by CathGerm
cathgerm@aol.com
 

Date: Mon, 8 Jul 2002

Category:  Story. Skinner. Angst.  But eve-
rybody's in it, including a bunch of dead
people.
 
Rating:  PG.  Language of the "F" kind.
Violence implied, not described.

Spoiler:  The Truth

Summary:  What happened after Skinner went
through the door of Kersh's office.

Archive:  You bet.  Let me know where.
 
Disclaimer:  Just borrowing.  Nothin' to see
here.  Move along.

Feedback:  cathgerm@aol.com
 
 
 
 

The Aftermath
by CathGerm
 
 

He was fucked.

Walter Skinner's feet moved of their own vo-
lition.  Duty called.  He'd knocked at the
door of his superior's office, therefore
when it opened, he needed to enter.  Never
mind that he was welcomed by an alien.  He
understood his place in this, and the alien
let him pass and then it stood in the door
looking out at Doggett, Reyes, and Gibson
Praise, and Skinner wanted to yell orders at
his charges from inside the office to move,
to leave the Hoover as fast as they could to
save themselves.  And to save Gibson Praise.
What the hell had they been thinking, bring-
ing him here?  Sometimes they were such ama-
teurs in matters of the X Files.  But as he
opened his mouth to call to them, Kersh,
seated at the chair behind his desk and
looking pale, if that was possible, caught
his eye and shook his head.

The door closed behind them.

He could hear Gibson speaking.  It was like
he was standing behind him, it was so clear.

"They know."

He was fucked.

But then he'd been fucked for a long time,
and he was somehow secure in that knowledge,
and the thought that Mulder and Scully were
gone and that Doggett and Reyes soon would
be filled him with a dark giddiness. He was
both sad and elated.

Elated that they were safe.

Sad that he was fucked.

He'd always expected to be left to fend for
himself. He had expected no more and no less
than that from all of them.  That's what he
deserved.  His punishment for sitting the
fence too long.

He heard footfalls as his last hopes left
the door and headed down the corridor.

He decided to pretend that it was just an-
other day at the FBI.  Just another day at
the FBI. and Deputy Director Alvin Kersh had
called him to his office for his weekly
reaming for whatever flagrant misstep he may
have most recently taken.  He tried to ig-
nore the tremor in Kersh's hand as he
brought it up to wipe at his chin, and he
took a seat in front of the desk while the
Juror took a stand beside it, his arms over
his chest.  He tried to forget that Gibson
had pointed at him in the courtroom and had
said that he was an alien.  He looked like
any number of Tired Old White Guys who
haunted the halls at the Hoover, but Skinner
believed that he was of the Billy Miles
bloodline.  He tried to forget that as he
attempted to compose his face, but he could-
n't.

He *did* remember that he'd forgotten a
stack of bills on his desk at home, and he
wondered if he'd ever have the chance to
mail them.  He pictured Doggett and Reyes
cleaning his personal effects out of his
condominium.

"Oh John," Monica says, her voice sad and
small.  "Here's a stack of bills he never
sent."

"Hey.  An Esquire subscription.  Think I'll
change the address to mine."

Funny how the mind worked when one looked
down the bore of a metaphorical loaded gun.

He'd never seen Alvin look so nervous, and
that alone was almost worth the price of ad-
mission.  If he was in on all of this with
the Juror, sweat wouldn't be glistening on
his forehead and his Adam's apple wouldn't
be bobbing up and down convulsively.

Skinner had had his doubts.  He hadn't be-
lieved it last night when Kersh had shown up
to help rescue Mulder.  He'd wondered then
at the ease with which Kersh had succumbed
to the notion of vast government conspira-
cies and various and sundry alien lifeforms
stalking the earth.  Eight, nine years Skin-
ner had sat on the fence, and all it took
for the Deputy Director was a fully-armed
Monica Reyes in his face, and he had crossed
over.

Skinner had to admit that he was jealous.
Had he crossed over years ago, he might now
be out there somewhere with Mulder and
Scully or Doggett and Reyes, organizing and
planning for a 2012 resistance.

Now he'd be lucky to make it to noon.

Gibson had said that they knew.  Skinner
crossed his legs and folded his hands in his
lap and held the Jurist in a steady gaze.
There could be some small hope here.  Who
knew what Gibson meant?

<"They know.">
 
They could know that he made a lousy defense
attorney.  And damn Mulder for setting him
up with that.  He'd known the case was
doomed from the start.  How kind of Mulder
to make Skinner the executioner of his lost
cause.  The guy had the directions for push-
ing all of Skinner's Guilt Buttons in his
hip pocket, no question about it.

They could know about those Baltimore Ori-
oles tickets he had in the top drawer of his
desk.  He hoped that somebody would find
them and put them to good use.

They could know he had always had a thing
for Dana Scully.  And had recently had less-
than-appropriate feelings for Monica Reyes.
And he allowed that there had to be an ana-
lyst somewhere who would give their eye
teeth to work him through that sad state of
affairs.  Or lack of affairs.

<"Have you always been attracted to women
that you cannot have, Mr. Skinner?">

They could know that Mulder and Scully were
an item.  And he wished he could thank them
so much, by the way, for locking lips while
he stood in a 10 x 10 cell with them feeling
like a complete and total ass.  And then he
thought of the next words out of Mulder's
mouth - "Come here, you big beautiful bald
man" - and he couldn't help himself.

He smiled.

"You find this humorous, Assistant Director
Skinner?" the Juror asked.

<Oh.  What the hell.  He was fucked anyway.>

"Kinda'."

It was so out of character for him that
Alvin's eyes bugged out.  The Juror shook
his head in dismay.

"I'm afraid that you don't understand how
serious your situation is."

"Oh," Skinner said.  "I think I do."

The alien moved to stand behind Alvin's
chair, and this made the Deputy Director
look even more unstrung than he  was al-
ready.  Skinner was surprised to feel a rush
of sympathy for him.  Alvin had dealt only
short-term with the Cancer Man.  He'd never
had to look over his shoulder for Krycek.
Never had to watch friends bleed from the
nose or disappear into alien light.
 
He was such a Rookie.

"Unfortunately," the Jurist said, "the two
of you are impediments.  But you also have
value.  Value because of what you know."

In spite of the calm he was projecting,
Skinner's guts roiled.  Nice to know you're
valuable.  Sad to know why: because of in-
formation in your head that you most proba-
bly don't want to give up, and he searched
his personal database as the alien stared at
him.

Mulder and Scully: didn't know where they
were.

Doggett and Reyes: didn't know where they
were going.

Gibson Praise: with Doggett and Reyes for
the moment, but the alien mustn't have
wanted him, or he would have snatched him
out of the hallway.

William:

William.

Walter Skinner was filled with a black de-
spair.

That, he knew.

His godson.  He knew where he was.  He was
the *only* one who knew where he was.  And
he would die with that knowledge.  At least
he hoped he would.  Who knew what kind of
sophisticated means of torture these super
soldiers possessed?

Unless . unless .

They were in the Hoover, the hallowed halls
of the FBI.  What could the alien do to them
there?  If he tried to march them out, all
they had to do was stop and refuse to move.
They weren't anonymous, the Deputy Director
and Assistant Director.  Most knew who they
were.  If the Jurist tried to strong-arm
them, agents would come to their aid.

"Deputy Director Kersh will, of course, want
to accompany one of his best Assistant Di-
rectors to the hospital," the Juror said.
"It would be unseemly for him *not* to,
given that it happened in his very own of-
fice."

Alvin was frowning over at him.  Skinner
frowned back.

"The emergency medical technicians who come
to pick you up will look just like emergency
medical technicians."  The Jurist smiled.
"No one will be the wiser."  He reached into
his suit coat.  When Skinner saw what was
being pulled from a pocket, his response was
Pavlovian.  His breath left him and he
leaned forward.  It hurt already, and the
alien hadn't even done anything yet.
Alarmed by his response, Alvin moved as if
to rise.

"Heart attacks and powerful men in stressful
situations go hand-in-hand, wouldn't you
say, Assistant Director?"

And then the pain exploded in his chest and
he saw Alvin rise as blackness licked at the
edges of his vision and he thought, once
again and with crystal clarity, that he was
fucked.
 

~~~~~~~~
 

Montana was huge.  Mulder tried to remember
when they had crossed the state line headed
north, and he couldn't.  He briefly longed
for a couple of nice-sized mid-Atlantic
states.  At least then he'd feel like they
were making progress.  Crossing state lines
meant movement.

At the moment they were plowing up and down
over sere hills in the big SUV like a tug-
boat plows through saltwater waves, the only
point of reference being the dark frown of
the Rocky Mountains along the horizon to
their left.  St. Paul, Minnesota was a long,
long ways away to their right, but there was
nothing to be seen in that direction.  Also
in that direction was Washington D.C.  Mo-
rose thoughts begin crowding Mulder's brain,
and he shook them away.

To his right as well was Dana Scully.

She'd been quiet.  So had he.  Their exis-
tence for the past two days after their ini-
tial euphoria had consisted of the basics:
movement, food, shelter, distracted sex,
sleep.

There was too much left undone for them to
celebrate their own survival.  Too many
loose ends.  Friends unaccounted for.  Wil-
liam, undiscussed.  And it would be a long
time before that was a subject that they
dared to broach.

Oh.  And he could see the dead.

"What?" Scully said.

Had he said that aloud?  He could see dead
people.  Who says she couldn't hear his
thoughts?

Stranger things had certainly happened in
their years together.

"I'm thinking that if I can see dead people,
why can 't I see dead people that I *really*
want to see," he said, and he allowed his
arms a languid stretch against the steering
wheel, trying to work out the kinks of
travel.  He was slightly desperate to see
her smile.  Even an exaggerated eye-roll
would do him a world of good.

"Like?"  She turned to him, her arm on the
window, half-in, half-out of the SUV, and he
considered warning her about an unbalanced
tan and then thought better of it since it
didn't really matter.  All the windows were
open.  It was warm, but they both hated the
artifice of air conditioning, and her hair
was a riot of fire, flame flying out from
her skull, licking at her cheeks and stick-
ing to her lips.  He was turned on in spite
of himself.

"Like Elvis, for example," he said, looking
away from her and back at the road.  "Why
not Elvis?"  He glanced at her out of the
corner of his eye.

There.  A spark of something.  Not a smile,
really, but something.

"Like Liberace.  Einstein.  DeForrest Kelly.
Gene Rodenberry."

There was a twitch in her lip.  Just the up-
per left corner, and just a little twitch,
and he loved her for it.

"Dave Thomas.  Walter Brennan.  Chuck
Jones."

There was something wrong in that string.
He could tell it by the look on her face.
He'd triggered something, and he cursed it.

She turned away from him and looked out the
window at the nothing of the landscape.
Minutes passed, and he reviewed what he'd
said:

<"Dave Thomas.">

Burgers?  Was it burgers?  Was she not a
burger fan?  He knew she wasn't a vegan.
He'd seen her scarf down plenty of red meat
in her time.  Was it square burgers, then?
Mulder had to admit that there was something
unnatural about that.

<"Walter Brennan.">

So he had a thing for "The Real McCoys."
Was that any more peculiar than any other
peculiar thing in their peculiar little
lives?

<"Chuck Jones.>

Dear God.  Scully couldn't possibly have a
problem with his Warner Brothers hero.
Could she?  That could be a deal-breaker.
Certainly she could indulge the eleven-year-
old in him.

She always had.

He gazed over at her.  The hair on the back
of her head whipped at the leather seat be-
hind her.

<Walter Brennan.>

< Walter.>

And at the same moment that he came to his
somber conclusion, she spoke, her voice as
far away as St. Paul, Minnesota.

"Have you seen him?"

"No.  No, I haven't."

Three more miles of nothing pass.

"Good," she finally says, and they drive on.
 

