Title: The Aftermath
Author: CathGerm
Written: July 2002
Category: Story. Skinner. Angst. But eve-rybody's in it, including a bunch of dead people.
Rating: PG. Language of the "F" kind. Violence implied, not described.
Spoilers: The Truth
Archive: You bet. Let me know where.
Disclaimer: Just borrowing. Nothin' to see here. Move along.
Feedback: cathgerm@aol.com

Summary: What happened after Skinner went through the door of Kersh's office.

He was fucked.

Walter Skinner's feet moved of their own vo- lition. Duty called. He'd knocked at the door of his superior's office, therefore when it opened, he needed to enter. Never mind that he was welcomed by an alien. He understood his place in this, and the alien let him pass and then it stood in the door looking out at Doggett, Reyes, and Gibson Praise, and Skinner wanted to yell orders at his charges from inside the office to move, to leave the Hoover as fast as they could to save themselves. And to save Gibson Praise. What the hell had they been thinking, bring- ing him here? Sometimes they were such ama- teurs in matters of the X Files. But as he opened his mouth to call to them, Kersh, seated at the chair behind his desk and looking pale, if that was possible, caught his eye and shook his head.

The door closed behind them.

He could hear Gibson speaking. It was like he was standing behind him, it was so clear.

"They know."

He was fucked.

But then he'd been fucked for a long time, and he was somehow secure in that knowledge, and the thought that Mulder and Scully were gone and that Doggett and Reyes soon would be filled him with a dark giddiness. He was both sad and elated.

Elated that they were safe.

Sad that he was fucked.

He'd always expected to be left to fend for himself. He had expected no more and no less than that from all of them. That's what he deserved. His punishment for sitting the fence too long.

He heard footfalls as his last hopes left the door and headed down the corridor.

He decided to pretend that it was just an- other day at the FBI. Just another day at the FBI. and Deputy Director Alvin Kersh had called him to his office for his weekly reaming for whatever flagrant misstep he may have most recently taken. He tried to ig- nore the tremor in Kersh's hand as he brought it up to wipe at his chin, and he took a seat in front of the desk while the Juror took a stand beside it, his arms over his chest. He tried to forget that Gibson had pointed at him in the courtroom and had said that he was an alien. He looked like any number of Tired Old White Guys who haunted the halls at the Hoover, but Skinner believed that he was of the Billy Miles bloodline. He tried to forget that as he attempted to compose his face, but he could- n't.

He *did* remember that he'd forgotten a stack of bills on his desk at home, and he wondered if he'd ever have the chance to mail them. He pictured Doggett and Reyes cleaning his personal effects out of his condominium.

"Oh John," Monica says, her voice sad and small. "Here's a stack of bills he never sent."

"Hey. An Esquire subscription. Think I'll change the address to mine."

Funny how the mind worked when one looked down the bore of a metaphorical loaded gun.

He'd never seen Alvin look so nervous, and that alone was almost worth the price of ad- mission. If he was in on all of this with the Juror, sweat wouldn't be glistening on his forehead and his Adam's apple wouldn't be bobbing up and down convulsively.

Skinner had had his doubts. He hadn't be- lieved it last night when Kersh had shown up to help rescue Mulder. He'd wondered then at the ease with which Kersh had succumbed to the notion of vast government conspira- cies and various and sundry alien lifeforms stalking the earth. Eight, nine years Skin- ner had sat on the fence, and all it took for the Deputy Director was a fully-armed Monica Reyes in his face, and he had crossed over.

Skinner had to admit that he was jealous. Had he crossed over years ago, he might now be out there somewhere with Mulder and Scully or Doggett and Reyes, organizing and planning for a 2012 resistance.

Now he'd be lucky to make it to noon.

Gibson had said that they knew. Skinner crossed his legs and folded his hands in his lap and held the Jurist in a steady gaze. There could be some small hope here. Who knew what Gibson meant?

<"They know."> They could know that he made a lousy defense attorney. And damn Mulder for setting him up with that. He'd known the case was doomed from the start. How kind of Mulder to make Skinner the executioner of his lost cause. The guy had the directions for push- ing all of Skinner's Guilt Buttons in his hip pocket, no question about it.

They could know about those Baltimore Ori- oles tickets he had in the top drawer of his desk. He hoped that somebody would find them and put them to good use.

They could know he had always had a thing for Dana Scully. And had recently had less- than-appropriate feelings for Monica Reyes. And he allowed that there had to be an ana- lyst somewhere who would give their eye teeth to work him through that sad state of affairs. Or lack of affairs.

<"Have you always been attracted to women that you cannot have, Mr. Skinner?">

They could know that Mulder and Scully were an item. And he wished he could thank them so much, by the way, for locking lips while he stood in a 10 x 10 cell with them feeling like a complete and total ass. And then he thought of the next words out of Mulder's mouth - "Come here, you big beautiful bald man" - and he couldn't help himself.

He smiled.

"You find this humorous, Assistant Director Skinner?" the Juror asked.

<Oh. What the hell. He was fucked anyway.>

"Kinda'."

It was so out of character for him that Alvin's eyes bugged out. The Juror shook his head in dismay.

"I'm afraid that you don't understand how serious your situation is."

"Oh," Skinner said. "I think I do."

The alien moved to stand behind Alvin's chair, and this made the Deputy Director look even more unstrung than he was al- ready. Skinner was surprised to feel a rush of sympathy for him. Alvin had dealt only short-term with the Cancer Man. He'd never had to look over his shoulder for Krycek. Never had to watch friends bleed from the nose or disappear into alien light. He was such a Rookie.

"Unfortunately," the Jurist said, "the two of you are impediments. But you also have value. Value because of what you know."

In spite of the calm he was projecting, Skinner's guts roiled. Nice to know you're valuable. Sad to know why: because of in- formation in your head that you most proba- bly don't want to give up, and he searched his personal database as the alien stared at him.

Mulder and Scully: didn't know where they were.

Doggett and Reyes: didn't know where they were going.

Gibson Praise: with Doggett and Reyes for the moment, but the alien mustn't have wanted him, or he would have snatched him out of the hallway.

William:

William.

Walter Skinner was filled with a black de- spair.

That, he knew.

His godson. He knew where he was. He was the *only* one who knew where he was. And he would die with that knowledge. At least he hoped he would. Who knew what kind of sophisticated means of torture these super soldiers possessed?

Unless . unless .

They were in the Hoover, the hallowed halls of the FBI. What could the alien do to them there? If he tried to march them out, all they had to do was stop and refuse to move. They weren't anonymous, the Deputy Director and Assistant Director. Most knew who they were. If the Jurist tried to strong-arm them, agents would come to their aid.

"Deputy Director Kersh will, of course, want to accompany one of his best Assistant Di- rectors to the hospital," the Juror said. "It would be unseemly for him *not* to, given that it happened in his very own of- fice."

Alvin was frowning over at him. Skinner frowned back.

"The emergency medical technicians who come to pick you up will look just like emergency medical technicians." The Jurist smiled. "No one will be the wiser." He reached into his suit coat. When Skinner saw what was being pulled from a pocket, his response was Pavlovian. His breath left him and he leaned forward. It hurt already, and the alien hadn't even done anything yet. Alarmed by his response, Alvin moved as if to rise.

"Heart attacks and powerful men in stressful situations go hand-in-hand, wouldn't you say, Assistant Director?"

And then the pain exploded in his chest and he saw Alvin rise as blackness licked at the edges of his vision and he thought, once again and with crystal clarity, that he was fucked.

Montana was huge. Mulder tried to remember when they had crossed the state line headed north, and he couldn't. He briefly longed for a couple of nice-sized mid-Atlantic states. At least then he'd feel like they were making progress. Crossing state lines meant movement.

At the moment they were plowing up and down over sere hills in the big SUV like a tug- boat plows through saltwater waves, the only point of reference being the dark frown of the Rocky Mountains along the horizon to their left. St. Paul, Minnesota was a long, long ways away to their right, but there was nothing to be seen in that direction. Also in that direction was Washington D.C. Mo- rose thoughts begin crowding Mulder's brain, and he shook them away.

To his right as well was Dana Scully.

She'd been quiet. So had he. Their exis- tence for the past two days after their ini- tial euphoria had consisted of the basics: movement, food, shelter, distracted sex, sleep.

There was too much left undone for them to celebrate their own survival. Too many loose ends. Friends unaccounted for. Wil- liam, undiscussed. And it would be a long time before that was a subject that they dared to broach.

Oh. And he could see the dead.

"What?" Scully said.

Had he said that aloud? He could see dead people. Who says she couldn't hear his thoughts?

Stranger things had certainly happened in their years together.

"I'm thinking that if I can see dead people, why can 't I see dead people that I *really* want to see," he said, and he allowed his arms a languid stretch against the steering wheel, trying to work out the kinks of travel. He was slightly desperate to see her smile. Even an exaggerated eye-roll would do him a world of good.

"Like?" She turned to him, her arm on the window, half-in, half-out of the SUV, and he considered warning her about an unbalanced tan and then thought better of it since it didn't really matter. All the windows were open. It was warm, but they both hated the artifice of air conditioning, and her hair was a riot of fire, flame flying out from her skull, licking at her cheeks and stick- ing to her lips. He was turned on in spite of himself.

"Like Elvis, for example," he said, looking away from her and back at the road. "Why not Elvis?" He glanced at her out of the corner of his eye.

There. A spark of something. Not a smile, really, but something.

"Like Liberace. Einstein. DeForrest Kelly. Gene Rodenberry."

There was a twitch in her lip. Just the up- per left corner, and just a little twitch, and he loved her for it.

"Dave Thomas. Walter Brennan. Chuck Jones."

There was something wrong in that string. He could tell it by the look on her face. He'd triggered something, and he cursed it.

She turned away from him and looked out the window at the nothing of the landscape. Minutes passed, and he reviewed what he'd said:

<"Dave Thomas.">

Burgers? Was it burgers? Was she not a burger fan? He knew she wasn't a vegan. He'd seen her scarf down plenty of red meat in her time. Was it square burgers, then? Mulder had to admit that there was something unnatural about that.

