DARK BEYOND THE STARS 
BY Mesa 
December 1998

Category:  X, A, 
Spoilers:  U.S. Season 5, Fight the Future (movie)
Rating: R
Summary:  The bonds that tie us to one another are complex and 
tangled.  Mulder and Scully and Skinner must face the possible 
severing and reforming of alliances; Krycek and Marita make an 
unexpected gamble.
Keywords:  Mytharc
Time Frame:  Set post movie, pre-Season six

Disclaimer:  The characters and situations of the X-files are the
property of Fox Broadcasting and 1013 Productions.  No infringement
is intended and no profit will be made.

Feedback would be *greatly* appreciated. (mesa98@Juno.com)

This story would not have been possible without the unwavering
friendship and fabulous beta of Meredith. Thank you, M, for 
everything, particularly that last conversation.

Along the way, several wonderful friends also read bits and pieces
of this and convinced me to keep going.  My deep thanks to Karen, 
Deb, and Lisa.


Prologue

Arizona, 1974

Late Fall.  The mountains of northern Arizona.  Leaves already gold 
and rust and the color of dried blood - falling from the trees in a 
splendor of color that he ignored utterly.  He couldn't see anything
beyond the places where snipers might hide.  He was simply thankful
that the thinning leaves meant that it would be harder for an ambush
to be set.  

He'd been "back" for 18 months.  His physical recovery was probably
as complete as it would be.  He still had a slight limp, not 
noticeable to anyone else, but it bothered him - reminded him that
he would never be the same.  Of course, even without the physical
injuries, he would never be the same, but the outward manifestation
of that difference was more troublesome somehow.

Not yet 21, and his life had been wrenched out of recognizable shape
forever.  He had left for Vietnam a brash and confident -- ok, 
arrogant -- young man; convinced of the rightness of his decision 
and the rightness of the cause he was joining.  Now, here, back from
In Country, back from the dead, he knew none of these things any
longer.  In fact, in the darker days, which were more frequent than
anyone knew, he doubted he knew anything at all anymore.  Simply
how to survive.

But what was the point in surviving?  What was the point in not 
surviving? It was too hard to make any decisions about such weighty
matters.  That was a part of survival.  No sudden decisions.

He'd come to the mountains because he needed the solitude.  The
hospitals and rehab clinics had been crowded, noisy, intense.  He'd 
never been alone in all that time.  There was always some nurse, PT,
doctor, fellow patient there.  It had been a distraction and shelter
from his own thoughts, which was needed in its own way.  But 
finally, his body now mostly healed, he found that he needed a 
different rehabilitation.

He'd been camping for a week.  Spending time hiking along the 
ridges of the mountains, sitting quietly for hours at a time. Finally
allowing the memories of where he'd been and what he'd seen to
surface in his mind.  To surface into the daylight, so that he 
could catalog them and ruthlessly suppress them once more.

That day, the air had turned cold.  Winter, once just a threat, was
now a promise and a warning.  The wind whipping through his tent
had woken him before sunrise, and the only way he could get warm
was to get out and walk.  He decided that he would break camp and
finally head home that night.  

Home.  Jesus H. Christ.  That was a whole other nightmare to be 
dealt with, but he would think about it later.

This morning he would simply walk.  Simply be a part of this 
landscape which had known violence in its past, but was currently
quiet.  As much at peace as anywhere could be.  

It was just past sunrise when it happened.

He'd been walking almost aimlessly, following the trail along the
ridge.  Walking for the simple expedient of keeping warm.  
Throughout the pre-dawn hours, a faint noise had been intruding on
his consciousness--a plaintive wail that seemed to raise and recede 
without his ever being able to pinpoint the source.  He could not 
decide if it were real or simply one of his ghosts intruding on his
early morning solitude.

The trail opened up into a clearing of pine and deciduous trees, just
as the sun crested high enough to cast almost real light--burning 
through the soft, rosy light of dawn.

The eyes stopped him even before the growling.

A wolf.

Caught in a trap at the far edge of the clearing.

Eyes that were lost and furious and utterly defiant.

Still.  So very still.  He thought maybe he'd quit breathing.  His
hand reaching behind him for the gun he no longer carried, but
whose weight he still felt across his shoulders.

The wolf never moved.  Standing in the trap, his teeth bared, a low
growl emanating from deep in his chest, the wolf regarded PFC 
Walter S. Skinner with no hesitation. No fear.

Past the first rush of adrenaline that had rooted him to the spot, 
Skinner tried to decide what to do.  His instinct was to turn and
leave.  The wolf, although immobilized by the trap, would still be
far too dangerous at close range to try to free.  Surely the rancher
or poacher who had set the trap would be along soon.  Skinner 
realized that he simply couldn't shoot the wolf, even to put it out
of its misery.

No more killing.  Never again.  

The sudden quiet surprised him.  The wolf had stopped growling and
now simply regarded him across the 20 feet or so that separated them.
Waiting.  But for what?  He found himself gazing back.  Oddly drawn
into the ice blue depths of the animal's eyes, drowning in an alien
intelligence that spoke to him--one hunter to another.

Again, Skinner was aware of an odd keening that cut through the 
forest.  Echoing in distorted ways in the clearing and around him.
It did not come from the wolf, but it spoke to him and the trapped
animal, he could tell.  The plaintive sound cut through him more 
keenly than shrapnel.  Too much suffering.  Too much loss.

Acting on an impulse he would never, even years later, be able to 
explain, Skinner found himself crossing the clearing until he stood
as close to the wolf as he could without being able to touch him.

The wolf didn't move except to tilt his head up to maintain eye 
contact with Skinner. 

Skinner knelt, moving his hand toward the wolf, moving to free the
trapped paw.

A renewed growl shocked him.  Even more shocking was the reaction
it provoked.  He growled back at the wolf, his lips pulled away from
his teeth, the noise pulling up from the depths of his very being--a 
sound he'd never made before in his life.

The silence that followed was absolute.  Not even a leaf rustled in
the wind.  

Once more Skinner reached forward; released the trap.

The wolf stepped free, and without ever hesitating turned and limped
out of the clearing, up toward the ridge that was washed by the 
now-bright sun.

Just as it was disappearing, another figure stepped out from behind 
a boulder and joined it. Whines of joy and relief reached him where 
he sat on the forest floor.  Two pairs of piercing eyes looked back
at Skinner for a long moment before the wolf and his mate 
disappeared behind the rocks.

Wolves mate for life.  She'd been waiting for him.  She would have 
waited for him until he was free, or until he died.

The looks in the eyes of those wolves--loss, fury, need--haunted
Walter S. Skinner's dreams for more than 20 years, until he saw
that look again.  In the eyes of Agent Mulder, standing in his 
office that day.

~ ~ ~

Monday 
September 14, 1998
AD Skinner's Office

"She's gone."

No need to ask who, the raw desperation could be for only one person.
The trapped panic in the hazel eyes lasered through the office's 
dim early morning light.

"When? How?"  Aware that he was barking at the man in front of him,
but the panic in the man's face provoked an answering turmoil in 
his own gut.

"Sometime Saturday night...I think.  Why now?  We haven't been doing
anything.  Have there been any...?" Mulder was lost, babbling.

"Stop.  Slow down."  Moving from his behind his desk--trying to use
physical proximity to reinforce some control. "Have you reported
this?"

"I can't.  Missing persons takes 72 hours....it's only been 36. But
I know, I just know."  Skinner wondered how many DC desk 
sergeants had thrown Mulder out of their precincts in the past
24 hours.

"Easy, Mulder.  We'll get through this.  Are you absolutely sure 
she's missing?"

Mulder suddenly collapsed into one of the chairs in front of the 
desk, a marionette discarded by a careless puppeteer.  "Yeah.  I'm 
sure.  She didn't come home on Saturday night.  She never came 
home..." His voice was striving for a normalcy that had no hope 
of disguising the terror.

"She couldn't be at her mother's?"  Not wanting to treat him like an
idiot, but aware that the agent was reacting far beyond normal 
parameters.

"No.  I called.  Didn't want to upset her, but I had to know.  Scully
had told her that she'd be around her apartment all weekend."

Gently, trying to ease the tightness in his own chest. "Mulder, 
Agent Scully is a grown woman, maybe she just took a trip on the
spur of the moment.  She'll probably show up this morning for
work--it's still pretty early."

"No.  I just *know* she's gone.  Something's happened."  

Skinner had long ago learned to trust the instincts of the man in 
front of him, but Mulder had been known to go off on tangents.

"Look.  It's only 9:15 - "

"She's always in by 8."

"It's only 9:15.  We'll wait until she misses the 10:30 check-in 
deadline," wincing as he heard himself assuming that she would miss
the meeting, "and then I'll open the matter with Internal Security 
and the DC police. OK?"  Trying to reach through the misery that
he could already see settling about the agent. "If she's just 
overslept, she's going to be more than a little annoyed if we send 
squad cars in with sirens flashing."

"She didn't oversleep."

Skinner had a brief vision of Mulder pacing through Scully's empty
apartment, night fading into dawn, desperately listening for her
footsteps along the empty hallway.  Had he been there all weekend?
Had he been waiting for...?  He shook off the thought.

"Mulder, in the absence of some kind of evidence of foul play, my 
hands are tied until the 10:30 agent check-in cut off.  I promise, 
though...."

He was cut off as Kimberly suddenly burst into Skinner's office, her
characteristic poise shattered by an expression of fear.  She almost
skidded to a halt when she saw Mulder.

"I'm sorry, sir. I...uh...he...."  A deep breath to collect herself, 
and she handed the bulky envelope in her hand to the AD.  "The
messenger told the front desk that this was about Agent Scully, 
and that there was very little time. They called me and I ran down
immediately."  

The room was suddenly too small. "Thank you.  Is the messenger still
here?"

"No, the front desk tried to detain him, but he somehow bolted before
they could get to him...I passed the director of building security 
on my way up, I think he was going to check into it."  Skinner 
suppressed an impatient sigh.  The ironies of a Department of 
Justice agency being unable to handle basic building traffic control
were all too apparent for commentary.

There was a videotape in the package.  With no wasted motion, he
inserted it into the machine in the corner and pressed 'play.'

And then the room was much too small to contain the rage and fear
and explosive need to act.

~ ~ ~ 

2 weeks earlier
Overland Park, KS

She was really going to have to talk to Mulder about his choice 
of field assignments.  Kansas?  In late August?  She'd known, of 
course, that she wasn't joining FBI for the glamorous travel, but 
there were moments when she had to ask herself why strange and
unexplainable events never took place in nice beach resort areas.

Momentarily distracted by visions of white sand beaches and cool
breezes in tropical palms, she realized she was even more tired 
than she'd imagined.  Using her forearm to push the hair out of her
face one more time, she turned her attention back to the matter at 
hand.

It was a depressingly familiar sight.  Another dead young woman.  
Almost no signs of the violent end she'd met.  The sixth such body 
she had looked down at in the past 10 days. Bodies that hid their 
secrets all too effectively.  

She'd changed, she thought.  Forensic pathology had lured her in 
with promises of mystery and science and resolution.  Clues would
be found, toxins discovered, wounds categorized and matched with
weapons.  The study of these violent and unjust deaths would permit
her to play a part in the pageant of justice.  To contribute to the 
capture of murderers.  She had been young and naive--out to change
the world--Make A Difference.  But even past that initial youngness,
she'd still believed.  In Justice. Truth.  Answers.

Lately, though, she was no longer content with the routine of 
autopsy.  In her darker moments she thought that nothing on earth 
would stop the parade of bodies beneath her scalpel and saw and 
microscope, and that there was no point in cataloging the outrage
committed on innocent victims, because it was already done, and
they were dead.

And they were dead....

She'd lost the detachment she had once so prized.  Death was too 
close, too familiar a companion for Dana Scully these days. It seemed
far too inevitable that all too soon she would simply be one of 
those bodies on one of these tables.  

Three times now, three times in just the past 18 months, she'd been
spared.  The cancer, the fire at the dam, and the ship...there would
be a time when her luck would run out, and death was so very cold.
And so very final.  It was the final and only truth, and only answer,
and she thought maybe she was ready to stop looking so closely at
it, trying to understand these things for others, or herself.

She had long ago surrendered a claim to understanding what justice
was.  She thought maybe it was time to surrender her claim to 
understanding death and its measures and causes, and to simply live.
There were other questions, other things to be answered before she,
too, was simply another body beneath a pathologist's scalpel.

She shivered in the chill of the autopsy bay--vaguely ashamed of her
morbid thoughts, vaguely surprised at their sudden intense
manifestation.

It was not, by any stretch of the imagination, the first time she'd 
had to autopsy the body of a woman approximately her age.  Women
of her age and general build were depressingly standard prey for 
serial murderers. Her clinical distance from the bodies she worked
on had allowed her to carefully and neutrally dissect dozens of 
other such victims.  Seeing them in sections--one potential piece
of evidence at a time.

Somehow, though, tonight, far from home and anything familiar, her
precise focus failed her, and she could see only the whole body in 
front of her. Nearly overwhelmed by the sense of loss that this
latest dead woman represented.  

She refused to allow herself to look at the chart and the woman's
name--couldn't face that small detail.  But whoever she'd been, 
she'd had dreams, loves, hates, and now, in this final hour, they 
meant nothing.  They would not appear in the measurements and 
weights that Scully would record.  They might never have existed.

She realized she was swaying slightly, not quite dizzy, but not quite
entirely sure of herself.  Backing carefully away from the table 
until she bumped up against the smooth tile wall, then she slid 
down  until she sat, hugging her knees to her chest to still the
small  tremors, finally laying her head against her knees.

What was this?  Why here?  Why now?

Too much--the year had been too much.  Highs and lows.  Cures of
cancer, closing of the X-Files, chases through Antarctica, desperate
rescues, near-death again, reinstatement, and now everything was
supposed to be back to normal, only it never was.  It never had been.

But it was no time for hysterics.  There was a case to be solved,
and she so desperately wanted it to be solved, so that they could
go home.

Home.

She closed her eyes and sighed, pressing her knees just a little 
tighter into her chest.  No time.  There was never any time.  She
wanted to step out of time for just a while.  Needed time for 
restoring her objectivity, her balance.  Needed to time to analyze
who she was now, what she'd become.  What they had become.

She knew, of course, that there was now, more than ever, a need for
her to be purely honest with herself about Mulder.  What he meant 
to her, what she was beginning to realize she meant to him.  But they
had been reassigned, and immediately there had been case after
case, and there was never any time, and anyway, if there had been
time....well, there were dangers in knowing and dangers in not
knowing.

Just a little step out of time.  It was what they both needed, and
both feared, she realized.  Time to answer that last question, 
discover if there was a truth underneath all that had gone before,
between them.

She allowed herself to rest against the wall for just one more 
moment and then she opened her eyes, and saw it.  There.  Just there,
from this angle, she could suddenly see the patch of skin on the
woman's thigh that caught the light oddly.  A peculiar shade of 
yellow lurking below the blue of death.

There. It called her to her feet, back across the room, back to the 
examination of death and its mysteries.


It turned out to be the break they'd been waiting for for almost a 
week.  The point of injection of a barely traceable drug.  A drug 
that was available only to a handful of people, only one of whom
lived within a 250 mile radius.

She wouldn't tell Mulder exactly how it was that she'd finally been
able to see the mark.  The momentary near-collapse in the bay still
too raw and difficult to speak of.  Too close to too many nerves.

Less than 48 hours later the killer was in custody, and they were 
free to go home.  Justice had been served once more, but she was 
left wondering how much longer she could do this.  She couldn't 
quite bring herself to define what "this" was.

As usual, by the time they got all the administrative issues squared
away, it was too late for them to go home that night.  They booked
tickets on the first flight out in the morning, and wearily returned 
to their hotel.


Scully's hotel room
Thursday night

She'd expected him--hoped for him, if she were honest with herself.
Too tired and wired to sleep herself, she knew he'd be equally 
restless.  

The knock was perfunctory--the connecting door opening even before
 the echo of the tap died away.

"You weren't sleeping were you?"

The raised eyebrow perfectly conveyed the message that a) he already
knew the answer, and b) if she had been, she wasn't now.

Slight smile. "So, whatta you want to do?"

"Well, we're in Kansas, so I think the options largely revolve around
eating large quantities of red meat, or watching whatever's on 
television."

Oddly, he seemed to take her seriously.  His eyes intent.  Seeing her
far too clearly.

"Are you hungry?"  For a moment she toyed with the idea of turning
the words into an innuendo.  Yes, she was hungry, but to assuage her
appetite no call to room service would be required.  Trying to gauge
his mood, though, she decided that they were both too frayed for
games.  

"I have no idea when I last ate, but no, I'm not hungry.  You?"

He'd begun pacing already--a complex figure-eight pattern that 
looped him by her bed and around a chair and back toward the 
connecting door.  "Nah--just sort of ...I dunno.....restless."

She sighed and stretched back on the bed, watching him turn and
weave through the air, that suddenly seemed thicker--harder to 
breathe.  "I know.  It's over, but we're still too wired. We won, 
but sometimes it seems like a hollow victory, doesn't it?  Still so
many dead--so many losses."

He was silent for so long that she wondered if he'd even heard her,
or if his measured steps around the room had carried him to some
other plane of reality.  Then, still pacing, he answered her.

"It's always worth it."  And she knew that he was answering more 
than just her implied question.

She thought again of her moment in the autopsy bay.  "I want to 
believe that." She hoped that he couldn't hear the ache that ran just
below the current of her voice.

Now he stopped to meet her gaze head on--the connection between
them ancient and warm. "You...*we* have to believe it. We believe
it," almost a plea.  "Because men like that cannot be allowed to get 
away with those things.  Because there will be no more dead women
from his hand." Something in his eyes shifted, sparked. "Because we
are still here, and alive and together."  For a moment she thought
he was going to approach the bed where she lay, and she could feel
the heat of his body against hers, along hers....but he stopped 
himself.

She repressed what might have been a moan.  Too much, too soon. Or
was it too late?  The moment in his hallway had never been discussed,
maybe it had never happened.  She took refuge behind Mulder's 
standard weapon.

"Yeah--together for all that stupid paperwork."

He paused to grin at her. "I told you we should have just cut and run
as soon as they made the arrest."

"Yeah--but Skinner knows where we live and he would have hunted us
down like dogs."

"And enjoyed it."  

The air was suddenly lighter again.  

"So, what do you want to do?"

"Don't start that again, Mulder.  And for god's sake, quit pacing. 
You're making me dizzy."

Her tone, sharper than she'd intended, had the desired effect of 
stopping him cold in his tracks, but then his eyes met hers and 
she'd wondered what she'd actually said.  One of the hazards of 
unspoken communication was that there was always a need to be 
careful of everything--tone, words, voice.

"It's only fair, you know."  Tone suddenly darker, almost lazy. The 
sense of danger returned.

She wished she could conquer her habit of licking her lips when she
was nervous. "How do you figure that?"

"You make me dizzy all the time."  

How had they come to this place?  But she knew, of course, they'd 
been traveling here for so long.  The hallway was always there for 
both of them.  Her eyes never left his. Danger everywhere--skating
along a pond whose ice was too thin, could fracture and drop them
into deadly waters.

Her voice dropping, too, near whisper. "I don't mean to."  Gliding, 
gliding, if you will skate, so will I.  Because the water is deadly, 
but enticing.  

"I know."  Beginning to approach--strange attractors circling each 
other in space until the gravitational pull of one finally overcomes 
inertia.  But was he falling into her atmosphere, or she into his?

"You don't even know you do it, but you make me dizzy.  You 
anchor me.  You free me.  You hold me to reality even when it's 
the last thing I want to see.  You make me...whole."  Sinking to 
the bed so that he sat looking down at her.  Eyes blazes of onyx 
in the inadequate lamp light.  And there were those words again.

It occurred to her that she should sit up--meet him eye to eye, but 
there was something bright white unwinding in her stomach, and 
reaching up to coil around her heart.  She concentrated on 
remembering how to breathe.

He seemed to be waiting for something--or maybe it was simply that
he, too, was reminding his lungs that they needed to keep bringing 
oxygen in.  It appeared that it was her turn to say something.  He 
seemed so serious, needing her to believe.  But she had always 
believed in him, of course.  It was herself....

They were locked into this moment that was locked outside of time 
itself.  So many cliches flashed through her mind--poised on the edge
of an abyss, on the side of bridge, an inch from the fire--until 
nothing was left but the moment, and Mulder, and Mulder's eyes, and
what was living there.

In that moment she saw clear through to his soul, and saw all the 
pain and longing and need and fury that resided there, and saw that
she was in the middle of it all, just as he had so long resided in
the center of her heart.  She felt the last bit of her resistance 
give way--he was right.  Nothing mattered but that they were
here--together and alive.

She saw the change in her eyes register with him, and the flush that
stole across his face.  But he still he didn't move, and neither did 
she.

Not a word, not a sound from either of them, except the ragged 
breathing that shook their frames.  She thought if he touched her
that she might spontaneously combust--simply disintegrate into 
individual molecules.  

She wanted to touch him--to reach across the tiny space that 
separated them.  But was stopped by habit, and that old friend 
and enemy:  reason.  

It was too soon after the ending of a difficult case, they were too
tired--nerves too close to the surface.  

She started to reach toward him again, and he leaned toward the 
motion, but she dropped her hand before they touched. He nodded, 
almost imperceptibly--regret, humor, knowing blended in the depths
of his open eyes.

A pulling back that felt as though they were moving through 
quicksand.  So hard to move, but necessary to prevent drowning.  Not
here, not now, not knotted into a thousand tangles by the case and
the time on the road and the strangeness of their surroundings.

Soon, soon. In time, they would touch.  In time they would talk.

Time.  Time to live with this new knowledge.  This new heart.

Very soon.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Unknown location
September 7, 1998

"Traitor."
"Liar."  Voices low, venomous, echoed in the unfurnished space.

The slam of his body against the concrete wall barely registered as 
a dull crack, as the eager, insidious mouth fastened on to his, 
threatening to divest him of the remainder of his limited supply of
sanity.

Fuck.  It was madness being involved with her, but a madness that 
made a certain rational sense, and anyway it was so fucking good.  
So good.

Tangling his hand in the golden strands, Krycek allowed himself a 
passing whimsical thought that it was such a fucking cliche that 
they traditionally branded each other with hurled epithets as part 
of their foreplay, before returning his whole attention to the matter
at hand.

She tasted of lies and honey and cardamom--so refined, but with an 
undertone of raw danger and something just slightly out-of-control.

Double agent?  Triple agent?  Which of them was less trust-worthy?
Difficult at this point to assess, and really, who cared? 

She moaned slightly as he reached down to roughly caress her breasts
--her hips grinding shamelessly against his.

Heat. Lust.  A moment's connection that had no before or after.  It 
satisfied their base needs without the danger of actual involvement.

And, he had to admit she was entertaining as hell in bed.  The 
things she knew....

As always, it was fast, hot, furious, and slightly hollow.

No afterglow for them, although she did light a cigarette, a habit 
that made him vaguely uneasy.  She smoked Morleys.

Exhale. "It's a new plan.  They will betray them."

It surprised a genuine laugh from him.  "What else is new?  They 
betray everyone eventually."  

"Yes--they betrayed you, but you were always too dangerous."  From
 any other woman it might have sounded coy, flattering.  From Marita
 it merely sounded bored.