~~~~~~~~~~~
 

"So do you think they made it, then?"

That was the thirteenth time he'd asked it.
Monica was keeping track.

Little did the rest of the world know: FBI
Agent and former Marine John Doggett was a
worry-wart.

She sighed.

"When I looked behind us, last thing that I
saw, they were fine."

"But that big blast at the end?  The one we
saw at that rise?  Do ya think-"

"Jesus Christ, John!" she snapped.  "Give it
a rest."

She was at the wheel, and she felt his eyes
on her face.  Once, twice they raked across
her profile like the lights in the oncoming
cars on the southern Nevada two-lane highway
they were rolling along.  She felt guilt
creep up on her.  Between oncoming cars, she
shot a look at him.  He was sitting ramrod
straight, his thin lips even thinner than
usual, his sightless stare grim.

She was tired.  He was tired.  They were
getting on each other's nerves.

It should come as no surprise.  John Dog-
gett, decorated Marine and stellar FBI agent
had aided and abetted a convicted murderer
in a prison escape.  And she had helped.

This information might or might not be known
by the powers-that-be.  Monica Reyes and
John Doggett might or might not be wanted by
the very institution that paid for their
medical and gave them other excellent bene-
fits.  Their lives might or might not be in
danger.  Mulder and Scully might or might
not have escaped.  Gibson Praise might or
might not be where they left him.  And Wal-
ter Skinner . she didn't want to go there.

John Doggett was a confirmed control freak,
and the murky unknowns of their current
situation was unnerving enough to drive
someone like him perfectly nuts.  And her
along with him.

They'd literally driven in circles since
their escape.  They'd headed west with some
vague notion of driving up the Pacific
coastline and changed their minds near the
California border.  So then they turned
north.  What was up north that wasn't west?
Who knew?  It just seemed necessary to keep
moving.

"Goddamned stupid order-followin' Marine."

This was the other thing.  This would be the
seventeenth time she'd heard this litany.

He wasn't speaking of himself.

He was speaking of Walter Skinner.

"Just walked in the goddamned door like he
*had* to.  No questions.  Just looked at us
and-" he snapped his fingers "-just like
that he turns around and goes in there.
What the *hell* was he thinkin'?  What the
hell was he thinkin'?"

No answer was necessary.  Besides, she did-
n't have one that John accepted.  She'd
tried answering the question somewhere just
after they crossed over the Nevada border,
but to no avail.  John had rejected it.

Monica was an empathetic soul, and in quiet
moments as she had watched the dusty red
mountains approach and recede, she'd tried
to put herself in Walter Skinner's place,
tried to understand what he did and why he
did it, but no matter how many times she
tried to walk in his shoes, those shoes al-
ways turned away from that door and headed
down the hall to freedom.

"Goddamned stubborn stupid man."

She felt hot tears ride in her eyes and she
blinked them away.

"Goddamned stupid stupid stupid.  Jesus.
Stupid."
 

~~~~~~~
 

What a peculiar young man this was.  So sol-
emn.  So cheerless.  She gave him a tenta-
tive smile across the table.  He stared
back, unblinking, his glasses making his
eyes appear even more large and solemn than
they already were.

She wasn't sure that she was very good with
young people anymore.  And now she would
have one less chance than before, what with
William .

She cleared her throat.  It would do her no
good to think of that.  She would pray for
strength tonight.  She would go to mass to-
morrow.  There was nothing to be done for
it.

"Mrs. Scully?"

"Hmm?"

"Mrs. Scully.  It's your turn."

"Oh.  Oh yes.  Of course."

She reached over to the pile of cards and
picked one, discarded one.

John Doggett and his new partner had ap-
peared at her doorstep two days ago with
Gibson Praise in tow.  No time to explain,
he'd said.  Dana and Fox were in trouble,
he'd said.  And Gibson needed someplace safe
to stay.  For how long, she couldn't know.

But "Dana" and "trouble" were the magic
words, words that she'd most certainly heard
before, and she understood the import of
them, so she'd taken him in and had given
him Dana's old room.  She'd felt uncomfort-
able with the notion of giving him Bill's or
Charlie's, and she wasn't sure why.  She'd
apologized to Gibson for the lilac walls and
lacy white curtains.

Gibson didn't seem to care.

But then Gibson Praise was an enigma.  Pecu-
liar, solemn man/child.

"Gin," he said.

And he was very, very good at Gin.
 

~~~~~~~~~
 

He could never remember signing off on a 302
like this before, and he'd signed some
pretty strange ones in his years as Assis-
tant Director.

It was the 302 of a child.

Bold crayon markings.  A flat sun in the up-
per right corner, in a place usually re-
served for the department number.  And rays
tracked down from that sun to the space al-
lowed for Explanation of Expense.  And in
that box was a house.  A farm house.

He picked up the pen that Sharon had given
him for their anniversary.  It felt heavy in
his hands, like it was made of some alien
metal, and he uncapped it and reached for
the 302.  But as the pen dropped to the
page, he felt a tingling in his chest and
the paper turned into an 8-1/2 x 11 pool of
liquid, something reflective like mercury,
and he couldn't catch his breath because of
the thing on his chest, and he wished he
could get the thing *off* of his chest, and
he looked down and it was William, it was
his godson strapped to him in a baby car-
rier, and then William started to cry.

"Easy.  Easy."  He felt something cool on
his forehead.  His cheek.  "Easy."

Skinner allowed himself plenty of time to
come around.  There was no rush, after all,
and much to absorb.

He recognized the voice.  It was Alvin
Kersh.  And he knew he wasn't in a hospital.
He'd been in enough of them to know the
smell of one and the sounds of one.  He was-
n't in Kersh's office, either.  There was a
hum about the Hoover that he could feel in
his bones.

And speaking of his bones: they ached.
There wasn't a part of him that didn't hurt.
He recognized this after-effect.  They'd
tripped the nanobots on him, and not just
once.  He wondered briefly how much time had
passed since he'd dropped in front of
Kersh's desk, and then decided that the
headache of memory was not worth it.

Right now it was whatever time it was, and
it really didn't matter.

Because he was fucked.

Even without opening his eyes he knew that
they were in a dark place.  In many ways.
And it smelled of wet wood and things dead
under the floorboards.  He was lying on
something lumpy and damp, and even though he
knew that movement would most likely have
him black out, he wanted to be off of it as
soon as possible.

He wondered where Mulder and Scully were
now.  He dedicated a moment to Doggett and
Reyes.  He even thought of Gibson before he
gave thought to the one thing he didn't want
to give thought to: William.  William and
where he was.  That piece of information
needed to go away to some place in his brain
where there was no escape.  Back there with
the one time he actually admitted to Sharon
that he had fears.  Back in that corner with
his sizable bundle of unrequited affections
and denied emotions.

"Walter.  Are you all right?"

Of *course* he wasn't all right, but he
pried his eyes open anyway so that he could
allay the Deputy Director's fears.  Alvin's
worried face swam into view.  Skinner
blinked several times.  Even his eyelids
hurt.  Alvin reached into his suit coat and
pulled out a pair of wirerims and put them
carefully on Skinner's nose and secured them
behind his ears.

"Better?" he said.

Skinner nodded and tried to make his throat
work.  He was unsuccessful, and Kersh
reached beside the bed and his hand came
back holding a cup.

"Can you sit up?" he asked.

Skinner would have laughed if he'd had the
strength.  One shot from the nanobot palm
pilot and for a week he'd been unable to sit
up without looking like a contortionist.
God only knows how many hits they'd given
him this time.  He shook his head.

"No," he mouthed.

Kersh nodded, put the cup back, and stood up
from the bedside.  Skinner felt Kersh's arms
fold around his chest, and he grunted in
pain as Kersh pulled him up and leaned him
against the wall.  Skinner fought the need
to black out and took in their confines as
he did.  No windows.  Slats just under the
roofline that allowed in dim light.  A lit-
tle bigger than Mulder's most recent abode.
One door.  Locked, he assumed.  Two bed/cots
and a table between.  And Deputy Director
Alvin Kersh, who was holding out a cup of
what Skinner assumed to be water, his dark
eyes sympathetic.

"Thanks," Skinner whispered, and he reached
for it.  He was filled with dismay when his
shaking hands refused to obey his brain's
order to be still, and water sloshed out of
the cup and onto his rumpled suit coat and
shirt.  Kersh's hand covered his and moved
the cup to his mouth.  Skinner shot a grate-
ful glance over the cup rim as he drank.

There were worse nurses than Alvin Kersh.
There were better ones as well, and he
though of Dana Scully.

Skinner closed his eyes and leaned back.

"How many times ."

That was as far as he could get.

"That palm pilot thing?" he heard Kersh say.
"Every time you'd start to come around,
they'd zap you.  Maybe four, five times."

Skinner grimaced.  He was amazed he hadn't
dropped dead of a heart attack, and he
cursed his genetic make-up for not allowing
him to do just that.

"How long have we been here?"  In spite of
the fact that he knew it didn't matter, he
found he wanted to know.  He needed a sense
of place and time.

"Two days plus," Kersh replied, and he
dropped to the other cot with a sigh.  He
gestured at the table between them.  "Hun-
gry?"

Skinner opened his eyes and turned his head
to look and was sorry that he did.  The room
twisted and turned and pitched on its side.
Whatever edible thing was on the table was
now inedible.  No point in keeping up his
strength anyhow. Keeping up his strength
might keep him alive.  And he didn't want
that.

Kersh's voice was a whisper, and it seemed
to come from far away.

"What do you think they want from us?"

Skinner closed his eyes and lied.

"I haven't a clue."

