Title: Subcutaneous II: Splinter
Author: Maria Nicole
Written: July 1999
e-mail: marianicole29@yahoo.com
Distribution: Anywhere automatic, fine. Anyone who's talked to me about a previous story, fine. Anyone else, let me know where it's going, please. Thanks :)
Rating: PG
Classification: SA
Keywords: Mulder/Scully UST
Spoilers: Season 6 up through Field Trip, especially the cancer arc. Disclaimer: Not mine, not making money

Summary: Recovery.

Author's Notes:
1. If you've read Subcutaneous, just skip to the story...

2. If you haven't: this is a sequel to a previous story, Subcutaneous, if you'd like to read it. If you haven't read it and would like to read this, you basically need to know (Spoiler alert!) that the rebel aliens used the implants to trigger cancer in abductees in order to prevent the colonizers from testing them. Scully went out of remission; the remnants of the Consortium abducted her again to cure her and run more tests on her. She was presumed dead. Mulder found her, Scully helped to develop a possible cure for other abductees and cancer victims, and Krycek offered both of them a job with the resistance, which they refused. At one point, Scully talked to her brother Charlie and offered to visit him when his wife has their baby, which is where this story starts...

Thanks to Jo, for suggesting a scene and general encouragement. And Lisa, for questioned answered. Thanks, auntie :)


The Bible cut away from Lazarus after they unwrapped him from the burial cloths, never mentioning what happened to him afterward, what the effect of his resurrection was on his life or his family.

It was an omission that Scully was beginning to regret.


Sunday

Her brother leaned on her as he hugged her, for the first time that Scully could remember. She stepped back a little and braced against his weight.

"It's so good of you to come," he said. "It's been...well, it's been great, but my God..."

"It's a big thing," she said. "Congratulations, Daddy."

"A girl. I'm glad it was a girl. I would have loved another boy, but it'll be nice to have a girl around the house." He pulled away from her. His eyes were red and strained, his hair tousled, his clothes crumpled. Julia had been in labor for a long time.

"You look better than when I last saw you," he said quietly, and she realized that she had not been the only one to cast an assessing glance.

"I feel much better. It's been almost a month, after all. Charlie, I'm fine, let's not talk about that now."

His face cleared. "The boys are excited to see their Aunt Dana."

"I can't wait to see them."

"Did you have a safe drive from the airport? I'm sorry we didn't pick you up, but..."

She tapped his shoulder. "It wasn't a problem. It'll be easier for me to have my own car, anyway. Now relax, take a deep breath..."

He did, and then grinned at her, his eyes still holding amazement and exhaustion in equal measure. "Come on to see the baby?"

"I can't wait," she replied, and let her voice hold all the affection she felt for him.


"Have you decided on a name?" she asked, watching the small, sleeping bundle through the nursery window.

"Annette Alexandra. Annie."

Scully nodded. Annette had been their grandmother's name. "She's beautiful."

Oh, and she was, with her still-crinkled face, a perfectly beautiful and healthy baby.

The sorrow that caught at her was no surprise; the joy was. She had thought that this would be difficult, that it would bring back remembrances of her own daughter, and the knowledge of her own infertility. She had been prepared to push that sorrow aside for the sake of her brother and his family, but she found that the happiness on her brother's face had become her own.

"We can go to see Julia now, if you want," Charlie said.

"Mmmm hmmm," Scully said, placing her hand lightly on the glass. "Where are the boys now?"

"At a neighbor's. Jackie's. She has a son of her own; she's real good with them. You sure you want to stay, huh, sis? They're gonna run you ragged...make you play endless computer games, or act as their horsie, or read them just one more story..."

"I've handled criminals, Charlie. Two boys won't be a problem." She turned away from the glass, waited while Charlie took one last lingering look at his daughter, and then moved with him to the maternity ward.

"You got off work all right?" he asked.

"I have days coming," she said. "I'd told Skinner that I would be taking off. Mulder'll tell him tomorrow that it's this week."

When she had told Skinner that she would need some time off, but she didn't exactly know when yet, he had raised both eyebrows. "Please tell me that you and Mulder aren't going off on a wild goose chase that's only waiting on the word of a mysterious and unreliable informant."

"Not Mulder, me. I'm going to Connecticut to visit my brother when his wife has her baby. To help take care of their other children. I'll go down when she has the baby, but I don't exactly know what day it'll be."

"You're taking time off?" Skinner had asked, with a tone of surprise in his voice that he usually reserved for Mulder's wildest theories. "Fine, then, I'll clear the request...just tell Mulder to tell me when you take them, or e-mail me. And Scully..."

"Yes, sir?"

"Please make sure that Mulder understands that that week will not be a good time for him to look into any new theories on the Bermuda Triangle."

"Understood."


She said hi to Julia, who was still exhausted and dazed, before she took her rental car to her brother's house. She fished her cell phone out of her pocket on the way, hitting the speed dial for Mulder's number.

"Mulder."

"Hi. It's me."

"Scully." His voice was perceptibly warmer. "What's up?"

"Julia had the baby, so I got a flight out. I thought I'd let you know that I won't be in this week."

"Oh." A pause as he assimilated this information. "Well, hell. You mean I'm going to have to wreak havoc on the FBI by myself this week?"

She smiled. "You've had lots of practice at that, at least. Anyway, I stopped in at work before my flight and left the Pareski report on your desk...you just have to give it to Skinner tomorrow. And..."

"Wait, you're already there?"

"What? Yes."

"Oh."

"Everything else should be in order. I know you wanted to get a head start on the ghostly music that people were hearing at that inn, but really, that's very likely to be a hoax to draw in business, and it's been going on for twenty-seven weeks already, it'll certainly wait for another..."

"Yeah, I know. Hey, Scully, you should've called before you left. I could have picked up the file, driven you to the airport so that you didn't have to leave your car there..."

"I took a cab. I was in a rush, Mulder." She bit her lip at the evasion, knowing that she had had time to call him while she had waited for the cab. She'd had time to go to the Hoover building, after all.

But she had quelled the part of her that wanted to call Mulder, fearing that if she did call him he would have some lead on a case, some new puzzle that had to be attended to, fearing that she would end up calling Charlie and cancelling her visit. It hadn't been until the airplane was rushing away from the ground that she realized that she too had successfully reached escape velocity.

"Okay," said Mulder, and although there was no obvious hurt in his voice, it had cooled, and she knew that he had picked up on the evasion.

And he probably did not understand that what she had been trying to avoid by not calling him was not the risk that he would try to keep her from going--God knew, he'd been nothing but supportive recently--but the risk that she would use him as an excuse to stop herself from going.

She sighed in frustration, mostly self-directed. "I'll call you tomorrow, all right? To make sure that I didn't leave something important undone. And I have my laptop, so if you need to send me any files you can..." She squinted at a street sign half-hidden behind trees, grimaced, and made a right turn onto Charlie's street.

"No, I can handle anything that comes up. Don't worry. You just... spend your time with your family. Call me when you get back in town."

She pulled up to Charlie's house, turned the key in the ignition, and leaned her head gently against the steering wheel. Mulder's voice had been full of a cheerfulness that was entirely forced, and her own voice matched it when she answered. "I have a flight back on Saturday. Don't run after any bright lights without me around."

"I promise to be a good boy and catch up on the filing."

"There's plenty of it to do...I'll call you, okay?"

"Sure...oh, hey, boy or girl?"

"Girl. Annette Alexandra."

"Nice name. Talk to you next week." And then the phone went dead.


Jason and Patrick gave her exuberant hugs when she picked them up at the neighbor's house, and she reveled in the stickiness of their fingers (lunch had been peanut butter and jelly, she guessed), and the way they both threw themselves at her simultaneously, expecting her to be able to stand strong under the onslaught.

They were six and ten now, too big to swing up into the air as she held them, and she missed that.

"So how have you guys been, huh? What have you been up to?" She ruffled Patrick's hair; he would still let her do that.

"We built a fort in Aunt Jackie's house. Us and Robbie. We shot each other to bits," said Pat, and mimed a gun, complete with shooting noises, spinning off to shoot at a nearby staircase.

"He wanted to play cowboys and Indians," said Jason. "He and Robbie, they're both really young."

"Robbie's not young," exclaimed Pat. "He's seven! And I'm gonna be seven in August. We ain't young."

"No, you're not. Just younger than Jason is all."

Jason made a face.

"What have you been doing?" she asked. "Are you still building model airplanes?"

His face lit up. He had Julia's dark hair and height; for a moment, he looked unnervingly like a childhood picture of Mulder, all arms and legs and thin, grinning face. "Not airplanes anymore," he said. "Ships. Because of Grandpa. And Uncle Bill. You want to see them?"

"Yes, of course. As soon as we get home. Why don't you boys say goodbye to Robbie and get your things, and we'll go home and have dinner?"

Jason grinned blissfully and ran; Patrick's face fell. "I thought we were gonna stay here. Aunt Jackie's making macaroni and cheese."

"We can make macaroni and cheese at home, how about," said Scully. "Why don't you get your stuff--"

"But I wanted to--" said Robbie

"Dana," said Jackie, leaning out of kitchen doorway with a towel in her hand. "If you'd like, Pat can stay here for dinner, and I'll bring him home afterward. God knows Robbie's spent enough time at Julia's."

Scully smiled, a little stiffly. "If you're sure you don't mind..."

"Hurray!" said Pat. "I'm gonna go tell Robbie..." and then he too was running away, feet pounding.

Nice to see how she rated compared to macaroni and cheese.

"He's been bragging all day about his Aunt Dana coming," said Jackie, and she wondered how much of her chagrin had shown on her face. "But I think he's a little shy around you, too."

"We...uh, I haven't visited for awhile."

