EQUILIBRIUM, by Vivian Wiley (vivwiley@yahoo.com)


Chapter 8

The Alexandria Warehouse

Somewhere around 2 o'clock in the morning, in the middle of a
furious argument about the interpretation of the data from the
bee attacks, it occurred to Skinner that Marita was the kind of
woman who would wear garters simply so she could keep a stiletto
strapped to her thigh.

He flushed and turned away, but the image lingered--the
blue-grey
hardness of steel pressed against warm, creamy skin. He found
himself in a corner of the warehouse, staring at a blank,
rusting wall, hands on his hips, a slight catch in his breath.
What the hell was that all about? Damn, he was tired.  So
fucking tired.  He was starting to lose it. Maybe he'd already
lost it altogether.

Behind him, the others continued their argument. Marita and
Byers seemed to be the main combatants.

"With all due respect, Ms. Covarrubias, I'm not sure you're
interpreting the data correctly.  Yes, this is a small sample
we're working from, and we don't have any sort of comparison
data.  But I don't think you can ignore the consistent reports
from four different doctors, and now that we have this MRI, I
think we have to consider both psychological as well as
physiological factors.  I think we have to look at this MRI in
comparison to those we've seen on other people who have been
exposed to...."  Byers' tone trailed off.  He seemed caught
between the force of his convictions and a fundamental distrust,
or perhaps fear of Marita.

Marita gave what could only be described as an extremely
lady-like snort of contempt. "I think you're overestimating
what's here.  We're talking about teenagers, not the most stable
of subjects to start with, who were exposed to a traumatic
event. Some psychological outcomes are to be expected.  Early
symptoms of schizophrenia are often first noticed in the late
teenage years, anyway.  These voices that these young men and
women
are reporting could simply be that, or some kind of
group-perpetuated hysteria.  It doesn't mean that they have
developed the anomaly that you're implying. One MRI is scarcely
conclusive evidence of fundamental physical outcomes. Besides,
we don't even have a baseline to compare it to."

A chorus of protest from the Gunmen met her statement, voices
overlapping in anger, and exhaustion, and simple reaction to the
thinly veiled contempt in her tone.  She was tired, too, he
realized.  Her veneer finally wearing away.

Skinner closed his eyes and exhaled, listening to the debate
behind him. The words washed over him, occasional phrases
suddenly and strangely clear, but the overall sense was lost.
He could hear only their weariness, their frustration, their
desperate sense of time running out. Nothing made sense anymore,
and so the arguments became fiercer.  Battles fought over small
points for minor victories among themselves, because
there was no hope anymore, it seemed, of winning the war against
the enemy who stalked them.

He turned around and waded back into the skirmish.  He resisted
the urge to grab the nearest two people, regardless of who they
were and whether or not they were arguing at this moment, and
just bang their heads together.  As satisfying as a brief bout
of mindless violence might be, it seemed to him that someone
needed to at least try to pretend to be in charge. What the
hell, it might as well be him.

"Byers!"  He felt a mild guilt at the man's instinctive flinch
at being singled out.  But Skinner wasn't quite ready to meet
Marita's eyes. "What is it that you're trying to say about the
data we got in the emails tonight?  And what the hell were you
talking about in terms of comparing it to other people?"  He
wondered how much of his own fatigue was reflected in his tone.

"I'm not completely sure."  Byers still seemed hesitant to fully
present his theory.  "But, based on the emails we've received
over the past couple of days, it's clear to me that some of the
older teenagers who were stung in the bee attack in Italy are
developing futher behavioral anomalies that may correspond to
actual physiological changes.  Tonight's email seems to confirm
that.  We received an MRI of one of the girls mentioned in the
first set of reports from that attack, and her brain is
showing activity in areas that you almost never see."  He paused
again, his eyes darting nervously over to Marita, and then back
to Skinner.

"In fact, the only other MRI that I've seen that comes close to
resembling this is the one we saw for Gibson.  Although Gibson's
had far more 'hot spots' than this.  Still, it looks like maybe
this girl has developed a more active...."  he trailed off,
seemingly unable to finish voicing his conclusions.  Then he
shook his head.  "It's also got some resemblance to one of the
scans I saw from Mulder when he was....in
trouble."

Skinner sighed and tilted his head back in a futile attempt to
loosen his aching neck and shoulders.  He forced himself to look
at Marita.

"Ms. Covarrubias?  What is your interpretation of all this?  We
know that the Consortium has used bees as a ... delivery
mechanism for various infectious agents before this.  Do you
think this is part of some old experiment?  Something new?"
They had had this conversation before, he realized, but
everything about this game was circular, and maybe this time
through the maze something would seem clearer.

Her eyes, as usual, gave nothing away, but he was surprised by a
small twitch of her eyebrow.  It was an ambiguous sign, but out
of the ordinary, so he paid very careful attention to both her
words and tone of voice.

"The Consortium, indeed, has been experimenting with bees as an
infectious agent delivery vector for several years, Mr.
Skinner." Her formality now perfectly back in place.  "As you'll
recall," her eyes just slightly harder, "experiments have
included smallpox, and even an alien virus, such as Agent Scully
was exposed to two years ago.  However, none of the experiments
that were underway at the time when most of the Consortium was
destroyed a year-and-a-half ago were focused on creating
the sorts of changes that these people," she flicked a
contemptuous hand toward the Gunmen, "would attribute to the
attacks in Florida and Italy."

"Florida?"  He felt a mounting frustration, as though always
four steps behind the unfolding events.  "I thought we were
talking about data from Italy."

Her response seemed a little too nonchalant. "We are, but there
was a second batch of emails that indicate that some secondary
effects from the attack in Florida are also starting to be
investigated by local medical authorities."

The facts rolled around in his tired mind, loose, without
context.

"Okay, Byers, what in particular has you so convinced about the
importance of this data?  Is it possible that someone is sending
these to us just as a red herring?  Does any of this relate to
Mulder?  Did you just say something about this looking like
Mulder...?"

Byers' stubborn assurance had returned. "Since we're not
entirely sure of the origins of the emails that have delivered
us all these data, I can't guarantee that this isn't all just
some fraud.  But we have been able to do some validation of the
long-term effects on the children in Italy by examining the news
reports from that region.  Popular media isn't the most reliable
of sources, in some ways, but we have enough reports from
various Italian news outlets that it seems as though the changes
are definitely showing up in some small portion of the children
from the Sicily incident.  We're still trying to trace the
effects in Florida."

Skinner finally recognized what he was missing.  "Can someone
please tell me what changes we're talking about?"

Strangely, it was Frohike who answered, his tone and demeanor
graver than Skinner could ever recall.  "Voices, Skinner.  The
kids are reporting hearing voices, and it seems like maybe
they're able to read people's thoughts."

Jesus.  He remembered the desperation in Mulder's eyes in that
hospital room.  The terror and rage when he'd attacked Skinner
in the padded cell. The cold helplessness he'd felt at trying to
help his agent navigate his way out of the darkness.  He turned
to Marita.  "Could they be doing this?  Could they have
engineered some new alien virus?"  He could hear the anger in
his voice and didn't care.

She stood her ground, but for the first time in their
acquaintance he thought he saw a flicker of fear.  "I don't
know. Nothing that was going on prior to the immolation of the
elders would correspond to this.  I don't think it's very
likely."

They stood locked in each others' stare for an endless time as
Skinner tried to penetrate her thoughts; to weigh not so much
her honesty as her candor.  The extent to which she was
revealing not only what she knew as fact, but the speculations
she must have.

She finally shifted minutely, and added, "But, there was always
a faction that was engaged in some experiments about which we
didn't know everything.  We had most of the facts, we thought,
but there were always rumors about other attempts at vaccines
and ....creating hybrids."

Naturally the phone rang at just that moment, fracturing the
silence. Langly flinched as though a gun had fired, and Frohike
glanced around as though looking for a sudden intruder. Marita
walked over and picked up the receiver.  The call seemed to be
for her. She turned away from the group, and they could only
hear her quiet, monosyllabic responses to the caller.

It was apparent that the call would last for a bit.  Skinner
glanced over at the Gunmen, who had huddled and were speaking
urgently in whispers. Byers kept pointing toward the bank of
computers, but Langly shook his head and seemed to be arguing
against whatever it was both Byers and Frohike wanted.

Skinner rolled his head again, the ache in his shoulders
screaming of too little sleep and too much tension. He found
himself walking out of the warehouse to the small gravel-paved
yard behind it.  He looked up at the stars, remembering how he'd
found Scully out here just a few nights ago. He wondered how she
and Krycek were doing in Alaska.  It suddenly occurred to him
that there had been no update from them in more than 12
hours.  He hoped Scully hadn't killed Krycek. He gave a
skeleton's grin at the gallows humor.  Damn he was tired.

He wished he had the option of just walking away.  Of ignoring
the madness that had swallowed him like some kind of ancient sea
monster. But those options had all been closed off a long time
ago.  He was trapped--within and without.  Tiny monsters running
along his bloodstream.  The other monsters that lurked in the
shadows that surrounded them all.  There was nothing to do but
fight--something he had trained for all his life--but he wanted
a moment's respite.

One moment when he wasn't reminded at every breath of how alone
he was. Alone in the dark.

Fuck. He was too goddamn tired. Tired of it all, tired of the
strange motley crew he found himself leading, tired of himself.
He needed to get away for a moment--regain his perspective.  As
it turned out, he wound up getting much further away than he
ever would have imagined.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

A plane, somewhere over the Atlantic

He was not, on balance, a Grateful Dead fan.   But on the
endless plane ride, Skinner couldn't get "What a Long, Strange
Trip It's Been" out of his head.  The chorus looped and hummed
in his mind, irritating him, but ultimately striking him as a
truth he had to accept.

This wasn't exactly how he'd planned to end his career.
Resigning from the FBI in the middle of a search for one of his
own agents appeared cowardly, he knew.  And he had to admit to a
certain ambivalence about that particular action.  But it was
the cleanest and most efficient decision he could make in these
circumstances--they clearly had to go to Tunisia, and a simple
leave of absence was out of the question.   Nothing was simple,
and there was no other way to leave quickly, with a minimum
of fuss.

He knew he'd disappointed AD Jameson and a few other colleagues
whom, over the years, he'd learned to regard as something closer
than mere acquaintances.  Not quite friends, but people whose
respect mattered to him.  It was a final small cut, one more
dull pain to add to the others. After the events of the last few
years, he'd given up any illusions that he would ultimately
leave the agency a hero, but he hated like hell that it looked
like he was slinking away a whipped dog, tail between his legs.
No matter, he supposed.  He knew the truth, and Scully knew, or
would know.

And oddly, walking out of the building that final morning, after
turning in his badge and his service weapon one last time, he'd
felt suddenly free.  His shoulders looser, his stride a little
less fettered.

He shifted in his seat and stared at the patchwork of cloud and
ocean rolling away beneath him.  Stale air circulating through
the cabin, the insistent drone of the engines.  A long, strange
trip that still hadn't ended.

He found that his mind couldn't focus on any one thought for too
long. It jumped and skittered.  A loss of concentration was, he
knew, one of the classic signs of fatigue.  And stress.

He forced his mind back to the present--the reality of this
flight, and the destination that awaited them.

Tunisia.  He was flying to Tunisia.  It should have surprised
him more than it did.  On the face of it, he and Marita were
flying to Tunisia to follow what seemed the only solid clue he'd
seen yet about Mulder's disappearance, and possibly the deeper
conspiracy behind it all.

But it seemed to him that maybe they had been heading there for
years. Like a kaleidoscope, the fragments of evidence tumbled
through his mind. The men who'd assaulted him at Dr. Orgel's
house had been carrying Tunisian diplomatic passports.  Krycek
had been held in a Tunisian penal colony just before his most
recent return to the States.  And the Gunmen had added the
surprising information that Diana Fowley had made numerous,
unexplained trips, on quasi-official FBI business to Tunisia
during her tenure as a Legate Officer in Germany.

He had not been out of the country since his return to Vietnam.
In some ways he was ambivalent about traveling abroad again.
Sharon had always wanted to travel--to Europe, or South
America--but he'd always managed to find an excuse to avoid the
trips.  Some conference, some training exercise, some case he
couldn't possibly leave.  Until finally she'd gone
with her sister, or her friend Anne.  And then finally she'd
just gone. One more loss, one more sacrifice to a cause he could
barely remember.

But, Tunisia was where they needed to go.  Marita's contact,
whose identity she refused to discuss, had called with
information about a compound in Tunisia where, in the middle of
the desert, there were large structures and fields that seemed
to be supporting a bee husbandry project.  The compound was
heavily guarded, and Marita claimed that her contact had said
that some "familiar" faces had been seen on the grounds. She did
not elaborate, but it was clear that both her contact and the
familiar faces were part of the old network of Consortium
scientists and conspirators.

There was a followup email that showed satellite readings of the
area that showed power and energy readings of the area
consistent with the Oregon and Alaska readings.  And finally,
there had been an eyewitness account of seeing a group of
American men in the compound, guarded by "strange looking
military men." Two of the men described in the report could
easily have been Mulder.

After the call had concluded and they'd received the email from
her contact, Marita had been more animated than Skinner had ever
seen her.  She'd argued forcefully that they needed to depart
for Tunisia right away.  Skinner and Frohike had argued for
caution, wanting to wait for an update from Scully and Krycek
before making any decisions.  Tunisia felt like one more wild
goose chase, and it would be difficult, in particular for
Skinner, to just leave the country on a second's notice.

But Marita had persisted, and finally she had been forced to
admit that she'd long known of an ultra-secret Consortium
project in Tunisia that had been infiltrated by "certain
dissident forces from within the conspiracy," and it seemed to
her that the news she'd just received indicated that maybe those
dissidents had survived the holocaust that had destroyed most of
the established powers within the organized Consortium.

Finally Skinner was swayed, out of combination of his own
fatigue at trying to manage the two on-going investigations, at
least one of which--the one he oversaw at the FBI--he knew had
no chance of finding Mulder, and some strange intuitive belief
in Marita's convictions.

Frohike remained adamantly opposed to the decision. He seemed to
feel that Skinner was somehow betraying them by taking off to
Africa with Scully's status unknown.  But Skinner pointed out
that this information clearly needed to be acted on quickly,
given how rapidly situations involving the Consortium tended to
change, and also that the three of them would be staying behind
to coordinate any help that Scully and Krycek might need.
Still, as he left the warehouse that night to start making
travel arrangements, he could hear Frohike's angry mutters as he
bent over his computer.

So, now Skinner flew over the Atlantic, to an unknown future.
But then, the future had never been knowable.