And then he heard the door unlock and creak
open, and he heard heavy footfalls, and he
prepared to meet his fate.
 

~~~~~~
 

To call or not to call, that was the ques-
tion.

They were lunching near the Canadian border.
They were at a small town park complete with
ailing bandbox and splinter-inducing picnic
tables under black cottonwoods that soared
into the blistering sky.  Their lunch was
white bread and baloney - the bread harden-
ing immediately in the dry air - potato
chips and milk in containers like the ones
in grade school, and Mulder had insisted on
a handful of 'Bama Pecan Pies.  They were
pure sugar and fat, guaranteed heart-attack-
inducers.

<"Would you like a heart attack with those
'Bama Pies, sir?">

And they were in the fifth round of the
Great Should-We-Risk-a-Call Debate.

They'd both turned off their cell phones as
they'd sped away from New Mexico.  Afraid of
being tracked, they'd shut them off and
tossed them in the back seat.  Phones were a
potential connection to aliens who did not
wish them well.  Phones were also a poten-
tial connection to friends unaccounted for.
To family, both blood and otherwise.  They
stared hard at every phone booth that they
saw, moved their heads as one as they passed
them, watched each one recede into the dis-
tance behind them through the side and rear-
view mirrors.

This hour, Mulder was taking the pro stand
in the Great Debate.  This hour, Mulder was
for risking a call.  But he'd played both
sides of this.  He knew both arguments by
heart.

<"They'll track us.">

<"Maybe not.  They've screwed up before.">

<"They're omniscient.  They know every-
thing.">

<"No they don't.  They're fallible.  They're
. human that way.">

With this debate came the What-Do-We-Do-Now
Seminar.  Mulder should have been able to
direct this seminar with ease, but he was
stymied.  They had a decade until 2012, and
if he and Scully could remain free, there
were valuable things that they could accom-
plish.  The world was large, with many ex-
cellent places to hide.

He squinted towards the one-story grade
school that squatted at the edge of the
park.  It was recess.  The squeal of chil-
dren dizzy with freedom wafted over to them
on a hot breeze.  He felt a lump rise in his
throat and he swallowed it away.  He looked
back at Scully.  She was occupied with try-
ing to open a little pouch of mustard.  That
achieved, she tried to spread it on the
stiff slice of bread without appropriate
cutlery.

Luckily he had his scientist and his doctor
and his soul with him.  But he needed more
than Scully to accomplish what he needed to
accomplish.

He mourned the Gunmen.  Again.  He mourned
the loss of their abilities at subterfuge
and misdirection, mourned their aptitude for
diddling with the government with impunity,
and their network of equally paranoid
friends, and their talent for cracking for-
tified websites and databases.

How could he do this without them?

He needed to gather people.  People to help
in the cause.  As much as he hated to admit
it, he needed Doggett and Reyes if they were
willing.  He needed Gibson Praise, and Dog-
gett and Reyes were his current keepers.

He needed people that he could trust.

He needed Walter Skinner.

He needed to know that Skinner was alive,
and then he needed to have Skinner at his
side.  His old boss was a proven leader of
people, an excellent manager of things and
assets, and a Yin to his Yang.  To do this
thing, to prepare, he needed Skinner.  He
pushed himself up from the table and ignored
the splinters that came with him.

Scully looked up from her sandwich.

"Mulder?"

"I have to know, Scully.  And we need some
help."  He moved towards the SUV that he'd
parked in the shade at the edge of the park.
He didn't want to allow himself too much
time to think about this decision, and he
took long strides, hoping that Scully would-
n't call him back.  The SUV was an oven, and
when he opened the back door and leaned in
to reach under the seats, it took his breath
away.  He figured it didn't matter which
cell phone he used, and he grasped the first
one he touched and pulled it out of the ve-
hicle.  He stood up and shut the door.

Scully was standing next to him, her eyes
unreadable, and the wind played with her
hair.  She captured it and pushed it behind
her ears.

"Call the FBI first, Mulder," she said.
"Play dumb."

He smiled down at her.

"My specialty."
 

~~~~~~~~
 

He had turned right on Interstate 70 and
headed east.

He'd had to.

He'd been driving as they flew up I-15,
headed north to some kind of sketchy notion
of safety, and then the big green interstate
signs framed in white began to beckon.

"Denver," they'd said.  "Kansas City," the
next sign had added.  "St. Louis.  Indian-
apolis."  And once there, he knew that DC
was but a punishing ten-hour haul away.

Doggett understood duty as well as Walter
Skinner.  And he had walked away from a fel-
low soldier.  Left him alone to face the en-
emy.

That was unacceptable.

Goddamned stupid Marine.

Doggett had taken two steps towards Kersh's
door to start the act of rescue, and he'd
been brought up short by Gibson's voice de-
fining exactly what "they" knew.  What
"they" knew was where Mulder and Scully were
headed.  Doggett had hesitated.

Mulder and Scully, or Skinner.

He'd opted for Mulder and Scully, and had
marched away from the office with Monica and
Gibson.  Every time he'd closed his eyes in
rest - most often in the back seat as Monica
drove - he saw that walk away down the hall,
had replayed the choice that he'd made over
and over in his cluttered and unhappy brain.

That was one reason that he'd been such a
giant pain in the ass about making sure that
Mulder and Scully had survived the firefight
in New Mexico.  He wanted to know that his
decision had saved *someone*.

They'd pulled closer to the interchange and
he hadn't known how to bring it up to
Monica, this need to go back and rescue a
fellow soldier. Monica, normally on the
chatty side, had been circumspect and re-
moved.  He would give her the option of not
returning with him.

He'd hoped that she would.

He'd slowed as the interchange loomed ahead
of them, and he'd shot several glances her
way and had tried to read her heart through
her skin.  She'd felt his eyes, finally, and
had turned to him.

"Monica.  I need to go back."

She'd smiled at him then, treated him to
that small sad sweet smile that always broke
his heart, even on a good day, and she'd
said:

"Yes.  We do."

And so they'd made the turn and headed back
across the heartland to God-only-knows-what.
As a gesture of faith, they'd also turned on
their cell phones.  They'd avoided the use
of them to that point.  They'd avoided con-
tact of any kind with anyone since they'd
left the New Mexico desert.

His cell phone rang three hours east of Den-
ver.  He nearly drove off the road.

Monica fumbled with it, pressed a button,
checked the display, and brought it to her
ear.  She listened, her brow furrowed, and
then she closed her eyes and smiled.
 
"It's so good to hear your voice," she said,
and Doggett heard her own voice crack at the
admission.  She opened her eyes and looked
over at him. "Scully," she mouthed.

"Muhldah?" Doggett asked aloud.

Monica was listening with great care to what
Scully was saying, and the lines reappeared
on her forehead.

"Muhldah?" he asked again.

She shushed him with a wave of her hand and
nodded a quick "yes" at him.  Doggett swal-
lowed hard and looked back at the road ahead
of them.  He did not like the haunted look
on her face.

"Quit?" she said.  "Would he do that?"

More waiting: Tires singing on the roadway,
bugs pinging on the windshield, white knuck-
les on the steering wheel.

"Did you talk to Kim?"

Monica captured her lower lip in her teeth
as she listened.  It was all Doggett could
do to keep from leaning over there and
snatching the phone away from her.  He was
not a patient man by nature.

"So are we," she said.  "We're east of Den-
ver."

She nodded and tugged at the ends of her
hair.

"Okay.  Okay.  Same time tomorrow.  We'll
call you on the other phone."  And she
punched the off button and dropped the phone
to her lap.  Doggett watched as she rubbed
the phone like a worry stone.  Her face was
partially averted, her blank gaze aimed out
the window at the wheat fields sailing past
and the thunderheads lining the horizon.

"Hey," he said, and it came out shorter than
he'd intended.  He couldn't help himself.
If they were going to rescue Skinner, they
needed intelligence.

She spoke.  "Scully's okay.  Mulder's okay.
They're in Montana, and they're headed
back."

"To DC?"

"Yeah."

"Have they found out  anything?"

She shrugged and turned to look at him.  He
could tell that she was fighting to remain
collected and composed.  He could tell also
that it was a battle that she was going to
lose.

"They called the Hoover and asked for you
and then for me, and they were told that we
were on extended personal leaves."

Doggett barked out an incredulous laugh.

"So *that's* what this is."

Monica didn't see the humor in it.  Her dark
eyes were singing a dirge, and something
squeezed Doggett's heart.

"What else?" he asked.

"They asked for Skinner.  They were told
that he quit."

"That he *quit*?"

She nodded.  "That he quit."

"Jesus.  Did they actually think that we'd
buy that shit?"

"He might have done it," she said, and her
voice quavered at the edge of desperate and
her eyes glistened.  "He might have done it,
John. He could have just decided that he'd
had it, and that it was time to quit.  It
could have happened."

Doggett looked away from her and back at the
road.

Anything was possible.

Just not this.

Walter Skinner hadn't quit.  They had him
somewhere.  And if they were lucky, he was
still alive.

He looked over at his partner.  Her eyes
looked huge in her pale face.

"C'mere," he said, and he reached out his
hand and captured the back of her head.  She
undid her seatbelt and slid onto the console
between them and buried her face in his
neck.  "S'allright," he said as he patted
her shoulders and he felt a sob rise up
through her body and claim her.  "S'all-
right," he said again as she began to weep
in earnest, and he noted a sign announcing
the number of miles to Indianapolis as he
drove with one arm around her.
 

~~~~~~~
 

Walter Skinner kept waking up alive and it
was starting to piss him off.

He knew that he should be dead by now.  He'd
mentally prepared himself, understood that
it was imminent, had gone through the how-
ever-many stages of grief that there were in
record time, and had come to complete peace
and acceptance, but he kept coming to,
alive, in spite of his best efforts not to.

He would close his eyes as they'd begin a
session and pray that the Elevator of Death
would come to his floor and take him away,
and inevitably his eyes would unpry them-
selves later to see Alvin Kersh looking down
at him, and then he'd smell the woody damp-
ness of their prison and smell his own blood
and know that he was, once again, alive.
Godammit.

The Elevator of Death.

He was not a clever man by nature, but in
desperation he'd come up with that moniker
in his second session with his anonymous
torturers.  His life had flashed before his
eyes.  Actually, that had happened about
five times so far, but during the second
session flash he'd thought about elevators
and all of the hours that he'd waited in the
Hoover for them to get to his floor.

What better things might he have done with
that time?

And then he concentrated hard on the import
of various Hoover elevator moments: a kiss
from Dana Scully, a crack on the forehead
from Billy Miles, Krycek's sick smile as he
didn't hold the door open ...

Elevators loomed large in his legend.  Thus,
the Elevator of Death.  And it kept passing
his floor.

They wanted the information about William,
of course, and he hadn't succumbed.  He'd
decided that the best defense was a good of-
fense, and he was using the opportunity to
bare his soul and tell his tormentors every-
thing he'd never had the balls to tell peo-
ple back when he still had a life to live.

He told them about his nightmares and about
the old woman that would show up at inoppor-
tune times and about the fact that in Viet-
nam he'd died and then lived.

He told them that he'd jerked his sperm into
a cup over a Playboy magazine and that they
had been studied and counted and that the
little sons-of-bitches had low motility, and
he confessed that because of that he'd never
managed to get Sharon pregnant, and she'd
wanted children badly.  He could command a
roomful of driven and opinionated F.B.I.
agents, but he couldn't knock up his wife.
He could come back from the dead, but he
couldn't knock up his wife.  He could take a
slug in his gut and be back to work in a
week, but he couldn't knock up his wife.
And that fact had nearly killed him.

He was screaming and hardly had any voice
left when he launched into the subject of
Dana Scully, how his heart had stopped the
first time that he'd seen her, how he'd
wanted to protect and defend her and cup her
pale face in his hands every time he got
within three feet of her.  He gave up to
them the fact that there wasn't a short red-
head that didn't turn his head no matter
where he was in the world because he saw her
everywhere, even in places where she wasn't.
And he knew that she would never be his, and
that fact had nearly killed him.

He told them about Monica Reyes, how it was
different with her than with Dana, that it
was more about heat and sex and punches in
the gut whenever he saw her coming down the
hall towards him.  She smelled of musk and
banked fires and it drove him wild.  And he
knew that there was something between she
and John Doggett, and he was once again
standing on the sidelines watching it, and
that fact had nearly killed him.

He even told them about Fox Mulder.  Skinner
considered himself to be a capital-H Hetero-
sexual, but he admitted in what small voice
he had left at the end of a session that he
thought Fox Mulder was beautiful.  And that
fact didn't kill him, but it did worry him a
little.

Funny.  All of those things that had nearly
killed him, and now he should be dead and he
wasn't.

He told them that he should have killed The
Smoking Man when he'd had the chance and
should have blown the biggest mother-fucking
whistle that he could've found on every
stinking last one of them, that he should
have gone to the New York Times or the Wash-
ington Post or 60 Minutes and squealed and
then taken on an assumed identity and spent
his waning days on some beach in Tahiti
smoking cigars, drinking wine, and watching
the skies for strange lights.

And so his life stories spilled out of him
along with his blood.

He was running out of stories.

He was running out of blood.
 

