During the first two days it'd been hard to convince Mulder that it was safe to leave the dubious sanctuary of the basement. He had dragged William's telescope down with them, and ceaselessly scanned the horizon the best he could through the narrow cellar windows, ignoring William's protests that it was pointless during the daylight hours. He saw exactly nothing. Just like TV claimed he would.

After the first few attempts at engaging their father got them growled at, the boys left him be. Instead, they amused themselves by making nickel bets about what the news would report next. Mulder hadn't even reacted when they'd left the basement to get their change jars from their rooms.

Scully, on the other hand, had noticed when they'd returned to the basement with the mason jars they'd caged from their grandmother a couple of years earlier when she'd made a less than fully successful attempt to can fruit. It was hard not to notice considering the coins in the three-quarters filled jars still had enough room to shift and rattle as they clomped down the stairs with them.

She believed that it was better for them to have a sense of humor about their situation, if they could, though she wasn't sure that she should sanction betting - and by not saying anything she was as good as doing so - she kept her mouth shut and went back to reading her book, desperately hoping that it wouldn't be the last book she had the luxury of reading. The thought of how many books remained on her to-read list filled her with a quiet sense of despair that got in the way of reading the current one.

"I bet you a nickel that they're going to say that it was a weather balloon again," Andy announced, his hand was already on the remote control, ready to switch from Fast and Furious V back to a 24-hour news station.

This had been the first thing the new stations had come out with. Within an hour of Andy and Mulder's arrival home, the evening news had an overexcited man in a cheap suit from the learning annex on to explain that there had been several slighting of a rogue weather balloon, and that people should not be alarmed by it.

People took this to heart just as well as they had in 1947, and there were soon people using the internet to post videos much like the one Mulder had taken on the way home. The first night no one had bothered to try to refute the videos, but by the next morning several of them had gotten over a million hits on Youtube, so the powers that be had scrambled to find other ways to explain what people were seeing.

"I bet you ten cents that they say something else," William retorted, holding up a dime.

Andy shook his head. "Not good enough. You have to bet on something specific."

His younger brother heaved a sigh. "Fine. I'll go with 'the videos are fakes.'"

"You're really going to go with that?"

"I really am."

"Okay..." Andy did nothing to hide his skepticism. "Mom, you want in on this action?"

"You know I don't." Letting them have their fun was one thing, and joining in was quite another.

"I figured that you'd say no, but it's polite to ask."

"Put on the news already!" William demanded.

"Geez, impatient much? It's not like we're going to miss it. They say the same things over and over again."

William threw a couch pillow at him. "An-dy!"

"Fine." Andy pressed the last button and a newsroom filled the screen.

The reporter, a man in his forties, looked like he hadn't gotten a lot of sleep over the last couple of days. Scully didn't comment on it, but she was fairly sure that he'd drunk himself into a dreamless night when he finally did sleep. He cleared his throat nervously and looked at someone off stage before turning to face the camera. "We have a special guest tonight who is going to explain what lenticular clouds and their connection to the recent sightings-"

"Aww man!" William cried. "That's a draw, right?"

Andy agreed that it was a draw, which meant that they both held onto their collected pocket change. They didn't think anything more about the explanation that the scientist who had wandered onto stage was dishing out, but Scully remained focused on the TV screen. In contrast to the reporter, the scientist looked both calm and professional. In a soothing yet authoritative tone, he carefully explained that lenticular clouds often looked like UFOs because they were disk-shaped, and at sunset took on color just as other clouds do. People sitting at home could relax upon hearing this explanation, especially once it was backed up by several colorful photographs showing the "UFO clouds."

Unless, of course, they were like Scully and knew something about the clouds before the scientist came on to give his spiel. It was true that the cloud formations did quite often have the police taking panicky reports, but the scientist left out one important fact: most lenticular clouds formed near mountains, and the vast majority of sightings in this case had not been within hailing distance of a mount anything. It's possible for them to form away from mountains, but it's unusual, and the odds that many would form away from mountains hundreds of miles apart borders on astronomical.

She must have been frowning at the man on the TV, because she became aware that Andy was staring at her. "What?" she asked, not enjoying the scrutiny.

"I take it from the look on your face that you don't believe that guy."

"I don't. Those clouds usually form near mountains, and there have been sightings tens of miles away from the nearest mountain range."

"So it's a BS explanation again, like the one about it being Venus?" Andy surmised. Venus didn't race across the sky or appear so huge, so very few people were willing to believe that particular desperate bid to quell panic.

"Exactly."

"How long do you think it will be before they have to admit that it's aliens?" Andy asked, glancing at William. William was constructing a tower out of the change he'd won so far and didn't seem to be paying any more attention to the conversation than Mulder, still huddled over the telescope by one of the windows, was.

