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Chapter Text

The DC suburbs are quickly and messily evacuated. It’s early in the morning on what is technically Thursday, but feels more like day three of Tuesday by the time all the shooting has died down. Scully is driving them down the center of an empty street in Bethesda, lined with rows of pink dogwood and colonial style mansions, while Mulder slouches in the passenger seat, watching her watching the road. The distinction between asphalt, and sidewalk, and tree lawn is lost under a thick layer of rotting petals. 

He presses his tongue to the roof of his mouth, sensing her growing annoyance with his road chatter but finding himself unable to shut the hell up.

“Seriously, Scully,” he prods, “who do you think is gonna make it?”

The suspension judders over some hidden speed bump or piece of debris. Behind them, the treads leave long and wavering grooves in the pink mush.

Her profile hardens. “Mulder,” she says. “I don’t want to talk about this.”

“My money’s on the Mormons,” he says. 

Dogwood drop all at once, so there could be anything under the layer of petals: A kid’s bicycle, garbage that never got collected, someone’s dead cat. Up ahead, on Scully’s side, there’s a car that’s been abandoned in someone’s driveway with all the doors open. 

“I understand that this is your way of coping,” she says, “but it’s not mine.”

“I think we’re looking at either hyper individualists or strong communitarians,” he continues over her objections. “Fringe subcultures, people who are already off the grid, and close-knit communities with a preexisting tradition of mutual aid.”

“Alright, how about the Scientologists?” she tosses out, humoring him.

“No way,” says Mulder. “They’re too pampered, too Hollywood. They don’t stand a chance.” As they pass by the vehicle, he notices the bodies sprawled across the back seat, the driver folded in half over the steering wheel. “Except for maybe the Sea Org,” he amends. 

Scully doesn’t respond to this and neither of them acknowledges the bodies. 

“I’m thinking the Mormons, the Navajo, the Cherokee, the Amish. Throw in the Nation of Islam, just for fun.” Mulder starts listing these groups on his fingers. “Your various species of California libertarian hacker types, your raw vegan hippies, your bearded doomsday preppers. Perhaps the more solidaristic of the southern black churches.” He glimpses what might be a child’s car seat through the back windshield and looks away before his eyes can confirm it. “Like a Noah’s Ark of ethno-religious and regional diversity. Preserve those elements, and when all of this is over, we can cobble America back together.”

“When all of this is over?” Scully’s voice is flat.

“Of course,” he says, “the advantage goes to the most heavily armed.”

“Mulder,” she sighs. “Are you having some sort of manic episode? Should I be concerned?”

“What?” He feigns offense. “What do you mean?”

“You’re talking too much,” she says, “and you keep talking over me. And you’re being incredibly morbid—”

“Isn’t that normal?” he asks, interrupting her yet again. 

“Well,” she says. “You know what I think? I think you're compulsively rambling in order to drown out your own thoughts.”

“Ok.” He crosses his arms and twists away from her, leaning his forehead against the passenger side window. He can feel her staring pointedly ahead at the road, even as he watches his own breath condensing on the glass.

“And now you’re going to give me this petulant silent treatment,” she says. 

He turns back, feeling his seatbelt lock, and yanks it in and out until it slackens again. “How is it that your silence is stoic, but mine is petulant?” he counters.

She shrugs with both hands on the wheel. 

“What do you want from me?” he asks her. “What, what is the correct way for me to conduct myself under these circumstances?”

“I don’t know,” she says. “Forget it.”

“Do you want to give me a list of approved inflections and facial expressions?” He raises his voice at her. He feels like arguing with someone, maybe God, but he’ll have to settle for Scully because she’s the only one here. “You know, so I can behave exactly the way you want me to at all times?”

Her jaw shifts on its hinges, but she doesn’t take the bait. She’s not going to give him the satisfaction of a shouting match.   

He unclips his seatbelt and lets it fly back into the reel, unable to tolerate the sensation of it against his neck any longer. His back is stiff from sleeping in the car. They both need a hot cup of coffee, a shower, a fresh change of clothes; But none of those things seem to be on the horizon. 

The dogwood give way to commercial zoning, looted storefronts and more bodies. They pass a car crashed into a fire hydrant that’s still geysering into the air. Scully is right: He can’t stand the sound of his own thoughts. He craves distraction they can ill afford, and her superior self-mastery under these extraordinary circumstances puts him to shame.

“This contact of yours,” he says, glancing at the stack of papers on the console between them. “This uh… Dr. Sonja Hathale. Is she Navajo? That’s a Navajo surname, isn’t it?”

“I’ll let her know she made your list of potential survivors,” says Scully. Her eyelashes flick towards him, and it feels like the first time in ages that her gaze has deviated from the road ahead. 

Mulder’s never met this woman in person, but he did catch her on the local news before it all cut to black, claiming to have manufactured more of the vaccine from a sample Scully gave her. As far as they know, the virus has already been released, though none of the bodies they’ve come across show any evidence of it, appearing instead to be victims of a chaotic mass exodus. Through the large front window of an ice cream parlor, Mulder notices a cashier slumped over his vintage novelty cash register, his brains splattered across the wall behind him. The weight of Mulder’s service weapon makes itself conspicuous against his thigh as they enter what may yet be a populated area. 

“How many rounds do we have?” he asks, opening the glove compartment to count cardboard boxes of ammunition. 

“I don’t know,” says Scully.

“How about a backup gun?” he asks.

“Yours and mine,” she says. “Under my seat.” She licks her lips, craning to look around the corner as she makes a turn. The traffic lights are all blinking simultaneously, signaling that the computer that controls them is out of commission. “I should have packed body armor,” she adds. 

He leans forward in his seat, taking hold of the ceiling handle. “You grabbed what you could,” he says. “There wasn’t time.” 

Among the last images he saw on television was the Capitol in flames, the federal buildings lying in various degrees of ruin, like the Roman temples they were so vaingloriously designed to resemble. At the time, these images evoked in him nothing more than a sense of déjà vu, so often had they been the subject of his dreams. Three days later, and with less than a night’s sleep spread across them, the horror is finally beginning to catch up with him. 

He can feel Scully holding her breath around each turn in preparation for whatever they might be confronted with next. The closer they get to downtown Bethesda, the less the world outside the car windows resembles civilization as they knew it. 

By the time they arrive at the campus of the National Institutes of Health, it seems they’re already too late. One side of the barbed wire barricades is piled high with civilian bodies, while the other is littered with the bodies of police in riot gear. Limbs and entrails are strewn across the lawn, the blood still brilliant red and fresh. Whatever killed both groups isn’t visible from the road, but Mulder has a terrible suspicion as to what it might be. 

Scully takes her foot off the gas pedal and the car drifts to a stop before the roundabout. “Shit,” she hisses.

“Turn around,” says Mulder. 

She cuts the wheel, but freezes when she looks up at the rear view mirror.

Mulder turns in his seat to see a lone figure standing in the middle of the road, a few hundred feet behind them. 

“Is that…?” He squints. 

“Is that Agent Spender?” Scully completes the thought. “I thought he was dead. Oh my God.” She looks from the mirror to Mulder and back again. “Put your seatbelt on,” she orders, and Mulder scrambles to comply.

The figure shifts his weight from one foot to the other and Scully floors it, turning onto the roundabout with a screech of the tires. 

“Back of the neck.” Mulder reaches for his gun. “I need a line of sight on the back of his neck.”

“How?” Scully yells at him. “He’s running towards us!” 

She’s doing sixty-five and Spender is still gaining on them. Mulder aims his gun through the rear windshield, looking for an opportunity to shoot, but Scully is right. Spender is so close to them now that Mulder can see his eyes, which are solid black. His expression is blank, betraying no evidence of exertion or even concentration on his target. The face of a shark would be more legible.  

Finding a gap in the barbed wire barricades, Scully swerves onto the front lawn, trying to avoid the bodies with mixed success.

“What are you doing?” Mulder asks her, turning back around in his seat.

“I don’t know!” She drives over a curb and onto the campus walkways, weaving in between the vast complex of collegiate-looking red brick buildings. “Trying to lose him!”

They fly down a wheelchair ramp, picking up speed again, only to find themselves in a cul-de-sac, surrounded by buildings on three sides. Without a moment’s hesitation, Scully drives through a set of glass doors into some kind of food court and out through a glass wall on the other side, scattering aluminum chairs and café tables. 

“We can’t lose him,” says Mulder. “We have to take him down.”

“By shooting him in the back of the neck?” says Scully. “Are you fucking kidding me?”

“Well, it’s the only way to kill them,” Mulder explains. “Their brainstem is vulnerable, because—”

“I don’t need a slideshow right now, Mulder!” she screams. 

The lawn they’re driving on slopes downward and Spender takes a running leap to land with a thud on the roof of the car.

“Oh, fuck.” Mulder points his gun uselessly at the ceiling as it begins to dent under Spender’s fists. 

Thinking quickly, Scully slams on the break in an attempt to throw him off, and Spender flips over onto the hood. His hand comes through the windshield, spraying her with shattered glass, and she floors it again with her eyes closed. The car zooms straight into a brick wall, deploying the airbags, and pinning Spender between the front bumper and the side of a building. The world rings and Mulder feels his teeth clack painfully inside his head.

Reeling from the impact, he and Scully both stagger out of the vehicle with their guns drawn. Her forehead is flecked with scratches, and there are shards of windshield in her hair. Blood pours from Spender’s mouth and the black film leaves his eyes, his expressionless face suddenly twisting in agony.

“Listen to me!” he chokes. “Agent Scully, they have your baby.”

Scully opens her mouth. “Who’s they?” She takes a step closer, her fear dissolving into anger. “Where are they?”

“Our father.” Spender’s gaze switches to Mulder. “Fort Bragg. Not much time.” His eyes flicker to black, then back to normal again, and he makes a horrible gurgling sound, the bloody vomit pouring down the front of his shirt. “He did this to us,” he says through his teeth. 

“He made you into one of the supersoldiers?” Mulder asks. 

His gun wavers, the pain in Spender’s face giving him pause. As far as he understood up until now, these hybrid supersoldiers were mindless drones. The thought that Agent Spender’s consciousness could remain trapped inside, forced to watch himself doing the aliens’ bidding, is considerably more disturbing.

“Kill me,” Spender pleads with Scully. “Then kill him.” He jerks his head at Mulder. 

“What?” says Scully. She’s shaking, and Mulder wonders if he is, too.

“He’s a ticking time bomb,” says Spender. “Kill him. Kill the baby. It’s the only way. Don’t let them do this to anyone else.”

Scrunching his eyes shut, he starts slamming the back of his head against the brick wall behind him and screaming.   

“What are you talking about?” Scully demands.

“They’re in my head!” Spender wails. “Kill meee!” 

He leans forward, exposing the back of his neck, but as Scully approaches him, he rears up, his eyes all black again.

“Run.” Mulder rushes to her side of the car and takes her by the arm, pulling her towards the center of the campus. They won’t get far on foot once Spender frees himself, but the car is now totaled and they are out of alternatives.

When they reach the NIH Clinical Center, the overhead lights in the lobby are out, but there are red emergency lights along the baseboards, indicating that the fourteen-story research hospital is on automatic backup power. The lobby’s high ceiling is supported by two rows of gleaming white columns, interspersed with potted palm trees tall enough to scrape the third floor balcony behind them. There’s no one manning the reception, but there are pens, and papers, and desktop novelties scattered across the floor, suggesting a hasty retreat.

“Balcony.” Mulder points, running for the elevator. 

Scully slips in after him as he repeatedly slams the number three button with the side of his fist. They catch their breath for a few seconds, staring ahead at the seam of the stainless steel doors. She gives his arm a brief squeeze that says, in case we’re about to die, which he immediately regrets failing to reciprocate as the doors open and they rush to the edge of the balcony.

As soon as the crown of Spender’s head clears the entrance, they both open fire. This is a mistake, but they are trained as police to aim for center mass, so it takes a second to register as one. Spender looks up at them and goes to scale the stairs, not even breaking stride when Mulder nails him in the chest. One of Scully’s bullets ricochets off the handrail and hits him in the thigh, which will slow him down only momentarily. 

They run, turning a corner into the clinic, and pushing through multiple sets of double doors. Mulder stops, his sneakers screeching against the vinyl floor, to make sure Scully is behind him, and ushers her into one of the exam rooms, where they press their backs against the wall on either side of the entrance. 

“I’m out of bullets,” Scully mouths, pantomiming with her gun. 

As silently as he can, Mulder unzips his jacket pocket and withdraws a cardboard box of ammunition. Spender’s footsteps can be heard down the corridor, punctuated by the sounds of him kicking open each of the doors one by one in search of his prey. Scully feeds a new clip into her Glock and stands with the barrel raised and elbows close to her sides.

The suspense doesn’t last long. The door flies open and Spender bursts in, ragdolling Scully across the room with a swat of his arm before she can take aim at him. She sinks to the floor, leaving a streak of blood on the wall, and Mulder lunges after her, calling her name, only to be hoisted into the air by his throat. 

The back of his head hits a whiteboard covered in writing and suddenly he is face to face with Spender, the gun clattering out of his hand. He tries to pry Spender’s fingers open, the toes of his sneakers scraping the floor as he dangles helplessly in the supersoldier's grip. 

“Hello, Fox Mulder,” Spender says without inflection. “We’ve been monitoring you for a long time.”

“Who am I talking to?” Mulder struggles for air. “Who’s we?”

“You already know who we are,” says Spender. “We have known you since your embryonic stage.” 

Mulder tries to shake his head in refusal but the grip on his neck is too strong. 

“Don’t be afraid,” says Spender.

Over his shoulder, Mulder can see Scully stir. The side of her head is bleeding, but she’s alive and conscious. Their eyes meet, and she reaches across the floor for her gun, training it at Spender’s brainstem. 

“It’s time for you to join us,” Spender is saying. 

Mulder closes his eyes, hearing the gunshot and feeling the hand drop him. When he opens them again, Spender’s body is convulsing on the floor, the bullet wound exposing the metallic casing of his spine. Then, the violence ceases. Spender’s head is framed by a spreading halo of blood.

“Oh my God.” Scully lowers her gun. 

“Are you alright?” Mulder asks her, stepping around the body and rushing to her side. “Are you concussed?” Scalp wounds bleed a lot, he reminds himself, so it’s probably not as serious as it looks. 

“I don’t think so.” She touches her face and studies the blood on her fingertips. 

“Are you sure?” he presses. 

Holstering her gun, she puts a hand against the wall for balance. “Yeah,” she breathes. Both of them are shaking with residual adrenaline. 

Mulder stoops to retrieve his own gun from the floor. “Great shot, by the way.” He tries to smile. “You really only get one chance with these guys.” 

There’s a vacuum in his chest he can’t explain. His thoughts return to the elevator, and his failure to acknowledge her when they both thought they were about to die. 

They find some alcohol wipes, which Scully uses to clean the blood from her face after picking the grains of glass from her hair. Besides the scalp wound and the spray of superficial scratches to her forehead, cheek, neck, and hands, she seems to have gotten away unharmed. Most of the cuts should heal without scarring. Afterwards, Mulder watches her take the elastic out of her hair and finger comb it into a fresh ponytail, wishing he could think of a way to broach the subject of what Spender said to them. 

Lucking upon an electric kettle in one of the staff lounges, they make themselves styrofoam cups of instant coffee and walk the halls in search of any signs of life. In addition to backup power generation, the NIH uses underground cisterns to supply its research hospitals with emergency water, making it an ideal location to seek shelter. It’s extremely troubling that they’ve yet to find anyone else here alive.

The closest thing they do find is an envelope addressed to Scully on the desk in Dr. Hathale’s ninth floor office. Scully sinks into the doctor’s chair, turning the envelope over in her hands, as Mulder takes the chair on the other side of the desk. Tearing it open, she produces a folded piece of yellow legal paper.

“Is it from her?” Mulder asks, watching Scully scan the note.

She frowns at it in silence. “That’s what it says,” she answers after a minute.

“Can you identify her handwriting?” he asks.

“Well it’s pretty much illegible, which checks out, since she’s a doctor,” says Scully. “But no, we’ve never exchanged handwritten messages.”

“Could it be a trick?” he suggests. “Someone posing as her?”

Scully hands him the paper. “You mean could someone else have left this on her desk, hoping I’d find it? Conceivably. But to what end?”

Mulder looks at the note. 

Agent Scully, it reads. 

The Sample you provided me with has proven Invaluable to us. Unfortunately, it’s not Safe to continue our Work here. My team and I are headed West to Indian Country. I don’t know if you will ever find this Letter, but I have no other way of contacting you. I leave it here in the Hopes that you might know your efforts were not in vain. 

Sincerely, 

Dr. Sonja Hathale

“What’s with the random capitalizations?” Mulder asks. “Could it be some kind of cypher?”

“I don’t know.” Scully tilts her head back, resting it on the top of the chair. 

“A-S-T-S-I-U-S-W-M-I-W-I-C-I-L-I-I-H.” He reads all the capitals out loud. “Does that mean anything to you?”

“No,” says Scully.

“What about just the non-standard capitals?” he asks. “S-I-S-W-W-I-C-L-H? Wait,” he considers. “Is Indian Country generally capitalized? How about S-I-S-W-W-L-H?”

“Maybe it doesn’t mean anything,” Scully sighs. “Maybe that’s just the way she writes.” She taps the little pendulum toy on the desk and watches it swing back and forth. “Anyway, it’s all too vague to be actionable. Maybe the vaccine got out there. Maybe your motley crew of survivors has a chance. But there’s nothing we can do to help them from here.”

Mulder drops the note, letting it flutter down onto the desk between them and leans back, tilting this way and that in his rotating office chair. 

“Do you think Skinner’s still alive?” he asks the ceiling.

“Will you stop this?” she says. “I don’t want to try to guess who’s alive and who’s dead. It’s pointless speculation.”    

Still leaning back against the headrest, Mulder lets his head loll to one side so that he can face her. “Since when does speculation need to have a point?” he asks. 

Scully has a way of rolling her eyes without actually rolling her eyes. “Does talking about it constantly give you some sort of illusion of control?” she asks. “Is that what this is about?” 

“Well, what else are we supposed to talk about?” He gestures to the room and to the universe in general. “People are dying. That’s what’s happening.” 

She doesn’t argue with this. He does a three-sixty rotation. 

“I guess we should probably talk about what’s next on the agenda,” he concedes. “Where do we go from here?”  

Scully stares into her last couple of inches of cold coffee, tilting the cup like she’s reading the future in it. “He told us they have William,” she says, growing distant. “He mentioned Fort Bragg.”

“You want to go to Fort Bragg,” says Mulder. He strokes his knuckles against his lips, studying her expression.

She believes what Spender told them, that their baby is in the hands of the Cigarette Smoking Man, if only because believing this provides the hope that their baby might still be alive.

“He also told you to kill me,” Mulder points out. “What did you make of that?”

“I don’t know,” she says. “I don’t know what he was talking about.”

“He called me a ticking time bomb,” Mulder says.

Scully puts down the styrofoam cup. “Well, it wouldn’t be the first time someone’s said that about you,” she snorts.

Mulder picks at his cuticles, replaying the encounter in his mind. “Doesn’t it bother you that he didn’t kill me when he had me by the throat?” he asks. 

She frowns. 

“He said some strange things,” Mulder continues. “I think… I think it was the alien hive mind speaking through him, directly to me.” He leans forward. “They addressed me by name.”

“I didn’t really catch that part,” says Scully. “I was focused on shooting him.”

Mulder nods, not really listening. “What did he want with me, Scully?” he asks. “What does it mean?”

“I don’t know.” She stands up from the desk, as if to put an end to this whole line of questioning, but her expression changes. “Mulder!” she exclaims.

Following her line of sight, he looks down to find what appears to be a black slug crawling on the toe of his white sneaker. He jumps up, kicking the shoe off and knocking his chair to the floor.  

“His blood.” She brings a hand to her mouth. “You stepped in his blood.” 

It was red when it left Spender’s body, but the blood has now turned black and taken on a life of its own. Mulder struggles out of his jacket as the slippery beads roll over his clothes like a swarm of insects. He removes his belt and hip holster and lets them coil to the floor on top of his jacket, preparing to strip. He grabs the hem of his t-shirt, only to realize that the droplets are already being absorbed into his skin. He yells, watching them crawl beneath the surface as they travel up his torso. Then, all of a sudden, they disappear. 

“Scully.” He lets go of his shirt and stares down at his palms, frozen in shock. Pins and needles spread from every point of entry. 

“Okay,” she urges him. “Let’s just— Let’s try to stay calm.”

She walks around the desk and he backs away, afraid of somehow infecting her as she reaches for him.

“It’s going to be okay,” she insists. “We’re both vaccinated. The virus can’t kill us.”

“Right,” he says, even as his vision begins to swim. 

He follows her out into the corridor, his heart pounding in his ears. Every few seconds, the urge to start tearing his skin off peaks and then subsides again. 

“I’ll just take a look at you,” Scully is saying.

They ride the elevator down to the phlebotomy lab, where she guides him into a chair with a special padded armrest designed for blood draws. Her face is neutral, but her hands are moving a lot. She touches the back of one of them to his forehead and searches his eyes. 

“How do you feel?” she asks him.

He notices the long scratch across the backs of her knuckles, and wonders if that one will scar after all. 

“Scully, I don’t think it’s going to kill me,” he tells her. “I think it’s going to do something a lot worse.”

“You’re feverish,” she says, ignoring his words. 

“You heard Agent Spender,” he continues. “He was trying to warn us.” 

All the talk of their father could only have meant one thing. Mulder and his half brother, though he’s not used to thinking of Spender in such terms, were equally cursed to share that man’s genes. Spender was talking about the Cigarette Smoking Man’s plans for both of them, plans that were encoded into their DNA before they were even born. 

Scully wheels a patient monitor over to him and holds the thermometer in front of his mouth. 

“Scully,” he says, denying her access to the underside of his tongue. Realizing he left his gun in Dr. Hathale’s office, he looks at the one attached to her hip. His skin is burning, and they both know it’s not from any ordinary fever. 

The thermometer hesitates in the air. “No,” she says. 

Their eyes meet and she shakes her head.

“Scully,” he says slowly. “You don’t have to be the one to do it. Just give me the gun.”

The thermometer clatters to the floor and she backs away from him before he can even think of snatching the gun from her holster. “I don't know what you’re talking about,” she says. 

“I think you do.” He droops in the phlebotomy chair. He’s growing lightheaded, the surfaces in front of him drawing farther away.

Scully turns away from him and towards the lab counter.

“There’s no time to argue about this,” he says to her back as she rifles through the cabinets. “We don’t know how long it takes. I could be a danger to you very soon.”

“Quiet,” she snaps at him over her shoulder. “You’re distracting me. I’m trying to think.”

“Scully,” he pleads with her.

There’s a smudge of blue dry erase marker on the side of his hand from being pressed against the whiteboard. He runs his fingers over it, imagining his flesh turning to jelly and sloughing away to reveal his alien replacement. He wonders if he’ll remain aware, as Spender seemed to. It doesn’t bear contemplating.

“We don’t even know if you’re right,” she says, pulling down a sharps bin to search behind it, cotton balls bouncing across the countertop. “You haven’t even let me try anything.”

“What are you going to do?” he asks. “Experiment on me? There’s no time.”

“You don’t know that,” she says. “You just said we don’t know how long it takes.”

When he opens his mouth to argue with her, he’s cut short by a stabbing pain in his chest. The room flips so that he’s looking up at the ceiling and he realizes, in a third person sort of way, that he’s lying on his back having a seizure. He hears, rather than sees, Scully run from the room as the pain intensifies, whiting out his vision. His teeth clamp down on his tongue, filling his mouth with the taste of iron. 

The fear is autonomic, but the sadness takes him by surprise. He realizes he’s missed his chance to say goodbye, or thank you for everything, or hug our son for me, or any number of other things he might have said.

Scully reappears, her blurry face emerging from the glare of the overhead lights. He tries to speak to her, but it’s impossible. A mixture of blood and saliva is threatening to choke him. 

“It’s going to be okay,” she chants, combing his hair away from his face. “It’s going to be okay.” She kisses him on the forehead and plunges a syringe into his heart. He feels himself sink into the floor as the world becomes liquid light. 

He doesn’t remember having any dreams, but when Mulder wakes up, he has the distinct sense that he’s been asleep for a long time. He feels transported. When he opens his eyes, he’s half expecting to find himself in Purgatory, so it’s a bit anticlimactic to find himself staring up at the same acoustic tile ceiling.

At least, he thinks it’s the same ceiling. The colors are different, the surfaces more granular, the edges sharper. He breathes from the diaphragm, inhaling the scents of antiseptic and death. Everything feels tender and uncanny. His skin is hot and his mouth tastes like metal. Becoming aware of his nakedness, he realizes he’s lying on some kind of foam mattress pad on the floor. 

He holds a hand up to his face for scrutiny. The shape seems right, but the two dark brown freckles on the back of it are missing. Noticing the needle in his arm, he looks up to see a tube connected to an IV drip and pulls it out.  

His arms and chest are covered with a light fuzz; Not stubble, but the tapered ends of brand new hairs. He reaches up to find the same virgin hairs sprouting from his face and the top of his head. The consistency of his skin is all wrong.

“Scully?” he asks the empty lab. 

The layered quality of his own voice makes him pause and listen to the sounds of the deserted clinic. Even the silence sounds different. He can hear what he thinks is the electromagnetic hum of the LED lights on the ceiling. 

“Scully?” he tries again.

Deciding to just rip the bandaid off, he sits up and looks down at himself, only to immediately regret it. His hair and clothes and other small possessions lie across from him in a puddle of jellied gore. He’s been rinsed clean, but not very thoroughly, leaving the bloody crust around his nail beds, his nostrils, the helixes of his ears.

He brings a hand to his chest, trying to imagine a diminutive Scully hosing him down over the drain in the floor and rolling his weight onto the foam mattress all by herself. 

His nipples are flat and gray, and there are ridges of this pearly gray skin along his collarbone, the blades of his hips, and the insides of his thighs. He flinches from the sight of his groin.

“Okay,” he says out loud to himself. He closes his eyes, feeling the air currents against his bare skin. The gray patches feel different, so he can tell without seeing that there are more of them on his back. 

“Yo, Fox,” he says, in his best 80s hip hop voice. “What’s good? What’s crackalackin’?”

He stands on shaking legs, brushing off the scales of dried blood. 

“Sheee-it, you know me,” he answers himself. “I’m keepin’ it really really real.”

Flexing his feet against the cold vinyl floor, he takes his first cautious steps towards the stainless steel sink at the end of the counter. 

“Maybe a little too real,” he says to his reflection in the mirror. He scrubs his nails with two pumps of the pink liquid hand soap, taking in his own appearance. 

The supersoldiers are designed to be able to pass as human. Wispy eyebrows and the peach fuzz on his head make him look oddly neotenous, but his hair will grow back. With clothes on, he could walk down the street without drawing the suspicion of strangers; But someone who knew him would notice the differences. The mole on his right cheek is gone, along with his old skin. His features are too symmetrical, too smooth, lacking any of the markers of having lived in the world; But they are his own features, and not someone else’s. 

Folding up a paper towel, he wets a corner of it and uses it to wipe the crusted blood from his nostrils and ears, and from the corners of his eyes. His eyes look normal, he thinks, though his perception of color is different. At least, they are not black.

Stepping away from the mirror, he straightens his spine and closes his fists at his sides. His breaths feel deep and satisfying. A powerful heart thumps in his chest.

Whatever he’s got going on below the belt will have to be its own matter entirely. He finds one of those mint green hospital gowns in the cabinet and puts it on, if only to remove the visual distraction. Standing over the semilucent marmalade of his own remains, he tries to see if there are any bones or organs, but all he can make out are indistinct masses, like chunks of fruit suspended in a jello mold.

“Scully?” he calls, louder this time. She will be able to explain all of this to him, he's sure.

Deciding to go and look for her, he leaves the lab and walks down the corridor, calling her name. His movements feel unnaturally smooth and mechanical, his muscles too eager, his joints too lubricated. He paces himself, alarmed by the coiled urge to break into a run. 

When he reaches the end of the corridor, he hears the click of a gun being cocked and turns towards the source of the sound.

“Don’t come any closer!” Scully yells at him. 

Mulder’s feet freeze in place and he raises his hands into the air. “Scully,” he says, taking her in.

The scratches on her face have faded, confirming his suspicion that at least a few days have passed. She looks like she’s showered, and she’s dressed in black sweatpants and a pullover embroidered with the seal of the National Institutes of Health that he thinks is navy blue. Her hair is no color he’s ever seen before. It occurs to him that he has no idea whether he’s actually seeing beyond the human visual spectrum or if he’s simply been cured of his color blindness. 

“St-stay where you are,” she says, with a little less conviction. The Glock trembles in front of her. 

“It’s okay,” Mulder says slowly. “It’s…” He hesitates, unsure if what he’s about to say is even true. “It’s me.”

Scully shakes her head so minutely it’s more like vibrating in place. Her eyes are round with terror.

“I don’t hear them,” he tells her. “There’s no one else in my head. It’s just me.”

“I don’t understand,” she says. “I don’t…” The barrel angles downward by a few centimeters.

His feet start working again and he takes a step towards her. 

“I said stay back!” Scully pulls the trigger, striking him just below the ribs, and he doubles over, clutching the wound in shock. Hot blood gushes between his fingers, soaking the front of the hospital gown.

“Why would you do that?” he asks her.

“I-I don’t know!” she sputters. 

“We already know that doesn’t kill them!” he says. “It has to be in the back of the neck!”

“I know!” she says. “I’m sorry, I guess it’s a reflex!”

“Dammit, Scully!” He feels a lurch behind his ribs, the muscles contracting until the bullet rolls out onto the floor. The nose is flattened from the impact. “That really hurts!”

“Sorry!” Her feet slide towards him without really taking a step as she lowers her gun. 

“Oh my God.” She blinks. “It’s really you!” 

Mulder looks up from clutching his belly to wince at her. “Hi.”

She runs to him, holstering the gun so that she can cup his face with both hands and he stills under her touch, trying to stand up straight. “Oh my God,” she repeats, frantically searching his eyes.

The feeling of her hands on his face is so arresting that he almost forgets about the pain. 

“What did you do?” he asks her.

Her forehead ripples. “What do you mean?”

“You injected me with something,” he says.

Her hands slide down to cup his shoulders. “It was morphine,” she says. “I thought if I kept you sedated, then maybe I could buy some time to figure something out.”

“Sedated, so I couldn’t hurt you, you mean.” His fingers curl. He wants to reciprocate her touch, but he’s hesitant to make any such moves. 

She lowers her chin. 

“What was in the IV?” he asks.

“Sufentanil,” she says. “It’s another opioid, used to maintain general anesthesia. But it took absurdly high doses to keep you under. You, you metabolize it so fast.” 

“And then what?” he prompts.

“And then I ran out of general anesthesia drugs.” She gives a laugh that’s more of a sob. “And you woke up.”

He sags into her arms, realizing what she’s saying, and she clasps the back of his neck. “You should have killed me,” he says.

“I know.” She pushes the top of her head against the underside of his jaw. “I know.”

He winces when she tries to hug him closer.

“Sorry.” She lets go and takes a step back, her hands hovering around his chest. “Are you alright?” she asks.

“You mean this?” He nods to the bullet wound. “Or in general?” The bleeding has stopped, requiring no compression, and he can already feel his flesh knitting itself back together. 

“Lemme take a look,” she murmurs, gesturing for him to move his hands out of the way. There are no voices in his head, but there is something, a compelling kind of pressure, and when she touches him again, he realizes it’s her. 

“How long was I out for?” he asks her.

“Four days,” she says. 

Mulder rolls this information around in his mind. “So what have you been up to this whole time?” he asks.

“Eating hospital food,” Scully says. 

They return to the phlebotomy lab to retrieve Scully’s notes and, she decides once they get there, to run a blood panel. Mulder’s gunshot wound is closing too quickly for her to even bother dressing it, and at this rate he should be completely healed in a matter of hours. 

He hops up onto the lab counter next to her, watching her scribble something into a spiral notebook. Her close, slanted handwriting is too small for him to read, especially upside down.

“Are those your field notes on alien-human hybrid supersoldiers?” he asks her. 

“You could say that.” She spares him a sideways glance.

“Does it say ‘I captured one of them live’ in there?” He wags his eyebrows. 

“Not in so many words.” She puts down her pen and starts preparing a needle for venipuncture.  

“Probably needs a more concise name.” Mulder kicks his heels against the cabinet beneath him. “Are you gonna be the species-namer?” 

She ties a rubber tourniquet above his elbow and uses her finger to palpate the vein. “This may hurt a bit,” she warns, before raising the needle and stabbing it as hard as she can into his arm. 

“Ow!” Mulder flinches. The same woman shot him in the abdomen less than an hour ago, he reminds himself, so this shouldn’t even rate. 

“Sorry.” She removes the tourniquet, letting the test tube fill up. “I took some blood samples while you were under,” she explains, “and I discovered that your skin is very difficult to penetrate.” She removes the full test tube and hooks up another, and then a third, before withdrawing the needle.

“What color is it?” he asks her.

“What?” She drops the tubes into a plastic rack.

“My blood,” he says. 

She frowns.

“The colors look different,” he explains, “and there are more of them. I don’t know if what I’m looking at is red.”

“It is red,” she assures him. 

“Why doesn’t it turn black, like Spender’s did?” he asks.

Scully looks down, pretending to consult her notes. “I think that’s… only the fluid in the brainstem,” she says.

They sit in silence for a moment and Mulder cups his knees, growing restless. He wants to ask her everything she’s learned about what he is, but he doesn’t even know where to begin. 

Scully faces him, seeming to sense this. “How do you feel?” she asks gently. 

“Like I took a pill at a rave,” he says. Despite the sensory strangeness, he feels physically well. His whole body is aglow with the kind of pleasant soreness that promises to resolve itself into strength. 

“Are you in any pain?” she asks. “Aside from the obvious.” She nods to the narrowing gouge below his ribs. 

“Why do I remember everything?” He answers her question with a question.

She presses her lips. “What do you mean?” 

Behind her, on the floor, lies the gelatinous cocoon from which he emerged, a gory mucilage in roughly the shape of a man. 

“That was Fox Mulder,” he says, pointing past her. “So why do I feel like I’m him? Why do I have his memories?”

“Because… you are him,” she says, without turning to look. “You said so yourself. Right before I shot you.” 

His toes curl against the cabinet door. “What if I’m actually the thing that killed him?” he asks her. “A thing that consumed him from the inside in order to create itself?”

“Then why would you have all his memories?” She shrugs. 

“If I’m Fox Mulder, then how did I get from in there…” He points. “…to in here?” He taps his sternum. “Do you think it’s— what? —my soul, or something?” 

“Maybe,” says Scully. “Maybe the brain was preserved.”

“But we aren’t just brains in jars,” he says. “What about the entire neural architecture? The whole body is involved in sensing and processing experience. And if you credit, as I do, any of the common notions of physio-psychism or chakra, then every individual cell is potentially its own—”

“Mulder.” She claps her hands over his knees. “Breathe.” 

Her touch startles him into silence. Like everything else, it doesn’t feel the way he remembers. The sensations are recognizable enough that his mind is able to parse them, but they are manifestly different. This red is not the same red, this heat is not the same heat, this pain is not the same pain.  

“You’re doing that thing,” she says, “where you ramble because you’re afraid.” 

“Hey, gimme a break.” He draws a shaky breath. “I just got here on the Ship of Theseus over there.” He points again. 

“I know.” She squeezes his knees and the pressure touches his mind with a similar warmth. He wants to tell her about this psychic touch and what he thinks it means, but he’s worried she won’t believe him. He’s even more worried she will believe him, and that everything will change for him in an even more terrifying way. 

Opening one of the cabinets to produce two sterile plastic jars, she sets them both down on the counter next to his thigh. “Alright,” she says. “You could probably use a shower, correct?”

Mulder eyes the jars. “Yeah.” 

“So while you’re in there, if you can manage it…” She visibly marshals her medical detachment. “It would be helpful to get a urine and a semen sample.” 

Mulder exhales. “About that.” He hops down from the counter, arranging his bloodstained hospital gown in as dignified a manner as he can. “You may have noticed,” he says, “that I’m missing my… original equipment.”  

Scully tucks her notebook under her arm, preparing to take him to him where the shower is. “Yes,” she says. 

“So, so.” Mulder rubs the back of his neck. “How am I supposed to…?” His heart squeezes painfully. “There doesn’t seem to be any way to, you know…” 

“Ah,” says Scully. “You haven’t seen it, um. Extended.” 

He opens and closes his mouth. “What?”

“Can you lift up the gown?” she asks. 

He obliges her, exposing the triangle of smooth gray skin where his genitals ought to be. 

“Okay,” she says. “Now just, um. Try to relax, and see if you can get it to come out.” 

“Jesus Christ,” he says. “Are you serious?” 

She winces in sympathy. “In terms of function,” she says, “it may not be as different as it looks. But the samples will help me clarify—”

Feeling something slide out of him, he backs up against the counter and stares down at it. “Um, um, Scully,” he stammers. “What the fuck— in your medical opinion —am I looking at?” 

