Foldback by GeeLady

Title: PhaHks 03 - Foldback
Author: GeeLady
Written: August 1999
Rating: Okay folks, here's the deal: X-Rating!! ANGST!! And: Mulder Torture/Scully-Skinner Romance/Mulder- Other-SLASH Romance/Mulder-Scully Romance, Language, Violence, disturbing scenes. NO KIDDIES PLEASE!!!!!

Spoilers: "PhaHks" & "FOCUS" by GeeLady. Various X-Files episodes & FTF.

THANK-YOU's: I thank this Mulder/TORTURE Site maintained by SMILEY! & X-RAE's VISIONS by RaeLynn! & The CHURCH of X by Erika M! & my BETA READER Swenglish! & Everyone who has read and enjoyed my previous books (and tells me, because it's spurred me on to keep writing more!) Thank-you ALL!

Special thanks to XObserver for nominating "PhaHks" for a Spooky Award for Best 1998 Crossover!

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.

*This is my fifth posting to MulderTorture (the BEST, Shirley, The BEST!). As always, I drool stupidly for feedback. [email protected] or [email protected]

Summary: Mulder gets involved in an investigation that sends him back to Scully & the X-Files, and into a deadly struggle for their lives and their future.

@ YOU reeeealy ought to first read "

"PhaHks" & "FOCUS". or there may be things in "FOLDBACK" you just won't completely clue into.

PERSONAL Disclaimer: "I've noticed some of my ideas sort of paralleled CC's in certain episodes for this Sixth season. Coincidence, folks. I started writing FOLDBACK last year, June! And no way am I going to change them now!" :-O

~~~~~*~~~~~

"The pounding waves are calling me home. Home to you.
The pounding sea is calling me home.
Home to you..."

("The Old Ways." by Loreena McKinnet)

~~~~~*~~~~~

FOLDBACK

The small six-seater commuter began it's descent and Mulder breathed a sigh of relief.

Flying never used to bother him, but the flight to Seattle from D.C. had been excruciating. He'd had to dash for the bathroom once or twice when the feeling of claustrophobia and nausea peaked. He hadn't throw-up, but the unease and tension hadn't waned even now.

Maybe it had been the cabin pressure. Maybe the movement. Maybe because he didn't like the sensation of something big and powerful and confining moving _him_.

Though the little six-seater amphibian single engine was better, the ground or rather, the water, never looked so sweet.

Mulder had come home (a hotel room in not a bad little waterfront joint in Seattle) from his run, checked his messages and, feeling like Jim Rockford, immediately called back on the one crucial message.

Connie Allenby had heard about him through the locals and called his answering service, leaving a vague message about needing his specialized skills on "a terrible thing that's happened". . He listened to the details she'd managed to stammer out. Promising him a wired advance for travel and hotel expenses, she'd begged him to come and he'd left Seattle the next morning on a special commuter airline.

It was slower and they didn't offer peanuts or cake but the coffee was good and it was a damn sight better than a boat-ride. Or another trip aboard a commercial flight where he'd have to lay-over in Vancouver, hop another jet and then spend the majority of the air time on his knees in the commode, doubled over in pain and throwing up a week's worth of meals.

The pilot cut the tiny craft's engine and skimmed across the water to the dock, leaving twin wakes pushing out across the choppy water.

The passengers climbed out, the peer wobbling beneath their feet at the unaccustomed load. Mulder cursed under his breath as the wind whipped salty spray over his feet. Shouldn't have worn the new sneakers.

A short walk to the tiny Port office and a phone call, and in thirty minutes a taxi arrived to take him to his hotel. Later he would see about renting a car. Not an abundance of car companies to choose from was his guess. Not on a island, and certainly not _this_ island of Vancouver, with it's tiny coastal towns stretching up and down a mostly unforgiving coastline with many miles in between.

He checked his appointment book, already knowing the address and name of the person he was scheduled to visit.

A shower and food was due. After placing his dinner order, he studied a map and the "Visitor's Guide" with a "Welcome to Nanaimo" on the front he'd picked up from the hotel lobby. Two or three rental car agencies were featured. He had a forty-mile trip in the morning.

The food arrived, a chicken sandwich, and, though hungry, he bit into it cautiously and chewed thoroughly. His type of hernia was unforgiving if fed too quickly. He'd had about enough pain for this decade, thank-you.

Decided he'd leave in the morning with enough time to arrive to check out the crime scene first and then make the hospital by noon.

His services were expensive. His invented job still new and somewhat unfamiliar feeling. He wasn't only a psychologist. Not just an investigator either. He, in his chosen self-made profession, filled a gap in crime investigation. Where the police and the crime-scene specialists left off, he stepped in. Working directly for the victims, he was still his own boss.

That part was perfect.

Survivors of violent crime, those were his clients. Those who had the money and the time and the desire to know "why them". Unsolved cases. Usually domestic related in some way. Almost always bloody.

Seattle had seemed as good a place to settle as any and, considering it's history of domestic and signature murder, was better than most for his type of work.

He traveled light as most of his consultations had not taken him out-of- country.

This was the first one so far. He'd brought two changes of clothes, toiletries, his gun, his I.D. and lots of curiosity. The rest of his meagre belongings were back at his hotel room in Seattle. Had decided against an apartment, that was too "settled". Seattle was temporary, he kept telling himself.

Mulder'd been practicing his new job for almost five months and though the work was not steady, it was challenging. He was enjoying using his brain for something other than self-analysis. Among other skills brought into his new line of work were a Phd, twelve years as an F.B.I. field agent along with a unique perspective on what it was like to be the victim of gross crime, having endured an eight year stretch of it himself.

He knew exactly what it felt like.

Post his eight year abduction-torture fest, had been over a year's "hospital" recovery, a good doctor and plenty of "rest".

When those doors had finally swung wide for good, he'd bolted out of that Recovery Centre like a kid at recess without looking back. He hadn't even glanced at the name on the high, metal gates as his taxi sped down the lane to sanity, wanting to erase from memory ever having seen the inside of it.

Now he had a new job. New home.

But no Scully.

And that was the only thing about the whole situation that bothered him.

*

The Allenby house was very large and very rich and sat on a spruce-treed lot damn near the size of D.C.. Mulder wanted to check through the house to get a picture in his head about the events of a single night that had blown away Connie Allenby's world. A night that would forever alter her life, whether she knew it or not.

She had provided him with a key sent via courier. Connie, his client, had money.

But no family anymore.

He knew what that felt like, too.

The estate sat at the end of a long, tree-lined lane that twisted up into the hills behind Campbell River, a salty, ocean aired, picturesque town on the east coast of central Vancouver Island.

Here is where his client had lived and almost died.

Mulder glanced at the name-plate - The Allenby's - on the mailbox as he drove the rental car up and up.

Allenby's:

Donald Allenby, murderer of children: Jennifer and Dylan, husband of sole survivor, the wife and mother - Connie Allenby.

Allenby's was now Allenby. Singular.

Used the key and entered the double oak doors. The alarm code had been disabled. Not by the police or his client, but by the perpetrator of the terrible deed that had taken place here.

Her husband, Donald, one week ago, had come home from the East, entered his den, loaded his 1908, bolt-action Twenty-Two rifle and shot three members of his family once in the back. The fourth, a daughter, had been found dead also but with no wounds to speak of. The coroner determined the cause of death to have been "extreme shock and fright".

Connie, no longer wife or mother, though seriously wounded had lived.

Mulder found his way to each of the crime areas of the house. Tried to get the feel of the place. See and get an understanding of the home, the family and the energy of the humans who used to live, laugh and argue in it.

Money.

Everywhere, every corner he looked was money. The best quality, the most expensive of everything. As if lining their walls and floor with wealth would cushion them against harsh things. The alarms and bolts on the doors, the bars on the ground-level windows, the air-conditioned, filtered, sweetened "only-the-very-best" interior air shut off from the raw atmosphere of the surrounding woods...

Like the Allenby's themselves maybe. Protected and guarded. Against what? Like so many: robbers, murderers, the world.

Evil.

Cities were filled to capacity with people trying to keep themselves safe.

Mulder remembered something a professor of his had once said to a classroom of young people like him who still had everything to learn about the ways of the world:

"Locks are very useful...for keeping out honest people."

The bedrooms. Other than the bloodstained bedsheets in the son's, they were the typical domain of teenagers. Posters of the most recent rock and movie star heart throbs. A stuffed horse collection in Jennifer's room. Model railroad in Dylan's.

Connie and Donald Allenby's bedroom was thickly carpeted opulence and about the size of a basketball court. Expensively draped picture windows looked out over manicured lawn and old growth spruce that blocked all eyes that might glance up from the highway at the bottom of the slope beyond them.

The Den.

What could he find out about Donald Allenby here?

A single unexpected terrible event and nothing is ever the same again.

Mulder also had first-hand experience with that.

*

COURTENAY GENERAL Hospital, VANCOUVER ISLAND.

"Do you have any idea why your husband would do this?"

Mulder liked to keep the questions simple and to the point. Get the usual ones out of the way first and then ask the tougher ones. And then ones his mind came up with later that often proved the most integral to the solving of the crime. It was something instinctual perhaps. He really didn't know himself why his guesses were so often right.

Connie was a petite, fine-boned woman with dyed-auburn hair. Even in the hospital with tubes sticking out of her chest and snaking from her nose, she had tried keeping it properly coiffured and had "teased" it with rigid conformity to match her class's rules about what constituted "taste".

"No, I told you, Donald couldn't have done this. He wuh-was a loving father and a g-good husband to me. That's why I can't believe them when they tell me he "just snapped"! Donald didn't even hunt. Th-that Twenty-Two was a collector's piece. I didn't know it even fired. Donald never, never took it out of the display case. He had a permit and everything, it was registered..."

Mulder nodded, familiar with Canadian weapons laws.

She went on to describe a business man who traveled and then came home to his loving wife and two children. A man who, other than his clubs and salesman travels that took him far and wide, stuck to hearth and home. A man she said, according to their neighbors and friends, was not violent at all. A little naive perhaps, a little too willing to lend a hand with money and time but not someone who would with forethought and intent, load tipped casings into his favored collector's piece and then fire that weapon into the spine of his wife and son, finally turning the weapon on himself. All without any warning.

And even if he was the kind of man to do such an act, why not leave a note explaining the sixty-four dollar question the locals newspapers had been printing over and over for lack of better selling news: WHY?

Connie Allenby insisted her husband and children had been murdered.

"I know these questions are difficult but can you tell me what they- not just the autopsy - but what the Medical Examiner said regarding Jennifer's death. Did he postulate any ideas, theories to you personally, beyond the autopsy findings I mean?"

"They let you see it like I requested, didn't they?"

He nodded.

"I can't tell you anything more. He didn't say anything to me. I..." She began to cry softly, "I didn't ask. "

"I'm sorry. Um..." He cleared his throat. "Your husband traveled a lot?"

"Yes."

"Is it possible that he may have had...made contacts with business people, maybe people he didn't know as well as he might have? Maybe people who had gotten him involved in something illegal or dangerous?"

"Donald wasn't like that."

She was mourning her husband and murdered children. She would think the best of the dead.

"It might have been something he didn't know was dangerous or illegal. It might have been something that he found out by accident, something he couldn't do any thing about." Or live with.

"But why shoot Dylan? Or hurt Jennifer?"

Another excellent question. Jennifer had been thirteen. Dylan, sixteen.

What had been going on in the Allenby household prior to that night? If there was anything to know, had the kids known it? Complained about their parents "uncoolness" to their friends? Kids talked. Highly doubtful he'd find out anything from friends but it didn't hurt to check it out.

Had Dad said anything to his son, if there had been trouble? Had daughter overheard a significant conversation and gotten on the phone to someone else and gossiped about her weird parent? All parents were weird when you were thirteen.

Had dad Allenby even maybe told one of his children something before he and they joined the dead? Sometimes a man will confess things to his children he wouldn't have to courage to reveal to his wife. Sometimes those children repeated such things to others.

The kids were dead. But kids talked to their friends and their teachers, too, sometimes.

"Do you think you could give me the names of any friends, favorite teachers the kids may have had. If they overheard anything your husband had said, a phone call, something like that, they might have spoken to someone about it.'

"They would have spoken to me." She admitted.

Mulder nodded, sympathetic, but he knew it wasn't true. Kids generally told their parents maybe one fifth of what the parents thought they did.

Connie Allenby provided him with several names. He had already made the rounds on the adult Allenby's friends and work associates and come up with very little that the local RCMP hadn't. Connie had also given him full access to Donald's business papers.

He'd found hundreds of contracts, expired and new, in the den's safe. Donald sold state-of-the-art micro-processors for a huge company out of Toronto. The names on the contract some of the same folks who'd had a hand in the Shuttle Arm. Interesting work, if you can get it. Paid well too, obviously.

The first name on the list was Jennifer's former music teacher and local resident, Erika Lyons.

A short drive up the coastline back to Campbell River. He pulled into a driveway of a house just outside of town sitting back from a tree-lined blacktop road.

The door was answered by an attractive redhead in her early twenties.

"Yes?" Beethoven could be heard on a piano from somewhere inside the house.

"Erika Lyons? My name is Fox Mulder, I'm a Crime Consultant, I'm here regarding the alleged murder/suicide of the Allenby's-"

"Alleged?" She scrutinized the I.D. that was held up for her inspection and the tall, dark-haired man in the black suit and sunglasses standing on her porch. Man In Black, she thought.

"Well, that's what I'm here to try and find out. I'm investigating the case further on behalf of Mrs. Allenby and I was hoping, if you don't mind, to talk with you for a few minutes about Jennifer. She was a student of yours?"

"Yes. She was one of my best students. Real potential." She glanced behind her. Someone was working hard at the Moonlight Sonata. "Uh, look, I don't want to interrupt my student, but we can talk in the office. Won't you come in?"

He followed her inside and was lead to a small study off the main hall. Seated in it already was a man he assumed to be the husband. "This is my husband, Jerry. Hon, this is Mister Mulder, he wants to know about Jennifer. Um, coffee?"

Thanking her, Mulder declined, though exchanging nods and hands- shakes with the husband.

"It's a terrible thing." Jerry offered and returned to his desk and the papers strewn across it.

Mulder sat on the leather love seat, coming right away to the point. "Mrs. Allenby - Connie - doesn't believe her husband is responsible. I can't really go into details but what I'm trying to find out is any reason behind why Donald Allenby would want to murder his family and then himself."

"But why come to us? I mean, we didn't really know the Allenby's beyond their daughter taking piano with my wife." Erika's husband had swivelled around, ignoring the paperwork for the time being.

Mulder addressed Erika, "Mrs. Allenby indicated that Jennifer came here for piano lessons three times per week for five years and that you and she were actually friends and not only teacher and student. You were a kind of big sister to her."

"Yes, I guess we were. She told me things sometimes. I think she was a pretty lonely kid. She kept pretty much to herself. Well, the Allenby's, they were,...they all pretty much kept to themselves."

"It's a long shot but I was hoping maybe in the weeks prior to the tragedy, she might have said something, mentioned something, anything, to you... perhaps something that was not right at home? Mrs. Allenby stated that things were perfectly normal and nothing unusual had happened but it's been my experience that kids pick up on things that others miss, even mom and dad. Did she say anything to you to indicate that things at home were not normal? Did she seem upset in any way?"

Erika thought for a moment. "No. Not really. I mean, she wasn't upset- wait a second, well, - but that's not what you're looking for..."

"Maybe not, but I'm just trying to establish the circumstances, the state of the family, in the time prior to the murders. You've remembered something?"

"Yeah. Um,...she asked me something, just a second.." Erika paused, "It was a kind of funny question...she asked me if Jerry ever cried." Erika looked at Jerry and back at Mulder.

"She asked you if your husband cried? Do you have any idea why she would ask you that?"

"I thought, at the time, that maybe she'd seen someone crying, a man, and she wondered if they all did. But then she was thirteen. And then I thought, maybe,.." She stared at Mulder to emphasize her own thought, "maybe she was talking about her dad."

Erika watched her unusual house-guest nod slightly at the information. He seemed to be picking at it, running it through mental files. "How long before the murders did this happen?"

"Wasn't it her last lesson, honey?" Jerry said.

"My god. I think it was, about three days before. The last lesson before-"

Mulder nodded. "It might be nothing but it also might indicate that something was wrong in Donald Allenby's private affairs, if it was her father Jennifer was referring to."

Erika asked:

"How will you find out one way or another?"

Mulder said:

"I don't know if I will be able to. But there must be some reason for him to have done this terrible thing. I really appreciate your time. Thank, you." He rose to leave.

Erika and Jerry escorted him to the front door while Moonlight began again.

Erika offered as the three walked down the front steps, "You know, about the Allenby's, they were private people, I mean in their personal affairs. But they also got involved in all sorts of community activities. School...Connie was a long time P.T.A. member. Donald I think was part of a Local Business- man's Association and the Millionaire's Club and two or three other groups. They seemed...happy. I just can't imagine why he'd do something like this."

Mulder nodded and shook their hands. "I really appreciate your time. I guess sometimes there just aren't any easy answers."

He thought as he left, MOST of the time there are no easy answers. He would visit Connie in the hospital again, tell her what he'd learned, ask a few more questions and hope she'd be more forthcoming with some honest answers. Had Donald been the Ward Cleaver she made him out to be or was there a skeleton in the closet?

Mulder drove to his beach hotel, ate dinner, changed into shorts and a T-shirt. Jogged a few miles. Changed to jeans and a light sweater, strolled the rocky shoreline. He wished Scully were there so he could share the raw beauty of the place with her.

In fifteen years, both of them had been to some incredible spots. But always work related. Often dangerous. Never just for them.

He realized he had never seen Scully just out walking on the beach without a care in the world and he wondered, did it change her face? What did she look like as a free woman? He'd never seen her shopping with her mother, walking a dog, sitting by a wood fire, curled up with a blanket and sleepy-eyed.

He'd spent a quarter of his life with her and didn't really know what life was like _with_ her. Those few weekends spent together at her apartment had been warm and comforting but fleeting. A few hours and many of those talking about his recovery or the past or her work or his search for work.

Never just about them.

And almost nothing about "what" and "when" - their future.

Kisses and a promise.

He wasn't even sure what settling down meant. He didn't know how it felt to be part of a couple, his past relationships had been short and sweet. More short than sweet, usually ending with angry words and hurt on both sides.

He'd been upper-class Phoebe's "sweet, young thing". But always on the lookout for a step up the ladder, she'd tossed him when more professionally effluent fodder had come along.

Diana - whatever happened to her anyway? Probably banging her latest somewhere - high-shooter and self-worshipping, had checked out when his interests had diversified into the X-files and suddenly she was no longer the sole reason for his being. At his defending of his own position when she'd taxed him about it, she'd pitched his ring back in his face fast enough.

Two down.

A secretary here, a bar pick-up one night stand there just about covered his other intimate forays into love-land.

And then one day in walks this teeny little woman with barely styled, fire-hair, in a conservative pants-suit that left no doubt but that she knew where to kick a man. Not to mention wearing big, big eye-glasses.

And his heart starts palpitating like his first wet dream had just materialized before his eyes.

History, as they say, told the rest. For him, his life really began that day. For real. Life. Not just getting up every day, shaving, shitting, breathing in and out _existence. But living. That tingle-jingle-nervous wreck thing that happened maybe once or twice during a lucky man's eighty. He knew it because soon some of the still raw hurt from Diana had eased and then eased some more until one day he went looking for it and found it gone.

Dana Scully had effectively wiped it out. And he had no idea why.

Scully.

"Scully" because it kept the professional mental distance needed to his control and sanity. It made her tantalizing curves into straight angles, her soft hair into a stiff, brush cut, and her erotically female smell into a guy's day old socks.

Dana was the woman. Scully was his partner. It allowed him control of his normal, male urges when faced with her. She had it all.

His intellect looked and said: Brains.

His heart reached out and saw: Compassion.

His penis twitched and shouted: god help me!

So "Scully", the partner-and-it-makes-no-difference-that-she-is-a-sexy- woman.

The last name basis thing kept him from thinking too much about how his wary but grasping soul was calling out for his partner.

That was simply Not Allowed.

After a day spent with her crawling through the woods, or overnight in the confines of the car or under her disconcerting watch while he shivered in a hospital gown, his videos in the privacy of his painfully bachelorfide apartment did their work. Enough of those would successfully crowd her out of his thoughts for another day or two.

Old news.

Now he wanted the opposite of course. And so, of course, he was living on the opposite coastline. But he had this job. He had this case.

Work. He had to work.

What would Scully think of the case?

Mulder returned to his hotel room and dialed her home number in D.C.. Really, though, he just wanted to hear her voice. Five months away from her and it was getting harder and harder to _stay_ away.

"Hey," he said and smiled when he heard Scully's warm contralto.

"Hey yourself!"

"Got a joke for you. This guy visits this restaurant all the time and he really likes this one waitress. One day the waitress comes up to him and says, "You know, Norman, I really don't like you. You come in here all the time, sit and stare at me and you're really giving me the creeps." After the waitress walks away, Norman says to himself: "Gee, I really liked her. I'm kinda' glad, now, that I didn't carve her name into my chest."."

Scully chuckled into his ear. "Mulder, this is long distance."

"I can't believe you don't think that's funny."

"You're cute."

"Cute"? Kill me. You busy?"

"No. I'm sitting here watching a news cast on the Royal Family's latest sex scandal. I've got an, oh-so-fascinating, point by point report in my lap detailing the ext-reem-ly meticulous autopsy one of my students just performed for his final. In short, I am bored out of my skull." But her voice was grinning.

"Wish I was there to dispel some of that boredom."

"Back at ya', hon'. Just leave your jokes out west."

It was good to hear her. He'd meant it, too. He flushed at the "hon".

"How about you? Where are you anyway?"

Mulder stretched out on the bed, tucked his hands behind his head, cradling the phone between ear and biceps. "Me? I am in a hotel on a semi-tropical island."

"Without me? Thanks, pal."

He chuckled. "I'm spending most of my time in the local fish town of Vancouver Island."

"Fish" town?"

"Yeah, little spot called Campbell River. Fish folks. They eat, drink and breath fish here. The Town Hall has a big fish over its entrance. The local bar is called Gill-espies. They held a classical music festival here a few months ago, the theme was _fish_. They are very serious about their fish here, Scully. Dead serious. Paranormally serious. All the restaurants serve nothing but fish. I'm eating fish and smelling fish. I'm dreaming about eating fish. I don't even like fish." He dropped his voice to a conspiratorial whisper. "In fact, I've become...sort of.... _scared_ of fish, Scully. My toilet got plugged? - it was a fish!"

Scully smiled into the phone. "You'll survive."

"It's gorgeous, but I've eaten so much salmon, I'm fighting this urge to spawn. Care to fly out and cure me?"

"What? No Porns?" Through the phone, Mulder heard her close her binder, putting an end to the boring report. "Soooo, Mulder, what _are_ you doing there?"

"I'm here on a case. If you were here we could have a little vacation maybe - but no fishing."

Mulder couldn't know that at the other end of the phone line, a lip trembled. "I'd be there if I could."

"I know."

"So what's the case? Can you talk about it?"

"Well confidentiality and all, no, but it's interesting. I have a feeling it's going to turn out to be either a dead-end or just not the way my client would like. I think she's hiding in the fantasy that only bad things happen to bad people."

"Mmm. So what are you going to do?"

"I have to see her one more time tomorrow and, unless I get more concrete information from her, I pick up my last paycheque and head back to Seattle." He didn't think of Seattle as home but it was just a little bit closer to Scully and that was a good thing.

"Ummm, when do you think we might...be able to get together?"

Mulder's heart beat faster. He wanted to. He wanted to go home. Really _home_. Maybe he scare up the same sort of thing he was doing in Seattle back in D.C. "As soon I can. Sooner than that if it's possible." He had put out resume's, feelers, "the Word". Nothing had materialized. "I just don't know, Scully. I wish I did."

"I miss you."

Mulder's throat constricted at how quietly she'd said it.

God, it was getting tougher to make the phone calls. It was like he'd left on a business trip and now he couldn't go home. He felt like a man excommunicated from his home town and from the one most important- most vital - to his sanity.

"I,..." Rubbed his eyes,.."I miss you too, baby. I wish I could be there."

He realized he'd said the affectionate pet name only after it had come out. Didn't care. "Soon. Soon, I promise."

"Please." She was crying now. He could tell because her voice was perfectly modulated.

"Sweet dreams, Scully. "

"'Nite, Mulder. You too."

*

Mulder had already given his sincere condolences to his client on his first visit.

Platitudes would be insulting now. He was there to look for what his client wanted: answers.

"Mrs. Allenby, can you think of anything, anything at all that leads you to believe that Donald didn't do this - besides what you know of his character."

Very, very tough question to put to anyone.

Mulder knew that. He'd had it put to him, in so many words. It had been asked _about_ him, to his face and behind his back.

//"Fox Mulder, is it? What were you and your father arguing about? Who would want to murder your father, Agent Mulder?"//

And:

//"Has your son ever been in trouble with the law, Mrs. Mulder? Can you give us any reason, Mr. Mulder, that would exclude Fox's possible participation in the disappearance of his sister?"//

Hard, painful questions arriving when your defenses were about as low as they could go. When your life felt like it had been taken over by strangers or monsters that did nothing but make the pain worse by their questions and doubting eyes.

He knew how much pain Connie Allenby was in, so made his voice soft like silk; tried to convey through it's delivery that he understood how she felt. He _knew_.

"I know this is a hard question but I haven't been able to find anything significant to explain why a total stranger would enter your house, murder your family and leave without taking or disturbing anything. As far as I have been able to determine, there appears to be no other explanation other than- "

"No! Donald didn't _do_ this, I told you. He wouldn't. He _couldn't_."

Connie Allenby was sitting up and breathing raggedly into an oxygen mask. Her chest had become congested from days of "lie still and let yourself heal".

Mulder was painfully familiar with that very same phrase. "Lie still, Mister Mulder, while we pull out this chest-tube.", "Now hold still while we irrigate your open thigh.", "Don't move for a minute so the Doctor can examine your artery line to check for clots.". Yup, he'd done the hospital tour plenty o' times himself, usually chronic bronchial infections the result for his efforts to be good and "lie still".

"I'm telling you, Donald could never have done something this!"

"But you said yourself it was dark. There was a storm that night and the power had gone out. And you were asleep. How can you be certain it wasn't Donald?"

"Donald wasn't a violent man. He was good and kind and never hurt anyone. He didn't even back out of his East-coast deal and he was losing hundreds of thousands on it. They were counting on him!"

Mulder blinked. It was the first time she'd mentioned anything of the sort. "East coast deal? What kind of deal? Did it have to do with the micro-processors?"

"I'm not sure. Sometimes, in business, it's not good to talk too much about transactions with big corporations. If information leaks, it can give competitors an advantage. There wasn't even anything on paper yet, Donald said. He didn't tell me everything but I over-heard things of course."

"What things?"

"Well, nothing. Just money talk and computer chips and things, and where he had to travel and who he had to see."

"Any names specifically? Any unusual sounding phone transactions?"

"No. But he had so many. He had to travel everywhere. England, Washington, Germany, He flew all over."

Mulder nodded, filing it away. It still told him nothing new. "Anywhere else?" He couldn't help but let part of his mind drift back to Scully and last night's phone conversation.

Connie Allenby mentioned a few more places. "Russia, once he even had to go to Van Dieman's Land. And Antarctica. I laughed when I heard him mention that one. It seemed ridiculous."

Mulder's mind snapped out of it's wanderings and came to rest back on Connie Allenby and her mourning face and tears that ran from the corners of her eyes.

"Antarctica?"

"Eh, yes. Donald laughed himself and said he guessed they needed computers in the snow too."

Mulder breathed slow and steady while his heart skipped every other beat. "And Russia. You mentioned Russia. Your husband was there? Often?"

"Yes."

Mulder rubbed index finger and thumb across his forehead. A tiny dent appeared between brows as one thought joined hands with another that made, once it was forged, an unbreakable chain.

"England too?"

She nodded.

"Did he ever mention the name Krischgau? Kurtzweil?" //"Computer chips and "things"..."//

"Not that I remember."

"Did he ever do business in D.C.?"

"Yes. I said he traveled. He was an excellent salesman."

Mulder forced a pleasant nod of agreement. "I'm sure he was. Mrs. Allenby, I'd like to check the house once more if you don't mind. Just a final going over to make sure I missed nothing."

"All right. Please tell me right away what you discover. You may think I'm just a silly, mourning wife, but I just know Donald didn't do this."

Mulder didn't think she was silly. He broke speed laws on his way back to the Allenby mansion.

He still didn't know what he was looking for but he had a hell of a lot better idea what Mrs. Allenby's dear, departed had gotten involved in. Who he might have been doing business with. He had a pretty awesome idea about that.

He had.

A hunch.

As Connie had mentioned, there was nothing in his business papers. And nothing else in the safe. Connie had assured him that the den safe was the only one. There were no safety deposit boxes that she didn't know about and those contained jewelry, insurance papers and the Allenby's wills.

He'd nodded at that information too, smiling at the trusting wife of a world traveling salesman.

There _were_ always hidden accounts, secret deposit boxes, even deals the details of which Donald would have kept from a wife who had only showed a superficial interest in her husband's business affairs.

Unfortunately he didn't have the time or the manpower to tear the mansion apart looking in every cubby-hole for what he didn't know. Nor did he have the connections to have so-and-so and Joe-Blow check world banks for Allenby's name.

The actual murder scenes themselves, however, he could check. And wanted to do so again.

The body outlines put there by the hand of the local RCMP were still in place marking the last moment of life of two children. Each asleep in their beds and totally oblivious to the respective manner in which they'd died. The equally ghostly shape of the father who had deep throated the barrel of the rifle and pulled the trigger one last time was also there in the upstairs landing.

Yeah, there was a question: Who in hell would stand at the top of a staircase to do himself in? Pretty strange spot to pick to breath your last; to eat a bullet. Pretty fucking strange.

Mrs. Allenby's bed was bloodstained but no outline as she had survived the dreadful night by managing a blood-choked, gurgling call to 911.

Mulder tore open the Allenby's senior's closets and rifled through them, looking for something, anything, that might support the tiny idea that had wiggled its way into his thoughts and wouldn't back down.

Nothing.

He checked dressers, under the bed, the safe again. The bathroom vanities, shelves.

Zero.

Wandering back into the son's bedroom,. Mulder sat down on the edge, the very edge of Dylan Allenby's four poster. He looked around at the two dimensional outline of what once had been a human being, a young man who played hockey.

Mulder stared at the blood soaked sheets, now drying. They smelled of urine and metallic, iron-rich blood.

He noticed something he hadn't before. A stain. A small stain. Not blood.

Touched it and his fingers came away wet with something. Something slick. He rubbed index and thumb together, sniffed it. No odor but it felt greasy.

The deceased child's bedroom suddenly became so much more confining and deadly. Something had been lurking here so much more frightening than a crazed father with a rifle.

Mulder had come looking for evidence to explain the murders. To try and find out why a reportedly loving father had tried to kill his entire family and himself, almost succeeding in all cases. To learn these things and then take that knowledge to the surviving wife. He hadn't.

In the end, what he thought he'd discovered was a multiple murder/suicide, just as the local authorities concluded. Terrible, yes. But a crime seen more and more often. Daily, almost, yet people still, very naturally, wanted to know why.

They wanted answers. Ones that made sense to them. As Connie Allenby did. But random violence was a fact of life. People snapped, they blew up, they directed anger. Sometimes, they killed.

Mulder had come looking in order to find any substance to Connie Allenby's insistence that her husband had been murdered along with the children, that Donald Allenby was, in fact, an innocent victim and not the man who had pulled the trigger on his sleeping wife and kids.

He'd not found that evidence.

That's what Mulder _had_ come looking for.

But tonight, he'd come looking for something else...

//"Russia, England, Van Deiman's Land, Antartica...Donald traveled..."//

Mulder had come looking for something, and - Jesus Christ -

There it was.

*

He arrived back at the hospital in time to see them draping a white sheet over Connie Allenby's body. He intercepted the man he knew had been her doctor.

Clutching the man's elbow, Mulder blurted "What's going on? When I left, she was fine, she was perfectly fine!"

Doc frowned at the contact and at the man almost yelling into his face. "Who are you? A member-.."

"No. No, I'm not a member of the family. She was my client, I was working for her, looking into this case- what the hell happened to her?"

"I'm sorry, - Mister....?"

"Mulder."

"Mulder. I'm sorry, but unless you're a family member or relative I cannot discuss details of the untimely deceased with you. If you'll step this way, perhaps we can call one of her relations and--"

"Untimely"?? You bet it's untimely. She was doing just fine. I wasn't gone more than two hours and you're telling me in that time she just crashed? Just like that?"

"As I said, unless you are a relation, I cannot-"

"There ARE no relations. They're all dead!"

"Then I can't help you. If you have anything you need to discuss, you'll have to take it up with the Attorney's at Law representing-"

But Mulder had already bolted out of the hospital and in moments was laying rubber back to the Allenby mansion. He wouldn't be too late. He _wouldn't_!

Forty minutes drive. Forty goddamn minutes! He should have taken a sample of the oily residue. He should have said to fuck with proper permission, etc. and just taken a sample and shipped it to Scully. To the Lone Gunmen, to anyone! But he hadn't. Against his better judgment, he hadn't.

"Fuck!" He cursed his own conscience. His own stupidity. Tried to blame his eight year abduction ordeal for some of his shortsightedness but that was just an excuse. In reality, he'd failed to recognize the one clue screaming at him from the murdered corpses:

None of them had woken up!

The bedrooms were spaced far apart in that gargantuan house and not one victim had woken up to the sound of a rifle-blast from down the hall. No one had dived under the bed or tried to call the police! Only Connie, a few moments later had done so, when it was already all over.

Jennifer hadn't budged and she hadn't even been shot. Why was she dead? The question had crossed his mind of course. Coroner had explained it.

People do die from shock and fright.

He'd seen it himself in South America.

But the others.

No silencer had been found as evidence. Just the rifle and a loud bitch it would have been. How could he have been so goddamn blind!?

But he'd wanted to do things properly this time around, through the right channels, build up a reputation for doing things by the book. Be a good boy and do all his homework.

Get good grades and maybe they'll let you back onto the play ground.

That had been the goal. Not erase his past from the eyes and minds of the Bureau, but at least prove that some of the assumptions about him had been wrong. He was not a rebellious nut who finally cracked under the strain. Not crazy or paranoid.

He'd been so caught up in the potentials for ass-kissing, he'd forgotten to actually-for-real-investigate the goddamn case!

Part of it was his vulnerability, he knew that. He was tired of trouble and had just wanted a few months easy haul.

But not now. Not fucking now.

Jesus! - he was out West squishing his toes in the sand while things in the land of Cancer hadn't faded, they'd probably spread! He'd had enough of hiding out in the sun and surf. Fuck the "job", he was going home. Fox Mulder was about to put himself back, back on the board and back in the game.

It was long overdue.

Mulder beat his hand on the steering wheel, willing the vehicle to go faster than the seventy-five he was already doing on the twisting, night-blackened highway and soon saw the distinct orange glow and brown billowing balloons of toxic smoke ascending into the night sky over Campbell River before he even turned into the long driveway that marked the entranceway to the Allenby Estate.

At the top, fire vehicles, flashing lights, people running every which way, and thousands of gallons of chemically treated water were not enough to prevent the century old mansion from collapsing under it's charred remains.

It went down in a Forth of July fireworks just as he stepped out of the car.

He didn't waste time asking around but found the man with the blowhorn. That usually signaled Sergeant. "Was the safe recovered?!" He yelled into the stocky man's ear.

