This Is How The World Ends

by Solia

In 2012 the invasion started, but no one saw it. This oversight cost them - his reputation, her purpose, each other... An unsanctioned case with a familiar threat puts everything at risk, and as they race to save what matters most, standing alone may not be an option. MSR. Angst. Novel-length. Alternative events diverging post-IWTB, ignoring/replacing S10&11.

37. XXXVI - Mulder

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, because this is fanfiction, as indicated by the fanfiction archive at which you have found it.

Author's Notes: Thanks to everyone who hasn't given up on me yet and is still reading! I know, I'm slow these days, and that's not looking like it will change. My thesis is due in October, as is my PhD application, which will make for a very busy girl in the meantime as I continue to work full-time, promote my books and, occasionally, sleep! I am researching the ways writing for fandom (in fanfic or in commercial tie-in novels) benefits and improves writers in their skill and writing craftsmanship. If you are a long-term fanfic writer, especially one who also writes professionally but not necessarily, and you can talk about how fanfic has made you a better writer, I would love to hear from you!

Those who take the time to comment or review and leave your thoughts, I appreciate you so much. This fic is how I spend my very minimal downtime, and it's definitely not selfless – I get immense satisfaction from knowing you are out there in the world reading, engaging and reflecting on my work. Thank you so much. Thank you DontGiveUp for all your wordly love! I agree completely, the adoption scenario in the show was a big weak point for me, so unnecessary with only a few episodes left to go, but I'm working with what they left me with at the end of I Want To Believe. When life gives you lemons, or when X-Files gives me a weak plot point, my strategy is to try picturing the lemons as already lemonade and build the rest of my party menu around that. Make the adoption situation important to the arc, instead of a hindrance. Your theory is sound, and as for your vote, the story and I are on your side ;) Hope you love this chapter! Guest, June 2, sorry about that? I'd love to hear what you want to see, so I can write what you'll enjoy :) Guest, June 14a, thank you for your beautiful words xxx I am delighted that this story is bringing you joy. This chapter is for you, and people like you. Guest also of June 14 (I'm calling you b), I read that interview too! Definitely, when you rewatch that scene with the knowledge of where their relationship goes, he does look momentarily enraptured. Sigh. NiksLov, thanks for reviewing and for your honesty. I'm not offended and I don't disagree with your initial statement. William's chapters are the least involved with the main story and lack known characters; thus far they have little significance to the Hosts or MSR arc, and I enjoy writing them less. However, I'd be disappointed if after this long, you'd believe I was writing a story this massive, this complex and this involved, purely to lay the groundwork for a sappy family reunion. William is integral to my conspiracy and I would argue that for him to suddenly pop up now, 37 chapters in, without any preamble, would be considerably weaker. I'm not sure whether you would agree with that without knowing where I'm heading, but it was a plot point in the show that I felt uncomfortable with, and which I personally want some resolution in. Of course I hope that you keep reading and that I hear from you again, because I appreciate honest and respectful insight, but as an impatient reader myself, I'll understand if an irritating character is a distraction too annoying to overcome. Thanks once again for taking the time to comment – I really do appreciate it :)

Back to Mulder now, for a lengthy chapter, where length feels directly proportionate to how guilty I feel for leaving you all hanging. I have looked forward to this chapter for SO long and yet reaching it, it felt like pulling teeth to write. I hope it reads better than it wrote, and I hope to bring you some more material soon x

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Comfort is family. Comfort is looking in the rear vision mirror at intervals on a two-and-a-half-day drive and seeing three exhausted siblings passed out on each other's shoulders, crumpled jackets and food crumbs and half-done wordsearch books scattered across their seatbelted laps.

But family isn't only comfort. Family is completion, desperation, the urgent magnetic need to be together when you brush each other's energetic fields. The formerly-Johannsson-now-Collins family and their new town disappearing into the rear vision distance and a wide, empty highway opening before him, Mulder flattened his pedal, eyeing the gas indicator. Should be fine. He'd fuelled up a few hours back and the car was reasonably economical. Good, because he wasn't prepared to stop.

For him, family was one state away. In Wyoming. He'd driven straight through the place just a few hours ago, someone else's family passed out, exhausted, in every seat of his trusty old car. He'd had no idea as his car's balding tyres spun on Wyoming's roads that he was so close, within the same nationally agreed-upon geopolitical straight lines as Scully… and William.

I think we found him.

Scully and Skinner had maybe found William. Every bit as exhausted as the Johannssons he'd just smuggled across the country out of Massachusetts to their newly arranged home in Idaho, Mulder scrubbed at his probably red eyes. It was impossible. It was insane, too crazy even for him to believe, and yet the source – Skinner himself, a voice four years out of the past – was as credible as it got. They'd found him. Jesus, how? Walter Skinner's anxious, low voice on Scully's phone had read to Mulder like it was an accident, but how did you accidentally trip over a child hidden in the system? For fourteen years? Mulder hadn't even known she was looking. That bothered him maybe more than anything, more than the convenient unlikelihood, that she could have gone looking for their child after all this time of ignoring the past, of pretending to be okay with her own actions, and not told him. So what if they weren't talking? William transcended that arrangement, didn't he?

He growled at the whiny, reluctant car engine as he willed it faster. It had been on the road near-constantly for three days, Mulder and Erik Johannsson tag-teaming the driving through backwater towns and around common roadblocks. The destitute family he'd found hidden in a decommissioned transport warehouse had fought and grumbled endlessly once the initial novelty of being in a car on their way to freedom had worn off, but Mulder hadn't bored of their presence. In the stretches of silence their cramped nearness – Erik beside him, three middle-sized kids bickering or snoozing in the back – stimulated in him thoughts of his own child, and of the boy's mother, and car ride he regretted every day not taking with them.

The car ride out of DC and into oblivion together, where they would all still be, if he'd taken them with him when he left. It would have been like this car ride with this other family, covert, fearful, long, winding. But like this one, in the end the family triumphed, and tumbled gratefully from their seats onto their driveway and in through the doors of their new home.

Maybe his had, too, at the very end, long after he'd thought the book had been closed on him. Tonight he had intended to collapse on the second-hand couch that had, among other randomly selected op-shop furniture, been sent to the 'Collins' household prior to their arrival, courtesy of Sixty-Four's careful arrangements, but now through fate's greatest unexpected twist, he was back in the car he'd been unable to wait to get out of, and he was driving back the way he'd come.

You need to be here. I think we found him.

The impossibility kept rushing him with conflict, equal parts delight and wonder and hope and wariness and scepticism and uncertainty and doubt. William. After all this time? For his two closest friends – close being a relative term, considering he wasn't on speaking terms with either one of them – to simply come across him, today, after three days of Mulder moping over the same lost child, was pretty absurd. Despite Skinner's contact, there were piles of evidence against. First and foremost, Scully hadn't called. It was her phone number that had flashed up on the screen of the cell he kept perpetually charged up, just for her, the only person in the world to know that number, but it wasn't her face that flashed up in his mind when he heard the voice that answered.

If Scully had found William, and there was no doubt in her mind, she would have called him. He was sure. He was sure he hoped so, anyway; he had to allow for the fact that she'd grown and changed in their years together and apart, and he couldn't predict her like he could have twenty years ago. But still, Skinner had said I think, which meant there was doubt, and Scully wouldn't break their mutually agreed silence for I think.

There was doubt. She believed what she could prove, or what she truly felt, and nothing else. Whatever, whoever, they'd found, there was doubt for her. Mulder acknowledged that, and despite the warm ember of hope sparking childishly in his heart, was entirely prepared to be disappointed. Maybe he'd meet his son at the end of the drive, but probably not; maybe he'd hold the boy in his arms again on this very night, but most likely not. She hadn't called, he knew logically, because she didn't want to put him through that disappointment. She'd test the disappointment on herself before recommending it to anyone else, ever the scientist. Ever the martyr. Mulder didn't slow down or divert his course. How quickly can you be in Wyoming? The directions app had said two hours seventeen minutes when he left the house Levin's property investor contact had arranged for the Johannssons, and by now he'd cut that down to thirty-three minutes. He had used speed limits as guides for how much to slow down for curves and corners, but otherwise ignored them. Skinner said she was fine, but he'd also said she was shaken. Why, what had they learned about William, or the boy they believed to be William, before the call? Had he been raised by drug traffickers, or had he lost a limb in a freak childhood accident? What had they seen to put the coolest, calmest, most cynical duo of feds into such a spin?

"Do you have a William Scully checked in? Or any William?" he asked at the hospital reception when he breathlessly flew inside, miserable overheated car sagging in relief for this momentary break in the parking lot. He knew even before the nurse shook her head that it wasn't to be – it was too much to ask of the universe, to not only guide Scully and Skinner straight to the boy, but to send Mulder there, too, especially without more accurate detail, such as the boy's surname. Did he even get to keep the name she gave him, when he was adopted? The nurse said they were lucky tonight, not a lot of admissions, and no William anywhere in any ward. Mulder accepted this, reluctantly, though the first tendrils of the disappointment he suspected Scully of trying to protect him from broke through his outer walls. Not an in-patient. Maybe the boy was a visitor to a patient when Skinner 'found' him. Maybe the boy was the adopted child of a staff member who had joined the FBI agents in the lunchroom for a chat between their interviews and divulged details that indicated he might be hers. There was no way to know without following the few breadcrumbs he had, and those led to Scully. He lay his badge quickly on the counter, long enough for the nurse to see and recognise it, not long enough for her to see it was out of date. "Were my colleagues here earlier?"

"Yes, a man and a woman. I didn't speak to them, I'm sorry. I'm not sure of their names."

"That's alright." Mulder pocketed the badge, glad the nurse wasn't one to question his scruffy appearance after seeing the two probably pristine agents from before. He could picture them, Skinner and Scully, intimating in their supreme coolness and crisp professionalism. "If they were to stay in town overnight, where would they go? I don't know the area and my calls aren't getting through."

"Hmm, there's Golden's, which is the bigger complex that most visitors stay at," the nurse answered, "but any local will tell you to go to Rhonda's Inn. It's only small but much nicer, and out of the way."

