TITLE: Paradise Lost 
AUTHOR: LoneThinker (aka bardsmaid)
E-MAIL: bardsmaid@imagesmithstudio.com
DISTRIBUTION: Yes, but please let me know where.
SPOILER WARNING: through *Drive, Season 6
RATING: varies, depending.  Nothing violent, lurid or offensive at this point.
CLASSIFICATION: S, A, MSR
KEYWORDS: M, S, Sk, K
DISCLAIMER: I don't claim to have created these characters, and we all know who they belong to.  I'm just acting as a rescue service here, attempting to save our heroes from the dreaded slough of character non-development.  Everyone learns, grows, and is affected by their experiences, especially the more traumatic incidents.  Being barred from the X-files at the outset of Season 6 had to have been an extremely critical marker in Mulder's life, and yet we see no consequences on-screen.  I just had to explore what this turn of events would have done to him.  An alternative to the show's subsequent trip down the Yellow Brick Road to Fantasyland.
SUMMARY: Mulder is dismissed from the Bureau on trumped-up charges of having had contact with the X-files.  Stripped of his driving motivation as well as his job, he's forced to look critically at his life.  Scully, reassigned to a teaching position at Quantico, must balance her new responsibilities with her concern about her former partner's well-being.  And Alex Krycek insinuates himself into Mulder's life for reasons that are not immediately apparent.  

*Paradise Lost is only the tip of the iceberg, the first--and smallest--part of a very long saga which has been written in its entirety and which is now undergoing some revision.  More to come--lots of files.  Lots and lots of files.  You can find all of them at:

http://www.sandarsdimension.com/excavations/XFfic/fanfic.htm
........................................

Paradise Lost-Part One 	

	Fox Mulder strode into the review room and took his seat.  Skinner, he noticed, was conspicuously absent from the row of emotionless faces that greeted him.  Kersh sat at the center of the panel.  So he was chairing this.  Why?  
	Mulder squirmed in his chair, glanced at his watch and frowned.  
	10:40.  
	Did she even know about this?  He hadn’t seen Scully 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 now '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 dropped again.  It wasn't her, after all; it was Kersh's secretary, the chemical blonde with the fake smile, the one that said if I find anything on you--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 weeks 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 make this easy for you."  
	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, and to 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 here, the whole row of them staring blank-faced, like mannequins.  
	"On... On what do you base this, sir?"  Heat rose in his 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, Mr. Mulder.  The conditions were ‘any contact’.  Now, there will be..."
	"Phone records?" 
	"Mr. 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." 
	Kersh's lips continued to move, but Mulder heard only the buzzing inside his own head.  Across the room, bureaucratic puppet faces--generic 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 figuredt Scully was still salvageable.
	He stood suddenly.  Kersh's droning continued.
	Mulder cleared his throat.  "Excuse me, are we through here?"
	Kersh 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 paused.
	"*Thank* you, sir."
	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 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 paired with him.  Even his dad 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, anyway, the growing restrictions and the quality of the assignments.  First the basement office was gone, and with it his autonomy.  Their autonomy--this affected her, 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--it had been 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 existence, 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 up 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/project taken 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 you coffeecake as their husbands pawed through stacks of receipts for feed and fertilizer and oil and hardware, only to find 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. 
	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 him at the end of their leash and then pulled him back in again?
	"Agent Mulder--"
	Mulder looked up.  Ahead, down the hallway, the steely silhouette of A.D. 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," he 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 swirled and his barked retort to Skinner echoed in his ears.  
	He 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 it 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 the goal, the clarity that came from backing off, or from sweating away your confusion through the physical effort of the game.  
	But the courts were empty.  He shot baskets for half an hour and jogged home.  In the elevator, his heart rate gradually slowing to normal, the nagging sense of jittery limbo took over again.
	He 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 real personal touches of a life happening here; his life was caught up in the boxes of files and papers stacked all over the bedroom, a room he only used for storage, and what did that say?--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 the 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.  The ball 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.  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.  
	His basketball lay in the middle of the floor.  Other than that single detail, 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 'Quonochotaug' 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 just been 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 that imprinted 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 found his evidence gone yet again.  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.  He went to the door and carefully twisted the knob; 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 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.
	This was precisely why he had to go, though.  It was her.  Scully'd lost her innocence; she'd 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 files a few months ago, 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 couch he slept on, where he lived--and sat down.  He leaned forward and 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 snickered at after she'd passed. 
	He leaned back and 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--that wild goose chase Kersh had sent her on.  	She'd never give up... And she accused him of being relentless.  
	She wouldn't.  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 a clear head would come with distance and he could think--really stop and think--of what do to next.

