Chapter 4

3:32 pm

"Agent Mulder, I have a great deal of respect for what you and Agent Scully have been doing," Dr. Stein said. "The work you've been doing the last twenty years is truly that of a pioneer, and that's if we only consider your work involving extraterrestrials."

"What did the rest of your work have to do with?" Jefferson asked. "Was it chasing down the evil versions of people like Grey and me?"

Martin had asked Jefferson to let him lead, but he wanted to know the answer to this question himself. Barry had essentially told him that he thought that the X-Files had essentially dealt with earlier versions of metahumans; he was curious to know Mulder's description of them.

"No two X-Files were alike," Mulder said. "Closest thing I ever had to something like the two of you was a man named Cecil L'Ively who was the master of pyrokenesis. Even then, it was pretty primitive. Guy couldn't use his powers without a lot of accelerant around."

Jefferson noticed Mulder shudder. "Scary guy?"

"My ex-girlfriend brought me the case. I think she did it less because she knew it was my field than to fuck with my head," Mulder said casually. "Part of me wouldn't have minded if she had gone up in flames. As to what you and Martin driving at, yes, we were dealing with what appeared to be metahumans, though at the time we used the more primitive term, mutant."

"It was the 1990s, there wasn't a term for what we were," Martin said. "How sure were you of that?"

"Like we told Cisco and Caitlin, not sure at all. We didn't get a chance to do a great deal of genetic testing with most of what we investigated and given the state of technology at the time, we probably didn't have the capability to know what we were looking at," Mulder said sadly. "But then, they were all basically trying to kill us."

"So most of your cases were aliens and metahumans?" Jefferson asked. "Any werewolves or vampires in there?"

Jefferson had been half joking; he was a little stunned when Mulder nodded. "A few witches, couple of ghouls, Sasquatch or two, hell, there may have been a genuine demon or angel in there, but for some reason Scully was the only one who seemed to get those particular cases, and I never really believed them."

"And I thought I was going on an adventure," Stein whispered to himself.

"I mean for all I know, there might very well be a genetic explanation for why those same vampires, werewolves, boogedy beasties and things that went bump in the night," Mulder said dryly. "Maybe they were ancient version of the metahumans the two of you currently represent."

"I believe the test for witchcraft back then was throwing them in the water and if they drowned they were human," Jefferson said just as dryly. "I think your approach is as good as any."

"I have even more respect for the work you do than I did five minutes ago," Stein amended. "That being said, neither Jefferson nor I are willing to agree to go on an adventure, no matter how exciting, unless we know exactly what we're in for."

Jefferson nodded. "Sara said this case has something to do with the alien conspiracy and your sister but you wouldn't share the rest. Now's the time to share."

Mulder nodded. "In April of 1996, there was a shooting at local DC restaurant called the Brothers K. A man named Galen Muntz who had been fired from his job for instability, pulled out a gun and started waving it a round. An older man rose to his feet and in a way that would have done any negotiator proud, began to talk him down. Indeed, by all reports, the situation looked like it might have been resolved peacefully until Muntz saw a police car, freaked out and began shooting. He shot four diners and then the police shot him in the chest."

"Not exactly uncommon in this world," Jefferson said.

"That's what we were expecting when we got there," Mulder said. "Except when Scully and I arrived, the ambulances and police were there and had nothing to do. Everybody had heard the shots fired and one cop admitted shooting Muntz, but there wasn't a single injury. Scully talked to one of the 'victims' who told him he remembered being on the ground thought he was going to die, and then he could breathe. There was a hole in his shirt, but there was no entry or exit wound, and no blood. I talked to Muntz who was utterly peaceful. "God reached down and healed me. With the palm of his hand."

"We read the file," Stein said. "The man was Jeremiah Smith, a variation on one of the aliens you've spent your life searching, and apparently a fellow shape-shifter."

"I don't know if there are good guys in this little mess, but he seems to be one," Jackson said. He paused. "And you wanted to find him because you wanted him to heal your mother."

Mulder swallowed. "What isn't in the file is what happened before. I was called to our parent's summer home in Rhode Island. My mother had sworn after her divorce from my father she'd never set foot in there. I don't know what she was doing there, but I knew who she was meeting with."

"The Smoking Man," Stein asked. "Did you ever find out why they were there?"

