By Sarah Segretti
mrsblome@aol.com
 

Date: Wed, 22 Sep 1999
Summary: A fragile and frightened
Mulder, traumatized by the events of
"Biogenesis," turns to an unexpected
source for help.
Rating: R
Category: S, A, MSR
Spoilers: Biogenesis, mostly. Reduxes.
Random S6.
Disclaimer: Not mine, just playing.
Real life places, scientific journals,
movies, sports teams and civic events
used in a fictional way.
Archive: Submitting to Gossamer,
anywhere else okay, just let me know.
Website:
http://members.aol.com/mrsblome
Author's note: Someone said that I
ought to use my artistic license before
it's revoked. So I have altered some
minor facts of neurology and the dates
of real-life events to suit my
purposes. My purposes also require that
"Biogenesis" take place in May. This
story takes place in late June.
Skilled, sensitive and spot-on beta by
haphazard method and EPurSeMouve.

A Less Certain World
By Sarah Segretti
September 1999

Evening

Screw the Knicks, anyway.

The first time in five years they make
a serious run for the title and they
have to do it the summer I'm locked in
a rubber room.

Scully taped every one of the games for
me, though, bless her uninterested
little heart. We've got Game 3 in the
VCR now, and even though my boys
avoided the broom this time, I know
that Cinderella has a big crack in her
glass slipper.

Better yet, bless Scully on general
principles. She saved my life. She's
helping me piece back my sanity. Funny
how busting me out has proven to be the
simpler of the two tasks. I still can't
stand to be around too many people at
once, even though it's been nearly a
month, even though the voices are mute
-

"Mulder?"

She's looking at me from the end of my
couch, where she's sitting sideways,
her toes tucked under my thigh,
casefile propped up against bent legs,
reading by the failing light of a long
summer day. I realize I'm rubbing my
temples, and bring my hands down. One
still holds the remote for the VCR.

"Nothing, Scully," I tell her. "Habit."

From the look she gives me, I can tell
she doesn't believe it. She swings her
feet to the floor, sets the file aside,
and pats her lap. Gratefully, I rest my
head on her thighs, sigh as I feel her
gentle hands stroke my bristly crew
cut.

/. as I wake to the familiar sound of
an electric razor, feel its
unmistakable burr on my head, feel more
needles slide into my arm, my scalp
before I'm awake enough to resist or to
hear oh God no no not that not like
Gibson Gibson was awake for *that*? And
I try to scream to fight but I can't
they've paralyzed me somehow oh God no
no please anything not that shoving me
into a chair clamps on my head the feel
of my bare scalp parting like a zipper
the smell of smoke you're letting that
fucker *smoke* in here? God no stop
please the sound of a saw an electric
saw ./

The sobs well up without warning. I
turn so that my face is half-buried in
her lap, and the terror washes over me
once more. Distantly, I hear the low
murmuring of the post-game show click
off. The remembered sound of the saw --
the saw they would have used to cut my
skull open had not Scully arrived at
that moment -- still buzzes in my
brain. Scully hunches over me, gathers
me into her arms as best she can.

I would be dead without her.

* * *

When I finally open my eyes again, the
apartment is dark. Soft lips press just
above my left ear. "You're doing
better, Mulder," Scully whispers, her
mouth forming a small smile against my
cropped hair. "That one only lasted
about half an hour."

A few cracks about length and stamina
and endurance cross my raw and bleeding
mind, but I'm too exhausted to organize
them into a sentence. "Stop keeping
score, Scully. I've already done the
lab rat thing."

"Sorry." She kisses me again and sits
up. I know her. She'll still keep
track, but she'll keep the results to
herself. There's a lot she's still
keeping to herself - to protect me, I
think, the way I used to protect her
from things I thought she didn't need
to know.

I would smile at the irony of that,
except that I think I do need that
protection.

She's tracing her fingertips up and
down my spine, soothing me. I close my
eyes, marveling at her touch. Some days
it's all that holds me together.

Last week she thought I was ready for
"The Phantom Menace" - she knew I'd
wanted to go on Opening Day. I missed
that, too. But even though she took
every precaution to minimize contact
with people - an early afternoon show,
on a weekday, even bypassing the
comfortable new theater near my
apartment at Potomac Yards for an
older, less popular one in Arlington -
I didn't even make it to the pod race.
The theater was only half full, but
that was still too many people. I
couldn't hear them, but I could feel
the weight of their thoughts pressing
against my mind and the weight of all
the people in the nearby office towers
and government buildings and even the
jail across the street and I couldn't
hear them but I felt like I was about
to - I barely made it to her car before
I broke down. Scully found me huddled
on the pavement near the open door to
her passenger seat, the awful sounds I
was making echoing through the parking
garage.

"It's all right, Mulder. Nobody likes
this movie the first time they see it.
And Jar Jar does grow on you."

In spite of myself, I laughed through
my terror, and then I cried into her
shoulder for a good hour anyhow.

"Mulder. Mulder, look at me."

I shift so that the back of my head
rests on her thighs. Paradise is only a
few centimeters to my left, but that's
out of the question as well. We've
tried. I can't. We'd only had a few
nights together before this happened,
starting with one glorious evening of
batting practice; we rounded second on
the field and completed the play at
home. Making love was a new and
wondrous experience for us then, would
be that way still except that now I
carry memories of trauma so close to
the surface that any strong emotion,
good or bad, brings the fear bubbling
up every time. I can't suppress it, no
matter how I try.

In a way, they've taken Scully from me
again.

She turns on the reading lamp next to
the couch, and I blink against the
light as it hits my eyes. "Mulder," she
says. "It's not going to happen again.
I've made sure of that. You're safe
now."

How can you be so sure? I wonder, but
there's a thread of steel in her voice
that makes me believe. She's done
something. She knows something. She
radiates something new.

Power.

Somehow Scully won this battle, and
with it, brought us a step closer to
winning the war. I don't know how. I'll
find out eventually.

My Scully, large and in charge.

She smiles at me, and I realize I've
been glowing up at her. We stay like
that for a while, taking nourishment
from each other's gaze. She slips one
hand into mine, entwining her fingers
with mine. "Want to watch the next
game?"

I shake my head, my hair whispering
against her khaki pants. "I know who
wins."

For a moment, I almost hear her
thinking: How did you know that? I
didn't tell you. The terror threatens
again, but I manage to calm myself
before she notices. This is Scully.
I've always known how she thinks. It's
okay.

"One of the orderlies was a Spurs fan.
He'd just won a couple hundred bucks in
the hospital pool," I tell her, and
feel her relax. "He was so pleased with
himself that he was gloating to
everyone. Even me."

Her lips twitch, but she doesn't really
smile. Her gaze drifts far away. I
twist and glance at the clock on my
desk - getting near 10. She's probably
thinking about her next steps, about
whatever it is she's been reading in
that unlabeled case file. Late at night
is when she does her work. I fall
asleep every night listening to her
quiet murmurs on the newly secure phone
the Gunmen rigged for her, to the
gentle clack of computer keys as she
searches and chats. So much better than
my first few days free, when she was
rarely around, when I felt like I was
going to die from the twin onslaughts
of drug withdrawal and the still-
present ability to read others'
thoughts. I almost hated her then, for
abandoning me. Now I am grateful that
she's here, that she's still focused on
saving me.

