Byers' cabin turned out to be an old hunting lodge that must have originally belonged to a fairly large group or family. It had four bedrooms plus as a separate bunkhouse that could sleep six as well. Best of all, it was less than two hundred yards from the shores of a small lake which was a source of fresh water if needed.

It was just after dusk by the time they arrived, and Mulder unfolded himself from behind the wheel with a groan. They had only stopped twice when they 'd deemed it safe enough, once to fill up the gas hog and grab supplies at a recently-abandoned station just outside Springfield, which came under attack while they were there and they'd barely made it out of. Then again less than an hour ago when Langley swore he couldn't hold it anymore and all of them had tromped into a tiny diner in a small, remote town that wasn't under attack yet and which they never did get the name of. He wasn't sure if the people they'd talked to had believed them since all communications were down, but at least they'd passed the warning along.

Thank God they'd had a powerful four-wheel-drive with a winch; Mulder knew that if they'd been in a lesser vehicle they might not have made it. The only good thing was that they'd been able to get on 95 just past Quantico, and the journey had been fairly smooth if slow from there on out.

They dragged themselves inside the building, barely looking around or at each other. He kept an eye on the woman they'd picked up, who had introduced herself as Dr. Lana Ashbury, wary and ready to take her down if she made one wrong move. But she seemed as shell-shocked as the rest of them. "There's no electricity, but plenty of candles and lanterns," Byers said as Mulder and Dana scanned the interior with flashlights they'd found in the Rover's emergency kit. "There is propane gas for cooking and heat, and running water from the pumps in the kitchen and bathroom."

"How about a radio?" William said, flopping on a dusty couch covered with a green-and-blue plaid blanket. It was cool, but not cold, inside, probably due to the fact that it was down in a hollow and protected from the worst of the winter winds.

"I don't know, but the car radio wasn't working so I doubt anything else would," Byers said dispiritedly, heading slowly up the stairs. The others spread out looking for the aforementioned candles and lanterns, and when Frohike found a box of barbecue matches in the kitchen he carried them around so everyone could light whatever they found. Then they took turns in the bathroom, which Scully was vastly relieved to see was fairly modern even if there was only one. The water was from a hand-cranked pump but worked well enough if slightly rusty in color.

Mulder and William built a good-sized fire in the large fieldstone fireplace in the living room, having found a large shed full of neatly-cut wood only a dozen steps from the back door.

Within half an hour the cabin's main room was warm and filled with a comfortable glow; dimmer flickering lights shone in the kitchen and upstairs as well as everyone investigated and picked rooms. Each bedroom had two single beds, and without a word Mulder pushed the ones in his and Dana's room together. William and Frohike had agreed to share a room so Dr. Asbury could have one to herself.

When they returned downstairs they found the other five in the main room, sprawled on the couches and loveseats drawn into a circle around a coffee table made of deer antlers and logs. The three Gunmen still wore the torn, ragged pants they'd escaped from their building in, but brand-new t-shirts that had been picked up at the gas station outside Springfield. Byers had managed to find a plain black one, but Langley's showed a mosquito with the words "Virginia State Bird" above. Frohike's, which was an XXL and hung halfway to his knees, was white with the words "Wrong Springfield!" and a picture of Bart Simpson mooning the viewer.

"Jesus, aren't we a motley crew," Mulder muttered as he pulled out the bench from the dining table, which was directly behind the couch area with no divider. The other four men had all the couch and loveseat space while Dr. Asbury was in the lone recliner and, in addition, he was afraid that if he sat down on something soft he'd pass out from both emotional and physical exhaustion.

"But we're alive and mostly undamaged," Dana remarked as she sat down next to him, leaning against his shoulder. "Better than most of those other poor bastards we passed."

"I wish I'd know that there was all this room; we might have been able to bring more people," William remarked. Mulder knew that he was remembering the dozens on the side of the road running from Washington, who had tried to stop them for a ride. But they hadn't dared to so much as pause; fleeing was their only chance of surviving.

