TITLE: Grand Seven
AUTHOR: Jess M.
EMAIL ADDRESS: snarkypup@mindspring.com
DISCLAIMER: I got 'em for Christmas. They're about three inches tall and
plastic. That's who I'm talking about here, I swear.
DISTRIBUTION STATEMENT: Anywhere, just let me know.
SPOILER WARNING: None, really.
RATING: R
CONTENT WARNING: Myth-Arc Madness!
CLASSIFICATION: UST, MSR, Big Serious Angsty Moments.
SUMMARY: When Mulder voluntarily disappears, Scully traces him to an oil
drilling platform in the Grand Banks. But what she finds there will lead her
question everything she believes she knows about... extra-terrestrials (said
in Pilot!Mulder voice). Features Krycek the Wonder Assassin, CGB
Splendifferous and other favorites! And actually, it's not funny, contrary
to the tone of this summary.

AUTHOR'S NOTES: Don't know jack about oil drilling, 'cept what I've gleaned
from the Discovery Channel. Don't know jack about the Grand Banks 'cept what
I read in "The Perfect Storm". Don't know jack about the chip in Scully's
neck, alien brain surgery or various other technical stuff mentioned herein.

I do know the wonderful music of Sheila Chandra. All of the quotes are from
her album: "Weaving my Ancestor's Voices". Songs featured are: "The
Enchantment" and "Dhyana and Donalogue", whose lyrics really belong to two
old English folk songs, and "Ever so lonely/Eyes/Ocean", which I assume
belongs to Sheila.

Visit my site for all my fiction, lovingly archived by Galia:
http://galias.webprovider.com/Jess/jess.htm
Then visit Galia's site for more great fiction!
http://galias.webprovider.com/visions.html


Email me and maybe the little voices will shut up. Maybe. "Hey! Quiet down!"


xxxxxx

Grand Seven

xxxxxx

Sun and dark, she followed him
Over the mountains high
Sun and dark, she followed him
For his eye so bright it shined
And he led her over the mountain
Beyond her mortal life

If perchance you ask for me
You will not me find
You will never me find

xxxxxx

The day Mulder disappeared began just like any other. Her alarm sent Scully
scurrying into the bathroom, still sleep-stoned and queasy from too many
sleeping pills the night before. She had been taking them often now, to
force herself to rest in her own bedroom, the one she hadn't moved out of.
Washing away the residue, she made it into her car with a cup of home-made,
and consequently far too strong, coffee without mishap. No one would know
she was still drugging herself. No one but Mulder, who would see it and not
comment, she thought.

The sun refused to rise that morning, shuffling just above the horizon in a
low gray wash. Her breath filled the chilled car with thick condensation,
barely banished by the time she pulled into the parking lot, her hands still
icy with cold. Fifteen minutes late, despite rising the same time as she
always did. Why, she wondered, was she moving so slowly? Mulder would laugh
at her, seeing he was there before her.

But not that morning. When he didn't show up for work, she wasn't too
concerned. She had, after all, been ditched before. Give him time, and he
always returned, fussy and annoyed at himself for leaving her. She ate a
bitter lemon-flavored yogurt, any sweetness it might have contained sucked
out by artificial sugars. Then she filled out expense reports, grinding the
tip of her pencil into the paper with each precise entry until her wrist
ached. Give him time, and he always returned.

She was still saying it, over and over to herself, nearly a year later.

What really galled her, what made it impossible to think "ok, maybe he's
dead," were the phone calls. Not the message left that day on her answering
machine at home, once he was sure she was at work, the one where he croaked
out "Goodbye, Scully," and then hung up. Not that one, which she had
listened to over and over until the tape broke and she threw the whole
goddamned machine across the room to find it wouldn't break that easily. No,
the ones where she woke up in the night to hear the phone ringing and then
to find there was no one there. She learned early on, if she spoke, he would
hang up. So she didn't speak. Sometimes, she just fell asleep again,
listening to nothing on the other end of the line. Once, desperate, she read
the number for a payphone into the silent phone and then drove there, biting
her tongue to keep awake for a phone call that never came. Damn him, why
couldn't he just let her go completely?

Not that she wanted him to, not really. She knew she would search for him
for the rest of her life, but unlike Mulder, she was not on any Homeric
quest. Clearly, he was gone of his own volition. He had even cleaned out his
apartment, for heaven's sake, and set up an automatic feeder for his fish.
His rent was paid for a year in advance, his utilities set up on an
automatic bill pay. So he intended to come back, did he? God, she hated him
so much it ate at her, left her small and angry and so intensely lonely it
was as if she were suddenly orphaned. That was what was worst, really. The
realization that there was truly no one else for her, in any sense.

After six months and the worst solve rate in the Bureau, she gave up on the
X-files for good. It wasn't that she couldn't have figured out the cases on
her own. It was more that they no longer carried any importance to her, no
desire. After running into the dark woods of the very plausible state of
Oregon after a beast-man she claimed not to believe in anyway, she found
herself lost there, alone with a terror so monumental it left her fetal on
the forest floor. So she let them fade away quietly and spent more and more
time shuttling to cities across the nation to assist as a forensic
pathologist in difficult cases. And she was good, damn good. She channeled
much of the anger, the sense of betrayal into those neat little incisions.
Not that she was seeing Mulder on the table or anything so melodramatic.
But...

In the end, when she woke at three am and rolled over to answer the wrong
phone, she discovered that she did, indeed want him back. In whatever
capacity he chose. That wasn't what she told Skinner, however, when he said
six words to her and hung up.

"Cancer man's dead. Get in here."

xxxxxx

Alex Krycek was exhausted. It had been an unbelievably long year, really,
starting with the whole Diana thing and not ending until tonight.

He'd been given the order, and he wasn't supposed to like it. But he did. So
screw it. He knocked politely on the door. The old man opened and looked at
him for a moment, drawing on the ever-present cigarette. He'd once put
forward the theory to Mulder that CGB Spender was some sort of alien life
form dependent on carbon monoxide. And been laughed at, which was fine,
since he was joking. He missed Mulder, though he would never have admitted
it. He saw them as strangely kindred souls, somehow.

"Why Alex, how pleasant to see you. I was expecting you."

Ever since he'd tried to become omniscient, old CGB had also become
extremely annoying. Who was he kidding? Everyone knew the experiment had
failed. You can take the man out of the alien...

"Really?" Alex said and waited until the door was closed to actually put the
bullet through the old man's brain. "Weren't expecting that, were you?"

Snickering to himself, he moved through the apartment, jerking open drawers
to find nothing more than the sad little remnants of a failed life. Where
the hell did he keep it all, you know, all the shit? Where was it? Oh well,
Alex thought. Doesn't matter at all. Not like he knows anything we don't
anymore.

Opening the last desk drawer he spotted a large manila envelope,
well-thumbed. What's this, he thought, the latest rejection letter?

Setting the contents out on the top of the desk, he shook his head in
disbelief.

"The prodigal son..." he said quietly. "So that's where you've been, you son
of a bitch. Well..." He rubbed a hand over his cheek and sighed. "Good luck,
man. You're going to need it."

Selecting a sharpie from a jar of pens on the table, he wrote: "To Be
Delivered to Special Agent Dana Scully, Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Eyes Only" in big, block letters on the front of the envelope, slipped the
photos back inside and placed it back in the desk.

"Don't say I never did anything for you, Mulder," he said to himself and
shutting the door behind him, dialed 911.

"Hello operator? I'd like to report a gunshot," he said, striding toward the
elevator.

xxxxxx

Oh wild as a crow is this heart within me
Dark as your shadow is this grief that blinds me
Stained as a board burnt on the polished hallway
And it is you that has stained it, forever and always

xxxxxx

Scully stared weakly at the scene laid out before her. The old man,
cigarette still smoldering slowly, spread-eagle on the hard wooden floor, a
large bloom of blood behind his head. He looked surprised, an expression
that didn't suit him.

Gunshot, she thought blankly, staring at the splatter pattern, not even
needing to roll him over to confirm. Right through his open mouth. Stepping
over carefully, she stamped out the cigarette and looked for Skinner.

"Scully," he called from the bedroom.

"I came as soon as I could," she said, looking at her former boss with some
trepidation. There was nothing remaining for her here, was there?

"Here," he said, and shoved a manila envelope into her hands. "They found
this in his desk."

"What is it?" she asked.

"I don't know," Skinner said. "I haven't opened it."

It was addressed to her. She sighed and gently bent back the prongs holding
the flap closed.

"Careful," Skinner said, unnecessarily.

"Right," she said, and pulled out the contents.

For a moment, she could do nothing more than stare at them, feeling her
heart... no, her entire gut twist violently with something alien, something
like joy. My God, it was good to know she could still feel it, pulsing
suddenly through her body with the force of her own blood. Joy, pure and
simple. With a shaking hand, she showed the photographs to Skinner.

xxxxxx

She took the photos to the Gunmen, handing them over with great reluctance.
Byers accepted the envelope first, his hand giving a gentle tug to force her
to release it. When he opened it, the others stood silently beside him. She
could feel their astonished happiness, as surely as she'd felt her own. It
was so strange, after this long, cold winter of a year to wake to a sudden
spring.

"Just tell me if they're genuine," she said. They had been searching for
him, with her permission, ever since he'd left, but found nothing. "Then
we'll figure out where the hell he is in those photos."

Frohike was staring at the top photo, turning it over in his hands as if he
couldn't quite believe it.

"He's grown a beard," he said. "It looks terrible on him."

"You would think," Langley agreed, "That it would hide the weak chin, but it
just makes his nose look bigger."

Seeing her annoyed look, Byers took the photos from his friends. "We'll get
right on it," he said, and they left her alone on the couch in the front of
the office, retreating to the back, where, as Byers put it, "all the good
equipment was."

How many times had she come here with Mulder? God, Mulder. She put her head
between her knees in an effort not to hyperventilate. Her pulse raced and
her heart, long-slowed and dormant, was pounding in her chest as if it were
a drum. What the hell was going on? She knew he was alive, had never doubted
it, but to see him in grainy black-and-white, his hair long and messy and
with that ridiculous beard... it was like seeing a picture of Santa Clause,
he had become so unreal to her. What would she say to him, if they found
him? And oh hell, what if they didn't? The photos might reveal nothing. And
why did Cancer Man have them? Jesus, it was too much. She was just one
woman, she thought, one little woman weakened by prolonged sadness. It
didn't matter that there was a thaw, did it, if the soil was dead?

Frohike came out just as she was standing up to leave.

"I can't do this," she said to the little man. "I can't get through it if we
can't find him."

Laying one gentle hand on her arm, he stopped her. "They're real," he said.
"And very recent. We were able to blow up the one with the computer in the
background. The date on the screen is this year."

She sagged against the door. "You mean since the new year?" It was only
February, but it seemed more like the end of the year, than the beginning.

"Exactly. Now, Scully, you can walk away... but I think we can find him from
these. That's the point. They're deliberate clues to his whereabouts."

Nodding, she found herself swiping away tears. "Ok," she said. "Ok. Show me
why you think that."

Frohike led her into the back room, labeled with a cross-stitched sampler
("A gift from a fan") as "The Enclave". She sat on the stool behind Byers
and tried to get her mind to slow down. It was useless. She was unable to
concentrate on the voices of the others in the room, seeing only the photo
scanned into the computer.

Mulder sat at a console, his head pillowed by his arms, staring wearily at
the camera. His eyes, with their unidentifiable color lost to her in the
last year, seemed to pierce her, as if he knew she would someday see this
image. Behind him a computer screen read out data in long streams. Beside
him someone was working, some lucky person she would never know, and they
were smiling at the camera.

Mulder's body, warm and still beside her in the car on a stakeout, smelling
of shaving cream and musk and salt, as he breathed slowly in sleep. Watching
him then, so transfixed by his extraordinary beauty that she could hardly
bear to be alive.

Lying in his bed after Donnie Phaster's death, listening to his heart beat
behind her as he held her, demanding nothing. The swirling feeling of him
against her, dragging her exhausted body into sleep even as she was charged
by him, electric and dark.

The night of his mother's death, covering him with a blanket only to find he
was awake, his hand reaching for her wrist and holding her there. "Stay."
His voice, cracked and weary, his thumb running over the pulse point of her
wrist. "I would never leave." Her own voice, speaking aloud things they
already knew.

