From: ephemeral@ephemeralfic.org
Date: Sat,  1 Sep 2012 17:22:45 -0500 (CDT)
Subject: Paradise Lost (1/6) by bardsmaid
Source: direct

Reply To: bardsmaid@gmail.com

TITLE: Paradise Lost (1/6)
AUTHOR: bardsmaid
E-MAIL: bardsmaid (at) gmail dot com
RATING: worksafe
CATEGORY: A/U season 6; MSR; mytharc 
SPOILERS/EPISODES: Diverges from canon after *The Beginning
ARCHIVE:Gossamer okay. All others please let me know where it's
going.
DISCLAIMER:The X-Files characters are the creations of Chris Carter
and 1013 Productions; no infringement is intended.
NOTE: Originally posted in 1999, but polished and edited over time. 

SUMMARY: Early in Season 6, Mulder is dismissed from the Bureau on
trumped-up charges of having had contact with the X-files. On the
outside, without his access and his partner, how can he prove CSM's
involvement and gain reinstatement?


Fox Mulder strode into the review room, took his seat and glanced
around. A.D. Skinner, his one ally, was conspicuously absent from the
row of emotionless faces on the panel in front of him. And at the
center sat the man--his boss, these last dreary months--who saw no
use in his work whatsoever: Assistant Director Alvin Kersh.

So Kersh was chairing this. Why? 

Mulder glanced at his watch.  10:40.

Did Scully even know about this? He hadn't seen her this morning. 
There'd been a note on his desk--if you could even call it a desk--a
'workspace' was all it was, if you wanted to consider what they were
doing these days 'work'--when he'd arrived, saying she'd gone to
Arlington to pick up... something about evidence for a case Kersh had
thrown at her at the last minute.

The door behind him opened and Mulder turned. The corners of his
mouth began to lift, but they dropped almost immediately. It was
Kersh's secretary, the chemical blonde with the fake smile, not
Scully after all.  If I find anything on you, her expression
said--and I'd like to have something on you--His Loftiness will know
in a heartbeat.

"Agent Mulder," Kersh's voice boomed.

Mulder turned to face forward.

"We'll make this brief. You were advised some months ago that any
further contact with the X-files would result in your immediate
dismissal. Apparently staying with the Bureau doesn't top your list
of priorities, Agent, so we'll just get the formalities over with."

His voice was all policy, but a hint of a smile pulled at one edge of
Kersh's mouth. Mulder watched the moving lips, curious. Now they
stopped.

"Sir?"

"You've been relieved of your position, Agent. You will be required
to--"

"Sir?" Mulder straightened in his chair, aided by a sudden jolt of
adrenaline. "Excuse me. Sir--"

"...participate in an exit interview within one week of this date. 
In addition, you must check your badge and weapon today before you
leave the building."

"Sir, on--" Mulder got to his feet, dazed. It was a dream, some kind
of crazy dream-scenario, the product of the nagging fear in the back
of his mind since... He blinked. Still there, the whole row of them
staring blank-faced, like mannequins, the paleness of their skin a
sharp contrast to Kersh's deep chocolate tone.

"On... On what do you base this, sir?" Heat rose in Mulder's cheeks.
Inside, a heavy rhythm pounded through him. "I've just spent the last
three weeks in California chasing down fertilizer violations with my
partner. We discovered an illicit stash in a warehouse in the Oakland
area, 500 pounds of ammonium nitrate. We stayed an extra day to
verify removal. The report is on your desk, sir."

"I've seen it, Mr. Mulder."

"I believe there's been a mistake--"

"We have the phone records, Agent. The conditions were 'any contact'.
Now, there will be--"

"Phone records?"

"Mulder, sit down."

Mulder sat. He didn't recall having stood.  "Sir, what phone
records?"

"Mr. Mulder, there will be an exit interview set up for next
Tuesday--"

"Sir, I'm asking for clarification here."

"Any concerns you have can be addressed at that time. Until then
you're on administrative leave."

The lips in Kersh's dark face continued to move, but Mulder heard
only the buzzing inside his own head. Across the room, bureaucratic
puppet faces made the occasional perfunctory nod. He focused on
Kersh's mouth, straining for a second to hear the words it formed.

Wait a minute. Where was Scully in all this? She was... Kersh had
sent her...

She wasn't being included in this. Kersh had sent her off so she
wouldn't even know until the dirty deed had been done. They were
doing this to him, booting him out, sweeping the trash out of the
way. They must figure Scully was still salvageable.

Suddenly he stood. Kersh's droning continued.

Mulder cleared his throat. "Excuse me, are we through here?"

The A.D. looked up from the paper in front of him. His eyebrows
lifted.

"Are we done? Is this little charade over, because I'm late for an
appointment."

Kersh mouth opened and he paused.

"Thank you, sir."  Abruptly, Mulder turned on his heel and strode
from the room.

 

 

The door was a hard slap against Mulder's palm, the hallway beyond it
a series of doorways passing by on either side, blurring as they
went, punctuated by the occasional form of a person standing, or
looking.

It made no sense. Not after all this time. The only phone call they
could possibly have caught was the one--one--he'd tried to make to
Marita Covarrubias at the U.N., and even that could be chalked up to
something legitimate. Anybody else he'd contacted--even the
Gunmen--he'd always called from somewhere else, from a pay phone,
from a public place; he had no death-wish where the Bureau was
concerned. But they'd always been watching; he'd known that since
Scully was first partnered with him. Even his father had warned him
once, though it had sounded like more of his standard negativity than
advice born of experience at the time: that if he pushed too hard
against the powers-that-be, they wouldn't hesitate to shove him out
the door. Now their agenda was out in the open.

Correction: He was the one who was out.

It had been a shrinking pool for months--the growing restrictions on
their work and the quality of the assignments. First the basement
office was gone, and with it his autonomy.  Their autonomy; this
affected Scully, too. But it was in her to be able to play the game,
to follow protocol and turn in the perfectly polished reports even
when the work was sheer crap. She could smile and deal with it. He
wasn't made for that kind of thing.

The progression was obvious now. The first time... the first time
they'd shut down his project--his life--he'd been given wiretapping
transcription, endless hours of boring low-lifes going on and on
about their empty, pointless lives. A hit here, a betrayal there, to
jolt them out of the routine of their rooming-house existences, and
then more nothing. The only thing that had kept him from going crazy,
or from putting a gun to his head, was Scully. She'd check in every
once in a while to see what he was doing, how it was going, whether
or not he was surviving the routine.  She had a gift for reading his
emotional temperature, and beyond that she cared, though sometimes
the why of it was a mystery.

After Antarctica it had been worse, his life work snatched away and
given to someone else, to that weasel Spender, and to Diana, who he'd
always trusted... and yet didn't, something he could never quite pin
down in the choreographed dance between mind and heart. And instead
of wiretapping this time: domestic terrorism, a dramatic sweep
through the country's heartland, sitting around in dozens of family
living rooms with TVs going and dogs trotting through the room while
wives in chambray and denim smiled nervously and offered up
coffeecake as their husbands pawed through stacks of receipts for
feed and fertilizer and oil and hardware, only to produce proof in
the end that the fertilizer that had sent up a red flag back at the
Bureau was actually being used to keep the family farm from going
under.

Over the months, the shrinking pond had become nothing more than a
pathetic puddle and now even that was gone, dried up with a little
help from... someone. Jeffrey Spender would be wound up in it some
way. Spender and the cigarette smoking son of a bitch who pulled his
strings. But why now? Why this after all the times they'd dangled
glimpses of the truth in front of him and then simply stolen back any
scraps of evidence he'd managed to grab, like teasing a cat with a
string?

"Agent Mulder?"

Mulder looked up. Ahead, down the hallway, the steely silhouette of
Assistant Director Skinner was approaching.

Mulder fought the urge to turn around, to go down a side hallway or
step into an elevator.

"Agent Mulder--"

Skinner was in front of him now, close. Maybe a step too close.

"I had nothing to do with this," his superior said, the words
half-whispered, his features characteristically tight and unreadable.
"You were set up. I'll be in touch."

"If you can find me," Mulder heard himself shoot back. He turned
abruptly and headed for the front lobby.

It was deja-vu. It was rapid water rising inside him, the
too-familiar panic of being caught, twisted, tumbled end-for-end,
everything familiar in his life ripped away; the need to breathe, to
do something, to fight back before he drowned. He passed unthinking
by the metal detector and through the front door.

His mind swirling, his barked retort to Skinner echoing in his ears,
Mulder stepped to the curb and raised his hand to hail a cab.

 

 

At 2 p.m. Mulder changed into shorts and left his apartment,
basketball in hand, hoping to run across someone looking for a pickup
game at the local park. Not because he had time to kill, but because
he needed to fill the time he had with something besides the
squirming, sloshing backwash that was muddying his mind, making him
unable to see what move to make, which direction to go. Clarity was
key, and so often that clarity came from backing off, or through
sweating away your confusion through the physical effort of the game.

But he found the courts empty. He shot baskets for twenty minutes and
then jogged home. In the elevator, his heart rate gradually slowing
to normal, the nagging sense of jittery limbo took over again.

Mulder worked the key in the lock of his apartment, opened the door
and paused. 'Set' was the only word that fit the scene in front of
him.  As in 'movie set', nothing but the bare essentials: chairs,
stove, coffee table, sofa, TV. No overt evidence of a life happening
here; what fueled him was inside the boxes of files and papers
stacked all over the bedroom, a room he only used for storage, and
what did that say?  Just how loudly did it speak?

Not that the frills mattered. Decorator furniture and strategically
placed objets de arte or a different color of paint didn't matter.
They weren't important. What was important was--

He threw his basketball hard against the front wall, narrowly missing
a window bearing the residue of a masking tape 'X'. The ball
ricocheted off an end table and knocked over the trash can beside his
desk, then came to rest, the sudden clatter slipping into silence.

That was the point, anyway, wasn't it? Like X, they were all dead.

 

 

Dana Scully rapped her knuckles below the '42' on the door for the
third time.

"Mulder?"

She sighed and called again, but this time her voice wasn't very
loud, certainly not loud enough to be heard by anyone inside the
apartment. Frowning, she pulled the key ring from her purse, slid
Mulder's key into the lock and turned it.

The scene that met her was silent and deep with shadows. The final
faint light of evening glowed softly in the front window.

"Mulder, are you here?"

She let her breath out slowly.  After a moment she stepped inside and
walked carefully to where she could see the couch. No Mulder. She
reached for the light switch and flipped it.

Aside from his basketball sitting in the middle of the floor, nothing
seemed out of place. She went to the desk under the window, pulled
out the chair and sat down carefully.

There could be something. He'd left clues before.

She flipped the switch on the computer and watched it power up,
fingers tapping on the surface of the desk. After a few moments, the
desktop screen appeared and she pulled up a list of file names.
George Hale. She clicked on it. He'd used that once before, when he'd
taken off for the SETI array in Arecibo. A password prompt appeared
on the screen. Scully typed in "trustno1". She paused.

No luck. She tried 'Samantha'.

Then 'Chilmark' and 'Quonocontaug' and 'Verber' and 'virus'. The
password prompt continued to stare at her, impassive.

Skinner had seemed distraught when he'd approached her in the parking
garage, as if he'd been waiting for her to arrive. As if it hadn't
been just a coincidence that they'd crossed paths. She should have
realized something was wrong. 'Agent Mulder has been dismissed', he'd
said, his voice taut. 'Maybe you ought to--' He'd opened his mouth,
paused and finally shrugged. She'd never seen Skinner look helpless
before. She could still see the worry lines imprinted in his
forehead.

Scully stared at her own pale reflection in the computer screen.
There could be a simple explanation for this empty apartment. Mulder
could have gone to the grocery store. He could be out jogging. She
leaned forward and rested her head in her hands.  She didn't think
so.

I still have my work, he'd said when he'd returned from Arecibo and
discovered all the evidence he'd gathered gone, part of an
all-too-familiar pattern. I still have myself. But did he have
himself now, after this? What would he do--what would it do to
him--if he didn't?

 

 

Mulder waited until she'd gone--counted two minutes on his watch in
the close, stuffy air--before he pushed the bedroom door open a crack
farther and stepped cautiously into the living room. Going to the
door, he twisted the knob carefully. True to form, she'd locked it.
After a moment he turned and went to the window. Scully's car was
just pulling into traffic.

Mulder's fingers curled tightly into his palms. He forced himself to
stretch them out again, then stepped back from the window. The smart
thing would have been to leave this afternoon, while the rental
agencies were still open and he had a better chance at getting a car.
But leave for where? There'd been too many possibilities then,
careening around inside his head like a compass set wildly spinning
by the proximity of a magnet.

She was the reason he had to go, though. She'd lost her
innocence--had nearly lost her life--trying to help him. How many
times had she been taken to the brink, left hanging by just a thread,
because of something he'd done, or because of someone who wanted to
use her to get to him? And with their reassignment off the X-files a
few months earlier, she'd lost her credibility and some of her access
as well. 'Mrs. Spooky'. It was a millstone around her neck,
everything they'd done together.

No, everything they'd tried to do and failed to accomplish.

Mulder went to the couch--the place he slept, where he lived--and sat
down. Leaning forward, he buried his face in his hands. He could see
her future and it wasn't pretty. She'd become what he'd become: a
walking Bureau joke, someone people in hallways would snicker at
after she'd passed.

Leaning back, he let himself sink into the cushions.

She had too much talent for that, too much to give. She deserved a
career--a legitimate career--and as long as he was here, she'd feel
obligated to help him.  She'd worry about him.

She'd get sucked under with him.

Mulder closed his eyes. He'd watched her there, at the computer,
through the slit in the doorway, trying to crack his password.
Finally she'd left, but she was probably dead tired; she'd had a day
to get through, too. And that wild goose chase Kersh had sent her on.
But she never gave up.

And she accused him of being relentless.

She wouldn't give up this time, either. He knew her too well.

It was time to leave, time to get away from this apartment and the
Bureau and D.C. Stop contaminating her. Maybe perspective would come
with physical distance, and he could arrange his pieces on the board,
look at them with clear eyes and figure out what his next move should
be.

 

 

Easing the car up to the curb, Mulder cut the engine and set the
parking brake. He stretched and winced, then let his head fall back
against the headrest. The house beyond the weedy, uncut lawn seemed a
little more tired, a little more weathered maybe, than he'd
remembered it. He closed his eyes. He could still feel the vibrations
of hours spent on the road, a slowly-fading phenomenon, like
half-life.

Was he running to something--he'd wondered that all the way up
here--or simply running? His whole adult life had been wrapped up in
the past: trying to find it, to piece it back together like Humpty
Dumpty's shell, while the present... while the present went streaming
past him as if he'd spent every minute since Samantha's abduction
sitting in one of those rear-facing seats they had in old station
wagons, never seeing anything until it had passed him by.

He let out a breath, opened his eyes and pulled up.

Maybe it ran in the family--not being able to let go of the past. His
mother hadn't been able to bring herself to sell this place. Not
after the divorce. Not even after she'd had the stroke, right here in
this very summer house, after meeting Old Smoky here.

Mulder slammed the steering wheel with the side of a fist, sank back
against the seat and sighed. Then he pulled the door latch and got
out.

He was here because of Samantha; he hadn't come to think about the
Smoking Man and whatever-the-hell connection the old geezer had to
his mother. There was no point in going there and anyway, he wasn't
going to invite Old Smoky to steal this time with his sister. He'd
come here seeking a setting, a sense of place; he'd read that
somewhere once, that physical locations stored memories. Maybe one of
them would lead to a connection, however tenuous: a way to understand
something more about her, about who she was and who she'd become.  Or
if she'd become.

For all his years of effort, he'd been unable to discover any
certainties about her life, as if her disappearance were a math
problem without the necessary constants that made it possible to
construct an equation. Solve for the variable, but every piece of
information--or misinformation--he'd come across was a variable. His
British informant had said their father had taken Samantha to a
cloning facility. But he also thought he'd seen her in the flesh,
once, grown up, sitting right on his father's front porch. And for as
much as he'd wanted to believe--had wanted to feel in his heart that
it was her, really her--he'd known, somehow, even before he found the
other clones, that it had been too good to be true.

He thought he'd found her a second time when Cancer Man brought her
to see him at that diner while Scully lay in the hospital, the life
trickling inexorably out of her. But that could have been a scam,
too, Old Smoky playing on his emotions, holding out carrots, offering
him everything he'd ever wanted. And why? That was the question.
Nothing came free, least of all long-lost sisters. Anyway, if the
woman the Smoking Man had brought with him that night had been the
real Samantha, the sister he'd lost so many years ago, she hadn't
wanted to see him anyway. She'd been scared, like a deer frozen in a
spotlight, waiting for her chance to spring away. He'd scared her
with his overbearing intensity. 'Passion', Scully called it when she
was being diplomatic.

He smiled suddenly, thinking of his partner. Then he pictured her,
head-in-hands, silent in front of his computer in the dark. He
swallowed and dug the garage key from the pocket of his jeans.