Scully allowed herself an uncharacteristic shrug. "As long as the crafts just hover over us and don't attempt to make contact, the government doesn't have to admit anything much."

"Until they attack, right, Mom?" William asked, looking up at them from the rug and revealing that he'd been paying more attention to the conversation than either of them realized.

"Right," Scully reluctantly agreed. She didn't have it in herself to protest that there was no way of knowing if they'd actually attack. Doing so would ring false, because everyone was just waiting for the inevitable.

"Do you think they will, soon?" Though he was doing a good job trying to look calm, anxiety tinged the boy's voice.

It was the evening of December twenty-second, the day that had been marked in her mind's calendar with a thick red circle. The invasion was supposed to begin then, but there was no panic in the streets, just a bunch of frightened people glued to their TV screens and holding their collective breaths. She no longer knew what she believed, and she was having trouble focusing on what it was she'd believed before.

"I don't know," she finally admitted, wishing that parenthood had conferred all the right answers upon her. "I just don't know."

"Me neither," William replied quietly. "I don't think anyone can, really."

"Then why did you ask?" Andy wanted to know. The tone of his question wasn't so much chiding as curious.

"I figured if anyone knew what to expect, Mom would."

Scully found herself touched by his confidence in her, but felt like she'd failed them on some level too.

Andy started to flip through the TV channels again before looking over at his mother and brother. "Do either of you know what channel the public access station is?"

"Twelve, how come?" William wanted to know.

"I thought we should check it out today."

"But why? When they're not doing boring pubic meetings, it's just a bunch of crazies on there ranting about their pet 'issues' to a largely imaginary audience," Scully said, thinking that she was a little surprised that none of the people she and Mulder had met during their cases had ever ended up on public access. Though perhaps they had and they simply didn't see the shows, especially considering how many of their cases were outside the DC area.

"Exactly. Aren't you interested in what the 'crazies' have to say?" Andy asked, his eyes gleaming excitedly.

"Maybe a little, but you can't imagine that they actually understand what's going on." There were very few people who really did, and Scully couldn't imagine that any of them, not even the ones who weren't glad that the invasion was starting, would be willing to paint a target on their backs by drawing attention to themselves.

"Aww, it could be funny, Mom," William said coaxingly. It was clear that he, at least, was just interested in the potential entertainment value.

Scully gestured to Andy to go ahead, and the three of them sat back to see what might be on channel 12. Andy looked over his shoulder - Mulder was still huddled by the window. "Dad, you want to watch too?"

His response was a predictable "No!"

Shrugging, the others turned to the screen. At first they were disappointed because they'd tuned in at the end of a high school basketball game, but after a couple of minutes the scene changed to a show that was very obviously filmed in someone's home.

"Hey, he's got a finished basement too," William remarked, and it was only then that Scully noticed the tell-tale basement windows in the rear of the "set."

"I wonder if it's his mom's?" Andy remarked, apparently thinking of the common image of a middle-aged loser living in his mom's basement. The man on the screen certainly looked like he might fit the role.

"What is he holding?" Scully asked, squinting. It looked like-

"Tinfoil!"

A moment later the man confirmed what William crowed. "Tonight I'm going to show you how you can use tinfoil to keep THEM from reading your thoughts." He reached for something off screen. "If you already have a baseball cap it'll make things easier, but I'll show you how to make a hat out of tinfoil and duct tape later on too."

"Jordon says that duct tape can fix anything," Andy told them. "But I don't think he had mind-reading aliens in mind."

"Would it work against mind reading people too? Or just aliens?" William wanted to know.

Scully almost found herself suggesting that if they ever saw Gibson Praise they could test the idea out, but she stopped herself. Over the years she and Mulder had told their sons a lot about their work, but they hadn't named any of the countless people they'd helped or arrested back then. It had been Mulder's insistence that they keep things vague, mostly because he was concerned that one or both of the kids might get the idea to look up people from their cases, and he didn't think anything good could come of it. When she thought about things like Facebook, she found herself agreeing. And so far, the young mind-reader had never sought them out, so there had been no reason to make an exception for Gibson.

"How many people do you know who read minds?" Andy asked him.

"Could be dozens. How would we know if they kept it to themselves?"

"Like people could keep that to themselves."

"They tend to commit people who claim to read minds," a dry voice from the other end of the room interjected.

Scully turned and gave him an uncertain smile. If he wanted to tell them about his brief commitment after coming in contact with those ship drawings, she couldn't stop him, but it was a conversation she could live without. Fortunately, he lost interest in the conversation and turned back to the telescope.

"See?" William asked snottily. "People would so keep it to themselves."

Scully stood up abruptly and looked at the pile of sleeping bags and folded camp cots a few feet away from where Mulder hunched over the telescope. They'd stacked them there in the morning after spending second night more or less confined to the basement. "We're sleeping in our own beds tonight," she said firmly.