<"Walter Brennan.">

So he had a thing for "The Real McCoys." Was that any more peculiar than any other peculiar thing in their peculiar little lives?

<"Chuck Jones.>

Dear God. Scully couldn't possibly have a problem with his Warner Brothers hero. Could she? That could be a deal-breaker. Certainly she could indulge the eleven-year- old in him.

She always had.

He gazed over at her. The hair on the back of her head whipped at the leather seat be- hind her.

<Walter Brennan.>

< Walter.>

And at the same moment that he came to his somber conclusion, she spoke, her voice as far away as St. Paul, Minnesota.

"Have you seen him?"

"No. No, I haven't."

Three more miles of nothing pass.

"Good," she finally says, and they drive on.

**

"So do you think they made it, then?"

That was the thirteenth time he'd asked it. Monica was keeping track.

Little did the rest of the world know: FBI Agent and former Marine John Doggett was a worry-wart.

She sighed.

"When I looked behind us, last thing that I saw, they were fine."

"But that big blast at the end? The one we saw at that rise? Do ya think-"

"Jesus Christ, John!" she snapped. "Give it a rest."

She was at the wheel, and she felt his eyes on her face. Once, twice they raked across her profile like the lights in the oncoming cars on the southern Nevada two-lane highway they were rolling along. She felt guilt creep up on her. Between oncoming cars, she shot a look at him. He was sitting ramrod straight, his thin lips even thinner than usual, his sightless stare grim.

She was tired. He was tired. They were getting on each other's nerves.

It should come as no surprise. John Dog- gett, decorated Marine and stellar FBI agent had aided and abetted a convicted murderer in a prison escape. And she had helped.

This information might or might not be known by the powers-that-be. Monica Reyes and John Doggett might or might not be wanted by the very institution that paid for their medical and gave them other excellent bene- fits. Their lives might or might not be in danger. Mulder and Scully might or might not have escaped. Gibson Praise might or might not be where they left him. And Wal- ter Skinner . she didn't want to go there.

John Doggett was a confirmed control freak, and the murky unknowns of their current situation was unnerving enough to drive someone like him perfectly nuts. And her along with him.

They'd literally driven in circles since their escape. They'd headed west with some vague notion of driving up the Pacific coastline and changed their minds near the California border. So then they turned north. What was up north that wasn't west? Who knew? It just seemed necessary to keep moving.

"Goddamned stupid order-followin' Marine."

This was the other thing. This would be the seventeenth time she'd heard this litany.

He wasn't speaking of himself.

He was speaking of Walter Skinner.

"Just walked in the goddamned door like he *had* to. No questions. Just looked at us and-" he snapped his fingers "-just like that he turns around and goes in there. What the *hell* was he thinkin'? What the hell was he thinkin'?"

No answer was necessary. Besides, she did- n't have one that John accepted. She'd tried answering the question somewhere just after they crossed over the Nevada border, but to no avail. John had rejected it.

Monica was an empathetic soul, and in quiet moments as she had watched the dusty red mountains approach and recede, she'd tried to put herself in Walter Skinner's place, tried to understand what he did and why he did it, but no matter how many times she tried to walk in his shoes, those shoes al- ways turned away from that door and headed down the hall to freedom.

"Goddamned stubborn stupid man."

She felt hot tears ride in her eyes and she blinked them away.

"Goddamned stupid stupid stupid. Jesus. Stupid."

What a peculiar young man this was. So sol- emn. So cheerless. She gave him a tenta- tive smile across the table. He stared back, unblinking, his glasses making his eyes appear even more large and solemn than they already were.

She wasn't sure that she was very good with young people anymore. And now she would have one less chance than before, what with William .

She cleared her throat. It would do her no good to think of that. She would pray for strength tonight. She would go to mass to- morrow. There was nothing to be done for it.

"Mrs. Scully?"

"Hmm?"

"Mrs. Scully. It's your turn."

"Oh. Oh yes. Of course."

She reached over to the pile of cards and picked one, discarded one.

John Doggett and his new partner had ap- peared at her doorstep two days ago with Gibson Praise in tow. No time to explain, he'd said. Dana and Fox were in trouble, he'd said. And Gibson needed someplace safe to stay. For how long, she couldn't know.

But "Dana" and "trouble" were the magic words, words that she'd most certainly heard before, and she understood the import of them, so she'd taken him in and had given him Dana's old room. She'd felt uncomfort- able with the notion of giving him Bill's or Charlie's, and she wasn't sure why. She'd apologized to Gibson for the lilac walls and lacy white curtains.

Gibson didn't seem to care.

But then Gibson Praise was an enigma. Pecu- liar, solemn man/child.

"Gin," he said.

And he was very, very good at Gin.

He could never remember signing off on a 302 like this before, and he'd signed some pretty strange ones in his years as Assis- tant Director.

It was the 302 of a child.

Bold crayon markings. A flat sun in the up- per right corner, in a place usually re- served for the department number. And rays tracked down from that sun to the space al- lowed for Explanation of Expense. And in that box was a house. A farm house.

He picked up the pen that Sharon had given him for their anniversary. It felt heavy in his hands, like it was made of some alien metal, and he uncapped it and reached for the 302. But as the pen dropped to the page, he felt a tingling in his chest and the paper turned into an 8-1/2 x 11 pool of liquid, something reflective like mercury, and he couldn't catch his breath because of the thing on his chest, and he wished he could get the thing *off* of his chest, and he looked down and it was William, it was his godson strapped to him in a baby car- rier, and then William started to cry.

"Easy. Easy." He felt something cool on his forehead. His cheek. "Easy."

Skinner allowed himself plenty of time to come around. There was no rush, after all, and much to absorb.

He recognized the voice. It was Alvin Kersh. And he knew he wasn't in a hospital. He'd been in enough of them to know the smell of one and the sounds of one. He was- n't in Kersh's office, either. There was a hum about the Hoover that he could feel in his bones.

And speaking of his bones: they ached. There wasn't a part of him that didn't hurt. He recognized this after-effect. They'd tripped the nanobots on him, and not just once. He wondered briefly how much time had passed since he'd dropped in front of Kersh's desk, and then decided that the headache of memory was not worth it.

Right now it was whatever time it was, and it really didn't matter.

Because he was fucked.

Even without opening his eyes he knew that they were in a dark place. In many ways. And it smelled of wet wood and things dead under the floorboards. He was lying on something lumpy and damp, and even though he knew that movement would most likely have him black out, he wanted to be off of it as soon as possible.

He wondered where Mulder and Scully were now. He dedicated a moment to Doggett and Reyes. He even thought of Gibson before he gave thought to the one thing he didn't want to give thought to: William. William and where he was. That piece of information needed to go away to some place in his brain where there was no escape. Back there with the one time he actually admitted to Sharon that he had fears. Back in that corner with his sizable bundle of unrequited affections and denied emotions.

"Walter. Are you all right?"

Of *course* he wasn't all right, but he pried his eyes open anyway so that he could allay the Deputy Director's fears. Alvin's worried face swam into view. Skinner blinked several times. Even his eyelids hurt. Alvin reached into his suit coat and pulled out a pair of wirerims and put them carefully on Skinner's nose and secured them behind his ears.

"Better?" he said.

Skinner nodded and tried to make his throat work. He was unsuccessful, and Kersh reached beside the bed and his hand came back holding a cup.

"Can you sit up?" he asked.

Skinner would have laughed if he'd had the strength. One shot from the nanobot palm pilot and for a week he'd been unable to sit up without looking like a contortionist. God only knows how many hits they'd given him this time. He shook his head.

"No," he mouthed.

Kersh nodded, put the cup back, and stood up from the bedside. Skinner felt Kersh's arms fold around his chest, and he grunted in pain as Kersh pulled him up and leaned him against the wall. Skinner fought the need to black out and took in their confines as he did. No windows. Slats just under the roofline that allowed in dim light. A lit- tle bigger than Mulder's most recent abode. One door. Locked, he assumed. Two bed/cots and a table between. And Deputy Director Alvin Kersh, who was holding out a cup of what Skinner assumed to be water, his dark eyes sympathetic.

"Thanks," Skinner whispered, and he reached for it. He was filled with dismay when his shaking hands refused to obey his brain's order to be still, and water sloshed out of the cup and onto his rumpled suit coat and shirt. Kersh's hand covered his and moved the cup to his mouth. Skinner shot a grate- ful glance over the cup rim as he drank.

There were worse nurses than Alvin Kersh. There were better ones as well, and he though of Dana Scully.

Skinner closed his eyes and leaned back.

"How many times ."

That was as far as he could get.

"That palm pilot thing?" he heard Kersh say. "Every time you'd start to come around, they'd zap you. Maybe four, five times."

Skinner grimaced. He was amazed he hadn't dropped dead of a heart attack, and he cursed his genetic make-up for not allowing him to do just that.

"How long have we been here?" In spite of the fact that he knew it didn't matter, he found he wanted to know. He needed a sense of place and time.

"Two days plus," Kersh replied, and he dropped to the other cot with a sigh. He gestured at the table between them. "Hun- gry?"

Skinner opened his eyes and turned his head to look and was sorry that he did. The room twisted and turned and pitched on its side. Whatever edible thing was on the table was now inedible. No point in keeping up his strength anyhow. Keeping up his strength might keep him alive. And he didn't want that.

Kersh's voice was a whisper, and it seemed to come from far away.

"What do you think they want from us?"

Skinner closed his eyes and lied.

"I haven't a clue."

And then he heard the door unlock and creak open, and he heard heavy footfalls, and he prepared to meet his fate.

To call or not to call, that was the ques- tion.

They were lunching near the Canadian border. They were at a small town park complete with ailing bandbox and splinter-inducing picnic tables under black cottonwoods that soared into the blistering sky. Their lunch was white bread and baloney - the bread harden- ing immediately in the dry air - potato chips and milk in containers like the ones in grade school, and Mulder had insisted on a handful of 'Bama Pecan Pies. They were pure sugar and fat, guaranteed heart-attack- inducers.