He thought again about leaving the Bureau, and realized, with
each mile that opened up behind him, distancing him from
Washington and the life he'd come to take for granted, that this
was the right move at the right time.  Tunisia was merely an
unexpected variable.  It was time to leave. He'd worked within
the system, in one form or another, from the time he
was 18, and he had learned the lesson over and over again that
the system was inexorable, and mostly right, but that there was
also so much about the federal government that could not be
trusted.  Bureaucracies fed on themselves--preserving power and
systems out of habit and short-sightedness.  Change could come,
but he no longer had the patience to wait for the slow erosion
and evolution.

Mulder's disappearance had signaled more than just another
battle in this long engagement that various powers had been
waging for decades.  Skinner thought that maybe the endgame had
finally arrived, and it occurred to him that it might be nice to
ride out the final battle with some small measure of freedom.

He drifted into a waking fugue--coherent thought leaving
him--lost in the blank endless nothingness of trans-Atlantic
flights.  Amorphous shapes and memories floating in and out of
his consciousness with no pattern or meaning.

He was jolted from his reverie by a sudden lurch and slide of
the plane, a jolting, shuddering drop down and then right.
Startled cries of passengers and the slide and thump of loose
carryon luggage shattering the white noise of the plane's near
silence.

He grabbed the arms of his seat as the plane pitched forward.
There was another drop, and a lift, and the plane tilted left
and then righted itself, leveling and continuing on--the ride
rough, but no worse than traveling a badly paved road.

The captain's voice crackled over the PA system. "Sorry about
that, folks, we hit a small wind shear and some unexpected
turbulence.  We're moving up to try to get over this section of
turmoil, but you can expect it to be choppy for a bit.  Please
keep your seatbelts fastened, and we'll let you know when we're
back to smooth skies."

He looked over at Marita, sitting next to him, and was surprised
to see her face white, rigidly set.  Her hands, when he glanced
down were gripping the arms of her seat so tightly that her
knuckles were lividly white and red with the effort.

Without stopping to examine the impulse or his motives, he found
himself reaching over and taking her hand in his.  Her fingers
were cold, but her skin was smooth and soft.  Startled, she
looked up at him.  He met her questioning eyes, not knowing
exactly what was reflected in his own.  The lines of her face
eased very slightly.  Her mouth opened briefly and he
thought she whispered, "thank you," and then she looked away.

Skinner turned back to the window, and watched the threatening
clouds roll away beneath them.

End Part 8



EQUILIBRIUM, by Vivian Wiley (vivwiley@yahoo.com)


Chapter 9

Somewhere in Alaska

As usual, no one gave a damn what he thought.  "Tunisia?  Are
you out of your fucking minds?  I'm not fucking going back
there!"

Scully, deep in discussion with the five men, turned and gave
him the "Mulder, you're not playing well with others" look.  He
wasn't sure whether to be insulted or honored that she would use
the same quelling statement on him that she routinely used on
her partner.  He decided to go with insulted.  It suited his
current mood better.

"Hey!  I'm talking to you, assholes. I'm not going back to
Tunisia. There's the small matter of a penal colony there that
I'd just as soon never see again.  I don't have any idea if my
passport will be flagged at entry, but I'm not going to find
out.  Got it?"

One of the clones looked up. Krycek still found the five
completely identical sets of features creepy.  He had long known
about the Consortium cloning projects, of course, but it was an
entirely different matter seeing the results up close and
personal.  He thought the one who was looking at him might be
Kevin, their guide, but it was so damn hard to tell.

"Mr. Krycek, we are well aware of your....situation in regard to
the Tunisian authorities.  We've taken that into consideration."


Evidently that little bit of information was supposed to provide
Krycek all the reassurance he needed, as the clone then turned
back to the group huddled around the table at the back of the
main area.

It was moments like this when Krycek really missed carrying a
gun on a regular basis.  Wait, he was pretty sure he was
carrying one.  He started reaching for his waist holster.  He
stopped the gesture with a frustrated sigh. Too much concrete
down here--no telling where a ricochet might go. He really
didn't need another bullet scar, and he was pretty sure that if
he shot one of the clones and it started leaking toxic gas that
it would really piss off Scully.  There was never an ice pick
around when you needed one.

He stalked back to the couch at the far end of the room and
flopped on it with a tired groan.  Fuck it.  He hurt all over.
He was definitely getting too old for this shit.

He tried to ignore the incessant throbbing pain from his stump.
He'd been wearing his prosthesis for too long, and the running
and tree-climbing had left the scar tissue at the end of his
truncated arm inflamed and stinging.  He shifted uncomfortably,
trying to work up the energy to deal with removing his false
arm.

He was lying there, contemplating the essential unfairness of
life, when Scully broke from the group and came back to the
couch.  She stared down at him, her eyes strangely bright, and
he realized that she really wasn't seeing him at all.  She
started to speak once, and then broke off.  He waited,
swallowing her silence, trying not to set off the landmine of
her emotion he could just sense below her surface.

"He's there."  Her voice was barely a whisper, but it slid
knife-sharp through the quiet.

"Who?  What?  Oh...."  Initial disorientation giving way to
comprehension as he watched her face.  There could only be one
'he.'  He groaned disconsolately.  "Tunisia?  He's in Tunisia?"

Her nod was distracted; she still wasn't fully with him.
"Yeah--they've got several sets of energy readings showing at
least two different crafts landing there.  Also, they have
pictures of a camp there.  There was this one group of men...."
She broke off for a moment.  He watched in fascination as about
six different emotions flitted across her face in
mere fractions of a second.  She was torn, he thought, between
some almost uncontainable joy, and some extremely deep worry.
Her composure returned almost instantly, but he was left reeling
in the wake of her momentary display.  "It's going to take the
guys a day or so to get our travel documents and arrangements in
order, but we're heading out as soon as possible."

"Tunisia?"  He knew he sounded like a broken record, but it was
impossible to describe what a hellhole the penal colony had
been. "So what do we do in the meantime?"

"We need to wait here.  Kevin and the rest say the woods are
still overrun with the soldiers from the base, and that some of
them have set watch on our campsite already."

"So we're stuck here in Never Never Land with the Lost Boys for
the next 24 hours, and then I get to find out if they're any
good at forging documents or get thrown back into a penal
colony?"  He was pretty sure he'd earned the right to grumble.
At least a little. It was only later that he would wonder why it
never occurred to him to just tell her to go to Tunisia without
him.

He struggled to sit up.  He knew it was a lost cause, but
figured he might as well go out arguing.  He swore as his
prosthesis cut a line of agony across his stump.  His statement
of pain seemed to snap Scully out of her semi-reverie.

"What is it?  Is your stump hurting?" Her voice was clinical, a
doctor making a diagnosis.  It left no room for him to deflect
the question.

"Yeah--it's not really designed for extreme sports."

A quick nod. "After the night you've had, I'm not surprised.
Let me take a look. Hang on, I'm sure they've got some general
medical supplies here."

He wanted to tell her no.  That he would deal with it as he had
all along, but she had already pivoted.  He watched her
purposeful, clean stride across the floor.  She returned in a
couple of minutes carrying a fairly serious-looking first aid
kit.

In silence she helped him shrug out of his jacket and shirt and
then he was exposed before her--naked from the waist up, the
straps holding his replacement arm lividly cutting across his
chest.

He watched her face--braced for pity, anger, a slight revulsion.
There had been women since the amputation, and none had been
able to escape revealing her reaction at this moment.  None of
them had been Scully.  He suddenly remembered that she routinely
cut up dead bodies.  But it wasn't just detachment, there was
something else he thought he saw beneath the calm blue.

A slight twitch of her eyebrows, and then her eyes narrowed and
focused, assessing, weighing the data in front of her.  Warm
fingers reaching and unfastening the straps and hooks.  He
reached up to help her and his fingers met hers for a brief
moment; he dropped his hand away, scorched, burning. He sat
passively as she lowered the synthetic object, and turned
her attention to the living, aching end of his upper arm.

Her forehead knit briefly, a clinical compassion as she touched
his biceps, and gently ran her fingers along the end, wincing as
he flinched away.

"Yeah--you're rubbed pretty raw there. I don't see any immediate
signs of infection, though.  I'm going to clean and dress it and
give you some antibiotics, just as a precaution, and also a
light painkiller.  It'll take a couple of days to fully recover,
but we have at least a day to rest here and we'll assess after
that.  Let's also try to put some extra padding on the
prosthetic for when you travel."  He had forgotten what it was
to be tended by a healer.

She moved lightly around him.  Quickly, but carefully working on
his injury.  As she cleaned and bandaged him, he let himself
sink into a not-quite-conscious state.  Let down his guard, and
simply gave himself over to her care.  Once, as she ran a hand
along his shoulder, to smooth down an edge of tape, he came back
to awareness just long enough to suppress the shudder that
wanted to shake his spine.  He inhaled sharply, a mistake, as
her scent filled his nostrils.

She took his sudden movement for pain. "I'm sorry.  I'm almost
done. Just this one last piece."  And her hands moved away from
him.

He opened his eyes.  She was handing him some pills.  She waited
for him to put them in his mouth before passing him the glass of
water she held in her other hand. It's the small compassions
that undo you.

He looked at her steadily for a minute, knowing that he wasn't
giving anything away.  "Thanks.  I think I'll get some sleep."

"Good idea.  I've got some details to work out with the guys,
and then I'm going to crash, too."  She straightened up, and
without warning, her face drained of color. She swayed for a
moment, her eyes closing.  In the time that it took for him to
reach out to touch her, to try to steady her, she seemed to
regain her balance.

She stared off over his head, her hand rubbing her middle, as
though soothing an upset stomach.  "Damn. I really do need to
get some rest."  She walked slowly away.

He watched the space she had been occupying for a long while
before flopping back down on the couch.  For no reason that he
could think of, he was suddenly reminded of her dash up the
aisle on the plane two days before.  Some thought he couldn't
quite name began forming just before he fell asleep.

He did not remember his dreams.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

The desert of Tunisia

The cornfields still glinted improbably in the sunlight.  The
drone of bees was continuous, a reverberating buzz that combined
with the heat rising up from the midday sun created a potent
soporific, a feeling of lazy ease that surrounded them, lulled
them.

The sense of ease was the most dangerous mirage of all.

The two men stood where they had stood on so many occasions.
Strughold, as ever, looked like a European colonist, an almost
quaint remnant of a grander, imperial time.  The scientist wore
a baseball cap.  Perhaps he'd finally gotten tired of his fair
skin burning and freckling in the unrelenting African sun.

"Now what?"  The scientist sounded improbably young.  Of course,
reflected Strughold, he was only 4 years old.  In real terms,
that is. The whole age thing and clones was a difficult thing to
calculate, and in general Strughold preferred to leave
metaphysics to the philosophers.

"Now nothing.  We continue as always.  Phases three and four
should be ready for trial runs in a week or so.  And I hear from
our North American counterparts that they have recently received
a new shipment of supplies and equipment.  There was some
incident the night of the delivery, but I am assured the
intruders have been contained."  He wasn't watching the
clone, so missed the slight smile that crossed the younger man's
face.

They turned and began walking through the rows of corn, pausing
to inspect the crops, checking random ears on the stalks.  The
ears were uniformly perfect.

"I'm still worried about casualty rates."

"As well you should be.  I'm not convinced by our latest
results, and our vector of delivery, while having many
advantages, also is clumsy for many settings. But we will do
what we can.  We will be ready."  The pace of the conversation
had a familiar feel to it, the smooth rhythms of practice and
repetition underlying it.

Then the scientist managed to surprise Strughold.  A cold tone
the German had never heard before. "Well, some of us will be."
He held the older man's eyes for a long while, and then left him
standing in the midst of the gently buzzing field.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Somewhere in Alaska

On the whole, she realized, she'd been lucky.  Her pregnancy had
been extremely easy, only every now and again she'd be hit with
a sudden wave of nausea or dizziness.  Usually when she was
tired, but sometimes for no reason at all.  So far no one seemed
to have noticed, or least hadn't commented.  She hoped Krycek
was too self-absorbed to realize that he'd twice caught her in
the midst of morning sickness attacks, which, she'd noticed,
almost never came in the morning.

She bent back over the table, and traced the faces of the men in
the photograph.  The telephoto-captured and digitally
transmitted picture was grainy, but she stared at it anyway
until the images blurred into abstract patterns of black and
grey dots.  It could be him.  He could in this group.  The
clones had been so very certain, so very convincing that this
was the end of her search.

Mulder.  Are we finally getting close?  Are you really back,
somewhere on this planet?  I miss you,  I miss you.

It was not, she realized, simply that she missed Mulder, her
lover.  She missed her partner.  She missed investigating the
unknown with that agile, exciting mind by her side. She missed
the small moments of companionship.  The knowledge he had of her
tiny, obdurate habits--that she didn't speak, at all, until
after her first cup of coffee.  That after a long day on the
road, she needed just 30 minutes completely alone, to sink back
down into her center, to refresh her reserves.  That she hated
more than anything to be interrupted during the mid-part of an
autopsy. That a hand on her shoulder at just the right moment
told her everything she needed to know about the man at her
side.

She missed Mulder.  She missed knowing about him.  Knowing that
he was chipper as hell in the mornings, probably just to annoy
her.  That he would lose himself so thoroughly in a case that
even a piece of pizza waved under his nose was just another
annoyance to be swatted away.  That he smelled vaguely like a
pine forest under his sweat when he was just back from a long
run.  That his skin between his shoulder blades was soft and
smooth.

Damn.  The hormones were really getting her tonight.  Or maybe
it was simply that it had been an appallingly long day...a long
series of weeks, and there is a point at which physical and
emotional fatigue will not be denied any longer.

She felt sleepiness tugging at her, luring her toward the
bedroom that one of the clones had cleared out of for her, a shy
deference to her privacy.  She glanced over to where Krycek
slept, sprawled out on the couch.

It had been so strange traveling with him.  A completely
different dynamic than traveling with Mulder.  And yet, an
inexplicable familiarity to it, as well.  The sharp expectation
of contradiction, the occasional unexpected glimpses of humor.
She shook her head.  She was unraveling if she was sitting here
comparing Krycek with Mulder.

Then another thought hit her. Had she become so isolated from
everything and everybody else that Mulder was now her only
touchstone?  Could she only judge every person and every
situation against him and what he would do?  She really needed
to get out more.

Sleep.  Sleep would be a good start.  But the fifteen feet to
the door of her borrowed bedroom seemed an uncrossable chasm.

In the distant reaches of the underground compound, she thought
she heard a phone ring, a startling touch of normality.  When
you fall through the Looking Glass, you don't expect any of the
outside world to follow you.

Krycek muttered something and turned on his side. She watched in
idle curiosity to see if he'd fall of the couch.  He didn't.

Her thoughts drifted again, asea on the currents of incoherent
thought.  Tunisia.  Africa--calling her back again so soon.  Not
the Ivory Coast this time, but another ship, and maybe the
answer to a different mystery.


She had grown up a nomad, moving with her family from assignment
to assignment, the clockwork precision of the military tour of
duty--two years here, three years there, and always the next
post waiting for her.  She had not thought she'd be a nomad her
whole life, but perhaps this was simply what fate had decreed
for her. Certainly the last seven years had been nearly constant
travel.  And to such unimaginable places.

