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.

52. XXXXXI - Scully

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. The notion of the world ending also far predates me and this fic and I think it's currently copyrighted to the mainstream media.

Author's notes: SCULLLLLAAAYYYY! Though I was really enjoying Colt and Harlow's thread, this is another narrative bottleneck with a lot happening simultaneously, so we are back this chapter with our favourite leading lady.

Thank you to everyone who read and commented across FF and AO3! Thanks to the wonderful Kara Thrace for sharing with me that Americans call hire cars 'rentals' – all mentions of Colt and Harlow's travels in this chapter are dedicated to you!

It's been a while since I've done this, but as I write to music, I often tailor and curate my playlist as I work until I find myself returning to the same handful of songs several times an hour to get that pace/mood/emotion back again. This chapter, I wrote mostly to Losing My Religion by REM, though I mixed up between the original and the Lacuna Coil versions. The slow intensity of the song building up and switching between tempo felt like Scully's experience in this chapter, but when I paid attention to the lyrics, I thought they were perfect for her in many ways, right from the opening lines: 'Oh life is bigger/It's bigger than you/And you are not me/The lengths that I will go to' … Then the second verse feels like it speaks to her failing faith in Mulder and their mission in the first half of this whole fic: 'Losing my religion/Trying to keep up with you/And I don't know if I can do it/Oh no I've said too much'… I encourage you to listen to your preferred version either while you're reading for the full Solia experience or afterward if you're more the reflective type, and let me know what you think! Enjoy!

/

Her world was coming to an end.

The clue that tipped her off was the dead body, though later she'd reflect that there were many clues before it that she chose to overlook in favour of misplaced optimism. She wasn't a naturally optimistic person, yet somehow she'd fallen too often into this trap of taking up hope like a shield instead of casting it aside like the liability it truly was. Scully had been through all this before. The signs. The hopes. The running, trying to stay ahead of the inevitable as it bore down and ripped up the road behind her, ensuring there was no way back. The urgent grappling for one last chance. The losses. The shattered wishes she should never have been foolish enough to make. The dark feeling of drowning when it all came down, and the low-lit emptiness that came after.

So she should know when this cycle started up again that she was at the 'signs' phase, and that once she began hoping, she was committing to the same pattern as before. But hope is hard to resist.

When Colt rang from the car around midday after spending all morning working through his Kentucky travel documentation with his office phone wedged between his ear and his shoulder, frustration rising in his features with every disconnection and lame reason to be put on hold, she expected a minor change of plans. Delaying completely in favour of Agent Harlow's latest information was unanticipated, but Scully couldn't disagree with his logic.

"Our whole investigation hinges on the Engel case," he'd said after summarising the message she'd left him. "If what she's worried about is true, someone might be trying to close down that avenue for us. If she and the family are overreacting, then showing up and offering our solidarity is only going to do good for our relationship with this family going forward. Plus," he'd added reluctantly, "I'm getting the feeling that Laura Macdonald isn't going to get any less missing by me showing up in Prestonsburg."

Scully had the same feeling, but didn't want to give up on the woman, nor be the one to dash her young partner's hopes. She also suspected that while both destinations sounded very much connected to their slowly unfolding investigation, the Engel thread was the one where new evidence could be uncovered, whereas Colt's Kentucky trip would be another exercise in futility.

"Go tomorrow instead," she suggested. "If you fly straight from Columbus you'll only have lost half a day, maybe a day, depending on what you find there in Ohio. You can take Agent Harlow with you."

He liked that idea. Leaving her own computer running the live feed of Freddie Wicking's apartment door, she wheeled her chair over to his workstation and logged back in when the screen returned to life. The travel reimbursement and approvals for out-of-office dates were still there, pending approval.

"I'll resubmit these and do the same for Agent Harlow," she told Colt. "I'll include the Kentucky trip but you let me know if anything changes before I approve it at my end." Over the top of the screen, at the office door, she saw the tall, imposing figure of Walter Skinner, and accidentally cut Colt off from thanking her. "Keep me apprised, Agent Colt. Have a safe flight."

She hung up and sat up straighter, always put on instant alert by the appearance of her oldest friend in the Bureau. He made eye contact with her but paused at the doorway as Agents Macgregor and Desmond were passing at the same moment, and the two lesser agents stopped to greet and grease. These things never changed, Scully reflected ironically. There was the work and there was the climb, and she knew from experience that ultimately, every agent needed to make the choice between them.

Mulder had made his choice even before she'd met him. She'd had her eye on the climb back then, and once he shifted her priorities, the chances to ascend that career ladder had dried up and had never returned until she turned her back on the work.

Agents like those in her division were climbers. She knew it from the way they compared close rates and raced to the quickest solution in every case they undertook. She could see it in the corners Donahue cut and the aggression Desmond displayed when his thoughtless heroics were not appreciated. It was why she'd never accepted a new partner since returning to the job, not until Colt. They would forever put in no more than ninety-five percent on any investigation they were part of, and so never deserve the high peaks they aspired to… but somehow, that's where they'd end up. Some of them. Hopefully not before Scully retired, because she couldn't imagine having to answer to any of these agents.

Or perhaps she could, she thought even more cynically as Skinner finally dismissed Desmond and Macgregor, since she'd been working for Tan and Hofstetter for years now. Only a small handful of the truly deserving ever caught a rung on that ladder and dragged themselves up it. Mulder used to say that Scully would be one of them, which seemed laughable now, but she thought Agent Colt might have what it took. One day. The drive without the ambition, the smarts without the ego, the compassion without the hesitancy. He had all the best qualities of all the best people she'd worked with across her time in the X-Files, but needed the load of years and years of this morning's phone run-around on his shoulders before that endearing idealism wore thin enough that he couldn't be played for the sweet fool he still was.