 

 

Inside the pocket of her lab coat, Scully's cell phone rang.  Quickly
she turned off the water, dried her hands and fished out the phone.
Her breath caught involuntarily. She forced it out evenly and pushed
'talk'. "Scully."

"Agent Scully, is there some place we might talk?"

Skinner. She felt her chest sag and made herself straighten. "Sir?"

"Off the record, Agent Scully. It's... important."

"How about Sweeney's, sir? I could meet you in, say, an hour?"

"Maybe some place more public." There was a pause. "Can you meet me
at the Wall?"

"The Vietnam Memorial?"

"Yes. By the directory."

"By the directory, sir. In one hour."

 

 

Mulder sat on an old patio chair, the contents of the Quonocontaug
garage spread around him. This was the place where, if there was a
place, he should be able to find some closeness to her, some thread
of connection.

After they sold the Chilmark house, everything of Samantha's had been
moved here: her bed, her desk, her dresser with everything still in
it, his mother hoping, he supposed, in spite of her silence, that one
day her daughter would be returned. Not so different, maybe, from the
ritual he'd developed of closing his eyes when he entered his room,
hoping that when he opened them again reality would have reset itself
and Samantha would be there, in front of him in the flesh. It had
been a child's trick, a crossing of the fingers. A skipping over the
cracks in the sidewalk just in case it might be true, what they said
in the rhymes.

And what of his mother, living every day knowing--not guessing,
knowing--what had really happened to her? If what his British
informant had said were true. Years spent trying to rationalize that
it might be for Samantha's good, for her protection... if only she
could believe the fantastic scenario his dad had set out for her. If
only she could buy into the righteousness of the motives of the men
who gathered around her husband.

Something pinched him. Mulder shifted in his chair.

For his mother, Samantha's disappearance had always been about his
father. After his death, her hatred for him was just as hard, like an
anvil that sends off sparks when it's struck. But for him it had
always been about his mother, a woman who would sit in stony silence
whenever her missing daughter was mentioned, who had never even gone
out and actually searched for herself. Who'd stopped him from
searching for her the day she'd gone missing. The police are already
looking, Fox, she'd said, as if what he'd wanted to do was wrong and
shameful.  We shouldn't get in their way.

But how could it have been his mother's fault, really? For all the
times he'd berated her in his head, screamed inside until he'd
collapsed in tears to let the pressure slowly seep away, it couldn't
have been her fault. She'd have had no chance against the power of
the men who made these decisions, no defense to muster against the
force of their will, or influence. They took what they wanted--who
they wanted--in the same way they'd taken his father at the very
moment when he'd finally been ready to open up to his son.

Mulder pushed up from his chair and glanced around the silent garage:
Samantha's mattress up against the wall; behind the stacked pieces of
bed frame, her bedspread in a large, dust-covered plastic bag;
cardboard boxes marked 'books' and 'toys'. The contents of her closet
in those big moving boxes meant for wardrobes. Her dresser, with the
desk beside it, covered with a moving pad and sheets of plastic over
the top. Dust. Years of dust, the accumulation of passing time.
Mulder wiped a finger through it.  It was all there was to show for
all those years.

 

 

Scully paused beside the shady bench, then sat down and glanced
toward the memorial. She was far enough away not to be seen clearly
by anyone who might be watching for them, close enough to see Skinner
when he arrived.

Vietnam had not been her war. She was young enough not to have been
personally touched by the people who lost their lives there, and her
father, though military, had been elsewhere at the time, or so he'd
told them. Still, it was a lot of lives, a lot of sacrifice--or
pointlessness--in a war that had been dubious and confusing at best.

Above her, the tree branches were filled with the delicate green of
new leaves. Though she sometimes walked the Mall, she didn't come to
this particular spot very often. The last time, to tell the truth,
she'd been with Mulder, who'd been busy interrogating a lead that had
taken them nowhere. That fact had been obvious to her at the time and
she'd finally drifted away from Mulder and his Russian contact, drawn
by the names set in the black, polished granite as if they
represented something solid and real in a way her partner's ideas
often did not.

Which had become a moot point as of yesterday. They weren't partners
anymore.

She'd slept only fitfully last night, waking to find her eyes open,
her mind on where Mulder might have gone, assessing whether he had
the strength to weather the loss of the job his adult life had been
built on. Everything he was, everything he was searching for, hinged
ultimately on the access he had through the Bureau.

And where did this leave her--this sudden separation, this new
division?

It wasn't the same as the time they'd merely been reassigned, when
she could fill the empty spaces in what should have been the
meaningful, career-building work of teaching at the Academy with the
occasional spark of his passion for his search for his sister, or for
alien life. Maybe those meetings in parking garages and on park
benches had sustained her as much as they had him. Perhaps she'd
needed that spark as much as he had.

"Agent Scully?"

She jumped at the momentary touch of a hand on her shoulder and
turned around.  "Sir?"

"It's about Agent Mulder," Skinner said, sitting down beside her and
glancing around him for suspicious eyes. "Do you know where he is?"

"No, sir." She shook her head. "He isn't answering his cell phone."
She paused. "I went to his apartment last night but he wasn't there.
I think he's gone." She swallowed.

Skinner scowled.

Scully smoothed a wrinkle from her skirt. "I don't think he wanted to
be followed, sir. He would have left some clue, some hint. There was
nothing." She looked down. A tuft of tiny daisies sprouted from the
grass near her shoe.

"I know this is no longer official Bureau business, Scully," Skinner
said after a moment, "but I think Mulder's life may be in danger."

Scully looked up.

"Look, Mulder was railroaded, plain and simple. I don't know by whom,
though I have my suspicions. I'm trying to find out for sure."
Skinner's lips twisted slightly. He squinted out into the hazy
afternoon. "Mulder doesn't deserve this. And I hate to think of the
things that may be allowed to continue by getting him out of the
way."

He glanced across the grass, to where the V of the memorial sliced
abruptly into the landscape. "Scully, I spent two years in a war that
was a bureaucratic nightmare as well as a tactical one. So many lives
were lost for no reason--men I knew, men I was close to. Good men."
He stopped. "Agent Mulder is a squeak in the machinery." One eyebrow
rose. "A squeak we need, frankly, to keep the power structure honest,
to make us look at what we're doing, and whether it measures up. He's
never been afraid to speak his mind, no matter what kind of reaction
it might cause--"

"No." Scully smiled in spite of herself. "No, he's not, sir."

"I tried to speak with Senator Matheson yesterday," Skinner went on
after a pause. "Do you know him?"

"No, sir. Mulder's mentioned him from time to time, but I've never
actually met the man."

Skinner pursed his lips. "I went to his office yesterday. I wanted to
see if he knew anything about what had happened. He seemed surprised
that Mulder was out, but I don't trust the man." He shook his head.
"He was holding something back. I got the feeling I shouldn't have
gone there, as if I were exposing myself somehow. When I left, he
asked if I knew where Mulder was, so he could contact him."

"Why would he have assumed Mulder had gone somewhere--that he
couldn't just call him?"

"My question exactly."

"He's always considered the Senator an ally, sir."

"I know. But alliances can change, Scully."

She nodded.

Skinner cleared his throat. "So if you have any idea of where he
might be, any way to get in touch with him..."

"I'm trying, sir. I'll do my best."

"I know you will. I just hate to see a good man go down."

"I understand, sir."

Skinner rose and took a step away from the bench.

"Thank you," Scully said, standing, "for coming here. And watch your
back, sir. Protect your access. You're not beyond danger yourself."

Skinner's mouth pulled to one corner. He squinted into the bright
glare of afternoon, then at her and nodded. Then his back was turned
and he was striding away toward the slope leading to the polished
marble wall.


(end 1/6)


FOOTNOTE:
'Paradise Lost' is the first book of the Sanctuary trilogy, followed
by 'Walking Through Fire' and 'Sanctuary'. The complete trilogy,
including download files, is available at
http://www.bardsmaid.org/XF/S-index.htm.

(2/6)
--------------------------

Mulder shifted on the couch and stared up at the ceiling in the
gathering darkness. It was like a museum, this house: a life-size
diorama of a family's life in the early seventies, only without the
people themselves: no life, no emotions, no spirit, just artifacts,
like the physical evidence recovered at an archaeological dig. But
then that's what his family had become after Samantha was taken: the
cast-off shell of something that had once lived and breathed.

Mulder rolled onto his side and ran his thumb along the dark, tight
braid of hair in his hand. It had been in a box in the garage.  He'd
lifted a lid and there it was: her hair, something his mother had
saved once, probably from the time Samantha'd decided she wanted
bangs. She'd sat outside on a stool--it was right here, at the
Quonocontaug house--with a towel around her shoulders, his mother
combing the long, brown hair straight down in front of Samantha's
face. He'd come up and teased her, told her she looked like Cousin
It, and she'd squealed for him to cut it out. His mother had chased
him off.

He brought the braid to his nose and sniffed. It smelled of hair. 
Not of her, but it was hers, an actual part of her he'd touched a
thousand times, on a head that had tucked itself--much younger then,
and smaller, the hair downy and soft--under his chin or against his
shoulder. Hers, but not her. There was no life in it now; it carried
no essence of her, the kind of thing a psychic might tune into in
searching for her.

And what would Clyde Bruckman have said? Would he have taken the hair
and closed his eyes, a pained expression crossing his face, and
announced a time and date and manner of death? Would he have handed
the braid to Bruckman if he could? Or would that have admitted too
much?

Scully'd say, if she were being honest and not so damn set on saving
his sanity, that it had been a dream, a necessary fantasy he'd been
living with all these years: the crusade for an ideal and not the
actuality of an eight-year-old girl who'd been no angel. She hadn't
been. Samantha was screaming/hair flying/brightly-ribboned
I'll-tell-on-you-Fox. And he'd been far from the perfect brother.
He'd insisted on watching the Watergate hearings and then 'The
Magician', but he'd held her--she'd come flying straight into his
arms--when she panicked watching her father argue with Old Smoky on
that terrible night. Just like when she was little. It was a sign,
proof. There had been a connection between them.  It wasn't just
something his traumatized psyche had created in the aftermath of her
disappearance.

Mulder rolled again, to the other side, and tucked the braid of hair
under his chin.  He closed his eyes and listened to his breathing in
the dark.

 

 

She'd gone to his apartment again after work. She'd checked the
computer, the refrigerator, the sink, the bathroom. This time she'd
even ventured into the bedroom, though it was only stacked with
boxes--files mostly--and he never used it, anyway. There was no
indication that he'd been home. He'd always left some sign before, a
flight number, or longitude/latitude coordinates... something. But
this time there was nothing, and the only logical explanation was
that he didn't want her to know where he was.

He was an adult. Well, for the most part he was, a survivor who
sheltered hope like a candle flame. He'd offered it to her once when
there seemed to be no hope left, none even remotely on the horizon.
Hope and a hug she'd direly needed but could barely afford to accept.

He could take care of himself.

Scully rolled onto her back and pushed the pillow farther under her
head. A patch of moonlight spilled across the bedspread and touched
her hip. Her fingers went to her neck, searching out the small gold
cross tucked inside the collar of her pajama top. She rubbed the
polished surface softly with a thumb and stared out at the
half-circle pouring its quiet light through the window. He'd kept the
cross for her during the months she was missing. He hadn't left it in
the evidence bag with her badge but had kept it himself and pulled it
warm from his pocket when she wakened in the hospital, as if it had
never been abandoned to cool into a piece of mere metal.

Scully closed her eyes. Behind them she found words, a piece of cross
stitch from her mother's kitchen wall--a psalm. 'Thou knowest my
thoughts afar off', the brown lettering said; she could picture the
plaque with its flowered border. 'Thou compassest my path and my
lying down.' She let her breath out slowly.

He needed space.

She just wanted him to be safe.

 

 

Mulder's eyes came open. Something...

He blinked and turned his head to listen. The house was silent and
wasn't. Beyond the window the sky was black, littered with stars.

A dream. His cheeks were damp and he'd been dreaming, but the images
were fading already, dissipating into nothing. There'd been some
great sadness--overwhelming sadness--but Scully'd been there, too, a
comfort up against his cheek.

On the far side of the room, a floor board creaked.

Mulder's breath caught. He held it, listening for subtle sounds.

A footstep, then another and another. Then silence.

A jolt of adrenaline and he was up, smooth and silent, on one elbow,
lungs short of air, blinking against the thickness in his head. He
strained to hear past the pounding of his blood.

Breathe.

A crackling sound could be heard from somewhere outside. Cool air
flowed past his cheeks. Mulder glanced toward the door and saw that
it stood open. The far side of the room was silent. The intruding
presence was still there but it waited now, unmoving. Mulder blinked
and then blinked again, straining to see. He forced himself to
breathe quietly, in and out, in again, out again, a metronome of
reassurance and fear.

A sudden light danced yellow and flickered against a tree trunk
outside the window. Two more footsteps--tentative footsteps--came
from across the room. Then nothing. Mulder's stomach tightened. The
garage was on fire.

He wanted to lean, to bend. He visualized his gun on the floor and
his arm reaching, stretching, fingers tightening around the cold,
weighty metal of the Sig. But the bed would creak; he knew this
mattress. Just hold. Breathe.

A step, then another and another, more casual now, as if whoever it
was had satisfied himself that the place was empty. Mulder squinted
into the shadows and saw movement. The sound of liquid sloshed inside
metal. Then it spilled, as if someone were peeing on the floor.

Silently, smoothly, Mulder reached toward the floor, his hand
stretching. His fingers reached around the cold, heavy weapon and
nicked off the safety. Slowly he slipped from the bed into a crouch.
Inside, his blood raced, throbbing. The smell of gasoline filled the
room.

Mulder circled behind the bed, around the dining table, careful to
stay low and in the shadows. Then he dove--slow-motion, it seemed--at
the figure in front of him.

The man went down--not a big man or a small man, but one about his
own size. Mulder punched, hoping for a face, and contacted a
cheekbone. His fist stung, then pain exploded in his ribs as he was
kneed. They rolled, Mulder pulling on his opponent, the other man
grunting and scrambling to get away. The side of Mulder's face
smashed into a table leg but he punched again, catching the man
square in the nose. There was a shriek and Mulder dragged his
opponent quickly toward a patch of light. His heart jolted.

"Krycek, you bastard!"

But Krycek rolled, slipped free and staggered to his feet. "What are
you doing here?" he gasped. "Get out of here, Mulder!"

More gas spilled on the floor.

"Like hell I will."

Mulder sprang, catching his adversary at the knees and slamming him
into the wall. Krycek went limp.

Mulder paused, gulped in a breath, then lurched toward the cell phone
he'd left on a chair next to the bed. When he came through the
doorway, flames were breaking through the garage roof, beginning to
lick at the shingles.

 

 

From his vantage point on the grass near the curb, hands around his
knees, Mulder watched them fight the fire. The action was somehow
distant, like an old movie with the color slightly off and not quite
real. Bursts of yellow-gold sparks flew into a black sky, carrying
away his past converted into bits of papery ash. It was the old
familiar pattern: everything disappearing the way his sister had, or
like the evidence he was always seeking. Everything vanished. His
investigations began as hope, as a faith in something unseen, and
turned at some point into vivid reality he could witness, touch,
sometimes even photograph or measure. Then the evidence was always
gone, snatched away or lost in some way he could never anticipate,
and he was left, once again, as nothing more than a prophet,
proclaiming what those around him could neither see nor accept.

The house was burning now, too, the result of shifting air currents,
or chance, or maybe just the force of the wind created by the blaze
itself. Mulder watched as yellowed technicolor flashbacks overlay the
scene in front of him: his then-young father angry and yelling, the
Smoking Man glaring at him from the doorway, his bitter
accusation--"You're a little spy!"--echoing and re-echoing. Then a
time not so long ago, being here and breaking lamps against the brick
wall of the living room, picking a strange, cylindrical object from
among the shattered pieces: the weapon Old Smoky had wanted.

Smoky would have been the one who sent Krycek to do this.

What was it with Krycek, anyway? He couldn't be the only goon Smoky
had working for him, and yet they kept crossing paths, with Krycek
doing more damage each time. Maybe assignments were drawn out of a
hat and Krycek just had bad luck. Or maybe, when Smoky handed him the
hat, every piece of paper inside it said 'Mulder'.

Shadow-forms approached from across the lawn and faces leaned close,
coming into focus: a sheriff who needed to file a report; a couple of
EMTs who wanted to check him over, wash the blood--Krycek's
blood--from his hand, fuss over the cut on his cheek where he'd
smashed into the chair leg. He let them do their work and kept his
eyes on the house: the doors, the windows. Krycek had escaped through
a window after he'd shot his father. He'd smooth-talked his way out
of a cell in a Russian gulag, leaving Mulder to be subjected to the
black Oil. He'd managed--somehow--to make his way out of a locked
room in an abandoned missile silo. Maybe this time his luck had run
out. Maybe he'd finally met his fate, a victim, in the end, of his
own treachery. The firefighters had gone into the house early on,
searching until the flames drove them back, but no Krycek had
emerged--not under his own power, and not over anyone's shoulder.