"So, why come to me with this information?" No trust between them 
at all.  Even here and now, and after what had just happened, it 
could still be an elaborate trap.

"Because."  A pause, and for the first time ever he saw her a little
afraid. "Because we have both housed.....it....them."

A moment of swirling, inky silence between them as they relived 
private terrors.

"I've been vaccinated--as, I think, have you."  Her voice flat, 
almost clinical, trying to drive away the nightmare of sentient
possession.

A bitter laugh this time--gesturing with the prosthesis.  "Just a 
little late...But yes--I didn't give that Englishman *everything*
I had."

"It makes us safe.....safer....for now."

It was an angle he hadn't considered.  "You think there will 
be....a mutation?"

"Why not?  If you were hell-bent on colonizing and had that kind 
of technology and science at your command, wouldn't you do a little
DNA-tinkering?"  

It really didn't do to underestimate her.  She was almost certainly 
a double? triple? agent, and she had survived this long because 
she was most definitely *not* stupid.

"So, you think our best hope is...?" He trailed off, wondering with a 
near desperation who he thought he meant by "our."

"We have to beat them at their own game, and she's the key."

"Are you sure about her?"

"Yes--she's the only one."

"How much time do we have?"

"Almost enough."

The concrete wall hadn't gotten any softer.

~ ~ ~ ~

Dale's Chippen Nightclub
Washington, DC
Saturday, September 12

Why had she come to this.....this place? What had she been thinking?
She was just too....old? tired? jaded?  for this sort of thing.  
And, when had *that* happened?  Well, that, at least she knew.  Five
years.  Five years ago.

She settled back in her chair, quite sure that her sigh wouldn't be
heard over the thumping music.  In order to pass the time, in what
was turning out to be an excruciatingly long night, she began 
counting things.  529 individually flashing lights around the stage,
104 moderately drunk and rowdy women, 3 way-over-developed,
over-oiled male *specimens* (she couldn't even think of them as 
men), and 1 very bored and far-too sober FBI agent.

Lee's bachelorette party was in full swing, and Scully was having a
hard time remembering why she came.  

Ok, it had seemed like a good idea at the time.

For all that the X-files team was something of a running joke among 
certain segments of the Bureau, Scully had long been the focus of 
an odd sort of hero worship among some of the younger female agents.

She was perfectly aware that some of the young things who approached
her wanting to talk about "career paths," and "glass ceilings," were
really just trying to befriend her in the hopes of getting close to
Mulder.  But, there had been a handful of students and trainee 
agents over the year who had become, if not friends exactly, then 
closer acquaintances than she normally made.  Young women who had 
a certain fire and drive that reminded her of possibilities and a 
time when she thought she could make the world make sense.

Periodically these young women would invite her along on a "girl's 
night out" at a bar, or a restaurant.  Even less frequently, she 
would accept--trying to fit back into the life that she once thought
she would be claiming when she graduated from med school and the
Academy.  Lee's bachelorette party had been an invitation she'd 
actually wanted to accept.

Lee was a favorite of hers--a brilliant student with a quirky sense
of humor and an ability to make intuitive leaps of deduction that
she had only seen paralleled by Mulder. She was marrying a 
genuinely good guy, and Scully was delighted.  She'd just forgotten
how annoying these types of events could be.

Under the pretext of getting another drink, she surreptitiously moved
to the bar, where it was marginally quieter.

"Another club soda and lime?"

"Yeah."  God, even her drinking habits were getting staid and boring.

It was a major relief when her cel phone went off.  It was, 
ironically, a wrong number, but it was the perfect excuse to make
semi-regretful excuses and slip away.

Driving home, winding through the dark and nearly deserted streets
of downtown DC, taking the turns on autopilot, she found her mind
turning and wheeling in unfamiliar waters.

How had she strayed so far away from "normal life"?  When had it 
become impossible for her to simply go out and enjoy a night with 
The Girls?  When had she lost all ability to make small talk?  
So--how do you deal with giant sewer flukes?  Shoot them?  Sever 
them?  No, small talk was just one more casualty....

Normal life.  An oxymoron, perhaps.  Maybe simple illusion.  Was a
house in the suburbs with 2.4 not-exceptionally bratty children and
a reasonably perfect husband still even possible?  Would she want 
it if it was?

Missy would have had fun tonight--known how to lose herself in
the moment, go with the flow.  An ease with other people had been 
just one of the many things that Dana secretly envied about her 
free-spirited sister.  Missy had had a generosity of spirit that 
reached out to encompass all she met.  It was so hard, by contrast,
for Dana to even meet people, let alone let them close enough to 
become friends.

To let them closer than that was.....nearly impossible.  But then 
there had been Kansas, and a recognition that sometimes barriers
were less a protection than something to hide behind, and that it 
was time--past time--to stop hiding.

Kansas....we're not in Kansas anymore, Queequeg.  Mulder...she...
they.... they had breached the last barrier between them, and then 
carefully re-erected the barricades.  In typical fashion for both of 
them, they hadn't spoken of that night in her hotel room.  Not the 
next morning at breakfast, not on the plane ride back.  Not at 
work the next day.

But there was something in his eyes.  A warmth that had always been
 there, she now realized, but that he let closer to the surface now.
  In glances that he allowed to linger.  She wondered how she 
betrayed herself.

And now she was driving heedlessly fast--past the turn for her street
 in Georgetown--on and on, across the bridge toward Alexandria.

Lights. Bright, cutting across her field of vision, blinding, shapes
 flying toward her, instinctively moving her foot to the brake and
 reaching for her gun, but there was no time and it was too late 
and it was too late, and NO!  Not them....not them.

Later she would be impressed by their planning--their ability to
capture her in the middle of a fairly busy DC street with almost
no notice.  To take her on her way from a place she hadn't intended 
to go, on her way to a place she hadn't planned to be. But that was
only later, when she had far too much time to think.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

September 12, 1998
Running path along the Potomac

.....eleven, twelve, thirteen.

One, two, three.....it amused him, this inane counting.  The 
pounding, driving, monotonous counting to thirteen and then beginning
again.  Thirteen--prime number, unlucky to some, lucky to others.  
An awkward age, an awkward number.

On and on....to thirteen and then back to one.  On and on he ran 
through the cool night.  Mindless, heedless to everything but the 
need to put one foot in front of the other, to take the next stride.
He felt his body loosen, fall into the rhythm and stride of the
running, the physical machine taking over.  Pure exertion and 
movement.  The voice in his mind quieting, lulled by the regular 
beat of his footfalls, the drumming of feet against pavement.

The maelstrom of thoughts and memories that jumbled randomly 
through his mind at most hours, grew quieter still, and then there 
was near-stillness.  Peace.  Rare, elusive.  Sometimes it seemed that
that was really what he had spent his whole life looking for.  
Harbor from the storms that blew so callously through his life--
wrecking devastation, laying waste to home and family, friends, 
loved ones.

Until he had finally become the storm, or had surrendered to it...at
times he wasn't sure which.  He only knew that now he, too, trailed
wreckage behind him.  It strewed the landscapes of his memory. 
Wreckage, loss, ruin.

He ran faster and harder still.  Running, he mused, was a far too 
symbolic activity for him--for someone like him.  But it was in 
running, in the mindless giving over to pace and rhythm and flow 
that the ease came, the escape.  There was so little else in life 
that he could control and hold to such a linear course.

There had been times when he'd been offered shelter from the storms,
or at least the chance to control the winds.  But offers had come 
from smoke-filled corners and couldn't be trusted.  Anyway, the 
cigarette smoking bastard had never understood that it wasn't the
power that interested him, it was the peace.  The quiet.

And now, and now......

....twelve, thirteen...one, two, three....

searching for the still center of his turning world, his tumbling
mind, and she was there.  Representing both turmoil and peace.  
Hope and despair.  All the contradictions of mystery and life.

Scully.

Of course.

She knew.  He knew.  It had smoldered between them for so long--that
truth--sparked to conflagration for a brief moment in Kansas.  And 
they'd backed off.  His steps faltered just slightly as he considered
that.

They had been right to back off--the emotions from the case still too
 raw and close to the surface, the fatigue of too many nights without
 sleep, or nights disturbed by nightmares.

But now, tonight, he couldn't remember any longer what they were 
waiting for.  What he was waiting for.

He turned his steps toward home.

~ ~ ~ ~

Skinner's Office
September 14, 1998

Time severed.  Past disconnected from future.  Trapped in the endless
now that looped and looped and looped, Skinner wondered how 
exactly he'd gotten stuck on this level of hell.

Shit.

Not strong enough.

Fuck.

Better, but still not enough.

"Jesus Fucking Christ!"

Closer yet, but not quite enough.  Still, his yell had probably been
heard several floors down. He couldn't bring himself to care.  He 
saw Mulder flinch at his crude shout, but thought it was simply
that he had managed to externalize what the agent was thinking.

The tape was a nightmare.  

It was simple--crudely lit, badly directed, but powerful in a 
visceral and unforgettable way.

An anonymous cinder-block room.  A simple chair.

A blindfolded woman tied to the chair, today's newspaper held up
 so that the headline was clearly visible.

A blindfolded woman, who should have looked like the victim she 
clearly was--a trickle of blood running along her cheek from some 
unseen cut at her hairline--but who instead sat ramrod straight.  
Defiant, controlled, furious.  He could tell she was furious simply
from the way she sat.

Because of course the woman was Scully.  

The tape ran for 3 minutes.  180 seconds of sheer gut-wrenching 
horror.

The woman never moved.  The genderless arm holding the newspaper
in front of her never wavered. The only movement was the slow 
rolling of drops of blood in a tiny rivulet along her face.  Then the
tape ended.

They stood there--the former Marine and the agent.  Shocked, 
motionless, expectant.  Waiting for a demand, a command for ransom,
for information, for a trade, for....something.

But there was nothing.  Nothing but the harsh breathing of the men
transfixed by the image they had seen.

Skinner finally stopped the tape, rewound it, and started it again.

180 seconds later, they knew nothing new.

"What the fuck - "
"What the hell - "

Stop.  An exchange of glances that said everything.  Skinner moving
with efficiently controlled motions to his desk, as Mulder picked up
the remote and rewound.

"Get me VCS.  Now." A brief pause as the lines transferred. "Johnson?
Assistant Director Skinner. Get a team of profilers, kidnapping 
experts and special agents up to my office, NOW!"  

Mulder hit play.

"I don't care who's out, I expect a team up in here in less than 5 
minutes.  There are no other priorities."

Mulder wondered how it was possible that he was still breathing,
that his heart continued to beat, when he was quite sure it had just
been ripped from his chest and tossed onto Pennsylvania Avenue 
below.

She was breathing.  He could see that much.  And it was today's 
Washington Post.  Desperately trying to cling to some semblance of
rational thought, he began trying to calculate how far away that
meant that they could be.

The first Posts were probably printed about 3 a.m.  There were at 
least 2 different printing plants in the DC-Maryland-Virginia area.  

So she had still been alive....he ruthlessly suppressed the thought.
The calculations.  She was alive.  She was alive.  She was alive. 
It was a mantra.  A lifeline.

Skinner's conversation become a barely heard background as Mulder
counted each breath she drew.  As he scanned for shadows, colors,
anything.

But there was nothing.  The tape was a taunt.  Nothing more. Whoever
had her did not intend to ransom her, exchange her.  The kidnapper 
was rubbing it in their faces.  They had Scully.  Arrogant, fucking 
sons-of-bitches.

They had Scully.  Oh god. Why now?

He hadn't realized that he'd voiced his distress aloud--something 
almost like a whimper.

He felt Skinner's solid presence behind him.

"Easy, Mulder.  We'll find her."

He stopped himself before he allowed the automatic bitter reply to
be said. But will it be in time?  This time?  She'd been taken again
--why her, why now?  His mind turning in endless repetitive circles.
Why now?  Why now?  We were so close.  Why couldn't it have been 
me?  Why now?

"Yeah.  We'll find her."  Aware that his tone was flat.  He somehow
sensed Skinner's worry, but then Johnson and the VCS kids burst 
into the office, and the tape began again.

Skinner didn't make him leave, for which he was pathetically 
grateful.  Under ordinary circumstances, he knew, he would have
been banished from this conversation, these strategy sessions.

Too close to the case--his partner.  As if somehow it was better to
exile half of a partnership when the other half was missing, or in 
danger, or in trouble.  He'd never understood the logic of that, and
sent a silent prayer of thanks to the powers that were that Skinner
hadn't enforced the rule.

But he was too close.  He knew it...he'd been too close for a long
time.  

There had been a shocked, appalled hush as the agents watched the
tape.  Every frame of it already imprinted on his brain, Mulder had
walked away from the group to stand staring blindly at the street 
below.

As the room exploded in outraged shouts and furious questions, and 
imprudent theories being tossed around, Mulder found his mind
pulled back to just 36 hours previously...

He'd cut his run short.  Turned and dashed back to his apartment as
though the hounds of hell were at his heels, but in reality it had 
been the vision of what could be ahead that drove him heedlessly
onward.

He'd showered and changed in record time and then found himself
parking in front of Scully's with no clear memory of how he'd gotten
there.  It hadn't mattered. He was there--her place, the only place
he needed to be.

The windows of her apartment were dark.  He'd known that she had 
been considering going to Lee's bachelorette party, and figured that 
she simply hadn't gotten home yet.  It was a pleasant fall evening, 
so waiting was no hardship.....

But the waiting had gone long--the women must have gotten rowdy.
He had a sudden vision of a flushed and vaguely tipsy Scully 
stuffing dollar bills into some oily mesomorph's g-string.  He shook
his head--nah, wasn't her.  More likely, she was the designated 
driver and taking people home. With a rueful smile, he considered 
how irked she'd be that he knew her that well.

But the vision of flushed and vaguely tipsy Scully had a certain....
appeal, and abruptly his car seemed too confining, his skin a little
too tight...he need to move, to stand, to stretch.

Without a conscious decision he found himself in her house--moving
effortlessly among her furniture, her possessions.  For all that
he'd spent relatively little time here, he *knew* this space--her
space.  He knew her.

He was shocked when the Sunday morning sun woke him--streaming
in through the blinds that had never been shut--finding him dozing
in her chair.

His first thought was that she'd come home and simply left him 
sleeping.  He sheepishly thought he ought to go out and get her some
coffee and bagels for breakfast.  Maybe caffeine and an appropriately
apologetic expression would allay her justifiable anger at his 
invasion of her space. She hadn't even covered him up with a blanket,
like she usually did on the couple of occasions he'd fallen asleep 
at her place.  She must have been ticked.

Coffee.  Really good coffee.  He'd go to the Starbucks down the 
street....

But first--he'd just peek in on her.  Just a peek, one small look.

She hadn't been there.

She had never come home.

The leap from sheepish worry to blind panic was instantaneous.  He'd
flown through her apartment, heedlessly opening doors, turning on
lights.  Like a child in the final stages of a lost-and-found game
--opening cupboards, closets, looking under tables.  

She wasn't there.

He'd picked up her phone and begun calling 911 before he made 
himself stop.  Take a deep breath.  Consider possibilities.  

She could have spent the night with one of her friends.  Might have
gone on to her mother's.  Might have...

Might have had an accident--be an in a hospital somewhere, bloody,
hurt, alone.  Might still be somewhere needing his help....

Oh god.

Scully.  Where are you?  

He'd spent another fruitless half-hour, pacing about her house, 
expecting at any minute to hear her footsteps along the hall, to see
her raised eyebrow asking him exactly what the hell he was doing
there, to be warmed by the fire of her.

She didn't come home.

He'd finally left, and spent the rest of the day calling her cel 
phone and her answering machine.  In between calls, making odd, 
restless excursions to places he might find her--cafes he'd heard
her mention, bookstores she'd talked about.

Through all of it, he kept imagining the worst--half-laughing at 
himself for an overactive imagination.

It never occurred to him that he could have under-estimated the 
situation....

"....Agent Mulder?"

He turned with a start to realize that some earnest young man was 
looking at him with an expression that managed to mix pity, worry,
and a vague awe.  He seemed to be asking some kind of question.

"I'm sorry, Agent...?"

"Scott, sir."

Sir? "I'm sorry, Agent Scott, you were saying something?"

"Yes, I was wondering if you'd be willing to brief us on when and 
where you last saw Agent Scully?"

The morning stretched interminably into afternoon.  Questions and 
questions and theories and implausible guesses, but no answers.  No
answers at all.

~ ~ ~ ~

Unknown location in New York City

The room was dim.  It always was.  Idiotic, when you thought about 
it, really.  Some of the most powerful men in the world continually 
gathered in a place with insufficient light.  He shrugged mentally
and decided that his erstwhile colleagues had more of a dramatic
flair than any of them would ever admit to overtly.

The conversation swirled around him--eddying and churning, carried
on a current of fear and adrenaline and a sense of lost options.  He
drew another deep drag from his Morley and maintained his 
carefully neutral expression.

"Are we sure this is a wise plan?"  The speaker's voice was level, 
assured, but there was vague worry around his eyes.  He was among 
the oldest of them, but also among the least powerful.

"Do we have any other options?" They had been debating the issue for
 hours, and the Asian's question had the ring of mere formality.

"There are always options, gentlemen."  The surprising dulcet and
very irritating voice of the smoker floated into the conversation 
from the corner where he lounged.  He was aware that he was
barely tolerated by most of his colleagues, but that actually 
amused him more than anything else.  Years of playing the Game had
left him with the clear understanding that everything was transient
--annoyance, victory, knowledge, faith, even death itself.

"Yes," in his impatience, Strughold sounded even more Teutonic 
than usual.  "Of course there are always options--they just aren't 
any good."

"In any civil war, it is unwise to chose sides before you make a full
analysis of the situation.  We don't even fully know how many sides
there are in this particular battle. I greatly fear that we are 
acting hastily, simply to give ourselves the illusion of doing 
something."  It was odd to be the voice of caution--an unfamiliar 
role.  He realized it gave the others in the room pause.  Briefly.

"Does it matter?  We do have to do something.  If we continue to 
just sit here, we allow ourselves to become lambs to the slaughter.
We must execute this trap. Lure in the rebels.  They are an 
unknown quantity and therefore inherently more dangerous than.....
the others."  Rodriguez, the representative from the Mediterranean 
contingent gave voice to the position that the others had been 
coming to for some time.

"Can you be so sure about that?  Our experiences this past summer 
would suggest that our long-term "allies" are perhaps less 
trustworthy than we thought."  And indeed, the men in the room 
knew even less than he did about the evidence of the colonizers' 
perfidy, but what little they knew should have been enough to make
them more cautious.

"Trust was never fully the issue.  The plan stands, gentlemen.  The 
trap will be laid.  We will move forward." Strughold concluded the
meeting.  It was a not an ideal plan, by any stretch of the
imagination, but these men needed to make a decision, and so 
had defaulted to the German's plan.

Watching the others file out into the New York City twilight, the 
smoker wondered if his resurrection had really been worth it. Fools.
Impatient, short-sighted fools.  Still, they had power, and if he 
stuck around long enough, he might wind up being the last one 
standing.

~ ~ ~ 

Skinner's apartment
Thursday, September 17
3:40 a.m.

The dream was the same, but not the same.  He was no longer young,
he moved through the woods wearing the battle-fatigues of his youth,
but in the body of the 40-something AD he had become.  He followed
the keening of the trapped wolf into the Autumn glen.

The clearing was somehow both narrower and larger.  Trees loomed in 
impossible heights and surreal directions.  The breeze blew cross-
ways, and there was the smell of smoke in it.  Crisp, sharp, 
dangerous.

The wolf's eyes still beckoned to him.  Pulling him forward at the 
same time that the ice-blue depths warned of a lurking danger. 
Skinner suppressed an impulse to look behind him.  

Forward, steadily forward.  The wolf was in pain.  It was imperative
to free him.  Somehow freeing the wolf would free him as well.  As
if a simple act could redeem the complex betrayals in which he had 
participated.

Even in his dream, he was aware that time had tangled.  That the
wolf and clearing of his youth had somehow expanded to capture 
him, unaware, from the present.  But the need to act remained. He 
had to free the wolf.

This time when he reached the wolf, there was no growling.  Only an
ineffable sadness in the wolf's eyes that riveted him to the spot.  
A simple acceptance of a fate that Skinner couldn't even guess at.

Then he knelt to examine the trap.  It, too, had changed.  Horrible, 
rusty, convoluted twisted bits of razor-sharp metal encased the 
wolf's foot--its complex design breathtaking in its snarled 
malevolence. As he searched for the release mechanism the fiendish
design of the implement became clear.  If he opened it, the trap 
would sever the wolf's leg entirely.

Rocking back on his haunches, Skinner looked into the wolf's eyes 
again.  For a moment, he saw the defiance that he remembered, until
 it was overtaken by a resignation that was the most frightening 
thing Skinner had ever seen.

Moving as best he could, the wolf awkwardly offered his throat.  
Submission.  A request for a more merciful death?

Skinner awoke--furious, frightened, afraid.  Alone.

********

Unknown location
September 17, 1998

The first two days or so had passed in a blur of light and dark and
shadows, a surrealistic collage of moving, bending shapes that 
finally resolved themselves into the all too real faces of Alex 
Krycek and Marita Covarrubius.  It had not, after all, been simply
another bad dream. Or if it was, it was certainly not one that 
showed any signs of ending. In a moment of dark humor, Scully
found herself wondering if it had been worthwhile to return to 
full consciousness.  

The pure white hot rage of seeing Krycek's face had burned away the
last of whatever drugs they had used to knock her out and keep her
compliant while they transported her...wherever it was that she was.
The searing clarity of her fury had initially frozen her in stunned
inaction, and then she had exploded into action--lunging toward 
him, almost reaching him before that blonde, who was stronger than
she looked, had yanked her back and pulled a gun.

Krycek.  

It was hard to even know how she felt about ....that man.

Mulder had long ago told her of his suspicions that Krycek had 
somehow been instrumental in her abduction.  The missing time in 
her life.  She also knew that Mulder thought Krycek was probably
responsible for killing his father.

And here she was again--at his mercy.

The thing that frightened her most of all was that, relatively 
speaking, Krycek did seem the more...merciful of her captors.  It was
at that point that Scully found herself wondering if the drugs 
had fully worked their way out of her system after all.  But there
was just something about that blonde woman.  Something cold and
calculating and not fully human. Almost reptilian.  

Scully shivered briefly--she was letting the situation get to her 
more than she should. She tried to rationalize her instinctive....
fear of Krycek's accomplice on the grounds that she was simply the
more unknown quantity.  Better the devil you know, Dana?  In the 
end, she supposed, it probably didn't matter a great deal.  They had
taken her--neither was her friend.

The question, though, was who was her enemy?  Why had this happened?
Why now?  To what end?  Nothing that had happened since she got 
here gave her any insight into what was behind this maneuver.  

In fact, boredom seemed to be the principal danger.  She'd had 
three days of pacing. Three days of learning every last little crack
in each of the walls.  Of memorizing the 17 separate and distinct 
water stains on the ceiling tiles, which she was seriously beginning
to contemplate naming, simply to have something else to *do*.  
Three days of wondering exactly the hell was going on.

As usual, it didn't make any sense.  That in and of itself should 
have been reassuring, but Scully decided that she simply wasn't 
going to deal with the fact that her life had come to the point 
where abductions could be classified as "usual," and that she didn't
even expect *those* to make sense.