In the decades that she had known him, Walter Skinner had never been a sweet fool. He crossed the office to join her where she was working on reopening Colt's travel files for editing.

"Rearranged the furniture, Agent Scully?" he asked, looking between the two desks as he rounded them to the side she sat on. "I could have sworn that this one was yours."

"It is," she answered easily, and left it at that, since the rest was obvious. Expression disapproving, Skinner leaned back on her desk's edge and surveyed the IT policy breach before him. Her workstation still streaming video from Wicking's building while she worked at another desk, her partner nowhere in sight.

"I'm going to assume that you're logged in twice with your own credentials," he muttered, frowning when she only cast him an amused glance. Like he really believed she and Mulder had kept their passwords from each other. Like he wouldn't send her his own login details after a two-second hesitation if she asked for them and said it was important. "I just got back from a very unremarkable meeting at Quantico. How has your day been?"

"It's been similarly unremarkable," Scully admitted. "Colt just left for Ohio and flies out with Agent Harlow in about half an hour. A possible lead in her Engel case. But somehow I don't think that you came by to ask about my day."

"No." Skinner glanced casually around to confirm that no one was in earshot, and thankfully he'd come at the tail end of the lunch hour. He dipped his hand into his pocket for his phone and unlocked the screen. "I was on my way to see you anyway when this email came through. Have you seen this?"

He offered the phone, and she saw that he'd opened an attachment for her. A police report from Massachusetts. She skimmed the details and Skinner slid his finger across the screen to bring up a second attachment, the beginnings of a formal inquiry. Apparently a Jane Doe had been found dead, roadside, early in January, but had just been identified by family members despite a thorough local missing persons campaign that should have resulted in a match months ago. Sad as it might be, none of it jumped out at Scully as particularly relevant until Skinner revealed the third document: the missing poster.

"Janae Szabo," she read faintly, fixated on the smiling photograph her family had chosen to represent her to the public. Without the disapproving expression and crumpled late-night lab coat, Scully almost didn't recognise the medical examiner's assistant who'd signed her in at Berkshire County Morgue to autopsy the Johannsson body a few nights before Christmas. She took the phone, chest suddenly tight with apprehension at this unexpected reappearance. "She's dead?" But of course she was. She'd taken Mulder's bribes to view 'anomalous' corpses and had witnessed the start of this whole investigation, not knowing what was unfolding before her other than there being a potential contagion in the body bag Mulder opened. She'd been in the room when the two former partners discussed old X-files and had formally received Rebecca Johannsson's body. Her signature was on the transfer papers. She was a loose end, and she hadn't been there the next day when Scully returned with Colt. Scully swallowed, feeling properly sad now, calculating the sequence of events and coming up with conflicts. "When they found her, how long had she been dead?"

"You can check the reports on there but I think it was recent," Skinner said, and when Scully scrolled across to an ME's statement, she saw that the Jane Doe had been found within hours of expiration, which had been ruled accidental. The assumption was that she'd been clipped by a car while trying to hitchhike in the dark and fallen into the ditch, breaking her neck. There were extremely high levels of alcohol in her bloodwork, attributed to New Year's Eve celebrations. "I saw the last known workplace and thought this might be the missing assistant you mentioned."

"Yes, thank you," Scully confirmed, handing the cell phone back with reluctance. "Can you send that to me?"

"I shouldn't." He got started on forwarding the email. "What's the significance of the recency of her death?"

"Someone made her disappear in late December, twenty-second or twenty-third. Twenty-third." Scully glanced at the briefcase under her desk, trying to recall the date of her ill-advised visit to Boston at Mulder's frustrating request. Trying to summon the assistant's wary voice from her memory as she'd passed on her employer's instructions about the limits of Scully's FBI jurisdiction and Scully, too annoyed with and caught up in Mulder standing beside her, had said something snappy and cold in return. Now the other woman's voice was lost to time, no thanks to Scully. "The coroner puts her death early on January first, so it follows that someone kept her alive for more than a week somewhere before dumping her, intoxicated, on the side of a highway in the middle of the night. Assuming they didn't just snap her neck themselves before tossing her out of the vehicle."

"It follows but you don't have any proof of any of that," her former boss reminded her sternly, before relenting to add the next obvious question. "What did they want with her for that extra week?"

Interrogation, Scully assumed bitterly, and plausible deniability. Janae Szabo's death as a New Year's Eve tragedy would easily overshadow any connection with curious happenings at her place of work a week earlier, even if that was actually the last time anyone had seen her. Had she heard or seen anything incriminating? Well, at the very least, she'd seen Special Agent Dana Scully conduct an unsanctioned autopsy on a victim of the black oil virus, assisted by a charismatic and slightly deranged science fiction enthusiast matching the physical description of Fox Mulder.

She remembered, with ice in her stomach, how Assistant Director Tan and Section Chief Hofstetter had known so quickly who she'd met in Boston. She remembered how soon after, AD Kelley had started querying her about her old partner. Who had told them? How long was the chain of communication between her watchers here at the Bureau and the people who took and undoubtedly murdered Janae? Did her watchers even know whose information they were acting on and what horrific sources it came from?

This was a sign, a sign that her world had been ending since the night she accepted Mulder's fax and followed it to Berkshire County, but she was too stubborn to accept it yet.

"I didn't look hard enough for her," Scully mentioned now, allowing herself to feel appropriately guilty for this woman's fate. She had known Janae the assistant and the real Dr Lansdowne, ME of Berkshire County Morgue, were missing when she left Boston in December, but she'd only half-heartedly followed up. She hadn't been invested back then. She hadn't known how big this would become. She'd let herself naively assume they'd maybe been paid off to go work elsewhere. How long until the real Lansdowne turned up dead somewhere, too? "As usual, I buried my head in the sand and hoped for the best, and someone else paid the price."

