TITLE: Ship Building AUTHOR: Jess EMAIL ADDRESS: snarkypup@hotmail.com DISCLAIMER: As if. DISTRIBUTION STATEMENT: Anywhere, just let me know. SPOILER WARNING: Right up through Millennium. RATING: NC-17 for both sex and very, very icky murders, though they’re “off-screen” CONTENT WARNING: Sex, Angst, child murders, molestation references, ickiness. CLASSIFICATION: X-File (sort of), Myth-arc, MSR SUMMARY: When THEY set out to break Scully, Mulder steps in. AUTHOR’S NOTE: This one is dark, folks. This ain’t “Hog Heaven”, put it that way. I’m not an FBI agent or a murderer, so my details may be off, but my heart’s in the right place. I wish you could buy what Mulder gets Scully, but I’ve never seen one. It does have a happy ending and it’s LONG, but complete. And I’m dedicating it to Galia, for reasons which will become obvious in the next sentence… If you are missing any sections, you can try my new site (!), lovingly archived by Galia (and where she will be posting this in its entirety as soon as she darn well wants to, so don’t bug her!): http://galias.webprovider.com/jess/jess.htm Then visit Galia's site for more great fiction! She has a lovely, lovely site and you’d be a fool to miss it! http://galias.webprovider.com/visions.html Ship Building He wasn’t going to buy her anything. Waking early on Saturday morning, his only thought was to get something to put in his refrigerator besides mayonnaise and two bottles of beer. Ok, it wasn’t his only thought. He did, for a moment, remember the silk of her mouth. He might have pondered, in the shower, the way she smiled at him afterwards. But he wasn’t going to dwell on the kiss, not at all. It was simply natural. An extension of their years together, of their feelings for one another. It was not a big deal. At the grocery store, he saw boxes of candy and didn’t even consider buying her one. There were plastic-wrapped bouquets and he ignored them. Irises the exact color of her eyes when she was angry with him, orchids streaked with red that must be the color of her hair in the sunlight, or at least the way it always appeared to him. He even passed up a giant heart-shaped cookie. It was not in his nature to gush or turn into a gooey puddle because he had, after seven years of yearning, finally touched her lips with his and felt her tip her head back and hold the kiss. But as he walked back to his car, past the other small shops in the strip mall that contained his grocery store, he was struck by something. It was the hobby shop. At first all he saw were the plastic model cars, the train sets, and a Mustang fighter hanging from fishing line in the window. Scully would have built models like that, he thought, with her brothers. He barely registered the other window, at first, until he was right up on it. And then, without hesitation, he was walking into the hobby shop with two bags full of perishables and telling the clerk that he wanted that one there in the window, and he was able to pay cash. Sliding the bags of groceries and the bag with her present into the back of the car, he thought perhaps he was being overly demonstrative. After all, they had never bought each other things like this, so large and so… intimate. But it didn’t matter. It was done, wise or not. He was putting away his groceries when the phone rang, and he was not expecting it to be her. Not really, anyway. Not if he thought logically about it. “Mulder, it’s me,” she said, and something resembling those awful little animated bluebirds of his childhood began to sing in his happy mind. “Hey Scully, you just getting up?” “Mulder,” she said, and her voice held something he hadn’t expected. Weariness. “I’ve been up for hours. What are you doing right now? Do you have a minute?” “Sure,” he said, cautiously, “What’s up?” “Can you come over here? We need to talk.” And that was it. Four innocent little words that on any other day might have seemed like a perfect excuse to visit with her, now contained the destruction of his entire life. She didn’t want him. She was breaking up with him. But how could she break up with him if they weren’t dating? If all they had done was kiss? For heaven’s sake, it was New Years Eve, the end of the millennium, what was he supposed to have done? Millions of people kissed then. It was traditional. How could she do this to him? He hadn’t even tried to slip her the tongue. “Ok,” he said. “I’ll be right over.” The ride to her house was unbearable. He realized, half way there, that the present sat in the trunk of his car. He had intended to take it to work on Monday and give it to her there, where it felt less personal. But now his imagination located it, still in it’s Odyssey Hobby Shop bag, sliding around in the trunk like a leopard crouching in wait. Too much, it chanted to him. She thought that damn key chain was a leap, and that was nothing. This, it, was too big, too… he would give it to her anyway, he decided. Fuck her. Fuck her and her lack of desire for him. Looking back on it, replaying it in his mind, he could still hear her voice: “No, it didn’t.” Was there a hint of disappointment there? Didn’t the same magical bells and whistles that blew wildly in his own heart sound in hers? Maybe not. Well, screw it. She was getting the damn present and he didn’t care. Not one bit. Let her take him down, let her destroy him. It didn’t matter. Bitch. He wanted to cry, to bang his head on the steering wheel, to beg and plead and wheedle his way into her heart like an abandoned puppy until she had to love him, just because he was there. Slamming the car into park outside her building, he watched the curtains for any sign of movement. There was nothing. So she wasn’t anxiously peering out her windows; was that a good sign or a bad one? Popping the trunk, he pulled out the bag, stalked into the hallway and pounded on her door. She opened immediately, looking immaculate and exhausted at the same time. “Mulder,” she said, as if she were somewhat surprised to actually see him there. “Come on…” But he was already in, brushing past her. There on the sofa, spread out like the evidence to a crime, was her suitcase. Jesus, it was worse than he thought. She wasn’t breaking up with him, she was leaving him. Every emotion, every thought, became suffused with adrenaline. “Scully,” he croaked out, “where are you going?” She followed his stare and smiled slightly. His heart sank further into his shoes and squished around there with his toes. “Seattle,” she said. “Scully,” he said, manic with fear, “if this is about last night, please don’t…” Her eyes widened and then she seemed to get it. She laid one gentle hand on his arm. “Mulder, come on,” she said. “I’d hardly go all the way to Seattle just because you kissed me on New Year’s Eve.” The pressure of her fingers on his jumping muscles was lotion on a burn. He sighed and willed himself to calm down. Something was, clearly, going on. But maybe it wasn’t what he thought. “Ok…” he said. “So what are you doing? Why do we need to talk?” “Oh Mulder…” She sat down on the edge of the sofa and looked up at him. “Did you think… all the way over here?” He nodded, swallowing the lump in his throat and she sighed. “Sit down. This isn’t about that at all. I’ve just been given an assignment.” “An assignment? By who?” “Skinner called me this morning. Apparently they’ve got a serial murder case in Seattle and they requested me.” His mind was still churning. She wasn’t leaving him. She wasn’t leaving him. He told himself to shut up long enough to hear her. “Why? What’s it all about?” “I don’t know,” she admitted. “Skinner didn’t have a lot of detail. He said there were children involved and that they thought my combination of skills as a forensic scientist and my experience with serial killers made me uniquely qualified.” “Boy,” he cracked, the voices still singing triumphantly in his head, “That’s something to put on your resume.” She grinned and nodded. “I know. I’m not sure whether or not to be flattered.” But she was. He could see it. Something in his jealous heart twitched and he said: “Gee, Scully, isn’t the timing rather coincidental?” “Mulder…” The grin became a glare. “Did it ever occur to you that someone else might want to work with me simply because I’m a superb field agent, not because I happen to be connected to you?” He was immediate sorry. “Of course, Scully. You’re right. Well, I guess this means I haven’t completely destroyed your reputation.” “Not completely,” she said, but she had softened. “Anyway, my plane leaves in a couple hours and I thought maybe you’d want to drive me to the airport.” The reason for this was unspoken, but it swelled the chorus in his head until it sounded like the end of the World Cup. Lovers drove each other to the airport to say goodbye. Lovers did that. “I’d love to,” he said. “How long will you be gone?” “I don’t know,” she said. “Until I feel I’ve done all I can or until someone is caught, I suppose. As long as is necessary.” He nodded. “I’ll miss you.” She blushed and stared at her hands for a moment, as if she were collecting herself. “I’ll miss you too,” she murmured. He was touched, greatly. This was wonderful, better than he had ever thought it would be. To have her say it, out loud, was better than any sex he had ever had. “So,” she said, raising her head and in perfect control once more, “what’s in the bag?” The bag? And then he remembered. Sitting over in the corner, as innocent as a pussy cat, was his present. “Um… I bought you something.” Her head cocked and she raised one eyebrow. “You bought me something? Why?” Though he realized the implication of his action, and knew exactly what she was thinking, he shrugged and walked over to retrieve it. “I don’t know. I saw it and thought of you.” “Mulder…” she began as if to chastise him, but then he dropped the bag in her lap and she simply accepted it. “Should I open it now?” “Well it’s hardly wrapped, Scully, so go for it.” “If this is lingerie…” she began. “It isn’t lingerie,” he answered, wondering exactly what sort of lingerie one would buy at Odyssey Hobby Shop. “But I don’t think you’d really mind if it were.” She said nothing to that, but opened the bag and pulled out the box. For a moment she was silent, staring at it, and he feared she was offended, or worse, bored. Then she raised her face and looked him in the eye and she was thrilled, he could see it. He sank to his knees in front of her and took her hand. “I thought you might like it,” he whispered. “I can’t believe it,” she said. “This must have cost you a fortune. These kits… this is a really nice one.” He nodded. “The best. Turn it over.” She did, turning away from the illustration on the front to the plastic-covered compartments of components on the back. “It has real rigging,” he said. “See these winches? You have to rig the entire thing just like a real ship. And here, the sails are real. And the hull… you have to build it over the ribs, just like the real thing.” She was nodding, her hand skimming over the various pieces. “The Pequod,” she said softly. “Mulder, it’s Ahab’s ship.” “I know,” he said. “Look here, there’s where Queequeg would stand to launch his spear. I’ll bet we could even find a tiny porcelain Pomeranian to stand there.” She laughed and set the ship aside, pressing her forehead to his. “Thank you,” she said, her voice husky. “I thought we could build it together,” he told her, fascinated by the shape of her ear. “When you get back, that is.” Her grip on his hand tightened and he knew she was moved. Of all the things he could have brought her this morning, the morning after he had kissed her, this was exactly right. “I’m going to be terribly lonely in Seattle,” she told him. Pulling her close to him and kissing the top of her head, he sighed. “Not as lonely as I’ll be here, Scully.” She laughed and then sat back, brushing her hair from her face as an excuse to swipe away a tear she thought he hadn’t noticed. “I’d better finish packing so we can go.” xxxxxx On the ride to the airport, they talked about Frank Black and the raising of the dead. But in the background, in-between the discussions of zombies and religious superstition, was the knowledge that this would be the last time they would see each other, perhaps for months. Mulder longed to reach out and take her hand, to caress her. He wished the assignment had come a few weeks from now, when he’d had to chance to make love to her. The fact that he might have been able to do it at all made him crazy inside, as if someone were whisking his stomach contents into a fine meringue. “So,” she was saying, “I still find it difficult to believe they were… Mulder, why are you staring at me?” He was caught. Some things never changed, he thought ruefully. “I’m memorizing you,” he told her. “So I can pull you out on some lonely Sunday night and talk to you.” She was silent and then she smiled. “My head had better not be appearing on the body of any of those women you don’t watch, Mulder.” He crowed with laughter and patted her leg, delighted. “Scully, with my memory, I could conveniently insert your head onto your own naked body, if that was what I had meant.” Blushing, she looked straight ahead as they pulled into the parking garage at the airport. She was so quiet as they got their ticket that he thought perhaps he had offended her. “Scully…” he began, driving through the rows of cars, searching for a parking space. “Mulder…” she said at the same time. He waited for her. “I just wanted you to know that if you were to um… think about me… that way…” She hesitated and he realized he had just stopped in the middle of the row, his heart