Turning away with a word of thanks, Mulder got the strange impression of being watched, and looked around. The reception was unpopulated, the nurse's attention back on her screen. A hallway to his left provided an immediate corner for someone to hide behind, and he leaned aside, trying to see a shadow or any other indication of human presence. He waited.

Nothing. But that was a pretty normal outcome. He was just jumpy, set on edge by a poor sleep pattern and an uninformative and worrisome phone call.

He left quickly, wincing to hear the hauntingly Scully-like voice of his inner logic note with a little too much dry sarcasm that paranoia wasn't usually considered 'pretty normal' even after a weird phone call, and who in a rural Wyoming hospital did he think would be trying to spy on him anyway?

He got back in his car and begged it to switch on. His poor car gave him one final chance and agreed, and they reversed out, with one last glance at the small hospital. More of a medical centre, actually; what passes for a hospital outside of Thayne. Not having to stay was relieving. When Skinner had called from inside those walls, ringing on Scully's phone, and mentioned the hospital after being so evasive with his first couple of responses – how quickly can you be in Wyoming? She's here. I'm with her now – Mulder's thoughts had naturally spiralled. Scully. Dead. Hurt. Afraid. Oh god, she had been in an accident, hadn't she, an accident in lame-ass Wyoming of all places, almost definitely a set-up, and Skinner wanted to tell him face-to-face. Or her cancer was back, somehow after all this time, and this was where she'd come for secret treatments. Or they'd gotten to her, taken her again, and Skinner had only just found her, dragged out to fucking nowhere and dumped, and he needed Mulder to identify the body. But he should be able to do that himself. Unless she was totally mangled. Maybe there were only birthmarks from under her clothes with which to identify her, marks only Mulder or maybe her mother would know about.

No, thankfully. Just avoiding the phone. Typical, normal Scully behaviour. It seemed Skinner still didn't get it. He knew they were divided, didn't he? Hadn't Mulder told him, four years ago when they'd last spoken, to expect this? Weren't Skinner and Scully close enough that he would have to know where she stood with her former partner, even if she probably didn't really talk about it? Or at the very least, was Skinner not insightful enough to note that they were very deliberately not seen together, which should insinuate – if he wasn't personally up-to-date with their relationship status – that they were avoiding each other for a reason?

Skinner had sounded concerningly, Mulderishly paranoid on the phone, so Mulder made his way to Rhonda's. Out of the way. Quiet. The local favourite, less commercial. It was the one he would have chosen.

The battles were not done in his mind, conflicts of head and heart on numerous levels. Hope versus brutal honesty. Faith versus facts. Scully herself had told him to stay away, but Skinner said they might have found William. Scully had neglected to call, but Skinner had. Sixty-Four had warned that the Worldwide Family of Hosts had eyes on both Mulder and Scully, and may consider her expendable if she was too strongly linked to Mulder, if it became too obvious that she was integral to his plan, which was reason enough to keep his distance and argue with Skinner on the phone about whether she's already shaken was worth breaking that silence for.

It wasn't. She was strong enough to handle any case, anything beyond herself, and did not need his help. Running to her compromised their goal, gave their enemy a reason to harm or discredit her, and the mission was paramount. He needed to win this, to bring down the Worldwide Family of Hosts and expose it for what it was, and he needed her at arm's length to achieve that.

He shouldn't be going. But the mention of William had sent Mulder's resolve into a tailspin. Scully was a power unto herself, but when the case was her, and her son, and her choices, he found his doubts in her. Skinner said she needed him. If she had truly been faced with their child and things were less than ideal, Mulder could imagine that she actually did, for once, need him there, if only as someone to hate more than herself. After all, what was the point of the mission to end all missions if the real goal – Scully – was broken in the process?

Finding William at all was too good to be true. To find him and for the circumstances to be positive was simply asking too much, wasn't it? Skinner's short call had filled Mulder with anxiety and dread, and he didn't have enough information to make any assumptions, so he just drove on into the night, head swimming. Scully, if she really was fine, would fill in the blanks. She would flatten him with facts, dismiss his fanciful fears. Maybe she would introduce their long-lost son to him. Maybe everything was about to change…

The standard-issue, conventional vehicle parked between two of the sweet little log cabins was the first clue he'd wheeled into the right place. The second clue was the tall, imposing frame of Assistant Director Walter Skinner folded over, sitting on the top step of one cabin porch. He stood as soon as Mulder pulled over, and the swinging beams of his headlights briefly caught a worn, tight expression. His stomach dropped further.

Mulder killed the grateful engine and got out. Scully was not around, nor did she appear, annoyed with him for turning up unannounced, annoyed with Skinner for going behind her back in calling him here. William wasn't there, either. Skinner was ominously alone, and his expression looked no less worried to see Mulder here.

"Thanks for coming." Low, flat. No joy or excitement there.

"Where are they?" Mulder asked, rounding the car at a jog, the hope in his chest sinking like lead. Where is my family? "Scully, and William?" How long had it been since he'd been able to put those two names in a single sentence, and say it aloud? How long since he'd seen them both in the same room? He looked past Skinner at the cabin door, closed behind him. "Are they in there?"

Despite the dread growing inside him, he allowed himself to hope again. Reunion. Everything he wanted could be right behind that door. Skinner sighed and looped his thumbs into the pockets of his trousers as Mulder jogged up the steps to join him.

"She is," he confirmed. "We couldn't bring him." They stood a moment on the porch, looking at each other under the light of cute lanterns, seeing the way the world had aged the other. Skinner looked tired, and weary, like he was several steps past done with whatever he'd stepped into here with Scully. This wasn't his world. Then the sounds of the night returned to Mulder's senses: insects entertaining one another with their calls, the breeze whistling through nearby trees and hedges… the waterfall of a shower running. Skinner tilted his head toward the door uneasily. "She's been in there for almost an hour."

"What, in the shower?" Mulder asked, failing to perceive the issue that was worrying his old friend. His own mind was caught in a depressive loop of four words: We couldn't bring him. William was not here. As usual.

"I've knocked a few times," Skinner said anxiously, demonstrating. The rushing sound of running water did not shut off, nor did it seem to change, as it might if someone were to move under its stream. "I even went and asked the owner for a key to check on her, but she looked at me like I was a pervert." He looked back at Mulder, eyes fearful. "She wouldn't hurt herself, would she?"

Inside, his heart seemed to leap out like a startled cat, striking the walls of his rib cage painfully. The stream of water was perfectly constant, no creaks of footsteps or splashes of water bouncing off a moving body. Almost an hour. He hadn't considered this, not in his whole two-hour drive.

"Why?"

Skinner shrugged, uncomfortable. "I can't shake the thought, since she stormed in there. She seemed… not herself." It was prompt enough for Mulder. He dug in his jacket pocket for what was always there – his lock picking kit, in its little tin. Skinner seemed to check himself when he saw the kit, reeling his worries in. "We're probably overreacting, like the owner said. Agent Scully would never do what I'm thinking, what we're thinking. We're just tired. Not thinking straight."

"She's on antidepressants that she prescribes herself, so we can't say for sure she's thinking straight, either," he insisted, Skinner's paranoia seeping into his skin. There was so much he didn't know about this situation, so much he still didn't understand, and it only exacerbated the potential terror. The Assistant Director frowned deeply while Mulder fingered through the picks. "How bad was it? With William?"

"She didn't go in to see him," Skinner said, looking back at the door as Mulder found what he was looking for, "but she heard when I did. We barely spoke on the way back, and when we did, it was…"

"Strained," Mulder guessed, starting on the lock. It was a modern keyhole, jagged and reasonably complex. Properly secure. Not that that was going to keep him out. "Do me a favour and don't write me up for breaking into a female agent's sleeping quarters, will you?"

"Better you than me," Skinner replied, voice dry and grateful. The lock clicked unexpectedly soon, and Mulder pushed the door open. The eerily constant rushing of water became louder. The little cabin was neat and homely, sparsely furnished with just a bed and a small table and two chairs, and an unclosed door on the opposite side led to what had to be a tiny bathroom. The two men looked at each other while Mulder pocketed the lock picks. Skinner's expression was conflicted, embarrassed. "If she's fine, I can't be… you know… It wouldn't be right for me to see…" He coughed awkwardly, struggling to find the balance of professionalism and concern, which is a difficult line to locate when you're talking about your opposite-sex colleague, friend and former underling possibly requiring help but definitely being naked, and sending her ex-boyfriend in instead without her consent. "But if you need me-"

"I'll be right back," Mulder promised, slipping into the cabin and heading for the bathroom door. As with every moment since Skinner's call, he really had no idea what he was in for around the next bend, and what he feared was only one of many scenarios that could come to be. Scully really could be just fine, standing under the stream of water enjoying the warmth, losing track of time, in which case any intruder would be entirely unwelcome; or she could be lying on the floor of the shower with slit wrists, a victim of the inability she'd fostered inside herself to handle real emotions. She may have slipped over and banged her head, only now coming to, or she may be flat against the tiled wall, head back, hot as fuck with steaming water running over her incredible body, hand between her legs, fulfilling the fantasy he entertained every time he thought of 'Scully' and 'shower' in the same sentence, engaging in a wilful distraction from whatever she and Skinner had learned today.

The range of possibilities were immense, but please, let it be that last option.

At the bathroom door he paused and looked back at Skinner, who stood stock still, waiting for a cue. There was still no tell-tale change in the rush of shower water to indicate movement. Mulder had wondered in the car whether everything might be about to change, and a sickness grew inside him now.

Nothing would be better if he put it off, so he swallowed and leaned until he could see through the door.

The bathroom was little and neat, a cute country basin with handmade soaps arranged in a basket beside a toilet with a knitted toilet roll warmer thing on the top. A relatively modern glass cubicle shower was behind the door, and blessedly clear puddles of spilled water had formed on the tiled floor around it, soaking the bathmats and the abandoned clothing right through.

He saw Scully, and finally heard her. She didn't see him through the steamed glass door, mosaiced to obscurity with condensation and rivulets of shower water, and he backed away quickly before she could. All his worries for her shifted immediately, and he strode back to Skinner, realising what he hadn't bothered to ask, and what Skinner hadn't explicitly said, and what he simply could not reconcile.

"Is she-?"