"Scully?" Byers touched her arm gently, as if she might burst apart into a
thousand fragments. "Are you ok?"

"Yes," she said, more firmly than was reality, shaking away the feel of
Mulder's hand on her skin. "I'm sorry. Please tell me again what you've
found."

Byers nodded, but not before sending a worried look to his companions.
Frohike took a deep breath and began again.

"This..." He pointed to the data stream behind Mulder's head. "This is some
sort of information feed, and from the code we're reading there, we believe
it to be unique to this program. This leads us to believe that this program
is specific to whatever they're doing. And here, in the upper corner of the
screen, there's an acronym."

Scully squinted at the photo and Byers obligingly brought it up more
clearly. "D.S.P.E.P.", she read and shook her head. "I don't recognize it,"
she said.

"Neither do we," Byers admitted.

"But," Langley added, "We know several people who might. This looks like one
complicated little mama. The work of someone we'll at least be able to make
contact with."

"Right," she said, staring at the acronym, willing it to tell her its
contents. "And what if you find out it's used in thousands of places?"

Byers looked briefly to Frohike, then back to her, his face guarded. "Dana,
we can't guarantee this, but we all believe this to be something fairly
rare. Otherwise, we'd have heard of it. Let us make some calls. There's
fresh coffee out in the other room."

She stood in the hallway, breathing slowly, looking carefully at the photos
again as the boys made their phone calls. In addition to the shot of Mulder
in front of the computer, there were several of him standing with three or
four other people, obviously part of a team. He didn't look exhausted in
these, but still, as she traced her finger over the outline of his body, he
seemed weakened to her. Older than a year should have made him. The final
photo was clearly taken at a completely different time than the others, and
it was this one that worried her the most. Mulder was clean-shaven, his face
thin and bruised. His head was also shaved and an angry scar rolled across
the back of his head, completing the circle begun by the Cancer Man two
years before. But he was smiling at the photographer, warmly, as if he were
happy to see them. The room he sat in looked sterile, but was clearly not a
hospital room. Her stomach churned as she touched the neatly stitched scar.
Why wasn't she there to tend to him? How could he have consented to brain
surgery, yet again? Nausea overwhelmed her and she lay down on the couch,
clutching the last photo to her chest as her heart raced beneath it.

"Dana?"

When she opened her eyes, Byers was leaning over her, smiling.

"You fell asleep," he explained, lifting the picture from her hand and
setting it aside. "I expect this has been very stressful for you."

"This whole year," she said in a rare moment of honesty, adjusting her shirt
and standing on shaky feet. She liked Byers. He was a gentle man, in all
senses of those words.

"Let me get you some hot soup," he said. "It'll help to have something in
your stomach."

She nodded and followed him to the back, where another small room contained
a microwave, a fridge, and shelving covered with dusty magazines. Byers held
up two paper cups and smiled.

"Minestrone or split pea?"

She grimaced and nodded to the minestrone. Two minutes later she was sitting
on a stool behind Frohike, staring at the first picture again, gratefully
eating soup that tasted mostly like the cup it was cooked in.

"D.S.P.E.P., or 'Dizpep', stands for Deep Sea Petroleum Extraction Program.
It was designed by a buddy of ours who does industrial programming on
contract when he isn't trying to hack into e-commerce sites. The program was
created to allow a deep sea platform to function automatically, with a
skeleton crew of repair men and operators. Fortunately for us, it was a dud.
Didn't seem to work without constant tweaking. So only one copy of the
program was ever sold."

"To whom?" she asked, sipping a bit of broth.

"Well, here's where it gets complicated. Ten years ago a consortium of seven
companies got together and formed an umbrella partnership known as Grand
Seven to build a platform for use in the Grand Banks. The platform was
built, at a cost of nearly four billion dollars, but when they got out
there, the yield was half what they'd been led to believe it would be by
their geologists. Ostensibly, the platform is still in operation, but since
the yield is so low, it's become increasingly expensive just to get a crew
out there. Control of the platform was eventually bought out by a single
company, a small Texas-based company known as Texpet, for Texas Petroleum."

"So Mulder's out there mining for oil?" she asked.

"Not exactly. Texpet didn't purchase the program. It was bought by a
subsidiary of theirs, a medical research company known for their focus on
gene therapy, a Dallas-based company called Meditex."

"These guys are great with names," Langley observed with a smile. Scully
smiled weakly back.

"Gene therapy?" she said. "Why would a gene therapy company want to reduce
the compliment on an oil platform out in the middle of the North Atlantic?"

"Excellent question," Byers replied. "Even more interesting, is that they
didn't."

"Didn't what?"

"Didn't reduce the compliment. Or at least, that's how it looked at first
glance. We pulled up the personnel records for Grand Seven for the last year
and discovered something rather interesting. Now, I don't know how much you
know about roughnecks, but on an oil platform, men work in shifts. Six weeks
on, six weeks off. So you need two crews. Grand Seven has that, at first
glance. But we dug deeper."

Frohike picked up the narrative. "What we found is that new people are
brought out every six weeks. Two-hundred and twenty-five new people. But the
platform has a minimum operating capacity of two-hundred and fifty, which
means there are at least twenty-five people out on the platform who never
leave. This is highly unusual, in and of itself, but it gets weirder
still..."

"By hacking into the mainframe at Grand Seven," Langley continued, "We were
able to ascertain that each time the two hundred and twenty-five new people
arrive, these are completely new people. And none of them, not a one, has
any experience with oil drilling. So far we're finding housewives,
programmers, vets, soldiers and many, many children."

"Children?" Scully asked, incredulous. "What the hell would children be
doing out on a drilling platform?"

"You tell us," Frohike finished. "We can't see what these people are doing
to the folks they're bringing out there, but I can tell you one thing. They
are using 'Dizpep' to run that platform, quite efficiently, it would seem."

"Which means those people they're bringing in aren't needed to crew the
platform," she said. "They're doing some sort of medical research out
there."

"It would appear so," Frohike said. "I'm sorry, Scully, but that's the best
we can do. They probably have another system out there with the medical
data, but we don't know how to find it without more information."

"Well," she said, tossing the empty cup neatly into a wastebasket across the
room. "I guess that means I'll just have to go out there and see for
myself."

xxxxxx

You took what's before me, and what's behind me
You took east and west when you remind me
Sun, moon and stars, from my sky you've taken
And the God above, or I'm much mistaken

xxxxxx

Skinner gave her immediate permission to go, over the phone from the
Gunmen's office, and thanks to the wonders of the internet, she was now
standing on a landing platform in Newfoundland, where the wind was so cold
she could no longer feel the tip of her nose or the fragile edges of her
ears. She shifted from foot to foot. Everything ached. A tall man in a red
flight suit jogged over to her, his fur-tipped hood making her own bare head
ache.

"Agent Scully?" he asked, extending a hand. She could hardly hold it, her
own gloved hand was nearly frozen through. "I'm John Mitchell. I'm the
pilot."

"Fantastic," she shouted, her voice carried immediately away by the whipping
wind. "When do we fly?"

"Seven minutes," he shouted back. "We're taking everyone out in shifts of
twenty. This is the third shift."

Perhaps it was luck, or fate, that got her there two days before the
six-week shift change. A bit of wrangling with the head of Grand Seven over
the telephone and she was given permission to join one of the helicopter
flights out to the platform, which lay off shore in a bank of ever-present
mist. It was a break in this milky white cover that had allowed her to go
along. Had the break come a week ago, when originally planned, she would
have had to wait another six weeks before she could see if all their work
was meaningless. They had insisted she wait for the third flight, and she
had agreed. There was little chance she would argue at this point.

She knew better than to ask for Mulder by name when she spoke to the head of
the project, a man named Carl Burman. The last thing she wanted was to
arrive and find Mulder was already gone, or worse.

"Great," she was practically screaming now, her ears filled with the screech
of rushing air. "Where do I go?"

"Follow me," he mouthed, giving up on communication. They jogged toward the
enormous white helicopter waiting with its massive blades whirling three
full feet above her companion's head. Inside, she found men and women, no
children, stuffed onto several rows of benches. They all wore the same red
jumpsuits, as if they were entering a cult. John sat her on a jump seat,
facing the others. She could feel the scrutiny of twenty pairs of eyes, as
if they knew she wasn't travelling for the same reason they were.

She closed her eyes, feeling the machine thrum around her. It was as if the
world itself were throbbing, the noise and vibration were so strong. For two
days she had sat in a darkened hotel room, watching the television without
hearing it, never quite sleeping. God, she was tired. How wonderful it would
be to fall asleep right now in Mulder's warm arms. Not that she would know,
she thought. Only once had they slept in the same bed, after Donnie Phaster,
and then she had been in no mind to appreciate it.

When she opened her eyes, she caught a movement that sent a dark shiver
through her body and brought her to her feet, adrenaline scattering her
exhaustion like wind-blown leaves.

"Agent!" the pilot yelled, "Sit down! We're about to take off."

But she had already drawn her gun. The dark-haired woman in the corner met
her eyes with a weary resignation borne of the realization that she was soon
going to die.

"Federal Agent! Open the fucking door!" Scully yelled. "I can't fire in here
without killing us all!"

The pilot, his mouth hanging open, scrambled out and jerked open the door
beside her. She gestured to the woman, who was now ringed with cringing,
howling passengers.

"Get the fuck outside!" she screamed. "Don't try anything or I will fire!"

The woman rose and passed within two feet of Scully's toes, her hands raised
meekly. She smelled of sweat and, oddly, baby powder. Perhaps she was wrong,
Scully thought for a moment, then the cold prickle of fear took hold and she
followed the young woman out onto the tarmac.

"What the hell is going on?" John yelled over the sound of the blades, the
endless wailing of the wind.

"Don't move," Scully shouted at the woman, who looked to John in mute
protestation. Scully felt ripples of nausea run through her. Was she
thinking clearly? John turned to her, his face tight, when suddenly and
without hesitation, the woman turned and began to run. Aiming steadily,
keeping her mind on Mulder, Scully fired one shot at the back of the woman's
neck.

John shouted in horror as the woman fell forward, toxic gasses rising
boiling into the wind. She had been right, Scully's mind supplied, but she
felt increasingly dizzy and ill. She should have slept.

"Get inside!" Scully shouted and pulled the pilot back into the copter,
slamming the door on the acidic cloud. The passengers were still crying.
"Radio the base. Tell them not to approach her body without biohazard
suits." That was assuming there would be anything left to examine by the
time they arrived.

"What?" John said, panic on his handsome face. "What the hell is going on?"

Scully closed her eyes and pinched the bridge of her nose. The acid had
burned the soft mucus membranes of her nose and left her eyelids feeling
strangely gritty. She saw in her mind the sudden, momentary shift of the
woman's mask and the strange eyeless face that had haunted her dreams for
years. Something in the frequency of the helicopter's humming, she
suspected, had made it difficult to stay hidden. Had she been facing the
other way, she would never have known.

"I will need to check each of these passengers," she said slowly. "To be
sure they aren't also... carriers of that disease."

"Wait a minute," John said. "Are you saying I was just exposed to
something?"

"It isn't a contagion," Scully explained. "It's... engineered." She was
never a good rapid liar, but there was no other way to explain what these
people had just seen. "I will need hypodermic needles. I need to draw blood
from everyone on board."

"There's something in our emergency kit," John said. "You can get started
while I call the Base."

She nodded and took the kit from the outstretched hand of the co-pilot.
Inside she found a scalpel and two needles buried beneath the usual bandages
and lotions. That would be the first three. "I'll need eighteen more
needles," she told John. She would have to test him too. The passengers
stared at her, their faces ashen, but solid. Her stomach rolled with a
moment of panic.

"I'm going to draw blood from each of you," she said. "If anyone objects,
they'd better get out of the damn copter and start running now."

No one did.

xxxxxx

The steady drone of the helicopter steadied her nerves, despite the sudden
dips and constant shaking from the strong wind. She was amazed, after all of
it, that they were flying out at all.

"What I don't understand," John shouted to her, "Is why you shot her if she
was just sick?" Her seat rested back to back with his. Leaning around the
edge, she was able to practically whisper in his ear.

"She was going to infect the people out here, deliberately." Well, it was
only half a lie, really. She was sure the woman meant to kill the people on
the platform, though she had no proof of it. Still, she had not had the best
experiences with faceless aliens so far.