Skinner had finished the email to her on his phone; she heard the soft ping on her computer to signify the incoming message. He glanced up at her from his screen.

"What's that supposed to mean, 'as usual'? As if you aren't the most likely person in this building to go chasing after injustices wherever you see them and standing up for victims no one else sees."

Scully dropped her gaze, ashamed, and insisted quietly, "You've got me mixed up with someone else we know."

"No," he countered, "you're being too hard on yourself. The people who took Ms Szabo weren't going to let you interfere, even if you'd known or gone looking. There's nothing you could have done differently."

But there was. She'd folded under the first sign of pressure and had let this all slide through her fingers at the precise moment she could have acted. She recalled Colt's incredulous voice. People's lives could be on the line. Respectfully, who are you to claim this isn't worth it? She'd walked away from him. From her conscience.

"I did the same with William," she pointed out softly, catching the spasm of conflicted emotion that passed over Skinner's bold features. "What? I did. I walked away, I didn't look back, and his life…" She pressed her lips together, thinking of the boy's voice on Skinner's recorder, of the odd things he'd said, the curl of his accent, and of the terrible events she'd abandoned him to. "I didn't look hard enough for him, either. I could have made a difference." Saved his mother before she succumbed to her cancer. Explained what their son meant to her enemies, as best she could, and given them phone numbers to call or safehouses to retreat to if his location were ever discovered. "I still don't know if I hope he's mine or hope he isn't."

The part that hoped he wasn't was small and foolish, ignoring the piles of evidence that suggested William Van de Kamp of Thayne, Wyoming was indeed her baby. It was the part that said, if he wasn't, then none of what he'd lived through was her responsibility. But it was stupid to think that, because did she hope her son was alive, cared for by a good man, thriving, and easily traced at a moment's notice now that she'd found him? Of course she did.

Skinner was staring at her like he would very badly like to say something. For a moment, she thought he would, but then he seemed to swallow it and his conflicted frown settled into something firmer, cooler.

"You shouldn't be talking about this here," he pointed out, and of course he was right. There was no one within earshot in her open plan office, but she knew better than most how walls, ceilings and even office equipment could have ears when someone wanted them to.

"No, you're right." Scully cleared her throat and tried to clear her mind of her traitorous thoughts about her son and her own failings. They weren't productive. "Thank you for the report on Ms Szabo. There was another employee who went unaccounted for at the same time, Dr Lansdowne. The man I met was the stand-in who we later saw trying to requisition–"

"Bletchley. I remember." He straightened and stretched his shoulders like he found himself suddenly uncomfortable. The X-Files had long had this effect on him. "The supposed Dr Petersen. I've got feelers out for those names already and will send it your way if anything comes up. In the meantime," he added seriously, tucking his cell back into his jacket, "be careful. No sudden moves."

It was good advice in general, she thought, but felt especially meaningful coming from him without prompt. Scully found herself searching his face, suddenly wary.

"Sir?"

"Nothing specific," he assured her as he adjusted and smoothed out his jacket. He hesitated. "Just… some points I expected to come up in this morning's meeting went unaddressed, and I've noticed since you and I got back from our last trip that some channels that usually take up a lot of my time with garbage admin have been increasingly quiet. So, nothing specific. Probably nothing at all," he admitted wryly, "except I've known you too long to believe that anymore."

"What do you believe?" Scully asked, thinking that the assistant director was too smart and seasoned to jump to conclusions that weren't there. He shrugged unhappily.

"That a few key people's attention has been diverted, and mine hasn't." Preparing to leave, Skinner patted the top of her monitor in place of touching her hand or shoulder, a show of solidarity all the same. "I'll be in touch if that changes."

"Thank you, sir." She kept her smile light but hoped the true depth of her graciousness resonated in her voice. "Was there something else? You said you were coming to see me anyway when that email came in."

The way he paused, she could tell she'd caught him off-guard; the way he met her eyes discerningly from behind his narrow glasses, she was sure he was trying to make up his mind about something. The way he smoothed over his features and smiled flatly, she knew he lied to her when he said, "That was everything. Take care."

He left and she went back to Colt an Harlow's travel permissions, unsettled. It wasn't as though she and Walter Skinner had a friendship built on telling each other the truth – far from it, they both handled each other's position and ability to be honest with a respectful distance. No, what bothered her about the end of that exchange was that he had approached her intending to share something further, and something about the way their conversation had gone had changed his mind. She retraced everything that had been said, everything she'd deciphered from what wasn't said, and still came up blank.

Allies going quiet. Wasn't that another sign?

It hardly mattered, she told herself forcibly. If he'd thought she needed to know right now, he would have spoken up. Whatever he'd withheld, it could wait, perhaps for a more appropriate time or place. She should be focusing on what he had said. About being careful. About the people who took Janae Szabo and how nothing Scully did would have made a difference. About the trails of logic she was yet to prove.

Well, one thing at a time. She finalised Colt's requests, resubmitted, then logged off his work station and returned to her own. The uneventful live feed of room 623's front door still dominated, and she minimised it to bring up her inbox. The forwarded reports from Skinner were sitting in there among a small fleet of new interoffice memos she didn't need, and at the top was the automated message asking for her approval as Agent Colt's line manager. Easy. Marginally fraudulent, but hardly problematic in the scope of things. She'd long walked a line running parallel to the company one, a habit her superiors acknowledged and chose to overlook because her line never took her over theirs. Not that they ever saw or had to deal with, anyway. She was very tidy and very low-maintenance in her rule-breaking.

