JOINT TASK FORCE OPERATIONS CENTRE

LOS ANGELES

0400h (PST)

Ever since Wittenberg Sydney had been on leave. Vaughn was in DC for an intense psych eval after burning down his house upon being released from the hospital, and Nadia had gone off with her father for reasons Sydney decided she didn't want to know.

As for her own father, Sydney had been avoiding him.

Going to a place called Harrison Hot Springs in British Columbia, Sydney had taken some well-deserved time alone. She sunbathed by Lost Lagoon, hiked and climbed around in the glacier rocks, hung out at the pool, and helped the economy by purchasing more souvenirs than anyone really needed.

Between Palermo and Wittenberg Sydney had avoided Vaughn, turning to her father to deal with Lauren's body. Unfortunately, by the time Jack got to Palermo, Sydney was in Wittenberg and Lauren's body was gone.

When her vacation time ran out, Sydney reluctantly went back to work. She was pleased that her father wasn't there. Dixon said he was on an assignment. Sydney wasn't sure if she should buy that or not, but she found that she didn't care. Vaughn wasn't back yet, still working out his anger in DC, and Sydney hated that she felt relief that he wasn't around. But Lauren had changed Vaughn. He was no longer the man who had broken into the Vatican with her. He was the man who shot a full clip into his wife, drawing out her death, dramatizing it, when a kill shot to the heart would have sufficed. Sure, Lauren deserved it, but Sydney didn't like watching anyone suffer.

Weiss was a godsend, watching over her in the first few weeks back at work. He was her rock once again, as he had been immediately upon her return from the living dead. Beer and tequila and homemade pizza with lots of sauce because it's all about the sauce and late night talks about everything and nothing that usually led to one or both of them passing out in the living room—usually his because it felt more like a home than hers—and the both of them waking up the next morning with terrible hangovers and wanting nothing more than more sleep and maybe a bottle of Aspirin or two.

Then Vaughn came back and moved in with Weiss. His muscles were more defined, as if he had spent the entire month and a half in the gym twenty-four-seven, and his eyes were more haunted than they had been, but his anger was much more manageable and when he asked if she would like to get dinner after work at a new restaurant that he'd heard about, she said yes.

They'd gone slow, dinners, movies, the occasional drink with friends. Light kisses goodnight that all too quickly progressed to heated gropings goodnight. Then fooling around on the couch, nudging at the line in the sand with their toes a little more with each date. They knew that when they finally crossed that line again it would be better than ever before.

That was the one regret Sydney had about her relationship with Vaughn before her non-death. They didn't do the dating thing. They went from people who would be killed for knowing each other to committed lovers before the oven timer even went off on their first dinner together. Sure, leftovers after hours of impassioned sex are great, but there's something about the thrill of thinking 'is tonight the night?' when slipping into the sexy lingerie 'just in case' and imagining what it would be like to wake up in the arms of your lover in the morning as you apply that slight coat of lip gloss before answering the door.

And, though slightly disappointed that their reunion hadn't followed some champagne and roses evening, but a mission gone wrong where they just barely made it out alive where their coupling had been more of need to confirm that they were in fact alive than a need to show their love for each other, Sydney knew that romance could come later.

That was eight hours ago.

Two hours ago she and Vaughn had received urgent calls to get their asses back to work, despite the fact that they had e-mailed their reports already and were due to have the weekend off. Now all she wanted at that moment was to attack the grunt walking by with the Veinte Starbucks in his hand.

The urgent call turned out to be a blatant security leak, several files being accessed by someone with a high level of clearance but not high enough, having to hack the rest of the way through. Marshall had been on the case immediately, the software protecting the files concerning Rambaldi in any way being his design.

Sydney wasn't sure why they were needed. She also wasn't sure where Vaughn was. He had been pulled away by an exhausted Dixon the moment they arrived. She'd been sitting at her desk, fighting the urge to go into Marshall's office and curl up on his plastic couch to get some sleep.

As Sydney ran through the last few months to keep her eyes open, her phone rang.

"Hello?"

"Sydney Bristow?" a gruff man asked.

"Yes," Sydney replied, fearing her exhausted state was seeping into her voice. "Who is this?"

"I'm Assistant Director Walter Skinner with the FBI. I wasn't actually expecting to get through to anyone. I was just going to leave you a message," the man said.

"Well give me the message now, I'll deliver it personally," Sydney quipped, not sure where she got the strength to joke.

She got a low chuckle in response. "I just wanted to let you know that an agent under my command is headed to Los Angeles right now and she and her partner would like to speak to you."

"Regarding what?" Sydney frowned. She didn't trust the FBI, and had no real proof that this man was who he said he was. She took her computer out of sleep mode and started searching for an Assistant Director Walter Skinner at the FBI in the government mainframe.

"Regarding Lauren Reed," Skinner said.

Sydney's fingers hovered over the keyboard. "Lauren Reed is dead," she said.

"I know. Her body was recovered in Ireland three days ago. The agent who wishes to speak to you has some questions about the autopsy report."

He was lying. It wasn't hard to tell. His voice was too regulated. She guessed he was ex-military, going by the clipped tones used by those types to shave a few seconds off their conversations, but it was still insanely easy for her to tell that he was lying to her. The problem was, without looking him in the eye, she couldn't tell about what.

"What is this agent's name?" Scully asked. She found Skinner's personnel file. Ex-military, served in Nam, currently working out of the Hoover building in a cushy seventh floor office. He had five very successful divisions under his command, all falling under the Violent Crimes Unit's far-reaching umbrella.

"Dana Scully. She'll be contacting you later in the day," Skinner said. "Probably around noon, your time."

