The Gift

AS8X03 (Originally 8X11)

Originally written by: Frank Spotnitz

Rewritten by: ga

Notes: Mulder's quote on the sin eater in English literature is from Precious Bane by Mary Webb. Information on the use and side effects of Carboplatin and Taxol provided by Aracelis. A thousand thanks to the folks out there who do episode transcripts and to the inventors of search engines. And in addition to the beta team for Alternate Season 8, thanks to Mo for trading insights.

A book I read a LONG time ago (like when I was about 12) came to mind while writing the blonde woman's action: The Other Side of the Sun, by Madeleine L'Engle (incidentally, this is NOT one of her science-fiction works). It's out of print, hard to find, but has stuck with me some 25 years later...

This episode takes place in the present and in flashbacks. Flashbacks are in italics.

Spoilers: Many previous episodes are referenced, directly or obliquely.

If this were filmed as an episode, I suspect it would run rather long. Consider this the director's cut...

------------------------

June 7, 2000

Squamash Township, Pennsylvania

Mulder's lips barely move; he murmurs the word, audible only to himself, as if in prayer. "Scully," he says, and pulls the trigger.

---------------------------

April 8, 2000

BWI Airport

The disembodied voice on the loudspeaker has just called Flight 2142 to London/Gatwick when Mulder inhales a familiar scent from behind him--not the one he had hoped for. Stale Morleys and callous death. Mulder turns and stops inches from the Smoking Man's face.

"I should kill you, you bastard."

"You've been saying that for years, Agent Mulder. Yet here I still stand. I'm beginning to wonder whether you truly are a man of your word."

"When you've never said an honest word in your life..."

"On the contrary, most of my dealings with you have been strictly honorable; I can't imagine you would ever have considered negotiating with me if you believed otherwise. But this is no time for petty accusations. There's work to be done."

"Yes, there is, and I am on my way to do it." Mulder turns to walk away.

"Your trip to England is a sham, a pretense." Mulder freezes at the Smoking Man's words. "The event in question is not going to occur, certainly not with any extraterrestrial involvement. You doubt its validity yourself, and clearly you were not able to persuade your partner to join you in this venture."

"Leave Scully out of this," Mulder hisses. "You just stay away from her..."

"I have no intention of approaching Agent Scully in this instance, although the ramifications of what I wish to show you speak to one of her most cherished ideals: that of a cure for all illness. I'd like to introduce you to a great healer, one whose capabilities are truly remarkable but whose methods are more in line with your style of thinking than with Agent Scully's. She has aided in your quest all these years; surely you can spare some time in the pursuit of hers."

"The last time you claimed to take an interest in Scully's work, she almost died."

"How many times has she nearly died for your cause, Agent Mulder? Yet you condemn me for putting her in danger. I knew without question that I could prevent any harm from befalling Agent Scully in that circumstance. Have you ever been able to say the same?"

Mulder stands silently seething, arms twitching at his sides, hands balled into fists. The Smoking Man can't resist a smile.

"Since you apparently have no further objections, let's go. Your luggage is already in my car."

Mulder glares at the man, holding his ground; neither moves as the final call for Mulder's flight comes and passes. Finally, Mulder stalks past the Smoking Man toward the terminal exit, leading in refusal to follow. He finds himself standing alone at the doorway for longer than expected; and his eyes narrow in focus as he studies the older man. The Smoking Man's voice and posture are as supercilious as ever. But there is more gray in his hair and his stride is far slower; his hands shake slightly as he raises them to light his cigarette. If indeed he stole the science Scully retrieved in order to save himself, it appears to be failing him.

------------

September 28, 2000

Mulder's apartment

The lock gives easily, as though it has been picked before. Doggett shrugs; you'd think, paranoid as Mulder allegedly was, that he'd have changed the locks on a regular basis.

Doggett enters the living room and just stands for a moment, looking around and getting a feel for the place--something he hadn't had the opportunity to do before Mulder's office was searched. Although she knew better than to obstruct in any way, Agent Scully had made it extremely clear that, in her mind, the office search had been both pointless and insulting. Since she is still in the hospital in Arizona, this is Doggett's chance for an uninterrupted look-see at how Mulder lived.

Mulder was no prize housekeeper--the desk, shelves, and TV top wear a coating of dust, disturbed a couple of different times recently. And the fish in the tank aren't dead; they've been fed. Someone has been in the apartment, then. Whoever took the computer: Mulder--or someone impersonating him? No way Mulder would come back here now, unless it was to turn himself in; not after taking those files, not after Arizona. Would he send someone?

A search of the living room reveals Mulder's penchant for pornography, but nothing relevant to the investigation. Doggett wanders into the bathroom, remembering Mulder's medical records. The medicine cabinet holds five or six prescription-pill containers: Tylenol with Codeine, Percocet, with various dates on the labels, some several years old. All are nearly full. One bottle holds a drug with a name Doggett doesn't recognize--Carboplatin/Taxol, prescribed by a Dr. Lev a month ago; this bottle has only a few pills left. Doggett pockets the container and heads for the bedroom. In a nightstand drawer, he finds another pill bottle for the same drug, dated three months earlier than the one in the bathroom. This bottle is empty.

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April 8, 2000

The Smoking Man's car

"Open the damn window," are the only words Mulder speaks until they are well into Maryland.

The Smoking Man, feeling indulgent, allows Mulder to brood. Finally, when all that stretches before them is highway, flanked by fields on both sides, he speaks.

"This healer, this man you are going to see, has his roots in simpler times, in a farm country era when doctors were few and superstition ruled daily life. You are, I'm sure, familiar with the legend of the sin eater."

"As represented in English literature," Mulder replies in a monotone. "By eating foods passed over the coffin, the sin eater symbolically took upon himself the sins of the deceased as part of the funeral ritual, thus relieving the dead man's suffering in the hereafter. 'I give easement and rest now to thee, dear man, that ye walk not over the fields nor down the by-ways. And for thy peace I pawn my own soul.' The sin eater was a pariah in the community, tolerated only for his necessary function."

"Here, the English country legend has been badly merged with half-understood Native folklore, but the individual described is real. This man attends to sins against the body--disease--and thus eases suffering in this life rather than the one beyond. He consumes the sickness, taking it upon himself and leaving the formerly afflicted person well and whole. The people he cures think him a creature, less than human. But they need him, so they are fiercely protective of him. They do not welcome strangers. As I have certain, ah, ties to the community, you will be allowed in--provided you do not overstep your bounds."

Mulder grunts and continues to stare out the window. He remembers cancer-eating mutants, fat-eating mutants, liver-eating mutants. He thinks of psychic surgery. He wonders what this has to do with the man sitting next to him.

"Why show me this? What do you expect to gain? Am I supposed to watch while you're cured of whatever it is that's obviously killing you, just so you can kill again? No soul should have to pay the price for you--how many have already?"

"You do me a great disservice, Agent Mulder. As it happens, I feel a certain kinship with this soul eater. Disease is a necessary evil in the greater good that is life; and this man takes on the disease of others so that they don't have to suffer for themselves.

"In my work--that which once was my work, mine and that of men like me--we believed in the greater good of our goals; but there were certain necessary evils that went along with the work. Good men, men like Bill Mulder, didn't have the stomach for these necessities, and were more than happy to allow me to bear their burden while claiming the moral high ground for themselves. I performed a necessary function, though some would judge me harshly for sparing them the painful realities. You, too, would dare to judge; yet you have at times been obliged to perform certain ‘necessary evils’ in the name of your truth."

