For the past month and a quarter, all she'd heard was knocking.

"Good afternoon/morning/evening, ma'am. I'm a

Marshal

Lawyer

Agent

and I would like to speak to you about the criminal behavior of your ex-fiancé, Tad O'Malley."

This far in the game, they were lucky if she let them finish the generic introduction.

She knew she shouldn't be so angry, so brash, in her predicament. By every formal definition of the word, she was, technically speaking, a criminal, and yet she was living a comfortable, albeit sheltered, life in a secure suburban neighborhood owned by the government. She should be grateful, and, if not that, then at the very least, cooperative.

But it was so natural to her, the indignation; and she'd be lying if she said it didn't feel good to feel, even if she was doing it in the most negative way viable. And they seemed to understand, truthfully. Perhaps they didn't care about her temperament. All they wanted was to know what she knew, and they seldom failed to make her feel like a criminal when they drilled her for information.

She was safe, in the physical sense. Nonetheless, she was emotionally drained, and she was feeling less and less like a person everyday. TJ wasn't doing so well, either, and she hated herself for not knowing how to fix that, how to give him a normalcy that didn't consist of staying boarded up in those four walls and watching his mother fade away, slowly, surely, and the rest of that jazz.

If there was an upside to any of this at all, it was that three raps on the front door didn't instinctively mean her ex was there anymore.

She didn't love her new life. But she was adjusting, which wasn't as difficult as it sounded when she was given moments like these.

TJ was racing about the halls, his lightsaber in hand, shouting silly orders to his mother every time he tore through the kitchen. Whenever he was feeling especially comfortable in his movement, he would quickly tug on her shirt—she'd started wearing actual clothes the day they'd been moved in—and whirl his way into the next room. He was hyper. She suspected it was because he'd been in the freezer this morning, eating ice cream that he wasn't allowed to have at such an early hour, and on an empty stomach, no less. Scully couldn't bring herself to chide him over it. His glee was the only thing that brought a smile to her normally blank countenance lately.

She was cooking her first dish in almost a year. She hadn't ever been a cook, per se, but it was calming, and TJ found it particularly pleasing because he claimed to love his mother's food more than anyone's. The specialty tonight was spaghetti and organic meatballs, not that she was disclosing the adjective in the latter. She had just retrieved a box of thin noodles from the pantry when there was yet another knock at the door.

Heaving a sigh, she set the box on the counter and hurried into the entranceway. TJ nearly toppled her to the floor in the process.

Which reminded her. "Go to your room, sweetheart."

She kept her visitors away from TJ. It was a power thing, although she'd never admit it—something that assured her that she still had some control, however miniscule.

He sighed a dejected little sigh and scurried up the stairs. She waited until she heard him open his bedroom door to even look into the peephole. Sure enough, there stood a suited man, who looked every bit like the others; she surmised that he was younger, yet that was where the differences stopped.

Tentatively, she swung the door open.

By the time she did, the man was holding up his badge. She resisted the urge to roll her eyes, instead settling a hand on her hip in subtle disapproval. That move didn't impress Scully anymore. It barely even intimidated her. Everyone had credentials of some kind, and people with credentials were collectively the same assumptive bastard, or so she'd been taught, indirectly, over the past weeks.

The man gave her a once-over. "Fox Mulder, FBI." He pocketed his badge. "I'm here to ask you a few questions."

"What else is new?" She murmured, bitterly. She stepped aside to let him in.

Scully led him to the living room because that's where she did these things. She didn't offer him refreshments; she never did. That would be a waste of groceries, considering how rapidly they tended to bolt.

She took her preferred seat on the chair in the corner of the room, and Mulder sat in the center of the couch adjacent to her. He was wringing his hands from the moment his butt touched the cushion. It occurred to her that he had nothing practical to do with them, unlike his colleagues, who were always equipped with a file of some kind.

"Mrs. Petrie," he started, after a while.

"It's Scully." She corrected him. "Behind closed doors, it's Scully."

Taken aback, Mulder merely nodded, saving his lecture on her accepting her new name. "Scully, then. I'm sure you know what this is about."

