Title:  Journey 1/WIP
Author:  Zuffy
Email:  zuffynuffy@yahoo.com
Rating:  R
Category:  MSR, angst, mytharc
Spoilers:  The story happens early in season 7
Date:  March 2000
Archive:  Yes, but keep my name and let me know where it is, please.
Disclaimer: Dana Scully, Fox Mulder, and the X-Files are the property
of Chris Carter, 1013 Productions, and Fox. But look, they've gotten
themselves into a fix and I'm trying to be helpful.

Thanks to Lone Gunwoman and Littljoe for their helpful beta comments,
with special awe to Littljoe for her amazing knowledge of botany.
Backstory note:  Journey begins about 3 months after the end of
Clinical Detachment, my Mulder and Scully get together story.  It's
not necessary to read *CD first, but it's here if you want to (and if
you're old enough, gals). This is a WIP.

Journey (part 1)

Fox Mulder sat in his basement office, chair tipped back, pencil
tapping out "Sunshine of Your Love" on the edge of his desk.  As the
guitar faded in his mind, he checked his watch again.  Nine-fifteen. 
It was odd for his partner to be so late.  Correction, it was odd
until two or three weeks ago, when the Dana Scully he had been
discovering with such pleasure was replaced by a distracted twin.  His
mind idled through the possibilities: drugs in the water, hybrid
replacement, genetic mutation, some residual memory from a prior life,
she's angry at me.  Only the last seemed plausible, but she hadn't
actually snapped at him or whined about his obsessions or turned her
back on one of his grainy alien videos.  Moody, maybe; tired, often;
preoccupied, absolutely.  He'd nosed around the topic of the flu but
she had assured him in that nothing-to-discuss tone of voice that she
was fine and had returned to her computer, capital F all but burned
into his forehead.  Okay, he got flamed on that one, no surprise
there.  What was the opposite of a hypochondriac anyway?

Gloomy weather out there, he thought. When the light of day didn't
make it down the airshaft, it was damn hard to ignore the insult of
being tucked out of sight behind the office supplies and the janitor's
mops.  It didn't used to bother him back in the days when the cellar
proclaimed principled defiance.  Days like today made him wonder what
the difference was between firebrand, gadfly, and pawn.  He flipped on
the desk lamp and worked through the mail and paranormal journals; his
favorite tabloids were tucked at the bottom of the pile.  How was he
supposed to walk past a headline like "Martian Babies Start School"?
He spun around to admire his UFO poster, some photos from the Hubble
ripped out of the latest National Geographic, authenticated pictures
of child ghosts in a New England fishing village, the box score for a
Rockies game he'd lured her to in Denver, and other curiosities. If he
put the Martian babies up there, Scully might just notice and they
could have a little dust-up about alien DNA and maybe she'd treat him
to a tolerant smile at the end.  She'd never admit it, he thought, but
maybe proving him wrong wasn't so all-fired important any more.

Why was it so hard for her to 'fess up?  They'd had a breakthrough in
their friendship -- as she continued to call their nights together --
two or three months earlier on that trip to the Colorado outback when
she banged up her arm.  She'd asked him through clenched, perfect
teeth to scrub her back and he'd tried his best to ignore the feel of
her body under his soap-slicked hands.  He'd hazarded an innocent
little kiss just to taste her lips and she kissed back with breath
that filled his lungs and his hand wandered out of bounds and next
thing he knew he was square back in his room, his partner unlikely to
speak to him again in this life.  Then the gods must have intervened
because she knocked on the door with eyes downcast and a bottle of
shampoo and an hour later she was his. He still wasn't sure he should
exhale. At one point he'd told her that if he'd known a little fall
was all it would take to get her into bed, he would have tripped her
years ago.  She laughed at that, but there hadn't been much laughter
in the last week or two.  Not only that, he had a hard time even
getting her to the autopsy bay.  She'd come in, late and pale, set up
her laptop on a table at the far end of the room and start in with the
equations. All these years, she'd talked a mean streak of biology and
chemistry whenever he ventured one of his little theories, so he
hadn't realized what a math geek she really was.  That Einstein thing
wasn't a fluke.  She was typing other stuff as well, stuff that she
shut down if he wandered near the table.  During one of her hurried
absences he happened to look at the screen.  An obit of Dr. Stephen
Stewart, gynecologist, dated June 1999.  Heart attack.  Didn't fit
with anything they were working on.

Evenings hadn't been much better.  They still went over to her
apartment some days after work - the two-car sneak for appearance's
sake, in case there was anyone who hadn't simply assumed their
intimacy years ago.  She didn't seem to know what people said about
them, but he got an earful in the john.  Never let on about the truth,
though, not when there was nothing to tell and not now.  Still, when
he and she got through her front door there was no more tugging at
each other's buttons.  Now she cuddled up to him on the couch after a
simple dinner and fell asleep by eight, her face warm against his
chest.  He was getting tired of washing up the dishes and tucking her
in, her mumbling apologies but in no shape for "friendship."  Hell, he
even had to do the cooking one night. He never thought Scully would
get that desperate.

A clack-clack-clack of heel on tile spun him around to his desk. 
Slipping on his reading glasses, he spread out a stack of aerial
photos and feigned a twitch of his shoulders as she pushed through the
door.

"Hey. Morning, Scully."

"Morning, Mulder."  She was wearing standard-issue black with his
favorite U-neck blue top that matched her eyes and those killer heels
that put her forehead right against his lips.  As she walked toward
him, the light caught the morning mist that had settled into her hair.
She balanced her bag on the edge of his desk and pinned him with a
smile. Five seconds of sunbeams and she disappeared down the hall. 
When she came back, letting out a sigh as she leaned the door shut,
her skin pallid against deep red lips, it was all he could do to stop
from shaking the truth out of her.  She pulled a folded sheet of paper
from her bag and handed it to him, hitching herself up on the edge of
his desk. He pulled his eyes away from her bare knees to check her
face, then reached to stroke a damp spot at the corner of her mouth,
but she tipped her head toward the smoke detector on the ceiling.

His eyes turned to the sheet of yellow paper in his hands.  "Mulder,"
her handwriting began, "What about a picnic in the country tomorrow? 
Weather's supposed to be nice, I know a spot- fresh air, sunshine.  We
can talk."

Talk? he thought. Scully? Was this the big brush-off?  The
we'll-still-be-partners-Mulder?  Rules-are-rules-after-all? Weren't
they way past that?  Or maybe it's the old I-feel-great-admiration-for
-you?  No, not admiration, respect is what women used to say. 
You-are-so-unique.  What the hell was that supposed to mean?
You-are-so-strange, only they were too panicked to say so.  Scully's
head tilted slightly, eyes querying his. No, not possible, not Scully.
That couldn't be it. He picked up his pencil and scribbled, "Sounds
great.  I'll pick you up.  What time?"

She bit her lip and shook her head, taking pen and paper from him. She
wrote, "Let's meet there.  I'll give you a map.  It's a little way
out. 11?"

"Yeah," he spoke, voice throttled by her words, "eleven's fine." 
Separate cars? Obviously not sleeping over tonight. Bad sign.  That
was the hardest thing about being a guy.  You didn't get to find out
what you'd done wrong until it was too late.  Until it had been
dissected and analyzed and resolved, so there was no chance of sliding
home with a simple explanation, apology, and a submissive kiss on the
hand.  And right in front of him was Miss Slice-and-Dice, the sharpest
dissector and analyzer he knew.  He kept his eyes fixed on the desk.

"You see this?"  He pulled the tabloid from the bottom of his stack
and held it out for her amused scorn.

"Martian first-graders, Mulder?  The quality of tabloid news is
definitely going downhill.  What next?  Elvis caught in Medicare
scam?"

He returned her smile.  "How about some aerial shots of a UFO crash
site in the Sahara?" pointing to the photos.  "These are the real
thing."

"Maybe later, Mulder.  I've still got a couple of equations to pin
down."

He slowed on the narrow park road and consulted the hand-drawn map
propped against the steering wheel.  Looked like another quarter mile
through the arching green tunnel. In two weeks, the reds and oranges
would flame out from under their formal summer wear - gorgeous like
Scully emerging from that black armor -- and vans full of jabbering
families would bumper-crawl along the forest tracks.  But right now
the greens were just starting their fade to yellow and the tourists
were at the mall, saving up their outdoor moments for one big weekend.
 Scully had chosen her Saturday carefully.

A blue rental Taurus was the only car in the lot when he crunched over
the gravel fifteen minutes early. She was sitting on the hood,
watching him as he pulled up next to her and cut the engine. She wore
jeans and an old blue business shirt of his she'd borrowed once and
never returned, sleeves rolled up to show her thin wrists.  As the
leaves overhead tossed in the breeze, a shaft of sunlight bounced over
her hair turning it golden bronze, a color he wanted to forbid any
other woman ever from wearing.

"Hey, Mulder, you're early."

"Speak for yourself.  You have car trouble or something?"  He patted
the roof of her loaner.

"Or something."

"I could have picked you up, no problem."

"It was kind of last minute, so-" Her voice trailed off and she picked
a leaf out of her blazing hair.

It felt like someone had thrown a sack of cement across his stomach.
His hand skimmed over the hood of the Taurus. It was cold.  Last
minute thing indeed.

"Well, what's the plan here?"  He rubbed his hands together in a show
of enthusiasm.

She slid to the ground and gestured to her picnic bag, sitting at the
head of a path where the gravel gave way to dust and a tipsy wooden
signpost pointed left for the Black Ridge nature trail.  "About a half
mile down here is a clearing overlooking a creek. It's a little off
the path-"  He waited for her to finish, but she just smiled and
shrugged.

Her estimate of a half-mile was conservative, at least by the time
they had circled through the undergrowth looking for the shortcut to
her secret spot. A cool front had blown away Friday's overcast,
leaving the sky a sharp blue more like water than air. Puddles from
the previous day's rain had evaporated into a slimy red muck in the
puddles, shiny and cracking at the edges.  The sun warmed Mulder's
back, and his left arm sweltered under the blanket she'd requested. 
The blanket was a plus, a good sign, he thought, like the kiss she'd
planted on his mouth as they set out, forcing him to walk backwards
rather than give up the soft press of her minted lips.  He was
definitely feeling warm watching her lead down the path, the black
sweater tied around her waist swinging with her hips.  When they cut
in under the trees, the shade set up a chill where the sweat glistened
on his neck. The smell of damp earth rose from under the accumulation
of last year's leaves, decayed now into a mat dry on top and slick
underneath. It was slow going where she took them off the path angling
up to the top of the ridge, arms brushing back branches of needles or
leaves, hiking boots stepping over fallen boughs and rocky
outcroppings and delicate plants whose names he figured he would never
know.  Scully slipped and caught herself on the trunk of
lightning-dead tree, her hand pulling away bits of bark as Mulder
steadied her with an arm wrapped around her waist. Further on, a
branch snagged the back of his t-shirt and she came around to loosen
it so the fabric wouldn't tear.  One soft hand ran up inside his shirt
while she fiddled with the thorny tip, her hand cool with autumn on
his warm skin.  He shivered and twisted his head to watch her; she
smiled and ran her nails slowly down his back.  "All fixed, Mulder."

He grabbed her around the shoulder as she pushed by and pulled down
the collar of her shirt.  "Equal time, Scully," he said, pressing lips
to the back of her neck, smelling clean hair and late summer heat,
running his tongue around the knob at the top of her spine.

They followed the ridge as it dipped slightly, then stomped through a
nest of withered ferns into a small clearing. Scully frowned.  "Well,
this is it, but I don't quite remember it this way.  There used to be
a view here and a path down to the brook," she gestured toward the
sound of running water, "but look at how the sumac has sprung up!  I
can't believe it's been so long."

She waded through dry grass up to her knees out into the center of the
clearing.  "Over here someplace was a wall-"  She walked in a circle,
then bent and lifted a field stone. "Over here, Mulder.  Imagine,
someone chopped down the trees, shaped them into logs, and built a
house here, a cabin, then cut through there for the view." He followed
her glance to the spot where the towering line of trees dipped to a
patch of bright red sumac leaves blazing.  "Magnificent, I would
think, and peaceful."  She balanced the stone atop what was once the
back of a fireplace.

"Nice and normal, Scully," he said, walking out through the grass to
stand beside her, brushing away a dragonfly that spun around his ear.

"Normal?  Actually, I think it'd be more like you were the only two
people on earth."

