Part I

Mulder adjusted his plastic name tag. It hung loosely, too loosely from his shirt pocket. He had carefully instructed the organizers of this event not to include his first name on the name tag. "Just F. Mulder will be fine. Thanks." And yet here it was in all its three lettered glory—F.O.X. He supposed it was better than being called Mr. Mulder, which some overly zealous fan boys gad called him at a conference just last month. He had signed their copies of his second book The Truth Is Out There as F. Mulder and added a little drawing of a UFO because they were kids after all, at least to him. Their pre-pubescent hands were pale and sweaty clutching the handbook cover. Those same hands that had been clutching his first book I Want to Believe three years earlier were by now most likely clutching the hands of a girl, or girls.

"Do you think these kids have any idea what you're talking about?" His agent was a fat man behind a desk in New York and his basic function was to keep Mulder from being sued or bombarded by fanny pack wearing UFO chasers and/or fanatics.

Mulder had replied to his question by saying that he wasn't sure himself if he knew what he was talking about most of the time but he kept on writing, kept on talking. It had never stopped him before.

He walked over to the refreshment table and took a cup of lemonade from the girls serving beverages and homemade brownies. They smiled up at him, braces and blushing faces on all sides and he gave a polite nod and sipped the bitter drink all the way back to his table. He felt sorry for whatever kid's mother made this because they more than likely had to drink it on a daily basis during their summer vacations.

"What a way to ruin perfectly good weather," he muttered tossing his half empty cup into the trash.

He straightened up his stack of books on the edge of that table and sat down slowly in his chair. It wasn't always like this. Mulder much preferred lecturing as an UFOlogist at the University or being on the University circuit but the convention circuit paid well and sometimes he even got his own panel and the room was usually full. Today, however he was in Bumfuck Nowhere right on the outskirts of Asscrack Anywhere but the convention was sold out. They were simply waiting to open the doors.

His agent had declined to come help wrangle the masses of "fucking hillbillies with stars in their eyes" for him and his panel room consisted of a microphone borrowed from a the High School auditorium sitting in the center of a makeshift stage on wheels that had recently hosted the 1st grader's production of 'Frog and Toad' earlier in the month. The panel was this evening but first Mulder would sign books and pose for photographs and answer questions. He was, as his agent so kindly put it, "Some kind of fucked up alien Santa Claus."

It was a far cry from his days, in the not so distant past, working for the Federal Bureau of Investigation in Washington. He was the sole agent assigned to the X Files, hidden below and tucked away into a basement office, if one wanted to use such a gracious term. It was basically a room full of file cabinets that were full of files only Mulder wanted to read. No one wanted to be assigned to such an arduous task, if tedious reading and endless paranoia could be considered arduous, and Mulder was avoided like the plague at the water cooler. He didn't get any invites to office parties and his inbox on every
"dating" site remained empty so when the offer came from Georgetown, who had been following his career and his work closely or as closely as they could, for him to lecture on UFOlogy, he was quick to agree. At the University he could research endlessly, obsessively and never stop and get paid to do it. He had peers and he had followers and he had casual observers that wanted to do more than breathe down his neck. His entire body hurt from spending the last ten years looking over his shoulder and it felt nice to sit down at a desk every day knowing he was going to read papers by people, young and old, who wanted to know, wanted to learn, wanted to believe.

He taught classes five days a week like a real job and had his weekends to himself where he prepared his lectures for the next week, slept in, pretended to clean his apartment or went to the movies. The theatre in his neighborhood had been showing a midnight viewing of "An American Werewolf in Paris" and he had bought his ticket far in advance.

He enjoyed sitting in his office on campus drinking bitter coffee like a real grown up, shuffling through the morning paper and checking his email. He felt needed, he felt trusted and no one uttered the word 'Spooky'. In fact a few of the female students placed themselves in his classes every semester and not a single one was a science major of any sort.