pounding wildly. “If you do, I just thought you should know it’s ok. That I will be thinking about… you… too.” He was jello. He was mashed potatoes and gravy. He was syrup. He was a runny egg yolk on a hot day. He was sliding into the floor of the Taurus with his tongue lapping the carpet. “You will?” he squeaked, sounding like the teenage boy he had suddenly become. “Yes,” she said, gaining in confidence. “I have, for years now.” God, could it get any better? Or any worse, he thought, staring at the parking space two cars up? He was in the airport. She was leaving. She had just admitted to fantasizing about him. Fuck. “Years?” he said. “Years?” “Years,” she confirmed as he slid the car to a stop and pulled the parking brake viciously. “Ever since… I don’t know. I think since I recovered from the cancer.” “That long?” he said, thinking, only that long? He’d been thinking about her forever. Longer than that. Since he was a zygote, a single cell, a twinkle in his mother’s eye. “So if you… I mean, you could call me…” God, she was proposing phone sex. His heart actually stopped. He knew because his entire mind became a momentarily blinding white sheet of light. “Scully,” he moaned. “Just stop now. I have to actually get out of this car and walk you to the gate and I can’t do that if you keep talking about this.” She giggled, god help him, giggled and put one hand on his. “Sorry,” she said, but she didn’t look one bit sorry, not one little teeny bit. He leaned his head back for a moment and collected himself. “Right,” he said. Fucking airports. “Let’s go, or you’ll miss your flight.” “And we wouldn’t want that,” she said, that same teasing lilt in her voice. She was stepping out of the car then, or he would have pinned her to the seat and consummated seven years… hell, a lifetime of longing in the middle of the short-term parking. “No, we wouldn’t,” he disagreed and stepped up to take her suitcase. He had wrapped his trench coat tightly around himself and she smiled when she noticed. Fucking Skinner. Fucking Scully and her fucking reputation for excellence. They checked her bags and headed for the gate, enduring the usual hassle at the metal detectors, flashing badges and holsters and guns and spare change as they were patted and triple-checked and man-handled through. At the gate, he thought he would tell her he loved her, but there were so many people there, milling around anxiously. They stood together, barely touching, as they had a thousand times in the past, as if nothing had changed between them. “Call me when you get in,” he said. “It’ll be late,” she pointed out. “As if I’ll be asleep,” he said and she smiled and straightened his tie for him. “Ladies and gentlemen, we’re now boarding rows twenty and higher. Twenty and higher,” the gate attendant said and they both looked at her ticket in unison. Seat 25A. “That’s me,” she said and looked up at him. “That’s you,” he agreed, and pulled her close. They hugged for a moment, arms tighter than usual, hands moving more than before, and then she was walking away and he was thinking about her hips and her hair and her eyes and her, just her. “Scully!” he called and ran forward, catching her at the edge of the gate. She dropped her carry-on and waited for him to touch her, to pick her up and kiss her hard, which he did. Her mouth opened and for a moment he felt her tongue touch his, and then he was setting her down, red-faced and glassy-eyed. “Stay safe,” he said. “Call me a lot,” she answered and then she was gone, walking briskly till she disappeared around the corner into the belly of the plane. He waited a moment, then dialed the number on his cell phone. “Not this soon,” she laughed into his ear. “I love you,” he said. He wanted to add, don’t forget me. Don’t meet someone else. Miss me. Need me. “I love you too,” she answered. “Now I have to go. I’ll call you when I get in.” xxxxxx The next day was torture. He had never liked Sundays, but this was worse because there was no possibility of seeing her in the office on Monday. Nothing to look forward to. She had called him from her new apartment the night before, at nearly two in the morning his time. Tired and cranky from the long flight, she had not spoken long. Now he longed to hear her voice, to feel her next to him. He went through his day narrating it to her. “See, Scully, now this is what I eat for breakfast, then I take a shower…” It was ridiculous and not comforting at all. Monday morning he was at work bright and early, really early. Six, to be exact. Why not? Why not work? By eight, he knew why not. Skinner arrived and dropped a huge pile of shit work, little piddly cases, on his desk. He tried to remind himself that this was what most FBI agents did every day and it was merely his turn, but it didn’t work. By noon, he was throwing pencils at the ceiling and staring at his phone as if it were alive and thwarting him. Ring, damnit, he thought. Fucking ring. The sound of the ringer nearly sent him straight backwards into the wall. “Scully?” he shouted into the receiver and then felt stupid and straightened his tie. “No, I’m afraid not,” a male voice said. “Is this Fox Mulder?” “Yes,” he answered, already annoyed. “I have something you might like to see, Mr. Mulder. Could you meet me somewhere?” He sighed and glared at the offending phone. “What’s this about?” “Will you meet me?” the voice said. “I guarantee this will interest you.” “Fine,” he barked. “Where and when? My whole day is open, trust me. Your tax dollars at work.” The voice chuckled. “You must be very bored with your partner gone,” it said and Mulder froze. “What?” he hissed. “Nothing, just noting a fact. Please, I’ll meet you at Tony’s Deli on Madison. One hour. I’ll be the one looking like an informant.” Mulder sighed. Oh great, a funny one. “Sure,” he said and hung up. The phone rang almost immediately. “What?” he snarled. “Boy,” a sweetly familiar voice said, “I’m gone for what, a day? And your phone manner goes all to hell.” “Scully,” he said. Scully. “Hi, Mulder. Bored yet?” “Infinitely,” he admitted, deciding not to mention the informant yet. “How’re you?” She was quiet for just a moment, but he had known her long enough to read her silences as well as her voice. “What’s up?” he said. “This case is…” she paused again, “… Mulder, this case is awful. What happened to these children… it’s barbaric. It’s monstrous. I don’t think I’ve ever seen evil like this, anywhere. I can’t even begin to fathom what sort of person would do this.” He felt something twist in his stomach and he whispered: “Are you ok?” “Yes,” she said, but she sounded cautious, as if she didn’t want to tempt fate by being sure, “I’m ok. I have a partner here, and he seems very nice.” “He?” Mulder said before he could stop himself. “Yes,” she said, sounding amused. “He. His name is Frank Ryan and he’s very handsome and charming and brilliant, straight out of Quantico. Supposedly he’s a wonderful profiler.” “Handsome?” Mulder said, and though he knew she was teasing, he was instantly jealous. “Yep, blond and blue-eyed. All-American boy. But Mulder, he has this one really annoying habit.” “Yes?” Mulder said, hopeful. “He agrees with me. All the time.” Mulder laughed, relieved. “That must be terrible for you.” “It is,” she confirmed. “No seriously, I’m sure he’s brilliant but… but he’s so young, so na?ve. I worry that he doesn’t have… doesn’t know…” “You think he could benefit from some experience,” Mulder surmised. “Exactly,” she said. “He’s so enthusiastic. It’s as if he doesn’t realize what we’re up against. I guess I worry he’ll miss something vital.” Mulder leaned back and stared at the space she normally occupied. “Do you want me to take a look at the case?” he asked. “No,” she said. “At least, not yet. I don’t want to step on any toes. So what are you up to?” Suddenly, he remembered. “Shit, Scully, I’ve got to go. I’ve got a meeting. I’m sorry.” She was quiet for a minute. “Meeting with who? Skinner?” “Nope,” he said, brushing her off and hating himself. “I’ll call you tonight, ok?” “I might be late. There’s a possible third body being flown in from Virginia.” “Virginia?” he said. “I thought this was a Seattle killer?” “Mulder,” she answered, “Don’t you have to go?” “Right. I’ll try you tonight, ok? Don’t work too late.” “I won’t,” she said and then hung up. He felt immediately guilty. He should tell her. Tell her what, exactly? That someone had called him and asked to meet him? It was like old times, with Scully not knowing, like Deep Throat or X. Rubbing his hands together, Mulder prepared to dive right back in, his concern for Scully disappearing beneath his new-found curiosity. Toni’s Deli was small and slightly dingy, the sort of place Mulder imagined FBI agents would go to meet their contacts, and therefore, exactly the wrong place. The Informant, for that had become his name in Mulder’s mind, was sitting with his back the door, but he was obvious. He kept shifting nervously and slicking his graying hair back with one large hand. Sliding into the seat opposite him, Mulder smiled at a man in his mid-Sixties, with a jowly face and deep-set, almost black eyes. “Agent Mulder,” the man said, nearly whispering. “That’s me,” Mulder said. “But I assume you know that.” “Indeed. Listen, I don’t want to waste your time, so I’ll just give this to you now.” “Give me what?” Mulder asked as the man slid an envelope across the table to him. “Open it and see.” Prying open the prongs on the back, Mulder pulled out several photographs and nearly dropped them in his lap like hot coals. “Like what you see?” the man asked. “Where did you get these?” Mulder demanded, turning the photos over and examining the inscriptions on the back. “Craft number one,” was written on one, with a date. December 5th, 1999. Less than a month ago. The next showed a similar ship, warehoused next to the first. “Craft number two.” “I work in the facility,” the man said and leaned forward. “It’s been brought to my attention that you may have seen something similar before.” “My partner did,” Mulder said. “I was incapacitated at the time.” “That’s a shame,” the Informant said. “So I bet you’d be doubly interested in seeing these.” “I would,” Mulder confirmed. “Can you get me in?” The Informant settled back in his seat. “Perhaps.” Mulder was instantly irritated. “What do you want?” he demanded. “Time, Agent Mulder, just time,” the old man said hurriedly. “I will need time to arrange the proper clearance. I just wanted to be sure you were interested before I put myself in any further danger.” “I’m interested,” Mulder said. “Of course I am.” “Right,” the man nodded and slid out of the seat. “Then I will be in touch. Soon. In the meantime, there are more photos in an envelope under your seat. You may have them analyzed, if you wish. I assure you they’re genuine.” “You better bet I will,” Mulder said and watched the man leave the restaurant and hail a taxi. When he had gone, Mulder slid his hand under the cushion of his bench seat to find the second envelope. It was fat with photos, not blown up or nicely printed, but black and white and obviously developed in a home lab. It was only on the way back to the office that he wondered how the man had known Scully was gone, but not known that it had been she who had seen the ship. He tried to reach her that evening, dialing her apartment and her cell phone, but received voice mail both times. Unsure what to say on a message, he only told her he had called and left it at that. Turning over the photos in his hand, he felt a rising sense of excitement. He was going to see a ship. It was going to be beautiful, he was sure of it. And as ever in these situations, he was sure he was the only one on earth who could truly appreciate the cost of such knowledge, of such beauty. xxxxxx By the end of the next day, he was sitting in the Gunmen’s office as they tried to find evidence of duplicity in the photographs. Frohike handed him the largest of the photos and shook his head. “I can’t find anything. It looks like the real deal.” “Are you sure?” Mulder asked. “This just feels so… convenient.” “Like I said, it looks real.” He nodded and let them continue, slipping one picture after another into the scanner. His cell phone buzzed and he answered cautiously. “Mulder,” Scully said. “It’s me.” “Hey Scully,” he cried, happy to hear from her. Frohike looked up and grinned. “Tell the lovely…” he began. “Frohike says hi,” Mulder told her. “So do Langley and Byers.” “Tell them hello for me,” she said, but she sounded… he wasn’t sure. Quiet? “What’s up?” he asked. “I’m just calling to see how you are,” she answered. “And to tell you that I will be unavailable for a few days. I’ve got to go to Mexico for another death.” “Mexico?” he asked, half-watching Frohike blow up another shot of the ship. “What’s in Mexico?” “Another body,” she said patiently. “And my phone won’t work there, so I’ll have to call you when I get back. I just thought you’d want to know.” “Mexico?” he repeated, unable to wrap his mind around it and still watch the ship grow ever fuzzier on Frohike’s screen. “What killer goes from Virginia to Mexico?” “Apparently, a very clever one. Frank thinks we may be looking at a child pornography ring in action.” Something in her voice caught him and held him, away from the office, from the ship. He lowered his voice. “Scully, have these children been raped?” “Raped,” she replied, her voice hard and cold, “tortured, beaten, bound… you name it, Mulder, if someone has ever caused someone else pain with it, it’s been done here.” “Jesus, Scully,” he murmured, and his concern caused