Scully decided to go for a walk before she called Mulder. She'd invited Kyrie to come too, but was secretly glad when the girl declined. It wasn't that she didn't want her company, but the point of taking a walk was to gather her thoughts before she informed her husband of the massive change to their lives. Or, the second one, she thought after a moment's reflection. Somehow, even though it had only been a few days, having Kyrie in their lives had already lost its alien quality and was being to feel pretty normal.

By the time she returned to the motel, she was feeling pretty confident about what she would say to Mulder. Smiling at Kyrie, she picked up her phone and asked, "Should I put in on speaker phone when I call your dad?"

The girl looked surprised by the offer. "Um, sure," she mumbled.

Scully thought about explaining why she thought Kyrie should be part of the conversation but didn't – she'd only known her a few days and was already getting tired of feeling like a lecturing mom of a teenager. Kyrie would catch on, or not, as they spoke.

Mulder picked up on the first ring. "Hey."

"Hi, Mulder," Scully said, feeling inexplicably shy. It was an unusual thing considering how long she'd known and loved him. "I've got big news."

"What's that?"

"The boys are both ours," she said in a rush. "Social services should be calling you this afternoon to arrange for you to get them."

"Wow," he said simply.

This understated reaction made her a little nervous. "You okay?" She'd expected him to say so much more. But then, she hadn't met the news with a great gush of words, either. She gave Kyrie a sidelong look and wondered if perhaps not wanting to make a far bigger deal about adding the boys to the family than her was what caused both of them to be somewhat subdued. On the other hand, not having yet reached William was probably damper enough for her at least.

"I'm good," Mulder reassured her, and his words sounded natural instead of strained. "Great. Thrilled. A little nervous about how much shopping I'll have to do tonight, though."

For a moment her mind went blank at the mention of shopping, but then it hit her: they had absolutely nothing at the house that a toddler or a newborn needed. "Yeah... want me to help you make a list? Actually, we both can. We're on speaker phone, by the way."

"That would be great," Mulder enthused, sounding a tad desperate. "Okay, so I already knew I needed to buy a full size bed for Kyrie's room-" They'd already discussed which room would be hers during a previous call. "-but am I buying two cribs or a crib and a toddler bed for the nursery. Nursery. Didn't think we'd have one of those in this house, but there you go."

Scully's brow furrowed as she tried to figure this out because at Nathaniel's age it could go either way. Then she realized she had the answer right in the room with her already. Turning to her step-daughter, she asked, "Which did Nathaniel have before now?"

"He was still in a crib." As she said it, Scully imagined Kyrie reaching into it, picking up the toddler and his bear, then skirting around the two dead things that had unsuccessfully impersonated the child's adoptive parents.

With some effort Scully managed to push away the morbid scene. "Okay, so a crib for each of them," she decided. "Keeping it the same as he's used to will make his transition a little easier, I think."

"How about the type of cribs that converts into toddler beds?" Mulder surprised her by suggesting. "I've seen a bunch of those in ads earlier today," he added, making her smile: apparently he had suffered no doubts that they'd be getting the boys.

"Perfect," she and Kyrie both said at once.

"Dark wood or white?"

Scully shrugged, so Kyrie spoke up a little hesitantly. "White seems a bit girly to me."

"Sure," Mulder agreed. "And if these little guys are anything like I was when I was that young, we'll want something that looks dirty less easily."

"Good point."

"What about you?" Mulder asked, and for a moment they were both confused, unsure who he was talking to. "Do you prefer dark finishes or white, Kyrie."

"Oh, um, dark," she said shyly. "If I have a choice."

"Of course. I'll see what I can do when I'm out buying furniture for you and the little ones tonight."

"And please get a twin-size bed for the guest room," Scully added. Kyrie gave her a pointed look, but she didn't allow herself to react to it. "If we can call it that with no furniture," she added without knowing quite why she was still talking.