	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 just 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 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 should get out of the car.  He opened his eyes and sat forward.
	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 house, after meeting *him* 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, not to think about the Smoking Man and whatever-the-hell connection he had to his mother.  There was no point in going there and anyway, he wouldn't 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 about her, about who she was and who she'd become, or *if* she'd become...
	Though he'd been able to discover no certainties about her life, as if it were a math problem without the necessary constants that allowed you 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'd also thought he'd seen her in the flesh, once, 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 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?  There 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 caught in headlights, waiting for her chance to spring away.  He'd scared her, him 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.  

	Scully turned off the water, dried her hands quickly and fished the ringing phone from the pocket of her lab coat.  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 a patio chair, the contents of the Quonochotaug garage spread around him.  This was where all of her things had been stored, the place where, if there was a place, he should be able to find some closeness to her, some thread of connection.  
	All Samantha's things had ended up here when they sold the Chilmark house:  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 when he opened them again she'd be there.  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.  Days--weeks, years--spent trying to rationalize that it might be for her own good, her own protection.  If only she could believe the fantastic scenario his dad had set out for her.  If only she could buy the righteousness of the motives of the men who gathered around his father.  
	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 was just as fresh, hard and sending off sparks when it was struck.  And for him it had always been about her--a mother who'd sit in stony silence whenever her missing daughter was mentioned, who'd never even gone out and searched for herself.  Who'd stopped him from searching the day they'd found her missing.  The police are looking, Fox, she'd said, as if he were doing something wrong and shameful; we shouldn't get in their way.  
	But how could it have been her 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 when he was finally ready--finally--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, here, 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 noticed 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.  
	She glanced up through branches 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 was 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, pulled 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.
	But they weren't partners now.  
	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 life was built on.  Everything he was, everything he did, hinged ultimately on the access he had through the Bureau.    
	And where did this leave her, this new 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 been for her benefit as much as his.  Perhaps she'd needed that spark as much as he did.
	"Agent Scully..."
	She jumped at the touch of his hand on her shoulder.
	"Sir?"  She turned around.
	"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.
	She 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, Agent Scully," Skinner said after a moment, "but I think Mulder's life is 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 what 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.  "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 the squeak in the machinery--"  He shook his head.  "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 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 another 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 looked down momentarily, then up 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)
.....................................
PARADISE LOST (2/6)

