Title: This Is How The World Ends
Fandom: X-Files
Rating: M
Disclaimer: I do not own The X-Files or any of its characters, although if I did, I acknowledge they'd all need a thorough dusting at this point because I've been away for a long while.
Author's notes: Hello friends! Thank you to anybody at all who is reading this after my extensive and frankly unforgiveable absence. In short, I had a baby. She's the new love of my life and for anyone thinking I'd abandoned this fic without a thought or care, you should know that one of her middle names is Harlow, so I think of this story quite often! I've also had consistent work as a ghostwriter since I last updated, which is putting my fanfic skillset to excellent professional use, and I've returned to my job as a lecturer. In all the other spare hours, I try to be the most present and involved mummy my girl could ask for, which is why it's taken me so long to return to writing for my own pleasure. But here I am, with a rather lengthy chapter a few days too late to call it a Christmas present. I have always said I fully intend to see out this fic and that I love it too much to ever give it up; I'm just sorry it's taking me so many years to fulfil this promise!
/
Fight and flight are natural responses to threats of danger, but perhaps because it doesn't rhyme, hardly anyone mentions the third option: freeze. Harlow was not a fighter, nor was she a runner. Even the briefest look back over her life's most prominent conflicts would show a pattern of indecisive paralysis when either throwing in or backing down would have achieved better results.
She froze now, too.
"Agent Halley, isn't it?" the centre of the three new men on the scene asked with a sharp knowingness in his eye that confirmed his awareness of the error, and his intention to belittle her. Harlow didn't bother to correct him – it would be giving him what he wanted, and she wasn't sure she could speak yet anyway. "I didn't think I'd be seeing you again, least of all back here."
Here. At the Engel property, where they'd first met. Agent Victor Pierce had looked, for all of a single minute, like the sleekest, most capable, most professional backup Harlow could have hoped to have joining her on this unexpectedly confronting first case. He'd stepped into the room, slipping his reflective sunglasses from cool eyes that spoke of confidence and experience, and for a moment, Harlow had thought everything was about to get better.
He'd just slid those sunglasses from his face and into his pocket again like he did that day, but this time, Harlow knew better than to expect a positive outcome. Her bad day was about to get worse. Still, her feet wouldn't move, and her brain seemed simultaneously numb and in overdrive, though she found her tongue.
"What are you doing here?"
It was a fair question but his condescending laugh ensured she second-guessed her right to ask it.
"I was about to ask you the same," Pierce countered. He shared a smile with the two bulging cronies he'd brought with him, though neither returned anything close to the expression. Either of them looked capable of snapping her in half, and she was certain that was the off-putting impression she was meant to get. "Looks to me like you're trespassing on private property and interfering with an active investigation. Didn't you learn your lesson last time?"
Trespassing, interfering… She swallowed the terror that rose in her throat at the thought of his word against hers landing her back in some storeroom somewhere, shamed and without a shred left of credibility. He could do that. She knew now, he'd done it once before.
"…irresponsible level of access to the surviving relatives, completely incompetent – who the hell even let you onsite? You're a kid, a pathetic kid playing at secret agenting, and who knows how many lives you've managed to fuck up in the day and a half you've been here getting your sticky little hands into everything. You should never have fucking been here…"
Against the trauma of that memory, a tiny glimmer of her brash arrogance caught onto the previous withered, frightened thought. He had used his political influence and his talents for bullying to make her go away once before – because he'd had to. Because she was in the way.
Because she was in the right.
Her throat loosened enough that she could respond, and she was relieved that the syllables rang clear and unshaken.
"It's not trespass when you're invited, Mr Pierce," she said finally. And because her pride wouldn't allow her to let sleeping dogs lie and she was genetically predisposed, apparently, to sinking her foot right into trouble, she had to add, "Were you invited?"
Pierce's smug expression briefly froze in place as she caught him by surprise, and though he cleared it quickly, it gave her spine a little more strength.
"And I'm glad to hear there's an investigation already underway here," she continued, even more boldly. Her pulse was a high-speed gallop in her ear. "I'd love to be CC'd into your reports on the violent assault, illegal property search and possible stalking that's taken place over the past few hours. As you know, I'm quite invested in this family's case."
"Naturally." Pierce forced a smile, and either side of him, his henchmen angled their heads in his direction, seemingly awaiting an instruction. She was sure she detected the tiniest headshake. "It's commendable. Though I'm disappointed that this family has tried yet again to drag you into their web of deceit."
Being less than socially fluent, it took Harlow a beat to determine that he'd smoothly changed tactics in response to her successful attempt at backing him into a verbal corner, and she asked, "What do you mean?" Effectively handing power back to him. His smile widened.
"They're conning you, Agent," he said with pity. "Some mightn't even realise they're doing it, but somebody in this family has all of us – the extended family, you, even me – all turned around over that initial tragedy. I've been keeping a finger on this case ever since we wrapped it, and it keeps flaring up, but those leads always go cold, right at that door." He pointed at the farmhouse, and Harlow glanced back over her shoulder, glad to see the front door was shut. "We got out here earlier to respond to yet another call for help, and there's Engel trashing his own house to make it look like it's been searched. Raging, inconsolable. He's mentally ill, Agent. So much of what he says, what he thinks has happened – it's crazy talk. I wish I'd seen it sooner."
Harlow frowned. Even she could detect that the conversation had changed direction. He wasn't being nasty anymore; that last bit sounded almost collegial. She didn't know why, but Pierce was trying to get her onside. Trying to undermine her belief in this case and pretend like he hadn't bombed her career and they were somehow on the same side. Gavin Engel might very well be crazy, but the case was not. The connection between the dead family's diagnosed manner of death, the alien virus in Harlow's Quantico lab and the rest of the insanity Agent Scully investigated as part of the bigger, more terrifying picture was unmistakeable.
There was something here worth hiding, and 'crazy' was one of the words these people used as gloss. She should know by now. She'd been hidden beneath it for years, and was now learning how powerful a guise it really was.
"With respect," she said finally, "no. Get fucked."
It was absolutely not the way to speak to a superior officer, and it gave him another pause. "I'm sorry?"