Kevin, or maybe it was Mark, rushed back into the room.  There
were moments when she thought she could tell them apart and
other moments when she felt trapped in some funhouse mirror
hall.  "Agent Scully, good news."

She felt the fog lifting away from her. She was surprised at how
close to the surface hope lived. "What?  Do we have
confirmation? Did you get more photos?"

The clone's face fell.  "Uh...no, I meant about your travel
arrangements. We've got the airline tickets all worked out and
are nearly done completing the ground transport arrangements.
Also, we've finished all the documentation that you'll need."

"Oh.  Thanks.  That's great."  She wanted to let him know that
she did appreciate the work that this announcement represented,
but it was simply not the news she wanted to hear.

"And, we're working on determining where you'll have the best
chance of meeting up with the rest of your team."

"My what?"

"Your team--Mr. Skinner and Ms. Covarrubias are on their way to
Tunis as we speak."

"They are?  Why?  They weren't planning on going anywhere when I
left them just a couple of days ago."

Suddenly Mark, or Kevin, or whoever the hell he was wouldn't
meet her eyes.  "Ah, well, we...we...uh picked up some
information that they were also going to...."  If there had been
carpet, he would have been scuffing his toe in it.

Fully alert, but still weighted down with exhaustion, she
watched him narrowly.  "I see.  Well, it would be good to have
all of us together, I suppose." She could hear her suspicions
staining her voice.

"Yeah.  There's a lot going on in Tunisia, you know."

"I didn't know, actually, but I suppose I'll find out."  She
decided that if they were going to kill her they could have done
it some time ago, and without the difficulties of sending her to
Africa.  She decided it was long past her bedtime.

"So, when do we leave?"

"Not for another day or so.  We have a couple final arrangements
to make."

"Fine.  I think I'll get some sleep then."

"That's a good idea. In your condition..." At her sudden
stiffening, he reddened and his voice dropped to an almost
inaudible stammer.  "That is...after the day you've had, I think
sleep would be advisable."

She stood there, debating how important it was to find out
exactly what the clone knew about her pregnancy. Ultimately, she
gave up--she was too tired to argue even with herself.

The bed was narrow, but the sheets were clean, and the mattress
offered firm support.  Sleep didn't claim her instantly, though.
Thoughts of the journey ahead kept her awake for a little while
longer.

The desert waited for her. It felt like a final frontier, the
last hope of a desperate explorer. You'd better be there,
Mulder, because I'm not sure where I'll look next for you if
you're not.

End Part 9


EQUILIBRIUM, by Vivian Wiley (vivwiley@yahoo.com)


Chapter 10

Tunisia

They landed in hell.

At least, for one travel-addled moment, that's all Skinner could
think. The heat was a solid wall that he collided with at the
door of the plane, and then finally forced his way through,
muscles protesting the movement, the fight to wade through the
waves of hot vapor rising from the airport's tarmac.  Walking
down the stairs from the plane to cross the asphalt to the
terminal, he squinted ineffectively against the glare of
the sun off the silver of the jet and the white of the building
in front of them.

God almighty.  It might be a dry heat, but it was fucking
miserable.

Marita had donned a pair of sunglasses before emerging into the
desiccating sun, and she moved effortlessly through the air,
smooth blond glide beside him, as they moved into the terminal
which was, he thanked every deity he could remember, air
conditioned.  Once inside the building, he found it easiest to
simply follow her, follow her lead. Thinking, at the moment,
seemed beyond him.  He trailed in her wake, as she guided them
quickly and efficiently through the labyrinth of passport
control and customs inspection of their luggage.

She switched seamlessly from French to something that sounded
like a local dialect of Arabic and then back into English with
almost no pause.  A brief, cool smile here, a handshake that
might also have been passing a bribe there, and an unbelievable
25 minutes later they were standing on a sidewalk outside the
terminal, once more wilting in the merciless white-yellow sun of
Tunisia.  That is, he felt like he was wilting. Marita seemed
unchanged from any other time he'd seen her.

He realized that crowds of travelers swirled and swarmed around
them. A motley collection of vehicles--cars, trucks,
taxis--pulled up the curb and paused, double and triple parking,
picking up passengers, and disgorging other travelers, and
livestock.  A Babel of languages eddied about them.  Women,
swathed in the traditional Muslim garb that covered them head to
toe, led dark eyed children into and out of the terminal.
The air smelled of dust, and gasoline, and metal.  Skinner
suddenly became aware of how very far away Washington was, and
how distant all that was known and familiar had grown.  The
weight of the distance pushed down on him, oppressive and
stifling.  He wondered if, when he picked up his feet to walk,
he would see his own footsteps pressed in the concrete where
he'd been standing.

He shook off his strange, melancholy as Marita suddenly raised
her hand and gave a piercing whistle.  "Ahmed!  Over here!"

A battered jeep, that might have once been dark green, screeched
to a halt, imposing itself through the chaos of the other
vehicles.  A cheerful young man wearing jeans and a black shirt
hopped lightly out, and began picking up Marita's bags and
flinging them in the back.  His skin was sun-darkened teak, and
his black beard was neatly trimmed. His teeth flashed, a sudden
blinding white. "Miss Covarrubias, so good to see you again."
He seemed to genuinely mean this.  Skinner had the fleeting
thought that it was maybe not surprising that the young man
would be glad to see a beautiful woman again....but the warmth
of the greeting still caught him off guard. He wondered exactly
who Ahmed might be.

"And you are?"  The young man was now flinging Skinner's bags
into the jeep.

"Skinner."  He wondered if he needed to explain further, but
Ahmed seemed to need no further information.

A quick nod, and their driver was already getting back in the
jeep.  "Yes, of course. Let's go--it's a long drive out, and
we'll want to get moving before the full sun hits."

The full sun?  Oh fuck.  He climbed into the backseat, cursing
his aging body and the foolhardy dedication to his agents and a
lost cause that had brought him half-way around the world.

As they pulled out of the airport, Ahmed pointed out a cooler on
the floor of the back.  "That has fruit and water, Skinner.  We
will be traveling for about 3 hours before our first stop."

Ingrained habits made Skinner look around, noting the other
cases on the floor and in the luggage area behind the backseat.
There were canisters of what was probably emergency gasoline.
There were also several long, rectangular hard-plastic cases
that looked suspiciously like sniper rifle cases, or containers
for even heavier weapons.

"Exactly where are we going?"  Impossible, even now, in this
foreign place, to abandon the patterns of taking command,
demanding accountability.

Ahmed responded with a non sequitor, "We'll be traveling about 3
hours."  Then he turned to Marita and fired off a question in a
language that could have been either French or Arabic.

She threw back her head and laughed--a crystalline,
uncomplicated sound that caught Skinner completely off guard.
He watched her, torn between startled fascination and  something
that felt almost like jealousy.

Still smiling, she turned and looked over her shoulder at
Skinner. "My apologies, Mr. Skinner, but I need to get an update
from Ahmed, and it will go much more rapidly if we converse in
Arabic."

Transfixed, he could only nod at her, accepting her smile and
her apology with stunned resignation.  In this new world of his,
he would have to redefine himself and learn new rules.

For the next hour or so, he watched the landscape roll by.
After leaving the airport, they quickly traveled through the
outskirts of the city, and then through a series of small
villages, that each seemed to be composed of a dozen or so
buildings, and some tents.  As they flew through, he could see
children running between houses and goats and cattle wandering
in the dusty open spaces behind the dwellings. The highway they
were on
was more or less paved, but the roads that crossed it were
gravel or rutted dirt paths.  Soon the spaces between the
villages grew longer and longer, and finally they were traveling
in pure desert.

The sun was pitiless--clear skies with no hint of clouds dazzled
him with a cerulean blue he'd never seen before.  The hard-top
of the jeep at least provided some artificial shade, and the
movement of the air through the open windows provided the
illusion of cooling.

In front of him, Marita was engaged in a high speed
interrogation of Ahmed.  The words flowed past him, distorted
and blurred by the roar of the wind through the open windows.
For a while he amused himself by trying to follow the
conversation strictly on a basis of tone, and twice he thought
he heard his own name, and once something that might have been
'Krycek,' but the game quickly palled, and he turned his head to
watch the unrolling desert, and tried to come to grips with the
idea that he was in Africa.

The frenetic series of actions that had been required to get him
here had taken such an intense focus of concentration that now
that he was here, there was a sense of anti-climax.  And yet,
there was still a sense of anticipation--of being at a
cross-roads, or maybe the edge of the cliff.  The next decision
he made, he knew somehow, would be one of the most
important he'd ever made.  Or maybe it was only that for the
first time in years he was free to make any decision he wanted
to, and he could no longer remember what that felt like.

Inevitably found himself wondering how Scully and Krycek were
doing in Alaska.  What had they found?  How were they doing
traveling together?  They too, seemed impossibly far away, and
not fully real.  Out here, in this trackless expanse of sand, it
was difficult to imagine that a place like Alaska even existed.


What was he doing here?

He looked at the front again,  Marita was frowning--she appeared
annoyed, or maybe even vaguely frightened by what Ahmed was
telling her.  It seemed to Skinner that she was being told
something that was causing her to change her gameplan.  He
wondered at what point he had learned her statements that well.

The ceaseless noise of the wind through the windows and the
underlying rumble of the engine turned into an improbable
lullaby, and Skinner surrendered himself to the sleep that had
eluded him for so many weeks.

His last thought, as he sank beneath the rim of consciousness,
was that the last time he'd slept, he'd felt the cool press of
Marita's fingers in his own.


The sounds of chickens woke him.  He shifted into awareness as
his dreams of planes that flew and flew and never landed gave
way to the incessant clucking of chickens.  Chickens?

He sat up groggily, and realized the jeep had stopped and was
parked in front of  a pair of mud-colored buildings.  There was
a rusty white Renault parked to the side of the farthest
building, but other than that, there was no sign of life.

The driver's seat was empty, but Marita was twisted in her seat,
looking back at him. Her normal guarded statement returned
quickly when she realized he was awake.  Still fighting his way
to full wakefulness, he struggled to recognize the statement
she had been wearing just before she realized his eyes were
open.

"Where are we?  Are we there?"

For a moment a warm smile crossed her face.  It seemed to want
to linger. "Well, we're somewhere.  This is rest stop.  We'll
get gas, and have a chance to stretch our legs before making the
final push to where we'll stay tonight.  Amed is getting Ibrahim
to turn on the gas pump."

He looked out the window again, and now realized there was a
lone pump in front of the near building.  On closer inspection,
the near building appeared to be some kind of store.

"I don't suppose they sell Cokes in there?"  A sudden longing
for
something familiar swept him.

Now she did laugh, and this time the smile stayed.  "They sell
Cokes everywhere, Mr. Skinner.  I'm going to change into more
comfortable clothes.  You might want to do the same."  With
that, she exited the jeep, and moved around the back, to take
out her smaller duffel bag.

He sat for a moment longer, sorting through thoughts that
refused to resolve into any sort of logical pattern, and finally
followed her.

Even the Coke was somewhat strange--the classic red-and-white
can
lettered in Arabic, and the taste not quite what he recalled.
Somewhat sweeter, a little hint of some other spice.  But it was
an anchor to the reality he came from.

He changed into khakis and a dark-blue polo shirt.  The new
clothes helped to restore him a bit.  A fresh exterior to mask
the transforming and reforming interior.

Marita changed into a khaki shirt and faded jeans, and when she
emerged from the bathroom, Skinner almost didn't recognize her.
It was as though crossing the border into Tunisia had
transformed her.  Released her from some kind of confinement.
As though this other Marita had always been waiting beneath the
tailored exterior that was all he had ever seen of her.  This
other Marita who was still very complex and dangerous, but
freer, and therefore maybe even more dangerous.  Her loose
stride back to
the jeep was panther-like.

When they began their journey again, he was surprised to find
Marita climbing in the back with him.  At his statement, she
explained, "I need to give you some of the background, and it's
too noisy to shout at you from the front seat."

So, with Ahmed playing their noncommittal chauffeur, Marita laid
out the events that had brought them there.

"As you must know, I worked for the Consortium for a number of
years.  My primary role was to act as a liaison to the
representatives from various nations who were part of the
Consortium's compact, and to gather critical information from
various United Nations programs.

"Given the UN's involvement in nearly every aspect of human life
around the globe--health, education, peace-keeping and economic
development--you can imagine the Consortium wanted to keep close
watch on some of the data UN workers were collecting and had
access to.

"My other job, of course, was to feed misinformation to certain
parties at strategic junctures."  She had maintained direct,
piercing eye contact through the early part of her recital, but
now she dropped her eyes for a moment.  Her discomfort did not
last long enough for Skinner to ask her what had changed.  Why
she had changed allegiances, or seemed to have.

"For the last five years, the primary goal of the Consortium has
been to develop an effective weapon against the alien colonists.
The research and work has been focused on developing a vaccine
against the main threat from the aliens: the viruses that we
think they will use to wipe out or control the majority of the
human population.  Agent Scully was saved by a prototype of one
of those vaccines.  But, what we have discovered is that there
are several strains of the virus, and, more frighteningly,
that each of the major families of the viruses seems capable of
quickly mutating and adapting so that vaccines do not stay
effective for very long.  The effects of these viruses is not be
underestimated."

A sudden shudder washed over her, and she seemed lost in some
violent memory.  The silence gaped for a minute, and then two.
He reached over and placed a gentle hand on her arm.  "Ms.
Covarrubias?"  She started under his touch, a flush creeping
across her cheekbones.

"I'm sorry.  It's just...." she trailed away, shaking her head.
"It's not important."

She continued her narrative, a new tone of resolve evident.
"There were at least four concurrent vaccine efforts underway
eighteen months ago when the majority of the Consortium's
leadership was burned to death at that airbase in West
Virginia."

She gave a mirthless laugh.  "I'm sure you're wondering what all
of this has to do with us, and why we're here."

He nodded, although more to keep her talking than out of any
real
impatience to connect all the dots.

"Please note I said that almost all of the leadership was
burned. Three major players survived.  One was C.B.G. Spender,
the man you call the smoking man.  The second was a Brit named
John Byron Aston.  The third was Konrad Strughold."

Skinner recalled the pictures he'd seen of the warehouse.  The
rows of charred objects that only resolved into bodies on close
inspection.  The conflagration was total, and yet, the puzzle
that had never been solved had been that only the bodies had
burned.  The floor where the men and women had been standing,
which should have shown extensive scorch marks, was untouched.
He felt a cold knot in the pit of his stomach.  Man had
always needed and feared fire.  There is nothing else which
destroys so completely.