"So is that why you're coming out?" John asked. "Is that what the FBI is
doing out here?"

He must know something, she thought. He ferried these people, and supposedly
some of them would be children, out to a drilling platform in the North
Atlantic. Could he never have any questions?

"Partially," she said slowly. "The rest is classified."

Beneath them the metal-gray sea slipped past, whipped up like meringue with
thick white crests to every wave. The Grand Banks had some of the worst
weather in the world. What an isolated place it was. It was less accessible
than the middle of the Tunisian desert, an irony not lost on her now.

"We're almost there," John said over an intercom. The people she faced
watched her nervously, their eyes wide and frightened. Did they know why
they were here? What if she were just to ask them? One man covered his mouth
with his hand, indicating he was going to be sick. The woman sitting next to
him handed him a paper bag as if they were flying coach to New York.

She could see the lights of the platform now, rising out of the water like
some strange mythical giant, its thick concrete legs seeming to stride
forward through the churning water. Atop the platform was what appeared to
be a small city, ringed with the lights of an airport. It grew as they
approached, widening to dwarf the helicopter, steady against the wind, the
sea.

"We'll be landing in one minute," John said and she let her eyes slip
closed. The helicopter seemed to stop in mid-air, shuddering and groaning.
For a moment she saw Mulder lying across from her, taking up an entire bank
of seats. "Must be the place," she heard him say and smiled to herself as
the copter thudded onto the landing platform.

xxxxxx

My pretty fair maid, I'm glad to meet you here
For it's on this lonely mountain, your beauty shines so clear

And if perchance you ask for me, perhaps you will not me find
But I'll be in my green castle, along the mountains high

xxxxxx

The director, Carl Burman, met her at the helicopter door, dressed in a red
suit with the same fur-lined hood as the pilot. But on his chest, visible
for the first time, was a logo and the words "Texpet Industries". He shook
her hand and even shouldered her bag, leading her into one of the buildings.

As the door shut behind them, she heard silence within her own ears for the
first time in what seemed like hours. The director's voice was warm and
soft.

"Agent Scully," he said. "Please follow me. We can talk when we get to my
office. I'm sure you'll understand if I don't wish to discuss anything out
in the hallway."

She nodded and let him lead her deep into the bowels of the building to a
small office overlooking the roiling ocean.

"Nice view," she said and he nodded.

"On a good day, you can see forever." There was a note of humor in his
voice.

"But what's there to see?" she asked and he smiled.

"What can I do for you, Agent Scully? You weren't terribly forthcoming on
the phone."

She set her bag down and reached into the front pocket. The photos were
neatly in their envelope when she handed them to him.

"Do you know this man?" she asked.

The director's face was unreadable. He cleared his throat and shook his
head. "I don't believe I do," he said. "Who is he?"

He was lying. She could feel it in her whole body, like the vibrations of
flying. She was that attuned.

"His name is Fox Mulder. He's been missing now for nearly eleven months.
This photo shows a computer program known as 'Dizpep' for Deep Sea Petroleum
Extraction Program. A division of Texpet is known to have purchased this
program. I can only surmise it is in use on this platform today."

The director eyed her for a moment and then reached over to hit a button on
his phone. "George," he said. "I need to speak to Allen Cox. Get him up here
right now."

"Do you deny you're using this program?" she asked.

"Please be patient, Agent Scully. I'm sure this will all be cleared up in a
moment."

The director smiled pleasantly, but she was sure they were covering their
tracks. How many times had this happened to her before? Mulder could be in
pain, or worse, and she was standing in a clean white office, chatting.
Without warning, even to herself, she reached behind her back and drew her
gun. Outside the clouds were rushing in, bringing a thick coat of fog. She
felt the fog in her own mind as well. Days without real sleep, without
eating, without cease, crashed in on her.

"I don't want to wait," she spat. "I've been waiting for a goddamned year
and I won't wait any longer."

"Agent Scully, please!" the director said, raising his hands and staring at
the gun. She held it steady and pictured the bullet entering his brain,
gnawing through the bone and exiting to smash the glass behind him. Then,
she thought, the sea would enter and swallow them all. Despite the fact, she
knew, that they were nearly a hundred feet above the rushing waves. "I'm
sure we can clear this whole thing up in minutes!"

The door behind her opened and as she spun to face it, a young man poked his
head into the room.

"Sir, I couldn't find Al..." He froze, staring at the gun.

"George! Do you know Fox Mulder?" Scully shouted, aiming at a spot right
between the boy's eyes. "Because if you do, you had better go get him or I'm
going to put a bullet in your bosses' neck."

"I..." the boy began, his face white.

"Do you know Fox Mulder?" she shouted. "Do you know him?"

"No, Scully," a voice from behind the boy said. "He doesn't. But he does
know Allen Cox. Let me by, George."

The world seemed to spin as the door opened further. Scully knew she was
going to faint, she could feel the blackness creeping up over her body like
oil. She had been so foolish, so stupid. She should have slept, she should
have eaten... there were so many, many things she should have done and now
it was too late. The gun fell from her fingers and she backed into a chair,
her knees nearly giving way as they found the edge of the seat.

Mulder stood in the doorway, his face covered in a dark growth of beard, his
hair long and messy. She closed her eyes and let the darkness come, washing
away with it the stress of the last three hours, of the last three days.

xxxxxx

"Scully?"

Mulder's voice was tickling her, cutting through the damaged buzzing in her
inner ear and drifting over her eardrum like a breath. She smiled and
whispered his name, for what seemed like the first time in a year. It was
strange how out of practice she had become in saying it.

"Mulder," she said again and opened her eyes. He looked down at her, hair
falling over his forehead and covering his eyes.

"She's ok," he said to someone else. "She just fainted. Scully, do you know
where you are?"

She shook her head, but answered anyway. "Grand Seven platform. The
director's office."

He grinned and brushed her hair back from her forehead. It had grown since
he had last seen it. Somehow she had been unable to cut it, seeing the
representation of her loneliness in its increasing length. It had been
eleven months. Eleven months of fear and anger and...

"Can you stand up?" he asked.

"Yes," she said stiffly, pushing his hand away. "I'm fine. I haven't slept
much since I arrived in Newfoundland. I just fainted." She stood slowly,
feeling the floor rock beneath her feet as if she were standing on the deck
of a boat. An illusion brought on my exhaustion, by the confused workings of
her inner ear.

Mulder stood back, waiting for her to recover. When she was steady, he
handed over her gun with what she could only describe as a sheepish
expression on his face. She could feel the heat in her own, not of
embarrassment, but of anger. How dare he just stand there? Shouldn't he be
on his knees, as she had been, prostrate with relief?

"Agent Mulder," she said finally, the words thick on her tongue. "I'm
delighted to have found you at last, alive and well."

"Scully," he said, his face falling slightly. "I'm glad to see you too."

The director cleared his throat softly and she was suddenly all too aware of
his presence, and of George, hovering behind her. She wanted to bat them
away, like pesky flies.

"I imagine you and Agent Mulder would like to talk," the director said
quietly. "But first, Agent Scully, if you don't mind, will you please
explain to me what happened back at the Base? I understand one of our
passengers was shot. By you."

Mulder was staring at her, his eyebrows up in an annoying parody of her own
most incredulous expression. She frowned.

"I don't know how much of this I should tell you..." she began.

"Tell him everything," Mulder said gently. "He knows more than you do, I
suspect."

That angered her too, unaccountably. "Fine," she spat. "I'm sure even George
here knows more than I do right now, Mulder. I was on the helicopter and we
were preparing to take off. I was in the jump seat, facing the passengers
when I noticed that one of them..." She sighed. Even if she could explain it
to them, she had no words for what she'd seen. "There was an... alien there.
A faceless alien. I saw her for a moment, just briefly, lose her...
disguise. She tried to run and I shot her in the back of the neck. I hope,"
she said, nastily, to Mulder, "That I didn't spoil some part of your plan."

"On the contrary," he said gently. "You may have saved lives."

"You were right again," the director said to Mulder. "Your accuracy seems to
be increasing."

"Well, there's no harm in that," Mulder replied, sounding very good-natured.
"Scully, these people will be grateful to you. At the very least, you spared
us some very nasty business."

"Well, I'm so glad," she hissed, anger threatening to overtake her. Who was
going to spare her? She tried staring out at the sea. Closing her eyes to
the bleak gray wall of mist and water, she controlled her own emotions with
a practiced mind.

"Scully?" Mulder's voice cut through her. "Are you all right?"

Yes, she thought, I'm trying to keep from gouging out your eyes.

"I'm fine," she answered, opening her eyes to see his worried face. She
resisted the urge to shut them again. "Now we have to talk."

"I agree," he said quietly. "Gentlemen, I'm sorry to have frightened you. I
should have been up here sooner."

"It's all right," the director said.

Mulder smiled and opened the door to the office. "Come on, Scully. Come see
what I'm up to."

God, she wanted to kill him. Or hold him, she wasn't sure. He slipped his
hand into its familiar spot on her lower back, burning her skin just above
her tattoo. The urge to push his hand away was so strong it was nearly
impossible to control. Don't be so childish, she chided herself. He led her
down the hall.

"My quarters are on the third level," he said as if they were just checking
out a new apartment. "This is the eighth. We'll have to take the elevator."

She stared at him, hearing words, but not understanding. "How can you be so
calm?" she whispered as they waited in front of the elevator doors. "Huh,
Mulder?"

He winced slightly at her tone. "Don't call me that," he whispered back.
"Here I'm Allen Cox."

"Since I have no fucking idea where 'here' is, Mulder, I don't feel
particularly inclined to follow your instructions. Do you know what this is
doing to me?"

She was almost pleading. Her legs were weakening again, threatening to land
her at his feet again with her arms around his knees. She grit her teeth to
stay upright. Mulder was staring at her with that unreal face, covered in
hair. Was it even the same man? Everything spun.

"Scully." His arm was on her elbow. "You're in shock."

"I'm a doctor," she said, jerking away. "I think I know shock when I see
it."

"And I know you're a goddamned doctor, Scully. You are so fucking stubborn
sometimes," he said, pulling her into the open elevator. "I know you're
angry and overwhelmed and upset, but I can't do anything about it until we
get to my quarters. Please understand that not touching you is killing me."
His voice was urgent and low in her ear as he supported her. She sighed and
leaned back against the wall as Mulder hit the button for his floor.

They arrived a slow few seconds later with a ping and a disconcerting jerk.

"Down the hall," he said and she followed him mindlessly, her body
functioning as her mind concentrated on simply not weeping.

He paused in front of a white door, identical to the rest of the doors in
the hallway, indistinguishable in every way. When he punched a code into a
box above the knob and pushed the door open, she recognized the room
immediately. Her mind fit the freshly-shaved, ill image of her partner to
the desk by the window. It was mind-numbingly clean and as unlike him as
anywhere she had ever been.

The door clicked shut behind them and for a long moment, they simply stood
and stared at one another. Scully felt dizzy again, the lightheadedness
making Mulder waver before her until she realized that it was in fact not
her ears, but her eyes that were causing the illusion. Tears rolled slowly
from them and slipped down her cheeks.

"Scully," he moaned and collapsed, finally, at her feet. But being Mulder,
he pulled her down as well. They lay on the floor, his body pressed over
hers, his mouth on her cheeks and in her hair as if he were trying to
protect her. "Scully," he said again as she lay still beneath him, unable to
move. "Please forgive me, please."

Finally her mind cleared. Like opening a door, she suddenly realized where
she was, and whose warm body she was touching. Relief as sweet as joy flowed
over her and she began to weep with him. "Mulder," she called him to her.
"Mulder. Thank God. Thank God."

He smiled against her skin, stroking her hair back from her face. "I've
missed you so much," he whispered. "I wanted to tell you so a thousand
times. Maybe a hundred thousand, but I couldn't, Scully. I couldn't."

"Why?" she whispered, kissing the warm hair of his bearded chin, wishing she
were tasting skin.

"It would have jeopardized everything," he said. "I'll explain it all, I
swear. But I just want to touch you for a moment. I want to be sure you're
real."

"I'm not the one," she told him, "Who vanished into thin air."

"I know," he said softly. "I know. And I will make it up to you, I will.
Scully, if it takes the rest of my life, I will make this all right."