"I don't think I stuttered," she shot back before she could think over the total inappropriateness of what she'd just said. He opened his mouth to reply, but no one got their mouth open quicker than Harlow on a roll. "How bizarre that the whole family is now swept up in this shared delusion, since they're all making the same claims of aggressive home invasions and illegal searches today, with no reason to participate in Gavin's ruse. I'm not a psychologist, but is that common? For a whole extended family of intelligent, stable people to randomly decide to trash their respective homes all on the same day? Is that something courts really believe, when it's used as an excuse to cover abuses of power?"
She left the brazen questions hanging and wondered wildly whether he was going to sic his henchmen on her when Pierce's jaw twitched with the tension of holding back his honest reaction.
He only said, tightly, "I believe it's been documented, yes." And the henchmen stayed dead still, but one of them must have tightened his fist, because his knuckles cracked with the pressure.
She was on thin ice. Her heart was thundering.
So, naturally, she said, "At least something will be documented."
Bright eyes flashed with displeasure.
"Watch yourself, little agent. You can be sure you're not the only one."
The threat, which she was sure that was, went right over her head. Their work was always at risk of being watched, so she didn't waste energy trying to further unpack his words.
"I just wonder," she said staunchly, angrily, "why you don't think it's odd, and why you'd hope I wouldn't think it's odd, that Gavin and his family's sudden psychosis and subsequent home destructions should coincide with the arrival of a package intended for someone we're all better off not naming?"
He froze. She'd said too much.
There was a beat and the farmyard was so quiet that she heard her own shallow breath. Pierce was staring at her, his face shifting as she spoke from tense to panicked into a discomforting calm, and Harlow knew something had just transpired that she couldn't interpret and that it was bad. She knew she'd just alluded to several truths – that Pierce had initiated these searches, that he was here looking for whatever treasure Gavin had hidden for Fox Mulder, that there would be no documentation of this search and that forensics was not coming, and that the Engels would be swept under the rug of the law and red tape yet again – truths her archnemesis could not have her spouting when she left here. She was suddenly very aware of the breeze against her sides, her exposed sides, and the complete emptiness of her hands, and the hugeness of the men in front of her, and her utter aloneness in this place an hour away from an airport with no one coming to rescue her.
Alone with the voice from her nightmares.
"…and who in their right mind sent you, anyway? What, they thought, cute gook kid with glasses and a fresh badge, spent her whole life squinting down a microscope in some fucking lab, might know a thing or two about science or some shit? Jesus Christ, the Bureau's been scraping the bottom of the barrel, haven't they? 'Cause they send you, no fucking idea how to conduct an investigation, desperate to find something exciting and worth prosecuting to get your name out there when sometimes there's just a tragedy and that's fucking life, kid…"
Harlow shivered though the breeze was nice. Pierce tsked and took an idle look around their beautiful, isolated surroundings. One of his henchmen twitched, and the other angled his sun-shaded gaze down, listening. Earpieces, tiny and unseen and high-tech.
"Dr Harlow," Agent Pierce said ruefully, with the unsatisfied smile of someone who had just won but by default, "you've cast me as your villain."
She lifted her chin, defiant and shaken by the sudden end to the dance of pretence. She knew he knew her name.
"Are you not?" she countered. She should shut up. To say more put her at risk of slander, and she only barely managed to rein in the accusations she wanted to spit at him. "Where would my career be now if we'd never met? Where would this case be?"
The questions hung heavy and so did his gaze on her, so steady, so level, and he was silent for so long that her nerve, bolstered by the thrilling certainty of danger, quivered and faltered; and when he finally answered, his words were soft and they rocked her foundation.
"You're not in the story you think you are, doctor," he said evenly. "At least you were safe in that storeroom."
She had no good comeback for that, and thankfully was saved the awkward floundering that was sure to occur when a new voice joined the scene, carefully loud to carry clearly over the rural breezes.
"…That's right, ma'am."
Pierce and his henchmen whipped their heads toward Colt so fast that it would be comical if Harlow hadn't done the same. Her heart flipped with actual joy and she could have cried with relief to see him, strolling out from behind the farmhouse with his phone to his ear and his eyes on the situation unfolding. He lifted an amiable hand to her, to Pierce, to the others, and when she glanced back at them for their reactions, she witnessed an odd exchange. Pierce raised an abrupt hand in a military-esque signal for 'stop'. The left-hand henchman touched a hand to his earpiece, giving it away, while the other made eye contact with an incredulous Pierce. Ha, they hadn't known to expect her to have backup this time.
The idea that Colt's presence could take Victor Pierce by surprise made Harlow love that former solider even more, and not even care when Pierce hissed to his henchman, "How?!" Then, when he received no immediate answer, "Find out."
The henchman turned away, murmuring to an unseen operative Harlow didn't think to consider. She was thinking only of her own unseen ally, here, walking toward her with purpose in his stride and Dr Scully at his ear as he filled her in on what they'd already seen.
"…complete mess, ma'am, clearly the result of a rushed and aggressive search, just as Mr Engel advised Agent Harlow on the phone," Colt was saying as he approached. "Can you see the photos I've sent you…? Oh, good… Yes, I've taken prints. Agent Harlow's here with three other agents. That Agent Pierce, I think? Can you be sure to clear our presence here with his supervisors?"
Colt was close enough now that he couldn't think his conversation was private, and Harlow was a little surprised by his unusual lack of tact. He thanked their boss by name and hung up as he reached them, arriving directly by her side, somewhat in her personal space as he held out his badge to the older men with his easy manly confidence.
"Agent Colt, sir," he said, leaning past Harlow and kind of blocking her from the conversation a bit. She tried not to be offended. "I'm sure Agent Harlow has already made introductions. I assume you're the lead agent here?"
She turned to give him a wide-eyed stare. He'd said to Scully that he knew who this was, yet he was going to hand over the scene to him? Had he not been paying attention to anything she'd ever said?
Pierce was still behaving oddly, watching his henchmen for signals as they communicated with god-knew-who on their earpieces, but at the slightest shrug from one and a headshake from the other, he turned back to Colt with slimy ease.
