Title: This Is How The World Ends

Fandom: X-Files

Rating: M

Disclaimer: I do not own The X-Files or any of its characters. I'm only borrowing them, but I don't promise to return them in the same condition I received them in. If I upset any of them, please hug the characters for me – I know you people are dying for an excuse.

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He had her hooked. He could tell from the exasperated way she'd ignored his offer of a goodbye handshake when she left him in the County Morgue parking lot that morning. If she wasn't already secretly committed to the case, she would be happy to ridicule it, to hang back for a bit to tease him; she would make a point of saying goodbye because she wouldn't know when she'd next see him. She would probably have let him shake her hand, perhaps let him hold on for a second longer than was appropriate, maybe let him pull her in for a hug…

But she'd done none of that. She'd rolled her eyes and turned on her heel and gotten into her rental car, muttering "Goodnight, Mulder."

Goodnight, as in, I'll see you only too soon. Because I'm committed to this case.

Back in his motel room he uploaded the photos of Spike from his phone and added them to the report he'd been working on for Fierro. He liked to be very thorough, and knew he had a good reputation for it. Fierro had had Mulder's services recommended to him, and was just as likely to suggest him to others. Paranormal investigators were few enough, but specialists of his calibre, experience and qualification were rarer still. This was a business and his skills and professionalism were for sale – they had to be sharper, stronger, better and altogether more desirable than those of the next guy.

The report finalised and polished, he saved it to a flash drive and collapsed onto the bed. It wasn't ideal, this life. Ideally he'd like to sleep in the same bed most nights, his own bed in his own place, with food of his choosing in the cupboards and his own dishes on the table and his clothes hanging in a wardrobe instead of packed into suitcases and a storage unit outside of Washington. This close to Christmas, ideally, he'd have a tree covered in lights and baubles – the baubles he chose and bought each year for his son – in pride of place in his living room, with colourful presents stacked underneath, and he'd be planning what he would cook Scully and William for Christmas dinner.

Ideally, he'd still have Scully in his life, and he'd be doing whatever was necessary to keep her there, rather than continuing the work that had driven her away. Ideally, they would be happy together, and they would still have their son.

Instead, he had reality. He had a drab view of a dirty motel ceiling and the mattress was lumpy. He had no Christmas plans, no family left to enjoy it with. Scully despised him and their son was forever gone, untraceable, exactly as she'd ensured when she organised the adoption.

Something she'd done in desperation. Something he knew she would never have done if she'd known how close he was at the time to returning to her. Something he knew she hated herself for, that she could never take back and that he would never be able to make her feel okay about.

Sleep was fitful, punctuated with dreams of her. In dreams she was many-faced; close, far, recent, young, fit, deathly sick, pregnant, alone, smiling, crying. He had known her in so many ways and at so many points in her life, and she had known him through so much, too, and loved him and followed him against all better judgement and had never, ever given up on him.

Until, one day, she had.

He wanted to be mad with her, because giving up was below her, but he knew he'd driven her to it. She hadn't wanted to leave. She'd wanted him to change so she wouldn't have to. But he couldn't let go of his work. He couldn't keep track of all the ways he let her down. Missed calls, forgotten messages, dinners left to go cold, erratic changes of plans, a bed all but abandoned… and there was just no excuse for catching a scent, packing his car in the middle of the night and leaving immediately to chase down a lead that any woman would accept year after year, even one as remarkable as Scully. How was she meant to read that kind of behaviour? That he didn't trust her? That he wanted space from her? That he just didn't think of her? That he knew she would be worried but simply didn't care? It seemed clear in the harsh light of retrospect but he'd not seen it that way at the time, even when she'd brought it up countless times, not until she'd walked out the door.

And not come back.

When he woke around midday he showered and dressed, preparing to meet Fierro's Boston middleman, who would either pay him or refer him to a third party qualified to relieve him of his hands and feet for his blatant arrogance in reporting to their boss that drug mules were being eaten by a Latin American legend.