The thing is pearly gray and smooth like the skin of a dolphin, uncurling from some unknown orifice between his legs to hang more or less where his penis should hang. It’s sort of flat and flipper-like, and has what appears to be a silver ball bearing in the end of it, which the gray skin largely conceals. Before he can really get a good look at it, it curls up like a prawn, returning from whence it came. He drops the hem of the hospital gown and presses the heels of his hands into his eye sockets, as if he can grind the image of it from his brain. 

“So, um,” he says. It hurts to swallow. “Are they hermaphroditic?” he asks, with what he hopes is an academic tone. 

“I don’t think so,” says Scully. “It wouldn’t really make sense for that to be a vaginal canal. I think it’s just a sort of, you know.” She attempts to demonstrate with her fingers. “A sort of blind cavity, into which the, uh… the phallus retracts, when not in use.” 

“Mmhm, mhm.” Mulder nods. “Yeah, that makes sense.” He grabs the sample jars from the counter and gestures for Scully to lead the way. 

The corners of Scully’s mouth twitch in a kind of poignant frown of concealed laughter. “You alright there, Columbo?” she asks, reaching up to stroke his short hair. 

“Yup, yup, yup.” Mulder knocks on the counter.

The patient bathroom consists of a toilet, a sink, and two large showerheads that drain directly into the tile floor, turning the whole room into one giant shower stall. There are stainless steel handles on the walls and a plastic chair, for the benefit of elderly and disabled patients, which Mulder uses as a table for the sample jars. Shedding the hospital gown, he balls it up and tosses it into a corner before flipping on one of the showerheads and grabbing a new bar of soap from the edge of the sink. 

The hot water pours down his back and he closes his eyes, the wax paper wrapper around the soap growing soggy in his hands as he stands there, forgetting himself in the feeling. There are gray ridges over his vertebrae and shoulder blades which react differently to the temperature; This skin is more sensitive, or at least, sensitive in a different way. Unwrapping the bar of soap and discarding the paper, he washes himself in meditative silence, not whistling or humming the way he might have in the past. The gunshot wound is a pink macule, still tender when he runs his fingers over it, but well on its way to disappearing entirely. Not bothering with the mini shampoo, he uses the same bar of soap to wash the short fuzz on his head. 

Objects feel flimsier in his hands. The soap warps under his fingers, but he’s been careful not to break the plastic jars. He can tell by feel how much force is required, just like he could as an ordinary man, so calibrating his strength is not too much of a problem. The main difference is that the threshold for force is lower, making the plastic feel like it’s paper mâché. 

Satisfied that he’s clean, he picks up one of the clear sample jars and unscrews the cap. He hasn’t urinated since he woke up, so it shouldn’t be too difficult to summon the urge. 

“Here goes nothing,” he says, standing with his feet shoulder width apart and positioning the jar in front of him. 

He tries to imagine what urinating ought to feel like, the release of pressure, and this seems to do the trick. The thing between his legs unsheathes itself, pissing on the tiles, and he grabs it, directing the stream into the cup. The urine itself appears comfortingly normal, even if the thing it’s coming out of is anything but.  

“One down,” he says, screwing the cap back on and setting the full jar on the seat of the chair.

Bracing one of his hands against the tile wall in front of him, he takes a deep breath and reaches for his crotch with the other. The thing curls around his fingers, trying to slip itself back inside, and he gently pries it away from the opening. Laying his forehead against the wet tile, he tries to relax and think about sex as it grows less flat and more cylindrical in his hand. It’s slippery to the touch, coated in a thin, clear mucus that rinses away in the shower. It feels almost painfully sensitive, and not in a very promising way, but he closes his eyes and keeps trying. 

Relaxation is more or less impossible under these conditions, but it doesn’t really seem to matter. The thing swells in his hand anyway, and when he dares to peek, he can see that the skin has stretched, exposing more of the silver sphere, which seems to rotate independently like the tip of a ballpoint pen. He can’t figure out where the urethra is supposed to be, but otherwise, it’s starting to seem a little friendlier as he handles it. A jolt passes through him and he leans more heavily against the slippery wall. Images of sex flash through his mind, too fleeting to identify, almost the mere artistic suggestion of bodies and poses.

Curious, he reaches down with his other hand to feel the lubricated opening. He manages to slip a finger inside, but it feels unnatural and uncomfortable, the muscles clamping around it in protest. Evidence in favor of Scully’s hypothesis. 

Letting go with both hands, he stands up straight and looks down at his erection. It doesn’t seem to flag at all when he stops touching it, and despite his decidedly unsexy mood. He waits, letting the water wash over him, but the thing is insistent. Once summoned, it doesn’t seem to have any intention of going away on its own. 

He grabs the other sample jar and unscrews the lid.

“You’re not the weirdest thing I’ve ever seen,” he mutters defiantly, taking said thing in hand.

Stroking the underside produces more of those metallic jolts to his system in increasing succession. Sensing the end is near, he holds the cup in position and leans against the wall again. There’s a flash of white light in his mind, and a feeling not dissimilar to that of missing time. He pushes off the wall, disoriented and unsure if he even hit the intended target.

When he opens his eyes, he almost drops the cup. The ejaculate he managed to catch with it has the exact color and consistency of mercury. What didn’t make it into the cup is traveling in beads towards the drain in the floor, being carried along by, but never mixing with, the water.

With mechanical detachment, he screws the cap back on the sample jar and turns off the showerhead. 

“Well, that’s going in the field notes,” he says. 

He grabs a towel from the rack on the opposite side of the room and dries himself off, folding it around his hips before approaching the sink. Wiping the fog from the mirror with the side of his fist, he uses the disposable safety razor on the sink counter to remove his pubescent-looking beard. 

All showered and shaven, he takes a step back from the mirror to reevaluate his appearance. It’s definitely an improvement. He still looks a little undercooked, but he figures it’s nothing getting some sun won’t fix. 

Dropping the towel, he grabs the folded bundle of clothes Scully gave him and puts them on. It’s a pair of gray sweatpants, a gray tank top, and a navy blue pullover like the one she has, all culled from the NIH gift shop on the ground floor. Once dressed, he is more or less indistinguishable from a normal man— a realization that causes a strange pang of sadness. 

Under different circumstances, it might have been thrilling to join the ranks of eldritch creatures lurking just below the surface of ordinary reality. There was always the half-conscious, childish hope that some day some Dracula or other might turn around and say good job Fox, you found us, and induct him into their secret world. But the secret world has become the ordinary world, and all the ordinary things they once took for granted are now sinking into the darkness.      

Scully figures they have about twenty-four hours of electricity and water left, so she runs whatever lab tests she can that evening and leaves for the morning what must be left for the morning. They eat granola bars, and goldfish crackers, and those weirdly shelf-stable pudding cups, avoiding the more odious hospital foods that need to be heated up in a microwave, and then brush their teeth with allegedly bubblegum flavored toothpaste. The notebook goes in a nylon backpack Scully took from the gift shop, along with a box of blue ink pens and a ring of elastics for her hair. They talk elliptically about leaving for Fort Bragg and what they’re going to bring with them.

Mulder lies on his side in the hospital bed where Scully has been sleeping, running his tongue over the backs of his teeth in search of a chip that used to be there when she finally decides to turn in. Her hair is down, still loosely imitating the shape of the ponytail it’s been in all day. The overhead lights are off, but there are enough ambient monitors and emergency lights to illuminate her tired expression. 

“Well, the good news is, it’s not mercury,” she says, sitting down on the edge of the bed. “The bad news is, I have have idea what else it could be.”

Mulder stares up at her, tallying up the faint freckles he never knew existed. “You look so different,” he murmurs. 

“I look different?” She raises an eyebrow. 

He rolls away from her onto his back, giving her the space to swing her legs onto the bed. She sits up, propping a pillow behind her, and looks down at him, her pupils swelling in the dark.

Mulder is the first to break eye contact. Even the simple grid pattern of tiles on the ceiling is dense with detail, imperfections and artifacts of reflected light. The world is playing at a higher frame rate. It’s like being on a drug trip he knows he’ll never come down from. 

“D’you think I can still get into Catholic Heaven?” He scrunches one eye shut. 

“That depends,” she says. “Have you been baptized?” 

“Wouldn’t I need a do-over anyway?” He nods down at himself. 

“Not necessarily,” she says. “Strictly speaking it’s the soul that gets baptized, not the body.”

He flexes his toes, watching the lines of his body shift as he breathes. The gray markings are more aware of his clothes than the rest of his skin, not in an unpleasant way, but in a way that makes it hard for him to forget about them.  

“You really think I’m him?” he asks her.

Scully sighs through her nose. “I’m looking right at you,” she says, waiting for him to meet her gaze again before continuing. “And I don’t have a single doubt in my mind that it’s you.” 

He folds his hands over his belly. “Me, as in… my soul?” he asks. 

She purses her lips. “You know,” she says, “René Descartes thought the soul resided in the pineal gland. Maybe it’s corpuscular.” She tilts her head to one side, then the other, pretending to weigh the possibility. “Either way, I’m convinced that your soul is in here now.” She touches his chest. 

The spread of her fingers tenses something in his abdomen, but he can’t muster the initiative to act on it. He’s seen the supersoldiers rip doors from cars and heads from bodies with their bare hands. The pressure in his mind makes him still.

“But how do you know?” he asks. 

Her hand withdraws, letting him breathe normally again. 

“Well, as a Catholic,” she muses, “I’m supposed to believe that life begins at conception. But as a scientist, I know that life began billions of years ago with abiogenesis.” 

She crosses her legs at the ankles. They reach a little more than halfway to the end of the large hospital bed. 

“You were once a part of your mother’s body,” she says, “and there was no single moment when you ceased to be a part of her and became a separate organism. In some sense, you never did. There’s no platonic distinction between species, or even between individual organisms. You could say that the history of evolution is the biography of one giant pulsating organism, stretched across billions of years.” 

“So, what?” Mulder asks. “So biological classification is arbitrary, so therefore I’m Fox Mulder if we say I am? That’s not a very satisfying answer.” 

“Not at all,” says Scully. “The categories are invented, but they’re not arbitrary. They’re invented by human scientists, from a human perspective, to be useful to humans. Distinguishing you and your mother as separate organisms at some point makes sense, because we experience the world as individuals. We break things up into human-sized units that make the world legible to our human senses. We all do this spontaneously. Scientists are just trying to do this in a more deliberate and disciplined way.” Her gaze lifts. “And scientists from another species, from another part of the universe, would probably divide reality up very differently.”    

Mulder’s tongue returns to the smooth edge of that incisor where habit expects to find a chip in the enamel. “So as a human scientist,” he says, “you’re saying it makes sense to consider me Fox Mulder, because it’s useful to you.” He smiles up at her. “Isn’t that called motivated reasoning? Wouldn’t it make just as much sense to say that I’m some sort of parasite, or even the shared offspring of Fox Mulder and another creature that reproduces parasitically? Shouldn’t your classification schema try to capture the fact that I have a different body?”

“I don’t think it’s necessarily the case that you have a different body,” she says. “I think it would be more accurate to say that your body has undergone a radical metamorphosis, which is nonetheless part of the lifespan of the same organism. The continuity between you and Fox Mulder is greater than that between the caterpillar and the butterfly, which we consider a single organism. You have his face, his voice, his memories, and probably all his DNA. It’s a bit like wondering if we’re the same person as an adult that we were as an infant. On the one hand, we change so fundamentally; But on the other hand, of course we’re the same person. Change is in our nature.” 

She touches his hair, and he feels her will guiding his head onto her thigh. Bowing to gaze at him upside down, she cradles his head and strokes the sides of his jaw with her thumbs. His joints feel heated and loose, but he is unable to look away.   

“You feel like you’re him, because you are him,” she says. “In every way that could practically matter from a human perspective. From my perspective.”  

“Alright, you’ve convinced me,” he says.  

She kisses him upside down and he shivers at the feeling of her breath against his face. Somehow the baggy NIH sweatshirts they’re both wearing are the sexiest thing he’s ever seen.

“It’s you.” He inhales.

“Hm?” She hasn’t let go of his face.

“It’s you in my head,” he clarifies, “instead of them.”

“What do you mean?” she asks.

They’re speaking very closely, almost whispering. 

He shifts in place on his back, but he still can’t look away from her. There are no voices, no commands, just this wordless pressure. She doesn’t even realize she’s controlling him. It’s so subtle and painless that he didn’t realize it either at first. 

“Our parents,” he says, gaining certainty as he distills his various hunches into a narrative he can recite aloud. “Members of the shadow government.” 

He sits up, his sudden enthusiasm breaking the spell, and twists around on the bed to face her. 

“They allowed us to be genetically modified,” he says, “so that we would survive colonization and serve the aliens as a slave class. That’s what Agent Spender was trying to tell us.” 

Only now does Spender’s death register to him as the loss of a brother he never got to know. It’s hard to fathom, but Spender was as much his own blood as Samantha, with whom he shared the same mother, but not the same father. Mulder can only marvel at the tangled lives of these people, their parents; They have for their patrimony the adrenochrome-fueled schemes of these decadent spooks.

“They did this to ensure the survival of their own offspring,” he says. “Their own genetic legacy on this planet. Even as the rest of humanity was fated to die. Marking their doors with the blood of the lamb so that the plague would pass over their houses. That’s all this was ever about.”

A single vertical worry line cleaves Scully’s brow. “It does make sense,” she allows. “The love of one’s own children, and the need to ensure their survival, is the most powerful evolutionary drive there is.”

The moons of his fingernails used to be less pronounced, more hidden under the cuticles, he could swear. He’s sitting cross-legged, hands open in his lap, wondering how this omen might interact with the fortune lines in his palms. 

“But it isn’t love, what they did to us, Scully,” he says. “They doomed their own children and grandchildren to a fate worse than death.” He slopes towards her. “Maybe they didn’t realize that,” he says. “Or maybe they just didn’t want to realize it.”

The betrayal shakes him in a way he thought he could no longer be shaken. When she wraps her arms around him, he crumples. Her warm breath rustles the collar of his sweatshirt as she props her chin on the top of his head.  

“You saved me from them,” he says into her shoulder. “My entire life has been planned out for me by shadowy forces I still don’t fully understand. And the only thing that’s ever interrupted their plans, the only thing that’s led me away from the invisible path I didn’t even realize I was walking, has been you.” 

He can feel her swallowing, the underside of her jaw flexing against his scalp. 

“I was always going to end up like this,” he says. “I was pre-programed. My whole life, I’ve been a fucking caterpillar.” 

“How could I have saved you?” she murmurs. “I had no idea what I was doing. I felt so useless.”

With great difficulty, he lifts his head from nuzzling the side of her neck.

“You interrupted my programming,” he says. “You stopped me from forming the psychic link they would have used to control me.” 

“You think the anesthesia did that?” she asks. 

“Exactly,” he says. “My psionic range was limited because my consciousness was submerged throughout the process.” 

“And you’re saying this psychic link was established… with me, instead?” she sighs. She doesn’t even have it in her to dispute the phrase ‘psionic range.’

“Yes,” he says gravely. 

“What, because I was closest?” She leans away from him on her hands. “That seems like a pretty imprecise mechanism.”

“Well, were you focusing on me?” Mulder asks. “Could you have been attempting to reach me on the psychic plane?”

Scully pauses, her lips parting softly, and lies back against the pillow behind her. “I was praying for you,” she says.

He crawls across the mattress towards her, helpless to refuse the pressure now, and lays his head against her chest. The gray markings spark with sensation under his clothes, drawing him tightly against her. She feels so soft in his arms, but he is incapable of harming her with his new strength. A peculiar gravity drags him down until his cheek is pressed against her stomach.

“I love you,” he blurts. 

Her fingers cease stroking the nape of his neck. 

“I’ve said that before, haven’t I?” he asks. “I, I must have, at some point.”

“I don’t know,” she says. “A lot has happened. But I think I’d remember.”

“Well, there you go.” He fidgets. “It’s said.”

Laying the pillow horizontally behind her, she nudges him over and slides her way down so that they can lie on their sides facing each other. Her arm rests in the bow of his waist. 

“Can you read my mind?” she asks him. Closing her eyes, she brings their foreheads together, as if to transmit a psychic message. 

“Not really,” he breathes. “Maybe a little. Not full sentences or anything.”

Her eyelashes flutter against his brow bone. 

“Well, I love you, too,” she breathes. “Just so it’s said.”

Chapter Text

Mulder wakes up to fists pummeling his back. He is holding Scully against him, her soft hair screened across his face. They are both fully clothed, their chests pressed together through matching NIH sweatshirts, his arms around her waist and his leg hooking her legs.

She hits him again as he stirs from his sleep. 

“Mmm?” His nose draws Zs on the side of her neck. The scent of her skin sweetens the roof of his mouth and he shifts against her, craving the gentle friction. 

“Mulder, I need to pee,” she says. “Let me go.”

He opens his eyes, blinking against the strange colors, to find her struggling in his arms. The hairs catch in his mouth.

“Sorry.” He releases her, becoming aware of himself. “Are you alright?”

Scully stands and patters across the floor in her socks. “I’m fine,” she says. Her face is glossed with sebum, her eyelids puffy from sleep. 

“Yesterday,” he groans, rolling onto his back. “All of that… really happened.” 

“Yes it did,” she confirms from beyond the doorway.

Mulder stretches out like a snow angel and stares up at the ceiling, listening through the wall to the sounds of Scully’s footsteps and running water. His body feels enchanted, dipped in gold. Yesterday’s soreness has healed, leaving him flushed with this pyrexic ecstasy of sheer power.

He breathes through his nose, afraid to move, hardly trusting his buzzing limbs. The gray stripes on his body are throbbing in time with his heartbeat beneath his bedwarm clothes. Now that he’s aware of its existence, he can feel (his penis?) his penis curled snugly inside him, sliding around a little in its scabbard as he sits up and plants his feet flat on the floor. 

While Scully brushes her teeth in the other room, he fights to compose himself, rhythmically kneading the tops of his thighs. The taste of iron is gone, leaving his mouth neutral, but the salivary glands under his tongue ache. All of his senses are vibrating with hunger.

“‘Morning.” Scully enters the room, wearing a ponytail and a look of bemusement. 

Mulder runs a hand over the top of his head, trying to discipline his spiky hair.

“I guess you’re not such a light sleeper anymore, Mister Three A.M. Stakeout.” She approaches the edge of the bed. “Do you know how many times I had to hit you—?”

Without meaning to, he pulls her against him, his arms wrapping around her back and his thighs bracketing her legs. The press of her body floods his brain with unknown chemicals as he struggles to keep up with what his limbs are doing. He can smell the fake bubblegum on her breath. 

“Mulder.” He can hear her rolling her eyes. “Should I put something in my notes about excessive clinginess?” 

His cheek is pressed over her heart, her pulse resonating in his temporal bone. The markings on his hips and clavicles form a kind of erogenous rectangle that draws his whole torso against her, but there’s no real sense of sexual urgency. Whatever concupiscent dæmon has taken hold of him, it seems content to sit there on the edge of the mattress, mindlessly nuzzling her like a cat.  

“Mulder, let me go,” she says.

“Can’t,” he grits. 

She cups the back of his head. “You can’t?” she asks, her tone changing to one of concern. 

“Tell me to stop,” he says.

“I just did,” she points out. 

She ruffles his hair, which isn’t helping.

“It’s not the words.” He squeezes his eyes shut, trying to think through the sensations. “It’s the intention behind them. You have to mean it.”

Without even looking up, he can sense her rapid blinks and incredulous eyebrows. “You mean, you want me to use my ‘psychic powers’ on you?” she asks. 

“No.” With great effort, he extracts himself, shuffling backwards onto the bed. “You don’t have psychic powers. I have psychic powers,” he huffs, sitting on his hands. “Except it’s more like a… psychic leash.” 

Scully cups her elbows, obviously uncomfortable with this whole line of reasoning. “What are you saying?” she asks.  

Mulder assumes an imperfect lotus position and takes deep breaths, managing to regain some control over his body. The textured brush of loose, all-cotton clothes against his skin is pleasant and grounding. Something tells him his new body would not be inclined to behave itself in a suit. 

“Scully,” he says, “this is for your protection.” 

She casts her gaze around in helpless search of an end to this whole embarrassing discussion. “Okay?” she says. 

Leaning forward on his elbows, Mulder massages the sides of his head. “As terrifying and, frankly, humiliating as it is being made to obey anyone— And I can’t believe I’m saying this—” He pauses, working to normalize his heart rate. “I’m almost grateful for it, because the thought of hurting you is so much worse.”

“Mulder.” She lets go of her elbows and turns open her hands. “I have no interest in making you ‘obey me.’ Even if that ability might come in handy sometimes,” she snorts. 

“Listen,” he says, growing emphatic. “If I lose control, if somehow I become a threat to you… I need you to understand that you have the power to defend yourself against me. All it will take is a little bit of psychic technique. Which I know you can learn, if you would just take it seriously for two seconds.”

Dropping all irony, she steps forward and hugs him again, this time of her own volution. “Mulder,” she says next to his ear. “I take what is happening to you very seriously.”

The vellus hairs on the side of his neck tickle. His skin is smooth and strange now, but not hairless as he believes the Grays to be. He has not been infused with their cold humors. Far from sapping him of his mammalian urges— such as they were— his hybridization only seems to have altered and intensified them. 

“I know the changes you’re experiencing are probably pretty traumatic and overwhelming,” says Scully. “But I also know you’re not going to hurt me.” 

“I was squeezing you too hard,” he mutters into her inebriating nearness. 

“You did have me trapped,” she concedes. “But you weren’t squeezing hard enough to hurt me. And you let me go as soon as you realized it.” 

“But what if I hadn’t realized it?” he asks. “What if I had hurt you in my sleep?” The image of waking up sticky with blood and holding her juiced corpse flashes in front of his mind. 

“That’s not going to happen,” she says.

She rubs his back, the gray stripe along the edge of his scapula throbbing under her palm to deliver some sort of drowsy hormone infusion. He droops against her, immediately feeling its effects. His breathing slows, his craniosacral outflow switching from feed-and-breed to rest-and-digest.

“How do you know?” he asks her. “How can you know that?”

Scully steps back, resting her hands on his shoulders. She still looks so incongruously girlish with a high ponytail and no makeup on. She has oily skin, which makes her appear younger than she is, and Mulder has always known her to be religious in the application of SPF. For health reasons, to be sure, though no one on Earth could possibly begrudge her just a little bit of vanity. 

“Your body knows how strong it is,” she says, squeezing his shoulders. “It knows how to interact with its environment. There’s no functioning vertebrate that can’t regulate itself kinesthetically. It wouldn’t make any sense.” 

The gentle press of her mind lifts his chin and he gazes up at her, grateful for the calm she is imposing on his nervous system, even as she continues to evade the matter of her psychic influence over him. 

“They don’t control you,” she says. “Right?” Her brow twitches with some obscure microexpression. “It’s all you in there. They can’t make you hurt me.”

Mulder hesitates before nodding in agreement. 

“Then you won’t hurt me,” says Scully. “It’s that simple.” 

He accepts her hand and stands up from the bed, observing the slippery, sinuous action of his limbs, the way his core muscles balance him, the flighty lightness of the feet beneath his not insubstantial frame. They— as in ‘They,’ with a capital T —may have lost control of him, but he is still what they made him. He is still their guinea pig, having escaped from his cage, but not from the consequences of whatever they pumped him full of. It remains to be seen what will be his condition in the wild.

After a breakfast of more granola bars and corn syrup-based fruit snacks, they head down to the radiology department so that Scully can present her findings. A half empty styrofoam coffee cup dangles from her hand as she pours over her notebook with a hip against the counter, Mulder’s radiographs arrayed on the lightbox behind her. The results of the blood panel lie curled on ribbons of receipt paper, the glass slides she spent half the night scrying through a microscope discarded, out of habit, in a biohazard bin.

Mulder boosts himself onto the counter across from her, the lip of his own coffee pinched in his mouth. The styrofoam is so flimsy that it actually is difficult for him to handle, so they’ve found him a stainless steel thermos in someone’s desk drawer.

“Give it to me straight, Doc,” he says, grabbing his coffee and letting his legs dangle. 

Wearing sweatpants without underwear might have been awkward in the past, but the lack of any pendulous encumbrances makes it more comfortable. Even as he can see the advantages of the new arrangement, the absence between his thighs provokes feelings of anxiety and loss.

“Well, first of all—” says Scully, turning from her notes. “Stipulated that everything I’m about to tell you is preliminary and subject to change pending new evidence— I am now confident in pronouncing you unambiguously male.”

Mulder sips his coffee, offering nothing beyond an interested ‘hmm.’ 

“I will say,” Scully scrunches one eye, “you’ve been taking this remarkably well. I know the male castration anxiety can be an extremely powerful—”

“Yes, yes it can,” Mulder cuts her off.

Schooling her expression, Scully points up at the lightbox. “Anyway, if you look here,” she says, indicating two masses within the pelvic cavity, “you can see the internal testes.”

Mulder adjusts his position on the edge of the counter, hyperaware of the slippery coil moving inside him as he does so. The image provokes a phantom itch as he absorbs the knowledge that his testicles are buried, like ovaries, beyond his ability to ever scratch them again. 

“Bloodwork shows they’re producing testosterone,” Scully continues, “or a steroid very similar to testosterone, as well as other steroid hormones I don’t recognize. Your semen sample contains what appear to be ordinary human sperm, but I don’t have the means to determine what kind of DNA they’re carrying. If, as you’ve hypothesized, your DNA was hybridized in utero, then your genotype is probably the same as it’s been your entire life; It’s only your phenotype that’s changed, in response to the activation of genes that were previously switched off.”  

“Well, that’s a relief.” Mulder sips, tucking the yoke of his forefinger and thumb into the inside of his elbow. Even the bracing bitterness of institutional coffee, a fixture of his previous life, is different now. “Nothing major, just my phenotype.” 

Scully turns a page in her notes. “If I'm right,” she continues, “you are reproductively compatible with both human and hybrid women. Despite the changes in morphology, your new anatomy serves the same function. It’s just much more efficient.”

Mulder pretends to do a spit take. “Scully!” He looks her up and down. “Are you saying you like it better this way? I didn’t know you were so freaky.” He shakes his head in mock opprobrium. “A nice Catholic girl like you?” 

She holds the notebook in front of her and extends a single thespian finger, as if she’s reading a stage direction that says ‘pause for Mulder’s stupid sex jokes.’ 

“It corrects the main weakness of the human male reproductive system,” she says, lowering the notebook. “Vulnerable external genitalia.”

“‘Corrects?’” Mulder brings a hand to his heart. “Ouch.” 

“The fact is,” Scully says, crossing her ankles as she leans against the counter, “human reproduction is not terribly efficient. If you’ve ever seen a house pet or a farm animal give birth, you know it’s a lot easier for quadrupeds than it is for us. In fact, human beings have among the most painful and dangerous labors of any mammal. Do you know why that is?”

“Oh, I know this one.” He snaps his fingers. “God is punishing womankind because Eve ate from the Tree of Knowledge.”

“Right.” She gives a slow, sarcastic blink. “Also, there’s a logistical conflict between our bipedalism and our large crania.” 

She makes a circle with her hands. “Human infants have big heads.” She makes a much smaller circle with her forefinger and thumb. “Human women have tiny birth canals, so that we can walk upright without our organs falling out. As for the male...” She pulls a comic grimace. “His organs practically are falling out. Human sperm are incredibly fragile, unable to withstand internal body temperature. And so the gonads dangle outside his body, constantly vulnerable to attack because of his upright posture. Evolution is full of such jerry-rigged compromises.”

Mulder taps the thermos against his lips, putting all of this together. “I guess that’s where the not-really mercury comes in?” he asks.

“Exactly,” says Scully. “Your seminal fluid protects the sperm inside you from overheating, so that the whole system can be internalized. At the risk of setting you up for a punchline, it’s actually a really elegant solution.”

He rolls the thermos against his cheek and studies the x-rays above her, reconciling himself to his own innards. The steel is warm and soothing on his face. At first glance, the shapes appear human, but the contours, the proportions are all wrong. His skeleton looks unnaturally opaque and crisp, like part of a Halloween display. It’s like recognizing the continents on an antique map projection, only to realize that’s not how the coast of Africa parallels the coast of South America and there’s no way that little shark fin is supposed to be the Indian Subcontinent. 

“Where are my kidneys?” he asks her.

“Oh.” She tucks some stray hairs behind her ears. “I was just getting to that: You’re missing a whole bunch of organs.”

He swallows, his right hand flying to the hollow beneath his sternum where the two halves of his ribcage end. 

“Kidneys, pancreas, gallbladder, spleen, thyroid, lymph nodes,” she lists. “Appendix, of course.”

“Oh yeah, sure, of course.” He nods. “But… Why?”

“Like I said,” Scully enthuses, “you’re more efficient. A lot of functions are probably consolidated into this, sort of, super liver you’ve got going on here.” 

The pen she’s using as a lecture pointer hovers over the mass that dominates the area between his stomach and intestines. 

“I don’t have access to the kind of imaging I’d need to know more,” she says, “and I think we’re running out of time for tissue biopsies, so for now all I have are educated guesses.”

He lets his gaze unfocus, studying the grayscale shapes for hidden patterns like a magic eye poster. There’s a sinking feeling in his stomach, which the images confirm he still has, at least. 

“Why does my skeleton look like that?” he asks. 

“Your bones appear to be extremely dense,” she says. “I’m at a loss to explain the mechanics behind your dramatically increased strength, but you obviously need a stronger skeleton to support it.”

“When you shot Spender,” he offers, “I saw a bit of his vertebra, and it looked like it was made of metal.” 

Uncapping the pen with her teeth, she scratches something into the notebook. 

“A metal skeleton?” she narrates giddily. “It’s not completely without precedent. Some scorpions and crabs incorporate biometals into their shells. I assume the bones are still highly vascular, they can’t be solid metal. Even so, a fully metallic skeleton would be extraordinary.” 

“Like Wolverine,” says Mulder.

“Am I supposed to know what that is?” Scully snorts without turning around.

“Not really.” He sets down the thermos and leans back, planting his hands behind him on the counter. “He’s a… Marvel comic book character from the early seventies.”

“I see,” she mumbles over the scrape of her pen. “I was more of a Judy Blume kid myself.”

While she takes notes, Mulder picks at his cuticles, drawing a pinprick of blood from the side of his finger. When he licks it clean, it tastes like salt. 

“So, what’s the prognosis?” he asks her.

“Well…” Scully tucks the pen behind her ear. “Your temperature is 101° Fahrenheit, your white blood cell count is over 16,000/μL, your electrolyte balance is completely insane, and your semen looks like liquid metal. But I figure all of that is probably normal for you now.”

“Because I’m ‘more efficient’?” He leans forward, draping his forearms over his thighs.

She takes a step back from the lightbox and makes a rainbow gesture, invoking the radiographs as a whole. 

“What you’re looking at here,” she tells him, “is the product not of natural selection, but of intelligent design. It’s the human body plan, streamlined and augmented to maximize for survival and reproductive success. A human body without the trade-offs, the redundancies, the vestiges of our messy evolutionary heritage.” When she turns back around, she is wearing a girlish grin. 

“Don’t look at me like that,” he says. “I can feel you autopsying me with your eyes.”

Scully laughs and comes closer. “Don’t worry.” She gives him a coffee flavored kiss and thumbs the corner of his mouth. “You’re far more valuable to science alive.” 

Their noses brush. Her hands find his sides and Mulder presses his tongue to the roof of his mouth. 

Being touched is so different now. The stroking of his ribs is so alarmingly pleasurable that he has to clamp down on vocalization. This is not pleasure as he knew it, this loosening in his ligaments, this vivid purring fever. He’s used to compartmentalizing bodily sensations, but these new ones are making outrageous demands on his attention. 

“Admit it,” he murmurs. “You like me better this way, don’t you?”

Scully’s eyelashes flicker, her warm palms traveling up his chest. “Honestly?” she asks, her flirtatious mood attenuating. Her voice is soft. “After all these years of watching you throw your very mortal body into the gears of their machine?” She smooths down the NIH logo on the front of his sweatshirt, her features pink and crimped. “It’s a relief to think that, in here, you might be somewhat insulated from harm.”

Mulder inhales, feeling his chest rise and fall under her hands. “I guess I’ll just have to work even harder to imperil myself,” he says.

Scully chuckles sadly. “That you will.”

He fidgets, trying to escape the afterfeel of her hands on his body as she walks back over to the lightbox. Washboarding his ribs with his knuckles helps to quell his hungry skin.

“Hey, you didn’t happen to take any notes on my psychic abilities, did you?” He spills from the edge of the counter and appears at her elbow in a couple of fluid strides. 

Scully doesn’t dignify this by looking up from her notes. “I’ll be sure to let you know if they appear on a CT scan,” she says.

“Lemme see.” He steals the notebook out from under her hands.

“Come on.” She flails at him. “Stop that.”

“Scully, your handwriting has gotten even worse.” He holds the notebook open above his head, but she will not give him the satisfaction of making her jump for it.

“Give it back.” She taps the lab counter. 

Twisting his arm behind him to keep it out of her grasp, he looms almost close enough to kiss her. “Make me.”

“Not this again,” she sighs.

“You’re not doing it right,” he teases. “You have to exert your will over me.”

“Is this going to end up being a weird sex thing with you?” she asks, affecting annoyance but not bothering to put any distance between their faces.

“Only if you want it to,” he murmurs. 

The hard pale rectangle of the lightbox is reflected in her pupils. 

“What am I supposed to do?” she asks. “Think at you like Jean Grey?”

“I knew it!” Mulder drops his guard long enough for her to snatch the notebook back. “I knew you knew what the X-Men were.”

Scully shrugs and smirks.

The power goes out that afternoon and they fill two backpacks with water bottles, butane lighters, antibiotic ointment, blue ink pens, and whatever else might prove useful from the NIH gift shop. They sync a pair of analog watches from the glass case beneath the counter and, sensing the return of his oral fixation, Mulder slips a sleeve of Lifesavers from the box next to the register into his pocket. Dr. Hathale’s enigmatic letter is tucked between the pages of Scully’s field notes in the hopes that it may yet yield clues. 

Outside, in coolish and cloudless weather, they find the car where Spender left it, upside down with four doors open like a struggling turtle. Holstering their service weapons, they raid the glove compartment for whatever’s left of the ammunition and find the silver Smith and Wesson backup pistols in the latchbox under the driver's seat. They proceed on foot down Old Georgetown Road, a thoroughfare once notable for its cyclist fatalities, but now empty of traffic. There are over three hundred miles between here and Fort Bragg, North Carolina. 

“We’ve gotta steal one of those radar guns off a dead traffic cop so you can clock me.” Mulder returns to Scully’s side after running ahead, out of breath and smelling of burnt plastic from destroying the polyurethane treads on his shoes. 

“Oh, you’re gonna be unbearable, aren’t you?” Scully withers. 

He jogs beside her, flushed and grinning. Exertion only feeds the permanent body high that is now his normal condition. He can’t maintain top speed for very long, but in short bursts, it’s like being able to fly.

“Want me to give you a piggyback ride?” he pants. 

“I think I’ll pass.” She rolls up her sleeves and adjusts the straps on her backpack. “I’m not sure I can trust you not to drop me.”

He still hasn’t gotten over how much more like Scully she looks, now that his eyes can see her in more detail. Her translucent body hair glows under natural light, outlining her exposed forearms in gold. 

“Scully,” he says sincerely, “I would never drop you.”

“Oh, I’m not saying it would be intentional,” she clarifies. 

He jogs backwards in front of her, working to dispel some of this canine energy. At her pace, it’s about a forty minute hike from the NIH Clinical Center to Bethesda Row. 

“You having fun?” She asks, screwing open one of the water bottles. 

“Is that allowed?” he teases.

Eventually, though, he falls into step beside her, slowing down to reacquaint himself with an illuminated world. The asphalt glitters with aggregate minerals that catch the pale sun. The water bottle in Scully’s hand throws parhelion rainbows, bending the white light like a prism, the colors dancing across her face as she tilts her head back to drink.

They used to take this route on the way to visit Scully’s mother in Annapolis. They’ve stopped at this exit; They’ve eaten those funnel cakes; Powdered sugar has clung to the tip of Scully’s nose in that parking lot.

So far, they’ve avoided talking about Scully’s family, and having no one else left in the world himself, Mulder is not going to be the one to bring it up. Belatedly, he wonders if his game of guess the survivors was in more than just poor taste.  

Their shadows stretch into spindly monsters as they walk in silence. 

Scully scans the horizon, her cool and searching gaze revealing nothing. Hard talk is in order, but neither of them wants to start it. The name of their son, on the lips of a dead man, is sending them south, without any plans or even leads. She is the one, Mulder thinks peevishly, who should be pointing this out. 

Then again, she knows that history is over. The future has been canceled. There is no hoped-for outcome. Maybe there’s simply nothing to say.

“What are you thinking about?” she asks him after a while. 

“Just bumming myself out with all the baseball records I’d shatter if baseball still existed,” he says.