Over the deafening noise of shattering wood and brick, water, sirens and shouting, the older man put a hand to his ear. "WHAA!?"

Cupping his hands on either side of his mouth, Mulder shouted it directly into his ear:

"I SAID WAS The SAFE RECOVERED? WAS ANYTHING RECOVERED?!"

Firechief shouted back: "ARE YOU KIDDING? I ALMOST LOST A MAN IN THERE. THIS FIRE WAS DELIBERATELY SET!"

"HOW DO YOU KNOW THAT?!"

He pointed, "The EMPTY Fifty GALLON DRUM of JET FUEL ACCELERANT WAS OUR FIRST CLUE!!"

Mulder turned away and strode to his car. He was parked under towering deciduous trees, the bark hanging off in long strips. Rare things. Trees that shed their bark yearly like snakes, the wood underneath as hard as stone. No insects could infest these. Nothing could burrow underneath and rot it from the inside-out. Not even a chain-saw could scar them.

The Allenby house, now just charred bricks and skeleton frame, groaned in the hands of the fire.

Into the night sky, flames and smoke took it's ashes to heaven.

*

Erika Lyons had just finished her Karate class. She was going for black belt in two weeks and practice, practice, practice. The parking lot was almost deserted at this time of night and the last thing she expected to see was a dark green rental Saturn roar up beside her. The passenger's window lowered and she saw the last person she'd expected to see lean over to speak.

"Get in!"

She instinctively backed up. "Fox Mulder?"

"Erika, please get in. We have to talk."

"What's goin' on?" I'm not getting into any car with a strange guy, I don't care how good looking!

"I have to talk to you. This is important. _Please_!"

She didn't move.

Whatever he wanted to say was apparently important enough for him to compromise by getting out instead. He came around to the passenger's side, looking around.

Erika also looked around, dismayed to see the parking lot as empty as it had been a moment ago. He was spooking her.

"Erika. I don't have time to explain it, but you _have_ to believe me. Forget you ever spoke to me."

"What?"

"I can't tell you any more except that I was involved with something, years ago. When I was in the FBI It was dangerous and it's followed me here. Or it was here already - whatever! - but you and your husband have to forget that you ever talked to me about Jennifer or Connie or the Allenby murders. Any of it!"

She shook her head, trying to clear it. "I don't understand, I thought you said you'd didn't think you'd find anything, so what's-"

"I said I don't have time to explain! But if you don't do as I say, you could be in danger. Connie Allenby is dead."

Erika suddenly felt the fear he was trying to instill in her. "But, she was doing okay, I heard it on the news."

"She didn't die a natural death. I can't explain to you how I know that but I'm telling you, that unless you do as I ask, you and Gary might ...be in danger too."

Erika heard between the lines. He'd been about to say: *end up dead too!*

"She was murdered? Maybe we can help-"

Fox grabbed her arm. It didn't hurt. "No! You can't. All you need to do is forget either of you ever saw me or what we talked about."

"I need more than that, you can't just grabbed me off the street and order me to shut up about something like this! I'm not an idiot, I know how to take care of myself."

"Don't you understand? The last person to speak to me about the murders was Connie Allenby and she is _dead_!"

Erika felt chilled suddenly in the hot, humid night air. "You think they were all murdered, don't you?"

"Yes. And Connie was not suppose to survive. The only reason she did was because somebody got sloppy. Now they've finished the job."

"Jesus." Whispered. "What are you going to do?" Suddenly she was worried about Mister Mulder. He was unshaven and looked haggard, like he'd had no sleep for a few.

"I have a friend, back in DC who'll help me. I'm going back. I need you to promise me you'll do as I ask. Just forget everything."

"Okay--all right. I promise."

"Jerry too."

"I said okay. I'll tell him. I'll explain, but he's going to ask questions..."

Fox took a folded paper from his pocket and stuffed it in her hand. "This is the name and number of my friend. If you have any doubt about what I've said to you, call her. She'll confirm my...character."

Erika nodded.

Mulder got back into his car.

"Good luck," she said as he closed the door.

He nodded in thanks and drove to the parking lot exit, turned right onto the main road and disappeared.

"Holy shit."

*

"Oh, god." Scully replaced the receiver.

//"Is he for real? Should my husband and I be worried? Are these people really like he said? Are we in danger?"//

Scully replayed the questions over and over in her head.

A woman named Erika Lyons had phoned her long distance at home:

//"Mulder. Fox Mulder - he was here on this murder case questioning us about it and then last night he came back and told us to forget everything; that if we didn't we might end up dead! Christ, I'm scared. He said he used to be with the FBI and this is related to it. Will you please tell me I'm not crazy!"//

Scully had assured the woman (even though she heavy-gulped through the whole conversation), that she should not be scared and to just take his word on it. Just do as he said and everything would be fine.

"Shit!" Scully paced in her living room. What the hell else was she suppose to have told her?: "Oh, no don't believe him, he's crazy." ?

No good because what if he was telling the truth? What if Mulder had not gotten "sick" again and this case of his really was linked to the conspiracy of lies? What if there really was the danger he said there was?

She could have told Erika to, yes, believe him and then what? The woman might get so frightened that she run to the police and she and her husband could just end up dead. IF what Mulder was saying was not just paranoia and the flaky remnants of a year long bout of psychiatric disturbance, the danger to those people could be very real. These Men Who Deceived did not play by the rules. They played dirty and they played for keeps.

Oh, god, Mulder, can't you stay out of trouble for just a few months?

Murdered client, Erika had said. Gutted house, burned out evidence, Mulder had told her, clutching at her arm, with bloodshot eyes.

It's happened before, Dana Scully, remember? Your very first case on the X-Files with a mystery named Fox Mulder. Burning hotel room and all they could do was watch it and all the evidence they'd gathered go up with it. But for one small item.

Which had "been misplaced", they'd said when she went down to evidence to retrieve for further testing. At the time she'd thought it strange but, oh well, shit happens.

And, Agent Scully, your next to very last case before your partner vanished? Burned out office. Everything black and curled and Mulder standing there in such grief and shock.

"Oh, man. Oh, god. Okay,...okay..." Scully forced herself calm.

I still believe him, I still believe IN him, she chanted in her head. Mulder is well now. Whatever happened on that island, he'll explain when he gets home.

At least he was coming home.

Except he had not called her yet and it had been almost twenty-four hours since the last time Erika Lyons had seen and spoken to Fox Mulder.

"Mulder, where are you?"

*

Mulder drove for five days straight, sleeping in a road-side motel twice and cat-napping in the car the rest of the time. No goddamn plane this trip. Besides the extra hours allowed him time to think.

Going home was just fine but what the hell was he going to do once he got there? How the hell would he convince Scully and begin his search? He was not FBI, he had no badge of authority.

Scully was not going to be terribly pleased (at seeing him she would be, yes), but not with his reasons for being there.

He sighed heavily. He would tell her the truth. She would just have to believe him.

*

"I don't have that proof. The place was burned to the ground...everything..."

Mulder stared at her, his eyes bright, his hands shaking. He smelled of sweat. Three and a half days after Erika's phone call, Mulder had showed up at two A.M. at her apartment, used his key and let himself in. He right away had come to her bedroom and woken her up.

It was fortuitous on his part that he had. That morning, Scully had been planning on placing an All Points Nation-Wide Bulletin out on him.

After throwing her arms around him, the explanations had started.

The Theory.

The whole Shadowy Island Murder Conspiracy right there inside Scully's Sunday Late, Late Bedroom Show.

"...I would have sent you the sample if I could have. I would have shipped you a body but I didn't have the access, Scully. I had no real authority. Connie Allenby, Connie, the woman who died in the hospital whom I believe was murdered, if I'd had the resources, I'd have gotten _her_ body to you or an autopsy report - lab results, something! - but without the proper authority, I couldn't do a damn thing. I was in another country, I couldn't just go in, wave my badge, confiscate a body and Fed' Ex' it out. She was my client and she was murdered."

Scully pushed her sleep-mussed hair back from her face. "Mulder how can you be so sure?" He was sitting facing her, twelve inches away, determined, intense and driven. It was like fifteen years had been erased from him.

"How can you be sure that the fire and her death were not just coincidences? She may have had sudden, serious complications from her surgery. The woman was shot in the back, Mulder."

"And her daughter found dead on the scene. And her son shot. And her husband, a supposedly loving man, supposedly after coming home from a supposedly successful business trip, went into his study, loaded a rifle, a never-before-used collector's piece, shoots only one kid in the spine, leaves the other alive. Then he walks down the hall to his supposedly still sleeping wife, shoots her. _Then_ stands a the top of a curving staircase, shoves the end of that rifle in his mouth and pulls the trigger with his toe! Don't you think that's an awful lot of supposed's?"

"Mulder,..." she sighed. "Did it ever occur to you he did what he did because he was insane?"

"Until I found the Black Oil, yeah."

She sighed. "You don't know that's what it was, I think it's flimsy, what you're advancing. I think it's thin. And I think you've jumped to conclusions."

Scully flipped back the sheets and found her robe. She headed for the kitchen, turning lights on all the way, better to dispel the creeping darkness. She plugged in a kettle.

Mulder followed her sudden retreat.

"Haven't you been listening? I checked that crime scene, Scully, I was there. I've seen this stuff before, I know what it looks like. So do you! It may have only been a visual examination but I found evidence of the Black Oil in three places, including the spot where the father died. It was overlooked by the locals because they wouldn't know what they were seeing and why in hell would they be looking for it anyway? It was hard to spot unless you were looking for it. It was blind luck _I_ found it."

Scully grabbed cups from rack and spoons .

But Mulder was nothing if not relentless. "Scully, I _saw_ the Black Oil, it was at my client's house, at the crime scene. I spoke with Connie Allenby. I checked the house and find the Oil. Fifty minutes after speaking with my client, she's _dead_. I get back to the house. It's going up in flames, the fire deliberately set!"

He stopped and stared as she struggled to believe him. He saw it was a struggle. "Scully, I'm not wrong about this."

She scooped powder into two cups, wanting something hot and sweet, but at Mulder's persistence, abandoned the cocoa tin momentarily, turning to face him. Crossed her arms. "Tell me all the reasons why you suspect your client was murdered? What happened on the Island?"

"It' s complicated but I think Donald, the man they say murdered his family and killed himself, I think he was being manipulated somehow. I interviewed a woman named Erika Lyons, she was their daughter's music teacher-"

"She phoned me."

"Erika. Yes, I told her to phone you. What did she say?"

"Well, she was scared, Mulder. She said that you said she and her husband would be in danger if she spoke about what you'd discussed. She sounded terrified, Mulder. _Are_ they in danger?"

"I'm not sure. I don't think so, not if they keep quiet."

Scully stared and Mulder saw it was with uncertainty. "What else did she say?" he asked.

"She said you looked anxious and thought that you hadn't slept in days." She turned and poured out two cocoa's, an extra heaping scoop in Mulder's, he probably needed the calories. Handing one to him, he took it from her hand automatically, without thought.

"Of course I was anxious, my client was murdered and her house was burned down!" Mulder saw the fear in Scully's eyes. Not fear for the case or the danger it could pose but fear for him; his sanity.

"Don't you believe me?"

Scully couldn't look at him, that sadness had the power to envelope her, always. She could sink into eyes like that and never find her will again. "I'm inclined to, yes."

"Hey, thanks." He slammed his untouched drink down on the counter beside them. "I'm taking all my medication, Scully! This has nothing to do with illness or delusion. I went to Vancouver Island to investigate a domestic case of multiple-murder/suicide. What I found was three bodies and a witness who swore the police were wrong. I followed up. I did the proper investigative procedures, I checked out the house, the background of the dead suspect and the murdered family and those who knew them. Guess what? Nothing to indicate foul play."

"But I thought-"

"At first. Then I dug further and take a shot at what Donald Allenby did for a living? His wife said he was a traveling salesman for a computer company. Scully, this man Donald Allenby sold micro- proccessors, but he traveled everywhere, China - remember China? Russia, remember that? - I'll never forget it. England, Scully. Van Dieman's land. Antarctica, Scully! When was the last time you heard of someone flying to the Antarctic to peddle 2000 Pentium's? Computer chips - nothing unusual - except he traveled to every goddamn port across this planet. And his family was infected with the Black Oil. Whether you believe me or not, I was there and I saw it. Now they're all dead. Doesn't that say something to you?"

Scully bit the inside of her cheek just so her voice would come out steady. "Yes. I just don't know what. You said that Donald Allenby was being manipulated. How?"

"I don't know. But I have an idea. I think he was involved in some way with the Smoking Man and whatever-the-hell _he's_ involved with, or used to be; this pyramid of lies that's still going on. But I think Donald wanted out. Only they wouldn't let him. But a person who wants out so deep into the game risk's the team, so to control him, they infected his family with the Black Oil, with this _medium_ which I believe is extra- terrestrial in origin. This stuff, if left in the body, eventually kills it. I think they infected them and I think they held that over his head. They have a vaccine, I've had it injected into me. They must have waved it in front of him; cooperate and we'll inoculate you loved ones. But I don't think he could live with it."

"Mulder-"

"Just hear me out! He might have been ready to speak to someone, maybe his wife, maybe his kids or the boys at the golf club but I think they had someone watching him. - they knew - so they made it look like a case of domestic violence except nobody who knew Donald Allenby believes that. And neither do I, not after finding what I did."

"How did "They" know you were even there, by the time you got there, Allenby was dead, wasn't he? How did they know you had figured it out?"

"They had someone watching him. So they were watching me."

A thrill of horror shot through her. Speculations. Theories. Leaps. So much of it sounded more like illness than truth. In the past, even when Mulder had been wrong about some things, he'd been right about others. Though inclined to believe him, she didn't know what to think.

"Okay. So what do you intend to do about it? How are you going to pursue it, prove any part of it?"

"I don't know. I'm not sure if I can in this particular case, but it was enough to wake me up. I've had enough "convalescence", I'm sick of hiding and I've walked down enough beaches to last me from here to eternity! I'm ready to work again."

She closed her eyes. She was already defeated and there was no point in trying to convince him to go into nice, simple, relatively safe

P.I. work, trailing cheating husbands and wives.

"How?" Simple question.

He had an immediate answer.

"The X-Files," he said.

"Mulder, The X-Files are gone. Our old office? - it's being used to store furniture. Those few cases that were salvaged from the fire, are packed away under lock and key. There are no X-Files anymore."

"Then you have to request to have them re-opened."

"Mulder-"

"Skinner is Director now, Scully. He has the clout. He'll do it. He'll do it for you if not for me. All you have to do is walk in there today and ask."

It was "today". Yes, Monday. Workday. "And what will you do?"

"Try to get reinstated into the FBI I'll take the exams again, I'll go the course, I'll kiss-ass, I'll bribe somebody if I have to but I'll get in somehow."

Scully looked at him. She was tired. It was late. "This is crazy."

"No, it's not. I'm not. _I'm_ not crazy, Scully. And if you think that, there's no point..."

She stared. "What do you mean?"

His animation had fallen. "If you think I'm standing here, crazy, that I drove five days straight for nothing, then there's no point in saying anything to you. Not point in me being back, not in why I came, not even in us."

Those words, god how they cut. "I see," she whispered. "Get you the X-Files, or there may be no "us"? Is that what you're saying?"

"No. I'm saying I came home for two reasons, Scully. One was to get back in the game. The other was to be with you but if you don't believe me, after all this time, all these years, after everything we've been through together, if you think either I'm lying or just crazy, then there's no trust. And I can't live without trust between us, I need that trust. Trust is hard for me but I always ended up trusting you. I still want to."

She took his hand. "I do trust you. I just don't, I'm afraid of how far you'll go with this. I'm afraid of what... might happen..."

"I am too, a little. But I have to try. I can't sit on my laurels. I don't have any, remember?"

She smiled a tiny bit at his attempt to ease her worry with humor but it did not ease.

More seriously, "Scully. I'm not ready to retire yet."

She thought about arguing more but gave in. She wasn't twenty anymore and to face what she felt the day was going to be like, a couple more hours shut-eye was still on order.

"I'll talk to Skinner tomorrow."

*

After a shower, Scully checked on her man-home-from-the-sea, gave him a light peck on his cheek and left him to sleep the morning away. It had been wonderful having him in her bed again. He'd showered, slipped in beside her and they'd wrapped themselves around each other. She'd allowed herself to forget her promise to talk to Skinner and just float in his feel and smell for a few wonderful hours.

But now she was sitting outside Director Skinner's office, trying to think of some way to convince him to re-open the X-Files. Skinner would ask why. He would wonder.

Skinner would see her face and then know.

Mulder.

Mulder wanted them.

Scully heard all of Skinner's next statements: But Mulder was no longer in the FBI. But Mulder was just six months out of a Psychiatric Recovery

Center for PTSD and severe manic depression. But Mulder was...

She practiced her answers but in reality she knew she was doing this more as a favor to Mulder than as something in which she believed. She believed in Mulder. She'd _believed_ in the X-Files. She just didn't believe in Mulder IN the X-Files. It was too soon. He was too fragile. Not right now.

And if she indulged in her most selfish wish, not ever. She wanted him whole and safe and in her bed. Not hunting or getting hurt. Not hunted.

Not vanishing without a trace.

Skinner would know all that, too. She supposed he knew how she still felt about Mulder. She supposed he knew a whole hell of a lot about both of them.

But she would ask. Mulder trusted her to ask. She'd promised him.

*

"Are you serious?"

Yup. Skinner's words were right on the nose.

"Sir-"

"This has nothing to do with tying up "loose ends" so don't try to pawn that off on me, Scully, I know you too well. This is Mulder. Isn't it?"

Scully passed her tongue over her teeth. "Sir, Mulder is going to try for reinstatement into the Bureau. He feels he will best serve in that capacity by doing what he does best-"

"If you try to sell that to the Review Committee like you're trying to sell it to me, they'll be wondering about you, not Mulder; about where your head is not to mention your common sense."

"Sir, Mulder is back in DC." May as well tell him the truth. The X-Files were dead and that's the way it appeared they were going to stay. "And he intends to re-apply to the Bureau despite his past reputation and the notations that will have to be made on his record should he be accepted." They both knew she meant his psychiatric treatment and the fact of his continuing dependence on medication for depression and stress disorders.

"He knows his status will be limited. But he needs this job. He needs a place to come to." It wasn't the whole truth and nothing but the truth but...

"What happened in Seattle?" Skinner asked her, seating himself in his padded, high back chair.

Scully pursed her lips. They hadn't made him Director for nothing. He was good.

"Mulder stumbled upon something unexpectedly while pursuing a private investigation on Vancouver Island. Uh, it was a domestic murder/suicide case. Mulder believes based on evidence he discovered at the crime scene that it was not strictly a domestic crime of passion. He feels that it may have been a...cover-up. One involving certain individuals with whom we are both familiar..."

She watched Skinner rub his eyes tiredly behind his reading glasses.

"...And that it also may be connected with a conspiracy.." Scully could see Skinner's expression change from polite tolerance to "the look". It said: "Oh, brother, here we go!"

"In other words, the Smoking man?" Skinner linked his fingers together and shook his head. "Scully, has Mulder been taking-?"

"Yes. He's taking his meds regularly. Sir, I know how it sounds but in the past, I have usually found good reason to trust Mulder's instincts. Despite his anxiety to get back into the Bureau, I don't believe this is a case of making an excuse."

"So why does he need the X-Files to further an investigation of non-domestic murder in Canada? Even if the Smoking Man were involved which I highly doubt - based upon what evidence?- the man must be seventy if he's a day. He's probably in a rocking chair with an afghan tucked around his knees, sipping hot water and reminiscing about the good ol' days."

Scully bit her lip. She stood stiff and straight, arms crossed. Defensive but not belligerent. "Mulder believes that the Black Oil may have been used on these people, to what purpose, he couldn't say but if he had access to those remaining X-Files, he might be able to find an answer."

"And if not? Will he do Audio Surveillance? Be satisfied with escort work? Transcription? Domestic Terrorism? Investigate Joe American and his Garage-Based Anti-Government Survivalist Freedom Club?"

Scully looked at the floor in front of her.

"The problem, Scully, is I alone, despite being Director, do not make the sole decisions. I have to justify myself before the Board and two other people before it goes to Lady President. Mulder and his quest - because I know that's what this is - is no longer an option. There is no X-Files Division anymore. It's been discontinued. Mulder can reapply to the Bureau. And if you or someone else writes a letter of recommendation, he might get in. But he won't be working on the X-Files. I'm sorry, but they no longer exist."

Scully heard what she'd expected to hear. Mulder would probably get back in, his record of achievement under then Assistant Director Skinner had been impressive if for somewhat unorthodox work. But there were no X-Files, as she'd tried to tell him. There were no investigations of the paranormal done now. There never would be again.

"Yes, sir. I'll communicate that to him."

*

At least he wasn't doing background checks or interviews.

But he was soooo bored.

Transcribing was tedious, thankless, and would advance his career about as fast as changing his tie on a daily basis would.

But he was back. And using whatever resources _were_ available to him to find out as much as he could about Donald Allenby and his work. Maybe it would lead him somewhere, to a starting point. The illegal stuff he could always do on his off hours, with the help of the Local Chapter of the Lone Gunmen and their magic fingers.

His side project was having them put out inquiries into the where-abouts of his sister. Not that he knew her name now, her married name, or have any idea where she lived. But he'd had computer representations of her likeness made up from as much as he could remember of their one and only meeting as adults, having the technician age her by twelve years. She had always looked young for her age and he wanted to be conservative. He also had the mock-ups done in several hair-styles and colors.

The Lone Gunmen had been distributing them over the Internet for days, setting up their mega-puter with an automatic States- based-Server E-mail-Search and forwarding program as well as distributing electronic copies to every site nation-wide that accepted jpg's of over one-half Meg'. Maybe, if he got lucky, somebody, somewhere would recognize her. "They" of course would find out about his little quest. He didn't know what they would do (if anything), about it.

But when it came to this he didn't care. "I promise to think about it." She had said after not seeing him for twenty-five years. Well, she'd had plenty of time and he wanted an answer now. He wanted that much at least before the day he died.

Did she even know their mother was dead?

Scully would be at his desk any minute. Despite the strain that had developed between them, they still caught lunch together. He endeavored to talk about things other than how much he hated his current position, about the X-Files or his little clandestine search for Samantha Somebody-formerly-Mulder.

"Mulder." Scully arrived and they set off together to the corner bistro that was, as usual, packed. Even the Snack- Bar was full.

They took their food out doors.

"How is your case?" he asked when they'd settled themselves on cement steps by a water fountain. The concrete was hot under the noon Summer sun.

"How'd you know I had a new case?"

"I heard."

Scully smiled a bit. Mulder had an amazing gift for "hearing things".

"Well, I haven't started it, really. It's a spree murder case and they're finding me an assistant, probably a profiler. I don't know any details yet."

"Spree murder? Locals and maybe a profiler usually handle that on loan from VCU. It's odd they're giving the case directly to a senior field agent. Unless the victims are high society. Who do they think is the "most wanted"?"

"They don't know, I guess that's why it came here. Plus the medical side has got them puzzled. A pathologist seemed the most efficient I guess. It's families. More than one. Similar M.O.'s."

"Oh."

Scully was surprised he didn't inquire further. That something was weighing heavily on his mind was clear.

"How about you?"

He shrugged. "What can you say about transcription? My typing has improved."

Scully felt awkward. And sad. Mulder was physically back in the Bureau but the parts of him that counted didn't seem to be there at all. There was nothing driving him. Unless he was hiding it.

"How are your inquiries into the Allenby case going? Anything new?"

"No. The case was closed. I have no voice in it now that my client's dead."

"I'm sorry Skinner didn't re-open the X-Files."

"Thanks for trying. I'm looking a bit on the side, into the Allenby thing. At least I have a job, it gives me room to breath on my own a bit."

She wasn't sure what that meant. Did he mean he had some resources at his disposal so to assist him in his private investigation or that he had room to stretch away from her? He had gone out and found his own apartment a week ago.

One week can change so much. Mulder back in the FBI. A new case on her desk, a new assistant about to arrive, Mulder in his own apartment, and five days worth of noon lunches that were about as enjoyable as double root-canal.

Seven days since their fight.

How it started was innocent. She did not want him pursuing the Allenby "case", though she hadn't said that, not is so many words. What she _had_ said were all the wrong things though, at the time, they'd felt right.

"Skinner made his decision, Mulder. The X-Files are gone. They're buried. They don't exist. Why can't you let them go?"

It had been said in the heat of her need to keep him safe because there was one thing she was sure of, if he somehow found his way back to the X-Files, it would all start all over again. She didn't know if she had the strength anymore. And, at that juncture, she didn't feel selfish for thinking that it was _him_ she wanted, and not his goddamn quest!

"Because I need a damn answer, that's why. I'm not willing to just walk away and forget it - what they did to Samantha, to you. What they did to me! I'm not saying it was them, but if they were the ones who took me, then they owe me. Big time! Eight years worth of interest. Did you think I'd come back to DC just to buy a house and RSP's?? That's not who I am, Scully."

"I thought you wanted this, Mulder?"

"What, exactly?"

"This. _This_; a home, a decent, normal, life. ME! You went to Seattle to rediscover your independence, to prove yourself. To the world, or to me. But I don't need that from you. All I need is you." She'd felt her heart drop at his pained expression at her next words that had just popped out: "But I guess that's not enough for you, is it? I guess I'm not. But you know what, Mulder, you AND the X-Files is too much for me."

"I don't have the X-Files, you just said so yourself."

"I don't think it matters. You're pursuing them anyway with this Allenby case. And if this one doesn't pan out, it'll be some other one. And then another. With or without the X-Files, you'll chase this quest, this "thing" you've been looking for your whole life, until it kills you. As much as I've wanted answers to, I am _tired_. I need some peace. And I can't just stand around waiting for this thing to destroy you. I won't just bide my time and wait for it to happen."

He'd stared at her in disbelief. "I can't... I can't believe you're saying this."

She looked down to the floor between them. Twenty feet became a canyon in the ten second interval from his last, aching word, his face expressing the breaking of something inside him, and when he turned and walked out.

She'd sat, sick to her stomach with what had just transpired, not knowing how those words had escaped her lips. She'd wanted to speak other things like "I love you and can't bear to see you hurt." or "Please be careful and come home and night."

But it had turned ugly because of her terrible fear for him. And for her doubts about her own inability to see him through anything like the death-throes he'd endured at GreenLawn Recovery Centre not even a year ago. Somehow, her heart had over-ridden her rational mind and screamed at him. Screamed so he would leave. Screamed so, if he was gone, she would not have to shoulder the horrible possibility that he might die, and she powerless to prevent it.

He had picked up his things a day later and moved to his own small apartment across town. He'd left her spare key and a note saying "I'm sorry, Scully." on her counter.

A key and a scrap of paper ending almost fifteen years of hope for her.

That was a week ago and she was still numb with it.

How Mulder was about it, she didn't know because he never spoke to her, not about that.

Lunch ended with unease as they went their separate ways back to their separate corners of the Bureau.

*

"YOU HAVE Feedback". When Mulder returned from lunch, the tiny 3-D Java Postman was dancing across his computer screen, carrying a letter in one hand and tipping his hat with the other. Some computer-Head had waaay too much time on his hands.

Mulder muted the voice-mail. He'd had to get used to using a computer all over again. So much had changed. Everything was of course bigger and better, faster and smarter than he remembered.

"This is only a 2005 CP with a hundred Gig and Tri-Di Mem' but then, you're not gonna be playing Ground Zero, are you?" The young Agent's attempt at levity had produced a bored stare and the young man had quickly demonstrated how to turn the thing on and then stormed off in a snit.

Mulder read the short letter from an unfamiliar addy'.

It was polite but to the point.

*

FOLDBACK PART II

*

Scully arrived at Mulder's cubicle to find nothing but his recently vacated chair. Very recent as it was still swiveling a bit from the motion of its owner's flight.

Scully looked and spotted tall and dark pushing out double, swinging doors into a main corridor that lead to she knew where: the Down elevators. To the Bureau basement and the sub-basement parking levels.

She knew he hadn't expected her since she'd had no intention of coming to his floor. But she was tired of the strain between them. It had showed itself again at lunch and allowed little patience in her. She wanted to rectify it, somehow and so halfway back to her own office, she'd turned heel and followed him to his designated work- space.

Even if their romantic relationship was at and end, she wanted the friendship salvaged. She wanted something of Fox Mulder in her life.

Mulder had left his screen on and Scully leaned over to switch it off when she saw the name at the top of an e-mail he must have been reading: "Fox".

No one ever called him that. In her memory, he was "Mulder". To everyone, workmates and, once upon a time, family as well.

Scully felt the slightest twinge at reading his personal mail but sat down and read quickly. Maybe it would give her a clue on his present state of mind. He had been so closed off and evasive. Even more so than in the days after their fight.

//"Fox, (it read);

I came across your Missing-Person's" E-Search. You can probably guess, then, who this is.

I had no idea you were alive. Father told me you had died years ago. I'm glad you're alive and well, Fox, and I understand your need to find me. That's why it is so hard for me to say what I must now say:

I do not want to renew our relationship. I have my growing children and their needs and what is best for them. My husband is also concerned that they would have trouble adjusting to a "sudden uncle". And it would be too hard on me as well.

At one time, perhaps... but I think, now, we would find ourselves strangers with nothing to say to one another.

Can you understand that?

We thought you were dead. I mourned for you, Fox, but I had to go on with my life and have gone on with it. It's a good one. I hope yours is as well.

I hope you can forgive me when I say I want no further contact from you at all.

I know this must be hard on you and that I must seem unfeeling but it's been too long. Too many things have happened and I'm not ready to delve into my past. I don't think I ever will be.

When I was gone, you had to learn to forget. So did I. I can't dig it all up again now.

I wish you well and hope for your forgiveness,

Samantha Mueller."

Scully closed her eyes. Oh, God.

She found him. Crept down the dusty, little used basement steps so the elevator bell would not startle him into another sudden running away.

Locating him by the quiet sobs he was attempting to stifle, she found him seated on a filthy heating duct behind the stairs leading to the next level down.

Scully sat beside him and didn't say anything for a moment but he acknowledged her presence by scooting over a foot to make room.

She waited as he tried to calm his emotions, trying to avoid the panic. He'd cry, hold his breath and be beaten as it gushed out again with more chokes.

Sobs and silence. Sobs and silence. Trying to avoid a full-blown attack of panic by controlling the emotions that caused the panic to begin with. A vicious circle that he sometimes could not talk himself out of.

Finally his breathing calmed somewhat and he was able to get out in between gulps of air: "I'm. used-to-the. attacks. Almost. But-just-not-hav-ing-them. In. public."

"I read the e-mail. I'm sorry." Both for reading it and what it's stone-hard words would mean to him.

"It's not enough. Not. after-thirty-five-years. It's-not. enough. to. get-a. brush off. I won't. I won't-accept-that."

Scully knew his hope, one of them, had been in the restoration of his family to some degree. That had been his hope since that night in 1973 when his sister was ripped away from his family before his eyes and the remainder torn asunder by proximity.

"I have. to see her."

Scully swallowed. How to say it gently? "She doesn't want to, Mulder. Why set yourself up for more hurt?"

"Because. I deserve. more-than-this."

It was true. Sometimes, though, the world didn't play fair.

"How? How will you find her?"

Breathing closer to normal, "The Lone Gunmen. Langly designed a way to extract private e-mail information. He might be able to get a street address from the Server."

The shit was just getting deeper and deeper. "Mulder. How can you be sure she's really your sister? And if she is, what will you do if she won't talk to you? Or if she won't even come to the door?"

His tears had stopped and his breathing was calmer. "Then I'll know. But I have to try. I want to talk to her, just once more."

"Once more"?"

He nodded, sniffing. "I saw her, years ago. You were still sick and I didn't want to bring it to you. Couldn't burden you with it. But she came with the Smoking Man, said he was her father, that he'd taken care of her since the night she disappeared."

Scully sat in absolute shock. "Why didn't you tell me, Mulder? My god, why didn't you tell me later?"

"He was trying to buy me, Scully, with a cure for you and Samantha for me. He wanted to own me. I didn't take the deal. And I didn't tell you about the meeting with Samantha because I didn't want to believe it."

Scully thought she understood. "You thought she wasn't the real Samantha?"

"No." He looked at her sadly. "She walked away from that meeting, Scully. After over twenty years, she just walked away. I was afraid she was _real_."

Scully swallowed the hurt she felt for him and let the anger she felt against Samantha rise.

She hated the woman. Even if she understood her, even if she could comprehend a sister's feelings of not stirring up old, dried mud or a wife and mother's feelings of keeping trouble away from her loved ones, even though Scully understood all that, still she hated Samantha Mueller.

*

"...And you are to report directly to me, Agent Mulder."

Mulder was seated before Walter S. Skinner. Not an interview, just a polite welcome to the Bureau, Skinner style.

"Yes, sir."

"You and Agent Scully will not be working together. You have your assignment and she has hers. I feel I must emphasize this."

"Yes, sir."

Skinner wrote as he spoke, rarely looking up at his "newest" Agent.

Mulder straightened in his chair. Skinner never changed. He still used his old "you're-not-indisposable-Agent-Dunzel" routine designed to put the Agents on guard against too much cockiness. It still worked. He couldn't help but feel nervous.

"Your reinstatement is probationary. Whether you stay depends upon you alone. You will be issued no weapon and due to your dependence on anti-depressants, you will be forbidden to carry arms of any kind on duty. This will be made note of on your jacket."

"Yes, sir." He had his personal fire-arm strapped to the inside calf of his lower left leg and actually felt guilty because, well, because this was _Skinner_.

"During any assignments, should they be handed to you in the future, you will not at any time venture out on your own without the knowledge of your direct superior, meaning myself. You will also be assigned a partner should the need arise during said future assignments. Should any one of these restrictions be violated, it will result in a Board of Inquiry and possibly your immediate dismissal. "

"I understand, sir."

"Any questions?"

"No, sir."

"You can go."

"Yes, sir."

Mulder moved to exit only to be stopped by Skinner's usual:

"Oh, Agent Mulder, one thing more..."

Mulder turned and respectfully waited.

"Welcome back."

Mulder stared directly at Skinner, his eyes unblinking. "Thank you, sir."

Skinner hadn't failed to note the stiffness in his old, and now new, agent. He muttered to the closed door. "Don't fuck this up, Mulder."

Still, he felt uneasy. Being Director meant having brass handles on the toilets and mints by the sink. It didn't mean ultimate power to decide what went down where and when and against or for whom.

What it did mean, however, was being under scrutiny. It meant great responsibility. It meant you had eyes on you all the time. So now, because of this step taken, so they would, too, be on Mulder whom he had literally taken under his wing once more.

Already the air felt more electric. More alive than it had been. It was Mulder-current. Somehow, when Fox Mulder was near, people, places and situations vibrated.

Skinner felt odd. Suspended. He realized after a minute, that he was listening for something. Then it hit.

He was waiting for the other shoe to drop.

*

During the week of Mulder's official reinstatement into the Bureau, the day it went on record, Scully received a visitor.

"Agent Scully?"

Scully looked up the autopsy she was performing on the most recent, unexplained dead child. Her newest assignment. Her case handed to her one week ago and just now had her work load allowed the body taken out of the freezer and thawed for her inspection.

A child of twelve, dead in his bed.

No wounds, no signs of asphyxiation.

Not even a blemish.

"Yes?" She stripped off her soiled gloves and tossed them into the disposal along with her gown and shoe-booties.

The thoracic cavity was wide open and her new young visitor made the mistake of taking a peek.

He paled, swallowing convulsively. "Ah, Agent Scully, I'm Morgan Beyer, I've been partnered to work this case with you."