Sydney looked up Dana Scully while she was on the computer. Medical Doctor, pathologist, specifically, with a boatload of commendations and about the same number of reprimands. Her partner was a man named Fox Mulder whose list of reprimands was impressive, mostly in the 'flouting orders' category, though there was one incident of attacking an auditor that struck Sydney as hilarious, but it was his commendations that really impressed her. Monty Props, a huge case in the late eighties that she heard about at school and had scared Francie shitless until the FBI tracked the psycho down. Several of the cases were ones she had heard of, though a lot of them seemed to be the type that get buried on the fortieth page under the ads for used farm equipment in rural areas or stories about the dog that came home from across the country in the bigger papers.

She looked into what their department specialized in.

X-Files.

Unexplained phenomena.

Suddenly Sydney knew what Skinner had lied to her about.

"You're the one that accessed the files," she accused. "You're the one that downloaded my file from the CIA's database. What the hell do you want with me?"

Skinner sighed heavily. "I usually don't have people pissed off at me until after Mulder gets there," he muttered. "Look, Miss Bristow—"

"Agent Bristow," Sydney corrected harshly.

"Agent Bristow," Skinner acquiesced. "The agents who are coming to talk to you are from a department called the X-Files."

"Yeah, unexplained phenomena, little green men, conspiracy theories. I read the bio. I can work a computer, just like you. If you want to know about Rambaldi—because that's what you're after, isn't it?—you can talk to a woman named Carson Evans—she likes to talk about this shit with the FBI—or to Director Kendall, though I doubt he'd give you anything that wasn't covered with doubletalk. I've read your file. Without authorization, your agents do not have clearance for anything related to Rambaldi. You shouldn't even know his name," Sydney said. Lack of sleep and the fact that Rambaldi was coming back to bite her in the ass yet again were coming together to make her want to scream. Instead she just grew hostile toward the Assistant Director. "Now, I'll speak to your agents regarding the death of Lauren Reed, though I doubt I'll be much help, but anything beyond that and I walk. If they so much as ask me my shoe size I'm gone, got it?"

"Yes, Agent Bristow. I'll brief my agents as soon as they call in," Skinner said before hanging up.

Sighing heavily, Sydney hung up and continued her checks of the agents sent to speak to her. Once she was sure she had learned all she could off the official files, she did a little voodoo and found some unofficial ones. It was amazing and terrifying what one could find with the click of a few keys on a keyboard.

"What are you doing on the FBI mainframe? Thinking about jumping to the more domestic side of counter-terrorism?" Vaughn whispered in her ear as he gently massaged her shoulders.

"Mmm, keep that up and I'll do whatever you tell me to," Sydney whispered back, her head lolling until it hit his chest.

"I like the sound of that," Vaughn grinned. He placed a quick kiss on her bare neck just behind her left earlobe. "Dixon and Marshall are still working on the leak. We can go home now, if you want."

"I know who downloaded the files," Sydney said.

"Who?" Vaughn asked, once again the neatly pressed CIA golden boy and not the man who, only seconds before, was trying to figure out a way to convince her that they would actually get some sleep if he got to stay the night.

"Some guy named Skinner. He's FBI. Works in the Hoover Building. He's AD over a division that wants to know about Rambaldi," Scully said. "The X-Files."

"X-Files? Sounds familiar," Vaughn said, perching himself on the edge of her desk. "I'm assuming they don't specialize in weapons control or anything simple like that."

"No, the specialize in the things that can't be explained. X, being the unknown, unexplainedquantity. Discovered by an Agent Mulder about fifteen years ago. He and his partner, Agent Scully, travel around the country and take on the cases that no one else wants to."

"Mulder? Why does that name sound so familiar?" Vaughn frowned, forehead creases out in full form.

Sydney shrugged. She hit some more keys and brought up Fox Mulder's file again. "Special Agent Fox William Mulder. 40, unmarried, and definitely delusional. This guy thinks that aliens are coming to 'colonize' Earth. Said they took his sister from the family's summer house in 1973."

"Samantha," Vaughn whispered reverently.

"Yeah," Sydney said slowly. "How'd you know that?" she frowned.

"I, uh… well, remember when I told you that my mom lives in Greenwich?"

"Yeah…"

"Well, her next door neighbour, until she killed herself a few years ago, was Teena Mulder. She was married to William 'Bill' Mulder and had two kids, Fox and Samantha. Her daughter was taken from their home when she was eight. Her brother, who was twelve at the time, had been watching her. He searched for her until literally the day Teena died. Sam died when she was eight. The rest of the Mulder's weren't much luckier," Vaughn said. "I grew up with them. Fox and I played baseball on the same team. Basketball, too. The occasional game of street hockey, though it wasn't too big back then. He was always a little weird, but after Sam was taken… it destroyed him. We still hung out together after that, though, until my dad died and mom moved us back to France to be closer to her family. Last time I talked to him was high school. He was a few years older than me and he looked me up during his summer break at Oxford. My first hangover came from that reunion," he said, smiling wistfully of days gone by. Days where the biggest problem was hiding a hangover from an ever-present mother. Sydney had never had such problems. "Then he started dating this Phoebe chick and we haven't spoken since. When mom moved to Greenwich and she and Teena got their friendship—or whatever the hell it was—back together I got stories of Fox's exploits at the FBI."

"So, does he really believe that aliens are coming?" Sydney asked as she shut her computer down and gathered her things back up again.

"Definitely," Vaughn said, falling into step beside her as they headed off to tell Marshall and Dixon that they could go home to their respective families because the leak wasn't as serious as they thought. "But he's no threat."

"Good, 'cause apparently I've got a meeting with him and his partner tomorrow," Sydney said.

Vaughn smirked. "Have fun with that."

Sydney growled and swatted him with her briefcase.


Harrison Hot Springs is real, and a great vacation spot if you're ever in near-coastal BC. Very tourist-y, though.