She doesn’t smile at this or even roll her eyes. Just hours ago, she kissed him and it felt like reason enough to keep living. With the road under their feet, things feel different.

“What are we going to do?” she asks. And still, she doesn’t look at him. 

He swings his arms and the roll of Lifesavers bounces against his thigh. The distractions of his body fill the silence. If he were the real Fox Mulder, he’d have a noble speech for her right now.  

“Maybe we can survive,” he says instead. “Maybe that’s enough.”

“I don’t think that could ever be enough for you,” she says.

It’s kind of her, he thinks, to try and prop up his collapsing self-mythology at this point. Or maybe she doesn’t mean it in that way at all. Scully is just, rather than kind.

“I don’t know.” He lets the backs of their knuckles brush. “It could grow on me.”

“Then we stay on the move while we can move, and we rest only when we need to rest,” limns Scully in the cadences of Genesis.

There was a real romance to the asceticism of the road, to the private ecolect of shared traumas, to being in the world but not of the world. But it’s a lot easier to be heroic and serious and beautiful and doomed when you have an FBI expense account, and a cell phone that works, and an apartment with running water.  

“You aren’t even supposed to be here, remember?” he says. “I was supposed to become their slave, and I was supposed to kill you. Every minute you survive, you’re thwarting their plans.”

Her profile scrunches. The walk has warmed her cheeks, sweat darkening the roots of her hair. 

It’s a neat trick, making her and the cause sound like the same thing; One he’s pulled on himself many times in the past, to great effect.

“Have I ever told you my D. B. Cooper theory?” Mulder asks.

When they reach Bethesda Row around six p.m., according to their watches, there’s a man hanging by the neck from the arch above the entrance. He’s probably been dangling there for several days, judging from the level of putrefaction and the fact that birds have already eaten his eyes.

“You have.” The red Lifesaver Scully is sucking on audibly clicks against her teeth. “More than once.”

Mulder peels back the paper and foil in a careful spiral, revealing a white pineapple ring. “I really used up all my best material on you way too early,” he laments. 

There’s a Honda dealership not far from the shopping center, but they can’t agree on what direction it’s in. If they could just get their hands on a car, they could be at Fort Bragg before midnight. They still haven’t discussed how they’re going to break into one of the largest military installations in the world, but it’s easier to focus on one problem at a time.

With the soles of his old sneakers coming apart from the uppers, Mulder ducks into the first shoe store they come across and kicks them off in the middle of the floor. Scully sits down on one of the fitting benches, watching him browse the aisles, the pineapple Lifesaver dissolving on his tongue, until he comes back over to her with a box. 

“I’ve always wanted some Jordan Retro 6s,” he tells her, lifting the pair out of the box by the insoles and tilting them for her to admire. He reads the label. “Gatorade Green.” 

Scully gives him a tolerant look. “Live your dream,” she says.

He pulls them on by hooking his finger through the futuristic plastic spoilers on the backs and bends over to lace them up. “You know,” he says, taking the shoes for a spin, “if the FBI didn’t frown upon neon high tops, I might have worn these every single day.” Biting his lip at Scully, he pantomimes shooting hoops.

She threads her fingers under her chin and blinks up at him.

“There are some white laces in there, too,” he says, kicking the box.

The corners of her mouth turn down in mock deliberation. “I think you’ve gotta stick with the Gatorade Green,” she says. 

There are gunshots outside. Scully jumps up, drawing her Glock, and Mulder follows suit, aiming through the storefront glass at the street. About ninety seconds later, there are more shots fired. Falling into cautious step just behind her, Mulder searches for the source as they exit the store.

They don’t have to look very far. At the end of the block, a man is firing wildly at a moving target while two others lie dead at his feet, still clutching their guns despite missing their heads. Scully takes aim at him, but the very next second, it becomes clear he’s not the true threat. A fourth man, a kid really, grabs the gunman and tears his right arm from his body in a geyser of blood. The gunman screams, until the kid does the same thing with his head. 

Scully takes a step back as the killer turns to face them. He looks about twenty, and grungy, with his ankle boots and flannel-lined jean jacket. Even from hundreds of feet away, Mulder can see that his eyes are solid black.

“Your interference is not appreciated, Dana Scully,” the kid says.

He rushes them and they both empty their clips at him, getting in a couple of hits that stop him almost in mid air. Scully keeps squeezing after the clicks and Mulder scoops her up and runs as fast as he can to the end of the street. The only way out is through the mall. She slings her arms around his neck, her lower legs dangling from the bend of his elbow, and he does his best to shield her as he throws them both through the glass of the automatic doors. The shallow cuts begin to heal almost immediately, leaving a sweat of blood on top of his intact skin. 

“He’s—!” Scully yells, looking over Mulder’s shoulder behind them. 

Mulder runs down the broken escalator as the kid chases after them, trying to find the exit, until the kid leaps, catching them at the bottom and sending them all tumbling across the floor. Mulder is faster to regroup, putting himself between the kid and Scully. Without electricity, the inside of the mall is dark, but there’s enough ambient light from the windows above them. 

The kid rushes again like an animal, and Mulder floors him, pinning his wrists above his head. Behind them, Scully fumbles in her backpack for a fresh clip of ammo. Mulder looks into the expressionless face just long enough to wonder which spook’s son or grandson it belongs to, before the kid headbuts him, sending him reeling from the clash of metallic skulls. Wiping the blood from his eyes as it runs down his forehead, Mulder scrambles to his feet to intercept him again.

“Fuck!” Mulder yells as the kid bites into the meat of his exposed forearm. He is taller and stronger than his opponent, but he is at a serious disadvantage fighting under his own power. The kid doesn’t hesitate or react to pain, not even flinching as Mulder repeatedly punches him in the face. He is being puppeteered by an entity completely indifferent to his suffering, and is therefore completely relentless.

“Scully—!” Mulder calls, though he’s not sure what he expects her to do. She stands back, training her gun at them and looking for a kill shot, but their movements are too fast for her.

The kid headbuts Mulder a second time to drive him onto the escalator and grabs him by the face, slamming the back of his skull into the edge of one of the combed steel steps.

Mulder is distantly aware of Scully calling his name. The damaged flexors in his right forearm make it more difficult for him to throw off his assailant, and he can feel his brain rattling around as the back of his skull strikes the edge of the step again and again. Black spots threaten the corners of his vision. Blood runs up his nose and into his eyes and he can hear Scully screaming. He reaches blindly for the kid’s throat, catching on the collar of his jean jacket. 

“You won’t escape us, Dana Scully,” the voice is droning. “If you destroy this host, we’ll send another. We have many. You only have one. There’s no contest here.”

Scully shoots wildly, striking Mulder once in the shin and the kid several times in the back. Groping for the railing on top of the truss, hands slippery with blood, Mulder is able to throw him back to the bottom of the escalator and pull himself to his feet. The bullet glanced off his metallic tibia, leaving a flesh wound, but he can still sort of walk on it.

Stepping over the prone body, he grabs Scully and tries to run again, but the pain in his leg prevents him from getting very far. The kid slams into him from behind, causing him to drop her, and sending her gun spinning across the floor. 

They grapple again, reaching for each other’s throats, and Mulder flips the kid onto his back, kneeing his smooth crotch just long enough to feel stupid for forgetting why that isn’t effective. Metal fingers bruise his neck, but this time, he’s more prepared to make use of his superior size and leverage. He rolls his weight forward, feeling the trachea collapse under his hands with a wet pop. 

Frothing and wheezing on his back, the kid claws at Mulder’s face with his nails. His black eyes bulge like quivering pearls of tapioca. He’s afraid. 

Mulder freezes. A silent scream lashes across his mind, confirming what he already knew, and his grip fails. Someone’s son or grandson is still in there.

“Mulder!” Scully yells at him.

The trachea uncrushes itself and the kid sucks the air, already lunging upward again. 

Mulder watches himself grab his skull and brain him against the floor. With vicious force he wasn’t capable of two seconds ago, he hammers the kid’s head over and over again into the tile until the tile cracks. He feels his own hands cleaving open the base of the skull, a plate of metalicized bone falling away like a shard of eggshell to let the sticky albumen run out. Mulder’s fingers plunge into the wet brainpan, closing around the slippery stem and yanking it out as the body beneath him seizes and dies. 

The moment he’s in control of himself again, Mulder repels away from the corpse and staggers backwards onto his feet. He stands there shaking and drenched in blood until Scully enters his field of view, startling him into action. 

“Bathroom,” he says, pivoting towards the other side of the escalator.

Scully jogs after him, carrying both of their backpacks. “Mulder!” 

He shoulders the door open and waves his hands under the automatic sink, only to be reminded that there’s no running water and no electricity. The soap dispenser, at least, is analog. 

“Should I be worried about prions or anything?” he pants as Scully appears in the doorway. “I stuck my fingers in his brain.” 

“I don’t know.” She offers him a water bottle and he pours it over his soaped up hands. 

Unsatisfied, he grabs a bottle of bleach from the janitor’s cart and pours it over his hands instead, flinching at the burn. His knuckles are fully skinned, the exposed bone glinting in the half light.  

“Are you alright?” Scully asks him. 

“Yeah.” He nods, catching his breath.

“Are you sure?” Her reflection reaches for his in the mirror.

He backs himself against the wall perpendicular to the sink and stares straight ahead at nothing. The adrenaline ebbs away, unmasking the pain, and his legs slacken beneath him. 

Scully drops the backpacks. 

“You made me kill him,” he says.

“What?” She approaches him.

“I hesitated,” he explains, watching her in the mirror instead of looking at her directly. “And you forced me to do it.”

Her head kind of shifts on its axis without really shaking no. “I don’t—”

“You willed it, and I had to obey you,” he says.

“Mulder.” She opens her mouth. 

“It’s okay.” He gives the wall a few taps with the back of his head. “It was necessary. He would have killed you if I hadn’t stopped him.” 

“Mulder—” she says.

The floor of his mouth aches, saliva gushing under his tongue, and he vomits into the sink. Strange organs clinch and lurch inside him. A thread of acid dangles from his lips into the basin and he grips the counter, waiting for it to break. He vomits again. 

Scully crouches in front of him as he slumps back against the wall and sinks to the floor. Reaching into her backpack, she produces a keychain flashlight from the NIH gift shop and shines it into each of his eyes.

“Pupillary response is sluggish,” she says. “I think you’re in shock.” 

He turns over shaking hands, noticing his silver knuckles again. The dissociative vacuum collapses and the sensory world rushes back in. 

“I need, I need to get out,” he says, gripping the front of his sweatshirt. 

“Out of your clothes?” she asks. “Or this room?”

“This, this, this.” He claws at himself. “I need to get out of this thing.”

She touches his shoulder, depressing his nervous system until he stops hyperventilating. He feels his muscles twitching to obey her. Despite her lack of psychic experience, he just knew she’d be a natural at it. Hers is a clear and forceful mind. 

“Come on,” she says, dragging him up from the piss-tacky floor. “Let’s get you out of these clothes.”

Following her out of the bathroom and back up the broken escalator to another department of the mall, he lets her strip him, and lather him with shampoo, and pour gallon jugs of distilled water over his head until he seems clean. Checking the tags to make sure they’re all cotton, he selects some clothes off the rack and pulls them on, including socks and underwear this time. A little blood spatter is easily wiped from the genuine leather toe box of his new Jordans— yet another feature to recommend them.

When he returns to find Scully seated in a corduroy recliner in the furniture department, he just stands in front of her, waiting for new instructions. When she doesn’t give him any, he kneels at her feet and lays his head in her lap. 

“It’s okay.” She pets his hair. “You’re okay.”

There’s room enough for both of them in the recliner, so she pats the seat next to her and hugs him close. The wounds are already closing, but he’s still tired and sore. Her neck is warm against his cheek as she strokes her hand down his back, soothing the casing that houses his silver spine.  

“Do you like it when I touch you there?” she asks.

“Mm,” he affirms. 

She kisses his temple. “I assumed these glands on your body were part of the immune system, because of the white blood cells, but they could have multiple functions.”

“It’s some sort of hormone uptake,” he mumbles into her shoulder. “I can feel it hitting my bloodstream.” 

“Oxytocin, maybe?” she speculates.

“Something like that.” His eyelids droop. “Feels good.”

The hand on his back makes little tranquilizing circles. He could almost fall asleep here, except that he’s afraid he may never sleep again. 

“He was reaching out to me with his mind,” he tells her. “For just a second, I could feel what he was feeling.” 

The circles continue with Copernican regularity. “Mulder,” she whispers, “I’m so sorry.”

“I’m not… angry with you for making me do it,” Mulder says. “I won’t begrudge you doing what it takes to survive in their world. And besides, he was in Hell. Killing him was mercy.”

Scully nudges their faces apart so she can look him in the eyes. She’s sitting sideways, her legs tucked underneath her, her socked feet fidgeting like they’re kids at a slumber party. She cups the side of his face, studying him for what feels like a long time.

“You’re my partner,” she says. “We are equals. I don’t want this, this…” She doesn’t dare to name it. 

Too drained to offer her an argument, he just presses against her hand. Which is kind of a point against her in itself, he thinks wryly. 

The tears in her eyes finally lose their battle with surface tension. “You’re the most reckless, insolent… let’s call it ‘free-spirited’ person I’ve ever met.” She gives a hiccup of sad laughter. “I could never take that away from you.”

His great fear has always been that she will find him ridiculous. That she will see in him nothing more than a child of privilege, rebelling against his parents, and that she will be right. She has at times diagnosed him— jokingly, lovingly —with oppositional defiant disorder.

“It’s too late,” he tells her. “They already have.”

It’s becoming impossible to avoid the conclusion that what he saw as his great and serious work was in fact irrelevant from the very beginning, benignly tolerated as a sort of rumspringa by the dark forces that have actually always controlled his life.

Taking her hand, he curls it around the back of his neck and lays his head on her chest. There’s a chill in his extremities which could be explained by the shock. The few times he’s ever cried in front of her have been embarrassing, but right now, he almost wishes he could. The shock is blocking him from generating tears.

“It’s you or them,” he says, squeezing her. “It’s you or them.” 

A cautious thumb strokes the border of his hair, right over his Achilles’ brainstem. Much of him is still purple with abuse. He closes his eyes and focuses on her heartbeat. Obedience coats his muscles like a slippery layer of fascia. 

“If it were anyone else, I’d die,” he says. “I’d rather die. But it’s you.” 

Somehow, they manage to fall asleep there. 

In the morning, they restock their backpacks with mall loot and head out to investigate the legend of the lost Honda dealership. Without the means to boil water for coffee, they are reduced to drinking room temperature cola for their daily caffeine fix. On the bright side, they have their pick of shelf stable snacks, from Twinkies and Slim Jims, to those little fruit cocktail cups with the maraschino cherries in them. After reading the nutrition label, Scully concludes that the latter contain enough Vitamin C to stave off scurvy. 

Standing outside the back entrance, flanked by thirsty potted plants, she waves her finger in the air and choses a direction at random. “I’m gonna say… left.” She glances back at Mulder. “Left?”

Mulder bows his head in wordless agreement and hikes the nylon backpack straps over his shoulders. He’s barely used his voice all morning, and he’s afraid to test it. He can still feel phantom brain matter under his fingernails as he follows her down the sidewalk. The urge to run ahead of her is gone. 

“I’m thinking a Civic,” she says, trying to engage him. 

The warm cola doesn’t taste good, but he keeps drinking it anyway. It’s unclear whether his chemical dependencies could have transcended his metamorphosis, but the caffeine seems to do something. 

They waste about fifteen minutes in this way before turning around and taking the right instead. When they reach the Honda dealership, the lot looks mostly empty and there’s a three car pileup in the middle of the tree lawn. Conveniently, someone else has already smashed the front glass and opened the safe, leaving the remaining car keys scattered across the floor.  

They don’t find Scully’s Civic, but there is a dark blue Orthia with a full tank of gas. She sits in the driver’s seat, systematically trying all the keys, while Mulder sits sideways in the passenger seat with his back facing her and the door open, spitting sunflower seed shells onto the pavement.

The engine hums. “Eureka,” says Scully, tossing the other keys out the window for the next set of scavengers to find. 

Mulder dutifully swings his legs inside and closes the door, but doesn’t bother to put on his seatbelt. The bulk bag of sunflower seeds is balanced between his thighs. As she pulls out of the lot, he stares ahead, mindlessly eating them and flicking the shells out the window. 

The atlas in the glove compartment predicts a five hour drive, but with no stoplights and few other cars on the road, they can expect to make even better time. 

“Talk to me,” says Scully, looking away from the road. 

“Hm?” Mulder cracks a seed between his back teeth. 

“You haven’t said anything all day.” She adjusts the rear view mirror, taking time to adapt to the unfamiliar vehicle. “Mulder, it’s freaking me out.” 

“Sorry,” he says. 

The horizon is gray today, threatening rain. He feels exsanguinated; Emptied of his vital juices. And lukewarm cola is no substitute for hot coffee. He wishes he were still asleep.

“What are you thinking about?” she asks him.

He holds a teardrop shaped seed between his index finger and thumb, admiring its graphite and ecru stripes. “I’m thinking that they don’t really taste the same anymore,” he says.  

“Oh no.” She makes an airless little throatsound. “You’re gonna make me cry with that.”

“I mean, they’re not bad.” He chews. “They’re just different. I can still enjoy them.” 

Realizing she’s tricked him into talking again, he leans his head against the window frame to feel the air on his face. She takes one of her hands off the wheel to gently rake his arm with her fingers while he looks away from her.

“Mulder,” she says. “Are you… okay?”

“I don’t know.” He watches the suburban carnage passing by the window, feeling the vibrations of the engine in his powerful and strangely sensitive body. The great bulk of their journey will be on the Interstate 95 to Fayetteville, whose rural stretches will hopefully provide a change of scenery from all the bombed out buildings and mangled corpses. “Should I be? Is any of this okay?” 

Scully reaches into the bag between his legs to steal a sunflower seed. “No.” She chews. “It’s not. What I meant to ask was: How are you feeling in apocalypse-adjusted terms?” 

He turns his head to look at her, still leaning against the inside of the door. 

“You know what else is weird?” he asks.

“What?” She sighs, already sensing him changing the subject. 

He knocks on the dashboard. “There’s no North American version of this car. The Honda Orthia is produced exclusively for the Japanese market. So how did it end up on a lot in Bethesda, Maryland?”

“Why would you know that?” Her pitch rises with incredulity. “Why would you, a man who has presumably never been in the market for a family station wagon, know which Hondas are only available in Japan?”

Mulder shrugs. “S’true. Look.” He opens the glove compartment and holds up a manuel entirely in Japanese. “Do you think it means anything, Scully?” he asks. 

“Oh, brother.” Scully fixes her eyes on the road. 

They ride in silence for a while. The way to I-95 is blocked by rubble, and they are forced to make a detour to the south east. 

Mulder closes his eyes, letting the wind on his face lull him into a shallow sleep. Scully is concentrating on the treacherous terrain, and there’s nothing on the radio but different flavors of static. The pit of emptiness inside him is relieved by the distraction of conversation, but as soon as he’s alone with his own thoughts, they return to the screaming Hell he glimpsed in that kid’s mind. 

A change in the vibration of the car wakes him after only a few minutes. There are curls of smoke on the horizon that could be bonfires. Evidence of other people watching them from behind covered windows or passing them in other vehicles. They’re getting closer to the heart of the city. 

It is now day nine of Tuesday. 

“I didn’t think I was still capable of being sentimental about America,” Scully says to him on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. 

It started drizzling about twenty minutes ago, but the clouds don’t look too serious. She rubs the outsides of her arms as if she’s cold, but it’s not really cold. The Orthia is parked at the bottom of the steps. Before them lies the sumptuous ruin of the National Mall.  

“Shouldn’t I know better by now?” she asks him. 

Mulder shrugs, hands balled in the pockets of his sweatpants. “There’s nothing more American than the willing suspension of disbelief,” he says.

The reflecting pool is full of leaves. The Washington Monument still stands opposite them, its meaning eroding into obscurity just like the obelisk of Ra it was modeled after. 

“I just can’t believe it’s all gone,” she says. 

Mulder can feel her thinking about William. They missed his first birthday three weeks ago. He doesn’t know what to do with Scully’s psychic pain, whether it’s kinder to acknowledge it or to let her think she’s hiding it from him. It’s not as if there’s anything he can say or do to change the circumstances. There’s no future, and they have a small child.

“You hear that, Abe?” she asks the statue. “It’s all gone.”

Mulder puts his arm around her and they stand at the edge of the platform together, watching the smoke rising over the tops of the trees. 

“It’s not gone,” he says. “Not as long as there’s a bearded maniac in a bunker somewhere, jerking himself off to a copy of the Constitution. America is an idea. It’s not gone.”

She gives his waist a sideways squeeze. “Are you gonna be the bearded maniac?” she asks him. “Are we gonna live in a bunker?”

Are we going to raise our son in a bunker? he can feel her thinking. 

The rain picks up a little, rippling the stagnant, dirty water. Already, the frogs and the bugs are returning, the capital sinking back into the swamp from whence it came. 

Scully is wiping at her eyes with the sleeve of her sweatshirt. Her hair is down, staticky and loose without any product to fix it in place. They should probably get back into the car now, in case it’s about to start raining for real, but neither of them is moved to do so.

Stepping out from among the columns, Scully throws her arms out to embrace the sky. The rain patters her face. She leans her head back and begins to sing, off-key, at the top of her lungs:

Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord!

He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored.

He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword.

The Truth is marching on!

She turns around, and Mulder steps out into the rain with her and they jump up and down together like they’re in a mosh pit, belting out the Battle Hymn of the Republic. Strands of wet hair stick to her forehead. She is all the more mesmerizing in her rage and grief for being such a terrible singer.

I have seen Him in the watchfires of a hundred circling camps.

They have builded Him an altar in the evening dews and damps.

I have read His righteous sentence by the dim and flaring lamps.

The Truth is marching on!

I have read a fiery gospel writ in burnished rows of steel.

As ye deal with my condemners so with you my grace shall deal.

Her voice cracks, and she gestures like Zeus, hurling an imaginary bolt of lightning at her feet.

Let the hero, born of woman, crush the serpent with His heel! 

Our God is marching on!

And he pulls her close, kissing her in between the glory glory hallelujahs, until they run out of verses.

Chapter Text

The traffic on I-95 is worse than expected. It seems they aren’t the only ones headed south. Scully has been perched at the edge of her seat for the past hour, gripping the steering wheel with both hands and getting ready to dodge collisions. People observe the old rules of the road out of habit, until they don’t. 

As they approach the Virginia-North Carolina border, the traffic comes to a complete stop. Mulder rolls the empty cola bottle on the floor under his foot, contemplating the logistics of trying to pee into it. After a few minutes of this, people start getting out of their cars and he watches them through the window, his cheek pressed against the warm plastic of the door. Fighting words are exchanged and a gun is drawn. 

“Are you awake?” Scully shakes his arm. 

He sits up, shifting around on the spike he’s come to recognize as the discomfort of a full bladder and rubs his face, noticing the length of his stubble. “Yeah,” he says, feeling himself tense for her orders. 

Grabbing her Glock, Scully opens the driver’s side door and braces her forearms on the roof. “Put the gun down,” she shouts at the man issuing threats two lanes over.

“Mind your own business, lady,” the man says, though he’s visibly affected by having a gun pulled on him. His cutoff t-shirt is already stuck to his back with a U of sweat. “What are you, a fucking cop?” 

“I’m Special Agent Dana Scully with the FBI,” she says. Though he can only see her from the chest down, Mulder can hear her facial expression. 

The man twists his torso to face her and lowers the gun halfway. “Are you for fucking real?” he asks. 

Mulder gets out of the car and draws his own weapon, realizing it’s empty and deciding to pretend it isn’t. Scully looks at him, telegraphing her intentions, and they move around the car together, intimidating the small crowd into submission. 

“Everyone stay where you are,” Scully orders. “My partner and I will go check out what’s happening up ahead.” 

They make their way through the gridlock, holding their guns out in front of them, and people duck inside their cars. 

Catching sight of his wristwatch, Mulder is surprised to realize how long they’ve been on I-95. He used to have an eidetic memory and a highly accurate internal clock, but now time seems to accelerate and decelerate as if in a dream. It doesn’t seem like he’s lost processing power, but rather like his brain has been reorganized, its capacity for detail redirected towards the lush sensory world of the present: The glitter of minerals in the pavement, the competing scents of exhaust and pinewoods, the layered audio of shouts and car horns, the pulse in Scully’s throat, the spring in his step that is the readiness to dispatch anything that threatens her. The metamorphosis divides his experience on Earth into two distinct phases, like the transition from black and white to Technicolor in The Wizard of Oz. 

The screams up ahead rise to the front of the audio mix as his nervous system decides, through some subconscious calculation, that they are relevant to him. As they get closer, it becomes clear what’s blocking the traffic: a four car pileup, a ring of people standing around in shock, a hysterical man begging them for help.

“We’re federal agents,” Scully announces as the ring parts and hands fly into the air. No one points out to her that even if they were before, they aren’t any longer. “What’s going on here?” she asks them.

“My daughter,” the lone man is saying. He’s confused and bleeding from the head. “Please, my daughter,” he yells in Scully’s face, unfazed by the gun in her hand.

One of the vehicles, a flatbed truck, is crushing in the roof of another. There are three bodies caught in the jumble of plastic and metal, and one of them is still alive. 

Holstering his empty gun, Mulder places his hands on the side of the truck. The surface is hot. He pushes, feeling the front wheels move. The truck is an awkward weight. 

The man is standing too close behind him, pleading with him and screaming the girl’s name. The back of his neck bristles with irritation and he tries to focus on the task at hand. Lifting the truck bed into the air, he is able to steer it off the roof and let it roll away, driverless, onto the shoulder. 

The sedan underneath is in worse condition, the whole front end crumpled like tin foil. The man must have climbed out of the driver’s side window. Mulder pulls one of the warped doors off its hinges with a grunt of effort, feeling the steel stretch like rubber before breaking off in his hands. 

Kelly, as the man calls her, is unconscious in the back seat, the seatbelt digging into her neck, her legs all origamied up in the wreckage. Mulder carefully extracts her, plastic beads clicking in her braided hair as she dangles in his grip. She looks nine or ten. Her pulse is strong, but she is wounded.

Depositing the girl in her father’s waiting arms, Mulder rights the sedan and pushes it onto the shoulder to make a path for the traffic. When he returns, Scully has taken off her sweatshirt, leaving her in a tank top with no bra, and she’s instructing the man to use it as a compress. The rows of cars begin to slowly move around them as they hike back towards the Orthia, and people honk their horns in applause. 

“What’s your name?” Scully is asking the man.

“Raymond,” he says.

Mulder can feel Raymond’s eyes on his back the whole way. Scully taps him to drive so that she can observe the girl, and he slides behind the wheel, adjusting the seat and the mirror to his height and waiting for the traffic to move. 

His hands are streaked with grease and his arms and chest hurt as it belatedly registers with him that he can pick up cars. Awareness of the heated muscles gliding over his metallic bones makes him shudder inside his skin. The need to urinate makes his coiled penis ache. Tired and overstimulated, he squeezes his shoulder blades together and takes deep breaths through his nose, focusing on the softness of the clothing against his body.

“Are you some kind of angel?” Raymond is asking him. “How did you do that?”

“Uh, yup,” Mulder says, inching the car forward. He glances at Raymond in the rear view mirror. “I used to have wings and everything, but you know. I got demoted for looking at dirty magazines.” 

“Don’t listen to him.” Scully twists around in her seat to apologize. 

The gridlock breaks and they peel off down I-95 again, with Raymond cradling Kelly in the back seat, applying constant pressure to her leg.  

“Where are you headed?” Scully asks him. “I’m Dana, by the way.”

“To Florida,” says Raymond.

“We can’t take you very far,” she says. “But we can get you off this road and make sure your daughter is stable. I’m a doctor,” she explains.

“I thought y’all said y’all was Feds,” he laughs, his voice still clotted with tears.

“I’m both.” Scully smiles. “Or I was, before.”

“God bless you, Dana.” He offers her his free hand and she shakes it. “Sir, you got a name?” he asks.

“Mulder,” says Mulder, annoyed.

The traffic thins a bit and he sits back with one hand on the wheel after shifting into fourth gear. He should have just peed on the ground earlier. 

“You got a first name?” Raymond asks.

“No,” he says, sounding more hostile than he means to. 

“Sorry,” he relents. “It’s Fox. What kind of a stupid asshole name is ‘Fox’?” he narrates, before Raymond has a chance to repeat it back to him in that incredulous tone people always use. “I don’t know, I didn’t pick it. Don’t call me that. No one calls me that.”

“Alright, man.” Raymond turns his attention to the balled up sweatshirt in his hand which is taking on blood.

The sky is already turning dark. They pull off at the first exit that looks like it might bring them to a pharmacy and rush the girl onto a counter. The great saphenous vein in her left leg has been severed, which Scully pronounces non-life threatening after removing some shards of plastic and performing a venous ligation by flashlight. The pharmacy has been trashed and looted for narcotics, but there are enough first aid supplies left to sterilize, suture, and wrap the wound.

Deciding he’s not needed for any of this, Mulder goes outside to finally pee in the bushes. He wonders how long it will take for the whole freaky lubricated process to become routine. 

Waiting by the car, he rummages around in his backpack for some Slim Jims and a packet of honey roasted peanuts. He used to forget to eat, but now he’s hungry all the time. His body won’t leave him alone.

He’d like to attribute his impatience to becoming tragically disconnected from humanity, but the less than flattering truth is probably that this has been his personality all along. Scully is not the first person to accuse him of being grandiose and self-absorbed; If he were being really honest, he might even cop to some Cluster A, if not Cluster B tendencies. 

He leans against the driver’s side door, eating his peanuts while tilting his head back and letting the sky swallow him. Without light pollution, the stars are spectacular. One nice thing about the end of the world. 

When they leave the Rite Aid, Kelly is awake and crying in Raymond’s arms. They pile back into the Orthia and drive around in the dark in search of another usable vehicle, which is surprisingly easy to find just off the highway now that so much of the competition for resources is dead. Twenty miles south of the Virginia-North Carolina border, Raymond thanks them again and they part ways forever. 

“Wouldn’t peg those two as survivors,” Mulder says as they pull back onto I-95. 

The highway is almost completely deserted at this point. It seems most people aren’t crazy enough to risk night driving. 

“What the hell is wrong with you?” Scully snaps. 

“Sorry.” Mulder turns from the window. 

Moonlight pools in his lap. 

“I don’t know how to talk about what’s happening,” he confesses.

“You know, shutting up is always an option, Mulder,” she yells. 

He stills, head back against the headrest and hands on his thighs, sinking into the vibration of the machine.

“I’m sorry,” she says. “You’re trying to be vulnerable.”

If he pays attention, he can feel the texture of the road, the slightest pock or pebble under the treads. 

“I haven’t cried this whole time,” he says. “Is that weird?”

“People react differently to trauma,” she supplies.

“I know that,” he says. “But what if my reaction is… lacking?” 

They’re surrounded on both sides by walls of jagged pinewoods, enclaving the fluorescent black sky. The high beams reveal the road ahead a sliver at a time.

“I can’t stop thinking about how I’ve always had this inside of me.” He doesn’t have to specify what ‘this’ is. “Wondering if somehow it’s the source of everything you don’t like about me, and everything I don’t like about myself.”

He considers offering Scully his sweatshirt. Her bare shoulders are dipped in moonlight, goosebumps rising on the backs of her arms.

“I don't think attributing your character flaws to alien DNA is going to lead to any personal breakthroughs,” she says. 

A bug pings the windshield and she uses the wipers to flick it away, leaving a teardrop of translucent ichor on the glass. 

“You are who and what you are,” she says. “You don’t have to love it, but the only healthy way forward is to accept it.”

He rolls a tuft of lint from the deep corner of his pocket into a hard pill between his fingers. 

“Have you?” he asks. “Accepted it?”

Scully shrugs. “There’s nothing about the way you’ve changed that’s difficult for me to accept.” 

The ball of lint feels good against the pads of his fingers. It’s hard to resist these repetitive self-soothing motions. He wonders if his fingerprints are still the same.

Maybe he’s been contemplating the lint for longer than he thought, because when Scully speaks again, she sounds concerned. 

“I know the others are suffering,” she says. “Mulder, are you… suffering? In ways I can’t see?”

“No.” He shakes himself. “I just feel weird.”

“Can you describe that?” she asks. 

His tongue worries the ridges of his palate. The fact of his body is laid out before him, unremarkable looking beneath his rumpled clothes. Only the centimeter of gray skin he feels peeking above his collar might give him away. 

“I feel a lot more… physical,” he says. “It’s not even unpleasant. Just distracting.”

“But you’re understandably ambivalent about it,” she guesses. “Maybe…” 

She trails off, squinting beyond the reach of the high beams as a low hum rises out of the forest. 

More bugs hit the glass like tiny hailstones. Mulder leans forward, feeling his core tense, the seatbelt locking across his chest. His body knows something he doesn’t. 

They are driving into a wall of bees. The particulate mass surrounds them like a sandstorm, blacking out the windows. Scully swerves onto the shoulder and slams on the brakes. There is only the mounting hum and the sound of her breath in the darkness.

The bees press the glass, blotting out the high beams and Scully hits the ceiling light to reveal them climbing in through the air conditioning vents. Mulder claps his hands over the vents, but there are already too many of them inside the cabin. They cloud Scully’s head and she screams, accidentally leaning on the horn as she clicks off her seatbelt and fumbles with the door handle. 

Throwing herself from the car, she tries to run and the bees overtake her as Mulder climbs over the console after her, plunging himself into a pool of television static. His first instinct is to shield her, but this is of limited efficacy. He tries to pick her up and run, but he can’t seem to get his feet under him. His skin is difficult for them to penetrate, except for where it’s thinnest around his eyes and mouth, but the frequency pierces his brain like a drill, disrupting his inner ear.

Slumped against the car for balance, he grabs two lighters and pulls the spare tire out of the trunk. He can barely see what he’s doing through the static. He pours the butane from one lighter over the tire and uses the other one to ignite it. The rubber explodes into white flames for a second before reducing to an orange simmer.

Crawling on his hands and knees beneath the canopy of black smoke, he reaches Scully’s side as the swarm disperses. Her face is swollen with venom. Regaining his balance, he lifts her from the pavement and a single word strobes across his mind: 

Pharmacy. 

Suddenly, he’s running down I-95 in the opposite direction. The tire fire shrinks into the distance, leaving him with no illumination but the moon and stars. It feels like he’s clocking easily seventy miles per hour, spraying dirt and gravel as he cuts across the grassy median. His lungs are burning, but he couldn’t stop even if he wanted to. She is compelling him, pushing his body to its mechanical limit. 

The woods streak by in various shades of black as the soles of his sneakers become unglued. Lactic acid is screaming through his muscles, fireworks threatening the edges of his vision.

In the Rite Aid parking lot, Scully struggles weakly in his arms and makes a kind of dry hissing sound in his ear. She is going into anaphylactic shock.  

Mulder watches himself carry her inside, his eyes straining against the total darkness. She is ninety seconds without oxygen. 

Flashlight.

He lays her down on the floor and his hand grabs one of the large camping flashlights she was using earlier, setting it next to her with the beam pointing at the ceiling. 

EpiPen.

He leaps over the pharmacy counter and she guides him to the correct shelf, closing his fingers around the plastic cylinder. The instant he drives the needle into her thigh, her control releases him and he collapses to the floor. 

“Scully.” He cradles her. Her swollen face is shiny and tight. “No, no, no, Scully, please,” he chants.

Her heart is pounding under his ear. Her airway opens and she gasps, her rib cage expanding beneath him. She has been almost two hundred seconds without oxygen. 

“Scully.” He rakes his fingers through her damp hair. “Scully. Scully.”

Minutes pass, her breath on his neck, his forehead resting on the floor. One of his quadriceps is torn, his knees protesting their misuse.

“Mulder,” she croaks. 

He gives a tearless sob that’s muffled by the dirty tile. 

“You owe me a new pair of Jordans,” he says. 

The swelling has gone down considerably, but Scully’s exposed skin is still covered in red bee stings, her hands trembling from the dose of epinephrine. She’s sitting on the floor with her back against a rack of magazines, drinking bottled water and puffing on a beta-agonist inhaler.

Mulder sits down across from her, the tractor beam of the flashlight between them, and hands her an asked-for bottle of calamine lotion. The product is violet on her skin in the limited light.

“I’m sorry I had to do that to you again,” she says, rubbing it into the backs of her arms.

Mulder picks up the cardboard box the inhaler came in and pretends to read the label. 

“Don’t be,” he says. “Jesus, Scully. Use me however you need to if it’s to save your life.”

He can feel her framing her swollen mouth so that her words won’t slur. Her heart rate still hasn’t normalized and her gray tank top is almost translucent with sweat.

“Well, I don’t want to ‘use’ you,” she says. “And I won’t do it again.”

“Come on.” He tosses the box aside. “Of course you will.” 

“What?” She frowns, taken aback.

Mulder leans his head against the empty shelf behind him and peers down his nose at her. 