<"Would you like a heart attack with those 'Bama Pies, sir?">

And they were in the fifth round of the Great Should-We-Risk-a-Call Debate.

They'd both turned off their cell phones as they'd sped away from New Mexico. Afraid of being tracked, they'd shut them off and tossed them in the back seat. Phones were a potential connection to aliens who did not wish them well. Phones were also a poten- tial connection to friends unaccounted for. To family, both blood and otherwise. They stared hard at every phone booth that they saw, moved their heads as one as they passed them, watched each one recede into the dis- tance behind them through the side and rear- view mirrors.

This hour, Mulder was taking the pro stand in the Great Debate. This hour, Mulder was for risking a call. But he'd played both sides of this. He knew both arguments by heart.

<"They'll track us.">

<"Maybe not. They've screwed up before.">

<"They're omniscient. They know every- thing.">

<"No they don't. They're fallible. They're . human that way.">

With this debate came the What-Do-We-Do-Now Seminar. Mulder should have been able to direct this seminar with ease, but he was stymied. They had a decade until 2012, and if he and Scully could remain free, there were valuable things that they could accom- plish. The world was large, with many ex- cellent places to hide.

He squinted towards the one-story grade school that squatted at the edge of the park. It was recess. The squeal of chil- dren dizzy with freedom wafted over to them on a hot breeze. He felt a lump rise in his throat and he swallowed it away. He looked back at Scully. She was occupied with try- ing to open a little pouch of mustard. That achieved, she tried to spread it on the stiff slice of bread without appropriate cutlery.

Luckily he had his scientist and his doctor and his soul with him. But he needed more than Scully to accomplish what he needed to accomplish.

He mourned the Gunmen. Again. He mourned the loss of their abilities at subterfuge and misdirection, mourned their aptitude for diddling with the government with impunity, and their network of equally paranoid friends, and their talent for cracking for- tified websites and databases.

How could he do this without them?

He needed to gather people. People to help in the cause. As much as he hated to admit it, he needed Doggett and Reyes if they were willing. He needed Gibson Praise, and Dog- gett and Reyes were his current keepers.

He needed people that he could trust.

He needed Walter Skinner.

He needed to know that Skinner was alive, and then he needed to have Skinner at his side. His old boss was a proven leader of people, an excellent manager of things and assets, and a Yin to his Yang. To do this thing, to prepare, he needed Skinner. He pushed himself up from the table and ignored the splinters that came with him.

Scully looked up from her sandwich.

"Mulder?"

"I have to know, Scully. And we need some help." He moved towards the SUV that he'd parked in the shade at the edge of the park. He didn't want to allow himself too much time to think about this decision, and he took long strides, hoping that Scully would- n't call him back. The SUV was an oven, and when he opened the back door and leaned in to reach under the seats, it took his breath away. He figured it didn't matter which cell phone he used, and he grasped the first one he touched and pulled it out of the ve- hicle. He stood up and shut the door.

Scully was standing next to him, her eyes unreadable, and the wind played with her hair. She captured it and pushed it behind her ears.

"Call the FBI first, Mulder," she said. "Play dumb."

He smiled down at her.

"My specialty."

He had turned right on Interstate 70 and headed east.

He'd had to.

He'd been driving as they flew up I-15, headed north to some kind of sketchy notion of safety, and then the big green interstate signs framed in white began to beckon.

"Denver," they'd said. "Kansas City," the next sign had added. "St. Louis. Indian- apolis." And once there, he knew that DC was but a punishing ten-hour haul away.

Doggett understood duty as well as Walter Skinner. And he had walked away from a fel- low soldier. Left him alone to face the en- emy.

That was unacceptable.

Goddamned stupid Marine.

Doggett had taken two steps towards Kersh's door to start the act of rescue, and he'd been brought up short by Gibson's voice de- fining exactly what "they" knew. What "they" knew was where Mulder and Scully were headed. Doggett had hesitated.

Mulder and Scully, or Skinner.

He'd opted for Mulder and Scully, and had marched away from the office with Monica and Gibson. Every time he'd closed his eyes in rest - most often in the back seat as Monica drove - he saw that walk away down the hall, had replayed the choice that he'd made over and over in his cluttered and unhappy brain.

That was one reason that he'd been such a giant pain in the ass about making sure that Mulder and Scully had survived the firefight in New Mexico. He wanted to know that his decision had saved *someone*.

They'd pulled closer to the interchange and he hadn't known how to bring it up to Monica, this need to go back and rescue a fellow soldier. Monica, normally on the chatty side, had been circumspect and re- moved. He would give her the option of not returning with him.

He'd hoped that she would.

He'd slowed as the interchange loomed ahead of them, and he'd shot several glances her way and had tried to read her heart through her skin. She'd felt his eyes, finally, and had turned to him.

"Monica. I need to go back."

She'd smiled at him then, treated him to that small sad sweet smile that always broke his heart, even on a good day, and she'd said:

"Yes. We do."

And so they'd made the turn and headed back across the heartland to God-only-knows-what. As a gesture of faith, they'd also turned on their cell phones. They'd avoided the use of them to that point. They'd avoided con- tact of any kind with anyone since they'd left the New Mexico desert.

His cell phone rang three hours east of Den- ver. He nearly drove off the road.

Monica fumbled with it, pressed a button, checked the display, and brought it to her ear. She listened, her brow furrowed, and then she closed her eyes and smiled. "It's so good to hear your voice," she said, and Doggett heard her own voice crack at the admission. She opened her eyes and looked over at him. "Scully," she mouthed.

"Muhldah?" Doggett asked aloud.

Monica was listening with great care to what Scully was saying, and the lines reappeared on her forehead.

"Muhldah?" he asked again.

She shushed him with a wave of her hand and nodded a quick "yes" at him. Doggett swal- lowed hard and looked back at the road ahead of them. He did not like the haunted look on her face.

"Quit?" she said. "Would he do that?"

More waiting: Tires singing on the roadway, bugs pinging on the windshield, white knuck- les on the steering wheel.

"Did you talk to Kim?"

Monica captured her lower lip in her teeth as she listened. It was all Doggett could do to keep from leaning over there and snatching the phone away from her. He was not a patient man by nature.

"So are we," she said. "We're east of Den- ver."

She nodded and tugged at the ends of her hair.

"Okay. Okay. Same time tomorrow. We'll call you on the other phone." And she punched the off button and dropped the phone to her lap. Doggett watched as she rubbed the phone like a worry stone. Her face was partially averted, her blank gaze aimed out the window at the wheat fields sailing past and the thunderheads lining the horizon.

"Hey," he said, and it came out shorter than he'd intended. He couldn't help himself. If they were going to rescue Skinner, they needed intelligence.

She spoke. "Scully's okay. Mulder's okay. They're in Montana, and they're headed back."

"To DC?"

"Yeah."

"Have they found out anything?"

She shrugged and turned to look at him. He could tell that she was fighting to remain collected and composed. He could tell also that it was a battle that she was going to lose.

"They called the Hoover and asked for you and then for me, and they were told that we were on extended personal leaves."

Doggett barked out an incredulous laugh.

"So *that's* what this is."

Monica didn't see the humor in it. Her dark eyes were singing a dirge, and something squeezed Doggett's heart.

"What else?" he asked.

"They asked for Skinner. They were told that he quit."

"That he *quit*?"

She nodded. "That he quit."

"Jesus. Did they actually think that we'd buy that shit?"

"He might have done it," she said, and her voice quavered at the edge of desperate and her eyes glistened. "He might have done it, John. He could have just decided that he'd had it, and that it was time to quit. It could have happened."

Doggett looked away from her and back at the road.

Anything was possible.

Just not this.

Walter Skinner hadn't quit. They had him somewhere. And if they were lucky, he was still alive.

He looked over at his partner. Her eyes looked huge in her pale face.

"C'mere," he said, and he reached out his hand and captured the back of her head. She undid her seatbelt and slid onto the console between them and buried her face in his neck. "S'allright," he said as he patted her shoulders and he felt a sob rise up through her body and claim her. "S'all- right," he said again as she began to weep in earnest, and he noted a sign announcing the number of miles to Indianapolis as he drove with one arm around her.

Walter Skinner kept waking up alive and it was starting to piss him off.

He knew that he should be dead by now. He'd mentally prepared himself, understood that it was imminent, had gone through the how- ever-many stages of grief that there were in record time, and had come to complete peace and acceptance, but he kept coming to, alive, in spite of his best efforts not to.

He would close his eyes as they'd begin a session and pray that the Elevator of Death would come to his floor and take him away, and inevitably his eyes would unpry them- selves later to see Alvin Kersh looking down at him, and then he'd smell the woody damp- ness of their prison and smell his own blood and know that he was, once again, alive. Godammit.

The Elevator of Death.

He was not a clever man by nature, but in desperation he'd come up with that moniker in his second session with his anonymous torturers. His life had flashed before his eyes. Actually, that had happened about five times so far, but during the second session flash he'd thought about elevators and all of the hours that he'd waited in the Hoover for them to get to his floor.

What better things might he have done with that time?

And then he concentrated hard on the import of various Hoover elevator moments: a kiss from Dana Scully, a crack on the forehead from Billy Miles, Krycek's sick smile as he didn't hold the door open ...

Elevators loomed large in his legend. Thus, the Elevator of Death. And it kept passing his floor.

They wanted the information about William, of course, and he hadn't succumbed. He'd decided that the best defense was a good of- fense, and he was using the opportunity to bare his soul and tell his tormentors every- thing he'd never had the balls to tell peo- ple back when he still had a life to live.

He told them about his nightmares and about the old woman that would show up at inoppor- tune times and about the fact that in Viet- nam he'd died and then lived.

He told them that he'd jerked his sperm into a cup over a Playboy magazine and that they had been studied and counted and that the little sons-of-bitches had low motility, and he confessed that because of that he'd never managed to get Sharon pregnant, and she'd wanted children badly. He could command a roomful of driven and opinionated F.B.I. agents, but he couldn't knock up his wife. He could come back from the dead, but he couldn't knock up his wife. He could take a slug in his gut and be back to work in a week, but he couldn't knock up his wife. And that fact had nearly killed him.

