Disclaimer: Don't own anything in these writings, and I am making now money from it. All I'm doing is borrowing the characters of Chris Carter and one of my own devising and putting a plot around it, same with any other trademark or copyright items that will be in this fic.

Plot Points: MSR, future, DRR, may be more

Okay, first time writing an X-files fan fic, as I lost track of the show after a move overseas, and read the episode transcripts off the net. Here's my take not on the events post Season 9, but way into the future. Call it tidying up loose ends, as I read the ending of the show and I wasn't too impressed. To the X-files fans out there, forgive any errors visible as unlike Harry Potter research, there is no one website with a lot of information and just bear with me as I had to do a lot of guesswork with this one.

Besides, I had to take a break from the other fan fic I'm doing as I had finished one chapter and am half way through the second (doing a massive, 12 thousand word update) when the first chapter of the next update got deleted by an accident on a floppy I was using. I'm still trying to figure out a way to correct that little problem.

Note: I never bought the concept of the 'Morley' cigarette. Here, I'm not pussyfooting around, and am calling them what they are: Marlboro Reds.

Warning: Blood, Gore, Violence, Cursing, and Sexual Situations throughout

Chapter I

Wyoming

1850 November 23, 2002

A light snow was falling, and would blanket the road, covering the trees, and the mountains surrounding and forming the land on which the house stood. A road connected the house to the highway, and there, parked next to a copse of pine trees, a black four-door Lexus was parked with a view of the road and the house, the engine idling. Despite the cold and blizzard, one of the windows on the tinted car was cracked down, and from within smoke and steam rose like a cloud. Silently it waited, the steam and smoke the only sign it was occupied, and that was gone with the snow and light wind blowing.

Inside, a silver haired man whose face was lined with creases and wrinkles, as though he had spent a lifetime carrying burdens big and small, opened his hard pack of Marlboro Reds and took one out. Next to him was a cell phone, currently being recharged with the car's cigarette lighter, and a bottle of Coca-Cola. Putting the Red between his lips, he lit it with an old black Zippo lighter, and leaned back in the soft leather of his seat. Enjoying himself, he slowly dragged and breathed the heady nicotine, and continued his examination of the house.

It had been almost six months since the incident with Mulder and Scully in New Mexico. Six months for him to get rid of his enemies in the Syndicate, and six months to ensure the continuation of the Project. He had, as he had done before, used a body double, someone altered to talk, act, and look like him. It wasn't the first time he had done it, nor did he think it would be the last time he would have to orchestrate his own death and disappearance. The only thing that had bothered him was dealing with the two federal agents who had, like him, vanished into thin air it seemed, for now, at least.

He had hated what he had had the double say, the harsh and brutal things to muddy the waters, and to keep the secrecy. For what he had revealed to the couple had only been part of the story. Was humanity on a collision course with history? Of course, but one thing the couple hadn't known, would never guess by the actions he had taken, was taking, would be that the man who smoked the Marlboro Reds and known once to his friends (when he had them) as Charlie Spender was that he had never surrendered, and never would.

The Project, the one the couple had found, was but one limb of a body that Spender had spent a long, long time creating and shaping. They knew of colonization, and one of the options to prevent it. However, they did not know of one pet project that he had been preparing, one that could shift the balance of power, and bring the situation to something where instead of being the Indians fighting the Europeans, the reason why they had so many years ago had to surrender. No, with what he was planning in secrecy so great that only he knew the full scope of it, it could end up as more of a Cold War, a standoff between two of more or less equally powerful enemies.

He took another drag, and shook his head. Perhaps it was the holiday season, perhaps it wasn't, as he had spent a sizeable time before New Mexico contemplating the actions he had taken in life, actions that had cost him a wife, a lover, just about all of his children, and the few people he had once called friend. Unlike other people, he knew exactly when he was going to die, and of what. It wasn't the fact his time was coming. No, the thing was he had done things vile and dirty over the years that the lines he had told himself when he was younger, that what he was doing would be for the best, for the survival of his children, their children, and then their children, no longer held sway. As a young man, sitting in a dismal orphanage library, he had read and daydreamed of one day being the one people could look at say was a man of unbent integrity, a man who had done the right thing. Spender's integrity had long been gone, and his soul crusted with filth. That disturbed him, for while he had persuaded himself long ago that all he did was for the right, the very idea that they were going to have execute the option that he had helped created felt not of success, but of failure.

Charlie Spender did not like or accept failure.

Feeling the heat on his fingers, Spender looked at his slowly smoking remnant of cigarette for a moment. He knew what he had to do for a little bit of redemption, but that redemption would cost him the Project, and without the Project everything he had done, every dirty deed he had stomached, would be for naught. Spender knew he had another option, one that would call upon him to do quite a few more vile deeds before he got what he sought. Deeds that would give him nightmares, ones he would smother through liquor and tobacco and in the writings he still did in his off time. He didn't even know if there was redemption, yet…

Spender smiled, and stabbed the cigarette into the side of the small ashtray of the car. Everything he was thinking of, he had thought of before he had driven to the road, and waited, watching as an entire family from across the state and nation arrived for Thanksgiving. He had found out of the gathering through his usual channels and had decided that they that had to be neutralized. The reasons were immaterial, just that they were good people caught in the wrong place at the wrong time. Once the thought of exterminating an entire family as though they were cockroaches would have shook him, now it was just the price of business, and that callousness bothered him now as he thought of the plan and the possible consequences. The possibility of something good coming out of the filth he did would be worth it, or so he believed.

Most of the past several days he had been moving the necessary pieces into place, so that now he sat waiting and watching and wondering if he should even execute the chain of events he had in mind. If he didn't execute the plan, the main principal would be your average man on the street, and while that was an admirable goal considering what he knew of said principal, one event (rather a series of events he had set in motion over the last several years) that had bothered him for a long time would remain that way. On the other hand, the principal would end up having to go through experiences that reminded Spender too much of his own life, and he had once promised himself that nobody would have to go through what he had as a young boy. Now, it was apparently looked like the only way to correct those actions of so long ago…

A thought occurred to him, of the first writing he had tried to have published. Back when he had been younger, less callous, and more…passionate, Spender thought to himself. Take a chance, he mused. After all, even if things went bad, only he would be damned, and he had learned to live with that a long time ago. If what he set in motion tonight succeeded, then he just might have scrubbed a little bit of that damnation off, and earned a small sliver of redemption, and that was something he was willing to do anything for. One thing he had learned over the course of a life in the shadows was that anything good came with a steep price, and in this case, it was going to be a steep price indeed.

Picking up the cell phone, he punched in a number he had made use of before quite a few times.

"Yes?"

"Execute"

Spender hung up, and pulled out another cigarette. Lighting it, he watched the lights of the house, and plotted the next stage of the plan. He hoped that the principal would make it for it was going to take years for his machinations to bear fruit, but that didn't bother him. If nothing else, he had patience…and if the principal was anything like what he believed him to be, then that was not going to be an issue.

Hell's highway may have been paved with good intentions, but then the thing with roads was that they were two-way routes. Flicking on the radio, he leaned back, and listened to "Wish to Build a Dream On" an old jazz song he liked, as the smoke continued to drift in a lazy swirl out of the car.

Cheyenne Daily Herald, November 28th, 2002

Police Baffled by Brutal Thanksgiving Day Slaying