	Mulder shifted on the couch and stared 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, only artifacts, like the physical evidence recovered at an archaeological dig.  But then that's what the 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 braid of hair in his hand.  It had been in a box in the garage, just lift 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 Quonochotaug 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 to in searching for her.   
	And what would Clyde Bruckman say?  Would he take the hair and close his eyes, a pained expression crossing his face, and announce a time and date and manner of death?  Would he hand the braid to Bruckman if he could?  Or would that act admit too much?
	Scully'd say, if she were honest and not so damn set on saving his sanity, that it was 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 wasn't.  Samantha was screaming/hair flying/brightly-ribboned I'll-*tell*-on-you-Fox.  Not that he'd been 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'd panicked, watching her father argue with Old Smoky on that terrible night.  Just like when she was little.  It was a sign, proof.  There *was* something between them.  
	Mulder rolled again, to the opposite side, and tucked the braid of hair against 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 slept there, anyway.  There was no sign 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'd gone.  
	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, no salvation even remotely on the horizon.  Hope and a hug she direly needed but could barely afford to accept.  	
	He could take care of himself.
	Scully rolled onto her side 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 white half-circle pouring its silent light through the window.  He'd kept it for her--the cross--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 mere piece of 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.
	A footstep, then another and another.  Then silence.
	A jolt of adrenaline and he was up 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, silent.  Mulder blinked and then blinked again, straining to see.  He forced himself to breathe silently, 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 weapon.  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.
	Mulder bent silently, smoothly, his hand stretching.  His fingers reached around the cold weapon.  Slowly he slipped from the bed into a crouch.  Inside, his blood raced, pulsing.  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 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 Krycek 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.    

	Mulder sat on the grass near the curb, hands around his knees, watching them fight the fire.  As with an old movie, the action was somehow distant, 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 like his sister, or like the evidence he was always seeking.  Everything disappeared.  It began as hope, as a faith in something unseen, and turned at some point into vivid reality he could see, touch, sometimes even photograph or measure.  Then it was always gone, disappeared or stolen or lost in some way he could never anticipate.  And he was left, once again, as nothing more than a prophet, proclaiming what others 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 the old 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 words--"You're a little spy!"--echoing and re-echoing.  He saw himself not so long ago, 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.
	Krycek would be working for him.
	What was it with Krycek, anyway?  He couldn't be the only goon Smoky had working for him.  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.  He kept his eyes on the house: the doors, the widows.  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, 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--gray now--and a little group of spectators.  He felt heavy-headed, as if he'd been awake for weeks.  When the EMTs 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.  She'd worry about him.  
	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, an 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.  And why this house, here in Quonochotaug?  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, and 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.  She gripped the edge of the pillow beside her and made herself breathe in, then out, slowly, willing her body to slow its sudden frantic pace.  Gradually, the rhythm of her heart slowed.
  	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 window, 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 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 tea bag and set them on the counter.  She walked 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.
	Scully curled into the corner of the sofa.  She took a sip from the mug, forced herself to concentrate on the flavor trickling hot down her throat and willed 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--on the surface of 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 these men.  And Mulder was gone.   
	How was she to do it now?  

	"Fox?"
	Mulder looked up and forced 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.  
	"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 Quonochotaug house, Mom.  It's gone.  Burned."
	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."
	She stared at the coffee table and at nothing.  
	"But who would--"  She only started to say the words.  Her face went taut.
	"He's the one 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 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 almost a whisper, 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, and her eyes were saying *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 do whatever they want.  They take whoever they want--"  
	His fingers found hers 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 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.
	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 here, if she could tell 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 the 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.  Langley smiled at her from the passenger seat; 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," Langley 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 get ahold of 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 again inside the moment she'd heard the news.  It had come like a sudden gunshot, an unexpected burst that changes everything.  
	"...Net this morning..." Langley was saying.
	"Excuse me?"  She willed herself to focus on him. 
	"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," Langley said, pointing.
	Scully looked.
	"Mulder's family does have a place there, in Quonochotaug, 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.  Silence filled the interior of the van.  Only the high-pitched whine of the engine filled the emptiness.
	"We'll keep our eyes and ears open," Byers said finally, quiet.  "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.

(end 2 of 6)
....................................
PARADISE LOST (3/6)

	"Yes, I appreciate your help, sir."
	Scully switched off the phone, let her head fall back against the sofa cushion and took a deep breath. 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 Quonochotaug 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 she'd 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.  She sighed, set the shoe on the spread and padded 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, making herself 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 tiniest 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 so proud."
	Scully's attempt at acquiescence ended in tightly-pressed lips, but her mother seemed not to notice.
	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 swallowed imperceptibly and studied her hands.  "It was his whole life."
	When there was no reply, Scully glanced up.  Her mother was looking at the kitchen cabinets beyond the dining table, lips pressed together.  She'd be 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 of us--and how to stop it, so that Penny Northern and all those other women 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?"    