Like every job these days, it was a gamble he just had to take. The cash payments he received for this kind of work enabled him to get by off the grid. He still used his bank accounts, though only sparingly, when he was somewhere he was happy to be seen and tracked. Working for criminals and renegades, obviously, he lived off cash, favours and assumed false names; when he was between jobs or working for more reputable clients, he resumed use of his bank card and ATMs and shied less from surveillance cameras.

All in all, though, he'd really prefer the government never really knew where he was or what he was up to. He knew better than most how that kind of information could be used against him and he was eager to avoid taking that road again. The year he'd spent in hiding had cost him his son, and, he was sure, had begun the slow breakdown between him and Scully that had brought him to where he was today.

Spare time and thoughts of Scully always brought the map out of his backpack, and he spread it now across the messy motel bed. Little symbols marked in pen scattered across the country. Black crosses with tiny little shorthand dates beside them were the most prominent – this was his bread and butter, always had been. Any reports of alien activity were marked with a cross to help him keep track of hotspots and patterns. Crop circles, abduction reports, cattle mutilations… It all added up over time, and he'd been developing this map for the last five years.

Red circles and blue triangles were less frequent but no less important. There were ten triangles, and these showed the residences of abductees who'd contacted him in the latter half of 2012 to report disturbing and escalating dreams about, as they put it, an alien 'auction'. He and Scully had interviewed the ten thoroughly and even she had concurred that the details of the nightmares (shared by ten perfect strangers with no discernible connection) bore uncanny resemblance.

The red circles were what had started the map off. In 2010, a former Soviet soldier had lured Mulder to Moscow to meet in a shady slum of a bar, where he'd given him a single sheet of paper with four handwritten coordinates listed.

"They'll kill me for giving you this," the old man had said in his low, thickly accented voice, dark eyes darting around the bar, "but someone needs to stop this from happening."

"Stop what from happening?"

"Invasion. These sites," the man, Vasiliy, or so he called himself in his introduction, stabbed at the page Mulder now held with one stubby, scarred finger, "are only four of many. Hundreds. I had not time to write the rest. My government, they know this much, but they will not share with the Americans." He levelled his uneven gaze at Mulder. "You must ensure it is known. It is coming."

"Major Dragomirov, how did your government come to know this?"

He became sketchy. "They have their ways, Mr Mulder. I think you would not like to know what becomes of visitors to our planet when they are shot down in Russian airspace, hmm?" He let the implication set in and took another worried look around the room. He leaned closer to be able to drop his voice even lower. He pointed again at the list he'd written, which he claimed he'd come here to hand over knowing his government would kill him for it. "These locations, they are on American soil, but I told you, there are hundreds. And they are everywhere. America, Russia, China, France… All nations are in danger. That is why I ask you here tonight. That is why I tell you this. All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men to do nothing."

Mulder sat back in his seat. "Edmond Burke said that."

"Apparently. The words have never been found in his writings, yet the man is remembered for saying this. What will we be remembered for, Mr Mulder? I? Nothing." Vasiliy Dragomirov sat back as well. His ragged grey stubble grew over the crags of many scars. "By the time you return to America and look for records to confirm my identity, all evidence of my very existence will be gone, and I will be gone also." He had nursed a drink all night and not taken a sip. He turned it slowly in his hand, wiping condensation from the outside of the glass. "For good men to do battle with evil they must relinquish the dreams of heroes to others. Good men are not heroes. I have known heroes. I have seen their fanfare. And I have known good men. I have seen the empty houses, the suicide reports, the offices transformed overnight with a new nameplate on the door. Good men tell no stories. What will matter in a hundred years from tonight? That you are remembered, or that your great-grandson's blood is human?"

Back home, Scully had given him a cool look when he'd burst into the kitchen of their house in the country early the next morning. "Mulder, you'll believe anything." She was obliging, though. She switched on her laptop and searched the coordinates. Dragomirov was right – they were all locations within the United States. Three were urban, one rural.