"Okay," Mulder immediately agreed. It was obvious that he understood why she thought the room should finally furnished with something more substantial than dust bunnies. But he also knew her well enough not to make an issue of it. "I'll have to buy some dressers too. Oh, and maybe some screw drivers. It's going to be a long night putting everything together."

"Sorry," Scully said immediately and guiltily.

Mulder's response was to laugh at her. "I think I've got an easier task than you do, Scully. When do you think you'll reach William's house?"

"In a few hours." Or so she hoped. The clouds in the sky took on a more ominous cast, she thought, even though it was still only snowing lightly. Every single one she could see was swollen and had the potential for dropping a greater inconvenience on them. Kyrie was looking outside too but with no apparent alarm, so maybe she had no experience with winter driving, or maybe she herself was just being paranoid. Scully decided it was the latter – there was no way for anyone to arrange to have the weather provide a hindrance to their goal; snow was on no one's payroll.

"Good. Check in as soon as you can afterwards, okay?"

"Of course." She'd call him either way, of course, but despite what she'd said to Kyrie earlier, she hoped that she'd be reporting that she had William with her. Had she not been ministered by stern Catholic priests her entire childhood, she might have been able to convince herself that it wasn't a sin to think it as long as she never shared the thought with anyone else.

"Be careful. Both of you," Mulder half admonished. "Since I can't be with you, I need you to take care of each other."

Kyrie seemed a bit surprised by this, but Scully honestly wasn't. He had long ago proven that he thought that she was just as competent as he was. "Of course," she told him automatically. "Kyrie and I are in this together."

"Yeah," Kyrie mumbled in faint agreement. Her expression all but said that she was feeling overwhelmed, and Scully guessed that she couldn't blame her.

"All right then," Mulder said. "I hope we have nothing but good news to report the next time we speak. Love you both."

"Love you too, Mulder." As soon as she finished speaking, Scully hung up the phone.

Kyrie stared at her. "Do you think he meant it?"

"That we should both take care of each other? Of course."

The teenager squirmed. "No, um, I know he meant that part. He said… He said love you, both."

In that instant she became painfully aware of what Kyrie was getting at. "Yes, I absolutely do."

"But he has even actually met me yet," Kyrie protested.

"In many ways your father is a complicated man. But he doesn't waste time pretending to feel things for people that he doesn't," Scully told her. "You're right that he may mostly love the idea of you right now, but I don't doubt that he already loves you."

"Wow."

"Yeah, he's a pretty amazing guy," Scully told her with a grin. For a moment she amused herself by imagining the shopping Mulder would be doing that night: he'd probably need to ask for help, and it wasn't hard to picture him blurting out the fact that he was becoming a dad.

As pleasant as this was, her brow furrowed when she realized that by the time she saw Mulder and their newborn son together, he would have spent more time with both Nathaniel and their still nameless infant than Mulder had been able to spend with William.

"You okay?" Kyrie asked, sounding mildly concerned. Apparently her sudden change of mood had been telegraphed across her face.

"I'm okay," Scully said bravely. She shook her head lightly, as if it could banish the sad thoughts.

Who knew what they'd find at William's house, she reminded herself. Even if William was safe and happy, it didn't have to be a dead-end. Maybe they could write to him or see him once in a while. And even if his parents didn't go for that, he'd be eighteen eventually – him seeing her might prompt him to want to have a relationship with them both when he could.

All of the sudden, she found herself feeling better. Even if they didn't get William back, he wasn't likely to remain as lost to them as he'd been for the past seven years. That might not be exactly her heart's desire, but it wasn't anything to sneeze at, either.


By the time they reached the Nebraska/Wyoming border, all of Scully's thoughts were focused on what it would be like to meet William for the first time. Some of them were nice, even bordering on insipid, but others took a less optimistic cast. She was so entirely preoccupied that she almost forgot that there was anyone else was in the car with her until Kyrie quietly asked "Can I ask you a question?" which made her jump. Not that the girl seemed to notice. "A really serious one."