a sharp-eared Frohike to pause and watch him. “How are you holding up?” “I’m not,” she said simply. “I’m not at all and I’m fine, as you might imagine. I can get through this, Mulder,” she said, but she sounded like she was trying to convince herself, not him. “I can do this.” “I know you can,” he told her. “That’s why they asked for you, Scully. Because you’re strong and brave and intelligent and compassionate.” She was quiet for a moment and then she whispered: “I wish I could just come home.” “You can,” he said. “Anytime.” “No…” she answered, and she was very far away, “I can’t. Someone needs to stop this. Anyway, Mulder, I’ll talk to you in a few days. Frank’s coming in the door, so I’d better go.” “Good luck,” he told her. “And I miss you.” “You too,” she said, and he knew Frank was there. “In a week or two, Mulder.” “In a week or two,” he confirmed, and she let him go. xxxxxx But it wasn’t a week, or even two. It was a month. A week after she left, she sent him an email. Just when he was beginning to feel the edges of panic creep around his thoughts of her. Beneath that email, sliding into his inbox without a working address to reply to, was a second message: Mulder closed his eyes, trying to block out the image of Scully not sleeping. Patience, he was finding, was not one of his virtues. As much as he wanted to see the ship, to stand on its cool exterior, to feel the alien metal beneath his fingers, metal which Scully had told him was warm to the touch even in the cold waters of the African sea… he could not help but wonder where his partner had found herself. Of course he responded anyway, sending her a little note, lighter in tone than he could possibly feel, trying to remind her of the way they had become together. He knew, without hearing from her, that it would fail. Two weeks later, she sent him another note, even shorter than the first. Again he responded, leaving out the jarring cheerfulness of his last email. He sent only one line. Shortly after he sent off his email, he checked again to find this waiting in his inbox: And he found himself wondering if their goals could possibly be the same any longer. Then one day, just over a month after she had left him, she was back in the US. She called him at eight in the morning on a Saturday, which would have been five her time. “Mulder,” she said, and he heard her voice crack, “there were six of them.” “Six?” he asked, half asleep. “Six. Little girls. Buried for several days, no longer. He seems to be escalating. And then when I got back, there were two more in California, and one in Nevada.” “Scully,” he said, “this sounds like more than one person.” “I know,” she answered, “except the semen samples… they’re all from the same man.” “Semen?” Mulder asked, feeling sick. “Yes,” she said. “From the vagina and the anus and sometimes, from the mouth. This man is so sick, Mulder, it makes me wonder why God allows us to continue. Why are we here, if monsters like this are allowed to live?” Mulder had no answer. “Scully, you’ve never lost hope before.” “I’m losing it now,” she said simply. “What can I do?” he asked. “Nothing,” she said. “There’s nothing anyone can do. This bastard is just going to keep going until he wears himself out or makes a stupid mistake. Until then, I just keep cataloging his crimes.” “I miss you,” he said. “I miss everything,” she answered. “I miss my sanity, I miss sleep. I miss chocolate and coffee that doesn’t taste like blood and my own bed and you and Skinner and mutants and… I don’t know how much longer I can do this.” “Come home,” he told her. “Let someone else take on the nightmare.” “No,” she sighed, “I can’t. For reasons I can’t even begin to explain to you without sounding insane, I can’t. I’ll see you soon, Mulder. I hope.” And she was gone. He leaned back in the bed and stared at the ceiling. Seattle, Virginia, Mexico, California, Nevada… it didn’t make any sense. He just didn’t know enough, he told himself. He didn’t have the information to make a judgement. The phone rang and he picked it up anxiously. “Hello?” He was hopeful. “Agent Mulder,” the voice said and he recognized the Informant. “The time has come.” xxxxxx They met in a warehouse outside of Richmond, on a day so cold Mulder could feel his toes tingling the minute he stepped out of the car. The sky was gray overhead, the color of steel. “This is your badge,” the Informant said. “It will get you in.” It was small and white and laminated. His name was to be George Wallace and he worked in maintenance. “This man has clearance?” Mulder asked. “It doesn’t work like that. Maintenance gets in everywhere. Take my word for it.” “Right,” Mulder said. “When can I go in?” “Day after tomorrow,” the Informant said. “Not before. I have to clear the way.” “I thought the way was clear?” Mulder said. “What the hell do you still have to do?” “Do you want this or not?” the Informant demanded. “I want it,” Mulder said. “Then be patient. There are things that have to be put into motion, there are things I have to wait for.” Mulder took the badge, and another envelope of crisp black and white photos, and sat for a long time in his car outside Scully’s apartment. He wished she were here, but at the same time, he knew she wouldn’t approve of him entering a covert government facility alone, so perhaps it was better she wasn’t. He had waited so long to kiss her, but when he compared it with the length of time he had waited for this opportunity, the whole idea of her, of another person, seemed trivial, inconsequential. What did one kiss matter in the scope of the entire universe? It was so small, that kiss. But then he remembered the softness of her lips and the expression on her face in the airport when he had called her name and he realized that it was of consequence. To them. And in the end, they were all they had. He wasn’t the entire universe, hell, sometimes he wasn’t even a whole man. He dialed her number and waited. “Mulder, what’s wrong?” she said, instantly concerned. “Nothing,” he said. “I just wanted to check on you, see how you were holding up.” “I’m fine,” she said, and it was obvious she knew he wouldn’t believe it. “No you aren’t,” he said, clearing the way for truth. “Tell me what’s going on, really. No more covering facts, Scully.” “I can’t,” she whispered. “I’m… not alone.” “So, go to the ladies room. Walk into the hall. Talk to me.” She sighed and he heard her excuse herself and walk for a moment. “Ok,” she said. “What do you want me to say?” “Why are you hurting?” he asked. “What aren’t you telling me?” “They look…” she paused and took a deep breath. “They look like Emily.” “What?” he said, feeling immediately sick. “They look just like her, Mulder. This sick bastard has a taste for little girls, strawberry blond, blue eyes…” “Oh god,” he whispered. “Scully, you must be going out of your mind.” “I…” she began, but he knew she was near tears and holding back, ever professional. He waited for her to finish. “I need help, Mulder. I feel like I’m losing my mind. She talks to me. I see her every time I lift the sheet. I hear her say my name or she tells me… she asks me to help her, Mulder, and each time my heart breaks a bit more until I think… I think there will be nothing left to put back together. This is the case, Mulder. You know, the one we all dread having, that we know will drive us insane. This is it for me. I don’t know…” and then she stopped. “I’m coming out there,” he said. “I’m coming to see you.” “No,” she said. “You don’t have to do that. You don’t want to do that. I’m… I’m not exactly sex on a stick right now, Mulder.” He was filled with anger at her and compassion, pity so great it seemed to rip through him. “That’s sure as hell not why I want to see you, Scully.” She was quiet. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that. I just… I don’t want to see you right now, Mulder.” “You’re too vulnerable and you’re afraid I’ll see your weakness,” he surmised. “Which is stupid, Scully, since the fact that you’ve held on this long is proof of your strength.” “Let me think about it, ok?” He sighed. “Fine. But if you need me, you had better fucking ask.” He hadn’t been off the phone for more than a minute, when it rang again. It seemed to have become a thing, this instant response. “Hello?” “Agent Mulder, there has been a change of plans.” “Oh yeah?” he said. “What’s that?” “I can get you in tomorrow.” “Why?” he asked, something forming in the back of his mind, a spark of comprehension. “Things… things have escalated.” “Yes,” he said. “They have. You’ve been listening to my conversations with Agent Scully.” There was a long silence and then a laugh, nervous. “Not at all, Agent Mulder. Things here have changed. The balance of power is shifting…” “Balance my ass,” Mulder said. “You’re a distraction. You’ve been designed to keep me away from Scully. Well, it won’t work. I’m not coming out there.” The Informant was silent. “That’s the wrong choice,” he said. “More will die, no matter what you do. She will not return with you.” “Fuck you,” he spat. “You underestimate me, you underestimate her, and most of all, you bastards, you underestimate us. Fuck you and all those of you listening in.” “You’re a fool,” the man said. “She is already set on the path to her own destruction. It has been accomplished.” Mulder hung up then, cutting the line and swearing bitterly. He should have seen it from the beginning. Turning out into traffic, he headed for Dulles. xxxxxx That night, sitting in his narrow airline seat, he dreamt of Scully. Certainly, he had dreamt of her before, ice-cream cone dreams of rolling in their combined sweat and sinking into her like a man diving through the clouds. But tonight was different. She walked a little ahead of him on the hot sands, wearing a bikini as blue as the water, as the sky around them. She looked young, and happy, and he wanted to kiss her, to dive into the warm water and play with her. Instead, she took his hand and led him around the edge of a promontory. There, half-washed by thick white breakers, was the wreck of the Pequod. It stood, stark and black against the frothy waves, it’s tattered sails drifting across the deck like smoke. Scully pulled him up beside her to stand on the deck and handed him a hammer. They were to rebuild it, together, pulling rigging and barrels and planks of wood from the water. It was only when he had been pounding on a piece of wood for what seemed like hours that he realized it wasn’t wood at all, but some sort of strange gray metal and he wasn’t sitting on the Pequod with Scully. He was sitting on the great hulk of the alien ship, pounding on the door, asking to be let in. Scully stood a few feet away, hands on her hips, staring at him with anger and disappointment so keen they seemed to hit him like the waves. He watched her as she turned to go, walking back toward her ship, to the ship they were supposed to build together and he found himself sliding off the edge of the alien ship and scrambling after her. Don’t go, he shouted to her. I’m coming. I’m coming. He woke somewhere over Nebraska, his head pounding, his body shivering in the cold air of the cabin. The air-phone in the seat ahead of him beckoned and he dialed her number from memory. “Scully,” she murmured, clearly half-asleep. It was only six in the morning on the coast. “Hey there, it’s me.” “Mulder,” she said. “What are you doing? What’s going on?” He laughed then, hearing her usual anger and confusion at being awakened. “Not much,” he said. “What’s that noise?” she asked. “Are you driving?” “Nope,” he said. “Flying.” There was a moment’s silence and then to his enormous surprise, he heard her choke back a sob. “Mulder,” she said, “you’re coming here?” “I am,” he affirmed. “I’m coming to be with you, Scully, for as long as it takes to make this ok.” “Oh Mulder,” she said, and she was really crying then. He could count on one hand the exact number of times he had heard Scully cry. “I’ll be there in five hours. United flight 213 from Dulles. I expect the full welcome wagon.” “You’ll have it,” she laughed, her voice lightening through the tears. “You will so have it, Mulder. I… god, I’m grateful to have you as my partner.” His heart was twisting and breaking and inflating at the same time. He realized in that moment that he loved her more than he had ever loved anything or anyone. More than his sister or his parents, more than himself. It was monumental, their love, as tall as the sky and as wide as the universe and it made him want to weep with her. “I can’t believe I heard you say that,” he teased, trying to hide his sweet, tender underbelly. “Where’s that damn tape recorder when I need it?” She laughed and sniffled in the same breath. “I’ll be there, Mulder. I can’t wait.” And then, for some reason, he felt like an asshole. “Scully,” he said, lowering his voice. “I should have come sooner.” “No,” she said, after a moment’s pause. “I wouldn’t have wanted you here any sooner. I think I would have resented it, like you were trying to smother me. I had to hit the bottom before I could admit it wasn’t smothering, it was affection.” Where was the bottom, he wondered? How far down? “Affection, desire, need, love, trust,” he ran his emotions down for her. “All that and a million other things.” “Funny,” she said then, her voice soft in the clear connection. The wonders of modern technology. “I would never have thought it, but that kiss has benefited us, made us stronger.” “More open,” he said. “Yes,” she answered. “More open. I’d better go, this is going to cost you a fortune.” “I’ll see you in a few hours, Scully.” “A few