He was right about something else. When they asked Skinner to log into the Bureau's secure databanks to see what could be found about him, there were no results. Later, Scully asked a colleague with friends in the CIA and they reported that the agency had no information at all about such a person. When she called the Russian Federation's consulate in Washington directly and asked for a way to contact him, she was told that there was no such person as Major Vasiliy Dragomirov in any branch of the Russian defence force, nor had there ever been.

"That doesn't make it true," Scully had berated him sternly as he'd pushed away from the dining table where they sat and stalked off to his study to find a map, invigorated by the confirmation despite the exhaustion of jetlag. She'd followed. "That just makes it ambiguous and unlikely, which is not a synonym for the truth."

Ah, but he'd been so sure, and everything he'd found since seemed to indicate he was right. Paranormal activity intensified in the areas surrounding the four coordinates, "and in other places, too, you'll notice," Scully had pointed out, "which would seem to repute your theory of correlation." Channels of information had fallen silent when he'd tried to follow up and people claimed ignorance, "which would also happen if you were wrong." Then the ad he'd put in the back of numerous tabloids had brought in almost a hundred responses, ten of them surprising even the unimpressible Dr Scully with their startling similarity.

And when one cross, one triangle and one circle had shared the same point on the map, she'd come around.

Briefly. Finally.

And then she was gone.

Mulder shook out the map, trying to shake thoughts of Scully away, too. Since she'd left he'd accumulated many more crosses as he followed reports of alien activity across the country, using connections both long-held and newly found from his work. One black cross went through an old neighbourhood just to the north of Boston where a UFO was sighted last year. Below it and to the right was a street he knew well.

Benny the baker was outside his quaint little establishment talking to a deliverer when Mulder pulled up outside in his beat-up sedan. A hand-painted sign hanging over the snugly closed double doors boasted the best daily apple pie in Massachusetts, and a printed-out poster in the window recommended trying Benny's Christmas pudding.

"That come with ice cream?" Mulder asked loudly, locking his car and smiling at the two bewildered-looking men when they glanced over. He pointed at the advertisement in the window. Benny looked up at the sky.

"Maybe if it snows and you hold your bowl out the window." He said goodbye to the delivery man and beckoned Mulder inside into the bakery café's warmth. The bell above the door gave a cheerful little twinkle as they entered. "They haven't found a hole deep enough to throw you in yet, huh?"

Mulder grinned, shook off his coat. "I keep climbing out."

"Good while your luck lasts, I guess." Benny went behind the counter to prepare the pudding. The little shop was empty, the day wearing on and customers flocking instead to the department stores for last-minute Christmas gifts. The baker didn't seem worried about the quiet. "Our mutual friend said you'd be by. You done with the case, then?"

"I closed it off this morning," Mulder confirmed, sliding into one of the smooth booth seats by the front window. Tinsel, fairy lights and false greenery had been artfully arranged around the frosted panes. For Benny, this café was only a hobby, a front, but he worked it with such love and care that no one would ever suspect it was anything less than his whole world. "Got the boss's report with me."

"Ain't my boss." The baker returned from his kitchen with a laptop under his arm and two bowls of Christmas pudding in his hands, complete with a perfectly round snowy white scoop of ice cream and a little berry-and-leaf topper. Cute. He put one in front of Mulder and sat down opposite to dig into his own delicious creation while his computer loaded. "Plans for Christmas?"

"I was thinking of camping outside my ex-girlfriend's house in the snow until she feels sorry for me and lets me in. You?"

"Nothing that sinister. Thinking of hacking the CIA's personnel files with Taryn. Might have a buyer."

"Romantic," Mulder noted, digging in his jacket pocket for the flash drive when Benny gestured for it, laptop ready. "How is Taryn?"

"Shopping up a storm because we have a niece now, and Christmas is all about the children, hadn't you heard? Like a four-month-old gives a shit about presents or Christmastime." Benny plugged in the drive and opened the file, still shovelling his pudding into his mouth. His pale gaze went flat as he began to read. Mulder stayed quiet, let him concentrate, and allowed himself to just enjoy the pudding.