"That's right," he agreed, happily taking the offered olive branch of power that Colt had so clumsily given up. She wanted to kick him. "We'll have to ask you to leave, and to hand over any evidence collected."
The affection she'd just felt for Colt melted into the lava of her fury.
"That's ridiculous!" she fumed, and would have said more if Colt hadn't slipped a warm hand under her jacket to lay firmly on her middle back. An unexpectedly intimate touch that stole her breath.
A warning.
She shut her mouth.
"We'll let Agent Scully deal with it," he reassured her. To Pierce he said, "Our supervisor has already received all the photographs I took but I'm sure she'll be quick to forward them onto yours when they explain the mix-up. We'll get out of your hair."
Colt's hand steered her out of the conversation and toward their hire car without waiting for a dismissal. His body stuck close to hers, even as he smiled and gave a friendly wave back at the men they were walking away from.
"Thank you, Agent Colt," Pierce called after them, though when Harlow glanced back, his eyes were on her. "That's a good decision."
He turned to confer quietly and seriously with his henchmen, and Colt walked Harlow swiftly to the passenger side. His hand was not gentle, his elbow locked and his chest hard against her bicep whenever she bumped him on each alternating step. He opened the door smartly for her like he was a butler, and she almost made a playful comment, but the look on his face, so close to hers as he shifted but eyes everywhere else, told her it would not be well-received.
"Get in," he muttered under his breath, and she did, his hand sliding away to be replaced by the sensible curves of the seat. "Answer your phone. Now."
He shut her in the car and she dug in her pocket for her cell phone. One look at its screen told her the reception was not back, which explained why it wasn't ringing. She looked up at him as he strode around the front of the car, his footsteps quicker than usual but not quick enough that anyone else would think he was being hasty. Beyond him, Pierce and his cronies were watching her through the windscreen.
Waiting for something. Harlow didn't like it. But she couldn't look away.
She actually jumped when Colt snapped open his door, and again when he snapped it shut.
"Pretend," he ordered as he clicked his seatbelt into place, and she hurriedly copied him and then did as instructed and brought her inert cell phone to her ear.
"Yes, hello?" she said lamely, eyes still on the men outside the farmhouse. One henchman touched his ear again and the other turned to listen to Pierce as stern conversation began again. "That's right, I'm totally on my phone right now. Talking. To ghosts, I guess."
Colt had the engine started and was already reversing. He repositioned the car and then shifted gears to get it moving up the driveway. Harlow leaned forward to spy on her nemesis through the side mirror. He hadn't moved.
"Talking to myself isn't weird at all," Harlow continued into her phone. "How long do I need to do this?"
Beside her, Colt shrugged despite his expression of intensity.
"Until the scout watching you from the top field loses sight of us, since the thought that we've circumvented their communications black-out to make contact with Agent Scully is probably the only reason they didn't just shoot us and leave us to bleed out in the meadow."
Stunned into silence, Harlow felt her gaze finally slide away from Pierce and refocus on the wavy grass Colt had just mentioned. The property sprawled for miles and miles around with no obvious life in sight, and the field looked as serenely empty as the rest of their surroundings. Her eyes scanned and scanned as they trekked up the driveway past it, but she saw nothing out of the ordinary.
"How do you know?" she asked, her voice meeker than she'd expected to hear from herself. She'd felt terrified yet emboldened up against Pierce for a moment there, but how much had she overlooked in that situation? What the fuck had Colt just pulled her out of? She searched the mirror again. Pierce had narrowed to a tiny speck.
Despite his stoic expression, she saw Colt's eyes cut nervously toward the field. "Breaks in the waves when the wind blows show where someone has disturbed the grass. Watch for a minute. And don't forget you're meant to be on the phone."
She did as he told her, continuing a false and plainly stupid conversation with her silent phone while she stared out the window at the lush spring meadow as it danced in the breeze. This way, that way, a wave passing across it as a heavier gust blew. It just looked like grass, and she might have rolled her eyes and said so if she weren't so shaken from the day's events, and if Gavin Engel hadn't been so insistent that he, too, had been under watch.
So she kept staring, trying to see the breeze's movements through the grass as a continuous wave and to follow it with her eyes, and… oh. Her stomach twisted uncomfortably to notice the briefly illuminated path winding through the weeds up to the top near the tree line. Anybody who'd made their way to that spot would have an excellent view of the farmhouse and the confrontation between Harlow and Pierce.
Anybody who'd made their way to that spot could easily still be there, invisible even at this closing distance. The hire car rumbled over the rough driveway, Colt not slowing down for any dip or pothole in his haste to get them out onto the road and away from here.
"You think it's one of Pierce's team?" she asked him quietly. From that spot, a scout would have seen the two agents arrive. If Pierce and his henchmen were nearby, say at another of the adjoining Engel properties conducting yet another illegal search, a scout's immediate report of their presence would explain Pierce's swift appearance. It meant they'd been watched from the moment they drove past the mailbox. Harlow tried not to shiver as they passed it again on their way out, and beside her, she saw Colt visibly deflate with relief to be out of sight of that field. Her brain was still catching up. "That's who they were talking to on their radios. Wait, you thought they were going to shoot us? So the scout…" Her throat suddenly felt very dry to have to voice this question, especially given the obviousness of it once it was out loud. "They had a sniper?"
Duh. Why would Pierce position any random lackey in the field overlooking Gavin Engel's place when Gavin was armed and a potential threat, and whatever item he was guarding for Fox Mulder was so valuable? Their team was high level, operating without any record that Agent Scully had been able to find. Of course they had a sniper. It made sense that the team member left to defend the property against other parties – such as herself and Colt – could actually do so. Stealthily. Cover-ups were their forte.
"I didn't see anyone," Colt admitted uncomfortably, "but the possibility crossed my mind."
"You knew it was a sniper because you are a sniper," she insisted immediately, getting the anticipated startled response and then exasperation as he tried to insist that he wasn't. Tension disrupted. "Takes one to know one, Corvette."