On that thought, Scully prioritised sanctioning Colt and Harlow's activities in Ohio – granting them both top-level permissions as they investigated a potential aggravated home invasion connected to a Counterterrorism case, which was certainly above board – so she could send those off and turn her attention back to the dead assistant from Berkshire. She reopened the reports Skinner had brought her and skimmed them once again. Janae Szabo. The medical examiner had done a thorough job on confirming cause of death, photographing the grazed skin of her bloodless limbs and including x-rays that showed the break in her vertebrae, running bloods and testing the foreign matter embedded in her wounds to confirm it was just dirt and road. As an ME's assistant, that seemed fitting; but what was not befitting of the murdered assistant was the utter failure of the law enforcers connected to her case in identifying her when she was just a few postcodes over from where she went missing. Could it possibly be just a case of incompetence and not one of wilful deception, and could Scully be so lucky as to find mere ignorant incompetence in an investigation like this?

She sent the documents to the printer, far removed from any version of herself that trusted online files to stay online, and went to collect them as colleagues filtered back in after their lunchbreak. She discreetly slipped the pages into the briefcase beside her feet and went back to her computer, checking the dull surveillance feed before starting on the next task in her workload for the day.

It might have been an hour of back-to-back administrative tasks later that the mail courier did his rounds. A few other agents received mail they looked like they'd been expecting, probably forensic results or other requested documents, but Scully's was wholly unanticipated. A padded envelope landed on her desk, addressed to her name in unfamiliar handwriting and sent, apparently, 'on behalf of Ms CJ Okafor', of whom she was sure she'd never heard. When she tore it open and shook out the contents, she found a purple USB thumb drive wrapped in a crumpled page of notepaper torn from an exercise book. On one side, a hasty letter in the same ink and handwriting as the envelope. On the other, Scully's name and office address for the sender to copy, written in a hand she'd know anywhere.

Her heart skipped.

Even before she'd turned the page over to read the actual note, Scully found herself calmly reaching for her briefcase and pushing her chair in, locking her computer and heading for the door. Reading correspondence from Mulder, even something as innocuous as just her postal address written out for someone else, felt sacrilegious in that shared office space. Skinner was right earlier. It wasn't a place to talk about anything that was supposed to be secret.

Scully's departure from the office never went completely without notice – though it were not always the case, she'd long been someone who attracted attention without meaning to – but she didn't sense any undue interest. Eyes lifted from screens and mail in response to her motion, and then they fell away naturally. Still, she walked out without hurry, letting the note in her hand hang at her side so it caught the least eyes, and ignored the burning desire to read it all the way to the elevator. She pushed the call button and waited, acutely aware of the tension in her elbow, ready to spring up and bring that letter close where she could read it. Skinner's warning kept her arm straight.

No sudden moves.

The lift arrived and she stepped inside with a handful of other Bureau employees who filed out at different levels until she was the last one, and when she was alone and descending to her familiar basement, she finally gave in. Her name and address on the back was undoubtedly Mulder's handwriting, but that wasn't intended for her. The other side was.

Agent Scully,

I don't quite know what to write here. I'm in shock. My sister Cara left this USB and your address with me, and said if anything happened to her, I had to post it, urgently. She was hospitalised last week and died suddenly in the early hours of this morning. I know logically that she got sick, but I also can't help wondering whether she knew this was coming? I hope this research of Cara's arrives with you safely and you can do something with it.

Tessa Okafor

'Send upon death' packages were always a concern. Normal people joked about it or watched movies that referenced the concept, but in reality it was something only spies and people involved with secrets ever made arrangements for. This one didn't feel as organised as those examples. The hand was scrawly and hurried, and Scully's stomach was lead even before she got the key into the basement office door and locked herself securely inside. Turning to face the office, she half expected Mulder to be sitting behind the desk with his customary expression of mild interest disguising a rabid curiosity. More than half-wished it. Times had changed, and she was no longer coming here to report to her partner, but when she voiced her unease with the letter's contents, she still found it was to him she addressed her thoughts.

"Mulder, what is this?" she mumbled, turning the USB over in her fingers as she laid the briefcase on the desktop. "What have you sent me this time?"

Last time he used her as a delivery site for documents of interest to this ever-broadening investigation, it was a package full of hacked CIA documents she could never explain away. This 'research' could be anything, and based on Tessa Okafor's letter, it promised to be similarly incendiary. It wouldn't hurt to take precautions.

Scully switched on the new PC work station she'd had installed on the desk, but from one of the low cupboards behind it, she wrenched out an ancient laptop and plonked it unceremoniously in the middle of the clear tabletop. In the days of Mulder-and-Scully, this desk would never have had the space for such a chunky extra addition to its detritus. Luckily, these were the days of Scully-and-Colt, and with only occasional assistance from haphazard Harlow, the basement office's tidy-up efforts had been methodical and steady. The result was a meticulously ordered version of what it once was – Mulder's dark academia but with fewer trip hazards; his wild genius but with more put back where he found it; his effervescent truths exposed for the team to ruminate on but in a system said team could interpret. Point being, Scully could sit in the chair behind the desk and use both the office computer and the old laptop at the same time.

The office computer she used to look up the names Cara and Tessa Okafor to confirm they were real people. From what she could tell, neither had a criminal record, but Cara's obituary had been featured in her local newspaper only two days earlier. Tragically, she'd been a first-in-family college student, studying journalism. No cause of death listed. There was little more to be found about her online except a few photos and short essays published in a high school newsletter years before. Scully took note of Cara's school, college and the newspaper – all from the same town – and did a search for the nearest hospitals. The more she read the girl's name, Cara Okafor, the more she started to suspect that she had seen it before. Where?