He was screaming and hardly had any voice left when he launched into the subject of Dana Scully, how his heart had stopped the first time that he'd seen her, how he'd wanted to protect and defend her and cup her pale face in his hands every time he got within three feet of her. He gave up to them the fact that there wasn't a short red- head that didn't turn his head no matter where he was in the world because he saw her everywhere, even in places where she wasn't. And he knew that she would never be his, and that fact had nearly killed him.

He told them about Monica Reyes, how it was different with her than with Dana, that it was more about heat and sex and punches in the gut whenever he saw her coming down the hall towards him. She smelled of musk and banked fires and it drove him wild. And he knew that there was something between she and John Doggett, and he was once again standing on the sidelines watching it, and that fact had nearly killed him.

He even told them about Fox Mulder. Skinner considered himself to be a capital-H Hetero- sexual, but he admitted in what small voice he had left at the end of a session that he thought Fox Mulder was beautiful. And that fact didn't kill him, but it did worry him a little.

Funny. All of those things that had nearly killed him, and now he should be dead and he wasn't.

He told them that he should have killed The Smoking Man when he'd had the chance and should have blown the biggest mother-fucking whistle that he could've found on every stinking last one of them, that he should have gone to the New York Times or the Wash- ington Post or 60 Minutes and squealed and then taken on an assumed identity and spent his waning days on some beach in Tahiti smoking cigars, drinking wine, and watching the skies for strange lights.

And so his life stories spilled out of him along with his blood.

He was running out of stories.

He was running out of blood.

Margaret Scully sighed and rubbed her fore- head. She had a headache again.

It was the stress of not knowing about Dana and Fox. It was also her houseguest, Gibson Praise. Having him in the house was unnerv- ing. He was so quiet that at times she'd wonder if he'd slipped out, or if he had - like Bill and Charlie had when they were his age - found something absolutely fascinating in the lingerie section of the J.C. Penney's catalog and had to take it into the upstairs bathroom to study it for a few hours. But then she'd go up to find him seated, stiff- backed and cross-legged, on Dana's old bed, his sightless eyes on the bay window, and she would wonder again at the boy and what import he had in matters regarding her daughter and Fox Mulder.

And it was about time for her son Bill to check in. He called her on a regular sched- ule to see how she was doing. He was as right as rain, her son Bill. He was also righteous and bull-headed, and she knew in- stinctively that telling Bill anything about this baby-sitting job would be a very, very bad idea, but she feared her ability to keep it to herself once she got on the phone with him.

She was seated at her desk in the kitchen nook. She had a lovely view of her back yard there. She needed to spend some time in the yard. She was a tidy person, and it was looking wild and unkempt back there. She loved to work in the yard, loved to feel the sun on her back and the soil under her fingernails.

It was simple work, the garden, and you could see progress. You could stand up and rub your back and look at what you'd done and feel good about yourself. And if you worked real hard at it, you could forget about your daughter in the FBI and the fact that she did dreadful and frightening things and had had a child out of wedlock and had given it away. If you concentrated very hard on a small corner of the garden you could forget that whatever it was that your one daughter did for a living, it had killed your other one. If you kept your head down, you could clear your mind of strangers like Albert Holstein and Gibson Praise crowding your life, showing up at your daughter's death bed, eating your food, making you feel uncomfortable in your own home. And if you were really lucky, you could forget the fact that your husband up and died and abandoned you just before everything got really strange.

Margaret Scully didn't cry much, but she found herself blinking back tears. She be- lieved in God and believed that all things happened for a reason, and that gave her strength. If she felt despair creeping into her thoughts in bed at night, she would pull her rosary from the nightstand drawer and would fall asleep with a "Hail Mary" on her lips, secure in the knowledge that the Blessed Virgin would protect her and protect her wayward daughter and her sons and Fox Mulder from harm. But there were times, like today, when her concerns trumped her faith card, when the real world intruded on her carefully constructed temple and rocked its foundations.

And she felt old. Old and brittle. She was officially a matron, a widow, and she was anonymous when she walked down the street. Men used to whistle at her, and when she passed storefront windows she would see her- self and be modestly cheered by the fact that God had given her - not beauty, cer- tainly - but solid attractiveness, and that made her feel good about herself. Not *too* good, of course. That kind of vanity was not allowed. But now . now she felt every one of her years, and she looked down at her hands crossed on the desk in front of her, and noted the age spots and the spreading knuckles-

"Mrs. Scully."

She started and nearly dropped to the floor. Gibson Praise was at her elbow. How he'd gotten there without her hearing it, she could not know, but ungenerous thoughts bub- bled in her brain, and she wanted to snap at him about sneaking up on people, or make some crack about putting a bell on him like she had on her cat, but then she saw some- thing in his eyes that made her stop.

"Mrs. Scully," he said with an earnestness that was rare in someone so young. "You look quite lovely today."

He put his small hand on her arm.

"That is a very good color for you."

She looked at her blouse. It was white. In spite of that fact, she felt unaccountably cheered.

"Mrs. Scully, I think I need some fresh air, and I wondered if we might work in your gar- den."

She was speechless. Gibson did this to her, took her breath away and made her wonder at her sanity. She found herself smiling up at the strange boy standing at her side.

"That would be lovely," she said. "I'll make some iced tea."

And not for the first time, she wondered if he could read her mind.

He was communing with the dead again, she could tell.

Someone had appeared to him, and Scully thought that whoever it was might be stand- ing on the front hood of the SUV. Mulder was staring out there through the windshield with singular intent. His lips were moving, but she could hear no sound. And although she loved Fox Mulder, the sight of it gave her goosebumps and made her shoulders rise to protect her neck.

She hoped that this particular talent would be short-lived.

Scully was driving this leg on Interstate 80 through eastern Ohio. They had considered abandoning wheels to take a plane, but planes meant credit cards and photo ID, and they had decided that they couldn't risk it.

Mulder had seen Deep Throat in Illinois, and tears had tracked down his cheeks. Mulder had been driving, and the long-dead infor- mant had decided to appear somewhere between Mulder and Scully on the console, and she had gripped the passenger-side door handle as they had silently conversed as if she wasn't on the same planet, let alone in the SUV with them.

The Lone Gunmen had joined them in the back seat for a while in Indiana, and according to Mulder they were bemused and pissed that he mourned them for their nefarious abili- ties and not for their company or their sparkling wits or their collection of soft porn videos.

She thought that he might be talking to the Gunmen now. He seemed most relaxed talking to them, and that fact amused her. Mulder wore Armani well and walked the world look- ing like a GQ model, but it was a disguise. He was a complete and unapologetic nerd at heart, and she loved him for it.

Mulder moaned.

"Stop. Pull over."

His voice was strangled, and she immediately obeyed, braking and pulling to the side of the freeway. She shot a look at him. His face was ashen, and he was fumbling with the door handle and she had yet to come to a complete stop. He was out the door before she could set the brake and turn off the en- gine. She got out of the SUV and tore around the front of it to find him on all fours in the deep grass up the hill from the roadway. His back was rolling with dry heaves.

She fell on her knees beside him and held his forehead with her left hand and smoothed his back with her right.

She'd been afraid that this would happen. One to many communions with the dead, one too many cups of coffee to stay awake and alert, one too many 'Bama Pies.

He was crying now, and she brought her right arm around his shoulder and whispered in his ear as an anonymous truck driver found it necessary to honk his air horn all the way past them.

"It's all right, Mulder. You just need a good meal and some rest. It's all right."

After a few minutes of soothing whispers and petting, his breathing evened and he brought a hand up to wipe at his eyes. He dropped and rolled to his back. She sat close be- side him and wrapped her arms around her knees.

She watched two school busses roll by and thought briefly of William. She looked down at the father of her child. His eyes were closed, and they were dark, bruised pools in his pale face.

"Better?" she said.

"I saw him."

It was a whisper that she could barely hear over the rush and hum of the cars on the freeway in front of them, but she had no doubts as to what he meant, and she felt her extremities tingle. She didn't want to say the name out loud. If she said it aloud, it would make it so. If she didn't, they could pretend that everything was all right. She found herself frozen, unable to move.

Mulder opened his eyes and stared blankly at the cumulus cloud-filled sky above them.

"I was talking to the Gunmen, and then all of a sudden, I saw him."

She dropped her head to her knees. She did- n't want to hear this.

"But not clearly." She pulled back up and looked over at him as he came to a seated position. "Not clearly, and I couldn't hear him." He matched her pose, his long arms wrapping his knees. He stared across the freeway and his chin was firm as he did so. There was some hope there, she decided. Her voice shook when she finally spoke aloud, and it was the doctor's voice that came out of her.

"Could you tell anything about his current condition by seeing him?"

He pressed his lips together and shook his head. "No. No. He looked fine. He was dressed for work." Mulder's voice cracked, but his head remained high, his chin, firm. "He had on a starched white shirt and a suit." He paused. "That dark gray one."

Scully looked away from Mulder and down the highway. She knew that suit well and appre- ciated it. She idly wondered what tie he was wearing and she gazed at the roadside as small and frantic crickets played hopscotch to the horizon.

She wanted him to put his hopes into words for her. "What do you think it means," she asked, her face still averted, "that you can't see him clearly and you can't hear him?"

He obliged her in a voice that carried both optimism and grave concern.

"I think it means that he's not dead."

Another truck driver found it necessary to salute them with a long pull on the horn, and she noted the Doppler Effect as the truck came into her vision and crushed a universe of crickets as it sped away. She barely heard Mulder's postscript.

"Yet."

Exhausted and fearful, she dropped her head to her knees. When she heard the SUV door slam, she snapped to attention. Mulder was gunning the engine before she even got to the passenger door, and she was only halfway in when they started to roll.

And she still wondered about the tie.

"Kill me."