When she's working, the apartment takes
on the thrum and energy of a fully-
staffed command center. A war room.

When she's done, she slips into my bed
and lets me feed off that energy, a
recharger for my leaking mental
battery. We wake with me wrapped so
tightly around her that it couldn't
possibly be comfortable. Beyond
spooning. More of a weld, I think.

We are quiet for a while. I can hear
traffic from the street below, the last
flights approaching National for the
night, the faint murmur of my
neighbor's television, the ding of the
elevator arriving down the hall.

Scully's breathing.

Nothing else. Thank God. Although the
fear that the silenced voices will
return fills my every waking moment and
a few of my sleeping ones, I am slowly
making up my mind that I want to know
how Scully did it, how she switched
those terrible voices off.

Silence. I'd missed that. I luxuriate
in it, watching Scully's face. She's
far away, thinking. I want her back.

It takes every ounce of energy I've got
left, but I sit up, and maneuver her so
that her back is against my chest. Her
shoulders are halfway to her ears, and
they feel like stone. I'm so tired, but
I can at least rub her neck for her.

"Hey, Scully?"

"Yeah, Mulder?"

"Why is it that when I go to the ends
of the earth for you, I wind up at the
South Pole, and when you go to the ends
of the earth for me, you get to go to
the beach?"

"Well, it wasn't any fun," she informs
me primly, striking precisely the right
note. "I got sunburned."

"I got frostbite." I slip my thumbs
under the chain of her crucifix, knead
the base of her neck, avoiding her
scar. Her head lolls to one side.

"You weren't alone." Her voice changes,
blurs, as my hands move outside her
shirt and down her back.

"You were unconscious." My fingers
accidentally brush the extreme outer
edges of her breasts through her shirt,
and she gasps with unexpected,
unmistakable pleasure. Dangerous
territory. I pull back, focus again on
those taut shoulders.

Her eyes close as I work out the knots,
and she lets her head fall back onto my
chest. Conscious thought is clearly
fleeing her mind, but she valiantly
tries to keep playing the game. "At
least this time I got to see the -"

She cuts herself off, her eyes snapping
open, as if she's said too much.

I freeze.

"The what, Scully?"

She licks her bottom lip, won't look at
me.

"The *what*, Scully?" Suddenly I'm
kneeling on the couch next to her,
spinning her around to face me. My
hands close tight around her upper
arms. She still won't meet my eyes.
"The *spaceship*?"

She swallows hard. "You're not ready to
hear all this, Mulder."

"The *spaceship*??" It's the voice I
use to hector doctors, to interrogate
suspects, to harangue review boards.
She knows it, and it makes her angry.

"A craft of undetermined origin."

My need for information, no matter how
damaging, overrides every rational
thought I'd had earlier about needing
her protection. "How could you keep
something that important from me? You
should have told me!"

"When?" Her eyes flash and flare at me.
"When you were going through
barbiturate withdrawal at the Gunmen's
or during the five minutes you have
between crying jags?"

I suck in my breath, her words slicing
through me. And I'm casting about for a
response when the first explosion hits.
Instinctively I grab Scully, throw her
face down on the couch, fling myself
over her as she gasps in surprise.  A
second explosion, and I clutch at her,
moaning in fear. She's wriggling
underneath me, calling my name and
something more. I'm too far gone to
hear her, too busy praying I can
protect her to listen.

A sharp elbow in the ribs clears some
of the confusion from my head.
"Mulder!" Scully shouts. "Fireworks!
The waterfront festival! Remember?"

Oh, God. Oh, my God. She's right. Less
than two miles away, tens of thousands
of heat-stroked, half-drunk revelers
are taking part in a summertime
tradition that's been going on as long
as I've lived here. And as soon as I
think about all those people, I begin
to feel the pressure again. Scully
maneuvers under me so that we're face
to face. I'm way beyond smart comments
- I just collapse on top of her and
break down again. Her arms snake around
my neck and hold me tight.

"Oh, Mulder," she sighs in my ear.
"We've got to find a way to stop this."

All I can do is nod helplessly,
shuddering against her with the force
of my out-of-control emotions.

* * *

Eventually Scully puts me to bed,
helping me out of my sweatpants,
finding a new T-shirt to replace the
one I'd used as a handkerchief. She
kneels at my side, brushing her fingers
over my hair in a way that had always
given me pleasant shivers before.

Before. Before.

I'd always been so resilient before.
Hypothermia, gunshot wounds, beatings,
alien retroviruses, you name it, I've
recovered from it.

Why can't I recover from this?

"Mulder," Scully whispers, pauses. "I'm
sorry - what I said -"

Control. Come on, Mulder, you can do
this. I stop the rest of her sentence
with fingertips that tremble only
slightly. "Don't. I'm fine." She
recognizes this for the lie that it is,
but accepts it at face value, the way I
always did with her. "Now get to work.
I can't sleep unless I hear you
working."

Under my fingers I feel her almost
smile. She takes my hand and kisses my
palm. I let my eyes drift shut, and I
try not to think about crafts of
undetermined origin. Her mouth moves
against my palm again, but it's not a
kiss. She's whispering something. Odd.

"What is it, Scully?" I ask.

I get a soft, almost bashful look.
"'Protect him, God, and keep him
safe,'" she says. "I ask that for you
every night."

Under normal circumstances, I would
have snorted, would have teased her
about turning to faux talismen, would
have scoffed at the one thing she'll
believe in without proof. Tonight, I am
stunned that she even admitted it to
me, and touched beyond words.

Man, I am messed up.

"Get some rest, Mulder," she murmurs.
"I love you."

With that final benediction, I sleep.

* * *

The change in her voice is what wakes
me later. It's Dana I hear, not Agent
Scully, not even Scully.

"I thought so, but now I'm not so sure.
No, just twice. But - Exactly. I don't
know if it's coming back, or if he's
just afraid it will."

I don't know either, Scully. Are you
telling this to someone who can help
me?

She listens for a while, and when she
speaks, her voice is low, anguished,
shocking. I've never heard her like
this.

"He's starting to scare me, Byers."

My mind goes white with fear.

"Yeah, I've thought about that, too.
No, you guys did everything you could.
You did great." Silence. I am
paralyzed, listening. "Yeah, I think
so. I'll call him in the morning. All
right then, if you want to get
technical, when the sun comes up.
Goodnight, Byers."

She hangs up. I wait for her to dial
again, to type some more, but instead I
hear the unmistakable electronic whine
of a Windows shutdown. The faint light
from the living room dims further as
she turns off the monitor. And then
there is another, muffled sound that
only adds to my fear.

I've seen Scully sob in relief, I've
seen her silently spill over with
emotion, but I've never heard this
quiet, desperate weeping before. I have
the awful feeling that this isn't new
for her, that it's just the first time
I've overheard her.

/Yeah, I've thought about that, too./

The echo of her words sends a chill
through me. I can't imagine - I don't
want to know. This is just a
particularly bad case of post-traumatic
stress syndrome.

Isn't it?