He was downplaying it, but she knew in her heart that his instincts were right. She thought back over the conversation with Pierce. The henchmen on their earpieces, listening to someone overseeing the whole thing. Pierce signalling someone to hold off – hold off firing? – and the look of rueful calm on Pierce's face when she put her foot in it and made clear that she was never going to be anything other than a pain in his ass. The whole picture made so much more sense knowing that his fourth teammate probably had her in his crosshairs, and she'd essentially just invited them to pull the trigger and make their lives much easier.
Until Colt showed up.
"Warren Forgot-Your-Middle-Name Colt," she said wonderingly, lowering her phone to her lap and weathering his incredulous sidelong glance. "Did you just walk into a live firing range to defuse a tense situation that was about to get me shot, put an end to an argument I was trying to pick with the most dangerous man I know, and put yourself in the line of sight between me and a likely sniper as you escorted me to this car and drove me to safety?"
Some more of Colt's anxious tension crumbled as he determined how to answer her, the faintest traces of amusement lightening his face. She simplified the question for his benefit.
"Did you just save my fucking life?" she demanded. "Because if you did, I think I love you. Even if you borderline felt me up to do it."
He finally smiled, a real smile, and she felt her own shakiness ease. The world felt safer with a stable, grounded, happy Agent Colt in it. It felt more like a place she could handle, even if it had snipers and alien angles and extraterrestrial viruses and dead children curled up in basements.
"Maybe I was going for the gun that was meant to be holstered there," Colt scolded, but with no bite. She scoffed, because like he wouldn't have just drawn his own, though she was reflecting with some self-reproach that it was stupid to rush off this morning to Ohio without first collecting her firearm. "And if you're saying thanks, I didn't mind possibly saving your life."
He looked across at her for a beat longer than necessary, and in his sweet, open face she saw some of the things he wasn't saying. He'd been scared, too. Scared his plan wouldn't work, scared she would be hurt, scared he'd have to work out what to do next. She was annoyed with herself that she'd let the situation reach that point, that she'd been so overly focused on her search of the house as to not notice the cars until it was too late, and that she'd been so inattentive to the behaviours of the men that she hadn't picked up on the likelihood of a fourth agent, watching on. Harlow was the agent in charge. She was responsible for Colt, and felt confident that Dr Scully would have her skin if something awful happened to him in the field.
"Why did they let us go?" Harlow asked, redirecting. "They totally changed tack when they saw you, and I thought at first you took them by surprise, but if there was a scout watching and reporting to Pierce, then they knew all along to expect you."
Colt took one hand off the steering wheel to draw out his cell phone and wave it at her.
"They thought they had comms under their control," he explained, sounding like the solider he was never going to quite shake from his past. "They had the landline tapped and the cell networks blocked, keeping anyone here silenced and off-grid. You and me, I'm sure they'd be happy enough to bury in that field if it meant less paperwork, but the minute it looks like we have our own sniper overlooking the scene? I put a question in their minds. They realised that killing us could create more problems than it would solve. I took a gamble, though it seemed a pretty safe bet given how we've seen people respond to Agent Scully's reputation. If they're going to entertain the possibility of anyone cracking their comms blackout, it'd be her."
Harlow watched him pocket the phone, marvelling at his mind. Between his tutelage under Scully and his time in 'ops' in Afghanistan, Colt had developed quite the brain for strategy and reading of people. Far better than Harlow ever would, he understood what people wanted, what they expected, and how those two things would prompt them to behave.
"So you rang Dr Scully," she concluded, impressed. Colt returned his hands to the wheel, manoeuvring the car off the dirt road and onto one more resembling actual road.
"Well, I wanted it to look like I'd called Scully," Colt corrected, and Harlow thought again of the utter lack of reception at the farmhouse. "More convincingly than you did, I'll add, and I hope you're grateful for that."
"I'm indebted to your theatrical skill," she mocked, but she meant it and she was pretty sure he knew that. He'd just bluffed them both out of a probable unmarked grave – Colt was her goddamn hero.
Dr Harlow, you've cast me as your villain.
Pierce's voice echoed unpleasantly around her head and her thoughts drifted unwillingly back to their exchange. The things he'd said, the way he'd started off trying to gaslight her into entertaining his side of the story… it had never occurred to her before that he saw himself as the good guy in all this. The hero, eliminating threats to the general good, doing the dirty work that needed doing to ensure the best outcome, and protecting the innocent and the noble.
You're not in the story you think you are, doctor. At least you were safe in that storeroom.
He hadn't wanted to have her shot, though it seemed he'd considered it and been in a position to make it happen and almost sanctioned it before Colt appeared; he'd spent time and energy trying to talk her around. It seemed crazy to even think it, but what if he had been trying to protect her from the outset? Cut her abruptly from the case before she could learn about this deep, dark rabbit hole and get lost in its filthy tunnels. Cruel to be kind, all that.
Her life sure as fuck was simpler before Dr Scully seconded her from her unsatisfying but safe storeroom, and would have been simpler again if she'd never attended the crime scene at Shane and Carly Engel's home.
The new angle on Pierce made her feel shaky, like she was back standing in the farmyard facing down with him, exposed and unsure and not knowing what would happen next. She liked it better when he was just the mean authority figure in her memory of this place and she could ascribe her own unreasonable motives to his actions. She'd never had to imagine him any other way, but his words haunted her. Forcibly, she cycled back over some of his less profound commentary to remind herself that he was, undeniably, a giant dick.
Don't tell me the agency's still paying you to stick that nose where it doesn't belong?
Yep, a dick. She wasn't wrong about that, at least. But where his unexpected words made her feel uncertain, his characteristically mean ones sent her mind spiralling back to that dressing-down almost two years ago, and she swallowed against the feelings of immense smallness.
Something light landed in her lap. A flyer, cheap and amateur with all the hallmarks of having been printed at home, the ink starting to run short and the margins not quite parallel to the edge of the paper. It heralded the grand opening of a new steakhouse, and gave an address.
"Can you punch that into the navigator? I think that's where we'll find your missing Engels," Colt said, and Harlow obliged without comment, glad to have something to do. Someplace to go next and be purposeful. "You okay?"