"There are still some truths I'm not sure I want to know," Mulder said. "In hindsight, I think I know why they met there. He was looking for something that he thought would be valuable when the time came." He reached into his pocket and took out a small chamber. "Careful with this. Its one of only three we currently have."

Jefferson thought he recognized what it was. He took it carefully and pressed the button on the side. With a hiss, a blade came out. "I've known guys with fancier ones, but I don't think they use them on nearly as important targets."

"This is the weapon these colonists use." Stein said slowly. "It's my understanding that you have to pierce the back of the neck."

"A gunshot won't do, but it can be effective," Mulder said in a distracted fashion as he took it back. "Honestly, if I'd had someone as skilled as Oliver in the Bureau's employ twenty years ago, countless lives, human and alien, might have been spared."

"Where'd you find it?" Jefferson asked.

"I found one just like it in our summer home," Mulder said slowly. "There was some sturm and drung that followed that you don't need to know about it. Where it becomes relevant is that Smith met up with the next night and so did one of them."

"How sure were you that the one that spent all those years chasing you was the same one?" Jefferson asked.

Mulder looked at Jackson as if he'd never considered the idea before. "I just assumed," he admitted. "I have this flash from my abduction where one after the other of these Bounty Hunters came out of the shadows and they were all the same. Hell, the only reason I knew they existed was because they were trying to kill other sets of clones."

"And that's what this is fundamentally about, isn't it?" Stein followed. "This has something to do with alien cloning."

Mulder looked at Stein with a smile. "Now I know how Scully found around me half the time. It really is disconcerting when you make these kinds of leaps."

"Sara said that was part of it and some of it could be deduced from the files," Stein told them. "But I'm guessing that you don't just want us to come with you because it only has to do with alien clones."

Mulder nodded. "I wanted Smith to heal my mother. Instead he convinced to come with him to Canada where I could see the process for myself. Where I could find out the truth about my sister. I don't know why that suddenly seemed more important than my mother being in a coma but I left Scully behind and I traveled with him to Canada. What I didn't know until it was too late to do anything was that the Bounty Hunter that I thought I'd killed was alive and heading after me."

The clarity of Mulder's previous remarks hit them. "You missed," Jackson said flatly.

"I stabbed him and it went down. I didn't know that when you do it the body starts to dissolve into chemicals." Mulder shook his head. "But even after all that when I saw what he showed me, I forgot everything else."

"And what did you see?" This wasn't in the file.

"My sister. Only she didn't look any different than when she'd been taken. And just as I was dealing with that, five identical versions of her and five identical boys came out." Mulder shook his head. "I don't know why this stunned me; I'd been in a room full of adult Samantha clones just a year earlier. I knew that somehow my sister was critical to the project. But my mind couldn't process. I barely heard Smith when he referred to them as 'drones' and that they didn't have any language."

"Hey, if I saw six identical versions of a kid I knew in fourth grade now I'd freak out," Jackson reminded him. "I can't imagine what it was like when science supposedly hadn't figured out how to clone a sheep."

"At the time, I thought Smith might very well be another version of this," Mulder said. "I thought he might be an alien or a clone or something in between. But just as I tried to ask him what the hell was going on, the Bounty Hunter drove up and we started running. I never got a chance to ask him again. And for all the years I pursued the Syndicate I never found out an explanation."

"And your sister couldn't provide one?" Stein asked.

"There had been tests done on her for years," Mulder said. "A lot of it she repressed and the parts she remembered didn't make much sense. We never did get a clear explanation as to this part of it." He paused. "But we might have one now."

Mulder walked over to one of the monitors. "In one of her last little excursions, Samantha followed up on a lead one of the Jeremiah Smiths gave her when we met up with him in National City."

"This isn't the one you dealt with twenty years ago," Jackson said.

"No, he's one that Scully encountered when she was looking for me in 2001," Mulder gave a small smile. "Welcome to the X-Files, gentlemen. You can't tell the players apart even with a scorecard."

"And from what I understand, most of your players didn't even have names on the backs of their shirts," Stein acknowledged.

"What did Smith tell you?" Jackson asked.

"I was never able to find a lead on the farms I seen in Canada." Mulder told them. "All Smith told me was that the crops that they were working on couldn't be found in any biological classification. Even after my source gave me evidence they were still out there, I was never able to find them again."

"That source, she's that Covarrubias woman: the one who double-crossed you at least half a dozen times," Jackson said. "How reliable do you think her information was at the time?"