The problem was that she had nothing to do but think and mull things
over.

Dropping abruptly onto the bland bed that occupied one side of the
room, she stared up at the darkest of the 4 orange-y water stains
(Fred), and finally let herself think about the latest dark insanity
to stain her life.

Fact:  she'd been abducted by Krycek, a rogue ex-Agent, and Marita, 
whom she had not met previously, but whom she knew had been feeding
information to Mulder at some point or another.

Fact:  they had drugged her long enough to get her here, but since 
then had studiously left her alone.

Fact:  they were feeding her regularly, and had made no attempt to 
torture her beyond the one odd incident.

The second morning after they'd taken her, she had been awoken by
someone tying a blindfold over her eyes.  She'd been hauled roughly
out of the bed and tied to a chair, although not too tightly. Blinded
by the cloth, her hearing muffled by the blood roaring in her ears
from the adrenaline coursing through her veins, she was momentarily
disoriented, completely lost.

A muffled and almost inaudible voice  muttered "sorry," and then 
there had been a sudden stab of pain at her left temple, followed by
the wet stickiness of what she knew to be her own blood.  Then 
nothing.  As the sound roaring in her ears quieted, she'd been able
to distinguish the sound of a video camera running.  She counted to
nearly 180 and then heard the abrupt snap of the camera cutting off.
There was an odd rustle of paper, then the sound of footsteps 
withdrawing and the door shutting and locking behind them.  

It had taken her less than 10 minutes, as best she could estimate, 
to undo the loose bonds around her wrists.  She'd removed the 
blindfold to find herself alone.  Since then, she'd seen no one.

It was that last fact that disturbed her most of all.  She was 
increasingly positive that she had been videoed, which begged the
question of who had received the tape. Somehow, she was sure it 
was Mulder.

Mulder.  He was a fact of her life, too, only she didn't know how to
define him anymore.  Except that he was elemental.  Necessary.  
What was this doing to him?  Did he think her dead?  Was he 
looking for her?  

She shook her head, allowing herself an almost fond smile.  
Completely inappropriate under the circumstances, of course, but it
was almost getting to be funny.  The searches that they each 
undertook for the other.  The searches that inevitably led them back
to each other.  Of course he was looking for her...unless.  Unless
he'd been taken, too.

She froze on the narrow bed, paralyzed in fear for the first time 
since her ordeal had begun.  Mulder.  Was he ok?  Was he somewhere
in a room like this?  Did he even know she was gone?  Mulder....

The searing in her chest finally reminded her that she had to breathe
--one tearing gasp and then another.  A tiny detached part of her 
brain recognized that she was close to hyperventilating and tried to
control her sobbing breaths, tried to slow her racing heart, tried 
to stop the sudden and irrevocable tears.  That part was 
overwhelmed, and overtaken.

A long time later she woke, aware that for the first time since 
Junior High school she'd actually sobbed herself to sleep.  The 
lights in her room had been dimmed, an action that she associated
with "night" in this place, although she recognized that she really
had no idea of what time of day it truly was. She was still wearing
her watch, which indicated that it was 9 p.m., but she didn't trust
it--they could have reset it at any time in those first two days.

She got up and walked over to the sink and splashed cool water on
her face.  There was an "institutional mirror" over the sink--a 
polished piece of steel firmly riveted to the wall.  Her vaguely 
muted reflection stared back at her.  Who was this woman?  Who 
had she become?  What was she now?

Even in the ambiguous reflection of her image, Scully could see the
changes the last five years had wrought.  She was not who she once
was.  But did it matter?  She remembered that Mulder had told her 
the man they had known only as Deep Throat had told him once that
sharks have to keep moving or they drown and die.  It seemed an apt
analogy and warning.

Humans, too, she supposed, had to keep moving, or die. There were
so many ways to die, and she'd always preferred the certainty of
the death of the body to the ambiguity of deaths of the spirit, or 
heart, or soul.

Her thoughts drew her right back to the autopsy bay in Kansas, and
her unexpected reaction to the final body of the case.  At last she
realized the source of her distress that day.  It wasn't death, per
se, that had stopped her in her tracks.  It was the other deaths 
that threatened--loss of faith, loss of focus, loss of meaning, loss
of love. 

Ensnared in her own gaze, hypnotized by the eyes of Dana Past and
Dana Present, she was nearly overwhelmed by a jumble of memories.
Cases, friends, conversations, random moments in time. And 
throughout them all--Mulder.  Always Mulder.  They hadn't really 
ever stopped swimming, she and Mulder.  They had paused sometimes
--sometimes caused the other to falter a bit--flounder, sink.  But in
the end, they had always buoyed one another.  

Mulder.  He was ok.  He had to be ok. She wanted to whisper his name
simply to reassure herself--a talisman against the surrounding dark.
She held onto the thought of him, seeking the calm center of 
herself that she had once been able to find so effortlessly.

A sudden whipcrack of pain across the back of her neck jolted her 
forward.  It lasted no more than a micro-second, but the after-echoes
of the sensation washed through her in olive-grey aching waves.  

God. What was that?  Pointless to ask the question, really.  She 
knew.  She knew long before she reached back with shaking fingers.
Long before she touched the small scar that marked where the chip
had been implanted under her skin.  She knew even as she touched 
the skin that burned with a contained 3 millimeter-square fever. She
knew what it was.  The chip.  On which they had gambled everything,
without ever understanding all the stakes that might be on the table.

~ ~ ~

FBI Headquarters
Situation command room
September 20, 1998

The nightmare had extended into what felt like weeks of endless and
frustrating waiting.  Although one part of Skinner's brain was fully
aware that the investigation into Agent Scully's abduction had 
lasted almost precisely six days, ten hours and several more 
minutes, there was an angry hole in his gut that calculated the time
since her disappearance to be closer to six or seven months.

He sighed and ran a hand over his head, wondering with a grim 
bemusement if he'd lost even more hair in the past week.  He'd 
personally taken command of the investigation into this matter. It 
was not quite standard practice, but apparently the look in his eye,
and the tone in his voice when he'd announced that decision, had 
been enough to convince his superiors and fellow ADs that there 
would be no arguments brooked.

Anyway, his commanding the case was the only way he had to  
ensure that Mulder would be a part of the investigation, and
having Mulder an official part of the team was the only way to 
have any chance of holding the agent under control.

The issue of keeping Mulder under control would be touch and go at 
best anyway.....or so he'd expected.

He grimaced as he stood--he felt like every individual muscle in his
body was aching at a slightly different pitch.  It wasn't just his 
age, it was a stress he hadn't felt since..... He looked down at the
papers scattered across his desk.  The ones he'd been staring at 
and shuffling through for the better part of the last 20 minutes. 
The pictures and laboratory analysis of hair and fiber from Scully's
car had long since blurred into meaningless random collections of
shadows and numbers and letters.

Two days ago, it had been a source of hope, a break-through.  The 
Virginia State Patrol had found Scully's car abandoned in a truck 
stop in Stafford County.  It had been camouflaged with piled up 
branches and shrubs.  A sudden windstorm in the area had blown
away the covering, and a patrolman had spotted the car during a 
routine check of the stop.  The license plate number had long since
been distributed to law enforcement agencies in DC, Maryland, 
Virginia and West Virginia, so the connection had been made quickly.

The truck stop had resembled a national convention of police, 
staties, sheriff's deputies and federal law enforcement officers 
in a matter of hours.

No other tire tracks, no viable footprints, virtually no 
fingerprints, except Scully's had been found. It was clear that 
the significant surfaces in the car had been wiped down, and the
floor mats were clean enough that it was just possible that the 
kidnappers had actually vacuumed them before stashing the car.  

That was in fact the part that worried Skinner the most.  They were
clearly dealing with people who were beyond simple "pros."  
These people were players in ways that he could barely imagine. 
Yet, they had left the car within 100 miles of where they'd taken 
Scully, and they had sent the video.  It simply didn't add up.  
Mulder was the profiler, but even without that background, Skinner
knew that there was a very deep game being played here.  Too many
unexplained coincidences. It was all too much like a cat and mouse 
game, and Skinner was damn sick of feeling like the mouse.

He looked over to the group of Metro DC police, State Troopers 
and FBI agents who were huddled over the same maps of Virginia
that they'd been analyzing for the last hour or so.  They were still 
cross-referencing them with census and industrial tract information,
trying to break out the most likely locations that would be 
sufficiently secluded, yet still contain an industrial structure that
seemed to be implied by the video of Scully they'd received. The
men and women were gesturing--pointing from one map to the next,
voices rising in anger, and sheer weary frustration.

As he had for the last six days, Mulder stood apart from everyone 
else.  Surrounded by the noise of ringing telephones, screeching fax
machines, blipping computers, he was remote--isolated in a silent 
and silencing aura that surrounded him and shielded him from all the
frantic and inane activity swirling about him.

At this moment he was staring out the window--his unseeing eyes
focused on some middle distance that had nothing to do with 
Pennsylvania Avenue below, or even the famous Washington skyline. 
His stillness drew the eye, sucked in a watcher's focus to the 
vortex of Mulder's aggressive non-movement.  The frozen stiffness 
that was beyond the simple exertion of control.  His stillness was
that of a bomb, quietly ticking toward detonation.  

Skinner watched his Agent for a long moment.  Mulder was beginning
to worry him.  He snorted to himself.  How things had changed.  Had 
he ever imagined a time when Mulder *not* flying off on his own 
would be a source of worry?  Yet it was.

His dream came back to him, suddenly. The wolf's palpable 
resignation.  In spite of the warmth of the room, Skinner was
chilled to the bone.

What might Mulder do?  He'd tried to make a deal with the smoking
bastard when Scully's cancer was diagnosed.  Skinner had barely been
able to step between Mulder and what surely would have been his 
downfall.  He nearly shuddered.  Lost again momentarily in his 
servitude to that cancerous SOB, the hopelessness of realizing the
trap that he'd stepped into.  Scully had been cured, or at least sent
into remission.  And Skinner had seemingly been released from the
terms of his deal after the smoking man's "death" and apparent 
resurrection, but still... There were nights when he dreamed of the
fire of the furnace that burned Jane Brody's body, and he knew 
there was a hell that waited for him.  He shook off the thought.  
There were other things to consider.

Mulder.  The question now, was what would Mulder do?  Six days of
endless, tensed waiting.  He was more than ready to snap. If past 
history was anything to go on, he might already have done 
something rash.  But Skinner knew exactly where Mulder had been
for just about every minute of the past week.

After his initial frantic rush of activity, Mulder had settled into 
an eerie calm.  He'd participated in the briefings, offering
thoughtful, rational insight into possible motives, profile 
construction, and ways of tracing Scully's movements.  He hadn't
insisted on leading every field expedition. Had, in fact, stayed 
away from the Stafford truck stop when Scully's car had been found.
The one time he'd stayed away from something big.

And now Skinner realized the source of his deepest worry.  Had 
Mulder cut a deal?  Tried to cut a deal?  Had he approached the 
smoker and finally traded away his soul in return for Scully's safety?
Was his calm only because he believe that all this activity really
meant nothing--that the price had already been paid?

Hands on his hips, Skinner stared again at Mulder and then back
to the room.  His own focus now pulled back, blurred.  Jesus.  
Had he just lost both his agents--Mulder to the shadows and Scully
to....to whoever the hell had her?

He didn't want to think about.  He had to know.

Walking over to Mulder, he spoke quietly. "Agent Mulder.  A word?"

For a second, Skinner thought that he hadn't been heard, that Mulder
was so far away that he had never even felt the AD approaching, but
then Mulder turned, and met him eye-to-eye.  The gaze was clear, but
worried.  "What?  Has there been...?"

"No, I just need to speak to you.  Privately."

Mulder paled briefly, then shrugged.  "Ok."

Glancing around the command room, Skinner realized there was no part
of the room  quite far enough away from the other agents bustling 
around.  It would have to be the hallway.  It was late enough in the 
evening that it seemed certain to be deserted.

Still, old paranoia lingered, and Skinner led them to a corner of the
hallway so that they could see anyone approaching from either side.

"What's going on?"  His own fatigue had rendered him clumsy, 
imprecise.

Mulder, rightly, looked confused. "What do you mean?"  Glancing down
and then up again, his grief now evident. "I'm sorry I haven't come
up with any new...."

Cutting him off. "No, no that's not what I meant."  Uncertainty still
gnawing at his gut. "It's just that you've been awfully...quiet these
last few days."

The flare of temper was entirely unexpected, but familiar 
nonetheless. "What do you want me to do?  Should I be screaming
at the agents?  God, I'd love to, but I don't think that will help
her.  I don't think..." He broke off, now visibly trying to 
control himself.

Skinner allowed himself to put a hand on Mulder's shoulder. "Mulder,
 I'm sorry.  I'm not saying this very well.  No, I don't want you 
screaming at people.  It's just that I also don't want you talking 
to certain other people because you think it's time to make some
kind of deal."

Mulder wouldn't look at him. Voice tense, thin. "We've had this 
conversation before...sir."

Skinner dropped his hand and barely controlled a sigh. "I know.  I'd
like to think we both learned something from that...experience."

Eyes now meeting his--still furious, defiant. "Did we?"

"Yes.  I think we did."  Quietly, urgently. "These people are not 
to be trusted, Mulder.  No matter what they might promise. Making
deals will do nothing but trap you in a meaningless bargain with 
the devil.  Utterly meaningless."

Something that sounded almost like sympathy colored Mulder's reply.
"I know."  He looked off into the distance again.  "I do know.  
Really.  I haven't...."  He broke off.  A long beige pause that 
threatened to suffocate. "I haven't figured out why they took her.
If I could just figure that out...."

Skinner recognized the fatigue.  Remembered abruptly that Mulder had 
basically not left the Hoover Building except to chase down a few 
early clues for the past six days.  Noticed the ashen pallor, the 
deeply bitten lines of tiredness.

"Go home, Mulder.  Go home.  You're no use to us like this."  The 
tone was gruff, the AD was speaking, but Skinner imagined that
Mulder could hear the underlying promise.  <I'll keep the team 
going.  None of us will give up.>

Mulder almost began to argue, and then reading the set of Skinner's 
jaw, simply nodded and strode down the hallway to the exit.

Watching him go, Skinner thought he heard a quiet howling in the 
back of his mind.  This was a temporary victory.  The clock was now
running on both of his agents.

~  ~ ~ ~ ~ 

Unknown location
September 19, 12:24 p.m.

It was twilight again.  It was always twilight in these damn rooms,
even at high noon.  He sucked in the smoke greedily, impatiently,
feeling the bitter-hot sting in his lungs.  Aware that every year he
felt it a little less acutely, which was probably something he 
didn't want to think about too carefully.  Unexpectedly, he found 
himself remembering the confrontation with the "Jeremiah Smith"
in that prison cell. <...lung cancer.>  He shrugged to disguise the 
shiver that wanted to rip down his spine.  Everyone was going to 
die--it was simply a question of timing.

The dark-paneled room was quiet.  The muted clink of ice in glasses
and crystal being set down on coasters were the only sounds to break
the muffled brown of the silence.  The meeting had not gone well,
and the men of the Council had retired to their individual corners 
and chairs and offices to sulk.  Well, the official word was that 
they were "considering the situation."  But the smoking man knew
petulance when he saw it.

Hell, he needed to some time to indulge in it himself.

In point of fact the meeting had been a complete disaster.  

There is nothing quite so guaranteed to produce dissent, gridlock 
and general distress as a meeting full of powerful men, none of
whom have the full picture, and each of whom are convinced that 
the others are conspiring against him.  It had almost been funny. 
Almost.

The bombshell had been dropped in the opening minutes of the 
conference.  The First Elder with the ridiculously crooked teeth 
had begun the attack.

"You have taken a rather hasty measure.  Was this wise?"

He had responded immediately--not even bothering to think too 
carefully. "All my measures are taken after deliberate consideration, 
gentlemen.  The situation is under control."  Meanwhile his brain had
begun scurrying to all of its darkest corners trying to remember 
what actions he had taken recently.  The problem with playing a
game at multiple levels is that it sometimes got confusing even 
to him which moves had been approved by which people.  And 
which moves he had simply made up.

"How can you say that?  We cannot afford this sort of high-level 
activity by the FBI at this time.  You know this."

The FBI?  That was the point at which he began to realize that 
something was seriously wrong.  He hadn't done anything that he 
could recall, hadn't even ordered any of his minions to do anything
that would evoke any sort of FBI interest.  CIA maybe.  But not 
the FBI.

What the hell had set Mulder off this time?  He had no doubt that
Mulder was in the midst of whatever had upset the council. The agent
always was, somehow. He'd long ago accepted the dangers of 
presenting himself as the person who could control Mulder.  It did 
mean that he tended to get called on the carpet--the very expensive
Oriental rug--more than he deserved, but he'd also long accepted 
that life was inherently unfair.  Mulder was a complete wild card
--that was both his appeal and his danger.  The smoker had gambled
more than he liked to admit on the pure hunch that one day backing
Mulder would be the ultimate advantage.

Years of playing this sort of poker had left him a seamless bluff. 
"It is under control, gentlemen.  As you know, I have certain points 
of...leverage within the FBI.  There is no reason to concern 
yourselves."

"We are concerned."  Strughold had decided on the grave, statesman-
like approach today. An ironic pose for a German industrialist who'd
barely gotten through high school, and had made his fortune through
brute strength and some rather conveniently disposed of bodies.  "I 
thought we had agreed, after this summer, that Agent Scully was not
a viable target.  She is valuable to the project, of course, and 
would be...." He suddenly broke off and paused briefly before 
continuing.  "Taking her may not be the wisest course of action. 
We cannot afford to have Mulder either too focused or too distracted
right now."

Agent Scully?  "Of course."  He hoped the brief phrase would convey
his complete command of the situation, and that the council need 
not bother themselves with it any further.  The difficulty of that 
was that he was genuinely worried.  Something was afoot, and the
timing was far too suspiciously close to the execution of the next 
Phase that it had to be related to it.

He was surprised when the meeting had moved on rather quickly after
that to other subjects.  He was only left with a clear imperative to 
make sure that "things don't get out of hand."  Oddly he had the 
impression that the other members of the group didn't really want to
know what he was up to "with Agent Scully"; simply wanted him to
make sure that nothing interfered with their latest plans.  That in 
and of itself was grounds for further thought and worry.

The meeting had rapidly degenerated into acrimonious debate over 
the shadow group's decision to set up an ambush to assist their alien
"allies" in drawing in and crushing the rebel forces.  A timetable
had been set--only 3 days from now--and the training camps had
already been put into overtime preparations and last minute drills.
Listening to the briefing on the preparations, he had been nearly 
overwhelmingly tempted to add "Cry Havoc and let slip the dogs 
of war!" He had refrained, however.  Although his colleagues would
have recognized the quote, they undoubtedly would not have 
appreciated the source.

He had not participated in the debate, understanding that the 
juggernaut of their response had already been set in motion, and 
there was no turning back.  What some of the other men who had once
populated this room had always failed to appreciate was that trying
to oppose the  processes of the consortium was simply a good way
of getting crushed by them.  The trick in survival and in acquiring
more power lay in learning how to subtly steer the forces in 
directions that favored your own interests.

This time, though, even the smoker was at a loss.  The opening
confrontation over something that had apparently to do with
Scully was....well, interesting was one word.  He detested ever
admitting to not understanding what was going on, but there were
limits.  Who could have taken Scully in such a way that the elders
would be convinced it was him?

He hadn't lied to Mulder.  He did like Scully.  It hadn't been his
decision to include Scully in the pod experiment on that ship. 
He hadn't even known the decision had been made until he'd been 
standing on the transport plane and realized with a shock who had
lain in that bio-chamber.  He'd looked out over the tarmac that 
night, before the bay door had closed, pondering again the knee-jerk
stupidities of the shadows.

At the time he'd thought it a tremendous loss of potential.  Scully
was an excellent investigator in her own right, and even working
"against" Them, was not infrequently the source of interesting 
secondary scientific analysis of their work.  He smiled grimly.  
Stolen copies of her lab reports had often pointed out rather useful
avenues for further explorations.  Moreover, as long as Scully was
alive, they had an irrevocable hold on Mulder.

So who had taken her?  This time.  Games within games. Circles of 
conspiracy that were Byzantine in their entangled intricacy.

The conspiracy was getting ever more complex. Too complex.  Players
were entering the stage from the wings at a rate that truly left him
breathless.  Although he had one of the best counter- and counter-
counter intelligence networks in the world, it had begun to occur to
him lately that there might be yet another group of forces at work 
that had been unrecognized until now.

The problem was that it was also possible that this was the simple
law of entropy.  Chaos did tend to rear its ugly head at rather 
inconvenient times.

Had Scully been taken by another faction from within the Consortium?
By another as-yet unknown group who also somehow knew of the 
plans to collude in the alien civil war?  Or simply by a random group
of terrorists?

He ruled out the possibility of another Consortium faction.  He knew
everything that was going on with the shadow government, and there
was no chance of something that big being planned and carried out 
without him catching wind of at least some small part of it.

He stubbed out his cigarette impatiently.  Ordering another scotch, 
he looked around the room at the other men.  Old.  They were all 
getting so old.  Inevitable, of course, but it struck him that maybe
that was the biggest danger of all.  They were getting old and 
cautious.  They had all seen too much, and so now believed 
nothing and everything.  

The Englishman had shown all of them the danger of actually thinking
about the future and implications of their actions.  Suddenly growing
idealistic about having a safe world for your grandchildren to 
inherit was a sentimentality that none of them could afford.  There
had been no particular love lost between him and that effete snob,
and he'd actually rather enjoyed the sordidness of the man's death
--a car exploding in a rather bad section of DC was scarcely a 
discrete and dignified end for the aristocrat.  Still, the Brit had
been the voice of reason in some of the more heated councils, and
that presence was missed lately.

For reasons that he absolutely could not name, the smoker found
himself thinking of his former lackey Alex Krycek.  A pretty man. 
A dangerous man.  Krycek was a player, but one who would
ultimately get ground up by the machine because he played the 
game solely for his own ends.  He never looked at the big picture,
simply hopped from the shadow of one protector to the next--each
time trying to work his way up the food chain a little higher, always
failing to understand that he would never work his way up high 
enough to rate being taken seriously.

Still, he was dangerous because he was ambitious, and not stupid.  
Moreover, there was still a great deal of inconveniently missing data
about exactly what Krycek had been doing in Russia and whom he'd
been doing it with or for.  In an information age when it should be 
possible to track someone's every sneeze, Krycek had done an amazing
job of disappearing for quite some time.  

Scully's apparent kidnapping had the random and violent flair to it 
that felt like Krycek.  It was just possible that Krycek had taken 
her, but if he had, then someone was helping him, and *that* was
the important factor.  

It kept coming back to a question of timing.  Given all the 
circumstances, that Scully would disappear now was unquestionably 
linked to the consortium-alien plot.  She would be used in this 
process somehow, but the question was by whom and to what end?  

Dammit!  He hated being in the dark about such an important thing.
She was too valuable a piece of evidence for him not to be 
controlling.  

It was perhaps time to set in motion his own game. Time to find
Krycek and see what could be seen.  There are many ways of leading
rats through mazes, the trick is to wave the cheese, never allowing
the subject to see the trap until it is far, far too late.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Mulder's Apartment
September 21, 2:49 a.m. 