Benny the baker got his name not because of his little bakery business and hobby of making excellent Christmas pudding, but because he was known to have a finger in every criminal pie. He was something of a broker: his unassuming talent for understanding what people needed and connecting them with specialists in their fields, his total lack of regard for the law and his straightforward, salt-of-the-earth demeanour coalesced perfectly, and underworld types loved him. He maintained tight lips and chose his clients carefully, ensuring trust always went both ways, and he stayed out of disputes. His hacker wife procured adequate leverage over their various connections that they never needed to fear betrayal. Benny was the one who'd recommended Mulder to Fierro in the first place, having utilised the investigator's skills before.

"'Bone-like appendages protruding from the mouth'," Benny read aloud, clearly entertained. He ate another mouthful of pudding and licked the spoon clean. "Delightful. No wonder you're alone this Christmas, brother. 'How was work today, honey?'"

"She was cool with Spike. She was more worried about the Columbian crime lord I'm wrapped up with and whether I'll be losing my hands and feet."

Benny scoffed. "People are so judgemental. You overreact once, cut off a few appendages,as you put it, and no one ever lets you forget it. Josef's sorry about that. He did his time." Pudding finished, the baker collected the bowls and spoons. Mulder thanked him, told him it was amazing, which it was. He took them back to the kitchen and returned with an envelope. He dropped it on the tabletop. "Count it if you like."

Mulder looked inside and saw cash but didn't bother counting. Benny didn't get his reputation by swindling. Instead he asked, "What's Taryn's going rate?"

"Depends on the job. What do you need?"

Mulder glanced back at the door but he needn't worry; the street outside was deserted. He got out his pen and wrote on the napkin.

"Absolutely anything she finds in any government database on a Dr Henry Gray, died February seventeenth, 1981."

Benny watched him write, twisting his mouth thoughtfully. "That's broad. You looking for anything in particular?" Mulder shrugged, uncertain, and Benny sat forward a little, happy to help. "What's the case?"

"College science professor and his mother killed in a supposed medical tragedy thirty years ago, then last night his daughter meets exactly the same fate."

"That's it? Happens all the time," the baker said, confused. "My uncle died of the same cancer as my grandad. Disease is often genetic."

"Dissolving lungs isn't, though," Mulder said with a grim smile, and Benny whistled, impressed again. "Last night's victim was only four years old at the time of her father's death so if it's a hit, it's safe to assume the father is the one most central to the case. I've given the case to a friend at the FBI but if this Dr Gray was killed in connection with anything I suspect this case is related to, she's not going to find anything. I'm hoping Taryn might."

Benny accepted the napkin and took back the envelope. He fingered through the notes and took a handful. "Mates rates," he said, showing Mulder what he took. "What do you suspect this Gray to be connected with?"

"I don't know anything for sure yet," Mulder admitted, "but it looks as though Dr Gray, his mother and his daughter, and maybe another unrelated family as well, may have been deliberately infected with an extra-terrestrial virus."

Benny was never shaken by anything, but this news did make him fold his arms and bite the inside of his cheek. Years of recurring waking nightmares had led him to regression therapy, where he'd uncovered memories of taking part in an unsanctioned drug trial as a young man. "By the government?"

He'd hired Mulder to investigate what had been done to him, and Mulder had hired the young hacker Taryn to access the data he needed. It had seemed quite apparent that the United States government had known about the trials, and the attempts to brainwash the surviving test subjects into forgetting the experience, but once Benny had the name of the scientist in charge he'd been happy for Mulder to lay off the case. Presumably he'd passed the name on to one of his many more violent associates, and he'd lived happily ever after with his perfect match.

"Possibly. That's why I'd like Taryn to see whether they have a file on him, and any projects he might have been associated with. He was a scientist, after all. Maybe he worked on the virus."

The baker gazed out the window for a while, thinking. Finally he muttered, "Bastards," and threw half of the money back. "She'll do it. How long will you be in Boston? It might take a few days to get what you need."

"I'm notoriously difficult to get hold of," Mulder said wryly, gesturing for the napkin back and writing another name, an address, a fax and a phone number, "but my friend would love to hear from you if Taryn finds anything."