"You and I have very different ideas as to what constitutes the greater good, not to mention the truth."

"I think you would find that our hopes and dreams are far more similar than you'd like to believe."

Mulder is reminded of Scully’s words after she returned from her journey with this man, how she saw in him a longing for something he couldn’t have, something quite human. He pictures his own blind rage at her then and wonders what she will say when she learns where he is now.

"She held it in her hand--why’d you do it?"

"Your partner is a doctor and a humanitarian. She believes in the possibility of a world without disease--a far more radical and fantastic vision than any you could contemplate of the existence of extraterrestrial life, and at least as dangerous. Just imagine that world beyond disease, where humans could live indefinitely. It would take only a few decades for the population to grow beyond the ability of the planet to sustain it. Freedom from illness doesn't guarantee enough to eat, only that no opportunistic infection could put an end to the hungry person's misery. What then? Do you decide when it is a person's time to die, or who should be born? Could you make those judgments? Could your partner"?

"Such decisions are the province of a man such as myself, one well versed in necessary evil. I spared you both by assuring that no one will have that science. Better that such miracle cures stay in the realm of the miraculous--random, accidental in location, and limited in scope. Had I allowed Agent Scully to keep the science on that disk, I have no doubt that she would have used it to cure me."

Mulder stares at the Smoking Man.

"I have, of course, every resource available to restore my health. I choose not to save myself. I am prepared to face the inevitable when the time comes, and seek only to ensure the future of my sole remaining legacy, my greatest achievement."

"And that is...?"

"Why, you, son."

"You are NOT my father."

---------------------

September 29, 2000

Scully's hospital room

MacLaren Regional Medical Center, Arizona

"He is NOT dying." Scully glares at the off-white, hospital-issue phone as though Doggett could see her through it.

"Then what's with these drugs, Agent Scully?" Doggett fires back. "The folks at the lab tell me that this Carboplatin/Taxol combo is pretty nasty stuff."

"I know what the drug is for, Agent Doggett. I also know that it is generally administered via intravenous drip in a hospital setting and not in pill form. What I am telling you is that he was not taking it."

"Then what's it doing in his medicine chest?"

"It's doing exactly what the people who put it there intended it to do: keeping you from looking for Mulder in any way that might actually lead to finding him."

Doggett huffs into the phone. "Look, I've got a job to do here, and I really don't have time for this kind of paranoid speculation."

"Agent Doggett," Scully's voice is icy. "One of the first things you'd better learn if you expect to survive in the X-Files is that those who want you to do your job are vastly outnumbered by those who intend to make sure you don't. You may think I'm paranoid, but I'll tell you it's practically the opposite; that it takes a starry-eyed optimist to even begin to hope to find the truth when up against a systematic and personally-directed campaign to protect the lies at all cost.

"Now, I don't know where Mulder is. But I do know that he did not go voluntarily, that he is being held against his will, and that it is because of his work, because of his threat to the lies, because of who he is, that he has been taken. And I am going to find him."

Drained by the force of her own words, Scully is unable to hold back a gasp as she is seized by a spasm in her abdomen, a lingering effect of the tissue damage caused by her fight with the Alien Bounty Hunter. Her knees draw up and she curls herself into a little ball of pain. She clutches her center and wills her breathing to even out, silently cursing herself for the weakness.

Doggett, too, curses himself; his next words are much quieter. "I'm sorry, Agent Scully. You're still in the hospital; you need your rest. Please understand, I intend to find Agent Mulder, and I'm going to follow up every lead I've got until I do. I realize that the medical stuff is something you're going to know a lot more about than I do, but without more proof than just you telling me it's bogus, I can't drop it."

"Okay. Since, at the moment, I'm here in the hospital against MY will and can't be out in the field, I'll get you your proof; I can do that with a telephone and a laptop. But Agent Doggett, when you're looking for leads, look to the work. It's in the X-Files--maybe not the answers, but at least the right questions."

"I will and I am; I'm looking at some of Mulder's recent case notes right now. And I WILL find him."

-------------------------

April 8, 2000

Squamash Township, Pennsylvania

It is dark when they arrive, darker than it ever is in Alexandria. The car's headlights provide the only illumination. There is no glow of city light, no streetlight; thick forest on both sides of the narrow road absorb the starlight. As the car pulls to a halt near the end of a stone-covered driveway, Mulder notices a woman emerging from the shadows, her light-colored hair pulled into a ponytail under her baseball cap. She crosses in front of the car, then disappears into the woods.

-------------------------

September 30, 2000

Mulder's office

The notes Mulder left behind are sketchy. Doggett digs one last time through stacks of files displaced by the task-force search, but comes up empty. He thinks the full file must be among those Mulder took, and it was recent enough not to have made it into the backup database. Missing woman reappears, lost time, physical condition markedly changed from before she was taken--sounds like one of those so-called alien abduction cases. Squamash, Pennsylvania, a few hours' drive. The sheriff there agrees to meet with him.

* * *

Squamash Township

Sheriff Kurt Frey is a big guy, a good-old-boy type with a handshake like an arm wrestle. It's a personal style Doggett has cultivated in himself, even during his years with the NYPD, when he found that perps would sometimes spill things, thinking they were putting something over on the country boy. Doggett senses that "Just call me Kurt" Frey wouldn't trust an urbanite, and he wants the man's trust.

"I appreciate the help, Kurt."

"Shame to have you drive all the way up here on a Saturday. Hate to say, you're wasting your time."

"Not if you confirm what you told me before."

"Yes, sir. Your Agent Mulder was here, all right. A few months ago--April, maybe." The sheriff seems to be remembering this visitor to a place that doesn't get many visitors. There's no documentation to be found here either, Doggett is reasonably certain.

"Investigating a missing woman, uh, Marie Hangemuhl."

"Well, she wasn't exactly missing. He wasn't exactly investigating, either."

This is just about all the confirmation Doggett needs. Mulder must have been out here doing his alien-buster routine, and clearly Kurt wasn't having any of it.

"So this Mrs. Hangemuhl is all right, then." Doggett frames this as a statement rather than a question, needing to make sure but careful to distance himself from Mulder's investigation.

"Marie? Yeah, she's fine. It was a false report, domestic dispute."

Doggett nodded. "And you didn't see Agent Mulder out here any other time after that?"

"Nope. You know, if you don't mind my asking, Agent Doggett, what's your interest? I mean, I was actually surprised that even one FBI agent gave this a thought." Sheriff Frey regards Doggett a bit coolly. Doggett senses he's losing the sheriff and quickly cuts to the chase.

"Agent Mulder disappeared nearly two weeks ago. We're retracing his steps over the last few weeks and, according to his cell-phone records, he was out this way a week or so before his disappearance. Do you have any idea why? Anything out of the ordinary happen here in the last few weeks?"

"Not that I can think of...no, Sir."

"Well, I'm hoping you can help me figure it out. It's my job to find him."