"That kind of normal I might be able to deal with.  No Smoky, no
Krycek."

"No mutants.  No flukemen."

"Sounding better every minute."

She smiled.  "Spread the blanket over here," she pointed to the area
behind the fallen stones.  "If you catch some of the shade, we'll be
more comfortable."

"So, how do you know about this place?"  He walked back and forth
across the grass, flattening it, pleased to see few signs of other
visitors.  He threw one fringed end of the cloth to her and they
flapped it open on the ground.

"I came out here with a friend from college once, a botany major," she
said, sinking to her knees and smoothing a corner of the blanket. " It
was spring, and this little meadow was full of clover and chickory and
daisies and bright pink milkweed and over there, I think, was a
magnolia, just dropping its last flowers. We lay on an old quilt and
listened to the sounds of the newly-hatched insects and he told me
about how a hundred million years ago flowering plants -- angiosperms,
Mulder -- suddenly evolved from unknown ancestors.  Darwin called it
an 'abominable mystery.' It was just magic that afternoon, like we
were the first to discover flowers."

"Agent Scully returns to the scene of her previous conquest."

"If you like."  She lay back and looked up at the clouds.

Scully spread the last bit of brie on a piece she'd torn from the
baguette and waved it in front of his mouth. He parried it with a
carrot stick and then grabbed her wrist to guide it to his mouth. 
Without releasing her hand, he slowly scraped the offering from her
fingers.  She rewarded him with a smile.

"I can't believe you forgot the beer and chips, Scully."

"I guess- I thought-" she looked down and brushed bits of crust from
her lap. "-I guess I forgot what a guy needs on a picnic."  She pulled
open her bag and fished around at the bottom.  "Worse news. The
oatmeal cookies got crushed by the water."  She pulled out a plastic
bag of large brown and black crumbs and swung it in the air.

"Most guys don't come on a picnic for the oatmeal, Scully."

She had opened the zipper top and was nibbling at the crumbs, eyes
intent on the contents of the small sack.  He leaned over and rubbed
her thigh, "It doesn't matter. This was a nice idea.  We don't often
get out into pollen country like this."

"C'mon Mulder, can't you admit that you like it out here?  The sun,
the smells, the quiet-"

"The right company-that's what a guy really needs on a picnic."  He
leaned across and pushed her back, the two of them lying face to face
on the blanket lumped up with tufts of thick grass underneath.  His
lips found hers peppered with small, sharp crumbs; he ran his tongue
to sweep them up.  "Nice idea, as I said."

"I wanted to get away from the eyes and ears..."  Her voice trailed
off.

"That's why we're here."

"Yeah."

He ran his hands through her sun-warmed hair, pushing it back, lips to
neck, to ear, tracing the inward spiral and the small pearl on the
lobe, the oyster prize.  Her breath against his face, rapid, moist. 
Her hands sweeping up his neck into the low hair, tugging, kneading
his scalp.  Needing each other.  A swift stroke along the outer edge
of her breast where the softness rose.  Gently along the edge of it,
teasing her, teasing himself; fuller, rounder, better than he
remembered and his memories were pretty damn good.  Her hands down his
back, his muscles twitching involuntarily, rippling at her teasing,
skimming fingers, warmth spreading in their wake.  His fingers at the
buttons of his/her/their shirt, a hundred times unbuttoned, but not
like this.  Mulder pulled back to look down at his task.

"I recognize this shirt, Scully.  Just when I'd gotten it softened up,
it disappeared. Maybe I should take it back."

"It's all I brought to wear."

"You don't have to wear anything for me." The upper button slipped
through the hole and then the second. "Tell me, have you appropriated
other things of mine?"

She pushed up on one elbow and lifted his chin with her other hand. 
Her eyes turned serious and she was chewing her lower lip.  "One big
thing, actually."

"Really, what's that?  I don't seem to be missing anything."  He
attempted to recapture a playful tone.

"Nothing you weren't well aware you were giving me."

His mind went dizzy for an instant.  STD?  God, no.  She'd have
crushed him with that news.  Besides, he was clean. He hadn't always
been careful when he was younger, but he'd been lucky.  He traced the
stitching along the pocket of her shirt.  "So, Scully, tell me what
else you've taken.  Or do I have to guess?"

"It's hard, Mulder. I don't know how to make sense-"

So this is the Talk, he thought, dangerous, shifting ground, the
compass of their relationship spinning wildly. She knew something he
didn't.  He took her hand and memorized the network of bones and veins
running up to her wrist, the delicacy of her form concealing her
strength. The FBI recruiter had probably laughed when she walked
through the door.  He waited.

She closed her hand over his.  "I'm pregnant."

"Pregnant?"  A foreign word like fluss or tobeeb.  Not even Greek,
something he might reason out.

"Pregnant.  A baby.  Yours and mine."  Her hand dropped to her
stomach, his eyes followed, tugged by a string, helpless.

"That's why you've been-"

"Yeah. Tired.  And the nausea- I can't begin to tell you."  A
tentative smile broke on her lips and faded.

"But the experiments?"

"I know.  I thought so, too."

They were both sitting now, his eyes riveted to her stomach, his face
unresponsive, blocking emotion, no emotion to block, just a sudden
knowledge that they could never go back, there could never be any
other reality than what she'd just mapped and nothing ever the same
again, better or worse, but never the same.

"Look at you. You're wishing we'd used some protection."  She swept a
hand down the leg of her jeans and concentrated on picking prickly
burrs off the faded denim, eyes moist.

"No, not at all. I'm thrilled. Just a little unclear on how, with the
removal of your ova-"

"They must not have taken them all.  With the potential for cancer and
everything-"

"They probably didn't see the need."

"Actually, the explanation is less important to me than the simple
fact that our child is growing inside me."

"Can I touch?"  His voice a husky whisper, not trusting itself.

"Of course." She reclined against the blanket, fixing her eyes on his
face.  He finished unbuttoning the shirt and ran his hand inside the
waistband of her jeans.  Gently, he slid the copper rivet through the
hole and ran the zipper down the track.

"Right there?" His hand spanned the soft, white skin of her belly,
fingers slipping inside her panties, pressing gently against the swell
of her breathing. A scar showed along the bottom edge of her navel. 
Tiny, precise, overwhelming.  As though the entrance to the City of
Woe was not a gate, but an incision. The first time he had noticed it,
realized what it was, he kissed it and wept against her. Here it was
again, the void now filled.  He stroked it with his thumb.  "It's
incredible to imagine that inside- You remember a couple of years
back, we were investigating that weird family with the birth
defects?"

"The Peacocks?  God, Mulder, what made you think of them?"

He flushed.  "It's just that we had a conversation about our gene
pools, remember, and I was thinking that I'd never pictured you as a
mother before that conversation."

"You said that aloud."

"Did I?  I hope you didn't take it the wrong way- I've pictured you as
a mother a lot since then, when I found your ova, and you with Emily
and every time you stoop to talk to a child-  and I think of
everything you've lost because of me."

He kissed her stomach, then rested his ear against it.  She ran her
fingers through his hair.

"Mulder, since it seemed impossible- I mean, I didn't know how you'd
feel about it. We've never talked. Never planned."

"There's no one I'd rather have fathering your little uberScullies."

"God, how is the poor kid going to manage with your belief genes and
my science?"   She snorted softly at some private vision.

"Easy.  The best of each of us."

"Or the worst."

Mulder rolled over to squint into her face.  "Always looking for the
dark side, eh?  We'll have to conquer those blues- how about the
patented Mulder worry-banishment technique right now."

"You have a technique to banish worries?  This surprises me."

"I have the best technique of anyone I've ever heard of."  He ran his
hand over her bra, pushing from below and watching her breasts mound
above the lacy edge.  "And complaints are few and far between."

"Well, I understand the far between-"

"As if that's *my fault?  Come on.  Let's celebrate. I've never made
love to a pregnant woman before."

"Yes you have."  Her eyes teased him.  "I'm ten or twelve weeks."

"I didn't know.  It didn't count. When did you find out?"

"About three weeks ago."

"Three weeks?  All that time?"  All that time.  He sat up and wiped
his hand across the back of his neck.

"I couldn't, Mulder.  Not until I was sure.  I traveled all over the
city picking up those home pregnancy kits.  I must have tested six or
eight times.  It just didn't make sense.  There were decisions-"

"Whether you wanted it?"  No, that couldn't be it, he realized as soon
as the words left his lips.

"I want the baby more than anything." She looked away, plucked a long
stem of dry grass and began stripping the seeds.  "It makes me
afraid-"

"Do you think we could be a family? I know I'm not the kind of guy you
ever thought-"

"Not yet, Mulder-"

"But I will make an honest woman of you if you let me."

"- not yet.  It would tip them off."

"I love you, Scully.  It could work."

"Did you hear what I said?"

He pulled back and studied her frown.  "Tip who off?"

"Smoky.  Krycek.  The others."

"They'll know soon enough."

She would not meet his eyes.  "That's why I have to leave."

"Leave?  What do you mean?"  A chill chased the breath from his lungs
and the sun dimmed and sputtered in the sky.

"This is your child, Mulder.  Think of how they will use it."

"Will they assume it's mine?  I'm sorry, that came out wrong.  But,
would they know that we-"

She sat forward, reached into her bag and pulled out a small white
unmarked envelope.  "I'd have to say yes. These came last week. 
Stuffed in my mailbox."  She slapped it into his hand, then lay back
and put her arm across her eyes.

Mulder pulled out three photos.  The first: two bodies entwined on a
bed.  Another: her at his knees.  A third: asleep in each other's arms
in the dim light of dawn, sheets pulled halfway over naked bodies 
"They took these in your apartment?"

"I don't know when it started or why."

"Okay, how long do we have before people can tell?  Skinner might be
able to set up something. Witness protection. I have a contact,
someone who I helped-"

"Mulder, stop.  It's already arranged."

"What do you mean?"

"I've arranged a leave."

"You told Skinner before you told me?"

She sat up.  "I just told him I needed some time off, not why. I
thought it would be better than having your partner disappear after
you take her out for an afternoon in the country."

"You're leaving now?  Where?"

"I can't tell you.  Not yet."

"Why not?"

A smile played at her lips, then she shook her head.  "If you knew,
you wouldn't let me go.  I'm sorry, that's not funny."  She wiped a
hand across her cheek and looked at it.

"You mean you have completely frozen me out of this?  You planned this
on that damn laptop of yours-Don't you think I have some obligation,
some right to protect you?  This too macho for you?  I want more than
sex, Scully. I want a life together.  Like our partnership only a lot
more.  That was the idea. Now you're bolting as soon as we - we have
something we never dared to imagine."    He got up from the blanket
and walked around the ruined fireplace to the inside of the ghost
house, to a spot where plantain and chickweed and nettles poked
through the hardened earth, but the tall grass had not reclaimed. 
Hands on hips, he stared at the spot where the view had once opened to
the hills beyond.

"Mulder-"

"I guess you didn't see it that way."

"That's not why I have to go.   It's the only safe place "

"For once, Scully, this is my life, too.  My child, too.  You can't
just close me out. If you won't let me protect you, why in God's name
wouldn't you let me help protect our child?  Am I so incompetent?"

"No, no.  Mulder, come back here.  Listen to me.  All I'm doing is
buying some time so you can find a weak spot in them, some
vulnerability, so we can come back safely.  I can't see inside them
like you can. If I'm here, you'll be distracted by the danger to us."

"Thank you for making that decision for me."

"Do you really think that I want to get up from this blanket and walk
away?"

"If God gave you this miracle, won't he protect it?"

"Do you really believe that?  Do you think I *want to cause you more
pain? They've taken your family and mine." The sound of rustling grass
was followed by her footsteps, soft against the packed ground.  "Why
wouldn't they take this baby?  They took my other one."  Her voice
caught but he refused to turn around.

"Emily was different, they created her as an experiment.  You were
never meant to know she existed."

"You saw what they did to her.  She was just a medical experiment to
them.  Test over, dispose of sample-"

A small casket filled with sand, containing only her cross.  He'd
wanted to stop Scully from opening it, wanted her to carry the memory
of a real little girl, to forget what had run in Emily's veins, but he
could never block her from the truth.  "Who else knows?"

"Just you and me.  I will write when-"

"Call."

"No, I can't."

"If you leave, I will find you."

"Don't. You can't.  If you reach me, so can they.  If you find me, so
will they.  Please just trust me..."