He knew Skinner had meant sending him home as a kindness.  Had 
probably even imagined that Mulder would actually get some sleep,
rest, change his clothes and come back to the investigation 
refreshed and with new insight.  Because that's what Skinner would
have done.  Hell, it's what Scully would have done.  They would have
stepped away, for a brief moment, slept a couple of hours and 
returned once more as functional human beings.

He'd seen it happen more than once during those intense cases that 
they'd all been involved in.  Had seen Skinner, even in the midst of
the craziness of the Teager case, able to walk away briefly to
regroup and return a stronger, more controlled field commander.  
He'd watched Scully do it during their road trips.  She somehow 
knew when she was getting too close, and she'd back away--sometimes
for just 15 minutes while she got a cup of coffee, but in that time
she would refocus, renew herself.  

Her ability to handle her emotions was a self-discipline that he knew
cost her no small amount of energy, but made her so terrifyingly 
effective.  Just as it did the AD.  He resented it.  It seemed to him
that he spent far too much time being hauled back from the brink
of some mental abyss by Skinner and Scully and that tonight was
just one more manifestation of it.  He felt like he'd been sent to 
the corner because he hadn't been playing well with the others.  
He wondered whether Skinner could really believe that this was 
going to help anyone.

But that wasn't quite fair.  He knew that there were times when 
neither Skinner nor Scully could completely disentangle themselves
from some case or situation.  He'd seen it happen--the time Skinner
had been framed for murdering that prostitute, the case of with the 
seraphim that Scully had pursued.  He knew that they knew what it 
was to lose themselves in a moment, a case.  He also knew what it 
was to be the one there for them to pull them back from the brink.  
He felt the resentment ease just a bit.  Skinner had sent him home 
with the best of intentions.  

He shifted on his couch a bit.  The bubbles in his fish tank rose 
with a comforting regular irregularity.  Each one slightly different,
moving at a different rate, rushing toward the surface of the empty
water, heedless that they were bringing oxygen to a system that no
longer required it. Their monotonous duty fulfilled without thought
or remorse.  Damn.  He was more fatigued than he'd even realized. 
He'd begun to envision an army of faceless, dutiful agents hurling 
themselves through fields of inquiry into Scully's disappearance...
rank after rank of unimaginative investigators, trying to stumble 
their way to light and answers.

He wondered if he were really any better.  He felt like he'd been 
living underwater for the past week.  He wanted to move, to do 
something, but felt weighted down by something that wasn't quite
despair, and wasn't fear.  He'd studied all the evidence.  Formulated
a half-dozen profiles of a possible kidnapper, but none had seemed 
right.  He'd even quit going out to followup leads in the field.  
He'd taken to simply standing in the command room, listening to the
evidence as it came in, commenting on it as appropriate, but mostly 
simply staring out the window.  

He knew he was waiting, but didn't know for what. Half a dozen times
a day he would find himself walking down to their former office and 
opening the door, expecting to find her there.  The void at the 
center of his being ached a little deeper each time the room was 
empty.  But the thing was that he knew he was waiting for her.  He
knew somehow that she was alive, and that it would be ok.  It had
to be ok.  It had to be.  If he could just wait long enough, it 
would be ok.

Fuck.  He needed to do something. Skinner had probably told *all* the
guards at *all* the entrances to the Hoover Building not to let him 
in until at least 8 a.m.  The AD was nothing if not a thorough 
son-of-a-bitch.

He briefly contemplated running, and discarded the thought before it 
was even half-formed.

He turned his gaze back to the ceiling, absently noting the patterns
of cracks that had become so familiar that he no longer even saw 
them.  They were now simply a part of the fabric of his life--the 
small imperfections that underlaid everything.  The cracks and small
holes that seemed to appear in everything while he wasn't looking. 

That appeared in almost everything.

And then, because there was nothing else to do at this hour of the 
night, on this day of the week, at this godawful time, he found 
himself thinking directly about Scully.

Well, letting himself think about her fully.  Sometimes it seemed 
that she was really always there, quietly shadowing the back of his
thoughts.  More so lately, of course, but always.  Since the first
day.  The first minute.

What was he going to do?  This was the third time she'd been taken.  
Fourth, if you counted the time at the dam, and he wasn't quite sure
he was going to make it without her much longer.  He felt so 
melodramatic thinking that, but it was a fact. He could feel himself
eroding, ebbing away with each passing moment.  

Skinner had been right, actually.  He had been thinking about trying
to track down that smoking bastard and offering something, anything,
himself in exchange for her return. Mulder was reasonably certain, 
though, that the smoker wasn't a player in this particular drama.  
If pressed, he really couldn't have said why he knew that, it was 
simply there.  That gut-certainty had been the only thing that had 
prevented him from seeking exactly the sort of deal that Skinner 
had gotten himself into last year.

But the clock was still running, and they were no closer to finding
Scully than they had been 6 days ago.  

Someone somewhere knew where she was, but who?  He kept coming
 back to the video.  And the question of why?  Whoever had her 
obviously needed her alive, but why?  Why make the video?  Why send it?  

His mind slipped around and around circles of speculation, partially-
formulated theories, wild guesses.....a rat running around and around
an exercise wheel--futile movement, helpless learned behavior.  He 
kept coming back to the consortium, the syndicate, whatever you 
called it.  The jumble of forces and events of the past years, all 
somehow interconnected, but he'd be damned if he could find the 
connecting thread.  The smoker, aliens, missing time, the chip, 
Krycek, Deep Throat, Skinner's deal, burned files, Scully.....

Scully.  Scully. Scully. A mantra, a prayer, a talisman.  He knew 
why *he* would kidnap her and take her far away to a secret location.
Only he wouldn't bother with a videotape message.  He wouldn't 
bother leaving partly-concealed cars. He would simply take her and 
vanish forever.

It was so tempting to let his mind free.  To let himself wander down
these quiet avenues.  But far too dangerous.  He would not, could 
not allow himself to think about some future that right now he 
couldn't even dream of owning.  She wasn't here.  He had to find 
her.  But he was so tired, and he didn't know where to look anymore.

He would find her.  She would find him.  Far below any awareness,
any rational thought, even beyond intuition, he simply knew this.  
They would find each other. They always did.

There would be a price to be paid for that finding, he knew.  That 
was also a part of the bargain.  And then he realized how things had
changed.  He would always pay whatever it cost to find her, to be
reunited with her.  Everything but his soul.  He had learned that 
from Skinner's servitude to the smoker.  He couldn't give that in 
trade anymore, because it was no longer on the market.  He had to
hold that in reserve, so that when she was returned to him, he could
face her with clarity and force.  Could meet her eyes in the 
conviction that there was nothing between them, but them, that he
could offer her all of him, and take all of her in return.

When she was returned....

For just a little while he let his thoughts wheel and drift.  Turning
his mind over and over to shake loose the kaleidoscopic fragments
of memories that contained her.  Her smile, the loose fall of her 
hair as she bent over her desk, her touch in those rare fleeting 
moments when she would reach out to hold him, or allow herself to
be held.  For just a while, he let himself be warmed by the meager 
candle flame of remembrance.  

Then, inevitably, he returned to the here and now. Lying on his couch
in this dead of night.  He wondered if she were asleep somewhere, 
or if she were also awake.  Was she alone?  Frightened?  In pain?  
Was she dreaming of him?  Did she know that he was looking for her?
Surely she knew that he was looking for her.  If nothing else, the
past 5 years must have taught her that he would always search for 
her.  

He was dreaming of the forest in Florida where they'd spent the night
while chasing after the mothmen.  It was night, and she was holding
him, and singing to him.  But this time he didn't recognize the song.
It was low and sweet, but somehow achingly sad.  He felt her gentle
hands running through his hair, touching his body, and he wanted to
turn and look up at her face, but he couldn't move.  

All around them, in the darkness, he could see glowing eyes that
came closer and closer.  They were surrounded, and in danger, but
as long as she was there, he would be safe.  He couldn't move and 
he couldn't see her, he could only listen to her song, which grew 
fainter and fainter.

The footsteps in the hallway were too quiet, too deliberate, and that
was what woke him.  He knew the treads of all the residents on his
hall--none walked with the stealthy tread that spoke of unmentionable
training.  He was kneeling to the side with his gun pointed at the
doorway when the paper abruptly slid under.  His still partially 
sleep-addled brain was expecting something so entirely different,
that by the time he rose to his feet and yanked open the door, the
hall was empty.

The note was to the point.  Directions to a location in Virginia.  He
was dressed, and sliding his cel phone into his pocket and clipping
his holster on before it even occurred to him that maybe he should
call Skinner.  That he should call for a backup team, just for once 
play things by the book.

He didn't.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

FBI Building
Command Post
5:30 a.m. September 21, 1998

Waiting.  So much of his life was waiting.  Had been waiting.  
Endless moments lost to the tiring and frustrating expedients of 
others' incompetence, the necessity of circumstances, the 
inevitable grinding slowness of bureaucracies.  

This time the waiting was even harder.  It was darker, colder, 
sharper. He felt this waiting eroding something that he thought 
he'd already lost years ago in a jungle clearing.  Something that 
had been lost again during his ill-conceived bargain with the 
smoking man.  But this week, this moment was inextricably bound 
up with a single image:  Scully in that chair--blood running down 
her face, posture defiant and somehow vibrant.  And that image 
was threatening to undermine his entire foundation.

He wanted to shake off the thought.  Wanted to believe that he 
was overreacting. She was, on an objective level, merely one of 
his agents.  A subordinate for whom he was responsible, like a 
commander of a unit on a battlefield, but no more or less 
valuable than her fellow agents.  She was a strong member of his 
team, and he would feel the same fury and pain at the snatching 
of any of his agents in this manner.... Wrong.  Dead wrong.  

There was something else. Something that had drawn him down into 
the basement of the FBI building more than a year ago.  Some 
bright, shining possibility and truth that had lured him into 
making a deal that had nearly cost him everything. That might yet 
cost him everything.  

In the pre-dawn dark of the command room, the only light coming 
from the various screen savers of the computers scattered on 
every work station, he had nowhere to look but inward.  

Not for the first time he found his memories drawn to that 
hopeless time.  Scully held hostage by a disease that was slowing 
wasting her--leeching her fire, her passion--slowly diminishing 
her before their eyes.  She had probably seemed, to most 
observers, to be functioning capably in her job. Continuing the 
investigations with Mulder, functioning as part of the X-files 
team.  But Skinner knew battle fatigue.  Knew what it was like to 
have your soul slowly draining away. That the next sniper's 
bullet would be for you.

He'd seen the toll that the cancer had exacted on both of them.  
Seen the ashen pallor overtake first her, then him.  Mulder and 
Scully.  Scully and Mulder.  Partners, friends, inextricably 
linked in ways he'd long ago given up trying to define. He knew 
only that their partnership was worth fighting for.  That 
together they were something that had meaning in this insane game 
they were all embroiled in, and that they had to win.

He'd been certain that if Scully had died that Mulder would have 
followed her.  Nothing so dramatic as a gun to the temple at her 
graveside.  Simply that he would have been a little slow dodging 
the next bullet.  Wouldn't have quite made the leap to the top of 
the next train that he tried to board from a bridge.  He would 
have slipped away in some quiet, but definite way.  They needed 
each other in ways that could not be explained--could only be 
respected.  It was a partnership that had already transcended, it 
seemed, the borders of life and death.

It had been that partnership he had tried to save when he went to 
the smoker and offered a deal in exchange for a miracle.  
Instinctively he'd needed to step between Mulder and the abyss 
that was any dealings with that bastard.  He knew that if Mulder 
had made the deal, the poison of it would eventually seep 
across all that Mulder did, and the Mulder-Scully 
partnership would suffer and finally fall apart.  That 
circumstance, at all costs, he needed to prevent.  He needed them 
strong.  Together.  Fighting for truth and justice and other 
constructs that were all too often mere abstractions. 

More than that, though, the deal had been Skinner's chance to 
enter the game on a different level.  

He had, of course, been a player from the beginning.  Without 
even overtly being aware of the names of the sides in the battles 
being waged in the halls of the Justice Department, in meetings 
that he attended, in the cases that crossed his desk, Skinner had 
long known that there was a war.  And, he had instinctively begun 
choosing his side almost from the moment he'd been promoted to AD 
in charge of the Section that included the X-Files unit.

Almost from the first, it had been clear that the X-Files were at 
the center of something that was so critical and so dangerous 
that it didn't even have a name.  The man with the cigarette had 
been in his office before he'd finished unpacking his meager 
personal possessions.

"Assistant Director Walter Skinner."  The tone could almost have 
been congratulatory, but instead seemed condescending.  The face 
and man were unfamiliar.

"Yes?"

"Welcome to your new....office.  I have heard a great deal about 
you."

"Yes?"  What in God's name did this person want?  He was 
beginning to wonder if he needed to call security.  The man 
across from him wore no building pass, but somehow seemed to 
belong.

"That's all really," an almost airy wave with the cigarette, "I 
just wanted to drop by and see the new AD."  He'd turned and 
walked out of the office.  But at the door he'd stopped suddenly 
and turned back. "Oh, by the way,"  the tone was almost casual, 
"You might want to review the materials on the X-Files first."

Yes, from the beginning the lines had been drawn, and Skinner was 
sick of being on the losing side.  Brief victories were just 
that--too brief.  You don't get to be an AD in the FBI without 
being a tough-minded SOB.  A tiny bit of arrogance didn't hurt, 
either. He'd tried to muster resources, gather information, 
develop allies.  But time and again, he'd been forced into 
untenable decisions by the smoker--made to suborn justice and the 
principles that he'd sworn to uphold to the whim of a man whose 
authority he still didn't fully understand.  It had infuriated 
him, and he had sworn each time that he would somehow best the 
smoker the next time.  The next time.

Then he'd made the deal.  In retrospect, he was forced to 
acknowledge that it had been, on some levels, unnecessarily 
quixotic.  Or maybe not.  He'd desperately needed to prevent 
Mulder from going to the smoker, and he had honestly thought that 
maybe, just maybe, working for the smoker he would 
eventually find a way to take him down.

On that wish and prayer he'd sacrificed a great deal.  Skinner 
had learned more about the smoking man and the organization he 
seemed to work for than he'd known previously.  He'd fulfilled 
his objective of keeping Mulder and Scully functioning as a team.  
He had not, however, been able to penetrate more than a layer or 
two of the shadow group.  Had learned only bits and pieces of 
their objectives, their needs, their weaknesses.  Not enough.  
Not enough for the price he'd paid.

He turned abruptly and began pacing the room.  It would seem 
there still more questions than answers, and yet another decision 
that would have to be faced.

He had once more prevented Mulder from approaching the smoker.  
Thinking again about his conversation with the agent he wondered 
if it really all gone too smoothly.  Had Mulder acquiesced too 
readily?  What was being hidden under that too-calm exterior?

No time to consider.  The issue in front of Walter Skinner now 
was what was *he* going to do about Scully's kidnapping.  It was 
clear, had been clear from the moment they received the bizarrely 
undemanding video of Scully, that this was not a standard 
abduction by any stretch of the imagination.  And, while standard 
channels of investigation had been implemented to deal with her 
case, it was also clear those channels weren't doing a damn thing to
find her.  Wouldn't do a damn thing to find her.

Non-standard channels.  Something Skinner was all too familiar 
with.  He knew the gatekeeper to the "other ways" that existed.  
But what was he willing to risk this time?  What would he hazard 
to secure Scully's safe return?  What remained of him to be 
offered?  Why did he remain willing to offer anything at all?

Everything had changed and nothing had changed.  Scully was 
threatened once more by unknown forces.  He had a gut feeling 
that there was something important and dangerous about to break 
loose from the shadow forces and this might all simply be a feint 
to distract him and Mulder while it occurred.  He couldn't shake 
the memory of those charred bodies at the dam.  Scully, too, had 
an implant.  Dangers everywhere, and no apparent way of defusing 
them without accidentally triggering a boobytrap.

For now, there was nothing to do but be the AD.  Command this 
team.  Collect what evidence he could.  Keep Mulder sane and 
alive until they got Scully back.

Dawn was just beginning to break, and the first of the agents 
began straggling into the room.  Lights were flipped on, 
computers re-booted.  He absently listened as the first reports 
of the morning were given, detailing the progress since the day 
before.  Detailing the lack of progress to discern anything new
at all.

Nothing.  Nothing at all had changed.  Not even the waiting. 

~ ~ ~ ~

Antarctic
September 21, 1998

Cold beyond the mere white of ice, the mere blue of death.  Ice, 
frozen wasteland of nothingness.  A land that should have been 
completely barren--unable to support any life at all.

The movement was at first imperceptible.  A shudder that 
disturbed the vision of the few creatures around to see it.  Then 
a low, ominous growl that accompanied the deeper shaking and 
trembling.  Finally with a crack-roar, the iceberg calved away 
from the ice shelf.

It was larger than the state of Delaware.  It had not been formed 
by random forces of nature.

It began its journey out to sea.

~ ~ ~ ~

Unknown location
September 21, 1998

"We already agreed to this."  Her voice was flat, uninflected and 
just a little bit sibilant.  The 's' a tiny bit prolonged, the 
faintest suggestion of a hiss.

"We talked about it, but I don't remember any definite agreement.  
Anyway, I think we need to keep our options open. If we go with 
your plan, we lose an option.  Besides, what do we really know 
about all this?"  He was surprised to find himself taking this 
position.  

"Nothing, of course.  Knowing nothing, Alex, is the safest thing 
in the world right now."  

He couldn't help himself.  The laugh was slightly bitter. "So we 
at last have proof that ignorance is bliss?"

Her eyes were blue, but not warm. "No, ignorance is survival." 
She regarded him clinically for another moment. "Think about it.  
There isn't much time left."  She stalked out.

Ah, yes.  Survival.  He knew a great deal about that.

He continued watching their captive, who was doing....nothing. 
It worried him.  Scully, like Mulder, was actually at her most 
dangerous when still like that.  He'd watched her, off and on, 
over the years, and had come to the clear understanding that 
underestimating her was a mistake people generally didn't live to 
make twice.

She was sitting on her bed, her back against the wall, legs 
pulled up against her chest. Her eyes seemed to be focused 
directly at him, although he knew that she hadn't yet discovered 
the placement of the surveillance mechanism, or at least had 
never shown any awareness of it.  He thought that she was simply 
staring at the wall, and thinking.

It was that thinking that worried him.  Her face was drawn in 
a slight frown, and he could almost see the wheels and gears 
turning in her mind.  She had to be wondering what the hell she 
was doing there.  Scully was, as far as he had ever been able to 
tell,  one of the world's true rationalists.  Oddly, he actually
admired  that about her.  He lived instinct to instinct--a creature
of  impulses--it kept him alive.  But just every once in a great 
while, usually when hiding out in yet another dingy safe house, 
nursing a bottle of vodka through another uncertain night, he 
found himself wishing that he could make *sense* out of the 
randomness that had become his life.

For the second time in 15 minutes, Scully reached back and 
touched the base of her neck.  That worried him, too.  Was 
something happening with that chip?  So much hinged on that tiny 
piece of metal and circuitry.  

Marita had returned to the room without him noticing. Her voice 
was quiet, but the surprise of it still caused him to flinch.

"So?"

He was still feeling the adrenaline of being startled.  "I don't 
think so."

"You understand the risks of not removing the chip?"

"Yeah, probably better than you do.  So far as I know, she's 
never pointed a gun at your head.  But, more to the point, I 
think the risks of removing the chip are greater.  According to 
what you told me, they're interested in how the chip is 
interacting with the vaccine.  We remove the chip, and maybe the 
data gets lost or fucked up."

"If we don't remove the chip, we have to turn *her* over to them-
-alive.  That could be inconvenient in terms of Agent Mulder."

"Well, Mulder hasn't exactly been inconvenient so far, has he?"  
That did surprise him, but he decided that he wouldn't raise 
the point with the blonde.  He understood Mulder's doggedness 
when it came to Scully. Had, indeed, witnessed it first hand.  He 
wondered if his former partner had lost a little of his fire.  
The more worrisome possibility, of course, was that Mulder was 
doing something pointlessly heroic like trying to cut a deal with 
the syndicate. Of course any deal between Mulder and the shadows 
would undoubtedly only end in aggravation for everyone and 
probably a lot of dead bodies.... He realized that Marita was 
still talking.

"...just been lucky. It's only a question of time.  So far, so 
good, but we can't run on luck forever.  My sources aren't what 
the used to be, but I hear the investigation is somewhat at an 
impasse.  What concerns me, though, is I keep hearing references 
to a video."  She stared at him impassively--the question and 
challenge quite clear in her eyes.  He stared back equally 
impassively.  

"How odd. Maybe your sources are confused about what evidence has 
been recovered--if any."

She nodded slightly. "Yes, odd indeed.  Still, we have to make a 
decision, and fairly soon.  The date is only 2 days away."

She was absolutely relishing this, he realized.  Not just the 
intricate game of double and triple cross, but having another 
person completely at her command and control.  She had never, so 
far as he knew, had any interactions with Scully, but there was a 
quiet malicious delight evident in Marita's desire to make 
decisions about Scully's fate.  

It was one of the coldest things he'd ever seen.  Personal 
revenge was something he understood entirely.  The need to avenge 
insults and betrayals ran deep in his blood.  But her pleasure in 
this situation stemmed from some entirely different place and it 
chilled him.

Just for a moment he found himself reassessing why it was that he 
was participating in this mad scheme.  Watching her watch Scully 
like a lab specimen, he wondered, not for the first time, what 
Marita saw when she looked at him.  He felt very small.

In one of those mercurial mood switches that always left him 
reeling in vaguely sea-sick nausea, she turned back to him. 
"Well, we do have 2 days left to make the decision, and in any 
case, we need to keep her alive at least that much longer, no?"

"Uh...right."

A fine impatience remained.  "We've been over all of this. We 
have three options:  kill her and remove the chip, remove the 
chip and release her alive, or simply turn her and the chip over 
to them.  We've discussed all the pros and cons of each scenario.  
I would think by now it would be obvious what we need to do."

"Well, it's not so fucking obvious to me.  Since I've never 
talked to them directly, I still don't know what it is 
they're really looking for.  Clearly the value of it...of her is 
that she's only one with the chip who's also been exposed to the 
vaccine. I *assume* they're hoping the chip will somehow give 
them information about the cure for....whatever the hell it is. 
I'm no scientist, but I'd *tend* to think that they'd want the 
whole package intact."  The sarcasm was a good cover for his 
essential insecurity about this whole operation.

For the first time since he'd known her, she looked 
uncomfortable. "I'm not a scientist, either.  And my par--they 
weren't exactly clear.  I think we have to consider the option 
that poses the lowest level of risk, and the highest possibility 
of return."  

He let the slip pass by unremarked.  But now his brain was 
furiously turning.  What game was she really playing?  She hadn't 
talked to them directly at all.  She was running through this 
maze as blindly as he was and he was following her.  Fuck.

The problem with running on instincts is that sometimes you 
follow them right into dead ends.  

He turned back to stare unseeingly at Scully.  Who was still 
doing nothing.  They were looking for the center of the 
maze...but would it hold the prize, or death?