"Hmmm. Well, this is a good chance for you to visit with Jason, then. He's been real good about playing with the younger kids, but I bet he'll love some attention. Julia's been busy with...well, being pregnant, and Robbie demands attention, but Jason...he's quieter. The responsible one. He'll love having someone to listen to him."

Scully smiled. "Thanks."


The boys were already asleep in their rooms when Charlie came home, having shown her their Sony Playstation and their absolute favorite computer game and the crib that they had helped their dad make for their younger sister.

She was sitting in the rocking chair in the nursery when she heard the garage door start to open, and she watched his headlights scatter patterns across the ceiling.

She could touch the bars of the crib from where she was sitting, and she had, letting her fingers run with the grain, feeling the smoothness where the wood had been sanded. In the dark, she could just barely make out the border of playing animals on the yellow walls ("We didn't know what it was going to be, and yellow's okay for either," Pat had said. Then he'd looked up at her anxiously. "It is okay, right? She'll like it?").

The room smelled clean, with fading hints of lemon. Julia had told her at the hospital that she always went into a frenzy of activity before labor, and that she'd spent that energy preparing the baby's room.

"When I was pregnant with Jason," she'd said, "I didn't know what was going on. All I knew was that I had this sudden spurt of energy. I used the time making potpourri, for God's sakes. Potpourri! As if that would come in handy." She'd shaken her head ruefully, and then leaned back against Charlie's shoulder, as he'd sat on the bed beside her. "I knew better, this time."

The sound of the garage door closing brought her back to herself. She stood up hurriedly, stilling the rocking of the chair with a touch of her hand and straightening the afghan that rested along the back of the chair with another, and walked out to the kitchen to greet Charlie.

"Hey," he said, putting two paper bags on the counter. "Boys asleep? Good. I'm going to get the rest of the groceries."

"Groceries?" She followed him out to the garage. "You should have let me do that tomorrow..." She reached into the trunk and took out a bag, and he reached for the remaining two.

"Close the trunk, will ya? I decided to go after visiting hours. It's impossible to shop with Patrick--he asks for every toy he sees, and whines when he doesn't get it. And Jason tries to slip things into the cart when you're not looking," he began to put away groceries, swiftly and competently, and she started to help. "No, sit down, I know where everything is. Or, hey, pour me a glass of water. The filtered stuff is in the fridge. Thanks. Anyway, the two of them would try to fill the cart with junk...too much hassle."

"Where would you like me to take them tomorrow? Any place special?"

"I've got to get back to work. Maybe take them to the hospital to see Julia and Annie. Summer camp doesn't start for another week, so anything else is up to you."

"When will Julia be coming home?"

He took a drink of his water. "Day after tomorrow."

"Maybe the boys and I could decorate or something. Put up a banner..."

"That'd be nice. How'd everything go today?"

"Fine. Pat...he wanted to stay at Jackie's for dinner. I hope that was okay."

His eyes were sharp and observant. "Fine with me. He might take a little while to get really comfortable with you. He's friendly, but he's always been a little shy around strangers."

"Strangers."

He made a small face. "You know what I mean, Red. He hasn't seen you since Christmas, and six months is a long time for a six-year old. He loves you, he just doesn't know you."

She didn't pursue the subject. "They're good boys, both of them. You and Julia have done a good job with them."

He smiled, broadly, and there was pride in his face.

Scully wondered if she'd ever seen that in her own father's face. Love, yes, approval, yes...but the kind of unashamed pride that she saw in Charlie's face, not because of any particular accomplishments but just because his kids were good kids? "We like 'em," said Charlie, and the light words did not disguise the depth of love.


Monday

"Aunt Dana, did you see our dog in heaven?" asked Patrick, and Scully almost choked on the bite of lasagna she was eating.

"You're not supposed to ask about that," Jason hissed at him, and there was a thump under the table.

"Ow!" cried Pat. "Don't kick me." Another thump,and this time Jason grimaced.

"Don't ask about things you're not supposed to, then," said Jason, and scowled down at his plate.

"First of all, neither of you should kick each other. Second of all... Patrick, sweetie, what do you mean?"

"We're not supposed to ask you about it," said Jason, mouth set mulishly. "Mom and Dad said."

"But I want..." said Pat.

"Shut up."

"Don't tell your brother to shut up. It doesn't bother me to be asked about it, so it's okay. Pat..."

He looked up at her with disingenuous eyes, one corner of his mouth smeared with tomato sauce. "Daddy said that you went to heaven. I wanted to know if you saw our dog there, 'cause that's where Daddy said Huck went last year after he was gone."

She took a drink of water to stall for time. "Honey, what happened was, your daddy thought that I was...gone, like Huck, but I wasn't really."

"So you can come back from heaven?"

Oh, lord. How to explain theological concepts to a six year old? Jason was quivering impatiently, still scowling.

"I didn't go to heaven. Your daddy just thought I did because I disappeared for a bit. But really I was right here on earth, they just didn't know where I was."

"But that's like Huck. One day he was just gone, disappeared."

Jason's mouth compressed into a thin line, and Scully suddenly guessed that there had been a discreet burial when Pat had not been at home, that Pat thought that the body disappeared along with the soul.

"But he was really gone. I was just somewhere else. Like when you're playing with a friend and your mom doesn't know where you are. I wasn't in heaven. You can't come back from there."

Pat looked up sharply, the expression on his face suddenly like Charlie's. "But then I'll never see Huck again. Never!"

"Sweetie..."

Pat's chair scraped back as he pushed away from the table. "I liked Huck!" he said, and then he was running away.

"They tried to explain it to him, but he's just a little kid," said Jason, crossing his arms.

"Maybe I should go after him," Scully said.

"He'll be okay," said Jason, and pushed away from the table, carrying his plate to the dishwasher and stacking it neatly. He was still scowling.

She frowned at the tension in his back. "Did you have any questions about what happened?"

He shook his head. She placed a hand on his shoulder, and he spun away from her, moving with the swift grace of children to the doorway. "My dad cried," he said, stopping there with his face turned away.

"What?"

His eyes met hers for a moment, his face defiant, and ashamed, and confused. "When he was on the phone with Grandma. My dad was crying." And then he was gone, and she heard the distant slam of his bedroom door.

She sat at the table again, and buried her head in her arms.


"How'd today go?" Charlie asked.

"There's lasagna in the stove that's still warm. How was your day?"

He stopped on the way to the stove. "What went wrong?"

"What do you mean, what went wrong?"

"Did you know that when you don't want to answer a question you either avoid the topic or ask a question yourself? That time, you did both. Spit it out, what went wrong?"

"You should eat your lasagna before the cheese congeals. And there's some zucchini, too. Hold on, I'll..."

"Dana."

"Listen, I'll tell you, but you might as well eat."

He looked skeptical, eyebrow raised; she wondered if Mulder found that expression as irritating as she did.

"I didn't screw up so badly that it'll ruin your appetite," she said irritably, and got out a plate from the cabinet, spooning some lasagna and zucchini onto it.

"I didn't think you did screw anything up. This is a weird time for the kids, especially Patrick. He has a new sister, his mom's gone for the first time in his life."

She brought the plate to where he was sitting down at the table, and sat across from him. "Most of the day went fine. We made a banner that we're going to tape up tomorrow; it's in the living room. We went to the park. We went to the hospital. They were hungry around 5, and you said you might not be home until 7 if you stopped at the hospital before coming home, so I thought we should eat dinner."

"And?"

"Pat started asking questions about heaven."

"Oh."

"And then he got upset about Huck, and Jason got upset because... because you had been upset when Mom called to tell you that I was... that she thought I had died. They both ran away. I tried to talk to them, but they clammed up."

"And that's it?"

"They're in their rooms, now."

"I'll talk to them after dinner," said Charlie.

Scully slouched down in her chair and kicked the leg of the table, lightly.

"It wasn't your fault. It was bound to come up sometime. I wish it had happened when I was here, but I'm sure you handled it okay."

"They were both practically in tears when they left, and they both just holed up in their rooms saying they're fine, they don't want to talk about it."

"It happens. They're kids, and this was the first time that someone they knew died. Or didn't die. They're bound to be a little confused."

She bit her lip, wondering if she should tell Charlie that Jason had seen him crying. For some reason, she, like Jason, felt ashamed at the thought.

She shouldn't be, she knew. Tears were a normal response to grief, and she certainly didn't subscribe to the notion that real men didn't cry. She had heard Mulder weep in the shower a few times after a bad case, one where she had been hurt, or one that involved brutally murdered children. When his mother had been ill, she had held him in her arms, feeling nothing but compassion. But Charlie was different somehow.

Maybe because they had been raised by the same father, whom she had never seen cry.

Or maybe she was ashamed of herself, since she had been the cause of Charlie's tears.


She called Mulder.

"Mulder." He sounded distracted. She could hear the TV on in the background.

"It's me."

"Scully," he said. "Hi." She heard the TV sound stop. "Don't tell me you ran into any psychotic dolls over there in Connecticut."

"Does a Furby count?"

"A case for immediate exorcism if I've ever seen one."

"I'll get right on that. You want to come out and help?" It was meant as a joke, but the longing she heard in her voice surprised her.

"You know I'm a sucker for an exorcism," he said, and she knew from the gentleness in his voice that he'd heard the wistfulness, too. "What have you been doing up there?"

She noticed that he didn't ask how things had been going; she would have only said that they were fine. It was irritating that her defense mechanisms were that obvious. "Playing with the boys," she responded. "Visting Julia. She and Annie come home tomorrow."

He remained silent.

"The boys were a little confused about my supposed death," she admitted.

"We were all a little confused about your supposed death," said Mulder.

"Pat--he's the younger one--wanted to know if I'd seen their dog when I was in heaven."

She could tell that Mulder at least tried to stifle his laugh; she gave him points for that.

"It wasn't funny," she protested. "He was really upset about his dog."

"Sorry. But he'll be okay."