"Do you really think it might take that long?" she asked, suspiciously, and
he laughed.

"No," he said. "I think you'll understand in a few hours. I think we'll be
all right then. But right now, I think you need to lie down. When did you
last eat?"

She shook her head beneath his. "I am lying down," she whispered.

He was looking at her with those dark eyes and she couldn't see what color
they were in the dim light of the room. She reached up and pushed back his
hair, staring at him.

"Scully," he murmured, turning his head to kiss her hand. "You need sleep
and food."

"I can't see your eyes," she said, and it was true. Her vision seemed to be
fading from the edges inward, narrowing to a single point. "All this time,"
she told him as she began to drift away, "I only wanted to see your eyes."

xxxxxx

The ocean refuses no river
Ever so lonely, an ocean refuses no river
Waiting for the time when we can be
Alone together, eternally
Your ocean refuses no river

xxxxxx

She awoke gradually, aware of sleeping heavily for some time. The dull
clicking of a clock somewhere in the room reached her first, then the nearly
silenced howling of the wind. Opening her eyes, the white expanse of ceiling
above her was dimmed now, shadowed by artificial light.

"Mulder?" she murmured, feeling drowsy and unreal. It seemed as if the room
were floating and she was swathed in a downy cloud of dream and warmth.

"I'm here."

His voice was several feet away, dark and liquid. She turned and found him,
sunken into a chair across from her, a book on his lap. She had the feeling
that he had been there for hours, watching her sleep.

"How long have I been out?" she asked, sitting slowly and brushing her
crushed hair back from her forehead.

"About four hours." He sounded husky, emotional. She peered at him and found
she could see his eyes clearly now, and they were the exact shade of a
midnight alpine lake. The light from the lamp beside him strained to reach
her. "I've arranged a few things while you were asleep," he continued,
barely moving. "You have a room now, a few doors down from here. And the
cook sent up some pasta salad for you. It's over on the table."

She nodded and pulled back the covers. Her legs were bare, but the rest of
her clothing remained. Good old Mulder, too much of a gentleman to undress
her. Her jeans hung over the end of the bed and he turned his head
obligingly as she slipped them on.

"How are you feeling now?" he asked and she thought he wasn't really asking
about her health, but about himself. She glanced out the window, trying to
find reality beyond the silent room, but seeing only a dark and closed sky.

"I feel better," she said, examining herself mentally. She didn't have to
lie. "I'm still curious, but I trust you."

He sighed and rose to switch on the overhead light. Suddenly the room was
the same she had seen earlier, stark and clean.

"Eat," he said, pulling out a chair for her at the small table. "There's a
bathroom down the hall if you need it."

Shaking her head, she took the seat he offered. A place setting, complete
with napkin, waited for her. Mulder poured her water from a pitcher and then
sat across from her, backwards on his chair.

"How can you stand this place?" she asked between bites of what was, she had
to admit, quite tasty food. "There's no mold, no dank corners..."

"I make do by growing things in the mini-fridge," he replied, smiling. "Are
you ready?"

She sensed from his unrelenting seriousness that he had been thinking about
this for hours.

"Yes," she said quietly. "Start at the beginning."

He smiled again, perhaps thinking of vampire sheriffs, and stole a sip of
her water.

"The beginning is before me, really. It starts with Carl Burman, back when
he was just another brilliant gene therapist working for Cramer Tech, which
is partnered with Meditex, a subsidiary of Texpet Industries."

"I know," she said. "The Gunmen laid out the relationship between the
companies."

"Excellent," he replied. "Ever-thorough. Well, shortly before they began to
build this platform, Carl met a woman named Becky Clarkeson. They fell in
love, deeply, and planned to marry. That was until she got sick."

"Nasopharyngeal cancer," Scully supplied.

"Yes," he agreed. "Just like you, just like all the other women. Carl was
devastated and began to research treatments, nearly giving up on his job so
he could treat her. Searching for other patients who might have survived, he
came across your story."

"How?" she whispered. "Who did he find out from?"

"Hospital records, Scully. Nothing sinister. Since he was acting as Becky's
physician, he had access to all sorts of things the general public would
never see. He read about the chip we placed in your neck and was intrigued.
He began to make inquiries, running further and further afield from the
medical mainstream. That was how he found Dave Robards."

"Who's he?"

Mulder reached out and swiped a finger across her lower lip, ostensibly
catching some miniscule flake of food her tongue had missed. She flushed.

"Robards is dead. He was a researcher for a pharmaceutical company."

"Roush," she whispered.

"No, but he had worked with them at one time. Without the allegiances of a
former employee, he was willing to talk. He took Carl to a warehouse in
northern Virginia, showed him records for thousands of women, and many men
and children too. Abductees, experimental patients, stretching back for
years. He told Carl about the procedures that had been done there. He
explained about the chip. But here's where it gets tragic, Scully..."

"It wasn't already?" she asked quietly and he sighed.

"Becky still had her chip, just as so many of the women you met did. Carl,
following the same procedure we used with you, implanted it in her neck.
Just as with you, the cancer disappeared almost immediately."

"This is tragic?"

"Wait," he said softly. "Becky died after all, Scully. On a bridge, probably
not three feet from where you yourself stood, watching faceless men burn
innocent abductees."

"My God," she said.

"Then Carl began to really dig. Scully, we should have found this guy long
ago. He's amazing. He found out about survivors, heard about the Faceless
Men, and began to put two and two together. It became obvious to him that we
were caught in the middle of a massive military campaign, stretching across
this solar system and far beyond. And the original inhabitants of this
planet, whoever or whatever they are, were losing. The Faceless Men were
closing in, preparing to eliminate anyone the others had touched, just like
Becky. And Carl didn't want that to happen. He found a remarkable partner. A
man named Aaron Tableman, head of Meditex and a former abductee himself."

"What a coincidence," she said.

"Isn't it? They got together and began to talk about a research project with
a single goal: to develop a chip that would control the cancer, but not the
person. Then they would steal those records from the facility in northern
Virginia and begin to save people, one by one. Eventually, that was what
they were able to do."

"They have a new chip?" Scully said, her stomach suddenly full. "One they
could implant in me?"

"They have one with your name on it," Mulder answered, taking her hand and
briefly squeezing it. "I made sure of it."

"My God, Mulder," she said, setting aside her dinner and standing shakily.
"This is extraordinary news."

"Isn't it?" he smiled up at her. "We're in the final phase, Scully. This is
the final batch of abductees. When they've all been cleared, the Faceless
Men will have no one to search for. They can fight there own damn war
without taking people as casualties."

She stared at him, his sincerity evident in his eyes. How she had missed
them, she thought. Perhaps more than anything else.

"But what do you have to do with this, Mulder? I saw pictures... you've had
surgery." She reached out and ran her hand down the back of his head,
feeling the tell-tale line across the back of his skull. He leaned into her
hand and gazed up at her.

"Just over a year ago, Carl approached me. They'd found someone who had
extraordinary abilities, abilities that were necessary to the project's
survival, but they were reluctant to use him. He told them that I too had
those abilities, though mine had been temporarily silenced through botched
surgery."

"Gibson," she whispered. "They had Gibson."

He nodded, his face lighting up as she smiled. "He can tell where they are,
Scully. The Faceless Men. He knows when they're coming and where they'll go
next. But he's a child, and no one could, in good conscience, take a child
away from his parents for heaven knows how long and isolate him on a
platform in the middle of the Atlantic. So they came for me and asked for my
help."

"The surgery?" she asked.

"Restored some of my abilities, but they aren't as overwhelming as they once
were. Gibson stayed here for a while, helping me."

"He took that photo I saw, didn't he?" she asked quietly. "That's why you're
smiling in it."

"Yes," he said. "If it's the one I'm thinking of. Gibson's quite fond of
photography."

"Where is he now?"

"Home with his mother, I assume. We've been monitoring him, and as far as we
know, he's fine. Scully, I wanted to involve you in all of this, but I
couldn't."

"Why?" she asked. "Because of my chip?"

"At first, yes. They could have tracked you to us. Don't worry," he scolded
as her hand shot up to the back of her neck. "When you got on the plane to
come here, remember the guy who insisted on running the metal detector over
you one last time?"

"You deactivated my chip," she said dully. "You've been monitoring me, as
well."

"Of course," he said quietly. "How could you think I wouldn't? But that
would all have become irrelevant after the new chips were completed. By
then... by then it was felt that no one living off the platform should have
any knowledge of its existence."

"For the first time in your life," she said coolly, "You followed the
rules."

"I had my reasons," he replied, his head still heavy against her palm. "I
wouldn't put your life in jeopardy. The less you knew, the better."

"What about the thousands of people who've been here and left, Mulder? Am I
any less trustworthy than they are?"

He shook his head and placed both hands on her hips, drawing her closer. The
heat from his body touched her through her jeans, making her shiver. "They
won't remember. It's the last thing their old chips will do. Their immediate
memories are wiped before the procedure and by the time they get home,
they'll only know they've been gone. It isn't perfect, but it will save
their lives, and ours. I wouldn't do that to you, though. I wouldn't let you
believe you'd been taken again."

"And this is it?" she asked. "The final phase? So I came here, what, weeks
before you would have returned home anyway?"

Mulder was quiet for a moment, then he leaned forward slowly and placed his
cheek against her stomach. "It has always been my goal to come home as
quickly as I can, Scully. You must know that."

His answer made her uncomfortable for a moment, but she pushed it away.
"When can we leave?"

"You'll need your new chip," he said quietly, "Then you can go home whenever
you wish."

"Not without you," she stressed.

He leaned back and looked at her for a moment, his face unreadable. "All
right, Scully," he said at last. "You can stay with me until it's safe for
me to come home."

She narrowed her eyes and leaned down until they were nearly level. "You're
hiding something from me," she said. "You're lying about something. Damnit
Mulder, I've had enough lies to last a lifetime."

Wincing, he shook his head. "I'm not telling you everything yet, Scully.
Trust me when I say that you will know everything when the time is right.
You have to trust me."

"I do," she said, feeling his warm breath against her cheek. "I do trust
you. That's how I've survived this."

"Oh Scully," he whispered and turned her face until he could kiss her,
gently, on the lips. "I never wanted to hurt you. Never."

"I know," she told him, kissing him back with the same chaste restraint.
Something told her that if she were to take this too far, they would both
shatter like glass. Mulder's arms, solid beneath her hands, had begun to
shake almost imperceptibly. We are not so strong, she thought. We are not so
strong.

"Now," he said, "How would you feel about being sliced open?"

She smiled at him. "Let's get it on."

xxxxxx

The procedure went smoothly enough. Mulder sat beside her, wincing as the
technician cut carefully along the small scar at the base of her neck and
removed the old chip.

"You'd think it was you under the knife," she said.

"It might as well be." He sounded moody. She patted his hand, trying not to
move too much.

"I haven't activated the memory sweep," the woman said and Mulder nodded.
"You're sure, Allen?" she asked and Scully smiled at Mulder's fake name.
Trust him to chose "Cox".

"Yes," Mulder said. "She needs to remember everything. I'll be damned if I
have to explain it all again."

Scully smiled even as she felt the strange blank pull of the sutures through
her numbed skin.

"There," the technician said, snapping off her gloves. "You're your own
woman now, Dr. Scully."

She had expected to feel something, a sense of freedom, perhaps, but there
was no real difference from ten minutes before. Mulder touched her hand and
smiled.

"They can never take you again," he said quietly. "Never." Then he leaned
forward and kissed her on the lips, much to the amusement of the medical
technician.

"Thank you," she said to both of them, unexpected tears forming and
threatening to work their way down her face.

The woman smiled and turned briefly, lifting her hair. "We're all grateful,"
she said, showing the thin red scar. Scully nodded and stood up to leave.

"Oh God," Mulder said suddenly, and slid slowly from the edge of the chair
onto his knees.

"What?" she cried, dropping beside him. "What is it? Tell me what's wrong."

The technician hovered anxiously. "Allen?" she said and Mulder looked up at
her, his face pinched and pale.

"They're coming," he said. "My God, they're nearly here."

xxxxxx

"How long?" Carl Burman asked, pacing the dull white office. "How long?"

"Three hours, at the most," Mulder whispered, his face pinched with pain.
"They tracked that woman Scully shot, I think. They don't know what they'll
find here, exactly, but they're coming prepared."