There was a sudden, sharp pain near his temple as the EMT worked on
it; Mulder gasped. His eyes watered and he noticed the sky
suddenly--a thinning gray now--and a little group of spectators. He
felt heavy-headed, as if he'd been awake for weeks. When the EMTs
finally let him go, he wandered around to the back of the house, away
from the gathering crowd. The press would follow soon enough. An
arson fire would make the front page in a sleepy little place like
this, and he had no need to broadcast his whereabouts by getting
caught in a press photo. If Scully saw the pictures, she'd know. And
then she'd worry.

Mulder headed for a clump of trees where the lawn dropped away to the
water's edge and sat down. They'd played hide-and-seek here, he and
Samantha, under these trees. He'd hide behind the biggest trunk and
she'd go off in some other direction, searching and calling, until
he'd step out, touch base, and call to her that he was safe. Then her
hands would fly to her hips, her nose would wrinkle and she'd blurt
out, "Not fair, Fox!"

Mulder looked up and across the yard. A thickness suffused the scene,
a kind of sleepy unreality. His eyes wanted to close. He leaned
forward and rested his head on his arms.

Krycek had wanted him out. Why? He'd said it almost without thinking,
a gut reaction, and Krycek's gut reaction was never to save anyone.
Why this house, here in Quonocontaug? No one lived here. Unless it
was a move to get to his mother somehow, to pressure her for
something.

"Agent Mulder?"

He squinted up to see a deputy; behind her, the sky was too bright.
The house was four blackened walls now, standing like the borders of
an open courtyard. Smoke and steam drifted from the wreckage.

"They've gone back in and checked. There was no body inside the
house."

"Are you sure?"

"They checked twice." She shook her head. "There's nobody in there."

He nodded and turned away, grimacing at the stubble that coated his
cheeks and chin. The light hurt his eyes; he just wanted to close
them.

His mother would have to be told, but how would she react? Would she
fall apart or would she be relieved to have this accumulation of the
past finally gone, taken away so she didn't have to make the decision
herself? And what about her after all? Was she safe? Or was she just
a pawn in another attempt to get to him, the way they'd used Scully?

Mulder got slowly to his feet. He had to go to her.

 

 

The drill descended out of a blinding light, its high-pitched whine
heralding a pain she knew too well.

Scully gasped and sat bolt upright in the darkness. Gripping the edge
of the pillow beside her, she made herself breathe in, then slowly
out, willing her body to ease its sudden frantic pace. Gradually, the
rhythm of her heart slackened.

The moon was gone from the window, leaving only a thin, angled shaft
of light on the carpet. Scully eased herself off the bed, reached for
her robe and went to the glass, searching for moon or stars--anything
to focus on to keep the pictures in her head at bay.

Better to head for the kitchen, toward the light and its safe,
reassuring things: the soft comfort of the sofa, the tea kettle, the
vase with the deep yellow sunflower she'd placed on the table
tonight. Scully sighed, ran a finger along the window ledge and
looked up into indigo sky.

Cassandra Spender had sat beside a window in her wheelchair once,
marking a pattern on the glass--an all-too-familiar pattern that had
drawn Scully in a way she couldn't put to words. She hadn't felt that
call since Cassandra disappeared, but the memory of it, together with
the nightmares that still came--the bright lights, the men, the drill
spinning so rapidly it was only a blur, and the terror--all these
things were jolting, recurring reminders that normal life, life with
its conventional assumptions of future and security and family, had
forever passed beyond her grasp like a plane she'd failed to catch.

Scully wrapped the robe around her and went to the kitchen to put the
kettle on to boil. In the cabinet she found a mug and a tea bag and
set them on the counter. She made her way slowly to the couch, around
the back of it, and back to the kitchen, letting her fingers trace
the tile pattern in the countertop, waiting for the kettle to boil.
When it did, she poured the steaming water into her mug and carried
it to the couch.

Curling into the corner of the sofa, she took a sip, forcing herself
to concentrate on the flavor trickling hot down her throat, willing
the dream-images into the shadowed corners of her mind.

She'd made a promise to Penny Northern that she wouldn't give up. And
she'd made a promise to herself, after Penny died, that no matter
what else she did with her life, she'd work to solve the mystery of
who had done this to her, not just for her own peace of mind but for
all the others who would continue to be taken if she didn't act, and
especially for Penny and the rest of the women who had lost their
lives from the aftereffects of the tests.

Scully held the mug under her chin and let its warmth drift up onto
her face. She needed to keep that promise. But it was more than one
person could do--to find these truths and expose the men behind them.
And Mulder was gone.

How was she to do it now?

 

 

"Fox?"

Mulder looked up and willed himself to focus. His mother stood in the
doorway, her eyes filled with worry.

He opened his mouth and when nothing came out, he shrugged. There was
blood across his T-shirt--that bastard Krycek's blood--and a cut on
his cheek. He hadn't shaved in... he didn't remember how long, maybe
two days.

"Sorry, Mom." He squinted against the brightness. He only wanted to
close his eyes and sleep.

His mother opened the door wider and stepped onto the porch. "Fox,
whatever happened to you? Were you in an accident?"

"I... I'm okay, Mom." He stepped forward and into her tentative
embrace. "I'm okay."

He stayed there a moment, eyes closed, his cheek against her
shoulder.  Her gray hair was turning white.  He couldn't recall when
it had started to do that.

"Come in, Fox. Sit down. You look like you need to rest."

He straightened and followed her through the hallway. In the living
room he sank into an armchair and let his head fall back. His eyes
closed; he made them open. She was standing, waiting.

"Would you like some coffee?"

"No." He shook his head against the back of the chair. "I've been
running on coffee all morning."

"Let me fix you something to eat, then," she said, turning toward the
kitchen. She seemed eager to get away.

"Look, Mom--" Mulder pulled forward in his chair. "Sit down. I need
to tell you something." He swallowed.

She stopped, then came to the end of the sofa nearest him and sat
down on the edge of the cushion. He took a deep breath.

"It's the Quonocontaug house, Mom. It's gone. Burned down."

She said nothing, just looked at him wide-eyed, uncomprehending.

"I went up there yesterday, Mom. I was looking through some things...
in the garage--" His voice was going gritty, the way it did when he
was on the verge of emotional overload. He eased his breath out
slowly. "I decided to stay over. And I woke up in the middle of the
night, and... the garage was on fire."

"But how could that be?" The lines in her face seemed a little
deeper, more defined than he remembered.

"It was arson, Mom. I kind of ran into the guy who was pouring the
gasoline," he said, touching the side of his face. The pain made him
wince.

"Did you catch him?"

"I thought I had." He shook his head. "But he got away."  Somehow,
Krycek always got away.

His mother stared at the coffee table and at nothing. "But who
would--" Her face went taut.

"He's the guy who killed Dad."

Teena Mulder sank slowly back into the cushions. There was pain in
her eyes now, years of it. "It never stops. It never leaves you. They
never leave you," she whispered hoarsely, and then stopped abruptly.
He watched her breathing, the up and down of her dress. She was weary
and dry-eyed, beyond tears. "And the house, Fox?"

"Gone, too. The wind blew the sparks. I--" He pulled something from
his pocket, something dark.

"I, uh--" He took a breath and attempted to smile. "I came away with
this. I ran outside--  I... I didn't even know I had it with me." He
handed her the braid of Samantha's hair and leaned forward, resting
his head in his hands. There was no sound, only the rhythm of his
breathing, in and out, and the hollow ticking of the mantel clock.
Finally a hand touched his shoulder.

"Fox, I am so... so very sorry--" It was softer, not the edgy voice
she used when he'd ask her to remember something and she'd say she
couldn't, that it was all too long ago, while her eyes were sharp,
brittle, demanding Why are you doing this to me, hurting me this way?
"I'm sorry for this life we've had, for the way it's been for you--"
She sighed. "I only wish I'd--"

Mulder looked up. "No, Mom." He shook his head. "It wasn't your
fault. There was nothing you could have done. These men, they do
whatever they want. They take whoever they want."

Reaching out, his fingers found his mother's and held them. On the
mantel, the clock ticked empty time.

"I'm tired, Mom," he said finally. "I need some sleep."

 

 

Teena Mulder paused in the doorway to her spare room. From behind her
came the soft chime of the mantel clock sounding three. Sunlight
streamed through the eyelet curtains and onto the end of the white
bedspread that covered the length of her sleeping son. Her eyes
traced the line of his cheek, the curve of his chin, the color in his
lips. His forehead was creased with subtle lines; stubble spread
shadow-like across cheek and jaw.

She pictured him asleep at six months, and at six years, and at
sixteen.

Even when the scene before her went watery, she found herself unable
to turn away.

 

 

"Sir?" Scully said, incredulous.

Kersh beamed at her from across the expanse of his desk.
"Congratulations, Agent."

Scully forced a smile. It was as if the wind had been knocked out of
her and she was trying to breathe again.

"You'll report to Quantico Monday morning."

"Yes, sir," she said, repeating the smile more fluidly this time. She
stood automatically to shake the hand Kersh offered and headed,
dazed, for the door.

Beyond the shadow of Kersh's office, the secretary smiled under
fluorescent light and Scully made herself smile back, a conscious
coordination of mind and muscle. In the hallway she reminded herself
to steer a wide berth around passersby. She walked a straight line,
but inside her thoughts swirled like dry leaves in a whirlwind.

It was a strategy, a ploy.

It was the position that would make the laudable career, the one that
would make her family proud--would have made even her dad beam to
tell his friends that his daughter was nested high in the teaching
faculty of the FBI Academy. Full professor. A solid, prestigious
career; something to show for herself and her life. Respect and
respectability.

It was the logical subsequent step to dismissing Mulder. Disable him,
move her out of range.

She paused by a window and looked out, unseeing.

Bill would be proud. Her mother would be encouraged, beaming. And
what would Melissa say, if she were still alive, if she could talk to
her about this?

Missy would say to follow her heart, to listen to what her insides
were telling her.

Scully ran her fingertips along the smooth-grained railing. Her
fingers squeezed the wood, gripping against a rising, invisible tide.

 

 

Traffic moved steadily past the row of parked vehicles at the curb.
Scully set down the cardboard box and raised her hand to hail a cab.
She'd spent the last of the afternoon cleaning out her desk, absently
sorting objects and documents while her mind remained trapped inside
the news Kersh had given her.

"Agent Scully?"

A pleasant male voice came from behind her. She turned to find
herself looking into John Byers' neatly trimmed beard.

"Do you need a ride, Agent Scully? We have some information you may
find interesting."

She paused and tried to force away the concerns of the afternoon.
"Yes. Yes, I do. Thank you."

A creaky VW bus pulled up in front of the row of newer cars lining
the curb and stopped. The door slid open. Langly grinned at her from
the passenger seat, his signature yellow mane framing his face;
Frohike was behind the wheel. They reminded her suddenly of two
cartoon characters, a lion and a dwarf. Byers picked up her box;
Scully climbed inside and slid across the seat.

"Agent Scully," Frohike said, turning briefly to acknowledge her with
a nod.

"What's going on?" she said.

The van pulled away from the curb. Scully gripped the back of
Frohike's seat for balance.

"That's what we'd like to know," Langly drawled, turning around, the
black rims of his glasses stark against his wild blond hair.

"Wait, I thought you guys had information for me."

"We do," Byers said. "But where's Mulder? We haven't been able to
reach him."

"Mulder was 'dismissed' from his position two days ago," Scully began
carefully, pausing to consider how much she should say. "Skinner
thinks he was set up. I do know Kersh deliberately sent me off to
pick up evidence so I wouldn't be there when it happened. I didn't
even know about the review until I got back, and by then Mulder was
already gone." She took a slow breath, caught up again inside the
moment she'd heard the news. It had come like a sudden gunshot, the
unexpected burst that changes everything.

"... 'net this morning," Langly was saying.

"Excuse me?" She willed herself to focus.

"I was surfing the Net this morning, and I came across this."  He
turned and handed her a printout. It was a police and fire report
from somewhere in Rhode Island.

"There, on the third line," Langly said, pointing.

Scully looked.

"Mulder's family does have a place there, in Quonocontaug, don't
they?" Byers asked.

"Yes..." Scully said.

"And you haven't had any contact with him since Tuesday?"

"No. No, I tried. I went to his apartment twice. He usually leaves
something on his computer, something so I'll know where he is, but--"
Cars and buildings passed the window in a blur. "There was nothing
there."

She swallowed against a sudden pressure in her throat and looked
down. All four passengers fell silent.

"We'll keep our eyes and ears open," Byers said finally. "We'll let
you know as soon as we hear anything."

"Thank you."

Scully attempted to smile. After a moment she turned to watch the
darkening blur beyond the window, her ears filled with the
high-pitched whine of the engine.


(end 2/6)


FOOTNOTE:
'Paradise Lost' is the first book of the Sanctuary trilogy, followed
by 'Walking Through Fire' and 'Sanctuary'. The complete trilogy,
including download files, is available at

(3/6)
--------------------------

"Yes, I appreciate your help, sir."

Scully switched off the phone and dropped it onto the couch cushion
beside her. It had taken every ounce of professionalism she could
muster to suppress her desire to take the officer on the other end by
the throat and shake the information out of him.

Her initial inquiries to the Quonocontaug sheriff's station had
netted nothing, but after some insistence she'd managed to locate the
deputy who had taken the report. Mulder had been there. He'd given a
statement but that was all the man was at liberty to tell her, aside
from the fact that the fire had been a case of arson. It was very
little to go on.

Mulder would have contacted his mother, either by phone or perhaps
he'd gone to see her, but if she were to call Mrs. Mulder, what would
she say? That she was looking for her former partner just to know...

To know what? If Teena Mulder hadn't seen him, her call would only
make his mother worry. If she had... Well, if Mulder wanted to
contact her, there was nothing stopping him. Unless he was hurt, in a
hospital somewhere. Or worse.

And how would she know? By sitting here, waiting for word to fall
into her lap?

Scully stood up abruptly and went to the bedroom. She changed into
sweats and took her running shoes from the closet. It would be a
welcome release of tension, running now.  Maybe it would even clear
her mind and help her come up with a way of locating Mulder. And if
not? At the very least, the exertion would be worth the workout
value. It would make the next hour pass.

She sat on the bed and worked at loosening her shoelaces, but as she
reached for the second shoe, the doorbell chimed. Sighing, she set
the shoe on the spread and went to the door.

"Mom!"

Margaret Scully's smiling face filled the narrow opening.

"I met an old high school friend for dinner, and the restaurant
turned out to be just a few blocks away." Maggie paused. "Are you
going out?"

"No. Yes. I was--" Scully sighed. "Come on in, Mom," she said,
opening the door wider.

"Dana, is something the matter?"

Scully returned her mother's hug. "Good news, actually," she said,
forcing herself to smile.

Her mother straightened and held her at arms' length.

"I've been reassigned, Mom," Scully said softly. "I'm going to be on
the permanent teaching faculty at Quantico. Eventually I should have
a full professorship."

Her mother's face lit up. It was exactly the reaction she'd pictured
when Kersh gave her the news.

"Oh, Dana!"

Scully smiled again, but caution flitted briefly through Maggie's
expression, a sign that the ever-working mother-radar had picked up
something amiss, the kind of thing that could be read in the tilt of
a daughter's head or the tiniest pull at the corner of her mouth.
Scully pressed on.

"Would you like some tea, Mom?"

"I don't think I can hold another drop of anything, thanks. Tell me
about your promotion."

Scully led the way into the living room and settled cross-legged into
one end of the sofa. Maggie sat down next to her, expectancy written
on her face.

"I don't know all the details yet. I just got the news today." She
paused. "It's the kind of job Dad would have wanted for me."

"Yes," her mother nodded, her voice going suddenly dry. "He would
have been very proud."

Scully's attempt at acquiescence ended in tightly-pressed lips, but
her mother seemed not to notice.

Then Margaret's face clouded. "But what about Fox? How is he--?"

Scully's gaze slipped toward her lap. "He was dismissed from the
Bureau, Mom. Two days ago."

"But why?"

"It was... politics, Mom." She shook her head. "Office politics, not
anything he did. Skinner believes he was set up."

"Then is he--?"

"I don't know anything, Mom." She pressed her lips together to keep
too many words from falling out. "He's... out of town. I don't know
where."

For a moment there was only singing silence and the backbeat of her
pulse. Finally a hand pressed against her knee.

"He probably needs time to think, Dana, to sort things out. Men are
like that, you know. Often they don't want help; they have to figure
things out for themselves." She paused. "But this job--it was such a
big part of his life, wasn't it?"

Scully sighed and stared toward the window. "It was his whole life."

When there was no reply, Scully glanced back. Her mother was looking
at the kitchen cabinets beyond the dining table, no doubt searching
for something helpful to say, something positive.