"She was screwing Alex Krycek, first literally and then figuratively, so the answer is I have no idea," Mulder told them bluntly. "I spent a lot of time on the road the last decade, trying to cover any lead that might link to one of these farms. Kept coming up empty. Turned out I didn't know where to look."

"Smith gave you a location."

"Actually he gave us three," Mulder said. "And one of them has a link to something my sister knew about."

"I guess sometimes the best Mulder for the job is a woman." Stein and Jackson looked up to see Samantha Mulder crossing towards them.

"You know I agree with the second part of that statement," Fox said quietly.

Jackson and Stein looked each other in a way not entirely unfamiliar to the Mulders. "Do you want me to prick my finger?" Samantha asked simply. "I'd understand if you did; considering everything you've read in the files, I wouldn't blame you for being suspicious."

Stein looked at Mulder. "I assume you…"

"She got in two hours earlier, I had her do so in front of me," Mulder told them simply. "But I am glad to know you and your colleagues have already signed on to the official X-Files mission statement already."

"It comes with our job too," Jackson reminded them. "Where are we going and what exactly have you found?"

Samantha looked at her brother, who nodded. "After I escaped the Syndicate's custody, I've been trying to run a backtrail on all of their old haunts. See if any of them were lazy enough to dare to set up shop again. Apparently, they've been smart enough to know better and almost all of their old haunts have been torched. I have no doubt they've relocated to other areas off the grid, but I haven't been able to find which doors to look through. Hopefully, you and your colleagues can help us knock on a few of them."

"You said most," Stein said.

"One of the three locations Jeremiah mentioned did ring a bell," Samantha acknowledged. "I should probably say even that comes with an asterisk attached. The farms that Mulder went to twenty years ago in rural Alberta have long since been abandoned. But Smith mentioned one about fifty miles outside of Winnipeg."

"My Canadian geography's lousy. Where is that in relation to Alberta?" Jackson asked.

"It's not in the same province, but Manitoba is known for being one of the Canadian prairies," Stein said. "Are there anything in that location to verify what Smith told you?"

"That's why I asked for you two gentlemen's help," Fox said carefully.

"I've spent the last few days trying to get satellite footage that would verify the intel," Samantha said. "There aren't a lot of American satellites looking over this part of the world, and we're trying to play very carefully with the Canadian government."

"I thought that Canadians were supposed to be friendly,' Jackson said.

"To the average citizen yes," Mulder said. "But for the last few years I worked for the Bureau, they were never as welcoming as I hoped. Fortunately we do have a couple of other agencies on our side that they have better relationships with."

"ARGUS or the DEO?" Stein asked.

"I asked Alex to go through with it. We still don't know how tapped in Amanda Waller is," Mulder said. "She came through…sort of."

Mulder took out his phone and showed them the footage they had. "I apologize for the quality of the footage, but from what we can tell there's some kind of distortion in this area that's wreaking havoc on the signals."

"Why would there be so much distortion around a group of farms and a grain elevator?" Jackson asked, because this was apparently what they were seeing.

"Because if you believe what you've been told, there is no middle of nowhere anymore," Samantha said. "And that's exactly what we should be looking at. According to every file I've been able to find, there hasn't been a construction in that area since the 1950s. The government has it listed as a wildlife refuge."

Jackson had focused his attention on a segment of the farm. "What wild animal requires that kind of security cameras?" he asked.

"The kind that's trying turn mankind into an endangered species," Fox said. "And we need to see what exactly is happening there before that area becomes collateral damage of an accidental drone strike."

"I hope three hours is long enough for the two of you get packed," Samantha said.

"We're not used to packing at all," Stein said. "I hope we're not flying commercial."

"One advantage of being allies of a couple of major corporations," Mulder said. "Cat Grant's lending us a corporate jet."

"She's coming with us?" Jackson asked curiously.

"I want to keep it relatively small," Mulder said. "Just the four of us on this little excursion. Small enough for us not to pick up enough attention; big enough for people to notice if we go missing."

Stein and Jackson both looked a little surprised. "Scully's not coming with you?" Stein asked.

"She figures you're enough protection if something goes wrong," Samantha said. "Besides, she said there were a couple of things here she wanted to handle on her own. And both of us know better than to cross her."

5:19 pm

"Lenny, I'm not entirely sure I recognize you any more," Lisa Snart said to her brother. "First you go off this little odyssey off the map for the past few months, and now you want me to come in to have a sit down with the Bureau?"