"These three were the only real remnants left of what was once a
global operation.  Spender survived because he has the survival
instincts of a cockroach and he managed to run away just at the
last moment.  Aston survived by pure dumb luck--his flight from
Singapore was delayed.  But Strughold survived because he
refused to leave his experiments at what he claimed was an
absolutely critical phase of trials.  It was the only time he
ever disobeyed a direct Consortium order, and was very out of
character for him. Spender later speculated to me that Strughold
must have had some kind of inside information about what was
going to happen
that night.  Strughold and his experiments are why we're here."

There should have been some dramatic musical accompaniment to
that announcement, he thought.  Instead there was only the wind,
and the thrum of the tires on the road.

"What are these experiments?"

"Vaccines, Mr. Skinner.  Work with alien material and
technology. But I have some information that leads me to believe
that Strughold decided two years ago to deviate from the
Consortium research agenda and has created a sub-experiment that
may be more dangerous than I'd even initially thought."

"Is Ahmed your contact?  Is he working with Strughold? And what
is the nature of this danger?"  Some of his reserves replenished
from his earlier sleep, he felt the logical frameworks of an
investigation forming around him again. The suspicion ran
granite-hard through his tone. He thought he saw the young man
react to the use of his name, but focused all his attention on
Marita.

She gave a small smile.  "No.  Ahmed's in contact with my
contact, and he's a reporter with a local paper, not one of the
scientists."  She sobered.  "The danger is the unknown, Mr.
Skinner, as it always is. There is some new variable in the
experiments and the early results are ambiguous, but the
potential in the data is...disturbing."

She was reverting to the enigma he had first known her as.  He
watched her, trying to decide what angle to pursue.  The
unanswered questions jostling restlessly in his mind, vying for
priority.

"What does any of this have to do with Mulder?"  He was suddenly
afraid that he'd been brought here under false
pretenses--diverted from the one thing he knew he had to
accomplish.

She read him instantly.  "There are a number of strange
alliances
involved in all this.  And Mulder has been, as nearly as I can
determine, caught up in the struggle between two of them.  I
don't pretend to understand all the details, but I am sure that
Mulder is here somewhere, and that it relates to Strughold's
work."

Even having acknowledged to himself what it was that he'd seen
in Oregon, Skinner still found it difficult to piece together
all that he knew with what he'd just been told and to come to
the most logical conclusion.  "So Stughold is working with the
aliens?"

She nodded slowly.  "With some of them.  Or maybe more than one
group."

"There's more than one group?"  He hated this feeling of being
perpetually four steps behind.  But then again, if there was one
group of aliens, why not more than one?

"Yes, at least two major groups, and I've been suspecting for a
while that there may be a third."

"What do we know about them?"

"Precious little.  The first group, the ones we've known about
for the longest period of time, is the one that was in league
with the Consortium--an alliance that is decades old.  The
second group is in rebellion against the first."

"I see." Although he really didn't.  Stubbornly trying to fight
his way through the facts. "And we are here because...?"

"Because we need to find Mulder who is key to all of this
somehow, and because we need to get the data on these tests that
Strughold has been running."

"Tests?"

A fine impatience showed itself in her statement.  "The tests
in Italy and Florida."

"And if we succeed, what then?"  It occurred to him that he had
no clear vision of anything beyond the next task.

"We'll cross and burn that bridge when we get to it." And so
maybe she was improvising her plans as well.

They drove the remaining three hours in silence.


Their resting place for the night was a small house on the
outskirts of a village.  They reached it just past sundown, and
in the dimming light, Skinner could only see that it was a low,
rectangular building that appeared abandoned from the exterior.
Once inside, however, the house turned out to be sparsely, but
comfortably furnished.  There was a small central common room
that included a kitchenette, two bedrooms, and a bathroom.

No explanation was offered about the owner of the house, but
Marita moved through it with an air of easy familiarity.

They unloaded all the bags and gear from the jeep, and then
Ahmed
surprised him by disappearing back out the door.  He heard the
jeep start up and pull away.

He glanced, slightly wild eyed, over at Marita, who shrugged.
"He always stays with Ria.  He'll be back in the morning."

They ate a quick supper from some supplies in the
kitchen--bread, a white, crumbly cheese, and some of the fruit
from the cooler.  He thought they talked about something
trivial, but five minutes later wasn't sure if either of them
had spoken a word. A long strange trip.

Marita indicated the first bedroom. "You can take that one."
She started walking down the hall, and then paused.  She looked
back over her shoulder.  "Good night. Sleep well."  Her voice
soft.

It had been years since he'd been this far from "civilization."
The night, in the absence of streetlights and other nearby
dwellings, was almost pitch black--only a tiny bit of star and
moonlight illuminating his room through the window.  It was also
nearly noiseless.  The lack of ambient light and noise was
unnerving at first, and he found himself laying on the bed, eyes
open and straining up toward the ceiling, alert to any small
sound.

The room was hot, but beginning to cool off from the breeze
through the window.  He recalled that at night, temperatures in
deserts could drop by as much as 50 degrees from the daytime
high.  He felt his body relaxing against the sheets, his
breathing evening out.  His thoughts slowed too, releasing from
the tensions and strange revelations of the day.

The footsteps along the hallway were soft, but sure, the sound
yanking him up from the semi-consciousness that had claimed him.
There was a tap at his door, and it swung open.

She was standing just inside the doorway, the light surrounding
her blinding him in contrast to the black of his room.  Without
his glasses, she was nothing more than a silhouette, a slender
apparition, and for a moment he thought her slender form was
someone else entirely, but then the unfamiliar feel of the bed
and smells of the desert reclaimed his consciousness, and he
knew her.

"Ms. Covarrubias?"

She took a step into the room, but still didn't say anything, as
the door swung shut behind her.  His eyes, beginning to adjust
to the small amount of light cast through the window, saw that
she was wearing a black silky nightgown.  It was held up by two
narrow straps, and flowed down over her, a stark and undeniably
erotic contrast to her skin.

His breath caught as she continued to move toward him, stopping
a
hand's-breadth away from where he lay. Her face was unreadable,
cast into indistinct planes and shadows that only suggested her
beauty. She looked down at him for an eon or two, and then
slowly she reached out her hand.  His own lifted to meet it, and
when their fingers met and tangled, he was surprised to feel her
tugging him up, out of the bed.

He rose from the bed to stand in front of her, not quite
touching, but close enough that he could feel the heat from her
body, smell her intricate feminine scent.  She inhaled sharply,
and brought a hand up to his chest, resting it lightly against
the skin just over his heart, and then trailing her fingers
along his skin, stopping to tangle in his chest hairs.  He
shivered under her touch, and raised his hands to frame herface.

Her pale hair fell through his fingers, molten moonlight, and
she was warmer beneath his touch than he'd expected.

This was not a time for words.  He leaned over and kissed her,
gently, tentatively.  She met him with a blazing hunger, and he
felt the fire burn away any doubts or fears he had remaining.
He stepped willingly into her flame.


Later, he watched her sleeping.  She was curled on her side,
facing him, and he resisted the urge to stroke back her hair, to
touch the silky smooth skin that stretched thin and delicately
over her collarbone.

He purposely did not think about what this meant.  Right now, he
didn't dare assign meaning to anything.

He remembered her face as she moved beneath him, the bittersweet
play of joy and sorrow that flitted across her features like
clouds chasing each other across a perfect sky.  He recalled the
sensation of her small, strong body around his. The perfect fit
of their joining.  The wordless sigh of her release, followed a
minute late by his involuntary groan.

No, he would not think about this.  There would be tomorrow for
all of that.  He watched her sleep.  For now this was all he
needed to know.

She sighed and turned over, mumbling words in some
unidentifiable
language.  He curved his body around hers, and slept.

End Part 10


EQUILIBRIUM, by Vivian Wiley (vivwiley@yahoo.com)


Chapter 11

Tunisia

She hated cliches.  She'd fought against them for most of her
life--"the weaker sex," "dumb blondes"--the stereotypes and
casually demeaning archetypes that had, in so many ways,
constrained her own ambition and abilities.  And yet, they
haunted her.

Marita stood by the lone window in the living room, watching the
sky shift from absolute black to the first suggestion of dark
grey.  The cup of tea in her hand had long since cooled, only a
vague scent of mint and smoke rising up from the glassy brown
surface, a subtle counterpoint to the sterile anonymity of the
room.

She was motionless, but her thoughts roiled and jumbled.  She
had made a horrible mistake.  There was no time for this sort of
complication, and she had utterly no excuse for this lapse in
self-discipline.  And yet. And yet, she had slept dreamlessly,
and woken feeling safe for the first time in years.  So, was
this it?  Was this all it took?  A night with a good man?  She
hated cliches.

She stifled the urge to go back to his bedroom.  To stand and
watch him in the gradually brightening dawn, to crawl into the
tangled sheets and wrap herself around his solid body.  To
surrender to the need and hunger she had almost forgotten
existed within her.  The hunger she remembered--she gave a
fleeting thought to Alex--but the need, ah, that was something
else entirely.

There was no time.  And, she would not give into the cliche.
She would not.

She let her mind wander for a moment--to recall the sensation of
his heavy, sweat-slicked body thrusting against hers.  The
masculine musk mingling with her own lighter scent to wrap them
in a cocoon of heat and sex and hunger.  Her stomach tightened,
a tingle low and urgent in her belly.  She wanted him, she
needed him.  She shook her head.  There was no time for this
nonsense.

She sighed noiselessly.  Her ability to focus was a point of
pride for her, and they were in the middle of a critical
mission. What on earth had overtaken her last night?

For a big man, he could move silently.  The hand on her shoulder
almost caused her to drop the cup she was holding.  He moved
back immediately at her instinctive flinch at his touch.

"I didn't mean to startle you."  His voice a gravelly morning
whisper.

She met his eyes reluctantly, afraid, for the first time that
she could remember, of what she might betray.  "It's okay."  She
paused, agonizingly aware of how fragile the moment was.  The
next thing she said or did, she thought, might tip the scales
forever in a direction she didn't intend.  She drew a breath,
not entirely sure what she was about to say, but he preempted
her.

He stepped into her space, breaching every barrier, and he
reached up and trailed large, gentle fingers along the side of
her face.  He paused, his hand cupping the back of her neck, his
thumb stroking her jawline. His eyes, without the usual barrier
of his glasses, were exposed and she could see the steel in his
soul--the strength that had drawn her--and something else
flickering warm and unexpected in the brown-hazel depths.

They stood looking at each other for a boundless minute of
clarity, and then she nodded, an answer to a question she
thought later he hadn't even realized he'd asked.

He bent over and kissed her gently, almost chastely, then
stepped back.

"What's the plan for today?  Do we head out to Strughold's
compound?"  In a single sentence, he fluidly made the transition
back to the operation that brought them here.  He resumed his
customary professional demeanor, and handed her the small
measure of control she needed to resume hers.  She experienced
the tiniest pang of regret at the passing of the moment, pushed
it aside.  They had to concentrate on the immediate concerns.

"Yes.  Ahmed will be back in an hour or so, and we'll head out
to begin surveillance.  The information he gave me yesterday was
a bit worrisome. It seems like some of the activity with the
bees has stepped up, which might mean another set of tests.  If
that's true, we'll need to stop them."

"Us and what army?"  His wry humor caught her off guard.

"Well, I do expect my associates to have..." She trailed off,
suddenly aware that she'd neglected to let him know about an
important factor, and he was likely to be annoyed at the
omission.  Oh hell.  She pushed on.

"Well, I expect that Agent Scully and Alex will meet us at the
rendezvous point."  She braced for his reaction.

Which was mild.  "So Scully and Krycek are meeting us here?
That will be helpful, but I expect the compound will have more
than four guards?"  His mildness, she realized was deceptive; he
was not pleased at all.  He was simply waiting to see what else
she might reveal.  Waiting for all the facts before reacting.
He was, she recalled, a true professional.

"You're right.  But, compared to other Consortium facilities
this is fairly lightly guarded--they clearly don't expect anyone
to even know they're there, let alone take any action against
them. We may also have some help from...inside."

"May?" His jaw clenched.  "You want to explain that?  Basing an
operation on possible assistance is usually....unwise."  His
tone starting to shift to something more overtly command-like.

She winced.  "I know I haven't given you a lot to go on here,
but I promise to provide you more information on the way out to
the compound. Alex and Agent Scully left Alaska on schedule and
I expect them here this morning.  It would be better if we were
there when they arrived."

Something that might have been disappointment marred his
features, and then his normal impassivity returned.  He nodded
sharply.  "OK."

She watched him turn and walk back to his room.  For no reason
she could fathom, she thought of quicksand.


Ahmed returned punctually.  They loaded up the jeep, and resumed
their travel with a minimum of fuss.  She climbed in the back
with Skinner again, debating exactly what to tell him.  The
basic facts were easy enough, but there was so much more than
the facts. She decided to start with the simple truths.

"I've been working, for the past two years, with a group of men
who are part of Strughold's primary research team.  Our alliance
started when they realized that Strughold was deviating from the
main research agenda. We have not been able to act openly, but
we have kept each other informed of results from all the
concurrent projects.  When possible, we have tried to subvert,
or at least mitigate some of the most...disastrous outcomes that
the experiments might have had.  We have not always been able to
effect that.  But, after the conflagration in West Virginia, one
small group of my associates was able to escape and set up
a...operations center of sorts."

"Escape?" He missed so little.  His tone was sharp, but not too
suspicious. "Are these, were these men prisoners?"

"It's difficult to explain.  But, in essence, they have no
choice but to stay on the compounds.  It will become clearer
once we're out there."

He nodded for her to continue.  "The group in the ops center
made contact with Agent Scully and Krycek out in Alaska.  It's
that group that rescu...that made the travel arrangements to get
them out to site where we'll meet today."  She could only hope
he wouldn't notice her slip.  She was not yet ready to reveal
everything.

"Why is your operations base in Alaska?"  Of the many questions
he might have asked, she hadn't anticipated that one.

"It was convenient."  One of several factors, but also true.

"Have you heard from your associates about what it was that
Scully and Krycek found up there, if anything?"

"Only a few details.  We'll have to get the full story from
them."  Less than fully truthful, but a necessary vagueness.

Then his tone was unyielding.  "What else haven't you told me?"
And there was the question she'd been dreading.

She lay the truth bare.  "More than I've told you."  She watched
the sense of betrayal start to stain his face. She reached out,
before she could stop herself, taking his hand from his knee.
"But, I promise you--it's nothing that will endanger us, or the
others.  There are simply people I still have to protect.  There
are reasons..."  Her voice weak in her own ears, but there were
things that couldn't be explained yet.

Her breath caught as she watched him struggle between suspicion
and doubt, and the human need to believe in something or
someone. So much depended on his decision.

He wasn't happy, but he finally he shrugged.  "Let's see what
Scully and Krycek say."  He very gently let go of her hand.

It wasn't quite what she'd hoped for, but it was more than she'd
expected.


Not surprisingly, Krycek was miserable and letting everyone know
about it.