"Why do you have to be so damned self-sufficient?"

"Mulder, listen.  If your mother had taken Samantha and run with her,
taken her someplace safe, even if you couldn't see her, wouldn't that
have been better?  Wouldn't it?"  A tentative hand on his shoulder
slid down his sleeve and the warm skin of his arm.  Two people.  In
this spot they could be the only two in the world, if only time would
stop.

"I don't know, Scully.  I honestly don't know."

She wrapped her arms around him and rested her cheek against his back.
"You promised a little while ago to demonstrate your special
worry-banishing technique.  To celebrate.  I want to celebrate now,
not fight." She ran her hands under his shirt.  "I need to love you,
Mulder."

End of Part 1

Journey - part 2

Mulder tested the knob on his office door before inserting the key and
turning it slowly to the right.  The weekend cleaning staff had left
the overhead fluorescents on again, bathing the room with flat white
light.  Things got done under fluorescent lights.  Crimes got solved
by the book, carefully, with the evidence spread out, lined up,
inspected.  The important and the trivial equally illuminated.  Linear
light, where logic could have full play, and the square pegs could be
matched with square holes. No one got inspirations under fluorescent
lights; inspirations, like mysteries, required privacy and nuance and
dark corners where the unknown could find temporary safety. Mulder
hesitated, his hand on the switch, not yet decided whether he wanted
or hated mystery this morning.  An insect buzz from a defective bulb
sawed into his thoughts.  He flipped the switch down and the crowded
landscape settled back into the dim morning light.  Seven a.m. and the
day was already old and tired.

He walked slowly around the desk and pushed his chair aside with his
foot.  He touched the items on top one at a time:  the envelope
containing pictures of the UFO crash site, a book on cross-species
transplants, three issues of the Journal of Abnormal Psychology
checked out from the library, a stack of Michelin maps of countries
bordering the Sahara.  He picked up the tabloid he had shown Scully,
crumpled it with both hands, and slammed it into the trash.  He walked
around the side of the desk and kicked the can into the door, followed
it, and kicked it back, all the way down to where she had been
working. "Damn it."

At the far end, her spot, he spread his hands over the table where the
laptop had been sitting.  A last trace of her perfume hung in the air
prepping his ears reflexively for the sound of her footsteps, sure and
firm, in the hallway.  Mounted above the desk were bookshelves; his
hands drummed on the table -- unheard by him -- as he scanned the
titles. This whole damn thing. She thought she had to run from him to
protect herself and she was right.  He brought it on her, every last
bit of danger came right back to him.

The cleaning staff hadn't penetrated far enough to fetch her trash,
probably afraid of poltergeists.  He tipped the can onto the table.  A
newsletter from the Organization of Women Agents, announcement of
professional training lectures, an invitation to a reception at the
home of the head of forensic medicine, the wrapper from a Band-Aid,
and several sheets of equations scribbled by hand.  He smoothed out
the papers in her writing, folded them and slipped them into his
pocket.

How on earth was he supposed to make it safe for her to come back? 
They hadn't been able to make any headway against the f* consortium,
against Smoky, in all this time.  So how was he supposed to do it now?
 Didn't she think he had tried?  But Cancerman's mind was slippery,
sliding, shifting.  A shape-shifter brain.  It was a chess game to
him, and the coldness of his moves didn't always seem to have a clear
connection to the alien project. Other monsters, you could see the
horrible things that drove them and once you grasped that you could
follow the dark slimy trail of their minds.  Something was missing
with Smokey.  Some other thing he wanted.  Some other thing Mulder had
never seen.

He settled back into his own chair, feet up on the desk.  Big clunking
cop shoes for a big clunking cop job.  Eyes closed, a few minutes and
he might be able to catch up, clear the fog of sleepless nights. 
Nothing was clear. Hadn't been, not since she escaped.  He hadn't made
it easy, damn it; she knew he wouldn't.  Her car almost out of sight
ahead of him but he kept visualizing it, knew which speck was hers. 
Blue turning black out on the highway, weaving in and out, but he knew
which one, until there she was suddenly on the overpass, hair blowing,
standing at the railing, waiting.  Waiting for him because she knew he
would follow.  He parked behind her and stood as close as he could,
hand looped around her wrist.  Diesel fumes drifting up, and they
shouted into each other's ears over the rumble below, the sun getting
low, a chill in the air.  Lips paused for a second, not shouting. She
pulled her sweater around her shoulders and sent him away.  She stayed
right there at the railing, eyes fixed on him. He watched her the
whole time through his rearview mirror, and as soon as he
saw/sensed/knew that she had climbed back in the car, he was down onto
the median grass, spinning up the other side and into the left lane,
some jerk behind him laying on the horn.  But she was gone then.  In
that split second of turning their connection had been lost and she
was gone.

The office phone rang with the summons he had been expecting. He
pushed against the edge of his desk, shoving the chair into the table
behind him. Shifting to his feet and around to the door, he took two
steps back, grabbed a half roll of mints, crumpled the foil wrapper
onto the floor, and tossed the candies into his mouth.  "Breakfast,"
he said, saluting the smoke detector.

*

Assistant Director Skinner's secretary opened the inner door, her
eyebrows knitted in concern as she scanned his face. Mulder paused
just inside the door to straighten his tie and smooth down his hair,
suddenly aware of how two days growth must look to the A.D.   Skinner
stood, his shirtsleeves rolled and his tie loosened by a fraction of
an inch, a small concession to comfort.  Papers were spread across the
desk and a pile of thick blue binders sat on the floor. Seven ay em,
thought Mulder, and already his boss was advanced in the morning's
work. Skinner stared at his subordinate in silence, one fist on the
desk, before he picked up a pen and manila folder, and motioned to the
large conference table. "Have a seat, Agent Mulder.  I'm sure you know
what this is about."

Scully's usual chair was just to Skinner's left.  Taking a place
across from it, Mulder imagined her as she had looked a hundred times,
her eyes clear and unwavering, reason and loyalty at war even when she
looked away during one of his 'crackpot' theories, waiting her turn to
speak and then insisting only, always, "What do we do about it?" 
Well, what do we do about it now?

Skinner leaned back in his chair at the head of the table, apparently
waiting for an explanation.  Mulder's stomach felt hollow and his
breath came from somewhere other than his lungs.  Like breathing from
a sack.  Nothing seemed to belong to him anymore. Skinner toyed with
his pen, then put the cap firmly on and leaned forward, elbows on the
freshly polished surface of the table.

"Is there some problem in your partnership that has brought about
Agent Scully's absence?"

"No, sir.  It's related to a case.  One of our long-running cases. 
She has to work on it from a safe location."

"Agent Scully has never been concerned about danger before."

"This is a little different. There is a lead which she feels she can
best follow on her own."

Each breath was hard, each lie easy.

"Without backup?  That violates rule number one around here.  I can't
see Agent Scully doing that." Skinner tapped his pen staccato against
the edge of the table.  "You know where she is, I assume."

"She believed that it needed to be secret for now."

"And you agreed to that?"

"Of course. I have complete faith-"

"This is beyond your habitual disdain for regulations, Agent, and I am
surprised you let your partner go off like this.  The risks are-"

"I am fully aware of the risks, sir."  Mulder squirmed in his seat. 
"When she reaches her destination, she will be in touch with me.  She
felt-we felt that the chance of exposure was greatest in transit. 
Once she arrives-"

"So you don't know where she is or when she will be back, either, I
suppose. "

"No."

"I don't happen to believe this half-assed story.  She says it's a
leave-"  He opened the manila folder and pushed a piece of paper at
Mulder. "You say it's a case.  I don't know what you two have cooked
up, but you're asking me to take a lot on trust."

"We have one of the best records in the Bureau.  I think you should
have confidence in us by now."

"You didn't get that track record with foolish choices."

"I'm not sure Agent Scully would agree on that point."  He smiled at
his boss who was looking instead at the form.  The Assistant Director
leaned back in his chair and ran a hand from his temple back through
the thinning hair.  He sighed heavily.

"Certain rumors have reached me about you and your partner-"

"There have been rumors since the first day she walked into my office.
 Wasn't that the idea?"

"-and as I was about to say, normally I give no credence to office
scuttlebutt, but under the circumstances, it does become my
business."

"Agent Scully has absented herself because of a case.  I will be
pursuing it from my end and she will return as soon as she can." 
Breathe in, breathe out. Only the lies to yourself were painful.

"When you come to your senses, I'd like to hear the real story. 
Better from you than through some snoop." He returned to his desk and
filed the folder in a side drawer.   "I'll see about assigning you a
temporary partner."

"No.  Scully is my partner.   This is our case."

"She is officially on leave.  You would be better off with someone
*here to back you up."

"The last partner you assigned to me was Alex Krycek.  Before that it
was Diana Fowley.  Let's just say that while Scully is out of town,
I'm better off alone."

"Your wishes may not be paramount in this, Agent Mulder, but I will
see what I can do."

*

I had the dream again.  Two nights in a row.  Twice last night.  I am
on a beach under a full moon, standing at the edge of a large sea.
Waves wash against the rocks and splash my legs, but there is no
sound. I sense her behind me, feel her hands on my naked back, but
something prevents me from turning. Her body trembles and the pounding
of her heart sounds above the silent waves.  Finally, she presses one
word into my neck -- when? -- and then she's gone.  I spin around, but
the beach is empty and then I'm wide awake. A shower doesn't begin to
do the trick, but I soap up anyway, towel down, shave--remember to
shave today--put on the uniform. A quick cup of coffee from the stale
jar of instant, most of it down the sink. In the lobby, the elevator
door opens to mailboxes lit with a neon glow and blinking lights.  Not
that the mailman could have come, but I jam in my key just because I'm
going to look every time I walk past. Inside a white envelope, my
name, no stamp or postmark. Hand delivered.  What am I supposed to
think?  She's hanging around invisible or something?  If she's made
herself invisible, she could hide out perfectly well in my bed.  Let
me touch if I can't see, feel the swelling secret.

The old lady who lives under me gets off the elevator and glares. Some
people get special deliveries, ma'am.  I hold open the door to the
October drizzle, gain a couple points.  Stop myself from shoving past
her while she blocks my way opening a big old-fashioned black
umbrella, one spine dangling and a lock that doesn't catch until the
third try.   But as soon as I'm in the car, I rip the top edge open
and shake out the sheet inside.  One piece of plain white paper, her
handwriting.

"Dear Mulder,

I have arrived safely and with a great sense of relief.  Everything is
as I hoped and I feel that we can carry through now.  Trust me that I
am out of harm's way.  I am tired from the journey which was strange
and frightening and seems to have drained every ounce of energy.  For
now this is all I can tell you. I am to see a doctor tomorrow.
Whatever you do instead of praying, please do that for me.

D."

He read it through three times. You owe me an explanation, Scully. You
owe me more than 'I'm fine.'  You think I'll stop now?  Pray for you? 
No, Scully, that's not enough.  He started the car and hit the gas too
hard, bumping into the jeep parked behind him.  Ignoring the screech
of the alarm, he pulled out narrowly missing a small Honda and quickly
left the wail behind.

*

Crossing the bridge into the city, he took the first turning left to
Georgetown. Her letter lay on the passenger seat, taunting him,
defying him to find the truth, crushing him with her evasiveness. His
eyes smarted with the heat of too much blood rushing too fast through
distended arteries.  He parked a half-block from her apartment and sat
for five minutes, watching the front door through his rear-view
mirror, until the windows misted with his breathing.  Just focus on
the investigation, he told himself.  Block everything out.  Block this
out.  It's an investigation.  He looked down at the letter on the
seat, then opened his glove compartment, took out a plastic bag from
his evidence kit, and dropped the envelope inside.  The letter itself
he slipped into his jacket pocket.

He let himself into her apartment.  She'd be angry if she knew he had
disobeyed her plea not to search, but what did she expect giving him
so little? Besides, if clues existed better that he find them than
Smoky. In the bedroom closet, her suitcase and weekend bag were on the
shelf over a full rack of work clothes, and her pajamas-not the sexy
ones-hung on a hook.   Her drawers all contained what seemed to be a
normal amount of underwear and socks and shirts, and he found only a
few empty spots in her medicine cabinet. Nothing in the trash, not
even a wadded up grocery list. Her passport and birth certificate and
other legal papers weren't in the desk, but then she had probably long
kept them somewhere out of reach.  Her phone bill didn't reveal a
flurry of long-distance calls and nothing stood out on her charge
bills.  He slammed the desk drawer.  Her desktop computer refused to
yield to the password she'd given him, even after he typed it in five,
six times. He'd bring Frohike to crack it open but she'd probably
wiped her disk.  He hit last number redial and his cell rang in his
pocket.  He checked caller id, but the memory had been erased. Well
done, Agent Scully.  You never miss a beat.