By the time the laptop had noisily booted up, Scully was thoroughly invested and also confused. Mulder had visited this girl Cara Okafor and recommended this course of action in the event of Cara's death – which had then come about. That was the only explanation for his handwriting on the back of Tessa's note, and would also neatly explain why a hometown college girl would think to posthumously send her research to an obscure Counterterrorism agent. The reason for her former partner's interest in the college girl had to be on this USB drive, and this was the only device she had access to here that she'd trust enough to plug it into. Not sophisticated enough to be worth tampering with, not connected to the internet, not joined to the office network, the stripped-back relic had only the software it needed to open basic file types, which made it an ideal quarantine zone for testing Cara Okafor's USB. It also meant no eyes except hers saw what the drive possessed.

The email Skinner had forwarded had come with attachments of rich and interesting information implicating an outcome for Janae Szabo that Scully could guess. Cara Okafor's research was like that email, but on steroids. Forty-two separate documents with names in the titles that immediately caught Scully's eye. Tannenbaum Solicitors. Fenchurch Transport. Worldwide Family of Hosts. She opened them one by one. Public-facing taxation records, business registration records, screenshots of social media posts loudly virtue-signalling generous donations made by the three wealthy organisations to various community groups and worthy-sounding charities. Okafor had been digging deep and leaving no stone unturned, because one document after the next laid a clear path of explicit, meticulous research into these charities and groups. She showed how she'd traced each one back to a shell – no listing on any state registry, non-existent office addresses or Google satellite imagery of construction sites instead of halfway houses, recycled phone numbers. Some did have offices in real-life commercial buildings, but those all seemed to have subsidiaries of Fenchurch Transport as the owners or lessors of those spaces.

All the unregistered or improperly registered charities Okafor had investigated had left glowing reviews somewhere on the web for one of the three corporations, and all had received donations or highly promoted assistance from at least one, usually two or even all three, at some point in the last three years. The money trail ended there because Cara Okafor was just a very resourceful and well-connected student journalist, not a forensic accountant, but collectively, the USB drive held enough damning evidence of fraud and money-laundering to instigate a full and public inquiry.

And Cara Okafor had been killed for it. Mulder had known what she had and that she'd be targeted, and had given the girl an insurance plan. Scully felt sure of it, turning to the office PC to search the details of hospitals in Okafor's vicinity. These shady organisations kept popping up on her radar. Fenchurch Transport and Tannenbaum and Associates were tied into that mess in Kentucky that Colt and Harlow had first looked into for her, starting with Steven Powell's death ruled as Diffuse Alveolar Syndrome after he made it difficult for Fenchurch to get their merchandise back from the evidence locker. Now after several obvious attempts to block the investigation there, not to mention the beatdown Colt and Harlow suffered at the hands of whoever was monitoring that situation from the other side, at least four people surrounding Steven Powell had gone missing.

The virus Scully had found in Rebecca Johannsson's dissolved lung tissue might not be capable of spreading itself yet, but the death and danger posed to those who learned about it certainly behaved like a contagion.

How long could Scully and her team avoid infection? How long before it spread to Mulder, out there alone? To William?

Preferring to focus on what she could control, she set about copying the files from the USB drive to a fresh thumb drive, and while the poor laptop whirred clunkily with the effort, she dialled the hospital's ICU. She had a strong intuition as to Okafor's cause of death, and though she hoped she would prove herself wrong, she was also unsurprised when she finally got through to the dead girl's treating doctor and got the confirmation.

"That's right, extreme respiratory distress, though I don't know what interest Counterterrorism would have in that," the doctor said when Scully had explained who she was and who she was investigating. "She came in through general with an awful cough and rattly breathing, just couldn't get enough air down, and she went downhill so fast. Nothing we did made any difference."

"Did you run any scans?" Scully asked, again guessing the answer.

"We did, and we weren't sure what to make of the results because she could barely keep still for it. But based on what we saw on the scan and what she was coughing up – thick, fleshy mucus, not just blood – it looked like… well, a dissolution of the lungs. Ultimately that's what the doctor on duty ruled it when she passed early the next day."

"Diffuse Alveolar Syndrome?"

As soon as she asked it, she knew where she'd seen the name. She couldn't believe she'd forgotten. If she wasn't on the phone, she would have cursed herself aloud.

"Yes," the doctor agreed, surprised. "You're familiar? Is this… something you're investigating? Happening to… others?"

"This doctor on duty when Miss Okafor died," Scully redirected, eyes drifting to her briefcase, "are they available for me to speak to today?"

The one on the phone consulted her notes. "Actually, it looks like it was a visiting doctor…"

The hospital was short-staffed, or some emergency had necessitated the shuffle of specialists around the hospital that day – it didn't really matter, some excuse had been invented and bought already to explain away the presence of a forgettable face in the ICU the morning Cara Okafor gasped her last desperate breath. Scully got the name and details from the doctor on the phone before she hung up, but when she stared at the notepad in front of her with the probably faked name and the probably pretend phone number, she didn't see words and numbers. The front of her mind swam instead with guilty images of Rebecca Rose Johannsson's empty black-and-red chest cavity and Austin Dunn's blood-speckled cheeks as he coughed and coughed and struggled to breathe.

The Black Oil virus had claimed another victim, and again, she'd been too late to help. Swallowing nervously, she opened the briefcase where all the files for this insane case were kept, and sifted through the documents held within until she found the one that had made it all real, the one she'd had Harlow present at the quarterly and say she'd been given by her anonymous contact.

Gray's list. Mulder's list. The one he gave her after they slashed each other's hearts open on a backwater Virginian road and demanded of each other do you really not know?