~~~~~~~~
 
 

Margaret Scully sighed and rubbed her fore-
head.  She had a headache again.

It was the stress of not knowing about Dana
and Fox.  It was also her houseguest, Gibson
Praise.  Having him in the house was unnerv-
ing.  He was so quiet that at times she'd
wonder if he'd slipped out, or if he had -
like Bill and Charlie had when they were his
age - found something absolutely fascinating
in the lingerie section of the J.C. Penney's
catalog and had to take it into the upstairs
bathroom to study it for a few hours.  But
then she'd go up to find him seated, stiff-
backed and cross-legged, on Dana's old bed,
his sightless eyes on the bay window, and
she would wonder again at the boy and what
import he had in matters regarding her
daughter and Fox Mulder.

And it was about time for her son Bill to
check in.  He called her on a regular sched-
ule to see how she was doing.  He was as
right as rain, her son Bill.  He was also
righteous and bull-headed, and she knew in-
stinctively that telling Bill anything about
this baby-sitting job would be a very, very
bad idea, but she feared her ability to keep
it to herself once she got on the phone with
him.

She was seated at her desk in the kitchen
nook.  She had a lovely view of her back
yard there.  She needed to spend some time
in the yard.  She was a tidy person, and it
was looking wild and unkempt back there.
She loved to work in the yard, loved to feel
the sun on her back and the soil under her
fingernails.

It was simple work, the garden, and you
could see progress.  You could stand up and
rub your back and look at what you'd done
and feel good about yourself.  And if you
worked real hard at it, you could forget
about your daughter in the FBI and the fact
that she did dreadful and frightening things
and had had a child out of wedlock and had
given it away.  If you concentrated very
hard on a small corner of the garden you
could forget that whatever it was that your
one daughter did for a living, it had killed
your other one.  If you kept your head down,
you could clear your mind of strangers like
Albert Holstein and Gibson Praise crowding
your life, showing up at your daughter's
death bed, eating your food, making you feel
uncomfortable in your own home.  And if you
were really lucky, you could forget the fact
that your husband up and died and abandoned
you just before everything got really
strange.

Margaret Scully didn't cry much, but she
found herself blinking back tears.  She be-
lieved in God and believed that all things
happened for a reason, and that gave her
strength.  If she felt despair creeping into
her thoughts in bed at night, she would pull
her rosary from the nightstand drawer and
would fall asleep with a "Hail Mary" on her
lips, secure in the knowledge that the
Blessed Virgin would protect her and protect
her wayward daughter and her sons and Fox
Mulder from harm.  But there were times,
like today, when her concerns trumped her
faith card, when the real world intruded on
her carefully constructed temple and rocked
its foundations.

And she felt old.  Old and brittle.  She was
officially a matron, a widow, and she was
anonymous when she walked down the street.
Men used to whistle at her, and when she
passed storefront windows she would see her-
self and be modestly cheered by the fact
that God had given her - not beauty, cer-
tainly - but solid attractiveness, and that
made her feel good about herself.  Not *too*
good, of course.  That kind of vanity was
not allowed.  But now . now she felt every
one of her years, and she looked down at her
hands crossed on the desk in front of her,
and noted the age spots and the spreading
knuckles-

"Mrs. Scully."

She started and nearly dropped to the floor.
Gibson Praise was at her elbow.  How he'd
gotten there without her hearing it, she
could not know, but ungenerous thoughts bub-
bled in her brain, and she wanted to snap at
him about sneaking up on people, or make
some crack about putting a bell on him like
she had on her cat, but then she saw some-
thing in his eyes that made her stop.

"Mrs. Scully," he said with an earnestness
that was rare in someone so young.  "You
look quite lovely today."

He put his small hand on her arm.

"That is a very good color for you."

She looked at her blouse.  It was white.  In
spite of that fact, she felt unaccountably
cheered.

"Mrs. Scully, I think I need some fresh air,
and I wondered if we might work in your gar-
den."

She was speechless.  Gibson did this to her,
took her breath away and made her wonder at
her sanity.  She found herself smiling up at
the strange boy standing at her side.

"That would be lovely," she said.  "I'll
make some iced tea."

And not for the first time, she wondered if
he could read her mind.
 

~~~~~~~
 
 

He was communing with the dead again, she
could tell.

Someone had appeared to him, and Scully
thought that whoever it was might be stand-
ing on the front hood of the SUV.  Mulder
was staring out there through the windshield
with singular intent.  His lips were moving,
but she could hear no sound.  And although
she loved Fox Mulder, the sight of it gave
her goosebumps and made her shoulders rise
to protect her neck.

She hoped that this particular talent would
be short-lived.

Scully was driving this leg on Interstate 80
through eastern Ohio.  They had considered
abandoning wheels to take a plane, but
planes meant credit cards and photo ID, and
they had decided that they couldn't risk it.

Mulder had seen Deep Throat in Illinois, and
tears had tracked down his cheeks.  Mulder
had been driving, and the long-dead infor-
mant had decided to appear somewhere between
Mulder and Scully on the console, and she
had gripped the passenger-side door handle
as they had silently conversed as if she
wasn't on the same planet, let alone in the
SUV with them.

The Lone Gunmen had joined them in the back
seat for a while in Indiana, and according
to Mulder they were bemused and pissed that
he mourned them for their nefarious abili-
ties and not for their company or their
sparkling wits or their collection of soft
porn videos.

She thought that he might be talking to the
Gunmen now.  He seemed most relaxed talking
to them, and that fact amused her.  Mulder
wore Armani well and walked the world look-
ing like a GQ model, but it was a disguise.
He was a complete and unapologetic nerd at
heart, and she loved him for it.

Mulder moaned.

"Stop.  Pull over."

His voice was strangled, and she immediately
obeyed, braking and pulling to the side of
the freeway.  She shot a look at him.  His
face was ashen, and he was fumbling with the
door handle and she had yet to come to a
complete stop.  He was out the door before
she could set the brake and turn off the en-
gine.  She got out of the SUV and tore
around the front of it to find him on all
fours in the deep grass up the hill from the
roadway.  His back was rolling with dry
heaves.

She fell on her knees beside him and held
his forehead with her left hand and smoothed
his back with her right.

She'd been afraid that this would happen.
One to many communions with the dead, one
too many cups of coffee to stay awake and
alert, one too many 'Bama Pies.

He was crying now, and she brought her right
arm around his shoulder and whispered in his
ear as an anonymous truck driver found it
necessary to honk his air horn all the way
past them.

"It's all right, Mulder.  You just need a
good meal and some rest.  It's all right."

After a few minutes of soothing whispers and
petting, his breathing evened and he brought
a hand up to wipe at his eyes.  He dropped
and rolled to his back.  She sat close be-
side him and wrapped her arms around her
knees.

She watched two school busses roll by and
thought briefly of William.  She looked down
at the father of her child.  His eyes were
closed, and they were dark, bruised pools in
his pale face.

"Better?" she said.

"I saw him."

It was a whisper that she could barely hear
over the rush and hum of the cars on the
freeway in front of them, but she had no
doubts as to what he meant, and she felt her
extremities tingle.  She didn't want to say
the name out loud.  If she said it aloud, it
would make it so.  If she didn't, they could
pretend that everything was all right.  She
found herself frozen, unable to move.

Mulder opened his eyes and stared blankly at
the cumulus cloud-filled sky above them.

"I was talking to the Gunmen, and then all
of a sudden, I saw him."

She dropped her head to her knees.  She did-
n't want to hear this.

"But not clearly."  She pulled back up and
looked over at him as he came to a seated
position.  "Not clearly, and I couldn't hear
him."  He matched her pose, his long arms
wrapping his knees.  He stared across the
freeway and his chin was firm as he did so.
There was some hope there, she decided.  Her
voice shook when she finally spoke aloud,
and it was the doctor's voice that came out
of her.

"Could you tell anything about his current
condition by seeing him?"

He pressed his lips together and shook his
head.  "No.  No.  He looked fine.  He was
dressed for work."  Mulder's voice cracked,
but his head remained high, his chin, firm.
"He had on a starched white shirt and a
suit."  He paused.  "That dark gray one."

Scully looked away from Mulder and down the
highway.  She knew that suit well and appre-
ciated it.  She idly wondered what tie he
was wearing and she gazed at the roadside as
small and frantic crickets played hopscotch
to the horizon.

She wanted him to put his hopes into words
for her.  "What do you think it means," she
asked, her face still averted, "that you
can't see him clearly and you can't hear
him?"

He obliged her in a voice that carried both
optimism and grave concern.

"I think it means that he's not dead."

Another truck driver found it necessary to
salute them with a long pull on the horn,
and she noted the Doppler Effect as the
truck came into her vision and crushed a
universe of crickets as it sped away.  She
barely heard Mulder's postscript.

"Yet."

Exhausted and fearful, she dropped her head
to her knees.  When she heard the SUV door
slam, she snapped to attention.  Mulder was
gunning the engine before she even got to
the passenger door, and she was only halfway
in when they started to roll.

And she still wondered about the tie.
 

~~~~~~~
 

"Kill me."