"I'm sure," Carl said dryly. "Jesus, can we get everyone off in time?"

"Maybe, if we start now," another man said.

Scully stood in the corner of the room, listening to their voices but
watching Mulder. He had waved off her concern, explaining that it always
hurt to receive his "visions". She groaned inwardly as he leaned forward,
head between his knees.

"You could call in the Coast Guard," she said, surprising herself.

Carl turned to look at her and squinted. "You know, that's not a bad idea."

"Sure," Mulder said, head still down. "And what do you think the people on
the planes will tell the Coast Guard when asked about the platform? We can't
risk it."

"Yes, we can," Carl said firmly. "The project is over. We all knew it could
happen. The most important thing is to get the people off this thing and
then worry about a little bad press."

"Right, so they can go back to their jobs and their families and wait to be
burned to death." Mulder's voice was higher than she had heard it before,
strained and gasping.

"Your judgement is clouded right now by pain," Carl said gently. "We will
bring the information with us. I believe we can still reach the remaining
abductees another way. For now, I won't have their deaths on my hands if we
can't get them off in time. Would you?"

Mulder shook his head, resignedly. One of the others moved away to make the
calls. Scully slid close to Mulder and pushed him upright in the chair,
checking his pupils and noting his sweat-slicked skin.

"Stop," she said. "Rest for a moment."

"It doesn't work that way," he rasped.

"Make it work that way," she said and he smiled weakly.

"Doctor's orders?" he asked.

"Damn straight."

"You two," Carl said grimly. "First transport out."

"No," Mulder said quickly. "I need to be here, where I can do the most good.
We'll leave last, with you."

The director scrubbed his chin and then nodded. A claxon began to sound,
shrill and grating in the hall outside the office.

"It's time," Carl said. "Let's go. Agent Scully, would you like to help with
the evacuation? We have to move people who may not be responsive yet."

She glanced at Mulder, who nodded. "I'll be here," he said. "It's not like I
can go anywhere."

xxxxxx

Sink into your eyes and all I see
Love is an ocean and you for me
Sink into your eyes, your eyes are all I see
Your love is an ocean

xxxxxx

For the next two hours, time compressed around her, vicious and quick as a
knife. The Coast Guard began scrambling people out in helicopters while two
floors below, Carl and the others prepared to destroy the platform. She was
acutely aware of sitting on top of tons of explosives, as if she were
walking through a minefield. At last the med. tech. released her and she
sprinted up the stairs to the director's office, hoping she remembered the
way.

Mulder sat in a chair at the window, his head on his hands, watching the
helicopters take off from the pad below. The night was nearly clear, a
rarity for the Grand Banks. The helicopters buzzed away into the darkness
like enormous fire flies. If she weren't so frightened, Scully thought, it
might be beautiful.

"We were lucky this time," he said softly before she could say anything and
she wondered if perhaps he had abilities she didn't know about. "We have
time to get out, and the weather's good."

"This time?" she queried, but he was silent.

"You love the sea, right Scully?" he asked as she came to stand behind him,
resting her hands on his shoulders, feeling the muscles cramped beneath the
skin.

"Yes," she said.

"Why?" he asked. "Doesn't it make you nervous to be so far from safety, to
be alone in that little boat in the big sea?"

"No," she replied honestly. "I've always felt safe, even in my little boat."

"The sea was such a mystery to me, and the vast unknown is the most
frightening, isn't it, Scully? To plunge in, to be lost and drowning... I
always said I preferred the air." He was quiet for a moment, then raised his
head and nodded to the ocean, far beneath them. "Sometimes I thought I could
smell your perfume in the wet wind from the sea."

"I don't smell like fish," she noted.

Mulder smiled and turned to look at her. "No, you don't. You smell like
clear water and rain. I will miss this place, believe it or not."

"Come on Mulder," she said. "We need to go get our bags."

He stood, creaking like an old man. "I have a plant in my room," he said
testily. "I need to save it."

She took his hand and he let her lead him down the five flights of stairs
into the crew's quarters. From his room they rescued a bag of clothing and
the plant, which looked like it needed to be saved from Mulder. From the
room she had never used, she simply picked up her bag, shot the bed a
longing look, and closed the door.

"Scully," he said suddenly as they neared the door to the helicopter
platform. "Are my fish still alive?"

She stared at him, astonished, until she realized he was actually worried.
"Of course they are," she said. "As if I'd let them die."

"They've probably been happier with you," he said and pushed open the door,
groaning at the weight of the wind and the noise of the engines.

xxxxxx

They watched with the horrified Coast Guard personnel as Grand Seven shot
violent orange flames high into the sky, a massive torch rising from the
deep, as if someone had sunk the Statue of Liberty off the coast of
Newfoundland. Then, while the innocent government employees scrambled to
their helicopters to check for "survivors", they slipped away in a darkened
car, driving through the black night toward anonymity. Carl and John, the
pilot she was sure had known something all along, chatted amiably as Carl
drove, discussing aliens and faceless men and the success of their project
as if they were baseball box scores. Mulder lay across the back seat, his
head pillowed on her lap, sleeping. Being the guard dog had worn him out,
and his mouth opened slackly to let out each exhausted breath.

God, but she was tired. Beyond tired, perhaps. Moving into a state of waking
dream, unable to relax enough to close her eyes. How do you fight a faceless
enemy, when he can become you as easily as closing his eyes? Mulder assured
her that the men were not looking for them, but she was uneasy anyway. He
had reassured her many times when he didn't really feel it.

The road was lined in snow, in ice, in darkness and the vast spread of clear
sky above them. Her mind conjured up a night spent on the Icy Cape, staring
at the stars from a closed window, wondering if they would survive till
morning. There were only so many times, she thought, you could question your
own survival before you began to give in to the nearness of death, the easy
approachability of it. Mulder stirred, turning his face toward her stomach
and balling up on the seat like a child. Absently she stroked his hair,
wondering where they were going but too worried to ask.

It was hours before they stopped. Dawn peeked around the frozen landscape,
pink and new as a baby. Mulder stretched and yawned, reaching his hands up
to cup her cheeks and gaze at her.

"You didn't sleep," he said quietly and she shrugged. "They aren't coming,
you know. We're all right for now, Scully."

But they weren't. Something had occurred to her in the long stretch of empty
night, watching the road unfurl just beyond the headlights as if the rest of
the world were nothing until they reached it. Still, this was not the place
to talk about her fears, in a car with Carl and John. She smiled at him and
caressed his jawline, wishing she could penetrate all the hair to reach the
man she remembered. If he even existed anymore.

"I want to shave you," she said softly, so that only he would hear. "As soon
as we're alone."

He nodded, staring at her with an intensity that made her heart ache. "The
beard must go, eh?"

"Yes," she agreed. Carl poked his head around the seat to smile at them.

"We're here," he said and she looked up, curious for the first time to know
where "here" was.

They were parked in front of a motel, one worthy of Mulder's early days. It
was, to be kind, a dump, with a gray parking lot full of slush. She smiled
and gestured for him to sit up.

"Oh goody," he said, catching sight of their resting place. "My favorite
kind. Seedy."

"I'll go check us in," Carl said. "Will you..." He hesitated for a moment
and then sighed. "Will you want one room or two?"

"Two," Mulder answered. Scully shook her head.

"One," she said. "With a big bed."

Carl looked at the two of them for a moment and then shrugged, hearing no
argument from Mulder. "One it is. I'll see what I can do about the bed."

They were left alone when John opened the passenger door and followed Carl
inside. Mulder rubbed the top of her thigh absently, staring out the window
at the hotel. She could feel the nervous energy dancing off of him until at
last he spoke.

"You're exhausted," he said. "Again. You should have gotten your own room
and slept, Scully. What's it been, four hours in as many days? We can't risk
you dropping now."

She shrugged. "I wanted to be close to you. I've been sleeping in my own
room for a damn year."

He turned to her, then, with those same bottomless eyes. "You've been
sleeping in your own room for the last eight years, if I'm not mistaken. Are
you sure you want to change that?"

"Don't you?" she asked, feeling bold. "Tell me now if you don't."

Dropping his chin to his chest, he grinned, suddenly bashful. "You know I
do. You know I've wanted it for years."

"Then I can safely say I'm not prepared to wait any longer."

Carl stepped out of the office and began to make his way toward them.

"Then, Scully, let's get out of the car."

She felt the double, perhaps triple meanings in his words, conversations
within conversations. Oh, to have that memory, she thought. They slid out of
opposite doors and Mulder reached around to pop the trunk. She shouldered
their bags as Mulder grabbed the plant and the key from Carl.

This is it, she thought, walking with him toward their room. This is the
decision I have finally made. Strangely, it felt as if she had made it many,
many years before.

Mulder slid the key into the lock and let them in. The room was still dark,
tinged with the morning light slipping through the door around them. It was
not exactly a love-nest. Dingy curtains blocked out the light from the
window, except for the requisite slivers that crossed the bed right at eye
level. And the bed. She could see the sag from here, slanting toward the
center as if both sides were pointing toward the floor.

It looked wonderful. Mulder set the plant on the nearby rickety table and
took her hand, pulling her into the room. She dropped their bags by the
door. Immediately, he was against her, pressing her back into the door with
the full length of his body. Dizziness hit her and she felt for a moment a
sense of d�j� vu, as if she were still laying on the clean wooden floor of
Mulder's room on Grand Seven the day before. Had it only been yesterday? She
was no longer sure. Time had ceased.

"I'm going to kiss you," he said slowly, his voice buzzing in her ear as if
he were set to reverb. "And then you're going to go to sleep. When you wake,
and only after several hours, Scully, I will make love to you. There will be
no argument."

She nodded dumbly and lifted her weary head to look into his eyes. He dipped
his face until he was a mere breath away, his large hands cradling her
skull. Then he was kissing her, pressing his warm lips against her own
without a trace of the chaste gentleman she had known before. Passion flowed
through her violently, causing her to grip his arms just to keep standing.
Opening to him, she pulled him inside her and held him there, feeling it in
her entire body - an exquisite aching tenderness. At last, he moved back and
she was left collapsing in her joy.

"Bed," was the last thing she remembered him saying. She wanted to sleep for
a week, but knowing what awaited her when she woke, she wanted never to
sleep again.

xxxxxx

I saw you first on a Sunday evening
About the old tower as I was kneeling
Upon Christ's passion. As I was reading
But my eye was on you, and my sore heart bleeding

xxxxxx

It was dark when she awoke, the thin band of light crossing her pillow
belonging to the motel's neon sign, not the weak northern sun. Mulder was
sprawled beside her, on top of the covers, mouth open and snoring lightly to
a soundtrack of evening news from the TV. She smiled at him, brushing the
last of her missed day from her eyes as he opened and closed his left hand,
reaching for something in his sleep.

Beside the bed, the tiny table contained a plate and two slices of pizza
with a note written in Mulder's handwriting on a page torn from the local
phone book.

"Eat," was all it said. She obeyed easily, reveling in the still-warm taste
of cheese and meat, the pungent musk of a mushroom. In truth, she was so
hungry she couldn't have risen from the bed even if she'd wanted to. The
explosion of Grand Seven was all over the news, the reporter's words nearly
muted in Mulder's attempt not to wake her. She watched the burning debris of
his last year tumble from the platform into the sea. She sincerely hoped
they were insured.

When she had finished the second slice of pizza, she was still a bit hungry,
but at least able to walk into the bathroom and start the shower. It had
been several days since she had last showered, and months since she had
sighed with pleasure at the sting of hot water against her skin. She worried
for a moment about the two small stitches at the back of her neck, but
decided they would be better off cleaned and dry.

Halfway through her shower, she heard the door open and Mulder move toward
the sink. He's brushing his teeth, she thought, listening to the sound of
bristles against bone. When at last he peeked around the curtain holding a
towel, she was prepared. Something had shifted between them in the last two
days, and it wasn't the result of any kiss. She let him dry her body,
running warm hands over her skin until she felt strong enough to pull his
shirt over his head and yank his shorts down to his ankles. There was an
equality in their nakedness now, with Mulder's formerly golden skin bleached
out from months indoors. Running her hands over his body, she felt for all
the familiar places she had missed and a few she had only dreamed of during
his long absence.