hours, Mulder,” she said and hung up the phone. For a moment, he cradled it against his ear, savoring the connection. The kiss had done something, it was true, but it was more than that. It was what they had done to him, to her, before the kiss. The whole mess with Diana and his surgery and his illness and the ship, that fucking ship. It had changed them, made them aware of the fragility, the sweet sugar-thin nature of their lives. He wondered how far they would have taken the ruse, how close to the alien ship he would have gotten? He had no doubt that it had existed, that it lay somewhere in a warehouse, being dissected and studied with far better equipment and a great deal less humanity than Scully had been able to do. How long would they have been willing to string him along? Until she cracked? That could have been months, years, knowing her. No, there had to be some catalyst. Something they had not yet used, but which waited in the wings to break her. That was what he had to find, before it was too late. Because he was sure they could break her, if they wanted. And in destroying her, they would destroy him, which he was sure was the point. Alive but dead, she would haunt him, overpower him, consume him until his quest no longer mattered. What they hadn’t realized, what he had known that morning sitting in front of her apartment in the damp light of the DC winter, was that his quest, his enemies, his search had all ceased to matter in comparison to her long ago. That what kept him searching wasn’t an all-consuming need for his sister but the knowledge that Scully would search with him. She gave him permission, so to speak, to continue. If something were to happen to her… but it didn’t bear thinking about. Why, he wondered for the billionth time in the last ten years, didn’t they just kill him and get it over with? Or her? Why torture, why drag it out, why try method after method of minute destruction? It reminded him of the assault at Waco. Whose brilliant idea was it to play tapes of screaming rabbits for hours on end in the hopes it would drive the cultists out? He could have told the men there that it wouldn’t work, that fire was the only ending. Not that he had much sympathy for David Koresh, but that was how he felt sometimes, like he and Scully were holed up in their little world, trying to ignore the screaming rabbits, waiting for the conflagration. He only hoped they wouldn’t have to trigger it themselves. The plane landed at Sea-Tac with a gentle bump. He had half-expected to be shot down in mid-air, like Max Fenig, and so he walked out into the bright light of the terminal with a feeling of elation. He had won. They didn’t know it yet, but he had won. She was waiting in the back, a little away from the others, and if he hadn’t known her for seven years, through cancer and abduction, he wouldn’t have recognized her. Dressed entirely in black, like the widow at a funeral, her hair lay limp against her skull, as shapeless as her clothes had become. She had lost about fifteen pounds, he guessed, in the last month and a half, leaving her skin gaunt and colorless on her cheekbones. So fragile and delicate it might have been paper, he felt that when he hugged her he would punch his fingers through the thin membrane and delve into her body. Only her eyes seemed to still live, glittering and bright in the midst of their cavernous sockets. “Mulder,” she whispered when he wrapped his arms around her and his name sounded like relief on her lips. She knew he had come to rescue her, to save her, to drag her from the pit they had built for her. Only she didn’t know yet that it was a trap. “Scully,” he said, and kissed her, despite her appearance, to let her know she was still alive to him. Her mouth was warm and dry, and her lips scraped against his. “I’ve missed you,” he told her. “So much.” “I missed you too,” she said, squeezing his hand, mildly embarrassed by the show of affection in a way that tugged at him pleasantly. “Do you have any luggage?” He shook his head and wrapped his arm around her shoulders, careful not to leave its full weight there. “Let’s go home. I want to see everything about this case, as soon as you can get it to me.” She nodded, glad for his tenacity, understanding it. “Ok. I’ve got most of my notes at home. Come on.” They walked together, arms around one another, like lovers. Except that people stared at her as she passed. He knew they were wondering if she were ill, and he pulled her closer, nearly walking for the both of them. Once, he had seen a photograph that touched him. It was of a husband and wife in their forties, both heavy set and respectable in the way people were in the Fifties, with thick ankles and sensible shoes. The wife had been in a plane crash, but was unhurt. And the husband was carrying her like a baby, her arms around his neck, her face buried in his shoulder. He had simply picked her up, this great, sad adult woman, and was taking her home like a frightened child. That was what he wanted to do in this moment, to pick up Scully and carry her away from what had crashed into her life. Her apartment was as small and neat as a dorm room, with a crisp double bed and white curtains in the window. She had tried to personalize it, at first, and he saw pictures of her mother, of himself, on the top of the dresser. She fussed a bit, taking his bag and setting it by the bed with a little swooping ceremony. He doubted she’d want to make love, but he appreciated the gesture. She poured them both a glass of wine and handed him two fat manila envelopes and one of those expanding envelopes divided into pockets, bulging at the top. “That’s it,” she said. “The only thing I can tell you about this case, Mulder, is that I don’t have any understanding of it. None. I know I’m not you, I’m no profiler, but usually I can at least sense the meaning behind something, even if it’s lurking behind banality, behind selfishness, behind hatred. But now, each time I look at these bodies, I only see senselessness. It’s as if the whole case is a massive void with no logic or meaning or… god, Mulder, I am as lost as I’ve ever been.” Touching her face, cupping her jutting, small jaw in his hand and feeling massive, like a giant next to her thin frame, he shook his head. “You aren’t lost, Scully. You have all the information to make the map, you just don’t know where to put things to create the path.” Her hands twisted in her lap, working at each other. He saw that her normally manicured nails were ragged, bitten down and rough. For some reason, that, more than her loss of weight, sent part of him into a mad instant panic. “Mulder, what if there is no path? What if it really doesn’t make sense? What if this is the one, the one that beats us?” Though he could feel the despair rolling off her like perfume, he shook his head. “There is always a path, Scully. Sometimes it just doesn’t lead to where you’re expecting it to go.” She nodded, finally, accepting that at least for the moment, he still had hope. “I’ll leave you to look over the data I’ve collected,” she said. “If you don’t mind, I’ll just be checking my email. I don’t really want…” He nodded and she stood up and walked to the desk, pausing there with her hands on the back of the chair. “If you want to ask me anything…” “It’s ok,” he said. “I’ll be all right. I’m a trained investigator, remember?” She smiled and sat down. He waited until he heard the buzz of the modem and then opened the folder she had placed on top. The first thing he saw was a picture. It was the single most gruesome thing he had ever seen. A small child, no more than four or five, lay in a heap in a pile of leaves, her body covered in gashes, welts and bruises he couldn’t even begin to guess the sources of. She had clearly been strangled, the garrote draping across her throat as casually as a necklace. Her arms were bound above her head, and there was a gag in her mouth. Something protruded from her genitalia. He thought he might throw up. Scully coughed from the computer, a hacking cough, and he looked up. “You’re sick,” he said softly. “Bronchitis.” She looked over, her face pink from the exertion of getting the mucus from her lungs. “Yes, but it’s almost gone,” she said, unconcerned. “You’re crying, Mulder.” He knew it, but didn’t think about it until she said it. The trilling of her cell phone startled them both. “Scully,” she said and then coughed again. “What?” He could tell from her voice that something was wrong. “Where?” she asked. “All right, Frank, I’ll be right there.” “There’s been another death,” he said grimly, cursing violently in his mind. “Yes,” she said. “I’ve got to go. Do you want to come or stay here and look through the notes?” He couldn’t tell what she wanted, so he thought about it. “I’ll stay here,” he said. “I’d like to be able to familiarize myself with everything. You have Frank to go with you to the site, right?” She nodded. “Frank’s very helpful,” she said quietly. “But honestly, Mulder, he gives me the creeps. I can’t say why. I think because he isn’t you.” He smiled at her, aware he was tearing up like a sucker. She smiled back and walked over to the chair. Closing the folder before she got there, he felt her breath on his cheek. “You know I’m going to want you to stay here,” she whispered. “I know,” he said back, something stirring in his groin despite himself. “You know this will be awful,” she said then, straightening up. “This will hurt you too.” “I know that too,” he said. It was designed for them, as close-fitting as a tailored suit. She was gone for the rest of the day. He sat on the floor, spreading the evidence she had amassed around him like a sea of death. Fourteen little girls, so identical they might have been clones, all cherubic and innocent, all tortured and killed in ways that made him doubt they were dealing with something even the Syndicate understood. Their strawberry blond hair, their blue eyes… they were Scully’s children, as surely as Emily had ever been, though from the DNA tests done to identify some of the more badly abused bodies, these were not related to her. At least that wasn’t the trump card, he thought, ever grateful for small mercies. The first two murders had taken place in Seattle, or at least the bodies had been found there. The third had been found in Reston, Virginia. The next six, obviously killed at different times, though close together, had been buried in a mass grave in Mexico. A grave so brutal it practically screamed “find me!” Then the two girls in Stockton, California and the girl in Las Vegas. Finally, the last victim before today, a child found face down in a sandy grave in Sanderson, Texas. It didn’t make sense. Not only were the graves so far apart that the man would practically had to have flown them there, but each girl had died of something different. Yes, they had all been brutally sexually assaulted, but the actual cause of death varied from child to child. It was as if a different man had killed each one, though according to her data, to the fiber and tissue samples found on the body, they were done by the same man. Mulder stared at the data, trying to figure it out. It was as if they had victims, but no killer. No picture immerged of the man doing this, only the knowledge that these deaths were too conveniently terrible to Scully to have been coincidence. Fine, he thought, staring at the papers in front of him. So there was no murderer. Nothing the brilliant Frank Ryan could profile, in his limited experience. It was clear that whomever was doing these things was being told to do them a certain way. No really compulsive killer could be so unendingly… original. Well, he was no Frank Ryan. He didn’t need a clear-cut killer. He needed only to know that someone, somewhere was doing this, then he backtracked. The families. He looked at each name, then booted up Scully’s computer and sent the list to the Lone Gunmen with strict instructions and a tight time-frame. Two hours later they emailed the information back. It was as he’d thought. Now, how to convince Scully of the truth? She had to believe this was deliberate, if she didn’t, they would never solve it. But would understanding that she was, in some small way, the cause of these children's deaths be the only thing needed to destroy her completely? He thought about it. This little blitzkrieg they were waging on her mind… would she be bowled over and conquered by it? Or would she be his bit of London, energized and galvanized by anger? Well, there was only one way to find out. Mulder called Enterprise and rented a car. xxxxxx She was home when he returned, sitting on the couch with a glass of wine and a face like broken glass. “Another one?” he asked, sitting down next to her and pouring himself a half a glass. “Six years old,” she said. “Found in a garbage dump in New York, flown in today. Cause of death… cannot be accurately determined, but I believe it was heart failure. From extreme torture.” Mulder was silent for a moment. They had said it would get worse. “Scully,” he said at last, taking her hand, “I think I’ve come to a conclusion about what’s going on here.” Her face brightened slightly. “Really?” she said. “Already? Mulder, you are a genius.” “No,” he said, carefully stroking the back of her hand. “I’m not. I’m just paranoid as hell. Listen, I need to show you something. Then I’ll explain it all to you.” She sat stone-faced as they pulled up in front of victim number two’s house. Alison Kline had lived in a nice little rambler on a block of nice little ramblers. The perfect suburban home. “What are we doing here?” Scully