"What happened?" Mulder demanded at the front door, fear driving him, making him irrational. He pointed back into the cabin. Scully in the shower should have made his day, not flipped it. "What made her like this?"

Skinner panicked. "Like what? What's wrong?"

"She's a mess. What did you see tonight?"

"God, Mulder. Does she need an ambulance?"

Ambulance? Mulder felt like the question was completely out of field, unrelated to what he was having trouble actually asking. "No. Walter, answer me! What happened with William? Is he…?" He couldn't swallow this time; his throat had gone dry, and it hurt to try. The hospital, the urgency – he'd told himself it was all too good to be true, hadn't he? "Is he alive?"

Skinner stared at him in the loud silent heartbeat that followed, looking exactly as confused and unprepared as Mulder felt. "What? Yes. Of course he is. Is Agent Scully?"

Rewind thirty seconds, and Mulder recalled that this had been a genuine shared fear of theirs, and he hadn't allayed Skinner's before launching into his demands. He inhaled deeply, slowing down his thoughts with effort. Of course he's alive. His son, their William, was alive, or at least the boy Skinner suspected of being theirs.

"She's not hurt. She's… not fine, but I'll take care of it," he assured his friend before he could stop himself. He shouldn't even be here, let alone staying longer, but he couldn't leave Scully like this, nor could he ask Skinner to do more than he already had. Skinner looked heavenwards, relieved. The water continued running in the background as Mulder hesitated, and made himself ask for more, unsure he'd like what he heard. "What happened tonight? How the hell did you find him, all the way out here? And why were you at the hospital?"

Skinner sighed and looked around the picturesque surroundings beyond the porch. "What I'm assuming is your case brought us out here – a mysterious file landing atop my inbox about a man back from the dead, which is probably just a day in the life for you, but happens a little too often these days for me to be comfortable with my place in the universe – and one of the witnesses attached to the investigation was a boy called William. His uncle was hurt in this Bletchley's rampage-"

"Morris Bletchley?" Mulder confirmed, surprised. Austin Dunn's childhood friend, disappeared during school and never heard from again until he turned up earlier this year out of the blue to offer Austin a puff from a vaporiser that infected his lungs. Skinner was exactly the opposite of surprised.

"Hmm. Had a feeling that came from you, whatever she says about working alone. Anyway, this William had the same birthdate and bizarre middle name as yours – no offence – and after dissecting what looked too much like a Super Solider and fending off fake officials trying to procure the body for god-knows-who-this-time, it really didn't seem that far-fetched that your kid would be in the centre of it all."

Mulder gazed into the cabin, thoughts in overdrive again. Skinner's words clicked into place in the huge internal puzzle he'd been piecing together over the past few months, and made perfect sense. The first generation of Super Soldiers were gone, but this new breed were certainly deserving of the same moniker. And for the Hosts to send false agents in their stead to collect their misplaced merchandise was not surprising, considering how hard they worked to keep their agenda and operations a secret. So Scully had found one, cut into it and made observations.

She was on their radar now whether Mulder had come tonight or not. And their son was tangential to all of this.

"Is the kid safe? Happy?"

"He's got a decent life, whatever she tries to tell you in there," Skinner assured him, nodding into the cabin to indicate Scully. "He's loved, which is why we didn't extract him. And he's safe – for now. I don't know how strong his connection is to the case, but I'm going to do what I can to keep this buried."

For the longest time, Mulder had questioned the Assistant Director's motives, but for many years now, he'd known to count him as one of his most trusted allies, and he felt a wave of graciousness for the man who would do and had done anything to help him. Even though half of the time, it felt like Skinner wasn't even on his side, he usually found if he dug deep enough that there was some other blockade Skinner was quietly working around to keep him safe from, and invariably, he found, Skinner was always on Scully's side, even when Mulder was going too far or scaring them.

"Thank you," he murmured, taking the doorknob and preparing to go back to Scully, but he paused. "Sir… Are you sure? About William?"

Skinner scratched his eyebrow and reached into his jacket. "Of course there's no certainty without a DNA test, which I intend to have performed as soon as I get back." He opened his badge and for a moment Mulder looked expectantly, unimpressed by the familiar motion. He squinted and looked closer. In the leather hinge of the badge's covering, a scattering of human hair. "She doesn't know, and I don't think she'd be happy if I mentioned it."

"You pulled hair out of Scully's kid?"

"Really? Still 'Scully's kid'? Who are you kidding? Scully's kid hid it there under the pretence of looking at my ID, then left me a cryptic message inside a sketch to ensure I'd find it." Skinner shook his head and carefully put the badge away. "He didn't get that covert bullshit from your partner. I think he had a pretty good idea what I was really doing there, and who I was representing. Aside from all this anecdotal evidence and awaiting genetic confirmation, no, I don't have any solid proof I spoke to the William, but," and he turned again to look forlornly into the cabin, toward the bathroom door and the relentless sound of the shower, shrugging helplessly, "after all these years of your partner frowning at me, glaring at me, suspecting me of something or another, I'd recognise those eyes in any face. Even yours."

It was proof enough, at least for the meantime, and Mulder looked down at his feet, heart twisting. They'd found him. It was real. And still out of reach for him, already a stone's throw into the past, just like when he'd come home from ten months away just a few weeks too late.

Maybe Scully had the right idea as to the appropriate reaction to the news of this day, and maybe Mulder would just go and join her.

"You'll want to listen to this," Skinner added, withdrawing a handheld recording device from another pocket and passing it over. "The last interview, I think I'll wipe rather than admit to evidence, but you should get to hear it." He nodded at the bathroom door. "Good luck. And thanks for getting here."

He turned and tread down the steps, still an imposing figure even in retreat, and Mulder closed the door quietly behind him and slid the recorder into his pocket with his lock picks and car keys. The noise of the shower was louder with the door closed, and the quiet human noises underneath it were more audible to him now than before. How had he missed that when he first came in, mistaking the silence for suicide or autoeroticism? There was no silence at all.

He should go, now, before she knew he'd ever arrived. Being here was in direct violation of his plan to undermine and combat the Hosts. It was integral that he should expose them; it was the complete validation of everything, everything he had worked for and everything he had sacrificed.

Scully included.

William included.

He went back to the doorway of the bathroom and looked at her, curled up on the floor of the shower like a kitten left out in the rain, the shower stream pouring over her. Her hair, dark with saturation, licked over her arms, which she had wrapped around her legs and her lowered face, and even through the wet glass he could tell that her shoulders shook and heaved with heart-wrenching sobs.

It was the very picture of desolation. He hadn't seen her like this since she'd had to admit to him she'd given away their child.

There was an argument Mulder and Scully had had a thousand times, a bitter, brutal, nasty, blameful argument where everyone ended up broken and battered like she was right now, which was why, in fact, they'd only ever had the argument inside his head, and never in real life. It was the argument where he admitted how much he hated her for what she'd chosen to do in desperation, without consultation with him, to their son. It was where he ranted at her for her selfishness and cowardice, for letting him down and for proving herself unworthy of being William's mother. It was where he told her she deserved any pain or sadness or guilt she felt for her actions, because it was all her fault. From there it spiralled quickly and painfully, because his imagined Scully spoke back on behalf of his subconscious, which reminded him that if was going to play the blame game, he had to dole out prizes for his own part in what she'd done. And his subconscious was far from kind.

His subconscious spoke logic, and it was very hard to argue with. She once had said he didn't define her but he knew his actions had defined her choices, and they both had suffered the consequences in the years elapsed.

And after all this time, in spite of every resentful thought he'd almost had but caught himself before fully acknowledging, he wasn't angry. He was still in love with her, and she was still his; and seeing her like this, a tiny heartbroken ball of anguish, he felt the burden of responsibility on his heart, and knew there was nowhere else he could possibly be in this moment and feel right about it, however hard this moment was for him.

This was his family. Comfort didn't just go one way.

Tentatively, Mulder stepped into the bathroom, unnoticed by Scully. His shoes he placed carefully on the sloppy wet tiles, mindful not to slip over, and he reached for the glass shower door. It creaked as it opened, and the cool off-spray of the shower peppered his arm as Scully abruptly looked up and instinctively shoved herself back, still crying. Her eyes were bloodshot and her pale skin blotchy, and her hair was plastered to her head and cheeks. When she saw him, her defensive tenseness fell away, and she burst into fresh tears that blended immediately with the heavy shower water.

"No," she begged, voice shattered, "not you."

Mulder winced and pushed the door open fully. "Yeah, I thought you'd say that."

He pushed his sleeves back as far as they would go and plunged in to turn off the taps, flinching when he felt the temperature of the water. Stone cold. He noticed now the lack of steam in the air, and the violent way Scully shook in her corner as she cried. Yet both faucets needed plenty of turning to shut off, indicating that this shower had begun warm or hot and had simply run on full stream until the hot water system had emptied.

And Scully either hadn't noticed or hadn't cared enough to turn the water off.

"G-Go away," she choked when the shower stopped, her voice muffled, her face hidden. Humiliated and miserable, she clutched her legs with one arm and curled the other around her head. Water ran off her in rivers over the pebbles of her goose-bumped bare skin.

"Come on," Mulder murmured, his chest aching to see her like this. He leaned over and gently took her upper arms in his hands. "Shit, you're freezing."

Her skin was painfully cold to touch, bloodless. He tugged her upright, holding her steady as she awkwardly unfolded and got her shaky legs underneath herself. She didn't fight, nor did she look up at him; she only shook and sobbed brokenly, and only took a step when he guided her out of the cubicle onto the soaked bathmat. She dripped and glistened, Aphrodite straight out of the sea, her body as he'd imagined in that brief second where he'd considered she might be pleasuring herself, but through her inconsolable tears he could hear her teeth chattering. Not an appropriate train of thought, Mulder. Sitting on a shelf on the wall was a single folded towel, which he grabbed and shook out. It was tiny. Bigger than a handtowel, not bigger than a gym towel. Insufficient. Still, he released her to wrap the excuse for a towel around her shoulders so she could dry off.

"Y-You sh-sh-shouldn't be h-here," she stammered, not moving. Her arms hung limply, her head hung, the towel hung over all of her, and she just cried. Shock? From what? Concerned for this version of Scully who didn't take every opportunity to do everything for herself, unassisted, Mulder rubbed her shoulders dry with the towel, running it down her arms, over her chest, mindful not to linger over her breasts, over her stomach, all of which just got wet again as her hair kept running with ever more water.