"Of course," Scully told her, hoping that none of her wariness leaked out into her tone.

"Um…" The girl seemed to have trouble getting started. "It's about my dad."

Scully just nodded, since that was what she expected.

"You said that he would have done everything in his power to protect me, if he'd known about me when I was younger…" she looked away as she continued to speak, voice now falling to almost a whisper. "Do you think he still would?"

"Kyrie, of course he would," she said automatically, but then she gave her stepchild a piercing look before looking back at the road ahead. "I take it that this isn't a hypothetical question."

"No, it's not," Kyrie admitted. For what seemed like forever, Scully said nothing, waiting for her to elaborate. Eventually she did. "My paternal grandfather's not dead."

"Wait, we saw-" Scully began to protest, but then she stopped short. What had she and Mulder actually seen? The unmarked black helicopters had fired on the adobe building, but they'd high-tailed it out of there immediately rather than sifted through the rubble themselves to find the old man's bones and assure themselves that the devil was truly dead.

"You saw what he wanted you to see," Kyrie noted cynically.

"What he wanted us to see?" Scully asked sharply.

The girl nodded. "The helicopters? They were his. Or he hired them, anyway."

"Why would he hire someone to blow up his home?" Scully demanded to know, not bothering to disguise the fact that she thought the idea was absurd. Though, the adobe structure hadn't really struck her as homey. Even now she wondered if he'd really been living there, or if it was yet another instance of him showing them what he wanted them to see, just like his granddaughter had just suggested.

Kyrie offered an inelegant shrug. "People stop looking for dead men. They stop paying attention to what they're up to, too."

As much as she wanted to insist that there was no way that he'd lived through the utter destruction of that building, her heart wasn't really in it enough to open her mouth. If someone had known that the helicopters were coming, it was possible that they could have carefully planned out how to survive. She and Mulder had spent no time at all exploring the structure and had seen very little of it. There was no way of knowing if there had been a lower level that had been fortified to withstand fire and the destruction of the building.

"That son of a bitch," Scully muttered.

To her surprised, Kyrie smiled wanly. "From the stories he told me about his mother, I mean my great-grandmother, you're not far off."

A sudden thought struck her, and left her feeling nauseous. "Kyrie, before you said that you were mad at Jeffery for not looking after you like he was supposed to. Did, did your grandfather raise you after your mother's death?" The idea was almost too horrible to contemplate, and if it was true, she imagined that Mulder would have Kyrie in therapy by New Years, detectable signs of post-traumatic stress or not.

To her vast and utter relief, Kyrie shook her head. Scowling, the girl said, "As if. He didn't have much use for an elementary school kid and pawned the task of caring for me out onto others, in a whole separate house."

"Thank god," Scully muttered under her breath, then gave Kyrie a weak smile as soon as she realized she'd spoken out loud. Fortunately traffic slowed to a crawl, so she felt less like she was being reckless by looking at Kyrie and thinking too hard about what she was saying. "He's really alive?"

"Yep." Kyrie sighed deeply. "He made me drop out of school."

"Why would he do that?" Scully asked automatically, but then she felt a sinking feeling when Kyrie's face fell. Even before she answered, she already anticipated exactly what she was going to say.

"He said that I didn't need a high school diploma for what I was going to be doing." She twisted in her seat, trying to get comfortable, but Scully doubted that her discomfort was entirely physical. "I tried to say of course I did, if I was going to be of any use to them, but he just stared me down and said that being a pretty girl was more than enough of a qualification to convince others to join the cause."

Feeling ill, Scully could barely get out her question. The thought that anyone might use their own flesh and blood, his own grandchild, in some sort of contrived honey trap scenario was appalling. "Did he make you... I mean, have you..." She swallowed hard, unable to finish.

"No, thank god. He at least realized that I needed to be eighteen before any of his potential... recruits was approached. It's kind of funny that he thought that they'd be willing to join a plot against humanity, but not to get mixed up in a situation that could potentially open them up to statutory charges," Kyrie said cynically.

