The Ship
Sometime later


Sounds, sounds echoed like those inside the kind of cave where 
water dripped into a shallow pond. In time they grew louder to 
boom along like the beat of a drum.

It took time to realize that what I was hearing was footsteps, 
many scurrying ones and one set of slow deliberate ones. The 
inside of my aching head was the drum. From above, fingers 
pressed down seeking the pulse at my throat but stayed only long 
enough to test whether or not I lived. 

I did, but not happily. 

A series of words faded in and out above me but I couldn't make 
them out. Then a woman spoke and that sound was still unusual 
enough to cut through the fog.

"...so much blood."

Blood? My blood? I certainly hurt in enough places.

But another woman was crying.

I did my best to shake away the gray shapes before my eyes. 
Bodies filed past. Limping. Bruised. Two were bent over a figure 
on the floor beside me.

Ness!

I raised by head. Somehow I managed a sitting position but in 
doing so put my right hand down into a slippery pool of blood. 
The pool was dry around the edges so it had been there some 
time, maybe an hour. And the pool was cold, very cold, like the 
air.

But not my blood. I pushed the legs aside that blocked my view. 
Ness on her side; she didn't have the strength to sit. She was 
crying over something in her hands, a thing the length of her 
palm covered in blood like that that seemed to be everywhere but 
especially between her thighs. 

She saw me staring at her and somehow found the strength to 
speak so I must have looked as stupidly dazed as I felt. 

"I-I lost the baby."

Stupid! I should have guessed that immediately. 

Two forms in work gang rags stepped back my range of vision. 
Very efficiently but very gently, they placed her on a litter 
and began to carry her away. 

"Wait!" 

I was struggling, very ineffectively, to stand, my muscles as 
insubstantial as a chewed toro root, when other former prisoners 
helped me to her side. Her white face terrified me. On Dale this 
kind of trauma was a death sentence but, I reminded myself over 
and over, this wasn't Dale. Supposedly others could help her, 
just not me.

Suddenly a cold hand latched onto mine. "I'll hold. Go to him!" 
she urged me in a ghost of her former voice and I was left 
standing stupidly as the litter moved on.

Him? When I first woke I had been aware only of Ness because she 
was all I could see, but now my vision had cleared. Indistinct 
forms became more former prisoners. Pairs of them managed 
litters and each bore an absolutely silent figure. Two were 
ahead of me down the corridor, one was beside me and a fourth 
was just exiting --

-- the command room! It had taken this long for the where and 
why to come back. There had been five in that room on those beds 
of pain, and of the four I could see none of them was Mulder. 
But their skin! It was like singed paper, white and dry and 
flaking as if they were something old and dead that had been 
left out in a desert sun way too long. 

"Mulder..."

I broke away from the two who has helped me and stumbled into 
the command room.

There was this smell, or rather a host of smells. There was 
sweat and urine and worse but most of all was the stench of 
something sweet and oily and burned. My stomach threatened to 
crawl up my throat. Charley of all incomprehensible figures was 
standing before the central 'rock' gently extracting a limp arm 
from a spike. It didn't want to come; he had to tug with some 
effort. When it came away, the once bright spike was encrusted 
to the hilt with something dry and dark. Hollow-eyed workers 
were attempting to free the long, bare legs. At least they had 
released the skin of his face from the claws first. Still I 
wanted to throw up. The condition of the skin made him look 
long-past dead. It was that swollen and distorted; the wounds 
looked old and burnt. 

Oh, Mulder... Poor friend. Didn't make sense. A person would 
have to be dead days to look this bad. Certainly not that much 
time had passed.

The last spike was finally withdrawn, the dried blood and torn 
tissue pulling roughly at the skin.

I winced and doing caught a glimpse of movement. Eyes opened. 
Slowly, but they opened. Alive? No, not possible. But there they 
were. They didn't belong to any man I knew, however. The eyes of 
the man I knew were as often green as a forest with mischief as 
they were brown with serious contemplation. Nor did they pierce 
the heart with the fire of their anger. Theses were not so much 
eyes as dead coals burnt to cinder and dust.




Ness stared upward, up and up. It was a small room but tall, the 
naked bodies stacked on shelves twenty high at least, two to a 
shelf. They looked like corpses but there was only the slightest 
scent of putrefaction. The sickening sweet scent would have been 
stronger if even one of this company had been truly dead.

Noticing a shiver run through her slight frame, I put my arm 
around her. She pressed against me, her oat-colored hair 
drifting under my nose. In other times I would have felt a wave 
of giddy, adolescent hormones. Not now, certainly not in these 
terrible days. This was comfort, my desperate need as strong as 
hers. We left the dim 'morgue', as Theresa had called it in her 
last conscious moments, for the anteroom, a place vaguely 
circular, draped in shadows.

Charley was frowning as he stood over Mulder's body, and 'body' 
was about all it was. He had not opened those dead eyes again, 
nor made any movement. The rare rise and fall of his chest was 
barely detectable. He wore no clothes but unlike the others was 
covered from the waist down with one of the hand-made woven 
cloths that only Ness and her family members had worn on Rock 
Four, as I had for a short time. Ness and I now wore ship-type 
jumpsuits that matched Charley's, a kind of camouflage to show 
that we were with him. The cloth that covered Mulder was 
striking because its colors weren't faded and encrusted with 
dirt and filth as the cloth worn by the imprisoned Family 
members had been. It was the color, mostly blues and rich 
browns, which was thing oddest thing of all in this colorless 
place of iron-gray walls and pale-white skin. It made me long 
for the plowed fields of Dale.

"Where did that come from?" I asked to no one in particular when 
I first saw it, two days before. That had been on my first visit 
to Mulder and what was left of the other pilots in Fred's 
infirmary. The incongruous cloth had covered his nakedness then 
as now. It had seemed too heavy and rough-weaved a thing to 
touch the horribly bruised and battered flesh.  

"He wove that himself," came Ness's soft voice that day from 
where she was recovering her strength on her own pallet beyond 
where the critical 'Five' lay like corpses lying in state. "It 
was when we lived together on City. He took it when he left, 
they found it with the few things Charley had brought from the 
little ship that Mulder calls 'the beast'."

"He told me some of City. I can't imagine it. Tell me more when 
you feel up to it."

"You'll see it for yourself very soon," she promised me, the 
shadows in her eyes even darker than her bruised face.

And I did, for that's where we were now. Charley, Ness, and I 
and those of the Five who still lived had shuttled unobtrusively 
to City, a magnificently overwhelming impossibility of a 
technological marvel turning slowly in space. Ness had lived her 
life there except for the few months on at the research station 
and her feeling about the place were as stormy as they were 
fond.


As always, my eyes went to the narrow band around his wrist. It 
blinked with a blue light at every heartbeat. The light, which 
had been slowing over the last days, now blinked erratically, 
sometimes skipping, sometimes rushing. The light itself was so 
dim that if his arm were not in a particularly deep shadow it 
probably wouldn't have registered at all. 

"We're risking detection!" Charley grumbled for what must have 
been the sixth time that hour.

"I know how much you risked to bring the four of them back here, 
but we need a little more time. We have to know if this is what 
he wants!"

"This arrangement is his only chance, unless this kills him 
first." The shapeshifter held up the device that we knew 
contained the stimulant that might bring Mulder around for a few 
precious minutes.

"We have to have him conscious to ask him," Ness whispered.

Frown deepening to a scowl, Charley pressed the device against 
the blue-white neck. When he pulled it away, a strip of the 
dried skin flaked away. The skin of all of the remaining Four 
was doing that, drifting away at the slightest touch like chaff 
in the wind.

Thinking about his skin kept me from thinking about his heart. 
We knew that it was swollen and was bleeding inside. Most of his 
other organs were not in any better shape. Even with the help of 
the others, if they had been of any help and not just a 
distraction, the stress of trying to lift the mammoth ship had 
been too much for this frail human body. He had nearly burst 
that heart, his gut, trying. But the effort had been enough, if 
barely. Of the two hundred forty-three humans who had made it 
aboard the ship, only twenty had died in addition to Ness's 
baby. As Mulder had predicted, the ride had been very rough, the 
explosion of the asteroid, far too close, but we had lived long 
enough to be picked up by Charley and his big cruiser, the one 
that Mulder in better times had named Fred. That seemed to have 
been in another life but had been in fact less than five days. 

Thankfully, Fred had been large enough to hold all of us. Odd 
that. It was as if Charley had had some premonition that our 
little act of terrorism would also turn out to be a rescue 
mission. In fact, Fred had been a comfortable size for us all 
with only a little room to spare.
 
Since Charley had administered the stimulant, I had been 
intently staring for any sign. I feared there would be none, he 
was that burnt out. There really was a chance that under such 
stress his life force would, like a casual step on a dry branch, 
simply snap. 

The small blue light on the wristband, faltered. Beside me, I 
felt Ness hold her breath. Wait... wait.... Then the blinking 
began again, a little irregularly, but also a little faster and 
certainly with more strength. Ness breathed again and I felt the 
bands around my own heart loosen. As we watched, Mulder's chest 
moved as well, with effort, but still with the first real breath 
that we'd seen. 

I forced myself to touch his hand. More bits of hid dry skin 
floated away. The appendage was as heavy and cold as death. I 
held the hand anyway though it lay like a stone in mine.
 
Ness was calling his name and touching his straw-dry hair. 
Another struggling breath and lips parted and eyelids fluttered. 
No, I thought, remembering the burned ciders I had seen, please 
not the eyes. My attention left the dead hand. The eyes opened 
haltingly and what I saw were as expressionless as flat, gray 
river stones that endless time had washed smooth.

