to walk the earth.

It would not always be so. If God was love as the Father's had taught, it could not be.

Scully had looked up a passage in her leather bound Bible, the very old one her mother had given her at age eight, and which she'd had lovingly and newly inscribed with her name in gold lettering:

Zechariah 14:12, "...And this what will prove to be the scourge with which Yahweh will scourge all the peoples that will actually battle against Jerusalem: There will a rotting away of ones flesh, while one is standing upon ones feet; and one's very eyes will rot away in their sockets, and one's very tongue will rot away in one's mouth."

The God's Children Killer's had used a man's invention to praise God and to control those who did not. Or those they felt who did not believe such particulars and in the way in which they approved. The evil among men seemed to dwell within their ranks.

Another method of controlling - in this case - their own members was to generously provide the antidote for those members, with or without their consent. Not the members families, just the members.

Scully recalled Frank's face, her informant, Crazy Man. The loss of his family had driven him insane, she was sure, but not too insane to tell the truth. Craziness didn't mean liar.

Spiritual didn't mean unscientific.

Spooky didn't mean unreal.

Did the God's Children Killers know about Sydney and The New Hope Evangelicals?

Protecting the children was the right thing to do, that's what they were here to do. Which children among millions? and Why them? were impossible questions and best left to posterity or God to figure out.

If only the Evangelicals had not denied them entry onto the property.

"This is a place of God. We are peaceable, tax paying citizens caring for children no one else wanted and we are, by the way, legalized in every way. Permission is denied. Even if the Devil were bold enough to show his face here, do you think God would not have an answer?"

So had preached the woman on the phone to her, vehemently denying the F.B.I. access to the property or the children.

"Has there been a report that the children are being neglected or abused in any way?" The woman had astutely asked, and with Scully's answer in the negative, she'd finished, "Then there is no reason for you or anyone to disturb the tranquility of New Hope. I'm sure if you've done your background check on us adequately, you'll know that we are registered as a free-standing Church of God and a place of sanctuary and as such, have every right under the law to refuse you entry. Men of war and weapons of death are forbidden here."

And that had been that.

Scully knew her duty, she wanted to help this man Frank Black save his daughter whom he claimed had been one of these special children. Scully wanted to save these kids. She wanted to do the right thing.

But the last thing she and the team wanted to do was let the New Hope's know that the F.B.I. was at least watching the property if not stepping feet on it. Spooking the New Hope's would not be a good idea.

The task force had no idea of the true nature of New Hope: who they were, how they operated, whether they themselves were innocents and in need of protection or if they were another self righteous, Waco-like paranoid cult just waiting for any reason to show their godly devotion by opening fire upon the law enforcers of men.

Caution was the word.

Mulder was at her mothers and after arguing fruitlessly about leaving him behind, with conscience burning with guilt, Scully' had decided to sedate him.

"I'm sorry, Mulder. You can't be in on this one, you're not strong enough for field work anymore."

He argued back. Coughed and spit up blood and argued some more.

"I have a right to find my nephew! Not as an agent but as a human being! He's the only surviving member of my family, Scully! Don't make me sit here while Sam's only son is murdered! You have no right to drug me up Scully! No right!"

She had ignored his protests and nodded to the day nurse who held his arms while she'd inserted the needle.

Three dozen agents in black body armor surrounded New Hope.

It was a non threatening place. A one two story house, a dozens smaller cabins, a corral where some horses dozed in the early morning sunrise. A cow barn.

There were no fences, no watchtowers, no fortifications of any kind. Scully crouched low next to Skinner. They were close to what appeared to be the main house. Through her field glasses, she could make out lace curtains in the windows and white wooden chairs on the veranda that wrapped the entire structure.

"This place looks like a Summer Bible camp." Skinner said. "All this fire power seems almost profane." He nodded in the direction of the house "That's where the children most likely are."

"Probably. It might also just be the cook house, where the camp counselors stay and where they all eat. These other cabins," she pointed, "could be sleeping quarters."

The task force had looked over aerial photographs of the site. No unusual activity had been detected. Reports from the neighboring town said that the place was benign and appeared to be exactly what it stated and nothing more. Even a check on taxes revealed complete and up front reporting to the I.R.S..

"What do we do first?" Skinner asked her, though procedures had already been laid out.

"We wait."

The sun had been up no more than forty minutes before all the children, talking and giggling among themselves like hungry kids do, were filing into the main house accompanied by their guardians to, Scully guessed, sit down for breakfast, as frying bacon could be smelled.

Things were quiet for a time.

If the place was a haven for aliens or angels, nothing was surfacing to mark it.

The sun had traveled for another hour before more movement could be seen in the camp. A woman wearing a simple dark dress came out the front door of the main house carrying a bucket. She walked to a well in the center of the small, fenced yard and pumped its handle, filling her bucket before re entering the dwelling. Before long, the odor of fresh coffee reached their nostrils.

Skinner's mouth watered. "Bacon. Coffee. I should have had breakfast."

"Well, you never did listen to your doctor much."

"So why start now, Doctor Scully?" He joked, exchanging looks with his prettiest agent and remembering past times spent with her in ways closer than they were now. Memories, he decided, better left in his head.

"I don't know, I'm beginning to think my informant really is just a wacko. Unless I've lost my instincts, there's nothing unusual going on here that I can see."

"He was an F.B.I. agent."

"So was Duane Barry, look how that turned out."

"Well, my ass is getting sore just-"

A voice on his radio interrupted:

"Sir. We've got company."

Scully knew without asking who their "company" would be.

"We have to get those kids to safety, sir."

"If we open fire, we'll have a war on our hands and some of them could be caught in the crossfire."

Their F.B.I. task force was good but not perfect. Some of the masked invaders would get by and soon the place would be swarming with F.B.I. and Enemy both armed with cannons trying to get the upper hand.

Skinner announced a strict no-fire order on the secure radio channel that was to stay in place until the location of the children could be determined and a suitable course of action decided. No Waco's or Ruby Ridge fiascos would happen under Skinners command.

Scully would do her utmost to make certain of it. the only difficultly lay in how to bring about that end.

She noted that their armed visitors were, strangely, also obeying the order.

It was Spooky.

All that could be heard were running feet on grass and rustling leaves through forest and brush. No firing, no shouting, no cocking of rifle bolts reached her ears. Nothing violent sounded out across the fields, not even shouting. Birds twittered in the branches overhead, as if the forest were empty of all life but that which belonged there. Peaceful park afternoon.

It was as if the peace of the place had invaded _them_.

Eerie.

"Why these children?" Skinner asked her, "It's no more or less particular than any other orphanage or Bible School or Y.M.C.A. Summer Camp."

"Why any of the children, sir? That's a question none of us can answer yet." And maybe never will, she thought.

"There's been no activity from the house since they went inside." Skinner observed, "But they had to have heard something by now. They have to know we're here."

"They probably-" Scully suddenly knew. Like a cat with its nose to a mouse hole realizing its empty. "Oh my God," She said as the thought hit her, "There was a tunnel under the Mueller house."

*

Inside the neat and clean main house, twenty empty chairs surrounded a long dining table set with plates. Bacon bits and cold egg remnants littered the flatware.

Scully had her team check the floors. "Look for an opening, trap door, cellar, loose boards, any kind of tunnel."

They found one.

Scully was the first to go, followed by Skinner and two other agents. "Do a search of the entire grounds and send teams out to the fields. Get the choppers in and ground sweep. This tunnel probably leads to the outer edge of the property. Keep you eyes open for any unauthorized planes or helicopters." She fired the instructions while checking her weapon. Fully loaded.

"Where do you think they're going?" Skinner called after her as they descended the rusted ladder into the dark.

"I don't know. Away from here, away from any threat."

"Who the hell are these people, Agent Scully?"

"I'm not sure about that either, sir, but whoever they are, there's something special about them. Why else would the Spree Killers be after them? Why would Frank Black, former F.B.I. agent and father have kept his daughter hidden with them for over a decade?"

She puffed and she ran. The tunnel was just tall enough for her not to have to duck. Skinner, however, was running at half mast.

"I don't know the answers, but the questions are enough, don't you think?"

"Do you think Mulder's nephew might be here?"

Damn him for bringing her mind from her task and back around to Mulder lying in the hospital. "I don't know." But she hoped not. Not with all the guns parading around.

*

Outside, F.B.I. and invaders swarmed around each other like angry bees but without a sound.

Rifles were raised and aimed but no fingers tightened on triggers.

Skinner kept in contact with his perimeter troops. "What's happening out there, Morrison?"

The tactical officer answered:

"Nothing."

Skinner exchanged puzzled glances with Scully. "What do you mean, "nothing"?"

There was a significant pause before the befuddled voice of his man came back,

"I mean nothing, sir. They're all out in the open, we're looking right at each other. They've got us in their sights and we're ready to open fire, but..."

"But what?!" Skinner demanded.

"No one's moving."

*

Scully bulleted down the tunnel with Skinner on her heel. He was letting her take the lead in their next move. She had no idea what that should be.

The tunnel sloped upwards until daylight could be seen and they emerged out upon a field of sunflowers, all in full bloom, all bursting with ripened seeds, some so top heavy they were bowing under their own weight, looking like worshipers standing in the courtyard of the Vatican.

The sight made Scully pause only seconds.

Skinner emerged seconds after her and stood beside her, his eyes following the path of hers to where she was held under a sight that made him shiver involuntarily.

The children stood in a group only yards away, their guardians with them, all looking at them and waiting.

One woman came forward a few steps, beyond their reach but close enough to be heard.

"Don't," she said.

Scully saw the dark, wavy hair, recognized something in the woman's eyes that was like her father's. "Sydney Black?"

She nodded. "I know my father thinks I'm in danger, but please, he is wrong as are you. No one is in danger here."

"You may not know that there are men looking for you - for the children - to possibly harm them and they've arrived. Our force will keep them away but as a precaution you need to come with us." Skinner told her.