Leonard Snart hadn't expected this to be an easy call. As long as he'd been alive the idea of 'going legit' had always been something he'd considered people who didn't have the balls to commit, much less the idea of fighting for something larger than himself. Now he was not only on the cusp of doing both, he was trying to convince Lisa, who had always danced to the beat of her own drummer – usually one she had seduced into playing her own tunes.

"I don't blame you for doubting me," Snart found himself saying. "I can't imagine how crazy I sound."

"I've been watching the news the last few months." Lisa said surprisingly. "Crazy seems to be the world we live in, and that was before the particle accelerator blew up. How much grief is Mick giving you?"

"Less than you'd think actually," This was a safer subject. "He doesn't like this any more than you, but he's a realist. The world gets taken over by aliens; there'll be fewer opportunities to do what we do best."

"I know, but the Feds Lenny?"

"I've had a couple of conversations with them. I hate that lines about cops and crooks, but honestly I think Mulder might have had more success if he'd been one of us," Snart said. "If he didn't break every regulation and policy the government has, he pretty much distorted them beyond recognition, despite his partner's best efforts to make it look like he'd left them intact."

"So they don't have a problem working with us?"

Snart had no intention of lying. "Mulder, none. Scully's having some difficulties with it, but from what I understand she was always the more realistic of the two. She actually said she wanted to talk with us when I finish up here."

"Mick's going into naughty schoolboy fantasies, isn't he?" Lisa said with a chuckle.

"Probably, but he's keeping quiet about it," Snart lowered his voice. "In a weird way, she's like you. She's appears small and fragile, but come at something she cares about, she's as vicious an animal as any of us."

Lisa considered this. "What are they offering, immunity or protection?"

"They said they'd try for immunity, but it's a longshot. Considering all the hoops that they must have had to jump through to get the Bureau to sign off on working with the Hood, I'm kind of amazed they're even making the effort for us," Snart admitted. "As for protection, Scully put it best: 'We're safer with you guarding us than us trying to do the same for you.'

Lisa paused again. "You remember where we met before you left Central City?"

"Yes."

"I'll be there at midnight. I want you and Mick to bring me in. And if Supergirl should be around, I wouldn't mind getting her autograph."

Snart gave a smile that his friends wouldn't have recognized – it was almost human. "When this is over, she'll want yours."

He hung up and walked over to Scully who was talking to Mick. "Midnight, last place we met."

"Just the three of us?" Mick asked.

"Shadow government attacks, they'll be in for a shock," Snart looked at Scully. "I realize this may not be up to Bureau protocol…"

"Even after everything that happened the last twenty years, part of me still holds fast to the old dictates and policies of my job," Scully said slowly. "That being said…"

She hesitated. "How closely did you read the file?"

Neither Snart nor Mick was sure how to tread with this. "Bits and pieces," Mick said.

"You know I had a sister, too," Scully said.

Snart's tone turned gentle for him. "We do. We also know that the Syndicate killed her."

"By accident," Scully turned around. "They were waiting in my apartment for me and they shot her by mistake. She was dead before I even got a chance to say good-bye."

There didn't seem to be a right answer for this. Mick, however, asked a question that mattered to him. "Did you get the bastard who did it?"

Neither of them expected an answer. They were shocked when Scully chose to respond. "The man who did it, Luis Cardinal, a few months later he shot Skinner in a restaurant. They were transferring him to a different hospital when we got stopped at a light." She hesitated. "Cardinal pulled open the door and I ran down the streets of DC after him.

Mick, who had a history of saying the wrong thing at the wrong time, had the good sense to shut up. Even he had a feeling that this wasn't a story Scully told often, if ever.

"I cornered him in an alley, and had him get on his knees. I demanded to know if he shot my sister. He denied it; he blamed it on another man who was there at the time. One who both Mulder and I had reason to hate and who I'd nearly let Mulder kill just a year before." Scully was there and yet miles away. "I could have shot him in anyway. Instead I played the good soldier and had him taken into custody."

She turned around. "Three days later, he was found dead in his cell. The people who hired him almost certainly had him killed rather than risk him talk to us. I thought I'd feel something now that he was gone. Instead, I was just as empty. There'd been no justice, no revenge, and no satisfaction. I just had to keep on going."