"Yeah." She cleared her throat, a truly Shakespearean performance. She focused on her task. "Fine."
"Yeah, okay," Colt snorted in disbelief. "I mean, what did he say to you? Pierce. I heard the start and missed a few things he said at the end. Did he threaten you?"
Harlow shook her head and finished typing the address and watched as the internet with its miraculous four bars of reception did its work.
"No. I mean, I don't think so. Who fucking knows?" She shrugged against her seatbelt and made sure to look at the passing trees and hills, anywhere but at her caring, thoughtful, brave partner. "He said I was safer in the storeroom. What does that even mean? Just that I'm in well over my head, as usual, and have no fucking idea what I'm doing, and am just a pathetic ant under his shoe?"
Colt glanced at her. "That's an oddly specific analogy that I somehow doubt was his intended message." His eyes darted to the mirror to note the empty road all around them. "Are we really going to have this conversation again? Where you act like you aren't the badass who just rocked up to the same crime scene he threw you out of eighteen months ago, bigger and better than ever before, proving he can't hurt you? Didn't I just hear you give him the verbal middle finger and throw his cover story back in his face? You're lucky he didn't have you shot sooner."
Amused, Harlow finally turned to him. He was focused on the road again, following the directions emanating from the navigation system.
"You really think I'm a badass?"
"I think you just said with respect, no, get fucked to a superior agent." Colt shot her a quick smile as she groaned. She'd forgotten. "You know I think you're a badass."
She couldn't believe she'd said that, but also, she found she wasn't as stressed about it as she'd expected. Unlike in any other scenario, with above-board investigations and honourable agents following real codes, the chances of any official repercussions for her disrespect were extremely slim. What was Pierce going to do? Report her? Admit he was at the scene?
Harlow settled back into her seat, calmer, and when the remainder of the car ride passed in companionable quiet, it wasn't just because Colt wasn't speaking. The voice in her mind, Pierce's remembered voice, forever eating away at her self-confidence, was muffled, too.
The navigator took them into the nearby town, and they easily found street parking on the main drive. The place was far from 'happening'. The new steakhouse turned out to be a good-sized but otherwise unimpressive venture with a plasticky Now Open! banner hanging over the hastily painted doors. Inside, only three of the thirty-plus tables were occupied, and the elderly couple near the door who were just finishing their plates didn't seem too thrilled. The advertised kids' playground was just a door on one wall that promised it was under construction.
It was over the back, nearest to the kitchen, at a long table created by joining two others together, that Harlow's eyes fell on familiar faces. Gavin Engel's eyes caught hers and visibly brightened, and he stood suddenly, his chair screeching back along the floor. His other adult family members glanced up and over, some recognising her and others perhaps not, but it was far from an inconspicuous arrival, especially given that Gavin looked worse for wear with his bruised cheek, cut hand, bandaged wrist and the limp that presented itself when he tried to round the table to meet her for a handshake.
"Gavin, you're…" A mess. But that didn't seem polite, and she should really be trying for that.
"I wasn't sure you'd get here," he admitted, wringing her hand with gratitude. "I thought for sure you'd be kept from coming, distracted or diverted in some way."
"Well…" Harlow hesitated, not wanting to alarm the other Engels watching on with talk of possible snipers. "We went to your house first, and there was… an unexpected law enforcement presence. Pierce."
Gavin cursed, earning him a frown and a swat on the hand from the woman sitting closest to him. His cousin or his wife, she couldn't remember. She recalled the woman's face from her short time investigating the Engel case, as well as a few of the others, but the details were a blur. Martha? Martine? The children were older now, that much she could see, sitting restlessly at the far end of the long table, squabbling over an insufficient number of iPads and telling each other off whenever their attempts to take or reposition the tablets bumped the scented oil burner in the middle of the table. Personally Harlow thought the thing was an accident waiting to happen, a little candle keeping the shallow bowl of essential oils hot enough to help mask the smell of paint still hanging in the air. There were three of them down the length of the table and she thought she detected notes of rosemary but that could have been from the kitchen nearby.
Gavin was rubbing his hand but was not relinquishing any of the gusto that earned him the smack.
"Pierce, that bastard," he growled. "Sent his lackeys to turn me and my house upside down and didn't even have the decency to show his face. He's at my place now, you said?"
"Did you speak with him?" another cousin demanded. This one looked less excited to see her. She wondered how many of them associated her with the poor handling of the case the first time, considered her a letdown.
"I did."
"And?" The cousin's eyes narrowed, unimpressed. Harlow felt Colt shift on his feet, adjusting his weight to be somewhat closer to her. "Did you let him push you around like before? That fucking prick derailed – sorry, Martie," he quickly rubbed his slapped hand, "derailed Shane's murder investigation. Painted us all lunatics. Had us bury those kids without justice."
Harlow swallowed. "I'm aware."
She'd had all these thoughts, a million times. Gavin waved his cousin's questions aside.
"She knows. That's why she's here, isn't she? Now Pierce, he's the one to worry about, and he's back at my place right now. I say we duck back to yours, arm up–"
Harlow started to protest but thankfully one of the other cousins, the one she recognised as Marcus, reached out for Gavin.
"You're not going back where they can take another shot at you," he said sternly. "You said Agent Harlow told you to come out somewhere public – well, we're here, now she's here. We've been sitting here for hours. We need to come up with a plan."
They were right, but Harlow's throat started to dry up when the family's collective gaze shifted to her expectantly. Like she hadn't let them down in the past. Like she was the agent in charge who had just swooped in at their moment of need to take control of a spiralling situation.
Fuck.
Colt leaned past her to offer his hand to Gavin.
"Special Agent Warren Colt," he introduced himself. The gazes sidled to him, cooling a little to see a stranger in a suit. "I'm here to assist Agent Harlow. To answer your question, sir," he added to the man still sitting opposite with a sour expression on his face, "when she saw Agent Pierce, she told him to respectfully get fucked and accused him of abusing his position of power. She was nearly shot for her trouble. In short, we're here representing your interests, as best we can." In the shocked but impressed silence that his announcement forged, Colt turned back to Gavin. "I understand your phone call earlier today was cut off so I might start by coordinating with local law enforcement while you brief my partner on what's been happening."