Mulder had worn suits every day for the first few semesters, a hard habit to break after years of working for the FBI but now he showed up to teach in jeans and sweaters. One of his favorite students even got him a t-shirt from the movie E.T and although he would never wear it, he kept it in a safe place in his bottom drawer at home.

He was more at home here, at places where girls gave away their Mom's brownies, where his plastic badge was temporary and not something he used to enter every building anywhere ever. And sometimes his name was even spelled correctly.

"There appears to be evidence of strangulation on the upper lateral…" Scully switched off the recorder and wiped her forehead with the back of her gloved hand. Her hands always smelled like raw latex now. When she drank her tea before bed at night, washed her dinner dish clean or took a bath, she could not escape the scent of the day's work on her hands.

It was no longer the smell of gun powder; it was the scent of cold and sterilized latex on her body after a long day's work.

Dana Scully's first love had always been medicine, not dead people. Typically one becomes a Medical Doctor because they want to see people alive and not in pieces, not poisoned or choked on a steel examination table before them. But in her own way, in a very backwards, unique way she was saving lives even if the life itself was gone. She was a part of the process of justice and in a way she was much more comfortable with at last. The victims helped her put the pieces of injustice together. The murderers seldom did.

Dana Scully had left the FBI two years prior to become a forensic pathologist full time and during that time she had traveled more and come home feeling a whole hell of a lot better about herself than she had in a very long time. She saw less people during her working hours but more of her friends and for the first time in her life, no one wanted to talk about her work as much as they used to. However she found herself oddly enough, wanting to talk about her new job. She wasn't putting band aids on skinned knees or holding old ladies' hands and that made her friends uncomfortable and she accepted that. She dealt with the side of life no one wanted to discuss; death.

Her work as a forensic pathologist had become well known and she had been asked to perform autopsies of well known and not so well known people. She had taught classes at Universities all across the globe and yet right here at home, her inner circle had no desire to talk about the inner workings of decomposed bodies. Dana laughed behind her mask at the thought of her job ever being a topic of interest over dinner. She turned the recorder back on hoping it had not caught her laugher.

In a corner her cell phone rang, vibrating harshly against the steel surface.

"You've got to be kidding me," She muttered. She had one finger on the red stop button of the recorder, one hand on the icy chest of a 40 year old man from Queens and no extra hands to answer another call from her Mother or her girlfriend with another male crisis.

Scully snapped off the gloves one at a time and made her way over to the phone. She answered without looking at the number.

"Agent Scully?"

Scully nearly dropped the phone where she was standing. She focused on the dead body in front of her, eyes glazing over the pale neglected skin.

"Not anymore. Can I help you?"

Skinner's voice came out thick and guarded against the line.

"I need to meet with you. Alone. In private."

Mulder's ass was vibrating during his entire panel. At first the feeling had been more than welcome but by now it was giving him cause to worry and it had rubbed his right ass cheek raw.

"One more question for Mr. Mulder here and he really must be on his way," The MC informed the room full of eager listeners.

Mulder looked out among the crowd, these were his people. All of them. Glorious freaks. He smiled and pointed to a young woman wearing an Arkansas University sweatshirt. He loved finding out what made people who looked so normal tick tock themselves over to the other side in the things they wanted, the things they believed in.

His phone vibrated again.

Mulder answered two more questions and even got to use his pointer against an old fashioned chalk board before being escorted down the shaky wooden stairs.

"Thanks again Mr. Mulder, really." The MC was shaking his hand and Mulder was smiling and reaching for his phone all at once, eager to silence the vibrations and consume the nearest food he could find.

Six missed calls all from the same number. He locked his screen, sending the glass back to a photo of the Moon and tucked the phone into the inside pocket of his coat.

Once he was outside he called back the number with one click. He squinted against the drizzle that was begging to turn into a down pour, guarding his phone with one hand from the rain.

"Skinner? It's me. Mulder."