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Title: A Love Song Summary: Scully is called out of seclusion to assist Skinner. Note: If you haven't seen the TXF episodes Pilot, Millennium, All Things, and Existence, I strongly suggest you do before reading this story. Also, the more of Millennium you have seen, the better, but it's not necessary. "Success is the sole earthly judge of right and wrong." --Adolf Hitler "You see the lights? Now, imagine if one of those lights flickered off. You'd hardly notice, would you?" --Scott Garrett "This isn't about the X-Files, Scully. This is only about you." -- Fox Mulder We are afforded only a moment in the history of a universe we can barely comprehend, a universe as old as time, moved solely through processes which paint a picture we must, necessarily it seems, only have access to by viewing simple pieces, and those as though through a glass, darkly. It is with supreme arrogance that we claim this moment as our own and we fill it with our lives and in that fleeting moment, we bask in the presumptuous glory of the lights of our own fires, also setting the lives those fires we value the most are born of above the countless others, rendering those others, in effect, resources only to be used or ignored in the pursuit of our own interests. Ultimately, we will judge those others, not by the natures of their souls, but by the impact of their actions and nothing more. Capable of seeing, or truly appreciating, only the near sides of those chasms we create in distancing ourselves from the resources which yield no fruit or bad fruit, from those people who are not of sympathetic natures to our own, we also seek the means and the opportunities to nurture and protect those lives we deem worthy of our attention, our affection - those lives on our side of the chasms. As we pursue our goals and try to fulfill our responsibilities, we face the risks inherent in such ventures. We strive to avoid, and if not, to overcome our failures, yet we each are destined to fail with every successful step we take. The most fortunate among us gain the clarity only hindsight can offer and with that clarity, hopefully, the wisdom to avoid the repetition of our mistakes. It has been mine to devote my moment to taking a journey as a scientist, as an investigator, and as a human being, and I have shared and learned of truths alongside the exceptional and the rare and together we have come to appreciate, to love, and to fear this universe, this treasure chest filled with our moment's magnificent wonders. I have witnessed what I had thought to be sacred boundaries stretched...and broken, and I have come to question my faith in all but the most practical of philosophies. It is with reluctance and with disappointment and with fear that I now, at times, see not only the grandeur of the chasms I continue to create, but I also look upon the near and even myself only in terms of worth as a resource for tending a fire I took it upon myself to light. My reason, my logic, nothing more than judging the quality of fruit in a marketplace. I have chosen to give life, to light a new fire and by lighting that fire, to accept the responsibility of tending it, nurturing it, and protecting it. Each decision I make now, I make knowing that I am opening doors while closing others and while I act with the conviction of knowing that I strive to take the correct path, I know that I must also have the courage to confront and accept that this moment's path is marked by both light and shadow and that we, every one, are, in the end, judged by the sum total of our actions, our success or our failure in keeping the fires burning, and nothing more. This is who we are. Yesterday Ropes moved through squealing pulleys, drawn first upward and then downward onto wooden spools by the simple motions of machines built over a century prior to this midnight. A low creaking rumbled like distant thunder from the wooden spools as they turned, but it was quickly and mercilessly dampened by the thick growths of moss covering the long stone wall of the round room. The well, protruding from the floor in the center of the room just beyond the reach of shadows cast by the various statues standing like thieves caught unaware by rude flames of torches hanging on the wall, echoed with the sounds of falling drops of water returning home from the wooden platform as it rose from the depths. Atop the platform, a man stood patiently waiting for his ascension to be complete. His naked body dripped with water, running down the back and chest and legs of a man in perfect health, despite wherever he may have been only as recently as yesterday. As he stepped from the now still platform onto the first of the stone stairs on the north side of the well, he briefly tried to remember where had been yesterday, but the memory wouldn't come and the effort died. He walked slowly, but without hesitation, across the floor of the room, purposefully avoid trespassing on any of the many designs etched onto the cold stones until he arrived at the mirror beside the room's only door. He stared into the eyes of his reflection, seeing not himself, but a younger man - a man he had been many many years before. That image melted before his eyes, his hair leaving first the top and then the sides of his head, his face becoming hardened with traces of wrinkles, his mustache now only a thin trace of hair across his upper lip to remind him of a youth spent in naive comfort and the passage from that youth into adulthood, into the life of a man committed to fighting the good fight, to being a protector only to die and be reborn now as a tool. A tool to be used by the very forces he once fought so strongly against. A monster. A slave. He tried to penetrate the fog gathering in his head and to recapture some memory, some fleeting moment of that naive and comfortable youth, but it wouldn't come. It wouldn't come and if this mirror cast an honest reflection, then the memory of that life, denied him now, was of no more significance than the perverted halo over his reflection's head. An iron halo in the form of a snake eating its own tail. He stared quietly at the snake, a thought beginning to take form, but he was distracted by the inevitable sound of the room's large wooden door being pushed open. "I'm ready," he said, looking once more into the mirror before walking away from that reflection forever. Today None of the ordinary residents of any of the ordinary houses on this ordinary street could have, on this ordinary Saturday, understood the extraordinary joy being felt by Dana Scully as she sat silently at the head of her bed watching her son twist and struggle on his blanket. Once again, he pressed his fists onto the bed and straightened his elbows and looked around, anxious for some clue about where he was to go from here. Scully stifled an urge to giggle as William's mouth opened wide and a slick rope of spit ran down his chin and onto the bed beneath him. She did give in to her urges then, giggling and leaning in quickly with the hand towel she had learned to keep close by at all times. William twisted away from the hand towel and began to crawl toward the foot of the bed. "William! Stop that!" Extraordinary joy. He stopped moving except to cock his head to his right toward the bedside table. "Alright, you," Scully said, grabbing his right ankle and turning him over onto his back. "C'mere." She loved spending whole days in this manner. Sometimes they would take night shifts together and sit on the porch or take walks through the neighborhood. On those nights when a walk was the big event, she would point out trees and repeat their names or various facts about them or she would recite to him the names of political figures or symphonies and their composers or she would sing folk or soul songs and she would always take a moment to stop and to look up into the stars but she had never spoken to her baby about the night's sky. "What is it, baby?" She had dragged him back to the center of the bed, but he hadn't broken his gaze at the bedside table. As she too