It had been the last thing he'd said to his captors before he'd blacked out, and the first thing out of his cracked and bleeding lips when he opened his eyes to see Alvin Kersh.

"Kill me," he rasped again.

Skinner watched Alvin's face. There was no hiding it: The Deputy Director was pissed. And not pissed as in "Not a chance you big lug; I can't kill you." It was an "Alvin's not getting his way" pissed, a look he'd seen many times before, and it was there and gone in seconds.

Skinner closed his eyes and felt Kersh leave his side and heard the sound of the cot op- posite him creaking.

Something was niggling at the back of Skin- ner's brain, back behind the information that he'd hidden so well that he honestly couldn't remember it anymore, back behind the pain of burns and cuts and busted ribs, back behind his desire to live. It was about Kersh and it was about their predica- ment, and he cleared his fogged brain and tried to think about it.

These things Skinner did not understand:

Where did Alvin go? And what did they do to him?

Skinner knew that he was alone at times. It wasn't a hard thing to discern, even when in a world of pain, since the space was so small. There was no hiding in their prison. Alvin would be gone for hours, and would come back none the worse for it.

Why did Alvin want to know where William was?

Skinner had neither confirmed nor denied to his prisonmate that William's location was what his torturers were after, but somewhere in his more lucid moments, he realized that Kersh had come to that conclusion. And Alvin spoke to him in earnest and soothing tones as he cleaned his face with a handker- chief, and he urged him to share the infor- mation, to tell him where Scully's son was so that he could make sure that William was held from harm. It was about the stupidest goddamned thing that Skinner had ever heard. It was what the super soldiers wanted from him, so one had to assume that if Kersh car- ried the information, he would be tortured for it as well. It didn't make sense. Un- less Kersh had a death wish or a strong streak of masochism.

Why had the Deputy Director let the Juror and his minions take him out of the Hoover?

If their situations had been reversed, if Alvin Kersh had been unconscious on a gur- ney, Skinner never would have let them reach the door, let alone drive away. There would have been opportunities to drop back, to call out in the hallway where everyone could hear that he'd forgotten his keys, or that he needed to go back to the office to let someone know about the emergency, and then he would have pushed every security and alarm button that existed, he would have alerted the front desk and would have con- scripted every agent within earshot into battle, and he would have stormed the flee- ing group and helped to shoot them all dead or die trying. And never mind that they would have regenerated and lived again, be- cause the Deputy Director would have been saved.

He heard the door open. He stayed as still as death, not a particularly difficult thing to do under the circumstances.

"Well?" he heard one of the torturers say.

"He asked me to kill him," Kersh said, as if Skinner was a recalcitrant child who had asked for a second cookie.

"Did he give you the information?"

"No. Goddamned idiot." No hint of fondness there.

"Come on," another voice said. "We need to strategize. We need to change tactics." And Skinner heard the creak of the cot and the shuffle of feet. The door closed.

For the first time since his ordeal began, Walter Skinner felt fear. And he also felt duped.

<"And the Best Actor Award for Performance Under Duress While Fucking a Subordinate goes to Deputy Director Alvin Kersh.">

If he had any strength, he would laugh. As it was, he couldn't even muster up a smile. So he concentrated on trying to die.

Gibson loaded his fork with macaroni and cheese and looked across the kitchen table at Margaret Scully as he brought it to his mouth.

She was delighted that Gibson liked her cooking. He could tell by her body language and by the encouraging smile on her face. He could also tell by reading her mind. Af- ter he confirmed that she was pleased that her cooking met with his approval, he turned off that part of his brain and tried to en- joy his dinner under her motherly gaze.

No doubt about it, the gift he had was a curse. Although he could use it to his ad- vantage when he balked at using speech, there wasn't a day that passed that he did- n't wish that he was not quite as special as he was, or was special in a different way, a more acceptable way. Special like a kid who could run fast, or could catch a ball, or could see fanciful creatures in clouds. His specialness was frightening to others. He could understand why.

It was frightening to *him*.

Mrs. Scully was talking. Something about Catholic mass tomorrow morning and wondering if he would like to tag along. Gibson con- sidered it as he chewed. He pictured read- ing the minds of the penitent throng. He was certain that fear of Godly retribution would allow for many interesting reflections on bad deeds done, and many requests for forgiveness for those bad deeds.

He had no doubt that he would hear things both titillating and confusing. Titillating he could handle. Confusing ... who could he ask? He longed for a friend or a mentor. He longed for a father figure.

He gazed at Mrs. Scully as he took a drink of milk. A mother figure he could do with- out, he'd decided after several days in her suburban home. He felt himself past the need for that, and although he was fond of his tablemate, she could also be smothering, someone who made him want to gasp for air and run for freedom. If he *could* run like any old unspecial kid.

She was looking at him expectantly, as if she'd posed a question and was waiting for an answer. And although on general princi- ple he didn't like to do it too often, he took the luxury of reaching out to read her mind, but he overshot and found himself reading something else: a different, stronger mind, one that was worried and busy, and it was close. He threw a look to- wards the front door.

The doorbell rang.

Margaret Scully jumped and her fork fumbled from her fingers and clattered across the floor.

<Gibson. Help. Hurry. Skinner.>

It was a jumble, and he turned back to the table and stared open-mouthed across it at Mrs. Scully as he tried to make sense of it.

"Were you expecting someone?" she asked, looking fearful of the answer.

"No," he said, and he sat his glass down be- side his plate. "But I think this is for me, and I think I'm going to have to leave." He rose from his chair and headed for the front door.

"But your dinner ..." he heard her say as he headed down the hallway. "I have a load of your clothes in the dryer ..."

He wasn't listening. He was concentrating on the front door with his brain ear. It was Doggett and Reyes, come to take him away. He knew this without seeing them. He could hear Margaret Scully protesting behind him as he opened the door wide.

He nearly went to his knees with the rush of emotions and sense of urgency that rolled off of the harried and disheveled FBI agents at the door.

"Gibson," Doggett said without preamble, pushing into the house. He gave Mrs. Scully a passing nod, and Monica tucked in behind him and closed the door. Doggett knelt be- fore him and firmly held him by his upper arms. "We need you. We need your ability to read minds so that we can find someone. Someone who probably needs our help."

Gibson nodded with no hesitation. "I under- stand," he said. And he did. It was becom- ing clearer to him how his gift was needed as he looked hard into John Doggett's un- blinking eyes and listened with his brain ear. He tried to block out Agent Reyes as he did so. Her mind was filled with fear and something else that was buried too deep for him to see clearly. And he had to block out Margaret Scully as well. Mrs. Scully was starving for news of her daughter. And she was angry that her suspicions were con- firmed, that Gibson *had* been reading her mind.

"I need my backpack," he said, and he turned to get it and bumped into Mrs. Scully. She looked down at him, her face sad and worn, and he left his brain unprotected and en- tered hers. It was filled with uncondi- tional love and concern for him, and those things flowed down through his mind and left a trail of warmth through his imperfect, un- dersized body. Without thinking, he threw his arms around her waist and held tight. He could never remember crying in the whole of his life, but he felt his throat con- strict. He pulled back from her, remember- ing that he had a job to do, and she put a warm hand on his cheek and smiled.

"I'll get it for you, Gibson," she said with the weary patience of someone who has had people leave her life on a regular basis. She nodded to Reyes and Doggett and went down the hall. He watched her leave.

"Gibson." It was Doggett, still on his knees, and Gibson turned to give the agent his full attention. "We have to find Walter Skinner. We think the super soldiers have him, but we don't know where. We need to get you close enough to one of them to read their mind. To find out where they've got him."

Gibson nodded his understanding. No words were necessary.

Doggett frowned up at his partner and then looked back at Gibson and searched his eyes. "This could be dangerous. They could spot you. They could know you, be looking for you." Doggett's voice was rough and urgent. "You don't have to do this. If you can't do this thing, you need to let us know now. We won't make you."

Gibson looked at both of them and was sur- prised to feel anger start as a hot ball in his stomach. It was an emotion that he did not allow himself very often. In fact, he allowed himself few emotions at all. With his life littered by the thoughts and con- cerns and feelings of others, day after day, every waking moment, he knew that emotions could run cheap and shallow. Everybody had them. Everybody thought of themselves all the time, and attached import to every lit- tle thing that happened to them every minute of the day. Gibson knew that most emotions were a waste of precious energy and time.

But in spite of this knowledge, he found he was ... he was pissed. There was no other way to put it. Doggett could see it, Gibson could tell, and he rose to stand next to Agent Reyes. Gibson took a deep breath and squared his shoulders.

"Walter Skinner carried me out of the desert when I was hurt," he reminded them in the deepest voice that he could muster. "He took on a bounty hunter to protect me. I think I know what I'm doing. I'm not a child."

The agents looked at each other and then back down at him.

"And you owe Mrs. Scully a thank-you. And she needs to know that her daughter is all right." He paused, filled with concern. He hadn't been able to read anything about Agent Scully. "Is she all right?"

Monica smiled at him and he felt his face burn.

"Yes, Gibson," she said. "She's fine. So is Fox. Thank you for reminding us of things we need to do."

Doggett didn't look quite as grateful, and he cleared his throat and shuffled his feet as Margaret Scully came back down the hall and handed Gibson his backpack. "Your clothes aren't quite dry," she said as if she'd failed him somehow. "Mrs. Scully," Monica said, moving closer to her, "you need to know that Dana is fine." She smiled and reached out and her long fin- gers touched the older woman on the forearm, and at that moment Gibson Praise officially fell in love with Agent Monica Reyes. "And Fox is fine as well. I'm sure they'll find a way to be in touch with you. And thank you," she said nodding down at Gibson, "for taking care of our friend. It was a lot to ask of you, and we appreciate it."

"Thank *you*," she said, her face awash with relief, and then she reached out and framed Gibson's face with her hands and kissed him on the forehead. "Be well," she said, and Doggett pulled him away before he had a chance to be sad again, pulled him through the door and out to back seat of the SUV parked in the driveway. Doggett started the vehicle and a cell phone on the console rang. Monica picked it up and stared hard at the display before she pushed the button.