Dishes from her last meal were in the drainer. She'd emptied the
fridge and unplugged the microwave, but left the table set, two places
laid out, sharing a corner.  He stood, hands braced against the back
of the chair.  Two white plates, two napkins, forks, knives, spoons,
wineglasses on twin placements with a big white pillar candle in the
center of the table and dried flowers in a blue and white porcelain
vase. He pulled out the chair, sat down, picked up the silverware one
by one and turned them in his hand.  He pictured her at the front
door, pausing for a final look around, then putting down her laptop
and picnic bag and coming back to lay the table, item by item, her
face determined but her eyes moist. Why can't we have what other
people seem to get by right?

Back in the bedroom he sat down on the bed, her side, and scanned the
walls.  From the angle in the photos, the camera must have been
perched over the curtain rod off at one end, a wire through the wall
and the recorder outside. They could get their fill of tapes without
breaking in again and again.  How cold had she felt when she realized
that their most private connection had been exposed?  He pulled open
the drawer to her nightstand and lifted the papers: magazine articles,
family photos, some children's drawings of people with arms coming
right from their heads, a postcard of Elvis he once sent her as a
joke. At the bottom was her address book.  He slid it into his pocket
and left.

*

Melody in the lab had told him they'd have an id on the prints on the
envelope within the hour and if they needed to do a DNA test it might
take a day or two.  He settled down at his desk and pushed aside the
case files that had sat unopened since Skinner's secretary had brought
down late Monday morning. He took out his cell and toggled the button
on-off-on-off.  If they were tapping him, they'd find out what he
knew. On-off-on-off.  But, chances were he wasn't going to come up
with anything.  He called Lariat.  The car had been returned to
downtown Baltimore late Saturday afternoon.  It was a drop-off and no
one had met Ms. Scully when she brought it back.  Could he see it? 
No, it was out on rental again, on its way to Chicago.

The airlines flying out of Baltimore had no record of a traveler under
her name.  Immigration said she had not left the country.  Mastercard
assured him that there had been no charges since the car rental.  A
trace on her cell phone turned up nothing since the previous Friday,
when she had rung him late at night to say she loved him. That had
been unlike her, it struck him at the time, but he thought it was just
part of their adjustment, getting used to being lovers as well as
partners, to having needs and showing them, to letting out secrets. 
Some of their secrets.  His phone rang.  Melody had found two sets of
prints, his and his partner's.  Otherwise the envelope was clean
except for the dust from latex gloves.

*

The next day's letter assured him that the doctor had pronounced her
well.  She continued, "I wonder if it had to be this way, if fate
dictated that I should have to leave you alone, perhaps more alone
than you were before I was assigned to the X-Files.  Assigned to you
but how quickly was it my choice to stay.  To trust you and protect
you from the forces arrayed against you and sometimes protect you from
yourself.  But now it seems I will not let you protect me from myself.
 Or is it freedom that allows us to cause such pain in the name of
necessity and survival."

No sleep that night, he stood at the window, waiting for the
messenger, waiting for the letter.  Went down at 3, at 4:15, again at
5 and stayed, sitting in the stairwell, head back against the scuffed
plaster, listening for footsteps, surprising his fellow tenants by
bursting through the door as they walked into the lobby.  No letter.
No news worse than not knowing who. Next night, awake in his bed,
counting seconds-minutes-hours.  The envelope waiting in the morning,
thick, two sheets:

"I have sat here with pen in hand for days trying to find the words to
tell you. I hardly know how you will react. Through an extraordinary
set of circumstances, barely believable I admit, I have traveled back
to 1996, October 12.  Do you see why this is the one safe place?  No
one will notice me here because there is already a Dana Scully and she
is at work with you. No one will look for someone who is not missing
in 1996, and so long as I am prudent, there should be no problem. 
Even if someone spots me in passage, they won't think twice, at least
not for a while longer.  I know that you will scarcely believe that I
have done this, Mulder, but it is true and there is a good scientific
reason why this could be done, and why I will be able to return."

Dammit, how on earth did she concoct such an idiotic story?  Did she
really expect him to buy something so feeble? Is that how gullible she
thought he was, that he'd buy anything salted with a little
paranormal?  After everything was said and done, after everything
she'd learned about him, was this what she really thought?  And how
the hell was he supposed to respond?  There was still no phone number
or email address or drop-box or some means of sending her a message.
Oh, course, how could he?  She's in nineteen ninety-*six.*

A day later: "Mulder, I'm sorry.  It was so risky, but it was the only
place to hide.  We cannot protect each other the way we wish we could.
I didn't want to believe it, that it was possible, but the equations
kept working out.  There it was, black and white-a portal to the past,
a way to come and go-and the calculations to support it.  Black matter
-- we barely know what it is, Mulder  -- but if it is compressed into
a left-handed array, it bends time like gravity bends light.  When I
went into the field, there was a feeling of a rush, not quite
spinning, more like racing around a corner so quickly you're sure the
car will flip.  When it was over I was sure it was a trick, but it
really happened.  We are only at the frontier of our understanding of
matter and energy, I see that now."

"I hadn't intended to write every day, but I find that I cannot leave
you alone.  Does that surprise you? I sat at the phone this morning,
calculating when you might be out and called your answering machine
three times to hear your voice."  He closed his eyes; he had done the
same thing, a poor substitute for her.  Had she been any more
satisfied?  Caller-id would tell him where she was.  No, better yet,
he'd have a trace done right now.  Caller-id be damned.  It was the
first boost he had felt since the clearing. If she thought her letters
might not be secure, then of course, she would tell this idiotic
story.  Swallow the pretty words.  Don't look hard.  Don't figure it
out from your heart.  You see what you believe and now he believed he
would see her if her looked.

*

It was dark by the time he finished his run, his thighs aching from
the unaccustomed length of his work-out and a knot in his calf forcing
him to lie down to work it loose.  The American University track was a
simple hop over the chain-link fence and more miles than he bothered
to count around the pink surface mulling the news that the new
letters, too, had two sets of prints - his and hers - and the dust
from a latex glove. Latex and Scully.  He always thought of her when
he saw surgical gloves.  Latex covering the delicate skin of her hands
in the toughest cases he could imagine. Scully cutting and probing and
keeping her eyes dry at sights that made his stomach turn and his head
ache and cold fingers grip his sides with the certainty of his own
end. Fright and fear and horror and Scully standing alongside a
mangled body with her goggles and her latex gloves, speaking calmly
into the microphone, facing the horror because it was the only way she
could conquer it.  Those latex gloves smeared with blood and pus and
worse, her hands steady and her brain clear and never had he loved
anyone the way he loved her.

Back at his apartment, he fiddled with the lock.  His hair was damp
with sweat and his shirt might have to be burned the way it smelled
and he hadn't allowed himself to limp against the burn in his foot,
but damn it, why wouldn't the lock turn?  Once in the door, the shoes
were instantly kicked aside and he hopped through the living room and
bedroom to the bath where he sat down on the toilet and slung his left
foot over his knee to examine the heel blister rubbed raw and
bleeding. The shower pulsed hot and cold from the ancient water heater
the landlord had promised to replace, finally settling down to a
steady warmth only as he was letting the tight stream beat the last of
the shampoo out of his hair.  Toweling off, he ran over the new dead
ends. Maybe she'd changed identities, picked up a new name. There
might be a charge receipt or a copy of an application.   He'd go back
to her apartment and check. The trace had turned up nothing on his
phone, no record of her calls, nothing to show that she had sought out
his voice.  Maybe he should change the message and see if she said
anything about it in her letters. Above all, why wear latex, if her
prints were already on the envelope?  She'd lied to him.  There had to
be a third party. Someone else to take care of her and guard her --
their -- secret. Someone whose powers she thought might allow his baby
to be born.

*

At the knock on the door, Mulder gathered Scully's letters and swept
them into the center drawer.  A.D. Skinner swung the door open and
ushered in a tall woman in a bright red suit. 5' 8" or 5" 10" he
estimated, her short black hair brushed back from her forehead, not
unlike the way he sometimes wore his own. Her eyes, dark behind large
red frames, looked back at him with curiosity.

"Agent Mulder.  This is Agent Parker.  She will be assisting you
during Agent Scully's absence.  You will find that Ms. Parker has
excellent training as an investigator and I trust you will make full
use of her skills."

"I thought I explained-"

"You made your position perfectly clear.  Agent Parker was a language
specialist who has since trained in cryptography.  I believe you will
find her experience useful in your work."  He lifted the cover of the
top file in the stack on Mulder's desk.  "Since I haven't had any
reports in the last week, I believe the additional helped is
warranted."  He held the edge of the folder straight up for a second
before letting it drop.  "Good day, Agent Parker.  Please let me know
if you need anything."  Skinner shook her hand, then without looking
at Mulder walked out of the office, leaving the door ajar.

Parker put her monogrammed briefcase on the floor and slid the strap
of her laptop off her shoulder.  "Where would you like me to set up
shop?"  Her voice had a slight lilt; Mulder wondered whether that was
foreign language training or something else. He leaned back in his
chair and put his feet on the desk.

"I'm sorry," he said, twirling a pencil in his hands.  "There is no
other desk.  You'll need to get space in the bullpen."

"What about the previous agent?  Where did she..?"

"Agent Scully is *not* the previous anything.  She is still assigned
to this project.  I am not disrupting her work or files.  You will
have to find another place to sit.  Why don't you take care of that
now?"

She looked around not awkwardly but defiantly, checking his assertion
that there was no other desk. Her tan was recent and he wondered
whether it was salon or fancy vacation or assignment to the kind of
cases that kept you out on the beach all day.  He wondered just how
complete that tan was underneath the hot red suit.  That's what they
wanted him to speculate, wasn't it?  Did they think he wouldn't see
through this ploy?

Her eyes settled on his UFO poster and he turned to admire it.

"Gift from a friend," he said.

"I've heard a lot of conflicting things about you, Agent Mulder.  I
hardly knew which to believe."

"Maybe you still don't."  He opened a file at random, and mumbled to
her,  "I'll be in touch if I need you."

She stood for another minute, then picked up her things and marched
out.

Mulder waited for the whirr of the elevator, then put on his jacket,
locked the door behind him, and took the stairs two at a time.  He
barged into Skinner's secretary's office, causing her to stand up
sharply and hang up the phone. "Agent Mulder!"

By this time his hand was on the knob to the inner office.  "He's
gone, Mr. Mulder.  He just left."

"Where is he?  This can't wait."

"He's left town. That's what he said."  She looked startled, her face
drained of color and her lips moving after the words stopped.  The
phone rang behind the A.D.'s door.  Without further hesitation, he
turned the knob and stepped into the empty office.  Files sprawled
across the conference table and a whisper of steam rose from the mug
on his desk. Behind him, Skinner's assistant intercepted the call, her
voice soothing, that glimmer of panic banished. She hung up, then
moved over to the table and started tidying the files, slipping
confidential materials back into envelopes, and stacking them to the
side.

Mulder walked around to the other side to watch her face as he
continued, "He was in my office a minute ago. He stops by, drops a new
agent on me and disappears? What's going on?"

"It keeps happening," she said, picking up the pile and carrying it to
the desk. "He got a phone call on this direct line.  Then shot out of
here looking sick."  She slipped the papers into his drawer, then
looked up at Mulder.  "Can you help him, Agent?  Can you stop what's
been happening to him?"

"Get a trace on the calls."

She nodded and replaced the lid on the coffee.

*

Melody Franklin gave her officemate a little rise of the eyebrows
after Mulder dropped off the latest envelope for testing.  "If I'm not
mistaken, there must be something unpleasant brewing between Spooky
and the Missus."

"Your big chance to move in."  Lisa leered over the rims of her
reading glasses.

"Not me.  Uh-uh.  He's a cutie, but I couldn't stand all the
weirdness.  This is what, the fifth envelope he's brought in this
week.  Her prints and his.  Her prints and his.  Latex dust.  So
what's going on?"

"What do you think?"

"Lovers' quarrel."

"So you believe the rumors?"