"Mmm. You know, you were lucky, you didn't have to deal with this." She cringed at her own words. Of course he wouldn't have dealt with this. He had no nieces and nephews, or none that he knew about. Idiot.

"Convincing the Bureau that I really was alive was bad enough, Scully. Either way, this whole rising from the dead business sucks. Makes you understand why the phoenix only tried it once every 500 years. It would have been too damned annoying to deal with the paperwork."

"I suspect the part of being burned to ashes wasn't pleasant either," she said.

"No," Mulder said. "Death by fire wouldn't be."

She winced again, remembering the boxcar, and changed the subject. "How did work go?"

"Fine. Don't worry about anything--"

"Oh God."

"Ha ha. I turned in the Pareski report, promised Skinner that I was not going to hightail it off to Puerto Rico or any other unspecified location while you're gone--he's getting really paranoid about that-- and did some filing."

"And?" she asked.

"And did a tiny bit of research on the people who are supposed to be haunting that one inn. Their history and such. It's interesting."

"Mulder..."

"Scout's honor, I won't actually go there until you're back. Although they're supposed to be very benevolent spirits, so..."

"You better not have your fingers crossed."

"Don't you wish you were here to see?"

"Videophone would do the trick as well," said Scully.

"Hey, Scully, I'd just like you to note that I'm taking the moral high ground and not making a joke about videophone and the future of phone sex here..."

"You go for that moral high ground, Mulder."

He didn't say anything in response, and she waited in silence for a moment before saying, "I should go. Tomorrow's going to be a big day, with Julia and Annie coming home."

"Right." Another pause, and then he said, voice suddenly pensive, "Scully...."

His voice trailed off, and she imagined a hundred things that he might be thinking, things that he wouldn't say for fear of hurting her.

"I'll be okay," she told him firmly.

"But it'll be..."

"Mulder, I'm okay with this whole situation. I wouldn't have come here if I weren't."

"You're not crossing your fingers, are you?" he asked.

"I promise."

"Take care," he said, and the tenderness in his voice caught at her.

"You, too."


Tuesday

If she'd ever needed proof that she could get into trouble when Mulder wasn't even around, she had it now.

She was wet, she was tired, and she was out for revenge.

And this had been her own bright idea, hadn't it? She gnawed on her lower lip and peaked around the corner of the house, ducking her head back quickly as she saw Patrick.

It had made sense at the time, though. About 20 extra balloons that they hadn't used in their impromptu decorations. Two boys with excess energy. Several hours before Julia and Charlie would come home. And the boys had been in sunny moods, the turmoil of the previous night forgotten or buried deep. The solution, guaranteed to put her on the "Coolest Aunt in the World" list and wear the boys out, had seemed obvious.

But...a water balloon fight? Had she gone mad?

Okay, only one remaining balloon. Two foes. She needed strategy. She peaked around the house again. No one. She glanced quickly behind her, and then above her.

That was a thought. She could sneak into the house and dunk them from above...

They're children, Dana, she told herself firmly. You do not need to use unfair tactics to compete against two sweet, darling children.

One of those children had landed a water balloon right on her butt. They deserved drenching.

Okay, okay. Strategy. How could she get them both with one well-placed blow?

More to the point: where were they? She looked around uneasily; they were planning something, she bet. She'd need to be sneaky. All right, Dana, think sneaky...what would Mulder be doing?

Other than making wet t-shirt comments.

Mulder would either be in the house, getting buckets of water, or... oh, the louse, he'd be in back hooking up the garden hose.

She headed in that direction.

Patrick ran up to her on the way, hands empty. She almost soaked him in retaliation for her wet butt, but refrained, as he was unarmed and no immediate threat. Damn that FBI training anyway.

"He got me!" he said in indignation. "And I don't have no more balloons!"

Ah, divide and conquer. "Shh," she said. "He soaked both of us, and we're going to get him, aren't we? But we've got to be quiet. Do you know where he went?"

"Towards the front of the house."

"Okay, here's what we're going to do. We're going to go to the back of the house, and make sure that the garden hose is safe, and then we're going to sit tight and wait for him to come to us, so that we have the advantage, okay?"

Patrick nodded solemnly, and they edged towards the back of the house. When they turned the corner, though, they were met with a blast of spray. She sent her water balloon at the source, wildly, and saw it miss through the mist of water. Jason was laughing hysterically. And Patrick was running around, yelling, "I got her! I got her! I tricked her!"

Tricked her? Jason stopped spraying her, and she stared at him.

"Good job, Pat," Jason yelled. "We got her good."

"You sent him?" she said incredulously. "You sent him to lure me to the back of the house?"

"We got you good!" Jason exclaimed enthusiastically. "And you're out of water balloons. We win! Yes!" And he sprayed the hose again in an arc towards the sky.

"You're not mad, are you?" asked Pat.

"I made sure not to spray you hard, or in the face or stomach, like Dad says not to," said Jason. "You're not mad, are you?"

They'd tricked her, and she called herself a Special Agent of the FBI. "I'm not mad," she said, feeling a strange sensation start in her throat. It bubbled up and came out: laughter.

"Hey, Aunt Dana, you're wet," said Jason, and that made her laugh even harder as she stood there, outmaneuvered, completely soaked, wet grass blades sticking to her legs, surrounded by shards of bright balloons.


They were dry, mostly, when Julia and Charlie and Annie came home.

The boys were shy with Annie, touching her with a reverence that got to Scully. And then Julia delivered Annie to her arms, and she held her gingerly, carefully.

Annie's eyes were such a sweet, clear blue, her hair reddish wisps on her forehead. "Hey, little sweetheart," said Scully softly, and touched one hand to Annie's, safe behind the mitten at the end of the jumper sleeve. Annie's eyes crossed and then seemed to focus. "Aren't you a pretty girl? You're going to grow up to be beautiful, and brave, and smart, aren't you?"

"Can I hold her?" said Jason.

"Sure," said Julia, and took Annie from Scully's arms to transfer her to Jason's. "You just have to be real careful to support her neck, okay? Like this."

Scully realized that she had been swaying automatically, rocking Annie with the motion of her own body, only when she stopped.


She called Mulder, much later, when they were all asleep and she was lying awake, staring at the ceiling.

"Mulder."

"It's me. I'm sorry, did I wake you?"

"Me? No. How are the nephews?"

"All tucked away in bed in their jammies."

His voice lowered a little, became husky. Intimate. "What about you? Are you all tucked away in bed in your jammies?"

She smiled. "I didn't get a bed. I'm on the pull-out couch in the living room."

"In your jammies?"

"Yes, Mulder. In my jammies. Before you ask, they're neither low-cut nor crotchless. Not sexy at all."

"You'd think I could be the judge of that." He sighed. "I wonder if the bureau would invest in videophone?"

"In your dreams."

"Only the better ones...you should know better than to feed me straight lines like that one."

"I live in hope that you'll try to refrain from the easy ones," she said.

"Mmmm...I'm assuming you didn't call to be my straight woman."

"Just checking to make sure that you haven't been eaten by ghosts."

"Scully. Scully, Scully, Scully. Six years and you don't yet know that ghosts don't eat people? How would they digest, huh? You think ectoplasm has acidic qualities that'd eat people away like that giant mushroom?"

"Ectoplasm? Have you been watching Ghostbusters again?" He hummed a few notes of the theme 'who ya gonna call'. She ignored him. "We've never seen any evidence that there is such a substance as ectoplasm."

"Maybe not. But I did find out some interesting things. About Yvette and Hilton Grogall."

"Yvette and Hilton. Maurice and Lyta. I have to hand it to you, you do find ghosts with unique names. Was this also a time of dark, dark despair?"

"Uh...no. Not especially. Unless you were a Democrat. They died in a time of wealth and prosperity during the 1980s, and they themselves were, by all accounts, a normal, married couple, remarkable only for their kindness. They ran an inn, with some success, and they had many returning customers who appreciated Hilton's taking them to the nearby golf course and Yvette's cheese strudel--the current owners of the inn have that recipe, and it's supposed to be very good strudel, Scully--they were well-liked by their neighbors and respected by the town. Every Saturday, they would work in their garden together, up until the day they died. Their guests would confide in Yvette; they say she was a good listener, a mother or grandmother figure..."

His voice was lulling her to sleep, planting images in her mind of a picturesque white inn with banks of flowers surrounding it... "Did they have children?"

The small sound that Mulder made, not quite a throat clearing, woke her back up again. "They never had children. According to their niece, she's the one who owns the inn now, they couldn't, although she never knew whose...why they couldn't. They devoted their energies to the inn instead, and by all accounts they were happy until the day of their death."

"How did they die?"

"They were both in their late 70s, and their health was declining, and one day...they just died. Quietly, peacefully. Both of them. In their sleep. The niece became the owner of the inn. I talked to her on the phone, and she says that even from the beginning she always felt a presence as she walked around the rooms, something very peaceful. Guests who came would say that they felt their troubles drain away from them, and a few of the female guests reported seeing an older woman outside, working in the gardens. It's only been within the last year that the music has started, though. Nothing obtrusive. The guests don't mind...they say it's very soothing, it's as if someone is playing a radio while they work, like Yvette used to do."

"Mulder..."

"There are people from the town who go there, not because they need a place to stay for the night but because they like the atmosphere, they say it's somehow healing." Mulder's voice sounded as if he were speaking in a dream. "It's as if they poured so much of themselves in that place, all the years that they'd spent creating a safe haven for passerby--that's what the inn's called, Safe Haven--that they couldn't let it go when they died."

Safe haven. Last time Mulder had taken her ghost-busting, the story he had told her had been full of danger and excitement, a distraction for both of them from the holiday season, and she thought, from the first anniversary of Emily's death. Mulder's voice then had been full of teasing and curiosity, his usual tone when confronted with strangeness. Now, it was full of longing, and she wondered just what had broken in him that needed healing so badly that he was searching for it among ghosts.