“In the past,” he says, “you’ve shot me to stop me from doing stupid things. Are you really saying that if you could have stopped me with your mind, you wouldn’t have done that instead? You really can’t think of any scenario in which you might use that ability?”

She caps the bottle of calamine lotion. Her face is covered with a chalky violet mask. 

“Alright,” she says. “I’m sure you can sit here and concoct all sorts of extreme situations in which I could possibly justify using it.” 

“This is an extreme situation and you’ve already used it twice,” he says. “The more you do, the easier it will be to justify using it in the future. Eventually, it will become routine.” 

Her lips part. “Mulder, what can I say to convince you that I’m not—?”

“Don’t try to convince me,” he cuts her off. “If you don’t promise me you’re never going to use it, then it won’t be a betrayal when you inevitably do.” 

She closes her mouth. They stare at each other for several seconds and she leans forward until the beam of the flashlight is almost under her chin, throwing her zinc whitened features into spooky relief. 

“Drink it.” She places her mostly-full water bottle in front of him.

Mulder sits up, feeling his fingers twitch. “Are you trying to make some sort of point?” he asks.

She unscrews the cap. “I said, drink it.” 

He knocks it back in a few gulps and crushes the bottle into a disk against the floor. 

Scully reaches into the room temperature cooler beside her and pulls out another one.

“Drink it,” she says. 

Mulder swallows, his mouth going dry. He chugs the whole bottle, just like the first. Added minerals give the water a slight metallic taste that wouldn’t be as noticeable if it were cold. 

She places a third bottle in front of him. “Drink it.”

He clenches his fists. This isn’t quite Russian roulette, but it’s starting to scare him.

“Are we going to sit here and do this until my stomach explodes?” he asks her.

Her glassy eyes scan back and forth.

“You’re fighting it,” she says. “You can fight it.” 

“Well, you’re not pushing very hard,” he points out.  

The pressure increases. “Come on,” she says. “Drink it.”

Most people need training to control their psychic projections, but Scully is more in command of her mind than most people. Already, she’s able to clearly will one thing while hoping for another. 

Mulder closes his eyes. He can feel her disappointment as he drinks the third bottle through clenched teeth. Some of the water leaks from the corners of his mouth.

“Scully, seriously,” he groans. “Don’t make me do it again. Please.” 

She sits back against the magazines and looks down at the empty bottles. Her knees are partially bent towards her chest.

“I don’t understand,” she says. “This resignation is so unlike you.”

“You mean, accepting reality is so unlike me?” he laughs bitterly. 

He thumps the back of his head against the metal shelf a few times. The psychic field that compels his obedience is almost palpable, visualizable as a pearlescent second skin beneath his skin. She could hand him a pen right now and tell him to gouge his own eyes out, and he would be forced to do it. 

“Do you want me to rail against it?” he asks her. “Because that’s what I do, right? I pointlessly rail against things I can’t change?”

“How do you know you can’t change it?” She raises her voice. “It seems like you’re just giving up without even trying.”

The real Fox Mulder wouldn’t tolerate this humiliation for even a second, she seems to suggest. He would stand, Catolike, demanding liberty or death.  

“Well, maybe that’s because I’ve seen the alternative.” He flinches from her gaze, his cheekbone resting on the edge of the shelf. The cords of his neck twitch as he swallows down the secondhand agony of the kid she made him kill.

“You saved me from Hell,” he breathes. “I’m not saying it won’t be hard for me, but this isn’t Hell.” He flexes his hands, testing their responsiveness. “It’s more like a… comfortable Purgatory.” 

“What can I do?” she asks, her voice quavering. “I didn’t ask for this. I don’t know what to do with it.”

“I need you to own it,” he says. “The fact is, you have this power over me. It’s there whether you choose to use it or not. And it will color everything between us.”

Her face crumples. “But I don’t want it to.”

“It’s okay,” he says.

She reaches for him and he bows to let her pet his hair. 

“I’ll take up Zen Buddhism or something,” he laughs. “I’ll learn how to kill my ego. I don’t know.” 

He opens his eyes, the heat of her palm glowing against the side of his face. 

“I just need us to be open and honest with each other,” he tells her. “That’s the one thing I can’t live without. I need you to acknowledge my reality.”

The hand falls away into her lap.

“I acknowledge that you have some sort of psychic connection to me,” she says in the cadences of contract law. “And that it compels you to obey me.”

Her knees unbend until her feet are touching the shelf behind him. The shape of her face looks normal again, but he was sure to grab the last two EpiPens for the road. Now, she just looks tired.

“I can see how my discomfort, my reluctance to discuss it, might have come across as dismissing your experience,” she says. “But it’s not that I doubt this phenomenon exists. It’s cowardice, on my part. I just didn’t want to face it.”

“Because it’s destroyed what you once admired about me?” he asks quietly. 

“God, Mulder, no.” She embraces him, smearing him with calamine lotion. “Because I love you! I don’t want to hurt you. I don’t want to take away your freedom.” 

The scent of zinc oxide mixes with the tang of her skin. His forehead hits her shoulder and he feels another layer of his pretensions dissolving like sunscreen in the ocean. He wonders how many of them are left.

He trusts her, he thinks, about as much as it’s possible for anyone to trust another person. He wonders if that will be enough.

“Can I order you to be free?” she asks.

“I don’t think it works that way,” he chuckles.

She soothes his back, remembering the way his spine likes to be touched. “Then I order you to be well.”

The now blazing tire fire is a convenient beacon, leading them back to the Orthia in the dark. Scully claims she’s fine, but Mulder insists on carrying her, reminding her that anaphylactic shock calls for hospitalization. He drives, letting her doze off in the passenger seat for the hour and change it takes them to finally reach Fayetteville. But only after covering the air conditioning vents with duct tape. 

Fort Bragg looms over the suburbs, a series of strip malls and poor neighborhoods with no sidewalks connected by narrow country roads through the pinewoods. By the time he stops at a motor lodge in Bonnie Doone, recessed from the road among the trees, the sky is beginning to lighten again. 

There’s no one around, so he nabs a key from the little office outbuilding and helps himself to one of the rooms. The air inside smells sterile and cool, like his apartment when he would come home from going out of town— like no human has been in here, eating, and defecating, and shedding skin cells for some time. There’s a queen size bed, a table with two chairs, a useless television set, a stack of clean towels, an empty ice bucket, a deck of cards, and a Gideon Bible. Most motels are about the same; Another reason it feels like coming home is that he’s spent so many nights in rooms just like this one.  

Carrying Scully in from the car, he lays her down on the bed and curls up beside her, kicking off his worn out Jordans. They are both in dire need of a shower, but the quest for water will just have to wait a few hours. 

His muscles are sore in the way human muscles might be sore a day or two after a strenuous workout, which suggests that the process of hypertrophy is accelerated in him. He props himself on the pillows at a forty-five degree angle and stretches his legs out in front of him, accessing the sense memory of lifting a car. 

The shape of his body is athletic but not muscular, maybe a bit sleeker than it was before his metamorphosis but not markedly different. Rubbing his sore shoulders and pecs, he reflects that he should probably be trying to get stronger. Scully has nearly died twice in as many days, and she was only able to save herself by pushing him to his physical limits. His supersoldier body is their main survival advantage, and it’s still wobbly and untrained, nowhere close to its full biological potential.

Scully stirs, kicking him slightly as her consciousness floats to the surface. 

“Where are we?” she murmurs. 

“A lil’ ole place called Bonnie Doone.” Mulder smiles down at her, attempting an accent. “Suburb outside Fort Bragg.”

“The sun is coming up,” she yawns, her blurry gaze falling on the pale gray window. The dawn is a jagged EKG line where the black trees meet the gray sky.

“It is,” he says. “But you should rest.” 

He shows her the EpiPen on the nightstand. “I know you said it could wear off after about six hours, but I’ll stay awake in case you need another dose.”

She rolls over so that her head is on his chest and drapes an arm over his shoulder. “You need to sleep, too,” she says. “Don’t worry: If I stop breathing, you’ll know it instantly and you’ll wake up.” 

“How can you be sure of that?” he asks her. 

Her hair tickles his neck and he runs his fingers through it, picking out a speck of gravel from the highway. 

“I can feel it.” Her voice is distorted by a yawn. “Our psychic connection will let you know if I’m in any danger.”  

“Oh, so now you’re the psychic expert all of a sudden?” he scoffs.

“Uh-huh.” She squeezes his shoulder. 

His gray markings throb and he feels himself sliding downward so that he’s horizontal beneath her. The ceiling is an unfortunate stucco. Its pits and pimples call to mind of the surface of the moon. 

“Now sleep.” She touches his forehead as if to anoint him with ashes.

“Scully.” He feels himself sinking into the mattress. His superhuman strength is no match for her insurmountable weight. 

“Shhh.” Her lips move against his sternum. “Sleep.”

“No fair,” he says.

He can feel her drowsy smile through his shirt. His arms wrap themselves around her and he closes his eyes, unable to disobey.

When he wakes up, Scully is gone. He calls her name, tearing around like an animal for about five seconds before realizing he can still sense her. His forehead rests above the peephole on the inside of the door while he takes deep breaths, waiting for the adrenaline to wear off before facing her outside. 

“‘Morning,” she says, without looking up at him.

She’s dragged one of the chairs out onto the strip of concrete between the door and the parking lot. There’s a towel wrapped around her damp hair and she’s wearing fresh clothes she packed from the mall in Bethesda, drinking coffee from an enamel camping mug and reading the Gideon Bible. 

“Where have you been?” he asks her, trying to keep the panic out of his voice. 

She gestures around at the dirt parking lot. 

Mulder looks between her toweled head and the door. “Wait a minute, we have running water?” 

“And electricity.” She grins into the rim of her coffee. “Turns out we’re on the same grid as Fort Bragg.”

The bee stings have faded from what he’s learned to call red, to what he presumes is called pink. With no previous history of allergic reaction, there’s every reason to think Scully will make a full recovery. 

He crouches down, leaning his cheek on the arm rest. There is a strong instinctive urge to get his head beneath her hand. 

“What’s wrong?” She closes the Bible on her finger. 

“Nothing,” he says. “I just— For a second there, I thought you’d left.” 

He lifts his head and puts both hands on the arm rest as if to push himself away from her. He just can’t seem to stop humiliating himself. The urge to grab her by the waist, spilling her hot coffee on both of them, is almost physically painful, but somehow he manages to resist.  

“Brushing up on the End Times?” he asks, nodding at the book in her lap.

“There’s not a whole lot else to do around here,” she says. “I’ve already played about fifty rounds of Solitaire.” 

He rises, slowly straightening his legs, and takes a second look around. “How long have you been up?” he asks. “The sky is still dark.”

“No, it’s getting dark,” she says. “You’ve been asleep for fourteen hours. It’s after eight p.m.”

Now that she mentions it, the air is heavier than before. Sure enough, the sun is setting in the west. 

“Then why’d you say ‘morning?’” He rubs the back of his head.

“I was joking,” she says.

“If you’ve been up all this time, why do you look like you’ve just showered?” he asks, not sure why he’s trying to poke holes in her story. Maybe it’s just his detective’s brain, needing to build a clear timeline. There are hopeful signs that his mind is adjusting, the world reconcretizing around his new senses, his faculties of observation and memory returning to him in modified forms. 

“It didn’t even occur to me to try turning the water on until about an hour ago.” She shrugs. 

Rubbing the sand from his eyes, he begins to notice how bright and rested he feels. The soreness is gone, his muscles humming with renewed strength. 

“Did you— Did you make me sleep for that long?” he accuses. 

“No.” She unwraps her hair and shakes a hand through it to unclump the damp tendrils. “I think that’s just how your body works now. Your sleep is much longer and deeper. Sorry, Buddy.” Her eyes crinkle with gentle schadenfreude. “Maybe psychic brains need more time in REM.”

“Great,” he sighs. “So I’m useless half the time now?”

“Not at all. It’s like I said: You’ll spring into action if I need you.” She brushes his arm with the back of her hand. 

“We should look for food,” he changes the subject. “I’ll go get cleaned up first.”

The hand retreats and she nods, flipping open the Bible again.  

Tossing his dirty clothes in the corner, Mulder waits outside the phonebooth of a shower stall for the water to heat up. The pearly glands on his body are excited, tasting the steam. A hot shower is such an unexpected luxury. 

After giving himself about sixty seconds to relax under the spray, he grabs the soap and starts washing, forcing himself to look down at his own nakedness as he does so. There are faint tan lines around his biceps from wearing a t-shirt, an encouraging sign that he won’t always be so pale. The hair on his head is coming in as thick and dark as he could hope for, but the hair on his body seems permanently finer and lighter. In the interest of self acceptance, he reminds himself that waxing is in these days, at least according to those Calvin Klein billboards.

The only stumbling block is cleaning his genitals. He touches his smooth crotch, trying to coax the trap door open, but the mechanism that governs it is mostly involuntary. Letting his arms dangle at his sides, he relaxes his pelvic floor and waits until his penis decides to slide out.

He’s not even sure if he should be applying soap to it. Maybe the whole mucosal interior is self-cleaning, like a woman’s vagina. He gives the thing a gentle lather and it unfurls itself against his belly, the silver eye glaring up at him as if to say, knock it off.

He lets go and watches it move under the water, prehensile and muscular as an eel. He can’t decide if he likes it, or hates it, or desperately misses the old one, or what. Whenever he looks at it, his mind becomes a screaming blank. 

It’s not just that it happens to be such an emotionally freighted part of his anatomy, although that’s certainly a contributing factor; It’s also the fact that it’s just the tip of the iceberg. The most visibly alien part of his otherwise human-shaped body, the biggest external hint of what he’s really like on the inside. 

He switches off the faucet, letting the water cool on his skin, and it retracts itself, preferring the warmth of its pocket. 

“It’s okay,” he mutters, cupping the smooth gray triangle between his legs. “You’re okay.”

He hugs himself, enjoying the goosebumps that rise on his back as he stands there dripping. 

“You’re okay,” he repeats, trying to commune with his body, or some yoga babble like that. 

Grabbing a towel from the stack, he watches his reflection dry itself in the bedroom mirror out of the corner of his eye. Scully brings him some clean clothes from the trunk of the car and he dresses in front of her, mourning the ruin of his Jordans.

“Can you go barefoot for now?” she winces. 

“Hm. Yeah,” he says.

The earth is warm beneath his feet. Standing in front of the open passenger side door, he watches Scully reading a local guide she got from the office and strokes the planet with his toes. The packed dirt is mixed with dry pine needles, which make him ticklish. 

“They have one of those Super Walmarts downtown,” says Scully, climbing behind the wheel.

“Great. We can pick up a lawnmower, a mattress, a shotgun, and some of those ginger cookies you like.” Mulder can’t keep the smile out of his voice. As he sinks into the passenger seat, he is overcome by this oceanic feeling of belonging; On this planet, in this car, in this body, with this woman. 

They fill up the Orthia through a funnel at the Bonnie Doone General Store and pack the trunk with gas cans and five gallon jugs of distilled water. Scully drives slowly out of concern for the suspension; Their cargo is only going to get heavier. Luckily, there’s no one else on the road to complain.

Downtown Fayetteville is the most deserted place they’ve seen so far. The parking lot of the Walmart Supercenter is filled with cars, some with the doors open and groceries rotting in the back seat. It looks as if everyone dropped whatever they were doing at the same time and left. 

“It’s like the Lost City of Teotihuacan,” Mulder muses. “You know, without any of the grandeur.” 

“You’re right.” Scully narrows her eyes as they pass through the automatic doors. “It’s strange. What happened here?” 

“This is Fayetteville, North Carolina,” he reminds her. “Maybe all the Evangelicals got raptured.” 

“Oh, sure.” She grabs a giant shopping cart. 

“And you got left behind for being a vile papist,” he says. 

She grabs a box of tampons off the shelf and tosses it in. Then she grabs a box of protein bars and rips one of them open with her teeth. They haven’t eaten in over twenty-four hours. 

“Sorry. Am I annoying you?” Mulder asks.

Scully talks with her mouth full. “I’m thinking.”

He takes one of the protein bars for himself, enjoying the taste of fake chocolate. It’s got a nice maltiness to it and a satisfying chew. 

“Maybe everyone’s inside the base,” she says, washing it down with a box of room temperature apple juice. 

“You think they were rounded up by the military?” he asks.

She nips the bendy straw in thought. “Not necessarily,” she says. “There are no signs of a struggle.”

“What.” He frowns. “Are you saying you think they went willingly?” 

As they wander up and down the aisles, the lack of looting and broken glass strikes him as more and more sinister. Though part of this may be the haunting, liminal quality of big box stores in general. This place is the size of four football fields, and every time they turn a corner, he expects to see a minotaur. 

“So, what? They offered the good townsfolk shelter?” he asks, after she’s laid out her theory.

“I’m not saying they did it out of the kindness of their hearts.” The juice is gone by now, the straw developing a crimp between her teeth. “But what’s the point of decapitating the government and putting yourself in charge if there’s no one left to rule over?”

Mulder grabs a hoodie off the rack and pretzel-knots it around his waist. “I guess that makes sense.” He tosses a few packs of socks and underwear into the cart and stops to browse for sneakers.

“Looks like they’re all out of Gatorade Green.” Scully clicks her tongue.

He holds up two pairs of Jordans for her consideration. “Original White Stadium Green or Retro Japan Metallic Silver?”

“At the rate you’re burning through those things?” she says. “Grab one in every color.” 

Once they’ve loaded the cart up with toilet paper, bar detergent, water crackers, sardines, canned vegetables, beef jerky, dried fruit, mixed nuts, sunflower seeds, red licorice, and those ginger cookies Scully likes, the last item on their list is ammunition. 

“Why would they go willingly?” Mulder studies a box of Magtech 9mm rounds. 

“Because the shadow government is offering them protection?” says Scully. “And people don’t have a lot of options left?”

He wonders if they should grab rifles for hunting, in case food gets scarce. He’s not experienced with hunting, but he feels like pursuing suspects with a handgun has got to be the more difficult task. 

“That’s not the paranoid, heavily-armed America I know,” he says.

“People talk a big game about freedom,” she says. “But maybe when the chips are down, they coalesce around the nearest strongman. Maybe that’s just human nature.”

He picks up a Magnum revolver and pretends to aim it at his own reflection. It’s ten p.m. and the sky is dark enough to turn the windows into mirrors. 

“I don’t like it,” he says. “I don’t trust it.” He jerks the barrel, firing an imaginary shot. “There’s something else going on here.”

“Well, there’s nothing we can do about it,” she says.

He drifts towards the window, his own image denaturing into swathes of color. They can’t see it from here, but the base is in that direction, just beyond the pine-blue hills.

“Mulder,” Scully warns. “Why are we here? Tell me you know why we're here.”

He lowers the Magnum but doesn’t answer, his eyes fixed straight ahead at nothing.

“We’re here to find our son,” she answers for him. 

“I know that,” he mutters. “Of course I know that.”

He returns the Magnum to the glass case where he found it and starts pushing the cart towards the exit.

“We’re not here to take Them down.” Scully follows him out into the dark parking lot, raising her voice over the roar of the wheels. “That’s over. We lost. In fact, it turns out we were never in any position to win.”

Mulder loads their cargo into the back seat with geometric nicety, the heaviest and most cube shaped items going on the floor. 

“They’ve engineered things so that they’re the only game in town.” She leans against the side of the car and crosses her arms. “The only authority left that can offer people any kind of future for their children. It doesn’t matter how sinister their motives are; I promise you, if we storm in there and kill whoever’s in charge, we will not be greeted as liberators.” 

“You’re probably right.” He shrugs.

“We are here for William,” she reiterates. “If he’s even here, if he’s even alive; If, if, if.” 

He piles the back seat with white plastic shopping bags.

“You don’t have to persuade me, you know,” he says. “You can make me do whatever you want.”

“But I don’t want that,” she says. “I want us to be on the same page.”

“Great.” He closes the door and stands up straight. “So it’s not enough that I have to do whatever you say? I also have to agree with you about everything?”

“That’s not what I meant.” She smacks the roof. “You know that’s not what I meant!”

He slouches his back against the car. “It doesn’t matter what I think anymore,” he says.

“Of course it still matters what you think.” She pivots to face him. 

Tingles pour from her hands into his sides, his rib cage expanding to meet them. 

“I don’t understand,” she says. “It’s like you’re trying to goad me into dominating you.”

“You have complete control over me,” he says, “but you won’t act like it.”

“And you find that somehow dishonest?” she asks. 

“I guess I’d rather rip the bandaid off.” He looks at his shoes. 

Retro Japan Metallic Silver. 

“I don’t have an angle here,” he admits. “I’m just reacting. I don’t know why I’m reacting this way. I guess I just have a lot of contradictory emotions.”

“So do I,” she says.

“I just wish you’d be more explicit about what you’re going to do with me,” he says. “So I don’t have to live with the suspense.”

“What I’m going to do with you?” she asks.

The slide of her palms is making him tremble. She can’t have failed to notice.

“Alright,” she resolves. “I’m going to make you take some reasonable care of yourself, and I’m going stop you from doing anything ruinously stupid. How’s that?”

“Thank you.” He nods.

“You’re thanking me?” She snorts.

“At least now I know what regime I’m under,” he says. “And can plan accordingly.”

They climb into the car and she turns the key in the ignition, sitting there with her hands on the wheel while it idles in the parking spot.   

“Mulder,” she says. “Seriously. If we do somehow manage to get inside the base, you’re not going to try anything, are you? Please, tell me you’re not.” 

He clicks on his seatbelt and stares ahead at the dark windshield. “As you say, we don’t always have to agree.” 

She sighs beside him, her hand hesitating on the gearshift. He can sense her wanting to say more, then deciding against it.

“You have to follow your conscience,” he tells her, “and I have to follow mine. If that ends with you stopping me, then that’s how it plays out.” 

The first time they ever slept together was a disappointment. 

They were at a ski lodge in Colorado, snowed in, bored, waiting for a phone call, a dossier from the resort company spread out across a long trestle dining table in front of the fireplace. Multiple homicides, a corporate conspiracy, the Yellowstone Death Zone, possible evidence of teleportation— A perfectly serviceable X-File, but for some reason, Mulder’s heart wasn’t in it. 

They were home by Monday, and even managed to make some arrests, which was rare enough. The Bureau was on Skinner’s case about their poor clearance rate, as he never grew tired of reminding them. Unfortunately, the alleged teleportation device, a kind of glass sarcophagus which the board had used to send its enemies to their doom, was destroyed in an avalanche; But that was just Mulder’s luck. 

He offered Scully a ride back to her apartment from the office that night, trying to quell the emptiness that had been yawning inside him all weekend. During the drive, she asked him if he was still sore it turned out not to be a yeti, and that made him smile. She invited him inside, trying to cheer him up, and they talked and drank a little, and even as he kissed her, he was already regretting it. 

She seemed tense, and he could tell she was pretending for him. Afterwards, they didn’t speak of it, and things went right back to normal at work. But quietly, he was heartbroken. The loneliness had a shape to it now, which made it far more painful than before. He contented himself with the fact that this mistake hadn’t ruined their partnership. More than a year went by, and he could pretend it had never happened. 

The second time they slept together was healing. 

This time, Scully initiated things. She knocked on the door of his hotel room and climbed into his bed with surprisingly little preamble, as if daring herself to do it before she lost the nerve. 

He always liked to have the television on as a buffer against nightmares. That night, there was an infomercial for a zucchini spiralizer that ran for hours. The changing colors flashed across her face and chest as she shyly explained to him how to make her orgasm while guiding his hand. She told him she needed a lot of kissing and foreplay, and that she wanted him to rub her clitoris in light, quick circles. She never once asked him to turn off the television, and he thought maybe it was the background noise that gave her the confidence to say these things.   

The fact that she couldn’t get off from penetration alone didn’t bother him, as she seemed to worry it might, because he was given to understand that this was common among women. Maybe she was afraid his expectations would be influenced by his porn habit, which she had never approved of. But that was just a way to take care of distractions so that he could keep working; As far as he was concerned, it had nothing to do with this. 

The next morning, they talked about the case over a continental breakfast of coffee, cubed melon, and bagels with real cream cheese, and Mulder felt a lightness, an optimism about the direction of his life he hadn’t felt in years.

Things didn’t change dramatically after that, but they did sleep together again. Each time was spontaneous and initiated by her, usually while they were on the road and away from anyone they knew. This gave the whole thing an exciting and secret quality. 

She would climb into his bed and they would kiss for a long time while he rubbed her clitoris, and then she would let him enter her. Nothing fancy, but each of these rare nights felt like an irreplicable experiment or a sui generis miracle. For a pair of attractive professionals in their thirties, and for all the rumors and innuendos, they were both somewhat sexually inexperienced. 

Now, back at the motel in Bonnie Doone, they lie on a fresh set of sheets with just the bathroom light on, listening to the cicadas because there’s nothing on the television but colored bars and a no-signal tone. Sharing a bed every night is still new. This still has the feel of one of their sleepovers, a dreamlike interlude, a state of exception.

“How do you know we even have sex?” Mulder is lying on his back, gazing up at her. “Maybe the lady supersoldier lays a clutch of eggs in a bathtub and I spray them, or something.”

Scully is propped on her elbows, hair fanned across one shoulder. “I don’t think so,” she says. “I think you’re still looking at months of gestation and years of socialization.”

“Doesn’t seem very efficient,” he says.

“Well, human beings aren’t infinitely malleable,” she says. “There have got to be certain hard limits.” 

Their faces have been getting closer, a millimeter at a time, since this conversation began. 

“They can’t grow something like you in a bathtub,” she murmurs.

His breathing changes as the hand which has been resting on his hip slides under the hem of his t-shirt. 

She massages his flank, studying his reactions. Her pupils are dilated and starry with bounced light from the other room. 

“Besides,” she says. “Your behavior is unmistakably that of a social species with a high-cost reproductive strategy, whose offspring would benefit from significant paternal investment.” 

“You can tell all that from my swooning?” he asks. 

“Mm-hm.” She grins, slowly pushing out of focus until their noses touch. 

They finally kiss, breaking the suspense, and he rolls his wrists, trying to keep his arms at his sides. She peels her shirt off and throws it on the floor before going to work on his.

“Scuh—” He stays her hands. “Scully, wait.”

“What’s wrong?” She pushes herself back up onto her elbows, her torso naked except for the glint of her cross. The sight of her hard nipples makes his chest tingle in sympathy. 

“If we’re still, er, reproductively compatible, as you say, then shouldn’t we be worried about that?” he asks.

“We’ll be careful,” she tells him.

One night in Arizona, she asked him what his first time was like, a question he didn’t even know he should have been dreading. There was no story, he insisted, but she wanted to know what the girl was like. Well, you’ve met her, he was then forced to say, and endure her knowing sadness, which was somehow worse than ridicule. My adolescence was somewhat derailed by, you know, he told her. So yeah, I didn’t get laid until college. 

How many times had he rehearsed the story of Samantha’s abduction to psychoanalysts, and hypnotists, and just about anyone else who would listen? And yet it wasn’t until Scully asked him this innocent question, in the interest of pillow talk, that he was able to put words to how it had affected him. From the age of twelve, he could never again feel safe in his own home or trust his own parents. He could sense that they were lying to his face about what had happened, that they were maybe, even, somehow… in on it. 

He played sports, but didn’t really have any friends outside of that; So no, there were no girls. They sent him home from school a lot, because he had what they called anger issues. Today, he speculated, they might say I had post-traumatic stress disorder. But you know, it was the seventies, and we didn’t talk like that back then.

Scully listened to all of this intently while rhythmically stroking his arm. There was a marathon of I Love Lucy playing in the background, which probably helped too. 

There was Phoebe, and later Diana, and a few short-lived, unsatisfying encounters in between. And that’s my entire sexual history, he told her. You already know it. 

She smiled and asked him if there was someone else he was forgetting now. 

Before you, he said, I had honestly started to wonder what all the fuss was about. 

His shirt joins hers on the floor and she kisses him again, lowering her weight onto his bare chest. 

“Okay,” he gasps. 

Skin to skin contact is instantly too much for him. He rolls them onto their sides and pulls her tightly against him, her delighted laughter tickling his ear. He massages her vertebrae, locking his jaw against the feeling when she does the same for him. 

“I had wondered about their placement,” she says of the sensing glands on his body. “But it seems like they’re there to coax you into this position.” She strokes his shoulder blades, giggling when he instinctively copies her. “Are you trying to stimulate mine?” she asks. “Even though I don’t have any?”

“The lady supersoldiers love it,” he tries to say, but his voice gives out on him halfway through, his slippery erection uncurling itself inside his underwear. 

“They’re getting warmer,” she observes. “Sort of engorged.” The markings pulsate under her hands.

At this, he finds himself mindlessly rubbing against her, making rueful subvocalizations. It’s not sexual urgency as he knew it before, and yet it’s completely recognizable as that. Everything he remembers from back home in Kansas has its equivalent here in Oz.

“Does it always feel sexual when I touch you there?” she asks.

He shakes his head no. Before, it was so soothing, he thinks at her, wondering if the psychic signal ever goes both ways.

“Only when you’re aroused?” she clarifies. 

“Yeah,” he breathes. 

He feels her smile against his neck. “So it’s almost like, when you’re aroused, your whole body turns into one big—?”

“Fuck you, Scully,” he says. “Don’t laugh.”

“I'm not laughing at you,” she says. “I swear.” 

“It’s okay,” she says, noticing his redfaced struggle against his own reactions. “You don’t have to be cool.”

“When was the last time I was cool?” he asks her.

She pretends to think it over. “1996,” she says. “You stopped being cool about halfway through 1996.”

Technically, what he’s sporting is not an erection, because the thing between his legs is not made of spongeous tissue, but of smooth muscle, so unlike the old one, it never actually goes flaccid. Instead, the strange, motile appendage is capable of tensing and relaxing itself like a sea cucumber. This, Scully has theorized, is related to his lack of prostate, whose role in ejaculation is rendered unnecessary. The fact that the male urethra runs through the prostate gland, she has explained, makes it prone to infection, comparing this flawed design to that of a certain giant squid whose esophagus runs through the center of its donut shaped brain. 

All this comes to mind as he feels his thighs tensing, the silver tip pressing painfully against the inside of his underwear as the thing— efficiently —ejaculates itself. 

“Say, Doc,” he asks, after catching his breath, “is it possible to literally die of embarrassment?” 

Scully kisses him, giggling into his mouth. 

The not-mercury rolls around uncomfortably between his skin and the fabric, refusing to soak in.

“What’s your refractory period like?” she asks, trying to get him to lift his pelvis so she can pull his pants off. “I have my suspicions.” She grins. 

“Wait—” he says. “Scully.”

Letting go of his waistband, she lies on top of him so that her hip bone is putting pressure on his crotch. “It hasn’t gone back in,” she observes. “Can I touch it?”

“Are you sure you want to do that?” he asks. “Doesn’t it freak you out at all? I mean, it freaks me out.”

“It’s okay.” She sobers, petting his sides with renewed tenderness. “It’s just your body.”

She reaches into his underwear and he looks away, feeling the thing exposed to the air. It moves itself against her hand, lapping at her like a curious tongue. He keeps comparing it to sea creatures, but a tongue is the first analogy he’s thought of that actually helps bring him clarity, because he already knows what it’s like to have one of those.

A light tap against his mind is all it takes for her to coax him into stripping his pants off, while she does the same. Metallic beads of his semen roll out onto the bed, and she casually brushes them aside like pencil shavings or crumbs, so unbothered is she determined to seem. 

“Scully,” he warns. 

They come together again, fully naked, and now he is cupping the velvety backs of her thighs.

“You said we were being careful.” He panics. “This is not— Scully, I can’t—”

Penetration is too dangerous, he thought they’d both agreed. He whines, locking his knees, scrunching his eyes shut, doing everything in his power to restrain himself. He’s not going to be able to stop it from pushing inside her. Once his body perceives an opportunity to reproduce, he’s learning, it’s not going to give him a choice in the matter.

“It’s okay,” she says, stilling his hips with her hands. “You can’t hurt me.”

He wilts against her, nuzzling her shoulder in relief as she depresses his nervous system. She is the one in control, he remembers; There is nothing to fear. 

She guides his hand to her vulva, and the familiarity of the gesture only serves to highlight how different things are now. She holds his freaky silver penis, working it up and down the way she would a normal one. 

“Don't—” He kicks when her thumb grazes the partially-exposed sphere. “Don’t touch that part.” 

“Sorry.” She kisses him. “Like this?” 

She focuses on the underside, letting her fingers pass over the slippery opening with each stroke. The way she likes her vulva stroked. It feels so good that he wonders if maybe she could be wrong about him not being a hermaphrodite. He knows that thought doesn’t make any scientific sense, but it feels… what? Emasculating, maybe? He’s not sure. But he can’t stop his pelvis from rolling in time with her hand. 

In his pursuit of the unexplained, he has been exposed to the extremes of human experience. There are frontiers of horror and suffering beyond what most people can imagine, beyond what the human nervous system can normally register. But this is the first time he’s ever felt physical pleasure so intense it pushes the boundaries of his reality. 

It pours through him like a solvent, melting his connective tissues into golden light. She is holding him down with nothing but her mind, pinning him to the mattress while she works him with her hand and bows to suck on his collarbone. Her control leaves him in a simultaneous state of acute arousal and limp passivity, as helpless before her as he has ever felt before the forces of darkness. 

“I love you.” She comes up for air, her hair buoyant with static and her face glossed with sweat, grinding her vulva against his thigh. You are mine now, he feels her thinking. 

“Scully,” he tries to warn her. He doesn’t want to get it on her. 

“It’s okay.” She brings their slippery foreheads together. 

Forgetting his hesitation, he pulls her down on top of him, covering his eye socket with the convexity of her shoulder. His chest shudders, his sinuses burning. He curls around her, squeezing her tightly, trying to disappear into her softness, seeking a kind of painless death.

“What’s wrong?” she asks.  

“Nothing,” he says.

She pulls away enough to see his face. “Mulder, you’re weeping.” 

“I do not ‘weep.’” He lets her go and rolls onto his back, brushing the semen from his belly. 

Scully gives the sheets a shake, sending the metallic droplets onto a carpet which has probably seen its fair share of bodily fluids anyway. At least this one will be easy enough to sweep up later. 

“Well, what do you want to call it?” She stretches herself out beside him. 

Scrubbing the tears from his eyes, he nestles his head in the bend of her armpit, where it becomes the side of her breast. “That’s not me,” he murmurs, encircling her waist. “That’s Fox; Fox is just an animal, and can’t be blamed for having certain physical reactions.”

“Fox?” she says. The name sounds so foreign in her mouth.

“Mm-hm.” He closes his eyes, inhaling the scent of her skin. The thing between his legs retracts itself, the gray markings dosing him with drowsy post-orgasm hormones. “Fox has to be your pet,” he reasons, “so that Mulder can be your equal.”

“I see,” she hums into his hair. “Do you think that’s healthy?” 

“No,” he says. “But I’m used to compartmentalizing.”  

“Who keeps foxes as pets anyway?” she asks.

“Russian oligarchs,” he says.

They feign sleep for a few minutes, but he can still sense the humming energy field of her arousal. He sits up, watching his shadow fall across her. One finger reaches to untwist the delicate chain and recenter her cross. 

“Part of you secretly likes this,” he accuses. “Having all this power over me. It turns you on.”

“What?” she scoffs. 

“Maybe you don’t even fully realize it,” he says, still playing with her necklace. “It’s ego-dystonic, like a lot of sexual interests. You feel guilty about it. You won’t admit it even to yourself.” 

“Excuse me?” She laughs. “Are you profiling me right now?”

He sits back on his heels. “I’m psychic, remember? I can tell how turned on you are.” 

“Couldn’t have anything to do with what we’ve been up to for the past half hour?” She presses her lips together. 

He nudges her legs open with his knee, positioning himself between them. “I’m not saying it qualifies as a paraphilia.”

“Oh my God.” She props herself on a pillow, glaring down her torso at him. “Mulder, I am not one of your serial killers. You know, not all sexual motivations belong in the DSM.” 

“I get it.” He searches her eyes. “It is about possessing me and controlling me, but not in a sadistic way. You want me to enjoy it.” 

He slides his hands under her butt, squeezing her flesh. Her knees bend, giving him greater access, and he sweeps his thumb over her labia, listening to her breathe through her nose. 

“When I talked about being your ‘pet,’” he says, “that was when your arousal spiked. That was the image that appealed to you.” 

He frowns at the triangle of white contour sheet between her thighs. “I always assumed the opposite,” he says softly. “I thought my defiance attracted you. I was afraid this submissiveness, which I can’t help, might make me repulsive to you.”

He lowers himself, resting his cheek on her warm belly. “But you like it,” he says.  

She doesn’t bother to deny it this time. There’s nothing she can say that won’t incriminate her further. 

All this talk of power is a bit exotic. Neither of them is naive, exactly, but their knowledge of such things is mostly theoretical. Worse, it’s forensic. 

He drags the tip of his nose down her belly, coming to rest in her bronze pubic hair. 

“Have you ever done this before?” she asks him.