It had been the last thing he'd said to his
captors before he'd blacked out, and the
first thing out of his cracked and bleeding
lips when he opened his eyes to see Alvin
Kersh.

"Kill me," he rasped again.

Skinner watched Alvin's face.  There was no
hiding it: The Deputy Director was pissed.
And not pissed as in "Not a chance you big
lug; I can't kill you."  It was an "Alvin's
not getting his way" pissed, a look he'd
seen many times before, and it was there and
gone in seconds.

Skinner closed his eyes and felt Kersh leave
his side and heard the sound of the cot op-
posite him creaking.

Something was niggling at the back of Skin-
ner's brain, back behind the information
that he'd hidden so well that he honestly
couldn't remember it anymore, back behind
the pain of burns and cuts and busted ribs,
back behind his desire to live.  It was
about Kersh and it was about their predica-
ment, and he cleared his fogged brain and
tried to think about it.

These things Skinner did not understand:

Where did Alvin go?  And what did they do to
him?

Skinner knew that he was alone at times.  It
wasn't a hard thing to discern, even when in
a world of pain, since the space was so
small.  There was no hiding in their prison.
Alvin would be gone for hours, and would
come back none the worse for it.

Why did Alvin want to know where William
was?

Skinner had neither confirmed nor denied to
his prisonmate that William's location was
what his torturers were after, but somewhere
in his more lucid moments, he realized that
Kersh had come to that conclusion.  And
Alvin spoke to him in earnest and soothing
tones as he cleaned his face with a handker-
chief, and he urged him to share the infor-
mation, to tell him where Scully's son was
so that he could make sure that William was
held from harm.  It was about the stupidest
goddamned thing that Skinner had ever heard.
It was what the super soldiers wanted from
him, so one had to assume that if Kersh car-
ried the information, he would be tortured
for it as well.  It didn't make sense.  Un-
less Kersh had a death wish or a strong
streak of masochism.

Why had the Deputy Director let the Juror
and his minions take him out of the Hoover?

If their situations had been reversed, if
Alvin Kersh had been unconscious on a gur-
ney, Skinner never would have let them reach
the door, let alone drive away.  There would
have been opportunities to drop back, to
call out in the hallway where everyone could
hear that he'd forgotten his keys, or that
he needed to go back to the office to let
someone know about the emergency, and then
he would have pushed every security and
alarm button that existed, he would have
alerted the front desk and would have con-
scripted every agent within earshot into
battle, and he would have stormed the flee-
ing group and helped to shoot them all dead
or die trying.  And never mind that they
would have regenerated and lived again, be-
cause the Deputy Director would have been
saved.

He heard the door open.  He stayed as still
as death, not a particularly difficult thing
to do under the circumstances.

"Well?" he heard one of the torturers say.

"He asked me to kill him," Kersh said, as if
Skinner was a recalcitrant child who had
asked for a second cookie.

"Did he give you the information?"

"No.  Goddamned idiot."  No hint of fondness
there.

"Come on," another voice said.  "We need to
strategize.  We need to change tactics."
And Skinner heard the creak of the cot and
the shuffle of feet.  The door closed.

For the first time since his ordeal began,
Walter Skinner felt fear.  And he also felt
duped.

<"And the Best Actor Award for Performance
Under Duress While Fucking a Subordinate
goes to Deputy Director Alvin Kersh.">

If he had any strength, he would laugh.  As
it was, he couldn't even muster up a smile.
So he concentrated on trying to die.
 

~~~~~~~
 

Gibson loaded his fork with macaroni and
cheese and looked across the kitchen table
at Margaret Scully as he brought it to his
mouth.

She was delighted that Gibson liked her
cooking.  He could tell by her body language
and by the encouraging smile on her face.
He could also tell by reading her mind.  Af-
ter he confirmed that she was pleased that
her cooking met with his approval, he turned
off that part of his brain and tried to en-
joy his dinner under her motherly gaze.

No doubt about it, the gift he had was a
curse.  Although he could use it to his ad-
vantage when he balked at using speech,
there wasn't a day that passed that he did-
n't wish that he was not quite as special as
he was, or was special in a different way, a
more acceptable way.  Special like a kid who
could run fast, or could catch a ball, or
could see fanciful creatures in clouds.  His
specialness was frightening to others.  He
could understand why.

It was frightening to *him*.

Mrs. Scully was talking.  Something about
Catholic mass tomorrow morning and wondering
if he would like to tag along.  Gibson con-
sidered it as he chewed.  He pictured read-
ing the minds of the penitent throng.  He
was certain that fear of Godly retribution
would allow for many interesting reflections
on bad deeds done, and many requests for
forgiveness for those bad deeds.

He had no doubt that he would hear things
both titillating and confusing.  Titillating
he could handle.  Confusing ... who could he
ask?  He longed for a friend or a mentor.
He longed for a father figure.

He gazed at Mrs. Scully as he took a drink
of milk.  A mother figure he could do with-
out, he'd decided after several days in her
suburban home.  He felt himself past the
need for that, and although he was fond of
his tablemate, she could also be smothering,
someone who made him want to gasp for air
and run for freedom.  If he *could* run like
any old unspecial kid.

She was looking at him expectantly, as if
she'd posed a question and was waiting for
an answer.  And although on general princi-
ple he didn't like to do it too often, he
took the luxury of reaching out to read her
mind, but he overshot and found himself
reading something else: a different,
stronger mind, one that was worried and
busy, and it was close.  He threw a look to-
wards the front door.

The doorbell rang.

Margaret Scully jumped and her fork fumbled
from her fingers and clattered across the
floor.

<Gibson.  Help.  Hurry.  Skinner.>

It was a jumble, and he turned back to the
table and stared open-mouthed across it at
Mrs. Scully as he tried to make sense of it.

"Were you expecting someone?" she asked,
looking fearful of the answer.

"No," he said, and he sat his glass down be-
side his plate.  "But I think this is for
me, and I think I'm going to have to leave."
He rose from his chair and headed for the
front door.

"But your dinner ..." he heard her say as he
headed down the hallway.  "I have a load of
your clothes in the dryer ..."

He wasn't listening.  He was concentrating
on the front door with his brain ear.  It
was Doggett and Reyes, come to take him
away.  He knew this without seeing them.  He
could hear Margaret Scully protesting behind
him as he opened the door wide.

He nearly went to his knees with the rush of
emotions and sense of urgency that rolled
off of the harried and disheveled FBI agents
at the door.

"Gibson," Doggett said without preamble,
pushing into the house.  He gave Mrs. Scully
a passing nod, and Monica tucked in behind
him and closed the door.  Doggett knelt be-
fore him and firmly held him by his upper
arms.  "We need you.  We need your ability
to read minds so that we can find someone.
Someone who probably needs our help."

Gibson nodded with no hesitation.  "I under-
stand," he said.  And he did.  It was becom-
ing clearer to him how his gift was needed
as he looked hard into John Doggett's un-
blinking eyes and listened with his brain
ear.  He tried to block out Agent Reyes as
he did so.  Her mind was filled with fear
and something else that was buried too deep
for him to see clearly.  And he had to block
out Margaret Scully as well.  Mrs. Scully
was starving for news of her daughter.  And
she was angry that her suspicions were con-
firmed, that Gibson *had* been reading her
mind.

"I need my backpack," he said, and he turned
to get it and bumped into Mrs. Scully.  She
looked down at him, her face sad and worn,
and he left his brain unprotected and en-
tered hers.  It was filled with uncondi-
tional love and concern for him, and those
things flowed down through his mind and left
a trail of warmth through his imperfect, un-
dersized body.  Without thinking, he threw
his arms around her waist and held tight.
He could never remember crying in the whole
of his life, but he felt his throat con-
strict.  He pulled back from her, remember-
ing that he had a job to do, and she put a
warm hand on his cheek and smiled.

"I'll get it for you, Gibson," she said with
the weary patience of someone who has had
people leave her life on a regular basis.
She nodded to Reyes and Doggett and went
down the hall.  He watched her leave.

"Gibson."  It was Doggett, still on his
knees, and Gibson turned to give the agent
his full attention.  "We have to find Walter
Skinner.  We think the super soldiers have
him, but we don't know where.  We need to
get you close enough to one of them to read
their mind.  To find out where they've got
him."

Gibson nodded his understanding.  No words
were necessary.

Doggett frowned up at his partner and then
looked back at Gibson and searched his eyes.
"This could be dangerous.  They could spot
you.  They could know you, be looking for
you."  Doggett's voice was rough and urgent.
"You don't have to do this.  If you can't do
this thing, you need to let us know now.  We
won't make you."

Gibson looked at both of them and was sur-
prised to feel anger start as a hot ball in
his stomach.  It was an emotion that he did
not allow himself very often.  In fact, he
allowed himself few emotions at all.  With
his life littered by the thoughts and con-
cerns and feelings of others, day after day,
every waking moment, he knew that emotions
could run cheap and shallow.  Everybody had
them.  Everybody thought of themselves all
the time, and attached import to every lit-
tle thing that happened to them every minute
of the day.  Gibson knew that most emotions
were a waste of precious energy and time.

But in spite of this knowledge, he found he
was ... he was pissed.  There was no other
way to put it.  Doggett could see it, Gibson
could tell, and he rose to stand next to
Agent Reyes.  Gibson took a deep breath and
squared his shoulders.

"Walter Skinner carried me out of the desert
when I was hurt," he reminded them in the
deepest voice that he could muster.  "He
took on a bounty hunter to protect me.  I
think I know what I'm doing.  I'm not a
child."

The agents looked at each other and then
back down at him.

"And you owe Mrs. Scully a thank-you.  And
she needs to know that her daughter is all
right."  He paused, filled with concern.  He
hadn't been able to read anything about
Agent Scully.  "Is she all right?"

Monica smiled at him and he felt his face
burn.

"Yes, Gibson," she said.  "She's fine.  So
is Fox.  Thank you for reminding us of
things we need to do."

Doggett didn't look quite as grateful, and
he cleared his throat and shuffled his feet
as Margaret Scully came back down the hall
and handed Gibson his backpack.  "Your
clothes aren't quite dry," she said as if
she'd failed him somehow.
 
"Mrs. Scully," Monica said, moving closer to
her, "you need to know that Dana is fine."
She smiled and reached out and her long fin-
gers touched the older woman on the forearm,
and at that moment Gibson Praise officially
fell in love with Agent Monica Reyes.  "And
Fox is fine as well.  I'm sure they'll find
a way to be in touch with you.  And thank
you," she said nodding down at Gibson, "for
taking care of our friend.  It was a lot to
ask of you, and we appreciate it."

"Thank *you*," she said, her face awash with
relief, and then she reached out and framed
Gibson's face with her hands and kissed him
on the forehead.  "Be well," she said, and
Doggett pulled him away before he had a
chance to be sad again, pulled him through
the door and out to back seat of the SUV
parked in the driveway.  Doggett started the
vehicle and a cell phone on the console
rang.  Monica picked it up and stared hard
at the display before she pushed the button.

"Yes," she said after listening.  "We have
him with us."

Gibson was glad he was in the back seat.
She couldn't see him blush.

"Really.  You're kidding.  Really."  She
snapped her fingers at Doggett, who had
backed out of the driveway and was starting
up the street.  "Paper.  Pen," she whis-
pered.  Doggett shrugged and dug in the
driver door pocket.  Eager to please her,
Gibson reached into the flap pocket of his
backpack and pulled a sheet of paper out of
his journal and handed her a pen.  She
pushed it back at him.  "Take this down,"
she said, and she carefully repeated direc-
tions as she listened on the phone.  Gibson
leaned forward onto the console and wrote as
neatly as he could and hoped that Monica's
hair would brush against the side of his
face.

"That's about a two-hour trip from here,"
Doggett said after he heard the address.

"Did you hear that?" Monica said into the
phone.  She listened and nodded at Doggett.
"For them, too," she said.  "Right.  We're
on our way."  And she hit the off button.

"How'd they get it?" Doggett asked, nodding
at the paper on the console.

"The Lone Gunmen."

"But they're-"

"I know."

"-dead."

"I know."

Gibson settled back into the seat to con-
sider this.  They had directions to wherever
Walter Skinner was, and they'd gotten it
from dead people.

Perhaps he wasn't as peculiar as he thought.

His backpack was on his lap, and he felt
something warm.  Curious, he pulled it open.
There was a sealed container in there rest-
ing on his damp clothes.  There was a fork
as well.  He pulled out the container,
opened it, and allowed himself a smile.

Macaroni and cheese.
 