"Come on, you're alright," he reassured her quietly, running the towel over her hair, careful not to rub back and forth because that made it dry scruffily, he'd been chastised in the past. Through the damp flannel he squeezed cold water out of the ends, then let go and grasped another lock and did the same. Her eyes stayed tightly closed, even as he tenderly cradled her head in one hand and patted dry her hairline and face with the edge of the now-damp towel. Around her eyes her skin was warm, heated by the salt of her tears, but everything else – her nose, her cheeks, her lips, her ears – was deathly cold. "It's okay. You're okay. Does this place seriously only have one towel?!" he demanded rhetorically, having scanned the entire bathroom and seeing that there was nothing else. Maybe there was something in the main room, a drawer or a cupboard or even a pile of soft laundered towels on the bed he'd completely missed. "Come on," he said again, this time pulling Scully after him out of the bathroom. She followed clumsily, her legs and feet probably numb with cold and poor circulation thanks to her compressed position in the shower.

"You should go," she whispered in a rush between uneven breaths. "I d-don't want…"

"To die of hypothermia, I assume," he muttered, unsure whether she heard, looking around. He could gather, though, what she meant. She didn't want him to see her like this. Messy. Vulnerable. He didn't blame her. Too late.

There were no towels on the bed, and when he left her standing in the middle of the room to fling open drawers and to fruitlessly search the one open shelf, he came back empty-handed.

"I guess this place really does have just one towel," he admitted, wiping new drops off her chest and shoulders before kneeling in front of her to roughly dry her legs with an increasingly wet towel. Under his hands her legs shook like she might fall down, and it wasn't the good kind of shaking he might have been aiming for in the past when he knelt before her like this. The first few times he'd seen her naked, it had been as platonically asexual as this moment now and he hadn't had any untoward thoughts at the time, but back then he hadn't had a decade of outstanding sexual experiences in his memory to combat as he reminded himself, this was really not the time to notice their intimate proximity, or how absolutely gorgeous she continued to be, even as she cried, even as she shuddered to inhale.

Tentatively Mulder gripped her thighs and twisted her; she turned on the spot, uncharacteristically obedient. It was unnerving, actually, when they'd been at virtual emotional war since sometime 2012 and she'd fought him at every turn since, throwing her cold sharp knives of words and staring him down with those cold sharp eyes whenever he asked anything of her. It was a tough act, an impenetrable solid glass shield, ensuring he didn't get anything from her except what she could offer any stranger: indifference, professional distance, even disdain. He dried water off the curve of her ass, swallowing his conflicted thoughts at the accusingly vibrant scarlet of the ouroborus serpent tattoo, that little reminder of the disastrous consequences of sidelining or underappreciating her when the world started slipping from her control. Like now.

Her back, her side. He looked up at her as she coughed, and finally moved of her own accord, wrapping her wet arms around herself against the cold, like she was holding her emotions inside herself, or trying. She trembled all over.

"Shit, sorry." He was wiping her down with a wet towel, hardly helping matters. He stood quickly and threw it aside, apologising again as she turned almost automatically to face him, and roughly rubbed her arms with his palms, trying to warm her up. She was freezing, the Ice Queen no longer just in name, and another cursory glance around the cutesy cabin confirmed that there was nothing else to dry her with. He could warm her up, though. "Here," he said, leaning forward into her and rolling his shoulders back, tugging the sleeves of his jacket to hurriedly remove it. He swung it around and settled it on her shoulders, even as she shook her head tightly.

"Don't. It's yours," she muttered thickly through her tears, and shrugged like she wanted it off, but this was her stubborn, self-sufficient side coming back to life, and it wasn't to be listened to. He nodded and closed the front of the jacket over her folded arms, hiding her wet breasts from his corruptible eyes and locking his transferred warmth in with her, then wrapped his own arms around her and pulled her tightly against his chest.

"Yeah, but I don't look like Kate Winslet at the end of The Titanic," Mulder countered gently, rubbing her back and resting his chin on the top of her head. He felt her break at his playfulness, and she quaked in his arms as she started crying anew into his shoulder, pressing close, hiding from the world, not fighting him. He held her tighter, shushed her lightly, but otherwise just let her fall to pieces. What else was there to do? She'd found her son and hadn't been able to keep him. She wasn't in a place yet to talk about it, and the way she shook and sobbed, he suspected this was the most she'd let herself feel in a very long time, courtesy of those fucking pills. Speaking of: "Scully, where's your bag?"

He'd looked around the whole cabin looking for towels, and there was no suitcase or overnight bag, either. She had some trouble answering, though it was only one word after some thought. "C-C-Car."

"Do you want me to get it?" he asked, still rubbing her back, taking a lock of her sopping wet hair in his other hand and wringing it out on the floorboards when he felt her chin quivering against his chest, teeth still chattering uncontrollably. "Is your medication in there?" If ever there was a time it was appropriate for her to take mood stabilisers, now was it. But she shook her head. "Where are they?"

"Gone," she whispered, voice a little more substantial. She turned her face to ensure he heard her when she said, still avoiding his gaze, "I flushed them."

Mulder wasn't sure what to say to that at first. Flushed her meds, as in, down the drain? No longer taking them? That seemed to be the insinuation. "When?" he asked finally.

"After last time." Her breath hitched and she choked on a little sob. "Just one… less way…" She couldn't finish, and the next intelligible thing he was able to make out from her was almost a minute later of heartbroken crying, and sounded like, "Fucking… cold…"

Yeah, she was. She lifted one foot and rubbed it against the back of her other ankle. "Here, sit," he prompted, releasing her from his embrace and guiding her to the edge of the bed. She dropped down, and again he knelt in front of her, this time grasping her feet to check their temperature. "Jesus." Her clothes were on the wet bathroom floor and probably unsalvageable, so he untied his shoelaces and straightened to kick off his sneakers, then peeled his socks off and crouched again. She shied away uncertainly when he grabbed her ankle and rolled his warm, worn sock onto her foot. "After everything you've seen, you're grossed out by my socks?" he asked incredulously. He felt her calf muscle relax at the joke, and he continued with his work. "Baby, if through contact and association I was going to infect you with anything, it'd be reputation, not socks. There." He sat back on his heels and affectionately squeezed her feet through his oversized grey socks. She still wouldn't look at him directly, but she definitely seemed calmer. Family is comfort, and it was working its charm, on both of them. "Better? Granted, I've been wearing these for two days, but that just makes them warmer."

"And dirtier."

A constant surprise. "Oh. Our sense of humour's back, hey?" Mulder raised an eyebrow and hooked his finger in the neck of one sock. "Does that mean you don't want them?"

She pulled her shivering feet away from him and tried to suppress a hiccough, pressing blue-tinged lips together. Mulder got up, leaning past her to wrench the thick quilt and blankets of the bed back. He waited, a silent invitation, and after a beat she did as he hoped, shuffling herself onto the bed and under the blankets. Of course there was a temptation to climb in with her, fuelled by the argument in Virginia where she'd insinuated she would have liked him to on Christmas night, but he knew it was unwise. Firmly he tucked the bed in behind her, trapping her in where she would hopefully start generating some body heat.

The Scully-shaped bump in the bedclothes continued to quake, leaving him doubtful. Mulder retreated into the bathroom, scooping the lump of useless towel off the floorboards as he went. His hands and neck were wet from contact with her hair, and the front of his shirt was sticking to his skin, damp now. It was hard to feel bothered, though; the comfort he had given her in these last few minutes soaking back into his dampened skin, soothing him after a long couple of hours stressing, a long couple of days driving, and a long couple of years missing this kind of familiar intimacy.

In the bathroom he looked for something else to offer her to wear, but as he'd guessed, the runout of water from the shallow shower basin had eliminated this option for tonight. He shook out her inside-out and splashed wet clothes and hung them over the basin and the top of the shower walls, hoping they would dry off overnight. She'd undressed without much notice, apparently, though as he arranged her sensible lace underwear he tried very hard not to imagine this event in careful detail. She was probably crying at the time, and crying was unsexy, he reminded himself. Her gun and holster were strewn carelessly among her crumpled dress pants and twisted blouse. Ugh. He lay the holster over the toilet, unwilling to touch the gun. He didn't know if she'd been reissued with a weapon since he'd pulled that on her in Chicago, fuelled by the hate of angry love-torn spirits, and the few parallels between that night and this one – together with Scully in a motel room, her evident lack of desire to be there with him, the sound of the shower running with her naked under it – made him edgy, almost superstitious about the gun. Not that he thought he'd get into another atrocious argument with her and threaten to kill her, or that extremely hot making out in the dark was likely to be on the table.

He cringed when he lifted her jacket, its sleeve waterlogged and dark, and felt the weight of full pockets. Badge, notepad with one damp edge of every page, pen, phone. Shit. Mulder pressed the home button and the lock screen brightened, indicating no damage. Password protected. Good girl. Reputation wasn't the only thing she'd caught from him.

He went back out to her and laid the contents of her jacket out on the table, but took a guess at her password and got it on the first go. The home screen unlocked and he tutted lightly.

"Your password's too easy," he mentioned, and heard her scoff through the last of her tears.

"Apparently. Didn't keep Skinner out."

She didn't chastise him for breaking into her personal device, but nor did she go any further and express any resentment toward Mulder for attending at Skinner's request. She just lay under the blankets and shivered. Mulder glanced back down at her phone in his hand, this phone he'd been waiting to hear from for so long, until tonight, when the wrong person had used it to dial him in. For the right reasons. It was right, wasn't it, that he was there?

"You have two missed calls," he commented, thumbing through the options to check who it was. The answer annoyed him but he tried to keep his irritation out of his voice. "Warren Colt."

"Leave it."

Mulder did as she asked and switched off the screen, putting the phone down beside the rest of her things and leaning on the edge of the table. The room went quiet as he watched her. The tears had stopped. Her breathing was still uneven, punctuated by blitzes of chattering teeth. From here he couldn't see her face; since he'd arrived she hadn't let him get a good look at her face, and she'd tried her best not to look at him at all. Typical embarrassed Scully behaviour. Embarrassed or secretive.