She winced for him. He was anxious. He didn't seem like the anxious type. "My entire life is about Tad O'Malley now. Of course I know what you're here about. Which part do you want to hear?"

Without missing a beat, or thinking, Mulder responded, "All of it."

Scully quirked an inquisitive brow. Nobody had ever wanted to hear it all. They asked for snippets, of days and times and the like, but not the big picture. They couldn't care less about the big picture.

She didn't question him. She had nothing to hide.

"It's a long story," she warned, half-heartedly. Somehow, she was convinced that not even that would stop him from wanting to know everything there was to know.

"With all due respect, Scully, this is my job, and I'm on the clock." He flashed her a kind smile, and she cast him a questioning look before she shrugged.

"Alright." She launched into it easily. She told him things that she was positive no one needed to hear because, well, no one asked had asked about them, effectively elongating her retelling. It was selfish of her, to take up so much of the man's time, but indulging Mulder in the gritty details was a cathartic experience. "This wasn't his first time breaking into a government facility, you know. It was just the first time things went wrong.

"He didn't want me to be there that night. He'd stopped wanting me around once I started questioning what he was doing, him and his group of cronies. It wasn't exactly my dream, skipping out on a paying job and a normal life to worry over Tad. As disgusting of me as it sounds, I was happy that he didn't need me anymore.

"I lived blissfully for a time, never having to see him, planning my wedding with a better version of him in my brain, taking care of our son. I was your average working mother of one. I swore to myself that I wouldn't get swept up into his quest for uncovering the supernatural by illegal means ever again. That's crazy, isn't it? A grown man risking his livelihood for little green men?

"Tad was crazy. He was a raging lunatic, and I stayed away from him, fiancé or not. That was, until he started putting our son into his little schemes. I know you're thinking that I'm terrible for allowing that to fly, and I am. But he threatened me. He threatened our son. And I was scared.

"The best I could do was tag along whenever he decided to use him. That's what I was doing there that night. I was watching out for our son: he thought he was standing guard, but he was really just a diversion in case the authorities showed up. Tad and the others were inside. And I was in the passenger seat of the would-be getaway car with the driver."

She went on to explain, in extensive detail, the moment when the authorities did, indeed, show up, and the driver, named Alex Krycek, abandoned her in the car to go and help Tad. Afterwards, she reacted on instinct and drove through the barbed fence separating her from the building, effectively killing a young runaway who'd been lying before it, something she wouldn't learn of until Tad taunted her about it. She'd skirted to the entrance where her son stood, all but throwing him into the passenger seat. Then, she'd driven away, as far as she could. She went all night.

The gas eventually emptied out, and Scully and her child wound up at a dusty motel, where they hid until she grew restless and ordered a cab back home. There, she did not find Tad.

He hadn't turned up there since that night, not when Scully and TJ were around, at least. He had gotten the message, loud and clear: I don't want to deal with you, Tad; I'm over you, Tad. It was nothing he hadn't heard before, according to the last of the threatening emails he'd sent to Scully under multiple aliases.

He'd accused her of disloyalty, of alerting the feds, of keeping him away from his son. He'd promised to harm her and her family, and it had successfully driven her to the brink, where she, finally, mustered the courage to turn him in, and herself, by association. The threats became harsher, more believable. Scully was led to think that he was having someone stalk her, or perhaps he was doing it himself. That was when Witness Protection had contacted her, and she'd waited for them for five agonizing months.

Her breathing was abnormal by the time she finished. Her heart had started uncomfortably drumming in her chest. She felt alive. That was the best part, the reminder that she did have a pulse, that Tad hadn't killed Scully, that she wasn't the one-dimensional Laura Petrie and never would be.

"Is that all?"

Scully made a face. She had just told him everything and he still wanted more. The redhead was two seconds from telling him off when TJ burst into the room, with a mischievous glint in his eye.

She narrowed her eyes. "Upstairs, TJ."

Mulder was intrigued, rather than bothered, by the strange interruption. He studied TJ like he was some kind of specimen. "Richard?"