"I thought ghosts usually left unfinished business. These two sound like they led a full life and died content."

"So content that they didn't leave. They'd created their heaven here on earth..."

"Mulder...Belinda Carlisle songs?"

His voice sharpened, and the dreamy quality left it. "All right, all right. Anyway, they sound interesting, right?"

"Interesting enough, I suppose. Why are you so into this set of sightings, though?" she asked, trying to keep her voice as gentle, as warm, as possible.

But all his defenses, as formidable as hers, were back in place. "Warm, fresh-baked cheese strudel. What more could a guy want out of life?"


Wednesday

Screaming/crying/pain/scared/gun/nightstand/reach/emptiness/ crumpledbedsheets/lumpymattress/notherbed/hotel?/crying/ Mulderwhereare?/terror/crying, not her crying/no pain, no one else in the room/sitting up, eyes adjusting to darkness, clock, 4:17. Footsteps above her head, in the baby's room. Baby. Of course. Annie.

She inhaled air, gulped it. Safe.

Footsteps walking the floor above her, back and forth, back and forth. Of course. Annie's room was right above hers; of course the crying would carry. But it was normal crying, not the crying of someone being tested past their endurance.

She squeezed her eyes shut and pulled her knees up, pressing her mouth against her knee to stifle something that sounded appalling like a whimper.

Only a nightmare. No one here. No one grabbing her and strapping her down by wrists and ankles. No drill coming at her face, no leaden heaviness of her limbs that prohibited movement but allowed knowledge of what was going to happen, allowed the sensation of pain.

They'd hurt her.

Deep, cleansing breath. They'd hurt her.

Okay, they'd hurt her. She'd always known that. They could hurt her again. She knew that too.

She crawled to the edge of the bed and turned on the light on the end table, reaching for the glass of water that she had left there and swallowing, water running down her chin.

Walk it off, Dana. You've dealt with this before.

On the very bad nights, she had found herself walking the halls of her apartment building, her own apartment grown too small. If it were light enough, she would walk the streets after a hasty change into jeans and shoes, a jacket thrown over her pajama top, gun holstered.

Here, she had only a little space, the pull-out couch taking up much of the living room.

Someone, Julia or Charlie, was still walking Annie upstairs, trying to soothe her. She mirrored their pace, arms wrapped around herself.


"All she does is cry," said Patrick.

"All you did was cry," said Jason. "And she's way cuter than you were. You were butt-ugly."

"Was not."

"Was too."

"Bet you were too."

"Not as ugly as you, troll-face."

"Hey!" said Scully from the doorway. "Be nice to each other."

They looked up, startled, from where they were examining Annie in her crib.

"We are," said Patrick, and Jason smiled smugly. Obviously, he'd trained his little brother not to be a snitch.

She walked into the room. "I made grilled cheese sandwiches, and your mom's down there ready to eat. How about we go down?"

Patrick attached himself like a leech to her side, wrapping his arms around her. "Can we go to the park later?"

"Sounds okay to me. Jason?"

He shook his head. "Is is okay if I stay home? I won't bother Mom if she's sleeping or anything, I promise, but I wanna work on a model."

"Sounds fine to me." She wrapped her other arm around Jason, who stiffened but then smiled up at her from within the curve of her arm. "Now, c'mon, before lunch gets cold." They lingered a moment to look at Annie, though, sleeping soundly. The boys, pressed against either side of her, warmed her.

They walked down the stairs like that, Patrick giggling as they all tried to fit on the same stair at the same time.


"Hello," said Julia into the phone. She listened for a moment, and then her eyebrows rose. "Hold on for just a moment, okay? I'll get her." There was a pause, and then she smiled. "Don't worry about it, Annie didn't start crying...no...why, thank you. Hold on, she's right here. Dana, it's for you. Your partner." Julia handed her the cordless phone over the debris of the dinner table.

"Mulder?"

"Scully."

She stiffened at the way he said her name. During the last few weeks, Mulder had been almost unbearably gentle, concern evident in every syllable he spoke even though she knew he was trying not to hover.

Her name on his lips had been a sigh of relief, a prayer, an endearment, a request for comfort, an offer of solace, even an expression of praise and admiration (when he had read over her shoulder that the cancer treatment was working, his first response had been a long, drawn out exhalation of her name).

But her name on his lips this time had harder edges, a more familiar tone: A call to action. She knew in the space between one breath and the next that he was summoning her to arms. "Scully, they found Scanlon."

She held onto the edge of the table, and listened to her own voice come out harshly. "Where?"

She looked around and realized that the rest of the family had stopped eating dinner, that they were looking at her instead. She plastered a small, fake smile on her face and stood up to walk into the living room, sitting on the folded-in couch.

"Texas. I'd forgotten, but Skinner forwarded that sketch to all the hospitals, remember? And a hospital in Texas recognized him."

"Did the police get to him in time? Before he left town?" the questions spilled out of her, burning like acid as they did.

"The police didn't. Someone else did."

"What?" But she and Mulder had been partners for six years; she knew what he meant even as he spoke again.

"They found him dead in his armchair, apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head."

"Da--" She suddenly remembered the kids in the next room, and finished vehemently, "darn it."

"Yeah, I was saying that too. I'm on my way to the airport now."

"I can be there in..."

"You don't have to come. I thought you should know, but there's no reason for you to come out to Dallas. They probably removed anything from his house--"

"Don't be ridiculous. Of course I'm coming. His records at the hospital may--God, I hope they didn't take his computer--and I'll need to do an autopsy--"

"Scully, I'll check for all his records myself. I'll send you whatever looks relevant. You don't need to come out. Spend the rest of your week with your family like you planned."

"I want to do an autopsy..."

"Scully. No."

"What?"

"I can handle it."

"You can handle an autopsy? That's a new facet of your personality," she bit out, astonished at the amount of venom in her voice.

"Dana." She looked over automatically to the kitchen doorway, expecting Charlie to be standing there, before she realized that the sound of her first name had come from the telephone receiver.

She hated the sound of her name when Mulder said it in that soft, soothing, voice.

"I can handle it," he said, stubborn to the core. "I'll sit in at the autopsy--I've sat in at enough of yours to know what should go on. I'll search his house for every last detail and send the computer to the Gunmen. And I'll send you anything I find about cancer. But there isn't any need for you to come out here for what is, in all likelihood, another dead end."

"Then why did you call me? I have to go out there..."

"No, you don't. "

She lowered her voice to a harsh, strained whisper. "That man nearly killed me. He did kill Penny Northern. He did kill Betsy Hagiopian. His work has killed literally hundreds of other women. Don't tell me what I can and cannot do. If there is anything in his household that contains information about the cancer, I have to find it."

His voice had lowered and harshened as well. "We will find anything there is to find."

"What was done, was done to me. This is my concern. Anyway, you're not a doctor, you might not even know what you were looking at."

"I may not know what I'm looking at?" His voice was still low, utterly calm, a smooth surface. It halted her in her tracks. "I may not know what I'm looking at?" And then the surface cracked and broke. plunging her into empty space. "How the hell do you think I spent my time the year you had cancer, Scully? Talking with faith healers? Lighting candles in my local church? Reading fucking tea leaves in the hopes that they'd tell me your future? I learned about cancer, Scully, and I learned it your way, through science and hard fact. I read every journal article, every book, I could find. By the end, I could read every notation on your chart at the hospital; I could read every notation on any cancer victim's chart. After you died, I read every autopsy report that came in on every victim, and I knew what they meant. I may not have a medical degree, but I as hell know everything there is to know about cancer."

Her temper snapped. "How dare you?"

"How dare I what? Point out that you aren't the only one this affects? Act as if this, oh, yeah, this concerns me too?"

"This isn't about you," she hissed into the phone. "This isn't about me, either. This is about the women who are still dying, and the fact that they deserve the very best investigation into Scanlon's life that they can get, and no matter how much you know about the cancer, you're not a doctor. And how dare you try to keep me away from this investigation because of some misguided desire to keep me safely tucked away with my family."

"You should stay with them, yes. You've been waiting for the phone to ring for three weeks, acting as if you can't wait to leave the office, not even telling me before you do leave because you want to get out of D.C. so badly--"

"Don't even use--"

He plowed straight through her interruption. "And you should spend time with them, you should spend some time recovering, especially when we both know that know matter how much we want to, we're not going to find anything in Texas...you stay with your family."

"What, you think know what's best for me?"

"Maybe sometimes I do, dammit."

"Well, whoop-de-do, you finally became God. Oh, wait, you didn't. And you don't have the right to make my decisions for me. So just...you can just go to hell, Mulder, but I'm going to Texas to find out what I can, regardless of how hopeless you think it might be."

There was a long pause, and then, "No, you aren't."

"Why not?"

"Because I haven't tell you the city they found Scanlon in yet, Scully. And Texas is a pretty big damn state."

Click. She stared at her phone in disbelief.

The son-of-a-bitch had hung up on her.

That fucking son-of-a-bitch asshole had hung up on her.

That fucking son-of-a-bitch Mulder-knows-best asshole had actually had the incredible gall to...

"Dana? Is something wrong?" Julia was standing in the doorway to the kitchen.

Scully smiled. It was not, she knew, a pleasant smile. "Everything's just fine."

"Was that something about work? Do you have to leave?"

"That remains to be seen. They found...I don't know if Bill or Mom would have told Charlie, but there was a Dr. Scanlon who..."

Julia's face hardened. "They found him?"

Scully nodded. "Mulder's going out to Texas. If you'll just excuse me, I think I'm going to use my cell phone outside to call Mulder back. There are probably some things that wouldn't be appropriate for the children to hear." She reached for her suitcase, drawing her cell phone out from the outside pocket. "I'll be back in a little while to wash the dishes."