"Last night," Scully began finally, the words leaking out unbidden,
"I had a dream, a... dream I have sometimes, about the time when I
was abducted." She paused, breathed in. "It's always made me feel...
it reminds me... why I've been working with Mulder, investigating
some of these... strange, puzzling cases. I need to find the key to
what happened to me--to so many women--and how to stop it, so that
Penny Northern and all the others won't have died in vain. I
survived. I was given the ability to fight back, and this is the only
way I can see to do it. But now... Any other time I would have been
ready to take this job, to go to Quantico and use my training to
teach." She moistened her lips. "And this assignment is not a choice;
it's not an option. But--"

Pressure filled her throat; her fingers curled tightly into her
palms. After a moment an arm slipped around her shoulders and she was
drawn forward. Margaret's sweater was soft against her cheek.

"It's not so easy to leave your partner?"

"We're not partners anymore, Mom," she said into the close warmth of
the sweater.

"Aren't you?" her mother said.

 

 

"What will you do, Fox?"

Mulder looked up from the mug on the table in front of him. His brow
wrinkled. "I don't know, Mom. It had to be--"

He set his jaw. He wouldn't do this the way he usually did, the kind
of preemptive foray into his mother's private territory that he knew
from experience would only inflame him--and hurt her--in the end. She
was looking at him, waiting.

"It has to be the Smoking--" He looked down. "The man who came to see
you at Quonocontaug, when you had the stroke."

Teena Mulder winced and settled into a look of quiet despair.

"I think he's behind everything, Mom--my dismissal, Dad. My partner's
abduction, her cancer--" He had a sudden, fleeting image of Scully
sitting alone on a windy rock at the beach, staring out to sea. "He's
always been there, Mom, in the shadows at the Bureau, right from the
start." Before that, even when he was a kid, but he wouldn't go there
now, wave it in her face only to be rebuffed.

"Fox--"

Mulder looked up.

"I never really... I didn't know what your father's work was. It was
classified, and in those days that was just something a wife
accepted. Whatever work a husband did was his business. If it was
classified, it was for the good of the country and you didn't ask
questions.  You didn't think to ask. You had other business; it
wasn't your... realm. But men would come from time to time. They'd
talk and then leave. I'd serve coffee or lemonade and go back to my
own duties." She paused. "But Leland would come from time to time..."

"Leland? His name is Leland?" He could feel heat rise inside him.

"It's what your father always called him."

"Is that a first or last name?"

She shook her head. "I... I honestly don't know. It's the only one I
ever knew." She paused. "One time he... he came unexpectedly, before
your father had gotten home, and when Bill arrived a few minutes
later he walked me to the kitchen--he had his hand on my arm--I
remember the way it felt, a very hard grip--and he told me to keep my
distance from him, that Leland saw life as a chess game and that
every move he made, no matter how small, was designed to take him one
step closer to winning. It seemed an odd thing to say. Your father
seemed so intense at the time."

Mulder swallowed and pushed away the thoughts forming in his head.

"Mom, I want you to find someplace you can go--someplace you can stay
for a few days, a week or so."

She gave him a quizzical look.

"I can't be sure you're safe here, whether he might be trying to get
to you with this--with the fire at Quonocontaug. Or if he thinks he
can get to me by getting to you."

"But Fox, for what possible--?"

"I don't know." He leaned forward across the table, earnest.  His
voice rose. "I just need to know you're safe. Dad was right. He'll
use anything--he'll do anything--if it gets him what he wants."

"I suppose I could go to Trudy's. She's been asking me to visit." She
glanced at the kitchen clock. "But it's too late to call tonight."

Mulder pushed his chair back from the table and stood. "Get some
sleep, Mom," he said softly. He came around and took her cup and
carried it to the sink. "It's late. Get some sleep."

 

 
Scully opened her eyes and glanced at the red glowing numbers.
1:43--exactly seven minutes later than the last time she'd looked.
She sighed and turned toward the window. The moon was just beginning
to force a blade of light onto the carpet. Tugging the corners of the
pillow closer around her neck, she propped her head higher.

It had to be a way of neutralizing them: get rid of Mulder, reassign
her. Offer her a satisfying professional career, keep her fed and
warm and drowsy so she wouldn't make waves. But why even bother with
her? Why go to the effort with Mulder out of the Bureau? How much of
a threat was she on her own?

Maybe it was only a matter of form. Maybe they were counting on her
being no threat at all.

She reached toward the night stand, picked the phone from its base
and dialed. She didn't think; she only counted the passing seconds.
She was past wondering what to say, how to phrase it, where they
stood, how it would come across.

"Mulder, I need your help," she said into the mouthpiece as soon as
the message machine had beeped, making sure to keep her tone even. 
"Call me."

Then she hung up.

 

 

Mulder pulled the back door shut behind him and eased himself down
onto the cold bricks of the steps. Orion's belt was tilting around
the corner of the house, glowing in the inky blue-black of the sky.
He looked up and thought of Scully.

He should sleep again, not let himself get out of the routine, but
he'd been up less than six hours. He hadn't gotten up until nearly
dinner time, when his mother had come into the room with linens to
put in the closet and the squeaking of the door had wakened him. He'd
lain there watching her work, watching the weakening light cure to
pale yellow on the walls and thinking how odd it was to be here, a
child alone in his mother's house the way he'd been before Samantha
was born, but the situation altogether different now, a strange
juxtaposition of time and circumstance.

He slipped a sunflower seed into his mouth, nudged it into place with
his tongue and bit down.

His legs were anxious to move, to jog, to stretch his muscles and the
skin that seemed to house him like a straitjacket. But he couldn't
leave her here unprotected, go off running and take the chance of
coming back up the block to find the house in flames and his mother
gone the way his father or his sister had been. And what about the
significance of everything that had happened in the past two days,
his dismissal and the Quonocontaug fire?

There had to be something he'd missed, or gotten too close to,
something he'd stumbled across without realizing its significance. Or
there could be more to this; it could be a piece to a puzzle he had
yet to see. So many times solving mysteries was a matter of vision,
of being able to take a chance or an extreme viewpoint and use it to
examine a situation from an angle no one else had considered.

Mulder rubbed the arms of his sweatshirt for warmth and leaned back
to look at Orion. Three points on a straight line. No--nearly, but
not quite. It was that matter of viewpoint again, and a perfect
example. He'd seen it in a documentary once: it had taken a team of
astronomers--not archaeologists with their entrenched theories--to
realize that the pyramids were laid out not in a line but in the
exact pattern of Orion's belt, the third one offset slightly, and
that what had been assumed to be an air passage above the burial
chamber was actually a shaft that led directly, at the proper season,
to the constellation Orion, the one the ancient Egyptians knew as
Osiris, guide to the afterlife. The purpose of the passage was not to
let air in, but to guide the soul up and out.

 

 

Halloween snapshots.

Mulder shook his head. He was probably six in the one he was holding.
In it he was wearing a cowboy outfit, with boots and a brown Western
hat with a big silver buckle. Samantha was dressed as a clown, half
of her costume green, the other half orange. A big ruffled collar
circled her neck and her cheeks and nose were pink with some kind of
face paint or makeup. He sat behind her in the picture, holding her
and grinning as if she were the grand prize from a raffle.

He ran his fingertips lightly over the picture, tracing her outline.
She was still the little Samantha in this picture, the one he'd
always tried to protect, the one he'd thrown his arms around when the
neighbor's dog had burst into the yard one day, threatening. She'd
faded eventually, gotten lost in his memory behind the Samantha he
argued with over TV shows and game strategies. But here she was, that
little Samantha with all her softness and vulnerability.

He swallowed, laid the photograph aside and reached into the box for
another handful of pictures.

It was worth having showered finally. It was worth having run, even
if it had only been up and down his mother's own block, where he
could keep the house in view. He'd done laps the length of the block
until the tightness inside him finally loosened and his body was
weary with the kind of good weariness that brought sleep. Then he'd
showered, washed his hair, and stood in front of the mirror trying to
decide whether to shave, eyeing the stranger in front of him.

A noise, a kind of moan, came from somewhere down the hall. Mulder
set down his handful of pictures and listened. Nothing. When it came
again, he stood and went out into the hallway.

"Mom--"

There was no answer.

Flipping on the hall light, he approached his mother's door. In the
shadows he could see the shifting of covers. He went in and sat down
carefully on the edge of the bed.

"Mom?"

No answer. She was lying on her side facing away from him, apparently
dreaming and caught up in something unpleasant.

He reached out and ran a hand over his mother's shoulder with gentle
pressure. Gradually she began to ease. There had been a time, just
after Samantha was born, when he'd discovered his mother asleep on
her bed with her eyes open. Until Samantha's abduction it was the
most frightening memory he'd carried with him, the thought of her
lying there seemingly dead, gone to a place where he could never
reach her.

Mulder let his hand pause, but soon his mother began to stir. He
rubbed again, softly, and continued until she was finally at peace.
The room smelled of her, of the powder she used and the perfume she
wore. He thought suddenly of another night, in a darkened hospital
room, watching over his sleeping partner. Was Scully asleep now? And
what had happened to her after they'd given him the boot? Had they
left her to languish in the bullpen or assigned her another partner?
She'd adapt. She'd smile and put her things in yet another desk, pull
a file off the top of the stack and... But she wouldn't like it.
Inside, it would be eating away at her.

Mulder eased himself off the bed and went to the door. He glanced
back once, then went to the living room and dialed his home number.
Two days and he hadn't once thought to check his messages.  Hadn't
been ready to check. He waited through the announcement.

Scully's voice came on the line. Her tone was calm and measured but
the words made his heart stop.  They were the very same words she'd
shouted into the message machine as Duane Barry dragged her off into
the night four years earlier. The second caller said only, "Be at
your apartment tomorrow night."

It was Krycek's voice.

 

 
A pink-gold swathe of light inched its way down the closet doors and
warmed the tones in the photographs spread on the floor. Mulder
stretched his legs in front of him, winced and glanced at his watch.
He would have gone back to bed--for a few hours, anyway. But then
he'd found the picture and after that sleep had been out of the
question. It was a group shot, his mother in the background and off
to the right of a group of men seated at the old picnic table in the
backyard. She'd just come down the stairs with a tray of something.
But she was pregnant in the picture--not huge and ready to deliver,
but pregnant enough for it to be obvious. And Samantha's rocking
horse was clearly visible on the porch.

His eye had gone first to the rocking horse. He remembered Samantha
tearing the wrappings off, what a huge box it had been--or at least,
had seemed to him as a six-year-old, when everything had seemed twice
its actual size. It was one of a handful of vivid memories he had of
that age, a present for her second birthday. She'd crawled right onto
it as soon as it was out of the box and ended up rocking it so wildly
his mother had worried that she'd throw herself head-first over the
front of the horse and end up seriously hurt.

But his mother. Another child... or another pregnancy at least. He'd
pressed his memory, trying to nudge it, but he recalled nothing about
another pregnancy. Not that it was something he necessarily would
have noticed as a child.

"Fox?"

Mulder looked up. His mother stood in the doorway in her bathrobe,
obviously newly awake.

"Have you been up long, Fox?"

"Actually, I... I never went to sleep. I got caught up in these
pictures. Sometimes you forget how long it's been." He paused and
held up the photograph in his hand. "Mom, were you ever pregnant
after Samantha?"

His mother's face clouded. She hesitated but then came into the room
and took the picture he held out.

"Yes, I was," she said, her voice quiet. She sat down on the edge of
the bed, not looking at him or the picture. "The baby was stillborn."

"What happened?"

She shook her head. "I don't know, Fox. It... They didn't look into
those things so thoroughly as they do now."  She looked past him at
the far wall.

"Was it...?" He paused. "Was it a boy or a girl?"

"I never knew," she said, her voice dry, her eyes still unfocused. "I
didn't want to know."

After a moment, Mulder reached up and covered her hand with his own.
The light in the room was strong and penetrating now, flooding the
room with brightness. Dust particles drifted in the shafts of light
that poured through the curtains.

"It's strange to think about," he said finally. "To go through your
whole life and then realize... that there might have been three of
you instead of two."

His mother nodded but said nothing. Her hand moved under his--loose
skin, bones--and she set the picture on the spread beside her.

"I'd better get packed for Trudy's," she said, and stood.

Mulder watched her walk toward the doorway.

"I'm sorry, Mom."

She paused and half turned around. "Thank you, Fox," she said.

 

 

The driver's window was open, sending waves of air through the hair
on the left side of his head, making it hard to hear. Mulder stuffed
the phone between his chin and shoulder and reached for the window
button. Abruptly he was sealed in quiet.

"...after the beep."

"Hey, Scully, it's me," he said, grasping the phone again. "I'm
coming back into D.C. this afternoon. I'll catch you when I get
there."

He pushed the 'off' button and set the phone down. What was it she
needed help with? She rarely asked for help, unless it was something
directly related to gathering evidence. Otherwise she only accepted
help when things were critical, say when she was dying or had just
been rescued from the clutches of some psychotic killer.

Maybe they'd demoted her to electronic surveillance or something;
that could send anyone over the edge. But they wouldn't get rid of
her. She could play the game.

 

 

Holly's face materialized out of the almost surrealistic swirl of
people inside Sweeney's.

"Was all of this your idea?" Scully asked, speaking loudly and
leaning closer to hear Holly above the chatter of the people around
her.

"Well, I had a little help." Holly was beaming. "You really deserve
it, Dana. We're all really happy for you."

"Well, thank you," Scully said, taking the girl's hand and pressing
it briefly between her own. "It's going to be... quite a change.
Quite a challenge."

"Oh, I'm sure you'll do great," Holly said.

Scully made herself smile. She was conscious of her own veneer of
reserve as if it were something dry and stretched a little too
tightly, like skin that had been washed with plain soap. She hoped it
wasn't obvious.

It had been a swirl of images, this surprise party, like a dream with
faces coming suddenly into focus, smiling and pressing her hand, or
shaking it and congratulating her on her promotion, and then whirling
away to be replaced by other faces. Dr. Scully, not Agent Scully. The
Academy professor.

Holly was pulling on her hand now, leading her toward a table in the
center of the room where a sheet cake and a wrapped package waited.
Scully felt her face color as all eyes turned to watch her.

 

 

Mulder knocked again on the door--a little more forcefully this
time--and glanced at his watch. 3:45. She wouldn't be home yet, even
if it was a Friday. When was the last time Scully'd left work early?

He paused and slipped his hand into his jeans pocket, fishing for the
key. He wasn't sure why he was going in; maybe it was like closing
his eyes as a kid and hoping Samantha would be there when he opened
them again. A lot of things were worth a try, just on the outside
chance.

Mulder worked the key in the lock and turned the door handle.

"Scully?"

Only silence met him. He stepped inside and closed the door. The
apartment was suffused with a close warmth that made him suddenly
realize how drowsy he was after all his driving. And another night
without sleep. It had been--what?--nearly a day again? A full day
since he'd slept last.

He stepped into the kitchen. Clean counters, table set with
placemats. A single sunflower set in a vase in the center.

He turned and went toward the bedroom. He remembered passing through
here--her practically carrying him through here--in a haze after his
father died, when he'd showed up on her doorstep near collapse, sick
from the drugs they'd been pumping into his apartment water and from
the weight of watching his father's dead body, from carrying it with
him in his mind.

He paused at the doorway and leaned against the frame. Neat, with
everything in subdued, neutral tones. Not like his own place, dark
and scattered with stacks of books and papers.

He felt a yawn starting in his throat. Fatigue coated him suddenly
like a color. He turned and went back to the living room, to the
little table where she kept the answering machine. Pulling a pad of
paper from the drawer below it, he wrote:

                                                      Catch you soon.
                                                                     
             -M

He'd grab a few hours' sleep--he needed them suddenly, as if he were
parched and thirsty for sleep--and then he'd call her. Before he had
Krycek to deal with.

 

 

Mulder leaned back farther into the couch, put his feet up on the
coffee table and stared at the ceiling. His body was ready for sleep,
but after three days in the twilight zone, the familiar markers of
reality--his apartment, his couch, computer and the papers scattered
on tables or stacked in boxes--only served to remind him that he was
suddenly unemployed, that he was on the outside now: no access, no
partner to call in the middle of the night after a sudden flash of
inspiration. No paycheck.

The implications were staggering--life-altering--another onslaught of
variables without givens on which to anchor them. It was enough to
send the old familiar panic seeping from the dark corners of his
mind, but he pressed back against it with determined pressure, a
symptom he knew he couldn't afford to ignore. He'd sat here like this
after hearing Michael Kritchgau's revelations, too, watching his
whole life pour past him--out of him, it had seemed. It had nearly
been the end of his world.  The end of him.

His mother would be at her sister's now, unpacked and settled in.

Mulder's head hit the back of the couch cushion, making him jump. His
eyes blinked open and he pulled himself up, leaned forward and
cradled his head in his hands. He felt thick inside, sluggish and
padded. He forced his eyes open again and glanced at the clock on the
end table. 4:37.