"There's only so much food, kid," Frohike said tiredly. "I looked in the pantry and for the seven of us it'll only last a few days, so we need to start thinking of how to get more soon."

Mulder turned to their guest, who sat slumped in the chair with her hands between her knees, head hanging. "Dr. Asbury, care to explain your part in this?"

She looked up, dark circles ringing her pink-rimmed eyes behind a pair of metal-rimmed glasses, short grey hair disheveled and, on one side, singed black. "I am one of the people responsible for this attack; not because I wanted it to happen, but because I was tricked into it," she said with a very slight accent. Slavic or Russian, he guessed. "I thought I was doing good by—"

"You've got to be shitting us," Frohike snarled, leaning forward. "You think we'll—"

"Hey—let me do this," Mulder snapped, glaring over at the smaller man. "It's my family that's in danger."

"Your family?" Byers said dryly with raised brows. "Last time I looked it was more than your family, Mulder. It appears to be the whole world."

"Stop it!" Dana snapped, glaring at her husband then over at the men on the couch. "Fighting among ourselves is a great way to start out."

"I didn't mean to cause trouble, I really want to help," the older woman said. "But if you don't believe me, there's nothing I can do."

"For now, I think we should get some sleep and talk more in the morning," Dana remarked tiredly. "I don't see what else we can do tonight unless anyone has injuries that I should look at."

A phone rang suddenly into the silence of the room, startling each of them into visibly jumping and/or flinching. Mulder fumbled in his jeans pocket and drew out his iAll, pressing the button that unfolded it into cell a instead of a vidphone or 'pad. The implanted receiver activated as the little machine opened, announcing itself with a low buzz felt more in the bones of the ear than by sound. He set it on the table and said rather cautiously, "Mulder."

"Mister Mulder!" Though he hadn't heard that gravelly voice, now crowing with amusement, in nearly twenty years, Fox Mulder recognized it immediately and the hackles on the back of his neck rose.

"You black-lunged bastard, you're like a cockroach, of course you'd survive," he snapped, reaching out and pushing another button on side of the iAll so it unfolded into a 4" vidphone and turned on external sound so everyone could see him.

None of them noticed Dr. Asbury ducking behind the recliner, shaking, her face snow-white with shock.

"Son of a bitch!" Dana exclaimed, recognizing him as well. "Cancer Man!"

"Who—" William began.

Mulder waved his hand in a sharp chopping motion, effectively shushing the group as they crowded around the screen.

"This must be your handsome son," Cancer Man, now wrinkled and with long white hair that made him look like a deranged ghost, beamed at them through the small but crystal-clear screen. "My, my, what a handsome boy. You must be thrilled that I worked it out so that he would exist."

"What in the hell are you talking about?" Dana snapped, leaning over Mulder's shoulder.

"Ah, Dana Scully, er, Mulder. You are as lovely as ever, my dear. Quite the nice life you and Fox and William have built for yourself… well, should I say it was." He smirked openly. "By now, I'm sure your house has been reduced to rubble and all traces of that life are completely obliterated."

She glared back at the old man. "Nice, you cheap-shot bastard. Why, and how, did you call us? Isn't all comm down?"

"Not for me, my dear. Not for me. Thanks to you and your, ah, husband's lack of self-control, I am the new human ruler of this planet. The invading forces are under my control, and answer to me as do the rest of you."

A loud babble broke out from the group, everyone talking over each other before the man on the screen had stopped speaking. Cancer Man beamed out at them, looking as pleased as the proud father of a newborn son.

"SHUT UP!" Mulder bellowed, glaring around him except at Dana, which he knew better than to do.

"My, my, dissention in the ranks, Mr. Mulder?" the voice was gentle and amused, but with a hard current of smug satisfaction running beneath. "If you want your little band of survivors to live to tell the tale of this invasion, you must lead better than that."