Scully tried to show decent manners but her surprise showed in her face. Young. Real young. Academy-fresh. Blonde hair. Thin face. Gray eyes. Eyes determined to prove themselves.

He explained: "I'm hot off the press and they're peddling me to every department."

Scully nodded, understood. Once, many, many years ago it seemed, she'd been the new kid on the block and they'd done the same to her. Every new recruit, unless blessed with super-specified talent, were run ragged, learning the ropes through many trials and errors, bearing the brunt of the "grunt" jokes, viewed in general as just the newest poker stuck up many a S.A.I.C.'s ass.

For her, it had been less of a battle, trained as she was in pathology. However, she had still done her share of this n' that, until landing the X-Files under Mulder.

"Oh, yes." She remembered being told she might get an aid. "I was told I'd be getting a new _assistant_." He was no blinking _partner_ if she had anything to say about it. "I don't usually get cases like this anymore except when the investigations come to a dead end as badly as this one has."

Beyer looked up and down the corpse, trying, she guessed, to get used to it. Before the case was over, he'd most likely be seeing a few more.

"How many so far?" he asked.

"This makes twelve."

"Twelve? Twelve dead kids?"

"Along with but not including the accompanying murders, yeah. Nation-wide."

"Oh," he said. "That's still weird."

Scully removed her various implements of dissection from the detachable table-tray and walked them to the sink. The catch-basin was next and she could see Beyer turn green at it's contents. It was a grisly thing to see your first time, she knew, the catch-basin being where all the stray body fluids seeped down the slightly convexed autopsy table, pooling into it.

Scully heard Beyer take a couple deep breaths. He couldn't have been more than twenty-five.

"Usually, I only see the inside of his room one or twice a week."

"Well, you might be seeing a lot more of it because it looks like we got another."

Scully looked at her young and eager companion. Suddenly she felt very tired.

"Okay. I'll get changed and we'll go."

Beyer nodded, opting to wait for her outside in the hall.

They drove to the crime scene. Beyer tried to make himself useful by driving.

"You've been with the Bureau a long time," he said, not a question.

Tongue in cheek, "Oh, decades."

"I didn't mean it like that."

"Sorry. Long year."

"You were with the X-Files at one time." Not a question again.

"Yup."

"With the Legend of Spooky."

Her anger rushed in like the tide. "_Agent_ Mulder, yes, who could investigate his way around a case with one leg tied behind him, out-classing most on his worst day."

Beyer winced a little. He heard she'd been the one who'd _committed_ the guy.

"I,..uh,...look, I'm sorry. Jokes circulate, you know how it is."

She nodded once. "Agent Mulder is _still_ an agent within the Bureau. I'd appreciate it if you'd remember that. He's just had some bad luck and some illness."

"I said I was sorry." After a minute, "What happened to him?"

"Don't _those_ stories circulate also?"

"Maybe I'd like to hear the real one."

She sighed, weary of this battle. "Maybe you could ask him yourself. He been through some rough times, that's all."

"Okay. Fine. I was just making conversation."

They arrived to find the usual S.N.A.F.U. crime scene pandemonium. The press were having a field day, swinging their cameras this way and that and homing in on Scully and Beyer when they pulled up.

"I hate the press." She commented. Especially when fresh shit hit the wind, like eighteen months ago on the nightly "News-Minutes":

"THIS JUST IN: MISSING FBI AGENT Fox WILLIAM Mulder, KIDNAPPED AND PRESUMED DEAD RESURFACED LAST WEEK IN DC. DETAILS ARE SKETCHY BUT THIS NEWS TEAM HAS HEARD A TALE of WOE AND HUMAN TRADGEDY FROM THOSE SOURCES CLOSEST TO HIM..." (There had been no "close sources", only the scuttlebutt circulating around the Bureau halls and most of that gossip inaccurate and misleading. Scully had fumed as the news team's spokes-person driveled and the crap flew) "...THAT SPECIAL AGENT Fox Mulder's CLAIMS of ALIEN ABDUCTION AND RAPE-TORTURE CONFIRMED SUSPICIONS THAT The ENTIRE DISAPPEARANCE HAS BEEN A HOAX! AND The REASON BEHIND IT, The MAN HIMSELF, DEEPLY DISTURBED BY The LOSS of FAMILY AND POSITION WITHIN The BUREAU."

The later reports on "Living News", hadn't been much better. They'd made him sound about as legit' as the check-out stand's "Believe It or Not" cover stories.

Beyer flashed his badge and Scully followed suit. He would soon tire of the novelty of having a lens in his face everywhere he went.

Soon they were in the suburban moderate house getting their first glimpse of a fresh murder. For murder it must be.

Though only thirteen nation-wide thus far, three of them had now occurred in or around DC.

As most of the crime details had been kept out of the news, Scully had been careful not to drop any information Mulder's way.

These crimes were similar to his own over and done with investigation on Vancouver Island. Too similar to be coincidence.

But they were murders. Simply that. Spree killing was the flavor of the decade. Not even just Spree but Serial-Spree.

Scully wanted to keep Mulder in the dark about what her new case entailed, if at all possible. She wanted to see him rebuild his life. Have him stay safe and not running around shouting to he populous that his old nemesis was back and murdering perfectly normal families. She did not want Mulder to end up at a place like Walburg or GreenLawn ever again.

Scully also wondered what he would say and do once he did find out the details of this case, because he would find out.

Of that, she had not the slightest doubt.

Wanting to be open and honest with him and talk to him about it but wanting him safe and calm and not caring about murders, Black Oil, Cancer Man or aliens, she was a mouse caught between a cat and a trap.

It was a laugh, keeping Mulder out of things, she knew. May as well try to keep the tide from going out to sea.

May as well try to stop a comet.

People everywhere were freaking about the murders because there was no warning in the night. Suddenly whole families were dead by gunshot and by mystery.

The mystery; one dead in his or her bed, the last breath having occurred, to all appearances, in slumber, and not a scratch on the body.

Scully tugged a pair of latex gloves from a box of two dozen and snapped them on. //"I know how you love snapping on the latex."// Beyer's mention of Mulder had turned her thoughts to him and it was tough to drag her mind back to business.

Eventually, at the sight of a dead child, she managed.

No signs of struggle on this child either. White cotton pajamas. Model jet fighters dangling from the ceiling shade. School books piled on the dresser. Clothes on the floor. Dirty bowl and spoon on the side table.

"Have these bagged for analysis." Scully said. It was routine. She really didn't expect to find arsenic in the food residue. If anyone had wanted to kill this child, that would have been a very obvious and stupid way to do it. None of the other bodies had produced evidence of poison.

Beyer was interviewing the parents who were, understandably, prostrate with grief. Nothing was missing from the house. No strangers had recently been seen in the area. No odd phone-calls or visitors. No threats. No change of diet, no complaints from Anthony (the dead child's name) about bullies in school or reports of pain or illness.

Not a goddamn thing.

Scully finished her autopsy the next day and submitted her report: Death by unknown factors.

Bagged and readied the body for shipping to Atlanta. Maybe they could scare up something. Maybe some new genius just out of medical school might have a lightbulb moment and save some lives, and careers too.

Three days later another one. New York. Samples shipped to Quantico. She could find nothing in or on this child's body to indicate the reason he'd expired either. He had died. Death has a cause, if not old age and organ failure, then something else.

Mother's cause of death: gunshot to the upper spine.

All tests showed the child to be a healthy ten year old girl. Except that her heart wasn't beating.

Scully sent lab samples out to other pathology departments and labs once more. Someone better find something. Scully had her staff start wearing full protective gear as a precaution. Masks, gloves, gowns, pants, shoes, eye-gear. The whole shebang.

Something absolutely stumping the tops of the medical world was killing these kids.

*

The next day, the junior half of the team, Beyer, was pulled away to another murder in Baltimore. The corpses would be sent her way as usual.

Four hours later, Scully got a cellular call:

"Scully." she announced.

"Agent Scully, this is Morgan Beyer. I'm in Baltimore and you'd better get down here."

Scully excused herself from her one class and left the autopsy bay, pulling her hair-bonnet and eye-gear off. "Why? What's going on?"

"What's going on is your old partner - Mulder - is down here and correct me if I'm wrong but I was under the assumption that he isn't suppose to be working _real_ cases?"

Little prick! "What's happening?"

"The guy has flipped. He's spooking everyone, ranting something about our stiff being his sister! I thought he had no family?"

The shit was hitting hard and fast. Mulder had found out, somehow he'd found out and sooner than she expected.

Now he knew what her assignment was all about and fuck, fuck, fuck!!

Scully hoped Beyer was making this call in a private location. Bereaved family's usually didn't appreciate graveyard lingo. "Just tell me what he's doing? How'd he get in anyway?"

"I don't know, claims he had a tip but I think he bluffed his way. But he's demanding to see the crime scene and pissing everyone off, including the on-site S.A.I.C.!"

Oh - fuck. Scully stripped off her gown and gloves. Gathered up keys, Badge, gun. "Look, Morgan, I need you to do something for me--" Tucked her gun in the waistband at her back.

"What? I'm going to have the Beef-Squad haul his loony ass out of here is what I'm going to do!"

"Beyer, please! This is important. Consider it a professional courtesy to me, as my "partner"?" She bit her tongue on the damn word.

Beyer was silent for a few seconds. "What?"

Scully was in the elevator to the parking level. "I need you to isolate him. I know this sounds strange but that woman just may well be his sister..." No God! Please! "...I don't have time to explain, but he's been looking for her for years. Make it clear to the S.A.I.C. that Mulder did come there on an anonymous tip. Okay? Are you listening?"

"Yeah, but-"

"No! Beyer, if I have to kickback half my paycheque to get your help on this I will. Please! Just do this for me? If Mulder says he got a tip, then he got a goddamn tip! Get him in a room somewhere in the house, handcuff him if you have to and hold him until I get there."

She was in her Explorer and flooring it.

Beyer cursed. "Okay. I'll bullshit the S.A.I.C. You are gonna owe me for this." He closed the connection.

You only have one lousy S.A.I.C. to sweet-talk, she grumbled silently, I have Mister Federal Bee-Aye-Director.

Enroute to Baltimore, Scully broke the sound barrier. She hadn't driven so dangerously fast since the Bus-Station. Since the day of Mulder's return.

*

Scully briefly examined the woman who in all likelihood had been once-upon-a-time Samantha Mulder, long missing sister to Fox Mulder. She had been shot once in the spine.

She steered a wide path around the local Coroner currently on site and the S.A.I.C. who to all appearances had more on his mind than a few extra badges. The cameras were rolling outside the home and he was all sunglasses and "That's classified, ma-am's".

Scully located Mulder in a small bedroom. He was sitting on the end of the tiny mattress. He was not handcuffed.

"Scully." was his greeting.

"You don't seem surprised to see me."

"I knew they'd send for you. You're the Spook-Buster."

"You want to tell me what's going on?"

She received his explanation in a mix of horror, worry and terrible sadness for the man telling it.

"They killed her."

Scully's heart nose-dived. "Who?" She hadn't seen or spoken to him in many days.

"Them"! She's dead and they murdered her."

"Mulder. I'm going to go and find Agent Beyer. Wait here."

He nodded.

It was De-ja-vu. He was on the verge of hysteria. Mulder's brand - small tight, words spoken through visions in black of Why?-Why?-Why?! He was near breakdown.

Scully located Beyer in the house's kitchen nook and he told her the story. "When Mulder arrived on scene, he started arguing-"

"-Arguing? Not screaming?"

"No." He looked sheepish at his previous exaggeration over the phone.

"He argued with the attending detectives and the S.A.I.C.. He wasn't suppose to be here."

Professional jealousy. Envy maybe. The "I'm New and eager to suck on my S.A.I.C.'s dick"-edness. Interfering Genius/Spooky legend not wanted.

Scully returned to Mulder and shut the door. He was on his knees breathing in and out in great, ragged gulps.

Scully had him rest his head on the floor, forcing his lungs to constrict and reducing the air-intake volume. After a minute, his lungs took the hint.

She imagined he was trying to quell the mind-altering sight of Samantha with a six inch hole between her shoulder blades.

One child was in school and being located. The other was missing. Husband - being tracked down by the local PD.

And Mulder was now a full-fledged, bonafide orphan without a soul to call his own.

Scully didn't care who might have walked into the room or what rumors it might ignite, she encircled him in her arms and rocked while he sobbed those great tears reserved for such a day and revelation.

He had no family anymore.

"It's my fault, Scully. It's my fault she's dead."

"Mulder, no-"

"Yes. Yes, I contacted her. I wouldn't leave it alone, they killed her because of me."

Mulder-" Helpless because she really didn't have anything to offer that made any better sense. Two spree murders, each having been touched by Fox Mulder just prior. Coincidence again?

"I understand why you didn't tell me about th-the murder details, Scully. I don't blame you."

She sighed. Felt like a traitor.

He didn't seem angry that she'd tried to protect him. "Did you see the Black Oil?" he asked.

"What?"

He pulled an evidence bag out of his pants pocket and held it to her nose. A smear of greasy residue on the inside.

If that's what it was. "You snuck this off the body?"

Nodding, "You have to get this tested, Scully, and do the autopsy, and get Skinner to get you complete jurisdiction over all these cases. I don't get it. Why now? Why kill her now? Why not all those years ago?"

She didn't get it either. But she'd try. "We'll figure this out, okay, Mulder? We'll figure this out..."

* In the basement, doors and cupboards were being swung wide and inspected. A storage closet under the staircase was opened. The FBI drone in black and orange jacket stepped back, choked on his words for a split second only.

"Hey!" He yelled into his Radio and up the staircase too. "Get the S.A.I.C. down here now! And the M.E!"

He closed the gap again, and touched his find very gently. His radio crackled. "S.A.I.C. SAYS: WHAT-DID-YOU-FIND?"

"A kid, man. A fucking dead kid."

*

Scully, hands clenched into fists all the better to strike them with, strode into Skinner's secretary's office.

Even the secretary had an an office! Mulder didn't even have a proper desk.

He'd gotten back into the Bureau but no X-Files. Transcription work instead and grinding his teeth at the cubby hole assigned to him. He'd been swallowing his pride and muling it.

It had been too good to last. Not after she'd seen the set in his jaw and the gleam in his eyes that first night back from Seattle. He had wanted back in and he was in, on auto-pilot and hating it but biding his time. Until yesterday.

He'd wanted the X-Files. She knew how determined he was. She knew he would do anything to get them.

He'd also wanted CancerMan. His sister was dead and Mulder's whole countenance said he believed Cancer-Man responsible and now he'd do anything to get _him_.

When Mulder had waved that evidence bag, thrusting it into her face like a child with a trophy, she'd done the analysis and come up with : Heavy-weight diesel oil molecularly altered by exposure to radiation. Millions of Rads of radiation and it had come leaking out of Samantha's corpse. Mulder had begged his Superiors to let him in on the investigation, citing his belief that the woman found dead in American Suburbia might be his long lost sister.

A DNA screen would prove that one way or another. But the evidence Scully held in her hand as she sat outside Skinner's office only proved the presence of diesel oil found at the crime scene next to the body. She was here to convince him otherwise.

*

Mulder's quest to find his sister was done. It was over.

Nothing else had stopped him so they killed her. So simple a solution she wondered why "they" hadn't thought of it before. She supposed the reasons for keeping her alive had out-weighed the possible risks of Mulder finding her and her confessing the whole damn thing (whatever the whole damn thing was) and he blowing it up in their faces.

For years he'd searched. A life-time really. Even those closest to him had lied and hindered, making his pain sharper yet setting his soul even more unmovable on that goal.

Even his mother.

Fox had gone to her, injured, sick, seizing, angry and tired. He wanted the truth, for once. Finally.

Even his mother had proved a liar. Refusing him peace.

~~Scully watched Mulder drive off in a screech of tires.

What had happened?

She padded up the staircase where she'd seen Teena Mulder bid a hasty retreat after her fight with her son.

Tapping on the door from behind which the noises came, it swung open.

The noises were clear. Sobbing.

"Mrs. Mulder?" Scully walked in slowly, peering around the corner. Her entry into the room caused the gray-haired head buried in the hand-embroidered cushion to look up.

"Did he leave?" she gasped it out between shaking of shoulders and great intakes of air.

Scully crouched in front of her. She had no idea what had been discussed but it looked like it hadn't gone shit hot.

"What did Fox ask you?"

"Questions again. Demanding I tell him everything about his sister, about when Samantha was taken. And now questions about me. But I couldn't tell him anything."

Couldn't or wouldn't, Scully wondered. "Did he say where he was going?"

Teena Mulder wiped her eyes with a Kleenex. "I couldn't tell him what he wanted to know." Her voice held an edge of hysteria. "He said he'd find out, one way or another, about Samantha, about his father."

"What about his father?" Mulder's father was dead and buried.

"It's all falling apart. All over again." Teena seemed to be volunteering information at random, or unburdening an old and stinking soul rot that she'd inherited from her marriage and then, in turn, had passed on to her baby boy a long time ago.

Scully took Teena's hands in her own and squeezed. Maybe if she let the woman talk, she would say something that Scully could take to Mulder. Something that would mean something to him, even if not to her. Something that would save him from himself. A dove of hope to pass over the black grief that painted his doorpost. Truth the mother for some reason couldn't bring herself to tell her son, but would perhaps say to a stranger.

"I shouldn't have let it happen." Teena stated.

Guilt rears its death-dealing head, Scully thought. "I don't know what you mean."

"I can't tell you anything either, Dana. I can hardly remember that night. All I know is I lost my baby girl and now I'm losing my son too."

Scully's chest constricted. "If you want me to help him, you have to tell me something. Something I can give to him. He needs to know, he needs hope."

"He's going to find out the truth from someone else."

One by one from the jawbone, this was. "I don't understand."

Teena started to cry again and her breath was fast. Too fast.

Scully made her lay on the bed and brought her a glass of water. Sat there with her. Teena drank the water but continued to make little sobbing noises. But at least her breathing had slowed. Her cardiac-ing would just about nail the lid on Mulder's mental and emotional coffin. If he lived to see it.

"Teena. Fox is recovering from a head injury, a very serious head injury, and he is not himself."

"A head injury?!" She bolted upright, a look of horror on her face.

Scully elaborated only slightly. Wanted to but didn't say; "Because of his wonderful childhood experiences, he let a doctor drill a hole into his skull and apply electric current directly to his brain tissue," she said instead: "A procedure, he's suffering seizures from it. He's in danger."

Teena started and covered her face with her hands. "Oh, my god. I slapped him."

Scully drank that in and tried not to react. It wouldn't be the first time, she thought.

"I hit him so HARD." Teena gasped out a sob, dreading that she'd added to his injuries when he'd come looking for a bit of healing.

Scully felt terribly tired, looking at this woman and seeing a sample of the turmoil with a capital "T" Mulder had called home. Scully found it exhausting, being here. What had it been like with the whole group together? How much worse with Samantha gone and Mulder living it on his own?

She tried to sound more confident than she felt. "I'm sure he's all right." *For now. As long as I can find him. Stop him.* "Can you tell me something to help him, so he won't undergo the procedure again. I'm afraid this obsession to find his sister will kill him."

Teena shook her head "no", back and forth. Emphatically to show she meant it. She was lying.

Not even to save your son? Scully thought. "May I ask, why you hit him?" It was treading very delicate family ground, but she needed to keep the woman talking.

"I don't want to lose my son. If you can help him...get through this." she bit her lip and answered the question. "I hit him because he said things about his father and about me. Do you know anything about our family?"

More than I'd like to. "Yes. I know that you told Fox that it hadn't been your "choice"."

Teena had calmed considerably and sat up. "Fox has been asking the wrong questions."

Scully looked at her curiously. "What do you mean?"

"The right question is why not HIM."

"I don't understand. What are you talking about?"

Teena's lower lip quivered and her eyes spilled over but she remained relatively calm. "I can't tell you anything except that Bill HATED Fox. For years. And it was all because of me. It was my fault that Fox was left behind. Bill made the choice in order to punish me."

Scully sadly shook her head. The Mulder family album was a crossword puzzle with pieces missing. Here are the edges. Now fill in the middle.

"I don't understand any of this." Scully was weary of answers that were not answers. No wonder Mulder never went home for Christmas.

Teena took Scully's hands and held them so tight. It was a grasping to connect. She stared into the eyes of the younger woman. "If Fox finds out the truth about Samantha, and I don't mean where she is, I mean why it was her at all, it'll kill the last connection I have with him. Just like knowing what I did, what it's brought to this family, killed me twenty-two years ago."

Dana raised her voice. "What are saying? Will you please say something to me that I can understand?!" God-damn the woman! "Are you saying Mulder might die if he finds the truth??" Scully thought. Has Teena known that all along and still allowed him to search?! Did she really find it more important to maintain the lie than save her son??

"Yes. What's left of him. What's left after -"

After this all began, Scully silently finished for her.

"I can't help him, Dana."

Scully, just for a moment, saw the whole picture undraped. Saw things, she felt, the right way around. It was so simple, really. And then she remembered Mulder's question, the one he'd shouted at his mom through the door where they had walked, leaving Scully to be hidden from their eyes but still plainly sharing in it. *"WHO IS MY FATHER?!" And the answer: "Why? So YOU can kill him again?!"*

Teena Mulder clearly blamed her son for her ex-husbands murder.

"WHO IS MY FATHER?"

"?

Scully could now guess what Mulder had, with the help of a few holes drilled into this head, at that time remembered.

But did he completely understand what he'd remembered? Scully didn't think so.

And she thought she knew now where Mulder was going.

Scully understood more than she wanted to.

All these terrible lies and whispers of the Mother. The fists and belts of the father. Two gods in a war over the fate of its progeny.

It made her sick to her stomach. It made her heart ache.

"You mean you won't." Scully was surprised by the venom in her voice but she'd said it. And now she'd finish it. "You son is strong. He is alive and breathing and living. He has a career and a long life ahead of him and he has me."

Scully's pitch and tempo increased. Her words coming faster and angrier. "He might seek for the truth the rest of his life but it doesn't matter because it is NOT what he is."

She stood up like she wanted to jump out of her skin. She wanted to get the hell out of there. And she no longer felt sorry for this woman.

Teena Mulder was speaking of her own son as if he were a walking shell with no human filling. Good God, had she ever cared more for what was standing in front of her eyes? About him, instead of looking behind? Looking behind had to be - must be - so much more painful. No. Mulder had become the invisible child. A beast of burden; he was to Carry On. But he hadn't, really.

He'd been sent away and grown up - smart as it turned out. And he'd started digging on his own. First with mom and dad, then in the face of their silence, with just himself.

Now nothing else mattered except finding out this great Truth putrefying in the family Tomb. Their hiding the stink had just made him sniff harder.

Scully saw that he was living, not a life of his own, but a quest that had sprung from the deceit and hatred long borne on the backs of his parents. Two adults who, intentionally or unintentionally, had made their son a hairshirt.

He was their walking, talking Living Guilt.

And so disliked. Hate something and one can dismissed it from one's conscience. And something dismissed as unimportant is eventually discarded.

Scully thought of these things and he anger blew up. "Unearthing or not unearthing this "truth" about Samantha, about you and his father, or about himself will change nothing! Mulder will still be who he is and I am so sorry you cannot see that. What are you going to do if he does find out all the dirty little secrets? Watch him fall apart? What the hell good are secrets or truth!? YOU know all the answers and look at _you_!"

Teena stood up, red in the face. "How dare you?! Get out of my house!"

"Listen to me. Fox is sick, he's hurt. He could die tonight! I am sorry that you worry more about your dead husband and, forgive me, Mrs. Mulder, about your missing daughter AND about your own guilty conscience than you do about your own son, who came to you tonight desperate for help."

Teena bristled and stepped forward. "I can't tell him, it'll kill him!" It was a last ditched effort and it fell into the dead air of a sad and sick house with no good memories. Within the confines of the room between these two women where a thousand moral miles were stretched.

Two women, one in shadows, one in light. One clinging to death and hate like a time-honored shield into the past. One unencumbered with regrets, satisfied with present and what good strong future might be made of it.

She, Scully, would do whatever she could to keep him alive and breathing and hoping. "No it won't kill him. What it would do, with help, is allow him to begin healing." Scully stopped herself, her fury spent.

"But how he heals is not so important as that he does. Because I can help him do that." If it's the last thing I do.

Time to go. She walked to the door but stopped at its threshold. "Even if you know this truth," she said over her shoulder, "it doesn't matter. He does. Just him."

"Miss Scully!"

Scully turned back.

"You think you know my son!" It was not a question. "You think you know me or anything that's happened in this house or what's happening now!"

Scully looked at her sadly but listened. The woman, having wasted so much energy and lost opportunities clutching regret and grief, deserved at least to defend herself.

"You think you know all the whys."

"No, I don't think that. But I know, myself, that they don't count as much as Mulder does."

Scully saw her straighten tired shoulders. That one gesture spoke of a life time of mistakes too old to repair. "Yes, he counts. Please." She was pleading. Begging. "Go after him and stop him before they decide that he doesn't."

Chills tracked up and down Scully's spine and she had left that house.~~

Samantha's disappearance had, somewhere inside, cut Mulder a wound and for decades he'd bled from it. He'd tried to find his healing bandage. Tried to find her.

Now Samantha's death had widened that gash in his heart and he was dying. Inside. That's what frightened her. Samantha had been _the_ search, _the_ answer, _the_ goal for so many years and now he had another: Revenge. Something to feed the hollow.

That's the thing that scared her most about Mulder being back and his sister being murdered. It was a deadlier pursuit and now he had some resources to pursue it.

But this search had to end, she thought. It had to end. It must end.

Mulder was, however, presently pursuing nothing except resting overnight at Mercy General.

"Agent Scully?..."

The secretary's pleasant voice brought her out of her private thoughts.

"..Director Skinner will see you now."

"Sir?"

Skinner motioned her in. "Agent Scully. What's this I hear about Mulder?"

"Agent Mulder has been admitted to Mercy General."

"Is he..?"

"He is recovering from extreme exhaustion and stress." I hope.

"That woman really was his sister?"

Scully nodded. "Yes. The DNA screen confirmed it. The husband cannot be located and the one remaining child has been sent to the husband's parents. They are making the memorial arrangements."

"This is...incredible. And very, very sad, I'm sorry. How is Mulder handling it?"

Scully was anxious to tell him the truth about that but said "As well as can be expected considering where he is. I wanted to talk to you about this. About the crime."

Skinner motioned for her to sit down and she did, opening the file and handing him her analysis. "This is a chemical breakdown of the substance found adjacent to Samantha Mueller's body. It is chemically altered Heavy-Weight diesel oil. That in itself is not unusual, heat can accomplish that, and does, given sufficient time. But this oil has been altered by exposure to radiation. Extremely high, lethal doses of radiation."

Skinner glanced at the, to him, written-in-Greek formulas and looked up at the woman who'd penned them. "Is this suppose to signify something?"

"No. Except that I cannot find an explanation for why it was at the crime scene. Neither can the County Coroner."

"What does Mulder think it is?"

"Mulder believes it...is extraterrestrial in origin."

"Mulder believes that about most things."

Scully heard the exasperation but at least he was listening.

"He also contends that this substance is the same that he discovered at the scene of the multiple murder on Vancouver Island, Canada. The case he was investigating there, where his witness was murdered and the house and everything in it burned."

"Did he get a sample of that "oil"?"

"No. He failed to do that. But Mulder thinks he knows the origin of this Black Oil and that there's a connection between it, the children and the murders."

"This oil has only been found at - what - two sites? What kind of connection does he think there is?"

"It's believe he's hunching, but according to him, these murders were committed with almost the exact MO The only difference is, the husband in this case wasn't home. In fact, he cannot be found. In both of these cases, this substance was discovered at the crime scene. And, strangely enough, a dead child, the son of Samantha Mueller, was also found at the scene. The circumstances around the scene of his death were different, but in every other way, his death matches exactly the cases I've been working on with Agent Beyer, deaths the press has labeled "God's Children", in reference to science's inability to find a cause."

"Where does he think this is leading?"

"If Mulder's hunch is correct, I can only make guesses at the reasons behind all this. One week ago, Mulder received an e-mail from his sister stating her reluctance to renew any contact with him. Naturally, he was very upset. He tried, two days ago to make contact with her in person, but the address supplied to him turned out to be bogus. Now his sister's dead. Maybe they thought he wouldn't take no for an answer and maybe they thought that if he managed to make contact with her, that she'd somehow lead him to "them". I don't know, this _is_ just speculation. But the fact is, Mulder gets close to something and someone dies. Children are being found dead. In this most recent case, both things have occurred. Maybe the next one to die will be Mulder."

Skinner drew in air. Conspiracies, lies, deaths, Black oil, "Them", extraterrestrial influences, and right there at the center of it: Mulder. "What are you proposing?"

"Re-open the X-Files. Let's try and find that answer. Let him get some kind of answer."

"So why? So he'll be satisfied? Scully, you know as well as I do that won't be enough. This could be nothing more than bizarre coincidences. But Mulder is the world's last Davey Crockett. He wants justice, he wants everyone to be able to eat apple-pie on Sunday. But the world's not like that, Agent Scully. If I didn't know better, I'd guess that Mulder's on some kind of personal vengeance quest against the Smoking Man. Tell me if I'm wrong."

Scully placed the sheet back in her folder.

"Sir, there is something going on. I don't know what but I believe it involves the case in Vancouver, _this_ case, - his sister, sir - murdered less than a week after he contacts her, her son dead like so many other children, the same way, with no evidence to show the manner of death. I believe that whatever is going on involves this substance, this Oil. It involves

Mulder. It may involve his _life_."

"How?"

"I don't know. What I do know is we have two cases of murder where Mulder was indirectly involved. We have this substance found at each murder site..."

Scully's voice started to rise along with the fear inflating inside.

Skinner knew. It was fear. Mulder was in the hospital and she was scared about that. So believe him. His theories. Believe anything if it would get him a clean bill of sanity and have him leave that hospital room sane.

Scully was pitching facts his way, one after another. Enough of them, and she would convince herself. "We have a child abducted at age eight. We have the fact that she has been kept alive with the Smoking Man and that knowledge kept from her brother, from Mulder. We have Mulder's water poisoned. We have his father murdered - my sister murdered! We have my abduction, my cancer. We have a history of things that make no sense but, sir, somehow they must make sense! And now we have a woman, Mulder's sister, a forty-three year old mother of two, Mulder's long lost sister Samantha, with a hole in her spine, a dead son and an evidence bag of Black-Oil-Something retrieved from her murdered body. And then, sir, we have Mulder, gone for eight years. Don't you think this," she thrust the folder at him, "has something to do with _that_?" Thrusting her hand out against empty air and the shadowy atrocities that had massed up to heaven. "Can't you see?!"

By the time she finished spouting her frustration and anger at what was happening around her, things that she couldn't understand or control, Skinner had moved out from behind his desk and taken her hand.

Scully felt herself pulled along the length of his office and out into the hall through a side exit, one he rarely used. They stopped in front of a waxed, handle-polished wooden door and he inserted a key.

Scully read the sign. "Sir, this is the executive washroom."

"Hmph." Skinner grunted, opening the door and pulling her inside.

"Sir? This is the MEN's executive washroom."

"Excellent observation, Agent Scully."

Skinner locked the door from inside with a turn-bolt and guided her firmly over to a urinal until her back was against the wall next to it.

Skinner depressed the knob and water trickled down to wash around the blue deodorant disk sitting in the bottom.

He placed his arms on either side of her and leaned in close. Whispered in tight tones but not angrily, "Pretty tough to bug a urinal."

"Yes, sir," she said.

He continued: "Scully, do you think I'm with "them"?"

The question looped her, "No, sir. Of course not."

"Then do you think I want to see Mulder dead?"

"No, no, I-"

"And do you think, Agent Scully, after fifteen years, that I don't care what happens to you or Agent Mulder? That I support what's happened to him and you or what may be happening? That I intend to sit back and ignore it?"

She looked down, ashamed at realizing that, yes, that's what had gone through her head as she was reciting her anger point by point regarding the whole pack of murdering, morally bankrupt liars.

Subdued, "No."

"Then listen to me. I have doubts about the whys behind these things, but it doesn't mean I'm turning a blind eye to them. And it doesn't mean that I won't try to help you or Mulder. Do you understand that?"

"Yes."

"Then pull yourself together. You can't come raging into my office shouting at the top of your lungs.. If these things are what Mulder thinks they are; if it's the Smoking Man or someone like him behind it, they may be listening. They may be watching you. Or me."

"Yes, sir. I am. I'm together now," she said, turning her face away from his proximity and his cologne mingled male scent. "I'm fine."

"Scully..."

Scully felt him embrace her. So comforting. So calming. She wrapped arms around that waist. Was it wrong to love two men?

She spoke, shaking, into his shirt, into his strength:

"Th-they took my daughter. They took Emily. Stole her body. There's no evidence. They killed Mulder's dad and Melissa. Poisoned Mulder, tried to burn him. There's no evidence. People infected with Black Oil, being murdered - Mulder was infected with it. Men with no faces burning people. But there's no evidence. Children are being killed. His sister is dead. Never any evidence, any proof. No one believes, no one knows or understands..."

Skinner tilted her face up. "I know. I believe. _I_ understand."

"They kill everybody," she said, terrified of who that might include next. "Mulder..."

"Not if we can stop them," he said and kissed her very tenderly.

*

The sex had been exceptionally satisfying. Physically.

She'd multi-orgasmed and the high of their anticipation and release had sent her emotions on a road trip to Eliseum.

But her encounter with Skinner's substantial cock had also left its aftermath of numb disappointment in her own weakness.

Because no matter how much she cared for Walter Skinner, she loved Fox Mulder.

Wasn't together with him. Didn't look like she was going to be but she loved him with a passion that turned ears from common sense.

Skinner was stability and strength and kindness and she felt like a whore because she'd used him to get what she wanted, some freedom from worry. She never thought of herself anymore, not for years it seemed, and their noon hour of lovemaking had given her leave to do so. He had used her too but she realized his motivations poured from a far more noble cup.

Mulder was an injured soul. Even all those years ago.

Only now, it was exposed to all the gawking eyes of the believers and the non-believers alike. Shown to her but she loved him anyway. Despite everything.

To spite "them" even.

She hadn't made love to Skinner, she'd fucked him. There was a difference. When she'd kissed him, it was a thankyou for saving her sanity and life that day and a request that their sexual merge be delegated to the deepest recesses of both their minds; that it never see daylight again.

Skinner was not unworldly, he knew Scully had offered her body as payment and as place to sluice away some of her turmoil. He had no illusions that suddenly she was in love with him. Mulder had still been there, in every grind from her hips and every moan from her mouth.

After dressing, fixing her make-up and hair, she'd kissed him once more. With that last kiss, she'd kept her lips drawn and tight. Mouth closed.

An unmistakable goodbye.

*

Scully entered Mulder's hospital room and immediately felt guilty. Not because she'd fucked Skinner, but that she'd liked it. She'd suddenly found herself tonguing and groping and wanting Skinner, if only to stave off the terrible fear that had gripped her when first seeing Mulder in that house of Samantha's death, hunched over, still and helpless like a piece of ancient sculpture, the features worn blank by weather and harmful hands, sinking into the soil made unstable by one too many storms.

That had frightened her to the marrow. Her core that had seen him conquer so much. So many things that would have felled a lesser man.

The murder of one woman, though, a stranger to him, really, had toppled him from his foundation of well-fired steel.

Mulder was lost to her. She was invisible to him in his grief. But with the evidence of the Black Oil, he hadn't asked her for any personal help. He hadn't wanted her company. Not for weeks, she realized. Their noon hour lunches had been his attempt at apology perhaps, for many things.