“Not exactly,” he admits. He kisses the inside of her thigh. “Have you ever had someone do it for you?”

“What do you think?” she asks.

The taste surprises him; But then, his tastebuds have changed. Just like his color vision, he doesn’t have a normal baseline to compare it to. 

“Ah-!” She flinches. “Remember, your tongue is also super strong.” She laughs. 

“Sorry.” He pulls back, losing some of his courage. 

This is not straightforward. He presses his face to her belly again, trying to feel what she’s feeling. 

A weekend trip to Assateague Island. Wild horses on the beach, a rotting pier, her legs dangling in the ocean, sharp barnacles under her hands. Plaid skirts and white knee socks. Rinsing sand out of the crotch of her swimsuit. Someone’s older brother buying them liquor. Getting drunk in the parking lot and making it back to bed before the nuns know they were gone. Watching the door while she touches herself under the covers. Reading great tomes at breakfast so that people will know she’s serious. Her youthful ego and her gothic imagination. 

He feels her heartbeat on his tongue. She grabs his head, pushing him deeper, until her orgasm sparkles across his mind, and it’s like drowning in champagne.

“I love you,” he says, because apparently that’s something they say now. It still makes him painfully self conscious, but she said it earlier, and he doesn’t want to create an asymmetry. And anyway, it’s the Truth.

Chapter Text

Mulder wakes up to find Scully showering, the curtain’s shadow wafting in the trapezoid of light created by the open bathroom door. The sound of running water competes with the roar of cicadas. 

He stretches his warm bones under the covers until the urge to pee forces him out of bed. Before, the abrupt change in altitude might have given him a headrush, but not now; Now, his body just works. All the parts fit together with precision-tooled smoothness, and all the minor aches and pains of being over thirty are gone.

With an indecisive hand around the door jamb, he watches Scully’s silhouette behind the frosted plastic curtain. Sure, she’s saved his life countless times and she’s the mother of his child, but he doesn’t know if they’re at the point where he can casually pee next to her yet.

“What time is it?” he asks, by way of announcing his presence.

“Early,” she says. “I thought you’d still be asleep.”

“Maybe I only need the extra sleep when I’m injured,” he speculates, putting the toilet seat up and deciding to get it over with. The steam opens his sinuses and he breathes in relief.

“Scully?” he asks, feeling a spike of distress that isn’t his.

When she doesn’t respond, he closes the lid and goes to peek behind the curtain. Scully has her red face turned into the stream, her features scrunching as she silently cries.

There’s enough hot water in the tank for several motel rooms, and she’s already been under it long enough for her fingers to prune. The muscles of her back are pinched, one hand splayed against the tile and the other fisted at her side. She turns around. Her skin is boiled red, sharpening the mineral blue of her eyes.

“Tell me you’re him,” she says. 

Mulder climbs into the cubicle with her and she flattens herself against the wall. Now that she’s caught, she cries openly. 

The spray falls between them, wetting his feet and shins. Her nakedness is mesmerizing to him, but he restrains himself from touching her, driving his short nails into his palms.

“I need to hear you say it.” She puts her hands on his chest. “I shouldn’t have to do all the convincing.”

He tucks his chin against her touch and peers down into the ravine between their bodies, their feet dividing the water at the bottom. Hers are so elfin and pink next to his. The fine gold hairs she has no reason to shave anymore make her legs glow. 

“What if I was never actually him?” Mulder says. “What if he was just a character I invented to feel like I had some control over my life?”  

Scully shakes her head. “Wrong answer.” 

He steps under the spray, enfolding her as she cries harder. It shouldn’t be so difficult to give her the answer she wants. Her diaphragm contracts, shaking her whole frame as his arms gently stabilize her. 

He still hasn’t cried for their son or for the world, and he wonders if she’s holding that against him now. He did cry last night, while they were having sex, so they both know he’s physically capable of it.  

“I was just thinking about Bill, and Charlie, and my Mom.” She catches her breath. “And what’s probably happened to them, and how I’ll probably never see them again.” 

His throat bobs and he rests his chin on her head. Her wet skin smells so good. Touching her like this reduces him to animal muteness, but he wouldn’t know what to say anyway. The real Fox Mulder never shut up; Until it really mattered, and then he shut up completely. In that sense, he hasn’t changed one bit. 

“I can’t lose you, too,” she says. “But I feel pathetic insisting that it’s really you in there, just because I need it to be. I want you to volunteer that it’s you.”

He presses the backs of his teeth with his tongue, but they still won’t open. 

“I want you to want to be you,” she says. “And by that, I don’t mean a reflexively contrarian asshole.” She laughs and pulls away, her slippery hands following the contours of his arms. “I’ve always seen through that, you dummy. I always knew it was just a defensive attitude you’d adopted, because of the way life had treated you. It’s not the sum total of who you are.”

They sway together under the water, the mood shifting from mournful to ambiguously erotic. 

“It is me,” he admits. “Maybe I’m just realizing I don’t like myself that much.”

He puts his arms around her shoulders, peeling the filigree of her wet hair away from her neck. Prismatic soap bubbles cling to her hairline like she gave up halfway through shampooing. He wishes he could show her the way light bends and vaults through his new eyes, enchanting his world with auroras and rainbows. She is more beautiful to him now than ever before, and not just because he’s relentlessly horny. 

“I have been selfish, inconsiderate. Callous, even,” he says. “I guess I thought that was okay when it was all in the service of some great cause. But knowing what I know now… I wish I’d hung up on you less. And jumped on fewer moving trains.” 

She cranes to kiss him, closing the distance between them. His markings seem to sing under her fingertips like the wetted rim of a drinking glass. She cups his pubic bone, making the muscles inside him twitch. 

“Again?” He panics. “Already?”

“It’s the end of the world!” she insists.

He licks the faintly chlorinated water from his lips. “Fair enough,” he says.

They kiss again and she teases him open with one hand while holding his hip with the other. He can sense her squashing her hesitation in order to touch his genitals. He’s not picking up any disgust from her, but there is a degree of uncertainty. 

“It’s okay,” he breathes. “It’s okay for you to admit it freaks you out. You’re not going to break my heart or anything.”

“Honestly?“ she rumbles softly. “A lot of heterosexual women find them somewhat comical-looking to begin with. It doesn’t really detract from your appeal.”

“Oh yeah?” He dares to cup her breasts. “Would you go so far as to say… I’ve still got it?”

She squeezes his hips, stroking her thumbs over the sensitive stripes that lead down to his groin. 

“It?” She wiggles her eyebrows.

“I mean, I think of myself as being kind of, you know. Handsome, I guess?” His face heats. “People say that. Women have said that to me. Shut up.”

“I didn’t say anything,” Scully giggles.

“Aw, come on. I’m not delusional about that, too, am I?” he asks. 

“Not at all,” she says. “If anything, I’d say it’s possible you underrate yourself. I’ve seen women hit on you.” She grins broadly, massaging him to full arousal. “You always get so shy.”

The gray flesh becomes engorged, making him awkward on his feet as the sensation covers his inner thighs. Trying to keep up, he kneads her vulva with the heel of his palm and gradually works a finger inside her. 

It usually takes her a while to loosen up, which might have made him self conscious if she were anyone else. But with her, he’s come to really enjoy the long foreplay. She never makes him feel like he’s boring her, or like he’s a total drip for just wanting to kiss. (Phoebe wasn’t the most felicitous choice of first sex partner, leaving him with several things he’s needed to unlearn.)

He brings his forehead to Scully’s shoulder, flinching as she skims the outside of his hidden opening. Emboldened by his reaction, she slips a finger inside him to match the one he already has in her. Mulder actually yelps. 

“Yea or Nay?” She starts to withdraw.

“Holy shit,” he laughs, overwhelmed and increasingly punchy. He sags, still resting his head on her shoulder. “I thought we’d already established that it wasn’t what it looked like.”

“It’s not,” she says. The finger moves, making him squirm on his feet. “It’s a blind cavity. You don’t have a uterus. And the interior is smooth, lacking any of the characteristic ridges. It’s not even the same shape as—”

“Then why does it feel like that?” His voice cracks.

The absurdity of it shakes another laugh from him. They are in the habit of talking a lot during sex, but they’ve never had a conversation quite like this.  

“Well,” she says. Her moistened finger forms an illustrative crook. “The so-called G-spot is really just stimulating the roots of the clitoris. The anterior wall of your, um. Orifice. Could be similarly innervated by the base of the penis. It makes sense.”

She withdraws, cupping the pearly gray inside of his thigh. He can feel his own clear mucus on her fingers. 

“So I don’t have a prostate, but I do have…” He mashes his burning face into her neck. “You’ve gotta be fucking kidding me,” he says.

Scully shrugs. “When God closes a door, He opens a window.”

They hold each other still for a moment, unsure of how to proceed from here. She tilts her head back, rinsing the suds from her hair, and he bows to nibble on her neck. The hot water feels so good on his sensitized skin. His penis slides between them and she pushes her finger inside him again.

“Do you like it?” she asks. 

“I don’t know,” he says.

“Do you want me to stop?” She pulls in and out, holding the small of his back for leverage. 

“I don’t know,” he says. 

His thighs are trembling. He groans in her ear as she curls her finger, stimulating the base of his penis from the inside.

“I like being able to do something for you that you’ve done for me,” she says. “It feels right. Is that strange?”

He tries to put aside the thought that being penetrated is somehow degrading. It’s not when he does it to her; He would sooner die than think of her that way. Still, maybe she’s right that porn is bad for his psyche. 

“Mmmff—” He presses her against the wall. 

She adds a second finger, straining to maintain her pace under his weight. He comes on her belly. Chemicals bloom in his bloodstream, making him sway in place.

“Sorry,” he gasps. 

He reels back, watching the mirrored droplets rinse away into the drain. His penis retracts itself. 

“I should have warned you,” he says hoarsely. “I don’t mean to be gross.” 

She turns off the water before it can go cold on them and hugs him. “I think it bothers you more than it bothers me,” she says.

Stepping backwards out of the cubicle, he finds himself grabbing a towel off the rack and throwing it around her shoulders. 

Good boy, he feels her thinking. Arousal blunts her inhibitions, letting her grind herself against him as she wrings out her hair. 

She makes him grab a second towel to dry himself, controlling him just because it excites her. Obedience turns his muscles slippery and tingly. His arms scoop her up by the backs of her thighs and he carries her into the bedroom, kissing her all the way to the bed.

“I can see what you’re thinking,” he says, as soon as his mouth is free. “You can’t ignore it, now that I’ve pointed it out.”

She lies back, making him curl up beside her. Their damp hair soaks the pillows.

“What?” His grave tone makes her giggle. 

“You imagine us walking into the bedroom,” he narrates. “You call me ‘Fox,’ and it’s like a code word. I feel myself change when you say it.”

She brings his hand to her clitoris, rocking slightly on her side. 

“You sit on the edge of the bed and you open your legs,” he says. “You tell me to get down on my hands and knees, and I put up some token resistance. You like that. You like that I’m kind of embarrassed and frustrated. You lie back and make me crawl between your legs and I go down on you like that.”

“You’re making this up,” she says.

“No I’m not,” he says. “You’re picturing it.”

“Well, I am now,” she scoffs.

“I did say it wasn’t sadistic,” he diagnoses, ignoring her thin denials. “If I were in any real pain, that would kill the mood for you. But you do like the idea of toying with me.” 

Her breath quickens and she rolls on top of him, guiding his fingers inside her. “Is that what you want?” she asks. She clenches around his fingers, already close to coming from all this talk. 

“No, I’m saying it’s what you want,” he says. 

“Shhh.” She touches the bow of his lips. “Don’t speak. You’re being my pet now, okay?”

He tries to say I told you so, but finds his mouth is occupied with sucking on her nipple.

“Good boy,” she says.

The melding warmth of her skin is excruciating. He doesn’t know what to do with it. There’s nothing he can do but endure it. 

Loops of damp hair stick to her forehead as she rolls her hips on top of him, her skin glowing like molten iron. It isn’t long before she sinks back into to the mattress, the incandescence leaving her, her body seeming to cool and resolidify.  

“You actually said that out loud,” he marvels. “I didn’t know you had it in you, Scully.”

“Neither did I.” She looks at the ceiling. “I’m sorry,” she pants. “Was that over the line?”

He shrugs with his arms around her. “Eh. Don’t worry about it.”

“I can’t tell if you liked it,” she says. “Or if I was just projecting that onto you.” 

The wet pillowcase is cool under his cheek. 

“I don’t think I’m otherwise inclined to be sexually submissive,” he says. “It doesn’t really do it for me, but it doesn’t ruin it for me either.”

She laces her hands over his chest to make a scaffold for her chin and he stretches underneath her until his metallic vertebrae click. 

“I just want to be with you.” He peers at her through his eyelashes. “I’m not that picky about how.” 

The puff of her breath on his collarbone makes him shiver. He wonders what time it is. It must be early still, because there’s no light peaking through the blinds.

She’s smiling so hard it looks like she might burst into tears again. 

“Does it feel pretty good in there?” she asks him.

“Oh, yeah.” He shifts beneath her, noticing himself. “I mean it’s— There’s no avoiding it: It’s just so damn comfortable.”

“Does it ever hurt?” she asks.

“I still feel pain if I’m injured,” he says. “But other than that, it’s pretty cush.”

“I’m glad,” she says.

His heart squeezes pleasantly when he senses her admiring his body. Her dangling cross draws figure eights on his chest.

“It’s so strange,” she mumbles. “It’s like seeing a dream made manifest.”

“What do you mean?” he asks.

“I used to look at you and think the barrier between your soul and the world was too thin.” She cuddles him and closes her eyes, listening to his heartbeat. “I wished I could somehow put armor around you with my thoughts. It’s like the answer to all my prayers for you. Prayers to keep you safe, to give you strength. To bring you all the pleasure and comfort I knew you’d never seek out for yourself.”

Mulder lies back and watches Scully getting dressed, covering his face with a pillow and groaning in exaggerated anguish when she opens the blinds and floods the room with light. The sounds of tinkling spoons and running water lull him until the smell of coffee draws him out of bed again and she throws a ball of underwear and sweatpants at his head.

Pulling them on, he takes a seat at the table and watches her fill the two enamel camping mugs with coffee before replacing the glass carafe on the burner and sitting down across from him. She’s wearing an oversized Duke Basketball t-shirt purloined from the Super Walmart, which he guesses is her sense of humor; She knows only enough about college basketball to remember which teams he vocally despises.

Mulder watches her breakfast on beef jerky and dried apricots, content to sip his coffee. The stained beige carpet is arrayed with guns and ammo and cans of gasoline, but they still haven’t made any concrete plans for the day. 

“You’re not eating enough,” Scully observes. “You already look like you’ve lost weight.”

He hunches to protect his coffee, suddenly aware of his shirtlessness. 

“Come on, it’s been— what? Days?” he scoffs. “That’s not possible.”

“Yes, it is.” She chews. “If you’re way stronger and way faster, that means you’re burning way more calories. Even you are not exempt from the laws of thermodynamics.”

“Maybe I’m photosynthesizing,” he says.

She shoves the jerky under his nose. “Mulder, fuck you. Eat food.” 

He takes the plastic envelope and plucks out the packet of silica gel. “I don’t feel like it,” he says, flicking it at her like a paper football.

She frowns at him. Maybe he is looking a little thinner in the light of day. 

“Don’t you feel hungry?” she asks.

“Yes,” he admits. “Constantly.”

“Well, you should listen to your body,” she says.

He leans back in his chair and holds his mug in front of him. “Why?” he retorts. “It doesn’t listen to me.”

“Mul-der,” she sighs. 

“Scuh-lly,” he mocks. 

She gets up and grabs him a plain gray t-shirt from the pile, just for an excuse to pace the room. When she returns, she sits back down and takes a composing sip of her coffee.

“Why are you being like this?” she asks him.

“I don’t know,” he says honestly. 

He puts the shirt on, consulting the bracing emptiness in his stomach.

“I’ve studied enough psychology to think a lot of it is bunk,” he says. “But one of its central insights, which I do find valuable, is that our motivations are not always transparent to us.” 

“Oh, brother,” says Scully.

“If I were to try and analyze myself right now,” says Mulder, “I’d say maybe I’m sublimating my frustration and resentment into not eating. Anorexia, for instance, is all about asserting control when you feel like you have none.” 

Scully peels an apricot in two, placing one velvety half on her tongue. There’s a joke in here somewhere about how he’d rather be eating her, but he can’t quite join the dots. Chalk it up to low blood sugar.

“Do you resent me?” she asks him. 

“Not consciously.” He shrugs. 

She slides a two pound jar of fancy whole cashews across the table. 

“Eat,” she says. “Nuts are nutritious and calorie dense. That’s over five thousand calories right there.” 

“The whole thing?” He unscrews the plastic lid and peels off the foil-backed paper seal, releasing a puff of cashew dust. 

“We’ll see what you can keep down,” she threatens. She throws the packet of apricots at him. “And a couple of these,” she says. “You need Vitamin C.”

Wary of the prospect of being force fed, he brings the lip of the container to his mouth and shakes some of the cashews out like he’s drinking them. The powered salt sparkles on his tongue to remind him how painfully hungry he is.

Scully throws up her hands. “And here I was thinking, this is great,” she says. “We finally got you in a nice Mulderproof container that’s really, really hard to destroy. You know, like babyproofing a house.” 

He puts extra spite into chewing the apricots.

“But there’s no point,” she rants. “Is there? I bet you were the kid who actually figured out how to get the plastic cap off the electrical socket so you could stick a fork in it.”

“I was just joking.” He talks with his mouth full. “I’m not really going to develop anorexia. You don’t have to freak out.” 

She goes back to drinking her coffee in silence.

The thought of putting away two pounds of cashews for breakfast makes him ill, until he looks up to realize he’s done just that. Of course, increased hunger is a necessary concomitant of his increased energy needs, and having several of his organs deleted provides more room for a larger stomach. It makes sense, as Scully would say. Which doesn’t make it any less disturbing.

Satisfied for now, he gets up and starts poking through their supplies. His walking fingers settle on a pack of white Nike crew socks and he tears open the cellophane wrapper, flopping down on the edge of the mattress to pull them on his feet.

“You know, people always said I’d end up alone somewhere, surrounded by canned food and ammunition,” he says. “But they were so wrong. I actually managed to rope a girl into it with me.”

From his collection of Jordans, all lined up against the wall, he selects the Retro Carolina Blue. 

Scully empties the carafe into her coffee mug and sits with one leg folded under her, drinking and staring out the window. The letting down of the pine began in the night, covering the parking lot in a fine layer of fluorescent yellow pollen. It’s not raining, but there are rolls of thunder in the distance.

“Gin Rummy?” Mulder asks her, grabbing the deck of cards from the nightstand. “We can play for ginger snaps.”

She falls still, training her ears on the sounds of distant machine gun fire. 

“Mulder, what if we’re not the only ones who want to get inside the base?” she asks. 

Their eyes meet. Scully jumps up and puts on her sneakers and Mulder straps on his Glock and hands over her holster and in seconds they are out the door and pulling the Orthia out of the dirt driveway. The Pepsi-blue paint job is green with pollen that turns their hands highlighter yellow. It streaks around them like the colored smoke inside a wind tunnel, marking their path through the forest. 

As they reach the edge of the Fort Bragg complex, they find that the barbed wire fence around Training Field Seven has been flattened, blocking their way. The sounds of combat are much closer now, smoke rolling towards them over the horizon. The sky is filled with fleeing birds as the ground shakes with artillery explosions. 

When they climb out of the car, Mulder can smell the propellant. Scully draws her gun and he falls into step close beside her. Leaving the Orthia parked behind some trees, they make their way around the perimeter of the training field under cover of the dense pinewoods. Sheets of yellow pollen hang in the air like fairy dust, quickly coating their skin and clothes.

Positioning themselves behind a wild winterberry bush, they crouch down and try to get a better view of what’s happening. Soon, sweat mixes with the pollen on their skin to form an itchy yellow crust.

“It’s them.” Mulder freezes. “They’re here.”

“Who’s here?” Scully shouts over the noise. “I can’t see anything through the smoke. Can you?”

He puts his mouth to her ear. “Get on my back,” he says. 

He can see her lips form the word ‘What?’ 

“Trust me!” he yells, tossing her over his shoulders. 

She clings to him, wrapping her legs around his waist as he climbs one of the tallest pine trees, cursing and keeping her grip on her gun. After testing its sturdiness, he sets her down on one of the branches. From up here, they can see the battlefield through a screen of green needles. 

“What the hell are you doing?” She hugs the trunk, her legs dangling about two hundred feet off the ground. 

“Look.” Mulder keeps their faces close so he can talk directly into her ear. “Don’t move around too much; They might spot us.”  

Below them, a company of soldiers is locked in combat with what looks like a small group of unarmed civilians. One man is taken out by an exploding shell, but his companions continue to advance, undeterred. 

“Oh my God,” Scully mouths.

A man and a woman who look like college students flip over an armored vehicle and kill the soldiers scrambling to escape it with their bare hands. The shelled man lurches to his feet, unbelievably still alive, and calmly holds his intestines in place with one hand while beating a soldier to death with the other. His face and scalp are falling away in blackened flakes, revealing a section of metallic skull.

“Looks like the alliance is over. No surprise there.” Mulder finds himself squeezing her upper arm. 

It’s hard to imagine his own body being capable of such feats of endurance. The shelled man trips over his own intestine, round after round of artillery grinding him into hamburger meat as he continues to lumber forward. 

“Kind of hard to root for either side here,” he muses. “But I’d say the army’s winning.”

“For now,” says Scully, closing her eyes against vertigo. “But it’s a long game. They’re designed to multiply. They’ll be back.” 

Hearing footsteps, Mulder looks down to see a fluorescent yellow woman approaching the base of the tree. She tilts her head back at a ninety degree angle, her black eyes standing out from her pollen caked face. She looks like she’s been standing still under the pine trees all night, lying in wait. No one could stand so still of their own volition. 

“Dana Scully,” she says flatly. “You shouldn’t have come here. If you’d stayed far away from this place, you might have survived. We might not have bothered to seek you out.” 

“Wow,” Scully calls down. “How magnanimous.”

Her tone is cool, but Mulder can feel her pulse hammering through her back. 

“We don’t hold pointless grudges,” the woman is saying. “It’s your continued interference that’s the problem. You’ve given us no choice but to eliminate you.”

She takes a step and Mulder jumps from the high branches without thinking, landing painfully on top of her. He pins her wrists and she bites him on the nose. The cartilage crunches, filling his sinuses with blood, and he lets her go to clutch his face.

“Mulder!” Scully yells, clinging alone to the trunk.

The woman laces her hands together, using them like a mace to pummel his curved back. Blood spurts from his nose onto the powered yellow ground.

“Scully!” he calls up to her. “Get ready to take the shot!”

Still bent over, he headbutts the woman in the chest. He’s much bigger than she is, which should make it easy to keep her pinned, but she keeps biting him. Mulder wonders why their teeth aren’t metal like Jaws from Moonraker, before remembering that they’re supposed to look normal. 

He hooks his arm around her waist and mashes her face into the dirt, trying to give Scully a clear shot. His hands leave streaks in the pollen, revealing the color of her skin. She seems young.

It’s going to be okay, he thinks, hoping she can hear him. It’s going to be over soon.

The shot is a few inches wide, striking the ground next to them with an explosion of dry pine needles. 

“Closer,” says Mulder. “Don’t worry about hitting me.”

Scully starts climbing down, still gripping her gun. She takes aim, ready to try again, but the woman slips free and Mulder lunges after her.

“What are you doing?” Scully yells. “Let her go!” The lowest branch is about twenty-five feet off the ground, a significant but not impossible jump for her. 

“We have to help her!” he calls over his shoulder. 

The fluorescent woman is well camouflaged against the pollen covered woods, but Mulder’s eyes are very sharp. He draws his gun, but he can’t get a clear line of sight through the trees. She’s leading him away from the training field and back towards the road. 

With the advantage of a longer stride, he easily overtakes her. He’s prepared for her to go for the weapon, but to his surprise, she reaches the edge of treeline and freezes. 

The black film peels away from her eyes and she stands there screaming at the top of her lungs. Mulder takes a step towards her and she bares her teeth, already pink with his blood. He levels his gun at her and she starts slamming her head against the nearest tree. 

“Do it!” she says. “Do it now!”

“Okay.” He approaches her with his left hand outstretched and wraps his arms around her as she spits and thrashes. She looks at him with terrified brown eyes and he presses the barrel against the back of her neck. 

“It’s okay,” he says, petting her hair as he pulls the trigger. The black fluid runs over his knuckles and she falls limp in his grasp. He lowers her to the forest floor as she makes her last gurgles in his ear. 

There’s a Humvee coming up the road. He stays still on the ground, but it’s too late: They’ve already noticed his presence. Two soldiers climb out of the back seat, carrying machine guns. 

Psychically pleading with Scully to stay where she is, Mulder rushes them before they have the chance to fire at him. He slams one of them against the side of the vehicle to feel body armor and bones crunching under him, and when he lets go, the Kevlar laminated carapace is caved into the man’s chest. He didn’t mean to use so much force, but his adrenaline is high, and with it, the killer instinct that’s designed to keep him alive.

The second man tries to lift his gun and Mulder grabs for it, spraying the bullets in a chaotic Z. A few nail Mulder in the leg, knocking his feet out from under him, and the man clubs him with the heavy gun, trying to keep him down. 

“Back of the head!” the driver of the Humvee is yelling. He gets out of the vehicle holding what looks like some sort of high tech grenade. 

The second man tries to aim for Mulder’s neck, but his weapon is unwieldy at such close range. Mulder decapitates him, pulling his head from his body with no more difficulty than popping a stubborn champagne cork and he crumples, splashing the pavement with blood.

The driver arms the grenade and throws himself on Mulder’s back. He’s a large man, about Mulder’s height and wider, but his weight is insignificant, and Mulder is easily able to throw him off. He lands on the ground like a capsized turtle, his heavy backpack beneath him, the device still beeping in his hand. 

It detonates, obliterating the men and pushing their Humvee off the road. Mulder feels the ground disappear and reappear, the back of his skull hitting the pavement with a metallic zap of neuroelectricity. His ears are ringing for what feels like minutes. He tries to move, but pain and nausea keep him on his back. 

After a while, he tucks his chin and tries to get a look at himself. His hands are sticky with a mixture of blood and pollen and his skin feels sunburned from the heat of the blast. The mess of gore and fabric confuses him until he spots the silver joist protruding from the bottom of his rib cage and realizes that the pinkish lobe flexing behind it is his lung. Some of the pieces of metal sticking out of him are shrapnel and some of them are his bones. He puts a hand to his chest to feel his heart pounding. Breathing is painful, but he can still do it. 

He’s not sure if he lost consciousness or just closed his eyes for a minute, but when Mulder opens them again, Scully is looming above him, the yellow pollen settling into the creases of her face. 

At first, he can’t understand what she’s saying. It stings when she touches his arm, the burnt skin already flaking away. She takes off her Duke Basketball t-shirt and stuffs it into the cavity below his rib cage. All he hears are ocean sounds, but he can sense her intentions. She takes his hand, instructing him to apply pressure. When she leaves his side, he understands that she is going to get the car.

He lies there for about ten minutes holding the t-shirt, fluid draining from his ruptured eardrums. Each breath produces an awful sucking sensation. The wound feels like a hot knife sliding between his diaphragm and his right lung. 

Scully pulls up in the Orthia and jumps out to crouch beside him again. She hooks her hands under his arms to try and drag him across the pavement and he can feel her pleading with his heavy body to cooperate. To her credit, she manages to wheelbarrow his top half onto the floor behind the driver’s seat.

Mulder can feel his throat vibrating with sounds of pain, but he can’t hear his own voice. Getting his good leg under him, he pushes against the ground enough to help Scully lift him into the back seat and bends his knees so she can close the door.

The drive back to Bonnie Doone keeps jolting him awake as his consciousness slips. His sinuses burn with acid and metal. The car doors open and Scully pushes on his back to roll him into a sitting position. He leans forward and vomits onto the ground. 

She appears in front of him, mouthing his name, and hauls him out of the back seat, standing him up on his good leg and letting him lean on her so he can hop across the concrete strip into the motel room. She leads him into the shower stall, and brings him a chair so he can sit down, and turns on the spray, her mouth moving all along. Her voice sounds like it’s coming from deep under water.

Mulder fades in and out of consciousness as she strips and washes him, watching the rivulets of blood and pollen and dirt spiraling down the drain. Her fingers soothe his scalp, his temple resting on her soft belly. 

The next thing he remembers, he’s lying on the bed with towels under him, and Scully is prying shards of metal from his body. Her trembling fingers are dark with his blood. His ears have repressurized, the membranes of his eardrums healed enough to hear himself gasp. 

She packs the largest wound with petroleum jelly and applies a pad of cotton gauze which she tapes over with adhesive bandages. Every breath stabs him under his ribs.

“Hurts, Scully,” he slurs. “It hurts.” The sound of his own voice tells him he’s delirious.

“I know.” Scully rubs his arm. “I know it does.”

“Hurts— when I breathe,” he says.

“Your lung was punctured,” she explains.

She touches his forehead, drawing a doglike whine. Her face is a mask of false calm. 

“It’s okay,” she says. “You’re going to be okay. Just relax and let the healing work.”

A wave of nausea clenches his stomach muscles and jams his diaphragm upward into his thorax. He tries to pull her down on top of him, to blot out his suffering self with her.

“Mulder, wait.” She braces her hand on the mattress, resisting his attempts to hold her. “You’ll aggravate the wound.”

“Nnnnnnn—” he pleads with her. 

He takes her hand and tries to place it over his collarbone, and she seems to get the idea.

“Does this help?” she asks, massaging him there. 

He closes his eyes and tilts his head, stroking his lips against the backs of her knuckles. His stomach muscles relax and he tries to deepen his strained breaths.  

“It releases endorphins that mask the pain,” she surmises. 

“Mmmnn.” He nods against her hand.  

She sits down on the edge of the mattress and he rolls onto his left side, by way of asking her to stroke his back. Chemical bliss hits his system and he sinks into the darkness, shifting weakly against the texture of the towels.

After a few minutes, Scully brings her legs up and stretches out beside him, still petting his spine. She’s wearing underwear and a camisole, and he’s wearing nothing. 

“Jesus, Mulder,” she says, in a tone that suggests she thinks he’s asleep. “What did you get yourself into?”

“I got blown up—” he wheezes. “With a grenade.” 

“Why did you have to chase after that girl?” she asks.

“I freed her, Scully,” he smiles. “It was worth it.”

The hand on his back gets tired and she swaps it for the other one. 

“I hate to see you in pain like this,” she murmurs. 

It’s easier for her to let go of doctor mode, now that his back is turned. He gets the sense that the sight of his exposed viscera must have made a terrible impression on her. 

“Tis but a scratch,” he says. 

“I swear.” She hiccups a laugh. “With your last breath, you’re gonna be doing some stupid bit.”

“That’s the idea,” he says.

She puts both hands on his scapula and kisses his spine. Her mind washes over him like the ocean. The scar on his shoulder from where she once shot him is gone, along with all the others he’d accumulated. He wants to tell her it’s the only one he sort of misses, but he’s afraid she wouldn’t take that the right way. 

“Hey, Scully,” he says instead. “It feels so good when you touch me.” He chuckles and winces. “I’m not being romantic or anything; I mean literally, every time you touch me it causes me immense physical pleasure.”

“Well, that’s good to know.” She shuffles closer, pressing her cheek against his back. “But don’t try to tell me you’re feeling better already.” 

Mulder opens his eyes. It’s afternoon, the sun slitted through the vertical blinds. He knows sleep will heal him, but his thoughts are racing. He just took a grenade.

“I feel… invincible,” he says. 

“Now, that worries me,” she rumbles.

He flexes his hands. His postnasal drip still tastes like blood. He cracks a slow smile.

“They fucked up, Scully,” he tells her. “They gave me their strength. They fucked up.” 

Mulder sleeps until the following afternoon and wakes to find Scully checking his bandages. The wound has closed, leaving a rough triangle of shiny pink skin, but there’s still enough internal damage to make movement painful. She flutters back and forth, helping him to the toilet so he can pee sitting down and putting on coffee and bringing him fresh clothes. A part of her just doesn’t buy that he can recover so quickly from such a severe physical trauma, even though it’s happening right in front of her.

Shaved and dressed in his new uniform of plain t-shirt and sweatpants, Mulder lowers himself into the chair farthest from the window and watches Scully distribute the coffee. They eat sardines on water crackers with little packets of hot sauce for interest, and afterwards they play Gin Rummy for ginger snaps.

“Hang on,” Scully is saying. “How is it not cheating that you can read my mind?”

Mulder doesn’t answer her at first, absorbed with trying to discard strategically. 

“I can’t see your hand,” he says. “It doesn’t work that way.”

She draws, dubious. “Then how does it work?”

He rearranges his diamonds, waiting for her to discard. 

“I get feelings, sense impressions,” he says. “But they have to be strong feelings. If this were a high-stakes game, and you were really sweating, I’d be able to tell.” He collapses his hand to focus on her. “Sometimes I get more, like words or images. Especially if you’re directing them at me.” 

“Can you see this?” she sends him an image of himself, as he is sitting across from her now. He runs a hand over his hair when he realizes it’s sticking up, and she snorts in delight. 

“That’s not really what I look like,” he says. “You’re making me look like a dope.” 

Scully lowers her cards and pops a ginger snap into her mouth. “That’s Gin,” she says. “And you are a dope.”

Mulder pushes his losing hand towards her. “Your deal.”  

He feels the spike of fear in her chest when there’s a knock at the door. 

They reach for their guns. Scully peers between the vertical blinds without disturbing the slats and looks back at him, widening her eyes in significance. The image of a black SUV parked in the driveway appears before his mind.

Ignoring the twinge in his leg, Mulder walks up to the door and looks through the peephole. Then he opens the door, stands at the threshold for a moment, closes it in Krycek’s face, and sits back down at the table.

Krycek knocks again. “Mulder!” he calls through the door a few times, before realizing he can just open it.

He’s casually dressed, in a leather jacket and blue jeans, clean shaven, his hair recently washed. However he’s survived, he certainly doesn’t look like he’s been roughing it on his own. 

“I come in peace,” he says, stepping into the room with his hands in the air. “You’re not going to need those guns.” 

“You’re right; I’m not.” Mulder clicks on the safety and puts his Glock down on the table before grabbing Krycek by the throat and holding him up against the inside of the door.

“You’re not going to want to kill me when you find out what I have to say,” Krycek chokes. 

His throat feels so soft in Mulder’s grip. It would be nothing to crush it into a paste.

“Mulder, put him down,” says Scully.

“Of course you’re still alive, you cockroach,” Mulder growls. “Why am I at all surprised?”

Their noses are almost touching. Krycek’s mind is dilated like a camera lens, taking him in with awe and fear. He already knows what Mulder is.

“I want to know what he knows.” Scully appears beside them. “I want to know who sent him. Put him down.”

Krycek stumbles, holding his throat, striped red from Mulder’s fingers, and Scully grabs him by the arm. 

“Sit,” she orders, throwing him into a chair. “Talk.” 

He catches his breath, squeezing his eyes shut and opening them again. Tiny veins in his sclera have burst, tinting them pink.

“We caught you on camera outside the base,” he says to Mulder’s knees. “We realized you’d been activated.” 

“Who’s ‘We’?” Mulder stands at Scully’s elbow. 

The word ‘activated’ strikes him disagreeably. He curls his toes against the carpet, trying to reign himself in. The sensation is so detailed, he can almost count the loops of nylon pile under his feet.

Krycek swallows his fear and looks Mulder in the face. “Why is he like this?” he asks Scully. “Why isn’t he like the others? That’s what we want to know.”

“Who is ‘We’?” Mulder insists.

“You know, ‘Us,’” says Krycek. “‘Them.’ Whatever.”

“The shadow government?” Mulder clarifies.

“Sure.” Krycek rests his prosthetic arm on the table. “If you wanna flatter them.”

Tired of standing on his sore leg, Mulder grabs the chair closest to the window and takes a sip of his now-lukewarm coffee. To his annoyance, he realizes Scully is maintaining a light pressure on him, as if he can’t be trusted to interrogate Krycek without turning violent. What’s even more annoying is that she might be correct.

He props his elbows on the armrests and leans back, trying to take some of the stress off his internal injuries. 

“So what do you want?” he asks.

“Me?” Krycek laughs miserably. “I just don’t want to die.” He scrubs his flesh hand over his mouth. “Is that too ambitious?”

Mulder studies him, clicking his nails against the side of the enamel cup. 

“I see: You’re their canary,” he concludes. “They figure either I’m like the others, and I’ll kill you on sight— No great loss to Them. Or somehow I’m still me, and maybe you can get some information out of me— Giving you a chance to redeem yourself to Them. Gee, seems like it’s in my best interest to just kill you.”

“You’re not going kill me,” Krycek rasps, struggling to project confidence while he recovers from being manhandled. “When I tell you what they’re offering you, you’re going to get in my car with me, and we’re all going to drive back to Fort Bragg.”