I start to shake, and I curl up under
the covers like a waterbug that's been
poked. But I can't cry this time. I
won't. Not when Scully's upset. Be
strong for her, be calm for her. Let
her have her moment. I would say that I
couldn't imagine what this is like for
her, except that I can - I lived
through her cancer. I remember putting
on the brave face, smiling and saying
reassuring things when all I wanted to
do was dissolve in grief. I remember
the desperation and the need to do
something to help. And I remember one
terrible night at her bedside, when I
thought I'd run out of answers, sobbing
silently for the woman I loved.

Dammit, I'm going to do it again.

* * *

I don't know if she ever came to bed;
she's not there when I wake up.
Fighting a surge of panic - she *does*
occasionally get up before I do -- I
sit up to regain my bearings. Someone's
here ...

... but it's not Scully.

The footsteps I hear in the kitchen are
heavier, there's soft music coming from
the stereo in my living room instead of
NPR, there's no smell of coffee filling
my apartment. She always makes coffee
in the morning. Quietly I slide open
the drawer of my nightstand, pull out
the gun Scully forbade me to use after
a couple of episodes where she says she
found me just staring into space, a
blank slate. I don't remember doing
that, and I talked her into reluctantly
giving me access to my weapon for
emergencies. Looks like I was right.
The gun feels heavy and cool in my
hand. I missed it.

Barefoot, wearing only the T-shirt and
boxers I slept in, I pad to the door of
my room, gun held ready at my ear. I'm
on automatic, full federal agent mode,
and as I sneak to my kitchen, I feel
good.

I feel normal.

"Freeze!" I shout and point my gun at
the man in my kitchen.
There's a crash, and an oath, and Byers
spins to glare at me.

"Jesus, Mulder!"

"Byers!" I'm almost disappointed.
Shooting one of those bastards would
have really hit the spot. I lower the
gun. "Where's Scully?"

"She had some - business to attend to."
He's down on the floor picking up the
shattered pieces of the mug he dropped.
I catch his hesitation, and get the
feeling he's glad he has somewhere else
to look besides at me. /Byers, it's
Byers, you know him too. You're not
reading his mind./ I rub the heel of my
hand from the bridge of my nose to my
hairline, find a chair and sit heavily
down, sliding the gun away from me on
my table.

Byers dumps the shards of mug into the
trash. I pre-empt his question. He
doesn't have the best poker face. "I'm
fine." He looks worried. I ignore it.
"So you pulled baby-sitting duty?"

"Babysitters get paid better than
this." The teakettle whistles, and he
plucks it off the stove to prepare the
tea. "Want some?"

"Tea's a girly drink, Byers." It's his
turn to ignore me. Langly gives him
shit on this particular subject
constantly. "I see you got the memo on
casual Friday."

Confused, he glances down at himself
while I get up to get myself some
orange juice. His coat and vest are
hanging over the back of one of my
kitchen chairs - he has rolled back his
sleeves and loosened his tie. After a
second, he gets it.

"It's Saturday, Mulder. You know, I
don't have to stay."

"Oh, yes, you do, or Scully will kick
your ass again."

Byers actually pales. Goddamn, this
feels good, ribbing the poor guy the
way I used to. Did Scully slip me
something before she left? This can't
possibly last. Yet I still feel like
doing a little victory dance and
upending my jug of Sunny D onto Byers'
head. Put that down in your little
notes, man, and take it back to the
Ubercommander. I'm fucking *fine*.

And then I see it on the counter next
to Byers' cooling mug of tea.

The unmarked file.

/A craft of undetermined origin./

It looks thicker than the night before.
I glance up to meet Byers' eyes to find
a cautious, worried gaze that I've seen
only in times of great stress . or
danger.

Without taking his eyes off me, Byers
puts his fingertips on the file and
slides it towards me. My legs feel like
jelly, and I have to lean against the
counter. "I'm guessing that's not the
breakfast menu," I tell him.

Byers' expression doesn't change.
Scully would at least have given me the
courtesy of a raised eyebrow. "Agent
Scully and I talked about it this
morning, and we agreed it's time you
got the overview."

/He's starting to scare me, too./

Neither of us says anything for a
minute. The music-you-can-listen-to-at-
work that Byers inexplicably likes
filters in from the living room. The
refrigerator hums behind me, like the
unheard thoughts of my neighbors. It's
hard to breathe. Everything I ever
wanted, or nothing I really need to
know. The truth, versus my sanity. This
is not as easy a call as I thought it
would be.

"Can't you just read me the good
parts?"

"No, you should read it for yourself."

By myself is more like it. I don't
think so. "Byers, tell me where Scully
is." I am ashamed at how shaky my voice
suddenly sounds.

"I can't, Mulder." He tries to smile.
"I still haven't paid off my Vegas
debt."

This is absurd. "Who died and made
Scully queen, huh?" I shout, temper
flaring out of nowhere, out of fear.
"Who are you loyal to, anyway, her or -
"

Me, I was going to say, but the
flashback smacks me right back into
captivity, and I'm shouting those exact
words at . Diana? Skinner? Someone I
know . and my hands are at my temples
again and I'm sitting in a ball on my
kitchen floor trying to squeeze out the
memories, concentrating. Concentrating.
Not in front of Byers. Not in front of
Byers. Not again.

"Mulder?" he says uncertainly.

I manage to hold myself mostly
together. "Give me a minute
here," I choke out, my face buried in
my knees. And he does. I hear him
slowly backing away. "I think I'd
rather shower and get some breakfast
before I start reading that file,
okay?"

"Okay." He slips away before I crack.

Scully, I think, rocking back and forth
on the floor, my arms wrapped around my
shins. Scully, come home.

Once, just once, I want to hear a voice
in my head.

Why couldn't the damn God module have
come with a transmit function?

* * *

This is the fourth time I've read the
file through.

It's hard to believe Scully wrote this.

How many times have I heard her
arguments against just this
possibility?

/Logically, I would have to say no./

/The very idea of intelligent alien
life is not only astronomically
improbable but at its most basic level
downright anti-Darwinian./

/That is science fiction. It doesn't
hold a drop of water./

Guess this one bit her in the ass.

That's not fair. I rub my hands over
what hair I have left. Christ, it's
cold in here. Byers must have cranked
up the a/c when I was reading this .
this . *This*. He's in my living room,
on the phone with Langly about story
placement and headline size and jumps.
Must be deadline time at Lone Gunman
Publications. Life goes on.

It's cold in here, but I'm sweating.

Scully wrote this. I recognize her
voice. Crisp and clear, even with the
medico-legal jargon she's forced to use
in the reports we write for the Bureau.
She lays out her findings as if she
were writing for the New England
Journal of Medicine. Abstract, methods,
results, discussion, references.
Evidence so good that neither a panel
of scientists peer-reviewing it before
publication nor Johnnie fucking Cochran
could poke holes in it. She couldn't
even poke holes in it, and it reads as
though she tried awfully hard.

"Based on the evidence, we conclude
that the structure is made of materials
unrecognizable to experts in
metallurgy, chemistry, polymer and
plastics technology and avionics, and
that we must begin to consider the
possibility that the structure
originated from an extraterrestrial
location."