~~~~~~~
 

Mulder had dubbed it The Whale.

It was the size of a Greyhound bus, but it
handled like an SUV.  It had cost him a
goodly sum of money, and he'd paid it out in
cash, a brown bag of it; cash that he'd
stashed in a bus depot locker in Pittsburgh
on the way out of town the year before.  The
purchase had made chubby, sweaty "Hi I'm
Bobby Hoover" the happiest salesman on the
RV Acres lot.  It had also made his eyes bug
out when the bag of cash had been tendered
in lieu of credit.

It hadn't made Scully quite as happy.  She
was, his love, a pragmatic person at heart,
and the notion of trekking the breadth of
America in a big bus while on the lam did
not hold the same romantic appeal for her as
it did for him.  She had crossed her arms
and pursed her lips and had only loosened
them from their pout when he'd reminded her
that the reason for their return was to res-
cue Walter Skinner, and it was unlikely that
Walter Skinner would be capable of doing
anything more than lying on his back and
looking up at the ceiling.  For that reason,
nothing but The Whale would do.  SUVs: too
bumpy.  Luxury cars: a smooth ride, but too
small.  An ambulance: out of the question.
But a bus ... they could be a family, going
for a cross-country trip in an RV, and there
was anonymity and safety in that.  They
could be going to see Mt. Rushmore or going
to see Old Faithful.  Places where Mulder
had never been.  Places where Mulder had al-
ways wanted to go.

They'd hit the pharmacies and medical supply
stores next, and Scully had provisioned them
for the third world war.  The bed that was
the daytime dinette seat and table now
looked like any number of hospital beds
where Mulder himself had spent more time
than he cared to remember: clean white
sheets, tidily tucked in corners, covers
neither too hot or too cold, a small pillow.
And there were coolers with blood in them,
blood of Walter Skinner's type.

Scully had called out for Mulder to stop at
a small, rural hospital in Virginia, and
she'd leapt from the bus and returned with
the bags of blood and serious-sounding
street-illegal drugs.
 
Mulder hadn't asked what tale she'd spun to
get them.  He'd parked the bus behind the
hospital and had waited with the motor
idling.  He'd pictured her storming the
halls as he'd smiled feebly and finger-waved
at curious hospital workers peering out the
windows.  She would use her badge, he was
fairly sure of that.  She was not above
flashing that when she needed something.
But the most compelling reason for the hos-
pital to comply with Scully's wishes, he
knew, would be Scully herself.  When she
wanted to be, she was a bronze-haired mael-
strom, a force to be reckoned with, someone
who would make it clear that she would not
be denied.  He'd seen the set of her lips
when she'd left the bus, and he'd pitied
anyone who might question her.

And now she was asleep in the bed she'd made
for Skinner, curled up with her back to him,
and the orange/red sun, slanting through the
windows at the side of The Whale, made her
hair shimmer.  He had the urge to reach back
and cover her unshod feet.  But he couldn't
reach her, so he contented himself with
looking over his shoulder at her every ten
miles or so and congratulating himself for
having a soul mate who looked good even ex-
hausted and curled up on a pseudo hospital
bed.

And then it happened again.  He'd managed to
suffer in silence for the last hundred miles
every time it had occurred, but this time he
couldn't help himself.  He said, loudly,
"No!" and smacked the steering wheel with
his hand and shut his eyes for as long as he
felt he could safely shut his eyes while
driving a vehicle the size of his first
apartment.

"Hmm?  Mulder?"  It was Scully's sleepy
voice behind him.

"No!" he cried again, and Walter Skinner's
image obliged and faded away.

"Mulder?"  Scully had come to stand behind
him, and she put her hands on his shoulders.

"Sorry, Scully," he said.  "I ... "  Fear
made his voice small.  He didn't want to
have to tell her.

"You saw him again," she said before he
could continue.

He nodded.

"More than once."

He nodded again.  They shared a moment's si-
lence, and then she kissed the top of his
head.

"Could you hear him?" she whispered in his
right ear.

Yes, he could hear him.  He'd heard him for
the last hundred miles.  He'd heard "Don't
bother, Mulder."  He'd heard "Turn around
and head back West."  He'd heard "Too late."

"Could you hear him?" she asked again.

"Yes."

"Clearly?"

"Yes."

"And could you see him clearly?"

He felt a lump rise in his throat and he
swallowed it away.  She moved to the passen-
ger seat opposite him and he felt her eyes
on his face.

"Mulder.  Do you think he's ... gone? "

He didn't answer because he didn't know.
And it didn't make any difference.  They
would still proceed.  If Skinner was alive,
they needed to mend him, and if he was dead,
Mulder still wanted him.  He didn't want to
leave Skinner's body in the hands of aliens,
aliens who would cut him up for study or
replicate him so that he could chase the two
of them for eternity, hoping to some day
catch them off-guard, hoping that they'd
forget that he was dead and that they would
happily embrace him in a moment of weakness.

He shot a purposeful look at his partner.

"I don't know, Scully.  And it doesn't mat-
ter.  We've come this far.  We owe it to
ourselves and to him ..."  And to Doggett
and Reyes as well, he thought but didn't say
aloud, and at that moment the phone rang.
Scully answered it and listened.

"We're close, I think," she said, picking up
a map from the console between them.  "They
think they're at the spot," she whispered
over at him as she listened.

"I figure ten, fifteen minutes or so,"
Mulder said.  "Tell them to hang tight.  And
tell Doggett none of that John Wayne shit."

Scully frowned at him and shook her head.
She listened in silence for a moment and
then said into the phone, "Well is there a
place to turn around there?"

More listening.

"A big place.  A parking lot?  A real wide
spot in the road?"

Mulder could hear Doggett's voice squawk
from where he sat: <"What the hell are you
drivin'?"> and he grinned in spite of him-
self.