Sydney Black shook her head. "Despite our request, you came anyway. Please, it's dangerous for you to be here. You weren't invited."

Scully stepped forward. "Ma'am, please. It is very important that you come with us, all of you." She addressed the children, looking for a dark haired little boy among them.

"How can I convince you?" Sydney asked.

Scully licked her lips, frustrated, puzzled by the woman's reaction but curious, desperate to know in fact, willing to do almost anything in order to understand what was happening and the meaning behind Miss Black's warning.

Frantic to have some good knowledge to take home to him. A parting gift, something more than a kiss goodbye while he died.

"Why are _you_ here, Miss Black? What brought you here, to these children? What is it about these children?"

The woman looked back as if at one who had gouged out her own eyes. "You know."

Scully's heart thumped in her chest, denying the woman's implication but needing - _needing_! She spread her hands then let them fall, weak with her inner hunger, her intellect flat-lining because all of this was so beyond her. She was a creature in a cage being stared at and startled by ones who had seen life beyond the bars and knew different.

"Please. I,..._please_...I must know." Everything in her life depended upon it - this one truth. She felt if she got an answer to this, to where the children came from and what they were, everything else would fall into place. It would all make sense, somehow, all of it: Her father, her cancer, Melissa, her daughter Emily, dead these ten years.

Even what was happening to Mulder. Just one answer.

_One_!

"Is there a little boy here named Caleb?" Scully asked, hoping that if the woman wasn't willing to divulge anything about the flock, perhaps she would send out a message regarding a single member. One tiny lamb of truth.

"There was. He's gone now. He choose to leave and go to his father alone."

"Where did they go?"

The woman only shook her head sadly. "You do not understand. I don't think you were meant to, Miss Scully."

Scully was about to ask how the woman knew her name when Skinner's radio crackled and Morrison's voice shot out, ending their strange meeting.

(During it all, Skinner had remained silent as if he hadn't been invited to witness their odd religious rendezvous. Scully had actually forgotten that he was present):

"Sir! There's something happening...a storm. Hail like knives - we don't know where it came from - we can't see-"...

Then, over the same radio, after seconds that seemed like hours,

"Holy God!"

*

"What's happening, Morrison?" Skinner managed to speak the single question before they were hit with what Morrison and his men had already seen.

Wind that felt like daggers hit them and, as though an invisible hand had reached out to slap them, they were knocked to the ground.

Scully saw Skinner go down and searched for the children and Sydney, only to see a building sized dust cloud whipping where they used to be. Light was there too.

Scully had a memory flash then, of herself standing on a bridge at night and lights that blinded sweeping across her field of vision, above her, sharp and penetrating her soul. Intelligent light, it seemed, eating a woman. She remembered men without faces - alien men, demon men - who came with a burning touch, incinerating those left behind. She recalled a lightening blue sky and the black chariots overhead and all of it sending her logical and reasoning mind spinning out of control. Spiraling into a torturing pit of hell fire things unrecognizable and misunderstood, things that made no sense but somehow, for someone, must make all the sense needed to understand them.

Scully wanted to understand now, but she could not open her eyes long enough to see through the storm of dust and of sunflowers suddenly air born or beyond the neutron star that had without warning appeared and pulsed, burning their eyes and preventing any from seeing anything more.

Scully felt suddenly like a wayward child and that she, in her faith abandoned, had made a pilgrimage to the site of Fatima's Holy Vison, hoping for the revelation of the third prophesy, to have it then appear to her, but only to be blinded by it.

If it's unveiling was taking place before her now, in this ridiculous field of sunflowers, with these strangers watching under their God's approval, for her, a blasphemer, it's fantastic light of truth was too bright to see by.

Scully was in darkness. Yet her mind saw things from her past as if they were occurring again there in the sunflowers, one, the most memorable, was the time when she was a child of seven sitting in Sister Ruth's class, sister Ruth scraping out her symbols on the chalk board, stern but loving to the thirty small children whose secular and spiritual life had been placed under her care. A responsibility she had not taken lightly:

"Today's topic is The Veil of Moses..."

Sister's voice reached out to them one by one:

"The veil of Moses, the light beautiful but terrifying. The understanding, only there for those who would open their figurative eyes wide enough to see it."

Scully lay on the ground as her retinas were heated unbearably, afraid now, to really know the truth of what it was she was seeing.

She felt the tingle of where her implant had been and where the chip that saved her had been placed by men and laughed, one of hysteria and confusion and the need to believe and hold faith battling with her want for irrefutable proof to back them up.

Scully did not want to go as Cassandra Spender had gone. She did not want to die because she did not know where Cassandra was. Or her father, Emily or anyone else.

Once, she thought she knew.

Now, without her to guide him there in his disbelief, where was Mulder to go? She couldn't bear the thought of him ending by becoming a few ounces of gritty dust, useless but for encouragement of new weeds. As many weeds pushed through as daisies. Mulder was worth more than that, no matter what he did or did not believe for sure. Christian, Muslim, Jew, or Newtonian, he had earned something better.

Mulder believed in visitors. She used to believe in God.

Even here, with something like the star of David shining brilliantly under skies that had darkened in contrast, it was not enough. Even this was not enough evidence for her to accept which was truth and which was lie.

She started crying, Scully resolved that she would never have resolution. No answers. The scientist in her rebelled, the child under God in her felt shame at her lack of trust.

Why should she have to choose?

Scully heared in her waking dream:

//"hold me hand, sweetheart."

She saw her mother, looking down at her from above.

"How do I know Grandma is in heaven if I can't see her?" She as a tiny girl whispered, holding her mothers hand tight in the big house filled with adults all talking so quietly.

Her mother's sad eyes smiled for her little one. "You must have faith, Dana. Like we have faith that Daddy is coming home soon from the sea because he said he would. God says Grandma is in heaven. You must have faith that what God says will come true too."//

She'd believed but she was a child then and the day came when her faith had been first tested: her father died on Christmas Eve'. After that, her doubts grew over the years in the form of her sister and her daughter and Mulder until she could no longer find any reason to enter a Church.

"We always learned that the healing gifts would be done away with, Dana." Her mother had told her when Mulder was in straps and under drugs and screaming, begging her to let him be released from his pain in mind as well as body. That was back at Greenlawn, back before he really got sick, way back when where hope existed.

The Sister's had never said anything about miracles being removed though.

Was a miracle happening here?

Scully opened her eyes. "I do believe," she whispered. "I believe."

But the field before her was empty.

*

Skinner appeared above her and she took his extended arm. "The children disappeared."

Scully didn't answer him. what did she have to report after all? "Where did they go?" Asked the question despite her heart that gave her the choices and then prodded her with: "Where is your faith saying they went?"

"They must have had helicopters standing by." She heard Skinner say and then he added a comment about the freak storm.

"Yes." She responded.

By the time Skinner and she returned to the main house, Skinner's men had several dozen black masked figures in handcuffs with his own men surrounding them, automatic weapons at the ready.

One immobilized captive drew special notice.

He was sitting on the ground, doubled over, hands cuffed behind him and muttering.

Skinner asked Morrison about the man's odd behavior.

"I don't know, sir, he's been mumbling like that ever since the storm hit. I can't make it out."

Skinner walked over and pulled the mask from the man's head.

"Krycek."

Skinner crouched down and lifted the man's head up by his chin. Krycek, his one time agent and then all around lying double crossing killer, did not resist or even seem to acknowledge the touch.

"If it isn't the hair of the dog that bit us. Have you got something to share, Krycek?"

Krycek didn't even blink.

"You'd better say it." Skinner encouraged the to all appearances near vegetative man, and then noticed something about his face . "Scully. Look at his eyes."

He stood, making room for Scully to lean closer.

Krycek's green eyes were smoked over with cataracts. "My God," she said, passing her hand before his blank gaze that didn't flinch. "He's blind."

Krycek heard, it seemed, and spoke:

"But we were right. They were the ones, but, but... we were supposed to save them.... only,...only,... we were wrong about... about.... ageless,..huge,...ashlez-z-z.."

Krycek's words were nearly incomprehensible and growing fainter. Scully leaned in to hear more if there was anything more to gather. She seriously wondered if the man had gone insane. But by what or who she couldn't guess.

As if reading her thoughts, Skinner asked, "Is he crazy?"

She looked at the opaque irises of Mulder's former partner and Cancer Man's former muscle. "I think the things he has done would drive any normal man crazy." A suffering in his own mind, she thought. A mind gone mad. A mind that had decided the fate of many with a twist of a lip. The punishment was fitting.

Krycek continued to mumble and Scully put her ear within inches of his mouth.

"Only one with any conscience left, Agent Scully." Skinner said, then saw her stiffen and straighten up as if what she heard had bared fangs and snapped at her.

"Sir?"

Skinner heard something in her voice. She was asking him for a confirmation of some kind, but he did not know what of. She was not looking at him, just at Krycek who sat still and wide-eyed.

"Sir, what did you see during the storm?"

"You were there. I told you. Helicopters."

Scully nodded, and looked over at Morrison. "And you?"

Morrison, big gun in hand, seemed puzzled at the question. "All we saw was the storm, but we heard them."

"You don't remember calling us on the radio or what you saw that made you call us?" Scully asked again and yet nodding, as though the information coming was already expected, and when it arrived...

"Beg 'pardon, Ma'am?"

...as if it had just been delivered right on schedule.

Skinner gave her a penetrating look. "Why, Agent Scully? What did he see?" Nodding to the stricken Krycek huddled in the dirt.

She took a deep breath and answered with a no nonsense voice that said take it or leave it.

"He claims he saw Angels, sir. The Army of Heaven."

She envied him.

*

DIVINITIES, Chapter 4

By the force of her accelerated forward motion, the double doors swung wide. Scully pushed through with both fists clenched, and broke into a trot when she saw her mother sitting against the wall in the Emergency Ward, Intensive Care just another double door away where he most likely would now be.