"Yeah, maybe she did ditch him. You saw the way he was standing here,
drumming on my desk, looking off into space.  Doesn't look like he's
been sleeping, either."

"She ditches him and writes every day?  Think again, babe."

Melody turned back to the evidence bag, removed the envelope with
tweezers and applied the dust, put the prints under the scanner and
pulled up the records on Mulder and his partner which she had
bookmarked for convenience. "This'll be news for him.  There's a third
party this time.  I'm going to run these through the database."

*

Mulder folded his cell phone and put it down in the middle of the
desk. Melody had just delivered the news about a third set of prints
on the newest envelope.  The database turned up a Mrs. Margaret
Scully, was she familiar to him, Melody had asked?  The sheer logic of
it stopped him for a moment, then he hastened,  "Of course, of
course."  Yes, he'd shared that letter with Agent Scully's mother, so
of course her prints were there. Glad they caught that.  It meant
their equipment was just fine.  That was a stupid thing to say.  Of
course their equipment was working fine.  Weren't there any prints of
strangers?  At least he'd had the sense to ask that, but had it been
enough? He should have given the voluble Melody something else to
think about, get Maggie's name out of her mind.

There was a quick rap on the door, and Parker stepped in, wearing a
tight beige dress scooped in front and a scarf knotted at the neck.

"I've been waiting for your call, Agent Mulder.  I don't particularly
like wasting my time in the bullpen. I was pulled off an important
project for this assignment, so let's get on with it, please."

"An important assignment?  What could possibly be put off because of
*my* work?"

"I'm afraid that's classified."  Her dark red mouth turned up at the
corners in a my-security-clearance-trumps-yours smirk, and then her
face relaxed so quickly that he wasn't sure whether he had seen it or
not.  "Suffice it to say that I would not have accepted this
assignment without the assurance that your work has high priority
within the Bureau."

"They told you that?  Well, I *am* flattered.  High priority.  Guess I
should read the office directives more often."  He took in the sharp
planes of her face, the high cheekbones and the thin nose that shot
straight and sharp from between the eyes and beaked down just a bit at
the tip, and those dark eyes not wavering in their focus on him. That
was news, X-Files: career move for the rising agent. He grabbed a
folder off his desk and handed it to her.  "OK, then try this for
size."

Parker balanced the folder on the edge of the desk, eyebrows raised as
she flipped through the newspaper clippings from the recent loss of
the Mars polar explorer, enhanced visuals of the projected landing
site, and computer drawn topographic maps.  She closed the file and
held it halfway back to him.  "Mars Polar Lander.  What exactly is
there for an FBI investigation, Agent Mulder?"

"There are rumors that the craft was disabled by forces directed at it
from Mars itself."

"I haven't seen any such reports."

"Of course not.  They are being suppressed.  If it were public
knowledge, it wouldn't need to be investigated, would it?"

"Isn't this a little out of our jurisdiction?"

"U.S. government property."

"So I'm looking for what, eyewitness reports of little green men
shooting down the craft?"

"Try to be a little open-minded.  I said forces from Mars, not
missiles.  We could be talking perturbations in the magnetic field,
unusual gravity spirals, some sort of suction effect.  Purposeful or
not.  Use your investigative imagination."  He pulled the newspaper
from his stack of mail, tugged out the sports section and began
reading.

"Agent Mulder."  Her voice calm now. "I'll have your report in a day
or two."  Two, four, six steps.  The door closed behind her.  She'd
been wearing Scully's perfume.

*

Mulder grabbed his suit jacket and headed down to the garage, now
largely emptied of the home-for-dinner troops. As he crossed the
bridge driving out of the city, he reran his conversation with Melody.
He should've told her a vampire story or something, distract her, get
her talking about something else, something besides Maggie.  Damn it,
it was too obvious.  Her mother.  Now confirmed for everyone.  Even if
Melody and that officemate of hers moved on, Maggie's prints were in
the computer.

The evening rush had passed and traffic was beginning to thin.  Deep
inside, he'd known it was her, but hadn't believed.  Maggie out here
in her tidy home was the one person Scully would always trust. She
walled off her family from her work, from him, from their odd life
together, his path and theirs crossing only in the hospital corridor,
his fault every time.  But the baby was different, the baby the only
thing important enough to bring the risks out here to the neatly
groomed lawns and the street lights only bright enough to mark the
way. He guided the car around a moving van half blocking the
intersection and turned down her street.   Of course Maggie, not some
stranger but her mother. They'd never be able to crack her, not about
the baby. If he'd come out here right away- no, so easy to direct
*their attention to her.  Too late now. He shouldn't have searched,
had to search. Glancing in the rearview mirror, he drove past the
white frame house and snapped off the headlights as he turned the
corner.  They'd guess anyway.  If he was lucky, they hadn't started
looking yet.  It was too obvious, too open.  How could she expect
safety with her mother?

No one else on the sidewalk, everyone inside, doors closed against the
chill air, the scent of dead leaves piled up in the gutter, and his
footsteps making a hurried sound against the pavement.  Some windows
glowing television blue, the life of the house in back, away from the
street, away from passing eyes.  That's where Scully ought to be, out
of sight, out of mind.  Not out of his mind, their minds.

Two houses down from Maggie's home, he stopped, pulled out his cell
phone, and dialed the number.  It rang four times before the answering
machine came on, Bill's voice so the random caller would think a man
was home.  Bill would have some well-chosen words about his sister's
current fix and they wouldn't be please-leave-a-message. "Mrs. Scully,
it's Fox Mulder.  I need to speak with you.  Please.  Could you pick
up?" Upstairs, soft lamp-glow leaked out between half-closed curtains,
but the downstairs windows showed only a narrow slash of light from
the back of the house.  If he went around to the rear he could look
into the kitchen.   That would scare her, make it worse with her
nerves already on edge.  A faint jingle behind him and he glanced
around sharply to see a calico trot through the circle of the nearest
streetlight.  Finally, Maggie's voice, full of caution.  "Fox?"

"I need to talk to you.  Not on the phone.  I'm outside.  Would you
answer the door?"

"Yes.  Of course."  She hung up and he slipped his phone into his
pocket.  Time enough for Scully to closet herself, put the second
dishes in the dishwasher, sweep away the game they were playing.  The
carriage lamp went on as he jogged up the walk, and the door opened as
soon as stopped under the light. "Thanks for seeing me."

Maggie double-locked the door and led him to the living room.  She
gestured him to the couch, then perched on the floral chair across
from him, twirling her wedding ring, her dark curly hair pulled back
and lipstick just freshened. The house smelled like cookies and you
wouldn't make cookies for just yourself.  "You're here about Dana,"
she said.

"You know that she's gone away?"

"Yes."

"Have you heard from her?"

"Yes." She held her hands in a prayerful gesture against her lips.

"Can I see her letter?"

"I didn't save it."

"That's too bad.  I thought we could compare postmarks."  He
unfastened the brown folder he had carried under his arm, and spread
its contents across the coffee table.  Her eyes followed as he pointed
to each white envelope with its smears of gray.  "I've been checking
the prints."

Maggie leaned forward to scratch at the dust, then rubbed it between
her index finger and thumb. Her voice was barely a whisper and he
leaned forward to hear her.  "I wish- I begged her to stay with you,
but she- she thought they'd be safe this way."

"They.  So you know?"

"Yes."

"Maggie, I asked her to marry me.  I wanted to, right away.  She-"

"It wasn't the time.  She told me."  She smiled at him sadly and
reached across to touch his hand.  "It would make me happy, Fox."

He nodded.  "You know where she is, don't you?" he asked.

She picked up one envelope, and ran a gray-tipped finger along the
torn edge, peeking to see if the message was still inside.  "I
promised to take her letters to you.  She told me to wear the gloves,
but I forgot."

"She won't be safe here. I don't understand why she hasn't trusted
me."

She squeezed her eyes shut.  "Dana was so afraid."  Some vision he
could not share replayed behind closed eyes, she sucked her lips in
sharply and held them.  After a minute, she stood and headed into the
kitchen, calling back, "I have something for you."

The kitchen had been updated years before with wooden cupboards and a
stained glass lamp over the breakfast table. Half curtains of eyelet
lace covered the window to the backyard, and a second window over the
sink held a small garden of cacti and herbs. Maggie opened the door to
an old-fashioned pantry and pulled on the string of the overhead
light.  She emerged with a large tin of oatmeal.  Reaching in she
pulled out a plastic bag and brushed the loose flakes into the sink. 
"She tried not to show it, of course."  She handed him the bag full of
plain white envelopes.  "You can sit over here."

He fanned the letters across the table.  Someone had penciled a number
into the upper right corner of each: +11, +12, +13 and so on.   He
raised his eyebrows, but before he could ask, she said, "That's when I
was to take them to you.  You've got tomorrow's on top."

"What is this?  These letters were all written in advance? Who wrote
these?"

"She wrote them when she was here.  In 1996.  She came in October,
when the weather was damp and chilly like it is now."

He leaned back in the chair and closed his eyes, squeezing the bridge
of his nose. "I know you'd do anything to protect her, but so would I.
 Please, we have to work together. I just want her back so I can help
her."

"It's the truth, Fox. I thought, from things you and she had said over
the years, that you believed in the possibility-"

"Oh I believe in time travel, all right.  But there's no way that Dana
would.  Much less subject her baby to it."  He pictured her again in
the office, sitting at the computer doing equations, the red hair
falling forward to shield her face from his scrutiny.  Working through
his invitation to lunch.  And to coffee.  Working until he got down on
his knees and reached for the plug.

"She came to me, two weeks ago.  She wanted to know if she had been
here then, if it had happened."

"And?"

"I tried to tell her I'd been ill, my memory was haywire, sedatives I
was still taking after Missy's death, but she insisted on the truth. 
So, I said that she had stayed here for a while and that the baby had
been fine. I knew about the baby, you see, that's what seemed to
convince her.  She hadn't said a word about it."  She grabbed a tissue
from a box on the table, rose from her seat and walked over to the
stove.  "I'm going to make some coffee." She stood at the counter with
her back to him, her head resting against the cupboards. After a
moment, she pried open the can of coffee and busied herself with the
coffeemaker, dropping the measure of grounds onto the floor.  The
water ran on full while she mopped up the mess.

Mulder watched her for a second, uncertain of whether he should come
to her aid or leave her to her sorrow.  He turned back to the task in
front of him, tearing each letter open and scanning quickly, picking
up bits of news, Fifteen, twenty days of manufactured news. How long
did she think she could string him along with her daily bulletins?

Day 11:  I feel so apprehensive, Mulder.  What you said at our picnic,
about the Peacocks.  That hit awfully close to home.  According to
what Penny Northern and the others found, apparently they used high
doses radiation during the experiments.  Who knows what the lingering
effects might be.  It could be a monster.

Day 12:   I'm sorry about the monster letter.  A woman's body is awash
in hormones during pregnancy and they tend to destabilize the mind and
emotions.  Probably hyperactivity of the thyroid responding to the
increase in estrogen, HCG, and progesterone, though knowledge does not
seem to be power in this case.  I find myself walking from my room to
the kitchen and forgetting why I came.

Day 13:  I went for my sonogram today with my mother.  The scans I
observed in medical school were always a matter of technical and
diagnostic interest. But now, my own.  It's more like magic to see the
tiny heart beating and the head so disproportionate to the body and
limbs and know that this is new life.  I wanted to squeeze your hand
and feel your arm around my shoulder.  The tech estimated 14 weeks. 
Do you realize, Mulder, that this child may have been conceived the
first night we were together?

He lifted the Polaroid enclosed with the note, a peanut shape dark
against a grainy background, the sonar sweep round the tiny body and
unknown handwriting indicating heart and head.  He brushed off a mote
of dust.  Was this their child or was it a prop?  Had she sneaked out
at lunch one day to lie in a darkened lab while he, unsuspecting,
walked circles in the office?

Day 14: Mulder, have you learned anything?  I try to imagine what you
are doing, how you are going about your investigations, what leaps
your mind is taking while I sit here imprisoned by time, wishing I had
never left you.