	
	 "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, a preemtive 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 Quonochotaug, when you had the stroke."  He let his breath out slowly.  
	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... knew 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 just 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--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 Quonochotaug.  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.  "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 and 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.  
	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'd happened in the past two days, his dismissal and the Quonochotaug 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 only 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 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, 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 pictures; 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.  There was a big ruffled collar around 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 smiling as if she were the grand prize from some drawing.
	He ran his fingertips 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 you could sleep on.  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.
	Mulder flipped on the hall light and went to 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.  Slowly she began to ease.  There was 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 she 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.  It would be eating away at her inside.  
	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 even thought to check; he 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--the very same words she'd shouted into the message machine as Duane Barry dragged her off into the night four years ago.  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 now sleep was 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 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 at six, when everything looked 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 get 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 would have been a six-year-old's focus. 
	"Fox?"
	Mulder looked up.  His mother was standing in the doorway in her bathrobe.
	"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 suddenly.  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 thorougly as they do now."  She looked up 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 started, 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.  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 said, 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 breifly 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--people--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 go red 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 taken off 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 filled with a closed warmth from the day that made him suddenly realize how drowsy he was after all his driving.  And after 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, quiet, light colors.  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.  He pulled a pad of paper from the drawer below it and 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 and he jumped.  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 he had Krycek to deal with.  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 gun 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 rubbed his index finger against the trigger and studied the figure lying in the shadows.  They hadn't made any difference in the end, his 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 gulag buildings, on always being *americanets*--the American--regardless of the fact that he'd grown up as Russian as the rest of them; on being always too cold, too hungry.  Mulder'd still ended up a laughing stock and he was, as usual, the old man's pawn, his goad.  But not forever.
	Mulder grunted in his sleep and rolled farther onto his side.
	Krycek's trigger finger tensed.  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 had 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 one hand but Mulder didn't roll or grunt; he didn't even stir.    
	Krycek eased the gun into his belt.  He nodded at the sleeping figure and slipped quietly from the room.  