It had taken her almost two hours to arrive. An hour and forty minutes on the freeway. Twenty sitting at lights that refused to turn.

"Mom?"

Margarete Scully rose when her daughter approached. "Bill found him, Dana."

Scully stopped before the anxious eyes of her mother and then glanced toward the doors to ICU "What happened?"

Margarete spoke quickly, breathlessly, to explain to her daughter who's eyes searched her own for explanation and reassurance that he was not yet dead. For hope, too, that this was just another setback, and that soon he could go home. A few short hours from then in fact.

"Bill found him, throwing up blood in the bathroom. We just stepped out to the store, both of us, just for a minute. We had to get groceries, the fridge was going empty, my car is at the mechanics, Bill had to drive me-" Margarete stopped when Scully looked at her in horror. "It was just a half hour, Dana, we didn't think - how could anything happen in just thirty minutes? He was sleeping, everything was okay. Dana, I'm sorry, honey, I'm so sorry. Bill did everything he could-"

Her mother's last sentence sounded like a finality of some kind, that doing everything had resulted in futility, as though -

"Where is he?!"

Margarete's saddened face turned to her right. "In ICU"

Scully turned away, pushed passed her mother and her brother Bill, who had been seated only two chairs away yet invisible against her own terrifying thoughts. Images blasted at her at the speed of light; Mulder in an empty house curled on his side; her partner throwing up his life-force all over her mothers' yellow tile; Fox crying and dying with his head between the sink and the toilet.

Scully found him lying flat, white and still, on an ICU bed with the side rails up. After consulting with the resident surgeon who had treated him and the nurse who had been checking his monitors, she looked him over herself, paying special attention to the bandage covering the newest scar on his abdomen.

"It was a quick operation." The surgeon told her, when she gently replaced the sheet. "Only a two inch scar. We had to cauterize three bleeding vessels in his stomach and suture two others. We think they'll hold but, as you know, his tissues...".

She knew.

"...There were three small gastric-aneurisms that had burst. He lost a lot of blood, but we caught it in time. His mother brought him in?"

The doctor looked at her for confirmation. The last statement had sounded like guesswork on his part, an assumption that the dark haired woman named Margaret waiting out in the hall was his frantic mother.

"No - _yes_." Scully shook her head then nodded once. "His mom."

The doctor waited.

She asked, "I'd like to stay with him for a while. Can we pull the curtain?"

He gestured for the nurse to comply.

Scully sat and watched. It was a vigilance of hope where there was none. A form of self-comfort where there was no other to be had. She touched his fingers, the back of his pale hand, taped where an IV, one of several, had been inserted into his hardening veins. Scully wondered how many pokes it had taken before success.

"It's cold in here." She stated to Mulder who was still unconscious and unhearing from the anesthetic, and to anyone within earshot who had reason to be in the ICU. Wistfully, she hoped one of the hearers might be God, but was no longer counting on it.

In reality the coldness dwelled inside her. She was chilled with the thought of him dying, that it was finally here, that it had arrived much too soon for acceptance to even begin, that it had come too violently and painfully and that now she was required by on-lookers and listening-in-er's to, (as a professional), expect and, (as a level headed partner), accept that nothing could be done.

She didn't think Cancer Man would show up offering her a deal and nice little vial with a chip init.

Scully was frozen by helplessness. Iced over with anger. Buried in a white, blinding grief that, she was sure, for the rest of her life would never ease.

Scully found a vacant bathroom in an unoccupied private room where she pressed her forehead against the cool wall, and cried and moaned until her throat ached.

She thought she had known grief. Emily and her short life, her tiny little body wracked with pain, her face twisted in hurt. She remembered it all; the sounds, the feelings, how everything had seemed unreal. Perhaps, back then, she'd been stronger or maybe she'd learned to swallow the anguish that comes along with the outrage any new mother has at losing a child.

But this.

This was the tearing away of half of herself. This was the brutal murder of the counterpart, the future, the hope of her tomorrow.

More than a decade of nurturing and learning to love more deeply with each passing day was about to be snuffed out. His wick sputtered now. Soon it would become blackened and cold, the tiny wisp of smoke rising in mockery to his curled up life that once was, and that could have been.

She made her way to the chapel where she lit candle after candle for him. Until they were all burning bright and high. Maybe God would see one and grant a reprieve. Maybe their heat would spark some renewed desire for living in her.

Would this kill her? She honestly did not know.

*

"Mom?"

Margarete Scully looked up at her daughter and Scully saw that it was not only Mulder who had arrived at the hospital that evening with injuries. Her mother's eyes were red and puffy. "I'm sorry, Mom. I know you both did the best you could. No one, none of us, could know in advance that this would happen, or that it would start this soon."

She took her mother's hand and sat beside her. "I'm sorry for the way I reacted."

"You don't have to be. " Both women fell silent.

"Dana?"

Skinner stood over her, his face grim and with the fidgety look of one intruding. "I was called. The, uh, Mulder's medical status...they have to call the Bureau now, in the event of...anything like this." He stumbled over words meant to convey an apology for being there at such a deeply personal time. He did not feel like it was his acceptable place.

Scully briefly took his hand that was at his side, twitching, not at rest. "I'm glad you're here." And he immediately relaxed, sitting.

"What's the word?" he asked.

"Stable for the time being." Scully told him. "But, other than that,..."

She hadn't been told much at that point. Mulder's blood pressure had fallen which was, because of the conditions of his sickness, in actuality good. But his blood volume, needed for oxygenating organs and other tissues, was depleted as a result, which was very bad.

"It's win-lose." Scully added. "I don't think there is any more to be done. I think this is the beginning of the end."

That final word, spoken aloud for the first time, caused her tiny sphere of hope to crack and fall away like pieces of a fragile goblet. She could feel it striking somewhere beyond her corporeal senses, dashed down by the flesh less hand of a specter.

Scully rose and left the small group, walking away down the corridor and out the front doors onto the lawn of the hospital. Out and away until she couldn't hear the voices of the doctors, the ringing phones or hissing breathing apparatus.

She walked until the last reminders of her broken dreams receded. There was the shape of peace, if not peace itself, in the silence.

In that quiet Scully searched for sound and found her heart still beating.

She searched for visions and found the thousands of stars visible to her eye. Many, she knew, were already dead, their light long gone in cataclysms eons past.

Yet they shone above her.

They said: We Live in your present. In you.

"Oh, God." Whispered, audible only to her and if God also heard, she doubted if he would act to save him when even those lights in the night sky above her had been allowed to die.

She sobbed. "Mulder." Saying it for herself. Just one word and it would not be enough for God she thought.

Spoken anyway, even if only the trees and grass had ears to listen, if only the insects lent their attention, she said it. "I love you."

"Hey," she said to him, when his eyes opened at last.

"Hey." His mouth made the words but no sound came out.

Scully nodded, understanding his forced silence.

Her partner's throat had been anaesthetized via a spray which the nurse would carry in every hour or so, apologizing for the interruption. She would have him tilt his head back and open his mouth, cautiously insert the long nozzle and spray twice. His throat was both raw and coated with a sticky antiseptic ointment.

"Sounds like you had an adventure." Scully said.

He smiled a bit, his lips smirked. Shrugged helplessly in his own apology and as an attempt to ease her worry. She knew the lines in her forehead were visible and told him all he needed to know.

Mulder gestured for a pen and paper which Scully located on a tray next to his headboard.

"Where do we go from here?" He wrote.

Indeed, Scully thought. In a moment, she wrote something back and showed it to him. He raised his eyebrows at her. She was leaving it up to him. His life. His choice entirely now.

"Where do you want to go?" She had written.

He answered:

"I want to find Caleb when I'm stable enough to leave here."

Scully nodded and wrote: "In the meantime, I'll keep checking with the guys to see if they've uncovered any leads."

Mulder nodded, thanking her. He wrote:

"I'm sorry."

Scully read the words and almost lost her control once more. She'd grappled with herself for twenty minutes out on the hospital grounds and her carefully tucked into place emotional state threatened to unfold and fly in the quiet storm behind his eyes. Even now, he struggles for me, she realized. Even now, he says he is sorry for his pain that hurts me.

"No reason to be." She scribbled the words quickly. "I understand. I would have done anything for Emily."

He read and knew her meaning. Samantha was dead, the son still lived.

Mulder had strength enough to take Scully's hand and squeeze it. His eyes spoke the rest. They said to her what she had revealed to the living world of the gardens outside.

It would serve very well as an answer of a kind. One answer. One very good resolution gleaned from so many years of effort and failures, pain and loss. It was an ending. Perhaps, in some way, a good one.

"Why so little?" she asked.

** Mulder came home and they continued their search for Caleb. Scully went to work each day and then came home.

Days if they were lucky, Doctor Watts had said.

Entering the house silently because it was so late, Scully closed the door and turned the deadbolt silently, sinking into the cushions of the couch. Just a moments rest before walking up those stairs to his room and having to confront her worst fears.

Mulder was dying with each minute that passed but she did not move. Each step up the stairs, she thought would only compound the terror in her heart. She felt like a coward, unable to face him because she could not bear to see his pain or hers that would multiply a thousand fold by virtue of seeing it.

She could hear Bill rustling around in the kitchen.

"Dana?"

"I'm here."

"There's coffee here."

She nodded to herself. It was like Bill to offer her something - food, drink - when he could think of no way to help her. When all the words had been said and he felt helpless. He wanted to fix things for her. He was his father's son and she did love him for it.

"No thanks, I'm fine. How's Mulder?"

"Sleeping."

"I'll just pop in and check on him before I go to bed," she said as her brother entered the living room with a mug.

"He's _okay_."

Scully turned her head toward him. Just by rolling her neck, she could see eye to eye with her older brother who wanted to, in his own gruff way, protect her from all the hurt, like when they were kids.