"What in the fuck are you talking about?" he snapped, losing patience. "I'm about to hang up on you, old man."

"Oh, you don't want to do that," Cancer Man advised with a smirk clear in his voice. "It was a simple matter to triangulate your location from the phone and get a lock on that remote cabin you're ensconced in with your false sense of safety. I could have a craft there in minutes to blow you all to Kingdom Come—but you've been one of my most successful experiments and I hate to have it end in such an abrupt manner."

Gritting his teeth, Mulder glanced sideways at Dana. She was glaring fiercely at the screen, nostrils flaring as she breathed in and out of her nose. He had never seen her so furious before, not even the time shortly after they'd been married when he'd spent their savings on a new computer without telling her. "I suppose you're going to tell us the hows and whys of this great experiment," he said, returning his gaze to the wrinkled, white-haired man on the screen. "The villain always monologues."

"But this time there's no saving the world," their ancient enemy said almost benignly, but with that cutting undertone to his rough voice. "So I decided to indulge myself and gloat just a bit." His gaze turned to Dana, still leaning over her husband's shoulder. "You, my dear, were the absolute perfect bait for him. We knew Fox was getting far too close to exposing us, and while you both thought that she was there to report on you, your true assignment was far more insidious. It worked even better than we had hoped; you both took the bait hook, line and sinker!" He tilted his head to the right, in William's direction, and smiled a toothy, insolent grin at them.

Mulder and Dana glanced at each other, immediately understanding what he was saying. 'They' had put a beautiful young woman in a remote basement office with a handsome, virile man, and let nature take its course. Which, of course, it had less than a year than they'd started working together; they'd been married and William born before they'd known each other a full two years. Dana had decided to quit the Bureau and go into private practice as a pediatrician and although Mulder had stayed with the Bureau, the X-Files had been shut down and he'd ended up teaching in the Behavioral Sciences division at Quantico rather than being a field agent. They had both agreed to remove themselves from danger for their child's sake well before he was born.

"I wouldn't change a moment of it," Mulder said, and in his peripheral vision saw Dana nodding her head.

"Ha ha ha, Mr. Mulder, neither would I," their enemy gloated. "I've been to an alternate timeline and in that life, you did stop me. That's when I decided that it wasn't acceptable and figured out how to start over and try again, this time knowing how to stop you. I knew you wouldn't be able to resist Dana Scully if I threw her at you when you were both younger—and was I right."

"So you're saying that you went back in time and changed history?" Frohike piped in, ignoring Dana's pointed look.

"More or less, and in the other timeline you and your cohorts died a horrible death that was quite amusing to watch," Cancer Man said with deceptive pleasantry. "I'm not pleased that we missed you this time around, but you're of no consequence now. None of you are, not even the vaunted Agent Fox Mulder, FBI boy wonder and profiler extraordinaire. There's absolutely nothing you can do; anything you try I will find out about and have you all obliterated."

"So you called just to gloat?" Dana said, her fingers tightening on Mulder's shoulder almost painfully. He covered her hand with his and hers turned over, lacing their fingers together.

"That's correct, my dear. And to let you know that I am watching you, watching every move you make. I see the slightest threat and you all die, as I will tolerate no interference in my plans for the new Planet Earth." He smiled benignly at them, again like a doting father. "You're welcome to survive out there, eke out a living as best you can. But come back to civilization any closer than the nearest Podunk town and it will be the last mistake you make. Farewell, my children." And with a last chilling laugh, the tiny screen faded to black.

:::

The next morning Mulder rose before the others, reluctantly leaving his sleeping wife's warm side in the predawn darkness. He'd been awake well over an hour thinking, and it was only his need for the bathroom that drove him from her arms. Once up, he was cold and awake and headed to the living room to stir the fire and see if there was anything at all approximating coffee, or even tea, to warm his guts.