“You know I’m psychic, right?” Mulder asks. “You’re trying to act like you have leverage, but I can tell you’re pissing your pants right now.” 

Krycek fidgets. “Like I said, I don’t want to die.” 

Putting the cup down, Mulder drags his chair closer and searches Krycek’s face. Fear is the most prominent emotion, but there are others. Mulder closes his eyes in concentration. There are images, a hallway, a woman, a key. A glass phial of black oil, a long hollow needle. 

“It’s William.” His eyes fly open. “Scully, he knows where William is.” 

“Tell us.” Scully’s grip on her gun shifts. “Krycek, tell us where.”

“I can’t,” says Krycek. “If you want to find out, you have to come with me.”

Mulder throws him across the room and Krycek crashes into the one of the nightstands, tipping it over onto himself, shattering a table lamp, and scattering a penpad, a telephone, the Bible. He picks himself up off the floor, testing his shoulder socket, and Mulder crouches over him, bringing their faces close again.

There are officers meeting around a polished conference table. The same hallway. The same woman. An elevator with red painted doors. Krycek has been to this place, but only once, and only briefly. These images are not from inside the fortress. A second location. But they're just fleeting impressions, nothing specific, nothing actionable.

“Tell us, now,” Mulder demands. 

Krycek’s lip is bleeding. “If you were really psychic,” he says through his teeth, “you’d already know.”  

Mulder grabs him by the wrist, cutting off his circulation. “You wanna keep this one?” he asks, as the hand goes white. “Tell us where our son is.”

The tendons spasm. Krycek’s dark eyelashes are spiked with moisture.

“Please, no,” he panics. “Don’t do that, please don’t do that.” 

“Mulder!” Scully intervenes by grabbing the back of Mulder’s t-shirt. 

He stands, leaving Krycek to nurse his wrist on the carpet. There’s a red ring of bruises around it, but the bones are intact.

Scully pulls him aside. “Enough,” she whispers.

“He knows—!” Mulder starts to protest.

“And if you kill him, we may never find out,” she hisses.

He opens his mouth again, but she cuts him off.

“Hey, Krycek,” she says, maintaining pointed eye contact with Mulder. “You’re Russian, sort of; Is it true that Russian oligarchs keep foxes as pets?”

The warning pressure on his body says, behave. Don’t make me humiliate you in front of our enemies. His fingers curl.

A bewildered Krycek is now sitting up with his back against the bed. 

“I guess so? I mean, it wouldn’t surprise me.” He glances between them. “Wait, why are we talking in code?”

He shrinks in terror as Mulder walks back over to him. 

“Relax. Don’t piss on my floor.” Mulder scrapes him up off the carpet and throws him into the chair again.

“As much as I’ve historically enjoyed kicking your ass,” he says, sitting down across from him, “I couldn’t possibly feel good about it now. It would be gratuitous; Like plucking the legs off an insect.”

Krycek slumps over, hugging his right arm with the stump of his left. The lens of his mind constricts. There’s a layer of sadness to him that wasn’t there before, like an invisible veil. The world has ended for him, too. 

Mulder offers him his hand and Krycek blinks at it. Then, in a display of trust Krycek doesn’t understand himself, he shakes it. Maybe he just wants to touch someone. He came here almost certain he was going to die.

“I’m not violent by nature, am I?” Mulder asks softly.

“You’re asking me?” says Krycek.

The texture of their skin is so different. Mulder’s thumb brushes the inside of Krycek’s wrist where his humanity quivers. 

He lets go of the hand and gazes down into the frame of their knees. The carpet between them is mottled with old coffee stains, and worse.

“I am, unfortunately, accustomed to violence,” he continues. “But unlike you, I don’t thrive in this world. I do what I have to, in the name of what matters to me the most. But I wish it didn’t have to be this way. I wish I didn’t know what it felt like to tear a man’s head from his shoulders with my bare hands.” He looks up. “What I’m trying to say is that I’ve never killed anyone without a good reason; So don’t give me a reason.”

“Got it,” says Krycek, recovering his contempt. 

Mulder stands and grabs his gun and holster.

“Always with the speeches, you two,” says Krycek. “You know you’re not actually Shakespeare characters, right?” When he thinks Mulder isn’t looking, he rolls his eyes and mutters, “Your dad does the same thing.”

“He’s not my dad.” Mulder spins around.

“Alright.” Krycek puts up his hands. “Your biological father slash arch-nemesis. I stand corrected: You are a Shakespeare character.” 

Mulder slips on his sneakers. Phantom Gray Varsity Blue. 

“Hit him for me, Scully,” he says. “If I hit him, his head will go flying like a three-pointer. I need you to do it so I can have the vicarious satisfaction.”

Scully whacks Krycek with the butt of her gun.

“Ouch!” he yelps. “What the hell?”

“You keep saying you want to live.” She holsters her weapon. “But you’re not acting like it.”

“Okay, okay.” He rubs the back of his skull. “I’ll shut up now.”

“Good call.” She nips the elastic from around her wrist in her mouth and gathers her hair into a ponytail. “Best decision you’ve made since you walked through that door.” 

Chapter Text

Krycek does a valiant job of driving stick with only one arm and a gun to his head. The gray sky fills his windshield, his bloodied lips caught in the rearview mirror. Fear pours from him like a scent.

Scully sits in the passenger seat with a finger on the safety of her Glock. The sleeves of her quarter-zip pullover are bunched around her elbows, exposing her shimmering forearms. Her thoughts are churning. She hasn’t said a word since they left Bonnie Doone. The baby hairs that don’t fit in her ponytail feather the back of her neck. 

The backseat of Krycek’s SUV smells suspiciously of perchloroethylene carpet cleaner. There are rubber mats on the floor that look like recent replacements.

“Were you hauling a dead body in here?” Mulder asks.

There's something almost nostalgic to him about the distinctive smell of cleaning products being used to cover the smell of cadaver. It brings him back to a time in his life when the world made more sense. He smooths his hand over the seat next to him, catching a glimpse of the bound and garroted body as it flashes across Krycek’s memory. 

“Wow, you cracked the case,” says Krycek. “It’s almost like I’m a professional assassin.” 

“Actually, I’m guessing someone else did the killing,” Mulder muses. “Pretty hard to garrotte a man to death with only one hand. So, am I correct in assuming you’ve been demoted to gofer?”

“I don’t know what I was expecting,” says Krycek, “but you haven’t changed one bit; You’re the exact same asshole.”

His mouth quivers in the rear view mirror, his false hand steadying the wheel as he changes gear.

“Just making conversation.” Mulder sits in the middle of the backseat, gripping the two headrests in front of him.

“It’s almost comforting,” Krycek sniffs. “Everyone else I know is fucking dead, but at least I can count on you two.”

Mulder watches his shoulders shift inside his leather jacket, briefly transfixed by the possibility that Krycek might burst into tears, but the moment passes. They exit the pinewoods and drive past a series of strip malls and parking lots filled with abandoned cars, the windshield wipers clearing an arc in the yellow pollen.

As they approach the first of several gated checkpoints, Krycek lowers his window and produces some kind of laminated security clearance.

“You know, you can put the gun down now,” he says to Scully. “It doesn’t really serve any purpose at this point.”

She hesitates, watching a soldier walk up to the side of the car, and holsters her weapon. The false sense of security it provided her with has run out. She looks at her lap as the soldier scans Krycek’s credentials and waves them through.

“Relax,” says Krycek. “They caught you on camera. They knew where you were. If they wanted to kill you, we wouldn’t be here. They want to negotiate.” 

Scully’s ponytail presses back against the headrest. “Why isn’t that even the slightest bit reassuring?” she asks him.

Krycek raises his window, muting the roar of gravel under the tires.

“This is a good deal for you, okay?” he snaps. “A lot better than most of us are getting. You two should be fucking grateful.”

Reaching the base has cooled his mortal terror, returning the focus of his resentment and anxiety to his employers. This is, at least, familiar terrain. 

“What deal?” Mulder demands. 

“You’ll just have to wait and see,” says Krycek. “The old man wants to tell you about it himself. But I will say this: If you think he wants you two dead, then you really don’t understand him at all. You’re his favorites.”

At the next checkpoint, the gate opens for them without anyone coming outside to greet them.

“And you think we should be grateful for that?” Mulder asks.

Scully glances back at him. Her forehead creases.

Krycek laughs. “You have no idea.”

“Enlighten me,” says Mulder.

The leather steering wheel creaks in Krycek’s grip. 

Rows of red brick barracks come into view behind a chain link fence. A soldier holding a pair of orange safety flags directs them away from the fence and onto a road marked ‘To FORSCOM Headquarters.’ 

“My parents were refugees,” he says after a while. “They came to this country with nothing.” His jaw shifts, his mind quietly roiling. “I wasn’t chosen,” he says. “I’m not part of anyone’s plan. I’m here because I’m willing to do whatever it takes to survive. You’re here because your dad owns the dealership. That’s the real difference between us. Okay? So you can stop flattering yourself.”

“See?” Mulder pats his headrest. “You can make speeches, too.” 

Two decorative Civil War cannons flank the landscaped entrance. Men with machine guns patrol the walkways between the grassy medians, lined with rows of international flags flown at half mast.

Krycek parks in a lot behind the stately brick and limestone building and uses a plastic key card— different from the one he displayed at the checkpoints, Mulder notices —to get them in through a side door. He’s furtive and tense, as if he’s not supposed to be doing this. 

“Stay close to me,” he warns them at the top of the stairs. “Don’t talk to anyone, don’t make eye contact with anyone.” 

Mulder tries to probe his mind as they walk single file down a long white hallway, past women in pencil skirts and men in suits. Thought is chaotic and nonlinear, making it difficult for him to glean anything specific, but he thinks he might be getting better at this. It reminds him a bit of trying to read a newspaper in Spanish and tentatively recognizing every fifth or sixth word. Emotions are the cognates, the first things he understands— but his psychic vocabulary is growing.

Staring at the back of Krycek’s head, he’s able to pinpoint the source of his anxiety: There are elements within the Headquarters that want to eliminate him, and they don’t know that he’s doing this. 

He leads them down an empty corridor away from the main arteries, glancing back to make sure they’re still following him. They do stand out in their sweatpants and sneakers, but no one approaches them, perhaps taking them for Krycek’s prisoners. The men in suits are accustomed to seeing him coming and going on all sorts of miscellaneous business. His position within the organization is one of both great license and terrible precarity. 

The corridor comes to an end and Krycek pauses with his hand on a stainless steel doorknob. He turns from Mulder to Scully, giving each of them a long, strange look. 

“You can do this,” he tells them. “Eyes on the prize.” 

He opens the door.

The cozy interior is at odds with the plain white hallways outside. Sumptuous rugs and floor to ceiling bookshelves give the office an almost Victorian extravagance. Aside from the desk in one corner, there’s a liquor cabinet, a variety of chairs, and a pair of brocaded settees, one of which holds the Cigarette Smoking Man. 

“Excuse us, Alex,” he says.  

Krycek leaves, closing the door behind him and cutting off the lights and sounds of the hallway. The smell of tobacco is overpowering in the sudden closeness and dimness. 

The Cigarette Smoking Man gestures to the settee across from him. There’s a black wood coffee table between them. On it sits a crystal decanter filled with brown liquor, a set of four matching tumblers, and a silver ashtray. 

“Please, sit,” he says, as they continue to stare at him in silence. 

He’s wearing a dark fisherman’s sweater, his fingers white as if from cold. Sallowness deepens the red around his watery eyes. The end of the world has hit everyone hard, and he is no exception. 

Scully is the first to accept his invitation. Mulder sits down beside her, their thighs almost touching on the narrow seat. The crystal decanter throws tilting amber lights across the black table. 

“I can’t tell you how good it is to see you both.” The Cigarette Smoking Man leans forward, twisting his spent butt into the ashtray, the amber lights flickering across his face. “Alive and together.” He withdraws a pack of Morleys from his pocket and pulls one out with his lips before removing it again to speak. “It’s a miracle.” 

Reignited, he sinks back into the settee to study them, setting the pack and his silver lighter on the table. He is in no hurry to say more.

Mulder feels a surge of impatience, only to realize it’s actually Scully’s. 

“What is this?” she asks. “Why are we here? Krycek mentioned a deal.” 

Smoking Man doesn’t answer her at first. His gaze is fixed on Mulder. 

“In crude terms?” he says. “I have something you want, and you have something I want.” He takes a slow drag, narrowing his eyes. “But I do hope for this to be about more than that. I would like a chance to explain myself first.”

Scully frowns. 

“By now, you’ve surely come to appreciate the significance of our work.” He props his smoking arm on the back of the settee. “And the sacrifices we made in its service. You know that we were forced to offer up our own children as collateral.”

“Yeah, about that,” Mulder cuts him off. “We ran into Jeffrey Spender— Small world, huh?” He leans forward, vibrating with barely-contained energy. 

Scully stills him with a hand on his arm. 

“Anyway, we killed him,” Mulder says. “He begged us for death, because he was in agony. That’s what you did to your own son.”

“Is that so?” Smoking Man lowers his gaze. “How unfortunate.” 

He reaches for the decanter, setting aside the faceted glass stopper, and pours two fingers of liquor into three of the tumblers. The cigarette dangles from his lips as he expertly exhales around it while his hands are in use. 

“To Jeffrey, then,” he says, raising his glass and taking a sip.

Scully stares incredulously at the drink in front of her. 

“What happened to him was your fault,” she says. 

He closes his eyes to savor the burn, manipulating both the cigarette and the glass with one hand.

“You must understand,” he tells her. “We didn’t know the details. All we knew was that it was the only way to save them. To save humanity, in fact. We realized that if humanity was to have any chance of surviving colonization, it would be in the form of alien-human hybrids.” 

“And your experiments?” she asks. “The abductions?” 

“Our first priority was to develop a vaccine against the alien virus, without which you and I would not be sitting here right now, Dana.” He sets his glass down on the table. “Our next hope was to reverse engineer their technology, in order to create hybrids of our own. But those efforts were never successful. Compared with theirs, our science was hopelessly primitive.” 

“Reverse engineer?” Scully asks. “You mean, the genetic modifications they had made to the children.” 

He nods once.

“We knew the alien DNA was within them, dormant, waiting to be activated,” he says. “So we made attempts to activate it ourselves.” 

“Attempts?” she asks.

“To trigger the transformation on our own terms, rather than waiting for it to happen on theirs,” he explains. “But we failed. All of the subjects died in the process.”

“The subjects?” She presses her lips. “You mean, your own children. That’s what you mean.”

He shrugs, granting her this, and Mulder tenses for the inevitable. 

“I’m afraid your sister, Samantha, was among them,” Smoking Man says to him. “I was present when our scientists attempted to induce her transformation, and I watched her die on the operating table.”

Mulder surges to his feet, clipping the edge of the coffee table. The crystal stopper rolls onto the floor but doesn't shatter, muffled by the carpet. He is breathing hard through his nose. Violence rises in him and he paces the room, fighting it down.

“I only mention this now,” says Smoking Man, “because I want you to know that she didn’t suffer.”

“Shut up,” Mulder says. 

He grabs the heavy wooden chair in front of the desk and splinters it against the floor. The heart that pounds inside of him is larger and more powerful than an ordinary human heart, and for one crazy second, he’s convinced they can hear it. 

“I’m sorry,” says Smoking Man.

“I said shut up!” Mulder yells at him.

He grips the back of the settee and Scully covers one of his hands with her own. At her command, the killing instinct releases him, and he is able to stand still again, though his heart continues to hammer painfully. The wood creaks under his hands.

Gathering his faculties, he taps the Cigarette Smoking Man’s mind to find that he is telling the truth. 

Scully looks back and forth between them, fingers unconsciously inching towards her gun. 

The old man finishes his cigarette and reaches down to retrieve the glass stopper. Replacing it, he rubs his cold hands together, trying to stimulate the circulation. 

His mind is a drafty attic filled with yellowed, brittle memories. Hotel rooms he’s slept in, people he’s killed. Beige meals in front of the television. Writing his spy novel in the shower. Daydreaming during secret meetings about the fate of the world.

There has always been a question of true motives with him, of where the spook ends and the man begins. Of what lurks behind his shifting pewter gaze. Mulder was not prepared for the answer to be complete sincerity. 

“Your hatred is nothing new,” he says. “Still, it is painful. I had hoped that you might look at me… differently. Now that I have been so richly vindicated.”

“Vindicated?” Mulder scoffs.

“I have spent my life as a prophet of the End Times,” says Smoking Man. “And now that they are upon us? Hate me, if you must. Kill me, if you dare. But I will die secure in the knowledge that what we did, what we sacrificed…” A tremulous smile crinkles his rice paper skin. “It was all worth it, in the end. You cannot take that victory away from me.”

“What are you talking about?” Mulder gestures at the door. “Have you stepped outside lately? You haven’t saved anything! Except for maybe yourself, and a few people to do your bidding.”

“The plan was never to save everyone,” Smoking Man laughs desperately. “That was never even a possibility. I’m talking about you.”

“Me?” Mulder asks.

With a rattling cough, Smoking Man rises to his feet.

“Jeffrey was… a disappointment,” he says. “You were always the one I wanted most to succeed.”

He drifts towards Mulder and Mulder takes a step backwards. If they get too close, there will be violence. 

Scully stands, as if preparing to intervene.

“But even so, I underestimated you.” He beams. “And just when I was starting to think all was lost, you appear before me, somehow, miraculously, free of their control. You have become the very thing we tried and failed for years to create.” 

Mulder feels sick.

“What does any of that have to do with saving humanity?” he asks. “It sounds like all you care about is saving your own DNA.”

The carpet around them is strewn with fragments of what used to be a chair. Smoking Man nudges a spoke with the toe of his shoe. Then he looks back up at Mulder and says:

“You are human in all the ways that are worth preserving.”

Mulder shoves his fists into his pockets and tucks his chin against his chest. 

“Spender preferred death to slavery,” he grinds out. “Maybe we all would have. But you didn’t give us a choice.”

“Choice is overrated,” says Smoking Man. “You think it was your choice to go to Oxford? To join the FBI?” he asks. “We led you there. We planted suggestions. To keep you close. To cultivate you, so that you might one day join us.”

Mulder’s head snaps upright. “I don’t believe you,” he says uselessly. His mouth is dry.

“We even chose her for you, if you remember.” Smoking Man gestures to Scully, his eyes crinkling with affection. “Though we couldn’t have known what a fortuitous choice it would turn out to be.”

Tears burn in Mulder’s sinuses. “No,” he says. “Shut up.”

“We don’t have to listen to this,” Scully interjects. “It has nothing to do with the reason we’re here.”

Smoking Man’s eyebrows rise and fall.

“What’s the matter?” he asks Mulder. “Didn’t we choose well? More than a beautiful woman— Truly your equal in courage and intellect. Is she not everything you could ever want in a companion?” 

Scully walks around the settee to stand at Mulder’s side. 

“That’s not what happened,” she says. “You sent me to debunk the X-Files. You can’t take credit for—” She struggles, humiliated by the suggestion. 

Smoking Man walks over to his desk and produces what looks like a remote control from the drawer. 

“It may not have been planned from the beginning,” he concedes. “But it was a welcome development.”

He presses a button and a flat monitor descends from the ceiling, the blue screen flickering to life.

“You are extraordinary, Dana,” he says. “I can’t imagine a more worthy candidate to be the mother of my grandchildren.” 

On the monitor, a woman sits cross-legged on the floor of a living room, watching a baby stack plastic rings onto a little plastic pole. Scully takes a step towards the image, covering her mouth.

“Mulder—” She sobs dryly into her hand. 

Mulder touches her shoulder. “Are you sure?” 

She nods, never looking away from the image. “I would know him anywhere,” she says.

The child looks eighteen months old, with pale blue eyes and wisps of dark hair. He is dressed in a suit of blue pajamas with feet, and he is stacking the rings with great seriousness of purpose.

“Is this a live feed?” Mulder turns to the Smoking Man.

“Yes.”

“How do we know that?” he asks, though he can sense the truth of it.

“Alicia,” the Smoking Man raises his voice. 

The woman on screen looks up at the camera. “Sir?”

“Where is he?” Scully asks. “Where are you keeping him?” 

“In a safe place,” says Smoking Man.

He sets the remote down on his desk and walks back over to them. 

“We were unable to induce a full transformation,” he says mildly. “But the child did develop some partial hybrid traits.”

At last, Scully turns from the screen. “You— You’ve been experimenting on him?” she says. 

“Biology is messy,” he continues, ignoring her question, “as I’m sure you know better than I, Dana. You and Mulder are quite capable of producing viable offspring, but the results are unpredictable. The degree of hybridization may vary from one offspring to another.”

Scully looks murderous. “Where is he?” she demands.

Smoking Man pauses to watch the monitor. On it, William has finished stacking his rings and decided to tip the pole over and scatter them on the floor. 

“Perhaps now, you can begin to understand our desperation,” he says softly. “Can you honestly say that you wouldn’t have done what we did, to protect our children?”

“Bullshit,” Mulder says. “You didn’t lie, and torture, and kill for us. You did it for yourselves. You’re just using us as an excuse.”

“You’re wrong,” says Smoking Man. He searches Mulder’s face, his voice welling with emotion. “My son. I did it all for you. To give you a chance. And look at you now.” 

A covetous hand hovers between them. 

“You took that chance,” he says, “and you’ve exceeded my wildest dreams for you. You are the next phase of humanity. The culmination of all our work.” 

The attic of his mind echoes with songs of victory. Fantasies of immortality. He skims Mulder’s cheek, mesmerized by the thought of his own DNA in this perfect vessel. This monument to his own greatness, sculpted from flesh.  

“My only regret,” he breathes, “is that Bill and Teena couldn’t be here to see you like this.”

“Don’t touch me.” Mulder slaps him away.

Smoking Man howls and staggers backward, clutching his hand, to land on the settee. His fingers are bent like the legs of a spider that’s been stepped on. He sucks the air, reeling from the pain. 

“Alicia,” he says calmly. “Mulder just shattered my right hand.” 

The woman disappears off camera and returns a moment later with a hammer. She kneels on the floor and grabs William’s right wrist.

“What do you want?” Scully panics. “Just tell us what the hell you want from us!” 

Tears are streaming down her face as she is torn between Smoking Man and the screen.

“See?” He looks up from nursing his injury. “We can be reasonable. No need for that, Alicia.” 

The woman puts the hammer down where it’s still visible in the frame.

It takes all of Mulder’s willpower to restrain himself from further violence. His lungs heave and he exhales through his nose, squeezing his fists so hard it feels like the skin of his knuckles might split open.

Smoking Man grabs his Morelys from the coffee table, plucking one from the pack and awkwardly lighting it with his left hand.

“So, you want to deal,” he says, sinking into the seat and catching his breath. “Very well.”

The broken hand renders him instantly smaller and older, curling his body defensively in on itself. His gray hair is splayed across his forehead, falling out of its usual part.

“Turn over your notes,” he says. “Give us everything you know about the hybrids’ biology.”

Drying her tears on her sleeve, Scully takes her place across from him again. 

“Who says I have notes?” she asks.

She is stone faced, her upper lip still glittering with mucus. 

“Dana.” He gives her an admonishing smile. “Of course you have notes.”

He tips his ashes into the ashtray. 

“Tell us how you managed to free Mulder from the aliens’ control,” he says. “It was you, wasn’t it?”

“You think I know something your scientists don’t?” she asks. “With all your money, and power, and decades of research— You think I outsmarted them all by myself?”

“I do,” he says. “You are brilliant. And motivated.” He glances between them. “Your love for Mulder may have saved the world.” 

The broken hand reddens and swells in his lap. A sane man would seek immediate medical attention. He shifts his weight onto his left elbow, wincing at the movement. 

“That’s all?” she asks. “My son, in exchange for what I know?”

A shaky left hand lifts the cigarette and he bows his head to reach it with his lips. 

“Not quite,” he exhales. “Mulder must submit to a full physical examination and allow us to take samples from him. Once we have what we need, you will have the child, and the three of you will be free to go.”

“What do you need these samples for?” Mulder asks, refusing to sit.

“We failed before,” says Smoking Man, “in part because we never had the opportunity to examine a live specimen who had successfully completed the transformation. Allowing our scientists to study you could change everything.”

“You mean, because it might allow you to create your own army of supersoldiers,” Mulder says.

“It’s our best hope,” says Smoking Man. “Right now, we’re struggling even to maintain this little stronghold. But with such an army at our disposal? Our descendents might someday take back the planet.” 

Mulder turns to face the monitor. William is crying as Alicia attempts to quiet him with a different toy. 

He looks to Scully. Her lips are parted in anticipation.

“Never,” he makes up his mind. “I will never help you. I would rather die.”

Smoking Man sighs. 

“Indecision is a fault of small men,” he says. “Certainly, you have never suffered from it.”

Finishing his cigarette, he stands and walks over to the desk again, cradling his broken hand against his belly. He switches off the monitor and slips the remote control into his pocket. Then he turns to them, memorizing their faces. 

“When you get tired of running,” he tells them, before closing the door behind him, “know that there will always be a place for you here.”

A ribbon of smoke still rises from the ashtray as his footsteps fade into the distance. 

Scully stands in front of the blank monitor. Her ponytail has lost a few locks. Mulder aches to hold her.

“Did you read his mind?” she asks without looking at him. “Was he telling the truth?”

“Yes.” Mulder adjusts the leather blotter on the desk. “He- Scully, he thinks he loves us.”

There’s a cube of post-it notes on the blotter. The top one is indented with the ghosts of letters written on the one before it. He runs his fingers over what might be a phone number. 

“So the offer is real?” she asks.

“Yes,” he says.

She turns around. “Then why did you say no?”

Mulder straightens. 

“I’m not going to help them create an army of slaves,” he says.

Static coats the blank monitor behind her in a fine layer of dust. Beneath the glass, the darkened pixels form a grid that generates wavy optical illusions. When he focuses, he can see the thousands of tiny LEDs that make up the display. 

“You’re jumping to conclusions,” she counters. “You don’t know that they would even have that capability.” 

“It doesn’t matter,” he says. “I won’t be a part of their crimes.”

Scully approaches him, looking straight ahead at his chest, and he wraps his arms around her. Her voice is distorted by tears. 

“They have our son,” she says to his sternum. 

They sway for a moment, pressure building inside her. She’s noticing the fact that he’s still not crying. 

“We’ll get him back,” he says to the crown of her head. “We’ll find a way.”

She peels away from him. Her face is red. She continues to wipe at her eyes, but the tears just keep coming. 

“How?” she demands. “Mulder, how?!”

He leans back against the desk. The damp spot she left on the front of his sweatshirt is almost a heart. Really it’s more of a plus sign, or maybe an X. 

“I don’t know,” he says. “But not like this. Not by making a deal with the Devil.”

“He’s not the Devil,” she says. “This isn’t a cosmic clash of good and evil.” She droops with exhaustion. “Mulder, when are you going to realize it’s over?”

He toes a splinter of the broken chair. He can’t look her in the eye. 

“We’re not going to save the world,” she pleads with him. “But maybe, just maybe, we can save our son.”

“Don’t you think I want that, too?” he says to her shoes. 

Without answering him, she flops back down on the settee and begins to sob, her head dangling between her knees. 

“Scully.” He steps away from the desk. “I’m sorry. I can’t give these men what they’re asking for.” 

She looks up at him through the splatter of amber lights. 

His head shakes minutely as he anticipates her next words. 

“What if they’re right?” she asks. “What if what’s in you is humanity’s only hope?”

“They want what’s in me so that they can use it to create their own supersoldiers,” he says. “They only care about protecting themselves.”

“Well, what’s the alternative?” she asks him. “Sit back and let every last man, woman, and child on the planet die?”

“No,” he says. “We fight.”

“Oh yes, of course.” She rolls her still-brimming eyes. “Silly me: I forgot that the righteousness of our cause was in direct proportion to its futility.”

His throat squeezes. The silvery stripes on his spine and scapula deliver pulses of cortisol. 

“You’re right,” he says. “I don’t have a better plan. I just know I can’t be a part of theirs.”

“Why? So you can pat yourself on the back?” She shows him her teeth. “So you can say you stuck to your principles, against all purpose, against all reason, to the bitter fucking end?”

“It’s not like that,” he says. “It’s not just about me. There are some things that are more important than survival. If making more of us into drones is humanity’s only hope… then maybe humanity’s time has come.”

“Who are you to decide that?” she asks him.

“Who are They?” he counters.

She raises her voice. “They’re the only ones with a fucking plan, that’s who!”

“I’m not going to help them,” he says. “I can’t. I won’t.”

“I can make you!” she thunders. 

Mulder freezes. 

Scully leans back in her seat, palms face down on her thighs. Crying leaves her eyelids swollen. 

“I’m sorry,” she blurts. “They have my baby! I don’t know what to do. I’m so sorry.”

He sinks to his knees, bowing his head in defeat. Wood grain fills his field of view, whorling like fingerprints. Dust particles settle into the crevices.

The floorboards creak as she moves to stand over him. Without looking, he can sense her hand hesitating in the air above his head. 

“Mulder,” she tries to explain.

“You said something you didn’t mean,” he insists. “You would never actually go through with it. You would never force me to do something so contrary to my nature.”

“That’s not—” she starts to say.

“Don’t argue with me,” he says. 

His burning forehead rests against her belly. 

“Just let me,” he says. “Just let me believe. What I need to believe.”

Her fingers find his scalp and he closes his eyes, letting the scent of her skin fill his lungs. He wraps his arms around her waist and squeezes her tightly, trying to purge the last two minutes from his nervous system. 

The rise and fall of her abdomen slows in his drowning grip. Even her scent changes with the composition of her blood. He can feel her tucking her emotions into a sharp little origami square. 

“Mulder,” she says.

The order to stand drags him to his feet and he drapes himself over her, making her prop him up like a big chattering classroom skeleton held together with fishing wire. All the will has drained from his limbs. She pushes on his shoulders to set him upright and he stares past her, letting her pose him.

“Hey.” She touches his cheek.

At the sound of footsteps, she turns to face the door as Krycek bursts into the room with an armful of olive drab clothing and two pairs of shoes.

“Put these on.” He throws a dress uniform at each of them. “No time to explain.”

Mulder catches the bundle out of pure reflex, while Scully lets hers fall on the floor. 

“Come on,” Krycek urges. “They’re disguises. We have to get out before they realize you’re here.”

Scully dodges the pair of shoes meant for her. 

“Before who realizes we’re here?” she asks.

“Them!” He waves at the invisible collective.

“I’m afraid you are going to have to explain,” she says.

Krycek looks over his shoulder and closes the door. 

“Okay, listen,” he says. “The old man wanted to get to you first, before letting the others know. But as soon as They realize you’re on base, they’re not gonna let you leave.”

Mulder holds the uniform out in front of him. He feels numb, as if the sensate contents of his chest have been scooped out.

“They want me for their experiments,” he says flatly. 

“Exactly,” says Krycek. “But he thought he could convince you to go willingly. He wanted to let you think it was your choice.”

“Why?” Mulder frowns.

Krycek sighs. “He’s turning sentimental in his old age. He doesn’t want you to hate him.”

“But you’re the one who brought us here,” Scully points out. “Why would you want to help us escape?”

“Conditions on the ground have changed.” He checks his watch. “Come on, get dressed. We have to move.”

She picks up the jacket by a sleeve, dangling it off the floor with suspicion. 

“I know where he’s keeping the kid,” says Krycek. “He has a cabin in the mountains. I don’t know the exact place, but I can find it. I can take you there.”

She looks from Krycek to the blank monitor and back again.

“The old man tells me things,” Krycek explains. “He should know better, but he gets lonely. I don’t know.” He sneers at Mulder. “Maybe when he’s missing you, he figures I’m the next best thing.”

Mulder takes off his sweatshirt and tosses it aside. “I believe him.”

Scully glares at the shoe that rolled under the desk before giving in and going to retrieve it.

While they strip, Krycek walks around the coffee table, tapping his thigh and repeatedly checking his watch. 

“I don’t understand,” says Scully, fixing her hair into a regulation knot. “Whose side are you on?” 

Krycek picks up one of the tumblers of brown liquor and knocks it back like a shot.

“Same side I’ve always been on,” he says. “The one that’s currently winning.”

When they got here, it was still light out, but now the sun has started to set. Krycek walks them out a different way from the way they came in, and leads them to a different car. This time, it’s a compact sedan, whose thick coating of pollen indicates that it hasn’t been moved in a while. His pulse is throbbing in his neck, the face of his watch flashing orange with the reflection of the sky every time he tilts it to check the time.  

He hands them each a fake ID card to present at the checkpoints, which he could only have had made well in advance. This plan, whatever it is, was in his back pocket all along.

Mulder sits in the back seat, barely reacting when asked for his card. It seems that stillness makes him a convincing soldier. He is only dimly aware of what Krycek is saying to get them waved through. 

“Talk,” says Scully, drawing her gun as soon as they clear the final gate. “We’re in the car with you, you have no excuse now.”  

“You’re not gonna shoot me.” Krycek chuckles darkly.

“You said conditions had changed,” she insists. “What did you mean by that?”

The horizon is a vanishing pink line. Once outside the Fort Bragg compound, he takes an exit ramp into the darkening forrest. A green and white flag that reads ‘Pineland’ is planted on a hill just off the highway. 

“The cavalry’s here,” he says, remaining cryptic.

“Why did you bring us on base only to smuggle us out?” she asks. 

“I didn’t have a choice,” he says. “Those were my orders.”

Scully levels her gun. “Until someone else made you a better offer,” she realizes. “Where the hell are you taking us?”

Mulder catches Krycek’s smile in the rear view mirror. “Indian Country.”

As they reach the edge of the Fort Bragg electrical grid, the road goes dark. They are surrounded on either side by walls of pine. A cluster of headlights appears in the distance, and Krycek rolls to a stop. The way is soon blocked by a semicircle of black vans. 

Mulder can feel Scully’s fear, but not his own. Some vital part of him was left on the floor of the Smoking Man’s office. Without it, he is empty inside, the prospect of death barely registering to him.

Krycek twists around in his seat. “Just relax, okay?” he tells them. “Put the gun away.” He nods at Scully’s lap. “They won’t like that.”

Then slowly, heart still pounding, he steps out of the car with his hands in the air. 

The back of one of the vans opens up and a group of men files out in formation, all dressed in black with automatic rifles. One of the men strides to the front, silhouetted against the high beams, and aims a hand gun directly at the center of Krycek’s forehead. 

“Oh my God,” Scully says. 

She unclips her seatbelt and reaches for the door handle. 

Distantly, it occurs to Mulder that Skinner is alive. He looks different, harder, with his head fully shaved and the beginnings of a beard. Like the others, he is dressed head to toe in black, except for a yellow insignia patch on his arm.

“I did exactly what you said.” Krycek panics. “Don’t shoot.”

Skinner's trigger finger shifts. Scully hesitates, watching the confrontation through the windshield. 

“If I let you live,” Skinner asks, “how do I know I won’t regret it?”

“I know where the kid is!” says Krycek. “Jesus! Please don’t shoot!”

The barrel sinks by a few degrees. 

“Why didn’t you mention that before?” Skinner demands.

“Because of this!” Krycek gestures between them with his flesh hand, quickly retracting it above his head. “If I gave away all my leverage up front, you’d kill me.” 

Skinner snorts, almost impressed. 

“Throw the prisoner in back,” he says.

Two of the men behind him come forward and escort Krycek into one of the waiting vans.

“Sir!” Scully opens the passenger side door. 

She starts to approach Skinner, but as soon as Mulder steps out of the car on the opposite side, the men open fire. The pain flashes hot, then searing cold, like being impaled with icicles. Suddenly, he’s lying on the pavement, the night sky streaked with the afterimages of muzzle flares. Numb fingers find the holes in his face, where several rounds pinged off his metallic skull. 

“Stop it!” Scully is screaming at them, crouched behind the open door. 

Rushing to the driver’s side, she throws herself on top of Mulder’s body while Skinner runs up behind her. 

“Scully,” he orders. “Get in the van.”

“You’re okay, you’re okay,” she chants, taking Mulder’s pulse. 

The front of her stolen uniform is soaked almost black with his blood. He tries to speak, but his lungs are collapsing, making it almost impossible to breathe. The image of himself in Scully’s mind is even worse than he realized. They must have shot him a hundred times.

Skinner grabs her by the arm and yanks her to her feet as Scully tries to shake him off. 

“Listen to me,” he tells her. “That’s not him.”

“Yes it is!” she yells in his face. 

“I’m sorry,” Skinner says. “I’m so sorry. You have to let him go. Get in the van!”

She draws her gun on him, even as a dozen machine guns are trained on her. 

“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” she says through her teeth. “That is Mulder. He’s not like the others.”

Skinner takes a step towards them and Mulder looks up at him through the black and violet pixels populating his vision. He can feel his blood pressure plummeting. 

“I don’t understand,” says Skinner. “How is that possible?”

“I was able to interrupt the process,” Scully tells him. 

Rocking forward slightly, he peers into her eyes. Mulder can feel him wanting to believe her. 

“Are you sure?” Skinner asks. “Are you absolutely sure?”