"No, Bill, he's not. Mulder's going to die and I have to face that."

He looked at his coffee as if it had suddenly become terribly fascinating. Nodded.

She took his hand. "Thank you for helping me with him. It means a lot to me, you being here. It takes a lot of the pressure off Mom."

He nodded again. "Look, Dana, I'm not a very open person but you're my sister. If you need help, just ask."

"Thanks."

He stood, as if needing to put some distance between himself and the emotions circling them. "I'm going to go freshen this up. Sure you don't want any?"

Smiling slightly, she shook her head.

Her cellular phone called to her.

*

~~From the kitchen Bill heard a ruckus and returned to the living room, confronting his sister halfway down the stairs. She was supporting a grey-faced Mulder by the waist, half carrying him down, one step at a time. The man was dressed in jeans and loose fitting white cotton shirt but it didn't hide the shadows of his rib bones that could be seen through the thin fabric.

"Dana, what the-?"

"Never mind, just help me."

She pulled Mulder's right arm over her shoulders and pulled his waist more firmly to her side, but he could barely put one foot in front of the other.

"Where are you going? He can hardly walk, Dana."

"Listen to your sister, Bill." Mulder joked lightly who received only a frown from his partner's stern sibling. But Bill took Mulder's other arm and pulled it over his own wide shoulders, releasing Scully from the burden and practically carrying Mulder down the stairs with her bringing up the rear.

"Where the hell are we going?" Bill asked as she opened the front door.

Scully said nothing, passing through the door first and leading the way out to her car, opening its passenger door.

Bill huffed a bit, helping ease Mulder into a more or less seated position in the front seat of her car.

Closing the door, he turned to her, "I care about you, and whatever stunt you're pulling-"

"We're not kids anymore, Bill-" She began, ready to spit words back and forth with him, but instead stopped, dropping her eyes. "Look, Bill, the Gunmen, some friends of ours, think they may have located Mulder's nephew, his sisters son."

"And we're going to find him? Is that was this is?"

"Yes. But just Mulder and myself." She answered firmly, daring any protest.

Bill looked at her tired face, eyes circled in black. He held out his hand. "Keys."

She stared. "No."

"Keys! If you're going on this wild goose chase, especially with him half dead, I'm driving. I'm coming along to see you at least get home safely."

Scully looked at his hand, palm up, ready to help when she had least expected it. "Bill,..you don't have to do this."

"Shut up, Dana. Stop telling me what you think I should do. Give me the dignity of helping my own sister when she's in trouble. God knows you left little enough room in your life for me to even make the offer all these years."

He was right, she thought as she felt little heart pangs. He was so right. She had cut him off from her feelings, from her need. She hadn't needed him, she thought. But, in reality, she'd only been willing to accept the good from him, the support she wanted, his agreement over her choice of life-mate, his approval of her decision to stay with Mulder. But Bill had a right to his opinion, even if his opinion had altered only recently. He'd become almost tolerant of Mulder lately, almost kind.

And Bill wanted to help her, his sister, now, in her darkest hour. And in Mulder's.

She put the keys in his hand. "Thank you."

Scully sat behind her brother as he drove. It was the best place to be. She could keep an eye on Mulder.

"Where are we going from here?" Bill asked as he came to the T intersection of Eighty-Five.

"South." Scully said, glancing at Mulder who had drifted off. She hoped he'd sleep for the entire trip.

"What's our final destination?" Bill asked again, sourly. "We'll need gas if this is far."

"We're going to Vancouver, Tennessee. A place near there. A farm."

"Tennessee?! Are you nuts?" His voice rose a few decibels but their ill passenger was far too deeply asleep to be awakened by it.

"I'm deadly serious. and if you're having a change of heart about coming along, now's the time." In her overnight bag, along with bottles of pills and sundry to treat Mulder's symptoms, in a side zippered pocket, she had a hand drawn map of the location of a farm. On that farm, if the gunmen were correct, was Caleb Mueller.

"I HAVEN'T changed my mind!" He growled, "This is just...Mulder didn't tell me about his nephew."

Scully looked up from her perusal of the map. "Since when do you know anything about it- ?"

"We've been talking."

"You're kidding? You and Mulder, talking? You hate Mulder, Bill, you always have."

"I still do. Who's farm?"

"I don't know. We're acting on a tip our friends received. But it's the best one we've had yet."

"Just a tip? We'll be driving all night! Suppose it turns out to be wrong?"

"Then it's wrong." She offered no further comment, settling back into her seat, satisfied that Mulder was deep asleep. Rest was good for him.

** Mulder woke beside him and right away Bill's nerves went into overdrive. On edge, ready to fray, tight as piano wire, all those, when he heard Mulder's usual wheezing grow louder as his body rose from the relatively easy rest of slumber to the agitations of the waking state.

"Dana. We should go back, he's not breathing well."

"Keep going, Scully," Mulder, now fully awake, countered. "I'm still okay. Keep going, don't stop."

She wouldn't hear of it and Bill's further pleas fell on deaf ears.

When they arrived at the farm, Scully felt historical irony that it turned out to be a corn plantation, with acres and hills of the stuff that could be seen for miles.

"This is where Caleb is." Mulder said, as if it were fact and not that they had driven a day on a tip from an unknown and highly dubious source. He had to take a breath after every second or third word. Even talking was fast becoming an impossibility.

Scully stopped the car. "Wait here." She spoke to both of them, to Bill to stop his interference before it began, and to Mulder so that he should rest through this preliminary contact. If a door knock produced nothing, then they would discuss the next step, whatever that would be.

Scully had her badge and gun ready but it was token preparations. If they wished her dead, they could shoot her through a window. If they didn't want to speak to her, they would not come to the door.

She was unsurprised when no one answered.

"Dana!"

When she looked behind her, Bill was standing outside the driver's door, looking, not at her, but at something beyond her field of vision, at something happening at the side of the house.

"Is that your guy?" he asked, trying to be heard over wind that had whipped up, sending dirt and twigs flying all around them.

She looked and, yes, it was the same boy, being lead away by the same man they had first discovered and who had eluded them.

When she stepped off the porch to follow, a flash of white lit up the blackening clouds followed by an enormous thunderclap.

"That was a close one!" Bill called to her.

In only a moment, the wind had gone from stiff and incessant to wild and angry, allowing no peace for even the thickest trees in the driveway.

"We'll never find them in that field or this storm!" She called and ran back to the car, on the way, the rain began. Whipped sprinkles turned to painful buckets in seconds.

She and Bill both retreated to the safety of the vehicle.

Mulder was awake. "Who was that?"

Scully couldn't lie to him but she was hesitant. "Mulder, we'll never find them in that field. It's almost impossible to see through the storm already."

He lifted his passenger side door handle. "I'm going after him. If Caleb's here, I have to find him, Scully!

"Mulder-"

But he ignored her and stepped out of the car, swaying and nearly falling over in the now gale force tempest.

Scully followed him. "Bill. Stay calm." She barked out the order as if he were a cadet on his first sailboat, and got out of the car.

"Mulder!" She faced him, holding onto his upper arm, gripping for life. His life. "This is crazy, you can't possible catch them. _I_ couldn't do it in this. We have to send for help!"

Mulder, his limbs protesting mightily over his sudden movement from the car, warned him with shooting pains. His chest pumped frantically, trying to get the vital oxygen to his muscles and brain. He ignored it all.

"That will be too late, Scully, and you know it!" He faced her, inches away to be heard, both above the storm and through her cautions.

"Mulder, please!" She pulled a little. Despite her promise to help him find Caleb, it seemed like insanity, now, standing out while the sky fell turning the ground to mud, the wind sending the rain sideways now, cutting like icy little needles.

He pulled away. "No, Scully! This is my last chance to know anything! It's may not be the answer I wanted but at least it's _an_ answer! There'll never be time to find any other. Please!" His eyes begged her, if not for her help, then her non-interference. "_Please_, Scully!"

She stared back with wide, frightened eyes, knowing this insane, reckless moment might be their very last together, their words said now the last spoken. And there was no time to choose the right ones.

"GO!" She yelled above the voice of the thunder, rendering the word from a body shaking but full of power. There was left no room for a sob. Regret or second thought were strangers discarded years ago.

Mulder kissed her, quick and fast, once, on the mouth and left her there, half walking, half jogging to the edge of the stalks, not looking back.

She moved to follow, but Bill had also climbed out and grabbed her arm from behind.

"Dana, what are you doing? This is insane!"

"No! Bill." When he tried to restrain her, prevent her from following Mulder out into what was turning out to be a furious thunderstorm. Already the gale had made it difficult to walk.

"No." Scully wrenched her hand from her well meaning brother, and shielded her face against the whipping, stinging rain pelting her skin like pebbles.

Bill did not understand. He had never faced anything like what she had. Like the things Mulder and her had stared at, wide-eyed, shocked to their souls. Bill Scully was her brother, she loved him, but he had no insight here and so no opinion she cared to hear.

Facing him, "I will not let Mulder die in a hospital bed with tubes sticking out of him and a machine doing his breathing. Don't you understand?" She had to yell to be heard over the sound of the storm and across the five feet of metal car roof. He stood with his back to the wind, but his head turned to her, his eyes wide with incredulity at her risk, at where there were and what they were doing while her partner ran through a cornfield in the middle of a rain storm - no - probably fallen already, maybe even already dead.

"Dana, he's dying! Can't you see that?!"

"YES! And if it's the last thing I do, on my life he will do it where he wants to!"

"You're a doctor!"

"I'm an investigative agent first, and this is our last case. HIS! I want you to use the cellular call for help but that's it. Do NOT interfere."

She wrapped her jacket around her, grabbed her gun and, shoving it in her pocket, ran after Mulder.