~ ~ ~ 

Somewhere in Virginia, South of DC

He was way too old to be playing Cops and Robbers in the woods in 
the middle of the night.  Or was it Cowboys and Indians?  Who the 
hell knew?  He was suddenly very tired of a life that included 
all these uncomfortable excursions at odd hours to ridiculous 
locales.  Why the hell couldn't his mysterious informants ever 
direct him to the bar at the Ritz?  Please take a table in the 
corner and order yourself a very expensive scotch.  A beautiful 
brunette will be delivering you papers with definitive proof of a 
massive government conspiracy to hide the existence of 
extraterrestrial life....

He sighed, recognizing the bleak humor for what it was--a way of 
avoiding thinking about what he most feared.  It wasn't so much 
that he was once again heading off to a place where no one knew 
he was going to.  It was that he knew this had to be related to 
Scully, and he was terrified that he would arrive too late.  He 
didn't know what he would do if he saw her disappearing in some 
blinding flash of white light.  Watching two people he loved 
vanish in that way in one lifetime was already two times too 
many.

As seemed to be inevitable for these kinds of things, the 
directions had seemed clear. At least on paper.  However, past 
that initial clarity, there was a certain vagueness once he got 
to where he thought he should be.  There were, however, trees. 
Lots and lots of trees.  None of them, thankfully, bleeding. Or 
moving, or anything else that would seem to warrant his being out 
here, bumbling around in the middle of the night. But he kept 
making his way through the forest, convinced that there was 
something just ahead.

He tripped over a root, nearly went sprawling, and caught 
himself--painfully--by grasping the nearest bush, which turned 
out to be holly.  

Fortunately, he knew the word "shit" in at least 6 languages and 
was muttering them all under his breath as he made his way up the 
hill.  His muttered curses initially deafened him to the rhythmic 
clanking that gradually insinuated itself into his consciousness.  
He slowed his pace.  Began to put more care into moving quietly.  

It was a cool night, but not cold, and the breeze was mild.  The 
dense, soft air of the forest was overlaid with the scents of 
pine, and moist earth.  A shift in the breeze, and suddenly he 
smelled smoke--not the murky-crisp smell of wood burning, but 
something sharp and chemical.

Up to the crest of the hill, and then there it was.  The 
proverbial deep-woods paramilitary training camp.  Was there 
anything in his life that wasn't a cliche?

He dropped to the ground, inching his way cautiously along the 
forest floor, to edge up to a vantage point looking down into the 
valley.

It was big.  What he could see of the compound had to be at least 
400 yards long and as many deep, and it seemed to go a long way 
back into the woods past what he could see in the dark of the 
night.  

Definitely military of some kind--there were men (and women?  
from this distance he couldn't tell) drilling in formations. On 
the far right of the area he could see there were squads of 
soldiers pushing through an obstacle course--climbing over logs, 
low crawling under razor wire, scaling walls. He watched them 
for a long moment, knowing that there was something wrong about 
what he was seeing, and unable to determine precisely what was 
bothering.  Finally it hit him--they were working in near 
silence.  

There was no shouting drill sergeant, no grunts or yells of 
encouragement from squad mates.  They pushed through the course, 
at a deeply efficient pace, with no extra sounds at all. The 
troops moved through the course with a grim and professional 
efficiency that left him in no doubt that he was looking at some 
of the most highly trained mercenaries in the world. There was an 
uncomfortable discipline to their movements that spoke of brutal 
assassinations and surgical strike forces that would melt away
back into the background after leveling some unspeakable 
violence.

He was beginning to look away--to examine the rest of the scene 
in front of him--when he suddenly snapped back, realizing a 
second oddity.  The soldiers were all dressed in winter combat 
fatigues--the white and light grey of their BDUs an eerie, almost 
glowing, presence in the night.

As he watched them continue their drill, he realized that a 
second squad waited to take the course, and they were all dressed 
in desert fatigues.  What the hell?

He fumbled in his pocket, finally remembering that he had 
brought a pair of miniature field binoculars along with him.  He 
began a systematic sweep of the compound.

On the far left was a weapons depot.  A series of tents with side 
flaps rolled up revealed dozens, if not hundreds of wooden crates 
that were clearly marked with various designations of missile 
types and guns and other weaponry.  It was the other weaponry 
that made him pause.  Aside from what seemed to be fairly 
standard stinger-type missiles and grenades, there were a number 
of bright yellow crates open with soldiers inspecting the 
contents.  

The weaponry in those yellow containers was most definitely 
nothing that he'd ever seen before, even in the most recent 
briefings on terrorism, and classified weapons being developed by 
the U.S. military.  These weapons looked something like a cross 
between an assault rifle and a flame-thrower, but were attached 
to odd looking canisters. In addition to the canisters, there 
were what looked like chambers that might hold rounds of 
ammunition.  The weapons were clearly unfamiliar to the troops 
examining them, also.

As Mulder watched, one of the grunts picked up one of the guns.  
He staggered a little under its unexpected weight.  Then hefted 
it to more comfortable carrying/firing position.  He pointed it 
in mock assault at one of his fellow soldiers.  Just at that 
moment, an officer sprinted into the tent, his yell eerily 
breaking the otherwise nearly silent night.

Mulder was too far away to make out the words, but the tone was 
one of urgent command and warning.  The soldier very gingerly 
returned the weapon to its crate and the whole group snapped to 
attention as the officer gave a long, quiet lecture on what 
looked like a safety briefing on the weapons. The quietness of 
the speech simply underscored the controlled fury and worry that 
seemed to emanate from the officer.  Finally, the group was 
released and each retrieved one of the new guns and followed the 
commander off to a portion of the camp that Mulder couldn't make 
out.  The firing range must be back that direction.  He noted 
that the men treated the guns with a significant degree of 
respect.

He shifted his view to the middle of the compound, which seemed 
to be a staging ground. Twelve large cargo/passenger helicopters 
were being loaded and armed.  He watched teams of men attaching 
sidewinders and other missiles to the mounts at the sides.  Boxes 
of what seemed to be supplies and more weapons and ammo were 
being loaded onto cargo pallets.  Several teams of men were 
moving through the area, inspecting things, and marking off 
manifests on the electronic pads they carried.

There were two cargo planes also being loaded.  They appeared to 
be C-130s, but the callsign and flagship markings were...non-
existent.  No markings or symbols of any kind adorned the flat 
grey paint of the planes.  Odd-looking humvees and sno-cat like 
vehicles were being driven onto the planes.  He couldn't see into 
the interior of the second plane, but it appeared that the 
vehicles on the first plane were being rigged for parachute 
drops.  From the helo-pad was long road off into the back of the 
compound that must lead to the airfield from which the cargo 
planes would take off.

It struck him again, that for all the activity taking place, 
there was almost no noise.  It made the night even more surreal.  
Like watching a movie in which the soundtrack had suddenly died.

He focused in again on the compound.  Several Quonset huts were 
visible behind the staging area.  He looked at them intently, 
trying to determine if any of them were the sort of structure 
that might have the room that he'd seen on the video of Scully.  
None of them appeared to be made of the concrete that had been 
visible behind her.  In fact, none of the huts looked to be more 
than a couple of weeks old.  Of course, they could be covering 
underground structures.... He spent endless fruitless moments
scanning each window. Hoping against hope for...what?  But he had 
to believe that he'd been led here for a purpose.

The door of the far left hut opened abruptly, and a group of men 
emerged.  Their dark, business attire contrasted sharply with the 
light-colored military uniforms surrounding them.  Their casual, 
civilian stroll across the helo-pad marked them as apart from 
this intense preparation, but the deference shown them by an 
obviously high-ranking officer made it clear that they were of it 
somehow.

A flare of fire interrupted his field of vision, much larger in 
the lenses of the binoculars that it should have been.

Of course he was there.  That smoking son-of-a-bitch was 
everywhere Mulder turned.  Was this the reason he was here?  To 
see this--this preparation?  But what was it a preparation for?  
The smoker's presence was an almost comforting familiarity, at 
the same time it intensified his worry that there was some 
now even more immediate danger to Scully.

As he watched, the men the broke into what become a heated debate. 
The smoker was looking smug, but Mulder thought he sensed an 
underlying uncertainty.  He was gesturing at a stout dark-haired 
man, who seemed to be the leader of the rest of the group.  At 
first the group was all engaged in the discussion, but soon, it 
was simply the smoker and the other.  

The smoker was saying something to the obvious annoyance of the 
fat man, when a uniformed officer approached them and indicated 
that they were to follow. One more sharp comment from the smoker 
and then the group began to follow the officer. They walked back 
toward the tents with the weaponry.  The officer halted them 
approximately 100 yards from the main area, and Mulder saw that a 
target on a sandbag had been set up toward the far end of the 
area--almost to the fence that marked the far perimeter.  
Apparently there was to be a firing demonstration.  The civilians 
were shifting nervously, foot to foot.  A commotion on the far 
side of the tents seemed to catch their attention.  

>From behind the tent just to the side of the target, three 
soldiers led a captive, who was struggling, toward the target. 
They tied him to a post just in front of the sandbag.  My god--
they were going to test fire at a live person.  Mulder was 
already on his feet, reaching for his gun before realizing that 
there would be nothing he could do to save the captive.  He 
remained standing, indecision and fury warring in his gut.

He picked up his binoculars and focused in on the unfolding drama 
once more.  He focused in on the man who was going to be the 
shadows' next victim.  It killed him to just stand there and 
watch--bear witness to one more atrocity, but he also realized 
the utter futility of a kamikaze charge down the hill into the 
compound.  He'd be dead before he was 10 steps beyond the tree 
line.  One more failure.  One more loss to the forces that had 
dogged him for so long.

There was something odd about the prisoner's face.  The features 
were oddly blurred--almost like a child had taken an eraser and 
smudged out the eyes and mouth and nose, leaving just the faint 
impressions of what had once been there. It was a deeply 
disturbing impression.  Some echo of a memory tugged at him...

Dark, truck, prison box, flash light, gun, my god--no face!, 
light, bright light, not again, not again....Scully....

He shook himself free of the pull of elusive images.  

The prisoner had stopped struggling. He stood with military 
ramrod straight posture against the pole, looking hopelessly 
valiant.  Refusing, in what he clearly knew to be his last 
minutes, to be a victim of circumstance.  Mulder inevitably found 
himself thinking of the defiance that Scully had shown on the 
video. It broke his heart all over again.

The commander of the weapons squad had finished giving his final 
briefing to the men, and three of the soldiers stepped forward 
and raised their weapons.  The prisoner squared his shoulders.  
Mulder tensed, not wanting to see, but utterly unable to look 
away....

CR-ack!

The twig snapping 20 yards to his right jolted his heart rate as 
though it had been a rifleshot.

He whirled, and saw a group of four sentries moving up the hill.  
He froze momentarily, not sure if they'd seen him.  He wasn't 
sure and began backing down, away from them.  For the first 5 
seconds, he thought maybe he'd be ok.  

Then the world turned upside down.

A dense crack-roar of weapons fire from the compound caught the 
attention of the advancing 4-man squad, and Mulder began moving 
away in earnest, just as a bright flash of light snapped on 
somewhere over the compound.  

The light came from above and below and sideways and perfectly 
illuminated Mulder for the squad to see.  The leader looked right 
at him and shouted, "Hey! Stop right there!"  He turned back 
briefly to his men, "Intruder ahead!  Full weapons!"

The men began running toward him, and then the ground began to 
shake.

It is a little known, or at least little regarded fact that the 
Washington, DC area actually lies on one of the most severe 
earthquake fault lines in the U.S.  There are many small tremors 
most years that aren't even noticed by the residents.  Geologists 
note the tiny events and make quiet, dire predictions about how 
overdue the region is for a big one.

As the ground began to roll, a tiny detached part of Mulder's 
brain wondered if the DC area was finally getting its due.  
Another part of his brain was telling his legs to keep moving, 
dammit, because there were men with very big guns coming toward 
him.

He turned, twisting, slipping, trying to find any kind of cover 
in the weird, cutting light that was permeating the forest.  

Behind him he heard the confused and angry shouts of the
soldiers.  He thought he heard one of them scream, "Goddammit!  
not AGAIN!"  But he was moving through the trees and the brush, 
and he was running and trying to move and faster and away, and he 
kept imagining that he could feel them closer and closer.

He'd pulled out his gun, fumbling the safety off, wondering why 
he was bothering, when it was perfectly clear that the patrol had 
fully automatic weapons.  And he ran, and ran, breath beginning 
to grow short, heart pounding with the exertion and fear and 
anger and adrenaline.  

The ground stopped moving.  Still he ran, zigging and zagging 
through the trees.  

He ran past the edges of the light, suddenly blinded by the dark 
of the forest, forced to slow his pace for fear of running 
headlong into a tree.  Finding a dense group of bushes in front 
of him, he ducked behind them, and cautiously looked back the way 
he'd come.

His breath coming in harsh pants, his heart pounding.  He tried 
to quiet his ragged breathing, to hear over the roaring in his 
ears.  His eyes strained through the dark.  Where were they?  
He'd been crashing through the forest like a wounded rhinoceros, 
surely they'd followed.

He glanced to the sides, behind him, in front.  Nothing.  
Gradually the night sounds of the forest asserted themselves 
again.  Quiet calls of owls.  Leaves rustling.  He sat absolutely 
still.  Weapon at hand.  Waiting.  Waiting.

Then, just on the horizon--a flash of light, a muffled roar that 
might have been an explosion.  

Then dark.  Silence.  Dead silence.

A smell of smoke.

Then nothing.

He waited two hours.  Unable to bring himself to move.  Not sure 
if there was more danger in movement or non-movement.  Also, 
semi-paralyzed by the realization that in his headlong flight 
through the woods he'd completely lost track of direction, and 
had no idea where he was.

The first light of dawn helped him find East, and he realized 
that it was pointless to continue crouching there, behind bushes 
that would afford him no cover in daylight whatsoever.  He stood 
stiffly, and began walking out.

He emerged from the woods an hour later.  The sign at the side of 
the road where he finally emerged stopped him in his tracks. The 
laughter that welled up from nowhere was only slightly bitter.

U.S. Government Property
NO TRESPASSERS
DANGER
Training grounds.  Live weapons in use.  
NO ENTRY

U.S. Department of Justice
Federal Bureau of Investigation

~ ~ ~ ~ 

Unknown location

Run!  Run!  You must run.  Keep running.  Don't stop! Don't look 
back!  Run!

She awoke, barely stifling the shout that rose up from the depths 
of her soul.

Run!

She was shaking, covered in light sheen of sweat.  She pulled 
herself upright, leaning back against the wall behind the bed, 
wrapping herself in the blanket--pulling it tight around her, as 
though it could keep her from flying apart, from flying across 
this room to pound helplessly on the door.

It had come again.  The dream.  The command.  Calling her.  The 
imperative.  Run.  You must run.  The fourth night in a row.  The 
command to run.  Growing stronger.  Pulling at her.  Leading 
her....

But where?  But where?  

She found she was unconsciously rocking.  Tiny back and 
forth motions, trying to soothe herself.  Trying to calm her 
heartbeat, her shallow, panting breaths.  What was happening?  

She knew of course, on one level.  She was being called.  
Summoned through the chip in her neck that may very well have 
saved her from cancer, but which might simply lead her to another 
death.  The video images of the charred bodies on the 
Pennsylvania dam danced on the edges of her consciousness, 
reminding her of the fate that might wait for her.  If They 
chose to call her, what would she do?  Could she resist?  She'd 
survived once, and didn't know why.  She thought it unlikely that 
such random twists of fate would save her twice.

Slowly pulling herself out of the nightmare, waking up, letting
her rational, conscious mind take over, she reminded herself that 
dreams of running were undoubtedly just her unconscious dealing 
with her captivity and her natural desire to be able to run away 
from this place.  The thought was momentarily comforting.

Knife point agony spiked her.  The back of her neck on fire.  
Tight, red hot pain jolting her for an endless 10 seconds.  She 
was utterly rigid with pain.  Held motionless in the grip of the 
torment, she was completely unprepared for a sudden jumble of 
images and emotions that assaulted her mind.  

Faces she recognized and didn't.
Mulder.
Lights sweeping across an oddly distorted body that she realized 
belonged to her.
A drill or probe, whirling, nearer, nearer.
Krycek.
Voices that babbled and broke and formed that sounds that she 
could almost but never quite be understand.
Dark, long, long dark.
Eyes that watched her and didn't see her at all.
Mulder....

The agonizing sensation abruptly ceased, and she collapsed 
boneless and trembling back on the bed.

Slowly she began to breathe cautiously, expecting each movement 
to hurt.  A residual ache washed over her, sweeping her with 
fatigue and weakness.

She huddled on the bed, motionless.  And still she felt the call.

~ ~ ~ ~ 

Skinner's Office
September 21, 1998
9:47 a.m.

There was a certain grim satisfaction in this new...arrangement.  
For far too long, it had been the other way around.  He'd been at 
the beck and call of that man whose name he still didn't know, 
but whom he referred to as The Smoker, or sometimes Cancer Man.  
There had even been a time when Skinner had equated the man with 
the Devil, but ultimately that had proved to be a false 
comparison.  His theology was a little shaky, but he seriously 
doubted that the Prince of Darkness would have left several pints 
of blood on the anonymous beige carpet of an anonymous apartment 
building in Arlington.

Still, despite the apparently fatal wound--the Smoker was back.  
Skinner decided he simply wasn't going to think about it.  The 
point of the matter was that things had changed.  Perhaps for the 
better.

Now he could make the calls, place the demands for the time and 
places of meetings.  He might even be able to prevent the man 
from smoking in his office.  Maybe.  The balance of power hadn't 
completely shifted, but it had tilted in his favor.  He was 
inclined to savor the feeling.

A slight creak and rustle, and he was there, standing in front of 
the AD's desk.  For a long moment Skinner didn't even look up 
from the paperwork he was ostentatiously perusing.  Oh yeah.  
This felt good.  

Click, hiss, and he heard the cigarette being lit.  He 
deliberately did not react to the affront. You can't win every 
battle, even if you win the war.

He waited just a moment more, and then looked up.

"You're late."  The same growl he used on Mulder after his more 
outrageous field reports.

"DC traffic."  Bland tone, but just the faintest shadings of 
something--warning, challenge, impatience--underneath.

"It is rush hour."  Skinner felt unaccountably magnanimous.  Or 
perhaps this was just rubbing the smoking man's face in it--it 
was now Skinner's role to dispense the absolutions for excuses.

"You called?" The impatience was starting to show.

"Yes, I did."  He settled back, steepling his fingers.  He 
should, by most measures, have felt at a disadvantage--seated 
while the other stood over him, but instead, he felt 
rather...confident. "We have a situation to discuss."

"Oh?"  The tone, still bland, almost casual, but the eyes were 
wary.

"Yes, I rather think this has gone on long enough.  Don't you?"

"You think -what- has gone on long enough?"  

He refused to rise to the bait. "I think it's time for you to end 
this."

"Are you perhaps referring to the rather...interesting... 
disappearance of one of your agents?  Really, Assistant Director 
Skinner, I should think you'd have better things to do than 
bother me during a time of such...crisis."

Skinner quirked an eyebrow. "Crisis? Interesting choice of 
words."  He projected a calm he didn't quite feel.  "Yes, one of 
my agents is missing under rather...unusual circumstances.  But 
crisis?"  He let the word lay heavy and blatant between them.

The smoker remained impassive, but Skinner thought it was costing 
him no small measure of effort to keep the facade. "My mistake 
then.  So why am I here?"

"Because enough is enough.  I want Agent Scully returned. Now. 
Unharmed."  He hadn't meant to cut to the chase so quickly, but 
the game had simply gone on too long.

"What makes you think I know anything at all about that? Or that 
even if I did, that I would be inclined to do anything about it?"  

For the first time, Skinner felt a jolt of uncertainty, but still 
couldn't resist the dig. "I thought you knew everything."

"My dear man, what would give you that impression?  I have 
certain...connections that prove useful from time to time, but 
knowing 'everything?' You give me far too much credit. I'm not at 
all sure I can be helpful to you in this case."

Skinner restrained himself from gritting his teeth.  "Well then, 
perhaps your connections can fill you in on your apparent lack of 
knowledge."

"That's presuming I want to know. I'm a busy man, Mr. Skinner.  
There are many things which simply don't concern me."

"But I think this should concern you."  

"Why?  As I said, I am a busy man, and although I do like Agent 
Scully, her disappearance is of little consequence to me.  Now, 
if you have nothing of interest for me, I believe I'll be going." 
Skinner had odd the impression that smoking man was both waiting 
to hear something that he did want to learn, and waiting for 
permission to leave.

It had been a long week, and Skinner was too tired to play games.  
"So, you know nothing, and can do nothing." His tone a deliberate 
insult.

"Don't confuse my *ability* to do something with my *willingness* 
to do it."  

"So you do know something about Agent Scully?"  

The smoker gave a slightly theatrical sigh. "I've told you--I'm a 
busy man.  I simply don't have time to concern myself with all 
the small details of the various...activities that are going on.  
Besides.  Why should I help you with this?"

"Because if you do, I'll return this."  Skinner reached inside 
his desk and removed the case that he'd been holding on to for an 
emergency.

The smoker actually paled.  "Where did you get that?"  A sharp 
urgency now filled the office.

"Where do you think?"  The man began reaching for the case, and 
Skinner flipped it open to show the empty lining.  "Do you think 
I'm an idiot?  The contents are quite safely stored.  But I will 
return them to you....for Agent Scully."  

He'd taken the sample during one of his "assignments" for the 
smoker, somehow knowing it was valuable--not even fully 
understanding all it was, but knowing that it was connected 
to the damn bees. He'd been proven correct when the smoker had 
demanded to know if Skinner had seen anyone else during that 
particular raid. He'd been tense and irritable for weeks 
afterwards.  For some reason it had never seemed to occur to the 
man that Skinner might have in any way acted on his own.  It had 
been a lone moment of satisfaction during those hellish months.

"You're a fool, Skinner."

"Maybe.  Do you want to make a trade or not?"

"I'll have to consider this. There are other...players to 
consult. It is a somewhat complex time, and people's moods are 
subject to change."  Something in Skinner's gut told him it was a 
bluff.  He'd just put all the chips on the table and the smoker 
was still hedging.  It would seem that he might not actually know 
who or what had Scully.

The smoking man was still staring at the case on the desk, 
transfixed by the sight.  The sample must be even more valuable 
than he'd initially guessed.

Finally, the smoker looked up, his mask once more intact, but a 
new wariness in his eyes.  "I'll be in touch."  The tone was 
curt. "In the meantime, you might want to find out what your 
Agent Mulder was up to last night."

Oddly Skinner was left with the impression that the smoker was 
fishing for information.  And that he was worried.

Skinner sat at his desk for a long time, wondering where you went 
when your court of last resort turned out to be nothing but smoke 
and mirrors.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ 

FBI Command Post
1:28 p.m. 

Mulder had been pacing around the room all morning, and well past 
lunch time.  He knew that he was giving off some kind of "leave 
me the fuck alone" signal because the other agents were giving 
him an even wider berth than usual.  Suited him just fine.  He 
was still keyed up from his adventures the night before.  Tense.  
Edgy.  Unable to decide what to do next.

He had long ago surrendered any illusions that the U.S. 
Government, or even the Department of Justice, were bastions of 
honor, integrity or justice.  Still, seeing the tangible proof of 
that involvement last night had shaken him.  He'd realized, 
during his drive back that the installation he'd seen 
had to be located somewhere on that no man's land between the 
FBI's Quantico facility and the Marine base down there.  Still, 
it was all federal land, and that clearly meant some kind of 
federal involvement.