His mouth shaped words though he hadn't really breath to speak. 
"S-Scully...?"

What else did I expect? When had she ever not been ever first in 
his thoughts? 

"Peace," Ness whispered. "You've been badly injured. It was the 
effort of raising the ship. You should never have tried, but you 
saved us all."

His brow furrowed. 

"The ship on Rock Four, remember? The one you and the others 
were piloting."

A deep line narrowed the eyes and he frowned. 

Charley was shaking his head. "The trauma. Of course, it 
affected the mind as well. This is useless."

"He has to remember some of it. Do you remember being abducted?" 
I asked. "You were taken from earth. Lots of people were. Do you 
remember the space station? City? Ness? The planet Dale? The 
farm at sunrise? At sunset?" 

Do you remember me?

Consternation showed on that corpse-pale face or as much as a 
man barely living can show. 

Charley came forward and placed a finger on the pink scar, 
straight and smooth down the length of Mulder's breastbone. "Do 
you remember the tests? Of being cut here? Of the chair?"

A pause and then Mulder's head jerked. Then there were a series 
of small spasms. It was almost as if I could see the memories 
popping up erratic and terrifying.

"Scully..." came out of that ruined mouth, cracked and dry like 
an old man's. A prayer, a petition, more wish than words. 

"She's not here," Ness apologized in her softest voice. "That's 
what this is about. You've been gone from her for a long time. 
She must be frantic wondering what happened to you. That's the 
point. Mulder, you're dying--"

"Ness!"

"Ben, he has to be told... Mulder, If you die out here, she'll 
never know."

She gave that a moment to sink in, for him to feel the passage 
Death had already made across his ruined flesh. Nothing moved 
except the eyes and that mouth. I don't know if his body was 
capable of more, whether the nerves even worked, or if he just 
had lost the strength, or the will.

A shadow of incredible sadness passed over his face. It's like 
that when there is no more time for dreams. 

"S-So?" finally came out with a rattling breath. Then came a few 
words I couldn't understand and then "...choice?" 'Do I have a 
choice?' he meant.

I looked towards Charley to see if he wanted to do the telling. 
I found him changed. As often as I had seen it happen, it always 
surprised me. A much thinner man stood beside me, still tall, 
but slightly stooped of shoulder and with an older and lined 
fine. A peaceful, gentle face. I'd seen this form of Charley 
before. It was the one he had not wanted Mulder to see before.

"Remember me?" he asked in a voice that matched that face.

Mulder's eyes narrowed as if thinking was painful. "Smith."

The lined face smiled. "Right. Jeremiah Smith, or one of them. 
We wear this form in remembrance of the human man who first 
convinced our faction of your 'Humanity'. You know that I mean 
you no harm. You know that I fight your enemies. What the woman 
says is true, you have been badly injured, so badly that I can 
do nothing. I wouldn't know where to start this time. Death is 
inevitable unless you can find some very special help. Our 
common enemy has developed a powerful treatment; it's carried by 
a virus. I can give it to you. In time it can reverse all your 
injuries, but it will go beyond that if not stopped. You will be 
transformed into something barely more human than they are." 
Mulder's weary but horrified gaze was fixed on the speaker's 
face. He heard; he very clearly understood. "You are only one of 
the many nearly dead here. After they are infected, they will be 
seeded on your planet. Some will truly die but most will 
transform unless -- " Mulder gaze was no longer weary. " -- 
unless one of my persuasion finds them. We have knowledge and 
experience. We know that at a critical point in the process you 
can be brought back. Whole and wholly human."

With alarm, I noticed that the little blue light on Mulder's 
wrist had begun to flicker again. For a moment his eyes 
threatened to roll back in his head. I gripped the cold hand I 
still held more tightly. At the same time Ness placed her own 
slim hand on his barely rising chest. He came back but not 
without a struggle. His eyes roamed uneasily from the hovering 
Ness to me without comprehension. 

"Who...?" the blue and cracked lips asked.

"We're your friends, remember? Ness and Ben."

One eyebrow cocked upwards. "Friends?" he mouthed as if he found 
the concept humorous, still the answer seemed explanation 
enough. "If I do this... could go wrong. Transformed, you said. 
Can't be good."

The Jeremiah Smith form of Charley exchanged glances with me and 
shook his head ever so slightly. Even a dying man could 
interpret that message. 

"Have to kill me then..." the dying man said with surprising 
firmness. "Have to promise."

"We aren't killers," Jeremiah protested. 

"I promise!" Ness's soft strained voice swore with cold 
conviction.

His eyes went to her face, searching for truth. Her face was 
hard. It was the expression she wore when she remembered the 
slavery and torture so many had been forced into and the escape 
that had resulted in her dead child. He seemed to find what he 
was looking for. His eyes went to mine. He demanded reassurance 
that he would not be allowed to exist as an evil that would be 
the scourge of his people.  But how could I do such a thing to 
Mulder? I had loved him, still loved him...

But then so had Ness and she had buried her baby and too many of 
her family in space. If I was going to give up the life of the 
hermit there was much that I was going to need to be willing to 
do for love. 

"It's hard," I said.

"But I'll already be dead." 

I gave him what he wanted. Though he no longer knew me from 
Adam, I said the words.

"I suppose there is no other way?" he asked of 'Charley' with a 
voice so weak now that the sound was barely that which a leaf 
makes when the wind blows it across dry ground. 

"No other way to both save your life and return you to Earth. 
Right now, the craft that are allowed to approach your world are 
being closely monitored. You have more than one ally but we are 
not in a position to help directly at the moment. Sometimes we 
are, but not now." The face softened in a way that Charley's 
never could. "I grieve for my part in this. I grieve that I 
cannot do more. This is not nearly compensation enough for all 
you have been through. But it is all that is within our power at 
this time. Can you forgive me?"

Mulder's eyes had closed for a long moment. A deep pain crossed 
his face. When the eyes reopened his pale face wore a dazed 
expression. "What?"

"Will getting you to Earth and sending word to have you picked 
up there to be restored be good enough?" 

Confusion replaced the dazed expression. "I know you. Jeremiah 
Smith. What.... ?" Now he looked at Ness and me and with even less 
comprehension. He had begun to shake. "I'm so cold." 

I stared up at Charley in dismay but he only shook his head as 
his bowed shoulders bowed even more deeply. "Agent Mulder, you 
were hurt. These two are your friends. They've stood by you 
these months. But the truth is, your body is shutting down. 
You're dying. We've told you this before. Don't you remember?"

"Scully --" 

"She isn't here but she's waiting for you." 

The lined face of this older Charley turned to us. In his hand 
was the little pressure spray that would deliver the virus. "The 
damage is accelerating. We don't have much time if there's going 
to be anything in his mind worth saving. There's a pattern for 
restoring muscle, not for recovering memory."

The dry lips of the man on the pallet trembled. Fear held in the 
fiercest control possible was in the dark eyes and in the cold 
sweat of his brow. Mulder had heard and maybe he could even feel 
Death stalking him moving with furtive footsteps across the 
grass in the night. 

"He never said to go through with it!" Ness protested. 

"But you promised to give him what he asked for, you both did. 
So will I. I'll help you get back to Earth, to him, but we don't 
have time to go through it all again."

Mulder understood enough to look scared, only he clearly did not 
have the strength to look as scared as he should have been. The 
little blue light could barely be seen and the beats I saw came 
slowly. 

"It has to be now!" Charley declared.

"You won't be alone," I promised, the heavy, cold hand in mine. 
"We won't leave you."

The lips etched up in the attempt at a smile but it was as if 
the effort was too much trouble and never quite got there. 
"Somehow I always knew... in the end... alone but for the 
kindness of strangers."

Ness and I each grasped a hand though I don't know if he felt 
either. "Not alone and not strangers," I swore to which Ness, 
touching his hair now, eyes filled and glistening, added, 
"You'll just have to trust us."

He tried harder to smile this time. Certainly something wry came 
alive in his face, an expression so dear and so familiar that I 
felt the tears that I had struggled so hard to hold back rise 
full and warm in my chest. "Trust... the magic word. Do this 
then, whatever 'this' is," and his eyes closed even as Charley 
drove the poison through his skin.  

A shudder went through him as if the potion burned like a thread 
of fire going in. His lips drew back in a grimace then moved one 
more time. I bent close to hear but there was not enough breath. 
Surprisingly, his hand closed over mine. It was probably only 
the muscles trembling. I say this because a set of spasms went 
through him then. It was different than the ones I'd seen 
before. This series began in the deepest part of him. I doubt 
that he felt any pain, but I'll never know because his face went 
still then as all personality drifted away like the drop of dew 
exposed to the summer sun.


In time, his grip loosened, his hand fell to his side. The dim 
blue light on his wristband blinked more and more slowly. In a 
very few beats it went out and did not return.

I was all at once aware of -- silence. The silence of an empty 
mind when I'd hadn't even been aware that I was receiving. Even 
as damaged as he was there had still been some connection, but 
not now. After some interminable seconds a woman's soft arms 
went around me. Her head came to rest against my shoulder that 
was all too soon wet with her tears. These, too, were silent.