Bill Scully soon lost sight of her between the flattening corn stalks and the rain falling all around him that was rapidly turning the dusty driveway into a quagmire. It was raining so hard, the water was bouncing off the ground and hitting his shins.

He got back into the car and put a call through to the local law enforcement. Even with the wipers on High, he couldn't see through the windshield for more than a second with each swipe. The house was gone, just a white blur, the corn mere spindly stick men, wildly waving their skinny arms in accord with the will of nature.

*

Scully ran and, after a moment of panic, caught up to him. Then it was a struggle to keep him in sight. Mulder was using every last scrap of strength in him, she knew, to keep up the pace he had set and she was hard put not to fall behind. But at least she was ready to assist if he fell or if it grew to be too much for him and even his extraordinary will faltered under the monster disease eating him alive, beating him back more and more with every step.

Until she fell. Hard. Flat on her face.

"Goddamn it!" She cursed aloud.

By the time she righted herself, Mulder was nowhere to be seen.

"Mulder!" Terror passed into her. "M-U-U-U-L-D-E-R!" The rain had worsened and if he was still close by, he was invisible in the downpour.

"Oh my God."

Scully ran ahead, fast, with no turns, praying he had not deviated from the course they had first set which was an unbroken straight line toward the far edge of the field, where could be seen huge maples, heavy with leaves.

"Oh, God, please..." She ran.

"Ca-a-l--e-b!" Mulder yelled when he thought he saw a form moving just ahead, just out of range of visual acuity, just beyond the edge of real sight.

He fell, not for the first time. his suit was thick with mud. Waterlogged shoes added to his weight and slowed him down. "Caleb! Stop! I'm her brother!"

Pain shot through his chest and he gasped with it, balling fists to his breast ti alleviate it. It was crippling and he screamed in frustration:

"C-A-L-E-B!! Please!! PLEASE STOP! Samantha, your mother, was my sister- AHH-!"

He fell to his side from the pain. Waves and waves of it and, when he coughed, blood slicked his bone-chilled fingers. He could no longer yell. Could not draw enough breath to even sit up.

The end.

This was his end and he had accomplished nothing. Sister, father, mother, career, health, life, all - in that order - done. Finished. Over.

And not only his. Scully's sister, career, even her failed marriage, he suspected, had been because of him and his obsessions that he had passed on to her. His badge of dishonor. His torch of defeat.

She had his bug now. Psychosis by osmosis.

It brought a tiny chuckle to his lips.

"I'm dying in a corn field in the rain," He laughed at the picture they would come upon; him on his side in a fetal position as if he'd curled up for a nap.

"...looking for a kid that might or might not be my sister's mystery child who might or might not be a product of selective alien abduction and genetic manipulation."

He gasped between every few words. He was confessing his sins maybe, he thought, in a moment of death bed religious hysteria. He didn't think God was listening though. Whoever or whatever might be would, however, be getting a good laugh.

"I'm dying. I'm lying here dying and this is my best shirt too."

Laughed louder because he was talking to himself. "I think there's a hole in my shorts."

Maybe he really was just a lunatic and he'd managed to fool them all these years and himself too. Maybe he was that good of an actor!

"Oh, Christ, I'm insane, I'm insane..."

His laughing subsided and he rolled over onto his back, letting the rain strike him full in the face, letting it wash away the muck from his skin, the leaves and twigs from his hair.

Maybe it was the one merciful act God would grant him. He'd go to his grave clean behind his ears at least.

For minutes he lay there, until the feeling of crazed hopelessness washed away and he was left empty.

A strange, unexpected calm settled over him.

//Probably your brain shutting down.// The little devil dancing on his shoulder whispered.

Mulder smiled. Whatever.

The last thing he saw before he closed his eyes was a vision of Scully looking down on him and smiling her warm, sweet, seldom offered smile.

If it was a hint to him that he was destined for heaven, then heaven was beautiful.

"All aboard," he whispered.

*

"Fox."

The first thing he saw when he awoke seconds later - it had to be seconds, he was still on his back in the rain in a corn field - was a shadow standing to his right. A small, dark human form stood there looking at him.

He turned his head.

"Caleb?" And sat up.

The small figure, the little flesh and blood boy, crooked his finger at him with a tease in his eyes.

Mulder sat up. There was still pain but it was manageable.

Caleb nodded and, encouraging him to follow, started walking backwards through the bent corn stalks.

Mulder got to his knees and then staggered to his feet, but it was hard. He was stiff and sore and the pain in his chest was back though not as bad as before. Blood spatters trailed down the front of his shirt.

"Caleb, stop, I...I can't."

"Yes, you can." The child answered, nodding and moving faster, backwards, backwards until Mulder was afraid that if he didn't move, he would lose him again.

He followed.

Caleb turned and walked away, faster. Mulder followed, tried to hurry but Caleb wasn't waiting.

The harder Mulder pushed himself, the faster Caleb went.

Soon, Mulder was dropping behind. "Ca-," He gasped. Coughed. "Caleb, wait, wait. I'm sick, I can't follow you...I can't keep up."

Caleb turned and looked at him while still retreating. Through all that pounding rain that was not letting up even one drops worth, Mulder could see the whites of his eyes.

"Yes, you can." Caleb said and broke into a run.

"C-A-Y-LE-E-E-E-B!"

But he could not be heard above the roaring of the wind. It screamed in his ear and his thoughts turned, inexplicably, to that night Dad sent him out in the rain.

"Fox. Go find your sister before she catches her death." Seven year old Samantha had gone to the park and had not returned by supper.

He could hardly see through the down pour. But the swings and teeter-totter were empty. All creatures, great and small, had taken refuge in their nests, holes and houses.

After searching through the trees and in the wooden playhouse, she had still not turned up, Fox became terrified that something was indeed wrong. Suddenly his little pesky kid sister had become the whole world and finding her the one thing necessary to banishing the increasing hollow feeling in his stomach.

When he did find her, huddled inside the big hollow of a drainage way and giggling with her friend Elsa, he wanted to shake her senseless and hug her close, too, until he could breath again.

The screaming of the storm around him, accompanied by the pellets of rainwater, made walking difficult now. He'd lost his shoes to the mud yards back and his socks were soaked.

Teeth shaking, he stumbled on. "Caleb!" But as soon as he thought he could see the tiny form of his nephew at the edges of his vision, just standing there calmly in the rain and bowing corn stalks, as if patiently waiting for him to catch up, the downpour would thicken and the vision would be lost.

He clenched his jaw in frustration, but miraculously, he kept going. Somehow, he was jogging, and then running to keep up. His betraying weakening physical state was, for once, not impeding his last, final wish. The cold rain and the forced rest must have taken his temperature down, slowed his metabolism.

If this _was_ Caleb, his sister's son, if he could die knowing that he lived, knowing that something was left of his family, see that someone would survive beyond the tatters he'd made of his life, something innocent, something that could be protected and made safe always, then this crazy highway he'd been traveling for decades might not be the dead end he feared.

And maybe, just maybe, he was not insane after all.

The lights were being seen more and more across the world. The sights in heaven and earth, the visions claimed by many as aliens come to save or destroy humanity, said by others to be angels here to fight the final fight, the great war of God, the people gathered to that place to await their denunciation or salvation, all these things, as he ran through that sodden field of corn, their heads now lying almost flat in the mud, their fruits rotting and useless, meant nothing to him.

The reasons behind it all were beyond him. Perhaps they had always been so. Perhaps the reasons were not so important as the personal choices made despite them. Despite who or what.

Maybe, even if the aliens or demons or fallen angels with their own sacrilegious agenda were about to destroy the world, this one beautiful child might be free from it.

Was that a good choice? Was it enough to justify all that had been sacrificed?

He didn't know how to assure Caleb's survival through whatever was happening, he only knew that he must. Scully would help.

Suddenly, he reached a small clearing - in all that corn that had gone on for miles - and Caleb was there again, standing very still at its center.

Mulder fell to his knees, gasping, the pain lancing through him. He knew how foolish it was to drive his body as he had done, he knew it could kill him, right there, right then, while Caleb watched.

"Caleb." He managed to speak when his lungs had gathered enough air to prevent his blood from boiling away as it seemed about to do from the burning he could feel in his torso.

Caleb looked at him with an expression of wonder. As though Mulder were a manifestation of something he had known long ago but forgotten.

"Why did you run, Caleb? We're here to help you. We're here to protect you."

"Why?" His voice was that of a child, a question of curiosity, requiring simply knowledge, simply fact.

"Because-" Mulder paused, not knowing how to explain. It was so complicated. "Because there are those who want to hurt you. I promised Sam - your mother - I'd protect you."

"Mom's gone."

"I know. I'm sorry, Caleb."

Mulder reached out to him but the boy stepped back, a move designed to keep from being touched and not from fear at all. No fear what-so-ever.

He looked up at the grey sky, his hair flat against his tiny skull from the water. "She's with them now."

Mulder squinted his eyes, trying to see into the simple pictures that made up a child's mind. Does he know? Was that really Samantha who was shot? Was it her corpse or had he been taken for a fool again? And how does Caleb know whether or not Samantha is with the aliens? These children are special, he knew that much. The only question that still remained was: Special in what way? To whom?

For whom?

_Why_?

"We should go, Caleb. They might be coming."

Again, in reaction to his reach, Caleb stepped back.

"Caleb, please..."

Instead, the child looked at him and smiled, a wide, sweet grin of which only a little boy was capable. Then he laughed with a child's happy laughter, for a reason only the child could understand. Delight at something unknown to those no longer innocent.

"Mommy sent me to you. She has something she wants me to give you."

Mulder stared, shocked that Caleb's words were adding strength to his own speculations. "What do you mean? Is Samantha alive. Is your mommy, is she with them? The aliens?"

Caleb reached out to him, stepping forward to close the distance between them as the rain soaked them both.

The wind and roaring grew louder as Caleb reached for him. "This is for you, Fox."