turned to look at the table, the telephone on top of it rang. "You stay put," she warned William and reached for the phone. "Hello?" Washington D.C. The return had just reached its high point of discomfort for her in the hallway outside the office of Walter Skinner. She had been so certain that she would never come here again, yet here she was and as she stepped into his waiting room, there he was at his now open door and a small but strong measure of her discomfort melted away. "Hello, Dana," he said, smiling and holding his arm out to her, putting his hand on her shoulder when she came close enough. He led her in and closed and locked the door behind them. "It's good to see you. Please, have a seat." And with only those few words set against the almost ceremonious backdrop of the locking of the door, her discomfort with this whole thing returned. She tried to move confidently, to hide her hesitation, fearing it would betray her in some way, would expose the weak spots in her faith in her friend. Skinner sat down behind his desk and looked the former agent across from him over once more. "I want to start by saying that I appreciate you coming here. I know it must not have been easy for you. I also appreciate and will try to be sensitive to the fact that this is not something Mulder would ever have approved of." Scully nodded. "You said this was a matter of vital importance," she said. "I wouldn't have come otherwise." "I know. I've asked you here as a friend of the Bureau," he began, handing her an open case folder. "The man you're looking at is named Dr. Richard Hildebrandt." She looked first to the attached black and white photograph paperclipped over the right side of the folder. "Yes, he's an astrophysicist. He has a following among some corners of the scientific community." "You know of him then," Skinner said, nodding once as though to prompt Scully to elaborate. "Only by reputation. He was a hero of a friend of mine in college. If I remember correctly, his work with artificial intelligence in the early seventies was valuable to NASA as well as the Soviets. He was a recluse, and I remember that there were rumors of mental illness." Skinner nodded once, almost curtly, and filled in the rest. "He worked for the Canadian government from 1975 until 1992 when he disappeared. Three weeks ago, he made contact with British Intelligence agents claiming to possess information vital to our national security. He wants to come to the United States. He wants to make a deal for the U.S. to protect him and in exchange, he will work for our government. Apparently a meeting has been arranged. He will be entering the country through Florida. Panama City Beach. The Central Intelligence Agency will intercept his party and is in charge of the operation from there on out. Once they step in, it should be academic. We're only there to..." His voice tapered off and his mouth mashed into a mini-mask of disgust and resignation. "It's not a Bureau action, nor is it Bureau jurisdiction, but..." He looked away from Scully, down at the papers on his desk. "Sir?" "One of my agents has pressed to be assigned to the escort party. Approval came from the Deputy Director's office today. I called you because I think your history together will help you in your assignment." "You're talking about Agent Doggett?" Scully asked. "No. Agent Doggett's on leave. He took some vacation time a couple of weeks ago. Some special family circumstances. I'm talking about Agent Reyes. She went over my head and somehow pulled some strings." His eyes were wide and his eyebrows arched, wrinkling his forehead in that way Scully had always been only barely able to resist giggling at in those early days. "Sir, Agent Reyes is one of the last people I'd suspect of having an ulterior motive. I-" "I know," he interrupted. "She's been an ally and a friend and a damn good agent. I have had a very good personal and professional relationship with both Doggett and Reyes. I've trusted her. "I don't trust this." He pointed to the folder in Scully's hands. "I just don't. I need you to keep an eye on Reyes. She is already in Panama City. You will only be eyes and ears. That's all. You know her better than I do, or anyone else here does besides Agent Doggett, and should your cover get blown, you have the best chance of anyone of walking away from it unharmed." Scully closed the folder, shocked by what she was hearing. "Sir, I-" "I know," he interrupted again. "I need you on this, Dana. There's no one else and if she's keeping secrets, then you have as much interest in finding out what they are as anyone." In the Bureau parking deck, Scully stepped out of one of the many elevators, waited for the door to close, and let her shoulders and her jaw follow their longheld urge to drop. Walter Skinner had just brought her out of seclusion to spy on Monica Reyes. After staring blankly at the rows of cars punctuated by concrete columns, her mind refusing to wrap itself around what was happening, she felt reason start to take over again and she started walking to her car, directing her thoughts away from the higher philosophies of loyalty, betrayal, and risk to more practical matters like airline tickets and motel reservations. She knew that if she lingered on the details of just why she had been called to resurface, why the pact had been violated for something so... No, she chided herself. You know better than this. There's something else... Why... As she cleared the last of the columns bearing a green square, she turned to her left, preparing to pull her keys out of her purse, and saw that a newspaper had been left beneath a wiper on her windshield. She stopped, quickly looking over her shoulder and scanning the parking deck but she saw no one else. She walked around to the driver's side of the car and pulled the newspaper from underneath the wiper. The front page seemed to be a standard any-day headline and standard any-day stories. Finding nothing significant about the front page, she started to fold the newspaper back up so she could unlock her door and be on her way when her concentration was shattered by the ringing of her cell phone. It was deep in her purse and she tried to reach for it and fold the newspaper at the same time, but it wasn't working out quite the way she had hoped. The newspaper fell at her feet, its sections spreading from beneath her car to the car behind her and her purse had begun to slide from her grasp. When the phone finally did make its way into her hand, before she could say anything herself, she heard the voice on the other end calling her name. "Mom, hang on a second," she said and set the phone on the hood of her car and picked up the newspaper. It was only after she had set it and her purse on the front seat that she returned to Margaret Scully. "Ok, Mom, I'm back. Is everything ok?" She looked again around the parking deck, pondering the odds that she was being watched. "You're asking me? That's what I called to ask you, Dana. What the hell is going on?" "I have to do something. I have to be gone for a little while. That's all I can say." "This is not what-" "It's important. I have to and I need you to understand that, ok?" She didn't like having to talk to her mother this way. It violated the remaining ghost of the adult-child relationship that had managed to survive thus far. "Is this about Fox? Is that what you're doing? You're not trying to find that son of a bitch, are you?" "Mom, I told you I don't have time to get into this right now." She walked back around the open driver's door and sat down behind the wheel while her mother continued to rant. "... abandoned him and this child deserves better than that from his mother. Your father and I..." She held her breath at times, bit her tongue at others, and suffered random incidents of driving her fingernails into her palms until her mother had said her piece and she was finally able to leave for the airport. She cried most of the way there. After giving Scully enough time to get her "assignment" underway, Skinner left his office and went downstairs. He rounded each