Had she really not known that Cara Okafor was one of the names on that list of upcoming victims? She'd had Harlow look into them; the first two had already been dead, the rest had seemed initially unremarkable except that they were already exhibiting self-protective behaviours – clearly, Mulder had warned them – and when nothing had happened to them after a few weeks, Scully had stopped prompting her junior agents to check back. But that wasn't good enough, was it? Though Scully's workload was significantly heavier than either Colt's or Harlow's, she was the one who had known where this list came from and had known what death by this virus looked like. She should have implemented protective measures right back then. She should have handled this all herself and kept this girl, along with the rest of the list, safe.

Somebody else she'd failed. She reflected on the weighty guilt Agent Harlow carried around over her inability to resolve the Engel case and hoped the two agents were able to get ahead of whatever the virologist was chasing in Ohio. If the rest of Scully's day was anything to go by – Janae Szabo dead, Cara Okafor from Henry Gray's list now the latest victim of the alien virus – chances were that if Gavin Engel was calling Dr Harlow for help, something was very wrong, and her agents were about to walk into it.

Scully cleared all her searches for the Okafor sisters and instead turned her focus to the remaining Engels. She'd done preliminary research on them in the past but she'd mostly left this aspect of the case in the heavily invested Harlow's capable hands. But none of the victims should be anything less than Scully's whole concern.

Unlike the squeaky-clean Okafor, the various databases she had access to brought up more useful results when she went looking for Gavin Engel. The FBI had flagged him as a potentially fixated person after several aggravated attempts to approach one Victor Pierce, the agent who'd hurriedly closed his cousin's family's murder case, but there had never been any warrant sought for his arrest nor any surveillance ordered from the Bureau. Perhaps it had served the shadows better to wait out the jilted man's anger than to take him in and risk the ire of the rest of the family, not to mention the public attention and record of making the charge. Did that stance still apply? What had changed for him to be targeted now, today of all days?

Coincidences were for amateurs. Agent Scully had played too long to believe any different.

She sighed and tried not to reflect on the repercussions of this line of thought as she put the list and the original purple USB drive inside the briefcase and switched off the two computers. Colt and Harlow made a good team, and they would act in the Engel family's interests while also watching each other's backs. Okafor's research had gotten her killed but thanks to Mulder's intervention, Scully could ensure it wasn't for nothing. The student journalist had provided not a silver bullet, but the knife that would slip between impenetrable sheets of armour and bring the monolithic corporations at the centre of all this to a halt long enough for Scully's investigation to gain a foothold in their collective disrepute.

The data was sensitive. Legal, but worth killing for, clearly. As such, having just the one copy seemed foolish after all Cara and Tessa Okafor had risked to get it to her, so Scully took the copy she'd made and climbed precariously onto the desk. It was still a stretch for her short frame, but from here she could reach the ceiling and push with her fingertips to lift a panel from its place. The thumb drive slid easily through the small gap, and she let the panel settle back into position. This ceiling was old and in need of replacement, she saw, running her fingers over the holes left by dozens of yellow pencils thrown in a madman's boredom, but no one was coming down here to this place of unwanted things unless she logged it as a job. The ceiling would stay undisturbed for the foreseeable future.

"It's been a long time," she murmured to the pencil holes, expecting to feel the warmth of nostalgia. Instead the reminder felt only ominous. It had been a long time since Mulder sat at this desk. Now he was only a shadow ally, one she trusted and who she knew was working tirelessly on the same case, but he wasn't here to take the falls when they opened up under her feet. It had been a long time since she'd needed to hide evidence in her own office. Witnesses foundational to the investigation disappearing, turning up dead or calling in frightened warnings all at the same time; allies going quiet; her own gut turning over with the cold certainty of everything coming apart at the seams. She'd been here before, backing herself, looking over her own shoulder, and it didn't bode well. Unsettled, she carefully got herself down from the desk. This had all happened before. She just didn't want to admit it. Because when it happened, she couldn't stop it.

Briefcase in hand, office lights off, Scully squared her shoulders and locked the basement with the hand that was itching to check her pocket for pills that weren't there. She didn't need them. She just needed a reset. Upstairs in the shared office, she could pretend like things were still in her control, like the world wasn't cracking in all the places she knew mattered. Down here, it was real. It was her responsibility. And she knew it was, but for the moment, she needed a break from the reminder of her many failings. She needed to be a normal agent who did good work and got things done and protected the common good.

She took the elevator up and checked her reflection in the shiny silver of the doors. She certainly looked like a good normal agent, one who got things done and did all the right things. That was a decent start. In the hallway, she said hello to a pair of agents from another Counterterrorism office, and in the doorway of her own, she nodded to Agent Marzollo as he stepped out to take a phone call. Everything felt more normal up here in the light of day. She felt the buzz of her own phone as she dumped the briefcase on her desk, and withdrew it from her pocket to check the screen. Her agents had landed.

"Scully," she answered automatically. On the other end, she could hear the noise of a parking lot and a plane coming in low overhead to touch down.

"Uh, hi, Doctor," came the characteristically awkward reply, as always sounding unsure of what to say despite being the one to initiate the call. "It's Natalie Harlow."

"I guessed as much from caller ID," Scully replied dryly, sitting down and logging back into her work station. To help kickstart the conversation, she said, "You and Agent Colt made it to Ohio, then?"

"Yes, just landed," Harlow confirmed. "Thanks for sorting out our tickets. Your partner's organising our rental and I'm on call duty because he's apparently sworn off phones after what sounds like a rough morning. He may need therapy."

Scully smiled in spite of herself and in spite of everything. There was something quirky about Harlow that reminded her of Mulder in unexpected ways. She didn't have half the charisma but the way she slipped in anecdotes to her answers and shone sideways light on her offbeat humour with her unnecessary observations rather than ever giving a straightforward response felt like talking with her former partner. Mulder had been absent from her professional life, visually at least, for a long time, but in many small ways she could still feel him here with her. The holes in the ceiling. Little qualities in her junior agents.