"Yes," she said after listening. "We have him with us."

Gibson was glad he was in the back seat. She couldn't see him blush.

"Really. You're kidding. Really." She snapped her fingers at Doggett, who had backed out of the driveway and was starting up the street. "Paper. Pen," she whis- pered. Doggett shrugged and dug in the driver door pocket. Eager to please her, Gibson reached into the flap pocket of his backpack and pulled a sheet of paper out of his journal and handed her a pen. She pushed it back at him. "Take this down," she said, and she carefully repeated direc- tions as she listened on the phone. Gibson leaned forward onto the console and wrote as neatly as he could and hoped that Monica's hair would brush against the side of his face.

"That's about a two-hour trip from here," Doggett said after he heard the address.

"Did you hear that?" Monica said into the phone. She listened and nodded at Doggett. "For them, too," she said. "Right. We're on our way." And she hit the off button.

"How'd they get it?" Doggett asked, nodding at the paper on the console.

"The Lone Gunmen."

"But they're-"

"I know."

"-dead."

"I know."

Gibson settled back into the seat to con- sider this. They had directions to wherever Walter Skinner was, and they'd gotten it from dead people.

Perhaps he wasn't as peculiar as he thought.

His backpack was on his lap, and he felt something warm. Curious, he pulled it open. There was a sealed container in there rest- ing on his damp clothes. There was a fork as well. He pulled out the container, opened it, and allowed himself a smile.

Macaroni and cheese.

Mulder had dubbed it The Whale.

It was the size of a Greyhound bus, but it handled like an SUV. It had cost him a goodly sum of money, and he'd paid it out in cash, a brown bag of it; cash that he'd stashed in a bus depot locker in Pittsburgh on the way out of town the year before. The purchase had made chubby, sweaty "Hi I'm Bobby Hoover" the happiest salesman on the RV Acres lot. It had also made his eyes bug out when the bag of cash had been tendered in lieu of credit.

It hadn't made Scully quite as happy. She was, his love, a pragmatic person at heart, and the notion of trekking the breadth of America in a big bus while on the lam did not hold the same romantic appeal for her as it did for him. She had crossed her arms and pursed her lips and had only loosened them from their pout when he'd reminded her that the reason for their return was to res- cue Walter Skinner, and it was unlikely that Walter Skinner would be capable of doing anything more than lying on his back and looking up at the ceiling. For that reason, nothing but The Whale would do. SUVs: too bumpy. Luxury cars: a smooth ride, but too small. An ambulance: out of the question. But a bus ... they could be a family, going for a cross-country trip in an RV, and there was anonymity and safety in that. They could be going to see Mt. Rushmore or going to see Old Faithful. Places where Mulder had never been. Places where Mulder had al- ways wanted to go.

They'd hit the pharmacies and medical supply stores next, and Scully had provisioned them for the third world war. The bed that was the daytime dinette seat and table now looked like any number of hospital beds where Mulder himself had spent more time than he cared to remember: clean white sheets, tidily tucked in corners, covers neither too hot or too cold, a small pillow. And there were coolers with blood in them, blood of Walter Skinner's type.

Scully had called out for Mulder to stop at a small, rural hospital in Virginia, and she'd leapt from the bus and returned with the bags of blood and serious-sounding street-illegal drugs. Mulder hadn't asked what tale she'd spun to get them. He'd parked the bus behind the hospital and had waited with the motor idling. He'd pictured her storming the halls as he'd smiled feebly and finger-waved at curious hospital workers peering out the windows. She would use her badge, he was fairly sure of that. She was not above flashing that when she needed something. But the most compelling reason for the hos- pital to comply with Scully's wishes, he knew, would be Scully herself. When she wanted to be, she was a bronze-haired mael- strom, a force to be reckoned with, someone who would make it clear that she would not be denied. He'd seen the set of her lips when she'd left the bus, and he'd pitied anyone who might question her.

And now she was asleep in the bed she'd made for Skinner, curled up with her back to him, and the orange/red sun, slanting through the windows at the side of The Whale, made her hair shimmer. He had the urge to reach back and cover her unshod feet. But he couldn't reach her, so he contented himself with looking over his shoulder at her every ten miles or so and congratulating himself for having a soul mate who looked good even ex- hausted and curled up on a pseudo hospital bed.

And then it happened again. He'd managed to suffer in silence for the last hundred miles every time it had occurred, but this time he couldn't help himself. He said, loudly, "No!" and smacked the steering wheel with his hand and shut his eyes for as long as he felt he could safely shut his eyes while driving a vehicle the size of his first apartment.

"Hmm? Mulder?" It was Scully's sleepy voice behind him.

"No!" he cried again, and Walter Skinner's image obliged and faded away.

"Mulder?" Scully had come to stand behind him, and she put her hands on his shoulders.

"Sorry, Scully," he said. "I ... " Fear made his voice small. He didn't want to have to tell her.

"You saw him again," she said before he could continue.

He nodded.

"More than once."

He nodded again. They shared a moment's si- lence, and then she kissed the top of his head.

"Could you hear him?" she whispered in his right ear.

Yes, he could hear him. He'd heard him for the last hundred miles. He'd heard "Don't bother, Mulder." He'd heard "Turn around and head back West." He'd heard "Too late."

"Could you hear him?" she asked again.

"Yes."

"Clearly?"

"Yes."

"And could you see him clearly?"

He felt a lump rise in his throat and he swallowed it away. She moved to the passen- ger seat opposite him and he felt her eyes on his face.

"Mulder. Do you think he's ... gone? "

He didn't answer because he didn't know. And it didn't make any difference. They would still proceed. If Skinner was alive, they needed to mend him, and if he was dead, Mulder still wanted him. He didn't want to leave Skinner's body in the hands of aliens, aliens who would cut him up for study or replicate him so that he could chase the two of them for eternity, hoping to some day catch them off-guard, hoping that they'd forget that he was dead and that they would happily embrace him in a moment of weakness.

He shot a purposeful look at his partner.

"I don't know, Scully. And it doesn't mat- ter. We've come this far. We owe it to ourselves and to him ..." And to Doggett and Reyes as well, he thought but didn't say aloud, and at that moment the phone rang. Scully answered it and listened.

"We're close, I think," she said, picking up a map from the console between them. "They think they're at the spot," she whispered over at him as she listened.

"I figure ten, fifteen minutes or so," Mulder said. "Tell them to hang tight. And tell Doggett none of that John Wayne shit."

Scully frowned at him and shook her head. She listened in silence for a moment and then said into the phone, "Well is there a place to turn around there?"

More listening.

"A big place. A parking lot? A real wide spot in the road?"

Mulder could hear Doggett's voice squawk from where he sat: <"What the hell are you drivin'?"> and he grinned in spite of him- self.

Scully gave Mulder a gentle smile. "You'll see when we get there," she said into the phone. "Plenty of room for everyone."

Monica watched Doggett snap the phone cover back into place. He shoved it in his hip pocket, squinted into the last sliver of sun as it disappeared beneath the horizon, and shook his head.

"I don't know what the hell they're comin' in," he said as if to himself. "Jesus Christ. As if we didn't have enough to worry about."

Monica didn't care that her partner was agi- tated. She was too busy watching Gibson Praise.

They'd parked at the side of a blacktopped rural road that cut through the fields, per instructions from the Gunmen. Then they'd walked on a secondary gravel road for a cou- ple of hundred yards to this place: a rut- ted, dusty lane leading up a hill to what looked to be a farmhouse. Not a working farmhouse, obviously. All the visible structures were leaning towards the rising new moon. Large patches of the barn roof were missing, and ivy and morning glory were climbing a tractor, a truck, the house, and outbuildings with impunity.

Lights were on in the lower floor of the house, and they spilled into the yard. There were newer vehicles parked alongside it, looking so antiseptic and clean that they seemed to be floating above the general detritus.

They were partially hidden by an unruly chest-high hedge at the roadside, and Gibson was leaning forward towards the farmhouse much like the farmhouse buildings were lean- ing towards them. He was as taut as a wire, Monica could see, and nearly on his toes. He was ... he was *listening*, she realized. Listening with a tool that she could not comprehend. His face rarely showed any emo- tion, and this moment was no different. There was no emotion there. Only the strain of reaching out as hard as he possibly could.

She wanted to soothe and calm him, to put her hand on his shoulder as a gesture of support, but she had no way of knowing if this would break any tenuous contact that he might have with Walter Skinner or one of the aliens. So she watched, her heart in her throat, and tried to ignore the scuffling and grousing of her partner on the other side of Gibson. She allowed her eyes to leave his intent face for a moment, and she glanced at the house and then back. Aston- ished, she noted that Doggett's arm had snaked around Gibson's shoulders.

"Hey, buddy," he said in a matter-of-fact tone as he patted Gibson's arm. "Don't hurt yourself here. Would it help if we got you a little closer?"

Monica felt a small smile pull at her lips in spite of the circumstances. Her partner never failed to surprise her, and she chided herself for allowing her own sensitivity to render her unresponsive.

Gibson looked up at Doggett's face and then turned to her.

"I can read something from here," he said as if he were presenting her with a small gift.

She leaned down.

"What, Gibson?"

"Deputy Director Kersh," he said, and he looked at the house and then back at her. "Mr. Kersh is in there. He's not a friend. He's with the aliens."

Monica's hand flew to her chest and she tried in vain to stifle a small cry before it escaped her lips. She'd truly believed that her impassioned words had changed the man. She'd believed that her honesty and sincerity had cut like a sword through his fog of disbelief and had speared his soul. She was wrong. She was wrong. Not only had she not changed him, he'd probably been aligned with them the whole time, and she'd been unable to sense it. The knowledge that she'd failed to see him for what he was and had failed to change him was devastating. She'd always believed herself capable of un- canny insight, but here, she had failed. And now Walter Skinner's life hung in the balance.

"Monica. Monica!" It was John, and he was in front of her, his hands on her shoulders. She looked into his worried eyes. "Hey," he said. "You with us? You okay?"

She shook her head.