Things had been strained, now it appeared as if the band, stretched to a thread between them, had broke.

Her desperate need not to be alone, even for a while had lead her to Skinner and his welcoming, inviting arms.

Skinner had even understood when she had not wanted to talk afterward. She had dressed, thanked him.

He'd held her hand. Without speaking he'd asked her "when"? "Would WE be only this day?" he'd wanted to know.

Scully'd kissed him, chastely on the lips but hadn't answered.

She didn't know.

*

She'd already talked to the doctor who'd done the physical exam on Mulder. Not an especially thorough one, their interest lying more so in Mulder's mental state.

Physically they'd come to the extraordinary conclusion that he had two working lungs and a heartbeat. Blood sugar down and blood pressure up. Too much work, too little sleep and too few calories.

But mentally:

"He's suffering extreme emotional and mental exhaustion brought on I'd say from severe fatigue and stress. I think it best he remain under medical care for now, considering his history."

Scully had _big time_ concurred with that. Now there was just the task of talking Mulder into staying put.

He looked terrible. She painted on a smile. "Hi." Leaned over the raised railing.

"Hi."

Hollow sounding and it scared her.

"Mulder, the doctor's think you should stay here a day or so. You're going to end up sick if you continue to push yourself."

"Sick-sick or nuts-sick, doctor Scully?"

"Mulder-"

"The last time you told me it was temporary, I was benched for a year."

"We're not going to do this, Mulder, we're not going to go back and pick apart everything that was said and done and why."

"Did you test the sample?"

"Yes."

"And?"

"Heavy-weight diesel oil, molecularly altered by exposure to extreme radiation."

Mulder raised his head as far as he could off, the pillow. He was, she realized, too weak to sit up on his own. "Samantha was infected. She may have been a long time ago, since the beginning..."

"Mulder-"

"Listen, Scully, that could be why she refused to talk to me or go and see Mom that night. She was being controlled all along. We have to arrange to have my mother's body exhumed. I want her tissue's tested. I want Sam's body quarantined until we can determine what the Oil may have done to her body-"

"Mulder, her husband's parents have already made arrangements for cremation. They are allowing no further examinations."

He fell back. "You think I'm being paranoid? You've seen these murders, Scully, you're one of the agents assigned to the case. Are they like anything you've ever seen before?"

"No, but that doesn't mean the Smoking Man is behind it all, Mulder."

"The Black Oil, Scully. He knows what it is! And he knows what's happening. If we could find him..."

He broke off, seeing her sad face looking at him. "Never mind, I'll find him myself."

"Mulder, I want you to stay here for a couple of days until you're rested and feeling better. Then we'll talk about this some more."

"I'm not going to stay here! Every day I waste lying around, more are going to die!"

He struggled to sit up, pushing himself with both arms. He immediately looked worse.

Scully pushed him back down. He was so weak he had no choice but to fall back.

"You don't have a choice."

It broke her heart to see his face, "What do you mean by that?"

Scully hated this. She hated this case. She hated what it was doing to him and what he thought it was doing to others. She hated his sickness and prayed it was not what she thought it was, that it was only his tired body.

She hated that she'd let him to go to Seattle.

"I mean that if you stay here voluntarily for observation for a few days, and get well, then you'll be released on Friday."

"Friday? That's _four_ days."

"Well, you're about that much behind in sleeping and eating."

"What if I don't voluntarily stay?"

At her silence, his face went from anger to devastation. "You'll have me committed again. That's it, that's what you'll do? Fucking sign on the dotted line."

"I don't think you're in a state of mind to understand how ill you are. You're underweight again, Mulder. Your dangerously weak. In Baltimore, two agents had to hold you up so we could walk you to my car ."

"I was upset, my sister had just been murdered!"

"I know that. In the car, on the way back to DC, I couldn't rouse you at all. When you finally woke up, you were doubled over in pain from your hernia. Your blood pressure is up. The doctor says it's the stress and I agree. You need rest. I'm going to make sure you get it."

"You have no right to do this."

"I still have power of attorney and I'm not going to let you kill yourself."

"Remind me to talk to my lawyer about changing that A.S.A.P.!"

Unfazed, Scully went on, but hurting inside. Hurting! "This leave of absence is compulsory. By the Bureau's mandate and mine."

He turned his head away. "I don't believe what I'm hearing. I don't believe it."

"I'm not doing this to hurt you, I love you." Under the circumstances she knew it sounded lame as hell, even if it was the truth. The taste of Skinner was still in her mouth.

"I'll remember that when they strap me down for the night."

That stung. Through her watering eyes, she could see him shrink away, as though her presence burned. She could see the pain in his eyes that refused to look at her and the expression of face that told her they might never do so again.

"Please don't shut me out, Mulder." This changes nothing between us, she wanted to say-promise-vow. But such words would not have been welcomed. They would have been received as a lie. Maybe they were a lie.

This case had destroyed him - them - already, and it was just beginning.

It might be his last investigation. It might be the last of anything for him.

"If you value your job at the Bureau, you'll stay put."

She known the risks to him when he had decided to so quickly go back to work. Once a person suffers a nervous break down, it can occur again more easily, because the ability to endure is compromised, the ability to shake off stress reduced. But she thought the type of job he had chosen would keep him relatively safe.

Laughing now, without humor, she wondered at her own naivete.

Mulder never shook off anything. He never compromised.

In or out of the hospital, this case was going to undo him. H would drive himself until it ended.

*

The next day, Scully learned Mulder had checked himself out. In Mulder-eze, that meant he'd gotten hold of clothes, probably belonging to some poor buggar down the hall, and made a get-away.

He didn't go to work the next day or go home either. Scully checked with all the usuals. If he'd been with any of the Lone Gunmen, they didn't own up.

Felt a vague but fearful disquietude.

But she didn't have time to dwell on it. Her own case with Beyer demanded her attention and the dead kids kept coming. And the parent-corpses with the holes in the spines and the lack of left-over heart pieces inside.

Enroute to yet another spree-killing - the press were having a field day with the monograms: "Spree-Killers strike again.", God's Children cases baffles FBI", "Seventeen Families Nation-Wide Die Horribly.", "Inspired by Manson, Man Claims to be the Leader of Death-Cult; FBI receives manifesto from Madman." and the list went on. - Beyer got a call on his cellular from yet another claimant of the deeds. Scully used her own to phone for back-up and they proceeded to the location.

"Where is it?" Scully asked.

"Station 23, it's an old subway they cut off and shut down when the area it's in went to slums. There's just empty buildings over there now."

"Back-up should be there about the same time we are."

Neither noticed the dark sedan following them a block and a half back.

*

They stood together, Beyer and Scully, ground-level, outside the station.

Minutes went by and no back-up.

Beyer's cell' phone trilled.

"Beyer."

"Come now, or I'm leaving."

It's the UnSub, Beyer mouthed silently to Scully.

"We're on our way." Beyer said, hoping he could stall.

"You're here already. Do you think I'm stupid? Thirty seconds!"

Beyer pushed "end". "He's taking off, we can't wait for back-up."

Scully looked dismayed but decided.

"Okay." Scully didn't mean to sound like she was lecturing Beyer but she did want to exit that subway station in one very much alive piece. "We go in to the bottom of the stairs only. Me first."

"Why you?"

"Because I'm the senior agent and I said so." And she didn't want any greenhorn bursting in there and scaring this guy off, if this was their guy or one of them.

They entered the cracked, duct-taped double glass doors, passed by the old ticket vendor booths and paused at the top of the old wide stairs.

"This could easily be a trap, Beyer."

"We could also lose this guy. Even if he's not our guy, we'll be getting one of the annoying wanna-be's out of hair and off the Bureau's call-in-line."

"No heroics. If he doesn't play by our rules off the bat, we're outta here and we wait for back-up to arrive. Clear?"

"Yeah. Let's go."

Scully proceeded down the stairs, Beyer right behind her.

She turned on the landing, checking to see if Beyer was still there. He was. More stairs descending into shadow, but beyond the shadow, a feeble light. She was at the bottom of the stairs and then stepping out carefully into the tiny overhead light. Old florescent still miraculously flickering, but threatening to extinguish itself.

She heard and thump and then a heavier thump. A whump!

"Beyer?!"

No answer.

"Beyer!"

Silence.

"Come with me." A voice said.

Wannabe? Sicko? Lunatic? Their UnSub??

"Where are you?!" Scully strained to see into the dark passage ahead of her. "You are under arrest, come out with your hands up!"

Scully heard the tiny click of metal on metal. Scully recognized it as a Safety on a handgun being released. Her partner- Beyer? Who the hell-?

She shouted over her shoulder, "Beyer?!"

A figure, not Beyer, weapon held between both outstretched fists, stepped from the staircase into the light.

Scully squinted, but could distinguish only a gray silhouette.

"Scully!"

Shit! "Mulder?!" She saw him slowly advance. He was carrying a weapon. Wasn't suppose to be carrying one. Wasn't suppose to be there at all. Not in the field. Not with her. "Stay there!"

He didn't. She didn't know how the hell he knew where she'd be.

"Mulder, have you been following us?"

"Yes."

"Mulder - Goddamnit! - you're not suppose to be in on this investigation. If Skinner finds out, you'll be disciplined, you could lose your job!"

"Better that than you." Mulder had ignored the best course as usual. Now they were both targets, even so, she was glad he was there. Maybe they'd get out alive.

"You should be in the hospital."

"You think I was going to snooze and watch you chase this murdering bastard with "Mr. Academy" back there?"

"He's a good agent, Mulder, just inexperienced."

"Not anymore."

"What do you mean?"

"He's dead."

"What?"

"Someone cold-cocked him. I couldn't find a pulse."

"How long have you been here?"

"You think _I_ did it?!"

"I didn't day that. But how did the UnSub get by you? Is there two?"

"I don't know but I find it funny that the Bureau would assign to a wetback like Beyer such a high profile case, don't you?"

When Mulder saw Scully with her weapon aimed into the darkness just beyond the feeble ceiling light, he pointed his sights in the same direction.

"Come out into the light!" He announced to their mutual: Subject, Unknown.

Despite his career being shot to hell with this violation, Scully loved hearing his voice. Things had, in a way, folded back and they were partners again, chasing down a suspect, working in tandem, covering each other's asses, finishing the others thoughts...

"Are you okay, Scully?"

"Yes," she said, gun still trained into the darkness. "I heard him speak. He's over there, can you see him, Mulder?"

"No."

Shit. Neither could she and it was a stand-off until someone moved.

"How did you know he was here?" Mulder asked.

"A tip on Beyer's cell phone from someone claiming to be the Spree-Kills-Leader. It's a game to him. We called for back-up but couldn't wait." She was rambling.

Tension.

"What was funny, Mulder, that he was assigned to this case, or to me?"

"Both. You should have waited for back-up, Scully, you could be dead!"

"Beyer _is_." She reminded him, her "new" partner of two weeks lying back on the stairs, with a crushed skull most likely.

"I don't like this, Scully, something's wrong."

Scully nodded. "I'm beginning to think you're right. Where the hell is our backup?"

"I don't think they're coming."

"What?!"

"I think this was a set-up. I think this whole thing smells. Your call for back-up must have been intercepted, I think we're waiting for something else."

"What? Why?"

"I don't know, I just get that impression. Call me gun-shy."

Scully had to laugh. "You want to know what I think, Mulder?"

"What?"

"I think I'm glad you were spying on me. I think I'm glad you're here."

She didn't have to see his face to know he liked hearing it. "Maybe your paranoia is rubbing off on me, Mulder. If so cut it out."

Mulder's smile widened but quickly he turned his attention back to the serious. Nothing moved in the shadows.

"Come out of there!"

"Mulder? I don't think he's there anymore."

"He has to be."

Dead silence but for their own breaths.

"Something's very wrong here." Mulder said and it sent shivers up her spine.

That's when her UnSub stepped out of the total darkness and into gray shadow. Smooth features. Blank face.

"Hold it right there!" Scully ordered.

Mulder didn't see the shape behind _him_. He didn't see the movement of the thing that bubbled out of the indefinite curtain that divided shadow and light. The thing that took shape behind him out of the dark.

Scully glanced over to see what Mulder was doing.

She did see....something. "Mulder!!"

Her glance gave another something time to advance. He did so, in a movement so lightening fast, Scully thought it inhuman. Nothing moved that fast. She'd at first the impression of something faceless.

Now she saw that he was merely wearing a black wool mask with holes for eyes.

Scully found her gun whipped from her hand before she could blink.

The UnSub stepped back, far enough that she would not be able to tackle him. Holding his own gun on her, aimed directly at her forehead, he pointed her own weapon in Mulder's direction. It was a preparation of something worse than if he had put the gun to her head and fired. He was going to shoot Mulder.

Mulder was still standing but Scully couldn't know that Mulder's eyes were squeezed shut. His face and hands trembling with the effort of some terrible internal battle as the man or thing stood before him.

Mulder let out stifled groan but did not move from where he stood.

"Mulder? Are you okay?!"

No answer.

Scully would not look away from him now. He was shaking from head to heel. He might fly apart. The other form stood next to him. Mulder didn't move.

She heard a click and faced forward. Her UnSub had put on the safety on her weapon.

Heard a cushioned cracking sound, like the snapping of a sapling's branch. Turned back.

"Mulder? Mulder?!"

"Don't bother." A cold voice from the shadows said. "He's not going to get up again."

Her UnSub stuffed her weapon under his shirt.

Scully hadn't seen him being struck down, but Mulder was lying on the concrete, unmoving, in an untidy pile just beyond decent illumination.

She wondered if Mulder was dead. The dark form was bending over him.

She called, "Mulder!" Didn't care of they shot her for it.

Mulder was a still, gray lump.

Shock and horror, the sight of him fallen and maybe mortally hurt; unprotected and vulnerable, made her heart hammer painfully. That life might be bleeding out of him and Doctor Scully on the scene but helpless, caused an aching in her throat and, in her physicians soul, a knife. But she could not be a healer this time.

Terror over what was transpiring beyond her ability to see it clearly, Scully turned to her UnSub.

"What did he do to him!?"

Before she had time to speak Mulder's name again and before she found out, a suffocating weight slammed her against the rough wall and her hands were roughly tied. Again, she had hardly seen the movement before it occurred.

"Why don't we just kill them?" The Cold Voice from the dark asked. Toneless. Icy.

"Because that's not what they want. Help me with her. Leave him. Is he still alive?"

"Yeah."

"Then get over here."

Was it the red fire behind her eyes or the stinging of her arms being yanked behind her back that blurred the image, but was that figure in the dark a man? The outline of him was indistinct, faded at the edges; where man began and darkness ended.

It was made moot when a blindfold was tied around her head and a gag around her mouth.

"MUUUULDER!" she yelled as loud as her muffled lips would allow.

They were taking her away. If he was dead, she would not breath again.

Scully made two mental observations as she was dragged away, both thoughts birthing a feeling of an uncontrolled dive into the unthinkable:

Somehow she was as involved with this - whatever in God's name _THIS_ was - as Mulder was, if he lived.

And:

She was about to find out the reason.

*

Precious, irreplaceable seconds.

Too long!

Mulder didn't even pause to think about it. His every intention was to rage into whatever was happening at the bottom of those stairs and bulldoze whoever was doing the bad shit.

And it was not the alleged UnSub. Mulder was positive the call had been an invitation from another source.

But if it were the UnSub and Scully were harmed, Mulder would empty his gun, and if the nameless scum's head popped open in the process, he'd cheer. He might grind it into the concrete himself.

But that's not what happened.

What happened was when Mulder came upon the scene in the subway, Scully's gun trained into the shadows, his legs simply halted him where he stood.

Things rarely went the way one imagined.

They exchanged words and puzzled questions, just like old times.

Then, when he saw Scully's small body blocked by the bulk of a larger one for a split second, Mulder tried to fire but couldn't.

Fingertips began to itch, then burn and then were on fire. He wanted to pull the trigger but couldn't. He couldn't even bounce the weapon off someone's head because his grip was locked.

"Get away from her!" He'd squeezed out the words between clenched teeth and knew they were lost before they ever reached her.

When Scully gasped in some nameless fright, simultaneously a painful blow from somewhere made Mulder reel to one side.

Something cracked and he was tasting blood and toothchips.

But no voluntary motion would come from his body. He was held back by nothing, no one touched him, yet he was caught. He stayed.

"So help me, if you lay one dirty finger on her, I'll blow you to pieces!" but it was only his mind screaming and the threat was made impotent.

Mulder's head snapped around as another blow made contact. Stars spun but the pain kept him conscious. He buckled under another terrific strike from above, falling to his knees, blood spilling through his hair and down his face to stain his white T-shirt red.

He heard nothing more from Scully.

Unable to do anything but gasp and fall over, it was a hated sound. Felt gritty concrete. It smelled of old gum and cigarette butts.

Tried hard, so hard, to stay awake, to get up, to run, to help his partner who had screamed and then stopped. Who was being taken away. Who might be dying.

Mulder could do nothing however but pass out.

*

"Hey, man." A greasy teen in combat fatigues wiggled a black booted foot in the prone man's face.

Mulder groaned and sat up, regretting it immediately as his head swam and his stomach gyrated.

Held his head, hair sticky with congealed blood. He tenderly touched the area he figured had been clobbered and felt flattened globs of blood on the top left side. It had dried enough to have formed a "skin" and probably wouldn't bleed anymore if he moved slowly. Ignoring the more curious than concerned youth he staggered, feeling top heavy, to his feet, using both extended arms as levers.

The pain was way worse now that he was vertical. He didn't know concrete could buckle like that. The subway threw him some pretty cool moves as he stumbled over to the stairwell and found his way outside.

His cellular and gun were both gone. Figures. He'd bought both himself. Not Bureau issue.

With some luck, a phone booth appeared about a half block away and he dialed "0" and gave all the particulars of badge, location, incident, stressing in particular the need for an APB on Agent Dana Scully and the "son-of-a-bitch" who had her.

Oh, yeah. And an ambulance. Mulder slid down the booth's glass sides, landing on his butt. He was suddenly very sleepy.

*

Mulder woke to the tick-tick of the high heels and perfume.

Scully! He opened his eyes. His LEFT eye - the right didn't join in, and blinked to compress the mucous in it. When he did, Scully vanished.

He'd thought he was depressed before.

It was, instead, the mother of Scully. He wished so hard that she'd turn into Scully his heart hammered.

Mrs. Scully was here to blame, he knew. To cry and ask how and why. Why Dana, Why my baby girl? Again? Why me?

He was prepared for the few dozen why-didn't-you's and why-couldn't- you-have's that she must have stockpiled.

Mulder wasn't about to close his ears to any of it. Especially not the why-couldn't-you-have's. He'd sure as hell like an answer to that one himself. He figured he deserved whatever verbal assault was coming. It would be a continuation of the conversation he'd been having in his own head anyway.

Except she just stood there looking at him.

Mulder waited but all was quiet on the front, it seemed.

Mulder saw two feminine hands resting on the bedcovers, clenching and unclenching. Maybe he could offer her a "Squeeze-Ball". They were popular with stressed-out exec's. People often gave them as gifts.

He used to have three.

Or would she be content with clamping them around his throat? Better to just keep quiet.

His head felt like an over-ripe melon, his jaw ached, his right eye was swollen to a slit. His body hurt pretty much from the neck down. And Margarette Scully being there did not improve his prospects for walking out the hospital intact.

He supposed he should say something , but all he could think of was to say sorry. Pathetically inadequate. It might even be received as insulting. "Ah, Scully got kidnapped (again). But look on the bright side, at least her life's not boring."

Against common sense, Mulder tried to move his mouth and gasped at the shriek of protest from the facial muscles and tendons that cramped painfully.

That was it for the speech test.

*

Margarette Scully had hesitated outside the sick room. *I will beat at him and scream Dana's name until he is deaf!* She wanted to finally vocalize her hatred now that things were at their worst. She wanted him to know that she blamed him for being here where he could be warm and safe. A place where he was being fed and nurtured and cared for.

Having convinced herself that she hated him thoroughly, she swept through the door to the bed.

But the swollen black and purple bruises and the temple covered by gauze padding and tape, caused all the hurting words she'd rehearsed to self destruct before she ever got them out. She'd come to toss a few verbal grenades but could not pull a single pin.

A terrible depression overtook her instead. The feeling one has when faced with utter futility.

"I read the report you filed, Fox." She taken the pin in her teeth at least.

Margarette Scully had only really met her daughters partner a few times.

When Dana used to speak about her work or her partner, those rare times she did speak, it was only a few sentences at most, sometimes frustrated words, sometimes admiring and kind. But never enough information for Margarette to get a clear picture of the man, so her opinion of him had swung from the generous side of the pendulum: someone she imagined as sound and honorable and a good friend to her Dana, over to the critical: a flaky, self-centered son-of-a-bitch.

Her son Bill had fueled the negative every chance he got.

But she also remembered a man who had never given up searching for her daughter when Dana went missing the first time.

Margarette had never imagined - ever - that there would come a second.

Her knowledge of Fox Mulder centered around the effect of his partnership with her baby girl, and how often had that association brought harm?

And always Dana had defended him, spoke out for him, protected him.

What kind of man was he to have such influence? At first study, they went together about as rightly as ketchup on cheesecake.

Upon closer inspection, it became clear there was a force at work. They seemed to be a balancing act. Two people who had been thrown together by no choice, but discovered they filled each one a void in the other. A meld had occurred over time. Occasionally thrust apart, yes. Eventually a drawing back of one to the other again; like a craving each felt, yet neither quite understood.

A pairing that somehow, just worked.

The way a light socket is a finished product; it has it's defined purpose but not much use. But screw in a lightbulb...

Margarette heard his panting. He was in pain. He was awake and looking at her. She saw a slight movement from him and the distress it caused. She saw the pain in his eyes like that in her own.

Behind the black and blue was a handsome man who enjoyed relative health when he wasn't decorated with bandages and tubes.

When no one was pounding him.

Margarette was certain Dana had not told her the half of the cases she'd investigated at Fox's side. Nor of the inherent dangers under which she had been placed over and over again.

Yet Dana was a grown woman and Margarette had learned a practiced restraint when it came to her youngest. Interference in Dana's life and choice of vocation was a NO. Absolutely. Non-debatably.

Dana had never tolerated it.

She had been a fiercely independent and self reliant young girl. Displays of affection had been received and given, reservedly, but displays of dependence had been rare.

Where Melissa had been whimsical and flighty, speaking of freedom and love, understanding and harmony, Dana had discussed natural order and biology, science and substance.

University, Medical Doctor, Pathologist, FBI Agent - SPECIAL FBI Agent Dana Scully. By the age of twenty-nine, she'd become a distinguished and accomplished career woman in a dangerous job.

Now, at forty-three, Dana was in love with this man lying in the hospital bed. A man who'd tried to save her daughter.

Dana would tolerate no interference in that omission either.

Certainly it was a dangerous occupation these two people were in.

But why did it have to be Dana who paid this time, too? Why Dana again?

Margaret's countenance was one of near perfect control, behind all the clenching of hands and teeth.

Her fury at Fox returned. And she felt sorry, but she had to tell him. She was Dana's mother. She had the right to be angry.

"It should have been you, Fox."

The man on the bed stirred again, his eyes opened, foggy from from the cocktail of drugs he'd been given. He stared for just a minute. Had he been awake? Had he heard her?

Her face must have said it all because he nodded.

Margarette Scully's soul didn't feel any fuller. She felt no righteousness at her words of vengeance.

She hugged herself and wept silently, eyes shut tight against her words and his face and all of it.

Then she pulled up a chair to his bedside, took his hand in both her own and held on to him for her dear life. And his too.

"You'll find her, won't you, Fox? You'll find her for me."

*

Skinner's work had just begun when his office's side door opened and in walked-

"What the hell do you want?"

"Good morning to you as well, Director Skinner."

Skinner slammed back his chair and stood to face the pale, sagging flesh of the once upon a time "Smoking Man".

Now it appeared that "Barely Breathing Man" was more apropos.

"Why?!"

CancerMan knew precisely what he meant. "What makes you think I had anything to do with Scully's abduction?"

"Because that's your style."

"I see. Well, I can assure you that neither I nor my associates have harmed Scully in any way."

"You're lying."

"How can you be so sure?"

"Because that's also your style. And I'm sick of your style. I'm sick of your lies, I'm sick of your old stink invading my office, and you know something? I'm sick of you."

"We must come to an understanding, Mister Skinner."

"I'm through having deals with the devil."

An ironic twist of the mouth. "Ever read your bible, Mister Skinner?"

Skinner sat, opened a report and started reading it. "Not lately." Not caring to hear anything more.

"Pity. There are lessons one can learn from it. For example, did you know that even the Devil himself transforms into an angel of light occasionally?"

Skinner looked up contemptuously, "Is that what you are?"

"What I am is a man who can help or hinder. But it depends upon so many things. I thought you were a smart man. I'm surprised you haven't yet figured out who your friends ARE."

"What's that suppose to mean?"

"You disappoint me. Perhaps you should show a little more gratitude."

"For what? You have nothing I need."

"Let's be clear, Mister Skinner. Your agents depend on you to lead them, to assist them to discover the truth."

"So?"

"So I depend upon you to assist them, and to continue to guide them to the correct sources for that truth."

"What truth? Yours?"

"The only truth there is."

Skinner stood and circled his desk, he'd had his fill and closed the distance between them.

They were almost touching noses. "You must have aced double-talk 101. I never seen you help anyone but yourself. But I'll tell you what I have seen. I've seen Agent Scully almost killed twice over, both times I am certain directly or indirectly by your hand. I've seen Agent Mulder nearly driven to murder and madness through chemical manipulation and to all intents and purposes dead more times than I can count. I've seen murder and misery brought into their lives and the lives of others.

And I've seen you manipulate and use me to further whatever-the-hell it is you do for whoever-the-hell your "associates" are. In short, I've seen nothing but death and grief come from you. And all this because why? Because one man wanted to find his baby sister."

"All things would have been in their acceptable time, if it were not for what we have discovered."

"Discovered what? You think you have everyone and everything in your pocket? You believe you can control destiny, invent the future?"

"It's being done as we speak."

"You're a sickening old man with a twisted ego. You make me sick. Get out of my office!"

"You have a small mind, Skinner. Small minded men usually don't survive in the long run."

"Now you're threatening me?"

"Merely stating an unfortunate truth."

The old man, for is what he was now, walked carefully toward the main door, pulling his oxygen tank behind him.

"There is a storm coming, Mister Skinner. And there are new players. I'm sure Scully understands this by now."

Carefully maneuvering the oxygen tank, precious liquid life, out passed it, he shut the door behind him.

*

FOLDBACK PART III

Enroute into Parking Level Two:

His cellular trilled for attention. "Mulder."

"Fox Mulder?" The voice was familiar.

"Yes, this is Agent Fox Mulder. Who's this?"

"Ian Moss. Do you remember me?"

"Uh, yeah-yes, I remember you. Can I help you with-"

"You can help me nail the murdering pricks who murdered him." The voice on the phone was distraught.

His breath hitched in his throat. "Who murdered who?"

"I need to see you, I'll come to DC if you want me to. But they're closing the case after a only a week. Some son- of-whore killed Gary."

Mulder tried to remember who was who. Gary had been the hefty cop and lover to Ian Moss. Ian - his former nurse in his former mental home.

He shuddered. My entourage.

Mulder parked and got out of his car. "Gary's been murdered? What happened?"

"Can you come to Boston? I'll pay for your flight, hotel, everything, but I need someone...someone who gives a damn because those homophobic assholes won't even take my calls anymore."

"Uh, Ian, I've got my own case right now-"

"Please, Fox - Mister Mulder. I don't have anyone else to call. No one will talk to me."

Tried to keep the reluctance out of his voice. Sighed. Can't you spare a day for the guy who pretty much saved your life? Mulder cursed his conscience.

"Listen, I have a couple of meetings but I'll fly out early this afternoon and home tomorrow. We'll discuss expenses later."

Ian let out a breath he'd been holding. "This means a lot to me, thanks."

Mulder closed the connection.

*

Skinners Office.

"Sit down Agent Mulder." Assistant Director Walter Skinner motioned to Mulder.

Skinner noted the bruise on the right jaw. The shiner. The hair that had been clipped shorter than the rest across the left side of the top, where the stitches were.

Stiffly, Mulder sat. "I-must-inform-you-that-you're-in-deep-shit", Mulder heard in his head.

"Agent Mulder, you know there is going to be an inquiry into the events of Wednesday night."

Mulder just nodded once. "I have a debriefing in one half hour."

"I know. And I'm sure you know that the report you filed with this office, a copy of which was provided to the local jurisdictional authorities has left some unanswered questions."

""I wasn't suppose to be there. I wasn't suppose to be carrying a weapon. My being there may in fact have compromised the situation and put in jeopardy the lives of two field agents. My presence did not prevent the murder of one agent and the kidnapping of another"." Mulder summarized.

It was what the debriefing would be all about.

Skinner tossed aside said report he'd had under his nose, "Alright. I guess I don't need to tell you that as it stands, it doesn't look favorable for you. It looks as though your actions may have contributed to the circumstances surrounding Beyer's death or Scully's abduction by the UnSub or both. There is also some speculation..."

"What?"

"There is speculation not only about Beyer's death, but your arrival on the scene just prior to it."

"They think I killed him, is that it? Do they also believe that I split my own scalp, that I nearly broke my own jaw? Sounds pretty implausible to me, what else do they believe?"

"Mulder, if you're not prepared to answer at this Inquiry, it'll not only finish your career in the Bureau permanently but you could be brought up on charges for the violation to your probationary status and who knows what else. Those violations in conjunction with the death of a Federal Officer are an extremely serious matter. I called you here because I wanted to - off the record - ask you to explain to me the circumstances leading up to Scully's abduction."

"It's in the report. It's the same as Thursday. I didn't lie in the hospital for a day thinking up something better."

"I just want you to tell me what you think happened, off the record. What happened to YOU."

Mulder's first answer was a frustrated headshake. "What you want to know is why I let Scully get taken when I could have stopped it. Why I LET her be beaten and abducted, that's what you really want to know. I filed my report and my honesty is questioned. I tell the truth and people hear it as lies. If I, right now, sitting here, made up more believable sounding bullshit, would you believe it?" Mulder answered for Skinner before Skinner could get out a peep. "No, because what I reported sounds like an X-File."

"Is this part of an X-File?"

"I don't know. But if these assertions of what occurred that night were coming from anyone else they might be believed without question. But because it's me, they are questioned without belief. We both know why, sir. Because I'm not Agent Mulder, I'm Spooky. Former psychiatric patient and all around general F-Up."

"So everyone is out to get you?"

Mulder's guts heaved. "No."

"You may not believe me but as implausible as your explanation sounds, I'm inclined to back you up and not because I'm your boss. But because during the years you were in my department, I believe that you never lied to me about something that was crucial; about something that I needed to know for the good of another agent. And that's more than I can say for myself. I was hoping that there was something more, something you'd left out that I could take to the Sub-Committee before the Inquiry date."

"I'm sorry. There's not."

"Fine. Your report stands as it is. You're on your own with this one, Mulder."

"I'm aware of that, sir."

"I'll do what I can within the boundaries of this office, but I can't take sides."

"No, sir."

Skinner closed the thick file on his desk. "What do you intend to do?"

Mulder didn't answer directly. "I'll be out of town this weekend, but all my calls will be forwarded to my cellular."

"You're leaving town, Agent Mulder?"

Mulder thought he heard the implied in Skinner's words: Scully's been kidnapped and you're off on a weekend trip??

"It's strictly personal. And I'll deal with my guilt my own way, sir, thanks."

Skinner's color deepened but he kept his cool "Your trip has nothing to do with the current investigation?"

"No."

Mulder stood, on shaky legs he was surprised to feel. He put his hands on his hips and looked at the edge of Skinners desk. Skinner waited for the last few sentences he knew were forthcoming from Mulder. He had learned to spot these mannerisms, and what they meant.

"I've thought about it every hour since it happened. It's true what they say, that if you think about something long enough, examine it, question it, pick it apart, pretty soon, it doesn't stand up under the scrutiny. I learned that at GreenLawn. Off the record?: My memory is unclouded and detailed as to what happened to Scully in that subway, and I told the truth about it. I saw and felt what happened to me. I remember _what_, but do I know - really know - for certain who or what caused it? Why I couldn't stop it? No. No, sir, I really don't. But I have my suspicions and I'm going to find out. I'm going to find him and I'm going to find her."

"Vigilante justice will only make your own situation worse."

"Better than no justice. Which is what will happen with that son-of- a-bitch. He won't even suffer a rash over what he's done. And I'm finally going to get my answers."

Something boiled up inside Skinner. ""Your" answers? You have exclusive claim to the truth? Maybe you should stop thinking about your own satisfaction and start thinking about Agent Scully's life!"

"I haven't slept for being unable to stop thinking about that!"

There were a lot of things Skinner wanted to say to this younger man. This man he saw who, on top of his integrity to ferret out truth and justice, also carried around a chip on his shoulder the size of the Washington Monument. He wanted to say them but not where they were standing. The walls had teeny electronic ears.

"Agent Mulder," Skinner stood up suddenly, "come with me, please." Skinner spoke through his main office door to his secretary: "Kim, Hold my calls, I'll return in five minutes." He strode passed Mulder and ignored the agent's comment:

"Only five minutes? I take it this is going to be a short and sweet ass-kicking?"

Skinner lead Mulder through his side door and to the Executive Washroom.

Mulder saw the door Skinner was fitting his key into. "Are you promoting me, sir?"

"No, but if I have to listen to anymore of your crap, I'd like to do it in the appropriate setting at least." Voice tight as a piano wire, "Step inside."

He steered Mulder over to the urinals. Mulder raised his eyebrows at his boss's odd destination. "Gee," he looked in the bottom of one, "We don't get pretty blue disks in our urinals."

Cocky adolescent! "Shut your mouth, Agent Mulder. I want to know what the hell is up with you?"

"What do you mean?"

"Scully's gone, Agent Mulder. She's been kidnapped by a friendly neighborhood psycho. No word, no demands, not a goddamn clue despite there being an eyewitness!"

Mulder colored red at the implication. "I didn't get a good look at him! I was busy getting my scalp retreaded!"

"SHE's GONE! For the second time! Now doesn't that bother you just a little?"

"What is this - "The View"? Of course it bothers me, am I suppose to justify something here? It bothers me! It bothers me right through one side of chest and out the other. It bothers me that she was partnered with a fresh faced kid on the verge of puberty! It bothers me like hell that in order to find out what she was being lead into I was forced to do penny-ante spying on her!"

"You sing the tune, Mulder, but I find the lyrics hard to believe, because you have an awfully funny way of showing it."

"What the hell is that suppose to mean?"

Skinner set his jaw with words he'd wanted to say for quite some time. "It means, after all Scully did for you, after all she's done - your therapy, breaking her own bank, standing up for you - when Greenlawn gave you your walking papers, the first thing you did was buy a one-way ticket west. Now, is it just me, or does that seem like some pretty piss-poor gratitude?"

Mulder stared back defiantly. "I tried to get a job here, I had to find something, get on my feet-"

"You're lying, Mulder. Out of curiosity just after you left for Seattle, I checked with Recruitment. No record of one Fox Mulder re-applying to the Bureau last year. You could have gotten back on then just as easily as you've done now. Your little vacation in sunny Washington State was a goddamn escape. You tucked your tail and ran! You lied to Scully, a woman you claim to care about. You know, I always thought you were a bit selfish, Mulder, but not when it came to her. I'm beginning to think that I was mistaken. So, as I said, you have a funny way of showing it."

Mulder, hands on hips, looked away, stared at the gold-painted wall, turned back. "Is this off the record, can I - can we consider this a strictly personal conversation, man to man?"