It was all I could do to leave him, just one more on the shelves 
in the room with so many others soon to be seeded like little 
pockets of infection on the planet of his birth. We placed him 
next to Billy with Theresa and Gary nearby. Kathy would not make 
this trip; she had not made it this far. Her uncertainties were 
at an end. Our last action was to fold up the blanket. We would 
have to take it away so he would look like all the others. He 
did look like the others, all pale or dusky flesh. More than a 
few had the same blackened and horrible wounds. 

Blanket clutched in her arms, back straight, Ness walked out 
with Charley. Only I lingered for one last look. I wish I 
hadn't. He looked so cold and, despite the company, so very 
alone.





BENJAMIN: Epilogue

As I remember, I made a scene the day that Mulder 'died'. When 
Mulder's mind faded into infinite silence I went into a kind of 
numb shock. That dam of numbness broke just as we were entering 
the long umbilical tunnel that would lead us back to Charley's 
ship. To Mulder's body behind so alone on City to be dispensed 
with like the others, like so many seeds. It was guilt, plain 
and simple. Easier to rail and weep over Charley's 'killing' him 
with his potions than to accept what could not be changed. I 
knew I was wrong; that he was only in deep hibernation to repair 
the damage before the metamorphosis that if all went well would 
never happen, that all would be well. That's logic, however, and 
emotions ripped raw can't reason like that. I clung to Ness all 
that long, dark trip between the silver of the slowly spinning 
station and Charley's ship. Bewildered and lost, not 
understanding in the least the hard soul of this soft creature 
that Mulder had brought me, I allowed her to tow me back. I 
lapsed back into my numb place after that until Ness and I and 
the nearly two hundred others arrived back on Dale.

The large proportion of women made the new colonists welcome, 
that and the supplies that Charley brought in his confusing but 
familiar guise of the young Dan Rowe. There was metal, each 
ounce of iron as precious as gold, and preserved food because it 
was winter and we were bringing so many extra mouths to feed. 
Most blessed of all, he brought the promised remedy for the 
bleeding syndrome that had killed Dale's women. 

Why bring the refugees to Dale? Where else could the surviving 
members of Ness's family have gone? The pressures of the 
civilization on Earth would have been hell to them, or so I'm 
told. Besides, Earth was still closed to the alien faction that 
Charley belonged to, so he couldn't bring the more recent 
abductees home either.

Dale was certainly what I needed. I didn't truly rouse from my 
stupor over Mulder's death until I took in that first lungful of 
bitingly crisp winter air. I at least had reached home safely, 
though not the person had I been so few weeks before. 

That was a phenomenally busy winter. Though we lived in shelters 
Charley sent down from the ship that were better in all respects 
than any cabin on Dale, we all knew they were temporary. It fell 
to me to teach and teach and teach. There was so much the new 
colonists needed to know. The Family who had lived all their 
lives on a space station had to learn that food would not just 
be delivered to you every morning through a little door in their 
'habitat'. The abductees from Earth weren't much better 
prepared. Once free of their various prisons, they had assumed 
that their lives would get back to normal. They had to realize 
that food would never come wrapped in plastic or served in 
cardboard boxes. When winter's back was finally broken there 
would be so much to do.

Ness and I were awkward with each other that winter though 
'together'. Being together had been assumed from the first. The 
awkwardness came from neither of us being able to forget the 
oath we had sworn and how impossible it was going to be to 
fulfill. But there was more than the oath between us; there was 
Mulder.  I knew how she had felt; to ask her to take second best 
was nearly as bad as being second best myself. If he had died I 
think it would have been easier.

The thaw in Ness came one early spring day when she went outside 
to gather snow to melt and to watch the sunrise. At her feet, 
just one dot in the endless fields snow, a single blade of grass 
had struggled through . It was the very first time that she had 
ever seen a wild thing growing. It was as if something hard 
broke within her then. She knelt before that single bit of green 
and wept the tears that she had held since Mulder's 'death', 
when she had held the world together so a very large part of 
mine could fall apart.

Her misery loosed a different kind of tightening in me and I was 
soon on my knees, arms around her.  Heat rises to my face every 
time I think of the inane things we blubbered to each other but 
they must have been the right things. Simply put, life went on. 
Mulder was lost to us.  He really always had been. What is real 
is so much better and you really don't have to give up one love 
for another. Parents love multiple children, after all, and each 
in his season.


Someday we will get to Earth, Charley has promised it. After all 
we have at least one of several promises to keep. If Mulder is 
found by another of the Jeremiah Smith's of Charley group and he 
neutralizes the virus, the Mulder who lives again still won't be 
the Mulder either of us knew. In that case I need to tell him 
and Scully -- for, of course, they'll be together -- all about 
these lost months. For they will be lost. He had already 
forgotten me. His mind had also been a blank to me. I asked 
Charley if the mindspeech centers would grow back during the 
time of repair, after all, the genes were still there. Charley 
doubts it. The burnout was complete. Scar tissue laid down upon 
scar tissue. Like memories that will never return, the virus, 
after all, has to have something to work with.

So maybe he's just a normal man now, but then a normal man was 
all he ever wanted to be. A normal man living with his Scully. 

That is what I'm hoping to find... a normal, happy Mulder, 
whatever that is.

There is the other horrible possibility... that Charley's people 
don't find him in time and don't neutralize the virus. Then a 
very terrible something will have taken his place, the thing he 
has been fighting for so long. I refuse to think about what we 
promised to do then, but refusing to think about it doesn't mean 
that I've forgotten.


Two years have passed. There is a new town not too far from my 
farm but not too close either. That first spring was an 
exhausting, incredible time. From bits of our shelters we made 
iron plows, which should have made the soil easier to turn but 
these new people were such pathetic farmers despite their 
enthusiasm that the planting took four times what it should 
have. Luckily, winter came late that year. I know that I didn't 
have time to think during the day... ah, but during the nights 
there was Ness, eternally excited by all she had done with the 
house during the day and in her own kitchen garden. At least one 
of us had the energy though I usually perked right up once she 
got me going though it didn't leave me many hours for sleep. 

We weren't the only ones preoccupied. With all the dating and 
pairing up between the colonists and old Dale dwellers, not to 
mention the changelings who now found the pressure less that 
they live predominantly female, it was a wonder that any crops 
got planted on Dale at all that year. 

Ness and I made it a point to harvest a lot of the river plant 
that resembles flax and I built her a loom during our first 
winter. It was one of our few joys that winter. While the colony 
exploded with pregnant women, Ness's abdomen remained flat. I 
don't know which of us was more depressed. Yes, she told me 
about what they had done, about the devil's bargain she had made 
to carry Mulder's baby, we just refused to admit the futility of 
our efforts, pleasant as they were in the short term. 

The colony as a whole held its breath when the babies started 
coming. Due to Charley's magic minerals, however, terrible 
bleeds were rare and mothers and babies thrived. Ness became a 
good midwife with practice though I never told her that she was 
welcomed into at least some of those homes out of pity. 
Meanwhile I carved toys that winter for all the children that 
would never be mine.


Except for our lingering disappointment, it was a gorgeous 
spring. With the social groupings settled down, there was a 
staggering surge of energy in the colony. And meetings? Oh, yes, 
meetings. Minds educated on Earth spoke on the dangers of 
deforestation now that we had metal tools and a much larger and 
growing population. We needed to stick to the gifts of turf and 
rock and brick for building and find alternative methods to heat 
and light our cabins during the long winters. Yes, there were 
some 'heated' discussions but we felt alive and there was a 
smugness that with this early warning, we would prosper more 
smoothly than old Earth. 

Finally in the late spring, a gift. Val. A little boy only 
months old came to live with us -- temporarily. His mother, one 
of Ness's 'sisters' from the Family and now a neighbor, had been 
badly injured in a fall and could not care for the child until 
after her husband was free from the heavy farm chores. It eased 
the anguish a little. 

What I haven't mentioned were the dreams that from time to time 
woke me sweating and screaming in the night only to find myself 
in Ness's strong arms. In one I wake alone in a black and 
airless place, trapped, buried alive. Ness tries but her 
assurances not to be afraid aren't very convincing. Even though 
Charley visits now and again, he has received no news of what 
happened on Earth and we certainly can't expect any from any 
other source. 

I know where the dreams come from. Early on I asked during one 
of his visits, "What if your people don’t find him. What if just 
any human does? What will their medical people think? What will 
they do?”

Charley was in his Jeremiah form, the one he used most of the 
time with us now. Everything showed on that face and that showed 
was grim. “They’ll do their best to keep him alive. That’s the 
last thing we want. They’ll end up incubating the monster." His 
face grew no less grim. "Then there's the other possibility.” 

“That they’re going to think that they know death when they see 
it,” I guessed with something like a rock in my stomach. I got a 
nod. “We burn our dead on Dale because most of us die in the 
winter. The burning brings heat and light at a time of cold and 
dark. Not the worst way to go.” But it would be a very final way 
to go for someone not quite dead. “Do they burn bodies on 
Earth?” I finally brought myself to ask.

“Sometimes. More often they bury the dead.”

The hairs went up on the back of my neck. “Like the early 
colonists? In the dirt? In the ground?”

“In a wooden box in the ground. Wood being less scarce there 
than here. They could do other irreversible things, but knowing 
him and thus knowing her, I think that once she had him in her 
arms and saw the state of him and all that he had suffered that 
she would want him touched as little as possible. There may, 
therefore, be a chance.”

“He could 'live’ that way? For how long?”

"We can only guess. This is a new 'treatment'. A year, maybe 
two, a decade. The rebuilding will go on, slowly, anywhere. But, 
Benjamin, he won't wake, not without air."  

