Author's comments: Sorry everyone, didn't realize my line breaks weren't showing up. I am re-submitting each chapter with "parts" instead so that it's more readable.

With regards to the story—let's just say that it's about to get real.

Skyscraper

Chapter Four

Part 1.

Scully despised lack of sleep—it made her feel frumpy. As she walked through the metal detector at work, she felt a charge run through her arms, only this time she felt it radiate all the way down from her spine. I'm too tired to care, she thought, as she stifled a yawn. Too tired to care about anything.

She hunted down Jeffrey Spender. Showing him the phone number she had jotted down from Mulder's phone, she said, "Do you recognize this number? I tried to run it through the system last night, but I can't find an owner."

Spender's eyes widened when he saw the number. Looking up at her, he said, "Yeah, I know it."

"Well? Who is it?"

Their eyes locked. "I think you know."

"It's not her, is it?"

"No."

"Cancer Man."

"Bingo."

Without waiting to answer any of his unasked questions, she swept her way out the door, her mission clear.

The receptionist outside Skinner's office tried to stop her. "He's in a meeting, Agent Scully." But her words fell on deaf ears as Scully opened wide the door.

Mulder and Skinner stood facing each other. Both of them looked at her like small creatures caught in the headlights. Nobody else was present in the room, but the smell of smoke thickened the air.

"Oh, sorry, didn't realize you were—"

Without finishing her sentence, she turned and walked out. She expected that Mulder would follow her, stop her with his words, but he didn't.

Part 2.

Now she knew. She knew they were in secret discussions—Mulder and the Cigarette-Smoking Man—but she had to know more. She found it hard to believe that Mulder would do anything like this without good reason (or Skinner, for that matter). Maybe he was undercover, trying to flush out more information about her recent ordeal at the Ruskin Dam, and he couldn't tell her until he had succeeded. But she needed to know.

She followed him. She had to be extra careful, because he would suspect her of resorting to such a thing.

He went straight home after work, carrying a file folder under his arm. The cigarette man came into his building shortly after. And then they left together, side by side, Mulder laughing at something the man said. Scully growled in the safety of her car.

She doubted that he would make it easy for her to snoop, which is why she was pleasantly surprised when her key still worked in his lock. Looking around to make sure this was not a trap—that he wasn't coming right back—she entered the apartment silently and scanned it for anything she had not seen before.

The most apparent item in the room was a manila folder sitting on his coffee table. Picking it up, she saw that the label read "D.K. Scully." Her heart sank when she opened it and saw her own medical records, going back several years, contained within it.

Flipping through the stack of papers, her eyes were drawn to a small plastic baggie that contained a tiny metal object. It had no label, but Scully was pretty sure she knew what it was. She ripped it out of the file and gave a cursory glance around the apartment to see if she could spot anything else. Seeing nothing of interest, she chose to leave before the two men had a chance to return.

Part 3.

Feeling beaten down and broken, Scully returned to her apartment to obsess over her latest findings. Just inside her door, she found a manila envelope on the floor that someone had obviously slipped underneath. Picking it up, she read the name "J. Spender" handwritten on the outside.

She sighed deeply and opened the envelope with shaking hands. The contents slid out, some of them falling onto the floor. She managed to catch one glossy item in her hand, and she dropped the envelope and covered her mouth when she saw what the photograph portrayed.

She gasped despite herself, letting the photo slip out of her hand. The picture of a naked Mulder lying on top of an equally nude Diana sat where it had fallen, mocking her until she turned her head away from it.

Part 4.

Thoughts escaped Scully. She didn't want them, really, because none of them would be pleasant right about now. A knock on the door interrupted her numbness. She debated ignoring it, but decided to drag herself out of her stupor and open it.

Seeing Jeffrey Spender made her nostrils flare. He was barely in the door before she started in on him. "Why are you doing this?"

"I just want you to know who you're working with."

"Why do you care?" she said, her voice even more forceful this time.

He put his hands out in front of him, palms towards her in stop signs. "Look, Agent Scully, I just want to find my mom. I thought you might help me if you knew which way to start looking."

She huffed, and then looked away in contemplation. "Why didn't you just bring those to me," she said, pointing to the pictures spread out on the floor while trying not to look at them. "You could have warned me."

"I didn't think you'd believe me unless you saw for yourself. And this was the one way I knew you'd look."

She half-turned away from him, ready to sink down into a chair in exhaustion but suddenly unable to propel herself forward.

"Please hear me out, Agent Scully. I dug through old e-mails today, expecting to find some between Diana Fowley and the cigarette-smoking bastard. I found these instead." He dug out a fistful of papers and held them out for Scully to take.

But she did not lift her hand to take them, so he continued. "They're e-mails between him and Mulder, going back four years. Four years, Agent Scully."

She found her head involuntarily swinging towards the papers. Snatching the top of the pile from him, she examined the e-mail addresses closely. The sender was Mulder, but she did not recognize the recipient. "How do you know it's him?" she said, her voice flat.

"I just know—" He shook his head, and she detected sadness in his voice as he said, "Just trust me, I know him well."

Now she looked at the body of the e-mail, noticing that it was from 1994. It read, "DKS implant successful. Medical records attached."

Scully felt as if she could not breathe, and she backed into a chair and fell into it, her legs caving in on her. Snow piled up outside the window like ashes. Some hit the window and melted away, rolling down the window in big, fat drops.