Scully gave Mulder a gentle smile.  "You'll
see when we get there," she said into the
phone.  "Plenty of room for everyone."
 

~~~~~~~
 

Monica watched Doggett snap the phone cover
back into place.  He shoved it in his hip
pocket, squinted into the last sliver of sun
as it disappeared beneath the horizon, and
shook his head.

"I don't know what the hell they're comin'
in," he said as if to himself.  "Jesus
Christ.  As if we didn't have enough to
worry about."

Monica didn't care that her partner was agi-
tated.  She was too busy watching Gibson
Praise.

They'd parked at the side of a blacktopped
rural road that cut through the fields, per
instructions from the Gunmen.  Then they'd
walked on a secondary gravel road for a cou-
ple of hundred yards to this place: a rut-
ted, dusty lane leading up a hill to what
looked to be a farmhouse.  Not a working
farmhouse, obviously.  All the visible
structures were leaning towards the rising
new moon.  Large patches of the barn roof
were missing, and ivy and morning glory were
climbing a tractor, a truck, the house, and
outbuildings with impunity.

Lights were on in the lower floor of the
house, and they spilled into the yard.
There were newer vehicles parked alongside
it, looking so antiseptic and clean that
they seemed to be floating above the general
detritus.

They were partially hidden by an unruly
chest-high hedge at the roadside, and Gibson
was leaning forward towards the farmhouse
much like the farmhouse buildings were lean-
ing towards them.  He was as taut as a wire,
Monica could see, and nearly on his toes.
He was ... he was *listening*, she realized.
Listening with a tool that she could not
comprehend.  His face rarely showed any emo-
tion, and this moment was no different.
There was no emotion there.  Only the strain
of reaching out as hard as he possibly
could.

She wanted to soothe and calm him, to put
her hand on his shoulder as a gesture of
support, but she had no way of knowing if
this would break any tenuous contact that he
might have with Walter Skinner or one of the
aliens.  So she watched, her heart in her
throat, and tried to ignore the scuffling
and grousing of her partner on the other
side of Gibson.  She allowed her eyes to
leave his intent face for a moment, and she
glanced at the house and then back.  Aston-
ished, she noted that Doggett's arm had
snaked around Gibson's shoulders.

"Hey, buddy," he said in a matter-of-fact
tone as he patted Gibson's arm.  "Don't hurt
yourself here.  Would it help if we got you
a little closer?"

Monica felt a small smile pull at her lips
in spite of the circumstances.  Her partner
never failed to surprise her, and she chided
herself for allowing her own sensitivity to
render her unresponsive.

Gibson looked up at Doggett's face and then
turned to her.

"I can read something from here," he said as
if he were presenting her with a small gift.

She leaned down.

"What, Gibson?"

"Deputy Director Kersh," he said, and he
looked at the house and then back at her.
"Mr. Kersh is in there.  He's not a friend.
He's with the aliens."

Monica's hand flew to her chest and she
tried in vain to stifle a small cry before
it escaped her lips.  She'd truly believed
that her impassioned words had  changed the
man.  She'd believed that her honesty and
sincerity had cut like a sword through his
fog of disbelief and had speared his soul.
She was wrong.  She was wrong.  Not only had
she not changed him, he'd probably been
aligned with them the whole time, and she'd
been unable to sense it.  The knowledge that
she'd failed to see him for what he was and
had failed to change him was devastating.
She'd always believed herself capable of un-
canny insight, but here, she had failed.
And now Walter Skinner's life hung in the
balance.

"Monica.  Monica!"  It was John, and he was
in front of her, his hands on her shoulders.
She looked into his worried eyes.  "Hey," he
said.  "You with us?  You okay?"

She shook her head.

"Kersh," she whispered.  "I ... he ..."

"He's an asshole," Doggett said, his voice
balancing kindness and impatience.  "But we
knew that already, didn't we?"  It was clear
he was waiting for an answer.  She took a
deep breath.

"Yes," she said, nodding.  "He's an asshole.
And we knew that already."

"Good," Doggett said.  "That's settled."  He
turned to Gibson.  "Anything else, buddy?"

Gibson, now standing sideways to the farm
buildings and tilting that direction,
frowned.  Lifted up on his toes.  Frowned
again.  Nodded.

"Yes."  He turned to look at the acreage
face-on, scanned, and then pointed.  "Walter
Skinner is in that building."  It looked to
be an icehouse or a pumphouse, about twelve
by twelve, and it was to the side and behind
the farmhouse.  They'd have to get by the
light pooling in the yard to rescue him.

For the first time in what felt like a very
long time, Monica felt hope.

"You can read his mind?" she asked.

Gibson paused and looked away from the two
of them, and Monica felt her chest grow
tight.  "No," he said down into the gravel
of the road.  "I can't.  It's in *their*
minds.  That's how I know."

The mournful sound of a faraway bus horn
rolled across the fields on a warm breeze.
Monica looked around Gibson and Doggett and
down the road.  The bus wasn't so far away
after all.  It was back at the beginning of
the gravel road, lights on, idling.

"Holy shit," Doggett whispered, and he took
off at a run towards it, she and Gibson
close behind.  As she ran, she saw the door
of the massive RV open and saw Mulder and
Scully emerge into the dusky evening.  See-
ing them took her breath away.  Intellectu-
ally, she knew that they'd survived and had
heard them on the phone, but the vision of
them - flesh and blood - elicited a happy,
visceral response.  She continued her full-
tilt run towards them and saw no good reason
to stop herself.  She blew past Doggett, who
had paused and slowed, and threw her arms
open wide and buried them in a sloppy em-
brace.

Monica felt surprise and tension in Scully's
body, but Mulder's return hug was strong and
firm.

"Oh God," she said into Mulder's shoulder,
her voice muffled by his denim shirt, "I
never thought I'd see you two again."  She
felt Scully relax and pat her back and then
Mulder left them and she pulled back to see
him heading for Doggett.  Mulder wrapped her
partner in a bear hug.  She could see John's
eyes over Mulder's shoulder.  He looked like
a trapped animal, but he managed to give
Mulder a couple of friendly thumps on the
back before breaking free. Gibson disap-
peared in his arms next, and Monica felt her
throat tighten as she watched Mulder's eyes
close and his face glow with exhilaration
and purpose.

"Did you find him?" Scully asked, wasting no
time in bringing them to the task at hand.

Monica nodded.  "We think so.  Gibson
pointed out the building where they're hold-
ing him."

Scully's eyebrows rose and she looked at
Gibson.  "You could read his mind?"

Gibson looked away, down the road towards
thunderheads still capped by dimming sun-
light, and they shared a moment of uncom-
fortable silence.  Mulder frowned and cap-
tured his lower lip in his teeth.  He put
his hand on Gibson's shoulder.

"Gibson.  Can you drive?"

Gibson's mouth dropped open.  He looked up
at the RV looming in front of him.

"You mean *this*?" he asked, gesturing.

"Yeah," Mulder said.  "It's not stick.  It's
manual."

Monica wasn't sure by the look on Gibson's
face that he even knew the difference, but
she could tell that he understood the ques-
tion.  It would take all four adults to res-
cue Skinner and get him to the RV.  Somebody
had to be ready for a quick getaway.  Gibson
nodded.

"I can do it."

"Good.  Get in with me and we'll back her
around so she'll be headed out onto the
blacktop."

So she and Doggett and Scully watched Gibson
get his very first driving lesson -  a full
five-minute one - in a recreational vehicle
the size of a semi.

Monica heard Doggett clear his throat and
she turned to see him pull out his Sig.  He
was ready for action.  He was coiled like a
spring, and she could feel the nervous heat
and energy rolling off of him from three
feet away.  She'd seen him like this before,
and she felt the hairs rise on the back of
her neck.  To calm herself, she pulled her
own gun out and checked the safety.

"Mulder's seen him."

It was delivered in a low monotone, and at
first Monica didn't know what Scully was
saying.  She shot a look at her.  Scully was
motionless, arms at her sides, and she was
blankly watching the RV stutter back and
forth on the roads in front of them as
Mulder maneuvered it.  Monica knew that she
had to be referring to Skinner, since that
was foremost in their minds, and she won-
dered why, if Mulder had spotted Skinner
somewhere on the way to this lonely spot in
the country surrounded by fields and for-
ests, they were proceeding with a rescue at-
tempt.

"He's seen him for the last hundred miles."

Doggett paused in his preparations to peer
at Scully, and Monica idly wondered if she
meant that Fox Mulder was losing his mind,
if she meant that he was exhausted and fear-
ful and was hallucinating.  And then, with a
cold shock,  Monica remembered.

Mulder saw dead people.

"Does Muhldah think he's dead?"  It was Dog-
gett's voice, a rough whisper, and it seemed
to Monica to come from far away.

The rear of the RV came to a halt in front
of them, the red back-up lights casting
their faces in a garish glow.  "He doesn't
know," Scully said as Mulder jumped out of
the bus and strode towards them.

"And it doesn't matter."
 

~~~~~~~~
 

Scully could smell him before she could see
him.

He smelled of blood and of man sweat and de-
spair.  He smelled of nascent infection and
feces and urine.  And for the moment, that
was more than enough.  For a moment, she
didn't *want* to see Walter Skinner, and she
welcomed the blackness of the small struc-
ture and hoped for a moment's respite before
anyone thought to click on a flashlight.
For a moment, she could pretend that he was
alive and fixable.  For a moment, she didn't
have to see what she knew she was going to
see.

They'd left the relative safety of The Whale
and had walked four abreast on the gravel
road to the farmhouse.  They'd exchanged not
one word on the walk.  It was surreal, a
dream, like an old spaghetti western where
the cowboys silently pace towards the gun-
fight.

Mulder had carried the folded-up stretcher
slung over his shoulder like a rifle.  She'd
half-expected him to attempt to lighten the
mood by whistling, or by humming the song
from the Wizard of Oz when the Lion, the Tin
Man, and the Scarecrow rescue Dorothy from
the Wicked Witch's castle.  But his lips had
been tight.  Almost at tight as Doggett's.
And she'd welcomed the silence.  Mulder had
known better than to try to make light of
the situation.  It would have been a waste
of precious energy.

Still wordless, they'd ducked down behind
the hedge at the road and had scoped out the
acreage.  Signaling each other with hand
gestures, they'd crept along the perimeter
of the yard, their eyes riveted on the farm-
house windows, their ears straining for a
call, a bark, a sound that shouldn't be
there.

The first bad sign had been the door to Wal-
ter Skinner's prison.

It was unlocked.

Worse, it was slightly ajar.

Scully, the first to arrive there, had known
what that meant: they had no fear of the As-
sistant Director escaping, and her spirits
had plummeted.  She had never shared any op-
timism with Mulder about what they might
find, since Mulder was optimism personified
and she'd wanted to balance that with her
natural pragmatism.  But she had secretly
harbored a small nugget of hope close to her
heart, held there with a prayer.  She'd
hoped that he'd be comatose.  Bound and held
against his will, perhaps, but relatively
untouched.  She'd hoped that Mulder's seeing
him on the trip here might have had some-
thing to do with a sort of mental transfer-
ence, something made possible by mind-
altering drugs.  And then she realized that
she sounded like a hopeful, naive school
girl, like Pollyanna, not at all like her-
self: Dana Scully, doctor, FBI agent, and
one-time skeptic who had seen far more in
her last nine years than she had seen in all
her years preceding them.

Her brief reverie was broken by the intru-
sion of a beam of light, then two, courtesy
of Doggett and Reyes, who had entered the
room behind Mulder.

"Oh Jesus," Doggett breathed.

It was every bit as bad as she had expected.
There didn't appear to be a place on Walter
Skinner's body that hadn't been recklessly
abused.  Skin not caked in blood was bruised
or burned.  She tried to look past the hor-
ror of it at his chest, where his hands were
resting.  Was his chest rising and falling?
Or were the flashlight beams that were
trained on him understandably wobbly, making
him look animated and alive?

Mulder brushed past her and knelt at Skin-
ner's side.

"Hey," he whispered in his ear.

Mulder.  Ever the optimist.

She surprised herself by first stopping at
the cot-side table.  When the flashlights
had come on, she'd noted a reflection.  They
were his wirerims.  He would need his
glasses if he survived this, and even if he
didn't survive, she realized that *she*
needed them, so she picked them up and put
them in her jacket pocket.

"Hey," Mulder said again from his kneeling
position on the floor, and he reached out a
hand.  It moved uncertainly as it looked for
an undamaged place to land.  But there was
no good place, and it hovered above Skin-
ner's forehead, and Scully mentally cringed
as she noted the juxtaposition of Mulder's
healthy hand versus Skinner's damaged body.

She moved to stand next to Mulder and tried
to find a pulse-point in Skinner's wrist,
but his hands were stuck to his chest.
Caked and dried blood held them there, and
she was reaching for a point on his neck
when, to her shock and amazement, Walter
Skinner's eyes pried themselves open and
fastened on Fox Mulder.  She heard Reyes
gasp behind her and watched the light beams
dance.

Mulder's face split in a huge smile.

"Hey, you big beautiful bald man," he said.

Skinner's eyes grew slightly larger with
recognition, glistened, and then fluttered
closed.

"Let's go," Doggett said, and he turned off
his flashlight and grabbed the stretcher
that Mulder had leaned against the wall next
to the door.  He pushed his way past Reyes
and moved Scully aside.  He and Mulder un-
rolled the stretcher and stood.  He turned
to Scully and looked down at Skinner.

"Will we hurt him any more than he is now if
we move him?" he asked.

"Does it matter?" she answered.

Doggett gave a short nod, and without a
word, he reached for Skinner's legs and
Mulder knelt again and put his arms around
Skinner's chest.

"One," Mulder said.  "Two.  Three."

On three, they hefted him up and grunted so
loudly that Scully threw an alarmed look at
the door that they'd closed behind them.
Skinner's body thudded down onto the
stretcher.  This was the part she feared.
Skinner was a big man, and he was dead
weight.  And she was well aware of the
height difference between Mulder, Doggett,
Reyes and herself.  The difficulty of the
trip back to The Whale - carrying a man who
was hovering at the edge of death, a man
that they cared about - made her knees trem-
ble.

She'd been truthful when she'd said that it
didn't matter if they hurt him any more than
he was already, but worry still gnawed at
her gut.  If they lost him now, after all
they'd been through to get here, after see-
ing his eyes open and fill with hope, the
loss would be far greater than the sum of
its parts.  As his doctor, she would bear
the guilt.  And if that weren't enough, she
could guess why he'd been tortured.