So that was where the first dream came from, not quite believing 
the not-waking-up part. Of course, it goes without saying that I 
also dreamed about the monster, Mulder's appearance but no soul, 
destroying all that Mulder loved. I always woke up from that one 
before I had to see that part of my promise through. No possible 
good endings to that dream.

Clearly it was on my conscience that I had to get there, to find 
out. Either to see if he needed 'digging up', gruesome thought -
- though leaving him there would be worse -- or to put him in 
his grave for good. But the blockade around Earth held so there 
was nothing even Charley could do to help. He waited just as we 
did. 


It was one evening during the crisp days of harvest time that I 
found Ness in the 'sauna'. That stone beehive that Mulder and I 
had built had become a very popular gathering place in winter. 
Ness and I and friends had added three rooms onto the cabin to 
accommodate all the guests that somehow always managed get 
stranded during blizzards. But on this day she was there alone, 
sewing and watching Val totter about on his wobbly legs. Her 
face was a shifting mosaic of emotions. Sorrow first.

"What?"

"Jared’s coming to get Val in a few hours. Hannah is feeling 
better."

"Oh, Ness, I'm sorry."

She wiped at a tear. "No, it's time and actually fortuitous." 
Back straightening, another brighter emotion flicked into place. 
Expectation, almost excitement. "Ben, Charley's returned. He’s 
gathering the abductees. He can take them back to Earth, those 
who want to go and some do. There's a 'window of opportunity', 
as he calls it. Just that. The war goes on."

I said nothing. 

"We can go, too. You know we have to see for ourselves what 
happened to Mulder and not just because of the promise we made. 
We both need to find some peace." The intensity in her was 
visible, just by the way she held herself. She was bothered 
almost as much about the nightmares as I was and had her own. 
"If the worst happened, if he 'changed', if he killed Scully --" 

I swallowed. I admit that I was afraid -- of leaving here, of 
risking our happiness, of what we might find, and other things. 
When I remained silent, Ness rose and took me in her arms. I 
know I was too stiff but I felt carved out of wood. 

“What’s wrong?” she asked, lifting her chin to look into my 
face.

“If we see him again, it may be hard.”

“True, it could be terrible, we’ve discussed that.”

“But even if everything is perfect.”

She read in my eyes what I couldn’t say and forced a kind of 
smile. “Don’t tell me that you’re still worried about that.”

“You loved him.”

“He was my first crush, besides, you loved him as well.”

“He never returned it.”

“Not in 'that’ way but he did love you as friend and brother. 
More than me. He barely tolerated me. I have more reason to be 
jealous than you. As far as finding him attractive again, I’m 
sure I will.” She pressed closer and touched my cheek. “But he 
is a dream, a fairy tale. You are real and whole and strong and 
handsome and I am proud of you and being with you. You are bone 
of my bone. You are where my heart lies. I don't see any of that 
changing. That is the way of it.” And in that tone of voice, the 
words might as well have been carved in stone. Ness was a woman 
who knew her mind and, yes, we’d had this conversation before 
but still it was good to hear it again.

“I am a fool.”

“But my fool. Now come. Even though Jerad will take care of the 
farm until we get back, there is still much to do."

I was glad that she had it all arranged in the same way that she 
set her mind to everything, just as, I realized, she had set her 
mind on me from the first time I unclothed before her on that 
hillside on Rock Four. I felt a blush rising and stooped to kiss 
her, the kiss quickly deepening into something more for both of 
us. Some men would be set back by her brashness but to me it was 
part of her being Ness. It was her way and I didn't mind. It was 
a need in her to 'do' after so many years of helpless 
inactivity. 

Later as we lay in our rope bed just the size for two to 
snuggle, I tried one last time to reassure her. "We'll find him, 
he'll be fine." The words though were empty. How could I give 
assurance when I had none myself. 


Utah, United States
Three years after Mulder's 'death'

We came down in the beam at night as soft as petals falling in 
spring. But it was not spring on this my first trip to my 
ancestral home. The baked, stone-hard earth under my feet still 
throbbed with the blistering heat of the sun. Dale being a cool 
place I was glad not to arrive during the day, still I was 
frustrated. I wanted so much to see. Not that I couldn't see, 
their huge moon was a brilliant white jewel in the sky so bright 
that I thought at first that it was another, if distant sun. And 
the stars, the stars were glorious even if the constellations 
were different that those I had known all my life. While Charley 
spoke softly with someone on a communication's device, Ness and 
I found what I thought was the Big Dipper. Mulder had described 
it to me on that night, years before, when we lay before sleep 
and stared at the sky above the garden behind Max's surgery.

Over our heads loomed great cliffs of red-gold stone to which a 
few scrubby bushes grew.

"I thought Earth was suppose to be this green and growing 
garden?" I remarked, disappointed.

"Charley showed me on the map where we'd be coming down. Most of 
the Earth that isn't ocean is green. This is a desert region in 
a state called Utah. It's in the same country where Mulder came 
from though far from where he grew up and usually worked."

I put my arm around her strong, slender form. She rested her 
head on my shoulder. I was happy and proud that she had a chance 
to display her knowledge. For so much of the year the learning 
of all her early years lay fallow, like an off-year field as we 
concentrated on the physical labor of just producing the food 
that we needed for survival. The winter we had spent together 
had been glorious. There was so much she had to teach me that 
she had learned in City from the Fathers and Mothers. 
 
I let her be my guide then since her group had kept alive so 
much more of Earth than Dale. Dale had had neither the time nor 
heart for any but the most practical education in its battle to 
survive both the climate and the tragic deaths of its women and 
children.

"He's coming," Charley said.

In a few moments I heard footsteps on the sandy ground. I knew 
this would not be Mulder but someone who could tell us about 
him. We had that much information. Still I braced myself for my 
first sight of the figure.

I could tell just by his silhouette that he was a big man, tall 
and broad-shouldered and fit but with little or no hair on a 
well-shaped head. Finally in the light I saw a strong face but 
wary. There was no doubt about his intelligence and he had the 
look of a man who commands even if he wasn't wearing what I knew 
from computer images on the ship was a kind of military uniform. 

"Director Skinner," Charley said extending a hand in the human 
way.

After a moment's hesitation during which time he had to pull his 
eyes from where Ness and I huddled together, this Skinner turned 
to the shapeshifter.

"Colonel Skinner now," he corrected then, "Jeremiah Smith?" for 
Charley was wearing his 'Jeremiah' shape so as not to alarm 
those who had known the Bounty Hunter, Rodan.

"Call me 'Charley', the name Mulder gave me. Though I resemble 
Jeremiah for you, 'Jeremiah Smith' rightly belongs to my 
predecessor."

"Who was himself taken by your people only a few days after 
Mulder was returned and before he could heal him."

"Not my people. Another faction. And, no, he's not been heard of 
since. He was probably tortured; he could be dead or as good as. 
We're considered criminals by the wrong people. We consider them 
criminals, too, only there are just so many more of them."

Skinner's alert eyes turned to us. "You knew Mulder during his 
abduction?"

"One or the other of us for most of the time, Colonel Skinner, 
sir," I said using my best polite speech such as I would use to 
an elder. 

"And how long was that?"

"Considering the half a year on Dale that I knew him, the time 
he was on City with Ness and the months before that on the 
Portjam with Billy and the others, we have information on about 
fifteen months."

Skinner's eyes widened. "For us Mulder was missing only half 
that time. Time being relative, our physicists have calculated 
that only a few days may have passed from his point of view. 
That's what we had hoped."

"Then your physicists need to look at their figures again."
   
"None of that matters," Ness snapped with irritation. "He must 
have made it back then! How is he? And Scully, did they find 
each other?"

The stern face of this commanding man if anything hardened. He 
held up a hand, "Wait," and spoke into the communications device 
he carried. Instead of the softly spoken question being 
answered, a second figure emerged from the dark. This one was a 
boy, shorter than I though taller than Ness, with intense eyes 
in a round face that didn't go with the rest of him. Older than 
a child but not yet a man.  

Oddly, I felt my mind itching as if someone were reading it, 
which couldn't happen, not here. Could it? 

"They are who they say they are, Colonel." My head itched more 
fiercely as the boy continued, "And the knowledge they carry... 
it's incredible."

For the first time, the stern face of Skinner changed, crumbling 
on the edges with some strong but fiercely contained emotion. 
"So it's true," he breathed. "There is so much we need..." He 
took a deep breath to steady himself. "I blamed myself for his 
being taken. For what he went through. Now he can fill in the 
holes, so can we all. But what do you say, Gill?" he asked the 
boy. "Should he be told? Would knowing be worse? He doesn't need 
any more grief."

The far-off-seeing eyes of the boy were like those in the 
picture of Buddha I'd seen in the computer. He shook his head. 
"It's horrible and amazing but he has the right. He certainly 
has the need."

Ness was shaking in her impatience. "Tell me! So Mulder's alive. 
He's well and happy?"

The face of the big man in uniform was thoughtful. "Alive, yes. 
Physically, well? Yes. Happy? No one could say that, not 
completely. Maybe your news will help."




MULDER: Epilogue

Morning. I'm not even out of bed and Skinner is bringing 
visitors. Visitors are rare enough but after another bad night I 
am not at my best. You would think that having Scully in my bed 
would help -- oh, it does -- it's just that I can't help 
thinking how bad and empty that place would be if she were not. 
I know that I can't help but reach out and hold on when the 
chill creeps across my skin and sinks deep into my bones. It's 
the grave come again.