"You sh-should go. It's… not safe."

He scratched his ear. "I know."

He shouldn't be here. Really. They both had a lot to lose if anyone other than Skinner knew he was in this cabin with her. The room was paid for by the Bureau credit card, no doubt, and she was here on official business, and if her presence here was linked with his, she would have questions to answer back in DC. Likewise, if Mulder was being watched or followed by the Hosts (though he was reasonably sure he wasn't, or he would never have travelled with the Johannssons) they now had their material with which to discredit Scully before her case could get any traction, and proof that she mattered to him. Those same sick bastards had killed what mattered to Dr Gray, and would have done it over and over again if he and Scully hadn't accidentally stumbled into that conspiracy and autopsied Rebecca Johannsson before knowing what this was.

Scully still didn't. A million times in the last few weeks as his understanding became fuller, he'd fantasised about calling her, turning up on her doorstep or grabbing her hand on the street and pulling her into a crowded marketplace where no one could follow them, and telling her everything he'd learned. He'd imagined her incredulous look, replaced slowly by that reticent okay-I'll-entertain-it look, eventually replaced by that most coveted look of all: acceptance. Revelation. Belief. Several times he'd come close, but he'd promised Sixty-Four he'd keep his distance, that he'd stay the course and finish the job, for all their sakes.

Well, he'd come here for William, and William wasn't here. He'd entered out of fear for Scully's safety and sanity, and Scully was perfectly safe and apparently, after an hour-long shower and a few weeks drug-free, clean. He'd stayed to comfort her, and she was now somewhat comforted, certainly warmer and drier and calmer than when he arrived. He should go now. She didn't want him here; she'd told him to leave, she hadn't called him in the first place and she wouldn't look at him. Plus, whatever she'd admitted in Virginia the last time they met, she'd still walked out on him three years ago and hadn't looked back. Wasn't that a good enough reason to leave her alone, if none of the others sufficed?

"Are you going now?" she asked softly, no opinion expressed in her voice, testing his resolve. He looked down at his feet, wiggling his bare toes.

"Not while you're wearing half my outfit, I suppose," he mused. It wasn't like he needed his socks or jacket, but it might be difficult for her to dispose of discreetly, the jacket especially. His brain was always thinking like a forensic analyst, considering how he might be caught, pinned down. "And you've got my keys."

She seemed to only now take note of the lumps in the front of his jacket, and shifted slightly underneath the blankets as she felt through the pockets. "Do you want them back?"

There were really no logical reasons for staying, yet his feet wouldn't budge, and his fingertips found their way to the cross at his throat. Wasn't this how he'd lost her in the first place, walking out on moments like this, when she needed him, in favour of the job? Wasn't this what led to the loss of their son? Scully wasn't just his former workmate and his last girlfriend. If she was nothing else, then yes, he should leave now. But she wasn't. She was his partner. She was the mother of his child. She was his best friend.

"Fuck," he muttered, glancing helplessly heavenward. Who was he kidding? He wasn't going anywhere. His hair and fingerprints were already all over this place, if anybody bothered to strip it apart looking for proof. "Scully. Scully," he said again when she didn't respond or move. "Scully, look at me."

"No." Her reply was quiet but firm.

"Why not?"

She was silent for a beat too long. "I don't want to see it."

"See what?" Mulder asked, confused. He leaned forward from the table, trying to see her without actually approaching. "Me?"

"Your look," she choked out through a tight throat, struggling not to cry again. The curves in the blankets that designated her position shifted as she curled tighter, smaller. "Everyone… Everyone whose opinion ever m-mattered to me, I disappoint. I disappointed my father when I left medicine. I disappointed my mother when I left my faith. And y-you." She drew a wet, shaky breath, and he wished he was holding her. "I let you down more than anyone else, a constant disappointment to your high expectations of me. When I'm too weak, when I'm t-too slow. Whenever I didn't s-stand up for y-you. The p-p-pills, our baby, our work… I've disappointed you over and over, and I see that look on your face in my head every night, reminding me how utterly I've f-failed you, and my mom and my dad but mostly you, and," she exhaled in a rush and inhaled again quickly before she could lose her nerve, and said all the rest in a hurry before she could break into sobs again, "and his is the only face I've n-never seen with that look, and right now, I can't look at you, because I just know he's got your face and your look and I couldn't… I c-couldn't go in and see him looking at me like that-"

She broke, but around the part where she'd referred to herself failing him he'd broken too. He shoved the blankets aside and climbed into the bed behind her, wrapping himself tightly around her, pulling her close by her hips so she fit perfectly against him, lifting her by her stomach to slide his other arm underneath her and enveloping her in his arms as she started crying again. He pressed his face into the crook of her shoulder and neck, breathing her familiar scent like an addict with cocaine, her wet hair dampening his short beard and his own hair. He tried his best to hold her together but the more she opened up the less of her there seemed to be to hold, and the less substantial he himself felt as she whittled him down with her raw words.

"I betrayed him," she managed brokenly. "He was my b-baby and I gave him away. I was supposed to take care of him, I was his mother. He was meant to be able to count on m-me. He trusted me and I wasn't strong enough to k-keep him, and I let him go. What kind of mother does what I did? I've kept this b-beautiful image in my head of his precious face, his eyes looking up at me full of love and trust I didn't deserve, and tonight I betrayed him – and you – again because I'm a coward, and I couldn't, I just couldn't look at him, and s-see that memory replaced with your disappointment. How can he think anything else of me?" she demanded wildly when Mulder only whispered "Shhh…" into her ear and tightened his grip on her. "I can argue I thought it was for the best, but it wasn't. He didn't get a choice, you didn't get a choice, my mom didn't get a choice, and now after f-fourteen years of lying to myself, wanting to believe I did right by him, my son is exactly what I hoped to save him from: an orphan, and one goddamn step away from them. And I can't do a single fucking thing to help him except walk away again, because all I'll do is make things worse because of my fucking notorious name."

Her words settled heavily on him, not all of them making sense with what little context he had for tonight's encounter but the tone and the slathering of guilt weighted disproportionately. Her notoriety was one of the ways this was his fault, not hers; despite her brilliance, the name Dana Scully was known in their circles as that troublemaker Fox Mulder's sidekick and associate, and she was never going to get a distance from that. This inescapabilty was what had put her in the position of having to decide whether she was the best guardian for William, and now it was impacting her ability to protect him once again.

"I failed him," she continued berating herself. "I failed you. I had no right. He was yours, too. He was yours. And now he's nobody's. I sent him away to be loved and raised by other people, and you never got to see him smile or laugh or sit up, and I hate that I did and you d-didn't, and those other people got to see him walk and feed himself with a spoon and ride a bike and climb a tree and start school… I took all that away from you." She ducked her face further away, burying herself into the damp pillow. He heard her whispered question: "How can you be here with me after what I did to you?"

A difficult question to answer succinctly. Mulder shifted his head to rest on hers. "You know why I'm here."

"I gave your son away without asking you. I betrayed you in the worst way."

"Scully-"

"I lost faith in you," she blurted miserably. "That's why I did it. I didn't think you were ever coming back, even though you s-said you would, even though you p-promised. I gave up on you, and when I did that, I lost something. I couldn't see the light at the end of the tunnel anymore, couldn't imagine h-how I'd find a way to protect him. I should have waited. I should have known you would come through. I should have been as strong as you believed I was." She tensed, holding emotion in with difficulty. "You shouldn't have come here tonight. You should have gone to him instead."

"Scully," he said, tugging his arm out from under her so he could prop himself up on it and try again to get her to look at him. She wouldn't. "Scully, I'm where I want to be."

She shook her head and struggled for an even breath. "We found him. We found William. And I didn't call you, not because I didn't want you to know, because I didn't believe in him at first, because apparently I don't believe in anything-"

"You don't," Mulder interrupted, "but luckily for us, reality, even insanely unlikely reality, doesn't require belief in order to perpetuate."

"Luckily. I don't feel lucky."

"Skinner says William's alive," Mulder reminded her. "That's something we didn't know for sure before tonight, and that's a blessing we never thought we'd have. He told me he's relatively safe and happy. Scully," he prompted gently, "what else did you want?"

"I wanted him to have more than we could have given him. I wanted him to have a dad he could see every day, but the man who adopted him, his dad, is dead. I wanted him to have a mom who wasn't an abductee and a person of interest to all our enemies, and I wanted him to have a mom who'd always be there and protect him from all the worst things in life, but I didn't save him from anything. His mom died. I sent our son away to protect him from everything you and I inevitably attract, lies and conspiracy and death and danger, and all I gave him was a family destined to die anyway, and yesterday he was less than a yard away from Morris Bletchley when he was shot dead, and that man is definitely someone's science experiment."

"Yeah, he probably was," Mulder agreed vaguely, not wanting to get into the case with her while there was so much William stuff he wasn't clear on, and while this topic was finally open between them. Poor William, losing his parents not once but twice. Fortunately he would have no memory of Mulder walking out the door, or of Scully handing him over. "You can't justify your self-punishment with talk about destiny when we have absolutely no evidence to support that concept here. The adoptive parents didn't die of destiny, just like you and I haven't survived this long thanks to destiny. Every choice we've made has defined our paths through life and time, and what if we'd made one single choice differently? We might not be here tonight. Or you might and I might not, or vice versa. The point is, if William had grown up with us instead of the family you gave him to, you can't guarantee it would have been better than what he got. In retrospect you're thinking if I'd just held onto hope in Mulder another few weeks, we'd be together now, but you have no proof of that. We couldn't have hidden as effectively as a family of three, or travelled as quickly – we might have been caught. He may still have been hunted; any number of unknown factors may have separated us. We might have lost him some other way, without the chance you had by being proactive to ensure he went somewhere they couldn't reach him. He's alive, and he's out in the world, not in someone's lab or locked in some cult's dungeon. Be grateful, Scully. And forgive yourself: you made the best decision you could, and in that moment, it must have been right, or you would never have done it."

She was starting to calm down again, though still heavy with misery, still shivering slightly with cold. "It's not my forgiveness I need."