The voice was no longer just Caleb's, but a female who's soprano was both familiar and alien.

Mulder felt weak. Weak and tired and wet to this bone marrow. Now was not the time, no! his mind screamed as pain traveled over him with elephants feet, pounding him in agony until his body gave up and fell sideways in the mud. It cooled him and he dug his fingers into it, the pain subsiding almost immediately. Mulder tried to sit up again but nothing physical cooperated. His mind seemed to have no more connections with his corporeal flesh or even the seat of his will.

Light could be seen above and around. The white, blinding light of a brainstorm, Mulder thought. His mind's last desperate attempt to form thought, his axons and neurons all firing together in some last stand before blanking out forever.

White, swirling Calebs flew around him in ghost images, wings or arms or rotted corns talks waved goodbye. A cyclone appeared, blinding him, lifting him into the heavens, telling him things in oceans of blue lightening. Samantha's little hands touched his wet hair. She was a child again and laughing, running across their yard to the swings, motioning for him to follow her, but he was too big for the swings by then. Twelve and growing like a weed. "I can fly higher than you Fox!" She yelled and giggled.

And then he was awake from the dream his mind had made for him, brought home to earth again, all in a second of time.

All in a dream.

Caleb spoke to him in the dream or in the cornfield:

"Perhaps there are things you've forgotten Fox. Or perhaps what you know or what you think you know has only now just begun."

The sun came out and sang in her voice, making him whimper with its beauty. Making him know for certain she was all right and that she loved him and that one day he would see her again.

In the rain and the blue-white sun shining through it, music touched him with a thousand fingers until every nerve was on fire and he screamed. Pain eased and left and he became sleepy with their absence, having forgotten what it felt like to not feel anything but good.

He listened to the music of his sister.

Samantha sang to him until he wept.

The tears caused him to remember that he had eyes and he opened them.

To see Caleb who was his last vision before he lost consciousness. Caleb, Samantha's child, his sister's son, his nephew, faded away in the rain and sun as his lids closed.

"Caleb, stay." Was also his last conscious thought before the rain, sounding like steak frying in a pan, and the burning sun, blinding his lids red, swallowed up even that.

*

"Mister Meuller, you are under arrest for suspicion in the disappearance of your son, Caleb Mueller..."

Miranda was read to him, he was cuffed and piled into the back of a waiting County car.

*

Back in D.C. before she had time to change her clothes, she reported to Director Skinner's office prior to heading to the hospital where an unconscious Mulder had been taken.

"Where was Mr. Mueller found?" Skinner asked her.

"Asleep in the farm house. He claimed he had been there all morning. He says he remembers nothing."

"Nothing? He's lying."

"I'm not sure why, sir, but I don't think he is."

"Why makes you think that?"

"Because he said...he said he doesn't know anyone named Samantha Mueller or Mulder or any boy named Caleb. He says he's never been to D.C. or even out of Tennessee."

"But his marriage license?..."

"If there was one, no one can find it."

"This is unbelievable."

"I realize that, sir, but I'm beginning to think that nothing unbelievable exists."

The words came on small puffs of gentle air that tickled and warmed his ear.

"Mulder, it's me. You're in the hospital. Everything's okay." It said when he stirred against the envelope of drugs and mind lethargy. "Everything's okay, you're safe. I'll be here when you're ready to wake up, okay?"

He wanted to say something, tell the voice what happened, ask where Caleb went, but couldn't make his mouth work right. All that came out was a soft moan.

Lips touched his ear then, so soft and comforting, so intimate, it was enough to drive the disturbing questions away for now.

He was content to listen.

"I'll be here. Everything's okay now."

Scully was speaking to him. He believed her and slept.

Scully had heard the words, denying them. "No," She insisted, "No, that's just not possible."

Watts opened his mouth to repeat his conclusions to her for a third time but stopped at her head shake. He frowned at her, raised his eyebrows in a defeated shrug.

"No matter what I say to the woman", he thought, "she argues." Watts placed the chart in her hands and walked away.

She read it, and then again, until she once more came to the final few sentences that confirmed what Watts had tried to tell her, his face inscrutable, his eyes strangely protruding and bright under the flourescent lighting, his words coming rather too quickly but otherwise as clear as crystal:

"Complete remission."

Scully did not know how it was possible for her body to have contained the amount of water her eyes shed that day.

Mulder still lay on a bed in a recovery ward. He still wore the white gown of sickness but it was no longer a white flag. There would be no surrender here.

He was well. Not just stable. Well.

Free of disease.

Dozens of tests later, designed to see into his blood and cells, bone and tissue, confirmed the undeniable miracle of his healed body.

The crowd of doctors all scribbling, shaking their heads because they could find no medical answer to explain the shocking discovery of his good health, looked over at Mulder as if he were a curious new species. But it was just Mulder.

Scully also watched him but for different reasons. They would find no explanation here, for their many questions and though their journals would be filled with speculative theories, none of it would find rest under proof. It was guesswork at best, why Mulder why lying there, healthy and new looking.

Scully knew, though, the questions would never really cease being asked. There would always be someone ringing him or her on the phone or at their door (_their_ door!) wondering why and recording their answers that were not good enough all on tape for this magazine or that article.

No understanding would be forthcoming. There were no petri dishes or beakers or tubes of truth to be unstopped that they could look at and declare: "Oh, yes, we know why."

The white coated puzzlers filed out the room, finally leaving them in peace.

All foreign invaders had gone and that included those who would have been conqourers. Whether aliens, demons or Klingons, no human had seen a sign or dreamed a dream about visitors since the "God's Children Event", as the news media had coined it.

She and Mulder would continue to investigate the occurrance. But she understood that her mind set had to change. Before, she had always tried to categorize the paranormal into something explainable, something she could relate to what she already knew.

But she'd been mistaken. All along, she had tried to "solve" their cases before solving them. Now she would work hard and let the answers speak for themselves. Let others try to file and reference if they were so bold.

The X Files were not behind them, but she at least, now knew how to feel about them.

And about her good fortune embodied in a sweetly living Fox Mulder.

Only twenty minutes before, in a washroom down the hall, Scully had shed buckets but they were because of that joy. And because, in all the years since her own abduction and her other personal struggles with life and death and the events that followed; her sister's death; her cancer; Emily; during it all, she had had Mulder, her partner, then friend, then lover whom she had lost and then found, and who had been nearly lost again.

Joy had poured into her as her tears had poured out.

Mulder was the one - her one - who made everything bad bearable and everything good wondrous.

He filled her empty places, he completed her picture of herself. Mulder who made her whole was coming home and her soul was a garden of new growth beside a diamond river of hope that flowed far ahead and around the bend.

She returned from her bathroom trip and sat beside his bed. Upon her insistence, he would remain in the hospital until every test they could think of had been run to determine absolutely, positively, certifiably and undeniably that he was heathy and would remain so.

For once, he wasn't complaining about resting or even about the food.

"Father O'Malley?"

"You've returned."

"Yes."

"You've had a change of faith. Something's brought you to it."

"Um,...a lot of things have happened. Things I can't explain."

"You have questions."

"Yes."

"Instead of asking them, would you tell me something? Would you tell me if you have learned anything since we last spoke?"

"I've learned that there's more in the universe to know and understand than I think we are ever capable. I think some things will remain beyond the scope of our understanding."

"Or beyond the reach of science."

"Yes."

"So you believe what now?"

"I believe that there is a love in each of us and yet, it seems to come from without as well. I'm not sure if I'm making sense, but my friend, the one I told you about, he's cured. He's going to live."

"So now you believe that God exists because you think he has done this thing for you."

"I know it seems selfish that my faith pivoted on it, but yes. I believe that something extraordinary caused his remission. I believe that he was in some way miraculously made well. Do you think it's possible?"

"Faith is the assured expectation of things hoped for though not beheld. There is no doubt that faith, hope and love are real. The greatest is the love. Did God cure your friend? I don't know. If so, He never announced it to me."

"My friend thinks he was cured by something else, he doesn't believe in God."

"Really? you might be surprised to know how many people, who say they do not believe, believe."

"I don't know what to think."

"You are a free moral agent, we all are. Keep the love, Dana, keep it strongly in your heart, that is where you will find your faith. Love is the strongest thing in the universe. It endures all things, hopes all things, _believes_ all things.

" _Conquers_ all things. Don't forget that. The issue is universal, this question of faith. It's a matter of choice."

"Why do so many still look to evil, if love is so powerful?"

"Choice. Failing to look beyond themselves to a Higher law. "The demons believe and shudder" the scriptures say. They know but made the wrong choice. Perhaps those who had harmed your friend and you did so as well."

"Where'd you go?"

"I had to powder my nose."

"Cute nose."

"Cute? Hooked."

"_Cute_. I love it." Mulder stared passed her out the window. There was a spring rain.

Scully loved the thought of the greener grass and the purple flowers it would bring. "What are you thinking about?"

"I was thinking," Looking at her, "When I get out of here, what do you say we take a trip somewhere."

"Sure. Where?"

"Well, I was thinking along the lines of a shopping trip. Maybe,... maybe we should scout around for a h-house."

Despite the stutter of nervousness, he was looking straight into her eyes. Mulder was no longer afraid of anything. Not even her.

She looked back, embracing the idea. Easy to accept something that had been there, in her own mind, lurking for ages. "Absolutely."

"You pick the area."

She nodded and it was wonderful seeing her old, very trusted and very loved friend and lover blossom into someone who was so much more.

Life partner. It was a brave term but she felt up to it. Really, it was the best adventure she could think of.

She took his hand "Mulder?"

"Yeah, Scully?" Though lying flat per doctors orders, he was fiddling with his blanket that had bunched up, trying to smooth it.

"Would you marry me?"

If he was afraid, it didn't show. If he'd expected it, he didn't say.