"I think he might have sworn off the whole state of Kentucky after the run-around that police department has given him," Scully admitted. "How far are you from the Engel property?"

"From Gavin's?" Harlow hummed as she considered it. "About an hour. We'll stop there first and hopefully meet up with him, but if not, I did tell him to go somewhere more public." Her voice brightened noticeably when Scully remarked, "Smart." She went on, "He was meant to gather the whole extended family and wait for me, but the phone line went scratchy before we dropped out. I haven't been able to get a connection with him since."

Par for the course of this day, Scully thought, but her cynical virologist didn't need any ammunition for her own pessimism. She idly checked the live feed of Freddie Wicking's eternally shut front door and brought up the window with her emails to clear out the latest irrelevant arrivals.

"I ran a few searches for you," she advised the other woman, hearing the lower tone of a grumbling Colt as he approached on the other end and Harlow's obnoxious shush to quiet him. "Other than ours, none of the Engel clan are cited in any open or recent Bureau investigations. There are no warrants to arrest Gavin or to search his premises, and there have never been any orders for surveillance. There's no official interest in the family or in any of their properties."

"You think he's crazy, then," Harlow guessed flatly, taking it personally. Scully resisted the urge to roll her eyes and to just exhale her frustration with the younger agent.

"No, I think I can't run searches for 'off-the-books' or 'censored'," she corrected. "I also can't check other agencies, but if you find anything that proves my searches are wrong, you respond however you need to and I'll reach out to some contacts at the CIA." Contacts she tried not to lean on too heavily for fear of attracting attention, but she'd grab for those lifelines before she watched this investigation sink, if that was indeed where someone unseen was trying to steer it.

The email from Skinner this morning was still sitting in her inbox, and she felt her brow furrow. Dead ME assistants, new virus victims, junior agents chasing down what was meant to be an innocuous lead. As it came into focus, the whole situation was looking less and less like unconnected strands of twine and more like a giant noose that had been settling over her neck for months now.

Scully knew that Harlow would want to know about Cara Okafor and her cause of death, but decided not to distract her from the lead she was already following. Colt and Harlow were her responsibility. She'd sent them to Ohio, and once she'd gotten them safely home, she could apprise them of the latest developments in the broader investigation. So rather than worry them any further, she hoped she conveyed enough when she cleared her throat and said only, "I've sent blanket permissions to both your emails so you can do whatever the situation needs from you when you get there. I'll back whatever play you make, Agents."

She didn't say within reason. She didn't say just come back alive and unhurt. She just excused herself before they could thank her and ended the call.

She sat for a few moments with her fingertips over her mouth, thinking. Perhaps optimism could still win out. Perhaps she was overreacting, and perhaps her agents would make an uneventful return sometime tomorrow with little to report. It was worth hoping, because hope was addictive, and even the Ice Queen herself was not immune to such weaknesses from time to time.

Well, there was always more work to be done to distract herself with while she waited out Colt and Harlow's trip. She put her phone away and settled more comfortably in her chair to review the emails she'd highlighted for priority tasks. Plenty to do to help her feel normal and in control. She picked something out that sounded important enough in the moment but which she swiftly forgot all about when she minimised her inbox.

The live feed of the hallway outside room 623 was still maximised and running in the background, and she'd chosen the absolute worst moment to have it on her screen. The hallway wasn't empty.

Her heart might have skipped when she saw his handwriting but it almost pounded to a shocked stop to see Fox Mulder's silhouette cautiously walking the hall of her highest profile suspect. Right here in DC. Right at this moment. And right here on the screen of her work computer in high definition, captured on recorded camera, plain as day for anyone looking over this way to see.

No sudden moves. The wise words of her most invested senior ally echoed in her head as she clicked on the tab for her inbox, bringing it back up to hide the video feed before she could see where Mulder went. Though of course he would be heading for Freddie Wicking's door. Coincidences were for amateurs. Scully felt the tremors in her hand on the mouse as she pretended to resume reading emails, heard the thud of blood slamming through her ears. Mulder, what are you doing?! The world had been cracking all day, probably for months without her notice, and now here he was kicking at the remaining supports, revealing the whole thing to be made of tissue paper and craft sticks, something she should never have put her faith in.

Any second, it would all end.

But it didn't. Nobody in the office had started shouting in excitement at seeing a newcomer approach the bomb builder's door, so she hoped that meant nobody else was monitoring the feed. That would make sense, she told her panicking brain. Colt was the agent assigned with that boring task, and she only had it on her desktop today because she had him on other tasks out of office. And further to that, she was likely the only person in this office or any others in this building who knew the exact shape and motion of Fox Mulder just from a two-second glimpse of his silhouette.

Anxiously brushing a lock of hair behind her ear and pretending to stretch her shoulders, Scully cast a subtle glance over her left shoulder to check whether anyone there would have seen her screen. When it wasn't far enough to tell, she had to grasp the back of her chair in a more obvious spinal twist stretch. Both sides. The desks behind her to her left were empty, the agents out of office. The agents on her right were all seemingly engrossed in what they were doing, and none even looked her way when she ran her gaze over them.

Safe, for now. Scully had long been conscious of the security cameras on this floor and aware of the angles they caught in each room, and felt secure at least in the knowledge that her screen wasn't in view of any visual recording. Mulder, though, was being recorded right now, an uncharacteristically careless misstep by her paranoid former partner. He'd developed an uncanny sense for detecting cameras in the years since they ran away together, so what was this? What was he doing in DC? What was he doing waltzing into the middle of her one Mulder-free investigation?