(end 3 of 6)
.......................................
PARADISE LOST (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, grabbing under the pillow.
	"I have your weapon," Scully's voice said.  "Mulder, you have an alarm clock set for three hours ago."
	Mulder pulled himself up on his elbows and forced his eyes open.  He squinted at the shaft of light coming in from the living room.  It was her.  He felt himself loosen.  "What...?  What time is it?"
	"Time to thank *your* lucky stars, maybe."  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 pencilled 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 and stood up.  "Excuse me."
	He 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 that mean?  It had to mean something.
	He flushed, turned on the faucet in the sink and let the water slowly fill his cupped palms.  The sudden 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 of it, though, keeping her voice even, quiet, not giving herself away. 
	"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 working 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 had this flash 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, reaching 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 own 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.  Someday, if he played his cards right, he could make his move.  But not until all his ducks were lined up.  He'd learned that the hard way, how the unexpected could catch you and send all your well-laid plans 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.  Props.  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.  
	"Hey, 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.  
	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 overhead.  "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.  
	Scully rubbed one heel against the log they were sitting on.  Her fingers were cold.  A breeze had come up and she was wearing only a sweatshirt over the shell she'd worn to work; she hadn't expected to be coming here.  Mulder had already switched places with her to shelter her from the wind.  
	It was 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 they were disconnected tonight--blatantly, painfully disconnected.  
	"I have no idea what to do, Mulder," she said finally, leaning forward.
	"Why?"
	She glanced over at him.  He seemed miles away, his only real sign of presence 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 chased 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 now, Mulder."  She paused and sighed.  "Mulder, I needed... your help--"
	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 close 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 was growing, spreading 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 dead 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 small 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 reality around him.
	Mulder would've filed a police report; he had no reason to run.  The old man would know Mulder'd been there; he checked everything, every detail, never trusting.  He'd know Mulder'd gotten away.  One way or the other.  Not that Mulder'd been part of the assignment.  But he hadn't said anything and that in itself would stand out.  
	Guilt by omission, and what would the old man be reading into his silence?  Would he have an inkling?  Or did he already know?  Is that what his 'sentimentality' crack had been about--a warning?
	Krycek looked behind him, at the people gathered around tables and 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 at home 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 back carefully.
	"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 here in the dark.  And then she'd fallen, a loosening that would have been like another woman just 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, gentle, 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.  And I...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 boxes in a 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 was comfort against him, warmth and security.  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.  Too upbeat; it gave 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. 
	Though the model hadn't worked so well with her.  For all he'd taken from her, she was still standing, still living.  She hated him, to be sure.  But she hadn't succumbed.  She hadn't crumbled.  She hadn't given out her secrets.  Perhaps that was what he admired so much about her, 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 wouldn't see it.  Maybe she didn't survive.  Or maybe last year, at the diner... maybe that was really her, maybe it--"   He sighed heavily.  "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...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?"  He ran one 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?"
	"Tresspassing, they said.  I guess they caught him sleeping 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.  He 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.  Skinner sat a far table, seemingly engrossed in a newspaper.  She stepped up to the counter, bought a coffee, then casually approached the table.
	"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 lately and I didn't want to chance going to your place."  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, by his own changing evidence... by what he believes--"  She looked down at the pattern on the table's surface.
	"I think I may have found something," Skinner said.  "Not anything that'll 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 ship.  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 tight now, 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 does in 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 give you this information at all."  He leaned closer.  "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 sat on the cement floor of the holding cell, eased his back into the corner and tried to relax.  There'd be at least a few minutes of quiet and it'd be foolish 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 would find him out now--a wife or a girlfriend or a parent--but he was killing himself already before the fact.  
	If enough riffraff came in, they'd let him go; simple tresspassing wasn't high on their list of crimes to hold a guy for.  Or he could sleep here; the group scene was no 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 was gone.  Righteous Mulder. 
	Krycek closed his eyes.
	Once, when he was nine or ten, the old man had showed up at the gulag 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 all the weeds out,' he'd replied, looking up, 'the soil will wash away.'
	The old man'd seemed surprised, then pleased.  Impressed, even.  He'd taken him from the fields early and they'd gone to eat somewhere in the town, a place with *real* food.  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 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, though, or stop by, needing to talk.  But best not to leave a message on his machine in case someone were 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'd 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 just did.  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, the man he'd referred to as Leland.  At his mother.  
	She'd said she hadn't betrayed his father.  Her denial had come out sharply and with force, 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 the men who came, 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.
	And what about her other pregnancy, the one after Samantha?  Had that been Smoky's child, too?    

(end 4 of 6)
...................................
PARADISE LOST (5/6)

	Scully secured the metal door behind her and turned around.  It was an older gas station.  The restroom was tired but clean, with the graffiti on the stall doors painted over and the air hung with the pervading scent of coconut-scented room freshener, the kind that had always reminded her of cookies as a child.
	She opened her bag, 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 mirror and began to stuff her own clothes into the bag.  Her father had been right after all--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 all his 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 the kind of caring Missy'd attempted to pour over her,  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.  
	Scully made herself look up into the mirror.  She slid the watch cap on and pulled it down over her ears.  After a considering glance, she tucked some of her hair up inside the hat, then quickly pulled it off again, set it on the counter and turned on the faucet.  She pressed her lips tightly together.  
	The hot water ran only cold.  For a few moments she watched it spiral rapidly down the drain.  Then she put 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 piece that would help solve the puzzle 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 suitably forlorn woman stared back at her.  