“Yes,” she pronounces. “It is him. I have absolutely no doubt.” 

Swearing to himself, he looks down at Mulder and shakes his head. “You two really are God’s favorite,” he says.

The last thing Mulder knows, he’s being lifted off the pavement and carried into the back of a van. Someone throws a towel over him in an attempt to soak up some of the blood. It feels like he’s breathing through a straw, his oxygen-starved brain generating abstract hallucinations, granular bursts of white light, like static or stars. This is what dying feels like, he assumes. Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad if he never woke up.

The darkness dissolves, awareness returning to him like the sun from behind a cloud. Mulder wakes up in a bed with a white ceiling above him, in a room that smells like petrichor. Someone has stripped him naked, and washed him, and covered him with white cotton blankets. The entire front of his body is splattered with dime-sized pink lesions which used to be entry wounds, hinting at extensive internal damage. Every breath and movement hurts.

The silvery glands feel hot and swollen with immunoactivity. The one on his right hip bone is radiating pain, and when he peels back the blankets, he finds the gray skin iridescent purple from subcutaneous bleeding. He drops the corner of the innermost blanket, letting the cotton waffle weave float down over his eyes so that he can view the ceiling through a gauzy screen. The fabric traps the heat of his breath, covering the scent of earth and metal with the scent of laundry detergent. 

He briefly entertains the idea that this could be the way station to some sort of afterlife, but he can’t seem to get himself too excited about the theory. Through the mesh of the blanket, his eyes scan the room, and the Scully in his head says, ‘Occam’s razor: You’re in prison.’ 

The room— or cell —is about six square meters, with white walls, a smooth cement floor, and a stainless steel toilet and sink. The wall opposite the bed is dominated by what looks like a pair of elevator doors, painted fire engine red. 

Frustrated, he pulls the blanket away from his face. Tensing his stomach muscles to sit up is too painful. For now, he can’t do anything but lie there, scanning the ceiling for tiny imperfections in the paint job. 

“Hello?” he asks the ceiling. He doesn’t try yelling, knowing it will hurt.

He reaches out with his mind, hoping to pick up a psychic signal. There are people somewhere, but they’re too far away for him to read their thoughts. He closes his eyes, straining to make contact, only to realize that someone is coming closer. 

The elevator rumbles before coming to an audible stop in front of him. Even rolling onto his right side is too painful, so all he can do is turn his head as the red doors open and a woman steps out. 

“You’re awake,” she says, approaching his bedside. 

She doesn’t look like a prison guard, in her blue jeans and casual blouse, her long black hair falling loose over her shoulders. Mulder taps her mind, sensing no immediate threat to his person, though the leather bag in her hands gives him pause.   

“Who are you?” he croaks. 

“I’m Dr. Sonja Hathale,” says the woman. “We’ve never met before, but I have met your partner, Dr. Scully.”

Mulder blinks as she withdraws a pen light from her bag and shines it into each of his eyes. 

“Where is she?” he asks. 

“You and Scully arrived here together,” she says. 

She takes out a syringe and gestures for him to extend his right arm so that she can draw his blood. Mulder hesitates, suspicious of her intentions. 

“And where is ‘here’?” he asks her. 

“The territory of the Navajo Nation,” says Dr. Hathale. “One of our reconnaissance teams brought you in last night.” 

Snapping a rubber tourniquet around his arm, she raises the syringe and plunges it into his vein with as much force as she can manage. 

Mulder flinches. “Did Scully tell you to do that?” he asks. 

Dr. Hathale doesn’t answer him, watching the vial fill up before replacing it with an empty one.

“Dr. Scully provided my laboratory with the sample from which we were able to produce our vaccine,” she says. “In doing so, she has earned a measure of the Council’s trust. That’s the only reason you’re still alive. Normally, the Anaye are to be killed on sight.”

The needle slides out, leaving a speck of blood that she dabs away with a cotton ball. 

“Anaye?” Mulder asks, incredulous. 

“That’s what people have taken to calling your kind.” She secures the vials in a plastic ziplock pouch and tucks them back into her bag. “It’s a thing from Navajo mythology, kind of a general term for monsters. But it has the connotation of ‘alien.’” 

“Yeah, I’m familiar with the term,” he snorts. 

Producing a sterile swab, she gestures for him to open his mouth. Mulder glares at the tip.

“The Navajo Nation has known about the existence of extraterrestrial life since the time of the Code Talkers,” she tells him. “And just like your Syndicate, we’ve been preparing for the threat of colonization since shortly after the Second World War. They knew nothing of our plans, but we knew of theirs. I suppose they considered us to be beneath their notice.”

Mulder opens his mouth to ask a question and she shoves the swab in, scraping the inside of his cheek. 

“This facility,” she twirls the swab before sealing it in a plastic tube, “was built by the physics department of Stanford University. You may have seen news reports about a laboratory constructed almost two miles under the New Mexico desert. The official purpose of the project was to isolate dark matter by filtering out cosmic rays.” 

“And you’re telling me that was just a cover story,” he says, “for the Navajo Nation to build itself a giant apocalypse bunker.”

“A shelter of last resort,” she says. “Yes. But for now, our people still live on the surface. The underground houses our secure laboratories, stockpiles of fuel and water, and the occasional prisoner.” 

She collects her bag and stands as if preparing to leave, tossing her long hair over one shoulder. 

“And what, exactly, have I done to deserve imprisonment?” he asks her. 

“You entered Navajo territory,” she says. “The Council has a duty and a right to protect its people. Some consider your mere presence here to be a threat.”

“I guess you guys don’t have ‘innocent until proven guilty’?” He glares at the ceiling. 

“You will receive a hearing.” Dr. Hathale straightens, becoming contemptuous. “At which the Council will decide your ultimate fate. I will present them with my findings with respect to your biology. Others,” she says icily, “will testify to your character.” 

Grunting in pain, he pushes himself up onto his elbows. 

“Just to be clear,” he says, “it’s not ‘my’ Syndicate. I’m not one of Them.” 

Dr. Hathale shrugs. “You were born to be one of Them,” she says. “You may think that doesn’t matter. You may argue that the crimes of your ancestors have nothing to do with you. But not everyone sees it that way.” 

Mulder considers his next words, polishing the backs of his teeth with his tongue. 

Almost as an afterthought, she tells him, “The child is undergoing a separate threat assessment.”

“Threat assessment?” Mulder asks. “He’s a baby!” 

They have William, he realizes a second later. William is here. Krycek must have made good on his promise.

“Not an ordinary human baby,” she says. “As our tests have already confirmed.” 

He covers his eyes, his injured body tensing with rage that he’s in too much pain to act on, tormented by thought of William’s short life consisting of nothing but these fucking tests. His imagination helpfully supplies an image of Samantha, lying dead in an operating theater full of men, a film of black oil covering her eyes. 

“Someone will be down here with your dinner in about an hour,” says Dr. Hathale. “It would probably be in your best interest to treat that person with respect. There’s no telling what may come up at your hearing.”

The red doors open, and she steps onto the lift, tucking her hair behind her ears.

“How can you do this to us?” he shouts after her. “What gives you the right? What makes you any different from Them?” 

Dr. Hathale raises an eyebrow.

“Get over yourself, Mr. Mulder,” she tells him, as the doors close to leave him alone in his cell. 

They bring him a tray of food and a stack of National Geographics. Mulder pretends to be asleep, the blanket covering his face, so he won’t have to interact with anyone; And even when they’re gone, he stays perfectly still, trying to think of nothing.

Eventually, the need to urinate exceeds the pain of movement, and he is forced to climb out of bed and limp a few feet to the toilet. The wound in his right hip radiates down his leg, forcing him to put all his weight on the left one. His abdominal muscles tremble from the strain of keeping him upright. Even his pee burns on the way out. 

Afterwards, he carefully lowers himself back onto the mattress and considers the plastic tray they left on the floor next to his bed. The meal consists of a bowl of red chili with two disks of Indian fry bread, a bottle of Tropicana orange juice from concentrate, and a packet of peanut M&M’s. Lacking the motivation to eat, he takes a few sips of the orange juice and then lies back down. 

He drifts in and out of consciousness for a while, monitoring the status of his injuries. There’s no clock down here, but eventually someone comes to collect his cold chili and replace it with breakfast, heralding the start of a new day. They are kind enough to leave the orange juice and the M&M’s, adding a bowl of instant oatmeal and a styrofoam cup of coffee. 

By now, he has healed significantly, enough to get in and out of bed without trouble. Survival instinct kicks in, and he finds himself wolfing down the oatmeal and room temperature coffee. 

Buck naked, he paces the tiny cell and counts to five hundred. He tries doing push-ups, but his body weight doesn’t provide enough resistance. To get stronger, he would need to do push-ups with a car on his back or something like that. Frustrated, he counts to five hundred backwards.

He screams. He punches the elevator doors, denting the steel. Chips of red paint stick to his bleeding knuckles and he punches them again, until the metal shows through his skin. 

He rinses his hand in the sink until the bleeding stops and then sits back down on the edge of the bed, wrapping one of the blankets around his shoulders. Flashes of rage alternate with long stretches of emptiness. He watches the shiny pink skin gradually stretching to cover his knuckles over the course of several hours, like a time lapse video of a flower opening or a butterfly emerging from its chrysalis. 

In Navajo mythology, the Anaye are born from human mothers and monstrous fathers. They are slain, in a variety of creative ways, by the hero Nayenezgani. Tse’naga’hai, a giant creature made of rock, kills his victims by rolling over them and crushing them. Nayenezgani sets a trap for him by planting his knives in the ground and tricking Tse’naga’hai into rolling over the blades and stabbing himself to death. This is why there are no monsters left in the world anymore. 

When dinner comes, Mulder rolls over in bed to take a peek at whoever’s been feeding him. It’s a young man in a black uniform, just like the one he saw on Skinner, the yellow insignia on his arm in the shape of a stylized arrowhead. He gets up from setting the tray on the floor, meeting Mulder’s eyes through a gap in the blankets, and hurries into the elevator.

This time, Mulder eats the chili and the fry bread, paging through a magazine from 1994. The cover article is about the importance of recycling. Plastics, it tells him, are ruining the oceans. It’s like reading an ancient Sumerian tablet, so lost is the world depicted within it, and so remote are its concerns. 

After finishing his dinner, he pushes his tray against the wall and arranges the National Geographics in chronological order. 

The pink spots all over his body have faded to almost nothing. The flesh is still sore when he presses on them, but everything seems to be back in its proper place. Thoughts of escape compete with the desire to lie back down and never get up again. He wishes he had his watch, but at the same time, he’s glad he doesn’t. The cold coffee is developing a bacterial skin.

It’s cool underground, enough that he can see his breath sometimes. Enough that he considers asking for clothes. His only hesitation is that that would require talking to someone. He doesn’t feel like talking to anyone. 

There’s a light switch on the wall next to the elevator which, for some reason, he hasn’t bothered flipping. Deciding it’s probably night time, he turns the overhead light off and goes to sit cross-legged in the middle of the bed, wearing one of the blankets like a cape. The darkness is not total, a service light above the elevator providing enough gentle illumination for him to see all the objects in the room. 

Combined with the cool temperatures and the smell of minerals, the darkness makes his cell feel almost cavelike. It’s nice to think of himself as hibernating, like some red-eyed, chthonic creature, in the secret caverns of the Earth. Not a care in the world, the empires of man rising and falling above his head while he lies in wait, dreaming his monstrous dreams.   

When he senses Scully coming down the elevator, Mulder feels a spike of adrenaline in his chest. He jumps out of bed, backing himself against the wall as she steps off the platform and into the room. 

“Mulder?” she asks, her eyes adjusting to the darkness. 

She rushes to him, cupping his face, and he draws the blanket tighter around his shoulders. 

“Are you okay?” she asks, checking his faded wounds. “Have you healed alright?”

Trembling in her hands, he finds himself shaking his head no. 

She stills, seeming to sense what’s wrong. Her hands fall to her sides. She watches him slide against the wall and step backwards into the bed, hugging his knees under the blanket. Her bottom lip shines in the limited light as she slowly opens her mouth. 

“You’re afraid of me,” she says. 

Mulder doesn’t confirm or deny this. Even he doesn’t know what he’s feeling. All he knows is that, whatever it is, it can’t be allowed to coalesce into betrayal; Because once he’s decided that she has betrayed him, that will be the end of him. And so, he casts about for other explanations. 

“I’m just a little stressed out about waking up in a prison cell,” he mutters into his knees.

She turns her head, noticing the dent in the steel doors. Her pulse leaps.

“Mulder,” she says, running her fingers over the chipped red paint. “You can’t–” She looks back at him. “Mulder, listen to me—”

“What are they doing to William?” He cuts her off.   

Scully approaches the side of the bed. She’s wearing a hooded sweatshirt with a glinting silver zipper. She stuffs her fists into the belly pockets and takes a deep breath through her nose.

“I saw him earlier today,” she says stiffly. “He’s going to be alright. And once we get you out of here, we’ll all be together.” 

Mulder strokes his lips against the textured cotton weft. The skin of his lips is thin and sensitive.  

“Your friend was here yesterday,” he says. “She told me they would have killed me, if you hadn’t interceded on my behalf.”

“Everyone here has to work for the good of the community,” she deflects. “It just so happens that my particular skill set is in extremely high demand. The Navajo Council wants me to join Dr. Hathale’s team, who are working to develop a vaccine booster. So I was in a position to negotiate favorable terms.”

“Would they have killed William, too?” he asks her. “If you weren’t so useful to them?”  

Her hands leave her pockets, twisting in front of her. She glances back over her shoulder. 

“I know you could escape from here if you really wanted to,” she says. “I know you’re strong enough. But there are about a hundred thousand people up there. Once you make it to the surface, they will kill you.”

He glares at her over the tops of his knees. 

“So what?” he asks.

She paces the floor, the red service light throwing her purplish shadow against the blank wall.  

“Please, don’t.” She covers her face with her hands. “Don’t be like this.”

“Like what?” he says, feeling petulant.

“Not everything is about you!” She raises her voice, making him flinch. “Maybe we could actually have some sort of life here. Have you thought of that? Raise our son in a place that has other children in it. A place with some sort of future. If you could just compromise for once!”

Mulder shrinks further, as if density will protect him. His jaw creaks, fear metabolizing into anger. 

“If that’s how you feel,” he seethes, “then why didn’t we just stay in North Carolina? Before Krycek showed up, it sure seemed like you were getting ready to hand me over to—”

The whites of her eyes are huge and glossy in the dark. She grabs him by the jaw, pressing him down onto the mattress. He’s never seen her like this before. It’s as if something inside her has finally snapped. 

“Sometimes,” she hisses in his ear, “when you talk about needing to follow your conscience… Sometimes, Mulder, I think what you’re really talking about is the need to protect your ego.”    

Mulder feels himself fall slack beneath her, as if the wires holding him together have been abruptly cut. He can’t get up, or throw her off, or do anything else to resist her.

She lets go of his jaw and holds herself above him, her hair curtaining both of them. He gazes mutely up at her, watching the struggle on her face. Her legs extend so that she’s lying on top of him, their foreheads almost touching. The cold zipper on her hoodie shocks his skin. 

“I’m sorry,” she says. 

The heels of her hands massage his rib cage in anxious circles.  

“Don’t be sorry,” he says. “If you’re going to do this to me, then commit to it. Don’t apologize and then do it anyway; That’s worse.”

A thin sheen of sebum paints her features with ruby light, enchanting her eyebrows, her nose, the bow of her lips. She relaxes into him, the bright thorn of desire glinting in her chest. A purple shadow fills the hollow of her throat, like the thumbprint of her God from when she was formed. 

“It’s okay,” she whispers. “Deep breaths.”

Like every other part of him, his lungs obey her. 

They breathe into each other’s mouths, almost, but not actually, kissing. 

“You’re right,” she says. “I need to take responsibility.”

Warm, drowsy sensations pour from her hands into his body. She pulls the blankets over both of them and lays her head on his bare chest so that her silky hair tickles his chin. 

“So here’s what’s going to happen,” she narrates, as she continues to stroke him. “You’re not going to try to escape. You’re going to stay calm, and you’re going to follow the rules. And we’re going to convince them that you’re safe to be around regular people, so that they let you out of here. Okay?”

Mulder closes his eyes, feeling the spell take effect. His heart rate slows, his body becoming completely relaxed and submissive. It’s like floating.

“Okay,” he exhales.

She wraps her arms around his shoulders, their body heat pooling under the blankets in pleasant contrast to the chilly air around them. Minutes pass, the red darkness enfolding them. The rest of the world seems to fall away. 

Mulder allows his mind to drift, until this could almost be one of their motel rooms. The familiar suint of her hair really helps to sell the illusion. 

“Why did they make me like this, Scully?” he murmurs. “Why did they let me love freedom if I was never meant to have it?”

She nuzzles him, not responding at first. Then, she props herself up on his chest and presses her lips together in thought. 

“I think… that’s just who you are,” she says. 

“Maybe,” he says to the ceiling. “Maybe that’s who I used to be.”

She is fond and sad.

“I think that’s still who you are,” she says. “All that’s changed is that you won’t always be able to physically act on it.”

He tucks his chin to look at her. 

“You mean, because you won’t let me,” he says.

Her forehead wrinkles.  

It’s still weird to see her in a hoodie. The delicate chain around her neck is perilously close to catching on the zipper pull.

“I would never want to change who you are inside,” she says. “Thank God I don’t have that power. But I can’t let you…” she sighs. “I just need you to…”

He reaches to unsnag the chain with one crooked finger. 

“To be a good boy?” he teases.  

“Exactly,” she says, before bowing to kiss the finger. 

“Well then, I guess you’ve got me right where you want me,” he says. 

Flirting helps him pretend things are normal. She’s not going to let him get away with it so easily.

“You were right.” She sobers. “When you said this would color everything between us.”

“I did say that,” he agrees, becoming noncommittal.

The floating feeling is both pleasurable and frustrating. He flexes his toes, just to make sure they’re still there. It doesn’t seem like she has the ability to paralyze him. He can fidget and idle, as long as he’s obeying the spirit of her commands. Of course, he’s a trained animal, and not a machine. 

“Are you going to hate me?” she asks him.

There’s nothing plaintive or leading in her tone. It’s as if she simply wants an honest answer.

He hums in thought. Being forced to relax is clarifying. 

“I don’t think I could ever hate you,” he says. “But I’ll probably get mad at you sometimes. Especially when you make me do things I don’t want to do.”

“I guess that’s fair enough,” she says. 

Her brown eyelashes flick downward as she traces the pale circle on his shoulder that was so recently a bullet wound. He wonders how much detail she can see in the dark. 

“Are you mad at me right now?” she asks. This time her voice is smaller.  

He turns his cheek onto the flat foam pillow. The rasp of his two-day stubble is comforting. His new skin loves textures. 

“I don’t know,” he says. “You’re probably right, that we should stay here. It probably is what’s best for William. Maybe…” he laughs. “Maybe that’s what makes me mad.”

“You don’t like it when I’m right?” she asks. 

“It’s not that,” he says. “It’s more that… I don’t like it when I’m wrong.” He swallows. “I guess you could say that’s my ego protecting itself.” 

She reclines on her elbows, blowing a lock of hair out of her face with a philosophical sigh. 

“Having all the power doesn’t make me right,” she says. “I know that.” 

She sits up to unzip her hoodie and toss it on the floor. Down to a tank top, she stretches out beside him.

“I want this gone.” He touches his throat, where the feeling he wants gone seems to catch. “I want to go back to just trusting you completely. I never had to think about it before. I want to go back to not thinking about it.”

She rolls onto her side to hug him, and he realizes he’s trembling. The ocean of her mind surrounds him. He squeezes his eyes shut, focusing on the sensation of her close nails against his scalp. 

“You are safe here,” she whispers. “You are safe with me.”

Mulder tries with all his might to believe it. 

Chapter Text

In the morning, Scully leaves for work. She sits on the edge of the foam prison mattress to pull her sneakers on and bows to give Mulder a kiss on the temple. His eyelashes flutter against the pillowcase, one drowsy arm yoking her by the waist and pressing his cheek to the small of her back. The pearls of her vertebrae protrude through her clingy camisole. 

“I have to go,” she murmurs, grabbing him by the thumb and peeling his arm away. 

The roof of his mouth vibrates in protest. 

“I’ll see you again as soon as I can,” she promises. Her hoodie lies puddled on the floor.

With his eyes closed, he listens to the sounds of her getting ready to leave. The squeak of her shoes and the rumble of the elevator car. The waterlike flux of her thoughts.

Once, I dreamt you were a mermaid, he tries to say. But all that comes out is muffled gibberish. Cold fingers stroke the helix of his ear. You’re secretly aquatic, he thinks at her. That’s why your hands and feet get so cold.

The red service light throbs like a heartbeat. He slips under again, and when he comes to, he’s alone in his cell. The scent of rain cools his sinuses, the sound of his own breath hushing in his ears. 

After about an hour, he climbs out of bed and tries to shake the sleep from his limbs, his metallic joints clicking as he stretches his arms above his head. Yawning, he pads over to flip on the light switch. The brightness doesn’t jolt him. He feels like he’s still dreaming, floating. The low fog Scully imposed on his body isn’t dissipating in her absence.

He paces the floor, testing the hydraulics of action. His strength is all there, but he feels drowsy and passive, unmoved to throw himself against the seam of the steel doors. She has robbed him of his manic edge, like popping the batteries out of an RC car.

A young soldier brings him his coffee and oatmeal, and Mulder accepts the tray, his limbs heavy and warm with compliance. He doesn’t even have it in him to make menacing eye contact. 

Steam heats his face as he holds the styrofoam cup under his chin. The sensation fascinates. The caffeine clears his head, sharpening the contrast with his drowsy body. Cinnamon flavor crystals dissolve on his sleep-thick tongue. 

After finishing his breakfast, he sets the tray down on the floor and rolls over in bed. He closes his eyes, hugging the pillow that smells like Scully until his sensing glands purr at her simulated nearness. He can’t decide if he’s furious with her. In any case, there’s not much else to do but wait for her promised return. He has lost all motivation to rage against his captors and plot his escape.

Growing bored, he reaches for the minds of the people above him, psychic fingers just skimming the surface like a kid straining for the cookie jar on the top shelf. He can’t make out what they’re thinking, but the effort provides a welcome distraction from his own thoughts. They diffuse and condense like vapor, like clouds, forming a canopy above his isolation. He plucks a single red hair from the sheets and flicks it onto the floor. 

He waits, measuring the time in meal trays. The soldiers’ minds offer up some hints about what’s going on outside, but he doesn’t have long to sift through them. He glimpses rows of ranch houses with aluminum siding, clotheslines, chain link fences, the hot pink New Mexico horizon. But these could just be memories from before.

After the first couple of days, his scalp itches and his teeth have developed a mossy covering. He leaves the lights off and hides under the blankets, brining in his own faintly metallic body odor. He tosses and turns. He plays with his penis. With only the sink to bathe in, he’s starting to reek like a handful of quarters. 

In his dreams, he’s back in his old job, his old body, his old life. The filing cabinets in his office are filled with curly pencil shavings instead of X-Files. The door to his apartment in Alexandria leads to his childhood bedroom in Martha’s Vineyard. The phone rings, and he’s relieved to hear his mother’s voice on the other end of the line. When he wakes up, it takes him a full minute to remember that that life, that world, is no more.

He has a sex dream that features Scully standing over him in a white lab coat while he lies naked on a coroner’s slab. She is vivisecting him as he gazes up at her in adoration. The scalpel tickles, making him squirm, and she admonishes him to hold still as she removes each of his organs and replaces it with a ball of tinfoil. Then the table morphs into a bed as she climbs onto it, her clothes dissolving as she grinds on top of him in sheets that are drenched in his blood. 

The one dream he doesn’t have is The Nightmare. He doesn’t wake up screaming, heart pounding in his ears. He doesn’t wake up reaching for Her and collapse, empty handed. He just lies on his side, staring at the red doors, the line of his body rising and falling. He wonders if this is what calm feels like.

When they come for him, Mulder is carefully tearing the wax paper wrappers from his peanut M&Ms into centimeter-wide strips. Three armored soldiers march him into the elevator: two to stand on either side of him and one to hold a gun to the base of his skull. 

He is meek, as Scully adjured, watching the floor numbers light up as his body slouches, unresisting in their grip. The physical symptoms of fear and anxiety are absent. With strange clarity, he realizes that the real Fox Mulder would have gone kicking and screaming, and more than likely gotten himself shot in the head as a result.

They stop off on another floor and lead him to a kind of locker room with communal showers. One of the men hands him a bar of soap and tells him to wash himself. Mulder can sense them stealing glances at his smooth groin in fascinated disgust. 

“I guess you’ve never seen one of us naked.” He wags his eyebrows. “Pretty freaky, huh?”

The soldier flinches, not expecting the Anaye to speak. “Just get cleaned up,” he orders, hefting his gun. 

Enduring the cold water, Mulder washes himself in silence. The pale green bar is stamped with the words Limpio Clásico, announcing itself as a Mexican import. He wonders who’s still alive in Mexico. The soap is harsh, leaving his hair squeaky and smelling of citronella and beef tallow. Facing the cement wall, he lets the spray run over his back and watches the oily foam streak down the drain. 

Once they’re satisfied that he’s finished, the guy in charge hands him a bath towel, a safety razor, and a toothbrush, and instructs him to put on the charcoal suit that’s been laid out for him on a bench. The slacks are too short, exposing the black dress socks they’ve given him, and the wingtips will need to be broken in, but at least it feels good to be clean. The toothpaste, also Mexican, coats his palate like licorice. After he’s done shaving, Mulder stands in front of the mirror and tries to remember how to tie a tie, while his chaperones hover awkwardly behind him. His damp hair is an untrimmed mess. He laughs at the image, making eye contact with their reflections, but they don’t share his amusement. 

He doesn’t ask the soldiers what this is for or where they’re taking him, because he already knows. They’re hoping the Navajo Council will vote to execute him, and he can hardly blame them. He is the very thing they are armed against. 

Another elevator brings them to the surface where he is herded into the back seat of an SUV and blasted with air conditioning. They drive for about an hour across a red landscape dotted with juniper trees, beneath a sky the color of Listerine. Mulder can’t see the dashboard clock through the prisoner partition, but he figures it’s around ten a.m. based on the position of the sun. His pulse is even, the tooth of the road resonating in his bones, the leather seat cold under his palms. The thought of dying seeps in and pools at the bottom of his heart. He considers smashing the tinted glass and throwing himself from the vehicle, rolling in the red dirt and breaking into a run. But the real Fox Mulder wouldn’t have considered it; He would have done it. 

The Chamber of the Navajo Council is a bright octagon filled with rows of courthouse seating. A panoramic mural depicting Navajo history in colorful Santa Fe Studio style dominates all eight walls, its scenes of struggle and overcoming evincing a quaint New Deal Era optimism. Commissioned by the Works Progress Administration in 1942— per a small plaque hanging by the door —the narrative ends just one year before the time of the code talkers, and the terrible truth they would bring back with them.

The twenty-four members of the Council sit on a platform facing the gallery, the rainbow seal of the Navajo Nation emblazoned on the wall behind them. To their left, Dr. Hathale places a stack of file folders on a long, empty table and adjusts the microphone in front of her, her long hair in a swishing ponytail. The oppressively air-conditioned chamber is layered with whispers. The Council members huddle in groups of two or three, while the Speaker confers with an older man in a black uniform, some yellow insignia of rank on his chest. 

Mulder is seated alone at a small table to their right, a phalanx of security separating him from the people in the gallery. The crush of minds hurts his molars, like biting down on a sheet of aluminum foil. Even at Fort Bragg, the effect wasn’t so concentrated. He curls in his chair, trying to hold onto the calm he felt earlier, but he doesn’t know how to parse more than one or two streams of consciousness at a time. He is vaguely aware of the proceedings getting under way. The drip feed of cortisol pinches his throat and makes his skin itch. Somewhere towards the back, he can sense Scully’s presence, but he can’t pick her out of the crowd, the blue thread of her purling in and out of his field of awareness.  

The chatter dies as the Speaker takes his seat and begins calling the session to order. Mulder closes his eyes, struggling to follow the text of their conversation as the agenda is read and Dr. Hathale is introduced. Things seem out of order. Even as one Council member is speaking, he can feel the others waiting for their turn, mentally rehearsing their next statements.

Recognizing the voice of Dr. Hathale, Mulder tries to key in to her testimony and shut everything else out. He lifts his head to stare at her profile, the movement of her lips, the metronome of her ponytail. She doesn’t like or trust him, but she regards herself, first and foremost, as a scientist. She will try to be unbiased in her presentation of the facts, sticking only to the evidence in hand.

“...our efforts to sequence the hybrid genome,” she is saying. “We compared the blood and tissue samples with those already in our database, and were able to find the same exogenous DNA markers.” 

A man in a white cowboy hat leans forward to ask her a question. He is picturing vials of Nickelodeon slime. He does not appreciate her epistemic humility.  

“Yes,” Dr. Hathale relents. “As far as we have been able to determine, Mr. Mulder is physically indistinguishable from the other hybrids. But I must stress that we have not been able to explain the dramatic differences in behavior.”

White Hat gestures at Mulder with the butt of his fountain pen. “You mean, the fact that he’s just sitting there and not trying to kill everyone in this room?” 

“For example,” Dr. Hathale allows. 

“Councilwoman Hodge,” the Speaker acknowledges an older woman in a denim shirt, with dangling silver earrings in the shape of Saturn. 

“Thank you, Speaker Lighthorse,” she begins. “Dr. Hathale, have you had a chance to review the brief submitted by Dr. Scully?”

Dr. Hathale touches the papers in front of her and exhales through her nose. She is less comfortable here; This is speculative ground. 

Hodge asks her a question Mulder can’t make sense of. He squeezes his clasped hands between his thighs, straining for clarity. Someone several rows behind him is loudly wondering how many tanks of propane the Council is going to let them have this winter. The trial of the century, this is not. 

“I can neither confirm nor refute Dr. Scully’s ‘hive mind’ hypothesis,” Dr. Hathale is saying. “The only assertion I can make at this point, is that it’s not incompatible with what we already know.”

“Councilman Begay.” Someone is arguing with White Hat. 

Mulder leans back in his chair, realizing he’s already lost track of what’s at stake in this debate. He can’t tell if any of this is helping or hurting his case. 

“But are the scientific benefits of keeping the Anaye alive and in custody worth the risks?” White Hat is asking.

“That’s beside the point.” A younger woman in a red blazer adjusts her mic. “The law is clear: If Mr. Mulder is Anaye, then he must be destroyed. If he’s a man, then we can’t hold him without cause. This Council must make a determination one way or the other.” 

“Councilwoman Rodriguez,” says Speaker Lighthorse, “Dr. Hathale has already confirmed that Mr. Mulder is Anaye. This Council must proceed on that basis.” 

“I disagree,” she says. “The scientific question and the legal question are separate matters…” 

Mulder drifts. When he snaps back, Dr. Hathale has already left the stand and been replaced by a nervous young man in a suit, who he takes several minutes to recognize as a grown up Eric Hosteen. The silver pendant his grandfather Albert once wore now hangs around his neck on its leather cord, lying over his wine colored tie. A Councilman Ortiz is asking him what he knows about his grandfather’s time as a code talker during the war, about the extraterrestrials, about the human experiments. Asking him if he’s ever met Fox Mulder.

“Once,” Eric is saying. “When I was seventeen.” 

His lashes flick to the left, and they make brief, strange eye contact. The first acknowledgement he’s received since he entered the room, Mulder muses. He was beginning to feel like a piece of furniture.  

“I let him ride on the back of my motorcycle,” says Eric. “He was, um. Human then.” 

Councilman Begay wants to know who Mulder was working for at the time. He starts talking about Mulder’s father, and it takes Mulder too long to realize he means the Cigarette Smoking Man. 

“No way,” says Eric. “My granddad trusted him.” 

But Begay isn’t buying it. He’s hawkish on the Syndicate, Mulder senses. 

“I don’t really believe in that stuff,” Eric is saying, with a degree of embarrassment, about the Blessing Way ceremony. “But my granddad did. And he wouldn't have done that for somebody unless he was cool with them, you know?”

“Just tell us what you saw first hand,” Ortiz admonishes him. “Tell us what you remember.” 

“I mean, after that, the suits came and beat us up,” says Eric. He touches his face. “I definitely remember them cracking my eye socket,” he laughs. “But they were looking for Mulder. He wasn’t one of Them.” 

After Eric, they call Skinner. He’s dressed in his black uniform, a black beret on his shaved head. Speaker Lighthorse introduces him as ‘Commander.’ They ask him how long he’s known Fox Mulder.

“For over ten years,” he tells them.

Mulder sits up, trying to get his attention, but Skinner doesn’t look at him even once. He just stares straight ahead at the giant Navajo seal on the wall behind the Speaker’s chair, and answers their questions in an official monotone. The rainbow ring is still surrounded by a corona of fifty arrowheads, representing the fifty United States. Inside it are hieroglyphs of sunlight, mountains, livestock, corn. 

They ask him about Mulder’s FBI record and his connections to the Syndicate. They ask him if Mulder is a dangerous person. They ask him how many people Mulder has killed. Skinner pauses, before answering honestly that he doesn’t know. 

It soon becomes clear that Skinner himself is in the hot seat. 

“When your convoy brought him here,” Begay is asking, “did you know Mr. Mulder was Anaye?”

“I did,” Skinner confirms. 

One steel toed boot shifts under the table. 

“Then you knew you were harboring the enemy,” says Begay. “Commander, are you confessing to treason in front of this Council?” 

“No, Sir,” says Skinner. 

“No?” Begay asks. 

“I made an assessment.” Skinner’s tongue moves behind his closed lips. “Based on the information I received from Dr. Scully at the time. She explained Mulder’s… condition to me. And I have every reason to trust in her medical expertise.”  

Ortiz prompts him to elaborate. 

“When we took Mulder into custody,” says Skinner, “he was not considered an enemy combatant. We decided to treat him as, essentially, a defector.” 

‘Defector’ makes me sound so glamorous, Mulder thinks at him. You shot me full of holes and then threw me in the back of your van like a sack of potatoes. 

But Skinner can’t hear him. He’s fielding another question from Begay. 

Mulder shifts a few restive inches in his seat, while they continue talking about him like he’s not there. 

Their voices warp into whale sounds. The room spins and the mural seems to come alive like a zoetrope, the painted figures marching around them in a circle. Mulder feels his electrons slipping their orbits and zinging off in every direction, the vexatious thing of his body returning to stardust. Women in blue garments kneel to grind corn while men on horseback draw their bows against U.S. Marshals in dusty gray uniforms. Herds of flocculent sheep and fields of agave cover the desert world with prosperity, the women spinning their fleece into colorful textiles on upright looms as Na'ashjé'íí Asdzáá, the Spider Goddess, taught them to do in ancient times. 

As the soldiers march him down the hall and into another room, Mulder belatedly realizes that the hearing has gone into some sort of recess. The door closes behind him, leaving him alone with a desk and a couple of chairs as his escort stands outside with their backs to him, machine guns lying diagonally across their chests. The static hum of other people’s thoughts is quieter in here, allowing him to hear his own again. It’s cool and dark, a simple office with a single window, a woven tapestry covering the opposite wall. Venetian blinds divide the polished hardwood floor with stripes of orange light. 

The suit they made him wear is constricting, the fabric irritating his skin. He yanks the tie loose, pacing between the desk and the door, the familiar chemical spike piercing his heart. There is only one way he knows of to dislodge it. He throws open the blinds and judges the drop, ignoring the creak of hinges behind him.

“Mulder!” Scully whisper-yells, closing the door before the soldiers can notice what he’s plotting. 

Her eyes are glassy. The same gray hoodie he last saw her in is tied around her waist, atop an oversized Grand Canyon t-shirt. 

“They’re going to kill me, Scully,” he tells her. “They’re going to kill me, and I didn’t fucking do anything!”

He starts unlatching the window, lungs burning with this sudden, desperate feeling of confinement.

“Stop it,” she says. “Mulder, don’t.” 

“I didn’t ask for this,” he rants, ignoring her. He throws off his jacket, pawing at his shirt buttons. “This was done to me. I didn’t ask to be one of these fucking things!”

“Mulder!” she hisses, right as he’s preparing to jump. “Sit down!” 

His legs wrench him away from the window and carry him over to one of the chairs, into which he makes a great show of resentfully flopping. 

Scully drags the second chair around and picks up his jacket. Taking a seat across from him, she folds it in her lap and waits for him to meet her gaze. 

Mulder doesn’t look at her. His knee bounces with frustrated energy. She can make him sit down, but she can’t make him sit still.

“So,” she says. “What exactly was your plan, after jumping out the window in the middle of court like Ted Bundy? What was step two?” 

He glares at her sneakers. One of the plastic casings on her shoelaces is cracked.

“Go ahead,” she says. “Walk me through it.”

“I don’t know,” he mutters. 

“You don’t know,” she repeats. 

Fear sweat cools on the back of his neck. He tries to stand back up, but his legs won’t cooperate. Sit, stay. Play dead. He grips the armrests and angrily rattles the chair. 