corner of the stairwell carefully, silently, a voice that never slept whispering warnings to him. When he reached the bottom floor, he stopped and took a deep breath before continuing down the hallway toward a door bearing nameplates which, for all their worth, seemed horribly out place. The office was dark, but as soon as the door was opened, the first thing he saw, the first thing his mind sought out, was a flying saucer but he was denied the satisfaction of seeing the familiar words beneath the saucer. Denied by the presence of Marita Covarrubias. "She's gone," he told her. "Good." Marita stepped from behind Doggett's desk. "I'll be in touch." "I'm not finished," Skinner said, stepping forward and blocking Marita's exit. "I've done what you wanted, now you give me something." "What do you want?" "I want some assurance that I'm not sending that woman to her death." Marita's stare was unyielding. "You think I've betrayed you," she said flatly. "No, not yet I don't," Skinner answered. "I know you're not Alex Krycek, but unless you start giving back, you're going to find my trust in short supply." Marita nodded, her face revealing nothing of the thoughts behind it. She continued walking toward the door and Skinner hesitated for only a moment before stepping out of her way. "If you are hiding anything... If any harm comes to that woman, I'll kill you. Do not fuck with me," he warned her as she passed. "Good-bye, Mr. Skinner," she said without looking back, and closed the door. Airplanes littered the runway, some taking on passengers, some losing passengers, most doing nothing. Scully could see them every time she rounded the turn at the north end of the parking deck, spiraling ever upward past endless lines of filled parking spaces until she erupted onto the top of the structure into a late afternoon which had become very similar to evening while she had been making the climb. It was then that luck befriended her and she eased into a freshly vacated space overlooking an unremarkable dirt road on the backside of things. She parked, grabbed the newspaper from the passenger's seat along with her purse, and stepped out of the car into the dying afternoon. A quick stop at the trunk to get her suitcase, and she hurried to the elevator, pressing the call button three times in rapid succession only to be ignored. Monica Reyes. The name had an almost tangible quality to it. It set off feelings of excitement and fear and comfort in Scully as she easily passed through memories of waking up, surprised by the noonday sun shining through the windshield of the car Reyes had driven her to Democrat Hot Springs in. She could feel the Georgia heat on her skin and she remembered that Reyes had seemed nervous. Maybe even scared. At the time, she had found it to be a disappointing contrast to Mulder, despite whatever other similarities she had seen in the two of them. Still, Reyes had been the one who was there for her. For her and for William. It didn't matter that they had had to keep her location a secret from everyone else - from her mom and her brother, the Lone Gunmen, from Doggett, from Skinner... And from Mulder, the now absent center of it all. What mattered was that Reyes was the one who had been there. She lingered slightly too long in her memory of Mulder and when the sound of the elevator's arrival distracted her, she locked the memory back in its box. Birmingham, Alabama Melanie Blaine's talent for making tea had, only moments ago, officially crossed the line from being suspect to non-existent. Taking a somehow obligatory second drink of the unpleasant concoction, she winced not only at the tea's flavor, but at the thought of her last New Year's resolution biting the dust. Jen, her sister, would be disappointed, being the advocate of the "learn to make tea" idea in the first place, but Melanie couldn't help it. It just wasn't meant to be. The fact now faced, she stood up and took her cup and saucer to the sink. The act of self-realization she was so proud of was a solitary act though, certainly not stretching far enough to cover her obsession with what went on in the lives of her neighbors, as she was easily distracted from the whole tea issue by the arrival of an unfamiliar car in front of the house next door. She watched, fascinated, through the little window above the sink as the passenger's side opened and the creepy teenage girl who lived next door got out and closed it behind her. The girl's parents were ok people, Melanie had thought years ago, back before they started having kids. That's when everything changed. That one, she nodded toward the girl, unaware of her own action, there was something very wrong about her and there had been from the start. The way that one looked at people... She knew things. "Oh!" The blood in her hands and neck turned to ice and she stepped back into the shadows of her kitchen quickly. Halfway to her own front door, the creepy girl had stopped walking and turned her head toward Melanie's house, her eyes, Melanie knew, focused on the kitchen window. Melanie's hands clenched into fists, they too unsure of what to do next. She was certain the girl knew she was there. Then the girl started walking again, her stride now broken by the rush of shapes from the shadows of the night surrounding the dark house. They moved quickly to her, three of them, and then she was gone. It would have been horrifying and exciting and something she would have called Jen in the middle of nights for years to come to talk about, but Melanie had turned away after the girl had stopped looking into her window. She had poured her tea into the sink, set her cup on the counter, and now she was halfway up the stairs, planning on taking a long bath and smoking a few cigarettes. Those had won her back from that resolution in early February. Or, maybe, late January. 27,000 feet in the air, Dana Scully stared through the window to her right, taking inventory of the stars. Shortly after takeoff, she had unfolded the newspaper left for her in the parking deck, searching for whatever secret it may have held. Within thirty seconds, she had found it. The page 2 story header read, "FATHER CLAIMS 'EVIL FORCES' KILLED DAUGHTER". The father in question was Frank Black, former FBI profiler, and the daughter was his daughter, Jordan Black. Scully had felt the paper fall away from her right hand as that hand balled into a fist and rose to cover her open mouth. Fighting off the shock of it, she had pulled the newspaper back up and had continued reading. The murder had taken place in the home of the girl's grandparents, her mother's parents, and Frank Black was her killer. At least, according to the story, Scully had thought, reading now with an arched eyebrow. The text went on briefly about Frank Black's history of psychiatric problems and his in-laws' accusations that he was an obsessive conspiracy theorist whose work and whose warped beliefs caused the death of their daughter and now their granddaughter. The story ended with a formulaic biography of Jordan Black. And now Scully sat between the newspaper, folded and dormant in the seat beside her, and the starlight, fighting off what she told herself were the waking nightmares any mother would have when away from her child. The first line of defense, clearing her mind of all thought by staring at stars, was failing. She had considered unlocking her memory box, but chose against it, knowing that now of all times was not the time to summon that particular ghost from its exile (although a small part of her could almost hear him saying, "this must be the place"), and looked back at the newspaper instead. Frank Black had helped them and Scully had thought him a good man. A good man and a loving father. As she had watched him reunited with his daughter on that New Year's Eve, knowing only a fraction of the journey the man had taken to arrive at that night, she felt nothing but total respect and admiration for him. As her thoughts turned to her own father, she was unaware of her weary body giving itself over to sleep. She is standing on a cliff, looking out