asked. “I’ve already interviewed the Klines. At length.” “I know,” Mulder said. “But they weren’t the Klines.” “What?” she said. “What the hell does that mean?” “Come on,” he said, and stepped out of the car. She followed him to the front door and watched as he rang the bell. No one answered. “They aren’t home,” she said. “They never were,” he told her, and jimmied the door. “What the fuck are you doing?” she hissed as they slid inside. “Mulder, this is breaking and entering.” “Not if no one lives here,” he said and led her through the neatly furnished living room to the kitchen. “Open a cupboard.” “No,” she said, crossing her arms. “This is ridiculous.” He opened it for her, then another and another, all empty. “Must be dieting,” he said as he opened the refrigerator to display nothing. Then he dragged her down the hall, showing her the furnished child’s bedroom she had already seen and then the empty master bedroom, the empty bathroom, the empty closets. She sat on the couch in the living room, staring at him. “What’s going on?” she whispered. “I already interviewed the neighbors. Aside from the ‘real-estate agents’, who I think were the people you met, no one has lived in this house for six months.” “I don’t understand,” she said. “I sat here, I interviewed them. Mrs. Kline wept and Mr. Kline held her hand… Mulder, they seemed so real.” “Because you had no reason to believe they weren’t. Scully, this case is a fabrication, a lie made up to hurt you.” “What?” She was standing, glaring at him. “There are fifteen bodies that would like to disagree with you, Mulder.” “Yes, Scully, there are. Fifteen little girls that look exactly like your dead daughter. And not coincidentally, either. Look at the timing here, Scully. You are I are closer than we’ve ever been. We’re working well again, together. We’re so close to making love, Scully, I can practically feel it.” “So?” she demanded. “So, they decided we were close enough.” “You’re saying I was sent on this case, and these children were killed, all because I kissed you? Jesus, Mulder, you are paranoid… and egotistical.” “No, Scully, not because I kissed you. Because you saved me. Because you never gave up on me, because you gave up the ship for me. The kiss was just the icing on the cake. The first two girls were probably randomly murdered, they found out about the killer, gave him protection, and they’ve been running with it ever since.” “I don’t understand,” she said, sinking back onto the couch and covering her face with her hair. “Of course not. This is so monumentally evil it defies understanding. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t happening.” “So all the families are fake,” she said numbly. “All of them,” he confirmed. “I had Frohike check them today. They just don’t exist.” “But I ID-ed the bodies, Mulder. I ran genetic tests.” “To confirm identities they fed to you, Scully. You already thought you knew who the children were, you were just checking against fake information.” She was silent for a long moment, and he thought perhaps she was crying, but when she looked up at him, her eyes were hard and dry. Damn the Nazis, he thought, she had already won the battle and they would never understand how they could have lost. “So who are these children, Mulder? They belong to someone. Someone who is right now very worried about them.” “Agreed,” he said. “Let’s go home and check the missing children databases. They’ll be in there, I’m sure.” In the car, she turned away from him, watching the washed out winter streets slide by, the empty trees and dirty-ice sky. He ached for her, wanted to comfort her and make it better, but there was nothing he could say. Her cell phone rang and they both looked at it like it might be a snake, coiled in her pocket. She fished it out on the third ring and answered it. “Oh, hi Frank,” she said. “What’s up?” Mulder piloted the car back to her apartment, listening as they recounted the day’s events. It wasn’t another body, thank god. Just a nervous partner. “He wants to show me some theory he’s come up with,” she said when she’d hung up. “Jesus, Mulder, how do I tell him the truth? That he’s a puppet in this very gruesome and private war?” “You don’t,” he said firmly. “The truth will come out, and he’ll deal with it then. For now, it’s just you and me.” She nodded and then plucked anxiously at his sleeve. “Why is it always just you and me, Mulder?” “Because they made the mistake of thinking that isolation would cripple us,” he told her. “But it hasn’t. It’s made us stronger.” “It’s certainly made us more dependant,” she said wearily. “No one else would believe what you just told me.” “No one else would have to,” he pointed out. They rode in silence, pulling up to her building just as a young blond man stepped out of a Bureau-issue car. “Frank?” he asked. “Frank,” she confirmed. “Be nice. He’s just a kid.” “Scully,” he said firmly, “I am always nice.” She snorted and stepped out of the car. He watched as the young man approached her, his face worried and nervous. He was handsome, definitely. So he was to have been her distraction. Well, they had lost more than a few members if they thought that little piece of well-oiled flesh would draw his partner away from justice. He stepped up to join them. “Frank Ryan, this is my partner, Fox Mulder,” Scully said, placing a bit more emphasis on the word “partner” than was absolutely necessary. “Mr. Mulder,” Frank extended a hand and smiled warmly. “I’m so honored to meet you. We heard all about you in Drake’s profiling class. You’re a legend.” “A living legend, that’s me,” Mulder said amiably. He didn’t dislike this boy, but he did pity him. What a way to begin your career. “I was just going to show Dana a few ideas I’ve come up with, if you don’t mind,” Frank said. “Sure,” Mulder nodded. Dana. Why did cute blond men always call her by her first name when he saw her only as Scully? He wondered how she saw herself. Upstairs, he watched them sit together on the couch, Frank obviously proud of his theories. And they were good ones, sound, until you looked at the picture with his own distorted lens. Scully, Dana, listened with absolute attention, even though she must have known he was barking up a very big wrong tree. Mulder admired her then, her ability to focus, to shut out the distraction of her own mind. She had learned it, he realized, listening to him. Turning off her own disbelief while she waited for him to finish. Ah Scully, your Mulder-skills serve you well, he thought. He saw her as Frank probably did: brilliant; beautiful even as she wasted away; compassionate; kind; funny. Only Mulder saw the darkness lurking just beneath the surface, the thing that had always drawn him to her. Her utter desire for vengeance. She worked slowly, methodically, sweetly, but it was there. Those bastards would be taken down, somehow, and probably not how they expected. Frank left after midnight, no closer to the truth, though he obviously felt better about the whole thing. He seemed so untouched by the horror Mulder had seen in those pages. That, he realized, was why Frank gave Scully the creeps. He was still innocent enough to believe that in the end, there would be an equal horror coming to the men who had done the crime. Mulder knew now that wasn’t always true. Scully shut the door and stared at him, her face white and ghostly in the soft light from the desk lamp. “Hey,” he said, feeling suddenly shy. “You hungry at all?” She shook her head, still staring at him. “Scully,” he admonished, “you have to eat.” “I know,” she said. “I had some dinner before you came back. I’m really not hungry.” “Right,” he scoffed. “You’re practically bursting at the seams.” “I just want to go to bed,” she said, her voice low. “You coming?” He nodded and watched as she carefully locked the door and turned off the lamp. “What will Frank think?” he asked, batting his lashes as she stepped over to her dresser. “I really don’t give a shit anymore,” she answered, and he felt slightly saddened by the response. “You should always give a shit,” he told her. “The Scully I know always cared if others respected her.” She lifted a pair of silk pajamas from the drawer and shut it with something approaching a slam. “Maybe I’m not the Scully you knew anymore.” He stepped forward then, pulling her into his arms and rocking back and forth on his heels until she quieted and leaned against him. “You will always be my Scully,” he said. “No matter what happens. That’s how we’ll defeat them. By staying true to one another, and to ourselves.” She leaned back then, looking into his eyes. “When I was dying…” she began and he immediately shook his head. She glared at him until he allowed her to continue. Her voice was deliberate. “When I was dying, Cancer Man offered you a deal. Why didn’t you take it?” “Do you think they still would have saved you?” he said. “Maybe, maybe not. That’s not why you didn’t take it.” “No,” he agreed, “that wasn’t why I turned him down. And it wasn’t because I could finger Blevins and get myself off the hook, either.” “I know,” she said. “I know why you didn’t take it.” “Why then?” he said. “Because you had to live, even if I died.” “Yes,” he said. “That was why.” “Well then,” she said slowly. “That’s why I’m still here, despite what they’ve done to me. Because you were true to yourself, and I owed you the same.” “You owed it to yourself,” he corrected. “You were stronger than they were. You still are. That’s what they’ve never figured out. We will get through this. Though I suggest we don’t discuss it here.” She smiled in the near darkness, the only light the bright reflection of the city lights on the low-hanging sky. “Agreed,” she said. “Little pitchers have big ears.” “I have no idea what that means,” he grinned, “though I know what it’s supposed to say.” She leaned up to his ear then, pulling him down. “Do you still want me?” she asked, her voice trembling with what he guessed was fear, and he felt his hands tighten instinctively around her dwindling waist. “More than ever,” he told her, though in a million years he would never have thought it would be like this, in the middle of such desperation. It was precisely because they themselves hadn’t become desperate yet that he was agreeing to it at all. “Then get in bed,” she murmured, warm breath in his ear. “I’m going to go take a shower and wash away as much of the horror as I can. I want to come to you as I was when I left.” “I doubt a shower will do it,” he said sadly. “But holding you just might,” she told him. Her sheets were cool against his fevered skin. He rubbed his hands on the top of the blanket, enjoying the rough feel of the fabric against his palms. He heard her turn the water on and step beneath it. Trying to imagine her there, he could only see her as she had been, warm and soft and whole, or as whole as anyone could have expected. He knew he was just imagining it, that in fact she was thin and bony now, and that she hurt. But he wanted to see her as she was when she left, for her. When she stepped into the bedroom, he realized from the creamy paleness of her shadowed form that she was naked. The silk pajamas lay folded at the foot of the bed, where she had left them. “Better?” he asked, wishing he could see her clearly, but afraid of his vision. “A bit,” her warm voice answered and she lifted the blanket to slide in next to him. The feel of her knee touching his, the knowledge that she lay there, bare, next to him, was almost too much. He hesitated, not wanting to enjoy himself too much. “It’s ok,” she whispered. “You can touch me. I won’t break.” “No,” he said softly. “You won’t. But I might.” “Oh Mulder,” she laughed gently. “So much for the office Don Juan.” He smiled and slid up against her, suddenly, and he heard her suck in her breath. “You were saying something?” he said and she shook her head. Filled with desire, and especially with gratitude, he ran one cautious finger down between her breasts to her stomach. Her muscles shifted beneath his hand, alive and solid. Lowering his head to find her lips, he kissed her, feeling her mouth open beneath his, her tongue search him out. At first, he simply kissed her, reveling in it, in the warm press of her lips and the taste of her, moist and muggy like sex. He licked her lips like a kitten, sucked on her lower lip and clicked his teeth against hers. She moved beneath him, sinuous and steaming, touching him in places he rarely thought of, much less paid any attention to, but under her fingers they became hot spots on his skin. When at last he touched her breasts, she was smiling like the Mona Lisa. He could see it in the pearl-soft light from the city outside her window. Circling her nipple, he sucked at her until she sighed and ran one lazy hand up from his lower back to tangle in his hair. She tasted musky and spicy, an oriental dish. The longer he lapped at her, the stronger the taste became, until he was nibbling not her nipples, but an entire banquet of Scully. Her stomach, her hips, the spot just above her pubic bone were warm and ripe beneath him, like the soft skin of a peach. He just knew, when he bit into her, she would be as juicy and sweet. He buried his face between her legs, and she squirmed and moaned and giggled until he was nearly maddened by it. Dripping, she was dripping and slick and he sucked her like a delicious, forbidden fruit. The night seemed to be swirling around him, liquid and moist. It was so late, much later to his weary time-confused body, that he was nearly lightheaded. Or perhaps it was the soft brush of her inner thigh against his cheek when she