And that's what it's like when I'm awake! The terrors that come 
in sleep are another matter. It's my spirit the demons are after 
then and the vast dark for my soul.

Yes, since my 'return' I am finally convinced that I have a 
soul, or had one. Either I lost it or it's too damn scared to 
come out. How else can I explain how dead I feel inside, for 
dead is all I feel when I'm so absolutely terrified. Scully's 
euphemism for this is that I'm 'in a mood'. I wonder if she 
knows how hard I try not to be in this particular mood for her 
though now that we're together constantly, it's impossible to 
keep up the pretense. I know that Gibson -- correction, Gill, as 
this maturing child prefers being called -- has talked to her 
about those months when I went into hiding to save my life and 
hers and William's. He had to have told her of a depression so 
bleak that I didn't wash or rise from the stifling, dusty couch 
in his little New Mexico trailer for weeks at a time. I just 
laid there getting hairier, and grungier, and grumpier by the 
day, obsessing over and over about all the ways that I had 
fucked up my life and yours. But the prime topic was always my 
stupidity in Oregon and even more the constant wondering over 
what happened to me during those months of dark. What was done 
to me? What was I forced to do? What am I still capable of? 
Brain washing comes to mind. At any time some post hypnotic 
suggestion may come leaping out and then murder, mayhem. In this 
day and age is it possible for one man to open the gates and let 
in the invasion force?
 
You get the picture. And it would all go around and come back, 
go around and come back. Again and again. Going no where. 

The only thing that would bring me out of my funk was for Gill 
to pull me out into a cloudburst. Something about the night and 
the thunder and lightning and the bone-chilling, driving rain 
touched 'something'. Only what? What? WHAT! Damn! How can 
'nothing' be so mountainously huge? I have retained a few 
images, though none that you'd want to write to the folks back 
home about. I'm pinioned like an insect on a rock; nothing else 
could be so uncomfortable and -- oh, gods, the pain. Bright 
metal arms come towards me. Arms ending, not in hands, but in 
glittering laser and probe, saw and knife. They connect -- 
though my mouth and into my brain mostly, but then there's the 
saw cutting though the skin of my breast above the breastbone. 
Terror and agony and the spray of blood. 

Maybe I could live with this -- torture I've known -- but there 
was more, much more before I 'died'. How do I know? I get these 
flashes of deja vu -- 'already seen' -- coming out of left 
field. Everyone has them but not like mine.  I've taken to 
writing them down before they evaporate like mist. I have quite 
a list. Besides standing in the rain in the dark during 
thunderstorms, there's bland food (I've taken to adding so much 
hot sauce that I'm accused, laughing, to being one of those 
aliens from 'Roswell'), the color brown (particularly when it 
comes to food), and pink sponges (doesn't get me out of 
cleaning, Scully buys yellow ones). I can't sit on a lawn 
wearing shorts; the feel of the grass blades touching my skin 
drives me mad. I never use to take medicine without a fight but 
now I down four Tylenol at the first hint of a headache and 
usually my hands are shaking so badly by the time I get to the 
medicine cabinet that I can barely get the childproof cap off. A 
night sky full of stars awakens something so painful to me that 
I cry, every time. 

There are days when I feel like I'm falling apart. Image upon 
image upon image and each with the emotional impact of a bullet 
and just as quick and just as shocking. However did my serene 
Scully deal with her lost time? I feel so useless, so pathetic 
next to her strength, but then she always has been the strong 
one. I was just the obsessed one.

"We all manage in our own way, Mulder. And I wasn't so together 
for quite a few years. I didn't let you in, did I? Needed you, 
leaned on you, but couldn't let you in. Takes time."

I fear that for me 'getting over it' is going to take forever. 
This has been no delayed PTSD from some forgotten childhood 
trauma; this had been immediate! I have been a wreck from the 
moment I woke up to the sight of Scully's tear-stained face. 
Nearly eight months pregnant! If only I could have accepted it 
from the start as a miracle. If only I could have shown at that 
first moment that I was truly happy for her. Instead it was as 
if I were made of wood. Why? Maybe it was shock but I couldn't 
feel. It was as if I were an alien looking in on a play in a 
language I couldn't understand. I know now that part of the 
reason why I kept my distance was because I didn't want to 
contaminate her with what I had become. After all, she was life, 
perfect life, and I was -- death. It certainly felt as if I was 
still dead inside. I was no good to her, little good to myself, 
absolutely no good for the X-Files. I didn't care, I didn't 
fight, I let it go. I threw it away and fell back on the quest, 
the quest, and the future to save. To save for someone if not 
for me. Oh, and, yes, I did leave her and William to keep them 
safe but to keep from dying again myself, that was a part of it. 
Of course that was then. No one's going to kill me here, unless 
I take that little task into my own hands. So I get up in the 
morning and take just enough anti-depressants to get me through 
the day with half a brain cell running. 

That reminds me, got to get up. Skinner's coming with visitors. 
I roll out. Dress. From Skinner's voice this sounds pretty 
important. Shit, what do I care. I throw on the clothes I took 
off the day before. Are they also the clothes I wore the day 
before that? At least they are clothes. 

I shuffle blearily down to the commissary to get coffee and a 
bagel. A few hands wave but no one speaks to me. They know 
better when there are purple shadows under my eyes, at least not 
until I've had coffee and time to absorb it. The food choices 
aren't many but a long way from the stale bread and rancid 
peanut butter that Gill and I lived on in New Mexico. At least 
then, however, I had the sky. No sky here two hundred feet below 
ground. 

That I would live like this, protected by the fucking government 
from the fucking government. How did that happen? I know I had 
nothing to do with it. Not directly anyway. As I sit with the 
mug warming my chilled hands I run down the short version in my 
mind. Facts are comforting.

MUFON, NICAP, and all those other organizations that believed in 
the existence of extraterrestrial life from the beginning are 
far from the crackpots the media would lead you to believe. 
Their founders were some of the first on the silicon bandwagon 
and instead of buying fancy cars, fancy mansions and fancier 
boy/girl toys put their money in a more practical direction. And 
so was born a large, well-funded extremely hush-hush federation 
that knew quite well what the government refused to admit and 
thus decided early on to have nothing to do with it except to 
bleed telemetry off their satellites. Sound like anyone you 
know? Yes, the Lone Gunmen of sad memory were charter members 
from the early days, at least Langley and Frohike were. Age, 
race, religion, sex, nationality were no barrier since so few 
actually met face to face, praise the Internet. (Who do you 
think REALLY got it started?) Of course, they had their radical 
fringe of UFO crazies. Some were real, some just playing a part, 
both were smoke screen, a deliberate campaign to discredit the 
group to those who didn’t know better. They did a good job. 

Interesting what Max Fenig said about Agent Mulder's career 
being so closely watched. Between my expense accounts and the 
Gunmen all of my activities and everything in the X-Files pretty 
much found its way into their databases, yet they never let me 
in. Too dangerous for me as well as too dangerous to their 
secret. I was too visible, too high profile. 

Too much of a loose cannon even for the lunatic fringe.

Of course when I went underground that was another story, though 
by then much more had changed. My old friend Senator Matheson 
was their first contact with the legitimate government. That 
ended badly. Later contacts were more subtle and included 
meticulously scrutinized members of the military, NSA, CIA, and, 
most importantly, the Department of the Treasury, especially the 
IRS. How else do you think they kept their millions so safely 
hidden.

Kersh's epiphany on the last day of my 'trial'? He wasn't the 
first to finally see the light and realize that humanity and 
civilization, in particular the U.S. government, had somehow 
lost control. 

How did Scully and I eventually 'link' up with this super-MUFON-
NICAP group? We were contacted outside our Roswell motel the 
morning after Spender's certain death in the ruins and our 
narrow escape. We were enlisted over a two-egg special with hash 
browns and a bowl of Grape Nuts Flakes. It wasn't difficult -- 
we really had no where else to go. By this time, the loose 
Internet web had developed a head, a central mind, referred to 
simply as, the Mind, with a very soft 'd'. In other words, The 
Mine. We were driven in a luxurious RV to Utah and give a grand 
tour of their new headquarters. You know those radio ads you've 
heard about Yuka Mountain? The central depository of all nuclear 
waste in our country? I'm standing right in the middle of it, 
well, beside it actually. 

It does make a kind of sense. As you can imagine no one bothers 
us and we have unlimited nuclear power, unlimited funding, and 
all the space we want by just extending the tunnel system. We 
also have some of the best brains in the country. Supplies come 
in and out in military trucks all the time to support the 
'public' work of the Mountain and what's a few million dollars 
in misplaced equipment a year to a government accounting office 
as fucked up as ours is.  We're well-shielded, of course. 
There's a hundred times more protection around this place than 
what most physicists would define as sufficient even for people 
living here 24/7. At least that's what they tell me. 

What I'm saying is that The Mind finally had to allow itself to 
be acknowledged as a secret though civilian branch of the 
government. They had to once they found out that Yuka Mountain 
was also sitting on one of the country's most concentrated 
deposits of Magnetite. See, there was a good reason for us to 
end up with such swell accommodations.

How this happened was that more than a dozen years ago, long 
before the coming of the Universal Soldiers, one man was smart 
enough to recognize that the shadow government that had been 
tasked since Roswell to keep this ET thing quiet was in danger 
of getting out of control. A significant number of career 
military and Men in Black (the real ones, not the movie ones) 
had begun splintering off into activities secret even from each 
other. Half of those remaining were more interested in job 
security than in the threat. The other half were too arrogant 
and narrow-minded to believe that Humanity could be defeated. In 
turns ineffectual and paranoid, the shadow government had itself 
become a target. That visionary was Bill Mulder. It was his 
plan, put into action only after his death, to allow the aliens 
to think themselves so clever. They would be allowed to 
infiltrate the shadow government all they wanted. Meanwhile the 
real work would be done elsewhere. Only where and by whom?
                