"That's my new name," TJ answered, blatantly ignoring his mother's command.

"Are you the boy who saw the alien?"

"Yes!"

Scully groaned in exasperation and stood to swat TJ out of the living room. "Upstairs." This time, he obeyed, giggling as he pranced off in the other direction.

"I'm sorry," she murmured, her hand covering her reddened face.

"Don't be. I don't bite, Scully. He didn't have to leave."

"Yes, he did." She frowned. "I can't have him involved in this."

"He's already involved. Isn't he?" At that, Scully's expression transformed into a patent scowl. "I mean, he's living here, with you, away from the real world. He's growing into the whole Richard getup. You really should start calling him Richard, Scully. It'll make things easier for him."

"Excuse me, but are you a parent, Mulder?" she inquired, hotly. Her face was flushed again, this time in fury. He flinched. She softened, somewhat. "Sorry. What I mean is… I don't want that for him. I don't want… After the trial is over, I want him to be TJ again."

There was an underlying message there, one that he evidently picked up on because he didn't push the issue further. She was going to give TJ up, once she was given the all-clear.

"I understand. I respect your wishes, Scully. I just need to speak with him."

"About?"

"What he thinks he saw that night. I swear, I won't ask him about Tad or Krycek or anything. Just the alien."

Scully crossed her arms, ogling the man in disbelief, skepticism, everything. The alien? The alien that couldn't possibly exist? That was what he wanted to know about. It was odd, and that was an understatement in itself.

"Go ahead. Five minutes."

"That's all I need."

TJ hadn't gone upstairs.

He was, instead, hiding out in the toy room beside the kitchen. There weren't many, but there were more toys than Mulder had anticipated, considering how quickly Scully and TJ had probably had to get themselves packed and the fact that Scully's bank account was frozen until further notice.

TJ barely spared Mulder a glimpse as the man neared him. Mulder plopped down in front of the lego building TJ was constructing and cleared his throat. TJ looked up. He wasn't annoyed, like Scully would most likely be if Mulder had invaded her personal space. That was when the man noted that TJ was sporting a NY Knicks jersey.

"You know, that's my favorite team. The Knicks." As cringeworthy as it was, it happened to be one of Mulder's best lead-ins.

That got TJ to beam up at him. He was missing two bottom teeth. Mulder couldn't tell if they fallen out or if they merely hadn't grown yet. "Mine too."

It took a full minute of silence for Mulder to realize that he'd gone about it the wrong way.

"Listen, Ri—TJ. I heard that you saw an alien."

If TJ was surprised that Mulder knew about it, he didn't make it obvious. "Yeah, I guess."
"You guess?"

"I don't know for sure if it was an alien."

"Can you tell me about it?"

Out of the blue, TJ handed Mulder a fistful of legos. Mulder took the hint and started adding to the blue wall TJ was crafting. He glanced up at the clock regularly.

"It could change shapes. I saw it was a table for a minute. I think it made a mistake because it changed into a police car right after."

"What was it before it was a table, TJ? How'd it look?"

He shrugged. "I don't know. It was my dad."

"It turned into your dad?"

TJ met Mulder's stare and held it. "No, it was my dad."

Mulder's tongue dried up. He didn't know what to say with a million things racing through his brain. Tad O'Malley, an alien. It would explain more than it would unjustly complicate. Mulder suddenly had a larger arsenal of questions.

It was an arsenal that he couldn't tap into. Scully entered the room, having gone upstairs to find that TJ wasn't where he was meant to be, and gave Mulder a telling look. Mulder nodded grimly and rose. He ruffled TJ's soft ringlets of hair for good measure and whispered, "Go Knicks." Ultimately, the boy kept on playing as if he'd never been interrupted.

Scully was eager to see him to the door.

He went without contest.

"You'll be seeing my face again, Mrs. Petrie." He said it cheekily as he stepped outside of the house, taking advantage of the fact that they were no longer behind closed doors.

"I hope not, Mulder."

In spite of herself, she watched his car pull out of the driveway.