Snart found himself at a loss for words. He knew if anything happened to Lisa, any code he might have would be ground into dirt to get vengeance. Scully had the man who killed her sister at her mercy, and not only had she let him live, she'd actually seemed sorry that he died.

Mick found his tongue first. "I'm guessing you'd killed people in the line of duty before that."

"And after." Scully said calmly.

"Saying you're a better person that I and Snart won't count for a thing," Mick went on. "Neither of us has killed anybody, but that's a low bar considering all the shit we've done the last few years. I guess neither of us are used to meeting people with, you know, a moral compass."

"And I'm not used to dealing with people that have one who are supposedly on the side of the law," Scully countered. "I'm not even sure what one looks like."

For the first time Snart noticed the cross she was wearing. "Do you believe in…you know a higher power?"

Scully surprised them both by smiling a little. "I disagreed with just about every supernatural monster we came across the years on the X-Files. It was always my job to come up with a rational explanation. The only cases that Mulder took on the role of skeptic were ones that were matters of faith."

"Angels and demons," Mick said dismissively.

"Maybe." Scully said, shocking both of them. Neither one of them had expected characters from Supernatural to come in to this.

"See one or the other?" Now Mick was genuinely curious.

"It's like everything else on the X-Files. There's a possibility but nothing concrete. I did think about it, once, when I was…."

She trailed off. Mick and Snart were delicate enough not to go into details of what you might think on your deathbed.

"So what do you think?" Snart asked. "There's some deity up in the clouds, with a ledger deciding whether you're naughty or nice, and if you're naughty you burn?"

Scully actually chuckled. "I'm sorry. Mulder had his doubts over the years, but I don't think even he ever put it as bluntly as that."

"We are nothing if not direct," Snart reminded her. "Me, I'm just curious because I never cared much for fire."

"You know, the idea of Hell is a relatively new one as far as religion goes," Scully said. "The Greeks, the Romans, almost every ancient civilization, they all believed in the afterlife, but they didn't really differentiate between good and evil. Most of the time, it didn't matter if you were bad or good, death was an equalizer. Some religions, like Judaism, don't recognize it."

Mick looked at the cross again. "Wild guess, yours does."

"Part of the reason there was a break from the Roman Catholic Church," Scully said. "Of course, these days everybody on that side is going to hell. Makes you wonder how populated Heaven actually is. Part of the reason I never quite agreed with it."

"So you think the standards of Hell are kind of strict?" Mick said.

"Oh, it doesn't matter what I think," Scully said matter-of-factly. "I know what it takes to go to Hell. And it's where I'm going. No question."

Scully said this like she had ordered eggs for breakfast. The casualness of this actually unnerved two stone cold criminals.

"I've enjoyed the theological discussions but I'd rather get back to why I wanted to talk to you."

Even Mick knew better than to push this particular issue. "All right, so why are we here?"

"One of the few areas where Mulder and I complete agree on this alien plot is that we're going to need some kind of weaponry that can find them," Scully was still speaking as if she was reading a foreign language. "You know, even now coming from me that still sounds wrong."

"Then focus on the part that makes sense," Snart said.

"Did you actually read the files or just skim them?" Scully asked.

"I read enough," Mick said. "Still not sure how Snart and I fit into this."

"Both of your cannons contain material that could help us in different parts of the war," Scully sighed. "I am not wild about producing weapons of mass destruction, even though we need them."

"They're only destructive if they're in the wrong hands," Snart wasn't sure why the opinion of a fed mattered to him, but for some reason he wanted Scully's approval.

"That's going to depend on which weapon. All right, time to stop stalling and get to the point." Scully looked at Mick. "You see that part in the file about the alien rebels?"

Mick actually looked grim. "I saw the photos. I have to ask: just whose side is the rebels on?"

"That is a question Mulder and I just can't answer. We know that they were trying to stop the efforts of the Syndicate to colonize in the late nineties which would seem to make them allies in the fight. But I've seen the destruction they've cost firsthand. "She hesitated. "I don't know why I wasn't part of it."

Snart had read that file. "You were one of the ones who survived that slaughter in Allentown," he said.

"I can justify to a point their actions against the Syndicate. But hundreds, if not thousands of people across the globe died in mass incinerations for reasons neither Mulder nor I can explain. If they were trying to somehow expose the actions of conspiracy, they failed in their first attempt. And innocent women and children died at El Rico whose only crime was being related to evil men. "Scully looked even more haunted than before. "They say the enemy of my enemy is my friend. Not even Mulder would be willing to go that far in this case."

