"Ahhh, oh. OH!" Scully cried out as she felt an orgasm build within her, desperately trying to be quiet so as not to wake the kids sleeping across the hall. She'd failed at that two nights before, leading to an embarrassing knock on the door from Megan at 11 pm. She and Mulder had thankfully been able to cover up what they were doing without the little girl being any the wiser, but Scully knew they had to be more quiet. Unfortunately, a lucky side effect of her pregnancy was not only an increase in her sex drive, but an increase in pleasure. Mulder had compared her to a horny teenage boy, but he had yet to shrug off one of her advances.
"Shhh," Mulder chuckled as he moved above her, trying to slow down because he knew she was close. Scully curled her lips inward, but it wasn't enough. Her moans once again escalated and as she came, she threw her upper body forward and bit down on Mulder's bare shoulder.
"God, Scully, GOD," he whispered harshly as he followed her, the two eventually laying spent just listening to each other breathe.
"You're a biter now?" Mulder asked, still breathing laboriously as he collected himself.
"Spur of the moment. I'm sorry," Scully ran her hand over the mark she'd left. Mulder shook his head and kissed his way up her body, spending an ample amount of time on her rounded stomach before reaching her lips.
Mulder was beginning to worry that he'd have to come up with a way to encourage a repeat performance out of himself at the early morning hour, but an annoyingly shrill ring of his cell phone quashed that possibility. He cursed and rolled over to get it. Skinner.
"Mulder," Scully heard him say over her sigh. She didn't know who was on the other end.
A few moments of indistinguishable audio could be heard from the person who had called, but if the phone call at 5:16 on a Thursday morning hadn't alerted her to something being wrong, what the man she loved did next surely did.
"You have to be kidding me!" he nearly shouted. "Overnight?"
Scully's heart stopped. It had to be work. What was happening at work?
"We'll be right down there," Mulder said and hung up the phone. He leaped out of bed and began throwing clothes on.
"What happened?" Scully wasn't sure she wanted to know.
"Get dressed. We have to go down to the bureau. Our office was broken into."
XXX
Mulder had been sure that he couldn't deal with another hit to the X-Files. It seemed as if they'd just gotten everything that they lost in the fire back, and now this. He reached the door first, in front of both Skinner and Scully and the kids, who they couldn't possibly find a babysitter for at that time of the morning. The door to their office had been thrown wide open, and there were papers scattered everywhere.
"Oh my God," Scully gasped when she saw the chaos that was formerly their office. Not only did it seem like every file had been ripped apart and thrown on the ground, but things were smashed and broken, and their computers were missing. Menial evidence that they'd had was now gone. Whoever had done this had wanted to cause as much destruction as possible. For what reason, though?
"It's a mess in here," Megan said, not knowing that this wasn't the normal state of affairs. This was their first trip to the office.
"Zach, can you take your sister out in the hallway?" Scully asked, not wanting them to be around when the inevitable happened… Mulder's flip out.
"Here," he sighed, knowing why Scully was sending them out, "here's a few dollars. There's a vending machine at the end of the hall. Get whatever you want."
"Whatever we want?" Zach asked, eyes wide.
Mulder nodded. A faint smile grazed his lips as he watched the kids excitedly run out of the office, but he was soon brought back to reality.
"What the hell happened here?" Mulder asked Skinner when he was sure Megan and Zach were out of range.
"I got a call from an untraceable number at three this morning telling me to get down here. That's when I found this."
"Have you checked the security footage?"
"Security footage for the entrances and all the hallways that lead to elevators or stairwells goes blank from the hours of eleven to one am. Everything else shows no suspicious activity."
"It was an in-and-out job," Scully commented.
"It was an inside job," Mulder was convinced.
"These people definitely had access. If nothing else, an informant."
"Why?" Scully turned to Skinner.
"Why do they ever target you two?"
"We haven't been very active lately… no run-ins with Spender and there's been no Syndicate activity for over a year. If there's ever been a time where we've been the least threatening… it's now."
"They want to shut us down," Mulder pointed out.
"Then why not just shut us down like they have time and time before?" Scully asked passionately. She was staring intently into Mulder's eyes, searching for his essence, searching for a connection. She hated it when he closed off to her, especially when something bad happened. But he was not even registering her presence. His eyes were trained on the wreckage. That's when he noticed a small, easily-overlooked piece of evidence. Yet he had the feeling that the very existence of the object at the scene of the crime meant it was intended for his discovery.
A cigarette butt.
Following Mulder's gaze, Scully ended up focused on the same spot. And she saw it. Alarmed, she did manage to catch Mulder's eyes, but the look in them told her not to say anything yet.
"Mulder? Scully?" Skinner asked after the both of them had been quiet for a long moment.
"I can't be here anymore," Mulder excused himself, walking quickly out of the room.
"He's not usually that short," Skinner said to Scully, referring to his attitude in the face of adversity.
"A lot has changed lately," she defended.
"What are you thinking?"
"I'm thinking that Mulder already has an idea of what's going on. And it involves the FBI."
The lie fell out of her mouth effortlessly as the sound of a dinging elevator resonated throughout the dark basement hallway.
XXX
It was a normal day in a normal park in Washington, DC. But what was about to happen there, what indeed was happening there as Mulder sat cross-legged on a bench, was anything but normal. And the man being wheeled by the type of expressionless manservant you'd expect to find in a bad horror flick toward him, the seemingly well-tempered, high class man, had seen things people only read about. Mulder could smell him before the man sat down. But that was nothing new.