finally came that made him sit up and swear there were stars in the room with them, entire galaxies, universes. She seemed to understand, flipping him onto his back so that he could see them behind her head, pulsing and exploding in colors he had only previously imagined. She slipped around him when he least expected it, making him gasp and rise to meet her, to be her. They were suddenly still, sure of the connection and transformed by it. Then she began to move, to ride him, and he forgot everything he had ever wanted. This was it. This was the meaning of life, the secret of the universe, this was why people climbed ancient mountains to speak to hermetic yogis. It wasn’t the sex, exactly, because he’d had sex a thousand times before. It was the way they burned together, the way she closed her eyes and leaned back, moaning his last name. It was Scully, and it was him and it was wonderful and wondrous and he thought he might be drugged, but didn’t care. His heart surged and pounded as she rose and fell, the moon to pull the tides of blood through his veins. And then he was coming, the orgasm so much a part of the whole experience that he almost didn’t realize he was there until it hit him. Knocking him backward into the softness of her pillows, it made him thrash like a dying man, drowning him in wave after wave of light and sensation so powerful, so glorious, he might have actually been in the heavenly garden and not known it. She rode it out with him, gasping and whispering to him as she shivered around him. It was only when it was over that he realized she was weeping. Not crying, or sobbing, but weeping. Deep, gasping sighs that rose from her shaking chest and pushed tears in rivers down her face. “Scully,” he moaned, “oh Scully.” He knew she wasn’t crying because he had hurt her, or even because she was sad. She was crying because in that moment they had seen all the beauty there could be in their small world and she was overwhelmed by it, knowing that it would soon be as unreachable as the sky itself. She lay down beside him, wrapping her leg and arm over him and pulling him close. They said nothing, until he felt himself drifting off to sleep and he knew he had to tell her that he loved her one more time. Now more than ever. “I love you,” he whispered. “I love you too,” she answered immediately and he felt she hadn’t quite understood. That was the problem with words, they were so overused as to be nearly robbed of their power. “No,” he murmured, “I mean…” he hesitated and she raised her head to look at him, her eyes black in the dim light. He thought suddenly of his present to her, lying in neatly sorted pieces on her coffee table. “… I mean, I want to build ships with you.” It sounded so stupid once he had said it, that he wished he could just reel the words back in. She smiled though, and touched his face with a tenderness that amazed him. “And we will,” she assured him. “We will.” xxxxxx In the morning, in the bright light sneaking in through the sheer curtain, he saw how thin she had really become. The woman he had pulled from an alien pod was gone, replaced by someone nearly skeletal. Since her cancer, she had never really regained the weight she had lost and now… now her ribs jutted up with each breath she took, her pale breasts seemed small and yet almost ridiculously fat against the translucent skin of her chest. He took in the sharp edges of her hip bones, the achingly slender curve of her leg. But when she opened her eyes, he was caught in the small peace he saw there and held, away from concern, for just a moment. “Good morning,” she said, and yawned like a cat, sticking out a pointed tongue he immediately needed to bite. “Good morning to you,” he answered and leaned down to kiss her. She tasted terrible, of course, but then so did he. They were stinky together and smiled into each other’s kisses. “I’d better get up,” she said. “We ought to get to work.” It was Saturday, he realized suddenly. No wonder they had awakened together in the full light of day. “Ok,” he said. “I’m making you breakfast.” Her face shifted for a moment as she pulled her robe around her waist, then she seemed to see her own bony feet and simply nodded. “All right,” she said. “Go take a shower.” He slid out of bed and stood before her, naked. The last few years had changed him, made him less sleek, but next to her, he felt like a great throbbing bundle of health. She stared at him and he was pleased by the desire in her gaze. “God, but you are beautiful,” she said suddenly. “I feel… I feel… I’m so ugly right now.” She turned away, tying the robe and letting her hair fall in front of her cheeks. Mulder slipped his arms around her, surprised by how little of her there was to touch. “I’ve seen uglier things,” he whispered, grinning into her ear. “Like flukemen.” She tried to bat him away, but he was stuck to her. “You could never be ugly, Scully, not to me.” He turned them together to face the mirror on the bathroom door. She stared at him, at them and then nodded. “I suppose I look better than I have in a long time, this morning.” “Nothing like a little Mulder-injection to clear you right up,” he laughed and she smiled. “I should have tried it years ago,” she said. “Go shower. I’ll be in to join you.” It was all the encouragement he needed, practically jumping into the hot water. She slid in behind him, arms crossed across her stomach. He spun her around and pushed her under the warm stream, kissing her madly. She responded, pushing her hot little tongue into crevasses in his mouth like the sweetest dentist he’d ever known. In his head he was chanting “better, better, better,” because that was what he was trying to create for her, do to her, make her. Her body dissolved in the water and he was able to touch her everywhere at once, kissing her as he caressed her breast and slipped two fingers inside her body to feel the plush softness there. Then she was letting him lift her and pin her to the cold tile with a gasp. They were crazed, wild with lust in the steaming stall. Legs open, she let him push into her and move in and out until they were both screaming with need. Never one to enjoy his own pleasure without hers, he slid his hand again between them and touched her until he felt her come around him, hot and magical. She was so light, it was like holding up a pillow. When he came, pulsing into her, she kissed him soundly and pronounced herself full. They stood in the cooling water and washed each other’s hair, slapping soap around like teenagers at a carwash. It was blissful, and then it was done. Over scrambled eggs and toast, they were quiet. Both knew that the minute he turned on her laptop, they would be re-immersed. The water was so cold and here they were, dipping their toes into it hoping they would not be shocked when the moment came to plunge in over their heads. She did look beautiful, then, her face flushed and her eyes bright. He hated to end it, but it was a false sense of security that gave them this moment. xxxxxx The Center for Missing and Exploited Children had a password-only service, and Mulder, much to his eternal disgust, had a password. They logged on and began the search. Female, aged between 4-7 years, light hair, blue eyes, missing in the last year. As name after name popped up, he felt her hand tighten on his knee. If any of these children proved to be one of the ones lying in the Seattle City Morgue, it would be proof. He tried the fourth name, a local girl, and they both watched as a familiar face popped up on the screen. It was Alison Kline, only that wasn’t her name. This little girl was Mindy Rivkin, age six, missing for two months. Scully’s face was impassive as she noted the girl’s distinguishing characteristics, her moles and scars. “It’s her, isn’t it?” Mulder said. “It’s Alison Kline.” “I believe so,” she said, voice crisp. “I would have to do a genetic ID to be sure, but I think it must be.” Mulder was sure as well. He closed the laptop and turned to her. “Let’s contact the Bainbridge Island police force and see what we can find out.” They drove to the ferry in his rental car, hoping to be able to talk freely. At the terminal, they waited, caught under the circling sea birds and fresh eddies of ocean air. “Mulder,” she said. “What if we can’t catch him? Aren’t I just prolonging the inevitable by continuing to work on this case?” He thought about it, about what pulling her away would do to her. “Yes,” he said. “But for a few days, we’re ahead of them. If we work quickly, we can beat them.” “I’m not sure,” she said, staring at the concrete-colored water at the edge of the jetty, at the fat white ferry puffing toward them from across the Sound. “What will we have accomplished that anyone couldn’t have done? If I had stayed with you instead of jumping at the first opportunity I had for professional glory, then the murders would have ended with the first two.” “Don’t,” he said firmly. “Stop blaming yourself. You no more asked for this to happen than you did for Melissa to die or for Emily’s illness. Terrible things have happened around you, Scully. Terrible things have happened around me. We are not blameless, because we make choices like all free people, but it doesn’t serve any purpose to beat ourselves senseless because evil is, by nature, attracted to good.” Smiling at him, though it was a shallow smile, she reached out to touch the scar that lay just beneath his short growth of hair. “You have changed,” she said softly. “Tell me, did they remove your guilt complex too?” “I hope so,” he answered. “Maybe it’ll help my perpetually swollen head.” On the boat, they walked to the deck and stood, watching, as Scully instructed him to do, for jellyfish. “When I was a child,” she told him and he listened intently, glad to snatch some small part of her, “my dad used to take us on the ferry to Catalina. We always watched for jellyfish, because my dad said that was how you knew the ocean was healthy.” She had pulled her hair back and looked more skeletal than before, more gaunt than when she’d been dying of cancer. He bought her popcorn from the little caf? on the boat and made her eat some of it before they tossed the rest to the seagulls that followed their wake, moving so easily it made Mulder jealous just to watch them. Bainbridge Island was small and quaint, with a red brick police station that actually had the confidence to advertise itself in a big painted sign, like the general store. Inside they found Officer Gaspardi, who was most willing to help. “Yeah, I know the Rivkins. They’re great people. Three kids, counting Mindy,” he said, leading them into his office and shutting the door. “I don’t remember calling out the FBI on this, though.” “Sir,” Scully began and Mulder let her take it in hand, “We feel we may have located the girl’s body, but we need to know more about this specific case before we begin the identification process. If it is Mindy Rivkin that I have back in the Seattle City Morgue, then she has become a part of a large and complicated federal investigation.” “I see,” Gaspardi said, leaning back in his chair and eyeing them. “What makes you think it’s her?” “Visual ID from the Center for Missing and Exploited Children. That’s all I have to go on, for now. Can you tell me anything about what happened to Mindy?” “Certainly,” Gaspardi said. “She was kidnapped from a shopping center, from the Westlake Center in Seattle. You know it?” They shook their heads in unison and the policeman nodded. “Well, she was there to buy a winter coat, from what I understand. Something of a treat, you know, trip in the city, ride on the monorail, that sort of thing. We even have what we think may be the suspect on video, if you want to see it.” “I would,” Scully said and the officer retrieved a tape from a cabinet beside his desk. Popping it into a TV/VCR combo sitting on top of his file cabinets, he rewound it a bit and pointed to the blurry shape of a little girl entering the ladies bathroom. “We’ve never released it,” Gaspardi said, “because we weren’t even sure it was Mindy. We think so, but can’t confirm it, so we didn’t want to start a panic over nothing.” The camera, out in the hall, showed nothing for a moment, until a man suddenly crossed in front of it, then turned and looked back down the hall. Scully gave a startled gasp just as Mulder reached for the pause button. “Rewind that,” she said, her voice shaking. “You know him?” Gaspardi asked, watching the two agents carefully. The tape stopped with the man’s sudden appearance and started as he turned. “Freeze it,” Mulder said and then hit the button himself. For a long moment they simply stared at it, unable to believe what they were seeing. “Oh God,” Scully whispered. “Shit,” Mulder said and realized he had found the catalyst. The man turning frame by frame and entering the ladies bathroom after a dead and tortured little girl was quite clearly Special Agent Frank Ryan. xxxxxx In the car, copy of the tape in hand, Scully was shaking. Visibly gray and shaking. She was in shock, and Mulder knew better than to try and talk her out of it. Waiting for her to calm down, he watched her turn to him and open her mouth to say something, only to close it again. “It might not be what we think,” she said at last. “I’ll need to do a DNA analysis to be sure. And even then, with their ability to plant evidence, I won’t be sure.” “It’s too perfect to be faked,” he said. “Think about it, Scully. All this time I’ve thought there had to be some final push, something to really take you over the edge. Imagine, after months of investigation, if you had