He stepped away, phone in hand, bravely prepared to take whatever hold music it could throw at him, and the Engels looked back to her in relief. Harlow forced a smile, feeling a little steadier.
"Your house is a mess, Gavin," she confirmed. "We've taken some pictures and are keeping our supervisor, Agent Scully, apprised. We've made her aware of Agent Pierce's presence here and the hostility you've experienced from his team."
"Scully," Gavin repeated, a little slowly, like he was testing out the word. Like he'd heard it before. His eyes narrowed somewhat in focus, but he didn't query any further down that line. Like he knew better. Definitely, definitely been chatting with Fox Mulder, then. "She believes us?"
"She does," Harlow confirmed, noticing the soft smiles shared across the table between the other Engels. Saw their tense shoulders loosen. "She's working on things back at the office, but we need to get the full lay of the land here before we can enact any sort of next step. Do we know how many of your homes have been searched?"
"All of them," the woman, Martina or Martie or whatever her name was, said promptly. "I got myself and the kids out of there before we saw anyone arrive at my place, but my wireless front door camera has been offline for the last few hours. Nothing captured, I'm sure."
Harlow was sure, too. Martina showed her the app on her phone that normally displayed real-time footage of the view from her front door, then brought up a map of the Engel ranch that showed where the boundaries and homesteads were for each family member. She could feel the connections reforging themselves in her brain as she recalled being shown this information before, more than a year ago. Even if they spent an hour, even two, at each Engel house, turning every drawer and bookshelf and ice tray over in search of whatever treasure was left with Gavin, the homes were close enough that it would not be difficult for Pierce's duo of cronies to cover the whole extended family in the space of one day.
"Why now?" Marcus wondered aloud as Colt ended his phone call and returned to the table, texting. "What do they think we have?"
Gavin stayed quiet, Harlow noticed, while the other family members deliberated theories. Whatever his contact had delivered for Fox Mulder, he hadn't shared with his siblings and cousins. She felt her curiosity rising.
"An officer is coming out to meet us here in the next fifteen minutes," Colt conveyed to the group as he finished his messaging. Across to Harlow he added, "Apparently after you spoke with them, someone else called in and cancelled the request. On your behalf. I gave them your physical description and badge number and told them to come talk to you in person before dropping this case again."
Smart. Let Pierce's handlers try and find a half-Vietnamese 30-year-old woman in rural Ohio willing to impersonate a federal agent in the next fifteen minutes.
"So someone knew you'd called," Gavin pointed out. Harlow was disappointed that she wasn't even surprised by this.
"Your phone line was tapped," Colt told him, shocking conspiratorial whispers from several of the other men and women. "It stands to reason that anyone tactically trying to control this situation would do the same to the local police station, though us proving that would be nearly impossible." He got his phone back out. "I'll notify Scully, though. I'm sure it'll interest her."
"You sent her the photos from Gavin's?" Harlow checked. He nodded as he typed.
"Just now. No reply yet."
One of the children had abandoned their end of the table and was nudging his mother for attention.
"Mom… Mom, are you sure you don't have a charger cable in your bag? I'm nearly flat."
"Hon, I told you, I didn't have time to grab one. You'll have to share with Dion."
"Dion's tablet died already."
"I'm sorry, hon," the mother said. Beside Harlow, Colt finished his message and slowly put his phone in his pocket, watching the scene. "We've all checked our bags and cars. You'll have to think of something else to do."
The boy slumped.
"Hey, you know what," Colt said suddenly, patting his jacket pockets. "I think I have… yep! Here." He held out a small power bank, complete with charger cable. "I used it on the plane trip but I think it's still got plenty of juice. Let's hope this will fit your machine. You don't have Apple, do you?"
The boy's face had lit up at the sight of the cable and he shook his head hungrily. His mother nudged him back.
"What do you say?"
"Can we plug in Dion's tablet, too?" the boy blurted out excitedly. "He's got a cable but no plugger thing."
"Kade!"
"I mean, thank you, sir."
"Let's see what we can do," Colt offered kindly, following the boy obligingly to the far end of the table. They all perked up as he joined them at their seats and began testing cables and tablets, and the Engel adults smiled indulgently upon the sweet scene. "What is this thing? Let's get rid of it. Hang on."
Colt carefully lifted the oil burner up from the centre of the table and shifted it further along toward the parents, amidst the plates of long-finished garlic bread and entrée crumbs. Harlow noted some of the parents sharing approving looks as Colt got into animated conversation with two children about the different ports and charging needs of each device. A natural with kids. Plus the parents were probably relieved to see them quiet and entertained, even if it was by an FBI agent who may or may not have once been a sniper.
Gavin turned to her. "Doctor, would you mind taking a look at my wrist? Think those bastards might have broken it."
Harlow was halfway to reminding him that she wasn't that kind of doctor when he seized her arm and walked her to the next table, this one empty and far enough away from his family to be out of earshot if they modulated their own volume. He promptly laid his arm on the table, expectant, and Harlow took a beat to realise she'd been cast in yet another theatrical deception.
"This looks… sore," she said lamely, stretching her brain for what Dr Scully might say in this scenario. The older woman might lift the arm and turn it over to look for… cracks? Bruising? Harlow approximated the action, wincing when Gavin did. "It's very swollen."
"Do you think I should get an x-ray if it still looks like this tomorrow?" Gavin asked, at normal volume, as Martina's gaze drifted over them. Harlow tried to look like she knew what she was doing as she carefully bent the hand at the wrist and then lowered it to the tabletop.
"Yes," she said. "Definitely. It feels like there's damage to the… radius. Probably a fracture. Plus, you know, you've got this cut." She heard Colt's laugh and felt the gazes pull toward the fun being had at the kid end of the table, and dropped her voice to just between her and Gavin. "You do know I've got no idea what I'm saying, right? Please don't let me give you medical advice."