He turned slowly, and she waited for him to protest, but he just stared at her. "Enough is enough, Mulder. If the aliens are going to attack, I'd prefer we face them after a comfortable night's sleep."

"All right."

For a moment there was silence, and then William sprung up from the couch "Yay! No more basement!" Before anyone could stop him, he raced up the stairs.

Mulder pushed the telescope away and followed him up the stairs. By the time Scully or Andy joined him, he was already in the kitchen, beginning the process of cooking dinner. Mother and son looked at each other and shrugged - they would have liked to know why Mulder had given up on the idea of the basement as a bastion of safety, but neither dared ask. Scully wasn't sure why Andy held his tongue, but she knew why she didn't ask - she was afraid that his answer would be that he'd concluded that they weren't safe anywhere.


The Next Morning

The question Andy asked about the powers that be was answered during the wee hours of December 23rd. It might have been the government's intention to cover up the existence of the ships for as long as possible, but the decision was abruptly taken from them.

By breakfast the entire country knew something horrible had happened when every station cut away in with a breaking news preamble and a somber president Obama took to the airwaves to speak to the citizens of the United States.

Andy and William took their bowls of cereal to the TV, and even Mulder was able to be pried from the telescope to hear the presidential address. The four of them crowded around the set, a scene played out in hundreds of thousands of homes.

Obama's characteristic smile was gone, and his eyes never once glanced at a teleprompter. "Statesmen, my fellow Americans, I stand before you to deliver news that no president has ever expected to give..." He looked away for a moment, as if it was all too much, and it probably was. "Just after midnight, the international space station was attacked. The assault did not originate from the ground, not from Earth itself and no man is responsible for it-" For a moment a swell of disbelieving voices roared up and the president waited them out before looking very resolved. "This attack originated from one of the unearthly crafts that have been reported around the world over the last few days. That is to say that the international space station has been destroyed by, by, by unearthly beings."

All semblance of order dissolved as a cacophony of outraged voices obliterated anything that the president might have intended to convey next. For several seconds the screen was filled with a swarm of men wearing dark suits trying to restrain reporters and elected officials.

William turned his shocked eyes to his parents. "Did the president just say we were attacked by aliens? I mean, obviously we were, but did he just admit it?"

"Sure sounded like it," Andy said before either Mulder or Scully could. "People are really losing their shit over this."

Mulder gave them a tense smile. "This is actually a milder reaction than I would have expected. I bet that the secret service men had no idea last night that they'd be doing this today."

"No one could have known," Scully asserted.

He turned and gave her a long look. "Couldn't they?"

"Somehow I doubt that being open-minded is considered a plus for a potential secret service agent."

A ghost of a smile flitted across his lips. "I never would have been hired for the job."

At last the quell of panic was reigned in, and president Obama began to speak again. "There were three men manning the space station, and I want to stress that the astronauts were able to escape in a safety pod. They have already been recovered from an ocean landing. Before they jettisoned from the space station, they transmitted images of the damage..."

Several reporters began to shout questions, and in a surprising move, the president pointed at one of them, indicating that the woman could speak. "Mister President, are you honestly trying to tell us that aliens have attacked earth?"

"Since the space station is not on Earth, I wouldn't go that far-"

"So it's confirmed that this attack is related to the UFO sightings this week?" another reporter shouted, reminding Scully strongly of Langly for some reason, even though the man's dark hair was neatly clipped.

For a moment the president looked like he was at a loss for words, but then he slowly nodded. This led to a lot of shouting and renewed pandemonium.

The beleaguered president held up a hand and a hush fell over the crowd. They might have been desperate to get their questions answered, but it was clear that they understood that there was value to listening to the information that was freely offered too. All stood in a fairly respectable silence as Obama began to address them again.

"Man has often wondered if we were alone in this vast universe, and this pondering has led to thousands of creative works devoted to the theme. We now know the answer to this question, and that answer is yes. Yes, there are other beings out there. And as of yet it does not seem as though they are particularly friendly.

"I know that everyone's question is 'now what?' and it's a reasonable one, perhaps the only reasonable one. One must ask themselves where do we as a country go from here when these visitors have already committed an act of aggression? While it has been official policy to deny the existence of, of aliens, I assure you that we have devoted decades to the possibilities that we are not alone and that the others might be hostile. Over the years plans have been made and refined to keep up with the growth of technology. Some of those plans are at the ready to be implemented."

When president Obama paused to collect his thoughts, a reporter, a young blonde woman in a pinstripe suit, took the opportunity to shout out a question. "President Obama, are we going to attack the, uh, aliens?"