"Yeah." Flowing smoothly and naturally, his answer was truthful. His very own kind of faith. "Yeah, Scully, I'll marry you. I asked you once, remember? Think you can put up with me?"

She nodded. Not a problem, she thought, in sickness and in health.

"I don't know what to believe about all this." Mulder said.

She held his hand and had been holding it off and on since her arrival.

"Maybe we're not supposed to have all the answers Mulder."

"How can you say that, Scully? You're a scientist. Answers are what science is all about."

"But truth is the beginning of wisdom and the truth isn't always about answers. We can ask our questions and that's good, I think, but we're not always going to find the answer, or maybe if we do find one, sometimes it's not the one we wished for."

"Have you been talking to Father O'Malley?"

She smiled. "I know you don't believe in it, Mulder, but sometimes we have to take things in life on faith alone."

"I've never been able to. I don't know if I ever will be able."

"No one's perfect." She teased. "But that's okay too. You've got so much love in you, I think that makes up for it. Faith, even hope can fade. Love remains."

"My faith is in the truth, Scully. I don't think that's ever going to change."

"My truth is I love you." She stroked his fingers, rolling them in her hand, admiring their strength that had returned in golden coloring.

"What do you think about all this? About what's happened?" He asked. "It's as if we were wrong about everything we expected. It's as if we made a left turn while everything else went right."

"I'm not sure. Maybe something beyond our understanding. Many people reported seeing amazing things this morning, when Caleb disappeared." She spoke the name softly, knowing Mulder's emotional fragility over Samantha's lost son. She herself believed Caleb had not died or been washed away in the storm. Nor did she think the colonists or whoever or whatever they had been had whisked Caleb away to life aboard a mother ship.

Nor did she absolutely believe that he was in heaven. They had, after all, no evidence either way. There were no facts to confront.

But hope was not dead. Had never been so, Scully mused. The only despair they had experienced had been their own fear. Their lack of faith. Their ignorance about what love was.

Fear had no place in love and it had taken her a lifetime to learn that. Such a simple place. What a long road behind her to find it.

True, Caleb's fate was a question mark, one Mulder would try to solve, she knew that, but she believed it would be, in the end, an unanswerable struggle, with no simple solution.

But, she was also certain, now, that the struggle, and not the solution, was the important thing. She believed Mulder would, some day, reach that understanding.

"I don't know what's happened, Mulder. But I think men, any group of people who take on their tiny shoulders the fate of the world based on their human and fallible perceptions, is gross presumptuousness.

"We were listening to a bunch of Chicken Littles. They felt a few hailstones and assumed that the sky was falling. They listened to a voice from the heavens without really knowing who's it was. I don't have the answer, but I have a faith that whoever does, we have nothing to fear regarding it."

He held her hand tight. She loved the strength in his touch. Vibrant, perfect life was in his hand. Perfect for her. Everything she needed.

"You're an amazing woman, Dana Katherine Scully," he said.

Where did you come from, Mulder? She thought as she felt his touch and listened. Who am I that you were sent to me?

She said:

"At risk of sounding like a hopeless fanatic, I have something you might be interested to hear."

"Yeah?"

"I was curious and looked up something up. "Caleb". Do you know what that name means?"

"No."

"It means The Messenger."

"You think he was from God?"

"I don't know. You're going to live, so you know what? I don't care." For her, Message Received. "But it's nice to think he might have been."

Mulder squeezed her hand and looked at the ceiling, a bit uncomfortable with the metaphysical conversation.

"Do you really think those kids were special, Scully?"

"Of course. Wasn't Samantha? Wasn't Emily? And Caleb too?"

"I mean special beyond the norm, beyond scientific explanation. Special in a way contrary to what we know to be normal."

"Yes, I do."

Mulder turned his head until he could see out the window. The hospital was keeping him for one more night, until all their test results came back, and then he would be declared well and could go home.

Mulder would go home with her.

"Really?" He said, as the sunlight lit his skin yellow and created tiny replica's of itself in his pupils.

"How many were there?" he asked, the question not really directed at her at all, she thought...

"...hundreds? Thousands?..." He spoke aloud but not to her.

She would take him home.

"...More?..." He seemed to be asking the daylight.

Home. Tomorrow.

"I wonder..." He murmured.

Tomorrow was another day and there would be hundreds more. Thousands.

"Thousands of children taken?..." He puzzled.

Thousands. They would see each one together.

"Taken back by aliens?..." He questioned.

Where he was concerned, she would rejoice in all things from that moment forward.

"...Called by God?..." He asked the springtime.

No matter what.

"Special?..." Mulder sighed.

No matter who.

He looked at her now. "Divine?..."

No matter about anything ever again.

"Do you really think those kids were divine, Scully?" It was meant for her.

She looked back at the healthy man on the pillow who would live and who would love and who had yellow stars in his eyes.

"Mulder." She leaned close. Always it would be this way.

Close enough to touch. Touch and believe without fear.

"Mulder. I think _you_ are."

UNDISCLOSED Date:

It rained so much that fall.

Everything was greener though than it had been all Summer.

I kept one eye on the moisture running down the glass while the other watched my husband limp away to the bedroom where he was going for his afternoon nap.

He had already kissed my cheek and patted my behind, laughing at my protest, the old perv'.

We have an old oak tree in the yard that's seen better days, and through the pane, I followed it's gnarled trunk with my eye. It was still tall and proud and reached above the power lines. Not a leaf left on it, but there was no reason to chop yet, we both had a soft spot for old things. It had stood there for nearly a century and had as much right as we did to be given the opportunity to see another sunrise. And another.

It was antique like most of our furniture.

The house is filled with them because of the garage sales we'd seen, my husband and his hobby of finding and fixing things; even old frail looking junk that appeared beyond hope. I had no idea, all those years, of what his gentle hands were capable, but he restored them all to glory.

My favorite was the old tea table by our back porch window in a tiny alcove just off the kitchen. They used to call them Sunrooms. That was our special place, where we'd bring our coffee and breakfast and watch everything wake up around us. It was that time of day when new things are spotted in the usually seen ordinary and everyday world.

We'd sit and talk for an hour. Every morning for one hour we'd talk, about anything, whatever was on our minds. Always. It was like making love with our eyes and our lips, something just between us and for us, before time came to do other things; chores, phone calls, shopping... I loved that hour.

My husband failed to appear for dinner and when I checked on him, he felt as cold under my fingers as the dampened room and I knew that even my mother's quilts would not infuse warmth back into his body.

He'd opened the window by his bed two inches and gone to sleep.

I lay down beside him and cradled his body to mine. I wanted my skin to remember. I wanted a physical imprint of him, something that would never fade from my body. I cried so much.

The next morning the clouds lifted and the sun chased away the last of the dew, drying out the yard and two days later, everyone came at two o'clock to say their goodbyes.

His family and mine, friends, old co-workers and some people who were strangers to me extended condolences while casting saddened eyes to the tiny antique wooden chest that held his ashes. Everyone wished me well and filed out into the sun.

"Everything dies." He had once said. Later he'd admitted that "Well, not _everything_." with a sheepish grin. It was an old joke that I was far too stubborn ever to leave this mortal coil.

I still use that tea table and think about him. About what he had been to me and what I had been to him. All I can say is unless you've loved like we have, you can't know.

You can't know.

I miss him. My body still aches for him. My soul still searches for him. It always will.

UNDISCLOSED Date.

The solid oak door, a rare possession in her day and age, opened silently, not a hint of squeak on the hinges, to reveal her visitor.

Whom she couldn't quite clearly see without her glasses.

"Yes?" she inquired politely, pushing a stray grey hair out of her eyes and behind her ear. Most would have asked it through the door but she preferred things met head-on. It was how she'd lived most of her life.

Her visitor seemed tongue-tied. A young man, that much she could make out of the slightly fuzzy image. Tall. Dark hair. The rest, who knew?

"Who are you looking for?" She tried again, thinking "I hope it isn't another insurance salesman. Another one of those this week and I might just have to haul out my-

"Fox Mulder."

She started. If there wasn't already enough light and warm animation in her eyes, they became even more replete with both. Her voice, patient as it was on occasion to be, now was gentleness itself. "I'm afraid you're about twenty years too late, sweety, my husband is dead. Died twenty years ago next month."

If there was upset on his face, in the dimming evening light, she couldn't tell.

"I am sorry," he said kindly. Her hearing wasn't what it was either but it was a lilting tenor, with a trace of accent she couldn't place.

"I was too, believe me. Did you know him?" He would have had to have been very young if so.

"No. No, not really. Someone I know knew him and they counseled me that if I ever...traveled this way, to look him up."

"I see." She didn't know what else to say to him. He seemed like he wanted to extend the conversation, maybe come in and sit a while, while she, on the other hand, wanted to get back to her still-life. She'd taken up painting about fifteen years back and quite enjoyed it.

As much as she loved to talk about her late husband, the water colors were drying and it was tough to overlap and blend shades if the paper got too dry.

"I'm sorry to have disturbed you. " He said.

She heard the sadness now. Just that hint in his tone that was asking her if only she would spare a minute...?

"Perhaps you'd like to hear about him?" She offered. What the hell. She needed to work on her bordering anyway. "I may not be as entertaining a narrator as he was but..."

Her guest smiled - she was pretty sure - and she stepped back to let him enter.

He did.

She lead him to a small, sunny sitting room with yellow wicker furniture. He sat, somewhat stiffly in the hardback chair she pointed to. She chose a gliding rocker opposite. Through the sparkling clean windows, sunshine fell on them both.

"I suppose we should begin with names." She suggested.

He cleared his throat. "My friends call me Phen."

"Unusual. Would you like something to drink?" She offered, as she lowered herself and began a gentle rocking, it helped ease the ache of her creeping arthritis, but readied to rise again and fetch him something.

"No thank you Mrs. Mulder."