It's cold, and I'm sweating. I stand
up. I pace around the kitchen. I sit
down. I get up. I'm shaking, but I walk
in circles. I can't stop moving.

The file, for all its size, is not
complete. There's nothing in it about
me. There are no photos of the
artifact. There's no indication of what
Scully's working on now.

Scully. She -

I can't say it. The thought is too
enormous.

For me, too simple. Another theory I'd
willingly absorb as easily as last
night's box scores. I accept, and
Scully disproves, or at least makes me
prove. I've bought into stranger ideas
before breakfast. But she doesn't. She
never - that's how I knew I was
hallucinating in North Carolina a few
weeks ago. Scully believed.

Scully believes.

She *believes.*

The tectonic plates of my worldview
shift beneath my feet. I am Pangaea,
shattering into pieces.

Who's going to tell me I'm crazy now? I
need someone who'll tell me I'm crazy.

I sink into a chair, my fingers
pressing into my temples again.

This is. It's. Too much. Proof. Belief.
Support. I'm not used to having that.

Voices. Murmuring, whispering.

Oh, God, no, not now, don't let it
start again.

My feet make the decision my mind
cannot, and I flee.
The heat outside my apartment hits me
like a hot, sodden blanket. The air is
too thick and dirty to breathe. But I
run anyway. I have no idea if Byers
noticed, I don't know if there are
enemies lying in wait for me, I don't
care.

I just run.

Past the half-million dollar
townhouses, past half a dozen Robert E.
Lee memorials, through the tourists
clogging the sidewalk outside Ben &
Jerry's. I nearly knock over an
overweight cyclist who can't get his
foot into his toeclip, and I don't
care. I've got to run. Away? Towards
something? I don't know. Voices. Again.
People everywhere, brought to you by
the alien culture that my skeptical
partner unexpectedly believes in.

I'm soaked with sweat and maybe with
tears and my chest hurts and I stop,
bending over to catch my breath, my
hands on my knees. Praying I just look
like a guy who's stupid enough to go
out for an innocent run in the midst of
a Code Red ozone alert, I crouch there
for a minute and let the tears flow.

And as I do, as people bump into me and
apologize, my surroundings begin to
come into focus. People, sounds,
voices, everywhere - because I've
plunged myself into the middle of the
waterfront festival.

Oh, Christ, what have I done? I feel
dizzy, and it's not entirely from the
heat. How the hell did I - I'm at least
two miles from home, and I'm too
exhausted and hot to walk back. No
wallet, no cell phone. Lord only knows
where the nearest pay phone is. All
these people - my hands go
automatically to my temples. Not now.
Please leave me alone, please stay away
.

My chest grows even tighter, and I
whirl about, searching for a space
where I can't be surrounded. I know
this park, I've run through it a
million times and today somehow I can't
get my bearings on where I am. There
are too many people. The weight of
their unheard thoughts is crushing. Not
knowing what else to do, I edge away
from what I think is the core of the
crowd. Alone, God, I'm so alone - and
then I simultaneously slip on something
and catch a noseful of dead fish and
sewage. The river. The sluggish,
brackish, evaporating Potomac. Yes. Sit
by the river and they can't surround
me. Yes.

Stumbling a little - maybe it is the
heat, or maybe the roots sticking out
of the desiccated earth - I find a
riverside tree that miraculously no one
has claimed and stake out territory
underneath it.

The bass thud of the oldies band on the
stage a few hundred feet away
reverberates in my aching chest.
Somebody's got a churros booth nearby,
and the smell of the frying dough makes
me nauseous. That's just what I need,
to get sick. People are going to notice
*that.*

Oh, Scully, where are you? Come and get
me, please, now, I need you. I won't be
able to do this alone for long -

/Protect him, God, and keep him safe./

The words resonate so strongly in my
head that I shudder with both relief
and fear, and I actually look up to see
if she's nearby. No. No mindreading.
Just a memory, a selective spark of a
synapse. My brain speaks fluent Scully.
That little mantra is something she'd
probably be thinking now, I hope,
something that would help her stay calm
as she searches for me.

Someone tosses a beer cup onto the
precarious stack of garbage spilling
out of the trash can a few feet away,
and I start at the sound. Too close.
People coming too close.

I put my head down on my knees and hug
my shins tightly, and I plead with
Scully's God to help me through this,
to keep these people's thoughts away
from me, to keep me together until she
finds me.

She'll find me.

* * *

Time passes, although I couldn't tell
you how much. The bands change, once,
twice, I lose track. The noise of the
crowd ebbs and flows. The psychologist
part of my brain whispers to me, "Fugue
state," but the voice is soft and hard
to hear. The internal alarm that
sometimes takes on my partner's voice
warns, "Heat stroke," but there's
nothing I can do about that, not
without getting up and asking people
for help. The shade protects me not at
all - I can feel my scalp burning
through the short, useless hair.

I am about to offer up another plea to
Scully's God, the one I don't believe
in, when I feel a change in the shade,
sense behind my tightly closed eyes a
decrease in the light.

I turn my head just enough to crack
open one eye.

The cavalry has arrived.

All I can see from this angle is a pair
of bare knees I'd recognize anywhere;
the left one still bears a healing scar
on the outside of the kneecap from
where she'd nicked herself shaving the
other day. It must be awfully fucking
hot if *she's* wearing shorts, I think
dully.

I hear the unmistakable rustle of a
plastic grocery bag, and something
moderately heavy hits the ground next
to me. Scully just stands there.
"Mulder. What the hell were you
thinking?"

She's angry and frightened and relieved
all at once. I can hear it in her voice
without looking at her. I twist my head
again, so I can see more of her. Even
in my haze I can see the strong
emotions dancing just below the surface
of her face. Something clicks in my
head, a relay connects, and I'm able to
speak.

"Awwww, Mom, you said I could play
outside when I was done with Mr. Byers'
homework."

"Mulllllder." But I can hear that I've
taken the edge off the situation. Guess
I haven't completely lost my touch. In
mock annoyance, she nudges my hip with
the toe of a chunky black sandal - her
Scientific Spice shoes, I called them
once, and nearly caught one in the
forehead for my trouble - and then
crouches down beside me. I'd pick up my
head to see her better, but I'm too
woozy. Her fingertips burn on the back
of my neck. She sighs. "I'm going to
pour some water down your neck. It
should help."

It's not even cold - she must have just
grabbed it from the soda aisle at the
Giant - but it races down my back like
an icy river, and I nearly jump to my
feet from the shock. She cracks open a
second bottle, and does it again.
"Drink this," she orders, and hands me
another. I obey her.

"God, Mulder, what were you thinking?"
she says again, although even in my
stupor I can tell she doesn't expect an
answer. "All those drugs - we have no
idea what they did to your body, your
heart - " Her voice catches. My hand
drifts to my chest. I'd thought that
was just from the smog. "Monday we're
going to get you checked out."

I shudder. The first time she suggested
seeing a doctor, I'd panicked myself
nearly into a seizure. But she's right.
I've stalled this moment long enough.

"Keep drinking," she says, and pours
more water right over my head.