He found an ancient, rusty, half-full can of Hills Brothers in the pantry but quickly realized that he had no idea how to brew it without a coffeepot. Instead he made do with a glass of tepid tap water, bundled up, and went to sit on the back deck steps; until the fire warmed the interior it was nearly as cold inside as outside.

The lake was shrouded in mist, the slowly brightening light just enough to show the pale fog and outlines of the surrounding mountains against the sky. He set the half-empty glass on the porch step next to him and put elbows on knees, resting his face in both palms and idly watching his breath plume out. It wasn't below freezing, but close.

He, Dana, and Dr. Asbury had stayed up talking late into the night although they hadn't decided much of anything. The older woman had convinced them beyond the shadow of a doubt of who she was, though not what they could do just yet. She had so thoroughly explained the science behind and described her work for Cancer Man—whose real name was CGB Spender, it turned out—developing the time travel equipment that there was no doubt that she'd designed it as well as why she was on their side now. Spender had originally recruited her for the time travel project and she had developed the equipment believing they were going to go back in time to correct or remove horrors like Hitler and the creation of the atomic bomb, but then smashed it when she realized it had been used to ensure the success of the alien invasion overseen by Spender. She had destroyed most of the eqipment and now wasn't sure if the infrastructure even existed to rebuild it… but she wanted to help them try.

After they were done talking, to his surprise, Dana had all but dragged him back to their room and made love to him skillfully, almost desperately, driving them both to near exhaustion so that they could doze off tangled together.

The screen door closed quietly behind him and he knew who it was instantly, not surprised that she couldn't sleep either. "Anyone else up?" he asked without turning.

A scratchy but thick and warm blanket dropped over his shoulders, then his wife seated herself next to him and curled up beneath it with him. "No, they're still all out like lights," she said, holding the blanket up as he put his arm around her and she snuggled against him, sharing her warmth. "The fire you started should have the living room warm in a few minutes."

"I like it out here," he told her as the lonely call of a loon floated out over the misty water. "The cold keeps my mind clear."

"I can think just fine in a warm house," she said drily, and Mulder turned his head to nuzzle her tousled hair with a snort of amusement. "But you're right, it is peaceful out here."

"The one thing I can't stop thinking about is how Cancer Man said he went back in time to see a life where we beat him," Mulder said. "If he really did it, perhaps Dr. Asbury is right and we can do it as well and stop him—again."

"He also said something about an alternate timeline; wouldn't that be different from going back in time?" Dana said.

"I've been thinking about that too. I think he used that to throw us off the track; I believe he really time-traveled, not going between realities or dimensions or timelines or whatever. For him to make a point of saying that, he must be afraid that we can follow his example and turn things around yet again. If Dr. Asbury can help us go back, Scully, we have to remove or destroy it completely after we use it so he can't turn around and do it again or we'll end up in a vicious cycle and who knows what that could fuck up in the long run."

Neither of them noticed the name he used for her.

"What if it is a different timeline and not actual time travel back and forward?" she pointed out. "There's more theoretical evidence for alternate time lines or dimensions existing parallel to ours than for time travel within one time line. In qualitative physics, anyway."

"But if that were the case he wouldn't be able to alter the events in the other timeline, so why even mention it?"

"But he could use the events from the other timeline to see how to alter this one," Scully argued.

"That's what he's trying to make us think is going on; that we can't cross over between timelines, or realities if you prefer. In the many worlds theory there are two or more parallel lines, each containing the same events up until the time you were assigned to work with me. In one timeline, you don't get pregnant and we stop Cancer Man, but in the other—this one—we do get together and he wins. That's where the timelines would diverge. I'm not buying into that theory; I think it's a case of true time travel, where it's a single line and we can go back and change our futures. Otherwise I don't see why he'd even mention anything about it."

They were both silent for a time, thinking.

"And I don't think he can track us that well; if he could, why warn us?" Mulder pointed out. "From what Dr. Asbury said last night, she destroyed as much of the comm and tracking devices as she could so we should be able to get back in there."