Day 16: I confess to a weakness. I went to the mall (imagine me at the
mall, Mulder) bought a wig, then parked outside headquarters for three
days, finally being rewarded by seeing you leave the building.  I saw
myself with you and the way you touched her and stayed close and I
felt a twinge of jealousy seeing you with "another woman."  I followed
you into the restaurant and sat four tables away. It was a stupid
hormonal thing to do, but I couldn't help myself. You were looking so
hard at her that never noticed me. See how well I am hidden?  I look
at that woman and know that she has toyed in idle moments with the
thought of what it might be like to love you, but she has always
chided herself to stay within the bounds of partnership. Her mind and
heart have warred, but her heart has never been an even match.  She
has no idea of what is in store. She has no inkling that one day she
will lie in bed, hand on stomach hoping for the fleeting movements of
a hand or foot.

Day 17:  My old self called to say she was stopping by after work and
it sent Mom and me into a panic.  I've been sleeping in the guest room
and we had to put everything away in the half hour between her call
and her arrival.  Thank God for heavy traffic.  We covered the
furniture with tarps and cooked up a story about some wayward
painters.  I am sitting in the basement with a flashlight, bundled in
a blanket, writing to you, while they make small talk upstairs.  Poor
Mom, she's so nervous about slipping up about my visit. Mulder, they
say suffering brings good -- will good come of my journey?

Day 18: What's the worst case scenario, Mulder?  That I can't come
back and will progress through ordinary time?  But look, I will catch
up to you in three years.  If nothing else works, then I will show up
on your doorstep, soon by your clock but ages away by mine, three
years older with our toddler in my arms.

Worst case, Scully?  He asked himself.  That's far from the worst
case.

Mrs. Scully carried two cups of coffee and a plate of cookies to the
table, then sat across from him.  "I wish I hadn't given it away.  I
should have lied."

"It might have been worse if you had," he said, not believing the
words as he spoke. Her eyes were damp and the smile forced.  He'd
never seen her lie before and couldn't imagine anyone more honest than
this extraordinarily mother in her ordinary plaid shirt belted into
generic khakis, forced by love to persuade him to swallow a wild tale.
She was always kind to him, but he was still just Fox, the odd man
Dana worked with, the crazy guy who knocked her up and sent her
fleeing. Maggie was trying to protect her family the way his own mom
should have protected Sam.

"Look, much as I want to believe you, she simply wouldn't do it.  This
is a double-cover isn't it?  The time travel story to cover up for
where she is now."

"No, Fox, none of it is made-up. She tried to show me on her computer,
how it could be true, but I- Look, when she showed up at my door, I
thought it was some trick or maybe amnesia.  So that night, the first
one when she was so tired she slept in her clothes, I called my
daughter at her apartment and talked about old things, things no one
else would know. Then the next morning my visitor told me about the
baby.  She was so happy."  She picked up the next unopened letter.  "I
couldn't bring myself to betray either Dana."

"Even if she swore you to secrecy, I've put her in jeopardy by coming
here.  You, too.  I'll do whatever is necessary to get you both to
safety. You have to trust me."

"Fox, I've got a photo upstairs, maybe if you see-"  She handed the
letter back to him and pushed herself up from the table.  She
disappeared around the corner, one stair squeaking on her way to her
bedroom.  He tugged the knife against the letter.

Day 20:  I feel like I am eight years old in a rainy summer.  My
mother is worried about me and perhaps she has good cause.  I am bored
to death without our work.  She has nixed any more "sight-seeing
trips" as she described my surveillance of you.  Today she gave me my
father's papers that she has never had the heart to sort through. So
that is to be my task.  Boxes call, Mulder.

Day 21:  My project is on temporary hold.  I had a little bleeding, so
mother and I rushed to see the doctor.  He feels that all is well, but
I am confined to bed for a day or two, condemned to flip between the
daytime confessionals.  Now I remember why I majored in physics.  A
nurse at the office has taken a special interest in me and seems to
have memorized my file.  It makes me a little uncomfortable but she
seems earnest enough.

Day 23: I have started on my father's papers.  I found his log right
away, in the first box of documents I opened.  He must have failed to
file these with the Navy before his death.  Many items in the box seem
to be official. I hope my security clearance covers it.  I knew that
in the months before his death, he had been on duty in the
Mediterranean, but I hadn't realized that he called at the port of
Sfax in Tunisia, not far from the desert and the oil fields.

Day 24:  The journal tells an odd story, Mulder.  I wish you were here
to lob some of your theories my way.  What do you make of this:  "I
met with Col. Abdulhamid Trabelsi today, who I recognized from a
training exercise he had attended on my ship.  Subsequent to our
meeting, he invited me to accompany him on a trip into the desert. We
rode for some miles out of Sfax, past the olive groves and the sparser
and sparser habitation until we were well out onto the dry steppes.  
An hour before sunset we pulled up at an enormous salt flat, looking
like nothing so much as my first trip to the Arctic only about 80
degrees warmer!  Trabelsi got a fix on our location and started out
slowly across the wasteland, joking about bands of travelers
disappearing into the unstable ground of the 'Shot,' as he called it.  
He assured me there were a few tracks that reliably held the weight of
vehicles.  For whatever reason, no one has ever marked them.  Seems
like an excess of bravado to me.  Then he told me a story of how early
in the century, a caravan had mysteriously appeared, the traders
insisting they had set out on their journey in 1560.  The way the
story came down was they used old-fashioned Arabic words that you
wouldn't expect itinerant merchants to know and their clothing was an
odd style. He said the desert breeds fantastical tales and people who
love to tell them.  Just like the sea, I told him. The men had
probably gone back to their village and had a good laugh on everyone.

"We drove for almost a half hour, then lights appeared and we pulled
into a small camp.  We entered a white tent, where we found a large
piece of metal protruding form the ground. The surface was smooth and
tapered like the wing of an advanced fighter which is what Trabelsi
was convinced it was.  His men had begun to dig it out, but they'd
made no progress in cutting into it.  Although it appeared to be
aluminum or a titanium alloy, it proved to be impenetrable.  Be that
as it may, someone had burned odd markings into it that neither I nor
any of the others recognized. AT told me it had been found by a
routine patrol a week earlier but the air traffic tapes for the zone
have no record of a crash or SOS.  Naturally, they are quite concerned
about potentially hostile activities.  We walked about the perimeter.  
The ground bore no scorch marks or signs of melting and it damn sure
didn't look like an impact crater."  Mulder, I've flipped back and
forth through the journal, but he doesn't seem to have sketched what
he saw. The stair squeaked again and then he felt Maggie's eyes behind
him as she paused at the kitchen doorway.  He tore open the next
letter.

Day 25:  The journal is slow going. Father suddenly switched to a
secret code of his.  He taught me as I kid; it was a private game
between us and I don't think he ever showed Bill or Charlie.  I guess
he felt bad because I couldn't promise to follow in his footsteps the
way they could.  It's coming back to me, but slowly, and it's
impossible to skim for the good parts.  My mind keeps wandering, too,
I must admit. I spent most of today thinking about driving over to
your apartment to show you the journal.  It seems too important to
wait, but then I called and got your machine again and I even tried
the office, but you are away as am I apparently. Perhaps it was that
trip to Tennesse, do you remember, with the Ephesians or Elysians? Day
26:  There's more. Shortly before his ship was to sail, father said
Trabelsi showed up to take him to a wedding.  It seems to have been a
pretext.  Father reports that T seemed extremely nervous and under the
cover of the wedding drums told my father that the day they left the
crash debris, a special military unit showed up and, with force of
arms, took over the dig from the captain in charge.  They brought
their own torches and were able to cut into the craft and remove a
half dozen bodies.  Trabelsi's men were kept at bay, but one sneaked
into the tent and opened a body bag.  He said the man inside was dried
out, his face a withered brown, but most remarkably his eyes and mouth
had been sewn shut. That evening, the craft itself disappeared, pulled
back into the ground by a tremor.  T sent father back to the ship with
crates of dates, a gift, he said, for father's wife and family.  
Those crates are here, Mulder, and they are full of papers in French
and Arabic.  I had hoped that we might reach the colonel, but there is
a brief entry a week later that Trabelsi had been killed in a car
crash in the desert. Day 27:  When I set out on this journey.  I swore
I would not tinker with history, yet it is far harder to resist that
temptation than I expected.  I've been thinking about the past three
years -- I mean three years back from where you are -- and talked with
my mother to give her some assurance about the hard times coming for
my other self.  I am afraid that she will warn her, but I could not
leave mom to mourn my death from cancer.  I told her that she must not
worry and that above all she must trust you absolutely.  I think she
already does. He put the letter down and looked across the table at
Maggie. "Do you want to read these, know what she says?"

"No," she shook her head. "It's not good news is it?"

"It's not bad.  She has- stories here.  Things about her father's
papers.  May I see them as well?"

"She took them when she left."

"She left?  When?"

"You're almost at the end."

Her mouth pulled her whole face down and the usual warmth he saw in
her eyes was replaced by pleading.  He picked up the letter and
continued reading:

I don't dare tell her more about the future.  In any case, I know so
little. I have simply seen more of the story than she has, but I don't
know the outcome.  Not the important things. I can be sure that we
will survive until this moment only if I do not set us on another
course. There are things I would like to change for us, but can I say
that the ending would be better, stronger, more right?  Or would it
mean disaster all around? I cannot arrogate fate to myself.

Day 28:  The baby fluttered today, not a kick but a feeling of
butterfly wings, just as Tara once described it to me.  The lightest
churning, yet not something I have ever felt in my body before.  I
confess that I called your answering machine again, to share the
moment with you in the only way I know how. With silence. Do you
remember the nurse I mentioned at the clinic?  Just when I was feeling
so good, she called at the house to see me, though I don't think I had
given this address.  Made me worry that all is not going well. In the
eyes of doctors, you're always a patient more than a colleague.

Day 29: I started going through some scientific papers in the file
today, including a binder of equations.  I glanced them over and they
seemed familiar, so  I read them more closely. Mulder, I am sure these
are the same equations Jeremy gave me to prove the feasibility of
travel through a magnetic warp.  How could his equations be here?  Or
did someone give him these equations and if so, who?  I am going to
find a safe place for these papers.  Mom said she thought she saw the
nurse at the supermarket today.  She has such a striking face-

Day 30:  Mulder, I have to leave. There are dangers I did not
anticipate. I visited you last night.  I let myself in and sat on the
floor for watching you toss and turn, knowing how selfish it was to be
there at all. I should have left - it was the only fair thing to do -
but the future is so uncertain and I wanted you one last time, for
courage and hope.  To feel my body wrapped in yours.  To lose myself
in your passion.  To give you mine.  So I touched your cheek and told
myself I would go if you did not waken. But you did.  What must you
have thought when it happened?  Did it just pass as a dream?  Can you
ever forgive me for taking something that I was so unwilling to
grant?

He remembered it clearly. A few days after they returned from the mass
suicide in Tennessee, he woke in the middle of the night to find her
kneeling beside the couch.  With a luminous smile, she stroked his
face and asked him to love her.  He undressed her with a trembling
hand and his lips tracked stripes of streetlight across her breasts
and when he woke at dawn he could still feel the fire of her body
moving against his.  He'd rushed into the office that morning, but
when he burst through the door, she responded quizzically to his smile
-- no nervousness, no blush, no shy retreat. He had backed away,
supposing that the vision was a delayed flash from the recent
hypnotism.  An aching memory of distant joy in a distant life.  For
weeks afterward every moment near her had been torment, until he
finally filed the encounter with his other libidinous dreams and never
breathed a word to her, not even after they finally became lovers.

Maggie poured the last of the coffee into this cup.  "Fox, are you all
right?"

He opened his eyes and found the edges of the letter crumpled in his
hands. "You've lived with this for three years?" he said.  "Why didn't
you say?  Why didn't you speak up?"

"Oh, Fox.  I thought about it a thousand times. I'd sit right by the
phone and plan out the conversation. I even wrote a long letter trying
to make it make sense.  But even if you believed me, Dana never would
have. I think it would have put me in the middle between you- It might
have, I don't know, done something to stop her from falling in love
with you or she might have quit her job out of worry for me.  And she
might never have conceived this baby.  How could I do that?  How could
I do that to her?"  Her voice ended in a whisper.  She held the photo
she had brought down earlier, blinking as she stared at the image of
her daughter.

One unopened envelope lay on the table, '31' penciled in the corner. 
Mulder spun it with his index finger until his name faced her.  Maggie
put the photo aside and lifted the envelope with both hands, seemingly
no more eager than he to read the final message.  Her thumb ran across
the name.  "I loved having her here with me, some days I even forgot
how it came about.  But she's not mine anymore, not like she was."

"What happened?"  His voice was soft now, trying not to push, certain
that they wanted the same thing. Certain, too, that there was more.