Shit.  Even though it wasn't wholly unexpected, it did reopen the 
can of worms about whom to trust and what to do next.  

His initial impulse on seeing the compound had been to call 
Skinner.  He'd wanted to literally send in the Marines--get 
Skinner and every damn agent he could get his hands on down there 
to overrun the place and find Scully.  But the longer he'd 
watched the less convinced he'd been that Scully was even there.  
He couldn't figure out the connection.  What would a seemingly 
random snatching of Scully have to do with what looked like 
preparations for either repelling or launching an invasion?

Through the long night of waiting in the woods, he'd also come 
back time and again to the question of *who* had given him the 
information to find this camp.  And to what end?  He knew very 
little more than when he'd started, but it was clear that what 
he'd seen had been vitally important.  The smoker and his 
colleagues were clearly about to take some new step, and they 
expected armed resistance of an unusual type.... the winter 
fatigues had inevitably brought to mind the ship in the Arctic 
that he'd rescued Scully from...but what about the desert 
fatigues?  Where did that fit in....?  Dammit!

And what would he do now?  He needed help.  That much was clear.  
Although he trusted them implicitly, he wasn't entirely sure that 
this was the sort of thing the Lone Gunmen could help him with.  
Which left him with Skinner.  Could Skinner be trusted?  The FBI 
was involved in all this, somehow, as was the military.  Trusting 
no one was the only thing that guaranteed safety, but wouldn't 
save Scully.  Fuck.  The bottom line was that somewhere deep in 
his gut he simply trusted Skinner...because he did.  There had 
been a time, early on, when it seemed that Skinner was far too 
deep in the smoking man's pocket.  But then there had been 
Skinner reopening the X-files, and the DAT trade, and his deal 
for Scully's cure.  He needed to talk to Skinner.

The pitch of the command room changed abruptly.  The general 
level of buzz and fatigued chatter died suddenly, and he began to 
hear isolated voices.  He looked up.  Skinner had come in and 
seemed to be conducting his usual afternoon update briefing.

He waited until the AD was finished and then met him in the back 
corner where Skinner had commandeered a desk as his work space. 
Skinner looked distracted--standing, hands on hips, frowning down 
at the papers that were neatly stacked in several piles on the 
desktop.  He didn't seem to realize that Mulder was standing 
there for several moments.

"Yes, Mulder.  What is it?"  There was an unexpected edge of 
impatience in the AD's voice.

"I need to talk to you."  Mulder hesitated, not quite sure what 
to say next.  Realizing that he'd just made a decision.

Skinner seemed to be weighing some serious matter.  Far more 
serious than Mulder's simple request warranted.  Finally he gave 
a curt nod.  "Let's move this to the interrogation room."

The small room to the side of the main command room was normally 
an oversized closet that held fax machines and copiers.  For this 
investigation, the machines had been cleared out and a small 
table and two chairs had been set up.  They had used it for 
questioning the precious few witnesses they'd found.  It was the 
only truly private area in the command post.

The room felt tight, claustrophobic as soon as Skinner shut the 
door.  He tended to forget just how solid the AD was.  His 
imposing presence a combination of the man's sheer physical bulk 
and his commanding persona.  "So, Mulder, what is it?"

It was hard to know where to start. "I got an anonymous tip last 
night."  

"And?"  

"I followed the directions to some woods down near Quantico. I 
found....well, I guess you'd call it a training camp."

As he described what he'd seen in the woods, he kept watching 
Skinner for signs of disbelief, or impatience, or perhaps he was 
looking for signs that Skinner actually already knew all about 
it.  But he found he couldn't read his superior at all.

"That's quite a tale, Mulder.  I don't suppose you got any 
pictures or evidence?"  For a brief moment, Mulder almost 
wondered if there was a glint of humor in Skinner's voice.

"Uh no, sir.  I sort of left in a hurry, didn't take a camera, 
and what with the lights and explosions or whatever it was, there 
really wasn't..."

"It's ok.  I didn't really expect, just thought I'd ask."  
Skinner sort of huffed, and looked down at the ground for a 
moment.  "Did it ever occur to you to call for back up before you 
took off?"

"Well, I--"

"Look, Mulder.  I know that this is a tough time.  Things right 
now are more than a little tense, and once again we're left not 
knowing who to trust.  But you have to trust someone, sometime. 
You trusted whoever left you that tip...."

"I know.  It was stupid--but it was late at night and I wasn't 
thinking." Damn, he hated sounding like a truant kid being hauled 
in front of the principal.  

"Scully's kidnapping has us all jumping at shadows."  Skinner 
looked away for a moment, seemingly lost in his own thoughts.  
"After the earthquake or whatever it was settled down, did you go 
back and check on the camp again?"

"No.  I hate to admit it, but I was lost.  I'd been dashing 
through the woods without paying attention to which way I was 
turning.  By the time I lost those goons, I really didn't know 
which way the camp was.  It was pretty much luck that I managed 
to get back to the road relatively quickly."

"You say this was down at Quantico."

"Yeah--I came out right at the marker for the FBI campus."

"But you don't know if that camp was..."

"I'm pretty sure it's right on the no man's land."

"Of course.  It's probably gone by now, but I'll go ahead and get 
some agents I trust out there. The question is what does it all 
mean.  You say you saw our smoking friend down there?"

"Yeah--they were conducting some kind of weapons test.  They were 
going to kill that prisoner..." He shuddered, thinking of that 
strange, blurred face.  The horror he'd felt at his own 
helplessness.

"And the soldiers who were training--they were wearing both 
arctic and desert BDUs?"

"Yeah."

"Any theories?"

Mulder shrugged. "I don't know.  It's frustrating as hell.  I 
thought about it last night. The only thing I can figure is that 
there's another ship somewhere.  Maybe at the North Pole."

Skinner nodded absently.  "Makes sense in a way, but why the 
desert cami's?  I can't figure that one.  There's been nothing in 
any of the recent security briefings that would suggest something 
in any of the desert areas..."

"Of course, this sort of thing might not show up in an official 
briefing."  Mulder knew he was not successfully keeping the 
bitterness out of his voice.

"True.  But nothing that any of my unofficial channels have told 
me would lead me to think that either...."

"Unofficial?"  Instantly on the alert again.

"Yeah."  Skinner's hard gaze pinned him.  Assessed him.  "I have 
a number of channels through which I receive information. Still, 
it's almost like they're preparing for a dual-front assault.  
Given the weaponry you've described, I think we have to assume a 
somewhat....unusual opponent."  Again, the gaze, heavy on him.

"You mean extra-terrestrial?"  Mulder took a moment to revel in 
the irony that it was now Skinner who would tentatively test the 
waters with theories of extreme possibilities.  "You're probably 
right.  What I still don't get, though, is why I got the tip to go 
see that particular test.  What did they want me to do about it?"

"The question is, what can we do about it?  And do you think this 
has something to do with Agent Scully?"

Mulder paced for a step or two. "Yeah--I do.  Can't begin to tell 
you why.  Just have a sense.  It's making me nuts, too.  The only 
thing I can figure is that it has something to do with this 
summer.  She was on that ship, the ship was in ice, these guys 
are training in winter gear...maybe a ship is coming back?  
Scully has the vaccine in her system.  Maybe that has something 
to do with it...Damn it!"  He kicked the table in frustration.

"Easy, Mulder. We'll figure it out.  If you think it's connected 
let's just work with that for now.  What do you want to do?  How 
involved do you want the agency to get?"  It could still surprise 
him--Skinner's tacit admission that there were parts of the FBI 
not to be trusted.

"Well, you said you'd send out some agents you trust to check out 
the site.  Let's see what they find.  In the meantime, maybe I 
should try to...."

Skinner cut him off abruptly.  "Our smoking friend came to see me 
this morning."  He looked down, and Mulder had the odd sensation 
sense that Skinner was almost embarrassed.  "I...uh...he seemed 
to be fishing for some information.  About what you were doing 
last night."

The men exchanged a wry look.  Skinner continued. "I think we've 
answered the questions about his involvement, but he isn't sure 
you were there.  I think we should keep it that way.  I know the 
time is still running, but I think we should just wait this out 
for a bit. Anyway--I don't think he knows where Scully is."

Mulder felt a deep rage begin to build in his gut. "What do you 
mean?"  A small detached part of his brain reminded him, even as 
he was advancing on Skinner, that Skinner outweighed him by at 
least 30 pounds, all of it muscle.  Skinner didn't budge a 
millimeter.  

"You might as well know.  I have something that the smoker wants. 
Something I acquired," he gave the word an ugly twist, 
"during....that time.  I essentially offered to trade it for 
Scully.  He didn't exactly leap at the offer, despite the fact 
that he obviously needed it.  I don't think he's quite in the 
loop on this."

He felt the rage easing a bit.  "I think that worries me."  

"Me, too."

And there was nothing else to be said.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Unknown location

She watched their captive pacing in her cell.  Precise steps 
measuring the length and breadth of her room.  She admired that 
about the red-haired woman.  Ironically, she actually admired 
many things about the agent.  Of course, none of the admiration 
would weigh in her decision about Scully's fate.

She'd already negotiated the price for the agent--or more 
specifically, the chip in her neck--and Marita was not a person 
to allow sentiment to cloud her professional judgment or long
range planning.

Scully's sleep patterns had been erratic the last few nights.  
They, of course, had her under constant video surveillance, 
strictly as a precautionary measure. It had seemed logical that 
some kind of activation of her implant might take place once the 
consortium's plans had been finalized with the aliens.  The 
videos were a way of monitoring Scully during times they couldn't 
be there.

It was so hard to get reliable help these days...besides, the 
fewer people involved, the fewer chances of a leak and screw-up.

Marita had been in Tunguska.  Had seen the charred bodies left by 
the rebel aliens.  She knew that whatever had called those people 
to that place of death and kept them there to be slaughtered like 
so many sheep had to be a powerful force indeed.

She wondered idly what the effect of that call would be on a 
captive.  She thought that something was beginning.  The tapes 
had shown Scully repeatedly reaching for the back of her neck, 
even while sleeping.  And her pacing today was tighter than 
normal--almost as though she were forcing herself into a routine 
against the will of her body.  

As she watched, Scully stopped dead in her tracks--rigid with 
surprise or pain.  She was absolutely still for 2 full minutes, 
and then crumpled to the floor, her hand clutching at the 
implant. 

Interesting.  There was definitely a call underway.  But the chip 
wasn't reacting like the others Marita had seen.  So it would 
seem her allies were correct--the vaccine did have some 
interactive effects.

They would shortly have to set up an "escape" for her--they would 
need her to lead them to the confrontation.

She heard footsteps behind her.  Krycek.  He was an impulsive 
fool....but quite useful.  And sometimes quite amusing.  He had 
certain talents in bed, and other places...

"Alexi--where have you been?"  She didn't even wait for his 
answer before covering his mouth with her own.  Yes, very 
amusing.

~ ~ ~ ~

Unspecified location in Washington, DC

The funny thing was how easy it was to play this game.  How 
simple was to fool these men.  She was never sure if they 
continually underestimated her because she was young, or because 
she was a woman.  Or simply because they were stupid. It really 
didn't matter.  The effect was the same--she could come and go as 
she more or less pleased, and there were rarely any serious 
obstacles to her accomplishing what she wished to do.  It was 
merely a question of biding her time until an appropriate 
opportunity....

Part of the men's complacency probably stemmed from this summer, 
when she'd been the first successful test subject for the new 
vaccine.  It had still been a beta version, but the results had 
been...useful.  She shuddered briefly, remembering that time--the 
endless suspension in a mental and physical limbo that was as 
close as she'd ever like to get to hell.  Inasmuch as she 
believed in such a place.

But, it had been worth it, she supposed.  A time she did not want 
to relive, but she was a pragmatist. There was a price to be paid 
for all gains.

The room was smoke-filled, as usual.  She sat quietly in the 
corner, in her accustomed place, looking vaguely bored.  She had 
long since come to the realization that the elders simply saw her 
as part of the furniture.  It was amazing what she and the 
leather chairs had learned over the past several months.

It was a mark that something serious and strange was happening 
that the elders had convened in Washington, rather than New York.  
But the room was still very much the same.  Expensively 
understated leather chairs, carpet that muffled sound and 
footsteps, and a quiet array of invisible servants and aides.  
Such as she.

She was perfectly positioned when the phone call came in for the 
smoking man.  

"Yes? Oh.  It's you." A grimace of distaste.

"About time you called.  Where is she?"

"Don't give me that, you know exactly who I'm talking about."

"Since when are you in any position to make demands?"

The smoker began to evidence small signs of agitation.  Marita 
watched him carefully without betraying her interest.  

"You know so much less than you think you do," now real anger 
could be heard, "and you are meddling in a situation that you 
can't even begin to understand."  The cold condescending tone was 
irritatingly familiar.  It was a pleasure to hear it directed at 
another.

"I don't have time for this sort of stupidity, Krycek.  Meet me 
at the usual place.  Forty-five minutes." Marita hoped her sudden 
involuntary jerk hadn't been noticed.  She felt the cold hand of 
rage and fright clutch at her gut.  Krycek? What the hell?  Had 
they been discovered?  Had she been betrayed? What did this mean?  

The smoking man slammed the phone down and stalked over to pick 
up his coat.  As he walked out of the room she could hear him 
demanding that a cab be summoned.

She quietly turned the pages of the file she was ostensibly 
perusing, and considered the call.  Krycek had said nothing to 
her about being contacted by the consortium.  While she hadn't 
exactly expected him to play a completely honest game with her, 
she nevertheless found herself annoyed by this somewhat 
unexpected betrayal.  On the other hand, it certainly did appear 
that Krycek had been pulled into this latest round of the game by 
the elders, not the other way around.  He had always been 
somewhat weak in his responses to them, and this was probably no 
exception.

She permitted herself a brief smile.  Perhaps it would be a 
useful thing for there to be an observer at this meeting.

One of the things she had learned during all those afternoons and 
evenings in this room was where the "usual place" was.

~ ~ ~ ~

Washington, DC
The Vietnam Memorial
45 minutes later

Cliches within cliches.  They met at the center of the dark 
granite V of The Wall. She spared herself a moment of anger that 
Krycek would leave their captive unattended for this meeting, but 
reminded herself that they had one or two minions who could at 
least be trusted to stand guard, and there was on-going video 
surveillance.  

Fortunately it was a cool but bright Fall day, and her concealing 
sunglasses and hat were quite unremarkable among the crowds that 
were always present at this memorial.  She trailed the men at a 
distance that put her out of easy earshot but was less likely to 
raise suspicions.

Krycek was clearly not pleased to have been summoned to the 
meeting, and the smoker was clearly agitated.  It made for an 
interesting dynamic.  The two men walked the length of the wall, 
and then turned away from the path into some of the trees that 
surrounded the area.  They were close enough to the nurses' 
memorial statue that she could pretend to be admiring it, but 
stand near enough to them to overhear snatches of their angry 
conversation.

"...and you're in over your head.  If you would just--"

Krycek cut off the older man surprisingly smoothly. "What?  Hand 
her over to you?  Presuming of course that I have her.  I fail to 
see *any* reason that would work to my advantage.  Hypothetically 
speaking, of course."

"Don't play games, boy."

Krycek gave an odd, bitter laugh. "Look, I have things to do, old 
man.  If you have nothing left to say, I think I'll be leaving."

"Wait.  Don't be hasty."  The smoker's tone was almost 
conciliatory. "Maybe some kind of arrangement can be made.  Who 
are you working with?  Perhaps...."

"What is it that you're really looking for here? And, far more 
importantly, what's in it for me?"

"I'm not without influence in certain....circles.  I could 
arrange for a promotion or suitable...compensation for you."

The bitterness in Krycek's tone was unmistakable.  "Oh, and 
dental benefits, too?  Cut me a fucking break.  What makes you 
think I'm interested in simply being a higher paid lackey for 
your stupid group?"

"Because you know that we will be the ones left standing when The 
Day comes."

"Maybe.  You know, there are moments when I think Mulder is right 
and trusting no one is the only way to go.  You fools may 
simply be the more convenient lambs to the slaughter. Your allies 
are rather....unpredictable."

"Maybe, maybe not.  You're losing the point.  I can help you.  I 
simply need a gesture of good faith on your part.  Tell me who 
you're working with."

She had walked slowly through the area as though lost in thought, 
and was now standing in a place that afforded her a direct view 
of Krycek.  She risked looking up, uncharacteristically curious 
about he would say.  He looked strangely focused.

"You have nothing that I want."  There was a note in his voice 
she couldn't recall ever hearing before.  She turned away and 
began slowly making her way back toward the main path.

Krycek brushed by her on his way out of the woods and never 
noticed her at all.

~ ~ ~ ~ 

Unknown location

The last two days had been a terrifying blend of unexpected 
lucidity and moments of complete disorientation.  Scully didn't 
think she was being drugged, yet she would wake at odd moments 
throughout the day and night and find herself in positions she 
couldn't remember getting into.  In parts of the room she had 
never walked to.  She thought.

The first incident had been two nights before.  She'd woken 
suddenly to find herself tugging uselessly on the door handle to 
her cell, pulling and twisting and turning the knob, frantically 
trying to escape.  At first she had chalked it up to simple night 
terrors.  A nightmare turned too real and tangible.  

Over the next 48 hours, however, she had four more incidents.  In 
each case she would suddenly "come to" to find herself in some 
unlikely position--scrabbling with her nails at the linoleum 
tiles, as though trying to dig her way out of the room, another 
time tugging at her bedclothes, as though preparing to rip them 
into shreds.  Each time, she would have no recollection of 
beginning the actions, and her memories up until she presumed she 
began doing these things were hazy.

Gradually she realized that just before she lost the thread of 
her memories, she had a distinct impression of sudden, 
debilitating pain emanating from the base of her neck.  The 
terror of that realization held her hostage for several hours--
she sat motionless on her bed, legs pulled up to her chest, 
panicked into stillness.

For a brief moment she actually found herself grateful to her 
captives.  Locked up here, she was powerless to respond to this 
alien call that the chip was imposing on her.  But she felt the 
call, and the force of it was undeniable.  Was that why she had 
been taken prisoner?  It seemed possible, at least, that this 
"call" and her kidnapping were connected.  But why hold her?  
What was their plan?

In her moments of clarity, she found her mind turning helplessly 
over and over the apparent reality of the call and what it 
meant....

.....charred bodies on the bridge, bright lights, gaps in her memory,
 cold, dark, dark, dark, nothingness...

What waited for her this time?  Would she ever know?  What would 
Mulder do when he found this next collection of bodies?  She 
closed her eyes against the image of Mulder desperately searching 
through charred and unrecognizable remnants of men and women, 
trying to fight the despair rolling through him.  She felt the 
pit of her stomach clench and roil.

If she were not being held here, would she already be journeying 
to some distant point?  Even in her moments of lucidity, she felt 
a thin, tenuous pull--outward, onward, away.  She had been 
dreaming of sand and ice.  How far was she being called this 
time?

Abruptly she was pulled back into her dream of the night before.  

Hot.  So dry.  Burning.  Endless dunes of sand.  Lost in the 
desert.  Again.  But she kept walking, because she had to.  
Because she was called, because she was needed.  She had been 
walking forever, sand slippery and soft beneath her uncertain 
feet.  

And there, ahead, a pillar of flame rising 100 feet from the 
desert.  No.  Not fire.  Not the destructive inferno of that 
vertical furnace.  But she had no choice.  The flame was for her, 
and would not be denied.  She walked to meet her fate.

The heat of the flame was overwhelming, enervating.  But still 
she moved forward, until she reached the moat of a living liquid 
that spread in shimmering, surreal waves out and away from the 
pillar.  The flame that called her had melted the sand into a sea 
of molten glass that rippled in the breeze caused by the blaze.  

She stopped, torn between the siren call of the flame, and her 
terror of the white-hot glass.  Frozen in indecision, she was 
unprepared for the cool lap of the liquid about her feet and 
ankles.  The fluid surrounded her, sweet, gentle, embracing.  She 
felt herself sinking into its cool depths, peaceful, unafraid.  
At rest from the harsh desert.

She dove, swimming down, down, glorying in the colors that 
flashed and sparked in the crystalline depths of this improbable 
ocean.  She rose up to the surface, and began walking back to the 
shore, and suddenly her steps faltered, her feet trapped, caught 
on something.  

She looked down, and in horror realized that the molten glass had 
become ice, and that crystals were forming all along her skin, 
and that her feet were already encased in blocks of ice.  She 
looked behind her--the lake was freezing, turning white, blue-
green of arctic glaciers. The pillar of flame was freezing, too, 
rising up cold and challenging into the sky, a beacon calling, 
calling.....

The cold ripped through her, but she was already too frozen to
shiver.  She could only wait and watch in horror and remembered 
horror, as once more she was encased in a column of clear, cold, 
nothingness.  She could still see out across the wasteland of ice 
and desert--existing together--trapped on the edge of this 
uninhabitable desolation.  She would be there forever.

Then across the distance, she saw a figure approaching--racing, 
tumbling toward her.  She strained to call out for help, for 
company, for any touch at all.  

She thought her heart would break as she realized it was Mulder.  

He arrived after an eon of waiting and longing.  Just as he 
reached to touch her, the column shattered, and she was swept 
away into wakefulness.

The voice came through the loudspeaker, breaking her reverie.  
"Back away from the door."  It must be a meal time. 

Instinctively, she moved away, toward the bed, hating the fact 
that she had been so readily trained to obey that voice.  On a 
sudden whim, though, she instead moved to the left side of the 
room, where she would be able see out the door when it actually 
opened. Surprisingly, the voice made no comment on this variation 
in her behavior.

The door opened, and a man slid a tray on to the floor, just 
inside the door.  

He wasn't armed.  Unlike the other times, when an armed thug had 
escorted a minion who carried the actual food tray, this time it 
was just the minion.

She could clearly see an open hallway behind him. It led to what 
looked like an outside door.

It seemed too easy.  It seemed just possible. Maybe they thought 
her too broken to make a break for it.  Such miscalculations had 
cost others dearly.

She didn't know what lay beyond that outside door, but for the 
first time she felt a glimmer of hope. 

~ ~ ~ ~


"It's time."  

Still partly caught up in the anger from his meeting with the 
smoker, Krycek almost didn't hear the words.  The tone 
alone was enough to further enrage him--that cold, flat tone of 
command he was so sick of hearing. From her.  From him.  
>From all of them.

The meeting had been less than satisfactory.  No, scratch that, 
the meeting had gotten him fucking nowhere.  He still wasn't sure 
why he'd bothered to call the smoking man in the first place--it 
wouldn't have been the first time he'd ignored a preemptory 
summons.  But he had called, and worst than that had actually 
shown up for the face-to-face meeting.  By the end of that little 
encounter he had been both frustrated and bemused.  The smoker 
had demanded that he hand over Scully, but it was also patently 
clear that on some level the old man had been bluffing.  Krycek 
came away convinced that the bastard wasn't actually sure if he 
had her.  A strange and somewhat disturbing realization.

"What?" A near snarl to cover the fact that he had been 
completely zoned out when the blonde had entered the room.  
Infuriatingly his tone provoked absolutely no reaction from 
Marita.

"I said, 'It's time'."  