"Yes, it is," he insisted, unwrapping his other arm from her middle to rub her outer thigh. Palm only, fingertips deliberately raised. Fingertips were sexy, provocative, and that was not the tone he was trying to set. Comfort. Warmth. She didn't react, presumably unaware that her naked lower half was pressed against his jeans. He was not unaware. "You've had mine for a long time. It's only you we're both waiting on." He paused a while, battling with the words inside himself. Her raw vulnerability was speaking to his. "I need your forgiveness, too."

"There is nothing you've done that will ever equate to what I did to you," she whispered. "You never gave up on me. You never betrayed me. You would never have given our-"

"I was his father," Mulder said fiercely, making her flinch at the unexpected passion in his voice. "I should have been there. I should have been there. For him, and for you most of all. I got it all wrong, fucked up to the highest degree. I shouldn't have waited as long as I did to try and hide you; I should have had you out of DC long before you were close to due, and if it still turned out I needed to leave you for a while…" He trailed off, embarrassed. Now, to speak of, it sounded so impossibly ridiculous. A reason, for leaving his partner and newborn alone and defenceless against enemies like the ones he knew would come for her, even for a while? Even if his partner was as competent and incredible as his? "I should have been with you. You shouldn't have needed to make your choice, because you shouldn't have been alone. You should have been able to rely on me. You and William were my family, my responsibility, and I did what I always do – I put the cause first."

She swallowed uneasily, uncomfortable with shifting the blame. "You had to. We agreed."

"Did I have to? I don't know now. I would do everything differently if I could do that time over. I was meant to be back months earlier, like we'd discussed, but there was always something else to chase, always some new lead. I was selfish. Undeserving of him, which is why I wasn't shocked when Skinner told me what you'd done. It seemed fitting." He shouldered the blanket off his arm and raised it to her head, smoothing her hair as it started to curl. She usually avoided getting it wet if she didn't have a hairdryer handy. God, he missed having her around so all these little anecdotes of useless information had some sort of context. "I stayed because I'm arrogant and I always think I know best, like you've said in the past, and I didn't want to know any different. I didn't want to know I'd left you to deal with impossible challenges and that I was failing my family."

"Mulder," she murmured, the first time she'd said his name all night, "you were saving the world."

"Maybe." In a roundabout, long-term way, he'd believed he was, and maybe it could be argued now that he'd been digging up the groundwork then for what he was now doing, in trying to save the world. "It cost me mine, though."

Silence. Did he imagine it, or did she shuffle slightly closer when she shifted next? She seemed to take a long time processing his words.

"There's no destiny, Mulder," she reminded him finally, softly. "If I can't argue could have, should have, neither can you. We don't know what would have happened if you'd stayed. Maybe they would have come for all of us. Maybe Skinner would be out here today identifying our fourteen-years-dead skeletons, dug out of some ditch, and maybe our son would have still ended up an orphan, but gotten stuck in the foster system instead of ending up here with his uncle. Maybe we would have been gloriously happy, but we don't know."

"That's right, we don't. We only have what we know today, and what we know in our hearts. You, Scully," he said, taking her chin in his hand and turning her face so she had to look at him with her swollen, red-rimmed eyes, still shockingly blue, "are not a failure. You are not a disappointment, and look at me: I am not disappointed by you. That pain and guilt you feel? That's what you feel because you're a mother, the best mother – listen to me," he insisted when she tried to pull away. "I know you. You would have done anything for our child, and you did. You broke your own heart rather than let him come to harm. You risked us, knowing I might never forgive you, and your relationship with your mother."

She stared at him. "She hasn't forgiven me."

"I don't think that's true. In any case, she never understood the extent of what we wanted to protect William from. We couldn't stop them coming for him. Not many parents could make the sacrifice you did. I couldn't have done it. It doesn't make me the better parent, Scully, far from it. It makes me the coward, and you righteous, like always." He felt that mesmerising pull that came with sustained eye contact with her and played the game, holding out. "I have learnt so much from you."

"We're pathetic," she sighed, and he let her chin go. "Twenty-three years and we still can't agree on anything, not even whose fault it is that we're miserable."

It was so stupid, so stupidly true, that Mulder snorted with amusement, and he saw the first radiant crack of a smile at the edge of her mouth. Her lips no longer trembled, and colour was returning to them. With affection he touched the corner of her lips, trying to catch it, and stroked her cheek. Her lashes fluttered down, hiding the blue and the red, breaking eye contact before the usual intensity could build up, the last time they were in a bed together occurring suddenly to him and maybe to her, though the circumstances were very different and he was quite sure they weren't facing any ghosts this time.

"We'll just have to agree to disagree, as always," he said eventually. "How do we always go forward from an impasse like this? We've only been here a million times."

Scully moved in his arms. "We go back to the facts." She had stopped shivering; she pushed the blanket back enough to release her arm, and she was holding the recorder from Skinner. No – it was hers. He recognised it from Rebecca Johannsson's autopsy, having to edit his own voice off the recording. She looked at him again, this time of her own volition. Eyes red and itchy, skin raw and make-up free, hair a damp mess, she was as lovely as ever. She was here. "Our son's alive."

It was relieving to hear it from Skinner but to hear it from her made him smile. "I want to know everything."

Her expression faltered slightly and she turned her gaze back to the recorder. "I don't know much. I didn't meet him – I couldn't-"

"And that's okay," Mulder insisted, but she spoke over him, determined that he should hear it.

"Not just for me, for him, too. I didn't want to be the bitch birth mother who abandoned him, but more than that, I didn't want to be the birth mother who walked in where the mother he loved walked out." She fidgeted with the recorder. "Her name was Sarah. The woman who loved my baby, kissed his bruises and sent him to school when he was big enough. She was called Sarah, and she died, in that same ward where we found him. If I'd come looking for William sooner, I could have saved her-"

Sarah. "No 'could haves'," he reminded her. "Of course you would have done what you could to help Sarah if you'd been able at the time, but the truth is, we had no reason to come looking for him before now. We were blessed to have him for the short time we did but aside from that, you and I are, generally speaking, cursed. We've never been safe, we never would have been, and we're not now." He paused. "William doesn't know about us, does he? Skinner said he might."

Scully shrugged against his chest. "I don't know. He said some odd things. He knows he's adopted." It was her turn to pause, still playing with the recorder. She almost smiled again. "He goes by Will."

It was the last thing either of them said for a while, revelling in the idea that their William – a silenced character in the myth of their long life together – was a real person, out there in the world. Somehow, the taking of a nickname, even one they might have given him anyway, made him more real, more believable. It gave him substance.

Scully waved the recorder weakly. "Do you want to hear his voice?"

It wasn't the first on the recorder but they rewound and fast-forwarded and skipped through the voices until they found where Skinner's voice, low and gravelly and probably quite intimidating to a child, identified the particulars of the case and of the interview.

"Is this going into federal evidence? This interview?"

"Is that him?" Mulder asked before he could stop himself, because of course that was the other speaker, the interviewee. Unconsciously he reached for the device in Scully's hand, the closest he would come tonight to touching his son, and he lightly fingered the plastic edge, feeling the faint vibration of sound emitting from the little speaker panel. Will. It sounded nice, a name for a nice kid, which he hoped his had turned out to be. And his voice… "He's a westerner." It almost made him laugh, though it wasn't funny, just… incredible. Real people developed regional accents. Ideas didn't. This was real.

Scully didn't have much to say as they listened, but she splayed her fingers slightly, and Mulder slid his in between, holding the device with her, holding her hand over the sound of their lost-and-found child. This was the intimacy he'd been missing for all these years. Family, or the closest he might ever get to the three of them being together again. William's voice laced around them, warming him with wonder. The tiny baby he'd only held a few times was now a full, real person, with a voice, and opinions, and knowledge, and questions, and a sense of humour. He smirked and sniggered more than once to hear their exasperated friend try to remain patient with some of the boy's quips.

Skinner and Will talked at first about how the interview would be held in evidence, then about Will's interest in law enforcement – "Not interested in law enforcement like on current affair specials – you know, 'his psychological profile demonstrates a long-held fascination with law enforcement'; not a terrorist, not a serial killer, whatever Trip told you. Just, like, interested" – and Will confessed to plagiarising assignments and skipping school after provoking a bully with accusations of schoolyard masturbation over 'ginger orphan midgets'. Mulder winced; his son had had his head smacked into a desk for that one, unsurprisingly. He'd survived similar lapses of judgement at that age and related strongly. They talked about some sort of violent attack the boy was witness to. Skinner was clever with that topic, careful not to give away too much, and the conversation about some possible suspect was delicately handled, too, though the boy had some pretty strong views on that. Mulder felt Scully tense in his arms as though preparing herself for something, and actually felt her flinch when Will's voice said, "I only know that you don't abandon someone you love."

"That was for me, I know it," was all she said on that run-through, and Mulder tried to imagine having to hear all this firsthand, from outside the door, knowing your child is just on the other side. He nestled closer to her, heart twinging. She wasn't the only one guilty of abandonment.

Finally Skinner's voice took them clear of the heavy stuff, and then Will was animatedly explaining a detailed and playful plan for getting Skinner to remember him long enough to hire him in the future. His kid was funny, or at least, the kind of funny he would appreciate, maybe not others. Not everybody found Mulder funny, which was fair enough.

His kid was wasn't just an idea or a sad memory that might never have happened. He was real, out there right now.

And then it was over.

They listened to it all over again, and this time Mulder listened more closely to what was said, not allowing himself to get as lost in the magic of his son's voice. He asked clarifying questions of Scully, and she answered as best as she could, pausing the recording occasionally. Yes, William watched Morris Bletchley take a bullet in a public street. Yes, he was okay. No, there was no definitive evidence that Will was a target, but of course she was uneasy about the possibility. She squeezed for pause. Their son's voice cut off.