Easing the chair into motion, "Call me Dana." She heard his unease and though his posture was stiff and straight, like a school boy in a principals office, there was also an elegance in his bearing. Nothing artificial about this young man. "What did you want to know about him?"

"Everything you can tell me."

Dana Scully-Mulder tilted her head, the lines between her brows permanent marks after many years, deepened at her odd visitor. Everything?

"There is an awful lot to tell."

"I heard,.." He hesitated, as if broaching the subject might be an intrusion into a secret history only she had a right to. "I heard he had disappeared."

Her frown cleared but the eyes beneath became a sadness. A human emotion he shared. A grief he understood and had sometimes seen reflected in his own face.

"That was a hard time." She answered.

"I'm sorry, if you don't wish to talk about it-"

"No. No, I want to. I've never spoken about it to anyone, I mean, my part. How it nearly drove me mad."

"I'm terribly sorry, Mrs. Mulder. If this is too painfu-"

Quickly, "-Have you ever loved someone, Phen?" She didn't want to dwell on too much sadness today. It spoiled her creative mood.

"Yes. In fact, I left my wife and children behind to make this journey. I didn't realize that I'd be so late. I didn't know he had died."

"What would you sacrifice for your wife and children?"

He paused at the question but only for a second or two. "Everything."

She nodded once, unconvinced by just words. Would he? Time might tell another story. "Then you understand what it means to be with someone who is your other self. YOU, only the better version, the parts of you that were missing. He filled those gaps in me. To me, he was perfect even when he was making mistakes."

"I think I understand."

"That time when he disappeared was the worst eight years of my whole life. When he came back or was brought back by whomever had taken him, things were terrible. Whatever happened to him nearly destroyed him. And me.

"He was sick when he returned, did you know that? So very ill. Dying. Even in those times, even when we fought, even when it seemed certain we were going to lose him, those times I cherish, I cling to them because he was alive and struggling - both of us - struggling against heaven and earth it seemed, he was still beautiful. To me."

Her visitor was listening like a child would while a parent read him a brand new fairy story filled with untold wonders.

"But he survived."

"Yes. He lived to a good old age and died in his sleep. Peacefully. A well earned peace I might add."

He said nothing.

"How did your someone know him?"

Her question startled him, she thought, but he appeared to have made up his mind to be truthful. Out of respect, she suspected. Right away, he's struck her as a man who respected others. "My mother knew him."

Dana's rocking chair stilled. His words rang true but the whole truth had not been told to her. But it was impossible wasn't it? "Your mother?"

"Yes."

"When?"

"Many years ago."

"It cannot not be that long, can it? I can't place your accent, it's foreign, you enunciate English unusually, as if it were not your native tongue."

"Well, I speak many languages, I've traveled."

"So you've said." She looked at him, her curiosity growing in proportion to his nervousness. "What did your mother tell you about my husband?"

He sat forward and suddenly she was struck by the familiarity of the gesture. How he laced his fingers together, resting his elbows on his knees, his great long legs bent at ninety degrees, the slope of his shoulders, the dark hair, the angled jaw, the eyes - their shape, yes - but the color, the color she did not know. Damn her failing sight!

"She told me some of the things he had told her, that's all. There was one that I have always been curious about."

Dana did not fail to notice his clever skirting of her previous question. He knew things he was not ready to tell her or was afraid to. Again, she thought, it was out of respect.

"She said that at one time he had told her - it was a phrase that seemed to mean something to him, but my mother never really understood what he meant by it -"

"-What phrase?"

"Not everything dies."." He quoted.

Dana heart leaped, but the only hint of her whirling emotions was the sweet smile of memory on her face. "I remember. Fox lost everything when he was young. His whole family eventually. He was the last of his father's children. We never had any of our own you know. His sister did but she died and her children died with her. Not all at once.

"Interesting phrase for someone in that position, wouldn't you say?" Remembering things so buried in the past did dampen her spirits somewhat, but this young man was just too unusual a guest to let it sway her from speaking of them.

He seemed uncomfortable now and made a motion to rise. "I'm sorry, I seemed to have stirred up some sad memories. Perhaps I should go."

Suddenly she was desperate for him not to. Looking at him, a connection in her mind popped into place, settled like a rabbit in its hole, by instinct and without effort.

Like when she free-painted, working without a model. Sometimes, if she just allowed it the freedom, the bristles would apply the colors to the thick paper by their own will, without her directing the stroking of the brush. She would not try to see ahead to the end of the work but just allow the colors and the paper to guide her until the picture was complete.

Often, the portrait or the vase of yellow sunflowers that resulted would be a piece of special power. Those she would frame and display.

A picture was being created inside her mind and heart of this young man.

"Phen-" She halted his rising and he settled back again, waiting.

"Fox knew a great deal. He was brilliant, loving, kind, impulsive, sometimes downright crazy, but one thing he was not, and that was always correct. He wasn't always right."

"What do you mean?"

"Phen - is that your real name? - when I see you sitting here before me, in that chair, looking like him and sounding like him and smart like he was, I realize how wrong that statement of his was. You're from Russia, aren't you? That area at least? Fox was there for a time. He never did tell me what happened. Or are you from some place else? From a very, very _far_ place?"

She knew he would not answer that question. "How like him you are." It didn't matter. If he was indeed who she thought he was, she already knew what the answer would be.

//"Might we not finally look to the fantastic as a plausibility?"//

Her heart was beating very fast. " I see you sitting there and soon you'll walk out that door and go on living your life, breathing,..tell me, are you going to return to your wife?"

Something crossed his features, a tiny but clearly seen few seconds of grief. "This was a one way trip. I can't. She,..." Phen looked away. "She knew why, knew it was important to me. She agreed."

Scully leaned forward and took his hand in her two, clutching at him. Holding him in her gaze and the embrace of her understanding. "God works in mysterious and wonderful ways, handsome Phen. Marry again and if you can, have more children. Rejoice in them. I know I will. And in you."

Soon, she could not help the tears that fell when his hands grasped hers in return. "Know that Fox Mulder was a great man. A very great, great man. And you, here before me, alive and beautiful, have brought him back to me for this hour. I can't tell you what it means to me to know that he will keep living through you. You're his son, Phen, aren't you?"

He stared. Nodded slowly, as if unsure what the news would do to her. As if it would hurt her! She laughed aloud, the tears unstoppable now, at the thought. "Fox, my husband, your father, that lovable, frustrating, infuriating, kind and gentle creature, was the most perfect thing to ever enter my life. Fox was beautiful. But still, he was wrong."

"Wrong how? I don't understand."

"Not everything dies", he said. Don't you see?"

Dana Katherine Scully-Mulder brought his hands to her wrinkled breast, pulling him closer, so she could see his face more clearly; that face she had missed so much, seeing every morning, kissing goodnight each and every evening through eighteen years of marriage. Missed so terribly. Loved so deeply.

She touched Phen's hands, and in that touch, she was holding Fox's once more. Mulder's strong, tender fingers once again laced in her own. The warmth in that touch was the fountain of youth. It was God's Grace to her, a last glorious gift from somewhere in the heavens, a place that she still did not understand. But understanding was no longer paramount. That she had loved and had been loved was. That she had known and loved a man as extraordinary as he had been was her prayer of thanks back to God.

Phen was looking down at their locked fingers in wonder. It was as if he had never touched another human before. It was something extraordinary to see, those eyes filled with curiosity and energy. It was magical and miraculous. Once upon a time, Mulder might have called it.

Paranormal.

Scully laughed, staring into the perfect depths of the dark pupils and, seeing Phen, she saw _him_ again, looking back. "Don't you see, dear Phen?"

Her thin lips, lined with the years, smiled with the happiness of youth and endless life ahead. In that grin she was a young woman again, in love with the man who was to become her husband and realizing it for the very first time.

Vocal chords breaking,...

"Dearest Phen,"...

...their music was not sorrow, however, but the voice of joy made perfect.

..."nothing dies at all."

The End

Author's Notes:

This story was a long time in coming. For that I apologize and thank you for your patience from the bottom of my heart. However, this was an emotional trip for me, writing these last chapters of Divinities. I went through some heavy duty memories to conjure up some of the scenes you've tasted throughout these passages, but it was a good trip none-the-less.

I wonder if you caught the fact that you were given no concrete answers to who the aliens/angels/demons were or what really happened to Caleb? Or what/who cured Mulder - aliens or angels? Well, I'm a Canadian writer and that means there are no neat little bow ribbons at the end. What I tired to give you were living, vibrant characters and a human struggle, the drama and conflict that is part of any struggle with a bittersweet end. If it seemed ambiguous or a "cheat" not to tie up all the loose ends, well, I answer with -

Ambiguity, thy name is Carter.

If you read this and concluded that I hold religiously ambiguous views, I do not. But one can not always write just from one's own POV. That would be too limiting. I did not want to produce anything that either preached belief or doubt in anything. That would have been insulting to you, the reader, and too limiting for my need, as a writer, to explore. I wanted Mulder and Scully to experience things and for you to share in what they saw, but for you to draw your own conclusions about the meaning and about the changes, if any, in the characters as a result.

Divinities will most probably be my last novel length X-File fic', but by no means my last X-File fic. I have a few shorter ones planned before the year of 1999 draws to a close.

I'm not a FILK-er, but I thought the following stanzas by Enya, from The Memory of Trees, personified the love of Dana Scully & Fox Mulder (and their struggle together) well. It is also a personal belief that love conquers all. At least, that is the way it should be.

Perhaps you think the same.

* Hope Has A Place: *

One look at love and you may see it weaves a web over mystery. All raveled threads can rend apart But hope has a place in the lover's heart.

Under the heavens we journey far on roads of life we're the wanderers. So let love rise, So let love depart. Let hope have a place in the lover's heart.

Look to love you may dream, and if it should leave then give it wings. But if such a love is meant to be; Hope is home and the heart is free.

Enya.

Thanks for reading. Love and peace to you,

GBVW

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