"Anything's possible."

"In those five years, _Walter_, I came to respect your opinion but - FUCK YOU!"

He spat it out hard in Skinner's face.

"You think I liked what I did? I had nothing to offer Scully. I still don't. Despite that job, I felt like I was going down for the count; making a showing. And we both know that my career with the FBI right now is nothing more than punching the clock. You think that's what I want to bring to Scully? You think that's enough? I have nothing to give her and you think I'm happy with that?! Did it occur to you that if I _am_ a lost cause, if I'm destined to fail, that I might not want to drag her down with me!?"

Skinner blinked, mentally kicking himself. Mulder was pale and sick looking. He hadn't slept in days and had been clearly ripping himself apart inside since that night for his failure to save Scully.

You didn't see him because Scully's all you've been able to think about, he told himself.

He could do no penance for his cutting words other than to hear Mulder out. He let the other man speak uninterrupted.

Whose first words long ago inscribed with gold on a heart somehow still beating behind that thin, shaking chest.

"I _love_ Scully. But I have fuck-all to offer her. No life, no family. She'll have no kids now because of her association with me! She has a career, a good one." Mulder stopped, panted a little for a second and walked away, half turning back to him, his face a tale of misery.

"I owe her my life and she deserves everything. The best. And maybe if - when - we find her, that'll turn out to be you and not me."

Mulder swallowed deeply. Skinner watched him struggle to form the next few sentences while, it seemed, resisting the urge to scream or slam his head into the wall. "And if it turns out that way...then I will walk away and be happy for her. It's not about me, Skinner. It hasn't been for a long time. I know how other people see me and I know how Scully does. I spent five years learning that and another two re-learning it."

Skinner winced. What had it been like - really? - to have gone through what Mulder had been through? Just how terrifying? Eight years in a prison would be a test of character for most men. It was a thing that took people to the limits of endurance. Most came out scarred in one way or another, and it was usually permanent. Life was rarely the same for them after. Not normal. _They_ were not normal. Not unlike battle fatigue or shell-shock.

Mulder had come back alive. Now his battle seemed to be with himself.

"Yes, I want answers. I want these cock-suckers to _pay_ for what they've done to her and to me. But I will never do anything to compromise her safety to get those answers. And I will do anything I have to get her back."

Mulder sagged. Hands at his side. Wrinkled suit. Rumpled heart.

"So don't think you can look at me and know the deal. Who are you to pass judgment? You don't know a goddamn thing!"

Skinner wondered if Mulder was going to make it through this one. He looked ill, he might tumble into a million pieces before him and Skinner did not want that.

Hoping to stop the avalanche, "I apologize, Mulder. I want her back safe and unharmed. I should have understood that you wanted that just as badly."

Mulder nodded. He appeared to have emptied of words. Turned the inner bolt to free the door and himself.

"Mulder-"

The agent stopped, not turning back, just listening.

"I'll help where I can. But if somehow, if you find the ones responsible, if they've...hurt her,if it turns out you're right and that they're beyond the law,....you'll take care of it, won't you?"

Mulder turned now to stare at his boss and the meaning underpinning the words. "Yeah. If it comes to that, I'll take care of it. At that point, for me, nothing else would matter."

*

Once he was free of Skinner's sparkling bathroom, Mulder found the nearest visitors and kneeled before the porcelain basin giving up his paltry dinner from yesterday. He retched foul soup and his esophagus burned in protest.

Lots of gastric-acid juices flowing. Only nothing was digesting well. More particularly not the words he'd just listened to with crushing finality.

Toilets and him had a great deal in common, he thought. He was always getting shit on too. Only he hoarded it.

Photographic memory and the rank reminders were piling up.

He was a selfish, dickless wonder. Scully was gone and he was leaving on a jet plane. Running for the second time.

Sure he had disputed Skinner's words. Gotta pretend a little bit. Fool his own conscience into numbness or he might never come back again. Not on a plane or even occupying a broken down body.

Scully was all and if she was dead, he'd leave all right.

Having miraculously avoided prolapsing, his stomach finally quite it's ballooning and deflated to normal. That is, the feeling of "beachball" went away and he was able to stand.

In ten minutes he had a debriefing. What fun.

*

Debriefing over, (all the usuals he and Skinner had hacked at), Mulder sought his own tiny corner of the Bureau. The cluttered drawers were dominated by pencils, notepads, an empty coffee cup, an extra neck tie... Nothing of any importance.

His desk. Him.

A loser, Blunht had said. More near the mark with each passing year.

Mulder yanked open the topmost drawer. It jammed halfway as usual. He didn't care, just flipped through one useless piece of paper after another. Grunt work. VCU phone errand running. Not even profiling. Nothing that could be fouled up. Risky to hand anything vital over to a rumored psychotic with one finger on the self-destruct button.

Mulder wanted to get some kind of not-like-him order to his life suddenly and starting with the drawer seemed as good as place as any to start. Better than going home to his posh one-room apartment. Vacancies in decent neighborhoods were scarce.

It was something he just had to do while inside his father/ his demons/himself said: "Loser, Has-been. Killing time and her too. You've fucked up and want to pretend. Really fucked-up this time. SERIOUSLY fucked up."

His fingers sorted and sifted and piled and his mind did it's thing: it went back over recent events like an iron, trying to smooth out the wrinkles he'd created.

Over and over, burning into his brain material. Enough times and maybe it all won't have happened and Scully would walk in through those double doors, up to his desk, raise one sardonical eyebrow above delicious eyes and judge his housecleaning attempt as hopeless.

He realized he was holding his breath and exhaled. It did nothing for his nausea.

Hernia again.

Maybe ulcer now, too.

Sure. Fine. Whatever.

He noted it then dismissed it after he'd been released from the hospital Thursday noon with yet another zipper of stitches holding his scalp in place, and a pocket full of pills to help ease the pain nestled throughout most of his bruised appendages. He was stiff and achy and his stomach wanted to burst.

On the way home, he'd stopped at a drug store and bought gravol.

He'd taken a couple without water - the nausea was really getting bad - and drove the rest of way, thinking fuck-it to the warning label about driving under the influence of the doping stuff.

During that drive, and the way to the Bureau that morning, (because staying home made everything worse), he took gravol. His blood and brain was tanked on it, yet sleep eluded him like a angry lover.

He was so sick of feeling sick.

The pressure and pain of it's writhing was a cancer intertwined with his memory and it's power steadily swelled with them.

The last thing he'd remembered was Scully's scream and his frozen hands stretched out stupidly in front of him, NOT firing.

He remembered Scully being knocked to the ground.

And he, Mulder, NOT moving.

And he remembered Scully being struck, and manhandled, and he:

Doing NOTHING.

And he remembered something standing in front of him on that subway platform, blocking him, making him - MAKING HIM - watch and hear every scene. Only the something was almost a nothing.

Man. Thing. Ghost. Imagination? Crazy Mulder illusion? Standing there, preventing him from acting like any normal human would have.

Maybe he was crazy. He felt crazy.

He could prove nothing of course.

When he'd bit his lip, swallowed the blood and walked into that debriefing with the six pairs of eyes and ears all listening, questioning, scribbling and evaluating, he'd tried to explain it rationally but, of course, it was bullshit-talk. Their faces said so.

Explanations from Spooky Mulder were Spooky Mulder explanations.

What had happened in that subway ended up not the way he'd intended. The way his secret following of Scully had started had been under his control. *Things are gonna go like this* he'd thought before rushing down those urine stinked stairs minutes behind Scully.

But too late.

Mulder went to Scully's office and, after obtaining permission via phone from Director Skinner to enter, he had.

It was nice to be humored at least.

He rifled through her recent case-reports, In-Box, Out-Box, files and waste basket.

Nothing.

He pulled open cabinet stuffed with files to see what they might whisper to him, about where she might have been taken and who might have done the taking. Some slipped to the floor, papers and clippings swirling around his feet like leaves.

Mulder grabbed the back of the cabinet and threw it over onto its face. The crash brought the secretary running but then she quickly vanished again.

In his outburst, he had bumped Scully's corner work desk - with it's neatly docketed notes and alphabetized files - and spilled her little flowered cup bursting with pens and colored felts.

Her little brass ruler. A white hair comb.

Inner panic gripped and he hastily thrust her belongings back in, straightening it and kicking himself for what he saw as just one more violation of her.

He stepped back slightly to examine the results.

Yes, it looked just as it had. Smart and tidy. Scully.

But it hadn't restored Scully herself.

Mulder slammed both palms down on the desk organizer.

He rested his head and forearms on the sacred place in the bureau that was hers and breathed hard, hurting and hurting.

Scully was gone.

He was still there and alive. It mocked him. He hated it.

Being there and breathing while she was elsewhere and maybe....

Oh, how history loved to loop and loop and loop.

Everything was ending.

*

This time he thought he was going to pass out from the pressure of his hernia pushing out on his diaphragm. It was like someone was inflating a beachball inside his belly. Thrice he had to run for the commode because it felt like his guts were going to spill out. They remained as infuriatingly unpredictable as ever and denied him that relief.

This was way worse than his flight to Seattle. But the stress of late had been telling on him to such a degree that even he noted it. He was actually worried about himself. Not a self-pity worry, but one where, if things didn't improve a whole lot and soon, he might end up back in Shrink Petrillo's office, trying not to puke while staring into that fucking plastic garbage can for hours on end while his mind _ralphed_ it's own gory wrath.

With blessed relief, the plane descended. Ian Moss was meeting him at the airport.

He arrived on time in a small, blue Chevy Sierra.

Mulder threw his bag in the open box and climbed in the front.

"Which hotel?" he asked, fidgeting uncomfortably in a truck not designed with tall people and their long legs in mind.

"You're staying with me." At Mulder's expression, "Don't worry, I'm sleeping on the couch." Ian said.

Mulder's stomach settled down somewhat. "It's not that I don't appreciate it, it's just that I like my privacy."

"So do I. That's why I'm giving you the bedroom and I'm sleeping in the living room. Look, you're only going to be here for thirty-six hours - maybe not even. I don't mean to sound ungrateful but how much can you get done if we spend the next hour or two setting you up in a hotel? I'd like to get home to some beers and tell you what's happened and then you'll be free to tell me if I've wasted your time."

Mulder nodded once, "I can take the couch. I'm used to it." Looked out the window at passing traffic and old, ornate buildings.

"Sorry, I've been kind of in a bad mood for a few weeks. I really want to thank you for coming. The couch is mine."

Decided not to argue the point. "That's okay. I wasn't doing anyone any favors by hanging around the Bullpen."

"You're back in DC for good, now aren't you? How's your lady friend, the Doctor?"

Instead of an answer, Mulder asked: "Why don't you bring me up to date right now?"

Ian heard the unmistakable tone that said mind your own business and made a mental note:

Do not mention Lady Doctor. <-----BAD!

"Okay. It went like this: After Ross's arraignment and trial - thanks for showing and supporting me by the way - he went to jail and my life went to hell. Gary's fellow's -in-Blue naturally found out he was gay and the harassment started. Phone calls from pay-phones calling him the usual brilliant originals: "fag", "homo", "queer", "Bum Cop", etceteras. Then it started at work. Pictures of naked guys hanging in his locker. Anal plugs with red bow ribbons. A fake pussy in his patrol car glove compartment, glow-in-the-dark condoms, you name it, he found it. Finally, he just couldn't take it anymore and transferred to another precinct, moving his stuff out of my apartment the same weekend."

Mulder listened to the stark and painful narration. He'd heard this stuff before. Seen what can happen to a minority when falling under the mercy of self-righteous "Our Way" Groups. Hell, he'd been there himself, with a half-jewish heritage and the obvious features that went with it. Society had become only mildly more tolerant while he was away.

"I'm sorry." Was all he could say.

"S'okay. Not _your_ fault. You saved my life. I just wish things had turned out different."

"What happened then?" Mulder asked.

"A couple days went by and I didn't hear from him at all. I wanted to talk to him, though, so one day a few days ago, I called him. Someone answered the phone and asked me if I was a relative or "close family member". I lied, said yes, and they broke the news."

"How-"

"-Shot him, point blank. Killed him instantly."

"Murder, obviously, but why do you think these other cops killed him?"

"Because he was a fag. And because nothing was taken. And because the B.P.D. won't fucking answer my questions. They wouldn't even let me view the body!"

"On whose orders?"

"The County Coroner, they say, but I don't think an autopsy or examination or whatever was done. He had no parents. He did have a wife at one time but she wanted nothing to do with it, I guess. They separated and divorced because, well, you know, because of me. He was buried in less than twenty-four hours."

Mulder had to admit that was a bit odd.

"We're here."

Mulder remembered the condo-type apartments. Nice. Pretty roomy. Ian must be pulling a good salary to afford to stay here while reduced to one income. But then, plenty o' loon's to go around, so plenty of work, too.

They elevated to the fourth floor. Mulder held his stomach during the short trip.

Ian took Mulder's bag, dumped it on the bed, went to the kitchen where Mulder sat, somewhat stiffly, on one of the two wooden chairs set around the small table. The place was tastefully but simply decorated. It was hard to tell how much of it had been due to Gary's influence or Ian's. Ian Moss didn't seem to be the homey type at all, though he'd had Ross's blood removed from the living room rug.

"You want anything?" Ian asked his reluctant houseguest.

Mulder shook his head. "No thanks. Listen, I don't know how much I'm going to be able to find out for you with just a day's stay but I'll do my best. Can you give me the names of some of the people you suspect had harassed Gary? That's where I'll start. Background checks, work history, and as much information as I can whittle out of the Local PD. I should tell you now, it won't be much. They have no obligation to help me just because I'm FBI. In fact, they're within their rights to refuse any sort of cooperation in a local murder case, I have no jurisdiction. It'd have to be a Federal crime or a suspected one for me to get that."

"Fair enough." Ian pulled a pad of lined note-paper from a drawer and handed it to Mulder. Several pages were filled with pen scribbles. "I already wrote down everything I know, names, dates, what happened, phone calls and what was said, as much as I can remember from what Gary said."

"Did you talk to anyone about this? Or receive any calls yourself? Threats"

"Calls, yeah."

"And?"

"The usual stuff. "Couldn't make it with a dame?" shit. One guy said he'd cut my nuts off."

Mulder nodded, rubbed his eyes.

Under the harsh light of the overhead 160 Watt bulb, Ian took a good, long look at Mulder. "You look like shit, Fox."

Sarcastically, "Thanks." Mulder regretted his shortness. "It's been a bad decade, sorry."

"I'm gonna order out, if you want to, you can use the bedroom phone for some of that unless you need me to drive you some- where?"

"No. Uh, the bedroom's fine. I'll have to see what kind of appointment I can get with Gary's old boss - his name and number here?"

"First one on the list. Chinese okay?"

Mulder nodded and retreated to make his dozen phone calls.

While Ian waited for the food to show, he listened in to as much as he could hear of Mulder's conversations. He heard the phone slam down a couple of times during.

Forty minutes later the food arrived, and he dished out two heaping plates full of all the sundries that made up typical occidental Take-out.

Mulder choose that moment to make an appearance looking, rightly enough, like he'd just had an argument.

"What'd they say?"

""They", as in Gary's Lieutenant, said that if I wanted any information regarding the murder of Gary Bilhaltz, I'd have to get a Court Order to re-open the file which has been closed."

"Fuckers. They want the embarrassment buried is what they want. Pretend a gay police officer never worked for them, you know: "Gary who??" They're probably hang a medal on the shooter for taking care of their nasty little PR problem."

"I'm going down there tomorrow."

"Why? If what you said-"

"Because people are a lot braver over the phone than they are in person."

Ian handed him a plate, a fork and paper towel. He carried the extra soy sauce and fortune cookies into the living room in a paper bag. Mulder followed.

"So, you wave your badge and what?" Ian asked through a mouthful of rice. He noticed Mulder playing with his food but not eating any of it.

"So I wave my badge and name-drop the Director of the FBI who just happens to be _my_ boss and we'll see who cringes."

"You don't like Chinese?"

"Just not hungry."

Ian contemplated Mulder's gaunt face. He'd been very clearly "just not hungry" a lot before arriving in Boston.

"You know, I'm not a doctor. I'm not trained in anything but nursing, long term care mostly, but I know how to shut up and listen."

He saw Mulder freeze in place, hand hovering over the food.

What he did not see was the things Mulder himself was seeing in those suspended seconds in time and space.

Scully.

But not pure Scully, clean and beautiful, bright and smiling.

He saw her blood. It was coating his food which was her dead body. It was dark, old blood the color of Soya or oyster sauce. It sat in little pools between congealed fat and skin, like the chicken balls he'd been stabbing with his fork.

Stabbing but not eating.

Ian jumped a foot off the couch when Mulder bolted up and made a lightening dash to his toilet. Stir-fried meat and vegetables sprayed the coffee table and rug where Mulder's foot caught the leg of it, sending both plates cartwheeling.

Ian heard horrid retching. Over and over.

"Fuck." He followed him, forgetting the new stains seeping into his just-shampooed carpet.

By the time he got there and looked in, Mulder had stopped puking and was simply sitting on his butt, staring into the toilet, daring it to ask more of him.

"Are you all right?"

Mulder nodded mutely but stayed where he was breathing quick and fast. Like something wanted out and he couldn't get it passed a blockage, like a woman in labor. Ian listened as the respiration's grew faster and shallower. Uh oh.

Mulder looked up at him beseechingly. "Hernia. Pah-" *Gasp!* " -paper bag?"

Ian ran and fumbled through draw after drawer to find one that wasn't plastic or stained with old Chinese food grease. He grabbed a small one that had held, he thought, donuts once, ran back and seeing Mulder's eyes flickering, placed it over the man's nose and mouth himself.

"No, no. Come on, Fox, breath, breath...." Mulder'd been naked seconds away from passing out.

Ian stayed that way for several minutes holding it while the bag crinkled and expanded. Mulder's eyes were watering and he was as white as a sheet.

"That's good. A few more. Slow and deep. Shit, does this happen a lot?"

Mulder didn't answer except to close his eyes. Ian wiped Mulder's lids with a bit of toilet tissue.

By then Mulder had regained some color and was holding the bag on his own. He tried to stand and staggered.

"Whoa - here, just sit on the toilet seat for a minute."

Mulder complied and sat with his head down.

Ian sat on the edge of the tub. "Feel better?"

Mulder didn't answer. What he did do, with a bag still over his nose, is start crying right there on Ian's American Standard.

"Scully's gone," he whispered into the pulp product. It muffled the words but Ian still caught them.

Ian had wondered if Scully had been the "it" bothering the man. Mulder's reaction he thought had just confirmed that "it".

Ian slipped easily into his concerned nurse voice. It was the same voice, just pamper-soft. "Gone? You mean...you mean she's dead?"

Sobs, strangled inside an very old wound, and a nod. "Maybe."

"You're not sure?"

"W-we don't know."

"I'm so sorry."

Quickly, Mulder seemed to get it under control. The tears stopped and the chokes. Now he just sniffed and wiped at his eyes. Removed the bag but still held it just in case.

"My fault."

"I find that hard to believe."

Mulder nodded again. "I had a clean shot and I didn't take it. The UnSub-"

"The what-?"

"-The Unknown Subject. The suspect, the one who got her is the psycho she'd been tracking. He's killed dozens of kids, we think. Now he's got her."

"Maybe he'll demand a ransom."

"There's been no demands, he doesn't make them. No word at all. You don't understand, his people, him and his "group", aren't in it for money. He does it 'cause he likes to kill. It's a high. He isn't touchable. He's beyond the Feds and doesn't care if parents and kids die. We just don't know how he does the deed yet or why. The only hope is that as far as we...I have an idea who he might be,.."

"How long has she been missing?"

"Almost three days. The more time that goes by, the less likely she'll be found alive. We might never find her at all."

"I'm very sorry. And here I call you out to Boston to help me."

"I owed you. I owed you and I wasn't doing much good sitting on my ass in DC."

"Let's get out of the bathroom. I could use a beer."

Mulder followed. "Shit. Did I do that?" Seeing the food mess.

"Don't worry about it. I'll clean it up a bit. You sit down. You want a beer?"

"Yeah, but I can't have one."

"Why not? - oh, the..."

"Yeah, the old heaves might happen again."

"That's a bitch."

Ian settled into the couch with a beer in one hand and another ready to open on the coffee table.

He'd brought a glass mug of icewater in for Mulder.

"So, what is this case you and the Doc' were working on?"

"You must have seen it on the news. And not me, just Scully and her new partner who's dead now. I can't really discuss the details because I don't have all the details but it makes no sense. The UnSub isn't leaving his signature at the crime scene. I mean, he does, sort of. He kills with a single blast, parents and kids. But then kills others a different way. No one can figure out how the hell he's doing that. There's nothing to indicate how these other kids died. Now he's taken an adult hostage but the scenario is all wrong. That just doesn't fit the MO, the signature is missing, the order to his thinking, his pattern I've... come to know is all...wrong."

"The Spree Killers? "Children of God" killings? That was what she was working on?"

"Yeah. Whole families in their houses. But always one child dead at the scene with no apparent cause. He or she is working the DC and surrounding areas. There were some similar deaths last year in several other states but that could just mean he was moving west to east. You gotta move around a lot in that type of work. And there was a case of mine out west, that's related to this I think-"

"-Is this what you do for a living? Hunt sick assholes who like to kill people and their kids?"

"Mostly. I used to. Now I'm doing grunt work. See, they think I might be a sick asshole, in some ways. Well, an asshole definitely."

Ian smiled, showing capped uppers.

"I'm really sorry about Gary." Mulder said to him suddenly and Ian's smile disappeared.

Ian leaned back into the brown cushions. He sighed, the false feeling of being in a good mood burst like a bubble. "Yeah. Me too." He hadn't allowed himself the luxury of thinking about Gary. The hurt was too painful. It was raw.

"We met in a gay bar. Except he wasn't there for the social life. He and his partner showed up to arrest some dick who'd been pissing off the other customers, there was a fight and Gary hauled that Mary out of there. I saw the whole thing and had to give a statement. You be amazed how little people see in a bar when they're drunk. Anyway, there I am warming the back seat of the patrol car, giving my statement and Gary's sitting there, writing it all down."

He smiled at the memory. "I don't know, I just liked the look of the guy. And I loved how he man-handled that prick. I don't know where his partner went but I just started flirting. At first he thought I was being a "flamin' fag", just to get under his skin. But then he started smiling and then laughing and before I knew it, I was handing him my phone number and he was taking it. At first I thought he did it just to be polite or screw with my head. But three weeks later, he calls."

"Three weeks?"

"Well, the first time is always the toughest. The admitting."

Ian slugged back his beer. "We had an affair. Fuck, he felt bad about that for weeks. I mean, he was married and it was killing him. Finally he told his wife and the shit hit the fan. She started divorce proceedings and he moved in with me."

Ian opened his other beer. "It was no "Sleepless in Seattle" but fuck, I fell in love with him in a day! I couldn't help it."

Ian had been staring at the ceiling, pictures of Gary frozen there. "Then the fuckers shoot him in the back."

He heard Mulder's mug fall and hit the carpet, the water seeped into the greasy stain of the spilled dinner.

Ian looked over. "What?"

"In the back. They shot him in the back?"

"Yeah."

"Between the shoulder blades."

"Uh, yeah, I thought I told you that."

"No. Did Gary have kids?"

"Um, yeah."

"Were they with him that day, the day he was murdered?"

"I don't know, but he used to take them out every second Saturday. I never went along, the ex-wife didn't like the idea, so I never met them. You think this was-"

"-Fuck!"

Ian saw Mulder get up and pace. "We have to find out. Probably just coincidence but we have to find out if those kids are still alive."

"What?!"

"Our UnSub, he most times, not always but most times, murdered parents with a single gunshot wound to the upper spine. That was the one piece of sequestered information. What the public didn't know about, _how_ they died."

"Shit. But this can't be the same, you said your guy was working DC."

"But Gary died weeks ago and our guy was moving around. He might still be. He can get anywhere. And he doesn't work alone. Who can I call to see if those kids are okay?"

"Uh, the ex-wife's parents I guess. They'd know but they're not gonna fuckin' want to hear from me."

"I'll make the call. Can you get the number?"

"I have Gary's old organizer. It should be in there." He rummaged around in a bedroom dresser drawer and emerged with the book in hand. Here. Shit, I don't know his wife's maiden name."

"What's her first name?"

"Terri."

Mulder went directly to the "T's". "Here it is: "Terri's parents"." Mulder looked at Ian's surprise. "It was a hunch."

A moment later, after speaking in his best sympathetic but official tone and mentioning FBI officiality, Mulder ended his cell call.

He turned to Ian. "Gary had two daughters. They were there the night he was killed. One was shot. The other dead on scene but no wounds."

"Holy mother and baby." Ian felt sick. He had a fleeting thought that maybe it would have been better not to have met Fox Mulder.

"Why would this guy pick Gary? Is it coincidence?"

"No. He picked Gary because of me, I think. Because I was here, six months ago talking to both of you. Because whoever knows what's going on doesn't want me to know what's going on. But they must think I already know and that I'm out digging around."

That just made Ian's head hurt. "I don't follow you."

"I'm speculating why, on three separate occasions, people with whom I've had contact have ended up murdered. I have no idea. Something's missing. It doesn't make sense. I wish I hadn't come here, then or now."

Ian's blood drained from his face. "You think he might try and get me?"

"I don't know. But I wish I did. I wish I hadn't used your land line to make those calls to Gary's work. I wish I'd used my cell', then nothing could be traced to you, they might think I was calling from my hotel. Now they know I wasn't."

"You're fucking scaring me, Mulder. He, they, whoever, you think they're listening in too? Am I a dead man? Am I gonna find a hole in my back tomorrow?"

Mulder stared back as if considering the possibilities. "I sorry. I'm sorry I even came here. I should go, the sooner, the better. And you should find some other place to be for a few weeks."

"I don't have any other place." Ian talked fast and high, he was scared now. "And you're fucking strung out like a clothes line, Fox, you can't travel. Besides, if I'm gonna die, I'd sure as hell like to know more than you've told me. Jesus Christ! _I'm_ gonna fuckin' die?"

He plopped down on the couch. "Holy shit." stared up at Mulder, helpless. Mulder stared down.

Helpless.

"What the fuck have I gotten into here, Mulder? What the fuck kind of people are they?"

"Fuck me." Ian whispered. "You're a babe, Fox, but I wish to hell I'd never laid eyes on you."

Mulder sat in the chair opposite. Couch, there. Coffee table, center. Chair, other side.

Conversational arrangement.

"The more I tell you, the worse it is for you. I don't know if what I know is even accurate. There's no way to substantiate anything especially when it comes to Gary's murder. Or the death's of his daughter's."

"They never even told me the girls had been killed too."

Mulder closed and rubbed his eyes. They burned like acid. It was approaching eleven P.M.. He hadn't slept for nearly three days but was too wired now to do so. He felt grubby, sick and was so tired that walking was effort.

"I'll stay the night. If you want, you can fly back to DC with me. But it would mean leaving your job here, finding a new one there, a place to live. Establishing a new life somehow..."

"Would it mean not being murdered?"

"Maybe. Maybe not. We don't know for sure whether you're a target."

"Why the hell aren't you one? If they don't want you digging around, why not kill you?"

"I don't know. It doesn't make sense."

"So take my chances here or DC? Sounds about even to me."

"I don't know what else to suggest. I could get you into the Witness Protection Program, if I had something more than speculation about a murder that might happen by subjects unknown."

"Terrific. This is just _sweet_." Ian sighed heavily. "I hope you brought your gun."

Mulder nodded.

"Lots of ammo?"

Again a nod.

"That's better than nothing."

Mulder leaned back in the chair, fatigue settling down like a quilt. "I'm sorry."

"Will they call you?"

At his dull eyed puzzlement, "I mean if they hear anything about Lady-Doc'?"

"I already called them."

"Nothing?"

"Less hope than this morning, I can tell by how they talk to me, by how he does."

""He"?"

"The Director."

"Oh."

Ian's own grief over Gary was fresh each morning, but by afternoon, work and friends and the local nightclub would dull it. By the time sleep rolled around, he could do it: close his eyes and not see Gary and nothing but Gary.

He forced it to keep his sanity intact. Doubted if Fox had reached that stage. "You love her a lot, don't you?"

"Don't talk about her anymore."

Ian contemplated backing off. But he might not be alive tomorrow.

"How did you end up at Walburg?"

Mulder turned white. Whiter than the white he was when he'd arrived that afternoon from DC. Bleached-out bones white. "Why do you want to know that. Think I'm still crazy? Think I'm making all this shit up?"

"No. Gary's and his kids are dead, remember?"

Mulder turned his head away, the disbelief he thought he would see having never arrived. "Bad shit happened to me. I was missing for eight years. I was...hurt a lot. Don't remember much about it. Don't want to. Not anymore."

Ian listened to the bare facts that told him nothing. Okay.

"Just wondered if maybe this had something to do with that, with you, and who I should blame if someone comes in here and blows my heart out the front of my chest."

Mulder stared. Dark and wounded. Clipped, "Would it be all right if I took a shower?" Guilt-frosted anger.

"Sure. Clean towels on the shelf."

Ian knew Mulder was escaping from the questions. Fine.

No, not fine. He had a right to know what the hell had happened to Fox and specifically, _who_ had happened to him to end up bringing all of it here and to Gary, so he, Ian, could figure out how to keep the murdering pricks away from _him_.

Fat chance. He knew how stubborn Fox could be. You don't daily nurse a guy for six months without experiencing their dark side.

The shower started. He listened to it and remembered suddenly the scars he'd seen on Fox's chest. "Fuck." He felt like a shit. He'd asked the man to come here and help him. Barely out of the hospital, his woman gone and he'd demanded Fox come here to help _him_. But it was hard not to be selfish when bad shit happened to _you_!

Maybe he should apologize?

Ian went to the bathroom and pushed the door open. Mulder was behind the thick plastic curtain, clear once but now coated in hard water deposits.

Long, lean, nicely formed tanned flesh merged into darker, mind teasing skin below the navel. But no detail.

Ian felt himself flush and sat on the toilet, watching. Just for a second or two, he told himself, feeling like a pervert for peeping where he wasn't suppose to.

The shower curtain was pushed aside without warning.

Shit! Most people turned the water off first. It was too late, and Ian got full view of healthy Fox Mulder, who hadn't even noticed his bathroom guest, as his long legs stepped out of the tub.

Ian grabbed a towel from the rack behind him. "Here."

Mulder jumped, looked, grabbed the towel, and blushing to his roots, quickly wrapped it around himself. "You usually spy on your house guests?" The blush was embarrassment more than anger.

"Only the good looking ones."

Peeved, "Christ, haven't you ever seen a guy before?"

"I _thought_ I had."

"Do you mind??"

Ian retreated, spoke through the door. "Sorry, I didn't mean anything. I didn't plan on ogling you, okay?" //Very, _very_ nice.// "I came to ask you something."

"What?"

"You,...will you be able to make these assholes pay? Will you be able to stick it to them?"

"I don't know." The anger was gone. "I'm going to try. No one is even fully aware of what's going on I don' think, or believes me, even, except maybe Scully."

"_I_ believe you, and I want those fuckers to die like they made Gary die."

Mulder came out, now dry and still wrapped in the same towel. Ian followed him into the bedroom, where Mulder sat and dialed a number on his cellular.

"Who are you calling?"

"DC."

Ian sat on the bed, waiting while Mulder gave his Badge number, asked for a name and then waited again. "This is Fox Mulder, I was wondering-" The other end must have interrupted. "Have you spoken to-" Again an interruption. "Oh. No word at all, no notes or calls? What about the coroner's office? No-no unidentified-" Interruption and a pause at Mulder's end. Mulder's eyes closed and stayed that way, head cradled by the phone. Breathing shallowly, the phone appeared to the only thing holding him upright. "I see, thank you."

"Nothing?" Ian asked when the connection was closed.

Mulder shook his head. Weakly, "no".

"You gonna go tomorrow?"

Mulder nodded, looked at him. "I'm sorry about Gary. About all of this but I can't pursue it, not right now. If I do, it could endanger your life. We just don't know who or what we're dealing with yet."

"Ask questions and maybe die, gotcha." He stared at Mulder. The bags under his eyes were like ink stains. "You look like hell, Fox. I don't know when your flight's going to be but you better get in a few hours, man."

Headshake, "I usually don't sleep when I'm on a case like this."

"Don't sleep? "Usually"? If the Doc' disappeared Wednesday night, then you must be hallucinating by now."

"Things are a bit fuzzy, but-"

"You're going down. I'm getting you a couple sleeping pills."

"I don't want any pills, I'm on enough of that shit already."

"These won't last beyond morning and they're not going to fuck your head, they're just muscle relaxants. Don't argue with the guy who's paying for your return flight."

"Holy shit, headstrong or what! It's a good thing Gary had handcuffs."

Ian smiled at a private joke. "It was often a _very_ good thing."

Mulder stammered, "That's n-not what I meant."

"Wait right here."

Ian returned in a moment with two pills and a glass of water. "You didn't even eat anything." Ian commented as Mulder swallowed and drank.

"Don't mention food."

Mulder swung his legs under the sheets, still wearing the towel, Ian noticed. "Geeze, Fox, I'm not going to molest you, if that's what you're thinking. Not that I haven't thought about it."

"You don't seem to have trouble speaking your mind, do you?"

"Why should I? Don't you hate watered-down bullshit talk? In this world, when you come out of the closet, you get used to having to speak your mind. If you don't you don't make it. I'd rather live and be hated by others than fucking hide and hate myself."

Mulder looked at him, surprised, "You've got guts. It takes guts to live out your ideals. It leaves you open to be slowly eaten alive. I speak from experience." He pulled the towel off himself and tossed it out from under the blankets.

Ian draped it over a chair.

"Nice sentiment, you must be a riot at Christmas parties. Speaking of ideals, I guess there's no chance your willingly sharing that bed with me?"

"I _offered_ to sleep on the couch."

"I'm not talking about sex, Fox, I'm talking about sleeping. Don't be so damn homophobic. You've shared a bed with a guy before, haven't you? At camp or something?"

"When I was a _kid_."

"Well, then..? Come on this is a king-sized bed, I won't even bump into you. I just don't feel like sleeping in the living room where I'm a hell of a lot closer to the front door and easier gotten to."

"Jesus, get in, then. Those bloody pills are making the bed float."

Ian swiftly undressed. Mulder looked away from the young, muscled body. For the first time, he realized that Ian was hardly more than a kid. "How old are you?"

""How old am I"? Twenty-six. Why, how old are you?"

"Forty-seven. I was just checking. If we die tonight, I didn't want to be found sleeping in the same bed as a minor."

"Christ, relax. I'm old enough to hold my own dick when I piss and everything. You don't look forty-seven, by the way, and I have to say it at least once, you are fucking _gorgeous_."

"Than's, go-t'-shhleb."

"The pills are doing the right stuff, sounds like."

"Hmmh..." Mulder was asleep before Ian finished tucking the comforter around his own shoulders.

"Mulder."

Mulder awoke and she was sitting on the edge of the bed, near the foot.

"Scully?"

"Hi. Sorry I woke you."

Mulder sat up, couldn't believe his eyes. "Scully! Jesus." He reached her but his fingers wouldn't quite reach. "Oh, Scully, I thought you were dead. When did you get back? Why didn't they tell me? Are, you all right? How did you know I was here?"

"It's okay, Mulder. I'm not suffering. Everything's fine."

"What are you talking about? What about the UnSub? When, why did he let you go?"

"Shhhh, I'm at peace. I'm happy. Nothing can ever hurt me again."