--------------------------

Scully's hospital room

By 11:30am (Mountain Daylight Time), Scully has berated receptionists, clerks, and managers in the records departments of hospitals in Woodbridge, Virginia (torn deltoid, lacerations and contusions from attack by "unidentified" (undead) assailant: x-rays, CBC, tox screen); McMinn County, Tennessee (multiple snakebites: CBC, ECG, ABG); Inland Empire, California (mild concussion, contusions, lacerations from attack by "unidentified" (virtual) assailant, burns to the center chest from low-voltage electric shock: x-rays, CBC, ECG, head CT scan); Winston-Salem, North Carolina (severe lung trauma and near suffocation, cardiac arrest, as a result of tobacco beetle infestation: x-rays, bronchoscopies, ECGs, EEGs, MRIs, CT scans, CBC, sed rate, ABG); and Kansas City, Kansas (broken jaw, broken wrist, concussion, multiple contusions from attack by "unidentified" (Scully) assailant: x-rays, head CT scan, EEG, MRI, CBC, tox screen).

All of Mulder's medical records, except for those documenting his abnormal brain function the previous year, have disappeared.

By the time Skinner walks into her hospital room, Scully is shaking with fury. Skinner nervously eyes the call button linked to the nurses' station, wondering to himself whether sedation would be worse for the baby than the steady stream of stress hormones. The look on Scully's face makes it clear it is not his decision.

Skinner's eyes are still somewhat red and swollen as a result of his exposure to the Alien Bounty Hunter's blood, but he removes the dark glasses he's been wearing, not wanting even the appearance of hiding from Scully.

"Mulder's medical records--they're all gone. Hospitals all over the damn country, and they've gotten to every single one of them." Scully shakes her head, with the edge of an ironic laugh.

"Scully, it's Saturday. All those records departments are on skeleton crews. Maybe Monday..."

"I can't wait that damn long!" Scully shouts, forcing herself to hide the twinge in her ribs caused by her outburst. "Sir, Krycek couldn't have done this on his own. There HAS to be Bureau involvement. No one on the outside could have been in a position to know our every move like this, let alone orchestrate a cover-up on this level."

Skinner studies her closely. She's accused him before of complicity in the conspiracy against herself and Mulder. He knows, intellectually, that Scully has come to trust him; but her words hit too close to home not to feel an indictment. And right now, if he were Scully, he's not sure he would trust him either. His gaze falters.

Scully reads his thoughts. "Sir, I'm not accusing you. I know you didn't do this. And, I know you know this, but..."

She presses her lips together and takes a deep breath, letting the words rush out in one exhale. "If I'd been the one in Oregon, I wouldn't have been able to keep Mulder from being taken either." She shakes her head quickly to stop the tears.

Skinner takes her hand and gives it a brief squeeze, then lets go. "I've been discharged from the hospital. Do you want me to stay here in Phoenix until you're ready to go back to DC?"

Instantly, she is all business again. "Is there anything more to be done here?"

"The Gunmen won't give me a straight answer on the phone, of course. But no, the activity over Arizona seems to have disappeared."

"We need to get back; I've got to get out of here." She says it automatically, but even she knows she's bluffing. At the moment, she can't make the 12-foot trek from her bed to the bathroom without moderate to severe pain. Already today she's been sitting upright longer than she should, and she's feeling the burn all through her torso.

"Scully, if I have to, I'll stay here just to make sure you stay. What good are you to Mulder if you kill yourself when we've just started looking for him?" Skinner throws her own words back at her.

"No, please, we've lost too much time as it is. I need you to get back and find out where the satellite data shows activity next. I need you to give Langly the hospital info and see if he can come up with the missing records. And I need you to keep an eye on Agent Doggett."

--------------------------

Squamash Township

The sheriff walks Doggett to the Hangemuhls' door. They are greeted by Paul Hangemuhl, who eyes the stranger with suspicion. Reluctantly, he lets the two men into the house; Marie Hangemuhl joins them in the living room.

Sheriff Frey introduces Doggett, "This is Agent Doggett from the FBI. He wants to ask you a few questions."

Paul Hangemuhl reacts visibly to hearing "FBI." He shoots a warning look to Frey and asks, "What's this all about?"

Doggett jumps in. "A colleague of mine, Fox Mulder, questioned you last spring."

Paul's look this time speaks more of fear than challenge. "Kurt..."

The sheriff attempts to smooth the waters. "He's not investigating you, Paul. He's investigating Agent Mulder."

"I'm really sorry to have to disturb you good people about this. If you could just tell me what you and Agent Mulder talked about..." Doggett, as well, keeps his voice level and nonthreatening.

"My wife suffered from kidney disease; she was a very sick woman. She had what they call a spontaneous recovery..."

Doggett notices the dialysis machine pushed into a corner of the room. He silently urges the man to continue.

Marie shyly adds, "He'd heard the stories." Her husband glares at her and she falls silent.

"What stories, Mrs. Hangemuhl?" Doggett asks gently.

Paul bursts out, "Let me ask you something, Agent Doggett. Was this Mulder guy sick? Sick in the head, I mean? Is that why you're checking into this?"

"What stories, Mr. Hangemuhl?"

"I've heard these stories since I was a kid, local legend. They say there's a creature, a wild man who lives out in the woods and eats sick people."

--------------------------

April 8, 2000

Squamash Township, Pennsylvania

"We're in time," the Smoking Man says, a touch of almost boyish excitement infusing his features as he urges Mulder toward the house.

Mulder pauses at the door to study the medicine wheel painted there. *Chicken's blood,* he thinks, recognizing the summons. He kneels to touch the spots where the blood has dripped, adorning the wheel like feathers on a dreamcatcher. The blood is still just slightly tacky.

Inside the house, a fragile-looking woman lies on the living-room rug, naked and shivering under a white sheet. A man stands to her side near a wall--tense in posture, his jaw clenched. He looks in challenge at Mulder as he enters but, apparently recognizing the Smoking Man, he warily accepts their presence.

"Marie Hangemuhl," the Smoking Man whispers to Mulder, "suffers from end-stage renal failure. Conventional medical science has done all it can for her. Her husband has summoned the soul eater to take away her disease."

As if on cue, a large man enters, dressed only in a pair of tattered cotton pants. His skin is richly tanned, his hair long and mostly black; but his face is so disfigured by illness and contorted with pain that Mulder can't be fully certain of the man's ethnicity. He hovers over the woman, who whimpers and quakes in fear. The man's face twists still further, in horror and agony, and tears stream down his face as he cries a wordless, keening cry. Marie's husband's jaw tightens still further.

The man kneels over the woman and opens his mouth wide, stretching his jaw past the point of dislocation. Instinct tells Mulder to spring into Special-Agent action and stop this before what is obviously about to happen can happen. He feels a restraining hand on his shoulder and turns away for a second, to find himself staring into the eyes of the blonde woman he saw earlier. With her eyes, she gestures to him to pay attention to what is happening before him.

Mulder watches, transfixed, as the man begins to consume the woman alive.

It takes nearly an hour, an hour of blood and the smell of sickness and the sound of the soul eater's sobs. The act speaks more of reverence than savagery, and Mulder is reminded of watching Scully perform an autopsy on a child.

When it is over, the soul eater lies spent and shaking on the rug, into which seeps the blood and bile that remains of Marie Hangemuhl.

The blonde woman gestures to Mulder to follow her out of the house. The sheriff stands guard outside, apparently more intent on seeing that the transformation taking place indoors is not disturbed than on stopping or preventing the apparent homicide that has just occurred. Some distance away, a shadowy figure lurks under the trees, a faint glow and curl of smoke rising from his cigarette.

"What happens now?" Mulder asks the blonde woman, his voice still very low.

"He will return to his sanctuary to hide his wounds. It will take several hours. Her sickness, he will digest, and the rest of her will be expelled from his body. He mustn't be disturbed; please do not attempt to follow him."