"Kersh," she whispered. "I ... he ..."

"He's an asshole," Doggett said, his voice balancing kindness and impatience. "But we knew that already, didn't we?" It was clear he was waiting for an answer. She took a deep breath.

"Yes," she said, nodding. "He's an asshole. And we knew that already."

"Good," Doggett said. "That's settled." He turned to Gibson. "Anything else, buddy?"

Gibson, now standing sideways to the farm buildings and tilting that direction, frowned. Lifted up on his toes. Frowned again. Nodded.

"Yes." He turned to look at the acreage face-on, scanned, and then pointed. "Walter Skinner is in that building." It looked to be an icehouse or a pumphouse, about twelve by twelve, and it was to the side and behind the farmhouse. They'd have to get by the light pooling in the yard to rescue him.

For the first time in what felt like a very long time, Monica felt hope.

"You can read his mind?" she asked.

Gibson paused and looked away from the two of them, and Monica felt her chest grow tight. "No," he said down into the gravel of the road. "I can't. It's in *their* minds. That's how I know."

The mournful sound of a faraway bus horn rolled across the fields on a warm breeze. Monica looked around Gibson and Doggett and down the road. The bus wasn't so far away after all. It was back at the beginning of the gravel road, lights on, idling.

"Holy shit," Doggett whispered, and he took off at a run towards it, she and Gibson close behind. As she ran, she saw the door of the massive RV open and saw Mulder and Scully emerge into the dusky evening. See- ing them took her breath away. Intellectu- ally, she knew that they'd survived and had heard them on the phone, but the vision of them - flesh and blood - elicited a happy, visceral response. She continued her full- tilt run towards them and saw no good reason to stop herself. She blew past Doggett, who had paused and slowed, and threw her arms open wide and buried them in a sloppy em- brace.

Monica felt surprise and tension in Scully's body, but Mulder's return hug was strong and firm.

"Oh God," she said into Mulder's shoulder, her voice muffled by his denim shirt, "I never thought I'd see you two again." She felt Scully relax and pat her back and then Mulder left them and she pulled back to see him heading for Doggett. Mulder wrapped her partner in a bear hug. She could see John's eyes over Mulder's shoulder. He looked like a trapped animal, but he managed to give Mulder a couple of friendly thumps on the back before breaking free. Gibson disap- peared in his arms next, and Monica felt her throat tighten as she watched Mulder's eyes close and his face glow with exhilaration and purpose.

"Did you find him?" Scully asked, wasting no time in bringing them to the task at hand.

Monica nodded. "We think so. Gibson pointed out the building where they're hold- ing him."

Scully's eyebrows rose and she looked at Gibson. "You could read his mind?"

Gibson looked away, down the road towards thunderheads still capped by dimming sun- light, and they shared a moment of uncom- fortable silence. Mulder frowned and cap- tured his lower lip in his teeth. He put his hand on Gibson's shoulder.

"Gibson. Can you drive?"

Gibson's mouth dropped open. He looked up at the RV looming in front of him.

"You mean *this*?" he asked, gesturing.

"Yeah," Mulder said. "It's not stick. It's manual."

Monica wasn't sure by the look on Gibson's face that he even knew the difference, but she could tell that he understood the ques- tion. It would take all four adults to res- cue Skinner and get him to the RV. Somebody had to be ready for a quick getaway. Gibson nodded.

"I can do it."

"Good. Get in with me and we'll back her around so she'll be headed out onto the blacktop."

So she and Doggett and Scully watched Gibson get his very first driving lesson - a full five-minute one - in a recreational vehicle the size of a semi.

Monica heard Doggett clear his throat and she turned to see him pull out his Sig. He was ready for action. He was coiled like a spring, and she could feel the nervous heat and energy rolling off of him from three feet away. She'd seen him like this before, and she felt the hairs rise on the back of her neck. To calm herself, she pulled her own gun out and checked the safety.

"Mulder's seen him."

It was delivered in a low monotone, and at first Monica didn't know what Scully was saying. She shot a look at her. Scully was motionless, arms at her sides, and she was blankly watching the RV stutter back and forth on the roads in front of them as Mulder maneuvered it. Monica knew that she had to be referring to Skinner, since that was foremost in their minds, and she won- dered why, if Mulder had spotted Skinner somewhere on the way to this lonely spot in the country surrounded by fields and for- ests, they were proceeding with a rescue at- tempt.

"He's seen him for the last hundred miles."

Doggett paused in his preparations to peer at Scully, and Monica idly wondered if she meant that Fox Mulder was losing his mind, if she meant that he was exhausted and fear- ful and was hallucinating. And then, with a cold shock, Monica remembered.

Mulder saw dead people.

"Does Muhldah think he's dead?" It was Dog- gett's voice, a rough whisper, and it seemed to Monica to come from far away.

The rear of the RV came to a halt in front of them, the red back-up lights casting their faces in a garish glow. "He doesn't know," Scully said as Mulder jumped out of the bus and strode towards them.

"And it doesn't matter."

Scully could smell him before she could see him.

He smelled of blood and of man sweat and de- spair. He smelled of nascent infection and feces and urine. And for the moment, that was more than enough. For a moment, she didn't *want* to see Walter Skinner, and she welcomed the blackness of the small struc- ture and hoped for a moment's respite before anyone thought to click on a flashlight. For a moment, she could pretend that he was alive and fixable. For a moment, she didn't have to see what she knew she was going to see.

They'd left the relative safety of The Whale and had walked four abreast on the gravel road to the farmhouse. They'd exchanged not one word on the walk. It was surreal, a dream, like an old spaghetti western where the cowboys silently pace towards the gun- fight.

Mulder had carried the folded-up stretcher slung over his shoulder like a rifle. She'd half-expected him to attempt to lighten the mood by whistling, or by humming the song from the Wizard of Oz when the Lion, the Tin Man, and the Scarecrow rescue Dorothy from the Wicked Witch's castle. But his lips had been tight. Almost at tight as Doggett's. And she'd welcomed the silence. Mulder had known better than to try to make light of the situation. It would have been a waste of precious energy.

Still wordless, they'd ducked down behind the hedge at the road and had scoped out the acreage. Signaling each other with hand gestures, they'd crept along the perimeter of the yard, their eyes riveted on the farm- house windows, their ears straining for a call, a bark, a sound that shouldn't be there.

The first bad sign had been the door to Wal- ter Skinner's prison.

It was unlocked.

Worse, it was slightly ajar.

Scully, the first to arrive there, had known what that meant: they had no fear of the As- sistant Director escaping, and her spirits had plummeted. She had never shared any op- timism with Mulder about what they might find, since Mulder was optimism personified and she'd wanted to balance that with her natural pragmatism. But she had secretly harbored a small nugget of hope close to her heart, held there with a prayer. She'd hoped that he'd be comatose. Bound and held against his will, perhaps, but relatively untouched. She'd hoped that Mulder's seeing him on the trip here might have had some- thing to do with a sort of mental transfer- ence, something made possible by mind- altering drugs. And then she realized that she sounded like a hopeful, naive school girl, like Pollyanna, not at all like her- self: Dana Scully, doctor, FBI agent, and one-time skeptic who had seen far more in her last nine years than she had seen in all her years preceding them.

Her brief reverie was broken by the intru- sion of a beam of light, then two, courtesy of Doggett and Reyes, who had entered the room behind Mulder.

"Oh Jesus," Doggett breathed.

It was every bit as bad as she had expected. There didn't appear to be a place on Walter Skinner's body that hadn't been recklessly abused. Skin not caked in blood was bruised or burned. She tried to look past the hor- ror of it at his chest, where his hands were resting. Was his chest rising and falling? Or were the flashlight beams that were trained on him understandably wobbly, making him look animated and alive?

Mulder brushed past her and knelt at Skin- ner's side.

"Hey," he whispered in his ear.

Mulder. Ever the optimist.

She surprised herself by first stopping at the cot-side table. When the flashlights had come on, she'd noted a reflection. They were his wirerims. He would need his glasses if he survived this, and even if he didn't survive, she realized that *she* needed them, so she picked them up and put them in her jacket pocket.

"Hey," Mulder said again from his kneeling position on the floor, and he reached out a hand. It moved uncertainly as it looked for an undamaged place to land. But there was no good place, and it hovered above Skin- ner's forehead, and Scully mentally cringed as she noted the juxtaposition of Mulder's healthy hand versus Skinner's damaged body.

She moved to stand next to Mulder and tried to find a pulse-point in Skinner's wrist, but his hands were stuck to his chest. Caked and dried blood held them there, and she was reaching for a point on his neck when, to her shock and amazement, Walter Skinner's eyes pried themselves open and fastened on Fox Mulder. She heard Reyes gasp behind her and watched the light beams dance.

Mulder's face split in a huge smile.

"Hey, you big beautiful bald man," he said.

Skinner's eyes grew slightly larger with recognition, glistened, and then fluttered closed.

"Let's go," Doggett said, and he turned off his flashlight and grabbed the stretcher that Mulder had leaned against the wall next to the door. He pushed his way past Reyes and moved Scully aside. He and Mulder un- rolled the stretcher and stood. He turned to Scully and looked down at Skinner.

"Will we hurt him any more than he is now if we move him?" he asked.

"Does it matter?" she answered.

Doggett gave a short nod, and without a word, he reached for Skinner's legs and Mulder knelt again and put his arms around Skinner's chest.

"One," Mulder said. "Two. Three."

On three, they hefted him up and grunted so loudly that Scully threw an alarmed look at the door that they'd closed behind them. Skinner's body thudded down onto the stretcher. This was the part she feared. Skinner was a big man, and he was dead weight. And she was well aware of the height difference between Mulder, Doggett, Reyes and herself. The difficulty of the trip back to The Whale - carrying a man who was hovering at the edge of death, a man that they cared about - made her knees trem- ble.

She'd been truthful when she'd said that it didn't matter if they hurt him any more than he was already, but worry still gnawed at her gut. If they lost him now, after all they'd been through to get here, after see- ing his eyes open and fill with hope, the loss would be far greater than the sum of its parts. As his doctor, she would bear the guilt. And if that weren't enough, she could guess why he'd been tortured.

