Disclaimer: Because I always forget to put one in the first chapter for some reason... Hell no, I don't own either, not Carter's X-Files or Carter's SG-1...

...

Chapter One

Oxford, 1983

.

It was a handsome day; the sky pastel and between seasons with a pale, silvery sun eloping through thin, fair clouds. Barely a wind to disturb us and the odd scrap of foliage turned a bold red or striking auburn. Through a window he saw it by slivers, and then he turned and looked away in a sulk.

What time did he have to gaze when he was suffering a dismal beginning to the beginning of the end? Oxford, the start of greatness begged through every ancient brick and for it he had no passion. Only a vague hankering for home that he could barely explain and a feeling – for the first time in his young adult life – that he had dive-bombed way in over his arrogant, American head.

Lunch remained untouched, much like his books, his notepads, his ambitions, and he stared listlessly at the table, alone in all senses. Perhaps he should just have stayed and joined the Massachusetts State Police. At least in that decision there would have been courage in deifying his father's wishes, which remained something of a dormant ambition in the young Mulder-boy. Yet at twenty-two and from a ridged home, the parental law still seemed somehow infallible.

Fox (though he was already debating having himself known by his surname) dragged a blunt fingernail across the deep varnished wood of the hall's furniture. Typical that even in its lunch room the school should reek of history. It unnerved his ego, to be humbled by a feeling of archaic heritage that his native country would never have if always placed in comparison to this tiny island.

Maybe though, if he adopted a course of blind faith, he could survive—

A heavy thud snapped him back to reality with a blue curse; a pile of musty library books, utterly in contrast to Fox's fresh, store-bought reading list, fell inches from his fingers, and, it seemed, by no accident. Fox scowled (in the angry arrogance of discovering adult youth he had decided he was not here, 3000 miles from home, to make friends) and adamantly shoved the books aside with his scrappy elbow. Such social defiance was challenged with a short, sincere laugh.

The culprit was a fidgety man about Fox's age, skinny as a strip of bark and not so tall as Fox's eloquent, approximate six foot. Yet he was dressed sharper than the best of society and stared with canny, humorous eyes straight and eagerly at the man whose solitude he now disturbed by sitting down uninvited across from him.

"Don't fuss," he cracked in a smooth British accent, with a sort of wry pull at the corner of his mouth passing as a smile, "You won't make it past the first week if you sit on your own and sulk like that, the over-thinking will kill you. Here—" He slid his peace offering across the table, a half finished packet of brazil nuts and the oddest offering for an alliance Fox had ever been presented with. In lieu, he took one.

"Thanks," he conceded, chewing thoughtfully.

The other man shrugged. "You're the first person to take one. Figures." But he seemed relieved, and so he struck out an immaculate, tanned hand. "Colson. Alec Colson. Call me either one you like."

Fox tilted his head, decided he envied – like so many – the question-less simplicity of this man's name, and then shook his hand. "Fox Mulder."

Alec said nothing of it. He was only happy to finally have a friend in this wretched, old place.

...

Three months later

Mulder was broken from his work by an assembly of cheap, techno-coloured paper which was thrust under his buried nose, and not so oddly for him it was a kind of interruption he was becoming entirely used to. Like the excited finger now jabbing frantically at something Mulder was sure was meant to be a thing in particular, at an article he dared to guess, as he saw haphazard columns of words on the newsprint paper in front of him.

Yet even as the notes from his studies began to slip from his mind's grasp and the last ten minutes of psychological conjecturing became a smudge of speculation, he could feel a familiar guilty pleasure of excitement roiling in his belly, a moment of undeniable curiosity spreading through the muscles of his mind. He allowed his fingers to go slack and drop his pen as Colson swung into a seat across from his at the wide library table.

"Three months mate, of digging through back-catalogues, trolling around every hidden apothecary this fair city has to give, asking every God-damned bohemia on the street, but here it is Mulder. Here is the undeniable truth."

It was a small phrase that he was not to know would haunt his life to come, and so it was with naive enthuse that Mulder bundled up the magazine into his hands and begun to read.

It was a Canadian-published hippie fanzine from the 60s – Fall of 1969 in fact, Mulder quickly checked the front page – and had a quaint air of amateurism on every page typical of a fanzine. With spelling errors, clashing fonts, rusty staples and a none-conformed layout, it was nonetheless a ripe vine of festival dates, arts and crafts fairs, vegetarian recipes, hemp patterns and sporadic but enthusiastic interviews from anyone and everyone/thing hippy, it seemed. And here, on the middle pages that Colson had presented specifically to Mulder, spoke a couple famed only as 'Michael and Jenny' who revelled to a reporter about their journey that summer up to Woodstock.

Mulder's eyes paused and Colson – whose brilliance for business amongst many other things Mulder had come to envy in the past several months – hung forward eagerly, desperate for his comrade's opinion. Eventually, after reading about a few most psychedelic trips and the best mellow-parties in America in the day, Mulder reached the part of the interview he guessed his friend was waiting for him to:

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Jenny – "We picked up four hitchhikers in Colorado. At first we thought, well, they looked... military. But one of them was a woman. And then they asked us if we could take them to New York, you know, instead of back to the missile base they have stored in the Cheyenne Mountains. And then..."