We do this for a couple more minutes,
until her six-pack is empty, and it
dawns on me that what may have saved me
from a full-scale freak-out this time
was incipient heat stroke. It also
dawns on me, once the wooziness clears
enough for me to actually lift my head
for more than a second, that Scully, as
far as I can tell, is alone.

"Where's Byers?"

"Still at the apartment. He said he was
on the phone when he heard the door
slam, and you were gone."

Byers. Dammit. There weren't any
voices, it was Byers on the phone. I
hate this. I'm sick of this. My eyes
sting as if I'm going to cry again, but
I'm too beat to even sob properly. A
few meager tears leak out, and Scully
touches one, tracing its path down my
face.

"How'd you find me?" I ask her weakly.

She gives me an enigmatic smile. "I was
psychic long before you were." While I
gape at her, she stands, balances the
empty water bottles on top of the trash
can, and extends a hand. "We need to
get to the car."

I let her pull me to my feet and lead
me through the throngs. My brain has
pretty much shut down, whether from the
heat or the stress, it's hard to tell,
and I'm actually able to ignore the
thousands of minds around me. Instead,
I just watch Scully, who's a step or
two ahead of me although she's holding
my hand. I can see the outline of a
dark sleeveless T-shirt underneath her
loose, open white blouse - I can also
see the lump at the small of her back
that is most likely her weapon. Her
phone is at her hip, along with another
gadget I don't recognize.

We thread through the barricades into
the restricted parking lot. Scully's
car is nestled between a brown
sheriff's car and a white city police
car.

A sweaty Alexandria cop tips his hat to
us. "Looks like you got your man, Agent
Scully."

"Thank you so much for your help,
Officer Moran." I swear she twinkles at
him. "And thank you so much for keeping
it quiet."

The cop gives me a look filled with
bathos and pity, an expression so
appalling that it cuts through my
mental murk. In the car, I immediately
turn to Scully, baffled. "What the hell
did you tell him?"

Scully is intent on backing out and
avoiding sunstroked drunks. She doesn't
look at me. "I told him that my
mentally challenged cousin wandered off
from the family picnic and that
uniforms scared him."

"Thanks a *lot.*"

"I thought you'd appreciate having your
name kept off the police scanner."

That much is true. Scully maneuvers
down Lee, back towards my apartment.
She has fallen silent, and I recognize
her mood: she's dying to dress me down
for my stupidity, but her compassionate
nature won't let her ream me out when
I'm not 100 percent. St. Scully and
Boss Scully are at war again. Maybe it
wouldn't be so bad to be able to read
her mind, I muse. At least then I'd get
a heads up on which Scully to expect.

While she decides who gets to speak, I
pick up the mysterious gadget, which
she's stashed in the brakewell between
our seats. It looks for all the world
like a GPS. My stomach sinks. "How
*did* you find me, Scully?" I ask
softly.

She sighs. There's an uncomfortably
long pause. "There's a transmitter in
your left shoe, under the swoosh."

"You *bugged* me? What the hell for?"

She comes to a full stop at the sign
instead of her usual rolling
rationalization, and gives me the
dirtiest Look I've ever seen. Oops,
Boss Scully won. My brain chides my
mouth for saying moronic things without
consulting it first.

"Gee, Mulder, why do you think -" she
begins, but her phone rings, and I'm
spared the rest of the lecture.
"Scully. Hi, Frohike. No, I've got him.
Except for a touch of heat stroke, I
think he's fine. No," she says, a touch
of marvel in her voice. "I don't think
he did."

I'm not sure I like the way she's
looking at me, as if her rat got to the
end of the maze first. The car behind
us beeps, and Scully accelerates. My
stomach feels like it's been left in
the back seat. There's a reason I do
most of the driving.

"Yes, the festival," she's saying.
"Exactly. Looks like you did some good
work today, Hickey." She chuckles, a
low, throaty sound that is incredibly
disturbing combined with her use of his
new nickname. Another weird Vegas
leftover. "No, *our* kung fu is the
best. Tell Byers he's off the hook.
Right."

And she hangs up. All this talk of
transmitters and kung fu - and I know
what Frohike means by that; it's a
hacker term - is making me very, very
uneasy. So is Scully's silence. Even
the voices would be welcome at this
point.

"Scully?"

"Hmm?"

I hesitate. "You are going to tell me
the whole story, aren't you?"

"When we get home," she answers
absently, her attention appropriately
focused on the tourists and cyclists
drifting carelessly in and out of the
street in front of us. I swallow hard,
my shoulders tensing. No going back
now. But then she sighs again. There's
something about her face. Her words
from last night come back to me.

"I scared you, didn't I?"

No one else would notice the twitch of
fear that passes across her impassive
face. "Yes," she admits.

My eyes fill, but I will them not to
spill over. "I scare you, don't I?" I
whisper.

Another stop sign. My building is in
sight. "Yes," she says.

I reach for her hand, grasp it and
hold, but I can't look at her. I need
to prepare to hear the truth.

* * *

We are alone again, Byers and Frohike
reassured that I'm all right then sent
packing. The Ubercommander ordered me
to take a shower while she dealt with
her lieutenants, and when I'm done I
find her waiting for me, sitting on my
bed with her back against the
headboard, knees drawn to her chest,
bare unpolished toes pointed in my
direction. I dig up a clean T-shirt and
shorts, and dressed again, flop down
across the foot of the bed on my back,
one forearm covering my eyes as a
shield.

"Lay it on me," I tell her.

She stretches out one foot and gently
spreads her toes across my hip, a
little caress. "Some of this might not
be easy for you to hear."

I squeeze her toes, then let go. "I
know."

"Okay." She draws back her foot. "Where
do you want me to begin?"

"Start with the kung fu."

"Okay." She takes a breath. "You
remember Chuck's assessment of the
artifact - that it could be an example
of a magic square, something that
conferred power to the person whose
name correlated to the numerical
sequences within the square."

"Right." I also remember the pain in my
head from exposure to a mere photograph
of a rubbing of the thing, and I
squeeze my arm tighter over my eyes.

"Dr. Sandoz discovered that the writing
on it, in addition to the Genesis
verses, contained genomic information.
He was convinced that whoever created
the artifact had unlocked the key to
human life, had decoded the blueprint
that makes us what we are."

"Holy shit," I exclaim. My arm comes
off my face, and I sit up. "Aliens know
our genome? But they would, wouldn't
they, after all these years, after all
those experiments - "

Scully gives me a sad little smile, and
I realize that I've reacted the way I
would have . before. And just as she
would have before, she waves her hands
in an effort to stop me. "Mulder,
Mulder. As much as I enjoy having that
particular argument with you, you're
off track." She holds up a hand before
I can say anything else. "Sandoz
thought the artifact contained *the*
human genome, but he was wrong. The
parts we found contained pieces of an
individual genome. Yours."

"What?" That wasn't what I expected.
"How?"

She shrugs. "Easy. You've had countless
blood draws in countless hospitals
across the country, you've had missing
time, you've had your memory wiped, God
only knows what they did to you in
Russia. They could have gotten genetic
material from you in any number of
ways. For all I know, your father gave
them a lock of your hair when you were
born."

That knocks me back. I can't say
anything. I don't know what to say. My
closed eyes sting. Not now. Not until
she's finished.