Scully--
	Looking back, all I can see is 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 everything I've tried to do to find her has only yielded 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.  He had to be the one 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... Sorry; I can't even put the words to paper.  Maybe that's the most difficult thing of all to face, that he insinuated himself into my family and started doing his dirty work there even before I was born.  I know what my mother denied, 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, and I'd hoped I'd never find myself here again, but I've searched and searched, and frankly, I can't find a single truth on which my life has been based.  I regret pulling you into my illusion as I regret, more than I can express, the pain and loss it 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 go limp in 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 paused, mouth open, then looked up and closed his eyes.  "I know.  I know what you were thinking."   
	He sighed and looked down. "But Jesus, 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 looked around.  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 body.  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'll do to her, Mulder?"
	Somehow Mulder'd always seemed exempt from the laws of the universe, for better or worse: he'd take a beating and keep on ticking.  Like Wile E. Coyote.  
	But Wile E. Coyote was fiction.  There was a warning in the difference.  
	The old man had been right about attachments, though in a back-door kind of way.  Mulder's search for his sister had been what fueled him; it was the thought that he might have the old man's venom pumping through his veins that was more than he could handle.  This 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 leave it on the couch in some semblance of straightness and retreated to the leather chair on the opposite side of the room, letting 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 was always 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 man.
	From out in the street came the sudden squealing of tires.  Footsteps approached in the hallway outside, then paused while a 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 body on the couch in the growing gloom.

  	Scully walked the last few steps to the shelter door and paused in front of the sign.  The paint on the door had cracked into thin, vertical strips, though the announcement in the middle was freshly painted.  Half an hour till opening.  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 other 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 several 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.

	Scully stared through the dusty barred window of the shelter.  There was a little light left; the sun had just set, throwing shards of deep, golden yellow against the tired walls behind her cot.  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, how much 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--"
	He reached for the receiver.  "Agent Scully?"
	"...Mulder?"
	Krycek bit his lip.
	"Who is this?"
	He let out a slow breath.  "This is Alex Krycek."
	"What?"
	He waited, anticipating.
	"Where's Mulder, Krycek?"  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 shooting himself.  Don't thank me now.  Just come."	He hung up the phone.  Right now she was the only light, only hope--the only thing Mulder had.

	It had been only 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, and 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 solemnity had been nothing compared to this.
	Krycek could be lying.  It could be some kind of a setup, an ambush.  It would be comforting to believe the convenient explanation but somehow its arguments rang hollow.  
	Headlights rushed toward Scully's car and poured past in the dark like strands of lighted pearls.  Their glare assaulted her like boisterous voices; their brightness made her squint.
	Scully counted the exits, waiting for his. 

	"What happened here, Krycek?" she said quietly, 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 to a magnet.  
	"Not much to tell.  He'd been drinking when I got here.  He was plastered, in fact.  When he saw me, he pointed a gun at me... and then he turned it--"  
	He reached for the paper on the desk 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 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 and looked down.  "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?"
	Krycek shook his head.  "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 and took her by the shoulder.   "--been so serious about anything."
	She quickly 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 walked to the darkened door and let himself out.
	Now he could only hope.

	Scully watched the door close and the handle turn.  Silence engulfed the apartment.  She passed a hand over Mulder's forehead and back through his hair.  He was warm, maybe too warm, and gave off the cloying, sweet smell of alcohol.
	She got up and walked 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 lack of strength 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.   
	She took Mulder's gun from the desk drawer and placed it in her bag.  The figure on the couch remained unmoving.  She wondered what he'd 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, the face 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.  As had Krycek.  And he'd burned down the Quonochotaug house.
	But he'd told Mulder to get out.  Why?  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 letter alone--the soul-heavy, weary letter--spoke to that.  And it *was* Mulder's hand, 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 gradually warming against him.  She knew his pain--she always felt his pain--yet it wore her down.  And she didn't have the strength to carry them both.