"Don't worry about them..." Julia's forehead was crinkled. "You're sure everything's okay."

Scully nodded and smiled again. "Just fine. Everything under control."

She walked...marched... towards the doorway.

"He seemed nice," said Julia.

"Excuse me?" Scully turned around very slowly.

"He was very nice...asked about Annie." Julia smiled, as if in encouragement.

Great. Familial support for her partnership with Mulder. Delightful. "He's very polite," she ground out between her teeth.


The phone rang once, during which time Scully came up with at least eight scenarios for a slow, painful death should Mulder choose not to answer his phone.

But he picked up, there was a pause, and then his voice grating out, "Dallas. Okay? Dallas."

She let out her breath, and some of her anger. "Don't ever hang up on me again."

"No. I won't."

She nodded.

"I'm staying at the Holiday Inn near the field office," he said, his voice suddenly lacking any animation. "Do you want me to reserve a room for you when I get there?"

She sat on the front steps and closed her eyes, feeling suddenly very tired. "Fine."

"They're going to start boarding soon. I'll see you later tonight if you're able to get a flight out. If not, tomorrow."

"Why is it that you didn't want me out there? Is there something that you're not telling me about his death?"

"I already told you why I don't want you out here--there's not any point to it, it's a dead end. He was dead for two days before he was found, you think that they didn't have time to take anything away that might have incriminated them?"

"So there's nothing else."

"Why would there be?"

"I don't know, Mulder. You tell me. Something that you think you have to keep from me because you don't want to hurt me?"

"I wouldn't--"

"You have before."

He was silent. She could hear him breathing at the other end. "I'm telling you everything I know," he said finally. "But hey, you're coming out to check for yourself, right?"

She rubbed her forehead and looked around her. She didn't want to go. Mulder was right, it would, in all probability, be another frustrating dead end. She wanted to stay here, in the slowly-setting sun, eating dinner with her family. Just this once, she wanted to stay. "This is...of great personal interest to me," she told him.

"I know that...Scully, when you called yesterday, you sounded... happy," he said the word happy as if it were an unfamiliar word in a foreign language that he was testing on his tongue. He said it the same way that he had said her first name. "Do you trust me?"

"Don't--"

"Not my ideas about the paranormal. Not, do you agree with me. But as an agent of the FBI, do you trust my competence at that?"

"Of course."

She heard him let out a sigh. Of relief? Had he doubted that? "Do you trust me not to lie to you? I know I've kept things from you, but have you ever known me to lie outright to you?"

"There have been--"

"Other than at the very beginning of our partnership."

"No."

"I promise that I will take that house apart board by board. If there's anything there, I'll find it. And I am a good agent, Scully, I'm not likely to miss something if I'm really looking for it."

"I know that."

"Then..." His voice trailed off.

She sighed. "Go catch your flight, Mulder."

"Scully?"

"E-mail me whatever you find. And watch your back."

"I'll call you."

"Call my cell, I'll keep it turned on from now on."

"Okay."

"Okay," she said, and they stayed for a moment in silence. "I've always known that this is your concern as well," she said after that moment, and then, hastily, "Go catch your flight." She pressed the disconnect button.

The screen door behind her opened, and Jason peeked his head out. "Are you going to have to leave, Aunt Dana?"

She shook her head.

His smile was reserved, cautious. "I'll tell the others." And then the screen door banged shut again.

She stayed out on the porch, feeling drained. Charlie came out after a while, sitting on the porch steps beside her and saying nothing for a long time.

"Jason said you were staying?" he asked finally.

"There's nothing really that I can do out there."

"All right."

"I'm sorry," she said, not sure what she was apologizing for, maybe only for the intrusion of tension on their dinner.

"It's your job."

"I know that the family would prefer it not be..."

He shook his head. "I'm not Bill, Dana. I'm not going to guilt trip you because I don't like your choice of work."

She thought about that one for a moment. "Not like Bill because you don't disapprove of my work or not like Bill because you're not going to guilt trip me about it?"

"I don't disapprove of what you're doing."

"But."

"But it has a high cost. Not just for the family. For you. All this week, you're been my sister Dana, who charms my kids into not fighting with each other more than three times an hour. And then the phone rings, and all that changes. One minute you're all...soft, and smiling, and relaxed, and then you turn into the agent."

"It's my job, to be that way. To be the most efficient agent that I can be, in order to catch the predators that are out there."

He rubbed at his eyes. "When you heard that it was Mulder calling for you, you looked like...like a falcon that's just been unleashed. It's a little disconcerting, when your sister suddenly turns into a predator herself." He stood up, and rested a hand briefly on her shoulder. "You do what you have to do, Dana. Don't apologize for it."


Thursday

She woke up out of a cold sweat, and there was a dark figure watching her.

Gun, she needed her...she reached for it wildly, and the figure spoke. "Hey, it's just me." The light clicked on, and it was only her brother, smiling and innocuous.

"Jesus, Charlie. You startled me."

"Sorry. Just checking to see if you were up."

"I am now. Is Annie asleep?"

"Yes, she's fine. It's Julia I'm worried about."

"Is something wrong?"

"I don't know...can you check on her?"

"Check on her for what?" Scully shook her head in puzzlement.

"Her blood pressure is a little high."

She shrugged. "All right. But it's probably nothing to worry about."

They walked up together, Scully yawning, their feet padding on the stairs lightly.

The door to their room was closed, the lights turned off. She twisted around to look at Charlie in puzzlement.

"She might be in the bathroom?" he said.

She opened the door gently, turning automatically towards the master bathroom, but there were no lights there, either, and she looked over at the bed.

There were two shapes sleeping there, quietly, peacefully.

A hand came over her mouth from behind, and then he twisted her around, his face shifting from Charlie's to that of the man who had once taken on Mulder's face, the man who had cured her cancer with a touch. "We can get you any time," he said. "We will. And if they're in our way at the time, we'll remove them."

She woke up in a cold sweat.

Her laptop was open in front of her, blinking to tell her that she had mail.

Upstairs, Annie was crying again.


"Scully residence," she answered the phone.

"Dana, honey? It's your mother."

"Hi, Mom. How are you?"

"Good. I called to check up on my newest granddaughter."

"She's doing okay. She seems to be a nocturnal creature, though--she was up half the night." Scully yawned. She would probably have been up most of the night anyway, reading files that Mulder was sending her on her e-mail, but Annie's crying had lent the night a surreal quality.

"So did you," said her mother. "And Bill. Now Melissa...she wasn't nearly as fussy. And Charlie was the best baby I've ever met."

"He's always been the most even-tempered of all of us," said Scully.

"Hmmm...you were fairly even-tempered too, except for a temper that blew the roof off when you were pushed too far."

She smiled. "Bill and Melissa knew how to push my buttons, Mom, what can I say?"

"That they did. But I didn't call to reminisce...how are things going up there?"

"Good, Mom. The boys are playing out in the backyard--a neighbor kid is over. I was just going to run out and get some diapers and stuff when you called. Julia's upstairs resting, if you want to talk to her."

"In a minute...how are you doing, Dana? I realize this isn't much of a vacation, babysitting, but..."

"I'm doing well, Mom." She frowned. Julia might mention it, so she might as well get it out of the way. "Um, they found Dr. Scanlon yesterday."

"He's the one who I met..."

"Yes."

"Oh. Was he...what did he have to say?"

"He'd been killed."

"I see. Well. I can't say that I'm sorry."

Her mother's voice was cold, and the bitterness of the sentiment shocked Scully. "Mom?"

"I'm surprised you didn't go out there," her mother said, voice smooth again.

"No...Mulder's taking care of it. He's sending me any of the relevant information. Mom..."

"Yes, dear?"

"You can't say that you're sorry?" Her mother, who went to Mass every Sunday and had told them always to forgive one another? Whose unvarying response to seeing a murderer on the news was, "Oh, his poor family"? Who had always frowned at her husband or any visitor to their house to propose the death penalty?

"Can you?" her mother asked.

"I regret that he isn't alive to answer questions. But you've always been--"

"I can't regret that he died, Dana. After what he's done, it's only justice."

"Mom, that's not like you."

"Not like me?" Her mother sounded incredulous. "I've had two of my daughters die at the hands of men who care little for human life-- are you telling me I should wish them alive?"

"I didn't die."

"Yes, dear, you did. That you're alive is an incredible gift, a miracle, but for five days you were dead to me...and my sorrow during that time was as genuine as it was for your sister. I can't forget that because you're alive now."

"I understand you being upset, but..."

"Oh, I didn't call to talk about this. "

"I never wanted to put you in a position where you would have to hate anyone, Mom. I never wanted that to be part of your life."

"But you allowed it into yours. What did you think, sweetheart, that you could keep everything that you do as an agent from touching the parts of your life where you're a daughter or sister or friend?"

"I never wanted it to touch your life," she said again. "I know it did, in a horrible way, when Melissa died, and I'm sorry for that, Mom, more than I could ever say--"

"Dana, I want you to listen carefully. I don't--and never have--blamed you for Melissa's death. Or Mulder either. I blame Luis Cardinale for that. But you cannot expect what you do not to touch our lives. You didn't just choose a job when you joined the FBI, you chose a way of life which has shaped you. As much as the Navy shaped your father."

"I never meant to hurt you by my choices."

"No. But the choices you have made--the choices all of you children made--have always brought pain--and yes, joy--to your father and I. You try to keep me out of your life sometimes, to protect me, to keep me from hurt. You can't do that."

"You've never said this to me before," she said, and then, belatedly, remembered her mother coming into her hospital room the first time she had been diagnosed with cancer, asking in anger why she hadn't been called immediately. She remembered a more recent hospital room, though, when her mother had said none of this. "You didn't tell me this at the hospital, Mom. If it was important, why not?"