"So," she continues, her soft voice
acknowledging that her words had been
rough, "Chuck and I figured that
someone designed the artifact
specifically to affect you."

Part of me wants to make a joke - who
are you, and what have you done with my
partner? - but a much larger part of me
is just plain gasping for air. This is
crazy, this is nuts, I can't believe
I'm hearing this -

"I know," she says. "Feels odd on the
other side of the fence, doesn't it?"

"Hey, I'm the mindreader here," I
grouse absently, still processing her
information.

"But it was the only conclusion we
could draw based on the evidence.
Circumstantial evidence, to be sure,
but good enough to take it to a grand
jury, if this were a normal crime."

A million questions crowd my aching
mind. The first one that pops out of my
mouth is "Why?"

"That we haven't quite figured out,"
she admits. "But their motive was far
less important to me than finding a
cure for you."

Something catches in my throat, and
emotion threatens again. Our roles have
been well and truly reversed. I find
myself hoping selfishly that she felt
one-half this loved when I showed up in
her hospital room with that chip from
the Pentagon's basement.

"So you smashed the damn thing to
pieces and all is right with my mind."

"Well, no." Her words make my heart
lurch with fear. "I wanted to, Mulder,
oh, God, how I wanted to. And I wanted
to use CGB's head to do it, too. But
what good would that have done? Who
knows how many copies they have, how
many rubbings, how many photos?"

I feel sick.

"So we, ah, overwrote the code."

This takes a moment to settle in, and
when it does, I feel even sicker.

"You hacked my *brain*?"

Scully winces. "I wouldn't put it
*that* way. We found a way to
neutralize the effects of the artifact
that seems to have worked, and we went
with it."

"'We?'"

"Frohike, Chuck and I. We did most of
the work at Chuck's. We couldn't have
copies of the artifact at the Gunmen's
while you were there."

That explains why she hadn't always
been around at the beginning. This is
an explanation I can accept. Hell, it's
more explanation than she ever got from
me.

"We reworked the code a little bit
today to make it more airtight," she's
saying. "It might have helped at the
festival. Or you might just be getting
over the fear."

Or your God might just have heard me, I
think, but I don't tell her that.

Her eyes unexpectedly shift away from
me. My throat tightens. "Scully -" I
reach over and guide her chin so that
she's looking at me again. "You're
leaving something out. Don't leave
anything out."

Her eyelids flutter, and to my horror,
her eyes well up.

"Oh, my God, Scully, what?" My voice
cracks. Something occurs to me, and my
hand flies to the back of my neck.
"They left something behind?"

Shock crosses her face, as though this
woman on a second chip of her own
actually hadn't considered the
possibility. Then she blinks and shakes
her head. "No, Mulder. I looked. I know
your scars. I saw nothing new. And your
blood work in the hospital showed
nothing I considered unusual."

So I escaped Skinner's fate, then.
"What, then?" My voice wobbles. Her
eyes are still full.

"I'm afraid -" And so am I, because
that's the second time today she's
admitted to an emotion she never admits
she has - "I'm afraid the enhanced
brain activity and the medications and
the tests may have caused -" She stops,
licks her lips, takes a breath. Her
voice is very small. "Brain damage."

Everything goes white and silent for a
moment. Was this what it was like for
her to hear the word "cancer"? She's
still talking - about having me tested,
about finally taking me to a
neurologist or two, how she should have
done this before but I was in no mental
shape - and her words slide past me
like drops of rain down a windshield.
Nothing sticks except those two words.

I know enough about the functioning of
the human brain to understand that this
is a very real possibility, and I
crumple into her lap. She folds over
me, and I fall apart. "Oh, Mulder, no,
we'll fix it, I promise, I swear," she
says, but her voice is clogged with
tears and I can feel her ragged,
frightened heartbeat against my back. I
clutch at her arms; she presses her
face into my shoulder blade. The sound
of our combined terror and grief fills
the room for some time.

When I open my eyes again, the light
has changed - the sun has moved around
the building, no longer comes right
into my bedroom. Scully's breath is
still coming in little hitches, and her
arms are still tight around me. Hard to
tell if she's trying to comfort me, or
to find solace herself. Either way,
that contact is necessary - for both of
us, I realize. I find the strength to
turn and kiss the inside of her elbow.
She presses a soft kiss into the back
of my head. Without a word, we untangle
ourselves and sit up. She quickly wipes
her nose with the back of her hand, and
raises her reddened eyes to meet mine.
Her blue eyes darken slightly as we
look at each other. Slowly I lower my
mouth to hers, tasting the salt of her
tears. For a long moment, we
communicate only with lips and tongues
and hands, the most basic form of
communication there is. She's hesitant,
though. I can tell from the way she
holds herself in my arms, waiting for
me to back down again as I've done
before. But oh, I need this. Need her.

My fingers find her necklace, trace the
line the chain makes over her
collarbone, gently grasp the dangling
cross. Is this what's going to save me,
Scully? I think, burying my face in the
side of her neck. Or will you?

"Scully," I beg hoarsely against her
skin. "I need to feel normal again.
Make me feel normal again."

Her hands, tugging at the hem of my T-
shirt, are all the answer I need.

* * *

Ivory Coast
Two weeks later

This is not the ocean I know.

My ocean is steel gray and icy and
treacherous, sucking down desperate
fishermen in storms, luring
unsuspecting pilots to their deaths in
the summer evening haze. It was a
barrier to cross, something that set us
apart from the mainland. Some thought
of it as protection, but I never did,
not after Samantha was taken.

But this is not my ocean. This is
Scully's ocean.

I say this not because she sits here
next to me on this outcropping of rock
overlooking the smooth stretch of sand
that leads to a sight I still have
trouble comprehending - dozens of
workers and armed men bustling around
her craft of undetermined origin,
carrying out her orders both scientific
and strategic.

No, it's because I've seen the
California Pacific, and most days it's
everything Brian Wilson said it was -
warm and open and thrilling, the pot of
gold at the end of the rainbow, a place
where hopes and dreams could be
fulfilled.

A place of possibility.

This is just the same.

The queen of this new kingdom surveys
her domain. We look like a couple of
wealthy tourists, I think - me in
shorts, sandals, a polo shirt and dark
glasses, she in a long-sleeved, ankle-
length sundress in deference to the
Muslim men she's hired and a wide-
brimmed hat in deference to the sun. I
can smell the tang of her sunscreen.
Yeah, just a couple of tourists,
although one's commanding a small army
to protect the most important
archeological find in history and the
other's buzzing along on a host of
mood-altering, seizure-preventing,
calm-inducing medications.

The team of friendly doctors she'd
assembled with the aid of her
oncologist, who'd seen enough strange
stuff already with her to go with the
flow when she asked him to help me,
think everything might clear up in
time. Then they turned around and put
me on disability. I think I'd be
angrier about what's happened to me if
I wasn't so high. The emotion does
still rise within me without warning -
the God module, it turns out, is close
to the portion of the brain that
controls emotion - but the drugs tamp
it down to a less terrifying level.

Sometimes the wild emotion is even
appropriate. I wept here, on these
rocks, the first time I saw Scully's
discovery, just as I'd wept in
Antarctica.