Through that open door walked the Mind and all its Internet dot-
coms. That's how all those geeks came to be working here in the 
Mountain and shrink-wrapped by a special branch of government 
security posing as protectors of the national nuclear waste 
dump. 

Now how to keep such a thing quiet? Amazing how well you can 
keep a secret if you know going in that you only need to keep it 
for ten years. That's not very long in the scheme of things.

This means that, yes, they've known the invasion date for twenty 
years, suspected it for longer. 

What that amounts to is that I infiltrated that shadow 
government base for nothing. I went through that horror of 
prison and the extraction of my 'confession' and trial and 
dragged Scully and Skinner through that hell for nothing. I 
nearly died (again) and for what? I was invited in here only 
after I'd burned all my bridges behind me. A charity case.

And Scully wonders why I'm depressed.


As if aware of my thoughts, there she is. She's clearly come to 
this dingy commissary looking for me because she heads directly 
to the table where I'm hunkered down with my coffee waiting for 
the caffeine to take effect.

Something's going on for she is transformed. Not changed in any 
outward way but she glows from the inside with -- what? 
Expectation? Only then do I remember Skinner's message. The 
medication makes it hard to think sometimes.

"Mulder..." and the tone is her old chiding one, no pity. "Come 
on, you have to shave, wear something clean at least."

I let her pull me up unresisting. I'm not put off by her gentle 
nagging. It's the undercurrent of excitement I follow. The 
dreary clouds over my soul actually lift a little. 

"Who are these people?" We're in our 'suite' now, small, but all 
ours. "Wait, you already know!" I exclaimed as she urges me 
towards the small bathroom. "Why tell you and not me?" When she 
doesn't answer immediately I mulishly stop dead, ignoring her 
urging. "Scully, I'm not a child."

She knows that the game has gone far enough. "Shave, I'll tell 
you. Skinner asked me to anyway so that it wouldn't be so much 
of a shock."

"That bad?"

"No, good news." Her brilliant eyes dimmed uneasily then. "News 
at least. 'Good' we'll have to determine later."

"You're driving me crazy here."

"Shave."

I reach for the electric razor. You can probably guess why I 
don't use a straight edge any more. My choice, by the way. 
Scully never asked and I never told her that on some days when I 
still had access to razor blades, the temptation had become 
almost too great.

Thirty seconds and it's done -- she didn't say that it had to be 
a good job -- and clothes are off, too. Possessively, she runs a 
hand over my chest now that the shirt is off. 

"Better stop that if you don't want him to find us otherwise 
engaged." That was one part of our lives that amazingly hadn't 
suffered. After eight years of barely touching, it's like we 
can't keep our hands off each other. It also helps that if we're 
touching we're not talking which means that I don't have to 
answer questions like how am I feeling.

She gives me a long serious kiss of love, not passion, and I 
slide on clean clothes of my own choice --jeans, black T-shirt. 
The ones she likes. She doesn't complain.

"Not formal then. No military types?"

"Only Skinner. And its personal, not business."

"It's not about your Mom, is it?"

Scully sits gingerly on the edge of the one upholstered chair in 
our sitting area. "No, she's safe in her safe house on the Outer 
Banks, at least until the first hurricane comes."  

I force myself to sit across from her on the battered couch that 
already knows my shape. My hands slip between my knees to keep 
them from fidgeting.

"You are driving me crazy here."

"It's hard." She takes a deep breath. "Two people have come. One 
of Jeremiah's Smith's faction brought them through. A young man 
and a young woman. They knew you -- during the time of your 
abduction."   

It's fortunate that I am already sitting down because I'm 
suddenly shaking so badly that I would otherwise have been on 
the floor. Scully is beside me now, arms around me though I 
don't remember her moving.

"How do we know they're for r-real?" My voice is as unsteady as 
the rest of me. "Even if they were there, how can they remember 
anything? Theresa Hosie can't remember any more than I can."

"Clearly, these two have a better travel agent that you and 
Theresa and Gary and Billy did. They came direct."

Shit and shit. "Still, how can we be sure? They could be anyone. 
I've been fooled before."

"Skinner took Gill. Gill says that they're legit."

A tightness in my chest that had been with me since I first woke 
from the dead at Scully's side relaxes enough for me to take 
what feels like my first deep breath in three years. 

That would do it. 

I sat for a long moment then, staring at the huge mural on our 
one bare wall. It's of desert scrub and defiant red rock up 
thrusting into the purest of blue skies. All at once I can't 
breathe again and jump up, a little unsteadily, to flip on a 
bank of fluorescent bulbs. The setup helps the claustrophobia 
that comes with always being so far underground. White light 
floods the room. My thoughts are circling in crazy ways. I pace. 
It's not far, three paces East and three West. I see her sitting 
there so alone and so I come and sit and hold her against me. 
She is everything real that is real at that moment. We sit that 
way, silent, holding on.

Finally, she draws away but only so that she can speak. "So now 
you'll know," she says softly. "What then, Tiger?"

I shrug, or maybe it's a shiver.

"Will it matter to know what happened," she asked, "or is it 
only the not knowing that's the problem?"

"I don't know. What if I find that they brainwashed me into 
killing hundreds, or thousands." I force a glitter into my eye. 
"Or into having sex with dozens and dozens of women."

"Don't make jokes about that."

"If it happened, would that matter to you?"

Her hand comes to rest on my cheek. "If it kept you safe, if it 
kept you from feeling alone and lost, I would have wished you 
that kind of release a thousand times." And she is perfectly 
serious.

That earned her another kiss, a long one.

When we finally parted, which was just shy of the point of no 
return, I was on my knees before her, my arms still full of the 
slight steel of her. Crying again, like a fool. How could I have 
treated her so coldly those months immediately after my return? 
True, I'd been a mess, but to put up such walls after all she 
had suffered, and later to abandon her and our son...! 

"Mulder, I understand," she assures me as she has a dozen times 
since with the kind of unflappable logic that can still cut. 
"You 'were' a danger to us!"
 
"I should have found another way. I've been a target before."

As before, she touches me -- runs her fingers through my hair 
this time -- and absolves my guilt, saying that I was not to 
blame, that I was still reeling back and forth between 
depression and shock. Sorry, that is no excuse! If I'm as 
intelligent as I'm reported to be, I should have found a way to 
keep us all safe! As a result of my selfish, short-sightedness, 
because of my failure, she was forced to give up the miracle 
child, the dearest to her of all possible hopes and dreams.

Only a total scum would have done what I did. The poorest 
possible excuse for a human being much less a father. And I had 
had my own dreams. I had wanted to be such a good father. Maybe 
I should have expected failure in that arena just like in the 
rest of my life considering the role models I had.

As if she can follow the well-worn tracks of illogic that my 
mind is following, her strong hands cupped my face. "Love, stop 
it." 

God... even now, in the midst of our love making, it's in me. 
Will it always be this way, vacillating between pretended 
happiness and intimacy and real happiness and intimacy, between 
the blackest depression and still blacker despair? 

Her touch and the smell of her, like her voice, is ever my 
reality and brings me back.

"You could have done better. You couldn't have done much worse."

"But you're the man I love, the only one I ever could love."

Which is a mystery it took me months to understand. Not only how 
deeply she had suffered but also how badly she needed me to let 
her in, that she needed my joy in order to truly feel her own. 
What a perfect traitor! So eventually I did my best to put a 
kind of smile on the pain, and not just with pizza man jokes. I 
really tried, I still do, every day, and I am continually 
overwhelmed when I get back ten times my effort in her 
happiness.

"You still think I can be saved?"

"You tell me. As I asked before, will knowing help?"

With a sigh I roll to sit on the floor at her feet my back 
against her legs. "What you're asking is what I'll obsess on 
next after I've filled this particular black hole in my life." I 
shrug. "I don't know. What if there's nothing left inside? They 
don't need me here. I'm just an icon, half of a zombie that they 
see that they need to save the world from."

She has continued to combing her fingers through my hair. Now 
she gives a sharp tug.

"Ouch!" 

She spins me around, her little fist clenched in my collar. 
"Imbecile, of course they need you! They need your twisty, 
brilliant mind and your bad jokes. They need your suspicious 
nature. They've been waiting. I'VE been waiting, and for the 
real you, not just a rolling mass of darkness sprinkled here and 
there with sugar and spice."

"Dana, I can't promise. This is too huge. I need to hear what 
these two people have to say."

"No, no matter what these people have to say, you still have to 
work your way out of this, AND you have to succeed. I won't 
accept anything less."

And she lets me know exactly how determined she is about this. 
After a few moments, the intercom in our room wakes up 
disturbing her demonstration of just how decisive this woman can 
be and how that turns me on.






"Good morning, Moles," an irritatingly peppy female voice 
announces. "Walter Skinner is in the hole with important 
visitors. Let's make them welcome but try not to disturb them 
with endless questions. They can't stay long." The voice had a 
definite Disney Academy quality to it.

Scully breaks the suction of our kiss and our bodies, partially 
to stop from laughing.

"Harold's youngest?" I ask?

"That's my guess and you'd better get used to it. She wanted to 
be a radio personality before her father had to drag her in here 
for her own protection."