Mulder stared as the meaning behind her words deadened him. Pain like a sledge hammer to his solar plexus. "Wha-what do you mean? What are you talking about?" He was going mad.

Scully was not dead. She was sitting there before him alive and beautiful.

So she could not be dead.

"I have to go now, Mulder. I just wanted to tell you not to worry anymore. And that everything's fine."

"Scully, no, noooo, don't - don't go. No-no-no,..Please, _please_ don't go. You can't be dead, it hasn't been long enough, we'll find you, I'll find you. Just, hang on, please, Scully. I'm sorry, I'm sorry, Scully? okay? I just wanted to give you everything,..._please_, please don't leave me....."

"It's okay, Mulder. I have to go now."

"Noooo." He watched night take her from him. She faded like the last moment of twilight. The grays over to black. His world.

All that he owned; the only thing he had left; the very reason he had wanted to come home; the only truth left, maybe; his only hope during those so many times he'd been forced away:

Was her.

He'd always tried to come back for her. Because of her.

Back from the clutches of the northern ice and alien death.

Home from the rain-forest.

Home from the drying desert sun and the fire-storm.

Safe with her from the tortured memories of the past.

Saved by her from the torments of eight years in someone's Hades.

Scully.

Was why.

So she must be alive! Had to be.

So he could come home again.

Shewasaliveshewasalive-alive-alive!....

A soundless scream in his head and then erupted an acoustic one: "No. No! NononoNONONONONOOOOO!!!" His heart burst from it's impact.

"Holy shit!!" Ian was awakened by terrorized yelling next to him. He sat up and blindly reached for the lamp switch. Mulder was as still as a corpse but for his trembling and the word he kept screaming over and over.

"Fuck!" Ian shook him. "Mulder! Fox! Come on, man someone's gonna think I'm murdering you in here."

Mulder's eyes snapped awake. He looked around sightlessly and then lucidness returned and he was seeing Ian's sheet wrinkled face.

Ian stared back. "You must have been having the mother of all nightmares."

"S-sorry. Yeah, I think I was."

"What about?"

Mulder didn't answer for a few seconds. He looked at the shadows on the ceiling overhead trying to blend with and overpower the beam of street light that hung in its center. He closed his eyes again.

Ian thought he'd gone back to sleep and turned to settle in again.

"Scully's dead."

Sitting up quickly, Ian thought he'd heard a ghost speaking. But it had been Fox. "What? What are yo?-how do you know that?"

"I just do."

"Look, man, don't fucking put too much stock in dreams or what they mean. I went to a fortune teller once and she told me I'd meet my fantasy girl and we'd live in South America. It's bullshit. Dreams are just dreams, they don't tell you shit."

"When Scully was taken before,.."

Ian thought: Before??"

"..I never dreamed about her. Three weeks and not one dream. We didn't get any word that time either. God I loved her, even then. You'd think I would have,.. but no dreams."

"So you think - what? - this time you have a drug induced nightmare and that means she's dead?"

"She was dying when they returned her."

Ian shuddered. He couldn't help it. "Christ. These are _some_ people you hang with. It's only been three days and you're giving up?"

"If she's dead, s-so am I."

Oh brother. Ian sat up and went around to Mulder's side, crouching down. "Mulder, don't lose it, man. Don't fucking lose it." Mulder was shaking, his face scrunched up as though he was about to scream but he didn't. He wasn't making a sound.

"I don't want to see you have a nervous breakdown in my apartment. Why the hell are you giving up so fast?"

Mulder just shook his head back and forth.

Ian took his rigid right hand in his own and placed his other behind Mulder's, head, making him sit up, then sat beside and slightly behind him so he couldn't lay back down again. The sheet covering Mulder slipped to his hips. Ian could see defined beneath it the man's sex, his own grief over Gary taking refuge in the sight of this gorgeous and tortured man, so vulnerable, before him.

Enigma. Intelligent in mind, passionate in soul, fierce in justice, but tender in spirit. Yet hating himself.

"Look, Fox. When I found out Gary was dead, I thought I was going to lose my fucking mind, okay? I tore this place apart. I was kicked out of three bars that night. I wanted to fucking kill someone. Or myself."

"It's barely been a week since I found out and still hurts like a cunt. But at least I had my shot. The best four years of my life with him and I'm not going to throw them out like the trash. You have _got_ to give it more time. Jesus, give her a chance to come back at least. You're giving up pretty fucking fast."

"It should have been me."

"Well, it wasn't you! I seem to remember her eating her heart out when you were in the hospial. She waited for you."

"If Scully's dead, I w-won't survive it, not this time, I can't stand that she's being hurt, I can't stand to think about it. She's all I have in this world, m-my whole life. Everything, absolutely everything. What am I going to do without h-h-her?..." He bent at the waist, tight fists pushing hard into his abdomen.

Now sobs, those scary choking, vomit kind. Fox was losing it, right there in his bedroom. Oh, fuck, oh fuck...

Ian pushed Fox's head forward and down. "No, man, don't _think_ that. She's okay, just keep believing that. Jesus, Fox, don't think I don't know how this feels. She's your fucking shadow and your conscience, your voice and soul and fucking life! I know, man, I know. That's why you have to keep going. You just can't give up like this. Be strong for her. If she's got you this tightly screwed up, she must be incredible! So you must be too, right? You are too."

Mulder tried to believe the well-meaning voice. But, as it stood, Scully was gone. Most likely dead. If she didn't come back, he would disappear too. He would leave this world.

"B-but what if she is, I have nothing without her. I don't want to live in this cock-sucking world if she isn't here with me."

"Grief's got you in chains, Fox - it's too soon for that. It's too soon."

"I'm so tired."

Ian knew he meant something very different than being sleepy.

"Don't give up on her, Fox. I know it fucking hurts, I know. I know it feels like someone's cut your insides to shit, like you're bleeding out. I know you feel like you're dying inside, like everything is gone. It's okay to _feel_ it, you just can't _believe_ it."

"I don't know how. I'm so stupid. So fucking blind, I can't see anything anymore."

Nothing good, he meant, Ian thought.

"Fox. I want you to breath. Just breath for me. Easy, man. And listen. I want you to tell yourself to go one more day, okay? Just one more day, Fox, and then one more day after that. Don't you fucking give in yet. Those pricks don't deserve that. They'll pay. Whoever this son-of-a-bitch is, stay around to make him pay! You or someone has to make that happen. And stay around for the Doc', she's going to need you."

Ian's voice called to his deep parts, where his conscience and guilt lived. Maybe now wasn't the time to curl up and die. "I can't afford to fall apart." He offered Ian as a flare, a peace- marker that he wasn't six down quite yet.

"Well, we agree on that, don't we?"

Total sincerety, "If they've hurt her, I'll kill all of them."

"Whew. You've got it bad, dontcha?"

Mulder stopped the painful-looking shaking but the stress released itself in a few more tears and some deep coughing.

"Feeling sick?" Ian asked.

"A little. Stomach. It'll pass." More tears, silent. Without the jerky sobs of new grief, just the exausted defeat of old.

Ian took a chance that Mulder wouldn't jump away like a frightened cat and stroked a couple fingers through his short hair.

Mulder wore it short and brushed straight back from his head. Almost a brush-cut. Not quite. It was a style for a person in a hurry. Run a comb through and go. It suited him.

"Fox, this pain you're feeling. This hollow fucking hurt that you think is gonna swallow you up or drive you insane, it is going to go away. I know it sounds impossible now, but it will end. Whether or not the Doc' comes back, it _will_ end. You'll feel real again, I promise you."

Mulder's chin was on his chest, shook his head, "No, you're wrong...it could never,...could never be like that..."

"Yes it can. It will. I know, Fox. I _know_."

Ian could see nothing was going to fix him up, at least not so quickly and not that night. "Come on, scoot over. Don't worry, I'm just lying down beside you."

Mulder didn't protest and lay back limply. Ian leaned across Mulder and switched off the lamp, then draped an arm across his chest. Mulder didn't flinch or try to move away. Didn't really care, probably.

"I'm not making a move on you, I'm just giving you what I think you need, some affection. There's nothing wrong with that, is there?"

Mulder's shoulder's twitched. A shrug.

"That's better than no answer I guess. You are one complicated piece of work, FBI man." He continued to stroke his hair. "Do you mind this?"

Another shrug.

"I want you to just lie there and listen to me. I know there's no guarantee you'll listen but what the hell."

Ian moved closer but was careful not to touch too much of Mulder with his own body. He didn't want to spook him. "You seem to have this belief that there's nothing good about you, nothing worthwhile. The doctors maybe, or your lady built some self-confidence back into you, but self-esteem, that's from your own engine. That has to come from you and I sure as hell don't see it happening."

Mulder smelled good. He felt good. Ian wanted to do so much more than just touch his hair. "You think you're weak for feeling this stuff so deeply, love I mean, for her; like you can't breath unless you know day by day how she is, am I right?"

Ian expected no answer and he wasn't disappointed.

"Anyway, that's not weakness. So you couldn't save her. Something tells me you tried like crazy to. You probably damn near died doing it and you're still here. Look at the bruises on your face. You didn't knock them out in the first round, huh? So? The shit you've only hinted at, the shit you've been through that I know about - fuck it makes my balls shrink. But here it is - what? - ten, fifteen rounds and you're still standing."

He had always been attracted to strong men. Height, muscles, body hair, a guy who looked like a guy. Goodlooks were always a tidy addition if available. And strong on the inside. Heart-and living-soul strong.

Like Fox who had all the above. He was gorgeous. Not just the physical. The man was staggering from the blows delivered but he was upright and still giving the finger to those who had made up the game rules.

"I could fall in love with you so easily, Fox. But I know you're straight and I respect that. I respect you. You don't respect yourself, I've noticed. Fucking staying awake for days on end, not eating - Jesus, it's a wonder you're still alive."

Had he fallen asleep? Ian raised his head off the pillow to see. No, Fox was awake, the light from the street creating tiny pin-point lanterns on the wet curve of his eyeballs. He was listening, too. Maybe.

"I think you need to be reminded once in a while that you're worthwhile. I get the impression that hasn't happened very often."

He spoke and ran the tips of his five fingers through the short hair and across the skin underneath. Felt one or two bumps. Suddenly Fox flinched and snapped his head away.

Ian's touch turned feather-light. "Sorry- shit!" Felt a three inch scar. The light from the window was just enough to see the stitches closing an obviously spanking new gash. He didn't comment on it. Another for the collection. The man's body was a museum to it's own living history.

Ian bent his head down and kissed the scar. "I think you need to feel substantial and understand that you have a lot to offer someone."

Mulder turned his head a bit in the opposite direction.

"I'd be lying if I said I didn't want to make love to you right now. But I wouldn't, _couldn't_ do anything to hurt you. Listen to me, you just finished telling me I may be a dead man. You'd think I'd be kicking your ass down the stairs but no, I want to fuck you instead. I'd say that says something about you. I don't even know what, exactly, except you are so full of this..._passion_, it just lights a fire under my ass. You are so fucking beautiful, you know that?"

"Don't call me that."

"Hey, you're actually listening. Why not - if it's true? You are and not just on the outside, though I'd say it's a good thing you didn't turn out dog-assed ugly, "Fox"."

Ian leaned in to gave Mulder a small kiss on the cheek. Backed off again. "Was that gross?"

"No. But it doesn't really do anything for me either."

It did something for Ian who felt a rush of desire that damn near left him shaking. "I want to ask you for a favor. It's a pretty big one, and I don't have any right to and you're probably going to tell me to go fuck myself."

A weary to the marrow of life sigh. "Ask."

"You'll be going tomorrow and I'll most likely never see you again. Or I'll die and you'll never see me-"

"-What's the favor?"

"I want to kiss you on the lips, and not just a peck. I was going to try that before but I didn't want to get a broken nose."

"What for?"

"Because I'm incredible attracted to you and if I know how you feel, how it feels to kiss you, I might survive it if I never get anything more."

Mulder sighed again.

"Well?"

"Whatever."

Ian rolled over until he was half on top of Mulder. He wanted to lay front to front on him but figured Mulder wouldn't put up with that. Ian could feel his own erection though, straining in his briefs.

He moistened his lips the tiniest bit and made connection with that mouth and those lips he'd been, in his mind, kissing since he'd first seen the man. Masturbating in the shower lately had been over him too. He'd tried to get off with visions of Gary in his head but the pain of losing him had always welled up and turned the images of joy into death, killing the attempt and leaving him sobbing instead.

Mulder's lips were a ride - as soft as they looked. Ian took a chance and opened his eyes to see if Fox had closed his. He hadn't but Ian took the opportunity while look into those fucking perfect things to open his mouth. Fox didn't reject his tongue and Ian dove deeply into him until he was kissing him as hungrily as he ever had Gary. Mulder just seemed to be going with it, neither frowning nor appearing to enjoy it.

That was a bit disappointing.

Ian kissed him longer than he thought Fox would have allowed and his body was looking forward to more. God, if only...

He took Fox's head between his hands and deepened the kiss, tasting the sweet saliva, tonguing him for all he was worth, and positioning himself over Fox until he could feel his rock hardness brushing Fox's lovely, if flaccid, cock. His hands began an exploration Fox's body. Smooth, soft shoulder skin, feather chest hair, muscled sides and abdomen. Masculine hips.

Caressed Fox where Ross, in his rage and twisted violations, might have gouged. Where Ross's work-roughened, painful digits had poked and prodded, leaving bruises without a hint of compassion, Ian's stroked and petted to smooth them away. Redeem the wounded flesh. Purify the shattered trust.

Ian's mind filled with what lay further down, beneath him, growing and changing.

Fox.

Creature of extremes. Ice and desert.

Isolated.

Stray. Loner. Hunter for scraps. Finds the bones and the leftovers from the bigger kills by the bigger killers.

Rare, night creature.

Curls up in his den when the blinding desert heat or the freezing snow would destroy him.

Hunted for his skin. Hated for his wanderings and curious ways.

Enduring the odds.

Skittish. Sometimes bold, sometimes scared. Beautiful.

*

Ian gasped. His mind raced:

I'm kissing him. So hard I'm kissing him.

Oh, god.

He - Fox - was looking up at me, curious, wondering. Puzzled.

Perfect.

He was looking up at me with an expression that made the breath leave my body.

Surprise. Surprise that he was enjoying it? Maybe that's just my own wishful thinking. Surprise that I could want him this badly. That anyone could.

This man did not feel pity for himself. He had stopped feeling anything a long time ago. That his body could still feel, maybe that was the thing that shocked him. His penis had hardened and teased me with it's potential for fleshly delight and mind-blowing pleasure.

I could hardly breath for wanting him. And wanting to tell him, teach him, prove to him that he was beautiful and desirable and deserved all the affection another human being had to offer.

As I caressed his body and imagined doing those things that maybe frightened him the most, he looked back with such sweet, goddamn fucking innocence, I almost wept. With my body and mind, I wanted to devour him physically and preserve alive his soul forever.

Whatever I had to give I would have served it up.

Who was I trying to kid?

I loved him already. Every cell in my body told me.

If God froze the world over in some bloody damnation, this is how I wanted to be found. Loving this man who had seen and survived things no human being had any business to.

Making love to him.

*

Ian began moving his hips in tiny circles over Fox's hardened shaft, feeling so burning hot he would melt any second. Was Fox feeling as he was feeling?...

"Ian, stop." Mulder obviously decided it had gone far enough. "Stop. Now."

Ian rolled off immediately. Tried to keep the anguish of his terrible desire from his voice. "Sorry, I got carried away a bit."

Mulder was quiet in the dark. Then, "Look, even if I wanted it... straight or not, even if I _need_ it, I just can't. I _can't_. And not just because of Scully."

Ian knew he meant Ross. "I know. And your loyalty is one of the sexy things about you. Anyway, I might have injured you. I can be a pretty aggressive lover and I like it rough and wild mostly. Especially with sexy, virgin territory."

Ian felt his erection dwindle. The deep heart and groin ache to plunge Fox's body and mouth with it didn't leave though.

He remembered vividly the sight of a nude Fox, glistening wet from his shower. Round, chock-full balls, and a rudded- skinned, circumcised and inviting cock so fucking perfectly right _there_, so thick and long and exposed to him, so goddamn-insanely-tempting!, he'd wanted to fuck it, suck it and swallow it down right on the bathroom floor.

He hadn't wanted anyone as badly for years. Since before he met Gary.

In retrospect, he'd felt quite proud of his self control.

"C'we go t' ssleep now?" Fox said, his words slurred.

"Yeah, sure, but I want you to listen first."

"What."

"Don't leave this world without having loved someone, Fox, or, even better, letting them love you. Life just isn't worth a fuck otherwise."

No answer.

"Fox?"

Sleepy, "Mmm?"

"Do me another favor and don't hate what just happened. Don't eat yourself alive with guilt over it all right?" He sat up and leaned over Fox again, whose eyes were closed now. "Don't you give up on her." He touched the hair again, it was hard to keep his fingers away. "And,...if...the worst happens, I'll be here, okay. If you just need an ear. Don't isolate yourself. You deserve some happiness, everybody does. Are you listening?"

"Yeah. Kinda' hard to sleep with someone _talking_."

Ian smiled. Closed the distance and kissed his mouth one last time. "Don't forget."

"I won't."

*

Mulder let Ian sleep on. Did not rouse him, even when he already had his bag packed and it was sitting by the front door.

His taxi would be there any minute. He wanted to say goodbye somehow.

Mulder carefully sat on the edge of the bed next to Ian and studied the sleeping, youthful face whose chiseled bones had never suffered a fracture.

Ian's shallow breaths did not change when Fox shifted so he could see the lids flickering, the eyes underneath R.E.M.-ing.

Mulder hoped it was a good dream.

Ian. His healer for the second time.

Ian had called for his help and he came. But now he knew he had also come for himself. He had become near mindless with grief over Scully. Was ready - waiting - to plunge headlong into death over her and his failure. Ian had saved him from that mistake.

He had been so terrified of losing Scully because he thought he could not survive it himself.

He loved her.

If she loved him, however undeservedly, he would be glad in it and love her back as much as he knew how.

If she loved someone else, he would still rejoice in her life.

Ian had given him that.

It was a debt he could never repay.

The door buzzed - his taxi.

Mulder was glad the intercom was down the hall.

He didn't want Ian to awake from his peace.

*

Four hours was about his usual, well, when he was thirty-five, it was his usual hours of sleep any given night. But that wasn't following three days straight waking time and dangerous stress to boot.

Back home to DC, he was headed and his time, the flight was inhuman torture. He spent most of it on his knees in the small Attendant's toilet.

They'd gently escorted him there after discovering him heaving uncontrollably in the Passenger's Men's Room, there having been, in fact, a substantial line-up of male passenger's all grumbling about the "Occupied Light" which had gone on shortly after take-off and not gone out a good hour into the trip.

The Steward had come with her key and opened it to find an unconscious passenger in a dark suit. "Oh, my god!"

Two others were called and an announcement made via the Captain if a doctor or nurse was aboard. A medical student answered the call. Successful in rousing the ill man with a cold cloth and smelling salts from a first aid kit, he was thanked.

"Will you be all right, sir?" The petite Steward asked.

"Yeah. Can't handle flying anymore I guess." The pressure on his insides and the headache that followed that first assent was about the worst physical ten minutes he could recall in the last year.

Mulder offered explanations and apologies all around as he was kindly given a pillow for his knees, ice-water for his upset stomach, a paper bag and generally made as comfortable as possible in the tiny Staff washroom for the remainder of the flight.

He cabbed it back to his apartment, changed, and drove his own car to work. Enroute he called in to check for news. There was none.

"Sir?" Mulder entered Director Skinner's office after seeing the secretary gone, (she knew what weekends were for), and Skinner's door ajar.

Skinner looked up. "Mulder?"

"Anything?"

Skinner shook his head. He looked tired. "No."

"Have you been here all weekend?' Mulder asked.

"Haven't left. How was Boston?" Skinner was curious about what had been so urgent in Boston.

"There was someone I had to see. What is being done about Scully?"

Skinner sat back in his high-backed chair. "Everything that can be, Agent Mulder. And there's nothing for you to do here that will make any difference, so why don't you go home?"

"Then why are you here? Don't tell me paperwork holds that much fascination."

Skinner stood, walking to his wall-length window. "What do you want to know, Mulder? That I can't sleep? I've been sitting here hoping like hell the phone will ring. Anything else you need to know?"

Mulder considered. What he'd just heard was about as personal as Skinner ever got. The Director had all but said: "Yes, I'm worried sick about Dana."

"I don't think...it was the UnSub who took Scully, I think it was..."

"Who?"

"The Smoking Man."

Skinner didn't get anxious or even annoyed . "Why do you think that?"

"I think it has something to do with this case I was involved in, in Canada."

"I'm listening."

"Scully and Beyer were assigned to investigate the deaths of these children, and these murders. Before the case was even handed to Scully, I stumbled across a similar case on Vancouver Island. Almost the exact same signature. Family murdered by gunshot wounds to the upper spine except for one child dead by an unknown factor."

"I know that. Scully brought me up to date on what you said happened out there, as much as she knew."

Scully'd been telling Skinner a whole lot it seemed. Mulder felt a terrible sinking and loss. Like someone had just discovered he had a broken foot and taken him out of the race.

"I just discovered a second case in Boston. I knew the Boston victim. On Vancouver Island, the only surviving victim was my client."

"You've concluded what from this?"

"I haven't figured that out yet. But it appears that whoever handed her this case wants her on it but not me."

"Mulder, you're not on the case because of your status. You are a limited field agent, you carry no weapon and right now your assignment is in Transcriptions. The fact that you're on probation is why you're not on the God's Children case."

"Something's wrong, sir. Don't you question why an inexperienced agent like Beyer was assigned to something this big? Building experience through the ropes is one thing but no one at that level gets cases like these, _I_ never got cases like these, not to begin with."

"Things change, Mulder. Beyer put in double-time doing leg work on these DC murders, and he's proved he has insight, he has potential. He was a valuable assistant to the S.A.I.C. when the case was first handed to he Bureau and a hard working partner to Scully."

"The case was handed to the Bureau when?"

"Eight months ago."

"And they figure the murders began when?"

"They've strung together more of them, from all over the U.S. It's estimated the murders actually began almost two years ago."

"When I was returned. And the cases turned over the Bureau around the time I left GreenLawn."

"Haven't you ever heard of coincidence, Mulder?"

"I don't believe in that much coincidence."

"Mulder-"

Skinner heard a cell' phone. It was Mulder's.

He pressed "Talk". "Fox Mulder."

Skinner sat back down and listened to the one-sided conversation.

"What. Who is this? Who the hell are you!? You better not have touched him! You just fucking better not have!"

Skinner joined Mulder at his side, heart quickening. He'd never heard Mulder swear before, not gutter-swear. It was foreign to the man. Unnerving. Things _do_ change.

"You fucker! If you work for him, that smoking son-of-a- cock, I will kill you first. WHERE's SCULL-?!"

Disconnected from the other end, Mulder swallowed and with shaking finger, pressed another number. "Boston Police Department? This is Agent Fox Mulder, I'm with the F.B.I., I'm inquiring about an Ian M-Moss, I understand-"

Mulder stopped and listened to what was said back to him.

Skinner watched his red in the face underling pale to a sick shade of green. Saw Mulder replace the cell in the inner suit jacket pocket. His eyes were moist and unblinking. No tears.

A mix of horror, grief and fury suffused him. He was on the verge of barely restrained murderous rage. "The UnSub who isn't an UnSub? "They"," he said pointedly, "just killed a friend of mine. Shot him in the back. Through the spine. "Insurance", they said."

Skinner looked at the floor. Somewhere in Washington, D.C., the other shoe dropped. "I'm sorry." He shook his head once, hoping if he did, all things he suspected that were building to a curtain about to go up, would collectively throw up their hands and just go away.

"_That's_ who I went to Boston to see. A _friend_. His friend was one of the murder victims. The daughter of that friend one of the kids who die without cause. One of "God's Children". I have a hunch, though, that this has very little to do with God."

"Are you positive your friend who was killed - Ian? - is connected?"

"You really believe in _that_ much coincidence, sir?"

"Let's get out of here, go to my place, you can tell me-"

Skinner's phone this time. Mulder waited by the door. He wanted to break it down. He wanted to kill someone for Ian. Wanted to hang their head on a stake and dance around it under the moon for Ian. And for Gary. And for the dead kids too.

Suddenly Skinner was passed him, wrenching the double doors open.

"What?"

"Scully! She's been found."

*

Scully's last clear memory was the feel of cold, rough concrete and pain.

Her next was waking up in a moving vehicle with her eyes covered by some kind of cloth. She felt the sensation of sickness and fear. The fear swelled when the vehicle - she guessed a van because she was sitting more or less upright - came to a rough halt. Arms supported her on either side and hustled her out onto smooth ground, where she stumbled. Her hands, tied behind her, were unfastened. Then she heard the slamming of doors, the sound of the vehicle's engine power up and tires on pavement as it sped away.

In one motion, Scully ripped away the blindfold and turned to watch the - she'd guessed correctly - the van speed away, trying to see a plate or any distinguishing features. But there was no plate.

The van itself was a polished black with darkened windows. It bore all the hallmarks of a vehicle owned and operated by the CIA, the F.B.I., the N.S.A., or any number of "Bad Boys" clubs with guns and an agenda.

She stood slowly and looked around, swaying a bit as her eyes adjusted to seeing in three dimension again. Before this present vision of an empty lot and dilapidated warehouses with broken windows and boarded up entrances, she recalled terrifying darkness and harsh voices speaking threats and violence disguised in "this is for your own good" words.

Kindness, mafia style. Words spoken to her about him and for him and because of them both.

She frowned and concentrated. But nothing else. Not where she'd been or with who.

The assault came to mind.

Mulder down, injured, maybe dead. Herself being dragged away.

It had been no dream, the biting air told her that.

Scully looked around her. It was night (she didn't know how late). A heavy drizzle was falling. Already her hair was sticking to her forehead and she pushed it out of the way with one cold hand. It was chilly here, wherever here was.

Scully patted her clothes, they were the same clothes she'd been wearing when - the almost memory refused to take solid shape, no outline she could use to separate it from the frightening twilight that was her mind.

Fear actually.

But she recalled the subway.

Scully searched through her pockets and found them empty. She been left with no ID, no money and no weapon.

And no idea where she was. It could be any city but she hoped it was D.C.

And what day was it?

Shaking she walked toward the only street visible between the lightless buildings. As she made her way out onto the road and then the sidewalk, passing more empty boarded up shops and condemned houses, she imagined that some of the street names sounded familiar.

She touched her body, her face and arms. But especially her neck. The terror of her imagination teased her.

A nightmare that might have been.

Physically she felt okay but she knew that was unsound. The shock she knew she was in would keep her from sensing any real injuries.

Scully walked and wrapped her coat about her.

But fear kept her from wanting to explore the why's of it for the time being.

A few blocks on, she came out of the industrial section she'd awakened in to a neighborhood where the houses, though windows dark, were newer and in relatively good repair. But Scully had no desire to knock on the door of any stranger to summon help. Though surprised at herself for the unrational feeling, she just didn't have the nerve to put herself into the hands of a stranger.

She couldn't handle anymore unknowns. Not right now.

Finally coming to an all night corner grocery store, she entered and asked the clerk behind the counter to dial 911 for her. Then she took the receiver and spoke to the Emergency Operator herself, giving the woman on the other end her name, F.B.I. badge number and status. Her voice shook badly.

Before long, she was sitting in the back seat of a patrol car, sipping on a large hot coffee the officer had got for her from the curious store clerk.

The policeman had informed her of her location, she was in D.C., and told her that Director Skinner had been contacted and was on his way.

She thanked him.

She didn't know how long she'd sat there slipping in and out of focus before a screeching of tires brought her back to the here and now.

A door slammed.

Running feet.

Skinner's voice. "Where is she?" asking loudly of another. Couldn't hear the answer back.

A second car had also arrived in the interval with screeching brakes that must have left a half block of rubber behind.

And those running feet she recognized. Unmistakable long-legged stride.

Skinner's voice: "No, wait! Let him through. Let him go."

Her door opened and Mulder was there beside her, looking her up and down; at her face, her hair, her clothes. She drew her eyes away from the swirling patterns in her coffee cup and looked back.

She wondered if he felt as bad as he looked, with his double eye-bags, hollow cheeks, swollen right jaw and bruised face. And his expression...pain swelling from underneath, from his own mind and terror for that she might be injured in some way he couldn't see. It transcended the physical hurt visible in his own injuries.

In that way, she wondered if he felt as badly as she did.

And suddenly, with the knowledge of four days on the missing persons list and what they had instilled in her for those four days; what they had drilled into her brain, the terror over what might happen now numbed her.

The coffee remnants cooled. She didn't care how he felt. No - she did but _couldn't_ care. Because of what had been said to her. Because of what they were making her do. She wanted to be selfish and cry into his arms but if it were to somehow end up the last time....Scully just wanted to go home.

They had already separated themselves before now. A great love was no more. It hadn't even made it passed the first and biggest hurdle: His quest.

And her fear of that quest.

"Scully." She heard him say her name as if she were a gift from god finally delivered to him, but arriving too late to save his soul.

In his voice she heard joy also, because she was whole and alive. And, too, shock and fear at her disheveled appearance.

There were questions there, in his voice. Questions for which she had no answers. For him or anyone.

She thought she should lift up her chin, show him she was all right, assure him that everything would be okay. But his eyes were an agony of emotions that she had neither the leave nor strength to deal with. Her energy was cold now and drained like her empty cup.

Like they both were.

She had difficulty looking at him. Had heard too many frightening words regarding him.

Now Scully heard his anguish when he'd said her name, and she could feel his physical pain. And his aching for her now, when it was too late.

"I guess you're not up to talking right away." Was all he said, accurately reading her state of mind.

She sank her gaze back into the safety of her cup. The warm liquid had provided her with a degree of physical comfort and had asked nothing back.

She said into her cup, "I need to speak to Walter." Knowing it would cut him to his center. Wound him deeper than any knife that had scarred him.

He jerked as if bitten. His eyes were black misery.

Scully saw. It would have been less cruel to have slashed him through the heart.

Mulder had caught and understood the abruptness of the movement, her look away; the unspoken message that said to leave her be. By his stiffening, Scully knew how deeply she had hurt him and it grieved her. But her goal was paramount. If by denying him physical contact or verbal communication hurt him, she would mourn for it, for him, for them, but the vitalness of being silent was so much greater.

Mulder broke through as far as briefly resting his hand on her shoulder.

That contact, electrified with longing and sorrow, made it so much more difficult to say the six words she next said to him.

"I need to speak to Walter now."

He left the car.

The pressure of his touch remained. She was grateful to him for that one touch despite her trauma. And his. Even though she'd been unable to acknowledge it, that lingering contact was a life line that she would hold onto: his life.

Mulder continuing. His contact was one she would use as a bridge to comfort. She hoped that, if the time came and she was free to seek more of it, he might be there and still want it.

There, alive. Willing to provide it.

Then the fear, the terror, the horrible thing she was having to do, things she'd been trying to beat into submission found their freedom.

She wept silently.

"How is she?" Skinner asked Mulder who'd only been inside the police cruiser for seconds really.

Mulder didn't answer but continued walking passed him. Skinner followed Mulder's hasty retreat back to his own vehicle. Mulder's long legs were eating up the yards and he did not slow at his superior's question.

"Agent Mulder?" Skinner grabbed one shoulder and spun the agent around to face him. "I asked you a question. _How_ is Scully?"

Skinner saw naked pain in Mulder's eyes. Naked soul.

"You'll have to tell me, sir. She's asking for you."

Shredded heart. Shrouded spirit.

He was forfeiting.

As there really was nothing else to pass between them, Mulder got into his car and drove away.

Skinner watched after for a moment and then climbed into the patrol car.

*

Next Day. Dana Scully's Apartment:

//Fifteen years ago, veiled in the guise of scientific analysis, they'd assigned her to the X-Files and to Agent Mulder - as a spy. To observe, assist where possible as a medical pathologist and scientist in order to validate the work. Or to expose it as a collection of falsehoods.

The assignment was to bring to light the mythology of the X-Files, things not based in facts or proved science, and the questionable use of Bureau funds in financing it.

To debunk it.

Mulder's world of the paranormal, unexplainable through any known scientific means.

Becoming a supporter of it and of Agent Mulder. His advocate.

They had not counted on the moral convictions of their chosen pawn. Her desire to ferret out truth. She would not be their tool.

Now the X-Files were gone, Mulder's passion drained from his sick soul like dirty water from a sink. Still they sought to hurt him.

Still, they wanted a betrayer....//

Dana Scully ceased her narrative. Recording it in third person was a cheat. It was unfair to him and a weakling's way of hiding from the truth.

She placed her fingers on the keyboard and continued.

//Now, fifteen years later, that is precisely what I am, a liar. Albeit unwillingly.

It is a most terrible and heartbreaking path to walk but absolutely necessary. One that, had I not taken it, would have brought serious, even deadly, consequences. I fear it will be a lonely road.

I can speak of it to no one. Neither can I reconcile my conscience to it.

I allow them to use me.

I live what I can only described as a daily moral rape of my very being. To have accepted this journey has meant that the very foundation of my relationship with Mulder is now based upon a lie. To refuse would have meant his certain death and perhaps my own as well.

They convinced me of the truth of this. They, who seek to destroy or control any they perceive to be either a detriment or asset to their "Work"; their Agenda. Which agenda remains obscured in deceit and fear.

And for which the sacrifices made seem to me to be incomprehensible. Unconscionable.

What secret project is this that it would call for such heinous crimes as these men have committed? Acts of terrorism against their underlings and the citizens of their own nation? What Agenda (which they have time and again excused as vital to the survival of our very way of life) is accomplished through manipulations and cold-blooded murder?

It is one that continues insatiable despite the sacrifices made paying homage to it.

How many deaths is too many? Who is anyone to judge that the lives of the murdered were worth it? Who will answer for the families that have been destroyed? Who will speak for their lost wives, husbands, sons and daughters?

Sisters? What about Mulder's losses and his enduring, deeply-rooted pain?

And what of my own anguishes?

How have I remained in one piece knowing what I know? Somehow I have kept my body and soul together. And somehow I will continue to. But there are days when it feels so heavy on my shoulders that I just want to run away. Leave this burden behind.

But I can't. I've - we've - come too far. Too much has been compromised and I want to see some of that paid back.

The innocent deserve their compensation.

And my need to protect him is greater than my need to escape.

Yet how much more grief can I watch him endure and bear it?

What more pain will be added before this journey has played out?

To my mind only for the salvation of all souls on the earth could such sacrifices be justified. And even then I harbor doubts.

What benefit to be whole in body but empty in spirit?

But I can't answer that. I don't know all the answers but I do know that if it is in my ability to save just one soul, I will. I must.

His.

I find I talk to myself a lot. I've been keeping a journal too. Perhaps for my own sanity I suppose. But, too, so that if I should fail and the unthinkable occurs, that the facts should become known. Not for revenge but for human dignity. Mulder's wrongful death, if that is what destiny has decided, must be made to count for something.

Justice must be served. That he stood to expose truths when so many took refuge in lies must be made known and remembered.

And I hope the same for myself.

I am writing in past tense, speaking of destiny as if all things have been written and are unchangeable but I don't believe that. I believe destiny can be changed.

It must.//

*

Preliminary Inquiry:

Member of Board: "Agent Scully, upon listening to and reading Agent Mulder's account of the events on the night in question, do you concur with his conclusions?"

Scully: A plunge into fire. "No, sir. I don't. I saw no second suspect."

Member of Board: "Are you certain of that, Agent Scully?"