"After what happened there, have you seen any sign of them since?" Snart asked gently.

"Not a trace." Scully admitted. "But it's like with the colonists. We have to think they're still out there. And whether their allies or enemies, we're going to need a weapon like Mick's to have a chance against them."

Mick had a weird mixture of pride and disgust on his face. "You may not think much of me and Snart, but we have standards. Neither of us has ever used on this another living creature."

"I have a feeling this may be part of our code we'll have to consider breaking, old friend," Snart said greatly. "These things may be living creatures, but they're not human either biologically or morally."

"You don't have to sell me on that," Mick said in a slightly more aggressive tone than usual. "I remember when we saw that footage in the electronic store windows when we were still teenagers."

"So you remember it too," Snart said sadly. "If I hadn't already hated fire, this would have turned me permanently against it. You remember what you asked me back then?"

Mick nodded. "'We're never going to be those kinds of people, are we?" He said reminiscently.

"And I swore we wouldn't. I never quite understood the meaning of dramatic irony, but I think the fact that we may be doing the only things under the auspice of the law that we never did as criminals qualifies." Snart said.

Scully had not foreseen this conversation taking the detours it had. Like most people, she had underestimated both Snart and Rory because they were criminals.

"Consider it from my perspective," she said carefully. "I have done some things wearing my badge that I have repeatedly questioned whether the authority I had was just being used to even influence the conspiracies I was trying to uncover. Being a federal agent has hindered my efforts to bring the real criminals to justice far more than being a private citizen would have. I don't approve of the things that vigilantes like Oliver have done the past few years, but having been in the system I can see the reason for their frustration."

"Queen stopped his reign of terror after a year," Snart reminded them. "That should count for something."

"It does," Scully admitted. "But would he admit that it solved the problems he's been trying to fight?"

None of them could answer that.

"I spent almost my time at the Bureau in denial that alien life existed even after multiple close encounters and at least two abductions," Scully said. "Now that the whole world believes alien, the person who spent the bulk of her career trying to pretend they didn't exist now has to be a general to fight a war against them. " She looked at Snart. "Another example of irony."

"Look if you think that my heat gun can end up killing these alien bastards, I don't have a real problem with that," Mick said. "You are saying that right?"

"I don't think those rebels would have used what amounts to a flame thrower as their weapon of choice if it wasn't effective against the colonists," Scully acknowledged.

"That's the thing I don't get," Mick told them. "This is a modified flame thrower and I can use it to control the dispersal in a way that the military devices can't. But I have a feeling based on what I saw those files, you don't need to be that picky when it comes to the aliens. You just need to be far enough away so you don't get killed when they start dissolving."

Snart was clearly impressed. "You really did pay attention to that part of the files."

"I have picked up a couple of things hanging around you," Mick said in his deadpan blunt way. "Know your enemy was rule three with you."

"I'm guessing you read about the only sure way to kill these things," Scully said.

"Pierce the base of the skull," Mick said. "From what I understand, the FBI did that a couple of times and it never paid off."

"Which is why I think we could use a weapon like that," Scully said. "The further away we are from these things, the better."

"I get why you'd need Mick's weapon. Would mine serve the same purpose?" Snart asked.

"Possibly, but that's not the primary reason," Scully said. "The first time we faced one of these, Mulder was exposed to the toxic agent in the blood. I managed to save his life more because of where he'd gone then anything else."

"Which was?"

"The Arctic Ocean. Being exposed to the extreme hypothermia slowed the reaction of the chemical agent. By managing to keep him at that extreme level, I was able to introduce anti-virals into his system that saved his life," Scully said. "We were able to use cooling tubs to in other approaches, but the medical equipment in the 1990s and even now requires very precise monitoring. "

Snart could follow the thread. "You think this weapon could be used in a similar way."

"If someone like you who understood how to use it, or a scientific mind like Cisco or Caitlin was paying attention."

Snart had heard some rumors. "I understand Dr. Snow might have more personal expertise on this end. Experience that might be invaluable."

Scully knew them too. "She's offered more than once. I'm not going to risk her life – and her soul - to save someone else's, no matter what the cost. For now, I'll settle for her mind which is considerable."

Snart considered this. "As a doctor yourself, you must understand even trying to use a weapon like this for that purpose has risks of its own."