at the broad expanse of one of Earth's oceans and listening to the thunder rising in the distance. Grey waves crash across even greyer rocks hundreds, perhaps thousands, of feet beneath her. She looks down at the rocks and the suicide parade of waves and for just a moment she imagines what if would feel like to throw herself against those rocks. Instead, she turns away from all she has been witnessing for what feels like a brief eternity now and toward a large black table made of stone sitting in the dirt to her right. She is not surprised to find her gun there on the table, waiting for her. A mist shrouds her vision, preventing her from being able to see more than a few feet in front of her. She picks up the gun, somehow knowing that it is the very reason she is here - to use her weapon, and she waits for whatever is to come. For whatever it is she has been brought here to destroy. The wind begins to blow in from the ocean, causing her black robe to whip furiously around her ankles and across the tops of her bare feet, but the mist doesn't stir. She is here because she is the only person who can stop this horror that is lurking, waiting for her behind the mist and so she waits, gun in hand, praying for the end to come soon. The smell of William brought Scully back from her dreams, but it was gone the second she opened her eyes. The airplane was beginning its descent and as she fell back to Earth, the single mother in seat 10A missed her baby terribly. Panama City, Florida A seemingly invincible sunrise set fire to the sky over Florida, the sun itself as magnificent and all-seeing as the eye of God, its rays heating the sand and the pavement with what was only the beginning of an assault which would last until night came. It bore down now on mostly empty beach and mostly deserted streets where less than four hours earlier the adult children of far away parents had exchanged, for only a brief moment really, those parents for the guiding hands of Dionysus. In dark motel rooms, they now slept off the effects of too much drink with the intent, not of recovery, but of recidivism. Scully was amused, pondering these sleeping party monsters. It was a welcome thought, a welcome distraction from the task at hand which she now reluctantly returned to. That task was forcing herself to take inventory of her memories of Frank and Jordan Black. She could clearly see the girl in her mind's eye, running into the welcoming arms of her father on New Year's Eve, 1999. And again, try though she might, she couldn't see Frank Black causing his daughter harm. The connections necessary to link him to such an act were simply not there. A tiny yet eager strain of familiar paranoia ran through her as she realized that she also couldn't see the connections Frank and Jordan Black apparently shared with Monica Reyes. Sighing in frustration, she moved her half-eaten bagel across her plate and looked again around the restaurant. An elderly couple had come in since her last inspection, the man's bald head and gray mustache taking Scully's thoughts back to Dr. Hildebrandt. He would be older than in the photograph Skinner had shown her, and perhaps completely bald now. The thin mustache would be easy enough to alter, but that face wouldn't be. The grim piercing gaze and hard set of the jaw alone were enough to make him unique and easily recognizable. The bell hanging on the pushbar of the restaurant's glass entry door rang and Scully quickly shifted her gaze. She watched as two girls, probably still in their teens practically ran inside. They were already in their bikinis and as they bounced into a booth, she saw that one had a tattoo on her thigh. She looked back at her bagel, suddenly consumed by the knowledge that, one day, William would be as old as these girls and he would be his own person and she felt hollow. She knew that day would come all too soon. He would make his own way and he would have his own thoughts and his own feelings and his own strengths and his own weaknesses. Scully looked quickly again at the girls, seeing that the one facing her had one of her eyebrows pierced. William would maybe even one day be in that booth, she thought. Or one similar. He would have to be genetically predisposed to such behavior and a small but undeniable grin spread across her face as she imagined her grown son sliding into the booth next to one of the girls. Genetically predisposed... "Fuck," Scully sneered at her own weaknesses and abandoned her bagel. She paid for her food and thanked the cashier and agreed that yes it was going to be a blistering day and yes maybe she was slightly overdressed and she wished the cashier a good day as well and she turned away from the counter and she took one step and then another and she reached toward the pushbar of the restaurant's glass entry door and the skin of her hand made contact with the plastic sheath the aluminum rod was covered by and the bell rang and the echo of the ring in Scully's ear sounded like the ocean and the sun's bright rays made her squint as time slowed to a crawl and she stepped outside. Each step now seemed a movement in a greater composition, her contribution equal to those of each of the artists in attendance. Everything around her, from the smell of salt in the air to the staccato presence of shadows cast by buildings moving slowly past her to the ubiquitous heat of the sun flowed together in individually unique melodies. She saw the faces of people and she knew the day was growing older and more faces came one after the other, some scattered loners, others in couples or in groups, families, friends, strangers, lovers all connected here. Now. William. She remembered him inside her, growing in that hollow space God had all but turned His back on. She had been fulfilled and his life was then and forever a part of her life, the two of them, bonded eternally. She could almost feel him now asleep on her chest, his heart beating softly near her own. She could hear his heartbeat and it sounded like the ocean. Shelves of cheap crap someone with no taste believed tourists would buy surrounded her now. For a lingering moment, she believed she was here not because she had stepped inside this place, but that this store, this head shop, had somehow opened before her, the air itself transforming and sealing itself around her. Her wrist was twisted and in front her face in a flash. 4:28. "What the..," she whispered, unable to finish the question for several reasons, not the least of which was the distraction of seeing the two girls from breakfast. They were standing by the front door examining a shelf of wooden animals. Scully blinked hard, hoping to shake any remnant of her apparent fugue state from her mind, and moved closer to the girls. One of them had picked up one of the carved trinkets. The two whispered about it, each having an equal amount of input, and then the one set it back down and they left. She walked to where the girls had stood and looked for the one they had found so worthy of comment. It was suddenly very important to her that she know. And when she found it, she was only partially aware that her lips opened and her right arm began to move behind her, a word preparing itself to part from her throat and her hand searching for something no longer there, when she was jarred back into what she knew to be reality by the sound of her name. She looked quickly away from the wooden ouroboros, feeling a total return to the natural flow of life and found herself staring into the eyes of Monica Reyes. "Dana?" "I, uh," she tried to answer, looking for a moment longer at Reyes but then turning back to the ouroboros which was no longer there and for just a second she could hear someone whispering, "Everything happens for a reason." "Dana? Are you ok?" Reyes asked, stepping slightly closer to Scully. "Yes, I'm fine." She shook her head. "There were two girls here. They just left. Did you see them?" Reyes' eyes widened slightly. "No," she answered, looking over her shoulder at the door and then back at Scully. "I wasn't looking for anyone, though." She stepped