But I still haven't gone down to see it
up close. Zoloft can only keep a guy so
calm.

The sun is warm on my head. I rub my
hair, nearly back to normal length, and
wish I'd brought a hat, too.

"You okay, Mulder?"

I nod. "A little muzzy-headed. It's
just the drugs. I'm getting used to
it."

Dr. Scully appears. She leans over,
pulls off my sunglasses and looks into
my eyes, then plops her hat on my head.
For a small woman, she's got a big head
- the fit is only a little tight.

"I don't think I look good in early
Martha Stewart, Scully."

"I don't think you look good in a
hospital, Mulder."

I hear the lilt in her voice that
indicates a joke, but my reaction time
is a bit slower than it used to be, and
the moment passes before I can come up
with a punch line. So instead, I slip
my hand into hers, to let her know I
understood. We sit quietly for a
moment, watching the crew she's paying
with the killing my stockbroker made on
a couple of well-chosen IPO's.
Apparently I'm the last person in
America to make money off the Internet
stock boom.

Scully was a very, very busy squirrel
while I was locked away.

Her work has created a small miracle:
for once, our evidence hasn't vanished.
She's outspending what's left of the
Consortium, treating her workers like
kings instead of serfs. Their loyalty
to her is breathtaking, especially on
this corrupt continent. And she's found
a way to protect our information until
she's ready to present it in a
scientific manner, a way that wasn't
available to us when we began work on
the X-Files:

We have a web site.

"Rob & Laura's UFO News!" has about
25,000 hits so far, and is mirrored at
any number of wack job sites. It looks
like a wack job site itself --
Webmaster Langly did a nice job
peppering the heavily capitalized text
with dancing aliens and exclamation
points. But once you get past the loopy
graphics and the blinding colors,
everything Scully discovered is there.

I thought she was nuts when she told me
what she'd done - why not just put up a
sign saying "Free evidence! Come and
get it!" -- but ever the scientist, she
came back at me with a peer-reviewed
study from a respected journal that
found that only 9 percent of all web
pages are linked to a search engine.
They'll never find it, she said. And
then she launched into a fabulously
geeky speech about bots and logs and
protected sites and the inefficiency of
automated searches that lost me
immediately but sparked two thoughts:

/She's been spending way too much time
with the Gunmen/

and

/I wonder how she'd look in black
raccoon eye makeup and leather pants./

The upshot is, once I forced her to
speak English again, is that we're
hiding in plain sight.

The truth is out there.

Scully rests her folded arms on her
bent knees, her chin on her forearms.
Her gaze is very far away. I scratch
her back lightly, just for the contact.
"Plotting our next move?"

"Writing my paper." She looks very much
like she wants to purr. "I'm going to
shoot for Nature, I think. Science got
burned with the Mars rock, and I doubt
they'll be receptive again, even if my
evidence is far more conclusive than
NASA's."

Science got burned? For a second, her
words make no sense, but then I realize
she means the journal, not the
discipline. The surf crashes and roars
over the sand and rocks below,
temporarily filling my ears with white
noise. Some twitchy part of my damaged
brain wants to have a flashback; the
drugs tell it to behave.

"This is what it sounded like, Scully,"
I tell her quietly. She tilts her head,
considering. "I know you find the sea
comforting," I continue. I need to make
her understand. "But imagine the surf
as voices, rising and falling, shutting
out your own inner voice. Imagine not
being able to get up and walk away from
the sound." She's looking at me
carefully, and I realize she's waiting
for me to crack again. This is the sort
of speech that would have triggered a
crying jag a couple of weeks ago. I
take one of her hands and kiss the
back. "You've got me on some good shit,
Scully. I'll be okay."

Her sad smile mirrors mine. I trace
fingertips over her cheek, and she
leans into my hand. "Mulder?" Her voice
is surprisingly small, hesitant.

"Yeah?"

"Did you ever - could you -" She waves
her hands suddenly, hoping to erase her
words. "Forget it."

But I know what she's getting at. "No.
Not directly." She looks relieved and
disappointed all at the same time. She
thinks she doesn't want to know. "I
knew that you were concerned about my
health, that you were very confused,
that you were furious -"

/Diana's face, the surprised O of her
mouth matching the round red mark on
her forehead as she fell backwards, her
brains splattering against the front of
CGB's smoke-stained jacket, against the
side of my face as I sit locked in that
chair, unable to move or to scream.
Scully's bullet, I'm sure of it now/

"Mulder??"

"I'm okay. Just - a memory." I blink it
away. I'll dream about it later.

"So you never really -"

"Read your mind?" I finish for her.
There's a reason there's not much about
me in her file. She can't prove what
went on in my head. "I didn't learn
anything I couldn't have figured out
otherwise. Except that it felt great to
hear you say you loved me."

She blushes. Scully still doesn't take
direct declarations well.

"And that you couldn't think of a thing
to wear in Africa."

"You -" She smacks me in the arm, anger
and amusement warring on her face. "Son
of a bitch. You *did* read my mind."

Ah. My timing isn't completely off. I
grin wickedly at her, she settles down
with a humph, and we go back to
watching Dana's Militia.

Her faith in them is admirable, but I'm
nervous about her reluctance to go
officially public right now. I know how
long it takes journals to peer review -
I'm afraid we may not have that much
time. CNN's London phone number is in
my wallet. They'd cover this. They put
any old kind of shit on the air. Scully
keeps telling me that we don't need to
make that call, that there's no need to
panic, and I believe her, but it's so
hard.

I sigh. "Why aren't they coming to get
us, Scully?"

"I don't know," she admits. "They know
it's here, they'd have to, to plant the
fake artifacts. My evidence is good, it
hasn't been tampered with, but - maybe
this isn't as important as we think it
is."

That's - no. This is important. It has
to be. Or the last seven years have
been for nothing.

"Maybe they're trying to lull us into a
false sense of security," I suggest.

"Oh, Mulder," she says wearily. "Take
your victories where you can find them.
We've preserved this evidence for
nearly two months, we're in a place
where we're safe ."

"Safe?" I interrupt her. "How can you
believe that?"

"Because I do, Mulder. We're meant to
be safe here. This is not our time."

Goddamn, I hate when she does the
believer thing. It scares the shit out
of me. But at the same time, the
serenity in her voice touches a button
deep inside me, one that releases a
little bit of calm. All the dope in the
world can't take away the fear,
although I will admit it dulls the edge
quite nicely. She glances quickly at
me, and opens her arms. I tumble into
them, knocking off the silly hat in the
process. She strokes my hair, the back
of my neck.

"I know you're still afraid," she
murmurs. "I don't blame you. It's hard
to let go of something that big."

The words bubble out of me before I can
stop them. "What if they come back to
get me?"

Her silence is unnerving. I can feel
her marshaling her thoughts, trying to
figure out how best to put what she
wants to say. "I think, if they had
wanted you back, they would have taken
you by now. I think they . allowed me
to keep you."

I squeeze my eyes shut against tears.
Her implication is that they'd damaged
me and I am now useless to them. It is
surprising how that hurts. Not
surprising is the pain from her words,
which echo something once told to me.
Was it worse for you than it was for
me, Scully, because you could see what
they were doing to me, because you knew
what was happening to me? I know how
much worse the anguish and the anger I
felt when you were taken would have
been had I known the whole time what
they were doing to you.