"That's the other reason I wanted to see them both," Scully paused. "It's my understanding that both of these weapons are the product of basically a certain amount of industrial espionage."

"It was robbery, pure and simple," Mick told her. "We won't pretty it up to make ourselves look better."

"I know that. I've seen the files." Scully hesitated. "What I know neither of you know about is who exactly you were stealing from. The company you stole most of your equipment from; it was a shell corporation that in the mid 1990s was owned by another company called Roush. Neither of you had any way of knowing it, but you originally got your weapons from the Syndicate."

Mick looked a little worried. "I've seen this movie. Does that mean we get sent on a suicide mission because we pissed off Keyser Soze?"

"If you do, it won't be because Mulder and I sent you. If anything, this raises your reputation with Mulder and me, even if you didn't know you were doing it at the time," Scully said with a raised eyebrow.

"They didn't let us steal it?" Snart said suspiciously. "I deeply loathe being used."

"As do we, but I don't think this was the case," Scully assured them. "Remember, the last twenty years have more or less led to a shift in leadership. I have no doubt the technology you stole was being used for the same purpose I'm discussing right now. But as far as I know, there are no weapons of this type at Luthorcorp or any of the other subsidiaries the new Syndicate has. Almost by pure accident, the two of you have designed weapons that our enemies – human and alien – don't have right now. And that's an advantage we need to press as hard and as fast as we can."

"I was always good at those. Make a plan, execute a plan, expect the plan to go off the rails, throw away the plan!" Snart said.

Scully found herself smiling at that. "Don't tell me I tapped into Mulder's head?" Snart almost sounded offended by the possibility?"

Scully shook her head. "Just the opposite. Mulder has spent his entire career leaping into crisis after crisis without ever making a plan at all. And you're already one up on the Syndicate. From what I understand, when their plan went off the rails their strategies were either go back to step 1 or surrender."

Both Snart and Mick found their old grins coming back on to their faces. "So we already have a couple of advantages on the bad guys within a day of meeting us," Mick said.

"And hopefully, the little treks your partners and mind are making right now can get us just a bit closer to where we need to be," Scully said.

"That's good to know," Snart told him. "I'm actually looking forward to you meeting Lisa now."

"Does she make plans like you?"

Snart's grin faded. "Actually she takes a little too much after our father."

"That's not necessarily a bad thing," Scully said thoughtfully.

"You don't know my father," Snart said grimly. "He'll never do the right thing."

"You didn't know Mulder's," Scully responded. "He did in the end."

AUTHOR'S NOTES

For those of you who are curious:

Cecil L'Ively was the monster of the week in Fire a season one episode that is considered one of the worst of the early ones, mainly because of the arrival of Phoebe Green, Mulder's ex from college who became the most hated character for one who only made a single appearance. Will she show up here? Well, she was played by Amanda Pays.

The arc about Jeremiah Smith occurred in the Season 3 finale Talitha Cumi and the Season 4 premiere Herrenvolk pretty much as described. The only thing that isn't clear is if Mulder ever knew the Smoking Man's role in his mother's recovery. It's kind of irrelevant at this point. (I also left out the scenes with Smith and Cancer Man, because seriously once was enough.)

The Canadian stuff is an in-joke. As those who know remember the series, The X-Files, like the Berlanti verse, was shot in Vancouver for five seasons. I couldn't resist.

I actually wanted Captain Cold and Heat Wave to work with Scully. She always had a more interesting relationship with so many of the human monsters of the week that I don't think these two 'mere criminals' would bother her much. And like the series says both of their weapons would be the kind of thing they could use.

Scully's confrontation with Melissa's killer is pretty much as it appeared on the series, as well as her reaction to his being found dead in his cell. As to Scully thinking she's going to hell…those of you who are fans of the series may know what I'm talking about already. I won't spoil it yet because I will have her confide in them in a later chapter.

In the first story of the series, the mass incinerations which I discussed did air on national TV. (Scully saw them.) I believe its possible Snart and Mick would have heard about it before reading about it in the files. As to the resistance appearing, I think they will but not until later in this story (or in this series)

Roush is critical in Season 5 and 6. Is it possible that some version of the Syndicate has been working on these weapons and that Snart and Rory were just in the right place at the right time? I will explore this possibility later.

Couldn't leave out that line. And yes, both Mulder's approach to doing things and the old Syndicate pretty much was as Scully described it.

If you don't review, how will I know what I'm getting wrong? Pretty please.