She heard her mother let out a shaky breath. "You were dying." They both sat in silence, frozen by that thought. "You were dying," her mother said again, as if the reiteration would lessen the depth of pain inherent in the words. "It hardly seemed to matter, then. But I can't continue in that pattern, of denying everything, knowing nothing. Would you even have told me about Dr. Scanlon if Julia and Charlie didn't already know?"

"I can't tell you everything that goes on."

"Oh, I understand that. There were things your father kept from me, because they were classified. I understand that; I always did. But don't you understand that you cannot stop the people who love you from worrying about you, from being affected by what happens to you?

She fell back on Mulder's defense, weak though she knew it was. "I've only ever wanted to keep you safe, Mom."

"But I don't want to be protected," said her mother. "You, of all people, should understand that."


In the hospital room, her mother's hands had shaken, a barely visible tremor that she had tried to still.

"How are you feeling?" her mother had asked, reaching out to smooth her hair away from her face with one of those hands, light as a butterfly on Dana's forehead. Scully had remembered how her mother had put her hand on their forehead when they were sick, a firm, warm pressure, how she would diagnose their fever.

"Okay," she'd said. "No, really, okay. Do you remember when we were kids, how you'd be able to tell how high our fever was by touching us? We thought it was magic, Melissa and I."

Her mother had smiled, sadly. "No, no magic, just practice...I wish I hadn't been able to tell. And I'd always wish that I could draw the fever out by touch, into myself." She had blinked away sudden tears, and continued, "I wish now that I could do that with the cancer."

"Oh, Mom. It does me good to have you here."

Her mother had shaken her head. "Not good enough, sometimes." Her hand had reached out to smooth Scully's hair again. "Your father couldn't stand to see you sick."

"I don't remember him ever being home when we were sick," Scully had said. "All my memories of him being home...they're of good times. No, wait, that one Christmas that Melissa had the flu and was throwing up. I remember that."

"Oh my, yes. Melissa had to keep a bucket near her when we were all opening our gifts. But, no, your father was home when you were sick a few times. He'd creep into your room when you were asleep to see how you were..."

"I thought I dreamt that..." Waking up, eyes still blurry with sleep and throat aching...her father a shadowy shape above her. "That was him?"

"Yes. Although he wasn't one for entertaining you when you were sick. He wasn't sick often enough himself, I don't think; he didn't know how to behave."

"I wasn't sick that often, myself," Scully had said.

"No, not you. Although you got the chicken pox fairly badly. All of you did at once...he wasn't around for that one, though."

"Did you ever regret it, marrying someone would be gone for long periods of time?"

"Most of the time, I was too busy to regret anything...and it was a good thing that he wasn't there when you had chicken pox, probably. He wouldn't have known what to do. But I had friends outside the military, friends whose husbands came home every night but were so absorbed in their jobs that they weren't home even then, not really. I suppose if it were a choice between a man who wasn't home often but really was home when he came, and...well, I'd choose your father."

"And he was there for the important things."

"Yes," her mother had said, but she hadn't elaborated, and Scully had been left with the uncomfortable feeling that there had been times when her father hadn't been there, that her mother remembered but wouldn't complain about for fear of disloyalty.

"You made it into an adventure, moving so often," she said. "It wasn't until I was in college and talking to some other military kids that I realized how lucky we were...I had a friend whose mother always complained, she said. We didn't always think it was an adventure, but you were always there to show us how it could be. I appreciate that, Mom."

"You make the best of things, once you've made your choices. I'd made the choice to marry your father, come what may."

Scully had suddenly been struck by a realization of her mother's essential toughness. You make the best of your choices, without complaining about them...in some ways, that had been her credo during the six years of her partnership with Mulder, during the more difficult days of med school, during all the times she'd wanted to quit something that she'd committed herself to. But she'd always thought she'd learned that from her father, not her mother.

"Not to quit...you taught me that, Mom. Thank you."

"Oh, sweetheart. I think you learned that lesson yourself. You were always the stubborn one."

"Stubbornness can be good," she'd said.

Her mother had looked around the hospital room. "I'm grateful for it now. Your father would be proud of the way you're handling this."

"Are you, Mom?"

Her mother had seemed surprised at the question. "Of course."


A single father tried to pick her up in the diaper section of the store, suggesting that they pool their resources, get together sometime to discuss child-rearing strategies. She imagined, cynically, just what that could mean...a quick roll in bed while their children played together in the next room, maybe.

Or maybe he just wanted a playmate for his child. Or a fellow parent as a babysitter in times of emergencies. Or maybe he was just being nice to another single parent in the grocery store, flirting gently to reassure both of them that they weren't dead. She'd grown unused to reading the moods and mating patterns of the normal single man.

Moot point, of course, since she wasn't a single parent herself, and never would be.

But it took the edge off of her own mood; she had driven to the grocery store quickly and whipped through most of the aisles as efficiently as possible, deep in thought about what her mother had said.

She was out in the parking lot, loading her groceries into the car, when it occurred to her that no one knew where she was. She stopped in place, mid-motion.

Oh, Julia knew where she was, in a rough sense. But there was no possibility of watchers, here. No chip in the back of her neck keeping track of her location. No bugs as there might be in her apartment.

She put the last bag in the trunk, closed the trunk gently, and pushed the grocery cart to the rack.

The chip had been a part of her for so long, as had the possibility of surveillance in her apartment or the office, that the sensation of freedom was like a shock of cold water in the shower, like vertigo.

She could run away, and no one would be able to draw her back or hunt her down through a mechanism in her own body.

She leaned against the side of the car, unwilling to trap herself inside, and breathed in a deep lungful of air, being accustomed to the feeling of sudden, limitless space. The sensation became the refreshing coolness of the ocean, the controlled vertigo that she felt at the top of a roller coaster plunge.

"Ma'am? Are you all right?"

She turned around to see flirty-single-father. "Yes, I'm fine, thank you."

"You sure? You looked almost dizzy there. Are you going to be okay to drive?"

Concerned, his face dropped the smarminess that it had had earlier. "Really, I'm okay. Thank you very much."

"All right, then." He shrugged and opened the door of his own car. "Oh, hey, I never did catch your name."

Hadn't he? No, she'd only told him that she was staying with her brother and his wife.

For a brief moment, she considered lying. She had used cash here; there was no record of her being here. Should anyone decide to track her movements, they would not be able to do so. This moment could be hers, and hers alone ("I would have gotten you a card, but Hallmark doesn't recognize 'Anonymous Day' as an occasion," said Mulder slyly in her mind).

"Scully," she told him. "Dana Scully."


Friday

She opened her e-mail to find a message from Mulder...nothing to find in Texas, and he was getting a flight back to DC that night. She huffed in frustration and opened the next message.

Three pictures. Her mouth opened in amazement.

A man, presumably Scanlon, sitting in an armchair. The gun had fallen from his lax fingers to the floor. She thought for a moment that Mulder had sent her a copy of the crime scene photo, but Mulder would not have provided the caption that read, "You could have talked to him before he died."

The second picture was of a woman she didn't know, taken from a distance. The woman was emaciated and pale, with a scarf wrapped around her head. "Nina May Reardon, 1952-????. You count this as a victory?"

Reardon. Scully knew the name, that of one of the women who was undergoing treatment for the cancer. That the treatment was harsh, Scully had known in theory, and from her remembrances of her own treatment. But Nina looked half dead...

The third picture was of Bill and Tara. A candid shot, taken from a distance, Bill's arm wrapped loosely around Tara's shoulders, a smile on his face that she hadn't seen for a long time. Below the image, someone had typed, "Think about what will happen to them when colonization comes."

She stood up in impotent fury. How could they, how *could* they...

She ended up calling the Lone Gunmen, and forwarding the e-mail to them, to see if they could trace the source. She talked to Byers, who was full of quietly restrained indignation on her account.

"Do you have any idea who would have sent this?" he asked.

"Possibly Krycek...I don't know if Mulder would have told you, but he offered us..."

"A job of sorts, yes," said Byers. "And he's taking this chance to reiterate his offer by showing you the consequences if you don't join?"

"Possibly."

"To bring your family into it...we'll get right on it, although I wouldn't expect too much, if I were you."

There was a sudden, sharp scream from outside, and Scully jumped. "I've gotta go," she said, and hung up over Byers' voice, running out the door.

There was a moment of piercing, formless fear, that they had somehow reached her family here, but there were no men in black suits, no shapeshifter. Only Robbie and Patrick, looking up at her in panic.

"It hurts," wailed Patrick, and she saw that he was cradling his hand.

"What happened, Pat?"

"It hurts!"

"We were just playing," said Robbie, who also looked near tears.

"Let me see, sweetie." He held out his hand, and she cradled it in hers. "Oh, hon, what did you do here?" there were scratches and scrapes, and little scrapings of wood embedded in his palm.

"We were trying to break the boards, like karate black belts," said Robbie, and she followed his gaze to where they had precariously balanced a board between two picnic benches.

"It gave me splinters," said Pat. Now that the first shock of injury had passed, he seemed more affronted than hurt, as if the board had stayed intact on purpose.


He was proud of his injury at the dinner table that night, waving around his gauze-wrapped hand ostentatiously. "I was brave when Aunt Dana took out the splinters, wasn't I, Aunt Dana?"

"I bet you cried," said Jason.

"Did not!"

"I'm glad you were brave, but not that you did this in the first place...what were you thinking?" asked Charlie.

"We wanted to play karate. We were trying to break the board."

She imagined Pat, slamming his hand against the board with as much force as he could muster, fully expecting it to break. She winced slightly at the image, seeing Julia wince also, as if at the same image.

"I don't want you playing with those boards," said Charlie. "I told you that already...I'm chopping them up for firewood. And they're old boards, with lots of splinters. You know you're not supposed to play around them."

Patrick pouted. "But I almost broke it," he protested.