"I expected a more… covert meeting place when I got your message, Mr. Mulder. After all, this isn't the type of news you'd want the wrong ears to pick up," the man remarked, wasting no time after he sat down to light up. Being in the old man's presence was disgusting to Mulder, and he wanted to smack the cigarette right out of his lying hands, but he knew what he had to do.
"I've learned that not trusting you doesn't even begin to cover how prepared I should be. We're in the open now. If I were you, I wouldn't try anything stupid with all these people around."
"Where do you think mankind would be if we never did anything stupid?" the old man exhaled. "Besides, you called me out here, Mr. Mulder. And I came. You have to convince me not to kill you just for the sheer inconvenience."
"Listen, you slimy bastard, you know why I asked you to come here."
"And you know why I agreed."
"So let's cut the bullshit and put everything out in the open. If you even can."
"The way you insult me betrays your insecurities."
A remark almost instinctually flew out of Mulder's mouth, but at the very last second, he decided to save it. As heartless and inhuman as the man was, he understood Mulder in a way nobody, not even Scully, ever had. And there was no use denying that the man controlled the situation. There had been a time, when Scully was missing, where Mulder had confronted him and may have even gained the upper hand on him then, but since that time a very strange thing had been revealed to Mulder. He didn't want to control the situation. Because that involved knowing what that man knew. And Mulder knew he would never be able to live with all of that knowledge.
"You want to know about the state we left your office in."
"We?"
"The identities of those responsible wouldn't interest you anyway. They work for me. They have no names. They have no faces."
"What I want to know is why. Why now? What could you possibly want?"
"I want what any father wants for his son. I want to see him succeed. Do better than him."
It hurt Mulder in a deep place to think of the shell of a creature before him as one half of his genetic material. Responsible for his life. He often worried that his hatred of the man was a reflection of the hatred he had for himself. He wished Scully were there. She was always so good at puzzles. She'd always seen through the man and his games. She'd protect him.
"Liar. You never wanted me to succeed. You've tried to kill me."
"That was before I knew how valuable you were."
"Why does that make any difference now? My goals have never changed."
"But your situation has. See, Fox, you aren't my only son."
Mulder shuddered as images of Jeffrey Spender ran through his mind. But he couldn't let the man before him see.
"He was weak. He wasn't ready to do the type of work this… lifestyle… requires. Imagine my surprise when the boy I had molded and raised to follow in my footsteps turned out to be a cheap knockoff of the son I allowed another man to call his own—"
"That's enough. What you want from me has nothing to do with my parents."
"Ahh, but it has everything to do with them."
"Look, are you going to tell me why my office was destroyed. I'm not interested in these games anymore."
"You'll sit here and you'll listen because your life can do nothing but change at this point. For your whole career you've been a man with nothing to lose. Then, all of a sudden, you have two children. What are their names again? Zachary and what was it… Megan? Yes, little Megan. She's so cute. She always says hello to me when she sees me at school."
The hair on the back of Mulder's neck stood on end. Animal-like, he let out a guttural growl.
"And Agent Scully is expecting a baby in the near future. Exciting time to be you, isn't it?"
"You. Stay. The. FUCK. Away from my children," Mulder was seeing red. The dirt that this… he couldn't even call him a human… left everywhere he went made Mulder feel like he would never be clean.
"You sound just like your mother."
Mulder couldn't help what happened next. He stood up abruptly and took a lunge toward Spender. He was going to do what he'd been dying to do for years – do to him what he had done to so many others. Kill him mercilessly.
Until he was tripped forward and felt his arm being bent behind his back. Pain radiated through his whole body. The servant had stepped in, and he wasn't playing. He was all-too-ready to break Mulder's arm, he was just waiting for the orders.
"AHHH," Mulder groaned. He met eyes with Spender, and a knowing gaze was exchanged between them.
He had won.
"Are you going to behave?" he asked as the servant sat Mulder back down on the bench. Mulder wanted to spit in his face for scolding him like a child, but he kept his mouth shut.
"What do you want from me?" Mulder was hanging his head, crying the cries of a desperate man.
"As I was saying, you are a man with a family now. And it scares you that they may be put in jeopardy because of your work. What I'm offering you is a way to make sure that they are never in harm's way. You could be great, Mulder, greater than my colleagues or I ever were. But you need to learn how to play by the rules… to be broken, perhaps," he smirked to let Mulder know what he was saying may have been a threat.
"In exchange for that security, I would need you to join me. I've tried to analyze your brain before, Mulder, but the best way for me to move forward with my work is not to fight you anymore. I'm not able to do it anymore. And you need protection."
A partnership. Spender was asking him to join the family business. On one hand, Mulder was proud of what the man was saying. He felt he had played his part as the worthy adversary. He and Scully had foiled countless plots orchestrated by the very man that sat in front of him, and now he was rewarding Mulder in the only way he could.
But he absolutely couldn't put his name on the sign. He stood against all this man had ever done, and the very thought of seeing him ever again – much less working for him or even in his arena – made him sick.
"You don't have to make this decision on your own. You can leave. Go back to your home with Agent Scully and your children. Watch them play. Watch them sleep without a care in the world. Feel your child moving inside of your partner. Then, tomorrow, meet me at this exact spot at this exact time, and you can tell me your decision."
what would you do?