"Stupid or not, I'm glad he hasn't made you do...anything yet." But then a thought struck her. "You won't be eighteen until July, right?"

"Right."

"Then why did he make you drop out? High schools have their graduations in June or even May, but not as late as July that I've ever heard of. Letting you finish school wouldn't interfere with his, um, plans," she said, trying hard not to think about what he'd had in mind for her.

"Oh, Dana, haven't you figured that out?" Kyrie asked plaintively, and it startled her to hear her use her first name. When Scully shook her head, the girl hunched her shoulders and looked down at her lap. "A person who doesn't even have a high school diploma can't get too far in life. If I can't do anything else...why wouldn't I do what he wanted?"

"Listen, that's all over with," Scully said firmly. Traffic began to move again so she had to attend to driving, but she could still see Kyrie's face out of the corner of her eye. The girl looked skeptical. "Your dad and I will never let him use you in his plans, got it?"

"I guess," Kyrie said with a drawn out sigh.

Shooting her a quick look, Scully asked, "What have you been doing the last six months if you haven't been in school and he hasn't deployed his plan yet?"

"Learning more about The Consortium," Kyrie told her with a small shrug, as if this should be obvious. "For an evil organization, they've sure kept meticulous records. Or, you know, had people keep them for them."

The thought that there might be ordinary-seeming women or men writing up records as if they weren't about inhumane acts almost made Scully hit the car in front of her because she didn't immediately realize they'd braked suddenly. A small detached part of her brain wondered what the going rate was for being an administrative assistant to someone like the smoking man was before she forced herself to focus.

"And that's how you know so much about what they'd planned for your brothers," Scully suggested, grimly putting the pieces together.

To her credit, Kyrie didn't say "duh" and roll her eyes like a lot of teenagers might. Instead she nodded and said, "I'm sorry I couldn't find out more about the other kids. I tried, but being his granddaughter wasn't a key to unlimited access, so there was only so much I could look into without drawing attention to my snooping."

A realization dawned on Scully quite suddenly. "You figured out the stuff about the prophecy early on, didn't you?"

"Sure. And to be honest, I found it interesting, so I kept going back to look once I realized those files were still active. That's how last week I figured out..." Kyrie trailed off, biting her lower lip.

Part of Scully wondered if Mulder's father had any idea that Kyrie knew about her siblings. And she wondered if he cared - it was quite obvious that Kyrie was more capable than he thought, despite what Scully gathered was a long term campaign to convince her that she wasn't good for anything else. Kyrie hadn't said as much, but it was easy to imagine that his plans for her future hadn't come as a shock to her back when she ended the school year in June. No wonder she had trouble being open and honest, Scully reflected, no wonder at all.

"Anyway," Kyrie concluded. "That's how I knew I had to get the baby out of there and where they'd sent Nathaniel."

"I bet you surprised them," Scully said quietly, and Kyrie gave her a curious look. "Let me guess - people who knew who you were, they thought you were docile and obedient, and would never do anything to defy your grandfather. They thought you were less capable of betraying him than they were, and that you were even more under his control than they'd foolishly placed themselves because they'd had a choice and you didn't."

"That's about the long and short of it," Kyrie agreed.

"Then you must have surprised the hell out of them."

"I guess," Kyrie agreed half-heartedly.

Scully just nodded to herself. All she could do was hope that their surprise didn't prompt an all-out search for any of the kids. Or worse, that it already had: the last thing they needed when they got to William's house was someone else to have beaten them there. She couldn't share this with Kyrie, not when she already had dark shadows under her eyes and a perpetually worried look on her face.

If they had to run off into the night with wolves nipping at their heels it wouldn't be for the first time, she thought with a fatalistic resignation. But there was plenty of time to worry about that later. Right then she decided to only worry about the next hour or two, not the days ahead.