Scully: "Though I am not advocating any duplicity on Agent Mulder's part,.." (Redeem him as far as possible) "..I feel I must emphasize that I was aware of only one suspect in that subway station."

Member of Board: "So it shall be noted here."

Scully: "However, neither am I supporting the contention that Agent Mulder had anything to do with the death of Agent Morgan Beyer-"

Member of Board: "-Do you have any speculations, then, on how Agent Beyer came to be murdered?"

Scully: "Not as yet. But I assert that Agent Mulder could not have participated in such an act. It is not in his nature."

Member of Board: "In your opinion."

Scully: "Yes, in my opinion."

Member of Board: "We are left back where we began, then, with two conflicting accounts. How do we reconcile them? Agent Scully? Agent Mulder?"

Scully: "I can't." (Keep Mulder occupied. Keep him safe. Keep him tangled up in anything other than-)

Member of Board: "Agent Mulder, you've been very quiet. Do you have nothing to add to this discussion?"

Mulder: "I don't...dispute what Agent Scully said she saw. But as to what _I_ saw and experienced, what I witnessed,...I have told the truth. I can't prove it. And...I don't know how to make sense of it. I don't know what else to say."

Member of Board: "Then, barring any further additions or addendum's to either of your reports, the Full Board Inquiry will go ahead as scheduled. There will be a full investigation of Agent Mulder's actions on the night in question. All records regarding the "God's Children Case" and Agent Beyer and Agent Scully's assignments to that case will be reviewed. In addition, all records relating to Agent Mulder's psychiatric therapy over the last two years will be by court order, opened and examined by a practicing psychiatrist appointed by this Board for that purpose. This Preliminary Inquiry is adjourned."

Scully felt sick to her stomach.

Mulder's treatment?

His private sessions, exposed to all the world? Him stared at and clucked about? It would bury him for good as an Agent in the Bureau. No pride left, no hope for promotion.

Destruction.

May as well let "Them" kill him instead. It would be quicker.

Less cruel.

Four Days Later. Fox Mulder's Apartment:

It could hardly be termed an apartment. COMpartment Mulder had thought.

But he'd given it's choice little thought and it didn't matter. It was a place to be. He slept, showered and went to the toilet here. That was about all.

It was the only place he could find inside a day after leaving Scully's place.

Packing had been a snap. He only owned two suites, a couple pairs of jeans, a few T-shirts, sweaters and the usual underwear, socks...

Three or four decent ties.

Some things did change and even improve.

A bigger television. No couch but a single roll away and a "TV" tray for a coffee table.

His suites hung in the main closet and the rest sat in a box underneath. Except for the dirty stuff which he'd taken to lazily tossing behind the door.

He didn't really give a shit since it was just him and he wasn't out to make it into a real home.

No place in his memory had ever felt like a home. Except for Scully's place. Cozy and bright and full of nice smelling things.

And maybe for mom and dad's old house way back when he and Samantha were little kids. Hardly more than babies.

The last innocent time.

A few years in the sun.

His chest grew tight. He caught himself thinking about Scully. It did that when he thought about her. It hurt.

The way dying must hurt. Kinda like that.

He hadn't seen or spoken to her in a week.

When ever he picked up the phone to dial her number, there was the fear Skinner might answer.

That would be a last stroke of the lash. He could imagine it, in his worst nightmare, dialing the number, hearing it ring and her answer out of breath:

"Scully?"

"Uh, yeah, hey can I call you back, Walter and I, we were just..."

He would never call back, the, after that. Ever.

For as long as he so-called "lived".

Better not phone her.

*

Dana Scully's Apartment. Same Time:

//I am drowning in it. What is happening. My destiny has been removed from my hands and placed elsewhere. But my choices have been made without my consent. And now his as well. How can I do this? How will I look at myself, live with myself? I feel like I have been disembodied. My will, eviscerated. My purpose, a strangers. One week can change your life so that you become unbalanced, afraid. Ten years can alter it so it is unrecognizable. I'm wondering if I'll be able to navigate through another day away from him. As long as we remain estranged, he is safe. I hope. He doesn't call...//

Scully paused in her typing and looked at her phone, willing it to ring. It had consistently refused her.

She resumed.

//...Every memory I have with him now is cherished beyond belief and filed away in my memory in such *detail*. I recall his every word, every expression, every movement now as if a film were running in my head. I hold his scent and taste his voice. I am acutely aware of him to the tiniest degree. I haven't seen him for days. I've never been able to visualize things in this way until now. But I guess it's because now I so badly need to. Just in case.

I have such a need to see him. I want to see him even for a few minutes every day. But I can't...//

The phone rang.

Scully stopped typing. Stopped breathing and reached out to pick it up, both praying it was him and afraid that it was.

Taking a deep breath, she picked up the receiver.

Fox Mulder's Apartment, Same Time:

He reached for the phone again. So afraid his heart was going to stop in his chest if a male voice answered. Pressed the pre-programmed number.

Seems he was always calling her when he was in the lowest places.

Three rings.

"Scully," she said.

She sounded...okay.

"Scully." Say it all and don't let her speak or you'll never find your way outside that door again. They'll find you here in a month, curled up like human jerky.

"Scully. Don't say anything. Okay, I just want you to listen to me. Just listen."

She said nothing.

"I,...I'm sorry. I love you so much but, I'm scared it would destroy you. I'm sorry I can't be what you need. I'm sorry I've spent all these years chasing after this fucking "thing" that's going to ruin me. Well, it already has, but I shouldn't have dragged you along. I've hurt you. I never wanted to. But I can't live with a shitload of lies, I can't happily accept what these people do and I know that part about me has fucked up my life. And yours too. I'm sorry about all of it. About going away, about you losing everything you had and nothing to show for it. I can't hurt you anymore. I hope you can forgive me. They've closed the Allenby case, well I told you that already. And I've been forbidden to look any further into the God's Children case. I don't know what I'm going to do now. I don't know if I'll stay with the Bureau..."

He stopped. That part was easy.

The rest he'd have to get passed the huge swelling in his throat and the shriveled lump in his thorax.

"I hope he gives you everything you deserve. I'll...I'll miss you, I'll think about you everyday..."

That's it. Couldn't say anymore. It had been a lame attempt anyway, to find peace with any of it.

"Bye, Scully." He replaced the receiver.

Dana Scully's Apartment, Same Time:

Scully heard. Listened, like he asked.

And by the end of his quiet, narrative that begged her forgiveness and wished her well without him forever, she found herself unable to breath.

She listened, the phone pressed painfully into her ear until pressure reminded her to get some oxygen. But all she managed was one ragged gulp, mouth away from the receiver so he wouldn't hear her fall apart.

The rest of the conversation she spent with a hand clasped over her mouth forcing the words she wanted to say back- back-back-back...

And tears draining from her.

When he finished, she dropped the receiver to the floor and watched it's downward flight. Conversation over as so much else was. It actually cracked when it hit.

She hated them with a hatred she never thought possible.

The way Mulder must hate them for taking away everything he had starting when he twelve, the sweet time where he played after school games and understood nothing evil.

The why's, the wherefore's...

He'd been such a cute, thin, introspective kid. Nothing hinting at the handsome, amazing, fighting man he'd turned out to be.

But _this_, this ending...it can't be!

Destiny couldn't be this fucked.

*

The knocking was insistent and roused him from what proved to be restless and harmful dreams filled with blurs and shapeless faces all talking at once- saying things, shouting at him. Accusing hands grabbed him, yanked his hair. Stitches popped, blood ran.

Teeth chattered and clicked like hail against a window; the devouring of him...

The door rattled on its hinges. Whoever it was, they were putting their fist into it. Still, it took Mulder another full minute to come fully awake and get from his bed to the door.

Fucking Meds.

Not checking the keyhole, he swung it open to have Scully walk in without being asked.

"Mulder - we need to talk."

Door still open, "Scully? - Are you -what about?" He shut it.

"About me. And you."

Mulder followed her slowly into his living room like he was the wary guest and she the hurried Hostess. She seemed tired and anxious.

"What's going on?"

Scully looked, not directly at him, but slightly off to one side, addressing the coffee table. It eased her a little to lesson the contact when speaking half-truths, her half-truths.

Mulder had not violated that commandment.

But she had to salvage this. Them. Fix it, somehow. Keep him safe but fix it.

"You did nothing wrong, Mulder and you're beating yourself for it."

"I let them take you."

She swallowed and forged ahead, still shifting her eyes from Mulder to the coffee table to the wall. Voluntary blindness.

"No you didn't. You couldn't have done anything."

"Scully, I was there, I couldn't fire my weapon. If I had, you wouldn't have been-." Gently, "I did this to you."

"No. You didn't." She sat on his bed. It was not like when he sat there, a thumping and sagging. With Scully, the perching of her slight build was as insubstantial as a cat.

She left room for him.

He sat obediently.

"Mulder. I owe you an apology."

He blinked. "What for?"

"For not trusting you. For not supporting you in this. Even for not believing you at first, about Vancouver Island."

"It's not the first time we've been at odds, Scully. It doesn't matter."

"Yes, it does." She tucked one leg under her in a very feline manner and sat sideways, facing him. "Something happened to you in that subway station. And to me. At first I thought that somehow, you froze. That through shock or the stress of the situation, you were paralyzed and unable to act."

Mulder's eyes never wavered. It always made telling him anything, especially potentially hurtful things, so much more difficult. That straight on stare of his, eyes expecting nothing but truth.

"And... I thought that...your explanation was a way to ...explain-"

Those eyes quickly got the point. "-Explain it away? Cover my ass. Cover my craziness?"

Scully sighed and rested her forehead in one hand, rubbing it. "I didn't know what else to think."

"That hurts."

Scully felt a sinkhole give under her heart and it dropped out of reach. The pain that had come through in those three words.

"Instead of thinking that I'd lie to protect myself after watching you get-" he bit off the rest and instead said: "But I understand, Scully."

An up-to-now unspoken fear had been kept hidden, and she had just cracked it wide open. She knew they had to breath it in, endure the stink of it and then exhale it away forever.

"I thought you, if no one else, at least you would trust me far enough to know what I am incapable of." His voice grew very soft. The words lumped up in his throat, aching. "I've learned to count on you to believe me, at least believe that I'm telling you the truth, Scully. I can't tell you how it cuts when you don't."

This was much harder than she'd imagined. It's because Mulder wasn't yelling. She knew Mulder's yelling, knew it very well. He'd yell, she'd yell back. They were like a couple of civilized gorillas beating their chests and tossing things about. "DAMN-IT-SCU-LEY!", "DAMN-IT-MUL-DER!" Thumpa-thumpa-thump!

Most of the time things were resolved, sometimes not. But at least his yelling was simple and plain, leaving no question for her about how to proceed. But this quiet restraint and the aching eyes. It was worse.

"Mulder, I was wrong about what happened down there. I'm sorry I was that far wrong. I did see movement, I did see something, I'm just not sure what."

He winced.

Now that the floor was hers, she stretched it. "Aren't you even going to ask me what changed my mind?"

"I guess something did."

"Listen to me, Mulder. Something's going on. I didn't think so before. But I do now."

"That's-" Mulder leaned his face closer to her and she resisted pulling back.

This was also a thing Mulder did. When he got mad, he mostly yelled, When he felt sorry, he did this. At least to her.

She recalled one other time he'd used it. Coupled with a touch to her face, a lifting of her chin with terribly gentle fingers, she'd clung to him and sobbed like a terrified child. Which is just about how she felt at that moment, having just been saved in the nick of time from being shorn of her red locks and de-fingernailed. Mulder had held her until she'd calmed down, embarrassed.

He could be such an obnoxious male at times.

He could be such a perfect and welcomed gentleman.

Like now. Like a fine tool. Mulder could go on the sweet offensive and get her defenses down or perform a saintly deed, doing it naturally and without calculation.

His voice was low and sympathetic but not patronizing. "I want to believe that's true, more than anything..but-."

She exposed the palm of a hand in appeal, "You were hurt , Mulder. Look at you. You'd suffered a head injury. You had a concussion and blood loss. The doctor who treated you said you came into emergency with blood all over your face. Look, what matters is that I've rectified my own report to include my convictions about the events of that night. Skinner has not recommended any disciplinary action against you. There is going to be no Board of Inquiry into the death of Beyer or the violations of your probation."

"Just tell me one thing."

She was tired now. "What?"

"Just tell me honestly if you're saying this only to protect me. I'm not talking about your doubts about me, just your own story. Are you altering your claims about what you saw and experienced so I won't be put under the microscope?"

"Absolutely not. I don't know what happened to me that night, not for sure. Something happened to both of us, we were attacked by the UnSub. You were attacked by an accomplice, that's the only way to explain what happened."

"But that's where we disagree."

"What do you mean?"

"You believe you were attacked by the Spree Killer or two of his group, that's what the press thinks, that's what the police and the F.B.I. think, but I think something more is going on here. Someone attacked me, but you were called to that subway for a reason other than just the God's Children case, or at least something connected to it, something obscure, that we're not seeing yet."

"Are you one hundred percent certain of that, Mulder?"

"No. But I'm pretty damn sure. And I know one thing. Something stopped me from firing my gun. You understand? Something big and powerful stood near me, blocking my way and cracking my skull and I couldn't stop it."

"Something or someone?"

"I don't know for sure but it may be something we've seen before."

Scully looked away and shook her head, sighing.

"If it had been just me, Scully." he volunteered, "if it had been some inner weakness or fear because of my incarceration or my PTSD or these goddamn meds', if I'd froze up and that was the reason you got kidnapped-"

Scully stared at him.

"-I don't think I could have lived with it."

Her touching of his hands broke something in him or maybe healed it. But he froze now, just looking at them. Unwilling, she wondered, to believe she was real. "And I couldn't-" He bit his last words off.

Pleading, "Tell me!"

"If something happened to you...again...I wouldn't want to live."

//"You made me a whole person."//

She came back to that so often it had become a mantra for when she doubted his feelings or her own. Before she had stepped into his basement office and into his life - what had he considered himself to be?

"Mulder..." The inflection was no different than if she'd said: "Mine.". He was hers. Her body tingled with it, her heart affirmed it, her mind pronounced it. He was hers.

"I almost lost you Scully."

"No, no, you didn't. Really,..."

"Did they hurt you? Do you remember what happened?"

She had always told him the truth, even if it wasn't what he wanted to hear. Because to disappoint those eyes would be a hard proposition. She forced the last bit out.

"No. I'm fine. Believe me, I'm okay."

She lied. A little. Still.

His life might depend on it.

He suddenly gripped her in a hug so tight, she wondered if they would melt together from its heat.

Then he was falling to the carpet, not letting go and she went with him on his journey of self-punishment and hate for his perceived wrongs and failure to save her from powers greater than himself.

"Scully, Scully,..God. Oh, God.. I almost lost you. God..."

She didn't let go either. Not a finger. "Shhhh, it's okay. I'm here. Everything's fine, everything's okay. He was buried in her or she in him. It birthed the same creation:

Together. Whole.

"They have to pay."

Scully realized him the slightest bit.

"No, no they don't, they didn't touch me."

"I have to do something, I have to do something - anything - to erase this last week from your life. I c-can't stand that this happened to you. I can't stand this one. Not this one, not this time."

"I don't want you to go after some kind of retribution for me. All I want is for you to come home. Come home to my apartment, Mulder. Please? If you want to, we can talk about it there." Stall, stall, stall...

"I can't just let this go,...they took you."

It was the worst thing they could have done to raise his sense of justice and they had failed to remember that little fact.

"They hurt you."

That was the fuel on his fire.

Merely his suspicion that they had touched her in any way, even to take her in the first place, was enough to make him lose rational thought.

In the past, even when he was calm and calculating his own move against them, his mind was an explosion of hatred, rebellion, retribution and disbelief. He was a good man, the best kind of man. When the innocent suffered, he hurt. When what he cared about hurt, he suffered near utter destruction.

Oh, Christ, please, no.

"Yes you _can_. You will, Mulder. If you value me, you will leave it alone."

He got to his feet. "I can't just sit around, Scully! When they took Samantha, they set me on this course. I want an explanation. I want an apology. I wanted my sister back! And now I can't have her. Now the very least I will accept is answers. I need those answers, Scully. _An_ answer. One! Is that so much to ask? After all they've done? They owe me and they owe you!"

"I don't want you to collect on my debts for me! I don't want you thinking you can just decide for me what should be. You do not have the right, Mulder."

You. Do. Not. Have. The. Right. "Maybe I don't. After all these years, I thought I had you. Looks like I don't have even that."

"What are you talking about?"

"You're sleeping with Walter Skinner, aren't you?"

"What? Is that what you think?"

Mulder looked crushed. "I'm sorry, Scully, I just get that feeling."

"Mulder, Skinner and I are friends. We...talk." He need never know anything else. I've punished myself enough for that. I won't punish him with it.

He gestured back and forth between them, "Why don't _we_ "talk"?"

Thrust.

"We do. We talk about aliens and Black Oil, abductions and shadowy conspiracies and invasion from above. But sometimes that's not what I want to talk about. Sometimes I'd like to hear other things from you. How many years have we known each other and I don't even know your favorite color. What's your favorite color, Fox Mulder?"

Parry.

"What are you trying to say to me, Scully? If you have something to say, let's hear it, I'm all ears."

"Someday, I may want to leave all this behind. In fact, I'm sure of it. But I don't think you ever will."

"Because they shouldn't get away with this."

"Did you ever stop to think that maybe your shadowy conspirators are just a group of old men in gray suits trying to invent history for their own selfish agenda. And even if there are alien invaders readying to take over the planet, do you really believe that those old men, that anyone - that you - can stop it?"

"I have to try. They have to answer for what they've done, Samantha, my father, Melissa, your cancer...my abduction, where does it end? When will it be too much to ignore?!"

"Don't fight my battles for me, Mulder. I have my own faith and it's not in-"

"Me?"

"I was going to say it's not immutable. Even truth wavers. Mulder, Years ago you said your faith was in the truth. But what if there is no one truth? What if there's just a life-long struggle with an uncertain end?"

"I can't believe that. I also can't believe you're saying this. You sound like you want curl up and forget all of it."

"And what if I did? Maybe you just might have to accept that you can't change the past or set the future or even alter it. You're only one man, Mulder. I don't want to lose you. You have all this "hope". But for me, for years, _you've_ been my hope. That's all."

"If that's true, then why won't you help me?"

"Because I want you to live and I'm afraid that if you leave here tonight, you won't be alive tomorrow. And if you go and my worst fear is realized, Mulder, I need to know that I did not lend a hand in supporting _that_ future because I'd have to live with that and I can't."

"So, that's it? We're,...we're finally finished?"

She stared in shock. "I didn't say that."

"But that's what you meant, Scully.

"You didn't hear me, did you?"

"Yes I did." He turned on his heel, his eyes locating the exit to an agony he could not grant another second of life.

"Mulder, please..."

He didn't respond but stood, rubbed a hand across his dark, cropped hair, waiting. Deciding.

Then Scully watched in shock and fear as he snatched up his car keys and gun.

His answer was a shutting door.

Scully let out the breath of fire she'd been holding in. Had he stayed it would have consumed her. Scorched her brain and burned her up. But it was no better breathing in the chills of the apartment air, made cold by the leaving of him.

Nothing she said or did made a difference. He would seek until it killed him or until they tired of him and put him to death.

Faith or no. Willingness or not, she could not allow that to happen. As always, his death would be hers. She gathered her coat, gun and keys and followed him.

It would be difficult. Shooting him again would not be well received, Scully didn't think.

But if she had to...

** ** Mulder, wearing dark clothes, eased himself through brush and trees until he could see the dim lights from the small windows. It had taken him the better part of the day driving to reach Augusta and another two hours of hiking to get this far. Night was falling again, and if he had to check each and every dwelling, it would take the better part of it.

If he was wrong, it didn't matter. There were other places and he'd go to those places until he found him.

And answers.

This was the fourth property he'd visited and the second he'd found to be occupied. Now the fatigue he'd been brushing off for a day and a half was making its presence known. His muscles were cramping and uncramping, and his water bottle, the only other item he'd brought with him other than his weapon and some spare clips, was empty. Not eating for days had been stupid but since his stomach had been unable to handle anything solid anyway, so what?

This was a expansive two story log house with a car port addition. Within a dark, expensive looking sedan was parked. He was still about one hundred, fifty yards away so he could see no movement from within.

"Fox Mulder is here."

Weathered hands brought a spoonful of peas up to weathered lips on a haggard face. But it was illusion, that he appeared old and weak. Some had believed him worn-out, dated and it had been their folly. Fools who believed the structure unsound and so had failed to look inside.

Stupid, dead fools.

The haggard face looked keenly at his ageless, expressionless companion. "Where?"

"Near the end of the foot path."

"Make certain he gets no closer."

With a nod, he rose and exited the cabin.

Scully drove and as she fought the wheel on the hilly, tree lined roads, wondered what it was she would do when or if she located her partner. Just how was she going to stop him? Other than him being physically bigger, stronger and faster, he probably wouldn't listen either. So she would have to - what? - shoot him?

Been there. Done that. She didn't think he'd let it pass with a thank you this time.

The Lone GunMen had been most helpful. Of course they knew where Mulder was going. They'd given him the address. Hinting that they just may have sent him off to his certain death and they'd confessed like wayward altar boys.

A tow-truck with its lights flashing and hauling a jeep, passed her going the other way. She had an idea. Fiddling with her cellular phone with one hand and driving with the other, she dialed. *Hope somebody is working late.*

*

She took in a great breath, held it for a few seconds, then let it out. It didn't calm her really, so she walked through the metal door, down to the last cell on the right and sat in the chair the Deputy had provided for her.

But the man in black lying on the one bunk didn't look at her. He continued to stare at the ceiling. She cleared her throat.

"Mulder?"

For a response, he set his lips and closed his eyes on her.

Scully needed to be strong for what she was about to do and for what she had just done to him. She had to be strong, just that. As always.

But she knew he didn't see any of that. He didn't want to see her. Scully could see, in every tense muscle in his body, his disbelief. His fury.

"Mulder, I had to do it."

All she got in return was a short, ironic one-syllibilled laugh. An angry bark.

*Well, this is pretty much what you expected, isn't it?* But she tried again. "Mulder, I know you don't understand - "

He sat up like a jack-in-the-box, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees, looking at her like she was the one behind the bars and it was, not a jail, but a nut house.

"Understand"?? You had me arrested!"

"Yes, I had you arrested, but there's a reason."

"Really? - no kidding?? Explain why at first, you don't want any part of this, then you come all the way up here to have me Arr.Es.Ted??" He leaped up and paced. "What is there for me to understand?"

"I was afraid for you."

"I never went there to kill anyone, if that's what you were thinking. I was going to question him, Scully. QUESTION! If he didn't answer me, _then_ I was going to kill him!"

"If you were only going to question, why was it necessary to sneak around in the bushes like a cat burglar? Why not just walk right up to the door?" Scully was babbling and she knew it. She wanted to avoid, avert or delay what she had come here to do. *Coward! Just say what you have to say! Do what you MUST!*

Mulder grabbed the sides of his head in mock confusion. He spread his arms. "In case you haven't been paying attention, Cancer-Man and I aren't exactly on the best of terms. I didn't know which place was his or even if any of them were. Now I guess I'll never know. I thought you knew me better than that. What the hell has gotten into you?"

He was as angry at her as she'd ever seen him. But it didn't matter. It didn't matter if he punished her with silence for months or never confided in her again. As long as he believed what she was about to tell him.

She covered her eyes with one hand and rested there for a moment. She looked up as she heard the creak of the cot springs. Mulder was resting up against the wall with his knees bent and feet on the bed but at least he was facing her.

"Why did you stop me?"

She heard the mistrust in the words and in his tone. The tone she had heard years ago when, convinced she was part of a hidden agenda, he'd questioned her motive behind her being partnered with him.

"I told you. Because I was afraid-"

He stood up again, furious now. "Do you believe that bullshit that's coming out of your mouth?!" Walking away from her to the farthest wall of his cell. "I can't believe what I'm hearing, Scully. Why are you LYING to me?!"

"You have to trust me. Please. We've been together for too long for-"

"No, I don't HAVE to do anything. I don't have to believe you or trust you!"

She swallowed, trying to rid her throat of the lump that was getting bigger and bigger. She walked to the bars and clutched them, trying to still the shaking in her hands.

"Mulder. I have something to tell y-"

"Why should I listen? How many other lies have you told me-"

"Mulder! Will you stop playing the martyr? Listen to me. Just shut-up, sit down and listen! Please!"

He leaned against the stained back wall and crossed his arms, defiantly not sitting down.

She closed her eyes. *Make it a good lie, Scully. A big lie. A convincing lie.*

"In my report, I said that I didn't know what happened to me during those four days? Well, I told you some things..."

She recalled the white room and the voice speaking of Mulder's extermination as if he were no more needed or missed in the world than a single housefly all ready dead. Her hands shook and she clasped them together to hide it. "I came here to tell you that something terrible happened during those four days. Something terrible happened to me. I can't, I'm not prepared to talk about it yet." She couldn't look at him, but she couldn't disguise the strain in her voice or the pain on her features. "But I know, it's going to affect me for the rest of my life. I know that someday I'll have to f-figure it out."

Her throat choked and she found herself trembling from it all. >From the horrible memories of that black room, from the voices. >From what the voices had said, those terrible things they had said. And she'd believed them. Absolutely.

Without the tiniest doubt she knew how serious they had been. And were.

"You of all people should be able to understand that." She looked at Mulder briefly. At his waiting expression. *He's waiting for me to prove my trustworthiness. What right do they have to manipulate people like this, to make me - MAKE ME - do this to him? What right do they have to grant life and death? What right!?*

Mulder uncrossed his arms and walked nearer. Soon he was right opposite her, only the bars between them. He'd momentarily forgotten about himself and his own problems.

"And I know, I mean, I don't think-" She could not stop the one or two tears that swelled in her eyes and dripped over. She could not hide the fear for him from him. But how would he interpret it?

She wanted to tell him everything and have her heart beat inside her chest as it used to; without the way between them being lies and things hidden. The words came back clear as ice:

//"We are in expectations of things, Doctor Scully. We have been aware of Fox Mulder's work against the evil for many years. And of the children. Until now, Mulder has never overstepped what we have been shown is his destiny. He has been granted a measure of tolerance, because what he has done means something to us. But that is now being tried by him. He must cease to peer into this now. The children must not be violated."

"Why do you have to speak in riddles? If it's so important that Mulder be kept off this case, why give it to me?" She didn't want to ask" Why not just kill him?" She did not want them postulating it as the easier solution. For him, to protect him, to keep him living on this earth, she would do anything. Anything they asked of her. Anything at all. "And what if I can't stop him, what if he won't listen to me?"

"No one is non-expendable, even among ourselves. No one is beyond sacrifice for the eventualities that are soon to arrive. I feel I must emphasize the certainty of Mulder's elimination should you fail. No prophet is greater than the work."//

Thinking them over and over gave her the force of will she needed.* Just lie. LIE LIKE HELL!*

"Mulder, I don't think I can deal with it on my own."

He frowned and shook his head the tiniest bit, puzzled. "But you won't be, Scully." Before her distress, his anger had dissipated. "I've always been there. I always will be if you need me, you know that, no matter who you're...in love with."

She wanted to reach through the bars of his cell and strangle and kiss him all at once. Why couldn't he believe I love him? Why can't he just accept that it is true? Why can't that be enough?

"No you won't Mulder. You'll be off running someone down, someone without a name or face, someone who you think or hope or wish will make everything right. Whether it's an alien or a ghost or something else because of memories from when you were twelve; or my abduction, or my cancer, or your abduction, putting your life on the line; chasing down shadows, trying to fix the whole, rotten world..."

"Is that what you think I'm trying to do?"

"I- no. No. I know you have to keep looking for answers. I have no right to ask you not to. I've come to understand that it's what keeps you going."

"I thought it's what you wanted, too. And you're an F.B.I. Agent, Scully, you know the risks of the job. We both do."

"Yes, reasonable risk. Justified dangers."

"It goes beyond that sometimes and you know it, Scully. Nothing's changed." Mulder put one hand on the bars. "I just don't get where you're coming from. What are you trying to say to me? Are you asking me to give this up for my own good? So I'll be safe and warm? I just can't do that..._nothing_...I'm not that person..."

"I'm saying I need you here - alive. I'm saying that if I'm going to survive what's happened to me, then I need YOU."

"I'm responsible for what happened to you. Do you think I'd just pull out?"

"No. You're not responsible. Goddman it, stop trying to shoulder the blame for everything that happens around you. I'm saying this out of motives purely personal and selfish. There is no accusation or blame or implied repayment."

"You're asking me to give up the search because...y-you want me to play it safe because you need me?" Mulder spoke the words carefully.

Scully had always been so strong but his voice had always turned that strength to dust. Because of her love for him, it was happening again.

Yes, I still love you and I want them to die for making me risk what we have - for making me destroy it!! She wanted to scream.

Mulder quietly probing for the truth, his hazel eyes keenly searching hers, as always.

She could see he was asking himself: what happened to her during those four days? What was going on? Really?

Scully was suddenly trembling from head to foot. *I should have known that I couldn't pull it off.* Lying was not in her nature. Lying to Mulder was simply impossible. They'd developed a relationship that had also become a life and death friendship and now a love so strong it scared her. Nothing was ever half way with Mulder.

The bond had its strength in trust: I trust you with my life and you can trust me with yours. Unspoken but unbreakable.

She decided to speak as much truth as she possibly dared.

"Mulder, have I ever imposed upon you? Over these years and years have I asked anything unreasonable of you? Begged for anything?"

Mulder was listening intently now, whatever passions had brought him there, had suddenly become far less important than that Scully was falling apart in front of him. "No. Never. You never have."

"Well, I am asking you now. I need you to give up on this. Leave "them" alone. Leave the Smoking Man be. For my benefit alone. For my sake."

Scully's plea rocked him to his foundation.

"Oh my god, Scully...?" He felt weak. What had happened to her? "For my sake"?? Was her life in danger still? How? Why? But all he could say was, "I'm so sorry I couldn't stop them."

"It wasn't your fault, Mulder."

He curled his large hands around her ridiculously tiny ones.

"I don't know if I can do what you're asking. I don't know if I can make that promise."

Scully had thought she'd succeeded. Now her face lost all color. She actually felt so weak, she couldn't stand anymore.

She slowly crouched down until she could sit on the floor, legs crossed. Both hands were clasping the bars that that unfeelingly separated them, held Mulder away from her.

Too far away.

She leaned her head against their coldness.

Mulder, standing there strong and alive, was as good as dead. They would kill him.

She didn't know what else to say or do. She'd failed and because of that, one day, he just wouldn't be there. One day soon, they'd assured.

Mulder crouched down also and reached through the bars to cradle her head in his hands. She cried that way for a minute. Then looked at his eyes. *He's looking at me like I'm sick. He thinks I've gone insane. Maybe I have.* For a crazy second, she felt like laughing. If the hopeless agony hadn't overpowered it, she would have. But instead she grabbed his hands and squeezed them as tightly as she could.

"Please." It was all she had left to say anyway.

Mulder buried his face in her lemon-scented hair. He felt her trembling through his hands that would not let go. What had they done to her? "They got to you didn't they?"

Whispering, helpless to conceal either the truth from him or the consequences were she to reveal it, "I can't...I can't do what they want, I can't...hurt you, Mulder. But they'll kill you.."

"They're using you to stop me. They asked you to stop me."

She nodded. Felt overwhelming joy/nausea/fright.

He kissed her forehead. "It's okay, it's okay."

Gently, he tilted her face up toward him with two fingers under her chin. She'd never said so, but she liked it when he did that. He was the only one in her life who did it now.

"All right," he said.

She questioned him with her eyes.

He continued. "I mean, I'll give it up, I won't go after Cancer Man. For you. For now. If it's that important."

_YOU_ are that important.

Her lip quivered and she tried to smile for him, but instead began crying. It was visible a gratitude and a secret relief.

And a terrible burden of guilt that she knew she would carry from that time forward until the day she could speak the truth to him. And nothing but the truth.

She cried for a few minutes as he held her head and pressed his face into her hair. He knew that whatever it was that had happened to her, he would not, could not let it destroy her. He'd do whatever thing was necessary, whatever it took, to ensure her safety. He'd comply.

Scully felt his strong, beautiful hands against her head and relished in their presence. In their life that would remain.

She said a silent prayer: I've just done an unforgivable thing, I've lied to your face. And, even worse, I have added myself to your burdens. In order for you to continue living. To keep you safe. Forgive me.

"If it'll help you." Mulder was saying. " But you have to promise me you'll come to me when you are ready to-"

"Yes," she said before he could say more. A supplication: Mulder, I am so sorry for what I've done. I am sorry because I've lied to you once more. Now I AM part of an agenda. Caught and unwilling. But if lies will keep you alive-

"Now will you do something for me?"

-I'll learn to tell them well. "What?"

"Arrange for bail so I can get out of here?"

Scully smiled. "Yes."

** Scully brought Mulder home and, after much coaxing, had him agree to stay one day and one night in the hospital to replace his body fluids, sadly depleted after his week-long self-neglect. Once tucked in the hated bed, he'd succumbed to sleep.

That afternoon, Scully returned to Augusta.

*

"Dana Scully is here."

"Leave her be. Let her come."

*

"Why?"

Scully stood in the center of a mountain cabin kitchen, staring at the gnarled face of a man she'd hoped never to lay eyes on again. But here he was. After years of having almost encounters, after the hurts done by his hand to her partner (yes! - working together or not, she still thought of him that way and more) and his family, here he was - the old Grim Reaper with a tube up his nose. His lungs must be diseased, his tobacco sticks finally having done their own evil.

Good!

"Why what?"

"Why Samantha? Why his father? Why all these lies and pain on him?"

Scully said a silent curse and blessing for The Lone Gunmen.

She'd followed Mulder yesterday because of what they'd said to her when she was gone, in that blinded white/black place. She'd followed him because she didn't want him to die.

"Answer me!" Came here alone. Didn't care if they shot her.

"I haven't done a thing to Agent Mulder. Not recently at least."

Liar! "This has already put Mulder back in the hospital once. He's on the verge of another nervous breakdown because of Samantha's murder. She was the last of his family."

She thought she saw something flicker in the old, rheumy eyes.

"If you are here to accuse me of Samantha Mueller's murder, you've made a useless trip."

"Look." She decided to beg since anger was doing little. Threats would be as pointless. "I've done what you asked. I kept him away. But I need something to give to him. I'm asking this for me. Is there something I can do for you so you will leave him alone?"

"I've asked nothing of you. There's nothing anyone can do for me, Agent Scully. You don't believe me, I realize, but I've done nothing to Fox."

She was startled at his use of Mulder's first name.

"Mulder, he's...tired. I'm tired. He won't interfere anymore. He'll listen to me. I promise you that. I'm begging you."

"Agent Scully, I am old and ill and the game is almost over. I won't see the end of it."

"But you want to see the end of Mulder."

"I never wanted that, but I'm only one man. I couldn't prevent everything."

"How did you know Teena Mulder?"

Bubbling oxygen interwove with words, "A somewhat personal question. I knew Teena when I was a young man, and Bill Mulder, too, of course. And Fox. A life-time ago, now."

"Did you know her in the biblical sense?"

"Impertinence will get you no-"

"Are you Mulder's biological father?!"

"I don't know. Teena kept some things very much to herself. She didn't want to hurt her son. I have no intentions of harming him either. If Fox is ill, perhaps you'd best serve him by attending to him in the hospital. And if you're suspecting my former colleagues of collusion against him, somehow I don't think leaving him alone and unguarded was a sound decision. Besides, others seem to have taken more of an interest in him these days."

Cryptic, double-talking bullshitter!