Silently, he reached over to the sink and handed her a razor. She hadn't
noticed it right away, too busy with limbs and the sleek muscles in his
back, but he had trimmed the beard down to a stubble, waiting for her to
awaken and finish the job.

"I let a woman shave me once," he said solemnly as she lathered his cheeks
with her small hands. "It led to terrible things."

She smiled, though he wasn't, and dabbed the cream across his upper lip.
"You do it," she said, handing him the razor. "I want to watch you do it."

He nodded and began to run the blade evenly over his skin, sweeping away the
changes in his face until she could hardly bear to look at him. It was her
Mulder, emerging from the swaths of thick white foam. He splashed water
across his face and patted himself gently.

"Does it sting?" she asked.

"Yes," he said quietly. "Yes, it does."

Then he kissed her, letting her lick his sweetly perfumed skin even as he
winced.

"You are so beautiful," she whispered. "You would never know you're lying to
me."

Startled, he pulled away and stared at her. "I said I would tell you, and I
will."

"When, Mulder?" she asked, gently, so as not to frighten him. It was not her
intent to force the truth, but to sweep away a year's growth of denial and
persuasion. "When they come for you? When someone fires on you? When they
hurt me to get to you?"

He closed his eyes and leaned against the sink, his long legs braced without
shame, so deep was his horror. "You know," he said.

"I had a lot of time to think, last night," she explained. "Come into the
bedroom, Mulder. We have to talk about this."

He nodded dully and let her pull him, barely helping. She pushed him onto
the bed and sat across him, a parody perhaps of what he thought was going to
happen, but closer to the truth of it in her own mind.

"You didn't keep me away because you thought I would lead them to you. You
kept me away because you were afraid of leading them to me."

"Yes," he said, daring to touch her hips, to lay his palms flat against
them.

"What they did to you, with that surgery, is irreversible."

"Yes."

She sighed and leaned down to lay her head on his chest, bent in half
against him. "They reactivated the dormant strands of DNA and they don't
know how to turn it off."

This time he didn't bother to confirm, slipping his hands instead up her
back to pat her there like a baby, which wasn't at all how she felt.

"And now they will come for you, because you pose a threat. No where is safe
for you, though you may have warning. You can't escape forever."

"I can't escape my own genetic code," he whispered. "You once said we all
have this ability, Scully, lying dormant within our bodies, but it isn't
exactly true."

"All animals are equal," she said. "Some are more equal than others."

If he caught the reference, he was too absorbed to show it, raising his head
to kiss her hair.

"You can still go," he whispered. "You can still walk away. We haven't
yet..." he paused and she raised her head to look him in the eye. Sadly, he
smiled at her. "There's no way you're leaving, is there?"

Shaking her head, she began to move against him, rubbing her body against
his.

"After all you know," he said, "You still want to make love to me, Scully?
You want to risk yourself to be with me?"

"More than ever," she whispered, and let him lean up to catch her mouth.

xxxxxx

It took him several hours and many whispered reassurances to fall asleep.
Scully rose quietly and pulled on her clothes, taking an ice bucket just in
case he woke and wondered where she was. Outside in the bitter cold, she
quickly located the pay phone and dialed with a sense of building terror.
She might not be able to sense them the way Mulder could, but danger raised
her non-psychic hackles easily enough.

"Hello?" a sleepy voice said.

"Sir? It's me."

There was a moment of silence and then Skinner sighed audibly. "Did you find
him, Scully? I was worried after I saw the platform on the news."

"I found him," she said quietly.

"Is he all right?" Skinner asked, genuine concern filtering through to her.

"Yes and no," she said.

"What does that mean?" He sounded more than worried for Mulder now. He was
justifiably worried for himself. From just beyond the motel, a lone truck
roared down the icy highway and Scully shivered.

"How far would you go to save Agent Mulder's life?" she whispered.

There was a long pause and then Skinner said, unaccountably: "As far as I
have gone to save yours, perhaps further."

Unsure what that meant, she waited before replying.

"I need a favor, Sir, and you won't like it, either from your perspective or
from mine."

"Name it," he said, "And let me decide how I feel."

"I need to set up a meeting."

Skinner groaned. "I knew you were going to say that. Cancer Man's dead, as
you know. Who the hell is it now?"

Scully looked out across the bleak night sky, overcast and moonless. She had
always wondered what it would feel like to sell your soul. Would you know,
she wondered, the moment when it was gone? She had no answer.

"Alex Krycek," she said.

xxxxxx

Washington was lovely in the early spring. The way the fresh green grass
sprang up beneath his feet, the flawless skies, the waving golden heads of
daffodils in clumps beneath the refreshed evergreens... all of it made Alex
Krycek happy. He was not, after all, soulless. He'd had a childhood, quite a
happy one in fact, with his parents in the early years of the cold war. A
little suburban house and a dog named Pete. But then, one afternoon out
bike-riding with his friends, he had found himself lying in a ditch with
little memory of how he got there. His friends had vanished, as had his
parents. Someone had broken into the neat little brick house and taken them,
just like that. Without, he sometimes thought ironically, a bright light or
a sense of paralysis. The friends, of course, returned, lost for the day.
His parents did not. It was why, years later, when Spender had asked him to
kill the woman he would today be meeting, he had agreed. Why should Mulder
think that he knew all the pain possible in this vast universe, when in
reality there was so much more waiting just outside our ability to
comprehend?

"Krycek," Scully said, sitting beside him on the concrete bench and looking
suspiciously around her.

"No one followed you," he said.

"And how would you know that," she spat back, "Unless you had someone
following me? Do you take me for a fool?"

"No," he said, feeling surprisingly docile under the warm spring sun. "I
took you to be as innocent and gullible as your partner."

She snorted in disgust and pulled her coat more tightly around her body. She
had lost weight, again, he thought, and it didn't really suit her.

"What do you want, Scully? Do you realize how dangerous this meeting is for
Mulder, considering whom I'm working for?"

"Again," she said, "You underestimate me. I know exactly who you work for,
which is why I'm here."

"All right," he said, preliminaries over. "Tell me what you want."

She looked out across the slope of green and the blue of the water and
sighed. For a pretty woman, she was certainly cold and controlled, he
thought. But there must be passion there, somewhere, for her to risk her
life like this, like she always had. Was Mulder privy to it, he wondered, or
did he like her the way she was and have no idea of her true level of
commitment?

"How will they go about it?" she asked and it took him a moment to catch up
with her.

"I suppose," he said slowly, "They will approach him first with an offer in
exchange for his allegiance. His skills are valuable. He doesn't just know
where the Faceless Men are, he knows where every alien is."

"I'm aware of that," she said. "And you must know he'll refuse."

"Of course he will," Krycek said. "He's Mulder. Then, they'll kill him."

She nodded and shrugged, as if chasing off a shiver. Oh how she must wish
sometimes to have fallen in love with an accountant, he thought. But it was
right, this way. A woman like her might delude herself into thinking she
could be satisfied with less, but deep within, she needed the danger, craved
it like a junkie. She was Mulder's woman, certainly, but she could just as
easily have been his own.

"What if they could get what they wanted, without killing him?"

Alex raised an eyebrow at her and shrugged. "What do you have in mind?"

"You know what Spender tried to do to him."

"Yes, but he failed."

"Because he didn't have the technology," she insisted. "They might. Wouldn't
they rather have this unique ability in the hands of someone they consider
an associate, then in a renegade like Mulder?"

"Are you offering me his ability as part of a deal?"

She looked at him, briefly, then out to the water again. "I don't even know
if it's possible."

"But if it were, would you be in the position to offer me this deal,
Scully?"

"He doesn't even know I'm here," she said quietly, barely above a whisper.
"But I would do anything you asked to save his life."

"Anything?" he asked and hurriedly added, as she glared at him: "Even betray
him?"

"Even that," she said evenly, with only the barest hint of regret. It had
taken her eight years to reach this point, he knew, though it was, perhaps,
always inevitable. That was why she had been allowed to return, again and
again, from the dead. "Think of the possible power, Alex. How bad do you
want it?"

Alex pondered it for a moment. What he wouldn't give, right then, to be able
to read her mind.

"I'll call you."

"Act with discretion," she said unnecessarily. "I can't do anything if my
hands are tied."

"When have I not acted with great discretion?" he asked innocently and
watched her roll her eyes.

xxxxxx

Oh Donalogue, can't you feel me near you
Why don't you tremble the way that I do
I'll be your lantern to show you truth plainly
And if you are set on, I'll defend you bravely

xxxxxx

Mulder was slouched down into her couch as if it were his bed, a blanket
draped across his legs and a half-eaten bag of potato chips on his lap. Her
heart clenched as she looked at him. For being the almost unbelievable
reality of the last year's desires and dreams, he was so very easy to hurt.

"Hey," he said. "I'm just catching up on the Sopranos."

"Didn't they have cable on Grand Seven?" she asked, hanging up her coat.
Though come to think of it, she couldn't even remember seeing a TV.

"Nah," he said. "I guess we could've put up a big ol' satellite dish, but it
was a little hard to get over to Radio Shack on our days off."

Smiling as widely as she could, she still felt as if her skin were
stretching over her bones. "So no porn?" she said, sitting beside his feet.
He immediately placed them on her lap.

"Cable's not the source for porn, Scully. Where have you been? It's all over
the internet."

She snorted and pushed his feet away. "Are you hungry?" she asked, moving
into the kitchen. "I thought I'd make something."

"Sure," he called to her. Standing in front of her cabinets, all the choices
looked terrible. Truthfully, she doubted she would be able to keep anything
down, much less prepare something, but if she didn't do something, anything
to keep her mind active, she was sure she would shut down into a little
catatonic ball of guilt at Mulder's feet. A can of chicken soup sat in
cheerful red-and-white just in front of her nose. It would do. But as she
picked it up, the phone rang and the can dropped from her hand to roll
noisily under the edge of the cupboard.

"Fuck!" she heard herself say, racing like a mad woman to her coat to pull
the phone from the pocket. Mulder watched her with his eyebrows raised in
amusement. "Scully," she barked into the mouthpiece, turning from his benign
gaze to face the wall.

"It's me."

She closed her eyes for a moment, feeling her legs go weak beneath her. She
didn't dare sit down, however. With her back still to Mulder, she sucked in
a breath and gained control.

"Oh hi, Mom," she said.

"Mom?" Alex Krycek laughed genially, as if they were illicit lovers trying
to fool the kids. "I never knew you thought of me that way."

"So," she said, chirping brightly, "What's up?"

"It's a deal," he said.

"That's wonderful," she enthused as if he'd just told her he was pregnant.
"When?"

"Tonight," he answered, still chuckling. "Seven."

"Really?" She tried to keep the panic from her voice. "Why so fast?"

"You tell me," he said. "Maybe they don't want you to have a chance to
change your mind."

But the truth, she wanted to shout, was that there was no way she could
retreat now. Just to know he was alive would be enough. She still had the
sleeping pills in her medicine cabinet, their endless succession of doctors
showing her need this last eleven months. She could do it for the rest of
her life: drug herself to stop the nightmares of his inevitable disgust at
her betrayal. That, surely, could be no worse than the image of Donnie
Phaster bending over her, could it?

"Ok, where."

"A warehouse on the corner of Third and Bateman. Be there, Scully, or be
square."

She could feel her palm sweating, slippery against the plastic casing of the
phone.

"What does that mean?" she asked.

"It means if you aren't there, we'll be sending out a couple of friends to
come get you. There's no backing out now." He actually sounded pleased with
the whole mess. She shuddered.

"Ok," she said. "I understand. I'll see you then."

He hung up immediately and she was left holding a buzzing phone and saying
goodbye to nothing. God, she was such a fraud. She slipped the phone back
into her pocket with a shaking hand and looked at her watch, trying to
steady herself with a hand on her wrist. It was fast approaching four. How
the hell was she going to get Mulder out there?

"So how's your mom, Scully?"

From the couch, he watched her with what she was sure was simply innocent
concern, but which felt to her guilty mind like an inquisition.

"She's fine," she said, mind racing. Three hours. "Friends of the family are
getting married, she just wanted to talk about it." The lies kept coming,
running from her tongue like water in a river. Who knew the depths of the
hole her soul had left behind, and what dark impulses existed there, right
next to her trigger finger? She wanted nothing more than to bury herself in
Mulder's kindness, opening her heart to him to show him the necessity of
what she had just done.