Two hours. Enough time to grab some shut-eye and then get back to
Scully before Krycek came. But no sleeping here. Not on the couch
where he'd be a sitting duck if Krycek decided to make his little
house call early.

Mulder stood unsteadily, picked the clock off the end table and went
to the bedroom door. Warm, stale air greeted him but that was to be
expected; it was a store room, after all. He set the clock on the
nightstand and went to open the window. It was still afternoon beyond
the glass, cars going by and the sun shining. Somehow he felt
removed, not a part of it. He pulled the shade down and returned to
the bed. With the file folders shoved to one side, he crawled under
the covers.

He remembered nothing. Not lying there, not drifting off.

 

 

Alex Krycek pointed his Beretta 9mm at the sleeping figure in front
of him. Ironic to find him this way, defenseless like a child: Mulder
the relentless, the tenacious dog who never gave up, driven by
shadows and insinuations and the visions they'd planted in his head.
By the conflicting evidence he'd find and then lose again. And still
he stumbled forward. How did he do it?

Krycek kept his trigger finger against the side of the barrel and
continued to study the figure on the bed. They hadn't made any
difference in the end--Mulder's beginnings, all the advantages: the
Oxford education, the scholarships, the childhood summer house. 
Things he had no concept of, his own realities built on the
gray-and-dirty-white of the institution, on always being
americanets--'the American'--regardless of the fact that he'd grown
up as Russian as the rest of them, and being always too cold, too
hungry. Mulder'd still ended up a laughingstock while he, in a sick
twist of fate, was doing an encore as the old man's pawn, his goad.
But not for much longer.

Mulder grunted in his sleep and rolled farther onto his side. 
Krycek's trigger finger tensed, ready to move. If Mulder woke, he'd
react like a Doberman. Ironic again: that of all the people who'd
hated him when he wasn't being useful to them, it was Mulder and the
old man who'd hated him with the most passion, the most feeling. The
old man might have reason--or thought he did. But Mulder... Mulder
didn't even know. Maybe he never would. Maybe that day would never
come.

Krycek glanced at the clock, then at the bed. He pressed carefully,
tentatively, on the mattress with his fake hand but Mulder didn't
roll or grunt.  He didn't even stir.

Krycek straightened, paused and finally tucked the gun into an
inside-the-waistband holster. He nodded at the sleeping figure, then
slipped quietly from the room.


(end 3/6)


FOOTNOTE:
'Paradise Lost' is the first book of the Sanctuary trilogy, followed
by 'Walking Through Fire' and 'Sanctuary'. The complete trilogy,
including download files, is available at

(4/6)
--------------------------

"Mulder?"

The voice seemed far away.

"Mulder--"

Mulder stirred slightly and grimaced.

"Mulder."

A hand nudged his shoulder. Adrenaline surged through him and he
rolled suddenly, one hand diving under the pillow.

"I have your weapon," Scully's voice said calmly. "Mulder, you have
an alarm clock set for three hours ago."

Mulder pulled himself up on one elbow and forced his eyes open. He
squinted at the shaft of light coming in from the living room. It was
Scully. He felt himself loosen.  "What? What time is it?"

"Time to thank your lucky stars, apparently." Scully held out a piece
of paper. "I found this next to your pillow."

He took it and held it in the shaft of light. 'Sweet dreams' it said
in familiar, penciled block letters.

"Oh my God, Scully." He let out a sigh and collapsed back onto the
bed.

"Mulder, what's going on? Are you okay?"

Mulder pulled up to a sitting position and ran his hands back through
his hair. His hands were numb; his mind was thick, running in slow
motion. It'd been how long? Four hours? Five? And Krycek--

His partner was staring at him.

Not his partner.

"Thank you," he said. "Good thing you didn't have to try waking me
from the dead." He gave her a grim smile, stood up--"Excuse me"--and
made his way to the bathroom.

Krycek.

It'd been five hours and now... He looked at his watch. 9:38. What
was that look she'd been giving him? Worry? The 'are-you-sane' look?
He winced at the sudden loudness of the splashing in the toilet.
Krycek. This was the second time in as many days, and what did it
mean? It had to mean something.

He flushed, turned on the faucet in the sink, washed his hands and
let the water slowly fill his cupped palms. The sudden splash of cold
wetness on his face made him wince, but it was a good thing; it would
clear his head. He looked up, into the mirror, and stopped. Four days
growth--that's what had made her stare. A smile started at the corner
of his mouth.

When he came out of the bathroom, he could feel her concern settling
over him like a blanket.

"Mulder, are you okay?"

She did a damn good job, though, of keeping her voice even, quiet. 
Not giving herself away.  At least, it would fool anyone who didn't
know her as well as he did.

"Yeah, I uh... No, actually. A lot of things have happened.  Lot of
things..."

"Mulder, did you make some contact, or were you railroaded? Because
Skinner thinks you were set up. He--"

"You know, Scully," he started, cutting her off. She was starting to
work herself up. "Let's get out of here. I could use some fresh air.
Maybe we both could."

 

 

"The beach?"

She was giving him the eye; it was definitely the 'are-you-crazy?'
look. Darkness and the occasional light sped past the car window.

"Yeah, Scully. I got this image of you in my head the other day, you
sitting on a rock at the beach." He raised an eyebrow in her
direction. "So what did you need? Should I be passing the honorary
Millstone of Humiliation on to you?"

When she didn't answer, he glanced toward her. Her expression was
unreadable in the dark.

"You know, I've never seen you with a beard before, Mulder," she said
finally.

She sounded half-amused, the way she did when she found out something
about him she'd never expected. But there was something else in her
tone, too, a wistfulness, or a sadness, maybe.

"It's the new me," he said. "Hey, I'm trying out this whole new
persona, you know? Bearded, Unemployed Mulder. Like an action figure
or something."

An exit sign flashed past on the side of the road. Mulder slowed the
car, watching for the entrance. He took it, when it came, and drove
slowly over crunching gravel into the parking lot. The moon was a
dull light in front of them, diffused behind furrows of plowed white
clouds framed like a painting by the windshield. He cut the engine.
After a moment the lapping of waves filled the quiet.

"You want to walk, Scully?" he said when the silence began to build.

"Okay, Mulder," she said with a little sigh, and reached for the door
handle. "Let's walk."

 

 

Krycek stood behind the old man's chair in the dark. It was worth a
point or two in the game to surprise him this way, to watch him
seamlessly cover his fear, his jolt of recognition, but to know it
had been there underneath it all. It was a reminder to the old man
that he wasn't just a drone to be programmed and used. It was a test,
too, the smallest probing of the old man's alertness. One of these
days it was going to come, the sign that would tell him it was time
to make his move.  He still wasn't sure what that move would turn out
to be, only that he'd have to be ready to act.  Use it or lose it;
opportunity was like that--like the momentary flash from the barrel
of a pistol.

Be ready.  But be careful.  He'd learned that the hard way--how the
unexpected could catch you and send all your planning up in smoke.

The cold glow from the TV threw shifting shadows against the walls.
The old man leaned forward in his chair and dropped the butt of a
cigarette into a half-empty bottle of beer. There was a momentary
sizzle; a mixture of smoke and steam wafted from the mouth of the
bottle and then went out. By the time Krycek looked up, the old man
had already pulled another cigarette from the pack of Morleys and was
lighting it. Krycek cleared his throat.

The old man skipped a beat, but only one. He turned around smoothly
and smiled a slight, stiff smile.

"Have a seat, Alex," he said, gesturing broadly.

"Nah."

"Suit yourself." The old man looked away, back at the television, and
took another drag on the cigarette. He exhaled slowly and watched the
smoke spread, lifting and evaporating into the shadows. "I see the
job is done."

"House and garage both. Gas station guy's prints are on the gas can."
Krycek paused and looked around him. It could be a motel room--just
the bare necessities and nothing more. The old man had nothing really
to show for all the power he wielded: a chair, a coffee table, a TV
and the weak light of a cheap lamp.

"What was the point, anyway?" he said aloud. "Nobody even lived
there."

"It had sentimental value," the old man said smugly, taking a drag on
the Morley. He glanced up at Krycek. "Often that's worth much more
than money. You can twist people with their sentiments." He exhaled,
forcing another cloud of smoke into the space in front of him. "They
hold on so tightly you can blow them anywhere you like, like flags in
the wind. Mulder hangs on more tightly than anyone. It will be his
downfall, eventually. Perhaps soon."

The old man's lips formed a smile and the cigarette went back between
them. His tone was always the same--smooth, even, devoid of
attachment to anything but his own success, and even that he was
careful not to grasp too tightly. Something inside Krycek took hold
of an invisible thing and crumpled it, squeezing until it was
unrecognizable.

"I'll be in touch, Alex," the old man was saying with his fake
cordiality, but he wasn't looking at Krycek; he was staring at the
strobing images on the TV screen.

Turning, Krycek went to the door and let himself out.

 

 

"They're transferring me to Quantico," Scully said, looking up at the
glowing mounds of clouds building on the horizon. "Kersh called me in
to tell me yesterday."

She waited for a reply but none came. Once they'd started walking,
their sparse attempts at conversation had quickly died.  Obviously he
was light years away, tightly tangled in thoughts he wasn't willing
to share.

Scully rubbed one heel against the log where they were sitting. Her
fingers were cold. A breeze had come up and she was wearing only a
windbreaker over the shell she'd worn to work; she hadn't expected to
end up at the beach. Mulder had already switched places with her to
shelter her from the wind.

It was the wrong choice to have come here. Her neediness had
acquiesced in a moment of weakness, or her relief at seeing him after
days of wondering how he was. They might be sitting side by side but
she knew well enough when they were disconnected, and they were now. 
Blatantly, painfully.

"I have no idea what to do, Mulder," she said finally, leaning
forward.

"Why?"

She glanced over at him. It was that flat, completely detached
delivery.  His only real sign of presence was the movement of his jaw
working the shell off a sunflower seed.

She stood suddenly. "Look, Mulder, what the hell are we doing here?"

She stared ahead of her to where the moon cast a shining silver path
in the black water. Her throat ached. She should have been more
careful, used her head instead of her emotions.

Scully shivered and hugged her arms to her body. Her ears were cold.
The surf was growing progressively louder, a hissing that seemed to
pursue her.

"Mulder--"  She turned to look at him. He was staring past
her--through her--at the sea and at nothing.  "I want to go home,
Mulder." She paused and sighed. "I needed... your hel--"  It was
painful even to say the words. She turned away and stared at the
surf, at the momentum of the advancing wave and the way it dissipated
into foam, as if its strength had never been anything more than
illusion. She ached inside, the penetrating, bone-deep ache of
emptiness.

"Fall back." Mulder's voice came from behind her.

She stared harder at the black water in front of her.

"Come on. Fall back."

The tired old trust exercise. "Stop it, Mulder." The ache inside her
only grew, threatening to engulf her.

"Scully, fall back." It came quietly this time, an asking, not quite
a pleading, his voice soft and insistent the way it was when he was
deadly earnest. "Scully--"

She closed her eyes. Her body shook.

"Scully, please."

She tried to loosen. Her throat burned. She leaned back slightly.

And let herself fall.

 

 

Alex Krycek raised the glass to his lips and stopped mid-sip, as if
his heart had stopped. The music around him still pounded, people
danced to a rhythm in the half-light, smoke wafted above nearby
tables but he was caught in a momentary limbo, sucked away from the
scene around him.

Mulder would've filed a police report in Quonocontaug. The old man
would know Mulder had been there; he checked every detail, never
trusting. He'd know Mulder had gotten away. Not that doing anything
to Mulder had been part of the assignment. But he hadn't said
anything to the old man about Mulder being there, and that in itself
would stand out: guilt by omission.

What would the old man read into his silence? Would he have an
inkling of what he'd been up to? Or did he already know? Is that what
his 'sentimentality' spiel had been about--a warning?

Krycek looked behind him, at the people gathered around tables and at
the stragglers sitting at the bar. No one seemed to be watching him.
But he'd find someplace else to spend the night. It wasn't a night to
be caught in your own bed.

 

 

Teena Mulder yawned and closed her eyes, but soon found them open
again. She'd gone to bed early, overwhelmed with fatigue... or so
she'd thought. But she'd wakened a few hour later and, unable to
return to sleep, had made her way to the window. She'd passed more
than an hour in the wing chair now, watching the moon slowly glide
from the left window pane to the right.

Her thoughts clung to her son with his intense, overwhelming
earnestness. He had such a hunger for meaning and she fed him such
crumbs in return.

 

 

"Scully, what would you do if I weren't here?"

He could feel her tense a little, shift a little against him, but
only slightly this time. He covered her arms with his own and pulled
her carefully back against him.

"What do you mean, Mulder?"

"I mean if I were gone. If... if Krycek had gotten to me while I was
sleeping... back there, a few hours ago." The question wasn't meant
to be self-centered. She'd understand that now.

"I don't know. I--" She sighed.

She'd actually done it. It was still almost too much to believe: that
she'd loosened enough--trusted enough--to let herself go, to fall to
him when it wasn't part of some Academy exercise or a documented
Bureau procedure. He'd half-expected her to walk away, to take the
car and leave him stranded in the dark. And then she'd fallen, a
loosening that would have been like another woman giving herself to
him--everything--and he'd reached out and caught her, sagging
slightly with her weight to cushion the stop, and had eased her back
here, onto the log with him. Onto his knee, his arms still around
her.

He hadn't let go. She'd squirmed at first, subtly--a controlled
panic--but he'd slackened his hold slightly and then had held it,
constant, careful, and she'd eased, gradually, until finally she'd
relaxed against him.

"I'd keep going, Mulder." She stirred again, then resettled. "I have
to. I have to find out what was done to all those women.  I can't
just take this job and forget about all of them: Penny, Missy--" Her
voice went dry. "I owe her more than this, Mulder."

"Then you have your decision." He paused. "I just needed to know it
was yours."

She turned to him. "And what about Quantico?"

"It's access. Right now you're the only access we have." He
half-smiled. "Besides, you've got to pay your rent. No use both of us
living in cardboard boxes in some back alley. There's a limit, you
know: only one destitute partner to a pair. Looks like I beat you to
it."

Somehow he could feel her smile. Or at least, he thought he had,
momentarily.

"What about you, Mulder? What are you going to do?"

His lips pressed together. She felt comfortable against him, as if
she belonged there. He sighed. "I don't know yet, Scully. I think I'm
still lost."

 

 

The Smoking Man aimed the remote at the television and clicked to
change the station. It had been yet another World War II movie,
'Escape from Sobibor'. Never one of his favorites. It was too upbeat,
offered false hope. People didn't work in concert so smoothly. They
had their own agendas, their own selfishness that foiled the greater
plan. Human nature never failed to do its work.

He pulled the last Morley from the sagging package and lit it.

It was all a matter of discovering what a person couldn't live
without, what their craving was. Once you uncovered it, the game was
up. You had only to withhold it, or manipulate it, or destroy it and
your enemy would do the rest and destroy himself.

Admittedly, the model hadn't worked so well with Teena. For all he'd
taken from her, she was still standing, still living. Oh, she hated
him, to be sure. But she hadn't succumbed. Hadn't crumbled. Hadn't
given out her secrets. Perhaps that was why he'd valued her so
highly, aside from the fact that she'd been a strategic game piece he
could use against her husband when the need arose. Perhaps it was why
he'd saved her that time, after she'd had the stroke.

It would have been so easy to let her slip away, to let her secrets
go with her.

 

 

"...I'm not even sure what I've been searching for all these years,
Scully. Maybe... maybe it's the easiest explanation that's true and I
just refused to see it. Maybe she didn't survive. Or maybe last year,
at the diner... Maybe that was really her, maybe it--" He glanced up
at the blue-black sky, winking with stars. "She said he was her
father, Scully. That it'd been a secret between him and my mother."

"Mulder, that's just a story, a... a line he'd use to gain her trust.
She was a little girl. She would have needed to hear something like
that--something that established a tie between them."

"No, but he said something to me once... when my mother was in the
hospital, when she had the stroke. He said that he'd known her"--he
grimaced--"that he'd known my mother, since... before I was born."

"Oh, Mulder."

 

 

Mulder pulled the key from his front door and hurried to catch the
ringing phone.

"Hey, Mulder."  It was Langley's voice.

"What?" He yawned, stifled it and then yawned again.

"Frohike ran into that Krycek guy you like so well. We thought you'd
want to know."

"What are you talking about?" Mulder ran a hand back through his
hair. The sky outside the window had turned a deep, rich blue.

"That guy Krycek."

"When?"

"A few hours ago. In the city jail."

"What?"

"Frohicke was out partying. He was trying to come on to this chick--"

"I asked her for a date," came Frohicke's miffed protest from
somewhere in the background.

"She claimed he was harrassing her," Langley went on, undeterred.
"The cops hauled him in.  Temporarily, anyway."