found this on your own?” “I’d have killed him,” she said quietly. “Taken out my service weapon and blown his pretty little head off.” “Even if you hadn’t done something quiet so extreme,” he pointed out, “it would have been a terrible blow, both to you emotionally and to your reputation. You would never have trusted your own judgement again, and as far as trusting those around you? Forget it. And then there would have been an inquiry and they would have uncovered every rotten thing we’ve ever accidentally done. And even if they had cleared you, which of course they would have had to, you’d never be allowed to work another investigation. Scully, he was doing it right under your nose. Hell, he may still be.” “Fuck!” she swore suddenly, and began to beat the dashboard viciously, smacking her fist down onto it with a force that startled him. “Fuck.” Her voice petered out and she stopped, staring straight ahead. “I always thought he was a prick.” “Don’t,” he said. “We need you to be calm about this. This isn’t enough to arrest him, much less convict him. They can’t even prove that was Mindy. We need proof, Scully, and then maybe we can find the whole fucking house of cards he’s holding up. There are men above him, Scully. Way, way above him. We have to find them too.” She nodded, staring blankly ahead. “He raped those little girls.” “Undoubtedly,” Mulder said. “He was probably a pedophile for years. Someone caught him doing it to Mindy Rivkin and decided to use him to destroy you.” “Why, Mulder?” she asked. “Why be so extreme? Why not just rip my fucking heart out?” “That’s been tried, if I remember correctly,” he said gently. “It didn’t work.” She wasn’t amused. “I feel like I’m dying,” she said, and she looked like she might be hyperventilating. “You aren’t dying,” he said. “You’re just really, really pissed off. And you’re going to stay alive long enough to kick that smug little bastard’s ass.” “Oh god, yes,” she said, leaning back, her face flushed but calmer. xxxxxx At her apartment, she threw down her coat and paced, hands pulling strands of hair from her ponytail. Mulder watched her with concern, but also with pride. It wasn’t that he had made her what she was, but rather that he had witnessed her own gradual evolution, a gardener waiting for a tree to sprout. She was so strong, so unbendable, so indestructible. He had no doubt Clyde Bruckman was right. “So how do we catch him, definitively? I can’t take a blood sample without just cause, Mulder, and don’t you suggest secretly stabbing him, either. I want this to stand up in court.” He smiled and crossed to where she had stopped. She had become so substantial she actually exerted her own gravity, drawing him to her. Touching her cheek gently, letting his fingers free her hair from its band, kissing her mouth, her eyelids… these were things he could no more resist now than breathing. She stood still beneath his hands. “We’ll call the Gunmen,” she said suddenly. “Hack into his computer, see if he’s stored any child porn.” “That’s hardly legal,” Mulder murmured, stroking the skin just above her right eyebrow. “I’ll find a way to make it legal, should we need to. I just want to know I’m right.” Nodding, he led her to the couch and deposited her there, pressing her down until she sat still. Turning the chair in front of the desk around so he could rest his arms on the back, he dialed the Gunmen. Frohike answered, as always. “It’s me,” Mulder said. “I need some serious kung-fu, who’s up for it?” “Is the lovely Agent Scully listening to me on speakerphone?” Frohike asked. “She is,” Scully called from the couch. “And she needs a favor.” “Anything, Scully,” Frohike responded. “If you want me to rub your feet, make your bed, iron your underwear…” “Nothing so dramatic,” she answered. “I need you to hack into the Seattle Bureau office and do some digging for me.” “Seattle? No problem. Those pussies spend far too much time hanging out with the Evil Empire. We can take them in… five minutes. Windows is so easy, it’s like candy from a baby.” From the background, Mulder could hear Langley and Byers talking as Frohike worked. “Hey Mulder,” Langley called. “You ever get in to see that alien ship?” Mulder turned to look at Scully and saw the raised eyebrow, heard her shift on the couch. “What ship?” Scully asked. “Mulder, what’s he talking about?” “Oh shit,” Langley said quietly. “Sorry, man.” “Langley, that was so fucking uncool,” Frohike said. “Put us on hold, Mulder. We’re not going anywhere.” Mulder pressed the hold button and stared at the phone. He heard Scully behind him and then felt her arms snake around his neck to caress his chest. In his ear she whispered: “Am I going to want to hurt you?” “Probably not,” he said, taking her hands in his, stopping their movement and placing them over his heart. “They sent me a distraction. To keep me occupied and away from you.” “What was that?” she said. “This distraction better not have had huge breasts.” He chuckled. “No. It was large, gray and out-of-this-world.” “They offered you the ship,” she breathed. “Not ‘the’ ship, Scully. Ships, plural. A ticket into the military installation where they were being stored.” “Do you think it was the real deal?” “Maybe,” he sighed. “I can’t say for sure. They definitely have them, whether or not I’d have ever gotten close to one is another matter.” “Which explains why I was allowed to work with the one I found unobstructed for so long,” she said, sighing. “They already had two, they didn’t need mine.” “Exactly.” “Oh Mulder…” She moved around to face him, straddling his lap as if this was how they always brainstormed a case. And maybe it was. Her touch had become so immediately familiar, he could barely remember the time before it. “You gave up everything you ever wanted to come see me.” “No,” he told her. “I already had everything I ever wanted, I just came out to preserve it.” She kissed him then, hard, on the mouth, and their passion had already become an extension of her need for justice, for the deconstruction of the case. “Let’s see if Frohike has got our boy,” she said, but she stayed on his lap. “Frohike?” she said as Mulder took the phone off hold. “Tell me you’re in.” “I’m in,” he said. “Fine, can you find Frank Ryan’s computer?” There was a moment’s pause, then he answered. “Got it. What are you looking for?” “JPEGs,” Mulder answered. “Cached photos. GIFs, whatever.” “Of what?” Frohike asked. “What am I looking for?” “If it’s there,” Scully said grimly, “you’ll know it.” They sat together, listening to the quiet sounds of the Gunmen’s lab in action. Mulder ran his hands up under Scully’s shirt to feel the bare skin of her back, the protruding knobs of her spine. “You’re too thin,” he whispered into her ear. “I’m going to have to insist on real ice cream for a while.” She smiled at him and put a finger on his lips. Already her face had retained the permanent flush, the color of sex, and it suited her. He kissed her fingertip. “Jesus,” Frohike’s voice came from the other end of the line, tight and strained. “I think I’ve got what you’re looking for. Tell me these are faked.” “What are you looking at?” Scully asked. “Kids. And a blond man. And… oh fuck, you better be going to fry this asshole, Scully.” “That’s my intention,” she said. “Can you arrange it so it looks like he accidentally sent me one attached to an email?” “Absolutely,” Frohike said. “You sure you want these?” “I do. Make it look like he’s sending them out to several people in his email account and add me on. It has to look real, Frohike.” “I’ve got an email last night to a couple guys with something rather nasty attached. You want me to add you to the list and resend it? I can even fake the date it arrived. And then I can send one of the ones he sent to you to one of the guys on the list. Make him think he mixed them up.” “Perfect,” she said. “Cover your tracks.” “Always,” Frohike said. “Anything else?” “Yeah,” Mulder added. “Dig. See if you can locate who he’s working with. We have reason to believe that young Frankie may be being… supervised by some former acquaintances of ours. See what you can find.” “You’re serious?” Frohike spat. “Someone’s helping this guy do this?” “That and worse. Find anything you can, Frohike. Scully’s going to go get an arrest warrant from Skinner. I’ll stay on the line with you. Run whatever you find by me.” Scully rose from his lap and, grabbing her cell phone, disappeared into the bathroom to make her calls. “How’s she doing?” Frohike asked after a moment. “How are you doing?” “We’re ok,” he said, appreciating his friend’s concern. He thought of Frohike the day Scully had been found after her abduction, dressed in his tux and bearing flowers. If anyone deserved this woman… he sighed. “You should know something, man. We’re… together.” The little man was silent. Mulder counted the seconds, like locating the distance between himself and lightening. “That’s wonderful,” Frohike said at last. “You mess up and I’ll send your email address to every biker message board in the country with a snarky little invitation attached.” Mulder smiled. “I can’t mess up, Frohike. She’s too important.” “Damn right,” Frohike said gruffly. “Byers and Langley give you two thumbs up.” “Tell them thanks. Find anything?” “Not a thing so far,” Frohike said. “But this may take a while. Like all government employees, this guy’s got a lot of crap on here.” By the time Scully emerged with a nod from the bathroom, Mulder had the unfortunate task of telling her that the machine, aside from buckets of child porn, was clean. “That’s all right,” she said. “He’s such a pretty boy, I’m sure they’ll make good use of him in prison.” And then she smiled. Mulder’s stomach lurched slightly. Maybe she had changed, just the tiniest bit. “Let’s go get him, first thing tomorrow morning” Mulder said softly. “He’s the key to the whole thing, Scully. If we can get him to talk..." “We can, what, rest easy?” she demanded. “I don’t know about you, Mulder, but there’s going to have to be a lot of searing pain inflicted on someone before I start feeling better.” Sitting suddenly on the couch, she stared at him with weary eyes. “Don’t get me wrong, what’s happened the last two days, between us, has been wonderful. When you… when we are together, I feel like this just might be something I can recover from. But the thing is, Mulder, you can’t be there every second for the rest of my life. What am I supposed to do when I’m alone? Sitting there on the toilet, on hold while Skinner was trying to get the DA to issue the warrant, I kept thinking, what fucking good does it do? How much justice do we have to achieve before we’ve equalized what these people have done? I understand nobility. I understand morality and turning the other cheek, but honestly, if you allow this much pain to exist, don’t you have to provide more to cancel it out?” Mulder sighed and came to sit next to her, not touching her. Not because she was too distant, but because she was so close, she burned into him like a brand. “I think, Scully, I believe… and I think you believe this too, or at least you did and you can again, with time… I believe that evil is never eliminated by more evil. If you want to neutralize an acid, Scully, you don’t pour more acid on it. You drench it in base. There is more than enough good in you, in me, in what we are together to someday cancel out what that bastard has done, what all these men have done. That’s how the world survives. We just have to work a bit harder at being good. And the thing is, Scully…” This was where he touched her, pulling her hands into his own and cupping them like a man capturing a drink of water in his palms. “… when I’m with you, I believe we can be that good. I can feel it, rising within me like an oasis in the desert, Scully. You do that to me, you do that to us, and you can do that to yourself.” “I think I will need an ocean, Mulder,” she said simply, but her hands stopped their worrying and slid against his like gloves. xxxxxx They didn’t make love, at least not when they first went to bed. Scully curled into him like a baby and slept there, fitfully, snuffling in her sleep and shifting restlessly. In the darkness of her bedroom, so much lighter even at night that the liquid dark of DC, he closed his eyes to see the children as she saw them. He hadn’t asked her if she was still seeing Emily. There was no point, because she would always have her daughter there, on every autopsy table, whether or not it was a vision. That was the humanity of her, surfacing in the form of a small, strawberry-blond ghost. He wanted to rock her, to sing songs to her, to tell her bedtime stories, but he contented himself with holding her loosely, letting her roll away if necessary. When he finally fell asleep himself, he was behind her, fitted up against her with his knees touching the back of her own. She woke him sometime in the darkness, not from a nightmare, but from lust. Touching him, her small hand pumping his nighttime erection without gentleness, but with a sort of tender ache. “What’s up?” he whispered, gathering his thoughts from between the gasps of pleasure shooting straight to his brain. “I’m just doing what a million college boys have done throughout the history of time and waking you up at four in the morning to see if you want a backrub,” was the reply. He laughed and moaned as she cupped his balls and squeezed slowly. “I never had a college boy do that to me,” he whispered. “And I don’t want a backrub, but I wouldn’t mind if we made love.” She stayed where she was, sucking at his shoulder blade and rubbing her breasts