Mulder smiled and patted the couch beside him. "Come sit with me for a
minute. You look stressed-out. I bet I know something that'll ease your
mind..."

His hand rubbed a spot near his hip and for a moment she was back in the
darkened hotel bedroom, feeling his warm hips in her hands as she urged him
deeper within her.

"I have to go out," she said suddenly, shaking herself. "I promised Mom I'd
get a gift for the wedding and I haven't done it."

He stared at her, his hand stilling. "Scully, what's going on?"

Her feet were frozen. She could only lift her hand and nervously brush away
the hair from her cheek. "Nothing. I'm just tired."

"Don't lie to me," he said, standing. Her pounding heart threatened her and
she thought it might burst from her chest like one Padget's victims. How
long ago that had been, she thought desperately. Almost another life.

"I'm not lying," she said, but she was and she was sure everyone alive could
feel it, hear it in her quavering voice. "I really have to go now." And
somehow she managed to get past him, to open the door and then shut it
carefully, to walk down the hallway and get into her car. She had no idea
where she was going, so she sat there, head down on the steering wheel,
until she heard him open the passenger side and slip in beside her.

"What have you done?" he asked, gently. She recognized the tone. But it was
too late. Oh, she was frightened now.

"I'm so sorry," she groaned, not looking at him.

"Scully, whatever you've done, you just have to tell me."

If only she'd had the guts to start the car, she thought bitterly. Of all
the times in her life to develop a complex about her own actions.

"What would you do," she asked, "To save my life?'

When he was silent, she knew he understood.

"I thought you said Spender was dead?" he said at last in the echoing
silence of the car.

"He is," she said. "He's not who I contacted."

"So you made a deal, Scully. Tell me."

She raised her head and looked over at him. He wasn't watching her with
hatred, even with anger, but there was regret. There was always regret, she
thought.

"Tonight, I'm supposed to take you to a warehouse on the other side of the
river. They're going to operate on you there."

"They who?" he asked, though she knew he knew.

"Them," she said, stressing it just enough.

He said nothing, but looked away for a moment. To the cars driving slowly
past they must look like a pair of quarreling lovers. Perhaps that's all
they were. Quarreling over whether or not he would have secret alien brain
surgery. If she weren't so miserable, she might have laughed.

"They'll turn it off," he said, and she understood him.

"Yes," she said. "Then you won't be a threat."

He nodded, at last looking at her. She winced away, but he reached across
the console and took her hand from the steering wheel. His skin was smoother
than she remembered, probably because he'd been away from the raw, stinging
weather of DC. He was tender now, as gentle and soft as a child. At long
last, she realized, the exterior matched what lay within.

"What did you pay for this?" he asked, his voice calm and low.

"Your abilities... won't go to waste. They will be given to someone else."

"Krycek," he said, making one of his intuitive leaps.

"Yes," she said softly. "I'm so sorry, Mulder. But I couldn't think of
another way..."

"It's all right," he said, still holding her hand.

"What?"

"It's all right." He wasn't leaving, he wasn't angry. His face bore only
resigned affection. "I would have done the same thing," he said.

"No, you wouldn't," she said. "You once said Spender offered you a deal to
save my life and you turned it down."

"Not exactly," he said.

"What does that mean?" she asked, jerking away, horrified by the entire
conversation.

"I didn't accept his terms, Scully, but in the end, I took the deal. We all
did. A doctor just carved it from the back of your neck. I understand what
you've done, Scully. And I think it was a fair price for my life."

"So you'll go?" she whispered, astounded by the depth of his love for her.

"Of course," he said, and he was smiling, genuinely. "Let me just go pack a
bag. No harm in getting there a little early. Think I can have a strawberry
milkshake before surgery? Or is this a no contents in my stomach kinda
thing?"

She stared at him. "I can't believe how calm you are. I sold us out. To
Krycek. Why don't you hate me?"

"Scully," he said, turning back to the empty street. "For the last year,
I've had to live with the idea that to return to you would be a death
sentence, not just for myself, but for you as well. I would lie on that damn
narrow cot, with the wind howling outside the three-inch thick glass, and I
knew that without you, my life would be as empty as the sea outside, as the
ice in Antarctica. But that was the only answer, to never return, to live
without you. I should have known, even then, Scully, that you would find
another way. This isn't you selling us out, Scully. This is us together,
making a decision to live."

"My God," she said. "My God."

"Are you astonished?" he asked, looking at her with half a smile. "Or are
you praying?"

xxxxxx

The warehouse was in the worst part of town she could imagine. Had she been
running over live rats, it wouldn't have surprised her. The steady stench of
rotting river bottom, dirt and alcohol blew in through the car's ventilation
system like dust.

"Oh goody," she said weakly to Mulder as they pulled up in front of the
squat building, perched at the edge of the water as if it were about to
slide in, one with the muck. "Your favorite kind."

"Seedy," he answered, staring at the gray boards weathering away on the
building's side. "Well, wouldn't you have been shocked if it had been a
nice, clean office building?"

"I suppose," she said quietly. A glance at her watch told her it was nearly
time. After their conversation, they had practically run upstairs and made
love with a bitter passion that had both horrified and aroused her, even
now. She couldn't forget the heavy weight of Mulder's hands, covering her
ears as he moved within her, shutting out every sound but the pounding of
her own heart. My God, she'd whispered in that moment, protect us. "Are you
sure?" she asked again, feeling for his warm hand in the darkness.

"Yes," he said. "If I can do that to you every night for the rest of my
life, Scully, I'd cut off my left leg."

"I think you'll need your brain more," she said viciously and he laughed.

"You think?"

The door opened a crack and she made out the familiar profile of Krycek,
smirking at them. Did he ever not wear leather jackets, she wondered
vaguely. Was there some sort of uniform involved in being a double-crossing
rat? "God, I'd give anything to be able to shoot him right now," she said.

"You've had several chances," Mulder pointed out and opened the door. She
followed immediately. She had already made it part of the deal, at least in
her mind, that he would never leave her sight.

"Krycek, you unbelievable bastard," Mulder said by way of greeting.

"Oh, and how are you, Mulder? Feeling up to a little slicing and dicing?"
the younger man replied. Seeing them staring at one another, Scully was
struck by the oddly similar intensity in their eyes, but shook off the
thought quickly in disgust. "Hey Scully, come on in and make yourself at
home."

Much to Scully's disconcerted amazement, the interior to the warehouse bore
no resemblance to the exterior. It was as if they had stepped into the
sterile waiting room of a private medical clinic in Beverly Hills. Pastel
paintings hung on the white, scrubbed walls. Soft chairs grouped around a
low table covered in magazines. A woman in a pristine nurse's uniform
stepped forward.

"Dana Scully and Fox Mulder, right?" she said, extending a hand which they
both shook, albeit reluctantly. "I'll be your nurse for the duration of your
operation, Mr. Mulder, and for your recovery here at the facility."

"I didn't catch your name," Mulder said and she gave him an ironic look.

"If you'll just follow me," she said, "The doctor would like to speak to
both of you privately. Mr. Krycek, if you could return to your room, the
nurse there will attend to your needs."

Krycek attempted a leer, but feel short, in Scully's opinion. As they
followed the nurse down the spotless hallway, she heard him call out: "See
you soon."

"Right," Mulder muttered. "Bastard."

To her surprise, Scully thought she heard the nurse give a small snort of
laughter. She opened the door to what appeared to be a standard hospital
room and motioned them inside. "Relax here for a moment," she said without a
trace of a smile. "The doctor will be right in."

The door closed and Mulder dropped their bags at the foot of the bed.

"It looks fairly legit, eh Scully?" he said lightly.

"Sure," she answered, careful to match his tone. "For a hospital disguised
as a condemned building."

"Come here," he said and she slid happily into his embrace. "It's going to
be ok, Scully. I can feel it." She marveled at the strength in his voice, in
his sturdy body. Surely, if he were doomed, she would feel it now, wouldn't
she, pressed up against the steady rhythm of his heart?

"Can you feel them?" she whispered.

He shook his head. "Surprisingly enough, no. I don't sense anything."

"I'm not sure whether that reassures me or not," she admitted. "I don't want
another repeat of that first surgery."

"Me neither," he admitted just as the door opened. They broke apart with
their usual guilt.

The doctor turned out to be a woman. Small-boned, with her pale blond hair
pulled back into a ponytail, she reminded Scully of a frightened field
mouse. But then the doctor smiled at both of them, as if they were simply
normal patients, under normal circumstances. The whole thing had begun to
take on an air of the surreal, Scully thought.

"Mr. Mulder, Miss Scully, I'm delighted to meet you," she said, also
forgoing her name. Scully was surprised by the strength and confidence in
her grip.

"You don't look like an alien," Mulder said without preamble. Scully winced
from habit.

The doctor laughed and shook her head. "I'm not," she said. "I'm a private
practitioner from out of state. I'm here as a favor."

"To who?" Scully asked.

"To you two," the doctor said and then turned her head and lifted her hair.
For a moment, they could do nothing more than stare at the small red line.
She heard Mulder's breath escape in one soft swish, as if someone had
pressed against his chest.

"Have we met?" he whispered.

"Yes," she answered. "I was in the first wave of those you treated."

"What's going on?" Scully demanded, feeling around behind her for a chair.
Collapsing into it, she waited as Mulder sat beside her.

"I think you two are suffering from a lack of relevant information," the
doctor said. "I'm hoping I can clear it up. Mr. Mulder, I understand you're
under the impression that... my employers wish you dead?"

He nodded, wordless. Scully reached across the table between them to take
his hand. It was as cold as northern air.

"You are operating under a false assumption. In fact, my employers are very
grateful to you for the work you've done. You see, they never wanted to hurt
us, and by us I mean abductees such as Miss Scully and myself, but in war,
one cannot allow the enemy too easily control any factor of the population.
What you and your fellow workers have done, Mr. Mulder, was spare my
employers a great deal of trouble. You believed that if you removed the
chips that controlled us, they would leave us alone. Yet it never occurred
to any of you that they might be delighted you were helping out."

"How generous of them. So what you're saying is they don't want to kill me,
the actually want to help me?" Mulder asked, slowly.

"That's right," she said, smiling, "They don't want to kill you. If you had
gone over to the other side, perhaps. But not as you are."

"So this isn't even necessary," he said.

"But it is," the doctor corrected. "They are well aware of how valuable
someone with your gifts would be to the enemy. This operation will give you
your life back, Mr. Mulder, on your own terms and not as anyone's pawn. This
is why I agreed to do it. I know the feeling too well myself."

Mulder closed his eyes and leaned back in the chair. "I had no idea," he
said quietly.

"All your life," the doctor said gently, "You have searched the skies for
signs of life. Didn't it ever occur to you that they, too, might operate
under the same sets of complexities that we take for granted in human
interaction, in human battles? Just because someone's not from around here,
doesn't make them a stranger."

Scully stared in disbelief. "You're saying the... they haven't come to take
over, to destroy us?"

"No," the doctor replied. "Just to stop the... others. They have no real
interest in us at all."

"Jesus," Mulder whispered.

The doctor smiled. "Would you like to know what I'm going to do?"

Scully nodded and watched as the doctor walked over to a drawer and pulled
out something that looked rather like a fairy tale magic wand. "I don't even
know what they call it," she said. "I think of it as a probe, but it doesn't
even do that, not in the conventional sense. I'm going to switch it on and
wave it across your neck, Mr. Mulder, for about three minutes."

"That's it?" Scully asked, incredulous.

"That's it," the doctor confirmed. "You could probably do it yourself, if
you knew how to use it."

"What about..." Scully stammered, "What about Krycek? What about giving him
Mulder's abilities?"

The doctor laughed. "Oh, we can't do that. Why do you think the first
surgery Mr. Mulder underwent was a failure? This is your DNA, Mr. Mulder,
and no one can take it from you. I'm just going to... tone it down a bit."

"Turn off the extra ability," he said and she nodded.

"And Krycek?"

The doctor shrugged. "Sometimes, people get what they wish for," was all she
said. "Now, if you'll just lie down..."

xxxxxx

Scully awoke cramped into one of the chairs in Mulder's room. The nurse was
standing at his bedside, checking his readings, her hair a golden halo in
the soft overhead light, almost as if she were an angel. They had been there
for nearly twenty-four hours, and Mulder had slept fitfully, as if he had
been knocked out. There were no windows in the facility, and though she knew
what time it was, logically, Scully had the sensation of having been away
for days.