"And Krycek was there? For what?"

"Trespassing, they said. I guess they caught him in some abandoned
building."

"Yeah? Well, they should have left him there to get eaten by the rest
of the rats. The son of a bitch just burned down my parents' old
summer house."

"Yeah, well, he won't be out torching anything for a day or two.
They're holding him unless the jail fills up."

"Good. Then I can get some sleep and not worry about waking up dead."
Mulder's thumb reached for the 'off' button.

"Hey, Mulder--"

"What?"

"He wanted you to get in touch. He said it's important."

Mulder laughed and hung up the phone. "Right, Krycek. I'm going to
come running to save your sorry ass."

He set the phone on the coffee table, sank into the couch and pushed
the pillows under his head, trying to get comfortable. Then he
stopped, got up, and went into the bedroom.

It's what he wants you to do, she'd said; he could hear Scully's
voice as he lay staring up at the ceiling. The Smoking Man wants you
to crumble, Mulder, and what better way to get to you than to tell
you something like this. It's a strategy, Mulder. Nothing more.

It was a strategy, like John Lee Roche's.

But what if it were true?

 

 

Scully paused in the doorway of the donut shop, then stepped inside.
At a table by a side window she spotted Skinner, seemingly engrossed
in a newspaper. She went up to the counter, bought a coffee, then
casually approached him.

"Sir?"

"Have a seat, Agent Scully." Skinner gestured. "Sorry about the
location; it's the closest place I could find. I'm not entirely
certain I haven't been followed recently and I didn't want to chance
going to your apartment." He paused. "I tried calling you this
morning but there was no answer."

"I... I must have been asleep, sir. I was up rather late last night,
talking to Agent Mulder."

Skinner's eyebrows rose. "You found him? So how's he taking this?"

"I think he's confused, sir. He's tired of being bounced around by
the men we can never pin down.  And by his own changing evidence.  By
what he believes." She ran a finger along the pattern on the table's
surface.

"I think I may have found something," Skinner said. "Not anything
that will help get Mulder reinstated, but something I think you
yourself may have an interest in." He glanced out the window,
scanning the sidewalk and parking lot, then refocused on her.
"Something came in late yesterday, routed to Jeffrey Spender." He
leaned closer. "Evidently someone claims to have seen Cassandra
Spender, Agent Spender's mother. It's the only lead that's come in
since she disappeared the night you were with her."

"They saw her recently?"

The scene played out in front of her again: Cassandra, arms stretched
upward, floating into the night air, higher and higher toward the
bright lights of the triangular craft. And then the faceless men,
bearing down on them from both ends of the bridge.

"Agent Scully?"

"This"--Scully cleared her throat--"this happened recently?" Her
stomach was suddenly tight, hard and uncomfortable. She made herself
focus on Skinner, on his glasses and the firm set of his face.
"Where?"

"Near the Potomac Yards in Virginia. The woman who claims to have
seen her is a homeless person. I don't know how credible she is, or
whether she might not just be claiming what she is in the hopes of a
reward. She was responding to a missing persons poster." Skinner
pushed a folded piece of paper across the table to her.

A train yard. A train car. Scully swallowed. "I don't think so, sir."

"Excuse me?"

"She may be telling the truth."

Skinner looked at her, questioning. She stared back at him, her eyes
clear and suddenly very hard.

"Agent, don't even step into this if it's going to cause you to lose
perspective. I debated whether or not to even give you this
information." He lowered his voice. "Remember, Agent Spender will
have this information, too. If he finds out you know about this, he'd
going to realize exactly where the information came from, and I'm no
good to you if I'm out the door like your partner."

Scully swallowed, then nodded agreement. "I understand completely,
sir. I won't let you down."

"I trust you won't."  He looked at her--into her--then stood, nodded,
and left.

Scully stared across the table, at Skinner's half-empty cup and the
two unopened sugar packets beside it.

 

 

Krycek shifted on the cement floor, eased his back into the corner of
the holding cell and tried to relax. There'd be at least a few
minutes of quiet and it would be stupid not to take advantage. Two of
the drunks were caught up in a drowsy, half-stupefied conversation;
the third was flat-out snoring. The john who'd been caught in the
vice squad sting was sitting at the far end of the bench, paralyzed
by his own humiliation. Someone was going to find him out now--a wife
or a girlfriend or a parent--but he was killing himself already
before the fact.

If enough riff-raff came in, they'd let him go; simple trespassing
wasn't high on their list of crimes to hold a guy for, especially
with the jail overcrowded. If worse came to worst he'd sleep here;
the group scene wasn't that much different than what he'd grown up
with, depending on the quirks of the individual players. Or Mulder
might come. But that was a pipe dream and besides, if Mulder came
he'd be a raging dog, and he didn't have the energy right now to deal
with the inevitable geyser of bitter self-righteousness, or being
shoved around, or having a gun stuck in his face until Mulder's steam
had dissipated. Good old righteous Mulder.

Krycek closed his eyes.

One spring, when he was nine or ten, the old man had showed up at the
orphanage while he was out working in the fields, his knees and
fingers half-frozen with icy mud. He'd been pulling weeds along with
half a dozen other kids when the old man's shoes had appeared next to
the row he was working. 'What are you learning here, Alex?' the old
man had said, leaning in closer to him, looking for signs, like a
teacher. 'That if you take out all the weeds,' he'd replied, looking
up, 'the soil will wash away.'

The old man had seemed surprised at first, then pleased. Impressed,
even. He'd taken him from the fields early and they'd gone to eat at
a restaurant in the town, a place with real food--meat and
everything. He'd eaten enough to make his stomach ache.

But the old man hadn't kept the lesson himself. He took out too many
weeds, and no man could hold all the soil together by himself.

 

 

"Mulder, pick up."  Scully sighed and waited.  "Mulder--"

After several more seconds, she switched the phone off.

He could still be sleeping; they hadn't returned to D.C. until nearly
five a.m. and in his emotionally wrung-out state, running on as
little sleep as he had been, it was possible he could still be asleep
now, at nearly two in the afternoon. She unzipped the athletic bag in
front of her and checked the contents again: a pair of worn, faded
sweats and a tired flannel shirt she'd picked up at a thrift store
near the donut shop, her oldest pair of running shoes, and a knitted
watch cap. She zipped the bag and set it next to the front door.

He could easily call, or stop by, needing to talk. But best not to
leave a message on his machine in case someone was tapping his phone.
Scully went to the computer, sat down and typed a brief message, then
labeled the file 'George Hale' and saved it. In the kitchen she found
a 'to do' notepad her mother had given her, wrote 'note to George
Hale' on it and left it on the phone table. They seemed almost silly,
the precautions, and yet the men who had managed to wedge Mulder out
of the Bureau--who'd given her cancer, who'd killed her sister and
'promoted' her to keep her from learning something, something
obviously important--weren't joking. Six years ago she would have
accused Mulder of being paranoid if he'd suggested the things she'd
just done. But now? It wasn't the way you hoped to see life: as an
ongoing process of disenchantment, of watching your realities fall
apart, your certainties gradually stripped away.

Scully picked up the athletic bag and opened the door. Whatever the
truth was, no matter how strange or disconcerting, she needed to find
it.

 

 

In the flashbacks induced by Dr. Goldstein's treatment, his mother
had been in his arms--Old Smoky's. Just momentarily, but it was a
detail impossible to miss. His father had been furious: at his son,
for witnessing; at Smoky. At his mother.

A year ago, she claimed she hadn't betrayed his father. Her denial
had come out sharply, like a gunshot. Never, she'd said. Never. Then
she'd slapped him across the face, denying every word.

She'd told him she didn't know anything about his father's work, or
about his associates who would come to the house, and he wanted to
believe her, the only scrap of family he had left. But she had known
some things. She'd known about the stiletto hidden in the lamp; it
was the one thing she'd communicated to him after her stroke.

Which made her the worst kind of liar.

The Smoking Man had told the woman at the diner who claimed to be his
sister that he was her father.  He hadn't wanted to believe it at the
time--hadn't even wanted to think about the possibility.  But what if
it were true? 

And if so, then what about his mother's other pregnancy, the one
after Samantha? Had that been Smoky's child, too?



(end 4/6)


FOOTNOTE:
'Paradise Lost' is the first book of the Sanctuary trilogy, followed
by 'Walking Through Fire' and 'Sanctuary'. The complete trilogy,
including download files, is available at
http://www.bardsmaid.org/XF/S-index.htm.

(5/6)
--------------------------

Scully secured the metal door behind her and turned around. It was an
older gas station. The small restroom was tired but clean, with the
graffiti on the stall door painted over and the air infused with the
sweetness of coconut-scented room freshener, the kind that had always
reminded her of cookies as a child.

Opening her bag, she slipped off her own clothes and changed into the
old thrift store outfit she'd brought. The colors didn't match, which
might actually add to the intended effect: stained light blue sweat
pants, a tired gray sweatshirt and a red, white and green plaid
flannel shirt. She glanced up into the mirror.

She looked shabby, poor, the kind of person who'd want to melt into
the background rather than be noticed. Missy might say she looked
relaxed, though; she'd see something positive in it. Missy would tell
her it was the soul inside that was beautiful, that clothes didn't
make the woman, or change her essence for better or worse. She'd--

Scully turned abruptly from the glass and began to stuff her own
clothes into the bag. Her father had been right after all--the vision
of her father as he'd appeared to her while she was in a coma,
tethered to this life by the thinnest of threads when she was
returned from her abduction. He'd told her, with emotion she'd never
seen him display in life, that he would willingly give up everything
he'd held dear--all the medals, the honors, the entire career that
had constituted his life--for one more second with her. And for as
much as she and Melissa had disagreed, for as much as she'd resisted
Missy's caring, which had seemed so smothering, she realized now what
Ahab had meant. What she would give, right at this moment, to be able
to sit down and talk with her sister for five short minutes.

Breathe.

After a brief attempt to compose herself, Scully made herself look up
into the mirror.  She slid the watch cap on, pulled it down over her
ears and paused, then tucked some of her hair up  inside the hat. 
But just as quickly she pulled it off  again, set it on the counter
and turned  on the faucet, her lips pressed tightly together.

The hot water ran only cold. For a few  moments she watched it spiral
rapidly down the drain. Then she held her fingers under the flow,
filled her cupped hands and splashed it on her face. Scrubbing warmed
neither her face nor her hands.  But there was a reason she was here;
 there was work to be done. She'd help Cassandra if she could, and
hopefully she'd come across another puzzle piece that would help
solve the mystery of the abductees.  It was time to be strong.
Skinner's career was in her hands now. And her partner, despite the
strength he'd seemed to gain the night before from helping to shore
her up, seemed seriously adrift.  He needed her strength, too.

Scully shut off the water and patted her face dry with a paper towel,
then looked up at the image in the mirror. A forlorn face stared back
at her.

 

 

Scully--
Looking back, I can see now that I've spent the past ten years as a
victim of my own delusions. My sister was real, and her abduction was
real, but nothing I've done to try and find her has yielded anything
but lies and misdirection. Who am I to say she survived this long, or
that the causes or results of her disappearance may not have been
radically different from anything we've even conceived of? All this
time we may have been going in the opposite direction from where the
actual truth lies. I've given that a lot of thought in the last few
days: the question of how much influence Smoky's had over the
direction of my work and its results. Who else could have been behind
my dismissal? Who's to say he hasn't been playing me like a puppet
for years, just as he must have manipulated my father by the way he
and my mother... 

I can't even put the words to paper. Maybe that's the hardest thing
of all to face: that he insinuated himself into my family and started
doing his dirty work there even before I was born, like a parasite
laying eggs deep inside its host. I know my mother's denied it, but
the hard fact is that he could be my father. I could be a deliberate
strategy, a cog designed to fit his wheel, and I won't give him the
satisfaction of playing that part any longer. I can't.

It's not the first time I've reached this crossroads, Scully. I'd
hoped I'd never find myself here again, but I've searched and
searched, and frankly, I can't find a single verifiable truth on
which my life has been based. I regret having pulled you into my
illusion as I regret, more than I can express, the pain and loss your
association with me has caused you personally and professionally. The
last time I arrived at this place, you were lying in a hospital bed
with your life in question and I couldn't leave you to face an almost
certain end alone. You're strong now, Scully, stronger than you've
ever been. You'll carry on, and your light will continue to shine on
me.
                                                                     
                                                  -M

 

 

Krycek let the paper slip from his hand and glanced at the form
sprawled on the floor in front of him. He shook his head.

"You think you know what it's like to be a pawn, Mulder?" he said
quietly.  He paused, mouth open, then looked up and closed his eyes.
"Hell, I know exactly what you were thinking, bratishka."  He shook
his head and glanced down at the body on the floor. "But fuck,
Mulder."

The last light of afternoon fell across Mulder's face, tinting it
with sunset colors. Krycek watched the tones fade, the rosy pinks
giving way to yellows. Only the quiet working of the fish bubbler
broke the silence. Krycek glanced around the room. It wasn't much
more, this place, than what the old man had: couch, a chair, a desk,
a lamp. Tables. Pictures on the walls and boxes of paperwork. Not
just paperwork, though--files, beliefs. Causes, reasons to run toward
something instead of away. There was the difference.

Krycek eased himself down beside the fallen form. The rich yellow
tones on Mulder's skin were going thin and pale. There was dust on
the coffee table, along with a half-filled mug and an open file
folder.

"You have any idea what this is going to do to her, Mulder?"  Somehow
Mulder had always seemed exempt from the laws of the universe, for
better or worse: he'd take the proverbial beating and keep on
ticking. Like Wile E. Coyote.

Except that Wile E. Coyote was fiction. There was a warning in that
distinction.

The old man had been right about attachments, though in a back-door
kind of way. Mulder's unsuccessful search for his sister had actually
fueled him.  But the thought that he might have the old man's venom
pumping through his veins--that was the thing he couldn't live with.
This, here, had been his attempt at exorcism as much as anything
else.

Krycek reached out, rested a hand on Mulder's shoulder and looked up.
The color outside the window was gone now and Mulder's face showed
not in pastels but in tones of gray, lighter on cheek and nose,
darker beside his eyes and where a good four days worth of stubble
covered chin and jaw line. Krycek pulled himself to his feet,
gathered the body as best he could and began to drag it toward the
couch. It wasn't any more cooperative than a sack of sand, but
eventually he managed to pull it up onto the couch and leave it in
some semblance of straightness.  Retreating to the leather chair on
the opposite side of the room, he let his head fall back against the
smooth surface. Outside, street lights winked on, laying striped
shadows across Mulder's body through the window blinds. It had always
been like this: a matter of watching without ever making contact,
like shadowing a target on the street. Or watching a surveillance
tape, the recognition all one-way.

Damn the old son of a bitch.

From out in the street came the sudden squealing of tires. Footsteps
approached in the hallway outside, then paused while a nearby door
was unlocked. Inside the darkening apartment, time stood still.

Food smells wafted in the half-open window, other people's dinner
preparations, the pulse of daily life pumping blindly on as if
nothing out of the ordinary had happened. 

Krycek watched the form on the couch in the growing gloom.

 

 

A few steps from the shelter's door, Scully paused to read the
building's sign. The finish on the door had cracked into thin,
vertical strips, though the announcement in the middle was freshly
painted. Half an hour until it opened. What did these women do with
their time, to while away the hours between morning and night, every
day just another long attempt at survival between the bed they'd left
in the morning and one they hoped would be there when the day was
done?

Scully turned from the door and made a place for herself on the
still-warm sidewalk within earshot of a cluster of women, hoping to
hear something that would direct her to Glenna Marquez. The women
eyed her from time to time. They sat close together in their
mismatched or semi-matched clothes, some clutching plastic grocery
bags filled with belongings, or loot scrounged from dumpsters. One
woman had found an unopened box of crackers and was sharing her
bounty with friends.

A woman in her early twenties approached from down the street with a
small, blonde child in tow, the little girl's hair long and uncombed.
The woman settled strategically onto the curb so the creeping shadows
wouldn't reach her for a few minutes. The girl, perhaps four years
old, took some small plastic trinkets from her pocket and set them on
the sidewalk. Then she gathered them up again, walked boldly over to
Scully and sat down.

"This is Pocahontas," the little girl said without looking up. "And
this is Sparky." She set a red plastic figure on Scully's knee. "Rick
gave him to me."

"That was nice of him," Scully said, smiling.

The girl's mother turned around and eyed them. She seemed wary,
though she made no move to call the girl back to her. Her face was
worn, the whites of her eyes pinkish and glazy. Scully winced to
herself.

"I found this. It's a giraffe. And this... is a fox." The girl put
dirty yellow and blue plastic figurines in Scully's hand.

"I have a friend named Fox," Scully said.

"A boy?" The girl looked up, quizzical. Her eyes were a deep ocean
blue.

"Yes." Scully hesitated, then smiled. "A boy. A man, actually."

"I'm Cassandra," the girl announced. Her mother turned around and
glared at her.