"You're not to try that again," said Julia.

Patrick looked mutinous. "I'll show you how to do a judo roll when your hand gets better," said Jason, and Patrick's eyes lit up.

"Really?" he said. "Like on TV?"

"Yeah, like on TV."


They watched TV later that night, after she had helped Charlie move the stack of boards by the side of the house into the shed, now safely padlocked.

Patrick curled up by her side. "You okay?" she asked him softly during a commercial. "Does your hand hurt? We can put more salve on it."

"How come it hurts after the splinters are already out?" he asked. "It should stop hurting then."

"Well, you've disturbed the skin and the tissue. They take a while to get back to normal."

"Like Mom and Dad take a while to get over being mad?"

She smiled. "Something like that. They were worried about you."

"I almost broke the board, though," said Patrick, loudly enough that the rest of the family looked over at him.

"He's a Scully all right," said Julia wryly. "Doesn't know when to quit."

Mulder sounded weary on the phone, worn by travel and defeat.

"The boys have Scanlon's computer. Someone stole all his disks, though. And they say the hard drive's been tampered with...they'll see what they can recover."

"I talked to them earlier today," she said. "Did they tell you that?"

"Yes," he said. "The photos."

She'd been his partner for six years, enough to read the shifting cadences of his voice. "You got some too?"

"Yes." His answer was flat.

"I was thinking Krycek...are you thinking that too?"

"Someone who was upset that we didn't join the Rebels' side, yeah."

"Mulder, what were they of?"

"Nothing important. Just usual 'let's yank his chain and see how far he jumps' shit."

"Mulder...if they're important, I should know. If you've given them to the Lone Gunmen, I'm going to hear the results on what they found anyway."

"I didn't send the pictures to them. There wouldn't be much point, would there?"

"Did he send you one of Scanlon as well?"

"No." He sighed. "Okay. One was of a woman who, in some ways, resembled you. Red hair, short, thin. Her name's Rachel Tralon; she's one of the cancer victims. Underneath, it said, 'They could do this to her again, if they wanted.'"

"The implant's out. The cancer's gone."

"Scully..." He sighed again. "If they gave you cancer once, they..." He didn't finish the sentence.

"What was the other photo?"

"A picture of Samantha, from when she was about 7. It's the picture that I had on my desk when I was partnered with Krycek...big surprise. That one just said, 'Got answers?'"

"That bastard."

"It's not a big deal, Scully. I probably won't look at those milk mustache ads in the same way again, but...I'm sorry about the one you got of Bill and Tara."

"They sent me one of Nina Reardon, as well. She's one of the women who has cancer."

"Yes, they told me. Scully, no matter what the caption said, that was a victory. Is a victory."

"Even with the treatment, those women's futures are very uncertain."

"Their future would have been certain death, if not for you."

"Sometimes I wonder, if we made the right choice. The idea of working with Krycek revolts me, but so does the, the state of helplessness that we're in now, always one step behind."

"You made the right choice. We did."

"How do you know?" she asked. "How do we know that we didn't just doom ourselves? I tell myself that we don't want to associate with people whose methods are so ruthless, that the ends don't justify the means, but sometimes I wonder."

"We don't know what the ends are," he replied. "Not the rebels. They want to stop the colonizers, but what do they want to do then? Take over our planet for themselves? Kill us all? I don't know what their ends are. All we have are the means."

"And their means aren't ones I can accept," she murmured. "Do you know, Mulder, sometimes you make sense."

"Don't sound so surprised," he said wryly.

"So you're back home?"

"Ensconced in front of my TV. You're going to be back tomorrow?"

"Flight comes in at 3, yes."

"Want a ride back from the airport?" he asked, casualness overlaying something more serious.

"I...would appreciate that," she said. "We can go over the files on Scanlon when we get back to my place. Maybe have dinner."

"Sounds good," he said, and suddenly he did sound happy, rejuvenated.

Sometimes it scared her, how much she could affect him.

"So what are we going to do Monday?" she asked. "To that one inn?"

"What? No, forget that." His voice was intent and hard-edged again, the hunter's voice. "It's not like there's a crime being committed, anyway, unless there isn't a ghost and they're perpetrating fraud. Either way, we don't have time...I was thinking, when I was in Dallas. We had to drop a lot of leads last time we were there. But with the X-Files opened...Scanlon might have been a dead end, but there have got to be some other loose ends around. And we might find out more about those pictures...if someone has been keeping track of the other women with cancer, that'd be interesting." He paused, and continued thoughtfully. "It is too bad about the ghosts, though. But they think they've covered their tracks with Scanlon; they might not be expecting us to go back and look into the bombing, not now, a year later."

And whatever Mulder had been searching for, she knew, he'd squelch down and ignore, trying to find solace in the quest instead.


She closed the connection with Mulder reluctantly, to find that Jason was standing in the doorway, frowning at her.

"Jason? Shouldn't you be in bed?"

He shrugged. "It's Friday. I get to stay up as late as I want on Friday. Unless there's something early the next day. Was that your partner?"

"That was Mulder, yes."

He sat on the other side of the couch from her, unusually skittish. "What's he like?" he asked.

"Well, he's tall." Scully frowned herself. Tall? How undescriptive could she be? "He's very smart. Curious about things. In some ways, you remind me of him--"

"I don't want to be like him!" Jason said.

"What?"

He looked at her, solemn, and took a deep breath, as if pulling together his courage. "Aunt Dana, you shouldn't stay with someone who hits you."

"Someone who hits me? Mulder's never...where did you get that idea?"

"I heard Uncle Bill, at Christmas, when you were late. He said that that sonovabitch hurt you all the time, and that one of these days he was going to kill you."

"No," she said. Oh, Bill was going to hear about this one. "Jason, Uncle Bill didn't mean it that way. Mulder's never hit me. He'd never ever hurt me, I promise."

"But Uncle Bill said..."

"What Uncle Bill meant was that...you know that Mulder and I work at the FBI, and we do some dangerous things sometimes. Like any law enforcement officer. Sometimes I've been hurt on the job. Not because Mulder hurts me. Just because it happens."

"But shouldn't Mulder be covering your back? Like on TV? Shouldn't he be able to keep you safe?"

"No. I mean, yes, he tries, but sometimes things happen. He can't be there to cover my back 24 hours a day."

"So why does Uncle Bill blame him?"

"Because..." Because Bill was an asshole who didn't believe his little sister could make her own decisions. "Because he thinks that Mulder gets us into dangerous situations. But what he doesn't understand is that I'd be in those situations anyway, or others like them. It's like...you know how your brother hurt his hand earlier today? You didn't blame Robbie for that, right?"

"No...it wasn't Robbie's fault that Patrick's a dork."

"Your brother's not a dork," she said automatically. "But the thing is, Patrick probably wouldn't have tried that on his own. Both he and Robbie were in on it. And this time, Patrick got hurt. But it was because he decided to hit the board, not because of Robbie. What your Uncle Bill sees is that I wouldn't be in certain situations if it weren't for Mulder. But what he doesn't see is that I'm there because I want to be...like Patrick."

His forehead wrinkled. "You're pretty dumb if you hit a board with your bare hand."

Doubtless. "My point is, just because Mulder's with me when I get hurt, doesn't mean it's his fault, any more than it's Robbie's fault that Patrick got hurt. And Mulder's a very good partner--he's gotten me out of a lot of bad situations."

"Oh." Jason looked down. "I guess I was being stupid, huh?"

"No, honey, you were just concerned. I'm glad you asked about it."

"I wasn't sure. Because you were all smily and everything at Christmas. You didn't look like you had any bruises, like Mrs. Kilgore. But Mr. Kilgore, sometimes he hurts her where it doesn't show."

"Mr. Kilgore?"

He shrugged. "Ray, he's from school, his parents." He looked up in sudden fury. "But Mrs. Kilgore, she won't leave! Mom and Dad have both been over there, Ray said, to try to talk her into leaving him, but she won't. I don't know why not."

God, he was young to be learning about domestic abuse and death. "Sometimes people don't do things that make sense," she said lamely.

He only looked at her, with eyes that had lost one more piece of innocence.


She woke up from sleep at 3:45, slipping out of slumber easily. No nightmares. She lay on the sofa bed for a moment, stretching out her limbs pleasurably.

Annie would be awake soon, for her 4:00 feeding. Scully yawned, and then headed out to the kitchen to make formula. She could handle this feeding, at least, and Charlie and Julia could sleep a little longer.

When she headed upstairs, Annie's eyes were just beginning to open, and Scully settled herself and the baby in the rocking chair with content, watching the sky begin to lighten again, just a little, towards dawn.

The door opened at 4:30, and Julia entered, rushing in the room. She stopped when she saw Scully, and sighed in relief. "When I realized that she hadn't woken us up at 4, I got worried."

SIDS. "I didn't mean to worry you; I thought I'd let you sleep a little longer. Did you want to hold her."

Julia yawned, shaking her head. "She looks comfortable." She sat on the cedar chest and leaned back against the wall. "You both look comfortable. I'll head back to bed when my heart stops racing. Unless you wanted to get back to sleep?"

"No, I'm awake," said Scully.

"Not nightmares, I hope?" asked Julia. "I don't mean to pry..."

Scully shook her head and smiled. "You're not prying. But no, no nightmares tonight. I just woke up."

They sat in silence for a bit, broken by the small sounds of Annie sucking at the bottle.

"You're good with her," said Julia eventually. "You'll make a good mother."

Oh, lord. She had assumed that since her mother had told Bill about her infertility, that she would have told Charlie as well, that somehow her whole family would have found out during the Emily Christmas. "Julia...I can't...some of the treatments for the cancer..."

"I know." Julia's face was compassionate, serene. "Oh, Dana, I don't mean to hurt you more. But there are other options. And if you choose them, you'll be a wonderful mother. I thought you should know that."