Michael – "People, they say, y'know – when they 'believe' and that – they say they believe because of lights in the sky, or photographs of spinnin' disks in the dark, or what... what is it with the Roswell thing— Yeah, 'little green men'.

"But it's just all more lies man, everything is lies, even the lies! They ain't green, they weren't even little. They're us! The hitchhikers, they were aliens..."

Jenny – "Well, they looked like us, is the thing. Exactly like us. Like humans. One of them, he even wore glasses. Just like the ones my kid brother used to wear, in fact... And he was the nicest man."

Michael – "But we can't tell you their names. Or their home planet, no. There's things you don't betray, y'know? But they're out there is the point. I mean, these guys, they had things that did things like you wouldn't believe. Totally... out of this world, man. By my eyes they were real and we just gotta keep believing! Believe in peace, in reaching out instead of striking out. In talking instead of shooting. Then—then they'll come back..."

.

Mulder kept his lips tight as he read the article again. The man's words especially sounded so full of blind faith it was hard to find a moment of blunder. He corroborated his own story perfectly, never contradicting his loose told facts, never stepping over his other-half's verifications. Mulder believed that Jenny and Michael believed entirely what they had to tell the magazine's reporter, but the magazine never revealed a bias as to whether or not it believed in turn.

Mulder carefully folded the fanzine and placed it back down. He considered Colson with a straight look, measuring the brimming excitement in the man's eyes that he so desperately wanted to share. But he was, simply through a slice more experience, wary.

"This doesn't actually say much, Colson. He says— Michael I mean, says what, that there were four of them, 'hitchhiking' apparently, and Jenny says they looked human but they both say they were aliens, looking for a ride to New York? For what, the pretzels?"

Colson offered his trademark wry corner smile. "They say they saw things, that the 'aliens' were carrying things 'out of this world'."

"What, lemon spiced marijuana? Colson—"

"Mulder, you know there's more to this than just those words being words. You know this is the crux of the whole matter. I mean, take the fact they picked them up in Colorado— don't tell me that's just a coincidence."

Mulder harboured a nasty scowl from a fellow student sitting astride him, and so in a rush gathered up his books before grabbing Colson's arm and sending them out into the halls. They began with unspoken consent towards the dining hall.

Colson began waving the magazine in front of them as he spoke with fervent conviction.

"We both know Roswell's just the meat they dangle to satisfy the curious masses. So we both agreed to take a different lead on the whole conspiracy and everything said in this paper by these people corroborates what we've found out so far! The military base in Colorado, the unconvincing public enquiries into the Cheyenne Mountain Complex, which all seems to lead back to these mysterious archaeological digs in Giza in the 20s. Mulder? Mulder—come on! I know you want to believe this!"

They ducked into the lunch hall together, half empty with only fifteen minutes left till classes resumed.

"Course I do, Colson." He sat down at a deserted table and dug a half demolished packet of Maltesers from his blazer pocket. He threw them onto the table and between them they began to pick hungrily. They shared many bad habits, and skipping lunch was one of them.

"It's just... Well they were a couple of hippies Alec. What's the bet they were wasted the whole trip on pot brownies. It's more a wonder they didn't invent a more radical hallucination of aliens than 'they looked exactly like us'."

Colson laughed bitterly. "C'mon. That's not the point and you know it. It's how this interview corroborates with everything else. Look, Fox."

Mulder scowled; Colson knew perfectly well how to draw his attention, if not for the worse sometimes.

"You're onto a good thing with Cheyenne, Mulder. I think you might have something. The military, it makes sense. Containment, control. And somewhere as deep and inconspicuous as an Air Force mountain complex in a state as unassuming as Colorado. So what if— Mulder listen, what if these humanoid aliens came from Cheyenne. What if they'd escaped. God they could even have come from Roswell and been taken up there, out of the spot light if you will. It makes sense. And for now, this," Colson waved the magazine tauntingly before Mulder's nose, "this is all the proof we should need. To keep going."

Mulder pawed absently-mindedly at the corner of one of his books. He was in a very deliberate effort trying not to look directly at Colson or his magazine.

"Mulder what are you afraid of? Why won't you tell me what is it that keeps stopping you, every time we get a little closer like this?"

Of course, Colson did not hear an answer. Never did he, and it berated the young engineer's flaunty, spirited character in a way few people could.

"Look, if the military are planning anything to do with technologies and biology that don't belong from this planet, they could end up killing us all. At the very least we all have a right to know before they decimate the planet!"

Colson's relentlessness was less to do with youth than his own personal agenda; his father's disgraced name and his family's soured reputation thus. He hardly expressed it but he was sensitive to the idea of such shadows hanging over what he voraciously believed was not only his family's innocence but also his business to defend the public's rights. Mulder admired and envied his plight. It was, rather romantically, a noble, selfless cause. Unlike his own guilt-ridden motivation.

"Of course," he finally offered to Colson's rant. "Of course they owe us the truth but Alec, we can't always charge ahead on each tiny scrap of new information we find. This interview," Mulder casually waved a hand at the fanzine still clutched in Colson's hand, "is aloof at best, and an unwitting lie at worst. I'd say, treat it as coincidence, if you're going to treat it all. And in the mean time..." Mulder rapped his fingers against his thick pile of books, "We've got midterms."