"You won't need to, ever again, once you see what I've got for you," Gavin murmured, stretching an arm under the table on the pretence of touching a pained ankle. He straightened with a clasped fist, something retrieved from his boot. Harlow felt her interest flare brightly, remembering what he'd said on the phone. This was the thing – whatever was given to him, whatever Pierce just upended five or six households for, it was in his hand right now. He glanced around and Harlow did, too. Did this place have cameras? Possibly. She leaned closer and kept pretending to probe the roughly bandaged wrist, careful to avoid the open cut near the thumb and the accompanying bloody tissue. Gavin cocked his head to the side. "Did you really tell Pierce to go fuck himself?"
Harlow cringed. "I'm hoping he cares more about covering up this case than indicting me for misconduct, but yeah, I told him to get fucked."
A light laugh, not enough to draw back the attention of the other Engels, but enough to convey his approval.
"I knew you had it in you." Gavin hesitated, then spoke very softly and very fast. "Fox Mulder – you know the name?"
"I know the name," she confirmed. She hesitated, too, looking into the steadfast eyes of this man she'd once let down, then decided she trusted Gavin Engel. "I know the man."
He smiled, just a small twitch of his mouth at the acknowledgement of a shared secret. "Then we really are on the same side, Agent," he said quietly. His eyes cut over to the family table. "Your partner seems a good sort."
Harlow looked over at Colt, too. "He is." She paused again, trying to keep up with the subject change, and made an interpretation she thought was logical. "He's with us, but he doesn't know everything. He doesn't know Mulder. Not yet."
She felt like that wasn't enough to say, but she made herself shut up. Colt remained carefully periphery to the deepest of this investigation's dramas, courtesy of an overprotective Scully, and by any objective description, that made him less 'in' than the rest of the team. Yet after today, after Kentucky, after the gun range, even after their first meeting where he'd helped her smuggle virus samples into the Hoover building, she really couldn't think of anyone she trusted more.
Harlow was certain she'd be either dead or crazy if it weren't for Colt. She watched him for a moment, showing one of Gavin's nephews a hack for doubling his inventory in whatever game they were playing, and he glanced up to meet her eyes. His miniscule nod suggested he could see she was getting the goss and he would keep the table entertained in the meantime.
He really was the best.
Apparently Harlow was still in conversation.
"He visited, last weekend. Mulder," Gavin supplied when she must have given him a blank look. "Spoke to us about Shane, about Pierce, even about you. He listened. He made us feel like there was hope. Thing is, we were told he would come."
"What, like Jesus?" Harlow whispered cynically. Gavin scoffed, but at least found some humour in her question.
"Few weeks before him, this young woman shows up at my door," he went on, voice still soft. "Barely out of school, she tells me a man called Fox Mulder is going to come looking for me. She left him a note and a menu."
Harlow raised an eyebrow. "What did the note say?"
"That their mutual friend wanted to meet. I gather he went straight to the diner after he left my place – the menu was from some takeaway joint in Cleveland – but I don't know any more than that. That's not the strange part. The strange part," Gavin murmured, now scratching above his eye with that clasped fist so he could glanced around the restaurant, which Harlow did too so she could confirm their conversation was their own, "was that this girl came back a few days after him. The first time she was here, she was purposeful but scant with information she thought might do too much damage; this time she was edgy, but harder. Willing to share, if she could damn them. Something had happened to her. She wanted to know if I could get a package to Fox Mulder. She had her hands in gloves. She took them off and her fingertips were raw, like she'd touched a sander or something. It was… It was not nice."
What the actual fuck. "Who is this girl?" Harlow asked. "What happened to her?"
"I don't know the answer to either of those questions, because she wouldn't say. But she gave me this."
He extended his fist across the table, and when she opened her hand, he pressed something small and cylindrical into her palm. She closed her fingers surreptitiously and slipped her hand out of sight into her lap where her fingers could play with the sought-after treasure. It was a tiny glass bottle, about two-thirds the length of her thumb and sealed with an eyedropper lid. Leaning back in her seat, she glanced down to see that the contents were a pale bluish liquid with the consistency of dish soap. It was maybe half full.
She tried to quell her disappointment. She'd been hoping for something much more exciting. A magical alien crystal relic, or a gene map of the virus that included a breakdown of how to treat each of its constituent parts in sequence to save a victim's life at each stage of infection.
Gavin laid his other hand, his injured hand, back on the table. The skin beside his thumb had been split open, a ragged cut maybe two inches long and only moderately deep, and was oozy and starting to scab up. It was the kind of position that made bandaging difficult, so he was holding a bunched tissue against it.
"The cut," he prompted. "Put a drop on it. You won't believe me unless you see it."
"You didn't tell your family about this bottle," Harlow noted quietly. "Why?"
"I was afraid of what would happen. If they knew. I haven't told them any of this, what I'm about to tell you. The girl told me what Shane did – why they killed him. She said no one could know I had this, that I had to get it to Mulder so he could stop what happened to Shane happening to thousands of others."
Harlow leaned forward, struck. "She told you why they killed Shane?"
"Put a drop onto the cut. Watch what happens."
Impatiently, Harlow unscrewed the lid and did as he told her, carefully positioning the dropper above the wound on his hand. One drop. The soapy blue stuff landed precisely on the open cut and sat on the surface. Gavin inhaled sharply, like it was burning. To Harlow, nothing seemed to be happening.
"You put detergent from strangers in all your open wounds?" she asked.
"She did this to one of her fingers," he said to her now, through his teeth. "The skin was gone, rubbed right off, and she had me put a drop on… Said, there's so much more going on than I ever realised. Shane was an engineer. He built systems for this company with defence contracts. Really shady and quiet. This girl shows up out of the blue the first time and tells me she works inside that parent organisation and they were the ones who ordered Shane and Carly's executions, but she was cagey about details. The second time, she comes back looking tortured and says, straight up, that Shane was made to build a system for dispersing a gas bioweapon, and his family was murdered after he tried to destroy the prototypes and plans. She said…"
He dropped his voice and trailed off as someone new came into the steakhouse and approached the table. The middle-aged man was law enforcement, identifiable by badge and uniform and even hat, and his eyes locked onto Harlow – just as visually identifiable in this restaurant full of white people – and he raised a hand in greeting. She smiled tightly and did the same, relieved when Colt stood to receive the officer. She raised one finger to indicate she'd be right over, because she could not walk away without hearing more about this bioweapon connection, and they turned to shake hands and introduce themselves.