Absentmindedly she clicked through her emails like she was playing solitaire, just to appear like she was doing something, but she didn't read a word of them. She'd suspected since her interview with Freddie Wicking that there might be some crossover between her cases – Wicking certainly knew who she and Mulder were, and recognised the vernacular of the truth-seeking network in which Mulder was an icon. More circumstantial evidence also suggested his bomb design might be a match for the alien bioweapon that had now claimed at least – what was it now, nine? – lives and misdiagnosed as Diffuse Alveolar Syndrome. But that Mulder and Wicking were in contact? She'd been convinced by Wicking's unprepared responses to her careful questioning that he'd never met her former partner.

That was about to change. Mulder had walked himself into the belly of the Counterterrorism beast, apparently unaware of the noose already dangling above her desk, really to ensnare her and him too if only her watchers could reach him. When had he gotten this stupid?

Or… maybe not stupid. Maybe not unaware. Scully got out her phone again and browsed her contacts until she came across the number she'd only called once. The one Skinner had called on her behalf in Wyoming and brought Mulder running to her side from across the country. Part of her strongly contemplated calling M.F. Luder right now and calmly telling him to kindly get the hell out of frame of her surveillance of a terror suspect. The part of her that hesitated with her thumb above the little call symbol prompted her to think critically. Mulder receiving her call would be caught on camera and timestamped. It could be easily matched with an outgoing call from her cell at the same instant. That didn't serve either of them. And while she knew Mulder was outside Freddie Wicking's door and that he was on tape, she didn't know what he knew. If Wicking knew Agent Scully and Counterterrorism were watching him, why shouldn't Mulder? No one else had approached the bomb builder's door in weeks, and Scully had long suspected they'd been warned off after what went down with Agent Desmond and Alistair Craig. So she could reasonably assume, if there was any reason to be found here, that Mulder knew it, too.

If he knew it, she realised, then he was relying on her. He was back to pushing the boundaries of their friendship, asking what he shouldn't without ever asking. He had to know the corner he was putting her in, the chance he was taking.

What else could she do?

Making no sudden moves, Scully carried out the last hour of her work day, tension running high and nerves frayed under her skin. She nodded or said goodbye to colleagues as they filtered out at clock-off time, pretending to be fixated on whatever task it looked like she was doing. It felt like the smokescreen of an inbox was too obvious, a flimsy curtain between her life and her downfall, much more immediate and dangerous than any noose any enemy could hang for her. With every movement from every fellow agent in the shared office, she worried someone would see straight through it and declare her for the traitor Desmond had already suggested her to be. But ridiculously, fortuitously, nobody noticed the live video feed she kept hidden behind that inbox, and nobody noticed that she'd been staring at and scrolling aimlessly through her inbox for a full hour, achieving nothing.

It didn't seem at all possible, but somehow she got away with what felt like an open guilty flame hidden in plain sight, and when the last agent left the room, she finally closed down her emails. The empty hallway outside room 623 filled her screen once again. Mulder was nowhere to be seen, but Scully had been following this case for a long time and had been the one to induct Colt on the use of this software.

So she knew how to rewind and find footage from the past hour. She knew how to let it play so she could watch the ill-advised love of her life approach Wicking's door and rap a Morse codeword that gained him entry. She knew how to race forward until, eighteen minutes later, he reappeared, eyes she'd fallen into too many times catching on the camera, catching on her, his face still roughly shaven and looking well enough from the sliver of it she could see beneath the hood over his features before he stalked out of frame.

He knew. Whatever his reasons for being there, he'd known the risk and he'd taken it, hoping and trusting that she'd be the one sitting here.

She'd left the basement this afternoon to try and return to some normal, but wherever there was Mulder, there was no normal, and there was always some Mulder in her world. She'd come back to this desk to feel less like she was failing in her many responsibilities and to feel like a good agent who did good work for the common good. Even if her work was unorthodox. Even if her past was sketchy.

Her chest was tight as she went about what she had to do. This was more than unorthodox. This was more than sketchy. She tried not to think of Agent Colt's face and his moralistic view of her as she opened the editor tab and selected the timeframe of the recording in which Mulder entered the hall and approached the door. Colt would disapprove, but she wasn't Agent Colt. As Skinner kept alluding, she was more and more her former partner, and this was not a trigger Mulder would hesitate to pull for her or anyone else he was responsible for. Whatever the consequences for himself.

It was their principles that had always kept them afloat in the muck of their work, and it was loyalty to their principles that had drawn them together in the first place. No case was worth compromising their principles; they'd always agreed.

But they'd also thrown those principles off the nearest bridge when the case involved their families.

Just as Scully was responsible for Colt and Harlow, so too was she responsible for her family. That would always include Mulder. So she swallowed her shame and kept her expression steady for anyone passing the door at that moment as she deleted that segment of film, and did the same for the seconds it took him to exit the apartment. She went through the files for the backups and did the same, careful to ensure the timestamps for the start and finish of her cuts matched.

She watched it back. Watching the door only, it was seamless. It was only if one watched the numbers running in the corner, you'd see that two of the minutes in that hour were shorter than the others.

Scully cleared her recycle bin and checked her histories for any footprint of the act that made her sick with herself. This was a crime. This was deleting evidence. This was obstruction. But this was Mulder. What other option was there?

Feeling like the day had well and truly beaten her, Scully closed down her programs and shut off the computer. Her hand, she saw when she grasped her briefcase, had not stopped shaking. Perhaps it was because there was no escaping the truth now. First the signs. Then the hopes. Now the running, the corners she found herself backed into, the choices she couldn't come back from that in more rational moments she'd never thought she'd make. The losses had started to add up already. So all that was left now was the dark of drowning when it all came down, which it must, because that was the pattern.

Her hands were still trembling when she laid them on her steering wheel. Her world was coming to an end, and there would be nothing she could do to stop it.