"Cassandra?" Scully's breath caught momentarily. "That's a big name.
An unusual name."

"It's my story name."

"What does that mean, your story name?"

"It's the story name Auntie Glenna gave me. She makes up stories for
me, and I'm in the stories. I'm Cassandra."

"Are you a princess?"

"Sometimes."

"Do you have a castle?"

"A big one. Really, really big." She waved her arms. "I bring my
horses inside sometimes and they have to let them stay because I'm
the princess."

"And where does Auntie Glenna tell you these stories? Does she come
here?"

"Uh-huh. At night. Only she's not here now."

"Will she come tonight?'

"Uh-huh," Cassandra said. She took the toys from Scully's hand and
arranged them on the sidewalk.

 

 

There was a little light left; the sun had just set, throwing shards
of deep, golden yellow against the tired walls behind her cot. Scully
stared through the dusty barred window of the shelter. She'd need to
stay here tonight in order not to arouse the suspicions of the women
around her. Her eyes wandered to Cassandra, playing with her plastic
figures on her cot, oblivious to her complete lack of privacy and to
the activity going on around her. Hopefully the little girl would
lead her to Glenna Marquez when she arrived.

She hadn't considered, when Skinner initially gave her the
information, just how much he was risking himself by passing on this
tip, or conversely, the degree to which he'd placed the safety of his
own position in her hands. Jeffrey Spender would be receiving the
information on Monday morning and undoubtedly he'd be checking out
the shelters soon afterward. Any identifiable mention of her by
anyone here would immediately expose Skinner's leak of the
information. So many times in the past she'd questioned Skinner's
loyalties but he was solid, steady, a covert operative behind company
lines. Unlike Kersh, he genuinely cared about their work, and about
justice.

Scully glanced around the room. The shelter cots were close
together--claustrophobically close, it seemed. The one to her left
had several plastic bags piled on it; on the right lay a gray-haired
woman who'd come in and fallen asleep almost immediately. Scully sat
on the edge of her cot and ran her fingers over the blanket she'd
been given. It seemed thin and worn, as if it had a history of sad,
tired people attached to it and she had to share it with all of them,
never to be allowed complete privacy, or peace.

She should call Mulder to let him know where she was, to see whether
sleep had restored him at all. Her car, and the privacy of her cell
phone, were only a couple of blocks away and there was still a little
light. It would be easy enough to slip away and return unnoticed.

 

 

The ringing of the phone made Krycek start. He opened his eyes and
leaned forward to chase his drowsiness. The form on the couch was
motionless. Krycek got up and approached the phone. Mulder's voice
was telling the caller to leave a message.

"Mulder, it's me..." came a voice over the speaker.

Krycek tightened.

"Mulder, it's 7:13 p.m. and I just wanted to touch base. I'm--"

Reluctantly he reached for the receiver. "Scully?"

"... Mulder?"

Krycek bit his lip.

"Who is this?"

He let out a slow breath. "This is Alex Krycek."

"What?" A pause. "Where's Mulder, Krycek?" Instantly, her voice was
sharp, a weapon.

"He's here." He paused. "He's not in any shape to talk on the phone."
He drew in a breath. "Look, Scully, I think you'd better come over
here."

"What are you talking about, Krycek? What have you done to him?"

"Well, for starters I kept him from blowing his brains all over the
walls. Don't thank me now. Just come."

He hung up the phone. Right now she was his only light, only hope.
The only thing Mulder had.

 

 

It had only been a story before, a lie floated to coax truth to the
surface, and yet she'd had to make it real to herself to be
convincing, had had to face the possibility in her mind: to picture
the blood, and his body, cold and vacant like the cadavers she
examined, and the wound, along with the gaping hollow of his absence.
It had become real enough to make her nearly break down in front of
the review panel as she'd said the words, though they'd been a lie:
"Agent Mulder died early this morning from an apparent self-inflicted
gunshot wound to the head." But that moment of calculated anguish had
been nothing compared to this.

Krycek could be lying. It could be some kind of a setup, an ambush.
It was the kind of thing Krycek would do, the kind of thing she'd
choose to believe about him, for that matter, though in this instance
the idea rang strangely hollow.

Headlights rushed toward Scully's car and poured past in the dark
like strands of lighted pearls. Their glare made her squint while her
racing pulse thumped a steady backbeat.

Scully counted the exits, waiting for Mulder's.

 

 

"What happened here, Krycek?"  Scully frowned, looking up and pinning
him with her gaze. She had one hand on Mulder's forehead. She'd
practically pushed him aside at the front door and had gone straight
for Mulder like iron filings to a magnet.

"Not much to tell." Krycek shrugged. "He'd been drinking when I got
here. He was plastered, in fact. When he saw me, he pointed his Sig
at me. Then he turned it on himself."

He reached for the paper on the desk, handed it to her and watched
her read the words. Gradually her eyes widened and the corners of her
mouth shifted in an attempt to maintain stability. After a moment,
she looked up at him.

"What were you doing here, Krycek?"

"I came to warn him about something, something that concerns the both
of you and about five billion other people."

"You burned down his family's house, you bastard."

"Just keeping up appearances. You have no idea, Scully." He shook his
head.

"Make me understand."

He shook his head. "But I can tell you this: leave Cassandra Spender
alone."

"We don't know where she is. We know nothing about her."

"Don't go looking. Cassandra's the key to everything, the cutting
edge. If she's exposed--" He swallowed. "It could all go to hell."

"All what?"

"Our defense. Against those... those creatures you almost became a
nutrient medium for. In the pods. In Antarctica." He shrugged. "And
then it's all over. Goodbye, planet."

"The vaccine...?"

"It's the only hope we've got."

"But what does Cassandra have to do with the vaccine?"

"Somebody claims to have seen her; you may get that information
through the Bureau. Don't touch it. They'll find whoever it is and
eliminate them. If they find so much as your scent in this, they'll
kill you, too, without a second thought."

"Why are you telling me this, Krycek?"

He opened his mouth but no words came out. He shook his head.

Scully swallowed. "It's a lie."

"I have never"--he came a step closer, well into her personal space,
and took her by the shoulder--"been so serious about anything."

Quickly she shook herself away from him. He let her go and retreated
a few steps. Scully glanced at Mulder, her focus shifting from one
worry to another.

"How long has he been like this?"

"Two, three hours."

"What was he drinking?"

Krycek pointed to a near-empty bottle on the desk.

"Anything else, any pills?"

Krycek shook his head. "Nothing I could find. I looked."

Scully sighed.

"I hit him, caught him on the temple, but I figured it was better
than the alternative, you know? Gun's in the lower desk drawer," he
added, nodding toward it.

"Why did you do this, Krycek?" She drilled him with ice-blue eyes.
"Who are you?"

"Scully, you aren't ready for who I am." He turned to go and reached
for his jacket on the leather chair. He was at the doorway when he
turned around again. "Take care of him," he said. "Oh, and Scully--"

She turned from Mulder to look at him.

"You can't structure your life on blood ties. Family's what you make
it. Tell him that."

She paused, nodded slightly, then turned back to Mulder.

Krycek went to the darkened door and let himself out.

 

 

The door closed and silence engulfed the apartment. Scully passed a
hand over Mulder's forehead and back through his hair. He was warm,
maybe too warm, and gave off the cloying sweetness of alcohol.

Rising from her seat on the coffee table, she went to the desk.
Mulder's note lay face-up; she pulled the chair out, sat and read it
again. If the Smoking Man had deliberately targeted Mulder with this
knowledge, or with the mere suggestion that his claims were true,
then he'd succeeded all too well. His insinuations had cut straight
to Mulder's soul. She smiled bitterly at the reference to her own
strength. Strength was often the last thing she felt, the weakness
she always tried to keep hidden away--that and the fear that someone
besides herself would discover it. Mulder had a kind of enduring
optimism; he saw things in her that she did not,  though sometimes he
was able to make her see them, too. Sometimes his sheer faith in her
made her rise to what he believed her to be.

Opening the drawer Krycek had indicated, she took Mulder's gun,
checked the safety, then placed it in her bag. The figure on the
couch remained unmoving. What would he be like when he woke from
this? Would he be sobered, renewed in some small way? Or would he
wish he'd finished the job?

She returned to the coffee table, sat down on it and leaned forward
to rest a hand on her partner's shoulder. Once, after they'd spent
time chasing down the victims of John Lee Roche--after Mulder had
killed Roche, and with him the hope of finding the identity of his
final victim, possibly Samantha--she'd told Mulder that she knew him.
She knew his strength and his boundless passion and his
relentlessness in pursuit of the truth. She hadn't believed there was
anything that could stop him, in much the same way that as a child
she hadn't believed anything could stop the movement of a snake,
until she'd shot one and its blood had stained her hands.

Mulder groaned and turned and went silent again. Scully got up,
pulled the coffee table away from the couch and set the desk chair in
its place. She sat down beside him, where she could feel the warmth
coming from his body, and closed her eyes.

 

 

If what Krycek had said was true, Glenna Marquez' life was in danger.
A defenseless homeless woman, most likely with all her earthly wealth
packed into plastic grocery bags or a shopping cart, she could be
killed for the mere decision to weave a name from a missing persons
poster into a hopeful tale, the way she had for the little blonde
girl. Little Cassandra, whatever her real name and the tragic
circumstances of her life, could be in danger, too, from someone
willing to shoot whoever was convenient in an attempt to eliminate an
enemy mark, the way Luis Cardenal had shot her sister walking through
her own front door.

But how likely was it that Krycek's story could be trusted?

He'd been with Cardenal; Cardenal had admitted as much. It could have
been Krycek who pulled the trigger, though she didn't think so from
the look on Cardenal's face when she caught him, the horror of a man
who had suddenly been yanked up before God for judgment. Krycek had
shot Mulder's father. He'd infiltrated the FBI and played partner to
Mulder in order to... perhaps in order to facilitate her abduction
itself; he'd been with Mulder on Skyland Mountain and hadn't
responded to Mulder's calls from the tram. And then the tram operator
had mysteriously disappeared. Along with Krycek. 

He'd burned down the Quonocontaug house.

Yet he'd warned Mulder to get out; he'd let him escape. Why? Then
he'd come here, and he'd stopped Mulder from--

He must have an agenda; Krycek always had an agenda. But he'd saved
Mulder.  The suicide note alone, weary and soul-heavy, spoke to that.
And it was Mulder's hand.  It was clearly Mulder's anguish.

Scully glanced at the couch. Mulder was curled up facing away from
her. She pressed her fingers against the side of his neck and felt
his pulse, her fingertips warming against the skin there. She knew
his pain--she always felt his pain--and yet it wore her down. She
didn't have the strength to carry them both.



(end 5/6)


FOOTNOTE:
'Paradise Lost' is the first book of the Sanctuary trilogy, followed
by 'Walking Through Fire' and 'Sanctuary'. The complete trilogy,
including download files, is available at
http://www.bardsmaid.org/XF/S-index.htm.

(6/6)
--------------------------

"Ahh--"

The couch creaked.

Scully stirred on her chair and opened her eyes. Mulder's shadow was
restless in the dark.

"Oh, God--"

"Mulder, it's me. I'm here."  She reached out, searching, and caught
his hand. He rolled toward her. 

"Scully? Oh, God, I feel like... like shit, Scully."

"I'm right here."

"Krycek--"

"He's gone, Mulder."

"He was here. He--"

"I know. He told me.  I called to check in with you and he told me to
come."

"Scully, I--" Wet eyes blinked at her from the shadows. "Oh." He sat
up abruptly. "Gotta go--"

Quickly she moved her chair out of the way and watched him move
unsteadily toward the bathroom. The retching sounds that came through
the wall made her wince.  In the kitchen she poured him a glass of
water and dampened a paper towel and brought them back to the coffee
table.

A minute later Mulder reappeared. He made his way across the room and
dropped onto the couch, easing his head back against the cushions.

"Mulder, do you want some water?"

He sighed. "Yeah, thanks."  He sounded sheepish, or maybe just sick.

She handed him the glass and made sure it was steady. He sipped
several times, then leaned forward and set the glass down.

She laid a hand against his forehead. "Mulder, you're covered in
sweat. Lie down." She paused, waiting. "Come on, lie down."

He did as he was told. She wiped his forehead with the paper towel,
then smoothed it past his temples and down to his neck. He shivered.

"I'm going to find you a blanket."

"Don't go, Scully."

"I'm not going anywhere, Mulder. I'll be right back."

"She lied to me, Scully," his voice came from behind her.

"Who? Who lied to you?"

"My mother. When I was at her house. Just before I came back to D.C."

Scully returned to the couch and spread the blanket over him. He
rolled onto his side facing her and pushed himself against the back
of the couch, making room for her to sit in the small space in front
of him.

"What happened, Mulder?"

"She said she never knew what my father's work was, that she was just
playing wife and mother. But she knew about that weapon, the one in
the lamp at Quonocontaug. She told me about it in the hospital. You
were there. It was what Smoky was looking for, Scully."

"I know--"

"She had another child."

"Who?"

"My mother. She was pregnant when Samantha was two years old. I found
a picture when I was at her house."

"And what happened?"

"I think it was his, Scully. What if it was his?"

"Cancer Man's?"

"What if we were all his?"

"Mulder--" She stopped. His voice had gone gritty and his hand was
against her leg. She covered it with her own and squeezed gently.
"Mulder, you're still who you are, no matter what. You're unique;
you're who you've made yourself. Even Samantha... even if he were her
father, she'd still be the same little girl you knew. She wouldn't be
anybody different just because her DNA wasn't what you expected it to
be."

His fingers worked their way between hers.  She stared into the
solemn shadows. 

"Mulder, Krycek said something, when he left here."

Mulder groaned quietly.

"He said family is what you make it." She paused. From somewhere in
the background she could hear the muffled ticking of a clock. "I
don't know when he started to think of himself as a philosopher,
but... I think he's right. About this, anyway."

Mulder curled around her, a band of sudden warmth around her back. A
palpable quiet took over the room. Gradually Mulder's breathing
eased, slowing into an even rhythm.

"What happened to the baby?" she said softly.

"Stillborn," he said after a pause.

"But what happened?"

"Don't know." Another pause; he sounded distant. "She said she didn't
know."

"But, Mulder--" 

She stopped. He sighed twice. Gradually his hand grew slack in hers.

"Get some sleep, Mulder," she whispered.

She smoothed a hand back through his hair and eased herself off the
couch. A star sparkled between two blinds, beckoning. Scully went to
the window, tilted the blinds and looked up. She thought of little
blonde Cassandra, asleep on a cot surrounded by a sea of other cots
in the homeless shelter with the barred windows.

She thought of Emily.

 

 

"It's late, Alex.  Where have you been?"

The voice came from somewhere inside the darkened room.  His room. 
Welcome home, Aleksei.  Your place is my place.

Krycek frowned, closed the door behind him and slipped the key into
his jeans pocket. He tried to make his movements smooth, fluid. "I
had things to take care of."

"So I see."

Silence was followed by the sound of a match and a small, reddish
spot glowed, barely lighting the area where the chair should be.

"They haven't found the woman yet, Alex."

"There are half a dozen shelters. She could be in any one of them."

"I want you to take care of it. Today." The old man exhaled, and the
red spot grew brighter for a second. "When it's light. It's Sunday
now. I want her taken care of before my son Jeffrey sees the memo
tomorrow and comes looking."

"Consider it done."

"I'm glad I can count on you, Alex," the old man said in his most
pleasant voice, taking another drag on the cigarette.

Krycek's hand tightened to a fist. He was glad for the darkness that
hid his face.

 

 

Moving from his position in the doorway, Mulder made his way slowly
to the bed and eased himself onto the edge of the mattress.

"Hey," he said softly.

Scully didn't stir. She lay on her side facing him, covered by the
bedspread.

He hadn't seen her when he woke--hadn't seen or thought anything.
He'd lain there immobile, gradually realizing that his eyes were
open. Then he'd moved and been wrenched by the sudden pounding in his
head and by the nausea.

He'd made it to the bathroom in time, had made it back to the couch
and found the glass of water there, the one she'd gotten for him last
night, and drank what was left in it. Then he'd looked, knowing she
wouldn't leave him alone here--not now--not to his own devices--and
had noticed the bedroom door standing partially open.

Reaching out, he brushed a few stray hairs from her forehead. Scully
stirred and opened one eye halfway.

"Hey."

Her eyes went wide with recognition and she rolled back to look at
him. "How are you feeling?" she managed, pushing up on one elbow.

"Like shit." He looked away. "Like a fool. Embarrassed. All of the
above."

"Mulder..."

Sun poured through a hole in the window shade, a pinprick shaft
spreading as it reached the floor, with dust particles doing a slow
dance inside it.

"I thought I could deal with it, Scully."

He watched the dust particles spiral and gradually, slowly drift
downward. He bit his bottom lip.

"Mulder, someone once told me that other people can see strengths in
us that we don't see ourselves--that they're actually there, but we
just haven't recognized them yet. You've... been a strength when I
didn't have any strength. You've held me up when I'd given up on
myself."