toward Scully, smiling. "Let's go somewhere where we can talk," she said and nodded her head toward the door. Scully nodded back, resisting the urge to chase the two girls. She motioned for Reyes to lead and followed her to a rental car. "So why are you here?" Reyes asked as soon Scully had closed her door. "Well," Scully started to answer, overtly surprised by Reyes' blunt question. She glanced out her window without turning her head, wondering if she would be able to lie to this woman. "Assistant Director Skinner asked me to keep an eye on you. I'm assuming you know why." Tense silence filled the car. Scully wondered what was coming next while Reyes stared angrily at the cars filled with teenagers lining the road. She kept her hands on the steering wheel, an erratic and perhaps exasperated chuckle breaking the silence now and again before she spoke. "Damn, I want a cigarette." She quickly turned to face Scully and apologized. "I'm sorry, Dana. I don't mean to be a bitch. I really am happy to see you. I've missed you and I've wondered about how you were. I know John talks to you from time to time and I ask him about you, but you know how he is." Scully nodded, hoping it appeared to be a confident and friendly gesture. "I've been waiting," Reyes continued. "I knew Skinner would send someone, but I just had no idea it would be you. This is all wrong." "Why do you say that?" Reyes shook her head. Since Scully had last seen her, gray had begun to bloom in the woman's hair. In the stretch of silence, she first thought that Reyes wore the gray well but that quickly gave way to a snide little whippy voice which cracked in her head, "No one gives a damn about Scully's hair." "A couple of reasons. Mostly I just have a really really bad feeling about this. A strong bad feeling." "Would you mind filling me in? Skinner wasn't able to tell me very much. I'd like to have some idea of why the hell I'm down here instead of with... Instead of where I should be." "You're right," Reyes said. "You shouldn't be kept in the dark. You of all people. "How much do you know about the Millennium Group?" "I know of them," Scully answered, trying desperately not to show her shock at the sudden appearance of a connection to Frank Black. "They were involved in an X-File we were assigned near the turn of the millennium. They acted as consultants to law enforcement. Former FBI and CIA agents mostly." "Right. I read the case file. Is that the extent of your knowledge of the group?" Reyes' tone had changed slightly. Scully sensed there was more to the question. "Well, I understand that even their highest-ranking members were kept in the dark about some of the group's work and its goals. We didn't learn very much about them in the investigation. They weren't the focus of it." Scully hoped her false indignation had covered her actual feelings (feelings which insisted that Reyes was fishing). "No, it's ok." Reyes laughed gently and took over the conversation. "No one knows very much about them. Of all the cults I've investigated, the Millennium Group was by far the best at keeping their secrets secret. "I first became aware of them when a man named Peter Watts contacted me twelve years ago. He invited me to join the Millennium Group. I declined, but we stayed in touch. We helped each other with cases from time to time. He taught me a lot. He...was a good man. "Their highest levels were dominated by representatives of two factions within the group. One of the factions was dedicated to science, believing that science held the answers to the questions of our time or something along those lines. The other faction held a more spiritual view of things. "After the group dissolved, shortly before your investigation, in fact, this spiritual faction continued their work." "And what was their 'work', as you call it, Agent Reyes?" "They wanted to harness these forces they believed so strongly in. The scope of their work was incredible. One of their projects caused them to seek out a man named Richard Hildebrandt. He was an astrophysicist. Peter Watts had consulted with him and that was how he was introduced to the Millennium Group." "Your friend, this Peter Watts, he's one of this spiritual faction?" Scully asked. "No. No, he's not. He never was. He wasn't loyal to any particular faction within the group. They killed him for that." "I'm sorry," Scully said so softly it was almost a whisper. "Recently, Hildebrandt contacted me. He's on the run from these people and he asked for my help. I don't know much more than. I only know that he was a friend of Peter's and I owe it to Peter to do whatever I can to help. He was really a very good man, Dana." Scully opened her eyes a little wider, catching her breath and trying to put everything she had just been told where it belonged but quickly surrendering to the constraints of time and asked, "Well, what do we do now then?" Reyes shifted the car into reverse and began to exit the parking space they had been in and asked Scully where she was staying. Baltimore, Maryland Twin rays of white light exposed a million cracks and imperfections in the yellow curb they lingered on as the driver of the black two-door parked. He leaned forward slightly and twisted the knob on the steering column, killing the headlights and allowing the curb and the night around it to saunter back into the privacy of darkness. The seatbelt rubbed against his trench coat as he leaned back against the seat of the car and then there was silence. The house he watched was dark and it was quiet and from inside the car parked outside it, Walter Skinner kept watch over Margaret Scully and William Mulder as they slept. Panama City Beach, Florida "There they are," Scully said, pointing and handing the binoculars back to Reyes and Reyes continued the commentary. "The one getting out of the boat is CIA. The other one is Dr. Hildebrandt. After the spook sees that the beach is clean, they're supposed to go north on foot for a mile to a safehouse." Reyes started the car. "Where are we going?" Scully asked as the car lurched onto the beach. "We're going to give the doctor a ride," Reyes answered and laid on the accelerator. In an incredibly bumpy second, they had split the distance between them and their prey in half and Reyes turned on her headlights. Beside the boat, the two men froze, shocked by the presence of the speeding car. Then the spell broke and the man Reyes had pinned as a spook began trying to wrestle Dr. Hildebrandt back into the water. Her body's memory of being with Mulder in similar situations had braced her unaware, so as Reyes slammed on the brakes and the car began to spin in the sand, Scully already had her right hand on the door handle and her left was gearing up to disconnect the seatbelt. "Shit!" Reyes screamed as she tried frantically to get the car under control and then they stopped. Scully was out first, her gun drawn, and she raced toward the wrestlers in the ocean. "Federal agent!" She knew she screamed it as loudly as she was capable of, but the sound of an explosion was all she heard and in front of her, one of the men stopped wrestling. He fell backward into the water as Dr. Hildebrandt ran onto the beach, Reyes' bullet having found its target. Scully turned to confront Reyes, mostly on animal instinct, but no words came. "What?" Reyes screamed, eyes wide. When Scully didn't answer, Reyes ran to help Hildebrandt. She met him as he ran toward the car and she ran back alongside him, her hand at his elbow. "I want to know what the hell is going on here and I want to know now!" Scully stood in front of the car, her gun pointed at Hildebrandt. Reyes started to say something but a very sudden and very subtle shift of Hildebrandt's posture silenced her. It was so subtle, Scully was barely able to read it herself, but she did. "Do you want to explain this to the police?" Dr. Hildebrandt whispered. "They'll be here shortly after the CIA arrives to fix this mess." Scully heard him, but his words seemed light and slightly garbled. She lowered her gun and tried to lower her eyes or look away but she was unable