They parked the jeep a half kilometer from the rendezvous point,
and hiked in through the low hills.  Marita could hear him
complaining from more than 200 meters away.

"...and have I mentioned lately how much I hate this fucking
heat?" Definitely unhappy.  She risked a glance at Skinner who
was smiling in grim amusement.   She heard some kind of murmured
response from Scully, followed by the worried chorus of the
clones.

They crested the last hill, to find the group of five waiting
for them.  Scully, Krycek and three of the clones were standing
in a loose circle, oblivious to the compound stretching low and
surreally green across the valley just below them.  The sharp
dry sounds of cicadas and locusts were overlaid with a softer
drone.

The air was crystal dry, and smelled of dust, and something
sweetly savory.  Rosemary, perhaps.

Krycek's complaints were cut off abruptly as he spotted them.
"About fucking time.  You want to explain what this is all
about?"  His broad angry gesture seemed to encompass
everything--the green in the valley, their presence in Tunisia,
the existence of clones, and perhaps the fundamental riddles of
the entire universe.

"Nice to see you, Alex.  I trust your trip went well."  She had
always loved upsetting his balance. Meeting his off-kilter fury
with a bland courtesy.  She turned to Scully.  "And Agent
Scully, how are you doing?"

She scarcely heard Scully's "I'm fine."  The agent did not look
well. She seemed tired, drawn, and in some way diminished.  A
cold gnawing seized Marita's gut as she looked at Dana Scully.
Oh god.  Please let her be okay.  Please let....

Skinner moved toward Scully--Marita had the fleeting impression
that he wanted to hug her, except that neither of them were the
type.  She watched him move toward his agent and stop,
awkwardly, a mere foot away from her.  "What happened up there,
Agent...Scully?  Did you find anything?  Are you okay?"  The
quick, interrogative tone didn't hide the deeper concern.

"Well, we found something, sir, some kind of ship, and there
were men, and some....humans.  But it's not quite clear what was
going on. Then we got spotted, and we had to take off before we
saw... And, we ran into....Kevin and some others like him."  She
indicated one of the red-haired men who had retreated to a small
clump to the side of them. She was simply tired beyond
endurance, thought Marita.  Scully couldn't even report
coherently--something she had not ever expected to see.

Skinner watched her, his concern evident. Oddly, the presence of
three completely identical red-haired men didn't seem to phase
him in the least. Then he turned to Krycek.  "Krycek--what the
hell happened?"

As Krycek began to fill in the details from the Alaskan
excursion--details she had long since received from her
contacts, Marita drifted over to the three other men who were
standing on the hill.

The clones were clones, and physically identical in eerie
duplication. But, they did have small individual quirks, and she
had learned, over the past year, to distinguish them.  She
turned to Kevin.

"Was it him?"

"Yes, definitely.  I was surprised, given the earlier report, to
see him back in Alaska so quickly, but it was him."

She had known it already, but needed to hear the information
confirmed in person.  "Do you think he knew who was watching the
exchange?  That it was Agent Scully and Krycek?"

Kevin shrugged, exchanging glances with Mark, who had also
traveled in from their northern encampment.  "I don't
know....probably not, but you just can't tell."

So many unknowns.  "What about the data?  What are your
conclusions?"

All three men exchanged glances this time, and finally Mark
spoke
reluctantly.  "The same as the last time we talked.  There is
some change involved.  We'd need a six-month study, at a
minimum, to determine the full scope, but all the early
indicators are that....well, that the change is what we feared,
and permanent."

She gazed out past their shoulders, staring unseeingly at the
green below her.  Trying to untangle the knotted skeins of facts
that surrounded them.  Trying to find the one strand to follow
out of the labyrinth.

There was so much work to do.  And very little time left.  The
smoking man had been a pretentious bastard, prone to overstating
the facts, his own importance, and just about everything else,
but he'd been right about one thing, as it turned out.  The time
was at hand.

She walked back over to where Skinner seemed to be wrapping up
his cross-examination of Alex.  "....flames?  They were carrying
flame-throwers?"

Scully's tired voice interjected over Krycek's exasperated
retort.  "They looked like flame throwers, but I don't
think....I don't think it was exactly normal technology.
I...when I saw them, I had a flashback to the bridge in
Pennsylvania.  You know--when Cassandra Spender disappeared."

Skinner recoiled physically at her words.  "You mean when
everyone was burned."

Scully regarded him steadily.  "Yes."

Then he did walk over to her and place a hand gently on her
shoulder.  He spoke to her in a low voice, asking a question
that Marita couldn't quite hear.  She looked him in the eyes for
a long time, and then simply shook her head.  He spoke to her
again, low and urgent, and then the two of them walked a little
distance away.

Marita watched them for a second, trying to sort out her
emotions, when her musing was interrupted by the surprisingly
calm voice of Alex Krycek behind her.  "So, what's the story,
babe?"

She stiffened reflexively.  She hated to be called "babe."  Then
she relaxed, realizing with a small shock that Alex was teasing
her.  It was so unexpected that she found herself smiling as she
turned to him.

"The same story it's always been, Alex.  Mystery, conspiracy,
the quest for global domination."  She lost her smile.  "The
search to build a better mousetrap."

She let that sink in for a moment.  Knowing that he would
understand.  He paled and looked over her shoulder to where
Skinner stood, still talking to Scully.  His voice was so low
she could barely hear him.

"Did you tell him?"

"No."  Her answer was clipped.

"Why not?"  He seemed genuinely curious.

"There wasn't a good time."  She shut down his line of inquiry
with her usual ruthlessness.  "What did you tell her?"

"Nothing.  There was no time."  His reply had a tone of near
mockery, but nothing she could openly fault him for.  "What's
next?"

She looked back over her shoulder to Scully and Skinner, who had
moved further away, partly down the slope of the hill.  Scully
seemed to be upset about something.  Somber, but also vehemently
opposed to what Skinner was saying.  Skinner simply looked
stubbornly resolute.  A doctor repeating news to a patient that
the disease was chronic, but probably not immediately life
threatening.

"I'm not sure.  We've got to verify the next test sequence, and
then, if necessary shut it down."

Krycek groaned, his head tilting back as he contemplated the
alien sky.  "Oh fuck, Marita.  A full-scale op at..." he glanced
at his watch, "whatever the hell time it is here?"

She was replying that they would have to do some surveillance
first, when the tornado arrived.

At least a tornado seemed the most rational explanation at
first.

The air abruptly grew still around them, and the insects all
simultaneously ceased their songs.  It felt like the oxygen had
been sucked out of the atmosphere, and suddenly the winds howled
down like an ancient avenging god.  The winds staggered them,
and ultimately drove them to their knees, and then to the
ground.

The sand and dirt blew around them--gritty and
relentless--abrasive against their skin, a raw power of its own,
choking them, infiltrating their clothing.

There was a screaming overhead that was louder even than the
winds, a bright metal shriek.

The sun was blotted out, and still the sand and dirt rained down
on them.

The shadow moved endlessly across them, across the hill where
they cowered, down over the valley.

Silence returned.  Absolute silence that felt like a death.

Then slowly, slowly a faint chirp, and buzz, and the insect
kingdom regained its domain.  A soft breeze brushed her.

Marita raised her head slowly.  Looking around to see if the
world still stood around her.  Beside her she heard a muffled
grunt as Krycek began levering himself off the ground.  He stood
and looked around warily, and then reached down to help her up
to her feet.  They stood dusting themselves off, wordless,
bereft of any language to ask even the first question.

Then from down the hill, a shout, and three people struggling up
the battered grass.  Skinner, his arm around a figure who sagged
between him and Scully.  A tall man, with dark hair, and eyes,
that had they been open, would have gleamed hazel in the
once-more bright sun.

And Mulder was returned to them.

End Part 11


EQUILIBRIUM, by Vivian Wiley (vivwiley@yahoo.com)


Chapter 12

Safe House
Tunisia

He was warm beneath her fingers.  Of all the wonders, this was
both the smallest and the most profound.  She had dreamed of
this moment so many times.  Imagined its smallest details.  But
the heat and slight damp of his skin was still startling.  The
scent of him rising up to her nostrils grounding her in sudden,
tangible reality.

She straddled him, her hands resting lightly on his
chest--arrested in mid-gesture by the sudden knowledge that this
was real.  It was really them.

She let herself fall into his eyes.

Lost in a tangle of thoughts.  This can't be happening. This is
really happening.  Please let this be real.  Should we be doing
this?  There is so much else we need to do, to talk about.  But
I want this.  I want this.

She realized she'd stopped moving altogether, and had drifted to
some other place.  Mulder's laugh brought her back.  "Earth to
Scully?  Where are you?"

"I'm here with you, Mulder."  She could feel the joy exploding
in her chest, drenching her in sweetness.  She felt it radiating
through her, spilling over to wrap them both in unseen light.

It sobered him.  "Yeah.  You are.  You really are."  He tugged
her down into a soul-destroying kiss.  Burning away the residual
fears and anger and longing of the weeks of separation.
Refining them in the crucible of their own truths and mysteries.

He thrust up against her, moving within her, dark, hard, sweet
force.  She gasped against his mouth, feeling a small shock wave
rise up, low and rolling through her belly.  He grinned in
response, and pressed upward again.  "You're here, I'm here,
we're here."  Chanting a mantra of nonsensical hope; thrusting
with each phrase.

He rolled them, settling her beneath him as his rhythm
intensified.  She felt him inside her--deep and complete.  The
sensation of surrounding him once more was homecoming  and brand
new discovery.

He kissed her again--slow, lingering--an erotic contrast to the
urgent, inexorable rhythm of their hips.  Thrust and parry,
counterpoint. Rocking to an irresistible beat.

He pulled back just far enough to see directly into her
eyes--holding her a willing prisoner in his gaze.  She was
captured, bound, in thrall to this man who was pulling her ever
further from herself, sending them both spiraling outward on
this path of passion and white-hot sensation.  A coil of  heat
and tension unwound within her--twisting up from the point
where they were joined, and curving along her body, her limbs.

Now, and now, and oh there, and oh...."Mulder!"  She was swept
under by the tidal wave of her release--the spasms shuddering
through her core, her arms locking vise-like around him.

He stilled, allowing her to ride out the mind-shattering
intensity of the sensations cascading through her, and then just
as she began to quiet, he moved again--sharp, hard thrusts, no
more than a half-dozen--until he, too, was swept out to sea.

He collapsed against her, breath erratic, ragged.  She could
feel his heart beating, hard, frantic.  His heavy weight
pressing her into the soft mattress.

Her hands moved over his back, long, soothing strokes.  Gentle
caress through his hair.  He was here, beneath her fingers.  He
was here.

After a long, sweet while, they slept.


She awoke some hours later, and her first panicked thought was
that it had only been a dream.  But then the sounds of Mulder's
even breaths reached her through the stillness.  She felt the
weight of the arm across her stomach. She relaxed back against
him--feeling his long body curled around hers.  Feeling the
solid reality of him holding her tight.  She had always loved
sleeping like this with him.  Not being able to see him, but
knowing, absolutely that he was there, behind her.  That they
faced
the same direction--together.

Finally she realized that she wasn't going to be able to go back
to sleep.  As tired as she was, her brain was racing--trying to
sort out all that had happened, and to make sense of the strange
events that had brought them here.

She eased herself out of Mulder's embrace.  He grumbled
sleepily, and turned over.

She moved quietly to the living room, and found a plain but
comfortable chair.

The night was quiet around her.  The stillness of an almost
unpopulated area was so foreign to her.  None of the usual
anchors to the outside world--no streetlights, no sound of
passing cars.  It was almost as though she were lost, floating
alone in her own isolated universe.  And yet, she thought she
could feel him sleeping in the room behind her.  Could feel the
ties that bound her to him.  The ties that bound them on
levels so deep that years of excavation would never be able to
describe or catalog them all.

There was so much to try to sort out.

He was back.  She still hadn't told him the news.  The child
growing inside her that was theirs.  The miracle that would
change them, again, in ways that still frightened her to think
about.

When he'd run his hands along her body, they had paused at her
fuller breasts, the now gently rounded belly.  His touch had
been questioning, but in his eyes there had been no shock of
recognition or intuitive leap about what the subtle changes
might mean.  His hands had known what his agile but overwhelmed
mind hadn't been able to reason out.

It was time to share this news with him, but she couldn't help
but worry a little at his reaction.  They had never discussed
children.  Had not really ever discussed their future, if there
would be one.  They had found each other in the improbable chase
for truth, amidst conspiracies and aliens, and so many
unexplained things.  It sometimes seemed to her that their love
was just one more unexplained phenomenon that they were
investigating together.

She closed her eyes against the dark of the room--remembering
again the brightness of their coming together.

So much darkness.  But there was this spark of hope.

Hope.  Her exhausted mind was skipping randomly from thought to
thought.  Tenuous connections between ideas.  Something tugged
at her memory, and she found herself replaying the events of the
afternoon, just before Mulder had been brought back.

She had been so relieved to see Skinner--his substantial, real
presence a comforting link back to the few things she could
still say with any certainty that she really knew.  He was a
constant in her otherwise increasingly uncertain world.  And she
was so tired of being continually surprised.

When he walked over to where she stood and asked her, in that
dearly familiar gruff tone, if she were okay, she wanted to
throw herself in his arms, simply for the relief of holding fast
to that one small reality.

But once more reality slid sickeningly awry around her.

It had seemed to her at first that he, too, had thought to maybe
reach out to her physically:  touch her, briefly embrace her,
but then he stopped just short of her personal space, and
something about the way he held himself--near, but with a slight
formality--set off warning bells in her mind.  Something had
changed, her tired mind realized, and although she couldn't
begin to analyze what it might be, she knew it was momentous.

She had been too weary to give any sort of coherent report of
what had happened in Alaska, so she'd let Krycek carry the
narrative, interjecting only when Alex had gotten completely
derailed in some rant or other about the various indignities to
which he'd been subjected.

The revelation about the men who'd been carrying the fire
throwers seemed to unsettle Skinner more than it should have. It
caused him to finally breach the perimeter of no-contact that
he'd unconsciously set up between them--reaching out to her,
settling his large hand on her shoulder, searching her face to
see if she were really okay.  Then he'd asked if he could speak
to her privately.  Krycek had shrugged, a "what the fuck do I
care?" shrug, if such a thing were possible with a single muscle
twitch, and wandered over to talk to Marita.

Skinner led her away from the others.  But once they were out of
earshot of the rest, he seemed reluctant to begin speaking.  He
cleared his throat, and looked down.  Finally, when he did look
up, his statement was so serious that she could only think that
something horrible had happened.

"Ag....Scully."  Skinner's voice was as close to uncertain as
she'd ever heard it.  "You need to know something."  He paused
again while her mind tried frantically to imagine what could be
so wrong. "I've resigned from the FBI.  Effective three days
ago."

