Title: Of Mammoths, Mayhem, and Lobstermen
Author: Neoxphile

Summary: a Christmas in July kind of story. Haven/Heart of Dixie/X-Files/Primeval. Audrey/Duke/Nathan, Zoe/Wade, Mulder/Scully, Abby/Connor

Haven, Maine
December 17th

A raw wind picked at Brett McKinley's rain slicker as he sat in a row boat that had seen better days. Most people thought that he was insane to go fishing at that time year, and not be snuggly ensconced in an ice hut while he did so, but Brett was getting on in years, and he no longer felt the need to kowtow to popular opinion. If he did, he wouldn't have tried to keep streaking a thing well into the nineties.

Most importantly, at least to him at the moment, he had a firm tug on his line. He wasn't sure what sort of fish had taken the bait, but he was certain it was quite large. In fact, it pulled at him in a way that he hadn't experienced since that one time his brother-in-law invited him to Florida to try to fish for marlin. That had led to Stevie needing to get seventeen stitches, and it was no longer a welcome story around the Christmas or Thanksgiving dinner table.

"Ah, come on," Brett mumbled to himself when it began to feel like his shoulder was going to be pulled out of the socket. He was so intent on what was that the other end of his line that he didn't look up until something dazzled in the corner of his eye.

When Brett finally did look up, it was to be instantly confused. Not 300 yards from him he saw something that he had never laid eyes on before. His first immediate assumption was that it was ice, because it was crystalline and sparkling the way ice does on a sunny day, but then he realized that it moved with the odd pulsing radiance.

He had a couple of moments to study it, but not long enough. Before he had come up with an alternate theory on what the strange thing might be - though he had been leaning towards an art installation by those weird kids at the University of Maine - before something large lunged through the center of the mass.

Brett screamed briefly, and his fishing pole clattered to the bottom of the rowboat. A few red spots were all that remained inside the rowboat other than the fishing pole.

En route to New York

At the beginning of the summer Zoe told Wade that she was going to spend a while in New York, pursuing medicine there for a few months instead of at her practice with Brick Breeland in Bluebell. He had accepted that, mostly because he felt so guilty still for having had the one night stand that pushed her away. He tried to explain that he had felt the need to sabotage the one good thing that ever happened to him, because he worried that he was going to screw it up accidentally if he didn't do it on purpose. And she had nodded, and told him that she needed time. That's when she said she was leaving.

Unfortunately, it turned out that she required quite a bit more time than he ever bargained for. Lavon warned him in September not to go running after her. And he listened then. And he listened in October. And even on Planksgiving day. But now it was almost Christmas, and he wasn't going to stand for Zoe Hart avoiding him any longer. Lemon told him that he was a moron and a narcissist to believe that she was still in New York because of him, but he couldn't shake the feeling that it was all his fault. Maybe because he didn't want to believe that she might have found something better in New York City than what she had left behind in Bluebell, Alabama.

Worst come to worst and least he could tell himself that Wade Kinsella wasn't the sort of man to just passively let the right one get away. It was going to take a lot of effort to get her to forgive him, but he thought it might be possible.

Or, at least he hoped so.

London, England

Things were bustling inside the Arc, but they usually did. Very few people paid attention to the team that studied anomalies. It wasn't their jobs to worry about those things, so for the most part they didn't.

"Looks like we've got another one," Connor Temple said, looking over his shoulder to his girlfriend Abby Maitland. It actually was his job to worry about anomalies, and he was quite concerned about the one on that had just popped up.

She barely looked up from what she was doing with Rex, everyone's favorite flying lizard. "Hmm?" she murmured, finally looking over to where he was surrounded by computer screens. In the center of one of them a red circle flashed. She walked over to him, curious. Pointing at the map she asked "where's that?" It didn't look like anywhere she was familiar with.

"It's in America," Connor declared with a roll of his eyes.

Abby squinted at the screen. "Where in America?"

"Maine. It's part of that section of the country they referred to as New England. Funny, isn't it? Those pilgrims wanted to leave England so badly, but then they named the place New England, the named most of the towns after places here."

She contemplated the screen a little longer, wishing for once that she had paid half as much attention in geography classes as she had her zoology courses. "Oh! That's Canada right?" she asked, pointing a finger a few inches above the pulsing red dot.

"Yes."

"That's odd, they don't get many anomalies in the States."

"Guess they lucked out this time," Connor said drolly. "And them without team to deal with that yet." He was referring to the whispered plans to install Arc in North America, but the powers that be had been saying that even before he and Abby had been accidentally trapped in the Cretaceous.

Suddenly Abby looked excited. "Connor, haven't you ever wanted to go to the states and not have to pay for it?" She thumped him on the shoulder. "Maybe this is our chance."

Connor gave her a long look. "Okay. But you have to be the one to tell Lester where this anomaly is."

Abby frowned. "It's not like he's going to say no. We can't just have prehistoric creatures roaming around this Maine."

"They don't have to be prehistoric. They could be from the future," Connor corrected automatically, and pedantically.

"Either way," she insisted.

"Right. So you're going to go tell Lester now, aren't you?" he asked hopefully.

This was met only with a sigh and a resigned look.

Virginia
Unremarkable House

Mulder open the front door to the unmistakable sound of his lover throwing up in the bathroom. Another man might be concerned about morning sickness or a hangover, but his first thought was a horrible flashback to when she had suffered cancer.

Hoping that he was just being ridiculous, he hurried the rest of the way into the house without bothering to knock the snow from his boots first. This meant he left a trail of wet, muddy footprints all the way through the living room and down the hallway.

As he expected, she was hugging the bowl. "You okay?" he asked, concerned when he saw how pale she was. In addition to being worried, he also began to feel guilty. Last night had been his turn to cook. Had he done something wrong when he cooked their pork roast? Surely that was more likely than her having started chemo again on the sly.

"No," she said, voice rough as she wiped a hand across the back of her mouth.

He said nothing as she went to the sink, filled a small paper cup with water, and rinsed out her mouth. Once she no longer had a mouthful of barf, he decided that it was okay to continue their conversation. "What's wrong?"

Scully didn't say anything. Instead, she led him to the computer screen in his home office. He was mildly surprised to see that she had been surfing the Internet while he had been out shopping at Home Depot: she didn't usually use the computer without his okay.

All of that was immediately forgotten when he noticed that she was on a news site. "Read it." She gave him a grim look, so he did what he was bid.

At first he didn't understand her interest in the article from earlier in the day, considering that it was about a tragic house fire that took place up in New England, leaving two adults dead and a child orphaned. But then he realized that there was a picture of the dead couple with their young son. He looked at the boy, studying the child's features.

"William?" he asked, numb.

"You think so too," she said in the same emotion-roughened voice.

"But…"

She jabbed her finger at one paragraph in particular. "The couple who took William lived out West. The agency told me that much. And this couple? They just relocated from Wyoming. The boy is the exact same age as William."

"And he looks like you," Mulder blurted out before he thought better of it.

"We can be on a flight to Manchester, New Hampshire in three hours," Scully informed him. "That's as close as we can get by plane. Then it's a couple hours by car. At least according to MapQuest."

Mulder looked at her, wondering if it was saying to chase after the son they hadn't seen since he was a baby. "Then I guess we'd better pack our bags."

a/n: Planksgiving is not a typo. Google it, people.