"He will feel all the pain she felt. He feels all their pain."

"Yes."

"How does he bear it?"

"It is his life."

"You take care of him."

"One of us always has."

"You love him."

"Yes."

"How do you bear it?"

"It has become my life."

--------------------------------

September 30, 2000

From the journal of Dana Katherine Scully:

"They gave me cancer to make you believe. Now, they claim that you are the one who is ill. But this, I cannot believe. It simply is not possible."

"First, you couldn't have kept it from me. You would have experienced seizures, tremors, memory lapses, sudden outbursts of aggression or agitation, motor-control difficulties, disturbances in your senses of hearing, sight, and smell. It would have affected your ability to process language and altered your personality. You could not have driven a car; you would not have been safe carrying a weapon. Medication might have slowed some of these symptoms, but would have brought side effects--the drugs they planted in your apartment cause, among other things: nausea and vomiting, myalgias and arthralgias, heart arrhythmia, blood-pressure disturbances, hair loss, rashes, and extreme fatigue."

"It is unlikely you could have hidden this kind of decline from a casual coworker, one in whose presence you spent several hours a day. It is utterly impossible that you could have hidden it from me."

"But I don't believe you would have tried to hide it. At a different point in our partnership, perhaps--back when you thought you could protect me by leaving me in the dark. I know, I've been as guilty of that as you have, with my 'I'm fine's and my stonewalling. Now that we both know better, I can't and don't believe you would knowingly put my life at risk by continuing to be my partner in the field while in such a compromised state."

"I am reminded of your feelings at your mother's house after her suicide: that it was staged, like a bad movie script. It's like that now--my God, Mulder, they had your tombstone engraved. And every shred of evidence that proves your overall health has disappeared. Records from all over the country--all vanished. I've asked Langly to hack them; but you and I know, these people don't make mistakes."

"Someone or ones--inside the Bureau and out--went to great lengths to weave this web. If I weren't sure by now of the truth of my own body, I'd fear that my medical records were being manipulated as well, my pregnancy fabricated as just another reason for you to have skipped out. But Mulder, I really am pregnant."

------------------------------

April 9, 2000 very early morning

Squamash Township

Afterwards, Mulder approaches Paul Hangemuhl and the sheriff. Neither is especially interested in talking with him, and the fact that Mulder possesses FBI credentials serves only to exacerbate the situation. The Smoking Man watches from a distance, bemused. Finally, Paul returns to his house, Kurt to his truck, and each shuts his door decisively.

"I did caution you about overstepping your bounds," comes the voice from the trees. Mulder is already furious with himself for his rare mishandling of the two men and is in no mood to hear it.

"What was this display all about? And what does it have to do with you? Did you get your kicks watching that woman be eaten alive?"

The Smoking Man gives Mulder a condescending look. "Don't be ridiculous. I've known Marie since she was a child; I introduced her to her husband. It's pained me to see her ill and I've been hoping for a long time that she would agree to do this. Paul finally forced her into it. It's a desperate measure, but a man on the verge of losing the woman he loves is nothing if not desperate--isn't that so, Agent Mulder?"

"Was there no chip available to save Marie's life?" Mulder spits out the word "chip."

"She didn't need one; she had this...equally dramatic alternative. Those chips are not in unlimited supply."

Mulder is well aware that it is a bad idea to pursue this right now, but he can't seem to help himself.

"What about me? Would I rate one of your precious chips, if I were sick, if I were dying? You said something before about ensuring my future--is this it? That if I needed to, I could come out here and get myself eaten alive?" Mulder neither waits for nor expects an answer. "Do you have to have been one of your lab rats to have a chip with your name on it? Are there any that were supposed to be for Samantha? Is Marie an abductee?"

"No." The Smoking Man seems surprised at the last question.

"IS SHE AN ABDUCTEE?"

"No, Fox, she isn't."

Mulder goes still for a moment. When he begins to speak, it is difficult to know whether he's aware that he's speaking aloud.

"All those years I searched for my sister, and I found out you had her. All the others returned, but not Samantha. Instead, you took her. Why? She was my sister; how could you?"

The Smoking Man is close enough to touch, but his voice reaches Mulder as though from miles away. "You know nothing of it; you were a child. A mere boy. You wanted her back for your own selfish reasons--the baby sister who looked up to her big brother. Her destiny was far greater than that: she was the key to the future as we saw it."

By now, the Smoking Man is himself lost in reverie, reliving the grand days of the Project. His words rouse Mulder, who stares at him until he can't look anymore; then he bows his head and rubs his eyes as though he's seen too much.

"Of all the children considered, Samantha was the most promising, but you were close. Several of the Project members thought you the better choice, since you were older.... But she exceeded our wildest expectations.... Her ongoing involvement was vital to the Project. Bill Mulder had his reservations, which is one reason why it was decided she was best kept with me. But if anything had gotten in the way of her continued participation, you would have been brought in to take her place. You never knew that possibility existed, I'm sure. You couldn't have protected her, or yourself. It was she who kept you safe, until you turned eighteen and were no longer eligible...."

Mulder's head jerks up. He walks, circling, pulling his hands through his hair and down his face. Then stops, face to face with the Smoking Man. His voice is deadly cold.

"You took a young girl--MY SISTER--away from her family and subjected her to years of scientific torture for the sake of your 'Project.' That's the kind of 'protection' she got from you: being probed and cut and medically raped and experimented on.

"Then she disappeared, right after I turned eighteen--was that a coincidence? Or did you let her go? Throw her away like she was garbage, all used up at fourteen years old? She's dead--do you expect me to be grateful that it was her and not me? I would have died for her. You...you should die for her."

The weapon is in Mulder's hand, pressed into the center of the Smoking Man's chest. As he stares down his intended target, visions in quick succession flash before him in the Smoking Man's stead: Samantha at age 8, Scully, Skinner, Krycek, Scully again, his father, Marie Hangemuhl, Scully again, the soul eater, Samantha at age 14,...over and over. Mulder closes his eyes against the visual onslaught.

When he opens them again, his gun is pointed at the chest of the blonde woman.

"It's time," she says.

-----------------------------

October 2, 2001

Skinner's Office

Kimberly is away from her desk, and Skinner's door is open.

"Assistant Director Skinner, can I ask you something?" Doggett's manner is somewhat more solicitous than it has been since the search for Mulder began. Technically, as an assigned X-Files agent, Doggett now reports to Skinner, but it is equally likely that Doggett is still keeping tabs on Skinner at Kersh's bidding.

"What can I do for you, Agent Doggett?"

"Were you aware of Mulder investigating some sort of abduction-type case in Pennsylvania recently?"

"An abduction case? Not recently, no. Several years ago, he and Scully investigated a group of women in Allentown who all claimed abduction experiences and that they had developed cancer as a result. They all had the same rare form of cancer, and they all died from it." *Except one,* Skinner thinks to himself, inwardly shuddering at the memory. He doesn't know how much Doggett has looked into Scully's records, whether he knows about her abduction, cancer, and remission. He's not sure he should have told Doggett even this much, but there had been at least as many abductees in the Allentown area as in Bellefleur. If the ship is on its way there....

Before he can even process that thought, Skinner is broadsided by the memory of another Pennsylvania case. Ruskin Dam. He'd gone there, seen it himself: dozens and dozens of people charred beyond recognition--and Scully came so close to being one of them. She'd been there but didn't know how she got there, seen faceless men and fire and a ship...Ruskin...Skyland Mountain...El Rico--GOD! Doggett is speaking again, but Skinner doesn't hear him.