along the sides of his spine. “Scully?” he murmured as she gave him what had to be the hundredth hickey on his left shoulder. “Are you ok?” She shook her head, hand still moving, mouth still sucking. Rolling over, he removed her hand and placed it on his hip so he could look her in the eye without distraction. She wasn’t crying, but her face kept twisting up like a deflating balloon. “I wonder,” she whispered, her voice cracked and thick, “if we will ever be able to just be together, without all the thousand little ghosts.” He shook his head, rising above her and hovering there. “No,” he said. “But I don’t mind them so much, you know? They feel like family. Look, there’s old Clyde Bruckman, smiling at you. Now he really is the only one not having sex. And in the corner there, there’s your sister, laughing at us because she knew all along. There’s Emily, sitting on the dresser, up way past her bedtime and knowing she shouldn’t be watching this, but she can’t help it because we are so beautiful together and she loves you, she wants you to be happy. And there’s Flukie, but he doesn’t want anything. He’s just wishing it smelled more like home.” Smiling slightly, she guided him to her and pushed gently until the first two inches of his penis were inside her. She was enormously wet, and he knew he must move forward or slip out, one or the other. He chose the most pleasurable route and slid into her until they were lying hip to hip. “We can rebuild,” he said, and his teeth were practically chattering with pleasure. “Whatever they tear down, we can rebuild.” She nodded, her fingers tracing circles in the rough stubble of his unshaved face. “I wish I was fertile,” she said, and he knew she didn’t want to have a baby so much as beat the system. “You are,” he told her, moving slowly, feeling her body grab him and hold the skin as it slid against the muscle within. “You’re the Nile delta.” “What?” she whispered and he heard the humor building in her voice. “Hot and marshy?” “Reedy,” he answered, plunging down inch by precious inch. “Full of little birds and fish and foxes.” “I’m certainly full of foxes,” she agreed as he rose again and they giggled together, breathy and light. He maintained the pace for what seemed to him like hours, but he knew it wasn’t by the number of times he was able to kiss her. “I wonder,” she gasped as he shifted and slid slowly down again, “if anyone else in the history of the world has ever felt just like this?” “This good?” he asked, speeding up slightly as his arms began to give out. “This good,” she affirmed, “this sad, this wonderful, this guilty, this…” “Alive,” he finished for her, moving faster and faster until she was opening and closing her eyes like someone drunk. “This alive,” she agreed, her voice floating as she gasped beneath him. He didn’t answer her. It was rhetorical, after all, her need to know. Everyone is that alive, he knew, at some point, but no one had ever felt as they did in that moment. She slid her hand between them, knowing he was supporting himself and unable to touch her. Seeing her masturbate nearly drove him wild. The pressure to come had been building the whole time and he had been knocking it back like a boxer, only to have the punching bag swing a bit further toward him each time. “Oh,” she moaned. “I’m going to come.” Thank god, he thought, blaspheming happily as he felt her clutch herself and him at the same time, quivering and pulsing. Freed at last, he let go and allowed the bag to knock him out, sending one long smacking shudder of pleasure from his crotch to every nerve in his body. He didn’t want to collapse on top of her, but he couldn’t help it. “I’m too heavy,” he croaked and she shook her head. “It feels good,” she said. “You were made to fit there. I don’t mind.” “Mmm,” he hummed, drowsy again, “just me or any man?” “Just you,” she soothed. “Just you.” He rolled off of her just before he fell asleep, her limp arm across his chest, her heavy breaths warming his sweat-cooled shoulder. xxxxxx They tried his home first, it being Sunday and the day of rest, but found that Frank Ryan was, in fact, a workaholic. He was also certainly surprised to see them. Sitting at his desk in his neat little office, all junior FBI man, in his suit and tie. He looked… Mulder thought he looked small perched on the edge of his chair. As small as a grain of sand, as small as a puff of wind. “Hey Dana, Fox,” he said as they entered. “Did you find something new?” Mulder was grim for him. There was no reason to be exultant. They had not stopped the swarm, merely knocked down the nest. “Frank Ryan,” Scully said stiffly, “you are under arrest for the rape and murder of Mindy Rivkin.” “Who?” he said, eyes blinking madly. “Otherwise known as Alison Kline,” Mulder said, realizing that Frank Ryan had never known his victims’ real names. Somehow, this made him even angrier. Scully continued to talk, her voice even and calm. “You have the right to remain silent…” Frank’s mouth dropped and he sputtered, at first. “You can’t… I’m not… for god’s sake, Dana!” “Shut up and listen to your rights,” Mulder advised. “You’ll need them.” At the door another agent popped her head in, stared at them with widened eyes and then disappeared rapidly. “Come on, Scully, the top brass is no doubt about to descend,” Mulder said. She nodded, snapping the second handcuff onto Frank’s wrist. “You want me to call a lawyer?” Scully asked the miserable boy, whose head hung limply from his neck as if they’d already broken it. “It wouldn’t do any good,” he said softly. “They’ll just kill me now, so I’m not worried about what might or might not happen at a trial.” “Who’ll just kill you?” Scully asked, but Mulder shushed her, anxious to do this right, get him into an interrogation room with observers in place. They found one on the second floor of the Seattle Bureau office, with little Frankie talking a mile a minute, spilling it all out around them like garbage, already used-up junk. “After Alis… Mindy, I knew I’d been caught, but they told me if I did what they asked, exactly as they asked, they’d ensure it that at the end I would be able to walk away, start a new life somewhere. What choice did I have?” “You always had a choice,” Scully said. “You could have chosen not to be a monster.” “I didn’t kill them,” Frank said dully. “I just… did… stuff to them. They took them from me and flew them somewhere and did the rest. I swear, I didn’t kill them. Except Mandy, Mindy, whatever her name was, and that was an accident.” “And the one before her, whose real identity we don’t know yet,” Scully added. “The four year-old.” Frank nodded, his face white. “Her too, you’re right, of course. What does it matter anyway? I won’t go to trial. They told me that. So pin it all on me, who cares? Say I did those awful things, if it makes you feel better.” “I can think of a few things to do to you that would make me feel a lot better, how about you, Scully?” Mulder said. “Who gave the orders?” “I don’t know,” Frank said, miserable and pale. “I don’t know their names. I don’t suppose you thought I would.” “No,” Scully agreed. “We knew you wouldn’t know. You’re too stupid to be told the truth. But we know them. Maybe not by name, but we know them. When they come to kill you tonight, Frank, in your cell, you can tell them that.” Frank shuddered and lay his head on the table, sobbing. “That’s enough,” Mulder said softly. “If you survive, Frank, I have no doubt it will be your semen Scully found on those bodies, your skin beneath their fingernails. Even if they let you live, you won’t survive long. Either the justice system or a very wise criminal will finish you off, catch you in the laundry room and beat your head in with a broom. But you already knew that; that was why you let them offer you a deal.” Frank said nothing, his head buried in his arms. There was nothing left for him to say. He was, in the end, just a sick little man, with no more clue to the grand scale of what he was being used for than the children he had been given. Scully rose and followed Mulder out, shutting the door on Frank Ryan. Assistant Director Ramparte, who ran the Seattle Office, held out her hand as they passed. “Fine work, Agents. If there really was a larger organization in control of this, we will locate them. But even if we don’t, you’ve just caught one of the most devious and evil men I’ve ever known.” Mulder shook her hand gently, but Scully only sighed and straightened her jacket. “Understand,” she said slowly, “there were other people involved in this. You will not catch them. And no real justice will have been achieved here. Frank Ryan is no more devious or evil than any stupid pedophile we’ve got sitting in any federal penitentiary, he simply had better advice.” In the car, darkness hanging around the edges of the sky despite the fact that it was only four-thirty, Scully sighed and clutched his hand like a teenage girl on her first real date. “What do we do now?” he asked. “Isn’t it obvious? We go back to the apartment and wait for the news that Frank is dead. Then we drive to the airport and we fly back to DC and write a report for Skinner that tells him everything and nothing, because that’s all we know. And the murders stop and the men who orchestrated this whole monstrous thing go unpunished long enough to find another clever way to break you or me. And at some point, Mulder, they will succeed. They have the law of averages on their side, if nothing else.” Mulder was quiet, watching the way the car headlights seemed to become shining jewels on the gray velvet of the road. It was a beautiful, clear evening, the first he had seen since arriving here. Ahead, the mountains were a dark ring on the horizon, dusted with lavender snow and jagged as if they were newly born. Before them, the city spread itself out on the hills and valleys of the Sound, Venice with much wider canals. There was so much beauty here, he thought. Too much to be sullied by evil. That was the way it worked. No matter how much blood they shed, the earth itself would remain lovely, because that was the essential nature of things. “And we have nothing,” Scully said bitterly. “I didn’t really solve a single murder, not really. And you never saw your spaceship.” He didn’t know how to explain it to her, what he saw in the cool plum light. So he simply kept driving, racing toward the apartment, to a place where he could hold her and tell her, not with words, but with what seemed to work, that it was going to get better. That just by living, they had won. That there had never been a battle at all. How could there be if the outcome had been set from the beginning? xxxxxx Mulder sat quietly on the warm carpet of Scully’s apartment, his back against her couch, his legs unfolded beneath her coffee table. She leaned over the blueprints for the model ship, her hair pulled back but falling out of the band nonetheless. She kept reaching up and brushing it from her eyes, as if it would stay tucked behind her ear. “I don’t get it,” she said. “I mean, I am an English speaker, Mulder, and I like to think I can recognize it when I see it, but this…” He smiled and patted his thighs, trying to get her to sit on his lap. She ignored him, shoving away a pile of pre-cut cotton sails and holding up a length of rigging. “Do you think they provide this so we can hang ourselves?” She was wearing her glasses. That was such a marvelous thing, to see them perched on her merry little aquiline nose, about to slide down and fall onto the blueprints. The funny thing, he’d found, about being confronted with so much death and evil was that from then on, he was nearly blinded by glory in his every day life. He knew this transformation hadn’t come simply from the awful deaths they had done their best to solve, or from the knowledge that they were so immanently destructible, or even from the strange surgery months before. And it hadn’t come overnight, either, an epiphany. It was the accumulation of all their time together, freed from their own fears and embarrassments by the knowledge that they could share it with one another. It consumed him, this quest for goodness and happiness and everything right about life. “What are we going to do with this ship?” he asked. “Sail away to a desert island?” She looked up at him, then, her face fatter than when they returned, but by no means plump enough for his generous eye. “I was thinking Aruba,” she said seriously. “You can wear that ridiculous Speedo on the beach and look lecherous and hairy and I can sit under a big beach umbrella like a wilting flower.” Then she slid, boneless as a cat, onto his lap and pushed him back against the couch with her mouth. “Scully,” he gasped, coming up for air. “Let’s do it. Let’s build that ship.” Sitting back and looking quizzically at him, she pushed more of her wayward hair from her eyes and smiled, genuinely. “We already are,” she said. “Let’s never finish it, then,” he said. “Let’s spend the rest of our lives trying to figure out that damn rigging.” Tenderly, she kissed his forehead and shook her head. “I thought you wanted to sail away to a desert island?” “I’ve come to the realization, Scully, that the destination is far less valuable than the journey,” he told her. “Mulder,” she said sternly, “haven’t you realized there are an infinite number of ships to build? Just because we finish this one, doesn’t mean there aren’t a thousand more to discover together. And just because we chose to go somewhere new and exotic, doesn’t mean we can’t sail right back. Now, about that rigging…” But he didn’t let her finish. xxxxxxxxxx End.