Scully wanted to throttle the old son-of-a-bitch. If it weren't for the Ugly Giant standing behind her, she would have shot him. Maybe.

Scully felt her resolve almost give way. She did not want to give that old prick the satisfaction of seeing her cry. Of knowing he had once again beaten Mulder down and, in consequence, her.

She turned to leave.

"Agent Scully."

She didn't face him again. "What?" Contempt rang out.

"If I could help Mulder, I would."

"Why didn't you get a cure for your own cancer?" She wanted to hurt him and it was the only thing she could think of.

"Possibly, I could have. But nothing cures old age."

"I'm glad you're dying. This time, in your case, justice will be meted out."

"I sent Mulder the anonymous tip."

"You?!"

"I was hoping he would find out, somehow, who murdered Samantha."

Seems even devils can love. "We don't know who."

"That's unfortunate news...I tried to pay one debt at least. Perhaps it isn't enough. Perhaps it's too late for me."

Scully paused, the smallest shout of triumph sang in her at his illness and his suffering. And that the Real Grim Reaper makes no distinctions. "Absolution? That would be more than you deserve."

He sat staring after her, even after the big door had been shut and bolted once again.

Approximately five hundred toxic agents. That's what he'd sucked into his lungs and exhaled. Suck in. Exhale.

Suck.

Blow.

For years until they reduced him to their level. Cancer Man, for the sobriquet fit perfectly now, certainly knew that every cigarette had steadily reduced his life expectancy by fifteen minutes. The millions of teeny death particles had done their work with all the same efficiency that he had done his.

But he hadn't minded back then.

His Helper spoke: "These others are interfering in the Work. Destroying our placements. They work for a different future."

"Their work doesn't concern me." he was saying to his younger and much healthier companion standing before him in the kitchen cabin, "The Associates and I want to know why the children are dying."

"We will find out."

"I'm sure you will." Cancer Man's face was one that had undoubtedly begun youthful and strong but had, as the years passed, fallen down his cheeks. It now seemed in a state of perpetual motion, giving the illusion of sliding off the bones.

The younger, healthier, more massive man nodded. "Who do you believe they are?"

"New players. Someone who shouldn't be interfering. Now, with your able assistance, we must interfere with them. Before they destroy all of our Watchers."

"What if they are more powerful? Will we be able-?" His unblinking eyes and square-block jaw showed nary a feeling.

"The power is the Work and the rules and you know the first rule? The first rule is that all other rules change if the situation warrants it. Besides," he wheezed, "there is no other power. You're proof of that."

*

Dana Scully's Apartment:

Scully was trying to deflect another disaster, Mulder- style.

Home for a day and a half.

He wanted in on the investigation. Behind Skinner's back would be just fine.

"Scully, I stopped my pursuit of the Smoking man, now I want to go back to work. Let's approach Skinner and-"

"What if they go after you?"

"I'm suppose to stop working too? I can't do that. I can't just around here and watch people die, knowing what I know, that the Black Oil is involved.."

"They might interpret your interest in these cases as a threat to him and make a move on you. We discussed this."

"We didn't discuss _this_; hiding away, doing nothing. I'm leaving the Smoking Man alone, I've stopped chasing my own personal answers, that should be enough for _Them_."

"What if it isn't?"

"I can't just sit around and hope everything works out, Scully-"

"Are you going to save the world, Mulder?"

"Why the hell not? Somebody has to try at least, why the hell not me!?"

"After everything you've been through, after everything we've seen? These people can't be touched. Mulder, you're a fly on a monster. You walk up to them and you disappear, they sneeze and you're gone. You were gone! They made it happen. They made you disappear!"

He moved to leave and she knew it was his way of closing his ears to truth. He would foolishly go through that door and vanish again. Mulder would be no more. They would see to it.

"Nooooo! No-Don't-you-dare-walk-out-that-door!"

He stopped....

"...Until you listen to me!"

...just short of an final exit out of her life, his back to her, stiff and ready to leap.

Scully planted her feet between him and her door.

"I don't believe it. You're going. You're just going to _go_, like always. Despite the danger to yourself and to your career. Your future. You'll risk it all to be right. And not even for a SURE right. A MAYBE right."

"You think my career means more to me than you and what they did? And what they're still doing to others? I'm so sick of lies. I can't live with them anymore. I can't turn my head away and shrug!"

"Not even if it means losing me?"

"You've got him. You don't need me, Scully."

She stared at him. He still did not know. Did not see. He was still blind to her. Still in darkness in himself. His words tiny. Almost too small to hear. Difficult to believe.

Then he said:

"Maybe I am crazy. But an answer, at least it's something. It's all I have left."

She wanted to slug him and drive him straight out of his dense walk in the lonely night.

"Goddamnit, Mulder. Why does everything have to be all or nothing with you? You have this huge mountain of guilt riding around on your shoulders and you expect others to share it with you, to pay for all their mistakes with the same self-destructive fury. Well, I don't! And I won't!"

"Scully-" He started, his pride enforced stiffness having been worn down somewhat by her honesty. She was right, it just hurt to be reminded of it.

"Be quiet and listen for a change! You're angry, Mulder. You're angry at the world. You're angry with yourself, with your vulnerableness. Well, if you love me as you have said, then you _are_ vulnerable. Because love _is_ vulnerable. It's risky, it means being exposed and having to trust! And it means maybe getting hurt too."

She paused for breath and continued more calmly. "So, if you're willing, you can be vulnerable with me, in fact, I require it. And this guilt and disappointment you have with your own failure to "save the universe", this guilt that daily consumes you pisses me off, do you know that?" Her voice rose again. "And do you know why? Because it degrades a man I happen to love, a man I consider not a disappointment and not a failure. That negative attitude lends no credit to my value of you and that pisses me off too! How many times do we have to go over it?! We say it and say it and nothing changes. You make me insane. So you're a little screwed up. Who isn't?! What I have to offer isn't purer than pure, it's normal, everyday feelings. I mean what the hell are you waiting for: The Magic Bus of Love to pull up and make a delivery?! Here I am, Mulder, take me or leave me, but will you STOP waiting. whatever it is, it comes from here." She thumped her chest with her finger. "And god knows it can come from inside you, because it's in there. I've seen it. Will you just accept it, please? Because this enormous self-depreciation in which you constantly indulge pisses me off!"

Scully was standing an inch from him, making sure her words hit home, aiming them right at him so he couldn't possibly duck. Her eyes suddenly bugged as though an unexpected light surfaced. "YOU piss me off, Mulder!" She stuck a finger in his face.

Scully was breathing hard and then, when his face and countenance started their crumbling at her words, she reached up to repair any lasting damage by taking his face in her palms, gently so it would not break him.

Mulder trusted enough to look back at her and there, instead of righteous anger, was tender feeling in forgiving eyes and a wetness that ran to her chin. She bit her lip and spoke: "Y-you piss me o-o-f-f-f-f..."

Scully drew him to her mouth and drank from the water she'd been thirsting for. Drank deeply. The journey had been long and the liquid fought for with body and soul, so it was sweeter than any.

Scully let the next leg take it's own course as she continued to kiss and kiss him, soon backing him against her kitchen counter and with arms encircling his neck, guided him to the floor. Quickly she shed his coat. The buttons on his shirt fell way under her fingers, the garment sliding off to end up down around his wrists and bunched around his backside. Swiftly, his jeans were opened and being pulled away from his hips, his underwear coming off with them.

"Scully..." he whispered and she could hear the quiver under the breathless way he said her name. "I-I'm n-not..sure I'm ready for this.." But his respiration's were quick and light and his skin had flushed to a beautiful hue. It spurred her on.

"That's a risk you'll just have to take..."

*

WATER:

Scully explored his mouth and lips and tongue with her own, not wanting to end the first contact. But other journeys were there, too, waiting for her.

She kissed throat and he leaned his head back to accommodate her. She sucked on nipple and applied tiny bites to muscles, and tongue to chest and stomach hair. His flesh would drive her insane. She would get lost in it - she was certain - in his sex.

Scully heard the words well learned and ingrained in her medical mind.

She kissed them, sucked them on her way south, down, down, down to his most perfect portion:

The orbicular and the risorius.

The stern-o-cleid-o-massss-toooooid.

Trapezius. Deltoid. Pectorals.

Anterior se-e-e-erraaaaatussssss...

The tight, rolling, obliques.

The looooong adductors.

The witch doctor in her smiled secretly and nipped at it; the notorious sotoriussssssss...

The words, so lovely in themselves were woefully inadequate to describe the harmonious coming together of all his parts into the pagan beautiful flesh of his writhing, consumable body.

Finely crafted. Finally achieved. An icon molded to be worshipped with hands, teeth and tongue.

Finally, her goal reached and lips and mouth sought out curls and silky tautness of what had been denied to her for too long.

She hesitated, drinking in his nakedness. The exposed and beautiful head, divested of its sheath when he was a babe, now a man's and offered to her. His rosy, tender bud atop the long, stiffened root.

She took his ridged penis in and rolled and sucked it, with eyes wantonly gazing up to watch his sweet trembling, his lower lip disappearing and reappearing, bitten and pinched under teeth in his desperate struggle.

She watched as he split in half, part afraid but part surrendering to her touch that felt soooo good. His brows drew together in default; succumbed; eyes shut; begging for more and for mercy as well.

"Just feel my lips, Mulder, just feel my mouth on you..."

Mulder.

Suddenly belonged.

So completely to her.

Sliding full length to the floor, he was wholly vulnerable as he had never before been to anything or anyone.

Trusting her. He declared all to her through sighs and soft moans so she would not betray his trust and they would complete the journey together.

Scully sucked in the feel of him and tasted the scent of him until she was moist for wanting him. But she did not want to top this first hill until he lay back in peace from it.

Watching him gasp as she sucked him was food from the gods. Soon she would have their drink as well. Quicker, more insistent she became and, eyes shut in disbelief of what he was feeling, his head whipped back and forth in the instinct to free himself from the sexual enslavement.

But, he was caught.

Yet, he was willing.

That anything should taste as good or be as perfect as he, was a mystery she didn't care to uncover. His spasms and moans came often, pleasing her. He had leaned up during his months on the Island and his stomach was fine and flat. The whole of his body, beautiful in it's center shape of skin over rippling muscle, was her landscape.

He would raise his head from her kitchen floor with eyes dilated in sweet shock for what she was doing. His silent gratitude was a gift to her - as was his perfection. Her love for him made him that.

She would conquer his center and his circumference, his end and his beginning.

Her offering.

Scully massaged, ever-so-gently, his testicles in a warm hand. He spoke to her in the language of carnal surrender - in moans she had never heard. His need, his trust and his want, his helpless state in her presence, made her wetter and wanting more from him.

Her embracing of his most secret parts:

Was the Hope she had spoken of.

Fox Mulder.

Her's now, and hers alone.

He sat up and laced new-born fingers through her hair.

"Mulder, no..." She placed a hand against his warm and weeping flesh, pushing him once more to the floor. "No, baby," she whispered, "lie down, lie back down sweetheart,..."

Mulder descended once more, but his fingers splayed on the cool tile, trying to find grips there rather than give in to instinct by taking her head between his hands and shoving himself into her.

Scully worked him until her jaw ached. Mulder moaned and tried not to accelerate the process but allow her total will.

She quickened, wanting him to feel her swallow him down. And then his offering was given; his innermost life offered up.

His deepest gift and most honest agreement.

He came and arched up, grabbing her hair, thrusting into her, crying out.

Scully's heart smiled. It was okay - that last. She had gladly let him make the final ruling. He was a man and, in this instance, impossible for him not to have done.

In physical automation his brain left the earth for those seconds, and he fucked her mouth until he was empty.

She swallowed, the more for him to be part of her. That, after all, had been her goal.

For a few seconds Mulder stayed that way, hands in her hair, head on her shoulder, arched over her like Greek Erotica until finally he lay back in delicious fatigue.

Afterward, Scully lay on top of him for a moment while his breathing calmed and his mind returned from that ethereal place she'd sent it. She didn't want to talk, just smell him and kiss his face and wait for his trembling to stop.

Finally, words seemed appropriate. "...And I love you, Mulder. Don't you know that yet?"

EARTH AND FIRE:

When he was able to stand, he took her by the hand and lead her into her bedroom with the neat-cornered bed. He began unbuttoning her blouse and didn't seem to mind that she helped. His fingers, shaking, fumbled a bit and she smiled up at him.

Mulder is naked in my bedroom, she told herself over and over. Mulder's nude and he's taking off my clothes and he's going to fuck me. He's going to shove his already hard cock inside me and come!

She was flushed with heat in her face and in her vagina. She herself would come _instantly_.

He was slow with the funny clasps on her slacks. They were fancy little hooks all the way up one side. She took control and undid them expertly, her passions for him running so wildly through her head, she all but tore the pants from her body, shimmying out of them and slipping her damp panties off in one quick motion. Then she took his shoulders, maneuvered him around so he was against the bed and pushed.

He fell back, bouncing, his long, hard and inviting looking penis bobbing. It was asking for her and she accepted. Scully slipped herself over him, delighted in the long moan it elicited from his mouth. She began rocking.

He filled her completely. He was hard and so very, very hot, she wondered if she'd live through it. Her chest was a bubble of thrill and sex-drive and she moved him every which way, wanting to fuck him until it killed her, until she exploded with orgasm.

Before she knew it, they were coming together. She wanted every last drop and squeezed and tilted until she'd gathered it.

I'm going to carry Mulder's living cum around in me all day tomorrow. I'll think of it there and remember who put it there. I'll remember and know that _he_ filled me up.

Mulder's sex had just decorated her insides and it was hot liquid gold!

The thought was like floating in the ocean.

"Ooooohhh my GOD!, Mulder, I _fucking_ love your cock!"

A bit crude, perhaps, but it was only the truth. Nothing spurious here. No platitudes need arise when faced with the male sex that was alive in Fox Mulder.

SKY:

Mulder did not let her separate from him but rolled her over and kept himself tucked away inside.

Looking at her from almost the level of her own skin but an inch were the eyes that saw within. She could not lie to their demand for truth. Not for long, certainly. Neither could she turn from the face of a boy who had grown up, became her partner, then her best friend, then her confidant and protector until, one day, he was not merely a person, but a man under her gaze.

A male.

Something more had conceived.

Before her each day as he walked into their office or to her apartment on those rare occasions he allowed himself to invade her privacy that much, someone new was there. He had seemed to revere her hideaway, a thing he felt the need to protect because it was part of her. Protect even from himself. His emptiness had been so great yet he had asked so little of her, as if his needs were inconsequential compared to her peace.

One day, partner and friend, the next a man. The opposite sex. Suddenly, that day, bursting forth from her female mind, came the realization that her affection and care for him was mingling with desire and lust.

He was on her mind constantly.

A creature for whom she already had such affection that the next step suddenly seeming logical and correct.

Not acted upon, however. She, too, felt the need to protect. To keep him from harm or hurt, even unintentional. She did not know how he saw her then. Suspicions were not foundation enough upon which to lay out her heart. But her eyes saw clearly what her heart questioned.

He had risked all for her. Would willingly destroy himself to save her. Years ago he had done so and done so again.

A day arrived where she learned the certainty of it.

Awakening on a plateau of freezing ice and snow, his face was the shining angel of the Old Testaments, his embrace the burning bush that warmed her in that place yet both embodied in simply a man.

Who had looked to the sky and laughed!

Then dropped his head to the surface of the Antarctic, satisfied with his visions and that they contained both the wonder of the sky and the life in her that would remain.

Her heart beat only for him from that moment forward. She would have told him then had he not gone into pre-death slumber.

Gathering as much of him in her arms as possible, she had lifted him from that almost death and infused her life-will into him as she did the warmth of her body.

He came for me. Here. He came alone.

Wounded, he still came.

Would have willingly died just in trying.

He'd become more to her, then, than anything else in life.

Partner, friend,...then man, sexual male, other half, perfect mate, second-soul...

Loving human being whom she loved....

Mulder kissed her, tasting all with his tongue and open mouth. Lovely, open lips. He was hardening again and moving around in her, she could feel him swell and push out at her depths until stuffed with his penis.

Then he moved, everywhere, all-over in every direction at once! And his lips sucked tit and tummy skin and neck and face and mouth until she might drown in him. His cock squeezing in and out of her, his hips pumping up and down. And all she could think about was it was her old partner fucking her brains out! It was Mulder. Spooky. The cute genius who'd looked at her through those old glasses making her heart flip just once. The guy who had covered up his nervousness and anxiety when he saw that his new partner and spy was a petite, pretty little thing. Nerves he covered over with cockiness that was so put-on, it was sexy.

He'd teased her and had somehow managed not to be an asshole about it.

Fox Mulder, bringing her a sports video. Placing her gold cross and chain in her hand with a shy grin and then slipping out her hospital room door as if scared to betray how terribly her disappearance had affected him.

Mulder, who'd thanked her for taking care of him when he was sick from poisoned water. Who thanked her because she had tended his poison-induced fevers across four states and three days of driving. Fox, who had come to her out of the fire, in a dream, to assure her that he was alive and would come back to her.

Mulder, who had wept profusely at her bedside as she lay dying of cancer and blood-loss.

Fox Mulder, her partner, who had said she made him whole...

..fucked her and never let his eyes leave her face as he filled her with cum. She wrapped her legs around his hips and pulled him in, wanting more. He gave more, until he was dry.

His eyes were large, black holes and she looked deeply, as always.

Reflected in each eye of Azure and Hazel, was the other's.

He collapsed on her softness, weak with having emptied into her. "Black," he said in her ear.

She stroked his back with finger tips, up and then down. "What?"

"My favorite color," he panted quietly, "is black."

Afterward, Scully wanted to shower. Not him - she loved his after-sex smell. A new and powerful odor. She wanted herself and the room filled with it.

When she moved to rise from the bed...

"No" He pleaded. "No." And drew her to him under the sheets, wrapping him legs around her, and resting his face between her underarm and breast to hibernate in her smell of sex and perfume. She saw his eyes flicker closed and felt his breath calm into the deep rhythms of sleep.

*

TRUST:

She was showering and the sound of the spray and the heated mist reached him from the open bathroom door. It was like waking next to a tropical waterfall.

He could see Scully's feminine form soap itself down and he quietly padded to the curtain, watching her touch her own body until he could no longer endure being denied that action.

Mulder pulled back the curtain and stepped in with her.

"I want to do that." Taking the soap from her hand, he lathered her back, his hand reaching around to soap her breasts that tightened at their tips under his touch. He slipped the slivered bar in between her legs and lovingly used his fingers to spread the silky cleansing agent into every canal and canyon.

He let the soap drop, lathering her sex with tactile fingers. She moaned and it was the sound they both wanted. He was hard, ready to speak back.

"Bend over, Scully." And she complied, turning up that golden bottom to him eagerly.

Mulder shoved himself deeply inside. She hadn't douched yet and was lubricated for him. He penetrated as far as nature allowed and then pulled away but never exiting. Tight, hot, wet Scully smothered his cock and it was as near to heaven as he would ever get in this life.

Her moans of pleasure mingled into a music with his and he thrust harder. Lifting her slight mass in his arms, one perfect thigh under each forearm, he pressed himself against her and she against the shower wall, shoving his cock in and out. She had nothing to grip, no control over what happened to her body under his greater strength but was letting him do his desire.

"Mulder-r-r-r-AH!" Liking it! Moaning for more.

He had spread and taken her in a way he had secretly imagined over and over for years. He was fucking Dana Scully and she wanted it!

He pounded her box that ached for him until his mind joined the flight of the shower drops and scattered into mist.

*

BELIEVE The TRUTH:

He soaped her down again and then she did the same for him. Then he wrapped her in a towel, carried her to the bed. She knew what he wanted, what he couldn't get enough of and let the towel fall away, laying back for him on the bed, ready for him. Always, she would be ready. Wanting him. _Wanting_ him.

Mulder didn't do anything for a moment but look at her. Memorizing the swell of her tits with their pink nipples pinched tight in lust while he watched. The slight curve of her tummy, a perfect pillow for his hips. His eyes plunged down to her waiting femaleness, fur glistening with need.

Mulder gently raise each of her legs, his hands on the backs of her thighs, pushing upward until full view of pussy and vagina were exhibited.

He stayed that way, looking at her. He wondered if there could ever be anything more beautiful in the world than this: Scully naked beneath him. Carpet and clit' created just for him by the talented God whom she worshipped. When he licked his lips, she sucked in air at the meaning. It was the only thing he was hungry for. The only food for years that would fill him without any kind of hurt but for the pain of that it would never be enough.

All of Scully was his. His to kiss and lick, smell and touch, kneed and fuck forever.

Mulder took her tiny member, the female hint of the male, between his lips in a pout and sucked ever-so-gently, teasing, tickling, until she was writhing under him and around him, her legs shuddering in sex-trembles. He licked and then kissed it over and over, teeny touches and she cried: "Mulder, oh god, Mulder, oh, fuck, oh _FUCK_!".

He used two fingers to stroke her in and out until she was begging him. Begging to feel him again. "Do you want me, Scully? Do you want me to fuck your pussy? Suck your tits? Suck your cunt? Do you want me? I want you to _want_ me."

"YES!" She cried. Whimpered, "y-e-s-s-s-s, so bad, so bad.... fuck me, please, baby-Fox-sweety-Mulder-doll, I wanna feeeeel you,.. you're perfect-perfect, you're so perfect, fuck me forever...Pe-r-r-r...f-e-ct.."

Mulder moved himself into position and he was inside, thrusting and jerking up and down on top of her. Felt her clench around him and then let him go, again and again, her hips rising up to meet him each time.

He rode her like that, pumping furiously until he came with a cry and she was overflowing with it.

She kissed him hard on the lips as her insides spasmed and clutched him, caught him and would not let go. He collapsed, burying his face in the hollow of her shoulder, confessing slavery to his priestess:

"I love you, Scully. I love you so much. I would die if I lost you, I was dying, I was...don't let anyone else touch you anymore, I don't want anyone touching like this, Just-me-just-me, _me_, please, only me..."

He would kill them if they did. If they hurt her again. If they took her and made her hurt or cry or frightened her. If anything tainted of their moral disease ever burrowed into her beautiful-like-the-sun- is-beautiful body, mind, brain, soul and life again, causing her to cease and leave him, he would kill them all and then kill himself.

"Anything you want. Anything, Mulder, anything..." She kissed his mouth to seal it. "...anything in this world. Nothing can touch us now..." She kissed him, held him, absorbed him into her - until now - piteously soul-less being.

"...nothing."

*

One more thing.

Fox Mulder turned it over in his mind as he entered the elevator. Each floor added one or two riders until eight or nine had crowded him to the back.

Just one more thing would make his life paradise. No, paradise had arrived in his life two nights ago.

It had come to him when he'd been stepping out her door ready to face hell because he wanted them to pay for bringing a taste of it to her. He knew what it was like to be blind and terrified. Promise to her or no promise, he could not sit by.

Scully'd lived a white/black hurting place for the second time because of them and to a lesser degree, because of him. And that was unacceptable.

He could not let it pass.

She deserved better than what he had brought her for the years since their awkward beginning in a chilly basement office cluttered as it had been with ideals and determinations.

She deserved so much more that what he could give now.

He'd felt his heart atrophy at the knowledge of the other who had held that future for her in his outstretched hand.

The best man would have her and she would be safe.

But she - Scully - had prevented his leaving and made him believe in something good again. She had showed him her heart and taken his, in it's presence and physical representation - convincingly.

Doctor-Agent Dana Katherine Scully loved him.

Was in love _with_ him.

She'd said it before. More than once. Hearing it and nodding and brain choosing correct words to speak back had not made his heart believe it though.

Brain and heart disputed the meaning and had done so since the beginning.

Now there was agreement. The questioning had ceased.

Only one more thing would make the paradise warmer.

Today, that very morning, she'd brought that to him as well:

Scully sat down with him in his cubicle on a chair she dragged over from the next "slot" - his word for the one place in the Bureau he could call his own.

"It's not just you, Mulder."

She continued, knowing he would not understand her meaning. "These murders, the Allenby's, Ian, Samantha, they're not because of some taint of death you carry or a dark conspiracy involving only you."

Mulder listened closely, knowing from experience that she was not counseling, but was building up to some new revelation.

"These strange deaths of children, these killings, they're happening all over the world. Before Beyer died, he'd been gathering information, had a half dozen law enforcement agencies searching world data basis for similar deaths; similar unsolved cases; similar signatures at the crime scenes."

She scooted her chair in closer and leaned into him, her face to his. "Dead children, Mulder with no determinable cause of death, all between the ages of 7 to 14. Unexplained deaths, hundreds of them. And if we include third world countries where data is sketchy? Maybe thousands."

Mulder shook his head but not in disbelief. "Hundreds? I don't understand. If that's true, there was no single UnSub or even a single group. The call to me, the case itself?"

"All exactly what you thought they were. Somebody wanted me on this case. But for some reason, not you."

"What else do you have?"

"Not much. Autopsy findings, Interviews that tell us little. But something terrible is happening, I can't begin to guess what and it's not only occurring in North American. All we do know is people are dying. Bizarre crime scenes being discovered where the parents or guardians, baby-sitters - whoever - and the children are murdered all the same way. But also at each crime scene, one other child is also found mysteriously dead. I've asked Director Skinner to assign another agent to me as an assistant on this case. THIS..." She held up her thick file folder like a flag, "is an X-File. Our office may have burned, Mulder, but the X-Files are alive and well and this is the scariest one I've ever seen, how about you?"

"Ditto."

Scully looked into tired but happier hazel eyes and debated whether to tell him the rest of what had been eating at her. She opened the honey jar, now out comes the stinger.

Do and die.

Together. Whole.

But then, too, must the whole truth be.

"Confession time," she said.

Mulder sat forward a bit. She had his complete attention.

"First, I love you more than anything in this screwed up world. And if you don't believe that after the things about me that I'm about to tell you, then speaking truth between us means zilch. And it means I'll have to punch your lights out. Okay?"

"I won't presume to argue with _that_."

She took a deep breath. This was going to hit him like a truck.

"First of all, I lied to you. I slept with Walter Skinner during the time you and I were _not_ together."

His eyes dropped and by that she knew it hurt him but he said nothing.

After a moment, he looked back up. Nodded.

It was forgiven and done.

One down.

"The men who took me told me that if I didn't stop you from interfering in their "expectations of things", they would stop you. I took that to mean they would kill you. And forgive me, Mulder but that is simply not an option in my life any longer. Tying you up wasn't practical, so we, meaning Skinner and I, consulted together. I falsified my initial report about what happened in the subway station so the blame would fall on you and you would lose your credibility and the resources to pursue the Smoking Man and your answers. If you think I was content with what I did, how I tried to save you, think again."

"Later, when you were in jail, I told you a half truth, to try and save you once more. Again at your apartment, I lied. But nothing worked Mulder. You're unstoppable. You're like a tsunami once you set your mind to something. That scares the hell out of me, you know."

Mulder was listening. He was not looking at her and his parlor was alternating from pink to white, but he was shutting up.

"Not even the threat that you might lose me or that it could destroy me - not even actually losing me - stopped you and that scares me even more."

He swallowed once. Twice.

"But I realized it's because you didn't really believe that I loved you anyway." Scully searched for his eyes. "Do you now?"

He nodded but did not give her his eyes.

"Don't be ashamed, Mulder, it happens to the best of us." Smiled.

She was satisfied to see his lip twitch at least.

"So I'm not perfect. Am I? I've done some pretty awful things that I'm not proud of. But I've forgiven myself the only way I really could. I reminded myself, about a thousand times, that you were the reason. Behind my motivations was you. Keeping you. I hope you can forgive me. I hope that above all else."

She waited anxiously as he scratched his eyebrow and fiddled with his pencil. Finally looking at her with eyes swimming in water. "Of course. Your the only thing I want above all else." He believed.

He believes I love him, she thought. Finally.

Thank-you Universe!

Scully let her body collapse with relief.

"I'm not perfect either, Scully."

He had something to say as well. She listened. It wasn't easy to do. Actually, it was damn hard because of what he might say.

"When you were...gone, I went to see a friend.,..." He paused. The 'fessing business was tough. "I was dying, Scully. I thought you were dead. And if your weren't dead, I thought..."

She knew. He thought it was Her and Skinner; Walt' n' Dana.

Skinner and Scully and zip for Mulder.

"I was going out, really "out", and he helped me figure it out, understand - helped me see a few things. Nothing "happened". But if he hadn't been there, I might have I don't know what I might have done actually." He stared hard at her, "They killed him you know."

Scully took his shaking hand. Squeezed it with her own on the tiny desk between them. "I'm so sorry. But I'm so glad he was there. I'm glad, Mulder. Do you hate me for being with Walter."

"No." He didn't really hate Skinner either. "No. Di-did you,...w-was he... was he..?"

"Not _bad_." Her lips twisted and pursed teasingly. "But, Mulder, I have to tell you: first they broke the mold. Then they made _you_."

He blushed to his roots.

Time to change the subject, she thought.

"There's something else I didn't tell you. Something I remember from when they took me. They spoke about you. A lot. About your searching into the case. But more than that, they said they'd been aware - and I quote: "of you and of the children for some time". They said the children "must not be violated"."

Scully could see his eyes light up like two tiny suns.

"It's those kids, Mulder. The kids are the key to all this. Don't ask me how, I can't begin to understand why or even the manner in which they're being killed. But that's where this investigation needs to look for those answers. the ones to those questions you keep asking. Something's killing these children and we have to find out how and who. Even if it means risking agents. Hundreds of children and their families. Maybe more. It shouldn't be."

Mulder agreed with an emphatic nod. He asked: "So who's the lucky slob?"

Meaning whatever new partner she was soon due.

"Well, he's not my type but he shows promise."

Despondent, "Yeah?" Annoyed too.

"Yeah. Skinner told me to go and bring my new partner..." Mulder winced "...up to date on all of this." Scully leaned in and quickly kissed his lips. "So, whadda ya' say, Partner, care to read it?"

Mulder had stared like a shocked fool and then his face split into a grin that made Scully stagger. Once or twice she'd seen that. Maybe not even.

Mulder had kissed her back, feeling light headed. Even the nausea that kicked in from the excitement didn't bother him.

And it wasn't just because he was back on the job as something more resembling a real agent, it was because he was there with Scully. And he was there with a Scully who held an X-File in her tiny, delicate but incredibly powerful hand.

Because she worked those hands through problems and kneaded them out.

Because she took shit and spun it into gold. She just made things happen.

She'd made him happen. And them.

Mulder indulged a loving look at his redheaded partner: She had to be a witch!

*

Skinner waited patiently along with half a dozen employees who, when their look brushed passed his, smiled or nodded.

No-one ignored an opportunity to say good-day to the Director himself. Ass-kissing at it's most refined.

-Ding!-

The elevator doors opened and instead of a steady stream of humans filing out, they were huddled around in a circle within, looking down on something he could not see.

Sentences were being spoken:

"Hey? Are you okay?",

"Can you get up?",

"Maybe we should we call an ambulance?"

Skinner pushed his way through the crowd when he recognized the voice of the one who answered:

"No. No, I'm fine. Just got a bit dizzy, that's all."

Skinner looked down between stranger's shoulder's to see Mulder sitting on his ass in the middle of the onlookers.

"Agent Mulder? What happened?" He offered his hand and Mulder gratefully accepted, letting Skinner pull him to his feet.

"Nothing. I just got dizzy. Working too hard I guess."

Skinner saw the dismissive look in Mulder's eyes, the non-concern with himself. "I think you should go to a doctor."

"No, really, sir. I'm fine now."

Skinner saw stain on the back of Mulder's collar. "Come out here, turn around."

Mulder was puzzled but decided it was best to obey the Director.

Skinner's finger was touching his collar and neck. "There's blood on your shirt, Mulder. Did you hit your head when you fainted?"

"I didn't faint, I got dizzy." But he did feel a small bump on the back of his head. "But, yeah, I must have whacked my skull on the handrail in there."

"Well, that calls for a trip to emergency."

Mulder knew that under his current status, medical concerns were top of the list on things to "watch for". He nodded. "I'll drive over there after work."

"You'll cab it and you'll go now. This happened at work so it's legit and you're covered for it."

Mulder sighed. He was so sick of people watching out for him, but arguing with Skinner would just get him a reprimand and his position in the Bureau was shaky enough already. He nodded again, heading for the front desk.

*

"Oh, Mulder..." Dana Scully muttered as she walked into Mercy Emergency and asked the admitting nurse where she might find the annoyance in question.

Checking her screen, "Oh, yes. He was taken up to X-Ray. Looks like he got a bump in the head when he,...wait, um who are you?"

"I'm his doctor. Doctor Scully." She may as well be.

"Oh, sorry. Um, he sort of passed out in an elevator. They think he might have a very mild concussion, but the Resident wasn't worried."

"Thanks." Scully made her way to X-Ray, by now familiar with every closet and stairwell in the much availed-upon facility since life began with a man named Mulder. Typically, he'd pushed himself too hard again. He was still on two medications. But at forty-seven years of age, he was a middle aged dog trying to be a young pup.

Scully smiled. Although, at that, two days ago, he had succeeded _very_ well.

Stepping off the elevator, she all but ran down Doctor Dethe'.

Pronounced "Deeethe", "with a long "e"

", Doc' had emphasized previously to Mulder who had, in Mulder-humor-fashion, called him "Death". Doc had not been amused at, Scully was sure, the play on his name that he had patiently endure probably a thousand times before.

"Doctor Dethe'!" (long "e") she said, "Excuse me."

"Doctor Scully? You'd be looking for Mister Mulder?"

"Yes. Another one for his collection." She joked, knowing the Doc' wouldn't get it. "Another bump."

"Yes." Dethe' was nothing if not humorless. He seemed grim, but he was a damn fine doctor. In other words, he'd handled Mulder before. "Would you care to examine the X-Ray?"

Scully, surprised, nodded. "Sure. When is he being released?"

Dethe' showed her into a small slide room and clipped the films of Mulder's skull on the Back-Lit.

Scully crossed her arms, getting comfortable and had a look.

Dethe' was busy clipping up the C-Scan's they'd also taken.

"Doctor Scully. Would you mind telling me what this man's doing running around the streets when it's clear he should be-" He turned around to finish his question and discovered the room empty but for himself.

*

Scully walked fast. Faster. Down one hallway and another, looking, searching, seeking, needing...

She saw a door that appeared like it might contain emptiness on the other side. Yanking it open, she ducked in.

Not empty. Janitor room. Shelves piled with chemical cleaners.

Disinfectant. Half full jugs of wax stripper. An orange mop-bucket on wheels. Wooden mop, handle thrusting nearly to the low ceiling, nestled in it.

Scully pulled the light cord, it tickled her face like a cob web, and closing the door to the hall from where eyes might see in and wonder at her implosion.

Because there was nothing else to prevent her decent she grabbed hold of the mop handle and hung on, until the floor moved up to meet her.

She sucked up deciliters of the mildewed and confining air of the closet while staring into the face of a monster who had leaped out at her from the X-Ray Back-Lit and followed her here.

The monster she had been fearing had shown itself.

It had come from the darkness into the light, opening it's great mouth to pronounce its directive upon her.

Gasping for air, her eyes absorbed water-soaked cotton mop string floating on the surface of dirty bucket water - rotting from bleach and wear. She added tears to it's poisonous chemical mix. And bile.

And when Scully steeled herself to look at that monster who was also a demon head-on with her burning eyes peering down that bottomless maw, what she saw looking back.

Was Emily.

~~~End~~~

But it's not over!!!!!!

Continued in "DIVINITIES" (Book Four). Coming End March '99

*

"We shall foldback 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.

:-)

GBVW>/p>

---

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