He shook his head and gave the crowd a stern look when they began to rumble again. "Right now there are none of these ships in our air space. They passed by a couple of nights ago, but North America clearly was not their destination. Given this, we have to remember that we can not throw away international diplomacy, no matter how good our intentions might be. If the countries where the ships are now present ask for our help, we will of course provide all aid that we can. But we cannot invade another country to deal with a potential threat."

This definitive statement was met with howls of protest, and secret service was called upon to calm the crowd again.

"People, alien beings might be a new experience for us all, but this does not give us the right to violate the sovereignty of other nations. Right now it is our place to remain in a state of watchful readiness, and come to the aide of whoever requests it. We will not, cannot, take a position of offense on the soil of other nations without their consent."

After a few seconds the cameras faded away, giving viewers the impression that the reporters and government officials had gotten too panicky to keep filming.

"It's a good thing he's not running for reelection," Andy said to no one in particular. "It sounds like he's even softer on aliens than illegal aliens."

Mulder shot his older son a look, and Andy shrugged. Andy's biological parents, who had been killed in a car accident when he was in first grade, had been proud of the fact that their South American grandparents had entered the US legally and sought citizenship, and they'd lived long enough to instill this pride in their son as well. As a result Andy was not very tolerant of people who came to the country illegally, an attitude shared by many decedents of people who had jumped through all the governmental hoops on their path to legal citizenship.

"President Obama isn't wrong," Scully said quietly. "The last thing the country needs is to set off another war while trying to do the right thing."

"What if the political cost is lower than the cost of doing nothing?" Andy challenged. "What if we do everything by the books diplomacy-wise, and then have a worse chance of defeating the invaders?"

Mulder studied her face carefully, and felt like he could almost read her thoughts. She was thinking about what it was like to be young and idealistic, ready to forge ahead without thinking through all the unintended consequences. She had the grace not to say any of this out loud, which he thought was a good move. Time and experience would stamp out the idealism in their children soon enough, but until it did, there was a place in the world for such confidence and boundless enthusiasm.

Instead of saying what she was thinking, she put her hand on Andy's. "There's a time and a place for fighting the good fight. It just isn't here and now."

This didn't make Andy happy, so he scowled. "So we just wait and do nothing?"

"Watchfully," William chirped, imitating the president's inflection.

This got a grudging smile out of his brother. "I guess there's one good thing to come out of the speech."

"What's that?" Mulder asked, curious about what he might have found favorable.

"They're admitting that the aliens exist, which is good because they're not going to be able to pretend that they're not here if they do come. People will call them on it instantly, and it's not like they can fall back to claiming there's no such thing as aliens now."

"I guess that is the silver lining," Mulder agreed. Andy had a point. With the world watching, no one could keep the crafts entering US airspace a secret for long.

"Dad, and you didn't think youtube was good for anything," William said with a smirk.

"That may be because he's not a fan of cats," Scully told him. "And virtually all the videos you've shown us have cats in them."

"You don't like cats either," Mulder pointed out, thinking of the strange case they'd once suffered through, one like a bad horror movie filled with felines.

"Not all the videos have cats," William protested.

"No, only like eighty percent."

"You're not helping, Andy!"


Christmas day dawned in the US with strange feelings of confusion and guilt. The guilt stemmed from feeling badly that aliens were not just an abstract concept in some parts of the world but a sinister hovering presence above many places. And confusion because they didn't know if it was okay to celebrate the day as they typically did. Many parents were tired from reassuring their small children that aliens wouldn't hurt Santa, or keep him from his appointed rounds.

In the end most tried to celebrate the day as normal, but in most homes, the Mulders' included, there was a pall over the day, much like the first holiday after a death in the family. Scully in particular was strongly reminded of the first Christmases after the deaths of her father and sister.

"I was afraid we wouldn't see this day, Dana," Maggie told her quietly after taking her aside before they ate, leaving Mulder and the boys to watch a Christmas Story. "I saw that red sky a few nights ago, and..."

"Began to look for Jesus descending from the clouds?" Scully couldn't help but quip.

Maggie looked annoyed, but nodded reluctantly. "I wouldn't put it that way, but...I guess we should be thankful that we have this time together after all."

This comment rubbed Scully the wrong way, but it wasn't her mother's fault. The idea that they only had the day due to the largess of the aliens galled her. Even more she worried about the Christmases to come. Would they be gathered in this house 365 days hence, or would the world be ripped asunder by then?

She had to say something, so she forced herself to smile. "I'm glad we're all here together. I just wish that Charlie and Bill could have come too."

"Maybe next year," Maggie said lightly before she seemed to realize what she'd just said. Her expression darkened briefly before she too put on a brave face. "Is there anything I can help you with in the kitchen?"

"Are you up to making a pie crust? I'm still no good at it."

"I'd be happy to."

They wandered into the kitchen, both pretending that everything was normal, and that it might not be the last Christmas before the end of everything.


A/N: I need more feedback, please