Because he knew where her son was.

"Scully?" Mulder looked pointedly at her and then down at the handle nearest to her. Everyone else was in place: Mulder at Skin- ner's head on the right side, Reyes to his left, and Doggett to Scully's left. After Monica extinguished her light, Scully turned behind her and opened the door, and then she leaned over to grab her handle. She could barely see their faces, but she couldn't help but caution them.

"Please try to be careful with him," she murmured into the darkness. And the doctor in her added, "And lift with your legs, not your back." Doggett let out a quiet chuckle.

"One," Mulder said again. "Two. Three."

They shuffled and staggered, adjusting and balancing his weight. She felt the stretcher tilting towards her, and she took a deep breath and lifted her corner higher.

"Okay," Doggett said, the strain of compen- sating for her relative shortness clear in his voice. "Let's go. Take it nice and easy."

<Right>, Scully thought as she and Doggett awkwardly backed through the door, banging the stretcher on the frame. The four of them froze as one and listened. Nothing. Just a chorus of crickets and the roll of thunder from the cloud line along the hori- zon. Good. They could use the noise as cover.

Once out the door, Scully and Doggett turned and faced forward, aiming them at the gravel road, and they began their uneasy trek. The house was to their right, and Scully's heart stopped as, out of the corner of her eye, she saw shadows play through the pools of light on the dark lawn. The aliens were moving. Would they look outside and spot them? A strong gust of wind blew from the approaching storm, and tree branches above them groaned and swayed.

"Faster," she heard Mulder hiss behind her, and her feet obeyed.

"You guys bring any magnetite with you?" Doggett said between soft grunts as another a welcome roll of thunder echoed through the farm.

"Oh, yeah," Mulder panted back. "Stopped in Nebraska at a Magnetite 'R Us store. Just in case."

Scully heard Monica snort out a nervous laugh behind her, and she felt herself edge up to hysterical giddiness. They were near the end of the dirt lane now, nearly to the gravel road, but she was losing control of her corner of the stretcher. Her grip was loosening, her fingers tingling, and she felt herself close to tears and laughter at the same time.

She wasn't going to make it. Which meant Skinner wasn't going to make it.

More thunder shook the air and lightening snaked down from the sky and struck some- where to the left of them, out near the highway that they needed to be on to escape.

Now two hundred yards to the blacktop.

She'd never make it.

Her eyes glued to the uneven gravel surface in order to gauge her steps, she almost ran into it.

It was The Whale.

Somehow, Gibson Praise, after one short les- son, had managed to silently back the bus to a position in front of the farmhouse, a dan- gerous but welcome strategy. The door swung open. Gibson, ever solemn, looked down at them, blinked, and spoke.

"All aboard."

He was coming out of that dream again. The one about the Power Point presentation with nothing on it. After a few years in the up- per echelons of the FBI, this dream had re- placed the can't-find-the-classroom-for-the- college-final-exam dream. Unfortunately, neither of them had ever successfully re- placed the Vietnam nightmares. They were in a category all their own.

But this one was almost comfortingly famil- iar: the vast lecture hall, all of the as- sistant and deputy directors peering down at him, Janet Reno in judge's robes, Sharon, seated in the front row this time. And he would hit the button on the computer, and another nicely framed screen would pop up with nothing - *nothing* - on it.

But there was something different about this time. Mulder and Scully, usually skeptical and sitting somewhere in the back row, were in this dream seated next to him up at the front of the hall, at the table where his computer sat. Looking over at them, he hit the Page Down key, and, as expected, more nothing came up on the big screen behind them. But Mulder and Scully smiled and nod- ded anyway, silently urging him to try again. And again. And again, until to Skinner's great surprise, something began to appear on the screen. The image was not clear to him, whatever it was, but by God there was something there, some vague and nebulous form that began to take sharper shape, and he didn't know exactly what it was, but he didn't care.

It was something. It was goddamned some- thing. And that was more than it had ever been before.

And the good news was that he was fairly sure that he was alive. Alive and out of that hell-hole and out of Kersh's clutches. Out of his prison and riding in a ... in something big, something that rolled over bumps like an army tank with excellent shocks. A brick shit house on wheels. Pe- riodically he would come to fleeting cogni- tion, and from his vantage point all that he could see out the windows next to his bed were moving tree tops and signs, and blue sky and clouds above that.

He seemed to be in a perpetual state of near-sleep, and periodically he used his en- ergy to allow his mind to argue over what was dream and what was reality, and he could probably thank the bag of clear liquid that was hanging on a metal hook embedded in the ceiling above him for his perpetual fuzzi- ness. He'd catch a glimpse of it out of the corner of his eye in lucid moments and would try to concentrate on it to see what was be- ing dripped into him. He couldn't look too hard, though. The swinging of the bag made him nauseous.

He no longer felt pain, but he hadn't felt pain for some time. He'd ceased to feel anything soon after he'd realized that Kersh was part of the alien scheme. After that, he'd just methodically shut down all parts of his body and willed himself to die. But Mulder kept showing up and yelling at him. Skinner would patiently try to explain what he was doing and why, but Mulder would rudely refuse to listen. The Gunmen had visited, too, and he'd found that both amus- ing and alarming. He'd struggled in that hazy half-world for a grip on something that might show him the way.

He'd only been sure of his rescuer's identi- ties when he'd briefly come to under Dana Scully's tender ministrations. She was dressing wounds on his face and neck when his eyes opened a slit. His awareness unde- tected, he watched her through lidded eyes for several minutes as she removed bloody bandages and grimaced at whatever she'd seen under them.

She twisted out of his vision to get some- thing, and when she turned back, she real- ized that she was being watched. Scully dropped whatever it was she had in her hands and threw those hands to her face. He stared numbly at the tears that filled her eyes and spilled down her cheeks and over her trembling fingers.

He wanted to talk to her and allay her fears, but he had no voice, no power to push air from his chest into his throat. All he could do was look at her and thank his lucky stars that Alvin Kersh was no longer his nursemaid.

Scully threw a look behind her and moved closer to him. She took his face into her hands - it was a trace of a touch, the bar- est suggestion of a gentle caress - and leaned over him.

"I'm sorry," she whispered, and she truly looked it. "I'm sorry I have to ask you this, but I *have* to know."

He knew the question before her lips parted.

"Did you tell them?"

He thought of the stories that had spilled from him. He remembered screaming his life's regrets into the alien's blank faces, the pathetic confessions of a dying man wasted on a species that didn't give a damn.

"Did you tell them?" she asked again, her lips pale.

He tried for a smile, sure that it looked pitiful. He could provide no noise, but he could get enough air into his lungs for a whisper. He took a breath.

"Everything but," he said.

And she'd smiled at him then, the tears still falling, and she'd leaned over and kissed his eyelids, both of them, and he'd guessed that she done that because they were the only spots on his body that allowed for it.

His life became snippets of conversations, small vignettes, the suggestion of action occurring around him in small pockets of lu- cidity.

Doggett was there. And Reyes. Scully, of course, which meant Mulder, of course. At night, in the dark, whenever his eyes would open, Mulder would be there. And when his eyes would open, Mulder would lean forward and stare at him, and he would say the same thing every time:

"I need you. I need you for the fight. I need you for the future."

Skinner began to understand, and at some point in time he had the strength to nod back at Mulder, and it had seemed to make Mulder an inordinately happy man.

As he healed, he listened. There were brief altercations regarding who would take con- trol of the wheel and who would not. There were small battles engaged to determine what CD would ride in the player after the one that was in the player was done playing. Maps were taped to blank walls and they poked their fingers at them and argued about which direction to turn. Even the choice of pizza topping required strenuous debate.

But underlying all of this was the steady thrum of purpose and direction, the heart- beat of mutual respect and lives intertwined and intersected, and it made him warm to his core to hear it and see it.

As he became more aware, he recognized more visitors. A pat on the arm from Doggett, a smile and a kiss on the end of his nose from Reyes. But there was someone else there. Someone small.

One moment, he had no sense of time. One moment, he was floating in a world of misty recognition. And the next, he opened his eyes and the world was new and sharp and he knew where he was, and who he was, and what they were going to be all about.

It was then that he realized who the Someone Small was. It was Gibson Praise, and he'd taken control of a impressive computer set- up at the easy chair across from his bed. The array was sitting on a table in front of the chair, and Skinner realized that it must have cost someone a fortune to outfit it. He could barely identify half of the tech- nology bristling off of the table. Adrena- line shot through his veins when he realized what it was.

It was Command Central.

They were equipped for the Third World War.

He closed his eyes and listened to the steady babble of voices from the front of the RV. The army. Five of them. Six if you counted young Mr. Praise. Could they do this? Could they have any impact?

Did it matter?

And then he felt cold fear because he real- ized that he'd never felt as energized and alive and afraid and excited for the future as he did at that moment. He had purpose. He had people who had risked their lives to come to his rescue. He was needed. So he thought he must be dead after all. It was just too good to be true.

He felt a hand on his arm. He looked up into the face of Gibson Praise. Gibson smiled. A smile with teeth. Skinner could never remember having seen that before.

"You're not dead, Mr. Skinner," he said. "You're very alive."

Skinner smiled back and managed to lift his arm and pat the hand that Gibson had offered in comfort.

"I'm beginning to believe that," he said, his voice raspy from disuse.

That was enough for today. He was tired again, and he felt his eyelids droop as he listened to the voices at the front of the bus. Doggett was declaring that Dire Strait's Calling Elvis CD was the best trav- eling CD in existence. This was loudly de- bated with Mulder, who was an Asleep at the Wheel fan. Scully blew out an exasperated puff of air as Monica Reyes suggested that a CD of soothing rainstorm sounds might be better for their patient and for their gen- eral moods. He found himself smiling as he drifted away.

Two alpha males, two different and very beautiful women, and a very different and beautiful man.

And a kid who could read their minds.

Life was going to be very interesting.

The End