to break her eye contact with the man. "Good. Shall we?" Hildebrandt motioned to the car. It was then that Scully noticed the book in his other hand. Reyes whistled and threw Scully the car keys. "You drive. Let's go." Scully watched the rear view carefully as she drove. She needed to be aware of anyone who may have picked up their trail anywhere along the way, but she also wanted to keep an eye on her passengers in the back seat. As per Reyes' instructions, they were taking the scenic route to a house Reyes was renting a couple of miles inland and once they had gotten away from the mobs of cars of teens, Hildebrandt seemed to go into a trance. He simply stared downward, eyes unblinking and hard. And, Scully thought, cold. At the rental house, after Hildebrandt had been led inside, Scully confronted Reyes, demanding to know exactly what was happening and threatening to make the call to Skinner in the absence of "some damn good answers" and with a seriousness Scully had never seen her show, Reyes called in her Democrat Hot Springs marker and Scully went back to her room with no answers and she didn't call anyone. She slept and when she didn't sleep, she stared into the empty darkness and filled it with the face of (...Jordan Black...) William. Reescher, North Dakota Lying in a room furnished only with the table beneath him and the harsh bare light above him, Terry Nosh turned his head toward the sound of the opening door to his right. Despite the blindfold over his eyes, he knew the faces of these men. He had seen them, walking toward him, walking into this very room, in his dreams. He knew the tools they carried and the symbols they would draw on the floor and on the walls. He knew the words to the prayers they would offer and when he finally felt the cold steel of the knife against his eleven-year-old throat, he knew what was coming next. But he would be back because he had seen it in his dreams and his dreams always came true. Baltimore Skinner's heartbeat was smooth and calm. Regular. Normal. The adjectives he kept rolling over in his head seemed not quite right, he thought as he shifted in his seat. None of them were adequate to describe just how at ease his body was... No, "at ease" wasn't right. He closed his eyes and shook his head for just a second, considering the irony that at one time, not so long ago really, he had wanted to write screenplays. He put his hands on the steering wheel and began tapping a soft erratic beat with his thumbs. "I coulda been the Skinman," he said and chuckled, hoping the humor and the steady heartbeat were enough to convince the fear storming through his brain to settle its ass down. Through his driver's side window, he watched the house. Inside the house, Margaret Scully had just finished crawling into bed after kissing her sleeping grandson's cheek and holding her hand over his heart. And now, as she closed her eyes and began put her worries away for the night, William opened his eyes and rolled over in his babybed. He bobbed his head once, twice, and then held it steady, moving only horizontally until his eyes were locked downward on the dark northeast corner of the room. In the direction of Walter Skinner. The screams grow louder as she walks from the table and where she stood becomes a hollow place in her past filled with mists she knows she could not have kept at bay forever. She feels movement inside her and for a crashing planet's second she believes it is William and he is home again and she can... She hasn't seen his face in so long. She needs her baby. She wants him back home, back in her womb but he is not inside her and still there is movement where he should be. The mists begin to gather around her, roaming over her like soft hands, caressing her hair, her neck, between her legs and her body responds, her cunt yawning for fulfillment and her soul screaming in acceptance and then defiance. She runs forward, away from the mist which she knows is here as a herald of a sky whose intention is only to fall. The screams are louder now, racing from the cave's mouth and into the gray daylight. She knows she is here for a reason. She remembers the table. She clutches her gun and begins to listen to the voices she has resisted hearing. The voices telling her why she is here. The voices telling her to keep her own fire hot and to avoid the mists. Telling her she is responsible for William and telling her** Panama City Scully shook herself out of her trip back into her dream from last night, what little she could remember of it anyway. After waking, she had taken a much needed shower and now she sat in front of her laptop computer reading about the short life of Jordan Black. The web had little to offer, mostly sites dealing with murder statistics and tangentially related stories of child abuse. After exhausting standard search engines and those few Bureau resources she still had access to, she turned to usenet and although that in itself was, she believed, as good as admitting defeat and a lack of creativity, in alt.conspiracy, in a post from "adhokk7," she found specific mention of Jordan Black's death, labeling it "ritual sacrifice". The ranting and deplorable typing of adhokk7 were mind-numbing, she thought as she deciphered the accusations of a Nazi conspiracy which had been responsible for the death of the girl as part of an occult ritual of resurrection. adhokk7 claimed that Jordan was killed because she psychic and that she was to have been brought back from the dead to serve as a messenger or a messiah for these Nazi conspirators. Mostly disgusted by what she read, she leaned back against her pillow and started weighing the wisdom of calling her mother and checking on William but the laptop beeped, signaling the arrival of e-mail, and she leaned back to work. She clicked on the e-mail window and saw that it was from adhokk7. Her eyes widened and she looked around the room before she opened it. H3ll0, U ha had d@ unmitigated pl3zzyure off read1ng 1 of *MY* ng psots. I envy U!1 2 get e-mail from a LUV M@Ch1nE like me must m@k ur Day, but I d rath3er drink than FUK u so 2bad 4u!1 "Freak," she muttered as she stopped reading and closed the internet connection, packed up the laptop, and drove to Reyes' house. "Good morning," Reyes said and smiled, stepping aside to let Scully in. "Good morning, Agent Reyes. How are you?" she asked it in a tone she recognized as snippy and knew immediately that she'd be called on it, but she wasn't. "You honesty want to know?" Reyes asked, closing the door and locking it. "I had a long night. How are you?" She followed Scully on into the house and motioned for her to have a seat on the couch before going to the kitchen for coffee for the both of them. Scully looked around, hoping some sign would be on the wall explaining everything so she could report back to Skinner and get the hell home to William. It bothered her that she wasn't any more bothered than she was by the death of the CIA agent, but she wasn't and she wasn't going to give that particular thought any more attention, she determined, looking now at the coffee table right in front of her and, on it, the book Dr. Hildebrandt had been carrying the night before. Beside it were two candles and a book of matches. "Here we go," Reyes said, walking quickly back into the room. She handed Scully her cup and then picked the book up with her free hand. "I was up late reading." She shrugged and said she would be right back. She walked into one of the bedrooms, which Scully could see from her seat was empty, and tossed the book on the bed. "Ok, so what's up?" Reyes asked, walking back to the couch and sitting opposite Scully. "Before I left Washington," Scully answered, "someone left a newspaper for me. They wanted me to see a story about the death of a girl. Jordan Black," she said the name and she could hear her voice going limp as she saw the girl running to her father again. Jordan. Frank Black. Reyes' expression didn't change. Vacant interest. "I met Frank Black," Scully continued. "He assisted us in the case connected to the Millennium Group. I