'Walter' also sounded odd but within 'the hole' even military 
titles were dropped. Civilian-managed, it was intended that the 
military would have little jurisdiction except to maintain the 
perimeter. Considering how much I believe that line you can 
image what a godsend it was when Skinner agreed to re-enlist and 
become our liaison after his forced 'retirement' from the FBI.

"I hope he doesn't mind the disrespect," I murmured. "Despite 
his protests that he only joined up again to give us someone we 
could trust to work with, I suspect that he privately likes 
being called Colonel."

"It's the fatigues," my Scully whispered conspiratorially, who 
had left her suits behind in favor of jeans more than a year 
before. "Certainly more comfortable than a coat and tie."

"Or the shoes," I agreed, wiggling my toes in my disreputable 
sneakers.

As we talked, more to kill time than anything, we had both been 
nervously straightening the room. Unfortunately, that didn't 
take long because we didn't have much. With a touch Scully 
changed our picture 'window' to the wallpaper image in our 
collection that was greenest and the brightest -- rolling 
farmlands. It was one of my favorites though for the life of me 
I couldn’t tell you why. On my screensaver before my abduction I 
had always leaned towards rugged seacoasts, mountains and 
storms. Now such bucolic scenes had found themselves into the 
mix. Surprisingly, they made me sad as if I had lost something. 
I wrapped my arms around Scully's slender frame and held on as I 
gazed at it. That sadness came on me again and a kind of peace. 
But why?

Questions. So many questions. 

Even though we were expecting it, we both jumped when the door 
softly buzzed announcing the visitors. Suddenly unable to move, 
I let Scully go to the door to play hostess.

I don't know what I expected; somehow not these two normal-
looking young people. The male was as tall as I, dark-haired, 
tanned a golden brown, good-looking in the boy-next-door sort of 
way and sleekly muscular, mid-twenties if that. The girl was 
just that, a girl, as small as Scully but blond with fair skin 
that was probably as tanned as it ever would be. Pretty but not 
gorgeous. Both bursting with health, they made the perfect pair. 
Didn't fit with abductees. Unconsciously, I had prepared myself 
for refugees from a concentration camp.

It was only after greeting Scully, whom they were surprisingly 
exuberant to meet, did they turn their eyes to me. 

Their eyes. Their eyes, their souls, were years older than their 
bodies. They had seen 'things'. I don't know how I knew but I 
just knew.

Skinner must have filled them in on me and my peculiarities 
because they didn't rush forward. The girl approached first. She 
moved slowly, those eyes on my face, hesitating before taking my 
hand. Hers was cool and trembled. 

"We left our home, our people, we traveled millions of miles, 
but it was all worth it just to know that you're alive, that 
you're okay."

I wouldn't know about the okay part.

The young man a head taller beside her touched my shoulder as if 
not entirely sure that I wouldn't disappear. "It is you."

"Then you really did know me?"

"Oh, yes," they exclaimed, and laughed nervously as the words 
came out together and with exactly the same inflection. 
Instinctively, I glanced at Gill, my truthteller. He was 
grinning with eager excitement, a rare emotion in that serious 
young man.

All was well then. The weight of suspicion released with a 
totally unexpected rush of emotion. "Tell it all," I said though 
the request must have been hard to hear over the frantic beating 
of my heart.

"Then let's start," the girl, Ness, said, "because we don't have 
much time. We have to leave by late tomorrow or miss our ride 
home."


So they talked and talked as I sat on the worn cloth sofa with 
Scully pressed beside me, hand in mine. They apologized that the 
first part would probably be erratic but neither of them had 
actually been there, so the young man, Benjamin, eventually 
began reciting from my 'journal'. My blood literally ran cold to 
hear my own words, full of hurt and my desperate loneliness and 
longing for Scully, come out of another man's mouth. Scully was 
entranced and silent until he got to the section about the 
'sponge', the isolation tank and the brain scan that was 
performed in an attempt to find out what had happened to my 
mindspeech centers. All at once she latched onto my hand with 
such force that her fingernails went through the skin of my 
palm. 

"The message I received on Halloween! It was true then!"

It was as if she had broken the trance that have wove around me 
as well. "Damn! What were we thinking? We should be taping 
this!"

Skinner stilled the room with a raised hand. "Don't bother. Do 
you think that you are ever not under surveillance?” His eyes 
lowered in apology. “For you own protection, of course."

I glared at him making it plain that, though this solved the 
immediate problem, we would be talking about that particular 
policy later.

It was clear that we wouldn't have missed much anyway. Our two 
visitors were just getting started. Ness did some of the talking 
now, her own story. Skinner had coffee and food brought in but 
no one could eat much and no one was going to sleep. When Ness 
talked of the deal she had made to be allowed to have a baby, 
Scully began trembling so strongly that I had to put an arm 
around her shoulders. Talk about the Lady or the Tiger... Would 
I by the end of this tale lie with this girl or not? When we 
reached the point where I was spirited away by Charley, virtue 
intact, I felt no triumph.

Flying lessons! The next section was about flying lessons. Talk 
about theater of the absurd! Skinner came alive and looked at me 
in a way he never had before, with sheer wonder and amazement.

"This means that you could help them at Ellens to fly those 
things." At my glare he amended his outburst with, "At least 
help them to see if they're put those aircraft together right. 
This could be a huge help to our defense."

Please, don't go there. Okay, maybe later. I’ll consider it, 
when this had begun to feel less like a fairy tale.

The story of my time on Dale was long but, at least in the 
beginning, brought the same kind of respite to those who 
listened to it as it had brought to me when I had lived it. As 
Ben went on in his soft Dale country accent, Scully looked 
curiously from the speaker to me and back again. Yeah, she had 
caught on to the parts he had carefully left out, too – that 
solitary young man’s attraction for his houseguest, his 
'newcomer'.

The episodes of torture that followed I can deal with; it was 
the growing back of the mindspeech centers that I found most 
disturbing but said nothing. Neither did Scully who dreaded 
going through that again as much as I did. 

Charley's return was not unexpected but to find that Charley and 
Mr. Stone-face Bounty Hunter were sometimes but not always the 
same person was a revelation and explained a lot.

Scully cheered without reservation at the news of Ness's 
pregnancy but her cheer was cut short as Ness stared at the 
floor and Ben's tanned face reddened. That joy was going to be 
short lived and in truth the tale did not end well for everyone, 
certainly not for me and Ness and Ben, though it ended as well 
as could be expected, I suppose. It felt weird to hear about 
what the other four and I had attempted. Considering that almost 
all the prisoners lived, I suppose you could say that the 
attempt was successful. Still Kathy had died, and later Gary, 
and Billy had died horribly after his even more horrible 
transformation. And I had 'died' and only by sheer dumb luck 
recovered, if the life I've led since can be called recovery. 
But Ben and Ness didn't ask about that; Skinner must have told 
them on the way here.

“So Charley was actually wrong," the former assistant director 
concluded. "There ARE invasion plans, and a date set which we 
are flying towards even now. Not just infiltration and 
maneuvering. Destroying the research station didn’t postpone any 
of that.”

“Unfortunately that’s true,” Ben said. “It turns out that his 
faction is not entirely trusted after all. They didn’t know 
about the invasion date. According to Charley, however, you will 
be in a much better position now when the time does come than if 
slave mentality had had a decade to infect the population. You 
prevented that. Earth’s people will be less likely to lose heart 
and give in.” 

“We’ve also had '9/11’,” Scully considered. “Western 
civilization, in particular the United States, has not been the 
same since then. Given a cause, the people will fight, they will 
sacrifice. We won’t be the soft, easy kill we might have been.”

"Still," I said, my voice numb with shock, "raising that huge 
ship, it should have meant more."

"It was enough," Ben said, gripping his wife's hand tightly and 
gazing into his eyes. "You brought me Ness. You saved hundreds, 
and I'm not even counting the children that will come after." 

I found that the two travelers were looking at me with hero 
worship in their eyes. Even Scully's green orbs were glowing 
though Skinner and Gill’s smug expressions indicated that they 
had privately suspected something as dramatic as this all along. 
What I heard was not the stuff of heroes, just the account of 
common people doing what had to be done. I guess in the end that 
that's usually the case.

Scully suddenly sat up ramrod straight. "Mulder, if Billy hadn't 
shown up alive when he shouldn't have been alive, and if Skinner 
hadn't exhumed your body --"

"Then you would be on your way to North Carolina now," I 
finished. Talk about footsteps on your grave; I could feel every 
one in my bones.

Scully was on her feet, hugging Ness, hugging Ben and thanking 
them both. Awkwardly, I got to my feet, or tried to, to do the 
same. For some reason my legs weren't working. Ben came to help 
me up but held on, hands clasped once I was swaying beside him. 
It took a moment for me to realize that he was speaking. 

"Please, we need a favor," he whispered. “I'm sorry that this 
has to be so sudden, but we don't have much time."

We were so close that I could smell the scent of his world on 
him skin and felt a surge as, unbelievably, it triggered a 
memory of dark turned earth and new spouted grass. 

"Anything," I stammered. "Anything you need." Then I caught 
Scully's eyes, which were achingly huge and brimming with tears. 
Ness had made their request to her already. 

"What?" I asked.

Scully answered. "They want a child, Mulder. You heard. Ness 
can't have Benjamin's. You're the only one who can give them 
one." 

There was suddenly no air in my lungs. "WE'RE the only ones who 
can give them one," came stumbling out. "You're part of this, 
too."