Her tattered control gave way.  "What!?"  After his nod, she
stood in stunned disbelief while the news fully sunk in.  "No.
You can't mean that!  What were you thinking?  Why....?"  She
didn't even have the words to articulate the full extent of her
shock.

"It's not really your business, Scully."  His tone was gravely
polite, but he was plainly taken aback at the vehemence of her
reaction.  "I just wanted you to know.  In case....when you
return to the Bureau, you will have a different supervisor.  I
think I've arranged it so that Susan Jameson will have oversight
of the X-Files."  He stopped, probably realizing that she didn't
care about that sort of detail.  "Anyway, it was time.  Past
time, really..."  He trailed off, gazing at something in the far
distance that wasn't anywhere near this latitude or longitude.

"But...."  She paused, choking on her fear and anger and a
subterranean sorrow.  "But...what if they're wrong, and Mulder
isn't here?  What if we have to go back to DC to keep looking?
Then what? How will you direct...?"

"Scully, you knew the FBI wasn't ever going to find Mulder.  If
we have to start the search again, we'll use....other avenues.
And, you're still an active agent."  His tone gentle now.

"I know, but what will you do?  Why did you resign?"  This was
too much to absorb.  She couldn't help but wonder what would
happen to her. Didn't he know how much she needed him?  How much
she had come to rely on him, both professionally and personally?

He looked at her, and then away.  His voice came from an
unfathomable distance.  "I had to, Scully.  I've seen and done
things that..."

She had to stop him.  This confession was moot.  No matter what,
he was still Skinner and she needed to let him know that for
her, his honor was unquestionable.  "We've all seen and done
things, Skinner. It's what happens when you get involved with
this conspiracy."  Her tone was harsh, trying to shock him.

Now he looked directly at her, the weight of his own sorrow and
loss clear to her for the first time.  "No.  I've done
things...."  He broke off, struggling with burdens that suddenly
she didn't want to hear. "I've done things that can never be
rectified.  I've justified them, rationalized them.  And they
were, I still believe, necessary within the larger context.  But
I can't take them back, and I can't make them right. I'll never
be able to."

Her breath caught.  His tone was so bleak that for a moment all
she could think of was the barren ice fields of Antarctica.

"I had to leave.  It was only a question of time.  And this time
was as good as any."

She moved forward and placed a hand on his arm, trying to ground
herself. To verify with physical touch that she was really here
and this was happening, and not simply some strange nightmare.
And watching him, and the shifting shadows in his eyes, there
was only one thing to say.

"I'm sorry."  She wasn't sure those were quite the right words,
but they were the only words she could find.

He shook his head gently, and gave a ghost of a smile.  "There's
nothing to be sorry for.  Things change.  This is just one more
of them."

Afterward she would never be able to say with certainty who
moved first. There was simply a movement, and he was holding
her.  They clung to each other for a long moment--simply holding
each other, not moving, just clinging to this tiny fragment of
comfort.

She heard him exhale shakily, and then he gently disengaged
himself from their embrace. She was looking up to ask him what
they were going to do next when the world's sounds died around
them.

Instantly on alert, she saw him also reaching for the weapon at
his waist.  Without pausing to discuss it, they moved so they
stood back-to-back, scanning their surroundings for incoming
danger.

The danger arrived from the sky.

The winds whipped across the hillside where they stood, and then
the sky ripped open and screamed down on them.  They rocked
against the gale forces beating at them, until they were forced
to their knees and finally flat against the trembling earth.

The screaming changed pitch, and she realized that somehow a
protective sphere had opened up within the storm, encompassing
only the area where she and Skinner lay, pressed to the ground.
Around them the wind howled and the sand battered the air, but a
15-foot diameter eye of the storm surrounded them.

They got to their feet just as it strolled into the calm,
carrying a man slung casually over its shoulder.

The face was human--square jawed, blue-eyed, almost
Teutonic--but there was something amiss.  Some spark of
animation that was missing from its symmetrical features.  She
had seen that face before, melting out of the features of her
partner.  She reached for her gun, only to realize that she'd
dropped it when the storm arrived.

It looked at them with impassive eyes.  "Don't bother.  Bullets
are of no consequence to me.  Anyway, you wouldn't want to hurt
him."  A shrug of its shoulder seemed to indicate the man he was
carrying.

Beside her, she could feel Skinner's tension.  Could almost feel
him assessing the situation, trying to decide whether to attack,
or shout for help, or wait and listen another minute.

The Bounty Hunter looked directly at Scully.  "I've brought him
back to you."  Her heart skipped, began hammering against her
ribs.  Could it be? Could it...?  She didn't dare let her mind
finish the thought.

In a single fluid movement, he lowered to one knee and then
almost carefully placed an unconscious Mulder at Scully's feet.


With a wordless cry, she dropped to her lover's side, hands
instantly touching, checking for injury.  Glaring at the alien
who still knelt on the other side of Mulder's body.  "What have
you done to him?"

The Hunter shrugged. "Nothing.  We use standard sleep inducing
medications for the jump back to your planet.  It's a bit hard
on humans otherwise."  For the briefest moment she thought he
suddenly looked bemused.  "Besides, this one....talked a lot."
Above her she thought she could hear a small snort from Skinner.
Her fingers sought and found Mulder's throat--discovering his
pulse beating strong and steadily beneath her touch.

The alien's usual mask returned, and he caught and held Scully's
eyes for a long period of time.  She had the sensation that she
was being weighed, assessed.  Finally he nodded.  "You'll both
be okay." He added, "And he'll wake up in about 15 minutes or
so."

He stood, in a movement so swift that she knew only that he was
once more standing.  Then there was nothing but Mulder--here,
now, once more.  She let her hands wander--touching,
reconfirming the reality of his presence.


After that it had been a strange jumble of events and actions.
She remembered moments, disconnected from each other.  Brief
images like half-blurred snapshots from a barely-remembered
vacation.

She and Skinner helping Mulder up the hill.  Marita and Skinner
in urgent consultation.

The clones helping Mulder into a jeep, and her sense of helpless
loss of being disconnected from him for even the brief time it
took them to settle his body against her in the backseat.

The crystalline moment when he opened his eyes during the ride
to the house, and she knew instantly that he knew who she was,
and that they were back together.

And finally, finding themselves in a small house, with nothing
but the two of them, and all the time in the world.

Their reunion had been swift, hot, almost wordless. They had
decided, without a word between them, that questions and
explanations and all the rest of the world could wait.  As the
door was still closing behind the clones who left them quickly
and discretely, Mulder reached for her, and she tumbled headlong
into the fire that was them.

She flushed at the heated memory of just a few hours ago.

She stood and moved to the window.  Sometime during her musings,
it had begun to move toward dawn.  The eastern horizon showed
the faintest glimmer of light--a hairline fracture in the
darkness.

She heard him moving in the bedroom.  His footsteps padding down
the hall.  His instincts unerringly leading him right to her.

His arms slid around her waist, and he buried his face against
her hair. "I woke up and I missed you."

She felt a sob rise in her throat.  "I've missed you, too,
Mulder."  He stilled against her--listening to her.  Listening
to all the undercurrents in her voice.

"Where have you been, Mulder?"  The tears she'd kept in abeyance
all those endless weeks threatening to finally spill over.
"I've needed you here."

His hands pulled her even closer.  "And I've needed you, Scully.
I'm so sorry.  I shouldn't have gone.  I had to go, I needed to
go with them.  But the thing is this...."

He paused, and pulled away from her, only long enough to turn
her around to face him.  In the breaking dawn light, she could
just see him clearly. Could see his face, his sleep-tousled
hair, his eyes that had owned her now for more years than she
could count.

His eyes which now shone with the light that illuminated him at
those moments when he had made some fundamental discovery.  She
was awestruck by the brilliance she saw sparkling there.

"While I was gone I discovered the one truth of my life.  My
soul knows only one direction--the way home to you."

She was speechless.  Could only reach for him, and pull him
closer to her than breath or thought or memory.  When language
finally returned to her, she took his hand, and placed it on her
stomach.

"Mulder?  I have one more truth to tell you...."


End Part 12

EQUILIBRIUM, by Vivian Wiley(vivwiley@yahoo.com)


Chapter 13


Tunisia
A safe house 20 kilometers from Strughold's compound

As so often happened, the choices available to them quickly narrowed
to one.

Krycek watched in disgust as Skinner and Marita hunched over the map
of the compound.  Pointing first at one possible entry point, then
weighing the merits of other possible approaches.  Around them, the
three clones--whom he would have dearly loved to dub the Three
Stooges, except he had a hunch that each of them would answer to
Moe--watched with anxiety.

After the bustle and turmoil of Mulder's deus ex machina like return
by the aliens, the remaining players had stood stunned on the
hilltop,
trying to decide what to do next.  They could see that there was now
heightened activity occurring around the buildings on the far side of
the corn fields.

They had been arguing about various options, when yet another
red-haired clone had come scurrying up to the group.  He had not
brought good news.

While Mulder was being returned to Scully, a group of aliens had
delivered some large cases to Strughold.  From the clone's
description of he contents, it sounded very much like the same sort
of weaponry that Krycek and Scully had seen being delivered in
Alaska.

That, however, was not the worst of the news.  Strughold had met
privately with a group of aliens for a few minutes and when they left
again, he'd quickly called a meeting of all the section leaders in
the
compound and announced that the timetable had been stepped up, and
that a new phase of testing would begin in the morning, with the
addition of new "materials" that he had just received.  It was also
not at all clear which group of aliens had come calling.

Marita and the clones hadn't been able, or perhaps willing, to fully
describe the potential consequences of this change in Strughold's
plans--it was only clear that this had changed everything for her in
terms of what she and her collaborators were trying to accomplish,
and
her sense of urgency about the dangers involved.

So, they adjourned back to the current safe house to try to come up
with a plan of action.

By Krycek's estimate, they had now been arguing for a good four
hours.

Fuck this shit.  There was only one viable entry point to the lab
they
needed and they all knew it.  They were simply delaying the
inevitable. He strode over to the table, and slapped his palm against
the diagram.

"You're just delaying the inevitable."  It felt good to snarl, to act
without censoring his words or tone.  "There's only one fucking way
in, through the south door.  If we approach from the west, we have to
move through way too much open space, and we'll get spotted because
we've established that there are guards.  And the north was never
really an option unless you," he glanced at Skinner, "have some
buddies in the Third Infantry who just happen to be vacationing in
this area along with a battalion or two and lots of light armor."

Skinner muttered something, and rolled his head on his shoulders.
But he looked up at Krycek, and just shrugged, a grudging respect in
his eyes. "You're right.  The southern route is the only viable
plan."  Skinner then turned to Marita, and a minute softening in his
tone was
discernible.  "Okay?  We're going in on the southern approach."  The
air of command was unmistakable.

Marita bridled a little, Krycek was amused to see.  He knew how much
she hated being out of control, and he was also intrigued by the
shift in dynamics that he saw between the former AD and Marita.
Clearly something had happened, and the scandal hunter in Krycek was
pretty damn sure what it was.  Well, well, well, that was certainly
an interesting twist.  He was going to have a hell of a lot of fun
with this little development.

He listened while Skinner laid out the details of the operation.
Details they had discussed a half-dozen times already, as they ran
through their narrowing list of options.  He half-expected one of the
clones to whip out a notepad and take detailed notes.

Damn. It was going to be amateur hour.  Skinner, he knew, would do
everything by the book. And he'd long suspected that Marita in the
field would be a fearsome and ruthless creature.  But these fucking
scientists were the wild card.  He had no idea how they'd react when
the pressure was on, and no one, but no one had yet addressed what
might happen to all of them if bullets started flying.

He was really, really getting too old for this shit.  In his next
career, he was definitely picking an organization with a decent
retirement plan.

He looked around the anonymous room, and thought tiredly that safe
houses had a certain sameness to them the world over.  They all had
an air of captured despair and surrender.  A capitulation to the
inevitable.

He heard Skinner wrapping up the meeting.  The agreement was to hit
the place at dawn.  On paper, at least, it was a surgical strike
operation. In and out, low and quiet.  They would hit the main lab,
retrieve the disks from the data storage room on the far side of the
building and obtain the "specimens" from the central testing
facility. He hadn't asked what the specimens consisted of because he
really didn't want to know.  He'd volunteered to run point for Clone
#1, who was in charge of getting the disks.

He asked again, more for the sake of argument than anything else.
"Shouldn't we involve Mulder and Scully in this?  We really need two
more people who know how to shoot, and we know that Red, at least, is
a dead shot."

Skinner glared at him, and Krycek shifted under the knowledge that
the
man could probably reach across the table and break his neck long
before he could reach his gun, or the palm pilot.

Skinner's tone, however, was surprisingly reasonable.  "No.  That's
not negotiable.  She's...They need to get out of here and get back to
safety. Kevin will meet them at the house where they're staying and
get them to the airstrip in time to meet up with us. They'll be in
the other plane, with the engine running.  That increases our odds of
at least some of us getting out of here and the information getting
back to the right hands."

Krycek was left with two thoughts:  Skinner wasn't entirely sure to
whom the information was going, and wasn't entirely sure it was the
right hands, but he seemed to have run out of ideas and options.  He
was also sure that Skinner was hiding something about Mulder and
Scully.

It was nearly midnight, and they would need to leave at 5 a.m. to
start their assault on the compound.

The clones were returning to the compound for the night, so they
would be in place in the morning.  One of the clones from this
project had
remarked wryly that one of the advantages of everyone looking exactly
the same was that it was easier to hide the fact that someone was
missing.  Krycek had barely refrained from replying that it also made
it way more fucking difficult to tell who was actually on your side.

The safe house, he realized with a jolt, only had two bedrooms.  On
the theory that the best defense is a good offense, he headed into
one and closed the door.  Let Skinner have the very short and very
lumpy couch. When he stumbled out a couple of hours later, for a
bathroom run, he was not really surprised to see the other bedroom
door firmly closed and an unoccupied couch in the living room.


Dawn came all too early.  He'd never been a morning person, and
waking up to a glowering Skinner shaking his shoulder was definitely
not his idea of a good wake-up call.  He growled back, "I'm up, I'm
up already.  Just give me five fucking minutes, ok?"

There wasn't a hot cup of coffee waiting for him.  Yup, in his next
life, a job with a retirement plan and accommodations with room
service.  He grimaced to himself.  It was the small, accomplishable
goals that made life worthwhile.

Sometime while he'd been sleeping, Marita had managed to secure an
impressive armory of weapons.  There was range of pistols, light
mortars, grenades, flash-bang grenades, and canisters that looked
like they contained something considerably more lethal than tear gas.

When he started to ask her about it, she brushed him aside with the
retort that someone in the group needed to think about logistics.  He
almost asked her which of Skinner's logistical needs she'd met last
night, but at the last minute thought better of it.

As they were loading up the jeep, he managed to pull her aside for
just a second.  "Tell me again why we fucking have to do this here
and now?"  He hoped he wasn't whining.