(end 5 of 6)
................................
PARADISE LOST (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 stared at her from the shadows. 
	Oh--"  He sat up suddenly.  "Gotta go--"
	She moved her chair out of the way quickly and watched him move unsteadily toward the bathroom.  The 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 both back to the coffee table.
	Mulder reappeared from the bathroom.  He made his way across the room and dropped down 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 Quonochotaug.  She told me about it in the hospital; you were there.  *He* wanted it, 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."
	His fingers worked their way between hers.
	"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 seeing himself as a counselor... but I think he's right.  About this, anyway."
	Mulder curled around her, a band of 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.  His hand slackened 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 window 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.
	Krycek frowned, closed his 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, then 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."
	"No problem.  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
.  

	Mulder eased himself down carefully onto the edge of the bed.  
	"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 becoming conscious 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.
	He reached out and 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.  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 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 lady who makes up stories for little kids at a shelter."
	He glanced up; the movement made his head swim.  He winced.
	"Skinner gave me the information yesterday; he'd 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 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 wouldn't 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 let out a slow breath and looked 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 what 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 to save you--"
	"And 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.
	He 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 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 letters, when justice was an unattainable ideal, just as 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.  If she'd been thinking with her head she would have given up on him long ago.  
	Mulder stood slowly, braced 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, 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'd seen the shining value of.  
	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; she would have taken it.  Mulder turned and walked to the desk.  He opened the top right drawer and pushed the papers around.  Nothing.  He straightened and turned, careful to do it slowly, not to aggravate the pounding in his head.  
	Alex Krycek stood 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, Krycek?"
	Krycek's mouth went tight.  His chin pushed slightly forward.  "You think I like 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-rehersal, 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'.  The movement stopped.  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; he knew already where it was coming from.  He slowed his pace as he approached the basement office.  He paused momentarily, 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 never stops," 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, 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 had 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 pain--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 shoulder.  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.
	Gradually, quiet filled the room.
	"Thank you," Scully's voice came from near his shoulder.  She sighed and then stirred and then stopped abruptly, settling back against him.  Mulder closed his eyes and let his cheek rest against her head again.  Sunlight was reaching into the room, stretching, 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 see, 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 and looked out across the manicured green expanse of the Mall.  His fingers played in the grass beside him, lifting out the occasional tuft of grass carefully, 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 was happening.  
	The woman'd 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 pull a picture from a DMV 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.  It'd suit the old man's sense of irony; he'd had him kill Bill Mulder, hadn't he?
	Krycek let his head fall back against the tree trunk and closed his eyes.  Behind them he saw a rural Russian roadside in early morning.  A girl lay face-down in the bushes, 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--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 rolled 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 sudden blissful absence of torment.  
	He sat up.  It was Saturday--no, Sunday.  Late Sunday at that; Scully'd be starting at the Academy in the morning.  He'd be... he'd have to make a plan.  He'd figure it out.  
	It was time to get up, time to shave for the first time in too long.  Time to start clean.
	Mulder went to 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.  *Scully'd* thanked *him*.  He stripped down and threw 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'd 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 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, to verify that the first was not his.  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 now, if her search turned up the evidence she suspected?  Would she tell him?  Was he strong enough to deal with it?  	Or would she protect him with her silence? 

(END)
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	Once upon a time I began this story, thinking I'd explore the personal impact of Mulder and Scully being reassigned off the X-files and get it out of my system.  How long could it take, anyway? 
	But as with the show itself, once I'd gotten to the end and found the answers to a few of my questions,  more intriguing questions rose to take their place.  What would the DNA test show?  How would Scully's job at Quantico pan out?  In which direction would Mulder's renewed resolve take him?  And what was up with the Rat?  Krycek must have had a reason for those uncharacteristic things he'd done here.  What was it?
	I had to find out, so I kept writing.  *Walking Through Fire is the next installment of this saga, available on my fic page, listed at the top of this file.
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Feedback always appreciated.  It brings the reading/writing experience full-circle: bardsmaid@imagesmithstudio.com