She was in my arms. "And I agree!".

"Scully, do you know what this means?"

"Of course, I do. A child of yours, away from here, off this 
battlefield. Safe. How could I not want that?"

There was no time to think, only time to feel the need of the 
woman pressed against my body. I could barely look at the 
hopeful faces of yet another couple who would raise a child of 
mine without me.

"My sperm may not be normal," I warned them. 

"Is that why you haven't had another child with Scully?" Ben 
exclaimed, wading directly in the quicksand of a topic that we 
had been skirting for more than a year.

"That and where we live," I snapped back. "A stone's throw from 
a few megatons of nuclear waste gives a person pause." 
 
"Only you can make that decision. As for us, we've all been 
tampered with; we'll take the risk. And who knows, the effect 
could be beneficial. We'd be happy if he turned out anything 
like his father."

"His biological father," Ness corrected, poking a slender finger 
against her lover's chest for emphasis. "You'll be his father -- 
or her father."

A sharp pain stabbed at my heart and closed my eyes. Maybe it 
was dark but I wasn't alone. Scully pulled my head down and 
planted her lips on mine. How could I have forgotten? Scully, my 
center, my touchstone, was with me and that kiss went all the 
way to my soul. Yes, I guess I have one after all. 

"Okay," I whispered into her ear, even as I bit down gently on 
the lobe, "but I may need a little help. It's been a long day 
and a long night after all."

Her hand snaked down slender fingers slipping inside the 
waistband of my jeans. "I think that that could be arranged."


It took an hour, only an hour, and the deed was done and the two 
were gone like willow-the-wisps. It's amazingly how quickly 
these things can be arranged. 

Not wanting to wait a moment, Ness and Ben had floated down to 
the 'Hole's' little infirmary to have everything ready when 
Skinner -- an odd mid-wife to be sure -- arrived with the little 
sterile cup. They were whisked off by Skinner moments later to 
make their rendezvous with Charley. Ness made the entire trip 
from infirmary to Skinner's van reclining. She probably made the 
entire trip to the spaceship in the same fashion to give the 
insemination a better chance of 'taking'. The last I saw of 
them, Ben was holding his wife's hand and both were smiling like 
idiots. As the 'harvest' was plentiful, the med tech only used a 
portion. The remainder was flash frozen and will be stored on 
Charley's ship for future brothers and sisters. Ben assures me 
that a lot of hands are needed to run a farm.

That left just Gill with Scully and I and since Scully clearly 
had words for me I parted with Gill at the door to our 'suite'. 

"Ben was right in that he has no small amount of what they call 
mindspeech himself," Gill confirmed to me in his soft voice 
after Scully had taken a few steps inside. "I was able to 
'download' all of the 'journal' from his mind just as you gave 
it to him so we can fill in the parts they edited out."

"And I suppose that you want to 'read' me those parts?"

The boy, now a young man, tilted his over-sized head. "Maybe 
that won't be necessary. Maybe some day you'll be able to read 
it from mine."

My heart skipped half a dozen beats. "No!"

"Mulder, you had such a bad experience with Spender that I 
didn't want to mention it but I always wondered if it could grow 
back or had already grown back. If the virus repaired everything 
else, why not? It's just not activated yet. Now that we know 
that your talent is controllable, it could be activated again --
"

"No, no, no."

"You could save the world. You could save Scully."

Hero stuff again, shit, and there was Scully standing at the 
door with something very definitely on her mind. Double shit. 
Gently, I pushed Gill down the corridor. "Later, we'll talk 
later."  

'What was I thinking?' I wondered as the door closed, but there 
was Scully waiting, hair like fire, eyes like flame. Thinking 
would have to wait until later. She took my hand and sat me 
down. Surprisingly, we didn't talk for some time. There were a 
host of thoughts behind those beautiful eyes. I would wait and 
let her begin; I'd only mess it up if I started. When she began 
speaking it wasn't where I thought she would.

"Does it ever amaze you how similar our lives are now to those 
of  -- Joseph and Sara?"

My eyes opened wide. We didn't discuss Joseph and Sara mostly 
because I thought Scully didn't entirely believe in them. They 
were us in an alternate time line. According to Scully, however, 
Joseph had, in a round about way, been the one who had come to 
her on the All Hallow's Eve when I was missing and gave her the 
message that I was alive. It had been some comfort to her during 
her own dark times. Secretly, I gave credit for the memory to 
the continued spicing of the air at that particular party with 
hallucinogenics. 

In any case, hallucination or parallel reality, we had a child 
in that story and all my fault that we had lost the one we had 
in this one and I made sure that we wouldn't have another.  

"You mean living in a mountain and working for a super top 
secret anti-alien organization? I'd say there were certain 
similarities."

"Then maybe that is how the story was always suppose to go." 
Sadly, she studies the dingy, trailer-sized living quarters. 
"Their accommodations were better."

"Sorry, I never saw them. They certainly smelled better."

Scully cringed. Trapped in Joseph's maimed body, I had been 
blind during my time there, a fact she'd forgotten. "You'll have 
to take my word for it then. It was like living in a mall, a 
really nice mall with a pool."

I put my arm around her. "I don't care about the mall part but 
if they'd just put in a pool I'd be happy. Something besides the 
cooling tank, of course."

"The point is, their organization was established decades before 
ours. The 'Hole' will get better, a better place for families."

So she had gotten around to that. "And the radiation?"

"We have a year of data from the monitors. They did a fantastic 
job of shielding. We're safer here than if we spent two weeks at 
Ocean City in mid-summer." Her hand tightened around mine. 
"Several of us women have been talking. We can set up co-op day 
care centers, home schooling."

"Down here? Where they'll never see the sun."

"Someday children will be born between the stars on multi-
generational colony ships. I know that you believe that. After 
meeting Ben and Ness you must. Those children will never see the 
sun either, or at least not ours."  

"And what about the longevity of ANY child being brought into 
the world now! They may have a very short life." 

"And so you'd deny them even a single hour of happiness of being 
alive? If dying is the issue than none of us should have been 
born."

"Scully --"

"Mulder, I want this. I didn't say so much before when you made 
your decision to use a condom all the time but I didn't speak in 
large part because I didn't think it mattered. I had my one 
miracle and I was afraid to ask for more. But I listened to what 
Jenny said; they as much as told her that I’d been altered in 
the same way. Mulder, if I read the story right you'll make me 
pregnant EVERY time we have unprotected sex unless I'm already 
pregnant." Her eyes were shining in a way that was both maniacal 
and terrified.

"We tried artificial insemination once, it didn't work."

"What if they lied to me? What if there was a mix up -- 
accidental or intentional -- and it wasn't your sperm? What if 
by fiddling with it and adding this and that 'preservative’ they 
messed it up so that whatever the magical DNA trigger you have 
for me was blocked or destroyed. It DID work the night after we 
learned that the A.I. failed, the night we sought comfort in 
each other." Her hand stole into mine. "The night the barriers 
finally came down. I guess sometimes the old ways are the best 
ways."

Which had been a night to remember, a night of unfathomable joy 
and bitter tears, the first time we had ever made love in that 
way. Unprotected, 'all the way'. 

"Oh, Scully, do you think that I don't want this too? But I'm 
still damaged goods. Look at William."

"LOOK at William. He's perfect."

"He's too perfect."

"So we'll find Jeffrey Spender and get more of his magical goo."

I didn't know whether to laugh or cry. "So you believe in magic 
now."

"Miracles, magic, call it what you will. I do. It's the world 
we're living in. And speaking of William, I want to see him. I 
won't take him from his life but I want us to be part of it."

"Aunt Dana and Uncle Fox?" I hissed, bitter sarcasm ripping 
through me. We had allowed ourselves only a glimpse of our child 
through a telephoto lens every six months or so for the past two 
years.

"Or Aunt Sara and Uncle Joe. Who cares?"

A hundred arguments struggled to the surface but were beaten 
into silence by this woman who I had never forgotten during all 
those long months of my exile. The very thought of her had been 
my light in some very dark places.

I answered in the truest way I knew, with my body. "What the 
hell and damn the torpedoes!" I murmured the words almost lost 
as my mouth was otherwise occupied.  It was Scully who struggled 
out from the kiss just as things were getting interesting. 

"Mulder, you don't have to do this. Not now. You donated for 
Ness and Ben less than two hours ago. Unless you can ...?"

"That only served to prime the pump, Tiger."   

She pulled me up off the floor -- don't ask me how we got there 
-- with an energy and a strength that never ceased to surprise 
me. "Then let's go plant a line in a sand for the future. It's 
not all about fighting."

"For the future," I agreed, swinging her up into my arms and 
heading for the bedroom.

"But first, Mulder," she whispered into my ear, "disconnect that 
surveillance camera."  

"Good point."

The End

Author's final notes: I started this series of stories the 
summer Mulder was abducted. That was ... what? Three years ago? 
The intent was to complete them before Mulder returned. Ha! The 
series ended before that. It was my feelings about the end of 
the series that are reflected in the last two chapters. This 
seemed the only opportunity I would ever have to comment on the 
mess that Chris made of the last two seasons. I needed to 
explain what I perceived as Mulder's general coldness, his 
distraction, nearly all the way to the end and also to give 
myself hope for their continuing story whether there's a movie 
or not. 

I will continue to write in a small way but when I do it will be 
for the Virtual Season crew or back in the early days before 
season four. I will not return to this time period again except 
for a short story called 500 Miles that I will post later this week.