Danas shook her head. "Mulder, it's been so long since I studied physics as an undergrad I just don't know if any of this is possible. I'm wondering how on Earth we're going to manage something so complex when the infrastructure is completely collapsed and we can't even make coffee. It's not like we can just trot down to the library and check out a 'how to time travel in 8 easy steps' book."

"We have Dr. Asbury; she was the main designer of the time portal and even though she destroyed it, she says she can recreate it with enough time and equipment. I think that's what will make all the difference in the world."

"That's true. I guess it's all that there's left to do, anyway. How much worse can things be if we fail?"

"For now let's rustle up some breakfast, wake the others, and plot our rebellion," Mulder said, feeling relieved now that they had a course of action. "I don't believe that bastard can know everything we do." He looked down at his wife's upturned face, seeing the same hope in her eyes that he felt, and couldn't resist leaning down to kiss her.

She truly was everything to him; he wouldn't change a thing about the past years, not even the fights and sometimes feeling like she was trying to run his life. He already suspected that to change the past they'd have to give this up; if she had been his bait then that had to be changed. But as long as he could remember the years they'd spent together he'd be content. He reached over and cupped her soft cool face, deepening the kiss, feeling her response as she pressed closer to him.

"Damn, don't you two ever stop?" their son's voice came from behind them.

"Never, William, never," Scully breathed, gazing up into her husband's eyes with undisguised adoration. "Not in this life."

Afterward - September, 1993

Mulder and Scully materialized in the darkened basement office facing each other. "We've done it, we're back," he said with wonder, gazing around. Only the desk lamp was on, barely illuminating the dank space. "It's just as it was thirty years ago when we met down here."

His wife gazed around, then went over to a pane of glass in the partial wall that separated the two parts of the office and gazed at herself. "I'm twenty-six again," she said with open wonder, fingering the thick, rich auburn hair that now fell past her shoulders. It had taken them nearly ten years to recreate the time portal, hence her amazement since five minutes before she'd been nearly sixty years old. "I'm back to exactly the way I was when we met—and so are you."

He walked over to join her and they stood looking in the glass at their faint reflections. "I can't believe it worked—I thought we'd come through the portal naked and screaming like in The Terminator," he remarked, tracing the firm line of his jaw with one finger. "Not as if we'd never left this time and place, in the same clothes and in the exact same shape."

"Remember what Dr. Asbury said," she reminded. "Within a few days we'll have forgotten our other life, and we've got to make sure that we both drive it into our heads not to get together. We need to wait at least seven years before we get romantically involved or we'll screw up the timeline again, and let Cancer Man win. And since the portal was destroyed behind us, this is our only chance."

They looked at each other, older minds in younger bodies. "On second thought, I'm glad we're going to forget," Mulder said hesitantly. "I couldn't go on knowing what we had and not being able to hold you again."

Though they had agreed to not touch each other once they'd arrived, Scully couldn't help but take his hand and lace her fingers through his. They'd already said their goodbyes before going through the time portal and made their peace with the sacrifices they'd chosen to make. "We will be together someday, Mulder. But not until after we've taken care of that black-lunged bastard and his insane plans."

"I miss William already," Mulder said they squeezed each other's hand lightly, then let go. He could have sworn he heard his heart breaking in his chest as he gazed down at her face. How could he love someone so much and let her go? Knowingly forget the wonderful life they'd had together? Only for the truth and the greater good, he knew. For nothing less.

"Me too, but somehow I know we'll see him again; he's meant to exist," Scully said, moving towards the doorway. "It's almost time for my meeting with Blevins, and you'd better get the slides out."

"I love you, Scully."

"I love you too, Mulder. No matter what happens from here on out. Forever."

Epilogue - May, 2001

When the kiss ended, they were both breathing heavily despite the baby between them. They gazed at each other for a moment, neither hiding the emotions in their eyes anymore, then Mulder spoke.

"Scully… I have the strangest sense of déjà vu…"

finis