think whoever left that newspaper did so because they knew I was coming here." Reyes nodded. "And you think that is somehow connected to Dr. Hildebrandt. You think you've been sent to find that connection. Or you're being used to find that connection." "I think that I am being kept in the dark. Maybe you are too. I think I made it clear that I'm only here as a favor to Assistant Director Skinner. He has concerns about your interest and, after last night, I'm this damn close to validating his concerns," she held her fingers a quarter-inch apart as she spoke. "So I think it's time we cut the crap and you make me understand exactly what you killed a man for. "And another thing, I also think we should ask Dr. Hildebrandt if he knows Frank Black." "Yes," the man answered her question, entering from one of the bedrooms. "I know Frank Black. What concern is he of yours?" He looked like he hadn't slept and his stride seemed slightly unsure. "I know him too," Scully said. "He was a help to me and my partner when I was with the Bureau. May I ask what the nature of your relationship was?" Hildebrandt had come fully into the room and stood at the far end of the couch, away from Scully and beside Reyes. "I did some work with the Millennium Group. We met when he was invited to join them. I was assigned the job of watching over his candidacy and aiding him in his assignments. "What is your interest, Agent Scully? Now that you know I was an associate of Frank Black's, is your mission here complete? Because if so, Agent Reyes and I have business to attend to. In short, I'd like to know why the hell you're here." His voice had climbed slightly in pitch yet had grown forceful in the process. His anger was evident to both of the women in his presence. "I met Frank Black while I was investigating the Millennium Group and I believe you know something about the death of his daughter, Jordan. Do you, Dr. Hildebrandt?" "Is that right? Let me tell you something, Agent Scully. Frank was my friend. I tried to protect him." "From what?" Scully looked from Hildebrandt to Reyes and back to Hildebrandt. He was quiet for a while, looking away from Scully and down at the floor, and when he spoke again it was slower and more controlled. "After the turn of the millennium, not by your calendar, but by a spiritual calendar very few even know of, it is believed that forces once ruling this planet will return. A door will be opened and evil will come forth like mankind has never seen. "Within the Millennium Group were a group who adhered to this belief and followed their own calendar and when the end came, that door did not open. It destroyed their faith, for the most part, but there are some who accept their misjudgment but that failure does not indicate to them that all of their beliefs are wrong. Quite the contrary. They merely believe that they miscalculated. They've been given extra time to prepare for the new dawn. They have their doctrines, their scared texts. The have their believers and they have their preachers. "Now they seek prophets, but God is a God of the living. Not a God of the dead. The dead are liars. "As the new dawn approaches, they believe, the walls between this world and the next will begin to weaken and there will be people who can communicate across the breach. It is through these people that this group we speak of believe they can discover the very secrets of life and death, that they can harness these forces and control them. They seek to extract prophecy from unwilling sources and to follow that prophecy and to bring about the end." "I'm sorry, Dr. Hildebrandt. I don't understand what your point is," Scully interrupted. "Then I pity you because you are not aware that when you're in the darkest places, even the smallest glimmer of light can be blinding to anything which may actually be of significance." His eyes were narrow now. They gave her chills. "I'm sorry. I don't unders-" "Why are you here, Agent Scully?" he demanded again. "That's what I'm asking!" She stood up and grabbed her purse. "Go home, Agent Scully. Your job has nothing to do with us and you're getting in our way." There were four more messages from adhokk7. She deleted them and opened her web browser. The FBI database approved her login and she opened the X-F/CI database. There were, of course, other areas within the Bureau's electronic storehouse that would contain information about the Millennium Group, but right now there was only one source she trusted. She typed adhokk7's name into the search engine and began scanning for anything relating to the occult. She believed adhokk7 would know the truth and she was right. In alt.anarchism, she found a link he had posted to a website about sightings of dead children. As she pored through story after story, she began again to long for William. Finally, after hours of reading and looking, a picture did catch her eye. It was a picture of Jordan Black standing with her mother in what Scully assumed was their yard. Across the street, behind them, a man was standing beside a car as though he had just gotten out of it and was waiting for the picture to be taken so as not to disturb mother, daughter, and photographer. Scully recognized him as Dr. Hildebrandt. She picked up the copy of the girl's autopsy report she had printed out and looked again for anything indicating that Jordan Black had suffered any sign of ritual abuse. And again, after twelve pages of information, she found nothing. In frustration, she threw the papers across the room, ready to hop the next plane back to D.C. to tell Skinner to stick it up his ass. She could even hear the way she would start tearing into him. She would sling his door open and shout at the top of her lungs that she would never answer a call from him again as long as she... (...C'mere...) The phone. That's how it had started. With the phone call. Time began stretch into infinity as she saw her bedroom at home form around her. She saw and felt the bed beneath her and she could hear the whir of the ceiling fan above her and it sounded like the ocean. And there on the bed in front her was William and he squirmed and he shook his fists and she felt such joy. Extraordinary joy. He was there and he was beautiful and she was there and she would keep him safe and then he stopped and he twisted his head and he looked at the telephone. Somewhere deep inside her, Scully went cold. William was waiting for the telephone to ring. He was waiting because he knew it would. She had her purse in her hands and upended in a flash and then the cell phone was in her hand. As she dialed the number, she could see her baby. Her baby. Waiting for the (...door to open...) phone to ring. (...prophets...) Maybe he knew now... The phone rang twice before Margaret's voice was there in Scully's ear. "Hi Mom, it's me." "Dana? Are you ok, baby?" "I need to know about William. Tell me he's ok, mom. Tell me..." "I just looked in on him. William's fine. Where... Are you ok? Can you tell me that?" "I'm fine. Really I am, now that I know." "Bill came. He's here waiting for you because he wants to see you. I can't stop him either, Dana. He is your brother." "Tell Bill he was right. The asshole was always right." She closed the cell phone and went back to the computer, back to the FBI search engine and began a search on Reyes, ashamed of not ever having done this before and ashamed of having trusted another liar. She cross-referenced Dr. Hildebrandt, Peter Watts, and the Millennium Group, hoping for any mention at all of anything connecting her to Jordan or Frank Black. While waiting for the results, she filled that second with almost imperceptible thoughts of her mother, Mulder, and Skinner. Dr. Hildebrandt. There was a Congressional subcommittee report on ritual abuse in America in which Reyes had submitted analyses of two cases in New Orleans and Dr. Hildebrandt had been cited as an expert on types of technology used in an international ritual abuse ring. Despite this catch though, there was nothing connecting back to the death of Jordan Black. But as time began to slow around her