"I told Skinner it's all coincidence, and maybe it is," she said, voice husky from her earlier crying. "He wants it to be a simple one-off revenge-and-money thing with this Kearney. I don't think that's it. William's right, it doesn't fit. I think if they wanted him, and they knew he was here, he'd be gone. They'd have him." She twisted slightly, tilting her face toward him. Her hips slid against his groin. She was a huge distraction, her worried expression only a slight dampener. "What have you heard? You've got your ear to the ground on this, no doubt. Have you heard-"

"I haven't heard a thing about him," Mulder assured her honestly, thinking back, hard. Not any indication from Levin's band or any of his associates about a boy of interest, nothing in his short exchanges with Sixty-Four. Gray said nothing at the Lion's Share about Scully's child, didn't appear to know they were ever an item, which made sense since he was dead for most of their romance and most of Will's life. "I'm in on the ground floor and I can't tell you much more than that, but there's been nothing said about William. Skinner's call was a shock. This interview is a shock. I can't think of any reason Morris Bletchley would come for Will, or how he would have found him." He released her hand to run his along her arm, from her shoulder to her elbow, back and forth along the leather of his jacket. "You'd be the first to know if I had."

She rolled away from him again, sighing, apparently oblivious to the effect she had on him, though that was becoming difficult to not notice. She continued the recording, and she cringed again at the hurtful line though she knew it was coming, and then they listened to her interview with Gary Milne, the man raising Will.

"I liked him, what I saw of him," Scully admitted while she rewound, "which wasn't much, but I liked something about him. He seemed…" She found the right spot. "He seemed like the kind of man I was hoping William would go to, if he couldn't have you."

It was a reassuring sentiment, and as Mulder listened to Scully and Skinner interview the new voice, through the slur of tiredness and painkillers he could hear the intelligence in the questions and the thoughtful answers. Milne had the air of a man who had his shit together, stable and placid and measured, which Scully would like, even if she couldn't articulate it.

He listened attentively, soaking in all she'd learned today, and at his insistence they moved on to the autopsy recording from the afternoon. He glanced down at her as her voice, calm and methodical, described the state of Bletchley's unreal lungs and the samples she was taking. She'd taken leaps and bounds from where he'd left her in Virginia, and despite the circumstances he felt a glimmer of pride. He'd known she could manage this investigation from her end, with the help of allies like Skinner. She was tougher and more dogged than she knew.

Catchphrases caught his attention and were filed away in his busy brain with the rest of what he knew, though he tried not to interrupt. A few things stuck, impossible to file, because even for him, they defied belief.

"Nasopharyngeal carcinoma. God, I hate that name. I never thought I'd hear it again," he admitted when the silence after the recording went on too long. Bits of metal implanted in the back of the neck, missing time, no memory, infertility. Sarah Van de Kamp was another one? He made himself back up. "Normal people get that too, though, right? Not that you're not normal – well, you're not," he amended immediately. "But it's not restricted to cases of government abduction?"

"No, Mulder. 'Normal' people are blessed with the same suffering as what I went through. But the year she went missing, the chip, everything adds up to the same answer. William's mother was part of the same program I was."

"You don't believe that," he insisted. Scully shrugged her shoulder against him. "That's… You would never believe a longshot like that. What are the chances that of all the women in the country looking to adopt, William would go to another abductee?"

"Extreme," Scully confirmed, "but not outside the realm of extreme possibility." She gave him a look over her shoulder, and he shook his head, bemused. If his self of twenty years ago could see him now, lying in bed with his infuriatingly sceptical and much-desired partner (naked, let's not forget: the hot partner is hotter than ever and naked) with her lecturing him about maintaining an open mind. "Why would Gary Milne lie? It could be argued that it became more likely because the pool of women was limited only to those hoping to adopt, hence increasing the likelihood that they would be infertile and unable to conceive their own, and within that pool of infertile women, anyone who had previously been abducted-"

"Alright, alright; but I thought you were the last one from your program?" He remembered the pain in her face when she knew the other women had died. He remembered his own desperation to save her from that.

"I thought so too. But if Sarah never connected with the Mutual UFO Network, and they didn't tell her to check for the implant, it might have – seems to have – taken her many years to notice it and to take it out. I wouldn't have noticed it without their prompting."

"Okay, but all the people who didn't take their implants out were called on in those mass exterminations, remember. Skyland Mountain, Kazakhstan… Pennsylvania. You were, against your own will."

"Not everybody died," she reminded him. He shook his head.

"No, but Sarah Van de Kamp wasn't one of the names of the survivors found with you."

"I knew you'd remember details like that. What about Sarah Milne?" Still he shook his head, and she kept thinking. "I don't know what to say. We don't know how many 'lighthouses' remained to call abductees before the events at the dam. Sarah may have been too far away to feel the call that brought me there, and hers may have never come. We'd need to see a list of names, and we've never found any such document, if it even exists." She fell silent, her fingers fidgeting with the recorder. "I wish to God I'd known about her. I wish I could have told her to put the damn thing back. After the dam, the microchip was relatively safe. I hate that William watched her suffer and die of something I could have prevented."

"From something that almost killed you," Mulder reminded her. "If only one person could be saved from this – if God said so, or destiny decreed it, or statistical probability insisted upon it – then I am so grateful it was you, and I am willing to bet Sarah Van de Kamp would be grateful, too, because if you had died, there would be no William for either of you to love. Besides. We've talked about this already. Maybe you could have prevented the cancer, told her everything, maybe you could have saved her from that suffering and death – only for her to die in a car accident a week later. Maybe with William in the backseat. We can never know the ripple effects of our actions, Scully. One thing leads to another." He nodded at the recorder. "Who would have thought when Austin Dunn gave us the name Morris Bletchley that we'd up following it to our son?"

She didn't seem to find that as comforting as he'd hoped. She slipped her hand behind her neck, under her hair, silent for a long time, looking conflicted. On the table on the other side of the room, her mobile vibrated suddenly, a call going unanswered, but she didn't react, even when Mulder pushed himself up on his elbow to look over, ready to go get it for her.

"Don't bother," she muttered. "It'll be Colt."

Ugh. "Agent Bieber. Shouldn't you pick up? He's called twice already."

"He's not a joke, Mulder. I didn't let them make fun of you; I'm not going to let you make fun of him. I trust him."

The phone kept shaking, shivering like Scully straight out of her shower, only now she was deliciously warm. Mulder resumed smoothing her hair, unable to resist all the opportunities to touch her, unimpeded, uncensored, unwatched. Nobody around to perform for, nothing between them but a jacket. This, tonight, was his Scully, Scully stripped of all her angry uptight masks, broken down to the raw essentials. She didn't seem to have the strength to shove him away or tell him off, and she certainly was off her game of knives, offering so few nasty jibes. This was the Scully he always tried for, when they crossed paths – the Scully who forgot to be mad and just behaved normally, honestly. His best friend.

"Alright, I'm sorry," he said, genuinely, respecting her argument. He was being unnecessarily hard on the kid, considering they'd never met, and it was hardly Colt's fault he was Mulder's replacement. "If you trust him, that's good enough for me." It wasn't, but it would have to be. "He keeps calling. He may need you and your expertise, Senior Agent."

"Now you're mocking me," she said, but she didn't sound mad, and she moved on quickly. "He's in Kentucky, conducting an interview with a pair who think I've met them, when I haven't. I've got you to thank for that mix-up, I suppose?"

"Stephen Powell?" The caller gave up, or it went to message bank. "A magician never reveals his tricks."

"You know everything, don't you," Scully asked, her voice not inflecting upwards as in a question, just lowering like she was making a statement of fact. Her hand seemed to tighten on the back of her neck. "You know how this all ties together, whatever Colt's learning in Kentucky and what Bletchley is and why Rebecca Johannsson was in that morgue with her lungs eaten out of her chest, why that morgue was sanitised and the surveillance stolen, and how Natalie Harlow was benched for opening the Engel case and why A.D. Kelley keeps asking questions about you. You know how Henry Gray, Reece Dwyer and Morris Bletchley are alive and young when they should be dead or old, and you even know why three people pretending to be the CDC tried to elbow in on us today and take Bletchley before I could autopsy him."

"I don't know everything," Mulder corrected cautiously, playing with the ends of her hair. "I don't know anything much about Bletchley or what he was doing here, but I'm not surprised they tried to stop you."

"Did you know I'd met one of them? Dr Lansdowne, the medical examiner at Berkshire County Morgue who tried to convince me I was never there and that Janae the assistant didn't work there anymore, was in Thayne today as Dr Petersen, CDC. It was the same man, Mulder."

"I believe you." Not so slick now, Worldwide Family of Hosts. Scully had a good memory for faces. "Sometimes it feels like they're everywhere. I suppose this is how. All playing roles, all playing parts."

"Are you going to tell me who they are?"

"No." He smiled apologetically, feeling strangely lonely. He wanted to tell her. He wanted to talk the whole thing over and hear it all out loud, get her perspective and her brilliant brain onto it. "One briefcase of leaked CIA documents and a room full of Dunn rifles says there's a delicate balance between telling you too much and not enough, and I'm going to play that very carefully this time. If you can't prove it or explain how you know it, it's no good to your case. It's not fair to lump it on you. It's not safe."

Her fingers moved under her hair. "It's frustrating. Sitting behind the desk on this, it's so big and grey and vague. Every dot I connect matches up with another one on the opposite side of the board, seemingly unrelated, and the web just keeps getting murkier and messier and more massive. I don't think I'll ever get a handle on it. I wish you were working it with me."

"I am," he reminded her, "and you will. You're the best investigator in the Bureau. I wouldn't trust anyone else on this."

"Another opportunity to let you down." But she didn't sound too down about it. "I understand why you can't tell me more. And you shouldn't. I already teeter between 'authoritative' and 'insane' in my team's books, I think. The way Dr Harlow looks at me, halfway between impressed and fearful, it takes me back." She sighed. "She's probably right to look like that. Just tell me: is it as massive and incredible as it feels?"

"World-shattering," he confirmed. He hesitated. "They'll kill us for taking a wrong step."

"So what else is new?" she asked, and his smile grew wider at her hint of dry humour. "It's not safe for either of us, Mulder. Someone's out for you. Should you consider backing off?"

"No. I'm in too deep, I'm too close. I have a plan. And the goal hasn't changed." He let that hang between them for a moment, a reminder to her. She seemed to shrink. He wasn't deterred. "Or maybe it has, maybe it's gotten bigger, because William's out there now. I want this to be over. I want to win this time." I want to win my family back.

"Mulder." She fell thickly silent, and he waited, sensing the withheld information. He wasn't prepared for what she said. "My chip's active again."