"She left then.  I hid the letters for you.  It was probably crazy to
put them in the oatmeal."

"No, no, it was a good place.  Men--I mean, these thugs are always
men--they wouldn't think of looking there." Unless they ransacked the
place which they might well have, and if they hadn't it meant they
hadn't known about Scully.  That was good.  "Where did she go?"

"She said she was going back to you.  She said she had what she
needed- but-"  Handing him the letter, she got up from the table and
walked over to the sink to wash out her cup.  She held it up for a
second and watched the water drops fall into the basin before putting
it into the drying rack.  "But we went to confession first. I don't
know what she told the priest, but I do know that she'd been crying." 
She turned around to face him.  "Those times that I picked up the
phone to tell you about this, it was always because I knew this moment
would come.  When she had cancer, when she was shot, I prayed and
worried but somehow I trusted that she would make it.  But this.  This
moment now."  She shook her head.

He turned the envelope over again in his hand, looking at it front and
back and edgewise.  Finally, he ripped it open. Two keys fell out.

Day 31:  It is possible that everything I have seen here is a plant, a
fake, a ruse, a trap. How anyone might have known I would make this
choice is beyond me.  I must trace my way back to you before the path
itself disappears. Yesterday I parked my father's papers at a
self-storage in Rockville.  The second key fits a post office box in
Fairfax if I am left with so slim a  connection to you.   I have
learned that safety is an illusion, a puff of smoke we believe somehow
will bear our weight. You trusted me. I thought I could trust science
in the abstract - that the equations told the whole story.  People
fail and I have failed you."?

Maggie's hand on his shoulder, her fingers pressing against the bone.
"You brought her back when Duane Barry took her, I keep hoping-"

"I didn't bring her back.  They did.  They returned her."  As a gift.
That's what Smoky said.  His gift.

End of part 2. 

Journey, part 3

Bureau headquarters were quiet when Mulder returned, the time on the
lobby clock just short of midnight.  Under a single bright lamp, the
security guard  hunched over a book tracing lines with yellow
highlighter.  He capped the tip to check Mulder's i.d. and wave him
through the metal detector.

"Hi there, Agent Mulder.  Another late one?"

"Looks that way.  What are you working on?"  Mulder folded over the
top of the brown paper bag Maggie had given him for the letters and
tucked it under his arm.

"I'm taking a psych class for my degree.  You ever have to do any of
this stuff?"

"Yeah, I did a little."

"I used to think I was pretty good at figuring people out.  You know,
you pay real good attention to their eyes and what they do with their
hands and see if that matches up with what they say.  Always worked
for me.  Now I find out all these things your mind might be up to and
you don't even know it."  He shook his head.  "Take this, what I'm
reading about right now. All this social biology."

"Sociobiology?"

"Yeah, Darwin, evolution. Survival on the brain, I guess they're
saying. You think everything we do is just an attempt to, well, you
know, reproduce?"   Arms crossed across his chest, he rocked slightly
in the high swivel seat. The chair creaked with the motion.

"I don't know.  At some level, yeah, the species wants to keep going
and people do some pretty unlikely stuff in the effort.  Fern bars,
disco. It's the only explanation."

"Oh man, you are right about that.  And going to chick flicks when
there's a good game on."

"Yeah, chick flicks, too.  It's been a long time since I've seen one,"
he bent to look more closely at the guard's nametag, "- Evan.  But we
make a lot of choices that don't-don't seem to have anything to do
with perpetuating ourselves.  Maybe work against it.  If I were you,
I'd be careful of people who try to boil everything down to one neat
thing."

"Yeah, I'm with you there.  Life never seems all neat and tidy, does
it?"

"Rarely."

"Chick flicks," Evan chuckled as he turned back to his reading.

Mulder's footsteps echoed off the tile floors and glass and concrete
walls of the entry corridor. As soon as he turned the corner, he broke
into a jog.  Did every minute count now or none of them?  Was there
any sense in rushing forward when everything important was back? 
Would speed take him closer to some crossroad in the fog where she
would be waiting?  He'd known her coordinates when they packed her in
ice.  Each passing second had pocked his soul and when he found her,
her eyes in shock behind frosted glass, he'd smashed the barrier
between them.  He knew her coordinates now. But the wall dividing them
was neither transparent nor brittle and no simple race would take him
to her. He glanced at his watch.  12:10. He'd left Maggie's at 11,
traffic light, all the time trying to imagine Scully's shadow life
apart from him, a woman in a restaurant, voiceless hang-ups, and a
night that had never made sense.

Mulder stepped into the waiting elevator, hit B, and watched the doors
shudder and roll closed.  He was sorting through his keys as he made
his way around the discarded filing cabinets stored temporarily in the
hallway.  A sharp click sounded in the darkness.  In a dozen strides
he reached the stairway door, and as he pulled it open he heard the
shuffle of feet and the door to the main hallway closing.  Taking two
steps at a time, he was back at the first floor in seconds, but there
was no one to see, nothing to hear.  He walked back to the front
entrance where Evan, sipping from a paper cup, said no one had
passed.

Downstairs, his office door was locked. Spies and thieves. He could
ask security who was in the building tonight, not that the records
would reveal anything like the truth. The overheads flooded the room. 
Nothing obviously out of order, nothing strewn around, no drawers
hanging out of the plane.  How had they known he was on his way down?
Evan?  Evan chatting up psych theory.  Well, Evan, how does this fit
into the greater scheme of survival?  Am I preventing you from making
it to the next generation?  He braced a chair in front of the door,
then headed toward Scully's area.  A stack of back issues of Science
stood on the floor; he squatted down to put them in chronological
order.  One appeared to be missing.  He checked again.  August 17 was
not there.

The library phone rang six times before the night attendant picked up.
 Mulder made his request and Bela Fleck flooded the line as the man
put the phone down next to the radio and walked off.  Mulder heard the
other line ring but the attendant did not come back to answer and
eventually the caller gave up.  He looked up at the ceiling. If the
damn surveillance was still on, maybe he could get a tape of who was
in here.  He'd have to find Skinner, though, and his secretary wasn't
saying where he went.  If she even knew.  Skinner seeing as well as
anyone the contours of corruption, believing just as Mulder did-no,
believing just as Scully did- in shadows more real than the suit-clad
bodies around the polished conference table.  Suddenly Skinner backing
off when they needed him. Having once looked down at his own bloody
end, what frightened him now?

Mulder tucked the phone against his shoulder as "At Last We Meet
Again" played on.  He flipped through his stack of maps and unfolded
Tunisia.  His finger ran down the undulating coast to Sfax and on to
Djerba, the Isle of the Lotus Eaters - dream state, prison of dreams -
and inward to the emptiness of the great salt flats. He scanned his
pile of folders looking for the UFO crash photos that had come in the
mail weeks ago.

"Agent Mulder."  The voice pulled him back, "I'm afraid that issue is
missing.  I assure you, this is a rare-"

"Not checked out?"

"No, I do apologize.  I did a complete shelf check, you know, just in
case someone was sloppy.  We try very hard to avoid this sort of loss,
but of course people like to have open access to the journals.  It's
very frustrating for us when something goes astray like this.  I'm
sorry, none of this is helping you, is it?  Would you like me to get a
download from the Internet?"

"Yes, absolutely.  How soon can you do that?"

"I should have it in fifteen minutes if the printer is working. 
Sometimes it jams and all the paper comes out pleated.  I swear, I
wish they'd direct a few more resources our way, Agent."

"Then I'll be there in fifteen minutes."

The UFO photos had been in a blue envelope.  Mulder pulled it from the
pile.  In his memory, the craft had looked as though it was adrift in
a sea of ice.  Sea of salt.  He flipped open the folder to find it
empty except for a page ripped from an old book.  Sonnet 90.  His eyes
double-checked the label on the folder, then flitted down the page to
the final lines:

If thou wilt leave me, do not leave me last,
When other petty griefs have done their spite,
But in the onset come. So shall I taste
At first the very worst of fortune's might,
And other strains of woe, which now seem woe,
Compared with loss of thee will not seem so.

Damn them.

*

He laid the Science printout to one side of the other evidence atop
his coffee table and pulled her address book from under the cushions
of his couch.  Opening it to the A's, he began scanning for Jeremy. 
Damn, if Jeremy didn't turn up, then he'd phone everyone with the
initial J.  Three a.m.  It would catch them off guard.

Midway through her carefully printed entries, there it was:  Jeremy
Mercer.  Professor Mercer.  The guy who supervised her physics thesis
at Maryland.  He remembered the name now.  Good physics department. 
The guy might have something of a reputation.  He logged into the
Internet and clicked his way to the department homepage.  The faculty
list turned up a photo and resume.  Fifty-something, thinning blond
gray hair hanging untidily over his ears, open-necked polo shirt, eyes
magnified behind plain black frames sitting not quite straight across
his face.  He was flanked by his lab team, two grad students or
technicians, one muscular, his Pearl Jam t-shirt tight across his
chest, the other balding as if suffering fallout from too much
abstract thought.  Mercer worked in magnetic fields, quantum
mechanics, unified field theory.  Mulder flipped through the pages of
Science he had collected from the librarian. There it was, Mercer et
al, "Theory of magnetic fields and time:  preliminary results."

He dialed the number listed on the homepage and imagined the phone at
the other end ringing in darkness or maybe one of the assistants
looking up from a glowing screen and turning back to his work.  When
the voice mail came on, he hung up.

Mulder picked up his basketball and lay back on the couch.  He rolled
it around his midsection. No point in driving out to College Park
quite yet.  Scaring Mercer wasn't going to do any good.  He needed him
to bring Scully back and it wasn't clear exactly what Mercer's
connection might be to the binder Scully had found with her father's
papers.  Were there two Mercers, he wondered, one at either end of the
pipeline through time, opening and shutting the valves in eerie
unison? What did the old Mercer think the first time a body came down
the tube from the future? How many times existed simultaneously
anyhow, your past streaming out behind you like a jet trail across the
sky, seemingly wrapped up but still there, still visible if you looked
over your shoulder?  Better sleep on that one. Sometime.  He popped
the basketball over to the leather chair where it hit with a dull
splat and rebounded weakly over the arm.  Skip the X-File.  He just
wanted to make sure both Mercers stayed on duty.

He covered his eyes with the pillow to block the light.  Was the baby
already born, he wondered, a pink or blue card waiting for him in the
mailbox?  If she went back three years and stayed wouldn't it have
happened, just as the letters had all been written?  That made no
sense.  It took nine months.  She couldn't defy the clock of her own
body.

He flipped onto his side.  None of it made sense.  How could Miss
Grounded-in-Reality have abducted herself?  The irrationality of
pregnancy?  Not Scully. No hormones possibly that strong.  He shifted
in the other direction. But it couldn't be denied. Not because of
Maggie's photo, Scully standing in the kitchen sideways holding her
shirt up and her leggings low over the belly.  Taken the day before
she left her Mom.  What had Maggie said, 18 weeks?  Yeah she was
bigger, he'd said, he'd supposed, but he didn't remember her exact
dimensions on that Saturday. He wouldn't have even guessed until
Scully told him, let him run his hand over her stomach and feel the
slight swelling, a fullness after a big meal, a child smaller than his
thumb. Hadn't wanted to explain that to Maggie, though half a sentence
spilled out.  Not that their sleeping together was a secret now, but
how do you describe your naked lover to her mother?  No, the photo
wasn't the proof.  One last time, that's what she said.

He pushed up from the couch and got his calendar from the desk,
stacked her letters in order, and began transferring dates.  If the
dates matched up, then she fled her mother's on November 12.  She said
she was coming back.  Back through Jeremy.  He'd know.  Jeremy
wouldn't have sent her away unless he remembered returning her to the
present. He wrote Jeremy's address and phone number on the back of a
business card, then slipped her address book into the pocket inside
the frame of his couch.

*

"Hey, Mulder, do you have any idea what time it is?"

Frohike held the door open.  He was wearing blue striped pajamas and a
pair of beat-up leather slippers.  "Why didn't you rouse your
beautiful partner to join us for breakfast?  Would have made it worth
getting up." He reset the deadbolts and double-checked the video
monitor fixed on the street outside.  "What gives anyway?"

Mulder followed him across the room and put a large brown envelope on
the battered wooden kitchen table where a stack of old bills, Chinese
menus, and computer magazines sat at the fourth place.  Frohike turned
on the hot plate and inspected the brown crud baked onto the side of
the pot.  "You're in luck, my man, I'm going to have to make fresh."