For the first time since they had all come back together, she fixed
him with that too lucid stare--blue eyes of endless calm depths
gazing
through him, finding him wanting.  Then she relented.  It seemed to
him later that she wanted to share the weight with someone, and he
was the only other one there who had walked through all of the same
darkened alleys that she had.

"Do you want several hundred Gibson Praises loose in the world? An
entire generation of them? That's what the tests in Florida and Italy
were aiming at.  They nearly succeeded, too.  There's a mop-up
operation going on right now in Italy.  If this new material that
Strughold received is what I think it is, the next tests will be 100%
successful."

At first it didn't make sense to him, and then he shuddered as he
considered the implications.  The Consortium hadn't been able to
finish all the tests on young Gibson, but they had learned enough to
know that he was a dangerous variable. His ability to communicate
with The Greys was undisputed.  The working theory had also been that
he might be an agent or creation of the rebel forces.  That there
might be something in his hybrid or enhanced physiology that was an
advantage to the faction that sought to overthrow the group of aliens
that had made the pact with the Consortium back in the 1940s.

She saw him realize the problem, and nodded at him.  "If Strughold
succeeds, and Aston was right with his theory, then earth becomes a
battleground in their civil war."

"Fuck that.  We need to move."  It occurred to him that they might
only be delaying the inevitable, but when faced with a crisis, it
always seemed to him better to do something, rather than wait to see
what would happen next.

She nodded again. "Yes, we do."


The initial phases of the operation went smoothly.  They parked the
jeep at the rendezvous point.  There were two clones waiting for them
there.  One would wait--keeping the engine running, while the other
took them in through the south entrance.

They hiked in silently, through rows of eerily perfect corn, trying
hard not to brush any of the stalks, to give any evidence of their
passage.

The hallway into the lab building was long, sterile white, leading
off
into an endless series of closed doors.  From the diagrams, Krycek
knew that the data storage area was at the far end of the hallway,
behind a set of double swinging doors, and the specimen lab was
behind the third door on the right.

He gestured impatiently to "his" clone, mouthing "Let's go."  They
set
off down the hallway at a quiet trot.

The door to the storage unit was locked.  It threw him for a loop.
He
was reaching for his gun to shoot out the lock, when the clone
suddenly grabbed his arm.  He gestured toward the security card
reader and number pad by the doorframe.  The clone quickly slid a
card through the reader, and then punched in a complicated series of
numbers.  A breathless moment of waiting, and the door clicked and
hissed open.

The room wasn't a room, it was a goddamn warehouse, and it was full
of
disks.  Row after row of 10-foot metal racks stretched out in front
of
him, and each of them was packed with neatly and cryptically labeled
disk storage containers.

He glared at the man standing next to him.  "Don't fucking tell me
we're supposed to take all of these?"

The clone shook his head.  "No, there are 10 disks we need to
get...but I've never been in here before, and I'm not sure..."

"Shit."  Resignation and a certain anxiety settling low in the pit of
his stomach.  "What will the label say?"

"We're looking for any disk that has a 22-F code in the first part of
the serial number."

"How long do we think the security cameras will be off in this room?"

"Uh...about 10 minutes?"

"Fuck, fuck, fuck."  He looked about helplessly.  "Let's do this."

It took more than 15 minutes to locate all the disks.  He felt
ridiculous, like some college kid on a scavenger hunt in a library.
Jogging up and down the rows of disks, muttering to himself "22-F,
22-F...."

Finally, they had all the disks.  Just as Krycek glanced at his
watch,
and realized that they had blown their 10 minute window, he heard a
klaxon sound in the distance.  Swearing, he stuffed the disks into
his
jacket.

"Let's blow this popcorn stand."  They took off down the hallway,
sprinting as though the hounds of hell were after them.  Which, as it
transpired, they were.

The others were just running from the lab, as Krycek blew through the
double doors. Skinner yelled at him.  "Why did you set off the
alarm?"

"Fuck you.  It wasn't me--must have been your girl."  He glanced back
at Marita, who didn't bother answering, just ran past him.

They flew out of the building, and headed into the cornfield.

There was an ambush waiting for them at the jeep.  As they rounded
the
corner, he heard the crack of a rifle and something went stinging
past
his cheek.

Instinct took over, and he stopped and dropped, making himself as
small a target as possible.  Looking for cover, any sort of cover.
There was very little between the edges of the corn field, and the
small grouping of trees and rocks that blocked his view into the
clearing where the jeep waited.

Behind him and beside him, he could hear Skinner and Marita .  He
looked back, and saw two of the clones, stunned looks on their faces.
He motioned frantically at them. Get down, you stupid jerks, get
down.

It grew quiet.  Too quiet.

Skinner low-crawled up to where he lay.  "Marita thinks this might be
some of the rebels."  Perfect.  Just perfect.

"So what now?"

"If it is the rebels, there will only be two of them."

"And if it's not the rebels?"

A shrug was the only response he got.

"Any chance of a flanking maneuver? No, I suppose not."

He had the half-hysterical thought that they were Butch and Sundance,
and he was clearly Sundance, but all he could remember was the final
scene in the movie and the cold reality of what happened to the
robbers turned folk-heroes in that small town in Bolivia.

He looked over at Skinner who regarded him steadily.  "Straight in."

"Unless you've got the Third Infantry in your back pocket."

"Uh uh--that was your job."

A death head's grin.  "Then straight in it is."

It was two rebels, but they were Tunisian, militant Christian
separatists, not aliens.  Krycek recognized the insignia from his
stay in the penal colony, and was trying to remember the correct pass
phrase that would indicate that he was a brother in arms, when a
third rebel jumped out from the left.

Before he could react, Skinner pushed him to the side, nearly
knocking
him to the ground.  Skinner dropped to one knee and took out the
rebel.

The rebel squeezed off a burst from his gun before collapsing, and
the
whistle of projectiles through the air was cut off by the sickening
thud of  bullets burying themselves in human flesh.  He heard a
surprised grunt from Skinner.

Without stopping to think, Krycek pulled himself up, and screamed out
the phrase that had finally surfaced in his overloaded mind.  The
remaining two rebels stopped, puzzled by the unexpected display of
solidarity, and just as they began lowering their weapons, grinning,
Krycek raised his gun and  killed them.  With extreme prejudice.

He turned to find Skinner laying ashen-faced on the ground, his chest
a spreading bloom of horrible red.

Marita dashed into the clearing, her gun drawn, and he heard her
sudden gasp, and she dropped to Skinner's side.  She pulled her shirt
off over her head, pressing it into the wounds, trying to staunch the
bleeding.  "Skinner, can you hear me?  Can you move?"

Skinner opened his eyes and nodded faintly.  Marita yelled something
at the clones and they took off running, although not toward the
compound. Krycek and Marita levered Skinner from the ground, and
helped him to the jeep.

The drive to the airstrip was surreally long.  He drove, and Marita
shouted instructions to him from the backseat, where she sat trying
to
hold Skinner as still as possible.

Finally, they were there.  Two small planes sat on the runway,
engines
running.  She screamed at him over the noise and wind.  "Take the
disks to the first plane and tell them to go.  They have a 30 second
window left to take off. GO!"

He ran toward the plane, which began slowly taxiing, even as he drew
near.  He had to run along side to see Mulder and Scully where they
sat near the open door, nervous tension evident in each line of their
bodies. Scully was on the far side of Mulder and slightly behind.
Her presence suggested more than fully seen. He hurled the disks at
them; Mulder caught them in mid arc. Mulder stared at Krycek's
blood-stained clothing.

"What the hell happened to you?  Did you get shot?"  He was shouting
at Krycek over the roar of the propeller, and the door, which was
beginning to close, a panel sliding up from the bottom.

There was no time to explain.  Krycek could only yell back, "No.  Not
me."  He thought he saw the sickening comprehension begin to spread
across Mulder's face, but then the door finished slamming shut, and
the plane picked up sudden speed.

He paused for a microsecond, watching the small jet pull away, and
then he sprinted back to the other plane.  Marita and the pilot had
somehow managed to lift Skinner up into the craft.  Krycek threw
himself through the door, slamming it behind him.

The plane's interior had been stripped down.  Where there would
normally be a dozen seats, there were only four left, all at the back
of the cabin.  Marita sat with Skinner's head cradled in her lap,
leaning against the wall of the front part of the plane.

Beside her two large crates were web-strapped in.

The pilot looked back from the cockpit, and Marita motioned to him.
"Go. Now!"

They began to taxi.

Krycek looked over again to where the other two were.  He had
witnessed death too many times to misinterpret the signs.  Skinner's
blue lips, the grey pallor of the skin told Krycek everything he
needed to know. That, and the ever-widening pool of blood in which
Skinner lay.  He watched the big man laboring to breathe, watched his
chest rising and falling, knowing that soon it would fall, and not
rise again.

Krycek had long ago given up any illusion that there was anything
noble or dignified about death.  What he had forgotten was the sense
of outrage that could overtake him when death came too soon.  He
hadn't felt that in so very long.

Skinner opened his eyes, looking around startled, lost, as a spasm
wracked him.  Marita tried to soothe him, her hand gentle on his
forehead.  She seemed to be speaking to him, her low tone drowned out
by the sound of the propellers.  He couldn't see her face, which was
curtained by her hair.

Skinner locked eyes with him--a moment of lucid infinity--and Krycek
could do nothing but look back, knowing that all his guilt and
uncertainty and weakness were there for Skinner to see and assess one
last time.  Nothing left to hide.  All the secrets that were knowable
had been exposed.

He thought he saw an infinitesimal movement of Skinner's
head--something almost like a nod, and then he looked back up at the
woman who held his head on her lap.

Skinner's lips moved, and Marita bent low to try to hear what he was
saying.  Krycek felt like he was watching some kind of tableaux, a
drama that he didn't want to see unfold, but whose ending he had to
endure.

They cleared Tunisian airspace.  He found he could think of nothing
at
all.

Somewhere over the Mediterranean, Skinner's chest stopped moving.
The
blood on the floor of the plane shone shocking red, bright, garish
under the harsh sunlight streaming through the windows.

A brief shudder shook Skinner's body, and then he was still.

Krycek watched Marita carefully close Skinner's eyes, her hand slowly
brushing over his face in a silent benediction.  When she looked up
at
him, he was not at all surprised to see her face scored with the
glistening tracks of ceaseless tears.

End Part 13

EQUILIBRIUM, by Vivian Wiley (vivwiley@yahoo.com)


Chapter 14

Arlington National Cemetery

The crack of the rifle shots ricocheted through her, echoing in the
vast empty chasm in her heart.  The open wound that refused to begin
healing.

Scully flinched as the second volley thundered.  CRACK!.

And again.  CRACK!

The reverberations of the 21-gun salute still wavered on the air when
the bugler, off in the distance, began the plaintive call of "Taps."

Surrounded and constrained by the formal pageantry of a military
funeral, there was no space to cry, to rail at the gods.  No room to
do anything but stand at attention at Skinner's graveside, holding
the flag that had been presented to her just moments earlier.
Nothing to do but stare straight ahead, trying not to see the quiet
polished coffin in front of her.

Her vision blurred, caught in the endless blue of the cloth in her
hands--the stars melting under her tear-dimmed gaze into meaningless
white symbols.

She drew a deep shaky breath and looked up the mocking perfect blue
sky. It should have been raining.

The service ended, and she was vaguely aware of movement around her.
Hushed conversations starting and fading into meaningless jumbles of
sound as people began drifting away from the grave.  Finally there
were only the sounds of the birds in the distant trees and the cars
rushing along the highway to the east of the cemetery.

When she could see again, she realized she was staring out over the
endless rows of white markers that stretched out forever across the
serene green lawn.  A silent sea of whitecaps, breaking on an inland
shore.

It was fitting that he come here.  That he should be laid to rest
among this fellowship of the nation's fallen heroes.  This corps
would welcome him, they would understand the sense of honor and duty
that had driven him to the very end.  This was fit company for him.

And yet.  And yet, she couldn't shake the sense of unfairness.

Her initial shock had left her numb, uncomprehending that such a
thing
could happen.  Then after a day or two, all the numbness had been
burned away by her anger. The rage that welled in her chest in the
middle of the night.  The clear knowledge that this was so wrong.  It
shouldn't have been him.  No victory was worth this price.

She could feel Mulder standing behind her.  Waiting, simply waiting
for her.  She appreciated more than her grief-struck heart could say
that he didn't rush in and try to comfort her, offering her
meaningless words of consolation.  That he respected her need for
private mourning. That he understood that for now no words he could
offer would help her comprehend this injustice.

He waited for her. And he was there in the middle of the night to
hold
her when she couldn't stand it anymore.

She knew her grief would eventually ease.  But it was still too raw,
stinging in the unfairness of all that had happened.   She couldn't
even find words to put shape to all that she was mourning.  To
describe her loss.  She had always known that Skinner was more than a
colleague, but until his death, she'd never tried to put into words
what he had been.

She thought again, of their brief embrace on the hillside in Tunisia,
just before she saw him alive for the last time.  Her chest tightened
at the memory, breath harsh in her lungs. Had he known?  Had he had
some premonition?  Had he seen his avatar one last time?

Skinner had obviously known something might happen.  The surprises
that awaited them in DC after they'd returned had proved that.  But
maybe that was simply the habits of a life-long warrior, who
understood that death can wait for you anywhere.  The careful
preparations of a man who lived by the rules, even in the midst of
lawless game.

She would not find her answers here.

"Damn you, Skinner," she whispered.  "I miss you."

She walked out into the midst of the sea of gravestones and stood
listening to the wind for a long time before turning back to meet
Mulder and go home.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

He watched her black-coated figure seem to recede into the distance,
although at first she didn't physically move at all.  He desperately
wanted to go to her, to cross the 10 feet that separated them, and
rock her in his arms until all her grief washed away.  But he knew it
was impossible.  All he could do for her right now was wait. So he
waited.

It gave him time to continue to sort through all that had happened
since he'd been gone, since he'd been back.  So much water flowing
under so many bridges, and so many cross-overs washed out to sea.

He thought that maybe, just maybe, if he replayed all the facts and
events often enough he might find the pattern, the reason for how
things had ended as they had.

The trip back from Tunisia had been surreal--a slowly unfolding
nightmare that refused to end.

He was suffering some kind of amnesia from his time away.  He wasn't
entirely clear if he'd been somewhere in outer space, on a space
craft, or exactly where.  For now all his brain could recall were
hazy images of lights and humanoid shapes with no distinct features.
Sometimes he woke in the middle of the night with the sense that he
had learned something vital, but just as he would try to speak that
thing outloud, the words to describe it would evaporate.

The first distinct memory he had after leaving Skinner in the Oregon
woods was waking to find himself jolting along a Tunisian road, his
head cradled in Scully's lap, and discovering that her eyes still
spoke to him in their private, exclusive language.