He felt instantly numbed. "What?"

"They're using it. I think they think they're being subtle, and I don't think they know I know, or they wouldn't continue."

Mulder grabbed her shoulder and rolled her toward him, onto her back. "What do you mean, they're using it? Sending you places?" She shook her head. "Are you…?" The question got stuck in his throat, the same way is my son dead did. "Are you sick? Is it back?" The cancer. The cancer he was just talking about. It made him ill just to look down at her face and not know whether that noxious killer was there behind her features. Those features softened slightly.

"I'm okay," she promised, calming him immensely. "Technically speaking, the cancer never left. I've just been in remission – the tumour is still there, Mulder, there was never an option to remove it. But there have been no indications of a relapse. I'm alright."

"Good." He almost collapsed on top of her in relief, and settled for exhaling his tension. "So…?"

"They're sending me dreams," she confessed, hand still behind her neck, massaging the area in question. "Most nights – maybe every night, and maybe I just don't remember some – once I'm deeply asleep, I get nightmares. And I know what you're thinking, because trust me, I already had these thoughts: it's natural for me to have nightmares after all I've seen, it's normal to experience night terrors and night sweats at my age, it's probably a manifestation of my subconscious worries and frustrations playing out… I know. I don't need you to Scully me and shut down my theory," she added sarcastically, and he closed his mouth sheepishly, because he'd been thinking all those things. How times had changed them. "All those explanations fit perfectly, except that every dream is specifically about you, betraying me in some horrific way, which has never been an explicit fear of mine, and when I wake up, the back of my neck is burning hot, like active hardware running on overdrive. Mulder," Scully said insistently, "I think someone has found a way to access my chip, and is trying to reprogram me."

His thoughts flew wildly in their erratic circles, bouncing off walls and striking other ideas, forming connections. He'd thought the chip was done with, but obviously it was only dormant, and besides, all this time it had been doing something, keeping her cancer in check. The long inertness indicated what he'd initially thought, that the people fucking with her body chemistry and her brain through that thing were gone and the chip was just a relic of their reign. But it sounded like she was right, and someone had found a way to tap back in. To do as Sixty-Four had suggested, by destroying his credibility.

"They're trying to make you afraid of me," he realised. "They want to undermine your belief in what we're doing." To make her question him. To shake her. "What happens in the dreams?"

"It doesn't matter. They're all the same in formula, but different enough in appearance that I shouldn't notice without conscious analysis. I don't think I'm supposed to wake up," she admitted. "I think I'm supposed to sleep through it, and wake up the next day with a slightly degraded opinion of you and your work. I assume they want me scared enough to rat you out when the time comes, and perhaps to shoot you on sight and save them the trouble."

Except that she worked it out. His clever girl. "You're not afraid?"

"No, they wouldn't actually kill you. I've told you before, you're too dangerous dead, and I know they know that."

"I meant of me. For yourself."

"Since I last saw you, you've strangled me, drowned me, beaten me, smothered me, thrown me from a rooftop, stabbed me… Maybe you should be glad I wasn't armed when you got here." She offered his stricken expression a slightly playful glance as she rolled away from his hand on her heart, settling on her stomach, her face turned away. She nestled herself close, though, not at all the behaviour of someone afraid of him. He stroked her hair fondly, warmed by her trust. "They clearly don't know I'm aware of their strategy, but I am afraid of why anyone would think of trying it, and what level of enemy we're working against if they can get access to something like my implant and consider this a viable option. Because this isn't about me. Someone wants to use me as a tool against you, against whatever moves you're making in the shadows. You shouldn't be anywhere near me. I'm a danger to you as long as I've got this thing embedded in my neck."

"Which will be the rest of your life, because you're never taking it out," he insisted. If it was a choice of cancer or questionable loyalty, he'd take his chances.

"This is very dangerous territory, Mulder, and not territory we've traversed before. I'm scared of what's coming for you. I think something big is about to hit, and I know you know what that is, and I know it's important for me to stay in the dark on some things and find them out for myself, but I'm afraid that this time, what they're going to use against you will be me and I won't know how to stop it. And here I am, with you, a few minutes' drive away from where our son is hidden in plain sight. He may already be implicated. If he's at the centre of this… this whole thing," she said finally, "this web, or even just caught in it, we cannot let them reach him. We can't."

"Of course we can't," Mulder agreed wholeheartedly, not understanding what she meant about that. About the rest, he understood perfectly, and hearing what was being done to her – bastards – answered the question of what the Hosts were planning for him. Maybe he could use it to his advantage. "We're his parents. It's our job to protect him, whether he knows about us or not."

"That's right." She sounded like might cry again. "You're a target, and my own head isn't secure. We're not safe. We have to protect him from us." He heard the truth in her words and felt his heart crumple a little. She meant it didn't matter that they'd found him. Reunion wasn't an option, not now. "I can't tell you what to do…"

"No, you're right." It hurt to admit. "Going to him now undoes all you achieved by hiding him in the first place. It puts him in the crosshairs. We owe it to him to keep eyes off him. Skinner's going to do what he can to bury this leg of the case, and if there's really nothing we can do here to help him, you and I need to walk away. I think that's all we can do. It's what's right." Hours of driving, years of yearning and wondering, for this dead end. He felt like crying too, and swallowed hard, letting a glimmer of his natural optimism flicker to the surface of his emotions. "For now."

Because what's right can change day by day. This didn't have to be forever, but it had to be forever-for-now, until or unless circumstances drastically changed. Pessimistic pragmatist Scully would have trouble understanding this, so he didn't elaborate.

He played with her hair, brushing it smooth with his fingers, one side at least. She kicked his socks off under the blankets and tucked her feet under his calves, drawing comfort. Maybe they'd both pay for this night, but contrary to what he'd thought when he arrived, this was definitely the right place to be. No one else knew his whereabouts – he was extremely careful – and the Johannssons were safe. The Worldwide Family of Hosts did not know who he was with. There was nowhere better to be than curled around his favourite person, sharing comfort like he should have done on Christmas night, sharing in a conversation that should have been had many years earlier. Better late than never.

"I can never have him back," Scully whispered after a long time. "I always knew that, but I didn't think I'd be mere feet away from him and still not be able to have him. He's not William Fox Scully anymore. He's Will Van de Kamp, and he's got a life I can't be part of. I knew it while I listened to him. I'm too dangerous. The most I can do is stand back and throw my arms out and hold back the shit storm that's going to hit him if Bletchley's clean-up crew come back for him."

"Of course you will. It's what you always do, above and beyond and more. He's still yours," Mulder murmured gently into her ear, brushing her drying, curling hair off her neck. The tiny scar still lined the skin under her cranium and it stood out to him because of all the trouble it had caused, but otherwise it was actually quite unobtrusive. "He's ours, wherever he came from, however he came to be, and whoever raised him. Nothing's changed, not for the worse, anyway. He's safe and growing up loved, like he was yesterday. Only now, we know about it. We can be more active in diverting attention that might sway in his direction. And we can do something about it if he's in more trouble than we've accounted for. I'd say that puts all of us in a better position than yesterday." He touched the scar, feeling for the heat she spoke of, but it was dormant, waiting for her sleep cycle. "Listen. You're probably not going to hear from me for a while."

He saw the edge of her face tighten in a frown. "That's going to be difficult for me to adapt to, Mulder."

"Very different for us, I know," he said, smiling, enjoying the return of her humour. "I can't say how long it'll take, maybe months or even more, but I have a plan. And I know what you're thinking," he acknowledged when he felt her sigh softly. "I can hear your voice in my head. 'This is so typical, Mulder, running off in the night to chase shadows, just walking out on me for some fucking case'. Am I right?"

"No, that's not what I was going to say," she answered, surprising him. "This isn't some case. You said this is the case to end all cases. I was going to ask what you need from me in the meantime. What should I be ready for?"

Christ, he loved her. So fucking perfect. He was still looking at the implant site. Could they really reprogram her? Break down what she felt and believed about him, given enough time and targeted effort? He shuddered to consider it possible.

"I'm going to give you everything," he promised. "The whole conspiracy, I'm going to come to you with proof. What I need from you, my partner, is a case. A strong case, with you at the helm. Can you do that?"

"What do you think I've been trying to do?"

"I need this from you, Scully. It needs to be bulletproof. What you got today, from Bletchley: can you use that? Will it stand?"

Scully sucked her lower lip between her teeth, thinking. Attractively. "I have the autopsy findings on tape and we left the biological samples at the morgue for refrigeration, so, assuming that hasn't been stolen, yes. Skinner and I were going to stake out the morgue to protect the body from those false agents but it didn't seem so important once we realised William might be involved. Chances are, the body's already gone. Hopefully the evidence I stashed is safe, because that's what will really make the difference."

"Good, that's what I need. That's what we need. An open investigation, a history, a legitimate line of inquiry and solid, clean policework. An audience, hungry for an answer. Keep it out of the basement filing cabinet and out from under the rug. Unquestionable, public. When we see each other again, I need you ready to prosecute, pending all those dirty bits and pieces you'd never get hold of formally."

"Prosecute who? And what will you be doing? You can't break the law to provide evidence for a federal case, Mulder. I can't use that."

"Don't worry about that. You do your science, Scully, and your policework, and I'll… do what I do. I know what I'm doing, alright?" He waited for her to respond, but she didn't. It made him unsure. "Are you with me?"

"Aren't you wearing your answer?" His awareness shifted to the warm, tiny gold cross at his throat. Like you wouldn't believe. "Why are you being vague with me? There's no conflict of interest in me just knowing what to do."

"Because," he said evenly, "if I tell you anything else, you'll try to talk me out of it, and it's the only way. Like you with William. I would never have let you do it – even though it was, in retrospect, the only thing to do. I'm taking a leaf out of your book and doing the difficult thing. Don't worry too much," he added when she started to argue. "Just get a viable case together and be prepared to take it all the way, whatever comes out. And stay strong. And don't listen to them."

"Anything else?" she asked ironically. She moved uncomfortably, digging his lock pick kit, keys and phone out of his pockets and dumping them on the bed beside her.

"Yeah." He pressed his lips to the tiny scar at the base of her neck, loving the way it made her shiver when he murmured his next words against her skin. "Trust me."