Because he knew where her son was.

"Scully?"  Mulder looked pointedly at her
and then down at the handle nearest to her.
Everyone else was in place: Mulder at Skin-
ner's head on the right side, Reyes to his
left, and Doggett to Scully's left.  After
Monica extinguished her light, Scully turned
behind her and opened the door, and then she
leaned over to grab her handle.  She could
barely see their faces, but she couldn't
help but caution them.

"Please try to be careful with him," she
murmured into the darkness.  And the doctor
in her added, "And lift with your legs, not
your back."  Doggett let out a quiet
chuckle.

"One," Mulder said again.  "Two.  Three."

They shuffled and staggered, adjusting and
balancing his weight.  She felt the
stretcher tilting towards her, and she took
a deep breath and lifted her corner higher.

"Okay," Doggett said, the strain of compen-
sating for her relative shortness clear in
his voice.  "Let's go.  Take it nice and
easy."

<Right>, Scully thought as she and Doggett
awkwardly backed through the door, banging
the stretcher on the frame.  The four of
them froze as one and listened.  Nothing.
Just a chorus of crickets and the roll of
thunder from the cloud line along the hori-
zon.  Good.  They could use the noise as
cover.

Once out the door, Scully and Doggett turned
and faced forward, aiming them at the gravel
road, and they began their uneasy trek.  The
house was to their right, and Scully's heart
stopped as, out of the corner of her eye,
she saw shadows play through the pools of
light on the dark lawn.  The aliens were
moving.  Would they look outside and spot
them?  A strong gust of wind blew from the
approaching storm, and tree branches above
them groaned and swayed.

"Faster," she heard Mulder hiss behind her,
and her feet obeyed.

"You guys bring any magnetite with you?"
Doggett said between soft grunts as another
a welcome roll of thunder echoed through the
farm.

"Oh, yeah," Mulder panted back.  "Stopped in
Nebraska at a Magnetite 'R Us store.  Just
in case."

Scully heard Monica snort out a nervous
laugh behind her, and she felt herself edge
up to hysterical giddiness.  They were near
the end of the dirt lane now, nearly to the
gravel road, but she was losing control of
her corner of the stretcher.  Her grip was
loosening, her fingers tingling, and she
felt herself close to tears and laughter at
the same time.

She wasn't going to make it.  Which meant
Skinner wasn't going to make it.

More thunder shook the air and lightening
snaked down from the sky and struck some-
where to the left of them, out near the
highway that they needed to be on to escape.

Now two hundred yards to the blacktop.

She'd never make it.

Her eyes glued to the uneven gravel surface
in order to gauge her steps, she almost ran
into it.

It was The Whale.

Somehow, Gibson Praise, after one short les-
son, had managed to silently back the bus to
a position in front of the farmhouse, a dan-
gerous but welcome strategy.  The door swung
open.  Gibson, ever solemn, looked down at
them, blinked, and spoke.

"All aboard."
 

~~~~~~~~~
 

He was coming out of that dream again.  The
one about the Power Point presentation with
nothing on it.  After a few years in the up-
per echelons of the FBI, this dream had re-
placed the can't-find-the-classroom-for-the-
college-final-exam dream.  Unfortunately,
neither of them had ever successfully re-
placed the Vietnam nightmares.  They were in
a category all their own.

But this one was almost comfortingly famil-
iar: the vast lecture hall, all of the as-
sistant and deputy directors peering down at
him, Janet Reno in judge's robes, Sharon,
seated in the front row this time.  And he
would hit the button on the computer, and
another nicely framed screen would pop up
with nothing - *nothing* - on it.

But there was something different about this
time.  Mulder and Scully, usually skeptical
and sitting somewhere in the back row, were
in this dream seated next to him up at the
front of the hall, at the table where his
computer sat.  Looking over at them, he hit
the Page Down key, and, as expected, more
nothing came up on the big screen behind
them.  But Mulder and Scully smiled and nod-
ded anyway, silently urging him to try
again.  And again.  And again, until to
Skinner's great surprise, something began to
appear on the screen.  The image was not
clear to him, whatever it was, but by God
there was something there, some vague and
nebulous form that began to take sharper
shape, and he didn't know exactly what it
was, but he didn't care.

It was something.  It was goddamned some-
thing.  And that was more than it had ever
been before.

And the good news was that he was fairly
sure that he was alive.  Alive and out of
that hell-hole and out of Kersh's clutches.
Out of his prison and riding in a ... in
something big, something that rolled over
bumps like an army tank with excellent
shocks.  A brick shit house on wheels.  Pe-
riodically he would come to fleeting cogni-
tion, and from his vantage point all that he
could see out the windows next to his bed
were moving tree tops and signs, and blue
sky and clouds above that.

He seemed to be in a perpetual state of
near-sleep, and periodically he used his en-
ergy to allow his mind to argue over what
was dream and what was reality, and he could
probably thank the bag of clear liquid that
was hanging on a metal hook embedded in the
ceiling above him for his perpetual fuzzi-
ness.  He'd catch a glimpse of it out of the
corner of his eye in lucid moments and would
try to concentrate on it to see what was be-
ing dripped into him.  He couldn't look too
hard, though.  The swinging of the bag made
him nauseous.

He no longer felt pain, but he hadn't felt
pain for some time.  He'd ceased to feel
anything soon after he'd realized that Kersh
was part of the alien scheme.  After that,
he'd just methodically shut down all parts
of his body and willed himself to die.  But
Mulder kept showing up and yelling at him.
Skinner would patiently try to explain what
he was doing and why, but Mulder would
rudely refuse to listen.  The Gunmen had
visited, too, and he'd found that both amus-
ing and alarming.   He'd struggled in that
hazy half-world for a grip on something that
might show him the way.

He'd only been sure of his rescuer's identi-
ties when he'd briefly come to under Dana
Scully's tender ministrations.  She was
dressing wounds on his face and neck when
his eyes opened a slit.  His awareness unde-
tected, he watched her through lidded eyes
for several minutes as she removed bloody
bandages and grimaced at whatever she'd seen
under them.

She twisted out of his vision to get some-
thing, and when she turned back, she real-
ized that she was being watched.  Scully
dropped whatever it was she had in her hands
and threw those hands to her face.  He
stared numbly at the tears that filled her
eyes and spilled down her cheeks and over
her trembling fingers.

He wanted to talk to her and allay her
fears, but he had no voice, no power to push
air from his chest into his throat.  All he
could do was look at her and thank his lucky
stars that Alvin Kersh was no longer his
nursemaid.

Scully threw a look behind her and moved
closer to him.  She took his face into her
hands - it was a trace of a touch, the bar-
est suggestion of a gentle caress - and
leaned over him.

"I'm sorry," she whispered, and she truly
looked it.  "I'm sorry I have to ask you
this, but I *have* to know."

He knew the question before her lips parted.

"Did you tell them?"

He thought of the stories that had spilled
from him.  He remembered screaming his
life's regrets into the alien's blank faces,
the pathetic confessions of a dying man
wasted on a species that didn't give a damn.

"Did you tell them?" she asked again, her
lips pale.

He tried for a smile, sure that it looked
pitiful.  He could provide no noise, but he
could get enough air into his lungs for a
whisper.  He took a breath.

"Everything but," he said.

And she'd smiled at him then, the tears
still falling, and she'd leaned over and
kissed his eyelids, both of them, and he'd
guessed that she done that because they were
the only spots on his body that allowed for
it.

His life became snippets of conversations,
small vignettes, the suggestion of action
occurring around him in small pockets of lu-
cidity.

Doggett was there.  And Reyes.  Scully, of
course, which meant Mulder, of course.  At
night, in the dark, whenever his eyes would
open, Mulder would be there.  And when his
eyes would open, Mulder would lean forward
and stare at him, and he would say the same
thing every time:

"I need you.  I need you for the fight.  I
need you for the future."

Skinner began to understand, and at some
point in time he had the strength to nod
back at Mulder, and it had seemed to make
Mulder an inordinately happy man.

As he healed, he listened.  There were brief
altercations regarding who would take con-
trol of the wheel and who would not.  There
were small battles engaged to determine what
CD would ride in the player after the one
that was in the player was done playing.
Maps were taped to blank walls and they
poked their fingers at them and argued about
which direction to turn.  Even the choice of
pizza topping required strenuous debate.

But underlying all of this was the steady
thrum of purpose and direction, the heart-
beat of mutual respect and lives intertwined
and intersected, and it made him warm to his
core to hear it and see it.

As he became more aware, he recognized more
visitors.  A pat on the arm from Doggett, a
smile and a kiss on the end of his nose from
Reyes.  But there was someone else there.
Someone small.

One moment, he had no sense of time.  One
moment, he was floating in a world of misty
recognition.  And the next, he opened his
eyes and the world was new and sharp and he
knew where he was, and who he was, and what
they were going to be all about.

It was then that he realized who the Someone
Small was.  It was Gibson Praise, and he'd
taken control of a impressive computer set-
up at the easy chair across from his bed.
The array was sitting on a table in front of
the chair, and Skinner realized that it must
have cost someone a fortune to outfit it.
He could barely identify half of the tech-
nology bristling off of the table.  Adrena-
line shot through his veins when he realized
what it was.

It was Command Central.

They were equipped for the Third World War.

He closed his eyes and listened to the
steady babble of voices from the front of
the RV.  The army.  Five of them.  Six if
you counted young Mr. Praise.  Could they do
this?  Could they have any impact?

Did it matter?

And then he felt cold fear because he real-
ized that he'd never felt as energized and
alive and afraid and excited for the future
as he did at that moment.  He had purpose.
He had people who had risked their lives to
come to his rescue.  He was needed.  So he
thought he must be dead after all.  It was
just too good to be true.

He felt a hand on his arm.  He looked up
into the face of Gibson Praise.  Gibson
smiled.  A smile with teeth.  Skinner could
never remember having seen that before.

"You're not dead, Mr. Skinner," he said.
"You're very alive."

Skinner smiled back and managed to lift his
arm and pat the hand that Gibson had offered
in comfort.

"I'm beginning to believe that," he said,
his voice raspy from disuse.

That was enough for today.  He was tired
again, and he felt his eyelids droop as he
listened to the voices at the front of the
bus.  Doggett was declaring that Dire
Strait's Calling Elvis CD was the best trav-
eling CD in existence.  This was loudly de-
bated with Mulder, who was an Asleep at the
Wheel fan.  Scully blew out an exasperated
puff of air as Monica Reyes suggested that a
CD of soothing rainstorm sounds might be
better for their patient and for their gen-
eral moods.
 
He found himself smiling as he drifted away.

Two alpha males, two different and very
beautiful women, and a very different and
beautiful man.

And a kid who could read their minds.

Life was going to be very interesting.

~~~~~~~

The End