"For what?  Miller?"

Uncomprehending blue eyes regarded him coolly.  Right.  She 
hadn't grown up in this country.  Sometimes her ignorance of 
American culture was amusing, today it was simply one more 
annoyance.

"It's time to let her 'escape'."

Still feeling lost, he was stubborn.  "Why?"

"Because it's time."

"I think you said that."  They seemed incapable of any sort of 
exchange that didn't almost immediately degenerate into anger and 
a certain sexual give-and-take.

She narrowed her eyes, and scrutinized him with a sudden and 
unexpected clarity.  He suppressed a shiver.  Feeling vaguely 
guilty for his meeting of that afternoon, and hating himself for 
that guilt, he wondered if somehow she knew.  Impossible.  There 
was no way she could.  But then she turned away and looked back 
at Scully, who was pacing the room with the slow, deliberate, 
desperate steps of a caged tiger.

"I've been watching her.  I'm certain that a Call has been 
launched.  You've seen the videos, too."

"Yeah?  So what's the next step?  I thought we still had a 
decision to make."

She looked back at him then. "We do.  But in the meantime we 
still need her.  The group has suddenly gotten far more 
secretive, and I haven't been able to find out exactly where the 
plan will be implemented."  The admission cost her, he knew.

"So?"

"So, we'll need to follow her to the site.  She'll be pulled in 
by the signal, and we'll be able to track her without her 
realizing it."

"Doesn't that make it a bit risky for us?  Who knows where it 
will be? Who might see us?  See her?"

She gave a sharp, impatient shrug.  "It's always in out-of-the-
way places.  You know that.  Anyway, I don't know that we have 
any other choices."

Again he found himself worrying about exactly what it was 
he'd committed himself to.

"Ok.  So how do we engineer this escape?  If we just open up the 
door, I think she'll be pretty suspicious."

"We'll let one of the guards get 'sloppy.'  She's been watching 
their patterns at the door much more carefully the last couple of 
days.  Anyway, once the call gets strong enough, I doubt she'll 
be sufficiently aware to be suspicious about anything."  

As it turned out, she was coldly accurate, as always.

In the next 8 hours, Scully's agitation increased markedly.  She 
began pacing in tight circles around her room, stopping 
occasionally to test the handle of the door, then standing in the 
middle of the space, rocking--foot-to-foot--her eyes focused on 
some faraway point.  

As her movements and gestures became more abrupt and ever less 
"natural" was the only way he could characterize it, Marita had 
one of the guards quietly unlock the cell door.  When Scully 
began her next cycle of pacing and testing the door, it opened 
easily under her touch.  The full power of the force that gripped 
her became clear when the agent didn't even stop to look 
cautiously up-and-down the corridor outside her room, simply 
walked out of the building, looking nowhere but straight ahead.  
As she passed by their observation room, with its two-way 
mirrored window that faced the hallway, he could see that her 
eyes were almost unfocused.

Yet, their icy blueness was focused somewhere in the distance, to 
a point he couldn't see.

Her movements were nearly jerky, yet she moved with her own 
natural grace and power.  It was as though she were being 
propelled by something more than just her own muscles.

They followed her down the corridor, somehow knowing that they 
wouldn't need to be particularly cautious in their shadowing.

She quickly left the building, exiting out into the crisp Fall 
day, seemingly unaware of either the slightly chill in the air, 
or the bright light.  As soon as she stepped into the wooded area 
surrounding the building, she turned North, and began walking at 
a quick pace, deviating from her direction only when forced to by 
a significant obstacle such as a tree or boulder.  Following a 
path that only she could see.

Leaves and twigs crunching underfoot, they followed her through 
the woods, seeing none of the splendor of the changing leaves--
intent only on their target, and her destination.

"Shouldn't we have some kind of backup?"  The words came almost 
without thought.

"What would you suggest, Alex?  The DC Police, or perhaps your 
former colleagues from the Bureau?"  The almost sweet sarcasm 
utterly failed to mask the contempt.

"You mean...?"  He left the rest of sentence to dangle in the 
air.... Great.  Just fucking great.  They were apparently going 
to take on an army--make that two armies--of aliens on their own, 
with nothing but a semi-sentient bargaining chip....he winced at 
the inadvertent and unavoidable pun.  Still, he sort of wondered 
if Marita were really prepared for this moment, if she had any 
idea what was going on, if she had some secret weapon she'd 
failed to tell him about, or if she were simply planning to use 
her charm to bluff them through this.

Fuck.

Up ahead, Scully stopped suddenly.  They barely had time to duck 
behind some convenient rocks, as the agent stiffened in her 
tracks, and suddenly whirled about, looking at her surroundings 
with apparent bewilderment.  He watched as her hand instinctively 
sought for the missing weapon at the small of her back, and she 
began looking for cover.

This was interesting.

Beside him he thought he heard Marita muttering something under 
her breath.  He chanced a whisper. "What?"

Her undertone hissed back at him. "Shit.  This is not good."  It 
was the first time he'd ever seen her rattled enough to state the 
purely obvious. It startled him into a silent stare.

Still able to observe Scully from their own cover, they watched 
as she began making her way to a group of trees, presumably to 
provide herself some cover while she.....she what?  What the hell 
was going on?  A few feet from the trees, she suddenly dropped to 
her knees, one hand supporting her as she slumped forward, the 
other clutching at the back of her neck.

"She's fighting it somehow.  Or something is."  Marita's 
commentary on the blatantly apparent would have been amusing, 
were the situation not so critical.  "I don't think they..." She 
stopped abruptly as Scully pulled herself to her feet again, 
swaying lightly with the obvious effort it cost her.  They 
continued to watch in grim silence as she staggered to the 
nearest tree and then proceeded to carefully lower herself back 
to the ground, resting her back against the trunk. Even at this 
distance, her pallor was noticeable.

Minutes, maybe hours, endless and torturous, ticked by.  Krycek 
longed for anything to break the silence, the stillness.  The 
only change was the quietly fading light. Scully was so 
motionless that for a while he entertained himself with the thought
that she had  actually turned to stone, and the entire plan 
would be  foiled as they had to explain to the aliens that the hunk
of rock  there in the forest had the chip in the middle of it 
somewhere.

Then, abruptly, just as dusk truly settled about them, the 
stillness was shattered in a most unexpected way. Scully's voice 
rang out, "No!  Not again, dammit! Not again, I won't....." a 
cut-off gasp, and as they watched in horrified fascination, she 
began to rock back and forth, almost as though pushed and pulled 
by invisible hands.

********

Skinner's apartment
2:47 a.m.


It was always a call in the middle of the night that began these 
things.  There were moments when Skinner seriously wondered if it 
would be easier to simply never sleep again, and thus always be 
awake for these damn calls, or if he could simply unplug the 
phone.  Being who he was, he did neither of these things, but he 
did find several long forgotten curses floating to the 
surface of his brain as the shrill red warning ring of the phone 
pierced his sleep.

He'd been dreaming of the wolves again--jumbled, confused images 
of traps and haunting eyes, and choices that were no choices, and 
always a sense of loss....

Still caught in the images and world of his dream, he was 
momentarily stranded between realities when he picked up the 
phone, automatic reflexes producing the crisp, "Skinner here," 
but his brain not quite ready to process the information.

"....woods.  You have less than 2 hours."  The voice was 
curiously neutral--sexless, ageless, no identifiable accent.

"What?"  Awake now, stomach tight and churning.  Something was 
happening, and it wasn't good, and these weren't official 
channels, and....

The voice was precise, with just a trace of impatience. "If you 
are interested in the fate of Agent Scully, I would strongly 
suggest that you investigate an incident that is occurring right 
now in the Anderson woods. Near Exit 14.  You have very little time
for making  a decision."

He was left swearing at the dialtone.

Out of bed, pulling on clothes, instinctively choosing dark, non-
professional clothing, he realized that he had already decided 
that he would not be calling for backup.  That he would not even 
call Mulder.  This call had come to him, and he would answer it.

He wondered briefly at his foolhardiness, then shrugged. There 
was no decision to make.  As once before he had wagered 
everything for Agent Scully's safety, he would do so again.  It 
was simply what he did.  He had long ago come to understand 
Mulder, at least in this regard.

~ ~ ~ ~ 

Mulder's apartment
1:55 a.m.

One of the advantages to never sleeping, or at least rarely 
sleeping, was that phone calls at unexpected hours were 
less....unexpected, somehow.  

He had been almost sleeping--lying on his couch, gazing out into 
nothingness, trying to simply feel, to listen, to wait.  He 
wasn't quite sure what he was waiting for, he only knew, 
somewhere in the instinctive core of his being he had long 
ago learned to listen to, that he was waiting for something.

He thought, maybe, he was waiting for her.  Some signal from 
her, some....something.  She had told him, not so long ago, on a 
dark and silent night, their 7th hour into a 10-hour stake out 
shift, that she had known he wasn't dead that awful summer of the 
boxcar fire.  She'd heard him speak to her in what she called a 
dream, but what he knew was something else entirely.  Then, in a 
voice so quiet that he'd almost missed it, she'd said, "Besides, 
I knew you weren't dead anyway.  I could still feel you."  She'd 
refused to elaborate further, but he known that she had wanted 
him to hear it.

So he lay on his couch, waiting to feel her, wanting to feel her 
vitality.  Wanting to believe that he did, but unable to get past 
his fear that it just his desperate need to believe that she was 
still alive.  But she had to be alive. She had to be.  He could 
feel her, too, faintly, pulsing along with his heartbeat--an 
awareness of her that was intangible, but the only thing real in 
the universe.

He waited, almost dozing, his thoughts seeking her, focused on 
her.  

Trees. All around him he saw trees--looming, distorted, 
frightening almost.  He was walking through a forest, being 
pulled on by a force he could neither see nor name.  Searching, 
seeking....Scully.  She was somewhere here.  Somewhere near.

The chirp of his cell phone seemed almost like the call of an 
electronic bird--the only form of life that could survive in this 
dark hour, at this dark time.  He was shaking off the thought 
even as he hit the on button.

"Yeah?"  After midnight it no longer seemed necessary to observe 
the professional pleasantries.

The voice on the other end was not instantly recognizable, but 
had a familiar quality to it.  He listened carefully to the 
message which was repeated twice, and simply said, "I'll be 
there."

Because, of course, it was the message he had been waiting for.

~ ~ ~ ~ 

Forest

Calling, calling, pulling her forward, irresistible force 
overriding her senses and will.  <you will go, you will follow, 
come here, come now.>

"No, not again.  Not again!"

The sound of her own voice, a mere whisper, breaking through the 
voices in her mind brought her a momentary lucidity.  Not again?  
Oh god, what was happening?  Where was she?  Woods.  She was in 
woods.  Not the cell.  Where were they?  Where were Krycek and 
that blond? 

She turned.  Looked behind her.  Around.  Saw nothing, but still 
felt vulnerable, exposed.  Her hand brushing the emptiness at the 
small of her back brought her to the realization that she was 
unarmed.  She needed cover. Shelter.  Where the hell was she?

The voices and call continued, unabated, but quieter. She could 
feel this...thing.....calling her forward, but could, for now, 
resist.  She had to resist.  She moved toward a group of trees 
that looked like they might afford a little cover.

God!

The pain lanced through her, and she dropped to her knees, one 
hand instinctively breaking her fall toward the earth, while the 
other reached back toward the source of the agony arcing through 
her.

Makeitstop, makeitstop, makeitstop.  

Mulder, where are you?  Mulder.....

And there, in the midst of the torment, she found a quiet point.  
A calm center to hang on to.  She hauled herself over to the 
closest tree and leaned against it, breath coming in pants, pain 
gradually receding.

Momentary blankness, and then the voices redoubled. She slid down 
against the tree, huddled on the ground, locked in a battle of 
pure will and desperation and force.

She felt rent in two.  This thing, this force pulling her toward 
what she knew to be fiery death, and herself, fighting against 
the call, fighting for survival.  

She didn't even know if she was moving or not, she was aware only 
of the struggle--the furious combat--inside her.  The call, the 
resistance.  Her resistance, but something more.  The call. The 
call. The call.  

Make. It. Stop.

And for a brief moment it did.  For a second she could feel her 
clarity returning, her focus re-engaging to the here and now. 
The pain receded slightly, and then intensified.

Oh. God.

<come forward, keep moving, we are waiting>

"No!  Not again, dammit! Not again, I won't....."

And she wouldn't.  She would never surrender willingly to this 
force that called her without her consent, without her will.

Somehow she would hang on.

She was aware of a terrifying sense of familiarity.  She hadn't 
lied to Mulder; she hadn't remembered anything from the dam until 
the hypnosis session, and even those impressions had been somehow 
distorted, almost dream like.

But now, suddenly, the images came back to her:  crystal clear, 
and horrifying. 

The fire, the men, the women, those....what were they?  They 
looked human, but their eyes!  Their mouths.....no. No it 
couldn't be, and they were carrying fire, and all around her 
people were burning, and burning, and Cassandra was already gone, 
and she was running through the woods.

She could hear them behind her, running with an even and untiring 
tread that was not at all human.  They shouldn't be able to run 
so easily with those weapons they carried, but they were behind 
her, and she could hear the screams, and imagined she felt 
the flames, and the heat, and the fire.

And then he was in front of her, blocking her path.  Unlike the 
others, his mouth and eyes were not sewn shut.  He looked at her 
with fathomless black eyes, and then raised the flame-thrower 
he carried.

Her hands instinctively flew up to protect her face, and she felt 
the first hot-cold licking of the flames and then they stopped.

They stopped.  

She lowered her hands, automatically checking them for damage.  
Noting with clinical precision that she had sustained third 
degree burns on at least one hand, and maybe second degree burns 
on the other.  

She looked up at her attacker....would-be attacker?

"You."

His voice was flat, neither accusation, nor welcome.  An odd 
recognition in his tone that sent an answering chill down her 
spine.

She had no voice to answer.  Simply waited.

He stepped toward her, raising his hand, but leaving the weapon 
loose at his side.

"Not now," he said.  And then all was black.

She came back to herself to find the clearing almost completely 
dark.  She realized she was hugging her knees to her chest, 
rocking back and forth slightly.  She waited, listening, trying 
to figure out what to do next.  She had no idea where she was.  
No idea which direction she should go.  She only knew that she 
didn't want to go in the direction she had been traveling--the 
direction the call wanted her to go.  She could fight the call.  
She would fight it.  

For the time being, staying still seemed the safest thing to do.  
But still the call persisted.

She waited, resisting the tug, feeling her strength grow to match 
the insistence of the call.  All the while wondering where the 
strength came from.  All the while wondering how long it would 
last.


~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Unknown location
Washington, DC

"So, it has begun."

Someone had to say it, of course, but it still felt melodramatic.  
On the other hand, given what they had just committed themselves 
to, maybe it was understatement.

The lines had blurred so long ago.  Their normal "reality" was so 
far beyond the ken of ordinary people, that that alone had cut 
them off from everyday life.  Even their oath to the organization 
hadn't demanded it.  There was simply no way to express to others 
what it was that they knew.  What it was they saw.

But they were committed now.  For the first time in 50 years, a 
decision had been made that hadn't been pre-ordained.  They were 
venturing into uncharted waters, with no maps, and a shaky sense, 
at best, of how to navigate.

They were simply too old for this nonsense, the smoker mused 
grimly.  This sort of foolishness and gamble was the realm of 
young men.  Men like Fox Mulder.  The grey men of the conspiracy, 
he winced a little at the unintentional--but unavoidable--pun, 
were too old, too stolid, too unimaginative to really try to 
change the sweep of history.  And yet.  

And yet.  They had gambled all on this maneuver.  Thrown caution 
to the winds in a way that was unexpectedly exhilarating.  Within 
72 hours, history might once again quietly shift course, and very 
few would be the wiser of how a handful of aging bureaucrats and 
former warriors had manipulated the lives of billions.

Or, the handful of aging bureaucrats would all be very dead.

In the meantime, however, he had one last piece of business to 
attend to.  

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

The Washington Mall
Near the Korean War Memorial

Patience, of course, had never really been his strong suit.  And 
the events of the last week were simply guaranteed to make his 
fuse shorter, hotter, less stable.  He was aware that the whole 
powder-keg/unintentional spark metaphor was probably vastly 
overused to describe him these days, but he found himself almost 
relishing his status of recognized lunatic.

He had every right to be.  For once, he had the full sympathy of 
the department.  His partner was missing.  It was a fear that 
every agent could instinctively understand.  But he didn't want 
their pity, or the sort of probationary acceptance the other 
agents offered.

He just wanted her back.

He needed her back.

He was pacing around the designated meeting area, peering this 
way and that, not even knowing who he was waiting for.  The voice 
had been familiar, but he still didn't know....

"So nice of you to be so punctual."  The oddly melodious voice 
from behind him stopped him in his tracks.  Fuck.  He should have 
known.  A deep breath--a stab at composure.  He turned slowly.

"What do you want?"  The snarl was not controllable.

"Agent Mulder, is that anyway to treat  the person who can grant 
you your heart's desire?"

"I believe we've had this conversation, you bastard, and you have 
nothing I want."

"Oh?"  The silence was suddenly populated with images of a brown-
haired woman and a midnight diner.

"No. Now, if you'll excuse me, I've got things to do." He began 
walking away.

"Really?  I didn't think you'd be in such a rush to leave, 
Mulder, considering I bring news of Agent Scully."

It was unnecessarily dramatic and utterly in character for the 
smoker.  And, naturally, it had exactly the effect the old man 
had probably hoped for.  He turned and swooped down on his 
nemesis.

"What do you know?!"  Voice raw, harsh.  Hand reaching 
instinctively for his weapon.  Control at that moment was merely 
a forgotten wish.

The smoker took a neat step back.  "Calm down, Agent Mulder.  
She's fine."

"And how the fuck would you know that?  Take me to her now!"  The 
weapon out, safety off.

The smug son-of-a-bitch simply looked amused. "You should know by 
now that this sort of interaction," he gestured toward the gun 
with his ever-present cigarette, "never gets us anywhere."

Then the amusement was gone, replaced by something colder and 
grimmer than Mulder had ever seen before.  "I think you'd better 
back down and listen to what I have to say."

Since it was Scully's life they were talking about, he backed 
down.  

"That's better.  Now."  A deliberate drag on the cigarette. "I 
came to you once before with an offer, a proposition for a better 
life.  You were not....interested.  Although it is the sort of 
offer that is usually only made once, I am feeling....benevolent. 
And, after all, your terms may be more...negotiable now."  

He hated the cold clutch of dread that settled around his heart 
and gut. A visceral reaction that he was utterly powerless 
before, "No!"

"I haven't even made the offer yet, Agent Mulder."  Another long, 
calculated pause.  "You will come to work for me.  The FBI is no 
place to waste a man of your considerable talents.  In return I 
will see to it that Agent Scully is returned to her life, and 
job, and your side, if you so desire."

"No."  Less convincing now, but still instinctive reaction 
against the revulsion of the offered bribe.  "She wouldn't want 
me to--"

Smooth interruption. "What makes you think she is any position to 
do or want anything right now--except to survive?"

Horrifying images of what that might mean threatened to buckle 
his knees.  "No," even less convincing.  "It would be wr--"

"Wrong?  Do you still cling to these petty notions about right 
and wrong? Truth? Justice? Don't be a fool, Mulder.  Come work 
with me, and you can have all the truth and justice you want--
custom-made."

"No."  It physically hurt to say it--a searing through his 
heart, a hollowness everywhere else.  "No."

"Do you recall the bodies at the Pennsylvania dam?  They didn't 
die right away, you know. They were paralyzed by a form of 
tractor-ray, and then burned.  Slowly.  Do you know what fire 
feels like, Mulder?  Do you think she does?  On the other hand, 
there are also worse ways to die...."

Mulder couldn't find his voice.  Or breath, or reason, or hope.  
He couldn't work for this man.  It would betray everything he 
was, everything he believed in.  Everything she believed in. He 
couldn't do this...even if it meant....he shied away from that 
thought.  There had to be another option.  And that, of course, 
made him remember Skinner.  

God.  Skinner had done this.  Had made this exact deal. And he 
had survived, hadn't he?  Of course Skinner was made of tougher 
stuff than he.  Hell, tougher stuff than almost anyone....and 
yet, and yet he recalled the look in the AD's eyes that night in 
his apartment.  The agony of Skinner's confession about failing 
to take his own advice.  It was a clear warning.  

And yet....mind turning in circles...can't take this deal....have 
to save Scully....no deal....Scully....can't be trusted....no 
deals....Scully.  Scullyscullyscullyscully.

"I--"  Ever after he would be left wondering how he was going to 
answer.  What it was he was going to say.

The phone interrupting the conversation was a surreal intrusion.  
A mundane, nearly comforting sound that nevertheless almost 
stopped his heart.  To answer the call was automatic reflex.

"Mulder."

"It's Skinner."  The brusque voice held a note he couldn't quite 
name.

"Yeah."

"I've got her."  There was no question what the AD meant.

"Where are you?"  Something in his voice must have tipped off the 
smoking bastard because he took a step away, and then paused, 
looking vaguely amused, as though a child had stripped away the 
curtain to reveal the puppeteer behind the stage.

"I'm down toward where you were at that camp..." Nearly crippled 
by the conflicting emotions warring in him, he still managed to 
get a clear picture of where Skinner was calling from.  There was 
still an odd note in Skinner's voice.

"Is she ok?"

"I think so.  The situation is not entirely...clear."  God.  Oh 
God.

"I'll be there as soon as possible."

He turned back to the other man.

"You son-of-a-bitch."  The bastard had never had her. Or if he 
had, it didn't matter now. The fury washing over him was an 
inextricably complex blend of rage at the smoker's confirmed 
duplicity and his own fucking gullibility.  When would he learn?

Had he really come that close to surrendering everything that he 
had once believed in?  What had he been about to say to the 
smoker?

There was no time to fully consider the issue, he had to go.  He 
regretted, briefly, that his gun didn't have a silencer. It would 
have been enormously satisfying to fire one or several warning 
shots over cancer man's head, just to make the point.

But there was no time.  Skinner had found Scully, and there was 
only one place for him to be.

********

In the woods

He had found Scully, but now didn't know what to do.  Like so 
much else in Skinner's association with the X-files, an apparent 
victory suddenly seemed like it might be something else entirely.

The voice on the phone had left him no choice but to act and act 
quickly.  He'd flown down 95 at breakneck speed, praying that for 
once the Virginia State Troopers would be elsewhere. It seemed 
that there was a benevolent god for ADs in need, because he'd 
made it to the turn-off for these woods in record time.

Entering the woods, he had momentarily no idea where to go.  
Then, out of nowhere, he'd suddenly felt an impulse, almost like 
a tugging, and he'd begun heading out toward the direction 
Mulder had described as possibly being the location of the
paramilitary training camp.

Less than 400 yards in, he'd suddenly heard her voice crying out, 
"NO!  Not again!"  It had frozen him in his tracks--horror and 
anger coursing through him, paralyzing him and then releasing him 
just as suddenly to move as quickly and quietly as possible in 
the direction of her voice.  

He moved maybe another 20 feet when he again heard her voice--
quieter this time--but enough to guide him the final 10 feet to 
the clearing.  And again, he was stopped in his tracks.  She was 
huddled against a tree.  Her legs clutched to her chest; she 
rocked almost imperceptibly back and forth.  But it was her eyes 
that stopped him cold.