Gavin leaned close across the table to finish his story, quick and quiet.
"This girl, this insider, she said the bioweapon was then tested on Shane's family," he whispered, stricken, and Harlow's heart went out to him. "She said that's what they died of. And I don't know, but that lines up, right? Because we always knew it wasn't whatever bullshit they tried to sell us."
"It does line up," Harlow confirmed faintly. "It lines up with the rest of my investigation. There are others, but knowing why Shane was targeted is really helpful. Thank you."
"But that still isn't the weirdest thing she said," Gavin whispered urgently, while Harlow's head spun. "She said they, the organisation she works for, had planned to bring him back to finish his work. Like, back from the dead."
Harlow tried to swallow but found her throat didn't want to work. More zombies. More alien viruses. She should be starting to get used to this.
"Did they?" she asked, trying not to picture the dead bodies Gavin had found in the basement. The little boy Riley, tidied up by his mother after expiring. Shane curled up, rotting. "Did they do it? Is he… out there? Are they all?"
Gavin shook his head, equally haunted. "She said they can't reanimate autopsied bodies. And you ordered autopsies."
Harlow's heart might have stopped. When fight or flight kicked in, she still always froze.
"I… Do you hate me right now?" Because they might have come back to life without my interference? What the fuck, what the fuck…
"What? No. You did what we all wanted. And…" Gavin hesitated. "You probably saved Shane from a fate he would never have chosen. So, no."
Harlow leaned across the table so they were face to face, suddenly suspicious and half-wild with panic at this latest confirmation that her world was utter chaos.
"Why would you even believe some strange girl who comes to your door claiming people can be brought back to life as zombies for evil shadowy scientists?" she demanded in a whisper. "Why would you believe in zombies at all? You're too smart for this, Gavin."
"You're right, I didn't believe her, not until this very moment," he shot back in a whisper just as fierce. "You just confirmed her crazy story. You didn't even blink at the suggestion. You believe in it, and you've got to be twenty times smarter than I am. Why would you buy into any of this, unless there was truth to what I'm saying?"
Harlow stared at him. She saw the steadfast certainty in his features and the hard look in his eye, and recognised something of Dr Scully – the jaded look of someone who knew more than they wanted to. And wasn't ever going to let it go.
"Gavin," she said finally, with a sigh, as she found herself giving the same advice Scully had once given her. "The less I say right now, the less you dig into this goddamn nightmare of a case, the better off you will be."
The ghost of a smile crossed his hardened features. "I'm gonna be careful, don't worry, but I'm not letting this go. Not after what I've seen."
Harlow shook her head. "For the sake of your whole family, you haven't seen anything. They'll bury what's happened here, make your home searches look like random robberies, even as Colt and I scream from the rooftops in DC that we know otherwise. The best we can do is coordinate with local law enforcement to protect you from further attacks, and document what's happened for some far-off future where can prosecute. You've seen this before – they control the narrative, whoever they are. We have to tread carefully. Your contact with her fingertips sanded off might want to help but we can't count on anything from anyone, especially someone likely under their thumb."
"No."
"No?"
"No, she's not under their thumb," he whispered calmly. "She's a rogue contact, like Mulder. She's a game-changer. Her, and that blue shit you just put on my cut."
His eyes directed hers down, and reluctantly she dropped her gaze to his hand.
The skin was flawless. No cut. No scar. Feeling panicky, Harlow grabbed both his hands and turned them over in case the wound was somewhere else, somehow moved, but there was nothing but the bloody tissue he'd been holding against it.
Her heart hadn't stopped, but the beat was anything but steady.
"They have this technology," he murmured. "They can repair flesh, repair bodies. And they can take life away, too, at an order. With weapons none of us understand. The girl said Fox Mulder needs this bottle if he's got any chance at stopping what's coming, and I didn't take her seriously. Then Pierce's henchmen appeared and tore apart my family's homes, looking for it. Clearly, this isn't meant for public knowledge." They both stood, feeling Colt and the officer's expectant gazes on them. "She called it 'blue'. I know it's a big ask and I know it's dangerous, but can you get this where it needs to go?"
Harlow carefully pocketed the little bottle, fostering a new respect for it. Her thoughts were spinning out of control at the information dump and at what she'd just seen, and at the realisation she needed to hold her shit together for more professional interactions today. She thought of the piles of research she'd wasted her time reading and what this little bottle represented. She dusted off her outfit and straightened her jacket and fixed a smile to her face for the onlookers.
"Gavin," she said, "I think you already did."
He seemed to take her meaning and accept it, perhaps remembering her research area as virology and guessing her role in the larger picture of what this might become. He lifted his foot onto the chair to tie his shoelace, or at least to look like it.
"Good," he said. "Then you should also have this. She said it's begun."
He withdrew a slip of tightly folded newspaper from his boot, and though she stashed it quickly upon receiving it, when Harlow unravelled it later, it made her freeze all over again.
There were two torn pages. One was an obituary for one Frank Benedict, school teacher. Not someone she knew, but a name she'd seen many times on a list. The one Dr Scully gave her to present at the quarterly to get the case going, months ago. The one whose origins she wouldn't explain.
The cause of death was not mentioned, though she could have guessed the medical ruling even if it wasn't mentioned in the article on the other ripped-out page. It was not a substantial piece of journalism, just a nasty little tabloid filler about Frank Benedict and his sudden death, accompanied by a blurry photograph of a man leaving Mr Benedict's property in the week before he died. It was titled 'Is this Frank's killer?' and ruminated on the baseless possibility that this visitor, unknown to any of Frank's interviewed friends or family, might have done something to prompt his unexpected illness and death.
Harlow wasn't that well-acquainted with him, but the photo was clear enough to make him out. She felt like Fox Mulder needed to stop showing up in all her cases.