He squeezed his eyes shut and breathed slowly. "Thank you. For saving
me."

"No, I think it was Krycek who saved you, Mulder." She sighed.

"What did he say to you?"

"That he'd come here to tell you something. Someone claims to have
seen Cassandra Spender. He said not to look for her, that she's the
key to everything, to defending us from... them. That they'll kill
whoever's seen her and anyone they find looking for her."

Obviously she wasn't finished. He waited.

"She's a homeless woman, Mulder. A woman who makes up stories for
little kids at a shelter."

He glanced up. The movement made his head swim and he winced.

"Skinner gave me the information yesterday.  He intercepted it on its
way to Spender. This woman was responding to a missing persons
poster. It could have been anything, Mulder. She makes up stories.
She tells stories to kids there."

Scully pulled up and sat cross-legged on the bed.

Mulder raised one eyebrow. "Nice threads."

"You should see me with a watch cap." There was a brief,
self-conscious smile, like sun between dark clouds, and then she went
serious again. "I was very surprised that Skinner passed me the tip.
If anyone were to find out--"

"He'd be out of the Bureau on his ass."

"Yes." She swallowed.

Mulder shifted uncomfortably on the bed. Something was
coming--something he wasn't going to like. He could see it in the set
of her mouth.

"Mulder, I have to find that woman. They'll kill her; Krycek admitted
as much. Whatever role she has in this, whether she's actually seen
Cassandra or whether she just took the name off a poster and wove it
into a story... whatever it is, she's innocent. She doesn't deserve
to die for stumbling into this."

Mulder glanced up too quickly. Pain shot through his head.

"Scully--"  He paused and squeezed his eyes shut, then opened them
slowly and looked at her again.  He kept his voice low, quiet. 
"Scully, I don't know whose game Krycek is playing--"

"He's playing his own game, Mulder."

"Whatever it is, I... I don't know where he's going with this, but it
seems to me he wouldn't do all this, come over here--" He paused and
looked up at the ceiling, waiting for his eyes to clear, for the
pressure in his throat to subside. "... do what he did, just to set
us up for something, to scare you off of something you should be
following. For whatever reason, we must hold some value for him.
And... and if he's trying to keep you alive, then I think... maybe
you should take what he said seriously."

He glanced at her. The blue in her eyes was hard and bright.

"Who is keeping this woman safe, Mulder--this poor woman with no home
and no life?"

He could only shrug. "Look at the background, Scully. You know these
people. They killed my father; they would have killed you. They
eliminate anyone who gets in their way. They took your sister. They
took Deep Throat and our British informant, the one who gave me the
vaccine that saved you--"

"Then what am I supposed to do? Just sit here and give up? Let her
die? What if... what if you'd given up all those times, Mulder?" Her
eyes bored into him, though her voice was soft.

"Scully, I... I just think you're thinking with your heart here and
not your head."

"Mulder, what do you think brought me here last night?"

The room rang in silence.  Scully crawled off the bed.

Mulder sat unmoving, staring at the carpet.

 

 

Mulder eased himself onto the couch and leaned back. Another wave of
sickness rolled through him. He leaned forward carefully and rested
his head in his hands. If he could only will away the pain and the
nausea--if it were possible--he'd be out there following her, doing
something to keep her from throwing her life away by darting out in
front of the Consortium's hit men with a red flag tied to her. As it
was, he'd be lucky to make it to the elevator.

She was out chasing justice, justice in finely polished gold capital
letters, when justice was an unattainable ideal, just as a perfect
family was. Just as a truth you could actually find--Truth with a
capital 'T'--was. Darlene Morris had said it and he'd been too
blinded by the green passion of his search to see the reality in her
words: that the truth had never brought her anything but heartache.

And Scully was thinking with her heart. 

Hell, if she'd been thinking with her head, she would have given up
on him long ago.

Carefully Mulder stood, bracing himself against the pain behind his
eyes, and started toward the closet. They'd be out there, waiting to
pick her off just like the homeless woman she was trying to protect,
and she'd end up as just another darkening blood stain in an alley
somewhere, or on a dirty sidewalk, a stain poor vagrants would walk
past, or over, and the fading spot would have no meaning for
them--that she'd died there, spent her last few minutes or seconds
there. That she'd given her life for someone no one would ever
remember, a homeless storyteller Scully refused throw away because
she was a fellow human being.

He opened the closet door and reached for his jacket. The car keys
were still in his pocket; he could feel them in a knot against his
leg. His weapon... was gone, probably; there was no way she would
have left it with him, given what had happened. Mulder turned and
walked to the desk. He opened the top right drawer and pushed the
papers around. Nothing.  Cautiously he straightened and turned,
careful to do it slowly, not to aggravate the pounding in his head.

When he looked up, Alex Krycek was standing in the doorway.

"Don't you ever knock?"

"I thought maybe you were asleep." Krycek looked around. "Where's
Scully?"

"She went home."

"Not likely."

"She went home."

"It's over, Mulder. The woman's gone."

Mulder felt for the chair back and gripped it without thinking. "You
did it yourself, didn't you, you bastard?"

Krycek's mouth went tight. His chin pushed slightly forward. "You
think I enjoy it, Mulder--that I get off on taking out old ladies?"
He glanced down, took a deep breath and let it out slowly. When he
looked up, the sudden flush of anger was hidden. "This is no
dress-rehearsal, Mulder; we're coming down to the wire. I can't
protect Scully if she makes herself a target."

Mulder let go of the chair and moved toward the couch. "Yeah, save
your own ass, Krycek."

"Grow up, Mulder. It's bigger than that. It's bigger than any of us.
And until you step outside yourself, you won't be able to see to do a
damn thing about it."

Mulder lowered himself onto the couch. "And there's something to be
done?"

"Maybe I'm just like you, Mulder." He glanced out the window and back
again. "Maybe I'm just a fool for trying."

Mulder stared at him.

Krycek turned to go.

"Don't hurt her, Krycek."

Krycek said nothing. He went to the door and let himself out.

 

 

The light on the elevator control panel slipped from '3' to '2' to
'1' and finally to 'B'. There was a momentary hovering sensation and
the door slid open. A faint smell of cigarette smoke wafted inside.

Walter Skinner's mouth twitched. He stepped into the hallway and
walked toward the source of the smell; it was obvious already where
it was coming from. He slowed his pace as he approached the basement
office. Pausing momentarily, he set his jaw and stepped through the
doorway.

"Assistant Director Skinner."

Skinner nodded at the Smoking Man, who stood behind the desk.

"Surprising to find you here at this hour on a Sunday."

"Crime doesn't take a day off," Skinner said, and shrugged.

The Smoking Man took a drag on his cigarette, exhaled and let the
smoke slowly drift and rise. "No, I don't suppose it does, does it?"
He smiled at Skinner, a hard, contained smile. "Tell me, Assistant
Director Skinner, is Agent Spender working out in this assignment?"

Skinner hesitated. "Yes, I guess so."

"Good. And is he making any progress on these... X-files?" Another
cloud of smoke billowed toward the ceiling.

"He owes me a report tomorrow."

The Smoking Man reached out and picked up a paper from the desktop,
the same one Skinner had placed there not half an hour earlier. He
creased the paper deliberately, folding it in half and then in
quarters. Then he slipped it into his pocket.

"The information on this report is out of date," he said coolly.
"This... informant... was discovered dead this morning in a vacant
lot near the Potomac Yards." He paused and raised an eyebrow. "It's
unfortunate."

Skinner said nothing, showed nothing.

"In any event, we wouldn't want to unduly upset our young agent.
False hope can kill a man in the end, when it's found out." He
brought the Morley back to his lips.

Skinner excused himself and walked unseeing through the hallway to
the elevator. He pushed the button and waited. In his mind he was
surrounded by jungle. He lay there tense, waiting, straining with
every inner fiber to filter the sound of a silent enemy from the
noises of life erupting all around him.

A chime sounded and the elevator door slid open. Skinner stepped
inside and waited. When it closed again, he stepped back and sagged
against the wall.

 

 

"Scully?"

He hadn't heard her come in, but she stood in the doorway now looking
pale and distant, as if she were in shock. Not the way she'd looked
in the hospital after Penny Northern died, worn but overflowing with
emotion. She seemed hollow now.

"Scully, I'm sorry. About the woman."

She looked at him, questioning, pain suddenly flooding her
expression.

"There was nothing you could have done to save her--"

Scully swallowed. She came closer, though he knew closeness was not
what she wanted. She wanted to run, to get away--to escape to where
no one could see her anguish--but she continued to approach until she
was standing in front of him. The corners of her mouth quivered
almost imperceptibly.

There was no blood on her, or on her clothes--nothing to indicate
what had happened. Her voice, when it came, was barely audible.

"Mulder, I... I didn't go."

The corners of her mouth twisted suddenly. She swallowed quickly and
took a ragged breath, then struggled to hold it and looked away,
toward the front window. The bubbler in the fish tank worked away,
its usually calming sound suddenly harsh. When she looked back, her
eyes were shiny.

"I couldn't throw away Skinner's career. I couldn't... exchange it...
for that woman's--" Her fingers flexed and then grasped for something
invisible.

Mulder reached up. She offered no resistance but curled down against
him, facing away, and pressed her head against his shoulder. His arms
went around her. There was no sound; she only shook.

Mulder eased his head against the back of the couch and closed his
eyes against the wash of pain. He felt her grip on his arm, her
breath warm and ragged in a circle against his bicep. He smoothed her
hair back from her face and then did it again. The clock ticked
softly, steadily into the silence.

"Krycek was here," he said quietly when her shaking had stopped, when
there was only a warm patch of contact between them. "I think he
killed her himself."

Scully said nothing. Her breathing rose and fell against him in
rhythm with his own. He sighed and rested his cheek against her head.

The phone rang and the message machine came on.

"Mulder, this is Assistant Director Skinner. I'm looking for Agent
Scully. It's extremely--"

Mulder stretched to reach his cell phone on the end table. Scully
made no move to pull away but eased with him, as if she were his
sweater.

He wrapped his fingers around the phone and pressed the 'on' button.
"I'm here."

"Mulder, I haven't been able to reach Agent Scully. Do you--"

He breathed in slowly. "She's here, sir."

He could feel her head shaking 'no' against him.

"She, uh... can't come to the phone at the moment. I think she went
down to get something out of her car."

"Please tell her not to follow up on the lead she has. It's extremely
important."

"I know, sir. I was paid a visit a little while ago by our friendly
local assassin."

"What?"

"Krycek. I think Krycek did it."

"Do you know what's going on here, Mulder?"

"Not yet, sir. But I'm working on it."

Skinner said goodbye. Mulder pressed the 'off' button and set the
phone down beside him. Quiet filled the room.

"Thank you," Scully's voice came from near his shoulder. She sighed
and stirred and then stopped abruptly, settling back against him.
Mulder closed his eyes and let his cheek rest against her head again.
Sunlight had reached into the room and was nearly touching the couch
beside them.

"It was almost as if I heard my own father's voice, Mulder, telling
me that no matter how much that woman meant, no matter how much I
wanted to save her... that I had to make the choice that was for the
greater good."

She moved now, sat up and turned and put her feet on the floor. She
leaned forward and rested her elbows on her knees.

"I thought about Emily, Mulder. It would have been the same with this
woman. They wouldn't have left her alone. They would have found her
in another alley, or a shelter, or a hospital room when I wasn't
there--" Her voice went dry.

Mulder leaned forward. "It's what we never want to recognize,
Scully... that we can't save them all. It's that hope--the hope that
maybe we can--that keeps us doing what we do."

He rested his hand on her shoulder. She turned and smiled briefly,
then looked ahead again.

"It doesn't make it any easier, Mulder."

"I know."

 

 

Krycek sat with his back against a tree trunk, looking out across the
manicured green expanse of the Mall. His fingers played in the grass
beside him, pinching out the occasional tuft of grass, roots and all.
In the distance, tourists like ants formed a steady trail between the
Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial.
She'd been nobody, a woman with nothing: no possessions, no house, no
real life. He'd had a clean shot; she'd gone right down, just dropped
and died. She wouldn't have had a clue what had hit her.

The woman had had gray hair at the temples that spread to frame her
face. His mother might have gray hair. Not that he'd know. Maybe it
was something to check on; he could probably have Che pull a picture
from the Connecticut motor vehicle database. Otherwise, if the old
man ended up deciding she'd betrayed him somehow, he might have him
take her out and neither she nor he would ever be the wiser. She'd
never know she'd been killed by her own son and he'd have no idea who
she was. Hell, it would suit the old man's sense of irony to a T. 
He'd had him kill Bill Mulder, hadn't he?

Krycek let his head fall back against the rough bark behind him and
closed his eyes. In his mind he saw a rural Russian roadside in early
morning. A girl lay face-down beside a dirt path, her skirt flapping
in a chill breeze. The color of her hand showed that she was already
dead, but he was powerless to keep his younger self from creeping
closer. If only he could see her face--if he dared to go that
close--Lena might open her eyes and live.

The corner of his mouth pulled. He forced himself to look up into the
green canopy overhead and count the leaves there.

 

 

Mulder eased himself onto his back and opened his eyes. The apartment
lay in deep shadow. A streetlight painted stripes of dull light
across him and down onto the floor through the blinds. The nausea was
gone, and most of the headache. He felt chastened, like a torture
victim suddenly set free, weak and fragile but grateful for the
blissful absence of torment.

After a few moments he sat up. It was Saturday--no, Sunday. Late
Sunday at that. Scully'd be starting at the Academy in the morning.
And he'd be... He'd have to make a plan. He'd figure it out.

It was time to get up, to shave for the first time in far too many
days. Time to start clean.

Mulder went into the bathroom and ran himself a shower. She'd thanked
him, when he'd called to make sure she was okay. For being there to
catch her, she said. He smiled to himself and shook his head. Dana
Scully had thanked him. He stripped down and tossed his clothes into
the corner.

Steam filled the room. He opened the shower door and stepped into the
warm-hot spray. Water streamed across his face, into his mouth, down
his throat. He crossed his arms up against the wall and rested his
head against them. For a long time he stood there, letting the
needles of water bombard muscles and skin and hair and then stream
away.

What was that thing she'd done when she'd gotten up off the couch,
giving him a quick hug and a kind of... ? It had happened too fast,
one of those things that pass you by before you have a chance to
notice. She'd looked a little self-conscious afterward, her cheeks a
little pinker than usual.

But she'd done it. She'd even confided in him a little. For Scully,
that was saying a lot.

He smiled involuntarily and let himself lean in against the wall.

 

 

Spidery cracks punctuated the beige ceiling, radiating at random from
the old paint. Krycek lay staring at them, watching the rising sun
color the room in pinks and then yellows and finally in strong light.

The old man was slipping.

He'd seemed pleased when he called--maybe even smug--that Skinner
hadn't taken the bait, hadn't tried to pass the Cassandra Spender
information along to Scully, or Mulder. He'd made no reply; the old
man could be probing him, testing. But Skinner's actions had been a
useful warning nonetheless. Skinner was a free agent, unpredictable.
His loyalties needed to be assured. There was always weeding to be
done, but enough weeds needed to be kept long enough, spread broadly
enough, to keep the soil from washing away.

Until the time was right.

 

 

Scully took another spoonful of yogurt from the cup on her desk and
set it back down. Her fingers curled around the computer mouse. She
clicked it and scrolled down the page on the screen in front of her,
searching. Not far enough back. If she wanted Chilmark birth records
from before 1980, she'd have to go there, or submit an official
request. Even then, there was no guarantee the information would be
on record. Most likely it wouldn't be, if her suspicions were
correct. A death certificate would have been filed to complete the
ruse, but she'd check it nonetheless.

The strands of hair she'd meticulously scoured the leather chair for
had already been sent down to the forensics lab, along with another
that she knew was Mulder's, for comparison. She could exchange favors
with someone in the lab and have the results in a few days instead of
a week, but that would only rush the inevitable dilemma of what to do
if the awful truth she now suspected proved to be true.

Once, after she'd found Emily and was attempting to gain custody,
Mulder had revealed to the court, under the pressure of
circumstances, that she was sterile, that the option to have children
had been completely and irrevocably taken from her, information he'd
known for some time, since Penny Northern, but had kept from her. Or
sheltered her from. I thought I was protecting you, he'd said with
the most solemn sincerity, though at the time she hadn't understood.

Now she did.

What would she do, if her search confirmed what she now suspected
about Teena Mulder's supposedly stillborn child? Would she tell him?
Was he strong enough to deal with it?

Or would she protect him with her silence?



(End Paradise Lost. The story continues in Walking Through Fire.)


FOOTNOTE:
'Paradise Lost' is the first book of the Sanctuary trilogy, followed
by 'Walking Through Fire' and 'Sanctuary'. The complete trilogy,
including download files, is available at
http://www.bardsmaid.org/XF/S-index.htm.

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