Then there had been the fever and tangle of their reunion, followed
by
the news that reshaped his world around him.

He still trembled when he considered the implications of their child.

Their child.  The words struck strange, resonating chords in his
soul,
and he was only gradually coming to terms with all that it meant.
The
impossible hope.

What felt like just moments after she'd told him, and his passionate,
joyous reaction, they'd been roused from their bed by an urgent
pounding on their door.  A breathless and clearly agitated clone had
told them to pack "immediately" and come with him.  He could tell
them only that "something was going down" and that the others would
meet them at the airfield.  He added that Skinner had said to "get
their asses in gear."

There were no choices but to follow the directions.

Then the awful montage of images began:  the banality of waiting in
an
airplane interrupted by a bloody Krycek hurling something at him, the
cryptic statement that he had just begun to decipher when the plane's
door shut and they flew into yet another unknown, and the fight all
through the flight to keep the panic from his face, so that he
wouldn't alarm Scully unnecessarily.

But then there was Malta, and meeting up with the others, and his
worst--their worst--fears were confirmed.

They touched down at a private airstrip about 20 minutes ahead of the
other plane, and as Mulder was hesitantly trying to explain to Scully
what Krycek had said just before they'd left Tunisia, the other plane
arrived.

Mulder and Scully sprinted in unison across the tarmac to the plane,
tugging at the door, even before the plane had drifted to a full
stop,
and when the door finally pulled away, they were so unprepared for
what they found.

Of the many images that would haunt him until he died, Mulder thought
the one he might  most like to repress was Skinner's too-bloody,
too-still body lying on the cabin floor.

Scully's gasp of horror and instinctive move forward to help Skinner
was stopped by Alex's snarl.

"He's dead.  Has been for over an hour."  Then Alex threw himself
from
the plane, striding past them without another word, his face a mask
of
some dark despair that Mulder couldn't begin to interpret.

Marita had been sitting with her back against the far wall.  She
stared unseeingly at Skinner, until Scully climbed into the plane.
Then she'd looked up at Scully and simply shaken her head--her face a
mask not of her usual composure, but a living anguish that hurt to
look at.

It seemed that Marita had contacts everywhere.  In mere hours, she
managed to obtain transit papers for Mulder, arrange for a coffin to
ship Skinner's body in, and secure their passages back home.

Once they were all back in the US, Marita disappeared.

Mulder and Scully spent most of their initial days back trying to
explain Mulder's reappearance, what the hell they had all been doing
in Tunisia, and how Skinner had been killed.

They spent their nights alternating between trying to explain the
events in Alaska and Tunisia to the Lone Gunmen, and trying to come
to
understand for themselves what had happened to them.  All that was
going to happen.

Then one day the FBI's questions stopped.  At the 800th (give or
take)
hearing that Mulder had been called to testify at, a somber
Department of State official, accompanied by a somber and
uncomfortable AD from the international terrorism unit of the FBI had
suddenly walked into the room, presented a series of documents to the
hearing panel.  Then the panel and the two officials had a long
urgent conversation in hushed tones.

He couldn't hear the exchange, but it was clear that no one was
happy.
It seemed some sort of irrefutable document or evidence had surfaced
that was screwing up everyone's day.  He thought he caught the
phrases
"insurgency,"  "deep cover," and "national security."

After much muted debate, the two men left just as abruptly as they'd
arrived, and the panel chair made the surprising statement that the
inquiry into the death of former AD Walter Skinner was closed.

Specifics about the conclusion of the investigation of Skinner's
death
were never disclosed, but plans for his full honors military funeral
in a week's time were announced the next day.

Mulder resigned from the FBI the same day.

Mulder shook his head--so much to try to comprehend.  The reality of
his present circumstances shouldered its way into his consciousness.
He was standing beside Skinner's grave.

Skinner.  There was another mystery, as it turned out, that he would
never fully fathom.  Skinner who had been more than a friend in life,
had managed to surprise them in death as well.

Once the inquisition into his death was closed, his lawyer had
contacted Scully.  It seemed that Skinner had left nearly his entire
estate to her. An educational trust had been established for the
child a distant cousin.  Everything else had been left to Scully.
She had been shocked, disbelieving, but there had been a letter
addressed to her from Skinner that gave her some explanation.  He
still didn't know what that explanation was, because she'd read the
letter twice, and then burned it. He'd known, from the look on her
face, that he shouldn't ask what the letter said.

Skinner had left a gap in their lives that he was still trying to
understand.  The funeral this afternoon should have offered
"closure"--whatever it was that psychologists meant by that--but it
seemed to Mulder that it would take more than the drama of uniformed
soldiers and a horse-drawn caisson to close this story.

He watched Scully move further away from the open grave behind her.
Saw her slowly walking with no real sense of direction or purpose.
She seemed weighted with all that she carried.

He would let her journey only so much further alone, and then he
would go to her.  He could wait for a little longer.

Scully was still at the FBI.  Her status was pending reassignment.
AD
Jameson, to whom Scully now reported, had offered her the X-Files,
but
Scully hadn't decided what to do.  Mulder refused to provide any
input
into her decision.  He told her that he was in no position to advise
anyone on their careers.  Look where he'd ended up, after all.  She'd
laughed at him, and hadn't asked again.

He marveled a little at how quickly her apartment had become home for
him.  He still kept his place in Alexandria, but he hadn't slept
there
more than two nights since they'd come back.   Particularly once
Krycek had shown up.

Both Marita and Alex had disappeared somewhere between Immigration
and
Customs at Dulles Airport when they'd all arrived from Malta.  Mulder
had assumed that they had gone off somewhere together.  All he knew
is that they'd both disappeared, which made sense in Krycek's case,
as Mulder assumed there were multiple warrants out for his arrest.

But on the third day after they'd been back, Mulder went over to
Scully's to find Krycek skulking on her couch.  The first of the
interrogation's over Skinner's death had begun that morning, and
Mulder had needed to run to blow off some the fury and sorrow the
questioning had raised in him. He'd gone home, run, showered and
picked up some spare clothes before going over to Scully's.

The run had cleared his mind, and the anticipation of evening
lounging on the couch with Scully had him smiling as he entered her
apartment. He'd even jokingly called out, "Honey, I'm home."

He had not been prepared for Alex's voice to respond.  "Ward, I'm so
glad you're back--the Beav had such a bad day."

"What the fuck are you doing here?"  Mulder's snarl had been
instinctive.

"Aren't you glad to see me?"

"Where's Scully?  Is she ok?  Is the ...."  His panic kicked in
almost
immediately.  But he managed to stop himself before blurting out
anything about the baby.

"Relax--she's getting groceries.  She left you a note."  Krycek
indicated a scrap of paper on the coffee table.

The handwriting was hers, and as he read the note he remembered that
she'd said something this morning about needing to pick up some
things
tonight.

"What the fuck are you doing here, Krycek?"

"What?  Can't a guy drop by and visit old friends?"  The mockery in
his tone nearly disguised the hurt that Mulder saw flashing through
the changeable green eyes.

Scully had arrived home at just that moment, and somehow the three of
them wound up having dinner together, around her comfortable kitchen
table, like some mutant family gathering.

As the evening grew late, Mulder began to glance meaningfully first
at
his watch, and then at the door, but Krycek wasn't taking the hint.
Finally, Scully began yawning and stretching and smiling with quietly
smoldering eyes at Mulder.

She stood from the couch, and offered Mulder her hand.  He took it,
and stood also, but looked quizzically at Krycek who remained
slouched in the armchair.  Krycek gave him an impassive stare in
return.

Scully tugged Mulder toward the bedroom.  He followed, because his
body couldn't stand not to, but his mind was still puzzling over how
to ask her what was going on.  Before he'd formulated the question,
she'd gone to her linen closet and pulled out a couple blankets and a
pillow.  She disappeared into the living room, where he heard her
saying something to Krycek, and then she walked back into the
bedroom, closing the door behind her.

"Scully?"  He knew she would hear all the questions he needed to ask
in that one word.

"I told him he could stay on the couch tonight."  She stopped, and
looked over Mulder's shoulder, seeing something far away from the
present.  "I don't think he has anywhere to go."

There was more to it than that, Mulder thought, but she seemed to
feel
this was important, and he was in no position to deny her anything.

The next day, Mulder gave Krycek the keys to his apartment, and told
him he could stay there.

Krycek hung around for about a week, seeming to be there everytime
Mulder turned around.  An ever-present and annoying presence, like an
unemployed brother-in-law.

Then, one night, they went out to the warehouse, to help the Gunmen
finish dismantling the command center.  Mulder arrived to find Krycek
deep in conversation with Scully.  He was handing her something, and
whatever he was saying about it seemed to be upsetting her.  He
thought he saw her face glistening with tears.

He felt a deep, atavistic rage overtaking him. As Mulder strode
across
the floor to where they stood, Krycek finished talking.  And then
Mulder had to stop in amazement.  Scully reached up and gave Krycek a
sudden, brief hug.  She kissed his cheek, and then quickly walked out
the backdoor to the courtyard.

Krycek seemed stunned.  He stood frozen where Scully had left him,
staring after her, as uncertain as Mulder had ever seen him.

Then he managed to shake off the spell, and he'd turned and walked
out of the warehouse, brushing past Mulder as though he wasn't even
there.

Mulder hurried to the courtyard.  Scully stood, her face wet with
tears, staring up at the skies.  It was unusually clear night, and
even with the local light pollution, the display of stars and planets
was breathtaking in its clarify.

"Scully, are you are alright?"  He spoke softly, not touching her
yet.

She turned to him, and reached out her hand, pulling him close.  She
buried her face against his chest, and his arms locked around her.
Although he could feel her tears soaking his shirt, her muffled voice
was level.  "Yeah.  I'm ok."

"What did Krycek want?"

She didn't answer him for a long time, but then she finally pulled
back a little and reached in her coat pocket.  "He gave me this."
And she handed him an oddly stylized Palm Pilot.

"What the...?"

"It was the control for those things in Skinner's blood."

Jesus.  He breath left him instantaneously as though he'd sustained a
prize fighter's blow to his solar plexus.  "Why....?  What..." He
struggled to understand.  To control his rage and urge to sprint down
the street after Krycek and beat him to death.

"I don't know why."  She watched him steadily, and he was struck by
how calm she seemed. "He said he wanted me to have it.  And he said
he
wouldn't be back.  Frohike got him connected with a group of
mercenaries, and he said he was leaving to try his hand at an old
game."

They had not seen Krycek again, and Mulder thought he'd seen Scully
quietly throw the control mechanism into Skinner's grave this
afternoon, when she'd thrown in her handful of earth.

The wind in the cemetery gusted suddenly, and Mulder pulled his coat
tighter about him.  Summer had given way suddenly to fall, and the
wind had a chill to it now that reminded them that November wasn't
far away.

He looked at Scully again.  She was standing where she'd been for the
last 20 minutes. Finally she turned and started back to him.  Her
tears had dried, and her eyes were clear again, although shadowed by
sorrow.

But she was Scully, and her strength shone through, even when she
could no longer see it.

He met her halfway, and they went home together.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Unknown location

"You failed."  Her voice was crisp, unemotional.  A casual listener,
although there were no casual listeners within 1000 miles of here,
might have assumed that she was discussing something trivial--a poor
showing in a flower arranging show.  The casual listener would have
been very wrong.

"You always see things in such black and white terms.  Success,
failure.  Up, down.  We didn't achieve all our goals, no.  But, we
did...."

"You failed."  Her tone a little sharper now, as she turned from the
window she'd been gazing out, to look at the man lounging in one of
the leather chairs across the desk. Behind her the setting sun
illuminated her hair, creating a dangerous halo-illusion. "There was
no room for that sort of blunder."

The dark-skinned man straightened in the chair, his sudden
ramrod-straight posture unmistakably military.  "I'd be careful, if I
were you in assigning blame too quickly.  It's not as though you
don't
have some loose ends to deal with.  And, we're still missing some
data."

"I got all the disks.  And you've had four weeks to work on the
data."

"I know."  His voice shifted oddly, sliding between American and
British inflections.  "But, there must have been a secondary data
collection going on, or Strughold deliberately miscoded those disks."

She grimaced.  "Well, we're not ever going to know, are we?"

White teeth flashed.  "It's astonishing what a kiloton or three of
explosives will do."

Her stare was level, neither impressed nor appreciably amused.  She
seemed to be assessing the man in front of her, weighing his fitness
for some impossible task.  She found him wanting.  "And Alaska?"

"Same story, different cover.  There's been an earthquake."  Now he
seemed hesitant.  "I still haven't found that bunker you told me
about."

She nodded.  Unsurprised.  So little surprised her.

"So what are we left with?"  He seemed to understand that it was a
rhetorical question, as he offered no response.  She swiveled 90
degrees, facing the expensive oil painting over the fireplace on the
right side of the room. She continued, "We have the data, or at least
most of it.  The experiments have been halted.  We have had initial,
successful contact with the other faction."

She was quiet for a long time then, and finally he cleared his
throat. "I was sorry to hear about Skinner.  He seemed like a good
man."

She sighed almost noiselessly. "Mistakes were made.  They always
are."
Her voice was level, and only one man might have heard the
undercurrent that trembled far below the surface.

She turned back to him then, fully focused.  He shifted uncomfortably
under her intense, cauterizing gaze.  "So, John Byron Aston, would
you
say that we are in the clear to wait for the results of the Epsilon
Test?"

"Rodden....I go by Rodden now."  His murmured response was only to
buy
time, and she paid it no heed.  He considered her statements
carefully, no casualness evident in any line of his superbly
conditioned body.

"Yes."  He faltered under her unyielding stare.  "Probably.  He's
always been a wild card, but she's been far more stable than we had
any right to hope.  She didn't even quit the FBI..."  He considered
further.  "Yes, we should be okay.  It's a few more months, but we
have people in place to ensure as much tranquillity as we can
manage."

Marita nodded. "I concur.  We'll simply have to wait and see
what....develops."

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

"Oh."  She sounded startled, and he felt an instant of panic until
she
said softly, "Mulder, come here."

He walked over, to find her smiling--a smile of undiluted wonder and
joy, the first he'd seen since their return.  She was holding out her
hand.  He instinctively reached back.  She clasped his fingers
tightly, and then guided them to rest on her gently rounded belly.

"Wait....right there.  Did you feel that?  The baby just moved."


END

Author's notes and thanks:  First and foremost, I owe an enormous
debt to the superb beta talents of the fabulous three--who will have
to remain nameless for various reasons, but you know who are, and I
hope you know how deeply I appreciate your assistance.  You were all
utterly wonderful in your support and help with this story.  Your
beta, feedback and suggestions are all deeply, deeply appreciated.
Any remaining typos, plot problems or strange characterizations are
solely my fault.

I also owe deep thanks to three others, who were there throughout.
Thank you for the support--it meant the world.