Eventually they reached the small Wyoming town that William called home, and Scully felt her impatience and sense of urgency growing exponentially as they listened to the dull droning voice of the GPS tell them where to turn after they left Main street.

Part of her felt that it was idiotic to trust that a piece of electronics could guide them to their final destination, but they'd put the paper maps aside a few states ago once it became clear that the GPS did know where it was going and wasn't determined to lead then off a dock and into the ocean like one occasionally heard about on the news when yet another Darwin award nominee had trusted their GPS instead of their own eyes.

Several turns later, the GPS announced that they were approaching their destination with a distinct lack of enthusiasm.

Kyrie, however, was more than excited enough to make up for that. "That's it." She pointed at a house. The numbers next to the mailbox matched their printed out maps.

Scully was still parking when Kyrie asked her, "Do you have a gun?"

"With me?" she asked, surprised by the question.

"Yeah."

"In my suitcase," Scully admitted. She hadn't really wanted to bring it with her, but she'd felt like she had to, much in the same way Mulder had insisted that she get the gun in the first place not terribly long after her glock had been left behind in the Hoover building. For a moment she thought about the argument they'd had about that - he'd thought it was foolish to go unarmed while they were on the run and she'd angrily insisted that theft of government property would only up the amount of prison time she was up for if they were discovered like he'd then feared - but then forced herself to listen to what Kyrie was saying.

"Maybe you should get it," Kyrie nervously suggested. It more or less answered Scully's question of whether or not the smoking man had yet gotten around to ordering someone to teach her to shoot. Either he hadn't thought Kyrie would need to be armed when he sent her out into the world to seduce people for his cause, or he figured she was going to pick the skill up quickly so there was no rush. "Please?"

The fact that a teenager was asking her to be armed felt more than a bit absurd, but she found herself nodding. It wasn't as though there would be time to go back to the car and rummage through her luggage if they needed to be armed after all.

Thankfully, her coat hid the holster even though it had been years since she'd needed to make wardrobe choices with that particular consideration in mind.

They walked towards the house with a deliberate casualness, both apparently in unspoken agreement that they wouldn't rush and give away their plans.

At first no one seemed alarmed by their appearance at the house, nor even seemed to have noticed their arrival, but movement caught out of the corner of her eye sent adrenaline surging through Scully and it took a lot of control not to give into the instinct to immediately draw her weapon in response. When she turned her head to get a better look she saw a somewhat familiar seeming figure headed around the house, clearly going out towards the backyard. She shook her head, wondering if her eyes were playing tricks on her. Kyrie hadn't yet noticed anything.

"Carl?" Scully whispered. It didn't seem likely, considering that Sister Tate's sibling was supposed to have been delivering toys just the night before. How would he have had time to get all the way to Wyoming after being in Virginia the night before like the poster at Target had said he'd been?

Apparently Kyrie heard her. "Who's Carl?" she asked, sounding confused.

The door to the house opened, and once Scully realized that the poster they'd seen had made no impression on Kyrie, she said "We'll talk later." Maybe. If her eyes weren't just playing tricks on her, and the man wasn't a figment of her imagination, summoned up by a desire to have potential allies around. Though why she'd imagine a man she only met once would be willing to walk into danger with her, she didn't know.

For no good reason Scully felt a bit better with Carl going around the back of the house, phantom or not. Still, she tensed up a bit when the door opened all the way and someone stepped outside.

It turned out to be someone rather small.

Rather than aliens rushing out to meet them with force, an ordinary looking boy with blue eyes and light brown hair came outside and looked around. After a moment he spotted them.

"Kyrie!" the little boy yelled in their direction and ran right for the teenage girl.

Scully found her heart sinking as he raced right past her without any recognition in his brief glance at her. She hadn't seen him since he was ten months old, so how could she possibly expect him to recognize her? Magic?


a/n: one of my creative writing professors was adamant that writers shouldn't spend time talking about travel because nothing interesting happened in a car. What do you think of that rule, considering Scully and Kyrie have been road-tripping most of this fic so far?