"Don't bother.  Instant's fine.  I need your help."

"My coffee, my food, my help, and, need I add, my forbearance." The
Gunman poked around in the fridge as he spoke, pulling out a plate of
Danish with congealed toppings.  "How hungry are you anyway?"

"Fresh coffee would probably be the best meal I've had all week." 
Mulder poked at the rubbery yellow cheese pastry Frohike had slid
across the table.

"Well, you've never had to ask twice.  Lay it on."  He chipped at the
coffee granules fused at the bottom of the jar. "Something hair
raising going on from the look of you."

"Yeah, well, maybe.  Scully has come up with some evidence.  Not clear
exactly what it's going to add up to, but we've got to pick it up."

"Where?"

"At a self-store in Rockville."  The key he'd placed on the table bore
tag 545. From the folder, Mulder removed the documentation she had
enclosed with her last letter.  "I'd be obliged if you could round up
this stuff.  Watch out for tails.  Somebody lifted some photos from my
office last night and I'm thinking there could be a connection."

"Care to give me a hint?"

"UFO stuff maybe.  It's not clear.  Maybe some secret military tests,
but if that's what's involved it's probably out of date by now."

"You and Scully going to meet us back here?"

"Actually, that's the hair-raising part."

Frohike rubbed a stain off the edge of Mulder's mug with his thumb and
filled the cup with water, steam rising. "What is?"

"Bringing Scully back."

"From where?"

"1996."

"Somebody sent Scully back to 1996?"  Frohike blew out a low whistle.
"Man, no wonder you look wasted."

"Worse.  She transported herself."

"Sorry, Mulder.  You just passed the outermost of the extreme
possibilities.  We both know Scully is not about to undertake time
travel."

"We both know it, but she did, and now it appears that her helper has
been compromised.  I'm on my way to see him now.  Put him under
protection until November 12th, so she can get back."

"Who is this guy?"

"A prof she worked with as an undergrad. Mercer at Maryland.  Look,
I've gotta get going.  I want to be there when he arrives."  The
coffee stung his lips and sloshed over the edge of the mug as he set
it down.  "Damn." He shook the drops off his hand and inspected the
spreading brown spot on his cuff.  "Almost forgot.  They assigned me a
new partner. Can't find anything on her in the Bureau records.  See
what you hackers can come up with, will you?  She may be MI like
Diana.  Where'd she come from?  Who's she report to?"  He tossed the
card on the table on which the name "Angela Parker" was written along
with her badge number.  "What does she want?"

*

The muscular assistant answered Mulder's knock at B337 in the Physics
Hall annex.  The department's colloquium schedule partially obscured
Mercer's name in gold paint on the frosted glass door and a
hand-lettered yellowing sign joked "Heisenberg May Have Been Here." 
Somewhat reluctantly, the man let Mulder into a large room which
smelled of industrial solvent and overheated electrical insulation.
Mulder glanced around at the desk and bookshelves and disorderly
stacks of paper on the floor.  The assistant rolled a chair away from
the desk, pulled a flannel shirt off the seat, and set it in the
middle of the room. A balding man in the far corner blinked at Mulder
quickly and turned back to the four computer monitors scrolling
numbers and three-D graphics.  "He'll be along," was all the larger
man said before disappearing into an adjoining room.  Fifteen minutes
later, Mercer walked in, his smile stiffening as soon as he saw that
he had a visitor.  Mulder flashed his badge and the scientist glanced
toward his desk.

"FBI?  This is unexpected."

"Purely a friendly visit.  I could use your help and I think you could
use mine."

"Well, I'm not sure how.  I live a pretty quiet life -"

"But not uneventful," Mulder interrupted.  "I'm not a scientist, but I
wonder if I could ask you a few things about your work."

"Has there been some allegation?" Mercer dropped his briefcase on his
chair and turned away from Mulder to straighten his desk.

"No, nothing like that. I read your article in Science last night, the
one about time travel-"

"A theory about the effects of magnetism on time."

"A theory, then, about sending people back in time.  The article said
you'd figured out the secret."

"I said that I had devised a way that the fourth dimension might be
understood to be both continuous and bi-directional, just as the other
dimensions are.  Symmetry would seem to be violated if we did not
allow for the possibility-"

"And you have found a way to reverse direction."

"We've-" he looked over at his assistant, "we think we solved some of
the problems-"

"And you have shifted time."

"I wouldn't make that claim. You understand what that would mean."

"Have you gone back yourself?"

"It's all paper and pencil.  A theory, an extension of Einstein,
worked out from our understanding of magnetism and relativity."  His
eyes were bright, full of pride, Mulder thought.  Baldy had swiveled
in his chair and now watched the conversation, arms crossed.

"You have, haven't you?"

Mercer took off his glasses and rubbed them with a tissue from his
pocket.  Mulder continued, "I believe know my partner, Dana Scully?"

"Dana? Your partner?  I- She-she studied with me a while back, more
than a decade by now.  Did a nice thesis. But it was a long time
ago."

"Couldn't be that long because she's been to see you recently. I think
she was interested in your work, too. Came to talk to you about it."

"I think I would have remembered that."

"I think so, too.  I think you also remember sending her back.  Did
you tell her it was all theoretical or were you only too eager to show
off your toys?  Did she have to talk you into it?"

"What exactly are you suggesting, Agent?"

"When does she come back?  You'll need protection until then."

"Agent Mulder, you surely don't imagine-"

"I'm not imagining anything.  I'm saying I want her back safely."

"You're saying I sent Dana somewhere? Do you realize how ridiculous-"

"What's in those rooms?"  He pointed to the doors locked with code
cards.  "Is this where the equipment is?"

"That?  Supplies, old computers, records of our research."

Mulder leaned his ear against one of the doors and jiggled the handle.
 "When I was a kid I saw that time-travel movie, the one with, ah, Rod
Taylor.  Well, in that one the time machine looked like a chair with a
big wheel. I assume the special effects are better these days.  Open
this please."

"Mr. Mulder."  He was smiling now. "I assure you that the science I
work on bears no resemblance to your favorite childhood movies.  Dana
could tell you that.  If, and this is a very big if, if it were
possible to translate my theory into a mechanism, the forces necessary
to move an object of any size would be enormous. And as for moving
humans, the body could not withstand forces of that magnitude."

"Let me see what's in here." pounded twice on the door with the back
of his fist.

Mercer opened the door to the corridor.  "You have been seriously
misled,  Mr. Mulder.  If you'll excuse me, I have a class."  He nodded
once, looking over Mulder's shoulder.  Mulder glanced back quickly;
Muscle Boy had returned and was dialing the phone.

"Who else have you sent back? Who else might be lost if they decide to
shut down your show?  That's it, isn't it?"

*

Construction on Riggs Road slowed Mulder's drive from College Park
into the city.  As he inched forward toward the spot where orange
barrels narrowed the road to one lane, he craned his neck out the
window despairing at the flashing line of brake lights ahead. 
Slapping the heel of his hand against the off button on the radio, he
leaned against the headrest and rehashed the conversation with Mercer,
looking for a hole he might have leveraged open. He tried to picture
his partner sitting in the cluttered office looking back and forth
between her former professor and those two assistants.  She would have
been pulled right into conversation, talking about the physics without
stumbling over any of the words, asking the right questions, testing
what they said against what she knew. Her eyes would have danced over
the equations instead of scrutinizing their faces, the sour look on
the bald one and raised eyebrows and twitchy smiles the men must have
passed among themselves.  Which of them had escorted her behind the
door where the machinery hummed?

A shrill blare from the car behind opened his eyes with a start and he
eased ahead another ten yards.

When Mulder reached his basement office, there were two notes taped to
his door, the first from Parker.  "Agent Mulder, I'd like to deliver
my report when you get in." The other a summons from Skinner.

*

The door clicked softly behind Mulder.  At the polished desk across
the room, Skinner continued signing papers, the faint shuffle of pages
the only sound from either man.  Vertical blinds across the large
window subdued the afternoon brightness except where one slat had
twisted and a thin streak of sunlight marked the carpet just in front
of Mulder's foot.  The shuffling sounds stopped and Mulder looked up
to see Skinner roll down the sleeve of his shirt and button the cuff.

"I've needed to speak with you for the past week, sir."

"So my secretary said.  You were out of line to badger her."

"I didn't badger-"

"I have other obligations, my own assignments, Agent Mulder, and may I
remind you that I do not answer to you."

"You dump a strange agent on me and promptly disappear for a week.
Under the circumstances I think I deserve an explanation.  Who is she
and what the hell is going on?"

"I owe *you an explanation?  Has your partner returned?  I don't think
I've heard an adequate explanation from you about her absence."

"Agent Scully was able to- She got to her destination and she's fine. 
I don't need Parker."

Skinner rose and straightened the papers on his desk, tapping them
against the surface.  "Is it still too much to expect that you might
be able to establish a productive working relationship with someone
other than Agent Scully?"

"Not without someone telling me who Parker is.  I thought I knew all
the agents under your command."

"She comes highly recommended.  Her record speaks for itself, I
believe, and she can certainly fill you in on her background."

"Who sent her?"

"I assigned her to the X-Files and that should be sufficient.  If you
needed more information, I'm surprised you haven't checked on her
yourself."

Skinner turned away and separated the blinds, squinting against the
glare. The phone in the outer office rang just once.  If Skinner's
assistant answered, her voice was too soft to be heard through the
heavy wooden door.  Neither man spoke. Skinner surveyed the Mall, the
view a perk of someone who played by the rules and played them well.
Mulder looked from his boss, motionless in thought, to the small
shredder perched on top the wastebasket, full of confetti strips. He
cleared his throat and turned to leave.

"What case is Agent Scully working on?"  Skinner's voice was calmer
now and the angry edge had disappeared.

"It has to do with a UFO we located."

"You sent Agent Scully to inspect a UFO?"

"Not exactly, I-"

The older man sighed and let the blinds clack back together.  He
walked around to the front of the desk and paused before Mulder,
scrutinizing his face, but revealing nothing of his own emotions. He
continued across the room and held open the door leading to the
corridor. Mulder set his shoulders and exited, not glancing at the
other man, not needing to see any more of his boss's meeting mask: 
the sharp eyes that failed to divulge surprise, disappointment,
pleasure, boredom, amusement, or lethal fury.  The look that said we
are both in the same place at the same time and beyond that you're on
your own.   Footsteps followed him down the corridor and Mulder
quickened his pace. A light tap on the shoulder brought him around to
face his pursuer.  Skinner tipped his head toward a small alcove.
Sorting through his keys, he opened the unmarked door and stood to the
side for Mulder to step into the janitor's closet. Skinner turned on
the light and leaned uneasily against the door.  He exhaled one heavy
breath.

"Other people know, Agent.  They know where she is and how she got
there."

"Who?  Who told you this?"

"You should be able to figure that out. Don't give me any details
beyond what I've gathered from them.  What I don't know, I can't
tell."

"What possible interest-"

"Could be anything with them. Just keeping her away from you is
probably a damn fine reason in their book. My guess is that you'll be
offered a deal.  Don't take it."

"You said that once before, and then you-"

"I was right in the first instance.  Keep looking for another way. 
Don't deal.  It won't make any difference to the bastards."

"You-"

"Well, I don't usually confer with my agents in this room, now do I? 
You can figure you're under surveillance, too."

"And Parker?"

Skinner rubbed his left wrist around the edge of his watchband.  He
flexed his hand three times.  "You never know what's going to come
down the pipes around here.  When there might be a breakthrough, a
crack.  One of Spender's friends could slip up.  Spender himself
undoubtedly has some vulnerabilities."  He straightened his cuff. "I
follow the orders that don't seem lethal.  The directives that leave
me with a position.  The game is all about position, Agent Mulder. 
I'm not ready to turn mine in yet.  Not until I can take somebody down
with me."  He turned the door handle, then pulled it shut again.  "You
might want to start working on the cases I sent you."

"Agent Scully takes some priority in my mind."

"And you have a day job here."  His voice softened.  "You might find
interesting things in your assignments.  Get to work.  Parker may be a
spy, but that can work both ways."

As they left the janitor's closet, Skinner straightened his tie.  A
young woman with x-ray folders tucked under her arm glanced back at
them and froze. Melody from the lab.  She blushed and hurried on.

End of part 3.