Clear, open, and utterly, utterly terrified.  She was waging some 
horrible internal battle and he knew, in that same dark corner of 
his mind where he kept the memory of his own death, that she had 
absolutely no idea where she was, but that whatever battle she 
was fighting was a matter of life and death.  A melodramatic 
phrase, but true.  

He had a sixth sense that he shouldn't approach her.  Shouldn't 
touch her.  But also knew he had to get her out of there.  He 
called Mulder.

The agent had seemed distracted when he answered the phone, but 
as soon as Skinner made it clear that Scully had been found, he 
could feel Mulder's relief, and an odd fury radiating across the 
connection.  He hadn't the words to tell Mulder about Scully's 
condition, but had to hope that he'd conveyed the need for the 
agent to meet him there quickly.

Actually, he had no doubts that Mulder was even at that moment 
speeding toward this clearing as though pursued by the hounds of 
hell.

Which left the question of what to do while he waited.  

He watched Scully for another agonizing 5 minutes.  Watching her 
silent and almost motionless struggle against a demon he didn't 
even dare try to name.

A shudder racked her body, and she closed her eyes.  

Unable to stand it any longer--needing to do something, move, 
touch her, something--he moved forward into the clearing toward 
her.

Almost instantly, he heard a startled gasp from across the 
clearing and then like some nightmarish apparition, Alex Krycek 
was standing before him, gun drawn and trained....on Scully.

At the sound, Skinner had instinctively drawn his gun and aimed 
toward that side of the clearing, but Alex had moved with ungodly 
speed, and had made what Skinner had to grudgingly admit was the 
best possible tactical decision.  If Krycek had pulled his gun on 
him, Skinner would simply have fired with no compunction 
whatsoever. But Krycek obviously realized that Skinner would 
never do anything to endanger Scully.

They stood there, fixed, locked into some grotesque game of 
freeze-tag.  Skinner's gun leveled at Krycek's head, Krycek's gun 
pointed at Scully, and Scully locked into some otherwordly place.

"Assistant Director Skinner."  The mockery in his former agent's 
tone was marked, and not unexpected.

"Boy."  The growl and the word a tacit reminder of a time when 
the situation had been reversed, and of the unfinished business 
that stood between them.

"Now, now, now. That really isn't very .... productive, Walter," 
moving into deliberate provocation, "didn't they teach you in all 
those management courses when to recognize that you were at a 
disadvantage?"

There seemed no need to answer that.

The green eyes regarded him maliciously through the dark.  "So, 
what now?"  

"Let her go, and I won't arrest you this time."

A derisive laugh. "I've always admired your....style, Skinner.  
You really do believe in the old adage that the best defense is 
a good offense, don't you?  Fuck.  You're always such a Marine.  
I rather think it's my place to make demands."  A dramatic pause.

As surreptitiously as possible, Skinner looked across the 
clearing, straining with all his senses, trying to determine if 
Krycek were here alone.  It seemed probable.  It was his usual 
style.

Krycek noticed even that small movement, though, and sneered. 
"I'm not going to tell you.  You're simply going to have to take 
your...her chances."  He refocused his aim very clearly at 
Scully's head.  "But I will tell you that I've filed down the 
trigger, so the very slightest twitch on my part and she's
very dead."

Of course.

"Now, where was I?  Oh yes, I believe I was about to name my 
terms for not killing Scully."

A flash of sudden insight.  "Cut the bullshit, Alex.  If you were 
actually willing to kill her you'd have already done it, just 
because you could."  A dangerous tactic, he realized, but he had 
long ago learned to trust his gut on these things.

For the first time, a moment of something that tasted like 
indecision.  "Maybe, maybe not."  The tone was level, but Skinner
was  unconvinced.

"I think so." The smallest step forward the other man. Krycek 
squared his shoulders, but made no movement.  "What is it you 
want, Krycek?"

The question was still dangling in the air when Mulder came 
crashing into the tableaux.  Then everything unraveled at a 
speed that left more than questions hanging.

~ ~ ~ ~ 

For Mulder it was a surreal sense of deja vu, with a twist.  
There was always a twist.

He'd flown down here, powered by desperation and fear and need.  
It had been clear from Skinner's voice that although Scully had 
been found, all was not quite right.  He could barely stand to 
think about what that might mean.  He only knew that he had to 
get there.  Had to reach her.  

He'd gotten lost briefly and then had heard voices, one of which 
he knew to be Skinner's and the other....familiar in some 
horrible way.

So his gun had already been out when he finally entered the 
clearing to see a standoff that terrified him.

Scully!  Oh god, Scully. For the first moment all he could see 
was her.  Pale, drawn, clearly in great distress, but alive, 
thank god alive.  But then there was Skinner, gun drawn.  And 
Krycek. Krycek? with his gun drawn, and there he was crashing 
into a scene with his gun drawn, and like the last time, he 
instinctively knew whom to back, but this time, this time, he 
wasn't at all sure of the outcome.

"Mulder."  Krycek, damn him, actually seemed amused to see him.  

Mulder moved a step closer, his weapon never wavering.  "Get away 
from her."

"I don't think so." Krycek moved a step closer to Scully.

Something resembling a growl rose up in Mulder's chest, and when 
he spoke again he didn't recognize his own voice.  "I said, get 
away from her.  Back down, Krycek.  Now."

For the briefest second, Krycek seemed to stop breathing, but 
recovered rapidly. "You never learn, do you, Mulder?  I *never* 
give up tactical advantages."

"But you will this time, Alex."  The fourth voice in the clearing 
was a shock to all of them.  Marita stepped out into the 
moonlight--her blond hair eerily bright.  Her gun, also aimed at 
Krycek.

There was a shocked moment's pause.

At first he didn't recognize her.  The context was all wrong, 
and all he really wanted to do was go to Scully and touch her, 
and take her in his arms and reassure himself that it was all 
right, although it was clear that she really wasn't all right.

Then he heard Krycek's shocked "Marita?" overlapping 
incongruously with Skinner's "You, again?"  

His own "Marita?" echoed faintly behind the others.

She simply regarded all of them with the expression of a lioness 
deciding which zebra to cull from the herd.  Then her 
dispassionate gaze refocused on Krycek.  "Alex.  Step away from 
Agent Scully, please." Somehow the 'please' was the most 
frightening thing that had been said yet that evening.  Krycek 
must have felt the fear, too, because he complied almost 
immediately.  The expression that crossed the rogue agent's face 
was an indecipherable mixture of resignation, amusement, and 
rage.

As Krycek lowered his gun and moved away from Scully, Mulder 
rushed forward and dropped to his knees beside his partner.  He 
was aware that the other three people were talking to each other, 
voices rising and falling in strange cadences, but everything 
simply faded away, and he could see nothing but Scully.  

"Scully?"  His voice low and more worried than he wanted, but he 
couldn't help himself.  She seemed so small, so determined, and 
so lost.  He reached out to touch her, half-expecting her to 
flinch away.  She was cold under his fingers, shaking with fine 
tremors.  "Scully?  What is it?  What's happening?"

She moved finally, her head coming up slowly, her eyes meeting 
his.  His heart sank.  Her eyes were dilated, focused no where in 
this place or time.  He knew that she didn't see him at all.  
Fuck.  What was happening to her?
 
He raised his hand and placed along the side of her face.  
"Scully?"  Moving in so that they were just inches apart.  
Pleading.  "Scully? Can you hear me?  Scully.  Come back. 
Please."  It seemed an odd thing to say, but he felt that he was 
calling her from a long, long way away.  An endless white time 
of nothing.  Behind him he could hear the voices still rising and 
falling, he thought he heard other voices  and almost turned 
around to see what was happening, but he needed to be there--
trying to connect with her, trying to ground her.

He could feel her cool skin beneath his hand, gradually warming.  
He kept searching her eyes, desperately hoping for contact.  For 
that spark.

He was aware of the voices in the clearing finally going silent.  
He could feel that there were still people in the clearing with 
them, but he couldn't care.  There was only Scully and this 
battle she was locked in, and his need to reach her.  Finally, 
thankyouthankyouthankyou, finally her eyes sharpened and focused.

A whisper. "Mulder?"

"Yes," his hand caressing her gently.  Stroking her hair. "Hey.  
Welcome back.  Where were you?"

A hard shudder wracked her.  "Mulder.  Oh god, I was being 
*called*. I was trying so hard to fight it.  I didn't want to go.  
I didn't want to leave you--" he saw her visibly bite off the 
rest of that.  Her voice still low, intimate, aching.  "I heard 
you.  You called me back. I heard you."  And then unexpectedly, 
she reached up and wrapped her arms around him, pulling him into 
a tight, awkward embrace.  

No hesitation. He sank to the ground and pulled her fully into 
his lap, rocking them both.  "It's ok, it's ok.  You're not going 
anywhere.  You're ok.  You're ok."  God, he had to hope that it 
was true.  

When her trembling, or was it his, finally stopped, he opened 
his eyes to see Skinner looking down at them, the AD's eyes 
completely unreadable in the moonlight.

Marita and Krycek were gone.

"What....where?"

Skinner's voice was oddly hesitant.  Almost as though he were 
picking his words even more carefully than usual.  "They're gone.  
Let's go home."

~ ~ ~ ~

The drive back up to Crystal City seemed interminably long.  He 
had escorted Mulder and Scully back to Mulder's car.  A silent 
guard against an enemy he still didn't understand, or even know 
how to look for, but it had been the right thing to do.  The 
reunited partners had barely even realized he was there.

With every step away from the clearing, Scully seemed stronger, 
better.  He was under no illusion that this was the end of it all 
for them, but he had the feeling that at least for now Scully was 
out of danger...he grinned darkly to himself. Out of the woods.

He watched Mulder help Scully into the passenger seat.  She 
looked out the window at him, maybe seeing him for the first time 
that night.  A small smile crossed her face.  He nodded back. 
Then Mulder had paused before getting into the car.  He looked 
across the top of the car at the AD.  "Thank you." In those quiet 
words, Skinner heard all the other things the man meant by that.

He did not ask them where they were going.

Now, driving up a nearly deserted I-95, he found himself thinking 
of what had happened in the clearing that night.  He would 
eventually owe Mulder a long explanation, but he somehow knew 
that simply didn't matter right now.

Marita's sudden appearance had signaled the beginning of a 
sequence of events that would be haunting them all for a long time.

He'd recognized her right away, and remembering his instinctive 
mistrust of her during their last encounter, he had expected her 
to join Krycek.  He was, therefore, nearly as shocked as Alex 
when she, too, leveled her weapon at Krycek.

After Alex had backed away from Scully and Mulder had rushed to 
her, the other three had been left standing in an odd tense picture.
Skinner and Marita still had their guns aimed at Krycek, who 
looked at them for a long amused moment, and then reholstered his 
weapon.

"So was it always going to come down to this?"  His former 
agent's voice was bland. 

"Yes, it was."  There was a strange hissing quality to her 
voice.  "You never really got it."

"No, I don't suppose I did." An unmistakable bitterness.

Skinner felt trapped--a voyeur to two unfolding dramas which both 
involved him and yet did not. For the moment, Mulder was clearly 
completely engrossed with Scully; he decided that the events 
playing out between the other pair in the woods required his more 
immediate attention.

"So, what now, Marita?"

"You leave empty-handed, I'm afraid."  

"Of course."  He gave an awkward asymmetrical shrug.  
"Again."

For a moment something that looked like regret crossed the 
blonde's face, but was quickly replaced by her expressionless 
mask.  "Survival is something, Alex."

"Maybe."

Then They entered the clearing.  For a second, Skinner thought 
the dim light was playing tricks on his tired eyes.  The men who 
stalked silently into the area behind Marita didn't seem to have 
faces.  Then as they drew nearer, he realized to his horror that 
their eyes and mouths had been sewn shut.  

What the fucking hell?  They carried unfamiliar weapons that 
Skinner thought might be the guns that Mulder had described 
seeing earlier.  But his eyes kept moving back to the horror of
their faceless faces.

The person? alien? that he presumed was their leader stepped 
forward to Marita.  Astonishingly, he seemed to be able to speak-
-or at least Skinner could hear words, although later he would 
find himself wondering if he had heard them with his ears, or if 
some odd telepathic communication had taken place.

"We're here.  Is that the one?"  He jerked his weapon toward 
Scully.

Marita's voice was cool.  "It is.  But there has been an 
unexpected complication."

"We don't have time for complications."  The voice was utterly 
flat.  Skinner couldn't read anything into it--not rage, 
impatience, or even boredom.

"I'm probably even more aware of that you.  But you also know 
that sometimes there is nothing to be done."

"What is the situation?"

"It's clear that the vaccine she received this summer has 
interacted with her implant, but it's also clear that if we 
remove it we'll lose all the data."

"Then we take her."

Skinner's instinctive reach for his gun caused three of the 
aliens to raise their weapons at him.  He settled for stepping 
closer to Scully and Mulder.  "No."

The remaining players in the drama simply looked at him as though 
he were no more than an annoying pest buzzing around the edges of 
the events.

"No."  Marita's decisiveness surprised him.

"We had an arrangement.  You need this.  We need this."

"I know.  But there are other ways.  Besides.  You don't really 
have the information you need to analyze her properly."

A long silent stare from the alien.  "Maybe.  But we have almost 
no time left."  An odd emphasis on 'we.'

Marita straightened herself, and then suddenly the edges of her 
form stretched and blurred. She seemed to grow taller, and her 
skin became yellower, flatter.  Her delicate features squared 
slightly.  "I know what I am.  What we are.  I have become one of 
you, thanks to that vaccine that was tested on me.  I know what 
time is left.  Probably even better than you."

She turned and looked at Scully for a long moment.  Something 
almost human surfaced in her eyes, before she turned back to the 
alien.  "I've been watching her for over a week.  She can't tell 
you what you need, and if you take her, you'll simply draw 
unwanted and dangerous attention.  There are other ways.  Let's 
go."

Skinner's hand tensed around the grip of his gun, sure that the 
aliens would make a grab for Scully.

Unexpectedly Krycek's laugh rang out through the silent night.  
"God.  It just fucking figures.  You've become one of them.  I 
get infected with that black rot and lose an arm, and 
you...you...well, look at you.  Just go.  Just get out of here."

Marita looked at him for the first time since the scene had begun 
unfolding.  Abruptly she shifted back into her more familiar 
form, and walked across to him, lowering her gun, and putting it 
in her jacket pocket.  "I'm sorry, Alex."  A voice none of them 
had heard before--almost gentle.  

"I'm not."  And Krycek turned and walked out of the clearing.

Marita turned to Skinner.  He waited, but she said nothing at 
all--simply watched him for a moment, assessing something he 
couldn't begin to guess at.  Then she addressed the aliens once 
more.  "Let's go.  Now."

And they did.

*******

AD Skinner's apartment building
Crystal City, Virginia

He was really getting sick of the son-of-a-bitch.

The smoking man was waiting for him in his garage.  Again.  He 
glared wordlessly at the old man through his windshield before
climbing out of his car.  All in all, though, it could have been  
worse.  He could have been stinking up his apartment with 
cigarette smoke.

"You're out late tonight, Assistant Director Skinner."  He 
resented the way the black-lunged bastard could make his title an 
insult.

"Your point?"  

The smoker appraised him with undisguised condescending mirth.  
"You're right. It's late.  Too late for beating around the bush.  
Looks like you won this one."

"Maybe."  

"Oh come, now, Skinner.  Scully is back, and you certainly know 
more than you used to about certain things."

The wisest course seemed to be to keep silent.

"I suppose I should congratulate you, but it seems premature."

And suddenly his senses were back on full alert.  

Carefully. "Really?"

A deep drag on the ever-present cigarette. "You're a solider.  
You know this was only a skirmish tonight.  Probably even just a 
feint.  There is still a war being waged, and you and your agents 
are squarely in the middle of it."

"What do you want?"

"Me?  Oh, nothing, really.  I just came to warn you."

"About what, precisely?"

A laugh that seemed genuinely amused.  "Don't be a fool. In this 
war there is nothing precise at all.  Tonight should have told 
you that if nothing else."

"So?" He was so tired of all this fucking fencing.

"I came to warn you, Skinner, because you have been too many places
and seen too many things.  The war is still running, and the next
battle will be much, much hotter.  And next time, you will have 
some choices to make.  You'd better figure out exactly where your
loyalties lay.  And where the tactical advantages are."

"I suppose you'd like me to believe there is an advantage on your 
side."

"You've seen more sides than almost anyone, Skinner; you know 
where the assets are.  And the liabilities."

"I also know where the Truth is."

"You will always be a fool.  You probably even still believe in 
justice," he spat the word out. "There is nothing left that can 
be called the Truth.  There is only what we make of the present."

Skinner turned to walk away.

"Mr. Skinner?"  The voice held an odd urgency, which actually 
stopped him and made him turn back to wait for the smoker's final 
words.

"The next time is coming, and you will have to make a choice.  
Get ready."

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Somewhere on the open sea

"Our plan has hit an unexpected snag."

"Life is filled with these sorts of unexpected events."

The speakers, having no faces, weren't really speaking. If they 
had, their words might have frozen and dropped to the ground of 
the iceberg they were standing on.

"Why do you think she did it?"

"I don't know.  She is still partly human, of course."

"Of course.  But that will change with time, as she is already 
changing."

"They will be back here soon.  Without the chip; without that 
Scully woman."  

The second alien shrugged, "We have time.  Not much, but some.  
And anyway, Marita's actions may in fact turn out to tell us more 
about these people than anything else."

"Indeed. But we don't have time for any more such 
miscalculations."

"I know."

~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Scully's apartment

He'd wanted to take her to the nearest emergency room.  She'd 
barely had the energy to argue him out of it, but had finally 
managed to convince him that she was just tired.  Or maybe the 
convincing argument had been that no ER doctor was going to be 
able to diagnose anything having to do with her implanted chip.

"I know you're worried, Mulder, and so am I, but honestly--I'm 
not being called anymore.  I swear it.  I just want to go home."  
Voice only a whisper.  "I need to go home."

He'd wordlessly reached over to take her hand, and they had 
driven back through the dark silently clutching each other's 
fingers.  

At her place, there was no question but that he would follow her 
up to her apartment.  Follow her into it.  

As he closed the door and locked it behind them, she looked 
around, momentarily disconnected from her surroundings--her 
living room a strange and unfamiliar place.  She had only been 
gone for 10 days, but it felt like her world had been wrenched 
into an entirely new shape in that time.

A hand on her shoulder. "Are you OK?"  

Reaching up to cover the long fingers with her own, giving in to 
the temptation to lean back against him, just a little. "Yes--it 
just feels so...different."

He reached around and pulled her into a light embrace.  Simply 
holding her for a long moment.  Then he led her over to the 
couch.

"Do you want me to build a fire?"

She shivered, unconsciously. "Yes.  That would be nice."  She 
watched him move with quiet confidence through her dark rooms, 
finding the wood and kindling and matches.  His graceful fingers 
stacking and building the fire, coaxing it to life.

He settled on the couch next to her, a few inches away, and then 
almost immediately, with a murmured apology, he moved closer, and 
pulled her back into his arms, shifting her so that she leaned 
against him, head cradled against his shoulder.

"I...I missed you."

She shifted her head against his chest a little.  "I missed you, 
too."

A hazy silence filled with the hiss and pop of the fire.

"What happened, Scully?  How...?  What...." He trailed off, 
seemingly unable to find the words to voice the despair she could 
hear in his tone.

She tightened her hold on him, trying to reassure him of her 
presence. Sighed.  "They just came out of nowhere that night, 
Mulder.  Snatched me from the road like I was some stupid 
rookie."  Sighed again.  "I keep going over and over it.  I 
should have been able to stop them."

He sat up then, setting her upright to face him, but still held 
on to her hand, keeping their connection.  "You're one of the 
best agents I know.  If there had been any way of stopping them, 
you would have."

"Maybe."  A long pause of reading his face.  "In an odd way, I'm 
almost grateful to them.  If they hadn't taken me, I think I 
might have given in to whatever was calling me.  It's almost like 
the time I was being held captive gave me the chance to build up 
some kind of resistance to the call."

He closed his eyes, and when he reopened them, she was horrified 
at the drowning misery she saw there.  "I almost lost you again."

Instinctive need to soothe. "No."  She reached up with her hand 
to touch him.  "No."

A long, gentle caress down the side of his face.  "I'm sorry," 
not even sure what she was apologizing for, but he seemed so sad, 
so intense.  

"Never."  And then there was nothing but time.  And Mulder, and 
Mulder's lips, and hands, and oh......

She shifted restlessly, and he read her accurately--not a plea 
for more space, but less.  His weight settling on her body was 
welcomed by each separate molecule of her being.  


She was so small beneath him.  A cliche, really, but she was, and 
yet strong and vital, moving against him with the slow surge of the
tide.  He let himself drown in her sweet, warm sea.  Surrendering
to the gentle demands of her mouth, and hands.  

He'd expected this to be a different experience--something hot, and 
fast and furious.  But this was pure connection. A wordless 
expression of trust and need and something that did not yet have a
name, but whose shape they knew and needed like sunlight.

A quiet eternity passed.  Mouths meeting and clinging, parting
to travel small distances across a face, a jawline.  

Finally, by what felt like mutual consent, they drew apart a
little and simply lost themselves in the others' eyes.  No 
sounds except their slightly ragged breathing and the paper
crackle of the fire.

He could read her tiredness, could feel his own weariness overtaking
him.  Now that he'd found her, the adrenaline draining away left
him shaky, worn.  He bent and kissed her forehead, and then
shifted off her a little, drawing a concerned murmur that gave 
way to a yawn.

She laughed a little as she let him tuck her next to him and draw
a blanket over them both.  "I'm sorry."

"No.  Never."  The same words, but the tone now smoky, husky
with promises of a future he'd never dared envision.

Her hands traced his arms.  "You saved me." He could hear her
sleepy smile, as well as her own promises for tomorrow.

"You saved yourself, Scully, and me..."  Pulling her closer, feeling
the soft fabric of her shirt.

She settled into the curve of his body, her frame almost immediately
relaxing into sleep.  He let himself follow her into the darkness.

It was a clear night, and there were stars to guide them through, 
and in the morning, there would be sun.

~ ~ ~ ~

Skinner's apartment

When he finally slept that night, Skinner dreamt of the wolves
again.

Once more in the clearing, he was called forward by the pain in 
the trapped wolf's eyes.  This time when he knelt to release the 
wolf's paw, there was no growl, only the tiniest whimper.  As he 
sprung the trap, the wolf hopped awkwardly backward, favoring his 
injured foot.  Then he moved forward and lightly brushed his head 
against Skinner's.

Skinner stood and watched the wolf limp out of the clearing.  At 
the edge of the treeline, the wolf was joined by his mate.  The 
joyful noise of their reunion sent an odd thrill through the pit 
of his stomach.  

The two wolves turned, as one, and looked back at him. Their cool 
gazes seemed to convey a wordless message to him--he felt 
inadequate to fully decipher it, but knew that there was a 
complex communication of trust and thanks and something that 
seemed almost like pity.   Then they disappeared over the ridge.

He too began to move out of the clearing, and then realized that 
something had changed--he had changed.  He looked down at his 
feet, and saw paws, and realized that he, too, had become a wolf.


END - Dark Beyond the Stars