"Well, according to the records I've got, he was out that way a couple of times at least, last spring and maybe summer, and around three weeks ago. Not Allentown, little town not far from there. I spoke with the sheriff, who confirmed Mulder was out there sometime. But I got the impression he wasn't telling me all there was to tell."

"Seems worth a follow-up, Agent." Skinner answers the unheard statements blandly, still too preoccupied to care. He intends his own follow-up with the Gunmen as soon as possible; it's just become even more urgent.

-----------------------------

April 9, 2000

Squamash Township

A trap door opened reveals the passageway downward into a winding catacomb, a candlelit grotto. A narrow passage opens on a wider space, and there lies Marie Hangemuhl. Her body is covered in an ectoplasmic sheen that glistens in the flickering light. Out of sight, but audible in the strange echo chamber, the soul eater still weeps.

Mulder kneels and gently wipes Marie's face clean; and she coughs and sputters back to life. He wraps her in the sheet the blonde woman hands him, and lifts her in his arms to carry her home.

One of the sheriff's men agrees to drive Mulder to the nearest large town. From there, Mulder takes a bus to New York City; a few hours later, he flies to England.

-------------------------------

October 2, 2000

Outside DC

The view of the night sky from the hill next to the satellite dish is impressive, considering its proximity to the city, but Skinner isn't interested.

"Come on, guys. Elect a spokesman and give it to me straight."

Byers takes over. "What we were most worried about were those gaps where there was no data indicating activity. It seemed to imply that the ship was moving out of satellite range, perhaps docking at a station outside the ionosphere..."

"The mothership," Langly feels obliged to interject.

"There's a lot of data, relatively, available for the earth's surface. In space, it would really be a needle in a haystack. But, we refined the data we had and expanded our focus to global phenomena. The gaps are filled by activity in Siberia, Mexico, and Tunisia."

"Nothing in Pennsylvania, though?" Skinner asks.

"Nada. Just before the Pacific Northwest, we see activity in Kazakhstan. We're continuing to trace back as well as forward to try to get this whole thing mapped."

"Where is it now?"

"Oklahoma."

Skinner snatches the regional-area printout and is halfway down the hill before the Gunmen can say goodbye.

-------------------------------

April 12, 2000

Scully's Apartment

Mulder and Scully sit side by side on her sofa, not touching, not looking at each other. Mulder grips his soda bottle tighter than necessary, while Scully crosses and uncrosses her legs several times.

"I should be furious with you, Mulder." She says this quietly, sounding tired or sad rather than angry.

"You're right, Scully, you should be." Mulder's voice is subdued as well. He dares to look at her. "Are you?"

"I don't know." Scully rises, taking her mug from the coffee table. She takes hold of the bottom of Mulder's empty soda bottle; he seems reluctant to yield it. She strips him of that small defense and carries the items to the kitchen, buying herself some time by rinsing the tea from her mug.

Scully is walking slowly as she comes back to the living room. Not quite ready to sit down and continue the discussion, she pauses for a moment in front of the CD player, but appears to decide that the quiet, though uncomfortable, is necessary. Out of excuses, she tucks one leg under herself as she settles back on the couch, angling her body very slightly toward Mulder but just a little further from him than she had been sitting.

She stares at her hands for a long moment before speaking again. "Right now, I think I'm more hurt. I feel like this was another test and I'm not sure what the right answer is." Scully finally looks at him and there are tears in her eyes.

Anger flickers across Mulder's face but is gone in an instant. "A test?" he asks, though he knows exactly what she's saying. This, too, is quiet; neither has raised a voice all evening.

"I feel like you've been testing me ever since I came back from my trip with...with him. Testing my loyalty, seeing if I'll follow you anywhere. That autopsy you had me do last week, on the girl who drowned in margarita mix playing Blair Witch in the woods; the crop circles in England...those aren't cases you'd normally have bothered with, let alone pushed. And, feeling that way--maybe I'm projecting some of this--I just couldn't do it, couldn't go to England, couldn't jump through more hoops after seven years. And, now, you going off with him like that. I'm grateful you told me, Mulder, really. It's possible I might never have found out. I just...what if you HAD killed him?"

Neither wants to answer that question aloud. They sit without speaking for several moments.

Mulder finally breaks the silence. "Scully, when I saw him in the airport, all I could think of was how he used you and what I would have done to him if you'd died. I didn't even think about Samantha at first--seems almost amazing. But then..."

She stops him with a touch of her hand to his. "I understand, Mulder. And I'm not angry. I'm just...give me the night, okay?" She kisses him quickly and stands up, moving away before he can touch her. "But stay here, please? I want to know where you are and that you're safe." She walks to the bedroom and closes the door behind her.

-------------------------------

June 6, 2000

Squamash Township

Scully gasps audibly when she sees the soul eater's companion.

It is not the same woman who led her to the Buddhist temple in DC two months previously--a woman who, incidentally, Scully has not seen since, despite a half-dozen or so work-related trips to that station at the hospital and a couple of circuitous driving jaunts past the temple. The woman here in Squamash is clearly older than the one in DC. But there is a sameness about them. And, this woman seems to know Scully, even though they've never met before. Scully feels rude for staring, but she can't help herself.

Mulder brought Scully here to see illness consumed, but as soon as the soul eater enters the room, Mulder looks at the man's haunted eyes and finds he cannot bear to watch. With a look to Scully that says "Don't follow," Mulder makes his escape. He hovers at the edge of the woods, feeling his stomach clutch and shedding a few of his own tears in empathy, until it is over and Scully comes to find him. She says little, lost in reflection herself, as they wait until the next stage of the transformation is complete.

Mulder again takes the responsibility of bringing the newly healed person, a 16-year-old boy freed from leukemia, back to his parents' home. Scully asks permission to examine the soul eater, but can do very little--her every touch causes the man intense agony. His skin nearly burns; his temperature is 108 degrees.

As she prepares to take her leave, Scully again looks at the blonde woman. "You remind me of someone," she says.

The woman waits to see if Scully will say more. When she doesn't, the blonde woman smiles in acknowledgement.

"There are many like me," she replies, then gestures toward the soul eater. "But only one like him."

--------------------------------

October 3, 2000

Allentown Municipal Center

Doggett spends the morning in Allentown, checking death certificates for all the female cancer victims listed in the older X-File. Everything is in order: the last of the women died early in 1997, and there's nothing that links any of the women to Squamash Township. In fact, there are no cancer deaths listed in Squamash, and few deaths on record at all. Curiously, though, there are several in the last few months, beginning with an unidentified shooting victim. The date matches up with one in Mulder's cell-phone records. The subsequent deaths are all of natural causes.

There's no answer at Sheriff Frey's office. Doggett leaves a message as to the nature of his inquiry and then decides he'll stop in Squamash on his way back to DC.

* * *

Squamash Township

When he pulls into town late that afternoon, the sheriff is considerably cooler toward Doggett than he was in the previous visit.

"So, Sheriff, about this shooting victim you had in town..."

"Yeah," Frey replies. "Late spring, early summer...June, I think. An unidentified transient. Local woman found his body in the woods."

"You got no suspects? No motive?"

"No, why?"

"I was under the impression that you don't get many strangers coming through here, Kurt. I'd think having a dead one show up would be pretty big news."

"It's happened once or twice over the years--somebody decides a rural place like this is perfect for dumping a body. I ship 'em out to Allentown to see if they find a match with missing persons."