"How can you be so calm, Scully? You
stealing my stash?"

She chuckles. "Faith, Mulder. You just
have to have faith. Trust me on this."

I do trust her, implicitly, but faith?
Faith in some higher power to watch
over us? I've always thought those
people who said that God would provide
were nuts - God's not an ATM or a
grocery store - and I can't join those
ranks. But . I did. I did, lost at the
festival, frightened and alone, and I
turned to Scully's God for help. And I
was able to hang on until she found me.
It could have been a coincidence, it
could have been whatever she and
Frohike were doing with the artifact,
but.

I catch one of her hands and hug it to
my chest. The most extreme possibility
of all is demanding that I consider it.
And I am taking the idea seriously.

"Hey, Scully?" I hesitate. Questioning
her religion is never the smartest
thing to do under the best of
circumstances, and I hope she
understands that I'm not trying to pick
a fight. I don't have the mental energy
for that. "What if what I said a long
time ago was right - that this ship is
the answer to everything, that we all
came from aliens, that the
extraterrestrials were responsible for
us being here?"

"I would say first, that you're either
trying to bait me, or you're still
keeping score on how many times you've
been right, and either would piss me
off." Her voice is the one she uses for
arguments over a case, and I feel oddly
relieved. She pats the hand that's
holding hers. "But if I decided that
you meant the question seriously, you
know what I'd say?"

I shake my head, because now I really
don't know.

"That Somebody had to create the
aliens. That Somebody had to come up
with the question to which the aliens
are the answer."

I turn so that I am once again laying
on her lap, staring up at her in
amazement. Usually this sort of brush
with ET unnerves her so badly that she
heads straight down the river called
Denial, rather than risk giving any of
it a thought. And that statement sounds
like the product of an awful lot of
thought. "Scully - " is all I can say,
but there's a world of question behind
it.

"I've come to the conclusion that it's
all too elegant to happen by chance,"
she says softly, a sense of wonder
creeping into her voice. "Look at the
human body. So many complex functions,
so many interdependent systems, all
from one cell, nearly perfect nearly
every time. How could that be random?
Look at our genes. So many of them are
identical to those found in the
flatworm, or the fruit fly, or the
chimpanzee. That can't be random. I
used to think we got here by accident,
by evolution, by chance, that the odds
of it happening again somewhere else
were beyond astronomical. But the more
I think about it, the more I believe -"

My breath catches just to hear her say
the word. She notices.

"The more I believe that Someone's got
to be behind it all."

"Someone who doesn't smoke, I hope."

"Mulder, you're going to burn in hell,"
she says mildly.

This conversation is making my head
spin. I've never liked discussing
religion with her. She's not rational
about the fact that she takes so much
of it on faith, and I can't help
boiling down her Catholicism into a
series of myths, symbols and terrific
adventure stories. But there's
something at the core of what she's
saying, something I want to grab onto,
something that's the cause of all this
serenity I feel radiating from her.

Something I think I want to feel, too.

I sit up, and tug at Scully's arm until
she figures out I want her to sit
between my legs, her back to my chest.
I am off-balance enough that I don't
want to continue this conversation from
a submissive position. My arms encircle
her waist; her arms go over mine.

She leans forward a little to brush
some sand off her dress, and her hair
parts across her neck to reveal the
tiny scar that marks the location of
her chip. She doesn't like me to touch
it, yet I can't stop looking at it. I
remember that nasty scene in her
hospital room as she and her doctor and
the Scullys and I argued over which
treatment route to take. I want to
touch the scar, but I settle for
tracing the skin around it instead. Her
body is suddenly still.

"Do you ever wonder -" I hesitate
again. This may be the first time I've
ever asked her directly about her
cancer. "Do you ever wonder what saved
you?"

She takes a long, deep breath, her
chest expanding and contracting under
my arms. My heart is thudding against
her back. She must feel that.

"I don't know what did it," she finally
says, then squeezes my hand. "Probably
the chip. But who's to say? I was
willing to try anything then, because I
was so desperate, and there was so much
faith around me. My doctor's faith in
science, my mother's faith in God, your
faith in me . "

My faith in her. I swallow hard.

"Scully, at the festival, you know how
I made it through before you found me?"

She shakes her head, then tilts it,
curious.

"I asked your God for help," I say in
her ear.

Scully twists to look at me, her mouth
open. "You're kidding," she says after
a second. And then she's on her knees
between my legs, staring at me. The
information makes its way into her
brain, and as it soaks in, the shock on
her face slowly evolves into wonder.

"Wow," she says. I've rendered her
nearly speechless. I think I'm proud.
"Wow. I'm seriously considering the
possibility of extraterrestrial life
and you believed in God for a second."

Her bald statement makes me squirm.
She's leaping farther than I think I've
gone - but she's not entirely off
track. "I don't know about that,
Scully. If there is a God, wouldn't the
Knicks have won the championship?"

"Sorry. He only pays attention to Notre
Dame."

My eyebrow lift isn't half as evocative
as hers, but she gets the picture. I
take both her hands in mine, and stare
at her until I see that mischievous
twinkle turn serious. My heart is
pounding. This is such . alien ground
for us.

"Does it help, Scully?" My voice
catches.

She frees one of her hands and cups my
cheek. Her eyes are the full rich blue
of the sky above, warm and caring. "It
can. Did it help you?"

I hadn't been calm, not by a long shot,
but I remember suddenly not worrying
about the voices any more. Not to the
point of hysteria, anyway. "Yes."

"Then it helps."

The rhythmic sound of the surf fills my
head, a susurration of sound that calms
and gentles. I find myself breathing in
time with the waves as they strike the
sand, an elemental rhythm as basic as
life itself. The usual barbed questions
I throw at her during discussions like
this still want to be asked; the
impossible questions - if there is a
God, why does He let these things
happen to us - still beg to be
answered. They'll have to wait.

"It takes time, doesn't it?" I ask her.

"Healing always takes time, Mulder,"
she says, an unexpected bit of
ruefulness in her voice, as if she's
reminding herself of something. She
stands up, still holding my hand, and
attempts to tug me to my feet. I resist
her, tugging back playfully.

"Where are we going, Scully?"

She smiles. "I think it's time you got
a closer look at the truth."

My brain spasms and lurches and tries
to scream, no, don't go there, there
might be more artifacts, I can't go
down there. Terror tries desperately to
override the drugs. At the same time, I
find myself reaching out for that place
where Scully is, that calm center, that
place I went at the festival.

Protect me, God, and keep me safe.

"Okay," I tell her as I get to my feet.
"Let's go to the beach."

-30-
 

Author's note #2:

"Ours is an unpredictable world . it is
a place of many possibilities that are
influenced by forces beyond our control
and, in some cases at least, beyond our
immediate comprehension.
"Ours is a less certain world than we
thought it was, but it is also more
interesting for that."
--Richard Leakey and Roger Lewin, "The
Sixth Extinction."

A small nod to my amused and tolerant
husband, who delivered the original
fabulously geeky speech.

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