“It’s because I’m crazy, okay?” He bares his teeth at her. “Is that what you wanna hear?”  

She crosses her arms in self defense. 

“I am mentally ill,” he pronounces. “I can’t run my own life. Is that what you’re looking for? Some sort of permission to treat me like a dog?” He mimes laying something on her lap. “Well there it is, permission granted.” 

She pauses, giving him a chance to cool down. Her arms unfold.

“I’m not going to let you do something that is guaranteed to result in your death,” she says. “We can argue about the rest once we convince them to release you.”

Mulder lowers his head onto his clasped hands, partially covering up his mouth.

“And what if they don’t?” he asks her.

Even if he could get away, they would take him down. There are more men, with more guns and SUVs outside. Logically, he knows this.

Scully scoots to the edge of her seat to fasten his buttons and redo his tie. 

“These people are not unreasonable,” she tells him. “They’re just trying to protect what they have. They can be persuaded.” 

Mulder sinks, feeling her unplug him again. His heart rate slows, the long, gory splinter sliding out and falling inert at her feet. The suffocating urgency is gone, leaving him relaxed and pliant. It reminds him of hypnosis, except that it’s his body being hypnotized, while his mind remains conscious and aware.

“So, here’s what’s going to happen now.” She fixes his collar and kisses him on the forehead. “You’re going to go back in there, and you’re going to stay calm, and you’re going to answer their questions honestly. You are not going to give them any reason to think you might be dangerous.”

Warm and heavy, he slumps face first onto her shoulder. His sensilla purr, craving her soft hands as she maneuvers him back into his jacket. 

“But I am dangerous,” he murmurs into the side of her neck.

She hugs him as hard as she can, swaying a few degrees in either direction. Tingles pour from the top of his scalp, his heated bones gliding in their sockets. Ready to do her bidding.

“Your body is good,” she rasps. She combs his shapeless crop of virgin hairs. “My sister would say it’s ‘your spirit’s only home on Earth.’” 

“Could use a trim, though,” he says. 

They stay like that for a while, slumped over each other. Any minute now, security will come and take her back to the gallery.

“Listen to me.” She holds his face. “You are not a thing.” 

It hits him that the difference between walking free, and facing execution is the difference between going home with her, and never seeing her again. 

“Scully,” He cups the side of her head, pulling her cheek to his. 

Her clothes smell like they’ve been in storage. There are creases in her t-shirt from the Sedona gift shop where it was folded and sealed in plastic. He closes his eyes, feeling the weightless gauze of her hair against his eyelids. Calm presses on his body like a heavy blanket as she pours her depleted mental resources into soothing him. 

“Scully,” he tries again, still coming up short. In what could be their final moments together, he can’t think of anything more to say.

The hearing resumes around five p.m., with mercifully reduced air conditioning. Speaker Lighthorse calls Mulder to the stand. 

The soldiers hang back to let him take his seat at the long, empty table, unbuttoning his blazer and adjusting the microphone to his height. Breathing slowly through his nose, he places his wingtips flat on the floor and prepares to face his inquisitors, tormented by the afterfeel of Scully’s fingertips on his scalp. His thoughts churn, while his body remains artificially calm.

Councilwoman Hodge is the first to question him. She peers down at him from the platform through narrowed eyes, uncertain how to address such a creature. Saturn tilts on either side of her head.

“Mr. Mulder,” she begins. “What do you… consider yourself?” 

The grain of the table is newly fascinating. With some regret, Mulder lifts his gaze. 

“What do I ‘consider’ myself?” he repeats. 

She clarifies, “Do you consider yourself a human being?” 

He leans back, draping his forearms over his thighs. The thing between his legs slides around inside its pocket as he shifts in his seat.

“Remember when they came out with those genetically-modified seedless watermelons?” he asks her. 

“I’m sorry?” She frowns.

“I’m kinda like that,” he says. “You know: Human, but juicer.”

“Is this funny to you, Mr. Mulder?” she asks.

“Well, you’re threatening me with execution,” he says. “Which is pretty funny, because I haven’t done anything wrong.”

She tests her pen against the yellow legal pad in front of her, pretending to write something down. 

“I see,” she says. “Are you going to answer the question?”

Mulder closes his eyes for a few seconds, a warning pressure against his sternum.

“Yes,” he sobers. 

“Yes, you’re going to answer the question, or ‘yes’ is your answer?” she asks him. 

Hesitation is probably not a good look. A kind of disembodied anguish grips him, the knowledge of how this question would be affecting him if his stress response wasn’t so muted. 

You don’t think I can handle myself, he accuses the Scully in his head. You really do think I’m crazy. Mulder, she sighs, I have seen you in court. Somewhere, the real Scully is silently imploring him to cooperate.

“Yes, I consider myself human,” he says.

Hodge consults her notes.

“We have heard expert testimony today that described you as an alien-human hybrid,” she says. “What are known to us as the Anaye. Do you dispute that characterization Mr. Mulder?”

His fingers curl. “No.”

“You are aware that the Navajo Nation is now at war with the Anaye,” she asks, “and that by entering into our territory, you have committed an act of war, for which the penalty is death?”

“I understand that,” he says softly, leaning over the mic. 

“This Council is not in the habit of violating its own policies,” she says. “We can’t simply make an exception for you, without any legal rationale.” 

He stares into the grain, waiting for his eyes to adjust. He is able to change the focal length of his lenses to see much closer or farther than the ordinary human eye. Zooming in until the wood surface is meaningless threads of color, he can pretend he’s not in this room anymore.

“At the same time,” she continues, “this Council is not disposed to arbitrary cruelty. Because you seem to have retained a human— or  humanlike —consciousness, some have argued that you might be legally classified as a human being. That is the proposition before us now.”

The chamber zooms back into focus. 

“I understand,” he says. 

She clicks her pen.

“Would you describe your consciousness as human or humanlike?” she asks.

The ball point hovers ominously above the yellow paper. 

“I don’t… I don’t know how I would even measure that,” he mumbles. “I mean. Yes. I think so.” 

“Thank you.” She scratches something down. “No further questions.”

Mulder tries to read what she’s writing, but there are too many other minds, too much interference. Once again, he’s at a loss to say whether this is going well or poorly. 

Speaker Lighthorse acknowledges a man in a black cowboy hat adorned with a silver and turquoise medallion as Councilman Goodluck.

“Have you ever killed anyone, Mr. Mulder?” Goodluck begins. 

For once, Mulder pauses to consider his answer. He tries to count up the people he’s killed, but quickly runs out of fingers and toes.

“In my capacity as a Federal law enforcement officer,” he says, slipping into cop jargon, “it has at times been necessary for me to exercise deadly force.”

“The laws of the former United States are of little interest to this Council,” says Goodluck. “The Navajo Nation was here long before the United States of America, and it will be here long after.”

“Well in that case…” says Mulder. This line of questioning is already a disaster for him, he feels certain. “I don’t know what you would consider justification. But I’ve never killed anyone out of… malice or, or vengeance.” Flipping through his memories, he’s not sure this is strictly true. “Only to protect myself and others.” 

Though he has lived a violent life, he insisted to Krycek that he was not a violent person. But then, it’s all too easy feeling morally superior to Krycek.

“Today we’ve heard a theory that the Anaye are ordered to kill all humans through ‘psychic transmissions’ from the alien mothership,” says Goodluck, with audible quotation marks. “Do you receive such transmissions, Mr. Mulder?”

“No.” Mulder straightens. 

“And how can we be certain you won’t receive them in the future?” Goodluck presses him.

At this point, Mulder knows his heart would be pounding if Scully weren’t suppressing his adrenaline. The calm of his body is eerie and capacious, leaving him curled up at the center of himself, like a crying kid in a giant easy chair at the center of a vast, quiet library. 

“I don’t—” he stammers. “If I thought there was any chance of that, I would be begging you for death.”

All day, he’s fantasized about returning to his cell and laying his sore bones down in his poor little bed. Sleep is nothing like death. Sleep is wonderful. He wants to sleep forever.

Goodluck frowns in surprise.

“They did this to me.” Mulder nods at himself. “Without my knowledge or consent. I was promised to them as a slave, but I escaped.” 

He takes a deep breath through his nose. 

“I will never serve them,” he adds. “Never.”

There is some general shuffling and muttering. He closes his eyes against their thoughts, willing himself lucid and present. His stomach tenses, feet still flat on the floor.

Speaker Lighthorse acknowledges Councilwoman Rodriguez.

“If you were to be released today,” she asks, “what would you do?” 

Mulder imagines walking across the gallery, and out of the octagon, and into the red infinity of the New Mexico desert. Imagines falling to his knees in the sand and bursting into purgative flames, his metallic skeleton grinning like the Terminator as his flesh falls away in sizzling cobs.

He opens his eyes. “I would help Scully raise our son,” he says.

Rodriguez is young, maybe a bit of a romantic. She seems to like this answer. Councilman Begay, in his white cowboy hat, is more circumspect. Mulder intuits that they belong to competing factions. 

Begay peers at him over his reading glasses. “What is the nature of your relationship with Dr. Scully?” he asks.

“She’s my partner,” says Mulder. 

“Your domestic partner?” Rodriguez prompts him. 

“You’d— have to ask her that,” he stammers.

“You do have a child together,” she points out. “Would it be reasonable to characterize Dr. Scully as your common law wife?” 

His skin heats. Somehow, the frank discussion of his possible execution got less of a rise out of him. 

“If you are in a committed relationship with a human being,” says Rodriquez, “then the record should reflect that, as it may factor into the Council’s decision.” 

She gives him a moment to regroup before continuing. 

As the Navajo know all too well, the law is whatever is boldly asserted and plausibly maintained. Deciding whether or not to kill him is the easy part; This whole process is an exercise in plausibility. 

“If you were to be released,” she asks him, “would you live with Dr. Scully as her domestic partner?”

“Yes.” The mic fuzzes, barely picking him up.

His shoulders fall, and he lays both hands on the table, shrinking from the eyes of the gallery. In the boiling pan of death, he is reduced to his essential syrup. Little remains of his froth and vainglory. 

“I wouldn’t bother anyone else,” he says softly. “I wouldn’t hurt anyone. Please, just— Let me be with her.”

As the sun sets, the desert cools. 

Back in the small office, Mulder waits for the verdict with his head between his knees. A color he’s learned to call pink floods the window behind him, casting rays across the polished floor. 

There are people standing above him, explaining to him that his child will not receive a separate hearing. The Council has decided that if they share the same nature, they must therefore share the same fate. The same exogenous DNA marks them, like original sin. 

It’s not until they’re setting William down on the chair across from him that he understands what’s happening. The door closes, leaving them alone in the semi darkness, and William squints at him, caught in a stripe of magenta glare. They’ve kept him in the same footy-pajamas, but at least it seems like they’ve been laundered. 

Mulder sits up, peeling numb fingers away from his face. 

“Hi,” he whispers. 

Up close, he can see that the pajamas are printed with storm clouds. The aluminum zipper pull is a little yellow lightning bolt.

William puts a thumb in his mouth. His large eyes are paler than Scully’s, less blue and more gray. There is no recognition behind them.

Picking up his chair, Mulder scoots closer to shade him from the sun. A toddler’s pre-verbal mind is a chaotic shuffle of feelings and images, lacking even the loose scaffolding of the developed ego. There is no sense of time or death, no awareness of previous nonexistence or of having been born.

Mulder offers him a hand, and William eyes it with suspicion. He sees an image of himself from William's perspective, all warped and giant. Then he sees an image of William from his own perspective, from William’s perspective, and it’s like standing between two mirrors.

“You’re psychic,” he realizes. “That’s why…” He withdraws the hand and scrubs it over his face. “…they put you in here with me.”

The thumb pops out of William’s mouth. His features crumple like a paper bag and he begins to cry.

“No, it’s okay,” says Mulder. 

An image surfaces of tiny fingers scraping neon tar from the inside of a foil wrapper. William reaches, his fist opening and closing in the air. He doesn’t have a word for hunger. 

“I’m sorry.” Mulder gives an airless laugh. “I don’t have any Gushers.”

The phantom flavor coats his tongue. It must have made a strong impression. William’s memory is a blur of being passed from one adult to another, tormented with machines and needles, and distracted with occasional treats. 

“Please don’t be fucked up,” Mulder mumbles, casting around the room for something to pacify him. 

There’s a cup of pens on the desk.

“What am I saying?” he laughs. “Of course you’re gonna be fucked up.” 

William wails, his baby teeth like perfect little Tic-Tacs, kicking and flailing as Mulder goes to scoop him up. His tiny body is rigid with fear at being handed off to yet another stranger. 

Mulder stands, rubbing his back and swaying until the screaming stops. Some hidden cord inside him trembles and he stills it, trying to model calm. Baby hairs tickle his chin, and he can smell the combination of himself and Scully. 

Grabbing a sheet of paper from the fax machine, he pulls his chair up to the desk and lets William stand on the seat between his legs so that he can reach the surface. William swats at the paper with an open palm as Mulder selects a red felt marker from the pen caddy. Fear is already forgotten in favor of exploring this new mise en scène.

“Here.” Mulder uncaps the marker and arranges it in William’s fist, showing him how to make strokes on the paper.

For all the case studies he’s read on reputed telepaths, he never gave much thought what they must have been like as infants, or to how their abilities must have affected their development. The implications for language acquisition, for individuation, would seem profound. It was perhaps a symptom of his own monomania, an ironic lack of interest in what other people were thinking, that he never gave even a single moment of consideration to what it must have been like for the Praises.

William seems to grasp the concept immediately. He makes a jagged circle, getting some of the ink on the table. 

Mulder lets go of the pen and watches over his tiny shoulder. Red circles intersect each other in a centifolia of meaning. He wonders if they are seeing the same color. William flares his nostrils and gives a serious little huff. As he bows over the paper, the collar of his pajamas is pulled away to reveal the back of his neck, where an abbreviated gray stripe covers the first few vertebrae. 

When he’s finished with the red marker, he throws it on the floor and grabs a black pen from the caddy. Next, the red vortex is studded with black dots, like the seeds on a strawberry.

“What’s that supposed to be?” Mulder asks him at length. 

“Ba!” William stabs at the paper.

“Oh yeah?” says Mulder. “Did you know Jackson Pollock was funded by the CIA as part of a Cold War psy-op?”

William babbles nonsense syllables. The black pen joins its sibling on the floor. 

He twists around and sends the feeling of hunger again, cramming fingers into his mouth and looking expectantly into Mulder’s eyes. Mulder supposes he must be broadcasting these cries for attention into the void all the time, unable to figure out why they’re being ignored. A toddler’s theory of mind is not sophisticated enough to comprehend that he is psychic and that other people are not.  

“I don’t have anything to eat,” Mulder says. “I’m sorry.” 

His sinuses burn. Not so much for himself, as for Scully, and the thought of her losing both of them at once. 

Tiny hands probe his face. He closes his eyes as William reaches for his brow bone, and the image of her blooms in blurry watercolor on the backs of his eyelids. He can feel her heartbeat, the muffled resonance of her voice. The inside of her womb. 

“You remember her,” he realizes. 

He conjures an image of her smiling, and William presses closer, fascinated. Then he adds himself to the picture, shows himself putting an arm around her shoulder, and they both stand there smiling like they’re having their portrait taken at the mall, trying to convey their connection. 

“I love your mom so much,” he rasps. “And she loves you so much.” 

Beyond the pink window, the world waits to destroy them. If not today, then soon. If not in this way, then in another. Love is untenable under these conditions. Nothing could be crueler than to be so known, to find the only one, just as the sky is falling and the continents are sliding into the sea. To be born into this immense world filled with evil is simply to begin to die. He holds their baby and begins to weep. 

Mulder drifts through the double doors, the spectators streaming around him like a river around a boulder. Twilight paints the dunes blue, the cool air bristling with the sounds of crickets and nightjars. Shell-shocked, he stops at the top of the steps and stares out at the vanishing horizon, as Scully fights her way through the crowd, calling his name.

When the Council read their verdict, he didn’t collapse with relief like the defendant in a network crime drama. He just stood silently in front of them, his face still puffy and sore from crying. Relief is not what he feels; Only exhaustion and resignation. 

Scully peels William from his arms and he slumps over her, covering them both with his boneless weight. 

“Mulder. Oh God.” She is breathless in his ear.

She clutches the back of his neck, pulling him closer as William fidgets between them, half asleep. Mulder buries his face in her shoulder, surrounded by the crunch of footsteps and cars filing out of the sandy parking lot. 

“Now what?” he murmurs. 

The breeze ruffles their clothes. A few hours ago, he couldn’t wait to tear off this stupid suit, but the exigency has passed.

“Now, I take you home with me,” says Scully. 

“Where’s home?” he asks her. 

Before they can go, they have to stop by the Office of Vital Records to pick up his documentation. A young woman with a nose ring and a shaved head takes his photo and makes him fill out a series of forms as Scully sits in the waiting area behind them, William fussing in her lap. 

The girl hands Mulder a pink card with his new personal identification number on it and tells him not to lose it under any circumstances. He gives the card a critical tilt, careful not to smudge the fresh ink, typeset digits glistering in the fluorescent light. This eight-by-five centimeter piece of paper is the only thing that separates him from the Anaye, the only thing that makes him a man. 

Navajo culture is matrilineal and matrilocal, meaning that land, livestock, and children belong by default to the female head of household. The girl explains this to him as he stares at the chipped black varnish on her fingernails. 

“You’re gonna wanna fill out this form, petitioning for recognition of your common law marriage.” She taps the open folder with the cap of her pen.

“We’re not–” he starts to say. His voice is a dry whisper.

“Don’t tell them ‘it’s complicated.’” She cuts him off. “Don’t tell them your freaking life story. Just tell them you’re in a ‘committed spousal relationship.’” 

A marriage certificate, she explains, will help him gain custody of William and a stake in Scully’s homestead. The tips of his ears prickle and he glances behind him at Scully. 

“If you need to fudge the facts a little, that’s okay.” The girl lowers her voice. “I’m trying to help you out here, Chebon.”

The place is an hour away, on the outskirts of Indian Country; No neighbors for miles in any direction. On work days, Scully waits for a black van to pick her up and drop her off from the lab here in the capital city of Window Rock. On Sunday, her day off, she scrubbed the entire house top to bottom with a bucket of Pine-Sol solution and a nylon brush in preparation for his and William’s arrival. She tells him this as they’re leaving the office, and it’s her way of telling him she hasn’t slept in days. 

He dutifully follows her out of the building and down the stairs, the papers tucked under his arm, and holds William for her so that she can don her hoodie against the chill. She’s wired and exhausted. He can feel her dehydration headache and sore feet. The sudden presence of a hungry toddler throws off their whole dynamic, the way they move through space together. Unfortunately, they won’t be able to feed him until they get home. 

They meet Skinner in the parking lot, leaning against a dusty blue pickup truck. He’s changed out of his dress uniform and into a pair of blue jeans and a buttoned-down shirt with the sleeves rolled up, his beefy forearms crossed over his chest.  

They don’t say much at first. Scully sits in the passenger seat with William and Mulder climbs in the back while Skinner drives. What’s left of civilization disappears behind them as they turn off the highway and into the desert. The juniper trees are twisting black specters against the dark blue sand, the sky salted with stars.   

“So, ‘Commander,’” Mulder finally works up the nerve to say. “How’d you swing that?”

The speedometer and fuel gauge are reflected in Skinner’s glasses. He doesn’t take his eyes off the dirt road in front of them. 

“The Navajo don’t trust outsiders,” he says. “But they’re also very pragmatic. The Defence Force is a meritocracy. My military experience gives me rank.”

Mulder leans forward, reaching for the water bottle Scully’s been drinking out of. 

“Like, you Scully.” He elbows her, taking a sip. The water tastes metallic and stale from sitting in that cupholder under a hot sun. 

“We’re lucky they need people with certain skills,” she says blandly. 

Mulder flips open the file folder on the seat beside him. Somewhere inside it there’s a job placement form he will have to fill out. Everyone, the girl at the office informed him, must earn their keep in one way or another. 

“I don’t suppose there’s a terribly high demand for criminal profilers around here,” he says. 

“That’s actually something I need to talk to you about.” Skinner frowns in the mirror. “They’re going to want you to join the Defence Force.”

“What?” Scully turns in her seat. “You didn’t tell me that.” 

William starts to fuss again, picking up on her negative emotions. She bounces him on her knee, trying to calm him down. 

“Good,” says Mulder. “I want to fight.”  

“I’m sorry, but this is a bridge too far.” She reaches back to grab the bottle from him. “Five seconds ago they were talking about killing you because of something you can’t help, and now they want to use it to their advantage?” 

She tips the lukewarm water into William’s mouth and he spits it out, soaking the front of his pajamas. 

“It’s not just because of… that,” says Skinner. The topic evidently makes him uncomfortable. “They’d want Mulder anyway. They’re desperate for people with any kind of combat training. Military, law enforcement, doesn’t matter.”

William stills, distracted by the window. They’re passing a heard of wild desert sheep, curved horns marking their distinctive silhouettes. His tiny fingers spread against the glass.  

Skinner sighs. “Most of these kids’ only experience with firearms is game hunting,” he explains. “They’ve never had to shoot at something that looks like a human being.”

He catches Mulder’s eye in the mirror, adding, “No offense.” 

“None taken.” Mulder waves the file. “I’ve got my human card right here.”  

They reach the homestead a tick before witching hour. Skinner parks the truck and Scully climbs out with William fast asleep on her chest. 

The property consists of a slate blue ranch house with a simple gable roof, a fenced area for livestock, a utility shed, and an array of solar panels. Skinner’s headlights fall on a rusty spigot dripping water into a bucket near the edge of the fence. He steps out, leaving the key in the ignition, a brown paper bag under his arm. 

Mulder sits alone in the back seat, enclosed in quiet for a moment as the dashboard clock strikes midnight on the longest day of his life. Gathering up his papers, he opens the door and hops down to join them.

“Housewarming gift,” says Skinner, producing a bottle of amber mezcal from the bag.  

Scully accepts it with a chagrined smile. The label reads ‘El Chupacabra’ and features a demonic face with the forked tongue of a serpent and the spiraling horns of a markhor. 

“Come inside for a minute?” she offers. 

“I can’t,” Skinner says. His eyes crinkle behind his glasses. “Another time.” 

He gives Scully a hug, and she wraps the arm holding the bottle around his back. Then he turns to Mulder, hesitating before placing a hand on his shoulder. 

“Before I go,” he says. “I’m sorry.”

“For what?” Mulder asks him.

Skinner looks at the dirt. 

“When my men fired on you,” he says, “I didn’t think…” He works his jaw. “I thought you were as good as dead. I thought it was something else, wearing your face.” 

He looks up, searching Mulder’s eyes. It’s unnerving for him to see one of these monsters up close, where the subtle differences in scent and skin texture are evident. 

“No harm done,” Mulder says. “One of the perks of this thing is rapid healing.”

Shaking his head, Skinner finally pulls him in for a hug. “Knowing you, you’ll get plenty of use out of it.”

They say their goodbyes and Skinner climbs back in his truck and pulls away, leaving them in the darkness of the yard. Handing Mulder the mezcal, Scully rummages in her pockets for the keys and lets them in, fumbling for the switch next to the door. 

Because the house is powered by solar panels, it has to rely on battery storage at night. The overhead bulbs are brownish and flickering, revealing a single main room with a kitchen area to one side and a rough hewn table and chairs to the other. The floor is made of cool cement, the white plaster ceiling held up by support beams of dark wood. The only adornment is a handmade wool rug in a kaleidoscopic rainbow pattern.

Scully makes a pot of boxed mac n’ cheese and they gently wake William to finally feed him. It’s too late and they’re too hungry to bother with a real dinner, so they sit him down on the edge of the counter and eat it quickly over the sink.

There’s a tall cabinet next to the propane stove, half filled with pantry staples, and the other half with nothing but jars of smooth peanut butter. The peanut butter is for Mulder, Scully explains, to supplement his calorie intake. She put as much of it in her ration book as they would allow her. 

Food and supplies will come once a month by delivery truck from Tuba City, Arizona: Flour, cornmeal, cooking oil, hominy, dried beans, agave nectar, canned vegetables, ramen noodles, cellophane sleeves of Mexican sandwich cookies, toilet paper, toothpaste, and soap. The rest, they are responsible for procuring themselves: hunting if they want meat, raising goats and chickens if they want milk and eggs, foraging for yucca, beeweed, prickly pear, and juniper berries.

To the left of the main room there’s a tiny bathroom with a pull chain toilet and the small bedroom Scully’s been sleeping in because it has better insulation. She goes to tuck William in, sitting on the edge of the bed as he kicks and fights with her. He is a colicky and anxious baby, deprived of normal attachments and thrown into yet another unfamiliar environment. 

She bends over him, trying not to cry, but he can sense her distress. Mulder stands in the doorway, wishing she didn’t look so helpless. 

“It’s okay,” she keeps saying. “We’re home now.”

He kneels beside her and leans over the bed. William shrills at him and scratches his face. 

“No hitting,” she says, halting his tiny fist.

“Here,” Mulder offers.

He tries rolling William onto his side to rub the silver stripe on the back of his neck. Then he breathes through his nose, sending wordless impressions of sleep. It seems to do the trick. 

“What’s he thinking?” Scully asks hoarsely. 

For the first time, she is acutely envious of Mulder’s psychic powers. 

“I don’t know,” he says. “Babies are pretty incoherent.”

She wipes at her eyes. William falls still as she draws the brightly patterned blanket over him, and just like that, he’s fast asleep. She pulls out her ponytail, slipping the elastic band around her wrist, and traces repetitive fingers over the stylized shapes of black sheep against a pink and turquoise sky. 

“He remembers you,” Mulder assures her. “He knows you’re his mom.” 

She nods, letting him enfold her in his arms. 

The desert can reach temperatures of over a hundred degrees fahrenheit during the day, only to drop below freezing at night. The larger bedroom to the right of the main room is cold from two big, single-pane windows that face east, letting the occupants wake with the rising sun. It’s around two a.m. now, and they are filled with stars.

Scully’s teeth are chattering as she climbs under the flannel sheets and wool blankets and sheds her clothes onto the floor. She laughs at the sight of her own breath, murmuring something about the thermal benefits of skin to skin contact. Mulder lies back against the pillows, letting her work on his buttons, and is surprised when her face changes.   

“Oh no,” she sighs. “Mulder, no.” 

She peels his shirt off, running her hands over his ribs, which have grown unpleasantly pronounced.

“What?” He plays dumb.

Scully lies down beside him, yanking the covers over them both. Her freezing fingers probe him, assessing the damage. 

“Mulder, you have to eat,” she says. “This is serious! You’re becoming emaciated!”

His head lolls to the side, letting her inspect his sharp clavicle, and he feels a wash of shame. He wants her to look at him the way she did before; Not like this. 

“Haven’t I taken enough personal hits lately?” he asks her. “Now I’ve gotta hear that I look like shit, on top of everything else?”

“Don’t give me that,” she hisses. 

In her fantasies, he’s sweaty and glowing, maybe straight from the basketball court, with laughing eyes and a doglike eagerness to please her. Through the dreamy scrim of her arousal, his tall, athletic figure looks far more impressive than it’s ever actually been in real life. 

“We have to make sure you’re getting enough calories,” she says. “Your basal metabolic rate appears to be several times that of an ordinary man your size. That’s the only explanation for such rapid weight loss.” She presses on his nails and runs her fingers through his hair, checking for other signs of starvation. “Mulder, this is an emergency.”

“Okay, okay,” he huffs. 

He pulls her close so that her soft breasts are pancaked against him. Her legs shift under the covers, trying to kick away the cold and she returns the embrace, running her hands over his back.

“Your body has different needs now,” she says gently. “We have to pay attention to them.”

There’s no excuse for him to be letting this happen. His strength is a valuable resource which he can’t afford to squander. Plus, her idealized image of him is stiff competition. 

“I know,” he says, considering what it will take to get himself in the kind of fit, muscular shape she finds most desirable. “I’ll fix it. I promise.”

“Okay.” She relaxes. 

The stress of the day bleeds out of him as she strokes his spine, commanding his body to rest. His sensilla heat, his joints going slippery, and he closes his eyes, feeling himself become her pet. Her cold hand shocks his cheek and he nuzzles against it, warming her palm, aware of his submissive body language but unable to help it. 

“I’ve been thinking,” he says. “I’ve been thinking that maybe you should just keep me this way.”

She looks up from lying on his chest. “What do you mean?” she asks.

“I think you know exactly what I mean,” he says.

The stars surround her; Dana, beatific and sad. She rests her chin in the X of her folded arms, challenging him to say it. 

“I’m not completely lacking in self awareness,” he tells her. “I know what I’m like, sometimes. I think…” he says slowly. “I think I used to think that if people only knew what I knew, it would prove I wasn’t crazy.” He laughs miserably. “I didn’t want to consider the possibility that I could be right, and still be crazy.” 

“‘Crazy’ is… harsh,” she demures.

“C’mon Scully.” He brushes her hair aside, feeling his face crinkle with affection. “I’ve always had people making excuses for me. You, Skinner. Before that, it was Reggie. But we both know the truth.”

By now she has stopped shivering, ensconced in the reservoir of their shared body heat. Mulder’s higher internal temperature certainly helps.

“Krycek is right about me,” he says.

Her forehead ripples. “Now, that’s just slander.” 

“But it’s true.” Mulder shrugs. “The fact is, I wouldn’t have gotten away with half the shit I did if I were just your typical corn-fed Bureau recruit— If I went to a state school, if I didn’t have my dad’s name.” 

She strokes her foot against his shin, vexed but unable to refute his reasoning. 

“How many times have you seen me lose it?” he asks her. “Something sets me off, and I, I suddenly turn erratic, unreasonable. Violent, even.”

Their legs tangle as she lowers her head onto his chest again, listening to his heartbeat. She lies and makes excuses for him, even to herself. They both know this.

She wants to believe in a version of him that isn’t quite real. A version of him that is merely damaged in a Byronic and interesting way, instead of the often obnoxious and occasionally frightening way he is actually damaged. 

“Do you want to know what I think?” she asks him.

“Always.” He smiles.

“I think you suffer from a complex form of post traumatic stress,” she says. “I think you experienced something when you were very young that was so extreme, so out of the ordinary, that no one else could understand it, and that left you very isolated. I think that trauma was compounded, again and again, over the course of many years, by the actions of your parents, the very people who were supposed to protect you. And I think that almost anyone, under those circumstances, would probably develop some unhealthy habits,” she euphemizes. “I have tended to view your… sometimes extreme behavior… through that lens.”

Pain presses on the inside of his chest, right under her ear, and he strokes his lips against her hair.

“You’ve been through much worse,” he points out. “And you’re not… like this.”

She sighs, expanding and shrinking in his arms. 

“I was lucky, in a way,” she says. “To have such a strong foundation in my family, in my faith. I have been through a lot, it’s true. But even in my darkest moments, I’ve never felt that I was truly alone.”

The ceiling slopes downward towards the windows, two oak beams dividing the white plaster surface into a tryptic. He remembers William’s rose in his jacket pocket, the page filled with intersecting red circles. They will have to choose a place on the empty walls to hang it.  

“It’s like I’m still standing there frozen, watching them take Her,” he says. “It’s not even really a memory: It’s a physical sensation. I panic, and when I get like that, the one thing I can’t bear to do is stand still.”

“But this brings you relief?” she asks. 

The feeling fizzes along his thoracic nerve, opening his sinuses and deepening his breaths. A tingly, bubbly froth pours through him, and he is floating inside his body, still tethered to it, but wearing it more loosely. He feels strong, but his control is weak; Like a lion dozing in a sunbeam.  

“I haven’t been… having the nightmares,” he tells her. “And it’s strange. My body feels subdued, but my mind feels freer.” His eyelids flutter, the moonglow of her shoulder appearing and disappearing as he struggles to keep them open. “I never realized how… tense I was all the time,” he says. “How much the adrenaline fatigue was affecting my judgment. It’s as if I’m finally thinking clearly.”

He remembers reading in one of those National Geographics they gave him that the male anglerfish reproduces by fusing himself to the female’s belly, his eyes and teeth dissolving as he becomes little more than a sperm-producing nub she carries around so she can fertilize her eggs. 

Scully guides him onto his side, squeezing him tightly, and he tries to practice disappearing into her, becoming a mere appendage of her will.

“I’m tired of fighting everything,” he says. “I’m tired of being in pain all the time. I just want it to be over.”

“Mulder…” she says.

“I'm not talking about wanting to die,” he clarifies. “Not literally. I guess what I’m saying is… I’m about ready to surrender.” 

Her silver breath heats his face. 

“I don’t think it’s that simple,” she says.

“Why not?” He chuckles. “I’ll have dinner ready for you when you come home from work, and I’ll answer the door wearing nothing but an apron.”

They are sharing a pillow, their noses only centimeters apart.

“You’re feeling down on yourself right now,” she whispers. “But you’ll bounce back; I know you will, because I know you.” Her blurry smile fills his half-lidded view. “Your rebellious nature will reassert itself. I don’t expect you to make it easy for me.”

“Oh yeah?” he asks. “Is it sexier if I put up a fight?” 

“Mmm.” She hums against his lips. “I’m just pointing out that my power over you is not total. We know you can resist it, at least to some degree. Plus, my concentration isn’t always going to be perfect. I can be distracted,” she says, half thoughtful, half flirtatious. “And you have the advantage of being able to read my mind.” 

The darkness throbs with potential energy. She brings their foreheads together and closes her eyes. 

“Maybe this doesn’t have to be resolved,” she whispers. “Maybe it can be… an on-going negotiation.” 

His throat makes a little hng of amusement. “We have always been so good at disagreeing,” he avers.

For a moment, he thinks she’s going to fall asleep on him and leave it at that. But then she withdraws, running her fingers through his hair. He moans, unable to conceal his reactions in this state.  

“I will keep you like this, for now,” she resolves, giving him a serious look. “But you’re still my partner. Any big decisions, we make together. Okay?”

“Okay,” he breathes.

They roll together, kissing enough to generate a slow-burning erotic charge, but not enough to produce real urgency. Her body is like velvet against him, the fine hairs on both of them teasing his sensitive skin in the most delicious way. Too fatigued to escalate it into sex, they are both content to let it simmer.

When the truth hits him like a shock of cold air, his face is between her breasts, one of his skinny arms looped around her waist. Unwinding himself from her, he lies flat on his back and spreads out like a star, his startled laughter rising in a puff of vapor. 

“Morphine,” he says.

“What about it?” she giggles. 

He shakes his head against the mattress, his stomach plunging in realization. 

“They spent fifty years carrying out the most sophisticated, far-reaching conspiracy in human history,” he narrates with sudden fervor. “Infiltrating the military, academia, the media, private corporations, and every branch of government in order to conduct their secret experiments on an unwitting populace, a project of breathtaking scope and scale. They were willing to go to any lengths, to sacrifice any principle in the name of pushing the technology forward. And after all that… they could have just given us morphine. A drug that was developed in 1804.” 

Teetering between laughter and tears, he can only gape at the ceiling in disbelief. The futility of it cores him. The absolute waste of all their lives. Just when he thought there were no more rugs left to pull. 

“I wish we’d told him the truth, Scully,” he says at last. “I wish I could have seen the look on his face, when he found out the answer was fucking morphine.”

Despite— or perhaps because of —their exhaustion, neither of them manages to get more than a few hours of sleep. 

When Mulder opens his eyes, Scully is already gone. The sheets are tangled around his legs and the windows at the foot of the bed are tinged with an iron glow.

He pulls on some of the clothes she procured for him with her ration book: A pair of red and green flannel pajama pants and an egg-shell colored thermal shirt. The cement floor is still icy under his bare feet as he crosses the main room and takes his morning piss in the tiny bathroom. The air smells of pleasant smoke and he can feel the warm vibration of William still sleeping in the bedroom next door. Finding the stovetop percolator already filled with coffee, he pours himself an earthenware mug and wanders outside in the direction of the smoke.

The sky is the color of plum skin, the sun a moon-white sliver on the horizon. Scully is seated on an upside-down shipping crate, swathed in a colorful wool blanket, before a crackling campfire she built behind the house.

Grabbing an empty crate from the stack next to the door, Mulder sits down across from her, curling his toes in the cool sand. They drink their coffee in silence for a few minutes, until she decides to acknowledge the glossy paper booklet in her lap. 

“I picked this up in town,” she says, handing it to him. “I was thinking about school, for William.” 

The front of the pamphlet reads ‘St. Michael’s Mission’ and boasts of its establishment by the Franciscans in 1898. 

“Are we gonna raise the kid Catholic?” Mulder smirks.

“If only in the interest of preserving civilization,” she says. 

The fire pops, logs reshuffling. She sips her coffee, squinting into the wind, her loose hair whipping around her. 

“I want him to have a community,” she says softly. “Many people find comfort in the rituals, even if they don’t really believe.”

He bows his head, considering this.

“Is that how it is for you?” he asks her.

She frowns, lifting her face in the direction of the oncoming dawn. 

“Sometimes I do believe,” she says. “And sometimes going through the motions is enough.”