"But you didn't do that this time, Kurt. Says the body's buried right here in town. You sure nobody knew who it was?"

"From the sound of things, it was too long ago to have been your missing agent, if that's what you're driving at."

"No, it's not what I'm driving at. Is the body still buried?"

-----------------------------

Scully's hospital room

Scully interrupts her mother's third "What are you going to do now that you're...?" phone call to take a call from the Gunmen.

"Hey, Langly. Got something for me?...Well, it's about damn time you got the secure transmittal worked out...Langly, I'm not the technogeek here, and I don't...What?...I don't shop online anyway...Look, Langly, just put Frohike on the line, okay?...No, I do appreciate...Frohike. Yes, I appreciate you too. Can you just tell me what the hell is going on?...It's the same damn phone line I've been using...Okay, no hints. You're right, we wouldn't want a security leak; I won't even ask...No, I'm doing fine; they should let me out of here in another day or two tops but I need to be moving on this now...Yes, I'm glad the fish are well fed. Mulder will be glad too...Look, I should...No, it's okay. Thank you so much, really. Please tell Langly again how much I appreciate it...Byers too, of course...Yes, as soon as I get back."

The security encryption Langly has coded into the transmittal probably loads immediately on the Gunmen's gigaflop CPUs, but on her somewhat less than state-of-the-art laptop, it takes several minutes. Once loaded, the gatekeeper invokes myriad questions and answers. At another time, Scully might be alarmed or upset to see just how much the Gunmen know about her and about Mulder; but at the moment she's too focused to care. And, although they have enough specifics to ensure that no one else could access these files, they have managed to stay on the side of decorum--with effort, she suspects.

For all that, the encrypted document contains very little, informationally. The Gunmen have hacked into the archives of all hospitals where Mulder should have records; they found none--not a single admissions form, test result, treatment record, or billing statement. So far, even the offline backups the Gunmen have been able to obtain have been tampered with. The Bureau records were hit, of course--selected pages are missing from those files that weren't stolen and blamed on Mulder. It's possible those missing pages would be enough to start an inquiry; but since Mulder's passcard was used after his disappearance, any investigation would immediately target him. They're still cross-checking with the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program; Special Agents Mutual Benefit Association; Workers' Compensation; Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency (for the snakebites); and Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (tobacco beetles) but, those being government entities, it's a long shot. Frohike adds a PS that maybe the Kansas City fight footage will turn up on "America's Wackiest Home Videos."

They make mention of having cross-referenced her own and Frank Black's (for the zombie attack) medical records, which are intact with no anomalies. They do not mention the fact that they must now know she is pregnant. She knows she'll have to speak with them about it once she's back in DC.

Information on Dr. Lev, the MD who "prescribed" the pills found in Mulder's apartment, is similarly shrouded--but Langly managed to track down a significant fact going back to the doctor's internship days: his research internship, safely described as being on genetic factors in neurological disease, was funded by Roush Pharmaceuticals. Automatically, Scully reaches for her cross, thinking of Emily--but it isn't there, she remembers as her fingers find only skin and her hospital gown. "I hope you're still wearing it, Mulder," she prays, and the tears descend; she blames them on hormones. She dials Mulder's number just to hear his voice on the answering machine, hanging up quickly before the beep.

------------------------------

June 7, 2000

Squamash Township

The third house, the white one with the wraparound porch, has a medicine wheel painted stark red on its white front door. Mulder and Scully leave their car but stay on the road, at the end of the driveway, waiting. It is almost dark, and the soul eater can be expected to respond to this summons soon.

Mulder turns toward Scully, a pained expression on his face.

"He can't keep doing this."

"You're right, he probably can't. But Mulder, I have no explanation for how he does it at all."

"Not medically, no." Mulder hesitates for a moment, uncertain whether he should say what he's thinking. "But...what about theologically?"

"What do you mean?" Scully looks at him warily.

"I mean, could this be a form of transubstantiation? That he, in effect, turns the bodies and blood of those he consumes into bread and wine, and then back into bodies and blood?"

"Mulder...just...no. First of all, the concept of transubstantiation implies that the bread and wine become the body and blood of Christ, not man. Catholic teaching is quite clear that there is no parallel in nature to this transformation, although many Protestant teachings, and some Catholic scholars, reject the concept of transubstantiation altogether, saying it goes against logic."

"Since when does logic..." Scully cuts Mulder off with a look threatening a slow and painful death should he dare continue.

"If you're implying that this soul eater is a Christ figure: yes, he suffers for others and appears to heal them, but I've seen nothing beyond that to indicate he even has a link to the Judeo-Christian tradition--the local legend makes him out to be a Native healer. I don't pretend to be an expert in Native American theology, so the fact that I haven't come across any direct reference to anything like this doesn't mean anything either." She pauses for breath, but makes it clear she isn't through speaking.

"But, Mulder, the other fact of the matter is, if the person doing these healings wore a collar and vestments and cured people through the power of Christ, you'd be the first one to come in here saying it's fake."

Scully stares at Mulder, daring him to defend himself. He fumes for a moment; then his shoulders slump.

"Look, Scully, I'm sorry I even brought it up. Let's just drop it, okay?"

Scully appears ready to continue the argument, but accepts Mulder's apology, if slightly less than graciously.

"Yes, let's drop it." Scully crosses the road and makes a point of studying the low-hanging pine branches intently.

Several moments later, the soul eater skulks across the yard. Mulder dashes forward, Scully just behind; they catch up with him on the third step to the porch.

Mulder looks the soul eater in the eye, fighting the temptation to wince at the pain he sees there. "Don't go in there," Mulder says to the man.

The soul eater stares back at Mulder. His mouth hangs open, torn and bloody and looking itself like a gaping wound. He moans a soft, inarticulate cry; but his eyes speak thanks at having been recognized as human. Encouraged, Mulder reaches for the soul eater's arm, to lead him to safety. Scully sees Mulder's gesture and goes to restrain him; but before she can get to him or say more than "Mul-," the soul eater lets out a piercing wail of agony at being touched.

Sheriff Frey bursts from the house to the porch; he is armed. Both Mulder and Scully draw their weapons. Another man steps out onto the porch to join the sheriff, who quickly assesses the situation.

The sheriff stares the two agents down. "This is none of your damn business. Now, I suggest you get the hell out of here and leave us alone." His eyes, menacing, move from Mulder to Scully and back again.

"I can't do that," Mulder declares, holding his ground, keeping his weapon trained. The sheriff cocks his rifle.

Mulder's lips barely move; he murmurs the word, audible only to himself, as if in prayer. "Scully," he says, and pulls the trigger. He whirls at the last second, and the shots ring into the side of the house, warning fire. Scully keeps the sheriff covered.

Mulder hears another rifle being readied behind his back. He turns to see the blonde woman, who catches his eye for a moment, solemn and unblinking, before turning and taking aim. "I love you," she says to the soul eater, and shoots him through the heart.

------------------------------

October 3, 2000

Squamash Township

Doggett waits until dark to check it out. He isn't surprised to find the grave disturbed, but he is at how recently it was done--that day or perhaps the day before, since he began his inquiry, not when Mulder had been here last. But if the sheriff had dug up the grave, it wasn't clear that he'd found the body. The rough casket has a hole in its bottom, with a tunnel underneath. What's left of the gravesite is marked with white stones, arranged in a circular pattern with lines crossing the circle.