Her throat burned. No one talked about Emily, about her infertility. She and Mulder danced around it, afraid to hurt or be hurt.

"Dana? I didn't mean to make you cry...oh, God, I put my foot in my mouth--"

"No," she said, wiping away tears with one hand. "No, I just hadn't realized how badly I need to hear what you said. No one talks about it." Like an echo, she heard a young Mulder in their first hotel room together, in a moment of unexpected honestly...it tore the family apart, no one would talk about it. But her silence in this had been tearing herself apart. "Thank you."

"Have you thought about adoption? Or in vitro fertilization, something like that?"

Scully shook her head. "I've thought about it, but...right now I can't. Not with the work I do. I couldn't handle both the job and a child, and the work I do...I'd be putting a child in jeopardy. And...I'm not yet willing to quit my work. Not as it stands now."

Julia nodded. "Someday, maybe."

Scully smiled and wiped away another tear. "Someday."

They lapsed into silence again. Julia broke it a few minutes later by asking, "If I can ask another impertinent question, and tell me to knock it off if it's bothering you--"

"Go ahead."

"What exactly is this partner of yours like? Bill thinks he's Satan Incarnate, Tara says he broods, like Heathcliff, and there was something about him having a nice butt, too, your mom says he's handsome, sad, and very nice, and Charlie refused to comment on his looks and just says he's very polite, and protective of you. It's been driving me nuts."

Scully grinned. "He's not the devil incarnate, and he does have a nice butt." She felt like she had suddenly entered a time warp and was back in her slumber party years.

"Do you have a picture?"

"Not with me...I might have some crime scene photos at home. He's..." she sobered and thought about it seriously. "In some ways, he reminded me of Patrick today. He'll throw himself into things, believing that things will work out. And even when he gets hurt, he always thinks that next time, things will go his way. Persistent. Determined. He's very intuitive, and I think that's why most people think he's a good investigator, but he's also willing to sift through loads of records, to follow a paper trail if necessary, and I think people forget that."

"Does he brood like Heathcliff?"

"Well, yeah. Sometimes. But he's really...for all that's happened to him, he's very resilient. He's kept his sense of humor. More important, he's kept his sense of wonder. And for all his cynicism, he's kept his trust in people, sometimes almost too much."

"Protective of you?"

"Yes. We're protective of each other, though. And he's...he's very loyal to people he cares about."

"Hmm. That's interesting." Julia eyed her thoughtfully.

"What's interesting?" said Scully, a tad defensively. Didn't she have to deal with enough innuendo about her relationship with Mulder at work?

"I'd always gotten the impression that he was very different from you. But the qualities you've described--persistence, resilience, loyalty--you're actually very much alike in some ways, aren't you?"

Scully opened her mouth to reply, found herself with nothing to say, and shut her mouth again.

Julia yawned. "I think I am going to head back to bed, if you can deal with it."

"I know where the diapers are," Scully said wryly, and Julia grinned.

"Thanks, Dana."

"No. Julia, thank you. I...this week has been...thank you for letting me borrow time with your children."

"Come back anytime," said Julia. "We all like having you here. And next time, we won't send you out for diapers."


The sky was lightning towards dawn, and Annie slept in her arms. She'd shifted the chair towards the window to watch it.

She felt light herself, as if all her burdens had left her, except for that of the precious bundle in her arms.

Someday, she might have this herself. Maybe. And probably, for all Julia's words, she wouldn't. But she could at least hold Annie for this hour, a space free from monsters.

She had let this part of her dwindle, losing her sense of joy, or having it stripped away from her. Sometimes Mulder brought it back in unexpected ways, with impromptu baseball games and small, lingering looks. Bill had accused her once of losing herself as a woman, becoming the hard, cold shell of the agent who answered her phone with a crisp "Scully." ("What the hell is with that?" he'd yelled. "You can't even say hello anymore? Does he have you trained to do that?") But it wasn't as easy as that; there was no simple dichotomy between Dana the woman and Scully the agent. In either guise, she had always been capable of warmth and laughter, and passion.

She forgot that sometimes.

"I don't want to forget again," she whispered to Annie.

Annie's eyes fluttered open again. Through the blinds, she could see that the sun was beginning to flood the sky with red and orange light, like streaks of fire. Muted by the blinds, they bathed her and Annie in gentle light. Sitting in the rocking chair, she began, haltingly, to sing.


Mulder didn't smell quite as freshly clean as Annie, but he did smell good, and she buried her nose in his shirt and inhaled the scent of his leather jacket.

His arms had closed around her automatically when she had walked into them, but he stood a bit stiffly. "Scully? Are you okay?" he sounded slightly panicked. As if the only reason she would touch him would be in a search for comfort...she frowned and mentally kicked herself. He'd always touched her, but how many times had she reached out to touch him when one of them wasn't hurt?

This was going to have to change

"Just happy to be home, Mulder," she said, muffled by his chest.

"Happy to have you back," he said, relaxing. "Flight okay?"

"Good," she said, pulling back from him. "It was sad, saying goodbye to everyone, of course." She smiled reminiscently, though. Charlie had hugged her fiercely and swung her around, Julia had hugged her and whispered, "Now remember, I want to see a picture of Mulder's butt at some point," which had sent both of them into a fit of laughter, Patrick had called her the bestest doctor ever, and Jason had presented her with the model he'd been working on all week.


"So you want to order in for dinner?" he asked, as she carefully set the model of the ship on a shelf, rearranging the other objects.

"No," she said. "We're going out." She smiled secretively.

"Oh. Okay. The deli at the end of your street?"

"No." She reached for her keys. "Come on, let's go."

"Go where?" he said, but she walked ahead of him without answering.

Outside, she walked to his car, to the driver's side, and held out her hand. "Keys?"

He raised his eyebrows, puzzled but willing to play along. "You hijacking my car, Scully?"

"It'll be easier if I drive; I know where we're going."

He shrugged and pulled his keys out of his pocket, handing them over. "Seems to me that you could just tell me where we're going."

"Consider it payback for all the times you've taken me off to Kroner, Kansas, without telling me that we're going there to investigate the weather."

"All the times? That happened once, unless I've forgotten something," he said, sliding into the passenger side of the car. "Oh, hey, you left your carryon bag in here."

"I'll get it after dinner." She smiled again and started the car. His carryon was, as always, in the trunk of his car for those times when he absolutely needed to run off at a moment's notice.

She pulled over at the local strip mall, reaching for her carryon bag and searching through it for a moment before getting out of the car. Mulder was already out, leaning against the car and regarding the local convenience store with some bewilderment. Always a good look on him. Julia would appreciate it, she thought.

He turned towards her when the camera flashed.

"Scully? What the hell?"

"Smile," she ordered. "I need to finish the roll before I can drop the film off. My mom wants pictures of her new niece as soon as possible."

"We're not staying here?"

"Of course not. You think I'd go through all this trouble to have dinner at a strip mall?"

"There's a Subway...seriously, where are we going?"

"Someplace where they seat you. What, you can't stand the suspense?" she teased. "Now, c'mon, smile."

His smile was tentative, but good enough.


He managed to restrain himself until they'd driven for about a half hour, and then interrupted himself in the middle of a long, rambling monologue about the Dallas field office, and how everyone who was sent there gradually became Texified. "And even the SAC, who grew up in Massachusetts, was wearing spurs, for God's sake, and Scully, come on, I've been patient, where the hell are we going?"

She shook her head. "Five more minutes."

He slumped back into his seat, pouting. "This place had better be worth the food. Hey, we're on Larkin Street? Guess what. We're not that far from that inn I was telling you about..."

"No, really?"

He sat straight up. "Scully?"

She grinned. "Consider it a very early or a very late birthday present, Mulder."

"We're going there for dinner? They say their restaurant is really good. You think that they'll let us poke around a bit?" His face was lit up.

"I can practically guarantee it, since I reserved us rooms for the night."

He settled back in his seat. "Wow."

"I'm assuming that you still have your tape recorder in your overnight bag?"

"Of course...Scully, this is great. I didn't think we'd get to this, even if Skinner had a nice moment and signed off on the 302."

"Yes...I know." They could see the inn now, and she pulled the car in. A nice place, with beautiful flowers. She pulled into a parking space and turned off the ignition. "Come on, let's find some ghosts. Or carefully planted audio equipment, as the case may be."

He caught at her wrist. "Hey. What's this all about?" His eyes were suddenly serious.

She considered putting him off, saying something that would send him out of the car, eagerly bounding off to search for the paranormal. "They've taken a lot of things away from us," she said instead, and watched his expression darken. "In abducting me, both the first time and more recently. They've stripped away my sense of safety, my sense of control over my own body. They've stripped away your sense of security, too, that the people you love will always be there." He drew a sharp breath when she used the word love, but she continued. "And they took away some of the sheer fun that we used to have when we were investigating something. Sometimes I feel like we do this out of duty, because the consequences are so dire if we don't...and then I remember you on our first case, laughing out loud in the middle of the rain because we lost nine minutes. I miss that sometimes, Mulder. We may never feel the same sense of safety we once had--I will always know how easily they can get to me, as will you. I can't do anything about that except learn to live with it. But I'll be damned if I lose the piece of myself that knows how to laugh, how to feel excited because of some tiny piece of paranormal evidence. I refuse to lose that."

His hand slid from her wrist to her hand, holding on tight. "Thanks, Scully."

"Yes. Wait...Mulder. I know you're expecting to find some ghosts here, but even if they're not..." She frowned, stopped and tried again.

"It's the ghosts that are supposed to bring some sense of peace to the guests, but if they're not here, I don't want you to be disappointed."

He drew her hand to his mouth and kissed the knuckle. "You'll be here," he said softly. "Now c'mon, G-woman. Let's go find those ghosts."

End

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