"When can we go home?" she asked and the woman jumped.

"My heavens, you scared me!" the nurse said. "As soon as he wakes up, which
should be any time. We're just making sure he didn't react to the...
treatment. Once he's up, it's just a matter of monitoring him as you would
for someone who'd had a concussion. It has a similar effect on some folks.
But you can take him home for that."

"You've seen this operation before?" Scully asked, stretching and coming to
stand on the other side of Mulder's bed. He slept restlessly, eyelids
jumping, as he had from the moment the doctor had touched his neck. Reaching
out, Scully slipped a hand through his and felt it was slightly cool, but
strangely alive, as if he were giving off electricity.

"Once or twice," the nurse said cryptically and winked at Scully. "The
doctor wanted me to let her know when you were awake. She had a few more
things to show you."

Scully nodded and took a deep breath to clear the last of the sleep from her
head. She could live without ever seeing anything new again. The nurse
smiled and replaced Mulder's chart in a plastic holder by the door as she
left.

Leaning over, Scully kissed Mulder's forehead gently. "Wake up, sleepy
head," she said.

"That you, Mom?" he asked, without opening his eyes. But he was smiling.
Scully kissed his warm lips.

"Not unless your mom used to wake you up like that," she said and he
chuckled. "You were awake this whole time, weren't you?"

Without answering, he opened his eyes. "How long have I been out?"

"About a day," she said quietly. "You feel ok?"

He squinted and she knew he was feeling for it, whatever it had been. "I
don't sense anything," he said. "Guess I'm no longer the human version of
the Early Warning System."

She smiled and stroked the hair from his forehead. "We need to get this
cut," she said.

"Geeze, woman," he laughed, catching her hand and kissing it quickly.
"Already you're trying to change me."

"No," she said, "Just trying to capture some of that old magic."

He laughed happily and swiped his tongue across her wrist. She sighed with
momentary pleasure.

"Come on in, Doc," he said, watching Scully's face.

"I'm assuming you just heard me," the doctor said, amused, "Not that you
sensed me in any other way."

"True," he said.

"How are you, Fox?" she asked, coming to stand at his bedside and check his
readings.

"I feel great," he said. "No little voices in my head other than those of my
own making."

The doctor rolled her eyes and shook her head.

"So when can I go?" he asked. "Not to sound ungrateful, but this place gives
me the creeps."

"In just a few minutes. I have something to show you both. Fox, do you feel
up to a little wheel around the corridor?"

He nodded and the doctor leaned out the door. "Bring it in," she said and
the nurse appeared with a wheelchair. Scully helped Mulder to stand and sit
heavily in the chair.

"Stop trying to peek at my ass," he said quietly to her as she held up his
arm.

"You are feeling better," she observed dryly, but somewhere within her, she
thought she might break from happiness. Mulder smiled up at her, and she
realized that he had sensed her emotions. Not because he had any special
alien abilities, but because he knew her, and loved her deeply. Momentarily
grateful to just about everyone, she took control and wheeled him out into
the hall.

"Down here," the doctor said. "There's someone who'd like to see you both."

"Krycek?" Mulder asked.

"Oh you'll see him," she said, with something approaching a smile. "But this
is someone else."

They paused at a doorway and Scully, from her unusual vantage point above
Mulder, clapped her hands over her mouth in astonishment.

"Well?" Mulder was testy without his turn. The doctor pushed the door open
slowly, until he was able to see the patient within, sitting on the edge of
a hospital bed in jeans and a sweater.

"Hey, Mulder, they told me you were still out. I was afraid I might miss
you. Hey there, Agent Scully."

"Gibson," she laughed, as he stepped forward and accepted a hug. "My God,
Gibson."

"Gibson, what are you doing here, Buddy?" Mulder asked, smiling widely, but
Scully could see his brow wrinkle in concern.

"Same thing you are," Gibson said.

"What? They turned it off?" Mulder said, astonished. "You wanted this?"

"Hey," Gibson said with a grin and a shrug, "Great as it was to be able to
read sixteen year-old girls' minds, you know... I just wanted to be a normal
kid."

Scully stared at the boy in front of her. Three years after she had last
seen him, and he had grown like a proverbial weed, with a full head of blond
hair to cover the scars she had tended in a dirty motel room. Still, with
his chunky glasses and sharp gaze, he was recognizably the same boy. He
looked down at her from his new height and smiled.

"I think that's great, Gibson," she said, sincerely. "I think that's
wonderful."

"So far," he said, "It's a bit disconcerting. Like suddenly losing my sense
of smell."

"You'll get used to it," Mulder said. "Then you can spend the rest of your
life trying to read women's minds and failing, just like the rest of us."

Scully rolled her eyes and patted Gibson tentatively on the shoulder. "I'm
happy that you'll be left alone now," she said. "I never meant..." Then she
stopped, seeing his face.

"You were one of the few good ones, Agent Scully."

She accepted the compliment, if that's what it was.

"We should say goodbye," the doctor said, "Before we wear you both out.
Gibson's still feeling the effects of having relied on the ability a great
deal longer than you did, Mr. Mulder."

Mulder shook Gibson's hand with both of his. "Don't be a stranger," he said.
"You know where to find us if you ever need anything.

"I appreciate it," Gibson said. "I've been worried about you ever since
leaving you out there in the Atlantic, Mulder. It's good to know you're
going to be ok. That we both will." He waited as the nurse wheeled Mulder to
one side and then as Scully reached up to hug him, he whispered in her ear:
"I should have told you then, but I was only a child and didn't know who to
trust. You were always the one in his thoughts."

Touched, she leaned up and kissed his soft cheek.

"You'll be fine," she said and he nodded. The nurse shepherded him back
inside his room and as she did they could hear him call out to his mother,
who was walking purposefully down from the other end of the building.

"He's going to be ok," Mulder said as they watched mother and son embrace.

"Of course he will," the doctor said, grinning. "If he survives being a
teenager. Now, there's one more person you'd no doubt like to see. He's in
through here..."

She led them through a doorway into what was obviously an observation room.
A bank of television monitors covered one side. Scully stared in
astonishment at the vision she beheld. There was Alex Krycek, wearing
nothing but a hospital gown, throwing himself against the walls of his
padded room with a viciousness borne of realization and vengeance.

"Jesus," Mulder hissed, wheeling himself back a few inches. "That looks
familiar."

"It's a normal reaction in some people to their first exposure," the doctor
said calmly. When they both turned to stare at her, she raised her hands.
"Don't worry, we won't leave him like that. But we can't do another
procedure for a day or two, until he recovers from the first one. It's
unlikely he'll want to repeat the experience. My employers are grateful to
him as well, but as I've said, what we do doesn't really concern them. They
are perfectly willing to let us destroy ourselves. I just thought you might
appreciate the irony."

"You seem to know an awful lot about us," Mulder said thoughtfully.

The doctor shrugged, her pale blue eyes expressionless. "You have an
interesting set of medical records, Mr. Mulder."

"I'm sure," he said quietly, and Scully could feel his distrust and paranoia
begin to return in his tightened stance and narrowed eyes. She marveled that
something she once found rather annoyingly distressing should now feel so
wonderfully familiar. How good it was to have Mulder back, with every fault
intact. "I think I'd like to go home now, if you don't mind."

"That's not a problem. Let's get you back to your room and into your
clothes," the doctor said. "Agent Scully, you want to wheel him over? I've
got to go check Gibson out of here. I'm sure his mother is anxious to get
him home."

"Sure," Scully said, watching the woman leave with a strange sense of relief
that for once, she didn't really understand what was going on.

"This place gives me the serious creeps, Scully," Mulder said quietly.
"Let's get the hell outta Dodge."

xxxxxx

Sun and dark, she followed him
Over the mountains high
Sun and dark, she followed him
For his eye so bright it shined
And he led her over the mountain
Beyond her mortal life

xxxxxx

Scully rolled over in her own bed, luxuriating in the cool, clean sheets and
the knowledge that nothing would awaken her here, nothing drastic and
frightening, not even Mulder. She had sent him home to his own bed for the
night, wanting him to rest and knowing him too well to believe that he would
find it here, with her eager body in easy reach.

Still, some small frantic part of her mind had begged him to refuse, to ask
to stay. He was merely across the city now, probably shaking out fresh
sheets and settling into the familiar routine of his own apartment. She was
so used to being unable to pull together an image of him that the smell of
his body on her clothes, the idea that he was within her power to see, to
hear, made her nearly unable to control herself. The phone which had come to
live on her bedside table, ready for the three-am calls, still waited there,
tempting her.

Restless, she rolled toward her bedside table and pulled out from the drawer
the half-full bottle of sleeping tablets. Shaking two out onto her palm, she
prepared to set them on her tongue and let the familiar wash of thick static
take her from her own fears. From Duane Berry and Spender and Phillip Padget
and Ed Jerse and Donnie Phaster. And, somehow mixed into the list of men who
had worked so hard to destroy her, was Mulder and his ability to leave her
there, alone and unable to close her eyes without a thousand thoughts of his
death. The ringing of the phone startled her and she dropped the pills,
watching them roll over her comforter to settle in a crevice by her stomach.

"Scully," she said.

"It's me," Mulder said quietly and she felt a wave of giddy relief at the
sound of his voice. Not because, she suddenly realized, she was frightened
for him, but because this was what she had dreamed of for so long. "Were you
asleep?"

"Not yet," she admitted.

He was quiet for a moment, the sound of his breath a steady huff in her ear.

"Remind me again why I'm here and not with you."

She smiled. "You have to rest, Mulder. Your apartment seemed like the best
place for that."

"Scully," he said, and his voice was so intimate, she shuddered as if he'd
touched her. "Can I tell you a secret?"

She smiled, knowing he would, no matter what her answer might be.
"Anything," she said.

"I hate this apartment."

Laughing, she switched the phone to her other ear and lay down on her side,
pillowing her head against her arm. "Why? You lived there for years."

"You aren't here," he answered, and he sounded honest. "It might as well be
my room on the platform, Scully. I don't want to stay here tonight. Hell, I
don't want to stay here ever again."

"Are you saying you want to live with me?" she asked, heart racing.

He replied with a startling rapidity.

"I want to sleep with you and eat with you and take baths with you and yes,
Scully, I want to live with you. I know," he rushed on, cutting off her
acceptance and leaving her smiling at him. She was not the only one who
feared their ability to abandon one another, "That your apartment is small,
but we could move. You should move anyway, get a fresh start somewhere."

"All right," she murmured sleepily, just to see what he would do.

"All right?" he asked. "Did I hear that correctly? Is this Scully? Special
Agent Dana Katherine Scully of the FBI?"

She snickered and he sighed. "Can I come over?" he asked tentatively.

"If you live here, Mulder, you can come and go as you please."

He was quiet at that, then she heard him clear his throat. "I used to love
it when you would fall asleep on the other end of the phone."

"I know," she whispered. "Did you sleep too?"

"Sometimes," he admitted. "I used to dream that the soft sounds of your
breathing meant you were there with me. And each time, Scully, that I dialed
your number, I thought: this time a man will answer. This time I will have
been away too long. I was aware that with every day, I was losing you."

"Nonsense," she said, thinking with some amusement of her death-like
slumbers, pills taking their toll even as she struggled to stay awake to
hear Mulder's own thick breaths. As if any man would ever have understood
her reactions to the ringing phone, the shaking and the longing so intense
it sometimes left her gasping. "You never lost me, not one bit."

"Stay on the phone," he murmured, and she heard him rise. "It will take me a
while to get over there, but don't hang up. You don't even have to talk,
just don't hang up."

"I won't," she promised, and glanced down at the two white pills lying
nestled against her belly. She slid them back into the bottle, replacing it
in the drawer. Tonight she would stay awake until he came, warm and musky,
slipping into her bed and settling there. Already her bedding had begun to
feel cold, and she longed for his skin to press against. "I won't hang up,"
she whispered and heard him sigh.

"I know, Scully," he said softly in return.

xxxxxxx

end 

Whoof! You made it! If it's been mildly less traumatizing than finding out
Mulder's sister was killed by starlight, please let me know...