Doggett jumps down into the grave to see the extent of the tunnel. It seems to connect into a network of underground caves, or bunkers perhaps. They have the impression of use: someone comes down here regularly, perhaps lives here. Doggett knows he'll need to get search teams in ASAP. But, ideal as the setup is, he has the feeling he's not going to find Mulder here.

One particularly well-worn passageway leads upward to a trap door. Doggett tries the door, which is unlocked, and he finds himself in a rustic living room, face to face with a blonde woman of indeterminate age. She is not armed, but might as well be; and Doggett raises his hands, identifying himself and apologizing as he emerges. He moves out of the house and onto her porch, preparing to leave, when he realizes that the sheriff had identified her house as the one behind which the body was found. He calls to the woman and asks her if he may come back inside and speak with her.

"Ma'am, the sheriff's report said you found a body in the woods out here a few months ago."

The woman watches him.

"It was reported as an unidentified transient. Was it? Or was it your local legend, that soul eater? There was another FBI agent out here who I think believed it was some sort of extraterrestrial being."

"You have it wrong. He is of this earth and this earth alone, part of the land. These things have been this way for hundreds of years."

Doggett stares for a moment at the fire burning in the fireplace.

"The body was buried here and the grave marked with a pattern, a circle with lines crossing it. Can you tell me what the symbolism is?"

"It's a medicine wheel, a Native American symbol used to mark a place with healing energy or the resting place of a healer. The same symbol, painted in chicken's blood, can be used to summon the healing energy."

"You believe this." When Doggett had questioned Scully on her beliefs, he'd been accusatory, incredulous. Here, it is a mere statement of fact. The blonde woman hears his incomprehension, however.

"To understand what this thing, this man, is, you have to understand what he can do, his gift. People hate him because they need him. He looks the way he does because of their sickness."

"And he was killed last spring--shot?"

It is the blonde woman's turn to stare into the fire. She speaks to it rather than to Doggett.

"He wanted to die. I knew, we knew what had to be done to save him. But he can't die. He still suffers; he still wants to die. He came back a day or two after we buried him. I kept him here in secret, but now that they know he's back he will keep suffering."

While Doggett and the woman speak, the soul eater quietly enters the room, and finally makes his presence known, whimpering softly. They stare at the man/creature: Doggett with wonder and horror, the blonde woman with love. Doggett looks away, gathering resolve.

"As long as he's here, he'll continue to suffer," Doggett says. "Let's get him out of here."

Doggett leaves to get his car from where it is parked at the sheriff's office. When he returns several minutes later, he is followed by the sheriff and several other men, who use their trucks to fence his car into the woman's driveway.

Doggett opens the car's rear door and goes to the door of the house, escorting the soul eater and the blonde woman to his car. As Doggett shuts the car door, he sees the men's rifles pointed at him.

"Sheriff," he says loudly, "As a federal officer I'm asking you and your men to get out of my way."

"You can't take it," the sheriff snarls. "It belongs to us."

"This is a man. He doesn't belong to anybody."

"We have sick people who need what it has. It's ours; we're taking it. You're free to go." The sheriff gestures with his head while keeping his rifle pointed.

"No, Sir. I'm taking this man out of here."

Doggett turns toward his car and takes two steps away, and the men open fire. Doggett falls to the ground, struck several times in the back. The blonde woman gestures to the soul eater to escape and watches him flee into the woods before exiting the car and coming to stand before Doggett's body, arms crossed. She kneels and rolls his body over as the men's trucks drive away.

---------------------------------

September 9, 2000

Squamash Township

Agent Crane looks around, taking in the Squamash scenery: dense pine forest; deserted, unpaved road; a few scattered houses; an entrance, barely concealed, to a network of underground tunnels.

*Perfect,* he thinks as he punches numbers into a cell phone. Seconds later, a phone on a Hoover Building desk rings; its caller ID shows an incoming call from F. Mulder.

Someone answers the desk phone. "Is that you?"

"Yes," Crane replies. "Everything is going according to plan."

"Good," the unseen figure answers, and hangs up.

--------------------------------

October 4, 2000 very early morning

Squamash Township

Doggett's hand moves slowly, instinctively, toward his face, to wipe away the viscous substance covering it. Once his nose and mouth are clear, he takes a deep, gasping breath. His hands grasp at the dirt floor beside him as he attempts to ease himself up to a sitting position, and one hand encounters a towel, which he uses to clean his face more thoroughly. Once he can open his eyes, he sees that he is lying naked in one of the underground rooms. Except for the slimy substance coating his body, he is unmarked. He hears crying from nearby, but it does not sound like the soul eater's whimper.

Rising gingerly, he moves to where the blonde woman kneels over the soul eater's body. He is dead.

The blonde woman dries her tears and turns to face Doggett. "He took your death. You freed him." Doggett can only nod.

-------------------------------

October 4, 2000 midday

Squamash Township

Sheriff Frey startles as though he himself has been shot on seeing Doggett appear with a cadre of agents from the Philadelphia Field Office. The two men stare levelly at each other.

The sheriff decides to take the offensive. "You know you can't prove anything."

"I know," says Doggett, not breaking eye contact.

Behind them, the field agents divide into teams to scour the underground tunnels and surrounding woods. The ASAC calls out, "Okay. You've seen Agent Mulder's picture. Assume he is armed, but do not, repeat, do not use deadly force. We need this man brought in alive. Now, go!"

The search goes on for several hours. There is no sign that Mulder has ever been there.

___________

October 5, 2000

Scully's apartment

In a fitting division of labor, Langly sweeps an electronic-bug detector along the upper walls and ceiling, while Frohike checks out under the furniture and along the floor. Byers installs a device into Scully's telephone that will detect any future wiretaps. Scully herself is relegated to the couch with her feet up.

"Find anything?" she calls after a minute or two.

"Yeah," Langly says. "Your upstairs neighbor has really crappy stereo speakers."

Frohike straightens up, wiping his hands on his pants. "Can I get you anything, Scully? A pillow, a vitamin? Any of a wide assortment of herbal teas--there's peppermint, lemon,..."

"This is her house, dork," Langly interjects. "I think she knows what's here."

Scully gives Frohike a quick and somewhat tired smile. "I'm fine. But thank you for your...obvious consideration for my...condition. Look, guys, I know you've been in my medical records so you know what's going on, and, well..."

"Congratulations, Scully." Frohike gives her a quick kiss on the cheek.

"Yeah, congratulations." "Congratulations, Scully." Byers looks at her a bit uncomfortably, as though he expects her to go into labor any minute even though she is only about six weeks pregnant. They ask no questions about paternity.

Frohike perches on the edge of the couch. "We brought you a present," he says and nods to Langly, who fires up the laptop they brought with them.

Langly passes the computer to Scully, who finds herself looking at the blips of a heart monitor, pulse rate 74.

"It's Mulder's," Frohike whispers, and Scully looks at him in shock.

Byers begins the explanation. "It's from a few months ago: First Person Shooter out in California, when Mulder went into the game. You knew the protective gear had built-in sensors to monitor the players' vital signs so that the FPS programmers would know what gave players the biggest rush. Anyway, the sensors fed into a database completely separate from the game, so the records weren't lost when they killed the game you and Mulder were in. And as I'm sure you can imagine, the security encryption on everything at FPS is absolutely impenetrable..."

"If I do say so myself," Langly jumps in. "No way your guys could have gotten at this."

"They may not even have known it existed," Scully breathes.