again, she knew she didn't need the connections pointed out to her. She knew. She watched, removed, detached, distant, as her fingers took her computer back to adhokk7's page and she opened a file alleged to be a transcript of a resurrection ceremony used to bring children back from the dead. Her eyes moved with purpose, seeking out only what would be found at the end. And with all the power of an ice sheet falling from the sky, Scully was struck cold as she realized that Jordan Black did die at her father's hands, but that she hadn't been killed in a cemetery as adhokk7 insisted she had to be in order for her fire to be completely extinguished. In order to prevent her fire from lighting the wrong paths. Once more Scully opened the FBI's search engine. And when the first of Peter Watts' personnel files was on the screen and she saw the face of the man she had come to know as Dr. Hildebrandt, she ran to her car and she drove, unaware of the day's rapid passage into night. She kicked in the front door, gun in hand, only to find Reyes' rental house empty except for the two dead bodies, each with an ouroboros tattoed on its forehead and a hole in each gut made by, she knew, Reyes' bullets. "Shit." She flipped through the phone book until she found pizza delivery places. The first one sounded like maybe she had gotten lucky. "Hi," she said to the boy, whose voice couldn't belong to anyone over seventeen, she thought. "My girlfriend and I are looking for a really cool place to go get naked and party and she wanted to do it in a cemetery. We're on Ashland Court. Is there one close by? We're really horny." "Yeah," the boy answered, obviously bored by the question. "There's one on Glenda Hodges Boulevard about three miles east of you. If you see the car lot, you've gone too far." Baltimore Skinner ran. His feet rolling the planet beneath him, drawing the house closer and closer until he was taking the stairs to the door. He held his gun ready and stepped inside, into the darker shadows of the house. They had nearly completely made it inside before he had seen them. He moved slowly, alert, toward the stairs. As his foot pressed against the first one, two shots were fired from above him. He raced upward, bursting into the closed bedroom at the top of the stairs, pointing his weapon and ready to destroy the sonsofbitches come here to this house under his protection, only to find the two men dead, their bleeding foreheads marked with what appeared to be brands of an ouroboros and at the other end of his gun, Dana's brother, Bill Scully, standing wild-eyed and pointing his own gun back at Skinner. Panama City She had found them. Watts on his knees, head hanging low, shoulders slumped, Reyes holding a cross in one hand and her gun in the other, chanting. Scully had found them and she, for only a moment in the history of her life, here before the new dawn to be visited upon man, before the rise of evil to be foretold and hastened by the words and visions of the risen dead, Scully saw through the eyes of the woman she had been at the beginning, so many years before, and she was terrified. But the moment passed and she watched as Reyes finished the ceremony and ended the life of the thing that had been Peter Watts and instead of being terrified by what she was seeing, she was terrified because she knew she may, at that very moment, be looking into the future. On the way to the airport, she called her mother again. Skinner answered. He told her what had happened and that William was ok. "You have to come get him and you have to go-" "I know. I'm on the way. Thank you, Walter. Now you have to listen to me. You stay right there with William until I get there. Do not go anywhere. As soon as I arrive, you leave, Walter. Is that clear, sir? You leave and there's no looking back." "I understand, Dana. I'm sorry." Skinner closed his cell phone and threw it down on the sidewalk, ashamed and angry in ways he had never dreamed possible. I hear the ocean behind me and the darkness I've come to know in this place is here, but held at bay by your beautiful eyes. I miss you so much, my love. I live every day without you, without your smell and without your voice and I can't move sometimes because it hurts so bad being without you. Come to me, my friend, my lover, my heart. Come to me here in this place of dark dreams I am born into every time I seek refuge from the world that never stops turning against us. Come to me here, Fox, and hold me. Whisper to me that I can live without the phone ringing and knowing it will be you and that these things I feel without you won't kill me the way I pray they will when I'm weak and afraid. Sometimes I lie under my own stars with our baby and I read your words in the sky, and I see the eyes of a million angels weeping with jealousy because they can only dream of having what we have had. Together. And here, together again, we, you and I. Please take me and hold me close and never let me go, Fox. Tell me that you can fix the things that haven't been the same without you and that you can protect us, me and you and our baby, and we can be together somewhere more than this dream place, beneath this zodiac waiting to crash down upon us. And when you look at me, let me see in your eyes that you know I love you. And that when I hear the phone ring and I know it won't be you, I die and I die without you every day. There are times when I think I can almost feel you. I never thought things would be like this, but our love is now only the fire that burns inside our baby, our special special baby, and that fire must be protected. Please know I love you now and I always will. Georgetown His time of waiting had come to an end. The knob of the door in front of him, across the dark room he now stood silently in a distant corner of, had begun to turn. He swallowed hard, not for the first time since his arrival, and he counted off the quarter seconds on an internal watch finely tuned for such measurements in a time long ago and a land far away. And as he knew she would, Marita Covarrubias stepped through the doorway and closed the door behind her. He moved forward only after she had completed the twist of the deadbolt and when her eyes met his, they did so with what he thought could only be shock, but they were the only parts of her face to betray any emotion. "You bitch," he said, aiming his gun at her chest. Then he squeezed the trigger. Tomorrow We are afforded but a moment in the history of a universe we can not comprehend. It is a moment which is here and gone, never to return and we can not, in any true sense, ever return to it. Not as the people we were. For some of us, the moment is a treacherous one, filled with all the Hells we create for ourselves as well as the Hells others would create for us. From these Hells, some of us, the fortunate or perhaps the ruthless, are able to climb to a place of safety. We have come here to this place, my son and I, under what meager cover darkness may hold and in secret from the rest of the world, from the beloved who see only yesterday and from those who would destroy what we have in the name of tomorrow, those who would extinguish our flames. It is mine now, I know, to fill the rest of this moment not only sheltering, but guiding, and praying for a fire which seems fated to blaze brightly enough to light the way for not only one, but perhaps for many. That flame holds its own mysteries and I must be here when they make themselves clear. I must make sure it endures, no matter the cost. I am the only one who can. Even the once familiar, once...angelic can hold no audience with nor offer a guiding hand to my son now because divided we may stand, but together we will surely fall and should you, my beloved, fail to keep your promise, I still will keep mine and your hand, though so very dear to me, will be stayed. My son and I are alone in life and we must do whatever it takes to remain alone...in life, and I am afraid because I know with certainty and with finality that this is who we are. ---The end---
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