"And Ivan owed us--and you--big time," Frohike comments. "So here it is."

Byers reaches over Scully's shoulder and keys in a command, bringing up a menu screen. "There were sensors in the chest pad, goggles, gloves, knee pads...basically, the whole outfit was wired. As you can see, they monitored just about every function that could be read via an external sensor: ECG, EEG, respiration rate, nerve activity, eye movement, reflex-response time,..."

"It's a full profile--you could do a brain map and total-body assessment based on this," Scully says, still reading down the list of recorded data.

"And since we have your records as well, Scully, we can compare them with your existing health records from the same time, as controls," Byers finishes.

"And to think how pissed I was at him for jumping into the damned game in the first place.... Oh, Mulder." Scully pulls up the recorded EEG and watches it as though she's seeing Mulder himself and not just waveforms on a screen--all perfectly within normal range.

*Doggett needs to see this,* she thinks. She's not sure she can trust him to accept the implications of what this data means--that there truly is a conspiracy at work falsifying Mulder's records--or to keep the information to himself. But she feels she has to.

Scully tunes back into the conversation to hear Langly say, "So maybe you won't be pissed when you see the 'Scully: Death Avenger' game out in time for the Christmas rush."

She looks sideways at Langly. "You're kidding, right?"

Frohike grins. "Worried about your image? You should be--we saw 'The Lazarus Bowl.'"

Under her breath, she mumbles, "I have other things to worry about," and goes back to staring at the computer screen.

-----------------------------

October 6, 2000

X-Files office, Hoover Building

Scully's gait is still a little stiff as she walks into the office for the first time since she'd left for Arizona two weeks earlier. The office is quiet, and the chaos she'd seen it in after the task force members searched it has been cleaned up. She thinks it is empty, but then notices Agent Doggett asleep, hunched over a notepad. She clears her throat, trying to wake him without startling him.

Doggett slowly becomes aware of his surroundings, then snaps to attention once he realizes Scully is standing there. He rises from the desk chair and offers it to her, with a "Welcome back, Agent Scully. Please sit; how are you feeling?" There's a slight pleading tone underlying his words. Scully doesn't know what he's been up to or what he's seen in the last several days; but, whatever it is, it's had an effect on him.

"I'm fine, Agent Doggett. How are you?" She is careful not to appear to look too closely at him as he stands a respectable distance away, in a military at-ease that controls but doesn't completely hide his discomfort.

"Me? I'm good, Agent Scully. Thanks for asking. Oh, sorry the office is still kind of a mess. I started trying to put away the files when I got back yesterday and kind of got caught up in it..." He gestures vaguely, seemingly apologizing for having spent the night refiling.

"Back from where?" Scully asks, feigning casualness. She gestures to him to take the other chair.

"Squamash, following up the case there--you know the one I'm talking about?"

"Yes, the soul eater. Why that one? It wasn't an abduction; it wasn't really even a case." She is genuinely curious as to why he'd pursue that lead.

"I realize that, now. Um, that soul eater, Mulder believed it could do what it was supposed to do, didn't he?"

"Mulder believes in a great many things."

"See, I don't know if you know this, but Mulder was out there just a few weeks ago. I think he went to try to get that soul eater to cure him."

Scully feels the flash of anger rising, that Doggett would suggest once again that there were things she didn't know about Mulder, and that he'd continue to insist that Mulder was ill. She senses, however, that there's something else at work here, that now is not the time to continue that battle, so she keeps her anger to herself and softens her tone.

"I'm reasonably certain, Agent Doggett, that Mulder hasn't been to Squamash since late spring. And even if he was there, which he wasn't, and even if he did need to be cured, which he didn't, by that time the soul eater was..."

"...dead? Yeah, he was; but then he wasn't. And now he is, but for real this time." Doggett casts his eyes around the office. "Agent Scully, have you ever had an incredibly vivid nightmare, that you know can only have been a dream but it seemed real?"

"Welcome to the X-Files, Agent Doggett," Scully says with a tight smile. Then, quietly, "What happened out there?" She knows she's asking for a leap of faith.

"Uh, nothing," Doggett replies vaguely. Scully raises an eyebrow but doesn't push him any further. Still, she senses that even he isn't satisfied with that answer.

Doggett looks at Scully, then looks away before continuing, speaking as though he's pretending she's not there. "I remember hearing a blast and at the same time feeling myself torn apart...then I was lying there covered in this slimy stuff, and she told me he'd taken my death. But it can't have happened like that."

Scully stands and takes a few steps around, but notices Doggett looking at her with concern. She returns to her chair before she begins to speak.

"A couple of years ago, I was sent on a case in New York. Kersh wouldn't send Mulder; I was paired with one of the agents out of the Field Office there, and I was shot by my fellow officer. The suspect in that case believed that he had long ago cheated death by letting someone else die in his place; and he told me to close my eyes and not look so that he could die in mine. The wound I'd received should have killed me. But I didn't die, and he did. I don't have an explanation for it, Agent Doggett, any more than I have an explanation for how the soul eater did what he did. They're among those things I've seen but can't deny. It's not always about aliens; there's a lot of this earth that can't be explained either."

"But...what do you DO with that?"

Scully thinks that maybe, just maybe, Doggett really wants to know.

"There are a few choices. You can deny it; you can try to force it into a 'rational' explanation; you can accept it for what it is without explanation; or you can go beyond what seems comfortable or logical or rational and try to find an explanation there. I spent a long time doing the first two; and I understand, better than I may seem to, how you feel and why you feel it. But I can't afford to stay in my comfort zone, haven't been able to for a while now, even before...this. And now, I can't afford to let you stay there either. The stakes are too high; my partner's life is on the line."

Doggett shakes his head. "I don't think I can do what you're asking, Agent Scully. It just makes no sense."

"Let me ask you something, please, Agent Doggett. I am well aware that you are the task force leader on Mulder's investigation and that the way you conduct it is your business. But if we're going to be working together on the X-Files, I need you to be honest with me: Do you believe Mulder staged his own disappearance?"

Doggett shifts uncomfortably, not wanting to look Scully in the eye. "It's one possibility, yes."

"But it is your main working premise for this case?" Scully refuses to let him off the hook.

"At this time, it's the most plausible scenario." It is the only scenario Doggett has actively pursued, but he can't bring himself to answer her question with a simple "yes."

"Well, then, according to your own premise, you should be doing what I'm asking you to do. One of the first things you said to me concerned constructing a working profile of Mulder. If he's your suspect, you need to get into his head, believe what he believes, think the way he thinks, predict how he'll act. That's standard investigative procedure--as I'm sure you know, Mulder is one of the FBI's best profilers and has himself developed hundreds of profiles that led to apprehensions.

"But I think if you do that, if you really do that, in this case you'll find that what you now believe to be impossible is not only possible but likely."

Doggett looks at her with doubt and goes to object; she holds up a hand, forestalling his comment.

"There are some people I want you to meet with as soon as possible; they hold some proof you'll be interested in. And, read the X-Files, Agent Doggett. Read as many as you can. They'll tell you about cases concerning phenomena you could never have imagined. But, more importantly, they will tell you what kind of investigator, and what kind of man, Mulder is."

Scully rises and goes to the battered file cabinet against the wall. It takes her only a little longer than normal to find what she's looking for; Doggett has done a good job restoring order.

She walks over to Doggett and hands him a seven-year-old file for a case that took place in Bellefleur, Oregon. She leaves him to read it.

THE END